Mid-century gothic

The uncanny objects of modernity in British literature and culture after the Second World War

Lisa Mullen

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526132796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Mid-Century Gothic defines a distinct post-war literary and cultural moment in Britain, lasting ten years from 1945-55. This was a decade haunted by the trauma of fascism and war, but equally uneasy about the new norms of peacetime and the resurgence of commodity culture. As old assumptions about the primacy of the human subject became increasingly uneasy, culture answered with gothic narratives that reflected two troubling qualities of the new objects of modernity: their uncannily autonomous agency, and their disquieting intimacy with the reified human body.
The book offers fresh readings of novels, plays, essays and films of the period, unearthing neglected texts as well as reassessing canonical works. By bringing these into dialogue with the mid-century architecture, exhibitions and material culture, it provides a new perspective on a notoriously neglected historical moment and challenges previous accounts of the supposed timidity of post-war culture.

Part I

Agency

1

Rubble, walls and murals: the threshold between abstraction and materiality

In the first days of bombing … one marvelled at pure debris; but soon this became usual and to lift the human interest it took a bare tree gibbeted with hanging scarecrows from a blasted old-clothes shop, or an unbroken mirror hanging high-up on the façade of rooms disappeared.

William Sansom, The Blitz: Westminster at War¹

It is impossible to account for the material turn that characterised mid-century culture without examining how it developed out of the experience of the Second World War. The Blitz, in particular, exploded people and things out of their familiar contexts: an arbitrary redistribution of the personal, the meaningful and the mundane blurred the distinctions between these categories, while the sudden and widespread visibility and banality of dead bodies, or body parts, meant that objects and human forms became uncannily interchangeable. The writer William Sansom, who worked as a fireman in Westminster during the Blitz, describes such ‘freakish effects’ of the defamiliarised city, the ‘strange light and strange textures’ of the bombscape:

[W]ith the pale plaster crumbled out on the street, with the puppety figures of rescue workers in their flat bowlerish hats covered also with pale dust, with the dead and wounded collapsed and unmoving – there was some of the atmosphere of the doll-shop, the shop for making plaster figures or people of wax.²

Just as clothes blasted into a tree might become quasi-human amid this strange new scenery – either as scarecrows or even the ‘gibbeted’ victims of an execution – so people here become uncanny simulacra of human forms which are only hazily defined (‘puppety’, ‘bowlerish’). Perhaps because Sansom was putting out fires in the West End, he found that bombed buildings conjured up a sense of gothic theatricality:

Here a pantomime was afoot, in the empty street a sudden festival booth had been erected and the play was on. At the root of this appearance lies something of the sympathy between grand guignol and the clown. Both, though one may laugh, are festivals of the macabre, of torchlit, painted terror.³

Such descriptions as these suggest the limitations of considering the Second World War bombsites as spaces that fit comfortably into the cultural narrative of ruins; of what Leo Mellor has called the ‘ever-present interest in the ruin and the fragment, the incomplete or decayed structure that offers an implicit dialogue with the past through its very continued existence’.⁴ The ability of bombsites to access both the restless scope of history and a frozen moment of sudden cataclysm certainly accounts for some of their uncanny quality, but their supercharged power derives from the macabre pantomime that Sansom describes – the sense that these are transitional spaces where a transformation, or even an inversion, of normality is performed. This chapter will argue that the interaction between bombsites and time becomes even more complex when one takes into account the temporal (and indeed socio-cultural) vertigo of the human subject who haunts these contemporary ruins.

Mellor cites the stopped clock ‘still affixed to a wall in a bombsite’ as the paradigmatic bombsite object, underscoring his argument that bombsites are broken timepieces which no longer relate to human temporality.⁵ Yet when Sansom wanted to describe a similarly telling detail, he chose ‘an unbroken mirror hanging high-up on the façade of rooms disappeared’.⁶ Sansom’s mirror is a subtly different metaphor, suggesting that these resonant bombsite objects offer to reflect back the plight of the subject, even while they appear to rise haughtily above human concerns in their ‘unbroken’ indifference. Later still, he suggests, even ‘the unscathed mirror or picture hanging exposed on the wall became platitudinous – and it then took a row of ten grey Ascot toppers exposed in their open cupboard to raise an eyebrow’.⁷ Sansom considered such objects, because they map so closely onto the particular idiosyncrasies of vanished individuals, more interesting than the ‘pure debris’ which was itself a marvel in the first days of bombardment; but in this chapter I want to place such metonymic personal possessions back, as it were, into the rubble, and look more closely at the thingly residue of the walls on which reflective objects – and in particular art-objects – precariously hung. A piece of rubble, I would argue, is the Blitz’s Ur-object, utterly abject and empirically meaningless, yet nevertheless freighted with narrative; it tells the story both of the building from which it derived, and of the catastrophic moment of its transliteration from coherent wall to disorderly debris. Rubble, in its blunt materiality, contains within it a narrative of catastrophe and wreckage; yet it is also an abstracted form, blasted out of history into a pure and irreducible eternity, remote from its former spatial and personal meaning.

By accessing eternity in this way, bombsites became a refuge for those who wanted to escape from modernity, and so a theme of conflict with modernism often characterises the cultural examples in this chapter. Modernism, with its enthusiasm for bricolage and fragment, seemed to have predicted the ruinscape of the 1940s, but I would argue that, as a way of looking at the world, it was put under strain by the sudden actualisation of its metaphors. In the wake of the First World War, high modernism had implied a promise to pull both the world and the word apart in order to make experience new, but for those who had lived through the Blitz, the Second World War seemed to have completed only half the job. The dialectical machinery of historical renewal had malfunctioned: the kaleidoscope had been shaken, but no new picture had formed.

In this chapter, the search for this picture – for an aesthetic ratification of the suffering and destruction of the war – will be traced through six different cultural responses to rubble and the walls from which it derives. Murals, in particular, are evoked as a special category of art-object, one that had gained popularity under modernism but which now seemed to mark a point of conflict between implacable materiality and the fugitive abstract idea. Strikingly, the murals of the mid-century seem to presage or bring about the destruction of the very walls on which they are painted, and these tumbling walls become an image of revolutionary remaking which responded to the uncanny power of art.

‘A wall will fall in many ways’: William Sansom’s war stories

For someone with William Sansom’s experience as a Blitz fireman, the idea that walls and buildings were possessed of both agency and animation was self-evident – under bombardment, they were not solid but moved, writhed, lashed out with deadly force at the human beings in their ambit. In ‘Building Alive’, Sansom gives an hallucinogenic first-person account of being inside a bombed building and knowing that another flying bomb is on its way.⁸ He notes the arbitrary nature of these robot-bombs’ deathly, machinic force: ‘It could drop anywhere. It was absolutely reasonless. It was the first purely fatal agent that had come to man for centuries, bringing people to cross their fingers again, bringing a rebirth of superstition.’⁹ A feral intent motivates the building’s eerily inorganic ecosystem, with its ‘creakings, a groan of wood … A legion of plastermice … pattering up and down the walls’.¹⁰ In the devastated cityscape ‘all the laborious metropolitan history had been returned to its waste beginning’, but something post-apocalyptic and post-human was beginning to stir amid the tangle of broken pipework:

Only the little sounds sucking themselves in hinted at a new life, the life of leaden snakes, hesitating and choosing in whispers the way to blossom. … A new growth was sprouting everywhere, sprouting like the naked plumbing, as if these leaden entrails were the worm at the core of a birth, struggling to emerge, thrusting everything else aside.¹¹

The narrator survives this encounter with living architecture only by chance – he watches as the building opposite collapses instead, crushing a man on a stretcher who has only just been pulled out of a different bombsite.

The horror of being buried by rubble is a frequent theme of Sansom’s wartime stories. In ‘The Wall’ – a story written during the Blitz and originally published in Sansom’s 1944 collection Fireman Flower, his fireman narrator finds himself entranced by the pattern of symmetrical rectangles in a wall which is suspended over him, on the brink of falling. Like the flying bombs, walls are awesome in their inhuman arbitrariness:

A wall will fall in many ways. It may sway over to the one side or the other. It may crumble at the very beginning of its fall. It may remain intact and fall flat. This wall fell as flat as a pancake. It clung to its shape through ninety degrees to the horizontal. Then it detached itself from the pivot and slammed down on top of us.¹²

The fireman is transfixed by the moment, ‘hypnotised, rubber boots cemented to the pavement’ with ‘ton upon ton of red-hot brick hovering in the air’.¹³ He finds himself ‘immediately certain of every minute detail’ of the wall and its windows, where ‘alternating rectangles of black and red … emphasised vividly the extreme symmetry of the window spacing: each oblong window shape posed as a vermilion panel set in perfect order upon the dark face of the wall’.¹⁴ Sansom’s characters frequently experience a kind of sensory bleed at such moments of extremity, a dreamlike merging of distorted vision, haptic sensation and emotion: ‘The oblong building, the oblong windows, the oblong spacing. Orange-red colour seemed to bulge from the black framework, assumed tactile values, like boiling jelly that expanded inside a thick black squared grill.’¹⁵ Yet these bulging fiery rectangles are what save him when time finally moves again and the wall ‘detache[s] itself from the pivot and slam[s] down on top of us’. Although buried under rubble, he and two colleagues survive because they have ‘been framed by one of those symmetrical, oblong window spaces’; it is the wall’s Victorian patterning, its manmade, cultural symmetry, that provide a hiatus in its merciless material force – a recess in which the men can shelter.¹⁶ The firemen can slip between the chunks of masonry because, at the moment of their most dangerous agency, such walls prove porous. In the post-war period, as we will see in Chapter 6, bombs would become the archetypal technolog...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘The world of things’: an introduction to mid-century gothic
• Part I Agency
• Part II Intimacy
• Conclusion: beyond the mid-century
• Bibliography
• Index