The New Urban Gothic

Global Gothic in the Age of the Anthropocene

Holly-Gale Millette, Ruth Heholt, Holly-Gale Millette, Ruth Heholt

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030437770
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Cultura popular

This collection explores global dystopic, grotesque and retold narratives of degeneration, ecological and economic ruin, dystopia, and inequality in contemporary fictions set in the urban space. Divided into three sections—Identities and Histories, Ruin and Residue, and Global Gothic— The New Urban Gothic explores our anxieties and preoccupation with social inequalities, precarity and the peripheral that are found in so many new fictions across various media. Focusing on non-canonical Gothic global cities, this distinctive collection discusses urban centres in England's Black Country, Moscow, Detroit, Seoul, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore, Dehli, Srinigar, Shanghai and Barcelona as well as cities of the imaginary, the digital and the animated. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the intersections of time, place, space and media in contemporary Gothic Studies. The New Urban Gothic casts reflections and shadows on the age of the Anthropocene.

Part IUrban Gothic: Identities and Histories

Julian Wolfreys

At some point, sooner or later, the idea of the city, and the many and varied modes of its representations, would be presented in terms of Gothic. These have areas of similarity, areas of overlap. They also have areas of difference from one another. As such, Urban Gothic (and by extension and form of Gothic or ‘new’-Gothic never entirely like itself, but also never entirely different), will strike a chord with viewer, reader, game-participant or audience alike. Gothic—no definite article, for to use this would be to delimit implicitly the multiplicity, the ‘swarms’ of Gothic manifestation and mutation and therefore domesticate and familiarise what is already in some cases overdetermined in controllable ways—is not one: always in the process of ‘othering’ itself, Gothic transforms and is transformative. There is no straightforward ‘genetic’ code for Gothic that is not, always already, corrupted, auto-evolving, within whatever might momentarily be perceived as an ‘itself’, a stable and recognisable concept or ontology, with an equally stable epistemological framework and embedding. Customary or conventional as it is in criticism to employ a capital G in referring to the cultural expressions of Gothic—film-text, literary text, game-text, painting, graphic novel, etc—ironically, and perhaps not a little paradoxically, this very convention capitalises on nothing so much as the fact that Gothic is irreducible to one form, one identity. This is Gothic’s identity: to have no one form, at the risk of repeating myself.

This is not to say anything remarkably new or even unknown. Today, many critics and commentators on all forms of Gothic take this as read, as given, in order to get on with business as usual. However, in order to begin again as it were, in order to locate an initial departure point in the liminal and crepuscular psychogeography of Gothic in general and especially in the landscape and cityscape of the Urban Gothic and new Urban Gothic, it is good to remind ourselves of just how wayward Gothic is, and how such auto-transgressive resistance to absolute familiarisation can inform and so promote and encourage the representation of alternative identities and so give articulation to the many articulations and affirmations of the Gothic subject, queer, postcolonial, LGBT or any other ‘other’.

This is though not yet to speak of the Urban, at least not explicitly. Again, like the idea of Gothic, there is no one Urban. If anything, we accept this much more readily, if not uncritically, than we do with Gothic. Without offering so many ‘variations on a theme’, allow me to suggest that we take it as given that Urban is, like Gothic, a complex and heterodox pseudo-portmanteau term, with little to its understanding that could be categorised as a normative taxonomy: like Gothic, heterogeneous within the ‘itself’ that the term implicitly signals, the many ‘selves’ of Urban, sometimes touching on, informing and coming to be informed by the many ‘selves’ of Gothic (and so producing or inventing ever more fascinating, seductive, dangerous and to some, threatening creatures), resists complete normalisation and complete comprehension.

Accepting this, I would argue that it is the impossibility of a full comprehension that lies at the root of the reading subject’s apprehension in the face of Urban Gothic in general, and New Urban Gothic in particular. Such apprehension is realised in that the texts of new Urban Gothic all produce, each after their own fashion, subjects-in-apprehension, each embodying, enacting, performing, articulating and affirming their Being-in-apprehension. Being dwells or might only have the possibility of dwelling authentically in new Urban Gothic, to be explicitly Heideggerian, on the condition that it realises in its actions, perceptions and reflections on selfhood and the self’s place in urban landscapes—and as a reflective and meditative condition of those constructed or built sites—to the fullest extent how the ‘nature’ of Being-as-dwelling is fundamentally to be always already homeless, unheimlich, uncanny. Understanding this as an explicit function of the new Urban Gothic is important. Its importance resides in a fact that is as materially and culturally historiographical as it is phenomenological and ontological.

To explain this as directly impossible: if one imagines, in an act of retrospective construction, a narrative trajectory for Gothic and Urban Gothic, then taking as a well-acknowledged inaugural moment—fiction or myth of origin—the conventionally agreed a ‘first’ Gothic narrative such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and subsequent novels or romances from the first flush of Gothic such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), and even Jane Austen’s parody of Gothic Northanger Abbey (1817),¹ what is blindingly obvious about such texts—what they have in common—is place. Each novel names as its principal setting a built environment. So far, so obvious. And each structure determines in large part the eventual determination of the novel’s principal subject. Place and self, Being and dwelling, Being and the uncanny: all are inextricably realised in literature as mutually interdependent in a way that arguably had not been foregrounded before. Moreover, this is not a simple one-way street. Setting does not determine subjectivity alone. The subject, fully engaged in the culturally overdetermined anticipation and phenomenological perception of a place, gives to a specific location through reading of architecture, ambience, tone or mood (perhaps best described by the German term, Stimmung) a mode of presentation, a staged ‘identity’. Place thus becomes an entity in its own right, imbued not only by the author but in the perception of the subject-reader and the reader of the text (the two subjects are often aligned to a degree to the extent that the author withholds or discloses information or otherwise determines reception through the rhetorical and poetic modes of perceptual production, in order to make material the ‘affect’ of place) with an uncanny sense of proximal Being.

Thus, there came about—to risk a hypothesis—early explicit presentations of both psychogeography and psycho-architecture, both in turn, as determinants of the content, serving to shape the psycho-archetectonics of Gothic narrative, Gothic poetics and their subjects. The structure and trajectory of the narrative was thus constituted through the interaction of Being and Dwelling, struggling towards revelation and reconciliation, in which the psychology of self and its many archaic and irrational fetishes came to be foregrounded through narratives of mystery and solution of those mysteries. Or to put this differently, Gothic narrative and poetics involve in its first acknowledged forms both a psychology and a psychoanalysis of subjectivity; and this subjectivity was in this narrative unfolding understood by the readers of Gothic as modern, like themselves—or at least, as they would have liked to have imagined themselves, eventually rid of any atavistic, fetishistic or superstitious residue belonging to earlier historico-cultural manifestations of the self. Moreover, such a gradual revelation of modern subjectivity, which necessarily took time inasmuch as it had never before been so directly articulated and reflected upon to such a great and sustained extent, required two elements: on the one hand, the temporality of an exploratory narrative that, like many adventure and puzzle-solving computer games or the past couple of decades, took time to develop and evolve in order that the subject might not only banish all that was initially accepted as frightening or unfamiliar, unknown, foreign, other, but also would come to arrive at a greater understanding of him- or herself. On the other hand, Gothic narrative needed the materiality of place not only as a setting, but specifically as the ground of the self, on which the subject could be constructed and so be given life—not unlike Victor Frankenstein’s creature, who, today, as I write, has returned via Jeanette Winterson’s latest novel, Frankisstein [2019] concerned with LGBT and transgender identities, the question of AI and the scientific possibilities of gender reassignment, all of which is given, in part, the setting of an increasingly Gothic Brexit landscape, where Englishness is, itself, an uncanny and monstrous manifestation.

Of course, Winterson does not need to provide an extended temporality of selfhood, as writers of what we might conveniently term ‘first wave Gothic’ had to, if only so as to begin to understand themselves the ways in which place and Being were closely entwined. She can foreground different modes of Being, other stagings of identity and selfhood differently Gothicised and urbanised, as can writers such as Peter Carey or Robin Robertson, in texts as wildly different as Jack Maggs, the postcolonial re-envisioning of Great Expectations, with its dark and forbidding, crepuscular London, or The Long Take, Robertson’s bleak take on the post-war deconstruction of the self in a mid-century staging of Los Angeles that is as Gothic as it is hard boiled, owing as much to the films of Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang as it does to the fictions of Raymond Chandler or James M. Cain. Or, to put this differently, Winterson or those authors, filmmakers and game designers considered in the present volume each work in temporality, in temporalities, that are markedly different from those of first, second or third generation Gothic writers and artists of the Urban Gothic, from Walpole to Dickens, from Brandon to Stevenson, from Wilde to Elizabeth Bowen’s short stories, and beyond. And here is the argument I have begun to develop. Over the history of Urban Gothic textuality, following the ‘first’ efforts to bring to consciousness the relation between self and place as a modern phenomenon, subsequent narratives (from Austen onwards) have come to terms more and more rapidly with this intimacy and mutual interdependence, thereby making telegraphic the work needing to be done, while also domesticating Gothic in moving event and staging to seemingly familiar locations of the subject’s own culture, nation, home. Furthermore, due to the attenuation of the once necessary temporal space of earlier Gothic narratives, present-day filmmakers, game designers and writers can explore, with all due acknowledgement of and reference to the poetics, rhetoric and politics of Urban Gothic, as this has been codified and made phenomenally and materially present over a roughly 250 year period, the transformations of urban space in post-industrial, postcolonial and post-heteronormative contexts, in rich and surprising ways. As the authors of the diverse essays in this section demonstrate, the latest generations of writers, artists, filmmakers, game writers have continued to expand and explore different cultures and sites of Gothic, and to reimagine those sites in inventive ways, even to the extent that there is already underway, in a global reimagining of the Urban (new) Gothic, a revision of political and poetic purpose in what just over a generation was still somewhat new, but now appears as a canonical genre, the neo-Victorian.

What this collection of essays makes abundantly clear is that there is no shortage of imagination when it comes to either the urban or the Gothic. We dwell, as unhomely as the experience may be, in both, the modernity of our Being determined by a dwelling that is also a displacement, homelessness; and with this arrives, as the authors gathered here demonstrate, a persistent sense of anxiety and the uncanny, as each and every modern urban subject remains caught up in, and in the wake of ...