Monstrous media/spectral subjects

Imaging Gothic from the nineteenth century to the present

Fred Botting, Catherine Spooner, Fred Botting, Catherine Spooner

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780719089770
• eBook ISBN: 9780719098123
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Explores the intersection of monsters, ghosts, representation and technology in Gothic texts from the nineteenth century to the present.

1

Fred Botting and Catherine Spooner

Introduction: monstrous media/spectral subjects

Monsters and spectres might seem to be opposites: one embodied, tangible, chthonic; the other incorporeal, insubstantial and ethereal. They may conjure different fears too: horror, visceral shock and corporeal repulsion or uncanny sensations of psychic displacement, temporal disturbance and haunting. Yet, as this collection of essays demonstrates, both figures circulate around emergent media from the nineteenth century to the present, colliding with and contaminating one another. The contagion of the monstrous and the spectral is a characteristically gothic effect. In Goya’s celebrated eighteenth-century engraving, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799), the sleeper’s nightmares are monstrous bat and owl-like creatures projected on a shadowy backdrop, a hallucinatory recall of nothing so much as a late eighteenth-century phantasmagoria show. In Goya’s envisioning of the nightmare, monstrous imaginings and spectral effects interpenetrate. Monsters may be reason’s shadowy double, but their form is suggestively determined in the conjunction of technology and entertainment comprised by the magic lantern. The emergence of new technologies, the marvels of modernity and science, is intimately bound up with the production of monsters and ghosts. So much so, perhaps, that it is ‘not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 112).

Monstrous media/spectral subjects: across these pairings relationships multiply and numerous configurations emerge. Underpinned (and undermined) by disturbing and obscure movements of monstrosity and spectrality, of monstering and spooking, a key polarisation is sustained in interrelations of political, normative systems and subjective orientations. Monsters are unacknowledged, wretched creatures, objects of exclusion and thence figures of fear and threat. But they also come to manifest the effects of systems of domination and dehumanisation that create them. Frankenstein’s creature is the most striking of these: a being of human parts made inhuman, he embodies not only Romantic systems of aesthetic self-production but the revolutionary polemics in which monstrosity concerns political and social change (Botting, 1991: 141–9). Monstrosity is an effect of systems of power, and, at the same time, an unreal, constructed figure; it manifests movements or forces within and beyond all relations, exceeding both objectification and domination. A spectre is an immaterial figure possessed of all-too-real histories and effects, preceding and retro-activating systems of law and subjectivity with an inescapably heterogeneous power; it is also a no-thing and a general disturbance of subjective and system boundaries: ‘it spooks’ [es spukt] (Derrida, 1994: 135).

Distinguishing monstrosity and subjectivity in terms of media or spectres implies a distinction of interiority and externality in which the positions and inclinations of beings are defined by the imposition of outside forms and forces: monsters are cast out from human society or made monstrous by their inhumane norms and practices; spectres come back from unknown realms yet also lie at the origins of law and religion, calls for justice, vengeance, repayment of debts. Only temporarily distinguished in terms of inside and outside, however, monstrosity and spectrality remain associated with ambivalence, borders and otherness, disclosing any opposition to be ultimately unstable.

Gothic fiction emerged in the middle of an eighteenth century undergoing shifts in the relations between social classes, between landed and commercial power, and amid challenges to colonial and political order. It was, from the start, a monstrous medium: Horace Walpole’s mixing of novel and romance forms was designed to have powerful effects on its readership, transporting them from an actual to an imaginative realm. Romances, opposed to the realism of the emerging novel form, were also monstrous: not only did they present improbable scenarios and fanciful worlds but, in breaking with a form that was attuned to social and moral didacticism, they were considered unnatural and dangerous for a growing, and indiscriminating, readership. Condemned as a ‘new species’ or as a ‘spawn’ threatening familial and political order, the rise of this type of fiction was portrayed as a monster threatening to explode the aesthetic and moral values binding society together and letting loose a tide of vicious, sexual and violent energies from within a burgeoning and undisciplined reading public (Matthias, 1805: 422). Monsters, appearing within a form that was itself criticised as monstrous, are linked both to social transformation and to changes in media.

In his ‘Reflections on the Novel’, the Marquis de Sade notes the operation and interrelation of both types of change, as well as introducing another medium. Praising the work of Matthew Lewis and Ann Radcliffe, Sade observes that their fictions were the ‘inevitable result of the revolutionary shocks which all of Europe has suffered’ and goes on to explain that, having become ‘monotonous’ in comparison to a reality that was all too exciting, fiction needed to find more extravagant ways of engaging its readership (1989: 109). The germ of a curious and counterintuitive logic is evident: revolutionary excitement, it seems, demanded that fiction become more exciting rather than less; stimulating – shocking – readers (as Lewis’s writing certainly did) rather than calming them or assuaging their fears. Much later, the logic is taken up and developed in Walter Benjamin’s (1973) examination of the relationship between the (new) media of modernity – photography and film – and the shocks of industrial and urban life.

Another figure, another medium, is also introduced in Sade’s discussion: describing the ‘sorcery and phantasmagoria’ of the new novels, he refers to a popular visual medium of the time, magic lantern shows (1989: 108). Fashionable across Europe during the period of the French Revolution, the shows often projected grisly scenes of death and ghostly visitation, aesthetically terrorising audiences in times of political terror: ‘phantasmagoria’ were bound up with concerns about mechanism, vitality, animism and reality (see Warner, 2006; Jones, 2011). As Terry Castle (1995) has argued, they also raised questions of representation and mediation: inaugurating a new and technological sense of the ghostly, they relocated spectres from a supernatural realm to one that was both medial and psychological, an interplay of reality and the unreal demanding a re-evaluation of ideas of empiricism, subjective perception and the literal and metaphorical power of fictional and visual media. Coleridge used the metaphor to describe the pernicious influence of popular fiction, concerned about how romance reading could reflect and transmit ‘the moving fantasms of one man’s delirium’ to a hundred others (1975: 28). As an apparatus for projection and as metaphor, phantasmagoria suggest the monstrous potential of media in terms of their spectral effects on consciousness, to the point that consciousness itself is rendered virtually spectral. In relation to mechanisms of projection, the understanding of reality and its perception change: media can present unreal images as though they were real and provide images of minds possessed by hallucinatory phantasms, simultaneously distorting perception and explaining misperceptions in rational, rather than supernatural terms.

Such devices – literally and metaphorically – establish new relationships between mind and world and furnish new modes of understanding at the same time as they apparently obfuscate or blur extant perspectives. The camera obscura – a dark space into which light, through a small aperture, delivers an inverted image of objects outside – was an apparatus that furnished numerous metaphors for consciousness, perception and subjectivity. In this respect it participated in the production of individuality, inseparable from a ‘metaphysic of interiority’ defining positions of observation and privatised subjectivity in terms of a ‘decorporealization’ that reduced the body to a phantom (Crary, 1990: 39–41). It was also a metaphor for misperception. Optical devices were used by Karl Marx to describe the ‘mysterious character’ of the commodity and distinguish the effects of ideology on representations of reality: the former – as phantasmagoria – substitutes a relation between things in place of social forms, the commodity occulting and the human role in production (1976: 164–9). Elsewhere in Marx’s writings the dominant ideas of a particular time – those of the ruling class – are viewed, through the metaphor of the camera obscura, as inverted, distorted or simulated reflections of reality. But, as Sarah Kofman reads Marx’s use of the figure, there is no simple reality behind the reflection that can be easily recovered: ‘ideology is not the reflection of real relations but that of a world already transformed and enchanted. It is the reflection of a reflection, the phantasm of a phantasm’ (1997: 11). Phantasmagoria, anticipating media operations more generally, do not present things or thoughts directly but increasingly envelop the world in folds of simulation. Indeed, Walter Benjamin’s use of the phantasmagoria extends to the point, it seems, of describing the entirety of modernity’s experience, from the effects of mechanical production to intoxications with commodities, shops, crowds and exhibitions (1999: 8–14).

By the twentieth century (new) media crowd the aesthetic marketplace pressing literature with visual, sonic and graphic forms that disarm its apparent stability and open it to diverse and fluid movements. Based on the writing central to the ‘discourse-network’ initiating modernity – the system of language, learning, recording and circulation that allowed bureaucracies and socio-political institutions to regulate the world, the Word of post-Romantic literature is pushed aside by media affecting different senses and using new techniques of inscription, storage and accessibility. These – photography, audio recording, typing and moving images – emerge in the nineteenth century and engender new spectres and, significantly, autonomous flows of data and different modes of ‘technological reproducibility’ (Kittler, 1999: 130). The spectral relation then changes from that haunting author and reader to the multiple discontinuities put into effect by the audibility or visibility of ghosts. It is a world perceived by Franz Kafka as increasingly – and fatally for humans – spectral: ghosts thrive amid new forms of communication, while humans are left to perish (Kafka, 1959: 229). Vampires, too, seem to thrive on the disjunctions of media autonomy: barely traceable in the Kodak prints, guide books, phonographs and legal and commercial ledgers and railway timetables of Dracula, it is only when this disparate, very modern, assemblage of information is unified that the undead can be tracked. Indeed, in the heady urban centres of Victorian Europe from the middle of the nineteenth century commodities became desirably and deliriously phantasmagorical, immaterial and fleeting, like the negatives and shadows that flickered on screen or crackled on wax cylinders. Media ghostliness appears originary, spectrality a primary if immaterial condition: negative, shadow, light, ink, acoustic trace. Though photography might capture life as though it were art – Henry Fox Talbot’s idea of the ‘pencil of nature’, say – the image is still, life frozen, paralysed, suspended, ripped from time and bound to death: ‘this will be and that has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake’ (Barthes, 1984: 96).

Monsters and spectres appear, disperse and proliferate in the movements of and between media forms, leaving ghostly subjects in their wake. The movement itself displaces the habitual practices, perceptions and assumptions surrounding media circulations, receptions and reproductions thereby rendering familiar modes strange: from being the message, the glow of a new neon light visible rather than the word it spells out (McLuhan, 1964: 8–9); the medium must efface itself to produce spectral effects. When a medium is new it does not produce what Brian Rotman calls ‘ghost effects’. Spectres are secondary, a result of processes of remediation depending on habituation and effacement of their media origins. Effects become evident owing to transitions between media and their subjective correlates: from the gestural or proprioceptive sense of identity associated with the moving body in space to the spoken and written self, the medium must become familiar to the point of invisibility for a ‘media-enabled ghost construct’ to become perceptible (2007: 78). A ‘ghost effect’ marks the emergence of strangeness and signals displacements in the structures of media production, reception and naturalisation in which specific selves and normal realities take their bearings. With new media and their pluralised, networked selves (all at once gestural, haptic, spoken, visual, textual, simultaneously dis- and re-embodied), ghosts are traces of previous media formations and prior senses of (mediated) selfhood, belatedly visible, shadowy, both after-effects and after-affective. The ghosts of the digital age await, their emergence dependent on their media becoming unnoticeable: ‘only when the network-induced perturbations of the space–time of their users have stabilized, when their effect has become naturalized and invisible, can a unified, planet-wide subject position, an electronically mediated encounter able to refer, via the unified planetary network, to itself, become available’ (2007: 79). When, or if, that happens, there will be new ghosts.

Teratology and hauntology have spawned their own disciplines and their own academic industries; nevertheless, their cross-contamination is seldom remarked. The essays in this volume animate monstrous and spectral figures in order to explore emergent media from the magic lantern and the photograph in the nineteenth century to the digital forms of the twenty-first. Paying attention to the media through which gothic narratives are disseminated, representations of media in those narratives and the gothicisation of media in wider culture, these essays demonstrate in dynamic and multiple ways how monstrous media and spectral subjects are inextricably linked. The first section of the book, ‘Between text and image’, explores the spectral effects that new imaging technologies trace in the text, ranging from the magic lantern in the mid-nineteenth century to the digital imaging of the present. It begins with Elisabeth Bronfen’s daring cross-mapping of First World War poetry by Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen with George A. Romero’s zombie films. Through Bronfen’s critical reading this initially unlikely pairing reveals, in Mieke Bal’s terms, the poetry’s ‘preposterous’ gothic resonances. Romero’s films, in turn, exhibit a concern with war, from echoes of Vietnam in Night of the Living Dead (1968) to a more extended exploration of the media reporting of war in Diary of the Dead (2007). According to Bronfen, the latter film maps an ethical crisis in which official reporting withholds crucial information while unofficial material provides an unmediated excess of information. As she argues, ‘Diary of the Dead uses the cinematic spectacle of the revenant to force us to confront an ethical crisis raised by the ubiquity of digital images and the visual lust that goes in tandem with a freedom to shoot and disseminate images at will.’

The remainder of the opening section excavates the historical emergence of new imaging technologies and their representation in nineteenth-century fiction. Paul Foster provides a comprehensive reading of proto-cinematic qualities in fin-de-siècle gothic fiction, suggesting that emergent cinema is a crucial interpretative context for their spectral and uncanny qualities. Key texts of the fin-de-siècle gothic canon, including The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1888), The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) and Dracula (1897), deploy effects reminiscent of filmic techniques such as reverse motion and double exposure. Foster concludes that ‘if there was something “gothic” about emergent cinema, there was something “cinematic” about the late-Victorian gothic revival’. Gregory Brophy presents a comparable reading of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) in relation to Victorian photographic discourses. Brophy explores the concepts of the ‘negative’ and the ‘optogram’, or image fixed on the retina at the moment of death, suggesting that Marsh exploits these figures in order to explore the interiority of his text’s narrators, creating a kind ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series editors’ preface
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: monstrous media/spectral subjects: Fred Botting and Catherine Spooner
• Part I: Between text and image
• Part II: Sounding spectres
• Part III: Moving media
• Index