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No sooner did that idea cross my imagination, than I became convinced of its truth.
-Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
This is not "like T.V., only better." This is life. It's a piece of somebody's life. It's pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex. . . . you're there, you're doing it.
-Strange Days
For some years now we have regarded the gothic as a particularly embodied genre. Modern gothic, suggests Judith Halberstam, begins when Mary Shelley discovers "fear to be a by-product of embodiment rather than a trick played upon the body by the mind." Beginning with the crudely stitched epidermis of Frankenstein's monster, gothic literature helps turn skin into the nineteenth century's "metonym for the human," refiguring various social crises and identities in increasingly sexual terms.1 Kelly Hurley, too, finds the various estrangements, alienations, and terrors of late nineteenth-century gothic to inhere in a body made newly uncanny by Victorian science.2 For Hurley, fin-desiècle gothic is particularly notable for its ability to produce visceral reactions in the reader, though in this respect it is the descendant of mid-century "sensation" novels rather than gothic per se. In both Halberstam's and Hurley's readings, the gothic plays out a dialectic of embodiment and dissolution which makes violence the inevitable corollary of corporealization.3 Implicitly linking embodiment to the logic of specularity, these readings point to the perils encountered by bodies caught up in the violent, gendered field of the gaze, subject to the ressentiments reserved for figurations of the human.4
But is it embodiment that precipitates violence in the gothic text? What if the drive toward violence in the gothic text were generated not so much by the figure of the human as by the fantasy of transcending mediation (an aspiration designated, at different historical moments, variously as "immanence" or "virtuality"), a fantasy built into the narrative apparatus itself and then displaced onto some rival medium or apparatus? In this essay I will suggest-contra much recent culturally-oriented criticism-that such a double apparatus is constitutive of the gothic genre and generative of the latter's peculiar affinities for violence. I will also argue that the impulse within the gothic to abridge, compress, or transcend its own narrative modality, though represented within the diegesis as the effect of particular scientific technologies,...