Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety

Gothic Things

DARK ENCHANTMENT AND ANTHROPOCENE ANXIETY

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESSNEW YORK 2023

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Contents

PREFACE: THREE BEGINNINGS

Introduction: Ominous Matter

1Gothic Thing Theory

2Dark Enchantment and Gothic Materialism

3Body-as-Thing

4Thing-as-Body

5Book: How to Do Things with Words

6Building: Bigger on the Inside

Epilogue: The Ominous Matter of One’s Ordinary Life

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

WORKS CITED

INDEX

Preface

Three Beginnings

Like most stories, this one has multiple beginnings.

The most obvious starting point for this project, which has been developing over the course of a decade, immediately followed a panel on which I participated in October of 2011 at the George Washington University, where I presented a paper with the title of What Monsters Mean. Post-talk discussion turned to recent trends in cultural and critical theory and, in particular, the approaches being referred to as Object-Oriented Ontology and New Materialism. Feeling myself sadly behind the curve, I solicited suggestions as to where I should start to get myself up to speed and assembled a list of names, including Jane Bennett, Graham Harman, and Timothy Morton. What followed was then a deep dive into these works and others broadly categorizable under the rubric of the nonhuman turn—Richard Grusin’s phrase for the constellation of modern theoretical paradigms engaged in decentering the human in favor of a turn toward and concern for the nonhuman, understood variously in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, materiality, or technologies (Grusin 2015, vii).

This post-talk discussion is the obvious moment at which the trajectory of the project originated because it set wheels in motion; however, it is also a kind of non-beginning because the new works I was reading in Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), Speculative Realism, Vibrant Materiality, eco-criticism, and so on didn’t seem at all new to me. In fact, the concepts and tropes introduced—thing-power; enchantment; the intrusion of the outside; hidden depths to objects; the entanglement or enmeshing of the human and nonhuman; the decentering of the human; the rhetoric of apocalypse, spectrality, and monstrosity; weird realism, and so on—were all strangely familiar. This, I realized, is because of a second, more diffuse beginning point: my research into the Gothic, which prompted the realization that these are exactly the concepts and tropes that the Gothic as a genre has been obsessed with since its origins in the eighteenth century. The Gothic, as this study will develop as its central argument, has always been about how human beings relate to the nonhuman world, what happens when objects assume a kind of mysterious animacy or potency, and what happens when human beings are reduced to the status of things among other things. It insistently decenters the human, showing human beings to be enmeshed in networks of human and nonhuman forces mostly outside of our control. The Gothic, in short, turns out to be the uncanny doppelgänger of twenty-first-century critical and cultural theory everywhere lurking beneath the surface (and sometimes explicitly surfacing) as it haunts considerations of how human beings interact with objects and their environment. The Gothic, I will argue, has been making the claims of New Materialists, Speculative Realists, and Object-Oriented Ontologists for them since its inception—and has exerted significant pressure on these frameworks, shaping their discourse in both obvious unacknowledged ways. New Materialism, it turns out, is just the repackaged old materialism of the Gothic with a different affective valence—and what the Gothic shows us is the troubling side of staying with the trouble, as Donna Haraway puts it in her 2016 book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Acknowledging our entanglement within webs of actants can be revelatory; it can also be terrifying—and the Gothic not only makes clear that being considered a thing among things can be frightening, but that, as Kyla Wazana Tompkins reminds us, certain groups of people have never been considered quite human enough in the first place (On the Limits [2016]).

The realization that the Gothic functions in some respects as the uncanny doppelgänger of twenty-first-century critical and cultural theory was then driven home for me by a third beginning point for this study: Drew Goddard’s 2012 horror comedy film The Cabin in the Woods. Itself a metatextual reflection on and critique of the formulaic nature of cinematic horror, the film early on focuses insistently on objects, making the role of what Jane Bennett, in Vibrant Matter (2010, 6), refers to as thing-power—the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle—in Gothic narrative a central theme. Having arrived at the isolated titular cabin, five college students descend into a basement packed with mysterious artifacts—among them a music box, a necklace atop a wedding dress, drums, a puzzle sphere, an amulet, a ceremonial dagger, a telescope, a gas mask, a toy chest, doll masks, and a diary. Everything about the staging of this scene invests the setting and these items with an almost palpable aura of dread. What we later learn is that all the objects serve as summoning artifacts to be used in The Ritual: an annual ceremony humanity must perform to placate The Ancient Ones, monstrous Lovecraftian entities that must be entertained with scenes of blood and sacrifice to ensure humanity’s continued existence. Each artifact correlates with a particular monster and, when handled, summons that creature. Then, if things go as scripted by a shadowy organization overseeing events, the summoned creature dispatches or devours the unlucky summoners and humanity gets to survive for another year.

The basement in The Cabin in the Woods is the cellar of the Gothic, the place where its various trinkets and curios and souvenirs have all been tucked away, and what it reveals is just how deeply invested the Gothic has always been in a kind of New Materialist theorization of objects. While the film emphasizes objects associated specifically with the horror film tradition, the movie nevertheless more broadly foregrounds the central role uncanny objects have played in Gothic narrative since Manfred was crushed by a gigantic helmet and a figure stepped down from a portrait in Horace Walpole’s 1764 The Castle of Otranto. Were the hapless students in The Cabin in the Woods to rummage even more deeply into the cellar, no doubt they would pull a drop cloth off of a creepy portrait with eyes that move or that has aged poorly in comparison to its subject; they might wipe the dust off a magic mirror with a sticky surface that stretches when touched and that functions as a window or portal into another dimension; perhaps they would come across a battered trunk housing a voodoo doll or mysterious idol, a marionette imbued with the will to do evil or a hateful talky Tina doll or a manic wind-up monkey toy with clanging cymbals. Certainly, there would be a whistle that summons a mysterious malevolent entity, a Ouija Board that permits one to contact the great beyond, and a cursed videotape (in an equally cursed antique VCR) or a gold doubloon or a violin with a disconcertingly red finish. They might even come across a volume of accursed lore, a skin-bound grimoire such as the Necronomicon or The King in Yellow or The Babadook. And if cabins in the woods have garages (in addition to basements), no doubt there would be a malevolent 1958 Ford Fury named Christine parked there. Like the warehouse that holds the Ark of the Covenant in Steven Spielberg’s 1981 Raiders of the Lost Ark (itself an uncanny object that exerts agency as it effaces the Nazi insignia off the crate that contains it at the end), the Gothic’s basement extends endlessly off into the distance in order to accommodate all the accursed matter of the Gothic. It is labyrinthine and no doubt, like a House of Leaves, larger on the inside than without.

Like elements in a dream (or nightmare) then, the story Gothic Things tells is inevitably overdetermined, traceable back to multiple points of origin: a discussion after a talk and a very metatextual horror film situated in relation to the Gothic genre, cinematic horror, and developments in twenty-first-century critical theory. It has taken me a while to work out the ideas here, which I’ve been trying out in bits and pieces over the past decade and then some, and I’ve sometimes worried that I’ve taken too long; but the essence of the Gothic is disturbing tales, and belatedness is the nature of ascribing meaning to traumatic events—so perhaps, given all the trouble human beings confront in the twenty-first century, a consideration of what the Gothic can tell us about the anxieties of embracing the thingness of the human and the potentially actant qualities of the material and non-human world (Tompkins 2016) is more pressing than ever.

Introduction

Ominous Matter

The Gothic as a genre has generated a substantial body of criticism that has sought to define the category in a variety of ways. Perhaps most influentially, Fred Botting, in his overview of the genre in his book Gothic, defines it as the literature of transgression. Tracing the development of the Gothic from the eighteenth century onward, Botting characterizes the genre as a writing of excess (Botting 1996, 1) that is preoccupied with locating and overstepping cultural expectations and boundaries. In Gothic productions, writes Botting, imagination and emotional effects exceed reason. Passion, excitement and sensation transgress social proprieties and moral laws (3). Encouraging superstitious beliefs, continues Botting, Gothic narratives subverted rational codes of understanding and, in their presentation of diabolical deeds and supernatural incidents, ventured into the unhallowed ground of necromancy and arcane ritual (6). Through representations of unrestrained desire, the Gothic raises the awful spectre of complete social disintegration in which virtue cedes to vice, reason to desire, law to tyranny (5).

In coordination with Botting, other critics have emphasized the mechanics of Gothic plots and recurring generic conceits—what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick refers to in her study of the genre as the Gothic formula (1986, 10)—and their participation in creating an atmosphere of dread. Nick Groom, for example, helpfully proposes seven types of obscurity that prevail in Gothic novels:

meteorological (mists, clouds, rain, storm, tempest, smoke, darkness, shadows, gloom);

topographical (impenetrable forests, inaccessible mountains, chasms, gorges, deserts, blasted heaths, icefields, the boundless ocean);

architectural (towers, prisons, castles covered in gargoyles and crenellations, abbeys and priories, tombs, crypts, dungeons, ruins, graveyards, mazes, secret passages, locked doors);

material (masks, veils, disguises, billowing curtains, suits of armor, tapestries);

textual (riddles, rumors, folklore, unreadable manuscripts and inscriptions, ellipses, broken texts, fragments, clotted language, polysyllabism, obscure dialect, inserted narratives, stories-within-stories);

spiritual (religious mystery, allegory and symbolism, Roman Catholic ritual, mysticism, freemasonry, magic and the occult, Satanism, witchcraft, summoning, damnation);

psychological (dreams, visions, hallucinations, drugs, sleepwalking, madness, split personalities, mistaken identities, doubles, derangement, ghostly presences, forgetfulness, death, hauntings). (Groom 2012, 77–78)

These forms of obscurity, propose Groom, aim at sublimity through mystification in order to probe the consequences of history and the telling of secrets (79).

While intermingling stylistic elements with thematic ones, and far from a complete list, Groom’s catalog of recurring Gothic conceits is nevertheless particularly apropos to my purpose here because it highlights so clearly the centrality of human/nonhuman interaction to Gothic narrative—that is, the roles of weather, place, architecture, objects, and so on in creating suspense, dread, and terror for Gothic protagonists, as well as for consumers of Gothic narratives. What Groom’s recipe for the Gothic illustrates is in fact the central premise of this study: that the Gothic has been insistently about objects and the material world as possessing what contemporary theorist Jane Bennett refers to as thing-power (2010, xvi and passim) and people as enmeshed in networks of human and nonhuman forces since its eighteenth-century origins. The Gothic, I will argue, since its beginnings has been consistently preoccupied with the nature of matter itself and the relation of the human to the nonhuman, and this sensibility informing early contributions to the genre continues to structure literary and visual contributions in the present. With this in mind, my purpose here is to reorient Gothic studies onto what one might refer to as Gothic materialism: the centrality of objects within Gothic narrative, the ways that the Gothic calls into question conventional distinctions between animate and inanimate, and how, in place of autonomous human actors, the Gothic redefines human beings as Latourean actants within constantly shifting networks of relationships.

Beyond a focus on the uncanny animacy of the material world and the ways that human beings are objects participating in networks of objects, however, what also distinguishes the Gothic as a genre is its characteristic affective orientation: dread and horror elicited by a sense of categorical confusion as humans and nonhuman beings and objects swap places. Consumers of Gothic narrative are meant to share the confusion and dread of Gothic protagonists as they are buffeted by challenging environments in their attempts to negotiate dark and confusing spaces and are forced to contend with malevolent and occult forces to avoid being transformed into corpses. Put differently, in Gothic narrative the animate world acts as an antagonistic force—in concert with and often eclipsing the threat posed by any human villain.

Thinking about Gothic materialism as the affect-generating machine of the Gothic genre then collapses the familiar distinction between terror and horror outlined by eighteenth-century Gothic author Ann Radcliffe in her 1826 On the Supernatural in Poetry. There, Radcliffe distinguishes terror as an anticipatory affect evoked by obscurity from horror, which she associates with revulsion elicited by confrontation with the abject. Terror and horror, she writes, are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them (Radcliffe 1826, 149). Drawing on the philosophy of Edmund Burke, Radcliffe associates terror with the sublime: awe and dread elicited by expansive powers. Horror, in contrast, is considered by Radcliffe as a lesser emotion provoked by crude representations of violence and physical decay. Glossing Radcliffe’s distinction, Devendra Varma writes in The Gothic Flame (1957) that the difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse (130). However, whether the source of anxiety and dread within Gothic narrative is the awful obscurity of the mazelike forest or the loathsome spectacle of decay, the smell of death or the corpse itself that one stumbles upon soon after, the affective response is evoked through a confrontation with the physical world in which matter asserts itself and the agency of the protagonist is circumscribed. Whether it is the humbling sublimity of the natural landscape or the spectacle of decay associated with the corpse, the world, we might say, is always too much with us in the Gothic, which is the source of its dread—not in the Wordsworthean sense of being out of tune with nature, but rather in the sense of being overwhelmed by objects and natural forces that, as Timothy Morton develops in his discussion of hyperobjects in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (2013a), humiliate (in the sense of humble, bring low) the human (17).

The Gothic genre, therefore, is indeed the literature of transgression, as Botting proposes, but its transgressivity goes beyond representations of illicit and unconstrained desire; this study will argue that at the core of the Gothic is its transgressive undercutting of human anthropocentrism through the fore-grounding of the agential qualities of ominous matter. This is the master narrative of the Gothic genre as it repeatedly upends the human/nonhuman hierarchy entirely by endowing things with uncanny life at the expense of human agency—and it is a story that has remained remarkably consistent since the genre’s origins. What I am calling Gothic materialism then invests this rethinking of the nature of the human and the relationship of the human to the nonhuman with dread, rendering matter as sinister and menacing, human mastery of the natural world a fiction, and human existence as precarious. The Gothic in this way can be said to offer a kind of philosophical meditation on the entanglement of human beings with the nonhuman world—and, in this, it corresponds in striking ways with the contemporary critical paradigms Richard Grusin assembles under the rubric of the nonhuman turn (2015, vii and passim), but with a different affective valence: one that substitutes horror for hope. As such, a return to the Gothic can help elaborate the challenges that New Materialism, Speculative Realism, Object-Oriented Ontology, and other twenty-first-century attempts to rethink the relationship between the human and the nonhuman confront as they seek to decenter the human and challenge the primacy of what Sylvia Wynter refers to as ethnoclass Man (see Wynter 2003, 262 and passim) in ongoing efforts to develop more just, humane, and sustainable ways of living. Indeed, as I will develop in Chapter 1, the Gothic turns out to be the uncanny doppelgänger of the theoretical paradigms associated with the nonhuman turn, informing their approach and suffusing their rhetoric.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Cthulhu?

Donna Haraway, in her 2016 Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, is clear that her notion of the Chthulucene as a name for an alternate version of our current epoch is not derived from or related to horror author H. P Lovecraft’s interdimensional tentacle-faced monstrosity, Cthulhu. As opposed to SF writer H. P Lovecraft’s misogynist racial-nightmare monster Cthulhu (Haraway 2016, 101), her Chthulucene, which names a timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth (2), entangles myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages—including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus (101). The web Haraway weaves of speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fiction, and scientific fact is, she asserts, a vein of SF that Lovecraft could not have imagined or embraced (101). Embraced, certainly not. The twentieth-century introvert who longed for the days of the eighteenth-century gentleman would have wanted nothing to do with feminism or other movements seeking to empower the disenfranchised and address historical inequities. But imagined? That’s another matter. Not only did Lovecraft clearly imagine what Haraway refers to as the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and humanas-humus, but this revaluation of the human as relational and material is in fact the source of the dread that pulsates through its fiction.

Lovecraft’s decentering of the human is reflected by his cosmicism—his belief that, as summarized by Trung Nguyen in his History of Humans, there is no recognizable divine presence, such as God, in the universe, and that humans are particularly insignificant in the larger scheme of intergalactic existence (2016, 160). Lovecraft weaves this perspective throughout his fiction, in which human civilization is presented as both ephemeral and precarious. Human civilization, his fiction proposes, will eventually decline and be replaced by something else later on—in his The Shadow Out of Time (1936b), a race of beetles is proposed. And the decline of human civilization is not necessarily an extended process—at the heart of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is the existence of powers and forces in the universe that could blot us out of existence should they actually take note of us.

Lovecraft’s cosmicism, on full display at the start of his most famous story, The Call of Cthulhu (Lovecraft [1928] 1999), is in fact quite amenable to contemporary theoretical paradigms that seek to decenter the human—and, despite its pessimism, is certainly implicated in Lovecraft’s twenty-first-century popularity. Lovecraft starts his tale by foregrounding human limitations and insignificance:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (139)

We human beings, asserts the opening of the tale, despite all our pretensions to grandeur, just don’t know what we’re getting into, what we’re doing, or what we are up against. We think of ourselves as masters of all we survey, penetrating the secrets of the universe, when, in fact, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what there is to know and are not prepared for the revelation of our own impotence and insignificance when we put the pieces together. After this opening, the rest of the story then serves to illustrate this premise through the introduction of Cthulhu, one of several interdimensional Lovecraftian monstrosities whose powers so far outstrip those of human beings that all we can really do is keep our heads down and hope not to attract their attention.

Cthulhu—and the pantheon of extraterrestrial deities called The Great Old Ones of which it is a part—are for all intents and purposes what Timothy Morton refers to as hyperobjects: things like black holes and global warming that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans (2013a, 1). Interdimensional, powerful beyond comprehension, and seemingly immortal, Cthulhu exists outside of human time but nevertheless has a global influence, with a greatly dispersed network of worshippers and an effect on the dreams of those with the requisite sensitivity. Indeed, Cthulhu works surprisingly well as an avatar for climate change—a massively dispersed threat to human survival that can’t really be fought directly. In this sense, we really are living in the Cthulhucene, spelled in the Lovecraftian way. To stay with the trouble, as Haraway directs, would then mean staying with Cthulhu—which would entail rejecting human hubris, acknowledging our insignificance in comparison to hyperobjects and in light of deep time and interstellar distance, accepting our enmeshment within Latourean networks of human and nonhuman actants, and so on—all of which would be in keeping with Haraway’s philosophy of "sympoeisis—of making kin" (2016, 2 and passim) with creatures human and nonhuman and creating the world together.

Lovecraft certainly did imagine myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages. The problem, however, is that imagining them filled him with dread. Where Lovecraft runs afoul of Haraway’s posthumanism—and that of all those who have followed in her wake—is in his horror at impurity, which reflects Lovecraft’s notorious racism. As author of weird fiction China Miéville explains, Lovecraft’s racism wasn’t simply a lamentable detail or aspect of his writing that can be bracketed off from his fiction; it is, rather, the motor force that propels it. According to Miéville, the antihumanism one finds so bracing in Lovecraft is a product of his racism—his race hatred (Miéville 2016, 241)—which cannot be divorced from his writing. Put differently, Lovecraft’s horror fiction is not effective despite his racism, but because of it (Miéville 2016, 242). Abhorrence of miscegenation arguably is the force that propels Lovecraft’s fiction and is present both in his dismissive attitude toward non-white races and what he refers to as mongrels and halfcastes in particular and in his human/nonhuman hybrid monstrosities more generally—Cthulhu’s humanoid shape with tentacled face, the fish-people of The Shadow Over Innsmouth (Lovecraft [1936c] 1999), Wilber Whateley’s monstrous brother in The Dunwich Horror (Lovecraft [1929] 2001), and so on. That Donna Haraway, the philosopher famous for celebrating the cyborg in A Cyborg Manifesto ([1985] 1991) as a concept that undoes rigid human/nonhuman distinctions, would hold Lovecraft, an author who can find only dread in the undoing of those distinctions, at arm’s length is not surprising. But isn’t the trouble with Cthulhu—that is, with Lovecraft’s worldview, including his racism and its intersections with colonialism, misogyny, exploitation of the natural world and environmental despoliation, predatory capitalism, homophobia, ableism, and with everything Sylvia Wynter, Alexander G. Weheliye, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, and other theorists of race associate with Man as a genre of the human (Wynter 2003, 288)—isn’t this trouble with Cthulhu precisely the root cause of much of the trouble with which we have to grapple in the twenty-first century?

Haraway’s insistence that when we