One of the most striking narrative descriptions of pure horror is not found in a slasher film, it stands like a guidepost, an ominous warning sign at the entrance to Michel Foucault's study of the prison system, Discipline and Punish. "On 2 March 1757," Foucault innocently begins
Damiens the regicide was condemned "to make the amende honorable before the main door of the Church of Paris," where he was to be "taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds"; then, "in the said cart, to the Place de Grève, where on a scaffold that will be erected there, ..." (chapter 1, "The Body of the Condemned," 3)and into the blank space suggested by my ellipsis, Foucault pours forth a wealth of detail about the physical punishments that are then inflicted upon the prisoner. The scene laid out before us rivals the most egregious displays of body horror in contemporary splatter films. Not only does Foucault dwell extensively on the varieties of bodily damage, as does any good horror writer, he also shows a keen awareness of how precariously moments of deep terror and hilarity are balanced. A bungling torturer has to change punishments in mid-process, improvising new methods of punishment as an expert audience stands by commenting sarcastically on his ineptitude. Foucault's complete description takes up an excruciating three pages, and most readers will experience reading about these unpleasant details as a form of cruel and unusual punishment in itself. There is something not only provocative, but downright assaultive in Foucault's relentlessness and fastidiousness, reminiscent of the scene in Hitchcock's Torn Curtain in which Paul Newman takes an exhausting ten minutes to dispatch an East German spy. Most of us do not take long to realize that the attack on this spy, or on the body of the condemned in Discipline and Punish, is an attack on us. Our experience of these scenes is not about being squeamish, it's about being made to be squeamish.
Whereas we might expect and tolerate such treatment in a thriller, critical discourse takes us by surprise when it employs horror as a palpable effect. The sense of scandal and outrage in Foucault is greater because we expect the writer-as I have done with my ellipsis-to avert the gaze and to let the blank space speak to the imagination. Even if we were to allow the scholarly gaze to linger, in the interest of "scientific objectivity" or the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, Foucault still sounds suspiciously duplicitous in this passage. His carefully laconic tone operates not only to support an attitude of scholarly objectivity, but also to establish an aesthetic discrepancy between the subject matter and the voice in which it is presented. The exposition deliberately withholds information, builds suspense, and prepares the way for the shock of graphic detail that is to follow. These devices serve primarily not as an effective means of transmitting information but are geared toward triggering the reader's affective response. They are deployed along the psychological fault lines of the reader's composure, to rattle the reader rather than to inform. Foucault's mode of delivery is unconcerned with the imperatives of empiricism, or the demand, in the anthropological tradition of Clifford Geertz, for thick description. It aims at excess, a wallowing in graphic detail uncontainable by the rules of scholarly discourse.
Since Discipline and Punish deals with the body as a site where political and ideological power is negotiated, and since Foucault is an intensely self-conscious writer, it stands to reason that creating a specifically physical response to the opening passage of the book is Foucault's intention. We are not supposed to understand horror, to comprehend it as the critical discourse lays it out for us; we are supposed to experience it. We are supposed to experience it as a loud, crass, and almost instinctual sensation, rather than as a gray sense of dread which, according to Foucault, takes place as the forces of the Enlightenment relocate discipline from the body to the internal space of the conscience. Horror, here, means bodily exertion: to shudder, to sweat, to squirm in our seats.
Traditionally, forms of discourse that aim primarily for a physical rather then a mental or intellectual response have been dismissed as trivial. The term "sensational," with its strong negative connotation, is itself revealing. Jane Tompkins made this argument in her aptly titled Sensational Designs in the context of American literature, and the prolonged critical dismissal of Beecher-Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as a tearjerker vastly inferior to the highly ironic canonical writing of her contemporaries Melville and Hawthorne. Though the critique of sentimental fiction is driven by specific social and political forces, the distrust of bodily responses to fiction expressed by these forces is far more universal. But Tompkins wants the body-fluids and all-to be redeemed as political. Even immersed in the "vocabulary of clasping hands and falling tears," which "makes words like 'kitsch', 'camp', and 'corny' come to mind" (132), she insists that we never lose our ability to think critically. Readers of sentimental novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin certainly didn't; the tears shed by characters and readers alike "are a sign of redemption" (131), a bodily trigger and marker of a politics of compassion.
Linda Williams has explored the same system of value judgments in the context of cinematic genres like "thrillers, weepies, and low comedy," all forms of discourse which she labels "body genres," designed and intended specifically to generate a physical response from the audience (5). Horror easily takes its place in this list of body genres, having to confront the same prejudices and critical dismissal; while pornography makes us lust rather than think, and melodrama makes us feel rather than think, horror makes us shudder rather than think. Ultimately, though, the body's response provides no certainty that we have left critical reasoning behind. "Goose bumps, tears, laughter, and arousal may occur, may seem like reflexes," Williams concedes, "but they are all culturally mediated" (5). It is this cultural mediation that inevitably involves us in processes of critical reflection. The body may interfere with our critical faculties, or we may be only vaguely aware of the cultural interpolation between ourselves and our bodies, but we can never claim to be fully unthinking. We may be hampered by our reflexes, but we are never reduced to them.
If Williams is right, and even the most spontaneous gut-level response to a text is mediated by acts of critical reflection, then horror criticism will also have to examine the social and cultural context of any specific bodily response to horror. Let's look, as an example, at one of the panels presented in the spring 2002 annual conference of the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Association under the heading "Horror (Literary and Cinematic)." During this panel, one presenter showed clips from Hisayasu Sato's 1995 film Naked Blood. As the VCR's reels started spinning, an audience of a dozen academics settled back in their chairs, stopped taking notes, and readied themselves for a familiar experience. After all, conference papers in the humanities are a rhetorical genre very familiar to those who attend academic conferences. And even though there is a rich anecdotal folklore about strange and unusual incidents during the delivery of conference papers, nobody really expects anything too far out of the ordinary. The clip from Naked Blood that followed this brief moment of comfortable anticipation, however, had the same effect on most audience members as Foucault's "The Body of the Condemned" must have had on most of its readers. Watching roughly four minutes of extremely skillful and convincing special effects, suggesting, among other things, on-camera self-cannibalization, most audience members seemed generally uncertain as to what exactly would constitute a correct response to such footage. There were those who were bewildered and too insecure to speak, and those who were offended but had little else to articulate other than their anger. And there were those who, physically repulsed to the point of nausea, obviously had other things to worry about for the moment.
There may have even been some audience members who liked what they saw. But by and large, they kept their enthusiasm to themselves, recognizing that this admission would disqualify them from academic discourse and move them into the shady territory of fandom. This form of polite dishonesty may be surprising because, obviously, most academics attending panels on horror film tend to be viewers of horror film first. Some of them, by their own admission, may even be fans, and many of them would have seen footage similar to this, or worse, before. This disequilibrium suggests that the source of the disturbance, most likely, was not the images themselves. Rather, this source could be located in the professional, institutional, and social context in which these images appeared. There was something disturbingly inappropriate, scandalous, or obscene about these images appearing as part of a scholarly discussion, and about the method, or lack thereof, by which they were embedded into this discourse.
David J. Skal, in his discussion of "the media circus surrounding [the publication of Brett Easton Ellis' novel] American Psycho," makes a valuable point in this regard (376). Ellis' publishers, "Simon and Schuster and Knopf," Skal reminds us,
were not genre publishers. To the offended sensibilities, it was permissible for the working classes to pork down on books like Rex Miller's Slob (1987), because the classes who read the books didn't matter. American Psycho was an upscale, gold-plated Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the purest kind of cultural collision. Although the whole incident was endlessly discussed in terms of taste, misogyny, and political correctness, a subtext of class snobbery predominated. The hideous progeny of Stephen King could be tolerated, or ignored, as long as they kept their place in the peasants' quarters in Brooklyn or New Jersey, but let them start tracking blood up the staircase of the Manhattan castle, and there'd be hell to pay. (376)Skal's shrewd discerning of a "cultural collision" in the public debate about American Psycho exposes the dismissal of horror as a bodily sensation among the literati, but rephrases it in terms of social class and ressentiment. Not only is horror dismissed as an inferior genre, it appears even more scandalous when it makes its appearance in the wrong class context. Academics confronted with clips from Naked Blood respond adversely because an invader from the "peasants' quarters" has made its way into the hallowed halls of academe. Like unsuspecting consumers reaching for highbrow product from Knopf or Simon & Schuster, audience members at the presentation of that conference paper on Naked Blood found themselves victims of a cultural collision. Neither group knew where to situate itself.
Since papers on horror, and clips from horror films, are staples of academic conferences, and since not all such papers cause a such stir, one other factor must be added to explain the impact of cultural collisions that do cause a stir. While the publishers of American Psycho attempted to extricate themselves from their contractual obligations to its author, sensing that a head-on clash with their paying customers was approaching, the presenter of the paper on Naked Blood was steering deliberately into the crash head-on. Similarly, Foucault's descriptions of physical torture are a deliberate move, not a result of the author's insensitivity or bad judgment. Both are staged collisions. Both aim for their respective audience's unease at being made to shudder rather than to think. The ambivalence inherent in such staged collisions between horror and academic discourse has been described by Ken Gelder in the introduction of his Horror Reader. "It is not the purpose of this Reader," Gelder writes,
fully to legitimize the study of horror, which has of course so often staked out its place in the broader field of cultural production in terms of illegitimacy: as an often shocking, spectacular, sensationalist and "immoral" (or amoral) form which can seem to take pleasure from the fact that so many people find it disturbing, distasteful or even downright unacceptable. The "minimizing" of the impact of horror texts happens most directly through censorship, of course ... (5)Conventional censorship suppresses horror altogether, depriving it of its opportunity to speak, primarily because of the "sensual equation" it suggests. "A horror text, like pornography (to which it is often compared)" arouses the suspicion that its operative principle "is a simple matter of cause and effect, arousing, nauseating, or inciting, as the case may be" (5). Academic criticism, Gelder proposes, should reject the silencing of horror by critics who dismiss it, together with pornography, as a body genre. Critics should "see horror texts as signifying systems" (5), and should allow them to speak, for example, to national (6), anthropological (82), psychosocial (50), or economic and ideological concerns (146), to mention just a few.
The selections included in the Horror Reader, and Gelder's knowledgeable and self-assured introductory essays that accompany these selections, do an admirable job of making horror texts speak within the framework of academic criticism. The multiple discursive and generic framings within the Reader redeem horror from its dubious and dismissive reputation of making its audience shudder rather than think. Gelder weighs in heavily on the side of Linda Williams' argument that there is no reflex without cultural mediation by placing all available emphasis on the mediation and not on the reflex. The far-ranging and immensely enjoyable conversation that Gelder orchestrates among his twenty-nine contributors often assumes a moment of bodily convulsion but never stages one. That we have all been repulsed by horror films, catapulted out of our seats, and made to shudder is treated as a given; the critical conversation starts from there, but in Gelder's expositions the moment itself is not given any play.
While conventional censorship sees only the body in the horrific throes of revulsion, academic censorship pays little attention to this spectacle. Of course, this scholarly disinterest in the body hardly constitutes a form of censorship as egregious as the "conventional" one. But it does raise the question of whether an essential element of horror has been screened out. What appears to confirm this suspicion is that the problem of horror and critical discourse is presented as one of mind versus matter, a dichotomy in which matter, i.e., bodily horror and our physical response to it, is a losing proposition. The body loses out, a casualty of the attempt "fully to legitimize the study of horror," as Ken Gelder puts it. It is not the horror text that silences the critic, it is the critic who silences the horror text.
A shrewd and circumspect editor, Gelder is aware that the institutional and discursive framework he brings into play has a negative impact on horror, albeit not as damaging as forms of censorship decreed from above or outside. One devastating effect academic criticism could have on horror would be to promote its canonization. This would place increasingly complex mechanisms of cultural mediation between the text and its reader, diminishing even further horror's ability to provoke a bodily response. As a result, horror would face even more obstacles to inspiring complex interactions between bodily and intellectual responses in its audience. Gelder employs a number of strategies in his editorial policies for the Horror Reader that deliberately lessen the impact of canonization. For this purpose, he refers back to Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the "field of cultural production" as the theoretical concept guiding him in his editorial work (Gelder 1). Bourdieu's concept allows him to focus on "the everyday deployment of what might be called the rhetorics of horror," on the politics of horror, its social dimension which makes "available (to draw on Bourdieu again) a range of positions and dispositions" (1). Gelder's declared intention behind the use of this concept-the short-circuiting of value judgments about (or rather, against) horror as a genre-leads to a systematic de-emphasizing of canonicity.
Though Bourdieu looms large, the concepts that come to mind when describing Gelder's editorial work are those coined by Michel deCerteau -- "strategies" versus "tactics." DeCerteau defines a strategy as "the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power ... can be isolated. It postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serves as a base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats ... can be managed" (36). Strategies, thus, are the conceptual instruments of canonicity, a rationality that operates within a model of center/margin, lasting/fleeting, profound/trivial, deserving of critical attention/beneath serious consideration, etc. These dichotomies are energized by professional and institutional investments, which map out power bases in the academy, to the exclusion or ostracization of marginal players and their respective agendas.
A tactic, meanwhile, is defined by deCerteau as "a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus" (37); that is to say, in the context of this argument, a move that comes not so much from the margins, as from the uncharted areas within the charted territories of canonicity. A tactic, DeCerteau continues, "operates in isolated actions, blow by blow. It takes advantage of 'opportunities' and depends on them, being without any base where it could stockpile its winnings. It must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers" (37). The study of subliterary or marginal genres in general appears to be indebted to deCerteau's concept of tactical thinking.
If the objective of critical discourse is to canonize its subject, albeit in "isolated actions" or "blow by blow," it would still make itself useful as a secondary helper of strategic thinking. Its ultimate goal would be the gradual elimination of any "exteriority" (in regard to the canon's centrality, the canon as power base where gains are stockpiled). Hence, arguing for the overlooked or suppressed literary qualities of horror fiction is not what Gelder is aiming for. "It is not the purpose of this Reader," he states categorically, "fully to legitimize the study of horror" (5). This declaration of editorial intent aligns him with deCerteau's definition of tactics as "an art of the weak" (deCerteau 37); it should not be the intention of marginal texts to move closer to the center of the canon, to appropriate some of the power from which they have been excluded.
The editorial idea behind this Paradoxa project takes its cue from Ken Gelder's attempt to preserve horror's problematic status within the larger field of cultural production. Though Gelder concludes by eliminating the more radical implications of horror as a "body genre" from his Reader, he succeeds in steering clear of any systematic attempt at rehabilitating the genre. Like the open-ended discussion Gelder orchestrates, this issue of Paradoxa comes at its material in fits and starts, steering clear of an overarching editorial narrative that charts the progress of horror from the body's convulsions to the mind's contemplation, or from the purveyors of pulp to the stewardship of academics. All selections are chosen with an eye on variety and diversity. Some, like Tricia Henry Young's essay on Goth dancing or Michael Hoover's and Lisa Stokes' essay on Hong Kong horror films, are written explicitly as introductions, requiring little prior knowledge about their respective topics from their audiences. Some, at the other end of the spectrum, are situated precisely and self-consciously at tactical points in an ongoing debate among scholars in the field. Ken Gelder's essay on voodoo, for example, zeroes in on the intersection of horror and postcolonial criticism, while Chantal Bourgault targets Donna Haraway's notion of the cyborg but reads it against another trope derived specifically from horror. Some of the selections in this issue are deliberately set side by side -- like Jay McRoy's essay on Clive Barker, Eugene Thacker's discussion of biohorror, and David Kirby's essay on H.G. Wells -- in order to illuminate a variety of aspects within one thematically focused discussion. The range of primary texts under discussion runs the gamut from the wildly popular (Stephen King and Peter Straub in the essay by Kate Sullivan), to the deservedly or undeservedly obscure (writer Judith Hawkes, discussed in the essay by Susan Poznar, or paracinema auteur Jess Franco, discussed by David Annandale). At times, canonical rehabilitation may make an appearance on the agenda of one critic or another. Mark Wegley, for example, makes a convincing case that Joseph Sheridan LeFanu has been neglected as one of the great writers of the British ghost story. But even in this essay, the demonstration of LeFanu's canonical potential is outweighed by an argument that reveals something more profound about the practice of horror as a popular genre, or as Ken Gelder calls it in his Horror Reader in reference to Bourdieu, as a field of cultural production. Wegley, like all others featured in this collection, approaches LeFanu with critical respect, but does not grant horror that respectability it dreads so much. In other words, taken together and read as one ongoing discussion among roughly two dozen voices, the selections in this collection make a conscious attempt to sound a bit ragged around the edges, to leave some business unfinished, and to recognize the perfidious power of the canon.
Steffen Hantke has written on contemporary American literature, film, and popular fiction. He serves as Area Chair for the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Association, and is on the editorial board of Paradoxa. He has taught in Nepal, China and Taiwan, and currently teaches at Regis University in Denver.
Copyright © 2002 Steffen Hantke.
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