The Gothic and the Everyday

Living Gothic

L. Piatti-Farnell, M. Beville, L. Piatti-Farnell, M. Beville

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137406637
• eBook ISBN: 9781137406644
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

The Gothic and the Everyday aims to regenerate interest in the Gothic within the experiential contexts of history, folklore, and tradition. By using the term 'living', this book recalls a collection of experiences that constructs the everyday in its social, cultural, and imaginary incarnations

Part I

Uncanny Histories

1

Trauma, Gothic, Revolution

David Punter

If there is one thing I would like to demonstrate in this chapter, it is the force of the truism that nationalism – a sense of living, and lived, history – exists only insofar as it is defined by its other. Perhaps we can see this most obviously in the multitude of acts of othering that constitutes the history of place names, which are regularly conferred by the other. There is a village near where I live in the UK called Chew Magna. ‘Chew’ is the name of a river, but it is not as though the villagers of this settlement near the river woke up one morning and thought, yes, we are bigger than the other villages along this river, and even if they had they would not have then thought, I know, let us add a nice, if rather grandiose, Latin suffix: the name was imposed from outside, in a non-native language, in order to fix the place on a map. Or, more grandly, we might think of the process by which the area including the island of Manhattan found its name changed from ‘New Amsterdam’ to ‘New York’. That was the consequence of a transaction of what might be called ‘commercial colonialism’: a new imperial master required a new imperial name, reflective of the change of dominion. And these acts of naming and renaming are all around. States of Australia called ‘New South Wales’ and ‘Victoria’; states of the USA called ‘New Hampshire’ and, rather more complexly, ‘New Mexico’. The list would be endless as we survey the effects of colonisation and what we now tend to call ‘global flows’.

There are similarly numerous attempts to rename in order to reverse namings that have come to be seen as overtly violent. The renaming of ‘German Southwest Africa’ as ‘Namibia’, of ‘The Gold Coast’ as ‘Ghana’: merely within Africa, this list too is long. In India the city until recently known as ‘Calcutta’ is now referred to as ‘Kolkata’: this is an unusual example, because the issue is that when other Indian cities were trying to throw off colonial naming, they searched for names that might reflect previous indigenous communities, but for Calcutta that was a problem, because there was no previous indigenous community; until European traders arrived, nobody had thought that a swamp on the banks of the Hooghly was a habitable place of any kind, and so the city fathers had to resort to making ‘Calcutta’ sound a little more local.

There are a number of processes at work here: colonial settlement; imperial domination; the need to impose order on what would otherwise be seen as chaos. One of the most resonant literary works to reflect, and reflect upon, this situation is Brian Friel’s famous play, Translations (1980). The scenario concerns the attempt, in 1833, to provide an intelligible cartography of Donegal in Ireland; here ‘intelligible’, of course, means ‘intelligible’ in the English language, and thus all the place names need to be literally ‘re-placed’. It is an added irony of the play, which Friel himself has pointed out, that in order to be intelligible to an international audience, the play had itself to be written largely in English (Friel, 1981).

This is only one small part of a wider process through which, in three distinct stages, English has taken over as what, following HSBC’s canny advertising campaign as ‘the world’s local bank’, we might call ‘the world’s local language’: the first stage was imperial domination; the second was the Americanisation of capitalism; the third, still ongoing, is the reduction of the functioning internet to the norm of a single language. HSBC, incidentally, is itself a further interesting example: I am not sure that many of its ‘local’ customers in England, while perhaps occasionally aware of its malfunctions and frauds, are similarly aware of what HSBC actually stands for: the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, a relic of colonialist opportunism if ever there was one.

I want to begin by moving through a number of literary examples of the connections between othering and nationalism, and then to move on specifically to the Gothic, because the Gothic, in its engagements with European national differentiations and its powerful, if sometimes displaced, accounts of national trauma, offers a particularly apt repertoire of images of nationalism of many kinds. If we were to doubt for a moment that this remains a relevant vocabulary for the expression of national identification in Britain, we would need only to look at the television news, and the continuing focus on the Palace of Westminster, that great neo-Gothic pile, which still figures as the home of what is sometimes referred to as ‘the mother of Parliaments’.

But I begin further back, in the 1650s, when Andrew Marvell wrote his poem ‘Bermudas’:

Where the remote Bermudas ride

In th’ocean’s bosom unespied,

From a small boat that rowed along,

The listening winds received this song:

‘What should we do but sing His praise

That led us through the wat’ry maze

Unto an isle so long unknown,

And yet far kinder than our own?

Where He the huge sea monsters wracks,

That lift the deep upon their backs;

He lands us on a grassy stage,

Safe from the storms, and prelate’s rage.

He gave us this eternal spring

Which here enamels everything,

And sends the fowls to us in care,

On daily visits through the air;

He hangs in shades the orange bright,

Like golden lamps in a green night,

And does in the pomegranates close

Jewels more rich than Ormus shows;

He makes the figs our mouths to meet,

And throws the melons at our feet;

But apples plants of such a price,

No tree could ever bear them twice;

With cedars, chosen by his hand

From Lebanon, he stores the land;

And makes the hollow seas that roar

Proclaim the ambergris on shore;

He cast (of which we rather boast)

The gospel’s pearl upon our coast,

And in these rocks for us did frame

A temple, where to sound his name.

O let our voice his praise exalt

Till it arrive at heaven’s vault,

Which, thence (perhaps) rebounding, may

Echo beyond the Mexique Bay.’

Thus sang they in the English boat

An holy and a cheerful note;

And all the way, to guide their chime,

With falling oars they kept the time.

(Marvell 2006, 1698–9)

A land of innocence is what we have here; a country where nothing bad can ever happen, and man – specifically the English man – is free to enjoy the love and protection of God. This isle is ‘so long unknown’, we hear, although we might fairly ask, ‘unknown to whom’ – it would certainly have been known to the Caribs who lived there, but then as Derek Walcott so wonderfully laments across a whole series of poems, the Caribs have been long since exterminated; they have endured, or rather failed to endure, their own trauma (Walcott, 1986, 59–60). The ‘grassy stage’ is a resonant phrase, turning the island into a stage set, as is the phrase ‘prelate’s rage’ – what is being alluded to here is an escape from the whole traumatic legacy of European religious strife. All the fruits, the vast beneficence of nature, are here, we note, free for the taking, in a specific ideological inversion of the profit-oriented mercantilism which in fact governed these early stages of empire – currency and trade as features of a benighted European past, to be superseded in this brave new world.

We may now find this fantasy portrayal of island life supremely ironic, or at best naïve, the idea, for example, in ‘proclaim the ambergris’, that we the colonisers are led to our treasure by divine will – we see here one of the origins of the still potent mythemes of Treasure Island, of Coral Island, of The Pirates of the Caribbean, so viciously exploded in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954). Trauma at home is replaced by a vision of peace abroad, and a well-deserved peace at that. The designs of God and the designs of England are in perfect harmony; and a notion of nationalism is founded on its other, the other reincorporated into what Benedict Anderson calls the ‘imagined community’ as part of a seamless whole (Anderson, 2006). But of course such an illusory whole is never actually seamless, and we can learn much by turning to the savage disillusionment of Daniel Defoe. In 1701 Defoe wrote a poem called ‘The True-Born Englishman’, on the occasion of King William III’s attempt to retain the military services of his Dutch Guards, and specifically in response to a xenophobic pamphlet by one Mr Tutchin, who has been happily consigned to the darkest recesses of history. One of the verses of Defoe’s poem goes as follows:

These are the Heroes who despise the Dutch,

And rail at new-come Foreigners so much;

Forgetting that themselves are all deriv’d

From the most Scoundrel Race that ever liv’d,

A horrid Crowd of Rambling Thieves and Drones,

Who ransack’d Kingdoms, and dispeopled Towns:

The Pict and Painted Britain, Treach’rous Scot,

By Hunger, Theft, and Rapine, hither brought;

Norwegian Pirates, Buccaneering Danes,

Whose Red-hair’d Offspring ev’ry where remains.

Who join’d with Norman-French compound the Breed

From whence your True-Born Englishmen proceed.

(Defoe, 1931, 2–3)

Whether Defoe’s scorn for nationalist myth would have increased if he had known that ‘Norman’ is only a corruption of ‘Norseman’ in the first place and represents a still further twist in the history of England, not as an invading but as an invaded nation, I do not know; however, the main thrust of his argument is obvious. The so-called ‘English’, those custodians of purported national and indeed ethnic purity, are in fact a mongrel bunch, the results of centuries and generations of invasion and interbreeding. There are very complicated matters at stake here, as there so often are, in the relationship between the ‘English’ and the ‘British’; suffice to say that one of the ingredients in the stew of the English is the ‘Painted Britain’, which assumes that the British, whoever Defoe conceived them to have been, occupy a subservient historical and cultural space to the English – although all this is grist to his mill, which is designed to deflate a sense of ill-founded national pride.

Nationalism proceeds through processes of inversion: mixed origins are replaced by national purity; offences against other peoples are replaced by location within a divine plan; a discontinuous, fragmented, traumatised past is replaced by a myth of historical continuity and greatness. And thus, naturally, to that eighteenth-century poetic icon, James Thomson’s ‘Rule, Britannia!’ (1740), and here I am moving to a different definition of ‘Britishness’: the elision between ‘English’ and ‘British’ is, as I have said, endlessly complex:

When Britain first, at Heaven’s command,

Arose from out the azure main,

This was the charter of the land,

And guardian angels sung this strain:

‘Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;

Britons never will be slaves’.

The nations, not so bless’d as thee,

Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall;

While thou shalt flourish great and free,

The dread and envy of them all.

‘Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;

Britons never will be slaves’.

Still more majestic shalt thou rise,

More dreadful from each foreign stroke;

As the loud blast that tears the skies

Serves but to root thy native oak.

‘Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;

Britons never will be slaves’. (Thomson, n.d., 492)

This is an embarrassing poem, but then most efflorescences of nationalism are embarrassing. One of my children recently showed me a book she had bought, which was about the architectural tastes of tyrants and dictators; from Mussolini to Saddam Hussein, from Hitler to a large selection of African potentates, the embarrassment factor was never in doubt.¹ However: what we notice here first is the renewed alliance between Britain and heaven, the notion of the British as the chosen race. Much is made here of slavery, but again this is a classic example of a nationalist ideological inversion. Britain is not shown as a land that lives upon the basis of overseas slave labour; rather, slavery is seen as a threat to the British way of life, and also as the automatic fate of other European nations, less blessed with democracy than Britain, and thus always prone to fall under tyrannical domination – this is a point to which I shall return a little later.

One of the issues here again, then, is of definition in terms of the other, yet this relationship is put in curious ways: ‘the dread and envy of them all’. One could spell this out in rather pedantic fashion: the dread of those rulers who seek to hold back nations on the path to democracy, a striking example of which we have recently had in the Western approach to the late Colonel Gaddafi, and the envy of those suffering people, denied freedom, who look upon Western shores and gasp with amazement at our democratic privileges – a number of Islamist parties in North Africa and elsewhere do not, mysteriously, appear at the moment to be seeing matters this way. But this does not matter, for ‘each foreign stroke’, each assault on the British heartland from the foreigner outside, renders the British fabled fortitude all the stronger. The ‘loud blast that tears the skies’ – to pursue more recent analogies, one might think of the events in London during the outrage of 2005 – rather like the Blitz serves only to reinforce the sense of national determination and pride. Indeed, one might go further and say that without such outrages the British sense of national destiny might be somewhat diminished; but that would be to verge on conspiracy theory, of which one should, I guess, despite John LeCarré’s best efforts, remain wary.²

As for the native oak: well, Britain during this period was to suffer from a variety of terrors about the diminution of its oak stocks – this was not a romantic matter but the source of the nation’s shipbuilding and thus naval prowess. After all, the oak is not really native to Britain. I mean that in two ways: first, varieties of oak are ‘native’ all over the place, from Mexico to China; but second, in a more long-term ecological sense, trees are not ‘native’ to anywhere. Tree populations come and go; they wear out and are, or are not, replaced; they are indifferent to the rise and ebb of empires and nations. I hope that is not to be interpreted as an indifference to the terrible iniquity of capitalist deforestation; but there are nevertheless broader perspectives here, and issues of what we as humans happen to prefer as our habitat will be necessarily functional, anthropomorphised, shaped according to what we from time to time perceive to be our own needs, whether we are conscious of this or not.

However: I have arrived by a perhaps circuitous route at the heartland of the eighteenth century, perhaps at the heart of oak. And now we encounter another dissenting voice, that of William Blake. If only Blake had read Defoe, I sometimes think; but sometimes history is not arranged in ways that would delight us. Here, at any event, is Blake, and it needs to be said that he had eccentric ideas on the history of Britain, although they were ones not without wider currency among his contemporary antiquarians and seekers after biblical and nationalist truth, some truth to hold against the problem of birth trauma – how, where and why was ‘Britain’ born? Gothic comes, as we shall see, to attempt to provide an answer to that question.

This is a brief passage from Jerusalem – the actual long poem called Jerusalem (1804–20), and not the short unnamed song that passes for ‘Jerusalem’ in English national mythology to this day – and it in part reflects Blake’s belief – again not unique to himself – in the British as the lost tribe of Israel:

What do I see! The Briton, Saxon, Roman, Norman amalgamating

In my Furnaces into One Nation, the English, & taking refuge

In the Loins of Albion. The Canaanite united with the fugitive

Hebrew, whom she divided into Twelve & sold into Egypt,

Then scatter’d the Egyptian & Hebrew to the four Winds.

This sinful Nation Created in our Furnaces & Looms is Albion.

(Blake, 1967, 739)

This is all very odd, and the best I can do is to attempt some kind of explanation for what Blake appears to be saying, which is that nation, nationalism, the fictions that lie behind Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ are all indeed the fruits of our imagination. We can construct myths, legends that appear to bind us back to our ancestors, but these are always more or less painful matters of ‘taking refuge’, of tryin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Editors
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Living Gothic
• Part I Uncanny Histories
• Part II Legend, Folklore, and Tradition
• Part III Gothic ‘Remains’
• Works Cited
• Index