Random Notes

RANDOM NOTES (Adorno and Horkheimer)

“The culture industry as mass deception. “IN: The Dialetic of Enlightenment (1944). Adorno and Horkheimer.

è After examining US popular culture, Adorno and Horkheimer’s pessimistic conclusion was that it consists of routinized forms that diminish human experience and its complexities in favour of the interests of powerful corporations.

è The classical denunciation of “culture industry” loss of capacity to nourish freedom and individuality. Move from artisanal to industrial stage and presentation of life as pure entertainment (they see high culture as a vehicle of civic /moral values). The other side is to see cultural industry as a service of organized capital which provides opportunities for collective creativity and decoding.

RANDOM NOTES (James Clifford)

“On collecting art and culture”. James Clifford

Describes an art/culture system in which art (collectable) is the pivot around which culture (communal tradition) turns. This system is open and fluid, bringing in objects from distant cultures as well as exorcizing home ones, this which is crucial to the formation of “western subjectivity”. Although, he comes up with a more optimistic view then Adorno and Barthes, Clifford overlooks categories of exploitation and power.

RANDOM NOTES (Stuart Hall)

“Encoding, decading”. Stuart Hall

Account on how messages are produced and disseminated. Four stage theor (production, circulation, consummation and reproduction). Each stage in the circuit limits the possibilities in the next.

RANDOM NOTES (Raymond Williams)

“Advertising: the Magic System” Raymond Williams

Dated essay which belongs to a former kind of cultural studies when it was unproblematically  linked to cultural history in the same line as Marx (who believed capitalism transformed commodities into fetiches), for Williams advertising is magic because it transforms commodities into glamorous signifiers(car= masculinity) provoking a sense of unreal , imaginary world. Most of all makes us forget the suffering in the production of commodities.

It might be argued the use value of many commodities is their signifying function.

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.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 19^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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 18^th 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.

SAGE, Victor. Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition. Basingstroke, Macmillan, 1988.

SAGE, Victor. Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition. Basingstroke, Macmillan, 1988.

PREFACE

There is something about horror fiction which has always provoked readers to account for it. The extremity of the genre, the recurrence of its symbols, and déjá vú effect of its language seem to demand a broader explanation than other, apparently more self-justifying, literary forms. Contemporary reviewers of the “Gothic novels” although they differed sharply as to what interpretation to give them, were in no doubt that they were a species of political writing. The Marquis de Sade was perhaps the most influential of these commentators. He took the novels of Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe as a response to the political trauma of the French Revolution “let us agree that…”

In 1930 the French surrealist André Breton developed this view of the Sade’s, integrating it with a Freudian perspective:

è Ruins, return of the past, subterranean passages representing the perils of the path towards the light, storms as roar of cannon extract of the human hecatomb the glorious restoration of life.

(A.  Breton. “Limits not Frontiers of Surrealism”. IN: Surrealism. London, 1936, pp. 108-109)

A direct connection is made between the essentially random activity of the individual subconscious and the determining pressure of the political culture. Surrealism, thought Breton, worked in an analogous fashion, subversively exposing the collective myths of the modern period, and this is in part why he sees the English Gothic novelists as such an important precedent for his own artistic programme. His remarks are important and influential in modern views of the subject but also unnecessarily reductive his insistence on a purely unconscious response by these writers lacks a certain explanatory power. Why does the genre survive, for example, as a demonstrably recurrent strain in 19^th century fiction long after the French Revolution?

And if we are to accept the unconscious factor, how exactly do the materials of this tradition become available to the individual writer’s imagination? The idea in itself that the unconscious is a timeless activity, unmediated by other cultural and ideological factors, yields no really possibility of giving a convincing, or even a detailed, account of the interaction between this kind of writing and the cultural context in which it may appear.

The availability of literary materials is a notoriously difficult question, especially when one has the problem of a species of writing that appears over a vastly extended historical period.

Breton’s reductivity is perhaps even more inhibiting in seeing the horror genre as a “fantasy”, and it is opposed, on the analogy of the pleasure and reality principle, to realism. Thus Breton comments on the choice of genre, as if it too were an unconscious factor. This view is still quite widespread. The horror novel is portrayed as the dark unconscious of the 19^th century, which surfaces periodically in a struggle with an “official”, “dominant” or “bourgeois” mode of realism.(the handiest most recent account of this position is Rosemary Jackson. Fantasy, the literature of subversion. London, 1981).

The curious effect of this is to confine discussion to a new kind of literary formalism which again fails to take account of real complexity of determining factors in the culture.

The psychoanalytic dichotomy (conscious x unconscious) has become crude a–historical metaphor for competing literary forms. This loose adaptation of Freud defeats its own ostensible purpose it gets rid of the nation that anxiety is common to art and life. In the act of trying to open up discussion of the subject, we find at the outset that horror fiction is sealed into an opposition with other literary forms. The notion of “subversive” is robbed of its efficacy by the implication that the only major thing it subverts is “realism”, another literary genre.

But Sade, Breton and Freud were originally right, to this extent: that horror is not a literary genre, in the narrow sense, at all It is a cultural response, which implies a broad series of relationships with the whole culture in which it is produced. The narrower the conception of a genre, the more one is moving away from the possibility of explaining it. (See for example, F. Jameson “Magical Narratives: Romance as a genre”. IN: New Literary History, Vol 7, # 1, 1975)

è Protestant tradition, a common set of doctrines which hold English culture together.

POSTCRIPT

Gothic writing has a greater unity and a greater rhetorical sophistication than readers sometimes give it credit for; however, this is not claiming that it is a form of literary self- consciousness.

We must call a political reflex into play if we are to speak of heresy, and often the images of the monstrous, the proscribed and the alien are precisely this - an imaginative play with heresy. Heresy in political terms is not the same as from a merely emotional or psychological point of view. It is a part of a way culture witnesses itself. Much of the horror novel’s concern with “superstition” in one form or another carries the implication of unstated orthodoxy. The typical rhetoric “feint” of the gothic writer is to provide striking images of the unthinkable with a false discredit. In the relative nature of credibility will come a flash of horror usually from an earlier, sometimes from a more primitive, part of contemporary culture. The peculiar rhetorical form of horror discredits and authorizes the unthinkable at the same time. Values admitted by the canons of “rationality” are paraded before the reader but it’s then discredited. The key to this form is what is unpacks about a particular concept of rationality. (Epistemological doubts are a hallmark of protestant faith with the assimilation of “faith” to “reason” accomplished as a result of the attacks of Hume and the Deists). Gothic as a cultural experience of the 19^th century reader horror fiction is, essentially, fantasy about history. It is a special form of the historical romance, in one sense.

The narrative form in gothic is often fragmented. The function is to concentrate the reader’s experience in particulars; discontinuity (Calvinist attitude towards history and providential modes of thinking) horror fiction is itself symbol of a resistance to the organic process of history, the breaking down of experience is a method of revealing its essential unity. (?) Hence, the frequent puzzling are close in method to empiricism, almost satirically close. The horror in the novel turns to the nature of the empirical concentration on random or accidental events that reveal an invisible structure from the fragments to the whole.

Morgan, Jack. The Biology of horror: Gothic Literature and Film. Illinois, Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 2002.

Morgan, Jack. The Biology of horror: Gothic Literature and Film. Illinois, Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 2002.

            The author builds a biological model of the Gothic, revealing a dark inversion of comic regeneration, that is, an organic interpretation of the form and function of horror, emphasizing its close relation to comedy. (Transhistorical conception). His conclusions of the gothic reality are aligned with J. Kristeva theories, which address horror’s existential and cultural significance in an uncanny positive and therapeutic key.

·         Detachment of body and mind: “Mentality meanwhile is off on its quasi-independent career as if our physical organism were, except in the case of eating and sex perhaps, a vestigial evolutionary issuance” (p.1) the thought tends to regard itself above the biological, nature is characterized as perishable. 

·         Method and classification: “It proceeds for the most part inductively, working as much as possible from examples, and follows from my impressions that a case might be made that horror invention, loosely designated as “gothic” over the past 2 centuries or so, merits, even demands, consideration as a primary fictional form” (p.4) horror emerges from our bio-existential situation, reflecting our agonies and exigencies of physical life.

·         “ Classic  “high” literary Gothicism, with its assertive physicalness, may then be viewed as a modality within the historical Romantic project, though grotesque imagining was alive of course well before the Romantic sensibility took it up and has continued to flourish well after, horror awakens thought shockingly to its intimate and inescapable connectedness to the flesh and to pain…” (p.5).

·         Gothic strategies: “by passing the rational and addressing the visceral instead, pointing up to the dangerous political and totalitarian possibilities of manipulated horror imagination” (p.11). Horror was used as political manipulation of the masses, ex: Nosferatu – Jew – rats – pestilence. Maggie Kilgour say gothic is a bricolage of other references (Rise of the Goth Novel p.4).

Comic – Horror Double Helix

·         Aesthetics of Horror Þ Aike and Barbauld’s “On the Pleasure derived from obj. horror”.

·         There is a begrudging acceptance of horror into the standard literary canon until the late 18^th century. (Usual vehicle is melodrama, sensational elements and adjectives that may be applied to the comic).

“I think a ‘loose’ definition of the literary gothic in fact comes closer to the mark than does a ‘purist’ historical one. Horror literature has arguably itself been somewhat too codified, too identified with it high gothic expression with the result that its visceral generic nature has been obscured. An alternative view would see literary horror issuing from an informal vernacular tradition and, as earlier suggested, greatly antedating the ‘high’ gothic literary expression it would receive in the 19^th century. Marginal expressions of a horror mythos might have been traditionally anti-comic term with scholarly currency.” (p.24).

           The Italian is quoted as example of a gothic story that entails relief, rather than joyous affirmation, ending in a comic fashion.

·           Horror would then be the opposite of comedy: “Whereas the comic mode, granted sometimes its grim moments, is pervaded by images of vitality and insurgence, horror is pervaded by virtually unrelieved vision of dissipation, menace and decline.”

The Muse of Horror: Traditions of dreadful Imagining.

·           “The ability of horror to function in the physical without resort to the deus ex-machina possibilities of the supernatural is evident as well in films such as the First Deadly Sin, Psycho, and Silence of the Lambs, with their human monsters”. (p.40)

·      “The high gothic romance mode in this context represents a powerful and dramatic refinement and codification of a horror imagination boated in fleshy peril; gothic artifices embody apprehensions reflective of the treacherous adventure biological live is involved moment by moment”. Long before the novel of gothic romance the generic horror tradition was constituted by catastrophic pestilences, martyrdom, religious terrors, sadistic criminality, public torture, execution, etc.

·      Metaphor of the house/body decay: fall of the house of usher, horror fiction in the protestant tradition (Hugenot see text), shared archetype of mortality. (p.42)

·      Protestant confrontation with the pagan myths of the Roman tradition, chance to access mythic, folk, iconographic, non-textual energy of  Catholicism, however on Protestant terms. Uncanny submerged they feared would return.

MACABRE AESTHETICS

·      “The rhetoric of horror is constructed toward summoning up and underscoring a readership’s visceral sense of embalmment among these forms, of being situated in the treacherous landscape of physical life, in a dimension we are unable to comfortably rationalize.” (p.68) Literary horror seeks to put readers in touch with a morbid sense of their own physicalness.

            The gothic imagination uncovers aspects of the organic environment we find repulsive or unsettling, conjuring “the repugnance the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage and muck”. [Kristeva]. The lack of clear light, water and fresh air inverts the entire system of the biologically wholesome and vital.

·      Gothic as a Bricolage: Maggie Kilgous, it “feeds upon and mixes the wide range of literary sauces out of which it emerges and from which it never fully disentangles itself… the form is thus…assembled out of it and pieces of the past”. Gothic literature exploits what mythic possibilities are at hand, be they Egyptian forms, medieval Christian, folkloric or others. (Organic focus or fertility)

THE ANXIETY OF ORGANISM

Horror is the most psychological/physiological of all genres, Linda Badly, “with the possible exception of pornography”.

·       Sartre’s Nausea: (Roquetin) – “I have seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of flabby messes which move spontaneously” (p.24).

·      Sebastin’s garden in suddenly lost summer. (Gothic mansion/tropical garden)

ACQUAINTANCE WITH THE NIGHT: AMERICA AND THE MUSE OF HORROR

Horror mode into a new region. A migration that tends to call into question attempts to strictly historicize the gothic genre or confine its genius geography cally. American landscape was considered inhospitable to literature in general and specially so to the dark dramtic need for decadent tradition and antiquarian setting. Also antagonist to the gothic morbidity was the Enlightment reason and optimism from which the USA cultural identity largely emerged. The body is the gothics essential landscape. Maurice Levy (p.36) criticizes the lack  of old houses  and castles in  A. horror Ensaontrism.

DARK CARNIVAL: THE ESOTERIC OF CELEBRATION.

Joker is the nefarious jester figure that haunts Gotham. Horror - comic synergy. Gothic is the excessive, transgressive dynamic of carnivals “looseness”. Montessori takes advantage of the carnival season in cask. Festive horror generated by the carnality, blasphemy, scatology, from a comic discourse to a pathological. (See Black Film Orphen’s 1959) (See The Italian p. 273). Carnival is a part of the Romantic grotesque of which the gothic was an extension.

LANGUISHMENT: THE WOUNDED HERO

  The mythic restoration task cannot be accomplished; the healing venture has failed – Thanatos, the death force, not Eros reign. Body as squalor. 

SINISTER LOCI: THE PROPRIETIES OF TERROR

·      Properties remote and private – the ideal gothic setting – where one may indulge    dark practices. Patterned aristocratic dwelling above the vulgar village, out off from scrutiny, moral conventions, ordinary reach of law. A casa de Mariz is not a medieval fortress, but it retains the gothic remoteness, seclusion that lends themselves to grotesque ocurrences.

·      Unhomely: the Gothic “outside” familiar words provides no relief from an inner hauting, instead, “inner” terror flicker in structures, objects and landscape.

APOTROPAION AND THE HIDEOUS OBSCURE

Burke: to make anything veru terrible, obstcurity seems in general to be necessary … (p.54). Blur or obscured sense of danger. The Fall of the House of Usher: reader disoriented, no coordinates of time and place [Schedoni in Radcliffe’s The Italian whose intemperate intellectualism the other priests are rather awed by, though they “observed that he seldom … undisguised before him] Excess, lack of moderation, humility, obsession.

THE SOUL AT ZERO: DARK EPIPHANIES

Mortality implicit in vitality. Conciousness correlative to physical organism. Kristeva: theraupetical horror to stimulate bodies healthy energy, like arsenic in homeopathy (Kristeva, p. 208). Horror provokes rational ordered civilization, will be indispensable to the aesthetics of terror (p. 229).

SAGE, Victor. The Gothic Novel. Basing stroke: Macmillan, 1990.

SAGE, Victor. The Gothic Novel. Basing stroke: Macmillan, 1990.

            Literary history has tended to marginalize 18^th century Gothic as a minor product of Romanticism. Such attitude pigeon-holed the Gothic as part of an excessive reaction against the dominance of Augustan rationalism by an age that had grown weary of Enlightenment values. These early novels of terror, so the account ran, with their gothic Machinery and conventions are nothing more than a were curiosity for a modern  reader.

            But the actual history of critical opinion is more diverse and interesting than such literary-historical judgment. The genre is not a dusty corner but an arena open to the social and political interests of the day. Both Literary form and the commentary on it are permeated by controversy, explaining something about the value of this writing during a period of fast social change and political transition.

→ Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto (1764)

·         Critical reception (unfavorable) X public reception (successful).

·         Mineral Press (William Lane), booksellers, circulating libraries.

·         Expansion of readership, futility of the novel, critical debate.

Proscribed by the canoes of good taste and morality, manufactured and consumed in large doses by women and sometimes by critics, the Gothic novel expanded like an open Secret in the last decades of the 18^th century. Locked in our modern view, the genre looks all too unified, but the fiction market of the 1970s was polarized by a range of contradictory social and political factors. (Methodism, female emancipation, political radicalism, anti-Catholicism, etc.).

·      The Pursuits of Literature (satirist?) tendencies followed the Revolution.

·      Sade’s “Ideé surles Romans” revolutionary up heaves. In: Crimes d’Amour.

Nothing illustrates this process more aptly than the reception in 1796 of one of the central Gothick texts, The Monk. The rhetoric of this novel, like Udolpho and Melmoth, uses the anti-Catholicism prejudice of the audience as a tactic to gain acceptance.

·      These writes (Walpole, Beckford, Lewis) form a tradition of Whig dilettantism which one might broadly speak as a form of cultural dissent. The dissent was more theatrical than political.

·      Charlotte Smith “democratic” views.

The development of the Gothic Villain, that gigantic sinister figure, needs to be seen in this context of political suspicion, because the archetype partially derives from the English translations during the period 1794/96 of Schiller’s  the ghost-seer, Schink’s ‘Magical-political’ victim of Magical disillusions and Marquis Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries.

            J.M.S Tompkins Gothic was… “a struggle to possess and appropriate the language of cultural division”. (SAGE, p.16)

·         Burke + Gothic architecture (Burke, p.)

·         Mrs. Raddiffe rationalism (explained supernatural)

·         Blackwood Magazine flourished between 1820-50 specializing in ghost stories and bizarre tales/new Monthy Magazine.

·         Elenor Sickels (The Gloomy Egoist) based on the assumption that theological doctrine plays a conditioning or determining role in the obsessively repeated motifs of the Gothick romance.

·         Mario Praz (The Romantic Agony).