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Copyright by Alejandro Nariman Omidsalar 2018 The Dissertation Committee for Alejandro Nariman Omidsalar Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Dissertation: Other Gods, Other Powers: Numinous Horror in American Literature Committee: Heather Houser, Supervisor Matt Cohen, Co-Supervisor Elizabeth Richmond-Garza Martin Kevorkian Matthew A. Taylor Other Gods, Other Powers: Numinous Horror in American Literature by Alejandro Nariman Omidsalar Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2018 Dedication To my parents and sisters, with profound respect and appreciation for their boundless love, patience, and good humor. Acknowledgements With tireless wit and wisdom, Professor Matt Cohen has shepherded this project from its frustratingly vague origins all the way through to this final product. His counsel has been invaluable to me, not only for the development of this dissertation, but my personal and professional development as a scholar. His fellow committee members, Professor Heather Houser, Professor Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, Professor Martin Kevorkian, and Professor Matthew A. Taylor, helped this dissertation advance in ways I could never have foreseen, all thanks to their sage advice, enthusiastic erudition, and patience with my unending e-mails. Anne Stewart, Erin Cotter, and Megan Snell read countless permutations of this dissertation. Without their keen analysis, sharp eyes, and ever-ready pens/keyboards, it would never have seen the light of day. Last, but never least—I must thank the found family that is THE COHORT. This isn’t a question of what year you are in the program, either; you know who you are. Without y’all, none of this would have been worth it. From 2012 to the future, from Hole in the Wall to wherever, let’s keep this thing going. v Abstract Other Gods, Other Powers: Numinous Horror in American Literature Alejandro Nariman Omidsalar, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2018 Supervisors: Heather Houser & Matt Cohen The Gothic has literary criticism in an interpretive stranglehold. Despite their wide cultural and temporal sweep, studies of the Gothic mode depend almost uniformly on suspicious reading practices, frequently overlooking the supernatural ideas that initially animated the Gothic and other, lesser-known modes of horror. At the same time, the Gothic mode—especially in its American context—is entwined with Judeo-Christian moral positions and political-historical anxieties, ensuring a human-centered ontological outlook that maintains narrow parameters for what sorts of dark fiction are considered worthy of academic consideration. My dissertation, “Other Gods, Other Powers,” broadens the scholarly conversation about the literary macabre by mapping the evolution of numinous horror, a strain of American supernatural horror writing that imagines the divine in non-anthropocentric and non-anthropomorphic ways, prioritizing pessimism, entropy, and negation over conventionally accepted, Judeo-Christian-influenced understandings of the divine. The numinous, a term denoting the experience of the divine as awesome or terrifying, is the aesthetic category that unifies the transhistorical scope of my dissertation, which runs from 1798 through 1988, covering works by Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Ben Hecht, Fred Chappell, and Thomas vi Ligotti. An alternative, markedly pessimistic tradition comes to the fore across these readings, contradicting popular understandings of American literature’s supposedly inherent optimism and humanism. Numinous horror narratives depict gods as malevolent, inscrutable, and alien; they re-imagine godhood as a state of omnipotent idiocy only accessible to people at the cost of their humanity. The horror in these works comes from the divine’s absolute inscrutability; the narration of each text must contend with an irremediable lack of knowledge, clarity, and certainty. My dissertation models a kind of reading that approaches a text’s underlying supernatural and metaphysical premises on their own terms, instead of reading them allegorically, symptomatically, or otherwise superstitiously. Pulling from philosophical, theological, and new materialist theoretical conversations, “Other Gods, Other Powers” opens up an oft-overlooked, philosophically rich body of writing to interdisciplinary inquiry by contributing to current conversations about alternative reading practices and genre fiction’s place in literary scholarship. vii Table of Contents Introduction: Beware of God(s) ...........................................................................................1 Chapter One: Poe, Pantheism, and the Roots of Numinous Horror...................................28 Rule of the Beast: “Metzengerstein” and the Networked Non-human .....................37 Supposed to Rot: Consuming Christian Comfort in “The Conqueror Worm” .........46 Primordial Malignity; or, Where and What Poe Leaves Us .....................................51 Chapter Two: The Deus Stultum in Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger Variations ........53 Metaphysical Disaster: The Shared Ending of The Mysterious Stranger’s Latter Variants ...............................................................................................................66 Ave Exitium: Theodicy and the Nullification of Human Identity .............................68 There Are No Limits: Forty-Four, Satan, and Violations of Diegesis ......................83 Throne of Lunacy: How Twain Negates God and Humanity ...................................92 Chapter Three: Fantazius Mallare and the War on Interpretation ....................................95 Makeshift Omnipotence: Dueling Narrators in Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath ..................................................................................................................102 Wretched Spawn: The Kingdom of Evil and the Mise-En-Abyme of Identity .......119 The Chaos Trance: The Aftermath of Hecht’s War on Interpretation ....................137 Chapter Four: Deranging Lovecraft in Dagon and “The Sect of the Idiot” .....................139 Cryptic Ascension: Sacralized Suffering in Dagon ................................................145 Omnipotent Crawling Chaos: Deteriorating Bodies and Language in “The Sect of the Idiot” .......................................................................................................157 Un-Endings: A Concluding Note on Closure in Numinous Horror .......................174 Works Cited .....................................................................................................................177 viii Introduction: Beware of God(s) In 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson told his readers that they were “guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advancing on Chaos and the Dark” (133). His clarion call from “Self-Reliance” exemplifies the self-perceived mission statement of American literature: to bring light to dark places. But the brighter a light burns, the darker its surrounding shadows become. There is an alternate strand of American literature that promises no humanist validation or enlightenment, that categorically denies the reassuringly coherent and proactive image of an “Almighty effort.” Instead, this body of writing extends the reach of “Chaos and the Dark” to domains of ontology and epistemology many believe impervious to such metaphysical doubts and fears. The core question animating this tradition is discomfiting in its simplicity and wide-reaching implications: what happens in literature when the idea of god embodies nothing but monstrosity and unknowable terror? The key to answering this question can be found, I argue, in American horror fiction, by reframing how literary criticism approaches and understands horror. What follows envisions a revised academic understanding of horror writing wrought from an interrogation of how a series of writers, major and minor, have rendered the figure of god monstrous across American literary history. The roots of this shadowy alternative literature predate Emerson’s optimistic dictum, stretching at least as far back as 1798, with the publication of Wieland; Or, the Transformation, by Charles Brockden Brown. A forefather of the American Gothic, Brown explored many early American anxieties in his works, including clashes with indigenous populations (Edgar Huntly) and the miasmic chaos of urban life (Arthur Mervyn). His debut novel is something of an outlier in his catalogue, telling the 1 revolutionary-era story of the eponymous Wieland clan, focusing on that of narrator Clara and her brother Theodore. Hearing voices thanks to the ministrations of a menacing ventriloquist named Carwin, Theodore eventually goes mad and butchers his wife and children. The tribulations of Clara and Theodore’s generation of the Wieland family are not as strikingly curious as the fate that befalls their father only two chapters into the novel. Praying to an unknown entity in a makeshift temple of his own design, Clara and Theodore’s father is severely burned by a mysterious explosion and left rotting alive. For a novel by a Quaker known for his dedication to Enlightenment ideals, Wieland opens on a surprisingly steady note of irrational terror. Omissions and indefinite implications mark the unnamed Wieland patriarch’s brief tenure in the novel. It begins with a quick precis of his early