Contemporary Gothic is haunted by Christianity. Theological themes and figuresâsin, redemption, apocalypse, heaven and hell, angels and demonsâare as integral to the Gothic imagination in the twenty-first century as they were in the eighteenth. Religious iconography is embedded in the Gothic aesthetic. Gothic retains a sense of the sacred, even if it appears at times in desecrated forms. Ritual, atonement and sacrifice remain prominent narrative tropes; (some) vampires still fear the sign of the cross, even if theyâand weâhave become less sure about why they do so. If the Gothic as a genre is defined by the coherence of its conventions, as Eve Sedgwick has argued, many of those conventions have a wider history in Christian belief, ritual, practice, architecture and iconography.1 Despite the proliferation of religious tropes, ideas and images in contemporary Gothic, however, relatively little critical attention has been paid to the ways in which recent Gothic texts have engaged with theology. If religion âis, once more, haunting the imagination of the Westâ, as the theologian Graham Ward has claimed, then its spectral presence in Gothic fiction remains curiously unrecognised by scholars, despite the significant expansion of critical work in recent years in the fields of both Gothic studies and literature and religion.2 This book seeks to expand the critical dialogue between Gothic studies and theology by exploring some of the ways in which contemporary Gothic texts have engaged with Christian ideas, tropes and images. It aims to demonstrate not only that Gothic writers continue to draw upon theology as a source of imaginative stimulation, contest and challenge but also that the Gothic offers distinctive imaginative and representational resources with which to explore theological concepts. In other words, this book attempts to reveal not only the theological threads in contemporary Gothic but the Gothic threads in contemporary theology.
The concept of the âcontemporaryâ can of course be a slippery one and, as I am taking a somewhat broader view of that term than is often the case in critical studies, it requires some comment. This book focuses on the period from 1970 to the present. This timescale has a practical convenience, as it spans the careers of prominent novelists such as Stephen King and William Peter Blatty. More broadly, however, this book is concerned with what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has described as the ââre-enchantmentâ of the world after the protracted and earnest, though in the end inconclusive, modern struggle to dis-enchant itâ.3 For Bauman and others, this âre-enchantmentâ of the world is an aspect of postmodernityâs challenge to the cultural, philosophical and epistemological structures of modernity. Ward claims that it is âthe re-evaluation of ambivalence, mystery, excess and aporia as they adhere to, are constituted by and disrupt the rational, that lies behind the re-enchantment of the worldâ.4 The renewal of cultural and artistic interest in religious tropes, images and iconographyâalbeit often far removed from the religious traditions within which they emergedâis consistent with this re-evaluation of mystery and otherness. For the purposes of this book, then, the âcontemporaryâ is that period from the late twentieth century to the present in which this âre-enchantmentâ of the world is most clearly recognisable. This is not to ignore the ways in which critical theory has now begun to challenge or move beyond postmodern thoughtâindeed, several of the theologians discussed in this book have offered extensive critiques of postmodernismâbut simply to acknowledge the ways in which postmodernity has shaped and continues to shape the encounter with religion in recent art and culture.
The image of a contemporary imagination âhauntedâ by religion is an ambivalent one. As any reader of Gothic fiction knows well, the appearance of a spectre is at least as likely to provoke an exorcism as a welcome. âA sceptical responseâ, writes Andrew Tate, âmight be to observe, dryly, that the spectral motifâŠis surely a sign that the age of belief has passed away only to be reawakened as an unhappy revenantâ.5 As Tate notes, the return of religion in Western cultural and political life has provoked concern (among believers as well as sceptics) about newly resurgent fundamentalisms and the threat of religious violence. Certainly, some of the writers discussed in this book and in Gothic fiction more widely are alert to the potential for religion to be imagined as a source and site of horror. Yet spectres of the sacred haunt Gothic fiction in other ways too: as nostalgic yearning for older forms of faith, ritual and belonging; as images of enchantment by which reality is encountered as more than the material and empirical; as tentative glimpses of redemptive possibility. âThe ghost, post-Derridaâ, writes Andrew Smith, âseemed to be transformed into a critically mobile figure whose presence helped to illuminate the complex origins and discrete political visions of a variety of intellectual contextsâ.6 Though the ghost in Gothic criticism has more often been associated with broadly secular concernsâeconomics, labour, psychology, sexualityâit is my contention that religion too participates in the kind of literary haunting in which, as Joanne Watkiss argues, âtexts are haunted by other texts through a series of uncanny inheritances that simultaneously renew the concepts afreshâ.7 I will argue in this book not only that Christian theology is among the âuncanny inheritancesâ of contemporary Gothic, but also that Gothic texts themselves provide space for the reimagining and renewal of that inheritance. This introductory chapter maps out some key areas of intersection between Christian thought and the Gothic imagination.
Gothic Fictions and the (Un)Death of God
According to a familiar narrative of secularisation, Western thought and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries departed steadily and inevitably from their historical roots in Christian faith, theology and praxis. While some commentators have described this shift in terms of a clash between religion and science, or faith and reason, others have located the origins of disenchantment within an increasingly rationalist and materialist Christianity in the aftermath of the Reformation.8 Though the nature and causes of secularisation continue to be debated, there is no doubt that what Matthew Arnold called the âmelancholy, long withdrawing roarâ of faith was for many people in Britain and the US a prominent aspect of the emotional, imaginative and intellectual life in the nineteenth century and beyond.9 In his pathfinding study The Disappearance of God (1963), J. Hillis Miller describes modern literature as shaped by the experience of Godâs absence:
Millerâs âterrifying absenceâ of God is not quite the Nietzschean âdeath of Godâ. Miller does not insist on the inevitability of atheism, but rather describes a widespread suspicion that God is absent from the places in which he was once encountered. Yet there is an unavoidable link between the concepts of divine absence and divine death; at the very least, it is easy to see how the imaginative experience of divine silence and the availability of intellectual challenges to Godâs existence might be mutually reinforcing. In his influential book A Secular Age (2007), the philosopher Charles Taylor argues that one of the main characteristics of secularisation is âa move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embraceâ.11 In a secular culture, religious faith is not impossible, but it can no longer be held naively as self-evident or uncontested.The lines of connection between us and God have broken down, or God himself has slipped away from the places where he used to be. He no longer inheres in the world as the force binding together all men and all things. As a result the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seem to many writers a time when God is no more present and not yet again present, and can only be experienced negatively, as a terrifying absence.10
Gothic narratives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reflect both the specific shift in the conditions of belief described by Taylor and the broader modern experience of disenchantment. Some Gothic writersâmost notably H. P. Lovecraftâsaw in the Nietzschean proclamation of the death of God a vision of nihilistic horror and a Gothic mode in which the ideological and epistemological certainties of modernity were overwhelmed by forces of uncontainable chaos and disorder. In the wider Gothic tradition, however, disenchantment was registered in other ways. Lucie Armitt observes that
Though images of the spectral, supernatural an...if one were to identify elements that specifically characterise twentieth-century Gothic, one would have to signal, in the early part of the century, the manner in which the real-life horror of two world wars takes over from the imagined horrors of the supernatural and/or superstition; those tortured individuals who, in the nineteenth century, refused to play dead, began to do so on a mass(ive) scale during and after the First World War, as spirit photographers, theosophists, spiritualists and clairvoyants pandered to the devastation felt by parents grieving for their lost sons.12