I was participating in the conversation surrounding Pete Peterson’s Lovecraft tribute, “The Stephen Hills Horror” when Andrew Peterson threw out a question:
So what is it about ghost stories, anyway?
- Ghost stories are part of the genre of imaginative literature, though its darker side, so naturally, those who love imaginative literature will love ghost stories. Lovecraft defended the genre using a lot of the same type of defenses Tolkien used in defending imaginative lit. Lovecraft called imaginative lit “art in its most essential sense.” (Amy Sturgis has a forthcoming essay on this point by Lovecraft in the 2009 volume from Apex Books, Cthulhu’s Grandfather).
- Ghost stories are a place to grapple with fear. When Maurice Sendak was asked to defend his scary monsters in Where the Wild Things Are, he noted that the most frightening thing is for children to have fears and nightmares and find no parallel in the real world. Ghost stories provide a mirror for our fears.
- Ghosts are about history. In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving makes a point about how there’s no encouragement for ghosts anymore, because people leave their hometown so quickly, there’s no one familiar for ghosts to haunt after their first nap in the grave. Ghosts remind us of a certain historical rootedness that most of us don’t feel in our transient, fast-paced, forward-looking culture.
Other thoughts? Why do we love scary stories? (And if you don’t, why don’t you?)
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Travis,
You gave away the answer to the Hogshead Facebook contest in your post here!
In regard to ghost stories & why they scare us & why we perhaps need to grapple with fear, De Maupassant speculates in “Fear.” Some quotes,
“”You say, commandant, that you were afraid [of being shipwrecked]. I beg to disagree with you.
You are in error as to the meaning of the word and the nature of the
sensation that you experienced. An energetic man is never afraid in the
presence of urgent danger. He is excited, aroused, full of anxiety, but
fear is something quite different.”
Another, “”Permit me to explain. Fear–and the boldest men may feel fear–is
something horrible, an atrocious sensation, a sort of decomposition of
the soul, a terrible spasm of brain and heart, the very memory of which
brings a shudder of anguish, but when one is brave he feels it neither
under fire nor in the presence of sure death nor in the face of any
well-known danger. It springs up under certain abnormal conditions,
under certain mysterious influences in the presence of vague peril.
Real fear is a sort of reminiscence of fantastic terror of the past. A
man who believes in ghosts and imagines he sees a specter in the
darkness must feel fear in all its horror.”
Anyway, Maupassant’s point seems to be that true fear grows out of a confrontation with the unknown, with the things that one cannot grapple with or make plans against. It doesn’t matter if there is a logical explanation for the event, so long as you don’t know that while the event is going on.
Here’s the link to the story,
http://www.online-literature.com/maupassant/2986/
BTW, is it just me or has the box for posting comments become greatly truncated?
I know I did. I completely forgot I had scheduled this post when I wrote that message!
I’m just guessing, but I think it has something to do with being scared in a safe sort of way. I believe that the physical sensation of fear is almost indistinguishable from a sensation of intense excitement, which many of us find enjoyable. Most of us don’t, however, enjoy being in real physical danger. But recreate the physical sensation, removing the actual risk, and you may have a safe – and cheap – “high”.
I could be off of course. Maybe fear and excitement have very different neural pathways. I’ll try to see what I can dig up.