Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny by Isabella van Elferen (review)

Isabella van Elferen’s Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny, represents the first monograph-length scholarly study of Gothic music. As such, it poses and strives to answer some fundamental questions, going well beyond the traditional usage of the term “gothic” as a rather vague stylistic descriptor, and invoking the Freudian concept of the Uncanny—that which can be said to be eerily unfamiliar, haunted, and having an in-between, boundary-blurring existence—as constitutive of the essence of the musical gothic. While van Elferen’s book is focused on music, her approach is broad, and considers “sound and music through the various transfigurations of the Gothic genre” (p. 3). In so doing, she pulls Gothic music out of the subcultural ghetto to which it is so often relegated, and considers the sound of the Gothic as it appears in a wide range of cultural products.

Gothic Music comprises an introduction and six chapters. The introduction rather neatly sets out the case for the book: as the author writes, “[a]lthough sound and music occupy a prominent place in all the manifestations of Gothic, the sonic characteristics of the genre remain obscured in Gothicist as well as musicological research” (p. 1). The first five chapters then focus on Gothic music within specific media: literature, film, television, video games, and popular music. The sixth chapter, which is relatively short, serves as a conclusion by way of some pithy theoretical and philosophical meditations on the ontology and metaphysics of the Gothic and the Uncanny, drawing especially on the work of Martin Heidegger. Indeed, a good deal of this book is predicated not only on Freud’s Uncanny, but also on Heideggerian ontology and its Derridean counterpoint, “hauntology” (one of Jacques Derrida’s infamous neographisms). Hauntology is a term intended to describe the hauntedness of “all being and time,” of an unstable present underpinned by shaky “cultural binaries and linear histories,” and undermined by the spectral otherness of the past, and thus ripe for deconstruction (p. 15). Drawing on such post-structuralist notions, van Elferen asserts that storytelling and even writing itself, especially the Gothic, is inherently “spectral,” occupied by an array of ghostly “revenants” or things that return: the Gothic, in its various manifestations “forces its readers, viewers and listeners to identify the ghosts that haunt them” (p. 15).

Music, according to van Elferen, is especially akin to the spectral revenant by virtue of its non-signifying, non-referential nature: music does not mean anything a priori, and so is phantasmal, ephemeral, and susceptible to “unlimited inscriptions of meaning” (p. 27). In Gothic literature, the evocation of music and sound can be used for a variety of purposes, such as “giving voice to Gothic ghosts” or accompanying the distortion of time and reality (pp. 32–33). In film, Gothic music pulls the viewer/listener “across the borders of reason . . . into the liminal space of the Gothic ghost story” (p. 72), via music’s own haunted and ghostly qualities: Gothic film music is Gothic insofar as it comprises disembodied sounds—haunted sounds linked to the “absent presence of other ones” (p. 44). Music in Gothic television—especially in Gothic serials such as Twin Peaks, X-Files, and Lost—fulfills many of the same functions as music in Gothic cinema, but van Elferen points out an added dimension in the case of television, namely the crossing over of the uncanny (the “unhomely”) into the private home itself, playing with notions of time and space, blurring the boundaries between source and functional music. This can make the audience “feel they take part in the transgressions narrated on screen as the vectral forces of music involve them emotionally and cognitively in . . . boundary-crossings” (p. 99).

Of particular interest in Gothic Music are the chapters on Gothic video game music and the (popular) music of Goth subculture. While there is no actual Gothic video game subgenre as such, van...