Dimensions of Monstrosity in Contemporary Narratives: Theory, Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism

Dimensions of Monstrosity in Contemporary Narratives Theory, Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism Andrew Hock-soon Ng Dimens...

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Dimensions of Monstrosity in Contemporary Narratives Theory, Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism

Andrew Hock-soon Ng

Dimensions of Monstrosity in Contemporary Narratives

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Dimensions of Monstrosity in Contemporary Narratives Theory, Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism Andrew Hock-soon Ng

© Andrew Hock-soon Ng 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–4446–6 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ng, Andrew Hock-soon, 1972– Dimensions of monstrosity in contemporary narratives : theory, psychoanalysis, postmodernism / Andrew Hock-soon Ng. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1–4039–4446–6 1. American fiction–20th century–History and criticism. 2. Monsters in literature. 3. American fiction–20th century–History and criticism–Theory, etc. 4. English fiction–20th century–History and criticism–Theory, etc. 5. Psychoanalysis and literature–English speaking countries. 6. English fiction–20th century–History and criticism. 7. Modernism (Literature)–English speaking countries. 8. Subjectivity in literature. 9. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Title. PS374.M544N45 2004 813′.50937–dc22

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For my Family, Malcolm Stevenson and Steve Kirkland

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Contents Dedication

v

Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction: Dimensions of Monstrosity

1

1. Monstrous Space

22

2. Geopolitics of the Serial Killer

65

3. Monstrous Progeny

107

4. Monstrous Body

144

Conclusion: The Language of Monstrosity

175

Notes

188

Bibliography

208

Index

222

vii

Acknowledgements During the entire writing process, I have had valuable help (in many forms), comments and criticisms from various individuals whom I would like to offer my thanks here. Firstly, to Gail Jones, my supervisor, whose enthusiasm and encouragement continue to inspire me. It is upon her suggestion that I send in my manuscript, and now, in its fruition, I would like her to know how much I have appreciated her guidance. I also owe my gratitude to my longsuffering family who has made many sacrifices for me during the time of my writing and rewriting. Special thanks must also be given to Steve Kirkland, whose friendship and moral support have been consistently invaluable, especially in the last few months of completing this study. Last but not least, to my best friend Malcolm Stephenson, whose help has seen me through so many situations and in so many ways. To him I owe my sincere gratitude. To all the above, I would like to say a big Terima Kasih.

viii

Introduction: Dimensions of Monstrosity

In his study of horror fiction, Joseph Grixti contends that monstrous individuals symbolise the ‘means of evading the real implications of the uncertainties and discomforts which appear to be endemic to the constantly changing social, political, and economic conditions of our technologically oriented cultures’.1 Grixti is correct in asserting that monsters in horror fiction are often metaphors for ‘unpleasant social and existential realities’2 that contemporary society seeks to deny and expurgate. They become ‘scapegoats’, embodied as abjectly and horrifyingly other, which must be confronted and destroyed. However, Grixti’s view that monsters are used as evasive means of such ‘uncertainties and discomforts’ is problematic. Sophisticated monster narratives often provide searching commentaries about the way culture and ideology work. These narratives show how monstrosity is profoundly interrelated with the culture that produces, camouflages, marginalises and resists it. It is perhaps true that monster narratives may not, as Grixti asserts, offer the ‘tools’ to understand the ‘meaning’ of the monster or the way it functions;3 nevertheless, they provide the context within which monsters are fashioned and understood. This study proposes to read some important monster narratives in this light. Drawing predominantly on recent psychoanalytical and cultural theories, I want to demonstrate that some narratives foreground monsters to problematise the notion of ‘reality’ constructed as the ‘Symbolic order’ – an ideological construction which largely dictates the way society and culture operate. If major nineteenth-century Gothic narratives, especially fin de siècle Gothic, situate the monster as geographically and physically other,4 the monster in much contemporary literature is located, by contrast, in an ‘elsewhere’ that is intimately with(in) us. The monster ruptures the 1

2 Dimensions of Monstrosity in Contemporary Narratives

reality of the self from within the subject – it reveals that the self is ultimately a complex ‘construction’ of society, culture, language and ideology, one which, in the process of becoming constructed, has subjugated ‘something’ more fundamental within the self. But this ‘something’ cannot be totally erased, and, given the right circumstances, can return to disrupt the frail construction. Often, these moments are profound and irreversible: they are, bluntly, the ‘moment of the monster’. Here, the work of psychoanalysis is especially valuable in disclosing these moments, but analysis does not end with just the excavation.5 It is the aim of this introduction to posit a ‘theory’ of the monster using the psychoanalytical insights of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zˇizˇek and Julia Kristeva; my aim is to show that not only are the monster, the unconscious, and ideology intricately related, but that monstrosity is often a struggle with, or a traumatic experience of, what is known in the Lacanian model, as the Void. And of course, to build a theory of the monster using psychoanalysis, important concepts such as desire, fantasy, the abject, the gaze, and their relationship with monstrosity, must first be carefully established. Monstrosity is largely interpellated by the Symbolic gaze which prescribes certain significances to particular bodies and behaviours, rendering them monstrous. And as aberrant bodies are most directly visible, it is not surprising that such bodies, failing to conform to the Symbolic normative, are immediately coded as monstrous. Briefly referring to the historico-sociological studies undertaken by Étienne Balibar, Michel Foucault and Francis Barker, I will demonstrate how the concept of law grants freedom and autonomy to the subject, but simultaneously dominates and subjugates it as well. It is my contention that this paradoxical relationship between bodies and the law engenders monsters. The law, translated into psychoanalytical terms, is resonant of the Law-of-the-Father, and bodies which imperil this law (because they are abnormal or criminal, for example) must be repressed or eliminated. But of course, this is precisely the ironic crux of the matter in contemporary monster narratives: for here, the monsters have learned to elude the Symbolic gaze, significantly manipulating and deconstructing it instead in multifaceted ways.

The paradox of the monster ‘The monster is eloquent,’ writes critic Peter Brooks.6 Brooks’s formulation, moreover, is paradoxical because the monster is conventionally excluded from the language which has otherwise determined it. That

Introduction: Dimensions of Monstrosity 3

is, although the monster is situated within language, its trademark is that it is unspeakable. The monster is the impasse of language, but is at the same time also an incarnation of language. More significantly, once the monster is articulated – that is, once it is embodied in words – it can no longer be unsaid.7 Clearly, there is a problematic relationship between language and the monster. Jonathan Dollimore, in his study of Shakespeare’s Caliban, argues that the perverse language Caliban utters is not the result of his ‘essentially perverted nature’, or of his coloniser’s corrupting language upon his ‘essentially good nature’; instead, Dollimore surmises that: He curses in terms of a language which constructs him as potentially that kind of subject even as he learns it. In this sense, he possesses no essential nature, perverted or true, but an identity partly formed in and by language. … It is within and by language that he is made or made able – created/coerced – to curse.8 Dollimore’s view is that Caliban’s monstrosity is constructed by and in language. It is language that has ‘created’ and ‘coerced’ him to occupy the position of a monster because it is the only language he knows – the language of his masters who pronounce his monstrosity. This is not the same as language ‘corrupting’ him. To say this would presuppose that Caliban has an ‘essentially good nature’, which his colonisers’ language subsequently distorts with their linguistic influence; but Dollimore denies Caliban any ‘essential nature’ altogether, and declares that he is a monster because language has constructed, even incarnated, him so. To a point, Dollimore’s view agrees with Brooks’s in that monsters are ‘birthed’ by language. But Brooks’s argument goes a step further: he argues that the monster ‘exceeds’ language. What I take Brooks to mean is that although the monster may be created by language, it subsequently surpasses language and even jams it, forcing language to encounter an impasse and/or to become monstrous itself. The monster can do this because, although situated within language, it is also ‘an excess of signification, a strange by-product or leftover of the process of making meaning’.9 Monsters are born in language, but take root when meaning falters. They are eloquent, but their utterance is of a radical kind which surpasses language. Alain Grosrichard provides a clue to the kind of eloquence the monster utters. For him, the monster delivers ‘truth from elsewhere … whether the monster delivers the truth to us or receives it from us, only the direction flow changes. Truth always passes through the monster’.10 The monster is a conduit


which transfers a truth which must be ‘[interpreted] before eliciting an explanation’.11 It seems that Grosrichard subscribes to the notion that the monster is ultimately situated in language, and that it has no significance (truth) until it is interpreted and explained. But I want to argue that this is not the case entirely. Like Brooks, Grosrichard sees the monster as part of, and beyond, language. Unlike Brooks though, who argues that the monster emanates from language, Grosrichard’s monster is external, arriving from an ‘elsewhere’, which must subsequently be incorporated into familiar systems of knowledge (such as language). Brooks’s monster begins with language and subsequently moves beyond it, whilst Grosrichard’s is already beyond language, which language must then incorporate in order to understand. The ‘truth’ that Grosrichard’s monster delivers is of a metaphysical kind – ‘a divine sign of an impending threat or punishment’.12 The origin of the monster – the ‘elsewhere’ – in this case implies the supernatural, a view which corresponds with the etymological meaning of the word ‘monster’. ‘Monster’ as critics tell us, is derived from the Latin monstrum, from which the verbs monstrare (‘show’ or ‘reveal’) and monere (‘warn’ or ‘portend’) are formed, and which also refers to a divine omen that announces God’s (or the gods’) will or judgement.13 The supernatural may be the traditional ‘elsewhere’ of monsters, but psychoanalysis has unearthed another ‘elsewhere’ which has become, in my view, increasingly the heuristic site to locate the ‘origin’ of many contemporary monsters. If traditional monsters are intruders from beyond who penetrate the human system to signify God’s judgement, contemporary monsters are intimately bound to the very human system which they inhabit, and which they subtly undermine. That is, the monster is now a part of us, with us, and sometimes, even within us. The ‘elsewhere’ is the human psyche, and more specifically, the unconscious – the repressed other which returns to haunt, and subsequently disrupt, the surface. Whether supernatural or unconscious, the truth which the monster delivers is always terrible because it reveals something which we deny and fear. Another paradox of the monster is its place as an ‘intimate stranger’. The monster has physical and social proximity to the human, but signifies nevertheless, as a threat. Through acts of definition and delineation, humankind attempts to contrast itself from monsters. In his study of the monster as a literary trope, Joseph Adriano points out that the monster is situated either as metaphor (if it involves ‘a representation of some human characteristics’) or as metonymy (if it is ‘represented in incongruity with the human, in


juxtaposition’). 14 Adriano’s division is rather simplistic, but typifies the point that the monster is defined against the human – as either somewhat similar, or totally other. The term ‘human’ can further be extended to include human concepts about, for example, the natural world: a twenty-foot parrot is a monster because it defies the humanly constructed order of things. Humanness, then, with all its connotations, is the yardstick to distinguish the monster.15 The need to maintain ‘humanness’ as normative necessarily relegates threatening entities to an ‘other’. The more perilous the (potential) threat, the more monstrous the other becomes. Yet, what is revealed in this dialectic is that monsters attest to an unspoken understanding that the ‘human’ may not, after all, be stable and coherent. As Jeffrey Cohen argues, monsters must always ‘be examined within the intricate matrix of relations (social, cultural, and literal-historical) that generate them’.16 Monsters then are always, in different degrees, the product of cultural, social and historical anxieties. They are projections of some ideological crisis, and become ‘embodied’ (such as in literature and/or through scientific classification) so that such anxieties can be ‘controlled’, examined, understood, and subsequently, ‘resolved’. As an example, consider the transformation of sociocultural angst into the phenomenon of literary monsters found in nineteenth-century Gothic narratives, especially Dracula (1897) and H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). 17 Franco Moretti, for example, understands the vampire to be the displacement of ‘the antagonism and horrors evidenced within society outside society itself’. 18 Staged through literature, a society’s anxiety about its ‘intimate stranger is revealed and fictively resolved by making it exclusively an ‘other’. But this form of ‘resolution’ belies the fact that there is already present a familiar monster which cannot be so easily cathected. Dracula, for example, cannot be definitively killed. Literature as a vehicle to expurgate the ‘other’ fails, in the end, to resolve the anxieties experienced: the monster cannot be destroyed because it is within the self. The intricate fabric that knits together human reality and experience – language, culture, society, gender and sexuality – is fundamentally a construction of fantasies to provide the human subject with coherence and meaning. But when this subject’s reality is somehow exposed for its fantastic nature, there is a possibility that the she will encounter a profound loss of subjectivity. This dissolution of subjectivity has several consequences: death, madness, and, as this study will demonstrate, monstrous becoming.


Psychoanalysis and the monster: from fantasy to the abject My reading of selected monster narratives relies heavily on psychoanalytical theories; hence, it is necessary at this juncture that I discuss some of the key terms that will recur intermittently throughout this book, and how exactly I will be deploying them. I begin with Jacques Lacan’s notion of fantasy. As he has famously demonstrated, fantasy is the ‘support of desire’; it signifies a ‘lack’, the desiring after an object which is always already lost: [It] is not the object that is the support of desire. The subject sustains himself as desiring in relation to an ever more complex signifying ensemble. This is apparent enough in the form of the scenario it assumes, in which the subject, more or less recognisable, is somewhere, split, divided, generally double, in his relation to the object which usually does not show its true face.19 For Lacan, it is the fantastic quality of the object, and not the object per se, that rouses desire. This, of course, is not recognised by the subject, who continues to view the object as desirable. The split (or doubling) experienced by the subject in relation to the object is the vacillation of desire between the object as substitute of desire (that is, fantasy) and the Real object of desire which is impossible. This ‘Real’ must be distinguished from the familiar ‘real’: the former is psychoanalytically loaded, and denotes the (lost) original site of desire; the latter represents an ideological position within the Symbolic order, which, in Judith Roof’s definition, is ‘the set of rules and language that comprise the sociocultural order in its largest sense. This means not only language and laws, but the principles of substitution and displacement through which language and Law work… [the] Symbolic order’s substitutive process contributes to the psychic development of individuals and grounds the organisation of societies’.20 In Roof’s assessment, the Symbolic order permeates and encompasses every aspect of what is designated ‘reality’. Monsters, on the other hand, expose the ‘constructedness’ of this reality, and reintegrates the subject into its original locus in the ‘Void’.21 This Void occupies ‘the deepest level of our psyches’, and confirms ‘that our desires and our identity come to us from outside [that is, interpellated by the Symbolic order] and that they are founded upon a void’.22 Fantasy thus serves as a screen to distinguish the subject from the Real by positioning ‘an ever more complex signifying ensemble’, or a


complex system of objects and signifiers, to motivate the subject into ˇ izˇek points out: repressing the impossible original site of desire. But as Z symbolisation ultimately always fails, that it never succeeds in fully ‘covering’ the [R]eal, that it always involves some unsettled, unredeemed symbolic debt. The [R]eal (the part of reality that remains non-symbolised) returns in the guise of spectral apparitions …. To put it simply, reality is never directly ‘itself,’ it represents itself only via its incomplete-failed symbolisation, and spectral apparitions emerge in this very gap that forever separates reality from the [R]eal, and on account of which reality has the character of a (symbolic) fiction: the spectre gives body to that which escapes (the symbolically structured) reality.23 Zˇizˇek demonstrates that there are two forms of ‘reality’: one is a construction of the Symbolic mechanism (variously represented as culture, gender, sexuality, and ideology), and the other is that which is outside the Symbolic mechanism, and which ultimately encompasses all aspects of the first real. This ‘surplus’ reality is known as the Real which persistently haunts reality. Fantasy belongs in reality because it symbolises desire through a complex ensemble of signifiers, thus effectively alienating desire from its original point (in the Real); but fantasy is also always already threatened by the spectre of the Real: The symbolic order is ‘barred’, the signifying chain is inherently inconsistent, ‘not-all’, structured around a hole [Void]. The inherent non-symbolisable reef maintains the gap between the symbolic and the [R]eal, that is, it prevents the symbolic from ‘falling into’ the [R]eal – and again, what is ultimately at stake is this decentring of the [R]eal with regard to the symbolic is the cause: the [R]eal is the absent cause of the symbolic. The Freudian and Lacanian name for this cause, is, of course, trauma.24 In this model, trauma is the realisation that reality is ultimately nothing more than a Void disguised as signifying fantasy. Trauma is the disappearance of the Symbolic and the resurfacing of its excess – the Real. The fact that the Real is non-symbolisable immediately aligns it with the Void, serving perhaps, as a reminder of the presence of this ‘hole’. If this view is appropriated to the intimate monster, it is then clear that the monster is the surplus of the constructed subject which defy the Symbolic mechanism. The monster rejects its place in the


Symbolic and recalls the subject’s original impossible desire now constituted as a Void. And as much as the monster is separate from the self (Reality is not the real), it is nevertheless a part of the self (Reality is the surplus of the real), an intermediary figure between the self and its collapse into trauma. In contemporary monster narrative, the monster can be read as being both real and unreal: that is, the monster is irreal. Fantasy contains the surplus by constructing desire around variable and increasingly complex objects, which ironically become progressively difficult to sustain. That which is constituted as reality is experienced to its limits and the Real becomes impossible to ignore. Consequently, the subject becomes a ‘hole in the other’;25 that is, the subject, in confronting monstrosity (often) within itself, encounters its own dissolution, and transforms into a ‘surplus’ of itself which can no longer be Symbolically contained. To an extent, this would also culminate in a ˇ izˇek argues: psychoanalytical definition of horror. As Z [The] relationship between fantasy and horror of the Real that it conceals is much more ambiguous than it may seem: fantasy conceals this horror, yet at the same time, it creates what it purports to conceal, its ‘repressed’ point of reference. Are not the images of the ultimate horrible Thing, from the deep-sea gigantic squid to the ravaging twister, fantasmatic creations par excellence?26 In his usual play of paradoxes, Zˇizˇek demonstrates that to conceal is already to disclose, and the more complex the concealment of fantasy, the more it arrives at its own limits, and the more horrible is the Real in its re-emergence. The monsters in horror fiction are projections of deeper, more fundamental and primal, anxieties which are cast as physical embodiments (the gigantic squid, the vampire), so that they ˇ izˇek uses the familiar ‘Thing’ (Das Ting) to describe can be subjugated. Z the limits of Symbolisation which give birth to the Real. The Symbolic, in its most powerful manifestations, is represented by the objet petit a, which is: [n]ot what we desire, what we are after, but rather, that which sets our desire in motion, in the sense of the formal frame which confers consistency on our desire: desire is, of course, metonymical; it shifts from one object to another; through all these displacements, however, desire nonetheless retains a minimum of formal consistency, a set of phantasmic features which, when they are encoun-


tered in a positive object, makes us desire this object – objet petit a as the cause of desire is nothing other than this formal frame of consistency.27 The objet petit a is the object par excellence of fantasy;28 it motivates the subject to desire, but always within the boundaries of reality; it is reliant on objects which are phantasmic in the strictest sense because, despite their elicitation of a belief that they are desirable, they never ultimately fulfil desire. The objet petit a both encourages and defers desire. Nevertheless, it is necessary because it disguises desire as a product of the Symbolic. For its dissolution would mean trauma (and its constituent, horror). This trauma is the loss of subjectivity as we know it: subjectivity is now replaced by its own impossibility, ‘a hole in the other’. This is what encountering the monster entails: the subject’s anchoring in reality is suddenly displaced, leaving it staring into an endless gape of the threatening other. The subject is now liminal, positioned as irreal, experiencing within itself the monstrous. One interesting and recurrent characteristic which I have observed in reading contemporary monster narratives is that they share a similar etiology of horror. Often implicitly, but sometimes explicitly, monster narratives posit the feminine (or directly, the maternal) as the source of impossibility. Deploying Lacan’s and Kristeva’s conceptual frameworks, I want to offer a tentative interpretation of the relationship between monstrosity and femininity. Lacan’s Symbolic order can be characterised by three things: language, masculinity (patriarchy) and the law. Entry into the Symbolic is also an initiation into language; through language, one comes to know, and consequently master, reality (‘the world of things’).29 For language is a fitting tool to structure reality, substituting absence for presence: it can embody and engender (no)things. ‘Law’ is one such structure. Finally, the Symbolic order privileges the masculine. It is centred around the metaphor of the Father (both the Law- and the Name-of-the-Father).30 In both language and Law, it is this ‘emblematic metaphor’ that is manifest ‘in the more overt power structures of modern western culture [that is organised] around a series of prohibitions and exchanges’.31 Familiar notions of continuity such as ‘concepts of generation, real property, legacy and tradition’, and even reproductive rights (Roof calls them ‘illusions’) are all deployments of patriarchy.32 Roof is clearly suspicious of the order, an order which she views as organised along the axis of gender and sexual differences, with the male being the superior (read normative) gender and sex. More precisely, if reality is, as argued, a construction, it


is fundamentally a ‘masculine’ construction. The feminine becomes necessarily repressed and consigned to the other. Following Julia Kristeva, I shall maintain that the impossible object of desire is located prior to the subject’s initiation into the Symbolic order. This pre-Symbolic stage (Kristeva calls it the ‘semiotic’ stage) is, however, never completely forgotten, but is instead relegated to the unconscious. Kristeva argues that the semiotic re-emerges whenever Symbolic language encounters an impasse.33 For Kristeva, the semiotic is located within the maternal, and more specifically, the maternal womb, or the chora. Hence, lapses in linguistic performances implicate the ‘return of the repressed’, the maternal other. Moreover, this semiotic display is also the surplus of the symbolic, for despite its integration by the latter, continues to exist beyond it. If we agree with Lacan’s and Kristeva’s theories, the maternal then will take the place of the original point of desire which, through Symbolic initiation, becomes impossibly lost to the subject, but continues to exist spectrally. It is therefore not surprising that in horror writing, the monster’s origin is usually with the feminine, either explicitly represented through a birthing process, or more obliquely embodied in the simultaneous fear of and desire for the feminine exhibited by (usually) ‘haunted’ male characters. However, this is not an essentialist attempt to collapse the maternal/ feminine and the monstrous into each other. My argument is that although contemporary monster narratives seem to posit the woman as the original site of horror, it is ultimately not woman, but what she represents (or fails) to the Symbolic order that situates her in such an etiological position. Here, Lacan contributes an important insight: he first demonstrates that the subject’s desire (or ‘want-to-be’) is related to an ‘appeal to receive the complement from the other, if the other, the locus of speech, is also the locus of this want, or lack’.34 The ‘other’, in this case, is the mother. He then argues that the (m)other herself fundamentally lacks what the child desires but misconstrues that desire as the child’s need for love, which she willingly embodies and confers.35 With the completion of the Oedipal process however, the child will reject his mother’s (misconstrued) desire, and directly, his own as well. This rejection is ultimately rooted in the child’s search for his own lack in the mother: ‘by refusing the mother’s demand, is not the child demanding that the mother should have a desire outside him, because the way towards the desire that he lacks is to be found there’?36 The mother is crucially the subject’s locus of want, or lack. This lack is the impossible desire which is lost upon entry into the Symbolic. The child rejects her because he sees the


mother as substituting their shared lost desire with love. In other words, when the child realises that the mother is also subject to the Symbolic, she becomes disqualified as his object of desire, thus betraying both the child’s and the mother’s lack. The loss of the maternal through rejection is simultaneously the origin of the subject’s lack. The mother represents each subject’s awareness and constant reminder of his own loss and impossibility of desire which the Symbolic subsequently, but insufficiently, substitutes.37 Perhaps the most sustained argument for the relationship between the maternal and horror is made by Kristeva in her now classic, Powers of Horror. Admittedly, Kristeva’s theory of abjection is somewhat essentialist, but it nevertheless proves useful (for my purpose) in designating the maternal as the locus of abjection. This is primarily because the maternal confounds (b)orders by externalising the internal, typified especially by child-bearing and menstruation.38 This has been quickly appropriated by feminists for a reading of the monstrous feminine in film and literature39 which often, however, overlooks other important issues in Kristeva’s theory. Kristeva, for example, declares that there is ‘nothing like the abjection of the self to show that all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded’.40 Abjection is not merely a confusion of (b)orders, it is also a ‘wanting’ of all forms of reality characterised by the Symbolic mechanism: what is abject is what has become, or is becoming, emptied of reality. The abject confuses borders because it breaks out of its containment (such as, in this case, the maternal body) and becomes, in the process, a surplus, something which is both a part of, and more than, its container. More importantly, this surplus destroys the fantasy of the stable, unimpeachable body inscribed by and within the Symbolic economy. When this happens, the subject is confronted with its own loss, admitting entry to the Void of the impossible. Hence, the abject is a twofold process: first, it breaks out of the Symbolic casing and becomes an excess (the Real that cannot be symbolised); then, it confronts the subject with its own sense of (ir)reality by leaving the subject emptied of reality. Kristeva’s abject body is fundamentally experiencing a loss, or a deconstruction, of reality. What replaces it is the Void, the origin of the monster. Taking together these two views of the maternal body – as reminder/embodiment of the subject’s lack and as abject – it is clear why many narratives of monstrosity and horror position the feminine as monstrous. Traditional monsters, for example, are often characterised by confused embodiments (male/female, human/animal)41


which disrupt the coherent and unified body. This characteristic is, of course, what constitutes the abject most profoundly. It seems that there are only two alternatives for the feminine other: she can either subscribe to the patriarchal order and repress her subjectivity, or challenge the order and risk being deemed transgressive, and marginalised. Both alternatives however, result in a single end: she will be read as ‘lack’ anyway and be subsequently rejected by the child. For the subject (that is, the child), the mother represents the loss of a desire which must consequently be substituted with fantasies. If these fantasies are somehow shattered, the spectre of the lost desire would take traumatic form, resurfacing to destroy the subject’s Symbolic foundation. He is ‘returned’ to the Void, which in a different configuration, is also the pre-Symbolic (or semiotic). Thus, either as subjected or transgressive, the maternal other will always be registered as abject, or monstrous.

The gaze, the body and subjectivity The monster is traditionally (and still) objectified as the threatening other. According to Timothy Beal (writing in the context of the monster movie), it usually occupies a position of indefatigable power as long as it remains unseen or partially seen, or doubtfully recognised. This, however, is short lived, for the monster will always be ‘captured’ by the gaze eventually. Once this happens, the stage is set for its defeat and elimination.42 This view has similarities with Laura Mulvey’s famous observation of the fetishised women on screen in that both the monster and women are disempowered and objectified under the ‘gaze’ of their audience.43 This comparison has further significance. The monster also becomes ‘castrated’ and ‘effeminised’ once it is subjected to the ‘full-frame camera shot’. Interestingly, this ‘frame’ indicates once again the confinement which assimilates or destroys otherness. As long as the monster remains out of sight, it is outside Symbolic limitations and positioned as a ‘surplus’ (it is representative of the Real); but once framed, it becomes ‘real’ and will be subscribed to, or destroyed by, the very Symbolic mechanism which it initially eludes and threatens. However, in many contemporary monster narratives, this subordinate position is duly reversed and even inverted. Here, the monster learns to manipulate visibility to remain visible and unseen at the same time. From this ‘Möbius strip’ (to use a popular Zˇizˇekian metaphor) position, the monster is both being gazed at and gazing back; it is also


the monster’s gaze that has more significance and power, suggesting the Medusa who petrifies her victims with her gaze. In this way, the contemporary monster succeeds in evading the regimentation of Symbolic policing (gazing) while effectively manipulating this gaze to suit its perverse ends. Freud writes that the ‘terror of Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something’; he goes on to show that this ‘something’, is the female genitals surrounded by hair, ‘essentially those of this mother’.44 Freud’s view not only confirms my reading of the feminine as the locus of monstrosity, but echoes many contemporary monster narratives portrayal of the monster as the castrating, and not the castrated, element. I understand Freud’s view of sighting the mother’s genitals as traumatic to be analogous to the confrontation of the subject with his origin in the Void. The mother’s genitals remind the subject of his place before and beyond the Symbolic, and relate him back to his surplus position. The Medusa is threatening because she confronts the subject with his illusion of fantasy, resulting in the resurfacing of the uncanny (see next chapter) and the destabilising of his Symbolic self-construction. Unlike the traditional monster which consequently meets defeat, the contemporary monster often signals its spectator’s complete disempowerment because it remains stubbornly irredeemable. It is an embodiment of trauma and the Real, which repositions its spectator as a ‘hole in the other’. Especially in narratives in which the monster is also the narrator, the reader becomes ‘the unwilling’ spectator who is implicated in the monster’s atrocities, thus positioning the reader both within (as vicarious participant) and without the text (as observer): the reader too, becomes a ‘surplus’ figure – that which remains unsymbolisable in the text but is nevertheless implied through an act of reading. In this sense, the reader can be considered an implicit monster. Monstrosity is most visibly registered in the body. It is the loss of a body (the maternal) as object of desire that opens up the space of trauma, and it is the body via the psyche which registers trauma. Certain contemporary monster narratives posit the body as the repository of trauma to which it is either submitting, or against which it is struggling. That is, there are wilful as well as reluctant monsters, and the way in which they choose to utilise their (monstrous) bodies will determine if they are going to subvert the status quo, entrap themselves further within a hostile Symbolic mechanism, or liberate themselves through a resignification of their bodies. In the case of the third category, being monstrous actually resists negative codification. To be monstrous is sometimes not a choice as such a categorisation has


already been presupposed and pre-inscribed onto particular bodies (such as deformed bodies and ‘freaks’45); but monstrous bodies can nevertheless choose to deconstruct the injurious coding of the Symbolic order, and in the process, recuperate by re-assigning for themselves new codes. This re-codifying of the monstrous body is best exemplified in Angela Carter’s novel, Nights at the Circus (1984), which will be the focus chapter four. As argued, contemporary monster narratives often ascribe the traumatised, haunted and monstrous body to the feminine. David Punter, for example, argues that the fiction of monstrosity (more specifically, the Gothic) is always about the dissolution of the body’s protective (that is, the Symbolically constructed) ‘casing’, which nevertheless betrays it to the Void of its original place with the maternal: [The] dialectic of monstrosity, then, has been within Gothic from the beginning, and it focuses on the body, on what we might call the ‘case’ of the body, in the redoubled sense which we might give to that vexed term: the ‘case’ as casing, as protective ‘shell’ which is always on the verge of dissolution; or ‘case’ as individual example, the unrepeatability of the body, precisely that unrepeatability which renders the body, even while it suffers most, perpetually unamenable to the rule of the law. The battle between the monster and the law is at all points an attempt to exceed or encompass the other…. The monster resists even the strongest of performatives, we might even say it is that shape which will have that perpetual exemption from the obedience which at once returns us ambivalently to the omnipotence and powerlessness of the infant, and also to a time before words, a time which precedes even a putative consciousness of undifferentiation, wherein performatives had no purpose or purchase.46 Punter’s pun on the word ‘case’ paradoxically suggests both the subject’s body as an encasement, as well as the body under subjection to the Law. It is the body that is simultaneously constructed and protected by the law (from a Lacanian perspective, the Law-of-the-Father), and subjected to it against which the body proceeds to retaliate. It is this struggle between the body’s subjectivity and subjection that incarnates the monster. As a result of the struggle, the subject returns to its site of origin where, in its seemingly powerless state, it is actually most powerful. Here, before and beyond the Symbolic frame which limits the body, the subject is free: it is undifferentiated and has no


need to perform its (Symbolic) constructions (language, sexuality, gender, ideologies), which is how I read Punter’s ‘performatives’. Interestingly, the body’s relation to the law is what positions the subject as both an autonomous, spontaneous entity, as well as a body intrinsically limited in freedom.47 According to Étienne Balibar, the human as subject originates with Kant. He points out that in Kant’s essay ‘What is Man’, the version of the subject is intricately related to the citizen – a civic and political entity ‘which implies epistemological, ethical and aesthetic rationality’,48 and is, at the same time: subjected to … particularly the legal state … [he] can belong to the state as a free and autonomous subject only inasmuch as every institution, every state, is conceived as a partial and provisional representative of humanity, which in fact is the only absolute ‘community’, the only true ‘subject of history.49 In other words, to be human, part of one’s freedom and autonomy must be subjected to the state; and because the state represents humanity, one should advocate freedom and autonomy. But this is obviously a circular argument; Kant’s ideal is quickly subverted when, as Michel Foucault demonstrates, the body becomes coded in two ways by sociopolitical powers in the seventeenth-century: the first focuses on the body as machine (it can be optimised, made useful, obedient, and efficient – an ‘anatomo-politics of the human body’), while the second is concerned with the body as a ‘species’ (the body channelled towards propagation, health, life and longevity, and supervised by the state – a ‘biopolitics of population’).50 Thus, the body became increasingly subjected to political and social constraints, and dominated by state power. But as Punter shows, the body is not always compliant to its subjection, and finds ways to challenge and even subvert domination. In a different but related context, Francis Barker also argues for the impossibility of absolutely subjecting the body: The body … is not a hypostatised object, still less a simple biological mechanism of given desires and needs acted on externally by controls and enticements, but a relation in a system of liaisons which are material, discursive, psychic, sexual but without stop or centre. It will be better to speak of a certain ‘bodilyness’ than of ‘the body’.51 More than a state mechanism, the body is a profound network of interrelationships, which is fundamentally without limit or centre. The


body, in other words, is in a constant flux, slipping from one signification to another. But viewed from a psychoanalytical viewpoint, it could also be said that the body is like a ‘hole’ capable of incorporating various significations and codings; to put it differently, this constant flux and interrelationship betray the subject’s desire for ‘an ever more complex signifying ensemble’,52 that is, the search for the impossible desire through an increasingly complex ensemble of substitutive fantasy objects. But the fact that this flux cannot cease implies that this ‘system of liaisons’ is a construction of the Symbolic which merely screens off the Void with fantasies, but cannot completely ‘plug up’ (to borrow Zˇizˇek’s phrase) the Void that is fundamentally with(in) the subject. Hence, whether it is Punter’s ‘law’, or Balibar’s and Foucault’s ‘legal state’, or Barker’s ‘system of liaisons’, it is, in the end, the mechanism of the Symbolic order which constructs the body, and which the monster defies. It seems that there are at least four ways in which narratives can represent the relationship between the monster and the Symbolic. The first is a re-signification of the monster so that it remains a positive challenge against a rigid and homogenising Symbolic regime. This is very difficult, and in this study, only one narrative – Carter’s Nights at the Circus – succeeds brilliantly in affirming the monster by reassigning to it new codes. In the second, the monster remains a powerful and unfaltering threat that openly transgresses and subverts the Symbolic. In this instance, one adopted by many traditional monster narratives, the monster is either finally destroyed, or, on a more benign note, rehabilitated and reintegrated into society. The third alternative showcases the elusive monster. This monster defies re-signification, is indomitable and profoundly threatening because it is either ‘hidden’ or cannot be directly encountered; hence, it cannot be destroyed or rehabilitated. More chillingly, it has learned to manipulate the Symbolic and has become assimilated into society, where it clandestinely carries out its atrocious acts. The supreme example of this type of monster is the serial killer.53 The last category of monster narratives is unusual because it involves geopolitics: that is, monstrosity in these texts is more the consequence of a subject’s relationship with certain space. Lived space, like the home for example, can assume monstrous proportions when it becomes a repository for the subject’s unconscious; the home becomes the locus of the subject’s projected anxieties, bringing into relief the repressed other and (possibly) transforming the subject into a monster. Other ‘monstrous’ space would include the city with its ‘unofficial’ (read repressed) histories, and the Baudrillardian simulacra


with its capacity to homogenise monsters with humans. It is the concern of the next two chapters to analyse the relationship between monstrosity and geopolitics.

Reading monster narratives One common feature in the contemporary monster narratives under discussion in this study is that the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is no longer viable. These texts, to quote Kristeva, confront us with: our disturbing otherness, for that indeed is what bursts in to confront that ‘demon,’ that threat, that apprehension generated by the projective apparition of the other at the heart of what we persist in maintaining as proper, solid ‘us’.54 In most of the texts under discussion, it is not only a ‘projective apparition of the other’ that confronts, but concrete, visceral embodiments of otherness as well. The monster is no longer merely spectral but a (corpo)realised entity betokening our worst fears and anxieties. Here, I want to introduce the nine narratives that will be analysed in the subsequent chapters, and the forms of monstrosity they represent. Understandably, my analyses of these texts will be heavily informed by the theoretical groundwork laid in this chapter. I am, however, aware of the limitations of psychoanalysis as a narrative theory: one problem is the unavoidable ‘psychoanalysing’ of fictional characters. This is, however, a kind of strategic methodological premise, one that does not imply that characters have an internal, psychic world – as though they are ‘real’ people – but is used to elicit important insights into, for example, the difficult relationship between the Symbolic and the Real. I hope to rectify this limitation by deliberately confronting psychoanalytical theory with other relevant theories of reading – including postmodern geopolitics, gender and cultural studies – to tease out the subtle and multi-layered dimensions of monstrosity. Chapter one deals with a very unusual representation of monstrosity called space. Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985) and J.G. Ballard’s HighRise (1975) will be the focus of this chapter. Both novels, in my reading, deal with repressed layers of signification that exist in lived space and which instigate certain psychic unconscious in its inhabitants, resulting in expressions of monstrosity. In the case of Hawksmoor, it is a city with a very long history made up of official and, more importantly, unofficial or repressed ones. It is the latter that


continues to subsist unspoken and spectral, and which implicates certain individual inhabitants in strange ways. I begin this study with a fictively ‘historical’ text to mainly counter the accusations by New Historicism concerning the alleged ahistoricity of psychoanalysis. In this, I follow Joan Copjec when she writes that: Historicity is what issues from [an] inevitable and constitutive misapprehension of ourselves – from what Freud would call the latency of historical time with regard to its own comprehension. This notion of latency must not be positivised, as though something lay dormant but already formed in the past, and simply waited to emerge at some future time; this would indeed be a continuist notion. Instead, latency designates our inaccessibility to ourselves, and hence our dependence on others – on other times as well as other subjects.55 Hawksmoor, in my view, confirms, in many ways, this concept of latency. Positing two figures in history which mirror each other, the novel rehearses this ‘dependence’ on the self to an other who may be distanced by time. But in my reading, I want to further posit that it is because these two figures inhabit a shared space that enables the evil of the past to catch up with the present. Hence, although time may distance, space retains that groundedness and unheimlich quality for the repressed to resurface. Ballard’s novel problematises the condition of modern living. High-rise apartments afford one a sense of luxury and comfort, but also set the stage for a manifestation of the uncanny. Living in box-like cells with the awareness that one is always below someone (unless one lives on the topmost floor) can result in taphephobia, which is fundamentally related to the uncanny. And as Fred Botting has argued, ‘the uncanny marks the decomposition of fantasy underpinning imaginary subjective integrity and the assumption of symbolic consistency: its apprehension discloses, in horror, nothing but a void’.56 In High-Rise, the fantasy of modern comfort that is linked, as I will demonstrate, to the masculine prerogative is slowly dissolved by the return of the repressed, resulting in curious sadomasochistic performances and gender reversals amongst its inhabitants. Chapter two deals with serial killers, whom Peter Hutchings deems as ‘horror’s new monsters’.57 This is, however, not entirely true, as the monsters in great Gothic literature have often been serial murderers (Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula being cases in point). Purportedly, Hutchings is considering only American horror, but even this is


inaccurate. The figure of the murderer, including the multiple killer, as ‘a means of questioning the ramifications of American-style democracy on ideas of American selfhood’ has, according to Linnie Baker, captivated American horror well over two hundred years, beginning with Charles Brockden Brown’s Weiland (1798).58 What is ‘new’ however about contemporary serial killer narratives is the incredible elusiveness of the monster, denying such narratives ethical or redemptive closures. These killers have learned to identify and merge with their space in order to perform atrocities undetected. Chapter two continues to concern itself with space, but with special emphasis on the serial killer as an inhabitant of this space. And, unsurprisingly, two American serial killer narratives will be considered – Bret Easton Ellis’s notorious novel, American Psycho (1991), and Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie (1996). The invisibility of the killer in Ellis’s novel is largely to do with his hyperconformity with what Baudrillard calls a simulacral space. Disconnecting himself from any originality and identity, he becomes instead, a duplicable and exchangeable (therefore undetectable) body which is also potently destructive. In such a hyperreal space, typified by a capitalist society where the self is mediated through signs such as money, fashion, and television, bodies come under the ‘dictatorship of images’.59 Serial killing, in this sense, becomes another act of accumulating and dispersing depthless and indistinguishable signs. The multiple killer in Oates’s novel, on the other hand, learns how easy it is to fool the Symbolic mechanism by resignifying himself to fit in with the mechanism’s expectations. From this vantage point, this ‘narcissistic’ monster sets out to find a perfect victim whom he will turn into a loveslave, or zombie, and, if this fails (and it often does), kill. Matias Viegener observes that ‘it is impossible to murder someone without losing one’s identity through an invasion of representation – all the murders that came before – just as it is impossible to “really know someone”’.60 The serial killer in these two narratives however, has already relinquished his identity before he even begins killing. The killer in American Psycho has no ‘real’ identity of which to speak, while Zombie’s killer disguises his monstrous nature with a semblance of civility. Remaining anonymous is their weapon, because in this way they can then become integrated into an unsuspecting, and hence, defenceless, society. More crucially, killing becomes a method of trauma control for the killers in that the very act itself temporarily diffuses the loss of (the murderer’s) subjectivity. Chapter three focuses directly on a distinct institution within the Symbolic mechanism – the family. Two novels about the child as


monster and destroyer of this Symbolic system will be analysed: Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory (1984) and Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child (1988). The predecessor of the monstrous progeny is, of course, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), but it is really only in the last thirty years that narratives with monstrous children really took effect. In novels such as Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1963), J.G. Ballard’s Running Wild (1989), and more recently, Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (1992), the murderous child remains an enigmatic presence which, according to James Kincaid, embodies ‘cultural needs or fears’ which are not ‘adequately disposed of elsewhere’.61 Here indeed, the ‘elsewhere’ is finally located in the home. Kincaid goes on to argue that the child can be invested with this, or any, kind of enigma precisely because: The child was impermanent, untrustworthy, protean, here-todaygone-tomorrow. Whatever meaning we placed there wouldn’t last too long. The child could be erased, was in fact in the process of being erased, even as we packed the meaning in.62 However, it will be clear that both Banks’s and Lessing’s monstrous children will undermine Kincaid’s observation of the child as effaceable. In the two narratives, the monstrosity which the child embodies signifies a powerfully subversive element that permanently damages the Symbolic institution of the family. Here, it is not the child that becomes erased, but the very mechanism it defies. Both horror novels emphatically align the monstrous child with the feminine, thus rehearsing Kristeva’s theory of the maternal abject in interesting ways. Chapter four considers the body as a site for monstrous representation. This is, without doubt, the most visible of monstrous forms, and deformed individuals and ‘freaks’ are its main repositories. Patrick McGrath’s neo-Gothic story, ‘Angel’ (1991) and Angela Carter’s celebrated Nights at the Circus (1984) – two narratives which showcase the angel – will be discussed. Acceptable, even lauded in religious or mythical iconographies, this body becomes strangely discomforting when situated in ‘(corpo)reality’ because it inverts and denies what David Williams calls ‘the constituent elements of the ideas of form and order’ which include aspects such as categorisation, hierarchy, differentiation, and similarity;63 that is, it exemplifies a ‘confusion of categories, the levelling of hierarchy, the synthesis of differentiated phenomena, and dissimilitude’.64 Ontologically destabilising, the angel, in order to survive, must ambiguate its presence as artifice. This means that the


angel must ‘perform’ its angel-ness (with its associated qualities such as transvestism) in order to conceal it. Both narratives deal with this theme of disguise, but McGrath’s tale is decidedly bleak, for it is a decaying angel still holding on to a (mythical) past glory, that presides. Carter’s angel, on the other hand, is forward-looking, and, in this study, represents the possibility of resignifying monstrosity as something positive. Both narratives, moreover, are about the power and/or limits of language as a tool for articulating the monster. This is a contention which will occupy the conclusion to this study. Through a close reading of Janice Galloway’s short story, ‘Blood’, I return to my earlier argument that the monster is both a creation and deconstruction of language. Galloway’s eerie story metaphorically foregrounds an overrepresented (and thus, monstrous) body that language denies. But in the process of trying to speak the unspeakable, meaning and form commingle inchoately, disrupting both in the end. This allegorical tale reinforces the main premise of this study that the monster ultimately evades all forms of Symbolic mechanisms (including language), and serves as an ever-present danger of returning the Void to our fragile subjectivities.

1 Monstrous Space

This chapter considers the ways monstrosity is grafted onto subjectivities via their interaction with space. Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985) and J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise (1975) will be the focus of my analyses. Both novels, in different ways, depict how space can contain certain unacknowledged ‘energies’ which manifest themselves, nevertheless, through bodies which inhabit it. In the case of Hawksmoor, it is unconscious history – history officially denied but survives as the repressed of society and culture – that vitally influences bodies and space (especially the churches in the novel), which in turn, results in performances of monstrosity. The past, in Hawksmoor, is one wrought in violence and death. In the final analysis, this narrative, I will demonstrate, is a profound meditation on the mysteries of time, space, architecture and sublimity; it is a novel about the way monstrosity can be perpetuated through time and space, and how this monstrous extension can take on incredible qualities which transform that time/space continuum into something both expansive and claustrophobic. Inspired by another fictional text on London, Lud Heat, by Iain Sinclair, Ackroyd fictively reconstructs the life of Nicholas Dyer, an authentic figure in history, and depicts him as a monster who is both fascinated with, and repulsed, by death.1 Three hundred years later, Dyer is reincarnated as the detective Hawksmoor, and the narrative, like the city, is transformed into a space where histories meet in order to resolve unfinished issues. Because the novel shifts between the seventeenth-century (odd numbered chapters) and the twentieth-century (even numbered ones), and insists on a deliberate connection between the two historical periods, reading the novel based on contemporary (postmodern) theories about the city is difficult. Postmodern theorists on urban space are often dis22

Monstrous Space 23

missive of the role of history and time, and privilege represented, or hyperreal space instead. Elizabeth Grosz, for example, concentrates on the way the body is constructed within the space of the city and how it is a mediated image of the hyperreal.2 Although I do not disagree with this view,3 I find that focusing on the postmodern condition of urban existence without also considering the effects and influence of history results in an unbalanced, or at least, shortsighted, reading of the city. Focus on urban hyperreality fails to account for the ability of the city to accommodate a plurality of phenomena of which, according to Burton Pike, ‘the most basic … is the interpenetration of past and present’. He points out that cities have a dual entity – a vital one which is the accumulation of streets, buildings and the convergence of different temporalities which constitute the ‘busy kinetic energy of the present swirls’, and a ‘subconscious’ one, which manifests itself through customs, rituals, and the inhabitants’ as well as ‘ties with the realm of the dead through its temples, cemeteries, and ceremonies’.4 Pike’s reading of the city is amazingly accurate in capturing the urban atmosphere of Hawksmoor. For Hawksmoor is about a city with a dark history – a past that is characterised by death, occultism and terrible crimes. This past is etched onto the walls of the city’s architecture – the churches – and despite the accumulation of time, the horrors of the past do not go away but continue to haunt the city. Ballard’s chilling novel locates the monstrous space directly in the modern home. The high-rise becomes an ominous site for the staging of the return of the repressed through encountering the uncanny. It enables certain psychic dynamics – or more precisely, psychosis – to gradually manifest, monstrously transforming the inhabitants. This psychosis, I want to argue, can be understood by recourse to Freud’s uncanny, and the way it brings out repressed fear of otherness (especially in the male protagonists), which is then transcribed onto the lived space. Yet, as much as it is psychosis projected onto space, it is also, as my argument will reveal, this particular sort of space – vertical and cell-like – that initially creates and prescribes a conducive atmosphere for the uncanny to return. Hence, although I am not imputing monstrosity to a building (I am actually declining the novel’s invitation to read the architecture as a monster – a kind of ‘huge animal presence’ with a ‘magisterial eye’ and ‘elevators pumping up and down the long shafts [resembling] pistons in the chamber of a heart’ [4]), I am suggesting that it can nevertheless harness a monstrous quality that is, on the one hand, projected onto it by the ‘unconscious’ of its inhabitants, and on the other, the condition for such a projection to become initiated in the first place.


Hence, in my analyses of both these novels, my concern is not so much with represented space, which will be considered in the next chapter, but on ‘lived space’. My argument is that the living environment – be it a city or an apartment block – can host aspects of the unconscious which, in certain situations, can be re-surface to haunt its inhabitants. Gaston Bachelard once wrote that a ‘house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability’;5 my contention is that stability is the desire of subjectivities for their lived space, and which has nothing to do with the space’s constitution. More sinisterly, lived space has a way of disturbing that stability precisely because that which is heimlich (homely), is also the unheimlich (unhomely).

The city as death in Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor The convergence of time (history), space and monstrosity is not unfamiliar in Ackroyd’s work. Narratives such as The House of Doctor Dee (1993) and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1995) vividly capture his fascination with an ancient city which is shrouded in mystery and peopled by madmen, criminals, and legendary creatures such as the homunculus and the golem. Ackroyd’s ‘historiographic metafictions’6 clearly recreates history, but privileges the unconscious side of it rather than the officially sacrosanct. These three novels (Hawksmoor included) form a trinity of narratives which uncovers London’s dark history, and the city’s straddling between rapid modernisation and superstitious past which converge and reveal themselves, often monstrously, in subjectivities. In the case of The House of Doctor Dee, modern science and medieval alchemy unite in the person of the enigmatic Dr Dee, whose quest for the homunculus rehearses the myth of Frankenstein. This attraction to the suppressed versions of London’s vast history is not only limited to his fiction, but is clearly exemplified in his biographical writings as well, especially London: The Biography (2000), which reads, to an extent, like the return of the city’s repressed. Death and the city: Nicholas Dyer Hawksmoor7 recreates the life of eighteenth-century English architect, Nicholas Dyer, and his work on the churches which now grace East London. During Dyer’s lifetime, London is powerfully characterised by death (after having endured the Plague [1665] and the Great Fire of London [1666]); the architect even calls the city a ‘Nest of Death and Contagion’, the ‘Capital city of the World of Affliction … the Capitol

Monstrous Space 25

of Darkness … the Dungeon of Man’s desires … a Wilderness of dirty rotten Shed’ (47–8). He tells his valet, Nat: Thus London grows more Monstrous, Straggling and out of all Shape: in this Hive of Noise and Ignorance, Nat, we are tyed to the World as to a sensible Carcasse and as we cross the stinking Body we call out What News? or What’s a clock? (48, italics in original) It is not uncommon to use the body as metaphor for the city.8 Dyer’s London is represented as a diseased body marked by filth, death, contagion and affliction. Within this body are desires which will never be fulfilled because of its ravaged condition. But unlike a human body which dies as the result of affliction, the body of this city, inversely, actually grows larger, spreading sorrow and disease even further. Here, the familiar image of the body is mutated all ‘out of shape’, heralding the monstrous in its stead. In Dyer’s view, London is both something familiar and disturbingly alien; but more importantly these opposite qualities both hinge on a single feature – death – which is perhaps the most intimate and most unknown of all encounters. It is precisely the powerful presence of death that turns Dyer’s London into a monstrous city. As Jeffrey Cohen has deliberated, monstrosity is the product of a culture in crisis;9 Dyer’s London is at such a crossroad where fear, death and corruption are daily encountered. Here also, commerce overrides humanity in importance, reducing men and women to a state of subservience. In Dyer’s view, it is a ‘World …of Tricking and Bartering, Buying and Selling, Borrowing and Lending, Paying and Receiving … Money makes the old wife trot, Money makes the Mare to go’ (48, emphasis in original). If the city is motivated by its commerce, then bodies too will invariably become part of the commerce, becoming commodified. Dyer regards the prostitute as the prime image of the commodified body: ‘What is their God but shineing Dirt and to sing its Devotions come the Westminster-Hall-whores, the Charingcross whores, the Whitehall whores, the Channel-row whores, the Strand whores, the Fleet Street whores, the Temple-bar whores …’ (48). The prostitute confuses the boundary ‘between the dangerously asocial world of commercial exchange and the healthy social world of married love’,10 for while the latter breeds life, the former is sterile, and therefore figuratively engenders only death. As Thomas Laqueur puts it, ‘prostitution is sterile because the mode of exchange it represents is sterile. Nothing is produced, because, like usury, it is pure exchange’.11 In the figure of the prostitute, death and commerce meet


and become synonymous, and the body and the city collapse into each other. Dyer’s aversion to death and his imputing of death onto the prostitute’s body can be traced to his childhood experience with his mother’s demise. His mother contracts the dreaded bubonic plague, and her body becomes a display of the grotesque. When Dyer describes the initial marks of his mother’s illness, he employs a commercial simile. He views his mother’s diseased body as marked by ‘tokens of contagion’ (14) which resemble little pennies, thus metonymically locating disease and commerce onto his mother’s body. The word ‘swelling’ (14) recalls Dyer’s view of London quoted earlier (the city ‘Straggling all out of shape’ [48]), grafting the monstrous image of London onto his mother’s body; likewise the word ‘stink’ is used both to describe London and his dying mother. At the last leg of her illness, Dyer no longer sees his mother as human, but a ‘Thing’, an ‘Object of Loathing’ (14), two suggestive pronouncements that also align his mother with monstrosity. Again, in the passage quoted earlier, Dyer tells Nat that ‘we are tyed to this World as to a sensible Carcasse’; here, Dyer remembers the image of his mother tied to her bed (14). I want to suggest that Dyer’s view of London is inseparable from the powerful image of his mother’s death; not only does he use almost the same words to describe both London and his mother’s diseased body, he also, in retrospect, sees his mother’s body as something loathsome and monstrous like the way London is to him now.12 Perhaps this is why Dyer ‘recalls’ having been ‘chearful’ (14) about his mother’s condition, for in his current aversion towards commerce and prostitution, he can look back and believe himself to have been indifferent. Yet, as this discussion will demonstrate, the image of his mother’s death will never leave Dyer, and he will, in a dialectic of fascination with, and aversion to, death, perform strange acts of atrocity. When Dyer is commissioned to rebuild several churches to replace the ones destroyed by the Great Fire, he sees this as his opportunity to escape not just London, but death itself. This escape is not merely vicarious (as in immortalising the self through a work of art), although Dyer has such an intention (‘My Churches will indure … and what the Coles build the Ashes will not burie’. [10–11]). He belongs to an occult group which follows a rather Gnostic belief of God as the reconciliation of good and evil.13 Dyer builds his churches on or near graveyards, which is, on one hand, consistent with orthodox religious belief; but on the other, and more sinisterly, it is in accordance with his occult notions (called Scientia Umbrarum) which posit that darkness and evil

Monstrous Space 27

can be prevented through the committing of evil itself. Conflating his architectural principles and occult beliefs, he contemplates: 1) That it was Cain who built the first City, 2) That here is a true Science in the World called Scientia Umbrarum which, as to the publick teaching of it, has been suppressed but which the proper Artificer must comprehend, 3) That Architecture aims at the Eternity and must contain the Eternal Powers: not only our Altars and Sacrifices, but the Forms of our Temples, must be mysticall, 4) That the miseries of the present Life, and the Barbarities of Mankind, the fatall disadvantages we are all under and the Hazard we run of being eternally Undone, lead the True Architect not to Harmony or to Rationall Beauty but to quite another Game. (9) Cain, the first murderer, is also the first Architect, and for Dyer, the two acts – killing and building – are coterminous. And if architecture points to Eternity as well as ‘contain[s] the Eternal Powers’, these two complementary rituals of Dyer’s religion must be performed, which is why he engineers a death for each of his churches.14 Dyer submits to the belief that he is already damned, as all infants are, and resting upon this knowledge, he builds his churches on the foundation of degeneracy (9). Building based upon this occult principle, Dyer believes that he can ultimately escape death by ‘housing’ it in the form of his architecture. Critic Susana Onega has observed that Dyer builds his churches to form a shape of a talisman that would cover a large area of London.15 She contends that ‘the real purpose of Dyer’s awe-inspiring and painful endeavours [is] to build an everlasting order which would permit his crossing the planetary orbs that separate the material from the spiritual world’.16 But Onega fails to question why Dyer desires this: it is, of course, to elude mortality. Upon the completion of his seventh and last church, Dyer expresses ecstasy at his achievement, running so that ‘no one can catch him now’ (186), suggesting that he has finally found a way of escape. In the earlier passage quoted above, upon witnessing his mother’s dead body, the young Dyer is suddenly ‘possess’d of an extream chearfulness of Spirits so that I might have sung a catch around my Mother’s carcasses (you see what a Life mine was to be)’ (14). The single word – ‘catch’ – appears in both passages. This suggests an underlying and constant preoccupation with being ‘caught’ by death. It is to bridge the material and the spiritual world (according to Onega) – in other words, to ‘cross over’ without dying – that Dyer builds his churches.


Dyer believes that ‘when there are many Persons dead, only being buryed and laid in the Earth, there is an Assembling of Powers’ (24). It is the many deaths then, as Dyer goes on to say, that ‘are my Pillars and my Foundation’ (25). The churches are but an encasing to house and harness this power. For example, the church at Limehouse, built near ‘a great Fen or Morass which has been a burying-place of Saxon times’, Dyer sees it as ‘a massive Necropolis [that] has Power still withinne it, for the ancient Dead emit a certain Material Vertue that will come to inhere the Fabrick of this new Edifice’ (62). However, resisting death through housing and harnessing is already a deconstructive strategy which will ultimately overwhelm the attempt. For architecture is not easily manipulated to perform specific roles, but has a way of taking on alien significances which can be threatening (this will be further explored in J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise). This becomes clear for Dyer during his visit to Stonehenge. He considers Stonehenge a ‘huge and monstrous Work’ and the ‘Architecture of the Devil’ (60), a view which both confirms his own architectural principle and repels it. Away from the city, Dyer is confronted by the excessive significance which architecture can accumulate over time. His desire to escape Death is also, in a way, a desire to escape time. He plans to house death in his architecture to arrest time. Time, for Dyer, is also a ‘Thing’ – the word which he also uses to describe his mother’s carcass – which he acknowledges he cannot ‘change’, but can ‘alter its Posture’ (11). Space and time are correspondent, and by seeking to modify space, Dyer is also attempting to manipulate the ‘posture’ of time. And if body is to city is to death, then time would necessarily be implicated in this equation, and must be arrested and escaped. Back in the city, Dyer actually makes a connection between time and architecture (Stonehenge) when he states that: Time is a vast Denful of Horrour, round about which a Serpent winds and in the winding bites itself by the Tail. Now, now is the Hour, every Hour, every part of an Hour, every Moment, which in its end does begin again and never ceases to end: a beginning continuing, always ending. (62) I will reserve discussion of this passage in detail for later; here, I want to argue that Dyer is confronted with the uncanny quality of architecture. Suddenly, Dyer realises that architecture does not necessarily house death, but can actually embody it. If he seeks to arrest time with his churches, here, at Stonehenge, the power of time accumulates in

Monstrous Space 29

the edifice and arrests him. Dyer’s pronouncement on Stonehenge’s monstrosity is apt. More interestingly, when he calls the edifice the architecture of the Devil, he is almost pronouncing his own judgement: for it is upon a rather devilish belief that he bases his architectural principles, that is, by deifying the devil in his work to keep the devil at bay. Here, for an instant, Dyer perhaps realises that allying oneself with the devil always results in dissolution (death or a fate worse, which Dyer will discover), rather than an escape from it. Denis Hollier’s views on architecture also prove relevant to a reading of Hawksmoor: From human body to monument, all that disappears is that which was perishable, which remained in time’s power: flesh that rots and its transitory colours. All that then remains is the skeleton, the structure. Architecture retains of man only what death has no hold on.17 If I am correct, Hollier is arguing that when architecture is metaphorised as a human body, the human body will necessarily be robbed of all signifiers of life – flesh, colours. Only the skeleton is a relevant emblem of the body as architecture, an emblem of ‘immortality,’ which when collapsed into architecture, becomes imperishable. But as much as a skeleton is a reminder of a life once upon a time, it is nevertheless ultimately an image of death, and more profoundly, of a death that is irreversible. Hollier’s argument is interesting because it both confirms and rejects the presence of life in architecture. In Hawksmoor, Dyer’s attempt at effecting immortality through housing death performs a similar paradox: to not die, one must house death; or rather, to be immortal, one must first harness death’s power. Architecture can be said to serve as a fantasy of the imperishable to screen off that which perishes. At Stonehenge, Dyer’s experience of the horror of death through petrifaction is prophetic of his final entrapment in the very materials with which he works. Edward J. Ahearn argues that this Stonehenge passage from Hawksmoor (59–60) shows that Dyer ‘experiences an inhuman but cosmic vastness of being’.18 Although it is possible to read the passage as Dyer merging with the cosmic, it is more ‘terrour’ (60) that he experiences, a terror which stems from that realisation that stones can trap eternally. Sublime city: Nicholas Hawksmoor In his book, Gothic, Fred Botting argues that in the mid-nineteenth century, the Gothic genre largely shifted its emphasis on exotic, wild


landscapes to locate mystery and terror in ‘domestic, industrial and urban contexts … the dark alleyways of cities [are now] the gloomy forests and subterranean labyrinths’.19 This view corresponds with Martin Tropp’s assessment of Victorian Gothic as reflective of a critical stage in English literature and sociology. Tropp demonstrates that the first Gothic writers were already aware of the power of space (whether geographically centred, or the space of the body) to produce effects of dread. But, as Tropp argues, this space remained ‘largely unexplored’; it was located outside the domains of everyday experience and found mainly in romantic adventures created by those ‘Gothic visionaries’. This view of space underwent an important transformation, however, during the Victorian era: here, the Gothic space is no longer somewhere ‘out there’, but located directly at the very heart of the ‘Victorian landscape’ itself: the city.20 What the Gothic genre has done is to relocate the site of terror from some external and alien place to a more familiar – and hence, more uncanny – location.21 In generic terms, the city is now no longer a centre of what is merely official and acceptable, but has become a repository for the unofficial and the terrible as well. This conglomeration of vastness, obscurity and terror also transforms the city into something both sublime and monstrous. According to Carol Bernstein, the city attains a sublime quality because the meeting of bodies and urban space engenders a sense of alienation in the midst of a ‘vast and terrible’ space which causes the bodies to confront their smallness.22 But at the same time, the city, with its gloomy alleyways and dark corners, also produces a claustrophobic effect which further shrinks bodies into a sense of obscurity and confinement. In Hawksmoor, both these effects of the city over bodies are present. In Hawksmoor, the vastness of London is imagined as both vertically – the ‘Pyrammide’ (61), and horizontally – the Labyrinth (24), by Dyer. In Denis Hollier’s view, the pyramid and the labyrinth are opposing structures. The labyrinth is ‘not a safe place, but the disoriented space of someone who has lost his way … the axes of orientation (up/down, left/right, back/forth) are astray’;23 the pyramid, alternatively, ‘stands out. Clearly, decisively. It rises above confusion, towers above it. It is an edifying monument …’.24 Dyer conceives his city as both a confusing labyrinth as well as a ‘Pyrammide [that rises] above the stinking streets of London’ (61). His re-imagined London enables him to tower above all that the labyrinth stands for: confusion, entrapment, and ultimately, death. But his is a selfish strategy because Dyer intends to reshape London as a labyrinth with only himself holding the key out of

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it. Here is an instance of this diabolical intent. For the church in Spittle-Fields (and I will quote at length): I [Dyer] have us’d the manner of building the Sepulture as it was in the Fourth Century, in the purest time of Christianity, as you may see from the Draught inclose. And then upon the Ground I have form’d a white Pyrammide, in the manner of the Glastonbury Church but littel and framed of rough stone without the Lime, this also in the manner of Early Christians…. Thus do I veil my Intention with Cant, like a cozening Rogue, and use this temporary Scaffold of Words to counterfeit my Purpose. As for the Chamber it self: it will be solid only in those parts that beare weight, and I will be so contrived within-side to form a very intricate Labyrinth. I have placed Cavities in the thicknesse of the Walls where I will put these Signs – Nergal, that is Light of the Grave, Ashima, that is Fault, Nibhas, that is Vision, and Tartak, that is Chained. These true Beliefs and Mysteries are not to be inscribed in easy Figures since the Mobb, being in Ignorance, will teare them down in their Feare. But if Violence does not happen, and it remaines buried from vulgar Eyes, this Labyrinth will endure 1000 years. (24) The pyramid is a motif which Dyer claims is borrowed from another church, thus continuing the affinity of his architecture with established religious practices. But his ‘veiled intention’ reveals that he is on the side of the enemy (the Devil). The signs placed on the walls attest to Dyer’s evil design to perennially trap the inhabitants of London within the labyrinth. ‘Light of the grave’ is a false light, which leads only to death; and ‘vision’ is intricately allied with ‘fault’ and ‘chained’, suggesting a sense of place where the victim will be misdirected (‘faulty’ vision), and become metaphorically shackled. But as argued, Dyer’s architecture is also treacherous towards its creator. The pyramid, in its concreteness, may symbolise a ‘rising’ and perhaps, an escape route from a horizontal and flat labyrinthine structure, but its function suggests otherwise: it is a tomb, a place of death, and he who is buried in it will remain in it (as though trapped) forever. The pyramid and the labyrinth are not opposed, but mutual structures. In his blind confidence, Dyer overlooks this crucial point and builds himself a tomb rather than envisions a structure to escape mortality.25 The city in Hawksmoor is also sublime because of its association with death, and especially violent death (93). According to David Morris,


death comprises the sublime ‘because it remains a terrifying mystery, not simply unknowable but linked with human desires that we wish to keep unknown’.26 It is this city of death with which the detective, Nicholas Hawksmoor, is associated. Where he lives – near the Red Gates pub (118) – was also where Dyer, three hundred years earlier, pursued his diabolical devices (90, 130, 182). Hawksmoor is investigating the mysterious deaths of several Londoners which have all occurred near the churches which Dyer built. But his investigation seems be obstructed by the city itself. On one account, on his way to a murder site, and whilst nearing a church, Hawksmoor suddenly finds himself in a rather dark and claustrophobic atmosphere: there is ‘very little light’ and the shops seem to hem him within a confined space, confusing him (188). This seeming collaboration of darkness, a strong sense of the past (shops of ‘old design’ [188]), and the maze-like quality of the area, prevents Hawksmoor from getting to where he wants to go. The sense of being in a confined interior with no exit is profound (‘the stone wall of the church apparently blocked off the end’ [188]). As argued earlier, the sense of terror and obscurity suffered by bodies can also be engendered by small, confined spaces as well. The sublime experience can be both agoraphobic and claustrophobic because in both, the body is dislocated from itself and displaced onto a space which threatens to nullify it. It is also as if the city is trying to conceal the murders from Hawksmoor and retain them as part of its mystery. Unsolved murders have a sublime dimension in themselves. Joel Black, in his interpretation of Thomas de Quincey’s essay, ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ (1827), states that ‘crime may evoke a feeling of sublimity so long as it is a disinterested, malevolent act. Murder loses its claim on the aesthetic judgment if the assailant acts out of petty self-interest, as in the case of robbery, or if the victims turns out to be a thief or a killer himself instead of a helpless innocent.’27 In the case of unsolved serial murders, of which the killer is unknown and the victims are randomly chosen (as in the case of Hawksmoor), Black’s two criteria of the sublime crime are fulfilled, but more through unknowing than anything else. This means that it is not that the murders are actually ‘disinterested, malevolent acts’, or that the killer is acting out of pettiness, or that the victims are criminals themselves (all of which will cancel out the sublime), but that these factors are ultimately not verifiable. If the city is a place where much can be witnessed, it is also a place which conceals much. As critic Hana Wirth-Nasher puts it: ‘Cities promise plenitude, but deliver inaccessibility’.28 Unsolved murders are

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one such instance. Their occurrences affirm the presence of an act of witness or concealment. A murdered victim becomes a paradoxical sign: at once excessive of referents and emptied of any. This is what Barbara Freeman means when she writes that death is ‘the unrecuperable excess of excess’.29 Pointing to nothing beyond itself, it nevertheless obliges significations to be found. And the very place where the body is deposited also becomes infused with this sense of impenetrable and paradoxical mystery. Space and the murdered victim are so intricately conflated that the former will take on a new significance, and become emphatically present. But this presence is also an absence because it conceals death. This is precisely Hawksmoor’s experience. The murder sites, although varied, are really one space which is ‘drained of meaning’ (156). The dead body is meaningless because it is loaded with signifiers that lead nowhere. Such is the nature of the sublime, in that the very distinctiveness of a sublime object nevertheless confounds understanding. Although the church is now unmistakably in sight, it continues to ‘disappear from sight’ (155), not just physically, but significantly as a murder site as well. Carol Bernstein declares that ‘the scene of death is thus a profoundly mystifying scene of origin’.30 This point usefully summarises my argument: the scene (or place) of origin – the murder scene – is ‘profoundly mystified’ (which, if punned, could actually evoke the famous London fog) by the presence of the body itself. Body and place are powerfully identified, with the former bringing distinction to the latter, and the latter emphasising the presence of the former as meaningless sign; both are at once revealing and concealing. ‘And the Twain shall Meet’ Hawksmoor cleverly suggests a sort of cyclic time sequence in which history is repeated. Key words and characters, with only a slight change in names and functions, are repeated to show the profound affinity between past and present. In fact, both Dyer and Hawksmoor share a similar first name, and there is evidence that Dyer is also known as Hawksmoor.31 This is the familiar Gothic motif of the double, and not unfamiliar in Ackroyd’s fiction.32 But the double motif in Hawksmoor is more extreme predominantly because the self and his other are separated by almost three hundred years. Hawksmoor’s deployment of the double also significantly departs from the Gothic tradition in that it actually reverses the familiar narrative sequence of the tale of the double (that is, the story of a man or woman who progressively becomes split33) by deliberately positing two distinct characters who


throughout the narrative continue to titillate the reader into reading them as potential doubles, but refuses to definitively confirm this. Ackroyd’s reversal of the double narrative is of course also a stylistic strategy to suggest the cyclical sequence of time, and the repetitiveness of history. In a city as old as London, the present is continuously haunted by the past and consciousness is persistently motivated by repressed histories. Songs, superstitious beliefs, ludic incantations and old wives’ tales expressed hundreds of years ago are still articulated in the present, becoming permanent fixtures in a city which is otherwise changing in its landscape. But in Hawksmoor – and this is again in line with London’s violent history – even the songs and rhymes express brutality, suggesting that the darker histories of London, although repressed or forgotten by official records, continue to endure in marginal (because trivial) forms of narratives.34 Myth and space are hence intricately bound.35 Another theorist of the city, Steve Pile, has argued that the ‘city has an unconscious life which, we might say, carries out a guerrilla warfare with attempts to repress it; in other words, administrative rationality continually struggles to impose an order on people’s everyday urban spatial practices, but must always fail’.36 This failure, as evidenced in Hawksmoor, has also to do with the fact that much of this unconscious life – or, repressed history – often passes through the administrative rationality of the polis as something playful and unthreatening, much like a child’s rhyme. It may be harmless, but it is certainly not insignificant. The unconscious life carries the burden of the city’s past (among other things) which can sometimes take on critical overtones for certain individuals. This is Hawksmoor’s situation, even though he is unaware of it. Dyer is especially attracted to tramps because he sees in them the perfect victims – individuals who actually live out death, and individuals who would serve his purpose of gathering death into his architectures to control it. As Dyer declares, ‘thus their place is by my church … they acknowledge that the beginning and the end of all Flesh is but Torment and Shaddowe. They are in the Pitte also, where they see the true face of God which is like unto their own’ (63). It must be recalled that Dyer’s God is also the devil, and the tramps, in their daily acquaintance with misery and poverty are symbolically dead and already in the torments of hell. It is no surprise that his first victim (Dyer both suggests and assists the suicide) is a tramp named Ned. According to Joel Black, there is an intimacy in murder which dissolves any ‘illusion of individual identity.’37 When a murder takes place, a relationship with an other is firmly and permanently established. In

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Dyer’s case, his murder serves both religious and secular purposes – the sacrifice of his victims deflects that violence away from him;38 yet murdering is also his way of identifying with the victim, so that, through an intimate knowledge of the latter, Dyer can acquire the terrible wisdom of turning his victim’s suffering into his own.39 This may seem contradictory, but it actually reveals Dyer’s deep connectedness with death (his aversion/fascination complex), and that his struggle to break free of it only implicates him further. Almost immediately after murdering Ned, Dyer meets a ‘Band of Rogues’ who are ‘Bawling and Calling to one another’ and in a sudden bout of confusion, Dyer ‘ran towards them with outstretch’d Arms and cried, Do you remember me? I will never, never leave thee! I will never, never leave thee!’ (66–67). Dyer’s identification with Ned is consummated. The replay of deaths in the twentieth-century emphasises the close intimacy shared between Dyer and his victims, this time, as Hawksmoor. The victims whom Dyer kills resurface again to be killed for Hawksmoor to investigate. There is already much written on Ackroyd’s narrative strategy to suggest time’s repetition, but I want to offer an alternative position to the ones which have thus far be offered.40 I have said that the dark history of London continues to haunt its residents because of unresolved issues, such as violent crimes that go unpunished. The haunting of Hawksmoor by his double’s past deeds is akin to the resurfacing of the unconscious past to carry out ‘guerrilla warfare’ against the rationalistic detective. I do not read this as merely a playful fictive performance by Ackroyd to tease his reader with ludic ambiguity. For me, this sense of destabilising time has a more profound significance, especially when considered in the light of Gilles Deleuze’s revision of the Nietzschean concept of the eternal return. In this concept, time has a way of looping, reconstituting an original moment from the past in the present endlessly. What has gone before will repeat itself anew and differentiated (‘Repetition in the eternal return, therefore, consists in conceiving the same on the basis of the different’41), a form of will-to-becoming which is ceaseless because it will never arrive. But this process of repetition is not always redemptive, because a form of sameness of the past, what Nietzsche calls ‘It Was’,42 can also occur. This is not to say that Nietzsche views the past as always something traumatic which defeats the will-topower of the present. As Deleuze succinctly puts it, for the individual, ‘the present exists, but the past alone insists and provides the element in which the present passes and successive presents are telescoped’.43 But when the problem of pastness itself becomes permanent, it limits


the power of the will-to-becoming. For Deleuze, the problem of ‘It Was’ is the problem of identical repetition, which is also a negative repetition.44 This sort of identical-negative repetition is evident in Hawksmoor, with the recurrence of similar characters and events (the murders). The motif of the convex mirror in the narrative further emphasises this. I want to suggest that it is Dyer’s violent crimes which have marked his churches as scenes of eternal violence; forgotten, they nevertheless do not disappear, and resurface in time: the repetition of Dyer’s crimes over three hundred years later proves the burden of history’s trace which these architectures must bear. In this sense, the narrative can be said to be translating monstrous actions into architecture and space. By relating this space to violent death and the sublime, it can be concluded that the sublime space of death is also, in the end, a monstrous space. The monstrosity which is Dyer becomes, three hundred years later, restaged within and as the space which he manipulated. This repetition in history finally brings together the two Hawksmoors. Interestingly, it is a tramp known as the Architect who points Hawksmoor to a lead in his investigation. The tramp as architect confirms precisely what I have argued concerning the close intimacy and identification between murderer and victim. When Dyer seeks out and kills a tramp, he becomes identified with the tramp; centuries later, it is a tramp who seeks out Hawksmoor and leads him to a final meeting with Dyer in one of the churches. Hawksmoor too, finds himself suddenly identifying with tramps (198), once again suggesting not only a parallel between the two men, but the inevitability of murder in binding the victim and the killer through time. The irony that Hawksmoor is a policeman is not lost, however. In the end, the killer Hawksmoor seeks is actually himself three centuries ago. Hawksmoor’s feeling of the killer being ‘closer to him than ever’ (198) is frighteningly prophetic. In a sense, it can be said that both men are trying to ‘control’ death by discerning its pattern and halting it. The two men are working on a ‘plan’ for the city, trying to see a relationship between death and space in the hope of being able to overcome both. Hawksmoor does not believe in unsolvable murders, and actually sees his job ‘as that of rubbing away the grease and detritus which obscured the real picture of the world, in the way that a blackened church must be cleaned before the true texture of the stone can be seen’ (126). Hence, although Dyer and Hawksmoor are separated in time and purpose, they share this one affinity: both men want to ‘master’ death – to understand it,

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and to solve its mystery. But both will fail. The two men are indeed parallel figures, but they are parallel in a paradoxical way. Both are pursuing a similar aim, but are doing it in precisely opposite modes. Dyer’s attempt at escape only traps him more and Hawksmoor’s accumulation of data (to close in on the killer) only sets him further from solving the case. The repetitive quality of time need not always mean events repeating again in a more or less constant manner, but can also encompass events repeating in a manner directly opposed to prior ones, but achieving the same end. Either way, Nietzsche’s problem of pastness remains. The enigmatic conclusion of the novel has variously been read as the author’s textual play to frustrate the reader, as suggesting the waste land metaphor of twentieth-century London,45 and as a final dissolution of separate selves in which ‘time and space, personal identity and language and vision’ are no longer meaningful grids with which one identifies oneself.46 Here, I want to offer a different interpretation, one that is dependent on my reading of the two men’s intimacy with death: And his own Image was sitting beside him, pondering deeply and sighing, and when he put out his hand and touched him he shuddered. But do not say that he touched him, say that they touched him. And when they looked at the space between them, they wept. The church trembled as the sun rose and fell, and the half-light was strewn across the floor like rushes. They were face to face, and yet they looked past one another at the pattern which they cast upon the stone; for when there was a shape there was a reflection, and when there was a light there was a shadow, and when there was a sound there was an echo, and who could say where one ended and the other had begun? And when they spoke they spoke with one voice: and I must have slept, for all these figures greeted me as if they were in a dream. The light behind them effaced their features and I could see only the way they turned their heads, both to left and to right. The dust covered their feet and I could see only the direction of their dance, both backwards and forwards. And when I went among them, they touched fingers and formed a circle around me; and, as we came closer, all the while we moved further apart. Their words were my own but not my own, and I found myself on a winding path of smooth stones. And when I looked back, they were watching one another silently.


And then in my dream I looked down at myself and saw in what rags I stood; and I am a child again, begging on the threshold of eternity. (216–17) In these paragraphs, there is a strong suggestion that Dyer has survived time’s passing, and is, in the end, found again by Hawksmoor. But the pronoun shifts create ambiguity. Does Hawksmoor meet Dyer, or are they merged into one? Perhaps both are true. Either way, Dyer’s attempt to surmount death succeeds because he has transcended time and death either through immortality or through being reborn again as Hawksmoor. But Dyer’s ‘survival’ is also a form of perpetual death and dying. The passage is redolent of deep pathos; there is at once a sense of hollowness (echo), darkness (shadow), and imprisonment. Earlier, I quoted a passage from the novel in which Dyer metaphorises time as a Serpent biting its tail (62) to suggest time’s eternal repetition of itself. In the passage above, the meeting of Hawksmoor and Dyer performs this serpentine quality of time, in which both men are trapped within a constant cycle. Dyer may have escaped death, but he must relive his affinity with death again and again. Killing does prevent Dyer from dying, but it also binds him intimately to his victim and causes him to identify with death itself. This reading is further emphasised by an incident in the novel immediately after Dyer murders Hayes. After dispatching this last victim, Dyer visits a prostitute and performs masochistic sex (151). It must be recalled that Dyer views the prostitute as a symbol of death. By submitting himself to a prostitute and to masochism, Dyer’s identification with death is complete. His great aversion for death is revealed to be intimately bound with a powerful desire for it as well; in both his architectural pursuits and his crimes, the paradoxical logic to which he adheres is actually this connection between aversion and fascination which he desperately tries to keep apart, but ultimately fails.47 When he finally meets Hawksmoor, it is a meeting of two contradictory selves bound by death. They ‘spoke with one voice’ but the blank indicates that nothing has been said because what can a Self say to itself that it does not already know? The interchange between ‘I’ and ‘them’ in the penultimate paragraph is a highly complex play between the fragmented self, doubleness and the collapse of various selves into a single ‘I’. This ambiguity is important in sustaining a terrifying atmosphere of simultaneous and perpetual deferment and stasis. No matter how much time has elapsed, and how many lifetimes have passed, the crimes of Nicholas Dyer are forever etched in stone and must be ‘relived’ in stones, possibly for eternity. In

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the end, after the meeting, Dyer/Hawksmoor is a tramp again – the first victim – waiting to be killed all over again. And as a child again, there is that suggestion that Hawksmoor is going to be replayed again in a new life, where the ending is but the beginning, where ‘death is also the mystifying scene of origin’ (to recall Bernstein’s quote). The last sentence brilliantly captures Dyer’s dilemma of the eternal return. He has escaped death, but has failed to attain eternity. This is the ultimate paradox in a novel fraught with paradoxes. My reading of the eternal return, however, departs from Deleuze’s conceptualisation in two significant ways. Firstly, monstrosity is the domain of differentiated repetition in Deleuze; in difference, the symmetry of form undergoes decomposition and abstraction, breaking down its ‘sameness’ to acquire transformation. Monstrosity, in this sense, has positive qualities.48 But in Hawksmoor, monstrosity is engendered by and in identical repetition. As demonstrated, the haunting of Hawksmoor is precisely the indelible (unchanging) marks of violence and transgression that his double has left on the walls of the churches. Secondly, for Deleuze, that which repeats identically and negatively will be ‘eliminated’ (298). But Ackroyd’s novel can be paradoxically read as giving Dyer/Hawksmoor endless chances to redeem themselves, or as a perverse punishment to identify them eternally with their crimes. Either way, the identical and the negative are ceaselessly repeated. Death and the void Dyer’s mother’s death has impressed upon him the association between death and the loss of the Self, a loss not merely on the level of the cessation of life, but also the ‘deconstruction’ of the coherent, stable body at the onset of dying. The diseased body, and subsequently, the cadaver, of his mother, is for Dyer the complete embodiment of the dissolution of self. Death (and disease), in a psychoanalytical sense then, is also the opening up of the terrible Void which will dissolve the body (see Introduction). It is this Void that Dyer is ultimately fleeing. But I want to propose that Dyer’s fear can be traced back to his witnessing of his mother’s grotesquely diseased body: the uncanny experience of one’s place in the Void where the Self is inchoate and has no meaning or coherence (qualities gained only upon entry into the Symbolic order). In locating death in his mother’s body and then in his architecture, what can be seen is Dyer’s psychic mechanism of projecting his fear of the Void outside himself and onto firstly, his mother and then, his buildings. Yet ironically, his mother and his buildings are intricately


bound to him – the former as Dyer’s point of origin, and the latter, an extension of himself. By imaging death onto both, what Dyer has done is to actually hem himself between two forms of death, and thus fashion his past and his future as already temporalities of death, and positioning his Self as always already threatened by the Void of death itself. To elaborate, I will consider an episode towards the end of Dyer’s narrative (chapter 11). Walter, Dyer’s assistant (whom the architect suspects is trying to usurp him), has been accused of murdering Hayes (Dyer’s rival) and has ‘despatch’d himself’ (thus saving Dyer the ‘Labour’ of having to do so himself [204]); Dyer has built all his seven churches and is now musing about how he ‘shall not leave this Place once it is completed’ (205). But the subsequent seven nights prove harrowing as he experiences ‘wild frightful Dreames’, as if in anticipation of his meeting with his own ‘Apparition’ – which he also calls a ‘Thing’ (206) during his walk on the morning of the eighth day. He sees his image again the next morning, a ‘Body as my own’, but dressed in strange, undergarment-like clothes, and wigless. More importantly, this image has its back ‘always towards me’ and is constantly hiding his countenance (206). This strange episode reinforces Dyer’s fascination with/repulsion of death. His belief in escaping mortality is compromised by his constant preoccupation with it. In psychoanalytical language, the mirror image is his ‘I’ which constantly eludes him because it belongs to the surplus of the real which can only be encountered absolutely in the Void – that is, his death. Dyer is playing a fort/da game with death, desiring that which threatens him to learn how to master that object of threat (his churches then, are part of the game he is playing with death). But in the two ‘apparition’ encounters, death walks away from him in the first instance, and refuses to meet him face to face in the second, suggesting not only that Dyer’s attempt at escaping death is also mingled with a wish to ‘meet’ it, but that death itself is both eluding and attracting Dyer. More interestingly, Dyer’s predicament here is couched between a death occurring in the past (Walter’s, but also all the way to his mother’s) and a death which is always already postponed to a non-arriving future. What Dyer sees in both his mirror images is his own death that can never happen. This reading also adds another dimension to the way the cyclic narrative of the novel contributes to the logic of the story’s thematic. Dyer is always walking a fine line which, on either side, is the Void he so aggressively flees. Refusing to submit to the Void, he must now remain precariously at its edge, experiencing all its terrors, but never actually falling into it.

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And this he does, all the way to his ‘reincarnated’ state as detective Hawksmoor, and, as the text seems to suggest, even beyond. Dyer/Hawksmoor must eternally rehearse the dialectic of escape from, and entombment within, the Void (death) again and again. In the final analysis, what could be said of Hawksmoor from a psychoanalytical reading is that it is a novel about historical trauma, which, according to Slavoj Zˇizˇek, in his reading of the Kierkegaardian notion of repetition in time, is the repetition of the ‘very experience of ˇ izˇek goes on to impossibility, that is, the failure to attain the Object’. Z explain that this form of repetition is due to a ‘traumatic encounter with the [R]eal … “traumatism” designates precisely the reemergent failure to integrate some “impossible” kernel of the Real’:49 What Kierkegaard has in mind here is, ultimately, the well-known opposition of two attitudes to history: when we are thrown into historical ‘becoming’, caught in its flow, we experience the abyss of history’s ‘openness’, we are forced to choose; afterward, when we cast a retrospective gaze on it, its course loses the character of ‘becoming’ and appears as the manifestation of some ‘eternal’ necessity.50 Dyer’s retrospective reading of his own trauma at the point of his mother’s death rehearses precisely this view of interpreting history as ‘some “eternal” necessity’. His mother’s death (re)locates him at the ‘abyss of history’s “openness”’, recalling for him the Void of his own being in history after which he must construct a sort of narrative to establish for himself a point of origin for his own fears and diabolical acts. In other words, history is itself a kind of constructed fantasy from which a subject can constitute for itself a body and a self in space/time, and then convince itself that that history is really some ‘“eternal” ˇ izˇek means by a ‘traumatic encounter with the necessity’. This is what Z [R]eal’; what Dyer is fleeing from is ultimately not just death, but death as Void. It is this ‘Reality’ (that is, the surplus of the real) that persistently haunts Dyer and which uncannily returns to Dyer’s consciousness at his mother’s demise. From thence, Dyer must re-fashion a history which will help him ‘reintegrate some “impossible” kernel of the Real’ through retrospectively reading his mother’s death as the point which defines his life’s ambition; but as Zˇizˇek correctly states, this attempt at reintegration will always fail; Dyer’s mother’s death only exposes him irrevocably to his own position in the Void. What is finally ironic about Dyer’s position, and this is in view of what Zˇizˇek


recounts, is that Dyer’s necessitating for himself a history – or more accurately, predestining his own history – has actually trapped him within the endless cycle of living and dying, which is truly an ‘eternal necessity’. Postmodern metaphysics and the detective novel51 I have sought to avoid the argument that the ambiguity of the novel is ultimately Ackroyd’s wordplay and teasing of the reader. Of course, I do not discount the validity of reading the novel as engaging the reader in play, and I am essentially in agreement with Richter when he argues that the postmodern mystery (which he considers Hawksmoor to be) ‘goes considerably further in fostering the awareness of the fictionality of the situations, and one major difference [from traditional mysteries] is over whether the synthetic signals are internal or external’.52 Take for example the penultimate paragraph again. The ‘I’ could easily be the position of the reader herself and an index of how the story is constantly drawing and distancing her simultaneously, refusing anagnorisis even as it invites it. The reader is further cast as the child begging to be let into the secret of the text, only to be refused by the omnipotent narrator. But I am also of the opinion that Ackroyd’s narrative achieves more than postmodern playfulness, and actually embodies a deep philosophical awareness about the nature of time and space, of life and death. The city, time, the body and death are all powerfully connected in the novel, reinforcing and repudiating one another. Ackroyd’s casting of the novel in the detective genre also has important implications. Traditionally, the detective fiction offers a supremely intelligent crime stopper who utilises wits and logic to aid in his (detectives in this genre are usually male) quest to solve cases. According to Margaret Crawford in her discussion of urban detective fiction, the detective is a ‘privileged figure’ whose goal is, like the psychoanalyst, ‘to penetrate below the surfaces of the city to discover meanings hidden in the city’s streets’.53 Hawksmoor, of course, defies this type of detective narrative. Upon encountering the detective and following his pursuit of an elusive criminal, the text already suggests that the killer will not, in the end, be apprehended. London clearly resists the detective; it is no longer the detective that tames the city, but the other way round. Discovering and unearthing the city’s secret implicates the detective and absorbs him into the morass of the hidden. Perhaps this is why there will be no capturing of a criminal in the end, because the criminal and the crime are the city itself; it may

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be ‘exposed’ but never apprehended. For a city which, like a vast Void, can absorb and assimilate pluralities of experiences and encounters, the division between crime and law, criminal and police, is blurred. In this sense, the city is truly a threshold, and a threshold is where monsters are found.

The architectural uncanny in J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise Monstrous space is a major theme in most of Ballard’s work, which often deal with lived space turned hostile. A sampling of his novels (and certainly many of his short stories) would attest to this. Despite their geographically encompassing titles – The Drowned World (1962), The Crystal World (1966), Concrete Island (1974), The Day of Creation (1987), and Rushing to Paradise (1994) – these narratives are really microscopic focuses on particular communities and their lived environments, and how the latter have turned antagonistic against their human inhabitants. In High-Rise, Ballard combines the themes of monstrous space and modern living gone awry, the one complementing the other (a combination to which he will return again in Cocaine Nights [1997] and Super-Cannes [2000], two novels which share many affinities with High-Rise). It is an analysis of the psychological effects of inhabiting a vertical city and how a subtle form of repression is embedded in the psyche which becomes unleashed in this unique lived-space, simultaneously housing and un-housing its inhabitants. Without disqualifying the novel’s in-built meta-criticism,54 I want to offer a retrospective reading of the novel based on contemporary and refined theories of the uncanny, because I feel that High-Rise55 is not merely a novel about the negative effects of modern socialisation but a powerful study of the way contemporary dwelling places can bring about mass psychosis and threaten gender and sexual (especially the masculine) constructions. David Punter once said that Ballard’s science fiction is not about futuristic events, but about ‘the slight relocation of perception, wherein the monstrosity of our environment might at any moment spring into focus’.56 High-Rise confidently confirms this view when it posits a lived environment which takes on monstrous qualities and dimensions, by ‘encouraging’ those who live within it to confront their own repressed fears/monsters. It is evident that the novel focuses predominantly on its male protagonists; in fact, the modern high-rise is itself an overt masculine metaphor. But High-Rise is also about men (significantly represented by the three male protagonists of the novel, Anthony Royal, Dr Robert


Laing and Richard Wilder) who are disempowered, or fear disempowerment and castration, and the fact that these anxieties take place within a very masculine architecture announces the paradoxical effect that high-rise living has on masculinity. It is as though inhabiting a metaphor of masculine supremacy is also a castrating experience. The women in the novel are more or less excluded, and their presence mainly serves to reify the centrality of the masculine in the novel. They are, in other words, already symbolically castrated (or disempowered) and seem to realise this. This may explain why the mass psychosis that eventually transforms this modern existence into something barbaric is largely experienced by the men while women are relatively unaffected, seeming even to welcome the strange change. As the building’s conditions worsen, its space becomes gradually cluttered with forms of disorder, technical breakdowns, dead bodies, and garbage. This can be read as regression to a ‘primitive’ state; but alternatively, and in line with my reading of the uncanny, it is also a metaphoric representation of abjection, which in the end celebrates a matriarchal return and community. The uncanny High-Rise Scrutinising the debilitating effect of living in boxed cells encased within a tall, vertical architecture, the narrative confirms the view that this form of existence has, according to Joseph Grange, a strangely paradoxical logic of extremities: The extremes for … verticality are feelings of great intensity that shade toward the experience of the monumental, the heroic, and even the transcendental. This positive spatial experience is negated by its opposite extreme when … verticality expresses looming perpendicularity within the urban environment. The resultant feelings combine a sense of diminishment with a sense of imminent threat. This is one side of the predicament faced by city dwellers – the sense of being boxed in by the environment.57 The high-rise quickly takes on an ambivalent, paradoxical atmosphere and becomes a metaphorical threshold. As a lived space, the high-rise is no longer securely coded with traditional meanings of what a home should represent: security, freedom and peace. Instead, as much as it houses the inhabitant, it also communicates smallness and threat. This feeling of being ‘boxed in’ and being threatened recalls the taphephobic (fear of being buried alive) effect in Freud’s concept of the

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uncanny, a concept which will feature prominently in my reading of Ballard’s novel. Freud’s view of the uncanny is originally a theory about space, and more directly, lived space (home). And indeed, the uncanny, as he postulates, is simultaneously the feeling of homeliness and unhomeliness. Freud derives his theory of the uncanny from a careful study of the German words heimlich (homely) and unheimlich (unhomely), which, although opposites, are also ‘identical’.58 Hence, in the German version ‘homeliness’ incorporates contrary meanings of both familiarity and unfamiliarity. One recent critic has again rigorously picked up this thread of the uncanny with regards to the home. Anthony Vidler, in his book, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, argues that: As a concept, then, the uncanny has, not unnaturally, found its metaphorical home in architecture: first in the house, haunted or not, that pretends to afford the utmost security while opening itself to the secret intrusion of terror, and then in the city, where what was once walled and intimate, the confirmation of community … has been rendered strange by the spatial incursions of modernity.59 Vidler resituates the uncanny within lived space. The contemporary home has become a contrary site which actually displaces its inhabitant even as it situates him in a supposedly personal and private space. As the locus of the uncanny, the modern home also incorporates monstrous qualities because it promises stability and security, but also threatens and disorientates. As Timothy Beal argues: Monsters are personifications of the unheimlich. They stand for what endangers one’s sense of at-homeness, that is, one’s sense of security, stability, well-being, health and meaning. They make one feel not at home at home. They are figures of chaos and disorientation within order and orientation, revealing deep insecurities in one’s faith in oneself, one’s society and one’s world.60 Beal is of course using the example of the unheimlich to help explain the paradox of monsters. But my argument is precisely how the un/homely is a quality of the monstrous. The paradox of unheimlich, applied to Ballard’s novel, subsequently confirms Grange’s reading of verticality. But as I have argued (and will later elaborate), it is not that lived space is monstrous but that it can assume monstrous qualities through the way it is experienced; as Vidler surmises, ‘there is no such thing as


uncanny architecture, but simply architecture that, from time to time and for different purposes, is invested with uncanny qualities’.61 Vidler’s argument is that a home can take on uncanny (and monstrous) qualities when those who live in it begin projecting their hidden and repressed fears onto it, resulting in the home becoming infused with a sense of imminent danger and threat. This is what he means when he writes that the uncanny aspect of architecture is derived from ‘a representation of mental state of projection that precisely elides the boundaries of the real and the unreal in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming’.62 I will argue that this is precisely what happens in Ballard’s novel. High-Rise concerns a group of people living in a high-rise and shows how conditions suddenly deteriorate after a pet dog is found killed in the building’s community pool. An obvious class war between those who live in the upper floors and those in the lower regions explodes and soon turns living conditions and the building itself into a monumental site of abjection. This regression to primitivism and savagery is, in my view, related to the feeling of diminishment and threat (of which Grange speaks), which in the end completely overwhelms the high-rise inhabitants so much so that all positive qualities of vertical living are eclipsed. Heroism and grandeur become undermined, to be replaced by mock-heroism instead (this is especially exemplified by Richard Wilder);63 it is also already suggestive of a form of haunting that is sensed by the inhabitants. These dwellers are constantly struggling with a certain numinous fear which they cannot name (numinous because it is repressed deep within them), and which causes them to feel ‘buried’ in their immediate surroundings. Taphephobia is strongly affiliated with a fear of otherness which is almost always represented as the feminine other (more of this later). This fear of the feminine takes on various guises in the novel. As I will show in this chapter, there is a lot of over-representation of aggressive masculinity performed by the male inhabitants of the high-rise, almost as if they are aware that living in this icon of masculinity compromises their own masculinity. Indeed, the ‘homotextuality’64 of the novel is suggestive. The fear of the feminine is also the fear of becoming emasculated, or castrated, and the powerful male icon – the high-rise – metaphorically challenges and diminishes the men who inhabit it. This fear of the other, compounded by the fear of the self becoming the other, results in a masochistic dialectic which at once disavows the father figure but also reinstates him. It is on this ambivalent note that

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the novel concludes. The father figure in the novel, Anthony Royal, is in the end removed, and the ‘sons’, represented in the novel by Dr Robert Laing and Richard Wilder, are both metaphorically infantilised once more. And although there are hints that the former attempts to supplant the matriarchal community to reaffirm a masculine dominance, the narrative ambiguously ends here. Ballard’s novel captures the power of the uncanny home and its influence upon those who live in it, and reveals how this power works its nightmare and transformation. But perhaps nightmare is too harsh a word, for the ending reasserts a sort of return to the pre-oedipal, which can be read as either celebratory or total regression, depending on which theoretical position one is coming from. What is obvious, however, is that the novel cleverly constructs a very masculine ideology in the image of a phallic icon, but then systematically deconstructs it to reveal that ideological system’s constructedness and frailty. Within the high-rise, some of the major characteristics of the uncanny are wonderfully played out – castration, bodies in pieces and the ambivalent relationship with the womb/tomb.65 The men who live in the high-rise are, of course, already candidates for the uncanny to resurface. They already exhibit some form of weakness or repression, which living in the high-rise only exposes. Dr Robert Laing, for example, has just come out of a difficult divorce and is vulnerable (13). He is emotionally attached to his rather masculine sister (who also lives in the high-rise), and continues to harbour certain anxieties about their alcoholic mother. All this, I will later argue, suggests an incestuous and masochistic trait manifested by Laing in relation to his sister, who becomes the Good Mother as opposed to the Bad Mother (the alcoholic mother). Here, suffice to say this relationship binds Laing powerfully to his women kin in a way which subsequently emasculates him and prevents him from forming healthy relations with women outside his family circle. In other words, Laing is already unconsciously, masochistically bound to his sister, and his failed marriage is merely a consequence. When Laing goes to live in the high-rise, he is also returning to his masochistic fantasy. Yet, if in this masochistic economy the woman plays the dominant role,66 masochism then becomes curiously incompatible with living in a modern high-rise, which is a metaphor of masculine superiority. Laing, who is already ‘castrated’ before coming to live in the high-rise, would necessarily find living in one attractive; for here, he can identify with a powerful icon of maleness and perhaps find a way of reclaiming his own masculinity. The masculine environment of the high-rise is


further suggested by the clear occupational demarcations according to gender within the building. Here, the men do traditionally masculine jobs, while the women take on traditionally feminine ones.67 This clear demarcation can help reassert a distinction between the masculine and the feminine which, of course, conventionally reinforces the authority and power of the former. Laing also admires Richard Wilder for his ‘overly aggressive sexuality’ and ‘restlessness’ (14), characteristics almost directly in contrast with Laing’s own sexual failure and passivity. Here, it is as though living in a masculine icon requires ‘manliness’, a leap of faith made by Laing between the building and Wilder, which Laing also hopes to incorporate. But, this will ultimately prove futile because this masculine icon is – like masculinity – a construction which is based on repudiating that other which is not masculine, and hence is paradoxically dependent on that otherness. Another important male protagonist is Anthony Royal, the designer and architect of the high-rise, who, with his wife, occupy the penthouse. It will later be made clear in the novel that Royal is more than just the architect – he also functions as a kind of patriarch figure who presides over the women and ‘children’ (the tenants) who live there. In Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, this Royal-like figure is rehearsed as Bobby Crawford and Wilder Penrose respectively, both of whom, like Royal, share a megalomaniac streak for authority which in truth, disguises fear and hysteria. For Royal is not an omnipotent patriarchal figure, but one who is thoroughly aware of his own failure and weakness; indeed, he masquerades masculinity (he expresses ‘arrogance and defensiveness’, has ‘theatrical gestures such as the Alsatian and his white-hunter’s jacket’, 27) more than exudes it. What is also interesting is that the ‘built-in flaws’ (27) of the building are also felt as a personal sense of inadequacy, re-enacting, in a strange way, a curious affinity between space and body. His masquerade belies the Void of his masculinity, just as the high-rise screens off what is internally regressing, that is, the failure, or reversal of that which the building is purported to represent – the grandeur of (masculine) progress.68 And as much as the building’s flaws reflect his weakness, the building is also a cause of that weakness. For it is while on site at the high-rise project that he suffered a terrible injury which will permanently confine him to a prosthetic machine. He is the ‘project’s first casualty’ (37). Even as an architecture is supposed to represent its owner’s wealth and power, it has already become infused with an uncanny quality when it undermines that power. A symbol of masculinity is also the encapsulation of its failure.

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Arguably, the character most haunted by castration is Richard Wilder. A television producer (an occupation which, I will demonstrate, has important implications), Wilder’s form of masculinity is blatantly loutish. He is a ‘thick-set, pugnacious man who had once been a rugby player’ with a ‘loud voice and rugby-scrum manners’ (14), and carries out clandestine affairs with the women in the building. Yet, this overt masculine performance once again belies a terrible fear of the uncanny: He was constantly aware of the immense weight of concrete stacked above him, and the sense that his body was the focus of the lines of forces running through the building, almost as if Anthony Royal had deliberately designed his body to be held within their grip. At night, as he lay beside his sleeping wife, he would often wake from an uneasy dream, into the suffocating bedroom, conscious of each of the 999 other apartments pressing on him through the walls and ceiling, forcing the air from his chest. (48, my emphasis) This is a description of taphephobia, which Freud aligns with the ‘phantasy … of intra-uterine existence’, a fantasy obviously aligned with the maternal.69 Taken together – the fear of the tomb and the womb – the result is a symbolic castration experienced by an aggressively masculine figure such as Wilder. Interestingly, Wilder’s wife lays quietly asleep, perhaps implying that women are unaffected by this intra-uterine reexperience, because they are, theoretically, the embodiment of that experience. Royal is also implicated in Wilder’s discomfort, but what is extraordinary is that Wilder sees Royal as designing him for the building, rather than the other way around.70 Apart from suggesting an oedipal relationship (more of this later), there is also a sadomasochistic performance enacted in which Wilder sees himself as part of an elaborate fantasy of emasculation and victimisation. Here, the novel’s homotextual quality is evident: Wilder is symbolically castrated not only by the fear of a feminine other, but also by his position as victim in a sadomasochistic fantasy. In this imaginary, Wilder is the constructed victim body which Royal encases within a larger construct. The double diminishment – Wilder’s body within a building within Royal’s design – reinforces Wilder’s threatened masculinity, more so because he assumes the position of a minimalist object, a mechanism designed to fit a building, rather than the other way around. In the scheme of this sequence then, Wilder’s sense of castration is profound indeed, being positioned as both feminine and object of another’s design (with all its implications). If


Laing’s symbolic castration is attributed to masochism, Wilder’s has a strong sadomasochistic flavour.71 Wilder specialises in documentaries about disasters and harbours ambitions to document the lives of highrise inhabitants. When the building first shows signs of social cracks, he sees an opportunity to combine his speciality and his ambition. Armed with a cine-camera, ‘with which he planned to shoot a few hundred feet of pilot footage for his documentary on the high-rise’ (43), his initial attempt to document the early stage of anarchy beginning with the topmost floors is immediately obstructed by Royal. The cine-camera – an obvious phallic symbol – already implies castration.72 Wilder’s attachment to his cine-camera positions him as a powerful, detached gaze which serves to ameliorate his castration fears that living in the building arouses. With this mechanical eye, Wilder attempts to reverse his victim position to one that is dominant by ‘penetrating’ the ‘secret logic of the high-rise’ (121) – that is, Royal’s secret. Psychoanalyst Christian Metz has shown that ‘the role of monocular perspective (hence of the camera) and the “vanishing point” … inscribes an empty emplacement for the spectator-subject, an allpowerful position which is that of God himself, or more broadly of some ultimate signified’.73 Metz argues that the eye behind a camera becomes a kind of transcendental ‘I’ which is at once both the projector (in the sense that ‘I’ am ‘casting’ my eyes on things) and introjector, or screen (in that the things which the eye casts upon ‘come to be deposited within me’74). The I/eye becomes both the designator and recorder. This gaze is all-powerful, penetrating and possessing everything. If Metz’s theory is appropriated to sexuality, Wilder’s wielding a cine-camera can be read as his staging of a powerful, authorial, and sexually dominant masculine position. Yet what he fails to realise is that the position of the powerful gaze is thoroughly dependent on that which is penetrated, and that without the latter, the gaze is completely impoverished: The gaze does connote power, yet simultaneously, and not at a more fundamental level, it connotes the very opposite of power – impotence – in so far as it involves the position of an immobilised witness who cannot but observe what goes on.75 This suggests that the dialectic of dominant/victim positions is curiously ambiguous and highly complex. The one who has the gaze, the phallus, is not necessarily dominant, and the one who is penetrated is not always subordinate. In her brilliant exposition on lesbian sado-

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masochism, Lynda Hart argues that the strap-on dildo is perhaps the most powerful representation of the incompatibility between the phallus and the penis. She argues that the relationship of the two are often readily assumed, but that lesbian sex defies that assumption: Without that identification, the top who wears the strap-on is not the one who ‘has’ the phallus; rather it is always already the bottom who ‘has it’ by giving up what no one can have. In the lesbian imaginary, the phallus is not where it appears.76 Hart’s concept is useful as an analogy for my reading of the gaze that Wilder assumes. Like the ‘top’ in Hart’s theory, Wilder, who possesses the phallic symbol, does not necessarily have the phallus.77 He wishes to reverse his ‘bottom’ position (this is suggested by Wilder’s climbing the building), only to find that when he finally succeeds in getting to the top, he becomes completely emasculated, even despite killing the oedipal father. The bottom position, in Hart’s view, possesses the phallus because it provides that situation for power to be performed, without which, the top would be powerless. Hence, it is the bottom which is truly powerful because it distributes, but does not lose, its power through submission. The top on the other hand, can only receive power – much like Wilder receiving images through his monocular phallic object – but cannot keep it unless it is constantly reinforced by the objects to be gazed-at. If this ‘harmonious’ relationship fails, however, the gazer will be left powerless to imbibe images over which he has no control. Victor Burgin is also in agreement with this view when he writes that ‘certainly the look [i.e., the gaze] puts out its exploratory, or aggressive, “shoots” (in Lacanian expression) but it equally clearly also takes in objects from physical space into psychical space – just as it projects unconscious objects into the real’.78 With Burgin’s view, I return to my earlier point that architecture can take on uncanny qualities when its inhabitants project their fears onto it, rendering it an embodiment of that fear in the end. It is not only selected persons who encounter the uncanny, as my argument seems to suggest. It is a familiar experience in the high-rise building, encountered by all. A common complaint shared by the tenants of the high-rise is insomnia, which has become almost ‘an epidemic’ (13). Indeed, insomnia has been considered as one of the building’s flaws (13). I want to argue that insomnia is redolent of the taphephobic experience. Within this ‘small vertical city’ comprising apartment ‘boxes’ (9) are tenants who cannot sleep at night. Their


insomnia may be evocative of their sense of entrapment, a psychical one that translates itself into something physical. Not surprisingly, only Wilder seems to understand this perpetual wakefulness (recall his sleeplessness as he ponders on his own sense of entrapment). As he later muses, the tenants’ enmity towards each other merely mirrors their struggle against ‘the image of the buildings in their own minds, the multiplying layers of concrete that anchored them to the floor’ (58). Their uncanny fears have become projected onto the buildings, which they see as an enemy that they cannot acknowledge because it houses them (and because, if they do, they would be undermining their own sense of stability, security and well-being). As a result, the tenants grow increasingly aggressive and antagonistic toward each other. The whole living environment deteriorates steadily, and this condition of disorder and strife would eventually require, even compel, a new existential regime to replace it. The feminisation of High-Rise Meaghan Morris agrees that towers are metaphors of masculinities, and most pronouncedly, the ‘male ego’, and that they reaffirm ‘a controlled and controlling “masculinity” … as the norm of public conduct’.79 As controlling and controlled male ego, towers are machines which represent order, effectiveness and efficiency in compliance with the progress of our technical age. As Laing observes in High-Rise, the building’s ‘staff of air-conditioning conduits, elevators, garbage-disposal chutes and electricity switching systems provide a never-failing supply of care and attention that a century earlier would have needed an army of tireless servants’ (10). But the high-rise as masculine icon is not, however, a stable gendered signifier. In one particular instance in the text, the masculinity of the tower is compromised by an equally feminine representation. The erectness of the tower is cleverly balanced by an equally suggestive description of the anticipation of the towers as open legs with regards to an imminent penetration. It was only fitting that the sun first appeared between the legs of the apartment blocks, raising itself over the horizon as if nervous of waking this line of giants. During the morning, from his office on the top floor of the medical school, Laing would watch their shadows swing across the parking-lots and empty plazas of the project, sluice-gates opening to admit the day. For all his reservations, Laing was the first to concede these huge buildings had won their attempt to colonise the sky. (19)

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On the one hand (and aside from the culture-over-nature implication in this passage), the gendered representations of the building as masculine and the sun and sky (nature) as feminine are evident.80 The nervousness of the sun between the ‘legs’ of the ‘waking giants’ is a compressed description with powerful sexual overtones, which renders nature as passive and indecisive, and hence, feminine, and culture – the high-rises – as dominant. On the other hand, however, this same passage can also suggest the building as female, opening up her legs for the impending incursion of the phallic sun. Such conflicting readings suggest the ambiguity of masculinity, which has links to the fear and repudiation of the feminine. The tower metaphor, in subscribing to both gender positions, is representative of the over-riding crisis experienced by the male protagonists of the novel who must constantly assert their masculinity in various guises in order to extricate themselves from an otherwise complex dependence on their feminine other, and hence become effeminised themselves. Another example is found in the way the high-rise is characterised by much male activity. The novel, for the most part, is tacit about the roles of the women characters in the novel, relegating them to rather passive, uninteresting functions: glamorous wives and/or sexual objects, or frightened, quarrelsome females. The novel revolves around three major male figures, while the prominent women characters circulate between and around them. Royal, for example, as the symbolic father in the novel, allows his wife Anne, to sexually tantalise the younger male tenants in order to arouse in him passion and jealousy; but she must never actually have an affair. Her promiscuities can only be ‘imminent’ (73). Wilder, married with children, continues to carry out clandestine affairs with several other female tenants. Indeed, the women in this building are there to serve men. But if the text is tacit about women, it also subtly reveals how the masculine is ultimately dependent on the feminine. Royal, who is already a castrated father, relies on his wife’s performance to reassure him of his (sexual) position; Wilder’s sexual aggressiveness and restlessness exist because there are women (including his wife) who would reinforce them; and even the passive Laing believes that he has to be careful so that he does not slip easily into another marriage – implying the availability and willingness of women to submit. All this, however, only reinforces the suggestion of an unconscious fear of the feminine, because without it, the masculine cannot derive its sense of presence and power. In this very homosocial microcosm, becoming a man requires the ‘repudiation’ – in the sense of repressing, subjugating, even domesticating – of


women. But this repudiation already masks a certain fear of and desire for (in both wanting and wanting to be) the feminine, which of course, is embodied by women. As Judith Butler asserts: Indeed, the desire for the feminine is marked by that repudiation: he wants the women he would never be; indeed he would not be caught dead being her: thus he wants her. One of the most anxious aims of his desire will be to elaborate the difference between him and her, and he will seek to discover and install proof. This will be a wanting haunted by a dread of being what it wants, a wanting that will also always be a kind of dread; and precisely because what is repudiated and hence lost is preserved as a repudiated identification, this desire will be an attempt to overcome an identification that can never be complete.81 Based on Butler’s view, I would like to propose that in High-Rise, the men who live in this building are trying to restore their threatened masculinity through identification with this very powerful and visible male icon. The women who choose to live there must comply, and occupy a subservient position.82 But in repudiating the women, there is already dread, a feeling of being haunted, which I have referred to as the uncanny. The masculine repudiation of the feminine can never be complete, and it is this gap that allows an uncanny experience to arise. The high-rise is also constructed like a zoo, and as a controlled environment which simulates freedom (80). This tactic cleverly disguises Royal’s desire to dominate, to be in control, to be on ‘top’ whilst subjugating the buildings and their tenants to his ‘secret logic’ (121). The tenants do not realise that they have become captives: they are people who feel ‘no particular objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape’ and who ‘[thrive] on rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed’ (36). In a way, they have fulfilled Royal’s dream for his high-rise zoo, where its inhabitants live in captivity believing themselves to be free. Yet, it is in this disguised captivity that the tenants begin facing their hidden dread. Confining each to his or her private cells, these apartment blocks have also: Removed the need to repress every kind of anti-social behaviour, and left them [the tenants] free to explore any deviant or wayward impulses …. Secure within the shell of the high-rise like passengers

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on board an automatically piloted airliner, they were free to behave in any way they wished, explore the darkest corners they could find. In many ways, the high-rise was a model of all that technology had done to make possible the expression of a truly ‘free’ psychopathology. (36)83 Made to occupy the subjugated position (at least unconsciously, as suggested by the ‘uneasy tenants’), the building suddenly becomes peopled with tenants re-experiencing intra-uterine existence, resulting in the abandonment of the Symbolic order of everyday life. As the metaphor of the airliner suggests, these tenants, despite occupying a subjected position, can in their confinement paradoxically take flight and soar above their subjection. Here, the phallus is floating incredibly; the dominant masculine father (Royal), in attempting to subjugate his building and tenants, has actually released his tenants into a flight of pre-oedipal fantasy which will ultimately free them from his domination. For all his blatant show of masculinity – the dog, his hunter’s jacket, his cane – he cannot, in the end, prevent the masculine from becoming deconstructed and the (dread of the) feminine from returning. The return of the dreadful feminine When life in the high-rise progressively deteriorates, the physical environment reflects this condition. The place is polluted with garbage (the disposal system no longer works) and water and electricity supply is erratic (100). This state of affairs is ultimately related to the residents’ lack of interest in the world around them (77). As the tenants turn more and more psychically inwards, all that is external becomes neglected and allowed to disintegrate. Elements that connect the individual to the external world – mail, transport (and even visitors) – are refused and become refuse themselves. Primitiveness becomes increasingly the state of affairs. The tenants organise themselves into warring clans (31); Laing, for example, eats ‘at random whenever [he feels] hungry’ and increasingly speaks in a coarsening language (100). Even the tenth floor, which has served as the neutral zone between the upper level tenants and the lower ones, is now neglected and allowed to run down (88). Earlier in the novel, the tenth floor accommodated the ‘double logic’ (60) of the high-rise, in that it served as the floor where neutrality is observed so that the daily routines of shopping and hairdressing can be carried out undisturbed, while at the same time maintained a sort of hostile complicity which will be ignored the moment anyone leaves this floor. As Wilder observes, this floor


allowed the residents, who are enjoying the breakdown and becoming increasingly confrontational to come together to end ‘the frigid isolation of the previous months’ (60). But it is the confrontation that ultimately brings the tenants together, and the tenth floor enables this paradoxical logic. Being boxed in their individual apartments and isolated from one another, it seems that the only way for the tenants to actually break away from those conditions is to physically ‘confront’ the building by neglecting it and allowing it to deteriorate; but to do this, they have to also confront each other because they are the building. Since one cannot ultimately fight space (and especially a space which is the repository of the unconscious), the alternative then is to fight what inhabits that space, which is each other. The tenth floor eventually loses its function as either a neutral or confrontational zone. Confrontation itself has almost come to a standstill, and the tenants are now acting like children in their petty attempts at vandalism (76, see below). Admittedly, there are still occurrences of physical violence perpetrated upon tenants, but the novel is more or less silent about these events from this point on. Instead, what preoccupies the tenants more is film-making. As Royal’s wife informs him, ‘They’re all making their own films down there … Every time someone gets beaten up about ten cameras are shooting away’ to be later shown ‘in the projection theatre’ (90). As actual violence progressively declines in the building, the need to record it becomes an important source of release as well as the opportunity to continue that sense of solidarity. Violence initially brought the tenants together, but now, it is recorded violence screened in a common theatre that does that. As the uncanny gradually and profoundly returns, resulting in the tenants regressing to an infantile, primitive-like state, the need for physical violence is also reduced. Only Wilder, the overtly masculine figure, continues to exempt himself from this petty vandalism and recording/viewing of beatings because he continues figuratively to uphold that masculine prerogative within the Symbolic system which the building idealises. He is, as Anne says, ‘waiting for something really gruesome’ (90) which, as a form of literary foreshadowing, is his showdown with Royal, the oedipal father himself. Mary Douglas, in her now classic Purity and Danger, has surmised that, ‘pollution … confuse[s] or contradict[s] cherished classifications’.84 Classification has to do with order and control, with having things in their proper place, and when this is disturbed, pollution occurs.85 In her rereading of Douglas, Kristeva posits that that which is polluted, or polluting, is the abject; the abject, she argues, is moreover, the condition of the maternal who, through menstrual blood and

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birth-giving, embodies abjectness. This is because the female body defies borders by allowing what is internal to become external.86 Douglas also contends that states of disorder resignify, or re-pattern order: ‘it has potentiality. It symbolises both danger and power’.87 Thus, the polluted state of the building in High-Rise swings it from a masculine representation to a feminine embodiment, in that it now manifests an abject state and defies hygiene and order (classification). In this regime, a new order emerges, one that will irrevocably change the course of the conditions within the high-rise. Anthony Vidler has pointed out that twentieth-century representations of architecture are often depicted in ‘phantom shapes’ which signify ‘anxiety or horror in the face of the [V]oid’.88 My contention is that the high-rise in Ballard’s novel houses exactly his kind of horror, which in psychoanalytic language is also associated with the condition of the pre-oedipal, or pre-Symbolic order. And of course, the maternal, or the feminine, would be relegated to the position of this dreaded Void, due to her clear association with all that is not Symbolic – father, masculinity, men. Although there may not be any phantom shapes captured by the actual outlook of the high-rise, phantoms in the forms of the masculine anxiety and the fear of the uncanny nevertheless haunt this lived space. The primitive and polluted condition of the high-rise represents a defiance of progress and order, as well as a metonym of the ‘horror of the Void’, or the dreadful return of the repressed feminine. Imaging the building as masculine is then an attempt to screen off that Void, which is always already a failure. As Zˇizˇek would argue, a metaphor of masculinity is there to cause a misperception of: the [V]oid around which drive circulates as the primordial loss constitutive of desire. In other words, fantasy provides a rationale for the inherent deadlock of desire: it constructs the scene in which the jouissance we are deprived of is concentrated in the other who stole it from us.89 What is this primordial loss but the desire of the maternal other, who through the entry of the subject into the masculine coded Symbolic has effectively been displaced? What substitutes this loss is, instead, a fantasy of the Name-of-the-Father as law and order to negotiate that loss through a blaming of that (m)other (which is the point of desire in the first place) for taking desire away. Women carry the burden of the lost desire of the male whilst simultaneously embodying that desire,


reaffirming Butler’s earlier view that being male has to do with repudiˇ izˇek’s view, when comating, because he desires and fears the female. Z pared to Butler’s, reinforces the association between horror and dread, the Void and the feminine. Because the tenants are relegated to a feminine position in response to Royal’s need for dominance, thus motivating an uncanny encounter, what results is that the building now houses the horror of the Void which also paves way for the return of the repressed feminine. The tenants actually find the dissolution of the high-rise ‘enjoyable’ (60), and this is itself a challenge to Royal’s authority. He is, for example, surprised by the way ‘the residents had become exaggeratedly crude in their response to the apartment building, deliberately abusing the elevators and air-conditioning systems, and overstraining the power supply’ (76). This abuse of the building’s order and controlinducing mechanism (the elevator, an especial target, signifies hierarchy) is an obvious act of rebellion against both the symbolic father-figure and the metonymic masculine icon. When things have reached a crucial stage, Royal retreats into hiding in his penthouse, having been abandoned by his wife and his ‘sons’ (or more ‘her’ sons, ‘the professional people around her’ [72, my emphasis]), only to be finally hunted down and shot by the most castrated of his ‘sons’ – Wilder. Again, following the paradoxical and reversal logic of the highrise, the captor has become a captive, and the hunter, the hunted. The novel strongly hints at the oedipal confrontation between Wilder and Royal. Wilder has a ‘confused image of his natural father’ (115) of which Royal knows and exploits. This is how Royal manages to prevent Wilder from scaling the high-rise the first time (115–6). But in the end, the masculine icon is but a mask, and the uncanny has almost completely overwhelmed the building and its tenants; the son, already castrated, is no longer in awe of his father. Royal is, by this time, the failed father figure holding on to his final vestige of weakening authority. He is also playing hide-and-seek with Wilder: During the past days [Wilder] had caught several glimpses of the architect, standing high above Wilder at the top of a staircase, disappearing in a commandeered elevator towards the fastness of the top floors. Without any doubt, he was deliberately exposing himself to Wilder, tempting him upwards. (18) I want to propose two possible reading of this passage. Firstly, in luring Wilder upwards, the castrated Royal may be hoping for his replace-

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ment, reasserting the masculine (Symbolic) system which the building idealises. When read in light of a sadomasochistic principle, Royal’s possible attempt to elevate his son to his position can be read as that sadomasochistic impulse to both expel and reinstate the father. Secondly, and to further the oedipal implication, Wilder has also, by this time, regressed to a child-like state. This ties in with the condition which Freud designates as moral masochism, which in this essay has been termed sadomasochism instead. According to Freud, this form of masochism has as its foundation a wish (of the son) ‘to have some passive (feminine) sexual relations with him’, which becomes translated into ‘a wish to be beaten by the father’ out of the unconscious guilt feeling of wanting to be identified with mother instead of the father.90 Clearly, Freud’s concept of moral masochism is closely associated with sadomasochism in that the homotextual element is evident, as well as the way the wish to disavow the father (through identification with the mother) is cancelled out by guilt which reinstates the father.91 Freud also adds that moral masochism ‘reactivates’ the oedipal complex all over again,92 a concept which, when used to interpret Wilder’s regression, is significant. As Wilder wanders upwards, he is ‘sucking his fingers, and thinking of himself abandoned in this huge building’ (164). He is the lost child, or more precisely, the child at the oedipal stage again, wavering between identifying with the father, or remaining with his mother. This building, representing both masculine and feminine, reinforces this confusion. By now, he is ‘no longer certain of [his cine-camera’s] function’ because the child at the oedipal stage has yet to appropriate the position of the all-powerful, penetrating gaze; in its place, he has a silver pistol which he ‘recognise[s] immediately’ (164), perhaps because the pistol is more obviously phallic, which Wilder, in his re-oedipalised state, vaguely remembers once possessing. When Royal and Wilder finally confront each other, the replay of the oedipal complex concludes in a different manner. When Wilder (who is still climbing upwards) spots Royal, he at first thinks that Royal may be playing a game with him. It is only when Royal strikes him, and in his feeling hurt like an ‘abused child’, does he raise ‘the silver pistol and [shoot] him through the chest (166). Wilder’s attempt to identify with the father, as the condition of a successful oedipal denouement, is rejected. It is not even clear why Wilder shoots Royal, as the text is silent about his thoughts and feelings. It may be anger, confusion, or both, or it may be that Wilder is still playing. If this passage rehearses the (failed) oedipal complex, it also stages the confrontation between the patriarch and his son which


Freud discusses in his Totem and Taboo (which in my view, is a kind of sadomasochistic homotext itself). In High-Rise, these two separate but mutual stages are converged but without the privileging of the father, as is often the case in Freudian theories. Wilder not only fails to identify with the father through a reactivated oedipal complex, he also does not totemise the father after killing him. Twenty yards away from this incident is a group of children at play, watched over by a community of women (167). Wilder joins them, trying at first to attract the women with his coloured and patterned chest – certainly a primitive, and perhaps residual, form of asserting his masculinity, which almost re-enacts once more Freud’s reinstatement of the father. But instead, his ‘make-up’ takes on a feminine form, as a passive beauty mark to be either admired or not (167). Once the proprietor of the gaze, Wilder is now the object of the gaze. Some of the women, who were once sexual objects and subservient counterparts to their men folk, are now Wilder’s ‘new mothers’ (168), clearly indicating that the re-oedipalisation stage has failed and that the final identification is with the (m)other again. But these ‘new mothers’ do not desire Wilder’s adoption and actually seek to kill him: From behind their sunglasses the women were looking intently at Wilder, as if reminded that their hard work had given them a strong appetite. Together, each removed something from the deep pocket of her apron. In their bloodied hands they carried knives with narrow blades. Shy but happy now, Wilder tottered across the roof to meet his new mothers. (168) I want to suggest two implications in the above passage. First, Wilder’s death would eliminate the last vestige of the ‘powerful’ masculine (although not quite yet the Symbolic order, as there is still Laing left); the collapse of the masculine hegemony must be sustained so that the feminine (m)other can truly ‘return’ without the threat of a dangerous masculine presence. Wilder would perhaps be seen as potentially dangerous because of his victory over Royal and his possible role as the latter’s substitute. Secondly, this passage also reinforces the misogynistic element in Ballard’s novel. In High-Rise, it is evident that Ballard is criticising the concept and construction of masculinity and modern technology, but at the expense of women. As mentioned earlier, the women characters play subservient roles, and in the end, despite the novel’s privileging the continuation of the feminine, the feminine is now depicted as truly dangerous indeed. They are mothers who no

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longer nurture, but who would devour a (male) child. Ballard explicitly calls these women ‘mothers’, but prefacing it with ‘new’; instead of suggesting a form of progressive female solidarity that would replace an anxiety-ridden masculine state, he actually posits the opposite. Here, the womb is really the tomb, and the feminine is ultimately monstrous.93 Interestingly, as the most passive of the major male characters, Laing is also the most adamant in continuing a masculinist tradition which the building has clearly abandoned. Earlier, it was noted that Laing harbours a masochistic impulse which has its root in an incestuous inclination (albeit unconscious) towards his mother and later, his sister (98–99). There is a reason for this transference. According to Gilles Deleuze, the masochist simultaneously desires a union with the mother and fears this symbiosis: [The mother] is the figure of the cold oral mother who represents the good mother from the infantile stage of imagined dual unity or symbiosis between mother and child. Bad mother traits are projected onto this image and are then idealised. In a process that eliminates the father from the symbolic order, the good oral mother assumes and transforms the bad mother functions of other maternal imagos, such as the Oedipal mother who is associated with sadistic elements, and the seductive uterine mother who is connected in fantasy to prostitution.94 For Deleuze, masochism subverts the law of the father and completely disavows him, reinstalling the mother as the object of love and controlling agent again.95 The oedipal mother and the uterine mother are bad mothers because the former is associated with the father and the latter is associated with distorted desires, and hence must be rejected in favour of the good oral mother, who, interestingly, must also stem from the bad one (note the assumption and transformation processes in Deleuze’s argument). Laing transfers his incestuous – and hence, masochistic – desires from his alcoholic mother (the bad mother) to his sister, who has become the good mother (the caring, concerned mother), and who, being a daughter, is also at once derived from the mother. It is also interesting that Laing’s father is completely absent (all we know is that he is dead), which suggests the disavowal of the father which is the condition of a masochistic fantasy. In the end, when Laing moves in with his sister, his unconscious desires to be near her again becomes actualised, thus reinstating that unspoken contract


between dominatrix and masochist. Laing has also invited the slightly older Eleanor Powell to join him and his sister. Eleanor, I suspect, is introduced into this ménage à trois both as complement and foil to Alice. For if Alice represents the good oral mother, the bad mother is equally still desired. This is only logical if the masochist is to reconcile the demonic figure and the moral agent of the desired mother: he must have both to play out his masochistic fantasy. Eleanor is clearly the bad mother figure because she reminds Laing of his mother (40). Laing catches her feeding her blood to her cat – a masochistic act which would satisfy Laing in his choice of her being part of his fantasy – just before he invites her to live with him and Alice. For Eleanor would not only be a bad mother, she would also be the one who would mediate between him and Alice. However, in a different context, Suzanne Stewart has correctly diagnosed that masochism is ultimately, like sadomasochism, a masculine ruse to reassert the patriarchal male. She points out that masochism is ‘a novel form of self control’.96 (Male) masochism, in positioning the woman as the object of desire and the sublime, already effaces the woman. The woman remains a passive slate on which the masochistic male writes his own sense of vulnerability and frailty, and the woman is only a dominatrix by virtue of her acquiescence to play that role without actually acting any part (it must be recalled here that masochism is an act of deferred sexual gratification, and that the woman must withhold playing her part). When Laing restages his masochistic fantasy with Alice and Eleanor, he is performing exactly the role of the masochist who nevertheless wants to be in control. Although he sees the two women as his ‘governesses’, and allows himself to be abused and seemingly imprisoned by them (172), he also desires to be dominant in his relationship with them; he wants to be the ‘hunter’ and ‘provider’ and derive sexual gratification from them as a patriarch would from his women-folk. The women, he realises, are not so willing participants and are merely acting the role (the term ‘pantomime’ is used) which he has designated for them in exchange for food and ‘the business of their physical survival’ (172). He suspects that the women are synchronising ‘their supervision of him’ (171) and have already discussed ejecting him from their domain (171). In the now feminised building, masculinity is no longer a necessary element, and the women have come to realise this and desire its removal. Laing realises that his masochistic fantasy is failing. He cannot even play the victim’s role because play-acting does not dissolve his otherwise strong hold on masculine supremacy, but only pretends to. This the women

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know, and come to be increasingly wary. As the text states, ‘perhaps they understood all too well what was taking place’ (172), although they do not witness Royal’s death, nor are they part of the female community which received Wilder. While Laing is even ‘sorry that Royal had died’ (172), he is also pleasurably thrilled at the prospect of being banished by the women, and contemplates how to appease them. This paradoxically reinforces the masochistic fantasy as well as the desire to reinstate a masculine order, which, as Suzanne Stewart has shown, are ultimately complementary. As a last resort, he plans to drug them with morphine ‘to tilt the balance of authority in his direction again, and increase their dependence on him’ (172). What is most sinister, in the end, is that this masochist is also the new father figure: in the total darkness which now pervades the high-rise, and ‘as the residents made their first confused attempts to discover where they were, Laing watched them contentedly, ready to welcome them to their new world’ (173). This final passage, I feel, encapsulates the real horror of HighRise: that the slow, painful struggle to destroy the constructed masculine image of power and authority is ultimately short-lived, for within this now castrated icon still exists a paternal figure, one more dangerous because he has learned to disavow his own paternalism and at the same time sustain and reaffirm it. He is the non-father, with equal emphasis on both prefix and noun, effaced but nevertheless present and powerful. Considering Stewart’s argument and my reading of masochism would, in this sense, challenge Leo Bersani’s claim that masochism is a ‘solution to the dysfunctional sequences of human maturation [which] would then be repeated as a dysfunctional choice – a choice, this time, for extinction rather than for survival’.97 Masochism, rather than leading to extinction, is surely a choice for survival, albeit a novel one, which is also more dangerous. The ambiguous ending of the novel may seem to reassert a re-emergence of the masculine, but may equally serve as a warning to be careful of such a return. It is impossible to decide which is the more plausible, but this only reaffirms the paradox of the high-rise and Ballard’s ambiguous landscapes of the mind.

Conclusion: what of the machine? It is evident from the novel that to inhabit the high-rise, one must become a machine oneself (34). From a psychasthenic point of view, high-rise inhabitants must become in Donna Haraway’s term, cyborgs, ‘hybrids of machine and organism’.98 Haraway’s essay, written ten


years after Ballard’s novel, is of course a proto-feminist treatise which rallies women to embrace technology to resignify the way gender and sexuality are codified. As a hybrid, transgressing rigid classification and rejecting borders, the cyborg can indeed become a powerful feminist icon to break away from the Symbolic order of strict binarism which pervades traditional western philosophy and science. But as Ballard’s novel demonstrates, the cyborg is at best a hopeful monster. Conjoining with machines does not aid in the ‘struggle over life and death’,99 but actually results in death. It is this condition that the tenants of the high-rise building rebel against. Royal has built his architecture basically to entomb his tenants in a perpetual existence of sterility which denies human experience. But this entombment turns into an uncanny atmosphere which, ironically, sets loose a chain of very human emotions and psychic reactions (especially the return of the repressed) which actually subverts and destroys Royal and his building endogenously. In saying this, it must be clarified that Ballard is not writing a literary work which involves ‘bachelor machines’.100 Ballard’s work, apparently privileging a modern male icon and metonymy of progress, is actually critical of such an image and implicitly suggests that all is not well in the Symbolic order. The presence of the uncanny which saturates the entire building and gradually transforms its inhabitants is the work of hidden fears projected onto the architecture, which confirms what Roger Luckhurst would term as Ballard’s fiction of inner space:101 that is, fiction about the worlds in one’s mind projected outwards and, there, worked out to its conclusion. Zˇizˇek has argued that the ‘problem of modern art is ‘no longer that of horror vacui, of filling in the Void, but rather, that of creating the ˇ izˇek to mean ‘representVoid in the first place’.102 By ‘creating’, I take Z ing’. For him, modern art is in a dilemma of representing the Void, especially now that psychoanalysis has exposed the reality (or Reality) of that Void, which, traditional art seemed to be vaguely aware of and busied itself with filling. Now that the Void is Real and everywhere, but ultimately elusive and nebulous, it is the difficult task of the modern artist to represent it. In my view, Ballard, through his novel High-Rise, has managed to create and represent the Void superbly, and has revealed that this Void lies at the heart of modern living and experience. Here, lived space takes on a monstrous reality of the repressed returning, bringing to the fore deep, dismal secrets of the self.

2 Geopolitics of the Serial Killer

Chapter one focused on the way lived space inherits monstrous dimensions because it assumes its inhabitants unconscious. In this chapter, I move on to a different kind of space and how it affects a particular type of monster – the serial killer. Two American novels will be considered: Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial American Psycho (1991), and Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie (1996). Both narratives take place within what I would call postmodern geopolitics – the dynamic dialectic between postmodern space and ideology – but address different manifestations of postmodern spatial ‘realities’. In American Psycho, it is the Baudrillardian simulacra, or hyperreal space, that will be the focus of my reading. This space is at once infused with endlessly deferring, replicating signs that are without originality and depth. In Zombie, I consider what Foucault calls a heteroropia, or a placeless place, and how this space shields the monster. Here, the mirror of the subject takes on assumed reality, whilst the subject of the mirror remains hidden from the Symbolic gaze in order to perform atrocity. In my discussion of the American Psycho, I view the simulacral world as the perfect mise-en-scène for the creation and existence of the serial killer. Patrick Bateman, the serial killer in the novel, summarises his existence this way: ‘Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in … this was civilisation as I saw it, colossal and jagged …’ (375).1 I will argue that the meaning Patrick finds is basically his own extreme conformity to this world of surface signs. It is this thorough conformity, or hyper-conformity, that transforms Bateman into a monster. The depthless self which Bateman embodies begins to find ways of occupying its own subjective emptiness with simulated, fragmented images as means of connecting with reality; yet this only further perpetrates that depthlessness. 65


Any extreme and total identification with ideology, such as in the case of Bateman and his identification with the capitalist sign system, is fundamentally dangerous. On this premise, I will then go on to analyse the novel and argue that the absence of any axiological explanation for Bateman’s psychosis reinforces my view that the postmodern represented space, or hyperreality, is ultimately the basis for his evil. Roger Caillois’s theory of the ‘legendary psychasthenia’ will also prove useful for my reading of the novel; together with Baudrillard’s theory, they explain the way space motivates and camouflages the killer. Eschewing subjectivity in favour of representative signs such as money and fashion as substitutes for who and what he is, Bateman is the perfect killer: becoming a sign himself, he is invisible. He chooses victims who are usually outside his culture of signs and are hence, marginalised, so that their elimination will remain insignificant. His evisceration of his victims’ bodies is literally his psychotic rejection of interiority in favour of surface;2 that is, he opens up body to expose the ‘depth’ of other selves and places them on the same level as his own depthless subjectivity. I will conclude my analysis of the novel with a brief discussion of the position of the reader with regards to the ethical contention of reading such a graphically violent narrative. Zombie (1991)3 offers another version of the invisible monster; but unlike the serial killer in American Psycho, whose invisibility is largely the result of hyper-conformity to an ideological system of signs, the invisibility of Quentin P. (the killer in Oates’s narrative) is due to his clever manipulation of the gaze of the Symbolic order, blinding it from recognising the monster that he is. By conforming exactly to how others wish to perceive him – a law-abiding, unnoticeable and nonthreatening member of a community – Quentin’s camouflaging technique evidences success: ‘I never contradict. I am in agreement with you as you utter your words of wisdom. Moving your asshole-mouth & YES SIR I am saying NO MA’AM I am saying. My shy eyes. Behind my plastic-rimmed glasses that are the color of skin seen through plastic’ (3).4 It is because he is always under the constant surveillance of the law (because of a criminal charge)5 that he becomes invisible. Realising that his community and the law are cognisant of his criminal capacity, he must deflect that gaze away from him by assuming his own otherness, the other extreme of a monster, the ‘perfect’ citizen. Having accomplished his disguise, Quentin is more or less free to practice ‘zombifying’ his victims into obedient sexual slaves. Drawing on, and interrelating, Foucault’s theory of the heterotopia and Lacan’s concept

Geopolitics of the Serial Killer 67

of the objet petit a, I will argue that Quentin has learned to occupy what can be designated as a heterotopic position, and there, has transformed himself into a objet petit a to fool the authoritative gaze of the law. Quentin’s monstrous perversion is also the direct result of a dialectical relationship between love of self (narcissism) and desire for others (homosexuality), which, I will demonstrate, are paradoxically one and the same for him. Quentin’s homosexuality was effectively repressed by both his father and the law (62, and 20–1 respectively), which caused it to turn inwards into himself and to manifest as destructive narcissism. His zombie – the creature he will create to love only him – fulfils and thwarts his peculiar dialectic of desire, at once embodying love for others and self-love (what I will term ‘narcissistic homosexuality). I must contend that the novel engages in pathologising the homosexual as criminal and monstrous, and stereotyping and marginalising racial otherness. These issues will be addressed. I conclude my analysis of Zombie with a suggestion that Quentin’s narcissism, in the end, takes on cosmic proportions: aligning himself with the cosmic void, Quentin sees himself as a kind of God who can do whatever he wishes. This merging with the void curiously returns my reading to what I have demonstrated in the Introduction, that the monster’s place is in the Void. I will conclude this chapter with an interrogation of the serial-killer’s geo-political space as largely reinforcing a white, middle-class American male environment which rehearses all over again a subtle form of colonial reterritorialisation that violently excludes (both figuratively and literally) subaltern groups (which include working-class women and coloured people) which, within this insular space, constitute as threats. Monstrosity hence, is not the ‘other’ from without, but (and reinforcing my argument in the Introduction) hails from the self and, more worryingly, is protected from, within.

The invisible monster: Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho In Lacanian psychoanalysis, what is ‘real’, at least for the purpose of my analysis, is the degree by which one is interpellated by one’s ‘dominant ideology’. For Kaja Silverman, the dominant ideology is the ideology which enables the individual to become socialised through an identification with, and pursuit of, collective desire. As long as this ideology ‘commands collective belief’, it will then be successful in ‘defining the reality of the prototypical subject’.6 In other words, the dominant ideology is one which will foster a sense of reality for the


individual. But Silverman is, in the end, suspicious of any ‘dominant ideology’ and calls it a ‘fiction’, implying that ideology is ultimately a ‘construction’ through a clever manipulation of signs (especially language). For Terry Eagleton, ideology is a ‘discourse’ which is at once complex and compelling because any successful engagement with a dominant ideology would also require a subject to ‘forget’ that she is within that ideology.7 Eagleton argues that the dominant ideology requires the individual to speak a specific discourse to the extent of cancelling out other potential or competing discourses. Because of this overt identification with one particular discourse, it becomes ‘natural’ to the speaker (thus confirming Silverman’s view that ideology commands belief); she forgets that she is merely articulating an ideological position and believes that she is articulating ‘reality’ instead. This misrecognition is repressive as it blinds the subject to other ideological positions. Contradicting positions must be suppressed so that a sense of coherence and wholeness within the dominant ideology is upheld. But as Eagleton warns: Ideology in its dominant form is often seen as a mythical or imaginary resolution of such contradictions, but it would be unwise to overestimate its success in achieving this goal. It is neither a set of diffuse discourses not a seamless whole; if its impulse is to identify and homogenise, it is nevertheless scarred and disarticulated by its relational character; by the conflicting interests among which it must ceaselessly negotiate.8 Eagleton’s caution is given a whole new significance in American Psycho. In my view, it is precisely the total identification with a dominant ideology that results in the creation of Patrick Bateman, the serial killer. Not only is the overestimation of a dominant ideology to represent reality ‘unwise’, it is positively dangerous and destructive. Patrick Bateman’s hyper-conformity to the capitalist ideology of materialism and commodification takes on monstrous proportions when he effectively seeks to obliterate anyone who, in his view, disturbs his sense of, and confidence in, his reality. I want to argue that Bateman’s ‘entrapment’ in an endless repetition of sameness – indeed, a ‘seamless whole’ – robs him of any sense of subjectivity and presence. Bateman articulates only one discourse and manipulates signs in only one way, which prevents him from breaking away from the surface experience – or reality as only images and signs – which he inhabits. This is why, as I will later argue, he watches so much television, because the television


screen mirrors his own lack of depth; this is why he is fascinated with labels and fashion, because their significances lie on surfaces; and this is why he murders and mutilates, because his own sense of depthlessness motivates him to destroy the depth in others by opening up and exposing their inner-selves in a desperate attempt to convince himself that everyone else, like him, is fundamentally empty. In other words, the reality that Bateman sees, understands and articulates is thoroughly determined by the ideology to which he subscribes. In conforming so thoroughly to an ideology of commodification, he becomes entrenched in materialistic signs, viewing them as natural and complete in themselves. This is the reality of the hyperreal. The postmodernity of American Psycho Bateman entertains a powerful fantasy which also serves as his reality. Yet, what exactly is Bateman’s version of reality? Here is a sample: I worked out heavily at the gym after leaving the office today but the tension has returned, so I do ninety abdominal crunches, a hundred and fifty push-ups, and then I run in place for twenty minutes while listening to the new Huey Lewis CD. I take a hot shower and afterwards use a new facial scrub by Caswell-Massey and a body wash by Greune, then a body moisturiser by Lubriderm and a Neutrogena facial cream. I debate between two outfits. One is a wool-crepe suit by Bill Robinson I bought at Saks with this cotton jacquard shirt from Charivari and an Armani tie. Or a wool and cashmere sport coat with blue plaid, a cotton shirt and pleated wool trousers by Alexander Julian, with a polka-dot silk tie by Bill Blass. The Julian might be a little too warm for May but if Patricia’s wearing this outfit by Karl Lagerfeld that I think she’s going to, then maybe I will go with the Julian, because it would go well with her suit. The shoes are crocodile loafers by A. Testoni. (76, emphasis in original) Cataloguing pervades the novel. I choose this passage because it brings together several important threads of Bateman’s version of reality. Firstly, there is the obsession with what he calls ‘hard-bodies’, which must be complemented by a strict regimen of surface hygiene. Then there is the need to be sartorially correct, so that his clothes match his date. Notice the absence of human, interpersonal relationship in Bateman’s meditation. For him, what is more important is his looking good, and an unimpeachable choice of clothing. Patricia (Bateman’s


date) does not register as a person, only as clothes which he must equal. Indeed, fashion is one of the few major concerns of Bateman. According to Douglas Kellner (commenting on Jean Baudrillard), fashion followers become identifiable signs.9 Fashion becomes a form of identification, but one that paradoxically destroys identity at the same time. It permeates almost all aspects of life but has no referentiality of its own. Hence, followers of fashion are signified by what they wear and not who they are. In Patrick Bateman’s world, he tends to recognise people mainly by their clothes, and evaluates them based on how smartly they dress. In fact, that is how he views himself as well – a fashion statement par excellence (29, for example). Such meticulous precision about how he is clothed and what he is wearing represents both a complete identification with the fashion scene as well as an emptying of individuality and self-meaning. Bateman has been colonised by the code of fashion, and has himself become incorporated into that system. Apart from fashion, television is another of Bateman’s belief system that is based on repetition and substitution. The shows in which he indulges are those which conflate the trivial and the serious, the mundane and the sensational (such as The Patty Winters Show with its weekly dose of bizarre topics [31, 68, 87, 138, 301, 347], which Bateman faithfully records and watches every week); or, in the case of the movie Body Double (by Brian de Palma), those centring on mistaken identities, perversions and atrocities. Shows like these allow Bateman to project his fantasy onto a simulated reality, preparing the ground for his own acting out of fantasy. The space of television offers the ‘fantasies of self-origination and … self-originating fantasies, the borders between inside and outside, between “self” and “world,” [which] are everywhere intensified and everywhere breached – the spillover of psychology into public sphere’.10 The fact that Bateman can remember the content of each episode of The Patty Winters Show distinctly is further evidence of his distorted reality in which mediated images are more valid and more meaningful than lived ones.11 Television images, I will argue, constitute a lack of the lack; they endlessly defer the achievement and fulfilment of desire even as they continue to tantalise and lure it. This is why it is such a potent instrument which Bateman uses to fuel his fantasy without ever satisfying it. And because Bateman’s fantasy is both limited (because the signs which make up the fantasy are limited) and powerful, it takes on a very dangerous edge. As Slavoj Zˇizˇek notes, ‘a fantasy construction … serves as a support for our “reality” itself … “holding us” only when we do not feel any opposi-


tion between it and reality – that is, when the ideology succeeds in determining the model of our everyday experience of reality itself’.12 In hyper-conforming to his signs, Bateman no longer separates his ‘reality’ from fantasy, regarding both as one. The fantasy world of Body Double becomes translated into his real world, and his murderous inclination is but an element of the hyperreality he experiences. Serial killing is a ceaseless act of brutality because fantasy cannot be culminated – like watching a television ‘serial’. The only way to satisfy television consumption is by watching more of it (for example, Bateman has seen Body Double thirty-seven times, and still counting). And the only way to satisfy his lust for killing is by killing more. Bateman’s form of reality is best defined by employing the Baudrillardian notion of simulacra. He inhabits a world in which things are reduced to mere copies of one another, in the same way that fashion arguably renders all its adherents similar. Reality is packaged and delivered in mediated forms, especially through the television screen, and the subject’s sense of worth rests merely on the surface. This is the world of the simulacra, where ‘[the] relation between [signs] is no longer that of an original to its counterfeit – neither analogy nor reflection – but equivalence, indifference…. Only the obliteration of the original reference allows for the generalised law of equivalence, that is to say the very possibility of production.13 American Psycho is obsessed with the production of signs. Characters are not identifiable as persons but by their clothing and choice of restaurants. The novel is populated by cardboard characters who look exactly the same as the next cardboard character. Originality is non-existent; there exist only models ‘of a real without origin or reality’ that continue to produce more duplicates. Everyone strives to achieve wealth, fame and beauty – to ultimately become exactly like one another, easily obliterated (no one misses something that is there all the time), renewable, and replaceable (everyone is indistinctive). The novel’s repetitiveness is obvious. In fact, the novel does not seem to go beyond a small cluster of episodes – murdering and practising grotesquery upon the victim’s dead bodies, eating at fancy restaurants, meditating and discussing fashion, television and video watching, visiting the gym, staging cosmetic rituals, discussing and appreciating music artistes, and the constant misrecognition of people. The routine events and mundane, repetitive episodes in Bateman’s life reinforce the endless repetition of his own meaninglessness in a simulated world. His hyperreality is confined to a limited set of activities, all of which paradoxically serves to deepen his sense of depthlessness.


Bateman’s ideology is precisely one of late-capitalism, which Fredric Jameson believes find expression in the cultural logic of postmodernity. It is a world where reality is ‘transformed into images, the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents’.14 Bateman inhabits a ‘social space which is now completely saturated with the culture of the image’15 and has powerfully (over-) identified with the image, so much so that the image is his only version of reality. In Bateman’s world, there is no time but the present. Fashion and television are ‘timeless’ in that they do not have a past or future reality, but signify only in the now. Television, especially, is notoriously present, in that whatever is mediated through its screen becomes immediate. For Bateman, space and signs become confused so that there is no longer a difference between what and where he is. Merging with his world, Bateman undergoes the process which Roger Caillois terms ‘legendary psychasthenia’, which he defines as a ‘disturbance in the … relationship between personality and space’.16 In imitating his surroundings, Bateman is not so much mimicking his world as assimilating into his surroundings. This is what is meant by hyper-conformity. His concept of space becomes so disturbed that he cannot differentiate his subjectivity from the space he inhabits, but becomes, as Caillois sees it, merely a point of spatial co-ordination among others. ‘[He] is dispossessed of [his] privileged [as the ‘origin of the coordinates’] and literally no longer knows where to place [himself]’.17 Caillois goes on to argue that when a subject is experiencing legendary psychasthenia, he ‘tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar’.18 In hyper-conforming with his reality, Bateman also views himself as what Mark Seltzer terms, ‘the mass in person’.19 No longer occupying any definite point in space, he becomes any point, and thus every point. He becomes that dark empty space which absorbs everything so that nothing can occupy him. Only he can occupy and not vice versa. And because Bateman’s space is inseparable from the signs with which he chooses to identify, and because these signs are non-original, he is rendered similar to nothing, but ‘just similar’ – a ‘real without origin or reality’. In her reading of Caillois, Elizabeth Grosz notes that: the psychotic .. [renounces his] rights to occupy a perspectival point, abandoning [himself] to being spatially located by/as other. This primacy of one’s own perspective is replaced by the gaze of another, for whom the subject is merely a point in space and not


the focal point in organizing space. The representation of space is thus a correlate of one’s ability to locate oneself as the point of reference of space: the space represented is as complement of the kind of subject who occupies it.20 Although I agree with Grosz’s view on psychosis, I am not convinced by her argument that a psychotic is someone who has renounced his spatial position as other. He is invisible to others (a point to which I will return), not because he cannot be located as an other, but because he has thoroughly identified with otherness. In a simulacral world, there are no subjects, only otherness. Here, Fred Botting’s essay on the Baudrillardian simulacra suggested in the movie Angel Heart proves helpful. Botting notes that in a simulacra, the ‘other’ is ‘a cipher, an image, a signifier: a cipher among ciphers, it is a cipher without a key, a code that refuses to be cracked. Images themselves, subjects become visible as servants of the cipher’.21 There are no selves in a simulacra because these selves have been absorbed by images, signifiers, ciphers; selves lose their presence in this space and become identified with a seamless space of similar signs. Appropriating this view to American Psycho, I will argue that it is not otherness that Bateman renounces, but self. He has so thoroughly identified with the sign system of capitalist ideology that he has become a sign himself, identifiable only by the image he portrays. He is ‘a cipher among ciphers’ which are without a key (or origin). And indeed, one of the ways Bateman discloses his identity is through his expensive business card: ‘New card.’ I try to act casual about it but I’m smiling proudly. ‘What do you think?’ ‘Whoa,’ McDermott says, lifting it up, fingering the card, genuinely impressed. ‘Very nice. Take a look.’ He hands it to Van Patten. ‘Picked them up from the printer’s yesterday,’ I mention. ‘Cool coloring,’ Van Patten says, studying the card closely. ‘That’s bone,’ I point out. ‘And the lettering is something called Silian Rail?’ ‘Silian Rail?’ McDermott asks. ‘Yeah. Not bad, huh?’ (44) In a world where signs matter most, the dollar sign reigns supreme. The passage above, although revolving around Bateman’s new business card, is really about money. Bateman is trying to offset his lack of right


connections by showing off his expensive card. But the card, a sign, is merely a representative sign of another sign, money. Bateman the subject is thoroughly subverted and inundated by a deluge of signs. His name – the sign of his personhood – is less important than the card which carries his name and the font with which the name is inscribed, both of which are less important than the materialistic symbol (money) the card represents (snugly kept in a Barnet’s gazelleskin wallet which costs $850 [44]). Hence, Bateman becomes a sign twice removed, with the most invisible sign of all – money – being his distinctive representative. Money – the most powerful of exchangeable, repetitive and renewable signs – is the ultimate fantasy object with which Bateman completely identifies.22 Money is invisible, but powerfully present and able to transform its wielder into a ‘concrete existence’, the way money materialises Bateman into a representative of the dollar sign. Bateman is not the only hyper-conformist in the narrative. In American Psycho, there is an ideologically distinct group of characters who inhabit this simulacral world. White, middle-class, educated, wealthy, beautiful, money and power circulate significantly in this group, and members become the mirror images of every other simulated sign. Whenever Bateman sizes up someone in terms of his or her clothes, he is basically looking at a mirror and projecting his own image onto others, even as others reflect him. As we have seen, in Grosz’s summation, he is already psychotic, but his psychotic nature is not, as I have been arguing, a renunciation of otherness but an identification with it. In this sense too, everyone in the novel is potentially a psychotic. But Bateman’s psychotic nature has a deeper, more dangerous edge. Mirror images are depthless and reveal only the surface. And mirror images are repetitive and everywhere. One of the most common episodes in the novel is the frequent misrecognition of someone for another (50, for example). Because the group which subscribes to a capitalist ideology ultimately inhabits a simulacral world, members of the group are recognisable only by the signs they represent via their clothes and wealth; elements of depth and individuality, such as a personality and a recognisable face, are unimportant. In the end, these repetitive, endless images both motivate Bateman’s alterity as evil incarnate, as well as hide him from the eyes of the law. As Botting deliberates: [The] mirror image sustains evil’s alterity as much as it reassures the subject of its specular self-identity. This depends … on whether


other is misrecognised as self. That in turn depends on the solidity of the framing limit, the symbolic oppositions that delineate distinctions between inside and outside, pleasure and reality, truth and fiction. In the image, selves are doubled, identities formed or inverted, subjects seduced and dispersed.23 Bateman’s evil and invisibility are dependent upon the mirror images he projects and absorbs. In his world, there are no insides and outsides. Because of this, his evil alterity remains hidden. As a mass in person, he can remove signs from circulation because he is aware of the renewability, duplicability and duplicity of signs. In this sense, signs are never seen to be ‘removed’ because signs, in their depthlessness, have nothing recognisable to distinguish them. That dangerous edge: American Psycho and the rejection of interiority This leads me to what I call the dangerous edge of Bateman’s psychotic nature. As a sign himself, he is an enemy to all that is deemed ontologically as depth. Interiority, to him, is a threat because it confounds his reality. In his ideology, everything exists only as visible signs that can be manipulated, and that which is not visible must be exposed, ‘opened up’, and made surface. It is not surprising then, that there is abundant repetition and replay of horrific scenes of murder and mutilation of women in the novel. Laura E. Tanner observes: Because Bateman’s world is all surface, his torture and mutilation of victims consists of opening up their bodies to deny the mystery of interiority. Through violence, the psycho forces his victims not only to provide the matter out of which he constructs his universe but to participate in a world of commodities, the emptiness of which any sign of their humanity would threaten to expose.24 American Psycho proliferates with ghastly depictions of atrocity. Bateman has ingenuous ways of brutalising and killing his victims, ranging from electrifying his victims (290) to inserting a live rat into a victim’s vagina (328–9). But for me (and Tanner), the fundamental point in all this killing is the desire to annihilate forms of interiority. Interiority is the other of Bateman’s surface world, just as his victims are the other of (in that they do not belong to) his capitalist system. Bateman is less willing to kill members of his own group than those of other groups.25 As ‘other’, these groups – prostitutes, tramps – remind


Bateman that not everyone belongs to his sign system of similarities;26 subsequently, these others reveal to Bateman the reality of occupying various (ideological) positions in space, that is, subject positions, and more importantly, subjects who have interiors and depths of being. And this is what Bateman fears most and must destroy. In a particularly gruesome section of the novel, in which Bateman is coolly mutilating two prostitutes’ bodies, the proliferation of descriptions which are violent acts of bodily dislodging is obvious, suggesting Bateman’s predilection towards exposing interiority (306). The interior body, that which is hidden, must be exposed, and exposed violently. Yet, interestingly, the final act of ripping open the stomach is done in darkness (305). Earlier, I have shown how Bateman’s identification with his simulacral environment is akin to the process of Caillois’s legendary psychasthenia. It is in darkness that the psychotic is most at one with his identified otherness. As long as there is light, the materiality of objects can still maintain its distinction as other, and thus eliminate space. But in darkness, the otherness of materiality becomes indistinguishable from the space which the psychotic occupies; hence, the psychotic can become dispersed into that otherness, a paradox of incorporation through denial and destruction. As Caillois puts it, ‘darkness is “filled,” it touches the individual directly, envelops him, penetrates him, and even passes through him’.27 Bateman’s final act of exposing interiority must simultaneously be the moment he incorporates that interiormade-surface into his reality. The body parts are placed alongside commodities (the CD player), transforming the former into the same sign system as the latter: Part of Tiffany’s body – I think it’s her even though I’m having a hard time telling the two apart – has sunken in and her ribs just out, most broken in half, from what’s left of her stomach, both breasts having been pierced by them. A head has been nailed to the wall, fingers lie scattered or arranged in some kind of circle around the CD player. … (305–6) What is most frightening however, is that Bateman views his monstrous acts as part of his routine. Like eating out, attending a musical, going to the gym and watching a video, murdering and mutilating bodies have become part of that hyperreality that he inhabits, done without fear or confusion. In Bateman’s reality, viewing bodily violation on television and murdering are not categorically different. Fantasy and reality are so


confused that the two complement each other and cannot be separated but operate within a single ideological system. And like watching television, which is a repetitive process, Bateman must kill and kill again so that his identification with his simulated world is complete. In one episode, Bateman even tapes his orgiastic practices and subsequent brutal murders of the prostitutes he lures into his death-house, so that he can watch them repeatedly (304). Here, the fusion of reality and fantasy is nowhere more prominent. In filming his rape, torture and murder of the girls so that he can watch himself doing these things over and over again, Bateman has profoundly over-identified with his version of reality. Celeste Olalquiaga observes that in pornography, ‘the boundaries between what is being watched and who is watching barely exist: performance and spectator fuse into one … the pornographic spectator is subjected to a reification similar to that of the pornographic object: both cease to be individuals in order to perform as figures of a libidinal mechanism’.28 Bateman does not want to be merely an observer, but a part of the simulated world itself. By videotaping himself, he transforms himself into a simulated entity – a television image of himself. He films the dying girls as an attempt to ‘understand’ them, but his detailed description of his actions and tools belie his failure to distinguish human subject and material object. The eliding of humans into material objects merges the two into a single entity. Bateman seems to privilege commodities over human subjects (the cool way in which he describes his camcorder’s model while murdering his victims is especially chilling, 304) because the former represent his sense of place within the simulacra most clearly – his self as commodified by capitalism. His desire to ‘understand’ the girls is nothing more than to reduce the interiority of the girls to a surface image, and to commodify them forever within a capitalist machine (the television). In the deliberate planning and clear consciousness of his act, he is fundamentally what the term ‘psychopathic killer’ means: one whose ‘normative distance with respect to fantasies or representations’ has collapsed, and hence, his ‘radical failure of distance with respect to identification’ with these representations.29 At this point, I want to make a brief comparison of American Psycho with another American narrative about bodies negotiating with represented space: Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1997). Both novels, to an extent, can be termed apocalyptical narratives in the sense that they are concerned with the human subject (constructed since the Enlightenment) who are seeing its final days, and is slowly being erased by a simulacral, capitalist environment. Both narratives, in


interestingly different ways, deal with bodies which are struggling to maintain vestiges of meaningful (corpo)reality in a world that is increasingly inundated by meaningless signs. Bateman’s approach is explosive. He negotiates his survival by jeopardising others’ (killing them) so as to maintain his hyperreal self. To exist as sign is better than not existing at all. The narrator in Fight Club, contrarily, chooses an implosive method. Instead of hurting others, he hurts himself (literally, and by getting others to fight him), using his own pain as a signifier for his being-in-the-world against the emptiness of his IKEAlittered, money-motivated world. ‘Fight club’, as he tells us, ‘isn’t about winning or losing fights. … There is grunting and noise at fight club like at the gym, but fight club isn’t about looking good. There’s hysterical shouting in tongues like at church, and when you wake up Sunday afternoon you feel saved’ (51).30 Although not as criminal as Bateman’s approach, it is nevertheless equally vicious and extremist. Both narratives seem to suggest that in a world increasingly hostile to any form of meaning and subjectivity, the only way to reclaim the self is through violence, either administered to another, or to oneself. The ‘opening up’ of women’s bodies to reveal their threatening interiority has a historical precedence. In a fascinating study on the culture of dissecting female bodies in the Renaissance period, Jonathan Sawday makes the figure of the Medusa the emblem of this culture because she: [stands] for fear of interiority; more often than not, a specifically male fear of the female interior … once the body becomes partitioned and its interior dimensions laid open to scrutiny, the very categories ‘male’ and ‘female’ become fluid, even interchangeable.31 Interiority, in Sawday’s view, has always been associated with the female body. In the Renaissance period, the female body, more than the male body, is constantly under surveillance, ‘since the female body seemed, in some ways “naturally grotesque” – a body which potentially escaped any boundary or limit … the locus of a quite specifically gender-determined fear’.32 And even if the body is male, the moment it becomes opened up or dissected, it becomes feminised. Hence, the culture of dissecting bodies – of reducing depths to surfaces – is partly associated historically with fear of interiority, and especially the female interior. Bateman’s victims are largely women prostitutes, not only because they are easily available, but because they represent that which he rejects most – interiority. It is not so much the human that Bateman rejects, but the human with interior which he cannot abide.


Through pornography, a form of mediated representation which dehumanises woman to mere objects, Bateman adopts this misogynist view into his ideology of signs by reducing his victims into identifiable surface materials (the women become breasts, fingers, skulls – body parts without depth). His victims, to adopt the words of Jerzy Kosinski, ‘never remained individuals; they became as identical as rats. They existed only to be killed’.33 This rejection of interiority, in my view, belies a deeper dynamic within Bateman: he fears interiority, especially his own. In attempting to reduce everything to surface, Bateman is ultimately protecting his own surface. Interiority must be rejected because his own interiority must be denied. In a significant episode in which Bateman ponders upon his existence, this realisation of interiority is foregrounded. This episode takes place during a summer holiday in East Hampton with his girlfriend, Evelyn: Everything failed to subdue me. Soon everything seemed dull…. The only thing that didn’t bore me, obviously enough, was how much money Tim Price made, and yet in its obviousness it did … my depersonalisation was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning. Something horrible was happening and yet I couldn’t figure out why – I couldn’t put my finger on it. (282) In this brief but telling moment, Bateman realises that he too is a victim. By hyper-conforming to a capitalist ideology and to signs, he comprehends his loss of an interiority, which is also the realisation that he has an interior. But he cannot even name that interior because his hyper-conformity has become too complete. And what he cannot name – what he cannot identify – is something he fears. According to Sawday, ‘this very impossibility of gazing within our own bodies [is that] which makes the sight of the interior of other bodies so compelling. Denied direct experience of ourselves, we can only explore others in the hope (or the fear) that this other might also be us.34 Sawday’s parenthetical remark proves more important in Bateman’s case. It is also, psychoanalytically, a fear possibly founded on the horror of the Void. As long as Bateman remains ensconced in his simulacral existence, he is safe from the Void which will threaten his conˇ izˇek has structed identity. Images and signs are the fantasy which (as Z


shown) support his reality. By opening up bodies, he is attempting to obliterate that internal surplus of his reality – the interiority (of others and himself) which he cannot understand and must deny – by relegating it to the surface and hence, conforming it with his ideological position. In this sense, interiority as Bateman’s surplus of the real, is that which threatens his ideology with the Void of his self. The invisible monster Bateman’s victims, as demonstrated, are mainly those outside his class and sign-system. But even when he murders someone within his class, he remains unseen because of the system of the replaceable sign which his class exemplifies. For instance, in one episode, Bateman finds it impossible to convince an acquaintance, Carnes, that he has murdered a business rival, Paul Owen. But Carnes would not believe him because, according to Carnes, he ‘had … dinner … with Paul Owen … twice … in London … just ten days ago’ (388). Carnes chooses to ignore Bateman’s seriousness simply because he has misrecognised Paul Owen. Owen’s replaceability represents the confusion within a world where ways of seeing and representation are compromised. For in a hyperreal world, all persons become similar, and hence simultaneously present and not present. Owen’s death is completely disregarded, because he is always alive as someone else. Later, when Bateman visits Owen’s apartment (where he had earlier murdered Owen gruesomely, leaving telling signs), he is confronted by the estate agent who has concealed the fact of Owen’s disappearance from her customers to get business. Encountered by Bateman, she firmly requests that he leaves so as not to raise doubts about the marketability of the apartment (366–70). Again, when Bateman tries to reveal his psychopathology to his fiancée, Evelyn, she pretends not to hear him and goes on discussing their engagement plans (330–43). Finally, there is his confrontation with a cab driver who has identified him as the murderer of a fellow cab driver, but will keep his peace if Bateman turns over a Rolex watch, cash and sunglasses in exchange for the his silence (389–94). All this confessions and near exposures, as Clara Freccero argues: succeeds in revealing absolutely nothing, not because anything remains hidden, but because there is no truth to be revealed, extracted, and expiated in confession. No one is listening to him (he speaks to a telephone answering machine) and, since proper names correspond interchangeably to bodies, no one can tell who is who;


nor does anyone (except the protagonist) notice that fact, and no one, including Patrick, cares.35 It is not that, as Freccero surmises, no one notices; it is more the case that no one cares or can care. In a simulacral existence, signs are more real and significant than dead bodies, which are valueless. The marketable apartment and the Rolex watch are both capitalist signs of wealth and have renewable and reusable qualities, regardless of the fact that their worth is merely conferred upon – and hence, is valued only – by the capitalist system and those who inhabit it. The only time in the novel that Bateman’s monstrosity comes closest to being exposed is when he takes his bloodied bed sheet to a Chinese dry cleaner, who subsequently refuses to wash it because of the unnatural amount of blood (81–6). But because of her inefficient English, she is ignored: ‘What?’ I asked spitefully. ‘You didn’t hear me? You want some ham? Is that what you said? You want some ham’ She grabs the arm of the Soprani jacket again. Her husband stands behind the counter, sullen and detached. ‘You … are … a … fool!’ I bellow. She jabbers back, undaunted, pointing relentlessly at the stains on the sheets (83) Blood is a potent sign, but one which does not circulate freely and easily like other signs. It is a representation of interiority, and in Bateman’s reality, is best to be ignored, and quickly removed. The nonEnglish speaking Chinese woman, in her triple marginality (nonEnglish speaking, non-white, and non-male) is immediately outside the bourgeois system of American Psycho, and therefore is helpless and ineffective. She clearly does not circulate as a conforming sign within a bourgeois system, and in her position as a subject – as one who inhabits a definite, original point in space – she is marginalised. Indeed, one of the most significant features of American Psycho is the marginalising of the subject; it is now otherness which has become the norm for existence. One of the most crucial episodes in the novel is the chapter entitled ‘Chase, Manhattan’ (347–52), in which Bateman shoots a taxi driver in the head in cold blood right in the middle of downtown Manhattan and becomes involved in a police chase. The point of view suddenly shifts to the third person, indicating Bateman’s stepping out of himself to occupy the position of an observer – an other who is gazing an


object, who is, paradoxically, also Bateman. This episode is a significant example of Bateman’s powerful identification and merging with hyperreality. The passage is too long to quote, and so I will confine myself to just one section as a point of reference: … in an adrenaline rush causing panting, I can only get a few blocks, partly because of panic, mostly because of the blood, brains, chunks of head covering the windshield, and I barely avoid a collision with another cab on Franklin – is it? – and Greenwich, veering the taxi sharply to the right … racing blindly down Greenwich I lose control entirely… smashing through a wall of glass, the body of a cashier thudding across the hood, Patrick tries to put the cab in reverse but nothing happens, he staggers out of the cab, leaning against it, a nerve-racking silence follows, ‘nice going, Bateman,’ he mutters … (340) This rapid fire prose is in many ways reminiscent of the car chase scenes often seen on television. Bateman has objectified himself and projected himself onto the television as an image, as a final and ironic act of meaning creation. He is now, like images on television, seen not only by others, but even by himself. This is an identification with the simulacra of television (ir)reality – like the videotaping of his own depravity earlier. But unlike the videotaping, this time he does not need a physical screen to detach himself. He mistakes the blood on the inside to be outside his windscreen, suggesting his distancing from the crime he has just committed by placing the incident as outside him – an irreal representation not unlike the television (for is not blood on television, however close up, always on the other side, the outside?) – a confusion and indistinguishability of reality and simulation. He has become the screen himself, a merging with the phantasmic images with which he identifies. He is also objectified in the sense that he now occupies the reversed position of the hunter: he is now the hunted. This episode is the culmination of Bateman’s total hyper-identification with his place, context and situation. At the close of the novel, Bateman deliberates that what he does is: what being Patrick means to me, I guess, so well, yup, uh …’ and this is followed by a sigh, then a slight shrug and another sigh, and above one of the doors covered by red velvet drapes in Harry’s is a sign and on the sign in letters that match the drapes’ colors are the words THIS IS NOT AN EXIT. (399)


In his brief discussion of the novel in The Literature of Terror: The Modern Gothic, David Punter interprets the ending as ‘an impossibility of change, of escape, or even of detection in a world where protective colouring is all and the notion that somebody like Bateman could be a serial killer is simply not one possible to entertain’.36 No one sees Bateman for what he is because no one can or wants to. Exposing Bateman means to criticise and expose his (capitalist) ideology for its distortion and falsity. As long as people choose to look the other way in order to maintain the ideology of commodification (or the commodification of ideology?), Bateman will remain invisible and continue his atrocities. He is an individual who finds meaning in conforming; the more he conforms, the more (sign)ificant he is. But this ‘devoiding’, as Seltzer terms it, is not the cause of his violence but the desired effect.37 Only through hyper-identification with ideology can the serial killer find a sense of being. For Bateman, the object of desire is ideology itself. The serial killer wants to fully exemplify, in his own ˇ izˇek, the transgressor of law (for being, his ideology. According to Z example, the serial murderer) is fundamentally ‘ingrafted into its functioning … the irony of this should not escape us: … this ‘transgressor’ par excellence who purports to violate all the rules of ‘normal’ and decent behaviour, effectively longs for the very rule of [Ideology]’.38 But as this chapter has shown, over-mimicry of a particular ideological system can turn an individual into a monster who cannot abide other ideologies and would seek to silence those who do not conform to his version. In this strange distortion, there is truly No Exit from his ‘Hell of the Same’.39 Some critics of American Psycho have suggested that the gruesome murders of Patrick Bateman are really figments of his imagination and that they did not really happen at all. One such critic is Linda S. Kauffman whose base for argument is the narrative’s ‘fantastical overfictionalisation’, and the fact that some ‘alleged murder victims … resurface by the novel’s end’.40 I find this reading untenable not only because it robs the novel of its gritty horror, but because it seems to me that Kauffman is trying to exonerate the novel (and the writer) from moralistic criticism. American Psycho resists any redemptive moral reading, and it makes no excuse for its misogynistic slant and graphic depictions of horror. Also, I tend to read Kauffman’s concept of ‘overfictionalising’ somewhat differently: American Psycho is an ‘overfictionalised’ text because it is about a man turned monster due to an excessive and extreme identification with a reality made up of signs and sign systems. That is, Bateman is over-identifying with


an ideology which is really a ‘dominant fiction’ (as Silverman sees it), causing him to ‘overfictionalise’. The fact that Kauffman reads the novel as ‘overfictionalised’ is precisely the success of the novel in capturing this bourgeois capitalist madness and its effects on one psychotic person. The abundance in cataloguing and discussions of iconic signs like Whitney Houston (252–56) are aspects of that overfictionalising which is also Bateman’s ideological pursuit. And the resurfacing of Bateman’s ‘alleged’ victims (in Kauffman’s view) is, as I have suggested, an indication of the replaceable and duplicable nature of the simulacra in which subjects become identified with otherness as signs and hence are transformed into circulating and renewable signs themselves. In my view, Kauffman’s reading is reductive and does not do justice to this powerful postmodern text which foregrounds and critiques the pervasive and dangerous preoccupation with signs, so much so that subjectivity is translated into a mere sign, and is lost in a psychotic’s psychasthenic space of darkness. The eye/I in American Psycho American Psycho, as argued, is an unabashedly unethical text which rehearses misogyny, violence and gore. This is especially so due to its first-person narrative, which somewhat implicates and entangles the reader. The reader is simultaneously drawn into, and distanced from, the serial killers’ world. And undeniably, the play of seeing is at once obvious in such a textual manipulation. The I is also the eye that perceives. As Lobanov-Rostovksy (writing of another context) surmises: the eye stands in for the mind in the perceiving consciousness, then supplants it, as the act of perception comes to define the self to itself. Consciousness, manifested as an act of self-conception-idea (from idein, ‘to see’), begins in the act of visual perception. Eye becomes ‘I,’ the self perched at the edge of the body.41 This paradox, however, is untenable in a first-person narrative like American Psycho. The critical reader, perceiving through Bateman, cannot reconcile the self to itself.42 Lobanov-Rostovsky’s connection between consciousness and visual perception is shaky because the ethical reader will retaliate against the violent visual images represented in the novel. But this does not mean that a reading position cannot be situated. In reading a text like American Psycho in which


there are graphic atrocities, the reader must perhaps adopt what Lobanov-Rostovsky terms ‘the gaze of an anatomist’. This gaze is: paradoxically, less an act of seeing than a refusal to see the selfmirrored in the dissected corpse…. The anatomist’s gaze lays claim to the status of pure empiricism, even as it derives from an aversion gesture, a looking away. It is from this gesture that the eye’s ideological power derives. In its capacity to gaze into the dissected body, the eye makes the anatomist – at once – both less human and more: the objectivity implied by this gaze (a ‘necessary Inhumanity’) affirms the anatomist’s subjectivity, makes him a perceiving mind, not objectified flesh.43 I would argue that this first person narrative, instead of causing the reader to identify with the killer, actually protects the reader from ‘seeing’ by constructing a subject position who would read the text as an anatomist would a dissected corpse. From this distance, the ethical reader can then ‘read’ the novel as a perceiving, ‘objective’ eye. For a novel greatly littered with disembodied limbs and mutilated bodies, this is perhaps the only way an ethical reader can approach the text without becoming implicated. I disagree with Ruth Helyer’s argument that American Psycho is ‘a catalyst for the reader’s “unconscious desires […] repressed energies and anti-social fantasies”’.44 Instead, the novel’s use of the first person is to protect the reader from viewing too closely and thus becoming identified with the body-as-text, placing the reader in a liminal position of being at once, inside and outside the text. Situated at this ‘safe’ vantage point of reading, the reader can then witness, without colluding, brutal and horrific acts of violence and body mutilation. What is interesting in a text like American Psycho is that the dialectic between visibility and invisibility becomes reversed: the obscene (literally, that which cannot be seen) becomes extremely visible, and thus gains depth, while the seen is a depthless image. At the same time, the obscene is made visible because it is Bateman’s psychotic need to render everything surface because he is depthless. In his simulacral world, even that which is obscene must be transformed to transparency and visibility so that he can truly encompass the mass in his person. Nothing must be hidden from him even as he affects camouflaging. The gazer must see all even as he deflects the gaze of the other characters by identifying with them. From this position, Bateman is always seen as an other but never as a subject. This is perhaps the reason why the novel does not offer a background for


Bateman for the reader to form a case history of this serial murderer.45 This refusal can be interpreted as demonstrating an inability to categorise the serial killer as a certain sort of person with a particular sort of history. As a kind of monster, Bateman defies any attempt to ‘name what which is difficult to apprehend and to domesticate (and therefore disempower) that which threatens’.46 His mother’s perpetual wearing of a pair of sunglasses is symbolic of her failure to see what Bateman really is (either by choice or disability).47 His father too, interestingly, has defective eyes (366). Indeed, this whole preoccupation with flawed seeing is profoundly significant in the reading of American Psycho as a novel about (mis-)perception. Like Keith Talent in Martin Amis’s London Fields (1989), Patrick Bateman is a depthless individual whose existence is interpellated by the signs of late capitalism. Talent’s: eyes were television …. Those eyes, and their urban severity … the eyes of Keith Talent shone with tremendous accommodations made to money. And murder? The eyes – was there enough blood in them for that? Not now, not yet. He had the talent, somewhere, but he would need the murderee to bring it out. Soon, he would find the lady. (9)48 This description would very well suit Bateman who, like Talent, also believes in the reality of television, a world where everything is ‘beautifully and gracefully connected, where nothing hurt much and nobody got old’ (55). Talent too sees women like the way he watches television (55, including pornography, 295). Although in the novel Keith never actually murders a woman, this thought is constantly replayed in his mind (289–90), making him a potential Bateman. If London Fields reveals the dangerous life that fantasy can acquire in a hyperreal existence, American Psycho takes this possibility to its logical extreme, embodied in a depthless, amoral serial killer who murders because he needs to endlessly protect and rehearse his simulated reality.

The heterotopic monster: Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie One of Oates’s earlier novels, Expensive People (1968), already offers a frightening look at the postmodern condition and its devoiding effects on subjectivities. The protagonist, Richard Everett is a rich, spoiled, immensely bored middle-class entity trapped in a world inundated by capitalist signs. Gradually, his complacent lifestyle takes a toll on his


subjectivity, and in a terrifying bid to etch out a kind of personal meaning in an otherwise depersonalised world, he turns into a serial killer (214).49 As he confesses towards the end of the novel, his monstrous acts grants him, at least, ‘the consolation of knowing that whatever I did, whatever degradations and evils, stupidities, blunders, moronic intrusions, whatever singly ghastly act I did manage to achieve, was done out of freedom, out of choice’ (236). For the middle-class in a late capitalistic society, freedom and choice have little value because lifestyles already come in neat and readily available packages. Originality and individuality are lost in this postmodern morass of endlessly duplicable signifiers. It is evident that Everett is protesting against his slow descent into effacement. But the serial killer Quentin P. in Zombie, has a more sophisticated view of things: without out-rightly protesting against the ideological status quo, he nevertheless subverts it by seemingly conforming to it. Zombie’s serial killer is much more potent and dangerous, because like Bateman, he is amoral and has learned to manipulate his geo-political environment to serve his perverse purposes. Zombie and the Hysterical Narrative I will begin my analysis of the novel by commenting on its strange narrative style. What is immediately outstanding in Zombie is the unconventional typography which pervades the novel, especially the extensive capitalisation and italicising of words and sentences. Quentin almost always capitalises when emphasising a word or phrase which directly pertains to himself. For example, the word ZOMBIE and the names of his victims are always capitalised; so are his various selves, private or public, such as CARETAKER (11), TODD CUTTLER, or even QUEER (38). Other words and phrases which are frequently emphasised are EYES and EYE CONTACT and references to his sexual activities. Sometimes, certain capitalised sentences read like subheadings to chapters – almost as if Quentin is highlighting interesting or important events which will ensue (For example, in chapter twenty: HOW A DUMB ACCIDENT CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE). This unconventional typography, in my view, suggests a powerful need to be heard. As a social monster, Quentin cannot, of course, admit to the horrors of his crime. But Quentin’s narcissistic individuality requires an outlet for expressing his unlawful derring-do. He finds his suppressed voice through textuality, and his compelling need to advertise himself is proclaimed through unconventional textual practice. Another interesting feature in the novel is the intermittent appearances of Quentin’s drawings. Like his textual unconventionality, his


artworks are also forms of self advertisement. His drawings can be roughly classified into drawings which portray his self importance, drawings which represent his desire, and drawings which express his fear. In the first category could be included drawings of his van (5), his name-card (13), his dad’s car key (he draws this on the day his father allowed him to drive his family home in his father’s car [22]), his birthmark (114), and his signature (120). Interestingly, the name card, the car key and the birthmark are drawn to their actual sizes, emphasising their importance to warrant being graphically captured ‘as they are’. In the second category, artwork would include drawings of the ice pick (52), his victim’s belongings (a gold tooth [84], Squirrel’s hair and pigtail [111, 180]), and a ‘shining’ Squirrel, his final victim in the narrative (101). In the last category, drawings of eyes (29, and again, 32, in which his father’s eyes are drawn peering through a latched door), a face with emphasised eyes (60) and a pair of glasses (64) are most prominent. What is important in all types of drawings are their powerfully narcissistic suggestions. For what Quentin is really drawing is himself, transforming his desires and fears into visual images which he can domesticate and control (much like his art of zombification, see below). Whatever makes him feel important, desirous and fearful must be transformed into something on paper as a way of ‘absorbing’ and ‘assimilating’ all these various objects into his complex system of self. Quentin’s strange typography and recourses to art are not, as it may seem, random and incomprehensible. Because his social status counters that of his profound and twisted sense of narcissism, he must find other means of advertising and articulating himself. His text and art are narcissistic dialogues with himself, and are necessarily idiosyncratic. I want to suggest that Quentin’s writing is symptomatic of the hysterical narrative, but not in the traditional sense (characterised by overt emotionalism and passivity).50 As a ‘textual’ attempt to represent the homosexual as pathologically aberrant, it necessarily fails. This view will be further examined towards the end of the analysis. Heterotopia and the serial killer Zombie is about a paradoxical subject through which several representations of self are played out, contested, and subverted, and of which two – narcissism and homosexuality – are prominent. To discuss the paradoxical self, I invoke Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia – and more precisely, its metaphor of the mirror – to discuss Quentin’s liminal position. The heterotopia has often been employed in a geographical sense, but I want to extend this use to encompass a perceptual


and psychic sense of space. Either way, however, the heterotopia would always be that ‘displacement and expansion of identity, a breaking of bounded space’.51 Heterotopia, in my reading, is not only about spatial transference but ‘psychical convergence’ as well, in which the gazer’s perception is returned to himself, thus conflating the gazer and the gazed in a single space. The heterotopia becomes a useful concept in representing Quentin’s curious position, for as a liminal place, it is necessarily paradoxical. As a paradoxical subject, Quentin must negotiate various embodiments which contradict each other. He is both the model citizen and a monster, both within his social system and without, both self-loving and loving others. Quentin deliberately attempts to conform to the image that is grafted onto him – the rehabilitated (but still potentially threatening) monster. He practices kindness (79) in order to disguise his private self, that of a monster who kidnaps young men whom he then lobotomises in a bid to turn them into sex slaves, or zombies. At once inside and outside his ideological system, he stands in a unique position in which he is both his Self and his mirror image: The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through the virtual point which is over there.52 This is the position of liminality, a placeless place, the heterotopia – one that has no meaning because it conflates signifiers without arriving at a signified. Foucault likens the heterotopia to the mirror image. For me, the heterotopia enables an understanding of the invisible monster in two ways. There is of course the more familiar reading of spatial occupation which places a subject in a heterotopic position. As Fred Botting suggests, ‘heterotopias are sites where subjects and behaviours that fit only partially within dominant norms can be both contained and excluded … their otherness enables the differentiation, ordering and policing of the limits of their own space as well as the boundaries of society’.53 Quentin embodies this ‘halfway’ position: his sexuality brands him as a social threat and would only admit him into the society as a ‘rehabilitated’ citizen. He is ironically both contained and excluded by his community and the law, occupying a space which is neither entirely outside community and law, nor comfortably inside as well.


But there is also another form of heterotopic position which Quentin occupies – one that is closer to Foucault’s conceptualisation of the mirror. Quentin’s position resides in the absence of the gaze – an absence which he engineers through manipulating the gaze. By deflecting the Symbolic gaze away from his monstrosity by simulating conformity, he occupies the heterotopic space of the irreal: his two selves both do and do not converge at a single point. Quentin’s private self is not his public self, and yet both selves conform to the space that surrounds them. He is at once saturated with signifiers and devoid of any. Quentin acknowledges his unstable self when he confesses that his sense of personal meaning is self-created, and is always already deferred, always already in the future: & I knew I was moving into the future. There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already it …. I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time and Space – who else? .… If this is where I am this is who I am. & so it was. (90, 122, emphasis in the original) Quentin assumes whatever he is at a particular point in space and time. Time is internal, within him. He creates his own time, making it whatever he wants (6). And shape-shifting – re-creating himself according to the situation at hand, which suggests a manipulation of time and space – becomes his most powerful weapon of concealment and destruction. The future is necessary because it offers possibilities, changes and renewals, whereas the past represents only stasis and unchangeability. That is why, when he draws a clock, it is without hands, suggesting that he is not time-bound, and is beyond time (6). The heterotopic vision is exactly this embracing of the future – the endless potential of re-creation, the positioning of the signifier that cannot become finalised in a signified.54 And with so many opportunities to transform, the past soon becomes forgotten, abandoned. It is this anachronistic structure that allows heterotopias to be placeless-places. And Quentin is not unaware of the power of a heterotopic position. It first came to him, about eight years earlier, while he stared at his mirror reflection after having been physically assaulted: [T]his fantastic FACE! battered & bandaged (& blood leaking through already) & stitched (more than twenty stitches they gave me at Detroit General for three bad gashes) & lips bruised & swollen


& these were blood-shot blackened EYES UNKNOWN TO ME. & I understood then that I could habit a FACE NOT KNOWN. Not known ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. I could move in the world LIKE ANOTHER PERSON. I could arouse PITY, TRUST, SYMPATHY, WONDERMENT & AWE with such a face. I could EAT YOUR HEART & asshole you’d never know it. (60) Several important observations can be deduced from this passage. Quentin’s history reveals an early realisation of his self as unstable and easily deconstructed to be reconstructed into other shapes. The fragility of his own body – being bruised and battered – is but an external exemplification of the fragility of identity. Quentin concludes that if the outside can be broken up and re-stitched, so can his inside. Interestingly enough, Quentin uses the word ‘fantastic’ in commenting on his broken face, almost as if he realises society’s fascination with phantasm and what Lacan would term, the objet petit a, as a social effacement and avoidance of encountering the Reality principle. As an objet petit a, his position is ultimately fantastic, and misrecognised. He will be the observed, the image of the reformed other and, by logical extension, a successful reintegration of the monster into society. A rehabilitated criminal is the mark of Law’s triumph and unimpeachable integrity. He exemplifies what Baudrillard would argue as the fooling of the eye by the object, ‘not by creating the illusion of a real world, but by eluding the privileged position of the gaze’.55 Quentin ‘fools’ the authoritative (represented by the law) gaze by conforming to it. In the mirror, Quentin realises that he can switch positions with his image by bringing that other self of his over into his reality. His stare is returned by a familiar stranger – his self, unrecognised. He can become effaced; that is, his real face can be erased and substituted with a mask of his mirror image. This new face cannot be known ‘ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD’ because it is constantly shifting according to need, such as in concealment or in arousing positive feelings in others towards himself. Narcissism and the rejection of the other Discussing the heterotopia also brings me to another crucial theme in the novel, narcissism, and by extension, homosexuality, both of which are intertwined. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen’s rereading of Freud’s theory on narcissism will prove useful here as an attempt to understand Quentin’s narcissistic monstrosity. I will argue that Quentin’s attempt at zombie-making is ultimately a form of narcissistic transference of


self-love onto an other which will naturally fail because it is not an other that is desired, but the self. In the heterotopic vision, the placelessness imposed is one of self-gazing: the gazer becomes the gazed, dividing the self in the process. There is a narcissistic predilection to this (mis)recognition engendered in heterotopic play as the gazer is constantly projecting himself onto a desired other on the other side of the mirror which is actually himself-as-other. The classic study of narcissism is Freud’s essay, ‘On Narcissism’, in which he claims man is essentially narcissistic (Freud’s study does not mention woman), but through socialisation and acculturation learns to project self-love onto an object (object libido) in the form of a love for another, which constitutes the basic structure of society (the family).56 This is vital in preserving the self from becoming immured with it-self, and hence, becoming more and more inward – a form of self dissolution. Consider, for example, the story of Ovid’s Narcissus.57 This negative extreme, which is a destructive form of narcissism, is what Freud deems a ‘paranoiac phantasy’.58 In the case of Zombie, it could be argued that Quentin’s desire is ultimately for himself. His zombieslaves are externalised objects which he creates to project desire back onto himself: that is, Quentin desires the zombie only as an extension of his own self-love. Quentin’s zombie will love and obey only him, be totally dependent on its master, will require no reciprocation, and most importantly, will not pass any judgement: A ZOMBIE would pass no judgement. A ZOMBIE would say, ‘God bless you, Master.’ He would say, ‘You are good, Master. You are kind & merciful.’ He would say, ‘Fuck me in the ass, Master, until I bleed blue guts.’ He would beg for his food & he would beg for oxygen to breathe. He would beg to use the toilet not to soil his clothes.… He would rest his head on my shoulder like a baby. Or I would rest my head on his shoulder like a baby. We would eat pizza slices from each other’s fingers. We would lie beneath the covers in my bed in the CARETAKER’S room listening to the March wind & the bells of the Music College tower chiming & WE WOULD COUNT THE CHIMES UNTIL WE FELL ASLEEP AT EXACTLY THE SAME MOMENT. (49–50) Throughout the passage, only Quentin’s desires are important; there is no suggestion of reciprocation or a relationship. The zombie must be thoroughly subservient to Quentin’s needs, embodying only what Quentin desires and relinquishing completely its own. Even when


Quentin desires togetherness (indicated by ‘we’) with his zombie, it is actually an introjection of self-love. His zombie’s eyes ‘would be open & clear, but there would be nothing inside them seeing. & nothing behind them thinking. Nothing passing judgement’ (49). As an extension of himself, Quentin need not preserve his hiddenness and keep his secret from the zombie, for there is no secret with the self. Narcissism is directly linked to this act of self-preservation, that is, an indulgence in the libidinal away from the censoring device of the ego. This may also explain why he does not make eye-contact (a point which I will elaborate later). Hence, the zombie also functions as the heterotopic space (the fact that they are the living-dead, neither one nor the other, already suggests their liminal entities) where he can cross over without giving up his original place, a dividing of the self that is not a self-division. Two heterotopias, represented by mirrors, are present in this novel, one engendered by ideology, the other by narcissism. Whilst the former heterotopic image is spatial, the latter is psychical. Both, however, involve ways of (mis)seeing and splitting. The double significance of the heterotopic image is crucial, as they combine to emphasise Quentin’s ‘destructive homosexuality’. According to Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, any form of projection – including the projection of the ego-libido (or self-love) onto an object – is ultimately a rejection.59 This curious paradox has to do with the desiring subject’s inability to transfer his self-love onto an image. In projecting, the desiring subject actually ‘loses’ himself to an external object, which results in indignation towards the object. Hence, the subject is rejecting the object even as he desires it. Borch-Jacobsen in fact argues that the term ego-libido is itself a contradiction in terms.60 He demonstrates that Freud, in conflating ego and the libidinal, is actually weakening the ego as the element of censorship. This conflation actually infuses the ego with erotic passion, which goes directly against the original concept of the ego.61 Narcissism then becomes the ‘peculiar complement/supplement’62 which has directly deconstructed the ego as a censoring device, resulting in self-destructive behaviour. For if the ego can no longer check the libidinal, but is instead a correlative of the latter, then the narcissistic individual is left with no means of identifying with another who is exterior to himself (as in ‘falling in love’ with someone), but is destructively in love with himself so that any desire for an object outside of him is immediately contested to the extent that he ‘can no longer even represent it [the object of desire] to himself, can no longer assume it in the first person, even in the unconscious, and that is why it


appears in the form of an external, foreign, other voice’.63 BorchJakobson’s understanding of the destructive narcissus is highly relevant to my reading of Zombie. In Quentin’s narcissistic dialectic, his zombies are at once loved (because they embody his own self-love) and hated (for precisely the same reason). Quentin’s zombie can alternatively be read as his own double; but unlike the traditional use of the double, his double is not so much a projection of an unconscious onto an external being but, as BorchJacobsen has suggested, a projection as rejection. Instead of selfdissolution (as in the case of most traditional narratives of the double, beginning with Ovid, where the double is the self), Quentin’s zombie exemplifies the dissolution of his externalised image of the self – a clever and novel strategy of preserving narcissism without the suicidal implication. If this reading is tenable, a double is the ‘impossible solution’ for a narcissist – impossible, because a double is not possible for him, but a solution because the double-to-be-destroyed preserves him. This partly testifies to Derrida’s dictum: ‘One will never reduce the one to the other – it is impossible and it ought not to be done’.64 In Zombie, doubling is impossible, but this is even more reason for it to be done. The double is also manifested in a different way – that is, as alter-ego – in the narrative. The culminating episode in Zombie is the kidnapping, abuse and murder of Squirrel, which is Quentin’s most daring act of depravity (see below). Interestingly enough, this episode in many ways resembles the ‘Chase, Manhattan’ episode in American Psycho. In a penultimate chapter (chapter 46), we see Quentin flicking through the television channels, immersed in a world of transient images. Advertisement, sports events and politics fuse into one huge image punctuated by the incessant scolding and pleading of Junie, Quentin’s sister and his voice of conscience, over the answering machine (chapter 44). The hyperreal space is strongly suggested here, where illusions, disembodied voices and fragmented realities merge into a chaos of existence. Yet unlike Patrick Bateman, who overidentifies with this chaos, Quentin is strangely indifferent. He realises ‘that nobody in the Universe knows’ him (136) and he does not care. Later, in his kidnapping and subsequent murdering of Squirrel, Quentin, like Bateman, steps out of himself to become an observer of his own actions, shifting into a third person narrative (142–52). He becomes TODD CUTTLER, an alter-ego assumed for this very purpose. As Todd Cuttler, Quentin becomes the suave, assured and charismatic figure that he is otherwise not. It is almost as if Quentin cannot trust himself even to carry out his own depravity successfully without assuming the guise of a more


confident double. As Todd Cuttler, he can relinquish remorse and responsibility for his actions. When he captures Squirrel, he announces: For he was mine now, & always will be so. In sickness & in health & till Death depart.… Yes but you could release him even now, dump him into the woods & somebody would find him. For it is TODD CUTTLER he saw, & not Q _ P _. But I was pissed with him. Always you get pissed with them, & want to punish. (150, emphasis in the original) Italicising his prose exemplifies a shift (splitting) into his alter-ego. It is not a monologue but a dialogic experience within a single self, which further emphasises the paradoxical personality of Quentin. As his alterego Quentin can do exactly as he pleases – whether to be merciful and release his prisoner, or kill him – for he is no longer responsible. Assuming an alter-ego, he is also at once the subject who desires and the object of desire. Kidnapping Squirrel has strangely effected this introjection of narcissism. The shift from ‘I’ to ‘you’ in the last phrase of the passage above suggests that his alter-ego is merely a mechanism of the narcissist; for the last two phrases are not italicised, which evidently shows that Quentin is no longer speaking as his alter-ego which is abandoned so that the real Quentin can resume charge of the situation. In this sense, Quentin’s invocation of the alter-ego is to reclaim his self as loved object without having to project outwards. In the end, Quentin does not do to Squirrel what he did to his other victims – that is, attempts to zombify him – but drives him straight into the woods, rapes, tortures, and murders him. The very assumption of an alter-ego has replaced the need for a zombie; for unlike the zombie (which is an object of desire externalised by a desiring subject), the alter-ego is the object of desire which is also the subject. In assuming an alter-ego, Quentin can then return to himself for the alter-ego is essentially his own self. He is now able to love himself as himself, and that ends his need for more zombies after Squirrel’s death (164) – but only temporarily, because the serial killer instinct will return (see 169–70, in which Quentin again begins dreaming of a zombie). For now, Quentin can assume what criminologists term ‘the cooling off period’ until the urge to kill again returns.65 Narcissistic homosexuality To an extent, Zombie rehearses the pathologising of the homosexual as aberrant and hysterical (as evidenced by his textual advertisement).66


But it should be evident by now that his monstrosity does not stem from his homosexuality but his destructive narcissism. Or, more precisely, it is not homosexuality that turns Quentin into a terrifying killer, but homosexuality disguised as auto-erotic narcissism – or what I will term ‘narcissistic homosexuality’. In his choice of Squirrel, Quentin manifests exactly this form of one-sided homosexuality. After describing Squirrel’s physical qualities, Quentin suddenly becomes indignant with ‘little cocksuckers’ like Squirrel who: don’t see me at all …. Hadn’t noticed me at all, I guess. & that was good. They don’t see people my age, that’s good. Sure I was hurt, I was pissed & the little fucker will pay for it one day soon but it was good. Q_ P_ the invisible man. (113, emphasis in original) Desiring Squirrel entails great risks for Quentin; for unlike all his other victims, who were hitchhikers and belonged to ethnic minorities, and whose absence will not be missed, Squirrel is a middle-class white boy.67 Squirrel’s allure and popularity become a source of desire for, and envy in, Quentin. On the one hand, Quentin wants this boy for his zombie. But on the other, Quentin sees Squirrel as a threat to his narcissistic tendency. He sees in Squirrel qualities of the desirable as well as the reminder of his own sense of loneliness and inadequacy. Vengeful hostility towards Squirrel is aroused even as Quentin increasingly desires him. His feeling of hurt and being ‘pissed’ stems from the fact that the object of his desire has replaced his narcissistic love for himself, and this leads to destructive consequences – the need to remove that object of desire which is impeding self-love. The object of desire in narcissism is similar to the objet petit a of the ˇ izˇek has observed, the objet petit a is always mediphantasmic gaze. As Z ated by desire, and hence is always already distorted. He illustrates how the objet petit a: is an object that can be perceived only by a gaze ‘distorted’ by desire, an object that does not exist for an ‘objective’ gaze. In other words, the object a is always, by definition, perceived in a distorted way, because outside this distortion, ‘in itself’, it does not exist, since it is nothing but the embodiment, the materialisation of this very distortion, of this surplus of confusion and perturbation introduced by desire into so-called ‘objective reality’. The objet petit a is ‘objectively’ nothing, though, viewed from a certain perspective, it assumes the shape of ‘something’.68


Fred Botting extends this view to show how the objet petit a is also a revelation of ‘one’s castration, one’s alienation in signification’.69 The dialectic of narcissism is here further complicated. The subject who projects is really the subject fearing castration, and hence, must destroy the objet petit a even as he needs, paradoxically, the objet petit a to love himself. That is, if loving an object manifests one’s self-love, then the self is also at the same time alienated as not it-self, because his love is channelled to an external object. In a comparison between homosexuality and soldiering, Klaus Theweleit has shown how the homosexual act is: indeed a compulsive act of defense against threats of devouring dissolution…. Like the maintenance mechanism … homosexual acts seem primarily to serve as means of restoring the acting subject to ‘totality.’ The homosexual like the soldier male, displays a distinct tendency to devivify his object; the redemptive nature of the release offered by homosexual intercourse closely resemble the redemption following ‘blackout,’ in which the soldier male mingles into and intertwines with the enemy (his subjugated equal).70 I find Theweleit’s reading of the homosexual conceptually and ethically problematic (because it pathologises the homosexual all over again, stereotyping him as aberrant, unnatural, and even criminal), but useful nevertheless when applied to Quentin as it provides an insight into his psychotic condition. Theweleit’s homosexual is obviously monstrous, motivated purely by the death drive (either in his own death, or in his enemy’s). Quentin’s act of degrading and destroying his object correlates with what Theweleit sees as possible only for those ‘men who have reached … a position in which, under certain social conditions, the pleasure of object degradation in the homosexual act becomes imperative for their survival. They use the degradation of others as a means of maintaining their own services [that is, their selfpreservation], in the face of all the threats and anxieties that typically beset the not-yet-fully-born’.71 I take the term ‘the not-yet-fully-born’ to mean one who has not successfully undergone oedipalisation to achieve subjectivity. This failure to ‘grow up’, as it were, retains the individual in an infantilised stage which is also narcissistic, as the individual has yet to surpass the mirror stage but continues to demand immediate gratification for his needs. The ego has yet to become assimilated by the superego, and is still very much unfettered by social limitations of adulthood. Hence, the homosexual is pathologised as


infantile, narcissistic and sexually unnatural in Theweleit’s reading, all of which, however, is applicable to Quentin. He adopts homosexuality as a sort of maintenance mechanism and infantile defense against castration. The figure he fears most is his father, and especially his father’s eyes. Whenever Quentin’s father sets his eyes on him, Quentin suddenly regresses (34). As far as he can remember, his father’s observation of him has always been associated with his involvement in acts of misdemeanour, culminating in the discovery of his homosexuality.72 The castration complex is evident here: the father’s gaze unmans Quentin. Yet paradoxically, it is the episode of his father’s discovery of Quentin’s Body Builder magazines – his sexual diet – and the subsequent burning of them, which binds Quentin to his father most significantly. This is attested to by his drawing of this crucial event in his life (39). It is also a homosocially binding incident which effectively excludes the maternal: ‘Together we burned the evidence. Back behind the garage where Mom would not see’ (39). In eliminating the evidence, a tacit collaboration between father, son, and the Law is enacted. Quentin is now initiated into the Lacanian Law-of-the-Nameof-the-Father through a fiery rite of passage to forge homosocial ties. Here, Quentin metaphorically experiences his castration and conflates the Law and his father; the avoidance of one would be the avoidance of the other – and thus aversion to eye contact: ‘EYE CONTACT HAS BEEN MY DOWNFALL’ (4). He will let the Law see him as it wishes, but he will not return the gaze because to look back is to see himself as mirrored by the image onto which he projects his self, thus seeing his own otherness, marginality, and subsequently, castration. Narcissistic homosexuality is au fond a strategy of not reciprocating the gaze. To be in love with oneself through projection, the projected image’s gaze cannot be returned. Only the observer can gaze, whilst the observed must remain unaware of its being gazed upon. If the observed returns the gazer’s eye contact, that is a direct challenge to the gazer’s authority, and he (the gazer) becomes castrated. Quentin’s love ‘for the other myself is at the same time hatred, the latter being “primary”’.73 Again, this strange dialectic is reminiscent of the heterotopic placelessness, rendering narcissism simultaneously somewhere and nowhere. Racial stereotyping in Zombie The issue of race in Zombie, like homosexuality, rehearses familiar notions about racial otherness and stereotyping. For example, whiteness is represented as a kind of narcissism which is more or less also destructive.74 In Quentin, whiteness as narcissistic is taken to mon-


strous proportions. His view of black men as sexually virile reinforces a historically recognisable lack in white consciousness, making the former into immediately identifiable threats, and therefore, victims. As there is already much work done on the subject of racial discrimination and (sexual) stereotyping,75 I will only briefly discuss the matter in relation to Oates’s narrative. Quentin’s victims are subjected to various levels of dehumanisation – ranging from being invested with ‘idiosyncratically significant names such as Frogsnout, Velvet Tongue, the Tease, BUNNYGLOVES, RAISINEYES, BIG GUY, SQUIRREL, and even NO-NAME’,76 to violent forms of total disintegration of the human person into horribly mutilated (failed) zombies. Certainly, his black victims such as BIG GUY and NO NAME are given special attention. In the case of BIG GUY, the objectification of the racial other is profound. BIG GUY is hair, bones, penis, muscles, stomach, chest and skin, but never a person (56). The two body parts which hold Quentin’s fascination are his penis and big toes – obvious phallic signifiers. Even his name is redolent of Quentin’s sexual fantasy. There is enough indication that Quentin, in the end, ingests parts of BIG GUY (like the penis, which Quentin equates with a ‘blood sausage’, 56), suggesting a realised fantasy of incorporation of the black victim’s alleged sexual potency. This act of cannibalism is, in the final analysis, another symptom of his destructive narcissism: the act of returning the externalised object of desire back to himself. Quentin’s prejudices also confirm what Jonathan Dollimore would view as discrimination through hierarchies. As Dollimore contends, discrimination can often occur on the level of the unconscious and is inextricably related ‘to other kinds of discrimination …. Discrimination descends through … hierarchies, including those of class, race, and gender, and within each of which each subject is situated differently’.77 In the case of Zombie, racism and homosexuality stand in a worsening continuum. Quentin’s initially commits ‘RACIAL OFFENCE’ (8) rather than a (homo)sexual offence because of his father’s social standing, and because the former carries less shame. In eliding the sexual offence, Quentin’s status as a heterosexual, middle-class white male is carefully maintained and protected. At least in the eyes of heterosexual, white, middle-class American men, being racist is a protective performance to retain one’s supremacy; being homosexual, on the other hand, threatens the community from within, exposing the constructedness of heterosexuality and masculinity. Hence, to be tagged a homosexual is worse than being branded a racist. Quentin quickly learns how to manipulate his middle class whiteness to protect


and camouflage his monstrosity, racial prejudices, and narcissistic homosexuality. In performing atrocities on his black victims, Quentin exposes the unconscious racism which continues to exist within the ideological make-up of his lived space. Cosmology, and zombification as ‘Art’ Quentin’s zombies share certain affinities with the familiar zombies of Haitian origin. Like the latter, Quentin’s zombies exist as the living dead; they are created by a (witch) doctor (Quentin’s method is lobotomy), and have no will of their own, performing only the bidding of their creator.78 It is interesting to note that Quentin first conceived of the idea while attending one of his father’s lectures on astrophysics: It was five years ago the idea of creating a ZOMBIE for my own purposes first came to me in a brain storm to change my life…. The Earth is continually bombarded by high-speed cosmic rays a voice was lecturing. An amplified voice. Was it Dad? Or somebody pretending to be Professor P _ with his nasal drone & habit of clearing his throat & pausing to let his words sink in. Cosmic rays from outer space. Of an age many millions of years. More concentrated at higher elevations than lower. It was a darkened lecture amphitheatre at the University. I did not know how I came to be there. I did not remember entering the amphitheatre. … Quantifiable and unquantifiable material. Research into the early Universe suggests. On an illuminated screen at the front of the auditorium was a computer simulation as Professor P _ identified it of a section of the Universe two hundred million years ago demonstrating how the Universe evolved from its early smoothness & equitable distribution of matter to the present condition of superclusters & dark matter. As much as ninety percent of the Universe’s mass is in unquantifiable ‘black holes.’ Most of the Universe is therefore undetectable by our instruments & does not ‘obey’ the laws of physics as we know them. (26–7, emphasis in original) As Quentin listens to his father’s lecture, the idea of the zombie comes into being simultaneously with another idea, albeit registered unconsciously: an identification with ‘black holes’ which cannot be detected by human instruments and which do not ‘obey’ the laws of conventional physics. The darkened lecture theatre, the initial misrecognition of his father (this is quickly corrected), the lapse of memory and the


feeling of suddenly being displaced, suggest a sort spatial-memory short-circuit even as he conceives of the idea of the zombie. The text strongly implies that the idea of the zombie is unconsciously founded on an identification with a cosmic void, a sense of being invisible and, more importantly, supreme. Quentin sees himself as belonging to a ‘higher elevation’; while he quietly observes the students around him ‘busy taking notes … it came to me that almost anyone of them would be a suitable specimen for a ZOMBIE’ (27–8). What I am suggesting here is that the moment the idea of the zombie is conceived is also the point when Quentin attains an awareness of himself as transcendentally superior (like the ‘black hole’, he is beyond the law). This awareness is the extreme culmination of his already perverse narcissism, and the ultimate motivation for his quest for the perfect zombie. In a brilliant reading of the works of Andy Warhol, Richard Dellamora argues that Warhol’s use of photographic negatives in image-making is a form of trademarking Warhol himself onto his works. That is, ‘[displacing] himself as subject in this way, Warhol has become a subject, so that when we see an image of a coke bottle or of Liz [Taylor], we read not “Coca-Cola” or “Elizabeth Taylor” but “Warhol.”’79 I read in this a kind of narcissistic tendency in the work of Andy Warhol in that he creates artistic works which would eventually turn the viewer’s gaze back to Warhol while viewing the work. Appropriating Dellamora’s argument of Warhol’s technique to reading Quentin, I see a similar sort of narcissistic creativity at work. Quentin creates his zombie as a way of signifying himself. In other words, the zombie reflects the creator but is in itself, a non-entity. As argued earlier, Quentin’s zombie is created solely to objectify selflove. But unlike Warhol’s narcissistic creativity which has an audience, Quentin is both the audience and the creator. If Warhol wants his audience to look at him through his work, Quentin only wants to look at himself in his work. Quentin’s narcissism requires no external other as he is his own private gallery, one which, however, will quickly lose its allure. To return to the passage above, Quentin’s momentary disassociation of himself from his environment suggests a flirtation with the transcendental. As Philip Simpson argues, Quentin ‘feels alive only when in proximity to the cosmic void’.80 Simpson goes on to suggests that ‘[one] of the strongest attractions of murder for Quentin is that it allows him, through personally controlled extinction of another consciousness such as NO-NAME, to come to the brink of nothingness and then pull back alive and empowered’.81 He quotes the following


passage from the novel – Quentin in the process of murdering NONAME – to substantiate his reading: HE [NO-NAME] KNOWS! HE KNOWS! NO TURNING BACK! which is the point that must be reached. The threshold of the black hole that sucks you in. A fraction of a second & you are still free but a fraction of a second later & you are sucked into the black hole & are lost. & my dick hard as a club. & big as a club. & the sparks of my eyes. (80) I want to argue, however, that Simpson’s reading of this passage is mistaken. Quoting this passage after making the claim above, Simpson seems to regard Quentin’s victim at the point of death and suggests that Quentin is approaching the ‘brink of nothingness’, from which he eventually pulls back. But careful reading of the text would reveal otherwise. NO-NAME, at this point, is heavily drugged, but is nevertheless aware of his plight. Quentin is not talking about approaching the threshold of the black hole only to withdraw, but is telling us exactly what it means to cross that threshold. I believe that it is the word ‘free’ which has misled Simpson in his surmise. I would argue that Quentin is using the word ‘free’ to suggest the condition of being able to choose. But once NO-NAME realises his situation, Quentin can no longer turn back (that is, he can no longer choose to not zombify him); the threshold has been crossed and Quentin must now pursue it to its logical end – either in successfully creating the zombie, or in destroying his victim (which, in fact, are not dissimilar). It is this moment of identification with the cosmic void, as opposed to Simpson’s reading, that Quentin experiences empowerment (as suggested by his erect penis). Here, it is clear that Quentin occupies a god-like position: his creations are merely objects which mirror his narcissism and are in themselves inconsequential. His language even attains biblical proportions: The week following Thanksgiving 1988. BUNNYGLOVES had been missing twelve days but there was never anything in the Mt. Vernon Inquirer or on local TV, why would there be? Set out from Detroit to Montana & not a trace. How many hundreds, thousands in a single year. Like sparrows of the air they rise on their wings & soar & falter & fall & disappear & not a trace. & God is himself the DARK MATTER swallows them up. (30–1)82


In Quentin’s perverse self-aggrandisement, God (the cosmic other), the black hole (the dark matter), and Quentin P. have become merged into a single entity.83 Identifying with the void also frees Quentin from being bound in time. Time is no longer outside him, but only inside (6). The clock without hands evinces this. Space too, becomes boundless, as suggested by my reading of Quentin’s heterotopic vision. Because he is a void, he can not only choose to occupy various spatial positions, but (as Simpson suggests) absorb others’ projection of their own presences into himself as well84 – all to his own design. This reading brings me back to my argument in the Introduction concerning the affinity between the monster and the Lacanian Void. Quentin’s quest is ultimately to identify with that Void – that place where he no longer has to submit to the Symbolic order. Here, god-like, he is his own order: his victims are internalised into himself in various ways including zombification and, if that fails, cannibalism. They exist for him only, and even then, only for a short while, for they will be destroyed the instant they threaten his self-love (which is always inevitable). And if the Symbolic order relies on a fantasy to support it, then Quentin has learned to occupy the position of the objet petit a, the fantasy object par excellence: the rehabilitated monster, the Symbolic order’s success story. Quentin is always ‘dual’ in that he never gives up his place in the heterotopia, and occupies both the Symbolic and its surplus as well. He is an ambassador of the Void who can exist comfortably and dangerously within the Symbolic, even to the point of being ‘protected’ and camouflaged by that order.

Conclusion: whiteness, colonialism and the monster In American Psycho and Zombie (and also Hawksmoor, to an extent), the serial killer’s ability to fuse with his lived space ultimately offers him protection from the policing eyes of the Symbolic order. Yet, both novels also suggest that the geo-politics of the serial killer are distinctly male, white and middle-class. Working class women (especially prostitutes) and coloured people, although inhabiting this ideological space, remain excluded and are denied the right to signify. Outside this insular and elitist system, these subalterns are vulnerable precisely because they do not merge, and have no way of merging with that system, due to sex, class and/or colour. They can be tortured and eliminated with no recourse to help because the ideological apparatus itself has marginalised them. This, in my view, is a subtle form of


colonialism exercised within a postmodern environment; for despite postmodernism’s promises of plurality, the signifying system of late capitalism in America continues to be monopolised and manipulated by the white, middle-class, American male. Whiteness is of course, already familiarly associated with colonialism. It is the colour which symbolises civilised humanness, whilst all other colours signify, in decreasing gradations, the lack of civilisation culminating in, of course, the blacks. But as Richard Dyer has convincingly shown, the powerful identity of whiteness is founded precisely ‘on compelling paradoxes’: it upholds heterosexuality, but the white man must keep a constant vigilance against sexual desires, whilst the white woman must have none (if she betrays this, she betrays the racial/spiritual purity of whiteness); it must reiterate its spiritual (read civilised) superiority whilst ‘maintaining a position of invisibility’:85 Whites must be seen to be white, yet whiteness as race resides in invisible properties and whiteness as power is maintained by being unseen. Whiteness is the sign that makes white people visible as white, while simultaneously signifying the true character of white people, which is invisible.86 Dyer reminds us that white is also the colour of death, and that the American horror genre (especially in film) has remained predominantly a white one because it serves as ‘a cultural space that makes bearable for whites the exploration of the association of whiteness with death’.87 American Psycho and Zombie continue this tradition of investing whiteness with death, but also reinforce the idea of the invisibility of whiteness as a terrible and terrifying power. In both novels, and more evidently in Zombie because of its racial overtones, the horror of whiteness is revealed in the serial killer, who, being privileged by the colour of his skin, is also a privileged monster within a system that camouflages and protects him. But whiteness is not the only technology of invisibility at work in the geo-political space of the serial killer in the two narratives. Capitalism, and its dizzying network of depthless signifiers, also provide refuge for those who know how to identify and merge with them. In Deleuze’s and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, they write that, ‘Capitalism institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities, thereby attempting, at best it can, to recode, to rechannel persons who have been defined in terms of abstract quantities… That is what makes the ideology of capitalism “a


motley painting of everything that has ever been believed”. The real is not impossible; it is simply more artificial’.88 This view sophisticatedly amalgamates the Baudrillardian simulacra and the Lacanian Symbolic order; it reveals their ultimate dependence on capitalism. The Symbolic order is that dominant ideology Kaja Silverman criticises, and which Baudrillard translates into the hyperreal. For both geopolitical spaces interpellate the subject profoundly within a network of related signs – the desiring-machine – which ‘construct’ the subject as abstractions such as taste, desire and beauty (among other things). Truly, there seems to be no escape from this insular system, safeguarded on various levels by the family (the Name-of-the-Father), the state (the media), and the nation (the Law-of-the-Father), each reinforcing the other. As Robert J.C. Young, echoing Deleuze’s and Guattari’s criticism of the Oedipal complex as normative, warns: [The] colonial subject [that is, within the context of my analysis, the subject colonised by capitalistic ideology] is constructed through imposed cultural and political forms which are internalised as a condition of psychic reality, and then reproduced as the basis for normative social experience.89 Especially in American Psycho, in which subjectivities are reduced to the dollar sign and statements of fashion, the one who can identify most profoundly with this capitalist environment of surface-based hyperreality will constitute the fittest, and survive. And embodiments of threat – that is, reminders of interiority – to the continuity of this ‘normative’ socio-ideological space and experience must be eliminated. And of course, Lacan’s Symbolic order, a subsidiary of capitalism, also decisively grafts this space as masculine, reinstating my earlier point that the ideological apparatus suggested in Ellis’s (and Oates’s) novel is male-centred as well. Hence, both narratives demonstrate that although the monster is, in the final analysis, a disruptive configuration within the geopolitical space of postmodernism, it is the conditions of such a space that, in the first place, make it possible and conducive for the serial killer to thrive. Both killers are mass-in-persons because they have cleverly manipulated their privileged colour and gender, and their capitalist sign systems (which include class and wealth) – all already neatly constructed within the Symbolic as vitally normative – to serve their perverse ends. Merging with their space, they are able to colonise whatever minimal space that is left for the subalterns to occupy by violently


and physically evicting their bodies. This is possible simply because the ideology of late capitalism has already ostracised these subaltern groups from its spatial consciousness, and their disappearance will not be missed. In these two novels the privileged white, middle-class, American male – the epitome of triumphant civilisation and ‘normative experience’ – is revealed for what it really is: a monster.

3 Monstrous Progeny

So far, the kind of monstrosity that I have been identifying in texts has to do with those which defy the Symbolic order metaphorised as the Law-of-the-Father, and staged within geopolitics. Monstrosity, as I have demonstrated, is the direct result of an identification with this lived space. In this chapter, I want to look at the other complementary half of the Symbolic order termed the Name-of-the-Father, and locate it directly within the patrilineal family privileged in Freudian theory. My readings of Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory (1984) and Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child (1988) expose the way in which this ideological institution is (as in the case of American Psycho and Zombie, although contextually differing) the source of monstrosity. For Banks’s narrative, I apply the theory of trauma built on the psychoanalytical insights of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok to read the monster: a child named Frank Cauldhame. Frank’s trauma is the result of an undisclosed secret – that he is really a girl – which he nevertheless registers unconsciously. But the secret sometimes manifest, which leads Frank to violent performances to repress it. For although Frank’s misogynistic father has fabricated a complex history to explain Frank’s lack of a penis, this is not enough to completely stifle the feminine which he, in the final analysis, actually physically embodies. The Wasp Factory is a story about a female body retaliating against the fantasy of masculinity; this fantasy, in order to silence the feminine other, must exert even more masculine pressure – or hypermasculinity – in order to convince itself of the ‘truthfulness’ of its fantasy. This, however, only leads to destruction, violence, and ultimately, failure. Frank’s trauma is twofold: it is a trauma of a lie which is then articulated through extreme bodily performances such as death-games. It is also a masculine-centred trauma constructed around the fear of the feminine. 107


Cathy Caruth once argued that trauma ‘is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not known in the first instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on’.1 For Caruth, trauma necessarily presupposes an actual violent event, which the psyche, at the point of the violence, resists but which later returns to haunt it. But Banks’s narrative suggests that trauma can be induced without the need of an actual past event; as long as the victim believes that something has happened to him, even if this ‘something’ is purely fictive, trauma can occur. In this sense, I much prefer Juliet Mitchell’s deliberation that trauma ‘may be actual, imagined or induced’.2 Frank’s trauma is certainly the latter. In the end, despite the neat narrative resolution offered through Frank’s discovery of his true gender (thus effectively ending his murderous spree), this revelation does not necessarily resolve the problem of the text. In other words, in ‘explaining’ Frank’s monstrous behaviour as sexually motivated, the novel cannot, in the end, attain closure. The monster, once given voice, can perhaps be contained, but not silenced. If the murderous progeny in The Wasp Factory is the result of trauma engendered by a perverse fantasy of masculinity, the deviant in Doris Lessing’s eerie novel, The Fifth Child (1988) is born of his mother’s monstrous imagination. But throughout Lessing’s narrative, the reader maintains an ambivalent view of Ben’s (the monster child) monstrous behaviour; this is because Ben remains more or less silent in the text, and all imputations of his deviance are made by the rest of his family (especially his mother, Harriet), who, as the novel suggests at various points, is prejudiced against him. Unlike Frank who confesses his evil, Ben’s presence is vitally fantastic in the Todorovan sense. Ben’s monstrosity may, in the end, be merely a demonised projection of Harriet’s inability to articulate her anger, frustration and depression at being a mother and a wife to a rather incompetent husband. What is definite however, regardless of Ben’s ‘reality’, is that this male child’s monstrosity is the identification of an offspring with the mother, which, in turn, upsets and destroys the Symbolic order of the father, represented by the pastoral ideal in this novel. Here, an initial masculine ideology working to repress the feminine turns into an antagonistic homosocial relationship between father and son as the result of a mother’s monstrous imagination. Apart from commenting on the family, The Fifth Child is also an allegory which touches on various other issues including England’s class system and the ideology of realist writing – all done primarily

Monstrous Progeny 109

through a metaphorical reading of Ben. All this will be discussed in my analysis of the novel below.

Trauma and the monstrous child: Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory Although the word ‘trauma’ never appears in Banks’s novel, I am employing this term to attempt an explanation of Frank’s monstrous behaviour. My reading of trauma also relies on the psychoanalytic insights of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. They suggest that there is a powerful psychodynamic presence shared among members of a single family, especially when it is in the form of a (usually sinister) secret. For such a family, reality is the unveiled secret. This view appropriately explains Frank’s monstrous behaviour, which, is essentially founded on a secret. And although Frank is aware of a family secret, he is denied knowledge. He knows that his father’s study hides the secret, for example, but it is also the one room in the house which he is barred from entering (16).3 It is not that Frank is completely powerless when it comes to his father (unlike Quentin P.). In fact, he knows that his father cannot be trusted (14), and that his withholding of information is but a father-son power-play which Frank views as ‘bogus’ and ‘pathetic’, and by which he is no longer affected (16). Yet strangely, he dares not probe into the secret of the study. Although he admits that ‘[o]ne of [his] few remaining unsatisfied ambitions is to get into the old man’s study’ (15), he is curiously also fearful of it, perhaps realising that therein lie aspects of himself or his family which he may not wish to know. As Abraham and Torok surmise, a family secret can, over time, attain the characteristic of a myth, which can be perilous. It becomes a ‘metapsychology’, a psychic presence that victimises the individual (usually a child who is denied the secrets of her parents), deterring her from exploring aspects of herself beyond a narrow dimension. Metapsychology, they observe, is that which is ‘rejected, masked, denied precisely as “reality” … [and] must not be known; in short, it is defined as a secret. The metapsychological concept of Reality refers to the place, in the psychic apparatus, where the secret is buried’,4 or, more familiarly known as the crypt. The irony and power of this crypt is that its victim will not expose it. Instead, the victim will guard the crypt against herself, preferring to support a deception rather than disclose the truth. As Derrida succinctly puts it, ‘The Self: a cemetery guard. The crypt is enclosed within the self, but as a foreign place,


prohibited, excluded. The self is not the proprietor of what he is guarding’.5 Abraham and Torok further observes that ‘[just] as desire is born with its prohibition, Reality too, at least in the metapsychological sense, is born of the necessity of remaining concealed, unspoken’.6 Desire and prohibition of that desire are twin features in a metapsychic dialectic. A secret can arouse desire to disclose it, but can equally prohibit desire from fulfilment in order to sustain desire. Frank aptly notes: ‘obviously the secret wouldn’t be a secret any more if he told me the truth’ (16). This tacit agreement to ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ (or more precisely, one particular sleeping dog) forms the basis of Frank’s unstable relationship with his father. His father often leaves Frank completely alone at home, trusting that Frank will not abandon his crypt keeper’s position and disclose the secret; in this, one can see the unspoken power that Frank’s father continues to assert on him – an assertion that is possible because the victim is compliant. This, according to Michel Foucault, constitutes real power, one that is not motivated by force, but a ‘collaboration’ between victimiser and victim.7 Both Frank and his father are equally victimisers and victims. They both manipulate the secret as a means to control each other. But, more fundamentally, their refusal to disclose the secret continues to inhibit them unconsciously which, in Frank’s case, subsequently transforms into aggressive and murderous tendencies. Because the secret ‘holds the child (later the adult) in a pathogenic dual union with the parent, in a silent partnership dedicated to preserving the secret intact [the] child’s unwitting involvement in this mute pact interferes with the psychic processes leading to successful introjection and inhibits the emergence as an autonomous subject’.8 The secret is buried in Frank, but he is not the secret’s owner, thus lodging an other within his self. He is ‘traumatised’ because the secret cannot be cathected from his psyche, positioning him instead in an endless loop of returning to the point of the secret. Frank’s play, for example, is reminiscent of what Piaget calls ‘symbolic play’, which does not last beyond the fourth year of a child (more or this later). Frank is sixteen, a teenager still trapped in child’s trauma because the secret prevents him from achieving autonomy. According to Fred Botting, trauma is the result of an unbridgeable gap between the body within the Symbolic order, and the body that continues to desire its original place in the Void of the Real. This Real is the ‘absolute plenitude that is lost when the living body is alienated in the imaginary otherness of the specular reflection and subjected to symbolic orders of signification’.9 The Lacanian mirror stage is the point of no return from the Symbolic order, but the Real never remains


completely lost, and the body continues to register a desire for it. This ˇ izˇek sees it: is the origin of trauma. Or as Z The [R]eal is therefore simultaneously both the hard, impenetrable kernel resisting symbolisation and a pure chimerical entity which has in itself no ontological consistency …. All its effectivity lies in the distortions it produces in the symbolic universe of the subject: the traumatic event is ultimately just a fantasy-construct filling out a certain void in a symbolic structure and, as such, the retroactive effect of this structure.10 Trauma is the distortion of the Symbolic with regards to the Real. Its place is in the Real which is lost but nevertheless desired. Trauma occurs when the subject becomes aware of a Real and realises that his position as subject is a fantasy; and because there is no returning to the Real, trauma becomes embodied in the subject. The word ‘aware’ is however, misleading, as trauma need not necessarily be registered as an awareness. The body can be a repository for trauma even if the mind fails to register it. Conflating Abraham’s and Torok’s theory of the secret and Botting’s and Zˇizˇek’s view of trauma in reading Frank, we can tentatively surmise Frank’s destructive pattern. His simultaneous reluctance and desire to know his father’s secret mirrors that simultaneous fear of and desire for the Real, that is, the point of the origin of his subjectivity. Frank’s trauma is translated into bodily performances, which is his way of repeating his point of origin (the ‘retroactive effect’). What the mind cannot grapple with, the body will, because ˇ izˇek further remarks that ‘the subject the body embodies that trauma. Z (consciousness) wants to penetrate the secret behind the curtain, nothing which ‘is’ the subject … the subject is the void, the hole in the [Symbolic] other, and the object the inert content filling up this void; the subject’s entire ‘being’ thus consists in the fantasy-object filling out ˇ izˇek, the subject, minus the subjectivation of the of this void’.11 For Z Symbolic other, is fundamentally a ‘nothing’. Hence, the subject’s sense of Self is really a fantasy-object filled out by the Symbolic. Relating this theory to Frank’s position, he is this Void which his father – the (paternal) authority of the Symbolic – permeates with a fantasy-object, which in this case is a fabricated history, or, as Derrida would term it, an ‘artificial’ unconscious.12 Here is an instance in which the Lacanian Law-of-the-Father is subverted: the father’s Symbolic order is revealed to be founded on deception, absence and lack. Frank struggles with the desire to penetrate (to use Zˇizˇek’s term)


the secret behind the door of his father’s study, but what he will eventually discover is that there is no secret at all – or that the secret is really a lie. But until then, being unable (and unwilling) to disclose the secret, he must experience trauma through articulations of the body, especially violent play. Curiously, secrets are pleasurable precisely because they carry overtones of crime. In secrets, there are accomplices and those who are excluded and even eliminated (such as those who threaten exposure).13 Frank’s position is a complex one because he simultaneously repudiates, entertains, and embodies the secret. He is at once his father’s interrogator, the enemy of his father’s secret, as well as the faithful crypt keeper who will not hesitate to destroy those who threaten to desecrate their grave (more of this later). It is this unique affinity with the secret that renders him a peculiar monster – a child serial killer. Engendering trauma The Wasp Factory represents the treacherous extremities of rigid gender and sexual construction and determination by culture (which I take to include history and society). As Judith Butler reasons, a ‘construction of a coherent sexual identity along the disjunctive axis of the feminine/masculine is bound to fail’,14 because any form of construction is ultimately a fantasy which reveals its instability sooner or later. In Frank’s case, his sexual and gender constructions are based on the fear, and a total repudiation, of the feminine. Frank hyper-conforms to masculine ideals in order to ‘protect’ himself from feminine influences. His father’s lie breeds and feeds upon his misogyny and the result is a traumatised child who suffers a powerful fear of and hatred for the feminine, especially after witnessing how his father’s and brother’s masculinity were subverted by feminine influences (see below). Frank’s father, in transforming his daughter into a son, invariantly transforms his ‘son’ into a monster whose manifestations of outrageous masculinity cross the boundaries of ethical decency into the domains of atrocity. Living on a secluded island separated from the nearby town, Frank’s family is largely patriarchal, and women are mostly excluded. Like his father, Frank views all women as enemies: My greatest enemies are Women and the Sea. These things I hate. Women because they are weak and stupid and live in the shadow of men and are nothing compared to them, and the Sea because it has always frustrated me, destroying what I have built, washing away


what I have left, wiping clean the marks I have made. And I’m not all that sure the Wind is blameless either. The Sea is a sort of mythological enemy, and I make what you might call sacrifices to it in my soul, fearing it a little, respecting it as you’re supposed to, but in many ways treating it as an equal. It does things to the world, and so do I; we should both be feared. Women … well, women are a bit too close for comfort as far as I’m concerned. (43) For Frank, women and the sea are synonymous: they are both to be hated. The final ironic remark (which Victor Sage notes but fails to comment on15) is not merely a narrative strategy of foregrounding the final revelation, but also an expression of a fear of feminisation. If in women Frank sees characteristics of stupidity and weakness, in the sea he sees power and destruction. But because the two are metonymically related in his psyche, it is arguable that the traits he attributes to women are actually a deflection of what he actually fears in them: their power and destructiveness. This strange paradox suggests a difficulty in the negotiation of aspects of sexuality, the body and the psyche – a difficulty which, I will argue, turns Frank into a monster. Frank’s misogyny can be historically traced back to the engendering of masculinity in the nineteenth century, when natural history and anthropology were carefully deployed to lay ‘an eternal foundation for manliness’ which has lasted until this day.16 Masculinity has always been constructed to differentiate it from the feminine, and the fear of becoming feminised has remained an important motivation for the unquestioned and unchallenged ideas of masculinity hitherto (one reason for engendering masculinity was to define its limits so that the feminine could also be clearly circumscribed). Unknowingly transformed into a male, Frank struggles to overcome this bodily trauma through his complex system of rituals and murderous rites – forms of play all repeatedly and elaborately carried out to affirm a fabricated masculinity. His monstrous tendencies are, like his observation of the sea, a destructive force that has no definable cause. This is because the secret has become occupied by what Nicolas Abraham would call a ‘phantom which returns to haunt [which] bears witness to the existence of the dead buried within the other’.17 Abraham’s phantom has clear associations with Lacan’s concept of ˇ izˇek’s fantasy-object, for it is essentially: phantasy and Z nothing but an invention of the living. Yes, an invention in the sense that the phantom is meant to objectify, even if under the


guise of individual of collective hallucinations, the gap that the concealment of some part of a loved one’s life produced in us. The phantom is, therefore, also a metapsychological fact. Consequently what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.18 In other words, phantoms are psychic constructions to replace a gap left by some terrible secret which cannot be disclosed. The phantom replaces the space left by someone else’s secret as a kind of bulwark against disclosure. This is rather similar to Lacan’s concept of fantasy.19 For Lacan, desire is ultimately a fantasy (the fantastic object is an illusory ‘stand in’ for desire’s gap), because the Real of the desire is an impossibility. Here, we can see that both Abraham and Lacan are positing a singular idea – that a fantasy/phantom comes to occupy the realm of desire in place of the impossible Real/unspeakable secret that is someone else’s but which implicates us. As Frank admits, in his family there is ‘[s]omething about a link with the past, or an evil demon we have lurking, a symbol for all our family misdeeds; waiting, perhaps, one day, to surprise us’ (53). But this past turns out to be a lie provoked by (and one that further provokes) a fear of the feminine (more precisely, the maternal). Indeed, Frank sees his mother as the sole cause for all his deficiency, violence and destruction: The Bomb Circle, my dad’s leg and his stick, his reluctance to get me a motorbike perhaps, the candles in the skull, the legions of dead mice and hamsters – they’re all the fault of Agnes, my father’s second wife and my mother. (66) Frank attributes all evils to his mother – especially the ‘castration’ of himself and his father. Agnes, who may very well be another fabricated history (all we know of her comes from Frank’s father, who strategically ‘let[s] slip’ information about her to Frank [104–105]), is represented as a femme fatale, at once a symbol of death and destruction (the skull and the dead animals) and the phallic mother (she rides a motorbike); her presence shakes familiar and strict constructions of gender, which is why she must be regarded as a threat to masculinity. Agnes remains an enigma; what Frank knows of her has been carefully edited by his father and their housekeeper, Mrs Clamp. After she gave birth to Frank, she deserted her family, only to return later again to deliver Paul. This final return leaves several important ‘markings’ on the Cauldhame men: Frank’s father is maimed, suggesting symbolic


castration, leaving him dependent on a walking stick, a substitute phallus;20 and Frank is transformed into a male after a putative accident which is directly related to Paul’s birth. At this point, Frank’s father makes the ultimate decision to remove all female presence from his life and turns Frank into a male child. To explain Frank’s lack of a penis, he fabricates a story of how Frank was castrated by a ferocious bull-dog, which was subsequently shot dead (104–6): So that was my mother’s last visit to the island and the house. She left one dead, one born and two crippled for life, one way or the other. Not a bad score for a fortnight in the summer of groovy and psychedelic love, peace and general niceness. (107) In a way, Frank has been made the embodiment of his father’s vengeance against women for his own castration, in the same way the child Ben, in The Fifth Child will come to embody his mother’s anger at being possessed (see below). Mr Cauldhame transfers his hatred of women to his daughter by destroying the female and feminine in her. But hatred is not the only thing transferred – along with it is also the fear of the feminine and the uncomfortable knowledge of masculine fragility. For if Agnes could be so ‘masculine’, the boundary which separates masculinity and femininity, male and female becomes effaced. Judith Butler has argued that ‘gender does not denote a substantive being, but a relative point of convergence among culturally and historically specific sets of relations’ which is fundamentally ‘performative – that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed …. There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; the identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’.21 For Butler, gender is a culturally and historically defined performance that constitutes subjectivity. That is, gender is not what the subject is, but what the subject becomes or embodies in culture. I want to argue that this reading of gender can be related to trauma in the Banks’s narrative. If trauma is experienced because the Real must be constantly screened by fantasy, gender is also that Void which must be filled by culture and history to predetermined boundaries so as to maintain the authoritative presence of the paternal. Frank’s subjectivity is based on a fantastic lie that is encouraged by his father (who represents the Lacanian Name-of-the-Father) to fill up the Void of the ‘Real’ Frank. But as authoritative presence, the Symbolic order is altogether an


unstable and fragile order which ruptures and cracks. Hence, gender too, as constructed by the Symbolic order, is highly unreliable as a determiner of subjectivity. In other words, if gender and sex are both constructions, one can choose to resignify both. One must necessarily be born male or female, but one need not conform to the signification of these sexual/gendered terms founded ‘on an artificial unity [based] on an otherwise discontinuous set of attributes’ which are presented as universal truths of individuality, but are actually serving the male hegemony’.22 In this sense, the careful boundary which patriarchy has set up to differentiate masculinity and femininity in favour of the former has been radically effaced. What is left of sex and gender are – not floating signifiers – but sites of perpetual interrogation and resignification. But it is this rupture in the masculine/feminine binarism which Frank fears. Unclear demarcation would mean the threat of feminisation. This must be prevented at all cost, even to the extent of resorting to violence and murder. Frank suffers from what Teresa de Lauretis would term as a ‘violence of rhetoric’, in which ‘sexuality is produced discursively (institutionally) by power’ to its logically violent extreme.23 In de Lauretis’s essay, what is institutional is also always male supremacy. Frank’s body becomes subjected to his father’s violent rhetoric presented as fabricated history. And because Frank’s trauma is indeed violent, his bodily articulation of that trauma will necessarily take violent means. Frank’s murderous proclivity is both repetitive and an indefinable factor in his life: it eludes rationalisation. Frank kills a friend, Blyth, out of revenge, and Paul out of the need to eradicate all remaining traces of his mother from his life; Esmeralda he kills ‘on a whim’ (42).24 Frank’s reasons for killing are all linked to two fundamental reasons: his hatred for (and fear of) the feminine, and his conformity to a masculinity of an exaggerated kind (I will discuss these reasons in more detail later). I believe that Frank’s repetitive, seemingly mindless brutality is linked to the secret, and that his killing spree (what I call ‘catastrophic games’) is a non-Symbolic articulation which has taken extremely violent forms because of the trauma experienced by his body. In my view, Judith Butler’s argument sums up Frank’s condition accurately: If to assume a sex is in some sense an ‘identification’, then it seems that identification is a site at which prohibition and deflection are insistently negotiated. To identify with a sex is to stand in some relation to an imaginary threat, imaginary and forceful, forceful precisely because it is imaginary.25


In Frank’s case, however, because his sexual identification with his father’s lie is not only ‘precisely’ but literally an imaginary one, it must be rigidly, even violently and ‘forcefully’ protected and reinforced, culminating in the ‘catastrophic games’ he plays. Godgames and catastrophic games Frank, a lonely child, spends much time devising games which often take violent and destructive forms. His games are highly symbolic, and he often confers special names to sites and events of a play. Jean Piaget notes that during their sensory motor years, children increasingly ritualise their games: ‘This progress in ludic ritualisation of schemas entails a corresponding development towards symbolism’.26 This constitutes the ‘make-believe’ play which ceases once what Piaget designates as the ‘sensory years’ are ended (at around age seven). Frank is sixteen – which suggests a prolongation of the ‘make-believe’ years. What has occurred here is an arrest in Frank’s psychic development which has to do with trauma. I am not suggesting that Frank is mentally deficient – in many ways, he shows a high level ability for complex thought, especially in planning, elaborating and executing his games. His arrested development has to do with being trapped in a ‘secret’ from which he cannot escape – a secret scripted onto his mind (and body) when he was very young, and has lingered there since. Until the secret is exposed, Frank will remain at that juvenile stage of play even as he develops in other areas. Indirectly, his symbolic play is another means of filling out that Void which his body ‘senses’. Piaget also identifies two criteria in symbolic playing: pleasure and its ‘relative lack of organisation’.27 The two are complementary, as Piaget reads pleasure as being free from orderliness, which by extension, involves rules. But Frank’s games do not altogether conform to this simplistic supposition. His games are not always planned (he plays quite a few games spontaneously), but are definitely not disorganised. And he certainly derives much pleasure in playing. The game leading to Paul’s death is an example. In this episode – ‘The Bomb Circle’ (66–72) – the game which Frank plays has a motive: to kill Paul. It is unplanned (Frank and Paul chanced upon a bomb on the island while on a stroll [67]), unlike the one he played with Esmeralda (87–94), but once the game is established, it becomes highly organised. Undoubtedly, once Frank finds the bomb, he knows what he must do: I went back to it [the bomb] carefully, stroking it gently and making slushing noises with my mouth … I followed the line of the shadow


along the sand, over the rocks, and found myself looking at little Paul, splashing happily about in the pool, slapping the water with a great flat bit of wood almost as big as he was. I smiled, called him over. (68) Frank will make Paul do away with himself with the stick with which he is playing. By now, Frank is a mastermind at game-playing, having played quite a few catastrophic ones already. He is able to organise a new, deadly game in a very short time. Piaget, in limiting symbolic play to the sensory-motor stage, does not note that abstract playing is fundamentally founded on the ‘make-believe’ stage, only more sophisticated. Frank seems to conflate a form of make-believe play with an abstract (and quick) thought-process, making him monstrous indeed: he is a teenager trapped in a perpetual loop of juvenile symbolic play but with the capacity for cold, calculated and careful abstraction. Frank’s games can be considered ‘godgames’. According to R. Rawdon Wilson’s, the concept of godgames involves a character (or several) who is made the victim by another ‘character’s superior knowledge and power’. The latter is considered the magister ludi, the gamewright who alone knows the rules because he invents them. The victim-character becomes trapped in the game-master’s ‘cunningly constructed web of appearances’, finding the web ‘impenetrable’, and all his actions and behaviours ‘observed and judged’. The game-master, on the other hand, ‘is godlike in that he exercises power, holds an advantageous position, [and] will probably be beyond detection (even understanding)’.28 Frank certainly fits, in many ways, Wilson’s description of the magister ludi. Over his victims, he is superior in knowledge and certainly powerful. And in his convoluted ‘web of appearances’, he remains, like Bateman and Quentin, an unseen enemy. To everyone else, Frank is a harmless, slightly backward child.29 Thus, he is beyond detection; an illusion who deceives others. His brutal murders are extensions of the catastrophic games he plays with animals (chapter two [30–36]). These games are whimsical, organised and brutal. In the twisted island landscape of Frank’s design, he is all-powerful and allknowing. Like a god, he watches over the island with his binoculars (reminiscent of Wilder in High-Rise) and believes himself to be helped by supernatural sentries (which are really poles decorated with parts of dead animals, and which he sees as extensions of himself [7, 20]). He confers special names to particular sites on the island where meaningful events have occurred (such as the Rabbit Grounds [27], the Bomb Circle [53, 62ff] and the Skull Grounds [104ff]). His godgames have


usually war and catastrophe themes, and the more excessive, the better. For in catastrophic games, extreme binary opposites are pitted against one another – life/death, master/slave, hero/enemy – and power and knowledge are crucial factors in determining victory. In one particularly brutal game, Frank goes on a war rampage against rabbits, scorching and bombing them randomly (29–36). One particular buck rabbit even takes on exaggerated proportions, becoming larger, more ferocious and more menacing than an average bunny – certainly a projection of overrepresentation to boost Frank’s own perverse masculinity. In the course of his ‘battle’, many enemies were killed, his finger bitten and his weapon, the Black Destroyer, ruined – all in a day’s war.30 This form of play certainly defies conventional views of what constitutes child’s play, which, according to Margarida Morgado, should provide her with the space to negotiate ‘cultural meanings at the junction of subjectivity and the outside world’.31 Play, in other words, enables a child to ‘experience reality from inside’, that is, from her limited perspective of the world at large. Through play, the child assimilates outside reality into her internal subjectivity. For Morgado, play is only possible in a ‘healthy’ (a word which she does not explain) child who is trying to understand her world. She extends Piaget’s play theory to incorporate the idea of play being a subjective experience which varies from child to child, but contradicts herself when she views the technology of play as essentially similar in function, whoever the player. As argued, Frank obviously cannot fulfil Morgado’s view of child’s play. His catastrophic games are, though subjective, emphatically not about negotiating social meanings and constructing reality. More obviously, his game undermines Piaget’s theory of play in that the symbolic play persists and becomes gradually more powerful and more organised (and therefore, more dangerous). Play enables Frank to feel a sense of (masculine) superiority. War games are evoked, because war is a heightened form of masculine performance. Only ‘real men’ can be soldiers, and of course, the better soldier will win the war.32 Frank is the superior soldier for, compared to his enemies, he is more intelligent and wields better weapons. Of murders and madness Murder is perhaps the supreme form of godgames. The gamewright not only manipulates the victim-players, but holds their lives literally in his hands. Whether the victims live or die is purely dependent on his whim. Frank plays this game thrice (this is only counting the humans whom Frank kills), and each time, it involves careful planning and


elaborate scheming (especially with Esmeralda’s game) before execution. His victims are purposefully chosen, and their deaths highly organised. Sure enough, two out of the three deaths (Paul’s and Esmeralda’s) occur as the result of a game.33 Frank’s choice of victims is compelled by limitations as well as kinship. The children he kills are really part of an elaborate world he has created for himself to preserve the secret which continues (unconsciously) to motivate him. In this world, patriarchal values of emotional hardness and machismo, are ‘paramount’.34 Threats and potential threats must be extinguished. Blyth, Frank’s first victim, is killed because he made Eric, his older brother, cry ‘like a girl’ (38). Eric is Frank’s hero and to see him cry is to see a feminised masculine figure.35 Esmeralda is killed because she is female; after killing two males, he feels that he ‘owe[s] it to myself and to the world in general’ to redress the statistical imbalance (87). Finally, Frank kills Paul because he is the last vestige of his mother’s presence, which must be eliminated so that all traces of feminine/ maternal influence are wiped out. After Paul’s death, Frank ‘lay there in the Bomb Circle where I killed her other son, and … hoped that she was dead too’ (66). Frank’s pathological hatred for his mother, is however, an uncertain one. After all, he only thinks he has good reason to hate her (66). Within the history of the bad mother is also the story of a ‘bad father’ who allows his son to dress up in girls’ clothes (66). Why this is so is not detailed in the text, but it does reveal a historical point before Frank’s time, when his father did not repudiate but embraced the feminine – so much so that he was branded ‘a bad parent’. It also suggests that it was perhaps after his figurative castration by Agnes that he in turn declares war against women, and effectively seeks to remove all feminine traces from his existence. But this ‘history’ cannot be verified by Frank. Somehow, just like the mysterious study, this incomplete history remains a fort/da game his father plays with him. For although Frank hears this other story, he does not believe it, or rather, he is not sure if he should believe it – so vigilantly is it concealed in the ‘bad mother’ story. In the ‘bad mother’ story, Agnes is the enemy; his father is ‘bad’ because Agnes says so, thus exonerating the father. Frank leaves the story as such because to pursue it would realign his father with the feminine – something against which he has been deeply indoctrinated. Thus, the revelation of the father’s ‘badness’ is carefully re-directed to the mother. The narrative is also carefully ambiguous about Frank’s father and Eric, but there are hints that the two of them are not quite the machismo men they seem. Frank describes his father as having ‘a


delicate face, like a woman’s’ (10); compared to Agnes, he certainly takes a feminised position. In this sense, he is both figuratively and literally castrated by her; and when Frank eventually enters his father’s study and discovers the male hormones and the preserved genitals, he immediately concludes that his father is really a woman after all (173). Certainly, his father’s name, Angus, can be a derivative of Agnes. This turns out to be wrong,36 but the fact remains that the machismo of the Cauldhames is indeed a compromised one. It is unstable and founded on a fear of the feminine. Eric’s machismo is clear evidence of the fragility of the constructed masculine. An incident at a hospital, which leads to his madness, is reminiscent of the return of the repressed other, which he, modelling after his father, has forcefully confined within a macho make-up. But during his second year as a medical student, while helping out at a ‘teaching hospital’ (139), Eric witnessed the internal decay of a deformed child when the child’s skull fell open. Then and there, his machismo ruptured as he stared into a horror that mirrored his own fragility: What Eric saw when he lifted that plate up, what he saw with all that weight of human suffering above, with all the mighty spread of closed-in, heat struck darkened city all around, what he saw with his own skull splitting, was a slowly writhing nest of fat maggots, swimming in their combined digestive juices as they consumed the brain of the child. (142)37 Only a deeply traumatic event like this can undo the many years of masculine construction – a brittle edifice – to reveal its Reality. Eric has finally become aware of his own emptiness and realises that his surface construction is but a fantasy to suppress that Void of his Real. This breakdown of the surface and the realisation of the impossibility of ‘plugging the gap’ of the Real is the state of trauma. Eric’s trauma is stark and immediate, unlike Frank’s, which is a non-event, and is based on an accumulation of false history. But typical of Frank who reads antagonistic events as feminine, he blames Eric’s mental dissolution on his having ‘just a little too much woman in [his self]’ (148). Suddenly, the soldierly and heroic Eric becomes a womanly man. More importantly, the story of the ‘bad father’ resurfaces. Frank remembers his father’s subtle insertion in the story of the bad mother, and sees his father as actively involved in feminising Eric (that is, allowing Eric to dress up as a woman [148]). But the tendency to blame the father


remains underwritten. His father is at fault only ‘in part’ but his mother is a ‘stupid bitch’ (148). Once the Real is experienced, or, once the subject is made aware of the Real, there is no turning back. There can only be resignification of the self, and Eric does this through madness and anti-social behaviour (usually violent ones). As Berthold Schoene-Harwood observes, Eric’s emotional collapse results: in a mad, excessive emulation of phallic heroism. Like Frank … Eric’s ultraviolence is motivated by an overwhelming sense of his own inadequacy, failure and competence as a ‘real’ man. Accordingly, it is not the feminine that softens him, as Frank suggests, but the masculine that makes him harden beyond the humanly bearable, to the point of cracking up.38 Although Schoene-Harwood’s term ‘real’ has no psychoanalytic overtones, his interpretation nevertheless confirms mine. It is not the feminine that destroys Eric, a view that Frank entertains, but the irreversible loss of the masculine construction. So rigidly schooled is he in the masculine, that a single crack in that construction will topple the entire edifice. Eric acts out violence and destruction to try and reclaim his lost masculinity in the way Frank carries out his godgames to eliminate any potential threats. The Wasp Factory In one episode, Frank contemplates the influence of symbols and their relation to the wasp factory: All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people’s, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid. The Wasp Factory is part of the pattern because it is part of life and – even more so – part of death. Like life it is complicated, so all the components are there. The reason it can answer questions is because every question is a start looking for an end, and the Factory is about the End – death, no less. Keep your entrails and sticks and dice and books and birds and voices and pendants and all the rest of that crap; I have the factory, and it’s about now and the future; not the past. (117–8) The Wasp Factory is part of the godgames he plays. The Factory becomes his private symbol of life and death, which are the two ulti-


mate poles which govern existence. In Frank’s view, nothing is exempted from the elaborate pattern or system of symbols called ‘life’. Whether the strong or the weak, all participate – either actively as the strong do in their pattern-making and influence, or passively as the weak do in letting their ‘courses [be] mapped out for them’. Death seems more profound because it marks the end of all life; using the question-and-answer analogy, Frank is surmising that the very reason for existence (life) is so that death can at last be achieved. I read the final sentence in the passage quoted as Frank affirming life in death. For him, life’s meaning is not sought in chance (dice), knowledge (books), nature (birds), religion (entrails and sticks), community (voices) or wealth (pendants), but in his private symbol of death as represented by the Wasp Factory. Death is the goal that life seeks to attain. Yet, what is suspicious about Frank is that he does not seem to be ‘involved’ in his views. His pronouns tend to change from the inclusive we to an othering ‘their’. Towards the end of the passage quoted, he clearly sees himself opposed to the ‘you’ who have the dice and books and birds, all non-guarantees of life. Indeed, only Frank (‘I’) possesses the true symbol of life and death. He sees himself as beyond the pattern of life and death because he possesses its ultimate symbol. Like a god, he is the one who designs and manipulates existence and cessation of life. It is therefore unsurprising that Frank plays with his victims’ life and death, and never his own. Yet, a question is begged: how exactly does the Factory belong to the present and the future, and not the past? For an explanation, I turn to the theories of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler to demonstrate that Frank’s ‘death drive’ is his way of resisting the Real. Frank’s fear of the feminine, and more directly the maternal, is also the fear of the Void of the Real – a fear which is both real and present because he has witnessed the feminisation of his father and brother. As Victor Sage elucidates, the ‘gender ambiguity [in The Wasp Factory] is not simply a mechanical switch for the purpose of a surprise ending. The topography of Frank’s little world of death and retribution is the topography of his own unconscious self-denial’.39 In her essay on abjection, Kristeva argues that an individual who recognises her image as a sign (the Symbolic sign, that is), will repress ‘the chora and its eternal return. Desire alone will henceforth be witness to that ‘primal’ pulsation’.40 In other words, the individual who signifies within the Symbolic must relegate the maternal to the unconscious; the maternal belongs to the past (the ‘primal pulsation’) which is simultaneously repressed and desired. Or as Butler succinctly puts it, ‘repression may


be understood to produce the object that it comes to deny. That production may well be an elaboration of the agency of repression itself’.41 Aligning these theories to my reading of trauma, one would read Frank’s hyper-identification with the Symbolic (like Bateman) as an attempt at disassociating himself from the Real (the maternal, the chora). Frank’s Factory symbolises the present and the future because the past belongs to the resisted and repressed Real. As Kristeva and Butler have shown, the ‘past’ must be forgotten because it is desired. This is, of course, impossible. Jacques Ehrmann argues that in playing, ‘players may be played; that, as an object in the game, the player can be its stakes (enjeu) and its toy (jouet)’.42 This is certainly true of Frank. As much as he engineers his godgames, he is equally an object of his games, which are also the representational form of repression. But if desire belongs to the Real, and trauma, if not consciously registered, can be registered elsewhere (that is, via the body), then Frank’s catastrophic games can also be interpreted as the return of the repressed through violent articulation of the body, an extreme measure of expression because of the extreme method taken to subjugate the Real. Thus, Frank not only plays, he is being played. His body is being ‘used’ as the embodiment of trauma to find a means of articulation. As much as he plays with other people’s lives and deaths, his own life and death are being directed by the trauma of his subjectivity. Endgame I will withhold analysing the aftermath of Frank’s discovery that he is really Frances. I find that this ‘revelation’ is a weak point of the novel because Banks, for whatever reason, seems to want to resolve the ambiguity of his story. In revealing the secret in the end, Banks seems to be favouring a redemptive conclusion to the narrative, which I feel is too simplistic an attempt to excuse Angus and (especially) Frank, and to rescue the narrative from an otherwise difficult problem of closure. I shall briefly look at some passages from the last pages of the novel to stage my criticism. Frank’s final revelation of herself as a woman allows her to understand the reasons behind her murderous predilection: Perhaps it was because I thought I had had all that really mattered in the world, the whole reason – and means – for our continuance as a species, stolen from me before I even knew its value. Perhaps I murdered for revenge in each case, jealousy exacting – through the only potency at my command – a toll from those who passed within


my range; my peers who each would otherwise have grown into the one thing I could never become: an adult. (183) Apart from an uncertain point of view – the word ‘perhaps’ precedes both sentences – Frank’s justification of her murders is curiously confused. On one hand, she seems to be saying that she kills because procreative rights have been ‘stolen’ from her before she even knew she had it; alternatively, this can be read as a destructive nostalgia for the lost-penis, the loss of symbolic presence and power which must be compensated by exaggerated masculinity; or again, she may be claiming that her murders have to do with jealousy over her victims’ ability to attain adulthood when she never could. The latter reasoning seems unfounded, but the first two are plausible within the ambit of my reading position. We also know that Frank/Frances does not officially ‘exist’ because her father has never registered her birth with the authorities. Perhaps this may explain why Frank/Frances sees herself as being unable to achieve adulthood (she sees her life as purposeless [183]). But this reading, if plausible, is not tenable. What is more likely is that Frank is offering herself various justifications for her actions because the real reason remains, despite the final revelation, too painful to accept. Frank acknowledges that her murderous instincts may be related to femininity, but gives herself alternative reasons anyway. The passage continues: I believe that I decided if I could never become a man, I – the unmanned – I would out-man those around me, and so I became the killer, a small image of the ruthless soldier-hero, almost all I’ve ever seen or read seems to pay strict homage to. I would find or make my own weapons, and my victims would be those most recently produced by the one act I was incapable of; my equals in that, while they possessed the potential for generation, they were at that point no more able to perform the required act than I was. Talk about penis envy. (183) By her own admission, Frank says that she kills because she must prove herself a ‘real man’. But this reasoning is highly tendentious. Frank surmises that her murders are due to her being ‘unmanned’: if she ‘could never become a man’, she would embrace hyper-masculinity by being a soldier and by killing (that is, expressions of hypermasculinity). But how would Frank even know that she had been


unmanned? This revelation only comes at the end of the story. Before this, there is no evidence in the text that Frank even suspects that she may not be a man after all. She suspects this of her father, but never of herself. Banks’s attempt at explaining Frank’s monstrosity fails to confirm what has happened before, and even results in an internal contradiction within the narrative. The revelation also frees Frank from an elaborate pattern of life and death, as represented by the Factory. It causes her to realise that she cannot be outside the system because she is part of that system: Inside this greater machine, things are not quite so cut and dried (or cut and pickled) as they have appeared in my experience. Each of us, in our own personal Factory may believe we have stumbled down one corridor, and that our fate is sealed and certain (dream or nightmare, humdrum or bizarre, good or bad), but a word, a glance, a slip – anything can change that, alter it entirely …. Our destination is the same in the end, but our journey – part chosen, part determined – is different for us all, and changes even as we live and grow. I thought one door had snicked shut behind me years ago; in fact I was still crawling about the face. Now the door closes, and my journey begins. (183–4) This passage, a rather shaky philosophical rhetoric, is perhaps the weakest point in the narrative. Frank’s admission that ‘we’ (note the inclusive pronoun) are ultimately pawns of fate (‘the greater machine’) is an attempt at aligning herself with the rest of humanity, and turning her deviance into a natural condition of being human. I find this unconvincing and even ethically unjustifiable. Indeed, the gentle picture in the final passage of the narrative in which the resting Eric is mildly attended to by Frances (who has yet to reveal her story to her brother), seems jarringly out of place in a novel which has hitherto nothing but violence, atrocity and destruction throughout. Thus, Banks’s narrative of redemption may serve to exonerate Frank and his father (and to an extent, even Eric), but it only results, in the end, in narrative bad faith.

Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child: maternal imagination, monstrous progeny The subtlety of Doris Lessing’s novel, The Fifth Child lies in the ambiguity of the Ben’s ontological presence in the text; that is his presence in


the text cannot be established securely. In literature, he is what Reinhard Kuhn would call an ‘enigmatic child’; this child ‘represents a menace to human life and to human institutions, because his is a perception of them that is radically different, and thus his reactions to them appear unmotivated, but only because they are for adults unpredictable’.43 Kuhn goes on to argue that this child is highly precocious and has ‘the uncanny knack’ to expose the fantasy of adult pretenses and conventions. He is, in the final analysis, ‘a serious threat’.44 As an enigmatic child, Ben joins the ranks of characters like Little Father Time (Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure [1896]) and Beloved (Toni Morrison, Beloved [1988]), whose presence as ‘normal children’ is, to a large extent, difficult to establish. Metaphorically, Ben serves as both a bearer of his mother’s unarticulated frustration and a threat to his father’s pastoral ideals. His presence signals anagnorisis, the revelation of the Void in the Symbolic order, that once made, can no longer be ignored. In other words, Ben changes the way others see things against their will.45 Apart from Todorov’s theory of the fantastic, which will be deployed to analyse Ben’s enigmatic presence, I will also draw on theories of horror conceptualised by film critics such as Carol Clover and Barbara Creed. The Fifth Child, in my view, is essentially a horror novel about the failed family romance and the disintegration of the masculine (read, paternal). It is a horror narrative with the familiar theme of the possessed mother and its consequence, the monstrous progeny. The lack of attention to narrative content inherent in the structuralist theory of the Todorovan fantastic is thus amended by horror theory which emphasises thematic concerns. This way, Ben’s fantastical and horrific presence can be analysed for its gender, social, and even political, dimensions. For related to the themes of possession, the pastoral and Symbolic breakdown, The Fifth Child also carries an embedded political commentary. As Ben wrecks the family from within, so allegorically, England is threatened by an otherness engendered from within. Internal monsters are often more destructive because they are not immediately recognisable. Either concealed (Bateman, Quentin P.) or ignored (Frank), they are able to disrupt the ideological institution from within, and expose the fragility of its construction.

The fantastic in The Fifth Child Lessing’s novel can be considered an example of a fantastic literature. As Todorov’s treatment of the fantastic is already familiar, I will merely


rehearse what is fundamental to my analysis of The Fifth Child. According to Todorov, the fantastic creates hesitation in the reader confronted by an ‘irreducible opposition between real and unreal’ in a text.46 Ben’s presence occasions this irreducibility, for it is impossible to decisively conclude if he is the monster everyone says he is, or merely an embodiment of his mother’s possession. Harriet’s prejudice for her last child, and her unreliable point of view, certainly compound the narrative’s fantastic quality. One episode which highlights the indeterminacy of Harriet’s narrative revolves around Ben’s alleged killing of the pet dog (75–6). She immediately attributes the dog’s death to Ben. Her meditation on Ben’s supposed careful planning (‘He had opened his door, gone quietly past his sleeping parents, down the stairs, found the dog, killed it, and gone back up again, quietly, into his room, and shut the door’ [75]) of the killing is doubtful, and she herself hesitates to believe her own conclusion. Ben’s soundless laughter and teeth baring (75) are assumed to be signs of his deviance. This episode is, hence, highly suspenseful and the reader must decide to either believe Harriet’s account, or consider her narrative unreliable. Harriet further reinforce Ben’s in-humanness through the names she confers on him, names which verge on the fantastic such as troll (61), goblin (61), Neanderthal (65), dwarf (68), changeling (72) and gnome (89) (Neanderthal carries further significance which will be addressed later). This proliferation of names reveals Harriet’s inability to decide what her son is. His presence is so equivocal that his mother can only identify him as fantastical. Even as the text frequently insists that Ben is a child by carefully charting his growth (72, 81, 85), it is nevertheless also the case that Ben is represented as unclassifiable. But in The Fifth Child, the fantastic is also important on another level. Lessing’s novel is an allegory of the failed pastoral (more of this later), and traditionally, the pastoral belongs to the domain of the realist novel. Thus, by introducing a fantastic presence in an otherwise realist narrative, Lessing is actually formally (that is, textually) mirroring her content (theme). Lillian R. Furst has demonstrated that the dilemma of realist fiction is the negotiation between the fact that it is representing fiction – that is ‘illusion’ – and the aim at ‘[eliciting] belief in its truthfulness’.47 In Lessing’s narrative, the realist text is, in my reading, aligned with the pastoral/masculine ideal which is represented foremost by Ben’s father, David. David tries to convince his family of the reliability of his ideal, much like the way a realist text attempts to coerce the reader into believing its truthfulness, but Ben’s presence finally destroys it. Just like David’s desire for the pastoral is inherently


unstable, the realist fiction’s ‘all is true’ claim is equally so. Thus, Ben’s presence does not only serve to disrupt the novel’s thematic, but its realist/textual claim as well. Unlike Todorov’s conceptualisation of the fantastic, which is essentially structuralist, and hence, preoccupied mainly with form, Lessing extends the fantastic to address thematic concerns as well. The power of maternal imagination Thematically, the fantastic can be analysed using horror as a reading approach. Lessing’s novel tells the story of a mother who harbours unconscious anger and guilt because of her reluctant collusion with her husband’s desire to re-establish an ideal paternal institution (the pastoral family). This results in a denial of her own self and needs in the process. She feels herself ‘possessed’ by her husband and by circumstances from which she cannot escape and to which she must conform. In such a state, she conceives a child who somehow embodies all her unspoken unhappiness. Like a familiar horror movie in which the woman becomes possessed by a vengeful spirit, Harriet, in The Fifth Child, becomes possessed by her own vengeance in the form of Ben. As James R. Kincaid succinctly puts it, the child ‘carries for us things we somehow cannot carry for ourselves, sometimes anxieties we want to be divorced from and sometimes pleasure so great we would not, without the child, know how to contain them’.48 Because Harriet cannot articulate her unconscious anxiety of being possessed, she produces a child who will carry her anxiety to its destructive limits. Harriet has given birth to four children before Ben, but strangely, the narrative rarely reveals how Harriet feels towards them. While the novel stresses Harriet and Ben’s difficult relationship, Harriet’s relationship with her other children remains tacit, almost as if they do not matter very much to her. Her children are, for the most part, brought up by Harriet’s mother, Dorothy, and by other members of her external family. Indeed, apart from giving birth to and suckling them, she contributes almost nothing else to their nurturing. She may initially defend her husband’s fierce desire for a large family (that is, according to the pastoral fashion, [22–23]), but this desire seems to be more David’s than her own. All her births are to keep David happy (see for example, the birth of their firstborn, Luke [24]). Inwardly however, Harriet resents (albeit unconsciously) being thus ‘possessed’ by her husband. In an early episode, while David and Harriet were making love (resulting in Luke), she was ‘overwhelmed by his purpose – yes, that was it, he was making love with a deliberate, concentrated


intensity, looking into her eyes, that made her accept him, his taking possession of the future in her’ (15). This incident is indeed prophetic, for it will be her future and self that will eventually be completely surrendered to him, stifling her freedom to no end. As long as she finds happiness only through granting David his wish, she will always be his possession – she and her children. By the time she gives birth to Paul’s (their fourth child), Harriet’s belief in her husband’s ideal for happiness is beginning to show signs of cracking. Although she has not given up the idea of more children, she is clearly no longer overtly supportive of David’s desire. She defiantly announces that she will not give birth for the next three years (34) and when she has to defend David’s ideal, there is a tone of uncertainty: ‘You aren’t really going to have four more children?’ enquired Sarah, sighing … ‘Yes, we are’, said David. ‘Yes, we certainly are’, said Harriet. ‘This is what everyone wants, really, but we’ve been brainwashed out of it. People want to live like this, really.’ (35) Harriet’s overstatements (‘we certainly are’ and the repeated ‘really’) and her use of the encompassing ‘everyone’ reveal her lack of certitude. Harriet is becoming increasingly unhappy and realises that having more children will not make her happier. Her detachment from her children is a sign of her reluctance and resentment. But these ill feelings remain unspoken because they reside predominantly in Harriet’s unconscious. That is, although she feels the strain, she chooses to deny it (as her overstatements attest). It will require the birth of her fifth and last child before she can finally articulate, through literal embodiment, her frustration. In a way, The Fifth Child resurrects a belief that was prevalent up to the nineteenth-century which argued that monstrous offspring are the result of unsavoury maternal imagination. In her study of this superstition in the eighteenth-century, Marie-Hélène Huet has shown that: the monstrous child bore witness to the violent desires that moved the mother at the time of conception or during pregnancy. The resulting offspring carried the marks of her whims and fancy rather than the recognizable features of its legitimate genitor [the father]. The monster thus erased paternity and proclaimed the dangerous power of the female imagination.49


Huet’s argument is useful for my discussion as a way of locating the site of horror in Lessing’s novel. When Harriet discovers that she is pregnant for the fifth time, her physical and emotional exhaustion finally catch up with her and she can no longer evoke positive feelings for her unborn child: ‘[s]he was frantic, exhausted … she was peevish; she lost her temper; she burst into tears … David saw her sitting at the kitchen table, head in her hands, muttering that this new foetus was poisoning her’ (41). Earlier, if Harriet was unconsciously resenting being ‘possessed’ by her husband, now she becomes clearly possessed by something from within her. This is typical of horror (movies) with possession themes. As Barbara Creed notes: monstrous births play on the inside/outside distinction in order to point to the inherently monstrous nature of the womb as well as the impossibility of ever completely banishing the abject from the human domain. The concept of inside/outside suggests two surfaces that fold in on each other; the task of separating inside from outside seems impossible as each surface constitutes the ‘other’ side.50 A possession that initially comes from without is then transformed into a possession from within, where it becomes embodied and released back to the outside again. The parturition of the monstrous child not only reveals the monstrous status of the womb which destroys boundaries, but reinforces the notion that the abject is irrepressibly present in the ‘human domain’. Harriet’s resentment towards her husband has become a monstrous desire and imagination embodied in her final child, who in turn possesses its mother from the womb. Harriet, in Creed’s term, would be akin to ‘a female creature who is … about to give birth to an alien being or brood of terrifying creatures’.51 Her womb becomes a site for the horror to be conceived and formed.52 Harriet’s imagination while pregnant with Ben is certainly monstrous. She sees ‘phantoms and chimeras’ feel her brain: chimeras which are ‘botched creatures, horribly real to her, the production of a Great Dane or a borzoi with a little spaniel; a lion and a dog; a great cart horse and a little donkey; a tiger and a goat. Sometimes she believed hooves were cutting her tender inside flesh, sometimes claws’ (52). This monstrous imagination, however, at once yields a paradox. On one hand (and by her own admission), she considers the child an enemy (51) who must be contained and endured. She tries to rationalise her pain as a way of repressing it. But as the repressed always returns, bestial thoughts continue to assail her. The ‘pathetic botched


creatures’ are ‘horribly real to her’ because they are perhaps what she is – embodiments of an assortment of unconscious and unfelt ill-feelings at being objectified and possessed. On the other hand, however, the botched creatures, conglomerations of two distinct creatures, are also suggestive of herself becoming merged with the child within her. She is transforming her condition of being possessed into a being embodying her possession. The unborn Ben becomes the embodiment of that which has now gripped her imagination. Although she fears Ben, she somewhat hopes for him to arrive as well. While she attempts miscarriage by walking, striding, and even running ‘along the country lanes’, she also fantasises about how she would take ‘the big kitchen knife, cut open her own stomach, [lift] out the child – and when they actually set eyes on each other, after this long blind struggle, what would she see?’ (59). The maternal imagination becomes powerfully imbued with meaning as variously suggested by the knife-cutting:53 firstly, a bodily marking made by the male that relegates Harriet to the position of object and possession; secondly, an angry and violent reaction to that marking in the act of wanting to remove it from her womb; and lastly, a desire to come face to face with the pain in order finally to understand and embrace it in an act of freeing herself (as in, cutting herself free). However, in asking herself what she would see when she finally meets her child, it is clear that Harriet is, in the end, unable to confront her pain of possession. In her discussion of ‘possession’ films, Carol Clover demonstrates that the possessed female body is a ‘body story with a vengeance. Film after film interrogates … the “physical presence” of a woman: forces it to externalise its inner workings, to speak its secrets, to give a material account of itself – in short, to give literal and visible evidence’.54 Clover also argues that women are often employed, especially in the occult horror genre, as ‘portals’ for otherness (that is, the supernatural) to enter the realm of the every day. Women’s orifices (such as the womb, which would agree with Creed’s view) are depicted as gateways through which the virulent otherworldly can enter the normative and wreak havoc. The result of these portal crossings is often the birth of a monster.55 But women are not the only ‘portals’ in horror film; another favourite site of possession are children who, as the film studies critic Julian Petley notes, become depicted as monsters to subtly expose certain social and cultural inconsistencies such as the failure of the family as a nourishing, enriching institution that enables children to reach their fullest potential.56 In The Fifth Child, it is obvious that both portals – woman and child – are employed: Harriet serves as the


gateway for Ben to come through, and Ben provides the means for Harriet to articulate her possession. Mother and son serve as each other’s portal to allow the return of the repressed to finally disrupt and deconstruct the patriarchal normative which has, hitherto, failed them. The womb, however, is not the only locus of monstrosity in The Fifth Child. The mother’s breast, (and by extension, breast feeding), especially as a site for the child’s dialectic of desire, can also be seen as contributing to the development of the child as monster. Admittedly, the mother’s breast occurs only once in the novel, but it is in a context which may help suggest greater significance for Ben’s monstrosity. Joan Copjec, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, has postulated that the child at the mother’s breast can take on vampiric qualities. The child becomes vampiric because his relation to the breast as a ‘partial object of desire’ is suddenly interrupted, resulting in the ‘anxiety-ridden phenomenon of vampirism … signalling, then, the drying up of the breast as objectcause of desire, the disappearance of the fantasy support of desire’.57 The drying up of the breast results in an anxiety which is due to the removal of the fantasy of security.58 As long as the breast produces milk, the suckling child is entrenched in a desire for his mother. But once the breast dries up, the child is traumatically dislocated from this desire, and turns vampiric; he becomes aware of his eternal loss of desire and, from thence, will be forever hungry; he will crave the return of that which he desires, but will perpetually be denied. Reading The Fifth Child through Copjec’s argument reveals interesting implications for the text. In fact, it is quite evident that Ben’s monstrous manifestation can be directly linked to the moment Harriet decides to stop breast-feeding him. Up to that point, Ben seemed contented and harmless (61). But breast-feeding Ben is an ordeal: Soon she was exhausted with feeding Ben. … Her breasts were painful. Making more milk than they ever had had to do, her chest swelled into two bursting white globes long before the next feed was due. But Ben was already roaring for it, and she fed him, and he drained every drop in two or three minutes. She felt the milk being dragged in streams from her. Now he had begun something new: he had taken to interrupting the fierce sucking several times during a feed, and bringing his gums together in the hard grinding movement that made her cry out in pain. His small cold eyes seemed to her malevolent. ‘I’m going to put him on the bottle’, she said to Dorothy. … (64)


This passage recalls, and slightly modifies, several points made in Copjec’s analysis. Firstly, there is that evident bond between mother and son represented in the breast-feeding, a bond strengthened by pain and anger. If he is conceived of, and formed in, his mother’s monstrous imagination, and the womb is his first encapsulation of desire, he now experiences that desire through a fantasy support – the breast. This way, he continues to feed on his mother’s ‘monstrosity’, embodying that monstrous imagination while being sustained by her possessed body. His embodiment may suggest the reason for his ugliness (60), his troll-like, goblin-like (61) and alien (62) affinities, but I want to suggest that his monstrous behaviour is finally confirmed by the loss of his mother’s breast. But if Copjec sees the removal of the breast as the point of vampirism, Ben, in my opinion, is already vampiric even before this: his ‘fierce sucking’ and ‘hard grinding movement’ whilst breast-feeding are suggestive of his affinity to a monstrous desire which is separated from his mother (hence, he has already experienced loss) even before he is removed from her breast. Embodying Harriet’s possession, he is both powerfully bonded to, and rejected by, Harriet. He carries his mother’s pain and anger, but at the same time, experiences the pain and anger as a cause of separation from his mother which consequently redoubles his monstrosity. When Harriet finally decides to put Ben on the bottle, the separation is experienced as final, and from thence, he will not only bear his mother’s monstrous burden, but be forever seeking to reconstitute this burden back to where he first inherited it; but because he is now finally separated from Harriet, he must now be his own monster as well as his mother’s projection, with no hope of relinquishing either. In this way, Ben fulfils, to an extent, Copjec’s view of the vampire, at least metonymically. When Ben reaches adolescence, he becomes a criminal. But the narrative retains a vagueness about his aberrant behaviour, refusing to clearly state the nature of his crime(s). His friendship and adventures with the delinquent John and his gang of social misfits (Ben later heads such a gang himself), are episodes which the text clearly relates; however, despite his striking appearance, ‘[e]veryone in authority had not been seeing Ben ever since he was born …. When she saw him on television in the crowd, he had worn a jacket with its collar up, and a scarf .… He seemed a stout schoolboy. Had he put on those clothes to disguise himself? Did that mean that he knew how he looked? How did he see himself?’ (157). The fact that the authorities (the law and more often, the medical establishment) do not see Ben indicates a refusal to


acknowledge entities which they cannot name or classify. This is another familiar theme in possession films: the clash between science (rationalism, the West, white male, hegemonic medical establishments) and magic (the irrational, spiritualism, ‘third-world people in general, children, old people, priests … but first and foremost women’59). In such horror films, White Science often initially rejects the supernatural, and until it finally admits that there are such inexplicable phenomena, resolution will not be possible. In The Fifth Child, Ben’s ambiguity defies any rational explanation, and hence, he remains invisible to science.60 Harriet, watching Ben on television, almost cannot recognise him. Qualifying words like ‘like’ and ‘seems’ and her questioning of Ben’s self-view, are instances of the ambiguous relationship she has with her son, as well as attesting to Ben’s fantastical presence. Furthermore, that Harriet is watching Ben through the medium of the television is significant. Having failed to ‘see’ him clearly all his life, Ben becomes, in the end, merely a televised image for Harriet – a depthless sign. This is ironic representionally, because he is, up until now, no different from a television image simply because he embodies his mother’s view of him; his reality is mediated through his mother’s viewpoint, just as a television image is mediated through a screen. Harriet wonders if Ben sees himself. But the real irony is if she ever sees him at all. Allegorising the anti-pastoral In her research into horror films, Carol Clover has discovered that many occult-based horror films portray the female and the feminine as either horrible or helpless (or both) because there is the subtle ideology of (re)establishing the male as dominant and superior who will, in the end, save the day.61 Recasting this view in psychoanalytic terms, the monstrous feminine must be subsumed and defeated so that the Symbolic (patriarchal, masculine) order may be restored.62 But it is the failure to accomplish this return to the Symbolic which makes The Fifth Child an exceptional horror narrative. The Law-of-the-Name-ofthe-Father in Lessing’s work is represented by Ben’s father, David, and, as mentioned, his desire for a pastoral home (which, in my reading, is associated with the ideological construct of the Symbolic). In the novel, the fifth child significantly undermines and destroys the paternal ideal, and along with it, the Symbolic structure, to reveal their fragile foundations.63 This aspect of the novel is represented allegorically, which also at once heightens the enigmatic quality of the novel and emphasises its horror.


Despite the availability of several criticisms on the allegorical nature of The Fifth Child, the main weakness in many of them is the inability to account for Ben’s monstrosity. Louise Yelin, for example, agrees that Ben’s monstrosity cannot be explained by any ‘prior experience’,64 and correctly claims that the ‘only credible interpretation of Ben’ is that he is an ‘ineffable otherness’.65 But she fails to address the ambiguity of Ben’s presence. Calling him ‘an eruption of unmediated evil’66 is too simplistic, and ignores the narrative’s fantastic and allegorical potential.67 My analysis attempts to correct this critical lacuna by positing that Ben’s monstrosity is locatable, and plays a vital significance in the narrative. As an embodiment of possession, he also functions as a critique of the pastoral which David wants to recreate. But the real enemy of David’s pastoral ideal, however, is Harriet. A literary typology of the pastoral includes the following:68 the setting is a rural, rustic world before the coming of capitalism; the predominant atmosphere of the pastoral is one which is ‘associated particularly with youth, against a background of harmonious nature’.69 Not surprisingly, the pastoral is associated with farmlands which form an important part of its bucolic landscape, and although ‘conditions of rural life are hard [with attendant] economic and physical hazards … [the people of the pastoral] are not stunted by it, nor do they yearn for other things’.70 In Lessing’s narrative, David wishes for such an idyllic life – but minus the hard work. He buys a large Victorian house ‘in an overgrown garden’ outside London (but ‘within commuting distance’ [13]), where he can commune with nature (14) and which is to be eventually populated with ‘a lot of children’ (13). Even if these are not exactly what the pastoral represents, they nevertheless carry powerful suggestions of it. The distancing from a capitalist world, a youthful attitude towards life, a happy family fostered by love alone, and the communion with nature are all strong pastoral tropes. The idea of planting and harvesting is also figuratively suggested in the narrative’s preoccupation with conception and child-bearing. This view accords with Shelagh Hunter’s observation when she writes that ‘the passions of the [pastoral] story are, like the harvest scene, perennially renewable and expendable’.71 Like the farmland, the woman’s womb is the site of seed sowing and reaping (which, in the case of The Fifth Child, replaces the agrarian landscape) and Harriet’s child-bearing metaphorically suggests a renewable resource. Andrew V. Ettin also demonstrates that the ‘pastoral society is predominantly male’.72 He goes on to suggest that: the pastoral life is indeed a way of life prior to responsibilities, precluding the complicated social arrangements, formal, legal or


religious laws, and pragmatic concerns that come with a familial responsibilities. These would limit the fictional image of total freedom so important to the pastoral ethos. The shepherd’s style would be cramped if a spouse and children are waiting at home.73 David seems to want both alternatives – the pastoral ideal, as well as a large family. Although he is clearly unable financially to sustain a large family, he eschews the responsibility by relegating it to his mother-in-law and parents (81–2).74 Harriet, on the other hand, has begun to understand that their retreat to an ideal is fundamentally impossible and anachronistic. She sees that they had manipulated others to realise their dream. Her perpetual birthing is now regarded as fundamentally ‘criminal’ (34), a resentment which eventually finds an outlet in Ben. Just before Ben is institutionalised (I will return to this later), a thoroughly worn out Dorothy finally announces that Ben is beyond normalcy, and must be sent to an institution.75 After a quick, loveless deliberation, it is decided that it would be best for the family if Ben is institutionalised. Harriet weakly protests, but David solemnly declares, ‘It’s either him or us’: ‘He’s probably just dropped in from Mars. He’s going back to report on what he’s found down here.’ He laughed, cruelly, it seemed to Harriet who was silently taking in the fact – which of course she had half known already – that Ben was not expected to live long in this institution, whatever it was. ‘He’s a little child’, she said, ‘He’s our child.’ ‘No, he’s not’, said David, finally. ‘Well, he certainly isn’t mine.’ (90, emphasis in original) If Harriet had shown contempt for Ben earlier, it is now David who is repulsed. Not only does David refuse to acknowledge Ben as his, he implicitly blames Harriet for having brought forth such an aberration. Ben is now a threatening alien creature who has invaded his idyllic world and destroying it. He is clearly not ‘one of them.’ David pointedly implies that Ben is solely Harriet’s fault and responsibility. Ben’s banishment and possible death would only mean the restoration of his family ideal, which is why David is adamant about his decision. Ben is sent to an institution, but is subsequently saved by Harriet and returns home, where he will expose David’s failure and the ultimate impossibility of constructing the pastoral family.


Earlier in the novel, Ben was termed a ‘Neanderthal’ by his mother. This is significant in that it is related to my reading of the narrative as a supersession of the Symbolic order. When Ben is born, for instance, the reader is given a detailed description of this strange baby. Ben is said to have a ‘heavy shouldered hunched look … forehead sloped from his eyes to his crown … hair [growing] in an unusual pattern … thick yellowish stubble … hands [which are] thick and heavy, with pads of muscle in the palms’. He is clearly ‘not a pretty baby’ (60) but more precisely, he looks like a throwback. Later, when Harriet tries to teach him words using pictures: His response to her nursery pictures was that he went out into the garden and stalked a thrush on the lawn, crouching down and moving on a low fast run – and he nearly did catch the thrush. He tore some primroses off their stems, and stood with them in his hands, intently staring at them. Then he crushed them in his strong little fists and let them drop. (82) This description of Ben places him in the middle of the evolutionary process between animal and human. Ben is described as neither fully human nor completely animal, and this ambiguity signals his aberration. Ben is an alien not only because, as David jokes, he comes from Mars, but because he is an evolutionary throwback from an ‘alien country’ called ‘the past’. To establish the significance of this allusion to the primitive, I will look at another complementary episode in the novel to argue my point. This episode occurs just before Ben is taken to the institution. Harriet and David are sitting in the garden when their two elder children emerge from somewhere, looking like: elegant little creatures, with flaring red cheeks and eyes full of excitements of the dark wilderness they had been part of …. For a moment it was a meeting of two alien forms of life: the children had been part of some old savagery, and their blood still pounded with it; but now they let their wild selves go away while they rejoined the family. Harriet and David shared this with them, were with them in imagination and in memory, from their own childhoods: they could see themselves clearly, two adults, sitting there, tame, domestic, even pitiable in their distance from wildness and freedom. (91) Ellen Pifer’s reading of this episode suggests that the family is implicated in Ben’s alien nature and past (the two are synonymous). She


postulates that Lessing’s language suggestively reveals the primal quality of the process of procreation, which directly implicates all who are born, and that ‘[at] the origin of life lies the “dark wilderness from which, generation after generation, human children emerge, abandoning (though never entirely) their “wild selves” as they join the charmed circle of domestic life’.76 I would argue instead, that this passage reveals the illusion of fantasy within the Symbolic. Harriet and David, for a fleeting instant in time, suddenly see themselves as divided selves who have become violently incorporated into normative social and cultural signification. Somewhere in the past (the primitive past in this instance) there is a self which remains unbridled by sociocultural constructedness. Psychoanalytically, this past is akin to the Lacanian Real which is the surplus of desire and is always already lost, but which nevertheless continues to be yearned for, and substituted with, fantasies. For David, the pastoral ideal is clearly a yearning for a lost (masculine) past which is also a fantasy. This fantasy is then translated to his wife and children (save Ben), although Harriet eventually begins to feel the burden of her husband’s masculine ideal. Ben, being a fantastical presence, subsequently reveals to David his delusion. Fantasies are only possible and effective if they are not obvious as fantasies; once they are exposed, the illusion is destroyed. Ben destroys David’s fantasy by refusing to play the part of the ‘normal’ son. As ˇ izˇek deliberates: Z At any moment, the idyllic texture of the everyday course of events can disintegrate, not because some iniquitous violence erupts from under the surface of social rules (according to the common notion that, beneath the civilised mask, we are all savages and murderers), but because all of a sudden – as a result of unexpected changes, in the symbolic texture or intersubjective relations – what was a moment ago permitted by the rules becomes an abhorrent vice, although the act in its immediate, physical reality remains the same.77 ˇ izˇek claims is that fantasy (aptly termed ‘the idyllic texture of the What Z everyday course’) need not necessarily require something violent and external to disrupt it; a sudden shift from what is considered normal can prove equally effective. In the novel, it is never clear if Ben is ever violent; but what is clear is that he refuses to subscribe to the pastoral familial system and challenges all the accepted ‘rules’ of his father’s ˇ izˇek fantasy. As a fantastic child, he occupies exactly the position which Z


says is ‘an abhorrent vice’ while stubbornly remaining within the realm of ‘physical reality’. By embodying the fantastic, he does not break his father’s rule, but turns the rule into something illusory and empty. The centrepiece of the narrative is, in my opinion, Ben’s institutionalisation, because it simultaneously marks an important shift in Harriet’s feelings for her son and emphatically interrogates notions of normalcy and monstrosity. When Harriet makes the decision to visit Ben at the institute, she finds herself suddenly relegated to an other, a ‘criminal’, by everyone else (94). In an instance, Harriet has become one with her unlovely son. Their fate, shared since his birth, is now irrevocably sealed. She realises that it is not Ben who is her misfortune, but the part she played in her husband’s illusion. And finally, at the institution, Harriet receives a shocking revelation: housed here are many deformed children ‘wrenched out of pattern, sometimes horribly, sometimes slightly’. They come in all sorts of grotesque shapes: a baby like a comma, great lolling head on a stalk of a body … a stick insect … a small girl all blurred, her flesh guttering and melting, a lanky boy [with] no back to its head…. Rows of freaks, nearly all asleep, and all silent. They were literally drugged out of their minds. Well, nearly silent: there was a dreary sobbing from a cot that had its side shielded with blankets. The high intermittent screaming, nearer now, still assaulted her nerves. A smell of excrement, stronger than the disinfectant. (98–9) Monstrosity, as the passage above suggests, is the failure to conform to the normative human body. Any variance of the surface, however slight, designates an anomaly (see next chapter).78 As deformities, the children have no place in polite, normal society and must be marginalised. Like the excrement they produce, they must be made invisible and distanced to a peripheral existence where they will dwell until death releases them. The institution becomes a crucial metaphor for monstrosity; it seems to suggest that the ambivalence of monstrosity lies in its definition (more of this in the Conclusion). More crucially, monstrosity is often not the entity which has been branded thus, but the one who does the branding (as in the case of Frankenstein and his monster, see below). In institutionalising Ben, what is exposed is David’s own monstrosity and the monstrous dimension of the Symbolic order. Placed among these other ‘monsters’, Harriet sees, for the first time, how ordinary, pathetic and despised Ben really is (100–1). If Ben has all this while been embodying her unconscious


articulation of pain, it is this incident that finally allows Harriet to comprehend it. Harriet takes Ben home, and hereafter shields and defends him, much to the dismay of her husband and the rest of the family. She henceforth turns ‘her back on [her family] and [has] chosen to go off into alien country, with Ben’ (108). On the night she brings Ben home, ‘David went up to the other room away from her’ (108). David already views Ben as an alien creature from Mars. It is not surprising then, that David now alienates his wife as well.

The politics of monstrosity As mentioned at the beginning of my analysis, The Fifth Child is also an allegory about the fractured condition of English society. It is of course, incomparable in urgency to an earlier novel by Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), in which the state of (a possibly futuristic) England has reached total dystopia. But like Memoirs, The Fifth Child explicitly comments on class segregation and the socio-economic insecurity in the English society, and insists that the problem comes from within. The middle-class is obviously represented by Harriet and David whose idyllic vision disregards the impending insecurity and strife which constitute the rest of the world. They insist on ‘guarding that stubborn individuality of theirs’ despite the fact that: The easy good times had utterly gone. David’s firm had been struck, and he had not been given the promotion he expected …. Brutal incidents and crimes, once shocking everyone, were now commonplace. Gangs of youths hung around certain cafes and street-ends and owed respect to no one. The house next door had been burgled three times …. At the end of the road there was a telephone box that had been vandalised so often the authorities had given up: it stood unusable. (29–30) The Lovatts’ stubborn insistence on their ideal can be read as the English middle-class pride of its heritage (represented by the pastoral), and its imputation of the nation’s problems to social/racial others. The narrative’s macro-level allegory portrays England as increasingly separated into ‘two peoples … not one – enemies, hating each other, who could not hear what the other said’ (30).79 But as Ellen Pifer has observed, ‘while the Lovatts are busy securing their “fortress” against these hostile outside forces, the “enemy” invades from within.’80 She goes on to argue that ‘[not] only the Lovatts’ private kingdom but the


social order is … being ravaged from within.’81 Clearly, the social commentary in the novel reveals that the most dangerous enemies are usually intimate strangers. Even as the Lovatts’ pastoral fortress is disrupted from within by Ben, so the English nation is being ruptured by local strife and socio-economic insecurities resulted from inequality and mismanagement. But of course, the Lovatts, like the middle-class, refuse to acknowledge this social dissolution, but stubbornly clings onto the fantasy of (Symbolic) order. A passage from Memoirs can work equally well in highlighting The Fifth Child’s socio-political condition: Yet even at this late stage, there was a level of our society which managed to live as if nothing much was happening – nothing irreparable. The ruling class – but that was a dead phrase, so they said …. The bureaucracy … that the section of a society which gets the most out of it maintains itself, and for as long as it can in others, an illusion of security, permanence, order. (95, my emphasis)82 The social allegory in The Fifth Child also correlates with the reading of the novel as enduring the loss of boundaries between the inside and the outside, which in the process, engenders monsters. It is no longer easy to identify the enemy because the boundary which separates the self from the other is lost. This is arguably a feature of the postmodern world, where boundaries are dissolved, the inside becomes interchangeable with the outside, the external internalised. As Harriet’s body becomes the site of rupture, destroying the border that separates the inside from the out, the boundary of the body of Mother England becomes dissolved, resulting in the impossibility of clearly distinguishing an ally from an enemy.

Conclusion: in Frankenstein’s footsteps The title of this chapter echoes Mary Shelley’s 1831 introduction to her immortal Gothic narrative Frankenstein (1818), when she bade her ‘hideous progeny go forth and prosper’ (5).83 Prosper indeed it has, spawning continuously for almost two hundred years after it narratives with demonic creators and murderous children. Zombie, The Wasp Factory, and The Fifth Child, in different ways, are progenies of Shelley’s creator and monster. Quentin, for example, resembles the Faustian doctor in certain ways: his narcissistic homosexuality and quest for male-zombie slaves are attempts at engendering ‘life’ without the contribution of women. But even more distinctive is the homosocial


concerns of the two novels. Frankenstein, as Eve Sedgwick has noted, is a ‘male paranoid plot’ about ‘homosexual panic’ which ultimately belies the ‘foundational historic condition of the early Gothic, of intense male homosocial desires as at once the most compulsory and the most prohibited of social bonds’.84 Sedgwick’s formulation, modified slightly, can apply to Oates’s novel, which is also about intense homosocial desires which must be recast as a male paranoid plot because homosexuality has been effectively repressed. Quentin’s homosexuality, denied a channel outwards for object-love, turns destructively inwards; similarly, the homosexual Frankenstein, living in a powerfully homophobic era and society, must resignify desire narcissistically. Both men project self-love outwards onto an other-that-isthe-self, only to find that the other threatens a loss of the self, and must be destroyed. Frankenstein is also a family romance turned Gothic, in which parents are incompetent, cruel, shadowy and persecuting outsiders.85 The Wasp Factory and The Fifth Child continue this tradition. What is interesting about these two texts, however, is their variation of the Frankenstein theme: in the former, Frankenstein’s monster’s feminised body is revealed to be female after all, while in the latter, the struggle between father (Symbolic) and son is made possible through the portal of the mother. If in Shelley’s narrative, the feminine other (Elizabeth) must be eliminated to re-establish the homosocial bond, in these two contemporary novels, the bond between men is mediated through the maternal (albeit unconscious) presence to ultimately reveal the destructiveness and fragility of such a paranoiac (Symbolic) order. Psychoanalytically, what all three novels under discussion ultimately share with Frankenstein is the supplanting of the Symbolic order by the Void of the Real. Like Shelley’s hideous progeny, Quentin, Frank and Ben are all embodiments of the Void who return to haunt and rupture the Symbolic system which has denied them in the first place.86

4 Monstrous Body

In the last chapter, I analysed a passage from The Fifth Child which foregrounded a variety of monstrosities which are written on the body. I argued that monstrosity, in this instance, is difficult to define but hinges profoundly on bodies which defy the normative. In this chapter, the aberrant body (or the deformed body) will be the main focus of my reading of the monster. Frankenstein is once again the predecessor of monster narratives in which monstrosity is invested on the template of the body. It is, after all, his ‘hideousness’ that turned his creator away from him in shock and disgust in the first place. Victor describes his creation as variously a ‘catastrophe’, ‘the wretch’, ‘breathless horror’, and finally: Oh! No mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch. I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then, but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived. (56) And yet, the question remains: is Victor’s horror ultimately the terrifying deformity of his monster, or his own moral turpitude as mirrored by his creature that has brought about such revulsion? This chapter will, to an extent, consider how the monstrous body serves as a powerful reflection of certain Symbolic crises (socio-cultural, ideological, language), bringing into relief the way such crises invest monstrous meanings onto certain bodies to cathect anxieties. Thus far in this book, monstrosity has been demonstrated as either performative (the serial killer texts) or psychical (High-Rise and The Fifth Child). In this 144

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chapter, I actually locate monstrosity directly on the body to argue the significance of strangeness embodied. The two texts in focus – Patrick McGrath’s short tale, ‘Angel’ (1989), and Angela Carter’s celebrated Nights at the Circus (1984) – are chosen because they concern a particular kind of body which, within religion and myth, are acceptable – even lauded – beings, but which, in any other circumstances, become monsters. It is the figure of the ‘angel’. McGrath distinctively ‘demonises’ his angel, turning an otherwise icon of purity and beauty into a body that is putrid, grotesque, and decaying. ‘Angel’ is a story within a story (a popular Gothic strategy): the framing narrative belongs to Bernard Finnegan, journalist-turnbiographer of Harry Talboys, and the framed one is Talboys’s, better known as Anson Havershaw – the angel. As the narrative progresses, it becomes chillingly clear that the inter-story is eating up, and finally dissolving the main frame. ‘Angel’, in my analysis, is an allegory about writing the monster, or more correctly, the impossibility of writing it (I will pursue this point from a different angle in the Conclusion). Indeed, monsters can only ever be represented allegorically, for their ‘reality’ would prove too traumatic otherwise (as I will demonstrate is what happens to Bernard). The monster’s corporeality and textualised body are fundamentally at odds because the former, as a revelation of the Real of the Void would necessarily deconstruct the latter, which is a mechanism of the Symbolic order (language). Intertwined with the story of the biographer and his monster is the story of a city at the threshold of the fin de siècle. Just as the beautiful angel is decaying and must resort to cosmetics and story-telling to hide his true state, Manhattan at the turn of the century is degenerating, averted shakily and temporarily only by a fantasy of ‘a restoration of order’. In this sense, ‘Angel’ is also a narrative about space. Of course, in McGrath’s narrative, the space-body dichotomy is more metonymic than metaphoric, the one mirroring the other, and not directly influencing or influenced. But it rehearses the argument that geopolitics and the body can often be interconnected in a relationship of monstrous magnitude. Nights at the Circus (1984), is the only narrative in this study that represents the monster as a positive element. But Fevvers, the ‘monster’ in Carter’s novel, share similar traits with the other monsters discussed thus far: she threatens and undermines the Symbolic mechanism, disrupts borders, and resists the masculine gaze; she does all this through a careful negotiation with, and resignification of, her peculiar body to maintain a ludic ambiguity that refuses closure. Unsurprisingly, it is a


‘radicalised’1 feminist who gives the monster positive qualities. Carter wants to write about ‘a new kind of being’ that is ‘unburdened by the past … and without precedent’,2 and succeeds most prominently with Fevvers, the winged prodigy. This resignification of the (female) body and femininity, however, is a difficult journey, and achieved only after much struggles and defeats. Hence, Nights at the Circus is also a monster’s Bildungsroman towards achieving a ‘new being’. Fevvers must learn to undo the patriarchal trappings by which she is very much interpellated, and reinvent herself positively against masculine codings of the monstrous-feminine (body). My discussion of Nights at the Circus focuses on Fevvers’s reinvention of herself from a negatively coded body (the deformed body), to a fantastic body (acceptable, but only as an eroticised ‘freak’, and hence still disempowered), and finally to a grotesque body that is both positive and empowering. More importantly however, Nights at the Circus is a narrative about the power of writing. If in ‘Angel’, the monster effectively dissolves language altogether, in Carter’s novel, language becomes a means to achieve decolonising of the monstrous-female self from the ‘extraordinary [patriarchal] lies designed to make people unfree’.3

The impossible body: Patrick McGrath’s ‘Angel’ ‘Angel’ is a narrative of the fin de siècle that is related to the crisis of representing the body. The backdrop of the story is a physically and socially decaying city. One similarity that characterises both the Victorian and the late twentieth-century fin de siècle is a culture in crisis.4 According to Elaine Showalter, they are both historical moments ‘of cultural insecurity, when there are fears of regression and degeneration, the longing for strict border controls around the definition of gender, as well as race, class and nationality’.5 One major preoccupation of these periods is strict monitoring and demarcating between bodies that matter and those that do not. The fin de siècle emphasises ‘difference’.6 As the body is situated in culture, it becomes powerfully influenced by the crises and shifts in a climate of degeneracy. In ‘Angel’ bodies are caught up and implicated by a culture of degeneracy, evident in the description of a languishing Manhattan summer (1).7 Here, the ‘liquid heat settles on the body of the city like an incubus, and one’s whole activity devolves to a languid commerce of flesh and fluids, the ingestion and excretion of the one by the other, and all sane organisms quite simply estivate’ (1). The interrelationship between cityscape and the body, a familiar Gothic motif,8 is quickly

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established in the narrative, foreshadowing the coming of the grotesque angel who will implode and dissolve this relationship. Invariably, it is on such a day that Bernard, strolling down ‘a garbagestrewn and urine-pungent sidewalk, beneath a blazing sun, and slimed in my own sweat, that [he] first encountered Harry Talboys’(1). The word ‘organisms’ used in the passage quoted above to describe the inhabitants also suggests the impersonality of the bodies in this city. Instead, like a huge, inactive slime, these human bodies are metonymically aligned with the lowest life-forms, existing merely to ingest and excrete. In this decaying city, bodies become neither human nor inhuman, but, as Kelly Hurley terms it, ‘abhuman’. In her study of the Gothic as a discourse of the fin de siècle, she argues that degeneration ‘propos[es] a negative telos of abhumanness and cultural disarray. It also accelerate[s] the pace of the narrative, emphasising the mutability and flux of human bodies and societies’.9 Hurley makes an important connection between culture and the body, arguing that the degeneracy of the former is coterminous with the abhumanness of the latter. I have suggested earlier in this study that monstrosity is engendered during critical moments in history,10 and ‘Angel’, a tale of the fin de siècle, certainly reinforces this view. At the end of a millennium, the beautiful body of the angel has turned aberrant, raising the ontological question of what normalcy ultimately is. The abhuman, to extend Hurley’s definition, is also the ab-ject body, one that transgresses boundaries, exposing what is obscene and should be kept hidden (inside). In McGrath’s narrative, the angel Havershaw transgresses boundaries in exactly these ways: not only is he a mutation between man and bird, his decaying body reveals a putrefying interiority that the exterior can no longer contain (see below). Manhattan is not only physically corrupt, it is socially wrecked as well, confirming Stephen J. Arata observation that in narratives of degeneracy, ‘fears about the breakdown of individual identities [are] imbricated with fears about an ongoing and perhaps irreversible social decline’ (recall High-Rise).11 Together with the garbage ridden streets are incidents of horrific crimes such as a ‘rather grisly murder [which] occurred in an abandoned building over on Avenue C; the body was mutilated and drained of all its blood. The New York Post suggested that a vampire was on the loose’ (5). This allusion to the vampire is significant as the vampire is often associated with degeneracy. In her study of Dracula (1897), Judith Halberstam identifies the vampiric Count as monstrous because of his threat of blood (racial) contamination, his ‘unstable gender identity, sexual and economic parasitism,


and degeneracy’.12 The vampire, hence, is the degenerate monster par excellence because in this single configuration is embodied all that is threatening, contaminating, and destabilising. Admittedly, Havershaw is not a vampire, but perhaps the angel is just another guise of the vampire trope. If the vampire is the ultimate degenerate at the turn of the nineteenth-century, the decaying angel may be the degenerate of the current fin de siècle, at least in this story. Like a vampire, Havershaw desires subsistence and replication through Bernard’s writing so as to prolong his life-in-death (more of this later). Interestingly, Bernard too is becoming increasingly vampire-like, adopting nocturnal habits and gradually losing his productiveness (5, vampires cannot reproduce, at least not in the normal sense). Most interestingly, his decision to write Talboy’s biography is a highly vampiric act as well, in that he needs to draw on the resources of another life (via writing) to sustain his own (he hopes to gain fame with the biography). He is, of course, in for a surprise. Fantasy and the Corpo(Real) The body in ‘Angel’ is powerfully invested with desire and hence, is rendered fantastic. Tamsin Spargo and Fred Botting contend that desire ‘is of bodies … of the other and in interminable relation to the other’. Gendered, desire engenders and disgenders, articulates as much as it disconnects. Desire is of the copula that never closes the distance between subject and object. Desire is to want to be at one with oneself as one’s own subject, image and signifier.13 Desire is that unbridgeable gap between subject and the always already lost image (object). Lacan calls this image a phantasm,14 suggesting a creation of fantasy. The act of desiring is also paradoxical because it simultaneously speaks the lost object of desire, and silences it. Appropriating Spargo’s and Botting’s theory, it can be said that both Havershaw and Bernard in ‘Angel’ are, on different levels, pursuing a fantastic construction for a lost body-ofdesire through narrative. When Bernard first meets Havershaw, he sees him as: A tall, thin figure in a seersucker suit the grubbiness of which, the fraying cuffs, the cigarette burns and the faded reddish wine stain on the crotch could not altogether disguise the quality of the fabric and the elegance of the cut. Very erect, very tall, very slow, on his head a Panama hat; and his face a veritable atlas of human experience, the nose a great hooked bone of a thing projecting like the prow of a ship, and the mouth – well, the mouth had foundered

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somewhere, but the old man animated it with lipstick! He must have been at least eighty. His shirt collar was not clean, and he wore a silk tie of some pastel shade – a pale lilac or mauve, I seem to remember; and in his buttonhole a fresh white lily. (I never saw Harry Talboys without a fresh flower in his buttonhole). And as I say, he was making his way down the Bowery, and the men from the men’s shelter drinking at the corner of Third Street greeted him warmly … and he moved through them with all the graceful condescension of royalty, briefly lifting his Panama to reveal a liverspotted skull devoid of all but a last few wisps of snow-white hair. Watching this performance, I was much taken with the dignity of the old fellow, and with his lipstick. Was there, I asked myself, a story here? (1–2, emphasis added) It is obvious that Bernard registers Havershaw’s ambiguities. This can be seen in Bernard’s exaggerations (note the recurrences of ‘very’ and ‘great’) and overemphasis of Havershaw’s surface elegance and gestures, disregarding altogether Havershaw’s ‘person’. Performance is what attracts Bernard to Havershaw. More peculiarly, whenever the body is being described, it is either metaphorised (the nose), effaced (lips) or hidden (hair), almost as if there is already a crisis in textualising the body which can only be achieved through abstraction or veiling. But at this point, he is not curious at all about Havershaw’s strangeness, for Bernard is only interested in him as a story: I wondered if, between us, we might not produce a memoir of the Twenties? We would call it An Old Man Remembers the Jazz Age, or something of the sort; lavishly illustrated with photographs from the period, it would stand as an expressive personal document of modern America in the innocent exuberance of its golden youth. The more I thought about it, the surer I felt that such a book was needed. (5) Bernard is interested in Havershaw as a link to the ‘mythic past’, which Bernard desires to reconstruct. It is Bernard’s nostalgia for the Twenties which prompts him to pester Havershaw, whom he sees as exemplifying that age of ‘exuberance’, to tell his story. Through Havershaw, Bernard hopes to retrieve the fantasy of an age of ‘golden youth’ to, perhaps, temporarily screen off the contemporary social and cultural degeneration from his immediate experience. And the ‘lavish photographs’ are, suggestively, space and time transfixed to which he can transport himself. Havershaw is, in other words, his narrative escape


clause from contemporary reality. But his inability to concretely ‘speak’ his subject already suggests the latter’s surplus significances which narrative cannot accommodate. Bernard is initially fascinated by Havershaw’s dandyism (he does in fact refer Havershaw as one [7]). This is also significant in a fin de siècle narrative for like the vampire, the dandy is another configuration of the decadent.15 Of all the destabilising categories which constitute the anxiety of the fin de siècle, gender instability is the most worrisome. Havershaw’s gender ambivalence is obvious from the long passage quoted above. Bernard even calls him an ‘old lady’ (2) and a ‘maudlin old queen’ (9). Havershaw is also anachronistic (a postmodern dandy), for despite living opposite the ultramodern Chrysler Building, he basically lives in the past (3). It is this combination of factors – chiefly his effeminacy and anachronism – that makes him a likely candidate for Bernard to recapture the past; for surely someone as eccentric as Havershaw must carry a wealth of historical significances which he adamantly keeps alive. But these ambivalences, I want to suggest, hide a deeper implication. They are not only historical markers onto which Havershaw clings to keep the past alive, they are also ‘cosmetics’ which hide his true, grotesque identity. Yet the repressed, as we know, can only be stemmed, but never completely eliminated. In the case of Havershaw, his physical corruption is already suggested by the lingering unpleasant smell that his body exudes – a smell that is, aptly, like an ‘overripeness in the bouquet’ (2) and ‘slightly rotten’ (3). His dandy clothes and eccentric old man ways cannot, in the end, fully disguise him. But for now, Bernard fails to register their significance. Havershaw and Bernard complement each other perfectly, because both desire a past that is lost. For Havershaw, the Twenties was like a Hellenistic paradise where body and sexuality could be displayed and celebrated with abandon. Increasingly, instead of talking about himself, he tells Bernard about the significance of the body back in the Twenties: [The body was a] temple in which there was nothing unclean. A shrine, to be adorned for the ritual of love! We lived for the moment, Bernard – the purpose of life was to express yourself, and if you were unhappy that was because you were maladjusted, and if you were maladjusted it was because you were repressed’. (4) What Havershaw has done is of course to collapse space-time into the body. The Twenties was characterised by ‘exuberance’ and ‘innocent youth’ precisely because the body was deified into a pure expression of

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love and beauty. The Keatsian ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’ is applicable here. And not long after the ‘story-telling’ sessions are on the way, Havershaw begins to speak of the most desirable body of them all – the angel: ‘Anson stepped up to the glass and slipped the gown from his shoulders; he stood there quite naked, with one foot advanced and turned very slightly outwards, and his fingers caught lightly on his hips. How tall and slender, and hairless he was! And white, Bernard, white as milk!’ Harry at this point sat up quite erect in his armchair and lifted a hand to sketch Anson’s figure in the air before him. ‘He had a neck like the stem of a flower’, he said softly, ‘and narrow shoulders; and his chest was very flat, and very finely nippled, and merged imperceptibly into a belly punctuated by the merest suggestion of a navel. He stood before the glass and gazed at himself with all the impersonal admiration he might have expended on a piece of fine porcelain or a Ming vase, as though he knew he was quite beautiful, and suffered no impulse to humility on the point’. (7–8) Here, the body is explicitly delineated in all its beauty and splendour. The feature that stands out with regards to the angel’s impeccable perfection is his androgyny. Pure beauty, it seems, must be androgynous (see Spargo’s and Botting’s point quoted earlier with regards to the disgendering of gender in desire). Yet sadly, unlike the Grecian urn, the body is not immortal, and will eventually suffer decline and corruption. It is this that Havershaw desperately seeks to avert, and in Bernard, he finds the perfect ‘victim’ to transcribe his body into narrative; for the body, when textualised, will become immortalised thereafter. In truth, it is not pure beauty that Havershaw desires to immortalise, but a fantasy of beauty. Androgynous, youthful, sculpted, unchanging – these forms of the beautiful can only be captured permanently in works of art, and never in the whimsical, unpredictable corporeal. With each passing day, and as his body decays rapidly, Havershaw realises the futility of his ideal. The Real of his corporeal ruination is puncturing the fantasy of his Symbolic beauty, and he literally embodies this. When he finally reveals his true state to Bernard, it is an overwhelmingly horrific body that Bernard witnesses: Harry’s flesh has rotted off his lower ribs and belly, and the clotted skin still clinging to the ribs and hipbones that bordered the hole


was in a state of gelatinous putrescence. In the hole I caught the faint gleam of his spine, and amid an indistinct bundle of piping the forms of shadowy organs. I saw sutures on his intestines, and the marks of neat stitching, and a cluster of discoloured organic vessels bound with a thin strip of translucent plastic. He should have been dead, and I suppose I must have whispered as much, for I heard him say that he could not die. (15) Havershaw’s revealed body contrasts almost point by point to the angel of his tale. Where the angel of his tale has a ‘flat chest, and very finely nippled’, Havershaw’s body is caved in and rotten; where the angel has ‘a belly punctuated by the merest suggestion of a navel’, Havershaw’s body manifests a hole so gaping that his spine and suture marks on his intestines can be seen; and of course, where the phallus is significantly absent in the angel, Havershaw’s penis is emphatically and tragically present as an index of masculine fragility and decay (‘a tiny, uncircumcised penis all puckered up and wrinkled in upon itself [15]). Most crucial of all is that whereas the angel’s beauty is external, Havershaw’s repulsiveness is his interiority turned inside out. The fantasy of the beautiful body of the Twenties is broken down, and the body of the fin de siècle is irrevocably revealed. Havershaw’s alleged deathlessness is an ironic testimony of his body as eternally desirable and eternally lost. Narrative as body of fantasy Clothing and cosmetics have failed as fantasy to support Havershaw’s desire, and now, as a last resort, he must seek to reclaim that fantasy in narrative. There at least, he can disguise without suggesting putrefaction, and desire without end. But Bernard finds Havershaw increasingly difficult to work with because the latter would not comply with Bernard’s wish to talk about ‘the past’: When next I broached the topic [the ‘Twenties’] … he spoke again of his angel. He was relaxed and affable, I remember, and I humoured him. ‘You mean metaphorically he was an angel, Harry’, I said. ‘You mean he was a very good man’. ‘Oh, no’, said Harry, turning toward me. ‘No, he was not a good man at all! … he was a real angel, absolutely authentic’. (6) Havershaw only ever wants to talk about his fantasy, thwarting Bernard’s in the process. This is an interesting juxtaposition of fan-

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tasies, which is ultimately a parallel event: as Havershaw’s physical body is decaying, Bernard’s narrative body is experiencing deconstruction. When he confronts Havershaw as to the reality of the angel, he is met, not with a lie, but an impossibility, an aporia. ‘Angel’, in this sense, is an allegorical narrative about the crisis of representation, especially the representation of monstrosity. Havershaw’s narrative purposefully attempts to penetrate Bernard’s to incorporate the latter’s tale into his own; to represent the monster is always to become overwhelmed by the very subject of representation (see Conclusion). More importantly, in being confronted with a tale of an angel, Bernard is ultimately confronted with the impossibility of recapturing the past. Both the angel and the past are mythical creatures which remains elusive and impossible. An interesting inter-story is developed in the narrative immediately after Bernard is introduced to Havershaw’s angel (another frame within frames). It is a gnostic tale which Bernard comes across: in which Satan, a great god, creates a human body and persuades a spirit called Arbal-Jesus to project his being into it for a few moments. Arbal-Jesus complies with Satan’s seemingly innocent request, but once inside the body he finds himself trapped, and cannot escape. He screams in agony, but Satan only laughs; and then mocks his captive by sexually violating him. Arbal-Jesus’ only consolation is that another spirit accompanies him in the body, and guarantees his release. That spirit is Death. (10) This brief tale, like a Shakespearean subplot, mirrors the main story of the monster overwhelming the narrative. Like Havershaw, Satan creates a narrative body and inveigles Bernard (Arbal-Jesus) to temporarily serve as the vehicle into which the narrative is invested. But once heard, Bernard/Arbal-Jesus is ensnared in Havershaw/Satan’s tale. He is ‘trapped, and cannot escape’, and ‘violated’ by the captors narrative. For a while, Bernard seeks to withdraw from Havershaw (9, 10) but he inevitably fails. As he admits, he has ‘tucked’ Havershaw’s story ‘into some dark grotto of my brain, there to hold if secret and inviolate’ (9). Just as Arbal-Jesus is ensnared by Satan until death releases him, Bernard is Havershaw’s victim until ‘narrative death’ frees him. Havershaw’s angelic body precludes him from death, and by allegorical extension, Bernard is implicated as well. Havershaw’s alleged


deathlessness is that impossible fantasy that would not go away. As he himself muses: ‘Who knows what an angel would be doing in a century like this one? Maybe he was just meant to be an angel for our times’. There was along pause. ‘Immortal spirit burned in him, you see … Sin meant nothing to him; he was pure soul. This was his tragedy’. ‘His tragedy? Harry nodded. ‘To be pure soul in an age that would not believe its existence’. (13) In decrying the angel as a ‘soul in an age that would not believe its existence’, Havershaw is confessing his own inability to corporeally sustain any longer an impossible fantasy that belongs to a mythic past (a double fantasy). And it is precisely also in ‘a century like this one’ – the postmodern era – that such a fantasy has been revealed to be nothing more but an ideological myth. Indeed, Havershaw’s angel becomes the symbol ‘for our time’, a historical moment characterised by what Thomas Docherty terms an ‘irony of representation’, that is an ‘irony with respect to the status of the real. We have an ironic attitude, believing that something’s absence is really its presence and vice versa’.16 Bernard, who would not believe in Havershaw’s angel, nevertheless realises that there is something behind the story. As he admits, ‘[t]his angel business was, of course, nonsense; but I had come to suspect that something rather phantastic, or even perverse, might lie behind it’ (12). In this, he exemplifies the postmodern ‘ironic attitude’: what is present (the angel) is believable only as absence, and what is absent (the unrepresentable lost object of desire, that is, beauty, the ‘exuberant’ past) is continuously reclaimed as substitute presence (through narrative, that is). The Reality of Angels Before the final revelation, Havershaw attempts to give his angel a narrative closure by making the angel ‘disappear’ into legend: ‘What happened to him [the angel]?’ I [Bernard] said wearily. ‘Oh’, he replied, snapping shut the compact, ‘I lost sight of him. I believe he came to a bad end; I believe he was sent to prison’. ‘No, he wasn’t’. (13) But Bernard, surprisingly, refuses to humour Havershaw and his story any longer, rejecting Havershaw’s story altogether. It is, after all, not

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the narrative which he wants to write. Confronted thus, Havershaw loses his ‘ideal’ listener, and directly, his chance to recuperate his lost desire in narrative. By rejecting Havershaw’s story, he is returning the monster’s tale. Arguably, Havershaw could have withheld revealing that he is ‘Harry Talboys’, and thus lose only part of his constructedness. After all ‘Harry’, has served as a useful and effective fantasy to deflect his monstrous corpo(reality). But in having his last recourse to reconfiguring an impossible fantasy refused, even ‘Harry Talboys’ is no longer relevant. Perhaps as an act of revenge, Havershaw’s exposure of his monstrous body to Bernard (15) ultimately disintegrates both their narratives, revealing them to be nothing but myths. At this point, I want to briefly return to my earlier reading of the city. As suggested, the city serves as a metonymy of the body, a subtext which echoes the main narrative frame (the city as another framed narrative?). And just as Havershaw disguises his grotesquery with semblances of dandyism, thus averting the inevitable dissolution, the city’s disorder and social instability are temporarily restored: The murder victim of Avenue C, ran the prevailing theory, was a double-crosser involved in a major drug deal. The nastiness presumed to be a warning to others not to make the same mistake. The garbage men went out on strike for three days, but a settlement was reached before things really began to go bad, and the trucks were soon rolling again – stinking ripely and clouded with insects, noxious monsters trumpeting and wheezing through the midnight streets. The one that serviced my block was called The Pioneer, and on the side of it was painted a covered wagon rumbling across some western prairie. When I found myself downwind of The Pioneer, I thought, unkindly, of Harry. (9) The resolution, however, remains suggestively ambivalent. As much as the garbage trucks are making their rounds again, they are also the constant signifier of the city’s pervasive degeneration. Psychoanalytically speaking, these trucks would serve as a fantasy which simultaneously disguises and exposes the inevitable Real, the surplus (refuse) which cannot be wholly incorporated. The truck which services Bernard’s block – Pioneer – is also an important metonymic link with Bernard’s and, indirectly, Havershaw’s narratives. Like Bernard and Havershaw who long for a lost past, the truck signifies a yearning for a (mythic) historical past which signalled the birth of a nation, a time when the land was young, free and undefiled by signifiers of


decadence. Interestingly, Bernard registers in his thought these two representatives of mythic desire – the truck and Havershaw – thus conflating the body, the truck and the city into a single signifier of lost desires. In finally encountering the monstrous body, Bernard meets a total impasse of narrative representation. So powerful is this revelation that Bernard himself becomes momentarily detached from his own body. While he stares at the body in eternal ruin, he simultaneously registers the ‘hot night’ and the city trembling ‘with a febrile life of its own, and somewhere a siren leaped into sudden desolate pain. All I saw then was a young man standing in the corner of a shabby room watching an old man pull up his trousers’ (16). All attempts at disguise, including through narrative, dissolve in the light of Havershaw’s true corporeality, and all fantasies relieved. I suggested earlier that this is done out of revenge; here, I am alternatively proposing that Havershaw’s act may actually be one of kindness. Like the inter-story of Arbal-Jesus who can only be free if death releases him, Havershaw is here assuming death to liberate Bernard from his entrapment by a fantasy. And Bernard’s outof-body experience (the shift from ‘I’ to ‘a young man’) may be read as precisely his final and total break from (Symbolic) fantasy. The ‘reality’ as he has always known it – including his own subjectivity – suddenly becomes alien and other. In this brief, shocking moment, the city also takes on a surreal, anthropomorphised atmosphere, finally collapsing subject and space into a singular body in pain. In this experience of the Void of the Real, all normative categories like young and old become meaningless. Although Bernard continues to register such distinctions, he now realises that he has stepped outside the limits of classificatory technologies of Symbolic control. He too is now a surplus body that occupies a place which, because it is unknown and uncontainable, is horrifying. The end of fantasy and the persistence of death Having refused Havershaw’s story, and witnessing him for the angel he really is, Bernard finally recognises the limits of representation. With no recourse to realising his mythic reconstruction and having had the angel’s corporeality rupturing his fantasy, all that Bernard is left with is an aporetic end akin to a narrative death: As I write this it is late January, and very cold outside…. I can’t help thinking of him as Harry – it seems somehow to suit him better. He asked me to write an account of our friendship, I wouldn’t other-

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wise have done it; writing seems futile now. Everything seems futile, for some reason I don’t fully understand, and I keep wondering why any of us cling to the raft. The one consolation I can find is the presence of that other spirit traveling with us in the body – a consolation denied my rotting friend downstairs, whoever, whatever, he is. (16, my emphasis) Once the fantasy of Symbolic construction has been breached, no fantasy can reclaim it. Writing, a Symbolic act, is for Bernard, futile ˇ izˇek’s view, subjects who now. Both Bernard and Havershaw are, in Z ‘[know] too much’ about the Real and subsequently ‘[pay] for this excess, surplus knowledge “in the flesh”, by the very substance of [their beings]’.17 But unlike Bernard, Havershaw would continue to keep up a fantastical appearance. This is his deathlessness – the denial of the consolation of the ‘spirit of Death’ suggested in the framed story. Bernard, on the other hand, has forfeited his fantasy, as implied by his giving up writing his version of history, and his awareness of narrative futility. Havershaw’s tragedy will continue as long as he seeks a substitute for his lost desire, desperately separating his ontological corpo(reality) from his masquerade performances. Like the vampire (who is also an over-determined body), he cannot die because he will not relinquish the need to replicate desire. In this, McGrath’s title for his tale is both apt and ironic. In Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture, Jonathan Dollimore argues that contemporary theory is unable to deal effectively with the issue of death because death defies theoretical tendencies to dissolve ontological and epistemological ‘reality’ into representation, while simultaneously invests ‘reality’ with an ‘“excess” which forever destabilises’.18 That is, contemporary theory is haunted by an ‘excess’ (or psychoanalytically, a surplus) which is simultaneously a part of, and outside, ‘reality’ (Silverman’s ‘dominant fiction’); this ‘excess’ ultimately escapes representation, always already disrupting representation. But Dollimore ends with this important insight: ‘Death, of course, disallows [contemporary theory’s] evasion [of the problem of reality]’.19 Dollimore is certainly correct in that as much as postmodernism has reduced reality to various forms of representation, death remains one ‘reality’ that is irreducible. ‘Angel’, in many ways, echoes this view, positing a dying body which defies representation by remaining unalterably and irrevocably r/Real. Death signifies both as an irresolvable Symbolic problem, and as the Real which returns all subjects to the Void. Havershaw, as the decaying angel, remains at


this terrible threshold, with his grotesque body juxtaposing and welding both r/Realities. There is a beautiful passage from Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ on Paul Klee’s haunting painting entitled ‘Angelus Novus’, which I find apt in illuminating the plight of the angel in McGrath’s tragic tale: His eyes are staring, his mouth wide open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.20 Read in light of Benjamin’s meditation, ‘Angel’ becomes a lamentation for the irreconcilability of the past with the postmodern present (and possible future). Because of postmodernism’s suspicion of all metanarratives, the past is reduced to incoherent fragments akin to a ‘piling [of] wreckage upon wreckage’, with little possibility of salvaging anything worthwhile from it. Considered this way, ‘Angel’ can be read as a quasi-commentary on the vanishing subject and a past which, despite its problematic mythic accoutrements, at least provides a locus of meaning.

Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus: redeeming the monster A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster. Angela Carter21 Linda Badley argues that the body in late twentieth-century is increasingly becoming signified as, and identified with, ‘the self’.22 What needs to be added, however, is that as much as the body is now synonymous with ‘self’,23 the body is also a sign which must be interpreted. That is, the body as sign must first be decoded before the self can be read. The body itself has no a priori or inherent signification, other than that which has been culturally coded. As a sign, it must be constantly and consistently reiterated before it becomes meaningfully established. Judith Butler has argued that subject construction is ‘a

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process of materialisation that stabilises over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter’.24 Matter here connotes both materiality and meaningfulness, and it is precisely this that concerns Carter in Nights at the Circus. Throughout the novel, Fevvers’s materiality and meaningfulness straddle between fact and fiction (7),25 and this ambiguity is cleverly maintained until the end. Her success as a bird woman rests on her performance of artifice: ‘For, in order to earn a living, might not a genuine bird-woman – in the implausible event that such a thing existed – have to pretend she was an artificial one?’ (17). Whether she is fact of fiction is immaterial as long as her materiality is disguised. What is abnormal about Fevvers is that she has a pair of wings. Within the strict categorisations of acceptable bodily forms administered by the dominant ideology (and which is necessarily limited and derivable only when set against the unacceptable, abnormal forms26), Fevvers’s would certainly constitute as aberrant. Normative bodies, then, are culturally (read Symbolically) coded, and deviations signify a threat. Fevvers is aware that her circus career hinges on performing the monster in order to ensure financial stability and protection of her secret. She knows that if she is exposed, she will be nothing more than ‘a freak’ (161), or a monster. Aware that if she wants to ‘matter’, she must resort to hyper-visible artifice – a ‘spectacular’ effect that can be commodified or comprehended, both of which are forms of closure. Fevvers, I will demonstrate, is often at risk of becoming coded thus, and mainly through her own fault (because she loves wealth and loves an audience). But in the end, she chooses to resist the Symbolic signification invested on her (such as seeing herself as authentic only through the eyes of her – largely male – audience), and learns to reinvent herself against the Symbolic code instead. This however, I will demonstrate, is only achieved after experiencing different ‘embodiments’ of her self: as deformed, as fantastic and finally, as grotesque (each corresponding with the three parts of the novel). The deformed body The deformed body does not necessarily mean a body which is misshapen or disfigured. Historically, it is also linked to distortion and perversion. The deformed body is ultimately a physical aberration, an ‘oddly formed [body] … incorporating other bodies, bestial or human, into [its] own’.27 In part one of the Nights at the Circus, we are presented with Madame Schreck’s museum of female monsters, a


thoroughly feminised version of the institution for aberrant children in Lessing’s The Fifth Child: ‘Who worked for Madame Schreck, sir? Why, prodigies of nature such as I [Fevvers]. Dear old Fanny Four-Eyes; and the Sleeping Beauty; and the Wiltshire Wonder, who was not three foot high; and Albert/Albertina who was bipartite, that is to say, half and half and neither of either; and the girl called Cobwebs…’. (59–60) The museum exhibits (save the Sleeping Beauty) are all abnormal, deformed bodies. These women fulfil David Williams’s postulation that the monster inverts and denies categorisation, hierarchy, differentiation and similarity28 – all of which are to do with establishing the normal from the aberrant. For example, in having four eyes – two of them in place of nipples – Fanny’s body manifests a synthesis of distinct body parts and functions: rather than serving as erotic zones for men to look at, the breasts now do the ‘looking’. For Felicity Nussbaum, what is historically defective in women ‘is not only the lack of a penis but the presence of the wrong thing’.29 This interpretation, converging castration and corporeal abnormality, reinforces my reading of Fanny’s monstrosity. As Fevvers observes, Fanny has ‘come to rest with all of us other dispossessed creatures, for whom there was no earthly use, in this lumber room of femininity, this rag-and-bones shop of the heart’ (69), precisely because no man will want her. For indeed, Fanny’s extra eyes imply excessive seeing, which is castrating and disempowering for men. Hence, Fanny represents the excessive body (like Fevvers as well), while the others may either be transgressive bodies (because they disrupt boundaries – Fevvers again, Albert/ Albertina) or deficient ones (The Wiltshire Wonder). In this museum, their existence serves as a social yardstick to measure normalcy and establish aberrations. Historian Stephen Pender has argued that the early exhibitions of human deformity (during the Reformation) often carry strong moral and spiritual implications: to warn the public of its ‘moral turpitude’ and the ‘imminent apocalypse’.30 This suggests that the fascination with such exhibitions often coincides with historical moments of uncertainty which compromise the stability and security of bodies. The understanding is that by exhibiting deformities, the public will be reminded of its potential (inner) deformity, and hence, encourage greater piety to prevent ugly consequences. Exhibiting monsters, then, necessarily reinforces an ideology of normalcy. This confirms Shirley Peterson’s view of Madame Schreck’s museum, which,

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according to her, ‘operate[s] out of a consumer culture that creates its taboos only to turn them into viable commodities. The violence of such an economy ensures the management of otherness safely within the limits of dominant culture’.31 Pender’s and Peterson’s views also accord with Foucault’s analysis of the state apparatus in which prisons and asylums become visible sites of marginality that serve to remind the public of its potential degeneracy, as well as to convince the public of its normalcy. As the public gazes at these ‘monsters’ in these particular sites (freak shows32, prisons, asylums), it is, at the same time, gazing at itself, ‘a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against himself’.33 The circus too is another site where monsters, of which the clowns are paramount, dwell. But unlike the museum women who are ‘freaks of nature’, the clowns’ deformity is deliberately performed. Buffo, the Master Clown, is of course, the most monstrous of them all. ‘[H]ilarious, appalling, devastating’, Buffo puts on extravagant make-up, dons a bladder-simulating wig on his head, and ‘wears his insides on his outside [storing] his brains in the organs which, conventionally, stores piss’ (116). Together with his clowns, they seek to deconstruct the very body they inhabit, turning the interior into exterior (the abject), defying normative subjectivity altogether. Exhibiting the most potent form of bodily incoherence and fragmentation, Buffo embodies the unreliability of surfaces to signify meaningfully. In fact, his audience cannot really distinguish between his flesh, costume and makeup, so intricately tangled are they; in this sense, Buffo is certainly ‘wearing’ his flesh and ‘inhabiting’ his costume and makeup (116).34 At the end of his clowning antics: he starts to deconstruct himself. His face becomes contorted by the most hideous grimaces, as if he were trying to shake off the very wet white with which it is coated: shake! shake! shake out his teeth, shake off his nose, shake away his eyeballs, let all go flying off in a convulsive self-dismemberment. (117) This public display of devastating self-dismemberment mirrors Buffo’s private fragmentation. Wrecked by alcohol, Buffo knows that ‘[d]espair is the constant companion of the Clown’ (119). His deformity is a physical manifestation of an internal rupture. Following Pender again, deformity need not be a corporeal distortion, but a surface evidence of a hidden trauma. Finally, Buffo (and his clowns) embodies an excess


which is his irrepressible interiority penetrating and spilling out of his fragile exterior. If Fevvers hyper-visibilises in order to disguise, Buffo outrageous expressions are his only recourse to signify at all, even if the end result is defeatist. The clown is ‘what is left but the poor mask of poor Pierrot, who invites the laughter that would otherwise come unbidden’ (119). It is better to embody hilarity, than to be a body that is laughed at. Without his deformed body, he is ‘nobody at all. Take away my make-up and underneath is merely not-Buffo. An absence. A vacancy’ (122). In the end, both the woman monsters and the clowns deploy their anomaly as a means to an end. They allow their bodies to become commodified in order to be marginally ‘acceptable’ within culture, and even gain some form of subsistence. In order to signify, however limitedly, they must embrace disempowerment. Fevvers, on the other hand, seeks to resist the forms of closure to which the monster women and the clowns resort. There is an important shift in the way she negotiates her deformity while at the museum, and the way she deploys it in the circus. When the American journalist Walser first meets her in London for an interview (at this point, she is already a circus aerialist), he is struck by her excessiveness. For indeed, Fevvers is a huge woman – six feet two, fleshy, bosomy; she dresses extravagantly in sequins and dyed plumes, and has vulgar manners and a huge appetite (15). All this, however, is largely to disguise her angelic corporeality. She delights in her excess in order to remain a fiction. Carter uses the word ‘fleshing’ to describe Fevvers’s voluptuousness, but there is an obvious pun on the words ‘fleshing/ flashing’. That is, Fevvers makes herself ‘fleshier’/flashier so that she can perform her greatest act: an arte-fact pretending to be an artifice. Walser however, realises that Fevvers must keep up her paradoxical appearance in order to maintain her extraordinary position: ‘if she were indeed a lusus naturae, a prodigy, then – she was no longer a wonder. She would no longer be an extraordinary woman, no more the Greatest Aerialiste in the world but – a freak’ (161). This view distinctly summarises Fevvers’s situation. The difference between Madam Schreck’s museum and the circus is that in the former, Fevvers is truly a freak – a marvellous monster – who exists only to be exhibited. Her threatening body must be commodified as a sign that culture can comprehend, and only within very limited space and function. But in the circus – and perhaps, learning from her former experience – Fevvers is the extraordinary woman; she chooses to display her abnormal body in a ludic play with her audience. A commodity nonetheless, here at least she can signify ambiguously as artifice, and gain some control of her

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life. But deformity, whether affected or real, is always disempowering. The picaresque mode of Nights at the Circus will eventually lead Fevvers through experiences that will correct the error of her ways, and enable her to learn instead what it means to really embrace the ‘New Woman’ (281). She must come to accept her devious body on its own terms, and not merely as a means to fool others (for this further subscribes her to a position of subordination within the Symbolic). It will be the grotesque body that she will finally celebrate, thus redeeming herself from her own callousness and the patriarchal fixity that seeks to limit her. Fevvers, however, will need to experience another form of ‘embodiment’ before she can arrive at the grotesque body. The fantastic body At the circus, Fevvers can be termed a fantastic body. Existing ambiguously (fact of fiction?), she is the projection of her male audience’s fantasy for the eroticised angel. The first two parts of the novel end with Fevvers fetishised by her male audience (Mr Rosencreutz, and the Grand Duke) almost to complete objectification, but she always manages to thwart them. If deformity disempowers, the body fantastic at least allows some form of subjectivity, as long as that fantasy resists closure. It is a dialectical relationship between (monstrous) body and (male) spectator, with the latter variously coding the former and the former reinforcing those codes through performance and reiteration. This of course, is not without its dangers, as Fevvers will soon come to realise. Embodying male fantasies can either objectify or empower her, and how she negotiates this is crucial in maintaining her freedom. Mr Rosencreutz purchases Fevvers from Madame Schreck for the purpose of sacrificing her in a strange religious rite. For him, Fevvers embodies the angel who will lead him to immortality. She is, for him, ‘Azrael, Azrail, Ashriel, Azriel, Azaril, Gabriel; dark angel of many names … Proserpine, [who] comes from the Land of the Dead to herald new life’ (75). In fact, Mr Rosencreutz never calls Fevvers by her name, addressing her instead, as his fantasy. Rosencreutz’s desire is not merely immortality, but its attendant sexual transcendence, suggested by a strange gold medallion in the form of a ‘rosy phallus’ that he wears around his neck (74). This medallion symbolises: The penis, represented by itself, aspires upwards, represented by the wings, but is dragged downwards, represented by the twining stem, by the female part, represented by the rose. H’m…. tread carefully, girlie! I exhort myself. (77)


Whilst the penis is auto-reflective, the ‘female part’ is represented symbolically as hindrance to the his masculine aspiration to overcome sex. Fevvers, a figurative transvestite,35 of course represents both male and female elements. She is both Rosencreutz’s fantasy of sexual transcendence as well as the potent reminder that he can never achieve it. She becomes his own ‘impossible phallus’ that is perennially etched on the medallion: The phallic signifier is, so to speak, an index of its own impossibility. In its very positivity it is the signifier of ‘castration’ – that is, of its own lack … the phallus is not simply lost but is an object which gives body to a certain fundamental loss in its very presence. In the phallus, loss as such attains a positive existence.36 The phallus’s self-referentiality is already indicative of a lack, that is, its non-signifiability as metaphor of power – a symbolic castration. Fevvers’s wings, however, symbolic of Rosencreutz’s fantasy of the unhindered (erected) phallus, enables him to recuperate his sexual overcoming, which is why she must be sacrificed. Psychoanalytically speaking, Fevvers is both Rosencreutz’s fantasy and r/Reality, his desired transcendence over sex and his obvious failure. This suggests a dialectical fear of, and fascination with, the female sex. Representing opposite and irreconcilable extremes, Fevvers thus, must be destroyed altogether because it is Rosencreutz’s only way out of his profound dilemma (echoing Quentin’s relationship with his zombies). Immortality for Rosencreutz is transcendence over sexuality, which is, however, always haunted by its own impossibility. Having her and then wilfully destroying her (81) would then symbolise his rejection of his impossible fantasy to finally embrace transcendence. But Fevvers is not merely a fantastic woman, she is literal as well. She is, as Magali Cornier Michael posits, ‘fantastic but recognisable’.37 Carter herself, in an interview with Anna Katsavos, admits that: Fevvers is a very literal creation. She’s very literally a winged spirit. She’s very literally the winged victory, but very, very literally so. How inconvenient to have wings, and by extension, how very, very difficult to be born so out of key with the world. Something that women know all about is how very difficult it is to enter an old game. What you have to do is to change the rules and make a new game, and that’s really what she’s about.38

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Rosencreutz could not anticipate that Fevvers would refuse to embody his pathetic phallus and thwart his plans with a phallic symbol of her own – a sword. Fevvers, the literalised angel, is also a working girl who must ‘earn a living’.39 Money is a powerful draw, and she must do what she does best to get it: to be a fantastical exhibition. As Lizzie, Fevvers’s foster mother, point out to her: All you can do to earn your living is to make a show of yourself. You’re doomed to that. You must give pleasure of the eye, or else you’re good for nothing. For you, it’s always a symbolic exchange in the marketplace; you couldn’t say you were engaged in productive labour, now, could you, girl? (185)40 All this is true enough, but Fevvers must learn to distinguish between manipulating her audience’s gaze and becoming objectified by it. She must, indeed ‘give pleasure to the eye’, but conforming to a specific (male) fantasy can transfix, or codify her indefinitely as that, resulting in closure. In the case of Rosencreutz, Fevvers escapes his transfixing of her subjectivity into an enduring fantasy because she is quick-witted and has a sword to protect her. But with the Grand Duke (part two), Fevvers is not so lucky. Here, in her greed, she deliberately entertains danger by exploiting her spectacular body, ignoring Lizzie’s advice (quote above). This almost costs her freedom. She marginally misses becoming permanently objectified as the Duke’s fantasy only because Lizzie comes to her rescue (192). Her sword and wings prove useless, suggesting a total disempowerment of the fantastic self.41 Fantasy is inherently ambivalent. Its presence simultaneously suggests the absence of what it substitutes. To counter this ambivalence is to resort to eliminating fantasy altogether (Rosencreutz) or transfixing it forever into a single identifiable meaning (the Duke). Both are violent means of preventing the Real that lies behind fantasy from surfacing. Because of this Fevvers must ‘tread carefully’ (77), for as much as she is the ‘focus for improbabilities and impossibilities of various sorts’,42 she is also always at risk of becoming compromised by someone’s singular (anti-Real) fantasy. Fevvers’s fantastic nature invites a comparative reading of the novel as an example of a literary fantastic,43 and a magic realist narrative. According to David Punter, magic realism ‘is not a matter of being transported to a distant and unrecognisable world; it is to do with seeing the recognisable world … through transformed eyes’.44 Hence,


like the fantastic, magic realism is a textual device which disallows the reader familiarity and coherence in the act of reading. But if the literary fantastic problematises the text by destabilising and ambiguating realism, magic realism transforms reality by reshaping it and turning instability into a virtue. In Carter’s narrative, Fevvers is the locus of textual instability (like Ben in The Fifth Child, she is the fantastic presence). But the narrative’s magic realist quality makes non-closure a celebratory event. The reader is absolved from the need to transfix Fevvers as something absolute. Nights at the Circus can thus be read as a sort of postmodern allegory in which ontological tension is a necessary element.45 As Brian McHale elucidates: Allegory projects a world and erases it in the same gesture, inducing a flicker between presence and absence of this world, between tropological reality and ‘literal’ reality – literal in the literal sense of ‘words on the page.’ For what this flicker foregrounds above all it the textuality of the text. If you ask what is the ‘realest’ level of an allegorical text, the answer … can only be the words on the page in front of you.46 How magic realism is effected most obviously in the novel is through the positioning of Fevvers as grotesque, the final, most celebratory of monstrous forms that she will embody. The grotesque body What is the grotesque body? How is it liberating? How is it ontologically different from the deformed and the fantastic body? These are three fundamental questions that will be addressed. The word ‘grotesque’ itself is ambiguous, suggesting at once physical distortion and interior corruption.47 But its underlying force is its power to undermine conventions and celebrate disruptions. As Barbara Maria Stafford clarifies, the grotesque challenges ‘conventional mores .… Dangerous and uncontrollable expressive freedom [constitute] its chief formal transgression, irrespective of the genre.48 The grotesque’s most rigorous critic is Mikhail Bakhtin, who argues that the grotesque body ‘is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body’.49 Fevvers, who embodies the multifaceted fantasies of her male audience, already display this quality of the grotesque.50 Here, it is important to stress that my reading of the different embodiments which Fevvers adopt is not a succession of bodies, but a succession of how she allows her body to be culturally defined. The bildungsroman theme of the narrative is

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not so much a physical journey (although that is there) but a semiotic one, in so much that Fevvers must learn to reassign for herself new meanings for her body, culminating in the grotesque, to achieve New Womanhood (281). According to Franco Moretti, the modern bildungsroman is characterised by ‘its interiorisation of contradictions. The next step being not to ‘solve’ the contradiction, but rather to learn to live with it, and even transform it into a tool for survival’.51 Nights at the Circus is one such example of the modern quest narrative. Fevvers’s constant negotiation with her monstrous body’s incongruous codes to finally settle for a grotesque one is her act of interiorising her contradictions and transforming her body into ‘a tool for survival’. The grotesque suggests, in Leonard Cassuto’s view, ‘anomalousness’.52 This, however, is a quality that Fevvers initially fails to appreciate fully. For the most part of the novel, Fevvers enjoys baffling her audience with regards to her ‘reality’ as a bird woman. Her spectators must ‘contemplate the unimaginable – that is, the absolute suspension of disbelief’ (17). Of course, they can afford to do this because that is the point of the circus. But believing in the unbelievable still situates Fevvers alongside the unbelievable, and this is not an empowering position. Something unbelievable has no subjectivity, because its presence only has significance in the objectification of its viewers. Fevvers, as the artificial bird-woman, is only a phenomenological trick of the eye which serves a limited performative function. In exploiting the gaze of her audience, she has come to incorporate that gaze as her essential self, which is unwise, for it is the gaze of objectification. Without realising it, she aligns her fantastic body with her earlier deformed one, rather than with the grotesque. Critics like Russo, in their very optimistic reading of Fevvers, fail to notice that in the narrative’s ‘unique … depiction of relationships between women as spectacle, and women as producers of spectacle’, Fevvers is very much the instrument of her own undoing, embodying both spectacle and producer, and failing to disassociate the two.53 It is the Siberian experience that finally corrected her view of her own self-worth and body. Injured, miserable and fearing for Walser’s safety (she has since fallen for Walser, who, suffering temporary amnesia, has gone missing after their train to Russia derailed), Fevvers comes to realise, perhaps for the first time, how much she has deceived herself into thinking that her fantastic body is any special: ‘Look love … [if] I hadn’t busted a wing in the train-wreck, I could fly us all to Vladivostok in two shakes, so I’m not the right one to


ask questions when it comes to what is real and what is not, because, like the duck-billed platypus, half the people who clap eyes on me don’t believe in what they see and the other half thinks they’re seeing things’. (244) Fevvers understands how devoid of meaning she really is, and that she signifies only as something unreal. In the middle of nowhere, with a broken wing, and more importantly, without an audience, Fevvers’s subjectivity loses signification. This echoes Ricarda Schmidt summation of her: ‘[not] only has her greed for money twice made her a nearvictim of men, she is also dependent upon public recognition of her symbolic meaning as a free woman’.54 Textually, the shift from a predominantly first-person narrator in part one to a more objective third person narrator in part-three, simultaneously suggests Fevvers being decentred from her narrative’s universe, as well as a gradual realisation of her own lack of a meaningful subject position. What fundamentally saves Fevvers, and teaches her to embrace the grotesque body, is love. When she meets Walser again (who has, all this while, been sojourning with a Siberian Shaman), the first thing she sees is her image in his eyes: In Walser’s eyes, she saw herself, at last, swimming into definition, like the image on photographic paper; but, instead of Fevvers, she saw two perfect miniatures of a dream. She felt her outlines waver; she felt herself trapped forever in the reflection of Walser’s eyes. For one moment, just one moment, Fevvers suffered the worst crisis of her life: ‘Am I fact? Or am I fiction? Am I what I know I am? Or am I what he thinks I am?’ (290) Perhaps for the first time, Fevvers realises how much her ‘self’ has been defined, or objectified, by male gaze. Paul Magrs suggests that in Carter’s fiction, ‘it is the already reconstructed women who initiate this process of reinventing men’, with Fevvers and Walser obviously in mind.55 This presupposes that Carter’s heroines have already attained resignified selves, and are now in the position to educate their men to do likewise. I cannot agree with this view because, as I have argued, Fevvers herself needs an education in reinvention, which she finally achieves because of love. Before Walser, her spectators were never subjects of her affections: they were there only to give her definition as an (artificial) angel, a position she happily assumed for money and atten-

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tion. But now, in Walser’s eyes, she learns to see herself for what she truly is – a real woman with wings – who need not hide behind the (dis)guise of artificiality. Love has freed her from that necessity. But this confuses and petrifies Fevvers for a moment, and it is Lizzie who once again comes to her rescue: ‘Show ‘em your feathers, quick!’ urged Lizzie. Fevvers, with a strange sense of desperation, a miserable awareness of her broken wing and her discoloured plumage, could think of nothing else but to obey. She shrugged off her furs and, though she could not spread her wings, she spread one – lopsided angel, partial and shabby splendour! No Venus, or Helen, or Angel of the Apocalypse, not Izrael or Isfahel … only a poor freak down on her luck, and an object of the most dubious kind of reality to her beholders, since both the men in the god-hut were accustomed to hallucinations and she who looks like a hallucination but is not had no place in their view of things …. She was hesitant, uncertain, at first; but then her plumage – yes! it did! – her plumage rippled in the wind of wonder, their expelled breaths. Oooooooh! (290) To embrace the grotesque body, Fevvers must first acknowledge her true nature as a bird-woman, and directly, as a freak. She is not all those wonderful symbolic designations which her audience invests in her. She must come to terms with her own subjective ‘reality’ that necessarily has no place in the scheme of ‘their view of things’. Only by accepting this can she spread her wings again. This paves the way for her new being, a resignification of her self as finally grotesque, an enigmatic monster emancipated from the appropriation of her spectators. She will, perhaps resume her circus career, but with the awareness that she no longer has to adopt her spectator’s fantasy for her. This time, on her own terms, she will assume both her factual and fictional qualities. Nights at the Circus has often been read together with Carter’s earlier novel, The Passion of New Eve (1977) as exemplifying Carter’s ‘revisionist fiction [that] aims at enhancing female power and countering the inscription of patriarchy’.56 Hence, I want to briefly discuss the bildungsroman motif and the grotesque in this other novel to show its affinity with the Nights at the Circus, and to allow me to make some tentative conclusions about Carter’s narrative aim later. The protagonist in The Passion of New Eve, Evelyn, a misogynist of the worst kind, undergoes a life-and-sex changing experience of a lifetime that begins with his kidnapping by a group of Amazon women and then taken to


Beulah, their underground city. Here, Evelyn is literally castrated by Mother, the first of the grotesque bodies he will meet. He (now Eve) subsequently encounters the androgynous Tristessa, and Lillith (who is actually Leilah, a black prostitute whom Evelyn earlier impregnated and then abandoned), both of whom are configurations of the grotesque in different guises. It is these encounters with such hopeful monsters that enable Eve/Evelyn to finally understand what it truly means to be emancipated from ideological construction of any kind, whether gender, social or sexual. In the end, Eve/Evelyn accepts her grotesque state of ambivalence (like Tristessa, s/he is now androgynous), signalled by a refusal of Evelyn’s genitals when it was offered back to him/her (187).57 It is ultimately not the impossible phallus that is the locus of power, as Evelyn once believed, but a reconciliation of contradictions that refuses subjective closure. Like Fevvers, Eve/Evelyn comes to realise that the grotesque body is the key to an array of potential and possible selves. Narrative as confidence trick Nights at the Circus concludes with Fevvers’s raucous laughter. This has variously been read, for example, as a ‘one up’ victory in the war for women’s rights,58 and as suggestive of an ‘irrepressible femininity’.59 Both these interpretations reinforce Hélène Cixous’s hope for feminist literature, and especially in her invocation of the Medusa figure as a symbol of subversion and freedom. For Fevvers’s laughter can be considered as what Cixous calls the ‘laugh of the Medusa’: A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive. It is volcanic; as it is written it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine investments, there’s no other way. There’s no room for her if she’s not a he. If she’s a her/she it is in order to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institution, to blow up the law, to break up the ‘truth’ with laughter.60 But Cixous’s theory is fundamentally a narrative one, and the Medusa’s laugh is a kind of écriture feminine that challenges and deconstructs masculinist writing. Angela Carter’s work certainly qualifies in this sense; as Andrzej Gasiorek’s notes, Carter’s narratives consistently straddle between ‘fantasy and rationalism’, using ‘liminality … to challenge specific targets, either disrupting them from within … or ridiculing their pretensions through the laughter and eroticism of the grotesque body … each [narrative] exposes the limits to the critique it

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offers by showing that fantasy must be attended by analysis and by providing deliberately aporetic endings that refuse closure.61 Gasiorek’s view indirectly aligns the grotesque body with language, a relationship which I now want to pursue. Carter once noted in an interview that Fevvers’s final quip – ‘To think I really fooled you! … It just goes to show there’s nothing like confidence’ (295) – is ‘actually a statement about the nature of fiction, about the nature of her narrative’.62 Carter is inviting the reader to ‘take a step further into the fictionality of the narrative’ rather than treating the narrative as an ‘artifact’,63 but her statement is, in my opinion, also an important observation about the nature of language. The confidence trick performed is precisely due to the way Fevvers’s body is continuously metaphorised, which subsequently ambiguates her. When Carter asks the reader ‘to take a step into the fictionality of the narrative’ she may be suggesting that metaphorical language is inherently unstable because it either over- or under-represents. Fevvers’s confidence trick then, partly subsists in her ability to fictively represent her body as metaphor, and thus always over- or underrepresenting herself so as to keep herself ambiguous. Or, as Brian H. Finney sees it, in Nights at the Circus, ‘the material world in which performance [such as Fevvers’s confidence trick] is as dependent for completion on the world of art as is art (or narration) on the material world’.64 The word completion here does not connote ‘closure’ but rather a dialectical relationship between art and the material world to complement each other. Thus, in order for Fevvers to remain materially ambiguous, her ambiguity must be ‘completed’ or complemented by the art of her story told by herself and her narrator. Yet, I am not prepared to follow Finney’s argument that Fevvers’s ambiguity is chiefly a narrative confidence trick played on the reader, as this would misrepresent the narrative’s political and feminist concerns. Fevvers is a monster who has not only learned to disguise and manipulate her grotesque body through performing ambiguity, she also realises the potential power of language to reinforce that ambiguity. Several critics have criticised Carter for her lack of consistency as a feminist writer on two counts. On the one hand, they argue that her larger-than-life heroines are only possible in fictional space, and who cannot really matter very much in ‘plain fact’.65 Clare Hanson, for example, accuses Nights at the Circus as suggesting ‘that a rearticulation of borders such as Fevvers engages in does little either to dissolve such borders or to modify the operation of power’.66 On the other, Carter’s writing has been accused of being too timid. Comparing


Fevvers and two other monstrous women, Fay Weldon’s Ruth (The Life and Loves of a She-Devil [1983]) and Jeanette Winterson’s Dog Woman (Sexing the Cherry [1989]), Sara Martin points out that these women ‘please paradoxically because their power to upset is consciously or unconsciously undermined by the novelist’s fear of agreeing with patriarchy’s view of woman as a powerful monster’.67 I will consider the second criticism first. Martin, in my opinion, has perhaps misunderstood Carter’s (and Weldon’s and Winterson’s) reason for representing their powerful monsters as equally benign and forgiving. She fails to note that these writers’ refusal to out-write their male counterparts when it comes to representing the monstrous women is simply because they do not want to, and not because ‘they do not enjoy the same power as men’.68 If men have had the privilege of portraying the monstrous woman as truly and radically destructive, thus reinforcing a familiar stereotype, it is only fitting for women writers like Carter and Weldon to counter this stereotype by creating female monsters who are equally powerful and equally redemptive of both themselves and others, including men. Fevvers and Ruth, despite being abused and misused by men, will not choose vengeance and ultimate destruction for that is merely reiterating a violent domination theme that bodes no good for anyone. Instead, through love and their grotesque bodies, they redeem their wayward men from the error of their ways, and in the process, resignify their monstrosity as something positive and celebratory. As to the limitation of Carter’s heroines, it must be commented that Carter is not writing fiction which enable a radical reassessment of the way women in ‘plain fact’ are or can be, but about the way fiction can be decolonised from its patriarchal (or Symbolic) impositions. In this sense, Carter’s writing is largely allegorical, a way of expressing ‘an infinitely greater variety of experiences than has been possible heretofore, to say things for which no language previously existed’.69 It is my view that Carter’s narratives are always about art first, before they are about women or feminism or social change (this is not to say that they are less important to her). I concluded my analysis of ‘Angel’ with a meditation on Benjamin’s Angel of History as a possible metaphor for the story. Here, I want to enlist another angel, this time Giorgio Agamben’s Angel of Aesthetics, from an engraving by Dürer, to conclude my discussion of Nights at the Circus. According to Agamben, ‘just as the events of the past appear to the angel of history as a pile of indecipherable ruins’, the Angel of Aesthetics endows and charges this same ruins with ‘a potential for

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alienation that transforms them into a cipher for something endlessly elusive’.70 This angel is conscious that he has ‘adopted alienation as his world; it is the nostalgia of a reality that he can possess only by making it unreal’,71 and goes on to demonstrate that: By destroying the transmissibility of the past, aesthetics recuperates it negatively and makes intransmissibility a value in itself in the image of aesthetic beauty, in this way opening for man a space between past and future in which he can found his action and his knowledge.72 This angel makes the past that is lost into an aesthetic virtue; the intransmissibility of the past becomes both an opportunity for recuperating the past as unreal, and for ushering in the future. If McGrath’s angel attempts to make a mythic (unreal) past into something real (and fails), Carter’s angel transforms a very real moment in history – the Woman’s movement – into something ‘unreal’ (because intransmissible) to both celebrate it as well as point the way to go next (at least aesthetically), which is, of course, also ‘endlessly elusive’ because Fevvers (and Evelyn/Eve, and the host of Carter’s wonderful monsters) remains in the realm of narrative, which is significantly multifaceted in meaning.

Conclusion: the grotesque revisited Bernard McElroy asserts that the ‘central figure of the modern grotesque … is humiliated man’.73 To consider just the works of McGrath and Carter would prove this point. Mcgrath’s narratives of the grotesque often portray men who are physically and/or morally deformed, and who often manifest it diabolically. Consider narratives like The Grotesque (1989), with its panoply of chillingly drawn characters and their dark perversions, Spider (1990), about a young man’s slow and dangerous descent to madness, and his recent Martha Peake (2000), of which one of its main character resembles Anson Havershaw with its deformed body and metaphorical castration. In these novels, redemption is usually impossible (unless death is considered a form of redemption), and the grotesque figures, humiliated, in turn live in shadows or take revenge. On the contrary, Carter’s narratives positively relish in, and celebrate the grotesque. Her heroines are self-actualised women who not only take pride in what they are, but educate others as well. Be it Fevvers, or Eve/Evelyn, or the many amazing women in The


Bloody Chamber (1979), the grotesque in Carter’s aesthetic is always renewing and redemptive. As Susan Corey astutely observes, the ‘grotesque acknowledges the reality of estrangement and evil in the world, but fosters the recovery of wholeness out of fragmentation and reconnection with those aspects of self or experience that have been repressed or out of touch’.74 Corey is commenting on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, but it is my opinion that Carter’s narratives certainly epitomise this formulation of the grotesque as well.

Conclusion: The Language of Monstrosity

The study of meaning, therefore, is coextensive with studies of textual embodiment and verbal incorporation (Geoffrey H. Hartman)1 In this concluding chapter, I want to raise two problems concerning the relationship between language and monsters. The first has already been considered in the Introduction, that is, how monsters are often creations of language itself. It is language that ‘names’, and therefore designates, certain entities as monsters. In this chapter, I want to rehearse this argument through a close reading of a short story by Scottish writer, Janice Galloway. The second problem is more complicated. Monsters, as argued, are beings which defy or confound classification, and the fact that they are designated ‘monsters’ already reveals the insufficiency of language. Monsters, as Foucault has shown us, are ‘leftovers’ of whatever that cannot be classified.2 When language is made to articulate the monster, it either deploys strategies of normalisation, such as rationalising its existence, or results in textual extremity (for example, the hysterical text). In the first instance, the monster becomes ‘tamed’, thus temporarily recuperating language from becoming disembodied in attempting to express the inexpressible. Many traditional monster (that is, the Gothic) narratives resort to this form of textual strategy. The monster is ‘explained away’, discussed – that is, ‘embodied in text’ – and very rarely has the opportunity to respond. That is why most traditional monster narratives situate the monster in a third-person narrative position. And if the monster does get the chance to respond, it has only the language of those who seek to dispose of it, and in this sense, is already speaking as, and from the position of, because that language has created and coerced it to be, a monster. Again, Caliban and Frankenstein’s monster 175


come to mind. Yet, if monsters are, to an extent, creations of language, it is not the case that they are always already inscribed by and within language. Language, especially metaphorical language, is (already) loaded with monstrous possibilities in their (monster and language) shared attribute as signs with no precise, designable signified. Again, through Galloway’s narrative, I will attempt to draw some conclusions with regards to this point. Contemporary monster narratives, such as those discussed in this study, reposition the monster in the first-person narrative. Here, the monster is no longer an object about which is being written or spoken, but the monster writing and speaking. Even if the monster does not occupy the first-person viewpoint, it is nonetheless clearly eloquent and its narrative distinctly heard (Fevvers and Havershaw are cases in point). Texts such as The Fifth Child and High-Rise are, to an extent, ‘normalising’ fictions in that there are inherent textual strategies to control the monstrosity. In Lessing’s novel, the realist mode is deployed to create a semblance of the ordinary, whilst High-Rise employs a certain meta-critical strategy to ‘explain away’ the degeneration occurring within the building. But my reading of these two novels reveals that such normalising strategies cannot, in the end, contain the monster within a narrow scope of interpretation, and that the monster inevitably undermines and deconstructs these strategies. Also, both texts can be read as allegories, which is a calculated method of ‘fixing’ a reading and privileging a particular interpretation. In this case, they relegate the monster/monstrous presence to a literary trope and a commentary on ‘something else’, such as the pastoral or modern progress. Undeniably, such allegorical readings of the novels are relevant and even encouraged, but this stultifies the possibility of reading these works beyond their alleged socio-critical agendas. More importantly, allegories, as much as they fix readings, already reveal the slipperiness of reading and the necessity to privilege particular (legitimised) interpretations over others (for whatever reasons). Hence, the allegory is selfdeconstructive, and as Christopher Norris postulates, ‘brings home the fact that signs are always “empty” in so far as their meaning necessarily eludes any last instance of an assured, self-present hermeneutic grasp’.3 In contemporary monster narratives, therefore, the site of the monster is a complex matter. It is now harder to dissociate the monster from the text. Monsters are not merely the subject matter of narratives, but are ‘bodily’ merged with the texts themselves. This textual-materiality of the monster, or the monster-as-text, is most evident in narratives which profoundly collapse body and text in order

Conclusion: The Language of Monstrosity 177

to paradoxically foreground and problematise both. When the monstrous body and text are merged, meaning becomes highly unstable. As language strives to define the monster through a proliferation of linguistic markers (signs), meaning becomes only further deferred. In this conclusion, I want to analyse a story that firmly converges the material (body) and metaphor (text), and demonstrate how this fusion creates enormous problems in the relationship between the corporeal, the monster, and language existing within the confined space of a narrative body. Janice Galloway’s elegant Gothic tale, ‘Blood’, will be the focus of my discussion. Before I analyse the text, I want to first establish certain points on the metaphorical language and its relation to monstrosity. My use of the term ‘metaphorical language’ is, to a certain degree, derived from Paul de Man’s theory that all language is metaphorical because the metaphor ‘assumes a world in which intra- and extra-textual events, literal and figural forms of language, can be distinguished, a world in which the literal and the figural are properties that can be isolated and, consequently exchanged and substituted for each other’.4 That is, all language is metaphorical because as signs, language becomes interchangeable with, and substitutive of, the signified. De Man admits that this is an ‘error’, but one that ‘no language would possibly do without’.5 This ‘erroneous’ concept of the metaphor becomes even more problematic when discussing the language of monstrosity. For the language of the monster is precisely this difficulty inherent in directly imputing a signifier to a signified; the monster, as a sign, is nevertheless ontologically unstable in that it has no designated signified. Challenging traditional views of metaphor as transference,6 de Man asserts that the ‘metaphor is not a combination of two entities or experiences more or less deliberately linked together, but one single and particular experience: that of origination’.7 For de Man, language is already metaphorical because its presence is always something new, something original; the fact that language is used in everyday situations which attempt to make them ‘as “common” as possible’8 reaffirms his concept of error because language can never become identified with what it represents. As he postulates, although ‘language is capable of origination, [it can never achieve] the absolute identity with itself that exists in the natural object’.9 In articulating the monster, this disjunction that occurs between metaphoric language and the object – in this case, monstrous body – becomes even more prominent precisely because the monster is not natural. Language’s attempt to represent the monster is increasingly disrupted by its own


‘error’, which then transforms language into a form of monstrosity itself. According to David Williams: The language of the monstrous is parasitic, depending on the existence of conventional languages; it feeds, so as to speak, at their margins, upon their limits, so as to gain the power to transcend these analytical discourses and, true to its etymology (monstrare: to show), it points to utterances that lie beyond logic.10 For Williams, the language of the monster is the language of limits. Monstrous language is ‘conventional language’ stretched to an extreme, and must now have recourse to post-logical utterances. Monstrous language occurs when the sign is no longer able to ‘impose’ its ‘form upon the world that it seeks to know and calls the world thus formed the real’.11 If ‘reality’ is linguistically understood to be a fusion between the sign and signified, then that which cannot be signified – that is, that which defies imposition from signs – is ‘unreal’. A monster is a sign that has no distinct signified, and hence remains at the threshold of the two – neither real or unreal, but ‘irreal’. To clarify, I want to briefly discuss Jean-François Lyotard’s view of the sublime, which I find is helpful in identifying some of the issues which concern language and the monster. Here, I am not suggesting that all monsters are sublime (although they often are, see chapter one) but that there are certain aspects of the relationship between the sublime and modes of representation (including language) that can help establish the place of the monster within and against language. In the now classic, The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard argues that the sublime: Takes place … when the imagination fails to present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept. We have the Idea of the world (the totality of what it is), but we do not have the capacity to show an example of it…. We can conceive the infinitely great, the infinitely powerful, but every presentation of an object destined to “make visible” this absolute greatness or power appears to us painfully inadequate. Those are ideas of which no representation is possible…. [They] can be said to be unrepresentable.12 Lyotard’s concept of the (postmodern) sublime, has, in my view, many important similarities with the way monstrosity is represented in language. Firstly, like Lyotard’s sublime, the monster is an ‘Idea’ which


cannot be objectified, or represented, to match a particular concept. The monster, in other words, is ‘unknowable’ in the sense that it cannot be understood, explained and classified. Secondly, and following the first point, language is then ultimately incapable of adequately representing the monster; it is limited in articulating the monster, and once that limit is transgressed, it becomes highly unstable and fragmented, deconstructing itself even as it attempts to construct the monster. Hence, it is not that the monster cannot become embodied as an Idea, or that it defies conceptualisation; it is that its very representation in language is derisory. This is similar to what Derrida says of aporia, which does not merely mean ‘nonpassage’, but a place where ‘there is no longer any problem’: Not that, alas or fortunately, the solutions have been given, but because one could no longer even find a problem that would constitute itself object or project, as a protective representative or a prosthetic substitute, as some kind of border still to cross of behind which to protect.13 The aporia, a space of non-problem and non-(Symbolic)language – a (linguistic) Void – is fundamentally the space of the monster. Just as in ‘Angel’, in which the profundity of the monstrous body effectively jams the very process of articulation altogether, in Galloway’s narrative, aporia is reached when the monstrous body defies the very language which seeks to represent it (more of this later). Elsewhere, Lyotard also deliberates that in postmodern art, ‘the art object no longer bends itself to models, but tries to present the fact that there is an unrepresentable; it no longer imitates nature, but is … the actualisation of a figure potentially there in language’.14 Postmodern art (including language), in Lyotard’s view, no longer tries to subsume an object to a model, or a signifier to a signified, but instead, reveals the inadequacy of such a coupling. The word ‘potential’ suggests the position of the Derridean trace the object (art/language) now occupies in relation to what it is supposed to represent. This failure to ‘represent’ becomes, in itself, the presence of the sublime. Applying this view of the postmodern sublime to the theory of the monstrous language, it can be argued that language has only the potential to articulate the monster. However, the monster, unlike Lyotard’s sublime, is not ultimately unrepresentable. As Jonathan Dollimore has shown, language can create monsters or coerce beings into monstrous positions.


As argued, one of the normalising strategies employed in some of the monster narratives discussed in this book is allegory, or a metaphoric plot.15 The allegory is a narrative form which relies on varied meanings carried by the metaphoric possibilities of the text. Metaphors are largely linguistic compensations for the insufficiency of language to express novel ideas, but to employ them is also to acknowledge the inadequacy of language to represent. A metaphor, according to Stephen Pepper, is a linguistic strategy to give utterance to what ‘appears to the inquiring mind inchoate [as] either a blank, or an elusive and tantalising confusion’.16 This is curiously reminiscent of Lyotard’s view of the sublime and Williams’s postulation of the language of the monster: the metaphor is the failure to ‘fix’ meaning – an inadequacy of the representing object, the sign, to represent the subject, signified. The object or sign then becomes either a blank, a ‘no-thing’, to the ‘inquiring mind’, or a deferring and differing (différance) trace of potential meanings. In either case, meaning is deformed as either incomprehensible or uncertain. Here, metaphor can be construed as a form of monstrous language. The attempt at normalising is self-deconstructive – the more language seeks to express itself metaphorically, the more unstable it becomes. Judith Halberstam observes that ‘monstrosity always unites monstrous form with monstrous meaning’,17 and substantiates this further by adding that ‘the monstrous… is now represented as potentially meaning anything – it may be the outcast, the outlaw, the parasite, the pervert, the embodiment of uncontrollable sexual and violent urges, the foreigner, the misfit’.18 This again reiterates the elusiveness and ambiguity of the monster in relation to language and meaning. Language can create monsters, but it can also be undermined by the very monster it creates, thereby becoming incoherent, fragmentary and ambiguous. When this occurs, the monster no longer submits to its linguistic confinements but actually ‘breaks out’ of the text. This is evident in the writing of Janice Galloway. In her first novel, The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989), a woman’s depression over the death of her lover, which consequently results in anorexia and bulimia, is textually conveyed in the style of the narrative itself. Words, for example, literally run off the pages (49, 73, 195),19 and throughout the text, there is a stubborn refusal to ever mention the words anorexia or bulimia, almost as if the protagonist is afraid that naming them will confirm their reality. Indeed, the whole narrative becomes a textual metaphor for a body in pain. The overpowering depression becomes a sort of unnameable monster: the more the narrative tries to articulate it, the


more it destabilises the narrative.20 Galloway continues this unconventional narrative performance in her chilling tale, ‘Blood’, which is the focus of this chapter. Here, an unnamed schoolgirl finds her body increasingly unmanageable after a dental appointment, and what is intimate and kept within the boundaries of her body – blood – comes pouring out unceasingly, tainting everything. It is a tale of the monstrous body in its very transgression and excess. Language in this tale encounters a terrific struggle with the body it seeks to articulate, resulting in an increasingly slippery and incoherent narrative. The story begins with the visit to the dentist, an episode redolent with suggestions of violence: He put his knee up on her chest getting ready to pull, tilting the pliers. Sorry, he said. Sorry. She couldn’t see his face …. The bones in his hand were bruising her lip. And that sound of the gum tugging back from what he was doing, the jaw creaking. Her jaw. If you close your eyes, it made you feel that needle as big as a power drill. Better to keep her eyes open, trying to focus past the blur of knuckles to the cracked ceiling …. There was a moment of nothing while he steadied his hand, as if she had only imagined the give. She heard herself swallow up and stop breathing. Then her spine lifting, arching from the seat, the gum parting with a sound like uprooting potatoes, a coolness in her mouth and he was holding something up in the metal clamp; great bloody lump of it, white trying to surface through the red. He was pleased. (87)21 The prose is deliberately evasive as to the place and occasion, almost as if it is defying direct representation. Yet, despite the avoidance of clarity, images of pain and violence are evident. A woman passively submits to what can be read as forms of physical abuse (pulling, bruising, parting, uprooting) and bodily discomfort (lifting, aching, creaking). The disjunction between actual and potential occurrences due to the deliberate ambiguity of the text confirms the tale as metaphoric in that it echoes Patricia Parker’s designation of the metaphoric plot as a space of disorientation.22 A rather commonplace act of meeting a dental appointment is transformed into a scene suggesting rape and bodily violation.23 It is the whole body, and not just a tooth, that is being subjected to violence. The dentist instructs the nurse to give the girl a sanitary pad to stave the bleeding. Upon returning to her school, the girl discovers that she


is menstruating: ‘Big, red drips’ (92) poured out from her mouth ‘[a]nd something else’: She watched the slow tail of red on the white enamel, concentrating. Something slithered in her stomach, a slow dullness that made it difficult to straightened up again. Then a twinge in her back, a recognisable contraction. That’s what the sweating was, then, the churning in her gut. It wasn’t just not feeling well with the swallowing and imagining things. Christ. It wasn’t supposed to be due for a week yet. (92) In her analysis of this story, Margery Metzstein notes that the blood is a metaphor ‘for those aspects of the female which cannot be contained and which cause fear’.24 But blood is not the only metaphor in this text; in fact, I would argue that the whole body is metaphorically represented. As the passage above exemplifies, the visceral body is potently displayed through a series of powerfully suggestive words which simultaneously over-represent the body and subvert the body’s presence. Indeed, throughout the text, the body is constantly depicted oxymoronically, as something both strikingly present, and strangely evasive: ‘Her tongue wormed’ (90), ‘slimy’ (90), ‘something slithered in her stomach’ (92), ‘churning in her guts’ (92). However, this proliferation of metaphors only serves to further distance the body from language. It is as if this proliferation reveals the text’s increasing inability to represent the body, compensating for language’s inadequacy by heaping on more descriptions. Hence, the blood, in my view, signals the advent of the metaphor’s gradual slide towards monstrous meaning. As the blood surges ceaselessly, it is clear that the body has somehow fused with the text into some(Thing) transgressive, and form and meaning are now simultaneously monstrous. It is not the blood or the metaphor of the blood, not the body or the metaphorical body, that makes this tale a monstrous text, but both. The body and the text have collapsed into each other. The body is ‘embodied’ by the text, but has also ‘broken out of’ the text in that it is no longer the text which confines the boundaries of bodily depictions, but the uncontrollable body itself that dictates the way the text should behave. The unnameable element in ‘Blood’ is, of course, the very act of menstruation itself. The text is violent in this sense because it denies this particular body a presence in its normal biological function. Kristeva’s theory of the abject, which locates abjection within the womb, and views menstruation as an abjection because it destroys


borders (menstruation is the outpouring of what should remain intimately concealed within the body),25 is relevant in further locating another dimension of the monster in this text. I have argued that linguistic representations of the body in this story are extravagant, almost as if the text is conscious of its limitations of representation. The body is almost always represented in grotesque terms. The reason for this becomes evident with the association of the female body with monstrosity and abjection. This is further compounded by an explicit avoidance of naming menstruation; instead, menstruation is represented through a series of metaphors, and most prominently, the blood. This rather complex play of overstatement and denial is the major strength of this tale. On the one hand, the body is excessively represented; on the other, the process of menstruation remains unnamed. Both overstatement and un-naming through metaphors are, in the final analysis, deconstructive: for both constitute forms of linguistic violence done to a specific body which is being deliberately obscured. Instead of revealing the body, the language of metaphor only effaces the body further. But, as much as the metaphor seeks to deny this particular body, the body cannot ultimately be silenced. As the repressed in the text, the body returns emphatically as a trace embedded within the obfuscating metaphor. As this study is heavily reliant on a Lacanian model of reading monstrosity, Galloway’s tale can also be used to criticise the privileging of certain bodies over others (which then become marginalised, and even silenced) in Symbolic language. According to philosopher Judith Roof, Lacan’s notion of the Law-of-the-Name-of-the-Father is ‘itself a metaphor [which] centres symbolisation as a delusively patriarchal and highly metaphorical formation’.26 This ‘paternal metaphor’ eventually comes to ‘[represent] the principle by which the individual relates to the social order’.27 In other words, within the context of Lacanian psychoanalysis, language as we know it is essentially ‘masculine’ (Symbolic), and paternal metaphors are that which enable us to name and identify ‘reality’. But Lacan’s (and Freud’s) drama of subjectivity is plotted along the axis of sexual difference; privileging the male, his Symbolic language of metaphors necessarily pre-empts the feminine. Galloway’s tale, in my opinion, confronts this linguistic privileging of one sex, and discloses how the paternal metaphor is not only inadequate in representing the female body but is actually violent in the ways it seeks to textually formulate this body. More importantly, ‘Blood’ is able to redeem the body and effectively challenge the paternal metaphor’s attempt at obscuring and silencing it. The fact that the


body ultimately comes through as something transgressive, excessive and grotesque, is itself evidence of the meagreness of the Symbolic language and its fragility when faced with a body that defies its ˇ izˇek has shown, the Symbolic always already preconfinement. If, as Z supposes a surplus of the Real, the body in ‘Blood’ can be read as this surplus (powerfully suggested by the outpouring blood) which has broken out of the order of the paternal language. To further elaborate, I turn to the final paragraph of the narrative: Welling up behind the lower teeth, across her lips as she tilted forward to keep it off her clothes. Spilling over the white keys and dripping onto the clean tile floor. She saw his face change and glance flick to the claw roots in the tissue before he shut the door hard, not knowing what else to do. And the bell rang, the steady howl of it as the outer doors gave, footfalls in the corridor gathering like an avalanche. They would be here before she could do anything, sitting dumb on the piano stool, not able to breathe, at this blood streaking over the keys, silting the action. The howl of the bell. This unstoppable redness seeping through the fingers at her open mouth. (94) At this point of the tale, the girl is in the music room, and her blood is witnessed by an unsuspecting male student. Class is also about to commence, and she can do nothing to escape her situation. This final paragraph is an occasion of pure horror: everything attains a heightened quality (the blood ‘wells’, ‘spills’ and ‘drips’ and is ‘unstoppable’; the bell howls and the footfalls gather ‘like an avalanche’ – all of which are metaphors) while the girl herself sinks helplessly into the background. Once again, the emphatic metaphoric pronouncements and the diminishing, obscuring body, subtend. But there is a another way of looking at it; perhaps, this particular kind of body – the body in pain – can only be made manifest when it is represented through linguistic violence. As Elaine Scarry contends: The body tends to be brought forward in its most extreme form only on behalf of a cultural artifact or symbolic fragment or made thing (a sentence) that is without any other basis in material reality: that is, it is only brought forward when there is a crisis of substantiation.28 The body in pain can only be represented as such by a ‘symbolic fragment’, that is, language which disembodies its subject of representa-


tion. To directly speak of menstruation will only relegate the tale into an exposé of a girl’s biological transformation rather than her traumatic encounter with puberty. It is this ‘crisis of substantiation’, that is, the crisis of portraying the suffering body sympathetically and horrifically, that results in this complexly metaphorical tale. One critic observes that Galloway’s ‘writing offers a “deconstruction” of gendered subjectivies and sexuality which takes into account the materiality of people’s lives’.29 In her somewhat unconventional way of depicting a menstruating body, Galloway is perhaps confirming this view: ‘Blood’ then, is, on one level, a tale about the fear and suffering of a girl experiencing her first menstruation; on another level, it is also a story which subtly criticises the traditional patriarchal practice of depicting women as non-bodies and which teaches that the female biological function of menstruation is something abject and hence, must be concealed. This inevitably results in secret guilt and shame, which only reinforces the protagonist’s suffering and pain. Alternatively, and on a different scale altogether, ‘Blood’ may also be read as a sophisticated parody of essentialism privileged by certain feminists.30 In the end, ‘Blood’ is a highly complex and ambiguous narrative, and it is all the richer for its multi-layered meanings. However it is read, what is clear is that it is a monstrous tale because of the synthesis of body and metaphoric language which results in an unstable text.31 In one sense then, the language of monstrosity is the failure to name and the proliferation of metaphors, which destabilise the text. But this failure and fragmentation of language are not necessarily negative qualities. As David L. Clark argues: [T]he monstrous evokes the inhuman, but it also humanises it, in a negative mode, by bringing it dialectically within the orbit of human as a threatening other. The a-pathetic glimpse of an other “within” language becomes the primary means by which to reflect upon the situation of the human, contingently exposed to a linguistic system it cannot entirely control, understand, or do without – a situation, in other words, of maximum pathos. Monstrosity is thus not only a figure of alterity, but also a figure for the uncontrollable figuration of alterity.32 For Clark, the notion of the monstrous already presupposes the presence of the human, for monstrosity can only be defined as opposed, or as other, to the human. The inability of language to articulate the monster adequately, which nevertheless continues to haunt the


margins of language (as trace) only reveals the ideological loadedness of (Symbolic) language which sets itself up precisely to represent certain subjects, or bodies, and deny others. The monstrous language of ‘Blood’, read in the light of Clark’s observation, is precisely that evocation of the human, or body, in its familiar, uncontrollable alterity. Through a dehumanising of the menstruating body through metaphorical layering, what results, paradoxically, is a pronounced presence of the very materiality and human-ness of a body in pain. Vicky Kirby argues that: the body is unstable – a shifting scene of inscription that both writes and is written – a scenario where the subject takes itself as its own object, and where, for example, an image could be said to rewrite the image-maker in a movement of production that disrupts the temporal determination of what comes first.33 In the context of my argument about the language of monstrosity, Kirby’s view recalls an earlier observation concerning the distinction between the monster as body and the monster as text. In a conclusion similar to mine, Kirby is asserting that there is no distinction between body and text because the body is text and the text is always already inscribed onto the body. Texts which set out to obscure the body, as in the case of Galloway’s narrative, would soon turn monstrous because to violently differentiate body from text is itself an act of textual and bodily deformity which will yield monstrous meanings. In ‘Blood’, the body is evidently depicted as monstrously corporeal, but this is because one particular body is violently silenced but seeks to articulate itself nevertheless. What results from this clash/fusion of text and body is the emphatic foregrounding of the body in all its vivid materiality. Unable to deny the body, this kind of text necessarily becomes monstrous: all the repressed aspects of the body are allowed emergence – its grotesqueness and beauty, visceral and corporeal manifestation, abjection and marvel. But it is also from this vast kaleidoscope of bodylines that the ambiguous monster/angel can emerge. Luce Irigaray once wrote that, ‘Angels destroy the monstrous, that which hampers the possibility of a new age: they come to herald the arrival of a new birth, a new morning’.34 My view, however, is that the angel does not destroy the monster, but actually recasts the monster as a positive, celebratory and possibly salvific herald of a new body which is no longer fettered by social and cultural subjugation and marginalisation. Of course, this is


not to say that all monsters are also angels – as the case of the serial killers will testify – but the easy confusion between angels and monsters already reveals that the ‘monster’ is often (not always) a ‘frame of mind, a way of thinking about and presenting people’.35 What is monstrous, ultimately, may well be a way of representing (such as in language) certain forms of bodies which somehow do not fit into cultural and social concepts of normalcy, propriety and/or acceptability. The monster then, enables us to reconsider positions and places of alterity, and through this reconsideration, perhaps understand our own bodies and selves better.

Notes Introduction: Dimensions of Monstrosity 1 2 3 4

5

6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17

18 19 20 21

Joseph Grixti, Terrors of Uncertainty, 172. Grixti, Terrors of Uncertainty, 172. Grixti, Terrors of Uncertainty, 172. Most notably Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau (1896). David Punter sees these two novels, among others, as Gothic narratives of decadence which capture the fin desiècle fears and desires of late nineteenth-century bourgeois England. (Literature of Terror, 13–22). Indeed, as the various writers of the special issue of The Oxford Literary Review entitled ‘Monstrism’ attest, ‘[m]onstrosity is at the heart of psychoanalysis’ (Bennet et al., ‘Explanations, Applications and Orientations’, 8). Peter Brooks, Body Works, 210. Peter Brooks, Body Works, 218. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, 109. Peter Brooks, Body Works, 218. In my conclusion, I will demonstrate precisely how language can turn monstrous when articulating monstrosity through an analysis of Janice Galloway’s ‘Blood’. Alain Grosrichard, ‘The Case of Polyphemus’, 119. Grosrichard, ‘The Case of Polyphemus’, 118. Grosrichard, ‘The Case of Polyphemus’, 118–9. See, for example, Timothy K. Beal, Religion and its Monsters, 6–7, and Jeffrey Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, 4. Joseph Adriano, Immortal Monster, xiv. See also Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror. Apart from classifying the ‘negative’ monsters against the ‘positive’ humans, Carroll also attaches adjectives like disgusting and unclean to the former, 21. Jeffrey J. Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses), 5. For a study of Dracula as the fear of cultural contamination in nineteenthcentury England, see Cannon Schmitt, Alien Nation, 1–20, and Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows, chapter 4. Similarly, for Wells’s novel, see Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body, chapter 5. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders, 84 (author’s emphasis). Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 185. Judith Roof, Reproductions of Reproduction, 10. ˇ izˇek, The psychoanalytic ‘Void’ is a difficult term which critics, especially Z often refer to, but do not qualify. It is often used in association with the ‘Real’ which, according to Christine van Boheemen-Saaf, ‘refers to that which cannot be directly inscribed or experienced, such as death or sexual difference, but which keeps insisting, and manifesting its presence through repetition’ (Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History, 19). Because of its paradoxical nature – the inability to experience it is countered by its in188

Notes 189

22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45

46 47

48 49

sistent presence – it registers as an ‘empty space’ which defies signification, and which the Symbolic cannot integrate. It is a ‘surplus’ outside the Symbolic, a ‘black hole’ which threatens to engulf and negate the Symbolic fantasy. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 50, author’s emphasis. Silverman is speaking in the context of renegotiating the ideological (male) bias which continues to plague sexuality and the family. ˇ izˇek, ‘Mapping Ideology’, 21. Slavoj Z ˇ izˇek, ‘Is there a Cause of the Subject?”, 101, author’s emphasis. Z ˇ izˇek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 196. Z ˇ izˇek, ‘Fantasy as a Political Category’, 92. Z ˇ izˇek, The Plague of Fantasies, 39. Z ˇ izˇek, Looking Awry, 12. Z Lacan, Écrits, 72–73. Roof, Reproductions of Reproduction, 14–15. Roof, Reproductions of Reproduction, 11. Roof, Reproductions of Reproduction, 11. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language, 39. Lacan, Écrits, 291. In a sinister, ironic twist, Lacan argues that although ‘love’ is what is given to the (m)other to fill (the child with), ‘it is also hate and ignorance’. (Écrits, 291). Lacan, Écrits, 292. Also important is the fact that Lacan is mainly interested in the male child’s formation of subjectivity (note the masculine pronoun). See also Herman Rapaport, Between the Sign and the Gaze, 75. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3–4. The metaphor of menstruation will be the focus of this study’s conclusion. Most notably Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 5, my emphasis. For example, Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster manifest both masculine and feminine traits. See William Patrick Day’s In the Circle of Fear and Desire, 139–49; and more recently, Cyndy Hendershot, The Animal Within, chapter 2. Beal, Religion and its Monsters, 165. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, 833–844. Sigmund Freud, ‘Medusa’s Head’, 273. As Elizabeth Grosz points out, ‘the freak is an ambiguous being whose existence imperils categories and oppositions dominant in social life. Freaks are those human beings who exist outside and in defiance of the structure of binary oppositions that govern our basic concepts and modes of selfdefinition’ (‘Intolerable Ambiguity’, 57). See also Leslie Fiedler’s classic study on freaks, Freaks, 16. Punter, Gothic Pathologies, 45–6. Étienne Balibar, ‘Subjection and Subjectivation’, 8. According to Balibar, prior to Kant, there is no such thing as a ‘subject’ in an autonomous sense: the subject is always ‘subjected’ to feudal, monarchical and/or religious powers. Balibar, ‘Subjection and Subjectivation’, 7. Balibar, ‘Subjection and Subjectivation’, 7, author’s emphasis.

190 Notes 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

Michel Foucault, A History of Sexuality,139, author’s emphasis. Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body, 10. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 185. See chapter two. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 192. Joan Copjec, ‘Introduction’, Supposing the Subject, ix. Botting, ‘The Gothic Production of the Unconscious’, 34. See Peter Hutchings, ‘Tearing your Soul Apart’, 89–103. Linnie Baker, ‘Whoever Fights Monsters’, 198. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime,129. Matias Viegener, ‘Men who Kill and Boys who Love Them’, 113. Viegener’s essay discusses the work of Dennis Cooper. James R. Kincaid, Child Loving, 78. Kincaid, Child Loving, 78. David Williams, Deformed Discourse, 81. Williams, Deformed Discourse, 81.

61 62 63 64

Chapter One 1 2

3 4

5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14

Monstrous Space

Iain Sinclair, Lud Heat, 17. See Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Bodies-Cities’, 242; see also Fredric Jameson’s concept of the ‘postmodern hyperspace’ in his Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 44. See chapter two. Burton Pike, The Image of the City in Modern Literature, 4. Compare this with Freud’s reading of Rome as a city ‘haunted’ by its past in Civilisation and Its Discontent, 9–10. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 17. This term is Linda Hutcheon’s, introduced in her A Poetics of Postmodernism, 5. For a reading of Hawksmoor as a historiographic metafiction, see Susana Onega, ‘The Mythical Impulse in British Historiographic Metaficiton’, 199–204. All references to Hawksmoor are from the Penguin (1993) edition. See Richard Sennet, Flesh and Stone, 46, 104. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, 4. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex, 230. Laqueur, Making Sex, 231–2. Dyer also calls his mother’s condition ‘fallen state’, which can suggestively identify his mother with the London prostitutes. Dyer manages to convince himself that Satan and God are synonymous; mulling on the word demon, he argues that the word is derived from daimon, ‘which is us’d promiscuously with theos as the word for Deity; the Persian call the Devil Div, somewhat close to Divus or Deus; also ex sacramenti is expounded in Tertullian as excramentum or excrement.’ (21–22, emphasis in original) This is not always explicit in the novel, but on two occasions, there is clear textual evidence. For the St Anne’s Limehouse church, Dyer incites a tramp to suicide (65. ff.), while for St Mary Woolworth, he actually

Notes 191

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22

23 24 25

26 27 28

murders a colleague whom he mistakenly believes is trying to oust him from his important position as the city’s architect (150 ff.). His last church is consecrated with his own blood. It must also be added that for Dyer’s first church, death was accidental, but it nevertheless only reinforced his belief. Susana Onega, Metafiction and Myth, 53. Onega, Metafiction and Myth, 52. Denis Hollier, Against Architecture, 55. Edward J. Ahearn, ‘The Modern English Visionary, 455. Botting, Gothic, 123. Martin Tropp, Images of Fear, 50. Ackroyd’s indebtedness to the Gothic tradition is evident; as he confesses in an interview, the Gothic remains a fascinating element which he consciously and continuous deploys in his fiction and non-fiction. See Susana Onega’s ‘Interview with Peter Ackroyd’, 214. Carol Bernstein, The Celebration of Scandal, 10. Edmund Burke writes that vastness is accompanied by a sense of grandeur, strength and power, because it is ‘obscure’ (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 99); to look upon vastness is to look upon something which the mind cannot comprehend in its totality, and which, thus, submits mind to constriction. Kant makes a similar point. For Kant, ‘[t]he colossal is the mere presentation of a concept which is almost too great for presentation, [a concept which] borders on the relatively monstrous; for the end to be attained by the presentation of a concept is made harder to realise by the intuition of the object being almost too great for our faculty of apprehension.’ (The Critique of Judgement, 100). Hollier, Against Architecture, 58–9. Hollier, Against Architecture, 70. In his essay, ‘The Obelisk’, Georges Bataille argues that the pyramids, in their imperishable state, ‘continue to crystallise the totality of centuries, taking on the immobility of stone and watching all men die, one after the other: they transcend the intolerable void that time opens under men’s feet, for all possible movement is halted in their geometric surfaces. IT SEEMS THAT THEY MAINTAIN WHAT ESCAPES FROM THE DYING MAN’. (Georges Bataille, ‘The Obelisk’, 216, capitalisation in original). Bataille is also arguing for the immortality symbolised by the pyramid, but it is the immortality of the architecture and not man. Yet, Bataille’s position concerning this form of immortal architecture is ambivalent. On one hand, Bataille seems to be privileging architecture over man, in that the former is unlimited, united and transcendental, over the restlessness and subsequent death of the latter; but on the other hand, Bataille seems to prefer the constant activity, mobility and change in man over the stasis, coldness and lifelessness of stone. In the end, what architecture ‘maintains’ for the dying (a continuous process with no finality) man can equally be life or death. David B. Morris, ‘Gothic Sublimity’, 309. Joel Black, The Aesthetics of Murder, 34. Hana Wirth-Nasher, City Codes, 8.

192 Notes 29 30 31 32

33 34

35

36 37

38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50

Barbara Claire Freeman, The Feminine Sublime, 11. Bernstein, The Celebration of Scandal, 201. Sinclair, Lud Heat, 17. The double, for example, has been gainfully deployed in Chatterton (1987) and The House of Doctor Dee. The latter has strong resemblances to Hawksmoor in that the novel also posits two different historical temporalities simultaneously occurring, and sometimes even collapsing into one another. Indeed, the plaintive tone of the doctor when he cries, ‘And was this what my city has become? Was this life a continuance of death, or was this a death in continuance of life?’ (208) almost echoes Dyer/Hawkmoor’s as well. For more on the traditional double, see John Herdman, The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 1–20. For example, the children’s rhyme in chapter two: What are you looking for in the hole?/ A stone! / What will you do with the stone? / Sharpen a knife! / What will you do with the knife? / Cut off your head! (27). Henri Lefebvre has argued that ‘there is doubtless no such thing as a myth or symbol unassociated with a mythical or symbolic space which is also determined by practice’. (The Production of Space, 118, emphasis in original). I understand this to mean that certain myths which are associated with a specific space will continue to be ‘asserted’ through unconscious practices such as children’s nursery rhymes, folktales and local superstitions. Steve Pile, The Body and the City, 227. Black, The Aesthetics of Murder, 128–9. Black’s reading of the intimate connection between murderer and victim is drawn from the insights of René Girard in his Violence and the Sacred, 39. Interestingly, at least for my reading of Hawksmoor, Girard also focuses on the story of Cain. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 2,4. Black, The Aesthetics of Murder, 125. For example, see Onega’s Metafiction and Myth, 47; Luc Herman, ‘The Relevance of History’, 116–7; David Richter, ‘Murder in Jest’, 109–110; and most recently, Jeremy Gibson and Julian Wolfreys, Peter Ackroyd, 92–104. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 41. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 139 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 85. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 298. The first is made by Luc Herman, while the second is by David Richter. Ahearn, ‘The Modern English Visionary’, 467. See also John Peck’s essay, ‘The Novels of Peter Ackroyd’, 443–4. Jessica Benjamin writes that the intention of the masochist is to ‘find a “safe” open space in which to abandon the protective false self and allow the nascent hidden self to emerge’ (Bonds of Love, 72). In other words, in performing masochism, the masochist hopes to enable his repressed other to surface. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 28. ˇ izˇek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 79. Slavoj Z ˇ izˇek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 79. Z

Notes 193 51

52 53

54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64

65 66

Hawksmoor is considered a metaphysical detective novel in Patricia Merivale’s and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney’s essay, ‘The Game’s Afoot’, although they do not discuss the novel in any detail. According to them, the metaphysical detective narrative is distinguished from its traditional counterpart by ‘the profound questions that it raises about narrative, interpretation, subjectivity, the nature of reality, and the limits of knowledge’ (1). Moreover, it also ‘parodies or subverts traditional detective-story conventions – such as narrative closure and the detective’s role as surrogate reader – with the intention, or at least the effect, of asking questions about mysteries of being and knowing which transcend the mere machinations of the mystery plot’ (2). In short, the intention of the metaphysical detective novel, as Heta Pryhönen sees it, is to ‘make [the reader] examine more closely these acts and generic conventions [of constructing reality through textuality]’ (Mayhem and Murder, 23). Richter, ‘Murder in Jest’, 107. Margaret Crawford, ‘Investigating the City’, 120, 121. Crawford is essentially opposed to reading the detective fiction in the way she has described above, and goes on to discuss how innovations in the crime genre, such as representing new ‘types’ of detectives and detection methods, and deploying female detectives, have significantly altered the way the genre is represented today. One of the characters, Laing, offers a post-Freudian interpretation of the condition of living in high-rises (109), but which does not involve the uncanny. All references to High-Rise are from the Flamingo (1993) edition. David Punter, The Hidden Script, 9. Joseph Grange, The City, 17. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, 225–226. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 11. Timothy K. Beal, Religion and Its Monsters, 5. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 12. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. 11. Wilder’s climb to the top of the building is suggestive of the tropes of a Bildungsroman narrative, which fails tragic-comically in the end; instead of self-actualisation and ‘discovering’ himself, he actually loses his self altogether and regresses to the position of a child. I am borrowing this term from Douglas B. Saylor (The Sadomasochistic Homotext, 2–3), although I disagree with his view that this kind of text is only the interweaving of homosexuality into literature. For me, homotextuality encompasses a larger scope which includes the study of homosocial relationships between men and the psycho-social significances involved. Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, 228–30, 235–6, 243. In masochism, it is not always a woman who plays the dominant role. In fact, Carol Siegel has argued against a grave misconception of positing the male characters as passive in Victorian literature, when in truth, they are the active principles, while the supposed dominant woman remain objectified and insubstantially drawn (Male Masochism, 5–17). See also

194 Notes

67

68

69 70

71

72 73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80

81 82

83

Michelle Massé, In the Name of Love, for a treatment of masochism in Victorian and contemporary Gothic literature. Among the men, there is a psychiatrist (Talbot), a physician (Laing), a architect (Royal), a surgeon (Steele) and a television producer (Wilder); among the women are air-hostesses, homemakers (Alice, Wilder’s wife Helen), a copywriter (Charlotte Melville), a fashion consultant (Mrs Steele) and a television actress (Jane Sheridan). This is similar to the way Bobby Crawford, in Cocaine Nights, jealously guards the civilised façade of the Spanish resort of Estella de Mar from being exposed for its lurid, secret world of corruption and vices. His method is a strange paradox of enforcing pleasure, civic awareness and creativity through crime. The community of Estella de Mar works because it is compelled to criminal activities (drugs, prostitution, even murder) to enhance creative leisure and a sense of civility (281, 304). Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, 244. The ‘his’ emphasised in the passage is ambiguous as it could also imply Royal himself. But as the pronoun has been consistently used to signify Wilder, it is more plausible to do so in this instance as well. I am adhering to Suzanne R. Stewart’s definition of masochism when she writes that masochism, or masochistic aesthetics, ‘is gendered because it is defined, according to Deleuze, as the incestuous relationship between mother and son at the expense of the now banished father’ (Sublime Surrender, 3); for sadomasochism, I refer to Douglas B. Saylor’s formulation of the dialectic of failure and success in the attempt to overthrow the Father which must always end in failure, because the Father is re-internalised in the sadomasochist (Sadomasochistic Homotext, 59). Freud, for example, equates blindness with castration, ‘The Uncanny’, 228–230. Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, 49, author’s emphasis. Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, 50. ˇ izˇek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 76, author’s emphasis. Slavoj Z Lynda Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh, 123. By phallus, I am following Lacan’s definition when he writes that the ‘phallus is the privileged signifier of the mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire’. (Écrits, 318.) Although Lacan is careful not to conflate the phallus and the penis, his theory often privileges the masculine, thus making the two indistinguishable. Victor Burgin, ‘Perverse Space’, 236. Meaghan Morris, ‘Great Moments in Social Climbing’, 8. For useful discussion of nature as feminine in Western philosophy and science, see Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, and Londa Schiebinger, ‘Taxonomy for Human Beings’, 11–37. Judith Butler, ‘Melancholy Gender / Refused Identification’, 26. Take for example, Wilder’s wife, who despite being a postgraduate, functions as a housewife and mother, who writes literary reviews for children’s books on the side (14). Here again, is another example of a quasi-criticism offered by Ballard to explain the psychology of his novel. I will deal with the relationship

Notes 195

84 85

86 87 88 89 90 91

92 93

94 95

96 97 98 99 100

between darkness and the psychopath in my treatment of the psychasthenic condition in American Psycho (see chapter two). Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, 37. In an interesting parallel to Douglas’s observation, Michel Foucault has also argued that what cannot be classified is, in natural history, relegated to the monstrous (The Order of Things, 171). And yet, as Foucault goes on to show, the monster is, at the same time ‘the root-stock of specification’ (171), suggesting that classification ultimately stems from being able to identify and structure species which stem from the inchoateness of the monster, or rather, a process of naturalisation through separating what is natural from what is not. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3-4. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 95. Vidler, Warped Space, 14. ˇ izˇek, The Plague of Fantasies, 32. Z Freud, ‘The Economic Problem in Masochism’, 266. Jean Laplanche also views Freud’s theory on masochism (although he does not specify which) to be closely affiliated with sadomasochism. According to Laplanche, when Freud is speaking of a child being beaten, it is not the ‘I’ who is the one beaten, but the one registering the activity of the father beating another child, usually a sibling. Hence, the observer’s understanding about the father and his sibling, who is the mirror of the I, becomes ‘compromised’. Laplanche explains that this ‘situation could be called, objectively and originally, sado-masochistic. But the mistake would be to centre it on the physical action, the father hitting the little “brother or sister”; the breaking-in is directed towards the [observing] child receiving the message: the other introduces his message, steeped in fantasy, which the child must in a second moment attempt to master, at once symbolise and repress’ (‘Masochism and the General Theory of Seduction’, Essays on Otherness, 212, author’s emphasis). Freud, ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’, 266. One problem with reading Ballard is his obvious misogynistic tone. His women figures are often objectified, even infantilised, or represented as the destructive, phallic women, like Dr Barbara Rafferty in Rushing to Paradise. Deleuze, Masochism, 16. Kaja Silverman, in discussing Deleuze’s account of disavowal and fetishism in masochism, demonstrates that ‘Deleuze thus makes it possible for us to see that the mother not only stands in for the father … but usurps his position’ (Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 212). Stewart, Sublime Surrender, 10, author’s emphasis. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body, 41. Donna J. Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’, 50. Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’, 50. That is, science fiction literature which privileges the masculine and denies the feminine (for example stories about reproduction without the feminine element, and death without procreation). See Alice Jardine, ‘Of Bodies and Technologies’, 153.

196 Notes 101 102

Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’, 48–9. ˇ izˇek, The Fragile Absolute, 27. Z

Chapter Two

Geopolitics of the Serial Killer

1 All references to Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho are from the Picador (1991) edition. 2 Laura E. Tanner, Intimate Violence, 102. 3 Zombie is loosely based on the story of real life serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, who terrorised Milwaukee in the early 1990s. For a comparison between the novel and Jeffrey Dahmer’s story, see Simpson’s Psycho Paths, 156–7. 4 All references to Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie are from the Picador (1996) edition. 5 That is, his sex offence against a minor (but was lightly discharged because of his father’s influence and the fact that the victim was black). Henceforth, Quentin is weekly inspected by his probation officer from the Michigan Department of Corrections (see 128ff). 6 Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 54, 55. 7 Terry Eagleton, Ideology, 196, author’s emphasis. 8 Eagleton, Ideology, 222, author’s emphasis. 9 Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard, 97. 10 Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers, 37. According to Seltzer, serial killers’ fascination with pornography is not a reinforcement of their fantasy, but a result of that fantasy. The fantasy is already there and these try-outs are merely generated by the already-present fantasy which would subsequently become realer to the ‘self-generating character of subject’ (220) which, in the end, can only be satisfied by an unmediated enactment, that is, an actual murder. 11 I do not, however, agree with Baudrillard’s version of television image as having ‘its own immanent, ephemeral logic; an immoral logic without depth, beyond good and evil, beyond truth and falsity; a logic of the extermination of its own referent, a logic of the implosion of meaning in which the message disappears on the horizon of the medium’ (Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images, 23). See Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory, 132, for a critical refutation of Baudrillard’s view on television. ˇ izˇek, ‘How did Marx Invent the Symptom’, 21. 12 Z 13 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, 97. Emphasis is in the original. 14 Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn, 20. 15 Jameson, The Cultural Turn, p. 111. 16 Roger Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, 28. 17 Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, 28, emphasis in original. 18 Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, 30, emphasis in original. 19 Seltzer, Serial Killers, 7, emphasis in original. 20 Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 47. 21 Botting, ‘Signs of Evil’, 502. 22 Eagleton writes that money is ‘self breeding, self-referential, autonomous of all material truth and able to conjure an infinite plurality of worlds into concrete existence’ (The Ideology of the Aesthetics, 201).

Notes 197 23 Botting, ‘Signs of Evil’, 499. 24 Tanner, Intimate Violence, 102. 25 The only member of his own class which Bateman kills is Paul Owen (I will discuss this later). 26 This strangely echoes Hawksmoor, in that Dyer too views tramps and prostitutes as disposable others. For both Bateman and Dyer, the prostitute embodies the representation of the Void which must be annihilated in order for these killers to retain their constructed realities of selfhood. 27 Caillois, 30. 28 Celeste Olalquiaga, Megalopolis, 6. 29 Seltzer, Serial Killers, 221. This inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy reaches maddening proportions in Ellis’s later novel, Glamorama (1998), in which Bateman also makes a cameo appearance (44), and perhaps a swift killing as well (170). Here, a rather imbecilic male model, Victor Ward, gradually and unwittingly spirals down into a world of conspiracy, terrorism and snuff-videos, where he remains frightened but unable to understand fully his situation because he has become powerfully interpellated by the depthless images which construct the world of celebrities (as Victor, in a moment of lucidity, actually admits, “A model … modelling is … I’m replaceable” [90]). In fact, reading the narrative, the reader can never tell if Victor is in the midst of shooting a video, or really experiencing horrific events, as real or imagined film directors and cameramen shift in and out of Victor’s focus. He practically views his life as a constant script and film-making. Glamorama, in many ways, continues the investigation into the postmodern simulacral existence where bodies which are meaningless resort desperately to atrocities in order to signify. Increasingly inundated by empty signs, the only recourse to bodily signification is by destroying other bodies in vicious ways; this is to allow for an intimacy with other bodies (through violent contact), as well as to announce the bodily-ness of one’s otherwise effacing body. 30 Reference to Fight Club is from the Vintage (1997) edition. 31 Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 3. 32 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 10. 33 From Jerzy Kosinski’s narrative, Steps, 64. The context of Kosinski’s narrative are the concentration camps. Interestingly, one of Bateman’s techniques of atrocity is to insert a live rat in his dying victim’s womb, perhaps a metonymic reduction of the woman to that of a ubiquitous rat. Kosinski’s next novel, Being There (1999) is both a comic look at television reality as well as a subtle warning about its immense power to disguise and delude. 34 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, 8. 35 Clara Freccero, ‘Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer’, 52. 36 Punter, The Literature of Terror, 177. 37 Seltzer, Serial Killers, 167. ˇ izˇek, The Plague of Fantasies, 14. 38 Z 39 Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, 113. 40 Linda S. Kauffmann. Bad Girl & Sick Boys, 248. See also Phillip L. Simpson, Psycho Paths, 153–4, who makes a more or less similar claim. 41 Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, ‘Taming the Basilisk’, 202.

198 Notes 42 This view seems to find support in James Twitchell in his book, Dreadful Pleasures. His argument concerns the way the camera ‘eye’ is positioned in the “stalk-and-slash” movies and writes that ‘the camera often shows us the violation scenes from the monster’s point of view and naturally enough we find ourselves siding within him. We have slipped into his skin … and are doing his hideous and bestial deeds…. The phallic knife is in our hands’ (46–47). Twitchell is clearly underestimating the ability of the viewer to distance him/herself from the screen, and confuses witnessing with colluding. Linda Tanner makes a similar underestimation in when she argues that ‘in refusing to lend [Bateman a recognisable psyche], Ellis also refuses to lend his readers a category through which to differentiate themselves from this killer’ (104). 43 Lobanov-Rostovsky, 200. 44 Ruth Helyer, ‘Parodied to Death’, 18–19. 45 According to Thomas Docherty, the anonymous first person narrator is a principal aspect in postmodern narratives. The reason for this has partly to do with ‘the desire to liberate character from any defining and binding restriction, such as the ‘label’ of a proper name’ (Reading (Absent) Character, 31). Yet strangely, in American Psycho, the anonymous (as in history-less) character is at once label-less and over-represented by labels (signs). 46 Jeffrey Cohen, ‘Preface’, viii. 47 Helyer, 735. 48 All reference to London Fields are from the Vintage (1999) edition. 49 All references to Expensive People are from the Quality Paperback Book (1990) edition. 50 Elaine Showalter, Hystories, 64, 76. 51 Botting, ‘Power in the Darkness’, 262. 52 Foucault. ‘Of Other Spaces’, 24. 53 Botting, ‘Power in the Darkness’, 253. 54 Quentin’s paradoxical position in the heteropia also reinforces the hysteria manifested in his text and art. As Zˇizˇek surmises, ‘apropos of every imitation of a model-image, apropos of every ‘playing a role’, the question to ask is: for whom is the subject enacting this role? Which gaze is considered when the subject identifies himself with a certain image? This gap between the way I see myself and the point from which I am being observed to appear likeable to myself is crucial for grasping hysteria’ (The Sublime Object of Ideology, 106). 55 Baudrillard, ‘On Seduction’, Selected Writings, 157. 56 Freud, ‘On Narcissism’, 547. 57 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 86–7. 58 Freud, ‘On Narcissism’, 547. 59 Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, 54. 60 Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, 54–5. 61 See for example, Freud’s formulation of the ego and the superego in The Ego & the Id. 62 Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, 55. 63 Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, 63. 64 Jacques Derrida, ‘Passions’, 31.

Notes 199 65 Stephen J. Giannangelo, The Psychopathology of Serial Murder, 91. 66 See Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, esp. 43–4 for the history of pathologising the homosexual as deviant. 67 Like Patrick Bateman again, Quentin’s invisibility then, has much to do with his choice of victims as well. ˇ izˇek, Looking Awry, 12 (author’s emphasis). 68 Z 69 Botting, ‘Culture, Subjectivity & the Real’, 90. 70 Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 318. The term ‘maintenance mechanism’ is coined by psychologist Margaret Mahler to explain the aggressive behaviour in psychotic children. She finds the Freudian term ‘defensive mechanism’ inadequate to explain the complete breakdown of all ego functions through acts of aggression in children (Theweleit, 210). 71 Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 320, 318. 72 The death of Barry, Quentin’s best friend and love object, when he was a boy, is textually ambiguous, leaving his role in Barry’s death undecided (99–100). This ambiguity also leaves open the possibility that Quentin’s feeling of guilt over this death may not necessarily be an actual involvement but because his father is observing him. 73 Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, 91. 74 See Kobena Mercer, ‘Busy in the Ruins of Wretched Phantasia’, 29. 75 See for example, Sander L. Gilman, Difference & Pathology, where he argues that the ‘association of the black with sexuality can be one of the touchstones to any examination of the problem of consciousness among the moderns’ (125). Gilman’s book, although dealing mainly with black women and their genitalia as the site of sexual fantasy, is pertinent to help us understand the long-held fascination of the white for black sexuality. 76 Simpson. Psycho Paths, 163. 77 Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Desire & Difference’, 24 (author’s emphasis). 78 See Wade Davis, Passage of Darkness, esp. chapter 2, for a detailed discussion on the Haitian zombie. See also Hans W. Ackermann & Jeanine Gauthier, ‘The Ways and Nature of the Zombi’, 466–94. 79 Richard Dellamora. Apocalyptic Overtures, 141. 80 Simpson. Psycho Path, 165. 81 Simpson, Psycho Path, 165. 82 The allusion to sparrows is from Matthew 10: 29–31; also Luke 12: 6,7. (The Holy Bible) 83 I want to also suggest that the conferring of idiosyncratic names to his victims, apart from being a process of dehumanising his victims as suggested in the chapter, is also a form of manifesting god-likeness. As Regina Barreca argues, ‘[n]aming – defining the world through words – has power over the universe and draws the universe into every life’ (‘Writing as Voodoo’, 176). Quentin, in naming his victim, is both defining his position as supreme, and (directly) identifying with the ‘universe’, or the cosmic beyond. 84 Simpson, Psycho Path, 170. 85 Richard Dyer, White, 39–40. 86 Dyer, White, 45. 87 Dyer, White, 210. 88 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 34.

200 Notes 89 Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desires, 171. Young, in this book, offers a very interesting insight into ideas of colonialism and postcolonialism using, unusually, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theories of the anti-Oedipus.

Chapter Three 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26 27

Monstrous Progeny

Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4. Juliet Mitchell. Mad Men & Medusas, 280. All references to The Wasp Factory are from the Abacus (1984) edition. Nicolas Abraham & Maria Torok, ‘The Topography of Reality’, 63. More than the other psychoanalysts, Abraham’s and Torok’s psychoanalytic rhetoric is perhaps that which resembles the Gothic poetics most prominently in its preoccupation with secrets, crypts, and family taboos. Derrida, ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, xxxv. Abraham and Torok, ‘The Topography of Reality’, 64. Foucault, ‘Politics & Reason’, 83–4. Esther Rashkin, Family Secrets & the Psychoanalysis of Narrative, 27–8. Botting, ‘Culture, Subjectivity and the Real’, 89. ˇ izˇek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 169. Z ˇ izˇek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 196. Z Derrida, ‘Fors’, xiii. Abraham and Torok, ‘The Topography of Reality’, 64. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 28. Victor Sage, ‘The Politics of Petrifaction’, 25. David Rosen, ‘The Volcano and the Cathedral’, 42. Abraham, ‘Notes on the Phantom’, 291. Abraham, ‘Notes on the Phantom’, 287, emphasis mine. See Introduction. Interestingly, Frank later makes his father’s walking stick the symbol of his Wasp Factory’s security (10). The castrated phallus becomes the factory’s security – a clear suggestion of the fragility of constructed masculinity which Frank, owing to his father, seeks to nevertheless safeguard for himself. Butler, Gender Trouble, 10, 25. Butler, Gender Trouble, 114 Teresa de Lauretis, ‘The Violence of Rhetoric’, 243. Although Frank admits that killing children ‘was just a phase I was going through’ (42), like Quentin, it may just be a cooling off period. He continues to kill animals (thus substituting his need to kill humans), and would entertain murdering another individual – Mrs Clamp, for example (73) – every once in a while. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 100. Jean Piaget, Play, Dreams & Imitation in Childhood, 95. Piaget, Play, Dreams & Imitation in Childhood, 149. Piaget’s term, ‘pleasure’ has strong psychoanalytic overtones. In play, pleasure is derived through the temporary release of the ego from the superego. The ego would ignore rules, and play the game according ‘to the whims of the ego’ (149). This has

Notes 201 obvious relevance to Frank, who also kills on ‘a whim’. 28 R. Rawdon Wilson, In Palamedes’s Shadow, 124. 29 The only person who suspects Frank is Diggs, the town inspector, but he never seriously entertains the idea that Frank may be criminal (72). 30 See also the war between ‘the Ordinary Soldiers’ and ‘the Aerosols’ (24–6). 31 Margarida Morgado, ‘The Season of Play’, 214. 32 See Phillip D’Alton’s, ‘Women in the Military and the Cult of Masculinity’, which demonstrates that in ‘Western images of war and destruction … [the] male warrior is the centre of attention and the assumed characteristics of the solider are an affirmation of traditional male roles…. Furthermore, it is an ideal predicated upon the assumption that real men [that is, beliefs constructed by the army] are the only suitable material for real soldiers’. (D’Alton, 227–228, author’s emphasis). 33 Blyth, although he did not die while playing a game, was certainly pacified through many games. This is how Frank wins Blyth’s and everyone else’s goodwill so that when he finally murders Blyth, no one will suspect him (38–40). 34 Thom Nairn, ‘Iain Banks and the Fiction Factory’, 128. 35 When they were younger, Frank and Eric used to play ‘war games’ as well. They would view themselves as soldiers willing to die for each other (137). 36 This is soon verified when Frank, in a fit of anger, pulls his father’s pants down and discovers that his father is unquestionably a man (174). 37 In a suggestively chilling revenge motif, Eric’s witnessing of insects consuming the child’s brain which ultimately unhinges him and irrevocably disrupts his masculine front, compels Frank to build a wasp factory – a death-trap for insects – which is, in a sense, his way of taking vengeance on the insect world for his brother’s masculine deconstruction. 38 Berthold Schoene-Harwood, Writing Men, 109. 39 Sage, ‘The Politics of Petrifaction’, 25. This view also thematically aligns The Wasp Factory with the first four narratives discussed, in that spatial monstrosity has a dialectical relationship with monstrous subjects. 40 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4. The chora is associated with the maternal. See introduction. 41 Butler, Gender Trouble, 93. 42 Jacque Ehrmann, ‘Homo Ludens Revisited’, 43. 43 Reinhard Kuhn, Corruption in Paradise, 36. 44 Kuhn, Corruption in Paradise, 36. 45 Doris Lessing published a sequel to The Fifth Child entitled Ben in the World (2000) which may serve to concretely establish Ben’s ontological presence. Perhaps it does, but I want to argue that this sequel fails nevertheless to subvert the fantastic nature of the first book. 46 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic,167. 47 Lillian R. Furst, All is True, 12. 48 James R. Kincaid, Child Loving, 79. 49 Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination, 1. 50 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine, 49. 51 Creed, The Monstrous Feminine, 53. 52 Creed’s reading of the feminine abject (a theory heavily dependent on Kristeva) that is located in the womb, and then applied across a series of

202 Notes

53

54 55 56

57 58

59 60

61

62

63

horror texts, has been heavily criticised for being essentialist and reductive. For useful criticism of Creed’s theoretical premise, see Cynthia Freeland, The Naked and the Undead, 20, 59–61, 67–8) This marking of the body, like the marking of the body that is pregnant, further recalls the Kristevan abject body which is always marked, as opposed to an unmarked Symbolic body. Carol Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws, 83, author’s emphasis. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws, 77ff. Julian Petley, ‘The Monstrous Child’, 87–107. In this essay, Petley discusses The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976). Interestingly, the popularity of horror films with monstrous children in the 70s was perhaps motivated by David Cooper’s controversial book, The Death of the Family (1971) which designated the family to be the root of all social evils. Joan Copjec, ‘Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety’, 59, author’s emphasis. For Copjec, anxiety is not a signifier – in fact, it is a negation of signifiers – but an ‘affect’ which cannot be doubted. It is neither an object nor its lack, but ‘a lack of lack, a failure of the symbolic reality wherein all alienable objects … are constituted and circulated’ (‘Vampires, Breast-Feeding and Anxiety’ [59]). If anxiety is an object at all, it is one that is so ‘inalienable and yet so insubstantial’ (59, author’s emphasis) that it cannot be communicated or exchanged, and simultaneously impossible to ignore or forgotten. At most, it can be marginalised, repressed, but it cannot be destroyed. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws, 66 An earlier episode, when Harriet visits the doctor before Ben is born, can further support this reading. At eight months of pregnancy, Harriet approaches her doctor, Dr Brett, to induce Ben. He refuses. Harriet accuses the doctor of refusing to acknowledge the monstrous foetus she is carrying, but he only continues to ‘look dubiously at her stomach, sighed and wrote a prescription for more sedatives’ (59). Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws, 218. According to her, even in horror films in which the final surviving protagonist is female – the ‘final girl’ – she is often ‘masculinised’. Kristeva, in ‘Women’s Time’, argues that ‘in [the] sense of psycho-symbolic structure, women … seem to feel that they are the casualties, that they have been left out of the socio-symbolic contract, of language as the fundamental social bond’ (199). Clearly, Kristeva follows Lacan in situating the Symbolic order as patriarchal and male. In his essay ‘Family Romance’, Freud claims that for a child to grow up normal, it must identify with the correct parent. After all, the child’s ‘parents are at first the only authority and the source of all belief’ (237; for a discussion on how a child is carefully channelled to model after the ‘correct parent’, see Foucault, A History of Sexuality, 41–2). Freud’s essay is, of course, indicative of the Oedipal process which clearly privileges the male child. The Fifth Child, however, subverts this narrow view: Ben does not ‘model’ himself after the paternal, but identifies with the maternal imagination instead. In fact, he rejects altogether David’s paternal influence. The novel seems to suggest that a child, born of the mother, will inherit her desires instead of the father’s. If the maternal desire is monstrous, then the child will embody that monstrosity. This reading is not so much a critique of

Notes 203

64 65 66 67

68

69 70 71 72

73 74

75

76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

maternity as it is a pathologising of the maternal. Maternal repression requires a voice and an escape valve, and the repressed, as Freud rightfully claims, will always return (be voiced) one way or another. Louise Yelin, From the Margins of the Empire,103. Yelin, From the Margins of the Empire, 104. Yelin, From the Margins of the Empire, 104. Other critics who have failed to explain Ben’s monstrosity include Ellen Pifer, ‘The Fifth Child: Lessing’s Subversion of the Pastoral’, esp. 123, and Sharon L. Dean, ‘Lessing’s The Fifth Child’. In the latter, the narrative is given a cabalistic reading, interpreting Ben’s monstrosity as being associated with the number five (120). In my view, this analysis is interesting but untenable because it frames the novel against a cultural and mystical background which it clearly does not suggest or support. The problem in defining the pastoral as a social and cultural entity is partly because most writings on the pastoral tend to view it as a literary expression, a trademark in literature beginning with Virgil and finding its greatest flowering in the Romantic poets (See Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology). I will therefore delineate ideas of the pastoral from criticisms of pastoral literature and set them up as a reading of the pastoral community. Shelagh Hunter, Victorian Idyllic Fiction, 14. Hunter, Victorian Idyllic Fiction, 202. Hunter notes this imagery especially in Thomas Hardy’s works. Hunter, Victorian Idyllic Fiction, 204. Andrew V. Ettin, Literature and the Pastoral, 146. He notes that ‘women, nymphs, and goddesses are frequently mentioned and may be dramatically important, but within pastoral poems they rarely speak. Even in the romances and in Renaissance pastoral dramas, where shepherdesses appear fairly often they are usually outnumbered’(146). Andew V. Ettin, Literature and the Pastoral, 149. In his book, Pastoral, Terry Gifford suggests that the pastoral is a literary form ‘written for an urban audience’ and which implicitly suggests to this audience ‘a movement of retreat and return’ to the country way of life (81). In other words, pastoral literature helps distance the reader from the anxieties of urban existence so as to enable the reader to evaluate and understand his existence better. David, of course, misses this point altogether. Curiously, however, Dorothy does not say that Ben is abnormal. Instead she says that he ‘is not normal for what we [his family] are’ (79). Again, Lessing’s textual ambiguity and distancing are revealing – she clearly refuses to name Ben a monster. Pifer, ‘The Fifth Child: Lessing’s Subversion of the Pastoral’, 128. ˇ izˇek, Looking Awry, 45. Z David Williams in Deformed Discourses argues along similar lines. There is an obvious reference to Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845) here. Pifer, ‘The Fifth Child: Lessing’s Subversion of the Pastoral’, 126. Pifer, ‘The Fifth Child: Lessing’s Subversion of the Pastoral’, 126. Reference to The Memoirs of a Survivor is from the 1983 Picador edition. All references to Frankenstein are from the 1994 Penguin edition. Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 186–87.

204 Notes 85 Margot Gayle Backus, The Gothic Family Romance, 18. 86 See Punter, Gothic Pathologies, 204.

Chapter Four

Monstrous Body

1 Carter uses this word to describe herself in ‘Notes from the Front Line’, 72. This is, however, not to say that Carter subscribes to a radical form of feminism, as this chapter will show. 2 Carter, ‘Notes from the Front Line’, 74. 3 Carter, ‘Notes from the Front Line’, 71. 4 Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 2. 5 Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 4. 6 Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken, ‘Introduction’, 3. 7 All references to ‘Angel’ are from the Penguin (1989) edition of Patrick McGrath’s Blood and Water. 8 McGrath’s confesses his commitment to the Gothic in his introduction to The Picador Book of the New Gothic, xiv. 9 Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body, 65. McGrath agrees with this view; in his essay on the Gothic, ‘Transgression and Decay’, he writes that ‘[many] of the dominant themes and motifs of the Gothic … speak of this instability of identity, and in the broadest sense make a question of out central assumption within identity, and ask: what is human?’ (155, author’s emphasis). 10 See Introduction and chapter one (Hawksmoor). 11 Stephen J. Arata, ‘’Strange Cases, Common Fates’, 177. 12 Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows, 91. Halberstam links Dracula to antiSemitism – pervasive in the late nineteenth-century – and demonstrates how the Count is a symbol of the Jew. This racial stereotyping was concurrent with advances in criminal anthropology and social Darwinist conception of human development which sought to classify degenerate peoples, of which the Jews were paramount. (Halberstam, 92–3) 13 Tamsin Spargo and Fred Botting, ‘Re-iterating Desire’, 379. 14 Lacan, ‘Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever’, 195. 15 Sally Ledger, ‘The New Woman and the Crisis of Victorianism’, 22. 16 Thomas Docherty, Alterities, 22, author’s emphasis. ˇ izˇek, Looking Awry, 44. 17 Z 18 Jonathan Dollimore, Death Desire and Loss in Western Culture, 127. 19 Dollimore, Death Desire and Loss in Western Culture, 127. 20 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 249. 21 Angela Carter, The Sadeian Women, 27. 22 Linda Badley. Film, Horror & the Body Fantastic, 31. 23 Aleid Fokkema, Postmodern Characters, 176–7. 24 Butler, Bodies that Matter, p. 9, author’s emphasis. Or, as Anne Fernihough asserts ‘our perception of other people’s bodies are always filtered through metaphor, through cultural codes, and our attempts to write about the [for example, the gendered] body even at the most basic level are infected by such codes’ (‘Is She Fact or Fiction?’, 94). 25 All references to Nights at the Circus are from the Picador (1984) edition.

Notes 205 26 Williams, Deformed Discourse, 113. 27 Barbara M. Benedict, ‘Making a Monster’, 136. This significantly recalls Frankenstein. 28 See Introduction. 29 Felicity Nussbaum, ‘Dumb Virgins, Blind Ladies, and Eunuchs’, 32. I read this present ‘wrong thing’ as the breasts; if Nussbaum meant the vagina, it would be an absence. 30 Stephen Pender, ‘In the Bodyshop’, 104. 31 Shirley Peterson, ‘Freaking Feminism’, 295. 32 For discussions of freak shows in the socio-cultural imaginary, see Robert Bogdan, ‘The Social Construction of Freaks’, 23–37. See also Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A. In this fascinating study, Adams concentrates not so much on the freaks but the purveyors and spectators of such shows. 33 Michel Foucault, ‘The Eye of Power’, 155. 34 For a discussion of makeup in Nights at the Circus, see Isobel Armstrong, ‘Woolf by the Lake, Woolf at the Circus’, 273–6. 35 See Harriet Blodgett, ‘Fresh Iconography’, 53. ˇ izˇek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 157, author’s emphasis. 36 Z 37 Magali Cornier Michael, ‘Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus’, 213. 38 Anna Katsavos, ‘An Interview with Angela Carter’, 13. 39 Katsavos, ‘An Interview with Angela Carter’, 13. 40 This embodiment of male fantasy is what Irigaray would call ‘masquerading’; it is performed by women ‘to participate in man’s desire but at the price of renouncing their own’ (Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, 133, emphasis added). For a reading of masquerading in Carter’s work, see Sally Robinson, Engendering the Subject. 41 Joanne Gass has argued that Fevvers ‘never gives up her uniqueness’ whilst she ‘exploits her exploiters by profiting from her appearance … because she understands clearly that once she has succumbed to “the kiss of a magic prince … such a kiss would seal [her] up in [her] appearance for ever”’ (‘Panopticism in Nights at the Circus’, 39). Gass may have, however, overlooked the episode with the Grand Duke. 42 Flora Alexander, Contemporary Women Novelists, 72–3. 43 For elaboration on the literary fantastic, see Todorov’s The Fantastic, and my analysis of The Fifth Child in chapter three. 44 Punter, ‘Essential Imaginings’, 143. 45 The relationship between magic realism and postmodernism has been discussed by various critics. See for example, Theo L. D’haen, ‘Magic Realism and Postmodernism’, 191–208. 46 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 145–6. 47 Mary Russo designates the bodily grotesque as the ‘carnival grotesque’ following Bakhtin in his Rabelais and his World, and the inner state of grotesquery as the ‘uncanny grotesque’, following Wolfgang Kayser in his The Grotesque in Art and Literature. 48 Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism, 274. 49 Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘The Banquet, the Body and the Underworld’, 233 50 Carter’s deployment of Bakhtin’s theories of the grotesque and the carnivalesque have been noted by several of her critics. Among them are: Andrzej Gasiorek, Post-War British Fiction,134–5; Aidan Day, Angela Carter: The

206 Notes

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

Rational Glass, 167–94; and Paulina Palmer, ‘From “Coded Mannequin” to Bird Woman’, 197–201. The most sustained reading of the grotesque (and the carnivalesque) in Nights at the Circus is Mary Russo’s The Female Grotesque. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World, 10. Leonard Cassuto, The Inhuman Race, 8. Russo, The Female Grotesque, 165. See also Sally Robinson, Engendering the Subject, 123–4. Ricarda Schmidt, ‘The Journey of the Subject in Angela Carter’s Fiction’, 50. Paul Magrs, ‘Boys Keep Swinging’, 185. Harriet Blodgett, ‘Fresh Iconography’, 49. Reference to The Passion of New Eve is to the 1996 Virago edition. Aidan Day, Angela Carter: The Rational Glass, 194. Walter Kendrick, ‘The Real Magic of Angela Carter’, 270. Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, 229. Andrzej Gasiorek, Post-War British Fiction, 127–8. John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, 90. John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, 91. Brian H. Finney, ‘Tall Tales and Brief Lives: Angel Carter’s Nights at the Circus’, 173. Daniel Punday, ‘Narrative Performance in the Contemporary Monster Story’, 809. Clare Hanson, “The Red Dawn Breaking over Clapham”, 67. See also Robert Clark, ‘Angela Carter’s Desire Machine’, 147–161. Sara Martin, ‘The Power of Monstrous Women’, 209. Martin, ‘The Power of Monstrous Women’, 209. Carter, ‘Notes from the Front Line’, 75. Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content, 110. Agambe, The Man without Content, 110. Agamben, The Man without Content, 110. Bernard McElroy, Fiction of the Modern Grotesque, 22, author’s emphasis. Susan Corey, ‘The Religious Dimensions of the Grotesque in Literature’, 230.

Conclusion 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

The Language of Monstrosity

Geoffrey H. Hartman, ‘Meaning, Error, Text’, 146. Foucault, The Order of Things, 171. Christopher Norris, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism, 212. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading, 151–152. De Man, Allegories of Reading, 152. As proposed by Aristotle in his Poetics, 38. De Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 4. De Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 3. De Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 6. David Williams, Deformed Discourse, 10. Williams, Deformed Discourse, 11. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 78.

Notes 207 13 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, 12. 14 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, 206, emphasis added. 15 The metaphoric plot, as Patricia Parker observes, is ‘a space of disorientation and discovery, and a mythos of transformation’ (‘The Metaphorical Plot’, 151). 16 Cited in Max Black, Models and Metaphor, 240. 17 Halberstam, Skin Shows, 11. 18 Halberstam, Skin Shows, 27. 19 References to The Trick is to Keep Breathing are from the 1991 Minerva edition. 20 For a fuller discussion on the textual strategy in The Trick is to Keep Breathing, refer to Mary McGlynn, ‘Janice Galloway’, 16–22. 21 All references to ‘Blood’ are from The Picador Book of the New Gothic ( 1991). 22 Note 15. 23 This dental episode recalls the dissection theatre of the eighteenth-century where dead bodies of women are displayed, thereby equating death with femininity, and negating both. As Elisabeth Bronfen has shown, the “gendering” of the dead displayed body, which occurs when it is semantically encoded as a figure of “feminine beauty”, not only veils death but also induces blindness toward the subjectivity of the corpse as this includes its sexual alterity (Over Her Dead Body, 102). 24 Margery Metzstein, ‘Of Myths and Men’, 144. 25 Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, 3–4. 26 Roof, Reproductions of Reproduction, 15. 27 Roof, Reproductions of Reproduction, 17. 28 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, 127. 29 Glenda Norquay, ‘Janice Galloway’s Novels’, 136. 30 Notably Julia Kristeva and especially her view of a semiotic which is prelinguistic and located in the chora (which is situated within the mother’s womb). See for example, her ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’ (The Kristeva Reader, esp. 93). 31 Perhaps a good way to sum up the ambivalence in reading Galloway’s tale is to situate the narrative within a theoretical position and make a brief analysis. Jane Gallop’s comments on Luce Irigaray’s writing is relevant here. In discussing this French feminist’s “vulvomorphic logic” (as opposed to “phallomorphic logic”), a logic which metaphorises the body as sexual and free, Gallop argues that this logic ‘frees the patient from her ruts and repetitions, produces movements where there was only stagnant paralysis. Metaphor heals. It is the poesies of a new body, one that is freed from hysterical paralysis or phallomorphic rigidity. To speak in vulvo-logic, it flows’ (Thinking Through the Body, 96). 32 David Clark, ‘Monstrosity, Illegibility, Denegation’, 65. 33 Vicky Kirby, Telling Flesh, 61. 34 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 15. 35 Robert Bogdan, ‘The Social Construction of Freaks’, 35.

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Index abject, 11–12, 20, 56–7, 161, 182–3, 186 Abraham, Nicolas, 107, 109–11, 113–4 Ackroyd, Peter, 17–18, 22–43 Dan Leno and the Lime House Golem, 24 The House of Doctor Dee, 24 See also Hawksmoor Adriano, Joseph, 4–5 Agamben, Giorgio, 172–3 agoraphobia, 32 Ahearn, Edward J., 29 allegory, 21, 166, 172, 176, 180. See under ‘Angel’, The Fifth Child, Nights at the Circus American Psycho, 19, 65–86, 94, 103–4, 107 and the anatomist gaze, 85 commodification in, 68–9, 77, 83 defective seeing in, 85–6 and depthlessness, 66, 68, 71, 75, 85 fashion in, 66, 68, 70–2, 74, 79, 82 and the fear of interiority, 75–81 the gaze in, 85 and hyperconformity, 65, 68, 71, 72, 74, 79, 82 and hyperreality, 65, 66, 68–9, 76, 82, 86, 105, see also hyperreality invisibility in, 66 misrecognition in, 71, 74, 80 money in, 66, 73–4, 105 and overfictionalisation, 83–4 psychasthenia in, 66, 72, 76, 84, see also psychasthenia and repetition, 71, 75 serial killer, 65, 86 and camouflaging technique, 66, 85 as mass in person, 72, 75, 85 and signs, 72–5, 78–9, 80–84 as self-referential, 69–70, 74

production of, 71 as ciphers, 73 simulacra in, 65, 71, 73–4, 76–7, 79, 81, 82, 84, 105 television in, 68, 70–2, 76–7, 82 See also Bret Easton Elis, pornography, psychasthenia, simulacra Amis, Martin: London Fields, 86 anagnorisis, 42, 127 angel, 20–1, 145, 148, 162–3, 168, 172–3, 186–7 ‘Angel’ (Patrick McGrath), 20–1, 145–58, 179 and the abhuman, 147 as allegory, 145, 153 body as fantasy in, 148–52, 156 body as textual fantasy in, 151, 152–54, 155, 156–7 and the crisis of representation, 149–50, 153, 156 dandyism in, 150, 155 death in, 152, 154, 156–7 degeneracy in, 147–8, 149–50, 155–6 and the fin de siècle, 145, 146–8, 150, 152 history in, 149–50, 152, 154, 156, 158 relation between body and the city in, 145, 146–7, 155 vampirism in, 147–8, 150, 157 aporia, 153, 156, 179 Arata, Stephen J., 147 architecture, 22, 29 and death 23, 29, 36, 38 as harnessing monstrosity, 28 and the sublime, see under Hawksmoor and the uncanny, see under HighRise Bachelard, Gaston, 23 Badley, Linda, 158 222

Index 223 Baker, Linnie, 19 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 166 Balibar, Étienne, 2, 15–6 Ballard, J.G., 17–8, 22–3, 43–64, see also High-Rise Banks, Iain, 20, see also The Wasp Factory Barker, Francis, 2, 15–6 Baudrillard, Jean, 16, 19, 65, 66, 70, 71, 105, see also simulacra and simulacrum Beal, Timothy, 12, 45 Benjamin, Walter, 158, 172 Bernstein, Carol, 30, 33, 39 Bersani, Leo, 63 bildungsroman, see under Nights at the Circus Black, Joel, 32, 34 blood, 81, 82, 181–5 ‘Blood’ (Janice Galloway), 21, 177, 181–7 and the body in pain, 181, 182, 184, 186 and the language of monstrosity, 176–7, 181–3, 185–6 menstruation in, 182–6 as metaphorical plot, 181–4, 185 various interpretations of, 185 Borch-jacobsen, Mikkel, 93–4 body, 14–6, 22, 111, 113, 117, 124, 144–74, 186 as encasement, 14 as construction, 16, 91, 159 as fantasy, see under ‘Angel’ as machine, 15 as metaphor of the city, 25–6, 28, see under ‘Angel’ as monstrous, see under monster as performance, 15, see under Nights at the Circus as species, 15 and relation to law, 14–5 and relation to self, 158–9 Botting, Fred, 18, 29, 73–4, 89, 97, 110, 148, 151 Brooks, Peter, 2–3 Brown, Charles Brockden: Weiland, 19 Burgin, Victor, 51

Burgess, Anthony: The Clockwork Orange, 20 Butler, Judith, 54, 58, 112, 115–6, 123, 158–9 Caillois, Roger, 66, 72, 76 Caliban, 3, 175 Capitalism, see under ideology Carter, Angela, 14, 16, 20–1, 145–6, 158–74, see also Nights at the Circus Caruth, Cathy, 108 Cassuto, Leonard, 167 Castration, 13, 97, 98, 173, see also Symbolic castration under HighRise, see also castrated men under The Wasp Factory children as enigmatic, 20, 127 as monsters, see under monster chora, 10, 123–4 Cixous, Hélène, 170 city, 16, 24–39, 42, 43, see under Hawksmoor Clark, David L., 185 claustrophobia, 22, 30, 32 Clover, Carol, 127, 132, 135 Cohen, Jeffrey J., 5, 25 Colonialism, 103–4 Commodification, 25, 159, 162, see under American Psycho Copjec, Joan, 18, 133–4 Corey, Susan, 174 Crawford, Margaret, 42 cyborg, 63–4 Death, see under architecture, ‘Angel’, Hawksmoor deformity, 159, 173 exhibition of, 160–1 relation to distortion and perversion, 159 see under monster, Nights at the Circus de Lauretis, Teresa, 116 Deleuze, Gilles, 35–6, 39, 61, 104–5 Dellamora, Richard, 101 de Man, Paul, 177 de Quincey, Thomas, 32

224 Index Derrida, Jacques, 94, 109–10, 111, 179 desire, 10, 16, 57–8, 67, 83, 110, 124, 133, 151, 154–6, 157 as phantasm, 9, 148 difference, 180 Docherty, Thomas, 154 Dollimore, Jonathan, 3, 99, 157, 179 double, see under Hawksmoor, Zombie Douglas, Mary, 56–7 Dracula, see Bram Stoker Dyer, Richard, 104 Eagleton, Terry, 68 écriture feminine, 170 Ehrmann, Jacques, 124 Ellis, Bret Easton, 19, 65–80, see also American Psycho Ettin, Andrew V., 136 family, 19, 107–8, 112, 127 the fantastic, see under The Fifth Child and Nights at the Circus fantasy, 5, 7, 12, 29, 49, 69, 70, 76, 79, 86, 103, 107, 112, 114–5, 127, 139, 142, 145, 149, 154–5, 157, 163–5, 169 and the monster, 13, 91 as object, 6, 8–9, 16, 74, 110, 113–4, see also objet petit a see under ‘Angel’, Nights at the Circus femininity as other, 10 as monstrous, see under monster fetish, 12, 163 The Fifth Child, 20, 107, 108–9, 115, 126–143, 144, 160, 166, 175 as allegory of the English society, 108, 127, 141–2 breast feeding in, 133–4 children as possessed, 132 as fantastic literature, 108, 127–9, 135, 136, 139 as horror with possession theme, 127, 129–35 and the maternal imagination, 108, 127, 130–41 and naming, 128, 138 and the pastoral, 127, 129–30, 135–41

and the Symbolic order, 108, 135, 137 characteristics of, 136 critique of, 137 relation to realist fiction, 108, 128–9 primitivism in, 138–9 and relation to Frankenstein, 142–3 women as possessed in, 131, 132 vampirism in, 133–4 fin-de-siècle, 1, 147, see under ‘Angel’ Finney, Brian H., 171 fort/da, 40, 120 Foucault, Michel, 2, 15, 65, 66, 88, 90, 110, 161, 175 Frankenstein, see Mary Shelley freaks, 14, 20, 146, 159, 161, 162, 169 Freccero, Clara, 80–1 Freeman, Barbara, 33 Freud, Sigmund, 13, 28, 44–5, 49, 59, 60, 92 Furst, Lillian R., 128 Galloway, Janice, 21, 175, 176–7, 180–4, see also ‘Blood’ Gasiorek, Andrzej, 170–1 Gaze, 2, 12–13, see under American Psycho, High-Rise, Nights at the Circus, Zombie geopolitics, 16–7, 65, 67, 87, 103–5, 107, 145 gender, 148 as construction, 112, 114–6, 121, 122, 151 as performance, 115, see also machismo under Wasp Factory Gothic, 1, 5, 18, 20, 29–30, 33, 142–3, 145, 146, 147, 175, 176 Grange, Joseph, 44–6 Grixti, Joseph, 1 Grotesque, 26, 39, 140, 145, 150, 155, 158, 169–70, 173–4, 183, 186, see under Nights at the Circus Grosrichard, Alain, 3 Grosz, Elizabeth, 23, 72–3, 74 Guattari, Felix, 104–5 Halberstam, Judith, 147, 180 Hanson, Clare, 171

Index 225 Haraway, Donna, 63 Hardy, Thomas: Jude the Obscur, 127 Hart, Lynda, 51 Hartman, Geoffrey J., 175 Hawksmoor, 17–8, 22–43, 103 architectural paradox in, 26 the double in, 33–39 the eternal return in, 35–39, 42 death, fear of and desire for, 22, 24–8, 35, 38, 39–40 as historiographic metafiction, 24 and housing death, 27–29, 36, 38 London in, 24–6, 33, 34, 35, 37, 42 labyrinths and pyramids in, 30–1 the legend of Cain in, 26 manipulation of space and time in, 28 as metaphysical detective novel, 42–3 religion in, 25–6 repressed history in, 34 significance of Stonehenge in, 28–9 the sublime, 29–33, see also sublime time in, 28, 33–4, 35, 38 tramps in, 34–6, 39 Helyer, Ruth, 85 heterotopia, see under Zombie High-Rise, 17–8, 22–3, 28, 43–64, 118, 144, 147, 176 and the architectural uncanny, 44–6, 47, 51, 64 disorder, 44, 52, 55–7 the feminine in, 57–8, 60–1, 62 fear of, 49, 53–4, 58, 61 traditional roles, 48, 53 the gaze in, 50–1, 59, 60 high rise as female signifier, 52–3, 57, 59 as male signifier, 43, 46, 47–8, 52–3, 54, 57–9, 64 as vertical city, 43 as zoo, 54 as homotext, 46, 49, 60 insomnia in, 51–2 and the intra-uterine experience, 49, 55 as lived space, 43, 45 and masculinity as construction, 47, 48, 55, 60, 63

as performance, 48, 49, 55 relation to architecture, 44, 49 traditional roles, 48 masochism in, 46, 47, 50, 59, 61–3, see also masochism mass psychosis in, 43, 44 matriarchy in, 47, 60 mock-heroism in, 46 the oedipal complex in, 47, 49, 51, 56, 58–60 primitivism in, 44, 46, 55–7, 60 sadomasochism in, 18, 44, 50–1, 59, 60, 62 symbolic castration in, 44, 48, 49–51, 53, 58 taphephobia in, 18, 43, 44–52, 56–8, 64 and the uncanny, 18, 43, 44–52, 56–7, 58, 64, see also uncanny Hollier, Denis, 29–30 home modern, 18, 23, 43, 45 traditional meaning of, 44 homosexuality, see under Zombie homosocial, 53, 98, 108, 142–3 horror fiction, 1, 10, 20, 127, 131, 135 Huet, Marie-Hélène, 130–1 human, 5, 15, 185 Hunter, Shelagh, 136 Hurley, Kelly, 147 Hutchings, Peter, 18 hyperreality, 19, 23, 94, 105, see under American Psycho hysterical narrative, 175, see under Zombie ideology, 2, 65, 69, 75–7, 79–80, 83, 89, 93, 100, 103, 107, 127, 154, 160, 170 and capitalism, 66, 72–4, 79, 83, 104–6 as discourse, 68 as dominant, 67–8, 84, 159 see under monster Irigaray, Luce, 186 irreal, 11, 82, 90, 178, see under monster Jameson, Fredric, 72

226 Index Kant, Immanuel, 15 Katsavos, Anna, 164 Kauffman, Linda S., 83 Kellner, Douglas, 70 Kincaid, James, 20, 129 Kirby, Vicky, 186 Kosinski, Jerzy, 79 Kristeva, Julia, 2, 9–10, 17, 20, 123, 182, see also abject Kuhn, Reinhard, 127 Lacan, Jacques, 2, 6, 9, 10, 66–7, 148, 183 lack, 10–11, see under maternal language, 6, 9, 45, see under ‘Blood’, monster Laqueur, Thomas, 25 law, 6, 43, 57, 66, 74, 89, 91, 98, 101, see under body Law-of-the-Father, 2, 9, 14, 98, 105, 107, 111, 135, 183 legendary psychasthenia, see psychasthenia Lessing, Doris, 20, 107–9, 126–143 The Memoirs of a Survivor, 141–2 see also The Fifth Child Lobanov-Rotovsky, Sergei, 84 Luckhurst, Roger, 64 Lyotard, Jean-François, 178–80 Magrs, Paul, 168 Martin, Sara, 172 masculinity, 9–10, 18, see also HighRise, Nights at the Circus, the Wasp Factory masochism, see under High-Rise maternal and death, 26, 39, 41 as lack, 9–12 as monstrous, see under monster as other, 57 McCabe, Patrick: The Butcher Boy, 173 McElroy, Bernard, 173 Mcgrath, Patrick, 20–1, 145–58, 173, see also ‘Angel’ McHale, Brian, 166 Medusa, 13, 78, 170 metaphor, 9, 21, 171, 176, 177–8, 180, 185, see under ‘Blood’

metapsychology, 109–11, 113 Metz, Christian, 50 Metzstein, Margery, 182 Michael, Magali Cornier, 164 Mitchell, Juliet, 108 monster, 1–22, 36, 39, 81, 83, 87, 89, 91, 96, 97, 100, 103, 106 and the body, 2, 13, 14, 20, 21, 25, 142, 144–74, see also Nights at the Circus and children, 19–20, 107–43 and deformity, 14, 20, 140, 144 and femininity, 9–11, 13, 14, 20, 61, 146, 172 and ideology, 5, 83, 104 as intimate stranger, 1, 4–5, 17, 67, 127 as irreal, 8, 9 and language, 2–4, 21, 175–87 and liminality, 9, 12 and the maternal, 12, 25 as metaphor and metonym, 4–5 meaning of, 4 as non-conformity to the normative, 20, 140, 142, 144, 159, 160, 187 as other, 1, 185 as paradox, 2–5, 8, 45 as socio-cultural construction, 1 and space, see under space, see also American Psycho, Hawksmoor, High-Rise as surplus, 7–8, 12, 150 and the Symbolic order, 6, 16, 140, see also Symbolic order and textuality, 108, 145, 146, 153, 175–6 Moretti, Franco, 5, 167 Morgado, Margarida, 119 Morris, David, 31 Morrison, Toni: Beloved, 127, 174 Mulvey, Laura, 12 murder, 32–3 as aesthetics, 32 as intimate knowledge, 34–5, 36, 38 unsolved, 32–3 victim of, 33 see also American Psycho, Hawksmoor

Index 227 Name-of-the-Father, 9, 57, 98, 105, 107, 115, 135, 183 narcissism, see under Zombie New Historicism, 18 Nietzsche, Fredric, 35, 37 Nights at the Circus as bildungsroman, 146, 162, 166–7 clowns in, 161–2 comparison with The Passion of New Eve, 169–70 the deformed body in, 146, 159–63, 166 the fantastic body in, 146, 159, 163–6 the grotesque in, 146, 159, 163, 166–70, 171 gaze in, 145, 161, 165, 167–8 love in, 168–9 as a literary fantastic, 165–66 the literal body in, 164–5 magic realism in, 165–6 masculinity in, 146, 164 the New Woman in, 146, 163, 167 and performances of monstrosity, 159, 162, 163, 165, 167 as postmodern allegory, 166 and the power of writing, 170–3 see also Angela Carter, monster Norris, Christopher, 176 Nussbaum, Felicity, 160 Oates, Joyce Carol, 19, 87–106 Expensive People, 86 see also Zombie objet petit a, 8–9, 67, 91, 96–7, 103 Olalquiaga, Celeste, 77 Onega, Susana, 26 Ovid, 92 Palahniuk, Chuck: Fight Club, 77–8 Pender, Stephen, 160–1 Pepper, Stephen, 180 Peterson, Shirley, 160–1 Petley, Julian, 132 phallus, 152, 163–5, 170 phantom, 57, 113–4 Piaget, Jean, 110, 117–9 Pifer, Ellen, 139, 141

Pike, Burton, 23 Pile, Steve, 34 pornography, 77, 79 postmodernism, 72, 84, 86, 154, 157–8, 179, see under space prostitutes, 25–6, 38 psychasthenia, 63, see under American Psycho psychoanalysis, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 16, 17–8, 39–42, 64, 79, 107, 135, 139, 143, 155, 157, 164, 183 psychosis, 23, 66, 73–77, 84–5, 97, see under High-Rise Punter, David, 14–6, 43, 83, 165 Real, the, 8, 91, 111, 114–5, 121–2, 124, 155, 157–8, 164–5 and the Symbolic order, 13, 17, 139, 184 and reality, 6–8 and the Void, 40–1, 110, 115, 121, 123, 143, 145, 156, 157 repression, 43, 121, 123–4, 131, 183 Richter, David, 42 Roof, Judith, 6, 9, 183 sadomasochism, see under High-Rise Sage, Victor, 113, 123 Sawday, Jonathan, 78–9 Scarry, Elaine, 184 Schmidt, Ricarda, 168 Schoene-Harwood, Berthold, 122 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 143 Seltzer, Mark, 72, 83 semiotic, 10, 12 serial killer, 16, 18–19, 65–106, 112, see also American Psycho, Zombie sexuality, 113, 163–4 as construction, 99, 113, 115–6 Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein, 18, 20, 142–3, 144, 175 Showalter, Elaine, 146 simulacra and simulacrum, 16, 19, see also Jean Baudrillard, see under American Psycho Simpson, Philip, 101 Sinclair, Iain, 22 Silverman, Kaja, 67–8, 105, 157

228 Index space, 18–9, 22, 24, 30, 33, 56, 66, 76, 90, 103, 145 and monstrosity, 16, 17–8, 23, 24, 43, 45, 65 and postmodernity, 22, 65, 66, 104–5 Spargo, Tamsin, 148, 151 Stafford, Barbara Maria, 166 Stewart, Susan, 162–3 Stoker, Bram: Dracula, 5, 18, 147 sublime, 22, 32, 62 and relation to monstrosity, 30, 36 and the postmodern, 178–80 see under Hawksmoor subjectivity, 5, 8, 19 Symbolic order, 1, 6–7, 9–17, 55, 57, 59–60, 64, 103, 107, 110–1, 115–6, 123–4, 127, 139, 142, 143, 183 and relation to capitalism, 105 and relation to the monster, see under monster and relation to patriarchy, 9, 172 as mechanism, 7, 11–3, 16, 19, 20–1, 145, 156–7 Tanner, Laura E., 75 taphephobia, see under High-Rise Theweleit, Klaus, 97–8 Thing, the (das ting), 8 Todorov, Tzvetan, 127–9 Torok, Maria, 107, 109–11 trauma, 2, 9, 13, 19, 35, 41, 108, 110–1, 133, 145, 161, 185, see under Void, The Wasp Factory Tropp, Martin, 30 uncanny, 13, 23, 28, 30, 45, see under High-Rise unconscious, 23–4, 56, 65, 129–32 and history, 17, 22 vampire, 5, 147–8 Vidler, Anthony, 45, 57 Viegener, Matias, 19 void, the, 6, 11, 18, 48, 57–8, 67, 79–80, 103, 115, 117, 127, 179 dilemma in representation, 64 and/as death, 39–1

and the Real, see under the Real and relation to trauma, 2, 7, 12, 13, see also trauma, see under The Wasp Factory Warhol, Andy, 101 The Wasp Factory, 20, 107–26, 142–3 castrated men in, 114–5, 120–1 fear of the feminine in, 107, 112–4, 116, 120–1, 123 games in, 110, 112–3 catastrophe games, 207, 116, 117 godgames, 118–20, 122, 124 as negotiation of cultural meanings, 119 stages in, 117 hypermasculinity (machismo) in, 107, 112, 116, 119, 120, 121, 125 narrative closure in, 108, 124–6 relation to Frankenstein, 142–3 secret in, 107, 109–17, 124 symbolism of, 122–3, 126 trauma in, 107, 109–17, 121, 124, see also trauma, see under void violence of rhetoric in, 116 Weldon, Fay: The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, 172 Wells, H.G.: The Island of Dr Moreau, 5 whiteness, 98–9, 104, 106 Williams, David, 20, 160, 178 Wilson, R. Rawdon, 118 Winterson, Jeanette: Sexing the Cherry, 72 Wirth-Nasher, Hana, 32 Yelin, Louis, 136 Young, Robert J.C., 105 ˇ izˇek, Slavoj, 2, 7, 8, 12, 41, 57–8, 64, Z 70–1, 79–80, 83, 96, 111, 139–40, 184 Zombie, 19, 65–67, 87–106, 107 alter-ego in, 94–5 the art of zombification in, 66, 88, 91, 100–3 cannibalism in, 99, 103 the cosmic void in, 67, 100–102 and the failure of the double, 94

Index 229 gaze in, 65, 91, 96, 98, 101 Haitian zombie in, 100 heterotopia in, 65, 66–7, 88–91, 93, 98, 103 as mirror, 89, 93 as liminal position, 89 and the gaze, 90, 92 and spatiality, 88–9 psychic, 88–9 and homosexuality, 88, 89, 95–98, 99 as pathological, 67, 87, 95, 97–98

relation to narcissism, 67, 91, 96, 142 as hysterical narrative, 87–8 narcissism in, 19, 67, 91–8, 100, 101 as self preservation, 93, 94, 97 racial stereotyping in, 67, 98–100 relation to Frankenstein, 142–3 time in, 90, 102 zombie-slaves in, 19, 67, 89, 92, 95, 101, 142, 164 see also Joyce Carol Oates, gaze

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