‘...The darkness of the night was echoed by the indefatigable darkness of his heart; the nascent sun waiting behind it no reassurance, just as his own humanity lay behind many layers of anguish and anger that rivalled the sun in its intensity and yet the coldness of the deepest ocean - mocking god with its emptiness as he plunged the knife deeper into the heart of his supposed lover - her body contorting like flames upon a pyre, as he truly discovered love’.
‘This is unreadable’, the professor muttered, eyes still locked on the manuscript.
A slight issue for the budding author. He collected his thoughts and asked, simply
‘Why? I think it’s quite evocative’
The professor’s eyes darted to him reflexively
‘Do you even know what that word means? This is an abomination. Horrific. Not fit to be read by rapists and murderers. I will not be reading the rest of this manuscript, Mr Blackwell, and I encourage you to pursue another avenue of learning. Writing is not your strength, and attempting to shock me with subject matter you have no experience with cannot hide that’
This blow to his ego was too much. He tried to defend himself, but the professor simply continued.
‘This focus on the macabre disgusts me. Your careless abuse of the darkest subjects we can imagine speaks volumes of your immaturity. I only hope one day these things befall you so you realise they are not to be written about for the purpose of crass entertainment. Get out.’
With the tirade absorbed, and the manuscript in his hand, he made his way out of the office.
The professor was an idiot.
As usual, his wife bore the brunt of his frustration.
‘This is obscene. I pour my soul through the ink, and yet i am scoffed at for my passion’
‘I see’, mumbled his long suffering wife as she boiled the kettle
‘The fire that runs through my veins cannot be imprisoned within these cages of morality and godliness’
After a few seconds of absorbing her husband’s rant, she realised it was her turn to agree.
‘That’d make sense, yes. Red cup or white cup?’
‘Red cup. Why would he need to tell me this? Is he scared of what I can achieve when I probe our most base fascinations?’
She had walked out of the room when he began his next volley of complaints
‘No. A man that educated cannot possibly think that little of my explorations of our instincts. He doesn’t think I’m worthy to discuss these things! Yet they are the secret to my success!’
The kettle boiled. She ran back into the kitchen, nodding her head and feigning interest.
Forcing the tea into his hand, she sat beside him. This rant has been had a million times, prompted by a million different things. She had accepted it by now.
‘... and I will storm into his office armed with the adoration of his peers!’
Even 2 years ago, he didn’t speak like this, she thought. She remembered, and craved, the brevity of their conversations in the past, before he had to bring up the categorical imperative when they discussed when to go to bed, and before he tried his hand at explaining antiquity-era playwrights at the dinner table. Was he even the same person she married?
She spent the rest of the night almost catatonic - staring at the floor, slowly draining her tea, and whipping herself for every lapse of judgement that led her where she was. Why did she stay? She’d glance up at him, trying to eke out a reason in his eyes - she couldn’t find one.
The two went to bed, an infinite distance between them. She couldn’t go on. There was no love left. She got up, gathered some strychnine from their cellar, and went on her way.
He noticed the coldness to his right, even before he opened to his eyes. An empty space next to him in his bed. He stood up, expecting a nice breakfast from his wife. What a sweetheart, he thought, even if she was hopelessly uneducated compared to him. He strolled down, but couldn’t see anything on the table. She must still be in the kitchen - frustrating, but she was clearly sympathetic to his plight as an artist.
She was not in the kitchen. Well, she was, just not cooking there.
He picked up her body, tears streaming down his face, as he welled with emotion and potential. This was his key to literary greatness. He imagined storming the office of his professor, slamming his manuscript on the table once again, but this time armed with the means to make it cut far deeper.
He cradled the body of his wife, a vestige of his transformation into a great writer. He would still need to take care of the material inconvenience - he ran to the police station, and brought them to his house.
The detective strolled around the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards seemingly at random.
‘Explain what happened, again’ , said the detective, face buried in a chest of drawers
He was bouncing on his chair. Buzzing with a neutral excitement, he was prepared to unleash a truly unnecessary tale of their meeting and his failures as a writer. Just as he opened his mouth, though, the detective locked eyes with him, and reflexed to his giddiness.
‘You aren’t too upset, are you?’, probed the detective
‘Upset? No. I’m crushed. Destroyed. I will never see the world the same way again!’
He stared at the detective like a dog waiting to be fed, anticipating the next question he could milk dry from the detective.
The detective walked out of the room, mumbled a little out the front of the house, and came back with an associate, and handcuffs.
‘Harry Blackwell, you’re under arrest for suspicion of murder’, said the detective glumly
‘I’m not a murderer! I’m an author!’
The police wrapped their handcuffs, and led him off.
‘No innocent man behaves like this at the death of his own wife!’ exclaimed the detective
‘I’m sorry to see the world different from a commoner! Melpomene waits for no one!’
I wanted to do three things when I wrote this:
Exaggerate Gothic character tropes
Criticise/illustrate the genre as a whole from within the story
Exaggerate Gothic story tropes
I think I achieved all three of these things, but I do think the theme ! was going for, a kind of satire, was a little bit muddled because I had to fulfil the things I mentioned earlier. I didn’t worry too much about a concrete setting for the story, and hopefully I don’t have to, because the point of the story was to blow gothic tropes out of proportion at various levels within the text.
When I refer to ‘Exaggerating gothic character tropes’, I feel like this was mostly achieved through the main character. I wanted to portray him as the type of ‘obsessed academic’ that we see in books like Frankenstein - someone who puts their humanity second to some greater endeavour. Rather than Victor Frankenstein’s obsession could be argued to have some benefit to the rest of the world, I wanted my character’s obsession (in keeping with my intent to make the tropes even more extreme) to be totally self centred - he simply wants to be recognised as a good author. Obviously that arrogance and lack of self awareness is somewhat funny, and while I think all of the satire slightly muddies the comedy of it, it still has its desired effect.
Criticise/illustrate the genre as a whole from within the story
The conflict between the professor and the protagonist in the beginning of the book serves two purposes. For one, it illustrates the conflict between the old and new, which is an important metanarrative present throughout gothic literature. Clive Bloom, author of ‘Introduction to the Gothic Handbook Series: Welcome to Hell’, states that ‘Gothic does not stand still. Reworking old tropes and inventing new ways those tropes may be expressed is central to the gothic sensibility’ Bloom C. (2020) - so a clear conflict arises between the existing tropes and those that replace it. This conflict is then extrapolated into a wider conversation about genre in the opening scene of my story, mimicking other Gothic stories and also referencing the ‘in-story’ struggle between old values and new ones between the professor and the protagonist. I feel like implementing this was probably the least satisfactory aspect of the story for me, as it was difficult to get these points across concisely without breaking the confines and pacing of the story.
Exaggerate Gothic story tropes
Obviously, Gothic is a very trope-heavy genre. I chose to focus on two elements in particular to lampoon - the depiction of women as fragile ‘un-characters’ that are entirely reactive to the wills of the male protagonist and the romanticisation/fetishisation of death as some beautiful, artistic statement rather than a tragic event. These tropes are mocked explicitly in the initial, in-story manuscript by the protagonist, and then again more subtly as the rest of the story plays out (the protagonist’s wife committing suicide because he annoyed him, and the death being treated as a beautiful act with only a sentence acknowledging the tangible action)
I think I succeeded in parodying the genre to an extent, but realistically I think I bit off more than i could chew and it shows. It was fun writing about someone who is so comically inept and arrogant, but I think it was difficult balancing it with the tropes I tried to parody.
Reference:
Bloom C. (2020) Introduction to the Gothic Handbook Series: Welcome to Hell. In: Bloom C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_1