 |
| Image Copyright Gareth Cameron |
Creatures
that are half-insect, half-man - giant jellyfish that rain down from
Mars to take over our planet. Modern theorists reflect on why we love
being scared.
Fantasy
and horror operate by challenging and dissolving perceived limits of
reality and so violate our “normal” perspective. How can people
be attracted by what is actually terrifying or repulsive? Why are we
transfixed by imagery that it would seem most natural for us to
avoid? It could be argued that this is an abnormality or a
perversion, but Noel Carroll in his The
Philosophy of Horror thinks
this conclusion might be a misconception, given the vast numbers of
human beings ‘turned on’ by horror and fantasy.
The
“Pretend Theory”
Kendall
Walton supports the “Pretend Theory” and maintains it’s all
just make-believe – we make-believedly fear the monster in horror
movies, analogously, we make-believedly feel happy or sad for
characters in fiction with whom we identify. These, Walton believes,
are “quasi-emotions” and when enjoying horror, we are merely
feeling quasi-fear. Noel Carroll disagrees with Walton. “If it were
a pretend emotion, one would think that it could be enjoyed at will.”
Carroll offers an example: “I could elect to remain unmoved
by The Exorcist. I
could refuse to make believe I was horrified. But I don’t think
that was really an option for those like myself who were
overwhelmedly (sic) struck by it.”
Carroll
takes an opposite stance from Walton's, one that falls in line with
much current thought. He points out that the main psychoanalytic
theories of horror maintain that the horror genre releases repression
in a way that is liberating and, as a result, promotes an
accompanying feeling of pleasure.
Contemporary
Horror Fiction and Our Cultural Anxieties
Rosemary
Jackson, a contemporary theorist, believes the monstrous creatures of
the horror and sci-fi genres are manifestations of what we have
repressed. “The fantastic traces the unsaid and the unseen of
culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over
and made absent.”
However,
Carroll disagrees with Jackson that repression is always at
the centre of the problem (although he concurs, it may be -
sometimes.) He says, “We are not prepared with a ready cultural
category for the insect slaves in the film This
Island Earth.
They are part insect and part man... The possibility… is not
something our cultural categories lead us to expect; many perhaps
never dreamed of the possibility of such a creature until they
saw This
Island Earth…
But this is not because we have been repressing the possibility of
these monsters.” So, while Carroll agrees that horror violates our
culture's norms, the creatures it engenders do not and
generally cannot exist
in our reality.
So,
for Carroll, the issue is that the monsters of horror fiction are
“unthought.” There isno
reason to assume that
these cases will always connect with repressed material. Further, why
should we try to repress such figures, which are merely routine
deformations, recombinations, subtractions, etc? This argument is
out-of-place. Who, for example, needs to repress a concept like
“jellyfish as big as houses coming from Mars to conquer the world?”
says Carroll. “There are no such jellyfish.”
The
main hypothesis of Carroll’s philosophy seems to be that the act of
repression is never pleasurable. “What is pleasurable is
the lifting of
repression.” It is fair to point out, however, that there is
another hypothesis that repression - in itself - is pleasurable,
although Carroll does not subscribe to this.
Sources
-
Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion, Methuen, London, 1981.
-
Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart, Routledge, London, 1990.
-
Steven Schneider, “The Paradox of Fiction” Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy,University of Tennessee, 2002, www.iep.utm.educ/fic Site includes excerpts from: Kendall Walton, “Fearing Fiction” Journal of Philosophy, 1978.
No comments:
Post a Comment