Dialectical Horror Stories

Is it possible to write a dialectical horror story? (or fantasy?). 

First, I have a problem with the Deleuzian "new weird" type of argument, which treats the monstrous as merely monstrous from the position of the bourgeois ego, etc. Certainly there is some truth to this position. We could reread the end of The Shadow Over Innsmouth as the moment of Lovecraft's embrace of the monstrous and miscegenation against his racism. 

"The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror. ...
I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton madhouse, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever." (my italics)

Another example would be Clive Barker, in which the horror gives way to the weird and fantasy, from The Damnation Game to Weaveworld. The Cabal tells the story of how the forces of law and order are the true monsters (see this excellent discussion). In a blunt reading, this would relate to Barker's own acceptance of his sexuality.

While this makes for good politics and some good fiction, much of the new weird, what can go missing is horror. Horror, in this reading, can only ever be momentary and needs to be surpassed by becoming. All becomings are good as such, as becomings, which I think is a bad dialectic (in lots of ways). We accept everything and potentially criticise nothing, after all it's a becoming baby... 

The risk of the counter position, my position, is that it seems reactionary. To have or celebrate horror would seem to be conditioned by the kind of rejection of the Other found in Lovecraft. Racism conditions horror (I tend to agree with Houellebecq that, in the case of Lovecraft, racism does condition much of his horror, although his fiction does exceed that at times). Can we imagine a dialectical horror that would not simply condemn the Other or treat it as moment of becoming? If Walter Benjamin wrote of dialectical fairy tales, can we have dialectical horror tales?

I was wondering about John Carpenter's argument re The Thing (my favourite film). He suggests two modes of horror: one reactionary, where the horror is outside the circle (as we tell stories around the camp fire) and one more radical where the monster is sat around the fire. The inside horror would be the dialectical horror.

[Obviously we can also think of The Fog, in which we start with exactly such a scene of story telling and in which the film will reveal the horror as being a result of the crime of the founding of the community (although the revenge doesn't exactly seem to fall on those responsible or their descendants).] 

The Thing is then a horror film of sociality and relations, and then the alien 'Thing'. It is a film of men in meetings, at which they have to decide 'who is who'. This is the horror of sociality, the stasis of the practico-inert in which they live from the start - simmering resentments and petty authority ('el capitano with his pop gun'). 

But the horror isn't only sociality, it is also the dialectic with the alien coming inside and the end of human civilisation (in 27,000 hours). This isn't a racist horror, in which the Other is feared as racial Other, but a horror of the inside. The dialectical moment is that horror that is inside in both senses, the implosion of the practico-inert in destructive violence that ends human life (the destruction of the camp) and the intrusion of 'the thing' into humanity to which the only solution is suicide, or waiting a while...

This is one, for me privileged example. I am tempted to also suggest Ligotti's abstraction of Lovecraft's great old ones to a cosmic 'dance' of decay and exhaustion also exhausts the localised racism of Cthulhu. Here, again, the outside and inside are rendered indistinguishable, as we are all puppets of the forces of the outside that are already inside. Here the abstract forces of decline (in some 'town'), seem also to be the forces of destitution of abstract capital and the forces of abstraction as moment of horror. Workplace horror, as in My Work Here is Done, is 'abstract labour' as the form of nothingness itself (as Marx suggests in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts - "the abstract existence of man as a mere workman who therefore tumbles day after day from his fulfilled nothingness into absolute nothingness".)

I am interested if you have other examples or think this is a reactionary position. I think a lot turns on the relation to the outside and hence, if it wasn't evident', I tend to reject the argument by Mark Fisher about the weird as intrusion of the outside (while of course feeling his loss). Dialectical horror is, precisely, horror of the mediation of inside and outside that resists us 'becoming outside'. In this sense, then, there is another political path to the new weird. A path through horror.

Much of the work of Blindfield has been devoted to the dialectical horror tale. This tentative effort by me is dedicated to that journal.

Brontë RPG

Not a Bronte Role-Playing Game, although that might well be interesting. I guess most people would want to play Emily... There is in fact a Jane Austen RPG, so it is not impossible to image a Bronte RPG. Although the constriction of the lives of the Bronte's, which as the cliche goes "produced" their imaginative fiction, wouldn't be much fun.

Instead I want to suggest the Bronte's invented an RPG, or a proto-RPG. One of the famous things about the Bronte's is how, as children, they created their own fantasy worlds. In June 1826 their father gave to Branwell Bronte some toy soldiers. Charlotte Bronte tells what happened next:

Branwell came to our door with a box of soldiers Emily & I jumped out of bed and I snat[c]hed up one & exclaimed this is the Duke of Wellington it shall be mine!! [Wellington was the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and he had defeated the French leader Napoléon Bonaparte at the famous Battle of Waterloo.] When I said this Emily likewise took one & said it should be hers when Anne came down she took one also. Mine was the prettiest of the whole & perfect in every part Emilys was a Grave looking fellow we called him Gravey. Anne's was a queer little thing very much like herself. [H]e was called Waiting Boy[.] Branwell chose Bonaparte.

A year later Branwell and Charlotte would create the imaginary kingdom of Glasstown, a colonial fantasy city in West Africa. They would later create Angria, an extension of Glasstown. Emily and Anne would start their own project, the kingdom of Gondal, rejecting the violence they found in Branwell's and Charlotte's world ('Angria' could obviously signify 'anger').

These creations involved creating plays and a vast amount of writing contained in small 'matchbooks'. The writings are also taken as what Charlotte called 'a long apprenticeship in writing', as juvenilia, before the 'mature' and 'real' works they wrote as novelists (Branwell being, of course, the dissipated non-writer). I am not going to re-evaluate these writings, but suggest that rather than read them as transitions into fiction we read them as proto-RPGs. Branwell and Charlotte are both game designers and game masters (GMs), Branwell shifting from war games (he destroyed a lot of models) to this RPG (Branwell is an Amerithrash gamer...)

This is not only to shift the notion from "apprenticeship to play" (Robertson, 1998), but also to specify what kind of play. Although started when Charlotte was ten, Branwell nine, Emily eight, and Anne six, this play continued into adulthood.  In 1845 Emily (aged 27) and Anne (aged 25) "passed the two days of a train journey role-playing together, pretending they were a whole class of royalist prisoners escaping from Gondel" (Moon, 46). Michael Moon uses role-playing in a general sense, but his remark struck me as one we could make specific.

So, rather than being a childhood addiction to "romance" (in the general sense, including that of quest narratives and fantasy), this might be an addiction to constructing an interactive fiction in the form of an RPG. More sympathetic critics, as Michael Moon points out, have seen this "never-ending story" (a quote from Jane Eyre), as an act of mourning for their dead siblings and mother. The soldiers were given a year after Maria's death (the elder sister).

Michael Moon also concentrates on Branwell, the one who did not become a writer and so did not transcend the "infernal world" of Angria. Branwell is the destructive character, but also in rebellion against the children's choice, suggested by Charlotte, that they become Genii and rule over the toy soldiers. Branwell's compulsion to write, his 'spoiled' or 'wasted' life, become a kind of model of the RPG player and the associations with military masculinity, sensitively explored by Moon. (I should admit here my own childhood fascination with toy soldiers and my own destruction of such soldiers in various "wars".)

Therefore, we could imagine this game as the creation of what would later become RPGs. It is not so much a transition to the "realism" of adult writing, or simply something "childish", but a particular kind of creative work, a particular kind of art. 

Further Reading
Michael Moon, Darger's Resources (Duke University Press, 2012), Chapter 2
Daphne du Maurier, The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte (Virago, 2006)
Robertson, Leslie. "I. Changing Models of Juvenilia: Apprenticeship or Play?" ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 24 no. 3, 1998, pp. 291-298. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/esc.1998.0004