Highgate Cemetery Videos

This morning I discovered some fascinating YouTube videos featuring one of our destinations for next week, Highgate Cemetery. The cemetery is believed by many Dracula scholars to have been Stoker's main inspiration for the one in which the newly undead Lucy Westenra was entombed, and where she is subsequently confronted and destroyed by her former suitors and Van Helsing. Additionally, there was a period of time in the 1970s during which rumors were spread of an actual vampire running about in Highgate. The videos are actually quite spooky, so consider yourself forewarned. You can read more about Highgate cemetery and its famous vampire by following the links posted above. Click on the highlighted text to view the videos.

Plot and the Emotions

A short follow-up to yesterday's thoughts on Dracula. Are you caught-up in the story yet? What is the "hook" that pulls us into the story and makes us want to learn more? Carroll's "erotetic" (question and answer) understanding of plot maintains that questions are posed early in the novel that we expect to be answered later on. In horror stories, the question at the heart of the narrative is often "is the supernatural being or event proposed by the story going to turn out to be real?". Such stories can be thought of as dramatizations of a conflict between a "supernatural" and a "naturalistic" interpretation of the story. If the narrative leaves us suspended between the two, the genre is called, following Tzveton Todorov, "the fantastic." An example would be The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, in which we cannot be quite sure whether there was an actual haunting/possession taking place or simply the imaginings of an unhinged mind. In "pure" horror tales, the monster ends up being real. Todorov calls that type of story the "fantastic-marvelous", and the type in which the purported supernatural event or being is explained naturalistically the "fantastic-uncanny." The "fantastic" itself offers no resolution at all. Do you think that it would be possible to interpret Dracula as an instance of the fantastic? That is, is there any evidence that Count Dracula was in fact not a vampire? Compare the narrative structure of Dracula with Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskerville's, a Sherlock Holmes story in which an allegedly supernatural being (a spectral dog) ends up being explained by Holmes as a murderer's plot. By the way, Doyle and Stoker knew one another, and there is a Holmes story that seems to have been based on Dracula ("The Illustrious Client"). We may look in on Holmes and his faithful companion Dr. Watson while in London.

Some Preliminary Thoughts on Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Horror Genre

 Dracula was published in 1897, and was written by Bram Stoker. Stoker was born in Dublin but spent much of his life in London. We will, of course, be visiting many Stoker sites in both cities on our upcoming trip. See the above links for more information on Stoker's life and works.

  Along with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1817) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula is one of the most influential horror novels of all time. But what is horror, and, perhaps more to the point, what accounts for its longevity as a genre? What is the aesthetic appeal of a genre so steeped in mayhem, supernatural terror, gruesome death and dismemberment, etc.? The second question that I have raised here is referred to by Carroll as the “paradox of horror”, and is one of the central questions of our course. We will return to it later. The first question has been addressed in a preliminary way in my last post, in that Carroll supplies us with a definition of the horror genre that highlights the centrality of monsters and the emotion of “art-horror.” For Carroll, a work falls into the horror category if, and only if, it features a monster that is both fearsome and disgusting. A “monster” is any entity that is taken not to exist by contemporary science. Some monsters, like those in Jurassic Park once existed but no longer do, others have never existed. As we have seen, not all monsters horrify us, and so not all fictions containing monsters are works of horror. Star Wars, as Carroll points out, is full of monsters but is quite obviously not a horror film.

 

Dracula as a Paradigmatic Horror Novel

 

It is fairly clear that, as an undead being, the Count is more than qualified to be a monster in the broader sense of a being that is not supposed to exist. According to contemporary science, the dead stay dead and are not to be found strolling about in Piccadilly or menacing picnickers on Hampstead Heath. If he exists, Dracula is a monster in the more general sense. In order to qualify as a proper horror monster, Count Dracula must be found to be both threatening and disgusting in addition to being impossible. For Carroll, it is from the attitude of the characters in the work of fiction that we take our cue with respect to the proper attitude toward a given monster. If the characters are afraid and disgusted, then Dracula is a fearsome and disgusting being. Notice that, for Carroll, the reader, or viewer, of Dracula need not herself be disgusted or afraid of the monster; it is enough that it is established in the fictional world of the narrative that Dracula has the relevant properties. Here are a few passages from Dracula that might serve to establish that Count Dracula is indeed fearsome and disgusting from the point of view of the characters who are not themselves monsters or monstrous.

 From Chapter 4: Jonathan Harker is attempting to escape from Castle Dracula and discovers the Count in an indeterminate state, neither alive nor dead, in the vaults of the castle:

 “I shuddered as I bent over to touch him, and every sense in me revolted at the contact.”

 Another example of Dracula being viewed as fearsome and disgusting comes in Chapter 2, in which Harker sees the Count move like “a lizard” down the walls of the castle. Harker reports that he “feels the dread of this horrible place overpowering me.” There are many such references to Dracula’s fearsome and disgusting nature scattered throughout the novel, establishing beyond reasonable doubt that Dracula is a horror monster.

 Plot

 Carroll is going to argue that a large part of the solution to the “paradox of horror” (why do we like being frightened and disgusted by beings like Dracula?) has to do with our interest in the plots of horror narratives. Such narratives, for Carroll, often center on the alleged existence of monsters. We will discuss plot and its role in sustaining our interest in works of horror in greater detail later. For now, try to think of the way that the plot (the order of events in the narrative) helps to engage our interest in the novel. Carroll analyses plot in terms of a question and answer structure. Events that occur early in the story set up questions that are answered by later events. For example, the first chapter puzzles about who or what Dracula is set up the expectation that later events will answer that question.

 

Questions

 

Please respond to my post with some questions and/or observations of your own about Dracula. That way, we can get a discussion going about the novel. I have also posted some links to other websites relevant to our course, or to the trips that we will be taking.

 

 

 

           

 

 

A Philosophy of Horror

Welcome to The Spectral Symposium. This post pertains to Noel Carroll's work on the philosophy of horror. Those of us going to London and Dublin to study gothic horror fiction will be using Carroll's work to provide a philosophical framework for our discussions of Bram Stoker and Sheridan Le Fanu.

Noёl Carroll's The Philosophy of Horror

Carroll’s account of horror is modeled on Aristotle’s classic study of tragedy in the Poetics. Carroll analyzes the horror genre, broadly construed to include literature, film, theater, and painting, in terms of the “emotional effects” it aims to evoke in its audience. The primary such effect, according to Carroll, is an emotion that he calls “art-horror.”

Art-Horror

Carroll makes an important distinction between ‘natural horror’ and ‘art horror.’ The former is the sense of ‘horror’ captured in the statement “I am horrified at the idea of taking a summer class,” while the latter is the sense of ‘horror’ operative in statements like “ Nosferatu is the greatest horror film ever made.” 

The following excerpt from Carroll's book illustrates the way in which he is using the term "art-horror."

“Art-Horror”, by stipulation, is meant to refer to the product of a genre that crystallized, speaking very roughly, around the time of the publication of Frankenstein—give or take fifty years—and that has persisted, often cyclically, through the novels and plays of the nineteenth century and the literature, comic books, pulp magazines, and films of the twentieth. This genre, moreover, is recognized in common speech and my theory of it must ultimately be assessed in terms of the way in which it tracks ordinary usage.” (The Philosophy of Horror, 13).

The Monster as a Necessary Condition of Art-Horror

Carroll argues that in order for a given work of art to be a member of the set of all works of art-horror it must feature a monster. Having a monster, however, is not a sufficient condition for inclusion in the set of the art-horrible (Puff the Magic Dragon is not a work of horror).It is the hallmark of the art-horrible that it aim to produce a specific emotional effect. The monsters in a work of art-horror, then, must be regarded by the other characters in the work (and by the audience) as both fearful and hideously unnatural or revolting. Compare: Chewbacca and the Wolf-Man. The first is a monster but not an art-horror monster (Carroll remarks that Chewbacca is "just one the guys").Carroll contends that it is from the emotional reactions of the characters in the work that we take our cue as to the ‘violation of nature’ on display in a given monster.

Fear and Revulsion

Carroll argues that the ideal art-horror monster is both fearful and revolting. Consider the following excerpt from H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness:

“We had expected, upon looking back, to see a terrible and incredibly moving entity if the mists were thin enough; but of that entity we had formed a clear idea. What we did see—for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned—was something altogether different, and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelists “thing that should not be”; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform—the great black front looming colossally out of infinite subterraneous distance, constellated with strangely colored lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder."

Lovecraft here perfectly illustrates Carroll's point about the "unnatural", fearsome and disgusting nature of art-horror monsters: the entity encountered by the novel's protagonists is a "thing that should not be", it is fearsome, and it inspires disgust in those who glimpse its form (or formlessness).