See the accompanying drawing for a breakdown of these three psychic divisions. Think of the individual as a house: the attic, where family mementos, childhood clothing and toys, and family pictures might be kept, is the Super-ego, where we get our sense of conscience and morality from our parents or other authority figures. In opposition to the attic is the basement of the house, where the furnace and instruments for running the system reside. The basement is the dark, dank, and often cluttered portion of our house where the foundation is laid. This is the Id. All the id knows is a childlike desire--pleasure is everything. Things that we may be taught not to do don't disappear; they still reside in the basement, and we merely try to avoid them. The middle section of the house is where we do the majority of our living, and, significantly, it is caught between the attic and the basement. The living room is the Ego, which gets pressure from that above and that below. The ego is our unconscious state as well as conscious, in that we have unconscious thoughts affecting our actions without being entirely aware of them. Like the heat that arises from the basement's furnace, we have ways of dealing with it in the living portion of our house. We control it by means of a "thermostat"--we may allow these desires to make themselves known (in safely coded symbols) in dreams, or we may sublimate (safely change the outward form of) a desire that society says we must hold in check.

Two basic "drives" dominate life: the inclination toward self-preservation and procreation (a "pleasure principle" driven by sexuality) and, conversely, a Death Wish: all life hungers to return to its origins. We engage in risky behavior because it appeals to our instinct for self-harm. Horror, therefore, may be an appeal to our desire for pain and suffering, experienced (much as Aristotle would have it) at a safe distance where we can maintain our self-preservation. Life is a paradox: we enjoy scaring ourselves and teasing danger, but we also strive to survive at all costs and thus equate sex with death: all life is an expectation and anticipation of death, just as sex is an anticipation and expectation of "climax." The sexual act is equated to life, with death as the orgasm.

  (The following drawing, "The House that Freud Built" (besides proving I'm no artist), likens the psyche to a house, with the Super-ego the attic, the Ego, the main living area, and the Id as basement.  While a bit simplistic,  it helps to define "where we live," in Freudian terms.)

Carl Jung:

Along with Freud and Alfred Adler (Adler disagreed with Freud's emphasis on sexuality, emphasizing instead the overcompensation of feelings of inferiority as the basis for neuroses), Jung is regarded as a founder of psychoanalytic theory. He pursued a course more oriented toward the symbolic aspects of human culture. Although Jung is best known for his distinctions between two particular personality types--the introvert and extrovert--his most impressive work consists in discovering a relationship between the patterns of the unconscious, called archetypes, and their representation in myth, religion, and art. Archetypes and archetypal patterns provide the material for an analysis of human behavior. In each individual there are many psychic forces, which sometimes block each other and at other times reinforce each other. Humans have an ego, which determines the conditions of life, and a persona, which is the appearance we would set before the world in a certain manner. Men project an archetypal anima; women project an archetypal animus. Some passions, such as love, have double projections and thus are paradoxical. Another archetypal pattern Jung called the shadow, which is a negative principle that corresponds in some respects to the Freudian Death Wish. It is sadomasochistic and explains the misfortunes we often bring upon ourselves.

While there is much more to Jung's theories than can adequately be addressed here, it is important to note that archetypes can be either artificial or natural. Those which are artificial, also called "literary archetypes," are images, symbols, and groups of images that we learn from our culture and which then project certain ideas or expectations. Examples would include the wise fool, the wise old man, the sacrificial victim, the suffering servant, etc. Natural archetypes are genetic imprints within humanity: the God-father (as a projection of the ideal self), water (as necessary for survival, as dangerous or "overwhelming," and which in dreams, usually, has sexual connotations), snakes, towers, etc. Coming to terms with one's archetypes is an integral part of Jung's therapy--understanding these images and what they suggest (within humanity or within a person's place in culture) leads to psychic health. Horror, then, can be the deliberate misuse of threatening archetypes or the inversion of cultural archetypes and their misuse.

Erik Erikson:

In brief, Erikson believed that the fantastic, horrible, or threatening helped children decipher between fantasy and reality. The distinction is obviously important, and Erikson's work consisted in analyzing culture and the cultural expectations of the group. When those of the society could not determine what was acceptable or not because of a lack of clarity within that culture, neuroses developed. Americans are especially prone to such problems since we are a large, diverse, and mobile populace. We can change our homes in a matter of hours, and the slight cultural changes in a new location can cause unforeseen difficulties--especially for children who learn to appreciate what is acceptable behavior, what is to be honored, and what feared as determined by their group. As one critic observed, you can judge a people by what they fear. In like manner, what some fear may not be frightening to another culture, and the reverse may also be true. Horror can arise when the stimulus and the result are at odds--expectation is a major part of our psychic well being, and we don't react well to surprises and changes.

Other theories abound, but space does not permit any elaboration. Some, such as that advanced by David Shapiro, set forth ideas about neuroses in which the stages of development--such as the oral phase, anal, genital, etc.--are arrested. Fear can be a result of an unhappy experience in one of these developmental stages. This is, however, subjective within the individual, for no author, screenwriter, or artist can adequately predict that a particular arrested state of development will shock or horrify another individual. Some societies, however, show a prevalence to delay or to prolong these stages: various cultures, for instance, breast feed children until well past infancy. The society has an oral fixation, and it takes little imagination to see how stories, monsters, or events that counter what is comforting to that society could be seen as terrifying.

One can see how these various psychoanalytic and philosophic theories could explain our need for danger and terror. Whether it comes from those who analyze fairy tales, such as Bruno Bettleheim--who says that fairy tales safely allow children to work out their fears and learn the differences between fantasy and reality--or Freudian theories of our need to equate danger and horror to sexual gratification, horror has an integral place in the human condition as a necessary function of psychic "health" or, at the least, fitness.

Literature

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49)

Poe was a philosophical writer--not in the sense of a schema of systematical belief; rather, he deals with the abstractions of logic and epistemology as understood and practiced by a "literary thought" common to a particular era or period of history. Thus Poe practiced his understanding of certain principles of art common to artists of his day. In particular, this meant Romanticism--especially the critical and metaphysical theories of Coleridge. Although Poe absorbed, and sneered, at Coleridge's principles, he was influenced greatly by Coleridge. His development was, however, influenced in another direction as well: that of the American thought of his time, especially Emerson.

Poe capitalized on a popular commodity of his day and outdistanced all rivals in the dramaturgy of death and the dead. Gothic romances contained the ever-popular corpse, the tomb, the mourning survivor. The first half of the 19th century delighted in fictive death, which did not abate until the American Civil War, when it became a matter of common life.

Attitudes towards death are not only fashionable but also sociological; in fact, one might well go on the premise that he could interpret any age of history if he knew enough about its burial rites and its folklore of death. Poe, perhaps better than any other writer of his time, defined the idea of death as that idea was held in the third and fourth decades of the 19th century. However strange and exotic his treatment may be to us, it offered no bafflement to his contemporaries.

Poe came on the world's scene just as the ritual and mystery of death were being transferred from the aristocrats and specially favored to the middle class. The industrial revolution freed many ordinary people not only from the necessity of living out their earthly lives in only one spot but also from the universally held belief that they must die into anonymity in the churchyard whose earth is disturbed at least every generation or in the common, mass grave.

Long before Mark Twain's ridicule of the southern tradition in the poetry of Emmeline Grangerford (Huck Finn), the burial service was a kind of canonically rigid office recited in the stylized landscape of death. But in poem and short story, Poe provided his age with a handbook on how the upper middle class should take care of its dead. Yet, by reason of the rigidity and monotony of the ceremony, Poe seems to have been reminding his age that the symbols of death were frozen and meaningless. Christianity professed to teach the life after death. Christian ceremonial, grown stale with time and repetition, had gradually lost its force and, far from asserting that the grave is merely the entrance to another life, had become content to let the catafalque, the gravestone, or the mausoleum be the indestructible symbols of its belief in immortality.

If death were specially dignified in the middle-class culture of the early 19th century, so too was death then as always very close to sexual love. The metaphysicals in the age of Donne (early 17th century) were not the first to discover that one could love in death and die into love or that, in each act of love's consummation, one came closer to death. One could "die into love" at the very moment of union. At marriage, the woman "dies" by changing her name and identity for the sake of receiving her husband's name and identity; therefore, in the nature of a "union of two" comes a denial of the separateness of the one.

The governing symbol in most of these nineteenth-century versions of love unto death and dying into love was the dead young woman. In a period of a hundred years this symbolic young woman had undergone a slow and certain change. She had begun, in the latter 17th and the early 18th century, as the seduction motif in the dramas of Wycherley or in the novels of Richardson: a creature of infinite fertility whose inevitable drama concluded when, willingly or not, she was brought to bed with a man. But the seduction theme had only a limited appeal and expression: by the time Fielding wrote his Shamela and John Cleland his Fanny Hill, the obvious flaws in the tale of seduction had been revealed: the young lady was "seduced" only at her own will and desire.

In an age that eschews one representation of Eros, it will find a substitute form. If a middle-class and commercial morality prevented the exposition of seduction in life, it found an equally titillating theme in "death as seduction." If a woman could not be presented seductively in life, she could be displayed in erotic postures and in seductive disguised in death. Death became a means of enticement: death was the great seducer, and the "ruined" girl was laid out for burial in the landscape of ruin and decay.

In another odd direction, which this theme assumed, woman in death became equated with woman at marriage: the corpse was the bride, and the grave clothes were the bridal dress. Woman as a sacrificial emblem in the allurements and pieties of marriage reached the ultimate sacrifice in dying. In an age when many women did die young after their many miscarriages and child-bearing, death indeed became a kind of second dying to which marriage had been the first. The wedding and the burial service became a nearly duplicate ritual.

As in love and life, the woman could be appealed to and wooed all over again in death. Poe's poems and tales are ritual incantations to the erotically desirable young woman who is forever white, aloof, reserved, virginal, bridal, whether she lies on the wedding bed or the funeral bier.

No age is without its eroticism; if popular expressions of eroticism are prevented in one way, they will break out in another. We say, now long afterward, that death was "sentimentalized"; what we mean is that the terror of death was concealed behind a set of masks and mimes which were part of that substitute reality any reading public enjoys. Poe was the cleverest man of his time in setting up these disguises for horror and not the horror itself. Death became not an event or an action nor a condition of total non-being but a series of seductive postures.

Death was sociology, an economic self-insistence, and, finally, a pictorial device, a landscape. Poe's versions of death and the dead are more scenic and pictorial than anything else: from the beginning to the end of his career he was happy to stop any action which might be proceeding and linger over the grave, the twilight spectral moon, the emblems of mortality and annihilation. To state the premise another way, Poe became a verbal landscapist of death in much the same way that a whole school and movement in painting had discovered in death one of their most vital subjects. The romance of dying and death as a dramatic scene were brilliantly and starkly set forth to the 18th and 19th centuries by painters such as Salvator Rosa and Nicolas Poussin (cf. Twain's satiric look at the poetry and painting of such events by Emmeline Grangerford in Huck Finn).

Death and horror would seem to be unequivocally associated; but horror can be investigated as an inquiry for its own sake. Horror is a state when the real world slips away or disintegrates and the mind finds itself fronting the "horror" of its own loneliness and loss.

For Poe, a vision of horror was that region or mysterious middle ground where the normal, rational faculties of thinking and choice have, for reasons beyond knowing, been suspended; ethical and religious beliefs are still the portion of men, but are powerless to function. All power of choice and all sense of direction have been lost; in fact, they have been so long lost that the nightmare world of presumed reality obeys no laws of reason or stability. It is a highly complex metaphysical condition wherein the constants of heaven and hell are fixed at their opposite polarity, but between them is the vast region wherein the human will is situated and is powerless to effect any variation of its own existence. It is a realm where the will cannot exist, not because it never had an existence but because it somehow lost its power to function.

Horror is, then, the urgent need for moral knowledge and direction--and its total lack. The characters in such a situation can only dream of a condition which once existed but which they would never be able to follow, even if they were able to recapture it.

Yet even the lack or the negation of a moral principle had to be based on some system of good and evil. A Christian view, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne propounded, conceived that sin entered the world with man and remains with man forever, while nature exists outside either in a dualism with man or in an implacable state of indifference to him. The naturalism of a Herman Melville or Mark Twain, to draw a brief contrast, found the basis for evil not in man but in the primal order of nature and at the center of the universe itself: man is thereby lodged in a universe of evil, and his tragedy is that he alone of all forms of life can both know and strive to meliorate his condition. This naturalism, as it was with Twain, can be driven far enough to exonerate man of all blame or consequence for the rigidly deterministic order.

Poe was hardly concerned with "evil" at all, insofar as evil might be considered inherent in man or in the phenomenal order. In a sense, his one prescription for evil is its absence: never to know evil or to have been engaged in any moral struggle is the condition of horror in which the Poe protagonist must exist. In such a nightmare world all the prescriptions for evil and good are matters for nostalgia and regret; they were part of some other state of being from which man has moved or which has long passed from the earth.

Poe can be seen as a religious writer since he employs the form and the action of the religious experience. But man is not the only "apocalypse"; Nature is too, itself, a chaos wherein nothing exists according to any law or order that man can know. God has gone away--not as in 18th century rationalism because he organized a mechanically perfect world--but as in some pre-Darwinian organic design from which even the god's thought has been removed. Thus life, death, and moral judgment have long lost their reason for being.

Two conditions thus exist for horror: one is the fading of the any moral law into an apocalypse of man's last "distempered" things in which anything may happen; the other is the total freedom of the will to function, at the same time that there is nothing to will "for " or will "against."

Horror was, however, not only a philosophy or a method of explaining the mystery of the universe; it was also "psychology" or a method of inquiring into special states of mind. It was a means to externalize, in vivid physical objects, inner states of being and a method of portraying the mind's awareness of itself. Poe demonstrated that states of consciousness are not simply isolated conditions of madness but are somehow intimately and intricately related to the physical world around it. Horror was Poe's insight into Romantic self-consciousness--into the tendency of the Romantic mind to consider that its own psychic response to life and to the world was a sufficient subject for life. The tendency need not have ended in "horror"; it did end in the capacity of the Romantic mind both to create and to be almost simultaneously scrutinizing itself at the moment of creative activity.

One elements marks his deaths, however horrifying they may be: they are all apocalypses; that is, they all concern the time before and the time after death; they do not portray that moment of anguish and loss of being which has formed so much of the imaginative experience in American literature. With Poe, the fact of death is very much like the Crucifixion narrative, which ends with the Cross and resumes when the stone is found rolled away from the tomb. The god or man did not really die; he merely shifted his location. One stage stops at the final glimpse of death; the other begins already on the other side, and, imaginatively, we have never really gone through.

Horror, madness, and death are man's avenues into the ultimate rational of existence of which our own mortal existence is but a crude fragment. Man in his earthly habit lives on the virtually unquestioned assumption that he can predict and understand nearly every event that occurs in his own life and in the motion of the planets. Poe was nevertheless writing a series of quite moral poems and tales concerning the evidence everywhere before man's eyes of the total disunity and incoherence of his own life, which is an infinitesimal part of the universal "plot of God." Man must, however, be terrified or driven to comprehend that what seems to be fractured is actually a segment of the universal design and what appears to be madness may be "divinest sense."

In New England, the power of religion was in decline. In the South, on the other hand, the decline of a religious force was not so precipitate or apparent. Especially in Virginia (Poe's Richmond--or slightly farther north in Baltimore, Maryland), where there had been for two centuries only one church, religion had too long been the support of the status quo ever to force an issue or to raise the dramatic specter of doubt. The church, in sum, was the final sanctification of the whole southern code of morals, slavery, politics, love, oratory, war, daily living, and even of a pseudo-Greek revival in architecture. To break with the church, therefore, was to break with society.

Poe is typical of certain expressions of the Romantic mind: his religious premise is essentially anti-intellectual and anti-ritualistic; he would return to the pure religion before it became contaminated by priestcraft and bell-ringing. Or, to state a corollary, he looks forward to the final Apocalypse, to the utter destruction of all things wherein the god finally achieves his justice or gets his awful revenge on the wicked.

Stories:

"The Cask of Amontillado" is the tale of a nameless "I" who has the power of moving downward from his mind or intellectual being and into his brute or physical self and then of returning again to his intellectual being with his total self-hood unimpaired. It is as though one might separate the physical aspect from the mind and then restore at will the harmony again.

The "I" has the power to punish. The tale delineates the mastery which the controlling self, when it concentrates all its energies in one of its three faculties, can obtain and maintain over the world around it. The "I" does not function as a mind; we never know hat has made him hate Fortunato nor are we aware that he has ever laid out any plan to effect his revenge. All we know is that we descend into the brute world "during the supreme madness of the carnival season," and there, in motley and drunkenness, we watch Montresor play on Fortunato's weakness--his connoisseurship of wines, his jealousy of a rival Luchesi, and his indifference to the evil effects of the niter in the subterranean depths.

There is nothing intellectual here; everything is mad and improvisatory--and Montresor succeeds just so far as he is able to adapt himself to a mad, improvisatory world. In short, he descends from one faculty to another and then returns to his former condition, all the while having suffered no detection from society or the world around him.

Poe apparently had the conviction that life consists of the disjunction of sides of the self: various elements in the human psyche or being are forever at war with each other; tragedy is always present because, in the inevitable bifurcation, one element is bound to obtain control and thereby exert such dominance that the human being is separated not only from the normal condition of a balanced self-hood but from his fellows and from the world around him.

The Poe protagonist, in another respect, is compulsively driven toward death because, if life is the condition of fatal separation of the human body, mind, and spirit, death or whatever afterlife there may be is the unification of these faculties.

The narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart," who suffers and commits a crime because of the excess of emotion over intelligence, is impelled to give himself up and pay the death penalty because he may thereby return to full self-hood or primal being. Death is the completion of the life cycle; it restores that totality of being with which one began existence or which one might have had in some prior existence but which, in the inevitable chaos of this earthly life, is more and more destroyed. The tragedy of the Poe heroes is that they suffer from a war between their own faculties, body and mind, or mind and soul; and once that struggle has begun, it ends only with death.

Poe's religious inquiry began with simplicities. He took creation either back to its primal origin or forward to its ultimate consummation. Like religious myth-makers of long ago, he felt free to create his own cosmos in any form that suited him and to give it any function necessary to its fulfillment.

This universe of Poe's is not merely a spaceless and timeless cosmos; people do inhabit it; yet they do not exist in it on the simple level of morality and belief that one might expect in such a primal world as Poe imagined. Poe's nightmare universe is one in which the world is itself either just begun or just finished but the people in it are condemned to live as if they are in some long after-time of belief and morality. They live by a rigid code of taboo, but they have long lost any notion of what the code means. They are forced to believe and exist for reasons that have long ceased to have any meaning. No one understands or can interpret, in this moral region of Poe's lost souls, why he must be punished; yet the penalty for any moral infraction is frightful and all the more terrifying because no one had enforced it and no one knows why it must be administered.

The punishment comes not from a church, a law, or even from society: it comes from some inner compulsion of the evil-doer himself who suffers from what Poe otherwise terms "perversity": he must do evil, and yet he wants to be punished and to suffer.

These characters are themselves god-players. In "The Tell-Tale Heart" the narrator assumes the right to do away with the old man whose one "eye, with a film over it," becomes an object of loathing to him. It is not so much an old man that he kills as it is the "Evil Eye"; but this god-player made the mistake of thinking it was an eye which was so vexatious; all the while it was a sound, the beating of the old man's heart, which kept pounding in the murderer's ears after the man was dead. The police who make a routine investigation are not ministers of justice; they are mere expressions of the narrator's compulsion to unmask and destroy himself by finally admitting the crime he had committed. In this respect the god easily passes into the devil and becomes his maker and slayer both.

"The Black Cat" (1843) is even more pointedly addressed to this theme "of perverseness...this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself--to offer violence to its own nature--to do wrong for the wrong's sake only." The sins the protagonist committed were so "deadly" that his "immortal soul" would be place "even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God." When the criminal had reached the completion of his iniquity and had walled up the body of his dead wife, he had, of a necessity beyond his comprehension, buried alive the cat which would betray and condemn him. No other god but the self as god can wreak such vengeance as when the criminal is his own judge and executioner.

In these ways, therefore, Poe removed all moral and religious considerations as far as possible from any social code or body of religious warrants. This method was not so much an overt attack on the society of his day as it was his tacit assumption that a moral and social code had so little cogency that he would have to discover or invent a rationale of existence as remote as possible from it.

The normal, healthy human being is one in whom these three faculties--body, mind, and spirit--are in balance; none dominates the other. But in the mysterious and chaotic condition of the universe, which is itself a duplicate of man's state of being, anything at any moment may occur in order to tip the human psyche either way, into sanity or into madness. And like the universe, the human organism, so delicately is it made and so intricately adjusted are its parts, can be turned in an instant into any one of an infinite possible conditions or states. The mind itself, the second or midway faculty of reason and direction, has no power to control either its own condition or the responses of the body and the soul; its only capacity is to speculate on whatever state of being it finds itself in at a particular moment. Neither the body nor the soul has this power: the body functions only as brute, insensitive existence; the soul, with only rare moments of perception, has the power of penetrating far beyond the limits of this sensual existence; chiefly the soul sleeps or is moribund.

In "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) we have an early exposition, and one of the best, of this psychic drama, a summary of Poe's ideas and method of investigating the self in disintegration. The story was a study of the tripartite division and identity of the self. It was, to go even further, extended through and animating all matter, a theory confirmed by the books which Poe, and Usher, had read: Swendenborg's Heaven and Hell, Campanella's City of the Sun, and Robert Flud's Chiromancy, to name only a few listed in the narrative, all of which consider the material world as manifestation of the spiritual.

From the opening sentence of the story we have the point-for-point identification of the external world with the human constitution. The House is the total human being, its three parts functioning as one; the outside construction of the house is like the body; the dark tarn is a mirror or the mind which can "image...a strange fancy," almost "a dream." The "barely perceptible fissure" which extended "from the roof of the building...until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn" is the fatal dislocation or fracture, which, as the story develops, destroys the whole psychic being of which the house is the outward manifestation.

Turning now from the material to the human realms, we find that the tripartite division of the faculties is even more clearly evidenced. Usher represents the mind or intellectual aspect of the total being: "...the character of his face had been at all time remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; ...a finely moulded chin, speaking in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy."

Madeline is the sensual or physical side of this psyche: they are identical twins (Poe ignores the fact that identical twins cannot be of differing sex); her name is derived from Saint Mary Magdala, which means "tower"; therefore she is the lady of the house.

Madeline sickens from some mortal disease and, when she is presumed dead, is buried in the subterranean family vaults or in a place as far remote as possible from the place of aesthetic delight wherein the mind of Roderick lives. Yet Madeline is not dead; she returns from the coffin and in one convulsive motion brings her brother to his death: the body and mind thus die together.

Very shortly afterward the House collapses, for it has all the while represented the total being of this complex body-mind relation which Poe had studied in the symbolic guise of a brother and sister relationship: "and the deep and dark tarn...closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the `House of Usher.'"

One of the curiosities of Poe's tale is that, while we have a study not only of the interrelationship of mind and body in the psychic life of a human being but also of the rapid disintegration of that being when one aspect of the self becomes hypertrophied, we have a narrative of presumed psychological inquiry with everything presented, as it were, "outside." We know no more of Roderick or of Madeline, or of the narrator for that matter, at the end than we knew at the beginning.

The method is entirely pictorial, as though external objects and the configuration of the intricate material world could themselves assume a psychic dimension: not only is the material world and outward demonstration of some inner and cosmic drama but it is at every moment exhibiting that drama more strikingly than can the human actors. The two realms, material and immaterial, coexist in such exquisite balance that one can be read as a precise synecdoche [common figure of speech by which something is referred to indirectly, either by naming only some part or constituent of it--"hands" for laborers--or by naming some more comprehensive entity of which it is a part of the other--"the law" for police officer]. The convulsive aspect of Poe's writing becomes nowhere better apparent than in his method of making the physical world of nature experience the drama more intensely than can any human being.

(From Poe: A Critical Study, by Edward H. Davidson, Edgar Poe: Seer and Craftsman, by Stuart Levine, and The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman)

Frankenstein (1818; rev. ed. 1831)) Mary Shelley (1797-1851)

Since the James Whale/Boris Karloff production of "Frankenstein" (1931) there have been scores of sequels, film adaptations, parodies, and travesties of the story. The story Mary Shelley invented in 1816 had an equally varied stage life for nearly a century before film was invented.

The story has its impetus in June of 1816, on a rainy night, when he and Percy Shelley spent an evening in the villa Diodati, Lord Byron's home in Geneva. Byron was there, as was his physician and sometime friend, John Polidori. They were a young company: Byron, the oldest, was twenty-eight; Shelley was twenty-three; Mary Shelley was eighteen; Polidori was twenty-one. For a time on that evening they discussed some German horror tales--Byron suggested that they each write a ghost story.

One of the discussions that Shelley and Byron had that Mary had listened in on concerned Erasmus Darwin and his experiments; especially of interest was the incident reported where he had preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case until by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Perhaps a corpse could be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things.

Frankenstein is not properly a Gothic novel. There, a distinct kind of writing that emerged in the mid-18th century, a virginal young woman of genteel breeding who finds herself set down in a tangle of misfortunes, is pursued through caverns, castles, or the ruins of abbeys by a looming, dark male who is threatening.

Curiously enough, Gothic fiction had, almost from its inception, a special attraction for women. In the early days of the genre, reading or writing Gothic novels became a middle-class female occupation--as of the oppression, psychological frustration, shame, babies, etc. found in the writing of these novels a way to signal one another, or to convey to the world of men their own pain.

There is plenty of female pain expressed by the figures in Frankenstein, but Mary Shelley was dealing with matters that were at once too biological and too personal to be contained in the Gothic formula of a young woman in flight from a man who has rape or worse on his mind.

Ellen Moers has claimed in an essay that Frankenstein deals with "the motif of revulsion against newborn life, and the drama of guilt, dread, and flight surrounding birth and its consequences...Frankenstein seems to be distinctly a woman's mythmaking on the subject of birth."

It would appear to be true that Mary Shelley has provided us with a living artifact beneath whose surface we see displayed the network of dangers that women face when they take the age-old risk of loving men. Below, or above, all the flattery of women as primordial life-givers, as instinctive nurturers, there gleams this fact: death sits on her side of the bed when a woman and a man make love.

Born Mary Godwin on August 30, 1797, she was the child of politically radical parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Though they did not believe in marriage, they were married four months before Mary was born. Mary Wallstonecraft's labor was unexpectedly long and difficult, lasting from five o'clock in the morning until eleven-twenty that night. Godwin was then 41; his wife was 38. They had anticipated a boy, choosing William as the name. She lingered for eleven days, in extreme pain, until her death.

In Paris, Mary Wallstonecraft had an affair with an American, Gilbert Imlay, and had a child, Fanny, in 1794. She attempted suicide several times, and wrote Imlay a series of bitter letters, which Godwin edited and published the year that Mary Godwin was born.

Godwin himself remarried four years later, struggling to raise Mary and her half-sister Fanny Imlay. He wooed his next-door neighbor, Mary Jane Clairmont--who has two children: Charles and Jane (later known as Claire). Mary was sent off to Scotland when she was fifteen; when she returned at the age of seventeen, she met Percy Shelley, a frequent visitor to her father's house. Shelley was married to Harriet Westbrook at the time--with two small children--but he left her. Mary and Shelley ran off, and, for reasons no one knows, took along Mary's stepsister Claire, who would be with the Shelleys off and on for many years.

Mary was soon pregnant; but her premature baby girl died two weeks after birth. Two months later Mary was pregnant again; her second child, William, was born in 1816. The threesome traveled to Geneva, probably at Claire's insistence, who had had an affair with Byron and was now pregnant.

Much of what took place in the Frankenstein summer of 1816 comes to us from Mary Shelley's memories set down from the vantage point of respectable widowhood in 1831. The group that met at Byron's home was interesting: Polidori was suffered, treated by Byron as a "plaything"; Claire was in love with Byron, but he weary of her; Mary was jealous of Byron, who took Shelley away from her for days at a time to go sailing. In addition, though the relationship between Claire and Shelley was at this time probably still platonic, they did later have an affair.

When the Shelleys returned to England in 1816, Fanny Imlay--Mary's half-sister--committed suicide in the manner of her mother's first abortive attempt: an overdose of laudanum. Two months later, Shelley's first wife, Harriet, had been found floating in the Serpentine (an arch of the Thames), a suicide, and pregnant, though not with Shelley's child.

Two weeks after Harriet's suicide, Percy and Mary were married, probably so that the poet might gain respectability in his attempt to gain custody of his children by Harriet. By April of 1817, Mary was pregnant again with her third child--by this time, Frankenstein was completed. Clara Shelley was born in September of 1817, but died three weeks later.

On March 11, 1818, Frankenstein was published anonymously by Lackington and Hughes, a not-quite-reputable house. The book was received with reasonably good, but occasionally harsh reviews. Blackwood's Magazine admired the fiction, but when it became known that it was written by a woman, it confess that "for a man it was excellent, but for a woman it was wonderful." The Quarterly Review detested it, ranting that it was "a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity."

Just as Mary Shelley's career was launched, she was assailed by new grief. Her son William died in Rome in 1819. Already pregnant when he died, she gave birth to a son, Percy, who was the only one of her children who lived to become an adult. In 1822, Allegra, Claire's five-year-old daughter by Byron, died in the Italian convent where she had been sent by him. Two months later, Mary Shelley nearly died from a miscarriage. Her life was probably saved by Shelley's quick thinking in that emergency. Then, on July 8, 1822, while she was still weak from the effects of her fifth pregnancy in eight years, she was dealt the horrible blow of Shelley's death--an avid sailor who had never learned to swim was lost in a storm at sea off the Gulf of Spezia in Italy. His body washed ashore ten days later.

Shelley's body was awkwardly cremated in a ceremony presided over by Edward Trelawny, who saved Shelley's heart from the furnace. Leigh Hunt, pleading his closeness with Shelley, pleaded with him for the heart. In some incredible correspondence, Mary Shelley begs Hunt to let her have the heart in order to bury it. With the exception of a few romances--most notably Matilda (pub. after Mary Shelley's death)--she spent the rest of her life as a quiet, productive, essentially bourgeois English widow.

As for the source for Mary Shelley's story, in the Western tradition there have been stories going back to the Greeks of people making. Hephaestus, the lame metalworker and Aphrodite's husband, was credited with making female servants for himself out of gold. Pygmalion, the Greek sculptor, detested women for their inconstancy; he abjured the sex forever, but erotic images of them kept pressing upon his imagination so, to ease his woes, he carved an ivory woman whom he inadvertently fell in love with. Aphrodite heard his prayers and turned the statue into life.

So too, as the story's subtitle indicates, Prometheus plasticator made people out of clay, but there's little sustained effort in her fiction to exploit the myth. The Jewish tradition of the golem is also a possibility, but there's no evidence to suggest that she knew the tale. The best known is that of Rabbi Low, who lived in Prague at the end of the 16th century and made a creature out of clay. He animated his creature by acquiring the secret of the Shem ha-Meforash, the unknowable, unspeakable name of God, and his clay creature was animated to protect the lives of the threatened Jewish community in Prague.

The story Frankenstein has been seen as a science fiction allegory of the dangers of science; it is, in fact, a psychological allegory in which the issues are the human use of human beings. But the science fiction warning is familiar because of the film view--there are things that mankind is not permitted to know. But science is hardly visible in the novel--from Percy's Preface to the book to Mary's protagonist who can create life after two years in college.

Frankenstein does not touch us because Victor Frankenstein is a scientist but because his creature was born ugly, because Victor abandoned him, because the creature's life is spent in a long pilgrimage toward his father/mother's love. The issue is not the scientist's laboratory; rather it is the "workshop of filthy creation" in which love and birth, and their consequence--death--take place.

Nonetheless, Frankenstein does make a statement about science, because Mary Shelley intuited that the direction in which civilization moves is determined by what it understands of the nature of power. That force, Henry Adams, years later, would recognize as sexual energy--especially the animating energy of women (which he equates with the dynamo in the "Virgin and the Dynamo" in The Education of Henry Adams.

In Frankenstein, the energy toward fecundity, toward wholesome life such as might be expressed by love and responsible parenthood, is distorted by a life-offending egotism. Male egotism, as no doubt Mary Shelley experienced it, but, in the atomic and computer age, and egotism pure.

As fiction, Frankenstein tends to be treated as a sub-literary classic. Certainly, it is a work frequently lacking in skill. It would be easy enough to make a list of Mary Shelley's mistakes as a novelist: she overwrites; she makes relentless use of coincidence; her men and women (though not the creature) can be garrulous stick figures. But finally there is the vision itself that, surmounting youthful uncertainty, inexperience, and wrongheadedness, leaves us with the sense that we have been taken by the hair and thrust into the presence of the awful truth.

There is a Gnostic myth that tells us that God, gazing intently into the water of light, generated a female being called Barbelo. In her turn, Barbelo, gazing intently at God, bore a son who became a false god, after which, in a series of descents from light, the world went from bad to worse. If the tale is true, it may explain why, when we see Victor Frankenstein's creature lurching across the movie screen of a darkened theater, we intuit that we and the creature are in the right place. There he stands, lifting first his eyes and then his hands to the mysterious light, compelled into life by Mary Shelley's vision. His hands waver, but despite error and pain, despite confusion and terror, he keeps reaching upward to an eternal fire. True, his task and ours is hopeless, but that stumbling flesh has a responsibility to reach toward light is always clear.

(From Leonard Wolf's The Essential Frankenstein).

"Frankenstein" is, for most of us, the name of the monster rather than the monster's creator, for the common reader and the common viewer have worked together, in their apparent confusion, to create a myth soundly based on a central duality in Shelley's novel. Critical insight has long recognized that the monster and his creator are the antithetical halves of a single being.

For Muriel Spark, Victor Frankenstein represents the feelings, and his nameless creature the intellect. In her view the monster has no emotion, and "what passes for emotion...are really intellectual passions arrived at through rational channels." Spark carries this argument far enough to insist that the monster is asexual and that he demands a bride from Frankenstein only for companionship, a conclusion evidently at variance with the novel's text.

The antithesis between the scientist and his creature in Frankenstein is a very complex one and can be described more fully in the larger context of Romantic literature and its characteristic mythology. The shadow or double of the self is a constant conceptual image in Blake and Shelley and a frequent image, more random and descriptive, in the other major Romantics, especially in Byron. In Frankenstein it is the dominant and recurrent image and accounts for much of the latent power the novel possesses.

As her husband, man and poet, Percy Shelley was a split person--more than even other Romantic figures. The "Modern Prometheus" is a very apt term for him (or Byron) because the mythic Prometheus best suited the uses of Romantic poetry, since no other traditional being has in him the full range of Romantic moral sensibility and the full Romantic capacity for creation and destruction.

No Romantic writer employed the Prometheus archetype without a full awareness of its equivocal potentialities. The Prometheus of the ancients had been for the most part a spiritually reprehensible figure, though frequently a sympathetic one, in terms both of his dramatic situation and in his close alliance with mankind against the gods. But this alliance had been ruinous for man in most versions of the myth, and the Titan's benevolence toward humanity was hardly sufficient recompense for the alienation of man from heaven that he had brought about. Both sides of Titanism are evident in earlier Christian references to the story. The same Prometheus who is taken as an analogue of the crucified Christ is regarded also as a type of Lucifer, a son of light justly cast out by an offended heaven.

In the Romantic readings of Milton's Paradise Lost this double identity of Prometheus is a vital element. Blake, whose mythic revolutionary named Orc is another version of Prometheus, saw Milton's Satan as Prometheus gone wrong, as desire restrained until it became only the shadow of desire, a diminished double of creative energy. Blake worked out an antithesis between symbolic figures he names Spectre and Emanation, the shadow of desire and the total form of desire, respectively.

Frankenstein's monster, tempting his revengeful creator on through a world of ice, is another Emanation pursued by a Spectre, with the enormous difference that he is an Emanation flawed, a nightmare of actuality, rather than dream of desire. Though abhorred rather than loved, the monster is the total form of Frankenstein's creative power and is more imaginative than his creator. The monster is at once more intellectual and more emotional than his maker; indeed, he excels Frankenstein as much (and in the same ways) as Milton's Adam excels Milton's God in Paradise Lost. The greatest paradox and most astonishing achievement of Mary Shelley's novel is that the monster is more human than his creator.

The creature is more to be pitied and more to be feared, more lovable and more hateful, and above all more able to give the attentive reader that shock of added consciousness in which aesthetic recognition compels a heightened realization of self. For like Blake's Spectre and Emanation, Frankenstein and his monster are the solipsistic and generous halves of the one self. Frankenstein is the mind and emotions turned in upon themselves, and his creature is the mind and emotions turned imaginatively outward, seeking a greater humanization through a confrontation of other selves.

What makes Frankenstein an important book, though it is only a strong, flawed novel with frequent clumsiness in its narrative and characterization, is that it contains one of the most vivid versions we have of the Romantic mythology of the self, one that resembles Blake's Book of Urizen, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and Byron's Manfred, among other works. Because it lacks the sophistication and imaginative complexity of such works, Frankenstein affords a unique introduction to the archetypal world of the Romantics.

There are two paradoxes at the center of Mary Shelley's novel, and each illuminates a dilemma of the Promethean imagination. The first is that Frankenstein was successful, in that he did create Natural man, not as he was, but as the meliorists saw such a man; indeed, Frankenstein did better than this, since his creature was, as we have seen, more imaginative than himself. Frankenstein's tragedy stems not from his Promethean excess but from his own moral error, his failure to live; he abhorred his creature, became terrified, and fled his responsibilities.

The second paradox is the more ironic. This either would not have happened or would not have mattered anyway, if Frankenstein had been an aesthetically successful maker; a beautiful "monster," or even a passable one, would not have been a monster. As the creature bitterly observes in chapter 17,

Shall I respect man when he contemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness, and instead of injury I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance. But that cannot be; the human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union.

As the hideousness of his creature was no part of Victor Frankenstein's intention, it is worth noticing how this disastrous matter came to be. It would not be unjust to characterize Victor Frankenstein, in his act of creation, as being momentarily a moral idiot, like so many who have done his work after him.

There is an undeliberate humor in the contrast between the enormity of the scientist's discovery and the mundane emotions of the discoverer. Finding that "the minuteness of the parts" slows him down, he resolves to make his creature "about eight feet in height and proportionably large." As he works on, he allows himself to dream that "a new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me."

Yet he knows his is a "workshop of filthy creation," and he fails the fundamental test of his own creativity. When the "dull yellow eye" of his creature opens, this creator falls from the autonomy of a supreme artificer to the terror of a child of earth: "breathless horror and disgust filled my heart." He flees his responsibility and sets in motion the events that will lead to his own Arctic immolation, a fit end for a being whom has never achieved a full sense of another's existence.

Haunting Mary Shelley's novel is the demonic figure of the "Ancient Mariner," Coleridge's major venture into Romantic mythology of the purgatorial self trapped in the isolation of a heightened self-consciousness. Coleridge's Mariner is of the line of Cain, and the irony of Frankenstein's fate is that he too is a Cain, involuntarily murdering all his loved ones through the agency of his creature. The Ancient mariner is punished by living under the curse of his consciousness of guilt, while the excruciating torment of Frankenstein is never to be able to forget his guilt in creating a lonely consciousness driven to crime by the rage of unwilling solitude.

It is part of Mary Shelley's insight into her mythological theme that all the monster's victims are innocents. The monster not only refuses actively to slay his guilty creator, he mourns for him, though with the equivocal tribute of terming the scientist a "generous and self-devoted being." Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus who has violated nature, receives his epitaph from the ruined second nature he has made, the God-abandoned, who consciously echoes the ruined Satan of Paradise Lost and proclaims, "Evil thenceforth became my good."

It is imaginatively fitting that the greater and more interesting consciousness of the creature should survive his creator, for he alone in Mary Shelley's novel possesses character. Frankenstein, like Coleridge's Mariner, has no character in his own right; both figures win a claim to our attention only by their primordial crimes against original nature.

The monster is of course Mary Shelley's finest invention, and his narrative (chapters 11-16) forms the highest achievement of the novel, more absorbing even than the magnificent and almost surrealistic pursuit of the climax. In an age so given to remarkable depictions of the dignity of natural man, an age including the shepherds and beggars of Wordsworth and what W. J. Bate has termed Keats's "polar ideal of disinterestedness"--even in such a literary time Frankenstein's hapless creature stands out as a sublime embodiment of heroic pathos. Though Frankenstein lacks the moral imagination to understand him, the daemon's appeal is to what is most compassionate in us:

Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other, and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.

 

The italicized passage above is the imaginative kernel of the novel and is meant to remind the reader of the novel's epigraph:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

 

To mold me man? Did I solicit thee

From darkness to promote me?

That desperate plangency of the fallen Adam becomes the characteristic accent of the daemon's lamentations, with the influence of Milton cunningly built into the novel's narrative by the happy device of Frankenstein's creature receiving his education through reading Paradise Lost as "a true history." Already doomed because his standards are human, which makes him an outcast even to himself, his Miltonic education completes his fatal growth in self-consciousness.

His story, as told to his maker, follows a familiar Romantic pattern "of the progress of my intellect," as he puts it. His first pleasure after the dawn of consciousness comes through his wonder at seeing the moon rise. Caliban-like, he responds wonderfully to music, both natural and human, and his sensitivity to the natural world has the responsiveness of an incipient poet. His awakening to a first love for other beings, the inmates of the cottage he haunts, awakens him also to the great desolation of love rejected when he attempts to reveal himself. His own duality of situation and character, caught between the states of Adam and Satan, Natural Man and his thwarted desire, is related by him directly to his reading of Milton's epic:

It moved every feeling of wonder and awe that the picture of an omnipotent God warring with his creatures was capable of exciting. I often referred the several situations, as their similarity struck me, to my own. Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence, but his state was far different from mine in every other respect....

From a despair this profound, no release is possible. Driven forth into an existence upon which "the cold stars shone in mockery," the daemon declares "everlasting war against the species" and enters upon a fallen existence more terrible than the expelled Adam's. Echoing Milton, he asks the ironic question "And now, with the world before me, whither should I bend my steps?" to which the only possible answer is, toward his wretched Promethean creator.

If we stand back from Mary Shelley's novel in order better to view its archetypal shape, we see it as the quest of a solitary and ravaged consciousness first for consolation, then for revenge, and finally for a self-destruction that will be apocalyptic, that will bring down the creator with his creature. Though Mary Shelley may not have intended it, her novel's prime theme is a necessary counterpoise to Prometheanism, for Prometheanism exalts the increase in consciousness despite all cost.

Frankenstein breaks through the barrier that separates man from God and gives apparent life, but in doing so he gives only death-in-life. The profound dejection endemic in Mary Shelley's novel is fundamental to the Romantic mythology of the self, for all Romantic horrors are diseases of excessive consciousness, of the self unable to bear the self. Kierkegaard remarks that Satan's despair is absolute because Stan, as pure spirit, is pure consciousness, and for Satan (and all me in his predicament) every increase in consciousness is an increase in despair. Frankenstein's desperate creature attains the state of pure spirit through his extraordinary situation and is racked by a consciousness in which every thought is a fresh disease.

A Romantic poet fought against self-consciousness through the strength of what he called imagination, a more than rational energy by which thought could seek to heal itself. But Frankenstein's daemon, though he is in the archetypal situation of the Romantic Wanderer or Solitary, who sometimes was a poet, can win no release from his own story by telling it. His desperate desire for a mate is clearly an attempt to find a Blakean Emanation for himself, a self within the self. But as he is the nightmare actualization of Frankenstein's desire, he is himself an emanation of Promethean yearnings, and his only double is his creator and denier.

Frankenstein's creature can help neither himself nor others, for he has no natural ground to which he can return. Romantic poets like to return to the imagery of the ocean of life and immortality, for in the eddying to and fro of the healing waters they could picture a hoped-for process of restoration, of a survival of consciousness despite all its agonies.

Mary Shelley, with marvelous appropriateness, brings her Romantic novel to a demonic conclusion in a world of ice. The frozen sea is the inevitable emblem for both the wretched daemon and his obsessed creator, but the daemon is allowed a final image of reversed Prometheanism. There is a heroism fully earned in the being who cries farewell in a claim of sad triumph: "I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the torturing flames."

Mary Shelley could not have known how dark a prophecy this consummation of consciousness would prove to be for the two great Promethean poets who were at her side during the summer of 1816, when her novel was conceived. Byron, writing his own epitaph at Missolonghi in 1824, and perhaps thinking back to having stood at Shelley's funeral pile two years before, found an image similar to the daemon's to sum up an exhausted existence:

The fire that on my bosom preys

Is lone as some volcanic isle;

No torch is kindled at its blaze--

A funeral pile.

The fire of increased consciousness stolen from heaven ends as an isolated volcano cut off from other selves by an estranging sea. "the light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds" is the exultant cry of Frankenstein's creature. A blaze at which no torch is kindled is Byron's self-image, but he ends his death poem on another note, the hope for a soldier's grave, which he found.

There is no Promethean release, but release is perhaps not the burden of the literature of Romantic aspiration. There is something both Godwinian and Shelleyan about the final utterance of Victor Frankenstein, which is properly made to Walton, the failed Promethean whose ship has just turned back. Though chastened, the Modern Prometheus ends with a last word true, not to his accomplishment, but to his desire:

Farewell Walton! Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.

Shelley's Prometheus, crucified on his icy precipice, found his ultimate torment in a Fury's taunt: "And all best things are thus confused to ill." It seems a fitting summation for all the work done by modern Prometheanism and might have served as an alternate epitaph for Mary Shelley's disturbing novel.

(From Mary Shelley's Monster, by Martin Tropp, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, edited by Harold Bloom)

Vampires: Distinguishing Between Fiction and Folklore

In Leviticus, so the Bible tells us, the life is in the blood. Thus, sacrifices meant to appease the gods involved blood and the offering of life to the forces that gave it. With civilization, more enlightened cultures substituted an animal or a bird for the human victim, but the great basic offering remained the same--the blood, the very life was offered, and what gave life to the flesh was also, of course, the blood that coursed through it.

The offering does not always allay this insatiable thirst for blood among those who bestow life, and those who remain alive do not always sacrifice enough to sufficiently offer their sacrifices for the dead. If the blood is not freely given, the dead will rise from their graves and attack the living in order to satisfy their unholy thirst for that which was not freely given. From such beliefs, perhaps, came the terrible legend of the vampire.

Their are tales of vampirism in the chronicles of Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, and ancient China. Belief is still strong in Europe even today, especially in Greece, where the vampire apparently made his first appearance on the continent.

The vampire is not a walking dead man; although it cannot be said that he is a living man. And the most famous vampires, at least in our civilization, has a Slavic lineage. The vampire belief arose in this part of the world from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, the era of the powerful robber barons who ruled their villages with bloody and brutal hands.

This was the time of the horrifying Countess Elizabeth Bathory, real-life Transylvanian Queen of the Vampires, who murdered and drank the blood of some 650 young girls.

There were many ways that a man or woman could become a vampire, such as leading an evil life. Other ways included copulation between the Devil and a witch--a master of the black arts during life and a vampire after death; in Transylvania, those born between Christmas and Epiphany possess the taint of the vampire; those born on a Saturday; or any corpse that has an animal leap over its grave, which is why doors are securely locked during funerals--windows are left open in order that the soul can find its way toward heaven, but one must watch to make certain that no animal or bird enters by that opening.

Vampirism is a belief current particularly in many Catholic countries of Europe: a man who is excommunicated will become a vampire. Montague Summers, the one-time priest who made an intense study of these creatures of evil repeats frequently that there are three necessities for the existence of the vampire: a dead body, the Devil, and the permission of God--although he doesn't say why God's permission is essential or why He would permit such evil (see his work The Vampire, His Kith & Kin, New York: University Books, 1960).

The spread of the belief of vampires was undoubtedly greatly assisted by the horrors of premature burial--a century ago it was not unusual for the burial of a person in a state of catalepsy or coma. Summers, in fact, states that at the turn of the century, there was at least one premature burial each week in the United States (he was writing in 1928). One can easily understand Poe's fascination with and repeated reference to premature burial.

Importantly, one must make a distinction between fiction and folklore when studying vampires. The vampire of legend is quite a different figure from that of fictional accounts. He is apt to be an untitled peasant, a quite average individual possessing nothing but the terrible vampire taint. He is lean and gaunt, extremely pale of face, except for the period just after feeding. His eyes are agleam with an unnatural redness reminiscent of hellfire, and his teeth are extremely white, the canines pointed as fangs. His nails, for some reason, are permitted to grow to an exceptional length and are dirty with bits of dried blood and torn flesh. His breath is remarkable for its foul odor. He lies generally with eyes open and is completely aware, even during the hours of daylight, of all that goes on about him.

There are variations on the methods for detecting a vampire. Most reliable is that he casts no reflection in a glass, mirror, or pool of water. In Grecian legend, there are vampires who can move about during daylight, but most often we find that he can only leave his grave two hours prior to midnight and must return before the first crow of the cock at dawn. He has hair, like the werewolf, in his palms and an index finger of unusual length. Vampires may have, in fact, been werewolves in their "normal" life.

The vampire lives in his coffin within its original grave, or it may strew the bottom with a layer of soil from its native soil. The love of a man fated to become a vampire is obviously perilous because he will first attack his loved one. The physical attack follows a predictable pattern: it begins with an embrace, during which the victim comes under his control by the forcefulness of his hypnotic eyes and then lulled into a sense of false security; a passionate, greedy kiss follows, after which the vampire moves down to the neck and bites through the jugular of his victim. He is possessed of curative powers as well, since, when he is finished, the bleeding stops and the bite is closed and healed.

The slightest taste of blood sends the vampire into a frenzied, orgy of feeding; yet he is in a constant battle for survival, feared by all creatures and constantly sought out for destruction. To avoid death, his most potent weapon is the ability to change shape. In fiction, he most often assumes the shape of a giant bat, which adds to the terror of a creature silhouetted against the silver of the moon, lingering menacingly outside a victim's window--he quietly leads the victim into a false sense of security before the attack, then gently lands on the sleeper's chest before biting the victim on the throat. One can picture the romance of such a picture even in the horror, which is why such a view of the metamorphosis is typical in fiction. The bat is, generally speaking, a feared and despised mammal.

In leaving his grave, the vampire can also turn himself into a mist and can enter through the smallest apertures to reach his victim. The form of a wolf is also assumed on occasion, which gives him the advantage of strength and quickness. He need not depend entirely upon his wit and talents for metamorphosis, however, for the vampire is possessed of superhuman strength. He also has his allies, whom he controls and who will always do his bidding. The wolves obey him, and legend also states that he has complete dominion over flies, mosquitoes, spiders and all blood-drinking creatures, whom he can readily call to his assistance. Yet in fiction, with the rising of the sun, all his terrible powers leave him and he is at the mercy of any who may cross him.

Many cultures, as has been stated, believed in and continue to believe in vampirism. On the African continent, immediate action is taken after the death of a man considered to be in danger of becoming a vampire. It is imperative to remove his power of movement and of speech; with this in mind, the victim's tongue is cut out and the arms and legs detached from the body of the corpse.

In Catholic countries, a corpse can be kept in his grave by the placing of a Eucharistic particle in the grave or in the mouth of the corpse itself. The deeper the grave, the less likely the possibility of the vampire rising from it, despite his ability to vaporize. If the thorny stem of a wild rose is placed in the folds of the shroud, the monster will become entangled in the cloth and be unable to leave the grave. Or a vampire's head can be forced to the coffin by driving a nail through the skull.

Most common precaution among the peasant people is the scattering of mustard seeds on the roof or threshold of the house where the vampire's visit is expected. Some unwritten law of vampirism makes it essential that the monster stop to count each and every one of these seeds. Nor can the vampire bear the odor of garlic, which reacts against him much like poison gas.

The most effective means against the vampire is, however, the crucifix. Devout Catholics throughout the world still wear such an emblem today to ward off evil, and, at least in the more backward regions of Central Europe, this evil includes the horrifying attack of the undead.

Accidental annihilation is a fear of which every vampire is constantly possessed. For instance, a single beam of light falling upon his body will bring instant, complete and absolute disintegration. Or, at the reading of absolution over the excommunicated vampire, the body will instantly crumble to dust. Montague Summers reports several accounts of such absolution. But the time-honored means of destroying a vampire is with the stake through the heart. This must be done during the daylight hours, or, according to some ancient legends, on a Saturday (Christmas Eve is also the time for vampire hunting, since those born on that day have considerable powers against vampires). But not just any wood will serve for the stake. The most acceptable is aspen, which is believed to have been the wood from which the cross of Christ was fashioned.

Of great importance is the tool used for disposing of the vampire: the sexton's sharp-edged spade for severing the head--a sword, knife, or axe will not serve. The spade is used as well to drive the stake through the vampire's heart.

The vampire sleeps but in most cases is fully aware of what is going on about him. His red eyes are open and staring, watching every movement of his would-be assassin. It is only the imprisonment of the daylight hours and the lethargy, which invariably follows his nights feeding that prevents the vampire from defending himself. The vampire screams horribly when he feels the blow of the stake, which sends him to eternal damnation; he also releases a torrent of blood, all of which he has stolen from others.

A second blow of the spade will have the opposite effect, restoring the creature's full power as the would-be destroyer becomes the next victim. But once the vampire is destroyed and his head severed, his mouth is quickly stuffed with garlic. Even more efficacious is burning the vampire to ashes so that there is nothing to restore him. Some legends state that burning must follow the ritual of the stake in order to make his destruction more certain. But any insect, worm, spider, etc., which escapes unseen from the funeral pyre may contain the spirit of the vampire. A silver bullet is sometimes used as a means of bringing death to a vampire; however, a vampire killed by a silver bullet can be restored by the touch of moonlight.

Although the belief in vampires is today most common in Greece, Stoker set his home in the wilds of Transylvania.

Montague Summers cites Goethe's Die Braut von Korinth and Burger's poem "Lenore," which, chiefly through the interest of Sir Walter Scott, was first translated into the English language in 1796. "Lenore" was to have considerable influence on later writers, and even Coleridge, in "Christabel," is said to have been strongly influenced by this work. It was not until 1819 that the first great vampire made his appearance: Lord Ruthven, in The Vampyre by John Polidori. In 1820, The Vampyre was presented on the French stage in a dramatization by Charles Nodier.

(From: Horror! by Drake Douglas, New York: Macmillan, 1966)

Dracula (1897) Bram Stoker (1847-1912)

As with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the monstrous literary creation has been embraced by popular myth, obscuring the identities of each author. Stoker benefited from John Polidori's The Vampyre (1819), James Rymer's Varney the Vampyre: or, The Feast of Blood (1847), and Sheridan Le Fanu's novella Carmilla (1872); yet Mary Shelley had already developed in 1818 at least two distinctive Gothic motifs that Stoker would find essential elements for Dracula: one concerns gender, the other is about the threatening nature of monstrosity itself.

In Shelley's novel, the scientist fails to protect his bride on their wedding night. Similarly, the men in Stoker's novel are constantly thwarted in their attempts to defend Lucy and Mina from the attentions of the bloodsucking Count. It is significant that it will be Mina who makes the final destruction of Dracula possible. In both novels the motivation for destroying the monsters coincides: it is a fear that they will multiply, threatening the survival of humanity.

The novel Dracula works on us from the inside, taking over our bodies, "infecting" our deepest desires with he lust for power and domination. The danger is not so much in being destroyed by pursuing the monster; the dread is that the pursuers will themselves become that which they fear.

Bodily desires and their satisfaction has always been a tricky problem for Christianity, historically a religion, which has tended to damn sexual impulses as an evil consequence of man's disobedience to God. As Michel Foucault has observed, for St. Augustine "Sex in erection is the image of man in revolt against God." Thus Abraham Van Helsing, whom Leonard Wolf has dubbed the novel's "priest-physician-teacher" figure knows that he is engaged in a cosmic, even spiritual struggle.

Read superficially, Dracula might seem to repeat the traditional theme of men rescuing damsels in distress, but what the novel is really trying to rescue, as one commentator has observed, is "an embattle male's deepest sense of himself as a male."

An enormous appetite existed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century for crime, ghost and horror stories. Sherlock Holmes had his evil adversary Moriarty. Robert Louis Stevenson created a scientist diabolically caught between gentlemanly propriety and experiments in lust with The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). In the late 1880s terror gripped the real world of London streets in the shape of Jack the Ripper, whose "revolting acts of blood" against women excited the fancy of an East End newspaper images of ghouls, vampires, and bloodsuckers. That episode of ghastliness may be recaptured when the Ellen Terry look-alike Lucy Westenra writes to her friend Mina that Dr Seward had been so nervous in his lovemaking to her, he played "with a lancet in a way that made me nearly scream." Many believe that Jack the Ripper was a doctor.

The blood theme continued with Wells' The War of the Worlds (1898); these creatures are "absolutely without sex," surviving on the blood of the creatures they conquer, with an "undeniable preference" for human blood. (Wells cleverly reverses the tide of British imperialism, having England invaded by an "advanced" race.) Britain was at the height of its imperialism in 1897, living off other nations rather than its own economy and competing with nations such as America and Germany for economic growth. Xenophobia and racism were everywhere, which is demonstrated in Dracula (Hildesheim described as "a Hebrew of rather the Adelphi Theatre type...). So too we encounter the inclination to see criminals and lunatics as degenerative "types"--Stoker was a long time believer in physiognomy and invokes the names of pseudo-scientists in his novel and also has Van Helsing go into detail as to the "child-brain" of the Count.

Yet the terror that haunts the novel is not the aberrations of mind-body-behavior combinations. The terror that haunts the work is Stoker's most persistently male fear of, yet desire for, sex. This lingeringly accurate account of a feared but deeply desired sexual encounter was aimed primarily at a male readership. Its soft-pornographic content is but a mild example of the much harder and cruder versions to be found in numerous other productions catering to the late-Victorian and Edwardian pornography market, such as those of the notorious publisher of erotica Charles Carrington. Jonathan Harker's encounter with the women in Dracula's castle, which he believes cannot be "all sleep," puts him into a role in the face of the advancing female vampire that is essentially passive.

If a current of male sexual terror runs through Dracula, this is far from always being passive. Dracula's violent bloodsucking and Renfield's greedy consumption of insects and small animals can easily be read as obsessive sadistic substitutes for sexual gratification. Sex was apparently the monster that Stoker feared the most. He published an article on censorship for The Nineteenth Century and After in 1908 in which he launched an all-out attack on literary "works of shameful lubricity" that were "actually corrupting the nation." Apparently he had Carrington and his Paris publishing house in mind. In the article, he sees nothing wrong with sex; on the contrary, it is because "it is a natural for man to sin as to live" that the "force of evil" needs to be contained.

To identify sex as the monster that made Stoker write so anxiously must be a crucial first step in understanding the novel. But that women can be a threat to men is not news. Despite the presence of demonized women as female vampires in the novel, it is Count Dracula, a male vampire, who provides the ultimate threat, and he is the figure of power upon whom we cannot but focus most.

Leonard Wolf has argued that much of the artistic strength of the novel "comes from the intensity with which Stoker evades what he guesses--while he decks it out in the safer Christian truths that he repeats." Stoker increasingly "decks out" his text with Christian allusions and quotations as the novel progresses to its climax. But what is the thing at which Stoker "guesses"? and why must he be so evasive? The thing Stoker both guessed and persistently evaded seems to have had much to do with the compulsive but ambiguous regard he felt for his employer, the famous actor Henry Irving.

The figure of Dracula is modeled after that of Henry Irving, a man who was intensely aware of his persona on stage and off and was generally self-obsessed. Stoker was in awe of the man. His own marriage, in fact, to twenty-year-old Florence Balcombe had been brought forward and the honeymoon postponed in order to meet Irving's' tight theatrical schedule, a prioritizing pattern that was to become all too familiar to the Stoker family in years to come.

One wonders what, as Leonard Wolf suggested, were Stoker's evasion of his "guesses." Could he be evading what he had guessed, that Dracula, his most accomplished work, in some way embodied what Freud would come to term the "return of the repressed"? Abnormal psychological states and hypnotic trance have significant roles to play in Dracula, a novel of narrative fragments that seems to refuse to tell its story from a reliable, single point of view. Stoker seems to have borrowed the technique of multi-narration from the more recent work of Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860).

As the text's frame narrator and supposed voice of sanity Jonathan Harker reports at the end, they were all "struck with the fact, that in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of typewriting...."

The threats to mental stability are repeatedly voiced throughout the book by the principal male characters, as when Harker finds himself alone in Dracula's carriage. Not only is there a "paralysis of fear" involved here but also in terms of the language an "evasive knowing" used to describe its horrors. As in Shelley's Frankenstein so here does the appearance of the moon both accompany and reveal the presence of threatening evil. Gothic and Romantic literature, alert to uncontrollable emotional eruptions but unable to characterize them as the work of the unconscious, had ever used the guises of nature, crime, madness and death as figurative substitutes that permitted the writer to textually "fix" the unfixableness of unconscious desires and experiences.

Dracula is a Gothic novel that also uses in its campaign against evil the latest scientific techniques and technological products. The final narrative transcription is made on the recently invented typewriter; Harker uses shorthand in his journal for security reasons; the case histories are made by Seward on phonograph; telegrams enable the "committee" to communicate rapidly over great distances; Van Helsing uses blood transfusions and new surgical procedures in his attempt to save Renfield; Quincey Morris's Winchester rifle is ever by his side. All of these modern innovations are deployed to combat what Geoffrey Ward has called "the spectral desire which invades the bedrooms of the imperial metropolis."

Yet none of these work. No matter how much "brave man's blood" is transfused into Lucy's body, this cannot change the men they are and the woman she is. What they fail to recognize is that Dracula represents not so much a spectral desire as a spectral power. It is somewhat appropriate that the campaign mounted to destroy Dracula has its headquarters in a lunatic asylum, the site of tidily contained but disordered minds. It is no accident that Stoker locates Seward's modern madhouse next to Dracula's ancient tomb-like chapel, for in the novel as a whole, threats of madness and death constantly hover together.

If Seward's asylum is an appropriate place for the novel's mentally baffled bourgeois men to gather, it is also the place where Dracula scores his greatest triumph--the forced enslavement of Mina and humiliation of her husband. If we ask what enable him to do this where the other men seem impotent to act, the answer is, perhaps unsurprisingly, his sexual power. For Dracula, sex is power; for them it is desire. He is the man whom all other men fear, the man who can, without loss of freedom or power himself, seduce other men's women and make them sexually insatiable with a sexual performance that the others cannot match.

Lucy, that "curious psychological study," is the one most "susceptible" to this power of Dracula's, because of all the women in the novel she is the one who desires most, wondering "why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble? But this is heresy...."

Whereas Lucy has three suitors she would gladly welcome into her embrace, Jonathan lies in uncertain agitation at the approach of the three sexually hungry vampire women. Significantly, their advances are interrupted by Dracula, who not only forbids them to touch him, but also says they must not even look at him: "Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me!" As Christopher Craft has observed, the sexual threat which the novel "first evokes, manipulates, sustains but never finally represents is that Dracula will seduce, penetrate, drain another male." Throughout the novel, the homoerotic impulse gets stifled and displaced, confined to achieving representation as "a monstrous heterosexuality."

It is Mina who remains the most important enabling factor for the defeat of Dracula, with the aid, of course, of what she calls "the wonderful power of money!" And the reason for this is her ambiguous sexuality. In her is to be found something both of the assertive New Woman but also of the compliantly feminine one. As Van Helsing observes, "She has man's brain--a brain that a man should have were he much gifted--and woman's heart. The good god fashioned her for a purpose, believe me, when He made that so good combination."

It is that so good combination in the persona of Mina that enabled Stoker to come to a fictional accommodation with his own sexual tensions, especially at a time when Oscar Wilde's prosecution in 1895 meant open season had been declared upon homosexuals. Evidently Stoker had had homoerotic impulses that found some kind of fulfillment in his devoted service to a great and compelling actor. But at a certain point, around the time both he and his alter ego Jonathan Harker qualified as lawyers, he seems to have begun enacting a programme of (unconscious) fictional revenge upon his adored Master, Henry Irving.

The novel is not, however, without its faults; the greatest of these is, undoubtedly, its considerable length. It is extremely difficult to maintain an air of brooding horror over an extended number of pages; for this reason, most of the finest writing in this genre has been in the form of the short story. The battle in Dracula to save the lives of the two female victims become rather tedious and repetitious. The story would have undoubtedly benefited from extensive cutting.

Dracula was first produced on the stage March 9, 1925, some dozen years after the death of its author. The dramatization was prepared by Hamilton Deane, son of one of Stoker's childhood friends, and starred Raymond Huntley as the count. At its run in the Little Theatre in London, a hospital nurse was posted in the lobby to assist patrons overcome by fright, a gimmick used today in movie theatres by producers of the cheaper style of horror film. This dramatization of Dracula was first presented in New York at the Fulton Theatre on October 5, 1927 and starred as the count a Hungarian actor whose characterization was to bring him fame for over the next thirty years--Bela Lugosi.

A silent Dracula had been made in 1921 by the German film director F. W. Murnau, titled "Nosferatu, the Vampire," since he had neglected to secure permission to use Stoker's title. "Dracula," although masterfully directed by Tod Browning and boasting the brilliant camera work of the German Karl Freund, seems somewhat dated today and does not stand up as well as does "Frankenstein." Lugosi, by the way, was not far from his fiftieth year when he appeared on the screen.

In subsequent films, the imagination of screenwriters began to wear thin, and it was no longer possible to produce an acceptable script constructed on a single idea; these stories presented a hodgepodge of loosely-woven incidents, each serving merely to bring a particular monster onto the screen and then dispose of him for the appearance in the next. Thus we were presented with the made scientist, the hunchback assistant (either male or female), the wolf man, the Frankenstein monster, and Dracula, all in one film.

With the revival of horror in the 1950s, Mike Hammer Studios in England assumed the mantle of the old Universal Studios, remaking many of the old classics of horror in large-scale, expensive technicolor productions. Of these, the "Dracula" films were by far the most successful.

(From: "Introduction," Dracula, edited by Maurice Hindle, The Essential Dracula, by Leonard Wolf)

The Exorcist (1971) William Peter Blatty (1928- )

See the papers handed out at the first of the semester (and available elsewhere at this web site), "The Exorcist," and "Cultural Expectations: The Exorcist From Book to Film." The only thing to add here is some additional information on the "psychomachia," the battle between good and evil for possession of a soul. The names of those involved are invariably symbolic of one's position in life or a sum of his or her attributes. The best example of this is the morality play Everyman, where the protagonist represents mankind in general. Names are equally important in Blatty's battle between good and evil. Merrin suggests the Arthurian wizard Merlin, who knew that his era was past and that the world no longer had need for his powers or the necessity to believe in him. Karras suggests the Greek for Lord (kurios), Christ (kristos), and his essential role in the novel, as one who "cares." Chris MacNeil has an ironic name: as the atheist who insists upon a religious rite, she seems to be a contradiction (a suggestive first name with the second suggesting "son of the dark" [Neil means "champion" in Irish, but may be a corruption of Nigel in the English--"dark"]). Reagan is named for the ungrateful, malevolent daughter of King Lear in Shakespeare's play (Chris MacNeil is an actress). The two daughters of Lear, Reagan and Goneril, who are equally cruel and interchangeable in their lack of filial love, have names that are virtually anagrams, further suggesting their similarities. In The Exorcist, Reagan changes into a "thing" who is not MacNeil's daughter, much as the two seemingly devoted but evil daughters in Lear change once they have "possessed" their father's lands and fortune. And finally there is Detective Kinderman, a child-like man (as his name suggests), who is wily, crafty, and good at his job, while at the same time charming and very likeable. His request for an autograph from MacNeil (ostensibly for his daughter but really for himself) is charming in its innocence--but at the same time he has surreptitiously examined Reagan's clay artwork, a piece of which he found where the body of Burt Dennings landed at the bottom of the stairs outside the house.

Some Variations on the genre and themes of horror: Jerzy Kosinki's The Painted Bird and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

Jerzy Kosinski (1933-19  )  The Painted Bird (1965)

 The symbiosis of cage and bird is an apt metaphor for Jerzy Kosinski's novels, each of which individually delineates the relationship between freedom and repression, victim and oppressor, writer and reader, bird and cage.  On more than one occasion Kosinski has borrowed a metaphor from his most famous novel, The Painted Bird, to refer to his own life.

 He sees himself as a painted bird still--that is, as vulnerable, often ostracized, surrounded by those who represent emotional, economic, and political conformity.  Several of his fictional protagonists also perceive themselves in terms of birds, like the Boy in The Painted Bird.

 For the narrators of his first two novels, The Painted Bird and Steps (1968), the cage is not so specific: the bars surrounding these speakers undergo continual transformations, from Nazi occupation, to brutalized peasant life, to the repressive institutions of socialism.  In all of these avatars of bird and cage, the bird succeeds in escaping from the cage.

 So it has been, in a sense, with Kosinski's own life, especially his flight from communist Poland in 1957.  "The creative man in a police state," Kosinski said in 1972, "has always been trapped in a cage where he can fly as long as he does not touch the wires.  The predicament is: how to spread your wings in the cage."  For those who need more room to fly—including artists—there  is only one hope: escape.  Kosinski, reflecting again on his former life in Poland, saw his escape from that cage in terms of an act of language.  "To exit is a very important verb.  When I reached the United States, I said to myself that since photography, unfortunately, requires such expensive equipment, my exit would have to be language itself, writing prose."  Kosinski once described Poland as a cage of words placed around him by the most powerful writer of his time.  "I saw myself imprisoned in a large `house of political fiction,' persecuted by a mad best-selling novelist, Stalin, and a band of vicious editors from the Kremlin, and quite logically I saw myself as a protagonist of his fiction.  Writing prose eventually provided Kosinski with an exit, but he reminds us that the cage he fled from was a book in which he was character rather than author, victim rather than oppressor.  Writing can free; writing can also imprison.

 Kosinski's fiction is about the art of writing fiction.  First, Kosinski has not been attracted to the self-conscious fiction we encounter in the likes of Donald Barthelme or John Barth.  Kosinski does not invent new ways to underscore our awareness that a fiction is only a pattern of words after all.  Rather, his power as a writer derives from the narrow rhetorical stance he chooses to impose on his material.  He creates a voice limited by what it sees, a kind of eyeball, although certainly not a transparent one.  Kosinski's fictive eyeball looks through a keyhole, as it were, seeing but not being seen.

 Second, Kosinski's novels confront the art of writing fiction from a unique and personal viewpoint.  He is a writer whose past includes a rejection of his mother tongue in order to seize on an alien one.  Although he eventually was a writer in English longer than he lived in Poland, the nature of his relationship to his "stepmother tongue" remained for him a persistent point of reference in a novel as recent as Pinball (1982).  For all its practical wisdom in terms of survival (he had to learn English in 1957 simply to live), his determination to write in an alien tongue entailed a willed vulnerability, a conscious choice to exchange mastery of his native language for apprenticeship to an adopted one.  His comment in 1971 that "no prison is an impregnable as language" can be taken two ways: it is difficult to break out of the prison of one's native speech, but it is also difficult for a foreigner to break into that prison from the outside.

 The writer in an alien language, he said on one occasion, is free from the trauma of childhood links with particular words.  "One is traumatized by the language when one is growing up.  In our society the adults use the language as a reprimanding device.  A child often cannot help feeling that certain words hurt just as much as certain gestures do.  A native, because of this, is at the same time more idiosyncratic to certain aspects of his language, of his self, than a foreign-born writer who adapted a new language long after his formative years.

 Kosinski's version of himself as a beginning writer in America makes a virtue out of the necessity imposed upon him as an alien.  But it also suggests that the process of sorting out the problems of writing in an adopted language--with its attendant images of children, pain, reprimands, tongues, curtains, mothers--might occasionally be a subject compelling enough for fiction itself.

 Writing in a new language forced him, he said, to pare down words to the bare minimum needed to instill a particular response in the reader.  The fewer the words, the sharper the impact.  On the surface, all this is conventional enough, but Kosinski's accompanying analogies often picture for us a concept of words as weapons, as if the aim were not clarity but intimidation.  "If you pierce someone with a small needle, " Kosinski conjectures, "the response might be greater than, let's say, twenty-five moderate blows."  The alien writer's engagement with his new language—an act which ordinarily would disclose his unfamiliarity and thus his vulnerability—provides him instead with unexpected strength, allowing him to victimize the native reader.  At least for this alien writer, penning words in his adopted tongue provided him with an alternative kind of power than that wielded by the novelist Stalin over his millions of characters, one of whom was Kosinski.  Writing is not only an exit, it can imprison someone else.  Or, to imprison a reader is a way of escaping one's own prison.

 Kosinski's books—whatever else they accomplish—inevitably involve protagonists who see themselves moving along an imaginary language scale that ranges from powerlessness to mastery, from mute victimization to words arranged to transform readers into victims.  Language is never a given, a mere means of expression, but a continual battle.  His fiction dramatizes protagonists who not only wage war with words but do so as writers, whether they are what may be termed "protowriters," such as the narrator of The Painted Bird.

 His consistent concern in all of these novels has been to describe a writer who first seizes power by mastering a language and then exits from the cage by means of the flight of words.  In Kosinski's first novel, The Painted Bird, the Boy dreams of becoming a writer like the "great man" that Gorky once was.  Each of Kosinski's books tests anew the premise that the writer's words can gain for him the power to flee from the cage of his own life by dominating the reader.  For Kosinski, the meaning of the writer's power—and his vulnerability—has undergone several transformations over the years.  As he confronts the task of writing each new book, he is a different writer.

 Because of the open-ended nature of Kosinski's continual probing of what it means to be a writer, and the unique and often bizarre range of personal experience he could bring on that probing, Kosinski's work needs a reassessment.  It is not enough to rely on his often scintillating remarks on the nature of fiction he once made in his essay, “Notes of the Author on The Painted Bird" (1967), because a number of these comments, such as those on Jung and the unconscious, do not illuminate his later work.  His disdain for the use of plot, first advance in The Art of the Self: Essays a Propos "Steps" (1968) does not survive his later compositions.  When, for instance, he said in 1976 that he wrote The Painted Bird as the first of a five-novel cycle, he was looking back from a specific moment in his career, one which of course included the publication of five novels.  He was his work then as methodically advancing a specific thesis: "As the story began to evolve, I realized that I wanted to extend certain themes, modulating them through a series of five novels.  This five-book cycle would present archetypal aspects of the individual's relationship to society."

 Here is one of several remarks Kosinski made on the duplicitous, manipulative energy of the writer's words as they provoke, victimize, and ultimately transform the reader: "By engaging my reader, on one hand, in the concrete, visible acts of cunning, violence--assault, and disguise—(as opposed to its diluted, camouflaged violence of our total environment) my fiction is, on the other, purging his emotions, enraging him, polarizing his anger, his moral climate, turning him against such acts (and against the author as well.)"  Still, it is not clear just why the reader should turn against acts of "cunning" and "violence' described in a fiction and against the author as well.  We certainly do not turn against Dostoyevski (to choose a writer Kosinski himself quotes) for narrating Raskolnokov's axing of an old woman.  But if Kosinski is perhaps self-serving here (he is attacked only because his art is powerful), he is nevertheless correct to emphasize that the relationship between his fictive narrator and the reader in The Painted Bird is one of provocation, deception, and victimization.

 Kosinski often invited speculation about the relationship of his life to his fiction; but whatever really happened to Kosinski as a boy in Poland during World War II, these experiences were not composed of printed words arranged for specific artistic effects.  What counts obviously is the art of each novel.  The Painted Bird is not only his first novel, but undeniably his best.

 The Novel:

 The Painted Bird is primarily a book about language testing.  Its main character, the unnamed Boy, is also the narrator grown old, an adult who has mastered the right language and who can look back at his childhood, at his desperate unlearning of a speech that brought him only the status of victim.  The actual telling of the story gives us only a partial glimpse into the abyss.  The story ends as the speaker reaches adolescence, and we never learn who the speaker has become as an adult or what motivated him to confine his viewpoint to the child he no longer is as he writes.

 Like all novels, The Painted Bird tells a tale, but this telling also involves the conscious discarding of tales, the necessary learning of new tales, and the disquieting relationship between the teller and his listener, the victim.  The Boy's story, first of all, is a painful giving up of stories.  His actual voice—as opposed to the brief paragraphs in the third person which provide a historical preface for the narration—begins to speak after the worst of a child's deprivations, the loss of parents, has already taken place. 

The Boy invents compensations, tests them as anodynes, and discards them as useless.  "Crying did not help," he says.  As he lives in the hut of Marta, he represses his old language and must learn hers.  He thinks of his past as a false language, "an illusion like one of my old nanny's incredible fables" (8).  But with barely a first lesson mastered, the Boy loses his teacher, Marta, who goes up in smoke.

 The Boy's survival depends on his ability to master new and cruel stories more appropriate for his new environment, such as the tale he tells to a murderous carpenter of war booty hidden in an abandoned pillbox.  This tale, a painful weaning from his mother's mode of telling is based on rhetoric of hate: the teller turns out to be a deceiver, the hearer the victim.  Thus the tale not only saves the Boy's life but it destroys his listener, the carpenter, literally cutting the cord that binds together torturer and victim.

 Further on in this painful learning of a language, Garbos, a sadistic peasant, orders the Boy to tell him Gypsy stories, but all he can do is recite "poems he heard before the war," poems in his mother tongue.  The poems bring about only an increase in Garbo's abuse.

 But the story Garbos himself tells the Boy reveals to him something about the kind of tale needed to survive: Garbos tells the Boy about a man who is impaled on a stake sharpened like "a gigantic pencil," an image which suggests the writer's power, the tale-teller's hold over his victim.  Garbos's story suggests the nature of the tale the Boy has not yet learned to tell, but it is the boy transformed into the adult narrator—speaking from the other side of the abysss—who tells it so well (138).  In the imagination of the suffering Boy, man-victim becomes bird-victim, the sharpened pencil one of nature's lethal stabbings.

 Rainbow the tale-teller is another of these narrators who are victimizers (106).  Rainbow's story of fish swimming through rainbows from pond to pond cannot be separated from his rape of a Jewish girl; his power over the girl is analogous to the now grown narrator's power over his readers, us.  Thus does the Boy learn the unspeakable connection between tale-telling and torture, words and victims.  His slow learning, his testing of modes of telling in his search for the right language, is also the story of the transformation of the boy into an aspiring writer, the same writer who finds, eventually, the right language to tell his story.

 For much of this story the Boy's quest is for a particular language, for whatever speech is necessary to avoid victimization.  When tormented by peasants after Marta's death, he finds that because he cannot speak their language he is treated the way some boys once tortured his pet squirrel (16).  In one of the first scenes, the Boy, who is temporarily living with Olga the Wise One, catches a fever.  To cure him, Olga digs a hole and buries him up to his neck (23).  He hears the flock of ravens' speech, but it is not his own and he cannot speak it.  Only in his imagination does he pass over into the world of new language (25).

 After this first imprisonment in the earth, the Boy endures one form of persecution after another.  He is whipped, pushed below the ice of a frozen pond, left to drown in a river, tossed into a cesspool, and suspended from hooks over a bloodthirsty dog.  In each case, the Boy learns that survival depends on observing the behavior of the oppressor, decoding the oppressor's language, and eventually learning to speak that language.  The Boy mimics dog speech to protect himself (61), or, earlier, hissing like a snake to distract a dog long enough to steal a comet from its owner (32).

 The Boy's whirling comet, much like the gigantic pencil, suggest the power of the writer's art, and, like Prometheus's own, the fire smoldering in the tin can is stolen.  The comet's glowing arc signals the presence of a demonic energy, a defiant inspiration; it forms a circle of defense, a "fortress," an "indispensable protection against dos and people" (29).

 The Boy's first mentor of this speech of animals is one who speaks it himself, Lekh the bird trapper, who could imitate their sounds (42).  Lekh's tales about birds define the terms of the Boy's own entrapment as well as the temporary exhilaration of release--his tiny cagelike bed is itself enclosed by bird cages: "At the very bottom of one of these cages a narrow space was found for me" (43).

 All around him hostile tellers invent tales in which he is the central character, and always his role is victim.  He hears that his stare causes sickness, that his hair extracts lighting from the sky.  to survive, he must tell new tales of himself, and, above all, abandon the mode of telling of his "mother and my nurses," those stories of the nurturing female.  The time calls for stories invented by the killer male, tales of men impaled on pointed poles as sharp as the pencils needed to write them.

 He is Scheherazade, spinning stories on cue that manage to defer the fate allotted to him by his listeners, who, when he is silent, become again his tormentors.  Listening to him, they lose some of their power over him.  His words are so captivating that the peasants cannot swallow their dinner (83).  In the minds of the Boy's oppressors, verbal agility is a weakness, even dangerous.  Although his voice suggests a certain power--he says his "city talk" was "full of hard consonants" and "rattled like machine-gun fire"--his speech lacks the power to oppress (as at the wedding feast where he witnesses the murder of a man [85]).

 He thinks of the Germans' power to invent--clever bomb fuses, first of all, but also verbal inventions on a grand scale.  The German claim of racial superiority the Boy sees as a story powerful enough to draw him into its plot (91).  The Jews, in this story, are getting their reward—as the peasants see it—for crucifying Christ, and the Lord was using the Germans for His justice (96).

 So too the Boy tries to learn the language of the priest and that of the Church, which sees as superior to anything he has thus far been taught.  But the boy cannot master this language of Christian prayer.  Its written text, the "Holy Book filled with sacred prayers collected for the greater glory of God by the saints and learned men throughout the centuries" (137), literally rises against him as he attempts to lift it during a High Mass.  The book tips him backward, crushes him to the altar floor, turns him into the sacrificial victim of the ceremony.  The peasants, enraged by the Boy's disruption of the Mass, carry him to a nearby open cesspool: "When I realized what was going to happen to me, I again tried to shout.  But no voice came from me" (139).  The pit into which he is tossed is a "maw," but his own mouth is silent, confirming the boy's enforced silence.

 The entire scene in which the cesspool's maw devours the Boy represents a turning point in both the Boy's life and the structure of The Painted Bird.  Up to this scene the narration is episodic: the Boy's voice describes discrete tales consisting of untitled, numbered units which we can refer to as the Boy and Marta, the Boy and Olga, the Boy and Miller the Jealous, and so on.  These units are linked together by the Boy's random wandering or outright flight from one to the next.  Each is a claustrophobic cell in which a "strange dialect," as the Boy calls Olga's speech, must be learned in order to escape.

 But when the Boy climbs unaided out of the cesspool, voiceless, he exhibits a new energy, linear rather than circular in its direction.  "The time of passivity was over," he says (160).  The remainder of the novel constitutes the steps he takes toward becoming a writer, the only one who has the power to open and close the doors tot he kinds of cages he has so far passed through.  The book's final scene shows him manipulating his newly returned voice, preventing it from escaping "through the door that opened onto the balcony" (251).  The Painted Bird thus ends with the Boy as stern gatekeeper of this final cage, which is both a hospital room (he is recovering from a skiing accident) and a metaphor of the writer in control of his own voice.

 After the cesspool incident, the boy is transformed into a mute, wandering the dark countryside believing that the power he needs--if it does not reside in God--must reside in the Devil (141).  His first sexual experience is with Ewka, a girl a few years older than he.  His disappointment in love comes from witnessing her copulate with a goat under the encouragement of her own father.  Her liaison with the Evil ones suggests to him that he might obtain a similar power from the same source.  "Only those with a sufficiently powerful passion for hatred, greed, revenge, or torture to obtain some objective seemed to make a good bargain with the powers of Evil" (153). 

 All this probing of the relationship between evil and power bring about still another transformation in the Boy.  He changes from passive victim to active inflictor of pain.  The Boy's ecstatic flight over the ice, aided by "the frenzied power of the wind," is a Dionysian dance, a surrender of the self to the unpredictable energy of inspiration, which the Boy sees as satanic in origin (157).

 As the war comes to an end, the Boy makes friends with some Soviet soldiers, including Gavrila, who teachers him to read and write.  The Boy relishes this new design of printed words.  Their order contrasts sharply with the disorder of his life.  Gavrila presides over the Boy's divestiture of entrapping stories about prayer, God, religion: "They were all tales," Gavrila teaches him, "for ignorant people who did not understand the natural order of the world, did not believe in their own power, and therefore had to take refuge in their belief in some God" (187).  Gavrila tells him a new sacred tale, that of Stalin.

 But this tale too, told so relentlessly, does not survive the Boy's growing talent for measuring stories for their capacity to provide him with power.  Variations on the Stalin story seem to him more enclosures, cages even stronger than the one he is in.  So too he is bothered by the variations in the party dogma from village to village.  It is not until he is taken on a sniping attack by Mikta that the Boy quietly rejects even this last of sacred texts, the story of Stalin and the masses.  Mikta's telling shots from the seclusion of a tree suggest to the Boy that there are "many paths and many ascents leading to the summit" (206).  New tales need to be learned.

 Gavrila's gift to the Boy is reading.  The printed word becomes for the Boy the latest in a series of discoveries about power and remains the only one to survive the test of his own experience.  All other sources of power--prayers, god, Satan, witchcraft, even communism--turn out to be empty promises.  (The Boy analyzes his first contact with printed words on page 186.)

 The Boy recognizes that literature not only intensifies life but reveals some of its mysteries, especially the seemingly inexplicable behavior of his adult oppressors.  Perhaps, he thinks, literature might permit the reader to anticipate the pitfalls of life and thus to become stronger.  Knowing what people are thinking and planning is a form of vicarious unmasking, a penetrating device that anticipates trouble by exposing its motivation.  If books could certify vicarious strength to the reader, how much more power might accrue to the writer of books? (186).

 When the authorities threaten to remove his Soviet uniform, and with it his recently acquired identity as a student of Gavrila's, he turns to written words to exact vengeance.  It is his first piece of fiction, and enormously successful as he runs into the street and writes a message for some Soviet soldiers accusing the principal and school of anti-Soviet behavior (211).

 As the war ends and the Boy is claimed by his parents, he seems fully aware that the power aligned with the writing of books is an uncompromising, even dangerous one to live with.  Later, a four-year-old child his parents have adopted interrupts the Boy's reading and knocks over his books.  The child's crime is to break the Boy's concentration, and so he breaks the child's arm.  The Boy's vengeance implies that reading and writing are powers nurtured by hatred itself.  Breaking a child's arm may be a hateful act, but hatred is the source of the survivor's strength.  Survival and vengeance become twin hallmarks of the writer's power.  He must hate in order to see, avenge in order to survive.

 Although he regains his power of speech—and to speak country or city speech at will—he also knows no one else knows of his transformation from mute to speaker.  He can continue to play mute, or he can speak city or peasant speech.  Either way, the words he uses will function to claim not hearers but victims.

 The Painted Bird, then, is a book that charts a character's transformation from helplessness to lonely power, from injury to retribution, from silent impotence to writer of the words that testify to his survival.  The Boy, in his early teens at the end of the narration, confides that he has learned what he considers the final truth.  He is beyond illusion.  For each situation he has trained himself to read the plot quickly, so that a new one of his own invention might be substituted.

 Kosinski's first novel dramatizes language's multiple roles: how the speech of victims is shaped by the commands of the oppressor, how words can confer either weakness or power, confinement or freedom.  Sometimes human speech seems inferior to silent action; certain gestures, such as the Silent One's refusal to use speech, or Mitka the Cuckoo quietly lining up victims between the cross hairs of his rifle, or the Boy himself, mute, dropping bricks into the dark on unseen enemies, seem refutations of the power of speech, or suggest that power increases as words diminish.

 Between the two extremes of silence and writing lies another area of experience for the Boy--the world of sounds.  For much of The Painted Bird the Boy finds himself at the center of a whirligig of sounds: howling dogs, buzzing bluebottle flies, the screams of victims of partisans, the "strange humming sound of the human throng" of Jews packed into railroad cars, and whose sound is "neither groan, cry, nor song" (101).

 The Boy's movement away from silent victimization toward the power of eloquence, which is the structure of his narration, is also a tale of a writer's slow progress from silence to spoken to written words.  The Painted Bird is thus filled with images of writing and the deadly side of writing devices: the comet's fire of inspiration can scorch those approaching the circular limit of its centrifugal force, the gigantic pencil is posed to impale, the Boy's skate blade can stab out eyes as well as cut designs like pens on a white surface, and axe cuts in the bark of living trees are inscribed messages of vengeance.

 To affect the author's style and "voice" in his own writing, Kosinki's narrator combines the vocabulary of an adult with the limited comprehension of a child.  Each moment of the narration is gauged by the reader in terms of the difference between what the child-speaker describes and what the reader infers is happening.  When the Boy sees Marta engulfed by flames, for example, the reader knows she has been dead for a day, but the Boy can grasp neither the reality of death nor the danger of fire; he remains fascinated by the way the flames seems to touch her "tenderly," licking her hands "as might an affectionate dog" (12).  Later, when he witnesses an angry peasant scoop out both eyes of a youth who is attracted to the peasant's wife, the Boy is struck more by the marvel of two eyes rolling on the floor than by the suffering of the blinded youth.

 This disturbing tension between the imagery of the Boy's descriptions and his limited comprehension of its full meaning is repeated on a smaller scale in the Boy's vocabulary, which moves back and forth between the polar images of confinement and flight, between the world of vegetables, which is the sign of his powerlessness, and the world of birds, which suggests freedom.  He is simultaneously imprisoned by society because of his "swarthy" physical features and freed from his tormentors by willed flights of imagination.  His descriptions are filled with words that suggest the tactile physicality of his peasant tormentors: potatoes, cabbages, rats, manure, lice (see pp. 136; 140; 190).

 The point of view of the Boy provides the reader with a complex disharmony between the words of the narrator and the narrator's comprehension of the experience he is describing, often creating for the reader a rich range of emotional response, from disgust to grim amusement.

 From Words in Search of Victims: The Achievement of Jerzy Kosinski, by Paul R. Lilly, Jr., Kent State UP, 1988.

Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird: plot breakdown by chapter

 Chapter One:  1939; a six-year-old boy from a large city in Eastern Europe is sent by his parents to the shelter of a distant village.  His parents lose contact with him; his foster mother dies within two months of his arrival.  The Boy is different from the villagers: he is olive-skinned and dark, while they are fair.  His language is educated, which is unintelligible to the peasants of the East.  He is considered to be a Jew or a Gypsy, the harboring of which brings reprisals from the Germans.  Villages are isolated from one another and have been for centuries.  The only law is that of tradition: the strongest survive and might makes right.  The villagers are of two faiths—Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox, but they are united by superstition.  The Boy stays at the hut of Marta, who teaches him about animals.  While she is kind to him, the local boys are not: they set fire to his pet squirrel.  Marta dies while sitting in a chair; the Boy drops a kerosene lamp, but she doesn't move.  He watches, not understanding death, as she becomes inflamed within the hut.

 Chapter Two:  He moves on to another village where he is tossed into a sack and treated like an animal.  Olga the Wise purchases him and he helps her with her medicinal "cures."  Plague comes to the village and the Boy catches it.  Olga buries him up to his neck in the earth to reduce the fever.  Ravens nearly tear him to pieces but he is saved by Olga, only to be tossed onto a giant catfish bladder by the men of the village.  He floats helplessly away from the village.

 Chapter Three:  The Boy speaks of the necessity of a "comet": a preserve can punctured by nail holes with a three-foot piece of wire attached to the top by which to hold it.  One places cinders or hot coals in the can and uses it to heat food, scare away animals, and to stay warm.  When he loses his comet from the previous village, he steals one from some boys herding cows.

 Chapter Four:  He lives with a miller in a new village, a man whom the peasants nickname "Jealous" because he has a desirable wife, whom he beats for his suspicions of her affairs.  He brings a young plowboy home to supper, one whom he knows is attracted to his wife.  He purposely puts a tomcat and a cat in heat in the hut, which the three watch as they eat.  The mating excites the plowboy and wife.  When Jealous sees the looks between them, he attacks the boy, gauging out his eyes with a spoon.  He stomps on the eyes.  The Boy is fascinated with the eyes and what they saw and how his own are held in place more than the violence against the plowboy.

 Chapter Five:  In another village he helps Lekh set snares for birds and the setting up of stork nests, which bring good luck to the villager whose roof it nests upon.  Lekh has interludes with Stupid Ludmila--a women raped as a child and now a nymphomaniac and simpleton.  In his disappointment that she has not returned to him, he paints a captured bird with bright colors and releases it.  Its own kind doesn’t recognize it and attacks it.  Shortly thereafter, Ludmila appears again, has sex with some of the village men, and then is attacked by the village women, who kill her.

 Chapter Six:  In a new village, he lives with a carpenter and his wife.  The carpenter mistreats the Boy, doing such things as tying him to a metal chain in a field during a thunderstorm.  The Boy flees on a passing train; he finds a deserted underground bunker filled with rats.  As he continues on, he mistakenly returns to the same village from which he fled.  The carpenter beats him.  The Boy leads him to the bunker--promising
armaments--and manages to knock the carpenter into the hole, where he is eaten by the rats.

 Chapter Seven:  In a new village he lives with a blacksmith.  The villagers fear the blacksmith and so leave the Boy alone.  He helps the blacksmith's wife make her concoctions of lice, spiders, horse urine, etc. as "remedies for ailments.  Partisans visit the village: the "Whites" are both against the Germans and the Russians and change sides frequently; the "Reds" want to help the Russians.  The partisans fight each other as well as the Germans.  White partisans beat the blacksmith and take the Boy to a German outpost.  A soldier takes him to a field where he is apparently to be shot, but the soldier allows the Boy to run away.

 Chapter Eight:  The Boy wanders from village to village during a hard winter.  He finds a horse with a broken leg; they show affection for one another.  The Boy leads the animal to the closest village where its owner discovers it.  He takes in the Boy and kills the horse.  The villagers, fascinated with the Boy's speech, make him tell stories and recite poems.  At a wedding party, he sees one peasant secretly kill another.  The body of the dead man is used by the villagers to cure goiter.  The Boy fears attacks by other boys in the village.  They all find munitions and ignite them for fun.  When some of the local boys attack him, he takes on the largest, hurts him, and flees to the barn of his master where he has his own munitions hidden.  When the villagers come for him, he lights a fuse to the explosives and slips out the back of the barn.  He hears the explosion as he retreats.

 Chapter Nine:  At the next village, his master hides him in a food cellar beneath the barn floor whenever the Germans come.  During the day, the Boy sees trains passing with Jews on their way to the camps.  The villagers maintain that this is God's punishment for the Jews having killed God's son.  The Boy wonders about these people; he remembers that his father was fair, but his mother was dark.  Villagers find bodies of children thrown from the trains by parents hoping against hope that their children will somehow survive.  The Boy wonders how many Jews God wants dead for the killing of his son.  A man named Rainbow, whose own barn shares a wall with his master's, finds a young Jewish girl and rapes her.  But he cannot dislodge himself when he is through with her, and the couple remain in a sexual lock.  Villagers, hearing his screams, arrive and kill the girl.  They then dump her body on the railroad tracks.

 Chapter Ten:  Because Germans are scouring the villages the Boy must leave again.  Germans catch him, however, and return him to the village.  He's tied to another prisoner who has been tortured.  As they arrive in a wagon tied together, the villagers pelt them with debris.  The prisoner is shot, and the Boy is handed over to a priest.

 Chapter Eleven:  The Boy is now ten years old.  The priest forces one of the villagers to take the Boy in--a man named Garbos, who has a vicious dog named Judas.  The priest instructs the Boy in the Catholic faith, while Garbos beats him at home.  The Boy tries to reason why he is beaten indiscriminately.  The Boy comes to believe that the difference between rich and poor, weak and strong, and those who take advantage of others, has something to do with prayer.  He feels guilt for the pain and suffering of the world and believes that he needs to pray.  Garbos, disliking the mumbling of the Boy--who is praying--hangs him from the roof beams while Judas snaps at him from below.  At the feast of Corpus Christi, he acts as an altar boy; but he drops the missal, the Holy Book filled with sacred prayers.  The outraged villagers throw him into a manure pit.  The Boy manages to survive but is now mute.  He flees the village.

 Chapter Twelve:  The Boy is captured by some local boys and ends up living with Makar, who has a son--"Quail"--and a daughter named Ewka.  Ewka seduces the boy.  Makar becomes irritated with a pet white rabbit and orders the Boy to kill it and skin it.  Thinking he has killed the rabbit, he begins to skin it; but the rabbit is only stunned and begins running wildly about the yard.  The Boy is beaten by Makar for the incident.  After watching Ewka copulate with a goat, while her father and brother watch, the Boy decides that power comes from evil: the more evil one acquires, the stronger he becomes; and the more pain one inflicts upon another, the greater his power.  The Boy determines that his passivity is now over.

 Chapter Thirteen:  Using skates and a piece of canvas as a sail, the Boy sails away over the frozen marshes.  He's soon attacked by a group of village boys.  Although he fights back, they submerge him in the cold water.  He manages to escape, but he passes out in the forest.

 Chapter Fourteen:  He awakens in the hut of Labina, who is a prostitute.  She was married to Laba: a poor but handsome youth who vanished from the village one day, but he returns with beautiful clothes and apparent wealth.  One day a thief steals his clothes and Laba hangs himself.  Labina dies of a broken heart and the Boy must flee again.

 Chapter Fifteen:  Villagers are becoming increasingly aware of and involved in the war.  The Germans appear to be losing, and villagers are now taking sides openly, fighting one another.  The Boy isn't noticed as much.  He thinks about God and decides that God can't be bothered with small details, such as his plight.  If the Russians, who are atheists, win the war, what does that say about God?  He believes that, if God exists, then everyone should lose since everyone is committing murder.  Kalmuks, dark, swarthy men who side with the Germans, enter the village; they rape all the women of the village in an attack of unbelievable beastliness and cruelty.  The Boy, now eleven, understands what is happening.  He has a new fear of God because he himself, dark and olive-skinned, looks like these Kalmuks.  The Red Army arrives and hangs all the Kalmuks upside down from trees.  The Boy, who received a Kalmuk's rifle butt to his chest, is injured.

 Chapter Sixteen:  1944.  The Boy has now healed and is looked after by the Russians Gavrila and Mitka "the Cuckoo," who is a famous sniper.  Gavrila teaches the Boy to read: his first book is Childhood, by Maxim Gorky.  Gavrila teaches him that God doesn't exist.  Great men arise on occasion by their own abilities, such as Stalin--who looks more like a Gypsy than does the Boy.  Gavrila teaches him about the Soviet Party.

 Chapter Seventeen:  Soviet soldiers sneak out of camp to mingle with villagers.  Four are killed by locals who are jealous of their attention to the village women.  After several days, Mitka takes the Boy with him to the village where they were killed.  He sets up a sniper's nest in a tree and shoots several villagers, who cannot hear the shots from so great a distance.  The Boy realizes that the village is the one where Garbos lived with his dog Judas.

 Chapter Eighteen: The Boy wears a Soviet uniform made especially for him.  He is sent off to a center for lost children in a large industrial city.  The principal and two nurses take away his uniform, which the Boy has refused to remove.  He runs into the street, finds two soldiers, and writes a false note accusing the school staff of anti-Soviet behavior and sentiment.  The soldiers retaliate against the school's staff.  After this, the staff leave him alone.  He's even allowed to write and read in Russian rather than his mother tongue.  In the orphanage, the Boy must fight for survival, and he becomes fierce and wild when attacked.  His Soviet friends taught him the need for appropriate reprisals.  He makes friends with an older and larger boy called the "Silent One."  They go out at night and play tricks on the townspeople.  The Boy merits respect from the others for lying on the train tracks while trains pass over him; he knows that others have been killed doing this.  The terror of the experience, however, makes it possible for him to endure any other terrors he might have to face.  One day some peasants at the outdoor market mistreat him when he accidentally turns over some fruit.  The Boy and the Silent One have discovered an old, rusty rail-switching device that leads to a cliff.  After oiling it, they find that they can move it.  For revenge, the Silent One takes the Boy with him, and, when the peasants are arriving by train early in the morning to set up their market goods, he throws the switch, causing the train to derail.  Many die, and the next day numerous market stalls are empty.  The man who beat the Boy, however, is still alive.

 Chapter Nineteen:  The Boy's parents show up at the orphanage and claim him.  He is disappointed that this means he will not see Gavrila and Mitka again.  He feels like one of Likh's painted birds.  His parents have adopted a four-year-old boy.  On one occasion, the child knocks over the Boy's books while he is reading and he, in turn, breaks the child's arm.  Later, when he denied entrance to a theater where a Soviet film is playing he retaliates against the usher by dropping two bricks on him from an adjacent building.  He begins to prowl at night, doing illegal errands for the people whom he meets, until he is caught by the police.

 Chapter Twenty:  The Boy's parents are worried about his health and his small size; he is sent to the mountains where he learns to ski.  After an accident, he awakens in the hospital.  He gets a call from someone he knows from his past experiences and suddenly finds his voice again.

Cinema:

There are an increasing number of scholarly film journals, now that cinema is accepted as an art form. Most colleges and universities offer at least one introductory class in film, and often a degree--either in film or modern culture.

A good place to begin is with any introductory film text, such as those on your reading list for this class as well as the assigned text. In the back of An Introduction to Film, you'll find a helpful guide in how to prepare a movie review. As with any argument paper, you always consider your audience: how much of the plot, story, or details does my reader know? That determines how you will proceed with your argument, which, like any argument paper, needs a narrowly-defined thesis on some aspect of the film--not the movie in general or several disparate ideas in one review.

Film is now, unfortunately, one of those vague terms that can mean a single movie or the entire genre of the medium. But whatever it means, it offers a means of communication, whether political, cultural, or purely as a means for entertainment. The genre of film contains a number of conventions, just as the stage does. A convention is a shorthand form of reality that is accepted and understood by audience and actor (director, camera operators, etc.) alike. Conventions change over time, and moviegoers accustomed to the conventions of their own time, without any knowledge of a previous era, may have prejudices against movies regarded by film critics as "classics," which the novice cannot understand as deserving any recognition for quality, or may even appear silly. Remember: every age has its prejudices against those--especially the former--different from its own. This is a matter of societal custom and cultural training and not a measure of what is "natural" or realistic. Past ages would be horrified to see how we try to make art into something "naturalistic," especially when we know that it isn't "real"--it's an illusion, so why treat it as if it were not?

Movies are, first and foremost, designed to offer the illusion of motion; that is, the majority of its operation is unseen by the viewer and he or she watches the narrowest of the film-making process, the movement on the screen. The film offers the opportunity for us to watch that motion in our own privacy, space, and privileged position. Only comedy, generally speaking, admits its own existence as a pretense or exposes its illusion.

The earliest films of the 1900s were sold to exhibitors who showed them until they literally fell apart. It was only later that films were distributed so that different viewers could watch films over a period of time, even returning to ones that were made years earlier. In the mid-teens, Thomas Ince created the first film studio that divided up production like an assembly line and organized the process in the manner of big business: set design, script writing, lighting, editing, etc., were all separate entities. Soon there were many studios, some major and others minor. Some specialized in particular genres. Universal, for instance, was regarded as a minor studio that specialized in westerns. The horror genre of the 1920s, and particularly "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" in 1931 changed that.

Technology obviously changed the style and design of movies. The advent of sound in 1927 is the most obvious example, but there are many other changes as well. The mobile camera made movement and the range of the shot more accessible, as well as permitting a greater variety in shooting locales.

Besides identifying movies according to genre--westerns, horror, adventure, romance, etc.--tone is instrumental in blending a variety of genres for particular effect. For example, after World War II film noir movies were immensely popular. They emphasized the city, urban landscape, often had no redeeming characters (only those who were "less bad" than others), were shot in black and white, and most scenes took place in darkened rooms or at night. The darkness without articulated the psychological darkness "within" the characters. The detective genre was especially ripe for film noir. But one may regard film noir as setting a tone for whatever genre it is applied to. Some genres don't permit the mixture--such as the western, which invariably concerns itself with big spaces, individuality vs. society or a group, and a clear definition between good and evil. However, many science fiction films, as well as the detective genre, combine the tone of film noir with the film genre to superb effect.

Viewpoints dictated by directors is another example of how the tone of a movie may be felt. The off-angle feel of a movie conveys an ideas of imbalance, madness, or instability. Characters can be shot from below, thus giving them the illusion of size and stature that may be compared to other figures in the film, suggesting that one character has either a greater stature than do the others or a false sense of his own importance.

Editing is another director's way of manipulating the audience (indeed, film is the director's medium--not the actor's). The earliest editing was achieved by stopping the filming. "Cuts" could be made by resuming the filming in another local or at a different time, or in a close-up of some aspect of the larger scene that preceded it. When the audience is unaware of the editing process, it is called "invisible editing," which can be achieved through several "jump cuts" or the rapidity of edited scenes. The "montage" is the result of several editing scenes which, when taken in their entirety, create a total perspective and "feel."

Sound was another innovation of the early years of film making. At first, sound was made on a disk that was meant to correspond to the film's action. In 1930, sound on film (made possible by the holes on the edges of film strip) gave the total flexibility of the film back to the editor. In the next several years, many advances were made that enabled editors and directors to maintain different sound tracks, block out background noise, and isolate sounds. In 1962 a new form of splicing made the editing process even easier, since the new machine made its own holes as it spliced. In the 1960s, in fact, great advances occurred which made it possible to isolate sounds when shooting on location.

Film makers continually manipulate the audience in a number of ways, not the least of which is with regard to time. There are three possible time schemes: running time (length of the film); screen time (narrative time); and experienced time (the "feel" of the time period). One can expand the feel of time by intercutting shots and thus expanding the material seen and comprehended, or by offering multiple angles of a particular shot. Another technique, which was used as early as the first years of 1900, is simultaneous time, in which events seem to occur in correspondence to one another, even if the time differential would make this literally impossible. Time can be manipulated in the order of events as well. For instance, film noir films often begin by showing the end of the action and then working backwards. In this technique, a viewer pays more attention to how these actions came to be rather than to what will occur. Romances or westerns often employ the technique of ambiguous time by offering no perspective on how much time has passed--there's nothing to measure it by, and thus the audience does not wonder how such things came to be (the young man learning to become a gunfighter) but rather accepts it after seeing a series of shots that suggest a process (such as target shooting).

The opposite of the montage (the relationship between shots) is the mise-en-scene (the relationship of things visible within a shot). Where montage contains numerous edits and becomes obviously artificial if one pays close attention, the mise-en-scene creates a feel of reality. Symbols and visual metaphors are important in such shots, and as a result the shots last longer, employ "deep focus" and "long takes."

Genre:

We recognize things by means of our experiences and expectations--genre enables us to anticipate what we feel, what emotions we will use, how the work may end, and with whom we may identify. We're familiar with the basic genres of films: comedies, romantic comedies, adventure, westerns, horror, science fiction, etc. There are a number of steps that may be followed in understanding how films use genre. First, Formula: a repeated actions with an expected end; it has a large structure; second, Convention: a smaller unit of action that has a set of rules or shorthand forms of reality that we easily understand; third, Icons: smaller units still, which present familiar images or symbols. A film is formulaic if we merely get variations on the ways in which events will occur and no real doubt as to the outcome: the airline disaster movie is such an example--we know that someone will eventually land the plane and save everybody (with a few possible exceptions). A typical convention is the shootout on Main Street between the bad guy and the good. An icon might be Eastwood's poncho in the "spaghetti westerns" he made, or the Magnum .44 in his role as Dirty Harry.

There are two principal genres: comedy and melodrama. Tragedy is non-formulaic because there is never any easy resolution. It is the easy resolution that makes genre films so easily recognizable. While comedy distances an audience from the action on the screen, melodrama draws one into an illusion of reality.

Musical comedy is probably the least popular of genres today. Rather than a simple good vs. bad thematic idea, "good" is equated with one's ability to entertain. Tastes today, however, run more toward the realistic. In harder economic times, people often escape into the most fantastic or least realistic of films, which is, as during the depression, when musical comedy was at its height. The western, on the other hand, had suffered badly at the box office until this past decade when it has made a surprising comeback.

More than any other genre, the western offers the clearest choices between good and bad. Adventure films, detective movies, and even science fiction are morally ambiguous. Horror films and science fiction are usually concerned with moral and social realities. In the horror film, there is moral disorder, a monster without or a beast within, and the victim is invariably linked with the monster. There is also specific suffering (which brings into question the quality of the "slasher films" of the 1980s, which emphasized random, impersonal evil--such movies are easily forgettable and don't constitute "horror" once the viewer has seen one of them; they become mindlessly formulaic and predictable). Horror films take place in small, tight places, with the natural order disrupted by spiritual or animal forces of some long-forgotten origin. Science fiction, on the other hand, does emphasize random suffering and focuses on social order and the evils or advances of science. Science is both the problem and its solution.

Psycho:

"Psycho" (1960) Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Credits:

Screenplay: Joseph Stefano. Based on the novel by Robert Bloch. Photography: John L. Russell. Special Effects: Clarence champagne. Art Directors: Joseph Hurley, Robert Clatworthy, George Milo. Editor: George Tomasini. Music: Bernard Herrmann. Producer: Alfred Hitchcock. Production/release: Paramount. 108 minutes.

Actors / Characters:

Janet Leigh: Marion Crane

Anthony Perkins: Norman Bates

Vera Miles: Lila Crane

John Gavin: Sam Loomis

Martin Balsam: Milton Arbogast

John McIntire: Sheriff

Simon Oakland: Dr. Richmond

Frank Albertson: the millionaire

       with:

Patricia Hitchcock

Vaughn Taylor

Lurene Tuttle

John Anderson

Mort Mills

Critique:

The movie opens with a view of a city: the name appears, followed by a precise date and time. Then the camera hesitates, seems to select, tracks towards one particular block, hesitates again before all the windows, seems to select again, then takes us through one slightly open window into a darkened room. Suddenly it's an arbitrary place, date and time, and now an apparently arbitrary window: the effect is of random selection: this could be any place, any date, and time, any room: it could be us.

The forward track into darkness inaugurates the progress of one of the most terrifying films ever made: we are to be taken forwards and downwards into the darkness of ourselves. "Psycho" begins with the normal and draws us steadily deeper and deeper into the abnormal; it opens by making us aware of time, and ends (except for the releasing final image) with a situation in which time (i.e. development) has ceased to exist.

The scene we witness between Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and Sam Loomis (John Gavin), while carefully and convincingly particularized in terms of character and situation, is ordinary enough for us to accept it as representative of "normal" human behavior. A leading theme emerges, unexceptional both in itself and in the way in which it is presented, though it subtly pervades the whole scene: the dominance of the past over the present. The lovers cannot marry because Sam has to pay his dead father's debts and his ex-wife's alimony; "respectable" meetings in Marion's home will be presided over by her (presumably) dead mother's portrait.

From this "normal" hold of past on present, with its limiting, cramping effect on life (the essence of life being development), we shall be led gradually to a situation where present is entirely wallowed up by past, and life finally paralyzed. That the lovers are meeting surreptitiously, doing things that must be concealed from the outer world, provides a further link (still within the bounds of normality) with Norman Bates. And in both cases the "secrets," normal and abnormal, are sexual in nature.

Everything is done to encourage the spectator to identify with Marion. In the dispute between the lovers we naturally side with her: Sam's insistence on waiting until he can give her financial security annoys us, because it is the sort of boring mundane consideration we expect the romantic hero of a film to sweep aside, and we are very much drawn to Marion's readiness to accept things as they are for the sake of the relationship.

This is in fact the first step in our complicity in the theft of the $40,000. It is Sam's fault that Marion steals the money, which has no importance for her. It is simply the means to an end: sex, not money, is the root of evil. Indeed, the spectator's lust for money, played upon considerably in the early stages of the film, is aroused only to be swiftly and definitively "placed": the fate of the money, after the shower murder, becomes an entirely trivial matter, and Hitchcock by insisting on it evokes in us a strong revulsion.

Our moral resistance is skillfully undermined during the office scene. The man with the money--Cassidy--is a vulgar, drunken oaf; he has plenty more; his boast that he "buys off unhappiness," that his about-to-be-married "baby" has "never had an unhappy day," fills us with a sense of unfairness even as we realize how far his boast probably is from the truth: whatever he is, Cassidy does not strike us as a happy man.

The whole fabric of the film is interwoven with these parent-child references: even Marion's fellow office-girl has a prying mother, and Marion's room is decorated with family photographs which look down on her as she packs. Cassidy's relationship with his "baby" takes us a step into the abnormal, because it is highly suspect: she will probably be better without the $40,000 house, which is clearly a symbol of her father's power over her. That Marion will also be better without it is a reflection we do not allow ourselves, any more than she does. By minimizing our moral opposition to the notion of stealing $40,000, Hitchcock makes it possible for us to continue to identify with Marion, involving ourselves in her guilt as easily and unthinkingly as she herself becomes involved.

There is no clear-cut moment of decision: she takes the money home, changes, packs her suitcase, but the money lies on the bed and she constantly hesitates over it: her actions tell us that she has committed herself, but she doesn't consciously accept that commitment. We are able to commit acts we know to be immoral only if we inhibit our conscious processes: Macbeth never really knows why he "yields to that suggestion whose horrid image does unfix his hair...", but the yielding itself involves the paralysis of his conscious moral faculties. So it is with Marion: the decision having gripped her (rather than been taken), she necessarily forfeits her powers of conscious will. She drifts helplessly, and we drift with her.

Her inability to control her actions rationally is illustrated in numerous incidents. As she drives, she imagines voices, conversations: Sam, her boss, Cassidy. She knows Sam will be horrified, will reject the money (she cannot finish the imaginary conversation with him); yet she drives on. Her boss notices her as her car is held up by traffic lights, and she sees him notice her; yet she drives on.

Everything she imagines stresses the impossibility of getting away with it and the uselessness of it anyway; yet she drives on. A suspicious policeman sees her changing cars, and she knows that he knows what her new car looks like, and what its number is, and that she is throwing away an irretrievable $700 quite pointlessly; yet she goes through with the exchange. Throughout the journey Hitchcock uses every means to enforce audience-identification—the staging of each scene, the use of subjective technique, the way in which each subsidiary character is presented to us through Marion's eyes, Bernard Herrmann's music and Hitchcock's use of it, all serve to involve us in Marion's condition. With her, we lose all power of rational control, and discover how easily a "normal" person can lapse into a condition usually associated with neurosis.

Like her we resent, with fear and impatience, everything (the policeman, the car salesman) that impedes or interferes with her obsessive flight, despite the fact that only interference can help her; just as, two films later, Marnie will be helped only by events that are entirely contrary to her wishes, everything she wants being harmful to her. As Marion drives on (after the exchange of cars) we share her hopelessness and her weariness. The film conveys a sense of endless journey leading nowhere, or into darkness: as the imagined voices become more menacing, darkness gathers. Driving through darkness, she imagines Cassidy learning of the theft of the money: "I'll replace it with her fine soft flesh"; Marion's verdict on herself, hideously disproportionate to the crime, will find its hideous enactment. Rain begins to fall on the windshield before Marion--before us. She pulls up at the Bates Motel, which seems to materialize abruptly out of the darkness in front of her. She has by her actions penetrated the shell of order, and like Macbeth plunged herself into the chaos-world, which finds here its most terrifying definition.

The confrontation of Marion and Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is in some ways the core of the film: the parallel made between them provides the continuity that underlies the brutal disruption when Marion is murdered. It is part of the essence of the film to make us feel the continuity between the normal and the abnormal: between the compulsive behavior of Marion and the psychotic behavior of Norman Bates. In the "parlor" behind his office, surrounded by Norman's stuffed birds and paintings of classical rapes, they talk about "traps."

Marion is brought face to face with the logical extension of her present condition. Norman tells her, "We're all in our private trap. We scratch and claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it we never budge an inch": he is defining the psychotic state, the condition of permanent anguish whence development becomes impossible, a psychological hell. The parallel between the two is clinched when Norman says to her, "We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven't you?"

It is her perception of Norman's condition that gives Marion her chance of salvation, which she takes. In answer to his question, she says, "Sometimes just one time can be enough. Thank you." She decides to return the money the next morning. The decision this time is clearly made: she has regained her freedom of will, her power of rationality. The scene prepares us for the transference of our interest from Marion to Norman. We see Marion under the shower, and her movements have an almost ritualistic quality; her face expresses the relief of washing away her guilt.

It is not merely its incomparable physical impact that makes the shower murder probably the most horrific incident in any fiction film. The meaninglessness of it (from Marion's point of view) completely undermines our recently restored sense of security. The murder is an irrational and as useless as the theft of the money. It also constitutes an alienation effect so shattering that (at a first viewing of the film) we scarcely recover from it. Never--not even in "Vertigo"--has identification been broken off so brutally. At the time, so engrossed are we in Marion, so secure in her potential salvation, that we can scarcely believe it is happening; when it is over, and she is dead, we are left shocked, with nothing to cling to, the apparent center of the film entirely dissolved.

Needing a new center, we attach ourselves to Norman Bates, the only other character (at this point) available. We have been carefully prepared for this shift of sympathies. For one thing, Norman is an intensely sympathetic character, sensitive, vulnerable, trapped by his devotion to his mother—a devotion, a self-sacrifice, which our society tends to regard as highly laudable. That he is very unbalanced merely serves to evoke our protective instincts: he is also so helpless. Beyond this, the whole film hitherto has led us to Norman, by making us identify with a condition in many ways analogous to his: the transition is easy. After the murder, Hitchcock uses all the resources of identification technique to make us "become" Norman.

He is a likeable human being in an intolerable situation, desperately in need of help and protection yet by the very nature of the case unable to obtain it. As he cleans up after his mother's hideous crime, the camera becomes subjective; they are our hands mopping away the blood. At the same time we cannot forget Marion; the intense anguish aroused in the spectator arises, as usual, from a conflict of responses. Our attention is directed repeatedly to the last lingering trace of Marion which Norman almost overlooks: the money, become now a mere squalid bundle of paper, an ironic reminder of her life, her desires, her relationship with Sam.

"Psycho" is Hitchcock's ultimate achievement in the technique of audience-participation. In a sense, the spectator becomes the chief protagonist, uniting in himself all the characters. The remainder of the film is an inquiry into the sources of the psychological hell-state represented by Norman Bates: a descent into the chaos-world. The other characters (Sam, Lila, Arbogast), perfunctorily sketched, are merely projections of the spectators into the film, our instruments for the search, the easier to identify with as they have no detailed individual existence.

Each stage in the descent ads to the tension within us: we want to know, and we dread knowing, we want the investigators to find the truth and put an end to the horrors, yet we have involved ourselves in those horrors through our identification with Norman. One is struck (bearing in mind the care with which Hitchcock always selects his players), by close physical resemblances between certain characters. That between Vera Miles and Janet Leigh can be easily explained: they are sisters; but what of that, still more striking, between Anthony Perkins and John Gavin?

As they face each other across the counter in Norman's office, we have the uncanny feeling that we are looking at two sides of the same coin; and the scene in question, which seemed at first mere suspense, useful only in its plot context, becomes one of the most moving of the film. The two men look at one another, and we look at them, and we realize suddenly that they are interchangeable: each seems the reflection of the other (though a reflection in a distorting mirror), the one healthy, balanced, the other gnawed and rotted within by poisoned sex. Similarly, Vera Miles is the extension of Janet Leigh, and what she sees is, potentially, inside her. The characters of "Psycho" are one character, and that character, thanks to the identification the film evokes, is we.

Lila's exploration of the house is an exploration of Norman's psychotic personality. The whole sequence, with its discoveries in bedroom, attic and cellar, has clear Freudian overtones. The Victorian decor, crammed with invention, intensifies the atmosphere of sexual repression. The statue of a black cupid in the hall, the painting of an idealized maiden disporting herself at the top of the stairs, a nude goddess statuette in the bedroom are juxtaposed with the bed permanently indented with the shape of Mrs. Bates's body (the bed in which, we learn later, she and her lover were murdered by Norman), the macabre cast of crossed hands on her dressing-table, the stifling atmosphere of stagnation: one can almost smell it.

The attic, Norman's own bedroom, represents the sick man's conscious mental development: strange confusion of the childish and the adult, cuddly toys, grubby unmade bed, a record of the "Eroica" symphony; the unexplained nature of all this carries the suggestion that what we see are mere superficial hints of underlying mysteries, a suggestion confirmed by the clasped, untitled book that Lila never actually opens (a Bates family album?). Consequently we accept Norman more than ever as a human being, with all the human being's complex potentialities. The cellar gives us the hidden, sexual springs of his behavior: there Lila finds Mrs. Bates. It is a fruit-cellar—the fruit is insisted upon in the mother's macabre joke about being "fuity": the source of fruition and fertility become rotten.

Our discovery of the truth, of course, partly changes our attitude to what has gone before. It adds, for example, many complexities to our understanding of the shower murder, which we see now as primarily a sexual act, a violent substitute for the rape that Norman dare not carry out, and secondarily as the trapped being's desire to destroy a woman who has achieved the freedom he will never achieve: a point that gives added irony to the fact that it is her awareness of Norman that gives Marion that freedom. What it cannot do is remove our sense of complicity. We have been led to accept Norman Bates as a potential extension of ourselves.

That we all carry within us somewhere every human potentiality, for good or evil, so that we all share in common guilt, may be, intellectually, a truism; the greatness of "Psycho" lies in its ability, not merely to tell us this, but to make us experience it. It is this that makes a satisfactory analysis of a Hitchcock film on paper so difficult; it also ensures that no analysis, however detailed, can ever become a substitute for the film itself, since the direct emotional experience survives any amount of explanatory justification.

The effect of forward tracking-shots in the film (from the opening right through to Lila's exploration of the house) is to carry us always further inside or into darkness. All the time we are being made to see, to see more, to see deeper: often, to see things we are afraid to see. Hence the insistence on eyes, into which the camera, our own eyes, makes us look, to see the dark places of the human soul beyond. And hence the dark glasses of the policeman: he is the only character whose eyes we never see, because it is he who is watching Marion, and hence ourselves. By the end of the film, Hitchcock has placed us in the policeman's position: we watch Norman Bates as the policeman watched Marion, and he is as conscious of our gaze as Marion was of the policeman's. On the other side of the cinema screen, we are as inscrutable, hence as pitiless, as the policeman behind his dark glasses. We may recall Norman's remark about "institutions" in the dialogue with Marion: "...the cruel eyes studying you." Norman is finally beyond our help.

Much of the film's significance is summed up in a single visual metaphor, making use again of eyes, occurring at the film's focal point (the murder of Marion): the astonishing cut from the close-up of the water and blood spiraling down the drain, to the close-up of the eye of the dead girl, with the camera spiraling outward from it. It is as if we have emerged from the depths behind the eye, the round hole of the drain leading down into an apparently bottomless darkness, the potentialities for horror that lie in the depths of all of us, and which have their source in sex, which the remainder of the film is devoted to sounding. The sensation of vertigo inspired by this cut and the spiraling movement itself, are echoed later as we, from high above, watch Norman carry his mother down to the fruit cellar.

The cellar is another clear sex symbol. And what Vera Miles finds there at the end of the quest are once again eyes: the mocking "eyes" of a long-dead corpse as a light-bulb swings before its face: the eyes of living death, eyes that move without seeing, the true eyes of Norman.

The psychiatrist's "explanation" has been much criticized, but it has its function. It crystallizes for us our tendency to evade the implications of the film, by converting Norman into a mere "case," hence something we can easily put from us. The psychiatrist, glib and complacent, reassures us. But Hitchcock crystallizes this for us merely to force us to reject it. We shall see on reflection that the "explanation" ignores as much as it explains (the murder as symbolic rape, for example).

But we are not allowed to wait for a chance to reflect: our vague feelings of dissatisfaction are promptly brought to consciousness by our final confrontation with Norman, and this scene in the cell, entirely static after the extremes of violence that have preceded it, is the most unbearably horrible in the film. What we see is Norman, his identity finally dissolved in the illusory identity of his mother, denounce all the positive side of his personality. "Mother" is innocent: "she" spares the fly crawling on Norman's hand: it is Norman who was the savage butcher. Thus we witness the irretrievable annihilation of a human being. The fly reminds us of Marion, who wasn't spared: the act constitutes a pathetic attempt at expiation before the pitiless eyes of a cruel and uncomprehending society. For a split second, almost subliminally, the features of the mother's ten-year-dead face are superimposed on Norman's as it fixes in a skull-like grimace.

The sense of finality is intolerable, yet it is this that makes our release possible: we have been made to see the dark potentialities within all of us, to face the worst thing in the world: eternal damnation. We can now be set free, be saved for life. The last image, of the car withdrawing from the dark depths of the bog, returns us to Marion, to ourselves, and to the idea of psychological liberty.

"Psycho" is one of the key works of our age. Its themes are of course not new—obvious forerunners include Macbeth and Conrad's Heart of Darkness—but the intensity and horror of their treatment and the fact that they are here grounded in sex belong to the age that has witnessed on the one hand the discoveries of Freudian psychology and on the other the Nazi concentration camps. Hitchcock himself in fact accepted a commission to make a compilation film of captured Nazi material about the camps. The project reached the rough-cut stage, and was abandoned there, for reasons that are still not clear: the rough-cut now lies, inaccessibly, along with vast quantities of similar raw material, in vaults of the Imperial War Museum. But one cannot contemplate the camps without confronting two aspects of their horror: the utter helplessness and innocence of the victims, and the fact that human beings, whose potentialities all of us in some measure share, were their tormentors and butchers.

We can no longer be under the slightest illusion about human nature, and about the abysses around us and within us; and "Psycho" is founded on, precisely, these twin horrors. For Hitchcock it was a "fun" picture, and a streak of macabre humor (as when Norman apologizes to Marion: "Mother...what is the phrase?...isn't quite herself today") certainly runs through it. Is it, then, some monstrous perversion? Many have found it so, and their reaction may be more defensible than that of those (including Hitchcock himself?) who are merely amused by it. David Holbrook, for example, remarked (and apparently with "Psycho" in mind since his book appeared in 1962), "Of course, if we live in the world of detective stories and Hitchcock films we may take all this sordidness in a light-hearted spirit as a snuff-like piece of stimulation. But if we are responding to poetry and drama our senses should be sharpened..." (Llareggub Revisited).

This reaction seems shortsighted and insensitive at best. If one is responding to "Psycho," one's senses should be sharpened too. No film conveys—to those not afraid to expose them fully to it—a greater sense of desolation, yet it does so from an exceptionally mature and secure emotional viewpoint. And an essential part of this viewpoint is the detached sardonic humor. It enables the film to contemplate the ultimate horrors without hysteria, with a poised, almost serene detachment. This is probably not what Hitchcock meant when he said that one cannot appreciate "Psycho" without a sense of humor, but it is what he should have meant. He himself—if his interviews are to be trusted—did not really face up to what he was doing when he made the film. This, needless to say, must not affect one's estimate of the film itself. For the maker of "Psycho" to regard it as a "fun" picture can be taken as his means of preserving his sanity; for the critic to do so—and to give it his approval on these grounds—is quite unpardonable. Hitchcock (again, if his interviews are to be trusted) was a much greater artist than he knew.

(From Hitchcock's Films, by Robin Wood, New York: Castle Books, 1969. While new works on Hitchcock's art appear regularly, this is still a good, solid staple with a no-nonsense reading of selected films. The study includes "Stranger's on a Train," "Rear Window," "Vertigo," "North by Northwest," "Psycho," "The Birds," "Marnie," and "Torn Curtain." It also includes an excellent introduction.

Hitchcock's masterpiece was no doubt helped by a shrewd publicity gimmick whereby Hitchcock, always the canny showman, insisted that patrons would not be admitted once the picture had started. The ad campaign for the film, which was distributed by Paramount, featured a puckish statement by the director that "'Psycho' is most enjoyable when viewed beginning at the beginning and proceeding to the end.... It does not improve when run backwards. This applies even to that portion of the film in which I make a brief but significance appearance." Hitchcock's cameo appearance shows him wearing a ten-gallon hat, visible through the window of an office building in downtown Phoenix, as he stands on the sidewalk outside.

For the film's celebrated shower scene, although it takes less than a minute of screen time, Hitchcock spent about a week filming the stabbing, which is composed of more than sixty individual shots. The very fragmentation of the brutal killing into a rapid succession of close shots makes the act seem even more sudden and violent than if it had been photographed in a single take. The prop department had initially supplied the director with a rubber torso that spurted blood when a knife was plunged into it. But Hitchcock decided that he could suggest the stabbing more vividly by cutting together several separate close-ups of assailant and victim without ever showing the weapon actually penetrating her flesh, and letting the audience's imagination do the rest.

As the water and blood trickle down into a black abyss, it seems to retreat into the very darkness her evil attacker seemed to materialize. This sequence of shots, as Rothman notes, is one of the several crucial additions Hitchcock made to the preliminary blueprint for the scene sketched by Saul Bass. One of the reasons Hitchcock chose to shoot his film in black and white when they were increasingly being done in color was that the slaying photographed in living color would have simply been too gruesome for many moviegoers. As he put it, he wanted to scare his audience, not nauseate them.

Bernard Herrmann, in composing his spare musical score for the film, took his cue from the fact that the movie was in black and white and limited the background music solely to strings as a counterpart to the way in which Hitchcock had limited his color spectrum. Herrmann said, "In using only strings, I felt that I was able to complement the black-and-white photography of the film with a black-and-white sound."

Some moviegoers found the shower murder so disconcerting that they were afraid to take showers thereafter (when else is one that vulnerable?). One irate father who wrote Hitchcock asking what he was to do with his daughter who refused to shower was told by the director to send her to the dry cleaners.

As many have noted, Norman Bates's donning of his mother's clothes before stabbing girls to whom he was attracted demonstrates that his own diseased imagination assumes, quite gratuitously, that she was as incestuously jealous of him as he was of her. In addition, because Norman was pathologically shy with women, each of these murders took on the nature of a symbolic rape, giving the dripping knife and the gushing shower nozzle a definite phallic significance.

Norman begins by enjoying his fantasies, and ends up with his fantasies enjoying him, as his personality becomes absorbed into the mother and he loses all contact with the outside world.

Hitchcock, for all the work that went into it, was disappointed with the shower murder until he heard Bernard Herrmann's accompanying score for the scene. Hitchcock was also of the opinion that people would label the film a low-budget potboiler and he seriously considered cutting it down and turning it into a television show. It was Herrmann who once more came to his rescue, assuring him of the film's quality.

(From Alfred Hitchcock, by Gene D. Phillips, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984)

The Exorcist

"The Exorcist" (1973) Directed by William Friedkin

Credits:

121 mins., Rated R, Color

Produced by William Peter Blatty; Screenplay by Blatty

Actors /Characters:

Ellen Burstyn: Chris MacNeil

Linda Blair: Regan MacNeil

Jason Miller: Father Damien Karras

Max von Sydow: Father Merrin

Kitty Winn: Sharon

Lee J. Cobb: Detective Kinderman

Critique:

The Exorcist, as both film and movie, has different priorities as to its designated audience; yet the effects of horror remain the same.  Supernatural evil actively exists in this world, and "the thing up there," as Chris MacNeil says with regard to her own daughter, is clearly not the little girl we met at the beginning of the film.  As well, "The Haunting" demonstrates--as do Poe's short stories--that the imagination can create its own horror without the necessities of gruesome scenes, elaborate plots, or unimaginable circumstances.  The mind can create, as Milton noted, its own Hell or its own Heaven.

Frankenstein

" Frankenstein" (1931) Directed by James Whale

Credits:

70 mins., No Rating, Black & White.  Adapted by John L. Balderston from a play by Peggy Webling, Screenplay by Garrett Fort and Francis Edwards Faragoh, Produced by Carl Laemmle, Jr.

Actors / Characters:

Colin Clive: Henry Frankenstein

Boris Karloff: The Monster

Edward Van Sloan: Dr. Waldman

Frederick Kerr: Baron Frankenstein

Mae Clark: Elizabeth

John  Boles: Victor Moritz

Dwight Frye: Fritz, the Dwarf

Lionel Belmore: Herr Vogel, Burgonmaster

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

" Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" (1994) Directed by Kenneth Branagh

Credits:

123 mins., Rated R, Color.  Screenplay by James Acheson, Music by Andrew Marcus, Director of Photography Roger Platt,  Kenneth Branagh and David Parfitt, Producers, Executive Producer Fred Fuchs, Produced by Francis Ford Coppola, James V. Hart, and John Veitch 

Actor / Character:

Kenneth Branagh: Victor Frankenstein

Robert De Niro: the Creature

Helena Bonham Carter: Elizabeth

Ian Holm: Baron Frankenstein

Tom Hulce:

John Cleese:

Aidan Quinn:

Critique:

James Whale's "Frankenstein" and Kenneth Branagh's "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" presented two contrasting visions of the Shelley novel.  The former, which departs radically from the book, but not from stage adaptations of the past century and a half, has become more the "official" version of the story than the novel itself.  The latter effort of the 1990s tries to reclaim the novel's plot but can't escape the accepted, perceived notions of what Frankenstein conjures up in our imaginations (much like the 1931 Whale's film).  The resulting film largely disappoints, even though it has some redeeming elements, such as the "birth" scene when Victor slips and slides in the fluid of life with the creature, which has emerged from the womb-like tank of its inception. 

The frame element of the story—Walton’s journal and letters to his sister—appear to have little meaning in Branagh's movie, yet remain essential to an understanding of the book.  Perhaps most disappointing to purists, however, remains Victor's reconstruction of Elizabeth—not because the monster requests it, but because Victor desires it.  De Niro (who remains De Niro, ever De Niro, De Niro playing the monster throughout the film) tries at least to capture the pathos and cruelty of the creature, two emotions that, like a child, have not formulated themselves into rational responses but have entangled themselves as one passion.

The Haunting:

" The Haunting" (1963) Directed by Robert Wise

Credits:

112 mins., No Rating, Black & White.  Based on the novel, "The Haunting of Hill House," by Shirley Jackson, Screenplay by Nelson Gidding.

Actors / Characters:

Julie Harris: Eleanor

Richard Johnson: Dr. Markway

Claire Bloom:

Russ Tamblyn:

Lois Maxwell:

Fay Compton:

Critique:

In Cold Blood 

"In Cold Blood" (1967) Directed by Richard Brooks

Credits:

134 mins., No Rating, Black & White.

Actor / Character:

Robert Blake: Perry Smith

Scott Wilson: Dick Hitchcock

John Forsythe: K. B. I. Agent

Paul Stewart: the Reporter

Jeff Corey: Mr. Hitchcock

Gerald S. O'Loughlin

Will Geer: Prosecuting Attorney

Critique:

A schema for understanding the above material: pre-civilization, societal organization, and it reflection of emotions and ideas in the creative forms of literature and cinema:

 

Necessary conditions for horror:   lack of control good vs. evil supernatural unfathomable depths of human depravity nostalgia for past (retribution; fear; memory)   Pre-Society   Pre-civilization: Totem (sacred) Taboo (against clan rules) Fear/respect for death: Body metamorphizes What power ends life? Body = corruption Remove remains from clan Cycles of Nature/sky: human cycles—return/journey

Society   Saga Legend Þ History       Myth Magic Sacred Þ Literature Religion     [Schema/Explanation as to our need for horror]                ß   Aristotle: (catharsis: pity/fear)   [Faculty Psychology]   Freud: “Death Wish”   Jung: Archetypes (“Shadow”)   Ericson: Culture (Fantasy and Freud’s “Reality Principle”)   Arnold Van Gennep Victor Turner:  (Rite of Passage: separation/transition/re-incorporation (“transitional” also called “liminal” and “liminoid”)— danger of “transitional phase

Movement into literature:   Generic Form: Thesis/Image   Poe: divided self (psyche) Soul/Mind/Body Atmosphere   Blatty: Psychomachia Occult Cultural upheaval   Shelley: Romantic self-consciousness (god-like; guilt) Traditions: Doppelganger Prometheus Genesis Golem Allegory of science Allegory of psychology “Birth Horrors”   Kosinski: Autobiography Horror of war Superstition Graphic detail Horror as commonplace Youth: movement from innocence to experience “Coming of Age” story

Film:   “Frankenstein” (1931) Monster Power Stage Acting No music   “Frankenstein” (1990) Sexuality/Power Blood imagery Birth imagery   “The Exorcist” Good vs. evil Assault on senses Sounds: horror of modern medicine Reason   “The Haunting” Imagination Past lives Psychological needs Anticipation Distortion   “In Cold Blood” End of American innocence “Non-Fiction Fiction” Randomness Social background—environments of protagonists No justification vs. justification/punishment of society

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