SOURCE: Perry, J. Douglas, Jr. “Gothic as Vortex: The Form of Horror in Capote, Faulkner, and Styron.” In The Critical Response to Truman Capote, edited by Joseph J. Waldmeir and John C. Waldmeir, pp. 179-91. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, originally published in Modern Fiction Studies in 1973, Perry proposes that in addition to the commonality of theme and images, American gothic fiction also uses traditional structures and techniques to create a concentric series of events, drawing the reader into an intense interaction between human communities that exist inside and outside the novel.]

An examination of Capote, Faulkner, and Styron reveals that modern American gothic is not only a matter of theme or image, as Irving Malin suggests,¹ but of narrative form as well, that certain basic modes of rendering are traditional to gothic, and that in structure, as in theme and image, writers like Capote, Faulkner, and Styron parallel Melville and Poe, and ultimately such gothicists as “Monk” Lewis and Mary Shelley.

A convenient rule of thumb for modern American gothic might be that its structures are analogous to its images and themes. If one considers gothic to be made up of the interaction of theme, image, and structure, Malin has covered two of the three areas. He identifies the three images of American gothic as the room, the voyage, and the mirror, and the three appropriate themes as confinement, flight—really two sides of the same coin—and narcissism.² It is with the remaining area, the three corresponding structural principles (which I have labeled concentricity, predetermined sequence, and character repetition) that this article will deal.

One more point should be made here. The most pervasive gothic theme, the most pervasive gothic image, points to the over-all gothic structure: the fear of being drawn in and the image of the whirlpool find their expression in a structural vortex, composed of a series of rings or levels which create a kind of hierarchy of horror, like Dante's inferno.

The three structural principles are simply ways in which a whirlpool is shifted from a visual representation to the printed page. The process down the side of the whirlpool becomes the sequential experiencing of levels, a series of events, funneling into the final one. The sequence is predetermined because the whirlpool cancels free will and random motion. To move through the whirlpool is to find oneself moving in smaller and faster circles; a novel conveys this sensation by repeating its initial event or situation in more and more strident ways, creating for us a sense of concentricity. Finally, there is the matter of character repetition, the recurrence of archetypal figures, or clusters of them, throughout the various subplots of the novel, in an obsessive and stereotypical fashion. This character repetition lets us see the workings of the gothic world, for as the main characters or their proxies reappear at successive levels, they become increasingly grotesque, distorted more and more by the whirlpool's pull.

In a sense, it is arbitrary and misleading to isolate these structures this way, because they are simply facets of the same process, even as the themes express each other: the room's boundaries both promote and define one's flight, and the mirror is not only what one flees, but what one flies to. Concentricity (which implies boundaries) and sequence (which is simply flight through the concentric events) have the same interlocking relationship. As readers, we experience the spatial arrangement of the novel (its chapters or levels) as a matter of duration, as though we ourselves flee downward through the circles of the vortex. The last structural element, character repetition (which expresses narcissism), is made possible through the interaction of the other two: it is observable because a series of human communities can exist simultaneously and be experienced concentrically in the novel.

All three of the structural principles are molded into a novel which, like the half-spent suction of the Pequod's whirlpool, sucks the reader in, only to throw him back out again, like Ishmael, or Poe's Maelstrom man. George Poulet's analysis of Poe, with slight modifications, can be applied to all American gothic:

A sort of temporal circle surrounds Poe's characters. A whirlpool envelops them, which, like that of the maelstrom, disposes its funnel by degrees from the past in which one has been caught to the future in which one will be dead. Whether it moves in the limitless eternity of dreams or the limited temporality of awakening, the work of Poe thus always presents a time that is closed.³

The first principle, concentricity, is far easier for a spatial form, like painting, than for novels. Nevertheless, the novel can utilize what Hillis Miller calls “the Quaker Oats effect”:

A real Quaker Oats box is fictionalized when it becomes a picture of a Quaker Oats box which bears in turn another … and so on indefinitely, in an endless play of imagination and reality. The imaginary copy tends to affirm the reality of what it copies and at the same time to undermine its substantiality. To watch a play within a play is to be transformed from spectator into actor and to suspect that all the world may be a stage and the men and women merely players. To read a narration within a narration makes all the world a novel and turns the reader into a fictional character.⁴

Such an illusion becomes all the more desirable in the whirlpool world of gothic.

It is in just such a manner that Mary Shelley draws us into her tale. As we read Frankenstein we are, in effect, cutting across a series of interrupted and resumed narratives, drawing a straight line through the concentric circles made by her narrators. After Mary Shelley's own preface, voyager Robert Walton writes letters to his sister embodying the narrative of Dr. Frankenstein who in turn supplies the monologue of the monster. Each story teller is interrupted by the other and only allowed to finish when his interrupter has finished. One charts one's progress through the book by the level of hearsay.

A similar if more crudely manipulated concentricity occurs in The Monk, between Ambrosio's fall from innocence and his on-going corruption. In a hiatus of more than one hundred pages, a second plot is introduced, involving the narration of Don Raymond, who interrupts himself first for the autobiography of Marguerite and then for Agnes's capsule gothic tale. One is farthest from the surface and from a sense of reality here, for Agnes's story—the tale of the bleeding nun—is so fantastic that not even Agnes believes it until, in melodramatic fashion, Agnes and Don Raymond themselves succumb to the Bleeding Nun.

With so many tales being recounted successively, recurrence of character types is almost inevitable. It happens in The Monk, of course, but the classic example of this repetition occurs in the dark and fair heroes and heroines of Wuthering Heights. The confusion of names in Wuthering Heights—with so many overlapping Heathcliffes, Lintons, and Earnshaws for namesakes—becomes not merely a problem of multiple marriages and dense plotting, but the first source of disorientation in Lockwood's gothic encounter:

In vapid listlessness I leant my head against the window, and continued spelling over Catherine Earnshaw—Heathcliffe—Linton, till my eyes closed, but they had not rested five minutes when a glare of white letters started from the dark, as vivid as spectres—the air swarmed with Catherines.⁵

Although there is no such confusion of names in Frankenstein, the character of the Promethean hero is central to each ring of the concentrically formed novel. His magnitude increases proportionately as one approaches the center of the book. The outermost ring is occupied by Mary Shelley herself who, despite her disclaimer that the novel was “commenced partly as a source of amusement, and partly as an expedient for exercising my untried resources of mind,” provides the book with this envoi: “And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words.”⁶

At this point, the interaction of character repetition with concentricity and sequence becomes clear. The concentricity is apparent precisely because of the recurrence. At each new level, the reader finds the patterns obsessively reestablishing themselves. As a temporal experience, the growing horror is based partly on our recognition of the inevitable course of events, a sequence we have already faced in a milder form on the previous level.

Inversely, the concentricity and sequence strengthen the reader's impulse to make the analogies. For example, Robert Walton's uncompleted journey becomes much more sinister when one sees the horrible outcome of Dr. Frankenstein's idealistic quest.

I have started my discussion with these nineteenth-century examples both because the formal methods and patterns are clear, and because they are the prototypes, as Leslie Fiedler might say, in Capote, Faulkner, and Styron. In these American authors, the use of these techniques may be more elaborate, but the issues which are treated are of the same existential profundity and ambiguity as those of Frankenstein. Other Voices, Other Rooms concerns itself, as so many American novels do, with an adolescent's quest for identity. Joel Knox, like Robin Molienux before him, seeks out the fabled relatives that may give him identity and security. When he arrives at Skully's Landing, he finds only a madhouse inhabited by his long lost father (in a near catatonic state); his father's second wife in name only (Miss Amy), a Havisham-like relic of Southern womanhood; and his cousin Randolph, a homosexual and transvestite. These are Joel's role-models, the gothic family. It is cousin Randolph, Joel's ultimate alter-ego, who poses the gothic dilemma by linking the identity quest to the gothic whirlpool:

What a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities? … Narcissus was no egotist … merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the one beautiful comrade, the only inseparable love.⁷

This passage, which clearly demonstrates Malin's diagnosis of theme and image, mirror and narcissism, leads to the kind of motifs that Ishmael attaches to water in Moby-Dick:

Still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus who because he could not grasp the tormenting mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.⁸

Capote's horizon is narrower than Melville's partly because it is more exclusively gothic. The circle is vicious rather than transcendental. Joel enters the whirlpool and fails to resurface. As I have been suggesting earlier, this is a formal matter as much as a thematic one. Close to the end of the book, after Joel emerges from a series of progressively more sinister levels of gothic, he enters the final delirium, the delirium that renders him fit for the Cousin Randolph's proclivities. The brief final section of the book opens with a description of the delirium as whirlpool, with Joel in his coffin at the center of a ring of grotesques—which includes every character in the novel but Joel:

Miss Wisteria … leaned so far over she nearly fell into the chest: listen, she whispered … are the dead as lonesome as the living? Whereupon the room commenced to vibrate slightly, then more so, chairs overturned … a mirror cracked, … down went the house, down into the earth, … past the deepest root, into the furry arms of horned children whose bumblebee eyes withstand forests of flame.

(C [Other Voices, Other Rooms], p. 113)

The center of the final whirlpool is Randolph's window, where Joel, on his first day at Skully's Landing, saw “the queer lady” (C, p. 40). Joel's final submergence is accomplished by means of this specter, whom he now knows to be Randolph:

Gradually the blinding sunset drained from the glass, … a face trembled like a white beautiful moth, smiled. She beckoned to him, shining and silver, and he knew he must go: unafraid, not hesitating, he paused only at the garden's edge where he stopped and looked back at the bloomless descending blue, at the boy he had left behind.

(C, p. 127)

Unlike Poe's “Descent into the Maelstrom,” there is no corresponding ascent; Joel makes his irrevocable choice.

To see the shape of the book, the gothic vortex, is to see only the symptom. The cause and ultimate meaning lie elsewhere. The reason why Joel must accept Randolph is that Randolph becomes the self-negating way out of an untenable and omnipresent situation: a perverted and sterile sexual triangle encountered, with different participants, not less than five times in the book. Joel finds either himself or Randolph at the apex, the variable element in each of these triangles, and each time Joel experiences or witnesses it, the triangle becomes more intense, more sinister. First Joel is a pawn in the sibling rivalry of the cruel Florabelle, totally feminine but totally self-centered, and the somewhat overbearing Idabelle, who has become a tomboy to escape the pressures of sexuality. All this can be accepted as part of the mildly confusing but normative world of adolescence. Not so healthy is the successive menage à trois of Ransom, Miss Amy, and the sexually ambivalent Randolph who, like Joel, drifts alone in the middle. Joel is then put between Zoo, feminine, warm, but somehow unattainable, and Randolph who is, at this point in the story, unacceptable.

Randolph's account of Ransom's incapacitating accident reveals a far more sinister triangle: Pepe, the stud prizefighter; Dolores, who, like Florabelle, lives only for self-worship; and Randolph, attracted differently by both, satisfied by neither. After hearing this story, Joel himself becomes the middle man in a similar but odder triangle with Miss Wisteria—a Florabelle transformed into a grotesque parody of the Southern Belle—and Idabelle, Miss Wisteria's inappropriate and hapless suitor. It does not help that Miss Wisteria in turn now covets the now terrified Joel.

The character repetition of this particular sequence makes Joel's end seem not only inevitable, but almost preferable. In effect, Capote has used the structures to turn the gothic inside out. The reader comes to understand that given the gothic nature of the outside world, which ravages Zoo, Ransom, and Randolph, the bond between Randolph and Joel—as perverse as it may be—is the most affirmative situation Joel can find.

Faulkner, in Sanctuary, also turns the gothic inside out. One finds in Sanctuary, as in Other Voices, Other Rooms, that while the center of the pool is the most dramatic, it is at the beguilingly calm margin that the real danger lurks. Not Popeye, but Narcissa is the real source of evil in Sanctuary. Faulkner uses the formal principles I have described to achieve this, but in a different way from Capote. For instance, instead of the slow but steady progress from the edge to the center, Faulkner flicks us back and forth between the two extremes. The novel begins with a confrontation, over a mirror-like pool, of Horace and Popeye who are, in some ways, the alpha and omega:

The spring welled up … upon a bottom of whorled and waved sand. … In the spring the drinking man leaned his face to the broken and myriad reflection of his own drinking. When he rose up he saw among them the shattered reflection of Popeye's straw hat.⁹

In one sense, this is a chance encounter between men from opposite poles: Horace, the respectable small town lawyer and family man; Popeye, the vicious and impotent bootlegger. Horace comes and goes at once, with no sense of participation in Popeye's world. Nevertheless, Horace first sees Popeye as an image mixed in with his own like the kaleidoscopic everyman shiftings of Joe Christmas's face when he dies. Horace is in flight from the sterile respectability of his marriage when Popeye, the social misfit, enters his life. In fact, as Olga Vickery points out, “there are certain startling similarities between these two morally antithetical figures”:

Popeye's rapt and unnatural absorption in watching Temple and Red perform an act in which he can never share is echoed by Horace's painful exclusion from the grape arbor where Little Belle casually experiments with sex. … Popeye's brutal act fuses with Horace's thoughts and culminates in the nightmare vision of the rape of a composite Temple-Little Belle.¹⁰

What Vickery notes about the men, and implies about Temple and Little Belle, is even more applicable to the antipodal figures of Narcissa and Temple. If Temple's father is a judge, the law runs rampant through the Benbow family.¹¹ This familial tie with the law makes both women see law as a personal convenience rather than an institution for human betterment. Both of them are concerned with the appearance of respectability. “Honest women,” Ruby sneers at Temple. “Too good to have anything to do with common people. … Just let a man so much as look at you and you faint away because your father the judge and your four brothers might not like it” (F, p. 55). Miss Jenny has fainter but similar scorn for Narcissa: “Do you think Narcissa'd want any of her folks could know people who would do anything as natural as make love or rob or steal?” (F, p. 115). In Sanctuary, the gothic world is synonymous with a loveless world, and Temple and Narcissa match the impotence of Popeye and Horace with a corresponding frigidity. Because they are not looking for adult relationships, both Temple and Narcissa are drawn to Gowan, but only to a certain point, as Horace's anecdote reveals:

“He asked Narcissa to marry him. She told him that one child was enough for her. … So he got mad and said he would go to Oxford, where there was a woman he was reasonably confident he would not appear ridiculous to.”

(F [Sanctuary], p. 161)

Imprisoned throughout the book, and standing as the sole exponents of the nongothic world, are Lee Goodwin and Ruby, and it is their destruction, or rather Lee's destruction and with it the meaning of Ruby's life, that finally crushes Horace.

The feeling of character repetition is heightened by the structuring of the narrative. Instead of moving from one situation to a more sinister one to a final one, Faulkner shuttles back and forth between the respectable world of Jefferson and the depraved worlds of Old Frenchman's Place and Memphis, counterpointing his landscape and characters, holding to a strict chronological sequence. A quick check of Cleanth Brooks's chronology¹² reveals that only once does Faulkner allow the two plots to slip out of synchrony; the result there is to intensify the gothic.

In chapter XXII, Horace has learned from Clarence Snopes of Temple's whereabouts, and in the next chapter, on June third, he interviews her. In chapters XXIV and XXV, Faulkner jumps ahead to June seventeenth, describing Popeye's murder of Red, Red's wake, and the departure of Popeye and Temple. Yet when the reader returns to Horace in Jefferson (XXVI), it is still June fourth: Horace is writing a letter to his wife in the aftermath of his horror over Temple's recital; Narcissa is preparing for Horace's defeat at the hands of the district attorney; and Clarence Snopes is headed for Jackson. Thus, while Popeye and Temple move beyond his reach and arrangements are made with Judge Drake and a “Memphis Jew” lawyer, Horace continues to conduct his life at a snail's pace. At the beginning of chapter XXVII, it is still only June tenth for Horace, calling to make sure that his star witness is still safely in Memphis, a fact which may comfort Horace, but not the reader. Abruptly, Faulkner brings Horace to the eve of the trial. Temple has disappeared and only reappears to give the false testimony which convicts Lee.

Faulkner manipulates time to create a doubleness, to put Horace in molasses while evil moves by him on greased skids. The result is to make physically impossible what Miss Jenny knows to be societally impossible: “You won't ever catch up with injustice, Horace.” (F, p. 115)

The final gothic twist, the final concentric pattern, is provided by Popeye's own trial. Here Popeye, that most impotent of the impotent men in Sanctuary, finds himself being defended by the ultimate parody of Horace's idealism: “His lawyer had an ugly, eager, earnest face. He rattled on with a kind of enthusiasm. … A fellow policeman, a cigar clerk, a telephone girl testified, while his own lawyer rebutted in a gaunt mixture of uncouth enthusiasm and earnest ill-judgment” (F, p. 303). Like the sideshow in Other Voices, Other Rooms, this courtroom comedy is the final degradation of and commentary on man's desire to act meaningfully. Both Horace's idealism and his actions are seen as if through the wrong end of a telescope, leaving a searing void like the fiery vortex which engulfs Goodwin in front of Horace's outraged eyes:

Horace couldn't hear them. He couldn't hear the man who had got burned screaming. He couldn't hear the fire, though it swirled upward, unabated, as though it were living upon itself, and soundless: a voice of fury like in a dream, roaring silently out of a peaceful void.

(F, p. 289)

In a slightly different manner from Capote, Faulkner has turned the gothic inside out. Evil seems initially a bizarre and isolatable element, confined to the aberrations of Popeye and Temple. Eventually, Horace's twin battles—with the natural world which threatens his sterile existence, and with the monstrous people who threaten his client—these merge. Nature itself, in all its forms, becomes the menace, menacing even the villains who become its victims, disrupting society, the law, and the community. When one recognizes that nature is gothic from Horace's point of view, one simultaneously realizes that Horace, all of us in fact, are unnatural, that good and evil are artificial, man-made concepts. In Sanctuary, Faulkner stops just short of what he later says in As I Lay Dying or Light in August: that it is man, not his universe, that is out of kilter, that the sensation of gothicness is man's projective response to the absurdity of his own existence in a totally consistent, self-sufficient, and alien universe.

If one characterizes Capote's subject matter as individual in its concerns, and Faulkner's as societal, one must call Styron's interpersonal. He is less concerned with Law and the coercions of the Community because he seems largely unconvinced that communal society can exist in America. The permanence of Jefferson, Mississippi, is negated by the transience of Port Warwick, Va.:

In America, our landmarks and our boundaries merge, shift, and change quicker than we can tell: one day we feel rooted. … Then … it is all yanked out from beneath us, and when we come down we alight on—what? The same old street, to be sure. But where it once had the solid resounding sound of Bankhead McGruder Avenue … now it is called Buena Vista Terrace (“It's the California influence,” my father complained, “It's going to get us all in the end.”)¹³

Even the name of the narrator, Peter Leverett, is invariably garbled and lost in introductions, becoming Levenson or Levitt, lending further evidence to a theory of instability: “There must be something basically unsound about the structure of my name,” Peter observes (S, p. 141). For Styron, the same problem prevails that Capote and Faulkner documented: a sense of the void at the center of things, a conviction that chaos is about to rise up and swallow man's personal order. To Styron, this feeling manifests itself not among or within people, but between them, at that instant when one person tries to establish himself in terms of his relations to others. So, in Set This House on Fire, three major figures (and several minor ones) of distinct and somewhat antagonistic temperaments, establish a temporary equilibrium of their opposing tensions, only to lash out at each other in the end, all in the name of self-actualization. The two survivors—Cass Kinsolving and Peter Leverett, the murderer and the not-so-innocent bystander—are left with the task of rehearsing and reconstructing the significance of the triangle.

The theme of the void provides ample explanation for Styron's adaptation of gothic methods and form. In addition, because the problem is interpersonal in nature, a treatment of gothic as group dynamics, character repetition becomes a crucial and valuable structure in Styron's story. Instead of providing merely the grotesque commentary of Capote, or the suggestive analogies of Sanctuary, it boxes the compass of man's capacity for good and evil. Peter, Cass, and Mason, like the three somewhat similar brothers Karamazov, cover the spectrum of observing, doing, and embodying.

Yet it is not the variety of characters, but their sameness that finally emerges as important. Here again is where the gothic concentricity, the argument from character analogy plays the major part. Peter and Cass uncover their pasts by telling the history of their involvement with each other, to each other. In so doing, they also collaborate on Mason's history, piecing together motive and murderer, cause and effect, during the entire book. Gradually, the fact of their parallel pasts overshadows the sequence of events they are trying to reconstruct. All the men are nearly identical in age: Cass and Mason cross the watershed age of thirty just before the rape, murder, and apparent suicide which occur in Sambuco; Peter, a year younger, fails to confront the issues of Sambuco until after his return home, when a general kind of angst leads him to seek out Cass and the truth. Styron suggests something like Erik Eriksen's delayed identity crisis in these men. With the significant exception of Peter, accounts are given of each man's initial sexual encounter, invariably in the late teens: from Mason's flagrante delicto in boarding school to Saverio's rape-murder of Angelina. Thirteen years later, the mild anxiety of Peter is set over against Cass's almost classic nineteenth-century self-flagellation. Saverio murders mindlessly; Cass murders in an ecstacy of mistaken vengeance; and Mason, like Gatsby, attempts to realize himself in a grandiose self-conception, a pursuit of “the green light, the orgiastic future,”¹⁴ only to find himself at an impotent dead end, pursued by Cass and the insatiable demands of his own unattainable fantasies.

In each man, one finds an inner compulsion, a need to establish his value by meeting the impossible standards he has set for himself. Like the overreachers in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, each refuses to recognize his own human frailty, the underlying egotism of his idealism. Like Mary Shelley, Styron uses the concentricity to drive the point home. In an obsessive way, the form of the novel is a series of nightmarish self-confrontations, of gradually increasing intensity. The cosmic unfairness of it all is that, in each case, the characters confront their moment of truth at the time when they are physically and emotionally drained, and totally inadequate to the challenge.

As one might expect, the book begins with Peter who occupies the outermost circle of the vortex, who is least susceptible to the maelstrom, and whose encounter with the nightmare is the slightest. The novel is a series of descents, with the first unchronologically but appropriately Peter's descent to Carolina and Cass, by way of Port Warwick. The reader is next given, in flashback, not the main event he has come to expect, but Peter's tragi-comic arrival at Sambuco, gothic enough in Peter's near manslaughter, by car, of a half-wit Italian motorcyclist, but retrospectively mild in comparison to the novel's final outcome:

DiLieto … lay face up on the road, blood trickling gently from nose and ears, and with a sort of lopsided, dreamy expression on his features, part agony, part a smile, as if in mindless repose. … One eye socket was pink and sunken (I thought this my doing), and with a grisly feeling I glanced around for the missing eye. … For what seemed like an endless time I kept trampling around the prostrate diLieto, reeling with shock.

(S [Set This House on Fire], pp. 32-33)

Peter is given no time, at Sambuco, to regroup from the combination of the accident itself and the travel fatigue which precipitated it and, like Faulkner's Horace, never quite catches up. In fact, Peter attributes all his misfortune to an initial sleepless night on the road: “Had I been able to sleep easily that night, I might very well have been spared my trouble of the next day. Without that misadventure, I most surely would have arrived in Sambuco fresh as a buttercup: not haggard, shattered, and cursed with a sort of skittish, haunted depletion of nerves from which I never quite recovered” (S, pp. 29-30). Peter observes that such second thoughts are no good, but both his and Cass's narratives are full of them. This is the first in a series of “if onlys” where the physiological state of the character predetermines the catastrophic outcome. Once more, sequence is all. From the moment Peter barges onto the movie set at Sambuco, until his groggy mid-afternoon awakening to the news of Mason's death, hallucination and illusion are his constant companions.

Cass repeats the pattern laid out for Peter. While in Paris when he has gone to study painting, Cass experiences a drunken hallucination, an Italian pastoral fantasy. He sets out for Rome and eventually Sambuco in quest of the sun-drenched South. When he arrives in Sambuco in a state of virtual collapse, he creates such a scene that he, like Peter, winds up confronting the local functionary. Cass's travel fatigue is heightened by his fall off the wagon. It is this alcoholic arrival, and relentless, ever-deepening alcoholism of his stay there that establishes the feeling of horrifying inevitability. His lack of money, his drunken desperation, his extra-marital involvement with Francesca, his acquiescence in Mason's sinister and ever growing domination over him, and his horror at Mason's rape of Francesca: all of these culminate in Cass's act of vengeance and self-liberation, the murder of Mason. Styron's vision becomes clearer at each level of the vortex. The nature of the universe is to demand more of man than he is equipped to deliver; the nature of our relations with our fellow man is to ask him to answer for our own inadequacies, to fulfill us; and the nature of our fellow man is such that he cannot do this. So each character projects his inadequacies and frustrations on the other: Peter lives vicariously through Mason's fleshed-out fantasies; Mason subjugates Peter and Cass for self-aggrandizement; Cass flees home, family, artistic responsibility, and self for an Italian Never-Never Land, an idyll with Francesca, and so unwittingly singles her out to be Mason's means of violating Cass through her. And if Francesca's hopes for herself and her family are projected on Cass, her fears are projected onto Saverio, bringing about a self-fulfilling prophecy:

What Mason had done to her just that same evening clung to her flesh like some loathsome disease. … So it was that when she met Saverio in the shadows and he put out his fingers harmlessly … to stroke her, the intense male hand on her arm brought back, like horror made touchable, the touch and the feel and the actuality, and she found herself shrieking.

(S, pp. 453-454)

She lashes out at him preemptively, and as he strikes back, she continues to scream, “unaware now that this was Saverio, or anyone, aware of nothing save that the whole earth's protruberant and insatiate masculinity had descended upon her in the space of one summer night” (S, p. 454). The half-wit kills her in self-defense, and so provides the most graphic example of the inevitably gothic dimension of all human relationships, the mutually destructive nature of people's needs for one another.

Nevertheless, the epilogue of Set This House on Fire, like the epilogue of Moby-Dick, is written by the survivors of the whirlpool, not its victims. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael, like Peter, is the one least involved with the cosmos of the story, and his survival is a demonstration of the difference in stature between him and Ahab. Cass is far closer to Ahab than Ishmael and suggests that Styron envisions another kind of survivor from one who returns merely to tell somewhat uncomprehendingly his tale. Cass has grown and learned, has learned that the gothic vision, with its Manichean values, its all or nothing philosophy, is out of kilter with human nature and self-actualization:

But to be truthful, you see, I can only tell you this: that as for being and nothingness, the one thing I did know was that to choose between them was to choose being, not for the sake of being, much less the desire to be forever—but in the hope of being what I could be for a time. That would be an ecstacy. God Knows it would.

(S, pp. 476-477)

The epilogue is two documents: one testifying to Cass's anticipated paternity, a reestablishment of creativity on several counts; the other Peter's reprieve in the miraculous recovery of diLieto. Only Cass emerges as the clear victor, perhaps because we are dealing once again with a kind of double gothic. Perhaps the real gothic world is Peter's, a world of twilight perceptions, evanescent pleasures, vicariousness and lost opportunities, a world where the lack of a real dark night of the soul also means the impossibility of a real redemption.

Character repetition, sequence, and concentricity are the formal means of portraying the gothic sensation of existing in time and space. As such they apply to all of the Faulkner, Styron, and Capote. The family resemblances of Lie Down in Darkness to The Sound and the Fury are only partly explained by influence, for in fundamental ways Faulkner and Styron differ at the start: Faulkner's concern with the Compsons turns on the family as microcosm of society; Styron sees the family as the most intense and glaring example of the failure of human relationships, the unendingly destructive demands of one on another. The similarities spring from Faulkner's and Styron's mutual fascination with time: with clocks and how to stop them, with existence, consciousness and its denial, with the sterile repetitiveness of family curses and familial neuroses, swirling on through time. Both writers stress subjective time, multiple narrations which substitute a series of fragmented and irreconcilable time-consciousnesses for a Greenwich stability. Capote's In Cold Blood is the archetypal horror machine of time, an inexorable pit and pendulum alternation, as Capote jerks the reader back and forth from Clutter farm to Kansas highway, in rigid chronological sequence and tightening geography, until the bright blue shotgun flash in the dark.

All three writers use the gothic form, with its denial of final absolute affirmation, tragic or otherwise, to capture the irony of our twentieth-century existence: the conviction that the search for self-awareness may not only be fatal, but fruitless, because it is equivalent to self-negation; that selfhood is an arbitrary but necessary construct of man's self-protective ignorance; that self-awareness and self-destruction are one and the same: “The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! Who can tell it?”¹⁵

Notes

1. Irving Malin, New American Gothic (Carbondale, Ill.: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1962).

2. Malin, especially pp. 79-80, 106-107, 126-128.

3. George Poulet, Studies in Human Time (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), pp. 333-334.

4. J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1968), p. 35.

5. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1942), p. 37.

6. Mary W. Shelley, Frankenstein (New York: Dell, 1970), pp. 8, 14.

7. Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms (New York: Signet, 1958), p. 78. In subsequent references to this book, page numbers will appear after the citation, in parentheses, with the author's initial: (C, p. 78).

8. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952), p. 26.

9. William Faulkner, Sanctuary (New York: Vintage, 1958), p. 3. See note 7.

10. Olga Vickery, “Crime and Punishment: Sanctuary,” reprinted in Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 132.

11. Robert Kirk thinks Narcissa's father may be Judge Benbow of Absalom, Absalom!: Faulkner's People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), p. 323. William Volpe makes the same assumption in his Sartoris family tree: A Reader's Guide to William Faulkner (New York: Noonday, 1964), p. 66.

12. Cleanth Brooks, The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 287-289.

13. William Styron, Set This House on Fire (New York: Signet, 1961), pp. 14-15. See note 7.

14. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribners, 1953), p. 182.

15. Melville, p. 529.