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Aug. 30th, 2014 11:59 pmLost has me thinking about Poe's Pym, its ancestor. Its ultimate ancestor?
I'm not sure if the late Pym sequence is supposed to almost or entirely resist the intelligence, but I do know it's supposed to make us at least initially unsure about that. The Purgatorio, The Four Zoas and Goethe's Fairy Tale didn't intend to confuse us as much as they do, and we know that reading them - the idea is that we do a certain amount and kind of work to understand, and once we do the world will be understandable in the same terms as the work is. Even if it never is we understand the tone: the world is ordered, we are not but can be, here's the clues.
In Poe's we fear this will be the case; in effect he's anticipating Frost's Design, since the polar angel acting on the world is either thoroughly nutfuck or completely and racistly evil, but in a way where the work itself seems to have been written by the ambiguous, unsavory designer depicted. (Frost plays with that too, but only in terms of form.) Poe's madly, minutely rational depiction of an at best irrational world is seen by everyone, and presumably was by Melville too, as a proto-Moby Dick, but the fact that it's ambiguous WHETHER it's ambiguous makes it the inaugurator of disturbance horror. In his post-Moby short story period Melville does play around with narrators who don't grasp the madness of the world they're describing (or by pretending it's just mad enhance its evil), which may have been inspired by the Pym tone but still isn't quite there. Moby Dick doesn't so much rewrite Pym as write about the experience of reading it, a reading allegorized as a similar sort of journey.
A strange effect created here is that we feel, or fear, that the work may understand more than the author does. Of who before Poe could this possibly be said? And of what by Poe but Pym?
But of course before Poe there's always Hawthorne, and before him Spenser. Dante's guides vacuum up all loose ends, like Milton's explaining angels, but Spenser's "what the fuck, Lord, 's up with time" keeps popping out, mixes in with the fray of his failure to end. In Hawthorne we can blame society, but we don't always want to; "Young Goodman Brown" and "My Kinsman Major Molineux" are quite interestingly designed in that you're supposed to work hard to see that the devil does NOT own the world - the only thing destroying the disturbance horror that he might is the full, earned moral lesson of the story, and implicitly the consequence of not having learned that same lesson in life is that you're in the same boat, faced or not, where your god may be devil. You don't fear Hawthorne's story knows more than him, but you do notice he understands what a nightmare a sub-omnibenevolent God in fact is. And why might he know that so well? Like Spenser's despairer and lesbian park the vision's too thorough, too strong. The question is a world, the answer words.
Disturbance horror is always theological. Questioning God's nature is not itself that horror, though; nor is contemplating it. As a genre it begins with the conflation of author and God - but not in the Romantic sense where an author becomes like God, but instead where we wonder if God's like an author: after mere conflict, making it up as He goes, pretending to know what he doesn't, reducing the world to the echo of an alien intention.
There must be no embedded narrator or that narrator must be flotsam, since the true driver of the story must be opaque. Hence the neat takeover of disturbance horror by film, I think, which it fits so well.
Because the horror moments of Lost are if anything helped by its collapse into inanity. (Not just its gradual collapse but its moment to moment one, its immediate loss of everything gained; compare with Breaking Bad, where a bad scene became a pretty much LOGICAL impossibility by, say, Season 4.)
You think about the work they do on you, not for the story.
I'm not sure if the late Pym sequence is supposed to almost or entirely resist the intelligence, but I do know it's supposed to make us at least initially unsure about that. The Purgatorio, The Four Zoas and Goethe's Fairy Tale didn't intend to confuse us as much as they do, and we know that reading them - the idea is that we do a certain amount and kind of work to understand, and once we do the world will be understandable in the same terms as the work is. Even if it never is we understand the tone: the world is ordered, we are not but can be, here's the clues.
In Poe's we fear this will be the case; in effect he's anticipating Frost's Design, since the polar angel acting on the world is either thoroughly nutfuck or completely and racistly evil, but in a way where the work itself seems to have been written by the ambiguous, unsavory designer depicted. (Frost plays with that too, but only in terms of form.) Poe's madly, minutely rational depiction of an at best irrational world is seen by everyone, and presumably was by Melville too, as a proto-Moby Dick, but the fact that it's ambiguous WHETHER it's ambiguous makes it the inaugurator of disturbance horror. In his post-Moby short story period Melville does play around with narrators who don't grasp the madness of the world they're describing (or by pretending it's just mad enhance its evil), which may have been inspired by the Pym tone but still isn't quite there. Moby Dick doesn't so much rewrite Pym as write about the experience of reading it, a reading allegorized as a similar sort of journey.
A strange effect created here is that we feel, or fear, that the work may understand more than the author does. Of who before Poe could this possibly be said? And of what by Poe but Pym?
But of course before Poe there's always Hawthorne, and before him Spenser. Dante's guides vacuum up all loose ends, like Milton's explaining angels, but Spenser's "what the fuck, Lord, 's up with time" keeps popping out, mixes in with the fray of his failure to end. In Hawthorne we can blame society, but we don't always want to; "Young Goodman Brown" and "My Kinsman Major Molineux" are quite interestingly designed in that you're supposed to work hard to see that the devil does NOT own the world - the only thing destroying the disturbance horror that he might is the full, earned moral lesson of the story, and implicitly the consequence of not having learned that same lesson in life is that you're in the same boat, faced or not, where your god may be devil. You don't fear Hawthorne's story knows more than him, but you do notice he understands what a nightmare a sub-omnibenevolent God in fact is. And why might he know that so well? Like Spenser's despairer and lesbian park the vision's too thorough, too strong. The question is a world, the answer words.
Disturbance horror is always theological. Questioning God's nature is not itself that horror, though; nor is contemplating it. As a genre it begins with the conflation of author and God - but not in the Romantic sense where an author becomes like God, but instead where we wonder if God's like an author: after mere conflict, making it up as He goes, pretending to know what he doesn't, reducing the world to the echo of an alien intention.
There must be no embedded narrator or that narrator must be flotsam, since the true driver of the story must be opaque. Hence the neat takeover of disturbance horror by film, I think, which it fits so well.
Because the horror moments of Lost are if anything helped by its collapse into inanity. (Not just its gradual collapse but its moment to moment one, its immediate loss of everything gained; compare with Breaking Bad, where a bad scene became a pretty much LOGICAL impossibility by, say, Season 4.)
You think about the work they do on you, not for the story.
