The Abject of Desire: The Aestheticization of the Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature and Culture. (Genus: Gender in Modern Culture)

The Abject of Desire GENUS: Gender in Modern Culture 9 Russell West-Pavlov (Berlin) Jennifer Yee (Oxford) Frank Lay (...

Author: Konstanze Kutzbach | Monika Mueller

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The Abject of Desire

GENUS: Gender in Modern Culture 9 Russell West-Pavlov (Berlin) Jennifer Yee (Oxford) Frank Lay (Cologne) Sabine Schülting (Berlin)

The Abject of Desire The Aestheticization of the Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature and Culture

Edited by

Konstanze Kutzbach and Monika Mueller

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007

Illustration cover: Monika Mueller Cover design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2264-5 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in the Netherlands

CONTENTS

Introduction Konstanze Kutzbach and Monika Mueller

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On the Matter of Abjection Hanjo Berressem

19

in

49

The Bhibhitsa Rasa in Anglophone Indian Cultural Discourse: The Repugnant and Distasteful at the Level of Gender, Race, and Caste Nilufer Bharucha

69

The Gothic-Grotesque of Haunted: Joyce Carol Oates’s Tales of Abjection Susana Araújo

89

“Now we know that gay men are just men after all”: Abject Sexualities in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead Dorothea Fischer-Hornung

107

Consuming the Body: Literal and Metaphorical Cannibalism in Peter Greenaway’s Films Tatjana Pavlov

129

Shape-Shifters from the Wilderness: Werewolves Roaming the Twentieth Century Andrea Gutenberg

149

Queer Transformations: Renegotiating the Contemporary Anglo-American Lesbian Fiction Paulina Palmer

Abject

The Two-…, One-…, None-Sex Model: The Flesh(-)Made Machine in Herman Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” and J. G. Ballard’s Crash Konstanze Kutzbach

181

Fear, Melancholy, and Loss in the Poetry of Stevie Smith Ruth Baumert

197

American Environmentalism and Encounters with the Abject: T. Coraghessan Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth Sylvia Mayer

221

Abject Cannibalism: Anthropophagic Poetics in Conrad, White, and Tennant – Towards a Critique of Julia Kristeva’s Theory of Abjection Russell West

235

“A Wet Festival of Scarlet”: Poppy Z. Brite’s (Un)Aesthetics of Murder Monika Mueller

255

Interior Landscapes: Anatomy Art and the Work of Gunther von Hagens Alison Goeller

271

Violence, Transgression, and the Fun Factor: The Imagined Atrocities of Will Self’s My Idea of Fun Frank Lay

291

Notes on Contributors

309

Introduction

Konstanze Kutzbach and Monika Mueller The reception of the unaesthetic as a category which derives from and also influences aesthetic norms has been covered extensively in its historical perspective by criticism. Clive Cazeaux gives an overview of the changing implications of the term “aesthetic” in his introduction to The Continental Aesthetics Reader (2000). He identifies three “senses of the term” (xv) which locate it diachronically: in ancient Greek philosophy aisthesis was associated with lived and felt sensual experience as opposed to eidos, “knowledge derived from reason and intellection” (xv). It was only in the eighteenth century that the aesthetic began to be associated with (class-bound) notions of beauty and was defined as the study of “the beautiful in art” (xv). Romanticism shifted the emphasis from classicistic definitions of the aesthetic as related to the proportionally, mathematically beautiful to a valuation of individual sense impressions and artistic expression; this process is considered as the beginning of subjective autonomy and the birth of the individual. By introducing the idea that notions of the aesthetic are constructed rather than given, Immanuel Kant questioned the increasing polarization of subjective experience versus objective knowledge (see Cazeaux 2000, vxi) and paved the way for more dynamic and inclusive, yet also more contestable definitions of aesthetics. Since the borders between what is considered aesthetic or not have become negotiable and context-dependent, divergent notions of what may be defined as (un)aesthetic coexist – a tendency reflected by the articles in this collection. Providing discussions of different strategies of aestheticizing the unaesthetic by and in cultural representations, the contributions exemplify the wide range of conceptualizations of the un/aesthetic body enabled by this opening up of philosophical definitions of what is aesthetic. Criticism has drawn attention to the close connection between concepts of (gendered) identity and categories of the (un)aesthetic as, for example, Tracey Warr points out in her foreword to The Artist’s Body (2000) with regard to twentieth-century art. In cultural production, what is perceived as “disgusting” or unaesthetic is often correlated with insights into the instability and the fragmentary nature of the self: “Everything seems at risk in the experience of disgust. It is a state of alarm and emergency, an acute crisis of self-preservation”

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THE ABJECT OF DESIRE

(Menninghaus 2003, 1). By focusing on such instances of crisis, the contributions in this collection take different approaches at negotiating the aestheticization of the unaesthetic. They thereby explore identity between “[t]he rhetoric of the end of the subject […] [and] conventional notions of a subject defined as a bounded unity with a specific structure that bestows identity – a subject, in other words, that we have come to identify historically with the Cartesian subject” (Schwab 1994, 5). One critic who shows that the body takes centre stage in the ambiguous experience of disgust is Julia Kristeva, who, in her influential study about the concept of the abject/abjection, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), describes abjection as an individual and collective fear of “otherness” that surfaces in “[l]oathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung” ([1980] 1982, 2). The abject, which evokes both loathing and fascination, frightens when it manifests itself as bodily excretion because it is not the body itself, yet still a part of it. It must be expelled to keep intact the border between inside and outside and to prevent corporeal decay. It points to annihilation and meaninglessness: A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness […] now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A “something” that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. (2)

Every encounter with the abject is reminiscent of the initial abjection of the maternal body that the subject has to perform in order to acquire language and to establish the border between self and (m)other. As Ruth Baumert puts it, the mother is “coded as ‘abject’ ” (Kristeva 1982, 64) and […] must be expelled if the child is to find its own identity and take up its place in the social order – the paternal realm of the Symbolic – which is then the source of the prohibition. Here, the boundaries between self and other must be clearly drawn, especially the boundary to the mother. This means the mother-child relationship, formerly perceived as an idyllic dual relationship, is now “coded” as chaotic, a place of uncertain borders, characterized by anarchy, and must therefore be rejected (Baumert 2003, unpublished excerpt).

Kristeva describes this process of separation from the mother as “a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling” (1982, 13).

KUTZBACH AND MUELLER

9

What is expelled continues to be perceived both as attractive and as a threat to the separated self. Encounters with the abject thus jeopardize personal and collective identity because they threaten the border of the subject and are accompanied by feelings of loss and loneliness. To escape the attraction of this dangerous otherness that is represented by decay, filth, and excrement – but still signifies a “desired” dissolution of bodily boundaries because of the continuing attraction of the maternal body –, the individual must reject the abject in order to be able to define and defend the boundaries of identity. Referring to the abject and abjection as “safeguards” and “primers of my culture” (2), Kristeva’s concept suggests that this mechanism works for entire cultures as well as for individuals. In this approach to the unaesthetic, desire functions as a volatile chiffre which constitutes (gendered) subjectivity in relation to an object that is not always clearly definable as “not me”. Kristeva’s theory, which proceeds from the dyadic mother-child relationship, has been expanded into a social theory by several critics, as for example Iris Marion Young, who points out that marginalized groups, such as people of colour and homosexuals, often become the victims of a “body aesthetic that defines some groups as ugly or fearsome and produces aversive reactions in relation to members of those groups” (1990, 145). This is very pernicious since “[t]he association between groups and abject matter is socially constructed; once the link is made, however, the theory of abjection describes how these associations lock into the subject’s identities and anxieties” (145). According to Winfried Menninghaus, some of these abjected groups have engaged in “affirmative abjection” by “condemn[ing] their own cultural abjection as a repressive function of patriarchal authority, while, on the other hand, provocatively affirming their abject existence as a socially unaccommodated way of life and source of pleasure” (2003, 389). Winfried Menninghaus as well as Hanjo Berressem (in the opening article of this collection) scrutinize variations of the notion of the abject: Menninghaus speaks about a potential “falsification” of the abject, which reduces the ambivalent concept to a focus on “thematic affirmation” (Menninghaus 2003, 398). Berressem, in “On the Matter of Abjection”, also conceptualizes a modification of the original idea by distinguishing between real and faux-abjects/abjection – a distinction which, as will be elaborated, also relates to the elusiveness of the differentiation between what is considered as aesthetic/acceptable versus unaesthetic/unacceptable in contemporary culture.

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A recent example that illustrates this complex relationship between aesthetic and unaesthetic and abject and faux-abject is the case of the Cannibal of Rotenburg (or Rohtenburg, according to the title of the 2006 American movie production directed by Martin Weisz). The cannibal case points to the dynamics implied by the title of this collection of essays: the aestheticization of the unaesthetic codifies the real cannibalistic act as well as its filmic rendition. Just as the film represents a medialized aestheticization, the “real” cannibalistic act itself – thoroughly prepared, executed, and filmed as well – also entails its own staged aestheticization. The a/object of desire is thus evoked in the act of cannibalism, which ambivalently centres on the trope of the desired dead body. Moreover, it is implied in the deed’s filmic representation, in which watching the body in the act of cannibalism is accompanied by desire as much as fear. When, at the age of twelve, Armin Meiwes first started thinking about dismembering and eating a classmate, he was already motivated by the idea of obtaining emotional closeness and security through incorporation (see Knobbe and Schmalenberg 2003, 48). In 2001, he implemented his plan when he met his future “victim”, Bernd Brandes, in an online forum; Brandes offered to have his genital cut off, and Meiwes consented to perform the act and eat the body together with his victim, so that through this act of incorporation they would always be together (see Knobbe and Schmalenberg 2003, 42, 48). In a first trial Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter by the district court of Kassel and sentenced to eight and a half years in prison. This verdict was annulled by the German Federal Court of Justice, and a second verdict pronounced by the Frankfurt district court in May 2006 ruled the deed a murder and “desecration of a corpse” and sentenced Meiwes to life. His defense attorney, who had pleaded that this was a case of “voluntary euthanasia”, might still appeal the decision (Badische Zeitung 2006, online). The fictionalization of the crime also made the headlines when Rohtenburg, the movie version of the Meiwes case, which was scheduled for release in March 2006, was banned in Germany after Meiwes claimed that the movie violates his privacy rights (see Landler 2006, online). As to the media attention, it is striking that both the real crime and the film have been perceived and treated as manifestations of unprecedented cruelty, even though there are criminal offences as well as filmic representations (splatter films or even snuff movies, the latter of which also constitute a criminal offence) which are more brutal and explicit, and which represent a more severe transgression of moral


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taboos, too. What makes this a special case is the fact that sexual offences are usually not based on mutual consent, a circumstance which is corroborated by the difficulty in finding legal categories that could define Meiwes’s deed appropriately. A possible explanation as to why the real cannibalistic act and its filmic representation have been received as so extraordinarily unsettling may be found in one of the central arguments of Hanjo Berressem’s article, namely in the distinction between the real abject, which is (perceived as) fundamentally threatening, and the culturally mediated, and thus less intense faux-abject. In contrast to faux-abjects, which work on the basis of a “juxtaposition of an official symbolic order and its disruption” (44) and which are the subject’s and culture’s “cultural others”, real abjects are disruptive material forces that are operative in the subject and in culture. […] There is a fundamental, inherent disruption to abjects that points beyond cultural abjections. Abjects drain life out of organic systems. Foul things tend to be abjects, for instance, because in foulness, an abundance of life is rotting from within. (44)

The cannibal’s deed, as we suggest, shares features of the real abject inasmuch as it goes beyond a mere disruption of the symbolic order, as for example the lack of appropriate legal discourse shows; the cannibal and his deed cannot be relegated to the realm of the what is other for the subject and culture. It is so disconcerting and intense because we (as the recipients of the news or the audience of the film) are denied received and distinctly opposable cultural categories of the symbolic order because discourses of gender (male versus female or, by implication, self versus other), legal discourse, (perpetrator versus victim) and physiological and ethical discourses (life versus death) are permanently upset and renegotiated. The disruptive material impact of this abject act of incorporation based on mutual consent, in which we are perpetually denied an object that can be directly opposed to the subject, thus comes to represent the ultimate trope of abject horror. This material impact of the abject and of its counterpart, the fauxabject, is what Hanjo Berressem explores in the opening article to this collection, “On the Matter of Abjection”. He investigates cultural production between the materiality of the abject on the one hand and faux-abjection as “the cultural marking of events|objects as disgusting” (19) on the other, presenting John Waters’s movie Pink Flamingos and Samuel Delany’s short story “On the Unspeakable” as examples which negotiate this ambivalent intersection. As Berressem argues, Pink Flamingos incorporates a wide range of abjects/abjection

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as its epilogue extends the film’s representational framing beyond cultural abjection towards abject materiality, while Delany’s “On the Unspeakable” succeeds in making abjects speakable and readable. Departing from the concept of the abject, different interpretations, which are based on conceptual distinctions between different modes of abject/abjection (affirmative/faux abjection), will provide the conceptional as well as structural basis for the categorization of the contributions in this book. Centring on representations of Anglophone culture from the twentieth century, the articles address the aestheticization of the unaesthetic through a range of different topics and genres and are arranged into three sections according to a possible classification with regard to the categories referred to above. The articles in the first part negotiate the aestheticization of the unaesthetic by presenting works that put the abject in the service of affirmative abjection which generates the faux-abject by juxtaposing the “official symbolic order and its disruption” (Berressem, 44). The second part features examples that deal with the aestheticization of the unaesthetic at the intersection between real abject and faux-abject, providing a combination of both modes. The third part contains contributions which look at works that emphasize the characteristics of the real abject as “disruptive material forces that are operative in the subject and in culture” (44). Yet, this classification, which presumes a predominant influence of either one of the two modes, conceives of neither the aesthetic/unaesthetic nor the real/faux-abject as discrete categories. The articles in the first section are connected through their focus on affirmative abjection. While the articles by Paulina Palmer, Nilufer Bharucha, and Susana Araújo trace the abject by stressing its function as a mode of empowerment which calls for personal and collective agency, Dorothea Fischer-Hornung’s and Tatjana Pavlov’s texts reference affirmative abjection by exposing the contradictions inherent in hegemonic structures. In her analysis of People in Trouble by Sarah Schulman and Affinity by Sarah Waters, Paulina Palmer discusses the authors’ strategies of deconstructing and renegotiating the lesbian’s (abject) role in American and British society. Her article demonstrates that while Schulman evokes the faux-abject by rendering a realistic picture of the instrumentalization of the homosexual abject in the context of the 1980s New York AIDS crisis, Waters does so by recoding the lesbian abject against the backdrop of generic literary conventions of the gothic. She thus examines representations of the lesbian abject in its socio-political context and traces its pejorative implications and stereotypes and, by criticizing the coding of lesbians


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as monstrous and abject, she aims at a resignification of gender codes in order to establish lesbian agency. Nilufer Bharucha shows how the authors of two Indian plays, Girish Karnad in The Fire and the Rain and Mahesh Dattani in Dance Like a Man, criticize cultural practices that label dancing as abject. In this tradition dancing is read in light of the concept of Bhibitsa Rasa (disgust that arises out of seeing what is unwholesome). According to Bharucha, both authors call for a redefinition of received notions of what is repugnant and distasteful (pure/impure, aesthetic/unaesthetic) with regard to caste and gender. Her reading of Fire and Rain shows that the play questions traditions of purity and impurity by correlating the “disgusting act” of acting to the sexual defilement of women and the loss of caste; her analysis of Dance like a Man correlates the “transgressive and defiling act” of dancing to deviant sexualities, thereby revising, by implication, pejorative images of homosexuality and prostitution. The grotesque female body of the gothic heroine in Joyce Carol Oates’s short story collection Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque is at the centre of Susana Araújo’s analysis. She argues that Oates’s rendering of the gothic-grotesque gives insight into the “veiled, regulated, and coded” (104) lives of women in contemporary American society. Oates’s gothic narratives ultimately critique such social representations of femininity in the gothic tradition. Since Oates questions conventional constructions of femininity through documenting female victimization, her resignification of the abject body can be read as a faux-abject instrument of empowerment. Dorothea Fischer-Hornung investigates why Leslie Marmon Silko, herself a representative of a minority, in The Almanac of the Dead presents her Native American protagonists as violent, repulsive homosexuals. By focusing on the bloody rituals in which Silko’s Native American protagonists engage, she shows that Silko aims at deconstructing the perverted European (American) values grounded in the Law of the Father. She comes to the conclusion that Silko, by reversing the gaze and by mirroring what the West considers barbaric in terms of race and gender, foregrounds the destructiveness and corruptive force of the patriarchal colonizers and thereby alters established connotations of what is considered abject by society. Tatjana Pavlov analyzes how film director Peter Greenaway instrumentalizes anthropophagy in order to criticize hegemonical structures such as the religious establishment, patriarchy, and consumerism. She argues that in his movies he uses cannibalism as a metaphor of the devouring nature of Western consumer society

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founded on patriarchy and shows that Greenaway, through ingenious intertextual references to the Bible, mythology, and English drama, employs anthropophagy in order to renegotiate traditional hierarchies between subject and object, consumer and commodity, and men and women. The contributions in the second section of this collection present arguments that are conceptionally located at the intersection of real and faux-abject(s)/-ion. Gutenberg’s and Kutzbach’s articles take a historical approach towards figurations of the unaesthetic and thus cover primary sources whose representations of the unaesthetic between faux- and real abjection are diachronically structured. The articles by Baumert, Mayer, West, and Mueller emphasize the synchronic dimension of this distinction. Andrea Gutenberg’s reading presents the figure of the werewolf from a historical perspective, showing that the werewolf figure goes beyond an affirmative social category. Despite the fact that especially twentieth-century werewolves have also been appropriated in the service of affirmative abjection, “the changing normative impact of werewolf narratives and their tendency to subvert contemporary norms manifests itself in a shift from the logic of moral transgression and punishment to uncertainty and undecidable moral issues” (175), as Gutenberg claims. While the earlier representations of werevolves tend to reflect an opposition of the symbolic order and deviations from it, the later ones may be “[s]een against the contemporary cultural background of revised notions of the body and the subject, namely as permeable, instable, and performative” (178). Konstanze Kutzbach analyzes implications of physical annihilation and dysfunctional bodies as tropes of the unaesthetic in Melville’s short story “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” and J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash, and relates these works to different concepts of gender and body such as the nineteenth-century two-sex model and a postmodern variation of the one-sex model, respectively. This is correlated with a progression from a metaphorization which focuses on the social implications of (faux-)abjection within the cultural matrix of the nineteenth century to a twentieth-century representation of the abject as featuring the universal “anonymity of ‘a death’ ” (Berressem, 44). Ruth Baumert’s analysis focuses on the poet Stevie Smith, who saw herself in a socially abject and ambivalent position and used poetry to come to terms with social stigmatization as well as her own melancholia. Baumert traces this strategy with regard to three aspects: the status of the speaker, poetic form (style and language), and subject


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matter. On the one hand, she reads the abject in Smith’s poetry as a strategic device to give voice to female concerns by pointing up pejorative implications and stereotypes about women. On the other hand, her autobiographical poetry also reflects the impossibility of such a strategic approach due to the highly contradictory workings of the abject, which often bring about death and annihilation rather than salvation. Baumert’s reading thus places Smith’s poetry at the intersection of the strategic faux-abject and the direct and uncompromising abject. In her article on T. C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth, Sylvia Mayer observes that the ecological catastrophe described in the novel will ultimately cause the dissolution of all life. Mayer’s reading indicates that (faux-)abjection serves as a metaphor for showing the effects of man-made ecological catastrophe. Via his protagonist’s struggle for male identity within the framework of American environmentalism, Boyle investigates how deteriorating environmental conditions attack the human self. As the ecological catastrophe advances, the metaphorical function of the abject loses importance since the real abject – represented by the ultimate and uncompromising death of nature – has no (metaphorical) function. Since the forces of nature are beyond human control, individualized death is subsumed under an anonymous and universalized death as nature and humankind are “rotting from within”. By tracing the presentation of cannibalism along the lines of gender and civilization in selected works by Joseph Conrad, Patrick White, Jeanette Winterson, and Emma Tennant, Russell West pursues an analysis of how established dichotomies of meaning are inscribed and reproduced to varying degrees. Whereas in Tennant, for example, distinctions such as “friend and foe, family and foreigner” (244), are absorbed into “a single regime of killing” (245) by a warrior culture, the works by Conrad and White share characteristics of what could be called faux-abject as they attempt to “draw cannibalism into the realm of the social” (241). West’s argument suggests yet another example of reading the abject between the position of real abject (as a visceral reaction) and faux-abject (as the social projection of cannibalism), and it ends with a critical revision of Kristeva’s theory of the abject. Monika Mueller’s reading of Poppy Z. Brite’s extremely disturbing Exquisite Corpse argues that by positioning herself within a long tradition of philosophical thought on violence (represented by Edmund Burke, Thomas de Quincey, and Georges Bataille), Brite focuses on violence and disgust to pursue an aestheticization of the unaesthetic. In her novel, she fictionalizes the real abject – “life

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rotting from within” – represented by reality-based serial murders and cannibalistic acts; as implied in Mueller’s reading, she instrumentalizes the real abject for her artistic agenda and turns it into a faux-abject that has an aesthetic rather than a socially affirmative purpose. The closing articles by Alison Goeller and Frank Lay reflect yet another shift in focus, as their discussions of the aestheticization of the unaesthetic evoke conceptualizations of the real abject, which are not clearly opposable to symbolic concepts within the cultural matrix as they are “disturbing on their own ground” (Berressem, 46). Thus, “abjects escape a full (counter)politicization […] because they ignore the political, working instead on a directly a-personal, affective, and thus less easily contained level” (45). Alison Goeller focuses on how the work of the anatomist and body artist Gunter von Hagens calls into question stable notions of (gendered) identity. She investigates how von Hagens’s depersonalization and degendering of flayed, dead bodies, some of which can no longer be identified as male or female, transforms individual deaths into “the anonymity of ‘a death’ ” (Berressem, 44) and serves as a source of anxiety. As her reading implies, the particularity of the faux-abject is here extended to the universal scope of the real abject. Frank Lay’s analysis of Will Self’s My Idea of Fun also focuses on such instances of the abject that are not understandable as acts of opposition within a cultural matrix. As Lay points out, Self’s protagonist Ian Wharton murders and tortures out of boredom, but fails to enjoy his transgressive acts: “the novel plays […] with the idea of transgression as liberating […], but in the end there is clearly no liberation in sight, only plain addiction” (306-307). Thus, acts of violence and abjection cease to have a social function or “use value”. As Self’s novel corroborates Kristeva’s thesis that “the horror of the abject lies chiefly in its failure to function as a forbidden ‘other’ ” (301), it reflects the end of representation in pure horror. The contributions in this collection reflect a variety of approaches that aestheticize the unaesthetic and are situated on a continuum from social abjection to the real abject. The different manifestations of the abject/abjection relate to a negotiable and flexible sign system within which they produce various representations of gender between conservative and progressive approaches. As different as these representations may be, they all reference identity as dependent on an unequivocally dialectic relationship of fear and desire: the German cannibal case and the ensuing discussion once more testify to the dialectic between a human desire for more and more powerful stimuli


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in times where taboos are increasingly suspended, and a return to tradition and conservative values which safeguard our boundaries. As Colin MacCabe states with reference to Georges Bataille: “[S]exuality is constructed from taboos and to abolish taboos is to abolish desire (MacCabe 2001, xv).

Works Cited Badische Zeitung Online. 2006. “Lebenslang für einen Lustmord“. 10 May 2006. http://www.bz-online.de/popup/nachrichten/welt/54,51-9503197.html (accessed 25 June 2006). Baumert, Ruth. 2003. Unpublished excerpt from “Fear, Melancholy, and Loss in the Poetry of Stevie Smith” for The Abject of Desire: The Aestheticization of the Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature and Culture, edited by Konstanze Kutzbach and Monika Mueller. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Cazeaux, Clive. 2002. The Continental Aesthetics Reader. London: Routledge. Knobbe, Martin, and Detlev Schmalenberg. 2003. “Der Kannibale”. Stern, 24 July, 41-54. Kristeva, Julia. [1980] 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Landler, Mark. 2006. “Cannibal Wins Ban on Film”. The New York Times, March 4, online. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/04/movies/MoviesFeatures/04cann.html? ex=1299128400&en=5b5832a0b744895a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rs s (accessed 16 April 2006). MacCabe, Colin. 2001. “Introduction”. In Eroticism, Georges Bataille. [1962] 2001, vii-xvi. London: Penguin. Menninghaus, Winfried. [1999] 2003. Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, translated by Howard Eiland and Joel Golb. New York: State University of New York Press. Schwab, Gabriele. 1994. Subjects without Selves: Transitional Texts in Modern Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Warr, Tracy, ed. 2005. Kunst und Körper, translated by Uli Nickel: Berlin: Phaidon Press Limited. Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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On the Matter of Abjection

Hanjo Berressem a small green frog … He didn’t jump; I crept closer … He was a very small frog with wide, dull eyes. And just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin emptied and drooped … He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football … Soon, part of his skin … lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water: it was a monstrous and terrifying thing … I had read about the giant water bug … It seizes a victim with [his] legs … and paralyzes it with enzymes injected during a vicious bite … through the puncture shoot the poisons that dissolve the victim’s muscles and bones and organs – all but the skin – and through it the giant water bug sucks out the victim’s body, reduced to a juice … The frog I saw was being sucked by a giant water bug. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

indecent exposures

pink flamingos

John Waters’s film Pink Flamingos (1972) is probably one of the most comprehensive and at the same time one of the most entertaining introductions to the world of abjects and abjection (terms that I will use in the first case to highlight the materiality of what is normally called “the abject” and in the second case to differentiate the production of disgust from “abjection”, the cultural marking of events|objects as disgusting). In fact, Pink Flamingos provides an almost complete lexicon of abjects|abjection, stringing a number of increasingly revolting scenes that centre on gluttony, vomiting, spitting, sodomy, voyeurism, exhibitionism, masturbation, rape, incest, murder and cannibalism along a plot that follows the lethal contest between Divine and the Marbles for the title of “the filthiest people alive”. In terms of a logics of abjects|abjection, three of these scenes are of particular interest. The first one, in which Divine buys a raw steak that she keeps squeezed between her thighs for the rest of the day, introduces the close relation between abjects and the material realm of flesh|meat. In the second one, which addresses the project to make even the most intimate and private spaces uninhabitable through abjection, Divine and her son cover the interior of the Marbles’ home, from beds to banisters and from couches to cutlery, with saliva

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(symptomatically, the movie’s production company is called “Saliva Films”). The movie’s epilogue, finally, pushes abjection beyond the level of the representational logic that had up until then framed and thus economized it. Coming after the apotheosis of physical abjection into a metaphysical concept that ends the movie – Divine has executed the Marbles and has declared “I am God” (something her name had suggested all along) – it refers abjection back to the level of pure physics. It is a moment of abject verité, shot without cut to ensure that, as much as one would want to, one cannot read it as either fictional or as a special e|affect, that documents Divine eating fresh dog excrement. In light of these scenes, Pink Flamingos is not only a preview of coming repulsions, but, more importantly, an introduction to a material logic of abjects|abjections. Like many other works of abject art, it links the abject directly to the corporeal realm. Not only are all of its scenes organized around the body and its apertures, most of them involve directly the flow of corporeal matter, such as semen, vomit, saliva, blood, or excrement. Before I consider this material logic in more detail, however, I will delineate the Lacanian topologics (a term I use to denote a structural logic that is inseparable from a specific topology), which are the default logics of the abject not only because Jacques Lacan introduced the term into psychoanalysis in the first place, but also because Julia Kristeva, who developed the term into a fully-fledged theoretical reference, remains faithful to these topologics.

abject

space

For Lacanian psychoanalysis, abjects are things|events in the face of which the subject experiences absolute dread. The excessive intensity of this experience is directly related to the topologics of abjects, which differs from that of objects, which are by definition safely distanced and thus separated from the subject. In the visual field, these separations proceed along specific lines of vision. The logic of the sublime, for instance, which is in many ways the abject’s other, is measured along such spectacular lines because the idea of sublimity can only arise in the subject when it is not too near to the material object that triggers the idea (it must be at a safe distance) but also not too far away from it (it must be near enough to be affected by it). Abjects, in contrast, are experienced, much like traumatic events – if Lacan defines trauma as a “missed encounter with the real”. [The

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function of the tuché, of the Real as an encounter – the encounter in so far as it may be missed – first presented itself in the history of psychoanalysis in a form that was in itself already enough to arouse our attention, that of the trauma (Lacan 1978, 55).] One might think of the encounter with an abject as a “direct encounter with the real” – as|in an unbearable nearness that does not allow for the distancing|separation that is the prerequisite for objectification. Not only does the abject lie “quite close” (Kristeva 1982, 14), it actually “emanates” from a curiously ambiguous place that overturns the very differentiation between inside and outside, “an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable” (Kristeva 1982, 1; my italics). Too close to the subject to be experienced as either sublime, beautiful or ugly objects, abjects cannot be “assimilated” (14) and thus they cannot be contained by aesthetic (or also anti-aesthetic) parameters. They are never merely tasteless or ugly for instance. As the final scene of Pink Flamingos shows, they are positively disgusting. The fact that abjects are not objective, however, does not mean that they are immaterial. It merely means that abjects cannot be contained within the registers of the subject’s psychic reality – unlike objects which are, as the subject’s reflection or “other”, always already integrated into the subject’s psychic reality and its representational logics|economics and thus always already domesticated|humanized. Actually, abjects are extremely, one might even say excessively, material. Not only are they material things|events, they also relate to physical|material realities, such as life’s uneconomical disruptions and ultimately to death as the end of the subject’s material economy. As Kristeva notes, they are related to “an archaic force, on the near side of separation, unconscious, tempting us to the point of losing our differences, our speech, our life; to the point of aphasia, decay, opprobrium, and death” (107). Lacan thinks of the subject’s psychic reality as spread out over the surface of a projective plane, one of the many figures of unilateral space used in the Lacanian topologics [as when he notes that the subject’s psychic reality, as described by his ‘Schema R,’ is not that of bilateral space but that of a “projective plan [sic]” (1977, 223)]. The topological conceit of a unilateral surface allows Lacan to conceptualize the imaginary and the symbolic surfaces as twisted into each other, with the Real functioning as the agency that sutures the two but is “excluded in” the topology only as the fundamental cut|twist that brings this topology about. [In semiotic terms, the


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Lacanian topologics relates the signified and the signifier through the exclusion of the referent.] In these topologics, abjects, as nonobjective, material things|events – as Kristeva notes, “the abject has only one quality of the object”, namely “that of being opposed to I” (1982, 1) – lie at the threshold of the Real, as something that “resists symbolization absolutely” (Lacan 1988b, 66) and the spectacular Imaginary.

[diagram of the “projective plane”] If Lacan’s linguistic turn ensures precisely that psychic space is closed off from physical space, abjects, in edging with the Real, disrupt the sutured topologics of psychic space and with it, the linguistic logics of an unconscious that is “structured like a language” (Lacan 1978, 20). This is why, when dealing with abjects, we are no longer within the sphere of the unconscious [which would be the unilateral space of the imaginary|symbolic] but at the limit of primal repression [which is situated at the threshold of the imaginary|real] [...]. There is an effervescence of object and sign – not of desire but of intolerable significance; they tumble over into [sublime] non-sense or the impossible real. (11; my brackets)

[In the Lacanian topologics, the cut between the Real and the Imaginary is directly symmetrical to the cut that defines the border between the Symbolic and the Real, at which Lacan positions the sublime, which means that in Lacanian topology the abject and the sublime border on one another. Kristeva notes in particular the similarity of abjects and the sublime in relation to non-objectivity: [I]f the abject is already a wellspring of sign for a non-object, on the edges of primal repression, one can understand its skirting the somatic symptom on the one hand and sublimation on the other [...]. In the symptom, the abject permeates me, I become abject. Through sublimation, I keep it under control. The abject is edged with the sublime. It is not the same moment on the journey, but the same subject and speech bring them into being. For the sublime has no object either (1982, 11; my italics).

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The “carnival’s semantic ambivalences”, for instance, “pair the high and the low, the sublime and the abject” (135).

In the Lacanian topologics, both the sublime and the abject are related to the “weight of meaninglessness” (2) of the Real. Once, this meaninglessness is approached regressively through material fragmentation [the corps morcelé] and once progressively through the “stupid” traumatic kernel that resides within the symbolic order. In fact, the sublime can only be thrown into relief on the background of the abject and vice versa. As soon as I perceive it, as soon as I name it, the sublime triggers a spree of disseminating perceptions and words that expand memory boundlessly [...]. Not at all short of but always with and through perception and words, the sublime is a something added that expands us [...] and causes us to be both here, as dejects, and there, as others and sparkling. A divergence, an impossible bounding. Everything missed, joy – fascination. (Kristeva 1982, 12)

If both denote borders to the realm of materiality, then abjects point towards the sensation of a material dissolution through a regression to a state before the Imaginary, while the sublime points towards a sense of spiritual dissolution through a progression to a realm beyond the Symbolic.] Topologically, then, the dreadfulness of abjects lies in that they fundamentally disturb the subject’s psychic space. Designating simultaneously a “border” (3), a space of “in-between” (4), and something that turns the subject “inside out” (3), they introduce a fundamental ambiguity and ambivalence into the subject’s world that threatens it in its very constitution as a coherent psychic aggregate.

abject

time

The abject chronologics is easily as ambiguous as the abject topologics. Although abjects are directly related to a “driven” time before the constitution of the ego, they simultaneously designate a

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stage that leads up to this constitution. As Kristeva notes, “the abject might then appear as the most fragile […] the most archaic […] sublimation of an “object” still inseparable from drives” (12). It is in fact “for the benefit of the ego or its detriment, drives, whether life drives or death drives, serve to correlate that ‘not yet’ ego with an ‘object’ in order to establish both of them” (14). Drives, this chronologics implies, are always already in the service of an ego, even if this ego needs as yet to be developed. In order to negotiate this chronological dilemma, Kristeva relates the abject to two subsequent versions of the ego, the first of which is a still unfinished, largely corporeal|material ego. As the ego’s main function is to create the object, it comes into existence only to the degree that it performs this function, which is why this ego “under construction” is fundamentally “uncertain, fragile, threatened, subjected just as much as its non-object to spatial ambivalence (inside/outside uncertainty) and to ambiguity of perception (pleasure/pain)” (62). As long as the object is not yet constituted, in fact, the ego remains to a large degree auto-objective. In psychoanalytic terms, this ego is the “ego of primary narcissism” for which the only outside is constituted by its own inside. As Kristeva notes, narcissism is predicated on the existence of the ego but not of an external object; we are faced with the strange correlation between an entity (the ego) and its converse (the object), which is nevertheless not yet constituted; with an “ego” in relation to a non-object. (62)

By the time that this ego has pulled itself completely out of the moat of material in-differences by creating the object as its other, and by establishing, together with that creation, the differentiation between inside and outside, it has become more and more projective|immaterial. In psychoanalytic terms, this fully constituted ego is the “ego of secondary narcissism”. According to the retroactive chronologics that define Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is invariably from the time of repression proper, which means from the time not only after the constitution of the fully constructed imaginary|ego but after the Imaginary has been reflected|twisted into the Symbolic, that the subject regresses nachtraeglich [retrospectively] to the first, fundamentally ambiguous stages of ego-formation and thus to the limit designated, in psychoanalytical terms, by primal repression.

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Because the topologic ambiguities instigated by abjects cannot be separated from these retrospective chronologics, in meetings with abjects the “unconscious” contents remain […] excluded but in a strange fashion: not radically enough to allow for a secure differentiation between subject and object, and yet clearly enough for a defensive position to be established [...]. As if the fundamental opposition were between I and Other or, in more archaic fashion, between Inside and Outside. As if such an opposition subsumed the one between Conscious and Unconscious. (Kristeva 1982, 7; my italics)

Abjects cannot reach the status of “objects o” if these are considered as imaginary|symbolic objects of desire. [When towards the end of his career, Lacan identifies the abject and the object o – “the abject […] that I have come to call my object petit a” (Lacan 1990, 21) – this has to do with his growing realism and the change in his conceptualization of the object o and of desire, which partake, by this time, more fully than before of the Real.] This means that they cannot be integrated into the subject’s libidinal economy, which pertains to the logic of desire in the Symbolic and to the logic of demand in the Imaginary. The only way to confront them is via the logic of an unspeakable and uneconomical jouissance, as a mixture of the affects of the real: want and disgust. This is why, in the Lacanian system, their only space is that of real jouissance: For, having provided itself with an alter ego, the Other […] jettisons the abject into an abominable real, inaccessible except through jouissance. It follows that jouissance alone causes the abject to exist as such. One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [...]. Violently and painfully. And, as in jouissance where the object of desire, known as object a [...] bursts with the shattered mirror where the ego gives up its image in order to contemplate itself in the Other, there is nothing either objective or objectal to the abject. It is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become the alter ego, drops so that “I” does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence. Hence a jouissance in which the subject is swallowed up but in which the Other, in return, keeps the subject from foundering by making it repugnant. One thus understands why so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims – if not its submissive and willing ones. (Kristeva 1982, 9; my italics)

It is thus the Symbolic, or, more specifically, the super-ego, that banishes abjects into the Real where they can only be enjoyed painfully and intensively. [“The sense of abjection that I experience is anchored in the superego” (15).] As in the logic of the sublime, the subject finds itself only negatively, as that which is subtracted from pure jouissance. As psychoanalysis argues, abject jouissance can only

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be reached by invert[ing] the direction of desire because “castration means that jouissance must be refused so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder (l’échelle renversée) of the Law of desire” (Lacan 1977, 324). In returning the subject to the fundamentally ambiguous space|time before and during its constitution, abjects, as themselves “inbetween”, “ambiguous” [“abjection is above all ambiguity” (Kristeva 1982, 9)] and “composite” (4), bring about de-differentiations. As in states of jouissance, for instance, in states of abjection pleasure and pain are disturbingly, even dreadfully, undifferentiated. [In this context, one of the most intriguing questions is: from what moment of organization onwards can an organism be said to feel pain, or a pleasure|pain conglomerate, rather than, say, a purely neuronal|nervous excitation caused by sudden shifts from equilibrium to disequilibrium, such as shifts in energy related to, for instance, excessively violent and intensive separations|disruptions. When, one might ask, does excessive excitation turn into trauma?] These de-differentiations fundamentally oppose abjects to the subject’s difference- and integration engines, the most complex and comprehensive of which is language. In order to protect the coherence of these difference engines against abject disturbances|dedifferentiations, the symbolic order, as the representative of these engines, installs a number of powerful taboos. [“[A]bject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture” (Kristeva 1982, 2).] One of the most important of these is the incest taboo. Prohibiting an uneconomical sexuality in which “the subject, fluctuating between inside and outside, pleasure and pain, word and deed, would find death, along with nirvana” (63-64), it protects the subject from falling into the violent, abject enjoyment [jouissance]. Although Kristeva constantly stresses the disruptions abjects cause within the subject’s psychic reality and within representational registers in general, and although she has a very ambivalent relation to the symbolic super-ego as the phallocratic agency of abjection, her work always remains within the framework of the Lacanian topologics and its retroactive chronologics. This can be felt not only in the fact that she points to the function of difference engines and to future orders that will contain the de-differentiating power of abjects by subjecting them to powerful mechanisms|strategies of exclusion, but also in the fact that the trajectories she describes invariably proceed from a logic of differentiation back to abject ambiguity and ambivalence according to the chronologics of nachtraeglichkeit

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[retrospectivity]. In the context of abject pain, for instance, the important moment for Kristeva is not so much the moment when the notion of a logic of pain emerges from a more general logic of excitation [in material terms: when the economy of various centripetal forces of coherence have become greater than the uneconomical centrifugal forces of disseminating excitations], but the moment when the pleasure|pain differentiation, and with it, differentiation in general, becomes representable. In other words, when language enters the game. If “the non-distinctiveness of inside and outside would […] be unnamable, a border passable in both directions by pleasure and pain” (61; my italics), Kristeva notes, then “naming the latter [the outside], hence differentiating them” (61; my brackets) in actual fact “amounts to introducing language, which, just as it distinguishes pleasure from pain as it does all other oppositions, founds the separation inside/outside” (61). Although Kristeva continually stresses the material origins of abjects, she invariably thinks these origins nachtraeglich [retrospective] from the position of the subject and of language as the retrospective thresholds from which abjects are theorized and negotiated. Like any psychoanalytically informed theory of the confrontation with abjects, her theory is organized around the symbolic logic of regression|repression, which means that abjects are always already contained fully within the realm of representation|differentiation precisely because they are always already the result of the threat to break it up. In fact, abjection, as a “primal sublimation”, is the very strategy to deal with that threat. Somewhat paradoxically, for psychoanalysis the abject, although it is the “boundary between nature and culture, between human and nonhuman” (75), [Freudian disgust “originates in the interstices – in fact as the fracture – of nature and civilization” (Menninghaus 2003, 190)] is always already the result of the cultural operation of abjection. In other words, although the process of abjection finds its origin in material processes [“There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border” (Kristeva 1982, 3); “the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be” (10).] and although “the defilement from which ritual protects us is neither sign nor matter” (73; italics in original), significance is always already “inherent in the human body” (10). Even though material processes are the objective referents of abjection, these are, like the Real, always already lost: “[T]he abject is the violence of mourning for an ‘object’ that has always already been lost” (15). Because of this logic, in which


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the effect comes always already before the cause, Kristeva does not need terms such as abject or abjection which denote the material causes of abjection. Menninghaus’s positioning of disgust partakes of this psychoanalytic chronologics, although it deflects it into a predominantly linguistic one: [I]t [disgust] does not stand under the sway of consciousness, but rather makes itself felt within consciousness as a voice arriving from somewhere else. In the volume of this voice from elsewhere, in this scandalous invasion of a heterogeneity, disgust brings eminent affective powers to bear: it processes elementary civilizing taboos and social distinctions between what is foreign and one’s own. At the same time, it is a medium for the intercourse with strong libidinal impulses. (2003, 2)

In both approaches, the material realm is contained, like the Real, in the symbolic universe only as an “inner exclusion”. For psychoanalysis, in fact, anything material that bleeds into the subject’s psychic reality from what it considers an impossible outside is excluded not only from that reality, but, one might argue, from the reality of psychoanalysis as well. It is somewhat symptomatic that the psychoanalytic logic positions abjects in an excluded, tabooed and unspeakable position. For both psychoanalysis and for the subject of psychoanalysis, abjects that threaten to undo their topologics are first and foremost unspeakable things|practices that return both the subject and psychoanalysis to the ambivalent time and the space of primal repression.

abjection

abjection

As an agent in the pay of the differential symbolic order, psychoanalysis excludes abjects through operations of abjection in order to secure that order and with it itself, from disruptive, dedifferentiating forces. Against the ambiguities|ambivalences of abjects, it sets sublimation, mathematical integration and the paternal metaphor, whose function is precisely to secure desire and to suture the subject’s psychic reality. As Kristeva notes, in a sentence that follows step by step the instigation of the Lacanian topologics, the paternal metaphor functions as the necessary condition of one and only one process of the signifying unit, albeit a constitutive one: the process of condensing one heterogeneous set (that

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of word presentation) with another (that of thing presentation), releasing the one into the other, and insuring its “unitary bent”. (1982, 53)

Ultimately, the paternal metaphor “ensures the existence of the sign, that is, of the relation that is a condensation between sound image (on the side of word presentation) and visual image (on the side of thing presentation)” (52). Once the topologics and the psychologics of psychic reality are established, one invariably moves from a theory of abjects to a theory of abjection and from a biologics of abjects to a politologics of abjection. If abjects denote things|practices that trigger violent, because de-differentiating affects, abjection denotes cultural operations|mechanisms that exclude such things|practices from the symbolic order. In light of the dreadful disruptions caused by abjects, the power to name abjects, and thus the power of abjection, becomes one of the most basic and important cultural operations. The stigmatization of things, groups or practices as abject protects the stability of a ruling culture and it alleviates its fears of dissolution. As Judith Butler claims, this exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet “subjects”, but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject […]. The abject designates here precisely those “unlivable” and “uninhabitable” zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the “unlivable” is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject […]. In this sense, then, the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside of the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, “inside” the subject as its own founding repudiation. (1993, 3)

Butler’s work has become an important reference in studies about the abject because it shows how in a linguistically constructed universe abjected groups – “unviable (un)subjects – abjects, we might call them – who are neither named or prohibited within the economy of the law” (Butler 1991, 20) – can subvert, shock and disorganize that very culture from within. [For Butler, at that time, lesbianism is “not even abjected” “because it has not even made its way into the thinkable, the imaginable, that grid of cultural intelligibility that regulates the Real and the nameable” (20).] Ironically, however, at this point of complete cultural saturation, the limits of the psychoanalytic logic of abjects|abjection come into view.

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In a universe in which denotations are infinitely malleable and plastic and which understands the abject purely as the result of cultural operations and thus as completely separated from the material realm, everything and everybody can potentially be abjected. The spectrum of abjection can go from “the social construction of woman as abject” (Taylor 1993, 62) to the abjection of the police. Because they were informed by Lacanians such as Kristeva or Butler, theoretical discussions of abjects in cultural, literary and arthistorical studies have tended to focus on cultural processes of abjection, such as the various modes of the exclusion of abjects and their images|triggers from within the cultural|representational realm. In opposition to psychoanalysis as a cure, however, which advocates the subject’s inscription into the cultural order, they have read abjects|abjections and their production as powerful critical commentaries about that culture’s phallocratic and heteronormative structure. This hijacking of abjects into politics and aesthetics has gone hand in hand with a repression of the material logics of abjects, an issue that I will confront in the final part of the essay. Before I get there, however, I will trace the logics of such a positive reading of abjects in Samuel Delany’s short story “On the Unspeakable” (1993). [In the text, the column will by designated by a “1” or “2” before the page number].

writing

space

The questions posed by “On the Unspeakable” are precisely: which subjects, groups or practices does a violently heteronormative culture mark as unspeakable|abject? And: how do these cultural mechanisms operate, especially in relation to a politics of representation? The project it develops from this is a theory of the subversion of culture and its representational modes that is based not so much on the shifting around of the objects of abjection or on the disruption of language via the use of an “abject writing” (a project Kristeva develops in Revolution in Poetic Language), but on the overall reorganization of the space of representation. “On the Unspeakable” asks: what new poetopologics can come to terms with mechanisms of abjection? – and its answers are eminently Lacanian. On the thematic level, the story treats abjection as a problem of unrepresentability or unspeakability. As the narrator notes, the story is about the unspeakable as “that tiny part of the freedom of language associated with abjection” (Delany 1993, 155:2; my italics). A more

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fundamental Lacanianism, however, lies in its creation of a projective, unilateral writing space, a surface on which sexual and social abjects|abjections can become speakable|readable. In assembling the story on two separate vertical textual columns, Delany in fact transfers Lacan’s projective topologics directly onto the printed page. From within this Lacanian space, however, the story comes to fundamentally criticize psychoanalysis’ investment in a heteronormative cultural order, which means that, like Kristeva, “On the Unspeakable”, even while it subscribes structurally to its topologics and chronologics, reads psychoanalysis against itself in terms of a cultural practice. The story opens with an arbitrary cut into the grammatical and the semantic continuum, and thus into the material realm of the signifier as well as into the immaterial realm of the signified. The beginning consists of a subordinate clause that implies a prior clause to which it will have referred – “the positioning of desire which always draws us to ‘The Unspeakable’ in the first place” (141:1) – and as such it implies an earlier, lost continuity that will always already have been cut. As in the retrospective chronologics that organize the relation of primal repression and repression proper, it is only in the mirrorical return to the beginning at the end of the story that everything that has constituted a past at the beginning will have been a past; a past that comes to the reader in and from the future of the completed story, as in Lacan’s automotive image of the past that comes to the driver from the “future space” of the rear-view mirror. [“For, in this ‘rear view’ […] all that the subject can be certain of is the anticipated image coming to meet him that he catches of himself in his mirror” (Lacan 1977, 306).] If culture considers the unspeakable abject as “evil and extralinguistic” (141:1), the story explores ways of speaking the unspeakable and thus confronts culture with its abject other(s). How can one give a voice|space to the abject and how can one (re)inject it into a culture that has always already excluded it other than by destroying|disrupting the text? When the narrator notes that the unspeakable is “an area, a topic, a trope impossible to speak of outside [...] ‘The Everyday’ ” (141:1; my italics), he points to the fact that both the abject and the quotidian have a problematic relation to representation. While the unspeakable is “representationally difficult” (141:1) because it is invisible and outside of the discursive realm, the “everyday” is representationally difficult because it is all too visible and fully inside the discursive realm. While the unspeakable cannot be easily represented because it

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is taboo, the everyday cannot be easily represented because of its very “banal[ity]” (141:1). To represent them, the former has to be stylistically downgraded, its rhetorical figure being the “euphemism” (142:2), while the latter has to be stylistically upgraded, its corresponding rhetorical figure being the “hyperbole” (see 142:2). For Delany, as well as for a cultural and literary studies informed by social|linguistic constructivism, the strict division between these two realms is crucial because it forms the matrix for the topologics of the social field in general. As the narrator comments, “the division between everyday and unspeakable, difficult and extralinguistic, banal and evil may just be the prototype for all social division” (141:1). After its essayistic opening, which lays down its theoretical|topological coordinates, the text begins its project of making abjects speakable|readable. For this, it morphs into the story of Rose and Red, two strangers who meet in a porn-theatre on Eighth Avenue above 43rd Street in New York City, an unspeakably abject urban wasteland that designates, from the perspective of heteronormative culture, a fundamentally repressed, unspeakable and tabooed site. It is described as a densely abject conglomerate made up of death, drugs, sexuality – in particular a sexual loneliness emblematized by masturbation and mechanical arousal – and, as in the world of Pink Flamingos, an all-pervading presence of filth. If each of these elements alone is enough to threaten the psychic coherence of the ego|subject and thus of the cultural order in general, in their combination, they cause, much like the sites of Pink Flamingos, an abject overkill. In psychoanalytic terminology, each “takes the ego back to its source on the abominable limits from which, in order to be, the ego has broken away – it assigns it a source in the non-ego, drive, and death” (Kristeva 1982, 15). In particular, each element denotes a transgression of precisely the “dividing lines […] between society and a certain nature” (65) at which Kristeva had positioned the abject. Each one of them brings about a dissolution of inside and outside. Through “intermixing” and the “erasing of difference” the abject ensemble of all of these singular abjects poses a terrifying “threat to identity” (101). Symptomatically, the description of the site is interspersed with comments on the disruptions of the spatial borders between the inside (society|psyche) and the outside (nature|physics), such as the remark that “the Strip [...] yearns to become a metaphor for the whole great American outside” (Delany 1993, 145:1) or that “[t]he meaning of the following exterior urban portrait is entirely in terms of what it tells us of this momentary travesty of theatrical interiority” (143:1). The pun

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on “theatrical” here connects the banal and the unspeakable in referring simultaneously to the fictionality of the scene as well as to the represented, but also unrepresentable site of the porn-theatre in which the story unfolds. Symptomatically, the parallel textual site deals with a similar reversal, noting that the events inside the theatre, in particular the masturbating young white male, “tell only of what is exterior to this tightly conventionalized and wholly contained commercial, public space” (143:2). After the white male in the theatre has asked Rose for the fourth time whether she can “use another hand” (151:1), the story is interrupted by a metafictional aside that proposes that, similar to the way that the male’s insistence runs counter to cultural|sexual norms, the literary rendering of this repetition runs counter to narratological ones: “This much repetition is, of course, narratively unacceptable, aesthetically unspeakable: its only excuse is accuracy of transcription; its only meaning is the patient persistence of it: repetition, said Freud, is desire” (151:1; my italics). In this gesture, Delany links the culturally transgressive repetition-compulsion depicted by the story to the stylistically transgressive repetition compulsion of the story, embedding the actual transgression (the text does “in actual fact” repeat itself) within a theoretical, metafictional frame. The motif of transgression is crucial for the logics|logistics of the story because the borders between the unspeakable and the banal are always policed by a symbolic order that demarcates spaces for itself and its other, with the everyday and the unspeakable only “the linguistic [...] shadows of this legalistic system: the passive surveillance and the aggressive attack of the law spoken of, written of (figured) as an inside and an outside” (152:2). Whether this border is philosophical or social in nature, the subject is either within symbolic space or without it, so that a crossing of the border can only be thought of as a transgression. Simply put: the banal|lawful is completely inside while the abject|unspeakable is completely outside. For Delany, the setting up of such specific borders, rather than the specific things|practices that are excluded by them, is truly abject: “The notion that anyone should clearly and committedly believe in the absolute locatability of such a boundary is, for many of us (if not most of us), unspeakable” (152:2). Against such static demarcations, the story sets the concept of a social topologics in which the unspeakable is no longer a semantically fixed, excluded site (the site of culturally defined and stigmatized abjects), but part of any number of local sites and thus open to cultural interpretation|negotiation. In such a shifting

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topologics, unspeakability no longer defines a specific object (Cartesian abjection) but a specific representational site (topological abjection). Once its content is no longer fixed, one can begin to think of other unspeakabilities and other abjections, such as that of the abject character of the law|norm, as in Pink Flamingos, which is suffused with images of abject white-trash trailer-park existence. The questions that follow from such a mobilization of the abject are: from where does the agency that controls the access to specific spaces take its legitimation? And, according to whose desire are groups and individuals localized and abjected? What the topologics of Delany’s story problematize, ultimately, is the twofold vectorization of the abject, in which the attempt at exclusion (abjection) is coupled to the need to transgress (jouissance). Symptomatically, the text turns around the masturbatory act of the young white male, with the story's opening “cut” occurring precisely at the probably most abject moment immediately following the story’s moment of jouissance. After the ejaculation, the white male “raise[d] his thumb to his mouth, and” (155:1). After the white silence of the cut, the story resumes on the other side with: “suck[ed] it clean” (141:2). Ironically, the ejaculation itself already occurs on the more metafictional and thus symbolic side of the story, which presents a literary-social commentary on the fictional and thus more imaginary side, so that the moment of jouissance is curiously abstracted and framed. Although the narrator starts thinking about the problems of representation, in the projective space of the story the fictional side remains part of the metafictional side and vice versa. This inmixing is underscored by the fact that the metafictional metaphors are identical to the objects that define the fictional story, such as the needle and drugs: “I find myself at that particular boundary of the everyday that borders the unspeakable”, the narrator notes, “where language, like a needle infected with articulation threatens to pierce some ultimate and final interiority” (145:2). The limit of this interiority is “when we attempt analytic seizure” (145:2; my italics), a statement that is again ambiguous, because seizure can denote “capture” as well as “spastic attack”, which is often related to jouissance. At this point – and it is of course always important to note the exact point because every word in the story is site-specific – the narrator once more takes up the topological discussion of borders|bordering, arguing that pure transgression is not possible and thus cannot become a political strategy:

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The unspeakable, of course, is not a boundary dividing a positive area of allowability from a complete and totalized negativity [...]. If we pursue the boundary as such, it will recede before us as a limit of mists and vapors [...]. It is not a fixed and locable point of transgression. (146:2)

The border cannot be crossed|transgressed because it always already refers the subject back to the Symbolic and its underlying rules. In an indirect reference to Foucault, the narrator describes the border not as a fixed geometrical site but as a topological one, as a forever shifting border within the speakable. It is “a set of positive conventions governing what can be spoken of [...] in general” (146:2). For Delany, the speakable and the unspeakable, and thus the cultural and the abject, are not a priori givens but epiphenomena that arise from specific social geographies (147:2) and conventions. Their relation is always relative, so that “what is speakable between client and prostitute in the balcony of a 42nd Street porn theater is unspeakable between man and wife of thirty years” (147:2). Symptomatically, Delany refers the elusiveness of the unspeakable directly to the topologics of the text. When the young white male sits down “looking left and right, like the eyes of a reader sweeping back and forth in their descent along the columnar text” (153:1), Delany takes up this metaphor by inserting the comment that like the eyes of a reader sweeping back and forth in their descent along the columnar text. (The unspeakable is always in the column you are not reading. At any given moment it is what is on the opposite side of the Moebius text at the spot your own eyes are fixed on. The unspeakable is mobile; it flows; it is displaced as much by language and experience as it is by desire). (153:1; my italics)

In analogy to the Real in Lacan, the unspeakable is what produces the complex topologics of the story in the first place, and simultaneously that which forever exceeds the story: [L]ike the text that loops and seals upon itself, without commencement or termination, the unspeakable lies in the silence, beyond the white space that accompanies the text, across the marginal blank that drops opaquely beside the text toward a conclusionary absence that finally is not to be found (154:1; my italics).

For Delany, the politically subversive gesture lies in making the unspeakable and the speakable eventual, local and thus mobile, in order to allow for the development of scenarios in which specific social geographies create specific unspeakabilities. In the social portrayed in the story, these abject geographies are defined

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particularly in relation to the inmixing of sexuality and violence. As the narrator notes, “[t]he unspeakable is as much about cruelty as it is about sexuality. Indeed, for many of us it is where they meet” (148:2). How then to speak the unspeakable abject? Symptomatically, the narrator goes through a series of unsuccessful beginnings – “I have something I really have to explain to you …” (148:2), “[a]llow me to make a special point here …” (149:2), “[y]ou mustn't take it personally, but ...” (149:2) or “I feel I just have to say ...” (149:2) – in his effort to show how difficult it is to speak this unspeakable and to show that the unspeakable demands a transgression of stylistics. Generally, the narrator notes, in order to become speakable, the unspeakable needs to be bracketed, as the passage about the repetitive transgression had shown. Now, however, the bracketing is taken up literally on the material level of the text: “I don't know how to tell you this, but ... (The unspeakable comprises the wounds on the bodies of abused children, the mutilations and outrageous shrieking or tightlipped murders at the hands of parents)” (148:2). [It is in tune with the concept of abjects as culturally constructed that Delany relates the framed unspeakable|abject invariably to human acts of terror. If it is already difficult to speak these human acts, the next sentence is even more difficult, because it comprises in particular the “pleasure at such abuses, even private, pornographic, onanistic” (148:2-149:2). Abjection – and here the prevailing theory of abjection blends into the prevalent logic of trauma – plays itself out and is theorized in a fully humanized field. In a psychoanalytically informed politics, in fact, the abject is by default a human abject, if only because the frames|brackets for abjects are culturally produced. The dilemma is that to transgress the cultural framing|bracketing means to destroy the frames and to speak the abject directly.] If to speak abjects directly – “[t]o speak the unspeakable without the proper rhetorical flourish or introduction” (150:2) – undoes every rhetorical incorporation, the only way to incorporate the unspeakable into a “coherent” discourse is indeed to frame it, which means to quote it in a speakable context (see 149:2). To illustrate this logic, the narrator provides a culturally controversial statement: “[I]n common circles it would be unspeakable to suggest that commercial pornographic films are relatively less sexist than the commercial non-pornographic cinema” (153:2), adding that this statement is made speakable|possible by a “rhetorical frame” (154:2), in this case the discourse of social analysis which “makes speakable the analysis of the sociology of pornography (in the literal sense of writing about prostitutes) that is to follow” (154:2).

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Crucially, according to the topologics of the story, this is a sociology that the reader has already read as a fictional story that at this point of the reading-process will have been revealed as having been a sociological essay. It is precisely in this retrospective temporality that the narrator will have succeeded in speaking the unspeakable, because to speak the unspeakable is precisely to speak it without the appropriate rhetorical flourish, “either by accident, misjudgement, or simple ignorance” (150:2; my italics). In the case of the story, this ignorance is that of the reader who will only belatedly realize the frame and thus have his abject cake and eat it, too. The story about Red and Rose illustrates that an unframed abject writing (or: a writing of the abject) will always express a violent rage against the symbolic machine; or, as Kristeva says, a “rage against the Symbolic” (1982, 178): The vision of the ab-ject is, by definition, the sign of an impossible ob-ject, a boundary and a limit. A fantasy, if you wish, but one that brings to the wellknown Freudian phantasies [...] a drive overload of hatred and death, which prevents images from crystalizing as images of desire and/or nightmare and causes them to break out into sensation (suffering) and denial (horror), into a blasting of sight and sound. (154-155)

The topologically ambiguous states that abject writing negotiates has direct effects on the identity of that text whose “narrative web is a thin film constantly threatened with bursting” (141). On the level of content, one knows that one is reading an abject text “when narrated identity is unbearable, when the boundary between subject and object is shaken, and when even the limit between inside and outside becomes uncertain” (141). On the level of style, one knows that one is reading an abject text when the narrative is what is challenged […]. If it continues nevertheless, its makeup changes; its linearity is shattered, it proceeds by flashes, enigmas, short cuts, incompletion, tangles, and cuts. [...]. [T]he theme of suffering-horror is the ultimate evidence of such states of abjection within a narrative representation. (141)

Abject writing, then, “perverts language – style and content” (16). It expresses “the sudden irruption of affect (53). This affect, however, is invariably a “written affect” (203), because “in abjection, revolt is completely within […] the being of language” (45). Perhaps the most important point of “On the Unspeakable” is that it goes beyond these abjections – which it takes up in the story of Red and Rose, however – figuring that one way of transcending the


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dissolutions|disruptions of abject writing lies in creating a new, projective writing space: [T]he gap between probe and presentation, between interpretation and representation, between analysis and art. It is as if we must establish two columns, with everything of one mode relegated to one side and everything of the other relegated to the other. It’s as if we had to figure the impossibility of such a task, such a split, such a gap – figure it in language – rather than write of it, speak of it. (Delany 1993, 150:2; my italics)

Such a projective writing space allows for a semantic dynamization and an unframing of the abject and thus it opens up politically subversive potentials. At the end of the text, the narrator will have succeeded in stating the political truth of desire, which “lies like a bodily boundary between the everyday and the unspeakable” (152153:2). This truth is that while “the content of desire does not contain [...] social power” (154:2), the “positioning of desire is a result of social power” (154:2; my italics). And, as the narrator concludes, in a topological twist it will have brought the story back to its beginning, “indeed, it is” (155:2), a sentence that finds its conclusion in the story’s beginning: “[T]he positioning of desire which always draws us to ‘The Unspeakable’ in the first place” (141:1).

matter

intensity

In relating the unspeakable abject directly to a transgression of discursive rules, Delany ties himself into the tradition that uses abjects|abjection as tools for cultural subversions and he reclaims the tactics of abject jouissance for political means. In this struggle, for both Delany and Kristeva the enemy is a hegemonic, heteronormative culture which abjects subjects and groups that are already feeling the full force of many other exclusionary mechanisms and practices of that culture. In fact, their abjection is only the final step in the project of excluding these groups and their languages from the cultural|discursive field. While I do have a strong sympathy for such a counter-politics, and while I applaud subversive uses of the abject, I also believe that psychoanalytically inspired counter-politics tend to forget that abjects are coupled to very specific intensive productions|affects that have to do with the break-up of material organization(s). As Menninghaus notes, generalizations of abjection often turn Kristeva’s “unsettling theory” – which he considers, going maybe a step too far, as

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“universally and biologically grounded (in the maternal body)” (2003, 392) – into “simple fable[s] of repression and liberation” (392). If “in the political field, various groups that felt themselves to be ‘abject’ – in the sense of discriminated against or rejected – have used Kristeva’s idiom in order to give a new articulation to their struggle for recognition (389), this all too often implies a “simple thematic [affirmation] of the abject” (398). In the final part of this essay, therefore, I want to provide a possible corrective to the prevalent logics|politics of abjection, with the decided aim of making abjects|abjections not less but more politically effective. The idea is not to replace the cultural politics of abjection but to relate it to a level of material machinics and material politics. This implies to also address “non-cultural” levels of abjection, as Vilém Flusser does when he relates the abject to the historical frame of and the memory operative in biological evolution. From these two perspectives, Flusser argues that the disgust humans feel for other creatures is directly proportional to the evolutionary distance between them: “Disgust recapitulates phylogenesis […]. The further away from the human on the evolutionary tree, the more disgusting. [Der Ekel rekapituliert die Phylogenese […]. Je ekelhafter, desto entfernter vom Menschen im Stammbaum]” (Flusser and Bec 1993, 14; my translation). In what follows, I will take this evolutionary argument to its limit, arguing that for the subject, the most disgusting thing is, beyond the scale of evolutionary distances, death as the “end” of the individual’s evolution in general. To recapitulate: although Kristeva would be the first to stress that abjects have to do with the realm of materiality and although she has been seminal in opening up the Lacanian logic to matters of the body, she does not truly address these levels because her critique of Lacan’s neglect of the pre-symbolic Semiotic and of the pre-symbolic chora remains fully within the frame of the Lacanian topologics, in which materiality is recuperated only in|as language and in which abjects are considered only negatively as things fundamentally excluded from language and representation – precisely as the unspeakable grounds of abjection. The limit is always that of primal repression. What then would it mean to address the fact that abjects also relate to a level of material, lived reality beyond primal repression; to a realm that Deleuze, in The Logic of Sense, calls that of states of affairs: “[B]odies with their tensions, physical qualities, actions and passions, and the corresponding ‘states of affairs’ ” (1990, 4). As I have argued, in Lacanian psychoanalysis the separation into subject and object involves the installation of the ego|subject as immaterial

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agencies of psychic organization. The result of this separation is that the field of representation closes itself off from the field of material production(s). At the end of the process of ego-formation, an immaterial, psychic reality has separated itself, for all psychoanalytic purposes, fully from a productive|intensive material reality. Lacan stresses this process when he notes that the speaking body in actual fact comes before the living body: “[T]he first [speaking] body produces the second [physical] one, because it incorporates itself in it” (1988a, 12). In other words, the Lacanian subject has always already uncoupled itself completely from “itself” as a living, material subject. Even if abjects bring the material level back into the psychoanalytic play, they are always already subjected to the retrospective chronologics that rule over the subject’s psychic reality, which means that they only function psychoanalytically from within a representational logic that they threaten to disrupt. As I noted, the abject is the result of abjection. In the light of these logics, the questions are: is there a way to recombine the psychic and the material subject and what would the position of abjects|abjection be in such a recombination? To answer these questions, one has to reconceptualize the material realm excluded by Lacanian psychoanalysis. One step towards such a re-conceptualization is to no longer think of it in terms of a field of “dead materiality” but in terms of what might be called an “intelligent materialism”. Such a materialism treats nature as machinic and as fully “informed” or, as Deleuze would say, “signaletic” (1989, 33). Before they become retrospected, abjects are parts of the intensive dynamics of this intelligent material field. In particular, they are systemic fallouts of the machinic, self-organizing process of the assembly|emergence of a more and more cohering organism|aggregate and of its gradual uncoupling from a complex, equally machinic environment. Translated into a Deleuzian terminology, they have to do with the dynamics according to which a subjective aggregate or “consolidate [consolidé]” (Deleuze 1986, 66) develops within an affective, a-personal, undifferentiated and continuous “plane of immanence”. These organizations integrate the forces and dynamics of a life into those of a specific life, developing a field of personal affection from one of a-personal affects, and translating a-personal percepts into personal perceptions. Many, if not most of the processes that lead up to such an organization, as well as many of the processes that threaten to disrupt it, take place on material plateaus and they follow an intensive, affective logic that deals in degrees of forces and formations rather than in representational registers.

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From this point-of-view, the process of ego-formation as described by Lacan addresses only the level of psychic organization. From a Deleuzian angle, however, abjects relate psychic organizations to particular intensive material processes of organization and disorganization. For instance, they mark moments when a complex corporeal organism|consistency, held together by a set of both material and psychic forces, is confronted with directly material and biological rather than immaterial and psychological forces|dynamics that threaten to disrupt that organism. Ultimately, abjects all relate to forces that cause the organism to fall apart into un-differentiation and they mark “first of all” material responses to such dissolutions. As Kristeva notes – and Edgar Allan Poe knew fully well when he wrote “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” – the most condensed|intensive abject is a decaying body, lifeless, completely turned into dejection, blurred between the animate and the inorganic, a transitional swarming, inseparable lining of a human nature whose life is undistinguishable from the symbolic […] the corpse represents fundamental pollution. (1982, 109; my italics)

If the quote shows once more the extent to which Kristeva is aware of the materiality of the abject, it also shows the force exerted by the Lacanian logics. Even while she talks about the natural life Deleuze is so interested in, by reconceptualizing it as machinic and signaletic, the quote recuperates the level of this life only within|as the field of language: “a human nature whose life is undistinguishable from the symbolic”. The quote also shows that although there is little disagreement between psychoanalysis and an intelligent materialism on the thematic level of abjects – for both, the ultimate perspective-point of the abject is material death|decay – psychoanalysis is mainly interested in cultural abjection, while Deleuze is interested in abjects and their relation to violent material disassemblies, such as biological death|disorganization, of living systems. In particular, these abjects relate to mechanisms of auto-disassembly (endo-death) built into these systems. [In fact, this might be where meetings with abjects differ from meetings with trauma, which is mostly to do with disassemblies originating from the outside (exo-death).] In topological terms, the fundamental difference between a Deleuzian and a Lacanian logics is the one between a general immanence and a purely psychic immanence, a difference that entails that between a psycho-physical projective plane [Deleuze] and a psychic projective plane [Lacan].

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Because the systemic assembly of living systems proceeds through machinic cuts into the unthinkable continuity of the plane of immanence, this assembly takes place, especially in its early stages, in the field of an unconscious that Deleuze considers not as “structured like a language” but as “structured like a material machine” and thus as part of the intensive, productive field of states of affairs. After the advent of human consciousness and of language, the unconscious productions that define the realm of states of affairs remain feedbacked with states of events|utterances rather than excluded. The fundamental difference between a Lacanian and a Deleuzian logic, then, lies in the fact that the machinics of the unconscious|material, productive level(s) remain operative within the conscious|immaterially representational level(s), so that this opposition in actual fact no longer makes sense. Operations of an apersonal, material reality are never excluded from the operations of the subject’s psychic reality. From this angle, abjects are related to material operations that threaten the material as well as the psychic organization of a human system, although there are abjects without abjection in the non-human realm as well. Ultimately, for the human system, they threaten the coherency of what Deleuze calls the unilateral|projective “surface of sense”. An intelligent materialism, therefore, does not understand the abject merely as something always already culturally excluded and tabooed and therefore, paradoxically, as something culturally completely malleable, but as a nodal point between material and psychic registers; as a node, for instance, between material disgust, chemical disgust and an aesthetics of disgust or also between material pain, a neurologics of pain and an aesthetics|anti-aesthetics of pain. It thus opens up investigations into the various modes in which abjects affect the subject (a phenomenology of disgust) but also into the field of purely material affects caused by abjects, such as the physical, maybe even chemical reaction to watching Divine eat excrement. The gradual uncoupling of the “soon to be human” organism from its environment creates an aggregate that is both materially and psychically more and more closed off and stabilized. At some point, for instance, the maternal breast is no longer experienced as an integral part of the organism. It is because abjects invariably point to the impossibility of a full closure and stabilization that they disrupt phantasms of order and coherence. This brings me back to Pink Flamingos, which showed that abjects tend to centre around bodily openings through which exchanges with the environment are materially regulated and channelled. Abjects are

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created when these exchanges get out of bounds: for instance, when they become uneconomic|excessive, as when one confronts unstoppable flows and fluxes such as diarrhea or haemorrhaging, or when they are reversed – for example in the case of vomiting or refuelling “waste” into the system through an opening that is normally used to fuel the system with nourishment as in eating excrement –, but also when they are completely stopped or plugged up as with anorexia or constipation. As Simon Taylor notes, the identity of the subject is “continually threatened from within by traces of abjection, such as corporeal wastes (excrement, urine, blood, breast milk, vomit, pus, and spit) that are jettisoned or leaking from the body” (1993, 60). On a material as well as on a cultural level – these differentiations ultimately lose their meaning in a fully machinic world – such excesses and reversals are detrimental to the system that experiences them, and they are ultimately symptoms of systemic illness, sterility and death. There are thus two vectors of abjects|abjection: 1. too many, or disorganized exchanges with the environment threaten the coherence of the organism that is abjected 2. the entropic slope that every living organism finds itself sliding down continually threatens its material and its psychic organization with dissolution|death. When Kristeva notes that it is culture that makes abjects repugnant, this is true only if one is prepared to read them within an ethical|moral, cultural context. In fact, I would propose that images such as Mapplethorpe’s Self-Portrait, which have become culturally highly contested sites, and which are often celebrated as abject art, are hardly abject. Homosexual practices, such as anal intercourse, a sexual practice that is obviously not restricted to homosexuality but which has become a powerful cultural icon of gay sexuality, are only detrimental to the human system from a position that considers these acts as unnatural and|or unethical. They form such a powerful ammunition for both a subversive logic and a logic of containment precisely because they lend themselves so readily to a false, essentializing biologics, according to which they introduce a logic of waste into what can only be thought of as a procreative|productive act. [For similar reasons, cultural abjection attaches itself very easily to differences of race, which has, of course, no direct relationship to the abject.] The politics of an economical sexuality cover anal practices with a cultural taboo and with laws of prohibition. [“This does not mean that the homosexual is inherently or essentially abject; rather, that homosexuality becomes ‘abjected’ in the construction of normative heterosexuality” (Houser 1993, 86).]

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Curiously a purely culturally conceived politics of abjection finds especially faux-abject images disturbing – such as some of Mapplethorpe’s photographs or Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1989) – because these take their power precisely from the juxtaposition of an official symbolic order and its disruption (heterosexual sexuality|homosexual practices, metaphysical order|physical waste). A number of Cindy Sherman’s photographs, one might argue, are more directly|intensively abject because they portray directly physical waste(dness). They point to the fact that if abjects are read in a material context, it is not only the Symbolic that has the power to disgust. [Sherman “a visceral as well as psychic […] response” (Taylor 1993, 62).] Abjects are repugnant on material levels as things|events that threaten an organism’s material coherence. Even more, they are repugnant on a purely a-personal level as forces that disrupt or reverse life-processes and as such bring the subject back to the level of the anonymity of “a death”. As Menninghaus notes, “to the extent that disgust says ‘no’ to life itself, it inverts the Kantian function of life-preservation into its opposite and becomes the agent of a ‘will to decline’ ” (2003, 148). Or, in Kristeva’s words, the abject “is death infecting life” (1982, 4). A Deleuzian counter-politics of abjects would need to reach the material level of abjects. As long as it does not differentiate between abjects and faux-abjects, it will remain caught within the economies of the cultural|linguistic matrix. Abjects, however, invariably go beyond the cultural matrix. In fact, one might argue that there can be no metaphorical abjects. They are so dreadful for both culture and the subject precisely because they are not merely its cultural others – it is in this realm that faux-abjection operates, as when it juxtaposes puritan cleanliness to “dirty things” – but disruptive material forces that are operative in the subject and in culture. Mostly, these forces operate in silence and imperceptibly, and although one might well think of imperceptible abjects, it is only when these forces become perceptible that they are experienced as abjects. What this means is that there is a fundamental, inherent disruption to abjects that points beyond cultural abjections. Abjects drain life out of organic systems. Foul things tend to be abjects, for instance, because in foulness, an abundance of life is rotting from within. Some of David Lynch’s images tap into this process of draining, which in his movies invariably concerns the level of a material, muscular, nervous, or visceral repulsion that is not immediately culturally symptomatic, such as the car-crash sequence in Wild at Heart, the sequence in which Jeffrey finds the severed ear in Blue

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Velvet, which, although it is related to Frank Booth as a cultural operative, ultimately points to a realm beyond culture, or the enigmatic figure behind the diner in Mulholland Drive. I would maintain that the response to such abjects is different from the response to culturally charged images such as those of Mapplethorpe or Serrano. [As a true Lacanian, Zižek deals with such bodies as images of “the Lacanian Real” which, he says, “is the flayed body, the palpitation of the raw, skinless red flesh” (1994, 116). In general, Zižek talks more about the traumatic “Thing” (181) than about the abject.] While these images can always be sublated into a (counter)politics of representation, abjects escape a full (counter)politicization precisely because they ignore the political, working instead on a directly a-personal, affective, and thus less easily contained level. But even such images, I would argue, can still be sublated because they are fictional. Ways to de-fictionalize such images are to “document” them, as Waters did with the epilogue of Pink Flamingos or, in Polyester, with the introduction of the “smell-o-rama” technology, which directly addresses the olfactory, chemical aspect of the abject. Another way to de-fictionalize such images is to make them happen. In fact, there is a particular affinity between the abject and happenings. When Bob Flanagan includes himself as part of his own art exhibit, however, even the logics of the happening are transcended. [In the commentary on Skullfuck, Houser highlights specifically that “although convincingly made, this scene is obviously a farce” (1993, 94).] In this case, the power of the image does not only and not predominantly lie in its social commentary – the sick artist and his sick art are simultaneously displayed in the museum-ashospital|hospital-as-museum – although it invites such readings, but in that it is an image|fact of an organism’s and a subject’s long history of material pain and of the fight against material dissolution. From this perspective, the exhibition becomes an example of the birth of art from intense pain; especially a pain that has become, once more, pure intensity. [Symptomatically, an art-criticism informed by linguistic constructivism cannot “read” this level other than as a naïve biographism: “While Chave perceives [artist Eva] Hesse’s work in terms of the abject, she believes it to have been permeated by the artist’s self-definition as a sick, decomposing, abject being. Such biographical and essentializing notions completely disregard Hesse’s work as a conscious and intellectual art practice” (Jones 1993, 45).] In the event’s excessive economics, this pain is put into the service of life, which means that the event is more than a spectacle of abject

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jouissance. In fact, it gives a positive spin to jouissance that involves the politics of a painful, disgusted body exhibited within a specific body politic. In fact, maybe the main figures psychoanalysis offers in relation to abjection – the image of abject jouissance and the image of the deject – are too impossible modes of dealing with abjects. Other, more difficult, but also more possible modes might be to develop economies of pain, such as practices of kindness in the face of unspeakable dread. For this, one would have to realize that culture and nature, the subject and the world, psychologics and biologics, are not fundamentally differentiated, but parts of the same plane of immanence. Flanagan’s real-life events, like the event of Divine eating dog excrement, show that it is too easy to consider abjects simply as the others of a hegemonic culture. Even if countercultures celebrate abjects, they can never be, from a Deleuzian position, experienced as simply positive, a fact that makes for a deeply disturbing underside to these celebrations. Although abjects may be included into a logics of cultural subversion, they remain disturbing on their own ground; the ground of matter and its organizations|disorganizations.

inside

outside

According to Lacan, the meaninglessness of abjects results ultimately from the meaninglessness of nature, matter, and the physical realm. For an intelligent materialism, however, nature is not at all meaningless, but eminently informed and machinic. Within these overall machinics of the material realm, abjects have specific positions. Abjects suck life out of biological systems, not so much from the outside, as with the introductory frog, but from the very inside. Sometimes Kristeva gets close to this level, as when she notes that “the body's inside [...] shows up in order to compensate for the collapse of the border between inside and outside”, adding that in these moments, “it is as if the skin, a fragile container, no longer guaranteed the integrity of one’s ‘own and clean self’ but, scraped or transparent, invisible or taut, gave way before the dejection of its contents” (1982, 53). Again, however, she sees such corporeal involutions from the position of the subject’s psychic reality: “I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself” (3). In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze goes a decisive step further in relegating the abject fully to the body: “It is not I who

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attempts to escape from my body, it is the body that attempts to escape from itself by means of […] in short, a spasm […]. Perhaps this is Bacon’s approximation of horror or abjection” (2004, 15). In these moments, “the body attempts to escape from itself through one of its organs in order to rejoin the field of material structure” (16). From this, one might extrapolate an eminently political statement that goes beyond the common politics of abjection: It is only in a world completely without subjects, in what Flusser calls the geoevolutionary slime of “a” pure life before the advent of singularization or subjectivation and thus before the advent of death, [“die Biosphäre […]. Es handelt sich um einen viskosen Schaum, nämlich um Meerwasser, in welchem solide Partikel und Gasbläschen schwirren. Ihre chemische Komposition ist komplex, besteht aber vorwiegend aus Kohlenstoff, Sauerstoff, Wasserstoff und Stickstoff. Dieser Schleim hat sich seit seinem Entstehen vor etwa vier Millionen Jahren über den ganzen Erdball verbreitet. […] Von Tod ist bei dieser Perspektive auf die Evolution keine Rede. Er kommt erst später im Verlauf dieser Entwicklung zu Wort. Seltsamerweise tauchen nämlich aus der Biomasse Auswüchse (Organismen) empor, die wie Schleifen im langsamen Voranfließen dieses Schleims funktionieren [...]. Was das Leben ‘interessiert’, ist Sex, und Tod ist nebensächlich. Allerdings ist das nicht der Standpunkt des einzelnen Lebewesens. Es scheint am (sich für seinen Tod nicht interessierenden) Leben bleiben zu wollen. Das Interesse der Lebewesen für das Lebenbleiben ist nicht im Interesse des Lebens. Sie sollen gefälligst die in ihnen enthaltene genetische Information in den Lebensstrom weitergeben und dann verschwinden. ‘Jedes legt noch schnell ein Ei, und dann kommt der Tod vorbei’ ” (107)] rather than in a culture that has been politically subverted that “abjection becomes splendor; the horror of life becomes a very pure and very intense life” (45).

Works Cited Ben Levi, Jack et al. 1993. Abject Art: Revulsion and Desire in American Art. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. Butler, Judith. 1991. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”. In Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, edited by Diana Fuss, 13-31. New York: Routledge. —. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge. Delany, Samuel R. 1993. “On the Unspeakable”. In Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation, edited by Larry McCaffery, 141-155. Boulder, CO: Black Ice Books.

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Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. [1969] 1990. The Logic of Sense, translated by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press. —. [1991] 1994. What is Philosophy?, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. —. [1989] 2004. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, translated by Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —, and Felix Guattari. [1980] 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —, and Claire Parnet. [1977] 2002. Dialogues, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press. Flusser, Vilém. 1998. Vom Subjekt zum Projekt. Menschwerdung, edited by Stefan Bollmann and Edith Flusser. Frankfurt: Fischer. —, and Louis Bec. 1993. Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: Eine Abhandlung samt Befund des Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste. European Photography, Goettingen. Houser, Craig. 1993. “I, Abject”. In Ben Levi et al., 85-100. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. Jones, Leslie C. 1993. “Transgressive Feminity: Art and Gender in the Sixties and Seventies”. In Ben Levi et al., 33-57. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. Juno, Andrea, and Vivian Vale, eds. 1993. Bob Flanagan: Super-masochist. Volume 1 of Re/Search People Series. San Francisco: Re/Search Publications. Kristeva, Julia. [1980] 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, Jacques. [1966] 1977. Ecrits, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton. —. 1978. Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. New York: Norton. —. 1988a. Radiophonie. Weinheim: Quadriga. —. 1988b. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and translated by John Forrester. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. [1973] 1990. Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, translated by Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson. New York: Norton & Co. Menninghaus, Winfried. 2003. Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, translated by Howard Eiland and Joel Golb. Albany: State University of New York Press. Taylor, Simon. 1993. “The Phobic Object: Abjection in Contemporary Art”. In Ben Levi et al., 59-83. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. Zižek, Slavoj. 1994. The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality. London: Verso.

Queer Transformations: Renegotiating the Abject in Contemporary Anglo-American Lesbian Fiction1

Paulina Palmer Introduction: The Lesbian, the Abject, and Anglo-American Fiction While, as Julia Kristeva points out, the female body in general signifies the abject body in that it is penetrable, exudes blood and, when pregnant, changes shape (1991, 71-99), there is one particular female figure who has traditionally been regarded by sexologists and guardians of morality as especially abject and monstrous. This is the woman who identifies as lesbian or forms primary relationships with members of her own sex (see Faderman 1992, 1-59; Hart 1994, 47134). My aim in this essay is to explore the socio-political context of the lesbian’s abject representation and to examine some of the derogatory images and stereotypes to which, over the centuries, it has given rise. This will furnish a starting-point for an enquiry into the struggles waged by members of the lesbian/gay community, including activists, theorists and writers of fiction, to contest and renegotiate her position. Taking as the focus of my discussion the novels People in Trouble (1990) by the American Sarah Schulman and Affinity (1999) by the British Sarah Waters, I shall then proceed to investigate some of the strategies which writers utilize to interrogate and challenge the lesbian’s abject role with the aim of contributing to the process of her resignification. Kristeva’s theorization of the abject, along with the interpretation of her ideas with specific reference to lesbian/gay culture and politics in the work of Barbara Creed and Judith Butler, furnishes us with an explanation for the relegation of the lesbian to the abject domain. Kristeva defines the abject as “what disturbs identity, system, order” and refuses to “respect borders, positions, rules” (1991, 4). In citing examples of such transgressions, she refers to the traditional prohibition of homosexual relationships in Western society, alerting attention to the biblical injunction which forms its basis: “Intercourse between same and same will have to be prohibited – neither 1

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promiscuity within families nor homosexuality” (103). The lesbian represents a particularly complex example of the taboo against “intercourse between same and same” and the abjection it signifies, since she transgresses moral and social codes and “disturbs identity, system, order” in more ways than one. In addition to refusing to take up the position that the phallocentric system assigns to woman by rejecting the role of man’s specular other and object of exchange between men, she also poses a threat to the Symbolic Order in that she usurps man’s role by taking a woman as a lover (see Zimmerman 1992, 1-5). In this way she destabilizes gender boundaries and problematizes codes of sexual difference. The disruption of system and order that she enacts, as Luce Irigaray argues, extends beyond the perimeter of her personal partnerships and the lesbian/gay community to affect, or from a hetero-patriarchal viewpoint, infect women in general. By means of her sexual identification the lesbian problematizes heterosexual femininity, exposing it as a performance and uncovering its compulsory aspect. As Christine Holmlund, summarizing Irigaray’s argument, observes, the lesbian exposes “mature femininity” as, in effect, mere masquerade, imposed on women by men. By desiring another woman “like a man”, the lesbian mimics and plays with the masculinity and femininity of psychoanalytic discourse, thereby making both “visible” as constructions and performances. At the same time she discovers, creates, “what an exhilarating pleasure it is to be partnered with someone like herself”. For Irigaray, then, the lesbian demonstrates that women “are not simply reabsorbed” by a male-defined femininity: “They also remain elsewhere […]”. (1991, 288)

However, like the other abject figures discussed by Kristeva, the lesbian, as well as posing a threat to moral and social order, also exerts a contradictory attraction by impressing people, heterosexual men in particular, as ambiguously “fascinating, threatening and dangerous” (Kristeva qtd. in Holmlund, 67). Images of nude women performing pseudo-lesbian love scenes in pornographic magazines or sex shows indicate her perennial fascination as an object of male voyeurism and fantasy. The portrayal of her in the uncanny roles of spectral visitor, witch and vampire in popular gothic fiction and horror film also illustrate her reputation as ambiguously fascinating/dangerous (see Palmer 1999, 14, 60, 101-105; Weiss 1992, 84-108; Zimmerman 1984, 153-163). Given the threat which the lesbian poses to the symbolic order, combined with the fascination which her transgressive sexuality exerts, her typecasting as abject is understandable, as too are the

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pejorative images and stereotypes, stigmatizing her as monstrous and weird. The significance of some of these is explored by Barbara Creed in her discussion of the different cultural representations assigned to the lesbian body. The lesbian, Creed illustrates, has been represented in literature and art as masculinized and virile; in earlier periods she was sometimes portrayed with an extra large clitoris which she was assumed to use for sexual penetration (1995, 88-96). Alternatively, she has been depicted as animalistic, disturbing the boundaries between the animal and the human, by being represented as a vampire or a hare (96-99). Another abject image assigned to the lesbian which Creed discusses is “the lesbian-as-double” (101); this, she argues, develops the concept of female narcissism since “the representation of the lesbian couple as mirror-images of each other constructs the lesbian body as a reflection or an echo” (100). The threat which this image poses, Creed suggests, resides in the fact that, as well as challenging our cherished belief in individualism, it evokes a closed world of female sexuality from which men are excluded. Other images representing the lesbian as physically abject, besides those mentioned by Creed, include the witch and the phantom. Catherine Clément discusses the witch’s association with deviant sexuality and the realm of the uncanny, describing her as “dressed in crimson and bear[ing] signs of violence and love” (1987, 3). Clément relates the witch to the repressed dimension of the Imaginary and, by association, to the figure of the hysteric, traditionally regarded as bisexual and distrusted as a disruptive sexual presence in society. With reference to the phantom, as Terry Castle illustrates, works of fiction dating from the eighteenth to the twentieth century frequently portray the lesbian in imagery of ghosts and haunting, with the effect of rendering her physically insubstantial and decorporealizing her desire. The depiction of the lesbian in spectral terms, Castle observes, has the effect of negating female intimacy and “denying the carnal bravada of lesbian existence” (1993, 30). The ghost carries, of course, abject connotations. Like the corpse, it destabilizes the boundaries between life and death, this world and the next, while simultaneously evoking a sense of the uncanny (see Freud 1955, 242; Jackson 1981, 64-70). However, the relegation of the lesbian to the domain of the abject, though continuing to exert a destructive pressure on women’s lives and partnerships, has in recent years been contested. With the advent of the lesbian/gay liberation movements of the 1970s and the growth of queer politics in the 1990s, members of the lesbian/gay community are starting to challenge it, along with the prejudice and

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discriminatory treatment that it incites. The queer theorist Judith Butler documents this struggle, discussing its ideological significance. Having illustrated the tendency of heterosexual society to repudiate or disavow homosexual identifications and, as a result, relegate lesbians and gay men “to the domain of abject beings, those who are not yet ‘subjects’, but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject” (1993, 3), she proceeds to discuss the strategies of resistance which she sees as available to members of the lesbian/gay community. Alerting attention to the political efficacy of individual acts of “coming out” and the parodic enactment of episodes from the history of gay oppression staged by groups such as the American ACT UP and Queer Nation, she describes these activities as vital strategies in renegotiating the boundaries of the abject and combating discrimination and homophobia. Reminding us that these boundaries are by no means fixed but are open to debate and reassessment, she argues that “the contentious practices of ‘queerness’ might be understood not only as an example of citational politics, but as a specific reworking of abjection into political agency” (21). This, she maintains, will have the effect of “resignifying the abjection of homosexuality into defiance and legitimacy” (21). It will hopefully create the form of society in which people with AIDS, instead of being rejected as pariahs and left to die, will survive, and the lives of individual lesbians and gay men will be regarded as valuable and worthy of respect. It is, however, not only political activists and queer theorists who seek to renegotiate the boundaries of the abject by challenging the position of social outcast traditionally assigned to lesbians and gay men. Writers of fiction also contribute to this project. As I illustrate in my study Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions (1999), AngloAmerican writers utilize a variety of different narrative strategies to achieve this end. Instead of portraying the lesbian as “other” and monstrous, as she has often been depicted in the past, they confer on her a subjectivity, agency and viewpoint, exploring her personal response to the acts of oppression and humiliation which she often encounters in her day-to-day life. By positioning her as the narrator or focalizer of events, they realign the viewpoint of the narrative in which she features and the values it encodes. They also challenge the conventional image of the lesbian as doomed to isolation and loneliness by foregrounding the relationship she forms with the interactive network of the gay community and by illustrating the contribution she makes to its vitality. Another strategy that writers adopt is to rework the motifs and images traditionally employed to

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render the lesbian abject, such as the representation of her as an outcast who exists on the fringes of urban life and the portrayal of her as an insubstantial ghost, depicting them, instead, from a lesbian/queer perspective. Images of the monstrous, conventionally utilized in fiction and film to stigmatize and demean the lesbian, are interrogated and their oppressive effects exposed (see Palmer 1999, 8-23). These strategies, in the deconstructive and transformative approach which they apply to traditional values and narrative structures, are, in general, postmodern in character. Although, as Linda Hutcheon illustrates, feminist/lesbian perspectives differ from postmodern ones in their focus on agency and their commitment to a political agenda (see Hutcheon 1989, 140-168), they nonetheless reveal significant ideological and intellectual connections with them. Strategies of denaturalization and deconstruction, typical of the postmodern, feature prominently in feminist/lesbian culture and literature in relation to institutions such as the family and heterosexuality, along with the reworking of genre and convention. However, feminist/lesbian writers, in contrast to their postmodern counterparts, utilize these strategies with a specific end in view; they employ them to investigate issues of gender and sexuality. And, while recognizing the role that social context, economics and the unconscious play in the formation of the subject, they seek to foreground, with differing degrees of emphasis, concepts of agency and self-determination (see Palmer 1997, 156-180; Wiegman 1994, 1-20). These observations are relevant to Schulman’s People in Trouble and Waters’s Affinity, the two fictional texts on which I have chosen to concentrate my discussion. Both novels, though differing radically in style and genre, seek to interrogate and challenge hetero-patriarchal value-schemes by recasting and transforming narrative forms and conventions. Whereas People in Trouble gives a realist account of the tense relationship existing between the gay/lesbian community and its heterosexual counterpart in the context of the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York, Affinity is a work of historiographic metafiction with Gothic affiliations. Located in Victorian London, it reworks, from a queer point of view, the lesbian’s traditional associations with the uncanny phenomena of the ghost, the vampire, and the witch. In addition, despite the differences they display, both novels represent lesbian desire, in conceptual terms, as signifying a form of “excess” (see White 1991, 142-172; Zimmerman 1992, 4) This excess, as Kristeva comments, disturbs “borders, positions, rules” (1991, 4) and is shown to have a destabilizing effect on heterosexual institutions such as the family and society in general. Forming a striking contrast

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in content and style, the two novels offer the reader an insight into the diversity of strategies and tactics which Anglo-American writers employ to recast the theme of the lesbian’s abject signification and, by so doing, renegotiate her position and status.

Sarah Schulman’s People in Trouble: Gay/Heterosexual Interaction in the New York AIDS Crisis Schulman’s People in Trouble is unusually ambitious in scope since, in contrast to the majority of works of lesbian fiction published in the 1990s, which, while treating the politics of lesbianism/homosexuality indirectly, generally eschew a directly political emphasis, it interweaves a narrative with a socio-political focus centring on the struggle waged by the New York gay community to achieve justice and medical facilities for people with AIDS, with a narrative that is personal in nature. The latter centres on the triangular relationship which develops between the heterosexual Peter, his bisexual wife Kate, and the lesbian Molly, with whom Kate is having an affair. The two narratives are, in fact, closely linked, since the storyline treating the relations between Peter, Kate and Molly represents, in its focus on the misunderstandings and conflicts that arise between heterosexuals and homosexuals, a microcosmic version of the AIDS storyline. Discussing the uneasy and frequently hostile relationship which exists between lesbian/gay and heterosexual communities, the theorist Diana Fuss describes the two haunting one another in abject fashion in the manner of a ghostly visitation. She writes: Heterosexuality can never fully ignore the close psychical proximity of its terrifying (homo)sexual other, any more than homosexuality can entirely escape the equally insistent social pressure of (hetero)sexual conformity. Each is haunted by the other, but here again it is the other who comes to stand in for the very occurrence of haunting and ghostly visitation. (1991, 3)

Fuss’s description of the tense relationship existing between lesbian/gay and heterosexual communities serves as a useful gloss on Schulman’s novel, evoking the socio-political problems and contradictions which it depicts. The two narratives which Schulman interweaves, the AIDS storyline and the storyline focusing on the triangular relationship between Peter, Kate, and Molly, are linked, in fact, by the concept of the abject. Heterosexual individuals and society are represented as expressing both fear and fascination with their lesbian/gay counterpart(s), while the latter strive, in different ways

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and with varying degrees of success, to resist and challenge this abject classification. In addition to the concept of the abject, there is also another device which Schulman employs to link the two narratives. This is the figure of Molly, which is central to both. However, Molly plays a radically different role in each storyline. Whereas in her personal relations with Peter and Kate her role tends to be limited to that of abject object, in her dealings with the gay community, on the contrary, she is portrayed as transcending this position by assuming a strong degree of agency and playing the role of a hero. Schulman represents her caring for friends and acquaintances who are HIV positive, encouraging them to fight for civil rights and medical facilities, and acting as a coordinator of the Justice movement, the organization that the gay community establishes to combat discrimination. By ascribing to Molly these two very different roles and representing her from a variety of different viewpoints – that of her lesbian and gay friends, as well as the bisexual Kate and the heterosexual Peter – Schulman interrogates the abject image which society assigns to the woman who identifies as lesbian, while simultaneously renegotiating and resignifying her position. Schulman’s representation of the triangular relationship between Peter, Kate, and Molly is characterized by ironies and contradictions – and she subtly delineates the psychological and emotional conflicts which the three characters experience as they struggle to cope with emotions and responses which, despite their good intentions, they find themselves unable to fully understand or control. Peter, though intrigued by lesbianism and homosexuality and priding himself on his liberal attitudes, is one of the worst culprits in committing the act of bigotry described by Butler of relegating homosexuals to “the domain of abject beings” (1993, 3) and denying them full subject status. On first discovering that Kate is engaging in a lesbian affair, he is in no way worried since, typecasting lesbian partnerships as superficial and ephemeral, he assumes that it will collapse in a week or two. When, to his surprise, the affair continues, he responds to the fact with a mixture of fascination and unease. On accidentally encountering Molly in the street, he scrutinizes her closely and, with a sense of relief, contemptuously dismisses her appearance as ugly and unfeminine: “She has a moustache, he thought. And she’s fat. Not fat exactly, but definitely out of shape. Her clothes don’t fit well” ([Schulman’s italics] 1990, 107). The character vignette which he proceeds to construct mentally and to foist upon Molly further exposes

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his prejudices, reflecting his view of lesbians as manipulative, strident man-haters: This one swaggered. He’d have known she was gay immediately. As soon as there was any real difference of opinion she’d be a real bitch, not conceding anything to a man, just for the principle. Then he’d have to make excuses to get away before she accused him of being a sexist. They were all like that. (1990, 107)

Schulman goes on to describe how Peter’s encounter with Molly, and the emotions of disgust/fascination which it generates in him, have the effect of arousing him sexually, while at the same time making him feel insecure about his masculinity. He enters a nearby cinema and, having purchased a ticket for the film, goes into “the men’s room. Once inside, he stood in the stall sweating holding his balls and rocking back and forth. It left a smell on his hands that he liked” (107). However, the incident also has an unpleasant effect; it uncomfortably evokes the memory of a disturbing encounter which, as a teenager, he experienced with a prostitute when the latter’s laughter, combined with the anonymity of the situation, upset him. Peter’s response to the gay community and the phenomenon of AIDS which is currently afflicting it reveals a similar mingling of fascination and disgust as his response to the lesbian Molly. He admits to admiring men who identify as gay for their creative abilities and for what, with characteristic insensitivity, he terms their “trick” (59) of concealing their sexual identification and rendering it invisible. As is typical of the ironic nature of Schulman’s narrative, he himself is, on occasion, deceived by this “trick”. Sitting in a café, watching a group of people enter the church across the street, he is at first unaware that the spectacle which he is observing represents a funeral for a victim of AIDS, an all-too frequent event in 1980s New York. When, belatedly, he perceives the truth, he feels threatened and disoriented, “slapped in the face by homosexuality” (31). The sense of personal threat which Peter experiences in this encounter with the gay community stems, Schulman indicates, from his unconscious desire, typical of the subject’s response to an encounter with the abject, to keep his personal borders and boundaries, both psychological and physical, intact and clearly defined. Even though he prides himself on being relaxed about gender roles and enjoying experimenting with conventions of sexual difference by dressing up in Kate’s panties when making love with her, he nonetheless feels shocked when, on embarking on the relationship with Molly, she engages in certain experiments of her

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own: she cultivates an assertive, masculinized appearance and starts striding round New York city in a suit. Peter’s concern with keeping his personal boundaries intact assumes at times a strongly physical manifestation. His fascination with the phenomenon of gay funerals prompts him, on one occasion, to enter a church and participate in the service. Once inside, however, he experiences a distressing sensation of suffocation and is overcome by feelings of nausea. The attraction which homosexuality holds for him is, in fact, potent enough, he remembers, to have impelled him, in the pre-AIDS era of the 1970s, to engage in a brief sexual encounter with a colleague who identifies as gay. However, while willing to perform the act of fellatio, he admits to feeling a pronounced sense of relief when the colleague does not insist that he swallow his semen. Another figure who relegates lesbianism/homosexuality to “the domain of abject beings” is Kate, a fact which may surprise the reader since, as well as being sexually involved with Molly, she is largely responsible for initiating the relationship with her. However, like her husband Peter, though for different reasons, Kate is deeply concerned to keep her psychological and social boundaries intact. Though passionately infatuated with Molly and becoming increasingly dependent on the sexual aspect of the relationship, she is terrified that her lover, as she vividly expresses it, will “want to eat me up […], trap me, try to turn me into a lesbian” (21). In order to prevent the love affair from impinging on her marriage, Kate determines to protect her domestic life and “never to grant her free access, not in one lump sum and not piece by piece” (20). As a result, she forbids Molly entry to the marital apartment and, on accidentally encountering her in the street when she is with Peter, refuses to acknowledge her. Treatment of this kind understandably humiliates and hurts Molly, as does Kate’s dictum that she will see her only at times of her own choosing when Peter is occupied elsewhere. Nonetheless, although the narrative emphasizes that it is Kate who controls the relationship, she refuses to recognize the fact, but, entrenched in an abject fantasy which blinds her to the reality of events, persists in regarding Molly as a dangerous, disruptive force. Pondering the problematic aspects of the situation which, ironically, she herself has engineered, she angrily concludes that “Molly had successfully insinuated herself right into the middle of her habit of living and had then started agitating from the inside for change […]. Molly had power over her” (20). As well as occupying the role of Peter’s wife, Kate is also a successful artist, and this is another area of her life which she attempts to compartmentalize and protect from Molly’s influence. She is

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entranced by Molly’s appearance and, as a result, feels a strong desire to paint her portrait. However, she forces herself to refrain from embarking on the project since she has no wish to create a work of art whose execution will cause Peter distress or that, if she kept it secret, she would be unable to share with him. Schulman’s description of the way that Kate “feared the consequences of chaos but was comfortable with fragments, when they were freely chosen” (14) is, in fact, as applicable to her relationship with Molly as it is to her artistic pursuits to which it immediately refers. Kate makes every effort to control the relationship and keep it on the perimeter of her life, with the aim of preventing what she sees as a frightening descent into emotional and social chaos. However, though striving to deny Molly “free access” (20) to her domestic life and, in one episode, denigrating the people with AIDS whom she befriends as “monsters” (97), Kate is unable to prevent Molly’s lesbian identification and political commitment from impinging on her consciousness and exerting an influence on her. In addition to adopting increasingly assertive body movements and styles of dress, she visits a lesbian club with Molly and even agrees to accompany her to the Mount Sinai Hospital to meet a patient in the final stages of AIDS. She also finds her artistic interests undergoing a transformation. She angrily rejects the paintings she has created in the past as too “distant” and removed from the “sex and violence” (16) of city life. Eventually, in fact, she gives up painting altogether and creates a complex installation which she entitles self-reflexively “People in Trouble”. The title acts as a gloss on the novel as a whole, unifying its themes and alerting the reader to their importance. As well as echoing the novel’s title, it is applicable both to the problematic triangular relationship in which Kate herself is involved, and to the plight of the New York gay community afflicted, on the one hand, with AIDS and oppressed, on the other, by the heterosexual population’s discriminatory and uncaring behaviour. While utilizing Kate’s and Peter’s attitude to Molly to illustrate heterosexual society’s abject treatment of the woman who identifies as lesbian, Schulman also subtly contests and challenges her relegation to the realm of the abject. She achieves this by conferring on Molly a complex subjectivity and viewpoint and by giving the reader an insight into her personal circumstances. We learn that her shabby, illfitting clothes, which Peter crassly ascribes to her lack of fashion sense and her being a man-hater, are not a deliberate choice but reflect her poverty as well as her generous nature. Surviving on a series of poorly paid, part-time jobs, she donates any surplus cash she obtains

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to derelict New York beggars and down-and-outs, many of whom are HIV positive. We also see Molly herself striving to resist her abject signification by challenging Kate’s refusal to acknowledge her in the street and questioning her decision that they organize their meetings to fit in with Peter’s schedule. Schulman furnishes us, in fact, with a detailed analysis of the stresses and strains of Molly’s situation, depicting, with considerable poignancy, the tensions and frustrations which it involves; she describes how Molly lived with this conflict like an itch, like mites laying eggs under the skin that made her squirm with discomfort, especially at night, when she, without restraint, relived those moments of pure anger. Like waiting for Kate. She seemed to always be waiting, the afternoon getting longer and later until it disappeared. (36)

Another strategy which Schulman adopts to give a multifaceted representation of Molly and to portray her as an individual rather than a stereotype is to depict her through the eyes of members of the lesbian/gay community. She describes how a lesbian friend, to whom Molly confides the difficulties she is experiencing in her love-life, astutely diagnoses the problem as political in nature rather than personal; she sensibly advises Molly to terminate the relationship with Kate and find herself a lesbian lover “who’s not going to treat you as a freak” (78). Schulman’s representation of the contribution which Molly makes to the work of the gay community and to supporting the work of the Justice movement gives her the opportunity to explore the situation of people with AIDS and the inhuman treatment which they encounter from a society which, all too readily, discards them as abject. Again, she treats the topic in a multifaceted manner. While acknowledging the unpleasant physical aspect of their suffering, she portrays them, by highlighting their courage and endurance and foregrounding their individuality, as transcending the domain of the abject and achieving subjectivity and agency. Depicting the body in the grip of disease or approaching death, Kristeva describes how [t]he body’s inside, in that case, shows up in order to compensate for the collapse of the border between inside and outside. It is as if the skin, a fragile container, no longer guaranteed the integrity of one’s ‘own clean and proper self ’ but, scraped or transparent, invisible or taut, gave way before the dejection of its contents. (1991, 53)

Schulman represents Scott, one of the AIDS victims whom Molly visits at the Mount Sinai Hospital, in just such a state of physical

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disintegration. She describes him as “propped up in bed with his hair brushed out loose around his shoulders. He looked like a Madonna, even though his skin was coming apart” (1990, 145). Seeing him in this derelict condition, Kate, who has accompanied Molly on her visit, finds it “hard to believe this raw, bleeding skin was Scott and not just something laid on top of him” (145). However, by unexpectedly introducing the image of the Madonna, with its connotations of iconic beauty and patient suffering, and recounting in a subsequent passage the wryly humorous remarks which Scott makes about his physical condition and his approaching death, Schulman redeems him from the category of the abject. She portrays him not as “other” and alien, but on the contrary, as a courageous individual with whose personality and perspective the reader is positioned to empathize. By utilizing this and other strategies, she contests the relegation of lesbians and gay men to the domain of the abject, emphasizing their humanity, individualism, and diversity.

Sarah Waters’s Affinity: Spectrality, Vampirism and Doppelgängers in Victorian London Whereas Schulman, in interrogating the abject signification of the lesbian and seeking to renegotiate her position, adopts a contemporary focus and employs a realist style, Waters, while involved in a similar project, utilizes tactics of a very different kind. Locating her narrative in an earlier period of history and appropriating Gothic conventions, she recasts from a lesbian viewpoint the motifs of the ghost, the vampire and the doppelgänger traditionally used in fiction and film to render the lesbian monstrous, employing them instead to represent the disruptive effects of lesbian desire and to explore the restraints imposed on female sexuality in Victorian England. The motif of spectrality is, in fact, central to Waters’s novel since the context of its action is the spiritualist movement which came to the fore in England in the 1860s and 1870s. During this period female mediums, claiming to communicate with the spirits of the dead and to enable them to materialize in physical form, organized séances which frequently attracted large audiences. As the historian Alex Owen illustrates, the role of medium could furnish, in fact, a route for the working-class woman to transgress barriers of class and gender and, if her trafficking in the supernatural met with success, achieve fame and fortune (1981, 144-235). Waters teases out the contradictions of power/powerlessness which the spiritualist movement posed for

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women and, by utilizing it as a context for a lesbian Gothic romance, illustrates its transgressive potential as a vehicle for subverting conventions of class and sexuality. Waters utilizes reference to the spectral not only in relation to the spiritualist movement and its representatives but also to portray the abject designation which Victorian society assigned to the spinster and to the woman who forms a lesbian attachment, denying both figures full subject status. Her heroine Margaret Prior, who occupies both roles, is portrayed as an isolated, haunted figure. Sitting writing her diary at night in the dim light of a lamp, she thinks “[h]ow my mind runs to ghosts, these days” (Waters 1999, 126). She describes the fogs engulfing the city in abject manner as disturbing the boundaries between outside/inside, as “they press against the windows […] seeping into the house through the ill-fitting sashes” (125). The personal tragedies which have reduced Margaret to this melancholy plight are conveyed to us gradually, filtered through her memories and thoughts. The death of her father, an academic working in the field of history whom she enjoyed helping with his research, as well as being an emotional blow, has put an end to her intellectual life, frustrating the plans for the research trip to Italy which the two had planned to make together. She has also, we learn, suffered an even more devastating loss, one about which convention dictates that she keep silent, confiding the anguish it causes her only to her diary. Her lover Helen, whom she first encountered at one of her father’s lectures and who was due to accompany them on the trip to Italy, has deserted her. Tired of the secrecy and subterfuge which the lesbian relationship involved and seeking to lead a “normal” life, she has accepted a proposal of marriage from Margaret’s brother Stephen and born him a son. These events have left Margaret feeling depressed and alienated, an image, in fact, of Irigarayan dereliction (see Whitford 1991, 91, 107). With the aim of achieving respite from her sorrows and escaping the tedium of her upper middle-class home, Margaret, to the dismay of her mother who associates the inmates with depravity and disease, decides to volunteer as “a Lady Visitor” (46) at Millbank prison. It is here that she encounters the working-class medium Selina Dawes, who has been sentenced to five years incarceration for the part she allegedly played in the death of a woman who attended one of her séances, when, she maintains, the spirit she caused to materialize proved unruly. Selina carries a number of different associations with the abject. Her connection with blood, stemming from the crime she has allegedly committed, is the most obvious. The novel opens, in

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fact, with a description of her gazing in horror at her hands stained with the blood of the deceased woman. Foregrounding its physicality, she comments, “I did not even know it for blood at first, it looked so black, & seemed so warm & thick, like sealing-wax” (Waters 1999, 2). Kristeva describes blood as “a fascinating semantic crossroads, the propitious place for abjection where death and femininity, murder and procreation, cessation of life and vitality all come together” (1991, 96; Kristeva’s italics). Selina herself, and the transgressive social and sexual role she plays in Waters’s narrative, vividly embody these binaries. In addition, her profession as a medium and the communication with the spirits of the dead which it involves, result in her performing the taboo act of crossing the border between life and death. Yet another boundary, one particularly relevant to her current situation as prisoner in Millbank gaol, which she claims to be capable of traversing with the assistance of her spirit friends, is that between the prison and the city that lies beyond. Selina also reveals a connection with two uncanny figures with abject connotations whose appearance in fiction and film frequently has the effect of stigmatizing lesbian identification and desire. These are the witch and the vampire (see Dyer 1988, 47-72; Palmer 1999, 29-58, 99-125; Weiss 1992, 84-108). Selina’s seductive beauty and enchanting words, like those of the sorceress in John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, enthrall Margaret sexually, prompting her to credit her protestations of love. Infatuated with her person and unconsciously regarding her as a substitute for her former lover Margaret, she agrees to use her inheritance to assist her escape from gaol and elope with her to the continent. Selina’s vampirish aspect is reflected in the way she devours Margaret’s energy and resources. As well as stealing her heart and her money, as the indirect allusion to suicide in the concluding paragraph of the novel signals, she takes her life. Reference to vampirism also occurs in relation to other female characters in the novel. In a bitter altercation with her former lover Helen, Margaret describes the bed they shared as “haunted” by their kisses, grotesquely envisaging the kisses “hanging in the curtains, like bats, ready to swoop” (Waters 1999, 204). However, while associating both Selina and Margaret with motifs relating to the uncanny, including the ghost, the witch and the vampire, Waters avoids portraying either character as conventionally monstrous. On the contrary, by giving the reader an insight into the troubled histories of the two women and exploring their subjectivities and motivation, she positions the reader to understand and empathize

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with them. In this way, she interrogates the application of these uncanny motifs to the figure of the lesbian, questioning their appropriateness and contesting the lesbian’s traditionally monstrous representation. Another role with abject connotations, which Waters utilizes in depicting the relationship between Margaret and Selina, is that of the doppelgänger. On first encountering Selina in her prison cell Margaret interprets the sigh which she utters as the “complement” (26) to her own melancholy state of mind. Perceiving that, like herself, Selina nurses personal griefs, she thinks, “You are like me” (82). It is, in fact, this sense of identification which Selina exploits in persuading Margaret to assist her escape from gaol. Combining the dual meaning of the word, the conventional meaning of “resemblance” with that of “paramour” which it signified in nineteenth-century spiritualist circles (see Owen 1981, 38), she ardently tells her, “You were seeking me, your own affinity” (Waters 1999, 275). In the interplay of doubles which, as this episode illustrates, pervades the relationship between the two women, Selina plays a particularly complex role. On the one hand, she signifies the image of the sexual jouissance which Margaret hopes she will enjoy if only she dare transgress the law and assist Selina in engineering her escape from gaol while, on the other hand, she reflects a darker message. In gothic fiction and film, as Ruth Parkin-Gounelas points out, the protagonist’s encounter with her/his double frequently acts as a harbinger of death (2001, 109-110). The novel’s concluding paragraph, with its indirect allusion to Margaret’s suicide, hints at this grim doom. However, as is the case with her treatment of the images of the witch and vampire, Waters, while utilizing the motif of the double to explore the emotional dynamics of the relationship between Selina and Margaret, also questions its appropriateness. The two women, the reader perceives, appear as doubles and mirror images in only a very limited sense. While sharing a common gender and sexual orientation, they differ radically in terms of class affiliation, personality and attitude to sex. Whereas the romantic Margaret is genuinely infatuated with Selina, the hard-headed Selina does not reciprocate her love, but, on the contrary, opportunistically exploits it in order to escape from gaol. By giving a detailed representation of the subjectivities and histories of the two women and highlighting the significant differences they display, Waters refutes the myth of the lesbian relationship as a form of narcissistic doubling. Another Gothic motif with abject connotations which Waters subjects to lesbian transformation is the haunted house. Margaret’s

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upper middle-class home and Millbank prison both represent, in fact, innovative recastings of the motif. Although the two establishments initially strike the reader as having little in common, they reveal on closer scrutiny, from an ideological point of view, significant similarities. Both are hetero-patriarchal institutions, the former embodying the oppressive power of the Victorian family and the latter of the state, which entrap their female inhabitants. Mrs. Prior, disapproving of Margaret’s activities outside the home, seeks to restrict her movements by means of keeping her under surveillance, while Millbank prison is constructed on the model of the panopticon, the architectural structure associated by Michel Foucault with state surveillance and control. Both home and prison, moreover, carry spectral connotations. Described in imagery of darkness and shadows, they are haunted by their inmates’ memories and frustrated desires, which relate to lesbian love in the case of both the middle-class Margaret and her working-class counterpart Selina. Spectrality assumes, in the case of the latter, distinctly physical manifestations. Selina is a medium by profession, and in the narrative reference occurs to spirit matter, the curiously oxymoronic substance of which, according to nineteenth-century spiritualists, the spectral body was composed. The floor of her prison cell is also described as specked with tell-tale drops of wax, the material the medium used to trace the body’s outline. The correspondence between the domestic world of Margaret’s middle-class home and the public institution of Millbank prison is accentuated by the fact that Margaret, on entering the latter, rather than being struck by the difference between the women prisoners and herself, as the reader might expect, finds herself identifying with them. In fact, in a passage heralding her feelings of attraction for Selina, she fantasizes about an exchange of hearts taking place between herself and the prisoners. A comment voiced by a male warder suddenly alerts her to the beating of her own heart, prompting her to wonder “[h]ow it would be to have that heart drawn from me, and one of those women’s coarse organs pressed into the slippery cavity left at my breast” (Waters 1999, 26). Margaret’s fantasy of the prisoner’s heart entering her breast, in its reference to the invasion of her body by an alien organ and the strongly physical manner in which it is described, carries connotations of the abject and is disturbingly sexual in implication. She appears both fascinated and repulsed by the thought of contact with the working-class prisoner’s “coarse organ”, a phrase which is, of course, as applicable to the genitals as it is to the heart.

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As is evident from the quotation cited above, Affinity, while differing from Schulman’s People in Trouble in content, location, and style, shares with it, like many works of contemporary lesbian fiction, a pronounced emphasis on the physical and the material. The reader’s attention is frequently directed to abject objects and substances. Reference is made to the insalubrious nature of the food served to the prisoners – “all of it horrible” (35), in Margaret’s opinion. She describes, “the potatoes boiled in their skins and streaked with black” (35) and observes that “the soup was cloudy, and had a layer of grease upon the top that thickened and whitened as the cans grew cool” (35). The sensation of disgust which the “layer of grease”, the interface between the soup and the individual drinking it, provokes in Margaret reminds us of the sensation of nausea which Kristeva records having felt “when the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk” (1991, 2). The prisoners’ clothing strikes Margaret as similarly sordid, and she describes in a tone of disgust their linsey dresses smelling of sweat. A woman whom she engages in conversation complains that her dress returns from the laundry “very stained”, while “the flannel under-things are awful rough, and tend to scratch” (39). Taken together, these references to the unpleasant food and the female inmates’ shabby clothing create the impression of Millbank prison as an abject world of female entrapment and suffering, physical as well as mental. My discussion of Schulman’s People in Trouble and Waters’s Affinity illustrates the different strategies which writers of lesbian fiction utilize to renegotiate the lesbian’s relations with the abject, with the aim of resignifying her position. Whereas Schulman gives a realist account of the relationship between lesbian/gay and heterosexual communities and individuals in the context of the 1980s New York AIDS crisis, depicting the uneasy and on occasion hostile interaction between the two, Waters appropriates and recasts gothic conventions and structures. Locating her narrative in Victorian London, she employs motifs relating to the spectral, the vampire and the doppelgänger in order to explore the disruptive effects of lesbian desire in the repressive culture of nineteenth-century England and to represent the element of excess which, regarded from a phallocentric viewpoint, this desire signifies. The two writers also differ in their treatment of the abject and the particular aspects that they foreground. Schulman concentrates on relating the physical and political dimensions. She prompts the reader to compare and contrast Peter’s perception of Molly in her shabby clothes as fat and dowdy with the heterosexual community’s rejection

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of people with AIDS on account of their physical infirmity and derelict appearance. Moreover, like the heterosexual population in general, Peter and Kate, despite their apparently liberal attitudes and their feelings of attraction towards the Other that homosexuality signifies, are revealed to be deeply concerned with keeping their personal boundaries intact from the “infection” that too close a contact with it represents. Waters, on the contrary, while acknowledging the physical dimension of the abject in the focus she places on Selina’s connection with blood and on the squalid situation of the inmates of Millbank prison, seeks rather to foreground the social and psychological dimensions. Margaret and Selina, though differing in class, are both constructed by society as abject, the former on account of her role as spinster and the latter due to her criminality and her connections with the uncanny. In addition, of course, both characters relate to the abject through their involvement in lesbian desire. Taken together, the two novels illustrate something of the vitality and diversity of contemporary lesbian fiction. They also indicate the ability of writers to respond fruitfully to new developments in theory and sexual politics by exposing and challenging the abject position traditionally assigned to the homosexual.

Works Cited Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. London: Routledge. Castle, Terry. 1993. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Clément, Catherine. 1987. “The Guilty One”. In The Newly Born Woman, by Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous, translated by Betsy Wing, 3-59. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Creed, Barbara. 1995. “Lesbian Bodies: Tribades, Tomboys and Tarts”. In Sexy Bodies: the Strange Carnalities of Feminism, edited by Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn, 86-103. London: Routledge. Dyer, Richard. “Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism”. In Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender and Popular Fiction, edited by Susannah Radstone, 47-72. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Faderman, Lillian. 1992. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Freud, Sigmund. [1919] 1955. “The ‘Uncanny’ ”. In Vol. 17 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, 218-251. London: The Hogarth Press. Fuss, Diana. 1991. Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. London: Routledge.

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Hart, Lynda. 1994. Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression. London: Routledge. Holmlund, Christine. 1991. “The Lesbian, The Mother and the Heterosexual Lover: Irigaray’s Recodings of Difference”. Feminist Studies 17.2:283-308. Hutcheon, Linda. 1989. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Jackson, Rosemary. 1981. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen. Kristeva, Julia. [1980] 1991. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Owen, Alex. 1981. The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. London: Virago. Palmer, Paulina. 1997. “Lesbian Fiction and the Postmodern”. In Just Postmodernism, edited by Steven Earnshaw, 156-180. Amsterdam: Rodopi. —. 1999. Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions. London: Cassell. Parkin-Gounelas, Ruth. 2001. Literature and Psychoanalysis: Intertextual Readings. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Schulman, Sarah. 1990. People in Trouble. London: Sheba Feminist Publishers. Waters, Sarah. 1999. Affinity. London: Virago. Weiss, Andrea. 1992. Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema. London: Jonathan Cape. White, Patricia. 1981. “Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter: The Haunting”. In Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, edited by Diana Fuss, 142-172. London: Routledge. Whitford, Margaret, ed. 1991. The Irigaray Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Wiegman, Robyn. 1994. “Introduction: Mapping the Lesbian Postmodern”. In The Lesbian Postmodern, edited by Laura Doan, 1-20. New York: Columbia University Press. Zimmerman, Bonnie. 1984. “Daughters of Darkness: The Lesbian Vampire on Film”. In Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, edited by Keith Barry, 153-163. Metuchen, NY: Scarecrow Press. —. 1992. “Lesbians Like This and That: Some Notes on Lesbian Criticism for the Nineties”. In New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings, edited by Sally Munt, 1-15. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.


The Bhibhitsa Rasa in Anglophone Indian Cultural Discourse: The Repugnant and Distasteful at the Level of Gender, Race, and Caste

Nilufer E. Bharucha Marking out and identifying the Other often involves stigmatizing, demonizing, judging as inferior, repugnant and/or distasteful. These acts surface in cultural discourse as representations of disgust and turn difference into inferiority, the disgusting, the abject. The marking of someone as disgusting or treating them as abject can thus become an act of victimization – as the Other and his/her disgusting abjectness can be blamed or made to carry the burden of the insufficiencies of the self. This could be manifested in the internalization of inferior status on grounds of both gender as well as race and thus becomes obvious in the discourse of women and those who have/had been colonized to experience self-hatred and low self-esteem. The disgusting and abject are complex notions, and, as Miller has put it, they can “attract as well as repel” (1997). Thus, in spite of its negative connotations, the disgusting has featured in different forms of art – both in the East and in the West and theories of aesthetics have taken notice of it. Aristotle’s Poetics assigns these feelings to the lower orders in the context of the comic. However, even in the higher genre of tragedy, in classical Greek drama, for example in Oedipus Rex, there are elements such as incest, which evoke disgust and repel. The theory of Indian Aesthetics, elaborated upon as the Rasa theory, is related in the Natyashastra, wherein the Bhibhitsa is one of the Rasas which signifies disgust and is conveyed by the artiste – the actor or dancer – through facial expressions and bodily gestures. The Natyashastra is supposed to have been created by Lord Brahma, the Supreme Creator of the Hindu trinity, (the other two being the Preserver Vishnu and the Destroyer Shiva); its more earthly authorship, however, is generally attributed to Bharata. Bharata’s Natyashastra could have been composed anytime between 200 B.C. and 200 A.D. (see Malshe 2003, 32-34). Bharata’s Natyashastra – Natya meaning drama and shastra being the theory of dramaturgy – classifies dramatic art, which includes dance and music as these were considered inseparable from drama. It also elaborates upon the varieties of Bhasha – language, chhanda – metre, abhinaya – acting, the styles of presentations – dharmis, types of rupas – plays and the

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eight Rasas – aesthetic emotions. Rasa literally means flavour or taste: the Natyashastra has codified the Rasas as different kinds of feelings and human emotions that may be portrayed by the artiste (see Vatsyayan 1996). Bharata’s Natyashastra lists nine Rasas, though Brahma had specified only eight. The ninth Rasa, Shantam, peace, is believed to be Bharata’s own contribution. The eight other Rasas are Sringara, the Rasa of love, beauty, and the erotic; Roudra, that of anger; Veera, bravery and courage; Hasya, happiness and laughter; Karuna, pity and compassion; Bhaya, fear and horror; Adbhuta, the strange and unique; and Bhibhitsa, the disgusting. Sringara, Roudra, Veera and Bhibhitsa are the primary Rasas and the others are derived from them. Hasya is derived from Sringara, as the beautiful and erotic can result in laughter or smiles; Karuna from Roudra, as paradoxically enough anger can be dissipated through pity and compassion with the object of anger; Adbhuta from Veera, as that which is brave is also often unique or at least unsual, and finally Bhaya, fear or horror. Bharata has defined the Bhibhitsa Rasa as the Juguptsa or disgust that arises out of seeing what is displeasing or unwholesome, such as vomit, faeces and bad odour. It can also arise upon hearing or discussing similar things. It is usually expressed on stage through anubhabas (expressions/gestures) such as the distortion of limbs or the rolling of the eyes and the shaking of the head (see Malshe 2003, 73-84). The Bhibhitsa Rasa, although a primary Rasa, is/was rarely used for long stretches in Indian classical dance or drama as it was considered to be repulsive and hence unsuitable for depiction in long stretches of time. The relationship of this Classical Indian theory of drama to Anglophone literature becomes evident when one keeps in mind that this literature draws upon both the Indian and the Western literary and critical traditions. Anglophone literature has emerged after the colonization of India by the British and has hence functioned as a cultural discourse with an in-built hybridity, due to the impact of Western thought on Indian scholarship. Postcolonial theory has drawn attention to how such evocation of the Western tradition can begin with apparent mimesis but is ambivalent and not merely dependent on identification with the colonial. Homi Bhabha has also said that the “menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority” (1994, 88; emphasis in original). He has further looked at hybridity as a “liminal space, in-between the designations of identity” which “opens

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up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (1994, 4). With regard to the Indian tradition right from the early years of Indian literature in English, the influence of Indian epics, myths and legends has been felt in the poetry of Henry Derozio, Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu and A. K. Ramanujam, among many others. The influence of Indian narrative modes has more particularly manifested itself in the texts of postcolonial Indian novelists such as Salman Rushdie and Vikram Chandra, again among many more. It is thus fitting that the expression of the abject/disgusting be mapped on this literature using the concept of the Bhibhitsa Rasa. The target texts, plays written by two of India’s best-known dramatists – Girish Karnad and Mahesh Dattani – focus on Indian myths (in the form of drama and dance) and draw upon the Natyashastra in many different ways. Dattani writes in English while Karnad writes first in Kannada and then translates his plays into English. For the mapping of the Bhibhitsa Rasa, I have chosen The Fire and the Rain (1998) by Karnad and Dance Like a Man (1994) by Dattani. In The Fire and the Rain, the Bhibhitsa Rasa is manifested at two levels, that of gender and that of caste. There is also a third level, that of the supernatural, where the acts/events that arouse disgust are recreated in the liminal form of the Brahma Rakshasa, the demon soul, who wanders between life and death, seeking relief from eternal bondage. The play was commissioned in 1993 by the Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, USA, has had several performances in India and the West, and was turned into a film with the same title in 2003. The focus here though is entirely on the play and not the film. The original Kannada title of the play is Agni Mattu Male. Agni is the Sanskrit, classical word for a sacred fire, while the rest of the title is in Kannada. In his notes to the play, Karnad explains that the word Agni has “connotations of holiness, ritual status, ceremony", which the more common Kannada word for fire – “benki” – does not possess. “Agni” is what burns in sacrificial altars, acts as a witness at weddings and is lit at cremations. It is also the name of the “god of fire” (1998, 63). “Male” is the Kannada word for rain and “mattu”, in Kannada is a concord which functions like the copula “and”. The plot of the play has been drawn from the Indian epic, Mahabharata, chapters 135-138 of the Vana Parva (Forest Canto). Karnad’s source for the epic is Chakravarti Rajagopalachari’s translation of the epic. The play is based on the myth of Yavakri that narrates the tale of the two sages, Bharadwaja and Raibhya. Raibhya has two sons, Paravasu and Aravasu (Arvasu in the play), while the

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son of the ascetic Bharadwaja is named Yavakri. Raibhya and his elder son Paravasu are well-established scholar priests, and when the play opens, Paravasu is performing a seven-year-long fire sacrifice (Yagna) to propitiate the Rain God, Indra, as it has not rained for ten years. Yavakri and his father, on the other hand, are comparatively unknown and this incenses the son who seeks to avenge himself against what he considers the unmerited neglect of his father and the consequently high repute of Raibhya and Paravasu. In the Hindu tradition there are at least two kinds of sages, those who seek knowledge and salvation through total renunciation like Bhardwaj and those who continue to interact with society at large and offer their wisdom to kings and other powerful figures and guide them in the running of the state. The latter thus have higher visibility but are in no way considered superior to the ascetic sages. In spite of this, Yavakri feels badly treated and retires to the forest to practise severe penances through which he hopes to be granted a boon from Indra that would destroy Raibhya and his sons. When he returns from the forest, though Bhardwaj cautions him otherwise, he seeks out Paravasu’s wife, Vishaka, and violates her to avenge himself on the men. Then ensues a chain of events that includes the summoning of a Brahma Rakshasa (demon soul) by Raibhya to destroy Yavakri. Raibhya also invokes a beautiful girl who distracts Yavakri as he performs his morning rites and pours away his sacred water thus leaving him open to attack by the demon soul. Also in the story in the Mahabharata is the unwitting slaying of Raibhya by Paravasu, who gets his younger brother Aravasu to take upon himself the sin of patricide. Later, however, Paravasu betrays his brother and denounces him as a Brahmin-killer. Aravasu retires to the forest to seek a boon from the Sun God. He succeeds in restoring life not just to his father but also to Raibhya and Yavakri. The gods admonish Yavakri and henceforth ask him to follow the path of righteousness, while Paravasu is made to forget his lapses and becomes a good man (see Rajagopalachari 1951a, 118122). Karnad has changed many aspects of the original myth in his play: while the role of the gods does remain important, human agency is given greater weight. One could read this as an aspect of Karnad’s cultural hybridity, i.e. the influence of Western culture and literature – by the early modern period, the role of the gods, fate and destiny, were replaced by individual character. Also foregrounded are the aspects of gender and caste. This makes Karnad’s text much more complex than the original tale. The manner in which both Paravasu and Yavakri abuse Vishakha sexually brings in the element of the disgusting in

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male-female equations. As regards the issue of caste, the tribal girl Nittilai is Karnad’s chosen vehicle in the play for showing how the lower castes and the tribals (outside the pale of the caste system) are considered a defilement of upper caste society. Also of import is the troupe of players who seek to perform a play, as this brings in the device of the double-frame, the play within the play, which can be found in the Natyashastra. The actor-manager is also utilized by Karnad to elaborate upon the origins of drama and the matter of the caste of the actors themselves. Even though they had originally been Brahmins (upper caste) they are debased to the Sudra (lower) level by their chosen profession. This is because as the last chapter of the Natyashastra tells us the human preceptor of drama, Bharata, had offended the Brahmins with one of his performances and they had cursed the actors to be outcastes like the Sudras (see notes to The Fire and the Rain, 72). The appearance of the actor-manager and the permission granted to him to stage the play against the backdrop of the Yagna provides the prologue that sets the scene for a flashback of the three acts followed by the tightly constructed epilogue where the man and the mask, the actor and the character portrayed by Arvasu merge in the enactment of the play and result in the final denouement. The performance of plays during Yagnas was a common practice in Vedic and even later times in India. During the British Colonial period Indian theatre was influenced by Western modes, and although the folk tradition did survive, the classical Indian theatre, which had earlier been disrupted by the Mughal (Islamic) invasions was to be found no more, except in the kind of revivals attempted by a writer like Karnad, whose drama itself is a hybrid construct influenced by both the East and the West. Other contemporary Indian dramatists writing in different Indian languages are also influenced by Western traditions, although their plays are also informed by classical Indian drama and its techniques, especially that of the sutradhar – the narrator – as in the case of the Marathi playwright Vijay Tendulkar. However, interestingly enough, at times this revival of Sanskrit dramatic techniques is routed through the theatre of Bertolt Brecht, which has had a major impact on modern Indian drama. Gender is debased in the play in the form of both Vishakha and Nittilai, the tribal girl beloved of Paravasu’s younger brother Arvasu. The younger Vishakha, who used to be the beloved of Yavakri, (the Yavakri-Vishakha relationship is Karnad’s creation and does not feature in the original myth) was abandoned by him when he had gone off to the forest in search of the boon from Indra. The only memory of her that he had carried with him to the forest was the sight of her

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young, half-formed breasts that she had bared to him in the moment of parting. This is the memory with which he confronts her years later in the play. Vishakha, now twenty-six, has gained much sexual experience during the years that she has been married to Paravasu and scoffs at Yavakri “you think a woman is only a pair of half-formed breasts” (16). During the first year of their marriage Vishakha’s body had been plunged into bliss by her husband, but after that he had said, “Enough of that. We now start our search” (16). The decision to “search” was a unilateral one and Vishakha had no say in the manner in which he used her body until “Nothing was shameful, too degrading, even too painful. Shame died in me. And I yielded. I let my body be turned inside out” (16). After these sexual practices/perversions that left Vishakha drained, Paravasu continued on the path of knowledge, sought power and was finally appointed chief priest of the Yagna, the ritual performed by the King to propitiate Lord Indra and bring rain to the land which had been parched for ten long years (although not mentioned in the text, Paravasu was presumably trying to be a Tantrik, one who seeks power and knowledge through the Bhog Marg, i.e. the physical route). Paravasu had not returned home once in the seven years that he was in the service of the King and Vishakha’s body had “become dry like tinder. Ready to burst into flames at a breath” (16). Here one could link Vishakha’s parched body to the parched earth and see how Karnad has mapped the kingdom/land across the body of the woman. This is also consonant with the manner in which Yavakri attempts to avenge his family honour by assaulting the wife of his enemy. This is in keeping with patriarchal practices, where an assault on the woman/property of a man would be a proxy blow directed against the man. In the Manusrmiti, the most popular of Hindu scriptures, which is widely considered to be a handbook on behaviour regarding familial, social, and religious duties, women did not enjoy an independent existence. According to Manu (generally placed in the Indian epic period, ca. 1110 B.C.), before marriage women were the property of their father and in his absence that of the brother. After marriage women belonged to their husbands, and in widowhood they were under the care of their sons or other male relations by marriage. Manu is also credited with having felt that the more you beat a woman, a Sudra, and a drum the better they became. Such opinions on women were also voiced in the epics. In the Mahabharatha, the patriarch Bhisma had opined that women were the vilest creatures on earth and the root of all evil. In the Ramayana, the other Indian epic, the sage

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Agastya had observed that women loved their husbands in prosperity but left them in adversity and that their nature was fickle and sharp. The Rigveda, for example, says that women were seducers of men and could lead men astray (see Mukherjee 1993, 10). Given such a backdrop, the manner in which Paravasu treats Vishakha, making her a partner in his perverse sex acts, probably for his own tantric gains, as well as the fact that Yavakri also has sex with her only to get back at her husband and father-in-law, comes as no surprise. Vishakha, ignorant of this agenda on the part of Yavakri, mistakenly exults in what she thinks is the possible knowledge and comfort her body can provide him. When Nittilai, who was with Arvasu (Vishakha’s brother-in-law), inadvertently sees them having sex behind some bushes, she tries to shield Vishakha (in an act of female bonding) by drawing Arvasu away but fails. Nittilai’s gesture of support is notwithstanding her lack of acceptance by the upper castes and thus cuts across caste boundaries. Also unlike Vishakha’s, Nittilai’s sensitivity is not steeped in knowledge – physical or intellectual. Vishakha runs back home to Raibhya’s hermitage. After Vishakha leaves, Yavakri swaggers out from the bushes and threatens Nittilai with imminent death, in case she disclosed what she had seen. Raibhya becomes suspicious when Vishakha returns home without her pot of water – the pot she had left behind when accosted by Yavakri. He begins questioning Arvasu, who had followed her home. When Arvasu tries to find excuses for her he grabs Vishakha by the hair and starts beating her. Vishakha admits that she had met Yavakri and her father-in-law explodes, “You whore – you roving whore!” (Karnad 1998, 20). There is an ambiguity in Raibhya’s anger as Vishakha’s later discussion with her husband Paravasu reveals; Raibhya could have used Vishakha’s body during the absence of her husband, a fact left ambivalent in the play – which in itself is a Bhibhitsa act as a daughter-in-law was considered to be like a daughter to the father-in-law. Raibhya creates a Brahma Rakshasa from a hair from his head and sends him out to destroy Yavakri. Arvasu runs to Bhardwaj’s hermitage and alerts the Andhaka – the blind man – who is the caretaker, to tell Yavakri when he gets home, to stay inside the hermitage, as he would be safe from the Brahma Rakshasa there. Vishakha in turn rushes off to warn Yavakri, who spurns her by saying that he had deliberately set up the situation where he would be discovered with Vishakha, in order to insult Raibhya and avenge himself for the degradation of his father at the hands of Vishakha’s father-in-law. He even tells Vishakha that if she had not yielded to him, he “would have had to take her by force” (23). This

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revelation traumatizes Vishakha, who sees it as one more instance of male betrayal and deliberately pours away the sanctified water in her pot, the water that would have saved Yavakri from the attack by the Brahma Rakshasa. In the myth, it is an alluring maiden created by Raibhya who tricks Yavakri and pours away the water, but here it is Vishakha who is provided with female agency and tries to right at least one of the wrongs done to her. This once again makes Karnad’s play more complex and interesting than the myth that inspired it. A distraught Yavakri, chased by the Brahma Rakshasa, runs to his father’s hermitage but is denied entry by the Andhaka, whose lack of sight is just then compounded by impaired hearing and hence fails to recognize Yavakri’s footsteps. Yavakri thus dies, being denied the safety of the hermitage where the Brahma Rakshasa could not have harmed him; but the travails of Vishaka, Arvasu and Nittilai have just begun. The good-hearted Arvasu could not let Yavakri’s corpse lie outside the hermitage to be torn apart by wild animals, so he decided to cremate him. This makes him late for the appointment he had with Nittilai’s tribe. He was supposed to meet her father and the tribe elders and ask for her hand in marriage. Slighted by what they thought was a Brahmin youth, trifling with the affections of an outcaste girl, they decide to give her away in marriage to a young man from the tribe. When Arvasu returns home he finds that his brother Paravasu has stolen away from the sacrifice and come home to investigate the rumours he has heard about his wife and Yavakri. Raibhya is horrorstruck at the enormity of his action; the rivalry between the father and son, professional and personal, comes to a head and we learn that the old man grudged his son the status of the chief priest at the sacrifice and recalls that he had warned the King, “Mark my words, my son defecates wherever he goes. And he will defecate in your sacrifice” (29). This is yet another clear reference to the disgusting and odious – the Bhibhitsa – as defecation in itself was a disgusting act according to the Natyashastra. Yet to imply that Paravasu’s being made chief priest for the Yagna would lead to its desecration by his metaphorical acts of defecation in its sacred fire, is doubly disgusting. Riled by the fact that it was his son’s youth that had won him the coveted position, he says, “Tell the King I shall outlive my sons. I shall live long enough to feed their dead souls. Tell him the swarm of dogs sniffing around my daughter-in-law’s bottom keeps me in good shape” (29). The gross reference to Vishakha reiterates the possibility of physical relations Raibhya might have had with her. He then rushes out of the hermitage. Arvasu too is sent out and Paravasu is finally alone with his wife.

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Vishakha admits to having had sex with Yavakri and wants her husband to kill her. She also hints that she wishes to be rid of Raibhya’s lust, “An old man’s curdled lust […], wizened body, the scratchy claws, and the blood, cold as ice” (32-33). However, instead of killing her, Paravasu shoots an arrow at his father and kills him. This is a deliberate act and not an error of judgement as in the myth. As Vishakha says, “Now you’ll never know if I told you a lie” (33). Having got rid of his father, maybe not so much because he had supposedly defiled his wife, but because his envy would have ultimately got in the way of the successful completion of the fire sacrifice (and consequently his own ambitions), Paravasu transfers the guilt of patricide onto his younger brother, Arvasu, who becomes an unwilling scapegoat for the actions of his brother. The play now opens up to bring in matters of caste into the acts of disgust and defilement. The division of the Hindu society into four castes is first mentioned in the text Purusa Sukta and was originally initiated to conserve the traditions of the Aryans when they migrated into India and had to contend with the Dravidians and other inhabitants they found there. This is how the division of Hindu society into Brahmins (the Priests), the Kshatriyas (the warriors), the Vaisyas (the traders), and the Sudras (the menials/untouchables) came about. Since the majority of those designated Sudras came from non-Aryan stock – the tribals and the Dravidians – the caste system was based as much on race as it was on occupation (see Radhakrishnan 1999, 1112). Over time, the caste system became hereditary and fixed. However, by acts of defilement, members of the upper castes, even the Brahmins, could become debased and be grouped with the lowest caste. This development is the central focus of The Fire and the Rain. The actor-manager says in the Prologue, “The sons of Bharata were the first actors in the history of theatre. They were Brahmins but lost their caste because of their profession. A curse plunged them into disrepute and disgrace. If one values one’s high birth, one should not touch this profession” (3). The actor-manager delivers a message from Arvasu, who has joined forces with the players. Defiled by Paravasu having foisted on him the sin of patricide, he did not see a reason to shrink from further defilement of becoming an actor. As Arvasu relates to Nittlilai, “ ‘Soldiers pounced on me. Kicked me. Dragged me to some cemetery. Tore my sacred thread […]. Did he think I was married to you? Did he think I had become a low-caste actor? No, no. I remember’. He clearly said, ‘Out! Out! Demon […]. Away with you’ ” (41). The sacred thread is the symbol of the Brahmin and he is invested with it in a solemn ceremony and the tearing off of this

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thread is akin to excommunication in the Christian church. In the act of excommunication, though, the offender is thrown out of the Christian fold; here the offender remains within the caste system, but is debased and assigned to the Sudra caste, i.e. he loses caste. The marriage to Nittilai, a tribal girl, would have meant loss of caste for Arvasu, but what happens to him is more dreadful as he is taken to a cemetery (the supposed haunt of demons and roving souls denied release, Moksha). There he is shunned and driven away as if he were a demon himself. Linked thus to the question of defilement by association with the lower castes is the defilement by demons (the supernatural) – this introduces the third element of the Bhibhitsa into the play. It was believed that demons gather around the sacred spaces of the fire sacrifice and try to defile it, especially as it draws to an end. This prompts Paravasu to take the risk of letting the players, who are of a lower caste, perform the play as there was already danger of demonic defilement to the Yagna. The play at least would provide relief to the king, his court and the priests themselves. At the beginning of the play, Arvasu is portrayed as a rather naïve youth, but by the time he is falsely accused of patricide and deprived of his beloved Nittilai, he becomes bitter and almost paranoid and says to Nittilai: It’s a conspiracy, don’t you see, it's all planned – because I wanted to marry you. Because I was ready to reject my caste, my birth […]. You hunters – you only know minor spells and witchcrafts – spirits slithering in shallow caves or dangling on trees. But Yavakri and Father and Brother can bring out the terrors from the womb of the earth and play with them. They can set this foul nature against you […] like a stink emanating from that sacrifice. (43)

Here the victim finally stops believing himself to be vile and disgusting. Instead, he has come to realize that it is Paravasu, the Chief Priest, who is vile: “[I]f such an evil man continues as the Chief Priest of the sacrifice, it’ll rain blood at the end” (43). Preoccupied though Arvasu is with these thoughts, he is fascinated enough with the craft of theatre to demonstrate his prowess as a dancer to the actor-manager who finds him excellent; the problem, however, is that, because of Nittilai, Arvasu will not be able to perform with the players, even though his brother grants the permission. Nittalai’s brother and husband have run to ground the runaway bride, and she is mortally afraid of being killed by them and wants to run away to safety with Arvasu. However, when she learns that Arvasu danced “like a celestial being” (49), she decides to hide in

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the jungle and join him after the performance. The play within the play is called “The Triumph of Lord Indra” – “a struggle between Lord Indra and the demon Vritra” (50). Arvasu takes on the role of Vritra as he has to dance, and the actor-manager plays Indra. As he puts on the mask of Vritra, the actor-manager cautions: “[O]nce you bring a mask to life you have to keep a tight control over it, otherwise it’ll try to take over. It’ll begin to dictate terms to you and you must never let that happen. Prostrate yourself before it. Pray to it. Enter it. Then control it” (52). The mask does gain control of Arvasu as the similarities between the play and his own situation become apparent not just to him but also to Paravasu and the Brahma Rakshasa, who had manifested himself next to Paravasu. The actor-manager, who has donned the mask of Indra, appears to Arvasu as the betrayer Paravasu, who also recognizes himself in that role, as does the Brahma Rakshasa. The Brahma Rakshasa, who had been evoked by Raibhya to kill Yavakri, claims brotherhood with Paravasu (since Raibhya had evoked him, he considered him his father) and seeks release from him – a relationship denied by the Chief Priest with as much ruthlessness as the denial of his actual brother Arvasu. Arvasu attacks Indra/the actormanager/Paravasu with a burning torch. His frenzy takes the latter by surprise and he cries out, “It’s the mask – it’s the mask come alive. Restrain him – or there’ll be chaos” (57). Arvasu, however, cannot be restrained and he enters the sacrificial enclosure and sets it on fire with a burning torch; behind him surges the audience of “weak and hungry villagers” (57) who enter the sacred space to get access to the sacrificial viands kept there to feed the gods, while they themselves starved. The Yagna is thus defiled many times over, once by the entry of Arvasu into the sacred spaces, meant only for the priests, and then by the common folk who loot the sacrificial food meant for feeding the sacred fire. Seeing his years of work as chief priest desecrated – the Yagna would now not be acceptable to the gods – Paravasu walks into the blazing enclosure and becomes the human sacrifice. Nittilai rushes in to rescue Arvasu, but is killed by her husband and brother. Here Nittilai, who had dared assume female agency by running away from her husband, is punished for this by being deprived of her life. The fact that her brother accompanied the husband makes for a more comprehensive assertion of patriarchal rights over a woman. What makes this patriarchal domination of Nittilai intriguing is the fact that she belonged to a social group that had not always embraced Hinduism’s laws regarding the ownership of a woman by the males in her family. Tribal societies, however, by association with Hindus,

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have over the centuries adopted Hindu laws, including the ones unfavourable to women. In modern India, the bride price demanded by tribal laws has been replaced by a dowry payable by the bride’s family instead. As in the case of women who internalize male supremacy and wield the stick over their own sex, such adoptions of strictures applicable to a higher social group, by a group cast out by the superior group, becomes an attempt to seek kinship and even a matter of social climbing. It is instructive to note that Arvasu, defiled though he is by his alleged patricide and association with actors, is not killed by the avenging duo, it is only Nittilai whose throat is slit. Karnad tells us that “she lies dying like a sacrificial animal” (58). Even Arvasu blames only Nittilai for her own end: “Serves you right! Who asked you to meddle with this world? […] What do you expect?” (58). He is, however, willing to die with her and moves towards the Yagna, offering the fire two more victims – himself and Nittilai’s corpse – after the flames had already been fed by Paravasu’s body. Even as Arvasu moves towards the sacred precinct of the Yagna, Indra, the King of the Gods and the rain god, too, appears to him pleased by the sacrifice and tells him to ask for a blessing. Karnad leaves ambivalent what actually pleased the God; was it Arvasu’s own courage in chasing the actor who played Indra and in trying to kill him, or was it “Paravasu’s sacrifice and Nittilai’s humanity” (59). Almost in the manner of Jehovah in the Book of Job, Indra dissuades Arvasu from trying to comprehend the ways of the Gods: “The point is we are here and you can ask for anything” (59). This can be read as one more instance of cultural hybridity in Karnad’s text, as access to Western literary/Biblical sensibilities as well as Indian mythological ones. In fact in the notes at the end of the play, Karnad has acknowledged a further influence and said how the shape of the myth [he] was dealing with had uncanny parallels with that of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. The plot naturally fell into three parts, like a trilogy, each part with its own central action and lead character. The first two parts opened with the protagonist returning home after a prolonged absence while the third part culminated not in some dramatic event, but in a debate on human frailty and divine grace. Then there was the presence in both of a supernatural agency bent on avenging a crime. (74)

Now begins the conflict of interests that leads to the climax of the play. The crowd wants Arvasu to ask Indra, the Rain God and the King of all the Gods, who has appeared before him, for rain. The Brahma Rakshasa wants Arvasu to ask Indra for his release. Arvasu himself wants Nittilai restored to life. The moral dilemma is finally

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resolved when Arvasu, unlike the treacherous Indra of the play/his brother Paravasu in real-life, chooses to keep faith with his “brother”, the Brahma Rakshasa, and asks for his release from a life within death. The liberation of the demon spirit heralds the coming of the much-needed rain, and at the end of the play Arvasu exults to the dead Nittilai, “It’s raining. Nittilai! It’s raining” (62). Ultimately, it is the women in the text who are sacrificed to public weal and order – Nittilai is killed; Vishakha is deprived of her husband – Paravasu dies in the Yagna. This aspect of “female sacrifice” for the larger good of society can itself be considered Bhibhitsa – women are viewed as more expendable than men. However, the text can also be read in an alternative manner: those who were thought to be disgusting, the defiled Arvasu and the outcaste Nittilai, are the ones who bring salvation not just to the Brahma Rakshasa, but to the rain-scorched earth and the starving villagers, too. The text thus reverses the notions of purity and impurity, that which is aesthetically pleasing and appealing and that which is considered Bhibhitsa. The second play under consideration has certain links with The Fire and the Rain. Dattani’s Dance Like a Man is also centred on the performing arts – the Bharat Natyam dance. Here, too, the performing artiste is belittled and considered debased and defiling by a traditional society, a society which from the times of Manu has been strongly patriarchal in its orientations. Arvasu as a Brahmin lad could not give free rein to his desire to dance, to perform. It is only when he is an alleged father-killer and already defiled, that he joins the players. In Dattani’s play Jairaj’s traditionalist father keeps him from becoming a dancer. Amritlal Parekh not only considers a male dancer effeminate but also thinks that women who dance are little more than prostitutes. Parekh looks upon dancers, especially male dancers, with disgust – regardless of the fact that the celestial dancer Shiva, also known as Natraja (the Lord of Dance), was male, and is held in great reverence by Hindus as part of the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva – the creator, the preserver, the destroyer. Parekh had been active in the freedom struggle of India and – as an avowed disciple of Gandhi, who had led India’s struggle against colonial rule – he should have been more progressive in his views, as social reform, aimed at caste and gender oppressions, was one of the platforms which Gandhi had used to mobilize the Indian masses against the imperial forces. Dance Like a Man is set within two time levels and has a double frame stage setting, too. The first time level is one immediately after independence, i.e. in the late 1940s and 1950s, and the second time level is placed a generation later. The actors, too, perform double

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duties – the young Jairaj and the young suitor of his daughter’s hand, Viswas, are played by the same actor; the older Jairaj and the Amritlal Parikh are also played by just one actor; the role of the young Ratna, Jairaj’s wife and that of Lata, Jairaj and Ratna’s daughter, are played by the same actor, too. Dattani insisted on this role-change, and although he has put this directive down in the published version of his play, he has not stated a reason other than that “it is vital to the play” (1994, 109). One could, however, conjecture that the passing of time can thus be seen as not linear, but as circular, when the son becomes the father and the mother the daughter. One could also read this “doubling” as a subversion of patriarchal authority, which gains further complexity given the sexual orientation of the playwright himself. Dattani has also prefaced the play with a “Playwright’s Note” in which he has explained the degradation of the classical dance form, Bharat Natyam. From being associated with temples and worship in the Vedic period, it became the preserve of Devdaasis, who were professional female dancers known as the slaves of the Lord, in later times. The Devdaasis were often sexually exploited by priests, kings and feudal lords. Yet these women continued to perform within the temple, before the sanctum sanctorum, and their presence was not considered to defile the deity. With the advent of the Islamic invaders and later the European colonizers – with their own brands of Puritanism – dancers were truly marginalized and were removed to dancing platforms outside the temples and later to brothels in the marketplace (see Dattani 1994, 107-108). The average upper caste Indian considered them impure and their very presence was supposed to defile the Brahmin and his household, though this did not prevent many of them from patronizing these dancers. As for the European colonizers, while they too thought these women to be morally repugnant, they were often patrons of what they called the “nautch girls”, “nautch” being a corruption of the Hindustani word natch meaning dance. In the first half of the twentieth century, however, Bharat Natyam and other classical Indian dance forms enjoyed a renaissance under the influence of social reformers and freedom activists, as they sought to revive native traditions and rehabilitate oppressed women. The institution of the Devdaasi was abolished and at the same time women from “respectable” homes began to learn the dance forms, usually from the Devdaasis, as they were the only exponents available at that time. An interesting aside at this point is that in recent years the renowned Odissi dance exponent, Sanjukta Panigrahi, shocked

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reformist circles in India by wanting to become a Devdaasi in the Kasi Vishwanath temple in Benares, the holy Hindu city. She saw this as an ultimate act of worship and surrender to the Lord but was prevented by a “progressive” bureaucracy that since India’s independence had tried to abolish anti-woman practices – not always with absolute success. Dattani’s own position as a gay man cannot be ignored in his depiction of the status of the male dancer in India of the 1950s and even the 80s. In this play one can see Dattani’s reference to intolerance by traditional Indian society towards men who engage in so-called “feminine” occupations such as dancing. However, postcolonial India has produced several eminently respected and lauded male dancers and gurus, such as Kelucharan Mahapatra and Birju Maharaj, and the caricaturing of male dancers is more the bane of popular Indian cinema than Indian society at large. In Dattani’s play, Parekh thinks his son’s teacher is effeminate, if not gay, because he wears his hair long and walks in a particular way. Dattani appears to see these sexual stereotypes and intolerance towards alternative sexual preferences as Bhibhitsa – disgusting – and makes Jairaj retort, “ ‘This is disgusting! You are insane’ ” (1994, 153). Parekh also believes that “anyone who learnt such a craft [dancing] could not be a man” (137). He felt that a man’s happiness lay “[i]n being a Man” (164). These stereotypical constructs of masculinity suggest that “[a] woman in a man’s world may be considered being progressive. But a man in a woman’s world is – pathetic” (166). For a traditional man like Parekh, a man in a woman’s world, even if the celestial dancer Shiva is a man, is unacceptable. Years later Jairaj still carried the searing memory of his father saying to him, “ ‘The craft of a prostitute to show off her wares – what business did a man have learning such a craft? Of what use could it be to him? No use. So no man would want to learn such a craft. Hence anyone who learnt such a craft could not be a man’ ” (137). Jairaj accuses his father of double standards and says, “ ‘Where are your progressive ideas now? […] You didn’t fight to gain independence. You fought for power in your hands. Why, you are just as conservative and prudish as the people who were ruling over us!’ ” (150). When Parekh defends himself by saying that “ ‘We are building ashrams (shelters) for these unfortunate women [the Devdaasis]! Educating them, reforming them’ ”, Jairaj counters with “ ‘Send them back to their temples! Give them awards for preserving our art’ ”, but Parekh is horrified with that and says, “ ‘I will not let our temples be turned into brothels’ ” (151).

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Interestingly, it is not just the Devdaasis who are considered to be prostitutes because they dance, but also middle-class, upper caste women like Ratna are vulnerable to male advances when they become dancers. This is evident in the text when, angered by Parekh’s hostility to their art, Jairaj and Ratna leave his house and take shelter in Ratna’s uncle’s home. This man, however, asks Ratna to go to bed with him. Jairaj comments on this by saying, “ ‘Do you think your uncle made such interesting proposals to all his nieces? No! That would be a great sin. But you were different. You were meant for entertainment’ ” (143). There are many other elements that arouse disgust within the actors themselves in the play and provide material for the deconstruction of the audience’s/readers’ own notions of what is aesthetic/beautiful and what is considered to be Bhibhitsa. In this category falls the guilty secret that Jairaj and Ratna carry within them – the death of their son Shankar, another name of Shiva, the Lord of Dance. Shankar was killed by an overdose of opium administered to him by Ratna when she had left him at home to go and perform, not knowing that her maid had already given the baby some of the same, so that he would be quiet and not trouble her. The story of Shivaratri provides an interesting comment here; Shivaratri literally means the night of Shiva. The story goes that when the Devas, the gods who were in search of a potent nectar (the amrut, which would destroy their enemies the Asuras, the dark, demonized race), requested Shiva to drink the poison they churned up from the ocean, which welled up from the seas ahead of the amrut. Of the Hindu trinity – Brahma, the Creator, Vishnu, the Preserver, and Shiva, the Destroyer – only the latter could drink this poison and neutralize it. If this had not happened, the poison would have spread throughout the world and destroyed it. When Shiva drank this poison churned up by the gods, his consort, Parvati (also manifested as Shakti, the female principle, Durga, the benevolent mother, and Kali, the dreadful destroyer of evil) held his throat to prevent the poison from going any further and kept him awake all night so that his body could neutralize it. Even though the poison was neutralized, it stained Shivas’s throat dark blue. As a result, Shiva is also called Neelkanth, the blue-throated one. Devotees of Shiva stay up all night emulating Paravati’s act of devotion on Shivaratri. Jairaj and Ratna are unable to rise to such heights and instead descend to the abject level of having poisoned Shankar – even if inadvertently – and being the ones responsible for his death rather than his salvation.

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By the time Shankar was killed, Ratna and Jairaj had become professionals, though it was Ratna’s career that flourished as she had made a disgusting (Bhibhitsa) deal with her father-in-law – he would let her dance if she kept his son away from it. She therefore deliberately sabotaged Jairaj’s career, and when he turned to alcohol she treated him with open contempt. Jairaj knew that his father was the root cause of the way his wife treated him and he pinned his hopes on his infant son Shankar; through him he would get back at his father, who doted on his grandson: “I’ll teach him how to dance – the dance of Shiva. The dance of a man. And when he is ready, I’ll bring him to his grandfather and make him dance on his head – the tandav nritya” (185). Tandav nritya is generally translated as the dance of anger – the Roudra Rasa. This, however, remains in the realms of dreams alone, as Shankar/Shiva, the ultimate symbol of masculinity and worshipped by Hindus in the form of the lingam – the penis – is killed, albeit inadvertently, by Ratna (perhaps a reference to the Freudian stifling mother?). He is replaced by a girl child, Lata, whose name means the clinging vine, through whom she now wants to live out her own unfulfilled dreams of stardom. Is it perhaps possible to read gay politics into this section of the play? And is it perhaps also possible to read the play as a debasement of the female principle – Shakti, in Hindu cosmology – and the valorization of the male Principle, Shiva, the Purusha? The lack of proper understanding of dance in contemporary India is also in the realm of the Bhibhitsa at the aesthetic level. The patronage of the state, which has replaced the earlier patronage of the king and the chief priests, has meant the abasement of the dancer to the new patrons. The state, in the form of politicians, has the financial wherewithal to dole out largesse by way of awards and foreign dance tours. Dattani critiques this in the manner in which Ratna pays, what she considers subtle obeisance to Dr. Gowda, the minister in charge of culture, so that he would consider Lata for a dance tour abroad. When Jairaj chides her for sounding almost obsequious, she retorts, “You say I’m pushing myself by talking to him, Chandra Kala is probably sitting on his lap” (169). The reference to Chandra Kala here brings to mind the real-life dancer Chandralekha, who was said to have a rather bohemian reputation in conventional, South Indian dance circles. Contemporary dance critics are also in the realm of the Bhibhitsa when they debase their calling by writing reviews of dance performances without actually seeing the performance, or else whose accolades can be bought with a few well-placed favours. Ratna is not above such behaviour when it comes to ensuring that Lata’s

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performances receive rave reviews: “I’ve taken care of the critics already. I’ve promised C.V. Suri I’ll make him the chief guest at the Navratri festival. That old fogey loves to be garlanded on stage. And if he gives Lata a rave review, the others wouldn’t dream of doing differently” (145-146). This could be read as defilement of the sacred art form by the modern world – a defilement that should arouse disgust. Bharat Natyam, which originated as an act of worship and was symbolized by the divine dancer (Nataraja), also embodied the ultimate union of Shiva and Shakti, the male and female principles, manifested in Nataraja sculptures which often show Shiva in his Ardhanareshwar form – half-female, half-male. Jairaj and Ratna in their initial desire to score points against one another and later, in pursuing worldly success for their daughter – even when her steps are not in consonance with the beat of the tablas (drums) – were unable to achieve through their dance this divine union between their physical selves – and ultimately with the divine. However, at the end of the play, when first Jairaj and then Ratna die, the physical and egotistic obstacles to their Ardhanareshwar manifestation are removed. In the monologue voiced by Jairaj, when they meet in heaven, “[We] embrace. We smile. And we dance. We dance perfectly. In unison. Not missing a step or a beat” (193). Jairaj attributes the mistakes they have committed in their lives and their art to the fact that “[w]e were only human. We lacked the grace. We lacked the brilliance. We lacked the magic to dance like a God” (193-194). The curtain falls and the light and the music fade over the reified man and woman and their divine dance – male and female together in perfect unison like the Ardhanareshwar Natraja. One could read into this the ultimate gay subversion of the patriarchal notion of maleness by foregrounding the one Hindu God who is the symbol of maleness – the lingam – and yet in his Natraja form incorporates and subverts this very in-your-face celebration of male superiority. In death, if not in a life that was considered Bhibhitsa by others, their life and their art is finally able to achieve aesthetic heights. The Bhibhitsa Rasa is transcended and turned into not just the Rasa of Sringara – love and beauty – but the ultimate Rasa of blissful peace – Shantam – the emotion which is not just the beginning but the end, an emotion achieved very near the state of release from the cycle of death and rebirth (Moksha). Taken together, The Fire and the Rain and Dance Like a Man provide new interpretations of the classical Indian concept of the Bhibhitsa Rasa; they thereby redefine notions of what is or should be repugnant and distasteful.

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Works Cited Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Dattani, Mahesh. 1994. “Dance Like a Man”. In Final Solutions and Other Plays, 111-194. Delhi: Manas [Affiliated East West Press Ltd]. Jha, Ganganath. 1932. Manusmriti with the Manubhasya of Medhatithi. 2 Vols. Calcutta: The Asiatic Society of Bengal. Karnad, Girish. 1998. The Fire and the Rain. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Malshe, Milind. 2003. Aesthetics of Literary Classification. Mumbai: Popular Prakashan. Miller, William Ian. 1997. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mukherjee, Prabhati. 1993. Hindu Women, Normative Models. Calcutta: Sangam Books Limited. Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli. 1999. Indian Philosophy. Vol. 1. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rajagopalachari, Chakravarti. 1951a. Mahabharata. Bombay: Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan. —. 1951b. Ramayana. Bombay: Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan. Vatsyayan, Kapila. 1996. Bharata: The Natyasastra. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.


The Gothic-Grotesque of Haunted: Joyce Carol Oates’s Tales of Abjection

Susana Araújo Body is earth, territory of violent metamorphosis and substitution. We are all in peril of becoming thing. The grotesque gap between our humanity and this thing – the body killed, damaged, wounded – is held open by metaphors. Stephen Owen, Mi-lou: Poetry and the Labyrinth of Desire In literature, as in the visual arts, images of the body have come to assimilate many of the collective changes of the postmodern world. In a recent review for the New York Times, the critic Laura Miller describes Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Blonde as “the most ferocious fictional treatise ever written on the uninhabitable grotesqueness of femininity” (2000, 6). Oates, for whom “the greatest realities are physical and economic” (Oates qtd. in Allen 1987, 61), has chosen the female body to stage many of the social changes of the last fifty years. Contemporary artistic and academic interest in the body is a consequence of the profound transformations of Western industrial societies brought about by a number of related processes such as the new systems of production, consumption, and distribution which characterize post-Fordism as well as the cultural framework of postmodernism. With the movement of industrial capitalism towards a post-industrial system based on a global economy, service industries, advertising, advanced consumption, and the manipulation of communications through public relations industries, the traditional relationship between employment, property, and the body has changed dramatically. For women, these changes have been accompanied by paradoxical facts. Having achieved a degree of economic power which would have been unthinkable some decades ago, women have become powerful consumers supporting an economy whose cultural logic and marketing industries continue to objectify women’s bodies through the stylized eroticism of advertising campaigns, themselves promoters of always-innovative notions of beauty, fashion and health. But new perspectives on the body have also been a consequence of the many

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transformations in the private sphere. The experience of physical intimacy has also changed within personal relations. Relationships are no longer exclusively based upon a property contract, nor dominated by the heterosexual paradigm but depend on a series of new expectations about personal satisfaction through intimacy and sexual contact. Women’s bodies are subject to other kinds of sexual control and scientific regulation as they are made more “efficient” and “sexy” through reproductive technologies, plastic surgery, etc. These changes are responsible for the contemporary commercial interest in the body and for the pervasiveness of corporeal images not only in consumer culture, but also in art, where the body is exposed as increasingly malleable and accessible. It is thus not surprising that Western contemporary art returns to the body, no longer as a private and unified space, but made public, commodified, and disjointed. In the photographs of Cindy Sherman, for instance, the body is often presented as an assembly of fragments where the female sexual organs are, critically, fetishized. Other examples of deconstructed bodies can be found in the sculpture of Louise Bourgeois, where the fragmented body is the site of challenging gender-metamorphosis and Robert Mapplethorpe’s work, where the male sexual organ is paradoxically both domesticated and sublimated. Diverging from many caricatured bodies in popular art and literature, which shock the eye of the viewer (or reader) but often cannot dispute their own commodified status, Joyce Carol Oates’s characters always struggle to resist commodification and exploitation. Oates’s bodies fight back, interrogating the visual/textual frames in which they are inscribed. Her characters do not, however, undergo the “fantastic” emancipation possible in the work of authors such as Angela Carter, whose magical realism offers a more drastic rewriting of our social reality. Oates’s characters can only change their own plots by renegotiating their roles within the logic of the social world. Their bodies are always contextual bodies, bodies in time and bodies in history. As Marilyn C. Wesley points out, “Oates’s characters are universally repelled by the chaotic. It would be impossible for Oates’s characters to remain within the undifferentiated state of the imaginary rather than attempt to participate in the cultural organisation of the symbolic” (1995, 120). Her characters are always represented in social frameworks, whose logic they have to recognize and understand so that they can eventually translate it into gestures of defiance. Novels such as Them and Marya convey that socializing process by staging their female protagonists’ entry into the world of language and culture, through a process which implies the redefinition of their

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physical selves and often the rejection of their own sexuality. The disturbance of gender categories, which is presented as a reticent process of Oates’s novels, finds an interesting terrain in her short fiction. By generating tensions between her stories, Oates creates visible dialectics within her collections which show how cultural constructions of the female body are not only painfully experienced, but also actively challenged and transformed by her heroines.

The Abject Female Body in Oates’s Gothic-Grotesque Joyce Carol Oates’s conscious involvement with the gothic as a specific genre – which she has called “Gothic with capital ‘G’ ” (qtd. in Johnson 1994, 18) – starts in 1977 with her short story collection Nightside and is pursued in the early eighties with Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), and Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984). Displaying traditional gothic devices in terms of imagery and methods of characterization, this trilogy examines America “through the prismatic lens of its most popular genres” (Oates 1988, 373). Oates returns to the gothic genre in 1994 with Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, where she takes a more conspicuously metafictional approach to the genre. This can be seen, for instance, in Oates’s rewritings of Poe’s “The Black Cat” into her own “The White Cat”, or in her revision of Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw” as “The Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly”. In the first story, Oates voices the repressed sexuality of James’s ambiguous tale, and in the second story, she frames the seemingly unmotivated violence of Poe’s protagonist in the context of power/gender relations within a contemporary middle-class American family. Both stories give bodies and voices to canonic female characters – the murdered wife of Poe’s narrator and Miss Jessel, the famous governess of James’s story. These two literary allusions disclose Oates’s feminist intent in reshaping the moulds of gothic literature, in order to place the female body and female subjectivity in other positions than that of ghosts or victims. Oates uses the term “grotesque” in the afterword of Haunted to define a specific aesthetic practice within gothic fiction. Referring to literary and visual arts – describing works as generically different as Gogol’s stories, Goya’s paintings, or Cronenberg’s films as representatives of the art of the grotesque – Oates characterizes the form by a “blunt physicality that no amount of epistemological exegesis can exorcise” (1994, 117), a feature which according to her

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distinguishes the grotesque from the more “genteel” narrative of the “Victorian ghost-story” (304). As far as its emphasis on the physiological and visceral is concerned, Oates’s notion of the grotesque conforms to the notion of female gothic as described by Ellen Moers in the pioneering Literary Women. Positing that female experience can be distinguished by the tendency to “visualise the self” (1977, 90), Moers finds in the modern female gothic a specific type of spatial imagery based on portrayals of physical distortion and disfigurement. Moers’s view is supported by other feminist critics such as Juliann E. Fleenor and Claire Kahane, who argue that the treatment of spatial and physical imagery in gothic literature in general, and female gothic in particular, has been dominated by feelings of fear, disgust, or self-loathing towards the female role and female sexuality. Claire Kahane, for instance, rejects the dominant Oedipal paradigms in the study of gothic fiction, arguing that gothic fiction by women is defined by a primal apprehension which is directed not towards the father but towards the “motherwoman experienced as global, all-embracing, all-powerful” (1983, 243). This apprehension illustrates women’s conflicts with their physical selves and is translated into the blunt physiological imagery of gothic writing by women. In this sense the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates can be placed within a tradition of women writers, which goes back to eighteenth-century author Ann Radcliffe, and is rearticulated with great disparity in the contemporary popular gothic of authors such as Phyllis Whitney and Victoria Holt, or the canonized gothic of Isac Dinesen, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor. The horror of female physiology, described by many of these women writers and inscribed within the logic of patriarchal society, is often considered a result of a sense of defectiveness enforced by the patriarchal paradigm which “valorises the visible phallus as the image of autonomous power” and suggests that “women [who are] encouraged to see themselves as congenially impaired […], experience a disturbed sense of self, a feeling of lack or estrangement that gives them a special eye for the imagery of self-hatred” (244). A useful way to explore the female gothic appropriation of the female body can be found in Kristeva's concept of abjection in Powers of Horror. Drawing on Freud’s work, particularly on Totem and Taboo and Civilization and its Discontents, Kristeva’s concept of abjection plays a crucial role in explaining the formation of individual subjectivity from a pre-Oedipal perspective. For Kristeva, the abject is a result of the process of individuation and complex experience of loss, which follows the separation from the mother. This loss, which

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constitutes language and desire, is accompanied by a necessary rejection of borderline elements (such as hair, excrements, etc.) which threaten the autonomous identity of the subject with the presence of disorder, filth, and chaos. The rejection of these polluting fluids and substances – reminders of absolute connection with the mother’s body – is imposed socially by means of social rituals (such as religious practice) articulated within the logic of the Symbolic. According to Kristeva, the idea of the mother’s body as an unreachable point of origin is always associated with those defiling elements. Subsequently, all that is female is, in a way, a reminder of the mother’s abject body and is therefore presented as a threatening presence to the symbolic order. Kristeva’s specific emphasis on the maternal body has been criticized, most notably, by Judith Butler, who highlights that the Kristevan maternal is problematically presented as a pre-cultural reality. In Butler’s view the abject female body is not really external to the Law of the Father: “[T]he repression of the feminine does not require that the agency of repression and the object of repression be ontologically distinct” (Butler 1999, 119). The female body is constructed within paternal law, and the spectral or mythological constructions of the maternal should be understood within the Symbolic or – in Lacanian terms – according to the Law of the Father. Butler thinks that in order to avoid a self-promoted repression of the female it is necessary to take into account the full complexity and subtlety of the law and to contest the illusion of a true body beyond the law. Whilst Kristeva’s notion of abjection is an extremely helpful concept for the analysis of Oates’s gothic-grotesque, where the female body is often translated into images of physical excess and disgust, it is also important to stress that, for Oates – as for Butler – the female/maternal body is always socially constructed, always experienced within the Symbolic. Oates’s fiction has been continuously engaged in investigating the social practices which reinforce women’s problematical relationships with their bodies by creating various plots where her female characters always try, if unsuccessfully, to rewrite their own relationship with their mother’s bodies and their inherited narratives. For Oates’s heroines the subversion of gender discourses remains possible only through the recognition of the inscription of these categories within signification. At a metafictional level, this recognition of the Law of the Father can be seen in Oates’s own approach to the “Gothic genre”. Oates draws from the mainstream discourse of canonized gothic horror (of male

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authors such as Poe and James, Wells and Stoker) in order to reverse gothic plots and manipulate gothic conventions, transforming the conventional gothic scripts into feminist gothic narratives. Oates’s gothic fiction explores how the internalization of gender dichotomies has been perpetuated by aesthetic traditions. In the afterword of Haunted, Joyce Carol Oates refers among other writers to Bram Stoker and H. G. Wells as important practitioners of the grotesque. It is worth noting that the works by Stoker and Wells are well known for their exploration of the monstrous feminine, which Oates analyzes and rewrites in her fiction. As Kelly Hurley points out, nineteenth-century gothic fiction epitomized by Stoker and Wells tended to portray the female body as “intrinsically pathological” (1996, 120): “[T]he disorders of the female body were inextricably linked to the female reproductive system, so that sexuality emerged as both casual and symptomatic of female abhumanness” (120). Along with the female vampire of Dracula, which conveys anxiety about the “new women” promoted by fin-de-siècle “feminism”, the central female character of Lair of the White Worm (1895) by Stoker is another example of incompatible perceptions of femininity (as obtrusively sexual or asexual and chaste) of nineteenth-century gender discourses (see Hurley 1996, 122-124). The abject female body in Stoker’s work is obviously that of the sexualized female, portrayed in the later novel as the metamorphosed Lady Arabella, a halfhuman/half-worm creature, which lives in slime and disregards gender distinctions and modes of sexuality. The same kind of anxiety is conveyed in The Island of Dr Moreau (1897) by H. G. Wells, another text referred to by Oates in the afterword of Haunted, where the female human-beast is portrayed as extremely repulsive (more so than her male counterpart) due to her power to provoke desire in men (human males) despite her indistinct species. In twentieth-century art, film has been the privileged form for the exploration of the monstrous feminine. In the same afterword, Oates refers to David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1979) and The Brood (1988). These two films are particularly interesting because of their use of female physiology as a form of grotesque. The protagonist in Dead Ringers possesses a terrifying triple uterus, while in The Brood an external womb houses monstrous creatures. In both films it is the female reproductive capacity, a dominant sign of sexual difference, which is rendered grotesque. In her study of the monstrous female body in contemporary film, Barbara Creed has pointed out that, like Cronenberg’s films, many other contemporary science-fiction horror movies which “represent woman as monstrous also define her primarily in relation to

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her sexuality, especially the abject nature of her maternal and reproductive functions” (1993, 151). Oates’s allusion to these texts conveys her interest in the exploration of the grotesque female body as written by male artists. Most of the stories of Haunted are, as we will see next, a feminist revision of the motif of the monstrous female. In Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque Oates brings back the female body to the prosaic realities of everyday life, allowing the grotesque to emerge from familiar and naturalistically constructed scenarios. The abject and its defiling substances are literalized in the daily lives of her characters. As Mary Allen points out, “the female body is a liability always out of control, the centre of pain and the source of excretions that proliferate in Oates’s work: vomit, blood, diseased tissue, menstrual blood, and the newborn child itself, the most terrible excretion of all” (1987, 64). However, Oates rewrites the female body against the extra-social bodies fashioned by Wells, Stoker or Cronenberg: hers is irretrievably a socially constructed body, a body always already contextual. Oates uses physiological imagery to describe specific contexts of women’s lives in a great variety of everyday scenarios: regulation of adolescent sexuality (“Haunted”), isolation and sexual fantasies (“Phase Change”), private and public images of femininity (“The Doll”), pregnancy and motherhood (“Extenuating Circumstances”), abortion (“Don’t You Trust Me?”) and domestic abuse (“Martyrdom”). Whilst many of these stories have the documentary purpose of disclosing quotidian narratives of female victimization, we also find in Haunted a significant number of stories which draw away from the documentary portraits suggested above to create different scenarios where the female body is an instrument of empowerment for the gothic heroine. These other stories explore the traditional grotesque imagery associated with the female body but subvert plots and structures in order to challenge conventional constructions of femininity.

“The Bingo Master”: Female Abjection and the “Eye” I will start by looking at “The Bingo Master”, which belongs to the first type of female gothic stories mentioned above – narratives which, in the tradition of the female gothic, explore instances of female oppression. The grotesque is employed here as a means of social critique combining the horrifying tragicomic mode of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood with the angry mode of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”. “The Bingo Master” tells the story

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of an ageing virgin and her troubled relation to sexuality. Rose Odom is a retired novelist from a provincial American town, who lives with her sick father after the death of her mother. One day she decides to take up the project to “divest [herself] of [her] damned virginity” (Oates 1995, 54). She goes out every Thursday evening, telling her father and aunt that she is going to the library, when instead she goes out to look for male candidates for her self-actualizing project. She looks for the perfect man in singles bars, in cocktail lounges of fancy hotels, in the local movie theatre, and even attends conferences on esoteric scientific matters – but not with much success. One night she decides to try her luck at the local bingo hall and hits the jackpot in her first game. In this auspicious setting, she meets Joe Pye, the glamorous manager of the bingo hall, “the only halfway attractive man in the place […], in his dashing costume, with his daring white turban held together by a golden pin, in his graceful shoulders, and syrupy voice” (60). Despite Rose’s initial nervousness, Joe Pye offers her several drinks and invites her up to his room. In the intimacy of his room, the Bingo Master “unclips the golden cock and undoes his turban” (67), a gesture which Rose takes as sexual invitation. Anxious about the act of sexual penetration, thirty-eight-year-old Rose tries to think about the loss of her virginity as a medical procedure. She associates the spreading of her mother’s disease with the perpetuation of her own virginity and is haunted by the vision of her mother’s body: She will think of it, I must think of it, as an impersonal event, bodily but not spiritual, like a gynaecological examination. But then Rose hates gynaecological examinations. Hates and dreads them and puts them off, cancelling appointments at the last minute. It will serve me right, she often thinks, if [...]. But her mother’s cancer was elsewhere in her body, and then everywhere. Perhaps there is no connection. (67; Oates’s italics)

Both the medical examination and the sexual intercourse reveal her self-perceived “abnormality”: she views her lack of sexual knowledge as a deficiency in the process of her individuation, which goes back to a pre-Oedipal closeness to her mother’s body. Rose’s mother was unable to stop the cancer from spreading throughout her body, therefore Rose insists on reversing her own “condition”, hoping to “regulate” her body through the sexual act. If the gynaecological procedure implies a full physical “examination”, sexual activity is also envisioned, here, as an evaluation parameter. Nervously Rose begins to unbutton her dress – a gesture which astonishes Joe Pye. The “Bingo Master” looks at the woman with disbelief: Rose Odom, who

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had folded her $100 check, ashamed to receive her bingo prize, now gives herself to a stranger without any resistance, any elegance or any romance. Decent people “don’t do like this” he tells her “not this way, not so fast and angry” (68; Oates’s italics). The “Bingo master” sets the rules of the game, as his gaze is translated into power: Rose “tries to shield herself from Joe Pye’s glittering gaze with her arms, but she cannot: he sees everything”; her pale-brown nipples turn hard with “fear and cold and clarity” (69). The frosty “clarity” of Rose’s breasts highlights the authority of the “Master’s stare,” whereby the act of looking is overdetermined by the act of knowing. Power is reaffirmed when Joe Pye throws her out of his room. Rose, now too drunk to walk, almost falls down the stairs: On the first landing of the fire stairs [Rose] grows very dizzy suddenly, and thinks it wisest to sit down. To sit down at once. Her head is drumming with a pulse beat she can’t control, and his angry voice too scrambles in her head, mixed up with her own thoughts. A puddle grows at the back of her mouth – she spits out blood, gagging – and discovers that one of her front teeth has come loose and the adjacent incisor also rocks back and forth in its socket. (70)

Unfortunately, Rose learns the “language of blood” – but not through the longed-for rupture of her hymen. Her blood, nevertheless, marks an initiation: Rose’s teeth rocking back and forth symbolize her own precarious status as a woman, suspended in contradictory ascriptions of gender. “You are a highly attractive girl, especially when you let yourself go” (65), Joe Pye had said softly when he was trying to seduce her. But now that Rose has really “let herself go”, “weaving down the corridor like a drunken woman, one hand holding her ripped dress shut, one hand pressing the purse clumsily against her side” (70), her body conveys her inability to sustain the logic of Joe Pye’s discourse of seduction. Rose does not know how to perform for the male gaze. Rose’s body – vulnerable, out of control, abject – is an excruciating reminder of her mother’s cancerous undesirable body and becomes a parodic literalization of the “fallen woman”. Rose’s body can be read as a symbol of castration according to which, as Laura Mulvey points out, woman’s desire is “subjugated to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound” (1989, 14). Rose’s portrait achieves a pathetic quality beyond the tragic pathos, as it underscores the fetishistic power of Pye’s vision. Rose’s body is inscribed under the signature of paternal law. This inscription of gendered power underpins the last scene of the story, where Rose looks inside her handbag and finds her $100 prize cheque with “Joe Pye’s large, bold, black signature on it” (71). Through the juxtaposition of Rose’s

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abjected body and Pye’s signature, the ending of “The Bingo Master” registers a feminist reflexivity, which exposes male power and its controlling gaze, showing how Joe Pye becomes Joe P(e)ye. Positing the above story as a counterpoint, I will discuss, now, how other stories in Haunted challenge the controlling power of the male gaze. Rather than simply conveying women’s conflicting relation with their physical selves, these other stories take advantage of the assumed omnipotence of the male gaze in order to challenge dominant constructions of the gendered body. The following examples, “The Premonition” and “Thanksgiving”, subvert the traditional gothic narrative by making explicit use of clichés of grotesqueness associated with the female body. Whilst in “The Bingo Master” the ambivalence toward the female body is internalized, in these other stories women’s reconciliation with their bodies is openly staged through a reappropriation of traditional gothic scenarios.

“The Premonition”: Revenge and Excess The story is told from the point of view of a male character – Whitney Paxton, the brother of Quinn Paxton, a successful upper-class businessman with a history of alcoholism and domestic violence. One day before Christmas, Whitney has “a premonition” (172). Not having heard from his brother or sister-in-law for some time, Whitney fears that his brother Quinn might have, once again, become abusive towards his wife. For this reason he decides to pay an unexpected visit to the family. When he arrives at their luxurious house in the affluent neighbourhood of Whitewater Heights he finds his nieces and sisterin-law with their bags packed and occupied with, what seem to be, final Christmas preparations. They tell Whitney that Quinn has gone away on one of his business trips and that they too are going abroad for a short holiday on which they will meet with Quinn as soon as he is done with his business affairs. There is, however, something strange about Ellen and the girls. Whitney finds the atmosphere in the house so “charged, gay and frenetic” that he feels “he’d stepped into a celebration of some kind” (180). He is not able to comprehend what is going on in the household and misreads several hints: the girls’ preoccupation with cleaning the kitchen and the presence of several incongruous tools, for example a carving knife for meat “placed on a green plastic garbage on the floor, as if awaiting removal to the garage, or disposal” (184). It becomes apparent to the reader that Whitney Paxton’s premonition might have been misdirected –

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something horrible might have happened to Quinn himself. Seeing all the different Christmas packages in the kitchen, Whitney rejoices in the women’s generosity and warmth, so “characteristic of women” (187): So many presents! – Ellen and the girls must have been working for hours. Whitney was touched, if a bit bemused, how like women it was, buying dozens of gifts which in most cases no one really wanted, and, in the case of the affluent Paxtons, certainly did not need; yet fussily, cheerfully wrapping them in expensive ornate wrapping paper, glittering green and red Christmas paper, tying big ornate bows, sprinkling tinsel, making out cards. (184)

Although Whitney recognizes something slightly unusual in the behaviour of the three women – “a distinctly female atmosphere in the room […] with an undercurrent of hysteria” (181); “their eyes glittering manic” (182) – he sees this excitement as part of their role in organizing the Christmas festivities. He remains unaware of the possibility that the typical family gathering and intended celebration of peace might have been replaced by a most gruesome ceremony. A particular detail, the accumulation of Christmas packages in the Paxtons’s kitchen, introduces a crucial hint: Quinn’s corpse has probably been dismembered and disposed of in the midst of the Christmas packages, in a ritual which subversively echoes another great Christian ritual, the symbolic division of Christ’s body amongst the apostles. Here we have a sabotage of Christian festivities: in a carnivalesque inversion of the Christian calendar, Christmas assumes the symbolism of Easter. “The Premonition” ironically confirms Kristeva’s idea that “abjection accompanies all religious structuring” (1982, 17). The abject is here temporarily controlled and regulated (Quinn’s body is hidden and kept under control) but only in order to upset and attack the religious and social practices which support and perpetuate traditional family structures. The image of the corpse is presented by Kristeva as the ultimate form of abjection, as it represents the most decisive abject stage where the “ ‘I’ is expelled” (4). By curtailing, dividing, and dissecting the body which used to oppress them, the women seem to celebrate the erasure of his physical power – an extinction, which is reaffirmed by the absence of Quinn's name on the beautifully wrapped package the girls entrust to Whitney: “To Uncle Whitney with love – Ellen, Molly, Trish. Quite pointedly, Quinn’s name had been omitted, and Whitney felt satisfaction that Ellen had taken revenge of sorts upon her selfish husband, however petty and inconsequential a revenge” (Oates 1995, 186). The Christmas

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presents, which the Paxton women have wrapped, are added to the list of commodities – such as indoor pools, saunas, Volvos, Diet Cokes, and baseball caps – which describe the family’s upper-middle class lifestyle. In this setting characterized by multiple reminders of bodily pleasures, Quinn’s corpse is not only objectified but transformed into a beautifully wrapped present – a symbol of revelation and desire. Following the tradition of female-revenge films, “The Premonition” evokes a crime no doubt horrific and grotesque. However, it is worth noting that those terrifying acts around which the narrative is woven – Quinn’s murder or the dismantling of his body – are never explicitly mentioned in the narrative. It is therefore highly significant and ironic, that in the only clearly grotesque moment in the text, abjection is conveyed, not through the image of the corpse, the dead male body of Quinn, but through the felt presence the female body. The episode of Whitney’s visit to the guest bathroom is built around a convergence of disturbing memories and incoherent signs, which in the impossibility of being fully articulated, are associated with the abject female. This is how Whitney describes the impressions caused by the smell of blood in the bathroom: [T]here was a peculiar odor – a cloying, slightly rancid odor, as of blood. Washing his hands, Whitney puzzled over it, uneasily for it reminded him of something – but what? Suddenly the memory returned: Many years ago, as a child at summer camp in Maine, Whitney had seen the cook cleaning chickens, whistling loudly as she worked – ducking the limp carcasses in steaming waters, plucking feathers, chopping and tearing off wings, legs, feet, scooping out, by hand, moist slithery innards […]. With a thrill of repugnance he wondered now if the blood heavy odour had to do after all with menstruation. (185) Although the memory of cleaning the chickens might correspond to a description of Quinn’s murder, this image is immediately effaced in the presence of the all-devouring and disturbing imaginary presence of female menstruation. Instead of the female body, it is the external male gaze that becomes grotesquely distorted. The characters of “The Premonition” retrieve the mystifying power associated with the female body in order to divert the male eye from the abject crime. While the female body is empowered by the possibilities of material and physiological excess, the masculinity inscribed in Quinn’s corpse is reduced to nothingness. Vulnerable and ultimately disposable, the memory of the male body stages here the ultimate form of abjection.

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“Thanksgiving”: Motherhood and Initiation “Thanksgiving” is told from a female perspective. The story is narrated by a teenage girl and takes place on Thanksgiving Day. As the story opens, the girl is informed by her father that her mother is feeling unwell; although the reasons for her three-day indisposition are not specified, it is suggested and will become more apparent through the narrative, that this fact has to do with that most tabooed element of women’s physiology – menstruation or what in the context of this story can appropriately be called monstruation. Faced with these unnamed facts, the girl and her father undertake the task of doing the grocery shopping themselves, hoping to have their “Thanksgiving like always” (223). However, father and daughter discover that their local supermarket has been vandalized, possibly shattered by the clientele in their desperate holiday shopping: And there was the A&P – but what had happened? The smell of smoke and scorch was strong here, you could see that the front of the store was blackened and the plate glass windows that ran the length of it had plywood inserts here and there. The posters advertising special bargains BACON BANANAS TURKEY CRANBERRY MIX EGGS PORTERHOUSE STEAK had begun to peel off the glass and the building itself looked smaller, not as high, as if the roof was sinking in. But there was movement inside. (222)

The supermarket assumes the status of a postmodern gothic setting replacing more traditional gothic images – such as the castle, the monastery or the haunted house – but reproducing the same enclosed atmosphere traditionally evocative of the female body. As Cynthia Griffin Wolff points out, the gothic building has been used by both male and female artists as “a siege of conflict over sexual stimulation or arousal” (1983, 210). And as Mary Russo shows, the grotesque “evokes the cave − the grotto-esque” (1994, 1): “Low, hidden, earthly, dark, material, immanent, visceral. As bodily metaphor, the grotesque cave tends to look like (and in the most gross metaphorical sense tends to be identified with) the cavernous anatomical female body” (1). Likewise, in its metaphoric “landscape of perforations” the gothic supermarket of “Thanksgiving” establishes an explicit analogy with bodily orifices, namely with female genitals, their odours and fluids, emphasizing the curiosity and repulsion generated by the image of the female body: [T]here was a gaping hole in the floor about the size of a full grown horse. Overhead, part of the ceiling missing, too: you could look up into the interior of the roof at the exposed girders. Rust-coloured drops of water fell from the

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THE ABJECT OF DESIRE girders heavy as shot. Here were fairly well-stocked shelves of detergent, dish washing soap, toilet cleanser, aerosol insect sprays, ant traps […]. The rust coloured drops fell in my hair, on my face and hands. Don’t look down. Don’t. I leaned over as far as I could, stretching my arm, my fingers, reaching for a box of detergent. (Oates 1995, 226)

This parodic representation of domestic horror assumes even more excessive overtones when both characters approach the meat counter where they expect to find their Thanksgiving turkey. At the vandalized meat counter father and daughter are informed that most of the meat is sold out – except what is left in a freezer that can only be reached through a huge gaping hole in a wall. The father is invited to enter the fearsome cavity “where it was shadowy and dripping, and there were things (slabs of meat? carcasses?) lying on a glistening floor, and something or someone moving” (229). But the father decides that he is not really able to squeeze through a hole that small in size. It is up to the daughter to venture inside the shadowy dripping tunnel: The opening was like a tunnel into a cave, how large the cave was you couldn’t see because the edges dissolved out into darkness. The ceiling was low, though, only a few inches above my head. Underfoot were puddles of bloody waste, animal heads, skins, intestines, but also whole sides of beef, parts of butchered pig, slabs of bacon, blood stripped turkey carcasses, heads off, necks showing gristle and startling white raw bone. I thought that I would vomit, but managed to control myself. There was another shopper in here, a woman Mother’s age, with steely grey hair in a bun, a good cloth coat with a fur collar and the coat’s hem was trailing in the mess but the woman didn’t seem to notice. She examined one turkey, rejected it and examined another, finally settling upon a hefty bird which, with a look of grim triumph she dragged back to the hole. Which left me alone in the cave, shaky, sickish, but excited. (230)

Physiological imagery is fused with descriptions of food consumption and the language of consumer culture, suggesting, at first reading, the objectification of the female body as an accessible and disposable product. But the access to this space is more limited than it seems at first sight: there are no male characters inside this gothic freezer. Instead, the narrator’s entrance into this abject space is followed by her recognition of a woman “Mother’s age” who, seemingly unaffected by the “mess” (or by her own association with the abject elements that surrounds her), goes on with her business, acting as an example to the young girl. This spectrum of the mother is a reminder of a narrative which the protagonist inherits but needs to rewrite. The heroine’s exploration of her entrapment in this gothic setting can thus be read as an exploration of the maternal body, a body which she too

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shares, in its conflicting connotations of vulnerability and power. Here, the contemporary horror scenario is directly related to the feminine/maternal, and presented as a menacing space to the masculine. The girl’s entrance into the caves of abjection and her mastering of everyday horror is depicted as a rite of initiation for her entrance into adulthood, a rite which implies an identification with the mother’s body, but which is in no way deterministic. “Thanksgiving” is also a witty satire on consumer culture with an implicit critique of the division of domestic tasks in a white workingclass household, which associates the highly stylized paraphernalia of gothic literature with the use of female physiology in contemporary advertising. Although the caves of the abject are still associated with the feminine, the invasion and conquest of this space by the masculine is denied in opposition to the conventional gothic plot. In Oates’s tale the traditional roles of the main characters are manifestly inverted: it is the daughter who assumes the part of the heroic rescuer, entering and defying the locus of abjection, while her father comes out as a passive and powerless figure in need of being rescued. The father is obviously emasculated by his new role in the family and disorientated in a society whose signs of power are no longer translated in terms of capacity of production, but are instead regulated by the consumer world. The end of the story makes clear that the protagonist is reminiscent of what Carol Jay Clover called “the final girl” (1992, 35): The lights of the store that had seemed dim before now seemed bright, and there was Father standing close by hunched over the grocery cart waiting for me […]. He was so surprised at something, the size of the turkey maybe, or just the fact that I’d done what I’d done, blinking up grinning at him, wiping my filthy hands on my jeans as I stood to my full height, he couldn’t speak at first, and was slow to help me lift the turkey into the cart […]. Father was breathing harshly, his face unnaturally white, so I wasn’t surprised when he told me he wasn’t feeling all that good and maybe shouldn’t drive home. This was the first time I’d been a witness to any adult saying any such thing but somehow wasn’t surprised and when Father gave me the key to the ignition I liked the feel of it in my hand. (Oates 1995, 231)

The maternal anagnorisis, the revelation and enabling exploration of the maternal space, shapes the narrative: Oates reworks the typical motif of the gothic heroine’s “masochistic identification” with her mother by dwelling on the protagonist’s “uncanny sensation that the past is repeating itself through her” (Modleski 1996, 68). Yet this identification is transformed here into a clearly empowering experience. By exploring the abject insides of the grotesque female

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body, the protagonist of “Thanksgiving” comes to terms with her own maturity and strength. Here, the female body refuses to be categorized according to the traditional gothic conventions and is instead demystified, explored and understood as an ally rather than an adversary. Alongside the rite of passage narrative, the story also examines the performance of female labour as exemplified by the mother’s domestic tasks (not only through the purchasing of domestic goods but also through the gruesome dealings with foods and products of all kinds) whose efforts are recognized as somehow heroic. The value and efficiency of women’s labour is acknowledged as such, but only to be transposed beyond typical roles ascribed to women. The driving motif and the image of the car mark, thus, the conquering of the male sphere, thereby concluding the story in a socially pragmatic feminist gesture. Oates’s manipulation of the Gothic-grotesque provides an incisive analysis of the tabooed contexts of women’s lives and of the processes through which these have been veiled, regulated, and coded in contemporary American society. In their unflinching re-examination of the abject female body, Oates’s gothic narratives mount pertinent critiques of social constructions of femininity as sustained by male and female Gothic traditions. In doing so, they challenge traditional Gothic roles and parody inherited generic structures and conventions. The endings of “The Premonition” and “Thanksgiving” correspond to rare but significant moments in Oates’s work because they are scattered in a fictional world that is not safeguarded by happy endings. These acts of insurrection emerge alongside the prevailing instances of suffering and exploitation which articulate the complex Oatesian universe of tales of American life. Oates’s examination of the female abject body plays, in this sense, a fundamental part in the author’s extremely detailed extensive exploration of the social contexts of women’s lives in contemporary America.

Works Cited Allen, Mary. 1987. “The Terrified Women of Joyce Carol Oates”. In Modern Critical Views: Joyce Carol Oates, edited by Harold Bloom, 61-82. New York: Chelsea House. Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Clover, Carol J. 1992. Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in Modern Horror Film. London: British Film Institute.

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Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Hurley, Kelly. 1996. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degenerations at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, Greg. 1994. Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne. Kahane, Claire. 1983. “The Maternal Legacy: The Grotesque Tradition in Flannery O'Connor's Female Gothic”. In The Female Gothic, edited by Juliann E. Fleenor, 242-256. London: Eden Press. Kristeva, Julia. [1980] 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Modleski, Tania. 1996. Loving With a Vengeance. New York: Routledge. Moers, Ellen. 1977. Literary Women. New York: Doubleday. Mulvey, Laura. 1989. Visual and Other Pleasures. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Oates, Joyce Carol. 1988. “Five Prefaces: Mysteries of Winterthurn”. In (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, 372-375. New York: Dutton. —. 1995. Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque. New York: Plume. Owen, Stephen. 1989. Mi-lou: Poetry and the Labyrinth of Desire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Russo, Mary. 1995 The Female Grotesque. London: Routledge. Wesley, Marilyn C. 1993. Refusal and Transgression in Joyce Carol Oates’ Fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. 1983. “The Radcliffean Gothic Model: A Form for Feminine Sexuality”. In The Female Gothic, edited by Juliann E. Fleenor, 207-224. London: Eden Press.


“Now we know that gay men are just men after all”: Abject Sexualities in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

Dorothea Fischer-Hornung O Rose, thou art sick! The invisible worm That flies in the night, In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. William Blake, “The Sick Rose” Early on in Silko’s monumental novel Almanac of the Dead she drastically exemplifies the voyeuristic exploitation of the ancestor spirits of the Laguna Pueblo people, a set of stone ancestor figures displayed in a small museum outside Santa Fe: The theft of the stone figures years ago had caused great anguish. Dark gray basalt the size and shape of an ear of corn, the stone figures had been given to the people by the Kachina spirits at the beginning of the Fifth World, present time. “Little Grandmother” and “Little Grandfather” lived in buckskin bundles gray and brittle with age. Although faceless and without limbs, the “little grandparents” had each worn a necklace of tiny white shells and turquoise beads. Old as the earth herself, the small stone figures had accompanied the people on their vast journey from the North. (1991, 31)

In their harmonious balance of male and female, the figures had been cared for as spiritual ancestors by generations of the Laguna people. Their theft and exposition had reduced them to objects, figures to be stared at in a glass case. When a delegation of Laguna people visits the gallery in an attempt to liberate the spirits by taking them back into the care of the tribe, Silko relates the vast gulf between the cultural and spiritual values of the colonizer and the colonized:

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THE ABJECT OF DESIRE The delegation walked past the display cases slowly and in silence. But when they reached the glass case in the center of the vast hall, the old cacique began to weep […]. He seemed to forget the barrier glass forms and tried to reach out to the small stone figures lying dreadfully unwrapped. The old man kept bumping his fingers against the glass case until the assistant curator became alarmed. The Laguna delegation later recounted how the white man had suddenly looked around at all of them as if he were afraid they had come to take back everything that had been stolen. In that instant white man and Indian both caught a glimpse of what was yet to come. (33)

The exposure and alienation of the ancestor figures, their pornographic objectification, reflect the materialist, anthropological and aestheticizing gaze of the colonizer which disrupted the cosmic symmetrical harmony of the male and female spiritual ancestor forces, initiating the time of abject destruction. Before conquest, a clanswoman had lifted them “tenderly as she once lifted her own babies”, calling them “ ‘esteemed and beloved ancestors’ ” (31). Generations of clanswomen and a male relative had cared for the stone figures, had fed them and given them rainwater to drink. Now the ancestor spirits lay exposed, on display and isolated in a glass case in a gallery, with only material traces of the care they had received in the past reflected in the tiny shell and bead necklace they wear. Five hundred years after colonization by Europeans, it is this vision of the apocalyptic final days of the rule of European Americans with a return of the original lands and state of harmony to the indigenous peoples of the Americas that marks Silko’s project. In this early scene, Silko defines the terms of inhumanity perpetrated by European Americans – a scene of stark abjection in the alienation of male and female spirit forces. Silko’s novel goes on to explore a proliferation of seemingly unending horrific, tabooed and literally disgusting examples of (in)human depravity, the world of cannibal queers and vampire capitalists. Her novel opens, however, with a vision of the lost harmony of the ancestor spirits as a clue to both the cause in the past and the potential transcendence of abjection in the future. Thus, the dialectic of harmony and disharmony offers a vision of a condition as old as the earth itself, as well as specific clues to deciphering the nature of crimes against indigenous peoples of the Americas and Africa. In an attempt to force the reader to confront and potentially internalize this negative vision – thereby possibly overcoming it in a process similar to psychotherapy – Silko portrays the abjection of (in)human acts specifically in the context of patriarchy and colonialism. If the harmony of male and female marks the one end of Silko’s visionary spectrum, alienated exposure delineates the other end of

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Silko’s representation of present-day vampire culture. Cannibal queers become Silko’s guiding metonym for the approaching apocalypse, the end of all days. These days of “Dead-Eye Dog” characterize contemporary time in the cyclical time calculations of the Mayan Almanacs. The late twentieth century is described as a time in which “the alien invaders would become obsessed with hungers and impulses commonly seen in wild dogs [...]. This period was “male and therefore tended to be somewhat weak and very cruel” (251). What could be more abject for many Western readers than the “perverse” appetites of male homosexual lovers? What could be more cruel and repulsive than, for example, a homosexual who exploits his partner’s despair and suicide commercially by turning photos of his lover’s corpse into highly stylized and aestheticized “art” photography: Death had not been any more peaceful for Eric than his life had. The extreme angles of Eric’s limbs outlined the geometry of his despair. The clenched muscles guarded divisions and secrets locked within him until one day the gridwork of lies had exploded bright, wet red all over. Only a few weeks earlier Eric had helped David carry the glossy white backdrop paper into the studio. David had wanted the backdrop for an “all-white” series in the bedroom. “But white shows everything, darling,” Eric had teased. David stared back silently. “Shows all the dirt. Shows all the nasty!” (106)

Not only does Silko show “all the nasty”, she clearly stakes out this territory to be white and male. In a process of de- and (re)construction, Silko provides us with metonymic clues as to the locus of evil. The descendants of the indigenous peoples of the Americas – and the contemporary reader as well, of course – must try to decipher the clues in the fragments of the Mayan almanacs that have been passed down over the ages. These almanacs, literally blotted with food and human body fluids, function as a central, unifying trope in the fractured narrative time structure of the novel. Almanac of the Dead provides the fragmentary history of the dead who have gone before in the holocaust of the Americas and the living dead, the cannibal homosexuals and vampire capitalists in Silko’s contemporary scenario of abjection. Silko situates the specific blood, race, and sexual crimes depicted in a much larger social and political context, locating the causes and resulting horror specifically in contemporary blood crimes and the death of Eros. Sexualities – and certainly not only homosexuality – have become exploitive and abject in their emptiness, commodification, and disassociation from human love.

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A number of critics have pondered Silko’s savage characterization of homosexual men in her novel. In her “Cannibal Queers: The problematics of Metaphor in Almanac of the Dead”, Janet St. Clair faces the problem head on, concluding that Silko’s depiction of homosexual men “engages the reader in a thorny dilemma. Mired in negative stereotypes, it offends. On the other hand, the metaphor works” (1999, 208). And she acknowledges the fact that “[i]t elegantly exposes the most heinous attributes of a stumbling ideology taken to its conceivable extremes” (208). She attempts to dispel the worries that Silko might substantiate stereotypes about gay men by noting that the novel is so difficult that anyone who is “seeking merely to titillate their bigotries” (208) would give up reading it – a weak defence at best. Further, not only Silko’s portrayal of perversely abject homosexuals disconcert her, she also feels called upon to clarify Silko’s negative portrayal of motherhood, noting that Silko at least spreads negative feelings toward mothers evenly: “it must be noted that virtually all the characters in Almanac, not just the homosexual men, hate their mothers” (219) – an even weaker attempt at a defence. In the end, these recognitions do not seem to alleviate St. Clair’s fundamental discomfort with the portrayal of gay men, which, on the one hand, is a group which is clearly discriminated against within Western culture, but on the other hand, is used by Silko as a metaphor for the decadence and perversion of that very culture. Yet, this does not undermine St. Clair’s basically sound interpretation of Silko’s intentions in which she sees Silko’s array of sexual queers as a metaphor of the insane solipsism and androcentric avarice that characterize the dominant culture […], their equation of carnal gratification with viciousness and their gynophobic sexual self-absorption emblematize the egocentric, phallocentric, and misogynistic savagery that Silko sees as endemic to Western culture. (207)

St. Clair is not alone, however, in her struggle to come to terms with Silko’s exceedingly uncomfortable depiction of homosexuality. Daria Donnelley, like St. Clair, essentially throws in the towel after speculating in a footnote on Silko’s possible concept that an “indigenous resurgence is being realized partly through birth rates among non-Europeans accounts for why in her imagined version, homosexuals seem particularly decadent” (1999, 257n) – read: homosexuals cannot procreate and indigenous people need procreation. She is unable to resolve the contradiction between the generally positive role allotted to male cross-dressers, the bedarch, in many Native American cultures and the negative portrayal Silko

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provides. Silko herself remarks on this in her collection of essays, Yellow Woman, noting that “[i]n the old Pueblo worldview, we are all a mixture of male and female, and this sexual identity is changing constantly, sexual inhibitions did not begin until the Christian missionaries arrived” (1996, 67). In Donnelley’s opinion, it “seems contrary to the status homosexuals have generally enjoyed in Indian cultures. I don’t know how to sort it out, but brutality seems much more intensely drawn in her gay characters” (257n). Silko’s point – and here Caren Irr makes an essential observation – seems not to be the creation of evil, gay characters, but rather the exploration of cruelty and sexuality as such – especially in the period after colonization – with Silko portraying male sexuality as abject and perverse in general: Even at their worst, the decadent queer characters do not approach the viciousness of the snuff movie films produced by Menardo’s friend the Mexican police chief. After the vehemently heterosexual torture of prostitutes and prisoners […] the chief orders the hijacking of his Argentinean cameraman and insists his testicles be slit open on film. (1999, 236).

The logical conclusion is that forms of homosexuality can be psychopathological but that this, of course, holds true for heterosexuals as well (see Lewes 1988, 22). David Moore also relegates his comments on Silko’s abject portrayal of homosexuals to a footnote – by now we can see a pattern developing – and excludes a discussion of the issue by stating that Silko’s “undiluted representation of homosexuals as murderous degenerated in Almanac poses a significant problematic beyond the scope of this paper” (1999, 178n). Nevertheless, he also recognizes that “[s]he is equally excoriative of heterosexual and homosexual exploitation, especially in the colonial and the racial frame” (178n). Fruitfully, he directs us to Richard Trexler’s evocative book Sex and Conquest, where Trexler explores the unequal power relations in the Amerindian and Euroamerican encounter, providing us with a clue to Silko’s intention. His study will become important to my own interpretation later in this paper. What are we to make of Silko’s seemingly brutal portrayal of homosexuality, which leads to so much critical hemming and hawing? In numerous places throughout Almanac of the Dead, Silko herself points us toward Freud and Marx. In their writings, both Marx and Freud give us a sense of the fundamental significance of an oral culture and take the victim of oppression seriously – certainly not an insignificant priority for Silko. Further, Marx serves as a model for a

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materialist analysis of the greed resulting from vampire capitalists, with Marx, according to Silko, having learned much of what he knew about collectivism from Native Americans. She feels that he almost got it right, but lacked, however, a clear theory of the ecological implications of the destructions of Mother Earth and indigenous peoples (see Silko 1991, 314-316, 408, 749). For Silko, Marx provides a social and economic narrative that explains how things are in the present and how things came to be historically and materially in the past. Freud provides the same for the aetiology of the individual. Silko’s appropriation of Freud is, of course, central to an understanding of her portrayal of homosexuality. In a number of ways, Silko is clearly a Freudian in her emphasis upon the reproductive nature of sexuality as well as his narrative of the depths of the human psyche as revealed in dreams and narratives – themes where the West and indigenous cultures meet. In particular, Freud’s recognition of “the similarity between the process of civilization and the libidinal development of the individual” ([1930] 1989, 51) is fruitful for Silko’s project to explore the implications of the rape of the Americas. It is no coincidence that the deciphering of the almanacs in the novel functions very much like the psychoanalytical process, as both processes are based on the narration of stories and the reconstruction of a larger frame of reference from fragmentary (un)conscious experience. Lecha, the Indian keeper of the almanacs in the present time, notes the following to Seese, her European American assistant in the almanac deciphering process: Each story had many versions. Had Seese heard about Freudian theory? Seese nodded. Lecha had got herself warmed up. Freud had interpreted fragments – images from hallucinations, fantasies, and dreams – in terms patients could understand. The images were messages from the patient to herself or himself. (Silko 1991, 173-174)

According to Lecha, one of Freud’s messages touches closely on her own efforts to decipher the meanings of the 500-year occupation of the Americas and its indigenous population by Europeans, clearly associating the past holocaust of the Americas with the Jewish holocaust: “Freud had sensed the approach of the Jewish holocaust in the dreams and jokes of his patients. Freud had been one of the first to appreciate the Western European appetite for the sadistic eroticism and masochism of modern war” (174). The distinction Freud makes between repression and displacement is also particularly enlightening in this context. On the one hand, the unsuccessful repression of a guilt-ridden past will come back to haunt

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not only the individual, but in the larger context of civilization, will haunt whole societies as well. Sublimation, according to Freud, in its positive integration of the uncontrolled forces of infancy, on the other hand, is used for a higher purpose in the work of civilization: “No feature, however, seems to characterize civilization more than its esteem and encouragement of man’s higher mental activities – his intellectual, scientific and artistic achievements – and the leading role that it assigns to ideas in human life” ([1930] 1989, 47). At this point we might again ask, then, why Silko singles out male homosexuality – with only one short reference to the existence of lesbian sexuality (see Silko 1991, 440-441) but no direct portrayal of female homosexuality in the novel whatsoever – to play a particularly destructive role in her horrorscape of the colonial encounter. In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud gives us a further clue to the homostructural aspect of modern industrialized cultures: The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men; it confronts them with ever more difficult tasks and compels them to carry out instinctual sublimations of which women are little capable. Since a man does not have unlimited quantities of psychical energy at his disposal, he has to accomplish his tasks by making an expedient distribution of his libido. What he employs for cultural aims he to a great extent withdraws from women and sexual life. His constant association with men, and his dependence on his relations with them, even estrange him from his duties as a husband and father. Thus the woman finds herself forced into the background by the claims of civilization and she adopts a hostile attitude towards it. (59)

European American society is increasingly a world of exclusive maleness which causes men, in order to enable them to shore up sufficient energy for the “civilizing” project, to withdraw from women and fatherhood. Women, seen as inadequate, are pushed out of the civilizing project of industrial capitalism, are pushed into the background, consequently, becoming hostile to the male project and, inevitably, toward their own offspring. Therefore, it is not accidental that fathers – not mothers – and young children are the great absence in Silko’s novel. Freud was quite straightforward on this point: “I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection” ([1930] 1989, 20). What we are confronted with, then, in Almanac of the Dead are the psychologically ravaged adults who are the product of their own civilization, the rejection by their mothers and the total absence of their fathers. This recognition – and it is a radically gendered one – helps to explain Silko’s aggressive vampire mothers who abort or abandon their progeny and, although fathers are essentially absent in Silko’s world, it is, nevertheless, the

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Law of the Father that is executed by the phallic mother, making female agency at worst a contradiction in terms and at best relegated to Kristeva’s presymbolic realm of the Semiotic (see Spiegel 1995, 17). But the question still remains why Silko’s portrayal of homosexuality seems so particularly vindictive? Although Silko is indeed a Freudian, Julia Kristeva’s theory helps us to define the particularly abject effect of Silko’s portrayal of homosexuality and why it is so disturbing. For Kristeva the abject is violent and “elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin; nothing is familiar, not even the shadow of a memory” (1982, 5). The opening description of the indigenous encounter with the abject pornographic display of their ancestors, exposed to a voyeuristic white gaze in a showcase and turned into an object, becomes clear in this context. The objectification of the ancestral body, disruption of the harmony of male and female, are fundamental to the horrors of the holocaust of the Americas: “Eyes, exhibitionism, and shame run together in the Freudian world and implicate disgust only because what is shameful is often also disgusting” (Miller 1997, 80). It is the particular character of disgust at the loss of humanity and Eros in the specific context of Native American and European history that Silko shows in such proliferating detail. The West fails to recognize its own kin, its own ancestors and can therefore only be lost in the world of the abject, ultimately imposing their own abjection, according to Kristeva, onto the other: “What he has swallowed up instead of maternal love is an emptiness, or rather a maternal hatred without a word for the words of the father; that is what he tries to cleanse himself of, tirelessly” (1982, 6). Because of this fundamental lack of community, both from the immediate parent to the wider circle of kin, the individual and society as well are consigned to “mourning for the object that is always already lost” (12). Abjection is, therefore, clearly related to perversion and “[i]t kills in the name of life” (15). For Freud, perversion is not eliminable and remains manifest in three principle ways: “active practice for some; the repressed constituent of neurosis in others; the unstably sublimated basis of civilization” (Dollimore 1992, 182). It is these three principle manifestations of abjection in the West that Silko explores. According to William Ian Miller, for the patriarchal order in Western culture – the determinant of what is disgusting drawn by culture rather than nature – there is nothing more disgusting and abject than the male homosexual and the attendant fear of contamination. This fear is associated with the most male of all substances, semen, a

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substance that has almost magical powers to feminize. Of all contaminating substances semen is the most powerful and polluting. In a misogynist order “[s]emen has the capacity to feminize and humiliate that which it touches. And it just may be that the durability of misogyny owes much to male disgust for semen” (Miller 1997, 2021; italics in original). Not only semen, but also the act of penetration, as the act most closely associated with the release of polluting semen, becomes always already overdetermined, beyond its physical meaning. Semen attains a cultural significance within power relations and explains the curiously positive evaluation of the penetrator over the penetrated in the descriptions of homosexuality: “The penetrator is engaging in an act of domination, desecration, and humiliation of another and in so doing remains relatively untainted” (100). Thus the female is marked as the object of penetration, and, ultimately, subjected to male dominance. This can, therefore, be transferred to the logic of homosexual relation which marks the penetrator as male and the penetrated male as feminized, subordinate, and abject: Whatever receives it [semen] is made woman. The feminizing power of semen can reduce men to women, even lower than women in some moral orderings since as biological men they had the option not to become sociological women. Semen is dangerous to oneself as well as to others, self-defiling as well as defiling. (103)

This is what distinguishes sodomy from every other perversion; sodomy turns “men” into “women”. The failure of psychoanalysis to deal adequately with homosexuality is surely partly due to an original gynophobic stance, making homosexuals deeply flawed and defective because they share certain psychic characteristics with women (see Lewes 1988, 237). But where is the connection between gynophobia and homophobia in Silko’s novel? Luce Irigaray notes that the exchanges upon which patriarchal societies are based take place exclusively among men, thereby making women commodities, passing from one man to another; they are the object of transactions among men and men alone (see Irigaray 1985, 192). In this context the homosexual relation becomes particularly abject and potentially subversive: “Because they openly interpret the law according to which society operates, they threaten in fact to shift the horizon of that law” and show what is “really at stake” (193; italics in original). Irigaray marks all economic processes as essentially homosexual, and, since women are always already a part of the economics of exchanges among men, the desire for women is a part of the dynamic as well: “Woman exists only as an occasion for

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mediation, transaction, transition, transference, between men and his fellow men, indeed between man and himself” (193). The woman herself does not exist since, ultimately, in the patriarchal order of things, the mother stands for phallic power, adopting the role imposed on her. Since woman does not really exist, she is, therefore, as indicated in Irigaray’s title, This Sex Which is Not One: “The only thing really required of her is that she keep intact the circulation of pretence by enveloping herself in femininity” (194; italics in original). Male homosexuality flies in the face of this pretence. Silko, in her own attempt to expose what is “really at stake”, constructs a set of constantly shifting and seemingly unending proliferations of erotic triangles: there is Paulie, the queer lover of Ferro and the keeper of Ferro’s vicious drug dogs; Ferro is the unattractive, insecure drug dealer who in turn is the lover of Jamey, the narcissistic boy-toy undercover cop: “In the beginning Ferro had compared the two of them [Paulie and Jamey] because he could not quite believe he had settled for Paulie when something so much finer had been available. But now he had nearly forgotten that Paulie had been his lover” (1992, 181). Like a jealous teenage lover, Ferro demands exclusivity of Jamey, who has become his fixation: Ferro savored each moment and all the pleasure he got with Jamey. Jamey and Ferro. Ferro and Jamey. Ferro wanted to stop Jamey’s nights on the town without him […]. It was funny how Jamey had eclipsed all the rest of it – the return of Lecha [the mother who had abandoned him], the trouble with Max Blue [his drug trafficking partner], even the rumors of war in Mexico [which would disturb the drug trade]. (692)

He dreams of a place where women as well as the disgust and nausea they elicit in him will disappear: “The reappearance of Lecha was another sign it was time for him to retire with Jamey and enjoy life far from the dirt landing strips and desert jeeps. Ferro wanted to escape the stink of women in the ranch house” (692). Most interesting in this context, however, is the triangle of David, the artist/photographer, Eric, his model and lover, and Beaufrey, the seller of pornographic movies of abortions and torture. These male triangular relationships shift continually like quicksand. Silko constantly destabilizes the narrative point of view and judgment of her characters, making it impossible to trust any individual perspective. Silko raises the stakes and introduces Seese as the female element in the triangular relationship based on David and Eric’s (homosexual) wish for a child. Eric sees Seese as a tool to cover-up the male-male relationships in public: “Seese was the decoy. Because Beaufrey was

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as anxious as David was about his masculine image” (59); Seese recognizes that both she and Eric are tools in a dangerous game: “Seese had always understood both David and Beaufrey used others – such as Eric and her – to taunt and tantalize. David had wanted to break Eric’s heart. But she had known that David had fallen in love with her after all” (109). Yet, Eric maintains that Seese sees things all wrong: “David never loved you. He made Beaufrey jealous with you. That’s all” (61). When Seese becomes pregnant for the first time, Beaufrey forces Seese to abort. When she becomes pregnant a second time, Seese refuses to abort the pregnancy. The birth of her son, Monte, causes further conflicts between Eric and David: “Eric had been David’s lover. David had wanted a child, a son […]. He was the odd man out” (51). Seese, in her need to be loved, believes that she, as a woman, has a perspective the men could never have: “Seese had seen how David glowed when he talked about the baby when they were together alone. Eric had no way to know any of this about David. Eric had seen only what a man might see” (61). Beaufort eventually abducts Monte, has him murdered and harvested for his organs – photographing the process for the insatiable pornographic film market. Beaufrey takes an almost classically Freudian stance in his analysis of David’s narcissistic need to reproduce himself: David needed to see himself reproduced, to see his own flesh live on; it was a common hang-up Beaufrey had seen in gay men, especially men who called themselves “straight” because they wanted to see their face reproduced on a tiny, shitting, screaming baby. Humans were like little monkeys delighted with the little mirror images, until they realized any likeness was only an illusion. Children, in fact, grew into total strangers. Beaufrey and his parents had loathed one another. (536)

Eve Sedgwick describes “the bond between rivals in an erotic triangle as being even stronger, more heavily determinant of actions and choices, than anything in the bond between either of the lovers and the beloved” (21). But she also alerts us to the danger of seeing the erotic triangle as an ahistorical Platonic form apart from gender, language, class, and power because “the erotic triangle is a sensitive register precisely for delineating relationships of power and meaning, and for making graphically intelligible the play of desire and identification by which individuals negotiate with their societies for empowerment” (27). Silko’s characters are caught in a dance of death in which sexuality becomes a tool, clearly based on Silko’s reading of the economic structure of exchange within patriarchy, colonization, and

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individual aetiology, wherein the effect of perversion arises from the fact that it is integral to just those things it threatens (see Dollimore 1992, 172). These factors strongly determine the actions and choices of her characters. Nevertheless, Beaufrey, whose portrayal is one of the most extreme examples of perversion in Silko’s novel, is also portrayed as a victim. Before becoming a perpetrator of terror and abjection, he was a victim of the systematic destruction of the mother/child relationship: “Beaufrey only laughed because he could imagine himself as a foetus, and he knew what they should have done with him swimming hopelessly in the silence of the deep, warm ocean. His mother had told him she tried to abort herself […]. Beaufrey had started by hating his mother; hating the rest of them was easy” (Silko 1992, 102). If the roots of homophobia, as we have seen, lie in the hatred of what is perceived and labelled as feminine in men, in societies where women are subjugated, feared and discriminated against because men feel contaminated or polluted by them, “feminine” character traits in males will be despised. Silko, I would argue, does not reject male homosexuality as such and universally, rather she rejects the strong gynophobia that determines so much of European American culture. Homosexuality, as elaborated earlier, serves as a metonym. Two of her Native American characters, Lecha and Sterling, speculate on the deeper implications of homosexuality in particular and masculinities in general. First, Lecha, the decipherer and guardian of the almanacs from which the novel gets its name, is also a mother who has abandoned her son, Ferro, leaving him to be raised by her twin sister. She notes that white society likes its women weak: “Lecha made fun of men who secretly desired young boys instead of real women. Lecha said the white men kept their women small and weak so the women could not fight back when the men beat them or pushed them around” (597). The age differential in men who desire young boys moves Lecha’s example beyond gender, defining the inequality of power relations in the exploitation of boys by men. Then Sterling, who is a Laguna Pueblo Indian exiled from his reservation (the occurrence which sets the novel’s overarching plot structure in motion), is also Seese’s friend. Both Sterling and Seese see no great difference between homosexual men and men in general: Sterling had found out a little from Seese about homosexual men. She said they were no different from other lovers, or other couples. Sterling could not explain his curiosity without sounding prejudicial. Paulie would have been strange even if he had not been gay. This was Sterling’s point. (450)

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Silko’s project is most assuredly not about “gay bashing” – her critique of the perversions of the five hundred years of European exploitation is far more fundamental. She wants to do nothing less than totally deconstruct the perverted foundations of European (American) values, values based on the Law of the Father that demands blood sacrifice to keep its purity. “Sangre pura” is introduced as a major thematic focus in the character of Serlo, Beaufrey’s partner in the pornography business, whose life is devoted to a perverted cult of purity both in his own sexual behaviour and attendant theories of racial purity: “Serlo had been ahead of his time with his fetishes of purity and cleanliness; there were insinuations his sex organ touched only sterile, prewarmed stainless steel cylinders used for artificial insemination of cattle” (547). The absence of human contact and desire in his sexual practices enable Serlo to maintain that he is neither homosexual nor bestial, indeed that he is “purer” than others who stoop to human sexual contact. Silko’s portrayal of Serlo shows absolute sexual and social abjection: “He did not think gender really mattered; sex after all was only a bodily function, a kind of expulsion of the sex fluids into some receptacle or another […]. Sex had always been filthy and deadly even before the outbreak of AIDS” (657). He denies his homosexuality based on the fear of the contamination of “receptacles” by semen. “Serlo considered himself heterosexual […]. Beaufrey should remember Hitler’s solution for homosexuals” (564), that is, their extermination in Nazi death camps as degenerates. Silko takes gynophobia to ever-higher levels of abjection by outlining Serlo’s vision of the total elimination of women from child rearing. In his perverted reading of Freud and his own version of racist eugenics, which has similarities to the Nazi’s “Lebensborn” project to produce and raise racially pure children in special organizations (see “The ‘Lebensborn’ ” n.d., online), Serlo wants to implement a eugenics research unit: [E]ven the most perfect genetic specimen could be ruined, absolutely destroyed, by the defects of the child’s mother. Serlo believed the problems that Freud had identified need not occur if a child’s “parents” were both male. The nature of the female was to engulf what was outside her body, to never let the umbilical cord be severed; gradually the mother became a vampire. (541-542)

Serlo’s cool “science” is the grotesque mirror image of David’s cool “art”. The aestheticization of a lover’s suicide as well as the art market’s addictive vampirization of such perverted images intensify Silko’s apocalyptic vision of absolute abjection. As suggested earlier

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in this paper, Eric, unable to endure the cold dance of death of evershifting love triangles, commits suicide. David, his lover, utilizes the images of Eric’s destruction in the ultimate aestheticization of “the nasty” (106), systematically adjusting the lights and reflectors illuminating and aestheticizing Eric’s destruction in death so that the “blood appeared as bright and glossy as enamel paint” (108). Deliberately posing, structuring and cold-heartedly photographing Eric’s corpse, David incorporates the images in his white-on-white series: “White on white: the pure white background of glossy paper; white cat in a snowstorm, white Texas fag boy naked on white chenille” (107). Silko ironically levels the racial implications in “whiteness” and also changes the usual paradigm of a female corpse aestheticized in the male view (see Mercer and Julien 1988, 143-144). In a redefinition of “the terms portrait and still life” (Silko 1991, 553; italics in original), David’s emotional death is mirrored in Eric’s physical death: All that mattered in the landscape was the human form, the human face, which was our original “landscape” as an infant. So-called still lifes and landscapes were only analogues for the artist’s perceptions and emotions. Eric’s body had become a new landscape, and his colors had been scattered all over the bedspread, ceiling, walls, and floor. (555)

Eric, “[f]everish with love and need” (107), reaches out to David’s aesthetic fixations, achieving the final, irresistible contact with his lover in death: “Eric had made his suicide a sort of visual event or installation, which Eric had somehow known would be irresistible to a visual artist such as David. Eric had performed the last act of his life farce perfectly; uncanny how Eric’s blood and flesh had become a medium consumed by a single performance” (537). Only the guaranteed commercial value of David’s pictures enables the absolute elimination of the human body and soul. Critics comment on the rich intensity of the reds against the white of the background: “One critic wrote of the ‘pictorial irony of a field of red shapes which might be peonies – cherry, ruby, deep purple, black – and the nude human figure nearly buried in these “blossoms” of bright red’ ” (108). In a voyeurism driven to its extreme, a steady parade of buyers filled the gallery before the opening where “[e]veryone wanted to see” (108). In the end critics agreed that “David ‘had found a subject to fit his style of clinical detachment and relentless exposure of what lies hidden in flesh’ ” (108). In ironic consistency, when David is later killed in a riding accident on Serlo’s finca in Argentina his pictures dramatically increase in value:

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David was worth more dead than he had been worth alive. The Eric series would appreciate in value, and even pictures of David’s corpse would bring a good price […]. Every ounce of value, everything worth anything, was stripped away for sale, regardless; no mercy […]. Capitalism stayed ahead because it was ruthless. (565)

This is the real “nasty” – danse macabre and almanac of the dead indeed! In her study Photography, Susan Sontag portrays our contemporary need not only to have reality confirmed but also enhanced by photographs in aesthetic consumerism, turning us into “imagejunkies” (1977, 24). The camera enables the annihilation of moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed (see 1997, 41). It is the total absence of responsibility to and emotional relationship with the photographed subject that Silko portrays in the fictional triangle of Eric, David, and David’s critics. Yet, Sontag maintains that because each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted; the specific context of the photo is essential (see Sontag 1977, 105-106). Therefore, Silko’s point of insertion cannot be overlooked – capitalist exploitation and the death of Eros. Seese, who in her own way simultaneously loved and exploited both Eric and David, recognizes this clearly: “She had not actually seen Eric’s body. Only the photographs. David’s photographs, but somehow that had been worse. All she knew was that something had happened to her eyes, something had diminished her vision” (Silko 1991, 53). Seese seems to be the only one who cannot separate herself from Eric’s reality as an individual, the subject in the photo, and David’s cold-blooded objectification. What she sees, the point of David’s photographic insertion, changes her vision. She sees not the reality of death, but a generally diminished, abject reality. In turn, her vision is changed and diminished as well. It is the intrusion of death into life without the protection of a higher order (spirituality) or the objectification for a higher purpose (science), which, according to Kristeva truly characterizes the abject and the uncanny: The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us […]. It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The inbetween, the ambiguous, the composite. (1982, 4)

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Neither art nor science, David’s photos lack the sublimely purifying moment. His is an aestheticized consumer product and therefore it remains in the realm of the abject. Yet Silko’s perpetrators are always also victims of individual and societal perversions – rejected by their mothers, the all-consuming vampires, and haunted by their fathers, the unspoken absence. Serlo, for example, in all his nauseating repulsiveness, is clearly a victim of the death of love: The old man did not attempt to hide the nature of his relationship with Serlo. His parents were divorced and neither had wanted him. The old man did not consider massaging the boy’s arms and legs at night homosexuality. Homosexuality involved others, other men who attempted to penetrate or who wanted to be penetrated. Serlo had learned sexual penetration was silly, unnecessary, and rotten with disease. (1991, 546)

Nevertheless, in Silko’s scenario this kind of perversion does not have exclusively European cultural roots, but also extends back to the days of the Aztecs and Inca, to a time when blood sacrifice began to spread in the South before conquest, forcing many tribes to flee to North America: The old parrot priests used to tell stories about a time of turmoil hundreds of years before the Europeans came, a time when communities had split into factions over sacrifices and the sight and smell of fresh blood. The people who went away had fled north, and behind them dynasties of sorcerers-sacrificers had gradually taken over the towns and cities of the South. In fact, it had been the sorcerers-sacrificers who had “called down” the alien invaders, sorcerercannibals from Europe, magically sent to hurry the destruction and slaughter already begun by the Destroyers’ secret clan. (475)

In the ancient blood sacrifices to the gods and in the abuse of boys by men, Silko mirrors ancient and contemporary perversions: “The old priest wanted the boy so they did not take the boy with the others […]. At night he whispers to the sleeping child there are other gods they must serve now” (593). Silko locates the perversions a society most abhors within itself and in those it conquers as well. The fact that the definition of perversion is inherent in European American society explains, I believe, Silko’s choice of homosexual male relations as the paradigm of the days of the dead, the epoch of Death-Eye Dog; Silko’s scenario of abjection coincides with five hundred years of European American exploitation of the indigenous peoples and the land of the Americas and Mother Earth. In Mimesis and Alterity, Michael Taussig refers to the “colonial mirror of production”, whereby the colonizer projects the worst

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imaginable traits onto the colonized: “[B]arbarism does double service, registering horror and disgust at this application of power, while at the same time ratifying one of the power’s most essential images, that of the barbaric – the savage, the brute, and so forth” (1993, 65-66). The trope of the cannibal serves the same purpose and mirrors the colonial gaze, marking the greatest measurable cultural difference and therefore they are the greatest challenge to our categories of understanding (see Barker et al. 1998, 20). In his Sex and Conquest, Richard C. Trexler confirms this in the earliest description by Veracruz when he writes to Charles V, purporting that the natives are a sinful people and focusing on two specific evils: blood sacrifice and sodomy. With the eyes of the conquerer, Veracruz suggests that the natives deserve to be conquered, punished and ultimately saved by their own colonization, in particular because of their practice of sodomy: [P]unishment [might] serve as a further occasion of warning and dread to those who still rebel, and thus dissuade them from such great evil as those which they work in the service of the devil. For in addition to […] children and men and women [being] killed and offered as sacrifice, we have learned and have been informed that they are doubtless all sodomites and engage in that abominable sin. (Veracruz qtd. in Trexler 1995, 1)

The Iberians here claim the right to conquer indigenous peoples specifically because the latter practiced “sodomy”, by which they usually meant homosexual behaviour. A discourse on sexuality becomes a rationale for colonial hierarchy, dominion, and subordination, a discourse that is fundamentally about power relations. (see Trexler 1995, 1-3). These texts provide us exclusively with the view of the conqueror and no matter how sympathetic to the Amerindians a given author may have been at the time, all of them viewed sodomy as a sin and as evidence of barbarism. Nevertheless, as contradictory as it might seem, Trexler clearly documents sodomy as a form of punishment imposed by the conquistadores upon the indigenous population during conquest, clearly symbolized by erecting a picota or penis shaped garrot outside the gate of every new American city. Since the shape of the picota so clearly resembled the erect penis, at least subliminally it indicated that sodomy is barbarous and that it will be punished along with other serious crimes (see 1995, 12, 167). In a twist of logic the conquerors reconciled their categorization of homosexuals, that is sodomy, as sinful for the natives on the one hand, but a type of justified punishment meted out by themselves on the other hand. Since penetration masculinizes the

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penetrator and feminizes the penetratee, there is a certain perverse consistency in this logic. The indigenous enemies are feminized both in the physical act of penetration (sodomy) and also essentially effeminated because they have been conquered (the rape of the land and its people). Here Freud’s theory that the abandonment of the reproductive function represents the common feature of perversion is also important (see Bristow 1992, 20). Silko reverses the gaze, turns the horror of what the West considers barbaric and perverse back upon itself and in the process deconstructs the very definition of these concepts both in their applicability to indigenous peoples and to the Western view of homosexuality. Silko’s vision transcends Freud, pointing simultaneously backward and forward in time, to a sense of indigenous cosmic reality in which there is a balance between the eternal forces of good and evil, male and female. To achieve this, Silko traces in unending refracted multiplicity the great spaces of abjection. Lecha, Silko’s Indian visionary psychic, explains this loss of balance and harmony in those who seek her out: They had all come to her with a deep sense that something had been lost. They had all given the loss a different name: the stock market crash, lost lottery tickets, worthless junk bonds or lost loved ones; but Lecha knew the loss was their connection with the earth. They all feared illness and physical change; since life led to death, consciousness terrified them, and they had sought to control death by becoming killers themselves. (718)

The subjection of the indigenous people of the Americas in Silko’s fiction is always set in direct relation to the land, to Mother Earth. She too has been raped, sodomized, degraded and perverted during conquest. Here Silko’s apocalyptic vision comes full circle in the unity of both present abjection and visionary future triumph of humankind and the land. The mimesis between woman’s soul and the spiritual cosmos rests on the notion that the earth is in an important sense the mother (see Taussig 1993, 121). Jonathan Rutherford fleshes out the details of this association of woman/earth both as threat and redemption: Men have associated women with the earth, the flesh subordinate to men’s reason. Mother Earth, green fields and lush pastures that men can bask in, that fed us. But she is also the mud and the dirt of women’s bodies, the menstrual blood, the female sexual desire that instils panic. She is to be feared and controlled. She is the vast mother with a cave between her legs. She embraces us when we were infants and ever since threatens to swamp us and swallow us up. She is the maternal body we must separate ourselves from. And woman is the temptress, the harlot who threatens our self-control, the body we objectify in our pornographic defence against our mothers’ bodies. The mother and the

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whore, two images of femininity that men’s heterosexuality invents to reconcile our contradictory desires for mother love and sexual love. Freud summed up this aspect of our sexuality, which he insisted was a “universal affliction […] not confined to some individuals”, with the sentence “Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they do not love”. (1988, 50-51)

In a process similar to psychoanalysis, Silko presents us with the fragments of her vision of both the horror and the potential to overcome the relentless laws of patriarchy. Her “perverts” are themselves the victims of this system, the conundrum of our sexuality in the death of Eros. Silko’s intention is not to pillar homosexuality to the absolute norms of heterosexuality, but rather to enable us to overcome the male-male, male-female, and female-female binaries, to transcend them in a new level of liberation. As in psychotherapy, images are the fragments of the deeper truth and lead to the source of the illness and ultimately to recovery. In this sense both Silko, as writer, and we, her readers, are part of this process. Eric, the lover who performs the death of Eros in his suicide, comes to the following conclusion: “So now we know that gay men are just men after all. […] Irrational and piggish like all the rest. I thought I had already whipped that demon back to the underworld” (Silko 1991, 51). But Silko refuses to let us whip the demons back into the underworld; she demands that we view the demons head on by radically exploring the psychological and material abjection of the European American tradition. She enables the reader to explore a higher order, a vision of non-abjection where sexualities could be restored to their rightful and positive context in the realm of our imagination, the healing context of kinship and Eros. In this vision, “Little Grandmother” and “Little Grandfather”, the ancestor spirits, would be liberated from their glass prison, returned to the care of their kin, and the balance between male and female, male and male, female and female, between Mother Earth and Father Sky would be restored – a world where, to paraphrase Silko’s own vision in Yellow Woman, “differences [would be] celebrated as signs of Mother Creator’s Grace” (1996, 67).

Works Cited Barker, Francis, et al., eds. 1998. Cannibalism and the Colonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barnett, Louise, and James L. Thorson, eds. 1999. Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection of Critical Essays. Albuquerque: University Press of New Mexico.

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Bristow, Joseph. 1992. Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing. London: Routledge. Bronfen, Elisabeth. 1992. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Chapman, Rowena, and Jonathan Rutherford, eds. 1988. Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Dollimore, Jonathan. 1992. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Donnelley, Daria. 1999. “Old and New Notebooks: Almanac of the Dead as Revolutionary Entertainment”. In Barnett and Thorson, eds., 245-259. Farrel, Kirby. 1998. Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Freud, Sigmund. [1930] 1989. Civilization and Its Discontents, translated and edited by James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton. Hulme, Peter. 1998. “Introduction: The Cannibal Scene”. In Barker et al., eds., 1-38. Irigaray, Luce: [1977] 1985. The Sex Which is Not One, translated by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Irr, Caren. 1999. “The Timelessness of Almanac of the Dead: Or a Postmodern Rewriting of Radical Fiction”. In Barnett and Thorson, eds., 223-244. Kristeva, Julia. [1980] 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. “The ‘Lebensborn’ ”. n.d. The Jewish Virtual Library. http://www.jewishvirtual library.org/jsource/Holocaust/Lebensborn.html (accessed 10 September 2003). Lewes, Kenneth. 1988. The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality: Freud’s Theory Unfinished. New York: Meridian. Mercer, Kobena, and Isaac Julien. 1998. “Race, Sexual Politics and Black Masculinity”. In Chapman and Rutherford, eds., 97-164. Miller, William Ian. 1997. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Moore, David L. 1999. “Silko’s Blood Sacrifice: The Circulating Witness in Almanac of the Dead”. In Barnett and Thorson, eds., 149-183. Rutherford, Jonathan. 1988. “Who’s That Man?”. In Chapman and Rutherford, eds., 21-67. Schmidt, Peter, et al., eds. 1998. Maya. Milan: Bompiani. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Siegel, Carol. 1995. Male Masochism: Modern Revisions of the Story of Love. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Silko, Leslie Marmon. 1991. Almanac of the Dead. New York: Penguin. . 1996. Yellow Woman and the Beauty of the Spirit. New York: Simon & Schuster. Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. St. Clair, Janet. 1999. “Cannibal Queers: The Problematics of Metaphor in Almanac of the Dead”. In Barnett and Thorson, eds., 207-221. Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge.

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Trexler, Richard C. 1995. Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas. Cambridge: Plity Press.


Consuming the Body: Literal and Metaphorical Cannibalism in Peter Greenaway’s Films

Tatjana Pavlov In a colonial context cannibalism has been used to dissociate “civilized” from “primitive” people. As Kay Schaffer points out, “cannibalism represented the ultimate denial of a common humanity, the ultimate sign of depravity, the ultimate mark of savagery, and above all, a guarantee of European superiority” (1995, 108). However, the absence of anthropophagy in so-called civilized society is an illusion. In stark contrast to the assumption that cannibalistic practices do not exist in the Western world, the case of the Rotenburg cannibal (Armin Meiwes) in Germany of 2001 proves the opposite. The incident constituted a major problem for the court trying the case. Since there is no German law prohibiting anthropophagy, the court lacked a legal basis for reaching a verdict. In the decision of January 2004, the court opted for a verdict of manslaughter. The Rotenburg cannibal acted in accordance with his “victim’s” sexual desire to be killed, cut in pieces, and be consumed (apparently, they opened their sexual ritual by eating the putative “victim’s” penis while the latter was still alive). The agreement was mutual and could, therefore, not be treated as a murder. Meiwes compared his deed with the Holy Communion, explaining that he wanted to become one with the man he consumed. From an anthropologist’s point of view, it could be argued that this is a form of endocannibalism (eating a member of the same group), which is associated with sacrifice, familial devotion, reincarnation, and other sentiments of group welfare and continuity. It stands in contrast to exocannibalism (eating a member of another group), which has to do with revenge or the destruction of enemies (see Eliade 1987, 3:60; White 2001, 58-60). The prominence of religious and sexual elements in the Meiwes case makes evident the full complexity of anthropophagy when it appears in our culture. In this essay I will focus on these various aspects of anthropophagy in an analysis of the metaphorics of cannibalism in the films of Peter Greenaway. By alluding to different forms of cannibalism, most of them metaphorical, Greenaway manages to destabilize familiar categories within Western civilization that set up rules of what is to be considered as either aesthetic or unaesthetic. Regarded as a barbaric

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and taboo practice, anthropophagy is consequently associated with the unaesthetic. In the Western world it is, with occasional exceptions, metaphorical rather than literal cannibalism that is all pervasive and that is closely linked to the devouring nature of consumer society. Greenaway formulates his ideology critique of patriarchal uncivilized societies by representing the “unaesthetic” consumption of the body in highly aesthetic ways, so that the distinction between the “uncivilizedunaesthetic” and “civilized-aesthetic” can no longer hold. Greenaway’s work can thus be situated close to the realm of the abject, which according to Julia Kristeva is “what disturbs identity, system, or order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (1982, 4). A number of films since the 1960s have used cannibalism as a metaphor for the brutal functioning of capitalist society, for example Porcile/Pigsty (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy, 1969), Themroc (Claude Farraldo, France, 1973), and Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1967). These films more or less explicitly draw upon Marx’s nineteenth-century vision of capitalism as a dynamic in which “the means of production become means of absorbing the labor of others”. Here, as Marx points out, “it is no longer the laborer who employs the means of production, but the means of production that employ the laborer. Instead of being consumed by him [...] they consume him, as the ferment necessary to their own life-process” (Marx 1990, 425). Kevin Dwyer claims that filmmakers such as Godard, Farraldo and Pasolini have all spoken about their work in Marxist terms of exploitation, materialism, and alienation (2003, 260-261). Films of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Olivier Smolders’s Adoration (Belgium, 1990), Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s Delicatessen (France, 1991) or Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (England, 1989; screenplay 1989), Dwyer argues, display cannibalism as “a metaphor for patriarchy in crisis” (265). Against the backdrop of this widespread anthropophagic metaphor, “traditional gender and power relations between parents and children, men and women, rulers and subjects” (265) are laid bare and thus called into question. In many of these films, cannibalism becomes “an implement of terror for confused, and often risible, males”. However, “[t]he alimentary delinquents are apocalyptically punished [...], giving victory to the purity of the childlike figures and romantic couples” (265). I would argue that in the case of Peter Greenaway, Dwyer’s observation does not merely apply to The Cook, the only Greenaway film in which a human body is actually served as food at a

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cannibalistic horror banquet. Rather, Greenaway also presents forms of cannibalism (both endo- and exo-) which go far beyond the literal consumption of one’s own kind. In The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982; screenplay 1984) women’s bodies are generally equated with gardens; different parts of their bodies are equated with fruits that evoke both sexual desire and death. The Baby of Mâcon (1993; screenplay 1994) deals with the progressive exploitation of the body of a child believed to be miraculous. In The Pillow Book (1995; screenplay 1996) human skin is used as “writing paper” for sexual satisfaction and aesthetic pleasure, culminating in a scene where a corpse is exhumed and flayed, and its skin transmuted into a pillow book while the rest of the body is thrown into the garbage. Food, waste, and the corpse, the central domains of abjection (see Kristeva 1982, 2-4) intersect in these films in a way that dissolves the border between the unaesthetic and the aesthetic. My analysis thus extends from literal cannibalism in the case of The Cook, via partial bodily dismemberment and exploitation in The Baby of Mâcon and The Pillow Book, to purely metaphorical consumption in The Draughtsman's Contract. I take the literal consumption of the body in The Cook as a template for deep structures of consumption within patriarchal societies across this selection of Greenaway's films. In showing how human bodies are transformed into commodities before being consumed (either literally or metaphorically), Greenaway alludes to the greedy, devouring nature of consumer society and its operative structures, one of whose central pillars is patriarchy (see Morris 1999, 393-395). By virtue of his critique of consumer society behaviour, I would argue that Greenaway employs cannibalism principally as a metaphor for “patriarchy in crisis”. In my reading of Greenaway’s films, I will show why the respective exemplifications of power finally fail in each case. Here, traditional gender and power relations are not only called into question, but also reversed. Subtle ironical references to the Bible, to literature and art, to political and historical events are used to point out the many examples of metaphorical cannibalistic acts that are tolerated in Western civilization and that are connected with patriarchy and consumer society. In the late twentieth century, traditional patriarchal systems are increasingly beleaguered, as is the distinction between “civilized” and “primitive” people, as Schaffer describes it (1995, 108). Greenaway reveals and questions the double standards of civilized society, exemplified by the practice of the Catholic Church in particular, and offers, in films such as The Cook, The Pillow Book, and The Draughtsman’s Contract, matriarchy as an alternative.

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The Catholic Church represents one of the major patriarchal institutions from which “civilized” Western values have emerged but which at the same time maintains traces of taboo anthropophagic practices in its essential ritual, the Holy Communion. Even though The Baby of Mâcon is the only Greenaway film that explicitly draws upon religious topoi, subtle references alluding to ambiguities within Catholic doctrine can be found in each film. This is why I divide the following analysis into three parts, each headed by a biblical quotation that contains cannibalistic implications, both in a metaphorical and literal sense. The first section will concentrate on The Baby of Mâcon and, to a lesser extent, on The Cook to expose the double meaning of the Eucharist and the relic cult. My reading of The Cook and The Pillow Book in the second part will focus on the close connection between text and body, which again refers to a biblical quotation, “And the Word was made flesh” (John 1:14). Finally, the Song of Solomon will be the starting point for an analysis of The Draughtsman’s Contract, where the woman’s body is offered for sexual consumption.

“For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed” (John 6:55) In the Bible, the Eucharist, the central act of Christian worship, is expressed in cannibalistic terms: “He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him” (John 6:56). The theological interpretation of the Eucharist varies widely among the Christian denominations and has been the cause of endless dispute. While Roman Catholics understand the presence of Christ literally, Protestants prefer to emphasize the role of the Eucharist as an act of commemoration (see Eliade 1987, 5:186). If the Holy Communion is understood by the Catholic Church as the actual consumption of the body of Christ, it can be argued that this is a form of endocannibalism, as mentioned above. Defined as a ritual act that protects the living against the negative effects of death, people from so-called “primitive” societies believe that in (endo)cannibalism the powers of the deceased are ingested along with their remains (see Eliade 1987, 3:60). This is not far from Catholic belief that considers the Eucharist in terms of sacrifice, as a renewed offering of Christ’s immolation in death. The need for redemption is central to the doctrine of salvation and, therefore, allows traits of cannibalism within the Catholic Church, traits implied both in The Baby of Mâcon and in The Cook in

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a most exaggerated manner. In both films avatars of Christ-figures are sacrificed, their bodies being consumed literally and metaphorically, in order to bring salvation. However, the longed-for redemption remains doubtful, as the following analyses will show. The Baby of Mâcon tells the story of a morality play performed in 1659 at the height of the counter-reformation. At a time when the community of the cathedral city of Mâcon is struck with famine and infertility, a beautiful, healthy boy is born to an old and hideous woman who has long passed the normal childbearing age. Consequently, the boy is regarded as a miraculous child and is used as a moneymaking device in a world of avarice and religious fanaticism. After the Child is born, the midwives examine the boy, touch the afterbirth and lick their fingers, superstitiously believing that this consumption will enhance their own fertility. The abject – here given visual expression by the afterbirth – is what is thrown away (ab-ject), cast off (see Kristeva 1982, 4). In this context, the body’s waste is regarded as something sacred and, therefore, allows the representation of the unthinkable: namely cannibalism. Even though it is metaphorical rather than literal anthropophagy that is represented in The Baby of Mâcon, it is no less cruel. The exploitation of the Child’s body is carried out in several steps. In the beginning, the boy’s sister, simply called the daughter, takes him away from his mother and offers his blessings in exchange for the affluence of her family. Encouraged by a credulous public she identifies herself with the Virgin Mary and claims the Child is her own. Building upon familiar religious beliefs and traditions, she dresses as the Madonna and clothes the Child – both literally and symbolically following the conventions of Catholic iconography. Later on, the Church takes the Child away from her and carries its exploitation to even greater extremes. Most cruelly, its spittle, phlegm, urine, excrement, tears, condensed breath, and blood are extracted and auctioned off to the wealthier inhabitants of Mâcon. In order to obtain the boy’s tears, they pinch and whip him, and to get his phlegm, they wet the boy and leave him shivering by the back door of the church. The Child endures each torture patiently, repeating at regular intervals a kind of incantation: “This is a fluid of my body. These are the liquids of my life” (Greenaway 1994, 94-95). The boy is aware of and complicit in the consumption of his body and accepts the part he has to play in this patriarchal system. The daughter finally ends the boy’s agony by suffocating him; since a law in Mâcon forbids the execution of virgins, the Church condemns the daughter to be raped to death. The Child is subsequently declared

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a saint, and the local populace, eager for relics, violently dismembers his body. There are numerous examples of saints’ bodies being cut up, by peasants or the ecclesiastical elite, in order to transform them into relics (see Angenendt 1994, 149-213). As Böhme points out, “Christianity expanded, taking the form of a culture of death which was characterized throughout Europe by fetishist and magical practices. The sacred became the medium of guarantees insuring both life and after-life, guarantees which like all magic functioned in a utilitarian and manipulative manner, and this on two levels at once: on the one hand, by warding off perils and menaces; on the other hand by promising advantage and good luck” (2003, 119; my translation). Both aspects are presented in the film: before the auction of the Child’s fluids, the Church orders some of the midwives and wetnurses to dress as saints and group themselves around the boy. Among them are Agatha with her breasts on a silver plate, the beheaded Catherine with a giant wheel, Lucy with her eyes on a stalk, and Cecelia carrying her severed head. The resurrection of martyrs reinforces the community’s belief in religious miracles; and they willingly pay for the boy’s liquids. Since dismemberment seems to belong to martyrdom, the film consequently ends with the Child’s body being divided into parts and distributed like the body of Christ in the Holy Communion. The Child’s body fluids as well as its final dismemberment belong to the realm of the abject. As Kristeva explains: “Such wastes [in the context of the film, the body fluids or the child’s various bodily parts] drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit – cadere, cadaver” (1982, 3). As a matter of fact, the process of “cadere” is accelerated in the film. The Child’s body is violently exploited until “nothing remains”. The boy’s dismemberment is the most revolting representation of the abject. By transforming the various body parts into relics, the abject becomes something sacred. It is via the sacralization of the abject that the Catholic Church implicitly justifies its own transgression of taboo practices. The desired salvation, however, is missing. Instead, the film ends as it begins: famine, disease and sterility return to the community. With these horrifying practices in mind, one could ask whether the behaviour of “civilized” societies may be no less savage and brutal than that of so-called primitive ones. The Baby of Mâcon exemplifies the way in which the Catholic Church exploits, indeed consumes, its own members. The deaths of the daughter and of the Child foreground

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the “consumption” of the body within patriarchal-ecclesiastical structures. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover provides another example of the ambiguous character of the Eucharist. Here, it is again treated ironically within the frame of a play, this time that of a revenge tragedy. The story is set in the late 1980s, mainly in the restaurant Le Hollandais, where the French cook, Richard Borst, works for the brutal thief and owner of the restaurant, Albert Spica, and his companions. It is also the place where Spica’s wife, Georgina, meets her lover Michael. When the truth about his wife’s affair comes out, Spica swears to kill and eat his rival. The cook helps the lovers to flee, but Spica finds Michael and kills him. Georgina persuades Richard to cook Michael, so that her husband can fulfil his oath. Albert is invited to a private banquet where all of his victims gather to watch the scene: a long white-draped stretcher is laid out horizontally on the table in front of him. Georgina takes her place opposite her husband and pulls away the sheet to reveal Michael’s steaming brown corpse. This is described in the film script in full detail: It is excellently presented, garnished with parsley and butter. It’s complete. The arms clasped above the navel. The fingers, genitals, toes, and nose charred a little. The skin brown and crinkled a little in places. The human features are unmistakable. It is certainly Michael. (Greenaway 1989, 91)

The tableau of the nicely decorated corpse, “the utmost of abjection” (Kristeva 1982, 4), is at once fascinating and grotesque. Georgina, holding a gun, forces her husband to eat. As Albert takes his last bite, she shoots him, uttering the last word of the film – “Cannibal”. Here, the metaphorical consumption is transformed into a real one. An unintentional exocannibalism takes place at the horror banquet, where the tyrant is compelled to eat his enemy literally. In contrast to The Baby of Mâcon, cannibalism is here turned against the patriarch – in this case Albert. This “Last Supper” alludes to yet another meaning of the Eucharist – the transformation of the word into flesh, to which I now turn.

“And the Word was made flesh” (John 1:14) In The Cook and The Pillow Book text and body are made one, albeit in totally different ways. Whereas in The Pillow Book the human body is considered as book and vice versa, the written text and the body in The Cook are associated with food. Both films represent forms of

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cannibalism that are closely connected with the well-known biblical quotation “the Word was made flesh”. Reading and eating are both acts of consumption. As Genesis most explicitly demonstrates, knowledge is figured as “food”. Like Saint John (see Revelation 10:8-11), we devour books, but we also swallow “food for thought”, then “ruminate” upon it or “chew it over” until it is well digested. In The Cook, the protagonists are not only characterized by what they eat, but also by what they read. While Albert Spica is literally presented as the “speaker”, whose vulgar prattle dominates the whole film, Michael is shown as the silent reader, who even “consumes” his books while eating in the restaurant. Albert, who has neither table manners nor taste, takes Michael’s reading as a personal affront: “Hello – what are you doing? Reading again? This is a restaurant, not a library. All you are allowed to read here, you know, is the menu. You’re insulting the chef. Reading gives you indigestion – didn’t you know that? Don’t read at the table!” (Greenaway 1989, 44). Albert and his cronies do not read – all they can do with books is destroy them. This is most explicitly shown in the book depository, where they create havoc and kill Michael by stuffing pages from his favourite book, The French Revolution, down his throat. Michael’s death is presented as a bloody event, like the French Revolution. His preferred book, which constantly accompanied him, has not only become a harbinger of death but also the murder weapon that causes his dreadful end. Ironically, Georgina once asked her lover: “What good are all these books to you? You can’t eat them!” (70). But this is exactly what Michael finally does, albeit not voluntarily. When Richard tells Georgina that his favourite cookery book even contains instructions for cannibalism, she asks him: “Could you cook him? [...] You have a reputation for a wide range of experimental dishes. He might taste good. What would taste best? His heart? His liver? The cheeks of his backside? His prairie oysters?” (84-85). Her ambiguous remarks could be taken to refer to the (endo)cannibalistic tendency of human sexual behaviour. Georgina has indeed “tried” her lover’s “prairie oysters” and that is why Richard mistakenly assumes that she will be the one to eat Michael in order to become one with her lover and to achieve eternal communion. She corrects him with a smile and they both know that it will be Albert who will consume Michael. Albert will be forced to eat his own words which have become flesh – “I’ll kill him and I’ll bloody eat him!” (66-67) – but in the act of eating Michael, Albert will not receive the Word of God. Surprisingly, Richard at first seems appalled

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by the idea that Georgina could be the one to consume her lover as an act of endocannibalism. The idea of Albert eating Michael, however, challenges Richard’s capabilities as a master cook. He willingly agrees and astonishes everyone with his unusual culinary creation. Furthermore, cooking Michael for Albert’s consumption shows that Richard belongs to the group of readers. He is well educated and knows that in traditional revenge tragedies, such as William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus or John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, the villain is forced to perform cannibalism. When Albert kills Michael, he tells his cronies: “I don’t want this to look like a sex murder. It is what it is – a revenge killing. An affair of the heart” (78). It sounds as if he were familiar with revenge tragedy conventions, but as Georgina informs the audience, Albert does not read (see Greenaway 1989, 69). He is totally surprised by Georgina’s reaction and does not, until the very last moment, expect death. Obviously he has no literary education, for otherwise he would have known that revenge tragedies always rely on retaliation. Ironically, it is also Albert who explains the difference between literal and metaphorical meaning. While torturing Michael to death Albert tells Mitchell: “I didn’t mean you literally have to chew his bollocks off, you sad little whippet. I meant it metaphorically” (78). In the end, it is Albert who is made to take himself literally: “Try the cock, Albert”, Georgina tells him, “it’s a delicacy, and you know where it’s been” (92). Albert’s first exclamation when he sees Michael’s corpse is: “God”! Georgina corrects him: “No Albert – it’s not God – it’s Michael” (92). Ironically, Michael shares the name of the archangel, meaning “the one who is like God”. In the Book of Revelation (12:7-9) Michael is the principal fighter of the heavenly battle against the devil. Contrary to the archangel, Greenaway’s Michael fails to defeat Satan (Albert). To accomplish his task, he needs the help of Georgina, whose name derives from England’s patron Saint George. The legend tells how Saint George killed the dragon that terrorized the country. Georgina acts like the saint insofar as she kills the tyrant that threatened the community. She has not only avenged the death of her lover but also all the sufferings Albert caused other people to endure. Georgina brings the final salvation, which demands the prior death of her lover. Thus, the consumption of Michael’s body as an allusion to the Eucharist means an involuntary literal exocannibalism for Albert, but – at the same time – a metaphorical endocannibalism for Georgina and her followers for whom it signifies a redemptive act. Here, the patriarch is destroyed by a woman who reverses the traditional structure of the archangel (Michael) as a male figure assisted by St.

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George. It is the feminized, yet no longer subordinate Georgina who achieves victory. In The Pillow Book “the Word [is] made flesh” through the creative act of writing on the body. In 1996 Greenaway observed: It may be that there are two simulations in life that can be, sooner or later, guaranteed to excite and please – sex and text, flesh and literature. Perhaps it is a commendable ambition to try to bring both these simulations together, so close together in fact that they can be considered, at least for a time – perhaps for the length of a film – inseparable. (qtd. in Pascoe 1997, 158)

Greenaway has clearly blurred the boundaries between book and body. In this film, the body is “consumed” in the “consummated” sexual act and “internalized” in the act of reading. The film tells the story of Nagiko, a Japanese girl growing up in Kyoto in the 1970s and 1980s. Her father is a writer and calligrapher, who, every year on her birthday, writes a greeting card on her face until she turns eighteen. Nagiko’s family is financially supported by her father’s homosexual publisher who, ritually on Nagiko’s birthday, demands sexual pleasures from her father. After a disastrous marriage with the publisher’s nephew, Nagiko escapes to Hong Kong, where she exchanges sex for calligraphy. She encourages her various lovers to write freely on any part of her body. None of them can really satisfy her until she meets Jerome, a young English translator, who encourages her to become a writer herself. Once again, a quasi-biblical reference is implied: Saint Jerome was well-educated and known for his achievements as a writer and translator of the Bible. He studied classical literature and learned to read the Scripture in original Hebrew. Greenaway’s Jerome, however, does not share the saint’s chastity but has several lovers. When Nagiko’s first attempts as a writer are rejected, she goes to see the publisher and discovers that he is not only the same publisher who sexually coerced her father, but also Jerome’s current lover. In his desire to help Nagiko, Jerome offers his own body for her writing and a period of sexual fulfilment between the two lovers follows. Jerome presents his calligraphed naked body to the publisher, who is excited by the text and by the way it is presented, and orders it to be transcribed. Jerome’s body offers a programme of thirteen sensuous poems on the subject of “The Lover” and the publisher agrees to the contract. Jerome’s throat bears a kind of introduction saying: “I want to describe the Body as a Book / A Book as a Body / And this Body and this Book / Will be the first Volume”. The message on his ribcage reads, “the book is in the torso”, and on his genitals, “I am the very

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necessary Coda, The tail-piece, the ever-reproducing Epilogue. The last dangling paragraph that is the reason for the next book’s sprouting” (Greenaway 1996, 102). The publisher passionately “consumes” both the text and the body: there is one scene in the film where we see the publisher first reading the text on Jerome’s body, then kissing it (both the body and the text). In a subsequent scene, we see the publisher from behind, kneeling in front of Jerome’s loins. This hint at oral sex figures a kind of endocannibalism. Nagiko is jealous and angrily decides to continue her writing on other men, then sending these human texts to the publisher. This, in turn, makes Jerome jealous and he desperately tries to win her back. One of Nagiko’s admirers proposes that Jerome should fake his own suicide, which tragically results in his real death. Nevertheless, his death seems to be a necessary precondition for Nagiko to become an independent professional writer. Grief-stricken, she writes the sixth book, an erotic poem entitled The Book of the Lover, on Jerome’s corpse before burying it. The publisher, finding out about this, has the body exhumed and flayed and the skin made into a personal pillow book. As Bridget Elliot and Anthony Purdy remark, Jerome’s body “is reduced to pure surface, his flesh, organs and even bones [are] discarded; his body spiritualized by its transformation into text, the text sensualized by its perfect embodiment” (1997, 89-90). Although the act of transforming Jerome’s skin into a book is a grotesque and horrifying idea, it is presented in a very aesthetic manner. When the skin is carefully flayed, skilled bookbinders, “working closely with individual handsewn stitching, labour in deep concentration, oblivious to the nature of the material they are working with, to make a superbly fashioned book of some seventy pages” (87). The publisher uses the pillow book for his own sensual communion: “Cradling the book in his hands, and putting his finger in among the most intimate of the skin-pages, he places his hands and the book on his lower belly. Soon he is breathing very deeply” (88). The way in which the publisher holds the “remains” of Jerome’s body close to his lower belly is a metonymic figure of sexual consummation and endocannibalism. Nagiko, pregnant with Jerome’s child, is determined to get the pillow book back. She sends the publisher the remaining body books and demands, in turn, the one made of Jerome’s skin. Since this publisher constantly refuses the exchange, a messenger, upon whose torso the last body book is inscribed, is sent to kill him. This thirteenth human volume is appropriately called The Book of the Dead, and after reading it, the publisher finally returns the pillow book and accepts his

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own death. The young man slits the publisher’s throat with a small blade and takes the book back to Nagiko. The Book of the Dead is essential since it not only contains Nagiko’s personal indictment of the publisher but also indicates her liberation from a patriarchal structure: This is the writing of Nagiko Kiyohara no Motosuke Sei Shonagon, and I know you have blackmailed, violated and humiliated my father. I suspect you also of ruining my husband. You have now committed the greatest crime – you have desecrated the body of my lover. You and I now know that you have lived long enough. (112)

Nagiko does not only avenge the humiliation of her father, the ruining of her husband, and the death of her lover; she also symbolically frees herself from the restrictions of a patriarchal world. For this reason it is important that she mentions her whole name, involving that of her historical model Sei Shonagon from whom she got her first name. The film pays direct homage to an original Japanese Pillow Book written by Sei Shonagon at the close of the tenth century. She was a member of the imperial court during the Heian period (794-1185), and her pillow book represents a collection of reminiscences, lists, literary quotes, and amorous stories (see Pascoe 1997, 163; Krewani 2001, 297-298). The link between text and sex appears to have inspired Greenaway’s version: I regard the most important and essential two pervading sensibilities – Sei Shonagon’s enthusiasm for writing and her abiding excitement of physicality, or one might simplify by saying her continuing enthusiasm for text and sex – as valuable and important now as then” (qtd. in Willoquet-Maricondi and Alemany-Galway 2001, 290)

Nagiko, too, derives the most intense carnal pleasure from having her body written upon. Shonagon’s text is witty and ironic about the “war of the sexes”; she is equal, if not superior in erudition to the males who are socially above her. All this is reflected in Nagiko, who battles against restrictions of all kinds to attain her independence and refuses to limit her sexuality. There are two rituals on Nagiko’s birthday that are central to her liberation process: her face being written on by her father and her aunt’s reading of Sei Shonagon’s pillow book. The annual face painting is accompanied by a ceremonial speech is reminiscent of God’s creation of man: “When God made the first clay model of a human being, He painted in the eyes [...] and the lips [...] and the sex. And then He painted in each person’s name lest the person should

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forget it. If God approved of His creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His own name” (see Greenaway 1996, 31). Greenaway himself remarks in his script that this “action, though innocent and ritualized and performed with domestic affection, is, nonetheless, a little odd, perhaps disturbing. The Child is no more, for a moment, than something to write on. And the father’s signing is a little too Godlike” (31). On the one hand the face painting gives Nagiko an identity, and on the other hand it marks her dependence on her father. It comes as a shock for Nagiko when the face painting stops on her eighteenth birthday. She feels lost and desperately tries to find substitutes, but none of the other men, apart from Jerome, can replace the ritual. Even though the separation from her father and the later death of her lover are cruel experiences for Nagiko, they are also necessary conditions for asserting her own individuality. In the course of the film she becomes increasingly self-confident and independent. She holds her ground in a patriarchal world and eventually becomes herself “the pen and not the paper” (100). She no longer offers her own body as an object to be written on, but starts writing herself. This is an important development that connects Nagiko closely with Sei Shonagon. To complete the circle, the film concludes with Nagiko writing a greeting card on the face of her daughter. Traditional gender roles are thus reversed. The consumption of the body as text becomes a metaphor for the end of patriarchy, which is superseded by daughtermother bonding. Whereas previously her father had taken up the position of Writer/Creator, now Nagiko usurps the part of God/Father and thereby symbolically implies the replacement of patriarchy by matriarchy. In the following section I will discuss the metaphorical consumption of the female body in The Draughtsman’s Contract in connection with fruits. Here, as in The Pillow Book, the birth of a child, which demands the prior death of its father, signifies a new beginning that privileges feminine power structures.

“Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits” (Song of Solomon 4:16) Lovers sometimes say that they would like to eat each other, expressing their tender desire for incorporation. Oral sex, as not quite an act of endocannibalism, is surely one of the forms closest to consuming the lover’s body. In the Old Testament this form of

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metaphorical endocannibalism is most explicitly expressed in the Song of Solomon, where the woman’s body is associated with the garden and the various parts of her body with fruits which are freely offered to her lover for consumption. Like eating, the sexual act makes of two bodies one, though in a union that is less absolute and permanent. The desire to become one, however, can easily turn into aggression. Kissing and eating are both oral activities, and at an extreme level of intensity the erotic and aggressive sides of incorporation cannot be distinguished. Thus it becomes difficult to say at what point the desire for consummation turns into the desire for consumption. In The Draughtsman’s Contract the same garden-fruit imagery is used as in the Song of Solomon, but here the consumption of the body also reveals an aggressive aspect. In contrast to the other Greenaway films, the treatment of anthropophagy is much more subtle; here, it is exclusively presented via metaphors. The film is set in the late seventeenth century and tells the story of Mr. Neville, a draughtsman, who is persuaded by Mrs. Herbert and her daughter, Sarah Talmann, to execute a series of twelve drawings of Compton Anstey, Mr. Herbert’s property. These drawings are to be done over a period of twelve days during Mr. Herbert’s absence. A contract between Mr. Neville and Mrs. Herbert is signed whereby the draughtsman not only demands high payment for his craftsmanship but also free access to Mr. Herbert’s property, including Mrs. Herbert’s body. Once again Greenaway makes explicit that within a patriarchal world, the female body is treated as an object to be consumed and exploited by males. During the course of the film, however, it becomes evident that the draughtsman’s power is only an illusion. After finishing drawing number six, a new contract between Neville and Mrs. Talmann is set up, this time under the latter’s conditions. She interprets the drawings in the context of a murder plot in which Neville might be involved. Admiring her ingenuity, he willingly follows her orders regarding her sexual desires, not knowing that Mrs. Talmann and her mother are only using him in order to secure their position in Compton Anstey by producing an heir. At the end of the film, when Neville has accomplished his tasks, the male residents of Compton Anstey kill him. The film begins with a banquet at which the gentry participants gorge themselves with fruit and recount insalubrious anecdotes. To quote Bakhtin, “[t]he grotesque symposium does not have to respect hierarchical distinctions; it freely blends the profane and the sacred, the lower and the higher, the spiritual and the material” (1968, 285-

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286). This is exactly the kind of “symposium” Greenaway presents in his film. As Amy Lawrence observes: “Greenaway’s insistence on the body’s inescapable vulgarity at once liberates it (and him) from the strictures of middle-class respectability and lowers it by calling attention to the less exalted attributes of the human animal” (1997, 49). In the first scene of the film, one of the gentry is eating a plum and talking about a Mr. Chandos and his passion for his garden. The people of Mr. Chandos’s estate have been “regaled” every year with the fecundity of his plum trees, “until their guts rumbled and their backsides ached from overuse” (Greenaway 1984, 47). It would appear, as Lawrence points out, that “not all fruit nourishes, often passing directly into excrement with much discomfort for the unpleasantly surprised epicure” (1997, 49). Mr. Chandos eventually builds a chapel where the pews are made of plum wood. The narrator concludes with relish that those who visit the gentleman’s chapel “still have cause to remember him through their backsides, on account of the splinters” (47). This is only one of many anecdotes about the unpleasant side effects of gardens and fruits, hinting already at the ambiguous tenor of the film. From beginning to end the film is dominated by images of fruit. They decorate tables and represent the wealth of Compton Anstey’s residents. The gardener demonstrates his talent daily by offering the most exotic specimens. These hothouse fruits, however, are not always as tasty as they look, which is also true of the fruits that are used as metaphors for the erotic parts of the female body. Gardens and wives are the focus of attention, and the fruit of fertility is central. Women’s “fruits” are as much consumed as real fruits, and they sometimes leave a bitter taste. Mentioned in the same breath as fruitful gardens, women find themselves objects of consumption. The first sexual encounter between Neville and Mrs. Herbert is brutal and ruthless, as Neville transforms Mrs. Herbert’s body into a fruit tree: “The trees have been poorly cared for. The angle between the branches and the main trunk is too steep”, he says lifting her arms, “but the original work is good. And what of the pears themselves, Madam? In season, are they presentable?” (56). Comparing her breasts with pears, he later talks about limes while looking at her genitals: “Madam, they smell so sweet. Especially when they are allowed to bloom without hindrance” (71). Even though Neville does not belong to the upper class, he feels superior. He makes fun of Mr. Talmann, treats Mrs. Herbert as a sex object, and enjoys making ambiguous remarks in the presence of the whole company:

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THE ABJECT OF DESIRE Gentlemen, Mrs. Herbert pays no price she cannot afford and, thanks to her generosity, I am permitted to take pleasure without hindrance on her property, and enjoy the maturing delights of her country garden and, gentlemen, there is much there to be surprised at and applauded. (68)

Neville constantly stresses his masterful dominance as a male consumer of women. The power relationships between women/gardens and men/gardeners are, however, to change with the second contract made by the new generation of women. Mrs. Talmann will liberate herself and her mother from traditional gender roles and prove that they are not just parts of men’s property. Interestingly, Compton Anstey originally belonged to Mrs. Herbert’s father. Unable to inherit as a woman, she was married to Mr. Herbert, who then took possession of the estate. It seems that after Sarah’s birth, Mr. Herbert lost interest in his wife. Sarah, for her part, was married to Mr. Talmann, a man who is not sexually interested in his wife, and is accused by her of being impotent. Given the fact of their husbands’ legal standing, Mrs. Herbert and Mrs. Talmann are confronted with issues of inheritance. If they remain childless, Mr. Talmann’s nephew Augustus will inherit their property without having any direct connection with the Herbert family. Being well aware of this fact, Mrs. Herbert and her daughter make plans to guarantee their position at Compton Anstey, plans which involve the exploitation of Neville for their purposes. The fruit and consumption metaphors are central to these plans. Although fruit metaphors are unflattering to women when used by men, women’s discourse on fruit seems much more ingenious. By the end of the film, the traditional roles of consumer and consumed are reversed. When Neville returns to Compton Anstey, he offers Mrs. Herbert a gift of three pomegranates. Mrs. Herbert invites him to a final sexual encounter, this time “to our mutual satisfaction” (110), as she says, and asks him to do one last drawing. After having sex, Mrs. Herbert tells Neville the story of Persephone. In the myth, Persephone is raped and carried off by Hades into the Underworld. Her mother, Ceres, the goddess of fields and gardens, searches for her daughter but her quest makes the world barren. When she finally locates Persephone, Hades refuses to release her daughter, who has eaten seven seeds of a pomegranate, a fatal fruit, which confines her to the Underworld. A contract is made and Persephone is restored to Ceres and, with her, fertility, and fruitfulness to the world – but only for half of each year. Neville does not know the myth but senses that her story is “certainly a cautionary tale for gardeners” (110). “And for mothers with daughters” (111), Mrs. Herbert adds as her daughter enters the room. Neville finds that the two women have been ahead of

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him all along. Mrs. Herbert assures him, “[i]n our need of an heir you may very likely have served us well” (111). Mrs. Talmann reminds him that a contract is always made between two partners for mutual profit. As it turns out, the “fruit” she offered him to consume was as fatal as the one offered by Hades to Persephone. Now that he has consumed her “fatal fruit” and “fertilized her garden”, he will be sent to the Underworld. Already Mrs. Herbert points to this necessary consequence when she squeezes the pomegranate whilst talking of the blood of the newborn and of murder, thus referring to the dual symbolism of the fruit. The pomegranate with its blood-like juice signifies both life and death. The blood of the newborn hints at the baby Mrs. Talmann is awaiting – a baby that will guarantee their position at Compton Anstey. At the same time the birth of this baby demands the prior death of its father who does not belong to Compton Anstey and whose existence must, therefore, be erased. As Bakhtin remarks, “[t]he end must contain the potentialities of the new beginning, just as death leads to a new birth” (1968, 283). This is perhaps why, as in other Greenaway films, liberation from patriarchy most often demands a sacrifice.

Conclusion Is the portrayal of a delicately cooked human body on screen, and its cannibalistic consumption before our eyes, something aesthetic or unaesthetic? According to standard Western categories which regard anthropophagic practices as barbaric, they can only be associated with the unaesthetic. In Greenaway’s films, however, the most horrible and unimaginable things, such as the steaming brown body of Michael in The Cook or the flaying of Jerome’s skin in The Pillow Book, are presented in a very aesthetic manner. Here, Greenaway blurs the boundaries between the aesthetic and unaesthetic – between the civilized and the uncivilized – between various forms of consumption, from literary cultivation to literal cannibalism. Consequently, he questions all kinds of categories that guarantee order in a given society. By employing images and metaphors of cannibalism, Greenaway makes us conscious that even within our so-called civilized society – whose feeling of superiority is based upon the condemnation of what it pleases to label primitive – these distinctions are doubtful. Greenaway’s exaggerated images of literal and metaphorical cannibalism make us explicitly aware of rules within Western


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civilization that continue to privilege patriarchal structures, structures which can no longer reign unquestioned. Greenaway, speaking of The Baby of Mâcon – but by extension of all of his films in so far as they thematize the hold of power upon the body – has said: For me, this film is not a criticism of Catholicism in particular. It talks about power, all ideologies that pretend to guide the thought and imagination of the social body. And what happens when one defies them. The church finds itself deprived of the opportunity to exercise [power] [...] and it reacts forcefully, taking vengeance in an atrocious manner. It annihilates this woman just as, for 2,000 years, it has constantly treated women in a terrible fashion. (qtd. in Ciment 2000, 160)

Greenaway here identifies the Church as one of the patriarchal systems that exploit and consume “the social body”, and in particular that of women. Cannibalism in his films is thus used as a metaphor, on the one hand, for the devouring nature of Western consumer society, and on the other, for patriarchy in crisis. In The Baby of Mâcon, Greenaway most explicitly formulates his critique of the brutal functioning of patriarchal structures in which a child and a young woman are the victims of the masculinist-ecclesiastical institution. While the Child accepts the traditional role of the martyr, the young woman tries to defy the church, but fails. In other films such as The Cook, The Pillow Book, and The Draughtsman’s Contract, traditional gender and power relations are not only revealed and called into question, but are replaced by structures which privilege the feminine. Greenaway creates transgressive and disturbing connections between dichotomies such as greed and thrift (The Baby of Mâcon, The Cook), eating and cooking (The Cook), consuming art and creating art (The Cook, The Pillow Book, The Draughtsman’s Contract), revenge and salvation (The Cook, The Baby of Mâcon, The Pillow Book). His subtle ironical references to literary intertexts, such as the Bible, mythology or English drama, employ anthropophagy as a means of showing that received power relations between subject and object, consumer and commodity, men and women, are revealed as unsustainable – and that they also open up new perspectives for less hierarchical gender structures.

Works Cited Angenendt, Arnold. 1994. Heilige und Reliquien. Die Geschichte ihres Kultes vom frühen Christentum bis zur Gegenwart. München: Beck.

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Bakhtin, Mikhail. [1965] 1968. Rabelais and His World, translated by Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Böhme, Hartmut. 2003. “Der Körper als Bühne. Zur Protogeschichte der Anatomie”. In Bühnen des Wissens: Interferenzen zwischen Wissenschaft und Kunst, edited by Helmar Schramm, 110-140. Berlin: Dahlem University Press. Ciment, Michel. 2000. “Interview with Peter Greenaway: The Baby of Mâcon”. In Gras and Gras, 154-165. Dwyer, Kevin. 2003. “Alimentary Delinquency in the Cinema”. In Eating Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Food, edited by Tobias Döring, Markus Heide, and Susanne Mühleisen, 257-271. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Eliade, Mircea, ed. 1987. Vol. 3 of The Encyclopedia of Religion. New York: Macmillan. —, ed. 1987. Vol. 5 of The Encyclopedia of Religion. New York: Macmillan. Elliott, Bridget, and Anthony Purdy. 1997. Peter Greenaway: Architecture and Allegory. West Sussex: Academy Editions. Gras, Vernon, and Marguerite Gras, eds. 2000. Peter Greenaway: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Greenaway, Peter. 1984. “The Draughtsman’s Contract”. Screenplay. L’Avant-Scène Cinéma 333:44-117. —. 1989. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Screenplay. Paris: Dis Voir. —. 1994. The Baby of Mâcon. Screenplay. Paris: Dis Voir. —. 1996. The Pillow Book. Screenplay. Paris: Dis Voir. The Holy Bible. King James Version. [1611] 1991. New York: Ivy Books. Krewani, Angela. 2001. Hybride Formen: New British Cinema – Television Drama – Hypermedia. Trier: WVT. Kristeva, Julia. [1980] 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lawrence, Amy. 1997. The Films of Peter Greenaway. Cambridge: Cambridge Film Classics. Marston, John. [ca. 1600] 1999. Antonio’s Revenge, edited by Reavley W. Gair. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Marx, Karl. [1867] 1990. Vol. 1 of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, translated by Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Miller, William Ian. 1997. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Morris, Meaghan. 1999. “Things to do with Shopping Centers”. In The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, 391-409. London: Routledge. Pascoe, David. 1997. Peter Greenaway: Museums and Moving Images. London: Reaktion. Schaffer, Kay. 1995. In the Wake of First Contact. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, William. [ca. 1593] 2002. Titus Andronicus, edited by Jonathan Bate. London: The Arden Shakespeare. White, Tim. 2001. “Once Were Cannibals”. Scientific American 11:58-65. Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula, and Mary Alemany-Galway, eds. 2001. Peter Greenaway’s Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press.


Shape-Shifters from the Wilderness: Werewolves Roaming the Twentieth Century

Andrea Gutenberg Werewolves have been regarded as prime emblems of the marginal, of deviance and hybridity for more than two millennia. These shapeshifters between the human and the animal world are an integral part of Western classical mythology (Lycaeon, Leto), and even the medical notion of lycanthropy as a mental disease (the patient thinks he is a wolf and is prone to cannibalism and the desecration of corpses) dates back to ancient times (see Eickhoff 1986; Steiger and Ruehl 1999, 104-108). Consequently, the dimensions of morality and pathology have always provided the ramifications for changing perceptions of the werewolf figure, with a gradual shift of focus from early Christian and medieval theological treatises on the position of monsters within God’s creation to a secularized medical treatment of the “monstrous” in modern times (see Ginzburg 1986, 207). Apart from its historically continuous significance, the werewolf seems to be a transcultural phenomenon, i.e. a constant anthropological factor or archetype of sadistic fantasies, with man-tigers, man-hyenas, man-leopards, manbears and man-panthers replacing the werewolf in non-European cultural contexts (see Jones 1951, 131). The shape-shifter’s habitual transgression of basic rules of civilized behaviour, rooted in its association with cannibalism, uncontrolled violence and/or sexual excess, has always made it a potential social threat requiring rigorous control as well as a figure of abjection threatening the integrity of the human subject. It necessarily disturbs any clear-cut notions of identity, system or order in that it takes up the position of what Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror has called “the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (1982, 4). Its characteristic hybridity and mutability account for a shifting affiliation with the realms of the real and the marvellous. This peculiarity partly explains the historical occurrence of werewolf trials, which, according to Ernest Jones (see 1951, 143), only ended in 1720 with the execution of a supposed werewolf in Salzburg. The idea of the werewolf shares with other notions of abjection an ambiguity of effect – the witness of its metamorphosis is typically overwhelmed by feelings of disgust and repulsion as well as by an inexplicable fascination. In the case of the werewolf, the abject

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connotes primitiveness, wildness, brutality, unbridled instinct and cannibalism – traits innate in every human being, which need to be repressed and sublimated in order to achieve or maintain integration into “civilized” society. Its capacity to change its shape makes the werewolf a construct diametrically opposed to the hard, impermeable, clearly gendered (that is male) body. The werewolf thus belongs to the realm of the abject because of its double failure to present either a reliable identity or a stable body, to be either someone or something: “Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either” (Kristeva 1982, 2). However, the abject is not only related to the werewolf figure as such; whoever is attacked by the werewolf is left in an abject state of bodily formlessness or mutilation, deprived of any recognizable human contours. The victim’s remains thus represent the abject to the extent that they function like “refuse and corpses [which] show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live” (3). In the case of triangular constellations involving attacker, victim and witness or voyeur, a third dimension of the abject exists in the perception of the viewer, who may verge on hallucination to the extent that his/her reactions shift between incredulity and panic and whose sensation of uncanniness places him/her “on the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me” (2). As a feature of werewolf tales, abjection may thus operate simultaneously on different levels: as a characteristic physical trait ascribed to the werewolf figure as well as to its victim, as the intratextual witness’s or extratextual reader’s psychological strategy of repudiating that which is perceived as abject, and as a condition of social marginalization and/or melancholic depression potentially attributable to any of the figures involved. In their visible regression, werewolves evoke primal fears because they recall an earlier state of human existence not only with regard to individual psychosexual development but also on the level of phylogenetic development. According to Sigmund Freud, the oral or “cannibalistic” stage of psycho-sexual organization comes first in the development of the infant (see Freud [1905] 1953, 198), and the cannibal’s act of incorporation is a libidinous fixation: “he has a devouring affection for his enemies and only devours people of whom he is fond” (see Freud [1921] 1955b, 105). Freud regarded mankind’s cultural achievements as precarious and considered earlier stages of human development to be highly influential at the level of the unconscious. In his famous case study of the “wolf man”, he points out the neurotic and traumatic potential of the wolf paradigm and its association with an anal and sadistic psychosexual disposition. As

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numerous examples from literature and folklore show, werewolf constructs are often related to an incestuous fear of the castrating father or the phallic mother and her vagina dentata. In the course of human evolution, language took the place of smell and movement on two legs periodically replaced movement on four legs. From a Darwinist viewpoint, however, these developments could also be reversed. Thus abundant hair/fur and mysterious and piercing eyes with thick eyebrows were, from the late nineteenth century onward, regarded not just as atavistic signs but also as stigmata of degeneration and of a criminal disposition. This belief in physical stigmata, however, was not entirely new at the time but constituted a takeover of medieval superstition into the realm of the newly developing sciences, including criminology. As Ernest Jones points out, “Werewolves could be recognized when in human form by having heavy eyebrows that met together, or by having hair on the palms of their hands” (1951, 137). Both the magic and the rationalist explanation seem to have survived side by side in certain parts of the world even into the twentieth century (see Jones 1951, 143). Interestingly, despite the werewolf’s obvious violation of the rules of respectable masculinity – self-mastery, restraint, discipline, and vigilance concerning bodily needs (see Young 1990, 138) – there seems to be no doubt in the minds of most (male) critics and theoreticians about the masculine gender of (were)wolves, even though their more or less latent homoerotic leanings are often acknowledged. This tendency to overlook the feminine dimension of the (were)wolf reaches back to Freud but continues to influence critical attitudes even in our day. Thus, as late as 1988, literary critic Richard Dyer goes so far as to claim that he knows of no female werewolf stories at all (see Dyer 1988, 71n). Denis Duclos’s study of the werewolf as a medial icon of American culture is another recent example which treats the werewolf as undisputedly masculine, characterizing it in popular film as “a ‘raw’ image of the mad warrior, at once human and animal as well as carnivorous” and contrasting it with the “more effeminate and ‘devirilized’ vampire” (1998, 83). In fact, it is precisely the ambiguous genderization of the werewolf that should be acknowledged as a determinant of its literary and medial effects. With its close connection to moonlight, the night, and violence, it effectively unites conventionally masculine traits such as physical strength and aggression with conventionally feminine traits such as cunning, uncontrollability, non-containment and irrationality. Maud Ellmann, who points out that “more men are werewolves than women, as in so many other professions” (1993, 88), also insists on

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the undeniably feminine specifics of the werewolf: “[I]t is curious that wolf men undergo their metamorphoses in the full moon, smitten by a monthly mania for blood. In this sense, a werewolf is a man with monthlies, a wolf woman, in effect; and the myth of lycanthropy bespeaks the ineradicable ambiguities of gender” (88-89). As this paper will show, both the gender ambiguity of the werewolf and its affinity to the domain of the abject and the feminine have been explored in numerous narrative texts from the end of the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century. “Werewolf aesthetics” seem to be intricately linked to the realm of abjection as well as to gender aspects. The werewolf appears to be capable of achieving an effect of sublimity, of abjection sublimated into an aesthetic strategy, both because of its affiliations to masculinity and because of its feminine aspects. Edmund Burke’s notion of the sublime, associated as it is with the uncanny, the supernatural and the violently gigantic, but also with ecstasy and movement, primarily connotes masculinity and is opposed to the subordinate feminine category of the merely beautiful. The werewolf clearly fulfils all of Burke’s criteria for the sublime, it is a creature of the dark, produces delightful horror by threatening the witness’s selfpreservation and is expressly mentioned as a source of sublimity because of its untamed strength, which, according to Burke, distinguishes it from the domesticated (and therefore, it might be presumed, less masculine) dog: “Wolves have not more strength than several species of dogs; but on account of their unmanageable fierceness, the idea of a wolf is not despicable; it is not excluded from grand descriptions and similitudes. Thus we are affected by strength, which is natural power” ([1759] 1970, 116). However, if we transpose Patricia Yaeger’s feminist revision of the sublime to the figure of the ambiguously gendered werewolf, this figure seems not only to enable but almost to condition a feminine appropriation of the sublime. According to Yaeger, the birthing woman serves as a prime signifier of the grotesque body that sublimely terrifies: In the act of giving birth, women splinter the concept of personhood; they become the wound in humanity, for they encounter the world both as speaking and as reproductive beings. With so many articulate orifices, women move beyond normal selfhood, beyond purification. Historically, birthing women belong, then, to the shameful zone of abjection. (1992, 7)

It could be argued that with its violent incorporation of victims the werewolf generally reverses the process of giving birth. Read against Bataille’s theory in Eroticism, the werewolf lives out the repressed

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desire of the ardent lover to incorporate, that is kill, the object of his love in order to create a continuity where discontinuity reigns (see 2001, 20). Psychoanalytically, the werewolf’s incorporation/jouissance could be interpreted as a phantasmatic construction of the maternal, where the infant introjects the m/other and still has to learn that it can only establish borders between itself and the other, between inside and outside, through rejection and expulsion. If we turn to fairy-tales featuring wolves, such as “Little Red Riding-Hood” or “The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats”, however, it becomes evident that the devouring wolf can function just as well as a trope for (male) motherhood (see Ellmann 1993, 91), i.e. for pregnancy and for (a violent) birth/repulsion. Both tales end with the wolf being forcibly delivered of the contents of its belly. As Marjorie Garber remarks in Vested Interests, the cross-dressed fairy-tale wolf perhaps fascinates us so much just because of its feminine, motherly appeal in conjunction with its masculinity: “Is it the figure of the male as female, the wicked wolf as benign (grand-)mother, that terrifies and pleases, seduces and warns?” (1992, 376). My thesis would be that its two-faced significance, which can be derived from a psychoanalytic reading, helps explain the werewolf’s transitory position of nonbelonging – always on the border between the presymbolic realm and the symbolic order, struggling desperately for separation from the other but always ultimately failing. As a typical borderliner denied entry into the symbolic order, the werewolf also stands outside the system of human communication and even affects or contaminates the latter’s proper workings in that it seems to verbally incapacitate victims and spectators alike. In view of its animal-like and even, to some extent, thing-like condition, the werewolf can be correlated with Kelly Hurley’s concept of the abhuman and its “spectacle of a body metamorphic and undifferentiated” (1996, 3), which she develops on the basis of Kristeva's notion of abjection. Werewolf narratives share a typical feature with the Gothic texts Hurley analyzes, namely an inadequacy of language due to the non-containment of abhuman realities (see Hurley 1996, 14). Moreover, werewolves could be considered “things” and thus to belong to the abhuman insofar as their state of bodily indifferentiation shows a contamination of form by matter, or, vice versa, the failure of form to hold amorphousness at bay. Such a concern is of course highly relevant on an aesthetic level, and the werewolf narratives’ changing negotiation between amorphous textual

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chaos and the attempt to organize this in literary terms will provide a central focus of my textual analysis. The contention of my paper is that, especially in the twentieth century, the werewolf becomes intimately connected to the realm of the sexual, and, above all, to “perverse” forms of sexuality that call into question the hegemonic system of heterosexuality. Homoerotic undertones characterize a number of werewolf stories, some of which present all-male or all-female communities. As will be shown, werewolf tales serve not infrequently to uncover the deficiency of mothers who fail in their task to watch over the racial and bodily boundaries of their kin (see Doyle 1994, chapter 1), while werewolves themselves can take the place of the (abject) mother. From the point of view of literary history, the werewolf figure experiences a particularly successful career in twentieth-century anglophone prose, where it is increasingly embraced and aestheticized as a marker of abjection and of cultural, sexual and/or bodily difference revalued. The texts chosen here – prose narratives spanning roughly one century and featuring male as well as female werewolves – will be studied semiotically, narratologically and psychoanalytically, taking into account the impact of cultural discourses such as Darwinism, imperialism, decadence, feminism, and gay identity politics on the werewolf paradigm. More specifically, convergences of the abject and the werewolf raise the following questions: How does the species change of human into beast affect notions of sex and/or gender? How does the werewolf motif relate to female reproduction and fantasies of masculinist self-birthing? What are the erotic constellations yielded by the werewolf theme?

Wolfish Transgressions Traditionally, the werewolf fable follows the rigid narrative formula of an initial transgression resulting in a curse, of metamorphosis into a monstrous beast, identification of the wrongdoer and his/her ritual killing (see Brittnacher 1994, 200). In the ancient Greek myth of Lycaeon, the crime which is punished by the Gods consists in Lycaeon’s presumptuous behaviour (he kills a hostage and serves his flesh to Jupiter in order to test the latter’s divinity). Jupiter’s sanctioning – he turns Lycaeon into a wolf – seems consistent to the extent that it mimics Lycaeon’s (failed) attempt to cross a fixed cosmological borderline and condemns him to an existence below the level of humanity. What the myth inaugurates is a logic of sinful

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transgression and punishment, accompanied by a law-and-order mentality calling for an authoritarian and possibly violent reconstitution of the social order. Not only subject and object but also cause and effect are clearly outlined and opposed to each other. Apart from cosmological or religious presumption, the breaking of taboos involved in werewolf tales includes sins against nature and offences against territorial rights or legitimate succession. The formula of myth or fable usually requires that both the transgressive act and its punishment occur within the narrated time of the fictive present. Less formulaic texts such as short stories and novels, by contrast, typically unfold a genealogical prehistory, sometimes reminiscent of the Gothic principle outlined by Horace Walpole in his preface to The Castle of Otranto, “the sins of fathers are visited on their children to the third and fourth generation” ([1765] 1986, 41). Twentieth-century werewolf narratives tend to obey the genealogical principle, although they use it to embed a different kind of logic. Sexual, and, more specifically, reproductive transgression or perversion become the most important catalysts for werewolf phenomena, but, at the same time, moral condemnation increasingly gives way to pathological diagnosis. The werewolf in twentiethcentury tales is thus regarded less as a morally disgusting sinner than as a degenerate case, requiring sympathy and understanding on the one hand, and, possibly, measures against contamination and unhealthy genetic reproduction on the other. A (pseudo-)medical frame can correlate werewolf symptoms with an underlying mental disease (lycanthropy) or with an insane disposition prone to violent and perverse sexual acts which produce bad offspring. Where the werewolf ceases to be regarded as a special case and appears instead as a phenomenon spreading over several generations, the dangerous impact of werewolf natures on society as a whole is thus considerably enlarged. Hope for relief then naturally centres on a medical or psychiatric pathologizing of werewolf occurrences, as this seems to promise that a reliable scientific distinction can be made between abnormal, diseased cases and the healthy majority – a precondition for curing and/or institutionalizing patients. The objectification of a certain type affected by such syndromes helps to keep the horrors of abjection at bay. The negotiation of werewolf cases and their impact on narrative literature is thus not exempt from the rule that, from the nineteenth century onward, biomedical sciences take over the authority of religious institutions and experts in distinguishing between good and bad, normal and abnormal, healthy and degenerate.

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One of Sigmund Freud’s best known psychiatric cases, his 1914 study of the “wolf-man”, is closely related to the werewolf context. Freud analyzes his patient, who has been obsessed with dreams of white wolves from an early age, as a latent homosexual and as suffering from an anxiety neurosis triggered by a childhood trauma. As a small boy he witnessed his parents’ coitus a tergo, a form of intercourse closer to that practised by animals (especially larger mammals) and which Freud himself classifies as a phylogenetically older sexual variant among humans (see Freud [1914] 1955a, 41). Freud explains his diagnosis of regression in the patient by referring to his oral obsession and fear of the father, which crystallizes in the recurrent scenario of being devoured by a wolf. Freud’s example is decisive because it announces a paradigm shift highly influential in twentieth-century werewolf narratives – the secularized interiorization of the werewolf phenomenon, i.e. the imaginary, phantasmatic incorporation of a visual image and repertory of behaviour. As Carlo Ginzburg puts it in his critical analysis of Freud’s case study, the patient is a child of his times in that he chooses to become a neurotic on the edge of psychosis rather than turn into a werewolf proper (see 1986, 192). An earlier case of lycanthropy, notorious in the mid-nineteenth century even outside France, was that of the French Sergeant François Bertrand (1824-1849), who exhumed, raped and mutilated numerous women under compulsion and whose sexual aberration was discussed as a case of “erotic monomania” (Hekma 1994, 214). A well-known twentieth-century example of a lycanthrope is Jeffrey Dahmer (19601994), who killed, dismembered and butchered at least eighteen gay victims (see Steiger and Ruehl 1999, 71-74). From the twentieth century on, such cases of lycanthropy have been dealt with in terms of serial killer profiles, so that the werewolf came to be regarded as a cipher for the newly virulent serial killer phenomenon. The authentic case of the French Sergeant provides the basis for Guy Endore’s 1933 novel The Werewolf of Paris to be discussed later (see Steiger and Ruehl 1999, 35-37). Looked at chronologically, the spectrum of werewolf narratives chosen here varies significantly both with regard to the logic of cause and effect and to the principles of exteriorization and interiorization. In the earliest story, Rudyard Kipling’s “The Mark of the Beast” (1891), a blatant act of blasphemy, due to cultural arrogance and an imperialist disregard for non-Christian forms of religious veneration, is at the heart of a werewolf occurrence. The events of the story take place in colonial India and the narrative is told from the perspective of

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one of the white British officials involved in the events of several years past. In the night of the New Year, an inebriated Englishman called Fleete commits a phallic act of pollution against the statue of the monkey-God Hanuman (he presses his cigar butt against the forehead of the idol and afterwards leans against it). This sacrilege is immediately revenged by the “Silver Man”, a naked, faceless leper, who bites Fleete’s breast and thereby repeats the transgressive act of contamination. Fleete’s gradual transformation into a wereleopard progresses through various stages: at first a leopard spot, which grows darker every hour, develops on his breast and his sense of smell becomes more acute. He then has cravings for raw meat, which he devours with an insatiable appetite; after that he rolls on the ground in the garden, suddenly prefers the dark and wants to dine outside in the bitter cold. His horses are terrified when he approaches them. When he tries to jump out of the window, his English friends grab him and tie him up. His bodily metamorphosis is not described in detail but only indicated through the fact that he loses his voice, can only utter a beastly growl, and that his eyes mysteriously change into those of a big cat: “His eyes were horrible to look at. There was a green light behind them, not in them, if you understand, and the man's lower lip hung down” ([1891] 1994, 300). In his story, Kipling thus clearly places his wereleopard Fleete in the context of degeneration theory by attributing to him conventional signs of degeneration or atavism. It seems highly significant, however, that these are brought to the reader’s attention by a degenerate, monstrous other, only slightly reminiscent of a human being, instead of being presented as a punishment meted out by some divine power. The “power of the Gods and Devils in Asia” alluded to in the very first sentence of the story is thus centred in the racial other himself, whose threatening alterity is thereby intensified. The medical expert whom Fleete’s friends consult proves to be ineffective in surroundings where magic appears to be so much stronger than science. The doctor diagnoses a fatal case of hydrophobia, but it is only when the two men decide to tackle what they consider as the real cause of the problem – the leper himself – that relief seems possible. They deal with the man by taking recourse to a “primitive”, anachronistic form of torture, reminiscent of inquisitional Christian practices in the Middle Ages (the burning of witches is actually referred to). When the leper puts his hand to Fleete’s left breast, the moment of healing takes place; and his transformation back into a human state, evidenced by bodily markers, is almost instantaneous: as a sign of his soul returning, his

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eyes change and the leopard rosette disappears (although a horrid doggy smell, that is a reminder of Fleete’s animality, remains). The truly abject body, the story suggests, can never be the civilized Westerner, not even in beastly transformation, but is inevitably represented by the polluted, diseased body of the racial other. At the end, “the East has been subdued; the beast has been conquered; evolutionary man has triumphed” (Dijkstra 1996, 98). With the disappearance of all bodily traces, Fleete’s memory of what has happened vanishes completely – his metamorphosis remains a temporary, precariously unreal occurrence and the narrator looks back on the events as a “mystery” ([1891] 1994, 307) to be hidden from Fleete as well as from the public. While Kipling portrays a wereleopard incident of limited duration and impact, a few years later Ambrose Bierce employs the werewolf motif in a story about the sin of territorial transgression revenged on a later generation. A “girl meets boy” story involving a smug young man called Jenner and a shy young woman named Irene frames the narration of past events which were apparently responsible for the female protagonist’s abnormal mental disposition. Irene’s father was a woodman pioneer who “pushed ever westward, generation after generation, with rifle and ax, reclaiming from Nature and her savage children here and there an isolated acreage for the plow” ([1900] 1963, 180). The other, more directly relevant transgression committed by the father is that he goes out to hunt game although there is meat enough in the house and despite his wife’s fears of some indeterminate recurrent nightmare which he does not take seriously. His “sin” is thus an unmanly lack of restraint, manifesting itself in greed and disrespectful, usurping behaviour. The hunter must blame himself for his absence from home, which enables “nature” or “the wild” to take a perverse form of revenge on his family. A werepanther enters the log-cabin through an open window (a rather blatant symbol of sexual penetration), frightens the hunter’s wife so badly that she clasps her baby to death and gets her pregnant with a bastard child, Irene. As a further punishment, the mother, who has proved incapable of guarding not only the threshold of her home but also the family’s genealogy and her own sexual purity, dies in childbirth. Eventually, after an indeterminate time gap wherein Jenner has moved into a cottage, the panther turns up one night at his window facing the forest. The initial situation – a wild beast crossing the threshold to attack bourgeois domesticity, sexual propriety as well as familial respectability – is thus almost exactly repeated, except for a reversal of gender roles. The threatening abject being outside the

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social order is now an attractive but demoniac femme fatale in the guise of a panther. Putting into action the “Draconian moral code of the time and place” (185), which he himself has to obey, Jenner shoots at the beast, only to find out when he follows its bloody traces that it is Irene he has killed. Unlike the all-male and latently homoerotic world of the Kipling story, which reintegrates the transgressive male wereleopard at the end, the heterosexual matrix in “The Eyes of the Panther” seems to require the female werepanther’s ritual killing, and the female transgressions that occur in the narrative are punished in a much harsher way: Irene's sexually transgressive mother has to die, whereas her father, who after all initiated the series of transgressions, is the only family member to survive at the end and to mourn the family deaths. The dangers and fascination of homoeroticism are at the heart of Saki’s short story “Gabriel-Ernest” (1910), in which the werewolf is an attractive young man who liberally presents himself in an animallike state of showy, aestheticized nakedness. In the seemingly nameless boy, the protagonist and main focalizer, Van Cheele, is confronted with an abject other of male sex, who speaks inaudibly to his own latent homoerotic leanings. By his intrusion into private grounds and later into the “primly ordered house” (13), the boy transgresses proprietorial rights and threatens to introduce chaos and anarchy into a meticulously ordered world. Van Cheele’s reaction of outrage and alarm not only at the boy’s trespass but above all at his nudity (in panic he covers the boy with a newspaper when he spots him “gracefully asprawl on the ottoman, in an attitude of almost exaggerated repose”, 14) hints at repressed erotic desires. Saki’s story is exceptional in that the origin of the boy’s werewolfish dispositions are deliberately left open to speculation. The actual metamorphosis and act of werewolfish aggression remain informational gaps in the narrative. Van Cheele only learns about the transformation of the boy into a “large wolf, blackish in colour, with gleaming fangs and cruel, yellow eyes” (16) through another eye-witness, his artist friend Cunningham, who had warned him of a wild beast roaming his woods. Most significantly, Saki’s story implies that the werewolf/boy may have managed to escape unharmed after attacking and devouring a child, an especially cruel crime not totally devoid of pederastic overtones. The traces he leaves are just as ambiguous as Van Cheele’s feelings for him: nothing is found except the boy’s discarded clothes, which allows for two different constructions of what may have happened. According to the village people's rational and harmless reconstruction of events, the child must have fallen into the brook and

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the boy stripped and jumped into the water in order to save it from drowning. Van Cheele, however, influenced by his imagination, is certain at the end that the werewolf has attacked and eaten the child. Notions of normative behaviour and bourgeois respectability as well as of poetic justice are thus turned upside down in a highly satirical manner. Ironically, it is the respectable aunt who at the beginning provides the openly sensual, immoral and morbid werewolf boy with clothes and gives him the “nice, suitable names” (15) of “GabrielErnest” – an attempt at verbal domestication. In the end she has a memorial stone put up for him in memory of his allegedly heroic deed. This decadent inversion of traditional values can work only because the two mutually excluding reconstructions of events offered within the story remain ultimately unverifiable. A reading of the boy as an abject other (a werewolf and murderer) is juxtaposed with an apparently more rational but less likely version of events, in which the boy figures as a responsible subject of the symbolic order (a selfless hero figure). While “Gabriel-Ernest” implicitly criticizes the twentieth-century negation of things magic and irrational as naïve, Saki’s short story “The She-Wolf” approaches the problem from the opposite angle in making fun of an esoteric interest symptomatic of modern, highly technologized society. The very first sentence of this comical story places any potentially fantastic occurrence to come in a psychological and therefore rationalizable context: Leonard Bilsiter, in decadent fashion, abhors everyday reality and looks for compensation in the “unseen world” of his own imagination. He has the reputation of a magician, not least because of his knowledge of Eastern European folklore and “Siberian Magic” (86). At a party at a friend’s house, Leonard is asked by the hostess, Mary Hampton, to turn her into a wolf as a test of his prowess – a request he puts into action with the help of a tame wolf, to the horror of the other guests. The story is actually devoid of a real (were)wolf but uses the motif in order to uncover the absurd degree to which the party guests obey conventions. The initial outrage at Mrs. Hampton’s transformation is soon followed by an absurd discussion on social etiquette: “ ‘If our hostess has really vanished out of human form’, said Mrs. Hoops, ‘none of the ladies of the party can very well remain. I absolutely decline to be chaperoned by a wolf!’ ‘It's a she-wolf’, said Clovis soothingly” (91). Compared to the stories discussed so far, Isak Dinesen’s “The Monkey” (1934) appears almost postmodern in certain respects, although the story is located in some magical world long past; it draws on popular generic conventions and is therefore rightly included in a

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collection called Seven Gothic Tales. The protagonist, Boris, whose vaguely indicated sexual perversities have got him into difficulties at court, pays his aunt, a prioress, a visit at Closter Seven. Marriage seems to him the only possible solution, which is why he follows his aunt’s advice to woo Athena Hopballehus, a friend of the family, and to ask her father for her hand. Athena rejects his proposal but follows the prioress’s invitation to Closter Seven where they have a “supper of seduction” (97) together. Boris goes up to her room after his aunt has given him a love potion and they fight almost to the death in a highly eroticized, bloody, animal-like manner, in a strange room strongly reminiscent of a womb – a place of violence and intense feelings. The prioress convinces Athena that she will have a child after this strange night and makes her promise to marry Boris, never to tell her father about what has happened, and to kill Boris as soon as she gets the chance. At precisely this moment, a monkey enters the room through the window and hunts the prioress, who gradually turns into a monkey herself, while the original monkey is transformed into the true prioress. Towards the end (after numerous adumbrations, especially on the level of body language) the weremonkey pretending to be Boris’s aunt is thus revealed to be a usurper, the non-legitimate prioress of Closter Seven. In an ironic twist, the story ends unconventionally, but with the telos suggested right from the beginning: through the revelation of her true nature, the ostensible prioress plays matchmaker to the young couple, Boris and Athena; they become accomplices in some strange world of their own: “[F]rom now on, between, on the one side, her and him, who had been present together at the happenings of the last minutes, and, on the other side, the rest of the world, which had not been there, an insurmountable line would be for ever drawn” (116). However, nothing is definite at the end, no clear distinction can be made between fact and fiction. As readers, we are left without a clue as to the history of the prioress’s transformation into a weremonkey and have to speculate on the nature of the relationship between the two she-monkeys, one legitimate and the other illegitimate. This implicit textual denial of a reliable, underlying reality of things is aptly accompanied by Boris’s passion for the theatre and for roleplaying (see 82, 98-99). Athena’s comment on the double-faced Wendish goddess of love (one side monkey, one side woman) suggests the core around which the story revolves: “But how, asked Athena, did they know, in the case of that goddess of love, which was the front and which the back?” (90).

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In his psychologically complex novel The Werewolf of Paris (1933), Guy Endore retains the mythic, magical dimension exemplified in Dinesen’s story, but at the same time introduces a double focus by drawing on the biomedical model of lycanthropy. Central to the narrative, not only on a thematic but also on a poetological level, is the metaphor of non-containable organic growth: “Where shall I begin my tale? This one has neither beginning nor end, but only a perpetual unfolding, a multi-petaled blossom of strange botany” ([1933] 1944, 3). The protagonist, Bertrand Chaillet, owes his existence to a criminal act of sexual transgression committed by a Catholic priest with werewolf ancestry. The frame narrator, an American scholar who has found a manuscript dealing with the life of Bertrand Chaillet, adds the story of a medieval rivalry between two families to explain the background to the “case”: “a Pitamont was shut up in a well and fed on meat and suet and after long years could not speak any more but only howled like a wolf” (130). He then shifts to the time level of the Galliez report (Paris of the 1850s), i.e. of Bertrand Chaillet’s activities. Bertrand develops into a psychopath who leads a double life as a respectable military man by day and a voracious attacker at night. Eventually he finds a suitable companion in the necrophile Sophie, who rejoices in having her skin cut and her blood sucked. Bertrand’s personal life story is far from being the sole concern in this novel. The occurrences during the war are described in even more cruel and bloody terms than Bertrand’s crimes so that the text suggests “werewolfishness” to be a collective, political and possibly epidemic phenomenon rather than an individual or unique one: Bertrand, it now seemed to Aymar, was but a mild case. What was a werewolf who had killed a couple of prostitutes, who had dug up a few corpses, compared with these bands of tigers slashing at each other with daily increasing ferocity! [...] Instead of thousands, future ages will kill millions. It will go on, the figures will rise and the process will accelerate! Hurrah for the race of werewolves! (290-291)

From the 1970s onward, the werewolf motif has been taken up by feminist writers such as Angela Carter and Tanith Lee in order to explore its affinities to specifically female ways of experiencing the world. In her short story collection The Bloody Chamber (1979), Carter deals with the subject in no less than three stories, including two revisionist rewritings of the fairy-tale of “Little Red RidingHood”. In Carter’s “The Werewolf” the positions of wolf, grandmother and girl are conflated at the end and wolfish cruelty and

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voraciousness are transferred onto Little Red Riding-Hood herself, who is unpleasantly revealed to collude in patriarchal law and to act as an unscrupulous usurper. The girl cuts off one of the wolf’s front paws and when the paw subsequently transforms into an old woman’s hand and the girl discovers her grandmother’s bloody stump where the hand used to be, she denounces her grandmother to be a witch so that the neighbours stone her to death. Through linking the image of the werewolf with the witch-hunt Carter pays tribute to a historical dimension which mainly affected (old) women (see Jones 1951, 140) and thus points up its gender-specific significance. The grandmother’s werewolfishness is a specific kind of perversity. Not only does she change species, but she also takes up a traditionally male position – that of the aggressor – and thereby loses all attributes of femininity and motherliness. This loss of femininity also applies to Little Red Riding-Hood, who acts the part of a castrating male and ruthless defender of the symbolic order. In “The Company of Wolves”, Carter draws on numerous variations of the wolf theme from fairy-tales, superstition, the fantastic and old sayings. This rewriting of “Little Red Riding-Hood” plays with the idea that the child is in fact a teenager on the verge of adulthood and that the fairy tale can be read as a parable of sexual initiation. The girl meets a hunter in the woods, who is in fact a werewolf and whose desires only she can satisfy. At the end she has tamed him and they live on together in sexual intimacy, so that in this narrative the wolf’s legendary insatiability is displaced onto the sphere of sexuality and questions of guilt and punishment become irrelevant. The third werewolf story in the collection, “Wolf-Alice”, has a female protagonist who could be described as a mixture between Kaspar Hauser, Alice in Wonderland and Romulus and Remus. The girl, who has been brought up by wolves and walks on all fours – “Two-legs looks, four-legs sniffs” (1987, 119) – is forcibly introduced to the world of “civilized” humanity, which seems as grotesque to her as the world at the end of the tunnel does to Lewis Carroll’s Alice. When the nuns, who have taken her in and tried to tame her, lose their patience, she is given away to the Duke, who turns out to be a vampiristic werewolf. In the end she saves him from the murderous attacks of the village people and redeems him from his curse by turning fully wolfish again, licking his wounds and dirt (“without hesitation, without disgust”, 126) until the face of the Duke reappears for the first time in the mirror. The werewolf world is thus revalorized as a realm of archaic, healthy instincts and tender intimacy and contrasted with a human world characterized by brutality and hate.

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Another feminist rewriting of the werewolf horror story, the Gothic novel and the fairy-tale is Tanith Lee’s “Wolfland” (1989), which privileges a female line of tradition. Lee’s narrative resembles Carter’s “The Werewolf” in that it establishes a link between what is called Wolf-magic in the story, a matriarchal knowledge passed on to female offspring only, and a grandmother figure. However, while Carter emphasizes feminine collusion, Lee takes up the conventionally feminine connotation of the werewolf with night and the moon in a very positive way and shows Wolf-magic to be a means of rescue for women who otherwise suffer from the brutality and sexual abuse of their fathers and husbands. The story thus situates the werewolf outside the logic of sin and punishment. Like Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris, Lee’s “Wolfland” subverts conventional notions of the monstrous, albeit on a less overtly political level. A pet-like, seemingly castrated dwarf called Beautiful is described in angelic terms and acts as guardian of the castle, while the real brutish monster is the non-werewolf husband with his “outbursts of perverse lust and savagery” (124), who beats up his wife and looks forward to abusing his unborn child. Again, the fairy-tale aspect of female initiation is taken up in this story with the protagonist, Lisel, being introduced to the nature of men and warned of marriage by her disillusioned grandmother. The most recent text analyzed here is Paul Magrs’s novel Could it Be Magic? (1997), which includes a variant on the werewolf theme placed in the context of gay identity politics. The novel features a young homosexual called Andy, who falls in love with a tattooed man, sleeps with him once and becomes pregnant with a leopard child, which is delivered from one of his calves. The boy is not exactly a werewolf but appears to be a morphological hybrid of human and animal form. Here it is the ostensibly perverse animal side, widely attributed to (anal) sex between men, which is responsible for the birth of the leopard-boy and seems to mark him indelibly as other. The man-eating, cruel aspect of the werewolf/wereleopard is played down in favour of the wild beauty of the beast: “Oh, his underbelly’s such a lovely, pale shade of gold. The rest of him is tougher and darker, autumn-leaf gold” (245).

Werewolf Bodies: Omens, Symptoms, and Traces As a paradigm for the monstrous body, the werewolf is a highly significant figure with regard to the culturally specific constitution and

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normalization of meaning. This is due to its power to call into question the ostensibly ordinary and typical, in other words, predictable corporeality (see Thomson 1996, 1). Its abnormal morphology illustrates the precarious borderline between the dimensions of the characteristically human and the non-human or abhuman. This oscillation between two species and forms of existence is undisputably more than a mere surface anomaly. For once, the werewolf’s bodily deviation from the norm of human entelechy, that is organic development controlled by some vital force, subverts notions of human progress and of classifiable boundaries of species and points to its affiliation with a world beyond (or below) a scientifically and technologically controllable everyday reality. Furthermore, the werewolf’s actual metamorphosis usually remains untold/invisible in narrative texts, and therefore appears even more mysterious and threatening to the witnessing subject. It functions as the textual blind spot, as that which is unrepresentable and therefore abject: “Abjection [...] is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles” (Kristeva 1982, 4). On a narrative level, this failure to find adequate words for the phenomenon effectively increases suspense: the horror of the werewolf’s violent acts of aggression is heightened if these have to be imagined purely on the evidence of scanty, not even necessarily bloody, traces. Werewolf spotting can be facilitated, however, through knowledge of the catalogue of age-old putative werewolf markers (see Steiger and Ruehl 1999, 83-86). Among the corpus of narratives considered here, Guy Endore’s novel features the greatest number of werewolf traits. Bertrand is the offspring of a sinful and violent sexual encounter between a young, innocent and naïve maidservant called Josephine and a perverted Catholic priest. The rape results in Bertrand’s birth on Christmas Eve, a date connected in folklore with werewolf births due to the supposed blasphemy of the mother who has dared to conceive on the same day as the holy virgin (see Jones 1951, 140). An eerie scream, uttered precisely at the moment when transubstantiation takes place at mass, announces Bertrand’s birth (see Endore [1933] 1944, 56). Josephine’s mistress, Mme Didier, serves as a mouthpiece for popular superstition in the text and declares this date to be a sign of the devil inside her (see Endore [1933] 1944, 54). Even as a newborn baby, Bertrand seems to belong to the realm of the monstrous. To Aymar, its fatherly mentor, the baby is a living contradiction of all the artistic stylizations and sentimental idealizations he is familiar with as a cultivated gentleman: “Brought up with the belief that new-born babies were such as one sees borne by Madonnas in Italian paintings,

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or such as are depicted in the canvases of Greuze, he was shocked by the scrawny, spidery, fuzzy and wizened little monster that Josephine was gently hugging to her breast” (61). The baby shows some unmistakably degenerate, atavistic traits: his eyebrows join above the nose (see 67) and hair grows on the palms of his hands (see 68, 104). He takes to making strange canine sounds (see 70-71) when Mme Didier’s health starts to decline and “announces” her death with a howl like “a moonstruck dog” (73) – a traditional omen of death according to popular belief (see Jones 1951, 145). Nine years later, the fragile and highly sensitive Bertrand shows symptoms of lycanthropy: he confesses to certain dreams, which involve him in wolfish behaviour (see Endore [1933] 1944, 105-106, 117, 133), and is obviously prone to sleepwalking. The incident that seems to have triggered his disease is an accidental taste of animal blood occasioned by his first shot at a squirrel which he wounds and then kisses out of pity: “And it burned my tongue like pepper, only it wasn’t bitter but sweet, only not sweet like sugar” (106). During his secret nightly rambles, which awaken in him animal instincts (including an acute sense of smell), his first victims are sheep and fowl, but he soon starts to practise his voraciousness on humans. His psychological dilemma manifests itself in the inability to control his attacks, despite the warning symptoms of a reduced appetite by day, and the inability to recall afterwards what he has done. As a consequence, the abject evidence consisting of torn-off human limbs (see 185) or remainders of his own fur (see 186-187) appears even more bewildering and terrifying to himself than to the reader: “[H]e could not remember whether he had been a beast or only a man acting like a beast” (188). After having slept with his mother as well as having killed his best friend and sucked his blood unawares, he is so much disgusted by his own idea of taking some of the dead man’s limbs along to snack on during the journey that “he nearly retched” (147). This instance of abjection can be read on two levels: a corporeal level, which would revert the act of incorporation, and a mental or psychological level on which “two selves” – in psychoanalytic terms, the id and the superego – constantly battle against each other: “ ‘Where do such ideas come to me from?’ he exclaimed in horror” (147). Bertrand’s decline is only stopped when he enters into a sado-masochist relationship with Sophie. The stab wounds he inflicts on her body are not only visible marks of a sexually arousing violence but are described in a highly aestheticized manner as a non-verbal but poetic body language:

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There was scarcely a portion of her body that had not one or more cuts on it. The older ones had healed to scars that traversed her dark skin with lines that were visibly lighter than the surrounding area. The newer ones were angry welts of red, or hard ridges of scab. In the candlelight the latter were like old jewelry or polished tortoiseshell. (252)

The bridal gift he offers her is a bodily proof of his strong desire for her and the unspoken promise of death, while she gives herself to him entirely in a nurturing, motherly and self-renouncing way: [T]hey desired nothing, night and day, but he to inflict pain and she to feel her body bruised and cut, so as to realize keenly at every moment that they were alive [...]. He grew insatiable. Her body was a fountain of blood to him. And it was as if her body responded to his needs. She grew heavy, sultry with blood, like a nursing mother with milk. (256)

The fact that the mutual satisfaction of their perverse desires is presented in the rhetoric of motherly nurturance and childish helplessness points to its close connection with Kristeva’s concept of the abject as the maternal body simultaneously feared and (as seen above, incestuously) desired. It does not come as a surprise that these desperate, dependent lovers both commit suicide when they are separated. Ironically, the only irrefutable proof of Bertrand’s nature – an epitome of the abject, animal-like, decaying body – comes to light long after his death, as the appendix which finishes off the narrative shows: The body of Sieur C [...] was not found in the coffin, instead, that of a dog, which despite 8 years in the ground was still incompletely destroyed. The fleshy parts and the furry hide are found mingled in a fatty mass of indistinguishable composition (adipocere). A nauseous odor spreads from the body. No insects. (325)

After more than three hundred pages in which lycanthropy is predominantly presented as a psychological burden to the individual, Endore gives the text a blatantly unaesthetic turn at the very end by using one of the prime tropes of abjection – the rotting dead body. This can only be understood as a deliberate attempt to confront the readers with their own voyeurism as well as their lust for sensation and need for empirical evidence. Obviously, it is not the living, performative body with its perverse acts of sadistic sexuality and cannibalism but the scientifically described dead body which is meant to evoke strong feelings of disgust in the reader. On the whole, werewolf bodies in narratives of the twentieth century tend to be depicted as fascinating and beautiful, even more so

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in the case of feminine (Bierce) or feminized (Saki) werewolf figures, which are typically associated with the stereotype of the femme fatale or with an aesthetics of camp. This is especially true for Bierce’s “The Eyes of the Panther”, where Irene, the female werepanther, is described as “lithe” ([ca. 1900] 1963, 178), with a strong resemblance to a wild cat with eyes that are “gray-green, long and narrow” (178), of “feline beauty” (179) and wearing “a gray gown with odd brown markings” (178). A paradox surrounds this figure from the beginning: even though the heterodiegetic narrator seems perfectly capable of describing her outer appearance, he/she pretends to be unable to name her thoughts and feelings: “one could not readily say […], with an expression defying analysis” (178) so that the mystery surrounding this woman is only resolved at the end, when Jenner, her former lover, hunts her down and discovers her true nature to be half-human, halfbeastly: The panther, which must be wounded because it gives a “wild, high scream […] so human in sound, so devilish in suggestion” (186), eventually proves to be a truly feminine “leaky body” (see Shildrick 1997) when one of the men following its traces slips in a pool of blood. The body of the werepanther is used in this story to exemplify and visualize classical stereotypes of femininity from an unambiguously male point of view: a dangerous, animal-like sexuality is correlated with the woman’s lack of control over her own mind and is finally restrained and overcome by a symbolically phallic act – Jenner’s firing of a pistol as a substitute for the sexual penetration denied to him. Judging from the stories considered here, the werewolf body tends to be presented as a highly erotic body, no matter whether it is of male or female sex. In Eroticism, Georges Bataille argues from a malebiased viewpoint that eroticism requires a beautiful woman as man's love object, whose beauty serves as a stimulating contrast to the ugliness of the sexual act (see [1957] 2001, 145). Interestingly, it is the woman’s hair which, according to Bataille, reminds man of her animal origins and provides erotic stimulation (see [1957] 2001, 143). Transposed to the werewolf paradigm, the werewolf’s fur could be read as an intensifier of erotic attraction. Where animal nature is married to (feminine) grace of comportment and movement, as is the case in most werewolf narratives, it appears to be devoid not only of ugliness but also of beastly behaviour, which is typically shifted to the humans in the stories. According to Christian morality, the animal aspect in humans is perceived as a deviance from divine law since God created man in his likeness and therefore human value must be measured against the animal world (see Bataille [1957] 2001, 136).

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While Christianity links animal traits with the devil and the sphere of humiliation, animality is revalued in most modern werewolf stories as a regenerative source. Angela Carter’s and Tanith Lee’s werewolf stories show how the sublime abject associated with ecstasy and excess can successfully be appropriated by females whose conventional role is reduced to the merely beautiful. In “Wolf-Alice”, Carter portrays a girl who believes herself to be a wolf but lacks a wolfish body. This can be interpreted as a mode of “naturalization” or more precisely as a form of anthropological/psychological realism in the sense of “Homo homini lupus” – we all bear the beast inside us. The (human) body is foregrounded as an unreliable marker of species affiliation, notions of the abject and the revolting are turned upside down, and the realm of the pre-Symbolic is revalued over the symbolic order. The girl has adopted the repertory of wolfish body language and behaviour – she runs on all fours with “panting tongue” (Carter 1987, 119), curls up to sleep and howls inarticulately instead of speaking. The forcibly taught elementary rules of what is considered civilized human behaviour in a convent are depicted as unnatural constraints to which the girl can only react in her familiar wolfish ways: “[S]he arched her back, pawed the floor, retreated to a far corner of the chapel, crouched, trembled, urinated, defecated” (120). A narrative comment makes it clear that Wolf-Alice’s curse is not her half-wolfish existence in a civilized world but the fact that she is denied access to “the Eden of our first beginnings where Eve and grunting Adam squat on a daisy bank, picking the lice from one another’s pelts” (121). This almost utopian scenario of the earliest stage of human development is precisely what the story ends with when the girl’s wolfish skills and her animalspecific pity (“she was pitiful as her gaunt grey mother”, 126) save the wounded Duke from an unbearable interim state of “wolf, not-wolf” (123). Ironically, her masquerade as a woman fails to work as a “visible sign of her difference from them [the wolves]” (125) but turns out to be a rescuing device – she has donned a white gown which belonged to one of the Duke’s victims and frightens the village mob with this appearance so that they are distracted from their original target, the Duke himself. The text suggests that the male werewolf is eventually being metamorphosed back into a human being (the bodily sign is that his face becomes visible in the mirror for the first time) through an act of female “birthing”, but leaves entirely open whether this change is for better or for worse. Paul Magrs’s novel Could It Be Magic? (1997) includes another example of a werewolf narrative linked with fantastic forms of

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conception and birth. When Andy, the young gay, who has been attracted by leopards since his childhood, suddenly starts to develop leopard spots and notices another physical abnormity, namely that his “left calf muscle is more developed” (219) and that something stirs under the skin, he believes that he is expecting a child. He connects his symptoms to his intercourse with a married man, whose body tattoos he seems to have incorporated in werewolf fashion when the condom split at the fatal moment: “Whatever was in Mark was in Andy now” (85); “I swallowed a man with tattoos” (92). The leopard spots are not the only beastly/motherly markers because he wakes “each morning with my teeth black and my mouth full of fresh blood” (221). Although these symptoms are explicable in terms of medical treatment for an ulcer of the tonsils and the spotted skin might be a psychosomatic reaction (see 217), Andy’s subjective view of them as signs of pregnancy appears to be validated when, with the help of a friend, he gives birth in a public toilet to a “very white creature” (232) nestled in a red plush sac. The creature seems to be so much of an abject, untouchable body that the male “midwife” (who cuts Andy’s skin open with a knife) refuses to take it up. At first, Andy loves and nurtures his strange furry and clawed boy-child unconditionally, but after some time he decides to shave him in order to make the leopard spots disappear – an attempt to adjust him to human bodily standards, which he later acknowledges to have been completely futile and absurd (“I’m such a stupid prick. I’ve been shaving the proverbial”, 247). Through juxtaposition, this episode is connected to past warnings issued to Andy not to dye his hair red in order to avoid attracting people’s attention to his gayness (see 246). This apparently fantastic episode of a monstrous birth by a male, depicted here as a markedly natural process, serves to illustrate on the level of body morphology and texture the central idea of the novel that every individual has a right to difference and needs to be respected for it. Despite their pronounced differences in theme, setting and atmosphere, Isak Dinesen’s and Tanith Lee’s short stories about werewolves and related creatures share with Paul Magrs’s novel the central concern of subverting traditional notions of bodily beauty and attractiveness. Thus the weremonkey is not the only deviation from an ideal body in Dinesen’s story. The whole family of Hopballehus, including Athena, are of “herculean strength” ([1934] 1986, 87) and gigantic height; Athena, who has been brought up like a boy, is characterized by her lack of femininity (“no claim to beauty”, 89; “strong woman [...] broad in proportion”, 89; “unromantically big”, 89) and given animal traits (“a pair of eyes for a young lioness or

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eagle” and the habit of standing on one leg just like “a big stork”, 89). In the “love scene” with Boris, her attraction seems to lie precisely in her masculine body and her resemblance to a male warrior (see 109) so that Boris’s homoerotic desires are titillated. In Lee’s “Wolfland”, Lisel undergoes a dual process of unlearning through reading bodily signs differently and dispensing with conventional notions of gender and species. The wolves she meets on the way to her grandmother trigger deep-seated, primordial fears in her of being attacked and devoured; at the same time the wolves’ bodies with their “jewel-like eyes” (1989, 128) appear strangely beautiful even if terrifying and an affinity exists between her and them right from the start (“Her eyes also blazed, her teeth also were bared, and her nails raised as if to claw”, 127). In her feminist werewolf story, Lee allows the reader to participate in a similar hermeneutic effort as the protagonist herself by hinting at Lisel’s own wolfish dispositions long before her grandmother turns her into a werewolf by means of a magic drink, so that the grandmother’s remark, “I’ve put nothing on you that was not already yours” (146), seems perfectly justified. Both Dinesen’s and Lee’s short stories contain numerous analogies between humans and animals, stress the existence of animal-like desires in human beings and portray sexuality as a basically sadistic drive. Dinesen erotically conflates sexual intercourse and murderousness in the encounter between Boris and Athena and thereby seems to validate sado-masochistic relationships (there is an explicit reference to the Diana myth, according to which Boris is doomed to lose his life, see Dinesen [1934] 1986, 95; Boris dreams of Athena as a skeleton and finds her attractive in this fleshless state, see 103). Civilization (the convent) as well as animality (represented by the prioress-as-monkey), Apollonian and Dionysian forces are revealed to be an integral part of human life and love (see James 1983, 148-149). In stark contrast to Dinesen’s, Lee’s story deliberately situates werewolfish behaviour in human males by depicting their sexual urges as sadistic, violent, and potentially murderous. At the same time, women’s magical bodily metamorphosis into werewolves, that is their recourse to corporeality and animality, is presented as the only effective form of self-help available to them (the grandmother is revealed to have torn her husband to pieces), so that Lee’s narrative runs the danger of reproducing the conventional, essentialized notions of femininity and the patriarchal logic it so strongly criticizes.

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Werewolf Worlds: Ontologies, Language, and Narration The werewolf’s inherent hybridity is reflected in the morphology of its name: both “werewolf” and its medical analogon, “lycanthrope”, are composite lexemes. A multiple ontological system frequently corresponds to the creature’s hybrid and changeable state of existence as a wanderer between two worlds: “For it is out of such straying on excluded ground that he (the deject) draws his jouissance” (Kristeva 1982, 8). Counterworlds such as foreign countries and their sacred sites (Kipling), the wilderness of the forest (Bierce) or a fairyland world (Dinesen) constitute werewolf settings and are opposed to what is evoked as homely or familiar terrain (England, domestic interiors, the world of Christian orthodoxy). Apart from these specific spatial dimensions, werewolf narratives tend to generate possible, multiply stratified worlds such as miracles, dreams or hysterical projections. Their ontological status reaches from a clearly indexed virtuality to a complete naturalization as part of the fictionally “real” (with radical ontological uncertainty as an intended effect). Numerous distancing devices such as dramatic irony (Lee), temporal framing (Kipling, Bierce), or the marking of incidents as miraculous anachronisms (Saki) serve to meet the twentieth-century reader’s scepticism concerning things magical and fantastic, and, on the level of narration, to bring under control the threats of anarchy and chaos associated with the werewolf. That its anarchism can easily infect the narrative itself is most clearly expressed by the already cited metanarrative comment in Endore’s novel, where the narrator muses on the endless proliferation of his story and the arbitrariness of any kind of closure. The narratorial comment in Angela Carter’s “Wolf-Alice” that wolves live “without a future” and inhabit “only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair” (1987, 119) accounts for the tense shifts within this story. Furthermore, it renders plausible the fact that the werewolf figure usually functions as an object of observation and analysis rather than as a focalizer or first-person narrator because “living in the present tense” would seem to preclude a self-reflexive consciousness. However, there are exceptions to the rule. Endore’s novel about a lycanthrope, but also the more recent stories by Carter and Lee, allow the reader glimpses into the werewolves’ consciousness. Significantly, these are precisely the stories which deal with humans that either feel like wolves or are only transformed into werewolves right at the end. On the whole, werewolf stories are told either by more or less omniscient and intrusive narrators uninvolved in

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the story (Bierce, Carter, Lee, Magrs) or they are presented from the perspective of an eyewitness (Kipling, Saki) or fictive editor (Endore). In the stories analyzed here, distancing effects are often achieved by the choice of narrative transmission. The extent to which narratorial reliability and evidence of werewolfish existence are evoked varies not only according to the narrative situation but also according to its semantic impact. All of the werewolf stories analyzed have in common a problematization of language. Of course, if the werewolf is female (as in Lee’s and Carter’s stories) its embrace of a non-verbal, semiotic realm is questionable from a feminist viewpoint because it appears to reinforce an essentialist concept of femininity as an alternative to masculinist logocentrism. The speechlessness of most narrators/character-focalizers in view of the horrors they perceive and the significant gaps in the narrative this produces could be regarded as a specific kind of contamination attributed to werewolf figures. Again, the only werewolf novel proper in the corpus is of prime significance in this context. For Aymar no words can express the horrible things which have occurred: “ ‘He (Bertrand) was being tried for [...]’ and there my tongue failed me. For nothing in the world would I have dared to say it. I could not have pushed that word over my tongue had I tried with all my might. There are some things that cannot be done” (Endore 1944, 16). As a narrative effect, this works most obviously to increase suspense, but at the same time the narrator seems to conform to an unwritten rule regarding werewolf narratives. The werewolfish deeds are made to appear sacrilegious so that their verbal articulation would constitute another moral/religious offense in the sense that putting them into words would repeat, on the linguistic level, the act of cannibalist appropriation. The credibility of Kipling’s story is presented as precarious because the first-person narrator involved as a witness tells it in retrospect and implies that he may have judged appearances incorrectly and that neither medicine nor law nor Christian religion were able to find out the truth. The undecidable ontological status of the past events but also the linguistic failures and instances of self-censorship inscribed in the story seem to underline the abject-ness of what is being told. In the enforced encounter of the transformed Fleete with the leper, certain things occur that are unmentionable: “Several other things happened also, but they cannot be put down here” (304). The scene of torture is another transgression which cannot be put into words, or at least not into print: “This part is not to be printed” (304).

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Satirical effects are achieved in Saki’s “Gabriel-Ernest” by the discrepancy between empirical evidence and action. Even though the werewolf boy provides all the evidence himself when he speaks frankly about his carnivore preferences, such as feeding not only on small mammals but also on children’s flesh (see [1910] 1994, 12) and hunting on all fours at night, Van Cheele persistently refuses to believe his words until it is too late. When he is convinced of the boy’s dangerousness, he dismisses his initial idea of sending a telegram because he realizes that the words “Gabriel-Ernest is a werewolf” would cause confusion instead of clearing things up (16). Van Cheele’s failure to read the werewolf signs correctly constitutes on the one hand an implicit critique of the mental rigidity reigning supreme in a rationalized, demystified modern world, and appears on the other to mirror his negation or repression of homoerotic titillation implied in the encounter with the boy. Ambrose Bierce’s story of a werepanther is narrated by a heterodiegetic, rather explicit, and sometimes intrusive narrator who tries to heighten the credibility of the tale by replacing the young woman’s narrative with his own words: “In deference to the reader’s possible prejudice against the artless method of an unpractised historian the author ventures to substitute his own version for hers” ([ca. 1900] 1963, 179). This deliberate act of male narratorial appropriation, apparently motivated by the unreliability of the girl’s hybrid, half-animal, half-human and therefore abject status, constitutes a transgression in itself. In a very conventional way, the male figures’ rationality and matter-of-factness (Jenner is likened to a scientist and a detective) is contrasted with the female werepanther’s insane, “morbid mind and [...] fertile fancy” (184), which need to be excluded as they cannot be contained and fully controlled. Saki’s story and Magrs’s novel resemble each other in their deliberate confusion of ontological boundaries. If “Gabriel-Ernest” suggests that the fantastic and the perverse as represented by the werewolf can indeed intrude into the realm of reality and “normality”, Magrs’s novel proceeds one step further. Could It Be Magic? contains a magical, fantastic ontological dimension indexed as a central concern by the title and can be read as a positive appropriation of the abject inspired by gay identity politics. The “wereleopard” in the text grows up into a “bright, leopard printed boy” (1999, 328), a passionate coffee drinker with spotted fur, who functions as an aestheticized representative of conventionally abjected bodies – homosexuals and especially AIDS patients.

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Magrs’s text is not the only example in which the werewolf figure is used for “affirmative abjection” (see Menninghaus 1999, 549-555). Most of the narratives mentioned above can be read as critiques of certain perversities of the “civilized” world – be it fox hunting, imperialist arrogance, lack of respect for nature or for deviant sexual orientations, non-legitimate appropriations of office or property. As far as the diachronic axis of literary werewolf figures is concerned, an increasingly positive outlook can be observed. My analysis has shown that an obsession with genealogy and the dangers of degeneration in the early stories turns into a fascination with (re)generation in the later ones, albeit without narrowing the focus to the werewolf's conventional association with masculine generative power. The aesthetic and ethic potential inherent in the “perverted” gender-bender – the mothering wolf – is preferably explored in postmodern werewolf stories. While Athena’s father in Dinesen’s story, for instance, is obsessed with the sin of having turned his daughter into a boy and its results – barrenness and a stop to his family’s genealogy ([1934] 1986, 94) – Magrs in Could it Be Magic? creates an almost sublime scenario of a birthing male and his peculiar offspring, and Carter’s “WolfAlice” portrays a seemingly paradoxical, animalistic birth of humanity. On the whole, the changing normative impact of werewolf narratives and their tendency to subvert contemporary norms manifests itself in a shift from the logic of moral transgression and punishment to uncertainty and undecidable moral issues. This goes along with a tendency to deviate from the rigid scheme of the traditional werewolf fable: the not-so-abject monster survives, cannot be killed or commits suicide (and thereby turns human again); lawand-order mentalities and totalitarian practices of discipline make way for feminist, gay and other visions of a deeper and mutually stimulating understanding between humans and werewolves. At the same time, magic is reintroduced into a demystified, enlightened world via the werewolf figure: Aymar, who takes the religious/superstitious position against the doctor in Endore’s novel (see Endore 1944, 311-312), is proved right about Bertrand’s werewolfishness at the end: as the postmortem indicates, Bertrand has metamorphosed into a dog in his grave. The novel leaves open, however, whether this discovery will change people’s opinions: “In this terrible age of disbelief and gullibility, people will swallow any tale of monsters of the past, but unless we find the bones of a centaur, no one will credit that myth” (87). Endore thus reverses the usual order of things: the werewolf is not freed from his curse at the end like

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the werepanther Irene in Bierce’s story, who undergoes a posthumous metamorphosis of panther into woman at the moment of her death, but Bertrand, the lycanthrope, seems finally to have come into his own by assuming the bodily shape of a wolf. Sinful transgression is in this text replaced by nature and psychology (“Aymar was moved. He had been cruel. It was the boy’s misfortune, not his sin”, 244), and the werewolf’s/lycanthrope’s suffering, Bertrand’s uncertainty about his own identity (see 188) as well as the nature of his disease, are foregrounded. Not only in this novel but also in several of the other texts (Kipling, Bierce, Saki) a sceptical attitude towards medical experts is discernible and cures are shown to be unattainable: “He learnt that his disease was known, that is to say, it had a name, but observers classed it either as a fraud or as a delusion, and as far as curing it goes, no one had any suggestions to offer except that the medieval method of burning was an unmerited cruelty” (Endore 1944, 198). Institutions such as mental asylums and sanatoriums, which isolate deviant individuals while refusing them treatment, are eventually revealed to be the truly cruel and misanthropic places, “genuine hell-hole(s)” (303) in an enlightened, scientific world. “Therapies”, even if they fail to cure the patient, depend on whether the werewolf is regarded as a magic creature or as a whim of nature which might have been prevented by an appropriate life-style, dietary discipline and the avoidance of incestuous relationships, in short: by body management. The notion of the docile body is crucial in Endore’s novel where Aymar tries to control and discipline Bertrand primarily in corporeal fashion: he whips him, locks him up and changes his diet. In Kipling’s story, the body also plays a central but totally different role. It is through a religious laying on of hands that Fleete is saved – the leper is forced to lift the curse from him by touching him a second time. In the majority of recent werewolf tales (Carter, Lee, Magrs) therapies or cures are superfluous concepts altogether because being a werewolf is no longer considered a curse but rather a regenerative source and viable alternative to the dominant conception of the human subject. If the inadequacy of language pays tribute to the abhuman and abject non-containment of the werewolf, the fact that traditional familial structures are often substituted, not only by illegitimate marriages of deficient wives and mothers (Bierce) but also by sometimes vaguely homoerotic, predominantly male (Kipling, Saki) or female (Lee) worlds must be counted as another subversion of the laws of the symbolic order. While Kipling and Saki portray a closeted male homosexuality in their stories, Endore’s novel implies that even

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hunting for the culprit can assume erotic overtones. Aymar, in whom empathy and hatred constantly alternate, seems to be as much attracted as he is taken aback by Bertrand and his deeds. Another perversion, which can be generated by werewolf figures, is the production of female nymphomaniacs, as Endore’s text suggests (Bertrand turns the necrophile Sophie into a sex addict just as his father, the priest, awakened an insatiable sexual urge in his mother). The metamorphosis of human into beast, which – as an epitome of abjection – tends to remain vague on the story level or is so sudden that it cannot be perceived properly, affects gender relations in manifold ways. First of all, it is important to note that in comparison with a related figure of abjection, that of the vampire, the werewolf seems to have taken much longer to accommodate feminine variants. However, these seem to catch up on their masculine counterparts in the course of the twentieth-century. Both male and female werewolf figures increasingly feature as ciphers of sexual deviance, including “perversions” such as sado-masochistic relationships, homoeroticism, androgyny, bigamy and transvestism. As Saki’s story “The She-Wolf” points out in a highly comical way, the real problem is not the change of species the werewolf undergoes but the phantasm of sexual metamorphosis it implies, which appears to be a burden much harder to bear: “I wish you would turn me into a wolf, Mr. Bilsiter”, said his hostess at luncheon the day after his arrival. “My dear Mary”, said Colonel Hampton, “I never knew you had a craving in that direction”. “A she-wolf, of course”, continued Mrs. Hampton; “it would be too confusing to change one’s sex as well a one’s species at a moment’s notice”. ([1910] 1994, 87)

The werewolf’s subversive potential with regard to gender would thus seem to lie in its disregard for the crucial binaries which traditionally found human subjectivity and in its monstrous violation of the classificatory cultural systems through which experience is meaningfully organized. Not only the utopian potential but also the ontological status of the werewolf have been shown to vary considerably. Its normative impact has shifted to a similar extent. While late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century werewolf narratives such as Kipling’s “The Mark of the Beast” or Bierce’s “The Eyes of the Panther” still represented the werewolf as a morally transgressive figure who incurs rightful punishment either for having broken a taboo or for inheriting the sin of an older generation, questions of guilt and the boundaries between good and bad become increasingly blurred in the later decades of the


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twentieth century. This is reflected by a significant change in narrative endings, which tend to deviate from the rather rigid scheme of the traditional werewolf fable requiring the ritual killing of the “beast”. Twentieth-century werewolves are not only typical survivors but could be claimed to advance to the status of icons of identity politics for those who feel marginalized and discriminated against. In this respect, they seem to share the fate of Kristeva’s notion of the abject, which in the last few decades has been widely appropriated and diluted in the name of “affirmative abjection” (see Menninghaus 1999, 549-555). In werewolf narratives, the boundaries between subject and object, cause and effect become increasingly blurred as the twentieth century moves on so that the effects of abjection seem to be intensified: So long as the monstrous remains the absolute other in its corporeal difference it poses few problems; in other words it is so distanced in its difference that it can clearly be put into an oppositional category of not-me. Once, however, it begins to resemble those of us who lay claim to the primary term of identity, or to reflect back aspects of ourselves that are repressed, then its indeterminate status – neither wholly self nor wholly other – becomes deeply disturbing. (Shildrick 2002, 2-3)

Seen against the contemporary cultural background of revised notions of the body and the subject, namely as permeable, instable, and performative, the werewolf assumes special significance as a destabilizer of fixed identities and a construct somewhat truer and closer to (post)modern notions of the self.

Works Cited Bataille, Georges. [1957] 2001. Eroticism, translated by Mary Dalwood. London: Penguin. Bierce, Ambrose. [ca. 1900] 1963. “The Eyes of the Panther”. In The Collected Writings of Ambrose Bierce, edited by Clifton Fadiman, 178-186. New York: Citadel. Brittnacher, Hans Richard. 1994. Ästhetik des Horrors: Gespenster, Vampire, Monster, Teufel und künstliche Menschen in der phantastischen Literatur. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Burke, Edmund. [1759] 1970. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Menston: The Scholar Press. Carter, Angela. 1987. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. London: Penguin. —. 1987. “The Company of Wolves”. In Carter, 110-118. —. 1987. “The Werewolf”. In Carter, 108-110. —. 1987. “Wolf-Alice”. In Carter, 119-126.

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Dijkstra, Bram. 1996. Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood. New York: Knopf. Dinesen, Isak. [1934] 1986. “The Monkey”. In Seven Gothic Tales, 72-117. London: Triad Grafton. Doyle, Laura. 1994. Bordering on the Body: The Radical Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Duclos, Denis. [1994] 1998. The Werewolf Complex: America's Fascination with Violence, translated by Amanda Pingree. Oxford: Berg. Dyer, Richard. 1988. “Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism”. In Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender, and Popular Fiction, edited by Susannah Radstone, 47-72. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Eickhoff, F.-W. 1986. ”Einige psychoanalytische Anmerkungen zu Carlo Ginzburgs Aufsatz”. Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 82.2:214. Ellmann, Maud. 1993. “The Woolf Woman”. Critical Quarterly 35.3:86-100. Endore, Guy. [1933] 1944. The Werewolf of Paris. New York: Triangle Books. Freud, Sigmund. [1905] 1953. “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality”. In Vol. 7 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey, 123-245. London: The Hogarth Press. —. [1914/1918] 1955a. “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis”. In Vol. 17 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey, 1-123. London: The Hogarth Press. —. [1921] 1955b. “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego”. In Vol. 18 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey, 65-143. London: The Hogarth Press. Garber, Marjorie. 1992. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge. Ginzburg, Carlo. 1986. “Freud, der Wolfsmann und die Werwölfe”. Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 82.2:189-199. Hekma, Gert. 1994. “ ‘A Female Soul in a Male Body’: Sexual Inversion as Gender Inversion in Nineteenth-Century Sexology”. In Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, edited by Gilbert Herdt, 213-239. New York: Zone Books. Hurley, Kelly. 1996. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the “fin de siècle”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. James, Sibyl. 1983. “Gothic Transformations: Isak Dinesen and the Gothic”. In The Female Gothic, edited by Juliann E. Fleenor, 138-152. Montreal: Eden Press. Jones, Ernest. 1951. On the Nightmare. New York: Liveright Publications. Kipling, Rudyard. [1891] 1994. “The Mark of the Beast”. In Collected Stories, edited by Robert Gottlieb, 293-307. New York: Knopf. Kristeva, Julia. [1980] 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lee, Tanith. 1989. “Wolfland”. In Don’t Bet on the Prince. Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England, edited by Jack Zipes, 122-147. New York: Routledge. Magrs, Paul. 1999. Could It Be Magic? London: Vintage. Menninghaus, Winfried. 1999. Ekel: Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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Saki [Hector Hugh Munro]. [1910] 1994. “Gabriel-Ernest”. In The Best of Saki, 1117. London: Penguin. —. [1914] 1994. “The She-Wolf”. In The Best of Saki, 86-92. Shildrick, Margrit. 1997. Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism, and (Bio)Ethics. London: Routledge. —. 2002. Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self. London: SAGE. Steiger, Brad, and Franklin Ruehl, eds. 1999. The Werewolf Book: The Encyclopedia of Shape-Shifting Beings. Detroit, IL: Visible Ink. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. 1996. “Introduction: From Wonder to Error: A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity”. In Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, edited by Rosemarie Garland Thomson, 1-19. New York: New York University Press. Walpole, Horace. [1765] 1986. The Castle of Otranto. In Three Gothic Tales, edited by Peter Fairclough, 37-148. London: Penguin. Yaeger, Patricia. 1992. “The ‘Language of Blood’: Toward a Maternal Sublime”. Genre 25:5-24. Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

The Two-…, One-…, None-Sex Model: The Flesh(-)Made Machine in Herman Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” and J. G. Ballard’s Crash

Konstanze Kutzbach “Sometime in the eighteenth century, sex as we know it was invented. The reproductive organs went from being paradigmatic sites for displaying hierarchy, resonant throughout the cosmos, to being the foundation of incommensurable difference” ([1990] 1995, 149). Thus writes Thomas Laqueur in his influential study Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, proposing a paradigm shift concerning the philosophical premises of (gendered) identity from the one-sex model to the two-sex model. Against the backdrop of Laqueur’s argument, I will, in a contrasting reading of two literary examples from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, foreground possible anachronistic characteristics in contemporary cultural representations and poststructuralist theoretical assessments of the subject in crisis: whereas the nineteenth century took the two-sex model as its foil, contemporary representations often negotiate the crisis of the subject by resorting to identity concepts recalling pre- and early modern scientific/medical discourses, thus referencing the conceptual premises of the one-sex model. The short story “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” by Herman Melville (1855), even though it can be read as a critique of patriarchal hegemony, conceives of gender identity as based on two opposed, natural categories. In contrast to that, the novel Crash by J. G. Ballard (1973), representative as it is of postmodern ideas of dissolution, resorts to a concept of gender identity that is closer to the Galenic onesex model (see Laqueur) and culminates, as I suggest, in a “none-sex model” as “[the characters] go hurtling toward annihilation“, as Gravestock writes with regard to David Cronenberg’s filmic adaptation of the novel (2003, online). This article will approach the crisis of the subject by focusing on the aspect of incomplete bodies – the fragmentation of the body, missing body parts, as well as substitutes of body parts, prostheses, – and show how these dysfunctional bodies figure as a trope of the unaesthetic, as artistic and intellectual expressions of contemporaneous negotiations and social conceptions of gender identity. In her

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seminal work Purity and Danger (1966), Mary Douglas emphasizes the close conceptual connection between the body and society, describing the body as “a complex structure”, “a model which can stand for any bounded system” ([1966] 1985, 115); she thereby conceives of both society and the body as effective signifying practices connected through implications of rituals, operative especially with regard to the vulnerability of their margins (see Douglas 1985, 121): “We cannot possibly interpret rituals concerning excreta, breast, milk, saliva and the rest unless we are prepared to see in the body a symbol of society, and to see the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body” (115). In view of Douglas’s ideas on the conceptual similarities between the body and society, I will shed light on how representations of mutilated, damaged, or otherwise unaesthetic physicality relate to society and its structures in the two works discussed. Both Melville’s and Ballard’s fictions explore the relationship between man and machine/automaton and show the weaknesses and dangers implied in the possible destruction of the margins and boundaries of the body as a microcosmic expression of the neuralgic spots of the bounds of society. However, having been written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively, they are influenced by different assumptions about the premises of a destruction of boundaries; these different premises at the intersection of physical and social implications pertain to changing concepts of gender as represented in the works. “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” and Crash present versions of dehumanization, yet in so doing they take into focus different implications: in the case of Melville’s story, the dehumanization refers to repression and boundaries that are too rigid, whereas in Ballard’s novel, it can be attributed to an absence of boundaries.

“The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids”: Dehumanization and the Rigidity of Boundaries Herman Melville’s diptych contrasts two narratives which both deal with a secluded realm assigned to each of the sexes: the first part, as Régis Durand points out, represents a “timeless, womanless ‘paradise’ of Bachelors, […] a Walhalla for aging barristers” (1990, 54). The second part of the story – in the tradition of nineteenth-century social realism – presents the reader with exploited women (virgins) literally

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working themselves to death in a mill and thus suggests a reading in the vein of Marxist-feminist criticism (see Karcher n.d., online). As a critique of the industrial exploitation of women, which correlates economic and sexual modes of production, it testifies to Melville’s “prescient insight he displays into the central problems of our culture: alienation; violence against women and the repression of the ‘feminine in man’ that usually accompanies it; the widening gap between a decadent ruling class and the workers it immiserates” (Karcher n.d., online). Referencing Mary Douglas’s idea that the most vulnerable spot of each bounded system lies at the margins, as they are prone to perforation and dissolution, one could say that Melville’s short story focuses on two damaged systems, both of which are connected by the logic of the two-sex model: nineteenth-century industrial society and the working girls’ bodies. In the following, I will focus especially on the second part of the story, “The Tartarus of Maids”, showing how the story accommodates the idea of the destruction of society and, by implication, the body, as bounded systems (see Douglas 1985, 121). The bounded system is here taken as a possible and intact foil, whose cracks are presented in the story: the physical fragmentation and final death of the maidens is linked to “cracks” in society and might be read as an indication of Melville’s pessimistic vision of society’s decline. The second part of the story, which deals with the topos of the infamous “dark satanic mills” described by Blake in his poem “Jerusalem”, is set up in contrast to the first part, “The Paradise of Bachelors”, which represents a decadent haven of jovial patriarchy. This becomes clear quite early in the story, when the first person narrator describes what he sees as he approaches the “Devil’s Dungeon paper-mill” where he wants to “order my future paper” (Melville [1855] 1949, 197): “ ‘This is the very counterpart of the Paradise of Bachelors, but snowed upon, and frost-painted to a sepulchre’ ” (199-200). Régis Durand corroborates the narrator’s impression: “The contrast […] could not be greater: there lies a world of […] feminine sexuality discovered at the end of a freezing, perilous journey in a nightmare of implacable whiteness” (1990, 54-55). This colour imagery, especially of the colour white, closely relates to the above mentioned implications of fragmentation and fragility in the story. As the narrator approaches the mill, he sees, for example, “[a] snow-white hamlet amidst the snows” (Melville [1855] 1949, 198). In the narrator’s subsequent observations upon entering the mill, the discourse about sexuality is introduced and added to the imagery of the colour white as he discovers the girls who are doomed to work

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the machines, “feeding the iron animal” (201); he sees “rows of blanklooking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper” (201). The imagery of colour, sexuality, and machine has been read, as indicated above, along the lines of Marxist-feminist criticism. Whiteness in the story “signifies a new labor discipline” (Roediger qtd. in McGuire 2003, 296), and the story reflects, as McGuire writes, the barrenness and inhumanity of the new industrial conditions via the repeated motifs of sexual sterility and ubiquitous, man-made whiteness. De-eroticized and condemned to perpetual virginity, the factory girls in “Tartarus” become, to the eyes of Melville’s narrator, ever more pallid, blank, white, and ever more part of their machines. (296)

“Each culture has its own special risks and problems. To which particular bodily margins its beliefs attribute power depends on what situation the body is mirroring” (Douglas 1985, 121); taking this quote as a point of reference, one could argue that nineteenth-century industrial society, which was strongly dependent on the safeguarding of its system-sustaining hierarchies and trajectories of power, paid special attention to the bodily margins referring to the distinction between the sexes: “Political struggles over power and position within the post-revolutionary public sphere were fought out in the scientific arena in terms of sex, race and class” (Martain 1996b, online). In order to be able to sustain the (seemingly intact) system, it was necessary to justify the inequality, especially the inequality between man and woman. This justification was to be found in what Thomas Laqueur (based on Galen) calls the two-sex model, which appeared in the context of the Enlightenment and replaced the rationale of social inequality – as a category which was not in keeping with the ideals of the French Revolution – by positing a natural and biological inferiority of the female (among other categories): Desire was given a history and the female body was distinguished from the male’s […]. A biology of cosmic hierarchy gave way to a biology of incommensurability, anchored in the body, in which the relationship of men to women, like that of apples to oranges, was not given as one of equality or inequality but rather of difference. This required interpretation and became the weapon of cultural and political struggle. (Laqueur 1995, 207) …………………………………………………………………………………… This radical naturalization, the reduction of women to the organ that now, for the first time, marked an incommensurable difference between the sexes and allegedly produced behavior of a kind not found in men, did not itself logically entail any particular position on the social or cultural place of women. What

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mattered was the mode of argument itself, the move from sex to gender, from body to behavior. (216)

In Melville’s story, as in Crash, bodily fragmentation/death pertains to sexual discourse. In contrast to Crash, however, Melville’s story thematizes the naturalization of social categories in a fashion typical of the nineteenth century. The safeguarding of physical and social bounds is here metaphorically connected through the imagery of colour, sexuality, and machinery, all of which reference the mechanisms of the two-sex model. Melville indeed criticizes the restrictive boundaries of a society that feeds on the relegation and exploitation of those in a “naturally” marginalized position. How much the story depends on the naturalization of the sex and gender relationship as an ideological foil, even though it is criticized by the author, becomes clear once more through the narrator’s description of the girls working on the machines: “The girls did not so much seem accessory wheels to the general machinery as mere cogs to the wheels” (Melville [1855] 1949, 202). Thus, the girls, according to their “natural” position, are not even part of a machine, but rather a part of a part of a machine (i.e. ”cogs”). The girls’ insignificance and meaninglessness culminates eventually in their final absorption and annihilation through the machines themselves, “where the colorless female operatives are drained by and then absorbed into the devices they operate” (McGuire 2003, 298). Karcher also describes the girls’ final annihilation as Melville’s critique of the typical nineteenthcentury inequality of the sexes: “[T]he women are silent and only the noise of their work is heard. […] Melville’s story comments on how women factory operatives are deprived of a home life and turned into machines” (n.d., online). Turning into and merging with apparatuses and machines in Melville’s story thus represents a metaphorized deconstruction of the body. Even later in the story, when the absorption and annihilation are presented in a very matter of fact way, as the girls are murdered and fragmented by the sharp blades of the death machine, the voiced critique is based on a high degree of metaphoricity: the girls’ annihilation functions as an expression of society’s (moral) annihilation – both are caused by boundaries that are too rigid. This becomes obvious in what could be called the climax of the story, where the connection between the central motifs, sexuality, death, and machines, is emphasized once more. The narrator gives the following impressive description of the scene, where the machine that brings about the white girls’ (physical) annihilation and death, is described in

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highly charged sexual imagery, and, according to Douglas’s concepts, evokes and mirrors the frailty of society as a bounded system: I see it now; turned outward; and each erected sword is so borne, edge-outward, before each girl. If my reading fails me not, just so, of old, condemned stateprisoners went from the hall of judgment to their doom: an officer before, bearing a sword, its edge turned outward, in significance of their fatal sentence. So, through consumptive pallors of this blank, raggy life, go these white girls to death. “Those scythes look very sharp”, again turning toward the boy. “Yes; they have to keep them so. Look!” That moment two of the girls, dropping their rags, plied each a whet-stone up and down the sword-blade. (Melville [1855] 1949, 204-205)

Thus, the story represents the issue of dehumanization in a context of boundaries that are too rigid, with regard to physical as well as social implications (see Mary Douglas’s idea mentioned above). This dehumanization culminates in the absorption and bloody destruction of the girls through the scythes of the machines they work and in their fragmentation prepared by their own hands: “Their own executioners; themselves whetting the very swords that slay them” (205); this passage metaphorically lays bare the weak spots at the margins of the body and society. The bodies of the girls, who, by the hands of men and with the ironic support of machines, are forced to extinguish themselves, here reflect on the all-pervading mechanisms of injustice and – not only sexual – inequality characteristic of nineteenth-century society, where women are marginalized and live according to the dictum of obedience and chastity. The presentation of the senseless fragmentation of both the body and society which the story criticizes works on the basis of static, i.e. inverted, essentialism: although it questions the conflation of sex and gender in the sense that women are weak and subservient by nature as the central premise of the two-sex model, it does not go beyond an implicational connection of sex and gender. This means that although the story criticizes roles ascribed to men and women, the scope of identity envisioned for both sexes does not exceed the framework of the two-sex model, implying that women will always remain different from men. In the following part I will show how both, theoretical attempts at describing the body and identity before the nineteenth-century two-sex model, as well as those that followed it, such as postmodern ideas, envision, by implication, a higher degree of possible equality between the sexes. The two-sex model, for example, – and even its critique – precludes any idea of processuality, as for example represented by the pre-modern “one-sex model”, where “even” women could reach the

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highest degree of perfection. Nor does it envision a possible synthesis, which could bring about an equalizing fusion of separate identities, as theorized, for example, by Georges Bataille. As the reading of Melville’s story has shown, identity is still understood as working according to the principle of an assumed entity or whole, the destroyed or fragmented body reflecting a “par(t)s pro toto” structure. I will now, by turning to the analysis of the novel Crash by J. G. Ballard, show how this “par(t)s pro toto” principle is turned into a “par(t)s pro nihil” model, which takes as its starting point the one-sex model and dissolves it into a none-sex model.

Crash – Dehumanization and the Absence of Boundaries Crash by J. G. Ballard (1973), “[a]fter Borges […] the first great novel of the universe of simulation”, as Baudrillard claims (1997, 119), draws the reader into a decadent world of sex, violence, and death “brought alive” by characters that share a special fetish: carcrashing, which includes a voyeuristic as well as a sadistic and masochistic component. Like the previous example, this novel also recalls Mary Douglas’s ideas of the connection between the human body and society, and in this case – as man and car literally merge – machine and society. In the introduction to the 1995 Vintage edition, Ballard himself draws a similar connection as he describes the car “not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society” (6). In contrast to Melville’s story, however, the dehumanization is not caused by the presence of boundaries that are too rigid, but in fact by the absence of physical as well as social boundaries in what Frazer calls a “demonstration of psychosexual decadence” (n.d., online). Thus, I suggest, in the fictional universe presented in the novel, the idea of an intact and bounded system is not only denied at the plot level, but also does not even exist as a foil anymore. Although the novel – like the “Tartarus of Maids” – deals with a form of self-effacement, in this case the dehumanization is selfinflicted and is not an expression of the failure of meeting rigid boundaries, but of postmodern masturbatory excess caused by an absence of boundaries. This absence of boundaries, which, as Horst writes, brings about a vagueness and an ennui that is at the basis of the characters’ fetishistic desires (see Horst 1996, online), suggests a reading of the conception of the characters as dependent on the one/none-sex model.

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Early in the novel the reader obtains an impression of the overall theme of decadence and boredom. Having witnessed and photographed a car crash, the protagonists Vaughan and Ballard (who is the first person narrator) pick up a prostitute. While Ballard is waiting, Vaughan arranges her in the back seat of the car “in the posture of the dying cashier [from the accident they witnessed]” (Ballard 1995, 12). Ballard comments, Vaughan unfolded for me all his obsessions with the mysterious eroticism of wounds: the perverse logic of blood-soaked instrument panels, seat-belts smeared with excrement, sun-visors lined with brain tissues. […] For Vaughan each crashed car set off a tremor of excitement, […] in the grotesque overhang of an instrument panel forced on to a driver’s crotch as if in some calibrated act of machine fellatio. (12)

This example already accommodates the mechanisms of dehumanization, distortion, and fragmentation of a human body which is increasingly absorbed by the topography of machines, the car. In a review of the film version of the novel, Horst speaks about “Entstellung” [disfigurement] as having become second nature to the characters (see Horst 1996, online). In the course of the novel, this “Entstellung” develops into an increasing indifference – or, to use a Baudrillardean term, “virtual indifference” (Baudrillard 1993, 12) – with regard to physical markers, which seem to dissolve more and more as the incidents become more and more extreme and violent. The narrator Ballard’s description of a dented car with which Vaughan had hit a mongrel dog suggests the diminishing importance of factual (differences of) physicality: The long triangular grooves on the car had been formed within the death of an unknown creature, its vanished identity abstracted in terms of the geometry of this vehicle […]. Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised a terrific almanac of imaginary automobile disasters and insane wounds – the lungs of elderly men punctured by door handles, the chests of young women impaled by steering-columns, the cheeks of handsome youths pierced by the chromium latches of quarter-lights. For him these wounds were the keys to a new sexuality born from a perverse technology. (Ballard 1995, 13)

The book provides several such examples of mutilated or severed body parts and killed people; it becomes clear that whenever sex meets death in combination with a machine/car, the people involved are stripped of their sexual distinctness and reduced to an unsexed generic physicality often expressed through bodily materials that cannot be contained in the body whose surface structure is not intact. This can be read, with Mary Douglas, as a form of social pollution

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where “the symbolism of the body’s boundaries is used […] to express danger to community boundaries” (1985, 122). However, one might as well argue that the mechanisms at work in Douglas’s model cannot completely apply in Crash anymore, since the decadent and dehumanized “society” presented in the novel no longer assumes intact borders as a foil or objective correlative. As Horst states, deviance has become the normal and all-encompassing paradigm as Crash reflects a society “which has been working on the dissolution and transgression of taboos so insistently that nothing that remains has the potential to shock anymore” (1996, online; my translation). In this sick community, where taboos and boundaries have vanished, actions are interchangeable, “[the protagonists who watch and participate in the car crashes] might as well do something else – collect stamps, for example” (1996 online; my translation). As the actions become interchangeable, so do the people and their sexes; both are blanks of indifference regarding difference. As the base material of organs, the generic matter, matters more than the persons to whom the matter belongs, we are moving toward a model of gender identity which – in contrast to the two-sex model –envisions an egalitarian scope. This model is not based on unchangeable biological/social ascriptions but opts for the same degree of perfection, thus referencing the one-sex model. (The concept of “degree of perfection” in the postmodern context, however, contains a cynical subtext since it pertains to annihilation and destruction, not, as in the original model, to generation and procreation). The one-sex model – according to medical discourses and descriptions like those by Galen as well as by contemporary critics like Laqueur – conceives of all bodies as equipped with the same material substance, with the sexes located on a continuum and the differences between them merely a matter of degrees of perfection, not of incommensurable biological or natural difference. The degree of perfection, that is, the rank or place in the Great Chain of Being, is, according to Galen, dependent on the amount of “vital heat” in the body (men were usually assumed to have more “heat” than women, which caused their reproductive organs to be outside rather than inside the body); yet this model of identity – even though it might appear phallocentric at a first glance – conceives of the boundaries between the sexes as permeable because (literally) “every/body” could reach the highest level of perfection (see Martain 1996a, online). With reference to the diachronic dimension of these concepts of gender identity, Crash represents an anachronism as it transforms the gendered markers of the two-sex model into the generic blueprint of

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the one-sex model, as the crashes and the violence eliminate sex- and gender differences. This idea of extreme situations which are characterized by “[m]en’s excess of heat” (Martain 1996a, online) and combine eroticism, violence, and death in heading toward a total elimination of gender differences (and differences between separate identities in general), is also, by implication, central to the theory of Georges Bataille, when he emphasizes the ultimately equalizing nature of the moment of being in the fusion of different (sexual) entities: Dissolution – this expression corresponds with dissolute life, the familiar phrase linked with erotic activity. In the process of dissolution, the male partner has generally an active role, while the female partner is passive. The passive, female side is essentially the one that is dissolved as a separate entity. But for the male partner the dissolution of the passive partner means one thing only: it is paving the way for a fusion where both are mingled, attaining at length the same degree of dissolution. (Bataille [1957] 1998, 17)

It is interesting to note the conceptual similarities between Bataille’s quote and the following observation by the first-person narrator Ballard, both of which emphasize the universal or generic character of the body on the verge of annihilation: “In his mind Vaughan saw the whole world dying on a simultaneous automobile disaster, millions of vehicles hurled together in a terminal congress of spurting loin and engine coolant” (Ballard 1995, 16). And Ballard reflects after Vaughan’s death: “I thought of Vaughan’s body, colder now, its rectal temperature following the same downward gradients as those of the other victims of the crash” (18). Moreover, there are also striking correspondences between Bataille’s postulates and those of John Sadler, who in his book The sicke woman’s private looking glass (1636) provides advice on how to treat women so that the female will also participate “substantially” in the act of conception. The following quote testifies to the importance of both male and female “[taking] fire and be inflamed” in order to enable successful procreation. He suggests that men “handle her secret parts and dugs, that she may take fire and be inflamed in venery, for so at length the wombe will strive and waxe fervent with desire of casting forth its own seed, and receiving the man’s seed to be mixed together therein” (Sadler qtd. in Martain 1996a, online). What unites these examples is the egalitarian assumptions expressed in the descriptions of the final moment of eroticized excess, since all of them posit a strong contrast to the way the nineteenth century conceived of the relationship between the sexes. Although there are seemingly patriarchal (or even misogynist)

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aspects to the given examples, they are still more ambiguous in character than the two-sex model. In all of the examples one finds a moment where the sexism and androcentrism are erased in a unisex fusion, which could not possibly be conceived of within the framework of the two-sex model with its stable connection between sex and gender on the basis of a naturalization of (the insurmountable barrier between) the sexes. Thus, contrasting the two stories, the sexual markers that were still valid in Melville’s short story do not apply as the two-sex model is turned into a one-sex model, or, one might even say, a “none-sex model”. The mutilations of the bodies in Crash, I would argue, even though they represent an extreme form of de(con)struction, at the same time have a procreative and constructive quality since static and traditional patterns of (gender) identity are not reshuffled, but new ones are generated. Following the argument presented by Elizabeth Grosz in Volatile Bodies (1994), I suggest that in Crash, via the destruction of and reinscription on the body surface (through rupture of skin, prostheses, mutilation, etc.) new forms of eroticism, new structurings of desire, and new codings of (violence-based) identity are generated (see also Bataille [1957] 1998). Referring to Lingis’s ideas on the difference between civilized and savage practices and rituals of body inscription presented in Excesses: Eros and Culture (1984), Grosz describes how primitive inscriptions enable a restructuring of sexual trajectories: “These incisions and various body markings create an erotogenic surface; they create not a map of the body but the body precisely as a map” (Grosz 1994, 139). This idea reflects Baudrillard’s concept of simulation as a counter-state of existence, where “the map […] precedes the territory” (1997, 1). In the chapter “Crash” in Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard further elaborates that in Ballard’s novel “violence done to technology itself and […] the violence done to the body” combine into a “semiurgy of the body – neither an anatomy nor a physiology, but a semiurgy of contusions, scars, mutilations, wounds that there are so many sexual organs opened on the body” (112). This restructuring of body surfaces through their mutilation and destruction brings about, one could argue, a creative newness according to which “puncturings and markings of the body do not simply displace or extend from already constituted, biologically pregiven libidinal zones; they constitute the body in its entirety as erotic, and they privilege particular parts of the body as selfconstituted orifices” (Grosz 1994, 139). Thus, destruction is procreative, and in Ballard’s novel this becomes obvious through the fact

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that to the degree that “conventional” (two-sex) markers of sexuality and sexual difference are violently destroyed as the body is written upon through eroticized incisions, bruises, cuts, or even the amputation of limbs, a restructuring takes place and generates a surreal, yet also blatantly and brutally real fusion of body and machine, i.e. cars, into a (n)one-sex model. This becomes obvious in a scene where the narrator, Ballard, and Gabrielle, a woman whose body is already deformed as a result of car crashes and marked by scars, braces, and prostheses, have sex, once more, in and with a car. Ballard comments, “[e]ach of her deformities became a potent metaphor for the excitements of a new violence” (Ballard 1995, 175). Corroborating Baudrillard’s comment on Crash that “all the erotic terms are technical” (1997, 115), the narrator makes clear, in the following scene, that simulation is favoured over reality, since the reality of traditional (female) markers of sexual difference has become devoid of erotic energy: I […] examined the breast carefully. For some reason I had expected it to be a detachable latex structure, fitted on each morning along with her spinal brace and leg supports, and I felt vaguely disappointed that it should be made of her own flesh. […] As she sat passively in my arms, lips moving in a minimal response, I realized this bored and crippled young woman found that nominal junction points of the sexual act – breast and penis, anus and vulva, nipple and clitoris – failed to provide any excitement for us. (Ballard 1995, 177-178)

In this decadent universe that has long since abandoned its boundaries, taboos, and fears – perhaps, as the most vital one, the fear of death – we are faced with an attitude on the characters’ and society’s part that is characterized by the “dispensability” of death (in favour of erotic thrills). As indicated above, the example reflects an ideology that works according to similar principles as the one-sex model, where bodies differ only in degree of perfection. Dead matter (prostheses, scars, braces, etc.) has replaced living matter – bodily flesh – as the most perfect form and highest degree of perfection. “Vital heat”, as the desired quality, is provided through the machines, or through the fusion of man and machine; the two-sex-markers are neutralized as sex takes place in universal orifices: [I] celebrated with her the excitements of these abstract vents let into her body by sections of her own automobile. During the next few days my orgasms took place within the scars below her breast and within her left armpit, in the wounds on her neck and shoulder, in these sexual apertures formed by fragmenting windshield louvres and dashboard dials in a high-speed impact, marrying through my own penis the car in which I had crashed and the car in which Gabrielle had met her near-death. (179)

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What becomes obvious in this example is an ironic reversal of the notion of “perfection”; perfection here does not pertain to a natural, physical, and biological real (cf. the narrator’s disappointment upon dealing with a “real” rather than a simulated breast), but to the technical simulation of a real – it does, however, still feature the same egalitarian component. In analogy to the Galenic model, both sexes can reach the highest degree of perfection – by means of cars, prostheses, braces or the like. Recalling Grosz’s elaboration of Lingis’s idea of the inscriptions on the savage body, the subsequent scene from the novel exemplifies how new sexualities are not based on inscriptions that “extend from […] pregiven libidinal zones”, but on inscriptions that “privilege particular parts of the body as self-constituted orifices” (Grosz 1994, 139). The narrator Ballard imagines how additional orifices might provide an even more perfect scenario of destructive erotic bliss, thus spiralling towards an ever higher degree of sexual perfection: I dreamed of other accidents that might enlarge this repertory of orifices, relating them to more elements of the automobile’s engineering, to the evermore complex technologies of the future. What wounds would create the sexual possibilities of the invisible technologies of thermonuclear reaction chambers, […] the mysterious scenarios of computer circuitry? […] As I embraced Gabrielle I visualized, as Vaughan had taught me, […] the wounds upon which erotic fantasies might be erected, the extraordinary sexual acts celebrating the possibilities of unimagined technologies. In these fantasies I was able at least to visualize these deaths and injuries I had always feared. I visualized my wife injured in a high-impact collision, her mouth and face destroyed, and a new and exciting orifice opened in her perineum by the splintering steering column, neither vagina nor rectum, an orifice we could dress with all our deepest affections. I visualized the injuries of film actresses and television personalities, whose bodies would flower into dozens of auxiliary orifices, points of sexual conjunction with their audiences formed by the swerving technology of the automobile. I visualized the body of my own mother, […] injured in a succession of accidents, fitted with orifices of ever greater abstraction and ingenuity. (Ballard 1995, 179-180; emphasis added)

Ballard’s imagination represents cravings for ever higher degrees of perfection through the ever more complex generation of orifices from the creation of “a new and exciting orifice […], neither vagina nor rectum” over “dozens of auxiliary orifices” to “orifices of ever greater abstraction and ingenuity”. In Ballard’s infinite visions, markers of gender identities are increasingly removed and replaced by the different forms of orifices as blanks, which may be an expression of aporia that culminates in a none-sex model. The none-sex model, as it combines the contradictory moments of simultaneous creation and

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destruction, velocity and inertia, recalls the laws of Baudrillard’s simulation and his concept of metastasis. As he describes, “the functionalism in Crash devours its own rationality, because it does not know dysfunction” (1997, 118). As the natural or rational laws of signification are suspended in the universe created by the author Ballard, the destruction and annihilation is – unlike in Melville’s story – not to be understood as a critical metaphor, but first and foremost to be taken at face value. Since signification is no longer possible as the space between signifier and signified has collapsed in a universe of simulation, metaphors do not work anymore and the implosion of meaning generates a realm without boundaries which has become simulationally real as “radical functionalism […] reaches its paradoxical limits and burns them” (118). Baudrillard further refers to the processes of signification in the novel Crash as “non-meaning, […] savagery, of this mixture of the body and of technology [from which] results a sexuality without precedent – a sort of potential vertigo linked to the pure inscription of the empty signs of this body” (112). And he continues to argue that “death and sex are read on the same level as the body, […] without metaphor” (113). Referring to Mary Douglas’s ideas, this article has contrasted two pieces of fiction that feature instances of the unaesthetic as they negotiate the dehumanization and annihilation of gendered bodies through machines as mirroring a society whose boundaries are too rigid against one with absent boundaries. With regard to the negotiation of gender identity, the comparison of the two works of fiction exemplifies an anachronism in concepts of gender identity. Whereas “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” criticizes the premises of the two-sex model yet at the same time functions within them, Crash recalls the Galenic one-sex model and envisions – by means of a simulational restructuring of trajectories of desire and eroticism – a model which is based on total indifference towards the difference between the sexes – a “none-sex model”. In Crash we encounter a realm where normal categories of human psychology have ceased to work because it lacks the necessary levels and foils of psychological ontology it could set itself off against; there is “[n]o affect behind all that, no psychology, no flux or desire, no libido or death drive” (Baudrillard 1997, 112). And, as Horst argues, mechanisms like repression and concepts like the unconscious are not valid anymore, therefore “ ‘Angstlust’ no longer exists” (1996, online; my translation). The representation of the none-sex model in Crash thus allows for a reading of the body and sexuality as blanks, as exchangeable free

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variable parameters, as Horst suggests (see 1996, online). If this is the case, if the body is nothing but a blueprint, how could gender, or much less, sex, matter as a category? Maybe the reason why the one-sex model has prevailed over the centuries and is still operative today in the universality of concepts of (post-)gender identity is that, ironically, it is more generic than the two-sex model. The early modern one-sex model and postmodern discourses of identity share many principles: a discursive Chain of Being might have superseded the Great Chain of Being with its criterion of degree of perfection, whereby the latter has been replaced by the concept of différance. Both gender concepts are united by the assumption of a universal blueprint underlying identity, rendering realizations of (gender) identity a matter of discursive rather than natural or biological categories. This idea of a universal (n)onesex model as the basis of human ontology is also corroborated by Grosz’s reading of Lingis’s ideas of bodily inscription: For Lingis it is as if the pure body, before its social incision, is a form of pure plenitude, a series of undifferentiated processes and functions that become erotic and sexually specific only by social marks. It is this presumption of a sexually neutral or indeterminate, universal body. (1994, 157)

While in Melville’s short story the destruction of the flesh by means of the machine works according to a par(t)s pro toto structure, in which the fragmentation takes place in view of a possible whole, in Crash the reader finds him- or herself in a (par(t)s pro nihil) universe where a whole as a possible backdrop is no longer imaginable since, according to critics like Bataille and Horst, all taboos have disappeared so that nothing that is left has the potential to shock. In this apocalyptic “universe of the accident”, where neither dysfunction nor perversion are possible (Baudrillard 1997, 113), we find a circularity in which pre-modern concepts of gender coincide with postmodern ones, combining into a universal template of identity in a hyperreal and hypertechnical scenario that abolishes both fiction and reality “without finality – is it good or bad? We will never know” (see Baudrillard 1997, 118; 119).

Works Cited Ballard, J. G. [1973] 1995. “Introduction”. In Crash, J. G. Ballard, 4-6. London: Vintage. —. [1973]. 1995. Crash. London: Vintage.

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Bataille, Georges. [1957] 1998. Eroticism, translated by Mary Dalwood. London: Marion Boyars. Baudrillard, Jean. [1990] 1993. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, translated by James Benedict. London & New York: Verso. —. [1981] 1997. Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Douglas, Mary. [1966] 1985. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. Durand, Régis. 1990. “Herman Melville: ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids’ – The Signs of Origin”. In Die englische und amerikanische Kurzgeschichte, edited by Klaus Lubbers, 52-59. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Frazer, Bryant. n.d. “Crash”. http://www.deep-focus.com/flicker/crash.html (accessed 15 September 2004). Gravestock, Steve. 2003. “Crash”. http://www.filmreferencelibrary.ca/index.asp? layid=44&csid1=69&navid=66 (accessed 15 September 2004). Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP. Horst, Sabine. 1996. “Spiel mit den letzten Dingen”. Frankfurter Rundschau, 10 October. http://www.davidcronenberg.de/frcrash.html (accessed 15 September 2004). Karcher, Carolyn L. n.d. “Herman Melville”. http://college.hmco.com/english/heath /syllabuild/iguide/melville.html (accessed 15 September 2004). Laqueur, Thomas Walter. 1995. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Martain, Susanne. 1996a. “The Pre-Modern European Concepts of Sexual Difference”. http://www.isis.aust.com/stephan/writings/sexuality/euro.htm (accessed 7 September 2004). —. 1996b. “Enlightenment Transition” http://www.isis.aust.com/stephan/writings /sexuality/enli.htm (accessed 7 September 2004). McGuire, Ian. 2003. “ ‘Who ain’t a slave?’: Moby Dick and the Ideology of Free Labor”. Journal of American Studies 37.2:287-305. Melville, Herman. [1855] 1949. “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids”. In The Complete Stories of Herman Melville, edited by Jay Leyda, 185211. New York: Random House.

Fear, Melancholy, and Loss in the Poetry of Stevie Smith

Ruth Baumert Nobody writes or wishes to Who is one with their desire Stevie Smith, “Mrs. Arbuthnot” This paper will examine the ways in which abjection functions in writing, especially in poetry. I will look at the strategies by which the English poet Stevie Smith (1903-71) attempts to cope with the “abject experience of loss”, in other words, melancholia, in her poems. Stevie Smith’s work is frequently read against her rather colourful biography. The temptation to do so is great as her life has been laid bare to the public partly through her own writings (essays, letters, autobiographical novels) as well as through performances, interviews, her lifestyle, and the various monographs and biographies written about her after her death. However, it is the aim of this paper to focus mostly on the writing itself and the way the texts operate. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva elaborates a theory which tries to answer the question she poses herself: “And yet, in these times of dreary crisis, what is the point of emphasizing the horror of being?” (1982, 208). In her reasoning, horror and fear are closely related to language and writing: “[A]ny practice of speech, inasmuch as it involves writing, is a language of fear” (38) and she points out that, ironically, the anxious subject uses language in a frantic attempt to ward off fear and take control of a situation which was generated by the appearance of language in the first place. A few years later, in Black Sun, Kristeva specifically discusses melancholia and loss in relation to art and literature. She argues that the denial of loss is the origin of melancholia, consequently, “the most efficacious way of overcoming the latent loss” (129) is to name it and so exert a certain amount of control and mastery over it. The artist is privileged in that, through the “sublimational activity of writing” (200), s/he can find an antidote to melancholy and ameliorate loss. These notions seem to offer an apt theoretical starting point to examine the poetry of

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Stevie Smith. In Stevie Smith’s considerable poetic œuvre, the attempt to ward off fear and melancholy can be traced in violations of “identity, system, order” (Kristeva 1982, 4) found not only in the subject matter of the poems but in the language itself and the forms used. In the words of Sylvia Plath, one of her contemporaries, her poems can be read as “Words, words, to stop the deluge through the thumbhole in the dike” (qtd. in Hughes and McCullough 1982, 188). As Jacqueline Rose points out, abjection is not only related to fear, but also to language: Abjection is a primordial fear situated at the point where the subject first splits from the body of the mother, finding at once in that body and in the terrifying gap that opens up between them the only space for the constitution of its own identity, the only distance that will allow it to become a user of words. (1991, 33)

Following Freud, Kristeva calls attention to the relation of fear and phobia to the object: “From the start, fear and object are linked” (1982, 34-35). She distinguishes between different kinds of fear, especially between nameable fears and archaic, unspeakable fear. Fear is aroused in the phobic by the failure of language to symbolize or name what s/he is afraid of – the void or lack. It is also the sign of the failure of the paternal instance to put the prohibition of the mother firmly in place. In desperation, the phobic subject resorts to language to fill the gap. In Black Sun, Kristeva explains this state in different terms and here she connects it to melancholy and suicide as well as to fear. Again she describes the phobic subject’s fear of the unnameable – engulfment, dissolution, the void, the “Thing” or “loss which has no name” (Kristeva 1989, 13) – but the reaction to the loss, or, as she calls it here, disinheritance, is ambivalent. Besides causing fear, it becomes the source of melancholy: “[T]he depressed narcissist mourns not an Object but the Thing. Let me posit the ‘Thing’ as the real that does not lend itself to signification” (1989, 13). The “Thing” is a loss which precedes all other losses and which can never be recuperated because it lies outside the “symbolic” side of language, where objects can be identified and named and therefore lose their strangeness. It is a loss which is necessary so that “this ‘subject’, separated from the ‘object’, might become a speaking being” (1989, 145). The connection of the lost “Thing” to writing, and especially poetry, will be discussed later in this essay; at this point it suffices to say that in order to keep both fear and melancholy at bay, the subject, especially the writing subject, resorts to language in a desperate attempt to name everything and bring it under control. Speaking the

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abject or horror is a way of coming to grips with it rather than being controlled by it. In these terms, writing, and especially poetry, can be seen as a continuous attempt to bring those things into signification which otherwise cause anxiety. But this only succeeds at a price, and the price is the loss of the “Thing”: “To speak, to venture, to settle within the legal fiction known as symbolic activity, that is indeed to lose the Thing” (Kristeva 1989, 146). At first sight abjection seems to demand materiality – bodily emissions, flesh, blood, skin, hair, putrefaction, decay, dirt, slime, broken bodies, dismembered limbs, corpses – but in a brilliant shift Kristeva transposes it to literature, where it can take less material and more subversive forms. She argues that the disruption and blurring of borders that signify abjection can also be traced in phenomena which bring it closer to texts and writing: “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva 1982, 4). To this list can be added phenomena such as want, fear, negation, perversion, corruption, lack of authenticity – in short everything she terms “horror”. In texts, therefore, abjection can be detected in amorphous forms, in ambiguity and ambivalence, in lack of coherence and unity, and, last but not least, in forms of transgression and sublimation. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva shifts the focus of transgression from experience and content – which Georges Bataille stresses – to form and style and the violation of discursive and literary norms. In other words, the transgression is in the writing itself, not necessarily in what is written about, the subject matter of the text: “Writing is violence” (Rose 1991, 37), and the writer or the artist “speaks horror” (Kristeva 1982, 38; my emphasis). In the first section of Black Sun Kristeva outlines the origins and causes of melancholia and explains its relations to loss. Later in the text, she develops a theory to show how this loss can be named and worked through in art, and the process has many similarities to that described in Powers of Horror. In Black Sun, however, the focus is melancholia, and she expresses the view that in writing, especially in poetry, it can be overcome by sublimation, which, following Freud, she posits as the other side of melancholy (see Kristeva 1989, 98). Through sublimation and poetic language, the loss, the disinheritance, can be named, symbolized or metaphorized (see Kristeva 1989, 171). By integrating the lost “Thing” into his or her discourse, “which has become a song by dint of seizing the Thing” (146), the poet finds a means of overcoming his or her melancholy. In conclusion, it seems that the poet is especially privileged in that, by

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means of poetic language, s/he can “speak horror” and combat melancholia; the writer can use signs to give form to the formless, and so, unlike the phobic or the melancholic, bring it into a realm where it can be dealt with, not only through what s/he writes but by how s/he writes, by style. In the case of the poet this goes even further as the loss can be articulated semiotically, there is a shift of interest “from content to sound” (Kristeva 1982, 188). In Powers of Horror, Kristeva illustrates this shift in her discussion of the style of Céline (see chapters 6-10). The poet gains control over the “Thing” by sublimation, by reactivating the maternal “through melody, rhythm, semantic polyvalency, the so-called poetic form” (Kristeva 1989, 14), by flouting the rules of symbolic language in deformations of syntax and grammar, by the use of slang and the vernacular, in short, by “a recasting of syntax and vocabulary” (Kristeva 1982, 141) that signifies abjection. The poetry of Stevie Smith can be discussed fruitfully under these terms in that it can be read as an artistic working through of the melancholy state, the fear, desperation and frustration that beset her most of her life. She seems to have used her art to protect herself, to keep melancholia at bay, and to cope with the loss that “no word could signify” (Kristeva 1989, 13). In interviews and essays, she puts this in simple terms, explaining that by writing she could ease the pressures of life and find some relief. In a radio talk for schools, she specifies the pressures which beset her personally: “The pressure of daily life, the pressure of having to earn one’s living [...], the pressure of one’s relations with other people [...], the pressure of despair” (Smith qtd. in Spalding 1988, 198). At the same time, she admits that her poems seem to give more evidence of the “struggles and melancholy” than of the fun and happiness of life, which she also felt should be expressed. As she says in the poem “My Muse”, Why does my Muse only speak when she is unhappy? She does not, I only listen when I am unhappy When I am happy I live and despise writing For my Muse this cannot but be dispiriting. (Smith 1985, 405)

Stevie Smith – Taking on Patriarchal Poetry Florence Margaret Smith (from the early 1930s “Stevie”) was born in Hull, England in 1902. In 1906 her father deserted the family – running off to sea – and her mother and her unmarried sister, Margaret, moved to London with Stevie and her older sister, Molly.

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The two sisters had very little money between them and only by pooling their resources from a paternal legacy were they able to survive. In Palmers Green, a middle class suburb of London, the four moved into the house which was to be Stevie Smith’s home for the rest of her life. These biographical details are faithfully rendered in the poem “A House of Mercy”, in which Stevie celebrates the strength and female solidarity she experienced in her home: “It was a house of female habitation / Two ladies fair inhabited the house” (1985, 410). Although only thirty-three lines long (six irregular stanzas), the poem tells the story of Stevie’s life – the two “feeble babes”, the defecting husband, the lack of money, the death of her mother (when Stevie was seventeen), her sister’s leaving home, ultimately leaving Stevie alone with her Aunt Margaret for the rest of her life. “Now I am old I tend my mother’s sister / The noble aunt who so long tended us” (411). Born two months premature, Stevie was always an ailing child, and she remained very small, thin and not very robust throughout her life (she was only five feet tall). At the age of twenty-three she became secretary to a London publisher and worked there for the whole of her working life, retiring, not entirely of her own free will (after a suicide attempt at work) in 1953. From then on, she supplemented her not very generous pension with reviewing. Smith looked after her “Lion Aunt” in Palmers Green until she died in 1968 at the age of ninety-six. Stevie only survived her by three years, dying of a brain tumour in 1971, aged sixty-eight, and leaving an œuvre of three novels, eight collections of poetry, a radio play, and a considerable number of stories, essays, and reviews. The name Stevie needs some explanation. To her family she always remained Peggy or Florence Margaret. “Stevie” was coined after some boys jokingly shouted “Come on Steve” when she was out riding in the early 1930s (they were referring to a popular jockey of the time, and her slight build must have given rise to the joke). The nickname stuck and it was the name she herself preferred; from this time on, Stevie Smith had two names, two personalities and two lives: at home she was the single, suburban, middle class, rather isolated, eccentric, working woman, living in a shabby house in an unfashionable suburb with an old maiden aunt, whereas outside she was gradually becoming part of the London literary scene. Her literary reputation began to grow from the late 1950s on; up until then, publishers had been loath to publish her poetry, finding it simply too unconventional and eccentric. In the sixties, Stevie Smith became a cult figure on the London scene, where her unconventionality suited the mood of the time and her eccentricity was appreciated. The BBC called her in to

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do broadcasts and her poetry performances were the height of literary fashion (see Sternlicht 1990, 1-16). As a person Stevie Smith was undoubtedly odd – small, thin, and birdlike, she frequently appeared at poetry readings in little-girl dresses and funny hats – and as a poet she was no less unconventional. She is often classed as a writer of humorous poetry – lightweight, odd, even freakish and eccentric. Philip Larkin used the adjective faussenaïve to describe both the woman and her work, and other critics gladly adopted it, but this is only half the story. In his article “Stevie, Good-bye”, Larkin admits to initially rejecting her poems as “facetious bosh”, and he maintains that “for some readers, she was simply not to be taken seriously at all” (1991, 115). He initially divided the poems into serious and silly, expressing the opinion that many of them “should never have got outside the family” (“Frivolous” 1991, 77), but later came to realize that “the silliness was part of the seriousness” (78), especially in the later work. Although eccentric, many of the poems are anything but silly and illustrate her constant preoccupation with religious, philosophical, and social problems – the nature of God, the state of the (Anglican) church, faith and sin, as well as the great imponderables love, life and death, isolation and the difficulties of human relations, especially for a woman, in Britain’s class-ridden society. Smith’s eccentricity is, however, always evident, even when she is pondering the most serious questions, and she always seems to find a totally surprising angle. For instance, in the poem “Was He Married?”, which sounds rather conversational, the He in question is Christ. There are two voices in the poem, one asking naïve questions about the nature of Christ and his life and the other supplying the answers. Finally, the clever voice states that man creates gods according to his needs: “A god is Man’s doll, you ass / He makes him up like this on purpose” (1985, 390) (note the small letter for god and the capital for Man). But it adds that at least man can be given credit for creating a god of love. The poem concludes with the statement that the best solution will be found “when men / Love love and hate hate but do not deify them” (391). The poem thus destroys the basis of religion and provides a secular solution to a religious question. In its formal aspects, Stevie Smith’s poetry seems to respect the decorum and traditions of discourse. On closer scrutiny, however, the reader becomes aware of the incongruities and heresies and the subversive way in which she undermines traditional aesthetics and the demand for coherence and unity in poetry to “speak horror”. Indeed, Sternlicht calls her “the great subversive of modern poetry”, speaks of

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her “carpet bag of […] tricks” and the way she sells “profundity in pop bottles” (1991, 72). Abjection can be traced in Stevie Smith’s poetry in the way she violates, transgresses, and even corrupts, discursive and poetic norms, in her permanent ambivalence, and in her general refusal to abide by the rules of the symbolic game. She uses transgression and ambivalence, modes associated with the Semiotic, to put pressure on the Symbolic, but her attack is launched in a subtle, seemingly harmless, even playful way, a technique which is subversive in the extreme. In an insightful article on Smith, Martin Pumphrey points out this playfulness and the way she scorns the power play of poetic tradition and asks the interesting question, which critics until then had ignored, “why someone who so manifestly enjoyed playing games should refuse, throughout a long career and at the obvious risk of critical obscurity, to play the game” (1991, 99; italics in original). Stevie Smith’s subversion can be interpreted in different ways, but by applying Kristeva’s theories of the semiotic disposition, abjection, and melancholia, a great deal of insight can be gained. Using Kristevan terminology, one might say the Semiotic breaks through in her poems, disrupting the code and “cracking the socio-symbolic order, splitting it open, changing vocabulary, syntax, the word itself” (Kristeva 1984, 80). In so far, Stevie Smith seems to demonstrate what Kristeva calls “the semiotic disposition”, by which the poet constantly attempts to renew the order in which s/he is inescapably caught up (see Kristeva 1985, 217). For this reason, she cannot be compared with any poet that went before, and many critics and readers admit to being nonplussed by her idiosyncratic way of writing. Her poetry avoids or transmutes existing formulae, belongs to no school or movement, disregards authority; she does not give a hoot for the paraphernalia of traditional poetry, for metaphysical transcendence, sublimation, and romanticization, indeed she might even be said to oppose all the notions traditionally associated with the poetic. At the same time, she never disregards these, but parodies them, perverts them, and takes issue with them again and again, even if she sets them up only to call them into question. In Kristeva’s words, she “turns them aside” (1982, 15). This can be seen in the various poems in which she shifts from a heavily literary mode of expression to a prosaic, even throw-away tone. A good example of this is the six-line poem “The Murderer”, in which she seems to move deliberately from the sublime to the ridiculous, both of which are representational modes that obfuscate the binary laws of the symbolic order. The poem begins with the speaker proclaiming: “My true love breathed her latest breath / And I have closed her eyes in death” and

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ends with the laconic remark: “She was not like other girls – rather diffident, / And that is how we had an accident” (Smith 1985, 117). The voice here, in keeping with the principles of the ridiculous and the sublime as modes which deny the idea of an object as defining the subject (see Kristeva 1982, 12), seems to be speaking from a position which is neither fixed in the Semiotic nor in the Symbolic but in a noman’s land between the two. All these aspects make it possible to link Stevie Smith to the notion of the abject. When Kristeva says, “[t]he abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them” (1982, 15), this seems to me a very good description of how Stevie Smith operates. Her poetry can be read as an attack on the smoothness and coherence, the comfort and safety offered by the Symbolic, and as an attempt to show the inadequacy of traditional poetry when it comes to expressing the view of the world of someone who has always been only on the margins. Smith never presumes to speak for humanity at large but uses poetic language to express in her own terms her own view of the world, her own condition and that of her kind. Stevie Smith’s subversive technique, her general refusal to abide by the rules of the symbolic game, can be traced in the permanent ambivalence which permeates her poetry. Catherine A. Civello uses the category of gender to explain the phenomenon: Two modes of behaviour typify women’s reactions to their female status in society: the acceptance of their ‘role’ or the impulse to change it [...]. Stevie Smith embraced neither of these extremes, but opted for the complex area between the polarities. Ambivalence permeates her work. (1997, 2)

Civello sees this ambivalence as arising from the relationship of the female writer to the society she is writing in. As our Western societies subordinate the female, the position of the writer is subject to the same subordination. So Stevie Smith’s work can be read as “an artistic response to a cultural situation” (3). Civello’s chapter headings point out the areas in which Stevie Smith’s ambivalence becomes manifest: “Delighting in Life / Rejoicing in Death”, “Craving Companionship / Longing for Isolation”, “Believing in God / Believing in Uncertainty”. True to her time, Stevie Smith colluded outwardly while inwardly she withdrew and licked her wounds. Like Emily Dickinson, and here many similarities could be traced, Smith refuses to accept the situation and give in gracefully, but chooses instead to create and inhabit a world of her own. This strategy can be traced in her female speakercharacters, too: outwardly they accept, inwardly they resist and refuse

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to conform. In many poems, the fairytale world offers girls a possibility of escape which the real world does not, but it is usually at the risk of loss: the young girls know what society expects from them: “If I say ‘I am valuable’ and other people do not say it of me, / I shall be alone, there is no comfort there” (1985, 448). The women in her poems always face an impossible choice, they are in the abject position, always poised between two worlds (fairytale = Semiotic, real = Symbolic), a no-win situation. But they do not give in. If they cannot be accepted on their own terms, they withdraw into their own spheres, many of which sound strange, or even absurd: they disappear into jungles, dark woods, far-off seas, grassy plains; they ride away, sail off over the sea, even enter pictures (see “Deeply Morbid” 1985, 296). In despair at her household chores, the “small lady” is tempted by the witch’s offer to become “a duck on a northern lake” (“The Small Lady”, 471). As a writer, Stevie Smith does not attempt to integrate herself into the given system of poetics and aesthetics of her time, either – into high modernism, for instance. She is on the edge and chooses to stay there and write from there, or from some place inbetween, the place of abjection. Last but not least, Smith voices an ambivalence towards herself in that she performs, but continually questions her own performance, never setting it up as the be all and end all of the world. The last sentence of her essay “My Muse” reads: “The poet is not an important fellow. There will always be another poet” (Smith 1981, 126). With this attitude, she is able to create a critical distance to herself, and it is this distance which in the end saves her. Despite all the surface comedy, freakishness, subversion, transgression, and ambivalence are the outstanding features of Stevie Smith’s poetry and the most characteristic gestures of her style. A closer analysis of the poems will show how these phenomena can be traced in three parameters: the status of the speaker-protagonist, the handling of prosody and poetic form, and the subject matter of the poems.

The Status of the Speaker – The Abject Position Although Stevie Smith’s voice is unmistakable, her œuvre does not present the reader with a strong, unified poetic persona/speaker. Instead, she impersonates a wide range of speakers and voices, including those of animals, often even switching within one poem. In this way she avoids creating a dominant, homogeneous voice, and refuses the master narrative in favour of a more heterogeneous, anti-

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hierarchical one. Many of the poems are dialogic in that either two characters speak (Mary and Eve in “A Dream of Comparison”), or a distanced narrator and a character, or even groups of people (“Not Waving But Drowning”). Even when only one speaker is present, an inner dialogue seems to be going on between an outer voice and a sad, quirky or wistful inner voice as in “In My Dreams”, where the speaker admits how happy and relieved she is to be always “saying goodbye and riding away” but adds “I am glad, I am glad, that my friends don’t know what I think” (Smith 1985, 129). Because of these many masks and voices, the reader never has a feeling of being in touch with an authoritative and consistent voice, but rather with many disparate voices – old, young, male, female, serious, funny – discussing an issue, quarrelling, questioning, commenting, reflecting, revealing, ridiculing. It also becomes clear that nearly all of Stevie Smith’s speaker-characters are abjected, rejected, helpless, bereft, isolated, depressed, disturbed, morbid: the deserted wife who is visited every night by a black man who “comes uninvited. His name is Despair” (“The Sea-widow”, 569), the betrayed woman, desperate to believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that “He loves me so much, my heart is singing” (“Infelice”, 107), the daughter, exhorted by her mother to accept the woman’s lot and “embrace the headache and the crown” (“The Queen and the Young Princess”, 313), the woman whose pain is more than she can bear, begging the doctor “so give me some bromide / And then I will go away for a long time and hide” (“The Doctor”, 105) and, last but not least, the countless speakercharacters who are tired of life and longing for death (“Come Death” (1), 108; Come Death” (2), 571; “Longing for Death Because of Feebleness”, 368; “Oblivion”, 562; “Scorpion”, 513 – to name only a few). These personae speak from the margins, from muted areas and helpless positions (see Showalter 1986, 261). A typical example is the secretary in the probably semi-autobiographical “Deeply Morbid” – one of Smith’s most abject characters: “Deeply morbid deeply morbid was the girl who typed the / letters”, her name was Joan and “at lunchtime / Solitary solitary / She would go and watch the pictures / In the National Gallery / All alone all alone” (1985, 296); or they are disturbed like the “deserter to ill health”, who admits “The world is come upon me, I used to keep it a long way off” (“The Deserter”, 259) and who is now scorned by his friend for being cowardly and giving up the fight. Others are even unable to speak for themselves (“Do take Muriel out / She is looking so glum”, 250; “Drugs made Pauline vague”, 264). Rather than accept the norms and give in gracefully, the characters escape – they ride off: “In my dreams I am always saying

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goodbye and riding away” (“In My Dreams”, 129); they withdraw into worlds of their own, into fairytale spaces: “the dark wood at night” (“I rode with my darling …”, 260), or they resolve to keep their own company: “I shall quite simply never speak to the fellow again” (“The Deserter”, 259). It becomes evident that Smith’s speaker-protagonists are never fully at ease with the language, the discourse, or the conventions of their environment (bourgeois society, suburbia, the church); they are not at home in the world – it even seems like alien territory to them. They long to escape from it and from human society, and, when they do so, like Joan in “Deeply Morbid”, who is sucked into a Turner painting, they are envied: “But I say she’s a lucky one / To walk for ever in that sun” (298). By refusing to establish a coherent, authoritative voice and a stable persona, by confronting the reader with multiple perspectives, conflicting or ambivalent points of view, with ambiguity and disturbed/abject speakers, Stevie Smith evades textual closure and frustrates the natural wish for unambiguous readings. As a result, the reader finds it difficult to identify with her speaker-characters and is unsettled by them rather than being given a feeling of stability and safety.

The Poetic Form – Style and Language When we examine the formal elements of Stevie Smith’s poems, some of them seem so egregiously bad that the question arises can she not or does she not want to, as, for example, in her poem “From the Greek”: “To many men strange fates are given / Beyond remission or recall / But the worst fate of all (tra la) / ‘s to have no fate at all (tra la)” (1985, 31). Is she purposely writing “bad” poetry? Is she incapable of maintaining the rhythm and metre of the lines, of finding apposite rhymes, or is she purposely doing her worst? Why does she not write free verse as so many of her contemporaries did if she finds prosody so difficult? Critics have frequently read Stevie Smith’s odd, jarring, ugly, absurd rhymes, faulty metre and rhythms simply as devices to arouse laughter, seeing her primarily as a writer of humorous, even nonsense verse (see Kristeva’s discussion concerning the disruptive properties of poetic language in Powers of Horror [1982, 133-139]). If we compare her technique to that of England’s great writers of nonsense verse, however, for instance Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, we find a great difference precisely in the attitude to form. Lear and Carroll are great versifiers, meticulous in their attention to prosody in all its variations, whereas Stevie Smith

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manipulates and parodies the literary stance and conventions of ninteenth-century and Romantic poetry. Many of Stevie Smith’s rhymes and rhythms, as well as her handling of metre are distressing to the sensitive ear. In his article “The Art of Sinking in Poetry”, Christopher Ricks goes into great detail on Stevie Smith’s “distinctive [...] ways with rhythm and rhyme” (1991, 205) and especially on her foible for “Simpsonian rhymes”, which rhyme “on the second syllable of a disyllabic word where metre forbids that syllable to carry stress” (206), for instance “waving / drowning”, “moaning / larking” (Smith 1985, 303). Such rhymes are disturbing to our sense of harmony and thus function perfectly as “distress signals” (Ricks 1991, 206), or as a Kristevan language of fear (1982, 38). Ricks points out that one of Stevie Smith’s favourites is “couple / rubble” (see Smith 1985, 174; 207; 415); another egregiously sardonic rhyme is “mother / smother”, emphasized even by the repetition “Ah mother, mother, your tears smother” (248). Many others seem simply amusing: “praevalebit / prevail in a bit” (372), “hippopotamus / lost in the fuss”; “ill-fed / Wilfred” (332), “orthodox / shut in a box” (21), “jungle path / photograph” (425). Very often, these rhymes link together terms which seem incongruous, such as in the eye/half rhyme “womb / bomb” (337). Smith uses zeugma in the same way to yoke two incongruous terms together (as in Donne’s conceits): “embrace the headache and the crown” (303). Other disturbing juxtapositions are the shifts in register between the poetic and the prosaic. The lofty and authoritative statement “[t]his night shall thy soul be required of thee”, a biblical quotation, is transformed into the wistful, tentative question “[w]ill my soul be required of me tonight perhaps?” (513). Because of their incongruity, all of these techniques succeed in alerting the reader to Smith’s underlying message and the distress of her speakers. Her metaphors and images function in the same way; they are surprising, often funny (“Wan / Swan / On the lake / Like a cake / Of soap”, 40), or she chooses dead, over-used metaphors, casting doubt on the sentiments and emotions expressed in these figures and highlighting their lack of meaning for the mid-twentieth century: “Satin-clad, with many a pearl / Is this rich and wretched girl” (214); “forests old and grim” are another favourite and she truly rubs in the cliché in her poem “Nor We of Her to Him” (543), repeating the phrase three times in five lines. Another typical feature of Stevie Smith’s handling of poetic form can be seen in the way she uses metre. Many poems have simple, traditional metric forms such as ballad metre (4/3/4/3) and nursery rhyme jingles, which gives rise to the first impression of

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lightness, harmlessness, even playfulness. Often, metrical devices work as a form of intertextuality in her œuvre in that rhythms and sounds echo the poems of other poets (“Cold as no plea / Yet wild with all negation”, 286) echoes Emily Brontë’s “Cold in the earth – and the deep snow piled above thee”. “My heart leaps up with streams of joy” (542) echoes Wordsworth’s “My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky”. Moreover, “The breast was withdrawn violently / And oh the famishment for me” (344) echoes the last lines of one of Wordsworth’s Lucy poems: “But she is in her grave, and, oh / The difference to me”. References to The Bible, The Book of Common Prayer, nursery rhymes, and popular hymns are also frequent. This creates an eerie feeling of half-recognition, which gnaws at the reader’s mind just below the consciousness level, provoking the question “What does that remind me of?” Many of the more memorable poems, however, demonstrate the unexpected shifts in metre, register, and tone, which seem to be her hallmark. Countless poems set out using a strong, regular metre, which is suddenly converted into a free-running, often conversational line. “Lady Rogue Singleton” is perhaps the most striking example of this technique. Come, wed me, Lady Singleton, And we will have a baby soon And we will live in Edmonton Where all the friendly people run. I could never make you happy, darling, Or give you the baby you want, I would always very much rather, dear, Live in a tent. I am not a cold woman, Henry, But I do not feel for you, What I feel for the elephants and the miasmas And the general view. (194)

This short poem illustrates many of Stevie Smith’s idiosyncratic ways of handling form. There are two speakers. The first stanza resembles ballad metre (though without the typical rhyme scheme) and is particularly fitting for the male speaker, who is offering his dialogue partner an extremely unromantic, though eminently practical, proposal of marriage. His lack of imagination is emphasized by the monotonous and not very skilful rhymes – they all circulate round the sound [o] but are all slightly off-centre. In the second and the third

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stanzas the unconventional lady answers. Abandoning all pretensions of romance and using a rather conversational run-on line with just a hint of a rhyme, she tells him where he gets off. The firmness of her decision is well-conveyed by the shortness of the fourth line in each stanza (only two feet): she would rather live in a tent and admire the general view. The already mentioned poems “The Murderer” (117) and “Scorpion” (513) are also good examples of this unusual technique. The reader’s expectations are always confounded. These shifts within the poem work similarly to transpositions in music. They indicate a change in key/mood in the text and require the reader to reposition him-/herself. In the essay “Too Tired for Words”, Stevie Smith comments on these sudden shifts, which often change the familiar to the unfamiliar: the above-mentioned shifts in tone from the sublime to the ridiculous – words that are “just a bit off-beam” (1981, 111) – seem like Freudian slips which she attributes to tiredness – for instance, in the poem “Duty was His Lodestar” (1985, 255), lodestar becomes lobster. She refers to these slips as “eerie shifts”, and even reveals that “[o]ne may get a poem out of these shifts” (1981, 111). More often than not they give rise to laughter: “sometimes the shifts of tiredness are too eerie by half” (112) and lead to thoughts of despair and death. Such shifts can be interpreted as a means of controlling pain; perhaps the awfulness of life (rejection, desertion, loneliness, loss, despair) can only be borne if we can see it as absurd or merely funny. They certainly evoke in the reader a feeling of being confronted with an uncoordinated, off-centre world view, with odd states of mind, madness, or dream states. Stevie Smith’s attitude to poetic form could be termed iconoclastic; for instance, she frequently sets up poetic parameters in the opening lines of a poem and then proceeds to shatter them. She seems to derive immense pleasure from knocking them down, like stand-up figures in a fairground. Such parameters belong in the Symbolic; they do not fit her own view of the world, do not give expression to her own situation as a single, suburban, middle class, rather eccentric, woman poet. They are therefore inauthentic and have to be reformulated to suit her requirements, perhaps, in other terms, to bring in, or give space to, the Semiotic (see Kristeva 1984). With regard to style and language, Stevie Smith takes great liberties with both, often stretching language to its limits. If a word does not exist she coins one (as, for example, famishment). If a line does not scan, she uses an ungrammatical form: “We said: She must have took him off” (Smith 1985, 543), “Oh why should I bear a babe from my womb / To be broke in pieces by the hydrogen bomb” (337). Such

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lines also serve to characterize a speaker or to place him/her socially. Sometimes she resorts to old-fashioned slang: “Poor chap, he always loved larking” (303), which also serves as a means of characterization. Her tone, which often changes within a poem, is sometimes lofty and authoritative, but more frequently deadpan, matter of fact, disillusioned, wistful, and even abject: “Scorpion so wishes to be gone” (513). All in all, Smith’s seemingly artless poetry displays considerable technical sophistication, seen primarily in her ambiguity and ambivalence and her odd juxtapositions of words, forms, and inappropriate ideas, all of which decentre the readers and force them to reposition themselves, to ascribe new meanings, or at least rethink the old ones. The unorthodox way in which she handles poetic form, style, and language, her pleasure in breaking the rules of prosody, her unexpected shifts in register and tone, her linguistic deviations from the norm, give rise to incongruity and discord and are thus unsettling, even distressing. Her shifts are always surprising and often seem inappropriate, even heretical – her funny poems are sad, her serious poems are funny. They present the viewpoint of someone who does not feel at home in the world, like the woman condemned to die at dawn in “The Hostage”, who abjectly admits: “Even as a child, said the lady, I recall in my pram / Wishing it was over and done with” (325).

The Subject Matter The majority of Stevie Smith’s most memorable poems, even the funny ones, present abject topics – primarily death, the most abject topic of all, and the related topics of suicide, fear, and rejection. Readers of Stevie Smith’s poetry cannot help but notice its “deathwards” slant (Dick 1971, 48), an aspect critics draw attention to. Sternlicht suggests that her major subjects, particularly in the late works, are “disintegration and death” (1991, 71). Stevie Smith herself commented again and again on the fact that death was her primary preoccupation, and she is particularly explicit about it in “What Poems Are Made Of”. The essay begins by listing the things that inspire her and give her pleasure – colours, the suburb where she lives, the parks, the city, the sea, the countryside. She goes on to tell how she loves to watch the birds, the animals, and the children, but then, in a typical Stevie Smith shift, she adds “and to think how fortunate I am they are not mine” (Smith 1981, 128). She then asks the rhetorical question:


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Why are so many of my poems about death, if I am having such an enjoyable time all the time? Partly because I am haunted by the fear of what might have happened if I had not been able to draw back in time from the husband-wiveschildren and pet animals situation in which I surely should have failed. (128)

Quoting Seneca, she comments explicitly on her fear of life and her love of death: “I think if there were no death, life would be more than flesh and blood could bear” (129). And in one of her poems she writes, “My heart goes out to my Creator in love / Who gave me Death, as end and remedy” (Smith 1985, 368). She also referred to this fear of life and love of death in talks and interviews. In a much quoted conversation with her friend Kay Dick she says “being alive is like being in enemy territory” (1971, 45), whereas being dead is like feeling at home. Stevie Smith’s idea of death and the state of being dead can be deduced from her many death poems, but it never becomes absolutely clear: going off on a solitary journey, disappearing, riding away into a place that cannot be named or described – an empty space, a nirvana, a miasma. Words fail when it comes to describing the state exactly; it is always a place – an open space, grass (park), the sky, an empty beach, the sea stretching to the horizon, the forest – and, perhaps most important, one where she is entirely alone. A few lines from “Scorpion” illustrate this particularly well: I should like my soul to be required of me, so as To waft over grass till it comes to the blue sea I am very fond of grass, I always have been, but there must Be no cow, person or house to be seen. Sea and grass must be quite empty Other souls can find somewhere else. (1985, 513)

Some of these pictures are reminiscent of corny video clips: the lone cowboy riding off into the setting sun, a solitary sailing boat disappearing over the horizon. Others bring to mind powerful literary images, especially images of isolation and emptiness – King Lear alone on the heath, Frankenstein’s monster disappearing into the desolate, icy wastes: “[H]e was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance” (Shelley [1818] 1994, 191). Such images are chosen when words fail; they are examples of what Kristeva calls “semantic fuzziness” (1982, 191). A typical example of the diffuse writing Stevie Smith uses when describing death is the poem “Oblivion”: “It was so sweet in my oblivion / There was a sweet

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mist wrapped me round about / And I trod in a sweet and milky sea, knee deep” (1985, 562). Death is, broadly speaking, leaving the world, escaping. It seems to offer rest, relief, solitude, and freedom. Sometimes it is referred to as a return back – but it is never quite clear to where. In the philosophical dialogue between Eve and Mary in “A Dream of Comparison”, Eve wishes for death while Mary loves life: “ ‘Oh to be Nothing’ ”, said Eve, ‘oh for a / Cessation of consciousness’ ”, whereas Mary paradoxically states: “ ‘I love Life, I would fight to the death for it’ ”. In Eve’s terms, “Nothing” is a return to where you were “ ‘before you were born’ ” (314). In Smith’s own words “perhaps what one wants is simply a release from sensation, from all consciousness for ever” (Smith “Too Tired for Words” 1981, 113). In “Deeply Morbid”, the girl is sucked into a Turner painting – a seascape, full of sunlight – where, all alone, “She went upon the painted shore / And there she walks for ever more” (Smith 1985, 298). In other poems, death welcomes the speaker “home”, whereby what home is is again only a vague idea. Stevie Smith certainly does not harbour the Christian notion of resurrection and eternal life but rather mistrusts Christianity’s solutions, as she makes clear in the darkly funny poem “Mrs Simpkins”. Bored with life, Mrs. Simpkins becomes a spiritualist, and, at her first séance, hears from those who have “crossed over” (21) that nothing changes: “death isn’t a passing away / It’s just a carrying on with friends and relations and brightness” (22). When she tells her husband the good news that death is just “a great reunion” (22), he cannot bear the thought and shoots himself. It is typical that many of the poems about death are rather funny. In a letter to a friend, Stevie Smith explains the genesis of “Scorpion”, which: “though rooted in utter despair has alas perhaps come out funny, or rather funny” (qtd. in Spalding 1988, 294). Her biographer, Frances Spalding, sees it as “another instance of her ability to metamorphose into poetry the miseries of her existence” (1988, 294). In many poems, death is personified and invoked as a friend, as, for example in “Come Death” (1) and “Come Death” (2) (Smith 1985, 108, 571). In “Do take Muriel out”, the speaker is addressing a prospective suitor, and only at the end does it become clear that the suitor is death and the venue not a bar but “the blasted heath”: Do take Muriel out Although your name is Death She will not complain When you dance her over the blasted heath. (250)

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Death also turns out to be the lover in “Tender Only to One”, which reads like a childish game of “he loves me he loves me not”. Only in the last line does the speaker reveal who the lover is: “His name, his name is Death” (93). Sometimes death’s words are ceremonious, evoking images of the apocalypse: “This night thy soul shall be required of thee” (“Scorpion”, 513), or he is described in traditional, poetic terms like “quiet death”, “sweet death”, “kind death”, “bitter death” (454-455), and conventionally associated with poppy and sleep. In other poems, death is treated in an off-hand way: the lady condemned to die at dawn in “The Hostage” feels guilty because she admits she has always wanted to die and always wished “it was over and done with” (325). In a typical Stevie Smith twist, the priest hearing her confession absolves her with the words: “Meanwhile, since you want to die and have to, you may go on feeling elated” (325). In “Voice from the Tomb” (1), which the poet hears in a nightmare, the voice categorically states: “[I]n Death’s clime / There’s no pen, paper, notion, / And no Time” (461). To sum up, the diffuse writing, the limitless spaces, the timelessness, the isolation and feeling of non-individuation, all evoke the notion of Kristeva’s Semiotic and the wish to return to a place of jouissance and wholeness, where there is no lack. Yet Smith refuses to allow herself to fall back into this completely – however tempting it may seem. Again and again her speakers break the illusion and come back down to earth again, which is not to say that the language signifies a return to the Symbolic, with all its demands of coherence, order and closure. She avoids landing in either realm. Instead she positions herself somewhere in-between, where she creates and defends her own space, never allowing the reader to be sure whether she is “waving” or “drowning”. This seems to be the only tolerable position. The notion of death as escape and refuge explains Stevie Smith’s attitude to suicide. It was always an alternative and this belief seems to have made life tolerable: life can only be borne if one always has the option of ending it. This idea is expressed again and again in the poems and she had no inhibitions about expressing it in her essays and interviews. In the essay “Too Tired for Words”, Smith talks of her frequent spells of melancholia, tiredness, and despair and the comfort she derives from the knowledge that suicide is always a viable choice: “It is then that the great thought of death comes to puff one up for comfort. For however feeble one may seem, [...] Death lies at one’s command, and this is a very invigorating thought and a very proud thought too [...] – commanding the great god Thanatos” (1981, 112).

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Stevie Smith’s ambivalent attitude to writing as a means of fending off death through compensating loss, yet at the same time also as a medium for celebrating death, echoes Kristeva’s ambivalent thesis from Black Sun. The possibility of ending her life seems to have enabled her to live with her fear of life and to face up to it stoically. Voicing the fear through her speaker-characters was her way of coping with it, even if the fearful creature is only a dog, as in “O Pug”. The speaker is trying to comfort the dog, who is so desperate from lack of love and existential fear that “panic walks” in his eyes. She seems to identify with the dog’s plight for the poem ends with the exclamation: “O Pug [...] / How one’s heart goes out to you!” (Smith 1985, 548). In poems such as “Harold’s Leap”, Stevie Smith expresses her admiration for those who commit suicide despite their fear. Although afraid of heights, Harold “felt he should try”, and so “He leapt from one rock to the other / And fell to the sea’s smother”. The speaker concludes “Although he succeeded in doing nothing but die / [...] It was a brave thing to do” (233). For her, fear is simply inherent in the human condition, so it must be confronted bravely. She summed this up in the words: “For I said, if you cry for fear you are an abject character” (Smith qtd. in Couzyn 1985, 35). Stevie Smith’s strategy seems to have worked. In 1953, at a peculiarly low point in her life, she attempted suicide at work and suffered a nervous breakdown; in the end, though, she lived her time out to its natural end, dying in hospital at the age of sixty-eight, practically bereft of speech due to a brain tumour, but writing poetry almost to the last. Critics frequently point out that Stevie Smith’s œuvre does not develop, that there is little difference between the early poems and those written at the end of her life (see Larkin “Good-bye” 1991, 115). She corroborates this impression herself when she says “I don’t think my poems have changed very much since I started writing” (Smith qtd. in Orr 1966, 227). Nevertheless, the collection Scorpion, the last poems of which were written shortly before she died, seems to provide a culmination of sorts. Sanford Sternlicht remarks that it “bundles up the iterative themes of her poetry” and that she finally “reconciles and blends her poetic voices: the girl child and adolescent; the cynical, lonely woman; and the skeptical philosopher” (1990, 98). In her study of female suicides in About Chinese Women (1977), Kristeva states that when the subject fails in her “desperate attempts to identify with the symbolic paternal order, [...] death quietly moves in” (Kristeva qtd. in Moi 1986, 157). Unlike other women writers of her time – Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, even Virginia Woolf – Stevie Smith seems to have found a coping

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style that saved her from ending her own life. Part of this is undoubtedly due to the way she developed her own strategies of handling language and poetic form, but perhaps the most important factor was that she learned to accept her marginality and even to make a virtue out of it. Realizing early in her career that she would never find a place in the mainstream, she withdrew to the margin, thus avoiding all head-on confrontation. She chose her place in a no-man’s land “on the dangerous frontier between the logical and the illogical, conscious and unconscious, madness and sanity” (Wheeler 1998, 127) and she remained in it until the end, despite the anxiety and isolation it involved and the suffering it caused her. As Kristeva points out in her theory of marginality, the margin is an ambiguous place; it is both an outer edge, a frontier which protects what it surrounds, but at the same time it has access to whatever lies outside and beyond it (see Moi 1985, 164). As in abjection, inside and outside are not clearly separate and defined. In an interview by Peter Orr, Stevie Smith speaks about her isolation as a person and her marginal position in the literary establishment. Rambling on in her own inimical fashion, she admits: I like company very much. Of course, I live rather alone, really. I live with an aunt who is ninety. [...] [B]ut we live alone [...]. I don’t know many poets. I know some novelists. But most of my friends are just friends and I don’t really know what they are. [...] I like to meet writers. I don’t know where they meet in London. I mean they don’t go and sit on the pavement cafés. But of course the pavements are so awfully cold. I don’t know where they meet. I think you must be friends with them to begin with. (1966, 230)

Although she was clearly ambivalent about her isolated situation and although it often caused her considerable pain, both as a poet and as a woman, she never left it. Contemporaries describe her as gladly emerging from her shabby home in Palmer’s Green to stay with friends or to dazzle on the London literary circuit, but she always returned home where “she disappeared, like an animal into its lair”. (Spalding 1988, 249). Her stable domestic situation and her mental habits seem to have provided her with a safe position from which she could defy society and the literary establishment through her strange way of life, her eccentric behaviour, and her idiosyncratic novels and poems. As I mentioned earlier, her home, from which she derived such strength, was “a house of female habitation”, and perhaps this links it to Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic disposition and semiotic mobility (see Lechte 1990, 140, 157), which are defined as energy drives that have their origins in the maternal and are “present in and potentially disruptive of […] language and representation” (Lechte

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1990, 157). Her early attempts to publish her poetry made her acutely aware of the potential censorship and the general cultural hostility towards women’s achievements in patriarchal areas, in her case in the field of poetry. In fact, she could only get her first poems published by smuggling them into her novels. Stevie Smith makes no bones about her attitude to these gender problems in her three novels, but in the poems they are only addressed obliquely. In the “Summation” to his study of Stevie Smith, Sanford Sternlicht says: Stevie’s childhood, particularly the loss of her father’s presence and love, and her long, stable, supportive, symbiotic relationship with her Aunt Margaret formed the foundation of the emotional structure from which she mounted her attack on life, her taunting of God, and her revenge on men. (1990, 103; my italics)

The phrase “mounting an attack on life” seems to be particularly appropriate to describe Stevie Smith’s poetic œuvre. She mounts her attack by persistently uncovering what Kristeva terms “horror”, and then undercutting it with ridicule, pastiche, and parody. By keeping herself on the edge in this way, she transcends the pain, or distances herself from it through stoicism or laughter, thus enabling herself to carry on despite her physical alienation and anxieties. By choosing her position on the margins of life and of the literary world, which she knew she was never really part of, Stevie Smith seems to have found a way of coping with her situation. She realized she did not fit into the times, but with amazing bravado declared: “I’m as much part of our time as everybody else. The times will just have to enlarge themselves to make room for me, won’t they” (Smith qtd. in Orr 1966, 229). She certainly made no attempt to adapt to “the times”, disdaining any attempt at integration. Instead, she chose to act against the accepted norms: in her life by refusing all the traditional female roles, and in her work by continually writing at odds with poetics and tradition. By emphasizing the horror of being in her poetry, she copes with it through abjection. Stevie Smith seems to have known instinctively that she was writing from beyond the pale, from what Kristeva called a foreign land: “In women’s writing, language seems to be seen from a foreign land” (qtd. in Marks and de Courtivron 1980, 166), but she braves the danger and even turns it to her own advantage. From her point of attack on the fringe, Stevie Smith is able to avoid the either/or of the Semiotic/Symbolic bind, which demands either regression or conformity. Instead she takes up her position on the borders of these two economies, or in the gap between them, developing a signifying practice that ceaselessly oscillates from one to the other but never

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gives in to either. This is the place of abjection – a dangerous place where the drives “have complete and uninhibited reign” (Lechte 1990, 159) – but at the same time a place of refuge and protection. A place where Stevie Smith could find herself and develop her unique voice.

Works Cited Barbera, Jack, and William McBrien, eds. 1981. Me Again: Uncollected Writings of Stevie Smith. London: Virago. Civello, Catherine A. 1995. “Stevie Smith’s Ecriture Féminine: Pre-oedipal Desires and Wartime Realities”. Mosaic 28.2:109-122. —. 1997. Patterns of Ambivalence. Columbia: Camden House. Couzyn, Jeni. 1985. The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women: Eleven British Writers. Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books. Dick, Kay. 1971. Ivy and Stevie. London: Duckworth. Hughes, Ted, and Frances McCullough, eds. 1982. The Journals of Sylvia Plath. New York: Dial Press. Kristeva, Julia. [1974] 1977. About Chinese Women, translated by Anita Barrows. London: Boyars. —. [1979] 1981. “Women’s Time”, translated by Alice Jardine and Harry Blake. Signs 7.1:13-35. —. [1980] 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. —. [1974] 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language, translated by Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 1985. “The Speaking Subject”. In On Signs, edited by Marshall Blonsky, 210-220. Oxford: Blackwell. —. [1987] 1989. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Larkin, Philip. 1991. “Frivolous and Vulnerable”. In Sternlicht, 75-81. —. 1991. “Stevie, Good-bye”. In Sternlicht, 114-118. Lechte, John. 1990. Julia Kristeva. London: Routledge. Marks, Elaine, and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. 1980. New French Feminisms: An Anthology. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Moi, Toril. 1985. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Methuen. —, ed. 1986. The Kristeva Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Orr, Peter, ed. 1966. The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets Conducted by Hilary Morrish, Peter Orr, John Press and Ian Scott-Kilvert. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Pumphrey, Martin. 1991. “Play, Fantasy, and Strange Laughter: Stevie Smith’s Uncomfortable Poetry”. In Sternlicht, 97-113. Ricks, Christopher. 1991. “Stevie Smith: The Art of Sinking in Poetry”. In Sternlicht, 196-210. Rose, Jacqueline. 1991. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. London: Virago.

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Shelley, Mary. [1818] 1994. Frankenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Showalter, Elaine. 1986. “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness”. In The New Feminist Criticism, edited by Elaine Showalter, 243-270. London: Virago. Smith, Stevie. [1938] 1981. “My Muse”. In Barbera and McBrien, 125-126. —. [1956] 1981. “Too Tired for Words”. In Barbera and McBrien, 111-118. —. [1969] 1981. “What Poems are Made of”. In Barbera and McBrien, 127-133. —. 1985. The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith, edited by James MacGibbon. London: Penguin. Spalding, Frances. 1988. Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography. London: Faber. Sternlicht, Sanford. 1990. Stevie Smith. Boston: Twayne. —. 1991. In Search of Stevie Smith. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Wheeler, Kathleen. 1998. A Critical Guide to Twentieth Century Women Novelists. Oxford: Blackwell.


American Environmentalism and Encounters with the Abject: T. Coraghessan Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth

Sylvia Mayer In A Friend of the Earth, T. C. Boyle’s satire about radical environmentalism, seventy-five-year-old Tyrone – Ty – Tierwater tells the story of his life as an environmentalist. Tierwater lives as the keeper of a pop star’s private zoo on the American west coast in the year 2026, at a time when the biosphere has collapsed, when the climate is characterized either by uninterrupted rainstorms or by excessive heat, when the ozone layer is gone, when many animal and plant species are extinct, and, as a consequence of all this, when the basis for human diet has been dramatically altered. Thirty-five years earlier, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tierwater had been part of the radical environmental organization Earth Forever! for which he had performed ultimately unsuccessful acts of monkeywrenching, of ecosabotage – mainly against lumber companies. There are several devices that indicate that Boyle’s novel displays a postmodern, parodic mode of dealing with environmentalist icons and issues: these are, for example, the novel’s title, its ecologically dystopian setting, and the intertextual reference (Earth Forever!) to the contemporary environmentalist group Earth First! Additionally, the references to the history of American environmentalism (to nineteenth- and twentieth-century icons Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Edward Abbey, for instance), to the deep ecology movement, to politically influential texts such as Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, or to the spotted owl as an issue of heated political debate, also testify to the novel’s critical assessment of contemporary U.S. environmentalism. The novel presents Tierwater’s account in a sequence of chapters that alternate between the 1980s and 1990s on the one hand and the years 2025 and 2026 on the other. The chapters that focus on the situation in 2025-26 are presented by Ty as an autodiegetic narrator, while the chapters that present the events of the years 1989 to 1997 are focalized by him as well, yet related by a heterodiegetic narrator. This change in narrative perspective is one narrative means that points toward the novel’s concern with questions of subjectivity and identity formation. Another one is the multilayered web of intertextual references which foregrounds the protagonist’s subjectivity as

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constituted in discourse. Still another narrative means of highlighting issues of subjectivity and identity formation are Tierwater’s frequent descriptions of experiences of disgust and loathing, which foreground the significance of the abject and of the psychic strategy of abjection. In Powers of Horror Julia Kristeva develops her psychoanalytic theory of how the experience of the abject functions both in the processes of constituting subjectivity and identity and in the processes of creating and maintaining social and cultural systems. The abject can be defined as an “other”, not as an object, which provokes fear, which threatens, which calls into question the boundaries on which notions of self and society are founded – boundaries that are articulated in the realm of symbolic signification, but are again and again challenged by the forces of the realm of semiotic signification. Most conspicuously, the abject manifests itself in phenomena such as “a piece of filth, waste, or dung” (Kristeva 1982, 2) that threaten the body’s assumed cleanliness, purity, and health; it is experienced spontaneously as horror, disgust, and loathing. Abjection is part of the dynamics of subject formation, of the process of constituting subjectivity. It can be regarded as the psychic strategy that a subject uses to fight the destabilizing impact of the abject, to reaffirm his or her identity, and to avert the abject’s ultimate effect, the confrontation with death: “[R]efuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death” (3; emphasis in the original). Ty Tierwater’s frequent exposure to experiences of disgust and loathing, which are articulated in his frequent – usually ironic, sometimes sarcastic – remarks about these experiences, show that Boyle created a protagonist whose subjectivity is strongly marked by encounters with the abject. Irony and sarcasm as responses to experiences of disgust and loathing signal that he needs to position himself at a distance from threats to bodily and psychic integrity, that the boundaries of his identity are strongly challenged. His simultaneous fear of and fascination with the abject shows a preoccupation with integrating these experiences into a notion of self and into a concept of the society and culture he lives in. The necessity to reconsider notions of self and society and the inevitability of encounters with the abject are caused by the dramatic ecological changes that have brought about the hostile conditions of living in the years 2025-26. At stake in the novel are thus questions of subjectivity and identity formation in the context of an ecological dystopia. By employing abjection as a crucial narrative means, A

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Friend of the Earth draws attention to the possible effects of ecocatastrophe both on the single human being’s sense of self and on the dynamics of symbolic and semiotic signification. Moreover, Boyle’s choice of a male protagonist and the fact that Tierwater’s descriptions of experiences of disgust and loathing are frequently related to the presentation of male characters in the novel suggest that different concepts of masculinity are also at stake in the process of this environmentalist’s identity formation. In the first part of this essay, I shall thus delineate how A Friend of the Earth conceptualizes human subjectivity and identity in an ecological dystopia. Confrontation with the abject shows that drastically changed environmental conditions destabilize both bodily integrity and received notions of the self. In the second part of the essay, I shall focus on how Boyle’s text employs experiences of the abject for the purpose of addressing issues of male identity in the context of American environmentalism. On the first pages of his account, in the “Prologue” that delineates the situation in the year 2025, Ty Tierwater introduces himself as someone whose conditions of living keep confronting him with experiences that challenge common notions of cleanliness and bodily comfort. Ty recalls feeding the animals in Maclovio Pulchris’s zoo and cleaning up after one of the regularly occurring heavy storms. He remarks that “there are trees down everywhere and the muck is tugging at my gum boots like a greedy sucking mouth, a mouth that’s going to pull me all the way down eventually, but not yet” (Boyle 2001, 1). About the atmosphere that has been created by the weather he comments: “The sky is black – not gray, black – and it can’t be past three in the afternoon. Everything is still, and I smell it like a gathering cloud, death, the death of everything, hopeless and stinking and wasted” (2). Even the thought of the alternative to storm, rain, and darkness – namely sunshine – cannot provide him with a moment of relief, because, so Ty ponders, once the sun comes back it will “pound us with all its unfiltered melanomic might” (2). Altered environmental conditions spell pollution and, more often than not, bear the threat of lethal disease – several times Ty mentions the mucosa epidemic which had spread three years before and killed thousands of Americans, including his third wife, Lori, and which in the year 2025 is rumoured to have once more befallen the American east coast (see, for example, 72). Experiences of disgust and loathing are, however, not limited to confrontations with weather conditions outside. The effects of climate change have also penetrated the places inhabited by human beings, and they have made them almost uninhabitable. Ty’s home is a two-

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room house, of which the storm has “torn off the gutters and threequarters of the shingles” (6). There are smells of mold – what else? – and rats. The rats – an R-selected species, big litters, highly mobile, selected for any environment – are thriving, multiplying like there’s no tomorrow [...]. They have an underlying smell, a furtive smell, old sweat socks balled up on the floor of the high-school locker room, drains that need cleaning, meat sauce dried onto the plate and then reliquefied with a spray of water. It’s a quiet stink, nothing like the hyena when she’s wet, which is all the time now, and I forgive the rats that much. (6)

In the restaurant where Ty meets his former wife, Andrea, he is greeted by another insulting smell, by “a funk of body heat and the kind of humidity you’d expect from the Black Hole of Calcutta” (9). In the course of their meal they have to put up with increasing dampness since the heavy rain starts to seep into the building from whichever direction possible. These many insults to the senses show that ecological changes have dramatically altered received patterns of sensual experience and that Tierwater and his contemporaries are constantly forced to pay closest attention to weather conditions. The body is exposed to dirt, wetness, stink, and prolonged phases of darkness; there is hardly any relief for the senses. The permeating quality of these experiences challenges the boundaries between body and outside world and asks for their redrawing. The fact that they surface so frequently in Tierwater’s account shows that Boyle’s protagonist has not yet been able to accommodate to these changes, that he is preoccupied with integrating them into a new notion of self. He suffers from a tension between, on the one hand, bodily memories of former times, which can be regarded as “cleaner” and “healthier”, and, on the other hand, the experiences of the present moment of ecological disaster, which is characterized by the abject threatening by means of the spectres of disease and death. Moreover, Ty’s remarks signal that he and his contemporaries in the year 2025 can no longer rely on the regularity of seasonal change or the day/night cycle which were still intact in the 1980s and 1990s. The fact that all these sensual assaults invade the home shows that its function to provide shelter and, as Gaston Bachelard argues, a space for dreaming, a space for the imagination to muster the strength necessary to perform healthily and successfully in the world (see Bachelard [1958] 1994), has been largely lost. In 2025 both body and mind have to adapt to this loss of received temporal patterns and spatial refuge. The collapse of the biosphere calls for new

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anthropological conceptualizations and for a new conceptualization of the relation between nature and culture. The concepts of nature, culture, and the human that have dominated Western societies’ ontological and ethical thought as well as the socioeconomic practices founded upon them, have been structured by dualistic thought since the beginning of the modern era and the emergence of the modern sciences in the Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (see Pepper 1997, 123-165). According to ecological philosopher Val Plumwood, the root dualism of nature versus culture, which regards nature as strictly separate from and inferior to culture, has spawned a whole system of dichotomies, among them matter versus reason – or body versus mind –, female versus male, and master versus slave (see 1997, 41-68). In the ontological system that has dominated modern Western history, the human being is positioned as separate from the rest of nature. It is conceptualized as an essentially rational, and, by implication, cultural, that is non-natural, being. The ethical systems, which operate on such an ontological premise, are strictly interpersonal and instrumentalist systems, which is to say that they do not address the question of expanding the moral universe in terms of including (parts of) nonhuman nature and that they neglect addressing the problem of a finite nonhuman resource base (for an overview of the development within the field of practical philosophy and environmental ethics see Krebs 1999 and, for the Anglo-American context, Nash 1989). In contrast to this dualistic paradigm, ecologically oriented ontological and ethical thought has proceeded from the premise that nature and culture are interrelated and that their relationship is characterized by reciprocity. The anthropological notion that follows from this premise is that human beings are a part of nature and dependent on it, that they are not only firmly rooted in processes of cultural production and consumption, but also in ecological processes that involve both the human and the nonhuman world. In this context Plumwood develops the concept of the “ecological self” (1997, 142), a notion of the self as relational or mutual, which recognizes not only the human other, but also the natural other “as another self, a distinct centre of agency and resistance, whose needs, goals and intrinsic value place ethical limits on the self and must be considered and respected” (145). The concept of the relational self, the concept of the human being as part of nature, as body and mind, emerges in A Friend of the Earth most significantly by means of foregrounding sensual experience in the constitution of subjectivity – sensual experience that illustrates the importance of the strategy of abjection. In many passages Boyle, for

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example, uses the depiction of experiences of the old body, the sick body, the body in pain, and the body as a victim of pollution or of insufficient diet for the purpose of rejecting the concept of the human as an essentially rational being. His protagonist Ty Tierwater thematizes his failing body again and again: “I’m an old man. My teeth hurt, my knee hurts, my back – and there’s a dull inchoate intimation of pain just starting to make its presence known deep in the intertwined muscles of my stitched-up forearm” (72). In another passage, set in November 2025, he has to spend an extended period of time on the toilet. The seventy-five-year-old man has resigned himself to the effects of age – such as constipation – and he calmly accepts that he has “to sit here waiting it out, […] my own familiar odor rising poisonously about me” (75). While sitting there, he reflects on the deaths of various loved ones. He remembers the death of his uncle Sol at a moment when they were working together on his Safari ranch in San Diego, “both up to our elbows in urine-drenched straw and the exotic shit of exotic beasts” (72-73), and he remembers the death of his third wife Lori, “the mucosa so thick in her lungs and throat she couldn’t draw a breath” (73). These death-related memories that originate in disgust-provoking sensual perceptions and the realization of the effects of old age on his own body all demonstrate the power of the abject for both the constitution of subjectivity and for the process of identity formation. Moreover, the fact that they make Ty sneer at the “promise” of the medical sciences to be able to cure “all disease” (73) indicates that he has long given up on notions of scientific and technological progress that are rooted in the West’s dualistic thought and have been foundational for its social and economic development in the modern era. Ty has relinquished notions that are, ultimately, founded in the Baconian creed of power over nature and its accompanying instrumentalist ethics. In the years 2025-26, both nonhuman nature and human nature – as concretized in the body – have reasserted themselves. The changes in local, regional, and global ecosystems have led to hostile living conditions and to the acknowledgement of nature’s ultimately superior power; the natural environment has defied human aspiration to exert total control, and the body still proves to be beyond the total control of the mind. Ironically, the majority of American society in the years 2025 and 2026 does not acknowledge these facts. Ty’s frequent descriptions of his contemporaries who still pursue twentieth century Western consumerist attitudes and practices in spite of the drastically limited resource availability demonstrate that insight does not even prevail in such ecologically dystopian conditions, in a situation that

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has proved environmentalists’ earlier warnings to be correct. These observations underline the weakness of the human mind and parody a concept of the human that regards rationality as its central defining feature. Ty’s realization of how little the mind is able to achieve and how wrong it is to define the human as separate from the rest of nature also becomes explicit in his many rejections of the absolute ontological gap between human and animal. When Ty introduces himself, “I’m an animal man” (1), at the beginning of the novel, he seems to refer only to his job as zookeeper. In the course of the novel, however, the foregrounding of sensual perception, of bodily experience, and the repeated comparisons of human beings and animals make clear that he no longer accepts the conceptual dualism. He remains aware of differences between human and animal, but rejects the hierarchical dualist notion that legitimizes absolute human domination. His remark “I’m an animal man” must ultimately be understood as an acknowledgment of the close evolutionary relations between the species. Another comparison of human and animal nature that Ty makes again illustrates Boyle’s reliance on the narrative strategy of employing encounters with the abject. Memories of prison emerge in a situation when Ty is again preoccupied with the problem of constipation: My guts are rumbling: gas, that’s what it is. If I lie absolutely still, it’ll work through all the anfractuous turns and twists down there and find its inevitable way to the point of release. And what am I thinking? That’s methane gas, a natural pollutant, same as you get from landfills, feedlots and termite mounds, and it persists in the atmosphere for ten years, one more fart’s worth of global warming. I’m a mess and I know it. Jewish guilt, Catholic guilt, enviro-ecocapitalistico guilt: I can’t even expel gas in peace. Of course, guilt itself is a luxury. In prison we didn’t concern ourselves overmuch about environmental degradation or the rights of nature or anything else, for that matter. They penned us up like animals, and we shat and pissed and jerked off and blew hurricanes out our rectums, and if the world collapsed as a result, all the better: at least we would be out. (106-107)

With its focus on the body’s excretions and on the link between human and animal this passage rejects the human-animal dualism as it firmly locates both within the realm of organic nature. By reflecting on the effects of methane gas, which is produced by both human and animal organisms, Ty depicts humans as well as animals as participants of the biochemical, ecosystemic dynamics. Finally, in addition to rejecting the human-animal dualism and to expressing a critique of a rationalist ontology, the passage critically

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addresses a third issue that is of central significance to the novel. It provides one instance of critical reflection upon manifestations of U.S. radical environmentalism in the twentieth century. By recalling that during his time in prison any concern about the environment had vanished, Tierwater calls into question the soundness of the motivation of a radical environmentalist. Ty went to prison after committing several acts of monkeywrenching and after spending a month in the wilderness with his wife Andrea – naked, and without provisions or tools. Both his acts of ecosabotage and his immersion in the wilderness point toward the motivational force of the principles of Deep Ecology. In contrast to what they call “shallow ecology”, deep ecologists try to transcend an anthropocentric environmentalist focus on problems of pollution and resource depletion in favour of a biocentric stance that attributes intrinsic value to human and nonhuman nature alike, a stance that no longer centres on the human being and his or her interests. For deep ecologists the principle of the primacy of all living things has led to emphasize issues of wilderness, population, and industrialization. They argue that a new kind of philosophy and new forms of social action are now required to reverse the course of the urban and industrial order and to challenge and ultimately eliminate or unmake a technology-based industrial civilization. (Gottlieb 1993, 195-196; see also Naess 1995 and Devall 1994)

Ty’s recollection of losing all interest in environmentalist issues while serving his prison sentence demonstrates that his role as an “ecowarrior” was motivated less by strongly internalized deep ecological principles than by feeling deeply wounded and wronged by the events that followed the failed protest action against the lumber company in the Siskiyou in 1989 – by his humiliation at the hands of the police and the courts, and by his loss of custody of his daughter Sierra. In other passages of A Friend of the Earth such critical assessment of radical environmentalist stances is tied to conflicting concepts of masculinity. Many of Ty’s recollections of his time as a member of Earth Forever! reveal that his identity as an environmentalist was formed in confrontation with a concept of masculinity that Andrew Ross has called the concept of the “ecological superman” (1995, 167). The ecological superman is one of the latest manifestations of what historian Michael Kimmel has shown to be the most powerful concept of masculinity in the U.S. since the beginning of the nineteenth century, namely that of the self-made man, who according to sociologist Erving Goffman, usually bears the following attributes: “young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant,

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father, of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports” (qtd. in Kimmel 1996, 5). Ross argues that this concept of masculinity has always supported white male dominance and has drawn its strength from its ability to “shape-change and morph the contours of masculinity to fit with shifts in the social climate” (1995, 172). The ecological superman is one of the latest transformations of this type of masculinity, and it has been characterized by its appropriation of the moral power of environmentalism. The ecological superman in A Friend of the Earth is Teo van Sparks, one of the leading activists of Earth Forever!, who conforms to many of the attributes listed by Kimmel. Tierwater fails to conform to most of these attributes – he is, for example, of Jewish-Irish Catholic background, he has failed in securing his father’s business achievements, and in terms of looks and a record in sports he is no match for Teo. Since he does not fulfil the criteria of the successful self-made man, he regards van Sparks as a rival right from the beginning. The tension between the two men, and the tension between the two different types of masculinity they embody, becomes visible in one of the very first passages in which Tierwater introduces Teo. Here, Boyle again uses the narrative strategy of presenting an encounter with the abject: This is Teo, Teo van Sparks, aka Liverhead. Eight years ago he was standing out on Rodeo Drive, in front of Sterling’s Fur Emporium, with a slab of calf’s liver sutured to his shaved head. He’d let the liver get ripe – three or four days or so – and then he’d tear it off his head and lay it at the feet of a silvery old crone in chinchilla or a starlet parading through the door in white fox. Next day he’d be back with a fresh slab of meat. Now he’s a voice on the E.F.! circuit (Eco-Agitator, that’s what his card says), thirty-one years old, a weightlifter with the biceps, triceps, lats and abs to prove it, and there isn’t anything about the natural world he doesn’t know. At least not that he’ll admit. (2001, 22)

By confronting the customers of Sterling’s Fur Emporium with processes that accompany the manufacture of leather and fur goods – namely the death and biological decomposition of the animals used – Teo tries to interrupt the successful performance of the strategy of abjection. He tries to further the case of animal rights activism by profiting from the effect that the customers are caught unawares, that they are shocked by the sight and the smells of the process of rotting. Teo’s purpose is to challenge their notions of self by exposing them to the abject – ideally in such a way that will make them refrain from wearing leather and fur products in the future. The fact, moreover, that Ty recalls this scene more than thirty years after the event testifies to

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the possible impact of such an experience. At the same time, however, it points toward his strained relationship with this successful environmentalist that is affecting his sense of self even after Teo’s death. His description bespeaks a response to Teo that is a mixture of disgust, fascination, and admiration; it indicates the challenge that the existence both of this man and the concept of masculinity that he embodied meant for Ty’s notion of self. Ty’s recollections show that in contrast to Teo he lacked – and in 2025-26 still lacks – such rationally controlled behaviour. His own actions, especially his acts of ecosabotage, are usually not well-planned, but sparked by powerful momentary emotions. He also lacks Teo’s discipline and ambition – both in politics and in business affairs; instead, he usually enjoys being lazy and not getting involved in risky political manœuvres. The contrast between the two men becomes once more visible in descriptions of their behaviour during the failed protest action in the Siskiyou timber area that are focalized by Ty. After having spent several hours on the road, their feet in concrete, waiting for the lumber industry workers, the police, and, especially, the press to arrive, the physical and psychic stress begins to show for the four activists, Teo, Andrea, Sierra, and Ty. Recalling the situation, Ty remembers Teo as a model of stoicism. Hunched over the upended bucket like a man perched on the throne in the privacy of his bathroom, his eyes roaming the trees for a glimpse of wildlife instead of scanning headlines in the paper, he’s utterly at home, unperturbed, perfectly willing to accept the role of martyr, if that’s what comes to him. Tierwater isn’t in this league, and he’d be the first to admit it. His feet itch, for one thing – a compelling, imperative itch that brings tears to his eyes – and the concrete, still imperceptibly hardening, has begun to chew at his ankles beneath the armor of his double socks and stiffened jeans. He has a full-blown headache, too, the kind that starts behind the eyes and works its way through the cortex to the occipital lobe and back again in pulses as rhythmic and regular as waves beating against the shore. He has to urinate. Even worse, he can feel a bowel movement coming on. (32-33)

Teo appears as an embodiment of his strong will, of his ratio, and he conforms to the concept of the human as able to transcend its physical and emotional existence. Ty – whose mental and emotional equilibrium is threatened by the abject in this passage – falls victim to the demands of his body (and of his emotions as his behaviour demonstrates once the group is confronted with the timber workers and the police officers). His detailed recollections signal that he is aware of being unable to conform to the socially dominating concept of maleness, that his notion of self is challenged and in need of confirmation. Thus, from the beginning of their acquaintance Ty

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reacts with suspicion. He is aware that Teo conforms to the socially most attractive concept of masculinity, and as a result he begins to watch closely the responses of his daughter Sierra, and, especially, of his wife, Andrea, to Teo van Sparks. Another character that adds to Boyle’s representation of successful environmentalists, who may be categorized as a “self-made man”, is Philip Ratchiss, the wealthy American who supports Earth Forever! financially. After the failed Siskiyou action and its many disastrous results for the family, he provides Ty, Andrea, and Sierra with a refuge by allowing them to hide in his cabin in the woods. Ratchiss is introduced as a grotesque figure, a strangely muscled man – muscled in all the wrong places, that is, ankles, wrists, the back of his head – with a bush-ravaged face and a stingy hook of a red and peeling nose stuck in the middle of it as if noses were purely accidental. He’d killed whole herds of animals. He drank too much (gin and bitters). In his blood he harbored the plasmodium parasites that gave rise to malaria. He was loud, boastful, vain, domineering. (123)

Later, the reader is provided with the story of Ratchiss’s life. He grew up on Long Island, but then spent twenty years in East Africa as a professional game hunter because of a traumatizing experience: during a family wilderness trip to Yosemite National Park he had to watch a bear kill and devour his sister and badly injure his father (see 129131). Confrontation with the abject – with violent, bloody, and painful death – is again used here for the purpose of demonstrating its significance for processes of identity formation. It is this traumatic experience that was formative in the creation of Ratchiss’s dual identity as a wildlife hunter and an environmentalist. Moreover, the fact that Ty and the other listeners are shocked and at the same time fascinated by this story implicitly once again raises questions concerning the formation of an environmentalist identity in general. Ratchiss’s experience with a violent, indifferent “nature” forbids any idealization of the wilderness experience, it rejects a simplistic reading of the deep ecologist call for identification with nature. The notion that an environmentalist identity has to rest first and foremost on a love of wilderness is dismissed. Of central importance for the argument of this essay is, however, that Ty’s suspicious attitude toward the “ecological superman” Teo van Sparks and his irritation concerning Philip Ratchiss hint at a political danger that Andrew Ross addresses in his essay. Ross argues that the ecological superman is one more example of creating “heroic, white male identities” such as “the frontiersman, the cowboy, the

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Romantic poet, the explorer, the engineer, the colonizer, the anthropologist, the pioneer settler, and so on” (1995, 174), and he voices his fear that this type of environmentally informed masculinity will be instrumentalized to thwart the efforts made by environmentalist stances that do not focus on issues of wilderness preservation. Preservation-directed environmentalism, Ross claims, “is geared toward direct, untrammelled encounters with ‘wilderness’, as opposed to the more left utopian version which sees the congeries of scarcity politics, risk management, and sustainability regulation as a conceptual gridlock through which we must struggle before an ecological society develops” (170). Ultimately, he wonders whether the concerns of advocates of environmental justice and of ecofeminism (which centre on issues such as urban pollution and on the fact that women, children, and poor people of colour are disproportionately affected by environmental hazards) might be silenced. In A Friend of the Earth environmental justice and ecofeminist concerns are, in fact, a telling absence. Tierwater does not mention them in any of the passages in which he delineates the ideas and activities of the Earth Forever! people. On the contrary, in a passage in which one of his renewed attempts at monkeywrenching in the 1990s is described, Ty formulates the most extreme anti-humanist position that radical environmentalism has been capable of. On his way to the site where he plans to commit an act of ecosabotage, he gets involved in a mass car crash. Already infuriated by the dirt and debris he finds scattered on the highway, he becomes even more furious about the situation when he is hit by the car behind him. As a result, he accuses the rest of his society indiscriminately of polluting and destroying their environments: The smog was like mustard gas, burning in his lungs. There was trash everywhere, scattered up and down the off-ramp like the leavings of a bombedout civilization, cans, bottles, fast-food wrappers, yellowing diapers and rusting shop carts, oil filters, Styrofoam cups, cigarette butts. The grass was dead, the oleanders were buried in dust […]. Sure, there were individuals out there, human beings worthy of compassion, sacrifice, love, but that didn’t absolve them of collective guilt. There were too many people in the world, six billion already and more coming, endless people, people like locusts, and nothing would survive their onslaught. (240-241)

The passage echoes radical environmentalists’ arguments “about the value of AIDS, Third World starvation, and even nuclear war as a form of population control” (Gottlieb 1993, 198). At this moment Tierwater is not aware of the fact that he has often been a part of

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American consumerist society; and he is not aware of the fact that he loves driving his car as probably most of the others on the highway do; and he is also not aware of his privileged position as a well-off, white, middle-class person who lives comfortably in a Californian suburb. When he talks about “collective guilt”, he refers to “them”. He thereby distances himself from the rest of society and assumes a superior position. He completely disregards that people in his society – and people globally, for that matter – lead different lives and that differences in terms of class, ethnicity, and gender lead to very different degrees of contribution to environmental degradation. This collective of people, which he defines in this emotional outburst, becomes a threatening, polluting “other” that needs to be abjected for the purpose of guaranteeing the existence of a bearable notion of self. It becomes part of an abject that Tierwater tries to “thrust aside in order to live” (Kristeva 1982, 3). In A Friend of the Earth, Boyle’s strong reliance on the narrative means of encounters with the abject works well for the purpose of presenting a subjectivity that might be typical of life after a global environmental catastrophe. It does not only shed light on the function of abjection in general, on its function to allow the human being to resist life-threatening forces and fortify his or her sense of self, but in addition to that draws special attention to its specific implications in an environmentally precarious situation. It shows that abjection may involve the repression of the insight that many of these forces are, in fact, human-made. In the case of environmental catastrophe it calls for the recognition and the acknowledgement of the fact that the threats to the health of body, soul, and mind, which result from climate change, are anthropogenic to a large extent. By highlighting the impact of abjection for the creation of human subjectivity and for the processes of identity formation in the characterization of his protagonist Ty Tierwater, Boyle’s novel ultimately points successfully toward many issues that are crucial for early twenty-first-century environmentalism: it envisions what ecological collapse might mean for human (and animal) sensual, bodily perception and it addresses the issue of local, regional, and global spatial experience. In pointing out the pivotal problems of dualistic ontological thought and its ethical consequences, the novel raises the question of how a notion of “progress” should be defined; thereby it critically reflects and deconstructs the gendered quality of contemporary environmentalism.

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Works Cited Bachelard, Gaston. [1958] 1994. The Poetics of Space, translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Boyle, T. Coraghessan. 2001. A Friend of the Earth. London: Bloomsbury. Devall, Bill. 1994. “The Deep Ecology Movement”. In Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory, edited by Carolyn Merchant, 125-139. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Gottlieb, Robert. 1993. Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement. Washington, D.C.: Island Press. Kimmel, Michael. 1996. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: The Free Press. Krebs, Angelika. 1999. Ethics of Nature. Berlin: de Gruyter. Kristeva, Julia. [1980] 1982. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Naess, Arne. 1995. “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary”. In The Deep Ecology Movement: An Introductory Anthology, edited by Alan Drengson and Yuichi Inoue, 3-9. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Nash, Roderick Frazier. 1989. The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Pepper, David. 1997. Modern Environmentalism: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Plumwood, Val. 1997. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge. Ross, Andrew. 1995. “The Great White Dude”. In Constructing Masculinities, edited by Maurice Berger et al., 167-175. London: Routledge.

Abject Cannibalism: Anthropophagic Poetics in Conrad, White, and Tennant – Towards a Critique of Julia Kristeva’s Theory of Abjection

Russell West It is curious that in the boom experienced by cultural analyses of abjection and disgust in recent years one cultural phenomenon has gone virtually unnoticed. Cannibalism has repeatedly figured as a trigger of disgust in European culture and its texts since the Renaissance, but it is mentioned nowhere in analyses of disgust (except very tangentially; see Miller 1997, 46, 48). This absence is odd, for cannibalism, in its function as one of the central taboos of our culture, would appear to be a close neighbour of incest and the Oedipal taboo, which, if we are to follow Julia Kristeva’s account of disgust, are central sites of “abjection”. Given the all-encompassing cultural validity to which Kristeva’s theory aspires (see Menninghaus 1999, 547) it should come as no surprise that cannibalism too can plausibly be integrated into the theory of abjection. In this essay, I will read five twentieth-century literary texts, ranging from the modernist to the postmodern in tenor – Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1900) and “Falk” (1903), Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves (1976), Jeanette Winterson’s “The Knave of Coins” (1997), and Emma Tennant’s “Philomela” (1975) – to place cannibalism within the field of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection – but also to question some of the basic assumptions upon which her theory is based. I also hope thereby to be able to query some of the Eurocentric subtexts of the notion of cannibalism itself, a notion which has attracted increasing critical scrutiny in recent postcolonial writing and theory (see Atwood 1991, Barker et al. 1998, de Certeau 1986, Rony 1996, Root 1996, Tracy 1991). The cannibalism taboo can be understood as functioning in a similar manner as the incest taboo. Lévi-Strauss documents numerous examples of cannibalism understood as “alimentary incest” (1966, 105-106). Like avoidance relationships within traditional societies (for instance in Australian indigenous law, see Bourke and Edwards 1998, 106), such taboos regulate relationships within the social group which could potentially place excessive strains upon its internal coherence. Conversely, they anchor the group in its broader social environment and open it outwards to other neighbouring groups (see Saint


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Augustine [first published in English 1427] 1972). Such taboos ensure that social relationships maintain a happy medium between proximity and distance. Both cannibalism and incest would appear to embody an “excessively close” relationship to an other, in the oral and genital modes respectively – an excessive proximity which the taboo works to avert. The individual cultural correlate of the incest taboo in our culture is the Oedipal prohibition (see Kristeva 1982, 58-68; Grosz 1989, 76). The parallel taboos imposed upon cannibalism and Oedipal desire point towards structural homologies shared by these two forms of transgression. In her psychoanalytic work on the instinct to ingestion and breast-feeding, Melanie Klein repeatedly speaks of the child’s sadistic-aggressive relationship to the breast as a “cannibalistic impulse” (Klein 1990, 5, 27, 33, 44, 68n, 76-77, 157). It is not difficult to imagine how the literal ingestion of the maternal other in the breast-feeding phase, upon which the child is both absolutely dependent for survival, but which must also be rejected if the child is to attain individual autonomy and a clear sense of its own corporealsubjective boundaries, may come to be marked with the visceral warning signals of disgust. The breast is connected with the genesis of the subject, and thus, by extension, with the danger of the obliteration of the subject – and this danger is the central drama of abjection. Cannibalism, the eating of “another self” (humans eating humans) can thus be understood within European representations of anthropophagy as an avatar of the ingestion of that primordial Other from whom the subject emerges – and who evermore represents the threat of regression to an undifferentiated fusional existence. Abjection, suggests Kristeva, and the spasmic, gagging revulsion which marks it, is the impulse to “vomit up myself” (1982, 3). “In this primary state of identification”, observes Maggie Kilgour of the early childhood phase of breast-feeding, “the eater is the eaten – or at least imagines it” (1990, 12). In the transitional space between fusion and separation, where the fusional structures are still residual, eating the Other simultaneously signifies devouring myself. Similarly, cannibalism as the ultimate figure of eating one’s fellows, comes by extension, to symbolically connote “eating oneself” – for without others as mirrors of my own limits, I would lose my constitutive contours; to devour my Other is to devour myself. Cannibalism thus stages a radical dissolution of the self. It is logical, then, that cannibalism as a revolting practice is contiguous with several of the principle domains of abjection-disgust, namely, food, waste products, and above all, the human corpse as the

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“abject” par excellence (see Kristeva 1982, 2-4; Menninghaus 1999, 7). In Joseph Conrad’s story “Falk”, to anticipate upon one of my textual examples, several of these domains of disgust – eating, the corpse and the body as a waste product itself – can be seen to converge: “They might have died as it were, naturally – of starvation. He shuddered. But to be eaten – after death! He gave another deep shudder [...]” ([1903] 1998, 182). Such an approach to cannibalism grounds it in the intersection between nature and culture, between body and society, at the point where the one blends into the other and endows it with a quasiuniversal status. However, the cannibalism taboo has also historically taken quite specific forms. Here, too, it has performed a distancing role, keeping cultural entities apart. Certainly since the Renaissance, and as recently as the nineteenth century, the cannibalism taboo was mobilized to allow civilized peoples to delineate themselves from their barbaric neighbours, commonly in situations of colonial contact: in Elizabethan Ireland with regard to the Irish native inhabitants (see Klein 2001, 176-182; Orgel 1987, 40-66), in British-occupied Australia with regard to the Aboriginal inhabitants, where “intimations of cannibalism” (Carr 2001, 31-32) frequently served the white settlers’ ideological purposes. Kay Schaffer observes that “[w]ithin a colonial mentality, cannibalism represented the ultimate denial of a common humanity, the ultimate sign of depravity, the ultimate mark of savagery, and, above all, a guarantee of European superiority” (1995, 108). In such cases the disgust experienced at the thought of cannibalism was a visceral reaction keeping those potential fellow creatures at bay. In this essay I shall play off these two forms of the social functions of cannibalism against each other. The psychoanalytic model clearly underpins the explanatory value of the collective, historical model of anthropophagy and its visceral rejection. Conversely, however, the second, patently ideological function of cannibalism-disgust should make us ask about the ideological character of the first model as well. Following this logic, I shall investigate four literary texts from the twentieth century which explicitly address the issue of cannibalismrevulsion, in order to interrogate the ideological agenda of that cultural form of disgust. Finally, I shall mobilize this literary critique in order to query Kristeva’s theory of abjection. In Conrad’s classic Heart of Darkness, cannibalism is strongly associated with disgust. Conrad’s elliptical references to the “fascination of the abomination – you know [...] the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate” (Conrad [1900] 1990, 140) are clear markers


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of what the reader eventually comes to understand as cannibalism. Disgust makes its presence known in an attempt to keep something awful at bay, to keep it below the threshold of utterance: “ ‘I don’t want to know anything of the ceremonies used when approaching Mr. Kurtz’, I shouted. Curious, this feeling that came over me that such details would be more intolerable than those heads drying on the stakes under Mr. Kurtz’s windows” (221-222). The signs are unmistakable, however, when we gain our first glimpse of Kurtz: “I saw him open his mouth wide – it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him” (224). Equally prominent are the markers of the “abject” which are strewn through the text. The journey into Africa itself is a journey into abjection, a voyage inland from “the formless coast [...] in and out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted mangroves [...]” (152). The associations of a threatening approach to a continent coded as maternal and suffocating, as “the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life” (226) are anything but subtle. Thus a dying native, succumbing to white men’s beatings, “arose and went out – and the wilderness without a sound took him into its bosom again” (167). Quite logically for an encounter with an “abject maternal”, “[g]oing up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world” (92). Marlowe continually circles around the unnameable “abomination” (140) – so unnameable that it has gone into literary history as metonymy for cannibalism: Malouf’s half-white half-indigenous Gemmy is suspected of having tasted “all the abominations they went in for. Were they actually looking at a man, a white man [...] who had – [...]” (Malouf 1994, 39). The disgusting practices are elided, or, on one occasion, inverted, so that it is Africa which “consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation” (Conrad [1899] 1990, 205). Cannibalism is resistant to language, it can barely be spoken, for it takes us back to an archaic stage before language. Significantly, Kurtz’s pamphlets written “before his – let us say – nerves, went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which – as far as I reluctantly heard from what I heard at various times – were offered to him – do you understand? – to Mr. Kurtz himself” (207-208). For the “abjection” of cannibalism, the oral fusion with an Other which threatens the Self with a dangerous loss of differentiation, is also a threat to language itself. Language is based

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upon difference, and it is the access to the Symbolic and the Law and language of the Father which extracts the subject from maternal fusion. Language is one defence mechanism against the feared loss of barriers which evokes the abject. Thus the loss of symbolic distinction via language and the intimate connection with psychotic aphasia is a central aspect of disgust. “Abjection” is and must remain the unnameable (see Kristeva 1982, 61). Disgust, repulsion, revulsion and nausea are atavistic, spasmic reactions which ensue in the absence of the distancing mechanism of language. When the “abject” resurges in adult subjectivity, speech is abruptly usurped by regurgitation. The role of speech to connect but also separate subjects is replaced by a more primitive extrusion of half-digested material. The well-ordered distinctions between eating and speaking, between food and words, become confused (see Ellmann 1993). Whereas Kurtz is lost to civilization forever through his cannibalistic practices, absorbed into the Real (Lacan’s term seems to describe accurately the unrepresentable, oppressive mass of the jungle as Conrad characterizes it), Falk, the hero of Conrad’s later story of that title, brings the cannibal back into the heart of civilization, back into the Symbolic. The narrator of the story, Marlowe in one of his many guises, tells of a tugboat captain named Falk known for his odd behaviour: “[H]e would, now and then, draw the palms of both his hands down his face, giving at the same time a slight, almost imperceptible shudder” (Conrad [1903] 1998, 123). This bodylanguage, this “passionate and meaningless gesture” (159) is an index of a mute fact so shocking that it can only provoke disgust in others when they discover its cause: a case of cannibalism on a becalmed ship. Falk confesses: “ ‘Imagine to yourselves […] that I have eaten a man’ ” (178). His interlocutor Hermann very appropriately “choked, gasped, swallowed, and managed to shriek out the one word, ‘Beast!’ [...] Hermann’s raving [...] was contemptible, and was made appalling by the man’s overmastering horror of this awful sincerity, coming to him suddenly, with the confession of such a fact” (178). Hermann’s “choking” appears as an attempt to regurgitate the news he has aurally “ingested”, though he does “swallow” it at a second go, only to compensate with an extended expulsion of shrieking breath. Some readers appear to have shared Hermann’s disgust, with Conrad’s wife Jessie reminiscing: “I remember I was quite physically sick when I typed those pages. Sick with disgust at the idea of human beings having been cooked” (qtd. in Tanner 1976, 19 – who wryly observes that in fact no-one is cooked in this story).


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Ironically, it would appear that overweening oral desire is quite socially acceptable in some contexts. Falk confesses that his yearning for Hermann’s blonde Teutonic niece is “worse than hunger” ([1903] 1998, 180). Other characters obviously regard women as edible: Schomberg “made a loud smacking noise with his thick lips. ‘The finest lump of a girl that I ever [...]’ he was going on with great unction” (155). The taboo arises when oral desire becomes too obvious a reminder of the epoch before the subject’s full emergence as an autonomous individual – something which is always latently present in male heterosexuality, Conrad appears to believe: “He was a child. [...] He was hungry for the girl, terribly hungry, as he had been terribly hungry for food. [...] [I]n my belief it was the same need, the same pain, the same torture” (184). Conrad merely makes explicit what, within this Western view of the taboo of cannibalism, usually remains silent: namely, that the cannibalistic taboo reformulates and displaces an archaic eating of a maternal Other, from which the self was once indistinguishable. Falk’s inability to communicate with women (see 138) casts him back into a preverbal silence of resurgent abjection. It is the act of confession, aided by Marlowe as go-between and mediator (see 162), which allows him to escape from the autistic Real of cannibalistic fusion and to avert the worst psychotic extremes of threatening male hunger for the feminine. Cannibalistic hunger is sublimated via speech, thus permitting the restoration of language as the guarantor of difference. Disgust can be dispelled by language’s intervention as a mediating instance which installs a relay between the overwhelming “thing” itself and the subject. Significantly, Conrad’s texts persistently dramatize the mediating agency of storytellers (in both texts examined here, Marlowe is a mediator within the “story” itself and within the frame narrative at the “discourse” level of diegesis). While Marlowe concedes his own partial response to the archaic appeal of “primitive Africa”, he nonetheless insists, “Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice too [...]” (Conrad [1900] 1990, 187). The agency of voice is crucial here. Narrative works in a similar manner to the linguistic function in the Freudian paradigm, binding primary processes, reducing the unbridled intensity of pre-verbal desire, and diffusing them within the symbolic domain (see Naficy 1993, 104-105). For Conrad, mediated narration functions like nausea, establishing a spontaneous distance towards the “abject”, but at the same time, within the modernist tradition, instrumentalizing the literary codification of revulsion, its secondary verbalization, as a means of overcoming the habitual banality and manifest bankruptcy of

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bourgeois modes of representation. Disgust emerges here as a warning signal against the undifferentiated sea of contemporary signs bereft of real expressive power – and points the way back to the raw difference in which speech arises. Conrad’s modernist aesthetic was shared by the Australian 1973 Nobel Prize winner Patrick White, albeit with increasingly acute anachronism (half a century had passed since high modernism had passed its acme) by the time his novel about cannibalism, A Fringe of Leaves (1976), was published. White employed cannibalism, like Conrad, as a defamiliarizing effect to mobilize “the shock of the new”. Like Conrad, White also wanted to draw cannibalism into the realm of the social. However, White’s novel is distinguished from Conrad’s in one essential aspect: cannibalism does not bring merely the male into dangerous regressive proximity with the feminine; far more, for White, anthropophagy reveals the woman as cannibal par excellence. Cannibalism emerges very early on in the novel as an index, indeed as the index of primitivism in its colonialist Australian setting. The first mention of the natives associates them with cannibalism, immediately eliciting a reaction of “horror” on the part of Miss Scrimshaw (see White 1983, 20). And following this, there is a blurring of the cannibal reference, which allows it to be attached also to Irish convicts or immigrants: “loathsome savages” (20), says a repulsed Mrs. Merivale. White thus has the double function of the cannibal motif in British cultural history, as a colonial differentiating mechanism wielded against the Irish and the Australian indigenous peoples, converge in a single epithet. He, however, wants to break down such colonialist dichotomies, insisting upon the intimate connections between civilization and savagery – in service of a caustic dismantling of a petit bourgeois morality in its Antipodean form. To this end he employs cannibalism as an alienation-effect within a modernist aesthetic which aims at “épater les bourgeois”. White’s protagonist Mrs. Ellen Roxburgh is shipwrecked on the Queensland coast and taken captive by a local native tribe. The disgust experienced by Ellen when she comes upon evidence of cannibalism is an indication of her own process of ascesis, as layers of artificial civilization fall away, and is also intended by White as a strategy designed to outwit the reader’s own repressive shield. But Ellen’s visceral reactions to cannibalism – “self-disgust” (206), “the horror which paralysed her” (229), her “gasping and sobbing” (230) culminate in her own participation in an act of cannibalism which White describes in vivid detail:


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Mrs. Roxburgh [...] tried to disentangle her emotions, fear from amazement, disgust from a certain pity she felt for these starving and ignorant savages, her masters, when she looked down and caught sight of a thighbone which must have fallen from one of the overflowing dillis. Renewed disgust prepared her to kick the bone out of sight. Then, instead, she found herself stooping, to pick it up. There were one or two shreds of half-cooked flesh and gobbets of burnt fat still adhering to this monstrous object. Her stiffened body and almost audibly twanging nerves were warning her against what she was about to do, what she was, in fact, already doing. She had raised the bone, and was tearing at it with her teeth, spasmodically chewing, swallowing by great gulps which her throat threatened to return. But did not. She flung away the bone only after it was cleaned, and followed slowly in the wake of her cannibal mentors. She was less disgusted in retrospect by what she had done, than awed by the fact that she had been moved to it. [...] But there remained what amounted to an abomination of human behaviour, a headache, and the first signs of indigestion. In the light of Christian morality she must never think of the incident again. (244)

Of particular significance is White’s use of the past continuous, which signals that the subject is already engaged in the action described. Language, suggests White in this manner, is always in some way secondary, supplementary. Language is permanently retarded with regard to something which was always already there and to which it is a mere reaction. White’s style dramatizes the death of the autonomous Enlightenment subject-of-language, just as the disgust portrayed embodies the visceral “return of the repressed” upon whose suppression civilization is ostensibly built. White’s strategies are, however, not as progressive as they might appear. By utilizing the discourse of cannibalism he becomes complicit in the extremely ethnocentric assumptions of early white settlers, for which no substantial evidence has ever been found (see Schaffer 1995, 107). In the process of confirming stereotypical notions of the savagery of the indigenous people, he also reinforces convictions of the primitive essence of woman. For White, it is her closeness to nature which ideally equips her for the vanguard work of embodying our repressed primitive nature. Devouring desire is deemed to be the domain of women. Woman, proverbially equipped with less reason than man (“We must keep our head, Ellen”, 203, admonishes Mr. Roxburgh), and traditionally deemed to be closer to nature (White compares Ellen to a “beast of nature”, 205), is logically more likely to lose control of primitive passions and cede to the desire to eat. Her quasi-maternal love for the children the tribe assigns to her care is expressed in cannibalistic terms: “She would have eaten them on such a morning, but only when they were safe inside her allowed them to share her joy” (248). Later on, regarding her convict rescuer Jack, in the moment of their love-making: “She would have

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swallowed him had she been capable of it” (269). The assertion of feminine will is rendered physical in the figure of “bared ugly teeth” (119) – the uncontrollable woman as cannibal. This topos goes back to early modern notions of South American cannibalism as a feminized phenomenon (see Schülting 1997, 104). Other more recent examples include Kleist’s Amazon heroine Penthesilea, who alternates between kissing and devouring her lover, and who ruefully admits that for a true lover, the rhyming terms Küsse and Bisse (kisses and bites) are easily confused. A last kiss farewells her dead lover, not without her experiencing disgust at her own excess (see Kleist [1808] 1996, 432 460-461, 473-474). White’s text positively stresses the upsurge of instinct typified by Ellen Roxburgh (see 1983, 92) but this does not alter the fact that he leaves the misogynist dichotomization, with its concomitant fantasy of the vagina dentata, intact (see Lévi-Strauss 1966, 107). But “primitive nature” is always already culture, as is increasingly understood with regard to the extraordinary sophistication and complexity of indigenous social forms. Likewise, cannibalism, far from being a merely “bestial” practice, has been understood as a social ritual designed to appropriate the attributes of another subject. Indeed, cannibalism was taken up as a metaphor for a movement of cultural self-assertion in 1920s Brazil by Harald and Augusto de Campos’s Antropófagista Movement (see Bassnett 1993, 153-158; PerroneMoisés 1987, 47-50). And disgust itself, a visceral phenomenon which appears to short-circuit processes of intellection, is mediated by eminently cultural processes of selection and transmission. Indeed, disgust would appear to cast into question the very distinction nature/culture, given that it is at once both intensely visceral and culturally overdetermined (see Menninghaus 1999, 8-9). In contrast, White mobilizes a one-sided reduction of an extremely complex cultural phenomenon so as to make cannibalism the point of convergence of nature/culture and feminine/masculine dichotomies of the most conservative sort. Far from dissolving the sorts of dichotomies that Western patriarchal epistemologies have erected, White actively reinforces their cultural agency. It should not come as a surprise to discover that contemporary women writers contest such notions. Jeanette Winterson, in a story from the collection Gut Symmetries, has a male narrator declare: “My wife believed that she had a kind of interior universe as valid and as necessary as her day-to-day existence in reality. [...] She refused to make a clear distinction between inner and outer. She had no sure grasp of herself or of herself in relation to the object. At first I mistook


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this pathology as the ordinary feminine” (1997, 191). Here we have all the hallmarks of the threatening feminine abject associated with the devouring woman. But the story rapidly takes another turn: I fell into a kind of dream, almost a trance, I suppose, and I was a child again and my mother was feeding me. [...] I made the cut so carefully. I made it like a surgeon not a butcher. My knife was sharp as a laser. I did it with dignity, hungry though I was. I did it so that it would not have disgusted either of us. She was my wife. I was her husband. We were one flesh. [...] I parted the flesh from the bone and I ate it. (195-196)

Winterson implicitly combats typifications such as White’s by revealing them as “splitting” mechanisms, as the self-exculpating projections of a cannibalistic masculinity. Emma Tennant takes such contestatory strategies a step further. In her rewriting of Ovid’s tale of Philomela, Emma Tennant takes one of the canonical texts of the classical age translated in the Renaissance, Metamorphoses, and places it at the archaic origins of Western civilization. However, the tale is first and foremost about masculine barbarism: Procne, the lonely narrator, sends her warrior husband Tereus to fetch her sister Philomela as her companion. But Tereus rapes Philomela and cuts out her tongue to prevent her betraying his violation of her. When Procne detects this atrocity via a tapestry which recounts the events in visual form, she and her sister take revenge upon Tereus by killing his son Itylus and feeding him to the father. To this extent Tennant diverts attention from a feminine-coded cannibalism – even in Conrad’s texts, where males cede to the cannibalist urge, it is a devouring feminized Earth which draws them into temptation – to a tradition which places cannibalism at the beginning of masculine history, in a manner akin to Freud’s narratives of the origins of social organization in Totem and Taboo (see Freud [1913] 1971). Disgust in this story is directed at highly civilized versions of “cannibalism” such as the feast celebrating a victory in battle: “The preparations for the banquet were growing more frantic – and it was only when we were surrounded by bushes of myrtle and thyme that we were able to go on without vomiting on the ground. The smell of burning meat was so strong” (Tennant 1987, 410). The narrator’s disgust is provoked by carnivorous warrior culture which does not distinguish between friend and foe, family and foreigner (“Philomela is dead” is Tereus’s warrior-like greeting to Procne after returning from the rape of her sister, 408), animal flesh and – in the last instance – human flesh (he devours his own son with the same gusto as the other meats at the victor’s feast). The warrior culture

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subsumes all of these distinctions to a single regime of killing. The critique implicitly launched here by Tennant resembles the way in which Michael Taussig reads in accounts of cannibalism their colonial authors’ own displaced acknowledgement of the nature of the colonial machine itself: an overwhelming force which devours the body politic and the bodies physical of indigenous peoples in ghastly acts of genocide (see Taussig 1986, 105-107). The Euro-American neocolonial economic- and war-machine, suggests Deborah Root, perpetuates such patterns (see 1996, 1-25). Tennant’s strategy is thus comparable to White’s – with the exception that it does not depend upon the reinforcement of stereotypes of feminized primitivism. The universal rule of war finally rebounds upon Tereus himself as he ingests his own offspring. “Perhaps only bloodshed kept him young”, Procne ruminates (Tennant 1987, 407) – but if masculine livelihood in its warrior form is at the cost of others, it finally becomes self-vitiating in the same way that cannibalism is coded as eating the other/self: Tereus’s “youthfulness” annihilates that of his son. The warrior habitus terminates its self-perpetuation by severing its own lineage: “The pie was brought in. Tereus sat down like a child and ate. When he had eaten a few mouthfuls, he nodded his approval” (413). Not only does the father eat his own son – he is also portrayed as a child himself, and thus as never having attained the adult maturity which would enable him to control the savagery of his appetites and submit them to the rule of civility. Revulsion marks a point of rupture in the text when Procne’s husband demands that she also eat the pie: “He offered some to his favourites. [...] Then he turned to me. I shook my head. Black, dizzy sickness. Inside me an ill-tempered sea rolled violently. [...] As I half fell, as all the eyes there in that room merged together and one eye, lidless, staring shone out at me” (413). The single eye Procne refers to is that of the one-eyed sea monster which lurks wounded in the cave where the two sisters kill the son Itylus prior to cooking him up for his father. The one-eyed monster, significantly, excites the small boy’s belligerent sense of “manhood”, which he then attacks at the very moment he is slaughtered by the vengeful women. Procne’s disgust is triggered by a masculine gaze which reduces everything in sight to a single common denominator of destruction. Killing, raping, and devouring are mere variants of a single predatory drive. This equation is one which was made by many cultural productions of the 1970s, as Gaye Poole has pointed out: “Many horror cannibalism films made in the Vietnam and post-Vietnam war period draw implicit and explicit


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parallels between the defoliation of human life in war and the mowing down of human life via cannibalistic attack” (1999, 77). It is in the moment of infantile imitation of the warrior ethos of adult males that the women arrest the spiral of inherited violence. The demise of the second generation of incipient warriors is, however, merely a local effect whose broader cause is revealed in the father’s own cannibalistic feasting upon the son – itself a displaced consequence of his violence towards women, the guarantors of human perpetuity. Cannibalism is not the domain of the feminine, but rather of masculinity, claims Tennant, in a gesture of reversal which echoes similar phenomena during first contact periods: the Hawaiian people, branded with the stigma of cannibalism by the British, themselves assumed that the British were cannibals, on the basis of the atrocities they witnessed; even earlier, the Indios appeared to have believed the same of Columbus and his party (see Schaffer 1995, 111; Holdenried 2001, 121). Or, in the words of a (fictional) contemporary Australian indigenous speaker: “Your law’s covered in blood. It’s washed its hands in blood. [...] That’s cannibal” (Gray 2001, 5). Even closer to home, anthropologists’ fascination with cannibalism in non-European societies has obscured ongoing institutionalized medicinal practices of cannibalism in Europe up to the early twentieth century (see GordonGrube 1998, 405-409). At this point in Tennant’s story, the silence which legitimizes and perpetuates masculine violence is broken by feminine speech: “It is for you to eat your son Itylus, I said. You destroyed us long ago” (1983, 413). In this context, speech is not the male’s defence against the disgust of abjection at the suffocating proximity of the maternal body. On the contrary, speech represents female retribution against a masculine culture of war which reduces all of life to the dual figure of victim or perpetrator. The association of the mother’s body with a place beyond language, as a pre-verbal domain of primitive fusion and engulfment characterized by sadistic oral desires is implicitly rejected by Tennant’s fiction. The silence reigning over Philomela is not the silence of something which escapes from representation because it belongs to an epoch before the subject’s emergence within language. To this extent, Tennant casts into question polarizations which identify the unnameable preverbal with the maternal, and language with the masculine Symbolic. Rather, for Tennant, silence is imposed as an act of violence perpetrated upon women by men. Exemplary here is Tereus’s act of cutting out Philomela’s tongue after raping her. Kristeva’s Symbolic is also an inherently masculine order, one which

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by nature resists the resurgences of the feminized the domain of the Semiotic; but the Semiotic nonetheless consigns femininity to a site before the thetic, “communicative” Symbolic. By contrast, Tennant suggests that women are always already engaged in communication: “Philomela [...] spoke the thoughts I hardly knew I had” (1983, 407); “I watched her all the time – for signs of happiness, or discontent, or simply to see what her eyes would say to me” (410). Before speech and after speech (Philomela’s mutilation) women communicate with each other. In Tennant, cannibalism is not moralized as in Conrad or White. Rather, by a process of indexicalization (it points out, accuses, illuminates causal connections) it is functionalized. It is a figure which demonstrates the real workings of masculine warrior culture – namely, the destruction of its own offspring, the vitiation of its own future. The figure of cannibalism, reinforced by revulsion, lays bare a selfannihilating contradiction at the very heart of a phallic virility in which the capacity to engender is subsumed to the power to destroy life. In her cannibalism narrative, Tennant shifts the focus from the mother to the father specifically, and to masculinity in general. In consequence, the revulsion provoked by cannibalism is situated within a quite different relational complex to the one which underlies the notion of disgust as explained in Kristeva’s theory of abjection. It is not by chance that the child which must separate from the mother to attain full subjectivity is for Kristeva a male (see Oliver 1993, 61) – and this male child becomes the adult which henceforth strives to keep the maternal abject at bay. To this extent, Kristeva appears to reproduce uncritically as a basic component of her theory the hegemonic drama of separation from the feminine upon which masculine autonomy, indeed the Western patriarchal order, is predicated (see Chodorow 1978, Dinnerstein 1978, see also Danahay 1993 on cultural manifestations of “masculine autonomy”). To generalize this division of the world into two parts for all cultures and all human subjects, however, is deeply problematic and must make us question Kristeva’s theory of abjection. The overwhelming duality of Kristeva’s basic conceptual scheme from Revolution in Poetic Language onwards reduces all gendered identity to a rigid dichotomy of the feminine/maternal pre-verbal chora/Semiotic and the verbal paternal Symbolic (see Kristeva 1984). Granted, these two domains interlock: the Symbolic is dependent upon the Semiotic to provide the raw signifying material which it then orders, while the Semiotic can only be given expression by erupting within the Symbolic. The dichotomizing force of the theory remains


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primary, however, continuing to furnish the background against which interference and eruption can be played out. Kristeva’s gender dichotomy is a temporal dichotomy which relegates the feminine to an epoch which is either permanently lost for adult maturity or only accessible via some sort of regression. Kristeva’s scheme of psychic and cultural development follows Freud in positing a moment of caesura (the threat of castration which dissolves the mother-child fusion), a rupture which founds all subsequent binary structures, from the signifier-signified distinction of de Saussure to the simplified schemas of xenophobia. This caesura is deeply gendered within our society because it also structures the exile from femininity upon which masculinity is built. Becoming a man in our society is predicated upon being a not-woman, because the mother is the most immediate role model and source of identity; fathers are generally more distant as a positive source of gender identity (although there are significant historical, cultural, regional and class-based variations in this determining pattern [see Connell 1995, 18, 31]). Within this configuration, the independence necessary to all processes of maturity is confused with a violent process of distancing so as to attain a polarized masculine identity. Because subjectivity, and masculine subjectivity in particular, is predicated upon a clear separation of selfhood from alterity, the proximity to others inevitably signifies a threat to autonomous selfhood. The eruption of traces of the past before the caesura is inevitably accompanied by a reaction equal and opposite to the violent movement of distancing upon which masculinity was founded – the convulsive reactions of disgust and repulsion described in Kristeva’s theory of abjection. But what if this configuration of subjectivity as hard-won autonomy and distance is merely gendered, and specific to a socio-historic context? It is worthwhile pausing to consider whether Kristeva’s theory of abjection is no less erroneous in its aspirations to totality (see Menninghaus 1999, 547) than Freud’s reinscription of lateHabsburg bourgeois family life under the ostensibly universal sign of the Oedipal taboo. Kristeva does acknowledge the arbitrariness, indeed the gratuitous violence of this primary caesura. As Kelly Oliver asks, employing the anthropophagic metaphor, [h]ow can we be bodies separated from our mothers when it is her body which we eat?” In a critical vein she continues: “The mother is made abject to facilitate the separation from her” (Oliver 1992, 71). Kristeva may highlight the arbitrariness of this cut, but she fails to question, it would seem, its essential contingence – and perhaps

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thereby also neglects to query its facticity. To this extent, I read Kristeva as essentializing the maternal function, in contrast to many other interpretations of her work. I have recourse below to the work of Irigaray, in turn often branded as an essentializer of “feminine corporeality”, as providing a more dynamic model of subject formation. Paradoxically, at the very heart of Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic chora, which serves as the foundation for her later work on abjection, there is an etymological hint of an alternative direction for exploring archaic mother-child relationships. Kristeva’s term is partly drawn from Aristotle, whose closely related term chorion signifies the membrane which separates the mother and foetus. The chorion is clearly to be seen in the anatomical drawings of early modern medical texts (see for instance Sharp 1671, Sig. L3v-L4r). In modern biology, this membrane is also the transmitter of hormonal signals crucial to the development of the foetus, that is, a semiotized in-between space which both connects and separates mother and child (see Payne 1993, 168-169). What this alternative etymology within the genealogy of Kristeva’s theory suggests is that signs, communication, difference were always already operative even at this early stage of pre-Oedipal, pre-subjective existence – a stage of existence which is otherwise equated by Kristeva with non-thetic productivity and fusion. At the heart of Kristeva’s thesis there is a hint that the dichotomy between the Semiotic and Symbolic (upon which the resurgence of the Semiotic within the Symbolic in the form of avant-garde textuality and artistic practice is posited) may itself be quite artificial. The semiotic chora, if we are to reread it in this sense, may not precede communication between discrete subjects, but heralds forms of communication between subjects whose dialogue has already commenced before the putative caesura of birth. A philosophical equivalent for this alternative genealogy can be found in Luce Irigaray’s work on the mucus membranes as a physiological metaphor for the space which both separates and joins subjects, affording both the autonomy from and the proximity to others necessary for social existence. It is significant that mucus, as the epitome of the “gooey, oozy, slimy” internal bodily objects of disgust (Miller 1997, 58) is chosen by Irigaray as one central vehicle of her theory of interpersonal ethics. Unsurprisingly, Irigaray’s recent work focuses on intersubjectivity, made concrete in her essays on the “interval” or the “in-between”, as the essential condition for subjectivity (see Irigaray 1992).


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With regard to the relationships between the maternal body and subjectivity, it is interesting to compare Kristeva’s work on mourning, where the loss of the maternal body (which inaugurates the separate existence of the subject and its forced initiation into language as a system of absences/differences) is posited as the source of depression, with language figuring as the scar-tissue which closes but also monumentalizes that irremediable loss (see Kristeva 1989, 40-42; Oliver 1992, 70) – an aspect of her work which has been sharply criticized by some theoreticians (see Grosz 1990, 100-102). However, in contrast to the notion of caesura and loss of the pre-verbal maternal space which underlies all of Kristeva’s work, Irigaray’s work on motherhood posits a continuum which accommodates both distance and proximity, from the moment of conception onwards. The placenta, for example, embodies the “in-between” which both links and separates two subjects during the process of gestation. According to this perspective, there is no archaic mother-child fusion, because the relationship is always already mediated via the placenta (see Irigaray 1993, 37-44). In contrast to Kristeva, for Irigaray neither birth nor weaning are fundamentally moments of separation (see Oliver 1992, 72), but merely new modes of mediation. Language, likewise, is never merely the tombstone of the rejected/abjected and then mourned mother as in Kristeva’s work. Some of Irigaray’s recent writing explores language games among mothers and daughters as pragmatic strategies reinforcing a relational interval or in-between which separates/connects mutually respectful and supporting subjects in their everyday co-existences (see Irigaray 1996; Irigaray 1993). For Irigaray, mother and child are both fully-developed subjects from the outset, despite all the patently obvious restrictions upon their agency and the mutual adventure of a constantly renegotiated and often painful dialectic of intimacy and autonomy. Consequently, the process of separation as necessary foundational trauma or as struggle for autonomy is reformulated in Irigaray’s theory as the ongoing relationship of two distinct subjects whose subjective difference and solidarity exists from the very beginning without necessitating the agonistic autonomy of embattled masculinity. To this extent, Irigaray’s approach powerfully refutes what Donna Haraway calls “the myth of original unity [...] represented by the phallic mother from which all humans must separate” (1991, 151). Irigaray’s suggestive theory of fluid relationships between human subjects eschews dichotomies such as presence/absence, fusion/autonomy, or proximity/distance. These more fluid conceptions of relationship facilitate different notions of intersubjectivity which, unlike Kristeva’s

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theory of abjection, may offer more pragmatic, though less dramatic, routes of escape from the prison of patriarchal norms. In this essay, in particular in my reading of Emma Tennant’s work, I have attempted to offer an alternative perspective upon anthropophagy. My aim in doing so was to question theories of cannibalism in which disgust founds and reinforces misogyny and racism. If the idea of cannibalism is indeed frequently structured by patriarchal stereotypes of women, thus masking patriarchy’s own contempt for human life, feminist perspectives may point towards more life-affirming economies of orality. In this spirit, I would like to return to one of the central “abjects” of cannibalism-revulsion: skin (see Miller 1997, 52-54). In White, for instance, one of the most important indicators of cannibalist-regressive abjection is “skin”, as on warm milk (White 1982, 59; 142-144). One final text on “anthropophagy” reformulates this “abject” to give a glimpse of the manner in which a respectful intersubjective space may recode the metaphorics of the feminized cannibalism motif. In the joyfully unrepulsive notion of “eating skin”, Elspeth Probyn creates a poetic image of a novel oral-eroticized relationship to the other. Probyn’s metaphor of oral-erotic ingestion is one which is contained and celebrated in language and allows the coexistence of two intimately related yet distinct subjects: My desire for her skin, for its shades of history and difference, her desire for mine: as my skin eats hers, and her skin eats mine, could we find a way of desiring that [...] through osmosis lets us learn to be together differently. [...] The figure of eating skin [...] suggests for me a way of being overwhelmingly close to difference, without subsuming difference into the same, or the sameother. (Probyn 2001, 89-90)

In this configuration of orality, figurations of “anthropophagy” are reencoded to make space for alternative paradigms of intercourse and discourse. Contemporary body theory has figured kissing, in opposition to the aggressive tenor given to that erotic activity by writers such as Kleist, as one of the privileged sites of a reworking of overdetermined notions of anthropophagy. In the notions of “delicacy” and “delicatessen”, kissing, tasting without devouring, consuming without annihilating the other, “eating skin” can unfold its full metaphorical potential: “The kiss involves the extremes of a fluttering touch light as breath (touching with the mouth without touch) and touch as greedy consumption” (Connor 2004, 269). The kiss and the caress have textual equivalents in Ouaknin’s notion of reading as caress, a textual consumption which respects the fluid


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space between self and other, thereby eschewing the dichotomizing thought which drives the customary poetics of anthropophagy (Ouaknin 1994, v-vi). By thinking of reading as an activity which itself may subvert restrictively gendered understandings of our oralized relationships to our fellow subjects, we may be able to reread the racist and misogynist discourses our culture has produced around “cannibalism” and work towards their gradual replacement by more democratic discourses.

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Miller, William Ian. 1997. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Naficy, Hamid. 1993. The Making of Exile Culture: Iranian Television in Los Angeles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Oliver, Kelly. 1992. “Nourishing the Speaking Subject: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Abominable Food and Women”. In Cooking, Eating, Thinking, edited by Deane W. Curtin, 68-84. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. —. 1993. Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Orgel, Stephen. 1987. “Shakespeare and the Cannibals”. In Garber, 40-66. Ouaknin, Marc-Alain. 1994. Lire aux éclats: Éloge de la caresse. Paris: Seuil/Points. Payne, Michael. 1993. Reading Theory: An Introduction to Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva. Oxford: Blackwell. Perrone-Moisés, Leyla. 1987. “Anthropophagie”. Magazine Littéraire 187:47-50. Poole, Gaye. 1999. Reel Meals, Set Meals: Food in Film and Theatre. Sydney: Currency Press. Probyn, Elspeth. 2001. “Eating Skin”. In Ahmed and Stacey, 87-103. Rony, Fatimah Tobing. 1996. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Root, Deborah. 1996. Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, and the Commodification of Difference. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Schaffer, Kay. 1995. In the Wake of First Contact: The Eliza Fraser Stories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schülting, Sabine. 1997. Wilde Frauen, fremde Welten: Kolonisierungsgeschichten aus Amerika. Hamburg: Rowohlt. Sharp, Jane. 1671. The Midwife’s Book. London. Sherry, Norman, ed. 1976. Joseph Conrad: A Commemoration. London: Macmillan. Tanner, Tony. 1976. “ ‘Gnawed Bones’ and ‘Artless Tales’: Eating and Narrative in Conrad”. In Sherry, 17-36. Taussig, Michael. 1986. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tennant, Emma. 1987. “Philomela”. In Bradbury, 407-413. Tracy, Ann. 1991. Winter Hunger: A Novel. Fredericton, CN: Goose Lane. White, Patrick. 1983. A Fringe of Leaves. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Winterson, Jeanette. 1997. “The Knave of Coins”. In Gut Symmetries, 189-196. London: Granta Books.

“A Wet Festival of Scarlet”: Poppy Z. Brite’s (Un)Aesthetics of Murder

Monika Mueller Exquisite Corpse (1996), by renowned New Orleans writer Poppy Z. Brite, who places herself in the tradition of Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, tells the love story of two men who both happen to be homosexual serial killers. Brite’s novel has been widely criticized because of its controversial content: before it was published by Simon and Schuster, Dell Books broke its three-book contract with Brite because of Exquisite Corpse’s “extreme subject matter and nihilistic worldview” (Sage 1995, online), that is its detailed and “realistic” retelling of the necrophilic and cannibalistic murders committed by Jeffrey Dahmer in the United States and Dennis Nilsen in Great Britain. Homosexuals might find the book offensive because it portrays them as perverted murderers, and the “general reader” might feel taken aback by the fact that due to Brite’s superb command of language s/he actually finds her/himself enjoying the grizzly descriptions of human slaughter. In the following discussion of the novel, I want to suggest that while Brite certainly aims to shock, she also pursues an ambitious aesthetic and social agenda with Exquisite Corpse, which indicates her indebtedness to the thought of Edmund Burke, Thomas De Quincey, and Georges Bataille. The novel begins with British serial killer Andrew Compton’s escape from a prison hospital near Birmingham, England. Compton, who is based on Dennis Nilsen (see Ramsland n.d., online), kills two doctors and an American student, assumes his American victim’s identity and flees to New Orleans, where he meets Jeffrey Dahmerclone Jay Byrne in the French Quarter. After they have come to realize that they share the same obsession of killing young, attractive homosexuals, they fall in love and go on a killing spree together, which culminates in the murder of Vincent Tran, a young second generation Vietnamese immigrant. A second plot focuses on the failed love story of Tran and the aspiring writer and talk show host Luke Ransome, a.k.a. Lush Rimbaud, of WHIV radio. Tran’s short life spirals out of control when he leaves Luke after the latter, enraged that only he is infected with the aids virus, threatens to inject him with his

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blood. Tran eventually dies in a most violent manner at the hands of Jay Byrne. Both Jay Byrne and Andrew Compton view themselves as artists when they inflict death. Compton explains his psychological and aesthetic motivation at the beginning of the novel. He kills young men in order to abate his loneliness and then goes to bed with the corpses: “I would take him into my bed and cradle his creamy smoothness all night. For a day or two days or a week I wouldn’t feel alone. Then it would be time to let another one go” (Brite 1996, 3). The pleasure of dealing with “creamy, smooth”, immobile bodies clearly has an aesthetic component for Andrew: “I found no joy in gross mutilation or dismemberment, not then; it was the subtle whisper and slice of the razor that appealed to me. I liked my boys as they were, big dead dolls with an extra weeping crimson mouth or two” (2-3). This aesthetic pleasure also extends to the olfactory: “I did not find the odor of death unpleasant. It was rather like cut flowers left too long in stagnant water, a heavy sickish sweetness that coated the nostrils and curled into the back of the throat with every breath” (3). Andrew Compton loves death and the dead and defines himself as a true necrophiliac: “At the trial they called me necrophiliac without considering the ancient roots of the word, or its profound resonance. I was a friend of the dead, lover of the dead. And I was my own first friend and lover” (7). Over a period of years he teaches himself to become like a corpse and to achieve “a hovering state between consciousness and void, a state where my lungs seemed to stop pulling in air and my heart to cease beating” (7). The perfection of this art of suspended animation eventually allows him to flee from the prison hospital because the staff there thinks that he actually is dead. In the US he meets Jay Byrne, who shows him how to dismember, rape, and cannibalize a victim all at once. After having observed Jay’s artistry, Andrew has to concede that even at the height of his own murderous art, he had not perfected it: “I did not come to appreciate the aesthetics of dismemberment until much later” (3). This finally happens after he has intently watched Jay, who derives aesthetic pleasure from dismembering bodies and viewing them as both delicious sex objects and food. Jay’s delights are described as follows: The heat of freshly exposed organs wafted up at him. […] He pulled out yards of intestines that felt like soft boudin sausages in his hands, the shrunken pouch of the stomach, the hard little kidneys, the sluttish liver, big and gaudy as some flamboyant subtropical blossom. […] [H]e liked the symmetrical arrangement of its various muscles and sacs, so different from the slick jumble of the belly.

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And the ribs, their connective cartilage severed, spread open like wings of scarlet streaked with snow. (102)

Throughout her novel Brite uses two main strategies of making these murders and the perpetrators appear almost acceptable to the reader. She “naturalizes” the horrible deeds by rendering their inevitability through the internal logic of the serial killer’s perception and she aestheticizes them through her consistent use of verbal imagery, whose dark beauty is difficult to resist. The stunning description of the dismembered body of a victim, “split wide open from crotch to thorax”, in terms of “a wet festival of scarlet” (102) which displays “the silken textures of [the] wounds, their slick interiors” (103) almost makes the reader forget the horrific aspect which is also aestheticized – the abject “visceral stink, the stew of blood and shit and secret gases, the innards’ rare perfume” (102). Brite thus presents murder as an aesthetic experience according to the De Quinceyan notion of the sublimity of murder. Thomas De Quincey was the first to point out the aesthetic component of murder in his essay “On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts” (1827). He argues that not only the murderer, but also the spectator who inadvertently witnesses a murder (and by extension the reader of a murder story), experiences a feeling of rapture that “entails a violent rupture with reality” (Black 1991, 53). This feeling can be explained in terms of Burke’s and Kant’s idea of sublime aesthetic experience as terror. In the twentieth century Georges Bataille has introduced a notion of deathly eroticism into the discussion of the aesthetics of murder: “Where De Quincey focuses on the murderer’s […] or the witness’s […] aesthetic experience of rapture with respect to murder, Bataille zeroes in on the erotic event of rupture, when the isolated body overcomes its own limits in a burst of excess” (110). As the following discussion will show, both rapture and rupture play an important role for the aesthetic experience that Brite creates in Exquisite Corpse. As a point of departure of his reflections on the aesthetics of murder, Thomas De Quincey reports about a London based “Society for the encouragement of murder”, whose members “profess to be curious in homicide, amateurs and dilettanti in the various modes of carnage, and, in short, Murder-Fanciers. Every fresh atrocity of that class […] they meet and criticize as they would a picture, statue or other work of art” ([1827] 1890, 9-10). He devotes his essay to the aesthetic component of murder, quoting from a lecture held at the society, in which the lecturer claims that “[p]eople begin to see that

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something more goes into the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed, a knife, a purse, a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature” (12). According to these aesthetic principles, De Quincey elevates the murderer to the status of the artist in his essay. As part of his aesthetic theory of murder, he calls the act of murder “sublime” due to its inherent terror and outrageousness. De Quincey thus becomes the first writer to include artful murder within the nomenclature of the sublime. He analyzes this sublimity in “On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts” and in “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” (1823). Both Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, as theorists of the sublime, deem concrete natural objects such as the agitated ocean or a majestic rock formation sublime; but they also apply the designation to more abstract phenomena such as that of infinity. Burke’s definition of the sublime is a good point of departure for De Quincey’s reflections on the sublimity of murder because it explains the notion of the “terrible sublime” and stresses the significance that death has for the sublime: Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. […] But as pain is stronger in its operation than pleasure, so death is in general a much more affecting idea than pain; because there are few pains, however exquisite, which are not preferred to death. […] When danger or pains press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain instances, and with certain modifications, they maybe, and they are delightful, as we every day experience. (Burke [1757] 1958, 39)

By drawing attention to the fact that a public execution could serve as a popular spectacle, Burke developed a theoretical stance on voyeurism and also further inspired De Quincey’s thoughts on the fascination exerted by murder. On the occasion of the execution of Lord Lovat in mid-eighteenth century Burke noted that the “live execution” of a “state criminal of high rank” would immediately empty all cultural centres and “in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would proclaim the comparative weakness of the imitative arts” (47). In his essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” De Quincey analyzes Shakespeare’s presentation of murder in Macbeth on the basis of Kant’s interpretation of Burke’s thoughts about the sublime, which stresses the dimension of the sublime as “disposition of soul” (Kant [1790] 1952, 98). According to De Quincey’s logic, what is true

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for the “[b]old, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks” (110) in Kant’s passage on the “dynamically sublime” is also true for the murder that is being observed; its “aspect is all the more attractive for its fearfulness” (110-111). De Quincey claims that Shakespeare must have intended a complicity between the uninvolved reader who finds himself in a secure position and the fictional murderer Macbeth, who is so enraptured by his deed that he has left reality behind: Our sympathy must be with him (of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into his feelings, and are made to understand them, – not a sympathy of pity or approbation) […]. [I]n the murderer there must be raging some great storm of passion, – jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred, – which will create a hell within him; and into this hell we are to look. ([1823] 1890a, 391)

After giving this description of the reader’s partial identification with the perpetrator (the spectator or reader can only aesthetically appreciate the deed from a position of relative security, according to De Quincey), De Quincey focuses on the extraordinary, sublime experience that both the murderer and the reader experience during the deed: Another world has stept in; and the murderers are taken out of the region of human things, human purposes, human desires. […] [W]e must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested, laid asleep, tranced […]; time must be annihilated, relation to things without abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion. (393)

According to Joel Black, this passage reflects the “terrible sublime” as Kantian disposition of soul. While Burke defines the sublimity of objects according to spatial dimensions and the potential of terror that results from them, Kant reasons that it is the “disposition of soul”, which “is evoked by a particular representation engaging the attention of the reflective judgement, and not the Object, that is to be called sublime” (Kant [1790] 1952, 98). He explains this as follows: If, however, we call anything not alone great, but, without qualification, absolutely, and in every respect (beyond all comparison) great, that is to say, sublime, we soon perceive that for this it is not permissible to seek an appropriate standard outside itself, but merely in itself. It is a greatness comparable to itself alone. Hence it comes that the sublime is not to be looked for in the things of nature, but only in our own ideas. But it must be left to the Deduction to show in which of them it resides. (97)

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As part of an analysis of the “terrible sublime”, murderous rapture can be accommodated within the definition of the sublime as “disposition of soul”. As indicated before, the spectator/reader plays an important role in the analysis of the terrible sublimity of a murderous deed. Both Burke and De Quincey associate the fascination that murder exerts on the public with voyeurism, about which Burke writes: “We delight in seeing things, which so far from doing, our heartiest wishes would be to see redressed” ([1757] 1958, 82). Both seem to accept voyeuristic interest in the horrible as a psychological given and stress that it is not objectionable if the horrible event cannot be prevented. As the example of Macbeth illustrates, the wish that a murder had not taken place, does not keep the spectator/reader from suspending moral judgment and identifying with the sublime feeling that the murderer experiences. Yet in spite of his identification with the perpetrator, the spectator can feel sympathy with the victim and can experience the cathartic emotions of pity and fear. In his writing De Quincey often, albeit in a very ironic manner, focuses on the incommensurability of aesthetic pleasure (derived from watching a murder) and an ethic, moral response (see Black 1991, 15-16). According to Black’s interpretation of De Quincey’s essays, female witnesses gain pleasure from the slight empowerment they feel because in this instance they do not function as the object of the “male gaze”, whereas male spectators experience an “erotic feeling” of visual jouissance (see Black 1991, 106-107). Taken to an extreme, the identification of the spectator with the murderer can cause him/her to experience the enraptured ecstasy that the murderer feels. De Quincey’s theory is important to a discussion of Exquisite Corpse because Brite deliberately implicates the reader in a voyeuristic position and also because she continuously aestheticizes the horrible murders she presents through the use of highly metaphoric, almost poetic language. In addition to that, her murderers act according to what seem to be De Quinceyan principles of “a fine murder”. Jay Byrne, for example, displays a De Quinceyan sense of “design and grouping”: “Inside [of the drawer] were the images he kept of all the boys, his Polaroid collection. They were good shots; Jay had an eye for composition, a keen sense of pose and angle” (Brite 1996, 141). The fact that Brite’s two serial killers both experience the sensation of rapture before and during a murder suggests that Brite is indeed familiar with De Quincey’s aesthetics. The descriptions of Andrew Compton’s emotions refer to sublime natural phenomena and

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correspond to the state of sublime rapture that De Quincey describes in his Macbeth-essay: “But when I saw that first drop of blood – always, when I saw that first drop of blood – something melted inside me. Like a wall of earth crumbling and dissolving in the hard rain, like a sheet of ice breaking apart and letting a river run free” ([1823] 1890a, 188). Jay Byrne, fresh from a murder, is likewise described as an enraptured being, a specter, who is temporarily “out of this world”: As Jay glided through the parlor, he caught sight of his reflection in the enormous mirror that stood in one corner, heavy gilt frame succulent with carved fruit and vegetation. He was a silver-white specter awash in the waterlight of dawn, his naked flesh luminously pale. His chest and abdomen were crisscrossed with dark spray patterns of blood, delicate as sea foam. (Brite 1996, 74)

When they kill a young male prostitute, the two murderers “are taken out of the region of human things” like the murderer in De Quincey’s Macbeth-essay and experience an orgiastic murderous frenzy (with which Brite’s readers may or may not be able to identify): As Jay stood by smiling, I savaged the headless body he laid out for me. I gripped its rigid shoulders as I fucked it. I slashed its bloodless flesh with knives, scissors, screwdrivers, everything Jay put into my hand. When I had reduced it to little more than a smear on the ancient bricks, I wallowed in its scraps. Then Jay joined me and licked me clean. […] [T]he intimacy between us was terrifying. We drank until we collapsed in the boy’s shredded ruins. (158-159) …………………………………………………………………………………… When morning light woke us, we rose aching and stinking, staggered into the house, and leaned on each other in the warm spray of the shower. Clean as babes, we burrowed into bed and slept for the rest of the day, half unnerved and half comforted by the nearness of each other’s breathing body. (160)

In this instance, the murderers in Brite’s novel encounter both the “aesthetic experience of rapture” and the “erotic event of rupture” (Black 1991, 110), during which they undergo a Bataillean moment of union between eroticism and death. Before discussing the implications of the fact that Brite’s description of a necrophilic act renders an instant of rupture, where “life is mingled with death, but simultaneously death is a sign of life, a way into the infinite” (Bataille [1962] 2001, 91), I want to focus on the inevitable criticism that Brite’s graphic, reality-based, fictionalization of the bloody murders committed by Dennis Nilsen and Jeffrey Dahmer has met with. As one reviewer puts it, with Poppy Z. Brite “you have an author who’s all but guaranteed to offend a

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major segment of the population” (Bracken 2001, online). In an interview conducted in September 1998, Brite defended her subject matter on aesthetic as well as “moral” grounds: What I’m looking to prove is that it is possible to find beauty in that sort of thing. I know that that is true for me, it always has been, and I’d like to be able to communicate this to the reader. To make them see beauty in something that they would otherwise find disgusting, and beyond that to possibly make them disturbed at their ability to see this beauty. To put something in their mind that wasn’t there before, but then they will never be able to get rid of it. (Brite 1998b, online)

As Joel Black argues in The Aesthetics of Murder, the aesthetic response to murder usually is the only response that spectators (these days mostly on TV) or readers have: “[I]n Western philosophy and culture in general […] our customary experience of murder and other forms of violence is primarily aesthetic, rather than moral, physical, natural or whatever term we choose as a synonym for real” (1991, 3). Yet if a murder is not completely fictional, then the “moral”, or “real” component cannot be completely virtualized, as De Quincey already suggested in 1827 in his aesthetics of murder. Even though he presents murder as an aesthetic event in his highly ironic “On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts”, De Quincey, calling attention to the incommensurability of the aesthetic and ethic, does not disavow the ethical component. In the essay’s introduction, he casts a critical eye on the voyeurism of the spectator (which Poppy Z. Brite, in contrast, seems to invite) by means of citing the Roman writer Lactantius, whose thoughts on gladiator fights in Roman amphitheatres contain an early criticism of the spectator’s voyeuristic implication: Now, if merely to be present at a murder fastens on a man the character of an accomplice; if barely a spectator involves us in one common guilt with the perpetrator: it follows, of necessity, that, in these murders of the amphitheatre, the hand which inflicts the fatal blow is not more deeply imbrued in blood than his who passively looks on. (qtd. in De Quincey [1827] 1890b, 10)

The problem with Brite’s graphic rendition of violence is that even though it is fictionalized, it remains too solidly grounded in the real. Reading Brite’s novel gives the modern-day spectator, the reader, the feeling that s/he indeed is involved “in one common guilt with the perpetrator”. This feeling becomes rather uncomfortable if the reader finds out that the whole episode leading up to the slaughter of Tran (including the police’s sad failure to act), is closely based on

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Dahmer’s murder of a 14-year-old Laotian boy named Konerak Sinthasomphone (see Bardsley n.d., online). As Brite says, with Exquisite Corpse something is put in the readers’ minds that was not there before – this “something” seems to be a voyeuristic implication that many reviewers and readers have deemed problematic. Brite’s presentation of homosexuals as murderous is equally problematic. Brite, who has repeatedly described herself as “a gay man that happens to be born in a female body” (1998a, online) certainly does not intend to reinforce stereotypes about the “perverted and criminal homosexual” (Aaron 1999, 67), but might nevertheless inadvertently do so with Exquisite Corpse. Both Diana Fuss and Michele Aaron have discussed “the homoeroticisation of murderous intent” (Aaron 1999, 67) in recent film and fiction. While Aaron concedes that working with the homophobic stereotype can, at least in some cases subvert its authority (see Aaron 1999, 68), Fuss less optimistically argues that “[i]n the specific case of Jeffrey Dahmer, the ‘homosexual-murderer-necrophilic-cannibal’ equation has proved particularly fertile ground in the late twentieth century for activating old phobias and breeding new justifications for the recriminalization and repathologization of gay identity” (1993, 197). Fuss reveals the deep structure of the stereotype of the “cannibalistic homosexual” by tracing it to Freudian psychoanalysis (see Fuss 1993, 183-188). Freud describes the homosexual as trapped in the early oral-cannibalistic stage of libidinal organization because he refuses to give up the first object choice of the maternal breast. He “swallows” the mother, “puts himself in her place, identifies himself with her, and takes his own person as a model in whose likeness he chooses the new objects of his love” (1953-1974, 4:100). This oralcannibalistic ingestion of the mother fosters a homosexual object choice as well as sadistic urges; Freud thus argues in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality that aggression in sexuality is “a relic of cannibalistic desires” (7:159). And in his General Theory of the Neuroses he lists homosexuals among a “class of perverts” who, “in their multiplicity and strangeness […] can only be compared to the monsters painted by Breughel” (16:305). These monsters include several types of “perverts”, who “replace the vulva […] by the mouth or anus”, derive erotic pleasure from “the excretory functions”, or desire partial objects as “fetishists”. Last but not least Freud’s list of perverts also includes cannibalistic murderers, who “require the whole object indeed, but make quite definite demands of it – strange or horrible – even that it must have to become a defenceless corpse, and who, using criminal violence, make it into one so that they may enjoy

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it” (16:305-306). Jeffrey Dahmer, the “German cannibal” Armin Meiwes (who in 2001 actually ate a friend who wanted to be eaten), and Brite’s two fictional cannibals, perfectly fit this latter description and can be viewed as clinical examples of murderous perversion and abjection. By modeling her homosexual offenders on the likes of Dahmer and Meiwes, Brite thus runs the risk of inadvertently, “recriminalizing” and “repathologizing” gay identity. In addition to Freud’s Oedipal explanation of cannibalism, Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory of individuation, which provides a counterpoint to Freud’s Oedipal theory, also explains this form of abject, murderous aggression. Kristeva attributes “destruction, aggressivity, and death” (1986, 95) to the impossibility of leaving behind the comforts of the maternal body and the semiotic chora (Plato’s term for womb). In her theory the maternal chora stands for the undifferentiated beginnings of an undeveloped life as a “not [yet quite] me” (see Kristeva 1982, 2). Thus it is associated with not being and points back towards annihilation: The mother’s body is [...] what mediates the symbolic law organizing social relations and becomes the ordering principle of the semiotic chora, which is on the path of destruction, aggressivity, and death. For although drives have been described as disunited or contradictory structures, simultaneously “positive” and “negative”, this doubling is said to generate a dominant “destructive wave” […]. [T]ogether, charges and stases lead to no identity (not even that of the “body proper”) that could be seen as a result of their functioning. (Kristeva 1986, 95)

According to Kristeva, the chora must be abjected when the child enters the realm of culture, the law, and the Symbolic because it threatens the newly established borders of identity. Yet the abject, nevertheless, exerts a strong fascination because the separated self yearns to be reunited with the maternal chora in spite of having rejected it. As Kristeva observes, “devotees of the abject […] do not cease looking, within what flows from the ‘other’s innermost being’, for the desirable and terrifying, nourishing and murderous, fascinating and abject inside of the maternal body” (1982, 54). The quotations from Exquisite Corpse have shown that this is precisely what, due to their psychological disorder, Brite’s cannibalistic murderers cannot cease to do. It is interesting to note that in the case of Armin Meiwes, who like Dennis Nilsen and Brite’s Andrew Compton ingested his victim in an attempt to abate his loneliness, the court psychiatrist diagnosed an “identity disorder” based on a failure to separate from the mother (see Knobbe and Schmalenberg 2003, 50).

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The above discussion has made it clear that Brite’s decision to base her characters on real life criminals Dahmer and Nilsen complicates her stated aim of debunking stereotypes that criminalize homosexuality and that are deep-seated even in contemporary society. Yet she nevertheless attempts to provide an (albeit slightly ironic) rationale for the outrageously violent acts committed in Exquisite Corpse. This implies that their violence does not have anything to do with their homosexual penchants. She simply attributes the depravity of her serial killers to common psychological and genetic aberrations: Andrew Compton, who insists that he did not have any traumatic experiences in his youth and boasts “I emerged from the womb with no morals, and no one has been able to instill any in me since” (Brite 1996, 159), lacked oxygen at birth and was a “blue baby”. And Jay Byrne, whose great-great-uncle was famous New Orleans serial killer Jonathan Daigrepoint, was possibly poisoned by dangerous waste material that emanated from his father’s chemical factory. The character of Luke Ransome, the violent ex-lover of Jay and Andrew’s victim Tran, however, highlights a connection between homosexuality and violence that cannot be traced to any kind of psychological aberration: his example illustrates that homosexuals kill because AIDS is killing them and because they are hated by a large part of society. Thus, Luke threatens to inject Tran with his AIDS infected blood because he is HIV positive and Tran is not, because Tran will live and he will not. Under the radio personality name of Lush Rimbaud, Luke hosts a radio programme on pirate station WHIV which broadcasts only AIDS-related news. The name is an obvious spoof on right-wing radio show host Rush Limbaugh, on being a lush, and on Rimbaud, the French poet of excess. On WHIV, Luke/Lush repeatedly expresses his death wish against heterosexuals, or breeders, as he calls them: Here’s a nifty item from yesterday’s paper. Shandra McNeil of Gertrude, Loooz-i-anna, was convicted on three counts of attempted murder, which may be upgraded to first-degree murder if any of her victims dies before her. McNeil, who has AIDS, engaged in unprotected sex with several men she met at singles’ bars. Her reason: she desperately wanted a child before she died. Shandra McNeil is now five months pregnant. Well, if it wasn’t for that fetus, I’d say pin a medal on her. She’s wiped out at least three breeder assholes, probably a lot more, and all because her biological clock didn’t stop ticking when the time bomb in her cells started. (192)

He later explains that his rage is a reaction to “right wing fundamentalists” and a world which “shrinks away from us in hatred, terror and disgust” (196) and admits that instead of redesigning the

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world by means of his heterophobic hate speeches, he “just wants to take it down” with him (198). Feeling that there is “nothing left inside [him] but broken glass and rusty nails” (199), Luke, who admires Rimbaud as a poet of abjection because “blood and shit were among his greatest passions” (126), actively embraces blood, death, and abjection. Blood actually is a prime site of abjection in Brite’s novel: Jay and Andrew engage in bloody murder rituals during which they mix blood and sperm and feed on blood in vampire-like fashion. Luke wants to inject Tran with his lethal blood, and Luke’s friend Johnnie, having given up his fight against the virus after his lover’s death, commits a gory suicide by shooting himself in the head: “[B]lood exploded from the top of Johnnie’s head, cascaded out of his mouth and nostrils, painting the wasted flesh of his throat, fountaining into the water” (202). As in Kristeva’s description of blood as an abject body fluid, blood here functions as “a fascinating semantic crossroads, the propitious place for abjection where death and femininity, murder and procreation, cessation of life and vitality all come together” (Kristeva 1982, 96; Kristeva’s italics). While Brite’s character Luke seems to be forced by AIDS into a Bataillean embracing of death and abjection, Jay and Andrew do so as a symptom of their mental disturbance. Unlike Luke, who would rather live and Tran, who had only courted death as a Goth fashion statement, the two serial killers actively seek death and even welcome the lethal AIDS virus into their bodies. Andrew concedes that contracting AIDS is a logical consequence of his lifestyle and Jay, who says, “HIV? If it finds me, I accept it with my blessing. Maybe it’s already found me. If so, I welcome it” (Brite 1996, 186), at one point actually asks Andrew to infect him. Peter Straub calls attention to the Bataillean component of Brite’s aesthetics by introducing her collection of short stories Are You Loathsome Tonight? (2000) with several short excerpts from Bataille’s The Tears of Eros (1961). These quotations stress the “diabolical” aspects of Bataillean eroticism which are closely related to (human) sacrifice (see Straub 2000, 13, 20). Bataille’s work often focuses on the interconnectedness of love and death, sexuality and horror. In Eroticism ([1957] 2001), he thus presents death as “a sign of life, a way into the infinite” (91) and calls attention to the fact that the shocking external violence that is exerted during a sacrificial act allows insights into the inmost human being: “The external violence of the sacrifice reveals the internal violence of the creature, seen as loss of blood and ejaculation. The blood and organs brimful of life

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were not what modern anatomy would see; the feeling of the men of old can be recaptured as an inner experience, not by science” (91). This inner experience that “the men of old” had is also felt by Brite’s serial killers Andrew Compton and Jay Byrne during their atavistic deeds, which suspend the Christian taboo that should have rendered them obsolete. Their sacrificial murders are atavistic because, according to Bataille, the possibility to experience “piety in sacrifice and in untrammelled eroticism” which “might by chance befall one person […] vanished with Christianity where pity eschewed the desire to use violent means to probe the secrets of existence” (91). Brite’s description of the bloody rapture and rupture that Jay delights in while cannibalizing a victim’s body captures Bataille’s notion of a murderous erotic ecstasy that entails a violent fusion of the bodies of victim and murderer: Then [Jay] fell to his knees and buried his face in the hanging man’s belly. He sank his teeth into flesh that had gone the consistency of firm pudding. He ripped at the edges of the wound, pulling off strips of skin and meat, swallowing them whole, smearing his face with his own saliva and what little juice remained in this chill tissue. […] At some point he ejaculated, and the semen ran down his inner thigh almost unnoticed, a small sacrifice to this splendid shrine. (Brite 1996, 144)

Bataille points out in Eroticism that there is a natural, erotic link between sacrifice and love: “[There is a] similarity between the act of love and the sacrifice. Both reveal the flesh. Sacrifice replaces the ordered life of the animal with a blind convulsion of the organs. So also with the erotic convulsion; it gives free rein to extravagant organs whose blind activity goes on beyond the considered will of the lovers” ([1957] 2001, 92). Sacrificial rituals of the sort that Jay and Andrew engage in follow a Bataillean logic according to which “the animal activity of the swollen organs” of the lovers eliminates “the control of reason” (92). These rituals entail a special type of love which suspends the confines of individuality and merges formerly separate identities into a continuity of existence: If transgression is not fundamental then sacrifice and the act of love have nothing in common. If it is an intentional transgression, sacrifice is a deliberate act whose purpose is a sudden change in the victim. The creature is put to death. Before that it was enclosed in its individual separateness and its existence was discontinuous […]. But this being is brought back by death into continuity with all being, to the absence of separate individualities. (90)

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In Exquisite Corpse Jay discusses this type of continuity of being with Andrew and even suggests that the victim actively collaborates in it: “[I]t becomes a collaboration”. “But surely they’re just trying to get it over with faster?” “I don’t know”. Jay’s eyes were dreamy. “I think once the body realizes it’s definitely, irrevocably going to die at your hands, it begins to work with you. You might be choking a boy, or cutting, or burning him, or your fingers might be knuckle-deep in his guts, but at a certain point his body not only stops resisting – it falls into your rhythm”. (Brite 1996, 178)

According to Bataille’s sacrificial logic, ritual murder culminates in a “communion feast following on the sacrifice. The human flesh that is eaten then is held as sacred” (71). This certainly is also the case in Brite’s novel, about which Peter Straub says that it treats the human body “like a communion wafer” (see Brite 1998b, online). After Luke has murdered Jay in retaliation for Tran’s murder, Andrew ingests part of Jay’s body in order to “assimilate as much of him as possible” so that he might quench his loneliness for good: “When I awoke, he would be with me always, and all the world’s pleasures would be ours to revel in. This time I was not corpse but larva” (Brite 1996, 242). The ending of Exquisite Corpse thus indeed suggests with Bataille that “death is a sign of life, a way into the infinite” (Bataille [1962] 2001, 91). Summing up the thematic concerns of her article “Monsters of Perversion”, Diane Fuss asks “To what degree is it possible that we could identify with a figure of abjection – with a Jame Gumb, a Hannibal Lecter, or a Jeffrey Dahmer?” (1993, 199). Brite’s Exquisite Corpse suggests that this is possible at least to some degree. By means of her extremely clever linguistic and “philosophical” aestheticization of both the abject murders and murderers presented in her novel, Brite succeeds in creating a “hell within the murderers into [which] we are to look” (De Quincey [1823] 1890a, 391). This inner hell seems almost inevitable and therefore almost acceptable. Through its rigorous logic of abjection, which culminates in Bataillean acts of sacrifice, Brite’s novel achieves its aim of putting something in the readers’ mind “that wasn’t there before” and that “they will never be able to get rid of” (Brite 1998b, online). Exquisite Corpse thus can be viewed as a novel that has the potential to make its readers question their voyeurism.

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Works Cited Aaron, Michele. 1999. “ ‘Til Death Us Do Part: Cinema’s Queer Couples Who Kill”. In Dangerous Desires and Contemporary Culture, edited by Michele Aaron, 6784. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bardsley, Marilyn. n.d. “Butt Naked”. www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious /dahmer/naked1.html (accessed 11 November 2004). Bataille, Georges. [1957] 2001. Eroticism, translated by Mary Dalwood. London: Penguin. Black, Joel. 1991. The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Bracken, Mike. 2001. Review of Exquisite Corpse, by Poppy Z. Brite. 30 December. www.culturedose.net/review.php?rid=10002211 (accessed 2 July 2003). Brite, Poppy Z. 1996. Exquisite Corpse. London: Phoenix. —. 1998a. “Enough Rope”. www.poppyzbrite.com/rope.html (accessed 2 July 2003). —. 1998b. “Interview with Dmetri Kakmi”. SevenMag, September. www.sevenmag. com/articles/sept_oct/poppy_z/index2.html (accessed 1 July 2003). Burke, Edmund. [1757] 1958. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. De Quincey, Thomas. [1823] 1890a. “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”. In The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, 389-394. Vol. 10 of Tales and Prose Phantasies, edited by David Masson. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black. —. [1827] 1890b. “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts”. In The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, 9-124. Vol. 13 of Tales and Prose Phantasies, edited by David Masson. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black. Freud, Sigmund. 1953-1974. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey. 24 vols. London: The Hogarth Press. Fuss, Diana. 1993. “Monsters of Perversion: Jeffrey Dahmer and The Silence of the Lambs”. In Media Spectacles, edited by Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, 181-205. New York: Routledge. Kant, Immanuel. [1790] 1952. The Critique of Judgement, translated by James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Knobbe, Martin, and Detlev Schmalenberg. 2003. “Der Kannibale”. Stern, 24 July, 41-54. Kristeva, Julia. [1980] 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. —. [1974] 1986. “Revolution in Poetic Language”. In The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi and translated by Margaret Waller, 89-136. New York: Columbia University Press. Ramsland, Katherine. n.d. “The Dangerous Stranger”. www.crimelibrary.com/serial4/ nilsen (accessed 12 November 2004). Sage, Robert. 1995. “Purple Proze Newsletter”. July. www.poppyzbrite.com/proze. html (accessed 24 December 2004). Straub, Peter. 2000. “Introduction”. Are You Loathsome Tonight?, by Poppy Z. Brite, 13-22. Springfield, PA: Gauntlet Publications.


Interior Landscapes: Anatomy Art and the Work of Gunther von Hagens

Alison Goeller In the winter of 1995 Dr. Gunther von Hagens, a researcher at the Institute for Anatomy and Cellular Biology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, opened an exhibit in Tokyo which was to prove as controversial as it was popular. Von Hagens’s exhibition – which he called “Körperwelten” or “Body Worlds” – presented to the public over two hundred perfectly preserved human organs as well as dozens of fully-flayed corpses in various poses: running, reclining, swimming, and even fencing. Over two million visitors attended that first exhibit in Tokyo, and since then von Hagens has exhibited his bodies and body parts in Berlin, Mannheim, Cologne, Basel, Vienna, Oberhausen, Brussels, London, Cheltenham (England), Munich, and Frankfurt, expanding his collection to include a corpse seated at a table playing chess, a basketball player, a bicyclist, a dancer, and his most ambitious work to date: a fully-flayed man riding a fully-flayed horse. An estimated fifteen million people have seen his exhibition. Von Hagens invented the method of body preservation, which he calls plastination while working at the Institute of Anatomy and Pathology at the University of Heidelberg; he then went on to found the Institute for Plastination in 1993. The process of plastination involves several steps. First, the body is prevented from decomposing by injecting the fluids in the body’s tissues with formaldehyde, then these same tissues are injected with acetone through a diffusion process, and finally, through a special vacuum process, the acetone is replaced with injected reactive plastics, such as silicone rubber, epoxy or polyester resin. In this way, bodies can be preserved indefinitely and can be manipulated and shaped, much as one would bend and stretch a “Barbie doll” (O’Rorke 2002, online) or as an artist might sculpt a figure from clay, an analogy that has frequently been used in describing von Hagens’s work. Another advantage of plastination is that it makes soft body parts such as muscles or the skin more rigid than is usual (von Hagens and Whalley 2001, 21), thus also allowing for a variety of presentations, or, as von Hagens calls them, specimens. Corpses can thus be “exploded” so that body parts ordinarily packed closely together can be viewed simultaneously in what is referred to as “open-door” or

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“open-drawer” displays. In addition, “slice plastination”, a special variation of the technique whereby whole bodies or body parts are cut and sawed or sliced into two-to-eight millimeter thick slices, allows for yet another perspective, what some spectators have likened to stained glass. Unlike formaldehyde, plastination also eliminates odors, so the bodies are more palatable to the viewing public. Perhaps the most important feature of the plastinated bodies and body slices is that the body cells and the natural surfaces remain unchanged and will do so indefinitely; corpses can thus be maintained virtually forever, a feature von Hagens uses to attract donors. As one can imagine, the process of plastination is slow; on average, it takes between 1000 and 1500 man-hours per specimen, depending upon the design. Despite the enormous success of the project (in Mannheim the exhibition had to be extended for several weeks and was kept open all night), it has also, not surprisingly, stirred up enormous controversy, as has von Hagens himself with his flamboyant hat and his theatrical posing. At the exhibition in the Atlantis Gallery in London, for example, a man claiming to be a “horrified parent” protecting his children against the “freak show”, poured red paint onto the exhibition hall floor and threw a blanket over the exhibit of a baby in the womb of a flayed mother (“Autopsy Show” 2002, 6). Visitors have described von Hagens’s work as “ ‘seasoned with crude obscenities’ ”, “ ‘exceed[ing] the limit of perversion’ ”, and “ ‘practic[ing] idolatry of the body […] as dead machine’ ” (von Hagens “A Body of Knowledge” 2002, online). Before its opening in Munich, which drew a record crowd of 4,700 visitors the first day, the Bavarian courts conducted a lengthy debate over the propriety of publicly displaying flayed bodies, finally ruling that it did “not fundamentally infringe on human dignity” (see “ ‘Body Parts’ Not Welcome” 2003, 2, and “Exhibition a Hit” 2003, 2). However, the controversy over the morality of showing corpses to the public is likely to continue, especially as there are plans underway to take Körperwelten to the United States, where religious groups and Right to Life advocates are bound to protest vehemently. For example, German church officials have argued that it violates the sanctity of the human body. Ulrich Fischer, bishop of the Lutheran Church of Baden (Germany), claims that von Hagens’s work encourages voyeurism and objectification of the human body, both of which are “permeating and threatening our public life” (2001, 230). Fischer continues to write:

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A society hallmarked by voyeurism, a society of gawkers, onlookers, and of curious people who want to dig up all of the intimate details, such a society can seriously harm our culture, which has always been characterized by a balance between intimacy and publicity […]. [A]n inevitable effect of the display of corpses at the Koerperwelten exhibition is to depersonalize human beings. The person, the corpse, is presented as an inanimate object, similar to the way in which our media frequently portrays corpses as objects rather than as dead persons. (230)

One clergyman, Reverend Ernst Pulsfort, even went so far as to perform a requiem mass in Berlin for the corpses, claiming, “ ‘As a Christian, I say a dead person is not only material. The human being has a spiritual dimension that is torn away here’ ” (Finn 2001, 1). Von Hagens himself has been labelled a modern-day Frankenstein, a body snatcher, a grave robber, and a fraud – claims that he has repeatedly denied (see “Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds”, n.d., online). He has even been compared to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele (see Finn 2001, 1). Although von Hagens often responds vehemently to these charges, he does appear at times to relish such notoriety. For example, before the Berlin exhibition opened in 2001, he placed a plastinated corpse of a reclining pregnant woman in the back of a bus and drove it around Berlin as a promotional tool (see Finn 2001, 1). And during the London tour his plastinated basketball player was displayed in the window of the Planet Hollywood Café (see “Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds”, n.d., online). What I will argue in this essay is that despite the controversial nature of von Hagens’s work, as well as von Hagens’s own insistence that his exhibitions are meant to be viewed not so much as “art” but more as tools to educate the viewing public about their own bodies, there are important and conscious links in his exhibits to a variety of traditional art forms. These links invoke sometimes quite consciously, not only the art and practice of body preservation as seen in the ancient technique of Egyptian mummification, in places like the catacombs of Palermo, Italy, or in the ossuaries throughout Europe, but also and more importantly the work of such artists and sculptors as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Jean-Auguste Ingres, Thomas Eakins, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, and Umberto Bocciono. Thus, von Hagens can be positioned in a continuum of artists and crafts persons who have used their knowledge of and interest in human anatomy to depict various aspects of the human body. Further, von Hagens’s provocative work raises important questions about the conventional ways in which we think about issues surrounding death,

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representations of the human body, and the “proper” ways to treat them. In raising these issues his work poses major philosophical and moral questions that link him to some of the great works of literature, namely Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and his short story “The Body Snatcher”. Finally, von Hagens’s work interrogates the way we think about and represent gender and human identity. His rendering of flayed females, sometimes in reclining positions to resemble artists’ models, or slit from the sternum to the genitals, to expose a fetus, can be read variously as yet another instance of woman as object, as an obvious tribute to some of the world’s great artistic renderings of the female body, or as a physiological specimen. And yet von Hagens’s bodies are not always gender-specific, calling into question the slippery notion of gender identity that Julia Kristeva explores in Powers of Horror. As she argues in her important work on the abject, the boundary of the skin being dissolved produces anxiety about the body’s individuality. Claudia Benthien, echoing Kristeva in her book Skin, historicizes the notion of skin as a boundary, pointing out that only in the last two centuries it has been an important site of comfort, a “cultural border between the self and the world” as the subtitle to her book suggests. In this way, the case can be made that Körperwelten marks a major contribution to the ongoing debate over the aesthetics of the body, our anxiety concerning matters of human anatomy and mortality, and our concept of gender and identity. One way in which to view von Hagens’s bodies is to place them within the tradition of body preservation, a process that can be traced back at least as far as the mummification of bodies practiced by the ancient Egyptians. Bodies were disemboweled, treated with fragrant resins and sodium bicarbonate, then dried and wrapped in linen strips, presumably to permit the dead to live on. In contrast to the plastination performed on von Hagens’s specimens, the ancient Egyptian process of mummification did not expose the “fascination beneath the surface” – as suggested by the subtitle of von Hagens’s and Whalley’s book (2001) – since only the skin and bones were preserved. Moreover, the Egyptians stressed the aesthetic aspect: The linen strips, for example, were coated in a kind of plaster of Paris and painted with bright colours. Other early examples of body preservation were the European ossuaries or charnel houses, where, in order to make room for new corpses, old bones were dug up, separated, sorted, regrouped anatomically, and stored. Very often when they were stored, they were arranged in artistic ways. One of the most well-known examples of this can be found in Kunta Hora, Czech

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Republic, at the All Saints Church. Here, in 1860 a wood carver, Frantisek Rint, adorned the charnel house with the bones of 40,000 people, much as one would decorate with candles and icons (see von Hagens and Whalley 2001, 16). Another example of using human bones decoratively can be seen in the church of Santa Maria della Concezione in Rome, also known as the Capuchin Chapel, where an eighteenth-century monk, using everything from shoulder blades to tibias, constructed niches, columns, and even lamps to “produce a theatrical or operatic setting” (Ariès 1985, 190). More modern attempts at preservation include placing corpses in formaldehyde, a process invented in 1893 and still used in the medical field, and paraffin, which was developed in 1914, although neither of these processes usually includes artistic aims. Recently, cryonics, the art of freezing bodies in the hope that scientists will one day have the technology to bring the dead back to life, made news when Ted Williams, the famous baseball player, was frozen after his death, presumably so that his DNA might be used commercially one day (see “Executor” 2002, online). Although von Hagens has said his primary goal is to educate the public about their bodies, thus democratizing human anatomy and removing it from the confines of the medical profession, his work also clearly appeals to the human longing for immortality. At each of the exhibitions as well as on his Körperwelten website, information and application forms are available for those interested in donating their bodies. The response has been so overwhelming – donations of bodies average five a day – that as of this writing over 3600 people have donated their bodies to plastination. Donors have expressed everything from feelings of gratitude to feelings of peace knowing that their bodies will be used for medical research and that they will be immortalized. Here are some typical responses: “The option of being plastinated after my death takes away my fear of death, because I know what will happen to me”. “The meaning of my existence does not have to end when I die”. “By donating my body, I am merely changing my meaning! The thought of becoming a museum piece after my death is a pleasant one which fascinates me”. “It is nice to think that I could be useful after death”. (Koerperwelten Press Kit, n.d., n.p.)

Indeed, what is so fascinating and complex about von Hagens’s work is that it links aesthetics, anatomy, and issues of death and immortality. In fact, despite some viewers’ attitudes that his work represents a twenty-first century disrespect for and perversion of the

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human body, this link has a long history. The ancient Greeks were perhaps the first to become interested in human anatomy. Around 500 B.C. they founded medical schools where they used animals to study human anatomy. Aristotle is considered by many to be the first anatomist (see von Hagens and Whalley 2001, 9). Aristotle’s work enabled him to distinguish between nerves and tendons, paving the way for future anatomists. Plato, under whom Aristotle studied, was thought to have performed the first human dissections, justifying them on the grounds that the body and soul were entirely different entities, thus preserving the sanctity of human life. Galen of Pergamum (131201 A.D.), who studied in Alexandria and settled in Rome, produced some 150 drawings based on animal anatomy and apparently influenced anatomical thought for the next 1300 years (see von Hagens and Whalley 2001, 9). Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), a Belgian professor at the University of Padua, published the first book on human anatomy, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Workings of the Human Body), which showed probably for the first time dissected bodies in life-like poses and skeletons and bones assembled in upright positions. This was an important development in the history of art and anatomy because “artistic means were employed to demonstrate the authenticity and individuality of the illustration; shadows caused by the light coming in through a window, for example, made clear what time of day that particular specimen was dissected” (von Hagens and Whalley 2001, 11). Vesalius is now considered the founder of the science of anatomy. A further breakthrough came with the work of Bernhard Albinus (1697-1747), who studied organ systems, and with the help of his illustrator, Wandelaer, was able to provide the foundation for developing schematic diagrams of anatomy. Instead of organs being drawn individually, they were “drawn together with their associated functional structures […]. A kidney, for example, was not just drawn along with the adrenal gland […]. [T]he ureters and bladder were included as well” (11). Cross-sectional anatomy was developed by the Russian anatomist Nikolas Pirogov (1810-1881), who published 213 illustrations of the human body, including one of a pregnant woman, which shows a striking resemblance to von Hagens’s reclining pregnant woman. Although von Hagens has repeatedly denied that his exhibits are intended to be art – “I have been called an artist, but I reject it. I give an aesthetic feeling to my exhibits – but in the way you would do in designing a book” (von Hagens “A Body of Knowledge” 2002, online) – and that anatomical works of art “become works of art [only]

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through the judgment of the visitors” (von Hagens and Whalley 2001, 31), fifty percent of the viewers at the Mannheim exhibit said they looked at von Hagens’s work as art. This most likely was because after the first show in Tokyo, visitors complained that his work was too medical, so von Hagens began studying Renaissance art in the hopes of changing the impact of his exhibited corpses. He then quite consciously designed and shaped many of his bodies based on famous paintings, similar to the tradition of painters copying the great artists in order to develop as a painter or sculptor. His The Runner, whose muscles have been decribed as “splayed out aerodynamically like a fan” (O’Rorke 2002, online), for example, is said to be based on Umberto Boccioni’s Prototypes of Movement in Space (see von Hagens and Whalley 2001, 268). And The Open Drawer, where chunks of the body are pulled forward in order to view threedimensionally, closely resembles Dali’s Anthropomorphic Cupboard. One can detect Cubist connections as well in many of von Hagens’s “exploded” and “open drawer” specimens, where different viewpoints are possible in one plastinated body. One of von Hagens’s most startling bodies, and the one he chose for the entry to his webpage, is The Muscle Man. This shows an erect male, his muscles and genitals exposed, holding his own flayed skin draped over his arm. Based on Michelangelo’s portrait of St. Bartholomew in the Last Judgment section on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, it is a nod to von Hagens’s regard for the great painter and most especially to Michelangelo’s work in the area of anatomy. It is well-known that Michelangelo, like many Renaissance painters and sculptors, dissected human bodies in order to better represent the human form in his work because “beauty was not just a superficial quality, but was attributed to internal structures and harmonious proportions” (von Hagens and Whally 2001, 237). In the portrait of St. Bartholomew, the martyred saint stands at the Last Judgment holding his own skin. This is first of all Michelangelo’s silent acknowledgment of his indebtedness to anatomical research. But also if one looks closely at the saint’s arm, a likeness of Michelangelo himself can be seen. Several critics have suggested that Michelangelo’s identification with the saint indicated his feeling of not being understood by his public; in other words, he felt “flayed alive” by them (Lecaldano 1965, 258). Could von Hagens’s “copying” of Michelangelo’s saint be his way of similarly responding to a public that does not understand him and a hint that he is indeed carrying on the work of previous generations?

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A more direct link with von Hagens is Leonardo da Vinci (14521519), the famous Renaissance painter, scientist, and inventor whom von Hagens has acknowledged as an influence. Da Vinci began dissecting and studying human anatomy, particularly the nervous system, when he was in Milan (1487-1495) during the same period he painted his famous Last Supper. Both da Vinci and Michelangelo were able to persuade the Church to lift the sanctions against human dissection on the grounds that “the accurate portrayal of saints and […] Christ himself could only be accomplished through the visual documentation of human anatomy” (Giegerich 2001, 204), again drawing on the notion that external beauty could only be fully represented with knowledge of what lay beneath the surface. Together, he and Michelangelo performed as many as five hundred human dissections. His so-called “Tree of Veins” sketch comes from this period in his career (see Zubov 1968, 18), which most presumably was a model for many of von Hagens’s blood vessel specimens. In his native Florence, where da Vinci was forced to flee after the French had invaded Milan, the artist renewed his study of anatomy, this time internal organs (heart and lungs), the skeleton, and the muscles in order to understand the “fundamental physiological laws of movement” (Zubov 1968, 29) so that he could paint those movements as accurately and authentically as possible. He also then made sketches of these anatomical specimens, and from every angle possible. According to his biographer V. P. Zubov, da Vinci felt that his anatomical drawings “must give a comprehensive picture of the object, reveal it in all its aspects, sculpture it, so to speak” (58). Da Vinci was so insistent on representing the various parts of the body accurately that he drew them from many different angles, what he called dimostrazioni, and also drew the parts in relationship to one another. In his “Notebooks on Anatomy” he describes this process: The true knowledge of the shape of any body will be arrived at by seeing it from different aspects. Consequently, in order to convey a notion of the true shape of any limb of man who ranks among the animals as first of the beasts, I will observe the aforesaid rule, making four demonstrations of the four sides of each limb, and for the bones I will make five, cutting them in half and showing the hollow of each of them. (qtd. in Zubov 1968, 59)

Da Vinci’s skill in drawing allowed him to “give a plastic feeling” (58) to the sketches, similar to sculpture, and to the effect that von Hagens’s process of plastination produces. Von Hagens’s indebtedness to da Vinci can be seen in several of the Körperwelten specimens. In one exhibition piece he has placed a plastinated figure

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in front of an anatomical drawing by da Vinci. And one of his body slices is clearly a variation on da Vinci’s famous “Proportions of the Human Body” sketch. Von Hagens’s work has also been influenced by the tradition of anatomy lesson paintings, made famous by Rembrandt, though many of his contemporaries also painted anatomy lessons and dissections, among them Thomas de Keyser, Pieter M. van Miereveld (see Ariès 1985, 182-183), Aert Pietersz, and Nicolaes E. Pickenoy (see Schwartz 1985, 143). In fact, according to one of Rembrandt’s biographers, it was a “minor tradition” to display paintings of anatomical demonstrations in the surgeons’ guild (143). Rembrandt painted several anatomy paintings. His most famous, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632), shows a group of seven prominent Amsterdam surgeons who watch as Dr. Tulp, the main figure in the painting, is about to sever the exposed left arm of a corpse. Although at the time public dissections were routine in Amsterdam, as well as in Leiden, Padua, and Heidelberg, in England after the Reformation (1565) the right to perform dissections was granted only to the Royal College of Physicians; before this the Church, operating on the belief that resurrection was impossible if the body was dissected, prohibited dissections in the hopes of curtailing the practice of dismembering and boiling the bodies of Crusaders killed in battle (see von Hagens and Whalley 2001, 15). This particular painting depicts Dr. Tulp performing a dissection for the instruction of the other surgeons only. The painting shows the influence of seventeenth-century Dutch group portraiture, focusing more on Dr. Tulp than on the corpse. Several lessons were supposed to be gleaned from paintings like this one. According to Tulp himself, for example, the main purpose of anatomy paintings was to show “ ‘the sympathy between body and soul’ ” (Schwartz 1985, 143). A contemporary of Rembrandt’s, a poet, claimed that anatomy paintings “put to shame” artists whose skill does not come close to God’s skill in making human beings and that knowing “[w]hat our skins encase / What keeps all our parts in place” is simply part of knowing oneself (144). A final lesson comes from the well-known fact that the corpses used in dissections were almost always those of criminals (in fact, in England the Murder Act of 1752 made dissection of murderers compulsory; see Marshall 1995, xiii); it thus acted as a deterrent, a warning to its viewers to obey the law. That many of the surgeons, Tulp included, were also government officials simply reinforced this warning. Three hundred and seventy years later after Rembrandt painted Tulp, Dr. Gunther von Hagens donned a hat nearly identical to

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Tulp’s and performed a public dissection in London, claiming the authority of Rembrandt by covering the corpse with a copy of Rembrandt’s painting. Although public reaction was mixed and police had to stand guard outside the theatre, from a historical point of view, von Hagens was simply repeating history. On November 20, 2002, in London, he performed his most controversial “exhibition” to date – a public dissection on a 72-yearold German man who died of heart failure. It was broadcast live on TV with several hundred people in the audience. According to the International Herald Tribune (“Dissection Goes Live” 2002, 2), it was the first public autopsy in England since public autopsies were banned in 1832. Von Hagens is quoted as saying “ ‘I stand here for democracy’ ” before making his first incision (“Autopsy Show 2002”, 6). And once again he invoked the legacy of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (in which a small group of spectators watch Dr. Tulp display veins and muscles in a cadaver’s arm), not only by wearing a similar hat but also by covering the cadaver with a copy of Rembrandt’s painting. A New York Times editorial was highly critical of the performance: [W]hatever pretense Von Hagens makes, whatever artistic or scientific analogies he reaches for, his basic premise is bankrupt. He claims to be democratizing anatomy, welcoming the public into the medical world. But the sole persuasive argument for public autopsy has been the advance of anatomical science, and the “public” that […] Tulp addressed was composed of fellow scientists and physicians. The only thing Von Hagens advanced on Wednesday night was his notoriety […]. Von Hagens’ performance will convince no one [of the usefulness of autopsies], except perhaps the makers of reality television, who will see […] a whole new genre waiting to be born”. (“Autopsy Show” 2002, 6)

The tradition of paintings depicting anatomy lessons continued well into the nineteenth century, illustrating the close nexus between knowledge of the human body and art. The American painter Thomas Eakins, whose oil painting The Gross Clinic is one of his most wellknown, formally studied anatomy as part of his training as an artist, signing up for courses at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia in 1864. According to his biographer, Lloyd Goodrich, Eakins was so interested in anatomical study that his knowledge of anatomy was “as great as that of most physicians and considerably greater than that of most artists” (1982, 13). Eakins returned to Jefferson after studying painting in France in 1873 and in 1875 began work on The Gross Clinic, one of his most ambitious paintings. Similar to Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson, Eakins’s innovation is to show not a dead corpse

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being dissected but a live human whose thigh has been sliced open in order to remove a piece of dead bone. The viewer’s eyes are primarily drawn to three areas in the painting: the high forehead of Dr. Gross himself, the thigh and buttocks of the patient, and Dr. Gross’s hand, holding the bloody scalpel, much as Eakins himself would have held his paint brush. In fact, the scalpel bears close resemblance to a paintbrush, while the blood on the scalpel could easily be red paint. Presumably, this was a strategy on Eakins’s part to suggest the doctor as artist, an idea that, as medicine advanced, became more and more tenable, so that now, in the twenty-first century, virtually every part of one’s body can be “sculpted” into a different shape. Although Eakins’s painting avoids showing the face and even most of the patient’s body, the realistic rendering of blood and muscle tissue horrified many of his contemporaries, even though most agreed it was a “ ‘great work’ ” (Goodrich 1982, 132). One Philadelphia newspaper critic wrote: “ ‘It is not a subject to be thus vividly presented upon canvas. It is rather a subject to be engraved for a textbook on Surgery’ ” (132). Consequently, the painting was rejected by the art committee for the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where Eakins had hoped to display it. It was eventually accepted at the Centennial, but was relegated to the medical exhibition only. Today, it hangs in the halls of Jefferson Medical College, apparently still considered more “medical” or perhaps even abject than artistic. In addition to the links between von Hagens’s Körperwelten and anatomy art there are provocative similarities to several famous – and infamous – literary doctors. Imogen O’Rorke of the Observer, for example, likens him to Hannibal Lecter, the cannibal doctor made famous in the film The Silence of the Lambs as well as to Ed Gein, the model for Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He has also repeatedly been accused of Faustian attempts at playing God, linking him, of course, to Dr. Faust who sells his soul to the devil for unlimited earthly power and to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll, who turns himself into Mr. Hyde in order to separate the evil parts of himself from the good and thus eliminate guilt: If each, I told myself, could but be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. (Stevenson [1886] 1991, 43)

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Stevenson’s story is a classic allegory of the Victorian penchant for polarizing virtue and vice, good and evil. Jekyll’s “ ‘tampering with the unknown’ ”, as the “Notes” to a recent edition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde suggest, also looks backward to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, “another scientific experiment […] containing potential for evil and good, but unerringly headed for disaster” (Stevenson [1886] 1991, [i]). In Shelley’s novel we see some fascinating connections to the work of von Hagens. In fact, von Hagens has frequently been compared to the famous nineteenth-century literary doctor, both because of his scientific experiments and the manner in which he obtains corpses for his work. Early in the novel we learn that Frankenstein, a medical doctor, is, like von Hagens, attracted to “the hidden laws of nature” (Shelley [1818] 1983, 295) and “the deepest mysteries of creation” (308) through his studying of the human body. In viewing the “natural decay and corruption of the human body” (311) and bereft after the death of his mother, he determines to create a human being in order to “renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption” (314). He discovers almost by accident that he can use the laws of electricity and his deep knowledge of anatomy to carry out his plan (see Shelley [1818] 1983, 300), although his ambivalence about his project echoes the feelings of Dr. Jekyll and foreshadows the doom that he must eventually face: “The dissection room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased” (315). The Creature he eventually fashions from body parts, with its “yellow skin scarcely [covering] the work of muscles and arteries beneath” (318), resembles one of von Hagens’s flayed corpses. Although Frankenstein has accomplished his goal, he has literally unleashed a monster over which he has no control, not Frankenstein’s “Adam, but rather […] the fallen angel” (364). Eventually the Creature murders the doctor’s brother, William, his university friend, Henry, and Elizabeth, the doctor’s beloved childhood companion and new wife, after Frankenstein refuses to create a female companion for the monster. Frankenstein’s lesson comes hard. Realizing that the monster he created has become his master, he sees the tragic result of his human “ ‘pride of wisdom’ ” (473): “ ‘like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell’ ” (484). Interestingly, Frankenstein discovers that the Creature kills by “throttling” or “burking” his victims, a method used by “resurrection men” in the nineteenth century when anatomists like Frankenstein

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sometimes had to pay body snatchers to either rob graves or in some cases to kill in order to keep them supplied with corpses. Tim Marshall, in his study, Murdering to Dissect: Grave-robbing, Frankenstein, and Anatomy Literature, points out that stealing corpses became so widespread that the city of Edinburgh built high walls and guard towers around cemeteries to keep the body snatchers out. The most famous body snatchers of the nineteenth century were the notorious Irishmen Burke and Hare, who supplied bodies for Dr. Robert Knox, an eminent Edinburgh anatomist. Such practices led to widespread public suspicion of the medical profession because of its close connection to the body snatchers. Even worse, when Burke and Hare ran out of graves to rob, they took up killing their victims. “Burkophobia” became a popular subject of novels and short stories, among them Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Body Snatcher” (1881), Charles Dickens’s “The Black Veil”, and more elusively in Frankenstein through the deaths of Frankenstein’s brother, wife, and friend Henry. In a ghastly ironic twist, the Creature “burks” the bodies, reminding Frankenstein that he used dissected bodies in order to create his monster in the first place. Thus the novel underlines a crucial anxiety in anatomy work: the “slippage” between creation and dissection, between art and destruction. It is not surprising, then, that one of the accusations waged against von Hagens, a modern-day Frankenstein, is that of grave-robbery. The head of the regional forensic medical examination bureau in Novosibirsk, Vladimir Novosyolov, has been on trial since April 2001 for plotting to export fifty-six dead bodies for von Hagens (see Stewart 2003, 3). Apparently, von Hagens was asked to return the corpses, but it is not clear whether he in fact did, as some journalists claim they saw a Russian orthodox cross and the word “father” in Cyrillic letters on an arm of one of the bodies on display in Berlin (Siegl 2002, 3). Von Hagens, of course, has repeatedly denied such accusations both in public as well as on his website (see “Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds”, n.d., online). Recently, in Heidelberg, Germany, charges that von Hagens was using executed criminals as well as crime victims and that he sometimes used bodies without the permission of relatives or the people themselves were dropped after a prosecutor determined that von Hagens had received the bodies from legitimate sources and that the display of the bodies did not constitute a violation of laws governing respect for the dead (“Prosecutors Drop Investigation” 2004, 3).

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“We murder to dissect”, Marshall writes, “but we also dissect in order to heal” (1995, 13). Quoting the anatomist Cecil Helman, Marshall emphasizes this paradox: In the dissecting room we come to realise the true paradox of anatomy. For the real agenda of dissection is the taming of Death, or rather the fear of Death. Because of this, we are asked to perform impossible alchemies. We must turn the cadaver into a three-dimensional textbook, a limited edition of tissues and organs. To do this, we must transform a dead body into the creation of a living body. The cadaver must become raw clay or pigment, the medical student a special type of performance artist. Our task is to create, or rather re-create, the body as a public sculpture, or as a series of sculptures. We must give to the body a posthumous life, through the rebirth of its parts. They must be reborn as objets d’art, as named, labelled, living commodities. (Helman qtd. in Marshall 1995, 82)

This fear of death that Helman refers to as a cause of our anxiety was, of course, famously taken up by Sigmund Freud in his classic Totem and Taboo and may help to explain negative reactions that many viewers of von Hagens’s work report. Horror, Freud suggested, is aroused by viewing dead bodies because they are stark reminders of the gazer’s own mortality. And this is not just a modern attitude; in fact, Freud felt that fear of death was more prevalent among many socalled primitive societies: Among the Maoris anyone who had handled a corpse or taken any part in its burial was in the highest degree unclean and was almost cut off from intercourse with his fellow-men, or, as we might put it, was boycotted. He could not enter any house, or come into contact with any person or thing without infecting them. He might not even touch food with his hands, which, owing to their uncleanness, had become quite useless. ([1913] 1968, 51-52)

However, such taboos, as von Hagens’s work has demonstrated, are not restricted to “primitive” societies; even in our so-called sophisticated world, physical reminders of death are so abhorrent that family members are willing to pay morticians thousands of dollars to create the illusion of life in death. Indeed, in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, mortuary science has become an art whose success depends upon how “life-like” the treated corpse appears. Morticians become artists in rendering their subjects palatable for viewing. Elisabeth Kuebler-Ross, who has written extensively on the art of dying, has made this point over and over in her research on death and dying. She points out that our contemporary society has such a horror of death’s appearance that it has created, in addition to the highly

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lucrative industry of mortuary science, dozens of euphemisms to avoid direct reference to death and the dead (see 1969, 7). James Elkins, in Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis, theorizes that another source of anxiety and even horror when gazing at the inner body is that viewers risk being dangerously seduced by notions of pain and death. Rather than being repelled, his argument goes, we are attracted. But our attraction is horrifying: [T]o really see the inside of the body is to risk falling in love with the heady proximity of death, with the incomprehensible tangle of unnameable vessels and chunks of fat, and with the seductive textures of the smooth, sensitive membranes – more delicate than ordinary skin, more sensitive and vulnerable, and above all more redolent of the most intense pain. (1999, 149)

More provocatively, Julia Kristeva, in Powers of Horror, traces the abject quality of a corpse to its roots in biblical injunctions, aligning it with the soulless, an idea that Aristotle ironically used to justify his anatomical interest: A decaying body, lifeless, completely turned into dejection, blurred between the inanimate and the inorganic, a transitional swarming, inseparable lining of a human nature whose life is undistinguishable from the symbolic – the corpse represents fundamental pollution. A body without a soul, a non-body, disquieting matter […]; it must not be displayed but immediately buried so as not to pollute the divine earth. (1982, 109)

The removal of the skin and the exposure of the inner organs and internal systems of von Hagens’s bodies adds another dimension of horror for the gazers, not because it is unclean but because, according to Kristeva, skinlessness produces anxiety about the body’s personal identification. She likens the skin to a border or boundary that is crucial to one’s identity or individuation, “the cover that guarantees corporal integrity” (101), […] the border of my condition as a living being” (3). Indeed, it is not the “lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection” but “what disturbs identity, system, order” (4). This attitude toward the body’s identity seems to be a fairly modern one and may explain the common practice of using cadavers in art up to the nineteenth century. In her fascinating study Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and the World, Claudia Benthien notes that it was only after the eighteenth century that skin was considered a wall: “the surface of the body was not yet regarded as a smooth wall but as a three-dimensional layer interwoven with the world. Not until the late eighteenth century did a hygienic concept appear that no longer identifies invisible fluid relationships inside the body as the cause of

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disease but rather attributes it to external infection” so that only during the last two centuries the collective body image has changed to “that of a closed, demarcated individual body whose boundary is the skin” (2002, 62). This notion is reinforced by Tim Marshall in quoting a passage from Ruth Richardson’s Death, Dissection and the Destitute (1989): “Dissection represented a gross assault upon the integrity and identity of the body and upon the repose of the soul” (Richardson qtd. in Marshall, 1995 221), again echoing Kristeva’s notion that lack of skin constitutes a site of anxiety and perhaps even trauma as it problematizes the identity of the corpse. Gender identity is, thus, another issue that von Hagens’s work interrogates and subverts. As with so many of his displayed corpses, his “Reclining Nude”, with her elbow supporting her head and her ideal (in Western terms) figure, is a direct tribute to the use of female models in art studios and to the traditional rendering of the female nude, invoking the likes of Ingres, Monet, and others who painted women in such a position. The fact that von Hagens’s nude happens to be skinless, however, marks a significant difference. In her article on the aesthetics of disgust as seen in the work of artist Jenny Saville, Michelle Meagher points out that the female nude has been, traditionally, the embodiment of “art” in Western aesthetics, so that variations on the female nude serve as acts of disruption, a breaking of the rules (see Meagher 2003, 10). Representing the female in grotesque ways, as Saville presumably does, or as skinless corpses, as von Hagens does, “interrogate[s] what is aesthetic and suggest[s] that what is repellant is defined by “implicit social agreements” (6). In other words, Meagher says, “disgust reveals […] the way our social orders are structured” (6) and calls into question centuries of “maleproduced art that have defined women’s bodies and women’s beauty” (2). Thus it is “a threat not only to the social order but also to one’s personal stability” (6) because it forces the viewer to feel her own body, to call into question her own sense of herself relative to her culture’s notion of beauty. Von Hagens’s skinless females, whether one wants to consider them nudes or not, produces a similar threat to the viewer’s personal stability and questions the notion of female aesthetics. Rather than presenting “milky blubber”, however, he exposes female genitalia – ovaries, Fallopian tubes, uteruses – as well as cross sections of breasts, breast tissue, and fetuses both inside the mother’s womb as well as out. Many viewers have expressed disgust at the exposure of genitalia, either attached to bodies or not, presumably viewing them as pornographic or unsuitable for public viewing. And yet, one asks, why

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should markers of female sexuality be considered pornographic? Why have they often been sources of anxiety and even fear when they are necessary to the reproduction of life? More specifically, the exposure of fetuses inside the mother’s belly or of fetuses alone has been a source of repulsion among so-called Right-to-Lifers even though they themselves use photos of fetuses in their demonstrations and protests against abortion to shock the public. If, as is planned, the show eventually goes to America, one can only assume that further demonstrations will be carried out against von Hagens’s exhibit. Von Hagens has insisted, however, that his public display of bodies democratizes medicine, removing the mystique of the body from the physicians’ purview, so that knowledge of the body, internally as well as externally, becomes an important source of power for laypersons, enabling them to better make their own decisions about medical matters (see “Professor Gunther von Hagens’s Body Worlds” 2002, online). Women, of course, have been particularly victimized by this mystique, as their genitals are not as exposed as male genitals and they are thus often at the mercy of doctors who conduct examinations but do not always reveal or explain the results. Although there are plenty of gendered specimens in von Hagens’s exhibitions, many of the bodies displayed cannot be identified as male or female. For instance, in whole body specimens showing the internal organs or the blood system, the genitalia as well as any surface indicators (such as breasts) are stripped away, leaving the corpse genderless. Taking Kristeva one step further, one could make the case that the inability to detect the gender of the body is yet another source of anxiety since gender is one of the major signifiers of human identity. Thus, the work of Gunther von Hagens, highly provocative, often contested, is an important site for a full range of philosophical, moral, ethical, and aesthetic considerations, calling into question notions of identity, beliefs surrounding death and mortality, as well as what it means to be human. Although for some, the shock of seeing our “interior landscape” may be too unsettling to appreciate the issues Körperwelten raises, the fact that the exhibit has been extremely successful suggests that our curiosity and need to better understand ourselves – inside and out – is a powerful human drive.

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Works Cited Ariès, Philippe. [1983] 1985. Images of Man and Death, translated by Janet Lloyd. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. “An Autopsy Show”. 2002. International Herald Tribune (F.A.Z. Weekly), 23 November, p. 6. Benthien, Claudia. [1989] 2002. Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and the World, translated by Thomas Dunlap. New York: Columbia University Press. “ ‘Body Parts’ Not Welcome”. 2003. International Herald Tribune (F.A.Z. Weekly), 21 February, p. 2. “Dissection Goes Live”. 2002. International Herald Tribune (F.A.Z. Weekly), 22 November, p. 2. Elkins, James. 1999. Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis. Stanford: Stanford University Press. “Executor: Ted Williams Wanted to Be Frozen”. CNN.com Law Center. www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/08/08/ted.williams/index.html (accessed 8 August 2002). “Exhibition a Hit”. 2003. International Herald Tribune (F.A.Z. Weekly), 18 February, p. 2. Finn, Peter. 2001. “Art of Controversy: Anatomy as Entertainment”. Washington Post, 5 March, sec. C1. Fischer, Ulrich. 2001. “When Death Goes on Display”. In von Hagens and Whalley, 229-233. Freud, Sigmund. [1913] 1968. Totem and Taboo and Other Works. Vol. 13 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press. Giegerich, Steve. 2001. Body of Knowledge: One Semester of Gross Anatomy, the Gateway to Becoming a Doctor. New York: Scribner. Goodrich, Lloyd. 1982. Thomas Eakins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hagens, Gunther von. Interview with Deborah MacKenzie. 2002. “A Body of Knowledge”. http://www.newscientist.com (accessed 23 March 2002). —. Koerperwelten Press Kit. n.d., n.p. —. n.d. “Prof. Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies”. www.koerperwelten.com/en/home.asp (accessed 8 March 2002). —, and Angelina Whalley. 2001. Koerperwelten: Fascination Beneath the Surface (Catalogue). Heidelberg: Institute for Plastination, Heidelberg. Kristeva, Julia. [1980] 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Kuebler-Ross, Elisabeth. 1969. On Death and Dying. New York: Macmillan. Lecaldano, Paolo, ed. 1965. The Sistine Chapel. Vol.1, with text by Roberto Savini. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Marshall, Tim. 1995. Murdering to Dissect: Grave-Robbing, Frankenstein, and the Anatomy Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Meagher, Michelle. 2003. “Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust”. Hypatia 18.4. GenderWatch. Proquest. UMUC’s Information and Library Services. http://www.umuc.edu/library (accessed 17 April 2004). O’Rorke, Imogen. 2002. “Skinless Wonders”. The Observer, 20 May. Online edition. observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,493200,00.html (accessed 15 July 2003). “Prosecutors Drop Investigation of ‘Body Worlds’ Exhibit”. 2004. International Herald Tribune (F.A.Z. Weekly) 12 March, p. 3. Schwartz, Gary. 1985. Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings. New York: Viking Penguin. Shelley, Mary. [1818] 1983. Frankenstein, edited by Peter Fairclough. New York: Penguin. Siegl, Elfie. 2002. “Corpse Exports to Germany Leave Siberian City Enraged”. Frankfurter Allgemeine (English edition). 2 May, p. 3. Stevenson, Robert Louis. [1884] 1906. “The Body Snatcher”: The Merry Men and Other Tales. Vol. 3, edited by Charles Curtis Bigelow and Temple Scott. New York: The Davos Press. —. [1886] 1991. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Mineola, NY: Dover. Stewart, Fiona. 2003. “Autopsy Professor Linked to Illegal Body Parts”. The Scotsman, 15 February, p. 3. Zubov, V. P. 1968. Leonardo da Vinci, translated by David H. Kraus. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


Violence, Transgression, and the Fun Factor: The Imagined Atrocities of Will Self’s My Idea of Fun

Frank Lay Will Self, who used to be a long-time heroin addict and diagnosed schizophrenic, has called his debut novel My Idea of Fun a cautionary tale. When asked at a dinner party about his idea of fun, the book’s protagonist Ian Wharton thinks to himself that it would be “fucking the severed head of a tramp on the Tube” (Self 1994, 5). He assumes that if he voiced his desire, people would presumably believe that he was just trying to make himself more interesting. Ian’s admission that he is a criminal initially leaves the reader baffled: “I may have killed, I may have tortured, I may even have committed the very worst of outrages, but it hurt me too. Not as much as it hurt my victims, I’ll grant you that, but it hurt me” (12). He also seriously contemplates murdering his wife. From that point on, confusion and doubt become the leading principles in the relationship between narrating protagonist and reader, since the reader is invited to join in the decision as to whether to murder her or not – a decision which is to be postponed until the story has been told. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s theory of the borderline personality, I will argue in this paper that the narrative constitutes what could be called a “borderline narrative”, a stylistic remodelling of the transgression of mental boundaries.

Autism, Eidesis and Virtualization At the beginning of the novel Ian Wharton is introduced as an almost normal boy – almost, except for his paranormal psychic gift of eidetics, which enables him to create photorealistic images and visual copies of reality in his mind. This gift allows him to manipulate the outside world by means of influencing the eidetic images in his mind. His ability makes him an agent of transition as it obscures received concepts of reality; his fantasies and visualizations are not only realistic, but they are real. Since he is able to project the world through the power of his eidetic propensities, Ian could be called a Baudrillardean hero, who celebrates the simulacrum that his mind constitutes. The scope of his ability becomes clear as he points out how he can manipulate his mental images:

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THE ABJECT OF DESIRE I can summon up faces from my yesteryears and hold a technician’s blowtorch to their cheeks. And then, once the skin has started to pollulate, I can yank it away again and count the blisters, one by one, large and small. I can even dig into them and savour the precise whisper of their several crepitations. (16)

During the enigmatic and disturbing prologue, Ian already hints at the fact that he is not fully in control of himself – most of the time he actually is not in control at all. Among other major influences, his mother seems to be the most important one. The relationship between Ian and her is very peculiar indeed. She is described as omnipresent to him: [T]here is the Mummy smell. For the world has always smelled of Mummy as far as I am concerned. By this I mean that if bacon isn’t frying, tobacco burning or perfume scintillating, I am instantly aware of the background taint. It’s something milky, yeasty and yet sour, like a pellet of dough that’s been rolled around in a sweaty belly button. It is the Mummy smell, the olfactory substratum. (19)

The imagery used bears witness to Self’s clichéd use of Freudian concepts. Ian has obviously never been able to sever the umbilical cord, which in his imagination still seems to tie him to his mother’s body in a very corporeal sense. The prospect of drinking mother’s milk still appeals to him; this is hinted at by means of the mother’s omnipresence as a smell. Ian’s wish to kill his father, who abandoned him when he was a child, fits nicely into this Oedipal scenario. Characteristically, his motive is not wounded pride or overt jealousy, but the fact that “[the father’s] presence would be an affront to [Ian’s] body” (20). In him, he sees an “imperfect version” of himself, and reveals a profound self-hatred when he wants to “enjoy the bludgeoning of [his] own features” (20). His mother is an overwhelming presence in his life, while his father’s mere existence is treated as taboo. And his mother is not only important in a nurturing sense, she has also clearly set the standards of quality for his sexual preferences: “Oh Mummy, Mummy! That was real sex – everything else, everything that has followed, has just been afterplay” (25-26). While he is not referring to penetrative sex, he refers to her touching him in an obviously sexually charged manner: “[T]he way you toyed with me, raised me up, so that my first intimations of the fleshly have remained for ever fused to your nylon armature” (26). His mother, who characteristically remains unnamed throughout the narrative, uses her sexuality to exert control over Ian; she even tries to make him a substitute for the lover she longs for and the husband she has lost.

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Consequently, his adolescent sexuality is a source of anxiety and frustration for him. He does not like his looks which do not correspond to his fantasy image of himself: “I was tubby, pink and unappealing. My body was awash with glandular gunk and my face dusted over with pustules” (46). Since eidesis is closely linked to autism, it comes as no surprise that Ian finds himself an outsider who is not able to participate in the “communal talk” about sex. At this point his eidesis becomes a vehicle for the systematic reenactment of reality, a substitute for the shortcomings of Ian’s real experience as a pubescent boy. When he is bullied by another boy, he only retorts by imagining violence: “I found myself eidetically slamming his gullet against the sharp jam of the classroom door. The vacuum-nozzle ridging of his slashed oesophagus was far more revolting than anything I could have invented” (50). This blunt description shows the realness of his visions – which he uses to satisfy his constant wish for transgression. The fact that he perceives his own visions as revolting shows that he does not feel in control of them. Here, Ian’s eidetic ability is identified as potentially hazardous; it threatens to cut all ties that link Ian to his peer group: “I sought frantically for methods of controlling my gift, ways of staving off chaos. I became certain that if I didn’t do something I might be sucked out of the fuselage of reality altogether and sent rolling and tumbling into the void” (50). The one major change in his life – his “crossing the abyss” – comes as he intensifies his relationship with the enigmatic Mr. Broadhurst, who becomes his male role model and his master in a “Faustian pact” (55). Broadhurst turns out to have eidetic faculties himself, which seem to be much more advanced than Ian’s. He is not only able to visualize detailed simulacra of reality, but also to move in them – and even to access the particular history of any single item in the picture. In addition, he has the capability to transfer this ability to Ian, who is very amazed at this sudden expansion of his gift. Mr. Broadhurst, the self-appointed “Magus of the Quotidian” (62), has singled out Ian to refine his eidetics and to facilitate his integration into society by providing him with a set of rituals designed to act as a profane countermeasure to the paranormal experiences of eidetic vision; thus they function as “rituals of sanity. More than that, they are sanity, d’ye see?” (63). These rituals allow Ian not to lose his mind and to be able to act like a normal boy. The rituals – some of which are as profane as “nosepicking with semi-dried snot” (63) – provide Ian with something to occupy his otherwise overstrained mind and senses. Moreover, Mr. Broadhurst explains that to see through the rituals of daily life enables

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an acute awareness of the mechanisms of “reality”construction as a mere set of conventions. This understanding of the construction of an artificial reality, however, seems only to be possible by means of rigid social asceticism. Ian is well aware of the fact that any physical contact, especially any sexual contact, would endanger his status as an apprentice in the subtle arts of “reality weaving” because of the radical intrusion of physical reality into the carefully constructed imaginative cosmos of his eidetics. Such an outlook scares Ian since he has learned to adapt his life to the delicate interplay of imagination and rituals, and he fears any interruption of this practice. Consequently, he limits himself to sexual fantasies. His attempt to have sex with one of his fellow students is interrupted by Mr. Broadhurst, who tells him that he wants to prevent him from a horrible fate: “ ‘Remember, put your pecker in her or any other doxy and’ – he held up his stogie braced between three fingers – ‘this is what will happen’. He snapped it in two – gave me a leer – and was gone, as suddenly as he had arrived” (104). Moreover, he informs Ian that he has found a suitable partner for him, one that is in tune with his own future plans. Scared by the prospect of castration, Ian complies with Mr. Broadhurst’s demands. Mr. Broadhurst explains to Ian that he deems him unable to form any normal relationship: “In your heart of hearts you know yourself to be incapable of such mutuality, such abandonment of self” (117); this causes Ian to refocus on his mother instead of abjecting her. According to Julia Kristeva, the nurturing mother has to be left behind so that the subject can acquire a sense of self. Given the sheer power and intensity of the maternal bond, however, this is a continuous struggle: “It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling” (Kristeva 1982, 13). Therefore, since he cannot escape his mother’s influence, Ian’s sense of subjectivity is further impaired. Ian’s dependence on his enigmatic pseudo-father figure, Mr. Broadhurst, becomes more and more evident. The latter identifies with the Fat Controller, a character taken from the popular children’s stories of the Reverend Wilbert Awdry. Awdry, who had originally invented the stories about the tank engines to distract his little son during an illness, began to write them down and subsequently published the first book in 1945. The series consists of thirty-six books; the last ten of them were written by Christopher Awdry, the Reverend’s son. From 1984 onward, the stories were also televised and thus widely popularized. The stories are set on the fictional island

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of Sodor, a place that closely resembles the south of England. It is populated by anthropomorphic trains that are favourites with children in the English-speaking world – the best known among these is “Thomas the Tank Engine”. The Fat Controller controls all the movements and tracks in the stories. By referring to this well-known children’s series, the narrator addresses the collective imaginary of the reader – and also Ian’s. The Fat Controller’s real name in Awdry’s stories is Sir Topham Hatt; he is only called by his nickname behind his back. Since the Fat Controller of the stories is a benevolent character, Mr. Broadhurst only resembles him in his outer appearance: both are strikingly obese. Broadhurst, however, can be compared to the Fat Controller with regard to the control he is able to exert over others: “I am the fat controller”, said the Mr. Broadhurst in my eidetic vision. “I control all the automata on the island of Britain, all those machines that bask in the dream that they have a soul. I am also the Great White Spirit that resides in the fifth dimension, everything is connected to my fingertips – by wires”. (75)

As the narrative progresses, the reader realizes that the concept of the Fat Controller as a subtle and scheming seducer and malevolent trickster, is used as a negative foil for the popular character. The Controller thus represents the embodiment of the border between reality and fiction. This is made clear as he decides to murder a woman with whom he once had an argument. The woman is sitting in the theatre in front of Ian and the Controller, when the Controller poisons her with a lethal injection of curare. Since Ian did not witness the poisoning, he does not believe that the murder has actually happened until he reads about it in the newspaper the following day. The Fat Controller, however, is completely sure of his powers: “When I wish to kill – I kill”. The voice was lubricious, polite but insistent. “And nothing that people say or do can detract from this. Fortunately I am not driven to this expedient that often, because I have many other stratagems that I have devised for attaining the same object. But every so often, such as now, killing does seem the best possible option [...]”. (85)

Significantly, this episode illustrates the way in which Ian perceives “reality”; he does not take the Controller’s word for granted, but has to look for another kind of evidence, in this case the newspaper. Whereas the Controller is able to manipulate fact and fiction, Ian still needs to establish some kind of “truth”. His bodily reaction to reading about the woman’s death shows that he actually did not believe in it before: “I began to tremble violently and would have fainted, had he

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not grabbed me by the elbow and guided me to a low wall, where I slumped down” (89). This realization marks a brutal and sudden intrusion of fiction into reality and vice versa. It is the moment at which the borderline becomes visible. This visibility is focused by the subsequent expansion of Ian’s eidetic abilities; Ian has learned how to “dive into” a visible item and experience its history – the Controller calls this process “retroscending”. In the shapeshifting tour de force that follows, the Controller and Ian take on the form of different objects, among them boxer shorts and cotton fabric, while they relive the genesis of Ian’s underwear in fast forward mode. Even this comparatively simple example of the boxer shorts involves so many different details that one can easily imagine how disorienting it would be to “retroscend” if one used a more complex object. The oscillation between fantasy and reality – or rather the dissolution of reality into an indefinite blur of emotions and bodily reactions – testifies to the decidedly “borderline” quality of both Ian himself and the narrative as a whole. As Julia Kristeva observes with regard to the “borderline” phenomenon: Owing to the ambiguous opposition I/Other, Inside/Outside – an opposition that is vigorous but pervious, violent but uncertain – there are contents, “normally” unconscious in neurotics, that become explicit if not conscious in “borderline” patients’ speeches and behavior. Such contents are often openly manifested through symbolic practices, without by the same token being integrated into the judging consciousness of those particular subjects. (1982, 7)

It is precisely this mystical quality that My Idea of Fun is meant to embody, namely the promise of an ultimate liberation from the factfiction duality, an abstraction from the very idea of “fiction”.

Psychosis – or the Reassurance of the “Real” In the story, inside and outside appear to be intermingled, and in these surroundings, nothing and no one can be trusted, neither from the point of view of the narrator nor that of the reader. The distinction of inside and outside, however, does only gradually become irrelevant, since Ian continues to cling to the “realness” of his life in spite of all the startling experiences that seem to hint at the contrary. Ian tries to convince himself that the Fat Controller had been a mere, albeit very elaborate, fantasy. From this perspective, his eidetics also gain a distinctly autistic quality; Ian views the excesses of his imagination as symptoms of a lacking paternal role model. The Controller thus

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assumes the role of the father who has never been present for Ian, who subsequently muses, “[p]erhaps I wasn’t the plaything of a mage, who was determined to drag me into a frightening and chaotic world of naked will, only a seriously neurotic person in need of help” (Self 1994, 125). The next step he takes is consistent with this evaluation to seek advice from the student counsellor and psychiatrist, Dr. Gyggle. This counsellor resolves to experimentally test Ian’s allegedly paranormal abilities, and he soon finds out that although Ian’s eidetic capabilities are remarkable, they do not constitute “real” extra-sensory experiences. Ian discovers that Dr. Gyggle’s presence seems to cancel out the paranormal characteristics of his eidetics. When Gyggle tries to prove Ian’s claims by experiments, Ian is unable to demonstrate his gift. The “retroscending” that worked so amazingly with the Fat Controller has ceased to function: “I conceptually fumbled, struggled to get some purchase on the sempiternal sheen of the visual image; but there was nothing, no movement, no astral agility, it remained frozen” (137). According to Dr. Gyggle, there is only one possible interpretation of the results of this experiment: Ian must be suffering from a complex delusion about the nature of his perceptions and the role of the imagination. To prove his point, he tries Ian with a tricky test. If Ian were actually able to move in the representations of reality in his head, he should also be able to see what is behind a sofa that is shown in a movie. But then he asks Ian what would happen if the movie was an animated film, in which case there could be nothing behind the sofa because it would only be the drawing of a sofa. This thought experiment clearly demonstrates that any possibility of “retroscending” can only be the product of Ian’s imagination, because he either cannot do it at all, or – if he can – it must be pure imagination. As Gyggle puts it: “There can be no picture of the world in your head that exists independently of your assertions and beliefs about it. [...] Your whole belief in your eidetic powers rests on a misconception of the nature of consciousness itself” (138). In the following, the reader is led to believe that Ian accepts his past history as characterized by psychosis, while his later life is marked by the effort to be “normal”. Ian accepts a job as a marketing expert and continues his therapy with Dr. Gyggle. His psychotic imaginations seem to become perfectly explicable as the fantasies of an autistic outsider in search of a father figure. In this situation the Fat Controller has taken over the vacant position. The fact that the Controller also has eidetic faculties – and that he is a real master of the art – enables him to be a role model for Ian. Thus, the Controller is pictured as an adept, a virtuoso of the borderline, the one who can show Ian what to

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achieve with his gift and talent. His real father, by contrast, is repeatedly called the “contemptible Essene” both by the Controller and Ian, marking him as the one who resisted the Controller’s temptations. As a consequence, for Ian the father gains the quality of the “other”, and this is why he must hate him. Paradoxically, the father, whom Ian perceives as weak and unwilling to accept his responsibility, might in fact be the only one who had the strength to resist. What he actually resisted can only be glimpsed on the margins of the narrative, but obviously he had known the Controller as well; therefore he could have been an eidetic who chose not to follow the path of the Controller, but who found his own way of dealing with the eidetic gift. Since he is repeatedly called an “Essene”, one might surmise that his way of dealing with his eidetics had to do with forsaking the pleasures of manipulating others that the Controller stands for and concentrating on mental improvements instead. Since Dr. Gyggle has identified the Controller as a psychotic fantasy, Ian is willing to undergo further therapy in order to overcome the remainder of his “problem” and finally achieve “full genitality”, as Gyggle formulates the goal (205). The episodes of a nightmarish dreamscape which are conjured up by an artificial coma experiment devised by the psychiatrist are unsettling, yet they further corroborate the concept of an ongoing and multiple psychotic delusion on Ian’s part. Meanwhile Ian’s “work self”, as the narrator calls it, gives his colleagues no hint of his continuing inner conflict. The entailed objectification is paralleled on the formal level by the shift in perspective from the first person to the third. However, even in this presumably controlled environment, there remains an intimation of uncanniness, and of the shadow of madness lurking beneath the surface of quotidian lives. The colleagues all have to compensate “for the painful nullity of their emotional lives by infusing their work, introjecting it into their psyches” (210). Thus, all the elements of a healthy imagination are reduced to “product placements” (210), and the cynical view of the marketing expert prevails. Predictably, this is the type of company that Ian feels comfortable with, because none of the colleagues feels any urge to deal with the uncertainties of emotions or imagination. They are totally focused on material things. One could argue that the description of Ian’s “work self” adds an additional sombre substratum to the narrative by implying that the cynicism of his own psychotic experiences can be aligned very well with the inhumane, materialistic rules of a neo-liberal market economy. Ian’s imaginary travels combined with the actions of the Controller have led him to believe

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that he can manipulate people – and even reality itself – at will. Moreover, since he has always used rituals to maintain his ties with other people’s reality, he senses immediately that money is just another form of ritual (see 253). This interpretation is further corroborated by the constant juxtaposition of psychological and economic terminology, suggesting the interrelation of the two realms (for example, “prospects”, “point-of-sale”, “Dharma Body of the Dull”, “retroscendence”). Another example is the Controller’s monologue (see pages 219-220), which describes retroscending in the style of an advertisement. And an additional verification of the close link between the two realms is the process of “retroscending” – namely the deep-scan of a product’s history and production chain. This involves opening up a mental panorama of the product, starting from its invention to its fabrication, shipment and so on, everything conveyed in vivid imagery comparable to a movie in the mind’s eye. The pedestrian character of this experience is closely connected to the external perspective of the marketing expert surveying a placement in the market. The interrelation – and interaction – of psychosis and economic materialism can be glimpsed through Ian’s thoughts of retroscendence, which are triggered by the conference at D. F. & L., his company. He imagines floating back in space and time to explore the genesis of a packet of crisps, seeing exploitation and desperation wherever he directs his mental gaze: In the flat land of the Delta the babies cry themselves to sleep in the airless shade, while everyone else labours in the scintillating sun. When the dun evening comes the kids go down to the irrigation channels for some bilharzia bathing. They have little to look forward to […]. (212)

Thus, the history of a very unspectacular product like a simple packet of crisps involves a huge chain of exploitation and injustice, along with pollution of the environment. The concept of retroscendence offers a fresh view at the deep structure of the everyday world of products and consumption and points out the basic similarity between marketing and murder: the negation of complexity, the end of communication. “The communality of products was stronger than that of language” (212), as the narrator puts it.

Transgression and Tautology Ian’s haunted past reemerges as the Fat Controller shows up again in the person of Samuel Northcliffe, who is behind the marketing deal

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that commissions D. F. & L. to market an edible financial product provisionally called “Yum-Yum”. The Controller does not materialize at first, but is nevertheless ubiquitously present in Ian’s perception. Especially telling in this context is the fact that the Controller’s hideous presence permeates the world of products, the refuge which Ian had created for himself to hide from his visions and the horror of his eidetic nightmares: “The big man was all around now [...]. He was in the lino, he was in the soap, he was in the Toilet Duck” (213). This shows that the horror lurking in Ian’s psychotic other persona has finally invaded the territory of his “work self”, and the reader wonders whether it might not always have been there. In fact, as one comes to realize, Ian’s other self is not only based on his schizoid eidetic experience, but also has a real dimension by the name of Richard Whittle, a junkie also treated by Dr. Gyggle. Richard and Ian are linked in their respective monstrous fantasies, inspired by drugs in Richard’s case and by Dr. Gyggle’s sleeping therapy in Ian’s. As both men’s experiences are merged, it becomes impossible to discern who is who or whose dream is being recounted in the “Land of the Children’s Jokes”. The obvious connection between Richard’s and Ian’s unconscious suggests a link between the drugs that the two of them take. Richard here seems to be taking the role of Ian’s “psychic vanguard” (251). The strange figures populating the “Land of Children’s Jokes” seem to find their counterparts in Beetle-Billy and Big Mama Rosie, the members of Richard’s therapy group at the DDU (drug dependency unit). Richard seems to be at least a part of Ian’s schizoid other; whether he is any more real than the Controller is left unclear. At this point, the narrative itself gains a distinctly “borderline” quality as the reader is violently thrown in and out of the psychotic drug-dreams of the fused consciousness – or rather unconsciousness – of Richard/Ian, while the “presence”, the demonic omnipotence of the Fat Controller invades the realms of the “real” as Samuel Northcliffe. The shift of the narrative perspective from first to third person externalizes the reader’s gaze while the figure in view is perceived as a fractured pastiche of three different personae: Ian, Richard, and the Fat Controller, are all intermingled with each other; they are inseparable, but still different. But the complexity does not end here: Ian is a highly ambiguous character since he incorporates both his “work self” and his eidetic and nightmarish psychotic self. It seems as if the Controller, thereby doing justice to his name, is located at the centre of the circulating signifiers which define the existence of Ian Wharton.

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The Controller drives forward the plot; he serves as a structural link which connects the loose ties and unites the tripartite figuration of Ian’s personality: his work self, his schizoid self, and Richard. He thereby fulfils a similar role to that of the Controller in the original children’s stories. The “Land of the Children’s Jokes” seems to reflect Self’s own drug experiences. His own and also vicarious experiences seem to have supplied him with the dark and perverted cartoon versions of the characters that have their origin in children’s stories, just like the Controller. Particularly revolting in this context is Ian’s second visit to the horrid dreamscape, where he sees a baby cutting itself up by eating razors – an observation accompanied by the tasteless joke by Ian’s “guide” Doug, a man with a spade in his head: “What’s red [...] and sits in the corner?” (261). The entire “Land of the Children’s Jokes” consists of instances and manifestations of the abject, from Doug with the spade over the razor-eating baby, to the pink man in the corner who tells him about the worm that lives inside his body. The complexity of the narrative forms a stylistic parallel to Ian’s borderline personality and the transgression of borders – in this case, the borders between Richard’s and Ian’s consciousness. Kristeva’s theory of the abject as a “non-object” (1982, 8), an entity which is dissociated from the self, but not (yet) transformed into a true object, describes this phenomenon. The narrative mirrors this notion by continuously questioning the limits of the self. This is obviously paired with the willful transgression of aesthetic borders and the invocation of the abject through the perversion of the harmless, both of which are crucial techniques employed throughout the novel. These techniques testify to Kristeva’s claim that the horror of the abject lies chiefly in its failure to function as a forbidden “other”. Instead, its being rooted in the harmless allows a glimpse at the horrors lying at the very centre of the quotidian. The abject exposes the arbitrary and oppressive character of religion and (moral) law: “The abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them” (15). It is precisely the blending of characters and their consciousness which underlines the importance of the use of tautology for the narrative process. In this fashion the action is experienced by different personae in different contexts, although the underlying principles remain the same. Tautological representation of transgression, in the blended narrative form as well as on the plot level, suggests total transgression, a final elimination of borders that have already been

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blurred and weakened before. The border between fiction and fact, reality and fantasy is thus constantly questioned. This is only the beginning of the challenge that the novel poses regarding the definition of the real, as the Controller prepares for the next transgression. This time, the Controller chooses to manifest himself again in the form of Samuel Northcliffe. Taking a taxi from Heathrow, he refuses to obey the no smoking sign, and when the cab driver gets angry and asks him to leave his taxi, the Controller threatens to kill him if he does not drive on. He not only uses his mohair tie to strangle the driver, but also tortures him with cigar burns, leaving “a neat line of blisters” (Self 1994, 232). The Controller eventually kills the driver and addresses his victim with gloating irony: “I would wager, sir” – The Fat Controller addressed the cabby’s slumped corpse, whilst pulling his suitcase from the back of the cab – “that that was as good a death as you could reasonably have expected to have [...]. Granted that I can have no idea of what your prospects might have been, but on the sound principle that every man is responsible for the nature of his own countenance, I would wager, sir, that you would never have become a creature capable of those nice distinctions, the contrivance of which serves, as it were, to define refinement”. (233)

The Controller’s style at this point is bombastic and euphuistic as always. The archaic eloquence that he displays can be seen as a sign of his status. The Controller is modelled after Sir Topham Hatt, who represents a patriarchal system of control. There might even be a parallel to the figure of the English colonialist, who mingles racist abuse with “refined” manners and speech, and whose likeness can perhaps be glimpsed in the Controller’s appearance as well: “He was wearing his travelling kit, Donegal tweed jacket, grey flannel trousers and brogues” (227). With the Controller’s material re-entry into the narrative, his presence has become visible – and bluntly violent as well. A dead cab driver cannot be dismissed as the mere product of Ian’s (or Richard’s) imaginations or drug fantasies. The abject, according to Kristeva, is characterized as “death infecting life” (1982, 4), and at this point the real death of another man does indeed taint the life of Ian Wharton by perversely uniting his schizoid self with his work self. Ian’s second trip to the “Land of the Children’s Jokes” reveals his personal involvement with the actions formerly associated with the Controller. Finally, it dawns on him that he, or his schizoid other, is in fact the killer and the rapist. As Dr. Gyggle says in one of Ian’s visions:

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As Ian rejects the thought, the Controller and Gyggle, still emanating from his drugged dream, compel him to retroscend and relive two of his more recent “outrages”, the torturing and killing of a dog, and the robbing and killing of a passer-by in order to get hold of his clothes. The violence is pictured very graphically here, as the narrator revels in blood and gore, giving detailed accounts of the disembowelling of the dog as well as the ripping out of the man’s eyeballs. After this disconcerting experience, there is another boundary crossing as the three men simply walk out of the dreamscape and right into London’s Roman Road, on the way to discuss Samuel Northcliffe’s mysterious financial product “Yum-Yum” with a man called the Money Critic. From this moment on, Ian seems to be reconciled with his criminal past, to “see the world the way the Fat Controller saw it” (278), that is, as a mere mass of undifferentiated flesh which is completely at his disposal. When he gets a glimpse of a woman similar to his girlfriend Jane, “he thought of the love he felt for her and how much he looked forward to tearing both it and her, apart” (284). The Money Critic himself appears as the Controller’s antipode and brother-in-thought at the same time. He is silent and secretive, and he embodies the esoteric aspects of the virtualized system of money – money as the “ultimate ritual”, as the motto of the chapter, taken from Mary Douglas, suggests (253). The borderline character of the narrative is nicely illustrated by the episode that introduces Jane Carter. Jane first comes to meet Richard Whittle, after seeing Dr. Gyggle for an interview for voluntary service at the Lurie Foundation Hospital for Dipsomaniacs. After this somewhat sobering experience, she runs into Ian at a PR date, thereby completing the Controller’s earlier prediction of “elective affinity” (238). Not surprisingly against the rather bleak backdrop of the novel, their relationship is far from romantic. Both are emotionally incapable of deeper feelings and are rather frustrated. Jane sees herself as unattractive, and even tries to wound herself out of self-hatred (see 235); she too is plagued by the presence of the Fat Controller, just like another one of his “engines”. Consequently, their lovemaking is remarkably void of passion:

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THE ABJECT OF DESIRE When at last they came it was with a thin-lipped finality, as if they were a putupon company secretary winding up a pointless board meeting. Yet afterwards, when they lay, she face down, he with his big leg pinioning her buttocks, they both thought: This could be love. (243)

Nevertheless, Ian subsequently marries Jane despite the disturbing things he has learned about himself: “It could be argued that I should never have married Jane [...]. The trouble was, though, I wasn’t exactly sure what that truth was” (290). So Ian goes on committing his “outrages”, erasing them from memory at will or revelling eidetically in them while not feeling any guilt. “I had become an effectively divided personality”, he muses (290). This would suggest that the formerly implicit schizophrenia is simply made explicit. The roles of the Controller and Richard the junky, however, remain unclear. The Controller is still present in the form of Samuel Northcliffe, and he shows Ian how the junkies were used to create the “Land of the Children’s Jokes” for him. At this point, a few narrative threads are brought together as the junkies reiterate the names of several generic products as the acoustic background for Beetle Billy’s death – a way of reducing the soul to what it is in the Controller’s view, a mere generic material. Ironically, the denomination of this ritual as “North London Book of the Dead” is obviously taken from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, another instance of literary antagonism by turning an intertextual reference into its very opposite. As the dutiful disciple of the Controller, Ian leaves the reader with the announcement that he is going to kill Jane and rip out their baby – who is nobody but the Controller himself –, thereby fortifying their unbreakable and ongoing bond. The overall absence of emotions reflects the book’s strange but striking paradox: in a novel based on the idea of “fun”, there does not seem to be much of it left. Even before he meets Jane, Ian has no illusions left as to the meaningfulness of his life. His job certainly does not provide much fun, nor do the drug-influenced escapades in Gyggle’s ward, and his sex-life, as seen above, cannot make up for anything either. The double – and thus tautological – blurring of borders between the different characters and between fiction and reality may serve to make the point that all borders are permeable, but as such it is self-referential in the highest degree, constituting a semantic circle which again leaves an impression of dullness.

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Pure Fun – or Laughing at the Abyss The critics did not like My Idea of Fun very much. Nor did many readers, as the following review taken from the website of Amazon.de illustrates: My Idea of Fun is one of the worst books I have ever read. The protagonist and most of the characters are haunted by the Fat Controller who determines everything they do in their lives. For his purposes he uses supernatural capacities and even seems to be able to freeze time and to make people forget everything they have ever known or done in life. The narrative style of the novel is excellent, but the contents make the reader sick. The perverse fantasies of the protagonist and his criminal past, which is revealed during the last chapters, let the reader close the book with a feeling of relief and a question in mind: “Why would I want to read THAT?” (Amazon review, online)

Especially interesting here is the apparent contrast between the style, which is praised as “excellent”, and the contents, which seem to contradict and even disrupt the notion of excellence – and coherence. The solution to this seeming paradox has to be seen in the way Self stylizes his narrative as a means of disruption, as “borderline narrative”, which is employed to effectively destabilize any coherent frame of analysis. As a consequence, it is no wonder that, apart from personal taste, there seems to be a common basis in most reviews to the effect that the novel instils a kind of frustration in its readers. As Craig Seligman points out, the main problem is that Ian’s idea of fun is just not funny at all – in fact, it consists more of the consequent removal of fun. All that finally remains is a loss of control: The notion of selling your soul carries with it the glamour of danger, riches, and delicious, forbidden sex. But Broadhurst – or The Fat Controller, as he insists that Ian call him – doesn’t offer any of these lures. The single temptation that he holds out is the one that Self’s creatures find irresistible: someone to take them in hand and make their decisions for them. (1994, 91)

However, as shown above, the different discursive implications of the narrative should not be dismissed as easily as that. The Fat Controller, after all, may not be an external persona, but a part of Ian’s own personality – a part of his schizoid self. Such a reading opens new layers of meaning and reveals the abyss which becomes visible through the double blurring of borders. Not just Ian Wharton’s identity, but the whole construct of a received “reality” is at stake, while transgression as such is turned into the central motif. It is mainly a transgression that is free from motivation, a purely selfreferential action. Given this premise, it becomes explicable why the

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moment of transgression is not connected to any kind of ecstasy. Rather, it is reminiscent of an addiction; and indeed the links to drug abuse are manifold: Gyggle employs drugs to create the “Land of Children’s Jokes”, for instance, and the act of retroscending shares many characteristics with a drug-induced trip. The narrative, just like Ian, balances on the edge of the abyss of its own extinction in pure self-reference. In other words, the narrative ridicules both the established difference between fact and fiction as well as the obsession to study it and turn it into a signifier in its own right. Consequently, the recipient must realize that abjection and the subversion of borders can be just a beginning on the way to selfobliteration. The human soul is reduced to its material roots, just as the Controller wanted it to be (see Self 1994, 299). The reiteration of generic product names by the junkies serves to underline just that – the repetition of the mantra that there is no unified soul, only a heap of generic raw material. The same applies to the form of the narrative, which allows a glimpse at its own collapse. Though Ian seems to be the focus, the perspective keeps strangely shifting between the inside and the outside, leaving open the possibility that Ian, the Controller, and perhaps even Richard, are in fact one generic person. Just as the existing concept of “reality” cannot account for Ian’s experiences, his little “outrages”, the traditional form of narrative perspective cannot mirror the fractured and schizoid raw material of Ian’s soul – if there can be said to be one at all. What remains is frustration, since the absence of fun is the main characteristic of the position on the edge of the abyss. “[I]f he’s really lambasting late-twentieth-century materialism”, wonders Seligman, “why hasn’t he given us – or Ian – any alternative? It’s loading the dice to offer your readers a Devil but no God. Self toys at length with the notion of evil, but it doesn’t mean much without his telling us what he thinks is good” (1994, 91). Furthermore, the acts of violence are in themselves not very alluring, Ian and the Controller murder and torture in an offhand way, apparently without taking much pleasure in it. The crimes are not motivated by an inexplicable urge, nor are they connected to any kind of satisfaction. They are committed out of terminal boredom, just as they are boring in themselves. Ian Wharton murders and tortures out of ennui and cynicism, but the often praised liberating power of the transgressive act as such fails to show. The inevitable consequence is dullness. Although the novel plays at large with the idea of transgression as liberating, as Bataille would have it, in the end there

LAY

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is clearly no liberation in sight, only plain addiction. One would need higher and higher doses of shock to achieve the same effect (see Menninghaus 1999, 565). It is obvious that this result is very different from Bataille’s insistence on the tension between taboo and transgression as a prerequisite for a continuity of being (see Bataille [1957] 2001, 40-54) Instead, Self exhibits a fractured and material being driven by addictions and schizoid fantasies. The constant transgressions neutralize the power of the taboos behind them, defying Bataille’s notion of transgression, which “does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it” (63). My Idea of Fun presents an ambitious project: Self, perhaps motivated by his own extensive psychiatric and addictive history, is obsessed with ridiculing the typical pattern of explanation for psychic disorders. Almost every common way of interpreting split identities and schizoid fantasies is incorporated in the narrative, from the classical Freudian approach hinted at in Ian’s pseudo-Oedipal feeling for his mother, to the claim that transgression liberates, made by Bataille and, especially with respect to art, by Kristeva. And every single one of these explanations is shown to be grossly inadequate; the only possible deduction seems to be that there is no soul and, accordingly, no personality, only floating signifiers. Will Self has claimed that he writes to amuse himself because “[he] really get[s] bored the whole time” (Henchman 1997, 53). His idea of fun, then, is the ultimate challenge of our perception of the “real” – only that it has nothing to do with fun as we know it. And while Self insists that his protagonist has managed to cross the abyss, the reader is far from being able to follow and at best remains pondering over the implications, at worst just bored.

Works Cited Barber, Lynn. 2000. “Self Control”. The Observer, 11 June. Online edition. www.observer.co.uk/life/story/0,6903,329703,00.html (accessed 15 December 2003). Bataille, Georges. [1957] 2001. Eroticism, translated by Mary Dalwood. London: Penguin. Henchman, Anna. 1997. “Will Self: An Enfant Terrible comes of Age”. Publishers Weekly 244.37:52-53. Kristeva, Julia 1982 [1980]. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Menninghaus, Winfried. 1999. Ekel: Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

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Review of My Idea of Fun, by Will Self. www.amazon.de /exec/obidos/ASIN/0140234004/qid=1093966700/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_8_2/3027891465-1723259 (accessed 16 December 2003). Self, Will. 1994. My Idea of Fun: A Cautionary Tale. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Seligman, Craig. 1994. “Buster Keaton in Hell: My Idea of Fun by Will Self”. The New Yorker 70.8:89-91. “You ask the Questions: Will Self”. 2001. The Independent, June 6. www. independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=76393 (accessed 16 December 2003).

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Notes on Contributors Susana Araújo is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, UK, where she also teaches literature and visual culture. Ruth Baumert (†) was a Lecturer of English at the University of Cologne, Germany. Hanjo Berressem is a Professor of American Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany. Nilufer Bharucha is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Mumbai, India. Dorothea Fischer-Hornung is a Senior Lecturer of American Literature at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Alison Goeller is a Senior Lecturer of American Literature at the University of Maryland, Europe. Andrea Gutenberg is a Senior Lecturer of English and American Literature at the University of Cologne. Konstanze Kutzbach is a Lecturer of English Literature at the University of Cologne, Germany. Frank Lay works at the Bundessprachenamt (German Federal Language Service) in Huerth, Germany. Sylvia Mayer is a Professor of American Literature at the University of Bamberg, Germany. Monika Mueller is a Senior Lecturer of American and English Literature at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Paulina Palmer has retired from the English Department at the University of Warwick, UK. She teaches part-time for the Gender Studies MA at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. Tatjana Pavlov is a freelance writer and has taught at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. Russell West is a Professor of English at the Free University of Berlin, Germany.

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