Premonitions, things

A new year and already navigating the gothic

I recently read The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto - it was in fact my first book of the year - now I’m just back from seeing Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’ adaptation of the Alasdair Gray novel, and my mind is full of the gothic and its various handlings.

I love that cover of The Premonition, so glimmery and sinister and calm at once. Have you read much Banana Yoshimoto? I find myself always dropped into a calm space while reading; there’s something so gentle and easy about the sentences, the scenes of domestic life and contemplation of self and relations with others. I picked up this book with a strong self-improving mission - to learn to write in some way that is different to how I write now, to remove clutter but leave the furniture of meaning behind. Yet this book, with its (spoilers abound, if such things bother you) deeply sad secrets, hints of the supernatural, premature deaths by drowning, decaying houses inhabited by the lost, near-sibling incest, a journey to the north (in this case Aomori, in Japan) etc etc - well, it is a gothic novel. And that raised an interesting maze of thought for me to stumble through

Many cleverer people than I have discussed what makes a book gothic [see I am using the lower case, to demonstrate not a commitment to canon, nor knowledge of it, to suggest a lightness of knowledge, commitment] and still plenty of others dismissed it as a cartoonish sort of a genre, full of melodrama and repetitive tropes. Perhaps The Premonition isn’t gothic because its tone is so resolutely down to earth, philosophical, psychologically rooted. Perhaps the gothic can be all those things. Perhaps the gothic doesn’t exist, a framing device for looking, a sequence of reflecting mirrors through which to view a text - a self - a culture. If my writing is gothic - it has been called so - and this work, too, can be gothic, should I worry myself with trying to escape the label, its concomitant motifs, or should I focus instead on drawning on the gentle pacing to help me structure my own work in a new way. What can a label give us, what can a book disrupt of a creaky genre? Will I write something fresh and still allow the eerie stuff that always wanders in? Can there be ghosts and low fi music too? Despite of the fact I do not consider myself an academic, the fact is that when I read a book, it is never just a simple matter of reading it for pleasure (though there is that), but to understand how I might inhabit a world of art just as it does, respecting the uniqueness of the work while trying to pick away at the architecture and mechanisms.

Films, on the other hand, I don’t know nuthing about, and usually go in with just blank happy enjoyment at the ready. A bit like Bella Baxter herself. Poor Things, with its controvery aside (yes, it should have been Glasgow, because it doesn’t make a bit of difference to the fantasyland stylings, so no, it can be London, it doesn’t matter) struck me between the eyes with its visuals, and I’m still trying to parse them. It’s a very Strawberry Hill House kind of a gothic. Bright and woozy and sinister in a playful way. The costumes are spectacular. The sets bounce with fake flowers and submarine looking cruise ships beching green smoke. There’s fireworks going off where there need to be fireworks, and the mildew in the cathouse looks infectious but in a absinthe bottle label kind of a way. Fisheye, tick. Weird exhuberant dancing, tick. I came out of the film, struggling to remember the book (which I last read maybe over a decade ago) and wondering if a Baz Lurhmann / Tim Burton fuckfest was a good use of the book. I don’t know! But I had a time. I’m still having one. But not a complicated self-doubting time like I have with books, more just like Bella squashing a toad and laughing. Because it is a lot of sensations, and no way through.