The Black Spider - Folk Horror Avant La Lettre
I have a general rule that, once I have started
to read a book, I must continue with it to the end before I can claim
the right to comment on it. In the case of The Black Spider, I
was beginning to get depressed by page 20 of this classic early
nineteenth century Swiss horror novella. One fifth of the tale gone and I
had been treated to a lengthy, rather dull and wholesome account of a
christening feast for the child of a prosperous Swiss peasant in the first half of the nineteenth century.
But Gotthelf knows what he is doing. He has set
the reader up for a multi-layered morality tale that loosely bases
itself on pre-modern folk interpretations of the causes of the plague.
He weaves, from the security of the first section, a genuinely horrific
and disturbing tale of a demonic black spider that punishes all those who
have defied God and who have tried to short-circuit authority with
an appeal to the Devil. The spider, a truly nasty creation, punishes
not a few good people as well (although the reader knows that these latter
die only to take the straight path to Heaven).
I wonder which is
more horrific today - the graphic account of death and mayhem at the
behest of the spider or the fact that a whole society was being held
together socially on the basis of fear and anxiety. The horror, for me,
lay as much in the latter as the former but then, if the author is
right, my lack of fear of God would have meant that I would not have
lasted long if the demon spider had been released in my home town. Conformity is not the communitarian horror to him as it would be to us - the devil exists and the good community, no matter how obscurantist, is the first line of defence against him.
How
ironic was Gotthelf (actually a Protestant pastor called Josef Bitzius)
in his portrayal of the roots of evil? One suspects not at all. Allowing
for any problems of translation, irony - that irony that says that,
surely, this writer cannot possibly have believed this nonsense (not the
spider as such, of course, because it is clearly allegorical but the
pre-scientific belief-system to which the spider belongs)- is absent.
Even if he gives himself a pseudonym, Pastor Bitzius fully endorses the
values of the Swiss free peasant in a story that is valuable evidence of
what historian Peter Laslett once called ' The World We Have Lost'.
However,
we know that he was also a progressive by contemporary standards -
interested in welfare issues - so there is an ambiguity in the tale. It
is as if he wants to improve the lot of his peasant congregation but not
at the expense of the values that hold the community together. Right
conduct is cemented by a horror story that provides the space in which
right-minded persons like Pastor Bitzius can do their stuff.
Regardless
of Bitzius' own views (we are not expert), there is much meat for a
cultural analysis of Middle European pre-modernity in its last days in
this story. It is instructive to see how the recalcitrant crooked timber
of men (house timber represents an apposite metaphor as you will see if
you read the tale) is brought into line by fear of the physical and
supernatural consequences of questioning tradition and defying
authority. This is a quietly sinister book in more ways than the obvious
ones. The Black Spider is highly recommended if you are
interested in the self-policing of sexuality and private conduct and in the
maintenance of order in pre-industrial rural Europe (remember that this
is a world that once drove witch-hunts as you read the tale) but also if you are
interested in the evolution of the European tale of horror.