A Fun Look at Richard Matheson's "The Funeral"

 

Timothy Saenz

Blog Post Essay: “The Funeral” by Richard Matheson

Readings in Genre: Monsters

MFA in Writing Popular Fiction: Term I

Due 12 February 2021

My guess is that Richard Matheson’s “The Funeral” parodies the gothic horror writing style of that genre’s late 19^th Century writers. He also pokes fun at what some consider the absurd monster bashes that were Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which came out seven years before “The Funeral” was published, and other monster assemblages by Universal Pictures. It should be noted that in I Am Legend Matheson savages Bram Stoker’s writing in Dracula through the musings of Neville.

To accomplish his vilification of old gothic horror writing in this story, Matheson creates silly monsters whose egomaniacal mischief leads to the utter collapse of the grieving assembly. They are a loose confederation assembled by necessity whose nature does not allow for a lasting bind. The tall man, a vampire, seeks to enjoy the ceremony he never received when he was bitten, perhaps by the Count (Dracula), killed, and made undead. He pays for the funeral rite and a splendid coffin from which he will rest and be “not so much out of the game as playing on another field.” (261) Double meaning can be construed. The tall man is leaving for another location where he will find new meals, so he takes a new bed with himself from which to conduct his operations and conceal his person (much as Stoker’s Dracula moved to England). I think it also means that these gothic literary characters as they were once written are dying or dead; they will live on only in a new kind of writing (like Matheson’s) and a new kind of film. With one notable exception, the Meet movies rang the death knell for Universal’s once respected monsters. They would be revived elsewhere, most notably at England’s Hammer Studios.

To pull the parody off, Matheson employs three conventions: first, the Count’s fustian; second, the toothless threat embodied in the repeated word, “tasty”; and third, his own battery of both sepulchral synonyms and compound adjectives. There is also the subtext of Morton Silkline’s love of lucre, the viagra of his venality more eternal than the rest he has made his business.

In his mimicry of a bombastic preacher of his age, the Count asserts that Ludwig Asper “the pious and unyielding fates have chosen to pluck from existence and place within that bleak sarcophagus of all eternity.” The declaration sounds ceremonially religious, but the unyielding fate is the Count’s own appetite, and the sarcophagus bleak and eternal because Asper is forever undead. Figuratively, however, it’s time for writers to give up the ghost of the old, gothic writing style, and the silliness of the Count’s pronouncement kills it, so to speak. The Count rebels against his hearers’ criticism and pushes on mulishly against all interruptions, hurling out grandiose and cryptic synonyms for bier – “litter of sorrow”, “cairn”, “cromlech”, “tumulus”, “mastaba”, “tope”, “ghat”, “dakhma” (the word is misspelled “dokhma” in the text) – most of which I had to look up in the dictionary, all to exhibit a flamboyant erudition and a grandiloquence.

Not only does the Count agitate his unheeded listeners, he brings them to a boil, and the eruptions that ensue scatter the assembled. The fizzing, poofing, crackling electricity, and madcap exits reminded me of the final scene of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein: Wolfman and Dracula are shoving a gurney back and forth at each other, the Frankenstein monster is bursting out of his restraints and launching an evil nurse out the laboratory window, and Abbott and Costello are hightailing it to the dock.

Matheson’s repeated use of “tasty” by various participants, but especially the smaller, waxen man, accents the futility of the writing style and the cinematic production. Once proud monsters utter cute threats but fail to inflict any damage. After ominously demanding that everything be prepared perfectly, Asper crumbles as his coterie cracks, and he can only plead with them impotently. People like Morton Silkline (close to silver lining) are in the business of death, and as the prototype of the gothic writer and cheapened monster movie producer with his own stock and stale phrases and conjured demeanor, Silkline finds a silver lining in the demise of the genre: he can make money anyway.  Once he’s re-energized from touching Asper’s gold coins, he entertains the sepulchral sensitivities of his first referral from Asper, the tentacled “it” that appears as some kind of Cthulhic manifestation,

Matheson does not confine his parody to characterizations but extends it into his narration of “The Funeral”. He, too, comes up with a million sepulchral synonyms. We get catafalque, ossuary, ceremented, obsequies, and exequies, including dated expressions from the lingua Franca – “cigit”, “chante du cygne” (swan song) – and a touch of Latin, requiescat in pace (the first word misspelled in my version of the text). He bombastically spits out compound adjectives: flaccid-fingered, gnarl-faced, peak-hatted, hairy-handed, waxen-featured, zombie-stiff, & etc., and proffers synesthetic colors/substances – gold, onyx, ivory – along with the delightful phrase “the accredited expression for Asking Painful Questions” in the third to last paragraph on what is page 256 in my version of the text. He dazzles by turning some nouns or adjectives into verbs or verb-like words: “dulceted”, “baritoned”, “bicarbonated”.

The irony is it all works, at least as parody. I confess a fondness for the storytelling of older writing, not all of it, mind you. Even in Matheson’s display, it’s hard not to think that writers of that period drew from a more populated vocabulary by which they articulated their thoughts and action with greater clarity and nuance. At any rate, I greatly enjoyed “The Funeral”. It made me think of Mark Twain’s humor. It has inspired me to refresh my vocabulary and play around with different ways to describe people and things and to express ideas and feelings.