Chapter 4: The Political Gothic Novel: Ahmed Saadawi’s
4.1 Introduction
Chapter 4: The Political Gothic Novel: Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in
“terrorist novel writing,” and the French Revolution, which he calls “terrorist politics,” appears only after the revolution (Crawford xi). Regardless of the exact time when the Gothic fiction of our current understanding might have flourished, Gothic writing and tropes are either a way to talk about the French Revolution, in the case of the French, or as a way to evoke a revolution, as in the case of Britain (x).
Mary Favert explains that the French experienced the revolution first-hand in their country, whereas Britain only experienced the effects (Crawford xii).
Politics was an essential component that helped create Gothic writing, whether the association between politics and the Gothic is related to middle-class anxiety, which Crawford denies, or related to the French Revolution, as the majority of Gothic critics assert. Both cases show that politics is the hidden engine that resulted in the existence of the Gothic. Punter and Hogle, among other critics, see that Gothic fiction originated out of the anxiety felt by the middle class because of their ancestors’ new domination over the monasteries and the aristocracy. Crawford elaborates that the middle class was besieged “by reminders of the old” social order of aristocracy and ecclesiastical hierarchy whom the middle class had replaced “in the form of ruined monasteries and castles” (ix). These became places “of anxiety for them, reminders both that their social dominance was historically recent and that it had been born out of the violent seizure of wealth and power from their possessors”
(Crawford ix). Although Crawford sees that the relation between the revolution and Gothic fiction is undeniable, he also believes that “Gothic fiction provided a crucial conceptual vocabulary through which the often-confusing events of the Revolution could be understood” (41). Crawford’s attitude might suggest a contradiction in his premise that Gothic as a literature of terror existed in 1793. That is because his last quoted idea ensures that Gothic writing partly had political intentions even before the
occurrence of the revolution. Gothic writing’s vocabulary, however, had evolved by the time of the revolution, since such fiction was affected by the prevailing trends of the time:
[F]rom 1794 onwards a new ghastliness rapidly takes hold: the barons, abbeys, and castles continue to appear, but alongside new watchwords such as “mystery” and “horror”, giving rise to titles . . . These changing titles point not only to the growing popularity of Gothic as a genre, but also to a shift in the genre itself; hitherto essentially a sub-genre of the sentimental novel, around 1794 the Gothic romance began to re-invent itself as a literature of terror. (Crawford 70)
Another idea that suggests Gothic’s relevance to politics before the revolution is the fact that pioneer critics of Gothic fiction, De Sade, Montague Summers, and Devendra Varma, all agreed that Gothic “became popular as a response to the events of the French Revolution” (40). This shows that Gothic writing, in its essence, has a political dimension, but this dimension did not become recognisable until it found the right climate of the revolution to make it popular. Although Walpole claimed in a letter to William Cole that his novel was “anything rather than political,” this very claim puts his text at the core of the political discourse. Deborah Russell comments that “the very escapism and eccentricity of his text takes on political significance as it uncovers a rupture with the past and problematises a discourse on political closure”
(773). It is important to note that Walpole was part of the English political sphere, since his father was a leader of the Whig party. Although this background is not referred to directly in The Castle of Otranto, the novel’s events suggest a political dimension in the work. The main event around which the novel revolves is Manfred’s desire for an heir. However, the death of his son, Conrad, prevents him
from achieving his desire. Consequently, Manfred goes through a continuous state of rebellion, transgression, and tumult to produce a legitimate heir. However, these actions lead to his collapse. The events in the castle can be interpreted as reflecting the unstable political state of England during the eighteenth-century.
Specific criteria determine whether a particular Gothic work has a political dimension. In his article, “Political Gothic Fiction,” Robert Miles tries to outline what defines particular Gothic works as political. In his view, two things need to be considered in this strand of Gothic fiction. One is “fiction which reflexively thematises ‘mortmain’ as a feudal system that imprisons us” (Miles, “Political Gothic Fiction” 137). According to Miles, mortmain is “the dead hand of the past” or “the will of the father echoing down through the generations, along with his sins”
(“Political Gothic Fiction” 133). In other words, it is the curse of ‘the sins of fathers [that] are visited on their children to the third and fourth generation.’ suggesting that the past is ever-present and the characters have to deal with this past curse haunting their present. The second feature of the political Gothic is that “it is a recognisable subset of Gothic” or in other words, the work still falls within the category of Gothic fiction (Miles, “Political Gothic Fiction” 137). To put it in other words, we can refer to a particular Gothic work as political when the idea of “mortmain” is made the focus of attention. Through this notion, the author practices criticism of the feudal system that imprisons people, unlike other Gothic authors who side with the aristocratic class. Another criterion for defining certain Gothic works as political is that they need to meet Gothic conventions. Because this dissertation is a study of contemporary Arabic novels, there is a need to explain in what way the idea of
“mortmain” can exist as part of the political Arabic Gothic novel. The idea of mortmain in Gothic fiction can be applied to any non-English Gothic work when it
aims to focus on certain political inheritances that turn into a curse in later generations. The work must address a political issue rather than a cultural one.
Moreover, the text needs to antagonise either the earlier conventions or what is known and accepted.
This chapter considers Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) as an example of a political Gothic novel. It attempts to trace the Gothic elements that render the work a political Gothic text by exploring the Gothic themes within the novel’s political context. As Bahoora writes, “the text, [Frankenstein in Baghdad], deploys the supernatural, the gruesome, and the monstrous to narrate a bloody landscape in which the past is resurrected to haunt the present” (193). This statement suggests the novel’s deployment of Gothic elements is haunted not only by the past but also the future. Because the future is also haunted in the novel, it helps to underline the sphere of the political tensions besides the writing of excess of the Gothic novel, such as the effect of terror, horror, and the sublime, which accordingly stresses the idea that the Gothic novel does not necessarily aim for resolutions. Instead, it aims to maintain a state of uncertainty. Ahmed Saadawi is an Iraqi poet, novelist and journalist. He worked as a journalist for the BBC Arabic service before publishing his novels. His literary outcome so far is four collections of poetry and five novels.
The first three novels Saadawi published all won literary prizes. One of these was Frankenstein in Baghdad. The plot of this novel is based on a real experience that Saadawi witnessed at a morgue in Baghdad in 2006. Saadawi declares that he witnessed an Iraqi man looking for his brother’s corpse. The man found only one part of his brother’s body and the worker their told him to “take what [he] want, and make [himself] a body” (Hankir).