"The Abyss Attraction in Poe, Hitchcock and Neil Gaiman."

Abstract

When David Punter said that “all writing is ‘haunted’ by the shapes of all that is not” (1998:2), he knew that every artist faces this dark abyss and the fear of being haunted by all that was produced in the past. Being an expert in creating haunted atmospheres, Gothic literature can only be haunted by itself, being caught in a perpetual act of creating or recreating past stories and recurring themes. A metaphor for the creative process, the mystery of man’s desire for the unknown, implicated in the extinction of his personality, has always attracted the attention of several artists from different periods of time. This explains many images of the abyss or vertigo in gothic literature. They are used as the most accurate vocabulary to explore the irrational depths of the human soul. Edgar Allan Poe found here the origin of what he called “the terror of the soul” and never stopped fighting the agony of desire that led him to create caves, crypts and catacombs that represent the dark recesses of human mind, kept under control or totally ignored by rational thought. The image of vortex is present in several of his short-stories, being this symbol connected to the loss of conscience and to the mind’s descent into dream. Something similar happens in Vertigo, by Alfred Hitchcock, and in Neil Gaiman’s novels, especially in Neverwhere, where the main character seems to be victim of an uncontrollable impulse that forces him to penetrate in London’s underground, where he meets a bizarre community of men and animals leaving in a labyrinth of dangers and delights beyond imagining. This sometimes perverse abyss attraction constantly haunts the male characters, whose identity and perception depend on their vertiginous experiences, inscribed in a diagram of the cruel geometry of desire that reveals the true authenticity of human existence.