The New Pathetic Fallacy

Caspar David Friedrich, Cloister Cemetary in the Snow

I offer this inconsequential thought after reading Dean Koontz's Darkfall:

The new pathetic fallacy of literature ( "the lights went out"), which one experiences reading weird, suspense and horror stories, is a simple inversion of the old imaginative ideal of Romanticism: it is claustrophobic, technological and introverted, instead of uplifting, natural and extroverted. Howard Philip Lovecraft, the father of modern horror, first established this in his 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Literature. It was the first complete historical and critical effort to establish the whole new tradition and poetics of a modern pulp genre: Weird Literature. He wrote about a dark primal vision for supernatural horror in literature based on a deeper cosmic and evolutionary vision: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." His novel evolutionary perspective caught on later with modern-day writers like Dean Koontz, Stephen King, etc. because it was imaginatively compatible with the unconscious experience of modern electric society. As Marshall McLuhan described in Understanding Media: "With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no loner depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism." When electricity fails, as we experienced a few years ago during the blackout in Ontario, our nerves begin to fail. The dangerous potential for the human being of the electric age is to regress into a catatonic, tribal shellshock described by McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy: "unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once moved into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and super-imposed co-existence."