SAGE.V.”The Ghastly and the Gostly: the Gothic Farce
of Farrel’s Empire Trilogy”. IN: Empire
and the Gothic, the politics of a genre. London Palgrave , 2003.( p. 172-
191)
Sage speaks against the ideas that (1) Gothic is an
exhausted 19th century genre and (2) It is a writing devoted to
psyche. (p.175)
“Modern Gothic is not just a matter of genre
conventions: we assume it is still relevant in the post war period, because its
recultivation of the sublime is a discourse about decay, of both the psyche and
what Court Volney referred to in the early 19th century as the Ruins
of Empires and that discourse, I shall argue, acts as an anti- historicizing
language.” (p.175)
In Farrell these affects out of an ironically
concentration on the motif form horror tradition of moments of misperception. This
is a tradition of what I will call la coda
dell’occhio (p. 175). These epiphenomena, arising on the retina or in the ear
occur momentarily. In the horror tradition, they are usually described in a
rhetorical sequence that always end up reasserting a skeptical or disbelieving, cynically
materialist, viewpoint denying them as illusions or, rather, delusions of the
individual subject, momentary derangements of the perceptual apparatus. (p.
176).
Closer acquaintance usually reveals a mundane object,
which after the moment of misperception lingers on in the text as an uncanny
moment adaptation of Burke and Gilpin’s
rhetoric about obscurity, distance and sublime landscapes. [See Sage: The Epistemology of error: Reading and
isolation in the mysteries of Udolpho Q/W/E/R/T/Y/6 (October 96).
The story of the 19th century gothic is the
story of the domestication of the sublime. The sublime is provoked by Nature,
or, its human equivalent ruined military or ecclesiastical architecture, the
grander and more ambitious the better. The 18th century gothic adds
an analogy with the graveyard, the skull beneath the skin. By the 1840s, all
this has been translated indoors, and with not without humour.
Negative sublime (the energy of this indoor jungle
which arises from its cultural decay) civilization has retreated from the place
and what remains is “other”: wild, anarchic, barbarous, dangerous and sinister.
The technique is purely metonymic: the realistic detail is a celebration of
decay. This work argued a simple case for the links between Farrell’s writing
and a Gothic inflection of the sublime.
