Toward an Organic Theory of the Gothic:

Conceptualizing Horror
JackMorgan
Here, in this supreme menace to the will, there approaches a redeeming, healing
enchantress-art. She alone can turn these thoughts of repulsion at the horror
and absurdity of existence into ideas compatible with life. (Nietzsche)

The somewhat dated usage toward is employed here to emphasize

this essays exploratory nature and because so little ground has been laid
in the area this article deals with, despite energized literary critical attention to horror fiction recently. There have been occasional books written
on the aesthetics or theory of the Gothic-Aiken and Barbaulds essay
On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror (1775) was an early
one; H. P. Lovecrafts Supernatural Horror in Literature appeared in the
late 1920s; David R. Salibas A Psychology of Fear (1980), Stephen
Kings Danse Macabre (1981), Terry Hellers The Delights of Terror
(1987) and Noel Carrolls The Philosophy of Horror (1990), are more
recent ones. In addition, a number of untraditional studies like Julia
Kristivas Powers of Horror, Terry Castles Masquerade and Civilization
and Stallybrass and Whites The Politics and Poetics of Transgression,
have contributed valuable supplementary insights useful in the study of
Horror fiction. Nevertheless, the genre has yet to be defined as clearly
having its own raison detre and its own place in the theoretical,
schematic landscape along with major forms like comedy and tragedy.
This despite the macabres undeniable literary, film, and popular cultural
appeal, one that hardly needs elucidation-the undiminished attraction
of Poes work, the cult status of Lovecraft, the astonishing popularity of
Stephen King, the rich film corpus from Phantom of the Opera,
Nosferatu, and Frankenstein, to Rosemary S Baby, Night of the Living
Dead, The Exorcist, and The Shining.
But neither Northrope Frye, nor Suzanne Langer, for instance, took
into account the literary significance of horror fiction in their theoretical
work-even though Langer was intrepid enough to attempt a unified
theory taking in painting, literature, music, drama and even film. It is
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perhaps unfortunate that she did not consider horror as a distinct literary
type (Poe is mentioned only with regard to his poetic criticism), since
hers is a theory of art that lends itself particularly well to an elucidation
of the horror genres feeling and form.
Langers 1953 study by that name, carrying forward the thesis of her
earlier Philosophy in a New Key, posited a fundamental unity underlying
all of arts various individual expressions-a complex argument running
to 415 pages and ranging well beyond the scope of the present essay. I
will instead focus on her treatment of comedy as a basis for this discussion of horror, it being my argument that horror-in a way entirely distinct from tragedy-represents the other side of the Comic coin, that it is
the inverse of the comic spirit. In so arguing I follow up on the invitation
implied in Langers introduction to Feeling and Form when she urges a
seminal view of her work: nothing in this book is exhaustively treated.
Every subject in it demands further analysis, research, invention (viii).
Criticism addressing the literature of horror is notoriously lacking in
an established terminology. Recent work in the field, as S.T. Joshi points
out, has caused an irremediable confusion of terms such as horror,
terror, the supernatural, fantasy, the fantastic, ghost story, Gothic fiction
and others (2). Chris Baldick, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of
Gothic Tales, having noted that his anthology attempts to set forth a relatively pure line of shorter Gothic fiction adds the following caveat: I
am aware, however, that a broader definition of Gothic is possible and
have at some points slackened the line to accommodate this view (xxii).
Noel Carroll writes that in terms of the theory propounded in his book,
most of Poes work does not fit into the genre of horror (215). No
attempt will be made here to sort out this vexatious taxonomy problem.
For the purposes of this essay, I feel reasonably comfortable using the
term Gothic in the generic sense which Joshi finds offensive (The
Weird Tale 3)-i.e., to refer broadly to the horror genre as well as to its
particular 18th century literary manifestations. When the terms weird
tales (Lovecrafts preference) or horror tales are used, they are meant to
refer to something not fundamentally at odds with the designation
Gothic and are used for variation rather than to draw a distinction. For
the most part, examples will be drawn from the kind of literature that
would fall within the framework of The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales.
Narrowly regarded, of course, the Gothic is an historical,
Eurocentric literary genre owing to Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliff, and
other 18th century pioneers of the form. But the more primitive sources
that define it, its nightmare archetypes, its ventures into the realms of
magic and taboo, are arguably as atavistic, sacramental, and folkloric as
those which define the Comic. Traces of horrors ritual origins often

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show through-for example, in the elaborately formalized, sacrificial

murders in Gothic fiction. Robert Giddings has noted the ceremonial
character of deaths in Poe, the painstakingly ritualized entombment of
Fortunato in Cask of Amontillado, for instance, with its measured progression, Masonic references, wine, and concluding In Puce
Requiescut (Docherty 47-48). Camille Paglia remarks the Gothics
return to the ritualism and mysticism of medieval Catholicism, with its
residual paganism .... Art withdraws into caverns, castles, prison-cells,
tombs, coffins. Gothic is a style of claustrophobic sensuality. Its closed
spaces are demonic wombs. The gothic novel is sexually archaic; it withdraws into chthonian darkness ... (265).
Chthonian Paglia uses to mean from the bowels of the earth ( 5 ) .
Stephen King likewise sees horror as atavistic: it is looking for something ...that predates art... (18). The 18th century marked not the appearance of horror ex nihilo, but rather its emergence from pagan antiquity
through ritual and popular folklore (with marginal literary expressionthe witches in Mucbeth and so forth) into novelistic expression, or, as
Lovecraft put it, the advent of the weird to formal literature
(Supernatural 23). In fact, he notes in the same essay, it is ...genuinely
remarkable that weird narration as a fixed and academically recognized
literary form should have been so late of final birth (21-22).
It is arguable that a horror sense of life exists as a mode of our
being as surely as does Miguel de Unamunos tragic sense o f life or
Langers comic sense of life. The horror tradition can be viewed as at
bottom more importantly existential than historical, tracing back to
rituaVreligious and ultimately to organic roots. The classic 18th century
tales wherein Gothic darkness and roughness oppose the Apollonian
Enlightenments light contour and symmetry (Paglia 265) exemplify, of
course, a particularly vivid and significant historical expression of the
generic tradition, a creative surge in its evolution. Lovecraft took note o f
the organicism we are referring to in his long essay on horror in literature:
There is here involved psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply
grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind;
coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and
too much a part of our innermost biological heritage ...to lose potency over a
very important minority of our species. (1 3)

Nevertheless, he did not pursue this biological insight much farther, and
historicism and taxonomy have continued to preoccupy much of the critical energy so far devoted to the analysis of horror.

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Langers thesis arguably comes out of Romantic literary and philosophical theory-Jane Harrison by way of Cassirer, Whitehead, and
Bergson. But a not dissimilar view regarding the well-springs of the
comic imagination was set forth by Mikhail Bakhtin in the 1930s when
he argued that the Rabelaisian comic image-whether reflected in folkfestival or literature-is grounded in the physical body: the leading
themes in these images of bodily life are fertility, growth, and a brimming over abundance (19). C. L. Barber, for another, has argued-relating Shakespearean comedy to annual folk celebration-that a traditional
festival like the May Game, growing out of the rhythms of a seasonal/
agricultural calendar, involved the composition of experience in ways
which literature and drama could [later] take over (1 8). In a similar
vein, Jessie Weston remarked the biological sources of Romance, arguing that the roots of the grail legend lay in fertility ritual and ramified
later, enhanced through folk and Christian traditions, to literature: the
pre-existence of these symbols in a popular ritual setting would admit,
indeed would invite, later accretion alike from folk belief and ecclesiastical legend (69). It is in this context, and in terms of a similar ancestry,
that horror literature should be viewed.
Langer, too, emphasizes fertility patterns that were first articulated
in ritual, arguing that the essence of the comic artifice lies in images
reflecting the energetic patterns of our biological being. Presented with
images of this energetic fundamental form of consciousness, we experience a delightful recognition, a celebrative sense of the mysterious
vitality that begets and sustains us (326-29). Thus, bawdy, for instance,
the ribald jokes and double-entendre of Shakespeares comedies, like the
considerably more obscene humor of Rabelais, does not stem from the
authors deference to the tastes of contemporary audiences, but rather is
an integral part of the comic imagination, tracing back to the genres
earthy origins of which the Greek Comus was but one expression.
...The Comus was a fertility rite, and the god it celebrated a fertility
god ... (Langer 331). Even familiar everyday jokes like the following are
informed by this biological dynamic.
A traveling salesman is driving along back roads through the Dakotas in the
dead of winter and meets with a major winter storm-howling winds and blinding snow. There is no shelter in sight and near zero visibility. His heater gives
out and soon after the car rolls to a halt, unable to proceed through the many
feet of snow. Recognizing he will freeze to death in the car-he is already
numb-he sets out through the storm, wearing only his business suit and dress
shoes, on the slim chance he may find a homestead. After hours of aimless
trekking, snow blinded and all but frozen to death, he miraculously stumbles
right up against the door of a farmhouse.

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The owner hears the thud and opens the door. The frostbitten salesman, unable
to speak, slumps against the doorframe. The farmer, appalled at the mans condition and anxious to help, says to him: My friend, I can see you are in need of
help-111 be glad to give you a change of clothes, some hot cider, a warm bed
for the night and a hot farm breakfast in the morning. But I think it only fair to
make clear that my wife and teenage daughter are gone to my mother-in-laws
in Sioux Falls for a week. There are no women here nor will there be during
your stay. With a trembling hand, the traveling salesman wipes away some of
the ice that has frozen his lips shut and says to the farmer, Well, is there
another farmhouse near here?
This is deeply comic whether or not it is funny. On one level it is a
cultural artifact-a good part of the jokes character derives from the
fact that it is a variation upon a familiar formula. It depends on audience
awareness of that formula-the perhaps hundreds of American obscene
jokes whose plot involves a traveling salesman being given a room at a
farmhouse for the night and then having some kind of sexual misadventure involving the farmers daughter. But, on a deeper level, the joke is
existential, provoking the kind of surge of vital feeling which is the
essence of comic energy and, Langer maintains, the source of laughter
(340). The joke goes to our recognition in it of the survival of Eros, the
delightful resurgence of that fertile life spirit against all odds, against the
darkest winter-where, for instance, death threatens if our body temperature should fall very far short of a critical 98.6 degrees. The joke is
what C. L. Barber called, speaking of comedic drama, an expression of
the going-on power of life (1 18). This sense of life, Langer argues, at
once religious and ribald, knowing and defiant, social and freakishly
individual, is the driving force of Comedy (331). The organism maintains its equilibrium by adjustment, by adaptation, by hook or by crook,
despite the stresses it undergoes moment by moment. Its equilibrium disturbed-by infection for example-the body normally recovers and
reestablishes its well-being. It does so again and again; and it is this flexibility, this pattern of lost and recovered organic balance and vigor, the
image of human vitality holding its own in the world that is the essential comic image. But, significantly, the spunky elan of living things celebrated by comedy-notably human brainy opportunism-is displayed in the context of an essentially dreadful universe (Langer 33 1).
It is this dreadful universe that the horror mythos addresses, and the
waning of organic energy in the face of it. Horror is the obverse against
which the comic expresses itself, as abundant harvest is relished against
the foil of deficiency and drought. Tales of terror turn upon threats to the
bodys coherence, the failure of physiological adjustment and adaptation,

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the all too possible victory of morbid forces. That the organic focus of
fertility ritual held forth dark as well as comic possibilities for later literary development, is evident, for instance, in that perhaps darkest of
modern poems The Waste Land, whose debt to Jessie Westons elucidation of the Grail legend-particularly the Fisher King motif-Eliots
notes acknowledged.
To paraphrase an observation of Langers regarding the comic: the
ultimate source of horror is physiological. The horror imagination is
informed, to quote Lovecraft again, by our innermost biological heritage. If in comedy the livingness of the human world is abstracted and
presented to us (Langer 348), in horror the dieingness, as it were, of
the human world is imaged forth, ritually recapitulated. The comic
masks antithesis is not only the tragic mask but the repellent mask in
molded rubber sold in K-Mart in November: a face deathly white, shading to green, a face crumpled and hollow eyed, suggestive of decay and
the grave. As opposed to simple death, repugnant, agonized dying is suggested. Underscoring our the bodys vulnerability, the Gothic heightens
our sense of physical peril. It is no accident that the shower scene in
Hitchcocks Psycho-a scene wherein a naked body, the quintessential
image of our carnal vulnerability, is materialized, violated and radically
unmade-occupies a primary place in contemporary popular cultural
memory. Thus the familiar, often-expressed perception that Gothic
horror reflects basic human fears, while sketchy, is not erroneous,
though visceral human dreads would perhaps put it more exactly.
Almost at random in The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, for example, one
finds passages like the following from Patrick McGraths story Blood
Disease in which an anthropologist in an equatorial rainforest is bitten
by a mosquito:
From the thorny tip of her mouthparts she unsheathed a slender stylus, and
having sliced through Bills skin tissue, pierced a tiny blood vessel. Bill noticed
nothing. Two powerful pumps of the insects head began to draw off blood
while simultaneously hundreds of tiny parasites were discharged into his bloodstream. Within half-an-hour, when the mosquito had long since returned to the
water, the parasites were safely established in his liver. For six days they multiplied, asexually, and then on the morning of the seventh they burst out and
invaded the red blood cells. (502)

The fertility narrative is inverted here. When this formerly vigorous

young man returns to England: He was haggard and thin now, and
forced to walk with a stick. His flesh was discolored, and his fingers
trembled constantly. He looked ...like a man who was dying. We note

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this physiological concern, this focus upon the sickening of the organism, consistently underlying the traditional Gothic literary conventions-this preoccupation with vitality lost, the bloodstream invaded and
hopelessly compromised. As Carrol Smith-Rosenburg observes, the
bodys physical integrity constitutes as significant a material vehicle for
symbolic representation as the bodys evocative sensuality (161). It
finds that symbolic representation in horror literature. The organism has
its own intelligence and its own stock of pre-rational aversion
responses-triggered, for example, by exposure to the dormant revelations under large, flat rocks and heavy boards, or glimpses of infestation,
mold, and decay. As John E. Mack, M.D., notes in Nightmares and
Human Conflict,the potentiality for...fear responses is innately present
in the organism and requires only the appropriate releasing stimulus...
(42). Horror arises from our proprioceptive awareness of our physical
being, our embededness in a vast organic matrix. But rather than on fertility, the Gothic focuses upon withering; rather than on growth, it
focuses on morbid deterioration; rather than on an intrepid human vitality, it focuses upon the human body eminently assailable.
Compare the same basic issue in Poes House of Usher where the
Usher bloodline has become enfeebled and stagnant, or H.P. Lovecrafts
Shadow over Innsmuth where alien blood has entered and corrupted a
towns and the narrators circulation. In the early 19th century Gothic
classic Melmoth the Wanderer, Stanton is locked in an asylum and trying
unsuccessfully to maintain his physical and mental integrity against the
incursion of abjection and dissipation:
He had at first risen early ...and availed himself of every opportunity of being in
the open air. He took the strictest care of his person in point of cleanliness ...and
all these efforts were even pleasant .... But now he began to relax them all. He
passed half the day in his wretched bed ...declined shaving or changing his linen,
and, when the sun shone into his cell, turned from it .... (40)

Stantons disintegration is traced in terms of his turning from nature, his

becoming squalid, listless, torpid, and disgusting in his appearance.
As opposed to the comic sense of life or tragedys dignified sense of
death, horror embodies a sense of anti-life or unlife; it takes note of the
demarcation between the wholesome and the unwholesome, the healthy
and the monstrous-a clarity essential to organic life. We love and need
the concept of monstrosity, Stephen King writes, because it is a reaffirmation of the order we all crave as human beings (50). That is the fundamental sense underlying horrors various traditional tropes and conventions. In this genre the healthy mind reconnoiters the regions of the

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unhealthy. Noel Carroll correctly notes that horror creatures-and this

would apply to the genre more broadly-provoke not just fear, but
loathing. The reaction of characters in tales of terror is more than a
matter of fear, he argues, rather the threat is compounded with revulsion, nausea and disgust (22). When the narrator of The Shadow over
Innsmouth views the fishy, frog-like parade approaching in search of
him along the Rowley road, he thinks not only of his own safety but,
more to the point here, of the irredeemable pollution of that space the
creatures occupy (173).
This sense of loathsomeness grows out of our inherent organic aesthetic, the fact that certain notes and images within our organic reality
repel us-snakes being an obvious example. Lovecrafts hiding
observers gaze notes the same slimy motif on which Seamus Heaneys
poem Death of a Naturalist concludes. In the poem, the gaze is a
young boys:
Then one day when fields were rank
With cow dung in the grass the angry frogs
invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before.. ..
Right down the dam the gross-bellied frogs were cocked
Their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats....
I sickened, turned and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it. (15-16)

***
As the comic imagination apparently traces back through drama to
carnival, to fertility ritual, the horror imagination would seem to issue
from implicit physiological fear responses finding imaginative embodiment in the darker aspects of fertility cults (human sacrifice, for
instance) and to trace through witchcraft and walpurgisnacht kinds of
later traditions (the pagan Irish festival of Samhain, for example, or the
Mexican Day of the Dead), finally inhabiting the neo-feudal,
labyrinthine corridors of 18th century literature like The Castle of
Otranto. So elegant was this conjunction that we often find it hard to
imagine horror literature apart from its traditional, specifically Gothic
expression. But recent literature in which the Gothic antiquarian framework is absent or vestigial makes the point that the essential elements of
horror, as mentioned earlier, are by no means solely historical, nor satis-

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factorily accounted for as a post-Enlightenment reaction, for example,

any more than Romanticism can be confined to the historical Romantic
movement. New England and Southern antiquarianism have often
replaced the medieval in modem American works of horror, as after Poe
the short story form replaced the novel as the genres primary vehicle,
and other conventions will in time replace them. (Ann Rice and Stephen
King would seem even now to be returning Gothic literature to its novelistic tradition for instance.) What is necessary is the derelict, deteriorating setting which the Gothic so well embodied. It is noteworthy that the
modem and contemporary neo-Gothic perception seems to find a properly failing, decadent setting in which to express itself. The Southern
Gothic has thrived on this decadence, and H.P. Lovecraft, it might be
noted, had the good fortune to be born in a time and place conducive to
the macabre imagination-in a milieu of decline, the New England
Gothic circumstance which Van Wyck Brooks described as follows:
The Yankee sun had shone over the world. It was time for the moon to have its
say .... There were colonies of savages near Lenox, queer, degenerate clans that
lived on the mountain, the descendants of prosperous farmers. There were old
poisoners in lonely houses. There were Lizzie Bordens of the village, heroines
in reverse who served the devil. There were Draculas in the northern hills and
witch-women who lived in sheds, lunatics in attics and men whose coffins hung
with their bodies from rafters, who had thought they could escape the grass that
waited ...to catch them when the old barn fell. (363)

In Melvilles dark tale Bartleby the Scrivener, the classic Gothic

conventions are subtly handled; the story doesnt wear its Gothicism on
its sleeve. But significantly, it is a drama of the human body, and thereby
the human spirit, under siege. It is a veritable catalog of assaults
mounted against the eyes, the back, the digestive and nervous systems;
against life and against nature, by modem civilization epitomized in The
Office, whose occupants are walled up as surely as Fortunato. Turkey,
like Roderick Usher or Benito Cereno, is manic, hyperactive and unpredictable: There was a strange inflamed, flurried, flighty recklessness of
activity about him (Melville 41). Nippers is sallow, plagued with indigestion and nagging back trouble: If, for the sake o f his back, he
brought the table at a sharp angle up to his chin ...then he declared that it
stopped the circulation in his arms (43). All the copyists suffer from the
especially punishing effects of their work upon their eyes, and perhaps
of junk food-ginger cookies-upon their stomachs. They have become
grotesque commercial artifacts-the analogy these days would be to
those artificially raised chickens that are force-fed and whose feet never

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touch real ground. The scriveners carry out their debilitating paperwork
in a setting devoid of natural light (a Gothic set piece), devoid in fact of
any intercourse with the outside, natural world at all. The lawyer/nmators chambers-a word of Gothic resonance-look out upon a shaft at
one end and at the other command an unobstructed view of a lofty brick
wall, black by age and everlasting shade... (Melville 41). Indeed the
very concept life has become the jargon of a few artistes. The narrator
concedes that the view from his chambers might be considered deficient
in, not life, but what landscape painters call life (my italics).
Bartleby himself, in his unspeakable dejection, is the epitome of enervation and bio-entropy ; he is quintessentially run-down.
The location of the horror tales ancestry in the Grail or similar traditions is arguably evident here. Bartleby is the figure of failed vitality; his
malady embodies the greater malady of the commonweal-of the city, or
the street as it were. While Bartleby is the title character, the subtitle
foregrounds the setting: A Tale of Wall St. The scriveners work is a
dull, wearisome and lethargic affair carried out in an environment given
over largely to paper-that epitome of dryness. Bartleby sends out for
cookies occasionally, but there is no mention of his drinking anything. In
the grail tradition the enfeebled or maimed Fisher King embodies the
enfeeblement of the culture, the kingdom, the land. The task of the hero
is the restoration of the kings health and thereby the vegetative health of
the land which is implicit in the Kings situation (Weston 23). The
would-be hero here is the narrator, who tries earnestly, within his limited
powers, to heal Bartleby. The ancient pattern is that of the infirm host
visited by a sympathetic guest who must restore the host to health. While
Bartleby is initially the visitor or guest, in that the office is the lawyers,
the roles, significantly enough, are later reversed-Bartleby taking on
the role of proprietor-bringing things into accord with the mythic tradition. The narrator goes to his chambers one Sunday morning only to discover that his key will not open the door:
When to my consternation the key was turned from within ...and holding the
door ajar, the apparition of Bartleby appeared, in his shirt sleeves ...saying quietly that he was sorry, but he was deeply engaged just then ...and preferred not
admitting me at present. (53-54)

A similar sense of the organisms vulnerability is evident in the following passage from John Cheevers dark tale The Five-Forty-Eight.
A businessman exits the elevator in his office building and finds he is
being followed by a woman, a former employee-her facial expression
one of loathing and purpose. When he proceeds outside, it is raining,

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and after walking a ways he stops and looks in a store window.

Reflected in the window is the woman, standing behind him:
She might be meaning to do him harm she might be meaning to kill him. The
suddenness with which he moved when he saw the reflection of her face tipped
the water out of his hatbrim in such a way that some of it ran down his neck ....
The cold water falling into his face and onto his bare hands, the rancid smell of
the wet gutters and pavings, the knowledge that his feet were beginning to get
wet and that he might catch cold-all the common discomforts of walking in
the rain-seemed
to heighten the menace of his pursuer and to give him a
morbid sense of his own physicalness and of the ease with which he could be
hurt. (Moffett 383)

This is very close to the situation in Poes Cask of Amontillado,

where the primeval pattern of hunter following prey obtains again. As
here the woman follows the man through the wet, cavernous city streets,
Montressor follows Fortunato through the likewise wet and cavernous
catacombs. In the first story, the rancid smell of the wet gutters is
remarked, in the second, the foulness of the air. In the first the (presumptive) victims fear of catching cold is noted whereas in the Poe
story the victim-to-be already suffers from a severe cold, coughing helplessly as moisture trickles down the walls. The significance of the cough
is emphasized by Poes extraordinarily extended representation of it:
Ugh! ugh! ugh!-ugh! ugh! ugh!-ugh! ugh! ugh!-ugh! ugh! ugh!ugh! ugh! ugh! (Poetry & Tales 850).
While each author has his own devices for heightening and ironizing
the horror in his tale-Poes use of costumes, for instance, the victim
grotesquely arrayed in harlequin clothes-each tale fundamentally goes
to human bodily aversions. The primeval fear of being preyed upon, the
dread of dampness made worse by a cold, the dread of rancidity, and so
on; these things arouse, to paraphrase Cheever, our sense of our own
physicalness and the ease with which we can be hurt, the essential, chillprovoking, element of Gothic literature.
Even the costumes in Cask of Amontillado, lending a bizarre,
operatic quality to the terror as they do, are arguably not unrelated to the
storys organicism. The tale occurs at the juncture of the comic and
horror modes. It begins in festival, in the dream-like ambivalence of the
masquerade-the festival being the traditional vehicle carrying the folkaesthetic, body principle Bakhtin calls grotesque realism. In all its
vulgar energy, the carnival is a comic ritual-During carnival time life
is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom .... It is a
special condition of the entire world, of the worlds revival and

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renewal ... (Bakhtin 7). Montressor is a figure antithetical to such a

spirit of revival and renewal; he is not a participant in the festival (which
he characterizes as madness). He is stranded in his resentments,
obsessed with his revenge agenda, and from the sphere of the carnivalesque Poes tale moves underground, to the dank realm of the Romantic
grotesque, to an ironic parody of the comic energy wherein the only
laughter is sadistic and mocking. (A comparison might be drawn here to
films like Blowout, Carnival of Souls, Tightrope, and so on, where horror
runs concurrently with festival and the phantasmagoric, potentially sinister, licence of masquerade--further suggesting the dark tales relationship to the carnivalesque.) The festive and the horrific are likewise conflated in Masque of the Red Death, and in Hawthornes hallucinatory
My Kinsman Major Molineaux. An observation of Bakhtins relative
to popular-festive celebration may be relevant here-that in the atmosphere of Mardi Gras, reveling, dancing, music were all closely combined
with slaughter, dismemberment, bowels, excrement.. . (223-24).
In Blood Disease, as mentioned above, a formerly vigorous
young man returns to England haggard and thin. When the narrator of
Fall of the House of Usher encounters Roderick Usher for the first
time in years, he cannot believe his eyes. Surely, man had never before
so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher. It was
with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the wan
being before me ... (Baldick 88). The weird tale focuses upon this terrible alteration, upon things coming apart or crumbling-bodies, minds,
families, human structures, civic order, and so on. (Yeats The Second
Coming is in this sense a horror poem turning on the terrible disestablishment of order.) The Gothic underscores the multifold miasmas, poisons, fungi, plagues, viruses, that are out there and able to destroy our
individual or collective systemic order. It is not the physical or mental
aberration in itself that horrifies us, Stephen King writes, but rather the
lack of order these aberrations seem to imply (50). Horror focuses upon
the terror of that which is bio-antithetical, bio-illogical, a fear as viable
today as it was in the middle-ages or in the imagined middle ages of 18th
century Gothic literature.
The Fall of the House of Usher, a classic example of the theory so
far set forth, has as its central concern Ushers disease, his acute
bodily illness; it is a tale of possession by disease, a morbid tale played
out in a morbid atmosphere. And here again vestiges of fertility legends
would seem evident. Here, as in Bartleby, is the figure of the infirm
host, his own health and by extension that of his house, family, and
lands, failing terribly. Again, the sympathetic visitor who is would-be
healer seeks to fathom the nature of the hosts malady. The pattern is that

Toward an Organic Theory of the Gothic

71

found in the Adonis cults, the European Spring Festivals, the Mumming
plays of the British Isles, in all of which, as Jessie Weston noted, the
salient point is that the representative of the Spirit of Vegetation is considered dead, and the object ...is to restore him to life ( 1 19). The Waste
Land motif is clear in lines like these: I looked upon the scene before
me-upon ...the bleak walls-upon the vacant, eye-like windows-upon
a few rank sedges-and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees-with
an utter depression of soul ... (Baldick 85).
The narrator realizes as he approaches the malevolent Usher mansion, and during his first experiences within, that all the mental capacity
he commands is proving inadequate. Man is inordinately proud of and
dependent upon hidher rational powers. Mental adroitness, Langer
notes, is humanitys chief asset in confronting its vastly involved and
extended symbolic world (330). David R. Salina, referring to the narrator in Poes stories generally, notes his incessant rationalizing and his
confusing version of the facts... (67). Indeed our symbolic, intellectual
powers, once doubted and neutralized, generate phantasms themselves
and are of doubtful trustworthiness. We begin to suspect, as the narrator
does, that our own imagination, our own thought, is implicated in the
very fear we would wish to overcome. Indeed because man is so dependent upon his virtuaVsymbolic world, he is easily victimized by it, and,
as Langer points out in a sentence that becomes all the more resonant in
a horror context, Even the dead may still play into his life (330).
One of the most familiar motifs of Gothic horror is relevant here.
RationaVintellectual prying into the seamless organic mystery and presumptuous attempts to gain control over it are doomed-and horribly so.
Rappachinis daughters body ends up so poisoned that what should be a
healthful restorative kills her. Captain Obeds crosspecies experiment in
Lovecrafts The Shadow Over Innsmuth results in a loathsome, misbegotten breed. And it is noteworthy that it is the unnatural gait of these
creatures which particularly horrifies the narrator, i.e., the discrepancy
between their bodily movements and those of normal human beings:
Their crouching, shambling gait was abominably repellent. He
describes their flopping march in the moonlight as a malignant saraband (175) i.e., a distorted similitude of courtly dance. In a likewise
chilling scene in the 1995 film version of Frankenstein, the sciencebesotted doctor joins in a dance with the experimentally ravaged body of
his beloved. Their waltz is a ghastly antidance, a gruesome semblance of
natural dances celebration of the bodys graceful potentials. (Cf. the
chilling pavilion dance of the dead in the cult film Carnival of Souls.)
And because of certain obtrusive and eager enquiries on their part,
Usher suspects the doctors whose medical knowledge has been stumped

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by the nature of his sisters malady, may, in their overweening postmortem curiosity, violate her grave and her body. This body-sacrilege
theme, pervasive in the Gothic literature corpus, is one more expression
of the genres physiological inspiration.
This most famous of Poes tales concerns disintegration and
decline-a single, organic dissipation taking in family line, the contemporary Ushers, the house and grounds. Life is flow, dynamic movement,
constant refreshment, elasticity; thus, we are repulsed by what is stagnant, stale, desiccated, musty-we recognize all the latter as anti-life,
entropic, unwholesome. Poe uses image upon image throughout his tale
to evoke an atmosphere of pervasive enervation. The atmosphere is
devoid of natural air and light-those mainstays of life; it is an atmosphere which has reeked up from the decayed trees ...and the silent tam,
in the form of an inelastic vapor or gas-dull, sluggish ...leaden hued
(Baldick 87). There is reference to woodwork rotted for long years in
some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external
air (87). The prevailing images are of things cut off like Lovecrafts
Innsmuth badly cut off from the rest of the country by marshes and
creeks, or the Bates Motel in Psycho left behind by interstate highway
construction. Usher himself, like Faulkners Emily and so many other
characters in Gothic literature, has not left the house for years-everything, including the family tree, is biologically static, unrefreshed, spent.
Madeline lingers in a settled apathy, a gradual wasting away (90). The
failure of vitality is the tales predominate note. The narrator remarks
that the books and musical instruments in Ushers quarters, for example,
failed to give any vitality to the scene (88).
Ushers entire vision in fact expresses an infirm, distorted organicism-a demented version of the comic festive perception c. L. Barber
describes as an experience of the relationship between vitality in people
and nature (19). Usher sees the ancestral estate, its grounds and natural environs as (cf. again the Fisher King motif) radically continuous
with his own decrepit organism which is itself the contemporary expression of the Usher family line. He is convinced of the sentience of all
vegetable things and so on. What in the comic-festive tradition is a
robust and exhilarating perception-the recognition, for example, of all
living things stirring together (Barber 21), becomes for Usher a horrid
undifferentiation, a terrifying trespass upon the kingdom of inorganization. At root the horror tale exploits the materialistic, presenting a
reductio ad absurdum of the materialist world view.
This is why the scientific 17th-18th century world view described by
Whitehead in Science and the Modern World-material on the one hand,
mind on the other-was conducive to exploitation by the Gothic authors.

Toward an Organic Theory of the Gothic

73

With its simply located bits of material (Whitehead 58), this devitalized cosmology was ill-suited to accommodate organicism; organic
material in the materialist model being itself simply located, decontextualized, de trup as Sartre puts it in Nausea. S. T. Joshi writes that
Lovecraft is correct in maintaining that weird fiction as such can only
be a product of an age that has ceased to believe in the existence of the
supernatural... (Lovecraft: A Life 28). But it might be better put that
Horror writers are either, like Lovecraft, irresistibly mechanistic materialists (qtd. in Joshi, Weird Tale 171) or they embrace that stance-what
Whitehead would call the requisite abstractions-temporarily for the
sake of their art, in order to explore the dead-end implications of the
mechanistic cosmology. The spirits in the Gothic are not religious, transcendent entities, but rather disconnected, drifting indictments haunting
materialism. Works in the horror genre presuppose a suspension of belief
as well as disbelief on the readers part-there must be no exit.

***
All human expression, Langer argues, bespeaks our physiological
nature; the human environment is throughout informed by it. Therefore
any building that can create the illusion of ...a place articulated by the
imprint of human life, must seem organic, like a living form (99). A
house, like a ship or, for that matter, a Gothic tale itself, is biogenic.
Langer refers to the obvious, rationalized examples of this principal in
the works of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. But the same
architectural insight-the organic nature of the house, its identification
with its inhabitants and the landscape-emerges in a darker, horrific
embodiment in The Fall of the House of Usher wherein the house is
distressingly and radically on a continuum with its living, breathing
inhabitants. Again, the ecological continuity of living things, a joy in the
comic/carnivalesque context, is an overwhelming, sickening concept to
the hyperintellectualized Usher.
Already eluded to have been the remote vicinities within the
dwellings in Gothic tale-cellars, attics, chambers long closed off, and
so on. From what are they closed off? Essentially from life-air, sunlight, human presence and care. They are repulsive in that they bespeak
abandonment and unlife. A house is a human nest. Areas that are
squalid-dust covered, moldy, cobwebbed-reflect malaise and irresolution, an absence of biologically sound human functioning. Only a sick,
neurotic animal allows its nest to become befouled. Maintenance-of its
own body, its offspring, its place of habitation and so forth, is an unmistakable signal of a sound, viable organism. Areas shut off and not kept
up suggest morbidity and locales where things sinister and repulsive may

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take place-a smell emanates from Emily Griersons house; a marker of

her growing peculiarity, her unsoundness.
The derelict, unmaintained ship, to take another example, is a recurrent image in Gothic tales and a vivid symbolic expression of broken
organic system. The sailing ship in its ordered elegance, able to gracefully ply the most treacherous seas, epitomized optimum human design
capabilities for centuries-the most finely coordinated and precisely
applied methodology and technology wedded to the realities of sea, sky,
weather, and so forth. The floundering ship iconography that occurs in
Poes The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, in Dracula, in
The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner and in Benito Cereno, works off
that trim ship ideal. Benito Cereno is in many ways The House of
Usher Goes to Sea. As in Poes earlier story, a visitor approaches a
crumbling house (here ship) which is enveloped in an eerie haze. The
narrator specifically stresses the house-ship analogy, noting the particular enchantment effect of the latter upon a stranger (242). As in
Usher, the visitor senses something profoundly wrong but tries to
account for it by compulsive rationalizing set against the forebodings he
takes to be the troubling manifestations of his own over-active imagination: Trying to break one charm, he discovers later aboard the grim
ship, he was but becharmed anew. Though upon the wide sea, he
seemed in some far inland country; prisoner in some deserted chateau ...
(269). The visitor encounters an enigmatic, distraught host the nature
of whose malady he tries unsuccessfully to figure out. In both stories, the
bewildered narrator is disturbingly obtuse, and so forth.
Captain Amassa Delanos 1817 nonfiction Voyages and Travels,
Benito Cereno s documentary base, has been available since its republication in PMLA in 1928. Comparing that text with Melvilles story permits us to see clearly how Melville recognized and drew out the inherent
Gothic possibilities in the original narrative as well as the way in which
he overlaid a Poesque, Gothic atmosphere upon it. One might expect
space from a sea tale, for instance-fresh breezes, light, color, bracing
salt air. But refreshment there is none, quite the contrary.
The initial atmospheric note struck in the story is static: The sea
seemed fixed ...like waved lead that had cooled and set, pervaded by
troubled gray vapors. Melvilles effort from the beginning is to render
the scene, despite its outdoor character, claustrophobic-there is essentially no outdoors in the horror tale; contra naturam is its bent-even the
sea is rendered in the lethargic mode of Coleridges Rhyme of the
Ancient Mariner. Harold Beaver writes of Poes Narrative of Arthur
Gordon Pym, that even here, where Poe seems his most boyish and
exuberant ...turning to the open sea, he is still trapped ...in the holds of

Toward an Organic Theory of the Gothic

75

ships...the runaway is also the stowaway ...inevitably on the edge of

nightmare (9). The state-cabins lights on Cerenos ship, for all the
mild weather, [are] hermetically sealed and caulked (241). Delano, as
mentioned previously, not unlike Poes narrator coming upon the House
of Usher, perceives the strange ship with some uneasiness with misgivings, uncertain of what he sees. The ghostly ships odd movements,
Delano reasons, might have been but a deception of the vapors (240).
His whaleboat nears the ship which lies in the still water shreds of fog
here and there raggedly furring her. Traditional Gothic semblances
intrude upon Delanos perceptions-fitfully revealed through the open
portholes ...dark moving figures were dimly descried, as of Black Friars
pacing the cloisters (240). Disarray, neglect, lethargy are evident everywhere. Battered and mouldy, the castellated forecastle seemed some
ancient turret long ago taken by assault and left to decay (241). The
ships name, San Dominick, appears set in gilt on its side each letter
streakingly corroded with tricklings of copper-spike rust ...sea-grass similarly swept to and fro over her name (241-42). The ships pallid, aristocratic master, like the master of the Usher House, is in ill-health evidencing sleepless cares and disquietudes. He is described as prey to
settled dejection ...a distempered spirit ...lodged in a distempered
frame ...his voice like that of one with lungs half gone (245). Delano,
wonted to the quiet orderliness of the sealers comfortable family of a
crew, on boarding the San Dominic, comes upon the Waste Land or, to
paraphrase Poe in The House of Usher, upon the kingdom of inorganization. In a remark that would well apply to Benito Cereno,
Stephen King notes that terror, a sense of loathing, often arises from a
pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking
(22).
Melvilles overlay, his gothicizing of Delanos narrative, is largely a
matter of sounding again and again these disturbing notes of dysfunction, lethargy, disrepair, debris, corrosion, mold, rust, slime and so forth.
(Contemporary bio-chemistry tells us that the oxidation implicated in
our organic decline is not a different process from the one involved in
the rust and decay of external inorganic things-metals, for examplepointing up what the Gothic has long recognized, the fact that our disintegration is not different in kind from that of the things around us.) This
repulsive sense of decline and dissipation pervades Melvilles tale and is
then overlaid with a conventionally antiquariadheraldic Gothic iconography:

...These tenantless balconies hung over the sea as if it were the grand Venetian
canal. But the principal relic of faded grandeur was the ample oval of the shield-

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like stern-piece, intricately carved with the arms of Castile and Leon, medallioned about by groups of mythological or symbolic devices; uppermost and
central of which was a dark satyr in a mask, holding his foot on the prostrate
neck of a writhing figure, likewise masked. (241)

The Gothic tale is itself a closed system, hermetically sealed and

caulked like the San Dominicks cabin lights. Hence the genres frequent vagueness as to time and place. Melville in Benito Cereno,
having used an actual historical document, created an anomalous Gothic
tale in that historical and moral issues related to slavery intrude. Babo
and the other African slaves in Benito Cereno, whatever the authors
intent, work in the service of the tales primary and horrific illusion-the
world upside down; in fact they are at the center of it.* Babo, a classic
vise figure in the tradition of Iago, Shylock or Edmund in Lear, rides
Cereno like an incubus, a cloying and sinister presence insinuating itself
at every turn. (We have here again the predator-prey horror pattern mentioned previously.) The hatchet polishers with their chant and their ludicrous-as if there were not more pressing maintenance duties evident
given the ships general condition-attention to cleaning and maintaining their hatchets are part of the general disturbing masquerade the San
Dominick presents to the visiting Captain Delano and address, clearly,
the dread of alien takeover, misrule, and cultural decline, or, to use
Stephen Kings term again, of disestablishment.
Critics have tried to explain away the problem involved here
through recourse to Melvilles ironic portrayal of Delano, as if the malignancy of Babo and his people were to be read as a commentary on
Delanos narrow New England racism and so forth. In fact, I would
argue, Babo and company become bound up in the storys horror
dynamic, in the tales closed off, ahistorical and virtual reality. The tale
outruns its author and his presumably more liberal perspective. The
problem with Benito Cereno is real and generic-it is a nightmarish
Gothic story and as such resists the intrusion of historical and morally
complex light of day. It is because the horror tale is so closed off that it
accommodates moral theme uncomfortably. The my heart grew sick
element at the end of Cask of Amontillado, if foregrounded as a
moralkautionary expression, could work to the detriment of the tales
stark horror dynamic. The loss of all bearings, the absence of moral-ethical-rational compass, is an integral part of the horror illusion. The same
holds true of Bartleby where issues of obligation to ones fellow man
and even overtly Christian notes make up a thematic level in the story
that is perhaps not satisfactorily wedded to its nihilistic Gothicism. In a
real sense, the Gothic author works with an amoral design. Like the nar-

Toward an Organic Theory of the Gothic

77

rator of Ligeia, s h e is engaged in a study the nature of which is more

than all else adapted to deaden impressions of the outside world ...
(Poetry & Tales 262).
In their introduction to the Necronomican Press edition of
Lovecrafts The Shadow over Innsmouth, Joshi and Schultz speculate,
probably correctly, that the specific name Gloucester, Massachusetts,
was removed by the author from later drafts of the story because
Lovecraft did not wish to make too obvious a tip of the hat to the real
location of his imaginary town (14). The genre in fact resists too much
truck with real location period-physical or moral, favoring instead the
specialized consciousness of dream.
But how to explain what Aiken and Barbald in 1775 noted: the
apparent delight with which we dwell upon objects of pure terror, where
our moral feelings are not in the least involved, and no passion seems to
be excited but the depressing one of fear...? (qtd. in Heller vii). How is
it that horror, as Emily Dickinson said of Hawthornes work, at once
appalls and entices? How to account for the popularity of horror in its
literary expressions-a highly unlikely popularity it would seem given
the theory advanced here that the genre turns on our organic apprehensions-our fear of infirmity, pollution, and physical degradation?
It is first perhaps necessary to note the obvious fact that there is no
pleasure to be gained from confronting the morbid and repulsive in real
life; a ritual hunt-dance is not to be confused with the hunt per se. Ours
is of course an aesthetic interrogation; it goes to the experience of the
virtual morbid in the virtual spacehime of literary art. The process is in
part intellectual, but the experience of horror, like that of comedy, is centered in a bodily registration, a body-informed imagination. Kant noted
likewise of laughter that it may begin with the intellectual perception of
incongruity, but the enjoyment of it is not due to the understanding but
is caused by the influence of the representation upon the body with only
a reflex effect on the mind (Swabey 13).
An hypothesis might be advanced here in keeping with the generally
physiological nature of the thesis so far discussed. A small quantity of
morbid material-smallpox vaccine for instance-provokes the bodys
healthy energies to muster themselves, and tones them. Small doses of
arsenic and like substances, according to homeopathic theory, can have
the effect of invigorating the bodys immune responses, awakening listless organic functions.
Brought to a kind of analog confrontation with the horrid through
the Gothic tale, readers are likewise reminded of the nature of their own
participation in a biotic harmony and well-being. The virtual claustrophobic heightens our awareness of space in actuality; of good, well-oxy-

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genated air in actuality; of our freedom in actuality. The demarkation

between the healthy and the morbid is brought to consciousness and vivified. Our bodies take pleasure in the fact that we are not locked in some
Gothic crypt nor on the dismal, thirsty decks of the San Dominic, or
walled-up hopelessly in the catacombs beneath an Italian city. In The
Premature Burial, embedded in Poes chilling description of burial
alive-the unendurable oppression of the lungs and so on-is a note
of horrors opposite, the wholesome: thoughts of the air and grass
above, our normal, healthy condition which often goes unnoticed
(Poetry & Tales 672). Through its negations, the macabre-canceling
out its own morbidity-brings us round to a biological affirmation as
comedy does, to an energized sense of our being-in-the-world. Stephen
King recalls the effect 1950s horror films had on him: There was that
magic moment of reintegration and safety at the end .... I believe its this
feeling of reintegration, arising from a field specializing in death, fear
and monstrosity that makes the danse macabre so rewarding and magical (27). The comic and horror genres are thus rooted in the same
bodily principal and the same reintegrative folk aesthetic-hence their
constantly renewed popular cultural expressions.
It might be noted finally in this regard that Langer makes brief mention of gallows humor, the lift of which she ascribes to a flash of selfassertion (341). It may well be that this, too, points to an element of the
horror literature therapeutics, something not there in real world horrors,
obviously. As in gallows humor-though at much greater length and
depth-we boldly venture up to the borders of what as living creatures
we dread, relishing all the while the fact that part of the mind knows we
are one-up on the story. We have taken horror in hand, as King notes,
and used it to destroy itself (27). As readers, we are willing participants in the tales reenactment and can, if we choose, close the book on
the terrors of the Gothic world.
...Or, on the other hand, can we? We may ask ourselves-perhaps
even with a trace of paradoxical delight-whether that insistent, sinister
imagination can be so easily put to rest, whether we will not in fact again
and again be drawn irresistibly back to the strange, alluring spell of
those dark narratives.

Notes
In both Bartleby the Scrivener and Benito Cereno, the revivification
imperative found in the Fisher King tradition is evident. In both, the would-be
restorative meal is offered by the visiting agent-in Bartleby the iawyer pays

Toward an Organic Theory of the Gothic

79

the grub man at the prison to bring Bartleby the best dinner you can get
(Norton 2257). And in Benito Cereno, Captain Delano brings baskets of fish,
bread, water, and cider to the failing Cereno. Cf. Jessie Weston (Chapter IX)
regarding the mystic meal, especially the sacramental fish meal, in the Fisher
king legend.
2See Terry Castles discussion of the world upside down theme and of
elements of the sinister in the Masquerade topos (Masquerade and Civilization,
Chapter 8).

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Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.
Baldick, Chris, ed. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. New York: Oxford UP,
1992.
Barber, C. L. Shakepeares Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its
Relation to Social Custom. New York: Meridian, 1959.
Baym, Nina. Ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 4th ed., Vol 1.
New York: Norton, 1994.
Carroll, Noell. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. New
York: Routledge, 1990.
Castle, Terry. Masquerade and Civilization: The Camivalesque in EighteenthCentury English Culture and Fiction. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1986.
Cheever, John. The Five-Fort-Eight. Points of View: An Anthology of Short
Stories. Ed. James Moffett and Kenneth McElheny. New York: New
American, 1966.
Docherty, Brian, ed. American Horror Fiction. New York: St. Martins, 1990.
Heaney, Seamus. Death o f a Naturalist. New York: Oxford UP, 1966.
Heller, Terry. The Delights of Terror: An Aesthetics of the Tale of Terror.
Urbana: Illinois UP, 1987.
Joshi, S. T. H. P. Lovecraft: A Life. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon P, 1996.
-. The Weird Tale. Austin: Texas UP, 1990.
King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. New York: Everest House, 1981.
Langer, Suzanne. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. New York:
Scribners, 1953.
Lovecraft, H. P. The Lurking Fear and Other Stories. New York: Ballantine,
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-. Supernatural Horror in Literature. New York: Abramson, 1945.
Mack, John E., M.D. Nightmares and Human Conflict. Boston: Houghton,
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Maturin, Charles Robert. Melmoth the Wanderer. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1961.
Melville, Herman. Great Short Works of Herman Melville. Ed. Warner
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Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily
Dickinson. New York: Vintage, 1991.
Poe, Edgar Allen. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Ed.
Harold Beaver. New York: Penguin, 1982.
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Weston, Jessie L. From Ritual to Romance. Garden City: Doubleday, 1957.

Jack Morgan teaches American Literature at the University of Missouri-Rolla.

Co-editor with Louis A. Renza, of The Irish Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett
(Southern Illinios University, Carbondale Press, 1996).