THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK

THE NIGHTMARE NETWORK (https://www.ligotti.net/index.php)

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I'm also focused (or fixated, more like) on atmosphere although I don't see it as a primarily literary phenomenon, nor do I see it as being connected with the supernatural - or at least not the explicit supernatural of most ghost stories and horror novels. In fact, atmosphere and the supernatural cannot coexist anymore than a light sponge cake can be baked with lead. The moment the supernatural enters, atmosphere is destroyed. A "weird atmosphere" is equally destructive of atmosphere.

I think atmosphere results from an enlarged/expanded sense of possibility that is nevertheless inherently and/or terminally interrupted - in the same way that upon awakening, people seem able to remember only the last scene of the epic dream saga they were involved in, without being able to remember the beginning, middle or most of the context. Along the same lines, I think children are more sensitive to atmosphere because their experience of the world is terminally lacking in context; they've entered the play in the second scene of the last act, as it were, and so the reasons for the great movements and emotions around them are obscure. The world hasn't yet been reduced to mental shorthand. The most atmospheric artworks I can think of are random fragments of anime I saw on TV as a five year old, the endings of films whose names I don't know now, video games whose names I also can't remember, etc. I think consistency is the enemy of atmosphere.

As far as writing goes, words are already weighted (contaminated?) with associations. To quote the Turkey City Lexicon:

Pushbutton Words

Words used to evoke a cheap emotional response without engaging the intellect or the critical faculties. Commonly found in story titles, they include such bits of bogus lyricism as “star,” “dance,” “dream,” “song,” “tears” and “poet,” cliches calculated to render the SF audience misty-eyed and tender-hearted.

Fortunately language is still relatively young and most people haven't done much with it so it's easier to pull off atmosphere than most people think...it just takes an awareness of all the places the words have been. Robbe-Grillet's project involved this, which is why the Mark Tansey painting is explicitly called Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every Object in Sight. Put the words in your own mouth to clean them off, then spit out atmosphere.

http://i61.tinypic.com/ndox3.jpg

Maybe you have a better word for it but I'd certainly use "atmosphere" for my favourite supernatural spinechillers (maybe part of the reason it's hard to discuss is that people use it to describe any number of moods and places, like clubs, bars and restaurants).

Although the revealed terror moments are a sort of interruption of the atmosphere, I wouldn't say it stops or dissipates, I feel like I'm plunged deeper into the atmosphere covered in a distinctly different feeling and it then resumes to something similar as it was before with little aftershocks wriggling about. Like the terror is the nucleus that is different but important to the overall atmosphere.

Not that you need terror to create atmosphere, I'm just talking about my desired spell found in terrifying moments that makes you feel like you're in an alternate reality (sometimes I think life feels more real when you're spooked and goosebumped), it's one of my goals to feel like this as often as possible but it's harder to come by as you get older.

Have to confess that I love pushbutton words. They're very cheap, hucksters can use them but just thinking about a title like Terror Creatures From The Grave gives me more pleasure and inspiration than so many actual stories. See also black metal titles.

I didn't feel much atmosphere as a child except regularly being terrified at night, it was age 13-23 when I was really able to notice and savour atmosphere. Getting desensitized was a bummer.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Justin Isis (Post 113963)

I think atmosphere results from an enlarged/expanded sense of possibility

I mean this is exactly how I feel when I'm terrified of imaginary things. Imagination becomes way more powerful and you start worrying about things you know are not real threats.

This somehow seems relevant:

Quote:

To pass freely through open doors, it is necessary to respect the fact that they have solid frames. This principle, by which the old professor had lived, is simply a requisite of the sense of reality. But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justifications for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility.

Whoever has it does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not. The consequences of so creative a disposition can be remarkable, and may, regrettably, often make what people admire seem wrong, and what is taboo permissible, or, also, make both a matter of indifference. Such possibilists are said to inhabit a more delicate medium, a hazy medium of mist, fantasy, daydreams, and the subjunctive mood. Children who show this tendency are dealt with firmly and warned that such persons are cranks, dreamers, weaklings, know-it-alls, or troublemakers.

...And since the possession of qualities assumes a certain pleasure in their reality, we can see how a man who cannot summon up a sense of reality even in relation to himself may suddenly, one day, come to see himself as a man without qualities.

-- Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Thanks for all the comments. I've been meaning to get back to this thread with some thoughts, but haven't had time. I hope I can do so before long, however.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Justin Isis (Post 113963)

Another one for The Selected TLO Postings of Justin Isis.

Testimonial:
As for the the half heard song lyrics and endings to films you caught 3/4 of the way through---utter fact: to witness them whole is to rent them asunder. One instance that readily comes to mind: I caught the ending of Cronenberg's Shivers as a child (the pool scene) on late-night tv in unfamiliar surroundings (atmosphere conducive all/on its own). I thought it must surely be a great horror film. I can now apprehend that it was the possible context of the scene--not knowing same, that--built up in mind as the years went by and then, one day, I blundered upon Shivers in a discount VHS liquidation place. I viewed it in all its grainy, seedy, seventies entirety and it did irretrievably lose the eeriness and disjointed fascination the child's mind had imbued the scene (I had originally caught out of context) with.

Kafka. For me Kafka's creation of atmosphere has always been highly ignored despite the many graduate theses written on him. I remember reading In The Penal Colony, the first Kafka story I ever read, and thinking that the atmosphere he created was downright suffocating and choking. It was so brilliant and powerful. I see this across his works, especially his longer ones like The Trial and The Castle. It's the best thing about Kafka in my opinion.

For Lovecraft, as he often pointed out, successful atmosphere was always cumulative. Every carefully chosen word, incident, character contributed to it. In The Dunwich Horror, it would seem, we have two main characters: the wonderfully realized Wilbur and the hamlet itself. But as we learn more about Dunwich, with its history of unspeakable crimes, foul odors, occult traditions, surrounding hills with hints of human sacrifice, we begin to suspect that these two entities are really one. And when Wilbur passes, something even more terrible takes his place...

"Japanese music is above all a music of reticence, of atmosphere. When recorded, or amplified by a loudspeaker, the greater part of its charm is lost. In conversation, too, we prefer the soft voice, the understatement. Most important of all are the pauses. Yet the phonograph and radio render these moments of silence utterly lifeless."

"And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway. The 'mysterious Orient' of which Westerners speak probably refers to the uncanny silence of these dark places. And even we as children would feel an inexpressible chill as we peered into the depths of an alcove to which the sunlight had never penetrated. Where lies the key to this mystery? Ultimately it is the magic of shadows. Were the shadows to be banished from its corners, the alcove would in that instant revert to mere void."

- Junichiro Tanazaki, In Praise of Shadows (trans. by Harper & Seidensticker, 1977)

I think that atmosphere in literature might be relatively easy to recognize but very hard to define. For example, it is obvious to me that HPL's dream-cycle and Dunsanian stories all share a certain kind of atmosphere: they take place at the intersection of longing and melancholy and under the illumination of a perpetually setting sun. If you ask me to explain any better, I will probably find another poetic formulation that will appear bombastic or pompous to someone who has not read the stories but that will immediately be understood by someone who has.

In the same vein, I offer that Borges, Eco, Calvino and Paul Auster breath within the same atmosphere in many of their works, an atmosphere I would designate as one of intellectual wonderlust or delight. I would then go a step further and state this atmosphere to have a tangible equivalent in the Wunderkammer or Cabinets of Curiosities of the Baroque Era naturalists.

The novels of the existentialist philosophers also have a shared atmosphere, one that is saturated by the insidious indifference [often perceived as hostility] of the inanimate. And perhaps the best example of this is to be found not in something written by Camus or Sartre, but in The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles, where the manifestation of the natural is always hostile, alien and suffocating.

There are two collections of short stories by Michael Ende [of the Neverending Story fame], the Mirror in Mirror and the Prisons of Freedom, the former having the additional distinction of being somewhat illustrated by the author's father who was a surrealist painter of some renown, which might be exercises at retelling a dream in the form of a parable or perhaps recasting a fable in the form of a prose-poem or indeed turning a painting into a tableaux of words.

I could go on but I don't want to bore you to death.