“Dreary Abodes”: Gothic Formulaic Discourse as a Technique of the Surface

This article seeks to reassess widespread critical usage of the terms “surface” and “superficial” with regard to Gothic fiction. The first part of the article provides a critical examination of the conventional surface-and-depth model, and proposes, as an alternative, a surficial approach to text which assigns to thresholds a central role. The second part brings these notions to bear upon the formulaic language associated with the word “horror”. This is a key term in Gothic fiction but one which (as opposed to the concept of horror) has never been an object of analysis. Concentrating on one Gothic novel, Peter Teuthold’s The Necromancer, the article outlines the formulaic pattern shaped by the fifty-seven tokens of “horror” in the novel, and distils the system of connotations which the pattern attaches to the word. Analysis of formulaic structures reveals two things: first, that formulaicity is a technique for making the “surface” of the text—its language—visible; second, that the connotative system of “horror” in this novel is tied to a conceptualisation of reality for the description of which surface/depth models are inadequate. An alternative analysis is then offered in the light of the concepts of the surficial and the liminal.