Beyond the Burkean Sublime

Any discussion of Gothic theology is incomplete without reference to its complicated deployment of aesthetic strategies. And any discussion of Gothic aesthetics inevitably turns to the sublime. In its Burkean iteration, sublimity's link to the Gothic is clear: both centre on an ‘indulgence in the pleasures of terror’ (Clery 1996, 165) and there is a shared concentration on extreme emotions. This connection between the Gothic and the sublime is emphasised by the fact that ‘illustrations of the sublime have provided something like a readers’ guide to the Gothic novel’ (Morris 1985, 300). For example, John Dennis’ list of catalysts of ‘enthusiastick’ (sublime) terror includes ‘gods, daemons, hell, spirits and souls of men, miracles, prodigies, enchantments, witchcraft, thunder, tempests, raging seas, inundations, torrents, earthquakes, volcanoes, monsters, serpents, lions, tigers, fire, war, pestilence, famine etc’ (1721, 460); it reads like a list of common Gothic tropes. However, neither the sublime or the Gothic exist ‘purely for the sake of evoking pleasant terror’ (Monk 1960, 90).

Criticism of the Gothic frequently concentrates almost exclusively on the Burkean ‘terror sublime’ as the Gothic's dominant aesthetic. Such an emphasis, however, ignores the centrality of other aesthetic modes (the beautiful, the picturesque) and relies on an inaccurate monolithic conception of the sublime. In 1809, Martin Shee despairingly writes of the sublime as ‘vague, irregular and undefined’, bemoaning the fact that ‘scarcely two writers are agreed as to its properties or powers’ (193). To engage with the Gothic sublime, we must confront this multiplicity of definitions and the ways in which the Gothic reflects and engages with them. The necessity of doing so is illustrated by Gothic writers’ diverse uses of the term ‘sublime’, as we see in the following three examples from Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).

First, the virtuous St Aubert, discourses on the ‘sublime pleasure’ of ‘thought and contemplation’ in ‘the taste they create for the beautiful and the grand’ (1795b, I, 17–8).

Alejandro Toledo rose from humble beginnings in the north of Peru to earn an undergraduate degree at the University of San Francisco and graduate degrees at Stanford University. In the 2001 presidential race, most of the candidates, including Toledo, were centrist, pro-market, and emphatic about their democratic credentials. Stressing his indigenous roots and rise from poverty, Toledo occupied the center ground between former president Alan García Pérez, a center-left populist, and Lourdes Flores Nano, a center-right conservative. Toledo defeated García in the second round with 53.08 percent of the vote (St John 2010, 27–31, 37–38).

Unlike its predecessors, the Toledo administration articulated an interrelated set of foreign policy goals at the beginning of its term in office and then pursued them over the next five years. First, it continued the long-time Peruvian emphasis on expanded integration with subregional, regional, and international organizations. Second, it emphasized better relations with the industrialized states of the world as well as the major powers in the Asia–Pacific region. Third, it promoted democracy and human rights, often tying improvement in these areas to a fourth policy goal, the struggle against poverty. Fifth, it advocated reduced arms spending throughout the region, arguing the money would be better spent on education, health care, and poverty reduction. Sixth, it worked to improve diplomatic and commercial relations with neighboring states, encouraging economic development in the borderlands. Seventh and eighth, it called for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to promote the domestic economy abroad and to improve services to the more than two million Peruvians living overseas. Finally, the Toledo administration encouraged ongoing reforms at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (García-Sayán Larrabure 2002, 18–27; Toledo Manrique, interview with author, 12 September 2008).

Subregional and Regional Integration

In his 2001 inaugural address, President Toledo promised a foreign policy that would connect Peru with the outside world, emphasizing the need to expand relations with subregional, regional, and international organizations. He called for CAN to be relaunched to accelerate regional integration, and he urged member states to adopt a multilateral approach to arms control, using the savings achieved to expand social welfare programs (Toledo Manrique 2001).

Alberto Fujimori, a little know university professor of Japanese descent, won the 1990 presidential election by a commanding majority. Following his election, Peruvian pundits referred to his campaign as a tsunami, a powerful metaphor highlighting the velocity and magnitude of his final electoral surge. With a straightforward campaign platform promising “Honesty, Technology and Work,” Fujimori promised an era of socioeconomic and political reform. Instead, he presided over a decade of increasingly authoritarian rule, marked by a level of graft and corruption unknown in Peru.

Fujimori's election led to enormous change in countless areas of socioeconomic and political life, including the end of the traditional party system in Peru. In the 1980 presidential election, four political parties, Acción Popular (AP), Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA), Partido Popular Cristiano (PPC), and Izquierda Unida (IU), won 97 percent of the vote, and in the 1986 municipal elections, they took over 90 percent. The traditional parties appeared to be vibrant and robust; however, a weak electoral tradition, an inexperienced electorate, and the disappointing performance of traditional parties in office undermined their appeal. As the established parties were discredited, voters increasingly sought options outside the existing political system. Fujimori's victory in the June 1990 runoff sanctioned this decline. During the campaign, Fujimori created a new model of electoral organization known as the disposable party. Described by some observers as independent movements, disposable parties were seldom more than electoral labels or candidate-centered vehicles. Over the next three decades, the decline in traditional political parties, combined with the rise of disposable parties, had a significant influence on both the domestic and the foreign policies of Peru (Tanaka 1998, 59–235).

The Five D’s

Given the deplorable state of the Peruvian economy, the first priority of the Fujimori government was to improve relations with the international financial community. Before his inauguration, President-elect Fujimori traveled to Japan and the United States, promising to implement an austerity program and resume service on the external debt. In response, an international consortium, including Japan, Spain, and the United States, made a preliminary commitment for bridge loans to cover the defaulted debt to the IMF and other multilateral lending agencies.

Throughout most of the 2016 presidential campaign, Keiko Fujimori was the front runner with Pedro-Pablo Kuczynski Godard, a wealthy investment banker with considerable international financial experience, occupying third or fourth place in most polls. Kuczynski was well known in Peruvian political circles, having served as an economic adviser and manager of the central bank during the first Belaúnde Terry administration and both finance minister and prime minister in the Toledo administration. Kuczynski's prospects improved in March when the candidates polling in second and fourth place were disqualified. Fujimori won the first round with 39.82 percent of the vote with Kuczynski in second place with 20.98 percent (Horler and Cazarez 2016). In the second round, Kuczynski benefitted from the endorsement of the leftist politician Verónika Mendoza, who placed third in the first round, and a strong anti-fujimorista animus among the electorate. Kuczynski won the second round by the narrow margin of 42,597 votes (Crabtree and Durand 2017, 186).

Rise and Fall of Kuczynski

On 28 July 2016, President Kuczynski appointed Víctor Ricardo Luna Mendoza, a career diplomat who had served as ambassador to the United States (1992–99) and Great Britain (2006–2010), as minister of foreign affairs. In a succinct overview of Peruvian foreign policy, Ambassador Luna highlighted the key components of the foreign policy of the Kuczynski administration. With neighboring Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Ecuador, he planned to continue binational cabinet meetings in conjunction with targeted programs for each country with the intent to encourage development in the borderlands. On the regional level, he prioritized the Pacific Alliance, noting blocs like ALBA, CAN, CELAC, and UNASUR often were competitive instead of complementary in their promotion of integration and development. Elsewhere, Luna recognized the need for institutional change at the United Nations, arguing the best way to effect change was for Peru to take a leadership role. As a former ambassador to the United States, he also recognized the importance of maintaining good relationships with the White House even as Peru continued to expand its ties with China and the European Union. Finally, Luna promised to better serve Peruvians abroad by continuing efforts to improve efficiency and reduce bureaucracy at Peruvian embassies and consulates (Luna Mendoza 2016).

In Heaven's Gate, Isabelle Huppert is pink, ginger and milky white, a gentle balance between a sweet and a sugary candy. The cakes that she excels at baking for her lovers have essentially one ingredient: Nestor Almendros’ lighting, collecting and objectifying its sentimental effects. “I have never loved you so much! I had oceans of cream in my soul” (Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet). The nudes of Isabelle Huppert date to the nineteenth century, the period when unclothed bodies were found on ornaments and in images. The twentieth century enters the film with the appearance of Christopher Walken (a creature imposes itself from the void that haunts her). When the two characters embrace, we are moved the way we are before cathedral facades that feature juxtaposed figures that do not belong to the same chisel, time period or world.

Introduction

I begin with one of Alfred Hitchcock's most incidental concepts: the thing, notion, or motive that he referred to as the film's MacGuffin. To spend any time at all on the subject of the MacGuffin may seem an odd decision given that Hitchcock said that when properly realized in the film's narrative the MacGuffin is an inconsequential cinematic element, a nonentity even. But as there are times when rejecting authoritative pronouncements can result in modest dividends, I want to demonstrate that looking at the MacGuffin more closely than is the case in most Hitchcock scholarship will help to reveal the way that Hitchcock prioritized affect over material essences even as it enables a deeper appreciation of the architecture of many of his films. The MacGuffin also raises some interesting philosophical issues to which I turn near the end of the chapter. The perfect MacGuffin may indeed be nothing, as Hitchcock suggested, but it is a substantial kind of nothing.

When the matter of the MacGuffin arose in interviews, or when he discussed the MacGuffin in pieces he wrote for publication, Hitchcock's usual strategy was to offer comments tinged with bemused indifference. However, a careful look at this material shows that Hitchcock was equally inclined to speak about the MacGuffin with a certain fondness, and, despite asserting its relative unimportance on many occasions, he also conceded his concern with prioritizing his search for the appropriate MacGuffin, the one that would be helpful in setting his story on its way.

This final chapter will offer three key policy recommendations. The first is a more rapid international timeline for emissions reduction to prevent the extinction of coral that make up reefs due to climate change. This will require bipartisan relationships that mirror those being formed in Congress around coral reef legislative topics. The second is increased cooperation between authorities within federal and state governments to ensure that existing conservation laws and policies are followed, in contrast to the Miami and Cayman Islands cases. The third is that private multinational companies should not be allowed to subvert the conservation laws and policies of sovereign countries, as seen in the case of the Cayman Islands.

In 2022, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Sixth Assessment Report, an extensive document examining the ongoing effects of global climate change. Among the key findings of the report lies an ominous warning:

The effects of climate change are the most significant threat facing coral reefs, driving their decline, and endangering the communities that depend upon them (International Union for Conservation of Nature, 2021). How can policy-makers rise to the broader challenge of managing coral reefs under the threat of climate change? This question is complicated and, as such, has become the focus of hundreds, if not thousands, of research projects aimed at understanding coral reef management in the Anthropocene. Some studies have found that returning to historical baselines for coral reefs may be impossible and that local management systems are insufficient to rescue them (Bellwood et al., 2019; Hughes et al., 2017). In response, researchers have suggested implementing multilevel, international initiatives such as the Coral Triangle Initiative in Southeast Asia or polycentric governance (or governance systems with many power centers) of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia to promote large-scale ecosystem recovery (Fidelman et al., 2014; Morrison, 2017). Other policy responses include government assistance for livelihoods and building capacity for local communities to adapt to change (Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2018).

The detailed attentiveness to layered landscapes and their melancholy debris is by no means a facet of Wharton's later literary production. She makes direct reference to antique and modern “stones” in her very first published short story “Mrs. Manstey's View,” which brings into sharper focus Christopher Woodward's notion that “[e]very new empire has claimed to be the heir of Rome, but if such a colossus as Rome can crumble—its ruins ask—why not London or New York?” The New York-set “Mrs. Manstey's View” is Wharton's earliest text to be analyzed in this book. While a monumental ruin suggests to many the grandeur of a classical heritage (as in “Roman Fever”), “Mrs. Manstey's View” is important for its focus on a mundane urban site that is falling into desuetude, incrementally abandoned due to dizzying civic and economic flows. For Rose Macaulay, these “new ruins,” linked with neighborhood backyards and other non-traditional or unofficial green spaces, do not command our full attention because they “have not yet acquired the weathered patina of age, the true rust of barons’ wars, not yet put on their ivy.” This is, however, precisely what captures Wharton's literary imagination. In a manner that exposes the shortcomings of some recent ecocriticism, which tends to devalue urban nature writing as “short takes and small grains at micro-level,” Wharton's story extracts a rare emotional power from the fragmented map of Mrs. Manstey's shabby locality.

Charlee M. Sterling points out that to “understand” the intricacies of Wharton's art “we must consider the literary circumstances in which she was writing.” Sterling adds that: “Wharton first published a short story (“Mrs. Manstey's View”) in 1890, just as the American literary scene was in great flux.” This story was published in July 1891 (not in 1890 as Sterling states) in Scribner's Magazine, at a moment when not just the “literary scene,” but more crucially New York City itself was undergoing an astonishing overhaul and reinvention. Wharton's story can be parsed as a “dwelling” on the rapid cycles of demolition, population reduction, relocation and urbanization that constitutes an emergent global metropolis. The watchwords of capitalist enterprise (progress and profit) exist alongside Mrs. Manstey's fears of erasure of her personal touchstones of horticultural beauty.

Life Sketch and Works

Alice Childress (1920–1994) was born on October 12, 1920, in Charleston, South Carolina. She moved from Charleston to Harlem in 1925, where she lived with her grandmother Eliza Campbell who became her legal guardian. She grew up in Harlem, New York City, where she was raised by her grandmother who was the daughter of a former slave. Childress was inspired to write at an early age by her grandmother who would sit with her at the window and encourage her to make up stories about the people who walked by. She attended two years of high school but left before receiving a degree.

Accompanying her grandmother, she used to visit regularly the Church where she listened to the poor people's troubles and witnessed the social ceremonies of the African American community. During those notable references, the poor people told their plights which Childress kept in mind for her future writings. She attended Public School, The Julia Ward Howe Junior High School, and then Wadleigh High School for three years, before dropping out when both her grandmother and mother died in the late 1930s. She was encouraged by her grandmother to use her imagination. Furthermore, due to her grandmother's instinctive love for arts, Childress visited periodically museums, art galleries, libraries, concert halls, and drama shows.

At the age of nineteen, she married Alvin Childress, an actor, who was renowned for his role as Amos in the controversial television show, Amos and Andy. In 1957, Alice and Alvin were divorced due to differences in their ideologies. Alvin left her alone with their only daughter Jean, but she got married to her friend and the company composer Nathan Woodard in the same year. He was a musician who composed music for many of her plays. Childress and Woodard were too dedicated and absorbed artists in theater, but kept a close space of intimacy between them which lasted for the end of their life. Childress died of cancer on August 14, 1994, in New York City.

Childress is indebted so much for her grandmother in her teachings and the art of storytelling. In her recent essay, Knowing the Human Condition, Childress makes the following statement:

In Ruin Lust (2014), Brian Dillon asks: “ruins are still standing—but what do they stand for?” Moreover, how do we explicate what Rose Macaulay terms “this strange human reaction to decay”? These questions resonate through Wharton's short story “Roman Fever,” one of her final works, published in 1934, just three years before her death. In this text, two affluent American widows sit on the terrace of a restaurant to reminisce and admire the “august ruins” of the ancient city in the afternoon light. That these women are positioned as “old lovers of Rome” suggests they are not too far removed from critic Joseph Luzzi's thesis that foreign pilgrims to this region, inspired partly by the Grand Tour imaginary and with deep enough pockets to purchase views of the picturesque, ultimately crafted a concept of “Italy without Italians.” Such devotion to the relics of Rome's faded glories conveniently elided the messy, unedifying contradictions of contemporary Italy, and Southern Europe more broadly.

Wharton's text deserves to be seen as more than a sketch inspired by Henry James's Daisy Miller (1878), because as Christopher Woodward states: “no writer saw the same Colosseum.” “Roman Fever” is not only rich in what Denis Diderot described as the melancholy “poetics of ruins,” when analyzing the paintings of Hubert Robert at the Salon de 1767. It also brings into relief, as Rachel Bowlby avers, “the excavations of ‘old’ parental stories”: “whether secret or not, they come out looking different in relation to the contexts in which we encounter them now.” “Roman Fever” shows the subtle operations of Wharton's imaginative archaeology, shaped by her shrewd awareness of Grand Tour iconography, as well as obsessions in the eighteenth-century imaginary, such as the widely reported discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii, and bestsellers of the era like Constantin Volney's Les Ruines, or Meditations on Revolutions and Empires (1792).

In “Roman Fever,” “ruin” from the Latin ruere (“to collapse, fall”) signifies both object (a time-worn statue or an amphitheater) and “process” (how apparently educated, privileged citizens of the world can spoil their own—and others’—happiness). In a story that uncovers through its closing phase a buried history of parental intrigue and illicit assignation, the “ruin” or safeguarding of a woman's personal honor or reputation also plays an unexpectedly potent role.

Béla Tarr, Paul Schrader, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub, R. W. Fassbinder, Andrei Tarkovsky…Robert Bresson's style and principles have inspired a variety of filmmakers with very different preoccupations. Three auteurs, however, seem particularly indebted to Bresson while also having been inventive with his influence: Jean Eustache, Philippe Garrel and Monte Hellman. Which aspects of Bresson's work shaped them in particular? How is it possible for a body of work with such dogmatic foundations to enrich styles where Christianity is unimportant (and if it is, then only as iconography, as in Garrel's case)? What does a copy say about its source?

From euphoric reuse (Eustache) to formal extension (Garrel) or even radical deepening (Hellman), Bressonian exigency, a lively source for contemporary cinema, is very much at work in the realm of quotation.

Living with Mouchette (Bresson Revised by Eustache’s My Little Loves)

In France, Bresson's main inheritor is incontestably Jean Eustache. La maman et la putain (The Mother and the Whore, 1973) represents a secular continuation of Bresson worthy of its model. The work with spatial fragmentation and black and white cinematography that affirms everything has an abstract dimension, the ethical conduct of the characters, the ostensible characteristics of gesture: These kinds of visual and narrative properties immediately recall the auteur behind Pickpocket (1959). And yet, Eustache proves himself most Bressonian when he approaches a problem already addressed by Bresson and comes up with the opposite solution. “A film by Bresson,” said Eustache, “feels longer than reality.” For example, Pickpocket's fragmentary description of the manual gestures of theft only makes sense in relation to theft's imperceptible nature: By objectively slowing down the action, Bresson highlights its instantaneousness, turning it into an event. To produce the same effect of transforming concrete time into a symbolic temporality, The Mother and the Whore adopts the opposite solution: the sequence shot. The scrupulous recording in static sequence shots of a growing emotion (i.e., Bernadette Lafont's tears as she listens to the love song) transforms time into duration and the materiality of the shot into a formal event. “Retouching the real with the real.”

If The Mother and the Whore constitutes a response to Bressonian ethics, Mes petites amoureueses (My Little Loves, 1974) is their violent riposte, a nearly situationist détournement.

The supernatural is a keystone of the early Gothic, from the demons of Matthew Lewis to the phantasmal shadows of Radcliffe, the prophetic dreams of Clara Reeve, and the vampiric predator of John Polidori.It has, however, become a critical commonplace that the Gothic was a reflection of wider secularisation, that the supernatural became increasingly untethered from a ‘traditional religious framework’ (Geary 1992, 16), and that its use became tied almost exclusively to the aesthetic production of fear and a theologically empty experience of the numinous. However, contemporary theological discourse and the potential for belief should not be dismissed when reviewing the Gothic deployment of the supernatural. Christianity, in many forms, continued to dominate cultural discourse in the period and, as Glen Cavaliero notes, ‘for a religious person spirit is no mere ‘aspect’; it is the primary reality, and any discussion of the supernatural which does not allow for such belief and take it seriously is self-stultifying from the start’ (1995, 15).

An increasingly common thread in Gothic criticism is the appeal to philosopher Charles Taylor's conception of secularisation not as ‘the separation of Church and state and the decline of religion’ (Miles 2014, 123), but as ‘an unheard pluralism of outlooks, religious and non- and anti-religious’ (Taylor 2007, 437). Taylor's ‘secular’ is not the absence of theological discourse but rather the awareness that there are ‘a number of construals, views which intelligent, reasonably undeluded people, of good will, can and do disagree on’ (2007, 11). In other words, secularisation is a process in which belief is broken up with multiple discourses existing simultaneously. However, Taylor's model continues to focus on a growing diminution of belief, an idea echoed in Hoeveler's claim that:

While acknowledging a variety of co-existent conceptions of the potentially supernatural, this suggests an ultimately rationalising bent, a ‘disenchantment’.

Warnung vor einer heilungen Nutte (Beware of a Holy Whore, 1971) is the theater of an annulment. The actors devour themselves, and abandon and leave behind bodies full of passions which become polemical figures of a destitution inflicted upon you by a violence that is unspeakable since it is obvious. Just as a marionette's staccato gestures reveal where the strings controlling it are attached, the effigies of anxiety (shame, vileness, cowardice, indifference, formless stupidity) performed by the film's actors show what determines such moral solitude at each moment and in the most private spheres. Fassbinder elaborates an imaginary actor here who is pitiable and grotesque and undone by his or her own apathy; the actor responsible for playing the part of this dismal silhouette paints a terribly accusatory picture and invents a repertoire of gestures and actions through which the performance becomes an indictment against affective deprivation, against deprivation of the self.

Beware of a Holy Whore describes a few days in the life of a German film crew in Spain: a crew lacking film stock whose production has broken down and finds itself marooned in an enormous white hotel; sketches of solitude, various kinds of prostitution and love; the successive entrance of stars (Eddie Constantine, the cameraman, the director) who only add to the confusion; and a revolving cast of small, local figures (waiters, receptionist, job seekers) to vaguely recall that work exists. The scenario of a crew in exile more or less bound together via a film project might lead one to believe that Fassbinder’s film represented for the 1970s what Jean-Luc Godard's Le mépris (Contempt, 1963) was for the 1960s and what Wim Wenders’ The State of Things (1982) was for the 1980s: A moment to express some urgent thoughts about creation within a genre known pertinently in Hollywood as the backstage drama and finding in film what literature called the poetic arts.

Edith Wharton's first experience of European mountains almost killed her. During a stay at a Black Forest resort, Bad Wildbad, in 1870, young Edith came down with typhoid fever and nearly died. It is revealing that during this time in Bad Wildbad she practiced her German by reading the New Testament, and she singles out one chapter that reverberated powerfully with her:

In the Christian tradition, Mount Tabor is the site of the transfiguration of Jesus, a turning point in the gospel narratives, and it relates to Wharton on both a personal and a literary level in A Backward Glance. Hermione Lee develops this point by suggesting that “Europe” becomes “the stage” for “a more disturbing event, which Wharton marks as a moment of profound change in her character.”Lee's account reminds us that in the Old Testament, mountains—just like the seemingly limitless desert sands—become sites of grueling trial and testing, revelatory vision and heavenly intercession. Wharton is fascinated by the biblical tales of ascending a peak, confronting its atmospheric extremes and discovering a new grammar and syntax of felt sensation. This becomes a crucial facet of her European mountain texts.

The earliest account of a mountain holiday features in a letter to Anna Bahlmann from St. Moritz, in the 1890s, when Edith and Teddy spent a few days in the Alps. It opens with a brisk account of reaching “the top of the mountains in safety.” But it soon becomes a vivid word-painting of her surroundings, marked by the ebullience of an amateur geographer keen to share an awareness of how topographical curiosities emerge through determined bodily and mental endeavor: “The scenery was fairy-like – hills & valleys clothed with snow more blindingly white than you can conceive of, pine woods powdered with glittering crystals & feathery fringes of white, waterfalls turned into deep blue icicles, & suspended thus over the sheer edge of the rocks.