Gothic Metaphysics

From Alchemy to the Anthropocene

Jodey Castricano

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786837967
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Gothic Metaphysics is a radical departure from Freudian-centred criticism of Gothic literature. It aims to explore our modern dilemma in the time of the Anthropocene, by bringing to light the role of Gothic since its inception in 1764 in holding space for a worldview familiar to certain mystical traditions – such as alchemy, which held to the view of a living cosmos yet later deemed 'uncanny' and anachronistic by Freud. In developing this idea, Gothic Metaphysics explores the influence of the Middle Ages on the emergence of Gothic, seeing it as an encrypted genre that serves as the site of a 'live burial' of 'animism', which has emerged in the notion of 'quantum entanglement' best described by Carl G. Jung and physicist Wolfgang Pauli in the theory of synchronicity linking alchemy with quantum mechanics. This relationship finds itself in dialogue with the Gothic's long-held concern for the 'sentience of space and place', as described by renowned Gothic scholar Fredrick Frank. The volume Gothic Metaphysics is multi-valent and explores how Gothic has sustained the view of a sentient world despite the disqualification of nature – not only in respect to the extirpation of animism as a worldview, but also with regard to an affirmation of consciousness beyond that of human exceptionalism.

1

Gothic Metaphysics: An Introduction

A New Kind of Peripatetics: Transmissions of the Unsayable

We stand at the crossroads of change in the history of Western consciousness, and the decisions we make concern survival on this planet. On one hand, we have egocentric individualism, and on the other, an extreme collectivism. Both have become deficient, even as our current worldview rests on the premise of our separation from and mastery of nature, in which nature is treated as an object with ourselves as controlling subject, born of the belief that we have been given dominion over the earth. Indeed, this belief has its roots in the distant past, and is thought to have gained purchase during the Scientific Revolution, when this dominant mode of thinking, referred to by historians of science as ‘mechanical philosophy’, signalled the end of what historian Morris Berman calls ‘participating consciousness’, once epitomized in the Hermetic tradition by the practice of alchemy, which was ‘the last great coherent expression of participating consciousness in the West’ and was replaced by non-participating consciousness and the ‘esoteric-exoteric split’.¹

During the Renaissance, alchemy became a target for the Reformation as well as scientific positivism, and the basis for ‘radical separation of matter and spirit, or mind and body’ (p. 103). Soon all ‘mystical experiences’ came under the derogatory heading of ‘enthusiasm’, while at the centre of such mystical belief was a view of nature directly opposed to the new science, a view that held ‘that matter was alive’ and that ‘mind exists in matter’ (p. 114). This notion seems to anticipate the zone of subject/object indistinction or uncertainty intrinsic to quantum mechanics in modern physics, which did not come about until 1925, following Louis de Broglie’s 1924 wave-particle hypothesis. While quantum mechanics has set the subject–object distinction of ‘mechanistic philosophy’ on its head, its antithesis, the subject–object merger, opposed by Freud as animistic, also made inroads into psychology, as demonstrated by the theory of synchronicity, ‘an acausal connecting principle’, developed by Carl G. Jung in collaboration with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. The theory of synchronicity was presented by Jung as an updating of ‘the alchemical understanding of unus mundus (one world)’ (quoted in Main, p. 14).²

This brief historical overview gives one a sense of the paradigm clash between the Middle Ages’ view of ‘participating consciousness’ and the ‘mechanical philosophy’ of the Scientific Revolution, and it does so by tracing the development of a scientific, psychological, and metaphysical worldview reliant upon the subject–object divide. This division has been challenged by a branch of modern science concerned with ‘quantum entanglement’, what Einstein somewhat gothically referred to as ‘spooky action at a distance’, the phenomenon in which subatomic particles appear to have the ability to share a condition or a state in a kind of feedback loop. This circular development suggests the figure of the Ouroboros, one of the oldest alchemical and Gnostic symbols in the world. As a trope, the Ouroboros lends itself to a compelling view of narrative in that it is said the Ouroboros ‘can be perceived as enveloping itself, where the past (the tail) appears to disappear but really moves into an inner domain or reality, vanishing from view but still existing.’³

To seek the path of the Ouroboros by writing a literary studies monograph seems rather esoteric, if not anachronistic. It even seems paradoxical when the aim of the monograph is twofold: to engage with fiction and poetry in a critical way while seeking to move into, or at least draw attention to an ‘inner domain or reality’ that is always already constitutive of Gothic. Although that domain has ‘vanished from view’, it is the real subject of my engagement with Gothic, which I see as a ‘holding vessel’ in the Heideggerian sense. Like the vessel, the genre’s ‘thingness’ ‘does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds’.⁴ This is not to say the genre is empty, but rather that Gothic is often mistaken for nothing-to-see, because encountering an inner domain or reality risks an encounter with a worldview long repudiated, which nevertheless holds metaphysical space for itself. I am speaking of alchemy and the Hermetic tradition, and thus of animism. This nothing-to-see involves a worldview that, like the tail of the Ouroboros, has ostensibly vanished. Yet, as I will argue, this world-view has not been extirpated, but has remained under the auspices of Gothic, a genre which can be said to be ‘expressive of the field (that is, the inner domain of reality) from which it is generated’.⁵

Recalling the Ouroboros, it is at this vanishing point that Gothic Metaphysics: From Alchemy to the Anthropocene begins. It aims to explore our modern dilemma in the time of the Anthropocene by bringing to light the role of Gothic (literature) in holding space for what Weber referred to as the ‘disenchantment of the world’. This book also seeks to highlight how Gothic, when seen as a meta/physics, has kept ‘alive’ a consciousness deemed ‘uncanny’ and anachronistic by Freud, which will have to be reimagined into a new and more intensive form at this moment of the Anthropocene. This intensive form will contribute to a new model of reality based on a certain ‘entanglement’ – call it neo-animism – that slips not into a naive worldview based upon nostalgia for a golden past, but into one that brings us to the demise of a ‘one-sided mechanistic-causal mode of thought’.⁶ All of this is to say that by the eighteenth century, if Gothic had not existed, it would have had to be invented.

A few words, perhaps a caveat, regarding the style and structure of Gothic Metaphysics. Readers are advised that they will come across content that may seem repetitive, or to echo with some familiarity. In my defence, if that is even necessary, I want to offer the reader, who may find any such echoes distracting or, at worst, annoying, the same reason for my idiosyncratic method as was articulated by Carl G. Jung, which I have used as one of the epigraphs: ‘I am sorry that I repeat things … I always consider certain things again, and always from a new angle. My thinking is, so to speak, circular. This is a method which suits me … a new kind of peripatetics.’ Furthermore, each chapter can be seen to stand alone while at the same time harbouring an echo of previous chapters. Because a metaphysics of Gothic is also a poetics, I see this style/structure dyad as the workings of refrain. I hope, dear Reader, you will see the method as creating new angles and, being somewhat performative in a way that suits you too.

The Realm of the Unmediated: Live Burial

Although there is a tendency to view ‘mystical’ traditions as anachronistic and inherently anti-modern, this study takes as a premise that such ‘systems’ are not merely cultural narratives subject to continuous change under social and historical conditions, but remain active and productive in terms of emergence. Thus, to a certain extent, I am thinking of ‘Gothic’ in the spirit of Victoria Nelson’s discussion of the relocation of the ‘supernatural’ in genre wherein she says: ‘if the postmodern indeed turns out to be the premodern … we now stand at the threshold of a paradigm shift whose scope is equivalent to that of the seventeenth century … [in that it now] draws heavily from the premodern image of a living cosmos.’⁷ In this sense, ‘Gothic’ functions as an emergent ‘object’ that undermines anthropocentrism by positing other-than-human consciousnesses, a thought so profoundly germane to the Anthropocene that it is disregarded at our peril. I mean to say that Gothic posits other-than-human consciousnesses, and undermines anthropocentrism by addressing the ‘tension’ that arose, according to Remo Roth, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, ‘where quantitative science began to supersede the archaistic-magic worldview of the alchemy of the Middle Ages.’⁸ In developing this idea, Gothic Metaphysics explores the influence of the Middle Ages, in particular, alchemical thought, on the emergence of Gothic, seeing it as an encrypted genre that serves as the site of what I’d like to call a ‘live burial’, helping preserve ‘animism’ into the twenty-first century. Although this thought goes against the grain of Freud’s consignment of animism, in his 1919 essay ‘The “Uncanny”’, to the dustbin of ‘previously surmounted thought’, Gothic Metaphysics is not a nostalgic return to a ‘golden era’, but rather an exploration of the rise of Gothic as an ontological and epistemological placeholder, a crypt, perhap, an interment in the history of consciousness. Gothic, however, is not an obituary but rather lives on, an unrepentant revenant.

Freud, who according to Victoria Nelson, ‘secularized metaphysics’,⁹ once mused that he ‘should not be surprised to hear that psychoanalysis, which is concerned with laying bare [the] hidden forces [in the psychology of the Middle Ages,] has itself become uncanny to many people for that very reason’.¹⁰ One has to wonder to what ‘hidden forces’ Freud is referring. What is it about the ‘psychology’ of the Middle Ages that makes psychoanalysis so ‘uncanny’ – again, in spite of Freud’s dismissal of animism as ‘previously surmounted thought’ and his stance on keeping psychoanalysis an ‘occult’-free zone? Was psychoanalysis haunted or inhabited by these ‘hidden forces’ to the extent that Freud felt compelled to write ‘The “Uncanny”’ to keep these forces at bay? It is interesting that Freud’s essay became – and remains – an aesthetic theory central to Gothic studies from Horace Walpole onwards, in spite of the fact that Freud’s lens is not only anthropocentric, but also casts a shadow on animism, which is intrinsic to Gothic. Indeed, Gothic criticism is historically and almost inextricably tethered to the work and theories of Freud, which, it can be argued, are indebted to the five hundred years of materialist science preceding the rise of psychoanalysis.

The Realm of the Unmediated

Into the mystery with you!¹¹

(Stephen King, Bag of Bones)

Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.

(Hamlet, I.i.42)

In Raids on the Unthinkable: Freudian and Jungian Psychoanalysis, Paul Kugler claims that ‘while psychic images are representations experienced in the sphere of consciousness, the realm of unmediated experience is the realm of the unconscious. And about this subject we cannot speak’.¹² While the question of the unspeakable must, by definition, remain unresolved, it is, nevertheless, a central yet paradoxically ineffable concern of Gothic Metaphysics: From Alchemy to the Anthropocene, a study that seeks to explore Gothic not solely as a genre but rather as a significant metaphysical outlier to a worldview that had previously involved ‘the progressive removal of mind, or spirit, from phenomenal appearances’,¹³ and that thereby privileged rationalism and vérité.

Indeed, the eighteenth century saw the rise of the realist novel, dominated by the aesthetic principles of verisimilitude, veracity, and irony that were clearly antithetical to the Gothic novel, which was seen to ‘exist … almost purely for the sake of evoking pleasant terror’,¹⁴ or that Gothic ‘came into existence and endured because it gave pleasure and satisfaction to its readers’.¹⁵ It would also appear that the ‘pleasure’, the ‘pleasant terror’ or ‘satisfaction’ evoked by Gothic texts was accomplished through what Fred Botting calls a ‘negative aesthetics’, the realm of the ‘not beautiful’, the inharmonious, the disproportionate. Furthermore, Gothic texts were seen as ‘anti-social in content and function’ and, for the most part, considered to have no redeeming features; as Botting describes them, they were ‘invariably considered to be of little artistic merit, crude, formulaic productions for vulgar, uncultivated tastes’. Gothic style was anti-rational in that it ‘conjure[d] up obscure otherworldly phenomena or the “dark arts”, alchemical arcane and occult forms normally characterized as delusion, apparition, deception’ and was ‘not tied to a natural order of things as defined by realism’.¹⁶

In Botting’s, Monk’s and Day’s descriptions of Gothic there is much to dwell upon. For one thing, we see Gothic relegated to the second-rate status of literature, capable only of titillating the reader by evoking ‘pleasant terror’. For another, and more significantly, we see in Botting’s observations the privileging of realism in the eighteenth century as something based on ‘a natural order’, an aesthetic that provides evidence of a paradigm shift in the perception of reality that was dismissive of an alchemical worldview seen through the lens of Enlightenment as being delusional and deceptive, with the implication that the ‘dark arts’ ought to be relegated to the dustbin of history. It is telling that Botting’s Gothic makes no further reference to the dismissal of alchemy or the ‘dark arts’; the absence of reference to these as being significant seems in alignment with the emergence of Gothic itself, which is tied to the progressive removal from nature of mind or spirit that came about with the extirpation of alchemy and animism. To put my concerns more plainly: if Gothic serves as the site of ‘live burial’, it is of a worldview, a reality, in which matter and nature are accorded consciousness or sentience and seen as not only alive but purposive.¹⁷

At this juncture, though, one might wonder why I am choosing to take up the case of Gothic in this regard rather than, say, Anglo-American Romanticism, when the latter, even beyond literary studies, is deeply identified with animism. Such is the case, for example, with authors such as the anthropologist Stewart Elliott Guthrie, who, in Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion, asserts that, even though animism runs throughout Western literature and in every period,

its zenith occurs in English Romanticism, which makes the whole sensory world alive, sentient, and capable of communication. Motion again especially suggests life. Everything also participates in a larger sentient being which unites the universe as a single living entity.¹⁸

Although Guthrie is not a literary scholar, he bases his exploration of animism in Romanticism, acknowledging in particular the perspective of William Wordsworth, who imagines, says Guthrie, a ‘soul animating and informing all nature’ (p. 57). So here again is the question a reader of Gothic Metaphysics might be asking: Why Gothic at all, especially since the genre has traditionally been seen, as Anne Williams points out, ‘as something relative and subordinate to its early co...