Early and Pre-Gothic Literary Conventions & Examples (October 2015 Literary Meeting)

Welcome to the October 2015 Literary Meeting!

The theme for this month’s Literary Meeting was Early and Pre-Gothic Literary Conventions & Examples.  This fall we’ve been doing something a little different in that our theme lasts all semester instead of one month.  We’ll be looking at different eras of Gothic Literature each month through the remainder of the year.  This month, we focused on early and pre-Gothic literary conventions.  I chose to spend an entire season on this subject because it is so important to the history of our genre.  Indeed, I dare anyone to show me an artifact of modern Western horror that doesn’t owe some influence to the Gothic tradition.

As always, I’ve made informal references in text, with full references listed at the end (I wasn’t very consistent this time with what I cited as a reference; sometimes I cited the publication we actually read from, while for others I did not).

Aromatic Accompaniment: Black Birch by Chesapeake Bay Candle.

Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination

In January of this year, I went to Britain to study for a few weeks.  While I was there, I saw dozens of sets of ruins, but the most important place I went was the British Library, which at the time was holding an exhibit called “Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination.”

The exhibit was amazing.  It laid out the complete history of the Gothic genre, from its origins to its modern influences.  I had never seen the history of the literary movement laid out so comprehensively before, and I spent six hours in the exhibit before they informed me, regretfully, that the library was closing and that I would have to leave.  On my way out, I bought the exhibit book.  The book is lavishly illustrated, with full color reproductions of most of the artwork that was on display.

When we held our meeting, I invited those in attendance to imagine the illustrations not as full-color pages in a book, but as pieces of artwork as large as my coffee table.  Standing in front of the paintings of Netley Abbey and Tintern Abbey, I finally understood for the first time what was meant by the sublime; the sheer and total awe I felt was terrific.  There are entire subreddits devoted to ruination and abandonment.  Similar to what I said in the post about the Baltic Sea Object,  there is something extremely Spooky about things that are made by man which have since fallen into ruin; it is that tie to a forgotten history that makes antiquity so enticing.  Ruined buildings are the tangible representation of unwilling purposelessness; that is, they had a purpose once, but it has been taken from them.  From the recognition that the same will happen not only to us, but to our works also springs terror.

At the exhibit I also saw original manuscripts of things like Frankenstein and The Castle of Otranto, which was wonderful.  Knowing that there are other people out there that care about this sort of thing was the best feeling in the world.  Horror is a genre that doesn’t receive its fair share of academic attention, and that is a large part of the reason why the Spooky Society exists; it creates a space for those who want to explore the genre in a serious way.

Gothic Conventions

When we think of the Gothic, we typically think of drafty castles, frightened (but virtuous) heroines, forbidding forests, ghouls, ghosts, family curses, and vampires.  A great body of work has accumulated regarding the symbolism of these things, mostly of the cultural criticism variety that seeks to tell us what these things represented in society.  Unfortunately, such an approach often ignores much discussion of the Spooky bits themselves.  I want to know about the Spooky bits!  What are those Spooky bits that comprise the Gothic, and how do they combine to make a work uniquely Gothic, rather than just grotesque, morbid, or mysterious?  In essence, why is the Gothic more than just the sum of a bunch of Spooky tropes?  It is in that vein which we shall proceed.

Clive Bloom gives this excellent description of what the Gothic is:

The gothic sensibility takes pleasure in the bizarre and the wild, the magical and the arabesque: in architecture, it was expressed in revived taste for the medieval, while in literature and painting it was expressed by dealing in the supernatural, with the inexplicable monsters of the forest and castle — spooks, witches, damned souls and corpses that rise at midnight; it is interested in science and invention, but turned on their heads as the weird productions of necromancers — doctors in strange laboratories dealing in forbidden knowledge; it is fascinated with the abnormal and the hallucinatory — drug abuse, torture, terrorization, the fear of the victim — the pleasure of being insane! (Bloom 3).

The Gothic (especially the early Gothic) is usually divided into two main schools: the Radcliffe school of Terror, and the Lewis school of Horror.  Kim Ian Michasiw paints this distinction best:

Gothic … ha[s] conventionally been divided into the schools of terror and horror, schools which have been grouped under the names of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis.  Terror seeks to evoke by suggestion, by suspense; horror displays in the hopes of producing disgust.  Terror veils a potentially ghastly unknown and temps the reader to peer through, to pull up a corner; horror marches readers through catacombs filled with violated nuns, with the rotting corpses of infants, with entombed lovers turned cannibal.  Terror remains discrete and seeks a unity of tone; horror has an appetite for sudden varation, for the blackly comic, for the grotesque (Michasiw, quoted in Bloom 3).

These divisions are still evident today.  I won’t go too deeply into this now, as this will be the subject of another essay, but a short digression is valuable here in order to demonstrate the conventions of the two schools of Gothic.  By example, consider the two film versions of The Haunting.  The original 1963 version terrifies (see my earlier writeup): the tension is built primarily by suggestion, created by things just out of sight but within hearing–in the end a reading in which nothing supernatural has occurred is a valid reading.  Contrast this with the 1999 version, whose only merits are bad ’90s CGI and Owen Wilson losing his head.

The 1999 version seeks to overwhelm with its sheer gratuitousness, and is a good modern example of what is meant by the Lewis school of horror.  To put it into even more generalized and contrasting terms, juxtapose Lake Mungo with The Evil Dead (2013).

Lake Mungo:

The Evil Dead (2013):

This particular scene in Lake Mungo is the full extent of the gore in the entire movie, and is only present because it accentuates the suspense of seeing something as-yet unidentified walk slowly out of the darkness and the terror inherent in finally recognizing it as your own doppelgänger; the Evil Dead scene’s gore is there because that’s the horror of the movie–it goes so beyond the gratuitous and loops back like integer overflow and becomes the constitutive.

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is generally accepted as the first Gothic work, but there was much that preceded it that seems quite similar in nature.  Why then does the timeline begin in such a specific place?  In order to understand how the components add up to more than a whole, which we must do in order to answer that question, it is necessary first to take an inventory of sorts to see what Spooky bits existed before Walpole brought them together in his famous literary hoax.

To answer this question, rather than beginning in 1764 with the publication of the first edition of Otranto we went back further, to the pre-Gothic.

The Conventions of the Pre-Gothic

There were several literary movements and conventions that had to converge before the Gothic could come to the fore.  Notable among these are what I will call “the mysterious imagination,” medievalism, the macabre and  the morbid, and finally an aesthetic to tie everything together.  In this section I will borrow heavily from Gothic Histories by Clive Bloom.  Those who are seriously interested in this topic would be well served to skim over much of this next section and read the first chapter of Gothic Histories instead.  For the rest of you, I will excerpt the most important sections.

The Mysterious Imagination

The first requirement of Gothic is the mysterious imagination.  Quite simply, this is the curiosity that is piqued by the knowledge that there is something out there beyond that which is immediately in front of us.  It is this curiosity that fuels all quests for understanding, and thus for any appreciation of knowledge itself, and is especially necessary for any appreciation of fiction.  This is where the “wonder” in “terror and wonder” comes from.  Without it, there is no suspension of disbelief (intended or otherwise) in the audience.

Bloom gives a mid-16th century example of the mysterious imagination at work:

In 1555, a strange island was added to the coast of the New World.  A Franciscan monk by the name of André Thevet claimed that he had made a journey to a mysterious place near ‘Antarctic France’ (Newfoundland) called Isola des Demonias — the Isle of Demons.  There he had been assailed by ‘a great clamour of men’s voices’, while on the island itself he was attacked by demons whom he kept at bay by repetition of the Gospel of St. John.  In 1558, Thevet wrote up his adventures, be even in a credulous age his tale was discounted.  Nevertheless, Thevet had heard the tale from someone who had actually been there (1).

Bloom also gives the background of the tale that he had heard.  It was a sordid affair involving a voyage, an affair, a marooning, and “‘beasts or other shapes abominably and unutterably hideous, the brood of hell, howling in baffled fury'”  that were held at bay with “readings of the New Testament and invocations of the Virgin” (1).  We can already see two related concepts that should be familiar to us: the insistence that the unbelievable tale is true, and the fact that the tale is true because he heard it from someone who was actually there–this form might be more recognizable to modern readers as “I heard it from a friend of a friend”; this is known as an urban legend.

Bloom cites this as an example of literary evidence of “a certain human need for the mysterious” (2).  In 1555, the Isle of Demons was fascinating–even if not widely believed as a true account–because “[p]laces like the Isle of Demons didn’t exist, but they just might and if they did they were something to be shunned as one would shun Hell itself.”  He calls the very real (at least insofar as it was still possible for it to exist; the whole world hadn’t been explored yet) place that the Isle of Demons represented “a geography of horrors” (2).  Critically, Bloom points out that the age of exploration was coming to an end–all the places where the dragons might have dwelt were being rapidly filled in, and nobody was finding any dragons.  This left a vacuum of mystery that the imagination would need to fill.  Bloom posits that without unknown lands to explore, this left an opening for other types of speculation to capture mindshare:

[I]f you were wealthy enough you might build your dream as a fairy castle, a ruined tower or haunted monastery, might dress servants as ghoulish monks and put lighted tapers in their hands to light you to bed, might even buy old suits of armour in hope that they might walk at night or old portraits whose sitters might descend spectrally from the frame; and if poorer you could imagine landscapes full of caverns and forests where bandits roamed and corpses rose from haunted graveyards.  Getting to the Isle of Demons might make you sea sick; going to the land of ghosts would give you sensual vertigo” (2).

Medievalism

The astute reader might here recognize the hints of medievalism in the previous quotation.  Rightly so; the 18th and early 19th centuries presided over a veritable obsession with the trappings of the past.  The reasons for this were many (all of which are fascinating; Bloom addresses all of them), but the net effect was that people couldn’t get enough medievalism.  Tournaments were held, in real or replica armor; false castles were built; manors were turned into castles; it became fashionable to construct sets of fake ruins on the grounds of estates.  This was the time of Netley and Tinturn Abbeys–scroll back up and look closely at the pictures; see those men with the torches on the upper level?  They’re exploring the mysterious imagination.  Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill is one of the most famous examples of this behavior.  It is from this cultural climate that we get our drafty castles.

The Macabre and the Morbid

The next component that runs through almost every example of the Gothic is the macabre and the morbid.  This can take the metaphorical form, in which case the work serves only to remind us of or call our attention to our mortality–our fascination with ruins works in this way–or it can take the literal form, as in that of the Graveyard Poets.  If the mysterious imagination brings us the craving and medievalism provides us our setting, the macabre delivers part–but not all–of what makes up the content.

This is where we get our corpses, our skeletons, and our churchyards.

Prior to the advent of the full Gothic aesthetic, the macabre, the morbid, and especially the supernatural didn’t appear with the emotional weight that they would carry later.  Instead, the effect was often comical.  Bloom demonstrates this with an excerpt of Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel Journal of the Plague Year, which takes place in 1655, a year of great plague.  The excerpt concerns the misfortune of John Hayward to stop to rest for a moment and gets thrown on top of a plague cart!  The literary scene reads like a literary version of and is almost certainly the inspiration for Monty Python’s plague cart:

Bloom notes, “Defoe’s touch is light, anecdotal, urban … but his whimsies aside, one may find … the terrors that would later characterize the gothic” (5).

Bloom takes us through several other examples of pre-Gothic poetry:  Edmund Spencer’s 1594 ode, “Epithalamion,” embodies “the new taste for the dreary and for the expression of grief and sorrow,” complete with “owls and goblins, ghosts, vultures and reptiles, but they are mere props … [they lack] the emotional importance attached to them by the eighteenth century” (6).  Of John Dyer’s 1726 poem “Grongar Hill,” he says “[he] would turn on the theatricals when required … yet this was so much flimflam” (7).  But, according to him, “it was Robert Blair, the son of an Edinburgh cleric … who caught the spirit of graveyard terrors in his work ‘The Grave‘” (7).

An Emotional Aesthetic to Tie it Together

All of the works referenced above have some element of Gothicism about them, but none of them are examples of Gothic literature.  Why not?  Because they do not satisfy the requirement for an aesthetic.  Without this to tie the elements together, they “fai[l] to have the substrance, either narrative or emotional, of the true gothic tale” (8).  Bloom notes that this aesthetic must take the form of a theoretical or philosophical core, which is necessary to “sav[e] the best tales from becoming mere anecdote or incoherent sensationalism” (8).  In this particular case, the aesthetic needed to be an emotional one, which was finally provided by Edmund Burke’s 1757 work, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, which “finally codif[ied] the gothic emotional experience” (8).

Bloom excerpts from Burke’s thoughts on the Sublime (Part I Section VII), Terror (Part II Section II), and Obscurity (Part II Section III).  These sections can be summarized thusly: The Sublime is that which is or produces the “strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling,”; the Sublime is most often evoked by Terror; and to cause Terror we need some amount of Obscurity–we can’t know everything about that which is inducing Terror–or else “a great deal of the apprehension vanishes”; Obscurity is necessary in order to experience the Terror of the unknown.

This emotional aesthetic powered much of what followed in the Romantic period.  Bloom asserts that Coleridge and Keats “exploited and enriched the descriptive vocabulary of Burke’s sublime mood,” Blake “illustrated Robert Blair’s poem” (The Grave), that J. W. M. Turner and John Constable “painted the landscape equivalent of the sublime … [they traveled to Stonehenge] to capture the mystery of the ancient past,” and that others “used Burke as if he were a philosophical tourist guide to the mountains and lakes of Italy, the forests of Germany, the Lake District (the English Alps) or the Scottish Highlands” (9).

Finally, then, with all the necessary pieces, we arrive at the gates of Otranto.  Walpole originally tried to pass off his fiction as a medieval manuscript, perpetrating one of the most famous literary hoaxes of that century (and also making that manuscript a Fictional Text and Otranto itself a sort of proto-Spookypasta).  There were many that followed it–too many, in fact, even to enumerate.  Much work has been done regarding this work which I will not attempt to duplicate here.  Wikipedia’s article on the subject is excellent, and I highly suggest reading it, particularly the section on its literary elements.

Selected Examples We Read

We covered a lot of ground in the meeting.  In addition to discussing all of the above, we had time to read a few other pieces:  “The Apparition of Mrs. Veal” by Daniel Defoe (1706), “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror; with Sir Bertrand, a Fragment” by John Aikin and Anna Laetitia Aikin Barbauld (1773), and “The Snow-Fiend” by Ann Radcliffe (1826).

“The Apparition of Mrs. Veal” is a standard tale of the “but how could you have spoken with him yesterday, he’s been dead for a week!” variety, and is a good example of pre-Gothic supernaturalism.  The most notable feature of the tale is the utter–and constant–insistence by the narrator that she is giving us a true account.

“Sir Bertrand” contains a short introduction that contains an aesthetic discussion; the tale itself is offered as a demonstration of that aesthetic.  The story is about a knight who finds a creepy castle and has a short supernatural adventure there.  He cuts off the hand of a monster.  This probably qualifies as Spookypasta, because this is a fragment of a Fictional Text.

By the time we got to “The Snow-Fiend” it was well after midnight and our ability to analyze poetry was flagging, so I can’t tell you what “The Snow-Fiend” was about, but the introduction given in our book made it sound neat.  It includes the lines “Disease and Want and shuddering Fear/Danger and Woe and Death are there,” so it must be kind of good at least.

That’s all I’ve got, folks!  Have a very Spooky Halloween!

Stay tuned in the coming weeks; in November we’ll be doing the middle Gothic (1830-1890) and in December we’ll be doing the modern Gothic (1890-present).

 

Content References and Further Reading from the August 2015 Literary Meeting (in the order in which they were read)

The British Library. Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination. Ed. by Dale Townshend. London: The British Libary, 2014. Print. (On the occasion of the British Library exhibition of the same name, 3 October 2014 – 20 January 2015.)

Bloom, Clive. Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010. Print.

Defoe, Daniel. “The Apparition of Mrs. Veal.” The Evil Image: Two Centuries of Gothic Short Fiction and Poetry. Ed. by Patricia L. Skarda and Nora Crow Jaffe. New York: New American Library, 1981. Print.

Aikin, John and Anna Laetitia Aikin Barbauld. “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror; with Sir Bertrand, a Fragment.” The Evil Image: Two Centuries of Gothic Short Fiction and Poetry. Ed. by Patricia L. Skarda and Nora Crow Jaffe. New York: New American Library, 1981. Print.

Radcliffe, Ann. “The Snow-Fiend.” The Evil Image: Two Centuries of Gothic Short Fiction and Poetry. Ed. by Patricia L. Skarda and Nora Crow Jaffe. New York: New American Library, 1981. Print.

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