Four seasons of horror fiction
“The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror” (2006) by John Clute
The nonfiction collection Stay (2016) by John Clute contains his 2006 monograph “The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror.”
“Darkening Garden” has been at my elbow since 2019. In it, Clute defines and explores his own bespoke vocabulary for understanding the origins and structures of horror fiction.
His four-stage structural breakdown of horror stories from “Darkening Garden” is below. Words in ALL CAPS refer to other entries.
SIGHTING
Sighting is a glimpse of terror to come; it is Uncanny to experience (see below), and it tells us that something worse than what we just sighted is in the offing: like the first glimpse of the child who will become devouringly the protagonist’s son in Thomas M Disch’s “The Asian Shore” (in Orbit 6, anth 1970, ed Damon Knight), or the first flash of red in Nicholas Roeg’s film version (1973) of Daphne du Maurier’s “Don’t Look Now” (1966), or the protagonist’s friend’s eyes, which “glisten like wet marbles in the gathering twilight” in Rick Hautala’s “Worst Fears” (in Gothic Ghosts, anth 1997, ed Wendy Webb and Charles Grant), telling us that she, and the city, and all else, are dead. Sighting is therefore more than an initial experience of horror (see AFFECT HORROR), whose effects may be exhausted in the seeing, for it is central to Affect Horror that what you see is what you get. Sighting predicts; it is an aliquot sample of what is to come; an Infection of the next. It is the first “sentence” in an argument whose outcome will be an unpeeling of the true world (see BOUND FANTASTIC). Sighting is directly analogous to the sense of Wrongness that initiates most fantasy tales set in a secondary world (see FREE FANTASTIC). They are both transitive: they convey us to the next thing.
In terms of the prescriptive four-seasons model of the narrative structure of HORROR which governs most of the entries in this lexicon, Sighting, the first stage in that model, signals the moment when the protagonist (or the narrative voice of the story) begins to recognize a THICKENING (which is the second stage) in the texture of the world, just as Wrongness (stage one in the equivalent Fantasy model) is an augur of the Thinning (stage two) of the old world into a condition of desert Amnesia. Sighting is the first sign that we are going to be unmapped or unhouseled from the normal world - “normal world” being a term simply designating a world that we are accustomed to, a world which we may indeed discover to have been unreal. In terms of the model used here, what Horror unmaps - from the first Sighting - is exactly not the real world, though it may be the world we desperately prefer, but the world-rind of civilized usage, the world-lie we use to repress the world-story, the cover up which coats over the Horror beneath: that being the true history of our times: the universal VASTATION that attends true sight of our species and its riven planet.
Sighting clearly signals a release of material that in any psychological reading of Horror is likely to have been repressed, though a wholly expressionist reading of the dynamic between the prior world, and the world Sighting exposes to view, does unduly restrict the range of meanings intended here. It is still surely the case that something like the return of the repressed - the re-emergence into sight of that which “ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light”, as Sigmund Freud describes the uncanny in his famous essay “Das Unheimlich” (1919 Imago 5) - does characterize Sighting. But for Freud the Uncanny is not simply (or not only) an exposure of the horrific unfamiliar within the familiar: it is far more slippery than that, as Susan Bernstein argues in “It Walks - The Ambulatory Uncanny” (December 2003 MLN, vol 118, #5): for Freud the Uncanny is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. Moreover, the Uncanny (passing beyond “Das Unheimlich”, but doing so insecurely, because Freud is cleverer than his readers) is not a term adequately restricted to the experience of an individual psyche in distress as the individual past wells up from within; the Uncanny. certainly in terms of the arguments being sketched here, is a pun of the world.
The Uncanny - which is to say Sighting - is a trompe l’oeil which the world generates. It is the familiar, which is the false, and the unfamiliar, which is the true, in one aspect. Because it is both the same and not the same, it affects the protagonist who bears witness as both sacred and profane: which it is. A Sighting is often first experienced, therefore, in a Mirror; the first glimpse of a DOUBLE or twin also constitutes - almost invariably in modern Horror - a Sighting. Its slipperiness is both chthonic and horrific, a doubling common in myth, and common once again after 1800. It is the wit of Terror, and makes the heart of the protagonist (and of the identifying reader) thump in the breast, though not for joy of the joke; and it is all more terrible in that the heart now beats to the rhythm of the world to come. Having experienced this pun of the world, and walking now to its beat, the protagonist (and the reader) may now attempt to escape their Sighting, but to run away in Horror is to be FOLLOWED; to run away is to make an APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA. Once a Sighting has been made, there is no Return. Alternatively, protagonists may respond proactively, they may set out on what they claim is a quest for the unknown: but there is no such thing as a genuine quest in Horror, for the unknown has already taken them; they are already hooked. (What is quest in Fantasy is HOOK in Horror.) Sighting is the beginning of the end of things. Sighting is a flash of the future. (Clute 410)
THICKENING
Thickening begins after the uncanny afflatus of SIGHTING begins to fade, and the future adumbrated in the terrorizing flash of Sighting begins to come true. In the prescriptive four-seasons model of the narrative structure of HORROR which governs most of the entries in this lexicon, THICKENING comes second: the full model comprises Sighting, Thickening, REVEL and AFTERMATH; the moment of Sighting may be conveyed in a sentence, but the process of Thickening normally occupies most of any text being considered. Thickening, taken alone, can of course be thought of as simply another way of pointing to the kind of plot-complicating common to much fiction; but even here, if Thickening is focused on deeply, an effect similar to that of Horror - unresolved Horror - may be felt: the greatest novel focused on Thickening alone may be Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa; Or, the History of a Young Lady: Comprehending the Most Important Concerns of Private Life (1748), a tale of extraordinary and suffocating intensity (but whose subtitle marks it off from Horror as understood here).
As part of the four-part model, the process of Thickening will normally be felt as a cumulative movement towards a further stage: betrayals and mysterious absences (or presences) and keys that do not open and trains that do not come clot the mise en scene, force protagonists down paths they do not wish to tread; nothing adds up; confusion reigns; life is inherently impeded: there seems no exit from the suffocating tangle of plot; the atmosphere of things literally thickens; it is hard to breathe; in the end there has been a progressive unmapping of the paths within the world, which increasingly shuts in one’s face, so that protagonists have no choice available to them except that of obedience to the pull of gravity, the HOOK that will expose them to the Revel: this all takes time to convey.
And all of it is false. Thickening may point to some truth which the moment of Revel may reveal, similar to the “metonomy contagion” familiar to readers of the gothic, a process by which that which lies below becomes identified with seductive bits of the surface, a knocking of the truth from underneath manifested as gear, visages, veils, fetishes in shop windows, grotesques, salads of orts. Partly through an accumulation of these metonymies, the phenomenal world is increasingly revealed as a rind that, once peeled, exposes the vacancies within the false consciousness of “normal” life, and the imposture of the history of the world: which we are taught to think of as a story which justifies our lives, not a sentence which convicts us. So the rind of the world, whose haecceity or thingness is mockingly focused upon through the various narrative ingenuities of Thickening in the hands of a competent author, is a rind of lies: as is the assemblage of evasions, the scar tissue over the unendurable past, which comprises the Hooked self: the face worn outdoors by the careerists (that is, you and me) who profit from obeying the rules of daylight “reality”: who breed and thrive, who consume upon the sinking deck. Look into the mirror, Dr. Jekyll, and you will see rind.
But in terms of Horror, a further entanglement binds writers and readers; within 21st century Horror texts, it also tends to bind protagonists recursively familiar with the prior stories that are telling them again: that entanglement being the accumulated mass of precedent and conversation contained in everything already written and read. Ghosts and Parodies out of this shared past haunt and encumber what we write and read today. Most of us do understand that characters in books are fictions, but there is some sense in which we share their experiences, as ghosts and parodies, out of a very similar shared past: one that haunts and encumbers them as well. An essential part of the 21st century experience of Thickening - where most of the icons are resurrected and told again, where most of the assumptions Horror makes about the world are iterated and reiterated at length - is therefore an experience of déjà vu; the past inhabits our present, doubles the stories being told. Recursiveness slows the course of story, embrambles the path with echoes. For better and for worse, it Thickens our passage.
The second effect of the past record of written Horror may be more important: it is a sense that the stories of the past 250 years are somehow testamentary, and that the world they testify to is continuous with our own. When we re-read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (1818), and recognize the “monster’s” estrangement and his longing to surface upwards into the world, we recognize the echo of his fate within every DOUBLE in the literature of Horror, as he stalks the surface twin who has Sighted him and who flees uselessly from him through the Thickening world (see FOLLOWED); but we also recognize, in the life of the “monster”, an exposure of history itself: the underclass exposed by the speed of change; the working-class man who learns to read and threatens to become dictator; the lubricious otherness of the breeds without the law who sue to join the golf club; the sense that the world now changes faster than its thrones can be inherited: to succeed in the 21st century world we must be made to do so. This incessant texturing of the storyable world irradiates almost any 21st century Horror novel; some shudder to a halt under the burden. But if the contemporary Horror novel is genuinely transgressive, it is not so through any discovery of new fluxes of affect. It is transgressive because it continues to tell us that Baron Frankenstein is the true monster, that we who are the owners of the world are the devourers of the world. Were we wrong to have eaten it all in just one century? No. We were the true suicide bombers, and Paradise was our reward. We will have left nothing behind but the memory of our movie stars “Prayer of Thanksgiving” (2006) by Tom Disch. The truth of things wells up …. (Clute 417)
REVEL
Revel is both a noun and a verb. As a noun it describes a formal event bound in time and place, an event in which the field of the world is reversed: good becomes evil; parody becomes jurisprudence; the jester is king; Hyde lives; autumn is the growing season. As a verb, Revel refers to actions which create and animate such an event, actions of telling which catch revelation on the wing; it also points to the subversive nature of story itself: because, as it is being told, every story about the world threatens to transport us out of our previous understanding of the world. In this lexicon, therefore, Revel as noun and verb represents the third of four successive stages - SIGHTING, THICKENING, Revel and AFTERMATH - that describe those works of HORROR which seem most completely to exhaust the potentials of the form. Revel comes after the thickening rind of appearances is peeled away at last, when the truth of things glares through the peeled MASQUE or DANSE MACABRE; and resolves into the exhausted latency of AFTERMATH. Revel delivers the truth (see also SERPENT’S EGG); it is most devastating when the truth it delivers is revealed to be some form of VASTATION, some defining expression of the malice of the world. Revel occupies the same slot in the four-seasons model of the narrative structure for HORROR as Recognition does in the similar model for Fantasy, which is elaborated in several linked entries by John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997) ed John Clute and John Grant. But Recognition is weighted towards a recovery of the lost or stolen past (the season it is analogous to is spring), while Revel tends to announce the world to come (and the season it is analogous to is fall). The wings of revelation create a wind from the future, from the winter of the world that the occupants of the early 21st century are now entering (see HORROR for a short presentation of the concept that as a whole Fantasy is shaped around recapturing the past, while as a whole horror is shaped around obeying the future: see, again, Vastation. Revel is the action of the real world announcing itself. It is “Reason” awakening itself from sleep.
Revel, in other words, marks the moment when a horror tale ceases to describe the welling up of the repressed and the subversive within the restraining walls of “civilization”, and begins to tell it as it is. The most perfect example of this may be found in a film not usually thought of as horror, “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) dir Frank Capra (1897-1991). It is a film open to an almost infinite variety of interpretations as regards the meaning of George Bailey’s imprisoned life; the most common of these interpretations is that the provincial airlessness of that life - a life which leads him to try to kill himself - is worth the cost, because the innumerable life-frustrations inflicted upon this latterday Bob Cratchett have bettered the lives of others, all of whom remain unaware that he has sacrificed his life to them. This reading of the film plausibly treats its climax positively: when the angel causes Bailey to recognize the worth of his life, and allows him to return to and to recover that life, It’s a Wonderful Life can properly be understood as a full Fantasy tale (for the relationship of these terms, and of Fantasy as a whole, to the range of subjects covered in this lexicon, see HORROR). But if the angel’s counter-story is true - if Bailey had never been born into his life of benumbing sacrifice - then the proper climax of the film is the unveiling of Bailey’s Bedford Falls as Pottersville in the long Revel sequence during which the never-born Bailey sees the true faces of his neighbours, sees the true nature of capitalist exploitation of the heart of America, sees the future (significantly, Mr Potter, the villainous cheating banker who has been instrumental in exposing Bailey to the way of the world, escapes any punishment for his criminal actions; as the film closes, he lies in wait for the next opportunity to bring Bailey - whose life-problems have not been solved but simply deferred - to his senses). Under the latter reading, It’s a Wonderful Life neatly transacts the four stages of the full Horror model: Bailey’s SIGHTINGS of the nightmare to come, each time his normal need to experience life has been melodramatically frustrated; the Thickening and intertwining of these frustrations into a net of fixated circumstance; the Revel as described above; the Aftermath, which is not directly experienced but which can be clearly anticipated lurking beyond the final frame: because Potter lives; because Christmas lasts a single day; because George Bailey has seen the Revel.
We spend time on this film for two reasons: because it offers a dramatic opportunity to note the radical distinction between a fantasy and a horror reading of a familiar story; and because that distinction here hinges on whether its climax is to be understood as a recovery of the past or as obedience to the future, as Recognition or as Revel. Certainly, in terms of the arguments presented in this lexicon, the heart of the film lies in the latter reading, in its telling demonstration of the subversive power of Horror to open the eyes. This seductiveness of Horror (some form of seduction or uncanny persuasiveness lies at the heart of almost all supernatural fiction, cf. the angel in Capra’s film) is often rendered as a Masque or Carnival, in which the movements of the dance themselves seem to peel away the rind of the congested past. Both the Masque and Carnival are best understood - in the frame of argument presented here - as manifestations of the Revel. Such moments are prominent in 19th century writers like E T A Hoffmann, Sir Walter Scott, Edgar Allan Poe and Nikolai Gogol, though Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818), unless one thinks of its inwardly spiralling narrative as analogous to a dance of revelation, or the wedding night murder as ceremonial, does not express itself through Revel. Nor is it unsurprising - slightly further into the century - that the various Christmas Books of Charles Dickens - including of course A Christmas Carol (1843) - constantly invoke, and refuse, the carnivalesque. Given that it is a deliberate fantasia on Dickens’s Carol, it is perhaps inevitable that “It’s a Wonderful Life” both quotes the 19th century, life-affirming aspects of the dance, in its parody-with-love of the Fezziwig Ball, and simultaneously enacts a horrific counter-dance of Revel out of the changed world of the 20th century, as described at length above.
There are Revels in Robert W Chambers’s The King in Yellow (coll 1895). The artistic rendering of a Revel, in Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” (in The Great God Pan, coll 1894), persuades the appalling clique of Late Victorian gentlemen who “occupy” the foreground of the tale into forcing the suicide of a woman who kills men by - in effect - forcing them to see her naked and entire (see MOTIF OF HARMFUL SENSATION). Much fin de siècle and decadent writing hints at Revels which unfreeze the action into full horror, but rarely enters fully into the enactment of “festivities” prophetic in this way of the world to come, though Joseph Conrad, in “Heart of Darkness” (1899 Blackwood’s Magazine), comes very close indeed in his depiction of the life of Kurtz. More explicitly, though very much less resonantly, Kenneth Grahame comes closer to creating a pre-Aftermath vision of the world turned upside down in the picnic of the under-beasts in The Wind in the Willows (1908). It is, however, an argument frequently proposed in this lexicon that Horror - like all examples of the literatures of the fantastic - is deeply sensitive to the nature of the world itself, and as the engines of history accelerated the rate of change at the beginning of the 20th century, this sensitivity became more and more tortured, increasingly more exorbitant.
So we enter the full spate of Revel. No one single text definitively marks the shifts in the ground of being generated by World War One; it might in fact be argued that World War One itself is a definitive rendering of the Revel of the world. Indeed, such imagery, variously couched, is commonly found. It is certainly the case, for instance, that trench warfare has often been seen as a Danse Macabre; that No Man’s Land has been understood as the veritable face of the world, our home from now on; that, in essence, the Great War is understood to have peeled the rind off the civilized world, and that we have been naked to reality ever since: hence the denial cultures that poison the early 21st century. A single example of the literary use of the war may stand in here for dozens: the long opening “Gethsemane” sequence from The Cross of Carl: an Allegory (1931) by Walter Owen (1884-1953) depicts an unnamed apocalyptic battle, perhaps the Battle of the Somme, as a world-ending Revel; the remainder of the book uncannily prefigures the Aftermath-years of the century up to and including World War Two (see AFTERMATH for details; Owen’s quite extraordinary text may have been drafted as early as 1917). Less case-specific, two of Gustav Meyrink’s novels - The Green Face (1916) and Walpurgisnacht (1917) - are Revels inherently illustrative of the trauma of war; and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) sublimates - as does much of his work - similar material into an artifact of taming discourse, which readers may be expected to pretend to believe; by the end of his second great work about the 20th century, Dr Faustus (1947), a tale that sets out to define the convulsions of an Aftermath world, there is no belief left in a saved world: all we can hope for from a universe defined in terms of syphilitic dance is that the Revel will not be worse than last time.
As the 20th century progresses, Revels begin to proliferate. Charles G Finney’s The Circus of Dr Lao (1935) is perhaps the best known story to conflate circus and Revel, along with many further tales, from authors like Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon, that examine the same ambivalent relation between nostalgia for a world well lost and subversion of the present. A similar nostalgia/subversion dynamic marks the Baseball story in fantasy; but despite the omphalos of Home Base, and the fact that its players “horrifically” act out - almost like clockwork - plays fully describable as iterations of the rules that govern those plays (baseball may be the only sport describable to the blind), baseball stories tend largely to mute the Revel aspect so visibly potentiated within their fundamental structure: this may be a form of patriotism. Out of an ocean of choices, four more exemplary titles can be mentioned. Robert Aickman’s “Ringing the Changes” (in The Third Ghost Book, anth 1955, ed Cynthia Asquith) ends in a literal Dance of Death, but one in which the protagonist’s wife joins, leaving him forever as she gallivants deadpan into the new desert world which he will never understand, being belated. The long descent of the protagonist of Fred Chappell’s Dagon (1968) into bondage culminates in an epiphanic (though almost immobile) Revel conducted in the presence of the God, which is an idiot and a SERPENT’S EGG, and which will rule the world. The whole second half of Peter Straub’s Floating Dragon (1982), as a whole an omnium gatherum of AFFECT HORROR effects, can be understood too as a superimposition of Revel upon Thickening, a Revel so boisterous and prolonged it almost seems to proclaim a welcome to the worst infections the world can offer. Elizabeth Hand’s Winterlong (1990) is structured entirely through a crescendo of Revels which, once again, strip the world of its masks. And Glen Hirshberg’s “Mr Dark’s Carnival” (in Shadows and Silence, anth 2000, ed Barbara Roden and Christopher Roden) returns to an even blacker outcome, for the dance his protagonist enters is death for sure, and the world which echoes his terminal moves is made up of the betrayed bones beneath America. In this tale, and in so many others, the dance of Revel is taps for the future. (Clute 401)
AFTERMATH
At the very heart of the moment of Aftermath lies an awareness that the story is done. This moment - which prefigures a world incapable of change, a world no longer storyable - terminates the four-seasons model of the narrative structure for Horror laid down in this lexicon, the other stages being SIGHTING, THICKENING and REVEL. The passage through these stages will have been taxing - the greater novels of Horror are almost certainly the most exhausting of all popular books to experience; and the passage out of Revel - out of the moment of transvaluation of all values into a fixated awareness that the world so exposed is in fact the real world - may be so swift, and the ending of the tale may come so soon, that the desiccating torpor of Aftermath may be no more than glimpsed, a surreal echo of the flash of Sighting which has earlier announced that the end is nigh. This is almost inevitable. The central sense conveyed by Aftermath, after all, is that there is nothing to be done, that there is no cure to hand, no more story to tell, no deus ex machina, no statement that It Was All a Dream: “Son, ‘This ain’t a dream no more, it’s the real thing’” (Bob Dylan, “Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)” in Street Legal, 1978 album). (The dozen or so greatest songs from the later career of Bob Dylan comprise - in their surreal, profoundly-worn desertedness - a visceral mapping of the gut dislocation that marks Aftermath.) A structurally similar awareness of terminus pervades our understanding of return in fantasy, though in this case the end of Story constitutes an pastoral arrival in Eden: there is no Story to tell because there is no problem. But Aftermath is all problem, like muskeg: problem without solution, a geography without watershed.
The term Aftermath itself is of course highly weighted. It has been most frequently used to characterize the world and literatures of the societies of Europe after the vast Revel of World War One, when the survivors of that conflict began dazedly to reiterate after the fact wisdoms adumbrated by so many central European intellects in the years before 1914. Two literary forms of interest in the context of this lexicon - they are not in fact comparable terms - were born during the years of Revel: Modernism, which we do not focus upon here (though the famous invocation of “silence, exile, and cunning” which concludes James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916] is a mantra for surviving Aftermath); and Fantasy, which was gestated not only by J R R Tolkien but at least a dozen other central figures who took their sense of the wrongness of the world from the trenches, often literally.) To choose the term Aftermath in consciousness of its historical use is of course deliberately to foreground the argument (made throughout this lexicon) that the body of texts comprising Horror is best understood in relation to the world. The choice implies a further claim: that Horror, which as a formal enterprise is a creation of the Western World, ends where the buck stops for Western humanity: in the Waste Land we have created. The true conspectus and habitation of Horror is the desolate world proleptically glimpsed by Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” (1899 Blackwood’s Magazine); it is the most famous use of the word Horror in all literature, and the truest to the case: “The horror, the horror!” exclaims Kurtz, on being vouchsafed one final dying gaze upon the world, which is also the world to come.
Though they anatomize the future for our species, Horror novels properly tend to unpack their message within the frame of the present tense of things; only in the spasm of Aftermath - which may seem an eternity - are the lineaments of the future likely to come clear. A single example can demonstrate the case, and provide an exception to the rule that Aftermath is a “prestige” of the flaccid relaxation of the tale into death. Perhaps the most striking single novel of Horror set in World War One is The Cross of Carl: an Allegory (1931) by Walter Owen (1884-1953). It is a short novel, with no real compass for expressions of Sighting or Thickening; it properly begins at the Battle of the Somme (see REVEL for description), and continues into an apotheosis of Aftermath that occupies more than half the book. After Carl has undergone the Danse Macabre of the battle, he is left for dead on the shattered ground: as dead as Europa seems then. He awakens some time later on a railway siding, bound into a faggot of corpses from the battleground; he is shunted into the adjoining warehouse-like “utilization” factory, where the dead are rendered into swill for pigs (see SERPENT’S EGG). Owen is of course not literally prophesizing Auschwitz here: but he is certainly delineating a paradigm for Europe into which Auschwitz slides like grease. As for Carl, he escapes the factory and is shot dead, while lying in the shallow grave he has constructed for himself, by two powerful bemedaled gentlemen who represent the obscenity of the powers-to-be in the world to come. To construct - or to witness - such paradigms is an essential function of Horror: a flash of such a paradigm perhaps constitutes the central extra-textual or para-textual function of Aftermath, beyond its central role in terminating the story at hand: to flash-freeze the future is the final gift of Horror. (Clute 347)
Source:
Clute, John. Stay. Hachette UK, 2016.
Jay
2 January 2024
Wow this seems like an incredible resource; I'm a huge fan of weird horror myself. Saving this piece to read in depth later!