Keepin' Emily company

[alice wellintown]

> Likewise, only the living can mistake the meaningless for the
> meaningful, which, on any level, can sometimes be fatal.
> Occassionally however mistakes turn out happy.

I suspect that mistakes are undervalued and that the right answer and
getting things right is given far too much weight.

Gothic and Gallows humor, a tradition Emily dashed off grave poems in,
turn, often, not toward happiness, but away from a comedy of errors.

Hamlet kills his lovers father; he takes the old windbag for his
better or strikes a fatal blow after mis-takes the meaningless old man
for the meaningful usurper.

But there is someting fortunate in that failing; we might call it
serendipitous, a fortunate Fall for Emily.


The word "Serendipity" is attributed to Horace Walpole, author of the
gothic novel, Castle of Otranto which is discussed, briefly, by our
man Pynchon in his Luddite Essay.


In Walpole's novel, this hand shows up as the hand of Alfonso the
Good, former Prince of Otranto and, despite his epithet, the castle's
resident Badass. Alfonso, like Frankenstein's creature, is assembled
from pieces -- sable-plumed helmet, foot, leg, sword, all of them,
like the hand, quite oversized -- which fall from the sky or just
materialize here and there about the castle grounds, relentless as
Freud's slow return of the repressed. The activating agencies, again
like those in Frankenstein, are non-mechanical. The final assembly of
"the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude," is achieved
through supernatural means: a family curse, and the intercession of
Otranto's patron saint.
The craze for Gothic fiction after The Castle of Otranto was grounded,
I suspect, in deep and religious yearnings for that earlier mythic
time which had come to be known as the Age of Miracles. In ways more
and less literal, folks in the 18th century believed that once upon a
time all kinds of things had been possible which were no longer so.
Giants, dragons, spells. The laws of nature had not been so strictly
formulated back then. What had once been true working magic had, by
the Age of Reason, degenerated into mere machinery.