‘The Hollow Echo’: Gothic fiction and the structure of a formulaic pattern

Abstract

The article proposes a methodology for the analysis of formulaic discourse in a Gothic novel, Peter Teuthold’s The Necromancer (1794). It builds on insights from both corpus linguistics and the theory of oral-formulaic composition, while adjusting them to the realities of a prose literary text. Concentrating on the 11 occurrences of the lexeme ‘echo’ in the novel, it analyses the various linguistic formations in which the word appears – a system of lexical, phonological, syntactic and connotative ‘fields’ held together by various types of equivalence. These build a flexible ‘formulaic pattern’ (to be distinguished from the rigid ‘formula’) characterised by iteration and variation. Analysis then shows how the formulaic pattern of ‘echo’ thematises iteration and shapes an unstable, liminal environment which exhibits attributes of the chaotic, elicits the experience of horror and constitutes a trope for the structure of Gothic reality.

Keywords:

• Chaos
• co-occurrence
• field
• formulaic pattern
• Gothic fiction
• liminality

Notes

1. For a representative token: of the 246 entries in the recent Encyclopedia of the Gothic (Hughes, Punter and Smith, 2013) – giving a comprehensive coverage of authors, titles, genres, themes etc. – only two (‘Intertext’, ‘Liminality’) directly tackle formal issues, while others such as ‘Folklore’ restrict themselves to the thematic or ideological aspects of their topic.

2. My thanks to Beatriz Sánchez Santos, who provided much intellectual stimulus for this article.

3. Gothic novels may even coexist with their own back-translations, as happened when Kahlert retranslated Teuthold’s rendering of Schiller back into German (cf. Conger, 1980a: 218). On rewriting see Lefevere (1992).

4. Long before that, of course, ‘formula’ had been used to designate a model (German Formel) for a predictable narrative structure (cf. von Hahn, 1871). It remains in use in the related concept of ‘formula writing’.

5. I have been unable to uncover in linguistic theory any type of co-occurrence that would correspond to the notion of phonological field as used here.

6. These are standard aspects of the Sublime and its terrors in Edmund Burke’s (1987) Enquiry.