The relationship between psychoanalysis and the Gothic, then, is complex and multi-layered, involving not just considerations of literary theory but also a debate about the nature and uses of subjectivity within the capitalist socius which must be viewed as directly political. Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-oedipal critique of Freud shows us that the influence of psychoanalysis within literature must be grasped in terms of the fundamental logic of representation and signification which it imposes on the literary.
This may work via the symbolic operation of repressed anxieties and desires, but as Deleuze and Guattari argue, literature can also be oedipalised purely in terms of its form and structure. Psychoanalysis has been instrumental in influencing critical perceptions of Gothic fiction in both these senses, and even where it has been considerably tempered and complexified amidst recent approaches it has continued to promote an implicit oedipalisation of the mode. Specifically, it has stimulated a tendency to value the Gothic as quintessentially representational, working to
assimilate otherwise inexpressible psycho-social fears and hopes by displacing them into terrifying, supernatural, quasi-historical forms. The mode thus appears
particularly amenable to such readings, causing Gothic subjectivity to be understood in terms of an oedipal paranoia, shaped by the neurotic urge to expel that which threatens subjective dissolution.
Schizoanalysis, though, presents a very different way of understanding some of the desires and subjectivities of Gothic literature, and in particular, its concern with threats to the cohesion of the self. From this radically alternative perspective, subjective dissolution does not appear as a threat but rather as a positive development: the opening of a gateway, the transformation of the self into a
gateway. It represents a restoration of the natural processes of desiring-production as they work before the imposition of oedipal paranoia. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, this repression was never, after all, ours, but was rather artificially engineered
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to maintain us in a state of subjection, as a docile consumer of ideological codes.
While Gothic fiction undoubtedly re-enacts this paranoia within its archaic territorialisations, this must be understood as reflecting an effect which is social before it is personal, and which relates specifically to the emergence of capitalism as its determining socius. Moreover, as I have argued, the existence of this paranoid polarity also implies the presence of an alternative, schizoid pole at work.
To discover the effects of this schizoid tendency within Gothic fiction, it is vital that criticism enacts a schizophrenising approach to texts, capable of grasping the ways in which they serve to construct new desiring-machines. This does not mean
disregarding the mode’s neurotic recuperation of the self, or devaluing existing critical approaches which have identified and explored these aspects of Gothic subject-formation. However, it does demand that we carefully contextualise these aspects as expressions of an essentially ideological recapitulation, and as the enactment of a specifically capitalist ‘politics’ of subjectivity. Furthermore, it requires that we attend to the lines of escape which flow across and away from the dark, fantastical archaisms of the mode, exploring not only the neurotic expressions which the Gothic represents but also the schizoid forces which it actively produces.
Yet to read in this way, to read schizophrenically and without our neuroses, is a process as difficult, experimental and unpredictable as it is to write with this schizoid force. If we are to extract from Gothic fiction its revolutionary force of transformation and liberation, and allow it to spread its delirium contagiously to our own perception, we must move beyond a critical dynamic of interpretation questioning many of the principles of established academic criticism. We can counterbalance attention to meaning and signification with a reading which highlights and activates the flows of prepersonal and depersonalising desire released by specific textual images and effects. As I have argued, in Gothic fiction, these reside in experiences of the world which release possibilities of virtual sensation from the dominant appearances of actuality, producing horrific inhuman becomings and delirious synchronic
connections.
This task is made more difficult still by the fact that, in its earlier manifestations, the Gothic mode represents a very early, uncertain series of moves towards the
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schizophrenisation of literature. It constitutes an experimental, exploratory mapping of pathways which (as in all schizoid writing) are only discovered in the process of writing (and reading) – they can never exist as a goal of the text. Moreover, over the course of its development and proliferation, different branchings of the mode have enacted this process in widely different ways, and with varying degrees of the
‘backing away’ common to all texts which approach ‘the schizophrenic wall’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 147). Schizoanalysis makes it possible to approach texts through these often coexisting oscillations of libidinal investment. More importantly, it offers a way to discover moments of anti-oedipal, schizoid desire within the mode and make use of them for our own empowerment. It is not merely Gothic subjectivity which is at stake in this debate, but our own.
Yet these potentialities do not simply exist, waiting to be discovered; they must be activated by the reader, brought to life and made to work. They exist, in a sense, as virtual predicates within the substrate of Gothic writing. In this chapter, I have offered general formulations of how these schizoid dimensions appear and function in the Gothic mode. A central argument of this thesis, though, is that the discovery and activation of these forces across the mode can be facilitated by exploring those Gothic modalities which most obviously and powerfully enact this schizo-literary dynamic. My exemplification of these operations begins with Lovecraft’s weird tales.
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Chapter Two: The Schizo-Gothic of H.P. Lovecraft