Accidental Migrations: An Archaeology of Gothic Discourse
In his masterful Accidental Migrations: An Archaeology of Gothic Discourse, Edward Jacobs burrows deeply into the idea and practice of Gothic discourse as it stretches across centuries, societies, and social groups. Taking Michel Foucault’s theoretical framework and critical practice developed in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) as his guide and method, Jacobs excavates and teases out the hidden ties between such diverse discourses as Jordanes’s sixth-century account of the convergence of the Romans and the Goths, seventeenth-century English political historiography, Horace Walpole’s mania for the curious and trivial, and the book borrowing practices of late eighteenth-century readers. He succeeds in showing that within fragmentation and diversity there is significant discursive connection.
The densely-argued introduction makes the case for Foucault’s four modes of verbal performance, refined by Jacobs as "Gothic statements" that "enunciate objects in relation to migration, define subject positions of collection and display, and associate with other events in their domain through balance" (21). While Jacobs’s argument intends to offer a new model for the dispersal of Gothic modes, it also serves the purpose of defending and recuperating the utility of Foucault’s "archaeological" methods. Jacobs succeeds in demonstrating that far from forcing a totalizing historical construct onto the concept of "Gothic," Foucault’s methods enable a delicate and nuanced environment in which new lines of influence can surface. One thing does not beget another, genealogically speaking, so much as disperse or scatter its influence through the acts and shifts that are relations of power.
Chapter One re-creates the series of accidents--mis-translations, mis-apprehensions, mis-statements--that join Jordanes’s sixth-century text, the so-called Getica [Origin and Deeds of the Goths] describing the entry of the Goths in Roman civilization, to the research undertaken by the Society of Antiquaries of London in support of the political and religious compromises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The "strategic similarities' between sixth-century Italy and the Britain of Alfred and, later, Elizabeth and the Stuarts show that "one rare and persistent way humans have exercised power through language when migrations bring alien cultures into contact has been rhapsodically to stitch their archives together, in the hope of somehow reconciling them" (57).
Chapter Two maps the movement from "genealogical" constitutions based on tradition to wide acceptance of deductive constitutions based on rights and "‘common reason’" (94), showing the power of language to remove obstacles and reconstitute possibilities previously foreclosed.
In Chapter Three, Jacobs demonstrates how the enunciative strategies chosen by Bolingbroke, who used the early eighteenth-century serial newspaper format to modernize his message about "constitutionalist" politics, served only to create destructive dissonance in the minds of those who received it. The material mode of delivery signaled modernity, while the "linguistic event" linked Bolingbroke’s political message to "a propertied, temporally leisured, and impracticably organized elite" (121). Connecting his argument back to Foucauldian principles, Jacobs notes that "by thus expanding the quantity and distribution of information, this ‘enlightened’ public sphere necessarily developed and valued ‘Gothic’ (and other) statements that targeted the relations of printed language less to balance than to the spatial movement and to the gathering and management of information" (97).
Jacobs’s fourth chapter will be, for Gothicists, of the utmost interest. Here Jacobs develops a fresh approach to the "vagrancy of Walpole’s writing," finding in the range of his interests and accomplishments a "strategy of ‘trivia,’" that is, 'using the occasion of collecting and publicly displaying items to orchestrate troubling migrations across opposed cultural, discursive, and textual domains" (124). This analysis highlights, too, the differing strategies and discursive contexts motivating The Castle of Otranto and the Gothic romances of the 1790s. Indeed, Jacobs finds in Otranto’s resistance to "the basic, enlightened imperative to order history and texts into tablets" a fundamental difference from later Gothics which found their mode of production in such tabulation (154).
Chapters Three, Four, and the final and longest chapter, Five, actually comprise a single unit, concerned as they are with developments in the eighteenth century. The focus of Chapter Five is on the circulating library of the latter part of the century, its marketing and lending practices, its organizing principles, and the subtle interplay between product and reader that dictated genre development--particularly that of the Gothic romance--and genre hierarchies, and, along the way, shaped a new audience, their tastes and expectations. Jacobs provides persuasive readings of Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian and Eliza Parsons’s The Mysterious Warning to illustrate the shaping tendency that the "table of modes, topics, spaces, and layouts" of one successful book can have on another and, in fact, on a whole category of works written to reproduce success and satisfy readers increasingly aware the pleasures of repetition (217). In Chapter Five, Jacobs frequently glances back at Chapter Three and the newspaper serialization detailed there, connecting it to the repetitions that distinguish genres and that characterize the readers who consume them.
It would be hard to over-estimate the significance of Jacobs’s research through the records of the Minerva Press and its library, as well as many lesser-known publishers and libraries. Taken alone, this part of his project will be of enormous interest to scholars of publishing and book history and of late eighteenth-century reading habits. Jacobs provides a particularly nuanced reading of the records as they may illuminate and reveal the practices of female readers and female authors. This section of the book is also less burdened by Foucauldian terminology that often frustrates rather than informs. As a whole, though, Jacobs’s book is an original and persuasively argued contribution to work on the Gothic that should stimulate some new thinking about how ideas are transmitted, converge, and flourish.
