African Gothic

Manfred Arcane, the hero of Russell Kirk’s new novel, would be very much at home in the fantastic world of The Mysteries of Udolpho or The Castle of Otranto. The illegitimate son of an English nobleman, but raised in Habsburg Vienna, he has wandered about the world intriguing and fighting under many flags; he has become immensely rich; some terrible secret has darkened his soul, and he seems as cynical as he is civilized. To counteract ennui he has accumulated a retinue of freaks and eccentrics. He is, in short, a typical character of Gothic romance.

It is Russell Kirk’s point here, however, that Manfred Arcane is equally appropriate to the fantastic reality of an “emerging” African nation. If the Gothic romance has its sinister noblemen, hunchbacks, trapdoors, evil priests, and locked towers from which mad laughter is heard, the new nation of Hamnegri, “no nation at all, but a French-built abstraction, now falling apart,” its chaos located somewhere south of the Limkoko Confederation, possesses—despite its pretensions in the General Assembly—a full set of equivalents.

About the Author

Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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Manfred Arcane, the hero of Russell Kirk’s new novel, would be very much at home in the fantastic world of The Mysteries of Udolpho or The Castle of Otranto. The illegitimate son of an English nobleman, but raised in Habsburg Vienna, he has wandered about the world intriguing and fighting under many flags; he has become immensely rich; some terrible secret has darkened his soul, and he seems as cynical as he is civilized. To counteract ennui he has accumulated a retinue of freaks and eccentrics. He is, in short, a typical character of Gothic romance.

It is Russell Kirk’s point here, however, that Manfred Arcane is equally appropriate to the fantastic reality of an “emerging” African nation. If the Gothic romance has its sinister noblemen, hunchbacks, trapdoors, evil priests, and locked towers from which mad laughter is heard, the new nation of Hamnegri, “no nation at all, but a French-built abstraction, now falling apart,” its chaos located somewhere south of the Limkoko Confederation, possesses—despite its pretensions in the General Assembly—a full set of equivalents.