Session 4: Literary Fears

Session 4: Literary Fears
Chair: Antonio Fusco

Horrifying Quixote
Stephen Hessel
Department of Literature, University at Buffalo (SUNY), USA

In this day and age the possibility of reading a text outside of its generic context is quite strong.  The use of archetypical works within parodies such as the “Scary Movie” series demonstrate that works can be easily lifted out of their original context and reinterpreted within the framework of an alternate genre.  Television programs such as “Mystery Science Theater 3000” show that almost no modification is necessary and the process can be almost organic and natural in its transformative power.  With this in mind, it appears also possible to take a work of burlesque comedy and transform it into something quite terrifying.
Cervantes’ Don Quixote, despite its many interpretations, is comic in nature.  The reader laughs at the adventures of this elderly Manchego and his not always so loyal squire, but behind the laughter lurks a context that can be just as frightening as it is hilarious.  The decay of the chivalric system, the rise of proto-capitalist culture, and the specter of madness among other things signal that laughter is a specific response to anxiety and what José Antonio Maravall would call crisis in the late Renaissance and Baroque periods.
Therefore, the adventures of the archetypical Spaniard can be viewed through a different lens that will reveal the possibility of a fearful response.  The works of David Castillo and his proposal of anamorphic process work in conjunction with the writings of Maravall, Foucault, et cetera to bridge the gap created by generic conventions, placing Cervantes masterpiece under the microscope of fear.  Though this reading has been attempted previously by Henry Sullivan in his book Grotesque Purgatory, it now seems to be the ideal time to resurrect this horrifying Quixote and explore his full terrifying potential.  By understanding the horrific potential of this book it is possible to see why at times we shiver and at others giggle.

Download Conference Paper (pdf)

Feeling Bad: Horror and the Repentant Criminal in the Urban Mysteries of Sue and Reynolds
Laurence Scott
King’s College London, United Kingdom

From the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, a particular dialogue of fear was conducted between England and France. As Alice Killen argues in Le Roman Terrifiant (1915), English Gothic novelists such as Walpole, Reeve and Radcliffe, contemporaneously supplied France with the delights of literary fear. Influence switched direction some fifty years later when Eugene Sue’s serialised novel Les Mysteres de Paris (1842-43) received unprecedented popular attention in England. Sue’s roman-feuilleton established the new genre of urban mystery, which G.W.M. Reynolds shortly thereafter adopted in his long-running work, The Mysteries of London (1844-56). My paper will, using a comparative approach, explore how the original Gothic aesthetic, itself a set of anachronistic deployments of Medieval tropes, was translated into the Urban Gothic of Reynolds and Sue.
Robert Mighall, in A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction (1999), explores Reynolds’s Gothic re-mapping of London, specifically the mutation of the haunted Gothic pastoral into a frightening urban underworld. I will expand upon Mighall’s arguments of geographic re-imagining by considering how the discourse of fear itself mutates in this new Urban Gothic. I will argue that Reynolds and Sue distinguish horror from terror by imbuing the experience of horror with a moral component. Horror, in this context the horror the criminal feels at his or her former wickedry, becomes a sign of rehabilitation. To be horrified is to engage in repentance. Terror here does not have this associated moral element, and remains a purely aesthetic experience. With this distinction in mind, I will consider how the structure of the serialised urban mystery necessarily defuses the potential for terror, while their authors’ focus on social reform and the plight of an externally corrupted criminal class allows a historically particular form of horror to emerge repeatedly throughout these labyrinthine texts.

Download Conference Paper (pdf)

Destruction of the Hero: An Examination of the Hero’s Purpose in Lovecraft’s Works
James Aevermann
Department of English, University of Guam

There will always be a part of us that fears that dark corner in the back of our closets. We will always have this eerie feeling of someone watching us from some unseen location, and making our skin crawl and our hair stand on end. Is this simply a massively spread out fear that has been built into all of us, or is there something greater at work making this fear more than irrational. Lovecraft, a true genius of horror, sees deeper into this human condition of fear and uses this against us to create a lasting impression upon our minds and our culture.
The hero in any story serves as a very important focal character from which we, the readers, may gain an insight into the world around us and humanity in general. However, there is a darker view of the hero which leaves us questioning humanity and our purpose in this world far more than giving any answers. Lovecraft’s works are such stories in which the hero, instead of achieving the goal and being lauded for it, becomes utterly destroyed by the fulfillment of his task. This impending doom has fascinated people, and has caused fear in all of us as we continue to read his works long after his death.
This paper will examine the role of the hero in Lovecraftian horror in contrast to the stereotypical, proper hero of Joseph Campbell. This comparison will show not only what an anti-humanist view of the hero can do for the horror genre, but also what causes people to be drawn to this bleak outlook on human nature. This paper will discuss the methods of creating fear through skillful manipulation of the hero, and how that fear manipulates our outlook on life as readers.