Unspeakable: Syntax and Secrecy in the Fin de Siècle Gothic

Abstract

Jack Halberstam describes the Gothic as “the breakdown of genre and the crisis occasioned by the inability to ‘tell,’ meaning both the inability to narrate and the inability to categorize” (23). The Gothic story is driven by a terrible thing, but this thing often remains strangely absent and indefinite despite its essential role. It becomes a hole at the center of the story, portrayed only through an accumulation of gaps and silences, leaving the reader to fill in those gaps with speculation. The Gothic saw a resurgence in the late-Victorian period. Charged with social, colonial, and psychosexual anxieties, its literature is filled with unspeakables: both the unspeakable because of social taboo, and the sublime that surpasses language. In the absence left by repression, language that is strained, broken, or in conspicuous surplus over something it can’t get conceptual hold of becomes the narrative event. Secrecy does not just conceal the content of these texts: it is the content.

As the most common function of language is to convey information, this deliberately non-descriptive language is a strange special case. What are the techniques, in wording, syntax and structure, that produce this effect? I have identified several linguistic structures commonly used to obscure, including repetition of a word until it becomes meaningless, description through negation, long, excessively qualified sentences, truncated sentences, placeholder words without clear antecedents, and sentences with no clear agent. I will take a closer look at these strategies’ appearance and significance in the texts, and then write a program using computational linguistics toolkits to track the frequencies of these structures across these texts; I believe this may reveal interesting broader trends in how these syntactic structures function across the Gothic and other genres.