Amortización de la instalación fotovoltaica

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of a vicious drug lord, very few of us feel genuinely sad, and many of us may even take pleasure in the news. Our tears do not flow because our minds accept the violent death of an evil man as, if not perfectly just, at the very least a fitting end.

Aristotle’s approach to art assumes that narratives affect us in power- ful ways because they interact with our intuitive understanding of life, the universe, and everything. For Aristotle, only the fall of a great man will move us to pity. Even better for tragic effect is if the great man has some flaw (like the rest of us) that brings him down, not randomly, but because of some mistake he has made. Our objective understanding of the man’s greatness activates pity—while our objective understanding of his fatal flaw increases our identification and adds the element of fear. This cocktail of pity and fear is, for Aristotle, the essential effect of properly constructed tragic drama, and all of it depends on a certain understanding of the world.

Though Aristotle’s Poetics discusses tragedy, much can also be said for the newer genre of horror as a medium for reflection on the ways that art interacts with, and disturbs, the way we see the world. In viewing a tragedy we grow to identify with the hero, especially with his inherent virtue, which is ultimately undone. In horror, however, what sympathy exists between the viewer and the victim will likely be visceral more than emotional. Seeing a woman hung on a meat hook, as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre invites us to do, isn’t “very sad”—it is terrifying and nauseating. Rather than experience a cathartic purge of the emotions, we are more likely to want to purge the contents of our stomachs. The connection between spectator and spectacle is further seen in the way that the emotions of characters within horror

fictions mirror those of our own. As Carroll points out, this is not the case

with every genre of fiction. He writes,

Aristotle is right about catharsis, for example, the emotional state of the audience does not double that of King Oedipus at the end of the play of the same name. Nor are we jealous, when Othello is. Also, when a comic character takes a pratfall, he hardly feels joyous, though we do. And though we feel suspense when the hero rushes to save the heroine tied to the railroad tracks he cannot afford to indulge such an emotion. Nevertheless, with horror, the situation is different. For in horror the emotions of the characters and those of the audience are synchronized in certain pertinent respects, as one

can easily observe at a Saturday matinee in one’s local cinema.1

Through a Mirror, Darkly 35

Jack Finney in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the book, the hero, Miles Bennell, encounters two of the alien pods that eventually take the form of humans. Finney describes Bennell’s reaction as he seeks to destroy them: “They were weightless as children’s balloons, harsh and dry on my palms and fingers. At the feel of them on my skin, I lost my mind completely, and then I was trampling them, smashing and crushing them under my plung- ing feet and legs, not even knowing that I was uttering a sort of hoarse,

meaningless cry—Unhh! Unhh! Unhh!—of fright and animal disgust.”2

Bennell’s horrorified trampling of the soon-to-be-human pods is easy to identify with. Similar examples can be seen in nearly any horror story where the protagonist or secondary character must enter a forbidding basement, venture out into the dark, or confront the monster. Like the character in the story, we are intended to feel fright and revulsion.

As genres go, horror is also the least friendly of the storytelling patterns. If genres were houseguests, romantic comedies would always be cooking you dinner, while historical dramas regaled you with stories, and science fiction kept you thinking about big ideas. Perhaps the broad comedies might leave the toilet seat up or fart at the dinner table, but, generally speaking, all these genres would behave themselves compared to horror. If horror were a houseguest, it would smash the china, flood the bathroom, and while you were cleaning off the gum it stuck to the living room TV, it would be trying to burn the house down.

As a genre, horror doesn’t like you. Horror doesn’t care if it causes you to lose sleep. Horror doesn’t mind if it frightens you so much it makes you swear off something you love, like camping or swimming in the ocean. In essence, horror is a jerk. As an artistic category, horror trades in the random and meaningless: hence this description of The Texas Chainsaw

Massacre, a movie whose story of innocent tourists caught in a house of

horror clearly portrays cruelty and violence as meaningless, and thus de- fies positive description: “The film’s archetypal structure is borrowed from fairy tales: this isn’t far from Hansel and Gretel, with its children lost in the woods who find an attractive house inhabited by a fiend who kidnaps and wants to eat them. But while fairy tales tend to serve the function of preparing children for the rigors of adult life, and thus present a positive face for all their often considerable violence, Texas inverts their traditional

values and presents an apocalyptic vision of unremitting negativity.”3 _This

unremitting negativity further calls into question the value of horror as an art form for consumption.

So what, then, can be learned from this most unpleasant of artistic genres? What of value could be uncovered about the way that we see the

36 Philip Tallon

world by looking at horror’s internal logic? In this essay I will look at the contribution horror makes to our thinking, arguing that horror can “illu- minate” the way we see ourselves by showing us a much darker picture than we are used to seeing. Despite its frequent kinship with dark humor and its tendency toward vulgarity and schlock, I will suggest here that horror as a genre is worth taking seriously (at least for a while) because of how well it can inform and enlighten our vision of the world by reminding us of our inner moral frailty and by forcing us to take seriously the moral reality of evil.

John Ruskin, the famous artist and art critic, writes, “Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts;—the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three the only quite

trustworthy one is the last.”4 _{Art, then, following Ruskin, may be a better}

guide to understanding ourselves than even our words or deeds. I want to show that this is especially true of horror, as it clashes with and critiques (both explicitly and implicitly) two broad cultural movements (modern hubris and postmodern skepticism) by puncturing their philosophical posturing.