Believing in Novels: Hoax, Hocus, and the Fictionality of the Gothic

Abstract Concentrating especially on Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, this essay redescribes the rise of the Gothic novel, recounting how this fictional tradition supplied its readers with opportunities to believe in others’ believing. At the same time, this essay also explores how and why the founding figures of this tradition linked their writing of fiction to the practice of hoaxing. Acknowledgment of that link can help us develop accounts of eighteenth-century fiction that, rather than ascribing to the genre an aesthetic autonomy it will achieve only later, do justice to its porosity—and to how as media events early novels bring real-life events and fictive ones into conjunction. Thinking about the novel and hoaxing and the novel as hoaxing can also prime us to push beyond the polarity of fiction and nonfiction and instead recognize multiple fictionalities, sustained by multiple modes of readerly address and receptive competencies. The term hoax—sometimes said to be related etymologically to the “hocus” of the magician's “hocus pocus”—enters popular usage in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century: an indication that by then the culture required a term that might designate a deception specifically designed to be exposed and to amuse. When assessed against this backdrop, the essay suggests, narratives like Otranto look a little different than they do in conventional histories of the novel. These works are stunts as well as books. They inhabited their novelhood conditionally and contingently—and studying that inhabiting can enrich our understanding of fictionality.