Surplus Sanity--Horror Fiction and Madness

Starts: 24 September 2007

Time: Mondays 7:00pm-9:00pm

Duration: 10 weeks

Location: 63B Bruce St. (Ossington & Queen St. W.) MAP

Contact: christian@anarchistu.org

RSVP (Class size limited to 25; students welcome at any time during the course; check for space.)

Independence is an issue that concerns very few people: — it is a prerogative of the strong. And even when somebody has every right to be independent, if he attempts such a thing without having to do so, he proves that he is probably not only strong, but brave to the point of madness. He enters a labyrinth, he multiplies by a thousand the dangers already inherent in the very act of living, not the least of which is the fact that no one with eyes will see how and where he gets lost and lonely and is torn limb from limb by some cave-Minotaur of conscience. And assuming a man like this is destroyed, it is an event so far from human comprehension that people do not feel it or feel for him: — and he cannot go back again! He cannot go back to their pity again!

Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups.

Friedrich Nietzsche

MANIFESTO

Dr. John Silence was the creation of the English fantasist, Algernon Blackwood. Part detective, part psychiatrist and part exorcist, he was designed to be a sort of Sherlock Holmes of the supernatural. Like Holmes, he would accept clients at his residence, listen to every detail of their cases and then apply his immense expertise and wisdom to their resolution. His cases were often culled from reality. But while Holmes’ had trained his mind to absorb and reflect the ever increasing abundance of trivial minutiae in the material world of post-industrial London, Silence’s specialty was the much vaster realm that lies within. He was a professional mapper of madness.

Over the course of the twentieth century, mapping madness has become a very sophisticated and specialized practice. The word ‘madness’ itself has become heavily weighted with the university jargon of Freudianism, anti-psychiatry, post-Structuralism, etc. Michel Foucault’s words on madness would be just as apt to describe the reams of academic discourse that have accumulated around it: … dreams, madness, the unreasonable can … slip into [an] excess of meaning. Thus, the image is burdened with supplementary meanings, and forced to express them. The old cliché about madness, that it is "doing the same thing repeatedly expecting something different to result", might be said about this attempt to rationally comprehend the irrational. As any madman could tell you, there is no system of meaning, no matter how much political, cultural and economic scaffolding props it up, that can possibly escape the natural processes of erosion and regeneration that are qualities inherent to the human mind.

To confront this mortality of meaning—and by implication mortality in general—is to enter in upon the frontiers of horror . In this class, we’re going to continue the investigation of the inner science of consciousness and imagination begun with New Waves: Science Fiction and Climate Change. With horror fiction—which has in common many of sf’s ‘genes’—we are going to see how the literature locates, defines and assaults the limits of what the emotional human mind can allow itself to comprehend of reality. It’s realm is a libidinal one of fear, spiritual disquiet and titillation, and its logic is entropy. We’re going to look closely at what the properties are that allow literature to decree and obey it’s own laws and how these can ‘safely’ deliver thought beyond what is considered rational, or ‘sane’.

Long since consigned to the ghettos of genre fiction, horror literature in English has been historically charged with this task of sorting through the dark psychological residue of modernity. Nourished by the corpse of Romanticism, horror in the late nineteenth century evolved on both sides of the Atlantic simultaneously. The gothic and ghost story fiction of Victorian England was easily adapted to reflect the Puritan anxieties of the United States in the writings of Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The twentieth century saw its resurgence in the mass produced literary decadence of the pulps. This is the world that evolved from the works of Poe, Lovecraft, and Blackwood, and also of M. R. James, Arthur Machan, William Hope Hodgson, Ambrose Bierce, Oliver Onions, James Branch Cabell and innumerable other forgotten craftsmen of the macabre.

Their works will be the subject matter of this course. In the tradition of Dr. Silence, our project is to once again take up the task of a cartography of the inner landscape of 20th/21st century madness. The primary objects are

- to establish a genealogy of contemporary conception of horror;

- to discover what the buried religious and cultural anxieties are that have resulted in the culturally mediated borders between rationality and its 'opposite';

- to speculate as how horror and madness inform current social/political practices;

- what new writing techniques might be employed to negotiate this violent territory and to help unify and broaden our personal realms of subjectivity.

This is not exacerbate the irrational fear and hopelessness that are already quite pervasive—but to test and temper the will and the mind to reach out past those things in search of raw material for the creation of new values. The course is part of an ongoing series designed to explore the liberating potential of extra-institutional (university/book market) literary practices. It’s purpose is to create and perpetuate creative communities of all kinds. It will be of interest to creative writers, thinkers and people desirous to wrest an increasingly malleable modern subjectivity from the pervasive electronic compulsions of capital.

For a detailed explanation of the unorthodox class format, see the FAQ I've created. Or just drop by with an open mind ...

POSSIBLE READINGS

(To be determined in class by consensus.)