Subject: (urth) Re: Re: Dualism and Horror

From: Tony Ellis <tony.ellis at futurenet.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 09:38:16 +0000

I wrote:
> Well, the usual expression is "supernatural horror" rather than
> "supernatural evil". Most of the more highly-regarded horror writers
> long ago grew out of the simplistic good\evil trap. 

and Alex David Groce wrote: 
> Perhaps out of the simplistic version of it--I think there are some good horror
> writers who still make use of the concepts.  Even a supremely ambiguous writer
> like Robert Aickman (my favorite) often suggests, in his quiet way, that
> something is evil--the dog in "The Same Dog," or Mr. Millar in "Meeting Mr.
> Millar" or Parliament in "My Poor Friend." 

Now that -is- interesting. I was actually thinking of Aickman when I
wrote that! He's one of my favorites too. But for me he's very much a
writer of supernatural horror, rather than evil. The dog in "The Same
Dog" or the father in "The Stains" scare -me- because they seem
representative of an alien, unknowable universe, rather than "evil". I
don't know what Aickman's religious beliefs were, if any, but the
impression I receive from his books is of a fundamentally pagan
worldview, where "good" and "evil" are labels for things we don't
understand rather then absolutes.

Alga wrote: 
> I don't pretend to be a Lovecraft expert (though I have a friend who is; I'm
> not going to ask him about this, however) but still, you have to have a
> Light that has beaten the Dark back for a while, don't you? During that
> blip?

Well... no, actually. Sorry to be so insistent, but this is the essence
of Lovecraft's fiction. The Dark is merely sleeping, as the result of
certain cosmic cycles - it hasn't been beaten back by anything. Later
imitators developed the idea of Good Gods defeating the Bad Gods and
imprisoning them, but you don't find that in the original McCoy.

> It does seem to me that, as a generalization, Good v. Bad works pretty
> well for horror. You start with a norm and discover that Things Are Not What
> They Seem. 

Perhaps as a generalisation for a certain kind of horror story, but I'm
still not convinced. If you find that the norm turns out to be Not What
It Seems, haven't you just collapsed dualism into monism?

> Easy to parody. Jane Austen did it in -Mansfield Park- a long
> time ago.

Northanger Abbey, actually. (Sorry.)

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

---

From: Alex David Groce <adgroce at eos.ncsu.edu>
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 09:55:46 +0000

> understand rather then absolutes.

Ah.  I would tend to agree that they represent an unknowable universe; I've
always wondered what exactly Aickman's beliefs were as well (I've never managed
to get ahold of a copy of his autobiography...) other than a passionate belief
in England's inland waterways (which is parodied in "My Poor Friend").
However, an unknowable can be implicitly evil or good, I think--I would say
there are moral judgments very quietly hiding in a lot of Aickman's
stories--it's because they are hiding that they are so convincing...  I think
that the haunting statement in "Larger Than Oneself," (roughly--don't have the
book with me) "They got what they wanted; as in the end we all do," has moral
overtones--David Hartwell seems to agree, and placed it in the section of THE
DARK DESCENT that deals with stories about good & evil.  After all, Christian
thinking suggests that in this state both good and evil are to some extent
unknowable--"now we see through a glass darkly."  And a story like "The Houses
of the Russians" strikes me very much a good/evil tale, in a Christian sense.
While "The Real Road to the Church" would be touching on the Mystery in Good.
Not that I'm saying Aickman's a C. S. Lewis of the spooky or anything--I'm not
at all sure from his fiction what his beliefs were, but I'd say he makes use of
good and evil and even very Christian ideas about them at times.
	Hmmm...  Probably boring the daylights out of the non-Aickman reading
public on the list.  Although if you like Wolfe, you should give him a try.

-- 
"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." - John 8:32
--
Alex David Groce (adgroce at eos.ncsu.edu)
Senior (Computer Science/Multidisciplinary Studies in Technology & Fiction)
'98-99 NCSU AITP Student Chapter President
608 Charleston Road, Apt. 1E (919)-233-7366
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~adgroce