The Fantasy of Orderly Grief: GRIS and The Haunting of Hill House

[justira]

Grief warps our world. The curvature of our private universe must now bend around an absence, the sudden removal of a body that leaves some gravitational well behind: a ghost, a memory, a role unfilled. It's no surprise that speculative fiction has long been a site for processing grief. Whether it is through the creative process or through consuming and interpreting its output, the overwhelming pain and confusion of grief calls for equally reality-bending expressions and interpretations in fiction. And there is an urge, an all too human urge, to make it all make sense somehow. Merely fictional or downright fantastical, we want it to make sense, to find meaning and order in a state and process that is by nature disruptive.

The Haunting of Hill House and GRIS are both speculative stories about grief that engage with the popular model of the five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. In GRIS — a platforming game — the young female protagonist is grieving for another woman; statues of the dead woman are scattered about the beautiful, often desolate landscape in attitudes of agony and despair, and at certain places near such statues the protagonist can perform mourning actions that garner achievements named after the stages. In The Haunting of Hill House, five siblings struggle to come to terms with their mother's mysterious death twenty years prior, with the memories of their strange, deadly summer at the house continuing to haunt them just as much as the ghosts of the place do. A common and ambiguously canonical interpretation ties each sibling, in birth order, to one of the five stages of grief. Both of these stories frame the perturbed, lonesome landscape of grief as a legible thing, with a narrative arc, known trajectory, and anticipated conclusion, all of which are explored through the lens of the fantastical premise.

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