Gothic-Punk Utopia in Laura Oldfield Ford's Savage Messiah

Abstract

Gothic-Punk Utopia in Laura Oldfield Ford's Savage Messiah Samantha Morse (bio) "Abandoned dreams reside here, unharnessed and unchanneled. Step over them in carefully avoided cracks in the pavement, feel them pulsating in the unsmiling eyes of the black cat" (Ford 2011, 4).1 The haunting memories and uncanny city spaces of early twenty-first-century London in Laura Oldfield Ford's Savage Messiah (2011) evoke a Gothic ambience of temporal disturbance, spatial disjointedness, and transgressive desire. This Gothic, however, is uniquely enmeshed with the politics and aesthetics of the British punk movement in the 1970s and 1980s: I pass by the industrial estates, the Furniture world on Orient way and fall into some Wetherspoons called the Drum. I'm over the other side now, a different zone echoing provincial English towns in the early 90s. Acid hangovers float around, garish graffiti drug references in luminous yellow and day glow tangerine. We feel the place drift around us. BAD E in spraypaint over a bookmakers door, girls trapped in a post goth/pre rave sartorial dilemma. This isn't London and yet it couldn't be anywhere else. As I'm smoking my second cigarette it strikes me that I could hide out here in this place of forgetting. It would let me lie embedded within it. (4)2 The bizarre drift from familiar industrial estates to an echoing "different zone" and a "place of forgetting" that is somehow open to the smoker's being "embedded within it" is utterly Gothic. Yet the drugs, "sartorial dilemma," and overall attitude toward the lumpen are quintessentially punk. The Gothic, a literary genre that originated in England in the late eighteenth century in response to new loci of economic power and accompanying revolutionary anxieties, is marked by tropes such as live burial, the unspeakable, doubling, and reiteration, as Eve Kosofsky [End Page 125] Sedgwick cogently argues in The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986). Although criticized by several contemporaries in the 1790s for its formulaic structure, the Gothic has been relieved of its hackneyed reputation by Sedgwick and numerous other present-day scholars. There clearly exists perennial significance in this popular genre; since its genesis in the three-volume romance form, it transmuted through the nineteenth century, pervading serialized fiction like the Newgate novel, the "penny blood," and the sensation novel, until its apotheosis in the harrowing ghost tales and novellas of the Victorian fin de siècle. The Gothic remains with us today in the vogue for vampire and zombie media. As Sue Chaplin asserts: "The Gothic is more than a literary 'genre': it is a cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical mode—perhaps the mode—of engaging with the 'disavowed ghosts' of modernity" (2). The Gothic dramatizes temporal disturbance, and its enduring appeal reflects an ongoing need to work through history—interrogating nostalgia and processing trauma—in order to make sense of the present. Although Savage Messiah explicitly implicates itself in anarchopunk cut-up aesthetics and violent radical politics, its uncanny encounters with the rejected specters of London's past and its unfettered representation of physical desire render the work a distinctly Gothic artifact. Savage Messiah thus participates in the Gothic punk milieu (GPM), or "a narrative environment which is aligned with a particular cultural climate that is defined by responses to technological and social transition during the twentieth century" (Moody, 168). Like Blade Runner (1982), the GPM of Savage Messiah "creates an aesthetics of decay, exposing the dark side of technology, the process of disintegration" (Bruno, 62). These Gothic ruins, however, are not mourned but valorized, just as the socially marginalized are not victimized but rendered powerfully throughout Savage Messiah's pages. In this, Savage Messiah's Gothicism diverges from some of its eighteenth-century antecedents, which could, at times, be politically reactive. Though radical Jacobin novels in the Gothic mode also abounded in the 1790s, Savage Messiah's sympathy with the lumpenproletariat is more essentially constitutive of a "punk sensibility" than a Gothic one (Hollinger, 31).3 In what follows, I examine how Savage Messiah combines conventions from punk and the Gothic in its black-and-white collaged pages of photographs, sketches, typed paragraphs, and handwritten phrases representing different swaths of...