Joakim Wrethed: Presence [Anwesenheit] and Gothic Elementality in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980)

Beskrivning:

In Ann Radcliffe’s gothic classic The Mysteries of Udolpho, the author explores the limits of imagination (or fancy). The ultimate verdict seems to be that the pleasures of imagination must be harnessed to become the aesthetic enjoyment that humanity craves. This is an ethical question that has a strictly historical side but also a diachronic aspect. The power, versatility and persistence of gothic fiction partly depends on this fundamental ontological question, which to most gothic scholars concomitantly and automatically becomes a hauntological enquiry. The work of the contemporary American author Marilynne Robinson has many faces and a few scholars have analysed her novels in the light of gothic tropes (c.f. for instance Hammerton-Barry on Gilead and Home). For Housekeeping (1980) specifically, the gothic is most clearly seen in three distinct ways. First, we have the foregrounding of the house as an actual and symbolic space; second, we have a haunting past that almost reaches elemental magnitudes in its way of presencing; third, the blurred distinction between reality and imagination, referred to in Radcliffe above, is in Housekeeping made manifest with a strongly phenomenological sensitivity. Reading events through the Heideggerian concept of Anwesenheit, a particular form of postmodern gothic is revealed. This chapter unveils new aspects of Robinson’s novel in terms of Anwesenheit and a specific postmodern hauntology.

Professor Joakim Wrethed has hitherto mainly worked in Irish Studies—especially on John Banville—but he also explores the contemporary novel in English more generally without any primary emphasis on national boundaries. Phenomenology, postmodernism, aesthetics, gothic literature and theology are overarching topics of his scholarly work. Some of the more recent publications have been on the postmodern gothic, the gothic origins of Charles Maturin, aesthetics, the anthropocene and the posthuman zeitgeist. His latest publication is a book in the Palgrave Gothic series, Gothic Hauntology: Everyday Hauntings and Epistemological Desire (2023). Professor Wrethed has worked on aspects of the gothic genre since 2019. Forthcoming 2025 is a monograph on the crime fiction of John Banville and his nom de plume Benjamin Black.