Robert K. Martin & Eric Savoy (eds.),
American Gothic : New Interventions in a National Narrative.
Iowa, University of Iowa Press, 1998.
ISBN 0 877456 224
US$32.95 (cloth)
265pp

Uploaded 12 November 1999

Fredric Jameson’s indictment of the gothic as a boring, exhausted paradigm (Jameson, 289) is challenged by the diverse and interesting collection of essays that comprise American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. Edited by Eric Savoy and Robert K. Martin, this book contributes to the resurgent wave of fascination with the gothic, emphasising the redundancy of Jameson’s contention. Whilst the essays in this anthology are bound by geography, the focus of each is on America’s gothic darkness, a cultural history that reveals the torture behind the gloss. David Punter describes the degenerate atmosphere of the new American gothic: “The worlds portrayed are ones infested with psychic and social decay, and coloured with the heightened hues of putrescence. Violence, rape and breakdown are the key motifs; the crucial tone is one of desensitised acquiescence in the horror of obsession and prevalent insanity.” (3) This is the territory explored in American Gothic, a space that encourages the elucidation of aspects of American culture that otherwise remained unspoken or hysterically dismissed.

This book is divided into five parts. The opening chapter is entitled “Framing the Gothic : theories and histories”: it outlines the state of contemporary gothic criticism. In contrast to Jameson, Savoy perceives the gothic as an ‘impulse’ rather than as a discrete literary mode. He highlights the fluidity of the gothic, a genre unencumbered by strict limitations. Savoy sees the gothic as “most powerfully American when it strains toward ‘allegorical translucency'”. (6) His conception focuses on emerging rifts, or semiotic gaps in the gothic narrative. (7) This position exposes “the fragility of our usual systems of making sense of the world.” (Anne Williams cited 8) Defamiliarisation, the uncanny and the double are central to this discussion as is the failure of repression and forgetting. According to Savoy, the gothic, “veers away from the clarity of denotation, towards the ghostly realm of connotation”. (11) The importance of an obscured, nostalgic allegory is established early in this collection.

The second section features essays examining psychoanalysis and the gothic. Primarily the discussion concentrates on issues of gothic identity with an emphasis on its fluidity and liminality. Steven Bruhm surveys Stephen King’s oeuvre, analysing the difficulties King’s characters have in developing and maintaining language, thwarting their creativity. This is most evident in the character of Jack Torrance in The Shining, who is unable to transcend writer’s block and instead of constructing a manuscript, regresses into repetition and thyme, typing”all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” interminably.

The third section on racial politics is the most controversial, and drawing from its history of African slavery and oppression, marks it as distinctly American. George Piggford’s analysis of revolutionary American theatre looks specifically at Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman, the one act play that exposes the “unspeakable” in the forms of incest and parricide, set in a haunted subway car in Manhattan. The controversy extends beyond the text, into the criticism. Piggford opposes Leslie Fiedler’s association of “the Negro problem in the United States … (with) the Gothic horror of our daily lives” (Fiedler cited 143) by focussing instead on the terror that whiteness provokes in the black imagination. In “Looking into black skulls”, Piggford reveals Baraka’s dire strategy: “By exposing the horror of race relations in America through the gothic case study Dutchman, Baraka both diagnoses the problem in American society – white dominance – and prescribes his cure: race revolution and murder.” (155)

Mariane Noble opens the forth section “Gothic currents in women’s writing” with an essay that associates the Gothic with sentimental fiction. In “An ecstasy of apprehension: gothic pleasures of sentimental fiction”, Noble aligns sympathetic identification with sadism to suggest an analogy between the tears of sentimentality and the terror of the gothic. This is an essay that continues the exploration of identity, its abjection and erasure in the acculturation of the female, but one that posits the subversive view that liminal vulnerability can be a pleasurable state. The final section on the “Postmodern Gothic” moves toward the future where traditional gothic monsters metamorphose into contemporary serial killers. Nicola Nixon looks at the valorisation of the serial killer throughout the media, suggesting that the real demon is the screen, representing a reflective surface for the projection and articulation of cultural monstrousness. Kim Ian Michasiw brings the gothic home arguing that gothic malice has left the darkness of the city and now pervades the fluorescent illuminated suburban home where the uniform, artificially-manicured lawns stretch to conceal the putrescence beneath.

This myriad of gothic perspectives shatters the conception of the gothic as exhausted and boring. This survey explores its influence at work across American culture and it suggests its continuation into the future. Gothic criticism in this book is abundant and seductive. Like the vampire, it is fascinating in its reinvention.

References:
Amiri Baraka, Dutchman (New York: William Morrow, 1964).
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1991).
Stephen King, The Shining (Toronto: Penguin, 1977).
David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longman, 1980).

Wendy Haslem