Gothic Topographies

Language, Nation Building and 'Race'

Matti Savolainen, P.M. Mehtonen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317126034
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

In demonstrating the global reach of Gothic literatures, this collection takes up the influence of the Gothic mode in literatures that may be geographically remote from one another but still share related issues of minor languages, nation building, place and race. Suggesting that there is a parallel between certain motifs and themes found in the Gothic of the North (Scandinavia, Northern Europe and Canada) and South (Australia, South Africa and the US South), the essays explore the transgressions and confusion of borders and limits, whether they be linguistic, literary, generic, class-based, gendered or sexual. The volume includes essays on a wide diversity of authors and topics: Jan Potocki, Gustav Meyrink, William Godwin, Alan Hollinghurst, Marlene van Niekerk, John Richardson, antislavery discourse and the Gothic imagination, the Australian aboriginal Gothic, vampires of Post-Soviet Gothic society, Danish, Swedish and Finnish fiction and film, and the Canadian female Gothic and the death drive. What distinguishes this book from other collections on the Gothic is the coverage of themes and literatures that are either lacking in the mainstream research on the Gothic or are referred to only briefly in other book-length studies. Experts in the Gothic and those new to the field will appreciate the book's commitment to situating Gothic sensibilities in an international context.

PART I
European Gothicisms In, Between and Through Languages

Chapter 1
Jan Potocki in the Intertextual Tradition of the Roman Anglais (the Gothic Novel)

Hendrik van Gorp

In the preface to his new edition of the Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse (The Manuscript Found in Saragossa), written between 1797 and 1813, René Radrizzani proposes that this novel by Jan Potocki represents ‘une étonnante somme de tous les genres narratifs’1 (8). Among others, he mentions the genres of crime fiction (l’histoire de brigands), fantasy (le conte fantastique), the ghost story (l’histoire de phantômes), the Oriental tale (le conte oriental) and, in the first place, the Gothic novel (le roman noir). In this essay I will focus on some intertextual relations of the Manuscrit with the Gothic novel genre and other traditions in fantasy literature, especially in France. Comparable textual features are not the only or even the most important parameters of a generic classification, since genre awareness or Gothic sensibility is based on a wide scale of literary and non-literary factors. Intertextuality, however, remains a major indication that literary texts are inspired by, reflect or influence other texts. The philosophy of intertextuality is based on the idea that a (literary) text is written as well as read against the background of other texts. In other words, the text is situated on the crossing of so many other texts with which it is connected as a response, a relecture, parody or an abbreviation. This intertextuality can be specific (that is, manifest traces of other texts as part of its structure, motives, characters or style) or generic (references to genre conventions and expectations of the reading public). It is argued in this chapter that an intertextual approach is one of the appropriate ways to study a popular genre such as the Gothic novel. In the case of Jan Potocki this is all the more important, because of the specific genesis of his novel – from the concept in 1797 to its publication in 1813 – and his somewhat marginal cult fame in the Gothic tradition.2 In order, then, to compare Potocki’s novel to the Gothic mainstream in England, the genre known as roman anglais in France, I would like to start with a brief description of the specific characteristics of this genre.

Literary genres do not emerge from a vacuum, but are mostly, in their form and content, an implicit or sometimes even an explicit response to contemporary questions or problems. As far as the cultural and literary context is concerned, scholars have stressed the relation of the Gothic novel genre to Pre-Romanticism in the second half of the eighteenth century: a preoccupation with the churchyards, ruins of abbeys and castles, old legends, the (late) Middle Ages, and with the ‘exoticism’ of the south of Europe or the mysterious Orient. With these Pre-Romantic preferences a new aesthetics came into being, in which the horrific and the ghastly were integrated. As Mario Praz put it, ‘the Horrid, from being a category of the Beautiful, became eventually one of its essential elements, and the “beautifully horrid” passed by insensible degrees into the “horribly beautiful”’ (Introduction 10). Praz had already discussed some of these themes extensively in his classic work The Romantic Agony, first published in 1930. In the specifically literary context this means that the Gothic romance of that period exploits, so to speak, human sentiments in indicating their horrible aspects and in discovering their exotic and mysterious character. It has become a cliché to say that the genre started with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), but it is nevertheless worth recalling that in the preface to the second edition (1765) he declared that his novel had been an attempt to blend two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern; in other words, fantasy and imagination, on the one hand, and nature and reality, on the other. He wanted to make people ‘think, speak and act, as it might be supposed mere men and women would do in extraordinary positions’ (Walpole 43–4). In this novel, which incidentally was known to Jan Potocki – he read it while in London in 1791 – Walpole evokes, next to the underlying ambiguous relation between reality and imagination, some motifs and narrative procedures that were to become staple devices of Gothic novel writing. This happened some three decades later, for the real representatives and propagators of the genre have to be situated only in the 1790s and the beginning of the nineteenth century with the novels by Ann Radcliffe, ‘Monk’ Lewis and their many epigones. Together with a number of translations, adaptations, dramatizations, parodies and even recipes for Gothic novel writing, they contributed to an intense awareness of the genre on the part of readers and critics alike, so that even novels with only a few of the characteristic features were equally received as Gothic. This genre awareness or sensibility was based on both a specific subject matter and a stock of devices such as ruined castles, mysterious portraits, abductions, immurements, pursuits through lonely forests and so forth. All this aimed at giving the reader a special sort of pleasurable horror and thrill (see Wellek and Warren 223).

Characteristics of the Roman Anglais (Gothic Novel)

The mainstream Gothic was also manifest in France. In order to investigate how the French writers were influenced by and parodied the pioneer works of the roman anglais, the most frequent procedures of the plot of the Gothic novel – such as characters as well as setting in time and space – need to be briefly considered. The fundamental structure of this novel often involves the removal of a threat that oppresses the protagonists: they have, for instance, to face the usurpation of a castle or property and the restoring of the legitimate heirs. The theme of love is incarnate in the opposition villain-persecuted maiden and toys with the limits of taboo: forbidden love, forced marriage, rape, incest, fratricide and patricide, even necrophilia. In a number of Gothic novels the characters are also victims of clerical pressure and religious fanaticism, such as the Roman Catholic Inquisition. The material obsession with power often finds its psychological counterpart, particularly in more fantastic variants of the genre, in an excessive desire for knowledge, a form of spiritual avarice to know all the secrets on earth and to possess a power similar to that of God. In contrast to the usurpation and sexual motives, these elements concern especially the relation of the ego to the self and to transcendence (see Todorov’s ‘les themes du je’), involving the well-known motifs of hubris, madness, schizophrenia, existential dissatisfaction with one’s self (the Wandering Jew) and pacts with the Devil.

Characteristic of the mainstream of the romantic Gothic novel in England, next to the opposition between villain and persecuted maiden, is also its specific blend of domestic features and exotic elements (cf. Walpole’s ‘mere men and women in extraordinary positions’). The geographical location is typical. The most influential English Gothic novels, especially the bestseller novels of terror by Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794 and The Italian, 1797) and the ‘Radcliffiades’ written in imitation of them, as well as The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis, the notorious model of the horror novel, are situated in the Roman Catholic south of Europe (Italy, Spain, the south of France and Germany). However, some important allegedly Gothic novels of that time differ from those models by going their own way, especially in the direction of Oriental exoticism and fantasy. This is, for instance, the case of William Beckford’s Vathek (1782/1786) taking place in the fabulous Orient, and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). Both geographical locations, the south of Europe and the Orient, create the necessary distance to render the strange events acceptable. Yet the Romantic locus terribilis can also be very local, such as ‘wuthering heights’, ruins, labyrinths, caverns or isolated places, which are intended to evoke in the mind of the (mostly female) reader a profound sense of terror, ‘an anxiety with no possibility of escape’ (Praz 20). In Jan Potocki’s Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse these terrible places are a hyperbolic legion.

The preference for a mixture of domestic and exotic spaces goes hand in hand with an analogous blend of a bygone age, often the ‘dark’ Middle Ages, and the immediate past or even an illusion of the present. But here, too, it is particularly the time experienced, namely the transition between light and darkness (twilight, mist, flickering candles) which is characteristic. It culminates in the midnight bell, the hour of spectres, when the forces of darkness, eschewing light, become active.

Finally, there is a specific way to recount a Gothic story. Generally speaking, the romantic Gothic novel has an omniscient narrator who is capable of anticipating or slowing down the action in order to create in the mind of the reader a feeling of suspense. Favourite procedures in this context are also cliffhangers, blanks in old manuscripts, parallelisms or contrasts and Chinese box structures. These last procedures are, for that matter, frequently applied in Potocki’s Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse.

A French Tradition of Gothic in Melodrama and Fantasy

The ground for the French Gothic novel had been prepared in the 1770s and 1780s by the popularity of the ‘sombre’ works of Baculard d’Arnaud (1718–1805), whose position in the French Gothic was pivotal (Hall 85). Characteristic of his dramas (Les Amans malheureux [The Unfortunate Lovers], 1764; Euphémie, 1768; Fayel, 1770) and nouvelles (Épreuves du sentiment [Tests of Feeling], 1772; Nouvelles historiques [Historical Short Stories], 1774–1783) was the evocation of melancholy atmospheres and dismal surroundings in which, in his opinion, the struggles between vice and virtue, or passion and reason are best displayed (Hall 88). No wonder that in literary criticism his work is often mentioned as being influential in parallel to the work of the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) in France and the most representative British Gothic authors, namely Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe and ‘Monk’ Lewis. More direct links can be found in the melodramas (Le Château du Diable [The Devil’s Castle], 1792; La Forêt périlleuse [The Dangerous Forest], 1797) and especially in the earlier short stories (Soirées de mélancolie [Melancholic Evenings], 1777; La Comtesse d’Alibre [The Countess of Alibre], 1779) of Loaisel de Tréogate (1752–1812). In this last work some specific Gothic motifs are manifest, such as the guilt of past wrongdoing (cf. Otranto, The English Baron, The Italian) as well as a real villain as protagonist (comparable to The Monk and The Italian), and a typically Gothic setting: ‘un caveau ténébreux, creusé sous les fondements de son château’3 (Hall 98). With the melodramas and collections of short stories by Baculard and Loaisel the foundations were laid on which, later, in the 1790s, a tradition of Gothic novels à l’anglaise would be written.

The political climate, the period of uncertainty and ‘Terror’ in France – the Revolution in 1789 and la Terreur in 1793–1794 – was then receptive not only to the notorious works by de Sade (Justine, ou les Malheurs de la Vertu [Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue], 1791; La nouvelle Justine [The New Justine], 1797), with their typically erotic heroines, but also to a stream of translations, adaptations, dramatizations and parodies of the romans anglais. Special reference must here be made to the sentimental Gothic novels by Ducray-Duminil (1761–1819), playing ambiguously with the political situation (Alexis, ou la maisonette dans les bois [Alexis, or the Cottage in the Woods], 1789; Victor, ou l’enfant de la forêt [Victor, or the Child of the Forest], 1797; Coelina, ou l’enfant du mystère [Coeline, or the Mysterious Child], 1799), and some historical novels by Mme de Genlis (1746–1830; Les Chevaliers du cygnet [The Knights of the Cygnet], 1795; Les Voeux téméraires [The Reckless Oaths], 1799). The flow of (adapted) translations cannot be better illustrated than by the fact that in only one year, 1797, four works by Radcliffe saw a French edition (Les Châteaux d’Athlin et de Dunbayne, Julia ou les Souterrains du château de Mazzini, Les Mystères d’Udolphe and L’Italien; see Prungnaud 14). The great success of the Gothic novel in France is manifest in the theatre, namely in the sensational théâtre monacale, with numerous Gothic melodramas, many of them based on English novels, by Pixérécourt (1773–1844), Alexandre Duval (1767–1842; Montoni ou Le Château d’Udolphe [Montoni, or the Castle of Udolpho], 1797) and Jean de Lamartélière (1761–1830; for instance, Le Testament, ou les Mystères d’Udolphe [The Testament, or the Mysteries of Udolpho], 1798). This phenomenon is comparable to the success of the Räuber- and Schauerromane in Germany and the popular melodramas by August Friedrich Ferdinand Kotzebue (1761–1819), August Wilhelm Iffland (1759–1814) and Heinrich Daniel Zschokke (1771–1848).

The adaptations and creative imitations, however, also reflect a certain deviation from the models. Indeed, in France the fantastic element, already present in the ‘deviant’ French-English Gothic novel Vathek by Beckford and, later on, also in Maturin’s Melmoth, played from the beginning a more important role than it did in the ‘Radcliffiades’. The Gothic novel in France, in that sense, is linked with a tradition of fantastic and frenetic literature that flourished in the early decades of the nineteenth century, for instance in some tales and novels by Charles Nodier (1780–1844) and in imitations of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (1814–1815) and Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixirs, 1815–1816). The fantastic and frenetic element culminated in La peau de Chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin, 1831) by Balzac. But this tradition goes back to predecessors such as Le diable amoureux (The Amorous Devil, 1772) by Jacques Cazotte (see Todorov 2) and translations of Schiller’s Der Geisterseher (The Ghost-Seer, 1789), with it...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I European Gothicisms In, Between and Through Languages
• Part II ‘Race', Society and Power in a Global Perspective
• Part III The Challenge of the North: Vast Landscapes and Inward Horrors
• Index