IMMERSION AND DISTANCING IN THE PRESENTATION OF THE MONSTER

By engaging with the monster through the consciousness of characters in the story, readers also become invested and immersed in the storyworld.

Through the evaluation of the encounter with the monster as eventful, read-ers learn the significance of this encounter, while through the description of those features that are evaluated as deviations or breaches they learn about the norms and values of the fictional world. More than that, the description of the monster can provide readers with detailed information that can aid in their recentering in that world.

Writing on the topic of the stranger from the perspective of translation studies, Horst Turk suggests that when it comes to categorization the dis-tinction is made between two types of “belonging”: the alien and the alter.

The alien (alienus), is that which “belongs to another” (“dem Fremden zuge-hörige”) while the alter describes the “other of two”—one that does not belong to another but is not the “same” either (Turk 1990, 10–11). Both terms can essentially be used to describe the same being: the alien clarifies that it does not belong to one’s own group while the alter positions that being in relation to another member of the other group (Turk 1990, 11).

Alterity and alienity pose different challenges to a person’s ability to catego-rize and analyze others, calling their own categories into question by show-ing their limitations. The problem is only exacerbated when they then try to communicate their evaluation to another person, since in the translation of

their experience into language they are limited by what Heinke calls the col-lective linguistic and cultural experience of their “reference system” (Heinke 2005, 98), or the notions of normativity, the schemata and scripts they are familiar with.

It is here that the context-sensitivity of the monster proves useful for immersion. If the fictional world is considered as its own self-contained world, then the monster is an object within this world (cf. Ryan 2003, 103–105). At the same time, part of the monster itself remains virtual in the sense that the context-sensitivity of monstrosity means that there are many possible ways the monster will deviate from the norm, all of which remain open as long as the text does not imbue the monster with specific features. As soon as the text gives the monster a feature that excludes other possible features, this feature is actualized and the other previously possible features are discarded. In H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror,” the text positions the monstrous creature as having features of both the alien and the alter: “The limbs, save for their black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth’s giant saurians, and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws” (Lovecraft [1929] 2008, 279 emphasis added). The legs are described as (“roughly”) resembling those of dinosaurs, while the narrator fails to find an adequate way of explaining the appear-ance of the creature’s feet. Too alien in nature, the only recourse is to draw analogies via negation, to state what the feet do not look like. By not com-mitting to a clear description of the monster and leaving certain features in the realm of the virtual, the exact deviation of the monster thus remains open to the interpretation of the reader.

The encounter between characters and monsters thus becomes the most significant immersive event of horror literature. More than that, however, it gains additional significance because it can also be the moment in which the audience encounters the monster as well. Consequently, it is during the main event of horror literature, the presentation of the monster, that the risk inherent in the structure of horror literature becomes clear. The text can present the encounter with the monster as an event, foreground and emphasize its eventfulness, and can make the reader understand why meet-ing the monster would be considered eventful. However, because of the context-sensitivity of both eventfulness and monstrosity, there is no guar-antee that the reader will be affected in a manner similar to that of the characters.

The discrepancy between how readers and characters evaluate the same event can make it necessary to create a certain distance between the eval-uation and the description. This distance can take different forms. One possibility is to create a temporal distance between the evaluation of the monster and its description in the structure of the narrative text. This is a common occurrence in horror literature, where the presentation of the monster is often preceded by a focus on character reactions as a form of evaluation.

An example of this can be seen in “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book,” where the paragraphs that precede the description of the monster provide a taste of the eventfulness of what is yet to come:

On the pavement before the throne were grouped four soldiers, sur-rounding a crouching figure which must be described in a moment.

A fifth soldier lay dead on the pavement, his neck distorted, and his eyeballs starting from his head. The four surrounding guards were looking at the King. In their faces, the sentiment of horror was intensi-fied; they seemed, in fact, only restrained from flight by their implicit trust in their master. All this terror was plainly excited by the being that crouched in their midst.

I entirely despair of conveying by any words the impression which this figure makes upon anyone who looks at it. I recollect once show-ing the photograph of the drawshow-ing to a lecturer on morphology—a person of, I was going to say, abnormally sane and unimaginative hab-its of mind. He absolutely refused to be alone for the rest of that eve-ning, and he told me afterwards that for many nights he had not dared to put out his light before going to sleep. However, the main traits of the figure I can at least indicate.

(James [1904] 1984, 7–8)

“Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book” thus provides the promise of a deeply emo-tional event within the storyworld, while also setting up the expectations of the audience. The audience knows of the danger posed by the creature through the mention of the dead soldier, who presumably fell victim to the creature. The characters in this scene exhibit sentiments of horror and ter-ror, while a more remote witness, one who only saw the photograph of the drawing of this scene, “absolutely refused to be alone for the rest of the evening.” This witness is also provided with some characteristics that let readers gain an insight into his mind and lets them understand part of the reference system of that character, who is abnormally sane, unimaginative, and—as a lecturer at a university—presumably also rational. The descrip-tion here is more concerned with the experiencing subject than with the monster, of which there is no description yet. It is only referred to as the

“figure” and the “being,” giving no indication of its form or its features.

The passage from James’s text contains another distancing strategy, when the narrator points out that he cannot convey “by any words the impression which this figure makes upon anyone who looks at it”—a very clear evaluation of its eventfulness—and can only “indicate” the “main traits” of the figure, thus distancing himself from the following description.

Addressing the inability to provide a reason for why an extreme emotional reaction takes place and the related impossibility of accurately describ-ing monstrous features is a common distancdescrib-ing strategy, often related to a limitation of language as a medium or the impossibility of communicating

intense experiences in general (see also Kakko, this volume, for an analysis of hallucinatory narratives). This notion of ineffability is often invoked by H.P. Lovecraft as well. In “The Dunwich Horror,” for example, the detailed presentation of a monster is prefaced by the statement that, while it “would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it,”

it is still an experience impossible to effectively convey to another human being (Lovecraft [1929] 2008, 279).

Another strategy is to posit a possible source for an emotional reaction without committing to it or presenting it clearly. One such instance occurs in Dracula, in a passage that Carroll also cites as an example of how character reactions structure the readers’ own emotional responses:

As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal.

(Stoker [1897] 2003, 25) In this passage, Harker cannot accurately describe any feature that caused his reaction and instead can only speculate that “[i]t may have been that his breath was rank” (emphasis added) and that this led to his irrepressible reaction (Stoker [1897] 2003, 25). Similarly, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one of the characters tries to describe Mr. Hyde, but is unable to give a clear description, instead repeat-edly referring to his emotional reaction as the only evidence for monstros-ity: “I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point” (Stevenson [1886] 2006, 7–8). Hyde is evalu-ated as ugly, as being repulsive, and as giving a “feeling” of deformity, but there is no description of deformity, not even clarity on whether Hyde is actually deformed in any way. Consequently, readers are not given enough information to decide if they agree with this assessment.