Defeat is Good for Art: The Metamodern impulse in Gothic metafiction

The years of postmodern deconstruction have leached into the Gothic. Mark Z Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park and S, the collaborative project of J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst, all recycle Gothic tropes, presenting as postmodern Gothic and as metafictional novels which highlight their artificiality. Each presents and problematizes the trope of the haunted house, the found manuscript, and the Gothic sublime for reasons that seem to align with postmodern ideals of deconstruction and fragmentation. Yet there is something distinguishable in their treatment of Gothic conventions that deliberately fails to adhere to the postmodern impulse. Within each text there are elements that suggest a new form of sincerity, a search for post-irony, that, in fact, seem to suggest a yearning for something beyond the surface. This article will first show how each presents as postmodern Gothic before moving on to a discussion of how each attempts to move beyond the postmodern impulse from within it, aligning with contemporary post-postmodern, and specificially metamodern ideology/