Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny

Abstract

Elferen not only provides thorough and convincing theoretical frameworks for understanding the workings of sound and music in Gothic texts, but also illustrates her points through a series of rich, detailed examples, including the soundtracks of film and TV adaptations of Gothic novels, Hammer Horror films, the TV series Twin Peaks (1990-1991) and Lost (2004-2010), and the game Ju-On: The Grudge (2009) (based on the Japanese horror film and its Hollywood remake). Gothic music crosses various boundaries, but most importantly, it seems, those between pasts, presents and futures, through a mixture of haunting nostalgia (for example with intertextual references to earlier sounds and music, from liturgical chants to classic horror-film samples), effects such as echoes, reverb, delay, drones, sustained chords, and repetition (also often deployed to excess), and futuristic noise (crossing the boundary between human and machine, intensifying the disembodied quality of sound).

Isabella van Eiferen, Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012)

Sound can be disturbing. Unlike a visual image, a sound has no boundaries; it can be impossible to locate, to control or conceptualise. A sound can evoke a presence that is invisible and thus ghostly. It is this quality of sound that interests Isabella van Elferen: its "ambiguous relation with embodiment" (p.4). Sound is uncanny on various levels. A sound without a definite body can evoke the presence of the ghostly, while it can also bring back half-forgotten memories - haunting the hearer - by keying into longstanding conventions (for example the eerie sounds of children singing in film). Gothic sound/music, argues Elferen, disrupts linear time, or "enables listeners to experience a time that is off its hinges, and with that a being that might be haunted, infinite, or simply unknowable" (p.10).

Eiferen traces how sound and music operate across different Gothic media, ranging impressively from literature to film, and through television, game and Goth music. The virtual sounds of literature become actual in cinema, and invade the home through television and video games, while Goth music immerses its hearers in a culture. In framing the question of what makes music Gothic, Elferen emphasises the "functional" quality of music, rather than its "stylistic essence". She brilliantly interrogates how sound and music function across a range of Gothic texts, including how they produce certain effects such as contributing to a novel's ability to haunt its readers.

The first chapter is well grounded in Gothic literature, with a focus on ghost stories. Elferen considers how a novel's soundscapes contribute to its eerie mood, and how commonalities can be identified across such literary soundscapes. In particular, she considers sounds and music that typically lack a source, such as a rustling, a breathing, a creaking floorboard, sounds which in Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas seem for a moment to have "no physical origin," to "be made by bodiless beings" (p.21).

In its attention to soundscapes, Gothic Music is in some ways reminiscent of John Picker's Victorian Soundscapes (OUP, 2003), one of the many books published in the past decade or so in the flourishing field of sound studies. Picker considers how sound operates in Victorian fiction, but where he engages throughout with how sounds are situated in their historical context (especially the scientific and technological developments of the time), Elferen's attention to sounds is primarily focused on the texts themselves. What this allows her to do is not only to reach beyond the single medium of literature but also to make connections between texts from different periods. Elferen moves in one paragraph from Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000), for example, novels which allow her to consider how silences as well as sounds can contribute to the eerie atmosphere of haunted houses. In her attention to the phenomenology of sound, Elferen considers, among other things, Don Ihde's argument that "silence is the basis of sound" (Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound (State University of New York Press, 2007)). Sound emerges out of silence and returns to it, a phenomenon that is amplified in the suspenseful silences of Gothic literature: "Rusty hinges, growling corridors and nocturnal singing represent invisible entities waiting in silence, a silence that may hide invisible, bodiless beings" (p.25).

Sound's relation to the visible is an ongoing concern in Gothic Music. Film actualises both sounds and sights which literature can only describe and make imaginable. In its ability to make feared objects visible, to display the violence of mutilated limbs, or the cold corpse, film can create "horror" in a way that literary texts cannot, but Elferen is interested in "terror". Where horror generally involves a direct and visible encounter with the feared object, terror involves a degree of invisibility, of darkness or shadows, what Edmund Burke called "obscurity" (in his 1757 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful). "To make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary," wrote Burke: "When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes. Every one will be sensible of this, who considers how greatly night adds to our dread [...]". Elferen doesn't mention Burke, but his account resonates with her use of "terror" to refer to that which isn't visible. Gothic produces terror by "leaving the object of fear implicit, just outside perception," and it does so through sound (p.36). What is terrifying is an audible but unseen presence, located beyond the screen.

Elferen frames these discussions of the gothicised version of sound severed from its origins with deconstructionist ideas about the non-referentiality of language, and the foregrounding of mediation. She considers how the medium of literature itself contributes to its eerie effects, as by its very nature, it embodies the absence of the signified. The virtuality of sounds in literature adds to their ghostliness, much as the sound technologies used in film, by separating sound from its physical origin, transmitting voices without bodies, contribute to their capacity to haunt. Other media similarly enhance the Gothic effects they depict. Television and games add to the sense of the uncanny by "multiplying the spectres seen in the cinema and bringing them into viewers' own homes via the little box in the living room"; the homely thus becomes unhomely (p.73). This effect is enhanced by the "extra-diegetic level" of television and game music: "the musically created space outside the television set in the viewer's living room," whereby the sound of the television overlaps with the domestic soundscape (p.77). Computer games invade the home in a more terrifying way as the player - or her/his projected dopplegänger - can not only see and hear but can interact with the spectres. Further, these spectres are digital in origin, which in contrast to analogue recordings of sounds originally existing in the world, need not refer to anything beyond themselves: "video game spectres are phantoms born from the algorithms of a lifeless machine" (p.100).

Elferen not only provides thorough and convincing theoretical frameworks for understanding the workings of sound and music in Gothic texts, but also illustrates her points through a series of rich, detailed examples, including the soundtracks of film and TV adaptations of Gothic novels, Hammer Horror films, the TV series Twin Peaks (1990-1991) and Lost (2004-2010), and the game Ju-On: The Grudge (2009) (based on the Japanese horror film and its Hollywood remake). The latter, for example, makes sparse use of sound, mainly consisting of the avatar's own sounds (her echoing footsteps, heartbeat, and breathing) and the surrounding soundscape (such as howling wind), while "the almost-silence" is periodically interrupted by "disembodied noises", including a death rattle indicating that the ghost is approaching. These sounds help to immerse the player through a kind of "Gothic Positioning System," suddenly breaking through the silence to "provide 3-D indications for gaming navigation" (p.120).

The final chapter on Goth music considers how the body itself becomes a medium: the Goth "becomes the lived and embodied destabilised Self that other Gothic media can only produce as a result of reading, viewing or gaming" (p.131). Elferen argues that through clothing, drinking, and dance in particular, the Goth performs and partakes in an alternative and ritualistic space that is Goth nightlife. Through music, participants are immersed in club life more completely than readers, viewers or gamers are immersed in novels, films or games, in part because music is a key part of sub-cultural identity (requiring knowledge and specific dance styles), and because "club music can be felt as well as heard." Drums and bass sounds contribute to the tactility of music, helping to "ensure a deep corporeal immersion in the temporary reality of a club night", along with clothing (wearing a tightly laced corset), drinking (absinthe) and other sensory experiences (smelling incense) (p.135).

Gothic music crosses various boundaries, but most importantly, it seems, those between pasts, presents and futures, through a mixture of haunting nostalgia (for example with intertextual references to earlier sounds and music, from liturgical chants to classic horror-film samples), effects such as echoes, reverb, delay, drones, sustained chords, and repetition (also often deployed to excess), and futuristic noise (crossing the boundary between human and machine, intensifying the disembodied quality of sound). As previously indicated, Gothic music manipulates time. Elferen argues, then, that the immersion in this music enables listeners to become engulfed in its temporality and to encounter "the existential uncanniness of Being beyond time" (p.186).

This is an extraordinarily rich book. Elferen systematically demonstrates the crucial and complex role played by sound and music across a wide range of Gothic media, engaging with theoretical, metaphysical, social and political questions, uniquely and brilliantly making links from Gothic literature through to contemporary Goth scenes. Gothic and Goth are often separated in academic discourse, while Gothic Music shows how music in all cases enables listeners to enter uncanny borderlands.

Shelley Trower