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Defining the Gothic tale and the Ghost storyTzvetan Todorov - analysis of the ghost taleThe genre is difficult to define. It is composed of many different sub-genres, including heroic fantasy, magical realism, horror, ghost stories, madness tales, odd tales. In fact these genres share something, but not everything with what is named in French "Litterature Fantastique" - a phrase for which I have not even found a translation in English. We are looking at tales, short stories.A lot of writers have written a few tales, some only one, and one thing is certain : the books always tend to drift away, because according to Tzetan Todorov, the most important is dual interpretation - which I have reserved on a page of its own - and the tale only can retain this dual interpretation till the end. This is the core of Tzvetan Todorov's analysis : at the end of the story, the reader must still be wondering what has happened, whether real or not. Todorov is of the opinion that the reader will always choose hi explanation at the end anyway. In some modern works, like "The Shining", collective madness could be used as a dual interpretation of facts. |
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is important that the univers described should be hyper realistic, down
its smallest details, where suddenly an element puts in question the logic,
the rules that glue this world together. Therefore it is an element that
intrudes in a known and managed reality. These elements exist in mythology
and literature, starting with famous works like Hamlet, for instance, where
the ghost of Hamlet's father is a key lement of the plot, and a very important
step in his decision to face his destiny. Equally, history - especially antique history - is filled with dreams, ghosts, visions, mysterious visitors, that motivate kings and soldiers. It becomes quickly the battle between good and evil, the normal and the abnormal. The hero is unfortunately the only witness (rings a bell, "Invaders" fans?), and because it is easier to refuse that reality as we know it and put it on madness.
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is therefore a common trick for the masters to place their heroes in a sanity
that, although it may have been caused by what they saw, makes them unreliable
witnesses - cf Lovecraft and Maupassant of course! The hero is a lonely,
rejected hero, not the brave and admired hero of the romantic novels. According
to Lovecraft in his famous essay, these tales come probably from nightmares,
drugs and the inconscious. Lovecraft of course hints at another explanation
in his works: that these worlds and creatures could in fact be real, and
that it is only when we open our minds that we can open the doors of these
other "alien" worlds.
The reader is left with the possibility to believe or not what is offered to him - a way for the storytellers to satisfy all sorts of audiences too. Ferreras described another important mechanism of the genre: as the world is ours, it is important that the style should remain as cold, objective, clinical. Metaphors are a no-no. The writer is trying to describe that our world is invaded by something else, that we do not control. He is not trying, near or far, to give it a moral - we are not talking about allegories there, there is no explanation for the horror reaching into our reality, just facts. But at the end of the 19th Century, writers were also facing readers who may be from a solid Christian background. Therefore dual interpretation was offering them a way to refuse the tale altogether. oppinions were split too betweeen religious and atheist visions of the world, and the supernatural explanation was often linked to non-natural events, but non-christian events either - thus separating the readers in two possible ways!That was the case in the 19th Century. In the 20th century, this tale has nearly disappeared, replaced by science-fiction, horror, the development of the vampire story (started with Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, even before Bram Stoker and Anne Rice), Heroic fantasy, whose founder and master, JRR Tolkien, started from the intensive study of Norse and Celtic mythologies and languages, and the minority of Magical Realism, represented by Garcia Marquez, Laura Esquivel, among others. |
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