Tomáš Erhart
“There is, in every event, whether lived or told, always a hole or a gap, often more than one. If we allow ourselves to get caught in it, we find it opening onto a void that, once we have slipped into it, we can never escape.” (Abbott, 2016: 13)
This is originally a quote from Brian Evenson, which was used by another writer of contemporary horror, Philip Fracassi, as the motto for the introduction to his collection of short stories – Behold the Void. Stories in it recount seemingly ordinary events, such as a grandmother’s funeral or a visit to a swimming pool, but then a rift opens (once even literally), filling the text with something dark and frightening. With a slightly looser interpretation, where we understand the crack as a gap in the narrative, Evenson’s words may describe one thing typical of horror narratives. Many horror stories do not explain the origin or nature of supernatural events that take place in them, leaving a gap leaking darkness.
The “egregious” gap
In Real Mysteries: Narrative and the Unknowable (2016), H. Porter Abbott writes about the gaps that are always present in every line of a book, which the reader must gradually fill to form a complete picture (referencing W. Iser or M. L. Pratt). Sentence by sentence, word by word, the reader fills in the surrounding details of situations that are not explicitly stated in the text. It seems that filling in these gaps is an inner need of ours. For Abbott, however, it is primarily those gaps that cannot be so easily filled that are crucial.
So, setting aside all the permanent narrative gaps or ellipses that are necessary to exclude the irrelevant, the question remains: what happens when we come across a narrative gap, the filling of which is vital to the narrative, but which cannot be filled without “amending” the text by selective underreading or supplemental overreading? This is the gap that not only keeps the narrative from closure but at the same time aggravates the need for closure. Is it possible, then, not to fill such a narrative gap? Can you cognize its emptiness? Should you? And what it would feel like, if you could? (Abbott, 2016: 112)
This gap in the narrative, which cannot be filled but at the same time needs to be filled for the story to be complete in a certain sense, is what Abbott calls an “egregious gap.” He uses a few examples to show different types. One of them is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – the famous story of a journey up the River Congo towards darkness, in the form of the mad ivory trader Kurtz. The gap in the narrative seems to be that Conrad created Kurtz as a more or less symbolic character, embodying evil, but he does not provide any clues for understanding the psychology of this evil.
The heart is dark. We gape into the tangle of this man’s soul, which has the quality of black hole, ever widening, ever mysterious, its gravity sucking us back into the book itself. What intrigues us, ultimately is not what we know but what we do not know and yearn to discover. (O’Brien 1991: 180)
Abbott borrows this assessment of Conrad’s novel from Tim O’Brien, another writer who has written a novel that offers, among other things, a second example of an “egregious” gap. In O’Brien’s book In the Lake of the Woods, Vietnam veteran John Wade wakes up one day to find that his wife has disappeared. During the retrospective narrative, we learn of several possibilities of what might have happened, but none of them are definitively confirmed, so each reader can lean toward a different one. Unlike Heart of Darkness, which is more about filling the gap with some psychological, metaphysical, or symbolic explanation of the nature of things, in O’Brien’s story about John Wade, the gap is much clearer and perhaps even more “outrageous.” We simply lack clues as to what really happened.
What is in the dark room?
“Fail Safe,” one of the stories from Philip Fracassi’s collection Behold the Void, offers a great example of the “egregious gap” (and it’s also being adapted into a feature film). The narrator of the story is a twelve-year-old boy whose mother suffers from a mysterious condition that causes her to transform into a dangerous monster from time to time. The boy’s father, with the help of unnamed friends, has created a room in the basement where they chain her up for several days until she transforms back. Part of the security system is a timer that releases gas into the room if no one turns it off within 24 hours of closing the security door. This system works for some time until, one night, the boy finds his terrified father in the control room with cameras. The father opens the door (which is against all the rules) and enters the room, telling his son to watch the monitor and let him out only if he waves at the camera and his mother is still chained up. But after a while, all the monitors go dark and the lonely boy does not know what to do. What follows are stressful hours until the gas is released. And when there are only seconds left on the timer, the son starts to count:
I’m tired, but I smile. I’ll be thirteen soon. I will change. One way or the other.
…nine…eight…seven…six…
I hear the faint sound of frantic scratching on the other side of the door. I can hear it through the steel. Desperate, monstrous. My parents clawing for life, maybe. Or something else. Something I haven’t thought of.
I love them so much.
…three…two…one…
I push the large black button, feel the click of the release vibrate up my arm. Metal slides on metal, the heavy door hisses.
I pull it open. The room is pitch black. Silent.
I step inside, ready for whatever waits.
There’s a shushing sound. The darkness is total. I move deeper into the room, confident.
It’s almost my birthday.
Something moves toward me. I lift my chin, spread out my arms.
No matter what comes…
I close my eyes tight.
…I will be a man. (Fracassi 2017: 186)
The boy’s decision ends the story. There are more gaps that cannot be easily filled, but there are two fundamental things about which the reader is forced to guess:
First, what is the illness or curse afflicting the narrator’s mother? There are several clues in the text (regular transformations, transmission by bite, swollen blue veins, black tongue) that may give readers familiar with the genre a hint. They may guess that the monster, into which the boy’s mother transforms, shares certain similarities with creatures they already know, whether it be the classic werewolf or another shapeshifter.
The second mystery is what happens after the last lines: will the boy be torn apart by his monstrous parents, or will he find their dead bodies, or perhaps meet them in a miraculously healed form? The main character ponders all these possibilities, and the reader can choose one or none, similar to the answers about the disappearance of the wife in The Lake of the Woods.
Feeling of the weird and eerie
Fracassi’s “Fail Safe” is just one example. Such “incompleteness” of the story is not some kind of experimental storytelling; it appears in many of his other works, as well as the works of other authors. The “egregious gap” can be considered as a feature of certain genres including horror. It raises the question: Why is the gap needed in the horror story? The first answer that comes to mind is that it preserves fear of the unknown. However, maybe a better explanation would be that the unknown is more fascinating than the scary – and that it evokes the feeling of weird or eerie.
What the weird and the eerie have in common is a preoccupation with the strange. The strange — not the horrific. The allure that the weird and the eerie possess is not captured by the idea that we “enjoy what scares us.” It has, rather, to do with a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience. This fascination usually involves a certain apprehension, perhaps even dread — but it would be wrong to say that the weird and the eerie are necessarily terrifying. (Fisher, 2017: 6)
This fascination for what is beyond our experience is powerfully evoked by the horror genre, and gaps in the narrative only strengthen it. It seems, then, that what H. Porter Abbott calls an “egregious” gap in the narrative is a typical feature in horror stories. The use of this kind of gap is connected to what allures us in the weird and eerie (as it’s described by Mark Fisher). While the “egregious” gap may be merely frustrating in some genres, in horror and weird fiction it is something that correlates perfectly with genre expectations.
References:
H. Porter Abbott (2016). Real Mysteries: Narrative and the Unknowable. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Fisher, Mark (2016). The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books.
Fracassi, Philip. (2017). Behold the Void. California: Journalstone.
O’Brien, Tim (1991), “The Magic Show,” in Robert Pack and Jay Parini (eds), Writers on Writing, Middlebury: Middlebury College Press, pp. 175–83.
Tomáš Erhart is studying for a PhD at Masaryk University in Brno, Czechia, specializing in Slavic literatures with a focus mostly on Eastern Slavic countries. He has a master’s degree in Russian literature. His master’s thesis was a genre analysis of Svetlana Alexievich’s works. In his PhD studies, he focuses more on popular genre literature and other kinds of popular culture, like video games or TV shows. His thesis is centred around one popular sci-fi genre in Russia and how it is influenced by ideology.
