Amy Wallen | December 2015

NOTES

With Coppola’s Dracula, then, Gothic dies, divested of its excesses, of its transgressions, horrors and diabolical laughter, of its brilliant gloom and rich darkness, of its artificial and suggestive forms. Dying, of course, might just be the prelude to other spectral return.
—Fred Botting, Gothic: The New Critical Idiom

If Gothic fiction has died, as Fred Botting proposes, then it has risen from the grave and inhabited literary nonfiction.

In this essay, William Styron’s memoir is used as evidence the Gothic style exists in creative nonfiction. Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness deals with Styron’s own struggle within himself as he spirals toward suicide. Styron is a well-known writer of American Gothic fiction, but here is an example of the same mode used in the memoir form as Stryon writes about an internal struggle with his antagonist.

Definition of the Gothic

In the 18^th century, the physical setting of the Gothic involved medieval castles set among the Alps or Pyrenees, environments of abandonment and incarceration such as dungeons or chasms and abysses. But over the centuries, as the Gothic tradition continued, the setting came to represent the same emotional evocation of desolation, only in a more modern world.

…the Gothic has become in such ways a mobile form, and so had generated significant traditions where there are no medieval castles at all, [as] in the Americas.¹

 

The dark setting of the Gothic evokes fear and anxiety through sensory imagery, and also creates an atmosphere that permeates the readers’ psyche. As Abrams’s A Glossary of Literary Terms defines it, “[the Gothic] develops a brooding atmosphere of gloom and terror, represents events which are uncanny or macabre or melodramatically violent, and often deals with aberrant psychological states….”²

Within the Gothic, figurative language and dark imagery formulate a fallen world, not only with the mysterious ambience, but also within the characters. To illicit the despair and degeneration standard in the Gothic, much of the setting is conjured by the characters’ situation: “The isolation of the protagonist is another principal testimony to the fallen nature of the Gothic world and is probably, next to setting, the best-known characteristic of Gothic fiction.”³

Another element of the Gothic is the grotesque. “[T]he grotesque is essentially disharmonious… [and] all involve the human body in a quite direct way.”⁴ “The sense of the grotesque, irrational and menacing presence pervading the everyday, and causing its decomposition, emerges in the Gothic fiction produced, predominately, in the Southern states of America.”⁵ Styron is not a stranger to this element in his Southern writing.

According to Wolfgang Kayser, quoted in Philip Thomson’s The Grotesque: The Critical Idiom, what may make the grotesque an essential element of the Gothic is its nature, since the grotesque is “an attempt to control and exorcise the demonic elements in the world.”⁶ The grotesque also provides a comedic element, which in the Gothic mode is helpful in transcending the limits of thought and entering the realm of emotion for the reader. Laughter opens up the reader’s vulnerability to the atmosphere of the grotesque, a step toward the edge of the chasm created by terror, the fourth element to be discussed.

Each of these previous elements—the imagery, isolated characters, and the grotesque—are developed to reach the Gothic’s aim which is to evoke chilling terror: “The Gothic world, like the fallen world, is blighted, a place of danger, sorrow, and exile… the ambience of despair and degeneration….”⁷ Each element envelops the other. Eliciting terror with the culmination of the above elements creates the awe and wonderment of the Gothic.

The Gothic, not to be confused with the horror genre, creates terror from which we cannot look away, fear intermixed with fascination. The atmosphere develops an incomprehensible terror. Each of the elements put forth in the definition, build an obscurity, a mysteriousness. The unknown is part of the Gothic mode; the unknown brings forth in the reader the fear and fascination, conjoined emotions essential to the Gothic. “Gothic form, then, is affective form… these works are primarily structured so as to elicit particular responses in the reader.”⁸

This essay will examine these elements of the Gothic: setting as atmosphere, isolation of the characters, the grotesque, and terror mixed with fascination, used in Styron’s nonfiction text.

Examination of Styron’s Memoir

In Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, William Styron begins with a Gothic depiction of his Paris setting, “…on a chilly evening late in October… [he] became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder in [his] mind… might have a fatal outcome.”⁹ He creates the atmosphere, both in his surroundings and with his internal conflict, as dank and evil with the interweaving of these sample phrases: “…rain slick street… a dully glowing neon sign…¹⁰ [he] passed the gray stone façade in a drizzle …[he] had come fatally full circle¹¹… [in his] dank joylessness … the gloom”¹² “…gloom crowding in on [him], a sense of dread and alienation and, above all, stifling anxiety.”¹³ He has set up the dank and evil atmosphere prevalent in his external world and in his personal mood. This depiction of his setting and his depression has similar characteristics to Botting’s description of what constitutes the Gothic: “Darkness, metaphorically, threatened the light of reason with what it did not know. Gloom cast perceptions of formal order and unified design into obscurity; its uncertainty generated both a sense of mystery and passions and emotions alien to reason.”¹⁴

Styron’s narrative casts a Gothic setting with shadows and gloom, then shifts into the depiction of the isolation or alienation of the protagonist—himself. Quoting Job in his epigraph, Styron begins the Gothic affect to characterize his disease with that same obscurity as Botting describes:

For the thing which
I greatly feared is come upon me,
and that which I was afraid of
Is come unto me.
I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.¹⁵

The encroachment of an unspecific, but personal danger and struggle, is intimated from the start with this epigraph. Styron builds his vulnerability when he describes the peril and obscurity: “Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self—to the mediating intellect—as to verge close to being beyond description.”¹⁶ He further illuminates how the “emotions alien to reason” actualize the obscurity, or even more, the oblivion in the excerpt below.

…[T]he gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain… owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned… no breeze stirs this cauldron, because there is no escape from this smothering confinement… the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.¹⁷

Styron continues with the allegorical isolation as he describes how alcohol had been for him a means “to calm the anxiety and incipient dread that [he] had hidden away for so long somewhere in the dungeons of [his] spirit.”¹⁸ Dungeons, usually the dark, underground prison of medieval castles, provide an early element from 18^th-century Gothic setting, which continues through to postmodern American Gothic narrative. Styron’s dungeon provides a physical comparison to the dank joylessness he references at the beginning of the memoir. He takes the reader inside the dark hallways of his mind, so to speak. The inscrutable disease, his antagonist, resides inside the dungeon of himself, and this merging of these elements creates an entanglement that holds the reader in awe of how deliverance ever could be possible. By using dungeon as setting and incarcerated character, he inculcates in the reader two elements of the Gothic. His mind is where he has locked away his “dread.” Dread, another clue to impending doom, also sets up the inevitable terror that is encroaching. As Judith Wilt explained, “Dread is the father and mother of the Gothic. Dread begets rage and fright and cruel horror, or awe and worship….”¹⁹

When Styron applies the grotesque, he incorporates it into terror. Styron’s personal terror is expressed in “the reality that [his] mind was dissolving….”²⁰ The physical action, “dissolving” draws an image of a melting or liquefying brain. Further, Styron describes the disease as, “this leaden and poisonous mood the color of verdigris.”²¹ “Leaden” provides the symptom of the burden of the disease with which the patient becomes exhausted from carrying. “Poisonous mood” depicts how the disease infects the mind and body, like a venom, with the intention of death. It is apropos that Styron chose verdigris, the color of patina, as the visual color to depict this poisonous burden. Verdigris creates the physical image of aging, calcification, or decomposition. This is the grotesque image of the abstruse illness with which Styron draws the mood of the Gothic. 

“The horror of depression,” Styron says, “…for those who have known it, is a simulacrum of all the evil of our world…”²² or an effigy, a likeness of a monstrosity. He creates many physical images of the disease throughout the memoir, but as Styron delineates his recovery in the hospital, he plays with the grotesque, as his sense of comedy improves and creates another silly simulacrum. “[He] began to dabble happily in colored modeling clay, sculpting at first a horrid little green skull with bared teeth, which [his] teacher pronounced a splendid replica of [his] depression.”²³ Styron’s grotesque with its comedic absurdity is an example of how nonfiction creates a metaphor with the elements from the past. The green skull depicts the horrific poison of the mind. But, he “happily” sculpted it, creating both a funny and dark moment. The absurd image of his illness is pronounced “splendid,” a positive remark veering the moment toward the comic. Both “happily” and “splendid” bookend the skull with bared teeth which, standing alone, would represent a much darker image.

Botting also states, “Gothic terrors and horrors emanate from readers’ identifications with heroes and heroines… escaping the monsters and penetrating the forest, subterranean or narrative labyrinths of the Gothic nightmare.”²⁴ If monsters of various forms are an essential element of the Gothic, then how are these typically fictional entities personified in Styron’s nonfiction? First, he creates the chase: “There is a Sisyphean torment in the fact that a great number—as many as half—of those who are devastated once will be struck again …to deal with the ogre.”²⁵ The perpetual, the unavailing attack by the disease intimates a pursuit with no foreseeable escape from this “ogre,” or the disease of depression. Styron establishes the setting of the chase with, “the twistings of [his] mind’s labyrinth”²⁶ and describes the venery’s onset with “those demons… beginning to swarm through [his] subconscious….”²⁷ With monster-like images and allusive actions, Styron creates the scenario essential to the Gothic.

The memoir diverges from Styron’s own internal struggle, while he tells the tales of others who have struggled with the same ogre and demons of depression. For these victims of the disease, the chase ends fatally. Author Albert Camus, for instance, died in a car wreck, and “he supposedly knew the driver… to be a speed demon.”²⁸ Did Styron choose to tell us this detail because it would provide the image of evil incarnate in the word “demon?” In the next sentence, his text personifies, or incarnates, the ride with the speed demon: “an element of recklessness in the accident that bore overtones of the near-suicidal, at least of a death flirtation.”²⁹ The use of the phrase “death flirtation” insinuates a personal interaction with death on Camus’s part that riding with the speed demon was a wooing or courting of the embodiment of death. Seduction in the Gothic is commonplace, e.g. Dracula’s victims succumb to his spell.

Styron also reflects on the beginning of Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living….”³⁰ I conclude from this reference that his fellow writer, Camus, and as he shows us, other friends, have succumbed to the romance, and often been defeated by the seduction, the awe of death. This sets up the essential terror and simultaneous fascination, that which draws the protagonist into the danger, but also pulls the reader into the terror. Styron has referenced his own death-by-suicide in Gothic terms by calling it the “ogre”—so fascinating, so attractive as to lure the protagonist in with its seduction of an alternative to the heavy poison and pain. 

Styron incarnates death, or at least creates the ethereal of a ghost with, “Death, as I have said, was now a daily presence, blowing over me in cold gusts.”³¹ Describing his struggle with the lure of suicide, in the same paragraph he says, “I would soon meet it face to face.”³² This implies that suicide has a face, as a human, or a ghost, has a face. He makes corporeal that which he is trying to escape.

Terror is acute throughout the tale and peaks when his depression reaches its climax: “I watched myself in mingled terror and fascination as I began to make the necessary preparation… putting together a suicide note, which I felt obsessed with necessity to compose.”³³ The emotional denouement comes when Styron uses Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy as allegory for his own personal spiral downward.

…his all-too-familiar lines still arrest the imagination with their augury of the unknowable, the black struggle to come:³⁴
In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
For I had lost the right path³⁵

Styron even mentions the hospital where he recovers as “a way station, a purgatory,”³⁶ in citing the second part of Dante’s epic poem. And, in the last lines of the book, Styron references Dante again: “For those who have dwelt in depression’s dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward out of hell’s black depths….”³⁷ The terror is prevalent, until released with “emerging into what he saw as ‘the shining world.’”³⁸ The invoking of language from Dante’s Inferno provides the comparison of spiraling into hell, and then making his way out. Hell, physically, could be envisaged as a deep dark recess with very little chance for escape, a typical Gothic setting. A setting absorbed into the protagonist, in this case Styron. 

With his weaving of the elements described above, Styron creates a dungeon setting, an evil incarnate antagonist, and the beguiling interplay of the terrors all existing within himself. Styron’s use of the Gothic to relate the story of his depression takes it from an indescribable disease to one that penetrates the emotional surface for the reader.

Conclusion

When Botting states in this essay’s epitaph that the Gothic has died, he is referring to how the postmodern version of the Gothic “for all its claims to authenticity, does not evoke the horror capable of expelling the evil.”³⁹ By “authenticity” Botting refers to movie director Francis Ford Coppola’s inability to sustain a modern day version of Bram Stoker’s original novel Dracula using present day Gothic ambivalence. From the 18^th century, when the Gothic came into being, to the 21^st century, the past and present contain radical differences as far as what evokes terror. For instance, diseases of the blood are prominent in both Stoker’s 19^th-century novel and Coppola’s 20^th-century movie, syphilis and HIV respectively. Coppola’s “Dracula is not simply an object of sublime horror.”⁴⁰ With the AIDS virus, “Dracula is less tyrannical and demonic and more victim and sufferer, less libertine and more sentimental romantic hero.”⁴¹ The attempt at the Gothic on Coppola’s part, in Botting’s opinion, is dulled by creating a more sympathetic character.

Botting explained the early critics’ condemnation of 18^th-century Gothic novels in comparison to true stories, succinctly when he says, “Writing from life is considered [at the time] the morally instructive way to ward off ‘monsters’ of the imagination….”⁴² Real stories, what today we would categorize as literary nonfiction, were considered “guidance in the ways of the world.”⁴³ Fiction was said to be “the straying of fancy from the paths of nature [and] demonstrated a more depraved taste.”⁴⁴ But today, over three centuries have passed since Gothic novels were considered depraved, and in fact, if Botting’s declaration of its death above is true, then Gothic novels have become sympathetic in their sense of reality. Though, it is this same “fancy” which is what matters most in the reincarnation of the Gothic in literary nonfiction. Conventions have pushed the boundaries of propriety over the years. “Representations of vice as monster,”⁴⁵ once considered a novelistic approach

…[gave] a familiar relation of such things… as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves… to deceive us into a persuasion (at least while we are reading) that all is real, until we are affected by the joys or distresses, of the person in the story, as if they were our own.⁴⁶

This perception of monsters, whether as physical antagonist or representations of weakness in the protagonist, the memoirist, is the vagary created in creative nonfiction to imply the incomprehensible terror to the reader. Not all frightening nonfiction tales lend themselves to the fancy of the Gothic, but when a strangeness or delusion colludes with the Gothic elements described herein, the mode may be innately appropriate. This innateness, I would conclude, is the perception of the author. The Gothic mode can be the metaphor for the terror the author experienced. 

Styron recreated for the reader an understanding of his own personal terror when he showed the disease of depression as a metaphorical demon who pursues him toward death’s door. Written in this Gothic tradition, with the disease being the villain and Styron the hero, then the stage is set for a deeper understanding of the disease and its pervasiveness from Styron’s perspective. Pervasiveness is key here. The ambivalence created in the elaborations used in the Gothic elements’ depictions creates the darker mood of the spooky unknown that the author wants implied. 

The Gothic’s affecting elements are what create transcendence for the reader. Depression is an important topic, and an enveloping of the most acute feelings actualizes a phenomenal experience for the reader.

Styron’s memoir is catalogued under both “autobiography” and “psychology.” As Styron states in his Author’s Note: “This book began as a lecture . . . on affective disorders sponsored by the Department of Psychiatry of The Johns Hopkins University of Medicine.” The embodiment of the depression suffered by Styron, and many others, represents the usage of the grotesque, the inability to escape an evil incarnate, and all of these create the terror that at times imbues the disorder of depression. The subject matter itself, depression, an affective disorder of the mind, meets the criteria of “aberrant psychological states,” as Abrams described in his definition of the Gothic. But most especially, Styron’s portrayal of his experience created the necessary affect that inhabits the Gothic. He used the Gothic to reflect his nightmare.

But is there any other way for Styron to tell the dark tale than in the Gothic style? Much literary nonfiction has been written about mental illness without using the elements of terror and horror. Oliver Sacks, for instance, in A Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, writes of mental illness without haunting images, but, “Fordham University scholar Leonard Cassuto… points out that Sacks’s case histories have precisely the opposite effect: ‘Medicine killed the old-time freak show by pathologizing its exhibits. Johnny the Leopard Boy inspires no wonder and awe if you say, instead, that ‘poor John is suffering from vitiligo.’”⁴⁷ Styron chose the Gothic to instead describe the disorder using the gloomy atmosphere, isolation, the grotesque, and the abject fear associated with all of these Gothic elements, instead of pathologizing the disease for the reader.

Another example of memoir about an aberrant psychological state would be Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking. Didion, in writing about the frightening time dealing with the grief of her husband’s sudden death while their daughter lay in a coma at the hospital, wrote about suffering delusion and insanity, but without the Gothic. As the New Yorker magazine describes her memoir, “[Coolness was always part of the addictive appeal of Didion’s writing,”⁴⁸ and the more baroque style of the Gothic would not have suited the coolness of Joan Didion.

The Gothic provided the best way for Styron to allow the reader go inside his own experience of terror and seduction. Styron came to it inherently, as he describes the irony of how his own “demons”⁴⁹ permeated his fiction writing:

I never gave much thought to my work in terms of its connection with the subconscious… [but] Suicide has been a persistent theme in my books—three of my major characters killed themselves… I was stunned to perceive how accurately I had created the landscape of depression in the minds of these young women, describing with what could only be instinct, out of a subconscious already roiled by disturbances of mood, the psychic imbalance that led them to destruction. Thus depression, when it came to me, was in fact no stranger, not even a visitor totally unannounced; it had been tapping at my door for decades.⁵⁰

In other words, the Gothic in Styron’s literary nonfiction provides a reach to an understanding, or transcendence to a darker emotion for the reader. “There’s a long history of people being intensely curious about the ‘dark side,’ and trying to make sense of it,” says Frank Farley, PhD, psychologist at Temple University.⁵¹

In the description of Sacks’s work above, the reader completes an understanding of the mental illness, but the understanding remains purely cognitive. But, with the Gothic influence, there is an emotional experience for the reader, based in the unknown, the truly incomprehensible. This ambivalence cleaves to the subconscious of the reader.

For the Gothic to enter the realm of creative nonfiction is a wonderful development for readers who like to be scared, who are what some would call “thrill-seekers.” There is also an underlying reason why some of us seek thrills, why we like the adrenalin rush, why we want to feel that fear and enter the sublime. In a discussion of the tradition of Halloween, scary movies and Stephen King novels, Leon Rappoport, PhD professor of psychology at Kansas State University states, “The experience [of fear] provides a sort of relief in much the way that an exorcism could be said to do.”⁵² An exorcism, an expelling of an evil spirit, could also be used to describe the history of the Gothic’s reputation. “[The] ‘Gothic’, [was] a general and derogatory term for the Middle Ages which conjured up ideas of barbarous customs and practices, of superstition, ignorance, extravagant fancies and natural wildness.”⁵³ Also, the grotesque, as noted earlier, is considered an exorcism of the demonic. Still, the idea of exorcism within the Gothic, the sense of a catharsis is, not for the author per se, but for the reader, instituted. Book critic Michiko Kakutani states in a review of an unrelated memoir, “the exposed life is not the same as the examined one.”⁵⁴ A tale rife with human agony and terror can be made purgative by the Gothic tradition.

As Botting says, “Gothic can perhaps be called the only true literary tradition. Or its stain.”⁵⁵ In addition to Gothic ambience wrapped around the narrative, the grotesque revealing comically gruesome character traits, and the seduction of the sinister antagonists, the rendering of Styron’s memoir carries an inherent sense of the macabre necessary for the Gothic tradition. Styron was an experienced Southern Gothic writer in fiction, so it may be no surprise that his works in literary nonfiction slips so easily into the Gothic mode. But if the Gothic is dead, as Botting is quoted in the opening of this essay, then I propose it is reincarnated in the literary nonfiction genre. It’s a natural place for the Gothic to land.

But what about this “stain”?

The Gothic mode’s transcendence permeates the reader’s psyche, and this memory after the book is closed, this permeation, is a stain—fading, not disappearing. In my opinion, the Gothic, if personified, would be proud of the title “Stain,” for the darker connotation alone. But, more than likely, the word “stain” references the style’s unlikelihood of disappearing completely, like the undead.         

Amy Wallen is the author of the bestselling novel, MoonPies and Movie Stars (Penguin, 2007). She is a senior writer-in-residence at New York State Summer Writers Institute. She received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Amy is currently at work on a second novel and her gothic memoir.

Notes

1. Chris Baldick, The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. xvi.
2. M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (Fort Worth: Holt Rinehart, 1993), p. 78.
3. Ann B. Tracy, The Gothic Novel 1790–1830 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981), p. 5.
4. Philip Thomson, The Grotesque: The Critical Idiom (London: Metheun, 1972), p. 8.
5. Fred Botting, Gothic: The New Critical Idiom (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 160.
6. Thomson, The Grotesque, p. 18.
7. Tracy, The Gothic Novel 1790–1830, p. 10.
8. George E. Haggerty, Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), p. 8.
9. William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (New York: Vintage, 1990) p. 3.
10. Styron, Darkness Visible, p. 3.
11. Ibid., p. 4.
12. Ibid., p. 5.
13. Ibid., p. 12.
14. Botting, Gothic, p. 32.
15. Job 3:25-26 in Styron, Darkness Visible, epigraph.
16. Styron, Darkness Visible, p. 7.
17. Ibid., p. 50.
18. Ibid., p. 40.
19. Judith Wilt, Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot & Lawrence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 5.
20. Styron, Darkness Visible, p. 12.
21. Ibid., p. 24.
22. Ibid., p. 83.
23. Ibid., p. 74.
24. Botting, Gothic, p. 7.
25. Styron, Darkness Visible, pp. 75–76.
26. Ibid., p. 35.
27. Ibid., p. 43.
28. Ibid., p. 22.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., p. 23.
31. Ibid., p. 50.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., p. 65.
34. Ibid., pp. 82–83.
35. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Random House, 2013), p. 11 in Styron, Darkness Visible, p. 83.
36. Styron, Darkness Visible, p. 69.
37. Ibid., p. 84.
38. Ibid.
39. Botting, Gothic, p. 177.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., p. 178.
42. Ibid., p. 25.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., p. 27.
46. Ibid., pp. 29–30.
47. Steve Silberman, “The Fully Immersive Mind of Oliver Sacks,” Wired (April, 2002). Wired Digital, Inc. 2009. The Conde Nast Publications. March 20, 2013. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.04/sacks_pr.html.
48. The New Yorker, “Books Briefly Noted” The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. (Conde Nast. October 10, 2005). http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/10/051010crbn_brieflynoted2
49. Styron, Darkness Visible, p. 43.
50. Ibid., p. 79.
51. “Thrill-Seekers Thrive on the Scary” WebMd, Feature Article, (WebMd A-Z Guides, 2002. WebMd, LLC. April 28, 2013). http://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/features/exploring-thrill-seeking-personalities
52. Ibid.
53. Botting, Gothic, p. 22.
54. Michiko Kakutani, “‘Amaze Me,’ Mother Said, So That’s What She Did,” (The New York Times, November 5, 2009: C25. The New York Times. 2009. The New York Times Company, May 6, 2013). http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/06/books/06book.html?pagewanted=all&_r=
55. Botting, Gothic, p. 16.