A Gothic Heterotopia: Four Anglophone Responses to Venice

Abstract

Starting from the view of the cultural geographer, Doreen Massey, that it is necessary to ‘move beyond a view of place as bounded, as in various ways a site of authenticity, as singular, fixed and unproblematic in its identity’, this article argues that places change in time, because the physical environment changes, especially in the Age of the Anthropocene, and because they are the product of imaginatively conceived collective fictions. It takes the view that outsiders invariably construct heterotopian visions of places, often drawing on past imaginaries and that Venice has habitually been cognitively perceived through Gothic lenses, in which past, present and future intermingle. It pursues this line of thinking in relation to four Anglophone representations of Venice: the recent film A Haunting in Venice (2023), directed by Kenneth Branagh and scripted by Michael Green, which is very loosely adapted from Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party (1969), and which subjects the whodunnit genre to a Gothic makeover, Daphne du Maurier’s short story ‘Don’t Look Now’ (1971) and Nicolas Roeg’s film adaptation (1973) of it, in which the Gothic particularly manifests itself in the form of psychic precognition, and Amitav Ghosh’s novel Gun Island (2019), in which an ostensibly realistic novel is infiltrated by recurrent paranormal elements, several of which are occasioned by the ‘unnaturalness’ of climate change.