Allan Lloyd Smith, 1996. Postmodernism/Gothicism. In: Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith (ed). Modern gothic, A reader. Manchester University Press, Manchester, p. (p. 1-19).
Introduction
"This essay attempts to interpret the unmistakable presence, through structural or verbal allusion, or wholesale rewriting, of the Gothic in some of the fictions of the postwar period." ( p.1)
"The Old Gothic, however, as the backdating of Stevenson's own tale suggests, doesn't stand still as a point of reference: even in the eighteenth-century, it was itself anarchic, popular, an indeed 'camp' recycling the past, long before Sir Walter Scott sought to transform and rationalise it into an official literary genre, the so-called 'historical romance'." ( p.1)
"Evidently, the Gothic is not merely a literary convention or a set of motifs: it is a language, often an anti-historicising language, which provides writers with the critical means of transferring an idea of the otherness of the past into present." ( p.1)
"As these essays demonstrate, there is no point in thinking of the Gothic as 'pure'; it is an apparent genre-badge which, the moment it is worn by a text, becomes an imperceptible catalyst, a transforming agent for other codes: the uncanny, a form of Gothic fantastic effect quite central to modern fictions of screen and novel, is not one code but a kind of gap between codes, a point at which representation itself appears to fail, displace, or diffuse itself." ( p.2)
"But these Gothic black spots, lurking like the sites of past road accidents in so many contemporary contexts, are not simple deconstructive aporias transformed into spatial metaphors; they form in themselves textual negotiations with history, and the corollary of this critical preoccupation of the Gothic's latest history of itself is a description of a present whose very presentness is diminished and vitiated by disruptive images of the past." ( p.2) Interference of the past into the present.
"The anxiety of influence is not a pattern for the authors and critics represent in this book - the Gothic, it seems, is a language that, by definition, belongs to no one; with its air of pastiche - only made, never born - it forms a ready-made language for the aesthetic and cultural politics of our time. ( p.3-4)
"The Gothic is perfect anonymous language for the peculiar unwillingness of the past to go away" (p.4)
"Reiteration is the modern form of haunting; reiteration of narrative manouevres and motifs, unholy reanimation of the deadness of the past that has the power to make something new" ( p.4)
"But whereas early Gothic proposed a delightful excursion through the realms of imaginary horror, contemporary use of the Gothic register strikes a darker and more disturbing note. It is the horror now that is real, and the resolution that is fanciful. Hence the peculiar effect we sometimes find, akin to the dropping of a stone through a spiders's web, when the actuality or realisations of the horrors of the contemporary life strikes through the web of highlighted representation with an effect that may be comic, or grotesque, or uncannily chilling." ( p.5) Although the popular evocation of horror is itself significant, the mode does not simply 'reflect' a modern condition by a form of inverted mimesis.
Modern Gothic- be it the "barbarous vitality of the Past, the Alien or the Other to erupt, and threaten the familiar plot, an accepted environment, the repeated pattern allows us first to glimpse, and then to reflect critically upon, the changing processes at work in our imaginings, and even in our theories, of our own contemporaneity." ( p.5)
Introduction
"This essay attempts to interpret the unmistakable presence, through structural or verbal allusion, or wholesale rewriting, of the Gothic in some of the fictions of the postwar period." ( p.1)
"The Old Gothic, however, as the backdating of Stevenson's own tale suggests, doesn't stand still as a point of reference: even in the eighteenth-century, it was itself anarchic, popular, an indeed 'camp' recycling the past, long before Sir Walter Scott sought to transform and rationalise it into an official literary genre, the so-called 'historical romance'." ( p.1)
"Evidently, the Gothic is not merely a literary convention or a set of motifs: it is a language, often an anti-historicising language, which provides writers with the critical means of transferring an idea of the otherness of the past into present." ( p.1)
"As these essays demonstrate, there is no point in thinking of the Gothic as 'pure'; it is an apparent genre-badge which, the moment it is worn by a text, becomes an imperceptible catalyst, a transforming agent for other codes: the uncanny, a form of Gothic fantastic effect quite central to modern fictions of screen and novel, is not one code but a kind of gap between codes, a point at which representation itself appears to fail, displace, or diffuse itself." ( p.2)
"But these Gothic black spots, lurking like the sites of past road accidents in so many contemporary contexts, are not simple deconstructive aporias transformed into spatial metaphors; they form in themselves textual negotiations with history, and the corollary of this critical preoccupation of the Gothic's latest history of itself is a description of a present whose very presentness is diminished and vitiated by disruptive images of the past." ( p.2) Interference of the past into the present.
"The anxiety of influence is not a pattern for the authors and critics represent in this book - the Gothic, it seems, is a language that, by definition, belongs to no one; with its air of pastiche - only made, never born - it forms a ready-made language for the aesthetic and cultural politics of our time. ( p.3-4)
"The Gothic is perfect anonymous language for the peculiar unwillingness of the past to go away" (p.4)
"Reiteration is the modern form of haunting; reiteration of narrative manouevres and motifs, unholy reanimation of the deadness of the past that has the power to make something new" ( p.4)
"But whereas early Gothic proposed a delightful excursion through the realms of imaginary horror, contemporary use of the Gothic register strikes a darker and more disturbing note. It is the horror now that is real, and the resolution that is fanciful. Hence the peculiar effect we sometimes find, akin to the dropping of a stone through a spiders's web, when the actuality or realisations of the horrors of the contemporary life strikes through the web of highlighted representation with an effect that may be comic, or grotesque, or uncannily chilling." ( p.5) Although the popular evocation of horror is itself significant, the mode does not simply 'reflect' a modern condition by a form of inverted mimesis.
Modern Gothic- be it the "barbarous vitality of the Past, the Alien or the Other to erupt, and threaten the familiar plot, an accepted environment, the repeated pattern allows us first to glimpse, and then to reflect critically upon, the changing processes at work in our imaginings, and even in our theories, of our own contemporaneity." ( p.5)
