VICTOR SAGE’S LE FANU’S GOTHIC

 

(ISSN 1932-9598)

 

Victor Sage.  Le Fanu’s Gothic: The Rhetoric of Darkness.  London:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

 

            Few authors have suffered more from lazy scholarship, anachronistic notions of authorial intent, narrow genre expectations, and a consistent failure to read what is on the page rather than what the critic wishes to find there than Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Myths about his life and writing methods which had been seriously undermined nearly three decades ago continue to influence critical and popular discussion of his work to such an extent that even Edward Wagenknecht fell into this trap in his otherwise estimable overview of Le Fanu for Seven Masters of Supernatural Fiction (Greenwood, 1991). Among the few full-length studies of Le Fanu’s work in English, Nelson Browne’s Sheridan Le Fanu (Arthur Barker, 1951) and Michael Begnal’s Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (Bucknell University Press, 1971) are still worth reading, though each is often baffled by what they perceive to be contradictions in tone, and fail to take into account the author’s use of metaphor. Even though Ivan Melada’s Sheridan Le Fanu (Twayne, 1987) has the advantage of more recent scholarship—notably W. J. McCormack’s biography Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland (Oxford University Press, 1980)—it is a much less satisfactory book than either of these others making its ready availability to libraries more of a curse than a blessing: Melada offers dates in the time-line contradicted within the text, repeatedly bases discussion of “development” in the fiction on book publication rather than magazine publication, stresses demythologization and allegory as dominant modes in the supernatural fiction to the exclusion of other themes, and then arbitrarily refuses to cover works he does not deem of sufficient literary interest or which fail to fit the limited number of pigeon-holes he has designed for their reception. One notes none of these limitations in this recent study by Victor Sage.

It is refreshing to read a book by a scholar willing to read the text carefully enough to let it speak for itself, especially when that scholar understands the milieu in which the author wrote as well as the diverse dramatic and narrative modes upon which that author drew while shaping his own fictional world. Sage makes a compelling case for reading Le Fanu’s works not as failed realistic fiction, but as cunningly fashioned hybrid fictions stressing chiaroscuro effects to depict an ever-shifting world where light and shade, past and present, chance and design, doubt and faith, the mundane and the numinous, the material and the spectral, appearance and reality, waking and dreaming, object and reflection, love and betrayal, tragedy and comedy, the beautiful and the grotesque, the tale and its frame are in such a state of flux that they often interpenetrate each other and share each other’s metaphors.

Le Fanu’s world, Sage demonstrates, is one in which candlelight calls attention to and even shapes the darkness it seeks to illuminate. It is founded on a characteristically unsettled and unsettling narrative flow blending dissonant elements from Sheridan’s stage comedies, Scott’s historical novels, Collins’s sensation novels, and the Gothic fictions of Hoffmann and Maturin, while investing each with a rich array of dark metaphors as capable of instructing lovers in the language of pain, horror, and doubt as it is in making paradox the true state of life rather than an anomalous exception. Hence, the author’s deviations from one set of genre expectations into another are not lapses, but intentional shifts meant to reshape the reader’s perception of the plot, the characters, and the very landscape they populate.

Aside from a few minor factual errors (e.g. an early reference to only one of Le Fanu’s two sons and the perplexing ascription of W. F. Harvey’s “The Beast with Five Fingers” to someone named W. F. Magee) and a sprinkling of repeated or redundant words (e.g. “some of the the DUM’s audience”, “finds Mary, and but too late”, “deeply in in the hands”), Palgrave Macmillan have designed the book for maximum readability and with a spare elegance. Sage’s prose may seem just a little dry at times, but his thesis proves compelling, his attention to detail yields insights on nearly every page, and the illumination his study casts on the author’s work as a whole is invaluable.

 

Jim Rockhill