Teaching & Learning Guide for: ‘Gothic’s Death Drive’

Abstract

This guide accompanies the following article: Farnell, Gary. Gothic’s Death Drive. Literature Compass 8/9 (2011): 592–608, DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2011.00823.x Further Reading A more detailed account of the Freudian death drive than the one I provided, but also formulated within the field of Gothic studies, is available in the form of the fourth chapter of Fred Botting’s book Limits of Horror (Manchester University Press, 2008). Botting brings out well how the death drive appears transversal to what is Sigmund Freud’s most famous discussion of it formulated in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Botting is concerned to argue as well that psychoanalysis, with its mental apparatuses and the like, is of a piece with much of the technological modernity of its day, ‘though not cinema’, he says. I am a little sceptical about this last point, given my own reading of the death drive from Jacques Lacan’s suggestion that, in Freud, this death drive is ‘structured like a montage’. But aside from this, Botting is good at explaining the nature of the death drive as being irreducible to either nature or culture – something I tried to convey through reference to the death drive’s sublimity. As regards the current state of Gothic studies as a contemporary field of enquiry, a new book which is starting to establish itself as a guide to, specifically, 21st-century Gothic is (the aptly titled!) Twenty-First-Century Gothic, a collection of essays edited by Brigid Cherry, Peter Howell and Caroline Ruddell (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). In particular, there is an essay here, ‘The Fall of the Hou$e of Finance’, by Brian Jarvis, which draws attention to just how conspicuous is a type of Gothic discourse – references to ‘shadow banking’ and the like – in media coverage of the current financial crisis. The way that Gothic is used in this regard as a means of conceptualization, now with zombies rather than vampires as pivotally important, seems to me to be an important subject to address (the zombie is typically the eschaton-made-flesh). And so, taking a cue from Jarvis’s essay, I have written a new essay on ‘Gothic and the Present Crisis’, which I hope will appear in the public domain soon. Useful Links Perhaps it is not too much to say that the home of Gothic studies in cyberspace is the International Gothic Association website that offers a great deal of up-to-date information to both Association members and non-members alike, at http://www.iga.stir.ac.uk. Because approaches to the Gothic from the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalysis are not uncommon (my own work comes into this category), see also the following: http://www.lacan.com. Syllabi In a way, ‘Gothic’s Death Drive’ amounts to a call for more study of Gothic texts in conjunction with their imitation-texts. This is the case in respect of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and the Aikins’‘Sir Bertrand’, as well as Reeve’s The Old English Baron. Among other things, this helps to bring less well-known texts (such as the last two mentioned here) more into the foreground. But this general proposal might be to encourage as well, of course, the study of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho as it is famously imitated in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, as well as in the opening chapter to Walter Scott’s Waverley. Either way, the crucial point, as argued in ‘Gothic’s Death Drive’, is that literary imitation gives expression to precisely that ‘compulsion to repeat’ that is constitutive of the death drive itself, which is then framed in this way as our key object of study. Lastly, ‘Gothic’s Death Drive’ also carries the suggestion that Gothic-Romantic literature sees a remarkable proliferation of figures who are ‘between two deaths’ (e.g. Alfonso and Theodore [in Otranto]; the lady languishing in the castle [in ‘Sir Bertrand’]; Edmund Lovel [in The Old English Baron]; the Ancient Mariner [in Coleridge]; Frankenstein’s Monster [in Mary Shelley]; and Melmoth the Wanderer [in Maturin]). There is the material here for an extended course of study that might investigate what is revealed to us about Gothic-Romantic literature from the historic growth of this extraordinary ‘between two deaths’ condition.