Flatline_Constructs 4.8 A Closing Parable: Hyperfiction and In the Mouth of Madness

Sutter Cane: “This book will drive you absolutely mad. It will make the world ready for the Change. It takes its power from new readers. That’s the point, belief. Once people begin to lose the difference between fantasy and reality, the Old Ones can begin their journey back. The more people who believe, the faster the journey. And by the way the other books have sold, this one is bound to be very, very popular.”

Deleuze-Guattari: “If the writer is a sorcerer it is because writing is a becoming…” (TP 240)

We will conclude with an analysis of a film which is very much about a strange-looped authorship relation, John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness (1994). In the Mouth of Madness is a film which is about fiction as contagion, fiction as an artificial intelligence, fiction which makes itself real. In the Mouth of Madness is perhaps the only film to merit the description hyper-Horror.[308] It is a film, that is to say, about Horror, which is by no means a parody or pastiche. Rather, it exploits the conventions of the genre – descriptions of which it implexes into the diegesis – to amplify, instead of disintensifying, feelings of dread and disquiet. In Hofstadter’s terms, it is a film which perceives – and recursively processes – its own “programming” as a Horror film, without attempting to trascend itself. In the Mouth of Madness takes on all the themes familiar from Baudrillard we discussed above – especially the idea of the fictional invading and destroying the Real – but it does so more in the spirit of Gothic Materialism than in the terms of Baudrillard’s melancholia.

Carpenter’s Lovecraft-saturated film is a deliberate redescription of the Horror genre in terms of capitalism and schizophrenia. Beginning with shots of pulp Horror novels being mass produced, it is a film about crazes, about “fictional quantities” which erode the reality principle. The film’s anti-hero is the insurance man, John Trent. Trent is hired by a publishing company to investigate the disappearance of their most successful novelist, the Horror writer, Sutter Cane. Trent is warned – in what he thinks of as a hype – that reading Cane’s work has a powerful, destabilizing effect on some readers. But, contemptuous of the Horror genre and confident in his own subjectitvity (“I’m my own man; no-one pulls my strings”), Trent laughs this off, displaying, at first, a bluff G. E. Moore-type empiricism (“I know what’s real”).

Following a set of clues, Trent is drawn to the town of Hobbs End[309]: a town, it was previously thought, which had never existed outside Cane’s fiction. Naturally, Trent at first assumes that he has been set up as part of a publicity stunt: Cane’s disappearance, even Hobbs End itself, have been fabricated as part of a particularly elaborate simulation. But he learns that, whilst Cane’s disappearance was, initially, planned, the subsequent events had spiraled out of control. Aspects of Cane’s fiction had begun to make themselves real. Meanwhile, the socius is becoming gripped by Cane-mania – crazed mobs hungry for a fix of Cane’s prose have beset bookshops, turning them into riot zones. Trent, meanwhile, becomes subject to strange glitches in space and time, and increasingly loses his grip on reality. This reaches its schizophrenic pitch when he meets Cane, who tells him that he is merely a character in the new novel he is writing, entitled, of course, In the Mouth of Madness (Cane to Trent: “I think therefore you are”). Ultimately, Trent – now incarcerated in an asylum - no longer tries to hold onto any solid sense of reality, no longer seeks the truth behind appearances, nor aims to distinguish fantasy from reality. He has been drawn into the hyperreal: a reality fatally contaminated by fiction.

Cane is a composite Horror novelist: the SC initials recall the SK of Stephen King, while what we hear of Cane’s prose – in theme and style – closely resembles Lovecraft (a favourite author of Deleuze-Guattari’s, of course, who is invoked in a number of places in A Thousand Plateaus). In an overblown, typically Lovecraftian style, Cane invokes the return of the “Old Ones” Lovecraft had continually foretold. As with Lovecraft, for Cane Horror resides not so much in the empirical encountering of “hideous unholy abominations” as in the transcendental trauma such encounters produce: faced with such anomalies, it becomes impossible to hold onto any stable sense of reality[310]. Horror, that is to say, cannot be disassociated from schizophrenia. But what Cane adds to Lovecraft is a stress on the role of Horror fiction as an agent of this process. Cane’s novels, as he explains to Trent, provide a necessary prerequisite – the softening of the boundaries between the fictional and the Real – “for the Old Ones to return.” Initially, this seems like another version of McHale-Barth’s “analogy of the author with God”: but, in the end, Cane sees himself as a machine-part of an impersonal process. He is merely a conduit through which the Old Ones’ schizo-signal can pass. Although he “thought [he] was making it all up”, they – the Old Ones, the creatures from the Other Side - were “giving him the power to make it real. And now it is. All those horrible slimy things trying to get back in. They’re all true.” A strange loop is in place. What should be inside Cane’s texts – the Old Ones as fictional presence – are in fact responsible for the existence of the texts, the fictions, themselves. It is they who were, secretly, the agents behind his fiction, not Cane himself. And their line of flight is constituted precisely by a fiction becoming real (and a real becoming-fictional). “Do you want to know the problem with […] religion?” Cane asks Trent. “It’s never known how to convey the anatomy of Horror. Religion seeks discipline through fear. No-one’s ever believed it enough to make it real. The same can’t be said of my works.” When Trent objects that “books aren’t real” , Cane points out that his books “have sold over a billion copies. I’ve been translated into eighteen languages. More people believe in my work than believe in the Bible.”

“That’s what matters,” Cane tells Trent, “belief.” In a sense, though, the emphasis on belief places us back in an economy that Cane’s novels have dismantled, since it seems that the process of fiction making itself real is more dependent upon hype than it is on “belief”. The Old Ones hype themselves back into existence, emerging only when humanity’s picture of reality has fallen apart. Yet Cane’s sense of belief, naturally, has a special skew, which tends towards an equation with hype. It is “belief” in a cybernetically active, rather than an epistemologically passive sense. It is belief in this sense that Deleuze-Guattari refer to when they write of the “beliefs and desires” that “are the basis of every society, because they are flows and as such are ‘quantifiable’; they are veritable social Quantities.” (TP 219) Similarly, as the epidemeological spread of Cane’s fiction shows, Quantities can become “beliefs.” To believe in Cane’s novels is to contribute – via intense feedback - to the destruction of any stable sense of the Real.

Like Deleuze-Guattari, In the Mouth of Madness participates in the hyperfictionalization of Lovecraft. In treating Lovecraft as an authority or source (rather than as just as a literary text to be the subject of readings), A Thousand Plateaus shifts him from being a “fantasy” author. The treatment of particular Lovecraft formulations as if real, in Carpenter’s film, as in Deleuze-Guattari, distributes them beyond their (original) textual instantiations. Lovecraft’s work, which has been supplemented by numerous other authors, including Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley, has already hyperfictionally propagated far beyond his original corpus of writings. And, right at the heart of this process is the hyperfictional text, the Necronomicon, a work supposedly invented by Lovecraft[311], which has nevertheless been written about as if real. Questions about the Necronomicon’s ontological status – does it exist? – do not in any way contribute to the stabilization of its relation to the Real, they add to the Necronomicon’s hyperfictionality. In the Mouth of Madness raises the possibility that, even if Lovecraft thought he was making the Necronomicon up, the text may yet be real. Perhaps the Necronomicon is only (as yet) a potential text, to be retro-assembled from Lovecraft’s fiction, and commentary about it …

Like Videodrome, In the Mouth of Madness can be seen as, in part, a parody of what the censorship lobby say: Horror will rot your brain. And it points to the massive, self-sustaining economic circuits that swarm around particular Horror novelists.[312] The sheer quantitative scale of the consumption of Cane’s work is itself, immediately, a social fact – the Gothic processes of capitalism (its anorganic propogative patterns) are laid bare in novels whose very sales accelerate those selfsame processes. Ultimately, of course, In the Mouth of Madness is stopped from spiraling into schizo-implex by the fact that it depicts, rather than constitutes, a strange loop. It goes as far as it can go, implexing the film into itself, by presenting In the Mouth of Madness, the movie, as part of the promotion of Cane’s novel. But when we leave the cinema, we cannot buy Sutter Cane novels (in the same way that we can buy the toys of Toy Story – a fact which, when we reflect upon it, might make the Disney film the more terrifying of the two movies). There is, that is to say, one of Hofstadter’s “inviolable layers” protecting reality from the strange loop (both Cane and the Old Ones belong to the fictional narrative of the film In the Mouth of Madness – for now, at least). That is why In the Mouth of Madness remains a Gothic Materialist parable. Nevertheless, if what we have said about cybernetic fiction and Gothic Materialism holds, the circuits it describes are all-too-(hyper)real: it is not as if capitalism and schizophrenia are merely Hollywood hokum we can dismiss as we leave the cinema. We might be well advised, then, to use In the Mouth of Madness as John Trent learns to use Cane’s fictions, as a “guide book” to the increasingly strange terrain of capitalism and schizophrenia (to be read, perhaps, alongside Deleuze-Guattari’s two volumes). As one of the townsfolk of Hobbs End cries out, “First it took the children… Now it’s coming for us.”

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[308] Perhaps Cronenberg’s Videodrome – with its radically implexed reality structure and thematics of the effects of the Horror film – is another candidate. But Videodrome does not pursue implex in quite the same way that Carpenter’s film does.

Wes Craven’s Scream (whose numerous sequels are all part of the – threadbare – joke), meanwhile, is certainly a candidate for being described as meta-Horror. The film self-consciously plays with the conventions of the slasher film (conventions established, funnily enough, by Carpenter in his 1978 Halloween), recursively feeding them back into a narrative which meticulously plays them all out (except one: the sexually active heroine, who convention dictates must die, actually survives to the end of the movie). Watching Scream, one is left with an odd set of responses, familiar from many postmodern artifacts; invited to examine (and ridicule) the structures of the film at the same time as one is made subject to them, one is simultaneously (interpellated as) transcendent of the film (and of one’s own experience of it) and manipulated by it. This is an important contrast with In the Mouth of Madness, whose recursive structures may make us tempted it to classify it as belonging to the same type. But where Scream clearly aims at self-transcendence (the sending up of the conventions, presumably, is an attempt to move outside or above them), Carpenter’s film tends towards immanentization. Whilst rigorously adhering to many of the conventions it (via John Trent’s ridicule) enumerates, it does so to intensify, rather than to deflate, the Horror: it is Trent’s attempt to ridicule the Horror genre that is the object of all the film’s jokes. Recursion, that is to say, attacks, rather than lamely shores up, the viewer’s (simulated) subjective interiority.

[309] One of many references to other Horror films with which In the Mouth of Madness is replete: Hobbs End is the name of the fictional tube station in Hammer’s Quatermass and the Pit. Note also references to Videodrome (there’s a character called Renn) and Rosemary’s Baby (one of the Doctors is named after the malevolent gynecologist, Sapperstein.)

[310] Horror in Lovecraft frequently entails the collapse of familiar structures of time and space. In a particularly complicated section of “Memories of a Sorcerer”, for instance, Deleuze-Guattari discuss Lovecraft’s account of dimensionality. (TP 251)

[311] But never written – except in the form of fragments occasionally quoted by Lovecraft when he refers to the abominable text.

[312] Compare, for instance, the situation with Stephen King. According to Skal: “Carrie had a first printing of 30,000 in 1974; ‘Salem’s Lot, the following year, had an initial run of 20,000. By the late seventies, however, spurred by the exponentially expanding delivery systems of the chain stores, King’s public exploded. Following The Shining (1977), King’s next three books, The Stand (1978), The Dead Zone (1979), and Firestarter had first printings of 70,000, 80,000, and 100,000 copies, respectively. His first book for Viking, Christine, hit the quarter million point, and, beginning with It in 1986, virtually all of King’s novels have had first hardcover printings of one million copies or above.” (The Monster Show, 360). For Skal, King’s fiction “has almost nothing to do with the aims and goals of mainstream literary publishing, and constitutes a category of its own.” (365) Its sheer quantitative scale of his sales makes the circuit between King and his readership effectively independent of the bourgeois publishing industry, Skal points out. It is a Sutter Cane-type cultural contagion.