The Gothic and magic have had a long association. This essay is framed with some relevant remarks by the magician known as ‘Éliphas Lévi’, and refers to a number of twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts that might well be thought of as Gothic: Aleister Crowley’s Moonchild, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Denis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory, M. John Harrison’s The Course of the Heart, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and F.G. Cottam’s House of Lost Souls. All of them have to do with magic, which is also to say that they approach the question of the supernatural through the route of conjuration and return, although from very different perspectives. They all have something to say about ritual magic, and therefore about the afterlife. Some of them express belief in the supernatural efficacy of magic; some do not – but the best leave it up to readers to decide for themselves.

Since 2000, Ian McEwan has published six novels: Atonement (2001), Saturday (2005), On Chesil Beach (2007), Solar (2010), Sweet Tooth (2012) and The Children Act (2014). To separate off this body of work from his previous publications is inevitably somewhat arbitrary; nevertheless, especially considering McEwan's frequently close involvement with historical events, it can fairly be suggested that these novels represent a sustained attempt to refract, as through a many-sided prism, some of the key concerns of the twenty-first century, as well as some of the major themes which have reverberated through his work since the days of First Love, Last Rites (1975), The Cement Garden and In Between the Sheets (both 1978).

The theme on which I want to concentrate here is the characterisation of the past by lies and deceptions. These are often not intentional lies: they are not told, or enacted, with the express purpose of deception, but their texture is slippery, they participate in a more general unreliability of language, and here surely lies one of the crucial paradoxes of McEwan's work: that a writing so precise, so elegantly textured, so minutely detailed, so regularly exquisite in its dealings with inner states, should simultaneously be devoted to an exposition of how language itself has continually distorting effects. As in Edgar Allan Poe's ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1845), the hiding place is in plain sight; but also plain sight itself has its hiding places, it can be revisited, rewritten, the word, whether spoken or written, is never stable, it is only an attempt to make still those floods of language and history which are continually restless: like the pebbles washing up on the shore of Chesil Beach.

Can writing, McEwan asks, put history ‘straight’ in some way, or does it serve only further to confound those moments in the past which continue to set the parameters for the stories we tell ourselves in the present? Perhaps equally important is the question as to whether such writing can actually produce or encourage real communication, or whether it is permanently in-turned, self-justifying: why do we need to tell stories in the first place if not to turn the world into a place in which we can live, which requires that the world accepts, at least to a degree, the version of it which will allow us to flourish; or, at least, to survive?

To speak of time travel is immediately to become involved in conundrums and paradoxes. I won't attempt to list them here, but one is perhaps particularly important. What could it possibly mean, we might ask, not to be travelling through time? Time travel is what we all do, and most usually we do it – or we think we do it – lineally. We regard yesterday as the past, tomorrow as the future. Under strange circumstances, this might not be what happens at all. Under conditions of trauma, for example, it might seem that the past is constantly revisited. In the realm of dream, we may encounter different arrangements of time. Freud (to whom I will briefly return) established his difference from conventional theories of dream – of which there have been many, spanning millennia – by suggesting, indeed, insisting, that dreams were not omens; in other words, they did not predict the future. In a strict sense, he may have been right; in other ways, he may have been wrong. ‘I have a dream’, said Martin Luther King in 1963, and it seems at least arguable that he was prophetic. ‘I had this dream’, says a person in the grip of psychosis; and lo and behold, he or she goes forth and proceeds to act on this dream. Are these omens? Well, perhaps not sensu stricto, but they play a part in organising the future. Whatever the notion of ‘future’ means; and I shall come back to that. ‘Back’, one might say, ‘to the future’ what might that really mean?

Doris Lessing's work, although this may at first seem counter-intuitive, can be understood as centrally concerned with time travel. As other chapters in this volume show, Lessing was profoundly interested in questions of scale, from narrating personal history to the histories of civilisations. I propose to follow the theme of time travel, as an expansion of those questions, by looking, first and mainly, at The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), and then, more briefly, at Shikasta (1979) and The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980) – although something about time travel could no doubt be demonstrated in other Lessing texts, for example The Fifth Child (1988) and The Cleft(2007).

In this chapter I want to return to the Gothic, or at least to considerations of terror alongside pity, as I did in relation to Algernon Blackwood, but this time in a more contemporary context, and a more geographically specific one. I want to talk about some texts, some novels, which one might consider under the heading of contemporary Scottish Gothic, even if, under current conditions of globalisation, it might not be entirely simple to understand what such a description might mean.

The first text to which I want to turn is Iain Banks's Complicity (1993), a novel in which pity and terror are writ large. The terror, if it has been simmering beneath the surface all along like a programme running while we have our attention turned to other things, comes out most starkly at the end:

Pity; the weak; the strong. When thinking of Blake's emblematic writings on pity, it would be impossible to begin anywhere other than with the two remarkable poems in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience which deal with pity in perhaps the most sustained, certainly the most memorable way: ‘The Divine Image’ from Songs of Innocence (1789) and ‘The Human Abstract’ from Songs of Experience (1789–94). Here is ‘The Divine Image’:

And here, in a poetic highly redolent of the contemporary hymns by which he was so ambiguously influenced, Blake establishes pity as an essential element in the continuous transaction between the divine and the human that was the continuing basis of his theology. There is little here that is troublesome: pity, as a trait (one might even say as an abstract concept, but that would be confusing) is un-ironic, it is a quality which manifests itself as an attribute of our dealings with other people and thus necessarily with God. If there is a discordant tone struck by this poem, one which may take it momentarily beyond the kind of song that might be sung by Sunday-school children – albeit on Holy Thursday perhaps – it occurs only in the last stanza, where the potentially divisive question of belief and conversion is blandly and skilfully elided into a broader view of tolerance.

This is the last chapter, and it is about Bob Dylan, who I think is one of the great writers of pity of our time. In ‘Chimes of Freedom’ (1964), for example, he refers to pity for the homeless, for the ‘countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse’, for the refugee, for the victim; and this might serve to introduce his texts, complex as they are, as among the most significant writings of pity, or perhaps more appositely, great songs of pity. The examples are legion, and run right through the work, no matter what the societal or religious framework. ‘Chimes of Freedom’ itself, of course, with the bells ‘tolling for the deaf an’ blind, tolling for the mute / Tolling for the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute’, is a tremendous work of pity. But also, outstandingly, we might think back to ‘Ballad of Hollis Brown’ (1963), with its ‘seven breezes a'blowin’ / All around the cabin door’, and the catastrophic deaths which ensue. Or we might include in the repertoire ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ (1964), when it takes so agonisingly long for it to be finally time to ‘bury the rag deep in your face’ because ‘now's the time for your tears’.

The terms ‘pity’ and ‘piety’ have long become intertwined, probably through their Latin and Italian roots; but it is in fact pity that is conjured in the famous images of the pietà which we have inherited from medieval and Renaissance art, perhaps especially emblematised in what is regarded as one of Europe's aesthetic masterpieces, Michelangelo's extraordinary sculpture. We are speaking here of the Christian tradition, and of how the notion of pity has become focused on the image of the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus in her arms after he has been cut down from the Cross.

But we need to ask more clearly what is at stake here, because in a different vocabulary we would refer to this tradition as a set of works of mourning, picking up for example on the alternative title ‘Lamentation’ attached to so many of these works of art, and a work of mourning which is redoubled. It is redoubled because there is a sense in which we believe that no parent should ever be called upon to mourn the loss of his or her child. This is, always, part of our response to the casualties of conflict: when we mourn we like to emphasise that our mourning is for the ‘innocent’, for those who, for example, have been permitted no knowledge of what the conflict might have been about, for those who have died without meaning, without cause.

Under the Dome (2009) is not Stephen King's best novel; indeed, it is distinctly ramshackle. Although it brings to something of a climax King's dealings with small-town USA, it sets out far too large a cast of characters, and eventually we lose effective sight of most of them, and the writing is occasionally rushed and clunky; however, it does in its closing pages provide a significant view of pity.

The plot, fantastical as it is, is easily told. An invisible but unbreakable dome descends one day over a small town in Maine; in doing so, it cuts various people and animals in half, but the principal effect is to provide an almost literal ‘hot-house’ within which existing rivalries and secrets move towards increasingly violent fruition. Although in some respect this is a typical small town, in others it is not: not many small towns in Maine, one may justly suspect, have a senior town official who is the kingpin in an international trade in hard drugs.

The nature and function of the dome are gradually revealed; it has been placed by a group of alien children who are using it in much the same way – in a metaphor which is stretched to its limit – as human children might torment and torture insects and small animals, regarding them – as the alien children regard us – as insensate and therefore unable to experience anxiety or pain.

It would be foolish to attempt to trace the trajectory of pity through Shakespeare's works; the term occurs, as one might expect, many times, and in many different contexts. Indeed, as with so many other terms, we might say that Shakespeare almost defines the term; although it occurs, of course, always in a complexity of more or less strict historical contexts, it participates also in what we might call a ‘flow of aphorism’ which has all that illusory, ‘literary’ appearance of transcending history.

We might begin from King Henry's musings towards the end of Henry the Sixth, Part Three (1591). He has despatched his supporters on various military errands, and is left alone with Exeter, who fears the worst; there may be something of a match between the powers of the opposing parties, but, Exeter suspects, Edward ‘will seduce the rest’. Henry cannot, it seems, see why or how this should be so:

Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark was one of her early novels; published in 1934 to little acclaim, it was only really resurrected when she underwent her curious renaissance in the later 1960s. Read now, it is I think – at least for me – a terrifying book. It tells, I suppose one might say, the story of Anna: lacking parents, in one sense or another, she is brought to England from the Caribbean by her aunt Hester, who effectively abandons her. She drifts from the life of a chorus girl into semi-prostitution, whatever that might mean, and becomes pregnant – she has no idea who the father might be. She undergoes an agonising abortion, whereupon the novel abruptly ends with Anna dreaming of beginning life all over again.

To say that is to suggest that we end our reading of the text on a note of redemption, but this is in fact the opposite of the case. Anna's dream of rebirth is exactly that, a dream: the reader feels at no point that such a rebirth could actually be possible; what has been done has been done and cannot be unravelled. Besides, we have no compelling reason to believe anything Anna says: she spends most of her time, as she and various other characters in the novel say, half-asleep; she is permanently exhausted and spends weeks on end in bed, retreating from the always ‘cold’ world of London and England. It is not that she is a victim: to suppose such would be far too simple. Rhys has an advanced and extraordinary insight into notions of collusion, which I need to try to explain.

In the world of western culture, it is impossible to try to trace or unravel the course of pity without seeking an origin, and that origin has usually been found in Aristotle's Poetics (c. 335 BC), where Aristotle appears to attempt to account for the force of various kinds of drama, and particularly, for our purposes, for the force of tragedy. There are, of course, many other descriptions of drama and its genres, and many other accounts of tragedy: Raymond Williams's work on ‘modern tragedy’ comes to mind, although the title is interesting and indicative, suggesting as it does that tragedy is intrinsically something ancient, something which we can ‘repeat with difference’, but with roots laid down in the antique.

Williams himself would naturally have shied away from the idea that this means that there is something ‘universal’ about tragedy: there are no doubt specific versions of tragedy, or better, specific events, feelings, regimes of emotion and behaviour to which we might from time to time supply the appellation ‘tragedy’. Nevertheless, when we consider the term ‘tragedy’, it is possible that we feel ourselves, however misguidedly, to be within some kind of cultural storehouse – and within that storehouse, whose proprietor is Aristotle, we immediately find ourselves in the presence of the two key terms Aristotle proposes when considering the force of tragedy: pity and terror.