The Halloween dioramas are annually more disturbing. Gardens near my house have half-buried skeletons emerging from the lawns, some with shreds of tissue still adhering. Suburban gates guarding freshly gravelled driveways are adorned with severed limbs and nailed heads, blood dripping. I saw skulls on a barbecue yesterday, as if the residents were planning human brains for tea.
It’s like a simulation of a particularly horrifying civil war, scenes too violent for newspapers and television. You’d think the people of suburban Dublin were going about their business ignoring continual, open-air mass killing and torture. I like ghost stories, but there’s a line somewhere between spooky and sadistic.
Call me a killjoy – after all, I’m not keen on a lot about Christmas either – but it used to be possible to enjoy Halloween and Samhain, to flirt with the supernatural and mark the dark turn of the year, without revelling in fantasies of violence and pain, and certainly without filling our homes and gardens with petroleum-based effigies and instruments of atrocity.
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The figures are uncanny partly because they’ll be around so much longer than real bones. Exactly the characteristic that makes them into games or toys, if torture is the game you like to play, makes them more deathly than the real thing. They represent sadism without suffering, dismemberment and execution without pain, because they are made of petrochemical rather than organic material, plastic not flesh. But the joke is on us, because centuries after my bones and yours have fed the Earth, the ones on display in Dublin this week will still be around, haunting the cockroaches and dead electronics in whichever post-apocalyptic scenario you like to imagine.
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I’m not arguing against the arts of darkness: some of my novels have strong Gothic tendencies and my own childhood party trick was to tell ghost stories so alarming that my friends’ parents would phone my house late at night to have my parents bring me to the phone to assure sleepless children that the stories I’d made up weren’t true. (“Not true as in real-life,” I used to say unhelpfully, “but I wasn’t lying.”)
I’m sure people have been telling ghost stories as the darkness falls across the high latitudes for about as long as people have had language. The pumpkin-carving is of course as much an American import as the dioramas, pumpkins being among the fruits of colonialism and cultural exchange, but it’s easy enough to connect harvest, All Souls and Samhain. Gather in, hunker down.
We need our seasonal festivities, perhaps especially as the seasons go awry and many of us feel further and further from organic, bodily rhythms of life. Celebration matters, especially celebration shared among neighbours who may have little in common but proximity, which is not little at all. Chopped and tortured petrochemical bodies seem a questionable form of celebration, especially for those of us who have neighbours recently arrived from places where such things have been done in living memory to real people, people for whom the half-buried bodies of friends and acquaintances and acts of public torture require no simulation. Stories in the news, hard to read and hard to know, are being mimicked for fun in the front rooms and gardens of people who don’t have to bear the reality.
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All Souls Eve has always been a time for thinking about and playing with the ways in which we at once long for and fear the return of our dead. I think there’s a difference between thinking about the power of ghosts and revenants, which is what we do with scary stories and images, and glorying in pain and suffering, which happens in many of the garden dioramas. One recognises our fears of and in the dark, the other celebrates the abuse of others’ bodies. I don’t make the rules around here – probably just as well – but the former seems to me deeply human and seasonal and the latter perhaps equally human but nasty.
There’s no accounting for taste, and maybe I’m just out of step, but as we move on from the Day of the Dead I prefer the sight of deliquescing pumpkins on garden walls to the deathless rattle of plastic bones in plastic chains.
