Dualism & horror

Peter T. Cash · 18 Oct 1998, 23:04 · from urth-v0020.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "Peter T. Cash" <PTCash at ibm.net>
Subject: (urth) Dualism & horror
Date: Sun, 18 Oct 1998 23:04:33
Message-ID: <urth-v0020-0062 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0020/0062.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

>from alga:

...
>Manichaeism: But Sarge, that's just exactly what Mani cobbled together, a
>ragbag of a religion, borrowing from everything he knew of Buddhism,
>Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Marcionism (Marcion taught that there were
>two gods: capricious old Yaweh of the OT was similar to the Gnostic
>Demiurge, while Jesus was son of the True God whose time would come). If
>he'd known about Thor, he'd have thrown him in too. Mani would have been a
>great scriptwriter for "Xena: Warrior Princess." And so would Dr. Talos, if
>he got a decent editor.

I know. Mani was the L. Ron Hubbard of the third century.

>Mani's dualism came from the Zoroastrians (who supplied Meschia and
Mechiane
>to Dr. Talos) and he added the concept of Light vs. Darkness, so beloved of
>gothic writers. Alex, you can't say that there is only Dark in Lovecraft,
>for opposed to that is the normal world, represented, in Hollywood
versions,
>by pretty suburban streets. If you don't have a norm--Innsmouth or Arkham
>before the horrors came--where's the scare? The Amurican Way of Life,
that's
>the Light. At least in novels.

Alga, your thesis that horror is inherently (will that do instead of
"necessarily"?) dualistic is so thought-provoking that I hate to spoil
things by finding fault with it. However, I would venture that if suburbia
is the light that opposes the  Great Darkness, then we've got a pretty weak
dualism. This light is a dim bulb, this divinity is one of communion by
water and not wine. It is not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob
illuminating this place. It's George Westinghouse.

>I will back-pedal a bit on "necessarily," but only a bit. Since the end of
>the 19th century, the Dark is not necessarily a Christian dark, in fact
most
>often it isn't. Despite the crucifix hocus-pocus, we do not think of
>vampires as demons of Satan; they inhabit their own Dark. Werewolves are
>folkloric, not Christian. Hyde, though a demon, is a metaphor for what
Freud
>would call the id, not a damned soul. Dorian Grey hides Hyde's face behind
>his own (sorry about that sentence), but again it's extra-Christian.

"How about "pagan" instead of "extra-Christian"? I don't think this darkness
is anything new; perhaps after the 19th century it becomes "neo-paganism",
that's all. I would argue that any work that doesn't have a Christian
dimension but does deal with supernatural evil is pagan; any dualism is
strictly secondary and quite uninteresting. (I'm not saying that pagan works
necessarily lack value or interest, of course.)

>Nevertheless, if only for convenience of term, I would argue that the
gothic
>tradition is Manichaean--with all the implicit messiness. Writers like C.S.
>Lewis and Tolkien, who tidy up the mess, have made this even clearer, but
>they are far ounumbered by the others. King now, a dualist to the Dark
>Untidy Core.

Never having read King and having not the slightest desire to do so, I'll
have to withold judgment. I do believe you're helping me  understand why
I've always despised the horror genre. Since I do believe in the God of
Abraham, this "supernatural evil" stuff seems a trifle silly to me; I just
don't get it. I know that God permits evil in the world--but it's evil done
by us humans--it is not supernatural. If Satan exists, he's void, in the
sense of having no substance--I believe the common metaphor is say he is
like a shadow. (Hmmm....shadows in Wolfe's works...not an uncommon theme.
Hmmm.)

>But nevertheless, Dr. Talos and his play do represent apocalyptic dualism,
>Armagedon, Ragnarok, whatever. And it may be a mess, Sarge, but it belongs
>too.

I never meant to say it doesn't. Just that it's a mess, and maybe a bit of
self-parody contained within the larger work.

Sgt. Rock

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

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net