'Gothic" when it comes to literature, evokes a certain vibe, all crumbling churches, mist shrouded graveyards, and foreboding stately homes. The kind of spaces where the clouds of your breath hang like spectral corpses waiting to be ripped apart by your passing and stalking butlers or other grotesques lurk in the liminal spaces. That's the jist when it comes to the classical take on it anyway.
The skies above Ōtautahi Christchurch have a leaden hue and there's been some rain today, not quite the storm that lashed Whitby in Bram Stoker's Dracula, but it will have to do. Today's delving into the 'Gothic' at the WORD Christchurch Festival is something a little closer to the bone.
What does Gothic look like here in Aotearoa? For Laura Borrowdale it's the monstrosity of the mundane, that dread that festers inside domesticity, ripping off the top layer of skin to reveal the maggots that feast on the rotting corpse of daily life beneath, all of which is laid bare in her short story collection Dead Ends.
Laura read a short story Last Drinks which for me channelled Shirley Jackson and Attila Veres. The implied ending hit like a stake through the heart and will stick with a few of us there for a while. During the question time at the end, she was asked if she had to have a body part removed what would it be? This provided a dose of morbid humour and a kōrero about her short story Your Husband and Other Body Parts (also in the collection) where the horror lies not in the amputation but in the banality and misogyny behind it - A woman is filling out forms at the doctors to have a limb removed, because she's leaving her husband, and that's the toll the state wants! Aoteroaian Shakespearian Gothic? Maybe? Utterly grim? For sure! And for you ghouls out there, Laura would choose the lower leg!
For Laura Vincent it's the transgression against the "normal", piercing the veil of rural Aotearoa and the people who haunt it even while they live. Shining the spotlight on Death who is around every gravel corner, walking down the empty main street of a dying small town, glimpsed through the windows as families feast on baking and dread passed down through the generations. Laura captured all this and more in the prologue to her pukapuka Hood's Landing which held us all silent and aware of a growing dread, despite the icing coating the piece of Gordons Gossip Slice that we were being fed. Having grown up in rural NZ this was way too relatable!
For Molly Crighton, it's what happens when the normal gets swallowed by the monstrous and the temporal sense of location, in the case of her pukapuka The Body and The Blood. Ōtepoti's Anglican Cathedral, where the rituals and religiosity cause time to seemingly stand still, despite the brutal murders that take place within its walls.
Molly read the opening chapter. Somehow its sense of location gave a sense of strange comforting familiarity that was ripped apart by the description of a corpse and the cold reaction to its discovery. Ah the sweet taste of blasphemy!
This was one of the best sessions I've been too in an age, with Noelle McCarthy working some black Irish magic, binding it all together like a blood-soaked feast in a Catholic cosplay taking place at Dracula's table.
My take on what New Aotearoa Gothic, after this masterclass, is embracing the darkness that hovers over us all, rising from the whenua to reach it, to feast on the corpse of our colonial past and its foul offspring, conservative religiosity, and late-stage capitalism. So let us light the black candles to light the way for transgressions, otherness, queerness, spookiness and all the othernesses that the Gothic has embraced through the ages.
Go forth and get these books out from your local library and after that go buy a copy of each from your local bookstore, park up with a cuppa and a sweet slice and let the darkness find you.
Big thanks to WORD and Christchurch City Libraries for the opportunity to report on the deliciously wicked New Aotearoa Gothic session this afternoon at the Christchurch Art Gallery, and an especially big thanks to Laura Borrowdale, Laura Vincent and Molly Crighton for their sinfully monstrous contributions to the Aotearoa Gothic, and to Noelle McCarthy for being the psychopomp we needed.
Mike, Tūranga
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