What is the Gothic Mode?

July 29, 2005 9:19 AM

In literature, what is "the Gothic mode?"

Bruce Sterling references the Gothic mode in his discussion of the singularity (mp3), but all my Googling has turned up nothing that explains what it actually is.

Also, are there other modes?

posted by Questioner to media & arts (9 comments total)

Does this help? I think "mode" in this context means something closer to "type," rather than one of a list of standard modes, if you follow me.
posted by JanetLand at 10:06 AM on July 29, 2005

The term 'mode' in music theory has a specific meaning: wikipedia article. If you take a music theory class you will learn all about them, but essentially they were early methods for describing scales (or more specifically, progressions of tones with specific defined intervals between them.) Today we do it somewhat differently by just saying "C Major" or "D minor".

I've never heard of a 'Gothic' mode, so it could be that Sterling is calling one of the classical modes by a different name, or is referring to some other concept.
posted by Rhomboid at 10:41 AM on July 29, 2005

Gothic in literature was characerized by horror-ish, extravigant, very rich, deep-colored stories. If you've ever read Masque of the Red Death by Poe, that is gothic writing in all its glory.

Not that gothic does NOT mean horror as we know it today. Gothic writers in England were more into richness (dark blood-red tapestries, etc) than scaring people. Just turns out that some of the stuff they wrote about was a little bit freaky...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_novel has a good article on it.

Also note that 'gothic' and 'pastoral' are considered sub-groups of the Romantic era & style of writing.

Other styles/eras (I think this is what he means by modes) include the Enlightenment (before the Romantic - Tom Jones by Henry Fielding is a good example here), Realism (Mark Twain/many American authors), Naturalism (Jack London), Modernism (Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner), and postmodernism (Toni Morrison, although this category is debatable).

Before that, Classicism included greek drama, and then not a whole lot happened until the Renaissance.

Hope that helped ;)
It would be a shame for English class last year to go to waste.
posted by devilsbrigade at 11:14 AM on July 29, 2005

By using the word mode, he is borrowing a conceptualization from music to convey the idea of a mood or atmosphere.
posted by Miko at 11:28 AM on July 29, 2005

I'm not sure exactly what Stelring is doing, but in literary studies a 'mode' is like a genre, only different. Whereas genre often specifies the content of a story (e.g., Western novels contain different content than science fiction novels), a mode is a way of telling a story--a manner, as it were.

I'm not sure that Gothic is, in fact, a mode--it's more of a genre in my book--but other modes would be, for example, the tragic, the comic, the ironic, the heroic, the epic, and so on. (Note, of course, that this is something often debated about--so my explanation isn't the last word.)

Think about a story you know well--say, Oedipus Rex. That story is in the tragic mode, but it could easily be told ironically, or even as comedy. I don't really think it could be told as a Gothic story, but there are many stories that could be. That's mode. If you wanted to play fast-and-loose with modes, it would be possible to imagine a deductive mode--Oedipus Rex could be told in that mode as well. Terms like "mode" and "genre" are pretty fluid in general, and scholars are constantly re-defining and debating what they mean, but a good principle to keep in mind is that a work can be in one genre while working in many modes--a science-fiction novel could be first tragic, then comedic, then tragi-comic, then ironic, and so on.

As for the Gothic itself--as devilishbrigade says, the Gothic was a lush, overwrought, above-all intense aesthetic that preceded and to some degree coexisted with the Victorian novel. It involved castles, counts, the supernatural, murder, and so on. Anne Radcliffe is the prototypical writer of Gothic fiction; Dracula is obviously indebted to the Gothic, and Wilkie Collins is a more high-brow Gothic writer. Gothic novels don't necessarily involve ghosts and murder--but they often involve at least the suspicion of ghosts and murder. The style is famously lampooned in Jane Austen's novel Northanger Abbey and, to some extent, in Charlotte Bronte's Villette. It's part of a whole 19th-century category of "sensation fiction"--fiction that was supposed to make you have actual intense feelings (such as fear or horror or even lust), which was at that time a novelty. The classic image is of an enervated, beautiful, wealthy lady of the house reclining on her chaise lounge reading sensational gothic novels like Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.
posted by josh at 12:03 PM on July 29, 2005

More on modes: Northrop Frye, a literary critic, developed a pretty elaborate theory of literary modes in his book Anatomy of Criticism. It's only one theory, but Frye imagined the modes as cyclical; e.g., they descend down the chart in the second link throughout literary history, and perhaps circle around to start over. He does a lot of good readings explaining the attitudes and ideas of certain writers using this theory of modes.
posted by josh at 12:08 PM on July 29, 2005

[clarified devilsbrigade's post re: Tom Jones as requested]
posted by jessamyn at 1:01 PM on July 29, 2005

A mode is not really a way of telling a story, or a genre, or series of tropes--it's more a classification concerning the way the story behaves. Both the manner in which the story is told and its content are important aspects of this classification. There are some who contend Dumas' Three Musketeers is a Gothic novel and that most Hollywood movies, in their extravagant scenes and stories taking place in a world 'haunted' by larger, unseen forces and characters of 'hard surface over murky depths' characters, are essentially Gothic in nature. It's a pretty complex framework to grasp, but start with the Wikipedia entry on Gothic novels.

If you google 'Bruce Sterling Gothic' + 'mode' some interesting links pop up that might shed some light on the subject.
posted by nixerman at 1:39 PM on July 29, 2005

My guess is that he's using the word mode in the French sense, where it literally means "style" or "fashion." And if that's the sense he's using, he's invoking Mary Shelly's Frankenstein and all that stuff that other people have eloquently summarized above.
posted by ikkyu2 at 12:47 PM on July 31, 2005