Welcome to the September 2019 Academic Meeting! (This is the first meeting of the new format.)
The most recent theme is Folk Horror and how it relates to Folklore.
Aromatic Accompaniment: Midnight Forest by Yankee Candle.
Wine: Baco Noir. Inniskillin Estate Wines, Discovery Series. Ontario VQA, 2017.
We started a new meeting format this year. We’ll still have a Literary and a Cinematic Meeting each semester, but we’ve added a third meeting where we read a bit ahead of time and use the meeting to discuss a concept. It’s more difficult to provide a vicarious experience for this format, but we’ll do our best. We felt that sharing our discussion with our readers would be desirable, rather than obscuring this avenue of discussion.
The format of the Academic Meetings that will make it into our Society Minutes has three parts to it:
- The background of the topic
- A reading list (read prior)
- Some formal remarks prepared by a member and delivered at the Society
The meeting takes place primarily as discussion, so these three items won’t capture everything, but these records should help give a good idea of what we’re up to. We sincerely welcome anyone interested in what we’re discussion to contact us, whether you’re a private citizen or an academic.
Background
The topic of our first meeting was “Folk Horror vs. Folklore.” Folk Horror is a growing field of inquiry, and there was recently an academic conference on the subject. (Actually the conference was happening as we met, but it was too expensive for us to get to England so we are here in Pennsylvania.) Folk Horror has also recently been written about by Adam Scovell, mostly in the context of film. We also looked into it a little bit at our July cinematic meeting.
Some information about Folk Horror (taken from the conference CFP):
Since at least 2010, critics and bloggers have been working to define folk horror, understand its appeal, and establish its key texts, including what has become the central triumvirate of the folk horror canon of the 1960s and 1970s—Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968), Blood on Satan’s Claw (Piers Haggard, 1971), and The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973).
The 1960s and 1970s also saw a rise in folk horror texts in British literature and TV series: Robin Redbreast (1970), BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas (1971-78), Penda’s Fen (1974), Children of the Stones (1977), and Alan Garner’s novels The Owl Service(1967) and Red Shift (1973).
Critics have also begun to uncover a rich pre-history for the folk horror of the 1960s and 70s, looking back to the 19th and early 20th century fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Machen, and M. R. James. But the history of folk horror can be traced still further back, to Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare, and the mystical poetry and witchcraft plays of the seventeenth century.
At the same time, directors in the 21st century have been re-inventing the genre with such new incarnations with films such as The Blair Witch Project (1999), Eden Lake (2008), Wake Wood (2009), Kill List (2011), A Field in England (2013), The Witch (2015), The Hallow (2015), Without Name (2016), Apostle (2018), and Hereditary (2018).
Literature too has seen a renaissance of folk horror novels and texts: Adam Nevill’s The Ritual (2011), Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney (2014) and Devil’s Day (2017), Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s Hex (2016), Joyce Carol Oates’ The Corn Maiden (2011) and John Langan’s The Fisherman (2016).
Despite what seems to be a general agreement that Folk Horror involves some aspect of the “old ways” coming back, the relationship between Folk Horror and Folklore isn’t as clear as one might guess from the name, and we’d like to explore the two in relation to one another. Are they in fact closely related after all? Are they in fact quite different? We don’t know yet! It’s still new enough that it’s up for grabs.
Reading List (read prior)
Macfarlane, Robert. “The Eeriness of the English Countryside.” The Guardian, 10 Apr. 2015. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/10/eeriness-english-countryside-robert-macfarlane>
Paciorek, Andy. “‘Folk Horror: From the Forests, Fields, and Furrows’: An Introduction.” Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies. Wyrd Harvest Press, 2015, pp. 8 – 16.
O’Sullivan, Keith M. C. “‘You Know Where I Am If You Want Me’: Authorial Control and Ontological Ambiguity in the Ghost Stories of M. R. James.” Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 15 (Autumn 2016), pp. 44 – 56.
Scovell, Adam. “‘Hours Dreadful and Things Strange'” (Introduction). Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Auteur, 2017, pp. 1 – 10.
——————. “Trilogy.” Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Auteur, 2017, pp. 11 – 34.
Remarks Given by Joshua
Folk Horror vs. Folklore: Bringing Lore and Horror Back Together
Folk Horror and Folklore. Lore and Horror. These terms feel as if they must be linked somehow. But how does Folklore fit into the recent discourse that has arisen around the cultural production of 1960 and 1970s Britain? How would we connect what we think of as Folklore with Scovell’s Folk Horror Chain, which seems to rely on a certain narratological arc that feels at once achingly adjacent yet frustratingly separate from the Folkloric memes that spring up sometimes rhizomatically in unfamiliar places and other times as locally as the most delicate variety of mushroom, suited to its own place and none other? Most of the famous examples given of Folk Horror—take the unholy trinity of Blood on Satan’s Claw, Witchfinder General, and The Wicker Man, for example—are known for their instantiations of the final link in Scovell’s Chain (the Happening/Summoning). Folklore, whether in an authentic sense or in a Jamesean “rules of folklore” sense, don’t really have any play there, as the sense of ritual or lore-ic source evinced in these films is evocative rather than particular—we get the appearance perhaps of a folkloric vehicle but no payload. The “skewed moral beliefs” that we associate with the cults or groups animated by this folkloric vehicle get us no closer, and the “isolation” helps us imagine the films as places where Folklore could live, perhaps, but this too is only evocative if we aren’t looking at one of the films or texts Scovell and others primarily refer to in their examples.
If we want to connect Folklore to Folk Horror, the best place to do it, to my mind, is with the first link in Scovell’s chain: Landscape. Landscape is a slippery term that, like many other spatial terms (including the word “spatial”) can refer to either physical or social realities, or even both at once. To quote Ruth Heholt, “The spirit of the place is the place and we have a bodily response to it; it affects us in the moment. Yet any spirit of place is also indelibly linked to the past. Places are always marked by what has gone before, by the people who populated and shaped the environment in many different ways … Layers of memory and action are embedded in the landscape alongside the layering of the earth’s history in stone” (Heholt 2). An author that might allow us to bridge this gap between Lore and Horror is M. R. James, whom Keith O’Sullivan has rightly observed “places a high premium upon evocation of time and place” (45), in the latter of which the slipperiness of the term fully obtains. The “rules of folklore” are important to James, and as O’Sullivan and Jacqueline Simpson have demonstrated, Folklore in James is particular; we get the payload rather than merely the affective sense of the vehicle, though the latter is critical to the atmosphere of James as well.
I want to focus on the affect created by particularized folklore. Jacqueline Simpson devoted her 1996 presidential address to the Folklore Society to analyzing James and his “rules of folklore.” James, as I have noted, is a perfect author for us to look to as we try to bring Lore and Horror together.
I didn’t have time to properly integrate Simpson’s material, so I will simply move through the most relevant quotations and make some commentary. [Commentary was given extemporaneously.]
From Simpson:
James had “a particular interest in the development and persistence of local legends and historical memories, a good knowledge of traditional beliefs, and an interest in oral narration” (9).
James “tried to make my ghosts act in ways consistent with the rules of folklore” (James)
James Quote (qtd in Simpson 10): “Yet such things do not easily die quite out, and imagination, working on scattered hints, may be able to devise a picture of an evening’s entertainment … in some such terms as these”
Another of James’s “rules of folklore” stories, he opens a tale by offering to fill a longing left by a tale Shakespeare leaves untold. Of the tale he offers as a possible answer to this longing, he says “it was not going to be a new story; it was to be one which you have most likely heard, and even told.”
“‘In Martin’s Close’ he shows the folk memory of a local murder as surviving for some two hundred years, but only in obscure and fragmentary form, and only in one man’s recollection” (James qtd. in Simpson 11)
James even successfully inserted a tale of his own making into the “authentic” oral legends of Suffolk: “In ‘A Warning to the Curious’ (1925) James uses the heraldic arms of East Anglia, which shows three crowns, as basis for a convincingly “traditional”-looking claim that three crowns buried on the coast guard England from invasion. This is now often taken as a genuine legend, and was told as such by ‘several Suffolk residents’ to the folklorist Enid Porter, who seems to have accepted it as authentic. … However, no source earlier than James has yet been found” (13).
Robert Macfarlane, a major protagonist in the field I might call “haunted landscape studies,” certainly recognizes the uniquely folkloric affect James creates: “His [MR James] stories, like the restless dead that haunt them, keep returning to us: re-adapted, reread, freshly frightening for each new era. One reason for this is his mastery of the eerie: that form of fear that is felt first as unease, then as dread, and which is incited by glimpses and tremors rather than outright attack.” If you forced Macfarlane to pin down the affect of Jame’s folkloric horror, he would call it eerie. This is how Macfarlane sums up the eerie in one sentence: “[T]he eerie is – as Fanshawe found on Gallows Hill – about the experience of being watched by a presence that you cannot perceive.” For Macfarlane, this presence has a contemporary urgency that manifests as an “English Eerie” that is making itself felt in circles as disparate as artists, political activists, and avant-garde antiquaries: “the hedgerows, fields, ruins, hills and saltings of England have been set seething.” This mysterious cultural happening, a sense of unease in the landscape itself, interfaces well with a concept Scovell calls “rurality.” Rurality emphasizes the fundamental connection to the landscape as constitutive of the affective eeriness that pervades Folk Horror. I see folklore as performing a key function in the “mythologizing effect” that mixes with rurality such that the “fantastical, surreal and horrific events [can] spring forth” (81). To return to Macfarlane:
“A second reason James stays with us is his understanding of landscape – and especially the English landscape – as constituted by uncanny forces, part-buried sufferings and contested ownerships. Landscape, in James, is never a smooth surface or simple stage-set, there to offer picturesque consolations. Rather it is a realm that snags, bites and troubles. He repeatedly invokes the pastoral – that green dream of natural tranquility and social order – only to traumatise it.”
To return to the question of how we would use these concepts of landscape and rurality to tie Lore and Horror back together, some observations by Keith O’Sullivan are helpful. O’Sullivan sees some affinity with the concept of Uncanniness at work in this folkloric mode, in that, channeling Freud, operates in the register of something primitive is experienced as a compulsion to repeat—and to bring in Mark Fisher, I emphasize the intransitive usage of a transitive verb: a compulsion to repeat … what? This gap, experienced as a presence, is the linguistic form of Fisher’s concept of the Eerie. O’Sullivan recognizes the applicability of the folkloric affect described by Stacy McDowell, who observed folklore’s “capacity to imbue ‘the sense of having been here before, without the listener’s ever knowing quite when'” (qtd. on 50). These sensations and affects mesh quite nicely with those articulated by Macfarlane and Scovell. Indeed, the two could have been at each others’ elbows: Scovell invokes the same themes when he mentions Folklore, which helps authorize this bridge we are creating: “Folk Horror can arguably manifest anywhere and within any culture as long as there are ‘folk’ to spread it around; every country has some relationship with its landscape, with its own folklore, its customs, superstitions and rurality … so many examples [of Folk Horror] from all around the world tap into their own form of rurality; where folklore, history, agricultural customs and landscape conspire to tip reality sideways” (101). The landscape will not be denied.
This “tipping of reality sideways” is a provacative way to describe the affect created when Lore turns into Horror. What remains a point of contention between the folkloric mode of James and the rurality of Folk Horror might be the attitude toward the past that is invoked. Scovell urges that “The past is always a darker, less enlightened place” (103). This might be a disjuncture from the folkloric mode of James, which O’Sullivan contends champions the folk wisdom of the inhabitants of the landscape (51), which would seem to venerate the mist of legendary past (even when such past is recent), though he acknowledges too that James’s stories exhibit a crisis of belief structures, giving the lie to a “consolatory Christian ideology” (52). What might reconcile the two is a recognition that the English Eerie Macfarlane sees as ascendant only can thrive when the ways that seem the bedrock of our existence are revealed to be newcomers to a landscape already thick with old ways, ways becoming visible again as the practices and ideologies that obscured them wear thin. Indeed, this is the very essence of the “rurality” Scovell identifies as one of the properties of Folk Horror: “implied … power and destruction of the traditional ways at the hands of an even older tradition” (92).
Works Cited
- Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. Repeater, 2017.
- Murfin, Ross and Supryia M. Ray. “Folklore,” The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. Fourth edition. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2018, pp. 158 – 9.
- Heholt, Ruth. “Unstable Landscapes: Affect, Representation and a Multiplicity of Hauntings.” Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment, ed. Ruth Heholt, and Niamh Downing. Rowman and Littlefield, 2016, pp. 1 – 20.
- Macfarlane, Robert. “The Eeriness of the English Countryside.” The Guardian, 10 Apr. 2015. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/10/eeriness-english-countryside-robert-macfarlane>
- Paciorek, Andy. “‘Folk Horror: From the Forests, Fields, and Furrows’: An Introduction.” Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies. Wyrd Harvest Press, 2015, pp. 8 – 16.
- O’Sullivan, Keith M. C. “‘You Know Where I Am If You Want Me’: Authorial Control and Ontological Ambiguity in the Ghost Stories of M. R. James.” Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 15 (Autumn 2016), pp. 44 – 56.
- Scovell, Adam. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Auteur, 2017.
- Simpson, Jacqueline. “‘The Rules of Folklore’ in the Ghost Stories of M. R. James.” Folklore 108 (1997), pp. 9 – 18.
Further Reading
- Macfarlane, Robert. The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. Viking, 2012.
- Mogen, David, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Karpinski, eds. Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993.
A Literary Scare
In a bit of a literary after-party, we read “There Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard” by M. R. James, as this had a bit of a folkloric flare and form to it. (It’s a “boo-story,” in which at the end the reader of the story jumps out at a member of the audience.)
The story itself is James’s example of what a particular tale from Shakespeare might have been like if the character had been allowed to give it rather than been interrupted just before beginning to tell the story. James says (I’m paraphrasing here) it won’t be an unfamiliar story, but one you already know and likely have already told. The formula for the tale is a man who lives by a churchyard and robs the graves of the recently interred.
One of the deceased finally comes for her belongings, and the primary chilling scene in the story has the woman creeping around his moonlit bedroom searching for her belongings. As I said this was a “boo-story,” at the end of the narrator’s related tale, the ghost’s repeated question “where is my bag of coins” eventually ends with a “YOU’VE GOT IT!” spoken in emotive caps and accompanied with a wide-eyed jump at the nearest audience-member. Try it some time; if the audience isn’t expecting it (as ours wasn’t) it makes for a memorable experience.
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