Justin Sledge, of YT channel Esoterica, has put out a video on the Gothic. It was a reasonably fun watch.
He tried to trace the Gothic back to the Burkean notion of the sublime. That is, to the emotion we feel when faced with something massive and awesome-a mountain, a waterfall, the night sky, maybe even the dome of Hagia Sophia–that makes us feel a distinctive sort of terror, apparently born of a realization of our own fragility and insignificance.
Now, it seems to me that the connection of the sublime to the gothic is made a bit too facilely. The gothic isn’t generally concerned with the sorts of big things that are typically taken as exemplars of the sublime: Mountains and waterfalls and such. It is concerned with civilizational decay, and not even decay of things that are necessarily massive. There is certainly some overlap (seeing a great culture fallen into ruin may well inspire feelings of your own insignificance), but still is seems they are fundamentally distinct.
Anyway, I don’t really have a particular point to make, I just thought it would be an interesting topic to place before the forum’s consideration.
A particularly interesting point that Sledge raised is that civilization aims to insulate us from horror. There aren’t that many things that really threaten us, in comparison with prior generations. What we call horror is often sanitized to the point of being ersatz–it is, for example, just a movie, we are never really in fear because we know we can just pause it and walk away. It’s a no-touch haunted house: you never really get worried because you know all along you are safe.
Here’s the video.
Porphyry I think you’re right. Sledge holds up the idea of the sublime and the idea of Gothic but I don’t think he demonstrates the connection he thinks they have. Couldn’t we even make the claim that the Gothic is itself part of the civilized distancing from the sublime? Gothic is the sublime overripened.
For the record my favorite gothic novel is Charles Maturin’s ** you do not have permission to see this link **. The novel, a variation on the Medieval tale of the Wandering Jew, is simultaneously a genre tribute and a parody. It’s also a “meta” technical experiment of sorts containing nested stories within stories; it won’t surprise anyone to find out Joyce was a fan.
A particularly interesting point that Sledge raised is that civilization aims to insulate us from horror.
This is the other side of the lament of how modernity separates us from the natural world. Folks who make this claim should put themselves in the place of a farmer who has his crop wiped out by a hailstorm two weeks before harvest. The farmer may experience the sublime but then he and his family starve to death. Separating ourselves from nature was rather the point of civilization.
Completely beside the point here but interesting nevertheless, science fiction writer/essayist Brian Aldiss has made the claim in his book ** you do not have permission to see this link ** that science fiction as a genre is a direct descendent of Gothic. Aldiss cites Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as the first true SF novel. If anyone hasn’t read it do so. It’s nothing like the movies and makes Aldiss’ case rather well I think.
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