I Think; Therefore, I Am Heathcliff

Abstract

Under Gothic conditions, thinking comes to be defined by way of the unhuman, especially in the form of art. Allowances must be made for the various aspects and kinds of Gothic literature, but key exemplars of the genre are consistent on this point.' In the activity of thought, one finds the unhuman coming alive and, in doing so, ruining not only the perspectives and sympathies but also the architecture of humanity. This ruination can then be made out to be the very proof of that humanity. Portraits stir and look back at their beholders, statues bleed, suits of armor walk, costumes disguise, invisible minstrels tantalize, picturesque scenes open themselves to nightmares: every mechanism of this genre adumbrates the proposal that, if thinking is to be, it will exist only through the aesthetic animation, sufferance, and internalization of that which is supposed to be foreign to thought.2 By emphasizing its own romance nature, which is designed to be enlivened through its readers' imaginative imprisonment in extravagantly hostile situations, the remote past, or exotic environments, the Gothic novel further embodied this proposal for its audience. As Ingmar Bergman recognized when he adapted this technique to the screen in his Gothic Seventh Seal (1957), in which Death appears to the Knight as the chess player he has seen him to be in a painting, all those restless works of art figure as synechdoches for the novel itself, which finds its fantasy of origins in the vivification of mouldering manuscripts into an appropriately modern genre. An emphasis on this genre's artifice could figure as that which is exterior, anterior, or foreign to thought because of the immemorial traditions in which art was considered to be fundamentally irrational. In addition, the historical conditions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries made it possible to see art as specifically emblematic of all that was irrelevant, anachronistic, or distant in relation to the utilitarian tendencies of modern life. (It was with good reason that Immanuel Kant chose this historical moment to draw a cordon sanitaire around art that would sequester it from crafts,