Session 7: Gothic, Haunted Spaces
2nd Global Conference
Monday 16th May – Wednesday 18th May 2011
Warsaw, Poland
Horrified Residing: Ghost Houses in Finnish Postmodern Horror
Tomi Sirviö
MA, University of Oulu, Finland
Ghost house has been one of the key motifs of gothic horror since Castle Of Otranto (1764). Surely there have been a lot of different variations of ghost house through the ages. Finnish author Kari Nenonen’s horror novel Se ken tulee viimeiseksi on kuolema (1988) (He who comes last is the death) includes a house which consists of worms. The house, which is an apartment building, is roomed by victims of the other protagonist who is some kind of telekinetic murderer or commander of the demon. In another Nenonen’s novel Ken kuolleita kutsuu (1991) (Who summons the dead) the sub-urban high-rise area is also the stage of the supernatural deaths.
Paper will research how the houses of these two novels correspond and differ from the haunting castles of the classic gothic horror literature. One difference might be that in the classic gothic the monsters like Count Dracula had their houses already when they were still mortal but in the Nenonen’s horror young protagonists have to learn occultism and die to get to leave their childhood homes and move to their own apartment. However there is much cohesion between classic gothic and Nenonen’s postmodern horror, which contains all the key elements of gothic horror: taboo, barbarism and plot which leads to the ambiguity of supernatural.
How the haunting and cognitive disturbed monsters are structured and how they are related to the apartment, neighborhood and dark places like cellar is also one of the main questions of explore. Main references are theories by Mihail Bahtin, Tzvetan Todorov, Noël Carrol and David Punter. Paper will also claim that the Finnish society is scared of communality which it also paradoxically and secretly hopes; in Nenonen’s books that wish will actualize in the ghost houses after death. Paper will extend the perspective for other Finnish horror novels and asks what kind of opinion of communality they contain.
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Paris Opera as an Edifice and a Literary Haunted House
Dorota Babilas
Warsaw University, Warsaw, Poland
Gaston Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera (1910) is as complex and controversial as its architectural counterpart – Charles Garnier’s splendid Opera house. In the proposed paper I intend to explore the connections between the architectural creation and the novel which it inspired. For Garnier, the Opera was a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, harmoniously combining many forms of artistic expression through “architectural empathy”. The power of Leroux’s book lies not in an innovative intrigue, which in fact is rather a compilation of many already existing cultural motives, nor in the writer’s skill. It was received without great enthusiasm, yet in the course of one hundred years it has become a work of classic status, inspiring many adaptations and reinterpretations. First of all, it remains an homage paid to Garnier and his Opera. Leroux completes the “totality” of Garnier’s creation by providing it with a myth – in a similar way Victor Hugo did to Notre-Dame de Paris. The opera house replaces the cathedral as the sanctus sanctorum of a modern city, just as art in the nineteenth century was gradually encroaching upon the cultural territory reserved earlier for religion. A Gothic romance with elements of a rational detective story, set against a colourful background of the operatic performances links the reality of theatre life with the fictitiousness of the spectacle. On the one hand, the story is devoid of any supernatural elements, the supposed haunting explained as a clever sleight of hand by an entirely human perpetrator. On the other, Erik, the title anti-hero, is a larger-than-life character related to great operatic villains. Leroux’s novel offers one of literature’s great city-scapes situated between the reality of the nineteenth-century Paris and the ghostly realm of Gothic imagination.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Postmodern Vision of Gothic London: Ackroyd’s Fiction Reflecting Hogarth’s Images
Alexandra Shubina
Department of English Language and Literature, Polar State Academy, Saint-Petersburg, Russia
London as any other big city has its own independent history, culture, philosophy and psychology. From the other hand, it resembles a human being with its personal biography, destiny, appearance and character. Postmodern writing makes the second way to perception of the big city actual.
Modern English writers tend to explore London from the point of individual history and reflect the image of the city as one of a person with its unique antinomical character full of romantic beauty and gothic horror.
Peter Ackoyd, one of well-known modern English writers, is famous for his biographies and novels about several significant English artists, such as Chatterton, Wild, Dickens, etc. His style gives us an excellent example of “historiographic metaiction”, as he combines fact and fiction, reality and imagination in his works. Ackroyd points that personages of all his works may be united by at least one important trait – their strong connection with London and its atmosphere. He adds that consequence of such connection is their unusual and very specific vision of London, as they are primarily “London Visionaries”.
One of the newest books by Ackroyd is the biography of London (“London: The Biography”). Here the author tries to incorporate centuries-long experience of conceptualization London’s image and character. To visualize main ideas of the book he uses images of Hogarth’s engravings, representing the atmosphere of gutten society as mysterious and horrible one. Tracing the interaction between postmodern poetics of Ackroyd’s fiction / metafiction and classical aesthetic of Hogarth’s engravings we get an opportunity to open new contrapuntal vision of London.
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