The epistolary and the gothic
/Speaking of letters, here’s a second epistolary topic I came across last week but didn’t have time to write about when I briefly returned to Emma on Friday:
One of the items I included in Quid, my Substack digest, over the weekend was this handy short guide to the gothic by literary historian Rebecca Marks. She opens by quoting the note at the beginning of The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole’s ur-gothic novel from 1764, and highlights the role of framing devices in gothic literature. She returns to this topic about halfway through:
Gothic novels are filled with letters, diary entries, found manuscripts, dreams, and reported speech, and Gothic paintings are full of so-called ‘liminal’ or negative spaces (windows, graveyards, ruins, dungeons, corridors, shadows). The idea is that we, as consumers of the Gothic, can never be sure about the truth because it’s always shrouded in degrees of separation.
Having just picked up Dracula to read for the first time (minus an abortive attempt in college) as well as being a fan of MR James and especially Poe—one of whose earliest stories was literally titled “MS. [manuscript] Found in a Bottle”—this rings true. Marks compares the way the gothic uses such framing devices to modern found footage horror like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity and credits their prevalence in the gothic to “the sense of uncertainty” they create.
No argument here. What I’d add is that these forms come with a not insignificant sense of discovery built in. This creates not only the “sense of uncertainty” Marks describes, but enhances it with a sense of chronological distance. That means getting the story will require assembling it bit by bit, slowly revealing the shocking truth. If one finds an epistolary horror novel scary because of the uncertainty created by the form, one keeps reading because of the tingling sense that one is slowly uncovering what’s really going on, a feeling we usually ascribe to whodunnits.
Not all gothic stories are mysteries, but I’d say all gothic stories have an element of mystery. In both, the construction of the real story in the reader’s mind is an important part of the storytelling process. In mysteries this involves clues; in the gothic it involves atmosphere and suggestion.
And to return to a pet theory: this fits well with my sense that UFO and alien stories are the modern replacement for the gothic. The same thrill offered by the pretense that The Castle of Otranto or one of MR James’s stories are old manuscripts dug up in dark archives is to be had from the grainy photographs, blurry film footage, photocopies of redacted Air Force files, or an especially juicy eyewitness interview many years after the fact. Any good UFO story is going to involve forgotten secrets revealed by carefully reconstructing the truth from old files.
