Popular Revenants: The German Gothic and Its International Reception, 1800–2000 ed. by Andrew Cusack and Barry Murnane (review)

Here is as straightforward an argument as Adorno ever made: If you wish to find an art that is adequate to mass death—an art, that is, that can do right by the Apache in the 1880s and the Armenians in the 1910s and the Palestinians now—you have a few different options. You might consider a documentary and testimonial art, one that gets the word out, peeling back blankets of denial and obfuscation and palm-bearing oblivion—a “photograph of the disaster” was Adorno’s name for such a thing (Aesthetic Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, 18). That might do, but better would be an art capable of giving voice to anguish and not just of tabulating it—an art that rather than producing a set of paraphrasable propositions about suffering actually made its audience ache, a sorrowing art, then, literature as paid mourner. Better still would be an art of “incomprehensible horror,” on the simple grounds that a tale of terror is more likely to rattle you than an exposé or maudlin vignette (18). Nothing will go as far to dent our perception of Adorno as fussy Brahmin than his embrace of Gothic literature, this one precious genre that puts violence on display and allows it to be horrible. The enormities of empire and a capitalism-without-pretenses do not in fact require that we abandon all of our storytelling conventions, that we start art over again from sanguine scratch. We already have at our disposal a narrative form that forces us to say who is dying and how and at whose hands: scary movies and the weird menace of the pulps. Such is the art due Guatemala in the 1980s or the biped chattel of a former Alabama. They keep telling you that you can’t write poetry after Auschwitz, but no one ever said you couldn’t remake Blood Feast.

But then perhaps Adorno’s argument is after all not so very straight-forward. It has always been possible to think of horror stories as an exercise in truth-telling and consciousness-raising, with fear functioning as the bearer of moral judgments, a role that sentimental fiction more typically reserves for tears. Sometimes you cry in the face of something you know to be wrong, something whose wrongness does not need to be argumentatively demonstrated to you. And sometimes, equally, you blench or panic, and you do so, when watching a film, not because you fear for yourself, but because you fear for another—an ethical fear, then, not panic, but companic. Slasher movies simply make more sense if you approach them as stunned investigations of male violence, rather than as grisly cheerings of the same. But the horror art that Adorno is proposing as commensurate with fascism and occupation and your administered life does not work that way; it is no longer on the continuum with activist journalism or moral sense theory. The “radically darkened art” that Adorno is proposing must do something more “than merely protest”; we need an art, rather, that “has taken the disaster into itself” and that “identifies with it,” an art, indeed, that “has defected to the enemy”—not horror, but gonzo horror. If we follow this line, we will actually have to give up on most ghost stories and vampire movies as being plain-vanilla Gothic (19, 21). Horror fiction, which respectable readers usually think of as out-there and round-the-bend, now stands accused of having never gone far enough. The Gothic is itself scared of something, permanently recoiling from its own dismal consequence.

But why? Why might a person think this about the Gothic? In what aberrant circumstances does horror fiction itself seem squeamish? Such is the utility of this collection of recent scholarly articles about weird fiction in Germany; the dozen contributors to Popular Revenants make...