Framing the Gothic: From pillar to post-structuralism

College Literature, Fall 2001 by Hennelly, Mark M Jr

In these visionary senses, architecture can also introduce advanced students to some of the more intimidating schools of post-structural theory (ways of seeing), which they might otherwise resist and whose coming distractions Gothicism previews by destabilizing the subject, the signifier, and the signified. As David Punter generally frames the issue without stressing architecture, "in the 1990s in particular, we have found ourselves at a peculiar confluence between the major motifs of the Gothic and a set of ways of thinking increasingly current in contemporary criticism and theory," especially, slips of the tongue, tricks of the eye, which ensure that what we see is always haunted by something else, by that which has not quite been seen, in history or in text-just as Gothic itself, we might say, consists of a series of texts which are always dependent on other texts, texts which they are not, texts which are ceaselessly invoked while no less ceaselessly misread, models of meconnaissance in the form of lost manuscripts, of misheard messages in cyberspace, in the attempt to validate that which cannot be validated, the self-sufficiency, the autonomy of textuality that is already ruined beyond repair (Punter 2000, ix-x).

After interrogating the "unhomeliness ' of terror, Homi K. Bhabha likewise insists on the politics (if not pedagogy) of post-structural negotiation rather than the polarities of structuralist nega ion: "the event of theory becomes the negotiation of contradictory and antagonistic instances that open up hybrid sites and objectives of struggle, and de troy those negative polarities between knowledge and its objects" (1994, 9, 25).

Lake's passage cited above includes provocative (post-structural) phrasing like somewhere inside, familiar refrain, architectural monstrosity, designed the thing, deranged, odd sense of humor, face, towers that rose, overlapping, and dream of a medieval castle. Such diction variously suggests deconstruction and its playful concern with the representation of "t e thing itself" and abyssal referentiality, spatial studies ranging from "overt pping" postcolonial/dialogic-carnivalesque/chaos/body/monster hybrids (respectively propounded by Malchow 1996, Howard 1994, Livingston 1997, Hurley 1996, and Cohen's Monster Theory 1996) to liminality, panopticism, and the Freudian uncanny, and finally feminist and Lacanian insights on scopophilia, transitional objects, and the horrors of abjection. Relevantly linking Romanticism with chaos theory, Ira Livingston sees Gothicism as both an amorphous antibody and the generative go-between which performs such a theoretically unholy marriage: [The] shape-shifter (a morph) nicely gothicizes the equivalence, in psycho

analytic "object relations" theory, of the equivalence, in psych-sought-after "indestructible object" and the "object that can be d.stroyed,"... or, in Lacanian theory, of the uncastratable and the always-already-castrated. These mandates dory, not describe a sublime object, abject mush, null set, or paralytic double bind but a generative contradiction (Livingston 1997,2).