John Dickson Carr and "Dark Romanticism"

From Dan Napolitano's introduction to The Kindling Spark: Early Tales of Mystery, Horror, and Adventure by John Dickson Carr:

          Romantic fiction, including Carr's, was frequently intertwined with the Gothic. Of course, Poe is an exemplar, and in this context he was both the best-known practitioner and the most significant influence upon Carr. (There were other Gothic writers who perceptibly influenced Carr, including M.R. James, Ambrose Bierce, F. Marion Crawford, and E.F. Benson.) Of Carr's connection with the Gothic, Greene notes (p. 109), "More than any other writer after Poe, Carr showed in his works the connection between the gothic novel and the detective story."

  Gothic fiction has its own set of defining characteristics, which are so compatible with Romantic principles that the phrase, "gothic romance" is perhaps generally better understood than the unaccompanied literary term "Gothic." The important characteristics of Gothic writing include: a nightmarish atmosphere of horror, suspense, or dread, especially with the (apparent) presence of the supernatural; a preoccupation with the past, which intrudes upon and threatens the present; the ascendancy of imagination and emotion, often placing terror into conflict with romance, or even commingling them; and physical settings that manifest these moods, which as literary devices typically symbolize and reflect characters' inner fear and agitation in the surrounding environment, e.g., centuries-old castles, ruins, barren landscapes, or any chilling site wrapped in tenebrous light, decay, or loneliness.

  Nineteenth-century American authors whose writings consistently exploited both these traditions—including Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville—have sometimes been called the school of Dark Romanticism, which was defined, in part, as a reaction against the optimism of the Transcendentalists and their belief in the perfectibility of humanity and its harmonious relationship with nature. Dark Romanticists are concerned with the intrinsic weakness of people, their susceptibility to evil, and with humanity's conflicted relationship with nature. Given this, Dark Romantic works are set uneasily in indifferent, sometimes hostile environments peopled with flawed, disturbed, and even self-destructive characters. Significant works in the tradition—much of Poe of course, but also academic standards such as The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick, can be readily and richly interpreted along these lines.

  So can Carr's works. Carr is an inheritor of all three of these literary traditions; they seeped into much of his fiction—especially during the 1930s and 1940s—during which he wrote two-thirds of his total output, despite continuing to write novels until 1972. Carr's participation in the Gothic, for instance, is not merely atmospheric; it is significant, as Joanna Kokot cogently argues:

  Contrary to most contemporary detective tales, Carr's novels do not present a crime as a mere (no matter how complicated) puzzle, an intellectual problem to be solved both by the fictitious detective and by the reader. The references to the conventions of Gothic fiction are at the same time references to a model of reality where the mimetic order has been violated by an alien element which is terrifying because it undermines the very essence of the universal harmony.8

  The lurid passages from Carr's novels and stories that one can recall and cite, comfortably fixing him into this context, are numerous. From time to time, Carr—ever lighthearted and opportunistically hurling some outrageously, even gruesomely funny detail into the midst of the grave and the frightening—flirtatiously acknowledged his place in the Gothic tradition openly. Consider the explanation in The Curse of the Bronze Lamp (1945) of the novel's Severn Hall, in which Carr silently traces the roots of his literary ancestry:

  This passion for the "Gothic" was started, about the middle of the eighteenth century, by a certain Mr. Horace Walpole. Walpole bought a modest villa at Twickenham, and gradually set about enlarging it in what his romantic soul imagined to be a medieval manner. Darkling towers, stained glass—"lean windows fattened by rich saints"—a profusion of antique armour and weapons, gladdened his heart at Strawberry Hill. Mr. Walpole presently wrote a novel called The Castle of Otranto. And he began a literary fashion which, with the assistance of Mrs. Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis, lasted well into the nineteenth century.

  Our great-great grandmothers thrilled to these romances. "Is it horrid?" asks one of them eagerly, in Miss Austen's gentle satire. "Have you read it? Are you sure it is horrid?" (p. 28)

  The Romanticism underlying Carr's embrace of the Gothic is distinguished from the literary schools that preceded and followed it in its consistent emphasis on the transformative power of the imagination. Probably the best critical explication of Romanticism's core principle—and one faithfully tied to Coleridge's original formulation—is the eponymous metaphor of M.H. Abrams' 1953 seminal study of Romanticism: The Mirror and the Lamp. (A 1953 study may not represent the cutting edge of twenty-first-century academic discussion, but it more than suits our purpose when placing Carr, a twentieth-century writer, into the context of his literary predecessors.) Abrams' thesis is easily summarized: before the Romantics, literature was perceived as a mirror being held up to the world, reflecting it accurately. Romanticism, instead, embraces the primacy of the author's imagination, which the writer casts over the landscape, illuminating it with the light and shadow of imagination, thereby transforming the landscape, not mirroring it, and transforming our perception of it. Romanticism depicts the world not "as it is," but as the artist's imagination insists it should be.

The Kindling Spark: Early Tales of Mystery, Horror, and Adventure https://a.co/d/6mNur30