Gothic N.E.W.S – 2007 Conference of the International Gothic Association

Guest Post – Sue Chaplin and Joanne Watkiss (Leeds Metropolitan University)

The Biennial conference of the International Gothic Association was held this year in Aix-en-Provence between 25th and 29th June. The title of the conference was ‘Gothic N.E.W.S’, a heading that neatly captured the two overarching themes of this year’s event: the capacity of Gothicism to embrace, represent and interrogate the ‘new’, and the Gothic’s relation to the geographical polarities of North, East, West and South. With five plenary sessions and over 40 panels, there was more than enough to tempt the intellectual palate! We hope to give a sense here of the diversity of this conference’s critical engagements with the Gothic, as well as some of the overall reflections that emerged out of five days of stimulating debate.

Monday 25th

SC – Having arrived in Aix early Sunday evening, I was lucky enough to have the time and energy for a spot of sight-seeing before the conference began in earnest with the first plenary on Monday afternoon. The sublimity of Aix cathedral (and particularly the organ recital I chanced upon whilst I was visiting!) provided a marvellous prelude the conference: I felt thoroughly ‘Gothicised’!

Denis Mellier’s opening plenary (‘Paradoxes of the NEWS and Gothic possibilities: the open range of an Acronym’) brought into the frame one of the most contested aspects of contemporary Gothic criticism: is the Gothic capable of critical categorisation in a manner that does not efface the differences that appear paradoxically to give this renegade ‘genre’ its literary, cultural and (as Mellier’s paper crucially suggested) its ontological form? The Gothic emerges here as a ‘category’ that has since its moment of inception called into question political, geographical and conceptual polarities. It is a productively dysfunctional ‘genre’ that opens up the conflicted, subversive and monstrous possibilities of the ‘N.E.W.S’. Mellier’s theorisation of a range of contemporary Gothicisms (in Ducornet, Pinol, McCormack and Hogdson) through the open-ended potentialities of this acronym provided an excellent point of critical departure for ‘Gothic N.E.W.S’.

Tuesday 26th

JW – My first experience of the IGA conference was a session entitled ‘Gothic Politics and Cultural Issues’ on Tuesday morning. This was an extremely stimulating panel that explored key themes of the Gothic including: revolution, madness, law, subjectivity and the Gothic body. Matthew Gibson’s exploration of the historical context of Charles Nodier’s work proved insightful in terms of a transgression from the rational into a liminal sense of “reality”. Sue Chaplin’s paper examined the guilty subject in William Godwin’s St. Leon, suggestively juxtaposing (through Derrida and Žižek) the contradictory declarations of ‘Swear!’ and ‘Enjoy!’ in relation to the law. She proposed that Leon was ‘beyond punishment’ in his excessive acts of transgression: acts that effectively cancel out the governance of law. Chiho Nakagawa closed the session with a discussion of the displaced body in Arthur Conan Doyle, focusing on his short story ‘The Brown Hand’. Her study of the ‘Imperial Gothic’ examined the discourses of Empire, science and “the rational” in relation to the ambivalent supernaturalism of Doyle’s works which both consolidates and disrupts those discourses.

SC – In the second session of the morning, I attended the first of three panels on Celtic Gothic featuring papers by Bernard Sellin, Camille Manfredi and Gaïd Girard. What united these papers, for me, was their shared interrogation of the cultural, political and geographic signifiers ‘Scottish’ and ‘Irish’ Gothic, an interrogation which implied a recognition of the extent to which these ‘NEW’ Gothic signifiers (as it were) entail a certain ‘othering’ of landscapes and identities that are in a sense always already Gothicised. Sellin’s discussion of the uncanny re-presentation of authorship, authority, landscape and identity in Alan Warner’s Morvern Caller, for example, and Manfredi’s excellent treatment of the persistence in Alisdair Gray’s work of the bestial, abject, material thing – the thing that is Gothic/Scottish – both opened up new ways of conceptualising a Celtic Gothic textual and physical space in the twenty-first century. Girard’s paper on McNamee’s The Blue Tango, meanwhile, placed a range of vital critical questions (Gothic intertextuality, parody, the ‘hauntedness’ of national identities and culturally constructed national ‘space’) in a new context for me. My resolution on leaving this session was to buy a copy of The Blue Tango ASAP.

JW – Both sessions on ‘Postmodernism / Metafiction’ on Tuesday afternoon were extremely suggestive of the resistant sub-genre that is the contemporary Gothic. Patrycya Antoszek’s paper on Robert Coover’s Pinocchio in Venice explored the uncanny carnivalesque, incorporating a discussion of both the inanimate and the abject. Her ideas on Venice as an uncanny feminised city were insightful in terms of Gothic space and the maternal. Caroline Marquette’s paper on the haunted textual space that is Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves was complimented by Eleanor Beal’s paper on the discourse of love in the same text. Both papers highlighted the importance of such a text that attempts to challenge the idea of the book itself.

SC – Unfortunately, I only managed to attend one session on Tuesday afternoon since neither of the speakers in the panel I was chairing turned up! Nevertheless, the quality of the papers I did hear in a session on ‘Postmodernism/Metafiction’ more than made up for that slight hitch. Monica Germana gave an insightful reading of Alice Thompson’s novella Justine which focused upon Thompson’s re-writing of de Sade in a postmodern Gothic context that problematises (and indeed, as Germana suggested, spectralises) textuality as always the voice(s) of an Other. Joanne Watkiss’s paper pursued a similar theme in certain respects: her sophisticated reading of surely one of the most conflicted Gothic novels of recent years – Brett Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park – used Derrida’s theorisation of spectralisation and inheritance very productively (and at times quite poetically) to examine the fraught symbolic re-presentation of paternal Law in that text.

The notion of spectrality returned in Andrew Smith’s plenary this evening. Given the amount of critical attention that has been paid of late to the ‘Gothicism’ of Marx and Derrida (and Marx-through-Derrida), the paper, entitled ‘Spectrality and Money’, represented a very timely and lucid study of a Gothicism that has existed, and that continues to exist, at the interface between the political, the economic and the literary. The uncoupling of ‘value’ from a materiality that no longer defines the subject’s relation to production and consumption creates an uncanny space within which commodities and their consumers circulate as ghostly signifiers of invisible wealth. Smith’s theorisation of this very Gothic phenomenon produced convincing readings of the spectres that circulate in mid-nineteenth-century Gothic fictions (particularly Dickens’s ghosts of past, present and future in A Christmas Carol, and the uncanny [non] entity that is simultaneously affirmed and effaced under the sign of ‘No Name’ in Wilkie Collins’s 1862 novel).

Wednesday 27th

JW – On Wednesday morning I attended a session entitled ‘Gothic Cinema’. In this panel the speakers were united by the theme of screening the Gothic: how is the Gothic explored in film and in what ways? Lydia Martin’s discussion on Jane Campion’s film The Piano suggested a reversal of the Bluebeard tale: a film that challenges our ideas of women as Gothic ‘victims’. Martin further argued that the postmodern Gothic reinvests itself through the exotic and modern romance. Claudio Di Vaio’s paper highlighted the influence of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw on Alejandro Amenabar’s film The Others. His ideas on the knowledge and power of the serving classes were interesting in relation to the ‘liminal space’ that the Gothic tends to inhabit. The Gothic convention of the ‘unspeakable secret’ he argues, is extended into a shocking discovery of double infanticide and suicide. For me, Di Vaio’s interrogation of Gothic space in this film was highly suggestive: he proposed that the house is a self-contained space where ‘no door is to be opened before the previous one is closed’.

SC – ‘Post-Feminist Gothic’ was the session I attended this morning, and if ever there was a contested sub-category of the Gothic, this has to be it! I found this to be one of the most stimulating sessions that I attended in my three days in Aix. Post–Feminism, as Fred Botting put it, always runs the risk of morphing into a ‘monster of a-historicity’ and Fred’s paper cast into sharp focus the problematics of a discourse that seems capable of multiplying deracinated, de-historicised ‘entrepreneurial hybridities.’ The paper traced lines of ‘fright and flight’ from early Gothic through to the machine-monsters of a post-feminist Gothicism that abjectly reproduces ‘the human’ as the corporeal detritus expelled from the body of (wo)man-machine (the space ship in Alien which is figured as ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’, the alien-mother to Ripley, and then the re-constituted body of Ripley herself). Another version of post-feminist Gothic hybridity emerged out of Stephanie Genz’s reading of Weldon’s She-Devil as a text which represented in the early eighties the monstrous performativity that has come to define a kind of hyper-aware, postmodern ‘feminine’ subject – a subject-in-crisis, or perhaps a subject-of-performance-in-crisis . This paper sat productively alongside Ben Brabon’s Butlerian analysis of the ‘new’ new man in the films Fight Club and Falling Down. Here again is a subject-in-crisis, but on different terms: the male subject is unable to perform his masculinity according to what is now, Brabon argued, a pretty much defunct, or at least dysfunctional, masculinist hegemony. In particular, Brabon argued that the ‘Phallus’ no longer functions effectively to give Symbolic support to the masculine subject of postmodernity: the Phallus has become ‘spectralised’, he contended. Perhaps because Ben didn’t have time to elaborate upon the Lacanian backdrop to this theorisation of the Phallus, I found this aspect of his argument least convincing. What I found more persuasive was the paper’s Butlerian account of a contemporary ‘ornamental culture’ in opposition to which the male subject stages a variety of abject, masochistic performances – the brutal, cultish bare-knuckle fights in Fight Club being amongst the vivid and disturbing.

Thursday 28th

SC – Unfortunately, I had to leave the conference today owing to work commitments back in Leeds. So it’s over to Jo….

JW – Thursday morning saw me in a session called: ‘Extending Genre Boundaries’. Although there were only two speakers, the session was lively thanks to two extremely suggestive papers and an ensuing discussion from the audience. Bernice Murphy’s paper on the Suburban Gothic in Richard Matheson highlighted the inherent consumerism in his 1954 text I am Legend. Murphy also focused on the Gothic house as a fortress that both imprisons and shelters its inhabitants. Ellen McCallum presented a paper on a fascinating text called Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. This Gothic memoir is in comic strip form with illustrations and speech bubbles substituted for text. She suggested a possible Oedipal drama between the protagonist and her deceased father, occurring – interestingly – through the medium of the telephone.

On Thursday afternoon, I attended a session entitled ‘Text and Images’. For me, the two papers in this session that captured my attention were by Catherine Lanone and Sara Thornton. Lanone presented a fascinating paper on the haunted realm of the Arctic from Mary Shelley to Charles Dickens. She focused on the natural wilderness as a Gothicised space that persists in haunting textual spaces. She argued that the ‘haunted Ice’ was a sublime place of conquest, through imperialism as well as individual achievements. Sara Thornton’s paper focused on Gothic economy in Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin. She outlined how Balzac’s fascination with paper resulted in a text populated with rich illustration and large white spaces. Her paper ended with the suggestion that Balzac was attempting to free himself from a paper prison created by the law.

This evening’s keynote was ‘A Politics of Superstition: the Elementary Spirits and the European Uncanny’ by Victor Sage. Sage discussed the impact of the Marvellous on the genre of the Fantastic. He discussed a variety of influential works that draw upon the tradition of the Fantastic, including: Cazotte’s The Devil in Love, Hoffman’s The Golden Pot and Fouque’s Undine.

Friday 29th

JW – In a session entitled ‘Gothic Displacements and Appropriations’, I was most impressed by Markus Oppolzer’s paper ‘Ann Radcliffe’s Italy and Gothic Liminality’. He suggested that Italy served as a Gothic frame of otherness in contrast to the constructed rationality of Englishness. He argued that the Gothic heroine is forced into a liminal space within an already liminal setting. John Whatley’s paper in the same session was also thought provoking. He explored notions of poisoning and toxicity in Matthew Lewis’ Gothic classic The Monk. He suggested that the Gothic itself moved in the manner of a virus: an infection of immorality.

The second session I attended on Friday was ‘Otherness and the Uncanny’. David Punter’s paper on The Castle of Ollada explored spatial and topographical details of the traditional Gothic castle. He argued that the planning and designing of a castle produces spaces that impede the vision of both characters in the novel and the reader. He also discussed the topography of spaces in dreams alongside traditional Gothic themes such as inheritance and genealogy.

For me, the final panel of the conference was ‘Global Gothic’ where two quite different papers complimented one another somewhat effectively. Glennis Byron discussed globalisation as a site of horror in Tunku Halim’s Dark Demon Rising. She argued that the global drains meaning from the local, threatening such cultures by insisting on an encompassing sense of identity. Isabella Van Elferen’s paper explored cyberspace as an uncanny borderland. She argued that reality is haunted by the spectre of cyberspace and that this haunting threatens our sense of secure borders. She highlighted how music challenges our spatial and temporal constellations as sound waves interfere with the ‘presence’ of the body.

This evening’s keynote was ‘The Rise of the Gothic Un-Dead: Cathexis from Polidori’s Vampyre to Nodier’s Smarra’ by Jerrold Hogle – an exhilarating end to the conference. Hogle very eloquently and convincingly theorised the development of the vampire across the nineteenth century in terms of a projection (or abjection) of cultural and psychological anxieties that the Gothic traumatically makes present.

The Gothic N.E.W.S. conference was the first IGA conference I had ever attended, and the experience was brilliant. I now have so many notes to go through and books to read that I have no idea where to start.

NB: if anyone would like to join the International Gothic Association, they should contact Sue Chaplin at S.Chaplin@leedsmet.ac.uk

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Sue Chaplin is the author of Literature Compass article, ‘Law and Literature in the Romantic Era: The Law’s Fictions‘, Literature Compass 3(4) (2006), pp. 804–817, doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00351.x