Abstract
Critics tend to view the Gothic as a means of fulfilling trauma theory’s ethical imperative of evoking in readers an empathic identification with the Gothic/psychoanalytic subject. Doing so, however, relies on problematic assumptions about the inevitability of ethical responses from writers and audiences alike. This monograph re-evaluates the link between trauma and the Gothic through six British novels: Martin Amis’s London Fields (1989), Margaret Drabble’s The Gates of Ivory (1991), Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), Pat Barker’s Regeneration (1991) and Double Vision (2003), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). Over the course of these texts, a progression emerges towards greater awareness of the ethical contradictions existing within literary trauma studies, which are brought to light by the Gothic conventions appearing in these narratives.
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Notes
- 1.
These include, in addition to Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, and Geoffrey Hartman.
- 2.
Felman and Laub theorize the Holocaust as a crisis of history and of representation that is analogous to the post-structuralist notion, elaborated by Paul De Man and others, of the slippage between language (sign) and that to which it refers (referent). Caruth (1996) later applies this loss of referentiality (in combination with Freudian models of memory) to the relationship between trauma and victim and, by extension, testimony and listener, leading her to envision trauma as a perpetually “unclaimed” experience (p. 10).
- 3.
Steven Bruhm (2002) notes the “enormous popularity of the Gothic … since the Second World War,” attributing this surge in popularity partially to the ways in which the genre “play[s] with chronology, looking back to moments in an imaginary history, pining for a social stability that never existed” (p. 259).
- 4.
For example, the Cambodian genocide, which is the focus of Margaret Drabble’s The Gates of Ivory, discussed in Chap. 3.
- 5.
The fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-VI) includes “numbing of general responsiveness” alongside “persistent symptoms of increased arousal” as characteristics of post-traumatic stress disorder (APA 2000, p. 463). The links between trauma and the Gothic will be discussed in further detail later in this chapter.
- 6.
The abject is theorized by Julia Kristeva (1982) as neither subject nor object, sharing “only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I” (p. 2). The abject, for Kristeva, is all that which is composite and which threatens the ideal of the unified self, and is hence cast off as filth. The abject “relates to a boundary, and, more particularly, represents the object jettisoned out of that boundary, its other side, a margin” (p. 69). “And yet,” Kristeva argues, “from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master” (p. 2). In the context of the Gothic, the abject presents a point of entry into understanding the overdetermined Gothic villain or monster, which Jack Halberstam (1991) argues “always represents the disruption of categories, the destruction of boundaries, and the presence of impurities” (p. 27), whether or not the narratives that peddle the monster as impure can, in fact, be trusted. Jerrold Hogle (2002) connects the Kristevan abject directly with the “Gothic others or spaces ” that “can abject myriad cultural and psychological contradictions,” in order to confront audiences with “the hidden reality that oppositions of all kinds cannot maintain their separations,” and “that each ‘lesser term’ is contained in its counterpart” (p. 11).
- 7.
Bruhm names, in addition to “The Uncanny,” Freud’s “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis” as an example.
- 8.
Here Beville is likely relying on Burke’s contention that what is “dark, uncertain, confused, [and] terrible” is “sublime to the last degree” (Burke 2008, pp. 102–103). Beville is not the only critic to have picked up on this particular aspect of Burke’s argument in order to emphasize terror and a concern for the unrepresentable as core elements of the Gothic; Wright (2007) argues that “Burke demonstrates with force that terror, intimately connected with the fear of subjection and death, is the ‘ruling principle of the sublime’” (p. 40), and that “By challenging the certainties of representation, the Gothic sublime continues to challenge the essence of representability” (p. 56).
- 9.
This notion follows Mary Favret’s argument in War at a Distance that the origins of the contemporary experience of wartime as an event occurring “at a distance, outside and beyond our reach” and yet “somehow fugitive and omnipresent at one” can be located in the Romantic period (p. 4). Her study of literature and art produced during the Napoleonic wars suggests that these wars are distinctly contemporary in part due to their infiltration into everyday life by a burgeoning print media, which made wartime “less … an object of cognition bounded by dates … and more … an affecting experience which resonates beyond the here and now” (p. 11). Favret’s theorization of modern warfare as part of the “long eighteenth century” is discussed in detail in Chap. 3.
- 10.
Derrida (1992) proposes that “a text would not belong to any genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text, there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging” (p. 230, original emphasis).
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Joyce, A. (2019). Introduction: The Gothic in Contemporary British Trauma Fiction. In: The Gothic in Contemporary British Trauma Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26728-5_1
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