Triomf and the Cross-cultural Gothic
Oct. 11th, 2005 05:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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darkling_talesLJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY mister_guignol)
I hope this post is not off-topic for this community, but I thought I'd offer my thoughts on a rather disturbing book, Triomf, that most people are probably not familiar with. Specifically, I think this novel represents a form of Gothic literature that has gone under-appreciated. Any feedback is welcome! (I'll use a cut as this is a bit long.)
In his introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, Chris Baldick states, "Unlike 'Romantic', then, 'Gothic' in its literary usage never becomes a positive term of cultural revaluation, but carries with it (even among antiquarian enthusiasts for medieval art, such as Walpole, the Aikins, and their followers) ab identification of the medieval with the barbaric. A Gothic novel or tale will almost certainly offend classical tastes and rational principles, but it will not do so by urging any positive view of the Middle Ages" (Baldick xii-xiii). Charles Shiro Inouye makes a similar point about the tales of Izumi Kyoka, a Japanese Gothic writer who was popular during the Meiji era; Inouye compares the writing of Edgar Allan Poe, claiming that "If anything, Kyoka's writing is a frontal attack on the barbarous and uncouth values to which European gothic supposedly owes its genealogy" (Inouye 1).
Both scholars espouse the idea that the Gothic is a reaction to the barbarity associated with European medievalism. But what if we posit an example of Gothic literature that does not react negatively against medieval uncouthness, but instead makes a more recent period of history its target? By straying outside of this accepted principle of the Gothic, does a literary work cease to function as part of the Gothic genre?
My example is Triomf, a novel of modern South Africa by Marlene van Niekerk. The novel is centered around the Benades family, a group as decadent and depraved as any found in the works of Walpole, Lewis, or Radcliffe. The Benades are a family given in to incest and violence; the only son of the family, Lambert, is described in terms of monstrosity not far afield from Shelley's Frankenstein's Monster; the members of the family are decaying into old age, their bodies displaying their inner corruption just as Poe's House of Usher illustrates the decay of that fictional family.
Nevertheless, as Gothic as the Benades may seem, they give no sense of a reaction against the valuations of the European Middle Ages. Instead, Van Niekerk writes the Benades as an indictment of South Africa's Voortrekker myth and the socio-political system of Apartheid. The Benades counteract the mythical journey of the Voortrekkers by proving that the white presence in South Africa is not divinely ordained; they contradict the idea of Apartheid by deconstructing the very notion of preserving white purity in the heart of the African city.
Does this modernist twist disqualify Triomf as a work of Gothic literature? I do not believe so. The conventions of the Gothic may be coherent, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points out, but the genre is far from static or totalizing. It is my hope that this view will attract further scholarship ready to unexplored new Gothic frontiers in locations and time periods that do not possess a narrow critique of the mythic Middle Ages. As Edgar Allan Poe once quipped to one of his detractors, "Terror is not of Germany, but of the soul."
Bib.
Baldick, Chris. ed. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales
Kyoka, Izumi. Japanese Gothic Tales
Sedwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions
Van Niekerk, Marlene. Triomf.
mister_guignol)I hope this post is not off-topic for this community, but I thought I'd offer my thoughts on a rather disturbing book, Triomf, that most people are probably not familiar with. Specifically, I think this novel represents a form of Gothic literature that has gone under-appreciated. Any feedback is welcome! (I'll use a cut as this is a bit long.)
In his introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, Chris Baldick states, "Unlike 'Romantic', then, 'Gothic' in its literary usage never becomes a positive term of cultural revaluation, but carries with it (even among antiquarian enthusiasts for medieval art, such as Walpole, the Aikins, and their followers) ab identification of the medieval with the barbaric. A Gothic novel or tale will almost certainly offend classical tastes and rational principles, but it will not do so by urging any positive view of the Middle Ages" (Baldick xii-xiii). Charles Shiro Inouye makes a similar point about the tales of Izumi Kyoka, a Japanese Gothic writer who was popular during the Meiji era; Inouye compares the writing of Edgar Allan Poe, claiming that "If anything, Kyoka's writing is a frontal attack on the barbarous and uncouth values to which European gothic supposedly owes its genealogy" (Inouye 1).
Both scholars espouse the idea that the Gothic is a reaction to the barbarity associated with European medievalism. But what if we posit an example of Gothic literature that does not react negatively against medieval uncouthness, but instead makes a more recent period of history its target? By straying outside of this accepted principle of the Gothic, does a literary work cease to function as part of the Gothic genre?
My example is Triomf, a novel of modern South Africa by Marlene van Niekerk. The novel is centered around the Benades family, a group as decadent and depraved as any found in the works of Walpole, Lewis, or Radcliffe. The Benades are a family given in to incest and violence; the only son of the family, Lambert, is described in terms of monstrosity not far afield from Shelley's Frankenstein's Monster; the members of the family are decaying into old age, their bodies displaying their inner corruption just as Poe's House of Usher illustrates the decay of that fictional family.
Nevertheless, as Gothic as the Benades may seem, they give no sense of a reaction against the valuations of the European Middle Ages. Instead, Van Niekerk writes the Benades as an indictment of South Africa's Voortrekker myth and the socio-political system of Apartheid. The Benades counteract the mythical journey of the Voortrekkers by proving that the white presence in South Africa is not divinely ordained; they contradict the idea of Apartheid by deconstructing the very notion of preserving white purity in the heart of the African city.
Does this modernist twist disqualify Triomf as a work of Gothic literature? I do not believe so. The conventions of the Gothic may be coherent, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points out, but the genre is far from static or totalizing. It is my hope that this view will attract further scholarship ready to unexplored new Gothic frontiers in locations and time periods that do not possess a narrow critique of the mythic Middle Ages. As Edgar Allan Poe once quipped to one of his detractors, "Terror is not of Germany, but of the soul."
Bib.
Baldick, Chris. ed. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales
Kyoka, Izumi. Japanese Gothic Tales
Sedwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions
Van Niekerk, Marlene. Triomf.
