LOOKING AT FISH AND STUFF

In my comfort zone, but very much out of my depth

A while ago I took part in a panel discussion entitled: ‘The Allure of Horror’. I was alongside a legend of horror fiction, a new writer, and a mid-career horror academic. It all went as well as could be expected. The horror legend was charming and hilarious. The academic was serious and loquacious. The new writer was sweet and enthusiastic. And I was completely out of my depth.

It probably didn’t help that my only preparation for the panel had been saying the word ‘allure’ over and over again until it stopped sounding like ‘allure’ and started sounding like I was saying ‘hello’ in a comedy accent, and then saying it some more until it stopped sounding like a word at all, and instead sounded like a dog with something gross stuck in its throat.

But worse than that was my sense that I didn’t really belong there. During the course of the discussion, I felt compelled to confess that I had never really intended to be a horror writer, but the only magazines that would publish my writing were called things like ‘Dark Tales’ and ‘Three-Lobed Burning Eye,’ so what could I do? When asked about my early horror influences, I cited Philip K. Dick - a tenuous choice, at best. At one point, I admitted that I didn’t think horror was really a genre at all, and that pretty much anything could be horror if you just pointed at it and said, ‘that’s horror’. In short, I did my best impression of a person who had been invited to join this panel by mistake.

It was nearing the end of the allotted hour when an audience member asked the panellists to speak about the difference between horror and terror. Immediately prior to that moment, I’d been breathing a sigh of relief that once again I had avoided being lured into a giant wicker man and set on fire for the crime of having never read a Stephen King novel. But now, here was a question that seemed precisely designed to expose me as a horror imposter. Luckily, the other panellists stepped in. The horror legend said he thought horror and terror were the same thing, which to my mind, should have wrapped things up nicely there and then, especially when the new writer more or less agreed. But just when I thought we were home free, the academic launched into a lengthy explanation about how horror was a feeling and terror an emotion. Or was it that one is a response, and the other is a reaction? Or one is a reaction and the other is a feeling, maybe. I don’t know.

I was way, way out of my intellectual depth. I found my attention slipping. But the academic’s comments had taken us over time, and I thought I’d get away with not having to say anything. So imagine my horror (or terror), when the moderator turned to me for my opinion. I opened my mouth to see what would happen, and out came a mumbled, “I dunno.” The moderator briefly paused, some smatterings of mocking laughter broke out around the room, then we swiftly moved on to the end.

I probably ought to be embarrassed by my ignorance, but I’m not really. Not knowing stuff is pretty much my comfort zone at this point. In fact, I take a sort of perverse pleasure in being the thickest person on the panel, or even in the room. When I was young, you see, I thought I was really very clever, and put a lot of effort into maintaining that illusion, because the only thing anyone had ever seemed to value about me was my ability to write a brilliant essay while sitting at the back of the school bus the morning the essay was due to be handed in. But these days, I’m way happier tooling around being a dork with other dorks, and finding people who value me even when I don’t have a clue what’s going on.

Trying to work out the differences between horror and terror seems to me like the kind of thing you’d find worthwhile if you were really quite academically inclined. This is, I admit, probably revealing of my prejudices about academia. I may even have a bit of chip on my shoulder. But I can’t get my head around all the complex analytical literary investigations academics undertake which almost invariably produce results that are bizarrely unrelated to anything that your average reader thinks about books. Harry Potter is not an allegory about the heteropatriarchy being enforced by phalluses in the form of wizard wands. I don’t care how many letters you have after your name; it just isn’t.

I’ve come to think of a university’s English Literature department as something like the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation’s Nutri-Matic Drinks Dispenser, as described here by Douglas Adams:

“The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject’s taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject’s metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject’s brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.”

In other words, the English Literature department uses up a lot of money, research, and time in order to produce something that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike knowledge.

Part of why this happens is because academics are very intelligent people, which means they can convince themselves and each other of pretty much anything. In order to reach the heights of academia, they have to specialise until they become experts in an incredibly narrow field, such as the hermeneutics of parties in Jane Austen’s novels and their influence on feminist discourse around gender fluidity in Paw Patrol. Being experts gives them and their work an aura of importance, which probably goes to their heads, and all the long words they use ensures that no one can ever tell them they’re talking mince, because no one ever understands what they’re going on about anyway. Then of course they are friends with academics, and they get married or start throuples with other academics, and have little academic theybies, and on the rare occasions when they are forced to encounter normal people, they can’t really believe we manage to get through life without knowing what the fuck a ‘hermeneutics’ is when it’s at home.

Of course, it’s possible to go too far in the other direction. For example: on my train home from the Allure panel, I sat near some mature ladies who were chatting to a younger woman about where she was going, what she was up to on her laptop, and what products she used to make her hair so lovely and shiny. At one point, the young woman mentioned something about her boyfriend’s work. One of the older ladies asked what he did.

“He’s a marine biologist,” answered the young woman.

“Oooh,” said all of us who were earwigging the conversation.

“What’s a marine biologist?” The older woman asked. “You mean, he looks at fish and stuff?”

“Yes,” said the young woman. “He looks at fish.”

I briefly wondered if all the men holding up dead fish on Tinder are actually marine biologists. Then I wondered if I’m a marine biologist, since the other week I’d spent a long time staring at some koi in a garden pond. But the truth is that I’m a marine biologist in the same way that I’m a horror writing academic. I may do something that looks vaguely similar from a vast distance, but when you get closer, you realise it’s not remotely the same thing at all, and those are probably not even fish.

And it’s L’Oreal Elvive, if you’re wondering.

JAWS 5: In the PhDeep

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