Duke Elric - Michael Moorcock [98]
A little heavy-going, perhaps, but the overall effect of The Mysteries of Udolpho is one of acute terror and, if deliberately read in this context, an insight into the darker depths of one's own mind. In his introduction to The Gothic Flame by Dr. P. Varma (Arthur Barker, 1957), Sir Herbert Read says:
The Gothic castle itself, that formidable place, ruinous yet an effective prison, phantasmagorically shifting its outline as ever new vaults extended their labyrinths, scene of solitary wanderings, cut off from light and human contact, of unformulated menace and the terror of the living dead—this hold, with all its hundred names, now looms to investigators as the symbol of a neurosis; they see it as the gigantic symbol of anxiety, the dread of oppression and of the abyss, the response to the … insecurity of disturbed times.
Perhaps the current revival of interest in the tale of terror is also a response to the “insecurity of disturbed times”?
• • •
Going on from Radcliffe and the eighteenth century and ignoring the better writers of the horror romance whom I shall deal with in later articles, we come to possibly the greatest of the nineteenth-century authors writing in the direct tradition of Mrs. Radcliffe's school—Edgar Allan Poe.
Poe was evidently far more aware of the true nature of his material than Radcliffe, possibly because his personality was less stable. He is known to have taken opium and, in many of his best tales, to have used his experiences under the drug. Since Poe, also, will be treated in more detail later, I shall deal with him fairly briefly here.
I learned, moreover, at intervals …another singular feature of his mental condition. He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted [the House of Usher] … in regard to an influence whose supposition force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be restated—an influence which some peculiarities in the mere form and substance of his family mansion, had, by dint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit—an effect which the physique of the grey walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at length, brought about upon the morale of his existence.
(The Fall of the House of Usher)
Not one of Poe's best passages, but a good illustration of how he linked the mental states of his characters with their apparently physical environment. It was Ann Radcliffe who taught later writers how to use natural scenery and effects to mirror the mood of their characters and, though less skilled authors overdid this and have continued to overdo it, it is easy to see how the corridors of Udolpho and the House of Usher mirror the secret passages of our own minds, how the labyrinths of these tales are the labyrinths in which we find ourselves running in nightmares, how the oppressive architecture links with the sense of helpless horror and depression which we all have at times whether sleeping or waking, how the chasm which Udolpho overhangs or the tarn above which the House of Usher is suspended, is rarely to be found in the physical world, yet always to be found in dreams.
It is this gorge into which we fall, bottomless, boundless, dark, unknown and terrifying, when we sleep—the gorge of the human mind.
We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss—we grow sick and dizzy. Our first