Deep Horror, Archaic Horror

Deep Horror, Archaic Horror


Category disturbance and breakdown occur in terms of subjectivity, the thoughts and feelings of a character in various ways coming undone, the structures of the self breaking down.  These also appear in terms of the body which in different ways loses boundaries, becomes porous and permeable, and by turns doubles, fragments, and goes abject.

(Abjection: the condition of the dependent and still-undefined body of the infant; the body as a sack of blood and excrement and primary need; abjection: the body as raw matter.  Chapter one of Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror is the standard reference for this term. )

Deep horror may be defined as a site where certain modern forms of subjectivity are constructed.

Drawing on Foucault and others, the argument here is that a range of discourses and practices, including literature, articulate problematizations that open up an imagined "deep space" and "deep time" inside the human.

(I use the term "deep"in a Darwinian/evolutionist sense.  In late-Victorian scientific discourses, "life" and "man" are projected on very long historical lines.  Evolutionist gradualism and uniformitarianism require such long stretches of time to make sense, of course.  Gillain Beer among others discusses this concept; Stephen Jay Gould's Time's Arrow is the classic popular exposition of the modern concept of deep time.)

Like the morphology of plants and animals, or like the strata of different ages exposed in contiguous layers by a geological cut, the human mind is also said to be layered with histories.  In the human mind, there are "vestiges" of a long evolutionary history all the way back to the prehuman and even the pre-vertebrate.  (Amoebas are us.)   This idea finds broad application in early cultural anthropology with the notion  of "survivals."  These are superstitions, customs, folklore beliefs.  The May-Day dance is a survival of ancient pagan rituals.   The belief in the evil eye is a survival of ancient magical systems.  Christianity itself is a survival of archaic blood-sacrifice rituals.

"Survivals" also are vestiges of older ways of feeling and thinking that still exist in the modern mind.  The human mind retains an archaic psychic layer, thousands of years old, still wired with the instinctual sex and aggression circuits of the early hominids, the proto-religious emotionalism of "primitive" humankind ("animism"), and a fundamental propensity to "savage" thought-process characterized by the irrational.

In some respects, the image is one of an infantile, childish entity continuing to exist at some level within the minds of modern, more enlightened humanity.

Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a well known late-Victorian version of this construction.

Wells' Island of Dr. Moreau presents a different sort of case, where the survivals motif is given literal expression in the present world by means of the new science of biology.  

Such constructions open up new territory for description, analysis, and classification.  The mind of modern man is said to be inhabited still by archaic drives, feelings, thoughts, and images.   "Alienists" and then Freud and psychoanalysis take off from this point.  It's a hugely productive fiction, we might say.

If biopower in one respect is about getting more control over individual bodies and minds for the benefit of the nation-state and modern capitalism, this deep-time, psychologizing "analytic of finitude," as Foucault named it, is one means of achieving it.

Problematize the body and mind of the individual in new ways, thus justifying multiple techniques of interpellating (calling to order, defining individual identities in particular ways); taking confessions (the individual becomes a case study, a case, a file or portfolio tracking the course of an ailment and a cure); and promoting internalized control (all of the discourse and practice here promotes a social norm that the individual is "programmed" to embrace and to internalize as a means of meeting a definition of "the normal" or the properly functional).  

Another side, however, and arguably an important aspect of Late-Victorian Decadence, is this "deep" construction of modern subjectivity opening to different lines that resist or elude the normativizing and social-control trend of biopower.   Writers like Vernon Lee claim such power for different visions, often subversive of mainstream Victorian values.

So this inward turn to deep horror can be read in light of Victorian problematizations of life, body, and mind that in some respects foster what Foucault calls biopower or more broadly we can call a dominant biopolitics of the late-Victorian period that is focused on social control of various kinds, maximizing productivity and maintaining political and social stability by attempting to model docile, self-normativizing subjects.


Returning to Carroll, we can track horror effects as they take an inward turn in deep horror and what I call "archaic horror."  The two are often mixed.   Sometimes, as with Verne's giant squid or Well's Island of beast-men, the deep/archaic is externalized.  In others, outward and inward are mixed, as in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.