Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law.

Richter, David H.

Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law. By David Punter.
Basingstoke and London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's Press.
1998. xi+251 pp. [pound]45 (paperbound [pound]15.99).

Twenty years ago, David Punter surveyed the Gothic novel of the 1790-1820 period and the way its progeny had haunted nineteenth-and twentieth-century fiction up to our own day. In The Literature of Terror (1980; repr. London: Longman, 1996), Punter read the rise of the Gothic as a social formation, a production of ideology, 'the ways in which a social class sought to understand and interpret class relations in the past' (p. 165), but his illuminating approaches to dozens of individual texts, written in consistently incisive prose, tinged with wit, owed far more to Freud than to Marx.

Like most surveys, Punter's approach was topographical rather than historical: his aim was not to explain a literary sequence but to shed light on the various forms taken by romantic fiction which, after the end of the first vogue of the Gothic, had never been really absent from English and American literature. And like borders in the Balkans, the Gothic terrain was hard to delimit in any satisfactory way. While many of Punter's texts were surely taken from a literature of terror, others, including some postmodern novels, were related to the Gothic primarily through their endless deferral of narrative authority, and still others, including Isak Dinesen's first set of tales, were Gothic mainly because that was what they called themselves. Such issues did not bother Punter then: he was monarch of all he surveyed.

Gothic Pathologies, which is largely cobbled together from essays Punter published as long ago as 1982, covers much of the same ground as The Literature of Terror, fiction from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, plus film, but with a greater theoretical anxiety. Those who might find The Literature of Terror theoretically passe because of its straightforward uses of Freud will not be any happier with Gothic Pathologies: Freud has not been supplanted by Lacan and Zizek but supplemented by the neo-Jungian James Hillman. And this is not an update: rather Punter seems to have been asking himself, over and over again for the last two decades, what the essence of Gothic was, what could unify these texts of alterity. As he might have feared, there was no single answer.

At one point the essence of Gothic resides in its relation to the Law: 'It deals with those moments when we find it impossible, with any degree of hope, for our "case to be put"' (p. 5). At another, the Gothic is about the Body: the 'more inward root of the Gothic' is 'the loss of the body, the making over of the body into the control and power of another' (p. 61). Or perhaps the Gothic is about the relationship between Law and Body: 'Gothic is therefore all about supersession, about the will to transcend, and about the fate of the body as we strive for a fantasy of total control, or better, total exemption -- from the rule of law' (p. 17). Later, the Gothic has become a terrifying textual web, like the traces of signifiers that Derrida helped us to unweave: 'All the data in which Gothic deals [. . .] endlessly convolute the possibility of neat guiding lines, threads of Ariadne's making which might guide us through the labyrinth and back to a sunlit world outside' (p. 218). And while 'Gothic is the paradigm of all fiction, all textuality' (p. 1), the Gothic is also 'haunted by Nothing' (p. 4).

Everything and nothing indeed: the framing chapters of Gothic Pathologies suggest that Punter has got lost in his own web of signifiers, straining after metaphors that will simplify the complexities he cannot ignore and would not wish away. The nine central chapters, on the other hand, on texts ranging from the canonical (Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights) to the obscure (Shelley's juvenile antic Zastrozzi, Liu Suola's King of Singers), display Punter's still unfaded deftness of analytical touch. Yet read as a whole the book is less than the sum of its parts. It becomes itself a mirror of Punter's mind as Gothic castle, passing from the tortured bodies in the dungeons to an absurd trial unfolding in the hall, and on up to the textual mise en abyme on the battlements.