It’s a busy time for me right now. I’ve started this blog and besides writing, I need to stay on top of self-promotion. I’m working on a new show and there are texts to write and learn, rehearsals to organize and run, and tentacles and monsters to stitch together (more on that in another post). And of course, I also have to work (preparing and giving classes and doing proofreading) and earn money to keep myself in bandwidth, liquid latex, and fake fur. And yet, the other night I watched four episodes of a TV show that I don’t even really like that much. Argh. Why? Why would I do something so pointless?
I think good old Poe put his finger on it in his 1885 story, The Imp of the Perverse, which puts into words so clearly, a human tendency at the heart of so much of his writing, a tendency which may often go unconsidered. The overwhelming urge to perform an act precisely because it is the wrong thing to do:
“I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution. Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong’s sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements. It is a radical, a primitive impulse — elementary.”
Perverseness
The story is an odd one, but I love it. For the first half, it comes across as a treatise on this psychological element, its narrator (who I had first assumed to be Poe-as-essayist) expounding upon history’s failures to account for irrationality before describing and naming this drive and giving three familiar examples: the urge of a usually succinct and generally kind speaker to irritate his or her listener by blathering on in a circuitous manner (an urge which my wife could attest I sometimes indulge in—though, to be fair, I could never claim to be laconic to begin with), the temptation, when standing on a precipice, to take the plunge, and the penchant to put off till tomorrow that which we most want to do today. His characterization of this procrastination is, perhaps, most striking in how true it rings.
“We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. We glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work, with the anticipation of whose glorious result our whole souls are on fire. It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow, and why? There is no answer…”
I can only assume based on my own experience of living, that this is a situation everyone has been in. But maybe it’s just me and old Edgar…
Shortly after, the story takes a turn and becomes, well, a story. The narrator is telling us all this to explain how he ended up in this cell, condemned to die. Having committed a very well calculated and painstakingly carried out murder, which had gone off without a hitch, and after which, he had acquired a large inheritance and lived comfortably for years, the narrator had realized that the only way that he could ever be caught would be if he “were fool enough to confess.” Following that epiphany, he could not stop thinking about it until he finally snapped and publicly declared his wrong doing. Thus, it was this imp of the perverse that has led him to his doom.
First of all, it is a tasty bit of irony that our example here of the imp is not the drive that led him to kill, which had been fully rational, but rather, that which has led him to confess. You might take for granted that a devil on the shoulder is more likely to needle someone into crime, into “sin,” but in Poe’s conception it is simpler and more broad. Simply the wrong act. The one for which there is no good reason, no motive. The motive for the killing had been obvious—money. The motive for admission is not so clear—but it surely wasn’t guilt.
Broader application
In this, I think Poe captures a human truth which, to this day, can still go overlooked. How often are characters in books, in films, on TV, written to be internally consistent, psychologically understood characters, driven by clear motivations. We criticize the writing when that lapses. And yet, I don’t think that’s who we always are. And it’s not merely a case of some kind of Freudian death drive, but that sometimes we act with no clear motivation at all. Sometimes we do something stupid, something cruel, something self-defeating, or just something odd or nonsensical simply because that is the thing that we do.
And this is not only a literary concern. I remember circa 2010, reading an essay reflecting on the economic crisis at the time, which criticized modern economists’ continued reliance on an outdated and inaccurate figure from classical economic theory, Homo Economicus. First conceptualized by figures like John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith, this theoretical economic agent “acts to obtain the highest possible well-being for him or herself given available information about opportunities and other constraints, both natural and institutional on his ability to achieve his predetermined goals.” A great deal of economic models have been based on this notion that en masse, people act out of rational, informed self-interest.
While people may be essentially self-serving, I think it unrealistic to state that we are, as a rule, rational or informed. Thus, forecasts, economic or otherwise, based on such expectations seem doomed to inaccuracy. To be fair, there are many competing theories and Homo Economicus was already being criticized in Mill’s day, but the idea persists. We still expect ourselves and each other to have reasons for doing what we do.
Horror
So what about horror? This is a horror blog, after all.
Beyond the fact that this qualifies as a horror story (murder, madness, and what not), I think that any time that horror (film, writing, etc.) falls into being too rational, it can ring false. Or at the very least, it can feel flat. But when a taste of mystery is sustained, when we can’t see the whole thing, when it feels that there are depths we cannot plumb, it is that much richer; it has a chance of delivering that delectable shudder of the uncanny.
I mean, of course, there should be motivations. I’m not saying that we should abandon all sense of psychological causality and lazily just offer up any old thing without thinking it through, but if at the end of the story, a killer can honestly and exactly state their motivation, whether it be revenge, money, fame, or love, it often underwhelms, not doing justice to the staggering inferences of a word like ‘horror.’ In counterpoint, think of the final moment of The Strangers when the killers, asked why they have done these horrible things, simply answer, “because you were home.” Chilling.
Horror is best when there is an element of not just the unknown, but the unknowable. And that need not mean abstract, tentacled, ancient, evil gods from another dimension. Rather, if a work brings us into contact with that which is unknowable within the human heart and mind, it can be most effective.