I once had an idea for a shop. It would be called Black. It would sell only black things. It would open at dusk and close at dawn. Some of the things it would sell: licorice, burnt toast, beetles, Doc Martens (black only), little black dresses, stuffed ravens, vinyl LPs (mainly Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, Leontyne Price), black tulip bulbs, letters sent by soldiers and prisoners (heavily censored with black markers). Someone asked me how anyone would ever buy anything, since in the dark store the black items would be hard to see. "All the customers would be blind," I said. Not exactly a fabulous business plan. I regretfully put it aside. But I am delighted to discover that Tate Britain in London has gone ahead and opened my little shop of blackness for me: Gothic Nightmares, which features the work of Henry Fuseli, William Blake and their contemporaries.
The essence of the Gothic is darkness and impracticality, warped logic coupled with desire. Few people are able to sustain a true Gothic sensibility into their grown-up years (rock singer Marilyn Manson being the exception who proves the rule), and a love of darkness is often associated with people hovering between childhood, when night's terrors are too real, and adulthood, when we banish such things along with our other unreasonable pleasures. Lately, though, modern adults have been embracing the dark and irrational side of things with enthusiasm; from Anne Rice's Lestat to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and from the magical folk of JK Rowling to novelist Susanna Clarke's faeries and magicians, we have a seemingly insatiable appetite for the supernatural. Our post-Enlightenment forbears took theirs with maximum histrionics and a dollop of Shakespeare. We prefer ours with irony and lots of sex.
The Gothic may be construed as the romance of the things that will eat us in the end. It is an attempt to subdue them and to dance with them, it is our perversity and a fancy-dress rehearsal for reality. When the Gothic is in fashion we allow ourselves to be infatuated with Mr Death, to flirt and be felt up by him. I think we are most sane when we can joke a bit with him, most healthy when we are artistic about our own mortality. The stubborn endurance of the art we call Gothic is a testimony to our need for an aesthetics of death.
I missed the original Gothic period, and I'm about seven years too old to have been a Goth girl, with the requisite piercings and tattoos. The Tate show covers the most abundant and genuinely original period of Gothic flowering, the years between 1765 and 1830. In addition to Fuseli's famous painting The Nightmare, the show includes paintings such as Death on a Pale Horse (William Blake), Margery Jourdain and Bolingbroke Conjuring Up the Fiend (George Romney), Ithyphallic Man with Two Women with Elaborate Hairstyles (Theodore Von Holst), and Gravedigger and Monster (George Montard Woodward) - and these titles tell you pretty much what you can expect from the exhibition. The art ranges from the sombre to the satirical, from the perversely erotic to the merely odd.
There is one piece in this show that sinks its teeth into my brain every time I see it: The Ghost of a Flea, by Blake. This is a report by Alan Cunningham of how John Varley saw Blake make the initial drawing:
"I'll tell you all about it, sir. I called on him one evening, and found Blake more than usually excited. He told me he had seen a wonderful thing - the ghost of a flea! 'And did you make a drawing of him?' I inquired. 'No, indeed,' said he, 'I wish I had, but I shall, if he appears again!' He looked earnestly into a corner of the room, and said, 'There he is - reach me my things - I shall keep my eye on him. There he comes! His eager tongue whisking out of his mouth, a cup in his hand to hold blood and covered with a scaly skin of gold and green,' - as he described him so he drew him."
The painting is fearsome - it is like looking at a portrait of the particular devil that owns your soul. But it is also funny - this beast is a flea, not even a flea but the ghost of a flea. In 1820, when Blake painted this, there was nothing more ordinary than a flea. The modern equivalent might be looking at an enlarged photograph of a cancer cell, if that cancer cell had protruding eyes and a "whisking" tongue. Blake's eagerness and sincerity couple with the grotesque to produce a thing of genuine and inexplicable power.
In my own work, as a writer and an artist, I try to find this balance between the ordinary and the strange. A colleague told me that her husband dressed as a werewolf for Halloween, and now her children demand every day that daddy don his werewolf gear and scare them before dinner. I immediately excused myself and ran off to the toilet to take notes. The story has the perfect combination of ordinariness, obsessive behaviour, and the juxtaposition of innocence and a monster. My first impulse was to have the dad turn out to be a werewolf, but I'm sure I can think of something weirder if I work at it. Much weirder. All the obvious weirdnesses have been used up, and to reveal the layers of strangeness that underpin modern family life I will have to be more subtle and more sideways about it.
The Gothic has this in common with religion and conspiracy theories: we want there to be something beyond the everyday world of surfaces and objects. In Gothic art and literature, dead is not necessarily really dead: in the Gothic world scientists re-animate corpses, spirits greet us from the afterlife, graveyards teem with ghosts and resurrection men. During the period dealt with in Gothic Nightmares, scientists were taking over from the clergy in shaping people's imaginings of life's beginning and ending; the art in this show represents a sort of rear guard. Most of it is inspired by folk tales, the Bible, Shakespeare's ghosts, superstitions. It is the imagination razzing the rational, yet there are genuine fears and thrills here.
Perhaps this is because we are not perfectly rational beings. For all I know about myself when I'm asleep, Fuseli's The Nightmare may be a documentary. Since I was a child I've maintained a secret, night-time life in which I can fly, mutate, converse with the dead, speak French fluently, drink nitric acid without ill effect, and see the future. These are all useful skills and I'm sorry every morning when I wake up and discover that they don't carry over into daylight. I make art and write stories to bring all of this odd stuff into the waking world, to give it a solidity and realness it can't have otherwise. Blake did the same with his visions. Any artist who works from their imagination shares this desire: make the unreal, real. Bring the night things into the daylight.
It's no accident that most of the paintings in Gothic Nightmares are very dark. There's lots of burnt umber and black paint on display at the Tate, for the good reason that whiteness has traditionally been the colour of the good, and daylight is associated with the ordinary. Black is slimming, and it can also hide things. It's the hidden life that constitutes our dreams and nightmares.
In our daytime lives the things we hide are our sex lives and our fear of death and bodily harm. You may be thinking those things aren't hidden at all, the world is chock-full of advertisements featuring half-naked women, and the TV shows are overrun with violence. But I'm talking about you and me here. You aren't having sex in public (at least I hope you aren't), and when someone does a violent thing in real life all the neighbours are shocked and tell the reporters what a nice man he was and how well he cared for his lawn (this is taken from a news item I read in the New York Times this morning about a man who killed two young boys with a hammer). We also hide our finances but somehow money doesn't figure prominently in the Gothic. Class does, though. The vampires all seem to be minor nobility, the witches are peasant crones.
Sex and death are inseparable in the Gothic. There is nothing more erotic than Klaus Kinski's Nosferatu draining poor Lucy white at her own invitation; when he realises that she has held him through the night in order for him to be caught by the dawn, his agony is that of a betrayed lover.
The show at the Tate is full of swooning maidens and muscular heroes, plus some rather attractive fiends. I confess that after seeing The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the impressionable age of 14, a certain portion of my erotic imagination was formed by Tim Curry's Dr Frank N Furter. And people wonder why my work is a bit odd.
Modern Gothic is an inversion of the Romantic original: instead of showing us the extraordinary and inviting us to shiver and smile in the comfort of a well-lit gallery, today's Gothic finds its nightmares in the ordinary. From Warren Zevon's werewolves wandering through Soho in search of beef chow mein to Shaun of the Dead, the Gothic is shimmering just below the surface of our normal day-to-day lives. Perhaps I should consider opening my black shop after all.
· Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination is at Tate Britain, London SW1, from February 15-May 1. Details: 020-7887 8888.
