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ERIC SAVOY The Face of the Tenant A Theory ofAmerican Gothic "Think of him," she said, placing a finger against the front-view portrait of the blond young man. "Think of those eyes. Coming toward you." Then she pushed the pictures back into their envelope. "I wish you hadn't shown me." TRUMAN CAPOTE, In Cold Blood A "theory" of gothic cultural production in the United States is necessarily invested in a poetics of terror-a tropics, a recurring turn of language. If such generally structuring turns are most strikingly conceptualized in particular moments, then this brief excerpt from Capote's work suggests the multiple, inevitable, and even casual ways in which narrative might take a decidedly gothic turn. These chilling words are spoken by Marie Deweythe wife of Alvin Dewey, an agent of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation -late in 1959 as she studies the photographs of two men who, without apparent motive, murdered a farm family "on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call 'out there'" (3). While the photographs give a face, a human agency, to a crime whose horror lies in its absence of meaning and its distance from the rationally explicable, her discourse betrays the desire to situate the static image of the face in a narrative, a desire from which she immediately recoils. What is most striking in Marie Dewey's language-what is most suggestive ofthe gothic turn-is her syntax ofreiterated imperative . "Think of ..." insists upon both the imaginative reconstruction of a historical event-a moment just prior to violent 3 4 FRAMING THE GOTHIC annihilation-and what might be called "being out there," an intuitive, visceral knowledge of terrible affect that approaches the experiential. In the queerly hybrid "nonfiction novel" that Capote attempted in the writing ofIn Cold Blood, Marie Dewey's brief appearance signifies both the act ofreading "America" and the writerly turn toward the fascination of the fearful, a fascination that, she implies, ought not to be indulged but inexorably is. Her fleeting comments suggest that the gothic tendency in American culture is organized around the imperative to repetition , the return of what is unsuccessfully repressed, and, moreover , that this return is realized in a syntax, a grammar, a tropic field. Once instigated, Marie Dewey's impulse to narrate the body that violates and the violated body can only escalate in the structure of haunting textual return: the photograph of Richard Hickock's face, especially his eyes, gives her what might be colloquially called a "turn," which is turned into a narrative obligation , which subsequently recurs in the rumor that Hickock bequeathed his eyes" 'to an eye doctor. Soon as they cut him down, this doctor's gonna yank out his eyes and stick them in somebody else's head'" (338). This final gothic turn provides a compositional vanishing point in which there is no vanishing; horrific history acquires a body, a face, a figure that recedes into futurity. The failure ofrepression and forgetting-a failure upon which the entire tradition of the gothic in America is predicated -will be complete in those conscious eyes. Such a return is not merely monstrous and unthinkable, it is uncanny. And the writing of the uncanny is the field-or, more precisely, the multivalent tendency-of American gothic, an imaginative requirement by which, as Leslie Fiedler pointed out, "the past, even dead, especially dead, could continue to work harm" (13 I). In the thirty years since the publication of Love and Death in the American Novel, Fiedler's genealogy of American gothic has remained vitally suggestive; indeed, his broad connections between historiography and psychoanalysis have shaped the parameters of subsequent conceptualization. He insists on the absolute centrality of the gothic in American literature, for "until the gothic had been discovered, the serious American novel could not begin; and as long as that novel lasts, the gothic can3 .141.202.187] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 16:09 GMT) A THEORY OF AMERICAN GOTHIC 5 not die" (143), while gesturing toward its essentially paradoxical status in "America," that eighteenth-century construction "pledged to be done with ghosts and shadows, committed to live a life of yea-saying in a sunlit, neoclassical world" (144). Influenced by his argument that "the whole tradition of the gothic is a pathological symptom rather than a proper literary movement " (135), much post-Fiedlerian analysis has been preoccupied with accounting for the role of the gothic as a negation of the Enlightenment...

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