Garry Gillard > writing > lectures > 229 > 05
H229 Narrative Fiction 1
Lecture 5 1995
For the next two weeks or so we'll be looking at texts which are said to belong to the genre of the Gothic, and therefore also giving some consideration to Vijay Mishra's book on The Gothic Sublime, [1] as it was Vijay's research in this area for his DLitt from Oxford which has led to not only Frankenstein and The Castle of Otranto but also Caleb Williams and Pierre being set for this course unit. It's rather stating the obvious, but I should point out that this is the time to read the last reading in the (blue) Reader, the first Chapter from Dr Mishra's book, the one called 'Theorizing the (Gothic) sublime.' It's included at the very end of the book, being the latest material to be included. I'll be referring to it and quoting from it today.
The Gothic Sublime is concerned not merely with a historical interest in a period and genre: it does not only look back. It is also concerned with making links with the present interest in the postmodern—and to the present conditions for narrative. The book's aim is to seek a prefiguring of our present postmodern moment—'the postmodern condition [writes Mishra] for which the Gothic, it seems, is a kind of traumatized earlier moment. … the rhetoric of the Gothic sublime may be seen as somehow anticipating the postmodern.' 2
Looking for a brief summary of this argument as a whole, I found this one on page 25.
Since, as we have already seen, all versions of the sublime—in Western thought, at any rate—have the same starting point, we need to construct a history of the sublime so as to make more meaningful our claim that the Gothic sublime insinuates a postmodernity in its undermining of a realist economy of meaning. To make this somewhat difficult connection possible, I would like to isolate the major trope of the Gothic—the sublime—and read it with a view to establishing its resonances with the postmodern. 3
So he's reading the Gothic in the context of the postmodern, and the connexion between the two is the sublime. [4] In another summary, as he approaches the Walpole text, he writes: 'The argument I have advanced is that the postmodern trope of the sublime as a category that captures the disjunction between the idea and its representation, and the uncanny horror of recognition that this disjunction entails, has had its antecedent in the Gothic.' 5
I thought I would spend much of the time available today in commenting on and simplifying those aspects of Vijay Mishra's chapter on Horace Walpole's novel The Castle of Otranto—the chapter, that is, in his book The Gothic Sublime. My colleague is writing here more for his peers than for his students, and he does not feel any need to elucidate his own Gothic thought processes or to make anything any more transparent than it needs to be for the publication of the book. And I think he might argue that the nature of the subject, being itself concerned with extra-linguistic experience, experience which by definition cannot be put into words, will always tend to result in opaque description. And that subject, that experience, is 'the sublime,' which is, among other things, that which cannot be put into words.
On the first page of the first chapter, Vijay offers something like a definition.
In the classic formulation of Kant (to which all theorizations of the sublime return) the effects are the consequence of the mind's confrontation with an idea too large for expression, too self-consuming to be contained in any adequate form of representation, but which idea, as representation, in a momentary surrender of the law of reason the mind nevertheless grasps. 6
It's something you can't put into words but something which you do nevertheless feel you can grasp, perhaps by an alteration of consciousness or of attitude. This recalls, by the way, and from my own research, the 'oceanic' feeling which is claimed to be the essence of the experience of religion which Freud deals with at the beginning of what I think of as his greatest book, Civilization and its Discontents. [7] Freud does not agree that it is a sufficient basis for religion. After I wrote those couple of sentences, incidentally, I was interested to discover that Vijay Mishra already refers to the notion of the 'oceanic,' in writing, of the end of Pierre, that 'the final consummation of self and Other in the oceanic sublime is complete.' 8
I want to make a few elementary remarks of my own about the term 'Gothic' and its history. I'll begin by sharing with you the results of some research I did into the present-day meaning of the term—in what I suppose a sociologist would inevitably call a youth sub-culture.
My research involved looking into the Internet usegroup or newsgroup called 'alt.gothic.' Many of the messages sent to the group are concerned with what we might want to see as the more superficial aspects of Gothic, such as clothing, sunglasses, makeup (lipstick), and (musical) groups, but other writers delve more deeply (appropriately) into its more profound nature.
The first contributor whose posting I collected signed herself 'Oblivion,' and wrote about it means to 'be' a gothic.
The only qualification to being Gothic is that you never have to ask, you just know. I finally figured I was "GOTH" when I heard someone call me Goth girl. Up until that point I have never even heard the term. Gothic is a mind set that has nothing *absolutely nothing* to do with how you dress. Sometimes outward signs of gothdom appear in dress and speech, but Gothic is far more inward. … Gothic is a personality trait. Goths are not made they are born. … Therefore if you feel the need to ask the question, "Am I Gothic?" then the answer is no not even in your happiest dreams. 9
The writer refers to two characteristics which I would like to interpret as separate: the notion of the inborn personality trait on the one hand, and, on the other, the idea that 'Gothic is far more inward,' which I take to be as much about the unconscious as about psychological inherence, as much about Freud, that is, as about Jung. The connexion between the Gothic and the unconscious is of course taken up by Vijay, for example on the very first page of your excerpt, where he writes that: '… Pierre anticipates, as the Gothic texts did, the sublime as a moment of entry into the unconscious, the "unplumbable," the tangled depth of the dream-text that surfaces in life only as certain effects like that of the "uncanny." [10] We—you and I—shall certainly have some more to say about the unconscious and about dreams in these next two weeks.
One of the posters whose message I collected last Wednesday in fact simply sends in an account of a dream as his or her contribution to the group discussion. It's a little ripper. Here it is.
I was about 8 yrs old when I had this one. I was in a fast food place standing in line. As I stood waiting for my turn to order this person in front of me started convulsing and fell to the floor. He then decomposed into a skeleton but continued to thrash about as people started to circle him and watch. The next thing I know, I am the skeleton in question and I can see a medic team rushing to me. As they got there and began work, I heard on of the bystanders say to another "It's more sick blood." 11
This might be as good time as any to share with you Horace Walpole's account of the dream which led him to write The Castle of Otranto—from a letter to a friend.
Shall I even confess to you what was the origin of this romance? I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands, and I grew fond of it. In short I was so engrossed with my tale, which I completed in less than two months, that one evening I wrote from the time I had drunk my tea, about six o'clock, till half an hour after one in the morning, when my hand and fingers were so weary, that I could not hold the pen to finish the sentence, but left Matilda and Isabella talking, in the middle of a paragraph. 12
But I turn back to the alt.gothic newsgroup for some more up-to-date information about the nature of the Gothic. Another poster called 'davey' had apparently sent a message earlier about Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon as being 'early Pink Floyd Gothic.' (That's the subject line of his message.) He had suggested to the newsgroup that '>>… maybe Dark Side of the Moon can be called a gothic masterpiece.' [13] And in his later posting he clarifies what he meant.
Well … since I posted the orginal I thought about it quite a bit. I have to say that with all its emphasis on madness and death, that, at least for me, it's gothic. I listen to it because it makes me examine and think about those feelings of madness, and it was even more special and important during a couple of periods of my life when I actually thought I was going mad. Maybe gothic is more of an experience that should be evaluated for every listener?? 14
So now we have two more ideas about the Gothic to add: its emphases on madness and death. Davey—whose email alias, by the way, is 'timewarp23'—also likes The Doors, and he writes about that in relation to the same themes of madness and death.
I love the Doors as well [he writes] and I haven't listened to it [sic] for quite a while, but I remember that I listened to the Doors for some of the same reasons as I did Pink Floyd. If you look at Morrison's life, quite a bit of it was centered around death. Look at his poetry. Maybe he is a goth, or maybe it is just in the mind of the person listening. … [And he concludes, as he did before, revealing himself finally to be a receptionist rather than an essentialist:] Goth is what you make it? 15
Perhaps I should expand what I mean by calling timewarp23 a receptionist. … I mean that he prefers finally to judge the effects on the receiver or reader of the message as being more important than what might be considered to be something that is essential: it's 'more of an experience' (as he puts it) than an entity. This approach in the area of literary theory has come to be called 'reception theory,' and was pioneered in Germany particularly (this is for you H288 students) by people like Hans Robert Jauss who took a phenomenological approach to the literary work of art. [16] The foundational theoretical work, Horst Ruthrof will probably tell you, was done by the Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden and by Alfred Schutz, and taken up notably by Wolfgang Iser and Norman Holland. 17
The word 'Gothic' comes from the name of a Germanic tribe, the Goths, who invaded the Eastern and Western Roman Empires during the third to the fifth centuries, and as a result the word 'Goth' may be used to refer to an uncivilised or ignorant person, as is 'vandal,' which is also the name of a Germanic tribe. The 'Huns' were yet another. The adjective 'Gothic' is most commonly associated with a style of architecture prevalent in churches of Western Europe of the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, including in England the Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular styles—but also found in the architecture of castles of the period. Its most common characteristic is its pointed-arched stone windows. The style was given this name during the Renaissance by writers on architecture because it came to be thought of as barbarous in its antiquity, and also because it was not a classical style, so that at the time it was first used for this purpose 'it was a term of reproach and contempt.' [18: Summers] By the eighteenth century many of these buildings had fallen or begun to fall into ruin. And I think we may see the application of the term to a style of writing as arising from these three characteristics, which come together coincidentally in the associations of the word: barbarism (of the original Goths), archaism (of the architectural style), and decay (in the ruins). And by 1764, during the period of the rise of Romanticism, these characteristics were coming to be seen in a more positive light, as interesting and stirring, so that when Walpole 'provided the entire convention with a descriptive term,' [19: MacAndrew] by giving The Castle of Otranto the sub-title 'A Gothic Tale,' he was not meaning that what would be found in it was merely ugly and barbaric. Meyer Abrams says simply that 'the subtitle refers to its medieval setting.' 20
Perhaps partly due to the influence of the literature, there was a Gothic Revival in architecture in the nineteenth century, at a time when some of the great public buildings in Australia were able to be built on the basis of the wealth that came from the discovery of gold; and some Australian university buildings, for example, especially in Sydney and Melbourne, were built in what is called Victorian Gothic—although not at this University's buildings, which are rather in Australian Colonial Economic Rationalist Functional. However, the architectural style—or at least pastiches of it—is probably familiar to you.
Vijay Mishra is quite right, then, to situate the beginnings of his discussion precisely in the castle of Horace Walpole, and commentators agree that The Castle of Otranto (first published 1765 [or 1764]) is the first Gothic tale. [21] It's a strange thing, isn't it, that a style of writing should have arisen in some senses out of a style of architecture, and it is a confluence which seems to some people to require a psychoanalytical explanation. (Vijay writes: 'The narrative of the Gothic sublime is bound up with these crazy architectural projects.') That psychoanalysis is an appropriate way to proceed is also supported by their authors' accounts of the origins of both The Castle of Otranto and Frankenstein in dreams. And it leads to the question: what do castles and dreams mean, or, that is, what do dreams of castles, mean? Sigmund Freud wrote in 1911 that:
'The frequency with which buildings, localities and landscapes are employed as symbolic representations of the body, and in particular (with constant reiteration) of the genitals, would certainly deserve a comprehensive study, illustrated by numerous examples.' 23
He also asserted that
… this symbolism is not peculiar to dreams, but is characteristic of unconscious ideation, in particular among the people, and it is to be found in folklore, and in popular myths, legends, linguistic idioms, proverbial wisdom and current jokes, to a more complete extent than in dreams. 24
I would prefer to extend the reference of this symbolism further, to the self, and would even suggest, following George Steiner, that the Freudian model of the psyche itself has a lot to do with the kind of house in which the Viennese bourgeoisie lived. Steiner writes this.
I put forward with hesitation, but with, I hope, some seriousness, the suggestion that the famous division of human consciousness—the id, ego, superego—has in it more than a hint of the cellar, living quarters, attic anatomy of the middle-class home in Vienna at the turn of the century.' 25
Now if you were living in a period which tended to an interest in the Romantic you might very well prefer to imagine yourself as a castle rather than a house. And on the subject of imaginary castles I can't resist quoting Freud once more.
As people grow up, then, they cease to play, and they seem to give up the yield of pleasure which they gained from playing. But whoever understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for a man than to give up a pleasure which he has once experienced. Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate. In the same way, the growing child, when he stops playing, gives up nothing but the link with real objects; instead of playing, he now phantasies. He builds castles in the air and creates what are called day-dreams. 26
(Vijay, by the way, also mentions that 'one builds castles in the air.' He sees this as implicating the absence of the real.[27] [52]) So I've now brought together two Freudian themes: firstly dream-symbolism, and secondly day-dreaming and creative writing, through the tenuous link of the firstly symbolic and secondly metaphoric 'castle.' And it's in the light of this kind of analysis that I would like to consider the Castle of Otranto, with its cloisters below the main floors and subterranean passage under them again, to which access is gained by a trapdoor, with a key, spring, and iron ring.
Whether you're interested in, or prepared to tolerate, these Freudian excursions, or not, there are those other aspects of castles that Dr Mishra mentions in his chapter: the castle as 'a site […] of power (in feudal structures, for instance, but also in chess …' [28] In the move called 'castling' the king goes 'behind' the rook—it's as if the king goes into his castle for greater safety. And castles in the middle ages were not just a symbol of power: they were the basis of the safety of all the people who lived in them, in times of trouble. So it's easy to see how a castle is available as a metonym for the self. An Englishman's home is his castle, especially if the Englishman is Mr Wemmick, but it's probably also true that an Englishman's home is an important source of his sense of power, whether consciously and not. Incidentally, having mentioned Mr Wemmick, it's worth noting that his castle is yet another Gothic mansion, though on a rather smaller scale than Squire Allworthy's. In fact, Pip tells us that 'it was the smallest house I ever saw, with the queerest Gothic windows (by far the greater part of them sham), and a Gothic door, almost too small to get in at.' 29
At the beginning of his 1994 lecture on The Castle of Otranto, which was a draft for what was published as Chapter 2: 'The precursor text' in his book, Vijay Mishra distinguishes two different types of Eighteenth-century novel. The first, 'the European bourgeois novel' with its stress on 'social realities and an awareness of real, lived history as the 'source' of fiction.' The second, the Gothic novel, offers a 'much more "fantastic" (or "fabulist")' reading of history.' Vijay distinguishes 'the two discrete traditions of narrative—the representational (mimetic/realistic—the 'novel' proper) and the symbolic (non-realistic/romance). [30] Unlike Henry Fielding, and the other novelists studied by Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel, with its analysis of 'formal realism,' the Gothic novelists that Vijay Mishra mentions: Horace Walpole, William Beckford, Ann Radcliffe, author of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Matthew Lewis, also known in his own lifetime as 'Monk' Lewis, from the title of his well-known book (1796), and Charles Maturin, best-known for his Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)—these 'Gothic' novelists are all interested in matters which have little to do with the social sciences, with history or sociology or politics, but more with the kinds of things which Freud later claimed to made the object of the new science of psychoanalysis: and he began with dreams—where both Walpole's and Shelley's narratives also begin.
I might point out that Dr Mishra's argument is a bit more subtle than it really needs to be for the present purpose, when he refers to the 'the two discrete traditions of narrative' I've just mentioned. He wants to be able to say that even the Gothic narrative includes aspects of both 'the representational (mimetic/realistic—the 'novel' proper) and the symbolic (non-realistic/romance),' because he needs to draw attention to the broad scope of the novel genre as a whole. Walpole himself would probably agree, on the basis of his Prefaces to both the first and the Second Editions of Otranto, in the first of which he suggests that 'the actors comport themselves as persons would do in their situations;' [31] and in the second that they act 'according to the rules of probability.' [32] But I think it's more useful for our purposes to stress how much more on the romance side the Gothic novel falls rather than on the mimetic, and only after having seen to what extent that is a useful way of proceeding should one point out what are the representational or 'realistic' aspects which are also present. Because the 'realism' that obtains in this sub-genre—inasmuch as it does—is of a more 'psychological' kind than a 'social' or 'historical.' Dr Mishra, rather wanting to have it both ways, makes the point himself, that 'There is nothing of that bourgeois essentiality of character at work here.' 33
I've given my own view of the usefulness of the image of the castle or house, influenced to some extent by what I remember of Gaston Bachelard's meditation on The Poetics of Space, in which he discusses human consciousness as distributed through rooms, cupboards, drawers, and so forth, as well as by Freud. Vijay, however, does a rather brilliant segue into Foucault's Discipline and Punish—which you may have read if you did Structure, Thought and Reality—and out again, in order to arrive at this insight: 'the need on the part of eighteenth-century man [sic] to explore the areas of darkness (as represented by the madman, the convict or the radical) in the hope of finding the truth.' [35] (This does not mean, by the way, that 'eighteenth-century man' could not have fun at the same time—though I don't mean 'fun' in the sense of the comic, but in the sense of 'play.' [36]) The madman, the convict and the radical are, as such, types, as are the prince, the friar, and the 'most beautiful virgin,' and I suggest you will not find 'round' characters—to use E. M. Forster's term from Aspects of the Novel—'round' characters like Dorothea Brooke, or Emma Woodhouse or Pierre Glendinning in a Gothic novel. Dr Mishra quotes Francis Russell Hart as making a division between 'sociological mimesis' and 'psychological exploration.' [38] Forster, in his plain-spoken manner, writes this.
We may divide characters into flat and round.
Flat characters were called 'humours' in the seventeenth century, and are sometimes called types, and sometimes caricatures. In their purest form, they are constructed round a single idea or quality: when there is more than one factor in them, we get the beginning of the curve towards the round. 39
The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round. It has the incalculability of life about it—life within the pages of a book.
Vijay Mishra makes the point about 'character in the eighteenth century [being] considered … as a "personality developing in time" (as in the novel)'—which is an essential part of a character's being what Forster calls 'round.' In novels like The Castle of Otranto, however, the interest is not on a character's being surprising—although the events may be—so much as in its position in the moral universe of the narrative. On the subject of the dichotomy between space and time, and I'm again referring to the first page of the 'lecture,' I got rather excited a couple of years ago about a quotation from one of my favourite books, The Condition of Postmodernity, by David Harvey, and made it the basis of a paper on an African novelist. [42] Harvey writes this.
Since modernity is about the experience of progress through modernization, writings on that theme have tended to emphasize temporality, the process of becoming, rather than being in space and place. 32
It's just another variation on the theme that Vijay states when he writes that 'The realist novel … had preferred 'history' and 'adventures' (markers of temporality) over symbols of space since its concern was pre-eminently with the question of origins, both of the subject and of its own self.' [44] Whereas Harvey, following Fredric Jameson, [45] is using the distinction between temporality and spatialisation to contrast modernism and postmodernism, Dr Mishra is using the distinction to make a point about the difference between the 'realist' and the 'Gothic' novels. (But he's also interested, as you will have noticed, in the postmodern.) The notion of characterisation is something which I've suggested we should take up in the tutorials on the Gothic.
But I should return to the psychoanalytical reading of the novel which is at the centre of Dr Mishra's reading. To put it very simply, he is suggesting something like this. As the novel has its origin in a dream—the one he quotes Walpole's account of on page 29 of the Study Guide—the whole novel can be seen as an extension of the dream, whether as a commentary on it, or as a kind of 'automatic writing,' done while suspending the normal control of rationality. This allows the upsurge of forbidden desires, which, in the classical Freudian model, evade the prohibition of the censor (the one in the mind, that is, not the one appointed by the state—though the one is theorised to some extent as representing the other). Though they appear in a distorted form, which must then be analysed to be properly understood, their force is felt in the disturbing effect which this kind of narrative has on a reader who is sufficiently open to suggestion.
There is a dialectic being conducted in The Castle of Otranto between the stability of traditional values on the one hand, and those desires that threaten to destabilise the established order, the hegemonic patriarchal order. Hippolita is one of the main carriers of conservatism, representing obedience to her duty to her lord and master, even to the point of allowing her very marriage to him—presumably the main source of her sense of duty—to be repudiated for the benefit of his succession. Jerome carries a double burden of conservative values: firstly as the representative of the established church, which he consistently represents as being of a higher order of importance than that of the aristocracy; and secondly when he turns out to be also an aristocrat, as the Count of Falconara, and finally—as the son-in-law of Alfonso the Good—the means of the transmission of rightful inheritance of Otranto to his son Theodore. The younger women also know their place and behave as imbued with a sense of duty, which perhaps reaches the height of implausibility as Matilda, mortally wounded by her father's dagger, orders her lover not to raise his hand against Manfred: 'Stop, stop thy impious hand,' she cries, 'it is my father!' And then, immediately after this: 'Ah me, I am slain!—cried Matilda sinking: Good heaven, receive my soul!' 141
It is the men in the drama who are the would-be transgressors: especially Manfred and Frederic, who have a bit of daughter-swapping planned. And like Woody Allen, they would be ethically wrong, technically guilty of incest, because they are structurally in the position of fathers, although not the biological fathers of the young women they wish to marry. Frederic, who is merely 'weak,' is not punished by the plot, but Manfred of course has to give up his principality—still not much of a punishment, one might have thought, for stabbing your daughter to death. In saying this, I am disagreeing with Vijay Mishra's view, expressed in pages 32-34, that there is a threat of a 'genealogical disequilibrium,' which appears to me to be based on a mis-reading by Bogel of the story told by Manfred on page 146. [47] Vijay quotes him as saying that Don Ricardo had 'falsified his real genealogy,' when all we are told that he has falsified is a will. Manfred's first transgression is in trying to hand on the property to his son when it is not in fact his; this becomes confused to some extent in the novel—and in the minds of commentators—with his second transgression, which I have suggested is to do with incest. I think the structure is relevant in the second instance, but less so in the first.
1 Mishra, Vijay 1994a, The Gothic Sublime, State University of New York Press, New York.
2 Mishra 1994a: 20.
3 Mishra 1994a: 25.
4 In case anyone poses the question: 'What is the postmodern?' I offer Brian McHale's definition of 'postmodernism': '… the term "postmodernism," if we take it literally enough, à la lettre, signifies a poetics which is the successor, or possibly a reaction against, the poetics of early twentieth-century modernism, and not some hypothetical writing of the future. McHale, Brian 1987, Postmodernist Fiction, Methuen, New York & London: 5; and I add John Frow's gloss: 'But rather than try to unravel the "meaning" of the concept of postmodernism, let me suggest that the word can be taken as designating nothing more and nothing less than a genre of theoretical writing.' Frow, John 1991, What was Postmodernism? Local Consumption Publications, Sydney: 3. I take 'the postmodern' to be the object constructed by that 'genre of theoretical writing.'
5 Mishra 1994a: 45.
6 Mishra 1994a: 19.
7 Freud, Sigmund 1930a, Civilization and its Discontents, SE 21: 59-145, (Penguin Freud Library volume 12: 243-340) trs. from Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, GW 14: 65 (Penguin: 253).
8 Mishra 1994a: 254.
9 'Oblivion,' (hmperry@utkvx.utk.edu) 1995, 'RE: AM I A GOTH ?', alt.gothic, Wednesday 22 March 12:37:31 +400.
10 Mishra 1994a: 19.
11 ArkDhampir (arkdhampir@aol.com), 'My first Gothic Dream,' as quoted by rpetro1@umbc.edu (Sphinxx) 1995, 'Re: Dreams (My first Gothic Dream),' alt.gothic, 23 March 01:36:44 GMT.
12 The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence 1937-1980, 42 vols, ed. W. S. Lewis et al., Yale University Press, New Haven, vol. 1, 1937: 88-9; as cited in Mishra 1994a: 56.
13 timewarp23@aol.com (TIMEWARP23) 1995, 'Re: early Pink Floyd Gothic,' alt.gothic, 23 March 11:51:18 -0500.
14 timewarp23.
15 timewarp23.
16 Jauss, Hans Robert 1982, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, Harvester, Brighton.
'… the relationship between the individual text and the series of texts formative of a genre presents itself as a process of the continual founding and altering of horizons. The new text evokes for the reader (or listener) the horizon of expectations and "rules of the game" (familiar to him from earlier texts, which as such can then be varied extended, corrected, but also transformed, crossed out, or simply reproduced.' (79)
17 Ingarden, Roman, Das Literarische Kunstwerk, Niemeyer, Tübingen, 1960; trs. 1973 as The Literary Work of Art. Ingarden, Roman, Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 1968. Schutz, Alfred 1962, Collected Papers 1: The Problem of Social Reality, Nijhoff, Hague. Iser, Wolfgang 1971, 'Indeterminacy and the reader's response in prose fiction,' in J. Hillis Miller (ed.), Aspects of Narrative: Selected Papers from the English Institute, Columbia University Press, New York & London: 1-46. Holland, Norman N. 1968, Five Readers Reading. Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn. Holland, Norman N. 1968, The Dynamics of Literary Response, Oxford University Press, Oxford. See: Suleiman, Susan R. and Crosman, Inge (eds) 1980, The Reader in the Text, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey; Ruthrof, Horst 1981, The Reader's Construction of Narrative, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London; Tompkins, Jane P. (ed.) 1980, Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London; Young, Robert 1981, Untying the Text. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
18 Summers, Montague 1968, The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel, Fortune Press, London: 37; as quoted in Vijay Mishra 1994b.
19 MacAndrew, Elizabeth 1979, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction, Columbia University Press, New York: ix; as quoted in Vijay Mishra 1994b.
20 Abrams, M. H. 1971, A Glossary of Literary Terms, third edition, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York: 69.
21 Mishra 1994a: 52.
22 Mishra 1994a: 53.
23 Note to the end of Part III, Section E, of Chapter 6 of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), appended to a dream on its first publication in Freud 1911a. Standard Edition Volume 5.
24 Freud 1900a, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 351. [Added 1909.]
25 Steiner, George 1974, Nostalgia for the Absolute, CBC, Toronto: 14.
26 Freud 1908e [1907], 'Creative writers and day-dreaming', SE 9: 143-53; this quotation: 144-5.
27 Mishra 1994a: 52.
28 Mishra 1994a: 52.
29 Dickens, Charles 1963 [1860-1], Great Expectations, Signet, New York, Chapter 25: 224.
30 Mishra, Vijay 1994b, [lecture on] 'Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto,' H229 Narrative Fiction I Study Guide and Reader, Murdoch University: 27.
31 Walpole, Horace 1968 [1764], The Castle of Otranto, Penguin: 40.
32 Walpole 1968: 43.
33 Mishra 1994b: 28.
34 Bachelard, Gaston 1969, The Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon Press, trs. from La poétique de l'espace, Paris: 1938.
35 Mishra 1994b: 27.
36 See, eg. Huizinga's book on 'playing man, ' Johan Huizinga 1971 [1949], Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Paladin, London.
37 Walpole 1968: 51.
38 Francis Russell Hart 1968, The Experience of Character in the English Gothic Novel in Experience in the Novel, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce Columbia University Press, New York: 84; as quoted in Vijay Mishra 1994b.
39 Forster, E. M. 1927, Aspects of the Novel, Edward Arnold, London: 93.
40 Forster 1927: 106.
41 Mishra 1994b: 28, quoting Paulson, Ronald 1967, Satire in the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England, Yale University Press, New Haven: 4.
42 Gillard, Garry 1993, 'Ayi Kwei Armah: postcolonialism/space/postmodernism,' Span, 36, October.
43 Harvey, David 1989, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Conditions of Cultural Change, Blackwell, Oxford: 205.
44 Mishra 1994b: 26.
45 Fredric Jameson (1984b) attributes the postmodern shift to a crisis in our experience of space and time, a crisis in which spatial categories come to dominate those of time, while themselves undergoing such a mutation that we cannot keep pace. 'We do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new kind of hyperspace,' he writes, 'in part because our perceptual habits were formed in that older kind of space I have called the space of high modernism.' [np] (Harvey: 1989: 201)
46 Walpole 1968: 141.
47 Bogel, Fredric V. 1984, Literature and Insubstantiality in Later Eighteenth-Century England, Princeton University Press, Princeton: 112; as cited in Mishra 1994b: 32.
Garry Gillard | New: 14 January, 2018 | Now: 20 December, 2018