By Robert Berry
Department of English
University of Otago
New Zealand
Deep South v.1 n.2 (May, 1995)
In his work Dostoevsky and the Process of Literary Creation (1989), the French critic Jacques Catteau refers to the novel as a “barbaric art”; he claims it is an art form that can readily assimilate both “civilised and elaborate genres.” The novel, he argues, is always “open to new forms, without worrying about ranks and rules” (p. 52). Dostoevsky’s central importance to the development of the novel, insists Catteau, lies in his instinctive recognition of the form’s malleability. In his major novels, Dostoevsky is able to unify what the critic calls a vast “pluralism of forms” (p. 53). In the typical Dostoevskyan novel, there is no “single triumphant highway”; there is, rather, a “maze of paths, a network of disparate forms” (p. 53). Dostoevsky’s creative achievement, Catteau urges, lies in his ability to synthesize divergent genres such as tragedy and burlesque, political writing and comedy, within single works. One has only to consider a novel like The Devils (1871), which unites revolutionary anarchist politics with a comedy of provincial society manners, to recognize the pertinency of Catteau’s observations.
In the same connection, it is interesting to point to Peter Kemp’s broad, yet detailed synopsis of Conrad’s creative method. In a 1991 Times Literary Supplement review, Kemp defines Conrad’s achievement in terms of his ability to weld divergent literary genres into an artistic whole. Many critics, Kemp argues, have found that Conrad’s fiction is riddled with heterogeneity, a strange composite of romance and scepticism, action yarn and metaphysical obstruseness. Some of Conrad’s narratives seem fashioned, as he said of ‘Youth’, Out of the boy’s adventure story’; others derive from sailors’ talk heard in Far East harbour offices or amid the click of billiard-balls in waterfront saloons thick with the smoke of cheroots. Into such robust stuff, however, he infiltrates fine-spun strands of philosophical and pyschological speculation . . . Conrad’s fiction characteristically oscillates between contraries. (Kemp, p. 4)
In his persuasive account of Conrad’s fictional world, Kemp identifies a number of literary forms — the adventure yarn, the romance story, the psychological and the metaphysical tale — all of which have been recognized as independent genres in the history and development of the novel itself. Like Catteau’s appraisal of Dostoevsky, Kemp suggests that Conrad’s primary achievement is his genius in unifying such diverse elements.
Though the critical establishment has long since labelled both artists as psychological, even political novelists, Conrad and Dostoevsky are also authors of what is usually called ‘popular’ fiction. Under this broad, notoriously problematic heading, are included such independent genres as ‘adventure, thriller and detective writing’; ‘romance’ literature; and Gothic fiction.’ Each of these literary forms, I would argue, can be claimed to exist in Conrad and Dostoevsky’s complex fictional worlds. It is the world of ‘Gothic’ fiction that I shall focus on.
Whilst Dostoevsky’s novels are recognizably Gothic in character, terming Conrad a Gothic artist might at first seem unusual, even perverse. By scrutinizing his shorter fiction, however, I hope to show that Conrad is not only an expert practioner of the Gothic form, but that much of his work refines, even extends, the original tradition. Firstly, however, it is important to identify the characteristic features of Gothic art, before establishing its significant place and function in each novelist’s world.
The Gothic novel had its genesis in English fiction in the later half of the 18th century. It is generally agreed that Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) represents the first Gothic text. Walpole’s novel established the general pattern the form was to take for many decades to come. The sensational popularity of The Castle of Otranto (1764) gave rise to its group of imitators, and a literary movement that became known as the Gothic School. Foremost among the later Gothic writers were Ann Radcliffe, whose novels The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797) are particularly important. It should be noted that both Conrad and Dostoevsky remained great admirers of Mrs. Radcliffe throughout their literary careers. Other notable examples of the Gothic novel are Matthew Lewis’ outstanding The Monk (1798), William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), and Mary Shelley’s somewhat later Frankenstein (1818).
The early Gothic novel was an extraordinarily popular form. Writing in 1797, one observer comments that the “Otranto Ghosts have propagated their species with unequalled fecundity. The spawn is in every novel shop” (Napier, p. viii). Many leading literary figures of the day adopted a deeply disdainful attitude towards the new literary sensation. In Waverley (1814), Sir Walter Scott makes a barbed reference to the Radcliffe school of writers, with its debased taste for “bandits, caverns, dungeons, inquisitors, trap-doors, ruins, secret passages, soothsayers, and all the usual accoutrements” (p. 33) (my emphasis). Perhaps the single most scathing indictment of Gothic art, however, must remain Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818).
Despite this sort of hostility, it cannot be denied that the Gothic novel was the truly popular form of its day. In her illuminating work The Failure of the Gothic (1987), Elizabeth Napier calculates that at least one-third of the novels published in Great Britain between 1796 and 1806 were Gothic in character. By 1805, the popular magazines devoted the greater part of their space to short or serialized Gothic fiction. This initial success has not proved to be a short-lived phenomenon. The form has remained immensely popular. The works of Stephen King amply testify to the reading public’s continued, undiminished fascination with Gothic writing. Though still a distinct literary genre within twentieth century literature, the form has perhaps found a new and yet wider expression in the world of the cinema.
In attempting to define the essential nature of Gothic art, Elizabeth Napier argues that it is possible to dismantle, to deconstruct, the entire Gothic experience. “Gothicism”, she writes, is “finally much less about evil . . . than it is a standardized, absolutely formulaic system of creating a certain kind of atmosphere in which a reader’s sensibility towards fear and terror is exercised in predictable ways” (p. 29). According to Napier, a number of exact formulas, a number of characteristic elements, can be identified in all primary Gothic fiction.
The most important, single element of the Gothic novel is its overwhelming atmosphere of menace and brooding terror. This mood is usually evoked before the appearance of the central protagonists, and characteristically achieved by creating profoundly threatening landscapes. According to one critic, the early Gothic writers typically forged a landscape which became “a grotesque vision of hell” (Joslin, p. 87). Right up to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Gothic novelists developed the initial sense of menace using an almost unvarying formula. Writers would traditionally invoke sublime mountainous landscapes; at the top of some wild, inaccessible pass, they would place a formidable half-ruined castle or crumbling abbey. By definition, creating these menacing landscapes meant locating the action in bizarre or alien settings. It was typical for the early Gothic novel to remove the reader from the everyday and ordinary, and place him or her in strange locations, normally the high wildernesses of Spain or Italy. In the eighteenth century, this was done to “capitalize upon the fear and superstitution” usually associated with the “strangely alien . . . Latin and Iberian temperaments” (Joslin, p. 13). Furthermore, it was vital to isolate, to insulate, the action from any possible interference from normal society.
In this specific context, it is perhaps surprising to find Conrad employing such traditional Gothic techniques to create an atmosphere of imminent terror. However, a short story like The Inn of the Two Witches’ (1915) provides a clear revelation of Conrad’s acquaintance with and understanding of Gothicism in its most basic form. In this tale, Conrad charts the story of Edgar Bryne and his search for a young seaman, Tom Corbin, who has disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Significantly setting his action in a remote region of early nineteenth century Spain, Conrad readily adopts a number of Gothic conventions aimed at creating a mood of initial terror. A sense of brooding oppression is achieved by Conrad’s references to the “wild, gloomy sky” and the “rank”, “stony”, and “dreary” nature of the surrounding landscape (Within the Tides, p. 138). As Edgar Bryne’s search intensifies, the Gothic atmosphere heightens correspondingly. Stumbling on a remote hamlet, Conrad’s narrative notes that it is “hidden in a fold in the ground”, in a spot which “seemed the most lonely corner of the earth and as if accursed in its uninhabited barrenness” (p. 139). In such passages Conrad’s language, with its heavy adjectival stress, is ideally suited to the Gothic form, which by definition demands linguistic intensification or exaggeration.
Developing on these early narrative sequences, Conrad slowly evolves his fictional world into the realms of true Gothic nightmare. His Spanish landscape assumes an increasingly hostile, evil character. Alone in the wild, Byrne is said to toil “against wind and rain, on a barren dark upland, under a sky of ashes. Far away the harsh and desolate mountains raising their scarped and denuded ridges seemed to wait for him menacingly” (p. 145). In characteristic Gothic fashion, Conrad’s landscape has become “a grotesque vision of hell” (Joslin, p. 87). When Byrne finally reaches his destination, it is significant to note the suggestion of supernatural terror implicit in Conrad’s description of the Witches’ Inn. The house, we are told, seems
as though it had risen from the ground or had come gliding to meet him, dumb and pallid, from some dark recess of the night. (Within The Tides, pp. 146-7)
Byrne’s first sight of the eponymous Inn closes this clearly defined Gothic prelude. In all respects, Conrad’s opening narrative sequence in The Inn of the Two Witches’(1915) follows well-established Gothic formulas designed to create a mood of initial terror. In a number of ways, I would argue, Byrne’s progress towards the Inn recalls the narrator’s sinister journey towards the Usher estate in Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839). …
