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this thread hits the spot - in fact I think Ward Fowler recommended it when we met up and were discussing some of this stuff in Glasgow a while back.
some great recommendations here (still haven't seen Robin Redbreast.
I've got a sort of theoretical model which is horribly generalised but goes something like this, so bear with me (er, this turned out to be a long post, sorry):
At the end of the 19th Century there was a schism in horror/ghost writing. Arthur Machen is the key person here, with his mixture of malign pastoral (that is to say it is not edenic or supernal), chthonic malevolent faeries (almost certainly versions of the Celtic so-called 'barrow-folk'), Roman syncretism (displacing chthonic, and 'spiritual'/of the stars), and the tentacle, or black degradation, itself a part of the Neoplatonic chain-of-being expressed by by the Silurian mage, Thomas Vaughan, as I wrote elsewhere:
The 17th century mystic Thomas Vaughan, like Machen a Silurian Welsh, wrote of the chain of being where ‘beneath all degrees of sense there is a certain horrible, inexpressible darkness. The magicians called it tenebrae activae.’ This crudely sentient and primal darkness is like a canker that infects first soul and then flesh. So it is that Helen Vaughan in The Great God Pan, Mrs Black in The Inmost Light, and Francis Leicester in The Novel of the White Powder all end up ‘a dark and putrid mass, seething with corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but melting and changing before our eyes, and bubbling with unctuous oily bubbles like boiling pitch.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_chain_of_being#mediaviewer/File:Great_Chain_of_Being_2.png
^ great chain of being, see base for boiling pitch
The interplay between these is complicated, and it's worth saying that MR James had also had a very effective tentacle in, I think, Count Magnus.
Arthur Machen's important for this genealogy is because the American journalist, Vincent Starrett, who had a fascination with Machen, wrote an article on him, and was friends with HP Lovecraft. It was in this way that the tentacle stretched across the Atlantic, and in HP Lovecraft's hands multiplied into a mythos with, like Machen, separate chthonic and stellar aspects.
Crucially it seems to me are the visual elements of Lovecraft - much English ghost story writing was quite reticent in this respect (MR James in particular nests his horror in shadows or heavily framed narrative/pictorial devices). Machen did visualise, but the moment of revelation was usually also the end of the piece. Lovecraft was all MORE TENTACLES GIVE ME MORE I MUST DESCRIBE THE UNDESCRIBABLE TERROR. Sometimes I feel this is a division between horror and ghost writing, though I'm not sure that's right (horror writing doesn't always heavily visualise). What I *do* think is that heavily visual element in Lovecraft (and subsequently horror writing in general) lent itself extremely well to comic books and film when they came along. It became part of popular culture.
At the same time in the UK, Machen had dropped his malign pastoral, and started concentrating on supernal stuff, Grail legend, still with elements of the little folk, but without the black degradation - he himself wrote 'Here then was my real failure; I translated awe, at worst awfulness, into evil.' Completely RONG of course, but n/m, point is it took him in a different direction that was characteristic of English supernatural writing generally.
I've got loads of gaps here, but as far as I can tell, English supernatural writing was free of visual horror throughout the first half of the 20th Century. The supernatural pastoral strain is extremely strong. Writers like diverse figures like John Betjeman, Denton Welch, the composer John Ireland, Jocelyn Brooke, Michael Powell (P&Pressburger) were influenced and were fans of the uncanny pastoral. Edwardian (and later) children's writing is full of it (E Nesbitt's Psammead is a chthonic fairy, the Hobbits are barrow folk, there's a fuckton of Graal stuff). Walter de la Mare belongs here too. It sat closer to high culture than it did popular culture. The reticence I mentioned earlier means there's a 'writing of unease' or even 'the unpleasant' (such an English word) - Eleanor Smith wrote some good gypsy/circus based stuff, Roald Dahl's short stories probably fit here. There's a very good set of stories by the young Elizabeth Jane Howard (with Robert Aickman) called We Are For the Dark. This is a genre probably best described as the 'macabre'.
I don't think the effect of the two wars can be dismissed here - the First World War, like the Boer war, saw a mass level of death of youth, which resulted in a fuck load of spiritism, table tapping, ghosts summoned up by grieving parents. Reading Edwardian children's fantasy both wars saw a lot of displacement to the countryside (for different reasons - wealthy children moved out 'while Father's away' in the WWI stories, evacuation in WWII obv) which perpetuated the pastoral - rus v urb distinctions.
John Wyndham I feel is essentially pastoral - it was a criticism I think of Brian Aldiss on JW that his novels always basically ended up with a return to a pastoral eden. The village of the Midwich Cuckoos is essential for the claustrophobia, but is also a v English Victorian genre location - I liked clemenza's point above though about US suburbia, which is often available for parables of uniformity, but i think that is different to John Wyndham's use here.
Chocky is the great counter-example.
John Christopher's incredibly bleak and effective The Death of Grass is also an eco/pastoral catastrophe.
In the US, it feels like science, the military, nuclear power, and space exploration are the crucial WWII elements - the stellar and alien precedes space exploration of course, and I'd suggest it's essentially the English druidic/mystical strain (a Romantic crypto-history), filtered through Machen-Lovecraftian monstrosity, with the religious elements removed. It becomes v difficult and probably meaningless to separate out much horror and science-fiction in the US post-war.
there's a quote I picked up the other day, which was originally in The Gentleman's Magazine, which sums up the British status for me:
“In England, everything of unknown origin is instinctively assigned to one of four - Julius Caesar, King Arthur, the Druids or the Devil.”
— TG Bonney - The Gentleman’s Magazine 1866
That was referring to the hazy archaeological theories of stone age monuments and remains, but such theories were extremely strong in late British Romanticism, and persisted culturally, so that you could say that of an awful lot of
The UK television that's mentioned in this thread sits firmly in this strain. Penda's Fen, which I will have to watch again cos it's great - v strong pastoral both musically - Elgar - and spiritually - pagan loca sacra. Nigel Kneale is central here. He introduces US science fiction elements to his horror, pulling together the two lines that had split early on: Quatermass and the Pit is a direct SF interpretation of Machen (separate strands of chthonic little folk and interstellar horror), the final Quatermass picks up on the popular revival of Neolithic monument theorising and adds the Quatermass-UK-tradition of nuclear and radio research to the mix. Extremely effective. See also Children of the Stones and Kneale's The Stone Tape. These are all the elements of that late Victorian Romanticism/archaeological theory, but with the crucial innovation of bringing in science-fiction. This gives brings British horror up-to-date in a way it hadn't really been, and also gives the science-fiction a very British flavour, that I'd located at the centre of this thread.
Kneale's Beasts sits somewhere between those Tales of Unease and traditional horror - Baby is the most remarkable of these imo.
plenty of gaps here: i'm interested in any 'ah no but because' responses. also interested to know about exceptions to early 20th C British horror writing theory, and also more about that yoking together of SCIENCE+ANCIENT HISTORY (or Romantic history - caesar, arthur, druids, devil bit).
Clearly The Avengers and The Prisoner don't fit into this - and I STILL haven't seen Sapphire and Steel, for shame.
there's some old good k-punk posts limning this stuff, aren't they? or maybe it was just a long parenthesis whilst talking about the Fall again. but mentioned the stone tape and the later quatermass.
one wonders if you could include: those creepy public info spots ('apaches' etc); the wicker man; i had a third, but i have forgotten whilst writing this sentence. m.r. james? enh.
― thomp, Sunday, May 1, 2011 9:55 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
i need to read these! can you remember where they are?
For what it's worth, I see The Fall along with Nigel Kneale as the other great example of bringing English supernatural writing into modern times - I wrote more about this on The Fall ballot thread.
For the third great post-war figure - JG Ballard - I'd also say much of his writing deals explicitly with versions of pastoral.
― Fizzles, Wednesday, 22 October 2014 10:14 (ten years ago) link