11 The Gothic as a Theory of Symbolic Exchange

Several chapters into the final volume of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Ann Radcliffe inserts ‘The Provençal Tale’, interpolating it on the verge of the novel’s final resolution (Radcliffe 1980: 552–7). In this tale, a baron, alone at night in his chamber, is visited by a knight unknown to him, who leads him into a recess in the nearby forest, where the stranger reveals the body of a man, recently murdered, ‘stretched at its length, and weltering in blood’, with a ‘ghastly wound’ on its forehead (1980: 556). Noticing that the features of this corpse match those of his visitor, the baron turns to the knight in surprise, only to see the latter melt away as a voice declares that the stranger knight, on his way back to England from the Holy City, was murdered. The voice goes on: ‘Respect the honour of knighthood and the law of humanity; inter the body in Christian ground, and cause his murderers to be punished. As ye observe, or neglect this, shall peace and happiness, or war and misery, light upon you and your house for ever!’ The baron accordingly gives the body of Sir Bevys due burial, ‘with the honours of knighthood’, and presumably fulfils all the demands given to him (1980: 556, 557).

This tale is unusual for Radcliffe’s fiction, for it features an instance of supernatural visitation that it does not eventually explain away. Yet, since it is an interpolated tale, it does not violate the premises to which she otherwise adheres over the course of her romance. Indeed, one might take it to articulate a set of premises that she refuses to endorse. Even so, this tale provides a remarkably useful template for the novel’s narrative, for before Emily St Aubert can fully enter into adulthood, she must discover the crime that haunts her family, Signora di Laurentini’s murder of her father’s sister, the Marchioness de Villeroi; understand the motives for that crime in sexual passion taken to excess; come to terms with aspects of her family history that her father kept secret from her; and absorb the consequences of what she has learned into her own life. In short, before she can enter her adult estate, she must carry out the psychic equivalent of confronting her ghosts, burying her dead, and according honours to those who came before her. While the novel translates the supernatural terms of the tale into a psychological idiom, it nevertheless foregrounds this tale at a suitably strategic moment as if to make clear that it finds in the tale a precise counterpart of its own form. Indeed, insofar as this insertion reprises Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), which similarly features the murder of a knight who has returned from a holy place, it transforms that initial Walpolean scheme into a template for Gothic romance.

The tale’s presence in a Radcliffe novel is more striking because it also exemplifies the narrative pattern that informs Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), ostensibly written as a defiant rebuke to The Mysteries of Udolpho (Collings 2009: 131–60). In one of its more notorious scenarios, The Monk features an unexplained instance of the supernatural, the ghost of the Bleeding Nun, who haunts the living in part because she, too, indulges in sexual passion to excess leading to murder, disturbs the world of the living in the form of a bloodied corpse, and can be laid to rest only when her descendant Raymond causes her to be buried with all due respect and ceremony. In a more naturalistic vein, the novel also narrates how Agnes, after taking her vows as a nun, indulges her passion for her lover; punished for her fault through the equivalent of live burial in the dungeons of the convent, she is rescued, brought into the light of day, repents of her sin and is eventually permitted to legitimise her passion by marrying her lover.

The narrative pattern exemplified by ‘The Provençal Tale’ and the tale of the Bleeding Nun is clear: a corpse that has not received a proper burial is anomalous, out of place, an affront to the peace of the world. Such a body endures a condition no longer alive yet not quite dead, hovering in the space between recognised categories, and thus cries out for a ritual that can confer upon it the status of the dead. According to the premises of these tales, death is not a biological category, a condition one enters automatically on ceasing to live, but rather a status that one can attain only through the symbolic actions of the living. The ghost represents the profoundly unsettling condition of the literal body that has not yet been symbolised as dead; it is not a specious entity, the product of mere superstition, but the figure of a demand that it be given a clear and honourable status. While the dead can no longer participate directly in the world of the living, it turns out that a demand to respect them nevertheless has a certain imperative force, one that will haunt the living as long as they ignore its appeal.

It follows on these premises that the living body must impose a similar demand to be given more than a merely biological condition, to enjoy a status that can only be given and received in acts of formal bestowal. Both stories in The Monk, for example, suggest that the sexualised feminine body, exemplified by the Bleeding Nun and Agnes, is similarly unsettling, for it instances a form of embodiment that has not yet attained an authorised status through the ritual of marriage. The burial of the Bleeding Nun and the marriage of Agnes are parallel events, homologous (if contrasting) symbolisations. The Monk is not alone in exploring this homology; the Bleeding Nun’s tale, after all, echoes that of Laurentini, who similarly murders for love. Moreover, much as Raymond must first learn of the tribulations of his ancestor and bury her with due honours before he can marry Agnes, Emily must confront the legacy of Laurentini’s actions before she can marry Valancourt. In these tales, it seems, one must bury the dead before one can symbolise one’s embodied passion in matrimony. One must confront an aspect of the literal body, the corporeality of both mortality and passion, before assuming its cultural significance in one’s own right.

That logic, in turn, points to the implication that, insofar as sexual passion can lead to murder and thus an unburied corpse, the sexual body and the corpse share a common condition, as is evident in both of the tales in The Monk. In effect, the body riven by its passions mutilates itself; it is a murderous and murdered figure. The demand of the ghost has its counterpart in the demand of the passionate body, an imperious call to attain a human status through a suitable symbolic act. Without due symbolisation, the passionate body, like the corpse, disturbs the peace of the world. In effect, these tales suggest a counterpart to the symbolic relations between the dead and the living, this time in the symbolic exchange between sexual partners. According to this logic, far from being a biological fact, sexual passion is an uncanny presence whose disturbing effects can only be defused through symbolisation. The opposite of an authorised status, it turns out, is not any merely literal condition but transgression, not biology but a destabilising excess, the sole exit from which is symbolic exchange.

Although Radcliffe and Lewis explore these questions through apparently opposed scenarios, the explained and unexplained supernatural, this divergence may be less significant than what they share, the narrative theorisation of symbolic exchange. The fact that tales otherwise so distinct have this theorisation in common invites one to consider it as fundamental to Gothic narrative; indeed, as if to confirm this intuition, later Gothic tales frequently complicate this theorisation even further, creating a problematic remarkable in its range and sophistication. Twentieth-century critical reflection begins to theorise symbolic exchange with Marcel Mauss and anthropologists working in his wake; it is also a central concern for Jean Baudrillard, who deploys it in the course of his critique of the hegemonic forms of value under capitalism. As we have seen, however, these Gothic tales proleptically complicate such accounts, proposing that symbolic exchange operates not only between the living but also through those familiar gestures, embedded in virtually every society, whereby the living confer a recognised status on the newly deceased. In the Gothic account, social agents participate in a mode of exchange that takes place over a span of time much longer than the individual lifespan; one’s place within the collective is received, just as one gives it to others, in a mode of reciprocity that applies not to objects but to subjects. According to this logic, human beings are to be understood as moments in a sequence of symbolic acts, each of which implies and calls for the rest; one does not own oneself, as in the ideology of liberal modernity, but rather owes oneself to others, occupying a position within a series of relations far wider than the self.

One might object that such a theory tends to subordinate the individual to the tradition in Burkean terms, for it seems to absorb the subject into what Burke calls the ‘great mysterious incorporation of the human race’ that includes ‘those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’ (Burke 2004: 120, 194–5). Yet Burke invokes this notion of an enduring, perpetually renewed body out of hostility to the French Revolution, taking his repudiation of the latter so far that he refused to be buried in a marked grave on his estate at Beaconsfield (Kramnick 1977: 189). Ironically, Burke’s paranoid repudiation of what may come denies the alterity of the future, an element intrinsic to the very continuity he pretends to value (see Collings 2009: 59–94). This gesture thus reveals what might otherwise remain unmarked: symbolic exchange is not a practice that simply maintains the tradition, for its practices encode a certain antagonism between the living and the dead. That antagonism, in turn, foregrounds the fact that a tacit antagonism operates even within gift exchange in the irreducibility of any gift to any other, of any symbolic gesture to a standard of measure or a medium of equivalence. In giving a gift, one can never be certain that it will call forth a return; it is thus at least in part an instance of expenditure, a gesture without a final calculation. As a result, symbolic exchange refuses any explicit recognition that one trades an act directly for another, introducing a temporal interval between them to defuse the potential violence implicit in such an overt comparison (Collings 2009: 49–54). This deferral – evident as well, for example, in the interval between receiving a symbolic status at birth and giving such a status to the dead – tacitly recognises the incommensurability of each subject, bringing each not into a synchronic symbolic order, as Jacques Lacan might propose, but rather into a collective enacted through a sequence of acts across time. As a result, symbolic exchange produces no smooth continuity but a discontinuous continuity, an antagonistic reciprocity, which transmits a symbolic status between generations that retain an irreducible alterity to each other.

If all this is the case, then the relation of gift and counter-gift across generations is far more subtle and capacious than any Burkean stance. But Burke is not alone during the Romantic period for failing to understand the complexity of generational exchange. Indeed, his suppressed burial affiliates him with an apparently opposed figure, the Marquis de Sade, who out of an extravagance of defiance asked to be buried in an unmarked grave on which trees would be planted so that his remains would be effaced forever (Lever 1993: 563). Such a defiance of traditional norms rehearses in another form Burke’s repudiation of alterity. In this period, further ironic instances of troubled burial abound. One might think, for example, of Burke’s most famous respondent, Thomas Paine, who famously insisted, ‘It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated’, and who, denied burial in sacred ground in the United States because of his supposed infidelity, was eventually disinterred by his admirer, the radical journalist William Cobbett, who wished to give him honourable burial in a mausoleum in England but failed to do so, leaving Paine’s bones unburied (Paine 1984: 42; Collins 2006). These and other instances indicate that in the ferment of this period, thinkers of various sorts at times imagined that they could overleap alterity and forcefully assert their agency against all the odds, only to reveal instead that the relations of symbolic exchange are not amenable to any such imposition.

What I have discussed so far suggests that, while the demand to bury the corpse may seem to be obvious, an instance of common sense, in fact its codification in narrative constructs a theory of social relations more nuanced than one might suspect: a theory homologous with notions of the gentry–plebeian reciprocity crucial throughout this period. Insofar as the Gothic builds on such a theory, elaborating it at times with great care across its various narratives, it explores an understanding of culture considerably more sophisticated than most of the familiar political, economic or social theories on offer in the period – including traditionalism and revolution, or utilitarianism and liberalism, to be sure, but also any stance that conceives of social agents in primarily biological terms, such as the biopower of Thomas Malthus (see Collings 2009: 161–92). Indeed, its strategy in this regard suggests that the practices upon which it draws, far from expressing simplistic or credulous beliefs superseded in the modern era, continue to obtain even under these new conditions and, what is more, urgently require renewed attention under the threat of conceptual systems that are intending to eradicate them. Even where practitioners of the Gothic appear to differ widely in their priorities, as in the cases of Radcliffe and Lewis, the Gothic tale insists that familiar conceptions of past and future, as well as modes of social and economic agency, rest on more fundamental practices of antagonistic reciprocity than they care to theorise. According to the Gothic, no such thing as wholesale traditionalism or full-throated revolutionary insurrection, for example, can succeed, for each generation necessarily demands to confer a human status on the next and to receive a human status in turn; continuity makes its demand felt, even when, or especially when, something has drastically interrupted that sequence.

Adopting this reading of the Gothic might seem to underline a broadly historicist account of its emergence. Indeed, there can be little doubt that the Gothic addresses itself to the question of symbolic exchange precisely because revolutionary challenges to the tradition in the later eighteenth century made it unusually difficult for the living to inherit the institutions of the past. The generation of the 1790s thus faced what they took to be the vexed question of how to confront the secret crimes of that past, the forms of violence and abuse intrinsic to its forms of power, and the flawed gender roles and sexual relations inscribed into those forms, as well as the problem of the violence implicit in condemning that past and in enduring the loss of continuity between generations. Hence they found it necessary to invent a discursive mode through which they could rethink that past and repair the breach. No doubt the tales of Radcliffe and Lewis, oriented as they are to the question of the supernatural, set themselves apart from the vast array of romances of their moment; as James Watt argues, most of the romances of this period focused on the drama of usurpation and the restoration of rightful ownership, placing such concerns within an overtly patriotic and didactic framework (Watt 1999: 7, 42–69). But in that case, what appears to be generic variation actually reinforces the central burden of what we would now call ‘Gothic’ tales, for they, alongside other romances, rather than being simply the product of a particular history, attempt to respond to and reinterpret that history, to think through what is at stake in the reception of the past and the articulation of its legacy.

It might thus be tempting to argue that the Gothic participates in formulating the terms of a historicism that becomes dominant in the initial decades of the nineteenth century – and one that underlies the historicist imperatives even of our moment (Chandler 1998). But the Gothic pursues another strategy. Rather than taking cultural discontinuity to be a historical question, an event within the complex interweaving of various causes and effects, it reads that interruption as the sign of a fundamental threat to culture: because the symbolic relations between the living and the dead have been altered, the human status of both is in danger (see Castle 1987: 241–4). In its view, the task is not to explain the breach in a discourse of knowledge but to heal it through a form of narrative reparation that revives and reconceives archaic practices in doing so. Rather than constituting a historicist response to the dilemmas of history, then, it provides in a fictional medium a quasi-anthropological response to what it considers a crisis in the basic practices of culture.

Undoubtedly, differing Gothic tales interpret this crisis in idiosyncratic ways. Sharing the post-Revolutionary anxiety of her moment, Radcliffe expands it to encompass a broader question: how to reconceive of the cultural traditions that precede the literature of sensibility in the new contexts imposed by the 1790s. Her tales typically centre on protagonists of sensibility encountering a world shaped by lack of sympathy, obsession with property, manipulation of law, the imposition of personal will and the indulgence in reckless expenditure or passionate murder. In effect, she places protagonists of feeling in a rather Hobbesian world, as if to expose the subjectivity of late eighteenth-century British literature to the realities of an alternative regime not shaped by its disciplines (Poovey 1979). Her work attempts to reinterpret those realities within the terms of an aesthetically capacious and psychologically coherent ethical life. It strives to incorporate a now alien past, as well as the breach between that past and the present, into a narratively rendered sensibility that can do justice to them while rewriting them in new terms. But since The Mysteries of Udolpho treats Emily’s consciousness as perpetually ‘preoccupied’ with familiar cultural tropes, including commonplace emotions and their received representations (Pinch 1996: 111–36), it is no simple matter to bring her incrementally towards less derivative insights. The novel thus presents the reworking of that past and its continued impress as the labour of years in a process conducted under perpetual duress.

Within this overarching emphasis on the revision of a prior cultural mode, the novel can reach its completion only through a surprisingly subtle engagement with the violence against which it is written. Never having learned of the legacy of family violence from her father, who keeps the murder of his sister a secret and thus in some sense unburied and unaddressed (Miles 1993: 130–1), Emily in Udolpho at last understands the history of her family thanks to her direct encounter with Laurentini, as if to suggest that she can defuse the threat of passionate violence only through a face-to-face exchange with its perpetrator (Radcliffe 1980: 641–9, 654–64). Moreover, having apparently signed over her property to Montoni, Emily receives a testament from Laurentini, retaining her privileged status in part because of a gesture of reparation from the person who committed violence against her family. The novel thus converts the sign of interruption into that of restoration, providing Emily a solution, not through her development alone, but also through a gift from the agent of violence. Here the detective tale held in solution throughout the novel’s plot is resolved not simply in Emily’s gaining access to a particular knowledge – a requirement voiced as well in the interpolated tale, in which the deceased stranger makes a murder known in order to demand that the perpetrator be brought to justice – but also in the novel’s placing such knowledge within the dynamics of exchange, confession, acceptance and reparation. Both knowledge and property thus operate under the imperative to bury the dead and heal the breach. A similar reworking of disruption is in play when Valancourt, having indulged himself at the gaming tables of Paris, stakes all on one last play and bestows his winnings on a friend, restoring him to his family, enabling him to marry, and thus in the novel’s terms to enter responsible adulthood (Radcliffe 1980: 652–3). In these narratives, the novel converts the site of transgression into bestowal, incorporating sensibility and transgression alike into its sense of the demands of antagonistic reciprocity.

Where Radcliffe often places her focus on such a negotiation with a troubled past, Lewis in contrast emphasises the implications of the breach itself, organising his tale around the excessive enjoyments of sexual transgression and its close analogue, destructive insurrection (Paulson 1983: 219–25). These two approaches to the disturbance in continuity ultimately shape two contrasting, yet mutually implicated, traditions of the Gothic tale: Radcliffe’s ‘terror’ and Lewis’s ‘horror’ Gothic. As we have seen, in Lewis’s novel, Raymond lays his ancestor the Bleeding Nun to rest and later receives his beloved Agnes back from a living death, completing the complex interplay between homologous tales. But this novel innovates on the Radcliffean tradition by providing a further tale in which no such resolution takes place, one that depicts what transpires when a protagonist chooses absolute transgression. In doing so, it complicates the Gothic’s core concerns, suggesting that such a choice ironically takes shape through a demonic version of symbolic exchange, the act whereby Ambrosio signs his soul over to Lucifer. The novel thus proposes that the repudiation of symbolic exchange cannot help but participate in a darker version of the same. Absolute transgression does not merely abrogate reciprocity, creating the conditions for disaster, for in the view of the Gothic even this apparent instance of fierce self-assertion must ultimately constitute another version of symbolic exchange, a horrific gift to a nihilistic alterity. For the Gothic, even the repudiation of reciprocity must be read as reciprocity, albeit a demonic one. Yet the Gothic tale also suggests that such a version of exchange must ironically cancel itself. As the final twist in Ambrosio’s tale suggests, the monk’s fidelity to disaster meets with its own undoing in a Satanic contempt that annihilates whatever he hoped for in signing the contract in the first place. Fidelity to disaster is a disaster for fidelity itself. By the same token, such a fidelity also leads to a world where even the most fundamental relations of symbolic exchange collapse: on the novel’s final page, as he dies over seven days, Ambrosio endures the scene of a cosmic anti-creation, an undoing of the divine gift of the world.

Because the novel provides no answer for this development, leaving Ambrosio’s corpse unburied in its final lines, it refuses to incorporate this plot into the scenario of ceremonial burial visible elsewhere; in its overall form The Monk thus provides us with both a narrative of symbolic exchange and an account of its radical collapse, giving neither version final authority. It thus initiates a key counter-tradition in the Gothic mode, bringing into play, along with a theory of culture, one of anti-culture, showing that the rituals of culture can form no permanent defence against anti-creation. It suggests, in short, that the acts constituting the apparent foundation of the world in fact do not found it but only attempt to ward off the perpetual threat of its dissolution, remaining caught within a contest that is ultimately unresolvable.

By initiating this exploration, The Monk also conceives of the form that a relation to sheer transgressive enjoyment might take. Through the figure of Matilda, Lewis provides a figure who perpetually incites Ambrosio to further transgressions, promises gratifications still to be pursued, and encourages his final, lethal contract with Satan. Embodying the quintessence of seductive agency, a form of enjoyment that few desiring subjects could resist, Matilda cuts against any participation in symbolic exchange, voicing a demand to defy it instead. While the incitement to enjoyment might seem to emanate from the protagonist’s own desire, in this novel it takes the form of an external – or what Lacanian theory would describe as an ‘extimate’ (Miller 2008) – agent, bearing out once again the Gothic insight that one’s apparently autonomous, anti-relational acts transpire in another mode of relation. Moreover, that relation, as in any instance of symbolic exchange, remains unstable, partly antagonistic; although Matilda seems to play a subservient role in fulfilling each of Ambrosio’s wishes, by perpetually enabling their satisfaction she eventually begins to dominate those wishes, commanding what she would fulfil. Much as Lacanian theory juxtaposes the moral imperatives of the superego with the superego’s command to enjoy, proposing that under the harsh demands of the moral law lurks a hidden injunction to obscene pleasure (Žižek 1991: 9–11, 237–41; cf. Townshend 2007: 329–31), this novel interweaves the strictures of conscience with their repudiation, suggesting that the norms of the law inevitably bear within them a similarly imperious, but demonic, command. The figure of Matilda, of course, is an instance of the disastrous alterity discussed above; her perpetual incitement to transgression thus constitutes an ongoing invitation to choose anti-creation, to opt for a fidelity that would erase symbolic relations tout court. Such a figure becomes pivotal for further Gothic explorations of the underside of symbolic exchange. The extimate agent, too evil to be human and too intimate not to be, reappears variously in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806) as a racially marked, Satanic tempter; as the theologically seductive Gil-Martin in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824); and much later (1897) as Stoker’s Dracula, a figure that even Mina Murray, exemplar of married virtue, personal stability and savvy resourcefulness, cannot resist.

Insofar as The Monk creates mutually implicated scenarios of restoration and transgression, it ultimately points to that aspect of the subject – and of the collective – which occupies a precarious position between symbolic exchange and its demonic counterpart. This position, which some might describe as a place of radical freedom, was especially palpable in the years during and immediately after the French Revolution, when the collective hovered between the prospects of further insurrection or restoration. Insofar as the Gothic reduces this instability to a dimension of the fictional subject, it creates scenarios in which the subject’s volatility remains distinct from either narrative option. Perhaps the most notorious result of this development takes shape in Lord Byron’s Oriental tales, where the visage of the so-called Byronic hero hints at a subjectivity whose previous acts and enduring commitments remain inscrutable.

These renderings, however, may only articulate in another idiom what is present in a seemingly benevolent figure such as La Luc in Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest (1791), who after the death of his wife withdraws from sexual interest in others and daily meditates on the one he hopes to join in the afterlife (Radcliffe 1986: 273–5). Insofar as he insists on sustaining his relation to her even after her death, he transforms her into a version of the undead, even if a beloved one. His condition thus nearly shades into that of Raymond in The Monk, who inadvertently finds himself pledged body and soul to the Bleeding Nun through his notorious mistake at the gates of the Castle of Lindenberg. In these tales, Radcliffe and Lewis explore a further complication to symbolic exchange, the prospect of marriage not to a mortal but an immortal, and thus potentially undead, partner. A marriage of this kind, while apparently within the terms of symbolic exchange, actually transforms it into something like fidelity to what such exchange normally excludes, the claims of a partner even after death, creating a paradoxical construction not far removed from the contract into which Ambrosio enters with Lucifer.

These various renditions of marriage to the undead hint that something uncanny takes place in marriage that it cannot fully defuse. La Luc’s undying attachment to his wife and Raymond’s inability to relieve himself of his involuntary receptivity to the visits of the Nun suggest that an aspect of the undead inheres in the living subject; marriage may thus be an exchange between immortals despite the marriage ceremony’s reference to a fidelity until death. That prospect, in turn, suggests that an uncanny, undead element remains in each partner, a queer aspect of the subject that cannot fully defer itself in symbolic action. Yet as we have seen, the Gothic proposes that this aspect of the subject does not exemplify autonomy or self-ownership but rather is itself to be conceived as owed to another. Thus the Gothic tale proposes that symbolic exchange, rather than defusing the demands of the ghost, creates the conditions for mutual haunting, producing a reciprocity of undead subjects, both of whom will forever be vulnerable to the welcome or unwelcome visits of the other. In effect, the Gothic takes the fictions of romantic love so far that it transforms them into their uncanny counterpart, into tales of horrific – or horrifically blissful – undead romance.

These aspects of the Gothic tale directly anticipate the themes that Freud explores a century later, for they suggest that the unheimlich – ‘uncanny’ or un-home-like – is intrinsically interwoven with the heimlich, the home-like itself. The uncanny is the unacknowledged element of the homely, the demonic persistence within those rituals of mutual bestowal that create the conditions for home and comfort in the first place. To bestow the human condition, it seems, is also to take the risk of accepting an inhuman condition at the same time. Uncanny alterity is never mastered, never deferred for good. The Gothic captures this motif in part by suggesting that the resolution to its plots can take place only by means of a fault: Raymond sets in motion the narrative that culminates in his marriage to Agnes only through a plot to help her escape, much as Laurentini, the one who violates the St Aubert family, becomes the only one capable of giving Emily the knowledge she seeks. Such a fault bears the trace of antagonism intrinsic to the rituals of symbolic exchange: without a hint of transgression, there would never be occasion for those rituals of reciprocation across the generations or between sexual partners to take place at all.

The prospect that a hint of the inhuman persists even in the rituals of symbolic exchange almost inevitably produces a religious or metaphysical horror, the unbearable fear that even the sacred bears the traces of evil. Taken far enough, such a horror touches on the prospect that Christianity is stained with that which repudiates its conception of the ultimate act of symbolic exchange between humanity and divinity: the crucifixion. Within the folkloric traditions on which the Gothic relies, no figure exemplifies this repudiation better than the Wandering Jew, who in the traditional telling refuses to come to the aid of Christ on his way to the cross. This figure, redolent of old Europe’s anti-Semitism, serves throughout the Gothic tradition as the supreme outsider; the tormentor of Christ himself, he is excluded from the sacrificial community and from death, forced to endure existence as a living version of the undead. In The Monk, this wanderer appears in the guise of the Grand Mogul, whose outsider status at once accurses him and gives him a privileged knowledge by which he can release others from their undead status. Here Christianity’s implication in its own inhuman other leads to the further complication that this other can help restore the sacrificial community itself, as if he is necessary for the relations of symbolic exchange themselves to function. In effect Lewis explores the logic of the Greek pharmakos, the sacrificial victim who attains a certain redemptive agency, suggesting that the one who violates symbolic exchange becomes, through that very event, a sacred outsider capable of restoring it (cf. Girard 1977: 94–6, 296–7).

But perhaps the most complex formulation of a Gothic religious horror appears in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), especially in the scene in which Mina, by now Mina Harker, is seen sucking blood from the breast of the undead Dracula (Stoker 1996: 281–2). This sublimely transgressive scene evokes the prospect that vampiric transmission constitutes a demonic parody of the Eucharist, producing a community of outcasts who share the exact contrary of a redemptive, sacrificially authorised, gender-normative and ethnically and sexually legitimate blood (Herbert 2002: 115–19; O’Malley 2006: 158–60). Even worse, the novel suggests that its virtuous characters are vulnerable to being converted to this unholy community merely because the vampire can gain access to their bodies, hinting that virtually anyone who enjoys the condition of embodiment hosts an involuntarily vampiric disposition. The sacrificial community, it seems, is at least potentially the host to its hellish counterpart. Still worse, the chief agent of this horrific Eucharist is almost impossible to destroy; to bury him is only to provide him a base for endless wandering, giving him his properly improper position as the perpetual contrary of the sacrificial community, a late version of the Wandering Jew. Thus Stoker must invent Van Helsing, a character who mediates between Britain and its Eastern European other and who, through his strange knowledge, can help construct symbolic exchange on a new level, enabling what one might call the emplotment of a second death, a further kind of burial, for Dracula and his acolytes – a death that can usher them into a state of eternal rest. In providing this new construction, however, the novel innovates yet again on the themes central to the Gothic, for its rendition of the passage from undeath to a truly final, peaceful death proposes an ultimate level of symbolic action: in its view symbolic exchange can definitively respond to the call of transgressive enjoyment only by producing a second version of burial that surmounts undead pleasure in the even more imperative bliss of peace. In that case, as it works through the themes of Radcliffe’s interpolated tale on a second level, Dracula proposes that the final form of the symbolic relation of the dead to the living is to exchange the peace of the grave for the peace of the earth.

One could argue that in this tale the complex role of the Grand Mogul, who is at once outcast and redemptive, is split into the more consistently transgressive Dracula and the consistently restorative Van Helsing, considerably simplifying the ambiguities of The Monk. But a similarly complex role reappears elsewhere in Dracula, as Mina, partially infected through her contact with Dracula, uses her unconscious knowledge to aid the mission of her peers in tracking him down and laying him to rest. Here an unconscious vulnerability to undeath becomes an asset, a means of restoring the Eucharistic community, suggesting that Mina has some of the attributes of the pharmakos herself. That suggestion, in turn, hints that any subject infested by the persistence of undeath can through a second-order symbolic act lay that intimate vampiric agency to rest. In this account, the subject’s vulnerability to the death drive goes only so far; even this dimension, cryptically inscribed within the relations of symbolic exchange itself, can be overcome through the bestowal of a state that exceeds any haunting, that goes beyond the mere immortality of the subject to an anonymous eternity, an alterity beyond all desire.

The appearance of a figure such as Van Helsing within the Gothic tale – an expert in the revenants of old Europe who, through his shadowy knowledge, can become a resource in laying them to rest – brings that tale within the vicinity of psychoanalysis, whose initial Freudian formulations appeared during the same decade as Dracula. The role that Stoker gives to Van Helsing is soon to be taken over by the analyst, who similarly aspires to a knowledge of the soul’s uncanny dimensions. Where Van Helsing relies on hypnosis to capture Mina’s cryptic knowledge, Freud moves from using hypnosis to inviting a certain mode of speech, bringing him closer to aspects of the literary evocation of the unspoken and thus to central terms in the Gothic tradition. In these and other ways, the analyst becomes the heir of the Gothic project, attempting to tease out the inhuman attributes of the haunted social subject and to bring those attributes into the light of day, allowing them expression through the interchange of speech. In this way, the analyst enables the subject to assume a more fully conceived relation to desire and to place it more consciously in relation to others.

Within the trajectory I have traced in this essay, then, psychoanalysis extends Radcliffe’s reinscription of the interpolated tale, following through on the attempt to find the unburied corpse, to recognise its alterity through appropriate symbolic action and to lay the unquiet dimensions of the soul to rest. Like the Gothic, psychoanalysis contemplates the various challenges of modernity from within premises it inherits from a distant past, sustaining imperatives that modernity has striven to forget and that as a result haunt it with redoubled force. Moreover, as we have seen, like the Gothic it conceives of the subject’s desire not as its innermost essence, an instance of its autonomy, but rather as a further instance of alterity; as a result, in its mapping of the subject and its relations, psychoanalysis refuses the terms of fictional realism and its attendant psychologically ‘deep’ or round subject, as well as the fictions of liberal social agency inscribed in such literature. It thus carries forward the broadly Gothic project of conceiving even of modernity in non-modern terms (cf. Collings 2009: 31–4), making explicit what the entire ensemble of apparently secular modernity otherwise would miss, the insistence of symbolic exchange.

A full rendition of the consequences of the Gothic for our own moment would thus need to interpret how the Gothic tale, psychoanalysis and their heirs, taken together, place symbolic exchange under the care of one who, knowing its ways, can tend to its practices within the nearly lethal context of liberal modernity. Heirs of all its sub-modes – Radcliffe’s explained supernatural, Lewis’s unexplained supernatural, and a wide range of further renditions of seduction, insurrection, usurpation and restoration – this ensemble of Gothic and psychoanalysis shows that its proper form inheres, not in any one of them, but in the dialectic between them and thus in the gradual elaboration of a core set of questions into ever more explicit and capacious terms. The Gothic, in short, is not a specific narrative form or mode but a theorisation of symbolic exchange that can range beyond narrative boundaries to incite and enliven a range of further discourses and practices enduring into our own moment. It is the site where a supposed modernity conceives of itself otherwise, accepting the demand to recognise and symbolise its vexed relation with a repudiated past.