The Gothic and the Fantastic in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Abstract

WE CAN EITHER SHRUG OFF THE DESIRE to categorize artistic productions, or we may pause and reflect on the difficulty of defining genres such as the and the fantastic. An examination of the critical discourse on the fantastic elaborated by critics such as Todorov, Jackson, and Monleon indicates that the definitions of the fantastic and the Gothic--however masterful or tentative--overlap to a considerable degree. In the first section of this article, I will analyze the similarities between the two critical discourses with the view of proposing a means of distinguishing between the fantastic and the Gothic. While both genres interrogate epistemological and ontological norms governing mimetic representation, the stands out by drawing upon a rhetoric of the uncanny which perverts mimesis and creates terror and disorientation in the reader. This rhetoric of affect is what distinguishes the from the fantastic. In the second section, applying this theoretical distinction to visual art, I will consider some of H. R. Giger's pictures which rest on a tension between the and the fantastic. I will demonstrate that this generic hybridism constitutes the visual vocabulary of Giger's critique of the discourse of sexuality and sexual reproduction in the 1960s and 1970s. I will conclude by examining the extent and limits of cultural subversion in Giger's visual art and the genre. The act of defining the seems to function like a critical irritant, and the attendant discursive discomfort may indicate that the very notion of genre belongs to an Aristotelian tradition that has been eroded by poststructuralist tales of textual indeterminacy. Although critics such as Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik do take the bull by the horns by claiming that Gothic writing always concerns itself with boundaries and their instabilities (243), others adopt an oxymoronic discourse that supports the notion that the is not a stable genre whose recurrent features can nevertheless be enumerated. Thus, Jerrold Hogle begins his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to the with the following defiant assertion: Gothic fiction is hardly 'Gothic' at all (2002, 1), but later proceeds to identify its general parameters (2). In his analysis of the Gothic, Botting singles out excess and transgression as recurrent features of a genre he is in other respects reluctant to define. Choosing a term that recurs in other critical analyses to designate the elusive genre of the Gothic, he states: changing features, emphases and meanings disclose writing as a mode (my emphasis) that exceeds genre and categories, restricted neither to a literary school nor to a historical period (1996, 14). Both Hogle and Botting underline the fact that in the we are dealing with a type of text that undoes neat typologies and literary genealogies. Why persist then in establishing generic boundaries if the very function of the text is to blur boundaries? It could be counter-argued that there is no necessary contradiction between the fact that narratives are concerned with indeterminacy and the decision to identify the recurrence of this indeterminacy as the index of a genre. The plot thickens when, despite the futility of the exercise, we succumb to the temptation of comparing definitions of the fantastic and the Gothic. The major problem one faces in this process of comparison is that critics do not draw any clear distinction between the two genres. In fact, the question as to whether the fantastic and the are two distinct genres is never raised. In The Fantastic (1973), Todorov states: In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, a world without sylphides, or vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world. The person who experiences the event must opt for one of the two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination--and laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality--but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us. …