Real Ghost V Ghost Fiction?
reap-er2000
difficult, or eccentric, have some belief in ghosts?
And if you have no belief in ghosts, what is it that attracts you to
ghost fiction?
I hope something more than profit, but what the hell, there's nothing
wrong with profit! Is there something more?
Peter
Randy Money
Ghosts are a literary trope that fascinates me. You'd think they were
fairly limited, but good writers from Dickens to Le Fanu to James (pick
one or both) to Hartley to Jackson to William Kennedy to Toni Morrison
to Glen Hirshberg and, I'm sure, beyond, keep finding interesting ways
to use them. As a thing to tool to entertainingly scare people or as a
metaphor for memory, loss, grief and regret they are hard to beat.
Randy M.
Veruca
wrote:
Are we not all haunted by something? Regrets about the things we've
done? Or worse, the things we've left undone?
Given that, cannot ghosts be an ideal metaphor and ghost stories a
tool for exorcising our personal ghosts?
And besides the psychobabble, the world can seem sterile and
mechanistic and boring at times. The fantastical provides an antidote
to the endless WalMarts and gas stations and idiotic mass culture that
presses in.
V.
paghat
<ver...@beekslayers.org> wrote:
> On 1 Jun 2004 13:13:38 -0700, reap_...@yahoo.co.uk (reap-er2000)
> wrote:
>
> >I ask simply, how many of you reading these posts, strange, bitter,
> >difficult, or eccentric, have some belief in ghosts?
> >
> >And if you have no belief in ghosts, what is it that attracts you to
> >ghost fiction?
> >
> >I hope something more than profit, but what the hell, there's nothing
> >wrong with profit! Is there something more?
> >
> >Peter
>
> Are we not all haunted by something? Regrets about the things we've
> done? Or worse, the things we've left undone?
>
> Given that, cannot ghosts be an ideal metaphor and ghost stories a
> tool for exorcising our personal ghosts?
This is an excellent observation on the distinction between the
preposterous framed as fact, & the preposterous framed as fiction, & why
the latter can be so artful & captivates both intellect & imagination,
while the former appeals if not exclusively then most wholeheartedly to
the merely superstitious.
-paghat the ratgirl
> And besides the psychobabble, the world can seem sterile and
> mechanistic and boring at times. The fantastical provides an antidote
> to the endless WalMarts and gas stations and idiotic mass culture that
> presses in.
>
> V.
--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
Visit the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com
Mark Dillon
Peter <reap_...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> I ask simply, how many of you reading these posts, strange, bitter,
> difficult, or eccentric, have some belief in ghosts?
>
> And if you have no belief in ghosts, what is it that attracts you to
> ghost fiction?
From earliest childhood up to my twenties, I was plagued
by hallucinations (aggravated for several years by chronic
hypoglycaemia in my late teens). For fifteen years or more, I
feared that I was schizophrenic, but was eventually told that
I had a textbook case of severe, long-term clinical depression.
On hearing this, I felt relieved, at first.
When, as a very young child, I came to understand that my "visions"
were false impressions, tricks of the mind, waking dreams,
I felt brave enough to explore similar images and moods in
books, movies, music and tv programs. Ghost stories resonated
with me because they, too, dealt with that fragile state between
sleep and wakefulness, that uncertain realm of apprehension
and dread I like to call the night country. They showed me that
other people, too, were afraid of impossible things, which made
me feel a bit less isolated.
(On the other hand, ghost-stories never helped me deal with
my worst fear: doomsday. As a child, I was never troubled by
the thought of my own death and non-existence; I knew my death
was inevitable, and occasionally longed for it. Instead, I feared
the death of everything: the end of the world, brought about by
vast, impersonal forces above and beyond human control. Perhaps
it was a child's twisted impression of nuclear holocaust anxiety.
Whatever it was, it poisoned my sleep with nightmare attempts
to warn the grown-ups around me, as I ran from door-to-door,
desperately trying to convince adults to look up at the vast red
thing that hovered miles overhead. In another dream I found myself
alone in my neighborhood, shrieking at a crystalline tornado as it
hurtled toward the houses. In further dreams, the houses
all around me would suddenly and silently crumble into dust, and
the dust would blow away, leaving nothingness behind. I was
four years old.
Five years later, when I began to read science-fiction, I recognized
similar anxieties under different names: Mutually Assured Destruction,
Terminal Beach, Andromeda Strain. Needless to say, my discovery that
others, too, were frightened of all-too-possible dooms brought me
no comfort whatsoever.)
Now that I'm forty, isolated yet standing on firmer mental soil,
I read ghost-stories for that recognition of psychological anxiety,
that sense of roads veering toward the night country. I prefer
writers who combine psychological uncertainty with dreamlike
landscapes or buildings: LeFanu, Hartley, M. R. James, Aickman,
Wharton, Capes, M. John Harrison, Bierce. I love surrealism and dark
fantasy in writers like Hoffmann, Bruno Schulz, Marcel Brion, C. L. Moore,
and -- long-time favourites -- H. G. Wells, Clark Ashton Smith,
J. G. Ballard. (Although non-horrific or non-apocalyptic fantasy tales
usually bore me, I do like R. A. Lafferty, Avram Davidson and
Mervyn Peake.)
What I look for in fiction is a heightened awareness of the physical world,
an almost paranoiac intensity of observation. For me, precise, physical
detail is the basis of atmosphere, something Smith understood well,
just as Ballard and Harrison do today. A similar intensity appears in
non-fantasy writers like Graham Greene and Lawrence Durrell.
Because, in my opinion, the supernatural cannot exist, its eruption
into the real world would be catastrophic. A sudden influx
of supernatural beings would be like an air-raid siren signalling
The End. For that reason, I find "genteel" stories of benevolent
ghosts dull no matter how well written. I also dislike explicable
ghosts with human motives, or any hint of psychic powers in human
beings, any suggestion that humans can control the supernatural
through magic; even though excellent stories have been written
about such things, I find them hard to swallow. I can accept a witch
in Hyperborea, a wizard in Xiccarph, yes... but in London? I don't
think so. Nor can I take seriously a menace that shies away from
garlic or crucifix.
Yet I'm more than willing to play along for the sake of E. F. Benson's
caterpillars, L. P. Hartley's Podolo, Elizabeth Bowen's demon lover,
Shirley Jackson's beautiful stranger, L. A. Lewis's child, M. R. James's
face of crumpled linen, because, after all, they ask only that I accept
something I know too well: that what we see is not the world, but
the brain's interpretation of the world; that the brain, like any other
bodily organ, can suddenly fail... and leave us in the foothills of the
night country.
Mark Dillon
Quebec, Canada
Paula C. Hunter
Paula C. Hunter
have been such a brave child/teen! I congratulate you on coming to terms
with such frightening condition and wish you nothing but the best. My
beloved Mother had a similar "disorder" or what ever these things are called
so can appreciate your struggle.
Paula
PS: I hope I expressed this right.
"Mark Dillon" <dq...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA> wrote in message
news:c9jber$cnm$1...@freenet9.carleton.ca...
Mark Dillon
Paula C. Hunter wrote:
> Oh Mark, what a profound explanation and I find it very touching.
Well, thank you.
> You must have been such a brave child/teen!
Not brave, no. If anything kept me going back then, it was rage.
Not even defiance; merely rage.
> I congratulate you on coming to terms with such frightening condition
Actually, I've never come to terms with it. I'm just relieved
that my problem turned out to be severe depression and
not schizophrenia or -- who knows? -- something even worse.
> and wish you nothing but the best.
I look at it this way: I'm still here, and so is the human species;
I hadn't counted on that. So far, so good.
> My beloved Mother had a similar "disorder" or what ever these
> things are called so can appreciate your struggle.
As I see it, everyone has to struggle against something; no one
has an easy time of it. Those who appear to glide through existence
with relative ease are merely experts at concealment. People
like your mother reveal the true face of life and the sheer courage
life demands from day to day. I'm always amazed that people
survive.
> I hope I expressed this right.
I know the feeling. : )
Mark Dillon
Quebec, Canada
Luc
> Date : 1 Juin 2004 13:13:38 -0700
> Objet : Real Ghost V Ghost Fiction?
Ah, the age-old question of whether it is necessary to believe in ghosts to
enjoy supernatural fiction. I may be repeating what I posted in the past
since I seem to remember it has been raised here previously.
As a confirmed materialist who gives not one nanogram of credence to
supernatural phenomena, I can answer a resounding no. For believers, ghost
stories and associated fiction are simply a confirmation of a belief system
already in place. For those of us us whose feet are solidly grounded in
reality, a truly effective supernatural story produces a greater shock since
it challenges, if only for a brief moment, our whole worldview. Which is
why perhaps I am not very forgiving of fiction which simply repeats formulas
or tropes that have been used before, since the frisson has already been
spent. It's like the difference between the soft comfort of familiarity
that weekly homilies give the congregation gathered in church by simple
force of habit, and the emotion a truly great interpretation of a Passion by
Bach can give to even the most confirmed atheist.
And perhaps there is also a perverse pleasure at play, in that one does have
to abandon, temporarily of course, one's rationality when indulging in
supernatural fiction. Just like you know a roller coaster ride will end,
eventually.
--
Luc Pomerleau, Gatineau, Canada
reap-er2000
I thank you for your post in answer to my question. I always feel
saddened to hear of anyone who feels "isolated" in his or her
day-to-day existence but, of course, this seems often to be an
integral part of "modern" life. But I'm gladdened to hear you feel
yourself "on firmer mental soil."
I sense from your reply that ghost fiction has, at least in part, been
therapeutic for you, which is to the good.
And I share your love of the surreal - both in art and literature!
Last year on my wife's birthday we travelled to Barcelona for three
days in order to visit the Salvador Dali Gallery (she loves Dali). In
fact I can identify with many of the points you make. Mervyn Peake is
one of my favourite authors / artists. I also enjoy Graham Greene –
however I do find him a little cold.
Only recently, I finished J G Ballard's "THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES"
which I would recommend to anyone quite unreservedly.
I do hope that your interest in these things continues and that in
turn they act as a beacon to banish those "foothills of the night
country" permanently for you.
Kindest Regards.
Peter
> Mark Dillon
> Quebec, Canada
Mark Dillon
Peter <reap_...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Mark
>
> I thank you for your post in answer to my question. I always feel
> saddened to hear of anyone who feels "isolated" in his or her
> day-to-day existence but, of course, this seems often to be an
> integral part of "modern" life.
Where "all that is solid melts into air"....
> But I'm gladdened to hear you feel yourself "on firmer
> mental soil." I sense from your reply that ghost fiction
> has, at least in part, been therapeutic for you, which is
> to the good.
Therapeutic, but only in the revelation that I wasn't the only
person with a head full of darkness. The darkness
remains, albeit locked in its own little corner.
> And I share your love of the surreal - both in art and literature!
I've been trying to understand Andre Breton's belief that a
metaphorical "conducting wire" between waking and
dreaming states can lead to personal liberation and
social liberation as well, by adding hope and energy to life --
hope for change, energy for social transformation. Yet how can
hope be inspired by terrible nightmares?
On the other hand, my childhood nightmares made
it clear to me that dreams were no escape from the world,
but echoes, amplifications of worldly fears: nuclear
war, genocide, extinction. Dreams and fantasies were
not escape routes, but pathways to recognition. Dreams
and fantasies forced me to confront issues that grown-ups
feared but wouldn't talk about. Perhaps, in that sense,
Breton was right: dreams can lead to social activism.
> Last year on my wife's birthday we travelled to Barcelona
> for three days in order to visit the Salvador Dali Gallery
> (she loves Dali).
Dali's "paranoiac-critical method" sounds like a recipe for
ghost stories!
> Mervyn Peake is one of my favourite authors / artists.
Peake understood a point that too many fantasy writers miss:
fiction does not convey magic through events or characters, but
through prose. Nothing overtly fantastic occurs in the Titus
books (although TITUS ALONE is bizarre in futuristic ways),
yet words on the page give the books a sense of wonder and
strangeness.
A similar case: I've found a greater sense of magic in Moorcock's
"realistic" MOTHER LONDON than in any of those Elric books
I've never been able to finish; the evocation of detail in LONDON is
more precisely physical and therefore, for me at least, more
evocative.
> I also enjoy Graham Greene -- however I do find him a little cold.
Have you tried Paul Bowles? He's even colder!
> Only recently, I finished J G Ballard's "THE COMPLETE
> SHORT STORIES" which I would recommend to anyone
> quite unreservedly.
Ballard is brilliant. Although a few stories don't work, in my
opinion -- "Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer" is too absurd, "End Game"
too drily abstract -- others are mind-meltingly good: "The Terminal
Beach", "The Voices of Time", "The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D",
"The Screen Game", "The Illuminated Man", "The Enormous Space",
"The Index", "The Secret History of World War 3", "The Waiting
Grounds", "Cry Hope, Cry Fury", "Deep End".... And his
ATROCITY EXHIBITION stories are all-too-relevant now, more than
three decades after their first appearance; we're still trapped in the
corporate-media dungeon they describe.
> I do hope that your interest in these things continues and that in
> turn they act as a beacon to banish those "foothills of the night
> country" permanently for you.
Well, thank you. It's one thing to visit the night country in dreams;
it's something else to find yourself there at 3:00 on a summer afternoon
while walking down Sparks Street in the city of Ottawa, Ontario.
That sort of disruption I can do without.
Mark Dillon
Quebec, Canada