Jerrold E. Hogle - Revisiting the Gothic and Theory, Książki, The Gothic novel - Articles, The Gothic genre
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//-->Revisiting the Gothic and TheoryAn IntroductionJerrold E. HogleUniversity of Arizona (USA)Andrew SmithUniversity of Glamorgan (UK)With this issue,Gothic Studiescelebrates its first ten years of continuous publica-tion. Its inaugural issue appeared during the latter half of 1999 at the culmina-tion of two decades in which a striking emergence of serious critical attentionto ‘Gothic’ literature and film – signaled most powerfully by David Punter’sTheLiterature of Terror(1980) – ignited an expansion in studies of the Gothic in allits various forms that greatly extended what the Gothic was seen to encompassand opened up a wide range of critical approaches that collectively made theGothic come alive (like Frankenstein’s creature) as an important, multi-layered,and profoundly symbolic scheme for dealing with Western culture’s most funda-mental fears and concerns. By this last turn-of-the-century, there were so manyreasons for a top-level journal about all exfoliations of the Gothic using all thebest possible approaches to it thatGothic Studiesquickly proved, and has provenitself since, to be an essential addition to literary, media, and cultural analysis inWestern (and now, we are beginning to see, Eastern) academia. Among the causesforthis‘Gothic revival’, aside from the cross-generic dynamism in the Gothicthat has made it so transformable to suit changing times, are the advances intheorising about literature and culture, especially since the mid-1960s, that havefinally brought the Gothic forward from its marginal status in earlier twentieth-century criticism to be a major focus for revisionist psychoanalysis and Marxism,feminism and gender studies, post-structural deconstruction, ‘new’ historicismand cultural studies, and the even more recent extensions of all these, especiallythe latter, into queer theory, critical race studies, postcolonial criticism, and theinterdisciplinary analysis of interdependent media. It is particularly fitting, then,thatGothic Studiescelebrate this evolution and its own tenth anniversary by offer-ing here a series of all-new arguments that reexamine the interplay between theGothic and theory from the several perspectives on that relationship that are nowmost prevalent and revealing in 2009. Hence the following essays articulate theways in which the Gothic can best be theorised and explained today, the reasonswhy theory is attracted to the Gothic for examples of its arguments, and evenM1817- GOTHIC STUDIES TEXT 11/1.indd130/6/09 16:14:592Gothic studies 11/1the occasional construction of theories out of Gothic ingredients as the Gothicactively instigates discourses appropriate to it rather than just passively providingevidence for theory’s retrospections about literature, art, drama, and film. Thesepieces come from scholars widely dispersed on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean,like this special issue’s co-editors, and thereby underscore the boundary-crossingscope of this theorising of Gothicandthis Gothic-ising of theory, a long-standingaim of theInternationalGothic Association.In point of fact, this momentary reunion of Gothic and theory helps us recall,not just the most recent three decades of Gothic criticism, but those final forty-to-fifty years of the eighteenth century in which theory and the Gothic were so closelyintertwined that they constantly fed into each other at the very time that Gothicwas first rising to cultural prominence in fiction and drama. Whether one locatesthe genesis of so-called ‘Gothic’ fiction-making simply in Horace Walpole’sThe Castle of Otranto(1764) or in the stirrings of its ingredients in ‘graveyardschool’ poetry beginning with Thomas Parnell’s ‘Night Piece on Death’ (1821),the ‘Gothic interlude’ of the ‘labyrinth’ of ‘fear’ in Tobias Smollett’sAdventuresof Ferdinand Count Fathom(1753),1Richard Hurd’sLetters on Chivalry andRomance(1762) with its extolling of a distinctive ‘Gothic’ style as a ‘lost . . . worldof fine fabling’,2or the mid-eighteenth-century resurgence of Shakespeare asEngland’s most essential, as well as best ‘Gothick’, playwright,3one finds fictionleading rapidly to theory or theory begetting fiction at virtually every significantpoint. We know that Hurd’s largely theoretical treatise, for example, was oneimpetus for Walpole’s first edition, as was Edmund Burke’s terror-based ‘sublime’in hisPhilosophical Enquiryof 1757 (itself one of the responses to ‘graveyard’verse), and that the surprising success ofOtrantoled to a second edition in 1765with a theoretical preface now famous for defining what a ‘Gothic Story’ canand should do, as well as for modeling this ‘Gothic’ defiantly on Shakespeare asopposed to the neo-classicism of French dramatic theory. All this was shortly fol-lowed in 1773 by John and Anna Laetitia Aikin’s theory of ‘the Pleasure Derivedfrom the Objects of Terror’ and their exemplification of its Burkean tenets in thefragmentary tale of ‘Sir Bertram’ published in the same volume.4By the 1790s, thedecade in which the Gothic came fully into its own as one of the most popularBritish and German modes on the page and the stage, Ann Radcliffe’s clearlyGothic ‘romances’ and Matthew Lewis’sThe Monk(1796) andThe Castle Spectre(1797) just assumed that their audiences were versed in Hurd and Burke as muchas Shakespeare and Walpole, as well as in the importance of ruins and ‘rough-ness’ in Uvedale Price’sEssay on the Picturesque(1791) and the ‘Gothic castle’as ‘sublime’ in Archibald Alison’sEssay on the Nature and Principles of Taste(1790).5It is no wonder that so many theoretical arguments from the eighteenthand the early nineteenth centuries, with all the disagreements among them – someof these lifted straight from volumes of Gothic fiction or reviews of them – appearin E. J. Clery and Robert Miles’s now essential collectionGothic Documents: ASourcebook, 1700–1820(2000).There were many reasons, to be sure, for this continuous give-and-take betweenM1817- GOTHIC STUDIES TEXT 11/1.indd230/6/09 16:14:59Revisiting the Gothic and Theory3theories and fictions during the time when the ‘Gothic’ as we know it came about.First, of course, there was the uncertainty and debate over what ‘Gothic’ meant inaesthetic terms as ‘barbarous’ qualities projected onto the ‘Goths’ who had broughtdown Rome and the pointed-arch building-style misnamed after them contendedwith Whig assertions of the high value in England’s ‘Gothic constitution’ and itsmany chivalric accoutrements before and after the Magna Carta of 1215.6Anotherproblem was the controversial rise of the novel at just this time as a kind of litera-ture particularly suited to the growing middle class in Europe and the resultingtheoretical debate about how close this heteroglossic form (as Mikhail Bakhtin hastermed it) was, or not, to such earlier genres as ‘romance’ or ‘epic’ or ‘the comicepic’ or drama or travel-writing or the periodical7– a debate that Smollett joinedparticularly in his Dedication toFerdinand Count Fathomand the way that novelmanifests the Quixotic problems encountered by a falsely-aristocratic anti-heroas reliant on the aristocratic ‘romance’ tradition for his self-presentation as heis exposed for a ‘counterfeit’ by his author’s ‘novelistic’ realism.8An additionalcause was the prompting of theory, poetry, fiction, and new theatre all at once bythe need to ideologically redefine the ultimate significance of death and of once-Catholic tombs and abbeys, a primary reason for the effulgence of ‘graveyard’poetry, as the decay of Catholicism’s power in the wake of England’s ‘GloriousRevolution’ of 1688 raised the question of what meaning should now be given tothe emptied-out creeds and symbols of Papist, as well as old aristocratic, domina-tion.9Then there was the ‘structure of feeling’ (as Raymond Williams would callit) that enunciated and subsumed all these others: the demand in the rising middleclass, as its literacy greatly increased, for explanations of how its ‘taste’ couldapproach the aristocracy’s former lock on the apparent possession of the theo-retical capital that set ‘standards of “polite letters”’.10The result was an onslaughtof belletristic theorising about what those standards should be – and thus wherethe ‘Gothic’, the novel, and the Protestant recasting of Catholic icons fit withinthem – from the periodical essays on aesthetics in Addison and Steele’sSpectatorandTatlerto the theorising about the ‘Gothic’ in Nathan Drake’sLiterary Hoursor Thomas Mathias’sPursuits of Literature(both 1798).11Walpole’s Preface to hissecond edition ofOtrantoand its definition of ‘Gothic’ as blending ‘two kinds ofromance’, which both asserted and disrupted generic identity at a clearly unstabletime, were and remain entries into all these arenas of contestation and so arousedfurther debates crossing between fictions and theories all the way through to theposthumous publication (in her final novel) of Radcliffe’s theoretical dialogue ‘Onthe Supernatural in Poetry’ (1826).12It took the ‘high Romantic’ disparagement ofthe very Gothic that Romanticism often employed, as in Wordsworth’s Preface tothe second edition ofLyrical Ballads(1800) or Coleridge’s scathing review ofTheMonk(1797),13for Gothic fiction, poetry, and drama to start gradually disappear-ing from theory and criticism by ‘men of letters’, though not without a struggle,14even as the Gothic experienced its own dispersion into popular plays and operas,periodical short stories, ‘shilling shockers’, ‘sensation’ tales, and subordinate fea-tures of Victorian novels.M1817- GOTHIC STUDIES TEXT 11/1.indd330/6/09 16:14:594Gothic studies 11/1Such a divorce between the Gothic and ‘high-culture’ or academic theorycontinued well into the twentieth century, particularly during the supremacy ofthe so-called ‘new criticism’ in England and America. However, the many revoltsagainst ‘new criticism’ arising mostly after 1965 have brought Gothic and theoryback into myriad dialogues with each other in a growing panoply of several differ-ent critical stances, leading to an explosion in multiple approaches to the Gothic,all between the 1970s and 2000, in ways that have been celebrated and traced inconsiderable detail already.15As in the eighteenth century, albeit differently, aseries of diverse cultural, as well as academic, forces have concatenated togetherto insist on new theorisings of Gothicanda re-Gothicising of theory. Each of theparticipating theoretical ‘schools’ has thus brought out different aspects of theGothic for revisionist critical attention, revealing this mode’s symbolic capacitiesand cross-generic dynamism in the process of restoring it and its many varia-tions to cultural importance in the academy. New forms of psychoanalysis haverevealed both the Gothic’s anticipations of what became Freud’s topography ofpsychic levels by 1900 and the channelling of this topography in some Gothictexts towards Julia Kristeva’s more recent exposure of ‘abjection’ and JacquesLacan’s ‘inruption of the Real’ into the cultural representations that try to keep thenon-sense of primal physicality at a distance.16Resurgent variations on Marxismhave uncovered how the Gothic ‘displaces the antagonisms and horrors evidencedwithinsociety[’s class conflicts]outsideof society itself’ into Gothic ghosts andmonsters and so ‘displaces the hidden violence of present [bourgeois-centered]social structures’ to ‘conjure them up again as past’, revealing them suggestivelyby obscuring them anachronistically.17Feminism in several different forms, meanwhile, has shown how much theGothic has long been a locus for symbolising the subjugation of women andthe male fear of the deepest causality as ultimately Feminine; such insights haveeven inspired wider theorisations of gender that find the Gothic bound up withsuppressions of homosexuality behind homosocial relationships and the latter’sunsettling of its apparent lip-service to the hierarchies and distortions in strictlybinary gender-constructs.18Post-structuralism has drawn forth the Gothic’s foun-dations in signs of previous signs, rather than ‘grounded’ reference-points, andthus in relations among signifiers (ghosts included) based more on absence thanpresence – thereby pulling Gothic elementsintodeconstruction as well as vice-versa.19‘New’ historicism has then taken aspects of this post-structuralism andneo-Marxism, along with the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz and others,and revelled in the Gothic’s capacity to draw in many non-fictional discourses anddebates from particular times and places. It has even pulled the Gothic towardsthe insights of Michel Foucault about the power that competing discourses seek inforcing anomalous multiplicities (such as social undergrounds and sexualities) tosubmit themselves to surveillance.20More recently, cultural studies has dissolvedmost of the previous boundaries that have tried to contain the Gothic and shownit to be imbued from the start with fears and uncertainties about numerous cul-tural issues: race and enslavement, colonialism and post-colonial conditions, theM1817- GOTHIC STUDIES TEXT 11/1.indd430/6/09 16:14:59Revisiting the Gothic and Theory5crossings among and confrontations between classes and sexualities, the multi-levelled cultural processes (for Pierre Bourdieu thehabitus)of how all socialgroups fashion their living conditions as their representations, and many differentconstructions of society and its media that have tried to divide both into ‘high’and ‘low’ groupings that the Gothic as cross-generic has always disturbed andcontinues to violate in its transformations across and amalgamations of differentformats.21These last few movements, all resistant to tight systematising and proneto combining with each other, have consequently validated, not only the unstableGothic itself, but the cultural and critical importance of the many forms that theGothic has taken, from stage drama to lantern shows to newspaper serials to dimenovels to films to teen ‘Goth’ clubs to many forms of cyberspace.22These rich and varied developments, while reviving the Gothic-theory dia-logues of the past, have set the stage for the theory-Gothic dialogues that we nowpresent here on the tenth anniversary ofGothic Studies.Even so, while each ofthese essays has some roots in or affinities with one or more of the clusters of criti-cal theory that we have just summarised, they also reflect how cutting-edge therecent study of the Gothic and this journal have always been by striking out fromthe orientations of the last three decades, while still revealing profound debts tothem, to show what theory can do with the Gothic – and the Gothic can do withor within theory. In ‘Writing in the Night’ Peter Schwenger, following the workof Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas, explores how images of insomniaenable us to reflect on what turns out to be a Gothic process of creativity. The writ-er’s role as an observer corresponds to the ‘annihilation’ of the insomniac throughwhich, paradoxically, both gain an impersonality which symbolically representsthe anonymous place – and the ‘Gothic’ state – that is a precondition of writing.Kathy Justice Gentile in ‘Sublime Drag: Supernatural Masculinity and GothicFiction’ addresses how a hyperbolic ‘terror sublime’ based on Edmund Burke’s,which reworks models of masculinity, can be identified in Walpole’sThe Castle ofOtranto.While exploring the political implications of such representation, Gentilealso applies these ideas to the works of Charlotte Dacre and Ann Radcliffe anddevelops a critical rereading of how early Gothic texts refract notions of sublimitythrough a hitherto overlooked series of gender-based narratives. In ‘Getting TheirKnickers in a Twist: Contesting the “Female Gothic” in Charlotte Dacre’sZofloya;Or The Moor’,Carol Margaret Davison then situates Dacre’s novel in relation toexisting conceptualisations of the Female Gothic, arguing that the history of thenovel’s critical assessment reveals the theoretical limitations of scholarship on theFemale Gothic. By suggesting how Dacre’s text can be reconsidered, Davison evenproposes new ways in which the Female Gothic can be theorised and its traditionsand themes evaluated. As a result, Gentile and Davison together offer some strik-ing advances, albeit from opposite angles, on the long-standing debates over howbest to apply gender theory to the analysis of the Gothic.Continuing, but also shifting, this focus on constructions of gender, Mair Rigbyin ‘Uncanny Recognition: Queer Theory’s Debt to the Gothic’ outlines the waysin which the Gothic has been read through queer theory and explores how GothicM1817- GOTHIC STUDIES TEXT 11/1.indd530/6/09 16:14:59
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