Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 10:33:28 -0400 From: a firm anchor in nonsense Subject: [WRITERS] TECH: Go Gothic for Halloween? Since I am sure that some of us, myself included, are still working on Halloweenie stories (you did know we are having a contest, right? No? Okay, take a trip across the magical mystical web to and read all about it! Your entry can be sent from October 1 -- that's TOMORROW! -- until October 17 -- which is later, unless you are travelling backwards by tardis or other fantasmagorical means. But read the rules, write the tales of shiver, and send them to the queen of the frozen northwest, Robyn Herrington herself, at . Say, did you ever notice that rmherrin@ucalgary.ca starts with RMH! Isn't that the initials for Royal Majesty Herrington or something like that?) Where were we before I interrupted myself? Oh, yes. Since I am sure that some of us, myself included, are still working on hollow beanie baby stories, here's a quote about Gothic that seems apropos. From the introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales edited by Chris Baldick, Oxford University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-19-214194-5, page xix: "Drawing together some of the characteristics of Gothic fiction already suggested in this brief account of its evolution, I can now summarize what I have understood, in selecting the contents of this collection, a Gothic tale to be. For the Gothic effect to be attained, a tale should combine a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration. This is, of course, too abstract a formula to capture the real accumulation of physical and historical associations by which we actually recognize the conventions of Gothic; so it may be translated into more concrete terms by noting that typically a Gothic tale will invoke the tyranny of the past (a family curse, the survival of archaic forms of despotism and of superstition) with such weight as to stifle the hopes of the present (the liberty of the heroine or hero) within the dead-end of physical incarceration (the dungeon, the locked room, or simply the confinements of a family house closing in upon itself). Even more concisely, although at the risk of losing an important series of connected meanings, we could just say that Gothic fiction is characteristically obsessed with old buildings as sites of human decay. The Gothic castle or house is not just an old and sinister building; it is a house of degeneration, even of decomposition, its living-space darkening and contracting into the dying-space of the mortuary and the tomb. Although Gothic fiction can work with other kinds of enclosed space, if these are sufficiently isolated and introverted -- contents, prisons, schools, madhouses, even small villages -- it is still the dark mansion that occupies its central ground. Doubling as both fictional setting and as dominant symbol, the house reverberates for us with associations which are simultaneously psychological and historical. As a kind of folk-psychology set in stone, the Gothic house is readily legible to our post-Freudian culture, so we can recognize in its structure the crypts and cellars of repressed desire, the attics and belfries of neurosis, just as we accept Poe's invitation to read the haunted palace of the poem in his tale as the allegory of a madman's head...." (and he has PAGES like this! Perhaps an affliction of the wordy order?) "... Prominent among its special features is a preoccupation with the inherited powers and corruptions of feudal aristocracy, and with similar lineages and agencies of archaic authority, which can include the pseudo-aristocracies of the American South and the monastic hierarchies of the Roman Catholic Church. So while it would be possible to concoct a passable horror story about the misdeeds of, say, a dangerously sadistic bank manager or dentist, one would not be writing a Gothic tale unless one linked the subject-matter in some way to the antiquated tyrannies and dynastic corruptions of an aristocratic power or at least of a proud old provincial family. Moulding our common existential dread into the more particular shapes of Gothic fiction, then, is a set of 'historical fears' focusing upon the memory of an age-old regime of oppression and persecution which threatens still to fix its dead hand upon us...." and lest we forget, on page 85, Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher,: "During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher...." 2,500 words... and here come the shivers, the shadows, the chills and thrills... It's halloween at WRITERS! Write! "Every poem is rooted in imaginative awe....there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and for happening." W.H. Auden t ink