'Anything scented by the rising effluvia of the tomb', was how our friend Jennie Gray, former Secretary of the late and lamented Gothic Society, defined Gothic. Trying to come up with a definition of this strange and unsettling genre - and is it a 'genre'? perhaps it's more an inclination, an itch, buried in the psyche - can keep you occupied a good long time. I amused myself for ages at it. The trouble is that 'Gothic' changes its meaning over time, yet maintains a near-miraculous inner consistency - and continually refers back to itself - and the best 'definition' is simply to tell the sorry tale. So ...
... We start with the Germanic tribes of Goths, invading the Roman Empire in the days of its decline, eventually under the Visigoth (western Goth) leader Alaric sacking the city of Rome itself in the year 410. Like other barbarian tribes - the Huns, for instance - the Goths became rather unfairly a byword for destruction and pillage. Eventually, however, they carved their own kingdoms out of the ruins of the Empire, settled down, were converted to Christianity, and eventually disappeared as separate peoples.
In the very late 1000s, Suger, Abbot of St Denis in Paris, rebuilt the abbey church and introduced revolutionary pointed arches which he and his stonemasons discovered could bear weight far better than old-fashioned round-headed arches. Presumably they got the idea from the Arabs settled in Spain. Within a hundred years every new building in Europe had pointed arches and the style began to affect other forms of art too. It was the 16th-century art historian Giorgio Vasari who first blamed pointed-arch architecture on the Goths (he'd never heard of Abbot Suger) and called it 'German' as a term of abuse, contrasting it with the harmony and order of Classical Greek and Roman buildings. Before long 'German' turned into 'Gothic', and the word came to include everything dark, barbaric, superstitious and chaotic. Today, we look at Gothic art differently. It expresses something sublime and uplifting, the human spirit soaring upward to reach the eternal glory of God. And yet the arch comes to an abrupt stop as its two arms ram into one another at the apex ... so there's a sort of strain and anxiety in the shape as well.
From the 1760s, first in England and later elsewhere, a new form of horror literature made its appearance. The first to call itself 'Gothic' was Horace Walpole's yarn The Castle of Otranto (1765) which he described as 'A Gothic Story'. Gothic fiction borrowed a lot from medieval romances and the more violent bits of Shakespeare, and abounded in ghosts, murders, abductions, and all sorts of disagreeable happenings. Gothic novels were commonly set in the castles and abbeys of the Middle Ages - hence the reason for calling them 'Gothic'!
The first wave of Gothic fiction was over by about 1820 - Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is often taken as the end-point - but its themes kept resurfacing until the word could really be applied to anything horrific, unsettling, dark, or bizarre. Writers and artists, and eventually people working in new genres like film, continually referred back to this growing body of work and so its scope was extended more and more.
Finally, in 1978 and 1979 in Britain the punk-rock movement began to develop offshoots of dark and pessimistic music which were described by a bemused music press as 'Gothic' in contrast with the general run of pop. The bands at the centre of this - Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Damned, largely - became the core of a subcultural style which used a huge range of influences from the past to signify melancholy, gloom and glamour.
And that's where we are today! As young master Voltaire puts it so well, 'Gothic means '"bright, airy and enlightening; dark, gloomy and oppressive; and pertaining to a Germanic tribe known as the Goths, yet not pertaining to the Goths at all".' Well done for getting this far.
So What's It About?
Well, you can spend even more time thinking about this should you please. Again, everyone says something different. The academics talk about the expression of social unease, the chaps and girls in black lipstick talk about individuality and fun. I eventually settled for the idea of Gothic as a means of working through moral ambiguity. All the signifiers of Gothic, the horror, the ghosts, the fondness for black and blood, express existential threat. They're about the undoing of the human. Goths like to dance on the edge of the volcano, relishing the unease. Gothic means the love of what you fear, the conjoined attraction to and repulsion from the possibility of our own undoing - and, in fact, so far as death is concerned, the actual fact of our own undoing. This is why some youngsters move in and out of the subculture in a few years while others remain. The leavers have come to some peace with their own and life's contradictions; or have chosen to put them mentally to one side, anyway. For the rest of us, it's not quite so easy or clear-cut. And that's my reading of it all, for what it's worth.
Gothic and Me
As I find with a lot of people, I can't really identify any clear time when my Gothic enthusiasms began: I've always had a fondness for ruined places, skeletons, and haunted houses. Later I found out about Gothic architecture from being interested in ruins, and really until quite late the only meaning Gothic had for me was referring to the spiky bits on churches. By accident in my mid-teens I discovered the dark glamour of Siouxsie and the Banshees, and so out of that encounter with Goth music came some faint inkling that the word meant something more. Before going to college I inherited a plain black suit from a cousin and eventually my wardrobe became, by no very obviously conscious process, more and more monochrome (when I was coming up to be ordained friends joked about how difficult I would find it wearing nothing but black!). It was one of those friends who sent me an advert for Jennie Gray's 'Gothic Society' and led me to join that. What a discovery! A whole set of dubious and over-educated people with similarly morbid enthusiasms to my own. Then a couple of years later I got invited to the inaugural meeting of the Bucksgoth group in High Wycombe. I can thank the Goth scene for introducing me to my beloved, who grabbed me at Intrusion in Oxford one night with the chat-up line, 'I hear you're training to be a vicar. What do you think about Hell?' Now, where else would you get greeted like that?
My own relationship with Gothic has changed over the years. Being a Christian has made a great impact. I'm sure that, in my case, part of the attraction of Gothic has been its signification of death - which a dark segment of me desires - and that 'existential threat' is also about punishing me for wanting those dark things I take pleasure in (moral ambiguity, as I said). Coming to see the Christian path as a constant war against death and the deathliness of
this fallen world has weakened the attractions of that, and I'm more on guard against the deathliness within myself these days. Since beginning my curacy I've come across quite enough very real pain, distress, sadness and death to make me yearn for the light most of the time, too.
Nevertheless, I still love ruins and graveyards. The first bars of Hong Kong Garden or Cities in Dust still make me shiver. And I still adore (most) of the Goths I come across. They're our tribe, God bless them!
And What Now?
There are quite a number of guidebooks to Goth/Gothic culture about these days - not least my own, which you can find by clicking 'Buy Things' above! Other books are listed under 'Goth Info' and also check the Links page too. Consequently, I'm not going to waffle on for ages about it here ...
