Duke Elric - Michael Moorcock [97]
In a word—Gothic novels.
It was the first of these experiences that convinced me that fantasy stories, in particular “tales of terror,” directly relate to the unconscious mind and that, in the hands of a good writer, such a story can act as a bridge between the conscious and the unconscious, that the world of the Gothic novel and its like is not the external or supernatural world but the world of the psyche; for, coupled with a mood of deep concentration and introspection, it was the reading of certain passages in certain Gothic novels (for purposes of research) that induced these hallucinations. I began to get them after a day's hard work and a week of immersion in the Gothics themselves—colours became richer, perspectives changed, sounds and sights took on a deeper significance. I am perhaps more suggestible than most to these books, but the fact remains that they have on different occasions produced varying mental states quite unlike my normal state; almost uncontrollable, extremely terrifying and at the same time marvelously rewarding. Also I have made psychological tests whilst undergoing these hallucinations and find that they have little relation to sex, which leads me to change my earlier opinion that the symbolism of the terror tale was primarily sexual.
So what chords does the fantasy tale strike in its readers? Jung was unable to answer this definitely so I am sure I can't. Only by discussing the tales themselves can I hope to help the reader form his own opinion.
Therefore, for me, and I suspect for many other readers, the effective fantasy tale, like an hallucinogenic drug or a nightmare opens the floodgates of the unconscious, releases into the reader's conscious mind a world of experience which, though not recognizably that of the “normal” world, is as real and as relevant to our existence as the world of, say, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
One of the best Gothic novelists was Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, a respectable, retiring, middle-class lady whose books shocked her husband and became the rage of the circulating libraries in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Her most successful book The Mysteries of Udolpho1 was published in 1794 and had, without doubt, a measurable influence on the work of many later writers, particularly Scott, the Brontës, Dickens, Balzac and Hugo.
Ann Radcliffe specialized in evocative descriptions of natural scenery and architecture, using them to build up her atmosphere of horror. The horrors themselves are not, in fact, as effective as the means she employed to prepare the reader for them. Most of her books, like most of the other Gothic novels, involved a wicked nobleman dwelling in a massive and oppressive Gothic castle, part of which was ruined. The wicked nobleman pursues and incarcerates, incarcerates and pursues the pure heroine through the labyrinthine corridors of his castle until she is finally rescued by the upright hero who is likely to be the true heir of the castle and its lands. This basic plot was, in slightly different forms, virtually the only plot of the Gothics, and the mixture was varied by its choice of supernatural events, although several spectres were always included. Ann Radcliffe was not its inventor (the formula was Fielding's and Richardson's, the setting Walpole's), but she was its greatest exponent and, because of her superior talents, lifted it beyond its melodramatic and sensational origins to form it into something which often comes close to real art. A single illustrative quote is hard to find, but here Radcliffe describes the heroine's first sight of Udolpho:
Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle … for, though it was now lighted up by the setting sun, the Gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object…The light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy purple tint, which spread deeper and deeper as the thin vapour crept up the mountain, while the battlements above were still tipped with splendour …Silent, lonely,