Papers
Philipp Kneis:
Opening Address:
Nightmares in American Culture
I.
The idea of the students conference at Humboldt Universität was born last year, when Anja Kootz and I invited fellow students to join a conference titled "Licence to Thrill. Reading James Bond as a Cultural Phenomenon". This year, the title is "Haunted Dreams. Nightmares in American Culture". The idea is to create an academic surrounding where students can take part in real-life academic work. It is organized by students and for students, but make no mistake: The intent is no less academical. We strive not for a test drive or a role play. This is the real thing. And from what I've seen, we needn't doubt that for a minute.
There are things that need to be discussed, be it anew, be it that some older findings have to be re-evaluated or put into a new context, a context that is contemporary, in a culture that is dominated by popular culture, and rightly so. We need to discard some false and antiquated notions of élitism that for long have governed the humanities.
II.
This conference, as originally planned throughout the summer of last year, would center around depictions of horror and related phenomena throughout American culture, with a strong focus on popular culture. That planning took place before September 11th.
After that day, we were forced to consider the topic again. Would it still be adequate to discuss fictional horror when real-life horror had made itself so very visible and undeniably real?
Should we be talking about culture under such circumstances? Should we look into literature, movies and television? Isn't it cynical to assumedly turn away from real-life horror and focus on fiction instead? Should we really go on doing the things we do?
Yes, we should. And no, we shouldn't.
Yes, because culture is part of reality. Cultural items are as much part of reality as the events taking place. Culture is perception, culture is interpretation, culture is codification, culture is coping with reality. Without culture, we couldn't properly understand the events, without fiction, there would be no fact.
No, because without fact, there would be no fiction. We cannot simply carry on without taking the actual events into account. Because it did happen. We cannot ignore that, we must not live in collective denial. Denial is only the beginning of new problems.
But also, we have to move on. We have to deal with the events culturally. We have to put them into context and learn from them. We who are learning the tools of how to do that have to communicate our findings to others. We cannot just lean back and ignore what is going on in contemporary society and culture, we cannot escape into a world where literature was still undertaken by some master genius, where the canon was supposedly simple and the choice of material easy, where the problems of today don't keep haunting us, where the future is known because the past becomes the present. But we live in the present, and the future is still unknown. The cultural text keeps being written and re-written over and over and over again.
We have to deal with culture, we are cultural critics. Culture is the representation of all that is, it is the outlet of human civilization, civilization is culture, the two cannot be separated. And as horrors and nightmares occur under what we call real-life situations, they are also represented by cultural achievements, codified into something which, at first hand, seems easy and accessible, but which, under closer scrutiny, becomes as complex as the facts of life. We will not all believe that fiction and fact are the same. But we may agree in that they are to a high degree inseparable.
III.
The American dream at its core is a representation of an altogether positive outlook on life. If you work hard enough, you can overcome your miserable situation of the present, you can enter a classless state in a middle class society, living in a nuclear family in a neat and tidy house with a green lawn and a white picket fence surrounding your estate, owning at least one car and at least two television sets, living happily ever after, your kids doing even better than you.
We all know that this is a dream only realized by a few, but it is part of popular mythology and popular mythmaking. The dream, though far from being overall fact, is an overall accepted image.
The dream, however, is not standing alone unquestioned. On the contrary. Since the very beginnings of American society, and I could even go farther back in time, the dream has been contrasted by the nightmare. Dreams and nightmares are interlocked, the one cannot exist without the other, the one is the prerequisite for the other. Together they are productive in shaping each other, they constitute not a dichotomy but are two manifestations of the same phenomenon.
When we speak of nightmares in the context of this conference, the first thing that comes to mind will of course be horror and what is associated with it. Everything you've always suspected to be there, all the gruesome things you either only imagined or were once told through fairy tales or in the cliché setting of a spooky story telling at a nocturnal campfire. Vampires, leprechauns, succubi, zombies, demons, all kinds of hairy or slimy monsters, creatures of the dark sitting under your bed at night and making you fear looking under it -- that's what most people understand as horror.
They're right. The main function of horror is to incite and/or topicalize fear. Yet this is not a thing that's done for its own sake. All those horrible things have a meaning, they have a story to tell that is much more part of this world than we'd like it to be. Mythology is codification, the bestiary of horror stories is an allegory to what we consider to be real. The problem with that is, if we dig deeper, trying to approach the real-life horror underlying the fictional one, what lies beneath may even be more gruesome, more terrifying, more shocking and revealing than the otherwise tame nightmarish dreamworld of the codification would suggest. When we see the social criticism enfolded in zombie films like Dawn of the Dead, the twisted love stories of Dracula or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the deconstruction of Middle America in the works of David Lynch, the confrontation of governmental politics and national history on The X-Files, we are suddenly forced to reconsider the governing myths of contemporary society.
To illustrate this more clearly, and also in order to open the field a bit after last year's events, the program of the conference also introduces as nightmares what is usually not considered to fall under the category of horror. A nightmare is what questions or repudiates the dream, horror stories are just the most codified reflections of underlying trauma and attempts to cope with reality. Each time may have its own fears, but fears of ages past do not just disappear. They accumulate. As much as we gain new understanding of the things around us, we also build on an arsenal of fears and anxieties that we inherited through our cultural and anthropological heritage. The old and the new, the alienated and the familiar, both work together in challenging the dream. Thus you'll find a strangely diverse mixture of topics on the agenda of our conference. This is intentional. There will be things left unsaid, and there will also be things that cannot be named.
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