story audience time and narrative time collapse into each other as the story
teller proceeds. A hesitation in the narrative must be marked by the audience. There is no
possibility of "skipping ahead" of the rattling of chains, or the wandering
discourse of the letter -- the audience is taken step by step through the text. To
read or hear the ending of the tale first would be to cancel out the experience
of it. There is little difference here between the structure of a text's temporali
ty and the structure of the Fun or Horror House, where the victim is commit
ted to experience the full range of horrors presented and cannot simply jump
out of the boat and swim back to the admissions gate or forward to the water
chute that offers closure. We can also see at work here the analogy often
drawn between the maze and the detective story, both structures which tor
ment the reader with a variety of possibilities, only one of which is true. In
these forms the audience must allow itself to be taken in by the text; there is
no possibility of a transcendent position. Even the past -- what the
reader/listener has put behind him as he proceeds in the narrative -- is made
vulnerable to a hidden set of referents. Not even experience can be taken for
granted or assumed to be irreversible.
Narrative Type At the same time that the horror story presents us with a distinct form of
narrative sequentiality, it presents us with an anomaly of narrative status. In
looking at the varieties of narrative, we might distinguish between those nar
ratives which stand in a metonymic relation to the world of everyday life and
those narratives which stand in a metaphoric relation to that world. In the first type of narrative, the "true story," patterns of signification are
borrowed from the discourse of everyday life. Assumptions concerning conse
quence, causality, and, therefore, significance in that world are transferred to
the world of the story. Such a story need not "really" be realistic, for to stand
in the place where one could determine that "really" a priori would preclude
one from understanding its operation. It is enough that the reality of the story
is a matter of convention; indeed, the real is at least in part an accomplishment
of the translations of experience offered in narrative itself. The narrative here
serves an ideological function, articulating the ...
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