The Gothic Condition: Terror, History and the Psyche

Introduction

This book is both a monograph and not a monograph. It is a monograph in the traditional sense that it is all written by one hand; it is not a monograph in that it is a collection consisting variously of essays previously published in journal form and material delivered either as conference papers or as guest lectures at various universities.

I have gathered these essays and lectures, spread as they have been in their original incarnations over sixteen years, together under the title The Gothic Condition; and the reason for this is that in various ways and in various contexts the world does now seem, in a very particular way, to be in a Gothic condition. The first book I published on Gothic, The Literature of Terror (1980), deliberately used the word ‘terror’ in a traditional, generic sense, the sense often referred to by Gothicists, especially when attempting that difficult distinction between ‘terror’ and ‘horror’, but as time has gone on the word itself has accreted further meanings and connotations. In an essay I published in 1991, ‘The Terrorist’s Story: The Reign of Terror and Later Terrorists in Literature’, I tried to reflect on this; for in some ways referring to Gothic as a ‘literature of terror’ has come to seem increasingly callow when confronted with the very real regimes of terror which now control so much of the world.

Certainly the early Gothic writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were aware of the possibility of ‘regimes of terror’: in Europe it was necessary only to look at how the early hopes and political ambitions represented in the French revolution had been changed, perverted into a system of oppression, an increasingly silenced world that showed signs of spreading to engulf other nations, other states. And there is a link between terror and silence: the individual, distinctive human voice, as writers from Kafka to Primo Levi have reminded us, is a mark of distinction and freedom, and is thus hated and despised by those who wish to assert an undisputed authority over us.

Yet this it to put the matter too simply, for it is certainly not through a quasi-theological emphasis on individuality that terror and repression can be resisted, but only through new forms of communality, new ways of overcoming alienation. What has this to do with Gothic? Let us consider an example, the representation of the figure of the zombie in recent years.

The zombie is one of the recurring inhabitants of what we might refer to as the ‘Gothic bestiary’, alongside the monster, the vampire, the werewolf and other more arcane but endlessly proliferating examples. But these denizens of the menagerie of the dark imagination do not arise by chance, neither are they susceptible of a single, static interpretation; on the contrary, they mould themselves to, and are moulded by, cultural fears, anxieties and priorities. During the period when slavery was a matter of colonial exigency, they represented, in paradoxical form, both the possibility of unlimited, unthinking labour, at the same time as the fear of revolt. During the Cold War, they were pressed into service to represent the ‘hordes of Communism’, the unthinking, brainwashed masses who were coming, perhaps one day soon, to take over control of the supposedly ‘democratic’ state. More recently, in line with wider political developments, they have been deployed to represent everything from the threat of Islamist terror to the consumerist base of advanced capitalism itself.

I use this example to suggest that Gothic motifs have proved, over the years and indeed centuries, capable of remarkable transformation; as we look at the development of cultures – and this is as true of China, Thailand and South America as it is of Europe – we see that alongside the move towards modernity and enlightenment, those two great shibboleths of power, there is always a concomitant move to uncover what may be repressed, subdued, cast into the shadows. And it is here that Gothic comes in.

For Gothic is a voice: it is restless, questioning, never silent: it may be, or seem, melodramatic, exaggerated, lacking in subtlety; but all of those things could be said of Dickens, himself greatly influenced by the Gothic. In The Literature of Terror, I suggested that one way in which Gothic might be considered is as a political literature; I still believe this to be true, although its politics are necessarily various, ranging from the obscurantist fascism of H. P. Lovecraft, through the lightly liberal politics of Stephen King, to the valuation of anti-statist outlawry we can find in any number of recent incarnations of the vampire.

The Gothic condition is one in which no excess, no transgression – for Gothic is above all a literature of transgression – that can occur to the dark imagination can fail to find its equivalent in the ‘real world’. Silent killing by drones; beheadings in the desert; the mass murder of children; racist attacks; endless violence towards women – all of these are features of the current global landscape, and beside them the so-called terrors of Gothic might seem pallid and even juvenile. But then, is a young apprehension of the world to be written off, or might it rather provide a more incisive analysis than that to which those who are old and jaded can regain access? Gothic is an old literature; but it is also a young literature – and, as I say in some of these papers, also and importantly an adolescent literature, a literature of the ‘in-between’; and this is, I think, a large part of its continuing inter-generational strength.

For the fact remains that Gothic continues to strike a chord, and the sound of this chord seems to have expanded in range vastly over the last thirty or forty years. It has expanded in two ways. First, the old figures of Gothic are being constantly rewritten. The ‘legend’ of Frankenstein and his creature continues to spawn huge volumes of rewriting – with five recent books by Dean Koontz alone. Vampires occupy our television screens constantly. A whole new genre, ‘Dark Romance’, based in the Gothic, has its own distinct place in the bookshops. The zombies, as I have said, are all around us, not only in writing but on city streets.

But, it might be said, many of these writings and rewritings are hardly part of the ‘great tradition’; on the contrary, they belong to the world of mass marketing, mass readership, popular culture. But here is precisely where, as the second point I would argue, Gothic is at its most potent, because it effects a bridge between what, for want of better terms, we might call ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. If we think of this purely in terms of critical theory, then it is instructive to note that most major practitioners – perhaps Julia Kristeva most eminently and obviously among them – have contributed to the evolution of a Gothic critical vocabulary. But the point is wider: over the last decades, criticism of the Gothic has proved to be one of the most vibrant fields in literary and cultural criticism.

We can find evidence for this in a number of ways. One is the sheer volume and critical quality of books, articles and essays on Gothic topics published each year. Another is the continuing development of the major journal in the field, Gothic Studies. A third is the liveliness of the International Gothic Association … and I could continue – but this is not the main point. The main point is that ‘Gothic’ has come to mark a point at which the ‘academic’ meets the ‘popular’, at which there is real engagement between established critical rigour and a meaningful analysis of what at first sight might pass for ‘popular entertainment’.

For what much recent Gothic criticism has done, and continues to do, is to take up texts which might otherwise have passed, as it were, under the radar and demonstrate how they, as well as the forms of high literature, have something to say about our current condition; indeed, it might be said that they have more to say because they are more in touch with states of fear and anxiety. It is not necessary to subscribe wholesale to Freudian notions of the ‘return of the repressed’ to sense that something is going on in the extraordinary persistence of crucial Gothic figures like the monster and the vampire – and not only their persistence, but also their remaking. Just as, so many decades ago, many of the very first films to be made were organised around Gothic motifs, so too is that most recent of forms, the graphic novel, deeply dependent on the Gothic – for its motifs, but also for its very modes of narrative, the sophistications of nesting and embedding for which Gothic’s earliest novelists are so rightly famous.

But Gothic is not simple, and neither can we ascribe to it an easy rhetoric of secrecy and revelation; there is also, as it were, a dark side to the dark side, for in its manifestations even prior to the late eighteenth century Gothic stood for a kind of nationalism, and all nationalisms have their devilish side. And so it remains: Gothic effects discriminations, as it always has, and some of those discriminations, political, religious, gender-based, are rightly the object of disgust. But disgust too is not foreign to the Gothic: perhaps disgust is merely a plebeian term for lack of taste, as its etymological origin suggests. But when we are dealing with terror, perhaps taste is not quite the point; perhaps we need a more robust vocabulary, a less delicate response. And that response is always complex: because alongside the disgust, the problems of taste, the engagement with excess, there is also, necessarily, a certain jouissance, a pleasure which needs to be constantly inspected and patrolled, but which cannot be relegated or ignored.

I will conclude this brief introduction with what might seem, perhaps appropriately, a melodramatic flourish. The Gothic represents an essential moment in our encounter with psychic life, and that moment, as we have known from Dante onwards, is the visit to Hades, the part of life’s narrative when we have to go down to the roots where all things are possible, that realm where our hopes of the rule of the moral law prove ineffectual. In Gothic, we are allowed – even encouraged – to see things we might prefer not to have seen. We are encouraged to write and read secrets. We are encouraged to examine death and the possible transgression of death. And we report back – the writers of Gothic report back, and the critics report back.

We report back on pain, on the limits of the body, on what it might be like to go beyond conventional ideas of the human – and so, it could be argued, Gothic has much in common with other rhetorics of the abhuman, with that which passes beyond, or perhaps precedes, the moral law. Gothic has to do with the edges of the human, with what happens when morality succumbs to addiction, obsession, apophenia, those features of our lives which appear to suggest that we are no longer in control, that our hopes for full subjectivity are always at the mercy of other imperatives, other dictates: his majesty the ego, as Freud puts it, is not impregnable, on the contrary, it is a construct – our sense of self is a construct – and beneath it there yawns a Nietzschean abyss.

Back, however, to more practical matters. I have tried to organise these writings on the Gothic not in terms of their gestation or delivery, but have instead attempted to group them up under various thematic headings. I hope these headings make some sense to the reader. But because I am worried, as all Gothic scholars should be, about the metaphoricity of ‘gestation and delivery’, implying as it does the possibility of the seed of Satan returning, the perversion of reproduction and thus of historical succession, here is a haiku with which to conclude (or begin):

Did you sense the truth?

Was there birth, collapse and pain

In the star-filled night?

D.P.

Part I

Phantoms of Theory

1

Spectrality: The Ghosting of Theory

I want here to consider the role of ghosts and the spectral in recent criticism and theory. It would be difficult, I think, to claim that there is such a thing as a ‘school’ or tradition of ‘spectral criticism’. Rather, what the use of the term ‘spectrality’ might seek to bring together would be a series of images and tendencies which have arisen within critical thinking over recent decades, from a diversity of sources, and which seem, to me at least, set to continue to exercise an appropriately ghostly influence over the critical activities of the next decades. If one were to go a little further back, the concerns of Maurice Blanchot with deaths and dubious returns of the literary voice, and with the ambiguous, liberating yet also menacing ‘spaces’ of literature, might figure as an (already inevitably occluded) ‘originary’ point.

We might think, for example, of Blanchot writing in 1955 about the act of reading and its inevitable encounter with what is dead, with what is not yet dead, and with what ineffably fails to declare its status in relation to death, resurrection and the phantom:

. . . what makes the ‘miracle’ of reading still more singular – what perhaps enlightens us as to the sense of all thaumaturgies – is that here the stone and the tomb do not only withhold the cadaverous void which is to be animated; they constitute the presence, though dissimulated, of what is to appear. To roll back the stone, to obliterate it, is certainly something marvellous, but it is something we achieve at every moment in everyday language. At every moment we converse with Lazarus, dead for three days – or dead, perhaps, since always. In his well-woven winding sheet, sustained by the most elegant conventions, he answers us and speaks to us within ourselves.¹

What Blanchot points out to us is, first, the unavoidability of considering reading under the heading of a dialogue with the dead; and second, the quotidian reality of this inscription of a phantomatic reality atop the bizarre illusion of normalcy which might otherwise attend the act of reading itself, epitomised as it might be in the construction and interpretation of the epitaph, the memorial to the dead. The figure of Lazarus here invoked will – perhaps inevitably – crop up again a little later.

This increasing realisation that the act of reading is of what we might term an uncanny nature, that in it the type of ‘converse’ we practise is necessarily also ‘perverse’, that it cuts across while it supposes itself to succour any ‘normal’ rule of ‘conversation’, can be seen as one of the roots of the growing insistence on spectrality in criticism, a sense that any involvement with or in literature is inseparable from the phantom, the ghost, that the continuing survival and material reality of the book is itself the possible subject of scrutiny, anxiety, even fear. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, writing in 1999 in the second edition of their Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, propose ‘ghosts’ (although they did not do so in the first, 1995 edition) as an essential topos of the critical:

Ghosts are paradoxical since they are both fundamental to the human, fundamentally human, and a denial or disturbance of the human, the very being of the inhuman. We propose to devote this chapter, to dedicate it, to the living-dead, to the ghost(s) of literature. And we propose that this scandal of the ghost, its paradoxy, is embedded in the very thing that we call literature, endlessly inscribed in multiple and haunting ways, in novels, poems and plays.²

The mention of the ‘inhuman’ perhaps serves to connect the possibility of a spectral criticism with other, better-known critical practices that seek to displace the overweening human subject;³ the word ‘devote’, however, with its associations of madness and obsession, seems to me usefully symbolically to indicate the mass of difficulty and resistance to interpretation that would need to be encountered in the process of practising a truly spectral criticism; the impossibility, as it were, of such a criticism ever emerging fully into the light of day. The term ‘spectral criticism’, then, would denote not a programme or task to be fulfilled but rather a substrate of all dealings with text, an undecidable ground on which our reading occurs, a reinvocation of a terrorising but desired communion with the dead.

In what ways, some would ask, could this address the concerns of the more ‘materialistic’ tendencies in recent criticism. The answer might, perhaps, not be as simple as it appears. While the ghost, the phantom, might appear to be the most insubstantial of apparitions, one might also say that in this way it uncannily redoubles the mode of appearance of textuality itself; that it is ‘materialist criticism’ which deals only in metaphor – for, after all, materialist criticism is rarely genuinely with the materials themselves, with the parchment, papyrus, paper that might be all that is left after the word has been erased; whereas these emptied substances, always awaiting the reality of their inscription, are precisely the essence of the spectral, which is never confident of the actuality it appears to perceive.

These roots of spectral criticism I would summarise as leading to a formulation of what I have referred to elsewhere as the ‘law of the orphan’.⁴ Whereas many other schools of criticism have looked at issues of tradition and influence, of authorisation, paternity and maternity, of intertextuality and inheritance, a criticism based on the omnipresence of spectrality would find itself instead seeing texts as paradoxical in their relation to the past, fundamentally unparented and ‘unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled’, to quote that most ghostly of plays, Hamlet;⁵ they speak to us indeed all the time of the past, but the voice they use is not authoritative, it is instead monitory, omenistic, it warns of dooms past and to come and above all it reiterates our own complaint of being not at home in the world, of being adrift, lost in a prior space that can never really be recreated, no matter how many times the stone is rolled away.

The most familiar pathway for these concerns – which are, at the end of the day, also political and social concerns – in the 1980s and 1990s was the rise of Gothic criticism: that is to say, the change in the fortunes of Gothic writing that accompanied the emergence of a criticism that looked at it with some seriousness but thus inevitably, some would say, became involved, infected with the multiple anomalies of the supernatural.⁶ Although to begin with one might claim that such criticism involved a ‘recapitulation’, an attempted recovery of meaning from various textualities over the last two hundred years, one can also sense the emergence of a double problem that in the end might lead us to a series of doubts about the very status of criticism. First, there is the usual vexed question of where, or indeed whether, ‘Gothic’ could be said to have ‘begun’, shading off as it always does into an imagined ‘prior’ that proves increasingly impossible of recapitulation. Second, there is an increasing recognition that the ‘supernatural’ material with which Gothic claims to deal itself comes to constitute an ‘excess’ around the space of criticism, an ongoing challenge to criticism itself, insofar as criticism might wish to consider itself as a branch of enlightenment.

. . . Gothic persists in eluding this notion of ‘rule’. What haunts Gothic . . . is Gothic: a ghost haunted by another ghost, almost as eighteenth-century Gothic was haunted by Jacobean tragedy, and Jacobean tragedy by the horrors of Greek drama; and as all these textual manifestations are themselves further haunted by a world which comes prior to text yet which we can know only in and through text, a world of oral tradition, of more primal hauntings by word of mouth.⁷

According to this perception of – or from – the Gothic, there would be no possibility of criticism isolating a single text, a nonduplicitous textual act; instead criticism would only be able to realise itself by entering into the ‘hall of absence’, which we might also think of a kind of clinic for chronic originary doubt. Like a ghost tied to, and doomed to return to, an already inscribed location, criticism itself would be doomed to haunt a site which can never be fully recaptured.

The way in which this ‘re-vision’ of the Gothic has been taken into a wider field of critical speculation is well exemplified in a collection of essays, Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (1999), edited by Peter Buse and Andrew Stott. This volume, Buse and Stott claim, argues ‘that modern theory owes a debt to ghosts’, even if that debt is often unacknowledged.⁸ The word ‘debt’, reminding us as it does of work on Freud done by Samuel Weber and others,⁹ apart from its Derridean connotations, is significant in this context; but equally significant is the tripartite scheme into which the editors divide their chapters: ‘Spectrality and Theory’, ‘Uncanny Fictions’ and ‘Spectral Culture’. All of these categories are, as we may see later, susceptible of further development: the second of them, as envisaged in the volume, is solidly on terrain of the Gothic, with chapters on, for example, ‘Specters of Marx, Derrida and Gothic Fiction’, the ‘Mysteries and Domesticities of Udolpho’ and ‘The Postcolonial Ghost Story’.

Among the echoes called to mind here are those of the spectre and the uncanny, and these inevitably draw us close to the concerns of deconstruction and psychoanalysis respectively. There is, for example, an overarching question, of which this might remind us, about the ambiguities of deconstruction, and especially about deconstruction’s workings between textuality and politics. The emblematic text here is, of course, Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994), which essays a ‘different’ version of history: not as linear development, but as precisely the site of multiple hauntings. Speaking with the ghost of Hamlet’s father – Hamlet is inevitably implicated in any spectral discourse – in mind, Derrida suggests that ‘everything begins by the apparition of a spectre. More precisely by the waiting for this apparition. The anticipation is at once impatient, anxious, and fascinated: this, the thing (‘this thing’) will end up coming. The revenant is going to come’.¹⁰

Everything, then, begins in – and perhaps continues to reside in – an absence, a premonition of arrival which will never be fully removed or replaced. Thus – and here as the spur to an account of recent European history and the fate of communism – Derrida engages with the looping circularity of all history, whereby there is, as in the Gothic, never an origin, or a never-origin, a state whereby the past refuses to be entirely occluded but remains to haunt the apparent site of ‘enlightened’ new beginnings: in the beginning – apparently – is the apparition. History therefore cannot be written without ghosts, but the point goes further than this: the narratives of history must necessarily include ghosts – indeed they can include little else – but they will also be written by ghosts. History is a series of accounts of the dead, but it is also a series of accounts by the dead; the voices we overhear in our dealings with history are spectral without exception, in their conjurings of the figurations of the past they serve precisely to spectralise the possibility of knowledge.

This inevitably connects, through the notion of the uncanny, through the conflation of the homely and the unhomely, the familiar and the unfamiliar, with the older tradition of ‘Freudian history’, from which, as from the unconscious, nothing ever goes away. We might want to have in mind, for example, the well-known vision Freud offers of Rome in Civilisation and its Discontents (1930); he offers it to us as a city which, as he remarks in a resonant phrase, is now ‘taken by ruins’. But ‘now’, he says – perhaps, therefore, in a different but equally problematic ‘present’ moment,

. . . let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past – an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.¹¹

According to this vision – although we might equally refer to it as a hallucination – ‘in Rome the palaces of the Caesars and the Septizonium of Septimius Severus would still be rising to their old height on the Palatine’, ‘the castle of S. Angelo would still be carrying on its battlements the beautiful statues which graced it until the siege by the Goths’, and so forth. In other words, according to a Freudian historiography, a history of the unconscious, nothing would ever have gone away. Clearly the mention of the Goths – as the ineffectual erasers of a prior memory that will never disappear, as the sign of the hovering and recurring possibility symbolised by the notion of the ‘dark ages’ – is suggestive here; and so is the tense or mood of the verbs, that repeating ‘would’, for example, that appears to have come to characterise spectral criticism, that comes helplessly to replace the affirmative but vulnerable ‘is’ that can no longer stand in the light of the endless returns of history: the rule, we might say, of the phantomatic hypothesis.

According to the development of this new historiography – which is at the same time a recrudescence of the concept of the ‘ancient’ – social life and its cultural textualities, however material they may appear, are constituted as much by absence as by presence, and the past takes the form of a series of apparitions that can be neither addressed nor banished. This, of course, has been the ‘lesson’ of psychoanalysis right from its own – deeply contested – origins; what, we might after all ask, was the status of linear history under the conditions of hypnosis and somnambulism within which psychoanalysis emerged? What, however, has been distinctive within the last decades, as I see it, has been the insistence with which psychoanalysis has associated itself with the (Gothic) language of the crypt and the phantom. Emblematic here, of course, has been the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, first in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word (1986) and later in the essays collected as The Shell and the Kernel (1994).

To rehearse briefly what may well be familiar ground: what this work principally points to is a psychic space different from the unconscious, a location that is not a location but whose existence is felt only as an insistent pressure from an otherwise absent or unattributable source. This ‘crypt’, according to Abraham and Torok, is the repository of the secrets of the past, it is the place where the memories of our parents and grandparents are buried, the site on which are stored all the stories which have been too painful, too embarrassing, too revealing to tell; it is in the crypt that the secrets of our own genesis may be buried, but we are ourselves unaware not only of its contents but even of its existence or whereabouts, and even psychoanalysis itself, according to this theory – which gestures towards a psychoanalysis that goes beyond, transcends, sublates psychoanalysis – can exert only a limited influence over the crypt’s role in psychic life, however much the psychoanalytic encounter in general seeks to replicate the conditions of an underlying dialogue with the dead.

This in turn, we might say, suggests new approaches to textuality, approaches based on a notion of what I would term the ‘text instead’, ways of reading ‘through’ the material text to a ‘different absence’. The whole tenor of The Wolf