The classic “Horror Topic” (things, thing, seemed, horror, hideous) almost overlaps the topic related to parts (hand, eyes, face, heads, hands).

What could explain the overlap?

Is horror linked to the body in an integral way?  Does the proximity of “horror” words to “body” words indicate a fear that is linked to the body? Or could it be indicative of bodily monstrosity? Basically, do these results indicate a fear of the body or a fear for the body? Or are characters using their bodies to sense fear?

To investigate I pulled out a selection of the paragraphs that fell in the upper left of the chart, those which scored highly in “horror” and “body parts.” I ran the chipper several times, with the texts in different orders, to make different novels sit on top, so I could get at them. I pulled out examples from eight different texts. Then I went through the paragraphs and bolded the words that I suspected put them into the horror category. I italicized the body parts. This way I could see for myself the proximity of horror words to body parts.

(My choice of words is certainly subjective. Another scholar might categorize differently. I’m not certain I match Woodchipper either. I didn’t, however, have any trouble finding either type of word in any of Woodchipper’s selected paragraphs.)

Here’s what I found:

Frankenstein (84-0242)

Mary Shelley (1818)

Urged by this impulse, I seized on the boy as he passed and drew him towards me. As soon as he beheld my form, he placed his hands before his eyes and uttered a shrill scream; I drew his hand forcibly from his face and said, ‘Child, what is the meaning of this? I do not intend to hurt you; listen to me.’

The Works of Edgar Allen Poe (2148-0456)

Edgar Allen Poe (1850)

There was an instant return of the hectic circles on the cheeks; the tongue quivered, or rather rolled violently in the mouth (although the jaws and lips remained rigid as before;) and at length the same hideous voice which I have already described, broke forth:

The Works of Edgar Allen Poe (2148-0205)

Edgar Allen Poe (1850)

I sat erect. The darkness was total. I could not see the figure of him who had aroused me. I could call to mind neither the period at which I had fallen into the trance, nor the locality in which I then lay. While I remained motionless, and busied in endeavors to collect my thought, the cold hand grasped me fiercely by the wrist, shaking it petulantly, while the gibbering voice said again:

The Woman in White (583-2109)

Wilkie Collins (1859)

“How do you know?” she said faintly. “Who showed it to you?” The blood rushed back into her face—rushed overwhelmingly, as the sense rushed upon her mind that her own words had betrayed her. She struck her hands together in despair. “I never wrote it,” she gasped affrightedly; “I know nothing about it!”

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (42-0086)

Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

“O God!” I screamed, and “O God!” again and again; for there before my eyes—pale and shaken, and half-fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death— there stood Henry Jekyll!

The Picture of Dorian Gray (174-0251)

Oscar Wilde (1890)

The suspense became unbearable. Time seemed to him to be crawling with feet of lead, while he by monstrous winds was being swept towards the jagged edge of some black cleft of precipice. He knew what was waiting for him there; saw it, indeed, and, shuddering, crushed with dank hands his burning lids as though he would have robbed the very brain of sight and driven the eyeballs back into their cave. It was useless. The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks. Then, suddenly, time stopped for him. Yes: that blind, slow-breathing thing crawled no more, and horrible thoughts, time being dead, raced nimbly on in front, and dragged a hideous future from its grave, and showed it to him. He stared at it. Its very horror made him stone.

Dracula (345-0352)

Bram Stoker (1897)

She shuddered and was silent, holding down her head on her husband’s breast. When she raised it, his white nightrobe was stained with blood where her lips had touched, and where the thin open wound in the neck had sent forth drops. The instant she saw it she drew back, with a low wail, and whispered, amidst choking sobs.

Dracula (345-0968)

Bram Stoker (1897)

There on the bed, seemingly in a swoon, lay poor Lucy, more horribly white and wan-looking than ever. Even the lips were white, and the gums seemed to have shrunken back from the teeth, as we sometimes see in a corpse after a prolonged illness.

The Turn of the Screw (209-0168)

Henry James (1898)

My lucidity must have seemed awful, but the charming creatures who were victims of it, passing and repassing in their interlocked sweetness, gave my colleague something to hold on by; and I felt how tight she held as, without stirring in the breath of my passion, she covered them still with her eyes. “Of what other things have you got hold?”

Collected Stories (31-0690)

H. P. Lovecraft (2006)

Then, after a short interval, the form in the corner stirred; and may pitying heaven keep from my sight and sound another thing like that which took place before me. I cannot tell you who he shrieked, or what vistas of unvisitable hells gleamed for a second in the black eyes crazed with fright. I can only say that I fainted, and did not stir till he himself recovered and shook me in his frenzy for someone to keep away the horror and desolation.

Collected Stories (31-3241)

H. P. Lovecraft (2006)

The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter preliminary phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and Gilman knew she was the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her bent back, long nose, and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her shapeless brown garments were like those he remembered. The expression on her face was one of hideous malevolence and exultation, and when he awaked he could recall a croaking voice that persuaded and threatened. He must meet the Black Man and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth at the centre of ultimate chaos. That was what she said. He must sign the book of Azathoth in his own blood and take a new secret name now that his independent delvings had gone so far. What kept him from going with her and Brown Jenkin and the other to the throne of Chaos where the thin flutes pipe mindlessly was the fact that he had seen the name “Azathoth” in the Necronomicon, and knew it stood for a primal evil too horrible for description.

Collected Stories (31-3201)

H. P. Lovecraft (2006)

That night Gilman saw the violet light again. In his dream he had heard a scratching and gnawing in the partitions, and thought that someone fumbled clumsily at the latch. Then he saw the old woman and the small furry thing advancing toward him over the carpeted floor. The beldame’s face was alight with inhuman exultation, and the little yellow-toothed morbidity tittered mockingly as it pointed at the heavily-sleeping form of Elwood on the other couch across the room. A paralysis of fear stifled all attempts to cry out. As once before, the hideous crone seized Gilman by the shoulders, yanking him out of bed and into empty space. Again the infinitude of the shrieking abysses flashed past him, but in another second he thought he was in a dark, muddy, unknown alley of foetid odors with the rotting walls of ancient houses towering up on every hand.

Conclusions

After mucking about in the paragraphs of these different texts, categorizing words, I don’t think my questions can be answered easily, nor do I think the link between body and horror can be simply explained. On the surface, it often seems that the characters are using their bodies to sense and to express their horror. But I don’t think that’s the whole story. Rather, it seems that the most intensely horror-filled passages contain a heightened consciousness of body and there must be more behind that body-consciousness. Whether this proximity of horror words to body words indicates horror of the body, or horror for the body would take further analysis and interpretation. I suspect that the answer lies tangled up in both options.

Monstrosity of the body is certainly an important factor in the Gothic Horror—that’s not a shocking find. Perhaps Woodchipper has failed, in this instance, to teach me anything that I didn’t already suspect. I do think the assortment of paragraphs identified by Woodchipper would give me a great place to start a more intense investigation.

For this Woodchipper analysis, I decided to limit the number of texts I would compare. (I ran these tests early on, before I was very familiar with woodchipper and at that time I was finding it very confusing to run more than a couple novels at a time.) I wondered if I could find one very typical example of the Gothic Horror and one very typical example of the Gothic non-Horror to see what they looked like side-by-side. I wanted to find the overlap and the divergences, thinking that they might be compared to the divergences Dan found in the runs he was doing simultaneously with Science Fiction. A bonus to this approach was that I would first have to determine if my groups (Gothic and Gothic Horror) even held up in Woodchipper.

First, I ran some tests on a core group of Gothic texts, which our group had established as “most Gothic.”

• The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• The Vampyre by John Polidori
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe

 *The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole was also on our list but not yet available in Woodchipper

I ran these texts against each other to get a sense of what Woodchipper would make of the Gothic. I found that the texts overlapped pretty well.

Ultimately, I decided to use Mysteries of Udolpho as my “most Gothic” text because its pattern seemed to most align with the others and also because it fit into my “Gothic non-Horror” category.

Then I chose my Horror subset of the Gothics. In addition to my sub-group’s consensus on what made horror I consulted Amazon and Goodreads, to determine which of our Gothic novels are popularly considered as such. This research led to a short list of Gothic Horror texts.

• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• Collected Stories of HP Lovecraft
• Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• Varney the Vampyre by Thomas Preskett Prest

In my woodchipper runs, I was looking to see if they would align well. I also hoped, of course, to find one text to use as an example of them all.

Related to this runs I made the following observations:

1. Frankenstein is the most divergent of this group. It pulls away largely with what I called its “existential” concerns. (life, death, existence, mind, heart)
2. The Lovecraft collection fits my stereotypes of horror best, according to Woodchipper, but it looks like an exaggeration of the other texts. It has a lot of the same lines, but they go further out. (You have to make sure its dots go on the bottom or you won’t be able to see anything else.)
3. The four that best match are Jekyl/Hyde, Dorian Gray, Varney, and Dracula.

I decided to use Varney the Vampyre as my example of a typical Gothic Horror, so I ran it against The Mysteries of Udolpho. I was not blown away by the results. Varney took some topics a bit further out than Udolpho, but didn’t diverge much beyond that.

So, what the heck, I figured I’d try out H.P. Lovecraft’s collected stories. Perhaps the most extreme and exaggerated Horror of my small collection would tell me something more interesting.

Ah! Well there are some nice divergences. Finally. So in Lovecraft, I have found some potential genre sprouts, as predicted by Moretti in “Trees.” Perhaps further investigation and a closer look at the texts could find more evidence of smaller sprouts–too small for my very limited runs–in Varney, the Vampyre or some of my other Gothic Horrors.

I seem to have learned a lot more from my earlier groupings, of 5 Gothic novels and then of 6 Horror, then from running example Gothic against example Horror. Instead, I learned some of the drawbacks of pitting texts one-on-one. It’s too easy for one text’s idiosyncrasies to take over–you may get some ideas, but you are certainly not going to prove anything.

I have not taken this investigation as far as it will go. In fact, I consider it a short, side adventure. But I’m sharing it because I think it illustrates another approach to using Woodchipper–drawbacks and all.

Late 1700s: The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk, Caleb Williams

Early 1800s: Northanger Abbey, Frankenstein, The Vampyre

Mid 1800s: Varney the Vampyre, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre

Late 1800s: The Beetle, The Time Machine, Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Carmilla

(Due to availability of texts, the last group used more than twice as many as the first. I did some test runs with a subset of the late 1800′s to see how much the large/small group would affect my results and it did not seem significant for the purposes of my analysis. I would have liked to increase size of all four groups, but I didn’t have the texts to do it.)

Splash Patterns

When I divided the gothic novels into sub-periods, I was hoping that woodchipper would find some interesting changes in the splash patterns. Based on some of Moretti’s ideas about a new genre starting out a bit shaky, then stabilizing, then branching out, I expected more variation in the earliest and latest sets than in the middle sets. I had hoped the woodchipper would prove that the early period was when the gothic was still figuring itself out (the splash patterns would be indistinct, fewer strong lines, less overlap between novels), that the middle periods were where it coalesced (strong lines, lots of overlap), and during the later period, I hoped the woodchipper would find evidence of the different subgenres diverging (strong lines, but going in different directions).

I could find some evidence to support my theory, but it was weak, and maybe I was looking too hard for it. The earliest patterns were somewhat fuzzy, but not remarkably so. The lines did get a little stronger and the overlap increased between the late 1700s and the early 1800s, but it wasn’t particularly dramatic. Then the middle 1800s definitely had the most overlapping patterns, but their lines were not noticeably sharper. I found an instance or two of nice diverging lines in the late 1800s, but also some splash patterns that were just as well aligned as earlier periods.

The following are the runs that most fit my hypothesis. Other runs don’t fit as well.

Early 1700′s: Not much definition.

Early 1800′s: Getting a little bit sharper.

Middle 1800′s: Maybe sharper yet?

Late 1800′s: Clear divergences

So I tried a more generalized chronological run, with larger groups—pre 1850 and post 1850. I didn’t think the pictures would be very good with so many novels occupying the same space at once, but I was pleasantly surprised. I could see pretty clearly that the early set overlaps much better, but has weaker lines, than the later set, which has much sharper lines and stronger divergences.

The samples I’ve chosen this time are quite typical of the set. The only problem is the splash pattern is much more difficult to see, as the titles overlap it.

Before 1850: Pretty fuzzy, but overlapping well

After 1850: Sharper but more divergent

So my larger groupings seem to illustrate the way the Gothic genre may have started out fuzzy, but then crystalized, just in time to diverge, as Moretti suggests genres behave in “Trees.” However, woodchipper was not able, in my runs, to separate the crystallization step from the diverging step.

Topics

I was also interested in the topics that the woodchipper found and had some luck finding patterns with my four chronologically based sub-periods of the Gothic novel. First, the most consistent topic, which appears at about the same rate in all periods is the one I’m calling “Good Conduct.” Some other trends emerge across time. For instance, I found a handful of topics that start out strong but fade through time. “Crime” is extremely prevalent in late 1700s, but then disappears after that. “Grief,” “Nature” and “Character” are very prevalent in both the late 1700s and early 1800s, but disappear as topics in the mid and late 1800s.  “Hope,” “Escape,” and “Goodness” are all most common in the earliest parts of the period, fade slowly, and are completely gone by the time of the late 1800’s.

Other topics move in the opposite direction, to become stronger over time. “Doubt” occurs throughout the period, but is not all that prevalent in the late 1700s, early and middle 1800s. It swells remarkable in the late 1800s. Both “Faces” and “Aristocracy” rise to prominence in middle and late 1800s, but are not seen before then. “Knowledge” first appears (just once) in mid-1800’s, but then becomes very prevalent in late 1800s. “House Interior” belongs with this group, gaining momentum in later years. It occurs once in the late 1700s, disappears in the early 1800s, but become extremely strong in the middle and late 1800s.

“Time” is the only topic in which I can see a marked ebb and flow. It first appears in the early 1800s, stays prevalent in the middle 1800’s and sticks around, but is less prevalent in the late 1800s.

The topic of “Existence” is very prevalent in the early 1800’s and occurs only there. I am sure, however, that this is due to one novel’s obsession with the topic (Frankenstein). My samples aren’t large enough to stop one novel from throwing the results and so I’m skeptical of other one-period topics, such as “Hearing,” and “Sky”(only middle 1800s), “House exteriors,” “Mind,” and “Sleep” (only late 1800s).

So then, what can I make of the way certain topics build over time and others fade? The topics that start strong then fade are “Crime,” “Nature,” “Character,” “Hope,” “Escape,” and “Goodness.” The topics that build up later in the period are “Doubt,” “Faces,” “Aristocracy,” “Knowledge,” and “House Interior.”

An easy observation is the way “Hope” gives way to “Doubt” as the two can be seen as opposites. Perhaps in some ways the gothic becomes less optimistic through the years.

These results also suggest to me that the early Gothic was more concerned with the extremes of human behavior. Think of the powerful extremes of “Nature.” Then think about the way a person’s “character” might move between “Crime” and “Goodness.” In contrast, the later topics appear more ambiguous to me. Maybe the later novelists are making more nuanced arguments. There may be a longing for certainty or “Knowledge,” but “Doubt” suggests there no real way to get it. Then I think about the way you might use  “Faces” and “House Interiors” to find or impart knowledge—it would be an interpretive act. It makes me think of a less imperious, more sophisticated search for truth—perhaps even understanding it as less certain and more interpretive.

This idea appeals to me–that of gothic novels moving, over time, from certain judgment of good and evil toward a more nuanced and complicated approach to knowledge and understanding. The woodchipper has not proved this movement, of course. But it suggests a direction for further study.

But that’s not at all what I meant when I first blurted out my half-formed idea.

I’ve thought about it more and I think I was trying to accumulate similar questions in the subject’s mind to test whether or not the subject created a narrative out of it. My idea was that for a human subject, related questions would line up in the brain to become parts of a story, even if random unrelated questions were interspersed between them. My thinking was that forming narratives, linking events (or questions) first into causal relations and then into meaningful stories, was a uniquely human habit. I have no idea, really, if a replicant could do this. But I think I was clinging to it as an idea because I see it as so very human.

Of course, this idea of mine would have failed, just as the questions should have failed, which is in fact the success of the experiment. We don’t have a definition of humanity, much less a test of it.

But the narrative as proof is still intriguing to me, especially as I see the relationship it has to memories—both real and fabricated. In Blade Runner, replicants need memories, even if they are made up, to develop a story of themselves and therefore to create their own sense of identity and subjectivity. The ability to do this, create a story from a sequence, might not be proof of humanity, but it still might be the way that anyone—human or replicant—creates personhood.

The ability of the human (and newer model replicant) to create narrative from memory is crucial to identity and subjectivity. Memory, whether we call it prosthesis or not, and whether it is based on actual events or simulated, creates a trajectory. The brain puts memories into a sequence, (often somewhat linearly but not definitively so), and that sequence creates a trajectory of a life. It creates a past that can be carried through the present and lets an individual carry a sense of self through time. Without memories there could be no sense of a unique and individuated self that stays together through time.

The trajectory created by memories creates a past, spreading out from the present in a straight(-ish) line. The line doesn’t stop at the present, however, but carries through to the future. The trajectory which leads to the future also leads to death, which creates the dread of death. Without the trajectory created by the narrative of the past (which is created by the sequence of memories), you can’t know of your own death. And you must suspect an impending death in order to dread it. But there’s more to it. The trajectory is also required to see death as a bad thing. If memories, which are unreal, become a part of you and feel real, think about how they reflect across the line of the present you. Death destroys that future and therefore destroys a part of you that currently exists.

In my current understanding of memory as prosthesis (which is not very sophisticated) I think these ideas apply to the way we can see memory as prosthesis and certainly to the way “the future” is really another type of prosthesis. I’m fully expecting later course to material to contradict and complicate these opinions.

It reminds me of Mary Shelley’s waking dream. There’s so much skepticism surrounding it. Yet, she got it just right; she has described exactly how it feels, to me, to begin a story.

My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together…. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me…. Swift as light and cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. ‘I have found it!’ (196)

That’s the way it feels to write a story—at least for some writers. You feed your brain. You read lots of books. You have intelligent conversations. You pay attention to the world around you. Then your subconscious pieces it all together and presents you with an image or a scene or a “waking dream.” You take that dream and you write it down. Then you analyze it, try to figure out what it means, go back in, and fill in the holes. Later, you’ll do a little more stitching, when you link it to other scenes, images, and waking dreams that your brain has mysteriously conjured up for you.

Shelley’s description of the dream does not negate or deny any of the other research she did for the novel—either the reading and general exposure to ideas she had before she started it, or any intentional manipulation she did after the draft was on its way. In fact, the dream happened because of the way she fed her mind.  And, of course, early influences and later editing are crucial to the novel. However, that dream can still feel like the defining moment of creating a story. It’s the exciting part. It’s the moment the story comes “alive”! Shelley very likely has an agenda in presenting the story’s genesis the way she does, but that doesn’t prove that her description is inaccurate. Literary scholars’ frequent skepticism regarding Mary Shelley’s dream seems somewhat misguided to me. But the fact that they are concerned about the story’s genesis at all (any story’s genesis, really) is quite revelatory; it parallels Victor Frankenstein’s quest.

That type of quest, in which an individual plays god by molding a creature and setting it, somehow, to life, is not unique to Frankenstein. One ancient example is that of the golem, from Jewish folklore. These monsters are not animated by technology or alchemy, but through prayer or incantation. Other similar examples are haunted dolls—animated by ghosts or evil spirits. And horror tales of re-animated dead, for example, abound. Human beings, it seems, have not required Frankenstein’s “science” (whether it be pseudo- or actual) to speculate about and caution against, playing God. Modern technology, however–computers especially–have given the old tales new “life.” Cylons, cyborgs, evil robots, the matrix—the list is long and varied and I’m not geek enough (yet) to do it justice.

Scholars debate the source of the creature’s “life” in Frankenstein. Is it science or alchemy? Technology or something closer to mysticism? Mary Shelley’s novel doesn’t explain precisely how the animation works; Victor is tight-lipped. Movie versions speculate according to their own agendas. There’s a ray beyond ultraviolet! Amniotic fluid! Lightning!

Mary Shelley’s waking dream draws all of these questions of life’s genesis together for me, and shows me how much they are related. That debate over whether it is technology or alchemy that animates Frankenstein is a telling one, just like the controversy over how Mary Shelley generated her ideas, just like the mystery of bringing any story to life. So the mystery of the spark of life, of what it is that animates, is very similar to the mystery of writing stories and novels. It happens. Stories come alive. But how? What, precisely, has made the novel’s monster live? And what makes the novel itself live in the public’s imagination? What draws us to keep asking? It seems to me this question has a lot to do with the interest in how Mary Shelley wrote her book, about what animated it—was it a waking dream or careful research and planning? But why is it so important? Is it because the scholars are also searching for that animating principle? In life? In fiction? Victor’s quest for the elixir of life is like our quest to understand how he did it in the book and is also like our quest to understand where the very spark of an idea for the story came from. Are we all trying to play god?

It seems to me that the “glitches” I enjoy might appeal to me because they make the machine feel fallible and therefore human. Mixing up people’s pictures, mis-guessing the next word—those are things I might do. And it’s pretty human to sympathize with a consciousness that feels to be “like me.” And there it is–these mistakes make me recognize technology as a consciousness. And it makes me giggle! Humor after all, seems to be a mix of that which is delightful and that which is terrifying. It’s like the uncanny. The familiar and the unfamiliar, in the same space. The shiver, or laugh, seems to emanate from the inability to understand which one is covering the other—which is the real and which is the costume. Is the technological consciousness friendly and familiar? Or is it taking over? (Could the takeover be parental or for our own good, as suggested by Brautigan? I feel the shiver/giggle again at that idea, which seems to repeat the same uncanny trick.)

And now that Freud is brought into my ramblings, I can talk about the other effect of those charmingly frightening glitches. Regarding a human consciousness, we tend to believe that slip-ups reveal truth. Whether we learned the technique directly from Freud, from popular culture’s appropriation of his ideas, or whether the instinct is much older than either, we tend to watch for the subconscious to poke through and reveal the great truth of who we are. In this way, a computer glitch becomes the technological subconscious poking out at me.

I mentioned in class that I was delighted by the way my iPhone mixes up my friend’s pictures. It’s funny because it’s silly. It’s funny because it brings technology down to a human level. And it’s terrifying because it brings human beings down to the level of the machine. This happens because of the recognition of consciousness in what I want to be only a tool. (I see the errors as more evidence of human-like consciousness, by the way, than a computer’s common trick of, say, computing.)

In the particular glitch I mentioned, the slip up goes further. It tells me that the computer can’t tell people apart. It mixes us up! We are numbers or objects to the brain that we have built. So as I recognize a frightening humanity in the machine, I know that it does not recognize mine.