ABSTRACT
Through Shakespeare, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) – the faked ‘Gothic Story’ that dubiously initiates Gothicism1 – exemplifies the operation of a literary and juridical mimesis that simultaneously instantiates and derives its authority from a fiction of authority that essentially fabricates a crime-scene. Within this economy, the emergence and development of the Gothic (a genre uniquely concerned with crime-scenes, of course) is both legitimized and problematized with reference to a certain literary re-presentation of ‘Shakespeare’: the Gothic consolidates and contests a national literary archive that constructs ‘Shakespeare’ as its most authoritative precedent. This archive can be construed in the Derridean sense as a place of ‘commencement’ and ‘command’ (Derrida 1995: 2); it is the place of origin of a chain of precedents, of juridical citations that reproduce within each generation the symbolic and material power of ‘family’ and ‘lineage’. This power is presented as pure, as sacred, in so far as it has its origin in pure presence, in the self-sufficient ‘being’ of the logos. As Pierre Legendre has argued, however, the abject truth about power is that it has no origin in anything outside of its own economy of signs (Legendre 1985); the law exists only in and through an endless re-citation of narratives that produce what might be termed ‘the false appearance of a presence’ (Derrida 2000a: 200).2 To historicize this point and to orient it towards my concerns in this essay, the institution in the eighteenth century of an authoritative English literary tradition is inseparable from the contemporary formulation of a uniquely English juridical tradition – a system of national precedents that depends abjectly upon a contingent, self-referential narrativity that affirms/effaces logos. This juridical and literary economy ensures continuity for the living through a deathly order of mimesis – a compulsive ‘repetition, reproduction, re-impression’ of the past (Derrida 1995: 11). This compulsive monumentalization and repetition of the past, this maddening evocation of spectres, of the ‘oldest names’3 (‘I am the spirit of thy father’ announces the most famous of
Shakespearean ghost) is ultimately ‘indissociable from the death drive’ (Derrida 1995: 12). The literary archive that obsessively reproduces ‘Shakespeare’ as its point of paternal origin and the legitimate source of its ‘commands’ (‘Swear!’ says the spectre: ‘I am the spirit of the father’) is a spectral juridico-literary space. It also re-presents a crime scene. I will return to it. This essay begins with a consideration of the emergence of the Gothic
in the eighteenth century as a highly ambivalent literary and juridical category. I examine the Blackstonian formulation of English law as a ‘Gothic castle’ that is authenticated by virtue of its Gothicism, but which requires ‘modernization’ if it is to reflect and serve the new national interest effectively (Blackstone [1765] 1966). This historical and theoretical Gothicization of English law by eighteenth-century jurists served a specific and pressing ideological function (as I shall discuss) and it is inseparable from the simultaneous development of an authorized literary tradition with a similarly vital yet ambivalent relation to the Gothic. The emergence of a certain eighteenth-century construction of ‘Shakespeare’, and Walpole’s utilization of it as an authoritative precedent for his work, will be set within the context of the uneasy relation between law, literature and the Gothic in the mid-eighteenth century. Through its own appropriation and re-presentation of Shakespeare, Otranto comes to exist within this early modern juridico-literary economy as a site of power in itself, a point of ‘commencement’ and ‘command’ in respect of texts to follow. The novel is also a site of transgression, however; it is the (in)authentic Gothic ‘original’ that plays with its own origins and that institutes a genre so susceptible to mutation that it comes to resist the very drive towards archivization which constitutes it as ‘Gothic’. Gothic textuality (and, I will argue, ‘Shakespearean’ textuality as it was re-ordered and re-presented by critics in the eighteenth century) appears to repudiate the very possibility of textual authenticity. The second section of the essay broadens out this analysis by means of a return to the scene of a crime. I seek here to interrogate, through Derrida, the relation between law, literature and ‘a certain interpretation of mimesis’ within the Western tradition. The initial focus of this section is, perhaps rather eccentrically, Derrida’s playful reading of Mallarmé’s Mimique, a text which is ostensibly neither ‘Gothic’ nor ‘Shakespearean’. Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Walpole’s Otranto, however, Mimique turns upon the commission of a hidden crime, a crime which can only be re-presented uncannily as ‘the false appearance of a presence’. I argue finally that Otranto’s re-presentation of the spectral appearance of a crime allows the text obliquely to reproduce and subvert contemporary national juridical and literary discourses that worked to conceal the absence of proper legal and literary origin through their ‘reproduction, re-impression’
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of precedents, of paternal ‘names’ that compel allegiance to spectres. According to Walpole’s re-ordering of Shakespeare’s economy of ghosts, there is no authentic ‘commencement’/’command’ signified by the father’s return, or ‘re-impression’ – there is only the compulsive, uncanny, spectral ‘re-impression’ that is always-already a pathological, death-driven fiction.
