(A response to Douglas E. Winter's essay "The Pathos of Genre") by Adam Golaski

4.  A Taste for Horror is Nothing to be Embarrassed About
“The Pathos of  Genre” runs into difficulty when it attempts to talk about the horror genre without admitting that horror is a genre. Winter identifies a body of literature, names authors he considers to be horror writers and in doing so, isolates a kind of literature from other kinds of literature. In other words, Winter describes a literary genre.
Throughout “The Pathos of Genre,” horror literature is referred to as horror fiction—a term I use when talking about fiction that can be described as belonging to the horror genre. Winter writes about “writers of horror fiction,” “writing horror fiction,” “repeating horror fiction,” “horror fiction of the past decade,” and “Great horror fiction.” These phrases reference different elements that make the horror genre whole: the writers who write in the horror genre; the ability to repeat motifs and ideas that are recognized as belonging to the horror genre; a horror genre history; and finally, a canon of established greats within the horror genre. Winter identifies a unique body of writing and then ignores the implication of that identification. Only once in “The Pathos of Genre” does Winter dismiss the notion that there is such a thing as horror fiction. He writes, “so-called horror fiction.” So-called, indeed. So-called by Winter, five times, in his own essay.
Perhaps the worst illogic of Winter’s essay comes when he defines horror: “It is a progressive form of fiction, one that evolves to meet the fears and anxieties of its time.” This is a worthless definition, but what’s damning is that Winter attempts to define a “form of fiction.” Form is another word for kind, and kind is a definition of genre. Winter defines the horror genre and then writes:
The eternal debate about what constitutes “horror”—and what it should be called—proceeds from the misguided belief that a definition has significance to anyone but the middleman.

Toward the close of  “The Pathos of Genre,” Winter writes that horror is “about our relentless need to confront the unknown, the unknowable, and the emotion we hold while in its thrall.” Again, this is not a description of an emotion. This is a description of a literary genre that is about an emotion.
 We need to consider why Winter (and others) insist that horror isn’t a genre.
Winter argues in his essay that once something is labeled, it’s tamed, and there’s some truth to this. He further suggests that once something has a name, it’s easier to ignore—again, there’s truth in that. Implied in Winter’s essay is the sense that he doesn’t want to be held back; he doesn’t want limitations on what he writes. This is a cowboy fantasy; in the end, all writing is dictated by the limitations of language and by the author who uses that language. I am aggressively for pushing at those limitations, but I accept that they exist.
The insecurity that underlies “The Pathos of Genre” is understandable. Many people think the horror genre is made up entirely of prurient, adolescent male fantasy. This impression is due, in part, to the way horror is marketed by publishers and, sadly, by what many horror writers produce. The solution isn’t to disown the horror genre. The solution is to be thoughtful about presentation and to direct readers to excellent writing. We also don’t need to be embarrassed by our taste for horror. If confident that the horror genre has produced great literature and will produce great literature, if confident that we are doing what we can to write and promote fine horror fiction, then what have we to be embarrassed about?

5. A Historical Aside
If I’ve convinced you that there is a horror genre, then I feel I owe it to you to propose an alternate to the cynical view that the genre was invented by a few greedy publishers in the 1980s.
The most obvious evidence to the contrary is an essay H.P. Lovecraft began writing in 1925 and published in 1927. The first line of his essay is the most famous; the second line is important to my argument that horror has been a genre for quite some time now:
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form.

A “weirdly horrible tale” can also be called a horror story. A literary form can also be called a literary genre. A few lines down Lovecraft refers to the “weird tale” and part two of his essay is titled, “The Dawn of the Horror-Tale.”
The bulk of Lovecraft’s essay is made up of a historical overview of the genre and commentary on his contemporaries. I would describe this as establishing the genre’s place in the history of literature, and establishing a canon within the genre.
Lovecraft’s essay is called, “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” The preposition “in” means within—a category within a larger category, a literary genre. Presumably, he uses the term “supernatural” to distinguish the horror of which he speaks: he’s not writing about war novels, which depict horrors, or mystery novels or realistic fiction. A definition of supernatural means something occurring above the norm, or a departure from the norm—and thus can be made to include psychological horror—so we’re not just talking ghosts.
Lovecraft’s essay was written to help identify an extant genre. Horror was a genre Lovecraft chose to work within, a form he used to convey his ideas. He worked within and expanded the genre. Within the horror genre, he found no limits.

Winter’s essay can be found online at www.darkecho.com/darkecho/darkthot/pathos.html