Table Of ContentThe Intermedial Experience of Horror
Also by Jarkko Toikkanen
THE GROTESQUE AND THE UNNATURAL (co-editor with Markku Salmela)
The Intermedial
Experience of Horror
Suspended Failures
Jarkko Toikkanen
University of Tampere, Finland
© Jarkko Toikkanen 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-29908-6
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Contents
Preface: The Intermedial Experience of Horror vii
Acknowledgements xi
Part I Concepts
1 Horror 3
2 Experience 16
3 Intermediality 32
Part II Case Studies
4 Heinrich von Kleist: ‘Über das Marionettentheater’ 45
5 E. T. A. Hoffmann: ‘Der Sandmann’ 60
6 Robert Frost: ‘The Fear’ 77
7 W. B. Yeats: ‘The Magi’ 103
Postface: Suspended Failures 118
Appendix 1 124
Appendix 2 131
Notes 137
Bibliography 156
Index 162
v
Preface: The Intermedial
Experience of Horror
One might expect from a book on horror a number of things that can-
not be found here, at least not immediately or in any obvious form.
There is no sounding out of the current genre scene, no in-depth
survey of its recent developments, and no exhaustive exposition of
authors and directors presently involved with it. References to these
issues do appear, but they are not the focus. Moreover, the book does
not consist of anecdotes in and about horror as concrete empirical
proof of its power and fascination, and it has little tolerance for views
that would restrict the study of horror into a certain subcultural cat-
egory. The reader can be assured that big questions of aesthetics and
philosophy will come into play, and that they are raised for a reason.
What the book does provide is an exploration of the phenomenon
of horror from an unusual angle, one perhaps unimagined before.
In the past, many studies have concentrated, on the one hand, on
establishing horror as a genre across the media (cinema, literature,
games), by distinguishing common cultural characteristics and influ-
ences. On the other hand, assuming a somewhat different aim, fur-
ther research has observed horror psychoanalytically, as a catalogue
of mental disturbances or collective trauma that the expert can use
to elucidate why either individuals or societies function and behave
as they do in certain sociocultural contexts.
So what makes The Intermedial Experience of Horror: Suspended
Failures stand out from the crowd? In bringing the phenomenon of
horror together with two other concepts, those of experience and
intermediality, the study highlights the multifarious and complex
relations they present, broadening the theoretical field in a unique
way. I explore horror as an experience, one defined and brought
into being by a break between the media of words and images. In
particular, I focus on reading specific examples of literature from
Romanticism to Modernism (Kleist, Hoffmann, Frost, Yeats) and
apply two traditional rhetorical devices, ekphrasis and hypotyposis,
in my reading of them. As the study proceeds, the rationale behind
these choices will become very clear. In literature, where images as
vii
viii Preface
such are frequently absent and the reader, through her imagination,
works from words alone, the experience of horror hinges on a certain
failure of i magination – there might be no words to describe what one
sees, or images might refuse to give in to words, even when explained.
The reader’s experience is intermedially suspended. Trapped between
words and images, and what they could possibly signify, the reader
cannot go anywhere except continue to read.
Why is it a timely enterprise to study horror or other experiences
and emotions that are commonly thought of as negative ones,
and how can it be useful to analyse literary texts for the purpose?
Historian Joanna Bourke has answered both questions in delving
deep into ‘the most pervasive emotion of modern society: fear’1 and
finding access to its cultural past in the experiences of people who
were there before us:
The only access we have to fearful people from the past is through
the things they left behind. Fear acquires meaning through cul-
tural language and rites. Analysis of these ‘texts’ allow historians
to pursue fluctuations in the nature of ‘fear’ as the emotion is
rendered visible in language and symbols.2
So language makes things visible and enables their sharing, and not
just for historians but also others. In that spirit, whereas Bourke’s tar-
get is the ‘simple’ emotion of fear, I will observe the ‘complex’ one of
horror – two attributes that Bourke herself applies.3 Jean-Paul Sartre
provided a famous twentieth-century example of complex emotion
in his 1939 description of the ‘grimacing face’ that out of nowhere
appeared ‘pressed against the outside of the window’ and left him
frozen in his tracks. It seems part and parcel of the experience of hor-
ror that it ‘abruptly transmutes the determinist world in which we
live’,4 turning our world into a strange place, emotively shocking for
the sudden moment of sensation, then processed as the experience
that one is undergoing.
In this sense, as Sartre notes, even if one knows that the shock and
horror will not last forever, its significance as experience affects one
with a dramatic change of understanding:
True, when I suddenly conceive an object to be horrible I do not
explicitly affirm that it will remain horrible for eternity. But the
Preface ix
mere affirmation of horribleness as a substantial quality of the
object is already, in itself, a passage to the infinite. The horrible
is now in the thing, at the heart of it, is its emotive texture, is
constitutive of it.5
This affirms that what one sees is what one feels, and that one’s
experience of the horrible – whether as words, images, or some other
medium – is what generates the horrible object and gives life to it.
The object exists in material form, as ‘the thing’ experienced, and
stays that way for any subject capable of seeing and feeling in the
first place. Sartre’s face, in other words, is no personal delusion or
mistake. It could well happen to anyone, without prior alarm, much
the same as other experiences of the horrifying kind could.
So what is the worth of this claim? This book has been written to
provide one specific response. As experience is a vital capacity that
everyone shares, and as each individual is yet capable of having their
own vital experiences, it operates at the divide between one’s own
self and other selves. As Rei Terada has said: ‘A living system is self-
differential; experience is experience of self-differentiality.’6 What I see
and feel is not exclusive to ‘me’ – and it is exactly for that reason that
it is constitutive of my experience as opposed to anyone else’s. The
distinction enables both the difference and the sharing. As the study
proceeds, the significance of this insight will be substantiated in the
changing forms of the intermedial experience of horror. I begin with
providing definitions for my three main concepts: horror, experience,
and intermediality. Then I offer the reader my four case studies with
the explicit aim of putting the concepts into practice. For as much as
the entire monograph strives to address a host of big questions about
what human experience is all about, it also serves as a full demonstra-
tion of literary analysis in action. As a teacher as much as a researcher,
as well as a lifelong fan of horror, I would settle for no less.
A word on how to read this book most productively is in order.
Whereas the more pragmatically oriented reader might prefer to skip
the theory part altogether and get started with the case studies instead,
it would be inadvisable to miss out on the concepts, their definitions
and background details. The chapter on horror is necessary to come
to an idea about the causes and consequences of the phenomenon,
and while the chapter on experience is heavy on theoretical and
philosophical content, the scope and depth of my approach would
x Preface
remain quite limited without it. Then again, the chapter on interme-
diality defines the specific tools with which the study proceeds, being
invaluable in that regard. However, should the reader start to feel the
weight of the theory becoming too much, it is possible at first read-
ing to skip the chapter on experience – notably the section on Kant
and Hegel – and come back to it afterwards. A similar manoeuvre
would work with the section ‘The idea of medium in visual culture’ in
the third chapter. The numerous interlinking questions and themes
that are threaded throughout the book on various aspects of horror,
experience and intermediality may well become more tangible once
the reader has found them identified in action in the texts examined.
This is further proof of the fact that my study is able to put complex
theoretical concepts into serious analytical practice.
