Philosophy of The Gothic

A Philosophical View of the Gothic Novel
Author(s): Marshall Brown

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer, 1987), pp. 275-301
Published by: Boston University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25600652 .
Accessed: 18/11/2012 19:02
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Boston University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Studies in
Romanticism.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.82.207 on Sun, 18 Nov 2012 19:02:51 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
MARSHALL BROWN
A View of the
Philosophical
Gothic Novel
c'est assez
dire: ab?me et satire de l'ab?me

(Jacques Derrida, La V?rit? en peinture, 1978)
dream as as other and this reminds me

Philosophers wildly persons:
of the well-known German Kant. He appears to have
philosopher,
been troubled with dreams beyond most men's imagination: for
Wasianski informs us that they were absolutely appalling; and that
scenes or passages in those dreams were sufficient to compose
single
"the whole course of mighty alarmed him, how
tragedies." They
ever, so sometimes, that his servant often him out
greatly, caught
of his bed, to escape to some other part of his house.
endeavouring
(Charles Bucke, On the Beauties, Harmonies
and Sublimities ofNature, 1831)
ARE INCLINED TO TAKE THE ARTIFICIAL hallucinations of the gOthic

too or else not are the mechan
WE seriously, seriously enough. They
ical of second-rate authors, set in motion one
outpourings impulsively
day in 1764 by a hung-over dilettante, an enduring fad thatwas a clich?

from its inception.1 Extending into dramatic fable the lives and emotions
of their twisted authors, offer a
they spontaneous?and thoughtless?
i. The best study of the time-worn topoi of terror remains Marianne Thalmann's Der
Trivialroman des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts: Ein Beitrag zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Geheim
bundmystik (Berlin, 1921).
SiR, 26 (Summer 1987)
275
276 MARSHALL BROWN
record of "erotic sensibility."2 Or they transcribe, with little or no

mediating reflection, the collective political and social instincts of the
multitudes.3 Even recent Lacanian studies where is the focus
language
still tie the gothic closely to psychological and political realities: the
mirror or aristocratic the gothic toward
stage tyranny.4 Calling "halfway
becoming a language" or imaging it as a crypt, they pique our curiosity

as to what kind of threshold the gothic erects or what lies within its
blackness.5 But then return us to the of our
they perplexities experience,
becoming too readily ensnared by the fragile threads that tie the gothic
to our lives and not attending sufficiently to the play of the dark powers.
Iwould like to reverse the priorities of our gothic criticism, treating,
for instance, Frankenstein's monster as a not a Paul
thought, thing.
Sherwin has written of the monster "not as a in search of
only signifier
its proper signification but as a literal being thatmeans only itself" and
as "apparently the thing itself."6 But the thing itself, das Ding an sich, is
precisely an eternal signified that is never a signifier; it is not an object
of real but a of our reason, the con
experience, mysterious hypothesis
2. The well-known comes from Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, tr. Angus
phrase
Davidson (London, New York: Oxford UP, 1970) xv. It is unnecessary to enumerate
psychological studies of the gothic here, but note a good recent study of Walpole, Beck
ford, and Lewis that is liable to be overlooked: Giovanna Franci, La Messa in scena del
terrore (Ravenna: Longo, 1982).
3. Cf., for instance, Ronald "Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution,"
Paulson, ELH
48 (1981): Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions
532-54, and David
from 1763 to thePresent Day (London and New York: Longman, 1980). In "Mary Shelley's
Monster: Politics and Psyche in Frankenstein," Lee Sterrenburg demonstrates a conscious
political allegory in the novel. See The Endurance of'Frankenstein,' ed. George Levine and
U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 1979) 143-71.
4. Paradigmatic is the essay by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "The Character in the Veil:
Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel," PMLA 96 (1981): 255-70.

5. The quoted phrase comes from Sedgwick 263. On the crypt see Jerrold E. Hogle,
"The Restless Labyrinth: Cryptonomy in the Gothic Novel," Arizona Quarterly 36 (1980):
330-58.
6. Paul Sherwin, "Frankenstein: Creation as Catastrophe," PMLA 96 (1981): 891, 886.
Hogle likewise uses the telltale phrase, with greater precision: "The 'thing itself never
emerges, even when its ghost appears complete" (338). See also Joyce Carol Oates,
"Frankenstein's Fallen Angel," Critical Inquiry 10 (1984): 543-54, which calls the monster
"(sub)-human consciousness-in-the-making" (546); the conclusion of Northrop Frye's

"Yorick: The Romantic Macabre," in A Study ofEnglish Romanticism (New York: Random
House, 1968) 51-85, which usefully, if too generally, relates gothic sleep and death to
Kant's noumenon; and Michel Serres' account of a gothic painting in "Turner Translates
Carnot," Hermes, ed. Josu? Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1982) 60: "Man has constructed a thing-nature. The painter makes one see
the entrails of this thing: stochastic bundles, dualism of sources, winking fires, itsmaterial
entrails, which are the very womb of the world."
THE GOTHIC NOVEL 277
jectural substratum perpetually hinted at by theworld we know.7 What

kind of stone, after all, is free, a Franken-stein? The substance is
gothic
a thing whose materiality has been sublimated into a freedom from all
factors, it at once madness, dream, and "Crit
conditioning making play.
ics," writes Charles Nodier about his tale, "Smarra, ou les d?mons de
la nuit," that the end leaves a vague and inextricable
"say only nearly
idea; that the narrator's spirit, continually distracted by fleeting details,
gets lost on any pretext in digressions without object; that the transitions
of the tale seem abandoned to the whim of language like a stake in a
. . .
game of dice. This is the praise I should always have desired. These
characteristics are those of a dream."8
precisely
The hauntings and torments of the gothic make man a plaything of
higher powers. But behind their sadism lies a reduction of the physical.
The body is kneaded until it is desiccated and inert, and at that point a
mysterious residual freedom of the spirit arises from the petrified corpse.
"True lies in a can of me?
happiness being stone?Nobody complain
all day long I do nothing?am a stone."9 This gothic condition has
apparently nothing to do with the world of ordinary experience; its
"stony Dread" (Blake, "Earth's Answer") lies beyond any recognizable
pity and fear. Yet the gothic lavishes its most colorful eloquence on a
region that lies, precisely, at the limits of experience.
I had no no
thought, feeling?none?
the stones I stood a stone,
Among
And was, scarce conscious what I wist,
As shrubless crags within themist;

For all was blank, and bleak, and grey;
It was not it was not
night, day;
It was not even the dungeon-light,
So hateful to my heavy sight,
But vacancy space,
absorbing
And fixedness without a place;
There were no stars, no earth, no time,
No check, no no no crime,
change, good,
7- This is the substance, though not the imagery, of Hegel's critique of Kant's Ding an
sich: "To the object an unknown thingness-in-itself behind knowledge is ascribed, which
thus?and truth along with it?is considered an absolute beyond for knowledge." Wissen
scha? der Logik, in Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1969) vi: 500 (Part 11, sect. 3, eh. 2, A).
8. Charles Nodier, Contes, ed. Pierre-Georges Castex (Paris: Garnier, 1961) 43.
9. William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. David McCracken (London: Oxford UP, 1970)
334
278 MARSHALL BROWN
But silence, and a stirless breath
Which neither was of life nor death;

A sea of idleness,
stagnant
Blind, boundless, mute, and motionless.
(Byron, "The Prisoner of Chill?n" ix)1()
Byronic entropy seems like a denial of everything, yet from it emerges

an and a voluble Elsewhere the of
impassioned speaker poem. poet
darkness produces his nightmare of annihilation by troping upon the
cadences of Genesis: "The world was void, / The populous and the
was a / Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, life
powerful lump,
less, /A lump of death?a chaos of hard clay" ("Darkness" 69-72). Such
an harbors an energy of creation or as becomes
apocalypse regeneration,
explicit in the shattering and scattering at the end of another poem of

the same year, "The of Corinth."
Siege
That one moment left no trace
More of human form or face

Save a scatter'd or bone:
scalp
And down came rafters, strown
blazing
Around, and many a stone,
falling
Deeply dinted in the clay,

All blacken'd there and reeking lay.
All the living things that heard
The deadly earth-shock disappear'd:
The wild birds flew; thewild dogs fled,
And howling left the unburied dead. . .
(1050-60)
Without so much as a full stop in the sentence, the apparently universal

destruction becomes a prophetic blast of harmony uttered in passion by
the chorus of liberated and increasingly personified animals?camels,
steer, bull-frogs, wolves (1068: "echo rolled in thunder"), jackals (1071:
"Like crying babe")?concluding with the triumphant flight of the eagle.
"Thus was Corinth lost and won!" (1078)?the eagle's terminal motto
means, in our context, that the fallen stones will rise again.
In the gothic physical destruction and mental resistance are mutual
and inseparable: we can see the principle again in the best known of
Nodier's later tales, "In?s de las Sierras." The tale begins when a band
of travelers on Christmas Eve take in a haunted castle.
refuge decrepit,
io. Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 1970).
to Byron's works are cited parenthetically in the text.
Subsequent quotations
As so often, the presence of spirits is linked with the decay of masonry?

an edifice to its origin as mere stone or mere dust.
returning Precisely
at midnight on Christmas Eve the ghostly In?s appears, an extraordi
narily beautiful and seductive figure. In her soulless madness she reduces
the travelers to stones: "we must have resembled those petrified figures
of Oriental tales whom death has seized in themidst of life" (686). Yet
gothic petrifaction is inseparable from exaltation. Nodier's ecstasy strikes
a different note from Godwin's ataraxia or nihilism,
Byron's passionate
for all three the stone betokens a release. "The two essences of my
yet
being separated distinctly inmy thought: the one, inert and clumsy, that
was held fast by itsmaterial weight on one of the chairs of the castle;
to the
sky with
the other, transformed, that mounted the words
already
of In?s, and that received, at theirwill, all the impressions of a new life,
inexhaustible in delights" (688). The ghost, who later proves to be a
famous and mysterious performer known as la Pedrina (the little stone),
then begins to dance, and her leaps reveal the freedom ordinarily locked
up within the stony materials of the world. "She returned, she turned
on herself, like a flower that the wind has detached from its stalk; she
leaped from the earth as if it depended only on her to leave it forever;
she descended as if it depended only on her not to touch it" (690).
Persecuted by malicious relatives and deprived of her patrimony, In?s
finds her freedom as a stone. Readers have tended to express
dancing
dissatisfaction with the conclusion of this story, in which the supernat
ural is away and In?s's madness is cured, her to
explained enabling
establish herself in a career. Yet the conclusion can be as a
regarded
literalization of what the gothic has always implied as it dies into life,
namely that the occult forces it portrays are what Hegel calls "das Innere
"
der Dinge, the hidden inside of theworld that they constitute and that
we
experience.
Iwould agree, then, with Francis Hart's contention that "the demonic
is no no but a ..." Yet it is not "... a
myth, superstition, reality.
in human character or Instead, the con
reality relationship."11 gothic
fronts us with a transcendent reality, the reality of the thing in itself, of
the stone in its freedom from empirical limitations. Their very crudeness
in what can never be constitutes novels as
imagining experienced gothic
pure instruments that investigate the origins of experience.
speculative
From the supernatural of the novelists to the transcendental of the
il. Francis Russell Hart, "The Experience of Character in the Gothic Novel," Experience
in theNovel, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (New York and London: Columbia UP, 1968) 83
108. Hart's valuable essay borrows the term "demonic" from Goethe; it goes wrong by
resonance in Goethe's
failing to recognize the transcendental usage.
280 MARSHALL BROWN
is thus no distance than from a numinous to

philosophers greater object
a noumenal one: both the self-indulgent frivolity of the gothic and the
seriousness of philosophy were dedicated, at least in part,
self-sacrificing
to the powers and conditionin?
imagining unimaginable surrounding
our world.
everyday
Suppose, then, that we consider romantic novels as

thought
gothic
that test the limits not of human endurance, but more
experiments just
specifically of human reason. Typically, after all, they devote farmore

space to the thoughts and feelings of the victim and (often) of the
demon than to the mechanisms of punishment and torment.
persecuting
What would be left of a man, these novels ask, if all human society
were stripped away, all customary perception, all the expected regularity
of cause and effect? They ask, in other words, what man is in himself,
when deprived of all the external supports that channel ordinary expe
rience. What resources, if any, does the mind retain in isolation? What
is the nature of pure consciousness?12 And this, in turn, is the funda
mental question of Kant's epistemology. The tangled skeins of influence
are not the issue here?though gothic novelists likeHoffmann and Balzac
readily absorbed the gothic psychology developed by Kant's disciples?
but rather a common concern with consciousness that pervades post
Enlightenment culture. A spirit of pure speculation was abroad in the

romantic period that broke through the barriers of selfhood to further
the life of the spirit.13
II
Numerous to such transcendental are scattered

temptations speculation
Kant's To be sure, Kant warns us
throughout major writings. repeatedly
against the lure of personifying the transcendental ideals?God, freedom,
and immortality. It is a a of
"paralogism," "subreption hypostasized
12. Writing of dreams, Nodier is as explicit on this motivation of the gothic as any
author I have seen. "It seems that the
spirit, obscured by shadows from eternal life, never
frees itselfwith more facility than under the sweet empire of this intermittent death, where
it is permitted to rest in its proper essence, sheltered from all the influences of the
conventional personality that society has made." "De quelques ph?nom?nes du sommeil,"
Oeuvres (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1968) v: 161. I hope to demonstrate more fully in a
book in progress how the gothic first probed this unsocialized "proper essence" of the
soul, whereas earlier, as Stephen Greenblatt has written in Renaissance Self-Fashioning
(Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1980) 256, "there were, so far as I could tell, no
moments of pure, unfettered subjectivity; indeed, the human subject itself began to seem
remarkably unfree, the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society."
13. Cf. Jerome Christcnsen, "Byron's Career: The Speculative Stage," ELH 52 (1985):
59-84.
consciousness" to who incarnate

imagine supernatural beings actually
the ideals. But clearly, the very act of denial acknowledges the impulse.
It is not too much to say that Kant's imagination, like that of a gothic
novelist, is haunted at its edges by a mysterious world beyond the
limitations of understanding; as has recently been written in the only
of Kant from this perspective, "The Kantian con
comprehensive study
struction of the enlightened subject contains an opaque etiology, a his
tory of terror, of anxiety and deprivation."14 This domain is inhabited,
for instance, by that shadowy "something=X" repeatedly invoked by
the Critique of Pure Reason; this ghost of Kant's system is a presence
somewhere in the mind, yet outside the bounds of experience. And in
a much less guarded mood, Kant devoted his last influential essay, "On
Eternal Peace," to that sweet dream" in which this world
"dreaming
reason becomes habitable, where the "mad freedom" of
beyond savages
to be "a race . . .must
proves rational after all, where of devils bring
about the condition of peace inwhich laws have force."15 Such language
shows us how the transcendental can
closely imagination approximate
a vision.16
gothic
"Did the Sage of K?nigsberg Have No Dreams?" asks one of our
leading Kant scholars in a thorough essay that endeavors to keep within
the limits of Kant's text.17 His answer is, in effect: no, Kant never
slept,
14-Hartmut and Gernot B?hme, Das Andere der Vernunfi: Zur Entwicklung von Ration
alit?tsstrukturen am Beispiel Kants (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983) 15. Of particular
relevance are the discussions of dreams and of hypochondria, 232-72 and 387-423 respec
tively. This fine book emphasizes the costs of Kant's rationalism and undervalues the ways
that Kant's repressions to define and eventually to chart the unconscious. There
helped
are many toward a reconstruction of the "Kantian unconscious" in
tantalizing suggestions
the writings about him by Jacques Derrida and by Jean-Luc Nancy.
15. I cite Kant from Werke, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, 6 vols. (Frankfurt: Insel, 1956?
64). Page references are given in standard form to the first (A) edition of each work, in
this case, A 3, 32, 60.
16.Martin Heidegger's Kant und das Problem derMetaphysik (1929; 4th ed., Frankfurt
am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1973) remains the classic account of the imaginative
mystery of origins in Kant. Heidegger's focus on the motif of the pure as elaborated in
the central arguments of the Critique ofPure Reason deflects him from the question of why
the "abyss" of "the transcendental imagination frightened" Kant (162). The answer, I
argue, can be inferred from essays, incidental metaphors and contemporary
peripheral
writings to which Kant later essay, "Kants These ?ber das Sein,"
Heidegger's
responds.
Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main:
Vittorio Klostermann, 1967) 273-307, opens up the
ambivalence of thought (305?6) through a focus on the "mere" (blo?) rather than the pure,
and with the?surely not fortuitous?example of being, "this stone is" (283).
17. Lewis White Beck, "Did the Sage of K?nigsberg Have No Dreams?" Essays on Kant
and Hume (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1978) 38-60. David Simpson phrases the
accepted wisdom in this way: "Kant ignored the evidence of such states as dreaming and
282 MARSHALL BROWN
he only suffered from periods of deficient wakefulness. Yet one of the

effects of Kant's was to stimulate
writing unquestionably imaginative
speculation. For here is how Kant looked in his own day, to a reader of
1788: "I of Kant's 'Dreams of a Ghost-Seer' in relation to his
thought
Kant now realizes his fantasies and dreams
present writings. through
serious cold philosophy; which is all the more comprehensible since it
was a philosopher who fantasized in that book and philosophers are said
to reason better in dreams than awake."18 Kant's of
frequently thought
the limits is a dream of pure reason, yet also a dream beyond the bounds
of ordinary rationality, a realm of spirit inhabited by spirits, a world
where mad savages and devils live at eternal peace. Here, outside of any
possible limits, the purity of transcendence merges into the demonic

violence of the supernatural. "What was God doing with himself before
the creation?" asks Beckett's Moran, and the question unwittingly echoes
a barb launched against his erstwhile teacher and friend Kant by Johann
Gottfried Herder, who speaks in a letter of November 1798, of "the
disgusting playing with itself, the onanism of pure-impure reason."19
Michel Foucault has written illuminatingly of what he calls the

to issued in different modes the Mar
"preface transgression" by Kant,
quis de Sade, and Ann Radcliffe.20 But he does not cite any texts where
Kant invites us to the limits set on rational
transgress understanding.
Here is one such text, the conclusion to section 33 of the Prolegomena to
Any Future Metaphysic. "There is indeed [literally: in the deed] with our
as
madness simply not appropriate to the account of transcendental psychology," The
Politics ofAmerican English, 1776-1850 (New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986) 233.
18. Karl Philipp Moritz, "Fragmente aus dem Tagebuche eines Beobachters Seinselbst,"
rv?)6i oaOx?v oder Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde vi.2 (1788): 55-61. This journal
founded by Moritz (a novelist and esthetician who was a close friend of Goethe's) was, I
believe, the first periodical devoted primarily to experimental psychology. It combines
abstract, philosophical articles with reports of empirical observations of abnormal states.
After Moritz died, itwas edited by Salomon Maim?n, a philosopher who tried to combine
elements of Kantian idealism with the affective philosophy of Jacobi.
19. Samuel Beckett, Three Novels (New York: Grove, 1965)^ 167. Herders Briefe, ed.
Wilhelm Dobbek (Weimar: Volksverlag Weimar, 1959) 388. Beckett's original French is
more graphic: "Que foutait Dieu avant la cr?ation?" Molloy (Paris: Union g?n?rale d'?di
tions, 1959) 222. The context is a very gothic list of "theological" questions.
20. Michel Foucault, "Preface to Transgression," and "Language to Infinity," in Lan
guage, Counter-Memory, Practice, tr.Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y. :Cornell UP, 1977)
29-52 and 53-65. I think, however, that Foucault iswrong at one point in suggesting that
Kant foreclosed metaphysical speculation (38). See further two seminal essays by Ernst
Bloch, to which my title pays homage, "Philosophische Ansicht des Detektivromans" and
"Philosophische Ansicht des K?nstlerromans," Verfremdungen 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,

1962) 37-63 and 64-80.
pure concepts of the understanding something ensnaring [Verf?ngliches],

with to the enticement to a transcendent use. . . .
respect [Anlockung]
Therefore of the understanding seem to have far more meaning
concepts
and content than that the mere use in experience could exhaust their
entire determination, and so the understanding builds itself unobserved

next to the house of experience a yet far roomier annex [Nebengeb?ude],
which it [literally: he] fills up with mere creatures of thought, without
once that with its otherwise correct it has
noting thoughts transgressed
over the boundaries of its use" (A 105-6, italics added). What deeds
does the pimp understanding transact with the bawd reason in its roomy,
yet hidden annex, filled with ghosts (creatures of thought)? Rather than
pursue the question, Kant draws the line. He begins the next section by
saying, "Therefore two important, indeed entirely indispensable, al
examinations were which were under
though extremely dry necessary,
taken Crit. page 137 etc. and page 235 etc." (A 106). Why such a
curt and cryptic reference here? And why were such dry
forbidding,
investigations necessary? Is something dangerous being kept out of sight,
something too fruity or juicy for polite mention? The simple, pure
consciousness of self is in itself?in its own house, which is not a genuine
house, but an annex?neither nor Its simplicity and purity
simple pure.
are the products of a at the and the transcendence of
repression origin,
the transcendental ego is the sublimation that accompanies that repres
sion. These are the ghosts that haunt the edges of Kant's imagination.21
The medical and psychiatric literature of the quarter century following
publication of the Critique of Pure Reason is filled with works that take
Kant's invitation to the erotic or insane realm of
up equivocal explore
consciousness. The very titles of these works often tell the story:
pure
"Fragments from the Diary of an Observer of Himself," "Outline of

theMetaphysics of Inner Nature," "The Dissolution of the Unity of
Our Body in Self-consciousness." Not all such essays live up to their
titles, but some do, and they circumscribe a Kantian theory of the spirit,
of madness, and?to cite one more title?"Of the Brain as
original
Organ of the Soul."22 From this extensive and influential body of writing
21. de Kant: Conte moral (Paris: Payot, 1984), Bernard Edelman

In La Maison has derived
an eloquent, even sensational view, in the spirit
from Kant's pragmatic essays and lectures
of Artaud, of Kant's world as bifurcated between inside and outside, rigid domesticity
and chaotic violence. Since he ignores the crucial threshold, or transcendental, dimension,
his view of Kant's house is not fundamentally an advance over that of the anonymous
rationalist who writes in the Berlinische Monatsschrifi, 6 (Nov. 1785) 432: "All marvelous
things will sooner succeed in Lavater's house than in Kant's or in that of another cold
blooded philosopher." De Quincey and Charles Bucke knew better.
22. The first of these essays is cited in note 18. The others are Carl Christian Schmid,
284 MARSHALL BROWN
it is possible to assemble a picture of the gothic personality as both the

limit form and also the essential embodiment of human consciousness.
One of the period, for instance, was the life-force, and
leading concept
the best witness to the underlying life-force of the human spirit is the
energy welling up inmadness when all hope is lost.23
Ill
What, then, do the gothic novels look likewhen viewed as transcendent

fictions? Let us consider, as a first Maturin's
epistemological example,
Melmoth theWanderer.,24The title figure in this spirited and sadistic di
vertissement has sold his soul to theDevil in return for an extended life,
on the understanding that he will be relieved of his punishment if he
can find a victim willing to assume his destiny. The novel relates the
stories of those whom Melmoth makes the object of his seductions and
persecutions during a span of well over a century. As is typical of gothic
novels, these stories are interlaced in a pattern that becomes dizzyingly
"Abri? der Metaphysik der innern Natur," Psychologisches Magazin 3 (1798): 294-353;
Johann Christian Reil, "Das Zerfallen der Einheit unsers K?rpers im Selbstbewusstseyn,"
Beytr?ge zur Bef?rderung einer Kurmethode auf psychischem Wege 1 (1808): 550-85; Carl
Christian Schmid, "?ber das Gehirn als Seelenorgan," Psychologisches Magazin 3 (1798):
102-11. Schmid was one of Kant's closest disciples and the author, among many other
works, of an early lexicon to Kant's writings, W?rterbuch zum leichteren Gebrauch der
Kantischen Schriften (Jena: Croker, 1788). His Psychologisches Magazin was founded as a
successor to Moritz' Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde. The soul organ (e.g., Descartes'
pineal gland)?the soul as "thing"?was the topic of S. Th. S?mmerring's ?ber das Organ
der Seele(K?nigsberg: Nicolovius, 1796), for which Kant wrote an equivocal introduction.
23. See C. W. Hufeland, "Mein Begriff von der Lebenskraft," fournal der practischen
Heilkunde 6 (1798): 785-96, also inHufeland's Kleine Medizinische Schriften, 2 vols. (Berlin:
Reimer, 1822-23) II: 344~54- See further Reil's early critique of Hufeland, "Von der
Lebenskraft," in Reil's Gesammelte physiologische Schriften 1 (Vienna, 1811): 3?133, together
with numerous essays on the topic in Reil's periodical, Archiv fiir die Physiologie, 10 vols.
0 795?181 o). Hufeland, a practitioner rather than a metaphysician, was court physician in
Weimar and for many years editor of the fournal der practischen Heilkunde. He was also
friends with Kant, who reviewed a political essay by Hufeland and who analyzed some
of Hufeland's in detail in the medical
writings section of "The Quarrel of the Faculties."
Another of Hufeland's
preoccupations moves us even closer to the gothic milieu: see his
mortuarial essay of 1792 against the premature burial of the dead, "?ber die Ungewi?heit
des Todes und das einzige untr?gliche Mittel sich von seiner Unm?glichkeit zu
?berzeugen
und das Lebendigbegraben unm?glich zu machen," in Kleine Medizinische Schriften 1: 272
324. As Robert Kiely has written, "Frankenstein digging about in graveyards and charnel
houses, matching eyeballs and saving bones, is not an inspiring sight" (The Romantic Novel
in England [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1972] 162); itwas, however, not altogether
unlike the professional researches into the life-force of the soul that were inspired by Kant.
24. Cited from Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, ed. Douglas Grant (London:
Oxford UP, 1972).
intricate.25 Not only is narrative disbelief but often narrative

suspended,
as well. As a result, we seem to enter what David
comprehensibility
Punter has called a world
of "self-validating fictions" (64), that is, a
disembodied realm of pure story.
However exquisitely gory themode of attack, Melmoth is typical of
gothic villains in that his real target is disembodied. Living an existence
in which, as one of his minions "emotions are my events"
says, (204),
he wants his victims to "writhfe] with all the impotent agony of an
incarcerated mind" and to suffer "the agony of consciousness" (56).
Physically secluded by imprisonment, the victim is literally chained to

a point in space and figuratively chained to the weary succession of
hours. But this is only the first step in torment. The greatest intensity
of despair comes where the victim is released into a limbo, uprooted
and driven out into a world seemingly beyond space and time. "Even
in the Inquisition I belonged to somebody,?I was watched and
guarded;?now I was the outcast of the whole earth, and I wept with
equal bitterness and depression at the hopeless vastness of the desert I

had to traverse" (151). This spiritual desolation is, of course, not Mel
moth's final either; he wants to win over his victim's consciousness,
goal
not to destroy it.The climactic struggle takes place between two minds,
and the victim's salvation depends on finding the right answer to a
that forms the title of one of Kant's most
question interesting essays,
"What Does ItMean: To Orient Oneself in Thought?"
The offers three answers to the of orientation. The
gothic question
first answer is madness. In Melmoth, as in most fiction,
early gothic
madness is neither sin nor Instead it is, as I have
punishment. already
the purest state of consciousness, without any defin
suggested, thought
able object of thought. The victim can no longer choose and is therefore
relieved of the agony of choice. This first answer to the question of
orientation is thus a or hiatus in however
respite temptation; nightmar
ish, madness functions in its purity like a sleep followed by awakening.
"Perhaps the profound tranquility of my last abode," says one victim,
referring to a bout of insanity, "contributed more than anything else to
the recovery of my reason" (216). The second response to disorientation
would be to follow Melmoth into sin. "'Escape?escape for your life,'

cried the tempter; 'break forth into life, liberty, and sanity'" (58). Life,
and are here in of Kant's tran
liberty, sanity euphemisms perversion
25- There is a good description of structural intricacies inMelmoth, with rather limited
interpretation, in Linda Bayer-Berenbaum, The Gothic Imagination (Rutherford: Fairleigh

Dickinson UP, 1982) 75-106.
286 MARSHALL BROWN
scendental ideas, the three unfathomable yet of human

inescapable goals
striving. Life is Kant's immorality in the guise of an eternity of dam

nation, liberty is freedom and unlimited power in the physical world
coupled with spiritual enslavement, while sanity really refers to the
ultimate perspicuity of demonic knowledge, substituting for the "intui
tive that Kant attributes to the Deity. Now none of
understanding"
Melmoth's victims succumbs to these ersatz blandishments. Instead, all
choose the third answer to the question of orientation, which is the only
valid one. That is to regenerate from within, even in the absence of any
objects of experience, what Kant calls the pure forms of apperception

that make experience possible. Just as for Kant and his followers the
of is the inner sense, the sense of time, so, too,
beginning experience
time is the foundation and the saving limit of the gothic victim's expe
rience when all else is lost. Here the exemplary case is that of the priest
Mon?ada. Mon?ada reaffirms his being in the dungeons of the Inquisi
tion?which puts the question of being in this as in so many gothic
novels?by becoming an embodiment of time itself, the fundamental
of pure reason. "So I sat and counted a doubt
orienting category sixty;
to me, that I was counting them faster than the clock. Then
always occurring
I wished to be the clock, that I might have no feeling, no motive for
on the time. Then I reckoned slower. . . . Thus I
hurrying approach of
oscillated, reckoned, and measured time on my mat" Melmoth
(146?47).
wins no converts because Maturin's novel is devoted to that
showing
the disembodied, pure consciousness which the demon unveils is the
life-force itself, an obscure yet energy.
irrepressible
Thelongest of the many interlaced stories inMelmoth is that of Im
malee, the human child fostered by nature on an isolated island in the
Indian Ocean. She is at once Melmoth's polar opposite and yet also his
one willing victim. Pure good and pure evil, the ultimate beauty and
the ultimate are alike transcendent.26 Immalee retains a
sublimity only
dreamlike recollection of her true Spanish origin; to her narcissistic
consciousness the world has always been just as it is, and her island is
the universe. She resembles the demon, then, in knowing no limitations
of and time and in absolute master of her environment. The

space being
story of Immalee puts us in touch with what Kant calls the transcendental
esthetic, or the pure, undifferentiated intuition of space and time.27 And
26. See Robert Kiely's excellent discussion of the ambiguous nature of purity inMaturin
in The Romantic Novel inEngland 206-7.
27. Here, in a like vein, is what Balzac (a great admirer o? Melmoth) writes in an open
letter to Nodier: "Now, my dear Nodier, neither space nor time exists, outside of man at
least; Fichte and many great geniuses have derived them abstractly, philosophically. Time
it shows us the buried motivation for Kant's choice of so ambiguous a

designation for the opening theCritique ofPure Reason: the transcendental
esthetic is not the region of pure, untrammeled and therefore
only
undefined perception (aisthesis), but likewise the home both of the
ultimate beauty, Immalee's absolute continuity with herself, and also of
the ultimate sublimity, Melmoth's absolute discontinuity from our

world.
Such is, of course, our grasp, from its approxi

purity beyond apart
mations in the vicarious thrills of the gothic novel. Nor would we want
to any closer. For the and of Melmoth and

approach passion marriage
Immalee expose the scandal of origins, the seductions that ensnare the
ghosts inhabiting the annex to the house of experience. Their flame is

lodged in their character, and it scorches and destroys first her, then
him. The origin is the ground not of similarity, but of ineradicable
difference. "To love," says Melmoth to Immalee in a passage that con
tinues for half a page, "is to live in an existence of perpetual contradic

tions?to feel that absence is insupportable, and yet be doomed to
experience the presence of the object as almost equally so" (363). Purity
is in fact a figment of our imagination and inaccessible except through
the regressions of esthetic play, for the truth of the origin is that it begets
a of utter and time, the sublime and the
marriage opposites, space
beautiful, the unlimited and the limit.28The origin, for Kant and for the
and space are, in the sense which you give to these words, one and the same thing, which
is, with respect to us, a product of movement, and movement is, like space, an abyss as
as the idea of God, where our reason grows enfeebled when we wish to penetrate
profound
it. Sleep, another gulf into which we can plunge . . . often shows, to a man of good faith,
annihilated, in its double form of time and space properly so called. . . .
space completely
Smarra, your magic Smarra, seems to me
the poetic episode from a great work on sleep,
an episode where, with marvelous talent, you have drawn forth beyond the walls of the
brain, the most intangible features of our internal power." Honor? de Balzac, "Lettre ?
Charles Nodier," Oeuvres diverses, ed. Marcel Bouteron and Henri Lorgnon (Paris: Conard,
1938) 11: 563-64. And later, when the gothic becomes the province of the foolish and the
superstitious?like Tatyana in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (v: xi-xii) or Affery in Dickens's

Little Dorrit?a neglected child, Lu?s Cadalso in Benito P?rez Gald?s's Miau, can experience
the same fundamental intuitions: "It was the same thing to sit [sentarse] on the cold stone
and to feel himself [sentirse] assaulted by a profound dream"; "the first thing the lad saw
in his snooze was a vacant expanse, an undetermined space whose horizon blended into
the sky, with no features whatever, almost without bounds, since all was equal, the near
and the far." Miau. Marianela (M?xico: Porr?a, 1973), eh. 3: 9; eh. 40: 138.
28. For the fusion of limit and limitlessness see Kant's discussion, late in the Critique of
Pure Reason, of the correlation between infinite judgments and the category of limitation,
for which his example?not coincidentally for the present discussion?is the predicate
"nichtsterblich" (nonmortal): "All true negations are thus none other than limits or barriers
[Schranken], which they could not be named, if they were not grounded in the unlimited
288 MARSHALL BROWN
gothic, is not a unity that engenders division, as it is for Schelling and

Hegel, but a "synthesis in general" which is always already divided
within itself and which is the all but unimaginable functioning of the
"The in general is, as we shall later see, the mere
imagination. synthesis
operation of the imagination, a blind, although indispensable function of
the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever
anywhere, but of which we seldom are at all conscious" (Critique ofPure
Reason A 78, italics added). We are originally blind and thus are driven
beyond the "Transcendental Esthetic" to the second stage of theCritique,
the "Transcendental at which we learn to see. It is,
Analytic," may
oddly, the function of the transcendental analytic to legitimate the orig

inal synthesis by means of the categories of the understanding. These
are "the concepts which give unity to thispure synthesis" (A 78, Kant's
emphasis) and beget objective knowledge of the world. At the origin
lies a synthesis without unity where the pure forms of apperception
operate in unconscious darkness.
IV
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein illustrates how the technical concerns of the

transcendental emerge form the quest for pure-impure
analytic gothic
Frankenstein with a sea to the limits of
origins.29 opens captain's journey
the world. To Walton's imagination the North Pole is the navel of the
world, "Its and features may be without example"; it is the
productions
source of "the wondrous power which attracts the needle" (269). He
11 to September 12) in the Arctic,
spends tenmonths (from December
as he had formerly become "a poet and for one year lived in a Paradise
of my own creation" (271). This is for him, unquestionably, the land of
Creation, perpetuating the moment when the Lord called for the light
(the all)" (A 576). Tilottama Rajan understates the radicalism of the romantic critique of
origins when she writes, "To dream of a pure consciousness without the difficulties of
existence, or of a world of things without the complications of consciousness, is to ignore
. . . the mediation that must take place between the two" (Dark
ambiguous always
Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism [Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1980] 252-53).
The fundamental ambiguity, to borrow the terms of Barbara Johnson's The Critical
Difference (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980), is not located between con
sciousness and existence, but within the auto-affections of "pure" consciousness itself.
When Coleridge begins the remarkable "Effusion at Evening, Written in August, 1792,"
with the lines, "Imagination, Mistress of my Love! /Where shall mine Eye thy elfin haunt
explore?" he illustrates the origin of romantic consciousness in a troubled narcissistic or

incestuous self-probing.
29. Cited from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
In Three Gothic Novels, ed. Peter Fairclough (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).
(he terms it?on December n!?"a country of eternal light" 269), but
before the light has been divided from the darkness, the firmament from
the earth, the dry land from the waters, or man from the beasts.
Frankenstein's Walton's. Frankenstein too seeks to mas

quest parallels
ter the light at the origin of life, beyond the limits of all our experience:
"Life and death appeared tome ideal bounds, which I should first break
through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world" (314). "From
amid this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me" (312), he says of
the moment of creation, calling into question whose discovery this is
and whose is revealed. But it is, in any case, a more than
power physical,
a
quest that engages him, as it engages Walton. "It was
metaphysical
the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it
was the outward substance of or the inner of nature and
things spirits
the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my were
enquiries
directed to themetaphysical, or in its highest sense the physical secrets
of theworld" (296).3()
Shelley seems to have avoided reading Kant. Her monster gains his
fatally limited conception of humanity from Volney's Les Ruines, a
meditation on history presented with gothic trappings as an address to
a wanderer a the "Genius of tombs and ruins."
by "phantom," Volney
is also concerned with origins and with the conditions of experience:
witnesses of the life of man in so many different ages, retrace
"places,
for me the revolutions of this fortune! say, what were their and
springs
secret causes! from what sources he derived success and
say disgrace!
unveil to himself the causes of his evils!"31 A Rousseauistic concern for
the proper relationship of the individual to his community of fellows is
30. Harold Bloom's essay, "Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus," in The Ringers in
the Tower (Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 1971) 119-29, should long since have laid
to rest the notion that a novel concerned with the highest kind of physical secrets, namely
ones, could be reducible to a tract against scientific materialism. The old
metaphysical
canard is still abroad, however, in J?rgen Klein's essay, "Das Problem der Wissenschaft
inMary Shelleys 'Frankenstein; Or theModern Prometheus,'" England zwischen Aufkl?rung
und Romantik (T?bingen: Gunter Narr, 1983) 151-72. George Levine places the issues more
accurately in "The Ambiguous Heritage o? Frankenstein," in The Endurance of'Frankenstein'
29: "The true monstrousness is not, then, the raging id . . . but the attempt of consciousness
to impose itself on the world, either in the form of reality or science" (revised in Levine's
The Realist Imagination [Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 1981] 323). Also good on the
problem of mind in the novel is L. J. Swingle, "Frankenstein's Monster and Its Romantic
Relatives: Problems of Knowledge in English Romanticism," Texas Studies in Literature
and Language 15 (1973): 52-65. Victorian gothic is, of course, more concretely scientific;
see, for instance, Ed Block, Jr., "James Sully, Evolutionist Psychology and Late Victorian
Gothic Fiction," Victorian Studies 25 (1982): 443-67.
31. Volney's Ruins; or,Meditation on theRevolutions (Boston: 1832) 30, 34.
of Empires
290 MARSHALL BROWN
at the heart of Volney's book as it is of Shelley's, and indeed of the

second of Kant's three Yet refuses to advance from
Critiques. Volney
causes to transcendental and he has his condemn
categories, phantom
man's with "smitten with an world,
preoccupation phantoms: imaginary
man despised that of nature: for chimerical hopes, he neglected the
(51). The difference is clear when his encounter
reality" temperamental
with Les Ruines prompts Frankenstein's monster to think about issues
that Volney himself never raises: the issue of his specific identity ("And
what was I? . . .When I looked around I saw and heard of none like
me" 386) and that of epistemology ("Of what a strange nature is knowl
edge!" 386): Such metaphysical yearnings mark her advance over the
empiricist sources on which Shelley drew.
The introduction to the revised version of the novel the author's
gives
version of the gothic quest for the creation and the origin of life, as she
compares her and invention" to "the of Columbus and
"discovery story
his egg" (62). (Columbus' act was to squash one end of the shell to
demonstrate how to stand an egg upright, but surely the idea of hatching
a new world could not have been far from Shelley's mind.) Creation
comes for her, as it does for Frankenstein, "swift as light" (264). Yet
she no more reaches the Pole or ultimate than does Walton.
origin
must have a she writes, "and that
"Every thing beginning," beginning
must be linked to something that went before" (262). All three meta
physical quests beyond the limits of experience lead not to the uncon
ditioned, but rather, in good Kantian fashion, to the conditions that
make experience possible. "Invention," says Shelley (but this might
be Frankenstein "does not consist in out of
equally speaking), creating
void, but out of chaos; thematerials must, in the first place, be afforded:
it can form to dark, substances, but cannot into
give shapeless bring
being the substance itself" (262).32
Now the chaos which is discovered at the ground of all experience is
first of all a transcendental esthetic, "the region of beauty and delight,"
32. The best of many discussions of parallels among the novel's three narrators are those
of John R. Reed, "Will and Fate in Frankenstein," Bulletin of Research in theHumanities 83
(1980): 319-38, and David Ketterer, Frankenstein's Creation: The Book, theMonster, and
Human Reality (Victoria, B.C.: U of Victoria, 1979) 9-16. Ketterer, whose monograph
contains much on Shelley's
excellent material sources, wrongly contends, however, that
her notion is "taken probably from either Locke or Hume"
of invention (17); the phrase,
"dark, shapeless substances," which he omits in quoting the passage given in my text,
reflects a post-Enlightenment view of the nature of matter. At the same time, Shelley's
empiricist roots make Frankenstein more suitable than other gothic novels for detailed
comparison with the "Transcendental Analytic," which is Kant's own of
grounding
empiricism.
asWalton imagines it (269), a world of pure space and time. As Walton

the Pole, time seems reduced to mere duration: "There,
approaches
the sun is for ever visible," he says and later, "How
Margaret, (269),
slowly the time passes here" (273). And space seems reduced to mere
extension, not or unvaried, but undemarcated and unbounded,
empty
"stretched out in every direction, vast and of ice, which
irregular plains
seemed to have no end" Walton's those
(279). experiences closely parallel
of Mon?ada and Immalee, even in their verbal expression.
I discuss Frankenstein, however, not to illustrate anew the gothic
just
genesis of the pure forms of sensible intuition but also to move ahead
to the second part of the Kantian system, the "Transcendental Logic."
Here some will be necessary. Reduced to schematic terms,
exposition
Kant's as follows. Our conscious are not
argument proceeds perceptions
raw sense data, which are random and formless, but instead they spring
from some of our sense data. Now a is a
organized synthesis synthesis
or, in terms, a But, to
putting together logical judgment. according
Kant, all logical judgments necessarily abide by the forms specified by
logicians in the table of judgments.
Quantity of Judgments
Universal
Particular
Singular
2. 3
Quality Relation
Affirmative Categorical
Negative Hypothetical
Infinite Disjunctive
Modality
Problematic
Assertive
Apodictic
(A 70)
And likewise, our perceptions, if they are to be recognized by us as a
meaningful world of objects and not a mere blur, abide by the derived
table of "categories" or, as they might also be called, perceptual judg
292 MARSHALL BROWN
ments. as words must stand in some determinate relation to one

Just
another if and communication are to be so
sense
understanding possible,
data must stand in some determinate relation to one another if conscious,
sane perception is to be possible, and according to Kant the table of the
categories all the basic determinants of these relations.
specifies
Of Quantity
Unity
Plurality
Totality
2. 3
Of Quality Of Inherence and Subsistence
Reality (substantia et accidens)
Negation Of Causality and Dependence
Limitation (cause and effect)
Of Community
(reciprocity between action
and passivity)
4
Of Modality
?
Possibility Impossibility
-
Being Nonbeing
-
Necessity Contingency
(A 80)
Now a many fictions and discriminate these
great explore categories:
any concern with character and behavior has a on the
bearing category
of substance and accidence, any action raises of cause and
questions
effect, and so forth. Gothic fictions differ in that their explorations are
abstract and rather than concrete and nuanced; deal
speculative, they
with the categories in themselves rather than with the complexities of
the as are Thus the common
categories they actually experienced.33
33- The "realist" emphasis on nuance, in contrast to the "gothic" emphasis on category,
may be illustrated by the following, late in ch. 15 of Walter Scott's novel, The Black
Dwarf "That the imagination of this gentleman is disordered, Iwill not pretend to dispute;
I have already told you that it has sometimes broken out into paroxysms approaching to
real mental alienation. But it is of his common state of mind that I speak; it is irregular,
but not deranged; the shades are as gradual as those that divide the light of noonday from
Doppelg?nger figures provoke reflection on the question of identity and

of the first three categories of quantity: is the gothic individuality single,
multiple, or total? Similarly, the three categories of quality?reality,
means
negation, and that partial reality termed limitation?are probed by
of supernatural beings, the degree or quality of whose existence is
that the of limitation cor
constantly questioned. (Remember category
responds to the infinite judgment, for which Kant's example is "non

mortal.")
But it is the latter six, the "dynamic" as opposed to the "mathematical"
to which Kant devotes the most attention?and with which
categories,
Frankenstein is particularly concerned. Both the creation of the book and
that of the monster involve questions of substance and accidence, and
the issue of the subsistence or conservation of matter is also addressed
by the dangerous cycle of melting and freezing thatWalton experiences

in the Artie. Creation is not ex nihilo, but consists, for the author, in
"moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to [her]" (262) and, for Fran
kenstein, in collecting and to make a man. The
combining parts question
arises here of what are the inherent or substantive of materials
properties
and of what potential they have for adaptation to accidental circum
stances. Can a rational be created out of "bones from charnel
being
houses" and animals "tortured ... to animate the lifeless clay" (315)?
Frankenstein can tailor the features of the monster's anatomy at
gross
will, but the finer, more accidental characteristics prove
apparently
rooted in the nature of the materials, and the nuances of coloration and
remain intractable. Frankenstein concludes, "The different

complexion
accidents of life are not so as the feelings of human nature"
changeable
(318), and if thismeans that human nature cannot be adapted to admire
the grisly materials, it also means that the materials cannot be infinitely
adapted to the fickle demands of human nature. Frankenstein thus gives

us an object lesson in what Kant calls the first analogy of experience:
"In all of appearances the substance persists" (A 182).
change
The second dynamic category is that of causality and dependence.
Frankenstein's labor of creation is self-evidently an obsessive
exploration
of this category. "I paused," he says, "examining and analysing all the
minutiae of causation as exemplified in the change from life to death,
and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light
broke in upon me" (312). And the labor of autobiographical narration
midnight." Needless to say, no sharp line divides gothic from realist modes; still, as
George Levine writes, "Such ambivalence is almost always disguised in realistic fiction
... in gothic fiction the energies to be suppressed by the realist ideal . . . are released"
(The Realist Imagination 27).
294 MARSHALL BROWN
is an obsession with causation, as Frankenstein to

equally struggles
determine the of his The monster's ed
psychological origins pursuits.
ucation schools him too in the workings of causation, first in person
(sticking his hand in a fire, he admires "that the same cause should
such effects" 369), and later vicariously when he spec
produce opposite
ulates about and then observes "the causes of uneasiness" of De Lacey's
family (376). Indeed, the very first page of Frankenstein's narrative

demonstrates the second of
experience, the
thesis, famous
by
analogy
which Kant to refute Hume's that causality gov
attempted skepticism,
erns all our For here Frankenstein relates how his father
experience.
urged his older friend Beaufort to surmount financial difficulties and "to
begin the world again through his credit and assistance" (289); but not
even this attenuated rebirth feasible, and Beaufort's as
proves destiny
serts itself as he dies "in the tenthmonth" (290), a child in the arms of
his There is no escape from the chain of events.34
orphaned daughter.
third category in this group is community or reciprocity. The
The
image of the chain linking victim to demon inmutual dependence runs
throughout the gothic tradition. Still, Frankenstein is special in its em
phasis on this category. Along with Caleb Williams it tests in particular
the limits of The monster appears demonic not because he
community.
exercises powers free from the constraints of causality, but
supernatural
because he is excluded from community. His exclusion is chiefly felt, of
course, as a social or curse: "I had never seen a
biological yet being
me or who claimed intercourse with me. What was I?"
resembling any
(387). Yet in the gothic novel community proves to be a metaphysical

or issue at bottom, for the monster's exclusion from
categorical society
denies him access to in vices are the children
experience general. "My
of a forced solitude that I abhor, and my virtues will necessarily arise
when I live in communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a
sensitive being and become linked to the chain of existence and events
from which I am now excluded" (415). A particularly Kantian facet of
this theme concerns the monster's he the day
temporality: sleeps during
and wakes at night, as if he lacked all simultaneity with those to whose
he wishes to
community belong.
Yet with the categories proves at last that reci
Shelley's experiment
and are ineluctable even where is denied.
procity community society
The recriminations of Frankenstein and his creature witness
reciprocal
34- The category of causality has, of course, a psychoanalytic dimension, richly explored
by William Veeder in "The Negative Oedipus: Father, Frankenstein, and the Shelleys,"
Critical Inquiry 12 (1986): 365?90.
their mutuality as each accuses the other of the cause of his own
being
evil: "Oh, earth! How often did I imprecate curses on the cause of my
being!" (407); "As the memory of past misfortunes pressed upon me, I
to reflect on their cause?the monster whom I had created"
began (470).
The creator becomes on his creature, the master a slave of
dependent
his servant in a whole series of and reversals that lead, for
exchanges
instance, to Frankenstein's of the monster's habits: "When it
adoption
became and the sun rose I on and was
noon, higher, lay down the grass
overpowered by a deep sleep. I had been awake the whole of the

preceding night" (439). We exist, the novel shows, in a universal or
between and over
categorical "reciprocity activity passivity," extending
vast regions of space, from Switzerland west to the British Isles and
north to the polar And if this affirmation has destructive con
regions.
sequences for Frankenstein and his family, itmust be conceded to have
a result in the frame narration, where the explorer Walton is
positive
led to forsake his megalomania, to accede to the unanimous wishes of
his sailors, and to return to Frankenstein never became the
society.35
liberating fantasy forMary Shelley that itwas to be for so many sub

artists. But the purgation or sublimation of Frankenstein and
sequent
his monster opens prospects that the book's author refused
apocalyptic
to the an
recognize. Despite entangled presentation, essentially complete
story is told, filtered through a hierarchy of coherent narrative perspec
tives. However the context it provides, the novel thus reaffirms
startling
not but the of sequence, evidence, and
only community, principles
material determination by which the ordinary experience of human
communities is governed.36 The novel first stretches to the limit and
35- The best study of the role of society in Frankenstein is Frances Ferguson's paper
"The Gothic Sublime," read at the 1981 Modern Language Association Annual Meeting
and part of a book in progress on the sublime, which argues forcefully that community
is a destructive binding in the novel. In my view, however, the category of community
is so pervasive that it transcends social determinations and the attendant negative valori
zation. Richard J. Dunn, "Narrative Distance in Frankenstein," Studies in theNovel 6 (1974):
408-17, is another good discussion of community in the social, but not in the transcen
dental sense.
36. I take issue here with Beth Neuman, "Narrations of Seduction and the Seductions
of Narrative: The Frame Structure of Frankenstein," ELH 53 (1986): 141-64, a subtle
account of seductions and broken promises which, however, occults the promise kept at
the end of the novel (mentioned only in passing on 154). My conclusions are, instead, in
the line of Lowry Nelson, Jr's. contention that the gothic is fundamentally about the
normal, "a fictional discovery of the true depths of human nature": "Night Thoughts on
the Gothic Novel," Yale Review 52 (1962): 238. Shelley's subsequent novel, The Last Man,
with its genuinely incoherent narrative perspective, is the exception that proves the rule
by its lack of direct successors; see Barbara Johnson, "Le Dernier Homme," in Les Fins
296 MARSHALL BROWN
then, at the limit, confirms another Kantian law, the third analogy of
"All substances, in so far as are
contemporaneous, stand
experience, they
in one
complete community (i.e., reciprocity among another)" (A 210).
It seems to demonstrate that novels in and
superfluous gothic general
Frankenstein in also the categories of modality,
particular explore namely
possibility (and impossibility), existence (and non-existence), necessity
(and chance). But it is at least worth mentioning these for the sake of
the antithetical form in which all six dynamic categories appear in the
Critique of Pure Reason. This form is not intrinsic to the transcendental
analytic, for in the Prolegomena toAny Future Metaphysic Kant designates
the categories simply by the first term in the pair. Rather, the antithetical
form of these categories is the firstmanifest sign of a threat that is latent
all along in Kant's imagery and in his lawless and terrifying prose style.
The antithetical pave the way toward the famous antinomies
categories
of pure reason in the later section called the "Transcendental Dialectic"?
four of theorems, all true and all con
pairs demonstrably reciprocally
tradictory. At the heart of the Critique of Pure Reason we find a philo
sophical madness and delirium more cold-blooded than Hume's; the
of the make even a normal read
parallel page-formats contrasting pairs
sequence Kant's in the antinomies are not all
ing impossible. proofs
equally strong, and his system domesticates the contradic
subsequently
tions without apparent difficulty (one antinomy of each pair relates to
and the other to an ideal of It is not
experience understanding, reason).
evident, therefore, his text should slide into such turbulence, unless
why
we learn to recognize how the gothic life-force of divided creation has
been at work from the beginning.
It is hardly necessary to do more than quote the antithetical principles
in order to suggest how uncompromisingly the gothic explores them;
are as much as are Kantian ones.37 From
they gothic propositions they
de l'homme, ed. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galil?e, 1981) 75
86.
37. In The Mutiny Within (New York: George Braziller, 1967), directly following a
good account of the empirical antinomy of fire and ice in Frankenstein (81-89), James
Rieger writes as follows: "Because it is after all a poem and not an ontological discourse,
'Mont Blanc' remains in the realms of eikasia, not episteme. The dialectic it develops is one
o? tropes, not categories" (90). These are false antitheses?and indeed Rieger's Gnostic
reading of Percy Shelley remains transcendental in Kant's sense?for on the way to the
antinomies Kant tropes his categories, generating out of their ontological structure the
eikasia that he calls the "schematism of the pure concepts of the understanding." He defines
the schema as "the general of the imagination in providing a concept with its
procedure
image" (A 140). It is precisely the burden of my essay that (Kantian) ways of knowing
(ontology, episteme, categories) cannot be disentangled from (gothic) ways of seeing (po
here we can to what seems to me the paradoxical heart of the

proceed
gothic enterprise.
i.i. "The world has a in time, and is also enclosed in

beginning
boundaries with respect to space" (A 426). Think of the traumatic and
nature of gothic Yet
claustrophobic experience.
1.2. "The world has no and no boundaries in space, but is
beginning,
both in consideration of time, as of space, endless" (A 427). "It iswith
considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being; all
the events ofthat period appear confused and indistinct," says the mon
ster (367). With to time, Frankenstein dates the monster's exis
respect
tence to a dark moment of creation "in a of November"
dreary night
but we can antedate the wellsprings of creation almost without
(318),
limit, to a sudden moment of revelation, to a of preparation,
long period
to a of character, even to a melancholia inherited
disposition perhaps
from Frankenstein's maternal the ill-fated Beaufort. With
grandfather,
to space, the victim's in all novels, stands
respect imprisonment, gothic
in a rigorously antinomic symmetry with the demon's freedom to range
across the earth.
11.1. substance in the world consists of simple
"Every composite parts,
and nothing exists anywhere but simples or thatwhich is compounded
from them" (A 434).
11.2. "No in the world consists of and
composite thing simple parts,
nothing simple exists anywhere in the same" (A 435). The creation of

themonster demonstrates both propositions. He ismade up of elemental
parts, and the parts have complex properties.38
m. 1. to the laws of nature is not the sole element
"Causality according
out of which manifestations of the world overall can be derived. It is
also necessary to assume a via freedom to them"
causality explain (A
444)
in.2. "There is no freedom, but rather in the world
everything happens
to natural causes" How indeed, are we to
solely according (A 445).
Frankenstein? As we have seen, Introduction, frame,
explain already
Frankenstein's narrative, and monster's narrative all circle around this,
the greatest of the antinomies. Is it "an accident," "some or
fatality,"
etry, eikasia, tropes). Two other good discussions of antithetical patterning in Frankenstein
are Andrew Griffin, "Fire and Ice in Frankenstein," The Endurance of'Frankenstein' 49-73,
and Sylvia Bowerbank, "The Social Order vs. theWretch: Mary Shelley's
Contradictory
Mindedness in Frankenstein," ELH 36 (1979): 418-31.
38. See further Sherwin's excellent account of the antinomies of creation in "Frankenstein:
Creation as Catastrophe" 894-98.
298 MARSHALL BROWN
"one of those caprices of the mind" (299-300) that leads Frankenstein

on the path of destruction?39 How can we fathom the workings of the
spirit in a book where all these explanations jostle one another within
the space of a single page? "I was so guided by a silken cord that all
seemed but one train of to me," says Frankenstein in the
enjoyment
very first chapter (292), using an image that makes both sides of the
antinomy, determinism and freedom, again rigorously symmetrical.
iv. 1. "To the world which, either as a of it,
belongs something part
or its cause, is a simply necessary being" (A 452).
iv.2. "No necessary exists either in the world,
simply being anywhere,
or outside the world, as its cause" (A 453). What, we always feel
compelled to ask, is themorality of the gothic? Can religious protesta
tions be taken where the demonic forces seem so contrived?
seriously
Can of atheism be taken seriously where mysterious forces
protestations
rule the world? As early as the novels of Richardson talk of angels and
devils seems inevitably to render insoluble all questions concerning the
grounds of experience and of morality, and gothic fiction becomes
obsessively dualistic?or irresponsible?in its approach to transcendental
concerns.40
the antinomies the Critique of Pure Reason moves
From on to its last
great section, "The Ideal of Pure Reason," where Kant discusses the
three so-called ideals or necessary, beliefs?God,
regulative unprovable
freedom, immortality. I have already illustrated, using Melmoth,
and
how the gothic novel tests the limits of these ideals by means of their
perversion. It likewise tests the central concept of the Critique ofPractical
Judgment, the so-called categorical imperative, which Kant interprets as
a rule virtuous action that resists all or
golden commanding temptation
inclination. From the "Critique of Esthetic Judgment" it tests the rela
tionships between the sublime and the beautiful and between themath
ematical and the dynamic sublime between size and power, as in
(i.e.,
the case of Frankenstein's monster), and eventually (notably in Balzac)
it also tests the relationship that had earlier been taken for granted
39- See further Reed, "Will and Fate in Frankenstein," and David Seed, "Frankenstein?
Parable or Spectacle," Criticism 24 (1982): 327-40.
40. The gothic representation of the fourth antinomy is the subject of Judith Wilt's
"Frankenstein as Mystery Play," The Endurance of'Frankenstein' 31?48. "The bi-structured
world," says Wilt, "is radically unstable, it seeks collapse into oneness, or else seeks to
. . .The Gothic describes
generate a third term to marshal itself into unity, not oneness.
the failure of its significant people to generate that triangulation point, listen to the Holy
Ghost" (47). The whole argument is acutely presented, but I am not sure that romantic
gothic novels seriously seek to go beyond antithetical play.
between beauty and virtue. Lastly, the pathetic fallacy that is ubiquitous
inAnn Radcliffe tests the limits of teleology and determinism, the central
topics of the "Critique of Teleological Judgment." Itwould be interest
to pursue these various tests or in the different
ing thought experiments
forms take in the tradition, now as obsessions, now as
they gothic
or limit cases, now as or I do not
provocations perversions parodies.
propose to do so here because it seems to me that with the antinomies
we have reached the center of Kant's thought.41 All that follows develops
antithetical structures, such as are illustrated in my of
summary leading
themes in the later critiques. And in retrospect all that precedes also
appears antithetical, once the gothic has the Kantian
viewpoint exposed
scandal of origins.
In conclusion, then, I would like to suggest that the essence of the
gothic lies in its play with unreconciled antinomies. It is not the final
triumph of good or evil, explanation or irrationality, free will or fate
that makes a but the uncertainties
gothic atmosphere, lingering along
the way.42 To be sure, terror is a characteristic component of the gothic,
but it is far more the terrors of suspense?of some mystery held in
reserve?than the full power of terror in action. The does not
gothic
break butterflies a wheel, but them on a
upon dangles string, toys with
them, at the exercise of power.43
plays
4L The antinomies are found in Part 2, section 2, book 2, chapter 2,

paragraph 2, of
the Critique. Kant's outline is generally tripartite, though not rigorously so, and the location
of this section can hardly be coincidental. While page counting has only a limited validity
in locating the center o? a writer's thought, I also note that in the first edition of the
Critique of Pure Reason the antinomies begin on pages 428 and 429 out of 856 pages in the
main text.
42. Given the bulk of most of the novels and the brevity of the typical blow-out, the
older view (represented by Eino Railo, The Haunted Castle [London: George Routledge &
Sons, 1927] 319-27) that gothic suspense is subordinated to the terror of the climax seems
implausible.
43. By the play of imagination in the gothic Imean a transcendental impulse, not the
surface linkage of the sublime and the ridiculous discussed in Paul Lewis, "Mysterious
Laughter: Humor and Fear inGothic Fiction," Genre 14 (1981): 309-27, and Philip Stevick,
"Frankenstein and Comedy," The Endurance of 'Frankenstein' 221-39. Robert D. Hume's
well-known distinction between the terrors of uncertainty in early gothic and the horrors
of prosecution beginning with The Monk seems to me a matter of the mechanism used to
create a suspense that is equally characteristic of both modes: see 284-85 in his essay,
"Gothic versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel," PMLA 84 (1969): 282
90, and also Robert M. Platzner's effective critique of this point in PMLA 86 (1971): 270
71. Nor can I agree with the judgment of W. R. Irwin, in The Game of the Impossible: A
Rhetoric ofFantasy (Urbana, Chicago, London: U of Illinois P, 1976) 96: "In gothic romance
the irrational remains unmodified and intrinsically thrilling; it gives nothing of the intel
lectual game and speculative participation that are central in fantasy." As Ernst Bloch
300 MARSHALL BROWN
Astonishment, suspense, ambivalence, is the

uncertainty, play?such
axis which the gothic moves. What we can never know for sure
along
is what stimulates our Darkness this is the
imaginations. begets striving:
literary discovery thatmakes the gothic mode into the bridge between
the wasteland of literature and the exaltation of the great
graveyard
romantic novels, the philosophic discovery that leads Kant from the
wilderness of the antinomies to the sublime ideas of pure reason. In the
middle lie Tantalus and Job, the most cosmic of jokes. From the time
of Walpole on, the gothic novel and the gothic novelist rarely seem to
take themselves seriously. "I shall not be supposed as according the
remotest of serious faith to such an we read in the
degree imagination,"
1818 Preface thatMary Shelley's husband wrote for her (267); "Swift as
and as was the idea that broke in upon me," she remem
light cheering
bers the horrific moment of inspiration in her 1831 Introduction (264).
The greatness of the gothic?inseparable from the seeming frivolity of
all its greatest not that it plays with terror and but
exemplars?is insanity,
rather that itplays with these things, that is, that it imagines them.44
Throughout this confrontation of Kantian and gothic psychology we

have seen how the authors and texts remain in touch with an
imaginative
vision that nevertheless remains than one of them compre
larger any
hends. At stake is nothing less than a difficult, even dangerous rethinking
of the relation of man to his world; if the novels often seem to have
some of the fleshless, abstract quality thatwe attribute to allegory, that
is because the underlying issues are cosmic ones, than the char
larger
acters. From the philosopher we may learn the issues and the terms for
analysis that let us see the vital statements implicit within the novels;
from the novelists we may perceive the energy that brings the philos
opher's rigors to life. It would be tempting to say that novelists open
questions and philosophers close them, but more than just chronology
is both a consolation in the

reminds us, the gothic fascinating and fun, and potentially
face of more material threats to our comfort; see Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1959) 453-56.
44. For a contrasting view see Jerrold E. Hogle's fine essay, "Otherness in Frankenstein:
The Confinement/Autonomy of Fabrication," Structuralist Review 2 (1980): 20-48. In the
a curse, that Shelley's novel, as Hogle
light of history I regard it as a blessing, not says,
"offer[s] a world of mere signs displacing other signs and calling for a rhetorical com
munion, all of which looks out for a lost origin without any attempt to recover it" (44
45). I have discussed gothic play at greater length, with particular reference to Nodier's
"Smarra" and Pushkin's "Queen of Spades," in "Kant e i demoni della notte," tr.Daniela
Carpi, Studi di est?ticaNS 12 (1984): 155-65.
prohibits painting this simplified picture: the philosopher's answers often

prove to be gestures of defense against his own psychological intuition,
the novelists' as often are in the service
explorations just promulgated
of all-too-decisive moral conclusions. indeed, allows us to
Nothing,
draw too sharp a distinction between philosophers and novelists: phi
losophers (even Kant) also tell stories, novelists (even gothic novelists)
also reason about higher issues. If anything, it is the philosopher who
is really the greater fabulist, driving his premise to the neatest, most
organic d?nouement; if anything, it is the novelists who are the greater
dialecticians, imaging the dynamism of their premises in the free play
of factors and forces on their characters. These distinctions are,
acting
of course, in no sense absolute. Both the insights of philosophers and
the intuitions of novelists?is the difference between "philosophy" and
"literature" no after all than the distance between a Germanic
greater
word and its nearest Romance an aura that
counterpart??come trailing
envelops and illuminates them. The metaphor favored by Michel Serres
seems apposite here: major texts are but nodal points, eddies in the
turbulent flow of human consciousness, juxtaposing points of conden
sation with expanses of sublimation. While the proportions may differ,
we to see in any major text a of binding with
ought conjuncture loosing,
terminating with initiating, limitation with transgression, looking back
ward with ahead. If the novels, in their exuberance, stress
looking gothic
play
over determination, this means that we more
readily read them
looking ahead than looking back. Nevertheless, as the present essay tries
to show, the novels must also assert their in the stream
significant place
by points of definition?a distinctive intellectual profile?lest they sink
in the current as as, Thalaba. and
irretrievably say, Southey's Thought
invention are and never antithetical; a literature
always complementary
can no more exist without ideas than can a without
philosophy expres
sion.45
University of Colorado, Boulder
45- I should have cited one previous essay that relates Frankenstein to the Critique ofPure
Reason: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperial
ism," Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 254-59. The newest comparison of the novel with Kantian
esthetics, Barbara Freeman, "Frankenstein" with Kant: A Theory of Monstrosity, or the
Monstrosity of Theory," SubStance 16 (1987): 21-31, despite good comparisons and re

flections, overlooks the way that the "theoretical terrorism" of the sublime pervades the
entire grandiose architecture of the Critiques. Finally, my closing exhortation should not
be mistaken for a passing mode or an exotic imposition; it echoes the end of R. G.
Collingwood, The Principles ofArt (Oxford: Clarendon, 1938) 298, 299: "There can be no
such thing as artistic writing; there is only writing." "Subject without style is barbarism;
style without subject is dilettantism."

Philosophy of The Gothic

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Philosophy of The Gothic

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

A Philosophical View of the Gothic Novel

Author(s): Marshall Brown

dire: ab?me et satire de l'ab?me

dream as as other and this reminds me

ARE INCLINED TO TAKE THE ARTIFICIAL hallucinations of the gOthic

day in 1764 by a hung-over dilettante, an enduring fad thatwas a clich?

bundmystik (Berlin, 1921).

SiR, 26 (Summer 1987)

record of "erotic sensibility."2 Or they transcribe, with little or no

becoming a language" or imaging it as a crypt, they pique our curiosity

Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel," PMLA 96 (1981): 255-70.

"(sub)-human consciousness-in-the-making" (546); the conclusion of Northrop Frye's

jectural substratum perpetually hinted at by theworld we know.7 What

As shrubless crags within themist;

But silence, and a stirless breath

Which neither was of life nor death;

(Byron, "The Prisoner of Chill?n" ix)1()

Byronic entropy seems like a denial of everything, yet from it emerges

explicit in the shattering and scattering at the end of another poem of

That one moment left no trace

More of human form or face

Deeply dinted in the clay,

Without so much as a full stop in the sentence, the apparently universal

As so often, the presence of spirits is linked with the decay of masonry?

is thus no distance than from a numinous to

Suppose, then, that we consider romantic novels as

specifically of human reason. Typically, after all, they devote farmore

Enlightenment culture. A spirit of pure speculation was abroad in the

Numerous to such transcendental are scattered

consciousness" to who incarnate

he only suffered from periods of deficient wakefulness. Yet one of the

possible limits, the purity of transcendence merges into the demonic

Michel Foucault has written illuminatingly of what he calls the

"Philosophische Ansicht des K?nstlerromans," Verfremdungen 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,

pure concepts of the understanding something ensnaring [Verf?ngliches],

entire determination, and so the understanding builds itself unobserved

"Fragments from the Diary of an Observer of Himself," "Outline of

21. de Kant: Conte moral (Paris: Payot, 1984), Bernard Edelman

it is possible to assemble a picture of the gothic personality as both the

What, then, do the gothic novels look likewhen viewed as transcendent

intricate.25 Not only is narrative disbelief but often narrative

Physically secluded by imprisonment, the victim is literally chained to

equal bitterness and depression at the hopeless vastness of the desert I

would be to follow Melmoth into sin. "'Escape?escape for your life,'

interpretation, in Linda Bayer-Berenbaum, The Gothic Imagination (Rutherford: Fairleigh

scendental ideas, the three unfathomable yet of human

striving. Life is Kant's immorality in the guise of an eternity of dam

objects of experience, what Kant calls the pure forms of apperception

of and time and in absolute master of her environment. The

it shows us the buried motivation for Kant's choice of so ambiguous a

the ultimate sublimity, Melmoth's absolute discontinuity from our

Such is, of course, our grasp, from its approxi

to any closer. For the and of Melmoth and

ghosts inhabiting the annex to the house of experience. Their flame is

tinues for half a page, "is to live in an existence of perpetual contradic

superstitious?like Tatyana in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (v: xi-xii) or Affery in Dickens's

gothic, is not a unity that engenders division, as it is for Schelling and

oddly, the function of the transcendental analytic to legitimate the orig

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein illustrates how the technical concerns of the

explore?" he illustrates the origin of romantic consciousness in a troubled narcissistic or

Frankenstein's Walton's. Frankenstein too seeks to mas

at the heart of Volney's book as it is of Shelley's, and indeed of the

asWalton imagines it (269), a world of pure space and time. As Walton