Gothic Metaphysics: From Alchemy to the Anthropocene

By Jodey Castricano

Gothic Metaphysics is a radical departure from Freudian-centred criticism of Gothic literature. It aims to explore our modern dilemma in the time of the Anthropocene, by bringing to light the role of Gothic since its inception in 1764 in holding space for a worldview familiar to certain mystical traditions – such as alchemy, which held to the view of a living cosmos yet later deemed ‘uncanny’ and anachronistic by Freud. In developing this idea, Gothic Metaphysics explores the influence of the Middle Ages on the emergence of Gothic, seeing it as an encrypted genre that serves as the site of a ‘live burial’ of ‘animism’, which has emerged in the notion of ‘quantum entanglement’ best described by Carl G. Jung and physicist Wolfgang Pauli in the theory of synchronicity linking alchemy with quantum mechanics. This relationship finds itself in dialogue with the Gothic’s long-held concern for the ‘sentience of space and place’, as described by renowned Gothic scholar Fredrick Frank. The volume Gothic Metaphysics is multi-valent and explores how Gothic has sustained the view of a sentient world despite the disqualification of nature – not only in respect to the extirpation of animism as a worldview, but also with regard to an affirmation of consciousness beyond that of human exceptionalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781786837967

Book preview

GOTHIC METAPHYSICS

SERIES PREFACE

Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking scholarship on Gothic in literature and film. The Gothic, which has been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is a form which plays an important role in our understanding of literary, intellectual and cultural histories. The series seeks to promote challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy. Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion, nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition. Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for scholarly developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory. The series will be of interest to students of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary and cultural histories.

SERIES EDITORS

Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield

Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi

EDITORIAL BOARD

Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts

Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia

David Punter, University of Bristol

Chris Baldick, University of London

Angela Wright, University of Sheffield

Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

For all titles in the Gothic Literary Studies series visit www.uwp.co.uk

Gothic Metaphysics

From Alchemy to the Anthropocene

Jodey Castricano

© Jodey Castricano, 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78683-794-3

e-ISBN 978-1-78683-796-7

The right of Jodey Castricano to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

1Gothic Metaphysics: An Introduction

2Occult Subjects: Parapsychology and the Foreign Body in Psychoanalysis

3There is No Occult-free Zone: Transgenerational Emergence

4An Other-valued Reality: Animism and Literature

5Ghost Dance

6Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and the Strange Question of Trans-subjectivity

7Learning to Talk with Ghosts: Canadian Gothic and the Poetics of Haunting in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach

8EcoGothic and the Anthropocene: The Ecological Subject

9Afterwor(l)ds: All my Relations

Notes

Bibliography

I do not know whether the things I have told you are of value to you, and I am sorry that I repeat things. I have also done this in my books, I always consider certain things again, and always from a new angle. My thinking is, so to speak, circular. This is a method which suits me. It is in a way a new kind of peripatetics.¹

(C. G. Jung)

That is not what I meant at all: / That is not it, at all.²

(T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’)

Something’s beginning is always a particularly magical point, the opening into a world that’s new. There – this book has already begun, which means the magic has been done. And, now, all that’s needed is to find the words to fill the abyss between beginning and end.³

(Peter Kingsley)

¹C. G. Jung, quoted in Sonu Shamdasani, Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 16.

²T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock .

³Peter Kingsley, Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity , vol. 1 (n.p.: Catafalque Press, 2018), p. 7.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Truth be told, this acknowledgements page reaches back decades to those friends, colleagues and interlocutors – human and non-human – whose generative thinking and ways of being in the world have encouraged me to keep on. Because I tend towards spatial thought, please imagine this eclectic page takes the form of a multidimensional Venn diagram that connects all beings – including non-humans – who over the years taught me what I needed to know, even when I didn’t want to learn. Thank you.

I want to acknowledge first and foremost that this book was completed while living and working upon the unceded, ancestral territory of the Syilx people of the Okanagan Nation.

I am grateful to so many past and present: most recently to my talented and truly intrepid editor, Kel Pero, for helping me chart a constellation of thoughts into Gothic Metaphysics and for raising my spirits when the going got tough. Abundant thanks to Sarah Lewis, Head of Commissioning at the University Wales Press, whose quiet patience over years encouraged and enabled me to compete this book. Likewise to the series editors Andrew Smith and Benjamin Fisher, who supported the initial proposal and its subsequent morphings. Special mention goes to Martin Bressani for inviting me to participate in ‘Architecture and the Environmental Tradition: the Atmospheric in British Architecture from 1750 to 1850’, a SSHRC-funded project that had me thinking of Gothic architecture and affective presence. Thanks, too, to the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies for support in the form of a Book Publication Grant.

Deep gratitude goes to those from the early days to the present, even though some remain in spirit only: my parents, David and Norine Castricano; Mary Gerolin, my grandmother, who knew the value of a good story; Joan Roberts, Mercedes F. Duran and Susan Clarke, some of my dearest friends. My gratitude goes also to Margaret Eady, whose faith from the beginning confirmed there was a path and that I could take it. I am also deeply thankful for those whose friendship and love meant putting in good miles, in all weather, on the road together. Some are theorists, literary scholars, dancers, poets, critical thinkers, artists, astrologers, activists, singers of songs, magicians; all are golden: Janet MacArthur, Anderson Araujo, Amanda Snyder, Shona Harrison, Jessica Stites Mor, Sharon Thesen, Jennifer Gustar, Karis Shearer, Margaret Reeves, Miriam Grant, Cynthia and Bruce Mathieson, Sonnet L’Abbé, Barb Rhodes, Debby Helf, Carlene Dingwall, Raven Sinclair, Sherry Robinson, Lorraine Weir, Joe Hetherington, Annie Monod, Maureen Mores. To Joel Faflak, Julia Wright, Jason Haslam, Jim Weldon and Emmy Misser, thank you for your friendship and wicked-good scholarship. My thanks to Michael Treschow, friend, colleague and Head of the Department of English and Cultural Studies, who opened space for me to think and write when it really counted, and to Bryce Traister, Dean of the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, whose support and encouragement made all the difference.

I am also grateful for the guidance of Corinna Stevenson and Wes Gietz, whose teachings over the past five years showed me the wisdom of council and the sweat lodge, the four-fold path of the vision quest, including the days and nights spent in solitude on the land, all of which inform my thinking in this book. And to those big-hearted questers with whom I spent many, many hours at Ravenwood in circle, sharing meals, sharing stories, finding our way: Raz Ruby Singh, Dawn King, Catherine Howe, Wade Smith, Rachel Boult, Claudia Tressel, Helen Pattinson, Chantal Lysyk, Jessica Dorzinsky and Isabelle Laplante. I also owe more than gratitude to Muriel McMahon and Nelia Tierney, guides in dreams, alchemy and the work. Last but never least, I also give thanks to the four-legged knowledge-keepers with whom I have shared this long journey: Ned, Lupin, TC, Leroy, Arthur, Felix, Willie, Harley, Max1, and, Little Bush Man, Simon. Today I live with and learn from Blue, the silver tabby, Eddie, Burmese of black cat nation, Stevie of Nicks, Norwegian Forest Cat, Siamese flame-point Ollie, the youngest, a cat with a wicked sense of humour, and, of course, Max, whose Chi-Corgi capacity for joy is boundless.

All of these beings, humans and other animals named herein, have taught me the deepest meaning of kinship. In lighter moments, they remind me that unless the house is on fire, to not take myself too seriously.

1

Gothic Metaphysics: An Introduction

A New Kind of Peripatetics: Transmissions of the Unsayable

We stand at the crossroads of change in the history of Western consciousness, and the decisions we make concern survival on this planet. On one hand, we have egocentric individualism, and on the other, an extreme collectivism. Both have become deficient, even as our current worldview rests on the premise of our separation from and mastery of nature, in which nature is treated as an object with ourselves as controlling subject, born of the belief that we have been given dominion over the earth. Indeed, this belief has its roots in the distant past, and is thought to have gained purchase during the Scientific Revolution, when this dominant mode of thinking, referred to by historians of science as ‘mechanical philosophy’, signalled the end of what historian Morris Berman calls ‘participating consciousness’, once epitomized in the Hermetic tradition by the practice of alchemy, which was ‘the last great coherent expression of participating consciousness in the West’ and was replaced by non-participating consciousness and the ‘esoteric-exoteric split’.¹

During the Renaissance, alchemy became a target for the Reformation as well as scientific positivism, and the basis for ‘radical separation of matter and spirit, or mind and body’ (p. 103). Soon all ‘mystical experiences’ came under the derogatory heading of ‘enthusiasm’, while at the centre of such mystical belief was a view of nature directly opposed to the new science, a view that held ‘that matter was alive’ and that ‘mind exists in matter’ (p. 114). This notion seems to anticipate the zone of subject/object indistinction or uncertainty intrinsic to quantum mechanics in modern physics, which did not come about until 1925, following Louis de Broglie’s 1924 wave-particle hypothesis. While quantum mechanics has set the subject–object distinction of ‘mechanistic philosophy’ on its head, its antithesis, the subject–object merger, opposed by Freud as animistic, also made inroads into psychology, as demonstrated by the theory of synchronicity, ‘an acausal connecting principle’, developed by Carl G. Jung in collaboration with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. The theory of synchronicity was presented by Jung as an updating of ‘the alchemical understanding of unus mundus (one world)’ (quoted in Main, p. 14).²

This brief historical overview gives one a sense of the paradigm clash between the Middle Ages’ view of ‘participating consciousness’ and the ‘mechanical philosophy’ of the Scientific Revolution, and it does so by tracing the development of a scientific, psychological, and metaphysical worldview reliant upon the subject–object divide. This division has been challenged by a branch of modern science concerned with ‘quantum entanglement’, what Einstein somewhat gothically referred to as ‘spooky action at a distance’, the phenomenon in which subatomic particles appear to have the ability to share a condition or a state in a kind of feedback loop. This circular development suggests the figure of the Ouroboros, one of the oldest alchemical and Gnostic symbols in the world. As a trope, the Ouroboros lends itself to a compelling view of narrative in that it is said the Ouroboros ‘can be perceived as enveloping itself, where the past (the tail) appears to disappear but really moves into an inner domain or reality, vanishing from view but still existing.’³

To seek the path of the Ouroboros by writing a literary studies monograph seems rather esoteric, if not anachronistic. It even seems paradoxical when the aim of the monograph is twofold: to engage with fiction and poetry in a critical way while seeking to move into, or at least draw attention to an ‘inner domain or reality’ that is always already constitutive of Gothic. Although that domain has ‘vanished from view’, it is the real subject of my engagement with Gothic, which I see as a ‘holding vessel’ in the Heideggerian sense. Like the vessel, the genre’s ‘thingness’ ‘does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds’.⁴ This is not to say the genre is empty, but rather that Gothic is often mistaken for nothing-to-see, because encountering an inner domain or reality risks an encounter with a worldview long repudiated, which nevertheless holds metaphysical space for itself. I am speaking of alchemy and the Hermetic tradition, and thus of animism. This nothing-to-see involves a worldview that, like the tail of the Ouroboros, has ostensibly vanished. Yet, as I will argue, this world-view has not been extirpated, but has remained under the auspices of Gothic, a genre which can be said to be ‘expressive of the field (that is, the inner domain of reality) from which it is generated’.⁵

Recalling the Ouroboros, it is at this vanishing point that Gothic Metaphysics: From Alchemy to the Anthropocene begins. It aims to explore our modern dilemma in the time of the Anthropocene by bringing to light the role of Gothic (literature) in holding space for what Weber referred to as the ‘disenchantment of the world’. This book also seeks to highlight how Gothic, when seen as a meta/physics, has kept ‘alive’ a consciousness deemed ‘uncanny’ and anachronistic by Freud, which will have to be reimagined into a new and more intensive form at this moment of the Anthropocene. This intensive form will contribute to a new model of reality based on a certain ‘entanglement’ – call it neo-animism – that slips not into a naive worldview based upon nostalgia for a golden past, but into one that brings us to the demise of a ‘one-sided mechanistic-causal mode of thought’.⁶ All of this is to say that by the eighteenth century, if Gothic had not existed, it would have had to be invented.

A few words, perhaps a caveat, regarding the style and structure of Gothic Metaphysics. Readers are advised that they will come across content that may seem repetitive, or to echo with some familiarity. In my defence, if that is even necessary, I want to offer the reader, who may find any such echoes distracting or, at worst, annoying, the same reason for my idiosyncratic method as was articulated by Carl G. Jung, which I have used as one of the epigraphs: ‘I am sorry that I repeat things … I always consider certain things again, and always from a new angle. My thinking is, so to speak, circular. This is a method which suits me … a new kind of peripatetics.’ Furthermore, each chapter can be seen to stand alone while at the same time harbouring an echo of previous chapters. Because a metaphysics of Gothic is also a poetics, I see this style/structure dyad as the workings of refrain. I hope, dear Reader, you will see the method as creating new angles and, being somewhat performative in a way that suits you too.

The Realm of the Unmediated: Live Burial

Although there is a tendency to view ‘mystical’ traditions as anachronistic and inherently anti-modern, this study takes as a premise that such ‘systems’ are not merely cultural narratives subject to continuous change under social and historical conditions, but remain active and productive in terms of emergence. Thus, to a certain extent, I am thinking of ‘Gothic’ in the spirit of Victoria Nelson’s discussion of the relocation of the ‘supernatural’ in genre wherein she says: ‘if the postmodern indeed turns out to be the premodern … we now stand at the threshold of a paradigm shift whose scope is equivalent to that of the seventeenth century … [in that it now] draws heavily from the premodern image of a living cosmos.’⁷ In this sense, ‘Gothic’ functions as an emergent ‘object’ that undermines anthropocentrism by positing other-than-human consciousnesses, a thought so profoundly germane to the Anthropocene that it is disregarded at our peril. I mean to say that Gothic posits other-than-human consciousnesses, and undermines anthropocentrism by addressing the ‘tension’ that arose, according to Remo Roth, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, ‘where quantitative science began to supersede the archaistic-magic worldview of the alchemy of the Middle Ages.’⁸ In developing this idea, Gothic Metaphysics explores the influence of the Middle Ages, in particular, alchemical thought, on the emergence of Gothic, seeing it as an encrypted genre that serves as the site of what I’d like to call a ‘live burial’, helping preserve ‘animism’ into the twenty-first century. Although this thought goes against the grain of Freud’s consignment of animism, in his 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’, to the dustbin of ‘previously surmounted thought’, Gothic Metaphysics is not a nostalgic return to a ‘golden era’, but rather an exploration of the rise of Gothic as an ontological and epistemological placeholder, a crypt, perhap, an interment in the history of consciousness. Gothic, however, is not an obituary but rather lives on, an unrepentant revenant.

Freud, who according to Victoria Nelson, ‘secularized metaphysics’,⁹ once mused that he ‘should not be surprised to hear that psychoanalysis, which is concerned with laying bare [the] hidden forces [in the psychology of the Middle Ages,] has itself become uncanny to many people for that very reason’.¹⁰ One has to wonder to what ‘hidden forces’ Freud is referring. What is it about the ‘psychology’ of the Middle Ages that makes psychoanalysis so ‘uncanny’ – again, in spite of Freud’s dismissal of animism as ‘previously surmounted thought’ and his stance on keeping psychoanalysis an ‘occult’-free zone? Was psychoanalysis haunted or inhabited by these ‘hidden forces’ to the extent that Freud felt compelled to write ‘The Uncanny’ to keep these forces at bay? It is interesting that Freud’s essay became – and remains – an aesthetic theory central to Gothic studies from Horace Walpole onwards, in spite of the fact that Freud’s lens is not only anthropocentric, but also casts a shadow on animism, which is intrinsic to Gothic. Indeed, Gothic criticism is historically and almost inextricably tethered to the work and theories of Freud, which, it can be argued, are indebted to the five hundred years of materialist science preceding the rise of psychoanalysis.

The Realm of the Unmediated

Into the mystery with you!¹¹

(Stephen King, Bag of Bones)

Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.

(Hamlet, I.i.42)

In Raids on the Unthinkable: Freudian and Jungian Psychoanalysis, Paul Kugler claims that ‘while psychic images are representations experienced in the sphere of consciousness, the realm of unmediated experience is the realm of the unconscious. And about this subject we cannot speak’.¹² While the question of the unspeakable must, by definition, remain unresolved, it is, nevertheless, a central yet paradoxically ineffable concern of Gothic Metaphysics: From Alchemy to the Anthropocene, a study that seeks to explore Gothic not solely as a genre but rather as a significant metaphysical outlier to a worldview that had previously involved ‘the progressive removal of mind, or spirit, from phenomenal appearances’,¹³ and that thereby privileged rationalism and vérité.

Indeed, the eighteenth century saw the rise of the realist novel, dominated by the aesthetic principles of verisimilitude, veracity, and irony that were clearly antithetical to the Gothic novel, which was seen to ‘exist … almost purely for the sake of evoking pleasant terror’,¹⁴ or that Gothic ‘came into existence and endured because it gave pleasure and satisfaction to its readers’.¹⁵ It would also appear that the ‘pleasure’, the ‘pleasant terror’ or ‘satisfaction’ evoked by Gothic texts was accomplished through what Fred Botting calls a ‘negative aesthetics’, the realm of the ‘not beautiful’, the inharmonious, the disproportionate. Furthermore, Gothic texts were seen as ‘anti-social in content and function’ and, for the most part, considered to have no redeeming features; as Botting describes them, they were ‘invariably considered to be of little artistic merit, crude, formulaic productions for vulgar, uncultivated tastes’. Gothic style was anti-rational in that it ‘conjure[d] up obscure otherworldly phenomena or the dark arts, alchemical arcane and occult forms normally characterized as delusion, apparition, deception’ and was ‘not tied to a natural order of things as defined by realism’.¹⁶

In Botting’s, Monk’s and Day’s descriptions of Gothic there is much to dwell upon. For one thing, we see Gothic relegated to the second-rate status of literature, capable only of titillating the reader by evoking ‘pleasant terror’. For another, and more significantly, we see in Botting’s observations the privileging of realism in the eighteenth century as something based on ‘a natural order’, an aesthetic that provides evidence of a paradigm shift in the perception of reality that was dismissive of an alchemical worldview seen through the lens of Enlightenment as being delusional and deceptive, with the implication that the ‘dark arts’ ought to be relegated to the dustbin of history. It is telling that Botting’s Gothic makes no further reference to the dismissal of alchemy or the ‘dark arts’; the absence of reference to these as being significant seems in alignment with the emergence of Gothic itself, which is tied to the progressive removal from nature of mind or spirit that came about with the extirpation of alchemy and animism. To put my concerns more plainly: if Gothic serves as the site of ‘live burial’, it is of a worldview, a reality, in which matter and nature are accorded consciousness or sentience and seen as not only alive but purposive.¹⁷

At this juncture, though, one might wonder why I am choosing to take up the case of Gothic in this regard rather than, say, Anglo-American Romanticism, when the latter, even beyond literary studies, is deeply identified with animism. Such is the case, for example, with authors such as the anthropologist Stewart Elliott Guthrie, who, in Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion, asserts that, even though animism runs throughout Western literature and in every period,

its zenith occurs in English Romanticism, which makes the whole sensory world alive, sentient, and capable of communication. Motion again especially suggests life. Everything also participates in a larger sentient being which unites the universe as a single living entity.¹⁸

Although Guthrie is not a literary scholar, he bases his exploration of animism in Romanticism, acknowledging in particular the perspective of William Wordsworth, who imagines, says Guthrie, a ‘soul animating and informing all nature’ (p. 57). So here again is the question a reader of Gothic Metaphysics might be asking: Why Gothic at all, especially since the genre has traditionally been seen, as Anne Williams points out, ‘as something relative and subordinate to its early contemporary, Romanticism’ and as ‘keepers of the House of Fiction have always treated Gothic as a skeleton in the closet’.¹⁹

Making a case for a Gothic metaphysics may seem outlandish or anachronistic, or may just be a thankless task, for, as Williams observes, ‘Twentieth century criticism records an increasingly effective repression of the Romantic poets’ kinship to the Gothic’; more to the point, even ‘philosophy has erected an … impenetrable wall between Gothic and Romantic’ (p. 4). Such is the case that, as Williams says, ‘the question of the Gothic’s relation to Romantic poetry almost never arises any more’ (p. 5). In this regard it would appear that, historically, Gothic is subject to a certain politics of exclusion in philosophy, while in literary studies Gothic owes its critical existence, and perhaps longevity, to Freudian psychoanalysis, which is always already disparaging of animism as anachronistic. In other words, contemporary Gothic studies, in being faithful to Freud, approaches animism as merely a literary trope rather than in any veridical terms. In Gothic studies, psychoanalysis becomes an interpretive method that delimits what we can say about ‘mystical’ experience, or, for that matter, about the animistic relation of psyche to matter. One could say that Gothic studies has a pact with psychoanalysis regarding uncanny conditions, which, as Geoffrey Hartman says, are ‘accepted as … functional belief[s] only in fiction’ and are ‘considered dysfunctional in terms of mental health unless demystified by [Freudian] psychoanalysis’.²⁰ In Gothic studies, psychoanalysis paradoxically demands a certain realist approach, which is probably what Graham Harman has in mind when he points out that ‘psychoanalysis cannot take us very far beyond the sphere of human culture, and it leaves the inanimate world [such as it is] largely untouched’.²¹ All of this is to say that there is a case to be made for rethinking approaches to Gothic literature. Making this case will require a critique of Freudian assumptions that may seem to focus on Freud but is, more importantly, a critique of the Freudian antinomies of the ‘mystical’ as well as the institutionalization of Freud in Gothic studies. Furthermore, as will be seen, making the case requires a critique informed by the work of Carl G. Jung and a re-evaluation of mystical, animist and alchemical modes of thought as being linked to quantum physics, new materialism, Indigenous philosophy and even deconstruction.

Furthermore, concerning wall-building, Anne Williams points out that Robert D. Hume’s influential essay, ‘Gothic versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel’ (1969), ‘builds a case for the irrevocable difference between Gothic and Romantic on just such philosophical grounds’. Indeed, Williams draws attention to Hume’s first footnote, which calls Gothic the ‘illegitimate cousin’ of Romantic poetry.²² Philosophically, aesthetically, psychologically and, shall I venture to include, spiritually, it would appear Gothic fails to make the grade because, according to Hume, ‘The Gothic literary endeavor is not that of the transcendent romantic imagination’.²³ If Gothic is thus so easily dismissed in comparison with high Romanticism and by philosophy, why take up the torch?

The short answer, to use the words of William James, is that, like James, I ‘now believe that he who will pay attention to facts of the sort dear to mystics, while reflecting upon them in academic-scientific ways, will be in the best possible position to help philosophy’.²⁴ The other reason why I feel it is worthwhile to turn our attention to Gothic is that I strongly agree with Anne Williams, who wrote in 1995 that ‘a radical remapping of the territory is warranted’ when it comes to Gothic, if only because, in Williams’s words, ‘Gothic and Romantic are not two but one’.²⁵ This is notwithstanding the fact that the two, like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, have been set in mutual opposition or ranked hierarchically. Keeping that configuration in mind, I propose to ‘remap’ Gothic via a certain metaphysics – although I should make clear that, as a literary scholar, I am using ‘metaphysical’ in a more eclectic way than might a philosopher. I draw upon the work of Carl Jung in collaboration with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, as well as on contemporary, non-scientific thought connecting quantum physics with alchemy, and thus forge an understanding of Gothic in relation to a call to change our relationship to the natural world in the time of the Anthropocene.

I am appealing to metaphysics because the metaphysical is concerned with the nature of ‘reality’, which I argue is also the concern of Gothic, as I regard it as not only a literary genre but also a worldview that has contemporary relevance. That is, I am working with metaphysics because I am seeking to explore a worldview that, speaking metaphysically, is ‘beyond the physical’, yet, paradoxically, is deeply concerned with the matter of ‘nature’ and sentience. In this regard, my appeal to metaphysics might be seen to align with the philosophical ‘naturalists’ who link metaphysics with the laws of nature, although most naturalist perspectives seek explanation in classical physics. This is where I differ in my approach and appeal to metaphysics. In seeking to engage the significance of the question: What is real? in Gothic studies, I will, as a non-scientist, be bringing the philosophy of quantum physics into conversation with Gothic’s concern with nature. I will necessarily be drawing attention to the metaphysical legacy of animism and alchemy for quantum theory, as that relationship was germane, as mentioned, to the work of Carl Jung and his collaborator, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, in developing the theory of synchronicity. According to Jung, synchronicity represents ‘a modern differentiation of the obsolete concept of correspondence, sympathy and harmony’ and ‘designates the parallelism of time and meaning between psychic and psychophysical event, which scientific knowledge so far has been unable to reduce to a common principle’.²⁶ I also take the liberty of using metaphysics in Gothic studies not only because I need to reflect