The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (18 page)

If it were not for tragedy, the human race would have become bored into extinction long ago. No one knows this better than the entertainers among us, who could not sell a book or a song or a seat in a theater without drawing upon the screams and tears arising from that primal pit of twisting shadows from which every life emerges and to which every life returns. Thus, each action and consequence in Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd flows out of and feeds into the tragic. It is the groaning pedal tone over which everything else—for instance, beauty and love—serves as fleeting grace notes that only seem to suggest the existence of something other than the tragic, yet are actually part of the piece as much as the mordant horror that stalks the stage. And tragedy (Oedipus, Hamlet, Long Day’s Journey into Night) begins at home.

“There was a barber and his wife.” In the style of many a horror that has wormed its way from the muck of organic existence, Sweeney Todd has as its backstory the seeding of new life, the child Johanna. (“Wake up, Johanna, it’s another bright red day,” sings Pater Todd.). And new life only perpetuates the pain of old life when one offspring meets another. “I feel you, Johanna / I’ll steal you, Johanna,” sings Anthony to his beloved, who together compose a couple whose purpose is to cast a ray of hope into the mayhem of the drama. However, to anyone who has been watching closely, this new Adam and Eve are 81

only being readied for the meat grinder of their future life, just as were a barber named Benjamin Barker and his wife Lucy. It is only when Benjamin and Lucy have been dragged through the inferno of their lives that they are fit to sate our hunger for tragedy.

They are positioned within the innermost circle of hell, while Mrs. Lovett, Judge Turpin, Toby, and others radiate concentrically about them with their own fateful cravings (for beauty and love of course), edging them ever closer to the barber’s blade and the fire-belching oven.

Ultimately, all of us end up as filling for one of Mrs. Lovett’s meat pies. In the reported last words of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, the Romantic poet and physician called himself

“food for what I am good for—worms.” While worms do not get to feast on many of us in modernized nations, the point still resonates that our lives are fundamentally inglorious, whether we are John Milton or John Q. Public. It is as a counterweight to the astounding mediocrity of human life that tragedy as entertainment performs a crucial function—that of daubing the dullness of our days with a tinge of grandeur and style, qualities of the theatrical world and not the everyday one. This is why we are thrilled with the horror of Sweeney Todd and envy the qualities that he possesses and that we lack. He is as edifying as any sage when he croons “We all deserve to die,” given the fact that none of us can unmake the tragedy of our birth. He has a sense of purpose that few who are made of flesh and blood rather than of music and poetry will ever know (“But the work waits / I’m alive at last / And I’m full of joy”). Most of all, he has the courage and bravado to do that which he knows needs to be done. “To seek revenge may lead to hell,” he says, to which Mrs. Lovett answers, “But everyone does it and seldom as well . .

. as Sweee-ney.” Nature is limited to Grand Guignol, pure carnage and fests of slaughter.

We can reach for things more heady and perverse than the corpse. After murder and cannibalism have been played out in Sweeney Todd, the dead rise and mingle with living, all of them grave to the bone, in a great, freezing crescendo of ecstatic horror—an incommensurable frisson within the gates of the supernatural. As in the beginning, so at the end, the puppet players sing once more: “Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd,” a story that, if only during an evening at the theater, leads our consciousness into a world of tragedy that is so much more than a mistake of nature.

SUPERNATURALISM

When the narrator of Joseph Conrad’s novel Under Western Eyes (1911) writes that “the belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness,” he seems to be speaking for the author, who shunned the supernatural in his fiction. By doing so, it might be argued, Conrad had confined himself to the role of a portraitist of the tearing insanity in the world of human beings, turning a blind eye to the tearing insanity of the world itself as seen by human beings. In Heart of Darkness, he pulls at the leash of realism, plying his genius for innuendo and at times stealing up to the very border of supernaturalism. He stirs in his readers the feel of a horror beyond rational understanding, an ineffable devilry that nests at the bottom of our world. What the career of Kurtz meant to Marlow, the story’s narrator, seems to surpass the “wickedness of men,” depositing both of them at the threshold of an occult truth about the underpinnings of the reality they had known—the anchoring fictions of civilization. If Kurtz is only a man who has realized his potential for wickedness—which, by corollary, is a potential for 82

each of us—then he is just another candidate for incarceration or the death penalty. But if he is a man who has probed the mysteries of a world the very essence of which is wicked (or MALIGNANTLY USELESS), then he has crossed the point of no return, and his last words—“The horror! The horror!”—have prodigious implications. Not to say that the assorted overtones critics have heard in the story—civilization is only skin deep; European imperialism was a bad business—are not horrors. But they are not the horror that every incident of the narrative so meticulously portends.18 As a fiction writer, Conrad would not have to cede “the horror” a local habitation and a name (e.g. The Creature from the Black Lagoon), but only to suggest, after Edgar Allan Poe and others, a malignity conjoining the latent turpitude of human beings with that active in the world itself, as seen by human beings. That world is not in “darkest Africa” or any other exact geography: it is situated at the point where our heads collide with the universe, meeting dead in the heart of a secret too terrible to know.

Many writers have alluded in their works to the insignificance of the human race in a dizzyingly inscrutable universe ruled by forces incomprehensible to our species. For Lovecraft, this insignificance is the alpha and omega of his work. At the heart of it all is a blind idiot "god," whether it is designated as Azathoth or the Colour out of Space or the groaning blackness that sounds above the Rue d'Auseil in "The Music of Erich Zann." It was in the last-named work that Lovecraft came up with a model supernatural horror story, one in which a subjective mind and objective monstrosity shade into each other.

The subjective mind is that of the nervously afflicted narrator; the objective monstrosity is the unnamed and unnamable nemesis of the musician Zann, who, with his viol-playing, battles to keep at bay this thing that would destroy the tenuous order of an already crooked, creaking world as represented by the Rue d’Auseil, the tumble-down street on which he lives and dies. To some extent, "Erich Zann" is correlative to Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows," in which there is a minatory force as nameless and unseen as the one in Lovecraft's story. One of the characters in “The Willows”— the Swede, who is described as an “unimaginative” individual—does offer possible explanations for the supernatural incidents in the narrative, referring to “a sound in the fourth-dimension" or some other realm of reality in which everything would make sense if only one could attain that perspective. In "The Music of Erich Zann," Lovecraft offers no explanations that would betoken a covert order in the universe. What he does offer is a world of "weird notes," which can work their magic only in literary form (no film could duplicate these harmonic or melodic impossibilities), and a battle that will always be lost against the horror that is our lives. Such is the outward formation of Lovecraft’s consciousness. His is a lonely voice speaking through lonely characters in a lonely universe, one as lonely as our nightmares. A self-acclaimed “non-entity” in his own time, Lovecraft has enlarged in stature since his death. This should not be taken as a sign that the world has “caught up”

with him. That is not the issue. Neither the public nor the academic mind can embrace the consciousness of Lovecraft any more than it can latch on to that of Schopenhauer or Cioran, much less Zapffe’s. None of these writers portrayed a world acceptable to either average or distinguished heads, not as long as those heads can believe in God or Humanity, not as long as they are disgorging gospels of purpose and meaning and a future as vomitive as the past.

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While belief in the supernatural is only superstition, the sense of the supernatural cannot be denied. It is the sense of what should not be at its most justly potent, the sense of the impossible as we often experience it in our dreams and in unsettling moments of our lives, particularly during those intimations of mortality or madness that for some are as regular as a heartbeat. The evil here is not bound up with bad men but with the nature of existence itself, or at least with our existence as victims of consciousness. The supernatural may be considered as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity and, as such, is the best possible hallmark of the uncanny nightmare of a conscious mind marooned for a brief while in this haunted house of a world and being slowly or swiftly driven mad by the ghastliness of it all. This viewpoint does not keep tabs on “man's inhumanity to man”

but instead is sourced in a derangement symptomatic of our life as transients in a world that is natural for all else that lives, yet, by our lights, when they are not flickering or gone out, is anything but. The most phenomenal of creaturely traits, the sense of the supernatural, the impression of a fatal estrangement from the visible, is dependent on our consciousness, which merges the outward and the inward into a universal comedy without laughter. We are only passersby in this jungle of mutations and mistakes. The natural world existed when we did not, and it will continue to exist long after we are gone. The supernatural crept into life only when the door of consciousness was opened in our heads: the moment we stepped through that door, we walked out on nature. Say what we will about it and deny it till we die—we have had a knowledge imposed upon us that is too much to know and too secret to tell one another if we are to pace along our streets, work at our jobs, and sleep in our beds. It is the knowledge of a race of beings that are both specters and spectators in this cobwebbed corner of the cosmos.

STYLE

Ostensible in all writing, either by devising or default, style is not well understood by much of the reading public. Should they sense its presence, they will fix only upon mannerisms of language. The style of a work is then placed between polarities that range from the simple, impersonal narratives of popular novelists to the complex, idiosyncratic coruscations of writers such as Bruno Schulz and William S. Burroughs.19 But as any student of style could tell you, language is only the surface. More attentively inspected, style is an expression of consciousness as opposed to linguistic constructions that may be as plain as the morning newspaper or as phantasmagoric as dreams. Whatever we read during our leisure hours, from the works of canonical masters to spy stories, we read for entertainment. But we will not be entertained unless a writer’s consciousness is both comprehensible to and sympathetic with our own. If you have a weakness for tricky thrillers in which love and conscience audaciously defy the amoral expediencies that make the world go round, then you will comprehend and be in sympathy with John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). But not every reader goes for plot twists and moral telegrams. One might prefer a literary exegesis of life as a tragic or comic nightmare: a doleful vision that not many readers can parse as either comprehensible to or sympathetic with their consciousness and one that only an infinitesimal cadre of writers was born to concoct. Tough luck, then, to the authors commended in the current text, whose works do not make the bestseller lists and are passed over for prestigious awards. Their style of consciousness has never been and never will be in style. The problem is that they either pass over subjects that entertain low-, 84

middle-, or even high-brow readers, or they handle them in a way puts off most people, which is to say normal, happy people.

In every literary work, there is an intersection where the handling of subject matter and verbal manneristics meet. It is at this juncture that a writer's consciousness expresses itself and his style is exposed to the full. For example, compare two horror novels that postulate the reality of supernatural possession—William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) and Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (written 1927; published posthumously, 1941). In the world of Blatty's formulaic novel, certain characters are dressed for doom and others for survival. Two priests, Frs. Karras and Merrin, die good deaths in the process of saving Regan, a young girl whose body, and perhaps her soul—

the relationship between body and soul among Christian sects can be tortuous—has been possessed by a demon or demons. The deaths of these priests are acceptable to readers.

Burke Dennings, the director of the movie in which Regan’s actress mother Chris MacNeill stars, is murdered by the possessed Regan. He is not a terribly sympathetic character, being a profane and belligerent drunk, so the function he serves is that of a character who can be killed off for pure thrills. This follows the formula and thus is also acceptable to readers. Such is the way that the greater part of those who patronize works of fiction and cinema like to see a writer handle this kind of subject matter. They want a finale in which good wins out over evil (we can spare the quotes), reassuring readers that human life, and the fabricated theistic order to which it is annexed, is all right. As a popular novel, the narrative of The Exorcist is spun out in a lively and nondescript

“show, don’t tell” manner. Intended readers of Blatty’s novel of demonic possession will be engrossed by its subject matter alone—which they believe is true, or could be true—

and they do not want any verbal embroidery to get in the way. The Exorcist is known to be based on newspaper reports from 1949 of a talk given by a clergyman who claimed to have performed the ritual of the exorcism on a boy named Robbie. Blatty took these reports and plugged them into a template of popular fiction that is more or less reportorial. The result was a bestselling book.