Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny (Gothic Literary Studies) by Isabella van Elferen

Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny (Gothic Literary Studies) Reviews

• 
  Baal Of

  I have a vivid memory of my first encounter with music that I explicitly understood as Gothic. My friend Troy was driving us to the UT campus in his Ford Torino for one of our late night wanderings, and he popped in a mix tape. "Charles sent me this recently. I don't know if you'll like it, but check this out." And the sounds of Bela Lugosi's Dead crept from the speakers. I was entranced. This was exactly the kind of music I had been gravitating towards for the last few years. I was already familiar with The Church, and The Cure, but I can't remember if I already knew about Joy Division - the sequences of my music journey are lost to me now, except in the broadest of impressions. But at that instant, I knew a whole new world of music had opened up to me, and my already deep interest in the darker side of music had just found a new cavern to explore.
  
  As an aside, van Elferen makes a distinction that a Gothic scene or Gothic milieu is a more accurate terminology than Gothic subculture, given the fact that the goth scene is too widely varied and lacks the kind of binding common values to be properly called a subculture. Note that this is from my memory and I couldn't find the keywords in the index to find the exact passage, and my 45 minutes of skimming through the book again did not help me uncover it, so take that as paraphrasing. I will use the term Goth scene going forward to refer to the social world in which I became immersed.
  
  My entry into the Goth scene came a little more than 10 years after its origin. At this time the Goth scene was still mostly considered an object of derision by mainstream society, a butt of jokes, scorn, and accusations that goths cared for little more than moping in their bedrooms, writing bad poetry in diaries, being obsessed with stupid things, and being conformists. In contrast, what I found was a vibrant, wildly varying and creative group of people, with beliefs and values ranging all over the map, tied together by a common love of dark and melancholy aspects of life and culture. Far from being conformists, the goths I became friends and acquaintances with brought stunningly different aesthetics and styles together to somehow all end up being loosely Gothic. Above all I found the Goth scene to be both intellectual and accepting, and from this I learned to be more accepting as well, for example completely losing the homophobia I had been raised with. The unifying feature was "darkness" whatever that meant, which ties in to van Elferen's core thesis the Gothic is about the uncanny, that is the strangely familiar rather than just the simply mysterious. It is fascinating to read such a deeply researched and scholarly examination of just what makes Gothic, and furthermore takes the lines of inquiry into the literary realm. Van Elferen draws from sources such as Derrida and Nietzsche placing much of her synthesis outside my areas of knowledge, which means I am probably missing out on a good portion of her depth of meaning. Nevertheless I felt edified after reading this book, and I like that she gives a solid intellectual foundation to my love of Gothic music.
  
  To clarify the scope of what van Elferen considers Gothic music, she covers 5 areas of popular culture, each given a chapter to allow a deep examination of how music is used to evoke a sense of the uncanny. She stars with Gothic literature and the use of descriptions of sounds and silence, and specifically disembodied voices and sounds disconnected from their source, which create the feel of something both familiar and strange. From literature she then moves to film music, TV music and computer game music, and finally to Goth music, linking each with the uncanny thread. There is no attempt to be a complete overview of the entirety of the vast richness of Goth music, for example Dead Can Dance are not even mentioned, and Sisters Of Mercy are given only one mention, however she picks her examples for dissection with care, and uses each choice effectively to build her case. This is a book that I feel I should revisit in a few years. Even better, I would like to have a discussion with friends who have also read it.
  
  Since this book was written in a university context, there is word usage outside my normal parameters. In particular, I was thrilled to learn about diegetic vs. non-diegetic music, and I now regularly pay attention to that distinction when watching TV or movies. Some other words I had to either learn or refine my understanding of were sfumato, hauntology and ontology. For the most part, van Elferen writes in a style that is approachable but there were occasional sections such as
  

  the obsessive foregroundedness of Gothic media can 'produce a momentary position of epistemological uncertainty whose euphoria stems from its bleeding into an ontological uncertainty'. What is observed here is the effect of hauntography, the ontological destabilisation caused by the disclosure of pervasive spectrality.

  which, to be fair is partially her quoting of Alex Link. I still don't understand that sentence, and perhaps I never will.
  
  This book is clearly aimed at a very narrow and specific slice of people, but for those that care about this kind of thing, it is deeply gratifying and maybe even a bit revelatory.
• 
  Kathleen

  “Chris Baldick describes Gothic as ‘a fearful sense of inheritance in time with the claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration’” (11).
• 
  Nathaniel Hughes

  Reading the term ‘uncanny’ had initially conjured images of disturbing, lifeless-looking animatronics mimicking human facial expressions and movements, creating the commonly penned ‘uncanny valley’ effect within my subconscious. This fear, while irrational, stems from the fact that I cannot begin to understand the mechanics of artificial intelligence and robotics. By placing the ‘uncanny’ within the Gothic context, this ‘fear’ expands to the discomfort of otherness and the mysterious workings of the supernatural.
  
  
  In Isabella Van Elferen’s book Gothic Music: The Sounds of The Uncanny, Gothic music is demonstrated as something conscious yet ghostly ‘made by bodiless beings’: a phantom language with unknown and discomforting intentions for the listener. Just as artificial intelligence becomes frightening through its dissimilaritiesfrom humanity, Elferen’s expert account of music in a variety of Gothic media is given significant agency that unnerves our understanding of reality and time. She structures her book with six chapters, exploring five areas of popular culture (literature, film, television, video games and Goth subculture) and how each invokes the Freudian term ‘uncanny’, relating to concepts of differing realities, alternating timelines and the giving of voices to silent spectres. In the first chapter, Elferen reads Gothic literature through a Freudian lens and considers its ability to reflect the often intangible, portraying music’s important role of evocating ‘uncanny atmospheres and ghostliness’ through literary techniques. Elferen writes, using the example of the vampiric Carmilla’s rejection of liturgical funeral music in Le Fanu’s novella, that ‘listening to music […] means becoming part of the music’ and to give into musicality and its uncanny nature is like that of a religious consummation. The exploitation of the Gothic and its tropes allows one to completely give in to the experience and its subsequent transgressions. In studies of the philosophies of music, such as Jean-Luc Nancy’s book ‘Listening’, the experience of listening to music is stated to transcendently produce its own space and time that represents the uncannily transgressive qualities of Gothic music.
  This view is expanded upon in the second chapter (focusing on Gothic film music and sounds) as Elferen elaborates that film music ‘initiates meta-cinematic dialogues between movies and their spectators’, allowing the spectators to self-reflect on how the film’s reality intersects with their own. One of the main strengths of Elferen’s book is her varied choices of other studies in the academic field as well as her chosen examples to argue the power of musicality within the Gothic, however, some parts of the book suffer from an overabundance of exemplar to support her case. To demonstrate her interpretation of non-diegetic music in film as a bridge between the spectator and the characters’ psyche (blurring the lines between reality and fantasy), Elferen uses the infamous prom scene from Brian DePalma’s Carrie (1976). In the spotlighted scene, the titular character loses her sanity and begins to hear a ‘pastiche of laughter, screams [and her] mothers and teacher’s voices’. Despite being a carefully selected scene that translates Elferen’s thoughts on the power of diegesis and non-diegesis well, her account of it is riddled with inaccuracies. She writes that the ‘bucket of pigs blood [drops] on the heads of prom queen and king Carrie and Chris’ and Carrie’s collapsing sanity is expressed through ‘a prism-shaped split screen showing six screaming Carries’, though in actuality the name of the crowned King is Tommy Ross (the perpetrator of the blood dump being Chris) and the ‘prism-shaped split screen’ showcases the laughing onlookers and not Carrie herself.
                           
  In the following two chapters, Elferen recalls Freud’s observation in his essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) of the terms German translation ‘Unheimlich’ (meaning ‘unhomely) and connects it to the forms of media we consume within the comforts of our homes, elaborating on how these can infiltrate our reality and make our homes ‘unhomely’ or uncanny. These chapters successfully drive the idea of an invasion of domesticity with the uncomfortable nature of the uncanny, using examples of both television and video game music. The avatars in games are used as an exemplar by her, suggesting their ‘uncanny presence upon the private home [is] much more terrifying than the televisual colleagues, as audiences literally get to meet and greet them’. Acceptance of another reality is inherent in games, in order to immerse one’s self in the reality of the video game and its avatar, we must give it the same suspension of disbelief as the aforementioned older, more traditional mediums. Like television and film, Elferen notes upon the crucial nature of sound in video games, stating ‘that immersion through music often verges on dependence on music’. In addition to this, Elferen highlights the agency that video game music procures due to the constantly changing actions of the player subsequently heightening their fear of these digital spectres haunting the player’s avatar.
  
  The final chapter studies Goth culture, in particular its music, performativity, clothing, and dancing, considering how individuals express themselves using typical Gothic tropes. People who identify themselves as part of this culture are stated to ‘embody the ghosts that appear in such liminal spaces’ of literary and cinematic Gothic, therefore participating in this ‘obsession with the past’ as well as its aesthetics. In this sense, Elferen argues that individuals immerse themselves in music and like ghosts, become discombobulated aspects of the past: time is no longer tangible and the past is slipping between the cracks of the present and finding itself in modern culture. This scholarly work is enriched by Elferen’s focus on immersion and materiality in relation to music with references to Victorian styles such as corsets and finds itself relating back to the Freudian ‘uncanny presence in philosophy’ that, like the timelessness of the Gothic, ‘will always return and produce unease’. Elferen brilliantly observes the sounds formed in these mediums and how they create fear of the uncanny like a thick fog which often lingers in Gothic media, blurring one’s grip of the familiar and tangible, leaving our conceptions and emotions as alien as when we first entered this realm of fictitious uncertainty.