Salvador Dalí occasionally paid in restaurants with checks on which he left signed vignettes. An ordinary means of payment became an art object through Dalí’s signature. For the recipient, this created a dilemma between the standard procedure and the value-creation logic of the art market.

A Look Inside the Black Box

Turning Danger into Performance – Horror in the Soul’s Chamber and the Accuracy of Oral Transmission

Dear J., regarding Albrecht Altdorfer:

His paintings possess spatial complexity, atmospheric depth, and an overwhelming density of the world. What is interesting about him is not a lack of perspective, but the fact that central perspective had not yet attained exclusive sovereignty over the organization of the image.

The early industrial production of Gothic novels is concerned with something else. Their characters often seem psychologically flat because their emotions are not the medium of horror. Horror nests in things.

In modern forms of horror—from Freud to Hitchcock, from Poe to Stephen King—terror dwells in the soul’s chamber. The mother is the monster. The stream of consciousness overflows its banks. Its Niagara Falls are repression, trauma, and psychic fragmentation. Even external threats are often readable as reflections of inner conflicts.

The Accuracy of Oral Transmission

Perhaps the early Gothic novels are the last outgrowths of an older narrative tradition that still originated in the world of fairy tales and oral transmission.

Why do fairy tales possess this peculiar formulaic quality, these repetitions, these stereotypical figures and turns of phrase?

The first answer is simple: because they were made not for reading, but for remembering. Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm were interested not only in the content of fairy tales but also in the code of transmission. They believed they could find in them traces of an ancient folk culture that had been passed down orally for centuries. Their observation of formal stability remains remarkable.

In an oral culture, the formula serves a different function than it does in any literate culture. This explains the formulaic building blocks:

Once upon a time...
And if they have not died...
Then he set out on his journey...
Three days and three nights...

Such formulas are memory anchors. The same applies to the characters. The wicked stepmother is not psychologically imprecise. She is functionally precise. Every listener immediately knows the role she occupies within the structure of the story. The character does not first need to be developed.

Orality favors types and dispenses with individuating nuances. According to Walter Benjamin, traditional storytelling conveys experiences, whereas the modern novel unfolds individual inner worlds.

Fairy tales are highly compressed. They store situations. The information they convey is not: How did the heroine feel? but rather: What happened after the mother died?

And now the connection to the early Gothic novel becomes visible. The first Gothic novels still possess the old economy of information. They preserve constellations.

A widow without protection.
An endangered heir.
A tyrannical guardian.
A young woman in dependency.
A dispossessed son.

These are transformed fairy-tale functions. Formulaic redundancy corresponds to a technique through which a society preserves experiences across generations.

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Fairy tales have little interest in inner life. The wicked stepmother is not wicked because we know her childhood wounds. The king does not suffer from attachment disorders. The witch has no trauma biography. Characters are defined by their position within a constellation. They are nodes within a social and symbolic structure.

The horror does not lie within them. It lies in the relations themselves.

The older narrative world asks: What happened to a person? The modern one asks: What has become of a person?

In the first case, the source of terror lies outside the character. In the second, it lies within. In the next stage, psychology enters the scene. The wolf embodies instinct; the witch embodies trauma. The castle becomes a cipher for the unconscious.

Once Again

The old conflicts revolve around social security. A widow loses her means of existence; stepchildren must fear for their inheritance. A guardian abuses his power. An aristocrat disposes of human beings as though they were property. A family is crushed by social prejudice. The actors are trapped within their circumstances, disenfranchised, persecuted, and exposed. Horror emerges from asymmetrical power relations.

This is why the cast sometimes appears surprisingly functional. They suffer from inferiority within a social force field. The novel does not ask: What does she feel? Rather, it asks: What can she do? Who has power over her? To whom belong the house, the money, the name, the child?

From a modern perspective, this can seem schematic and overdetermined. Violence is not mediated symbolically and psychologically. People do not get into trouble because they are traumatized; they get into trouble because society deprives them of the air they need to breathe.

We live in a culture that translates almost every problem into psychological terms. Poverty, dependency, alienation, and political powerlessness are described in categories of identity, resilience, self-image, and mental health. More on that in a moment.