The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture

By Timothy Jones

The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture offers a new account of the American Gothic. Gothic studies, the field that explores horrid and frightful narratives, usually describes the genre as exploring genuine historical fears, crises and traumas, yet this does not account for the ways in which the genre is often a source of wicked delight as much as it is of horror – its audiences laugh as often as they shriek. This book traces the carnivalesque tradition in the American Gothic from the nineteenth into the late twentieth century. It discusses the festivals offered by Poe, Hawthorne and Irving; the celebrations of wickedness offered by the Weird Tales writers, including H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith; the curious aura attached to Ray Bradbury’s stories; the way in which hosted horrors in comics and on television in the 1950s and 1960s taught their mass audiences how to read the genre; Stephen King’s nurturing of a new audience for Gothic carnivals in the 1970s and 1980s; and the confluence of Gothic story and Goth subculture in the 1990s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: May 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781783162314

Timothy Jones

Timothy Jones is an author, editor, and speaker specializing in the spiritual life. He was managing editor for Moorings, and prior to that was an editor for Christianity Today magazine for six years and a pastor for almost eight years. He has written The Art of Prayer, Celebration of Angels, and The Friendship Connection. Tim, his wife, and their three children live in Nashville.

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Introduction: Ballyhoo

The label ‘American Gothic’ suggests a genre that describes the historical circumstance of the American nation; certainly, this has been a common theme in criticism since the 1980s, which has loaded the genre with various discursive potentials. The American Gothic often very obviously addresses crises and traumas produced by genuine historical forces; indeed, how can a text not be marked by the time and space from which it emerged? Yet this account of the genre has difficulty explaining why it should be that readers often use Gothic texts as a source of irresponsible and wicked pleasure rather than as an engagement with the serious stuff supposedly being described. Often, the Gothic text does not offer a compelling account of the American real, but nevertheless remains a distinct product of American culture. These texts are the product of a historical moment but appear to turn their back on that moment, instead offering readers something else.

What is this something? Consider Charles G. Finney’s 1935 novella, The Circus of Dr. Lao. An extraordinary circus rolls into Abalone, Arizona, and demands the attention of the townsfolk. The conceit of the book is that the circus is filled with true wonders – a sea serpent, the magician Apollonius of Tyana, a hound made of vegetation, a ‘Sonoran medusa from Northern Mexico’, and so forth; the attractions all have ‘a taint of evil or hysteria about them’.¹ Yet the folk of Abalone, mired in Depression-era troubles, have difficulty recognising the authenticity of the miraculous carnival. Larry Kamper sees the parade on Main Street but refuses to believe the unicorn is anything other than a fake; confronted with a mythical roc, Edna Rogers complains she had actually been hoping to see elephants holding each other’s tails.² Their everyday lives are too raw, too banal to admit the proffered eccentricities.

The narrative builds towards a performance under the big top, a show that works itself up to a cruel, ritualistic, sexual frenzy; the circus’s acts are basically Gothic – salacious, satanic and appalling. A black mass is staged as an entertainment, witches fly through the air, the Devil himself is made to manifest, a naked witch is whipped, then all is dismissed so the next act can be rolled in. The limits of the big top disappear as a statue of the great god Yottle appears, together with thousands of worshippers. Virgin sacrifice is demanded and three people are crushed to death. The performance threatens to spiral out of control; the medusa accidentally petrifies a handful of spectators. Yet the audience cry out ‘Louder and funnier!’³ Uptight audience member Agnes Birdsong complains that the circus is a symbol of evil; Mr Etaoin consoles her: ‘It’s only a circus’, he says. ‘Don’t let it disturb you.’⁴ Both the staging and the audience’s reactions are comic, but not quite absurd. The text presents a largely nonsensical but recognisably Gothic performance. Marvels, violence, weird rites and forbidden sexuality are presented, but the audience want more volume and better jokes. Concerns about fakery are aired; prim moral complaint follows. The action is presented as potentially out of control, but it is safe for the majority of the spectators. Whatever terrible thing is happening on the stage, Mr Etaoin is right – circuses ought not to disturb.

The way the carnival is presented suggests Gothic experience in a wider sense. As anyone who has watched a horror film in a full cinema knows, when frightful action is presented, sometimes the audience appears to be scared – gasping, shrieking, quietly tense -but just as often, there is laughter, incredulity and even derision expressed. This is not breaking faith with the spirit of the performance or film: it is instead characteristic of how we engage with horror narrative. The screams should be louder, the ghastly should be funnier, it ought to bother the likes of an Agnes Birdsong more than it already does, and it needs to continue to entertain the body of the audience.

As Apollonius prepares to summon witches and demons, ‘a pall of darkness came into the tent, opaque and not to be seen through; and it crept into every angle and corner of the tent, so that one could not tell beside whom one sat.’⁵ This too is an important method of the Gothic carnival. The show’s viewers are offered anonymity. They need not be held accountable for their responses; for the period of the darkness they are excused the responsibilities of their identity and their place in the community, of the pressures of the sensible and the seemly. Yet ultimately, the folk of Abalone are utterly unchanged by the spectacle, and if they are genuinely moved, the text does not say. The show is over and ‘into the dust and sunshine the people of Abalone went homewards or wherever else they were going.’⁶ It is not that the circus has been less than disturbing or thrilling: it is that the real is so powerful that it cannot be repudiated or avoided, except for the small period of time watching the show. The townsfolk are like Mrs Cassan, who has had her fortune read by Apollonius; he tells her ‘Tomorrow will be like today . . . I see your remaining days as quiet, tedious collections of hours. You will not travel anywhere. You will think no new thoughts. You will experience no new passions.’⁷ Such is the power of the real.

Dr. Lao’s circus describes the process of engaging with a Gothic performance. Academic readings of the American Gothic have stressed the seriousness of the genre’s thematic concerns, often linking its texts to cultural and psychic distress and the troubled history of the United States – to the stuff of the real. The genre is understood as an engagement with the forces of history, just as any work of ‘serious’ literature is. Yet this position does not easily account for the manner in which Gothics potentially delight, thrill and amuse their audiences. Finney suggests that history exists principally outside the carnival and that the carnival is an opportunity for leisure rather than labour. As weird or unkind as the amusements offered might be, they seem not to touch the real; the pleasure they offer is not the kind of pleasure we find in our everyday lives. To take pleasure in the black mass or human sacrifice requires a shift of values, and indeed of practical reading strategies, for these are not the things that provide pleasure in our lives or when we approach serious literary works. As Dr. Lao insists, ‘I have my own set of weights and measures and my own table for computing values.’⁸ The values of the horrifying carnival are not those of the real.

The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture explores the carnival tendencies present within American Gothic texts. Chapter 1 explores the formation of Gothic studies – the field that treats horrifying and frightful narratives – as an area of academic endeavour, describing some of the critical habits associated with the field. The academy emphasises readings of the American Gothic that explore the political and historical weight, psychological complexity and cultural ‘subversion’ Gothic texts offer. The genre has come to be seen as treating genuinely difficult cultural complexes, in much the same way that the best ‘serious’ literature does. However, this description of the Gothic does not recognise the genre’s place inside American culture: Gothic texts are more often marketed and consumed as thrilling entertainments rather than as discursive venues.

To account for this, the chapter proposes a conceptualisation of genre that draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. Narrative genres like the Gothic might be understood as practices that inform the action of readers and writers, and generate fields that orient the practice of participants. Readers are able to distinguish between ‘serious’ iterations of the genre and a ‘carnivalesque’ mode. This latter sort of Gothic invites a distinctive reading practice that emphasises the in-the-moment experience of reading itself; the generation of affect – although more often pleasure than fear; and the insincere assumption of unusual stances in the reader – we abandon our day-to-day values and find ourselves enjoying cruelty and horror. The Gothic, in its carnival mode, is a genre interested in erotics before hermeneutics, having much in common with riding a rollercoaster or visiting a haunted house attraction, emphasising practically oriented, immediate thrills over reflective, interpretive labour.

The Gothic often offers a break from the propriety of responsible, sensible reading, and this break might be described as carnivalesque. The term draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s usage, describing a time and space apart from the everyday where the usual ‘rules’ do not apply. However, The American Gothic and the Carnivalesque breaks with the Bakhtinian version of carnival in some respects. Bakhtin seems to see the carnival as a moment of genuine topsy-turvy and even lawlessness. This might describe the carnival’s myth of itself, but in truth the carnival is a limited period of altered behaviours rather than a genuinely chaotic eruption. The carnival’s participants understand the practical strategies of the carnival and know its limits. The contortions of taste and moral sense the genre requires are limited only to the period in which readers are engaging with the text. Likewise, it is all very well to present horror as an entertainment, but there are some things that are too horrible to entertain; they carry the charge of the real and tend to end the Gothic carnival. Some representations are no longer ‘just playing’.

The following chapters describe some of the major textual venues that have facilitated the American Gothic’s carnivals. Chapter 2 discusses three writers who sit at the heart of the American Gothic canon, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and especially Edgar Allan Poe. Their works typically have meaningful, hermeneutically-oriented literary discourse and capitals attached to them; for instance, Hawthorne’s work is usually understood as a critique of Puritanism, while Toni Morrison understands Poe’s ‘blackness’ within the context of America’s troubled racial history. This chapter instead draws out the playful, celebratory and performative elements in these writers’ Gothics, and, in doing so, suggests that a carnival element has been an important part of the practice of the American genre from an early stage. ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ describes a frightening prank; ‘Young Goodman Brown’ offers a satanic celebration in the woods outside Salem. Poe identifies delight as working alongside horror in the frightful narrative. His writing frequently reduces the mimetic depth of his characters so that readers need not feel troubled by their inevitable destruction and can instead revel in it. Moreover, Poe’s works hold such campy potential that they were adapted into Roger Corman’s highly coloured films through the 1960s. The carnival orientation in these nineteenth-century texts has become a resource for later Gothic texts and practices, which have followed them in depicting grotesque celebrations and in celebrating the grotesque.

The third chapter explores the work of some of the Weird Tales writers of the 1930s, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard. Weird Tales was the first American magazine dedicated to Gothic tales, and marks the development of a specialised audience as well as specialist writers. Lovecraft, Smith and Howard took up the carnivalesque practices of the nineteenth-century authors discussed in chapter 2. Lovecraft and Smith’s narratives typically turn away from the American everyday, and their tales postulate bizarre other spaces and states that their heroes enter into. This turn is an analogue of the Gothic reading experience, which creates a ‘subjunctive’ space for readers, a mordantly satisfying although entirely subsidiary alternative to their real. Howard does engage with the stuff of history more seriously, but when he raises the spectres of America’s colonial history or Texan racism, he denudes them of political significance; again, readers are directed away from the substance of the real and towards the playful pleasures of horror. The Weird Tales writers continued to define the methods of the Gothic carnival: embracing purposefully flat characters to free their readers from unwanted sympathies, and presenting transvalued sets of ethics and aesthetics, so that wickedness and horror are made to seem more appealing than propriety and pleasantness. Lovecraft’s celebrated ‘Cthulhu mythos’ is a spoof demonology; one way of understanding his notion of ‘cosmic fear’ is that, whatever it stands for, it comes from out of this world, offering something beyond the American present.

Ray Bradbury began his career publishing in the pulps, including Weird Tales, before ‘crossing over’ to garner a much broader audience. Chapter 4 considers Bradbury’s unusual position, having acquired a degree of specifically literary prestige as a writer of science fiction, despite his beginnings. Rather than arguing that Bradbury somehow ‘transcends’ the pulps, his texts have been allowed to double as ‘literature’ on the one hand and as ‘genre writing’ on the other. Bradbury’s Gothics are, in the main, separate from his science fiction. As with the Weird Tales writers, time and again, they reject the pedestrian world of workaday America, preferring to celebrate a pleasingly gloomy alternate of the States, often described by Bradbury as an October country inhabited by October people. Bradbury does not really describe America as it is, but instead creates a speculative, subjunctive space for readers; it allows them to experience fictionally a world more wonder-filled than the real. As such, Bradbury’s work is a part of American culture, but significantly modifies its representations of America; it should not be understood as simply representing the nation, but instead as facilitating a national imaginary. This is typical of the carnival Gothic.

The October people Bradbury depicts seek a particular quality of experience, and the regions they occupy and actions they perform might, in turn, offer that experience to their readers. This peculiar ‘vibe’ can be usefully read in terms of Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura. Benjamin noted the fading of the auratic qualities as a hallmark of the age of mechanically reproduced mass art. Where Benjamin seems to advocate this loss as politically necessary, Bradbury’s characters instead recoil from an auraless world, and seek a reinstitution of peculiarly Gothic auras. Feeling rather than meaning is the thing: even when Bradbury apparently offers substantial allegory, as in Something Wicked This Way Comes, the seemingly proffered meanings dissolve under any kind of scrutiny.

In postwar America, two of the most visible venues for the Gothic were comics and television. In the main, these were carnivalesque enterprises and appealed to their audiences as forms of play and leisure. Chapter 5 discusses the hosts who introduced the horror comics and television of the mid-century, including the EC comics of the 1950s and the Warren titles of the 1960s; and the television shows Thriller, hosted by Boris Karloff and Night Gallery, hosted by Rod Serling. The tendency of carnival Gothic texts to remark upon themselves, to provide instructions for their readers, is especially visible in these texts. The hosts that present the narratives emphasise the potential they hold for delight and amusement, while directing readers and viewers away from moral and interpretive reading practices. The EC comics titles were infamous for their involvement in the hearings held by the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in 1954. While public outrage focussed on the objectionable content of the comics, chapter 5 suggests that really, the issue at stake was reading practice; where outraged moralists tried to find meaning and instruction in the titles, the EC comics – and hosted horrors in general – ask to be understood in basically non-discursive terms.

The 1970s and 1980s saw the ascent of Stephen King to bestseller status and a growing interest in the genre amongst literary writers. In novels like Carrie, King successfully extended the Gothic carnival into the novel-length narrative, asking readers to sympathetically invest in figures that they nevertheless expected to see attacked by the vicissitudes so common in Gothic narrative. King’s It is an exemplary demonstration of a carnival Gothic of this type, and indicates how the carnival Gothic as a practice remains distinct from postmodern literary pastiches of the genre.

The final chapter explores how, through the 1980s and 1990s, Goth subculture came to be used like Bradbury’s October country, a milieu where pleasingly frightful things might naturally occur, and Goths are like his October people, romantic outsiders who turn away from the everyday, preferring the consolations of ghastliness. As such, the figure of the Goth or deathrocker provides another analogue for the carnival Gothic reader; reading the Gothic text is as performative, camp and daring as subcultural participation, although reading is, of course, a far more private and inward performance. These texts often understand Goths as participants in Halloween-ish parties that threaten to run to riot and wickedness.

The texts discussed in this book trace the development of an American narrative tradition, a practice shared by readers and writers. The American Gothic in its carnival mode asks to be excused the decency and reasonableness of literature in the valorised sense. It may appear in high or low cultural venues, but is purposefully tasteless in either. Yet rather than disregarding taste entirely, the carnival Gothic text adopts a topsy-turvy but still coherent set of aesthetics and values. It is naughty rather than evil. As horrible as the carnival Gothic text might be, there remain limits, although it will typically hold a preference for the grotesque over the seemly, even becoming antagonistic to various everyday norms. Nevertheless, despite these preferences, the carnival Gothic text tends to reduce the import of its discursive properties, so that it provides a venue for readers to stage Gothic experience before it provides a vehicle for hermeneutic effort. It offers an opportunity to celebrate, for readers to generate a particular ‘vibe’ before it means anything.

1

Theory, Practice and Gothic Carnival

Stephen King’s story ‘The Raft’ first appeared in the pornographic magazine Gallery, before it was republished in his 1985 collection of short fictions, Skeleton Crew. It narrates the story of Randy, Deke, Rachel and LaVerne, four university students who swim out to a raft anchored fifty yards from the shore of the secluded Cascade Lake. Deke and Randy are close friends, Deke an athletics star and Randy in pre-med. We do not learn what Rachel and LaVerne are studying, only that Rachel is a blonde, nervy city girl, and LaVerne is a brunette. In any case, these details are incidental. The narrative is not really interested in representing people but in destroying them; unluckily for the friends, the lake is menaced by an amorphous, hypnotising black blob that devours them, one by one.

Rachel dies first. Deke is next, gruesomely pulled between the planks of the raft and consumed. LaVerne and Randy remain, scared and cold as night falls. Huddling for warmth, the pair begin to have sex, but alas, the thing envelops LaVerne’s hair, which hangs down in the water, and then consumes her. Randy is left alone and hopeless for a day before he throws himself to the monster.

King’s narrative is interested in describing unusual mutilations of the human body. Deke virtually explodes as he is sucked through the half-inch gap in the raft’s planks:

Blood was pouring from Deke’s eyes, coming with such force that they had bugged out almost comically with the force of the haemorrhage . . . Blood streamed from both of Deke’s ears. His face was a hideous purple turnip, swelled shapeless with the hydrostatic pressure of some unbelievable reversal . . .¹

As Deke dies, we learn he ‘voided a great jet of blood, so thick it was almost solid’.² LaVerne is reduced to an abject state as she is covered in the blood that shoots out of Deke. ‘"Oooog!" she cried, her face twisted in half-mad revulsion. "Oooog! Blood! Ooooog, blood! Blood!" She rubbed at herself and only succeeded in smearing it around.’³ Once Rachel is caught in the blob, her arm is reduced to something that ‘looked a little like a rolled roast of beef’.⁴

How should we interpret a story like this? There have been at least three critical attempts. Tony Magistrale believes one of King’s major themes is the betrayal of innocence, and argues this is a useful frame in which to read ‘The Raft’. Magistrale’s reading makes the blob primarily a metaphor for a youthful fear of adulthood. He believes that:

In its ambiguity and destructive hunger, the dark circle (reminiscent of the spiral imagery in Pet Sematary) becomes a symbol of the mystery of adulthood – capable of mesmerizing at the same time as it plunders – and Randy in particular gains acute insight into this realm before he perishes.⁵

The narrative is accorded value because it seems to say something about what it is to be a young person, and offers us ‘insight’. ‘The Raft’ becomes a coming-of-age story. Heidi Strengell suggests another reason: when Randy tells the monster to ‘go to California and find a Roger Corman movie to audition for’, this apparently gives ‘postmodern substance to the validated nightmare cliché’.⁶ In this reading, the tale’s engagement with the intellectual zeitgeist is reason enough to examine it. In another reading, Linda Badley observes that King changes to using capitalised letters to denote that Rachel is screaming while she is eaten by the blob: ‘Help it hurts please help it hurts IT HURTS IT HURRRRR–.’⁷ Badley argues that ‘King reclaims the discounted or discredited language of the body, especially the body in pain.’⁸

‘Insight’, ‘postmodern substance’, and the reclamation of discredited languages are all appropriate reasons to praise or defend a work of literature. However, each of these readings carefully avoids the rather more obvious point about the narrative, namely that it is, before anything else, an explicitly sadistic and sexualised depiction of the death of four young people. Magistrale privileges an allegorical reading over a simply representational one, completely avoiding the tale’s matter. Strengell takes a throwaway joke and uses it to attach the weight of discourse to the text. Badley, at least, addresses the substance of the narrative, but avoids the idea that this spectacular mutilation is written to be relished rather than abhorred. By finding qualities we expect to find in literary fiction in this genre exercise, these critics, while attempting to champion King, simply offer apologies, entirely evading what the text is really offering: an opportunity for readers to take pleasure in the spectacular horrors represented.

Magistrale, Strengell and Badley apply the familiar approaches of academic criticism, and are able to extract the sorts of readings we expect; the problem is that in making these points, their readings do not engage with the primary function of the story. Their readings presume we care about how the characters feel or what they have to say. Sometimes, when we read Gothic narrative this is the case, and King is quite capable of developing characters his readers will care about; but this is not his approach in ‘The Raft’. The story depends on readers agreeing that seeing the four destroyed is an entertaining proposition. To this end, we are distanced from the characters; they are sketches rather than portraits. Our sense of the characters as substantial, as deeply mimetic, is reduced. Deke is dull, a jock and a philanderer. Randy is well-named, envious of Deke’s success with women. Rachel and LaVerne are ciphers, developed in even less depth than the young men. If ‘The Raft’ were a short story in the literary sense, the sort that Michael Chabon has uncharitably described as the ‘contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth, revelatory story’,⁹ this would probably be a failing. Instead, this distance facilitates the staging of the brutalisation of the swimmers. We can enjoy the spectacular destruction of the unfortunate students unencumbered by the readerly concern we might experience if we were deeply involved in these figures.

Given the principle of ‘The Raft’ it is unsurprising that King’s success has troubled the kind of critic who values literature only in the valorised sense, such as Harold Bloom.¹⁰ Yet the critics who argue for the value of ‘The Raft’ do so by claiming that the story holds the kinds of values that we attach to so-called ‘serious’ literature. Perhaps there is another way of assessing the story that addresses its unliterary qualities.

King himself tends to resist allegorical readings of horror, arguing that sometimes meanings are not the most important things offered by a text, asking, ‘to simply delight the reader is enough, isn’t it?’¹¹ While King makes his argument lightly, its implications are substantial; he does not deny the importance of reflective, thoughtful, meaningful reading, but suggests the primary mode in which horror readers and writers operate is more concerned with the immediate pleasure of the reader. The complaint that King’s writing – at least in the simple gross-out mode of ‘The Raft’ – is not of literary quality is really a category error. King is not aiming for specifically literary quality in tales like ‘The Raft’. As King reflects, in relation to another of his particularly cruel and bizarre stories, the autophagous shocker ‘Survivor Type’, ‘I guess Faulkner never would have written anything like this, huh? Oh, well.’¹²

Strengell writes in the conclusion of her monograph on King, ‘Indeed, the horror genre has always been plagued by its fascination with the grotesque . . . I have attempted to show more reasons for King’s popularity than the visceral.’¹³ Aside from the perplexing suggestion that grotesquery plagues horror, a concern that amounts to a feeling that horror might be horrible, Strengell’s tone is apologetic, as if the only way to accord value to King is to demonstrate that his work is, at heart, literary. King’s defenders tend to argue that what is good about his texts is good despite the fact that he often writes horror. What if a substantial part of King’s value is that he is good at writing horrors and has contributed to the ongoing invention of a national imaginary macabre? What if ‘The Raft’ is valuable because it is horrible? And what if, rather than asking to be read in earnest, the story is an opportunity for a kind of play?

This chapter considers how we might acknowledge the presence of distinct practices and values within the American Gothic, suggesting that often these texts are used by their native audience (that is, common readers largely outside the academy) in a way that differs from how the body of literature is read and used by those readers. No matter how fruitful interpretive ‘academic’ readings of genre texts can be, these readings seldom describe the wicked playfulness that is a major part of the American Gothic. To make this observation, the chapter considers genre as a notion, noting that most descriptions of genre are either loosely essentialist or historicised, before suggesting that this tension might be resolved through Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, where genre can be understood as a practice. This view of genre can provide a useful framework to understand how the kind of Gothic that celebrates rather than condemns the horrible differs from ‘serious’ literature; simply, it is a text that demands a different reading practice. Gothic studies would profit from making this distinction.

While there were significant works that treated the genre earlier,¹⁴ Gothic studies, the specialist academic field that treats the genre, was established in the mid-to-late 1970s, with works such as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s pioneering 1979 book The Madwoman in the Attic, Eve Kosofky Sedgwick’s The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1980) and especially David Punter’s The Literature of Terror (1980). These works injected new energy and interest