Abstract
The motif of the ‘journey north’ is a central element in Gothic fiction generally, and especially in Scottish Gothic. Whether in Romantic-era texts from Ann Radcliffe and Sophia Lee to Mary Shelley, or in the Highland settings of novels by Iain Banks, Alan Warner, and Michel Faber, stories of the journey north both maintain a conventional association of northern or rural settings, primitive and barbarian cultures, and Gothic otherness, as discussed in the Introduction, and also question it. As Kirsty A. MacDonald argues, the North in such novels is presented as ‘a Gothic space that is particularly prone to the haunting effects of a distorted and abused history. […] This is a community haunted by phantoms.’1 In contemporary Gothic, the North is often figured as an open and liminal space where traditional delineations of self and other are no longer applicable. More generally, the North is used to foreground the instability of place, nation, and ultimately genre. Like the islands discussed in Chapter 3, remote environments are used to foreground questions of relation between both humans and texts.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Kirsty A. MacDonald (2011) ‘“This Desolate and Appalling Landscape”: The Journey North in Contemporary Scottish Gothic’, Gothic Studies, 13.2, 37–48, p. 47.
Peter Davidson (2005) The Idea of North (London: Reaktion), p. 21.
When Diamond reaches the Arctic, for instance, he finds himself in a daz-zlingly beautiful ice cave, but simultaneously is forced to watch the North Wind dissolve into light, an experience that films him with ‘terror’. George MacDonald (2001) At the Back of the North Wind (London: Everyman’s Library), p. 102.
Arthur Conan Doyle [1914?] The Captain of the Pole-Star (London: Hodder), p. 22. The ship’s name may come from an earlier Scottish novel, R.M. Ballantyne’s 1859 The World of Ice, which similarly describes an ice-locked ship.
Doyle is notably more pleased with the Arctic in the diaries he kept during the 1880 expedition that inspired the story. In one of the final entries, he writes: ‘Who says thou art cold and inhospitable, my poor icefields? I have known you in calm and in storm and I say you are genial and kindly. There is a quaint grim humour in your bobbing bergs with their fantastic shapes’. Arthur Conan Doyle (2012) ‘Dangerous Work’: Diary of an Arctic Adventure, ed. Jon Lellenberg and Daniel Stashower (London: British Library), p. 294.
John Burnside (2012) ‘Alone’, London Review of Books, 34.3, (9 February), 23–24, p. 23.
As Burnside writes in Glister, snow indicates ‘how much of the world is invisible, or just on the point of being seen’; snow changes the relation between observer and observed. John Burnside (2008) Glister (London: Jonathan Cape), p. 64.
Sarah Kofman (1998) Smothered Words, trans. Madeleine Dobie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), p. 30.
Eugene Thacker (2010) In the Dust of this Planet (Alresford: Zero Books), p. 8.
Anne Williams (1995) Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), p. 96.
Sarah Moss (2006) Scott’s Last Biscuit: The Literature of Polar Exploration (Oxford: Signal), p. 56.
Appearances of ghosts and spectres are common but often unexplained and deeply uncanny. In ‘The Saga of the Greenlanders’, for instance (one of the Vinland sagas), Gudrid Karlsefni suddenly encounters a pale woman with ‘eyes so large that eyes of such size had never been seen in a human head’. The woman is also named Gudrid, but upon introducing herself she disappears with a crash, and is never spoken of again in the saga. While the easiest explanation is that Gudrid is here encountering her own ghost, the incident has no bearing on the rest of the saga, and is never commented on. Keneva Kunz (trans.) (1997) ‘The Saga of the Greenlanders’, in Örnólfur Thorsson and Bernard Scudder (eds), The Sagas of the Icelanders (London: Penguin), pp. 636–652, p. 647.
Francis Spufford (2003) ‘I May Be Some Time’: Ice and the English Imagination (London: Faber), p. 163.
Avery Gordon (2008) Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. xvi.
Rosemarie Buikema (2013) ‘The Madwoman in the Attic of Labuwangi: Couperus and Colonial Gothic’, in Agnes Andeweg and Sue Zlosnik (eds), Gothic Kinship (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 48–62, p. 48.
Alexandra Warwick (2007) ‘Feeling Gothicky?’, Gothic Studies, 9.1, 5–15, p. 14.
Sarah Moss (2009) Cold Earth (London: Granta), p. 2.
Eric G. Wilson (2009) The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 1.
Wilson, Spiritual History of Ice, p. 2. Gavin Francis, in a memoir of Arctic travels, similarly points to the Arctic as the locus of change: because the physical changes in the Arctic are more visible than elsewhere, it becomes a metonym of the changing world. Gavin Francis (2010) True North: Travels in Arctic Europe (Edinburgh: Polygon), p. xiv.
Moss’s depiction of the settlement is supported by current archaeological and historical research. Kirsten A. Seaver expresses similar bewilderment, concluding a lengthy discussion of the abandonment of these settlements: ‘Not one of the discoveries so far made in the Western Settlement permits conclusions about any single threat sufficient to kill the settlers or put them to flight. […] It seems unlikely that people who appear to have been in control of their lives to the last, and who had ships as well as occasional news from outside, would allow themselves to perish quietly and patiently as a group’. Kirsten A. Seaver (1996) The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America, ca. A.D. 1000–1500 (Stanford: Stanford University Press), pp. 131, 138.
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1997) Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso), p. 215.
John Burnside (2011) A Summer of Drowning (London: Jonathan Cape), p. 6.
Jacques Derrida (2001) The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), p. 41.
Quentin Meillassoux (2012) ‘Spectral Dilemma’, in Robin Mackay (ed.), Collapse IV (Falmouth: Urbanomic), pp. 261–175, p. 261.
Gordon, Ghostly Matters, p. 17. Luke Thurston has more recently argued that at the heart of the ghost story is ‘a problem to do with the textual manifestation of life’. Luke Thurston (2012) Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism: The Haunting Interval (New York and London: Routledge), p. 3.
Colin Davis (2007) Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 156.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1995) Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Routledge), p. 542.
Christina Howells (2011) Mortal Subjects: Passions of the Soul in Late Twentieth-Century French Thought (Cambridge: Polity), p. 2.
Judith Butler (2006) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso), p. 20. As Morton similarly argues in formulating the concept of ‘dark ecology’: ‘Now is a time for grief to persist, to ring throughout the world. Modern culture has not yet known what to do with grief’.
Timothy Morton (2007) Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press), p. 185.
Jacques Derrida (1993) Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 76.
Jean-Luc Nancy (2013) Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II, trans. John McKeane (New York: Fordham University Press), pp. 88–89.
Dale Townshend (2007) The Orders of Gothic: Foucault, Lacan, and the Subject of Gothic Writing, 1764–1820 (New York: AMS Press), p. 39.
Alessia Ricciardi (2003) The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 9.
Félix Guattari (2008) The Three Ecologies [1989], trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Continuum), p. 24.
Stephen Clingman (2009) The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 6.
Matthew Wickman (2012) ‘Alba Newton and Alasdair Gray’, in Caroline McCracken-Flesher (ed.), Scotland as Science Fiction (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press), pp. 171–184, p. 173.
Matthew Wickman, (2013) ‘Tartan Noir, or, Hard-Boiled Heidegger’, Scottish Literary Review, 5.1, 87–109, p. 105. Eliot argues firstly that ‘there is no common denominator between the periods when Scottish literature was most important’, and secondly that the ‘love of precise detail [… and] the fantastic’ that G. Gregory Smith positions at the centre of Scottish literature are not literary traits.
T.S. Eliot (2004) ‘Was There a Scottish Literature’ [1919], in Margery Palmer McCulloch (ed.), Modernism and Nationalism: Literature and Society in Scotland 1918–1939: Source Documents for the Scottish Renaissance (Glasgow: ASLS), pp. 7–10, p. 9.
Gary K. Wolfe (2011) Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press), p. 170.
David Punter (2012) ‘Scottish Gothic’, in Gerard Carruthers and Liam McIlvanney (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 132–44, p. 143.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Timothy C. Baker
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Baker, T.C. (2014). Northern Communities. In: Contemporary Scottish Gothic. The Palgrave Gothic Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137457202_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137457202_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-49861-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-45720-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)