Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic

Edmundson has got hold of a powerful idea here: that strategies and characters of Gothic literature have burst out of the realm of fiction and infiltrated our public life. While he sometimes pushes his broadly defined notion of the Gothic too far (it sometimes it seems as if everything belongs to the realm of the Gothic depending on his say so), for the most part he does stick to his original definition of a hero/villain, haunted structures, seduced and screaming heroines and the occasional heroic rescuer. He suggests, quite believably, that the powerful Gothic themes, have been used by Marx (the capitalist as vampire), and by Freud (humanity haunted by the past, in the grip of infantile memory which dooms us to behavior we can never fully escape except with the help of modernist magicians like Freud). Moving from the talk show (where families reenact Gothic scripts wherein hero/villains describe their inexplicably destructive behavior without understanding or regret as their families hurl abuse at them), to movies (pick just about anything including Disney films), Edmundson strikes at the root of the malevolent vine of the Gothic, a vine which snakes through our political life - Gothic monsters such as Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, through our social life - our collective perception that we are in danger even in the most benign circumstances.He does see hope for using the Gothic the way it was intended: to throw off the dead hand of the past, originally the aristocratic, then the plutocratic, or therapeutic, now bureaucratic hand of power and discipline. His writings on Freud are particularly incisive on the therapeutic hand. Here's a quote: "Freud, in his most resolutely Gothic moods, believed that we never forget anything, so that every past moment is stored somewhere in the psyche... He also thought, at least at times, that *any* negative event that befalls us -- no matter how apparently contingent -- is in some measure the result of our guilty need for punishment, our wish to self-destruct. Edmundson also notes that Foucualt and Derrida and other "new" critics favor the Gothic as well. And if you think of Foucault's evocative prose style, and Derrida's "terrorism," Edmundson has a point, a minor point, but a point nonetheless. The Cold War Gothic has now been replaced by the Terrorist Gothic, the apocalyptic version of Gothicism. George W. Bush whips up the external apocalyptic Gothic, while at the same time we're being terrorized internally by the second variety of the Gothic - the "terror" gothic - in this case, the recession terror gothic. The Gothic can be a powerful tool for critiquing the status quo. The problem is, it has become the status quo, and, unlike "healthy" Gothic horror, it never opens out into new territory now. Instead, we're all doomed, doomed, doomed!. Edmundson notes a few exceptions: the first Nightmare on Elm Street by Wes Craven for one. I heartily agree on that score!

Mark Edmundson has created a book (really a series of intertangled essays) on angels, sadomasochism and the culture of gothic (as goes its sub-title). Nightmare on Main Street is a fascinating look at a dark, disturbing, interesting subject. The joy in this book, and sometimes its frustration, is the wide range from two centuries old gothic novels to Forrest Gump, Oprah and Iron John/Women Who Run With Wolves. The connections are not always clear but the writing will carry the reader along this weird academic roller coaster ride as they nod along in agreement (for me particulary the Forrest Gump section) or they shake their head in exasperation or frustration. Either way it will get the reader thinking of everything around them in terms of gothic or angel (and these words are very loosely defined in order to create a net big enough to catch all of Edmundson's concepts). This book was an intelligent read.

In his deceptively concise work on "angels, sadomasochism, and the culture of the gothic," Nightmare on Main Street (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997), Mark Edmunson argues that, pace the late, great Carl Sagan, we do indeed live in a "demon-haunted world," albeit one haunted perhaps by demons of our own making. Edmundson's seductively convincing claim is that, two centuries down the line from the genre's origins, we have come to narrate our world through the conventions of gothic fiction. Not only our literature (horror, but also such works as Nobel laureate Tony Morrison's Beloved), our cinema (the slasher film, legitimated by the Academy Award given The Silence of the Lambs), but even our news is generically gothic (l'affaire O.J. Simpson). We--individually, socially, culturally--are haunted by psychology, ideology (cf. Terry Castle's "Phantasmagoria" in The Female Thermometer (NY: Oxford UP, 1995), as well as her claims for Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho as a source of modern subjectivity, e.g., her introduction to the recent Oxford World Classics edition), and our resurgent gothicism is as much an epiphenomenon of millenial anxiety as its emergence was of the Terror of the French Revolution. Interestingly, however, Edmundson's own narrative takes typically gothic twist, doubling this evil twin with the "facile transcendence," as he quite rightly names it, of new age spiritualism, exemplified by the recent mania for angels and such middlebrow feelgood productions as Forrest Gump. While such tail-biting is somewhat problematic, Nightmare on Main Street is nonetheless an ambitious, suggestive, and, provisionally, convincing work of cultural analysis. Related works of interest include Harold Bloom's Omens of Millenium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (NY: Riverhead, 1996); Teresa Goddu's Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (NY: Columbia UP, 1997); and the collection of essays/exhibition catalog, Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth-Century Art, edited by Christoph Grunenberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).

Professor Edmundson's book explores some of the darker issues in our culture and the various ways some artists and others have tried to cope with gothic "forces". For an academic book, it is very clearly written and witty. I learned a lot from it and found it very thought provoking. Edmundson notes that a few years ago he went on a prolonged horror movie binge, so his "culture" is probably slanted in a direction others may not find so familiar. However, I think that readers interested in horror and of an intellectual bent will love the book. I also think that psychotherapists might find this book quite worthwhile. There are some exceptionally clear presentations of some of Freud's concepts and, in my view, the book also is a meditation on trying to deal with human suffering and our attempts to find hope and redemption as individuals, both psychologicly and spiritually. I found this to be a rewarding book and highly recommend it.