Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD)

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A close and more realistic reading of the Gothic shows how the genre is ignored as a cultural and an ideological product par excellence. The Gothic is a literary product like any other literary or non literary one which is characterized by its rootedness and embeddedness in the culture that any product of a particular historical moment represents and illustrates, hence the importance of cultural studies as an approach capable of giving a satisfactory account of the genre by taking into consideration the space and time in which the genre erupted. The emphasis then should be put on the text and its nurturing discursive practices within the larger paradigm of a particular epistemic context so that we can get instances of how cultures come to inspect and control the subjects of their inner and external social groups. Tackling the Gothic from a cultural studies perspective makes obvious the real contiguous contribution of the genre to the mainstream ideologies and policies in their respective historical context.

We should be aware of what can be done with literature and especially with what is encoded in the Gothic both culturally and politically. Since the Gothic is a discursive form that has a function, that is, it is associated with a cultural position that gives the insight of how some practices have a more privileged place than others. Our examination then must be a kind of digging in the hidden relations between the Gothic and power. In the sense that the Gothic is a particular discourse embedding social and cultural positions, its ideological effects are revealed in the course of its formation.

In this way, we can get insights about what evaluation of the genre would be on the ethical level, that is, to expose and uncover power and hegemony relationships and to point out the social, racial and cultural inequities embedded in such a narrative.

           What relates the Gothic as a literary object to the political and cultural site of its respective era is of paramount importance. It plays a vital role in the generation and propagation of the official ideology. One has to seek to demonstrate the power of the Gothic as a cultural artifact in a sense that has nothing to do with illusion but rather to track out its functioning within the historical moment in which it appears as a social and cultural discursive material practice. Also the clout of Gothic transgression, especially in the nineteenth century, reveals that the relationship between discourse and that of politics and culture is not to be conceived merely as a relation between base and superstructure. The point is more sophisticated in a spider web way where the different elements, material and symbolic, interact with one another and no place for determinism, or one way determination.

Ideology is explicitly in action through the social and cultural situations that pervade the Gothic discursive patterns. The ideological character of the Gothic as a discursive formation receives its validity from its reflection and construction of the points of view, beliefs and value judgements that a particular social group adopts to differentiate itself from other groups and to separate the normal from the pathological. Such affinity between the Gothic and the distribution of power relationship that serves to maintain certain hierarchical structures in a particular society gives the Gothic discursive power a prominent ideological scope which can be sensed everywhere.

Fright and unease excite a whole range of sensational feelings wrapped in mystery and an unbridled torrent of threats that shake the foundation of rationality and confront social values. The resulting excess and ambivalence that constitute the core of the Gothic transgression trap the reader into unbearable situations, fearful and uncertain volatile identification that maims the soul’s sense of being. The resulting traumatic effects of excess and ambivalence are not intended to transgress and revolt against all the limits; they should rather be seen as a calculated project that rummages around for the restoration of what it seems to destroy.

         Transgression becomes an insignia of conformity rather than dissent. Its effect is not meant to stain what it trespasses. It rather serves to bleach what it seems to tint and propitiate what it dislocates: Transgression, “by crossing the social and aesthetic limits, serves to reinforce or underline their value and necessity, restoring or defining limits” (Gothic 7).

The Gothic involves its audience in reaction and interaction since no instance of ease and comfort is left undisturbed. Emotions are fiercely stirred, minds are completely boggled and bodies will writhe under the pelts of transgression the way the reader has no way but to act and resort to a self-defense reaction, triggered by Gothic emotional and intellectual pressure. This image resembles that of chasing a frightened-to-death animal. When the latter finds no outlet for escape and feels death putting its seal in all directions, life instinct triggers its sense of survival, terror and horror turn the dove into a beast whose desire for survival is stronger than its fears. The same principle can be observed in the Gothic mode where the instinct of cultural survival lies behind its exercise of transgression.

Therefore, transgression in the Gothic is not inherently subversive. The seemingly overwhelming tendency towards horror and terror mechanism of ambivalence and excess does not rise above the ideological context in which they exist. The heteroglossic nature of the Gothic seemingly defies the linearity and univocality of a particular discourse and therefore a particular ideological effect. In reality, this heteroglossic multivoicedness has an acquiescent political potential embodied in a main ‘discourse ray’ which is set in motion and in dialogic interaction with different existing discourses. Such a discourse ray tends to gloss ‘alterity’ or all that is not the self under the gaze of the culture that observes, specifies, magnifies and contains in order to maintain the purity of cultural selfhood and identity.

In fact, the perceived transgressive modus operandi of the Gothic in its address to the world is not a dissimilar mode of representation Thus, revolutionary and subversive efforts can occur only when a given discourse expresses a difference in the world view, the sum of ideals, viewpoints and classification of the orders of things.

In the shadow of the Gothic discourse, paranoia is generated through transgression where ambiguity and excess find their repository as the main directing poles. They strike every boundary and limit that the human could cherish and defend as the maintainer of their culture. As an example one can mention Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth The Wanderer. The cultural codes that constitute Melmoth are not to be taken only as a way of articulating mere anxieties and paranoiac fears about the mystification of limits and boundaries that blur the sense of cultural identity and dissolute the difference between what is ‘us’ and what is ‘them.’ However, it is rather a process of objectification that takes those fears and anxieties to be thrown in a specific historical moment which makes the Irish Catholics the cultural, ‘racial’ different ‘others’, as the site of Protestant practices of power and authority. Maturin creates a ‘racial’ tension based on imagined terrors that constitutes his Gothic talent. The colonial environment that carries all the dichotomies of difference on all levels, social, economic and political, is an element of great importance to the Gothic imagination that holds and sustains the colonial zeal and imperial schemes. Maturin creates a space where religious and gender hierarchies serve as a promulgation of the colonial political cause. 

The text is permeated by an apprehension about national and cultural identity which is central to British colonial establishment. Then, it comes as no surprise that the Spanish and the Eastern settings are there present in the text as parallels and as instruments of a process of ‘racialization’ and therefore of exclusion. They represent the colonial subjects whom in order to be legitimately subjugated turn out to be the everlasting morally abhorrent embodiment of human frailty and wickedness.  What Maturin does is to appropriate the Catholic cultural elements into the Gothic for an effective discursive purpose that serves the Protestant ideological hegemony. He reduces Catholicism to what is beyond the limit of the approved. The monastery is designed to be foggy and shivery, obfuscating all kinds of visibility forever. It is the nest of despair where everything seems to be lost, and life cannot be renewed. The monks that populate Melmoth the Wanderer are tyrannical vampiric tricksters obsessed with what Maturin wants to communicate to his readers as a perverse and barbaric way of life.

The process sketched so far makes it essential to draw a special attention to it because it demonstrates an important characteristic which is remarkable about the Gothic. The Gothic is renowned to include in its mysterious pages tales of alien nations be they European or Eastern, recording their exoticism and eccentricity. It cannot be denied that the attempts to alter the cultural richness of alien people as a strategy of justification of hegemony and colonialism are prominent elements in the Gothic. It is part of a recording and inspection system that processes information in order to classify and individuate different Others to be objects of exclusion. This exclusion is anchored in the demands of the colonial cultural system that has imposed its difference through a well-organized cultural technology of control that resorts to a process of production and location of that difference by perpetuating stereotypes and stigmatizing the intended bearers of those stereotypes. Thus, the examination of Gothic tects gives us a sense of how their authors exploit their Gothic elements to enshroud the Others’ body within the nexus of the power/ knowledge network exercised on them, and how they transforms their cultural specificities into an indication of their perennial inferiority, hence their exclusion from the political and cultural scene.

The Gothicist is to be unmistakably construed as someone who is speaking culturally and not speaking about culture. He is not in a detached and transcendental position that isolates him from his own space and time, and therefore he cannot acquire the position of the objective observer which is a myth. The Gothic literature shows that its authors use modes of representation that derive from the dominant discursive fields of knowledge of Their own time. Their texts are haunted by an ideology, which is precisely that of the representation. Added to the factors of ‘filiation’ and ‘affiliation’ of the Gothicist, discourse is regulated by a particular cultural dispositif that submits everything within it to its respective order. A dominant discourse entails different ways through which it can be expressed according to the institutional character of a given mode of existence of that discourse such as the school, religion, science…etc, or what Louis Althusser calls the ‘Ideological Status Apparatus.’ Finally, The Gothicist is by definition someone who is delegated and sanctioned by his cultural group as its representant. He is someone whose job is precisely to speak for his social community.

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