QUICK NUM NOTES

 Without disavowing my previous statements on the NUM formula, I continue trying to come up a simpler way to express it for the purposes of the theoretical book project. I posted this today on CHFB.

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While I don't disagree with the stuff I wrote all those years ago, I have to admit that, if one depends on the "affective argument"-- that terrors like Jaws and Quasimodo are meant to carry the sense of being supernatural even though they aren't-- that argument becomes dubious just because not every reader responds to the same set of signals the same way. One reader may feel that Jaws is meant to carry a supernatural vibe, another will say he didn't get that vibe at all. 

It's the same thing with the "rational Gothic" stories I brought up recently in another thread. Even their authors thought that they were disavowing the supernatural by coming up with gimmicks like phosphorescent hounds to explain away the suggestion of ghostly apparitions. But my current line of thought is more like, "how much crap did an author have to come up with to put across this involved a deception?" And does that level of crap exceed what real swindlers do to gain their filthy lucre? 

Real criminals usually try to keep things simple. if Al Capone wants to kill a rebellious underling, he shoots him, or (more famously) beats him to death with a baseball bat. He doesn't put him in an electric chair, the way Blofeld executes his subordinate in THUNDERBALL the book. Real torturers are direct in the ways they compel confessions, with unsubtle devices like the rack and the strappado; they don't engineer a whole "Pit and Pendulum" setup. Real dreams aren't as elaborate and structured as Alice's dream of Wonderland.

The opposition I'm currently playing with is that we're used to thinking of "marvelous things" are total inventions while "uncanny things" are supposed to be in line with the way the natural universe works. But the latter are arguably just as much inventions as the former. if you can't observe a real Pit and Pendulum in human history, or a real crime in which someone pretends to be a ghost to get rid of all the heirs to a fortune, then the phenomenon described is still a creation of the imagination-- just not one that requires as much imaginative effort as something overtly marvelous. (See Stephen King's DANSE MACABRE remarks on his preference for Batman over Superman.)