This paper considers an underexplored aspect of Horace Walpole’s gothic resistance to neoclassicism: its experiments in ludic energy. Framing a reading of The Castle of Otranto with a discussion of Alexander Pope’s satire Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry (1728), I argue that Walpole’s embrace of the classical grotesque adopts “sinking” as a deliberate method. Debasement, falling in ruins, moral descent—these are valences of “sinking” that are familiar to our understanding of the gothic. Yet in Walpole’s work as writer and as collector, additional valences are equally significant: the spectre of being lost at sea, introduced by the tale’s Mediterranean setting; the irreverent gathering of cultural debris in combinations unsanctioned by classical order; and the giddiness of bathos, of suddenly slipping the hold of cultural dignity. By attending to these aspects of Walpole’s fiction through the paradigm of the ludic, I show how the gothic generates sites of play in which the distinction between comedy and tragedy does not hold.
This talk is in conversation with Laura Sarnelli's 'The Mediterranean Gothic,' which engages with the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean, and draws upon Black studies scholars like Hortense Spillers, Christina Sharpe, and Alexander Weheliye
