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To my mind, the most elegant and concise definition of what is and is not gothic was put into words by James M. Powell in 1988, writing for the Syracuse Scholar about German narrative historian Leopold von Ranke:  “The great paradox of human existence is the refusal of the past to die and the danger that critical examination of the past, always fragile, may succumb.  Human beings live in the narrow margins between mythic pasts and hard-won efforts at understanding their past.”  To wit, I believe that a story becomes specifically gothic fiction rather than more broadly horror or fantasy when its central themes deal with the uncomfortable intrusion of the past into the present and the stubborn refusal of that past to die.

My opinions on literary fiction should be well-known to anyone familiar with my work, but to briefly summarize a bitter old woman’s lifetime of kvetching, I find the majority of contemporary so-called litfic to be uninspired and uninteresting drivel that isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on (with the few notable exceptions, such as Leslie Feinberg’s incredible Stone Butch Blues or Latin American magical realism, notable as much for their rarity as their exemplary quality).  I find myself at home in the world of speculative fiction, in stories of imagined worlds and flights of fancy and phantasmagoria; what Professor Tolkien called subcreation.  Progressive speculative fiction is a genre dominated by science fiction, such as the dystopian near-future sci-fi of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and the “harder” far-future sci-fi of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish cycle, with works of fantasy and phantasm (such as the fantasy of Margaret Killjoy, or Le Guin’s own Earthsea series) being comparatively uncommon.  This is to be expected; the fantasy genre is usually rooted, at least superficially or aesthetically, in the past or the present, and those artists setting out to create art dealing with progressive themes will naturally be most concerned with progress, whether that’s dreaming of a better future or ruminating on how the crimes of the present might affect the future.

However, the problem of the stubborn past is not one that can ever be discounted or ignored.  As the character Ulysses said in one of my favorite works of progressive near-future science fiction, the video game Fallout: New Vegas, “Who are you, who do not know your history?”

In his 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, the brilliant political economist and passable wordsmith Karl Marx famously said:  “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted by the past.  The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”  This, to me, summarizes the essence of the gothic as much as it's a statement on real-world history and politics.  The past, with all of its mistakes and all of its secrets, defines and creates the present.  The stage of history upon which the great drama of our lives will play out was set and dressed long before we were born, and the problems of the present that we fight to fix are the purest form of the stubborn refusal of the past to die.

Ever since the people who worry about such things have condescended to turn a critical eye towards genre fiction, rivers of ink have been spilled discussing the possible utility of horror fiction and the nature of humanity’s perpetual fascination with the grotesque and macabre.  The general consensus amongst critics and theorists, which I mostly agree with, is that horror is important both as a conceptual “safe space” in which to explore the more unsavory aspects of the human experience and as an unflattering mirror providing a far too honest reflection of ourselves and the world we live in.  This, I think, makes the gothic a genre uniquely poised to treat with the problems of the modern world; as the past creates the present and the contradictions of the past define the issues of the present, our lives as workers are haunted by the uncomfortable intrusion of the past into the present and by the stubborn refusal of the past to die, and the phantasms vexing workers in the edifice of a dying empire are far more terrifying than those haunting Victorian aristocrats in their decaying estates.  After all, as the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born, now is the time of monsters.

Marx also said, in his verbose and rambling but nonetheless insightful Capital:  “Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more the more it sucks.”  We artists tend to be a disconnected and self-aggrandizing group who go through life with an over-inflated sense of the importance of what we do, and I as a novelist have got my doubts about the utility of fiction as a pedagogical tool, but it can’t be denied that all art is propaganda.  I do believe that, when we as artists take the time to explore the gothic, we might help deliver just a few more hammer-taps onto the end of the stake being driven into the heart of the vampiric wage system.

In love and solidarity,

Natalie H. Ironside

Horror Writers Association