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BOOK EXCERPT : THE
DARKENING GARDEN : CLOACA
It is not hard to understand how essential the portal is to the architecture
of any fantasy in which a protagonist moves from one world to another: to envisage
a wardrobe whose mothballs are butterflies is surely the easiest way for an author
to figure travel afar, anew. Farah Mendlesohn's arguments about the nature of
the Portal — in Chapter One, "Portal Fantasy", of her Rhetorics
of Fantasy (Wesleyan University Press, 2007) —
constitute a thorough exploration of the use and structural implications
of the device. At the same time, it should not be hard to understand that
the Portal is peculiarly well fitted to Fantasy precisely through its
isomorphism — in storytelling terms — with that escape from
prison so central to the genre (see free fantastic). Tales of horror,
on the other hand, as demonstrated in almost every single entry in this
lexicon, do not normaly involve travel to a secondary world, nor can they
be understood as escapes from the world. What might seem exceptions — David
Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), for instance, or Stephen
R Donaldson's first Thomas Covenant trilogy (all volumes 1977) — tend
to be novels whose encompassing difficulty creatively darkens any sense
of the moral clarity — the sex without semen — of escape.
Novels like these intrinsically mutate the moves of genres like Horror
and Fantasy, and in that sense operate at the forward edge of the fantastic:
where change threatens the ideas of order. But this does not mean that
Horror is about the freedom to leave; for it is not.
So: what is defined as Portal in Fantasy does not exist in Horror: so
the term Cloaca is applied here to semblances of Portal when such are uncovered.
If entering a Portal can be likened to swimming with the tide as upon a
quest, then entering a Cloaca can be likened to swimming upstream like
a gaffed fish: hooked. The Cloaca is a parody of the Portal: an extremely
bad joke (such being common in tales of Horror) about the true nature of
the world. The term is visceral, it allows a strong inference of deep unpleasantness
ahead. Almost always, Cloacas are lesions in the thickening of the world
towards the moment of truth, when the rind of things is peeled. They are
indentations in the rind which hint falsely of egress. then sully. They
are indistinguishable from the bad place: the house built with cavities
beneath the cellar, or the bottomless swamp, or some labryrinth which strangles
Ariadne: the omphalos that leads to the blank stone exitless stair to the
underworld. The eponymous house in Stephen King and Peter Straub's Black
House (2001) is a Cloaca, a place out of the basement anus of which
an M C Escher tangle of stairwells leads the protagonists downwards to
the black tower. The Congo in Joseph Conrad's
"Heart of Darkness" (1899 Blackwood's Magazine) is cloacal.
In the end, the message is clear enough. If the omphalos into the body
of the earth is in fact Cloaca, then the world is surely diseased, and
we are all up shit creek without a Portal.
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