Dark & Twisty

I just finished reading a how to book if you will, called How Fiction Works.  It was written by James Wood.  The main thing I learned is that this book doesn't tell you how fiction works at all.  The book is complicated to read.  The author used more 25 cent words than one text should allow.  In 248 odd pages and over 120 chapters, the author touts up realism, but never really gives a good definition of what it is.  He also bashes genre fiction along way.  This isn't unusual because that's what academics usually do.

The truly main issue of this book is that it really never addresses how fiction works.  It talks about how Gustav Flaubert is the greatest writer ever and that he made realism.  He talks about how realism has changed, and even at some point stated that realism might itself now be a genre (gasp!).  By the end, he assures his readers that realism transcends genre, and actually is the cause of genre as they react to what is not real.

This book was $12.  It had a binding that looked like something you would by for a Baptist Sunday School.  I can't say I learned anything about fiction from this book.   I did learn that genre hate is still out there.

Here's to you genre haters! 

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I just finished listening to the vampire story Carmilla.  This story is legendary in the canon of vampyric literature.  The story has been much up held as the first lesbian vampire story.  It is true that much of the story has a homoerotic mood.  The main villian, the vampire Carmilla, seems to only feast on women, and young women at that. The story was written during Victorian times, so any direct reference to such is not made.

The interesting take on this story is that it is set in Germany and Austria, although the protagonist's father is of British descent and keeps some of the traditions of England.

The story for the most part does a good job of establishing some well known tropes of the Vampire literature.  The vampire still comes out at night.  She sleeps in the grave, and staking her kills her.  There is still a heavy connection between sin and becoming a vampire.  This story seems to bring in the idea that suicide caused one to be a vampire. 

The story is rather boring however.  It reads like Jane Austin wrote a vampire novella.  It was much to romantic for my particular taste.  I think that some of the ideas surrounding the vampire character were good.  The discription of being bitten compared to being stuck by needles is very good and descriptive.  Bram Stoker never really gave such a good take on the story. I think the best thing about the story was that the vampire was female instead of male.  She is still of noble blood which seems to be a huge part of being a vampire in early literature.  This of course is probably a class thing.  Also, Carmilla could be based on the story of Elisabeth Bathory, the countess who did drink and bath in girl's blood. 

The best part of Carmilla is that it seems designed for such wonderful production companies as Hammer Films and Roger Corman.  That makes things wonderful when you can see Peter Cushing staking a large breasted vampire.

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By today's standards, The Picture of Dorian Gray seems tame in the horror genre.  It leads to some asking whether or not it is actually horror. I think that people who would ask this may not truly understand horror beyond its slasher movie and torture porn status. 

One of the main issues of horror is to make people uncomfortable or even anxious.  Being scared isn't even part of horror.  There are many nonfiction books that are scarier than anything written in the horror genre. (Mein Kampf, Night) Dorian Gray does leave reader (or at least should) with a feeling of discomfort.  It is the story of a man who doesn't reap any of the evil he sows.  His potrait absorbs all his evil.  The man goes out and does very nasty things and never gets caught. This drives him to further and further heights of depravity and narcissism.  He gets to the point that he will do anything he wants to anyone.

In a way, Dorian Gray is a serial killer.  Because he has no need for guilt, Dorian's personality becomes such that evil means nothing to him.  He can go about his life doing good or evil and feeling nothing for it.  This is the same as any serial killer's personality trait in history.  The only difference is that serial killers have a personality flaw that makes them unremorseful.  Dorian transfers all of his to his picture.

Dorian is a pretty poison, and is there little scarier than this.  None of us like the idea that pretty people are evil, but Wilde in this story takes that away from us.  In the old days and even some now, the villians are grotesque and ugly.  Dorian is gorgeous in the eyes of men and women.  Yet, he moves about them spreading evil everywhere.  The character reminds us that the person standing beside us may be the one who will kill us.   Isn't that the way of the serial killer?

So, without  knowing it, Oscar Wilde may have written the first serial killer novel.  Although, Dorian doesn't engage in the activities of a normal serial killer novel villian, he matches the profile. 

So The Picture of Dorian Gray is a horror novel. It was ahead of its time in the fact that it takes the serial killer approach to things.  It explains this personality disorder or flaw supernaturally, having the picture take on the evil of the man, but for the most part, science (psychology or otherwise) couldn't explain such a personality.  This isn't a normal scare 'em silly horror novel.  It isn't bloody, gory, or disturbing in that way, but it is startling because it shows the evil that can be beside us.  Dorian Gray is the prototype of Patrick Bateman, or even in some ways Hannible Lector.  Think about it.

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That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Today, I saw a woman's name.  It was Novella.  She was born before that title existed in literature.  But that got me to thinking.  What if we named people like Native Americans or other cultures did.

What if we wanted our Daughter to be named a short fictional tale longer than a short story.  We'd name her Novella or maybe Novellette.  Novellette sounds more French in origin.

How about Lyric, Stanza, Iambic, Foot, or Ballad?  What would these say about our child or us?

Come here Stanza; I have a job for you to do.

Ballad, you are so long winded and boring.

Would giving our children such names hinder them in life?

Could Lyric be taken seriously as a astrophysicist?

What if we named our children, Go-go, Can-can, Tango, or Burlesque?  What kind of life would that set up for them?

How about characters?  Could a character bearing the name Hiaku exist without reprecussions of believability.

The interesting thing is that yesterday, I was reading up on Dr. Joe Medicine Crow, the last War Chief in the US.  I saw Indian names like Man Afraid of His Horses, and Red Cloud.  What wonderful names, but what do they say about the people or character?

It's kind of like Scrooge.  That name fit so well the character, even Ebenezer, they both sound so miserly that they fit so well.  (Even though Ebenzer means rock of help.)

So, I've rambled.  Now I'm going to stop before my name becomes, Man Whose Wind Blows like a Hurricane.

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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are such good characters.  It's hard not to write a lot about them.  Yesterday, I wrote a detailed account from the Freudian point of view.  Today, I'm going to do several other discussions of the duality of the characters.

Substance abuse is an easy definition of the duality of these characters.  The story is often mentioned as an allegory for substance abuse and how things and people are changed by drugs.  Dr. Jekyll made an elixir.  It released his bad side.  That's the story.  It's easy to see the comparison to drugs and alcohol.  Stevenson (the author) lived in a world of substance abuse as much as we do now.  Artists were proned to use of drugs (as they are now).  He would have seen the changes it made in friends and aquantainces.  The drug Jekyll employeed made him Hyde.  Although drugs do not really change us, they lower our inhibitions.  Alcohol doesn't make me mean.  I've got the potential for that inside me, but the depressant affects my ability to squash this.  I get drunk and angry, but the alcohol didn't make me do it.  I just didn't care because I was drunk.  (I work with a large number of drug addicts.  They always blame the drugs, but it's not the drugs.  They do their thing, and blame it on the drugs.) The elixir Jekyll makes brings out Hyde, who was already inside of him.  The drug just inhibited Jekyll so that Hyde became more dominant.  Eventually, as with drug addicts, the drug takes over.  Jekyll becomes Hyde, but knows that he was Jekyll.  This is the sad side of drug abuse.  You become the shell of who you were.

I received a comment on yesterday's blog.  It mentioned something I had forgotten.  Steveson dreamed the story.  He wrote it a feverish three days of writing.  This is a great way to get ideas, but any of us who write know that you can't just rely on dreams.  I also believe that dreams have more purpose than just Freudian ideas.  We often dream as residue of the day.  Perhaps, Stevenson was having trepidation about something in his person.  That duality thing.  This would have manifested itself in dream form and he then wrote it down.  I don't know how much of the story was told in the dream.  Mary Shelley dreamed a lot of Frankenstein, but not the whole thing.  She even changed parts to make a better story.  Stevenson himself probably did the same thing.  He undoubtedly added substance to his story to make it better.  Dreams themselves often only have one plot point if you will.  Sometimes they have a whole lot of lines of thought but nothing central.  Stevenson would have had to grapple with this and form some kind of strong story line.

Sex.  Victorians loved it, but had to keep that under wraps.  In the text of Jekyll and Hyde, we learn that Dr. Jekyll had a taste for some vice from his youth.  Showalter says it was homosexual love, but why could he just have been a letch.  Maybe he liked the prostitutes, that upper class men were to avoid.  This would also account for the duality of nature.  (Having read ahead, I think this something we see in Robert Bloch's Psycho as well.  But you'll have to wait on that.)

So here are three discussions of the duality or probable causes for Stevenson's text.  Take it for what you will.

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Recently, I finished reading The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  This was a story I hadn't read since high school.  After reading it, I had a prompt question concerning my take on the duality of the characters.  This led me to thinking about a variety of duality explanations.  (I previously talked about one taken by Showalter in another entry).  This entry is to look at the story from a very Victorian Freudian take. 

In Showalter's article on this work of ficition, she states that R. L. Stevenson was reading alot about the phenomenon of male hysteria. At that time, I mentioned that hysteria doesn't cause split personalities.  (Please note that hysteria doesn't exist as a diagnosis anymore.  We have something called conversion disorder that took its place.) The more intersting thing from this time in history, psychologically speaking, is Freudian psyche.  Freud came up with his concept of personality.  According to this theory, our personality is made up of three distinct parts: the id, the ego, and the super ego.

Now we are going to take a crash course in psychological history. (For readers who aren't aquaintances, I am professionally a psychotherapist and adjunct psychology instructor.  I hold a MS in clinical/applied psychology.) According to Freud, the id is the most primative part of our psyche.  We have it at birth and it is totally pleasure controlled.  It wants what feels good now without any delay.  It does not reason morally or otherwise.  It acts completely on impulse.  The ego develops by about two or three (during the anal phase of psychosexual development, where we learn potty training).  The ego is the overlord of the id.  It is focused on delayed gratification and acting not on impulse but on more logical and appropriate basis.  Lastly is the super ego.  This is the moral reasoning part of us.  It holds both the ego and id in check by establishing moral grounds for why we do things.  It is the most logical and well controlled part of the psyche.

Now, It is obvious from that quick and dirty history lesson that Mr. Hyde is the id figure.  He comes out, parties, kills folks, and is just down right nasty.  He doesn't reason things.  He acts mostly on impulse.  In Freudian idealogy, this makes him, evil, and Freud might even argue that id driven people are mostly evil.

If Hyde is the id, Jekyll is the ego.  He is more contolled and supresses his impulses, but we don't know why.  He is also the ego because he is overlord of Hyde when they are together.  He has controlled that part of himself for many years until he releases it.  We do not see the moral reasoning behind Jekyll and so that prevents him from being the super ego.

So who is the super ego?  Utterson is the super ego.  He is not part of the duality of Jekyll and Hyde, and in discussing duality, Jekyll and Hyde can only be id and ego, otherwise it would be multiplicity.  The reason Utterson is the super ego is that he is able to express moral reasons for his dislike of things and tries to rein in both Hyde and Jekyll, even when he doesn't realize that they are one in the same.  Now Freud would have something to say about this interpreation, but phooey to Freud. (All his theories have been disproven.)

In Stevenson's story, the id takes over and the ego is left no option but to destroy them both.  Freud would agree with this.  He would more than likely say a suicide was caused by the failure of the ego to surpress the id.  He would also disucss the lack of the super ego in that person. 

Now, did Stevenson know all about this when he wrote Jekyll and Hyde?  I don't know, but I doubt it.  Freud was still new to things at this time.  I really didn't read the story from this angel as much as from that of substance abuse, which is in Freudian terms, an id over ego thing.  The real reason I wrote this take on the story is because writers love Freudian theory.  I've no idea why.  The man was the biggest freak in psychology (next to B.F. Skinner).  But there we are.  Take this for what it's worth, a couple of shillings, mate.

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Today I finished reading a thesis on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  It's rather old now being published in 1990.  The author wanted to discuss the duality of character in the book.  She took the approach of stating that Stevenson wrote it as a study or discussion of male hysteria, a rare Victorian psychological ailment that was associated almost exclusively with homosexuals.

I'm going to be honest, I completely disagree with the author of this article.  Although, Jekyll and Hyde are duality of personality, I don't know if I would take it as far as calling it a homosexual story.  Much of the logic the author relies on is that the story is about men and no women are featured prominatly.  Well okay, woman are featured in a lot stories from then and now and it doesn't make it a homosexual story.   One of the things I think that the author forgets is that women didn't have to be in stories from Victorian times or even later.  Nowadays we have opposite sexes mixed into stories because I believe writers are afraid that people will call their work homosexual or find it as an undertone when there isn't one.

Why can't Jekyll/Hyde represent the duality of humans in relation to drug and alcohol use.  During this time in Britain and abroad, opium use ran rampant.  It made people seem like two different people.  The junky and the sober.  There was the belief of this time about absynth doing the same thing.  I recall a few impressionist paintings with drinkers of the green fairy as subjects.  One of the things not mention in "Dr. Jekyll's closet" was the Robert Lewis Stevenson was a sufferer of TB. He died in the South Pacific trying to recover from this ailment.  TB suffers had to take a lot of medications.  He would have seen the change this can make first hand.

I'll even take Jekyll and Hyde as sexual supression as well.  Victorians believed in rigid sexual conduct.  This story can be the split between the rational, sober, virginal male, and the opposite, the lush, the letch. 

If we are talking about hysterics, I think that we are talking wrong.  Jekyll and Hyde is more similar to DID (dissociative Identity disorder) which isn't hysteria (now called conversion disorder).  A marked change in personality due to psychological issues even then was considered schizophrenia.  The author of "Closet" seems to be mistaken.  Another issue I had with her arguement is the reliance of unpublished other writings of the story.  I have two or three writings of a story before I'm done.  I don't think you can gleen what I was thinking about in the final draft from the first draft because it changes. 

I do not believe that "Jekyll's Closet" is a good take on this story.  I find it be an attempt that started in the 1990's to make everything homosexual in its basis.  This is silly.  It would be like trying to make everything black, or hispanic to mainstream then and cut prejudice.  It doesn't work.

I believe that Jekyll's Closet could have used more indepth and wider range research.  I wrote a paper years ago on this story and several others.  I did this paper in High school.  I found reliable source as well that stated it was about the duality of man because of substance abuse.  If I were going to argue the meaning of the duality in this story, like our author did, then I would want all possible answers to the question.  That's being a good scientist, which is what I was first trained to be then a writer. 

No scientific theory or hypothesis would be taken seriously based on such loose and shaky evidence or just taken from one  source without discussion of other possibilities.  I know this isn't science but I think critiquing of works should hold to the same standards.  Prove why it is your theory and how it disproves the others.  "Dr. Jekyll's Closet" fails to do this.

(And it just made me angry)

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As I've been reading The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I started to think about all the characters similar to Hyde in Victorian England.  Of course, the first that comes to mind is Jack the Ripper. He is a very similar figure to Hyde, even though he didn't start killing until a year after this book was published. But I remember several other bloody characters besides Mr. Hyde.

One of the things that suprises me is how much Jekyll and Hyde seem like the Jack the Ripper cases.  I think I've seen too many Hammer Movies or other cinematic takes on the tale.  I looked up some things as well.

About a decade before the publication of the book and the Ripper murders, Victorians were haunted by a springheel Jack.  This was  a character or monster that looked like a human, committed murders and then sprang out of sight like he had, well, spring heels.  This is funny story but it is so much like Hyde and the Ripper that they fit together.  These tales might have even inspired Hyde.

Then there is of course the Demon Barber of Fleet Street Mr. Sweeny Todd.  He was before this time.  HE stalked around in the early 1800's penny dreadfuls, but his story was set earlier in the 1700's.

The thing is that Victorians, to have been so staunch and pragmatic, loved their bloody horror tales.  They seemed to relish in the gore of all these murders and what not.  That came up with wonder tales about the killers.  They saw a lot of death from disease and war, so bloody murders in real life and fiction and the mixtures of the two make sense for these folks.

I enjoy reading about these other bloody Victorians.  Just the other night my wife and I watched From Hell.  It was only the second time I watched it and her first.  I noticed so many similarities to Jekyll and Hyde though.

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I just finished reading How to Write Killer Fiction by Wheat.  Wow!  I usually never say that about a writing book or style manual but this book really made me think.  She throroughly discussed the differences in mystery and thriller styles but also the differences in the way they are written.

I realized while reading this book exactly what kind of writer I am and have been.  I also realized via this book and the reboot of my thesis novel what type I need to be. I have always been what Wheat calls a "blankpager".  I never write out an outline before I start to write.  I mostly outline in my head and keep it there.  The problem is as I've gotten older (I have a magic date birthday coming up soon.) and become more stressed with my two jobs, I can't hold as much in my memory without letting some things slip.  I don't like to admit this because I keep everything in my head from appointments to phone numbers, email address to birthdates and other important facts and figures.  This has hurt me greatly.  I believe the best evidence for this was my original thesis project.  I had an outline in my head that actually had a central plot, but somewhere in the mix of psychology notes and stastics, and phone numbers for half the mental health centers in Alabama, it got lost.  If I had been an "outliner", i wouldn't have lost this as readily.

I'll admit that one of the reasons I have avoid outlines is that I felt it hindered my creative ability to be flexible in my story.  I'll see or hear something and say "that would be great."  As I read, this book I realized that a outline can be made to incoporate changes.  I also learned this outling for my new thesis novel.  I wrote at times a specific outline even adding in dialog for that section but also some generalities like "put something creepy here."  I think, and whether or not this was Wheat's intention, that an outline can just keep you focused on the central plot and makes sure you have it running through the story.

Another thing she discussed was the arc system.  By nature, I'm a short story writer.  I like the small bite-sized story.  For one thing, I don't get bored with it.  Novel writing gets boring about midway and then picks up toward the end, but  you have to push through that boredom.  The arc system seems to  me a wonderful way to keep things in perspective.  They make it so you write small sections of story with that central theme running through them.  I had done this my outlining process and not even realized that what I was doing.

Writing is an amazing job/hobby/academic pursuit/coping skill/art/enjoyment/guilty pleasure.  You can learn so much you didn't know tot make it more enjoyable, but you can also realize that you've been doing stuff you didn't even know had a name.

Although I write mostly horror and occasional absurdist fiction (a new interest of mine), I drew alot out of this mystery and thriller book.  I think that everyone should read it. But it may be my belief that you can learn much about writing from anyting about it.  I have journalism books that I learn about writing from.  I've sat through Romance writing worshops and writing for the Christian market (and let's be frank, Hillybilly rape ain't big in that market.) and I always bring something away with me.

How to Write Killer Fiction can teach you how to write killer fiction but not just stories about killing, fiction that will slay the reader.

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