Fear in Intercultural Competence Development: The Blind Spot Diagnosed in a Health Care Setting

FEARFUL Symmetries

Editors Riley Olstead and Katherine Bischoping

Fearful Symmetries

At the Interface

Series Editors

Dr Robert Fisher Lisa Howard Dr Ken Monteith Dr Daniel Riha

Advisory Board

James Arvanitakis Mira Crouch Simon Bacon Stephen Morris Katarzyna Bronk John Parry Jo Chipperfield Karl Spracklen Ann-Marie Cook Peter Twohig Phil Fitzsimmons S Ram Vemuri Peter Mario Kreuter Kenneth Wilson

An At the Interface research and publications project. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/

The Evil Hub ‘Fear, Horror and Terror’

2012

Fearful Symmetries

Edited by

Riley Olstead and Katherine Bischoping

Inter-Disciplinary Press

Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2012 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/ The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press. Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087 ISBN: 978-1-84888-145-7 First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2012. First Edition.

Table of Contents

Introduction Fearful Symmetries vii Riley Olstead and Katherine Bischoping

Part 1 The Symmetry of Sameness and Otherness

‘Death in the Air’: War, Violence and Fear in Robin Jenkins’s The Cone-Gatherers 3 John Armstrong

Mothers of Desertion, Cannibalism, and Murder: A Familial Reader-Response to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road 13 Magdalena Louise Hirt

Writing Terror Within: The Role of Science in The Secret Agent and Saturday 23 Gen’ichiro Itakura The Fear of the People 33 Lisete Rodrigues Semiotic Construction of the Horrific in Jacobean Tragedies 43 Justyna Galant Fear in Intercultural Competence Development: The Blind Spot Diagnosed in a Health Care Setting 51 Zhenyi Li

Part 2 The Symmetry of Power and Powerlessness

What Have the Ancient Greeks Taught Us about Horror? A Brief Review of the Concept in the Classical World 63 Nadia Scippacercola

A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Irresistible Appeal of Serial Killer Novels 77 Ebru Çeker

Hit Me ‘Baby’ One More Time: A Reflection on the Role of the Final Girl that Got Away in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) 87 Elisabete Lopes

Men’s and Women’s Accounts of Panic 97 Riley Olstead and Katherine Bischoping Gothic Peter Pan 107 Ana González-Rivas Fernández and Alfonso Muñoz Corcuera

Part 3 The Symmetry of Voice and Silence

Poesis: Cauldron of Horror 119 Christina Natsis

Shocked into Submission: Fear of the Irrational Mind in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’ 131 Lizzy Welby

The Aesthetics of Fear in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Novel Fragment Das Buch Franza 141 Simone Klapper

The Abysses of Passion in Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica 153 Rita Benis The 9/11 Fetish: Manufacturing Fear, Horror and Terror through ‘Event-ness’ 161 Amanda D. Watson

Introduction: Fearful Symmetries


Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? Blake ‘The Tyger’ (1794)

This volume represents a generous sample of the proceedings of the 5th Annual

Fear, Horror and Terror: At the Interface Conference, held at Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom in September, 2011. The international character, disciplinary span and variety of approaches employed by the conference participants are reflected in the rich contributions gathered here. Each demonstrates an appreciation for the complexity of fear, its mutability, and above all, its historical relevance. Taken together, the authors’ work coalesces around the character of fear, and its significance to sameness/otherness, power/powerlessness, and voice/silence binaries. Throughout, we style these binaries as ‘symmetries’ in homage to William Blake’s ‘The Tyger,’ one of his Songs of Experience and a powerful reflection upon both the qualities of the fearful and the inquiries that its construction inspires.

Several of the chapters bear witness to the continuities of fear across time and space, noting, as did Kierkegaard, that fear is an expression of the human condition. The authors of these works develop our understanding of the fearful nature of humankind. Among many others, theorists such as Giddens and Baudrillard have drawn our attention to the particularity of fear in the modern period. We are told, for instance, that the modern subject does not merely fear, but is constituted by anxiety. Our authors’ work aligns with literatures on the historical importance of fear, including the history of the social construction of both fear and representational techniques, and the institutional production of fear and terror in modern life. The relevance of this collection is also found in its context: a post- 9/11, 7/7 and 3/11 world, in which our orientations to terror and terrorism are immeasurably altered, influencing our personal and political thinking about self and other.

The first of the three dominant strands running through this collection is concerned with configurations of fear in relation to the same/other symmetry. ‘In what distant deeps or skies / Burnt the fire of thine eyes?’ Blake asks the Tyger. John Armstrong’s chapter examines Robin Jenkins’s disturbing novel, The Cone-Gatherers, to consider fear of the other as a symptom of the paranoia and brutality prevalent in a remote, feudal community. In doing so, Armstrong alerts us to more widespread associations and more universal questions about the ways in which fear is linked to conditions of war, masculinity, and violence. A different approach to

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gender scripts and fear is taken in Magdalena Louise Hirt’s discussion of gender and nurturing in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road. Hirt argues that the ‘othering’ and displacement of the maternal in The Road produces terror in the reader who sees a faltering inadequacy in the character of a father who is ill-equipped to nurture a liveable world back into existence.

Using Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent and Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, Gen’ichiro Itakura is likewise concerned with the construction of a sameness/otherness symmetry. As Itakura demonstrates, both works employ the language of science to distinguish between various modes of this symmetry, including sanity/insanity, civilised/uncivilised, rational human/instinctual animal. Itakura looks at how we use a scientific view to order and give meaning to the world, thereby overcoming our terror and fear of the chaos and uncertainties that human existence presents. At the same time, he criticises the terrible potential of rationalist science, which endorses a cultural fear of the other. Thus, for Itakura, science can produce terror, can wield the anvil that creates Blake’s fearful Tyger, even as it seeks to contain and organise it. He suggests the possibility that a greater morality could be uncovered from within otherness, the irrational and the disordered.

The antinomies of fear are also recognisable in Lisete Rodrigues’ chapter. Where Itakura is concerned with otherness and science, Rodrigues looks to political discourse to think about how fear is taken up in political conceptions of citizenship and subjecthood. In a discovery analogous to Itakura’s, Rodrigues demonstrates that notions of citizenship both recognises, and thereby brings into existence, the people as the basis of the sovereign order. The people thus become subjects, and in turn require containment and ordering. As Rodrigues shows, ‘fear of the people’ contains a dual impulse, regarding the people as both same and other.

A significant focus of this volume is how social institutions represent fear, horror and terror, and specifically the scientific, popular and political constructions of fear. ‘[W]hat art,’ asks Blake of the Tyger, ‘[c]ould twist the sinews of thy heart?’ Justyna Galant offers an analysis of four Jacobean plays to demonstrate how techniques used to evoke horror experimented with meaning, misrepresentation and deceit. Her study demonstrates an historical relationship between popular understandings of horror and failures in meaning, as well as the Jacobean audience’s evident gravitation toward horror.

The chapter by Zhenyi Li explores the link between communication and fearful emotions, in yet another intriguing way. Li draws on a Canadian health care authority’s two-year study of a team of executives, conducted with the intent of improving each employee’s intercultural competence (a particularly important skill in a setting with high cultural diversity). Li’s is one of the rare studies of intercultural competence that considers the role of fear in people’s engagement with the other. Fear might reasonably be regarded as indication of a limitation to


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cultural competence. Not so, Li points out: rather, fear can be an ordinary concomitant of perspective-shifting, and therefore a desirable part of intercultural competence development.

A second symmetry on which several chapters focus is that of power/powerlessness. As Nadia Scippacercola’s genealogy of horror literature demonstrates, even as early as the 8th century BC, the ancient Greeks had been categorising the aspects of fear, including, for example, hesitation, consternation, and stupor. Like us, the ancient Greeks recognised a certain pleasure associated with consuming horror, says Scippacercola, attributing it to an instinctual delight in accurate imitation. While Blake wonders whether the Tyger’s creator, ‘smile[d] his work to see?,’ both Ebru Çeker and Elisabete Lopes proactively interrogate the pleasures of horror. Çeker uses a psychoanalytic approach to explore why serial killer novels garner such a sizeable readership. She suggests that these novels’ allure reflects a human urge to dabble in the power of evil, and to sample the powerlessness that evil effects.

‘The Final Girl’ is a slasher film trope pertaining to a protagonist who is commonly read as a powerless female subject. Lopes turns this reading on its head by drawing on the original and the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Bringing these films together, Lopes observes an unexpected female affinity with the monster, and thereby refutes the popular construction of women as vulnerable and helpless in the face of fear, horror and terror. Both Çeker and Lopes’ analyses present us with a compelling look at the shadow side of human nature and invite us to think about the complex ways that desire, pleasure and gender entwine with our relationship to fear.

The chapters by Riley Olstead and Katherine Bischoping, and by Ana González-Rivas Fernández and Alfonso Muñoz Corcuera, approach notions of power and powerlessness that have their etymological origins in the Greek God ‘pan:’ In classical mythology, Pan is a wild satyr with the power to strike terror in his victims, a terror which came to be named ‘panic.’ Olstead and Bischoping present analyses of interview data from men and women with panic disorder. They find that men and women both tend to experience panic in gender-normative ways: women define panic as a naturalised, feminine powerlessness, yet men consider panic to be a threatening form of feminisation that strips them of normative self-constructions of power and masculinity, rather like Blake’s stars which - upon beholding the Tyger - ‘threw down their spears, / And watered heaven with their tears.’ González-Rivas Fernández and Muñoz Corcuera take ‘pan’ as the inspiration for a reading of James M. Barrie’s Peter Pan as a monstrous Gothic subject. Instead of clasping Peter to our bosoms as an exemplar of childish innocence or whimsy, the authors propose we thrust him at arm’s length and behold him to embody three Gothic monsters: ghost, vampire, and doppelganger.

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We have already highlighted the strength of the collection in addressing the connection of fear to meaning-making. The last of the symmetries we will discuss here, that of voice/voicelessness, builds on that connection. In an examination of the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson and Anne Sexton, Christina Natsis, for instance, considers the discursive terror of madness. Her focus is on the poets’ voice, both literal and figurative, and on the silences imposed upon the ‘madwoman’ in the 19th century by a patriarchy that perceived woman as monstrous and mad. As Natsis explains, the voice these poets sought was fraught with contradiction: they wished for a language of containment yet beyond the limitations of the patriarchal order.

It is notable that two other chapters exploring voice and voicelessness share Natsis’ feminist focus. Lizzy Welby looks at ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,’ a work that draws heavily on Sylvia Plath’s experience of electro-convulsive therapy. Welby uses this novel’s dream-collecting protagonist, a sojourner in Blake’s ‘forests of the night,’ to explore depictions of the subversive ability of the maternal realm to disrupt an autocratic phallo-discourse. As Welby describes, the ‘meaningless’ babble of the maternal-psychotic is not nonsense but notnamedsense that Plath translates and brings into voice as artistic expression. Simone Klapper’s work on poetology buttresses the two previously-discussed papers. Klapper discusses the aesthetics of fear in Ingeborg Bachmann’s fragmentary novel of 1965/66, Das Buch Franza. Likened to Welby’s dream metaphor, the poetology of fear illuminates the topos of the anxious victimised woman as a critique of gender constructions, rationality, patriarchy and fascism. As Klapper explains, Bachmann offers a text (or, as Blake might have it, a ‘song of experience’) by which to criticise patriarchal power structures and the subjugation of women as objects of science and of intellectual discourse.

Rita Benis likewise concerns herself with the limitations of discourse to articulate the meaning of life, which she argues, contributes to a feeling of terror. Using Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica as an example, Benis concludes that though life itself cannot be explained, art permits us to communicate the inexplicable, to contain the paradoxes of both a ‘chilling anguish’ experienced as sublime and a ghostly realm that seems more real than does anything tangible. (Interestingly, in contrast with the forcefully subversive female characters and narrators whom Natsis, Welby, and Klapper study, the male protagonist of Benis’ work seems gently melancholic.)

Finally, Amanda D. Watson’s analysis also considers voice and voicelessness, but through a return to the past 10 years, widely known as the ‘post-9/11 era.’ Using a mixed media art project entitled ‘September 10th’ Watson critically examines the concept of ‘event-ness’ as it is occurs in hindsight descriptions and depictions of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Watson demonstrates how the event of ‘9/11’ has been temporally and spatially mapped, as is commonplace under Western capitalism, as a way of


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recolonising history. Blake’s lines adjure the Tyger to identify its maker - ‘What dread hand? & what dread feet? // What the hammer? what the chain? / In what furnace was thy brain?;’ Watson, meanwhile, accounts for the manufacture of a terror that imposes silence and voicelessness in political life.

Bibliography Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, 37–38. New York: Dover, 1992 [1794].

Part 1

The Symmetry of Sameness and Otherness

‘Death in the Air’: War, Violence and Fear in Robin Jenkins’s The Cone-Gatherers

John Armstrong

Abstract In Michael Haneke’s 2009 film, The White Ribbon, a small German village is traumatised by violent acts committed by a group of local children, driven it seems by an inexplicable desire for cruelty which emulates, in some ways, the behaviour of the adults. Set just prior to the First World War, the film pre-echoes Germany’s future by creating, in miniature, a state of persecution, brutality, and paranoia. Consciously or not, Haneke’s film touches upon a fear present in literature throughout the early modern and modern periods. Shakespeare often utilised a similar kind of fear. In ‘The Improvisation of Power’ Stephen Greenblatt argues that ‘Othello’s blackness is the sign of all that society finds frightening and dangerous.’ The success of Iago’s meddling, therefore, relies heavily on a prevalent fear already loose within the community, fear of the other, something shared at least in part by Haneke’s Aryan children. My chapter will primarily explore the representation of this fear and the fear of war itself in Robin Jenkins’ 1955 novel The Cone-Gatherers, using Haneke’s and Shakespeare’s work as interdisciplinary points of comparison and support. In the novel, Jenkins attempts to distil the violence and hatred of war into a pastoral tragedy, pooling the worst attitudes and atrocities of Nazism and genocide into the story of a remote, feudal community in crisis. Fear in this text is closely linked with issues of war, masculinity and brutality, and the chapter will use Jenkins’ novel as a prism through which to ask larger questions about fear and violence, and the complexities of their representation in modes such as tragedy and the sublime. Key Words: Robin Jenkins, The Cone-Gatherers, war, violence, fear, the sublime, tragedy, other(ness), Shakespeare, Michael Haneke.

*****

In Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War, Donald Ringnalda criticises the ‘sense making’1 tendency of novels that emulate American military strategies during the war. He likens these works (and their need to make sense of the war) to the U.S. Army’s napalm and Agent Orange defoliation campaigns, themselves attempts at making sense of the Vietnamese jungle landscape by destroying it. Ringalda’s book champions rather those texts which capture the confusion of the war through more fragmented forms and styles. I am inclined to agree with his opinions. But reading his book I began to wonder about other wars and the texts that suited them, and about universals in war - fears, horrors and terrors produced by war per se. I was troubled by the idea of particular styles for particular wars,

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and by the notion that each war might create its own rigid aesthetic paradigm. Robin Jenkins’s 1955 novel, The Cone-Gatherers, is set in the Scottish Highlands at the time of the Second World War. Whilst there is not one direct war scene within its pages, it is, in my opinion, every inch a war novel. Viewed from the right distance, World War Two would seem to possess a much clearer shape than the Vietnam War, a ready-made universe of good versus evil, perhaps, for subsequent novelists and poets work from. The Cone-Gatherers, with its realist style and tragic bent, would, at first reading, appear to benefit from this. But Jenkins’s conscious use of tragedy for his novel is more complex than it seems, and eventually reminds us that traditional forms and genres are not necessarily synonymous with ‘sense-making.’

The Cone-Gatherers is set on a feudal country estate. John Duror is the game-keeper of the estate and anti-hero of the tragedy. At the bottom of the hierarchy are the cone-gatherers themselves, temporarily contracted to the estate to collect pine-cones from the trees for replanting. Calum has a humped back and the mental age of a child, and his older brother Neil is a bitter, middle-aged man in poor health. These two men, Calum in particular, embody Duror’s murderous fixation which drives the novel toward tragedy and its requisite murder, catharsis and resolution: ‘His [Duror’s] tragedy was now to be played in public,’ writes Jenkins early in the novel, ‘it must therefore have a crisis, and an end.’2 So there is, on the one hand, a ‘sense-making’ straightforwardness to the text, a bold and traditional realism which, as Cairns Craig has pointed out, is more nineteenth century than twentieth, more ‘pre-modern rather than postmodern’3 in style.

Tragedy, however, has been undermined in some postmodern, avant-garde, and contemporary thought and theory. Roland Barthes, for one, is suspicious of tragedy’s shaping of experience. ‘Tragedy,’ he says,

is only a way of assembling human misfortune, of subsuming it, and thus justifying it by putting it into the form of a necessity of a kind of wisdom, or of a purification.4

The avant-garde American film-maker, Stan Brakhage, goes even further.

‘Narrative drama as a form that’s unchanged since the Greek,’ he says,

is a trap that’s loaded the dice that makes it very possible that the Third World War will be in Jerusalem and all the apocalyptic visions of drama will be fulfilled.5

A significant problem, then, for tragedy’s recent naysayers, is its apparent

justification of necessary evils in pursuit of a higher order of the kind G. W. Hegel envisions in his Lectures on Aesthetics: ‘a situation pregnant with collision is above all the subject matter of dramatic art,’ he says, ‘the privilege of which is to

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stery of the whole wo

es their hut, we are privy to the game-keeper’s fantasies about killing the brothers:

isgust and despair drawn, these past few days, so much tighter.10

while the reader watches Duror watching, the link is created between fear based on

represent beauty in its most complete and profound development.’6 Hegel’s alignment of tragedy with conflict and suffering as necessary elements of history’s progress toward harmony, it seems, carries an inevitability too solid for contemporary thought’s more plural and deconstructive processes, and renders tragedy partially responsible for the ills of the world in a ‘chicken and egg’ misreading.

So with the aid of The Cone-Gatherers I want to defend tragedy’s capabilities concerning war, and show that over-arching meanings and the appearance of violent ‘sense-making’ are perhaps outer shapes that contain more plural interior recesses. In his famous 1961 book, The Death of Tragedy, George Steiner argues that tragedy portrays ‘the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world.’7 Jenkins’ use of the form chimes with these words but to more modern ends. A clue to this may lie in the man himself. Jenkins was a conscientious objector with a deep fear of violence, something he amplifies to phobic levels through the character of Calum. It seems unlikely, then, that a true pacifist should choose the tragic form for its ability to justify conflict. Rather, I think what Jenkins saw in tragedy, in connection with his thinking on the war, was its ability to portray and produce high levels of fear, both in character and audience, and its complex relationship with evil, ‘inhumanity’ and ‘destruction,’ forces that have stalked the genre for millennia. Jenkins uses tragedy for its classical Aristotelian qualities - its ‘incidents arousing pity and fear’8 - and attaches them to fears more in tune with modern and postmodern versions of the sublime, in which intellectual reconciliation or transcendence-through-reason is impossible. But perhaps this abyssal quality has been there in tragedy all along? Certainly A. C. Bradley would seem to think so in his classic study of Shakespearean tragedies, something he calls ‘a type of the my

rld.’9 Throughout the novel Jenkins deploys tragic irony to privilege the reader over

the cone-gatherers’ understanding of Duror’s intentions. At one point, while he secretly watch

To pull the trigger, requiring far less force than to break a rabbit’s neck, and to hear simultaneously the clean report of the gun and the last obscene squeal of the killed dwarf would have been for him, he thought, release too, from the noose of d

As readers, we are placed in the position of the Aristotelian audience from the

outset, helplessly watching in ‘pity and fear’ as tragic events begin to unfold. But these lines also point to another fear, Duror’s fear of himself. In these moments,


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the mechanics of tragedy and a more modern kind of sublime terror. Just after the passage cited above, Jenkins writes,

so passionate had been his [Duror’s] visualizing of that scene, he seemed himself to be standing on the floor of a fantastic sea, with an owl and a herd of roe deer flitting by quiet as fish, while the yellow ferns and bronze brackens at his feet gleamed like seaweed, and the spruce trees swayed above him like submarine monsters.11

Duror is confused by his own condition. He appears in states of undiagnosed

physical illness, as if his malevolence were psychosomatic, and his trances a form of sublime paralysis, locking him in dumbstruck awe at the horror of his own evil. Here, this takes the form of a fantastic hallucination. Jenkins also foregrounds Duror’s bewilderment with phrases like ‘ungovernable horror,’ ‘accumulated horror,’ ‘compulsion inexplicable,’ ‘meaningless vigil’12 and ‘inconceivable disgust.’13 At one point, he is described as ‘slack-mouthed, mumbling, rather glaikit’14 (an old Scots word meaning stupid). Simon Malpas sees part of a postmodern sublime as ‘a disturbance of everyday sense-making activity.’15 The sense of disruption and disturbance that Jenkins creates through Duror’s confusion is doubled by the reader’s presence as fearful audience. Thus the novel paradoxically achieves moments of postmodern sublimity through traditional methods of tragedy by privileging the reader into a clearer view of the tragic protagonist’s total and insurmountable confusion.

Behind this configuration of fear is the war’s proximity. While the novel is removed to Scotland’s ‘sublime hinterland,’16 its other backdrop is the war itself. The war is at the immediate margins of the text. The war is always there, sometimes innocuous, a sailor singing on board a frigate on a loch, sometimes a visceral stab, as if the door to some terrible inferno had been opened. ‘Haven’t I told you hundreds of times,’ Neil says to his brother, ‘men and women and children too, at this very minute, are having their legs blown away and their faces burnt off them.’17 This statement is universal. It could be said to anyone at any time and would almost certainly be true. Calum’s response is simply to ‘whimper.’ It reflects the reader’s reaction too. Language fails in the face of such information. These moments bond our fear of Duror to a speechless civilian terror we feel at the presence of war. As well as tragic anti-hero, Duror is a vessel of the war, a partly fathomable human sign of otherwise unfathomable horror, a node as well as a character, a point through which the violence of war flows. The war’s palpable proximity, to some degree, explains the smaller-scale violence of the novel, yet the war itself is inexplicable in its sheer magnitude and capacity for death, suffering and destruction. It is important here to pause and consider the new horrors and fears that World War II ushered into the public psyche, the Blitz, the Holocaust,

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the terror bombing of German cities, and the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example. Jenkins’ novel was published a decade into the Cold War, and by linking his readers’ fear of Duror to the war itself, he also activates their newfound fears of Armageddon and annihilation on an unprecedented scale. Adam Piette has commented upon the significance of World War II in shaping modern fears, describing how the atomic attacks at the end of the war created ‘a post-Christian sublime to worship and fear, a new imperialism of the nuclear sun.’18 We are drawn toward answers to Duror’s behaviour by looking through him to the war as background tapestry of human cruelty and destruction, but we ourselves are then dumbstruck by the war’s presence, impossible to take-in all at once. Our natural ‘sense-making’ habits are tempted and then crushed by the reality and enormity of the war itself. The modern/postmodern is achieved through the classical. Calum’s speechless reaction to the truth of war registers a sublime disturbance in ‘sense-making,’ triggered by the war as ‘spectacle of suffering and waste,’19 a phrase used by A. C. Bradley in his discussion of Shakespearean tragedy.

Duror’s obsession with Calum is contiguous with Nazism’s treatment of Jews and the physically and mentally handicapped. On finding a small wooden squirrel he has carved, Duror’s hatred of Calum is further piqued. ‘To Duror it had been the final defeat,’ writes Jenkins,

that such ability should be in a half-man, a freak, an imbecile. He had read that the Germans were putting idiots and cripples to death in gas chambers. Outwardly, as everybody expected, he condemned such barbarity; inwardly, thinking of idiocy and crippledness not as abstractions but as embodied in the crouch backed cone-gatherer, he had profoundly approved.20

The surface of the text here is again disrupted by the war. Duror views the

cone-gatherers as less than human - ‘those two sub-humans,’21 he calls them at one stage, echoing Nazi ideology on racial and physical (im)purity. In his recent study of violence, Slavoj Žižek has commented upon how the Nazis propagandised the ‘less-than-human-other-enemy;’22 Claudia Koonz also, in The Nazi Conscience, shows how Nazi ideology created ‘less than fully human others,’23 designed to appeal to people’s prejudices and to growing beliefs in the new human sciences of genetics and eugenics. Duror’s hatred of Calum, then, his wish to ‘cleanse the wood of his defiling presence’24 (my emphasis), whilst symptomatic of his own aversion to difference and deformity, is a kind of Nazism in miniature, mimicking not only the worst aspects of World War Two, but pre-emulating more recent conflicts also. The word ‘cleanse’ feels horribly clairvoyant in light of Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Rwanda, for example.

Michael Haneke explores fascist intolerance in miniature and essence in his 2009 film The White Ribbon. Set in a remote German agrarian community on the


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eve of World War One, it features a group of children who kidnap and torture a handicapped child. The audience is led into all kinds of reasoning for the children’s barbarity - patriarchal austerity, feudalism, sexual abuse, and incest are all present. But one of the film’s most disturbing scenes is perhaps one of its most poignant and telling, ironically so as it contain no words. After Karli (who has Down’s syndrome), has been found beaten and bleeding from the eyes, we are subjected to his loud crying while his eyes are bandaged by the doctor. It is a protracted, agonising scene in which we are given time to consider the boy’s blind and bewildered suffering. The noise is similar in symbolic terms to Calum’s frightened ‘whimper’ in The Cone-Gatherers; it registers fear and horror but it is wordless and dumb and serves only to amplify the audience’s inability to understand the attack on Karli. Near the end of the film the narrator tells the audience that the war has begun, prompting both a consideration of the story’s relationship with Germany’s national future, and of the nature of Nazism and fascism in their most nascent and foetal guises.

Similarly, the reader of The Cone-Gatherers is baited into reasoning over Duror’s malevolence. His wife Peggy is hugely obese, and has been bedridden for nineteen years. Whilst examining Duror, the local doctor alludes to his enforced celibacy as a serious threat to his sanity. Indeed, it is possible to read Duror’s actions as outward reflections of his own frustrated masculinity, embodied in the grotesque form of his giant, sexless wife. But this reading exonerates him and misses a fundamental aspect of the novel - evil as ‘a presence like air, infecting everyone.’25 Duror sometimes revels in his evil, yet at other times, he is dumbfounded by it. He has the evil of a Shakespearean villain who knowingly subscribes to the dark side of a tragic universe, but he is also aligned with the evils of his time - Nazism and genocide.

Jenkins’ villain, like so many of Shakespeare’s, does not get to choose the level of his own evil, and is subsequently overwhelmed by it. Like Iago, Duror is aware of the evil of his actions, yet unable to stop himself or control the outcome. He uses otherness in the most spurious of ways, playing on Calum’s physical difference and people’s natural prejudice toward him,26 like Iago does with Othello, whose ‘blackness,’ argues Stephen Greenblatt, ‘is the sign of all that society finds frightening and dangerous.’27 Shakespeare, like Jenkins, distils the savagery and physical violence of war into a feudal community, removed from yet fearful of war’s presence. Othello alludes to this after Cassio’s drunken disturbance of the peace: ‘What, in a town of war/Yet wild,’ he says, ‘the people’s hearts brimful of fear.’28 The irony of this is that it is Othello himself the audience fears most and who most personifies war, even referred to at one stage as ‘the warlike Moor.’29 Throughout the play he is animalised and linked to war, his soldiership and expected savagery almost interchangeable through the audience’s fear of him as other. Jenkins’ use of Shakespeare, then, is complex. He borrows not only from his

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characters and his use of evil as a palpable presence, but also from Shakespeare’s alignment of tragedy with war and its need for violence, savagery and cruelty.

In his Very Short Introduction to Tragedy, Adrian Poole considers its relationship with disaster and catastrophe. ‘Death is promiscuous in tragedy,’ he says,

[t]here is no justice we can recognize in the way war, famine, and plague choose their victims. The “evil” that tragedy shows us is a realistic assessment of the way individuals are destroyed with no regard to whether they deserve it or not.30

This reminds me of the mantra - ‘So it goes’ - in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel

Slaughterhouse 5, said after every death, the demise of a pet dog, or thousands incinerated in the Dresden firestorm.31 It captures both the arbitrary nature of war’s destruction and slaughter, and the impossibility of its reasonable justification or explanation. Jenkins’s novel also confronts the random waste and cruelty of war, using tragedy and the sublime to reveal its unspeakable horrors as precisely that, unspeakable. The novel’s ‘sense-making’ is thus humane, as rather than portraying conflict as necessary and cathartic, it highlights its senselessness as most terrifying of all.

Notes

1 Donald Ringnalda, Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994), ix. 2 Robin Jenkins, The Cone-Gatherers (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007), 33. 3 Cairns Craig, Introduction to The Cone-Gatherers, ix. 4 Roland Barthes, quoted in Adrian Poole, Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005), 62. 5 Stan Brakhage, ‘Stan Brakhage: Correspondences’, Chicago Review 47, No. 4 (2001), 48:1, (2002): 36, quoted in Daniel Kane, We Saw the Light: Conversations Between American Cinema and Poetry (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2009), 55. 6 Georg W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume 1, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 205. 7 George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 291. 8 Aristotle, ‘Poetics’, in Critical Theory Since Plato, eds. H. Adams and L. Searle (Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005), 55. 9 Andrew C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth (Teddington: The Echo Library, 2006), 12.


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10 Jenkins, Cone-Gatherers, 9. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 9-13. 13 Ibid., 51. 14 Ibid., 70. 15 Simon Malpas, The Postmodern (London: Routledge, 2007), 29. 16 Craig, Introduction, viii. 17 Jenkins, Cone-Gatherers, 7. 18 Adam Piette, ‘The Fictions of Nuclear War, from Hiroshima to Vietnam’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature, eds. Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 161. 19 Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 14. 20 Jenkins, Cone-Gatherers, 12. 21 Ibid., 13. 22 Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Profile Books, 2009), 47. 23 Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003), 1. 24 Jenkins, Cone-Gatherers, 24. 25 Ibid., 93. 26 Duror invents a story and begins an unfounded rumor that Calum is a sexual threat to children. 27 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘The Improvisation of Power’, accessed July 18, 2011, http://ecmd.nju.edu.cn/UploadFile/17/8045/improvisation.doc. 28 William Shakespeare, Othello (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001), 2.3.209-10, 195. 29 Ibid., 2.1.27, 163. 30 Poole, Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction, 118. 31 Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5 (London: Vintage, 2000), 1.

Bibliography Aristotle, Poetics. In Critical Theory Since Plato, edited by Hazard Adams, and Leroy Searle, 52–69. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005. Bradley, Andrew C. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Teddington: The Echo Library, 2006. Greenblatt, Stephen. ‘The Improvisation of Power’. Accessed July 18, 2011. http://ecmd.nju.edu.cn/UploadFile/17/8045/improvisation.doc.

http://ecmd.nju.edu.cn/UploadFile/17/8045/improvisation.doc

http://ecmd.nju.edu.cn/UploadFile/17/8045/improvisation.doc

John Armstrong

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Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume 1. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Jenkins, Robin. The Cone-Gatherers. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007. Kane, Daniel. We Saw the Light: Conversations Between American Cinema and Poetry. Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2009. Koonz, Claudia. The Nazi Conscience. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003. Malpas, Simon. The Postmodern. London: Routledge, 2007. Piette, Adam. ‘The Fictions of Nuclear War, from Hiroshima to Vietnam’. In The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature, edited by Adam Piette, and Mark Rawlinson (forthcoming). Poole, Adrian. Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005. Ringnalda, Donald. Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994. Shakespeare, William. Othello. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001. Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy. New Haven: Yale University Press 1961. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse 5. London: Vintage, 2000. Žižek, Slavoj. Violence. London: Profile Books, 2009.

Filmography

Haneke, Michael, dir. The White Ribbon. 2009. DVD. John Armstrong is Assistant Professor of English Studies at National Formosa University, Taiwan. He has published several articles and reviews on modern American poetry and is currently researching representations of fear in British and American post-war fiction.

Mothers of Desertion, Cannibalism, and Murder: A Familial Reader-Response to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Magdalena Louise Hirt

Abstract As a means of disrupting the already fraught existence of humans in the post-apocalyptic fiction, The Road, Cormac McCarthy evokes new depths of fear, horror, and terror as he presents a mother who has deserted her husband and child. In the stark memories of her husband, she appears to have lost hope for herself and her family’s future. Filled with despair, she is suicidal. Her infatuation with death, rape, and cannibalism is a sickness evoked by desperation. It is her memory throughout the novel that makes McCarthy’s aesthetics starkly more real and horrifying. Why must the memory of the mother reveal these terrifying truths about a life of survival? Why has McCarthy given the mother the voice of the inevitable? The representation of motherhood in the novel presents challenging questions of the role of motherhood in postapocalyptic existence. In this chapter, I will examine the intricacies of McCarthy’s representation of motherhood through my own personal experience as a mother. Ultimately, I suggest that the four roles McCarthy presents for his female readership add to the complete disruption of traditional paradigms and comfort, and thus provoke the most fear, horror, and terror a reader can experience through the blame placed on the feminine and the lack of a female ‘how-to.’ Key Words: The Road, Cormac McCarthy, postapocalyptic, feminine, familial, mother, Eve, how-to, deserter, survivalist.

*****

A mother can be defined in a combination of ways: ‘a woman in relation to a child to whom she has given birth;’ or ‘a woman who undertakes the responsibilities of a parent towards a child.’1 In Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic vision of The Road, the mother is almost completely excluded. Reviewers have chosen to accept this: Janet Maslin from The New York Times deems the mother worthy of a few paragraphs,2 Alan Warner from the Guardian Review gives her one sentence,3 and in The Missouri Review Steve Gehrke ignores her existence and describes the novel as ‘a love story between a father and son.’4 McCarthy, cuts the positive feminine role of mother completely out of the story; it is easy for a reader to eliminate her existence from the plot. The mother’s ghost-like presence, which exists only in dreams and memory, not only pushes the role of mothers to the periphery of critical discourse but also in the narrative itself - where motherly characters are shown only in brief terrifying flashes. In this chapter, I will demonstrate that Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic fiction, The Road, is a novel

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of feminine absence that provokes the ultimate fear in a mother by revealing her inadequacies to live up to a father’s expectations. Fear, horror, and terror are a mother’s new choices that she learns only ‘how-to’ blame herself for. Through an examination of McCarthy’s mothers, the novel reveals itself as one of the most horrifying postapocalyptic novels for a female parent to read. McCarthy’s male-governed society blames the mother for the father’s and son’s bleak, grey, and painful existence just as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam blame Eve for being expelled from the Garden of Eden. The exclusion and portrayal of mothers in The Road leave them without a survivalist role - mothers must grip a lamp from deep within the darkness to become part of the critical discourse.

Apocalypse is defined as a ‘disaster resulting in drastic, irreversible damage.’5 The story of the first disastrous apocalypse that presents irreversible damage is written in The Bible and concerns the couple Adam and Eve. After Eve convinces Adam to take a bite of the forbidden fruit, they are thrown from the garden into a life of nudity, childbirth, and death. McCarthy builds on the blame of Eve for society’s condition by creating a mother to blame in his postapocalyptic world. In The Bible, Eve is allowed to survive; in The Road, the mother is not. The end of the world is given to men. McCarthy therefore hardens the plight of Eve by placing blame on women and has no sympathy or consideration for feminine and maternal predicaments. A future like this would be terrifying to me as a mother.

The Road, first published in 2006, has little criticism available and hardly any that discuss the mother’s perspective. Ben DeBruyn focuses on ecology and the elusive final paragraph;6 Ashley Kunsa mentions suicide without discussing the mother and chooses to quote the religious mother-figure at the end;7 Rune Graulund mentions the picture of the mother when it is pushed off the bridge to discuss the fact that there is no room for sentimentalism;8 Thomas H. Schaub discusses the voice of the mother in a brief paragraph with inclusion of the religious mother-figure at the end;9 and David Wyatt, in his examination of Michael Herr and McCarthy, only discusses women in Herr’s novel.10 The only critic to date that gives the mother an appropriate discussion is Clare P. Curtis in Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract.11

Curtis argues that postapocalyptic fiction is didactic and this is the reason fiction are read like how-to manuals.12 McCarthy gives readers the ‘how-to’ for fathers, but provides no ‘how-to’ for mothers. The mother’s roles are few. As a mother myself reading the novel, I discern the following four roles: deserter, murderer, cannibal, and inadequate survivalist. Mainly, the mother is presented as the deserter and the father as the survivalist; both of them confront the roles of murderer and cannibal from within their dominant roles, but mothers are to blame or to serve as examples for what fathers need to avoid. Didactic, apocalyptic fiction, especially McCarthy’s projection, warns mothers of the undoing of justice. The Road horrifies mothers by presenting them with their lack of dependability and


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absence. To analyse this closely, I will examine each of the mother’s roles separately. 1. Deserter The main role acted out by the mother in The Road is that of deserter. In this role, the mother is presumed to have committed suicide. McCarthy presents the mother as the one to be blamed for destroying the strength found in the traditional family paradigm. Just as Eve was too weak to resist the forbidden fruit, the mother is too weak to survive. The father and son, through her desertion and absence, endure a second apocalypse, existing without the comfort only a positive version of her could have provided. The loss of a mother has a traumatic effect on a child. McCarthy uses this to make her betrayal that much worse.

In 1757, Edmund Burke philosophised about psychological, parental identities and their influence on children when he contemplated the sublime and the beautiful. The mother, who represents beauty, gives children a sense of joy and pleasure, whereas the father, who represents the sublime, gives children a sense of terror and pleasure in his role as an authority figure.13 Burke’s concepts still hold true because they assist McCarthy in making postapocalyptic characters that embody these truths; in The Road, he removes the mother, and thus the ‘beauty’ from the traveling son and father. This leaves both readers and the son with only the ‘sublime,’ authority figure, which strikes a deep fear in a mother who has been able to experience the affection of a mother herself. Here, the feminine disrupts the already fraught existence of family in a postapocalyptic world, making it more intolerable and more terrifying. Though both parental roles are important, the mother’s connection is the one that coxes the child through terror. The mother’s choice in The Road is a terrifying ‘how-to’ survivalist role for a feminine future because at no time, no matter how barren an existence, should a mother or father who has responsibilities towards a child retain an essence of humanity by sacrificing themselves.

It is also helpful to examine the biological make-up of a woman versus a man to understand the absence of the feminine versus the masculine. The mother physically gives more comfort in her embrace versus a father that provides security. I speak this point with great respect for fathers, for I was raised by a stay-home dad. I know a dad can be comforting, but he is not a replacement for the feminine physique suited for breastfeeding and nurturing a newborn child. Removing this primitive need, which a mother knows a child has always needed, strikes fear and pity from me as a mother. This is best demonstrated in the metaphorical scene where the father attempts to wash brains out of his son’s hair with ice cold water causing him to scream and cry. After a man has been shot and his brains are blown all over the son, the father tries the mother’s role. His attempt at the mother’s role is terrifying, which enforces Burke’s ideals of the sublime. The boy’s reaction demonstrates that metaphorically the father lacks the true warmth of


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a mother. Witnessing her own absence instigates more feelings of fear and blame in a mother’s read. These are some biological and psychological differences between a mother and a father. The removal is a technique used by McCarthy to make his novel that much more terrifying for a mother to read. It is true that the absence of a mother makes the intolerable, unbearable, but because McCarthy extends this removal through other female characters and metaphors of the land, he is destroying any physical or metaphorical existence of the feminine within the son’s world. Mothers must confront not only being absent but being eliminated. Graulund’s concept deserta is appropriate here.14 The concept explains McCarthy’s style as being physically and emotionally absent. When taking into account the feminine Goddess of Earth James Lovelock sets forth with the Gaia theory, Graulund’s concept deserta is extended beyond land and emotion. It presents fiction that is void of the feminine like life in a desert - perhaps even more so in the postapocalyptic environment. The sun is also presented this way as it hovers ‘like a grieving mother with a lamp.’15 The father and son in The Road travel without any maternal presence - the parallels of the land, the sun, and the mother communicate blame on the feminine parent for lack of nourishment. Because McCarthy extends this removal through other feminine characteristics and metaphors, he is destroying any physical or metaphorical existence of the maternal. Mothers must confront the desiccative elimination. McCarthy takes the absence of women to a new level that exposes a painful thirst. 2. Murderer

As a deserter, a mother is blameworthy and terrifying; as murderer, she is deplorable. McCarthy presents a mother who wants to take the life of her own child. As a mother, it is hard to bear the thought of my child living in a dangerous world without my care - McCarthy’s mother contemplates this before her desertion. This makes her even more inadequate and horrifying, especially when contrasted with the survivalist father who resists this urge. The mother says,

I should have done it a long time ago. When there were three bullets in the gun instead of two ... I’d take him with me if it weren’t for you. You know I would. It’s the right thing to do.16

McCarthy’s mother believes life has come to the point of familial suicide, when the only alternative is a life of hiding and fear. She presents this moral dilemma, and therefore readers blame her for destroying the safety of the home. The father, the brave survivalist, only confronts the same dilemma when in immediate danger, which portrays him as merciful. In Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract, Curtis discusses this issue in On the Beach, when she claims that familial suicide is seen as an act of love and suicide pills are sold at the local store;


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comparative to The Road, Curtis furthers this argument with the claim that a mother’s desire for the family to commit suicide together is a realistic and sane choice.17 Because this role is presented in two different ways - the father is given the righteous motive, not the mother. As a murderer, she is filled with blame instead of justification. Curtis states ‘[t]he woman is right. The man is living a fantasy and it is a dangerous one.’18 The mother knows this life is not a life worth living, and readers can see that it is not a life worth living, yet McCarthy wants readers to see the father as a saint and the mother as weak. This strikes terror into a maternal reader. I found myself having brief panic attacks due to anxiety about thinking that the mother should be more like the father. This disturbed me, because it is not an accurate view of this mother, who has lived for approximately ten years after an apocalypse and should not be blamed for wanting her family to now die with grace. McCarthy gives no glimpses of her surviving during those ten years. 3. Cannibal

The role of the cannibal is truly confronted when a pregnant mother whom the father and son meet on the road is cannibalistic. Women are stripped of their maternal instinct. This role is played out in the most terrifying scene for the boy because he buries his eyes in his father’s coat after he sees a ‘charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit.’19 This visual reveals that the pregnant mother seen with a young child from a distance earlier would eat her own child. A terrifying flash like this strips mothers of any maternal dignity; like Eve, women are blamed for being tempted into the existence dangled before them. The mother who should be caring and giving is the narrator of doom, rape, cannibalism, and murder, while the father is the narrator of survival. As a mother, I would not desert my family. As a mother, I would fight to survive in any type of world presented, because I have maternal instincts to care for my children, no matter what. By saying so, I do not intend to put pressure on women to be better mothers; it puts pressure on the idea of terror in literature to give mothers a ‘how-to’ in didactic, postapocalyptic situations. McCarthy successfully pushes feminine mentality and maternity past its limits. Are there to be no survivalist opportunities for mothers? Are mothers only to be seen as deserters, murderers, and cannibals? Why does McCarthy not see maternal characters as survivors? Are we, like Eve, to forever be blamed and made to suffer in literature written by men? As a mother, I do not accept this horror and I do not accept these roles. 4. Survivalist The term ‘survivor’ bears a lot of weight. In the first flashback the readers encounter dialogue between the father and mother. The father tries to convince the mother that they are survivors. She responds by saying, ‘We’re not survivors. We’re the walking dead in a horror film.’20 The term ‘survivor’ changes who a


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person is and how they live. The mother’s immediate rejection of this shatters hope.

In The Road, during the mother’s delivery, the father takes the son, cuts the cord with a kitchen shears, and wraps him in a towel.21 The mother is not portrayed reaching for her child, and the father does not place the newborn on her chest or in her arms. Even when the mother is present, McCarthy cuts her from the scene; she is psychologically distant and insignificant. This is not to mention that being pregnant and counting down the days to do what in history has been referred to as the hardest work a woman will ever do - no, this is not terrifying enough. In childbirth, the mother puts everything into giving her son life, yet she is still blamed for being a depressed deserter instead of a survivor. She states, ‘My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born so do not ask for sorrow now. There is none.’22 If, in fact, she is to blame for anything, it is only for suffering from a postpartum condition. Literally and metaphorically, she walks into the darkness, creating a reality for her husband and son that barely glimpses any light; the father gives no assistance for her depression and instead blames her for desertion. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue why a woman suffers this way when they discuss Milton’s Paradise Lost and Eve’s punishment as ‘the anguish of maternity ... to bear young is to be not spiritual but animal.’23 McCarthy builds on this concept with his mother who is living in a weak state of survival - he blames her and makes her suffer what Eve was doomed to suffer. She is doomed because she is a woman and women, since Eve, have contributed to the world’s being a chaotic and sinful place. So by making the mother suffer in childbirth, McCarthy punishes her and gives her a deserved biblical judgment that destroys the ‘how-to’ survivalist role for women.

The mother’s survivalist role, portrayed through the mother-figure at the end, is presented as being filled with hope through faith. Though there is a hint of hope, McCarthy destroys this optimistic view for mothers as well. The religious mother-figure at the end of the novel contends that ‘the breath of God’ is to be passed from ‘man to man through all of time.’24 This does not leave much room for the maternal to breathe. The last optimistic survivalist role is therefore filled with a faith that communicates false hope; the son’s hope in carrying the fire exists for him and other men. The father holds the only role that communicates a life-and-death journey of scrounging for food and avoiding bad guys. The feminine has only communicated the roles of deserter, murderer, cannibal, and inadequate survivalist. This future holds no form of happiness - the father leaves the photograph of the mother on the bridge like McCarthy leaves the role of mothers - they are both placed on the ledge and dropped into a novel of absence that provokes the ultimate fear in a mother by revealing her inadequacies to live up to a man’s expectations.25 Fear, horror, and terror are a mother’s new choices, for which she can blame only herself. She is left with no hope or knowledge on ‘how-to’ survive or where she will belong. If Cormac McCarthy was trying to strike fear


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and panic into a mother’s heart with a tale that was supposedly about a father and son, he was disturbingly successful.

Notes

1 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v ‘Mother.’ 2 Janet Maslin, ‘The Road through Hell, Paved with Depression’, The New York Times, 25th September 2006, NY Times.com, accessed May 5, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/books/25masl.html. 3 Alan Warner, ‘The Road to Hell’, Guardian Review, 4th November 2006, Guardian.co.uk, accessed May 5, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/nov/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview4. 4 Steve Gehrke, ‘The Road’ review of The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, The Missouri Review 30, No. 1 (2007): 151-152. 5 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘Apocalypse.’ 6 Ben De Bruyn, ‘Borrowed Time, Borrowed World and Borrowed Eyes: Care, Ruin and Vision in McCarthy’s The Road and Harrison’s Ecocriticism’, English Studies 91, No. 7 (2010): 776-789. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO, accessed May 18, 2011. 7 Ashley Kunsa, ‘Maps of the World in Its Becoming: Post-Apocalyptic Naming in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’, Journal of Modern Literature 33, No. 1 (2009): 57-74, Project MUSE, accessed April 7, 2011. 8 Rune Graulund, ‘Fulcrums and Borderlands: A Desert Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’, Orbis Litterarum 65, No. 1 (2010): 57-78, accessed February 2010. 9 Thomas H. Schaub, ‘Secular Scripture and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’, Renascence 61, No. 3 (2009): 153-168. 10 David Wyatt ‘Studying War: Cormac McCarthy, Herr’, in Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010). 11 Clare P. Curtis, Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract (New York: Lexington Books, 2010 ), 17-18. 12 Ibid., 17-18. 13 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 86-89. 14 Graulund, ‘Fulcrums and Borderlands: A Desert Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’, 58. 15 Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Vintage Books, 2006. Print), 32. 16 Ibid., 56. 17 Curtis, Post-Apocalyptic, 29-30. 18 Ibid., 33.

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19 McCarthy, The Road, 198. 20 Ibid., 55. 21 Ibid., 59. 22 Ibid., 57. 23 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 198. 24 McCarthy, The Road, 286. 25 Ibid., 51.

Bibliography

‘Apocalypse’. Oxford English Dictionary. Accessed November 11, 2011. http://www.oed.com.proxy.ohiolink.edu:9099/view/Entry/9229?redirectedFrom=apocalypse#eid. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Curtis, Clare P. Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract. New York: Lexington Books, 2010. De Bruyn, Ben. ‘Borrowed Time, Borrowed World and Borrowed Eyes: Care, Ruin and Vision in McCarthy’s The Road and Harrison’s Ecocriticism’. English Studies 91, No. 7 (2010): 776–789. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Accessed May 18, 2011. Gehrke, Steve. ‘The Road’. Review of The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. The Missouri Review 30, No. 1 (2007): 151–152. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd Edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Graulund, Rune. ‘Fulcrums and Borderlands: A Desert Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s, The Road’. Orbis Litterarum 65, No. 1 (2010): 57–78. Accessed February 2010. Heffernan, Teresa. Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel. Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

http://www.oed.com.proxy.ohiolink.edu:9099/view/Entry/9229?redirectedFrom=apocalypse%23eid

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Kunsa, Ashley. ‘Maps of the World in Its Becoming: Post-Apocalyptic Naming in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’, Journal of Modern Literature 33, No. 1 (2009): 57–74. Project MUSE. Accessed April 7, 2011. Maslin, Janet. ‘The Road through Hell, Paved With Depression’. The New York Times, 25 September 2006. Accessed May 5, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/books/25masl.html. McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. ‘Mother’. Oxford English Dictionary. Accessed November 11, 2011. http://www.oed.com.proxy.ohiolink.edu:9099/view/Entry/122640?rskey=0E1eNA&result=1&isAdvanced=false. Schaub, Thomas H. ‘Secular Scripture and Cormac McCarthy’s, The Road’. Renascence 61, No. 3, (2009): 153–168. Warner, Alan. ‘The Road to Hell’. Guardian Review, 4 November 2006. Accessed May 5, 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/nov/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview4. Wyatt, David. ‘Studying War: Cormac McCarthy, Herr’. In Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature, 259–279. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010.

Filmography

John Hillcoat, dir. The Road. Dimension Films. DVD, 2009. Magdalena Louise Hirt is in the graduate student program at the University of Toledo. As a mother of two toddlers, her critical work consistently considers their involvement. While interested mostly in creative writing, currently her research and writing is devoted to the analysis of apocalyptic fiction.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/books/25masl.html

http://www.oed.com.proxy.ohiolink.edu:9099/view/Entry/122640?rskey=0E1eNA&result=1&isAdvanced=false

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/nov/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview4

Writing Terror Within: The Role of Science in The Secret Agent and Saturday

Gen’ichiro Itakura

Abstract This chapter examines the role of science and the scientific worldview in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Ian McEwan’s Saturday in relation to the novels’ exploration of ‘terror within.’ These two novels attribute this sense of terror to a widely shared fear of ‘madness within’ - both within British society and within the individual - by appropriating the contemporary scientific worldview. In both novels, the language of science is often employed to make clear distinctions between sanity and insanity, the civilised mind and the uncivilised mind, scientific thinking and animal instinct: Conrad’s Winnie, who allegedly has genetic traits peculiar to the ‘criminal type,’ kills her husband Verloc and herself; McEwan’s ‘genetically challenged’ Baxter resorts to random acts of violence. These two characters are contrasted with those who treat them as the subjects of scientific studies, as if to confirm that madness only inhabits the minds of those biologically ‘inferior.’ However, the boundary between sanity and insanity becomes less and less clear-cut as the two novels display ambivalence towards science. In The Secret Agent, the references to science, mostly made by the anarchists Alexander Ossipon and the Professor, point to an odd mixture of sanity and insanity, objective reasoning and self-importance, in the terrorists’ minds, and thereby reveal the dehumanising tendency of fanatical devotion to scientific thought (Lombrosian criminal anthropology and Social Darwinism). In Saturday, a commitment to neurosurgery makes Henry Perowne somewhat apathetic and insensitive, and yet does not eradicate an unscientific, disproportionate fear of ‘madness within’ that occasionally disrupts his tranquillity of mind. Science is thus imagined in these novels as an intellectual endeavour that could intensify our fear or even our ‘madness within’ under certain circumstances. Key Words: Joseph Conrad, Ian McEwan, 9/11 rationality, Saturday sanity science, The Secret Agent, terror within.

*****

Alexander Ossipon, anarchist, nicknamed the Doctor, author of a medical (and improper) pamphlet, late lecturer on the social aspects of hygiene to working men’s clubs, was free from the trammels of conventional morality - but he submitted to the rule of science. He was scientific, and he gazed scientifically at that woman, the sister of a degenerate, a degenerate herself - of a murdering type. He gazed at her, and invoked Lombroso, as an

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Italian peasant recommends himself to his favourite saint.1

Even as he turns back towards Baxter in surprise, and even as he sees, or senses, what’s coming towards him at such speed, there remains in a portion of his thoughts a droning, pedestrian diagnostician who notes poor self-control, emotional lability, explosive temper, suggestive of reduced levels of GABA among the appropriate binding sites on striatal neurons. There is much in human affairs that can be accounted for at the level of the complex molecule.2

The two citations above present the sense of horror an educated man feels in

the face of an irrational, murderous person, but they suggest different, though not totally opposite, stances towards the focal characters’ devotion to science. The first quote, taken from Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, does not only encapsulate the intellectual trend of fin-de-siècle Britai3 but it also reveals Ossipon’s quintessential shallowness through the repetitive use of the words ‘scientific’ and ‘scientifically’ and the undercutting comparison between this self-proclaimed scientist and an ‘Italian peasant.’ The reader sees ‘that woman’ - Winnie Verloc - from Ossipon’s point of view, but is unlikely to share his prejudice against the uneducated underclass woman. After all, Conrad once called all his characters ‘tous des imbéciles’ (all idiots) in his letter to Henry-Durand Davray. 4 By contrast, the second passage, cited from Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), invites a more sympathetic reading of the focal character, Henry Perowne, who is being struck by a frustrated underclass youth named Baxter. The language of more advanced science (e.g. ‘reduced levels of GABA,’ ‘striatal neurons’) does alienate the reader to a certain extent, but it also makes Perowne’s observation somehow reliable, especially for those re-readers who know what happens to Baxter towards the end. Unlike Conrad’s amateur criminal anthropologist, McEwan’s neurosurgeon demonstrates the uses of science and wins the reader’s trust at the same time.

In this chapter, however, I would like to find commonalities in these two texts, especially in their uses of the contemporary scientific worldview, and consider what they mean to our understanding of fear, horror and terror. It is important, to begin with, to understand the ways the language of science helps shape our conceptions of sanity and insanity, rationality and irrationality. These two novels explore ‘terror within’ in the world where science is conceived as the pinnacle of rationality. Fear of ‘terror within’ is predicated upon our uneasiness in the presence of unscientific irrationality. Thus the boundaries between sanity and insanity warrant a close analysis, for, as we shall see, they are not as clear-cut in these two novels as they seem at first glance. What seems like a dysfunction turns out to be inherent to our pursuit of science and rationality, and our fear of irrationality at least partly stems from our irrationality. Finally, I will conclude by re-examining


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how this traditional narrative of rationality and irrationality is carefully revised in these two texts.

1. Science and Terror

Both in The Secret Agent and Saturday, terror is associated with irrationality, or more precisely, the Western notion of irrationality. For different reasons and to varying degrees, these two novels are marked by the use of the language of science, which, at least on a superficial level, serves to make clear distinctions between sanity and insanity, the civilised mind and the uncivilised mind. In this respect, the basic idea behind the books’ conception of terror can be attributed to the traditional Western notions of rationality and irrationality, according to which, in the Classical Age, madness was defined as the lack of reason (‘unreason’) and was classified into the harmless type (‘imbecility’) and the harmful type (‘frenzy’).5

Despite its image as a ‘terrorist’ novel, the latter half of The Secret Agent revolves around Winnie Verloc’s tragedy. In the ‘Author’s Note,’ Conrad particularly draws our attention to the ‘anarchistic end of utter desolation, madness, and despair’ of Winnie’s story.6 Her centrality is also confirmed by the author’s letter to Ambrose Barker.7 There are mitigating factors to her eventual murder of her husband Adolf Verloc: she lavishes her ‘quasi-maternal affection’ on her ‘delicate’ or mentally challenged brother Stevie;8 he is implicated in the terrorists’ plotting and is literally blown up to pieces; the vision of his violent death torments her;9 she realises that he has been murdered by none other than her husband, whom now she calls a ‘devil.’10 Yet Winnie is not so much an object of sympathy as an object of study. When she comes to him on the run from the police, Ossipon attempts his Lombrosian diagnosis of her as a ‘degenerate’ of a ‘murdering type’ twice.11 His scientific or quasi–scientific diagnosis sounds somewhat convincing, because this violent kind of insanity is apparent when she kills Verloc: ‘Mrs Verloc had let go the knife, and her extraordinary resemblance to her late brother had faded, had become very ordinary now. 12 This quasi-scientific equation of murderousness and insanity or mental disorders, on a superficial level, provides a ready-made narrative of the frenzy of the uncivilised mind, obscuring the true nature of Winnie’s ‘madness,’ which is arguably the main concern of the novel.13

This narrative is endorsed by the novel’s conception of science and rationality. Despite some of the anarchists’ scientific backgrounds, science is still associated with the world order and the Establishment. Notoriously, Mr Vladimir propels Verloc to perpetrate a terrorist outrage at the Royal Observatory, or an attack that has ‘all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy,’ because ‘[madness] alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it either by threats, persuasion, or bribes.’14 No matter how logical their reasoning is, or no matter how much scientific education they have received, Conrad’s terrorists somehow force themselves to act irrationally to send the public into an utter panic. The self-imposed ‘madness’ of this sort consolidates the link between terror and irrationality


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on the one hand, and the link between science and rationality on the other. If the reader feels fear of these anarchists and Winnie, this fear is interchangeable with unease in the presence of the irrational.

As McEwan says in an interview, the same battle of the rational and the irrational is restaged in his Saturday - perhaps more straightforwardly.15 When confronted with the uneducated, troubled Baxter and his gang, Perowne, a neurosurgeon, takes advantage of his scientific knowledge and diagnostic skills to detect the young boy’s hereditary disease (Huntington’s disease).

Baxter is in his mid-twenties. This isn’t the moment to be asking for a family history. If a parent has it, you have a fifty-fifty chance of going down too. Chromosome four. The misfortune lies within a single gene, in an excessive repeat of a single sequence - CAG. Here’s biological determinism in its purest form. More than forty repeats of that one little codon, and you’re doomed. Your future is fixed and easily foretold. The longer the repeat, the earlier and more severe the onset. Between ten and twenty years to complete the course, from the first small alterations of character, tremors in the hands and face, emotional disturbance, including - most notably - sudden, uncontrollable alterations of mood, to the helpless jerky dance-like movements, intellectual dilapidation, memory failure, agnosia, apraxia, dementia, total loss of muscular control, rigidity sometimes, nightmarish hallucinations and a meaningless end.16

Unlike Conrad’s scientist-turned-anarchist, Perowne conducts a ‘pedestrian’ diagnosis with almost textbook exactness. His extensive use of the language of science highlights his objectiveness and correctness, implicitly associating Perowne’s scientific mind with rationality. The novel’s petit criminal, the genetically challenged Baxter, is utterly helpless under the scrutiny of modern neuroscience. He breaks into Perowne’s house later, but ends up falling down the stairs and being hospitalised, only to be operated on by Perowne himself. After all, Perowne can explain Baxter’s irrationality perfectly and cure it by an operation, albeit partially. He even decides to persuade her family and the police to drop charges against Baxter because he knows from a more accurate diagnosis that the young man only has a ‘diminishing slice of life.’17 In other words, the rational, scientific mind that Perowne stands for can also be morally superior to the irrational, unscientific mind. Terror here is reduced to a physiological disorder or even a slip in the genotype that causes irrationality or a disruption in the normal routine of everyday life.18

In these two texts, terror is considered to be a form of human irrationality and unfavourably compared with science, the epitome of human rationality. The former


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is identifiable and eventually removable by the latter. Indeed, their sources of inspiration are different: The Secret Agent takes its inspiration from the Victorian/Edwardian belief in science and progress, whilst Saturday can be read in relation to the contemporary debate on anti- or post-humanism. Despite the difference, however, these novels restage the same old narrative of rationality and irrationality.

2. Illusion of Rationality

Significantly, the boundaries between rationality and irrationality become less and less clear-cut as both The Secret Agent and Saturday display ambivalence towards science. Indeed, the two novels acknowledge the growing centrality of science as a legitimate form of knowledge and a primary source of morality. In the late-Victorian period, science - especially Darwin’s theory of evolution - was so often applied to the social body that it was debated whether science could establish ethics or at least the legitimacy of particular political actions. 19 This belief in science as the most authoritative worldview is still popular in McEwan’s time.20 But both The Secret Agent and Saturday detect morally ambiguous aspects of science and propose alternative paths to more authentic knowledge or a higher stage of morality.

Both The Secret Agent and Saturday not only endorse but also interrogate the infallibility of science or the scientific worldview. In Conrad’s novel, flaws in Ossipon’s and the Professor’s philosophy of science are attributed not solely to their quintessential selfishness and extreme political ideology but also to the dehumanising tendency of a devotion to scientific thought. The Lombrosian criminal anthropology Ossipon espouses is called into serious question at first by Karl Yundt, another anarchist, who challenges not only the legitimacy of biological determinism but also the widespread definition of crime, and then, as Schnauder points out, by the fact that his own physiognomic features - a ‘red, freckled face, with a flattened nose and prominent mouth cast in the rough mould of the negro type’ - surely classify him under the category of the degenerate/criminal type.21 Likewise, the Professor passionately expounds his own version of Social Darwinism, complete with his dream of a world ‘where the weak would be taken in hand for utter extermination,’ totally unaware that he, being a man of frail physique and constitution, would be a potential victim of his social theory.22 Despite its facetiousness, their complete lack of self-consciousness suggests that they have already been dehumanised or reduced to a function in a collective political action. These anarchists are also a reminder of the sinister fact that certain branches of science, combined with a fear of those who are considered ‘undesirable,’ would cause a social catastrophe - in other words, science itself can be a source of terror.

Saturday tells us about the insufficiency of science differently. Perowne’s commitment to neurosurgery makes him somewhat apathetic, though this level of insensitivity does not entirely undermine the reader’s trust in him or the legitimacy


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s rational as he or she may look.

of science. Rather, it is his inability to eradicate a disproportionate fear of ‘terror’ that undermines the legitimacy of the scientific worldview. From the very beginning of the book, Perowne harbours an acute fear of a 9/11-type of terrorist attack. Seeing an aeroplane, he instantly imagines it soon crashing to the ground, and pictures ‘brave passengers’ in the aircraft charging against the ‘fanatics.’23

It’s already almost eighteen months since half the planet watched, and watched again the unseen captives driven through the sky to the slaughter, at which time there gathered round the innocent silhouette of any jet plane a novel association. Everyone agrees, airliners look different in the sky these days, predatory or doomed.24

Knowing that he might be experiencing a ‘trick of vision,’ Perowne cannot stop imagining another catastrophe, another 9/11. He is nearly convinced that he has been carried away by an ‘excess of the subjective’ until he flashes back to a vision of a terrorist attack, a vision of a ‘man of sound faith with a bomb in the heel of his shoe’ who shares such reasoning. 25 He is nearly overwhelmed by those nightmarish visions in spite of the slim possibility of such incidents. His unscientific, disproportionate fear of another 9/11 originates in his fear of the irrational. He understands any complex matter by breaking it down into particular symptoms or even chemical reactions that he finds analysable. Therefore, Perowne sees in Baxter only a combination of symptoms detailed in medical journals, as he sees in the aeroplane a well-circulated, understandable version of the tragic incidents that took place on 11 September 2011. His fear of the irrational makes him vulnerable to a set of narratives that are offered as the truth. Conrad’s anarchists also believe in their own version of history. Perowne’s vulnerability to such narratives, as well as Conrad’s anarchists’, amply demonstrates that the scientific mind is also susceptible to this kind of fabrication of ‘reality’ that provides a flimsy excuse for all manner of prejudices and even for extreme political ideologies. A believer of science is not a

Both The Secret Agent and Saturday do not only challenge scientism, but they also - though only tangentially - suggest alternative routes to take. Unlike other characters, Conrad’s Stevie is capable of great compassion. Through his attentiveness to the others’ pain, he understands the wrongs the coach driver has done with his decrepit horse, or ‘a sort of wretchedness having to feed upon the anguish of the other.’26 His capacity for compassion points to his moral superiority or essential altruism, which ironically leads him to become an accomplice to a failed terrorist bombing. In McEwan’s novel, it is poetry, not science, that saves Baxter from committing a more serious act of violence. When Daisy, Perowne’s daughter, reads Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach,’ the poem espousing the importance of faithfulness to other people in the age of scientific progress and the


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decline of Christian faith, this uneducated, genetically-challenged youth inexplicably feels ‘elated’ and unwittingly transforms from a ‘lord of terror’ to an ‘amazed admirer.’27 Although Baxter cannot explain his own ‘elation,’ it can be easily inferred that he experiences a moment of catharsis from a poem in which the poet desperately tries to channel a pessimistic observation of the brevity of life and the insignificance of human existence, which Baxter has always felt, to a positive impetus to make one’s life more meaningful. Arnold’s poetic defence of his apparently irrational faith works much better for him than would Perowne’s neuroscience. 28 Despite their apparent emphasis on science, these two books suggest that a higher stage of morality can be reached through something irrational - or something that scientists might dismiss as irrational29 - within oneself.

3. Conclusion

Read alongside each other, Conrad’s and McEwan’s texts at once present and challenge the legitimacy of a classical view of terror as irrationality. Science is thus imagined in these novels as an intellectual endeavour that helps overcome our fear of terror within, but that, under certain circumstances, could intensify our perennial fear of irrationality. By caricaturing political anarchists and detailing the tragic death of an innocent man, The Secret Agent serves as a scathing critique of conventional values and as an attempt to transcend them. Despite its apparently new outlook and the recent historical incidents that have allegedly changed our mindset, Saturday shares the same concerns and explores them even more straightforwardly. Because of their ambivalence, these two texts are poised on the fulcrum between the traditional Western fear of madness and the authors’ scepticism towards the traditional belief in rationality.

Notes

1 Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 217. 2 Ian McEwan, Saturday (London: Cape, 2005), 91. 3 Ludwig Schnauder, ‘The Materialist-Scientific World View in The Secret Agent’, Conradian 32, No. 1 (2007): 95-105; Ellen Burton Harrington, ‘The Female Offender, the New Woman, and Winnie Verloc in The Secret Agent’, Conradian 32, No. 1 (2007): 57-69. 4 The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad Volume 3, eds. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 372. 5 Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006), 390. 6 Conrad, The Secret Agent, 233.


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7 The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad Volume 8, eds. Laurence Davies and Gene M. Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 165. For a feminist view of Conrad’s deliberate choice to focus on Winnie, see Susan Jones, Conrad and Women (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 201. 8 Conrad, The Secret Agent, 6 and 7. 9 Conrad, The Secret Agent, 191. 10 Conrad, The Secret Agent, 202. 11 Conrad, The Secret Agent, 212 and 217. 12 Conrad, The Secret Agent, 193. 13 For a feminist view of Winnie’s ‘madness’ and her relation to the ‘New Woman,’ see Harrington, ‘The Female Offender, the New Woman, and Winnie Verloc in The Secret Agent’. 14 Conrad, The Secret Agent, 25. 15 David Lynn, ‘A Conversation with Ian McEwan’, in Conversations with Ian McEwan, ed. Ryan Roberts (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 144. 16 McEwan, Saturday, 93-94. 17 McEwan, Saturday, 278. 18 It remains a moot point whether McEwan unwittingly contributes to stigmatising people with Huntington’s disease, but in the present chapter I would like to concentrate on his exploration of fear of irrationality or faith in rationality, which is apparent in his recent novels, notably Amsterdam. 19 Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 37-38. 20 In an interview, McEwan enthusiastically celebrated the recent advancement of biology. Liliane Louvel, Gilles Ménégaldo and Anne-Laure Fortin, ‘An Interview with Ian McEwan’, in Conversations with Ian McEwan, ed. Ryan Roberts (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 72. 21 Conrad, The Secret Agent, 35 and 33; Schnauder, Schnauder, ‘The Materialist-Scientific World View in The Secret Agent’, 96. 22 Conrad, The Secret Agent, 222. 23 McEwan, Saturday, 16. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 17. 26 Conrad, The Secret Agent, 126. 27 McEwan, Saturday, 222 and 223. 28 For Arnold’s religious view, see David J. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1969), 106. Schad argues that this late-Victorian version of ‘Christian unreason’ is an irrational form of Christianity left behind the rationalisation of


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religion since the Enlightenment. John Schad, Queer Fish: Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2004). See also Foucault, History of Madness, 152. 29 Needless to say, the definition of ‘irrationality’ and the scope of science change with the times. Stevie’s compassion can be scientifically explained by Marco Iacoboni’s ‘mirror neuron’ theory and Simon Baron-Cohen’s ‘empathy circuit’ theory, and Baxter’s ‘elation’ or religious turn by the correlation between religiosity and the low density of serotonin receptors established by Jacqueline Borg and others. Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others (New York: Farrar, 2008), 106-129; Simon Baron-Cohen, Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty (London: Lane, 2011), 16, 101-102 and 122; Jacqueline Borg, Bengt Andrée, Henrik Soderstrom and Lars Farde, ‘The Serotonin System and Spiritual Experiences’, American Journal of Psychiatry 160 (2003): 1965-1969. However, Stevie’s compassion and Baxter’s elation are treated as something beyond reason in The Secret Agent and Saturday respectively.

Bibliography Baron-Cohen, Simon. Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty. London: Lane, 2011. Borg, Jacqueline, Bengt Andrée, Henrik Soderstrom, and Lars Farde. ‘The Serotonin System and Spiritual Experiences’. American Journal of Psychiatry 160 (2003): 1965–1969. Conrad, Joseph. The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. —––. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad Volume 3. Edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. —––. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad Volume 8. Edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. DeLaura, David J. Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1969. Foucault, Michel. History of Madness. Edited by Jean Khalfa. Translated by Jonathan Murphy, and Jean Khalfa. London: Routledge, 2006.


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Harrington, Ellen Burton. ‘The Female Offender, the New Woman, and Winnie Verloc in The Secret Agent’. Conradian 32, No. 1 (2007): 57–69. Houen, Alex. Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Iacoboni, Marco. Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others. New York: Farrar, 2008. Jones, Susan. Conrad and Women. Oxford: Clarendon, 1999. Louvel, Liliane, Gilles Ménégaldo, and Anne-Laure Fortin. ‘An Interview with Ian McEwan’. In Conversations with Ian McEwan, Edited by Ryan Roberts, 67–78. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Lynn, David. ‘A Conversation with Ian McEwan’. In Conversations with Ian McEwan, Edited by Ryan Roberts, 143–155. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. McEwan, Ian. Amsterdam. London: Cape, 1998. —––. Saturday. London: Cape, 2005. Roberts, Ryan, ed. Conversations with Ian McEwan. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Schad, John. Queer Fish: Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2004. Schnauder, Ludwig. ‘The Materialist-Scientific World View in The Secret Agent’. Conradian 32, No. 1 (2007): 95–105. Gen’ichiro Itakura is an Associate Professor at the School of International Liberal Studies, Chukyo University, Japan. He has published several books, and his articles have appeared in journals including ARIEL.

The Fear of the People

Lisete Rodrigues

Abstract Our starting point is the intense post-revolutionary political and philosophical debate, in which the fear of the people becomes a central category, determining the institutionalised arrangements on behalf of an idea of order and security as an apparatus conceived from, in relation to, and unsustainable without fear. Underlying the political use of fear of the people is a philosophical premise on which the ‘people,’ both as a political agent, and as a natural being to be afraid of, is constituted. One of the greatest exponents of this philosophical buttress is Thomas Hobbes, whose display of the constitution of a self-evident fearful citizenship was developed as a strategy to contain the threatening aspect of the social movements in defense of democracy. At the same time that fear is changed into an honorable and rational way of calculating individual benefits and liabilities, every political theory has available a naturalised menacing subjectivity. On the other side, that Thomas Jefferson, for instance, took a stand apart from those who ‘fear the people’ prominently acknowledged the artificiality of a threatening subject that legitimates a political authority to contain the latent menace. In unison with an entirely different philosophical tradition - Machiavelli, Spinoza, Rousseau - opposed to what E. Balibar called ‘la crainte des masses,’1 this line of thought deconstructs the naturalised aspect of an unequal society and identifies the ‘automatons of misery’ as an apolitical condition. By bringing these two philosophical genealogies regarding the ‘fear of the people’ to light, I demonstrate how a political display of the idea of citizenship as subjecthood can be a language of fear. Key Words: Fear, popular sovereignty, constituent, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Taylor, Thomas Hobbes, Spinoza.

***** 1. A Fundamental Ambivalence

Our age is itself haunted by a “fear of the masses”, which joins together the images of state absolutism - indeed of electronic control of opinions - and those of revolutionary violence or terrorism.2

As Étienne Balibar has well seen, the political use of the concept of fear involves a deep ambivalence in its own structure: it refers, at the same time, to the agent identified to be feared, and also to the fear this agent himself feels. By


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bringing to light this fundamental ambivalence, it becomes much clearer how the political use of a language of fear employs a discursive strategy similar to that of chiaroscuro. On one hand, it brings to light what appears to be a natural relation of forces, from which the legitimate identification of the agent to be feared proceeds. On the other hand, the discursive outlining of the first moment obscures the unnamed agents who have reason to fear the named one, as well as the nature of the relations that remain as the backdrop of the emergent political display.

Throughout this chapter, we propose an approach to this ambivalence inherent to the fear of the people that departs from the intense American post-revolutionary political and philosophical debate, in which it becomes a central category. From there, we will explore the philosophical ground of fear as a political category, by taking into account Hobbes’ and Spinoza’s different understandings of the political nature of fear, through which how the conception of citizenship as subjecthood rests on a language of fear becomes perceptible.

2. ‘I’m Not among Those Who Fear the People’3

As Derrida has already shown concerning the performative effects of The Declaration of Independence,4 taken from the perspective of a constituent moment,5 focused on the performative effects of specific acts of speech, the post-revolutionary debate about the question of what constitutes a state, its matter and its laws, rests on the everlasting dichotomy opposing nature to culture, or nature to law and society.6

When Thomas Jefferson says ‘I’m not among those who fear the people,’ he is taking a relevant stand in that debate, immediately suspending a discursive display whereby the people in any form of self-government are taken as a natural source of all sorts of violence and for that reason self-government becomes inconsistent with the possibility of order. Suspending the self-evidence of the fearful social and political nature of the people, puts that same evidence immediately under a closer investigation, making visible the contradiction inherent in the naturalisation of something said as people that is already produced in a political and social level of collective existence. In fact, we can speak of a dichotomous structure that supports what appears to be a unidirectional political narrative of the fear of the people. In the context of a dichotomy between nature and law, its terms may be reduced to people and order, in a constant relation of mutual determination: the people are the basis of the sovereign order, which itself exists only by means of the successful containment of the people. The people in Jefferson’s sentence refers to this twofold existence as a political entity in the civil state, capable of living according to the political order, and simultaneously as the referent of the latent menace of disorder, that ‘bodily lower stratum’7 that is meant to keep under restraint.

As member of the former, the people is the subject of that performative declaration starting with ‘We, the People,’8 but as member of the latter, it becomes the realm of the ‘creatures of democracy,9 as John Adams labels some

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revolutionaries, and which he frames as a political problem: ‘It is certain in Theory, that the only moral Foundation of Government is the Consent of the People.’ Immediately thereafter, he asks, ‘But to what an Extent Shall We Carry this Principle?’10

This lurking contradiction is a sign of the duplicity inherent in a political discursive order in which the people is the word for the new political beginning, as a general concept applied to the United States civil population as the source for the political sovereignty, but is simultaneously kept outside the governmental cabinet.

Outside that dichotomy between ‘people’ and ‘order,’ there would be no philosophical ground for objections to the idea of self-government of the People by the People. In fact, self-government is the ‘speculative phantom’11 deluding those who stand by it, since, according to Adams’ perspective, human nature has already proved itself in terms of an eternal disposition to harm other human beings, and has shown how the natural distinctions between men have always been successfully accounted for in a social structure of ‘the one, the few and the many.’12

From this perspective, it is rather clear to Adams that popular sovereignty must not coincide with political self-government of the People by the People, since there is no such thing as the people, materially speaking, but only distinct individuals and their corresponding social classes. It follows that a balance of powers and classes is the only political architecture suitable to a state of social order and individual ‘pursuit of happiness.’13

The fear of the people appears as the strongest objection to that idea of self-government, authorised by the eternal proven truths, or better said, by an enduring line of thought that finds in Thomas Hobbes its nearest and strongest exponent.14 Thomas Hobbes gives us the philosophical ground from which a naturalised idea of people as a fearful crowd or multitude becomes a key concept in the modern and subsequent political thought. From this naturally-given fundament, the main attribute of the political idea of Sovereignty becomes the authority to enforce the law by every means, as the only way to ensure the conditions to avoiding harm that individuals can inflict. Hobbes’ widely known theory of the contract forges a political instrument wherein it is stated that every man exchanges his private fear of a violent death for a collective fear that will secure a general peace. Fear becomes the operative element of any civil state, founding a political unifying agent that has its source in nature itself and not in any given or pre-existent social order. The use of the fear of the people in that debate preserves that twofold existence, grounding a preventive apparatus that secures the collective body against the risks of disruption that the people is capable of.

That preventive apparatus is said to be a state of peace regarding the natural distribution of human qualities and their correspondent social positions, controlling the degenerative natural elements with ‘constitutional energies on a system of checks and balances.’15 The overlap of these two orders of existence appears in


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Adams’ statement of an evident consequence: ‘They have all equal rights; but cannot, and ought not to have equal power.’16

The constituent energies invested in the People in the first lines of the Preamble to the United States Constitution, are interpreted as the Hobbesian contractual starting point, resolved at once by the coalescence of every single man in a Sovereign body. Under that fear of the people objecting to the claims of self-government lies a political conception of an heteronomous internal political condition, which reveals the true nature of the relations that support a sustained fear of the people, i.e., the people that materially exist and keeps its constituent energies. Thus, accepting the political instrument of the contractual foundation of the collective existence implies on one hand the assumption of an everlasting conflict, and the operative elements of fear and hope, and on the other hand, a pre-existent order of what are taken as the eternally-verified political ends. The above- mentioned chiaroscuro metaphor helps us seeing how this discursive plane shows a constituted order as the one adequate to the natural foundations, by leaving its political nature in the shadow, as well as ‘the stuff politics is made of,’ viz. the constituent energies.

Still, Jefferson’s stand suspends this deduction of a natural menace that underlies any political order, circumscribing the issue to a political level, questioning instead the nature of the republican regime that this discursive strategy sustains. Not fearing the people implies thinking without that extra-constitutional human nature and the corresponding pre-constituted order of goods that becomes the first end of any government.

Contrasting with this eternal nature of political principles, John Taylor speaks of a ‘political terra incognita,’17 alluding to a political New World, intimately connected with a new idea of man. In contemplating the American revolution’s first thirty years, he asks:

Where are wars, tumults, oppression, prosecutions and corruption, proceeding from the people? If these calamities have not appeared under our policy, we ought to conclude that they proceeded in former times from the causes which we have excluded; or that the human character has undergone a moral change, which secures a nation, if it will govern itself, against any danger from itself.18

Against the perverse effect of that duplicity of ‘the remedies proposed by Mr.

Adams, for the evils of their own invention,’19 the key concept that disrupts this discursive order is that of a threatening people, from which all these remedies-to-be derive their legitimacy.

Extending further this question, one can put it in different terms: is then the political realm always overdetermined by a language of fear, subordinating

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struggles in the name of liberty, equality and democracy, to a discursive order whereby they are known as license or mob rule, or to a political order of equal rights and different power? Can we move beyond a conception of political community dependent on the idea of fear?

3. A Bond without Bondage

Hobbes is currently acknowledged as the founder of what is called ‘the imunnitarian paradigm.’20 This paradigm names that atomised preventive reality and its role as the basis of the idea of community or civil society. As Esposito points out, Hobbes annihilates the conditions of a fearful existence, nullifying the plan of relation that it implies.21 By introducing a fragmented relation of every individual (now as a citizen or a subject) towards the Sovereign, avoiding any condition that would rest on the relation between individuals, which is recognised as the source of any possible damage, Hobbes is open to a political conception simultaneously based on the naturally harmful individual, characteristic of the state of warfare and without whom the civil society loses its raison d’être.

Despite Esposito’s identification of modernity with this immunitarian paradigm, when seen from theoretical perspectives on understanding and securing the conditions of life and thought against the spectre of death, Spinoza’s account of the political meaning of fear seems to contradict this immunitarian identity. Within philosophical modernity Spinoza offers a rather different perspective, arguing in terms of a positive conception of peace - instead of the Hobbesian negative one, understood as ‘the absence of war’22 - overcoming that nature-law opposition by rejecting the self-evident aspect of any performative dualism, e.g., by saying that ‘But surely nature creates individuals, not nations, and it is only difference of language, of laws, and of established customs that divides individuals in to nations.’23

While Hobbes saw the solution for that menacing perpetual fight for self-interest in emptying the material base of the collective human relationships, and conducing to that atomised immunitarian base supporting the contractual discursive order, Spinoza instead considers the actual conditions of the proper collective human relationships. Where Hobbes puts a fundamental individual base, Spinoza finds the crucial concept of singularity. Singularity accounts for the constitutive aspect of the mutual determination between every living being, in a complex and variable network of similarities and differences. What is relevant here is the change from a natural plane of insatiable acquisition of goods and commodities to one of common utility, based on a social conception of rationally- driven human beings as opposed to one of atomized selves fighting for survival or scarce goods.

In sum and in general, we change from a competitive model to a cooperative one, whenever that rational common utility finds its adequate conditions. Spinoza rejects a political narrative dependent on an underlying menacing nature,


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proposing a political community informed by the nature of relations constituted and constituent of collective existence.

Nonetheless, the political use of fear is present as a bond among the multitude, without implying a political bondage of the many towards the sovereign (the one or the few), as in that heteronomous internal political conception. The radical difference lies in the ontological conception of human existence as constitutively singular and as a singularity, from which a positive sense of bonding is developed. Since there is no fracture between nature and society, hence there is neither a pre-social individual, nor any human being properly said existing before or apart from society.

This proper human existence is thought in terms of what Deleuze has developed as the plan of immanence, wherein a new ethical and political space would be thinkable without the need of an external source of legitimacy and of meaning, allowing singular encounters to become reality.24 This absence of a transcendent source of meaning and pre-given language, puts the constituent elements of the political community under a permanently renewed light.

The language of fear is now seen under the light of an immanent structure of those who fear and those whom are feared, bringing us back to that controversial coincidence between popular sovereignty and self-government. As Deleuze remarks, ‘Spinoza assigns to philosophy the task of denouncing all that is sad, all that lives on sadness, all those who depend on sadness as the basis of their power.’25 This task can be applied well to that discursive political duplicity whereby the people keeps its twofold existence, sustaining a political architecture that is legitimately fearful (in its ambivalent meaning) of the people.

Once this fundamental duplicity is understood, how the conception of citizenship as subjecthood relies on a language of fear becomes perceptible. At the same time as it names the people as the basis of the sovereign order, the limits of the modern western conception of citizenship are understood from that perspective of the people as those against whom - with speeches and practices of containment - ‘society must be defended,’26 to use Foucault’s expression.

So, should we join Sahlins’ remarks about Western the belief in human nature: ‘It’s all been a huge mistake. … It is probably true, however, that this perverse idea of human nature endangers our existence,’27 in which he speaks, this time, in terms of fear of the people? In other words, and to conclude, can we take Taylor’s question even farther, taking into account these different senses of political fear, and pose the sensible question: what have we been afraid of?

Notes

1 Étienne Balibar, La Crainte des Masses, Politique et Philosophie Avant et Après Marx (Paris: ed. Galilée, 1997), 11.

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2 Étienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas (New York: Routledge, 1994), 36. 3 Thomas Jefferson, ‘Letter to Samuel Kercheval’, in Political Writings, ed. J. Appleby and T. Ball (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 212. 4 Jacques Derrida, Otobiographies, L’enseignement de Nietzsche et la Politique du nom Propre (Paris: ed. Galilée, 1984), 20-21 and 25. 5 Jason Frank, Constituent Moments, Enacting the People in Post Revolutionary America (EUA: Duke University Press, 2010). 6 That this opposition is transversal to the tradition of western thought in the context of a western metaphysics of order is an argument defended by Marshall Sahlins, in The Western Illusion of Human Nature (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2008), 2-40. 7 Cf. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1968), 371-377. 8 Cf. in Preamble to the United States Constitution (1787): ‘We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.’ 9 John Adams, ‘Letter XVIII to John Taylor’, in The Works of John Adams, 327: ‘Napoleon and all his generals were but creatures of democracy, as really as Rienzi, Theodore, Massaniello, Jack Cade, or Wat Tyler. This democratical hurricane, inundation, earthquake, pestilence, call it which you will, at last aroused and alarmed all the world, and produced a combination unexampled, to prevent its further progress.’ 10 John Adams, ‘Letter to James Sullivan’, in The Adams Papers Digital Edition, ed. C. James Taylor (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 208-212. 11 John Adams, A Defence of The Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, vol. III, in The Works of John Adams (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1856), 96. 12 John Adams, ‘Letter VIII to John Taylor’, in The Works of John Adams, 312: ‘What is this analysis of antiquity? The one, the few, and the many. And why is this called the “analysis of antiquity,” rather than the analysis of modernity? Is there a nation, at this hour of this sixteenth day of June, 1814, on this globe, in which this analysis is not as obvious and undeniable as it ever was in any age or any nation of antiquity?’ 13 Cf. in United States Declaration of Independence (1776): ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’


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14 Cf. Sahlins, ch. ‘Hobbes and Adams as Thucydideans’, in The Western Illusion of Human Nature (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2008). 15 John Adams, ‘ Letter XII to John Taylor’, 318. 16 John Adams, ‘Letter VII to John Taylor’, 309. 17 John Taylor, An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (Fredericksburg, VA.: Green and Cady,1814), 104. 18 John Taylor, An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States, 88. 19 Ibid., 93. 20 Roberto Esposito, ‘Community and Nihilism’, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 5, No. 1 (2009): 24-36. 21 Ibid., 29. ‘Having started of from the need to protect the thing from the nothing that appears to threaten it, Hobbes thus ends up annihilating not only the nothing, but the thing itself; he sacrifices to the interest of the individual not only the inter of the esse, but also the esse of the inter.’ 22 Cf. Benedictus Spinoza, Political Treatise, ch.5/4, in Spinoza: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002), 699. 23 Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, ch.17, in Spinoza: Complete Works, 548. 24 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 25 Alberto Toscano, ‘The Politics of Spinozism, Composition and Communication’, Paper presented at the Cultural Research Bureau of Iran, Tehran, January 2005, 9. 26 Michel Foucault, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76 (New York: Picador, 2003). 27 Sahlins, The Western Illusion, 112.

Bibliography Adams, John. The Works of John Adams. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1856. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1968. Balibar, Étienne. La Crainte des Masses, Politique et Philosophie Avant et Après Marx. Paris: ed. Galilée, 1997. —––. Masses, Classes, Ideas. New York: Routledge, 1994.

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Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy?. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson, and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Esposito, Roberto. ‘Community and Nihilism’. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 5, No. 1 (2009): 24–36. —––. ‘The Immunization Paradigm’. Diacritics 36, No. 2 (2006): 23–48. Foucault, Michel. ‘Society Must Be Defended’, in Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, edited by Mauro Bertani, and Alessandro Fontana. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003. Frank, Jason. Constituent Moments, Enacting the People in Post Revolutionary America. EUA: Duke University Press, 2010. Jefferson, Thomas. ‘Letter to Samuel Kercheval’. In Political Writings, edited by Joyce Appleby, and Terrence Ball, 210–217. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Sahlins, Marshall. The Western Illusion of Human Nature. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2008. Spinoza, Benedictus. Spinoza: Complete Works, edited by Michael L. Morgan. Translated by Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002. Taylor, John. An Inquiry into the Principles of Government, 1814. Accessed March, 2011. http://oll.libertyfund.org/. Toscano, Alberto. ‘The Politics of Spinozism, Composition and Communication’. Paper presented at the Cultural Research Bureau of Iran, Tehran, January 2005. Lisete Rodrigues is an integrated member of the Centre of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon, has written her MA dissertation on Spinoza and the problem of immanence and alterity, and is currently doing a PhD on the ontological grounding of politics in the thought of Spinoza and Hannah Arendt.

http://oll.libertyfund.org/

Semiotic Construction of the Horrific in Jacobean Tragedies

Justyna Galant

Abstract The four tragedies of the era examined here are linked by the motif of the amalgamation of desire, intimacy and self-expression determining the form and function of the climactic scenes of horror. The canonical The Revenger’s Tragedy by Thomas Middleton or Cyril Tourneur and John Webster’s ‘The Duchess of Malfi, as well as two less popular texts - The Tragedy of Sophonisba by John Marston and the anonymous Lust’s Dominion - exemplify a range of approaches towards the horrific and the manner in which the Jacobean dramatis create an atmosphere of terror by employing a number of visual elements, often relying on the theme of deceitful appearances and on multi-layered semiotic constructions. At the heart of the various representations of horror in these tragedies lies experimentation with meaning and multiple signification of the semiotic phenomena seen and interpreted within the playworlds, which also constitute the foundation of horror and, often enough, the source of playful, perverse enjoyment of the overtly sensational, notoriously decadent texts of the period. On closer examination, the Jacobean plays infamously recognised as catering to the theatregoers’ popular tastes (with sex and violence as major points of attraction) come across as complex textual entities whose extravagant scenes of violence and horror prove to be dramatically intricate constructions, coalescing - in the concept of horror - the emotions of pleasure, despair, hope, and aesthetic/artistic expression as well as auto-creation of the victims, the villains and the voyeurs. Key Words: Jacobean tragedy, semiotics, meaning vs. horror, Thomas Middleton, Cyril Tourneur, John Marston, John Webster, ‘Lust’s Dominion’.

***** In Jacobean tragedies, horror eludes our full grasp, pervading the plays due to

the frequent and unexpected disruption or challenge to our meaning-forming habits. In effect, the texts themselves appear as Noel Carrol’s ‘monsters,’ or ‘cognitively threatening’ entities, leaving the readers experiencing cognitive discomfort at the challenging display of horrific scenes, characters, and props, as well as horrific virtuous heroines, horrific justice, horrific physical spaces and horrific spaces of the mind. As a result, the notorious popular sensationalism of the period’s tragedies can be read in terms of experimentation with signification, as the question of meaning in the plays becomes intrinsically linked with the concept of the horrific.


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1. ‘The Tragedy of Sophonisba,’ John Marston In the central scene of ‘Sophonisba,’ the villain Syphax asks the powers of evil,

represented by the witch Erictho, to help him gain the virtuous heroine’s affection. Erictho, desiring Syphax herself, assumes the form of the maiden and arranges a meeting between him and the allegedly charmed heroine. After intercourse, the hag shows herself in her true form of a ravenous, insatiate succubus, triumphantly laughing, leaving the disgusted, awestruck lover horrified, ‘Can we still breathe? Is any plagued like me?’1

On the basic level of interpretation, the horrific in this scene derives from the theme of deceitful appearances and relies on the abrupt substitution of the monstrous for the erotic, of visceral punishment of violent lust for long-awaited sexual fulfilment. On closer analysis, however, it becomes clear that Erictho seems to be a character intended to reflect the even further distorted evil of Syphax, sharing with him the features of covetousness, cruelty and monstrosity. What is more, there are numerous clues in the play that prove that the evil Erictho is in fact also reminiscent of the virtuous, pure Sophonisba. In effect, the hag is the essence of the play’s two opposing figures, an extract of the two main characters’ ‘id.’ As much as she is a condensed metaphor of the degenerate character of Syphax, hyperbolising his features of evil and lust, her dramatic function is also to reveal a quality of Sophonisba that is by no means prominent or explicit in the play - the will to defend herself against sexual assault and punish her tormentor. In being demonic, Erictho resembles Syphax, in being female, she brings to mind Sophonisba, and does what the heroine would not / should not do: wreak vengeance on the tormentor in a cruelly ironic bed-trick that reverses the hitherto fixed roles of the victim and the villain.

The manner of presenting the horrific here may be well explained by means of Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque body and carnivalesque punitive justice. The bed-trick in the cave is an equivalent of the carnivalesque sequence of ‘uncrowning, travesty, thrashing.’2 Here the authority of the mighty and tyrannous king Syphax is ultimately derided, and the element of public ‘thrashing’ is appropriately replaced by sexual intercourse with a horrid witch. The duped Syphax becomes the carnivalesque ‘king of clowns,’3 or, as Erictho calls him ‘fool of kings.’4

Appropriately, the festive sacrifice is also additionally directly related to the grotesque, subversive quality of giving birth and cyclical regeneration hinted at earlier in the description of the cave and its surroundings as the locus of the intercourse. The witch had apparently long awaited renewed life at the expense of Syphax’s sexual energy:

Know we, Erictho, with a thirsty womb, Have coveted full threescore suns for blood of kings. ...

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We ... Have wished with woman’s greediness to fill Our longing arms with Syphax’ well-strung limbs. ... Now we are full Of our dear wishes. Thy proud heat well wasted Hath made our limbs grow young.5

Syphax ‘feeds’ the witch and becomes one of her gourmet corpses as well as

her impregnator. In keeping with Bakhtin’s grotesque/festive/biological description of the carnivalesque, as a result of the violent/sexual act, ‘the monster, death, becomes pregnant.’6 In this manner, Erictho makes a sacrifice to herself of the ‘well-strung limbs,’ blood and heart of Syphax, metaphorically ‘consuming’ him to regain youth and fill her ‘thirsty womb.’

Let us bear in mind that Erictho is an alternative sign referring back to the heroine - representing her active, revengeful self entirely liberated from ‘ceremony,’ rules of propriety and socially-prescribed virtue which constitute a running theme throughout the play and are repeatedly associated with the idealised figure of Sophonisba. Then such a construction of the character is ultimately oxymoronic and, in its non-uniform construction, disconcerting. When the witch physically transforms into Sophonisba, and then returns to her original form, we come across an example of the complex grotesque Bakhtinian two-body which, additionally, incorporates the sacrificial body of the tyrant. The tri-partite hybrid becomes symbolic of the carnivalesque order, ruled by the violent, revengeful, highly erotic and greedy excess and characterised by self-dissolution as well as self-enhancement or self-hyperbolising simultaneity of being(s). In the end, the horrific is born of the unlikely marriage of the three characters, or in other words, from the combination of the semiotically overlapping signs. 2. ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy,’ Thomas Middleton or Cyril Tourneur

Another instance of substitution of horror for sex can be found, famously, in The Revenger’s Tragedy. Similarly to the climactic scene of Sophonisba, revengeful punishment with strong sexual overtones comes to the centre of our attention.

To pursue his revenge, Vindice acts as a go-between for the Duke and arranges for him to meet a bashful country lady, whose assets Vindice advertises as a pander. The skull of Gloriana, the long-dead victim of the Duke, is clothed and made-up with poison so as to ‘play’ the woman’s part.

The original skull/sign is overlaid with multiple other signs - costume, perfume, make-up, voice and image - to produce the ultimate complex of meanings that seduces Vindice’s/Gloriana’s victim. Vindice ‘beautifies’ the skull until, in the final masterly ‘animation,’ the ‘enhanced’ signifier is, literally, enriched with garments, beautified with cosmetics and perfume, to be experienced through all the senses and to ‘passively produce’ a well-rounded, enticing one-off adventure of seduction. In effect, the lady who seduces the Duke and destroys him is a semiotic


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construct constituted in the Duke’s mind on Vindice’s promptings, the royal’s ultimate punishment being appropriately inflicted by what he cherished all his life - attractively deceitful appearances.

The erotic foreplay leads to torturous killing, linking sex and horror with a cause-and-effect bond suited to the strong morality play overtones of the text. Contrary to a morality play, however, violence becomes the prominent theme of this scene, and the revengers’ actions draw far more attention than the Duke’s suffering. The victim is appropriately silenced, having ceased to be the centre of the scene and having been reduced to the role of a prop.

Appropriately, working against people of the decadent age who rely so strongly on falsified appearances, the revenger underscores the visual aspect of his vengeance. In Vindice’s revenge, the very confrontation with reality, slightly ‘made-up’ to accentuate the hallmarks of the corrupt world and so appeal better to the artifice-oriented victims/spectators, is horror enough. To be a victim in Vindice’s plan for revenge is to be a spectator who confronts the ugliness he is trying to overlook.

Vindice works conscientiously to make sure his victims see the carefully-constructed images he contrives for them. In the painstakingly prepared masterpiece of stagecraft, the villain is first treated to a carefully-designed performance of Gloriana’s own revenge:

Brother, place the torch here, that his affrighted eye- balls May start into those hollows. Duke, dost thou know Yon dreadful vizard? View it well ...7

Subsequently, while his victim’s wife and bastard son are committing incest,

Vindice gives directions to his partner in revenge - Hippolito:

Brother, If he but wink, not brooking the foul object, Let our two other hands tear up his lids And make his eyes like comets shine through blood.8

Thus, Vindice and Hippolito make sure the Duke’s visual experience is

thorough, and that the view of the wife and the bastard son coupling are the last sight he sees before dying. In a masterly final stroke of this staged revenge, the toxin smeared on the ‘bashful lady’s’ lips ravages the flesh around the Duke’s mouth as his face is beginning its mimetic transformation into a skull, until the villain resembles the tool of his destruction, both corroded ‘faces’ grinning at the end of the extreme scene.

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3. ‘Lust’s Dominion,’ Anonymous The plot of this little-known Jacobean tragedy to a large extent discards

believability as a means to explain the central anti-hero’s influence on other characters. In effect, the readers may get the impression that the play is more of a projection of the villainous protagonist’s - Eleazar’s - mind rather than a text with a more or less realistic tragic plot, a one-man play that forwards the function of horrors as a means of self-expression for the central character.

In the final climactic scene, which is a travesty of a dress-rehearsal, Eleazar takes great pleasure in pretending to be his own mortal enemy and rehearsing the opponent’s death. As part of his subversive entertainment, he is tied at his own request and as a result left at the mercy of his disguised mortal enemies to meet the death he intended for others.

Throughout the play an undaunted, proud believer in his invincible self, Eleazar loses as soon as he decides to pretend to be another. He becomes destructible when he moves beyond the role of the proudly Black(=)villain as outlined in the script of his tragedy and begins to improvise his own play within a play. Deflecting from the play that he directed, through disguise he ‘becomes’ the Cardinal, his enemy, and takes his place in death.

The visual horror in this scene relies not only on the reversal of perspective but also on the confusing process of signification, where Eleazar and his opponents, as well as the play’s audience ascribe various meanings to the characters present on stage. The costumes inform of one reality, yet we are capable of realising the identities of the characters wearing them. The full scope of the semiotic simultaneity to which only Eleazar is oblivious adds to agrimly humorous element to the scene and establishes the villain in the new function of a dependent character in a play, rather than as adirector manipulating both the plot and his puppet-like characters.

Significantly, as Eleazar’s final words prove, the Moor sees his defeat as an interruption in a performance, or as a breach of an artistic illusion provoked by the unruly supporting actors in his unfinished play. Consequently, the tragedy can easily be viewed as an Eleazar-directed play that only towards its end radically changes the perspective and re-describes the anticipated final horrors done by Eleazar as horrors performed on him.

While throughout the play it was Eleazar who managed to manipulate others,-endowing their actions with the meaning he favoured, steering their lives in the direction he chose, in the climactic scene of horror, he is finally denied his role of the main ‘semiotician.’ The disguised characters prove that he is not the only one capable of creating an illusory reality. 4. ‘The Duchess of Malfi,’ John Webster

In the notoriously gruesome scene from The Duchess of Malfi, the heroine is inventively tortured by her twin, Ferdinand.


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First Ferdinand ‘my(i)stifies’ the world of the torture chamber by introducing an extremely complex sign - in the darkness he offers the Duchess his hand as a sign of reconciliation. When torches are lit, the heroine finds herself holding a cut-off hand which, as she is informed, belongs to her murdered husband, Antonio. In this short span of time, the hand Ferdinand offers his sister is identified as his own, Antonio’s, and (as is the case in reality) belonging to an anonymous dead man. In effect, it functions as an opaque sign9 with one signifier and many signifieds, additionally also referring synecdochically to the wax figure of Antonio.

In the course of the elaborate torture scene we are never meant to emerge from this disturbing ambience of layered, opaque signification. After Ferdinand leaves his sister with the cut-off hand, the Duchess is promptly offered the ‘sad spectacle’ of Antonio and her children’s bodies revealed dramatically as a curtain is drawn. Though in reality the corpses are wax sculptures made to resemble her dead family, the heroine is deceived and accepts as true the ‘reality’ Ferdinand contrived for her, in other words, she completes the process of signification by recognising the signs as ‘authentic.’ The horror evoked in this scene relies on the fact that the heroine identifies artifice as reality, that is - ascribes to the iconic simulacra of the wax figures the value of authentic corpses. The space of the torture chamber functions like a stage on which the Duchess co-operates unaware with her tormentor in creating the make-belief world of horror.

Another means of inventive punishment Ferdinand contrives for his sister is the show of dancing, singing, talking madmen rented from an asylum. The exposure to others’ madness is intended to drive the heroine to insanity.

In the torture chamber sequence of actions, the shows of sculpting, dancing and singing replace readily communicable language and direct actions as systems of signification. The metaphorical meaning they possibly try to convey is transferred through channels which makes the connection between the signifiers and their referents more artificial: that is, moves away from the comprehensible and relocate meaning to the sphere of the symbolic and the multifarious. In effect, the Duchess does not really have a chance to decipher the meaning behind Ferdinand’s inventive tortures. In a way, the futility of the effort to understand becomes an inherent feature of the punishment invented by the brother with Ferdinand coming across as a demiurge trapping the Duchess in the world of illusions, barring her from the truth until whatever she witnesses is a distorted reflection of reality, filtered through Ferdinand’s artful semiotisation. 5. Conclusion

The semiotic construction of the horrific in the selected representative tragedies of the period relies on falsifying signs. Importantly, the characters who dabble in practices of misrepresentation take great pleasure both in the act of deceit and in the horror they provoke in others. The common and prominent evocation of the eros-thanatos connection, alongside the apparent function of aesthetic self-

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expression, which characterise the horrific violence performed by the deceitful ‘semioticians’ add the characteristics of intimacy and enjoyable artistry to the sensational horror of Jacobean tragedies.

Importantly, a large part of these processes of falsification relies on attenuating the one-to-one correspondence between signs and their referents, as repeatedly the meaning of signs expands from the comforting single sense to disturbing and often oxymoronic multiplicity. The horrific can be traced back to the process of defamiliarisation through substitution, multiplication, reversal of perspective, or, paradoxically, mimeticism, which enhances our perception.

Notes

1 John Marston, ‘The Wonder of Women, or The Tragedy of Sophonisba (1606)’, in Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays, eds. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), V.i.22. 2 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press., 1968.), 198-199. 3 Ibid., 202. 4 John Marston, ‘The Wonder of Women, or The Tragedy of Sophonisba (1606)’, in Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays, eds. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), V.i.4. 5 Ibid., V.i.8-20. 6 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press., 1968.), 91. 7 Thomas Middleton, ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy’, in Three Revenge Tragedies, ed. Gamini Salgado (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2004), III.v.12-14. 8 Ibid., III.v.196-199. 9 On the opacity of signs see: Tadeusz Kowzan, Znak i Teatr (Warszawa: Znak-Język-Rzeczywistość. Polskie Towarzystwo Semiotyczne, 1998), 130-133.

Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968. Kowzan, Tadeusz. Znak i Teatr. Warszawa: Znak-Język-Rzeczywistość. Polskie Towarzystwo Semiotyczne, 1998. Marston, John. ‘The Wonder of Women, or The Tragedy of Sophonisba (1606)’. In Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays, edited by Peter Corbin, and Douglas Sedge, 33–84. Manchester: Manchester University Press Anonymous, 1986.


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Middleton, Thomas or Tourneur Cyril. ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy’ (1606). In Three Revenge Tragedies, edited by Gamini Salgado, 41–136. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2004. Webster, John. ‘The Duchess of Malfi’ (1614). Edited by John Russell Brown. London: Methuen and Company Limited, 1969. Justyna Galant is associated with the English Studies Institute of Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland. She completed her PhD on Jacobean tragedy and is currently working in the field of utopian studies.

Fear in Intercultural Competence Development: The Blind Spot Diagnosed in a Health Care Setting

Zhenyi Li

Abstract Intercultural competence is one of the most desired skills in this globalised world. A dozen developmental theories and models have been published and used in the past three decades, including the Intercultural Developmental Inventory (IDI). Oddly, as a commonly-recognised stumbling block for competence development, fear slipped away from intercultural scholars searching for illumination in those theories and models. For example, the result of administrating IDI assessment and associated training programs to a group of executives in a Canadian health care authority was unsatisfactory because it was hard to explain how these highly motivated leaders were unable to make progress in intercultural competence development on a personal or organisational level. A second look at their IDI data revealed that they actually accumulated more fear after IDI assessment and training. However, fear was not addressed either in the assessment or training. Subsequently, an overall survey on IDI and twenty other prevailing intercultural competence developmental theories and models indicates that fear was overlooked because developmental theories based on modern Western philosophy narrow developmental possibilities to a unidirectional ascending mode. Fear was negatively viewed as a drag in intercultural competence development in this mode. That explains the absence of necessary research attention and training efforts on fear in intercultural competence development. The existence of fear in each intercultural developmental stage is discussed in this paper. This chapter concludes with strategies for dealing with fear in intercultural competence development. Key Words: Fear, intercultural competence development, health care organisation, Intercultural Developmental Inventory (IDI).

***** 1. The Neglect

During the past two years, I engaged in a research project with a team of 30 executives in a health care authority in Greater Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Our goal was to improve intercultural competence for every employee in that health care authority by systematic assessment, intervention, and on-going evaluation. The executives volunteered in the pilot study to help me, as the principal investigator, to assess the effectiveness of the research and training tools in this project. Another reason for the executives to be involved from the outset of this project was to highlight the necessity and importance of intercultural competence development in their organisation where diversity is an increasingly evident phenomenon. Communication between physicians and patients, doctors

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and nurses, central management and local departments, the authority and the community, just to name a few, has become more complicated than ever due to the changes in the past four decades. The demographic composition of the patients is more diverse, as is that of the personnel. This particular health care authority has received more immigrants from Asia than many other places in Canada. For example, in the region this health care authority administrates, there is a city nicknamed ‘New Delhi’ and another ‘Seoul.’ Therefore, the executives are passionate advocates of initiatives for intercultural competence development for their staff, including the one I led.

In this project, intercultural competence is conceptualized as ‘the appropriate and effective management of interaction between people who, to some degree or another, represent different or divergent affective, cognitive, and behavioural orientations to the world.’1 Key components of intercultural competence include motivation (affective), knowledge (cognitive), skills (behavioural), context (situational, relational, functional), and outcomes (perceived / real effectiveness, perceived / real appropriateness, satisfaction, understanding, attraction, task result and effect).2

Since the 1980s, scholars have proposed over 20 different models to identify and interrelate these components for particular or general purposes.3 Among these models, some are compositional, i.e., no specific relations among these components are explained. Some are outcome-oriented, usually emphasising ‘understanding’ or ‘adaptation’ as a desired result of competent intercultural communication. Some models highlight a causal path and conceive of the components linearly.

I surveyed intercultural competence theories and various models published in the past three decades and chose the Intercultural Developmental Inventory (IDI) as the main assessment and intervention tool for this project for three reasons. First, the IDI is based on Bennett’s Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS),4 which illustrates each transition stage from ethnocentric understanding of other cultures to ethno-relative comprehension and appreciation of diversity. After 15 years of evolution, although the IDI renamed, combined, and eliminated some of the ‘stages’ originally proposed in DMIS, which I will discuss later, it still keeps the same rationale as DMIS, emphasizing that each stage is identifiable and each transition is feasible with specific assessments and interventions.5 Second, the reliability and validity of IDI have been tested rigorously for many years in many countries.6 This was exactly what the health care authority wanted: a clear road map with reliable assessments and practical interventions. Third, the IDI was designed to be a combination of assessment and intervention tool from the very beginning, which also differentiates it from DMIS and other developmental theories and models.7 The IDI is one of the most prevalent tools adopted by intercultural trainers and consultants for their clients’ intercultural competence development.8 There are more than 2,400 certified IDI

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administrators in the world. To examine the validity and reliability of the tool, the IDI was once administrated to a cross-cultural sample of 4763 individuals. The result was satisfactory.9

In this project, the executives took the IDI before and after the workshops I facilitated for their intercultural competence development. It is typical to organise pre- and post-training IDI assessments to monitor change. The workshops, delivered within two weeks after the first IDI assessment, consisted of foundations and skills of intercultural communication. There was a six-month interval between the pre- and post-training IDI assessments. The interval was supposed to provide sufficient time for the participants to digest what learned from the workshop and practice it in their daily work and life. After the post-training IDI, I provided individual debriefings on intercultural competence development changes found through comparisons of the two IDI assessments for each executive. Individual, instead of group, debriefings were provided in order to protect confidentiality as well as to address individual developmental needs privately. These are common practices when using IDI.10

When everything worked well, there came a question I was not able to figure out promptly: my respondents hesitated to move forward as the IDI data indicated. Comparing their pre- and post-training IDI ‘scores,’ many of them stayed at the same ‘level’ (or ‘orientation’ as Hammer likes to call it11), while some even moved backwards to a lower level. This was neither expected in this project nor reported in previous studies. The IDI has been proven to be a reliable and valid tool. I received full training and am a certified IDI administrator. Every step in this project has been well designed and performed. The executives were as passionate about intercultural competence development as before, if not more so. But their data revealed no progress. What had gone wrong? Did we miss something? What has been neglected? 2. The Inspiration

When I had a pleasant conversation with my colleague Mrs. K on sky diving, her hobby, I was not looking for an answer to these questions. In fact, I was trying to alter my focus from this project by engaging in many different activities including this chat. Mrs. K co-created a world record with 181 women sky divers and had put a picture of their formation on her desk. I asked how she made progress and what the most difficult obstacle was in her experience. ‘Fear,’ she told me, ‘and the way my coach guided me to overcome it.’

Our conversation did not bring me to a sky diving class or simulator, but back to my desk full of the IDI data from this project. Fear is obviously and naturally one of the most common and difficult obstacles for a person to make progress in intercultural communication.12 Does IDI measure it and address this factor? Did my respondents mention that in the workshops? If not, how could fear being neglected, and why?


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3. The Reflection The DMIS (1986), as mentioned above, lays the foundation for the IDI. In the

DMIS model, a person can progress from ethnocentric to ethno-relative stages. The ethnocentric stages include denial, defence, and minimisation. The ethno-relative stages are acceptance, adaptation, and integration.13 The first version of IDI (1998) mirrored these stages in its intercultural sensitivity orientations except for integration. Hammer, the owner of IDI, argues that integration is an identity developmental issue, not an intercultural competence / sensitivity concern. Therefore, the IDI has neither interest in measuring that stage nor the capacity to do so. The second version of IDI (2003) reduced the question items from 60 to 50 and further renamed and combined levels. In the IDI ‘Intercultural Developmental Continuum’, there are denial, polarisation, minimisation, acceptance and adaptation orientations. In the polarisation orientation, there are two sub-orientations: defence and reversal. Another differentiation effort the IDI made was to claim that the minimisation orientation is neither ethnocentric nor ethno-relative, but a transitional one. In fact, Hammer began to replace ethnocentric and ethno-relative with ‘mono-cultural mindset’ and ‘intercultural / global mindset.’ The third version IDI (2010) kept the same 50-item questionnaire as the second version, but included more online presentations. Both V2 and V3 have paper-and-pencil and online options, and use similar online IDI analytic structure to generate profiles of the respondents’ overall position in the ‘Intercultural Developmental Continuum’ and to provide the administrators more statistical information for each individual and the whole group (if needed).14 Both V2 and V3 use the same ‘Intercultural Developmental Continuum,’ which can be viewed as a modification of DMIS.

Whether it is called a stage in DMIS or an orientation in IDI, denial is an attitude that proclaims one’s own culture is real or legitimate and that other cultures are irrelevant in some sense. A person may recognise observable cultural differences like food but denies deeper ones such as communication styles. Polarisation is a nice modification for the original defence stage in DMIS because one might defend the view that one’s own culture is better than that of others, or conversely, view other cultures as better than one’s own. Minimisation tends to highlight cultural commonality and mask cultural difference. An interculturally competent individual is supposed to be able to ‘accept’ both cultural commonality and difference between one’s own and other cultures, and to ‘adapt’ better by shifting cultural perspectives and changing behaviour in culturally appropriate and authentic ways.15

All of these well named and defined stages or orientations sound reasonable. They do generate realistic portfolios to inform individuals of what their current intercultural competence is and what their developmental needs are so that they can make progress. For example, in the research project at the health care authority, I found out more than 90% of the participants were at the ‘minimisation’ orientation, with less than 5% at ‘denial’ or ‘polarization’ and more than 5% at ‘acceptance’ or

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even ‘adaptation’ in the pre-training IDI assessment. We focused on strategies to overcome the limitation of ‘minimisation’ in our workshops and handed out reading materials for the participants to further work on in the next six months. Both the executives and I were confident that a difference would be made after the workshops and the interval. We looked forward to that change in the post-training IDI assessment.16

The result of the second IDI assessment, as mentioned before, was surprising: no progress, no development, as the computerized data indicated. Some individuals even moved backwards. We reviewed the whole process to make sure each step was conducted correctly and followed the protocols in common practice. We reviewed the literature, especially on the validity and reliability of IDI, and found no error. We were frustrated in front of the data, until I got the inspiration from Mrs. K that fear might be neglected in this project as an important factor for intercultural competence development.

4. The Discussion

Fear was not conceptualised in either DMIS or IDI. Nor was it in many other intercultural competence developmental theories or models. Spitzberg and Chagnon listed 325 concepts related to intercultural competence, starting with ‘ability to be understood’ and ending at ‘wit.’ This is supposed to be the most comprehensive survey of concept and factor labels associated with interpersonal, communicative, and intercultural competence coined and / or used by intercultural scholars.17 Unfortunately, one cannot find the word ‘fear’ there. The closest reason that can be argued is that, in the rich traditions in developmental psychology, individuals are considered, and more often encouraged, to focus on learning and forward-looking growth.18 Fear, along with uncertainty, worry, hesitation, reluctance, and other common and natural emotions or behaviours, is negatively regarded as a drag on intercultural competence development. A backward motion, in a single-direction developmental ‘mindset’ - allow me to borrow Hammer’s IDI terminology here - is unreasonable, impossible, unacceptable, or at least not suggested. Such a unidirectional linear logic, as Hall stated, is neither natural nor normal in our real life.19 However, it has become dominant in modern Western philosophy, including the developmental psychology. Therefore, consciously or unconsciously, intercultural competence development theorists and practitioners overlook fear.

Fear, however, does exist in each stage or orientation in intercultural competence development. Denial and defence are caused by fear. Reversal defence, praising the other culture(s), also has a fear component because at the reversal defence stage, the person is afraid of losing ‘the admirable.’ Minimisation hides or underplays cultural differences. People have the natural tendency to do so when they are afraid of something.20 Acceptance includes fear, too: people often doubt their capacity to accept new cultures. When adapting, a person could


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naturally worry about losing his or her one’s own culture or identity - the horror of over-adaptation.

Intercultural competence developmental fear, like other fears, can be handled; we all have that capacity.21 If it is undiagnosed and unaddressed, it cannot receive proper treatment.22 To establish awareness of and confidence in one’s own culture helps one to overcome denial and reversal defence. To become sensitive to and interested in other cultures relaxes the anxiety in defence and early stage of acceptance. To be able to categorise cultural similarity and difference leads one out of the swamp of minimisation. To feel comfortable and secure in perspective shifting is essential for adaptation.

I need to emphasise immediately after the strategies mentioned above that, in this chapter, fear is not conceptualised as something can and should be conquered or eliminated. Instead, fear, as a natural and common emotional reaction of human beings facing real or imaginary threat, shock, uncertainty, or unfamiliarity, is not to be suppressed or neglected, consciously or unconsciously. Fear, in my view, needs to be balanced with courage.23

Intercultural competence development is all about leveraging courage and fear. Courage and fear can be viewed as two faces of a coin that cannot be separated.24 When encouraging my respondents to move forward, I should have noticed the fear accumulating behind them. Taking a second look at the IDI data a few months after the pilot study, I noticed some of the respondents did advance further in their acceptance and adaption orientations, while they became less certain and firm in denial and polarisation. The data indicate more doubts and uncertainty in denial and polarisation in the second IDI assessment, in comparison with high certainty in those orientations in the first IDI assessment. This fact was not discovered before, partly because the common IDI practice is to believe once a stage / orientation is passed, it has passed forever. The only thing the IDI administrator needs to work with the respondents is their ‘developmental needs,’ in other words, their current and next stage / orientation. By the same logic, once we graduate from an elementary school, there is no need to return to kindergarten; or once skills are acquired, they are always there, like cycling, driving, or swimming. I am not totally convinced by this logic because we may learn something new by returning to the very beginning and because we resist the loss of these skills by repeating practices. Nor would I regard intercultural competence in the same way as some of the skills mentioned above because it is not a simple set of management skills.25

Another factor I would like to highlight here is the health care setting and its impact in this project. The majority of the IDI respondents summarised by Hammer were from high educational backgrounds.26 Many of them took the IDI intervention before and / or after their overseas sojourn time. The health care setting in this project is quite different. First, the executives and their employees are health care, not educational, professionals. In one of my previous surveys, I found nearly no intercultural education was provided to medical schools in Canada

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and the United States.27 No matter how motivated they are, my respondents could not skilfully balance fear and courage in their intercultural journey in six months spent with some assessment, intervention, and reading materials. Without formal and systematic education, the achievement they made in the pilot study actually was more than satisfying. Second, the health care system is less open to internationalisation comparing to education. It can be argued that the efforts of some executives could hardly make a difference in this monolith. On the contrary, I witnessed more hesitation and uncertainty in these executives second IDI assessment. May I attribute that to ‘tried but failed’ and the subsequent fear? Third, unlike most IDI respondents who went abroad to ‘strange’ cultures, my respondents stayed at home and received ‘strange’ cultures. The difference is obvious: being in a minority abroad or in a majority at home. The former automatically raises greater sensitivity to cultural similarity and difference than the latter. Some of my respondents were exposed to or ‘horrified’ by the depth and width of intercultural issues and thoughts for the first time in the workshops in this project. Overlooking fear in the pilot study could cause their retrogression because they were not taught how to handle fear, which accumulated significantly during the process. 5. The Conclusion

Fear is diagnosed as an under-studied factor in intercultural competence developmental studies due to the limitations of the linear developmental ‘mindset’ and the overseas educational sojourners’ orientation. This study highlights the necessity to include fear and proposed a notion to balance fear and courage in the IDI-based developmental model for health care professionals serving diverse population at home. Other normal and common emotions such as uncertainty, worry, hesitation, and reluctance could have received similar attention so that both intercultural competence developmental studies and general social sciences can embrace and benefit from a two-way dialectical multicultural ‘mindset’ that takes into consideration each study’s specific context.

Notes

1 Brian H. Spitzberg and Gabrielle Changnon, ‘Conceptualizing Intercultural Competence’, in The SAGE Handbook of Intercultural Competence, ed. Darla K. Deardorff (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2009), 7. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 9-22. 4 Milton J. Bennett, ‘Towards Ethnorelativism: A Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity’, in Cross-cultural Orientation: New Conceptualizations


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and Applications, ed. R. Michael Paige (New York: University Press of America, 1986), 22-70. 5 Mitchell R. Hammer, ‘Additional Cross-Cultural Validity Testing of the Intercultural Development Inventory’, International Journal of Intercultural Relations 35 (2011): 474-487. 6 Ibid. 7 Mitchell R. Hammer, ‘The Intercultural Development Inventory’, in Contemporary Leadership and Intercultural Competence, ed. Michael A. Moodian (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2009), 203-217. 8 Hammer, ‘Additional Validity Testing’, 474-487. 9 Ibid. 10 Hammer, ‘Intercultural Development Inventory’, 203-217. 11 Ibid. 12 LaRay M. Barna, ‘Stumbling Blocks in Intercultural Communication’, in Intercultural Communication: A Reader, eds. Larry A. Samovar and Richard E. Porter, 7th edition (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1994), 337-346. 13 Bennett, ‘Towards Ethnorelativism’, 22-70. 14 Hammer, ‘Additional Validity Testing’, 475-477. 15 Ibid. 16 Zhenyi Li, ‘Making Sense of “Care” in an Intercultural Context: Intercultural Competence Development Barriers and Solutions Found in Canada’ (paper presented at the Second National Transcultural Health Conference, Calgary, Alberta), May 2-4, 2010. 17 Spitzberg and Changnon, ‘Conceptualizing Intercultural Competence’, 36-43. 18 Ibid., 21. 19 Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1976), 9. 20 Stanley J. Rachman, Fear and Courage (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1978), 4. 21 Ibid., 7. 22 Ibid., 13. 23 Ibid., 233. 24 Ibid., 251-281. 25 Spitzberg and Changnon, ‘Conceptualizing Intercultural Competence’, 7. 26 Hammer, ‘Additional Validity Testing’, 477. 27 Zhenyi Li, ‘The Missing Piece: Intercultural Competence Building for Medical Professionals in Canada and the U.S.’, in ICCC5 Proceedings: 5th International Conference on Intercultural Communication Competence, eds. Mara Alagic, Glyn Rimmington, Fuchang Liu and Kay Gibson (Wichita, KS: Wichita University Press, 2008), 93-108.

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Bibliography

Barna, LaRay M. ‘Stumbling Blocks in Intercultural Communication’. In Intercultural Communication: A Reader, 7th Edition, edited by Larry A. Samovar, and Richard E. Porter, 337–346. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1994. Bennett, Milton J. ‘Towards Ethnorelativism: A Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity’. In Cross-cultural Orientation: New Conceptualizations and Applications, edited by R. Michael Page, 22–70. New York: University Press of America, 1986. Hall, Edward T. Beyond Culture. New York: Anchor Books, 1976. Hammer, Mitchell R. ‘The Intercultural Development Inventory’. In Contemporary Leadership and Intercultural Competence, edited by Michael A. Moodian, 203–217. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2009. —––. ‘Additional Cross-Cultural Validity Testing of the Intercultural Development Inventory’. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 35 (2011): 474–487. Li, Zhenyi. ‘The Missing Piece: Intercultural Competence Building for Medical Professionals in Canada and the U.S.’. In ICCC5 Proceedings: 5th International Conference on Intercultural Communication Competence, edited by Mara Alagic, Glyn Rimmington, Fuchang Liu, and Kay Gibson, 93–108. Wichita, KS: Wichita University Press, 2008. —––. ‘Making Sense of “Care” in an Intercultural Context: Intercultural Competence Development Barriers and Solutions Found in Canada’. Paper presented at the Second National Transcultural Health Conference, Calgary, Alberta, May 2-4, 2010. Rachman, Stanley J. Fear and Courage. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1978. Spitzberg, Brian H., and Gabrielle Changnon. ‘Conceptualizing Intercultural Competence’. In The SAGE Handbook of Intercultural Competence, edited by Darla K. Deardorff, 2–52. Los Angeles: SAGE, 2009.


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Zhenyi Li is an Associate Professor teaching Intercultural Communication at Royal Roads University in Victoria, Canada. His research interest is intercultural health communication. His email is [email protected].

mailto:[email protected]

Part 2

The Symmetry of Power and Powerlessness

What Have the Ancient Greeks Taught Us about Horror? A Brief Review of the Concept in the Classical World

Nadia Scippacercola

Abstract A fundamental distinction has to made between real horror and horror experienced by any (artistic, literary, or media) filter; this chapter will deal with the latter. As regards modern literature, it is well known that the British and the Germans contend for the primacy of the origins, around the second half of the eighteenth century, of the ‘tale of terror,’ and that the work of Burke, which permitted the entry of concepts other than the Beautiful into the field of aesthetics, is to be considered as an indispensable theoretical reference. From the gloomy atmosphere of the ‘Gothic novel’ there probably developed, first contaminated, and then recombined the vein of contemporary horror literature in its various forms, and in its derivative forms of movies. Within this general framework, scholars seem unaware that in the Italian culture no less, ever since the early decades of the sixteenth century, and during the seventeenth century, a sensitivity towards an aesthetic effect developed first in literature and then in the visual arts, basically to activate audience members’ involvement, but also to impress them. The shift towards an art designed to stimulate delightful horror was to mark a new season of Renaissance from 1530 onwards - a change dictated by several factors, among them the slow assimilation of ideas offered by ancient poetics and rhetoric, mainly the Poetics of Aristotle, followed by Peri hypsous of Pseudo-Longinus. It might come as a surprise that the ancient Greeks may have prepared the road to an ‘aesthetic of horror,’ but not only do the Greeks appear to have reflected on the intensity and nuances of feelings that produce horror, they also used a series of horrific themes to move and bend the hearts of their readers or listeners towards various emotional effects, in literary fiction. Key Words: Horror, fear, ancient Greeks, aesthetics, sublime, European literature, poetics, Marinism, scholia, Renaissance.

***** 1. Introduction

It is not easy, as it might first appear to be, to speak about horror and its wide semantic universe. Today we are said to be living amid expressions of horror, and such an abundance of it might be making us insensitive towards it.1 The Italian word ‘necrocultura’ was coined to describe such phenomena, too.2 It is known that the provocative museums of ‘horrors’ usually have a moderate number of visitors and that horror has now spilled over into video-games, thus becoming an integral part of modern-day entertainment. Moreover, recent news bulletins have reported

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the atrocious use made of the Internet and digital technologies - personal and available to the individual - to reproduce nefarious crimes and to spread photos and videos of them on the web; the alarming phenomenon is often disseminated by shock sites.

After the Auschwitz event, an ontological crime against the ‘essence as humans,’3 horror seems also to have condensed the meaning of contemporary violence into that increasingly directed toward helpless victims. After September 11, 2001, we have witnessed the creation of neologisms, among which ‘horrorism’ defines the substance of an epoch that has come to write ‘the most extensive and anomalous, if not the most repugnant, chapter in the human history of destruction.’4

But a distinction has to made between real horror and horror experienced by any (artistic, literary, or media) filter, and this will represent the special field of this research. It is well known that the British and the Germans contend for the primacy of the origins, around the second half of the eighteenth century, of the ‘tale of terror,’5 and that the work of Burke (1757/59) is an indispensable theoretical reference.6 From the ‘Gothic fiction’ - with examples such as, H. Walpole (the famous author of 1764 The Castle of Otranto), A. Radcliffe, M. G. Lewis, C. R. Maturin, M. W. Shelley (author of 1818 Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus), E. T. A. Hoffmann and B. Stoker (author of 1897 Dracula) - contemporary horror literature was probably born in its various forms, including noir, thriller, fantasy, etc., or its various derivative forms of literature and movies, including splatter (heir of the Grand Guignol theatre), and slasher. To confirm the interest aroused by reflections on horror themes in the most varied fields of study (historical, political, sociological, religious, literary, artistic, philosophical, and even marketing),7 there is a very rich bibliography, which has been gradually increasing over the past few years. Moreover, research made by linking different experiences, promising to focus on the presence of a specific debate on horror in the classical world, has recently developed.8

But within the general framework, it seems to be less known that the shift towards an art designed to stimulate public excitement and the subsequent ‘naturalistic’ representation of horrible and ugly scenes as an integral part of a strategy to impress the audience, marked a new season of Renaissance, beginning 1530. When the concept of ‘dolcissimo horrore’ (sweetest horror)9 affected the Italian culture, it found expression - in keeping with Horace’s precept ut pictura poesis - both in a literary as well as in an artistic ambience. To mention but a few, noteworthy theoretical contributions were made by: Gregorio Comanini (1550-1609), in his On the Purpose of Painting (Figino); Giovanni Gilio (d. 1584); and Giulio Mancini, in his 1611-1621 work Considerazioni sulla Pittura, which includes the argument that, ‘beauty shall be in all things, ... indeed in the horrible ones themselves (la bellezza sarà in tutte le cose, … anzi nelle cose horribili istesse).’10 But it is the founder of the Marinism ‘School’ whose lines will offer us

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a more complete expression of the new aesthetic feeling. In 1620, Giambattista Marino (1569-1625) dedicated a brief composition of his collection of poems, La Galeria, to his contemporary Guido Reni’s painting, The Massacre of the Innocents:11

What are you doing, Guido, what are you doing? The hand that paints angelic forms now treats of bloody deeds? Do you not see that while you revivify the bloody throng of infants you are giving them new death? O compassionate even in cruelty, gentle artificer, well you know that a tragic event is also a precious object, and that often horror goes with delight12 (fabro gentil, ben sai, / ch’ancor Tragico caso è caro oggetto, / e che spesso l'horror và col diletto).13

This was a change dictated by several factors: not only the transformation of

intellectuals’ role, the season of the Protestant Reformation and the Counter Reformation, but also the slow assimilation of concepts and ideas offered by ancient poetics and rhetoric. Aristotle’s Poetics was in fact rediscovered first in the Humanistic culture of Europe with Giorgio Valla’s partial Latin translation (1498), and hence with the edition of the original Greek text (together with Rhetoric), printed in Venice, by Aldus Manutius’ prestigious printing establishment in 1508. The Peri Hypsous (On the Sublime) of Pseudo-Longinus was edited in 1554 by Francesco Robortello, who was also author of an important 1548 commentary on Aristotle. 2. What Do the Ancient Greeks Say about Horror?

It is inconceivable to retrace herein the history of the various editions, re-adaptations, interpretations, cultural superimpositions and rewritings that influenced these two ancient texts, often associated in their destiny with Horace’s Ars Poetica. It would mean embarking on recounting a cultural lively debate that dragged on for centuries throughout Europe from the time of Antonio Sebastiano Minturno (d. 1574), passing through Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636-1711) to converge in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.

Rather, we wish to present a selection of literary testimonies in ancient Greek of various epochs (from the mid 8th century BC to late Byzantine period),14 which will act as indicators of the presence in the classical world of critical observations regarding fear and its effects, regarding the pleasure deriving from terrifying stories, but also concerning the more or less negative effects, innate in their acknowledged power of suggestion; finally we will examine some examples, among the many that the very vast ancient imagination offers us, of ‘ancient horror.’


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A passage from Plato’s Republic shows how the themes correlated with death, with Hades and with ghosts terrorise and horrify both young people and adults by having a negative influence on courage. In this regard, Socrates and Adimantus question each other on the need to delete some lines of Homer and the other poets, not because such passages are unpoetic or displeasing to most hearers, but because they are not suited to the ears of boys and men who are destined to be free and not to be afraid of death:

SOCRATES: Then, in addition, we must also get rid of the terrible (deina) and frightening (phobera) names that occur in such passages: Cocytus, Styx, “those below”, “the sapless ones”, and all the other names of the same pattern that supposedly make everyone who hears them shudder (phrittein). Perhaps they are useful for other purposes, but our fear is that all that shuddering (phrikē) will make our guardians more emotional and softer than they ought to be.15

On the other hand a passage from Aristotle confirms that the Ancients also

derive pleasure from what, in contrast, ought to provoke fear and disgust. The passage from the Poetics witnesses, between the lines, that the description of horrid or macabre morphai procures delight, and this feeling is unanimously shared at least for the Aristotelian epoch:

Poetry in general can be seen to owe its existence to two causes, and these are rooted in nature. First, there is man’s natural propensity, from childhood onwards, to engage in mimetic activity (and this distinguishes man from other creatures, that he is thoroughly mimetic and through mimesis takes his first step in understanding). Second, there is the pleasure which all men take in mimetic objects. An indication of the latter can be observed in practice: for we take pleasure (khairomen) in contemplating the most precise images (eikonas) of things whose sight in itself causes us pain (lypērōs) - such as the appearance of the basest animals (thēriōn te morphas tōn atimotatōn), or of corpses (nekroi).16

In Aristotle’s vision, imitation is not a purely aesthetic concept, but is an

essential part of human nature. Human beings are inclined to imitate and from imitation they learn and gain pleasure. Lypērōs: it is the first reference in the Poetics to painful and mournful cases, which will be later indicated as being essential in the tragic story line, and which, on the other hand, give pleasure when

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they are not reality, but artistic imitation. Donald W. Lucas comments on the Aristotelean passage as follows:

Most ancient painting and sculpture - eikonas covers both - was of mythical subjects, among which corpses would appear from time to time, e. g. the children of Heracles or Niobe; the lowest animals, one would have thought, less often, as Circe’s swine or a hydra.17

Thērion may also refer, in fact, to monster creatures. Another passage is of a

more technical style:

Fear and pity (to phoberon kai eleeinon) sometimes result from the spectacle and are sometimes aroused by the actual arrangement of the incidents, which is preferable and the mark of a better poet. The plot should be so constructed that even without seeing the play anyone hearing of the incidents happening thrills with fear (phrittein) and pity (eleein) as a result of what occurs. So would anyone feel who heard the story of Oedipus. To produce this effect by means of an appeal to the eye is inartistic and needs adventitious aid, while those who by such means produce an effect which is not fearful but merely monstrous (mē to phoberon...alla to teratōdes monon) have nothing in common with tragedy. For one should not seek from tragedy all kinds of pleasure (hēdonē) but that which is peculiar to tragedy, and since the poet must by “representation” produce the pleasure (hēdonē) which comes from feeling pity (eleos) and fear (phobos), obviously this quality must be embodied in the incidents.18

Here referring specifically to tragedy, Aristotle’s criticism includes the more

important point: that the poignancy of a Greek tragedy is due to what happens and not to our seeing it happen. That Medea murders her children is tragic: to display the murder coram populo would add either nothing or something merely monstrous. That there were plays which relied for their effect on the scenery and make up is clear from chapter 17, ‘The Phorcides and Prometheus and Scenes set in Hades.’ According to one of scholiasts of Aeschylus,19 when his tragedy Eumenides was represented, many children fainted through fear, and several pregnant women actually miscarried at the sight of the horrific appearance of the chorus of the Erinyes. The famous and problematic anecdote is the following: ‘Some say that during the representation of the Eumenides the chorus on entering in disarray so frightened (ekplēxai) the audience that some children fainted and


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some fetuses were aborted.’20 Then was this a result of tragicality or horror? Pseudo-Longinus will return to the theme yet again:

That imagination means one thing in oratory and another in poetry you will yourself detect, and also that the object of poetry is astonishment (ekplēxis), of prose writing to present things vividly, though both indeed aim at this latter and at excited feeling. “Mother [i.e., Clytaemnestra], I [i.e., Orestes] beg thee incite not against me / These snake-like hags with silent bloody feet. / See there! See there! They [i.e., the Furies] leap upon me close.”21 / And “Ah, she will slay me, whither shall I flee?”22 In these passages the poet himself had Furies before his eyes and almost compelled the audience to see what he imagined.23

For the ancient critic the sublime is to be sought for in what is upsetting and

therefore provokes consternation (ekplēxis), wonderment (thaumaston), and even fear (phobos).24 In fact as is also shown by a late scholiast of Homer,25 these themes were especially sought after by the poets:

To Aides’ household] (Scil. Circe said to Odysseus: “you need to be going to”) Suspecting she has not been believed sends him (i.e., Odysseus) to Tyresias. But at the same time the poet (i.e., Homer) also preferred to dedicate an episode to horror and to the bewilderment of the evocation of the souls (to phrikōdes kai ekplēktikon tēs psykhagōgias).26

The testimonies relating to the seven types of fear show moreover, the existence of a reflection articulated around this theme; the most ancient example is offered by Diogenes Laertius,27 but the following is the most detailed:28

Fear (phobos) is subdivided into seven categories: [apprehension (deima)] hesitation (oknos), shame (aiskhynē), agitation (thorybos), stupor (thaymasiotēs), anguish (agōnia), consternation (ekplēxis). Deima (apprehension) is fear which generates cowardice; oknos (hesitation) is fear of future actions; aiskhynē (shame) is the fear of contempt; ekplēxis (consternation) is the fear caused by the appearance of an unusual fact;29 thaymasiotēs (stupor) is hyperbole for consternation (ekplēxis).30

An interesting statement is also found in Galen’s De Tremore, Palpitatione, Convulsione et Rigore Liber:

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Let us not try moreover to relate shiver only to the cold since a story or a frightening spectacle (phoberon akousma kai theama) can also at times produce horripilation (phrikē) and shivering (rhigos). Even Plato, and not only Hippocrates, knew this.31

Let us now look at a ‘practical’ example of ‘horripilation’ from Lucian’s The Lovers of Lies or the Doubter. Eucrates recounts:

After a short time there came an earthquake and with it a noise as of thunder, and then I saw a terrible woman coming toward me, quite half a furlong in height. She had a torch in her left hand and a sword in her right, ten yards long; below, she had snake-feet, and above she resembled the Gorgon, in her stare, I mean, and the frightfulness (to phrikōdes) of her appearance; moreover, instead of hair she had the snakes falling down in ringlets, twining about her neck, and some of them coiled upon her shoulders. - “See”, said he, “how my flesh creeps (ephrixa), friends, as I tell the story!” - And as he spoke he showed the hairs on his forearm standing on end because of his terror (phobos)! Ion, Deinomachus, Cleodemus, and the rest of them, open-mouthed, were giving him unwavering attention, old men led by the nose, all but doing obeisance to so unconvincing a colossus, a woman half a furlong in height, a gigantic bugaboo (mormolykeion)!32

Eucrates’ story horrifies. In Lucian’s work the image of Hecate recalls that of

the Gorgon, of a per se powerful horrific figure of antiquity. This rebuke is directed by Tychiades, the unbeliever, against his deceitful companions:

Will you never stop telling such buncombe marvels (teratologeō), old men as you are? - said I - If you will not, at least for the sake of these lads put your amazing and fearful tales (tas paradoxoys...kai phoberas diēgēseis) off to some other time, so that they may not be filled up with terrors and strange figments (deimatōn kai allokotōn mythologēmatōn), before we realise it. You ought to be easy with them and not accustom them to hearing things like this which will abide with them and annoy them their lives long and will make them afraid of every sound by filling them with all sorts of superstition.33

Tychiades himself acknowledges the fact that he has been influenced by the

frightening tales he has heard, since having his head now filled with them


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complains: ‘I think I see monsters and spirits and Hecates (terata...kai daimonas kai Hekatas)!’34 This is the effect of horror fiction which sometimes even today makes us choose to sleep with the light left on! For different reasons and at a different time, Isocrates too had expressed a negative judgement of stories that nevertheless enjoyed a large following:

For I think that such marvelous tales (teratologia) are on a par with jugglers’ tricks (thaymatopoiia) which, though they do not profit anyone, yet attract great crowds of the empty-minded, and I hold that men who want to do some good in the world must banish utterly from their interests all vain speculations and all activities which have no bearing on our lives.35

Later we also witness a further example among the many ancient amazing stories such as this anecdote from Pseudo-Aristotle’s On Marvellous Things Heard:

In Mysia they say that there is a species of white bear which lets out so foul a breath when it is hunted that it causes the flesh of the dogs to decompose: it has the same effect upon all other kinds of animals, and makes them uneatable. But if one forces one’s way close to them, they let out of their mouths a quantity of phlegm, which apparently blows at the faces of the dogs and men alike, so as to choke and blind them.36

This bear appears as a forerunner of Brundlefly (the hero of the 1986 remake of

the film The Fly, directed by David Cronenberg)! But the finale is left to an eerie scene from Homer’s Odyssey: the prophetic vision of the Suitors’ slaughter. Pallas Athene aroused inextinguishable laughter amongst them:37

And now they laughed with lips that seemed not theirs, and all bedabbled with blood was the meat they ate, and their eyes were filled with tears, and in their own minds they seemed to be wailing. Then among them spoke godlike Theoclymenus: “Ah wretched men, what evil is this that you suffer? Shrouded in night are your heads and your faces and your knees beneath you; kindled is the sound of wailing, bathed in tears are your cheeks, and sprinkled with blood are the walls and the fair panels. And full of ghosts is the porch, full also the court, ghosts hastening down to Erebus beneath the darkness, and the sun has perished out of heaven and an evil mist covers all.”38

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Notes

1 Fabiano Bassi, introduction to Orrore, Pathos e Trauma, by James Alexander, et al. (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1996), 10. 2 Fabio Giovannini, Necrocultura. Estetica e Culture della Morte nell’Immaginario di Massa (Roma: Castelvecchi, 1998). 3 Arendt’s words: Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence, 1926-1969, eds. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert Kimber and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), letter no. 109, 4 March 1951, 165-168. See also Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 45-46. 4 Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 2. 5 See, for e.g., Carsten Zelle, ‘Angenehmes Grauen’. Literaturhistorische Beiträge zur Ästhetik des Schrecklichen im Achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1987), and Hans Richard Brittnacher, Ästhetik des Horrors (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994). 6 Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: Dodsley, 1759). 7 Mathematical, too: Anna Sigler and her team at King’s College London proposed the algebraic equation of the perfect horror film, see Roberto Rombi, ‘L’equazione di Kubrick’, La Repubblica, August 7, 2004, 42. 8 See panel organised by Edmund P. Cueva, The Nature of Horror in Classical Antiquity, 105th Annual Meeting of the CAMWS, Minneapolis 1-4 April 2009, accessed July 21, 2011, http://www.camws.org/meeting/2009/program-/abstracts/12E1-6.Cueva.Byrne.Nappa.Scippacercola.Lux.Felton.pdf. 9 Harald Hendrix, ‘Orrore e Diletto: Peripezie di un Concetto “Sublime” fra Cinque e Seicento’, Aevum Antiquum, N.S. 3 (2003): 183. 10 My translation is based on the edition by Adriana Marucchi and Luigi Salerno, eds., Giulio Mancini: Considerazioni sulla Pittura 1 (Roma: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1956), 121. 11 It is a Gospel theme: Matthew 2.16-18. In 1632 the poet also wrote a poem in four cantos dedicated to the same subject. 12 English translation from Elizabeth Cropper, ‘The Petrifying Art: Marino’s Poetry and Caravaggio’, Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 (1991): 207. See also Carlo Caruso, ‘Orrore e Diletto: G.B. Marino’s La Strage de’ Fanciulli Innocenti di Guido Reni’, Letteratura & Arte 7 (2009): 101-115. 13 Original text cited by La Galeria del Cav. Marino (Venezia: Brigonci, 1675), 58. See also Marzio Pieri and Alessandra Ruffino, eds., ‘La Galeria’ di Giambattista Marino (Lavis: La Finestra Editrice, 2005).

http://www.camws.org/meeting/2009/program-/abstracts/12E1-6.Cueva.Byrne.Nappa.Scippacercola.Lux.Felton.pdf

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14 I have romanised ancient Greek words according to Table 11.4 of the Chicago Manual of Style (16th Edition), accessed July 21, 2011, http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/16/ch11/ch11tab04.html. 15 Plato, Resp. 3.387b-c: cited according to the translation by Charles D.C. Reeve, Plato: Republic, translated from the New Standard Greek Text, with Introduction (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004), 67. 16 Aristotle Poet. 4, 1448b.4-12: cited according to the translation by Stephen Halliwell, The Poetics of Aristotle (London: Duckworth, 1987), 34. 17 Donald W. Lucas, Aristotle, Poetics, with Introduction, Commentary and Appendixes (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1968), 72. 18 Arist. Poet. 14, 1453b: cited according to the translation by William Hamilton Fyfe in William Hamilton Fife, et al. eds. and trans. Aristotle: The Poetics; ‘Longinus’: On The Sublime; Demetrius: On Style (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1960), 49-51. 19 For date see C. John Herington, The Older Scholia on the Prometheus Bound (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 1-52, and Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Art of Aeschylus (London: University of California Press, 1982), 369-376. 20 Vitae Aeschyli (Secundum Commentarium A) 9. My translation is based upon the edition by Herington, The Older Scholia, 60. 21 Citation from Euripides, Orestes, lines 255-257. 22 Citation from Euripides, Iphigenia among the Taurians, line 291. 23 [Longin.] de subl. 15.2. I have slightly modified the translation by Hamilton Fyfe in Aristotle: The Poetics, 170-73. 24 See Giulio Guidorizzi, Anonimo: Il Sublime (Milano: Mondadori, 1991), 14. 25 For date see Filippomaria Pontani, Sguardi su Ulisse. La Tradizione Esegetica Greca all’Odissea (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2005). 26 Scholia in Odysseam (Scholia Vetera) 10.491.1-3. My translation is based upon the edition by William Dindorf, Scholia Graeca in Homeri Odysseam (Ex Codicibus Aucta et Emendata) 1 (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1962), 475. 27 See Diogenes Laertius 7.112-3, and Suda phi 559, therein agōnia is defined as: phobos adēloy pragmatos ‘fear felt when some issue is still in suspense.’ Herbert S. Long, ed., Diogenis Laertii Vitae Philosophorum (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), Ada Adler, ed., Suidae Lexicon 4 (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1971). 28 For date see Alexander Turyn, Studies in the Manuscript Tradition of the Tragedies of Sophocles (Roma: ‘L’Erma’ di Bretschneider, 1970). 29 Asynēthēs: almost German ‘Unheimlich,’ the Freudian ‘uncanny.’ See Sigmund Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’, Imago 5 (1919): 297-324. 30 Sch. Soph. Ai. 169b. My translation is based upon the edition by Geōrgios A. Christodoulos, Scholia et Glossae in Sophoclis Ajacem (Athens: University of Athens Press, 1977), 263-353.

http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/16/ch11/ch11tab04.html

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31 My translation is based upon the edition by Carolus G. Kühn, Medicorum Graecorum Opera quae Extant Omnia 7 (Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), 628. 32 Lucian, Philops. 22-23: cited according to the translation by Austin M. Harmon, Lucian 3 (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1947), 355. 33 Lucian, Philops. 37.1-10: Ibid., 377, with slight modifications. 34 Lucian, Philops. 40: Ibid., 379. 35 Isocr. Antidosis 269. My translation is based upon the edition by Georges Mathieu, Isocrate: Discours 3 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1966), 103-81. 36 Pseudo-Arist. mirab. 144: cited according to the translation by Walter S. Hett, Aristotle: Minor Works (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1955), 313. 37 For comment on the passage see Irene De Jong, A Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 501-02. 38 Hom. Od. 20.347-360: cited according to the translation by Augustus T. Murray, Homer: The Odyssey, revised by George E. Dimock, 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 305-306.

Bibliography

Adler, Ada, ed. Suidae lexicon 4. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1971. Arendt, Hannah, and Karl Jaspers. Correspondence, 1926-1969. Edited by Lotte Kohler, and Hans Saner. Translated by Robert Kimber, and Rita Kimber. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. Bassi, Fabiano. Introduction to Orrore, Pathos e Trauma, by James Alexander, Edmund Bergler, Sigmund Freud, and Alfred Winterstein. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1996. Brittnacher, Hans Richard. Ästhetik des Horrors. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994. Burke, Edmund. Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London: Dodsley, 1759. Caruso, Carlo. ‘Orrore e Diletto: G.B. Marino’s La Strage de’ Fanciulli Innocenti di Guido Reni’. Letteratura & Arte 7 (2009): 101–115. Cavarero, Adriana. Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.


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Christodoulos, Geōrgios A. Scholia et Glossae in Sophoclis Ajacem. Athens: University of Athens Press, 1977. Cropper, Elizabeth. ‘The Petrifying Art: Marino’s Poetry and Caravaggio’. Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 (1991): 193–212. De Jong, Irene. A Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Dindorf, William. Scholia Graeca in Homeri Odysseam. Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1962. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Das Unheimliche’. Imago 5 (1919): 297–324. Giovannini, Fabio. Necrocultura. Estetica e Culture della Morte nell’Immaginario di Massa. Roma: Castelvecchi, 1998. Guidorizzi, Giulio. Anonimo: Il Sublime. Milano: Mondadori, 1991. Halliwell, Stephen. The Poetics of Aristotle. London: Duckworth, 1987. Hamilton Fyfe, William, William Rhys Roberts, Donald Russell, and Doreen C. Innes, eds. and trans. Aristotle: The Poetics; ‘Longinus’: On The Sublime; Demetrius: On Style. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960. Harmon, Austin M. Lucian 3. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947. Hendrix, Harald. ‘Orrore e Diletto: Peripezie di un Concetto “Sublime” fra Cinque e Seicento’. Aevum Antiquum 3 (2003): 173–185. Herington, C. John. The Older Scholia on the Prometheus Bound. Leiden: Brill, 1972. Hett, Walter S. Aristotle: Minor Works. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955. Kühn, Carolus G. Medicorum Graecorum Opera quae Extant Omnia 7. Hildesheim: Olms, 1965.

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Long, Herbert S., ed. Diogenis Laertii Vitae Philosophorum. Oxford: Clarendon, 1964. Lucas, Donald W. Aristotle, Poetics, with Introduction, Commentary and Appendixes. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1968. Marucchi, Adriana, and Luigi Salerno, eds. Giulio Mancini: Considerazioni sulla Pittura 1. Roma: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1956. Mathieu, G. Isocrate: Discours 3. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1966. Murray, Augustus T. Homer: The Odyssey. Revised by George E. Dimock, 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Pieri, Marzio, and Alessandra Ruffino, eds. ‘La Galeria’ di Giambattista Marino. Lavis: La Finestra Editrice, 2005. Pontani, Filippomaria. Sguardi su Ulisse. La Tradizione Esegetica Greca all’Odissea. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2005. Reeve, Charles D.C. Plato: Republic. Translated from the New Standard Greek Text, with Introduction. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004. Rombi, Roberto. ‘L’equazione di Kubrick’. La Repubblica, August 7, 2004, 42. Rosenmeyer, Thomas G. The Art of Aeschylus. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1982. Turyn, Alexander. Studies in the Manuscript Tradition of the Tragedies of Sophocles. Roma: ‘L’Erma’ di Bretschneider, 1970. Zelle, Carsten. ‘Angenehmes Grauen’. Literaturhistorische Beiträge zur Ästhetik des Schrecklichen im achtzehnten Jahrhundert. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1987. Nadia Scippacercola is a Humanities graduate, with a PhD in Greek and Latin Philology of the Classical, Christian and Medieval-Humanistic Ages from the Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘Federico II’ (Italy), where she is currently collaborating in research activities. Her book, Il Lato Oscuro del Romanzo Greco (The Dark Side of the Ancient Greek Novel), appeared in 2011.

A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Irresistible Appeal of Serial Killer Novels

Ebru Çeker

Abstract The huge public interest shown towards fights, accidents, and crime scenes, the wide audience of movies which consist of violent scenes, the countless readers of crime novels indicate that when people are at a safe distance, they are delighted by violence, which arouses not only anxiety, fear, fright but also a kind of joy and satisfaction. The appearance of crime fiction and non-fiction as genres in literature is the outcome of the darker side of human nature, which is even obscure to one’s own self. The most extreme form of this genre is serial killer novels in which people kill others not because of hatred, revenge, jealousy, or any other excuses but for pure pleasure. Serial killing has been increasing yet it is still very rare. In serial killer novels, it is introduced to people as if it is a very common occurrence, and an unbelievable imagination is used to make it as violent and horrific as possible. So there is a contradiction between the real world and the world depicted in novels. Haut confirms this fact as: ‘competing against reality, crime fiction, while reflecting the era, has come to seek ever greater horrors and facsimiles.’1 The surprisingly increasing number of crime novel readers suggests that people enjoy even this exaggeration in violence. This chapter intends to give an insight for this stunning appeal of violence, crime, and murder in serial killer novels, both fiction and non-fiction, in terms of psychoanalytic literary criticism. It is intended to deal with the question of why serial killer novels are so compelling and to explain the reasons of people’s attraction to murder, especially serial murder, with the help of some psychoanalytic terms and theories. Key Words: Serial killer novels, violence, murder, pleasure principle, id-ego-superego conflicts, internalization, persona.

***** 1. The Human(e) Defect

Human beings are the most unexplainable creatures in the world as they are the only living creatures who have concerns other than surviving and breeding. They are also unique in that they employ violence not only to protect themselves but also to quench their blood-thirst. People have always been lured by the irresistible appeal of blood, sorrow, and violence but the exact reason for this has never been clearly explained. This may be because people are totally selfish in every respect, even in their most intimate relationships. Everything people do is for the sake of their own pleasure and benefit as they are self-centred by nature. There is an egocentric drive even in people’s most innocent feeling: love. People love because


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they feel a desperate need to be loved, because they are afraid of being lonely and because they strive to be praised by someone else; nobody loves just for the sake of the loved. Being so selfish by nature, people have the capacity to do anything no matter how severely censorships are applied by the later-formed moral values or so-called conscience. Consequently, nobody should be startled to encounter with motiveless crimes committed in incredibly violent manners. All people have a craving for violence, and a kind of weird passion for terror either because of curiosity or because people unconsciously regard them as a way of feeling and expressing their freedom and authority. Willard Gaylin confirms that all human beings are violent in a way.2 The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde3 proves evidence for this inborn evil capacity of humans. Deborah Cameron interprets the message that is intended to be given in the book:

All of us have dual personalities, for “original evil” is latent even in the most admirable and respectable persons. Furthermore, that evil has a very strong appeal - it may enslave, but the thought of it also “braces” and “delights.”4

Psychoanalysis also verifies these two existing, contrasting aspects of human

nature and Freud affirms the simultaneous existence of excessive morality and immorality of human beings in The Ego and the Id.5 This belief can be observed in all cultures and religions through investigating some common concepts. For example, the concepts of yin and yang (in Chinese philosophy),6 endless knot (in Buddhism),7 and original sin (in Christianity)8 all confirm that people from all walks of life believe in this idea; all people are both good and bad, but some go to extremes and use unimaginable violence against others without any apparent reasons. This unexplainable inclination towards unnecessary violence implies that people have a dark side which is latent and unknown even to themselves. Carl G. Jung mentions this side of man as ‘the shadow-side of human nature,’ which is present in all human beings but whose existence is denied or sought to be ignored by people.9

The dark side of human nature makes itself apparent in every aspect of social life. Nobody is able to resist the thrill promised by this disturbing part of human nature. Seltzer claims that this vice of humanity makes up the ‘wound culture’10 in society. He gives all kind of human inclinations towards violence and destructiveness as a proof of this ‘wound culture’ and mentions some of the movies that consist of exaggerated forms of violence as the very product of this culture.11 So, it can be inferred that Seltzer’s concept of ‘wound culture’ is a more generalized version of Jung’s ‘shadow side of human nature.’ We can conclude that the wound culture is the shadow side of the whole society.

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2. Exploring Boundaries of One’s Self People like going beyond the limits of their imagination, experiencing

something that is even unimaginable by others, being different and doing something unprecedented; something that is either useful and good or bad and harmful to others. The after-effects of their deeds are not much of a concern for them so long as they provide them a kind of popularity in a way. Humane activities which are chosen to gain this celebrity require some kind of self-sacrifice whereas inhumane deeds - being easier to carry out and involving less self-giving - are preferable to most psychologically disturbed people. This desire results in people’s choosing the most violent form of crime; murder, especially serial murder, as a career. Serial killers are mostly people who seek popularity for extraordinarily committed murders, which not only terrifies but also thrills others. The most stunning and unexplainable thing in serial killing is not the violent manner the murder is committed but the motivelessness and repetition of the act. It is true that every person is enigmatically inclined to take pleasure from destructiveness, caused by an urge deriving from the dark side of human nature, but not every person can enjoy killing someone against whom he has no grudge and continue killing remorselessly. Serial killers are thought to be beasts, creatures other than human beings. We try to put a space between ourselves and them but no matter how much we want to categorise them as something different from ourselves, it is an undeniable fact that they, too, are human beings.12 They are generally losers in life who cannot lead the life as they imagine. Leyton describes them as:

Both serial and mass murderers are overwhelmed with a profound sense of alienation and frustration stemming from their feelings that no matter how fierce their ambitions may be (and they are, most often, among the most ambitious of men), no matter what they might do, they could not achieve the place in society to which they aspired. They aim high, these multiple murderers: they have not, like Durkheim’s contented man, accepted their station in life.13

Their failures in life are not necessarily connected with economical problems

or lack of an affectionate relationship with a family or friends; they may have an average life; a loving family, friends and an ordinary job, like, Peter Sutcliffe,14 and Andrei Chikatilo.15 Their seemingly normal lives do not guarantee that they are or should be contented enough to have a happy and satisfying life. Though, to some extent, physical and social factors influence the way people lead their lives, it is the psychological factors that play the most important part.


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s like serial killing.

3. Psychoanalytic Explanation of Serial Killing The fact that almost all serial killers have psychological problems makes it

clear that the human psyche is the most important determining factor in leading a normal life. Hence an understanding of the psychological causes of serial killing is to be gained in order to make sense of serial killers and the luring attraction of serial killer novels. I would like to explain certain psychoanalytic concepts that would be helpful to grasp the tendency for serious criminal offences like serial murder. First of all, I will explain the indispensable concepts of psychoanalysis; the id, ego, and superego. The demands of all of these three mechanisms generally contradict. The id is pleasure-seeking, ignoring all conflicting forces, and trying all possible means to reach its end. The superego is the unconscious part of us that applies moral restrictions to the id’s impulses. And the ego plays the role of mediator between the libidinal cathexes of the id, the moral restraints of the superego and the rational demands of the external reality.16 Here, the task of the ego is very difficult: to ignore the irresistible wishes of the id, soften the cruel judgements of the superego, and pay regard to the realities of the external world. The purpose of the ego is to repress or retard the most irrational demands and give way to the reasonable ones and in so doing, the ego adopts some strategies to cope with these conflicts. These are called ‘defence mechanisms of the ego.’17 They may be used to lessen anxiety, make realities bearable and turn unacceptable behaviours into acceptable ones. When used moderately, they are able to help people to get over psychological dilemmas but when used excessively, they themselves may be the problem. So these defences may themselves cause some psychopathological illnesses and are actually the underlying causes of most popular and common ones such as hysteria, schizophrenia, and neurosis. That is because they distort, transform or falsify reality and excessive use of these defences causes to form new and relative realities that draw people away from the objective realities. In this chapter, I will explain some of these mechanisms as they are thought to be the underlying causes in criminal tendencie

Repression is the most well-known and basic defence mechanism that is used extensively. In repression process, the ego makes the conscious part of the mind forget some drives and sends them into the unconscious. Repression is successful only for a while as ‘the return of the repressed’18 is inevitable at a point when the pressure becomes unbearable. If the repression has been prolonged and none of the connected demands has been satisfied, it is likely to cause deep mental problems in the long run. It can even cause serious criminal tendencies.

Internalisation and externalisation are other mechanisms that are to be mentioned here. Internalisation is the process through which a person accepts other people’s thoughts and feelings without any objection and in time regards them as if they were his own thoughts and feelings; that is, he starts to imitate others unconsciously.19 The dynamic structure of the human psyche enables people both to internalise external factors and to externalise internal ones so there is a constant

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interaction between internal and external processes. Externalisation is the opposite of internalisation. Through externalisation, one reflects his own thoughts and feelings onto another and thinks as if they belonged to the other. Considering the distortion created by internalisations and externalisations, it can be inferred that human psyche is not shaped by objective realities and events; actually the most important factor is the way they are perceived by the mind. That is why people give different reactions to the same circumstances. Serial killers are the ones who give the most extreme reactions as a result of the endless internal conflicts which they cannot handle successfully. Below, Robert Royston tries to utilise Fairbairn’s view of internalisation to understand the criminal mind and concludes:

Criminals, for example, are not evil (though frightening and hateful) but themselves as much victims as the people they victimized. The internal world is made up of conflicting selves, some of which aim to persecute others; but this situation is the product of internalizations.20

As above paragraph confirms, as a result of internalisations, criminals create

imaginary people and events in their minds but end up with real and challenging internal conflicts. This reformation of external realities precipitates them into a hypothetical world which distances them from the requirements of social life. This alienation weakens the social and moral values or causes them to be reconstructed. As a result, they are torn between the world they built up in their minds and the one constructed by the society. At this point, both the ego, which is governed by the reality principle, and the superego, which represents the external precursors, lose their strength and give way to the id. Instead of helping people to conform themselves to the social norms, the id, driven by the pleasure principle, urges them to revolt against the society and try to adapt the external world according to their own inner realities and rules. Serial killers are the ones who experience these conflicts severely. As the dark side of human nature can only be overcome with the help of social and moral precursors, serial killers, free from these precursors, can do anything with no worries or remorse. It is easier to comprehend this situation when they are compared with little children who have not yet formed these values. They, like serial killers, act according to their impulses.21

The last defence mechanism I would like to mention is ‘identification with the aggressor.’ It is the internalisation of an abuser’s personality or behaviour by the abused. It explains the situation of serial killers and sexual abusers, as almost all of them have experienced many kinds of humiliation, and torture in their childhood. They cannot be expected to behave and think like normal persons in their adulthood. When life is extremely difficult to handle - even for a person who had a normal childhood - because of the inner conflicts he experiences every moment, how can a person who was imbued with inhumane thoughts and feelings


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throughout his life be expected to be humane? These people find solace in identifying with the aggressor, as a result of which they gain the control and become the powerful person in relationships.

Persona is another psychoanalytic concept which makes it easy for us to comprehend how the serial killers can lead two separate lives which are contradictory to each other. Jung claims that every person has two types of personality; the individual personality, which is conscious, and the collective personality which is unconscious. He states that individual personality is, to a certain extent, restricted and reshaped by the collective unconscious, and he calls this adapted version of personality by the norms of society the ‘persona.’22 Serial killers form a strong persona through which they manage to mingle with the society. But, as there is a huge gap between their individual and collective personalities, it gets harder to maintain this persona day by day. Serious psychological problems occur in the long run as it is really difficult to think, and feel in one way and act in another.23 That is why almost every serial killer’s real identity is revealed in the end.

4. Serial Killing and Public Fascination

Socially and morally prohibited acts and thoughts generally allure people as they promise to unravel the unknown and latent sides and fantasies of the individual. Murder is the most gripping of them and people recognize no boundaries to exploring the enigma of ending a person’s life. Apart from the moral aspects, it represents endless freedom and authority. And some people get dispense with moral obligations through repetition. Klein points out that repetition changes the way people regard morally prohibited acts and implies that it is a way of escaping from the feeling of guilt.24 When a person repeats an act that normally seems to be embarrassing or immoral, he begins to regard it as a usual thing and in time, repeats the act automatically without feeling anything at all; thus the act is isolated from feelings by repetition. The person feels indifferent to the moral or social consequences of the act; he just does it without considering anything other than the act itself. This kind of isolation from feelings explains serial killers’ persistence in their crimes till they are caught in the end. There is nothing keeping them from obeying the id’s impulses. But their lack of social or moral inhibitions does not mean that they also lack human feelings like love. They are, contrary to the general view, capable of loving besides hating.25 Their capacity for love fascinates people much more than their most violently committed murders and this is one of the reasons why people find serial killers interesting. They cannot comprehend the phenomenon that someone who can love can simultaneously kill people without even any excuses and this enigmatic phenomenon increases the attraction to serial killer novels. They provide readers with a world where they can satisfy their dark side with extreme forms of violence, and destructiveness with the

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advantage of both being at a safe distance and feeling free from any responsibilities and the sufferings of a guilty conscience.

Novels and films generally distort and exaggerate the facts in order to give them a kind of appeal. For example serial killers are presented to readers as though they were very clever and would murder their victims with thoroughly considered plans. In real life, however, serial killers mostly commit murder by impulse rather than a premeditated plan and so generally choose their victims randomly.26 But, because nobody finds it attractive if events happen by coincidence, there is always a causal connection between events in serial killer novels. Another factor contributing to the popularity of these types of novels is that they give sentimental excuses for the brutality of the serial killer which creates empathy for the killer. People have a tendency to find a logical explanation for every human action but real life does not always offer us reasonable explanations. So the rationally explicable world of these novels gives a sense of safety to readers. They not only experience the tension created with the proximity to the violence, death, and murder but also feel the relief of being at a safe distance from them. One of the best examples of this genre is The Hannibal Lecter Trilogy27 by Thomas Harris. The trilogy owes its popularity to satisfying people’s expectations from serial killer novels. They introduce readers to a very clever and cruel serial killer who hardly ever makes mistakes, and who plans his brutal murders flawlessly. The trilogy appeases people’s insatiable thirst for blood, violence, and destructiveness. Moreover, a fourth novel Hannibal Rising28 was published afterwards in order to justify the killer’s criminal acts and arouse a kind of pity for him. As a result these four novels give readers everything they demand from a serial killer novel.

To conclude, the alluring effect of serial killer novels on people derives from satisfying the inner urges of dark nature of man. These novels enable them to enjoy every kind of evil unconsciously without even feeling any responsibility and guilt. Reading them is like getting on a very dangerous and thrilling machine in a funfair; you know that you are in safety and will not be hurt still feel the risk and enjoy the tension.

Notes

1 Christiana Gregoriou, Deviance in Contemporary Crime Fiction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 57. 2 Eliot Leyton, Hunting Humans (London: Blake Publishing, 2001), 26. 3 Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003). 4 Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer, The Lust to Kill: A Feminist Investigation of Sexual Murder (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 43. 5 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (Lexington: Pacific Publishing Studio, 2010).


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6 Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v. ‘Chinese philosophy.’ 7 Wikipedia, s.v. ‘endless knot.’ 8 Jean-Yves Lacoste, ed., Encyclopedia of Christian Theology, volume 1 (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 1480-1482, Kindle edition. 9 C. G. Jung, The Collected Works: Volume VII: Two Essays in Analytical Psychology, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge, 1990), 30. 10 Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1998), 21. 11 Ibid., 129. 12 Leyton, Hunting Humans, 249. 13 Ibid., 23. 14 Gordon Burn, Somebody’s Husband Somebody’s Son (London: Faber and Faber, 2004). 15 Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v. ‘Andrei Chikatilo.’ 16 For detailed information about id, ego, and superego see: Freud, Ego and the Id. 17 Anthony Bateman and Jeremy Holmes, Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Theory and Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 76. Kindle edition. 18 Ibid., 77. 19 Charles Ashbach and Victor L. Schermer, Object Relations, the Self, and the Group (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). 20 Celia Harding, ed., Aggression and Destructiveness: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 26. Kindle edition. 21 Sigmund Freud, The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis, trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2005), 488. 22 Jung, Collected Works: Volume VII, 157-158. 23 Ibid., 194. 24 Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921-1945, ed. Roger Money-Kyrle (New York: Free Press, 1975), 181. 25 Ibid., 260. 26 Paul Roland, In the Minds of Murderers (London: Arcturus Publishing, 2007), 89. 27 Hannibal Lecter Trilogy consists of: Thomas Harris, Red Dragon (New York: Dell Publishing, 2000), The Silence of the Lambs (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989) and Hannibal (New York: Delta, 2005). 28 Hannibal Rising is the fourth book which is published after the trilogy and complements it. Thomas Harris, Hannibal Rising (New York: Dell Publishing, 2007).

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Bibliography

‘Andrei Chikatilo’. Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Accessed June 5, 2011. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1245841/Andrei-Chikatilo. Ashbach, Charles, and Victor L. Schermer. Object Relations, the Self, and the Group. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Kindle edition. Bateman, Anthony, and Jeremy Holmes. Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Theory and Practice. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Kindle edition. Burn, Gordon. Somebody’s Husband Somebody’s Son. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. Cameron, Deborah, and Elizabeth Frazer. The Lust to Kill: A Feminist Investigation of Sexual Murder. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987. ‘Endless Knot’. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Accessed June 5, 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endless_knot. Harris, Thomas. Red Dragon. New York: Dell Publishing, 2000. —––. The Silence of the Lambs. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. —––. Hannibal. New York: Delta, 2005. —––. Hannibal Rising. New York: Dell Publishing, 2007. Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. Lexington: Pacific Publishing Studio, 2010. —––. The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by James Strachey. London: Vintage, 2005. Gregoriou, Christiana. Deviance in Contemporary Crime Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Harding, Celia, ed. Aggression and Destructiveness: Psychoanalytic Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Kindle edition.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1245841/Andrei-Chikatilo

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Jung, C. G. The Collected Works: Volume VII: Two Essays in Analytical Psychology. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. London: Routledge, 1990. Klein, Melanie. Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921-1945. Edited by Roger Money-Kyrle. New York: Free Press, 1975. Leyton , Eliot. Hunting Humans. London: Blake Publishing, 2001. Lacoste, Jean-Yves, ed. Encyclopedia of Christian Theology. New York and London: Routledge, 2005. Kindle edition. Roland, Paul. In the Minds of Murderers. London: Arcturus Publishing, 2007. Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 1998. Stevenson, Robert L. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. ‘Yin Yang’. Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Accessed June 5, 2011. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/653297/yinyang. Ebru Çeker is a Lecturer of English at Cumhuriyet University, Turkey, and an MA student of English Literature at Erciyes University, Turkey.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/653297/yinyang

Hit Me ‘Baby’ One More Time: A Reflection on the Role of the Final Girl that Got Away in The Texas Chainsaw

Massacre (2003)

Elisabete Lopes

Abstract In this chapter I intend to examine some of the themes evoked by the 2003 remake of the 1974 film, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,1 putting special emphasis on the role played by the main female character, the so-called Final Girl. The slasher film plot is based on a linear cinematic narrative, in which a group of people (normally young people or teenagers) are, one by one, violently slaughtered. Within this violent framework, the Final Girl in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre2 is the one that is wounded and chased by Leatherface: the one that falls down, screams, picks herself up, overcomes the fear and fights back her enemy. Therefore, engaging with the theories put forward by Carol J. Clover,3 Barbara Creed,4 Sarah Trencansky5 and Laura Mulvey,6 I propose a reflection on the character embodied by this post-modern ‘damsel-in-distress’ together with the controversies that surround her cinematic construction. These concern questions of gender identification, gender interchangeability and performance. My thesis is that, contrary to Carol J. Clover’s argument about the 1974 incarnation of the Final Girl, in the 2003 incarnation, the Final Girl is not depicted as a male in disguise. In reality, the film appears to deconstruct that theory, reasserting that Erin, despite being brave and clever, ultimately still remains a girl. The frequently observed female affinity with the villain (or the monster) of the slasher film will also be a focus of attention in this analysis, as the two of them - girl and persecutor - seem to share some characteristics. Indeed, sometimes in the end, they are the sole survivors of a journey made of blood and loss. Key Words: Final Girl, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, slasher film, horror, gender, monster, lack, wound, feminism.

*****

Slasher films have traditionally been dismissed by critics as formulaic, marginal films that revolve around violence and gore, displaying a predilection for showing women being tortured on screen, as a misogynist spectacle for the entertainment of a chiefly male audience. However, Marcus Nispel’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre figures as an example of how a slasher film can be the repository of a critical view on gender issues, mainly through the revision it offers with regard to the feminine character that Carol J. Clover had coined the Final Girl, an ‘intelligent, watchful, levelheaded’7 young woman who, in the end, fights the monster on her own terms. The problem with Clover’s theory is that she

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compromises the femininity of this female character, dismissing her as a ‘congenial double for the adolescent male.’8 Based heavily on Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalytic theory that sees the female on screen represented both as castrated and as a lack,9 Clover argues that the Final Girl appears disguised under a female appearance, and subsequently undergoes a phallicisation, in order to call for identification from the male spectators. In this fashion, she stands triumphant on screen, not as truly a woman but as a disguised ‘lack.’ Although the protagonist of the first version of the film bore traits that identified her as a female, Marcus Nispel’s construction of the Final Girl is somehow more complete. Although he models the leading character of his film version on the protagonist of the first film, he is able to turn her into a young woman where femininity, intelligence and strength conflate. Given the circumstances, we can hint at the possibility that the Final Girl in Nispel’s terms constitutes, to a certain extent, a reply to the essentialism displayed by feminist scholars regarding these matters. In truth, this remake challenges and puts into question the validity of their ideas on the feminine protagonist of slasher films.

In reality, closely examining the 2003 version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, we become aware that it changes this restrictive concept of the Final Girl put forward by Carol J. Clover, somehow restoring the heroine to her feminine status in a more blatantly manner. It is precisely the aim of this chapter: to analyse how this slasher film deconstructs the profile of the Final Girl put forward by Clover, showing that, despite that she is not wearing a dress, and although she is forced to use weapons and display a degree of aggressiveness (which divert her from the role of the fragile defenseless victim), due to the extenuating circumstances, Erin cannot be equated with ‘maleness,’ hence maintaining her femininity in the cinematic narrative.

Clover had dismissed the slasher films as a ‘male exercise … that finally has very little to do with femaleness and very much to do with phallocentrism.’10 In this scenario, according to her view, the Final Girl is a mere ‘male surrogate, in things oedipal, a homoerotic stand-in, the audience incorporate’11 and ‘to the extent that she means “girl” at all, it is only for purposes of signifying male lack.’12 For Clover, the Final Girl is immediately identified in the group ‘by her masculine interests, her inevitable sexual reluctance, her apartness from other girls, sometimes her name.’13 I concur with Peter Hutchinson, who says in this regard that

the danger in Clover’s approach is that in order to establish a slasher scenario involving gender disruption that then reaches out into the audience, she accentuates these “masculine” elements when in many other respects these representations of women are more conventional than she is prepared to acknowledge.14

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In reality, that Erin can start a car without any key in the ignition, does not turn her automatically into a male; this only goes to show that her practical abilities are in tandem with her intellectual skills. Carol J. Clover, based on her analysis of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre of 1974 and other slashers, also contends that the Final Girl is usually a virgin, which, according to the author, is usually stressed throughout the cinematic narrative by her lack of interest in sexual matters. However, once again, Erin does not fit the profile Clover has defined for the immaculate Final Girl in typical slasher films. In truth, as far as sexuality is concerned, we cannot affirm that Erin is not interested in sexual matters. We are informed from the outset that she is interested in forming a family with her boyfriend, Kemper. Nevertheless, she refuses to follow the model of the ‘easy girl,’ embodied, by her friend Pepper, who enjoys indulging in displays of sexuality, such as constantly kissing and touching her boyfriend.

As a matter of fact, Erin can be considered a girl who rebels against female objectification, on the grounds that unlike her friend Pepper, who is always flirting with her boyfriend, Erin does not need to flaunt her sexuality in order to assert her feminine identity. She becomes a transgressive character once she rejects the image of the ‘ideal American girl,’ highly feminised, proclaimed and accepted by Western society. By diverging from Pepper’s feminine role, Erin seems to be rejecting what Joan Rivière calls the masquerade, that is to say, a kind of figurative mask of excessive femininity.15 Luce Irigaray in her widely debated work This Sex Which Is Not One argues that the:

masquerade has to be understood as what women do in order to recuperate some element of desire, to participate in man’s desire, but at the price of renouncing their own. … What do I mean by masquerade? In particular … “femininity” …a woman has to become a normal woman, that is, has to enter into the masquerade of femininity … (has to enter) into a system of values that is not hers, and in which she can “appear” and circulate only when enveloped in the needs/desires/fantasies of others, namely, men.16

Howard R. Bloch and Frances Fergunson, in their study Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy, also contend that Carol J. Clover’s interpretation ‘does not do justice to the sense of her character as a whole.’17 Tony Williams also subscribes to this criticism, when she states that Clover’s theory ‘elevates the Final Girl into a rigid model,’18and does not make room for other cinematic narratives that would constitute, in part, a subversion of that theory thus offering a critical view regarding both patriarchal structures of society and the male gaze. Actually, the film undermines Clover’s arguments, as its narrative discourse displays details that


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is strikingly graphic:

erotically charged than that of her male counterpart.20

level, since they constitute a glimpse of their fatal destiny. In fact, in Leatherface’s

ineffably tie Erin with femininity: for example, when she is inside the van with her friends, she is filing her nails while they speak.

Many slasher films are criticised for being misogynist and for gratuitously displaying violence against women. In effect, a theory seems to endure that these films constitute a minor subgenre whose main narratives are ‘explicitly about the destruction of women.’19 The revised version of the The Texas Chainsaw Massacre proves this theory wrong. Scholars such as Isabel Pinedo, Carol J. Clover or Vera Dika point out that there is a difference in terms of representation as far as female and male characters on screen is concerned. Pinedo reinforces the view that the degree of violence enacted against women in slasher films

male death is swifter, more distanced, and more likely to occur off-screen or to be obscured, whereas female death is extended, occurs at close range, and in graphic detail. Her death, and the anticipation of her death, occupies substantially more screen time and is more

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre subverts these ideas because, apart from Erin, another girl, Pepper, died in a way that does not differ much from the way the male characters succumb to the hands of Leatherface. Moreover, it is important to emphasize that in this film, the chief amount of gory violence is directed toward males, some of whom Erin will try later to rescue from an impending ordeal. In this view, those beacons, that according to Clover, signal femininity, such as ‘crying, cowering, screaming, fainting [or] trembling,’21 are here cunningly displaced onto men. Once more, Laura Mulvey and Carol J. Clover’s perspectives are defied, since according to their view, the female works as the spectacle par excellence, as the ‘bearer of the bleeding wound.’22 Conversely, in this context, the bearers of the wound are the male characters, not Erin. Similarly, Leatherface (the monster with the chainsaw), who becomes disfigured by a disease he contracts during his childhood, can also be seen as an embodiment of the wound-as-spectacle. By this token, if the ‘wound’ is feminine, then, in a subversive fashion, all the male characters are feminised because they have all been wounded. This feminisation of male characters turns them into objects, mimicking the cinematic role traditionally afforded to girls. As Vera Dika remarks, not only women, but in general all ‘[t]he young victims of the stalker film are often presented as sexual objects.’23 Actually, the dismantled plastic dolls that Erin and her friends find in a dilapidated building they come across, while waiting for the sheriff to arrive signify, in figurative terms, the reduction of these characters to objects. In this way, and to a certain extent, these dolls double the characters on a psychoanalytic

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playground, the young party of the The Texas Chainsaw Massacre can be said to work as his private toys.

Unlike her frivolous friends, whose sole interest is in having a good time, Erin represents conscientiousness in the group; she possesses an awareness that the others do not. Her friends seem alienated from the real world, which gives them a sort of naiveté; they are fascinated by the allure inherent in all the transgressions they are liable to commit and, therefore, they do not consider the consequences of their actions. Contrary to the majority of her friends, Erin knows how to read the signs presented in the visual narrative and how to interpret them; she is the one who actively participates in the unfolding of the story, meaning that the narrative advances due to her suspicions and subsequent interaction with the villain. She is the one who feels that something is not right, a fact that equips her with an effective sixth sense and an accurate ‘feminine intuition.’ Another important characteristic that contributes to stressing Erin’s femininity is the focus on her maternal instinct, which- in this remake- is particularly highlighted.24 Indeed, male spectators have to come to terms with the fact that she is in fact a woman, a woman that despite being capable of holding weapons is also capable of holding babies.

Interestingly, in Marcus Nispel’s remake, there is a striking new scene that parodies fixed gendered positions. In it, Sheriff Hoyt asks Morgan to assume the role of the dead girl transported in the van,25 forcing him to emulate every gesture she had made prior to her suicide. The boy, threatened by the Sheriff’s gun, is then subjected to a kind of rape, because the Sheriff makes him put the gun inside his mouth, almost as a simulation of oral sex. Therefore, in this particular ironic, but highly tense scene, the male character under a male threat and in order to survive, is compelled to assume a feminine position on the grounds that he must display a feminine role. This process of feminisation that Morgan undergoes undermines and parodies Clover’s theory, which sees brave women as males in disguise. In this scene, the male body actually is the sexual spectacle on display.

When pondering gender-related issues, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre insinuates that society is fundamentally distorted, since the patriarchal system, which serves as its foundation, appears fraught with flaws. The Sheriff, who stands as a symbol of a decayed patriarchy that refuses to evolve, clearly states in the film that his mission is to protect and serve; however, the spectator soon finds out that he is merely a sadistic man, devoid of any sense of justice. As Sarah Trecansky wisely argues, many slasher films show that ‘to trust in adult father figures, no matter how much it is desired, is coded dangerous.’26

It is important to point out that little attention has been paid to the fact that at the moment when their eyes meet, Leatherface is wearing Erin’s boyfriend’s face as a mask to cover his facial deformity. This situation metaphorically points to some important aspects: first, the boyfriend who starts as a prince can well end up, after marriage, being a ‘monster;’ second, it means that Leatherface stands for male power, eager to dominate and penetrate everything that he can with his waving


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chainsaw. Figuratively, it works as a wake-up call since, at that moment, Erin seems to acknowledge, the potential risks that marriage can entail, namely that by marrying Kemper, she might turn herself into a passive housewife, a model of femininity that she seems to reject. Moreover, taken in this light, the home, as a symbol of domesticity, acquires terrible undertones: it is no place of bliss, but a place that produces monsters. As the film shows, Leatherface’s lair is filled with corpses and other remains, which metaphorically point to a domestic scenario in which women are liable to become asphyxiated and doomed to meet a kind of figurative death: they are turned into passive women, busy with domestic affairs, eternally excluded from adventure. In this context, we can say that Erin’s battle is against these patriarchal symbols that oppress women’s autonomy, and which are here figuratively displayed by the disfigured body of Leatherface.

Carol J. Clover, drawing on a psychoanalytic background provided by Freud’s theories, claims that the slasher film resolves man’s castration anxiety either by doing away with the woman character, or by phallicising her, so that she is able to destroy the villain. However, according to Barbara Creed, this sub-genre ‘actively seeks to arouse castration anxiety in relation to the issue of whether or not the woman is castrated.’27 Creed adds that it achieves its aim by ‘representing woman in the twin roles of castrated and castrator.’28 It is precisely this later embodiment, woman-as-castrator that prevails in our memories when the film reaches its end. Given this ambiguous scenario, the male audience vacillates: although they display signals that point to an identification with the Final Girl, they might actually fear her castrating power.

In this vein, the hitchhiker girl who commits suicide inside the group’s van, appears to work as a double for Erin: if the latter had not been so skillful, she could have ended dead like the first, who appears, purposefully depicted in a summer short-sleeved dress, in order to enhance her femininity and underlying vulnerability. This girl, to whom the group gives a lift, tells them, in a prophetic voice, that soon they will all be dead. Without being able to cope with the events she witnessed, when she had been kidnapped by the cannibal family, she, in a kind of erotic and unexpected gesture, opens her legs and pulls a gun out from beneath her dress. That the gun is lodged in her sexual organs equates the vagina with a weapon, illustrating Barbara Creed’s theory that sees the feminine character as someone liable to castrate and not as a mere castrated victim.29 Within this frame, Erin fighting Leatherface with a weapon does not necessarily make her a phallic woman; above all, it transforms her into the prototype of the female castrator. Actually, we must bear in mind that the fact that Erin defies the social code of femininity somehow transforms her into a kind of feminine monster. In this regard, Leatherface can be said to work as a mirror projection for Erin: armed with the chainsaw, he truly embodies the monstrosity of the vagina dentata.30

To summarise, we can argue that the slasher film is ultimately capable of embracing a feminist discourse ‘by restaging the relationship between women and

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violence as not only one of danger in which women are the objects of violence but also as a pleasurable one in which women retaliate to become the agents of violence and defeat the aggressors.’31 Erin is determined not to become just a screaming terrified girl, a mere body to be slashed and exhibited as spectacle in the slasher’s shop-window. Being courageous, she really defies Leatherface, begging him to chase her, so that she can catch him in the end, in an attitude that evidences fearlessness. In this fashion, we can say that Erin’s behaviour bears some resemblance with the title of Britney Spears song ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time;’ once enraged, the Final Girl does not care if she is beaten by the aggressor, as long as she is given the opportunity to fight him back. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, both the film’s director and screenwriter have subverted the rules of the game, endowing Erin with agency: by refusing the roles played out by her counterparts, she refuses to be the body that is solely made of meat, and which will be ultimately turned into an eroticised corpse. She is the one who survives and her scars mean more than simple wounds; they represent a text of power and do tell a tale of survival.

Notes

1 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, dir. Tobe Hooper (Austin, Texas: Vortex, 1974). DVD. 2 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, dir. Marcus Nispel (Austin, Texas: New Line, 2003). DVD. 3 Carol J. Clover, ‘Her Body, Himself’, in The Horror Reader, ed. Ken Gelder (London and New York: Routledge, 2010). 4 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). 5 Sarah Trencansky, ‘Final Girls and Terrible Youth: Transgression in 1980s Slasher Horror’, Journal of Popular Film and Television 29, No. 2 (2001): 73-63. 6 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 833-844. 7 Clover, ‘Her Body’, 296. 8 Ibid., 300. 9 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. 10 Clover, ‘Her Body’, 301. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13Ibid., 298. 14 Peter Hutchings, The Horror Film (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2004), 205.


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15 See Joan Rivière, ‘Womanliness and the Masquerade’, in Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality, ed. Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek (New Haven: Rowman and Littlefield, 1966), 219-209. 16 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 133-134. 17 Howard R. Bloch and Frances Ferguson. Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1989), 221. 18 Tony Williams, ‘Trying to Survive the Darker Side: 1980s Family Horror’, in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 164. 19 Christopher Sharrett and Barry K. Grant, The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 254. 20 Isabel C. Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (Albany: State University of New York, 1997), 75. 21 Clover, ‘Her Body’, 300. 22 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure ’, 57. 23 Vera Dika, Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the Films of the Stalker Cycle (Cranbury, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press: 1990), 89. 24 Before abandoning the town, Erin rescues a baby from one of the cannibal families. This baby had belonged to the last family they slaughtered. 25 In the beginning of the film, Erin and her friends give a lift to a girl that ends up committing suicide in their van. 26 Sarah Trencansky, ‘Final Girls and Terrible Youth: Transgression in 1980s Slasher Horror’, Journal of Popular Film and Television 29, No. 2 (2001): 68. 27 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 127. 28 Creed, The Monstrous Feminine, 127. 29 Ibid., 124. 30 Ibid., 107. 31 Pinedo, Recreational Terror, 87.

Bibliography

Bloch, Howard, and Frances Ferguson, eds. Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy. London: University of California Press, 1989. Clover, Carol J. ‘Her Body, Himself’. In The Horror Reader, edited by Ken Gelder, 307–294. London and New York: Routledge, 2010.

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Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Dika, Vera. Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the Films of the Stalker Cycle. Cranbury, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990. Hutchings, Peter. The Horror Film. Harlow: Pearson Education, 2004. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Mulvey, Laura. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. In Feminism and Film Theory, edited by Constance Penley, 57–68. New York: Routledge, 1988. Pinedo, Isabel Cristina. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. Albany: State University of New York, 1997. Rivière, Joan. ‘Womanliness and the Masquerade’. In Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality, edited by Hendrik M. Ruitnebeek, 219–209. New Haven: Rowman and Littlefield, 1966. Sharret, Christopher, and Barry K. Grant. The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. —––, eds. Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2004. Trencansky, Sarah. ‘Final Girls and Terrible Youth: Transgression in 1980s Slasher Horror’. Journal of Popular Film and Television 29, No. 2 (2001): 73–63. Williams, Tony. ‘Trying to Survive the Darker Side: 1980s Family Horror’. In The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 180–164. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

Filmography

Hooper, Tobe, dir. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Austin, Texas: Vortex, 1974. DVD.


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Nispel, Marcus, dir. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Austin, Texas: New Line, 2003. DVD. Elisabete Lopes is an English Language Assistant Lecturer at the Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal. She completed her Masters Degree in English Studies in 2003 with a dissertation entitled Women, Mothers and Monsters: The Feminine Shadow behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Her current areas of research are related to the Gothic genre, namely women’s studies and visual culture. At present she is writing her PhD thesis, also in the field of Gothic studies.

Men’s and Women’s Accounts of Panic


Abstract Sociologists and feminists have offered a sound critique of medically-reified and purely quantitative approaches to panic disorder, at the same time as they have generally taken the statistics on at face value, conducting interpretive research with women because panic has been reported to be a gender-specific problem. Accordingly, there is an absence of sociological research that considers men’s interpretations and experiences of panic. This chapter reports on a research project in which we use data from 22 in-depth interviews, conducted with Canadian women and men who self-identify as suffering from Panic Disorder with Agoraphobia, to explore how women and men employ panic to communicate, construct, manage and resist particular kinds of gendered identity. Our findings suggest that women and men’s understandings of their experiences with panic are influenced by dominant expectations of masculine and feminine expressions of fear and that these expectations are reinforced through the medically-institutionalised claim that panic is a ‘woman’s problem.’ Key Words: Panic, gender, interpretive methods, masculinity, mental health, selfhood, statistics.


This chapter focuses on one aspect of a larger project on the relationship between panic and gender identity. The common view is that panic is a medical phenomenon with a strong gender expression. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) IV-TR defines a Panic Attack as a discrete period of intense fear or discomfort, in which four or more of a list of symptoms - including choking, dizziness, and fear of dying - develop abruptly, peaking within 10 minutes.1 The diagnosis of Panic Disorder involves having experienced recurrent, unexpected Panic Attacks followed by at least one month of worry or anxiety about having an additional attack. Since it is considered usual for agoraphobic avoidance to develop alongside Panic Disorder, these once-separate disorders are combined as Panic Disorder with Agoraphobia, a condition to which our research participants colloquially referred as ‘panic.’ In Canada, 21 percent of the population are estimated to have experienced at least one Panic Attack in their lifetimes, and 3.7 percent have experienced full-blown Panic Disorder.2

The hegemonic view of panic is important to our analysis because it illuminates the discursive authority of medicine, which has institutionalised the idea that panic is a gender category. Women are estimated to make up some 62 to 70 percent of


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those diagnosed with Panic Disorder with Agoraphobia.3 The disorder thus appears distinct from certain other anxiety disorders, including social anxiety disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder, which do not appear gender-related.4

Sociologically-inflected research probing the gender gap has largely focussed on Fodor’s hypothesis that women’s identification with sex role stereotypes may account for their greater levels of fearful dependence.5 While acknowledging the role of gendered expectations, our inquiry eschews psychological approaches that reduce individuals to bundles of traits. Instead, it is interpretively-oriented, focusing on how research participants actively engage with, incorporate, and resist cultural meanings of their experiences and their ‘selves’ as ‘people who panic.’ We note that most of the interpretive studies on panic to date have accepted the statistical findings as definitive, and therefore have focused on mapping the experiences of women - the more afflicted gender. However, we study both women and men, asking how dominant cultural inscriptions of femininity and masculinity,6 signally including the statistics’ own contribution to perceptions of panic as inherently a ‘woman’s problem,’ influence research participants’ identities and subjective experiences of panic.7 Although in the results reported here, we focus on gender differences, it is important to note that men’s and women’s experiences considerably overlap. 2. Methods

Between 2001 and 2006, thirteen women self-reporting significant experience with Panic Disorder with Agoraphobia were recruited through snowball sampling and postering in Toronto, and participated in one hour in-depth interviews. In 2010 and 2011, nine men were interviewed, having been recruited by similar means in two small Nova Scotia towns, as well as in the city of Halifax. The sample was all white and predominantly middle class. They ranged in age from 19 to 71 years. All either held or were working on undergraduate degrees, while five held post-graduate degrees. The majority worked full-time, four were full-time students, one was a retiree, and another was an unemployed work-seeker. 3. Results A. Gender and the Spatial Structure of Panic

From previous research, we know that women’s panic descriptions have a marked spatial component, reflecting an experience of alienation in social, public space.8 This was confirmed by women participants, such as Maggie:

Going on the bus is terrible. I can’t help but keep my eyes on the door and when it closes, I can feel myself starting to sweat and feeling very scared. I start thinking, “I have to get off this bus and get home right now.”


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Other women participants routinely spoke of the alienation and emotional difficulties of simply being present in social spaces, not only because of the quantity of people in such spaces, but also because of the quality of relationships possible in them. Our interviews corroborate earlier studies of women, which conclude that panic is a crisis of subjectivity related to the particular quality of social connectivity with others.9

Primed with the finding that women readily and continually described panic experiences using a grammar of an alienated self-in-space, we asked men about the spaces in which they experienced their panic. Their responses differed conspicuously. Although they employed spatial references as commonly as did the women, the men systematically resisted the notion that a spatial structure underlay their panic. For example, when Kevin was asked to describe the places in which he is most likely to have a panic attack, he replied:

I had to go to a meeting - actually, I go to meetings often with my work - but the other day it was really bad. I was stuck in this boardroom with all these people, you know, important people to my work. I really struggled to hold it together and the whole time was worried I would mess up in front of these guys - make a fool of myself, you know?

When Pablo was asked, ‘Can you explain what it was about that place [the

restaurant in which he’d experienced repeated panic attacks], or was it also other restaurants?’ he replied,

I can have a good time going out but if there’s people around me or even if I am thinking about how others are thinking about me, I can’t relax. Actually, it’s when I start to relax is sometimes when I get hit with a panic attack. It’s like a message saying, “If you relax, you’re going to fall apart in front of these people.”

Whereas the women’s discourse emphasised panic as a problem of their social

alienation, of ‘being present’ in relation to others in social space, Pablo, Kevin, and the other men communicated panic as arising from social competition, based on a fear that others would negatively evaluate their social performances. Thus, while the men referenced space in describing contexts in which they experienced panic, their relationship to these spaces was not spatially ‘mapped.’ Unlike the women, they did not problematise how to be in and occupy a geography of social space. Instead, the men emphasised where they stood - that is, their social positionality, or where on the ladder they stood within social space. In this sense, the men took their presence as ‘selves’ in social space for granted, instead focussing on the gendered problem of maintaining a particular social rank within their social encounters. The


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men’s panic structures are consistent with a competitive model of selfhood, in which concerns about location within competitive hierarchies reflect North American hegemonic masculinity, rooted in values such as aggression, control, competition and the devaluation of displays of fear, weakness, uncertainty, and other emotions.10

While we found strong evidence of men’s panic discourse, reflecting such dominant notions of masculine behaviour, the men also challenged these gender norms through their panic discourses. For example, when Sam indicated, ‘The trouble is the pressure. I have to always be the one in charge and the best at what I do and that’s what the panic is all about,’ he used panic discourse to trouble gender norms of competitiveness and the pressure to ‘be in charge.’ Liam said, ‘If I am not a presence, then I am going to be kicked off the island.’ His reference to the television show Survivor articulates his sense of being in a precarious, performative social location. Liam was not alone; each of the men expressed such a sense. Such statements illustrate a complexity in the men’s engagement with dominant discourses on masculinity. B. Accommodating vs. Battling Panic

Although the women emphasised how difficult panic ( and simply ‘being’ in social space) was to manage, with three of the 13 indicating that they felt suicidal at times, they also suggested that they were receptive to aspects of panic, constructing it as an occasional source of helpful social and emotional messages. In what we termed ‘accommodation discourse,’ women spoke of ‘listening’ to their panic, of ‘taking it seriously,’ of panic acting ‘like a guide’ - a perspective quite distinct from passively accepting panic. These women came to relate to their panic over time, as, ‘a part of who I am so I have to you know, pay attention or it gets worse’ (Liz).

In contrast, the men often externalised their panic as an enemy to be combated: ‘I have to be vigilant and in charge or this thing is going to take over my life,’ said Kevin. Jake offered that, ‘If I don’t keep fighting, I feel like it will swallow me whole.’ As Pollock has shown, invoking fighting in illness narratives is an effort to express a valued form of masculine selfhood that can be imagined as optimistic, powerful, warrior-like, and potentially heroic.11

Examining these comments, we found social norms shaping how, where, and when to feel certain emotions to inform how men and women in our study see themselves in relation to their fear.12 In particular, the differences in how women and men relate to panic as internal resource or external threat reflect essentialist gender ideologies that naturalise women’s emotionality, fearfulness, and willingness to be accommodating, in concert with men’s control, fearlessness, and aggression.13 Ironically, in appearing to adopt the dominant gender ideology, which paints them as fearful, even hysterical, the women studied were able to more favourably regard certain aspects of their generally vexatious panic-selves. In


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forcefully invoking panic as an external ‘enemy,’ the men produced a greater sense of identity under attack. This did not mean that the women were less affected by panic, or that their relationship to panic was somehow less debilitating. Rather, we note that both women and men draw upon dominant notions about feminine and masculine identity in making sense of, and experiencing, their panic. C. Panic as a Woman’s Problem We were surprised, for instance by the fluency of both men and women respondents in gendering panic as ‘a woman’s problem.’ They were not simply aware of statistics showing higher panic prevalence among women, but also believed panic to be an expression of an essential feminine self. Women in the sample drew dominant ideologies about women and emotionality into their self-concepts. Ainsley, an upper-middle class woman in her late 60s, told us,

Women are emotional. I know that’s a stereotype but there are good reasons for stereotypes. Mainly they are true. And I have made peace with that part of myself so now it’s about being careful and paying attention to what I need to stay even.

While the women’s accommodating discourse might have seemed empowered and positive in our earlier reference to it, Ainsley’s statement reveals that her accommodation stems from regarding herself as naturally, femininely unstable.

The men held a like view, orienting to panic as a feminisation of selfhood that they were fighting to expunge. For example, Theo compared his trembling voice to that of ‘a scared little girl,’ while Kevin expounded:

I worry a lot, like I think I am turning into a chick …. I don’t want to get emotional and second-guess what you are [i.e., what I am], like, “Am I a chick?” To be a father, a friend, a husband, a CEO, is thrown into question. I am not a real man. … Guys don’t think they or other guys are gonna get a mental condition like this. […] Not only am I having a hard time, I’ve got a woman’s disease.

That men and women abide by gendered cultural codes may well be

influencing the prevalence statistics being used to denote panic as predominantly a woman’s disorder. Cranford, Eisenberg and Serras have suggested that women may be more likely to present to physicians, while men are more likely to binge drink to manage attacks.14 Our findings show how these possibilities may be borne out in women’s and men’s understandings of their selves and of their panic disorder. Because women appear to more readily identify panic as a persistent ‘part of myself’ and not something that renders their gender identities shamefully


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suspect, they may be more willing to tell others of their experiences and to seek treatment.

The men, in contrast, see not talking about panic as self-protective. Uniformly preferring to consume alcohol and street drugs, substances that have a well-known place in the understanding of normative masculinity, the men we spoke to describe their strategies as ‘heroic’ inasmuch as they were able to take on the opponent - panic - single-handedly.15 Men’s resistance to seeking medical care may well reflect gendered patterns in which ‘help-seeking’ is perceived as a concession to the enemy, a loss of autonomy and a gendered failing. For both men and women, how they understand, construct and experience panic appears to have much to do with their relationship to powerful gender norms. 4. Commentary

Our interpretive approach enables a systematic analysis of interview data that reflects constructions of panic differentiated along gender lines, not because ‘women’ and ‘men’ are distinct, fixed gender categories pre-dating social interaction, but because our participants bring meanings to their panic that arise out of a social context rife with cultural expectations about gendered behaviour.16 These powerful expectations are communicated, in part, by the prevalence statistics, to which we have alluded several times. Our intent has not been to repair these statistics, so much as to observe how the broad cultural acceptance of panic as ‘a woman’s problem,’ so profoundly supported by the statistics, surfaces in both women’s and men’s descriptions of a self that panics. This finding helps to make sense not only of the different structures that women and men use to approach panic, but also of how they treat, understand and employ panic as an expression of selfhood, one which informs their gender identity constructions.

Our participants’ discourses about panic are produced within a set of power relations governing what is sayable or thinkable about the gendered self.17 At the same time, our participants are no mere cultural dopes passively reproducing dominant gender ideologies.18 As in Victor’s comment, ‘I wasn’t allowed to show my feelings. I still felt them but just had to bottle them up. That’s wrong to do that to boys and men, too’ - we see ways in which participants also challenge these power relations, disrupting social expectations of gender identity and their relationship to fear and panic. Evidence of resistance, as well as men’s and women’s differential incorporation of gender norms into panic discourse suggests that ‘panic’ is indeed strongly gender-expressive - not only because the category institutionalises cultural norms around gender and fear, but also because men and women who experience panic actively produce meanings about themselves in relation to such norms. We cannot effectively understand panic unless this complex relationship is explored further.


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Notes

1 American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, Text Revision (Washington: American Psychiatric Association, 2000), 431-439. 2 Statistics Canada, ‘Mental Health and Well-Being’, Canadian Community Health Survey, Cycle 1.2 (2002), accessed June 1, 2008, http://www.statcan.ca/english/concepts/health/cycle1-2/index.htm. 3 Ibid., 35. 4 Carmen McLean and Emily Anderson, ‘Brave Men and Timid Women? A Review of the Gender Differences in Fear and Anxiety’, Clinical Psychology Review 29 (2009): 496-505. 5 Iris Fodor, ‘The Phobic Syndrome in Women: Implications for Treatment’, in Women in Therapy: New Psychotherapies for a Changing Society, eds. Violet Franks and Vasanti Burtle (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1974), 132-168. 6 R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 67-76. 7 Dorothy Smith, The Conceptual Practices of Power (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 107. 8 For examples, see Lisa Capps and Elinor Ochs, Constructing Panic: The Discourse of Agoraphobia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); Joyce Davidson, Phobic Geographies: The Phenomenology and Spatiality of Identity (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2003). 9 Joyce Davidson, ‘Fear and Trembling in the Mall: Women, Agoraphobia, and Body Boundaries’, in Geographies of Women’s Health, eds. Isabel Dyck, Nancy Lewis and Sara McLafferty (New York: Routledge, 2001), 211-243. 10 Connell, Masculinities, 68 and 164. 11 Kristian Pollock, ‘Attitude of Mind as a Means of Resisting Illness’, in Worlds of Illness: Biographical and Cultural Perspectives on Health and Disease, ed. A. Radley (London: Routledge, 1993), 62-66. 12 Arlie Russell Hochschild, ‘Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure’, American Journal of Sociology 85 (1979): 566. 13 Elizabeth Stanko, ‘Safety Talk: Conceptualizing Women’s Risk Assessment as a Technology of the Soul’, Theoretical Criminology 1 (1997): 479. 14 James Cranford, Daniel Eisenberg and Alisha Serras, ‘Substance Use Behaviours, Mental Health Problems, and Use of Mental Health Services in a Probability Sample of College Students’, Addictive Behaviours 34 (2009): 138. 15 Connell, Masculinities, 263. 16 Ibid., 69. 17 Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practice (London: Sage, 1997), 45.

http://www.statcan.ca/english/concepts/health/cycle1-2/index.htm

http://search0.scholarsportal.info.cat1.lib.trentu.ca:8080/ids70/p_search_form.php?field=au&query=serras+alisha+m&log=literal&SID=9f24dc6b152a4d7ec55a0b5415f973fe


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18 Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1967), 35.

Bibliography American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 4th Edition. Text Revision. Washington: American Psychiatric Association, 2000. Capps, Lisa, and Elinor Ochs. Constructing Panic: The Discourse of Agoraphobia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Connell, R. W. Masculinities. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. Cranford, James, Daniel Eisenberg, and Alisha Serras. ‘Substance Use Behaviours, Mental Health Problems, and Use of Mental Health Services in a Probability Sample of College Students’. Addictive Behaviours 34 (2009): 134–145. Davidson, Joyce. ‘Fear and Trembling in the Mall: Women, Agoraphobia, and Body Boundaries’. In Geographies of Women’s Health, edited by Isabel Dyck, Nancy Lewis, and Sara McLafferty, 211–243. New York: Routledge, 2001. Davidson, Joyce. Phobic Geographies: The Phenomenology and Spatiality of Identity. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2003. Fodor, Iris. ‘The Phobic Syndrome in Women: Implications for Treatment’. In Women in Therapy: New Psychotherapies for a Changing Society, edited by Violet Franks, and Vasanti Burtle, 132–168. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1974. Garfinkel, Harold. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1967. Hall, Stuart. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practice. London: Sage, 1997. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. ‘Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure’. American Journal of Sociology 85 (1979): 551–575. McLean, Carmen, and Emily Anderson. ‘Brave Men and Timid Women? A Review of the Gender Differences in Fear and Anxiety’. Clinical Psychology Review 29 (2009): 496–505.


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Pollock, Kristian. ‘Attitude of Mind as a Means of Resisting Illness’. In Worlds of Illness: Biographical and Cultural Perspectives on Health and Disease, edited by Alan Radley, 49–70. London: Routledge, 1993. Smith, Dorothy. The Conceptual Practices of Power Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990. Stanko, Elizabeth. ‘Safety Talk: Conceptualizing Women’s Risk Assessment as a Technology of the Soul’. Theoretical Criminology 1 (1997): 479–499. Statistics Canada. ‘Mental Health and Well-Being’. Canadian Community Health Survey, Cycle 1.2 (2002). Accessed June 1, 2008. http://www.statcan.ca/english/concepts/health/cycle1-2/index.htm. Riley Olstead is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at St. Francis Xavier University. Her research focuses on the role of gender and the relationship among desire, aversion and fear. Katherine Bischoping is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at York University. She is a qualitative methodologist interested in approaches to narrative.

http://www.statcan.ca/english/concepts/health/cycle1-2/index.htm

Gothic Peter Pan

Ana González-Rivas Fernández and Alfonso Muñoz Corcuera

Abstract The character of Peter Pan evokes a variety of conceptual tensions, and it is this that makes him a complex figure. On the one hand, the intention of the writer, James M. Barrie - whose work Peter and Wendy1 celebrates its centenary this year, 2011 - was to write a children’s book, and with this in mind he imbued Peter with an aura of eternal joy. On the other hand, the novel springs from the author’s deepest concerns about the relationship between childhood and death, which lends the main character certain sinister traits. Setting aside the tone of what is after all a children’s book, therefore, Peter Pan reappears as a Gothic character who is finally assimilated into three well-known monsters of modernity: the ghost (Peter Pan as a dead child who is unaware of his own lifelessness), the vampire (the eternal child who needs the lives of others to keep on living), and the double or ‘doppelgänger’ (Pan as the reflection of a Captain Hook, tortured by the jokes and mockery of his childhood Ego). This Gothic reading of Peter Pan, recreated in many literary and cinematographic works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw2 to Stephen King’s ‘Children of the Corn,’3 or films such as Let the Right One In,4 The Lost Boys,5 or The Orphanage,6 opens the door to the study of the real-life narrative doubles of another character: Peter Llewelyn-Davies, the child who inspired the character of Peter Pan and who finally committed suicide due to his inability to escape his childhood literary shadow.

Key Words: Peter Pan, Gothic literature, ghost, vampire, double.

*****

Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand (‘The Stolen Child,’ William Butler Yeats)

1. Introduction

Beyond the tender and innocent image evoked by Peter Pan, James Barrie also used his character to give voice to his deepest concerns. This contained fear materialized in the character of Peter Pan, who embodied three Gothic monsters in disguise: the ghost, the vampire and the double. Such an interpretation implies a Gothic reading of the novel, with its undercurrent of Barrie’s anguish regarding the relationship between childhood and death.

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The story of Peter Pan is fundamentally based on a very important substratum of folklore where Classical and Celtic mythologies converge. As regards Classical mythology, the reference character is the god Pan, a wild and libidinous satyr who had the power to strike absolute terror in his victims, a terror which came to be named ‘panic.’ The syncretism between Peter Pan and the god Pan is a complete one, which stretches from the identification of the name itself to a way of dressing and other elements, such as the pipe and the goat.7 Celtic mythology, on the other hand, is ever present in the fairy world recreated on the island of Neverland. In Celtic folklore, it is the fairies who receive the souls of dead children, a psychopompic mission which has its parallel in Peter Pan, who is always surrounded by ‘lost boys.’ These mythological beings, moreover, dwell with the dead in the Other World, a place sometimes situated on an island called Tír na nÓg, or ‘the land of eternal youth,’ a clear parallel with Neverland. Like Barrie’s novel itself, these lethal fairies are at once sweet and doom-laden, and with their Gothic connotations they become naturally integrated into a tale that attracts a broad audience of young readers. Perhaps this is because, as Yeats warns in his poem The Stolen Child, ‘the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand,’8 and sometimes death can come as a relief, even for children.

2. Peter Pan as a Ghost

The most clearly Gothic identification is that of Peter Pan with a ghost, an idea which is present in the very Celtic substratum of Barrie’s work. We have already mentioned the psychopompic role played by Peter in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens;9 on the other hand, the identification of Peter Pan with a bird, and specifically with a swallow, also harks back to this same idea, since in Celtic mythology this creature is associated with death and the ability of the soul to reach the other world through flight. As this relation suggests, Peter Pan is probably a dead child who has not been completely transformed into a swallow, as the others have been: a ghost, in short, trapped between two worlds, since he does not accept his death, or, at least, is unaware of it. Like other ghosts, who tend to return to the place they lived while they were alive, Peter also tries to go back to the window of his own nursery,10 and it is then that he feels the most acute disappointment: his mother has closed the window, and a new child occupies Peter’s bed and now receives all the maternal love. Peter thinks his mother has forgotten him, but in reality his mother has given up waiting because, unlike Peter, she does know that her son is dead and is not going to return. Barrie here develops one of the topics of Gothic literature: the ghost who is not conscious of his death and keeps interacting with others as if he were alive. One might recall, for instance, the character of the psychologist Malcolm Crow in the well-known film The Sixth Sense,11 who also believes he is being ignored by his wife, but is in fact already dead.

Placing yet more emphasis on the fact that Peter Pan is a dead child, Barrie himself reveals in Kensington Gardens the headstones of two graves with the


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abbreviations ‘W. St. M.’ and ‘P. P.,’ which, according to the narrator, stand for the children Walter Stephen Matthews and Phoebe Phelps.12 The headstones are in fact two milestones that indicate the distance between the churches of West St Mary and Paddington, but nevertheless the coincidence of the letters P. P. with the initials of Peter Pan is curious, and perhaps not at all unintentional. At this point the reader is offered the opportunity to consider whether perhaps the whole adventure has been a journey to the Underworld, or even a metaphor for death itself, since, as Peter Pan himself points out, ‘to die will be an awfully big adventure.’13 On the other hand, as has already been suggested, Peter Pan is not only a ghost, but also a gravedigger, a modern-day Charon who escorts children to their tomb, as the narrator himself knows.14

But if Peter Pan is in fact a ghost, then how is it possible that Wendy and her brothers can see him? Here Barrie has recourse to one of the common themes of Gothic literature, whereby it is common for children to see spectres and interact with them, an ability that disappears once the children grow up. Peter, however, does not grow up, but instead lives in Neverland, the land of eternal youth, given that, as Barrie knew too well, it is only the dead who remain forever young. There can be little doubt, as has often been pointed out by the critics, that one of the key images behind Peter Pan is that of David, Barrie’s elder brother, who died in a terrible accident when he was thirteen, and remained a child in the minds of all those who knew him.15 David, the eternal boy child, stole from Barrie the love of his mother, whose obsession for her dead child led her to forget her little James.

It may be inferred, therefore, that it is not Peter Pan who flies out from his window at the beginning of the novel,16 but his soul, en route to the world of the dead, situated in Kensington Gardens or in Neverland. If we also consider that two characteristics of the Peter Pan of Peter Pan or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up are his mysterious absence of weight17 and the fact that nobody can touch him,18 then it appears even more likely that Peter Pan is a spectre after all.

3. Peter Pan as a Vampire

If we posit that Peter Pan could in fact be a dead child, it then becomes possible to point out parallels not only with the figure of the ghost, but also with other examples of the living dead, such as the vampire. Besides this immortality, Peter shares certain other characteristics with vampires, such as the ability to fly and the complex relationship with his own reflection - either in his shadow or in the mirror - which could suggest the absence of a soul and, consequently, the presence of evil.19 Some scenes also show how bloodthirsty Peter and the ‘lost boys’ can be: they do not hesitate to kill pirates or any other enemy when necessary, because the truth is that on the island ‘all wanted blood.’20

Leaving aside other characteristics that they have in common, Peter and the vampires share a need to suck out the life of others in order to survive. Just as vampires need human blood in order to keep up their strength, so Peter needs

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Wendy’s tales in order to endure the burden of his existence.21 Both need to turn others into the same state as their own in order to escape their loneliness: Peter Pan is, after all, a misfit, unadapted to the world, a kind of monster. His inability to grow up entails an alteration of the passage of time which everyone is subject to, obliging him to watch others - especially his beloved Wendy - leave him in order to become adults. It is not that Peter Pan does not want to grow up: the problem is that, even if he wanted to, he would be unable to.22 He is a freak who, if he did not live in an imaginary country, would be a victim of mistreatment, including social exclusion, hatred, aggression and scientific experiments with the aim of revealing his secret.23

In the film The Lost Boys,24 Peter Pan becomes wholly a vampire. In this film, a group of teenage vampires tries to change Michael, the protagonist of the movie, into one of their own kind. However, these youngsters turn out to be merely the followers of their vampire boss, a middle-aged man whose real aim is to find a woman who will accept being vampirised and become the mother of his forever lost boys. The similarities between Peter Pan and two other cinematographic vampire children is also notable: little Claudia in Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles,25 who wants to change a woman into a vampire so that she can be her mother, and Eli, the main character in Let the Right One In,26 a female version of Peter who finds her way into Oskar’s life as she searches for a new lover who will help her to feed herself, since she needs to find a substitute for her previous lover, who is now too old. This is a reflection of the situation lived by Peter, who substitutes Wendy for Jane when the former becomes too old to fly to Neverland. This aforementioned detachment from the temporal dimension turns Peter, as well as Eli, into tragic monsters, not only as regards their need for blood and death, but also in their inhumanity and inability to establish a relationship with other children within the parameters of eternity. They are forced to accept their condition as monsters.

4. Peter Pan as a Double

As far as the relationship between Peter Pan and the lost boys is concerned, Peter is a ghost surrounded by dead children, and as regards his relationship with Wendy, he is a vampire who needs the girl’s vital energy. On the other hand, if we look at his relationship with Captain Hook, the theme of the double emerges.27 The fact that the motif of the double appears in the story of Peter Pan is in no way exceptional, since, as Otto Rank points out, this theme is usually linked to the desire for eternal youth and the fear of ageing and death. In particular, the double is related to an extreme form of narcissism, an intense love of one’s self as it appears at a certain stage of life, which responds to an irrational fear to any change that might occur with the passage of time.28 This narcissism takes the shape of a double which represents that past self and becomes detached from the current self, attempting to replace it. In Gothic literature there are several examples of this kind


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of process, including two masterpieces, The Picture of Dorian Gray29 and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.30 From this point of view, Peter Pan might be understood as a young Captain Hook, whose fear of the passage of time and of death crystallises in the eternal child, a symbol of his child self who tries to take his place. This is evident, on the one hand, in the many traits shared by Peter Pan and Hook, and, on the other, in the suitability of the story’s plot to the structure of Rank’s theme.

The similarities between the two characters start with their childlike nature, shown in their desire to see Wendy as their mother. Likewise, both Peter and Hook are capricious and behave in a despotic fashion with their followers: the lost boys have to do everything that their captain orders, even if the rules are absurd or unfair, such as dressing in ridiculous bear furs in order that they do not look like Peter,31 or changing size so that they can use the door assigned to each of them.32 Peter’s punishments are also disproportionate:

The boys on the island vary, of course, in numbers, according as they get killed and so on; and when they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out.33

The phrase ‘thins them out’ is ambiguous, since it may be interpreted in a

number of ways. It may mean that Peter shrinks the children when they grow up, so that they become small again, or it might refer to the possibility of Peter expelling the children from Neverland. It could also mean that he kills them, and this is indeed our preferred option, considering the context of the sentence. It is a sinister idea, but understandable from the perspective that Peter puts an end to the lives of those children who refuse to obey, in the same way that Hook treats the pirates like dogs and kills them when they disobey.34 This gloomy idea of murder committed by children also underlies other Gothic works, such as Stephen King’s tale ‘Children of the Corn,’ in which a group of children seizes power in the American town of Gatlin after murdering all the adults, who are sacrificed in honour of a demonic god ‘who walks behind the rows.’35 As appears to be the case with Peter in Neverland, the children of Gatlin are sacrificed by their own community once they reach adulthood in their nineteenth year, in order to perpetuate forever the bloodthirsty society of children.36 This idea is not new within the tradition of Gothic literature, where the world of childhood is always surrounded by a particular atmosphere of doom and gloom, as can be seen in many novels and films, such as the novel The Turn of the Screw, or the film The Orphanage. The reason for this interest is that the contrast produced by the juxtaposition of childhood innocence and terror has a bloodcurdling effect, and this is of course something that Gothic fiction has always been adept in developing.

Other aspects that point to the relationship between Peter Pan and Hook are the fact that Peter is the captain of the lost boys, and that, like Peter, who plays the rustic pipe - the symbol of his identification with the Greek god - Hook is also a

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gifted player of the flute. Both characters also possess a sexual ambiguity, because, despite being male, in the theatre Peter was played by a woman, whereas in Hook ‘there was a touch of the feminine.’37 However, the two most important identifications that lead us to view Peter as the double of Captain Hook appear in the two scenes where both characters appear face to face. In the first one of these, it is said that Peter Pan ‘can imitate the captain’s voice so perfectly that even the author has a dizzy feeling that at times he was really Hook,’38 and in the second, Peter is depicted just after the death of the pirate ‘on the poop in Hook’s hat and cigars, and with a small iron claw.’39 The novel Peter and Wendy extends this idea even more, showing how Captain Pan treats the lost boys like dogs, as Hook used to do, and orders Slightly to be whipped only ‘for looking perplexed when told to take soundings’40 - yet another example of Peter’s despotic character and his disproportionate punishments. This final substitution of the child for the pirate highlights the structure of the theme of the double proposed by Rank, in which the reflection gets closer to the original person and tries to occupy his place, thus reinforcing this particular reading of Barrie’s story.

The identification between the figures of Peter Pan and Hook apart, this theme of the double is present in many other aspects of Barrie’s work, even transcending the dividing line between reality and fiction. The reflection of James’s brother David, the dead boy who never grows up, in Peter Pan has already been mentioned, but James Barrie himself lurks behind his characters too, now appearing as Peter Pan - since he also wanted to remain a child forever, in order to regain his mother’s love - and now as Hook, the adult who, in the end, is still a child, and whose identity hides a very important secret: ‘Hook was not his true name. To reveal who he really was would even at this date set the country in a blaze.’41 Moreover, Peter Pan himself is inspired by the real person Peter Llewelyn Davies, one of the children whom Barrie used to play with in Kensington Gardens, and whose life was conditioned, in spite of his own wishes, by this identification.42 Finally, the relationship of Peter Pan with his shadow should not be ignored: as well as relating Peter with the figure of the vampire, as was pointed out in the previous section, this reflection, or absence of a reflection, also symbolises a new double.43

5. Conclusions

As we have seen throughout this chapter, the several faces of the character of Peter Pan conceal within them many different readings of Barrie’s literary work which, far from being limited to the canon of children’s literature, is also well and truly part of the tradition of Gothic literature. Peter Pan expresses the sadness of a ghost trapped between two worlds, a state which even leads him to have dreams that are ‘more painful than the dreams of other boys.’44 He is a dark being of the night who, like the vampire, needs the vital energy of other children in order to keep on living. Finally, Peter is the child double of Captain Hook, whom he teases by reminding him of his adulthood, and whom he finally comes to substitute as a


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captain. These three Gothic monsters reflect many other kinds of relationships that the eternal child establishes with the different characters of the novel, providing evidence that, on occasions, terror does indeed hide behind a veneer of innocence.

Notes

1 James M. Barrie, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Peter and Wendy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 2 Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975). 3 Stephen King, ‘Children of the Corn’, in Night Shift, ed. Stephen King (New York: Signet, 1979). 4 Tomas Alfredson, dir., Let the Right One In (Låt den Rätte Komma In) (Sweden: Sandrew Metronome, 2008). 5 Joel Schummacher, dir., The Lost Boys (USA: Warner Bros, 1987). 6 Juan Antonio Bayona, dir., The Orphanage (El Orfanato) (Spain-Mexico: Warner Bros and Picturehouse, 2007). 7 See Alfonso Muñoz Corcuera, ‘Peter y Pan’, Cuadernos de Filología Clásica 28, No. 2 (2008): 145-166. 8 William Butler Yeats, ‘The Stolen Child’, in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Wordsworth Editions, 2000), 15. As well as the aforementioned thematic affinity, there is another significant relationship between this poem and Barrie’s work. Chapter 3 of Peter and Wendy, where Peter persuades the Darlings’ children to fly with him to Neverland, is entitled ‘Come Away, Come Away,’ which could be a reference to the famous stanza of Yeats’s poem with which this chapter begins, and which was published in 1886. 9 Barrie, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Peter and Wendy, 65. 10 Ibid., 40. 11 M. Night Shyamalan, dir., The Sixth Sense (USA: Hollywood Pictures, 1999). 12 Ibid., 65. 13 Ibid., 152. 14 This is evident when, at the end of his story, the narrator expresses a mysterious and sinister wish: ‘I do hope that Peter is not too ready with his spade. It is all rather sad.’ Ibid., 65. 15 See Andrew Birkin, J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005). 16 Barrie, Peter Pan, 12. 17 James M. Barrie, Peter Pan and Other Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 124. 18 Ibid., 98. 19 See Antonio Ballesteros González, Narciso y el Doble en la Literatura

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Fantástica Victoriana (Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 1998), 349-364. 20 Barrie, Peter Pan, 112. 21 Carlos Losilla, ‘El Vampiro y Peter Pan’, in Las Miradas de la Noche: Cine y Vampirismo, ed. Hilario Rodríguez (Madrid: Ocho y Medio, 2005), 261. 22 The original title chosen by Barrie for his play was Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Couldn’t Grow Up. However, the producer Charles Frohman advised him to change it to the definite Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, giving a different connotation to the main character (see Silvia Herreros de Tejada, Todos Crecen Menos Peter: La Creación del Mito de Peter Pan por J. M. Barrie (Madrid, Lengua de Trapo, 2009), 51-52)). 23 Jesús Palacios, ‘Peter Pan era un Freak: Sobre Infancias Eternas y Otros Infiernos’, in El Día del Niño: La Infancia como Territorio para el Miedo, ed. Rubén Lardín (Madrid: Valdemar, 2003), 74-76. 24 Schumacher, The Lost Boys. 25 Neil Jordan, dir., Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (USA: Geffen-Warner Bros, 1994). 26 Alfredson, Let the Right One In. 27 This aspect is developed more in detail by Alfonso Muñoz Corcuera in ‘The True Identity of Captain Hook’, in Barrie, Hook, and Peter Pan: Studies in Contemporary Myth, eds. Alfonso Muñoz Corcuera and Elisa T. Di Biase (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012). 28 Otto Rank, The Double (New York and London: New American Library, 1979), 77. 29 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (London: Penguin Books, 2003). 30 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1990). 31 Barrie, Peter Pan, 112. 32 Ibid., 133. 33 Ibid., 112. 34 Ibid., 198. 35 King, ‘Children of the Corn’, 267. 36 Another significant novel, The Lord of the Flies (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1965), by William Golding, stresses the idea of the cruelty which is associated with childhood and which becomes manifest when adults disappear from the scene. 37 Barrie, Peter Pan, 147-148. 38 Barrie, Peter Pan and Other Plays, 120. 39 Ibid.,146. 40 Barrie, Peter Pan, 206. 41 Ibid., 188.


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42 Some novels have fictionalised this fact, such as the recent Fantasmas de Kensington (Madrid: Neverland Ediciones, 2011), by J. D. Álvarez. 43 See Ballesteros González, Narciso y el Doble, 349-364. 44 Barrie, Peter Pan, 181.

Bibliography Álvarez, J. D. Fantasmas de Kensington. Madrid: Neverland Ediciones, 2011. Ballesteros González, Antonio. Narciso y el Doble en la Literatura Fantástica Victoriana. Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 1998. Barrie, James M. Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Peter and Wendy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. —––. Peter Pan and Other Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Birkin, Andrew. J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005. Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1965. Herreros de Tejada, Silvia. Todos Crecen Menos Peter: La Creación del Mito de Peter Pan por J. M. Barrie. Madrid: Lengua de trapo, 2009. James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975. King, Stephen. ‘Children of the Corn’. In Night Shift, 250–278. New York: Signet, 1979. Losilla, Carlos. ‘El Vampiro y Peter Pan’. In Las Miradas de la Noche: Cine y Vampirismo, edited by Hilario Rodríguez, 259–272. Madrid: Ocho y Medio, 2005. Muñoz Corcuera, Alfonso. ‘Peter y Pan’. Cuadernos de Filología Clásica 28, No. 2 (2008): 145–166. —––. ‘The True Identity of Captain Hook’. In Barrie, Hook, and Peter Pan: Studies in Contemporary Myth, edited by Alfonso Muñoz Corcuera, and Elisa T. Di Biase, 66–90. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.

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Palacios, Jesús. ‘Peter Pan era un Freak: Sobre Infancias Eternas y Otros Infiernos’. In El Día del Niño: la Infancia como Territorio para el Miedo, edited by Rubén Lardín, 67–112. Madrid: Valdemar, 2003. Rank, Otto. The Double. New York and London: New American Library, 1979. Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1990. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Yeats, William Butler. ‘The Stolen Child’. In The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 14–15. London: Wordsworth Editions, 2000.

Filmography

Alfredson, Tomas, dir. Let the Right One In (Låt den Rätte Komma In). Sweden: Sandrew Metronome, 2008. Bayona, Juan Antonio, dir. The Orphanage (El Orfanato). Spain-Mexico: Warner Bros. and Picturehouse, 2007. Jordan, Neil, dir. Interview with the Vampire: the Vampire Chronicles. USA: Geffen-Warner Bros, 1994. Schumacher, Joel, dir. The Lost Boys. USA: Warner Bros, 1987. Shyamalan, M. Night, dir. The Sixth Sense. USA: Hollywood Pictures, 1999. Ana González-Rivas Fernández has a PhD in Philology and first degrees in both Classics and English from the Complutense University in Madrid. Her main line of research is Gothic literature and the Classical tradition. She is currently lecturer in English literature at the Autonoma University of Madrid. Alfonso Muñoz Corcuera is a PhD student in the Faculty of Philosophy of the Complutense University in Madrid. His research work is related to the concept of personal identity and its relationship with contemporary literature.

Part 3

The Symmetry of Voice and Silence

Poesis: Cauldron of Horror

Christina Natsis

Abstract This chapter will present the literary, philosophical, psychiatric, psychological and psychoanalytical underpinnings of manic-depressive states in the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson and Anne Sexton. I will argue that the quintessential abject is not the Kristevan corpse, but the fear, horror and terror of madness: it is a terror that dissembles, as opposed to the teleological implications of death. This project will express, through selected poetry, the poets’ violent and fractured origins in an abject maternal body as well as the horror, both literal and figurative, of recurrent relapse and containment within the asylum. Whereas the voice of the madwoman was silenced in the 19th century by an asphyxiating patriarchy that perceived woman as monstrous and mad, each of these poets sought release, and even healing, from their crypt of horror through their relentless endeavour to find ‘containment’ in prosody. However, such containment was elusive because psychotic madness, at the extremities of manic-depressive states, is ambiguous, encompassing that which ‘disturbs identity, systems, order.’1 More importantly, I will argue that these poets spoke the unutterable language of manic-depression in a manner that the epistemological and clinical Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders2 cannot, because they spoke it in a ‘language that is beyond language,’ a language that privileges the semiotic overflow of boundaries. The abject nature of psychotic madness with its power of horror and its internal scission is that which places the subject in perpetual danger. Sexton, in particular, expresses this horror most aptly in free verse, particularly in contrapuntal techniques and non-metrical modes of organisation, with multiple rhythmic patterns employed to give her poetry the tension that evokes mental fragmentation. Poetry, like psychoanalysis, is better equipped than prose to navigate the reader through the fear, terror and horror of madness because of its revolutionary and transgressive language. Key Words: Manic-depression, fear, horror, terror, poetry, madness, Dickinson, Plath, Sexton.

***** 1. Signifying the Unutterable

This chapter examines the literary representation of manic-depressive madness in poetry. It provides a palimpsest of the manner in which the poetry of Sylvia Plath Emily Dickinson and Ann Sexton evokes the unutterable: the terror of madness, the place where meaning and order collapses, where ‘one is at the border of [their] condition as a human being.’3 In my reading of selected poems, I will

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argue that the quintessential abject is not the corpse of Julia Kristeva’s theoretical discourse, but the fear, horror and terror of madness: it is a terror that dissembles, as opposed to evoking the teleological implications of death. For Kristeva, the corpse seen without God and outside of science is the utmost abjection: it is death infecting life.4 However, I will argue that there is a horror that is worse than the infectious finality of the corpse; it is the living death that clinical depression and mania thrusts upon its victims. Kristeva has described this horror as ‘sinking into the blankness of asymbolia or of the excess of an unorderable cognitive chaos.’5 She refers to it as ‘the dead language’ that the depressed person speaks’ or ‘as concealing a Thing buried alive.’6 To be buried alive in the labyrinthine darkness of depression is to be in a place where one seeks, but cannot find, the teleological finality of death. This ‘living death’ of depression may be interpreted through the asphyxiating crypt of the maternal stranglehold, as demonstrated by the poetry of Plath. It can also be found through the schism between body and mind that characterises the poetry of Dickinson and the oscillation between containment and fragmentation that characterises the poetry of Sexton.

By creating complex configurations of poetic language, Plath, Sexton and Dickinson were able to signify their madness because poetry, like psychoanalysis, has the capacity to gesture beyond words towards the emotional tenor and terror of the manic-depressive experience. David Eagleton argues that poetry is ‘the most semantically saturated’ form of writing we have, yielding more information in a condensed space than any other form of text.7 Eagleton refers to a poem as an unfathomably complex interplay of systems that ‘allows the rhythms, images and impulses of our subterranean life to speak through its crisp exactitudes.’8 The theoretical discourse of Kristeva and Melanie Klein9 provides a glimpse of the volatile schisms and oscillations that underpin the infantile and primordial manic-depressive experience that resonates, in certain vulnerable individuals, into adulthood. According to this discourse, the maternal space that is anterior to language, and which was not developed in Freudian and Lacanian theory, posits the dualism of the drives of the semiotic chora as both assimilating and destructive, making the semiotised body a place of permanent scission.10 It is precisely this scission, I contend, that mimics and evokes the manic-depressive experience. Kristeva argues that women, because they are maternal, and governed by highly volatile semiotic forces, are more likely to relapse into madness and the blankness of assymbolia.11 If abjection is the ‘living death’ of madness, such a death may be interpreted from the perspective of Kristevan discourse as ‘the immemorial violence through which the body becomes separated from another,’12 in which the brain splinters and swerves from its groove.13

Each of these poets sought release, and even healing, from their crypt of horror through relentless endeavour to contain it through poetry. Their art evokes the horror of recurrent relapse and of the silencing of their voices in the asylum. Containment is expressed metaphorically and literally through prosody and

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through the mental asylum. It is also expressed as psychical incarceration, aptly expressed by the poet William Blake in his poem, ‘London,’ as the ‘mind-forged manacles’ of the living dead. 2. Manic-Depressive Terror in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson

With incredible metaphorical accuracy, Dickinson’s poetry evokes the terror of depression and the mind in terror of collapse into psychosis: it evokes kinaesthetically the perpetual movement of mania and its inherent akathesia. The rhythmic, ceaseless, akathesia of depression is evoked powerfully in the poem, ‘I felt a Funeral in my Brain’14 by the inclusion of the hypnotic, repetitive and mesmerising incantation of the aorist participles: ‘treading’ ‘treading’ and ‘beating,’ ‘beating’:

I felt a funeral in my brain, And mourners, to and fro, Kept treading, treading, till it seemed That sense was breaking through.

In this poem, the internal chaos experienced by the subject is analogous to mourners treading in a funeral service. The poet employs the auditive and visual simile: ‘a service like a Drum,’ so that the funeral service becomes metaphorically like a drum, ‘beating’ with mind-numbing regularity. The acoustic and visual elements, represented by the bell and the ear, drown out all other sensory experiences and terrify the speaker. This poem traces the speaker’s descent into madness. However, more terrible still is the poet’s powerful evocation of being herself one of the living dead, of witnessing her own funeral. Dickinson uses the metaphor of standing on a ‘plank’ over a precipice to describe the speaker plunging into irrationality and the nightmare-horror of madness.

And then a plank in reason, broke, And I dropped down and down— And hit a world at every plunge, And finished knowing— then—

The poetry of Dickinson routinely dismantles syntactic order and obscures the relations on which that order is dependent. In the poem, ‘I felt a cleaving in my mind,’15 Lyndall Gordon describes the syntactically dismantled poetry as ‘the jolting rhythms of poems with protracted breaths between spasms of words.’16

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I felt a Cleaving in my Mind— As if my Brain had split— I tried to match it—Seam by Seam— But could not make it fit.

The inability to join one thought ‘Unto the thought before’ - evokes the cacophonous and chaotic thought processes of madness:

The thought behind, I strove to join Unto the thought before— But Sequence ravelled out of Sound Like Balls—upon a Floor.

Dickinson’s poem ‘The first Day’s Night had come -’17 evokes the transformative horror of madness.

And then—a Day as huge As Yesterdays in pairs, Unrolled its horror in my face— Until it blocked my eyes—

Whilst Dickinson does not recount the nature of the thing that had ‘Unrolled its horror in[her] face,’ it was a thing ‘So terrible’ that she was acutely aware of her transformation from ‘that person that I was - /And this One - do not feel the same.’18 In this poem, Dickinson expresses the permanent far-reaching consequences of the transformative horror of madness.

My Brain - begun to laugh— I mumbled - like a fool— ‘And tho’ ‘tis Years ago - that Day— My brain keeps giggling - still.

The fear, terror, horror of madness represents a world beyond the schism created by the dynamic oscillations between the symbolic and the semiotic. It is state in which the ‘brain begins to laugh’ and henceforward is ‘giggling still,’ like an erratic heart-beat that requires a defibrillator to still it. In the final line of this poem Dickinson asks the rhetorical question: ‘Could it be Madness - this?’ 3. Psychotic Horror in the Poetry of Ann Sexton

A schizo-affective scission between mind and body is evoked powerfully in the poetry of Sexton. In the following poem the ‘beggar’ may be interpreted as the

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anthropomorphosis of madness from which the speaker attempts to extricate herself.

I am torn in two but I will conquer myself. I will dig up the pride. I will take scissors and cut out the beggar.19

In this context, the schism between body and mind, ‘I am torn in two,’ is synonymous with the inability of the flesh to contain the body’s integrity. For Sexton, mental illness stands for the danger to identity that comes from within. It is a danger that lurks in the crevices of the mind and body and spills out as defilement. It is a terror so shocking that it requires the anaesthetising oblivion of narcotics.

My sleeping pill is white. It is a splendid pearl; it floats me out of myself, my stung skin as alien as a loose bolt of cloth;20

Sexton employs graphic and macabre metaphors to evoke her oppressor’s stranglehold in her body and mind. Zoomorphic and anthropomorphic metaphors give shape and form to her terror. Green witches, crabs, pestilential rats are some such metaphors that permeate, invade, scavenge and wreak havoc in her body and mind. For example, in ‘The Double Image,’21 Sexton describes her mental state as ‘They tattled like green witches in my head, letting doom leak like a broken faucet.’ What renders these metaphors more macabre is that they are entrapped within the subject and either eat her alive as sarcophages, or seep out of her flesh and orifices as putrefacation. In ‘The Poet of Ignorance,’22 Sexton’s psychotic depression is evoked metaphorically as a physical pain as a ‘huge crab’ clutching her heart tenaciously.

There is an animal inside me, clutching fast to my heart, a huge crab.

The terrifying sense of wanting to flee from madness, to find a sanctuary of sorts is powerfully evident in the poetry of Sexton; however, escape eludes her.

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I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head.

The evocation of psychosis in Sexton’s art through her original and unorthodox metaphors and discordant counterpoint describes the sufferer’s terror of psychosis, experience of it, and reflections on it more accurately than diagnostic or psychiatric grids or clinical epistemological definitions. Ultimately, Sexton’s poetry speaks the sufferer’s yearning to be extricated from the terror of psychosis.

fear as the night can’t be shut off, and the dawn, my habitual dawn, is locked up forever.23

Because she fails to eradicate it, Sexton’s ‘unnameable lust for thanatos’ represents the only exit passage from this terror: it is as tantalising as it is destructive.

Death will be the end of fear and the fear of dying

Her poetry could be interpreted as the excitatory and orgiastic lust for death expressed as a conflagrated manic dance that springs out of the containment of her own imagined coffin.

Even then I will dance in my dire clothes, A crematory flight.

The most terrifying image of Sexton’s ‘living death’ is evoked in the poem ‘Noon Walks on the Asylum Lawn.’24 The tone of this poem is meditative and controlled, just as the form is taut, closed and ceremonial, yet the horror of psychosis leaps out of the imposed constraints, evoking a powerful paranoic sense of being perpetually surveyed; wherein ‘even the sun looks around for me,’ and the ‘sky sags and breathes upon my face.’ Ironically, although the poet is falling apart mentally, the orderly, tone, syntax and meter appear to be starkly incongruous to the sense of dissolution conveyed. The poet, although remaining rigorously in control syntactically and metrically, is expressing the horror of paranoia intrinsic to psychosis: ‘The world is full of enemies. There is no safe place.’ The inclusion of the italicised lines from Psalm 28, woven neatly throughout the three verses, embroiders a thread of cohesion in the midst of psychic fragmentation. Yet the words of the psalm are ominous and do not provide the comfort for which they are renowned.

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It sags and breathes upon my face. In the presence of mine enemies, mine enemies. There is no safe place.

Nowhere is Kristeva’s theoretical discourse on abjection and the rite of defilement more relevant, I posit, than within the spectre of psychotic madness. However for Sexton, this defilement is a lived experience. In ‘Demon’25 Sexton attempts unsuccessfully, to bury her madness in the crypt of verse by striving to seal off her orifices.

Oh demon within, I am afraid and seldom put my hand up to my mouth and stitch it up covering you, smothering you from the public voyeury eyes of my typewriter keys.

In this context, horror is more ominous because the subject is not only buried alive but also eaten alive. With dramatic cadence and a dazzling development of shock imagery, Sexton addresses her illness directly in the vocative case, ‘Oh demon within,’ demonstrating her familiarity with it within the ‘container’ of her body. Psychosis transmogrified as ‘demon’ is the quintessence of abjection and defilement. In ‘Noon Walks on the Asylum Lawn,’ the italicised words of Psalm 23 embroidered throughout the poem, ‘I will fear no evil,’ lack conviction for the tortured psyche of the involuntary patient, as it is a world where God is either silent or absent and which seethes with anthropomorphic predators. The haunting, paranoiac presence of the sun, like the birds of Alfred Hitchcock’s horror movie, surveys her menacingly; it ‘looks around for me’ within the asphyxiating and oppressive dome of the sky. The patient is unable to escape its omnipresent ‘ray [that] shifts through a suspicious tree.’ Instead of providing sanctuary, the lawns mock her with schizophrenic incantations: ‘I hear green chanting all day.’ Like swords, ‘the blades extend and reach [her] way.’

The grass speaks. I hear green chanting all day. I will fear no evil, fear no evil The blades extend and reach my way.

Caught in the centripetal force of her madness, the poet becomes increasingly paranoid. Like the orality of the sun’s rays, Sexton’s own internal motor and manic mind usurp the space, ‘I have a motor in me that keeps vibrating, sucking up all the

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t but unattainable.

room.’26 ‘Noon Walk’ lends itself to interpretation through a Kleinian discourse of the oral-sadistic phase which is characterised by ambivalence, anxiety, fear and horror associated with the destruction of the loved object, and the fear of being devoured by that object.27 4. The Feathery Turnings of Plath’s Gratuitous Rage

Whilst rage is the defining characteristic of Plath’s final poems, it is depression that seduces Plath into suicide. Once rage dissipates, as it does in the poem ‘Edge,’ the teleological implications of thanatos are preferable to the terror of a living death. Plath’s manic-rage appears directed towards the maternal because, being a woman, she and the death-bearing mother are inextricably linked. I contend that beneath Plath’s rage is terror because Plath’s art depicts an unsuccessful matricidal fantasy. The tension and dynamic interplay generated by her matricidal and suicidal proclivities underscores Plath’s rage. This rage subsumes the paralytic stupor of melancholia and acts as the prophylactic mechanism against the subject plummeting into the blankness of asymbolia.

Melanie Klein was the first theorist to raise the issue of matricide as an essential prerequisite of individuation.28 Based on Kleinian theoretical discourse, Plath’s poems present an irreversible oscillation between fear of separation and resentment about attachments to a lost-loved object, the mother. This struggle and yearning for the security of the primordial rhythms of maternal body culminates in rage and despair at not finding it. In this tenuous state, matricide becomes Plath’s ‘vital necessity.’29 However, Plath’s poetry demonstrates the enormous difficulty in murdering the mother because, by identifying with the mother, Plath has encrypted her mother within herself. Murderous impulses aligned to the maternal realm may be interpreted as a desperate endeavour to avert Plath’s descent into madness, thereby ridding herself of the thanatic osmosis, or what Kristeva has referred to as the death-bearing mother within herself,30 poignantly expressed in ‘Three Women’ as ‘I should have murdered this that murders me.’31 Here the word ‘murders’ is an infinitive verb denoting the perpetuity of matricidal murder. This is synonymous with the theme of the torment of the living dead, in which the teleological finality of death is so earnestly sough

In ‘Three Women’ the mother becomes the deadly ‘vampire of us all,’ draining the life-blood from the very children she has mothered. In this context, as Kristeva has argued, ‘the feminine becomes synonymous with a radical evil that is to be suppressed,32 because the mother becomes a sort of phobic object: a form of abject.’33 In ‘Elm,’34 the psychic terror of maternal interiority and Plath’s sense of being invaded by the malignant force of madness is powerfully evoked:

I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

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This ‘dark thing’ encapsulates the horror and terror of madness because, even when it remains dormant with it deceptive ‘soft, feathery turnings,’ it has the latent capacity to unroll its horror. This dark thing ‘That sleeps in me;’ is not the ‘corpse’ infecting life but a macabre, living, breathing insidious evil that defies putrefaction. 5. Conclusion

The abject nature of psychotic madness, its powers of horror is that which places the subject in perpetual danger. Sexton, in particular, expresses this horror most aptly in free verse, particularly in contrapuntal techniques and non-metrical modes of organisation with multiple rhythmic patterns employed to give her poetry the tension that evokes mental fragmentation.Through the creation of startling metaphors and the flexibility inherent in the configurations of poetic language, Plath, Dickinson and Sexton were able to evoke the pain, terror and horror of madness. The horror of entrapment and incarceration takes on a multilayered meaning: it is pharmacological, corporeal and mental. It is represented by the indignity and terror of the straitjacket, the high dependency unit and the locked doors and fences of the asylum, together with the cocktail of drugs that act as chemical restraints. These chemicals represent the subtle lobotomies and tranquilisers that place the bars of Bedlam and the locked doors inside the patient, rather than outside.

By giving voice to their madness through their art, Plath, Sexton and Dickinson figuratively break down the asylum wall. The poetry of Plath resonates with matricidal rage that culminates in literal thanatos; Sexton’s poetry emanates from the primal scream of the Kleinian cauldron, and the poetry of Dickinson, with its rhythmic, mesmerising incantations, is the most graphic evocation of depression ever written. Out of the internal chaos of madness, Plath, Sexton and Dickinson produced poetry of unutterable beauty and terror. Through their art, Plath Sexton and Dickinson express the fear, horror, and terror of their ‘living death.’

Notes

1 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horrors: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. 2 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). 3 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press 1989), 3. 4 Ibid., 4. 5 Ibid., 33. 6 Ibid., 53.

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7 Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 57. 8 Ibid., 22. 9 Melanie Klein, ‘Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 9 (1928): 167-180. 10 Kristeva, Revolutions in Poetic Language, 27. 11 Melanie Klein, ‘Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 9 (1928): 167-180. 12 Kristeva, Black Sun, 243. 13 Emily Dickinson, ‘The Brain within Its Groove’, Complete Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1970). 14 Emily Dickinson, ‘I Felt a Funeral in My Brain’, Emily, in Complete Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1970). 15 Emily Dickinson, ‘I Felt a Cleaving in My Mind’, Emily, in Complete Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1970). 16 Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns (United Kingdom: Virago, 2010), 115. 17 Emily Dickinson, ‘The First Day’s Night Had Come’, in Complete Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1970). 18 Thomas Johnson, ed., The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Volumes 1-3 1951 (Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 1979). 19 Anne Sexton, ‘The Beggar’, in The Complete Poems (Boston: Houghton, 1981). 20 Anne Sexton, ‘It Is a Summer’s Evening’, in The Complete Poems (Boston: Houghton, 1981). 21 Anne Sexton, ‘The Double Image’, in The Complete Poems (Boston: Houghton, 1981). 22 Anne Sexton, ‘The Poet of Ignorance’, in The Complete Poems (Boston: Houghton, 1981). 23 Anne Sexton, ‘The Death King’, in The Complete Poems (Boston: Houghton, 1981). 24 Anne Sexton, ‘Noon Walks on the Asylum Lawn’, in The Complete Poems (Boston: Houghton, 1981). 25 Anne Sexton, ‘Demon’, in The Complete Poems (Boston: Houghton, 1981). 26 Thomas Johnson, The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Volumes 1-3 1951 (Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 1979), 397. 27 Klein, Early Stages, 186-198. 28 Klein, Early Stages, 186-198. 29 Kristeva, Black Sun, 27-28. 30 Kristeva, Black Sun, 27-28. 31 Sylvia Plath, ‘Three Women’, in Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (London: Faber & Faber, 1981). 32 Kristeva, Powers, 70.

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33 Ibid., 68. 34 Sylvia Plath, ‘Elm’, in Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (London: Faber & Faber, 1981).

Bibliography Eagleton, Terry. How to Read a Poem. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Gordon, Lyndall. Lives Like Loaded Guns, Emily Dickinson. London: Virago, 2010. Holbrook, David. Images of Women in Literature. New York and London: New York University Press, 1989. Johnson, Thomas H., ed. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Volumes 1-3. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958. —––. The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Volumes 1-3 1951. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1979. Klein, Melanie. ‘Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict’. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 9 (1928): 167–180. —––‘A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’. Reprinted in W. M. K. II, 1935, 262–289. Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. —––. Powers of Horrors: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. —––. Revolutions in Poetic Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Sexton, Linda Gray. Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters. Edited by Lois Ames, and Linda Gray Sexton. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004. Christina Natsis, is a Senior Secondary English Teacher and Head of Teaching and Learning at St. Andrew’s Christian College in Victoria, Australia. She is

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currently completing her PhD entitled ‘Poesis: The Cryonic Furnace,’ at the University of Melbourne.

Shocked into Submission: Fear of the Irrational Mind in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’

Lizzy Welby

Abstract ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,’ written in 1958 but published posthumously in 1977, draws heavily on Plath’s experience of electro-convulsive therapy. Sally, an assistant secretary in a psychiatric hospital, narrates the story. Her secretarial duties, however, are interspliced with the more shadowy activity of clandestinely transcribing patients’ dreams. From the heart of this decidedly eerie tale, Plath conjures an image of a polluted, primordial dream lake, through which float the ghastly props of unconscious dreams. The symbol of the lake, which in a psychoanalytic discourse is associated with the pre-Symbolic maternal space, remains a site of transgression from the ordered world of the Symbolic, imaged in the depersonalised hospital psychiatrists. Sally’s dream pays testament to the subversive ability of the maternal realm to disrupt an autocratic phallocentrism. The abjected dream lake looks back to a pre-verbal state and as such remains a site of terror for psychiatrists, representative as they are of the paternal law. Caught in the act of transcribing dreams, Sally is frogmarched to the electroshock room and undergoes electro-convulsive treatment. Not only is the poetic voice of the narrator sanitised into silence by this violent, painful act of ‘forgetting’ and ‘undoing,’ but also the dreams of the patients are no longer catalogued and concretised in Sally’s ‘Bible’ of the unconscious, creative self. This chapter will explore the notion of how semiotic elements are bound up with the capacity to imagine and create and throws into relief the fear that the irrational mind can be embedded within the linguistic economy of the Symbolic’s patriarchal authority.

Key Words: Sylvia Plath, ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,’ Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, psychosis, abjection, unconscious.

*****

‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,’ written in 1958 but published

posthumously in 1977, draws heavily on Sylvia Plath’s experience of electro-convulsive therapy. Sally, an assistant secretary in a metropolitan psychiatric hospital, narrates the story. In addition to her secretarial duties, Sally is engaged in the more shadowy activity of clandestinely transcribing patients’ dreams. Memorised from doctors’ notes at the hospital during her lunch breaks, the dreams are then studiously copied into Sally’s compendium of nightmares, entitled ‘Johnny Panic’s Bible of Dreams,’ once she is alone in her apartment at night.1 Johnny Panic is Plath’s literary manifestation of anxiety. ‘He’ induces psychosis

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with ‘his’ ‘dog-face, devil-face, hag-face, whore-face, panic in capital letters with no face at all.’2

As Sally’s obsession grows so too does her desire to gain access to the patients’ notes. Hiding in the lavatory at the end of a working day, Sally manages to spend the night feverishly reading dusty, yellowing diagnostic sheets recorded decades before. Hungry and cramped, she is discovered by the fatherly Head Doctor the next morning, caught in the act of memorising dreams for inclusion in her anthology of troubled psyches. Coaxed from her hiding place with the promise of hot soup, Sally is, however, frogmarched to the electroshock room and undergoes electro-convulsive treatment. Not only is the poetic voice of the narrator sanitised into silence by this violent, painful act of ‘forgetting’ and ‘undoing,’ but also the dreams of the patients can no longer be catalogued and concretised in Sally’s ‘Bible’ of the unconscious, creative self. This chapter will explore the notion of how semiotic elements are bound up with the capacity to imagine and create and throw into relief the fear that the irrational mind can be embedded within the linguistic economy of the Symbolic’s patriarchal authority.

At the end of the tale we understand that Sally is psychically positioned with the other patients in the hospital on what is a predetermined sliding scale of mental health/illness but Plath’s textual tints and textures have already accentuated the subtle semantic ‘clues’ that have been inlaid in the story. The author’s quick-witted, resourceful and creative secretary shares with the patients a route into their unconscious, where the point of entry is the dream. Plath underlines a crucial difference, however, as Sally is, at the beginning of the story, imaged as ‘sane,’ (to our critical eye she appears to be a reliable narrator), and is thus able to both explore and examine the creative life of the unconscious ‘other’ self, where the ordered logic of language is replaced with a sprawling, spiralling narrative that is an endless shadow dance of displacement and deferral. She has a recurrent dream; a ‘dream of dreams,’ set around a polluted, primordial body of water, described as ‘Lake Nightmare’ or ‘Bog of madness’ into which ‘people’s minds run at night.’3 From the heart of Sally’s decidedly eerie dream, Plath conjures a passage that is both psychically charged and deeply disturbing. Representative of a Symbolic in disarray, the wreckage of humanity, imaged in ‘dead bodies puffed as blowfish’ as well as ‘human embryos bobbing around … like so many unfinished messages’4 drift eerily among the detritus of discarded objects of the everyday.

The symbol of the lake, which in a psychoanalytic discourse, is associated with the pre-Symbolic maternal space, ‘padded soft as the first room you knew of,’5 and remains a site of transgression from the ordered world of the Symbolic, where the authority of depersonalised hospital psychiatrists hold sway. Sally’s dream pays testament to the subversive ability of the maternal realm to disrupt an autocratic phallocentrism. To produce, in effect, a rippling aqueous discourse that is a substratum of structured grammatical language. The abjected dream lake looks

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back to a pre-verbal state ‘before men started … figuring out the wheel and the alphabet,’6 and as such remains a site of terror for the ‘white-coated tinkerers.’7

Sally’s description of her own dream is rich in grisly detail, and pays testament to Plath’s poetics, with images that are stark and terrifying (green shoots of a signature style that would bloom in the work she later produced). Sally’s rendition of her dream stands in contrast to the scant details she offers of others’ dreams. For example, we learn of the ‘guy [who works] for a ball-bearing company’ and ‘dreams every night how he’s lying on his back with a grain of sand on his chest,’8 which enlarges until it is big enough to crush his chest and suffocate him. There is the dream stamped with the date May 1931, found in the faded record book that recounts the nightmare of a ‘private nurse [who] has just opened a laundry bag in her patient’s closet and found five severed heads in it, including her mother’s.’9 But it is Sally’s dream that demands our attention with its sheer scale and horror. The abiding image of a prehistoric lake hints at a time before written records, a time before language, a space that is defined in spatial not temporal terms. It remains the source of all dreams and thus Sally has a connection to all unconscious thoughts of every person in the world that has ever dreamed, not just those who end up in seeking professional help for psyches adjudged to be out of sync. She says that:

When you think how much room one night of dream props would take up for one person in one city, and that city a mere pin-prick on a map of the world, and that space by the number of nights there have been since the apes took to chipping axes out of stone and losing their hair, you would have some idea of what I mean.10

Sally is a sort of psychic lightning rod for every person who ever dreamed, on

every night of every year since human kind became conscious, not only of their own sense of self, but also of their ability to imagine the thoughts that spiral through the mind of another, which in cognitive neuroscientific terms is known as Theory of Mind.11 In this respect she can not only relate to but identify with the subversive ‘feminine,’ propelled in this story to the other side of the Symbolic border. Still more worrying for the keepers of a Lacanian paternal injunction (le non du père) is Sally’s hint that, in addition to experiencing an empathetic connection to the dreamer, she is able to give voice to a dream before it has been dreamed. She says that:

I am at the point of recreating dreams that are not even written down at all. Dreams that shadow themselves forth in the vaguest way, but are themselves hid, like a statue under red velvet before the grand unveiling.12


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Note that she says that she does not create the dreams, merely re-creates a narrative that exists in a Kristevan always already configuration. Such a concept is reiterated further in the story: ‘[t]o be a true member of Johnny Panic’s congregation’ she says ‘one must forget the dreamer and remember the dream: the dreamer is merely a flimsy vehicle for the great Dream-Maker.’13 In this respect, the great ‘Dream-Maker’ is not only responsible for the mechanics of the dream lake, all the props that float on top and below its murky, abjected waters, but is also the progenitor of alternative realities. The fluid, rippling, frightening lake is conversely a space of creativity that becomes terrifying only when viewed from the perspective of the guardians of the phallogocentric economy, the psychiatrists who have a vested interest in imaging the subversive effects of the semiotic as abject. The omnipresent ‘Dream-Maker’ can be read as a terrifying phallic matriarch with the capacity to disrupt and destabilise the differentiated fabric of the psycho-rigid Symbolic.

The lake represents a pre-Oedipal site of subversion where the soon-to-be-abjected maternal authority holds sway over the child’s oral desires and anal expulsions. This semiotic, which is reanimated in Sally’s dream lake, ensures, in Julia Kristeva’s terminology, a ‘revival of archaic pre-oedipal modes of operation.’14 According to Kristeva, before a child enters the linguistic realm of the Symbolic, s/he exists in a pre-Oedipal psychic space, what she terms the ‘semiotic chora,’ which is a ‘nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full as it is regulated.’15 Bound up with a time of pre-verbal utterances when the child has yet to succumb to the injunctions that will be imposed upon it once the paternal word and law-of-the-father (le non et le nom du père) is inaugurated, the semiotic is in contradistinction to the Symbolic. Echoes of the maternal realm (stamped though they may be with imprints that a paternal authority has proclaimed abject) encroach and impact upon the growing identity of the child as a speaking subject as it moves further into the structured sphere of the Symbolic order. Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic can be characterised as a ‘free-floating’ verbal state, a time of cadenced pre-linguistic utterances. In this undifferentiated realm, which recognises neither linguistic borders nor Symbolic injunctions, the child is inextricably linked to, and its desires and drives are bound up with, the mother’s corporeal self. Contrary to the Lacanian notion of an order that is set up when the child enters the Symbolic, maternal authority exists before the Father’s (dictatorial) Word. The mother begins the process of socialisation by regulating her child’s oral and anal drives. The semiotic, according to Kristeva, is thus a prototype of the Symbolic in so far as the child begins to recognise a Maternal authority before submitting to the law of the father.16

Maternal authority in any shape or form is a constant threat to the autocratic mastery of the paternal word underscored by the dominating potency of the phallus that needs, in order to safeguard its continued power, to image the maternal realm as a place of terror, a site of castration, a realm that can unman the man. The child,

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until the moment of entry into the Symbolic, has been able to identify with a life-giving and nourishing mother, an ideal object, in effect. From a Kleinian perspective, the ideal object is the mother’s breast and as such is, for the child, both life-giving and protective. The successful negotiation of the child’s anxieties toward his mother as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ object leads to the more or less successful integration of himself into the world and the gradual organisation of his universe, which can be found in Melanie Klein’s watershed essay ‘Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’ and ‘Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant.’

In a Kleinian sense, deep anxiety characterises Sally’s dream-lake, with its horror-filled images of foetus in jars swirling through murky toxic waters. Waters that ‘stink and smoke’ and hide at their almost unfathomable depths the ‘real dragons:’ abjected maternal ‘beasts,’ imaged as such once ‘men started living in caves and cooking meat over fires and figuring out the wheel and the alphabet,’17 taking their first shaky steps, in effect, on the evolutionary path towards the process of phallogocentric communal socialisation. It is in the semantic landscape of Sally’s dream world and more specifically her dream lake that we learn that there was a time before societal edicts; before the autocratic keepers of the paternal world deemed that the maternal figure must be abjected if the ‘clean and proper’18 self is to ‘be.’ And Sally has the ability to plumb the almost unfathomable depths of her unconscious and dream herself back to a pre-verbal time, which is then accessed through the dream-life of the imagination. Literary endeavours have long been associated with the free life of the imagination, which is a source of creativity and inspiration. Dreaming, says Sally, significant dreaming enables one to be taken ‘back among these great originals’ where ‘there is no point in any dreams at all.’19

Sally’s army of dreamers, defined by the ‘psychotic’ nature of their dreams, are confined to a state institution for their minds to be ‘healed.’ The treatments range from medication, to a discursive therapy and for those Sally recognises as the ‘wildest,’20 a series of electric shocks lies in store. One such patient has been struck dumb by her negative feelings towards her ‘French-Canadian mother-in-law,’21 so Sally sets herself the task of ‘uprooting [her] dream from its comfortable purchase under her tongue,’ a dream that Johnny Panic has planted there himself, leaving only ‘a thumbprint in the corner’ for those like Sally with the eyes and experience to ‘see’ his presence. Sally becomes more proficient in recognising what is medically categorised and labelled as psychosis and manifested in the dream-life of the patients. And eerily, she begins to transcribe the patients’ dreams before they dream them. For example, she encounters a young Catholic man suffering with a terror of death, more specifically of being consigned to hell. He works in a fluorescent light plant and Sally imagines a dream in which he is incarcerated in a Gothic monastery cellar surrounded by an endless vista of skulls and bones augmented to infinity by a series of mirrors (one is tempted to infer a Lacanian notion of the mirror image (mis)representing an individual’s sense of


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es into artistic expression.

identity). Into this bizarre setting she inserts corpses, which in Kristevan topography represent the utmost of abjection, in various stages of decomposition. These cadavers are eerily lit with contemporary lighting; a glaring ‘ice-bright fluorescence.’22 This grisly detail is the ‘poetic element’ that, ‘Johnny Panic injects’ into the subconscious life of the individual. The patient’s ‘panic in capital letters’23 is Plath’s route to the creative life of the artist in the grip of psychosis. Anxiety becomes the psychic pit mouth through which the writer can excavate a path to what is imaged by society as unnameable states of hysteria. The alleged ‘meaningless’ babble of the psychotic is thus not nonsense but notnamedsense that Plath translates and voic

She understands that those who have ‘really gone floating down toward the bottom of that boggy lake’ come into the Out-Patients Department ‘only once’ before being ‘referred to a place more permanent ... at another hospital specializing in severer cases. Or they stay for a month or so in our own Observation Ward in the central hospital which I’ve never seen.’24 Ultimately, it is a fate that awaits Sally herself. Tied to a hospital bed, the electric shocks she receives shake her ‘like a leaf in the teeth of glory’ amid the chants of patients in ‘niches along the wall:’25

The only thing to love is Fear itself Love of Fear is the beginning of wisdom. The only thing to love is Fear itself May Fear and Fear and Fear be everywhere.26

At the moment when she feels most ‘lost,’ Johnny Panic appears as a spectacular, fiery, powerful alternative to the father-of-the-law in the ‘nimbus of arc lights on the ceiling overhead.’ It is his jumbled, hazy non-linear Word that ‘charges and illuminates the universe,’27 challenging forever the ascendancy of the Symbolic order, in Sally’s interpretation of the world. The figures of authority that were powerful enough to force a young woman undergo a terrifying treatment against her will have become obscured in the poetic lightening that is streaming from the eye of the all-encompassing outcast, Johnny Panic. And Sally is ready to take her place as a votary of his death-bound, abject love, which will lead inevitably to ‘the twenty-storey leap, the rope at the throat, the knife at the heart.’28

From the kindly yet steely director of the Clinic, who leads Sally to the electro-convulsion therapy room at the end of the story, to the terrifying head nurse Miss Milleravage, with ‘whopping milkless breasts …, wrists [like] iron hoops’ and a breath that is a ‘love-stink fouler than [an] Undertaker’s Basement,’29 Sally is forsaken by those enclosed within the confines of Symbolic borders. With a ‘crown of wire placed on [her] head’ and ‘the wafer of forgetfulness on [her] tongue,’ Sally is sacrificed to the Symbolic and crucified for her transgressions against the law-of-the-father, namely that of transcribing patients’ dreams and compiling an almost poetic compendium of the substratum of their unconsciousness, where

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according to Freud, displaced and condensed images and symbols hold sway over the more ordered logic that characterises a Symbolic discourse. And Sally’s dream lake is the origin of the maternal spring, which has been polluted and abjected by the figures of authority in the hospital who characterise the free life of the imagination as markers of alterity and thus defined by madness. Hélène Cixous writes:

But has there ever been any elsewhere? … While it is not yet “here,” it is there by now - in this other place that disrupts social order, where desire makes fiction exist.30

And within Plath’s fictive universe of power and terror there can be heard the

plaintive cry of multiple mourning. Mourning for the loss of a maternal metaphor. Mourning for the irretrievable impossibility of re-writing the narrative of an abjected maternal figure. Mourning for the loss of a nourishing, creative feminine force that can now only be recovered in the dream-life of the imagination. In Plath’s fictive universe the narrative of the maternal feminine is forever synonymous with the medicalised representation of the hysteric.

Notes

1 Sylvia Plath, ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’, in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and Other Prose Writings (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 18. 2 Ibid., 17. 3 Ibid., 19. 4 Ibid., 20. 5 Ibid., 19. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 27. 8 Ibid., 18. 9 Ibid., 29. 10 Ibid., 19. 11 For a more detailed explanation of Theory of Mind and Metarepresentations, see Lizzy Welby “‘Configuring Cognitive Architecture”: Mind-Reading and Metarepresentations in James Joyce’s Ulysses’, paper presented at Cognitive Joyce: The Neuronal Text, University Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3, Institut du Monde Anglophone, Paris, May 27-28, 2011. 12 Plath, Johnny Panic, 21. 13 Ibid., 26. 14 Julia Kristeva, On Chinese Women, trans. Anita Barros (New York: Urizen Press, 1976), 58.


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15 Quoted in Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double-Bind (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 46. 16 Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, eds. Alice Jardin and Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 6-7. 17 Plath, Johnny Panic, 19. 18 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 72. 19 Plath, Johnny Panic, 19. 20 Ibid., 23. 21 Ibid., 21. 22 Ibid., 22. 23 Ibid., 17. 24 Ibid., 23. 25 Ibid., 33. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 32. 30 Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays’, in The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 97.

Bibliography Cixous, Hélène. ‘Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays’. In The Newly Born Woman. Translated by Betsy Wing, 90–98. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Kristeva, Julia, On Chinese Women. Translated by Anita Barros. New York: Urizen Press, 1976. —––. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. —––. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Edited by Alice Jardin, and Leon S. Roudiez. Translated by Thomas Gora. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.

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Oliver, Kelly, Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double-Bind. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993. Plath, Sylvia, ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’. In Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and Other Prose Writings, 17–33. London: Faber and Faber, 2001. Welby, Lizzy, “‘Configuring Cognitive Architecture”: Mind-Reading and Metarepresentations in James Joyce’s Ulysses’. Paper presented at Cognitive Joyce: The Neuronal Text, University Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3, Institut du Monde Anglophone, Paris, May, 2011. Lizzy Welby is a Creative and Critical writer, specialising in the theoretical work of Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous. She is an alumna of the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom.

The Aesthetics of Fear in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Novel Fragment Das Buch Franza

Simone Klapper

Abstract This chapter discusses the aesthetics of fear in Ingeborg Bachmann’s fragmentary novel of 1965/66, Das Buch Franza. The literary depiction of fear, in particular the topos of the anxious victimised woman, functions in Bachmann as a critique of gender constructions, rationality, patriarchy and fascism. Having experienced the horrors of World War II, and the continuation of fascism in the private sphere, Bachmann had a deep scepticism about the ability of language to express the individual nature of traumas. Das Buch Franza depicts female fear in order to criticise patriarchal power structures and the subjugation of the woman as an object of science and intellectual discourse. Bachmann’s depiction of fear is a vital element of her poetology that searches for alternative forms of expression. Her aesthetic of fear seeks to overcome an entirely objectifying and rationalist language. Bachmann considered fear to be a positive mental quality in its impact on an individual’s pre-rational and evidence-based evaluation of threatening situations. Bachmann categorically rejects any metaphysical efforts to explain the phenomenon of fear. Her novel’s protagonist views fear as ‘terror,’ as a ‘massive attack on life.’1 Fear bears a key role in Bachmann’s criticism of language and in her effort to search for an alternative by creating a symptomatic language. The female body functions as a place of inscription and of the articulation of fear. Thus fear is staged, imagined, dreamed and processed in the protagonist’s body - which is eventually the place that leads the emotion back into language. Key Words: Female fear, speechlessness, symptomatic language, psychoanalysis, postmodernism.

***** 1. Fear as a Critique of a Lethal Way of Thinking

Close all the books, the abracadabra of philosophers, the satyrs of fear who manipulate metaphysics but who do not know what fear is. Fear is no mystery, no end in itself, no existential condition, nothing noble, not a concept, and, God willing, nothing that can be systemized. Fear is indisputable. It is an assault, it is terror, a massive attack on one’s life.2

A long-established theme of literature is that the inner experience of feelings

such as fear cannot be adequately represented by language and writing. Throughout

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her body of work the Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann engaged with the issue of how language corrupts those who unconsciously succumb to its ‘letters, syllables, lines, the signs, the setting down, the inhuman fixing, this insanity which flows from people and is frozen into expression.’3 Being very familiar with the Romanticists and also with language theory, Bachmann understood writing as a search to reach a form of reality, particularly the inner reality of emotions. In her posthumously-published novel Das Buch Franza (The Book of Franza), part of her Todesarten-cycle (Ways of Dying), the depiction of female fear is the pivot point of a complex analysis and critique of the interdependence between gender constructions, logocentrism and fascism.

This chapter focuses on Bachmann’s aesthetics of fear as presented in her famous novel fragment. It argues that Bachmann’s aesthetics of fear develops a language that overcomes the objectifying and rationalist spirit of logocentrism, which the author considered the root of a lethal way of thinking that lies at the origin of all fascism. As Bachmann strategically uses and deconstructs the topoi of the female body and the anxious woman as bearers of authenticity, the novel seems to share many features of postmodernism. As in the Écriture Féminine theories, the body functions as a place of inscription and of the articulation of fear.4 The Todesarten novels depict the dissolution of the subject, which was considered an enjoyable process by some key theorists of postmodernism.5 Although Bachmann did not consider herself to be a feminist writer, she anticipated subsequent feminist critiques but she considered this process as very problematic.

Das Buch Franza traces the destruction of the protagonist’s personality through the changing perspectives of Franza, her brother Martin and a personal narrator. Her husband, the Viennese psychiatrist Leopold Jordan, who considers her to be a pathological case, destroys Franza by abusing her physically and psychologically. After her husband forced her to have an abortion, Franza flees to her childhood home at the Austrian-Slovenian border. Martin searchers for her, and finds her at the home, and in a poor physical and psychological state. Franza convinces Martin to allow her to join a research expedition he is mounting to Egypt where she hopes to improve her state of health. Although she initially recovers at their trip, she cannot escape her traumatic past. Hence, Franza’s suicide is depicted as a manifestation of the destructive forces of fascism in the private sphere of marriage. Fear is a central motif in the novel. It functions as a symptom for Franza’s inner destruction and simultaneously leads the reader on a search for the origin of her fear. The original title, Der Fall Franza, refers to the different facets of the key theme: The German word ‘Fall’ means either ‘case’ or ‘downfall.’ Thus Bachmann plays with the two connotations of the word. Franza’s brother appears as a witness and also acts as a detective in a criminal case would. Franza’s husband makes her a medical and psychological case that he dissected ‘… until nothing more was left, nothing remaining except a finding that belonged to him.’6 The story also resembles a Bildungsroman.7 Unlike in a typical Bildungsroman, however, the

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protagonist does not undergo personal growth; rather she is marked by her increasing destruction and decay.

Like the other texts of the Todesarten-cycle, Das Buch Franza reflects on the fatal consequences of a merely instrumental form of reason, a rationalism in science (particularly in Psychiatry), and deconstructs its purpose as a misuse of knowledge as power and to protect paternal power structures. Bachmann hints at the exclusion of the other of reason, which is feared by the representatives of the symbolical order and therefore suppressed. Fear works on a thematic and aesthetic level as a disturbance and that always points to the origin of repression, exclusion and destruction.

2. Speechlessness and Fear

Franza’s psychological speechlessness is a symptom of the inner fear and pain caused by her husband’s abuses. Her continuous suppression by Jordan, and her inability to defend herself against him, lead to a loss of Franza’s formerly unique language. Her speechlessness can also be seen as a fear of facing the reality of the violence she experiences.

In her fear of language and in her inability to express her feelings and thoughts, the theme of the killing word8 manifests itself. Speechlessness hints at the destruction of the protagonist’s identity and consequently her inability to express herself. The novel seems to depict Levinas’s view that killing is predicated upon defining,9 i.e., that the Nazis were able to kill Jews only because they knew what ‘Jewishness’ meant. In causing Franza’s destruction by constantly defining and categorising her through his medical terms, Jordan follows a parallel process. According to Bachmann, ‘[f]ascism begins in relations between people. Fascism is the primary element in the relationships between a man and a woman.’10 For Bachmann, the real settings11 are the inner world of thinking and feeling.

Lennox states that in Bachmann’s view, European history is influenced by a tendency to overpower and destroy that which is different. This manifests itself not only in overt physical violence but also in the way that consciousness is governed. In human thought the other is obliterated by the dominance of the abstract, thereby undermining its unique quality.12 The novel reflects on the antagonism between the vividness of the word and the destructive force of analysis.13 Writing functions as a metaphor for the terror of a fatal rationalism that does not rest until it has succeeded in its conceptual dissection of the other.14 The psychiatrist Jordan objectifies and reduces Franza to a case study by writing and fixating her in a psychogram. Franza’s increasingly frequent panic attacks and inability to speak are categorised by Jordan as part of her hysterical symptoms. Her ‘illness’ and fear seem to be consequences of the violent stigmatisation by words, by medical terms that reduce her to Jordan’s ‘finding.’15 The novel addresses the dialectic of enlightenment parallel to Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s analysis of the destructive potential of modern rationality.16 Bachmann depicts the highest form of rationality


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as closely linked to evil and insanity: Jordan’s mixture of medical reason and insane violence evokes an existential angst in Franza that eventually robs her of her will to live. Nevertheless, she realises that she has become ill through Jordan’s abuses. Franza is still able to realise the insanity of his ongoing violent drive: ‘I have no way to account for the choke marks on my throat, for my peeling skin, for I am peeling everywhere, the result of a diabolical experiment.’17 3. Bachmann’s Poetology of Fear

Bachmann develops an aesthetic of fear that seeks to refrain from a categorising and narrowing language that she most strongly rejects. She develops a language that subverts the Enlightenment effort to dispel all fear with rationality and searches in her writing for a way to present a different kind of reason.18 Even at an early stage in her writing, Bachmann engages with the issue of the limitations of our concepts. Following Wittgenstein’s critique of Existentialism, she claims that art has to express that which cannot be captured in abstract concepts.19 For Bachmann, literature is the ideal vehicle for creating authenticity of expression. Her writing embraces the articulation of emotions and affects, such as fear. Fear is expressed in a stuttering, fragmentary manner of writing, in a language of the body, in seizures of madness and personal dissociation. Fear cannot be articulated in a direct manner; it shows itself in the dysfunction of a categorising language and in opposition to scientific rationalism.

Bachmann plays with the topos of the fearful woman, which has been popular throughout literary history. During the seventies, the literary depiction of the fearful woman experienced a ‘boom’ of sorts. As a vehicle for expressing emotions outside of the symbolic order, the female body, particularly, functions as a bearer of authenticity. Many writers of the new subjective movement in German literature aimed to create authenticity while rejecting literary fictionalising.20 Although the depiction of female fear plays a key role in portraying the outer and inner destruction of the protagonist, Bachmann strives to avoid a ‘naïve’ concept of authenticity, one that forgets that literary writing cannot take place without fictionalisation and stylisation.21

The body of the fictional woman in literary texts, which has to re-stage ‘femininity,’ which displays and articulates emotions and which simultaneously functions as a sender and receiver, appears as a highly stylised and artificial one.22 Taking the body of the woman as a discursive product, that gains its culturally readable identity as a result of re-signifying and memorising processes, psychoanalysis (and particularly the works of Freud and Groddeck) plays a key role in Bachmann’s depiction of fear.23 As the articulation of the body reverts to psychoanalytical discourse, it refers to the non-authentic, the non-individual and to the staged and theatrical language of the body in the text.24

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4. Staging Fear The novel alludes to various illnesses for which fear is a typical symptom. The

body language of the protagonist is depicted through the symptoms of psychological illnesses in Freud’s pathology, such as hysteria and anxiety neurosis. Franza’s panic attacks are characterised by her shivering, trembling, collapsing, breathing quickly, having vertigo and the feeling that her legs are made of lead:

The Nile seemed to be rising, itself a swift-moving snake. The Nile rose and sank quickly, the entire length of it. Franza leaned hard against the small table, her knees feeling weak, and then sat herself down on the stool that Martin shoved beneath her. … [S]he tried hard to look at the floor in order to stop the spinning. She couldn’t stand these windows that reached all the way to the floor. The windows were everywhere.25

Bachmann refrains from naming or judging these symptoms of illness. They are staged in such a way that they conform to the features described in psychoanalytical theory. The artificial, fictional and construed character of Franza’s body language is revealed in the exaggeration of symptoms in which various different diagnostic possibilities intersect. Thus, it is not surprising that critics have described the protagonist as anorexic, hysterical, suicidal and neurotic.26 Bachmann’s relationship to psychoanalysis oscillates between affirmation and rejection. Representatives of medicine and rational science are mainly depicted in a negative light, denoted as ‘fossil[s].’27 Throughout the novel different characters are introduced that are all associated with fascism and colonialism, i.e., Jordan, the former Nazi doctor Körner, the tourists at the Egyptian tombs. All of these are associated with the colour white, which in Bachmann’s text symbolises a destructive rationalist and colonial spirit.28 Nevertheless psychoanalysis plays a central, though paradoxical, role in the convincing staging of Franza’s ‘own great drama.’29 On the one hand Franza’s fear appears to be a result from her medical stigmatisation, but on the other she becomes aware of her abusive situation through the signals her anxiety gives to her. Through her illness, physical symptoms and her panic attacks, Franza becomes aware of how far her inner destruction has progressed. Her desperation is mirrored in the disjointed language of her letters to Martin and Jordan. The elliptic character of her phrases acts as a kind of symptomatic language which reveals more of her inner state than any detailed explanation could do. The narrator’s perspectives clearly allude to Freud’s writings, but at the same time restrain from diagnosing and judging the protagonist.

This demonstrates Bachmann’s highly reflexive understanding of writing. She was eagerly searching not only for a different form of knowledge which can be sensually experienced but also for a different kind of aesthetic perception which


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overcomes a merely rational perception. Nevertheless, she seemed sceptical about the possibility that writing is finally able to cross the border of the symbolical order which excludes the other. 5. Absence as the Exit of Fear?

The novel presents the city as a place of civilisation, a place of rationalist and paternal structures which threaten and evoke fear in the protagonist. In contrast, the desert appears as a liminal area, a threshold between civilisation and nature, between life and death. It is presented as an indeterminable place of darkness that resists scientific accounts and categorisation. The chapter title ‘Egyptian Darkness’ seems to allude to Freud’s statement of the ‘woman as the dark continent.’ Indeed, the desert resembles the characterisation of the female in (poststructuralist) theory as open, structureless and indescribable.30 Franza considers herself connected to this place and, in contrast to her brother Martin, she quickly adapts to the heat and the otherness of the desert. At the beginning of their journey it seems that the role-construction of the anxious helpless woman is turned upside down. While Martin tries to overcome his unease with consulting his travelling guide book, Franza even regains control over her thinking and body for a while:

There was no doubt that her skin had begun to heal as a result of experiencing real necessity. Something (what?) was helping her to gain control over herself, for she no longer trembled for hours on end and was becoming brown and fit.31

The desert is a utopian place for her in which ‘[e]verything is empty and yet more immediate than anything that claims to exist. Not simply nothingness speculated on by the holders of endowed professorships. It escapes definition.’32

The fact that even in the desert Franza is unable to escape her fear for long demonstrates that it cannot be understood as a utopian place of female otherness. Such a reading is not very credible, as such a depiction would be a further inscription and categorisation rejected by Bachmann. Franza is unable to free herself from the spirit of the white which set off her fear and inner destruction. During her journey she is confronted with repetitions of the crimes she experienced in her Viennese past. She observes that Egypt is not free from the destructive spirit which she fears so much: she encounters the violent humiliation of an Egyptian woman, a former Nazi doctor and colonialism.

As Franza identifies with those whose voice is taken away, she is particularly upset when she faces the exploitive exhibitions of Egyptian tombs. The act of being read, analysed and dissected is, for her, a destruction of something holy. The repeated experience of being raped, this time not by her husband but by a stranger at the bottom of the Giza pyramid, evokes her final act of self-destruction:

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She hit the wall, smashing her head, slamming it with full force, her head smashing against the wall in Vienna and the stone wall in Giza, her voice returning, herself saying aloud, No, No.33

Franza realises that the only way to escape the lethal spirit as presented in the metaphor of the killing word is by making herself unreadable. When she sees the ‘scratched-out symbols of Deir al-Bahari within the temple of Queen Hatshepsut’ she realises that ‘though he [the pharaoh] had deleted her, she was still there. It [the hieroglyph] can still be read, because nothing is there where in fact something should be.’34

By causing her own death, Franza makes herself unreadable and paradoxically regains autonomy. Only in absence, in becoming a ‘gap,’ is Franza able to escape the dissection of that lethal spirit that caused her fear. The gap is the central poetic metaphor of the novel. The unreadable and deleted names refer to the most important function of the poetic text: literature is a hieroglyphic text with negative signs. The gaps in the text resist a deceptive natural representation; they disrupt the illusion of presence by pointing out their own absence. What is readable can only be legitimised in relation to the unreadable.

6. Conclusion

In her fragmentary novel Bachmann develops a complex perspective on fear - on an aesthetic level as well as on the thematic level of the novel. The motif of the anxious victimised woman serves to illustrate and deconstruct gender roles. Fear also plays an important role in Bachmann’s criticism of culture and language, which consists of two aspects: it is presented as an effect but also as an instrument of a destructive dissecting rationality, which Bachmann considers to be the origin of all crimes and of fascism. On the other hand, fear has a subversive aspect in being a symptom for repression, marginalisation and destruction of the other. In that sense Bachmann preceded what Irigaray wrote in Speculum:

Rack it with radical convulsions, carry back, reimport, those crises that her “body” suffers in her impotence to say what disturbs her. Insist also and deliberately upon those blanks in discourse which recall the places of her exclusion and which, by their silent plasticity, ensure the cohesion, the articulation, the coherent expansion of established forms.35

Notes

1 Ingeborg Bachmann, The Book of Franza, trans. Peter Filkins (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 84.


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2 Ibid. 3 Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina, trans. Philip Boehm (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1990), 57. 4 Hélène Cixous, Schreiben, Femininität, Veränderung, Alternative 19 (1976): 108/109; 84-85, 143. 5 See Jean Baudrillard, Die Fatalen Strategien, ed. Oswald Wiener (München: Mattes and Seitz, 1985), 140. Cf. Christine Kanz, Angst und Geschlechterdifferenzen: Ingeborg Bachmann’s, Todesarten-Projekt in Kontexten der Gegenwartsliteratur (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 1999), 143. 6 Bachmann, Book of Franza, 73. 7 Cf. Scheifele, Sigrid, Nichts Halbes Duldend, Fingen Ich und Ich an, Gegeneinanderzugehen’, in Grenzgänge - Literatur und Unbewußtes: Zu H. v. Kleist, E. T. A. Hoffmann, A. Andersch, I. Bachmann und M. Frisch, ed. Achim Würker, Sigrid Scheifele and Martin Karlson (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1999), 102. 8 Cf. Claude Heiser, Das Motiv des Wartens bei Ingeborg Bachmann. Eine Analyse des Prosawerks unter Besonderer Berücksichtigung der Philosophie der Existenz (St. Ingbert: Röhrig Universitätsverlag, 2007), 256. 9 Emmanuel Levinas, Totalität und Unendlichkeit. Versuche über die Exteriorität (Freiburg and Munich: Alber, 1987), 63; Emmanuel Levinas, Jenseits des Seins oder Anders als Sein Geschieht (Munich: Alber 1992), 26. 10 Cf. Christine Koeschel and Inge von Weidenbaum, eds., Ingeborg Bachmann. Wir Müssen Wahre Sätze Finden: Gespräche und Interviews, trans. Peter Filkins (Munich: Piper, 1983), 144. 11 Ingeborg Bachmann, Das Buch Franza. Todesarten Projekt. Volume 2, eds. Monika Albrecht and Dirk Göttsche (München: Piper, 1995), 78. 12 Cf. Sara Lennox, Geschlecht, Rasse und Geschichte in Der Fall Franza, in Text + Kritik. Ingeborg Bachmann, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold (München: Piper, 1984), 157. She alludes to what Horkheimer and Adorno called the ‘Entzauberung der Welt’ [disenchantment of the world]. 13 Jacques Derrida, Grammatologie, trans. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Hans Zischler (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1983), 47; Monika Schmitz-Emans, Schrift und Abwesenheit. Historische Paradigmen zu einer Poetik der Entzifferung und des Schreibens (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1995), 359. 14 Cf. Sigrid Weigel, Ein Ende mit der Schrift. Ein Andrer Anfang, in Text + Kritik. Ingeborg Bachmann, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold (München: Piper, 1984), 58-83; Roland Barthes, Am Nullpunkt der Literatur, trans. Helmut Scheffel (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,1982). 15 Bachmann, Book of Franza, 73.

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16 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1988). 17 Bachmann, Book of Franza, 63. 18 All female characters in the Todesarten-cycle are killed by this instrumental kind of rationality as it is criticised in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectics of Enlightenment]. This demonstrates that Bachmann is engaged with a critique of this form of rationality as well as that, for her, writing itself and finding an appropriate form of writing was highly problematic. 19 This was also her main point of critique against Heidegger. Cf. Kanz, Angst, 135. 20 Cf. Christine Kanz, Postmoderne Inszenierungen von Authentizität? Zur Geschlechtsspezifischen Körperrhetorik der Gefühle in der Gegenwartsliteratur, in Postmoderne Literatur in Deutscher Sprache: Eine Ästhetik des Widerstands, ed. Henk Habers (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 133. 21 Although many publications have pointed at biographical parallels between Bachmann and the protagonist of her novel, generally scholarship distinguishes her from the group of writers who took their own subjective experience as a ground of their literary ‘authenticity.’ Cf. Sigrid Weigel and Regula Venske, Frauenliteratur - Literatur von Frauen, in Gegenwartsliteratur seit 1968, eds. Sigrid Weigel and Klaus Briegleb (München: dtv, 1992), 245-276. 22 Cf. Kanz, Angst, 145. 23 Cf. Michèle Pommé, Ingeborg Bachmann - Elfriede Jelinek. Intertextuelle Schreibstrategien in Malina, das Buch Franza, die Klavierspielerin und die Wand (St. Ingbert: Röhrig Universitätsverlag, 2009), 59-92; Judith Butler, Das Unbehagen der Geschlechter (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 9 and 26. 24 Cf. Ibid.; Barbara Korte, Körpersprache in der Literatur. Theorie und Geschichte am Beispiel Englischer Erzählprosa (Tübingen: Francke, 1993), 41-42. 25 Bachmann, Book of Franza, 122. 26 Cf. Kanz, Postmoderne Literatur in Deutscher Sprache, 142. 27 Bachmann, Book of Franza, 7. 28 See Monika Albrecht and Dirk Göttsche, eds., Bachmann Handbuch. Leben - Werk - Wirkung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002), 148. 29 Ibid., 78. 30 See e.g. Jacques Derrida, Sporen. Die Stile Nietzsches, in Nietzsche aus Frankreich, ed. Werner Hamacher (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1986), 129-168. 31 Bachmann, Book of Franza, 103. 32 Ibid., 89. 33 Ibid., 140. 34 Ibid., 109. 35 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), 142.


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Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1988. Albrecht, Monika, and Dirk Göttsche, eds. Bachmann Handbuch. Leben - Werk – Wirkung. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002. Bachmann, Ingeborg. Das Buch Franza. Todesarten Projekt. Volume 2. Edited by Monika Albrecht, and Dirk Göttsche. München: Piper, 1995. Bachmann, Ingeborg. The Book of Franza. Translated by Peter Filkins. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1999. Bachmann, Ingeborg. Malina. Translated by Philip Boehm. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1990. Barthes, Roland. Am Nullpunkt der Literatur. Translated by Helmut Scheffel. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982. Baudrillard, Jean. Die Fatalen Strategien. Edited by Oswald Wiener. München: Mattes and Seitz, 1985. Butler, Judith. Das Unbehagen der Geschlechter. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,1991. Cixous, Hélène. Schreiben, Femininität, Veränderung. Alternative 19 (1976): 108/109; 84–85, 143. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Sporen. Die Stile Nietzsches’. In Nietzsche aus Frankreich, edited by Werner Hamacher, 129–168. Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1986. Derrida, Jacques. Grammatologie. Translated by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, and Hans Zischler. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983. Heiser, Claude. Das Motiv des Wartens bei Ingeborg Bachmann. Eine Analyse des Prosawerks unter Besonderer Berücksichtigung der Philosophie der Existenz. St. Ingbert: Röhrig Universitätsverlag, 2007. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. New York: Cornell University Press, 1985.

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Kanz, Christine. ‘Postmoderne Inszenierungen von Authentizität? Zur geschlechtsspezifischen Körperrhetorik der Gefühle in der Gegenwartsliteratur’. In Postmoderne Literatur in Deutscher Sprache: Eine Ästhetik des Widerstands, edited by Henk Habers, 123–153. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Kanz, Christine. Angst und Geschlechterdifferenzen: Ingeborg Bachmann’s Todesarten-Projekt in Kontexten der Gegenwartsliteratur. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999. Koeschel, Christine, and Inge von Weidenbaum, eds. Ingeborg Bachmann. Wir Müssen Wahre Sätze Finden: Gespräche und Interviews. München: Piper, 1983. Korte, Barbara. Körpersprache in der Literatur. Theorie und Geschichte am Beispiel Englischer Erzählprosa. Tübingen: Francke, 1993. Lennox, Sara. ‘Geschlecht, Rasse und Geschichte in Der Fall Franza’. In Text + Kritik. Ingeborg Bachmann, edited by Heinz Ludwig Arnold, 156–179. München: Piper, 1984. Levinas, Emanuel. Totalität und Unendlichkeit. Versuche über die Exteriorität. Freiburg and Munich: Alber, 1987. Levinas, Emmanuel. Jenseits des Seins oder Anders als Sein Geschieht. Munich: Alber, 1992. Pommé, Michèle. Ingeborg Bachmann - Elfriede Jelinek. Intertextuelle Schreibstrategien in Malina, das Buch Franza, die Klavierspielerin und die Wand. St. Ingbert: Röhrig Universitätsverlag, 2009. Sander, Sabine. Der Topos der Undarstellbarkeit. Ästhetische Positionen nach Adorno und Lyotard. Erlangen: Filos, 2008. Schneider, Sabine, ed. Die Grenze des Sagbaren in der Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2010. Scheifele, Sigrid. ‘Nichts Halbes Duldend, Fingen Ich und Ich an, Gegeneinanderzugehen’. In Grenzgänge - Literatur und Unbewußtes: Zu H. v. Kleist, E. T. A. Hoffmann, A. Andersch, I. Bachmann und M. Frisch, edited by Achim Würker, Sigrid Scheifele, and Martin Karlson, 101–125. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1999.


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Schmitz-Emans, Monika. Schrift und Abwesenheit. Historische Paradigmen zu einer Poetik der Entzifferung und des Schreibens. München: Wilhelm Fink, 1995. Weigel, Sigrid, and Regula Venske. ‘Frauenliteratur - Literatur von Frauen’. In Gegenwartsliteratur seit 1968, edited by Sigrid Weigel, and Klaus Briegleb, 245–276. München: dtv, 1992. Weigel, Sigrid. ‘Ein Ende mit der Schrift. Ein Andrer Anfang’. In Text + Kritik. Ingeborg Bachmann, edited by Heinz Ludwig Arnold, 58–92. München: Piper, 1984. Simone Klapper is a PhD candidate and tutor at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her dissertation focuses on the literary representation of suicide and speechlessness in 20th century Austrian literature.

The Abysses of Passion in Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica

Rita Benis

Abstract Camilo’s famous words, ‘I would love everything, but much more, I love death itself,’ were always a kind of obsession and enigma for the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira. Such mystery seems to be pursued throughout many of Oliveira’s films, including his latest ’The Strange Case of Angelica.’ In it, a photographer (Isaac) is asked to take the picture of a young woman (Angelica), who has just died. As he looks through his viewfinder, she smiles at him. The experience binds him to the ghost of Angelica in such terrifying way, leading him towards his own death. Immersed in a chilling anguish, Isaac seems to follow Camilo Castelo Branco’s tone: aspiring to merge with the ghost of death, more than anything. In this film context, the link of affinities between fear, terror and horror produces a certain ‘air de famille’ that is impossible to deduced out of any principle, out of any particular circumstance. Still, its presence is sensed, more as an issue of an immediate understanding than one of definable evidences. ‘There is nothing going on, but something happened there,’ says Manoel de Oliveira. This chapter intends to follow some of the traces of that ‘something happened there.’ Is it possible that the truth content of these affinities rests precisely in its resistance to reveal itself? Does cinema enables the ghost of the matter to reveal itself, ‘more real than reality itself’ (Oliveira), allowing a glimpse to such indescribable ‘parenthood’? Key Words: Life, death, ghost, transcendence, fear, uncertainty, melancholy, visibility.

*****

In Manoel de Oliveira’s 2010 film The Strange Case of Angelica, the Portuguese director presents us with the story of Isaac, a young Jewish photographer who is documenting the gestures of the people who work in the fields of a vineyard farm by the Douro hills. Late one stormy night, Isaac is called to do a rather archaic portrait: a post-mortem photo of a young woman named Angelica. As he looks through his camera’s viewfinder, searching for the best angle to capture her peaceful Mona Lisa smile, Angelica swiftly opens her eyes. Isaac recoils, only to find that no one else saw her do so. After this startling incident, Isaac progressively immerses in a world of ghosts, following Angelica towards his own immateriality.

Originally written by Manoel the Oliveira in the early fifties, the idea came out of a personal experience (Oliveira himself was once asked to take a photograph of

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a deceased relative of his wife). The film evokes some of the recurrent themes in Oliveira’s universe, namely the aesthetic romanticism explored by Camilo Castelo Branco - the nineteen century Portuguese writer with whom the filmmaker shares many obsessions: a universe dominated by the longing for ideal love and purity, the attraction of love for love, crossed also with an irony, a bitterness with which both authors depict the human condition and its limits. Invariably we see this crossing turn into a radical exacerbation of feeling and suffering, often leading their characters to an idea of passion as a condition never satisfied, wherein death comes to represent the definitive role in the fulfilment of a promised love. ‘Death is the last abyssal state of love,’1 Manoel de Oliveira once said. The romantic melancholic spirit of The Strange Case of Angelica (as its Chopin soundtrack underlines), reminds us, hence, of the impossibility of representing this Absolute - only allowing the apprehension of its substance, a glimpse of it, more as an issue of an immediate understanding than one of definable evidences. Something our body both experiences and perceives, not as a metaphor, but more as ‘an understanding in our heart.’2 The homage to Camilo is present throughout the film, not only in this romantic melancholic atmosphere, but also in certain details, such as the presence of a Camilo Castelo Branco book among Isaac’s personal belongings.

Still, beyond this romantic surface, one wonders whether the abyss Isaac immerses himself in is indeed a passionate drive or something of another nature. The Strange Case of Angelica is one immense riddle full of secondary understandings, a mise-en-abyme with infinite motives to decode. Real and fantastic moments are tightly intertwined in a constant alternation between the sensible, perceptible world, with the ideal, spectral one. This invisible, radiating world (more sensed than sensible) is clearly prominent and reflects the affinity that defines the principle that engenders the film: the mysterious relation between the workers in the vineyard and Angelica.

Technically, the film installs two types of strangeness: one more unconscious and the other more conscious. The unconscious strangeness (something not new in Oliveira’s work) comes in part from the way the outdated mingles with contemporaneity, not allowing the film to anchor in a naturalistic perspective. Different scales of time overlap constantly. For instance, the dialogue use some archaisms but at the same time they evoke today’s ecological and economical crises; also, the presence of a recent model of automobile crossing the image contrasts with the old fashioned method Isaac uses to print his photos. The conscious strangeness of the film results from the fantastic elements: Isaac’s dream, for example - a black-and-white sequence without dialogue, whose magic artificiality evokes the artisanal simplicity of Méliès’s silent films. Added to this is a counterpoint reference: the realist sequences where Isaac shoots a series of portraits of workers digging the soil in the vineyards of the valley of the river Douro - which recalls the Lumière Brothers and also Oliveira’s 1931 debut, Douro, Working River. The strength and the mystery of The Strange Case of Angelica rests

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particularly in the link between these two perspectives, the documental side and the fantastic pieces. Both are strongly connected: their contrast is what generates the real fear implicit in the film. It is a contrast that highlights an affinity: the infatuation for death (Angelica) and the obsession with the vineyard diggers. As Isaac’s dreams of Angelica become increasingly vivid, the real world grows dim and Isaac turns dreadfully to his labour - as in the distressing sequence where he desperately follows a tractor working the rocky soil, taking furious snapshots to the fading traces of an ancient world (the connection between man and earth). The vision that haunts Isaac (Angelica) then becomes something that exceeds the vision, something connected with Isaac’s immense melancholy about not being able to save the vineyard diggers from oblivion, a Walter Benjamin theme.3 By watching such antique activity disappear, Isaac witnesses an irreparable loss: the loss of a world of metaphors and the reduction of our relation to earth.

Also, Isaac’s loneliness comes from an unbearable feeling: he is unable to make himself understood by others. Every other character that crosses his path finds him strange and manifests some dislike for his strangeness. His ‘otherness’ is threatening, making the others uncomfortable. As he merges into the spectral universe (of the diggers, of Angelica), Isaac becomes inaccessible. His extreme solitude is what leads him to seek escape in the arms of the angel (Angelica, as her name suggests, is like an angel that visits him). She comes to his rescue, embracing him in an amorous flight. The two lovers float over the gloomy skies like in a picture of Chagall. As mother-earth loses its meaning, Isaac turns to another mother: death. The Sublime (horrific) is represented here.

In the fine article Jean-Philippe Tessé wrote dedicated to Oliveira’s latest film, he describes the iron rope that cuts the room in two - where the photos are hung out to dry - as a portal. As soon as Isaac crosses that line the phantom of Angelica come to his encounter, either on spectral appearance or by opening her eyes once again in the photo. Close to the end, when the moribund Isaac finally follows Angelica, at the exact moment when he crosses that same line, his last breath is exhaled and his spectral body joins Angelica, leaving his material body lifeless on the floor. This ‘portal’ (the rope) carries many faces of death: a cruel montage between the photos of the girl’s corpse and those of the working man (the image of the past). It is no accident that both photos (Angelica and the workers) are related to Isaac future tragedy. As Tessé refers:

The episode of the diggers: it’s not just side by side with the story of Angelica, it is its hidden heart … it is like an intuition. … there are too many asides not to suspect that an enigma is developing in front of our eyes, that something is hidden in this film, which, in the end, shortly passes by the obsession of Isaac with Angelica.4


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In a way these diggers are also ghosts, ghosts of outdated gestures. They have a materiality that does not coincide with visibility - it is more of a contingency that dissolves the form, something that is present but not visible. The digger’s affinity with Angelica is what makes our perception emerge in such horror. The terror and the horror released from this affinity allow us to fear something that is not clear to our eyes, something that scares us, an uncertainty. Zygmunt Bauman refers that: ‘fear is the name we give to uncertainty: our ignorance of what is threatening us and of what it can be done.’5 The fantastic that arrives causing immediate fear - Angelica - covers another fear - the vision of the digger’s disappearance. The spectral presence of Angelica might be horrifying, but more terrifying yet are the spectres of the diggers. The horror evoked by Angelica’s presence, therefore, can be seen an ornament, a ceremonial display, a semblance of the nearby real threat: the digger’s disappearance. The feeling of impotence to answer the question that arises from the shock between wanting to reach for the impossible (to keep a memory, to preserve a legacy) and confronting the indifference of his contemporaneous (Justina and the other clients in the pension, who seem not to care for the past), is followed by a consequent fragmentation of Isaac’s identity. For Isaac, the order of the world falls off-tracks, and he is taken by a paralysing horror which leads him towards Angelica. As Oliveira explains: ‘Isaac’s suffering comes from not being able to make himself clear, understandable. … There is nothing unless death - Angelica - that can save him from his suffering.’6 Therefore, when Angelica takes him, we have more an escape than a drive coming out of a passion. To Manoel de Oliveira there is in fact a release for Isaac: he escapes from his nightmare (of watching the ancient world disappear) by turning to Angelica. In a recent interview the renowned director reveals: ‘the spirit comes and saves Isaac from the anguished situation he was living in. But it is difficult to explain things that have no explanation. One can feel it, apprehend it, nothing more.’7 In the same interview he also states that:

There is a contrast between passion and liberation, and I ask myself if Isaac is, or is not, a passionate one. In other words, if there is a spirit that might liberate him from the nightmare which are the diggers and our life in certain circumstances.8

One must not forget that, to Manoel de Oliveira, life is not only about will: in

his perspective there are exterior forces that push you. The spheres of the natural and the supernatural always interpenetrate: ‘we are not as free as we think we are. There are in fact true obscure forces that we call destiny.’9 Thus, his obsession with Camilo Castelo Branco’s words: ‘I would love everything, but much more, I love death itself’ is also present. When Isaac defends his love for the things of the past (the gestures, the expressions), he is speaking of his love for life. Life is much more in the past than in the present, for him as for Manoel de Oliveira. The

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ommunicated.

director’s notion of life is something beyond an immediate existentialist perspective. The narratives, the films, the history we are telling can be seen as a mirror of life - there is an expression Manoel de Oliveira keeps repeating: ‘cinema is the mirror of life’10 - but it does not show the whole narrative: life. In a recent interview the Portuguese director said:

Today, I think of a very precise image: the rivers. They have a life, they pass through it, tortured, and when finally disembogue in the sea, they lose their personality because they all join with the Absolute.11

And in another interview he adds: The river is life. But life doesn’t exist. What exist are convections, codes. Life expresses itself through these codes, and we are shaped from a tender age to reproduce these codes. Life, like cinema, is a representation … it is impossible to touch life … it’s the genius of artistic creation to try to retain life. It’s the function of literature, painting, sculpture, etc., to conserve this life that passes. Not the historical side, but the ephemeral side of the thing that flows like the water of a river.12

Manoel de Oliveira also holds that: ‘Angelica is a desire for Love. But a love in an Absolute sense. And this Love is something that hides itself … Our spirit hides in the Absolute.’13 For the Portuguese filmmaker, the laws of nature and the universe are mysterious to us. This is something very clear to him: ‘life is not politic; life has its own impeccable laws.’14 Maybe these strange contacts that occur between real and unreal - causing all the manifestations of fear to emerge, those feelings of terror or horror -, could translate the Evil we feel we unleashed through the wrong relations we establish with those laws of life Oliveira refers. Since we are not able to grasp the meaning of life, the laws of the nature and the universe, we keep on falling repeatedly into situations and narratives of terror or horror which give us an opportunity of encounter with the Sublime. Throughout Oliveira’s film, the link of affinities between fear, terror and horror presents us with this Sublime that is impossible to deduce. For the Portuguese director, the truth content of these affinities rests precisely in its resistance to reveal itself. In his words, ‘the way I see it, truthfulness is behind reality. We never see it. We only make suppositions.’15 Still, its presence is sensed. And, in Oliveira’s words, ‘it’s the genius of artistic creation to try to retain life.’16 So art, being a place of constant attention, a vigilant place that watches us from a distance, has an important role: though the mystery of life cannot be absorbed by any formula of intelligibility, it can be c


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Perhaps what is more is that the phantoms in our imagination and the phantoms on the screen have the same origin. In The Strange Case of Angelica both ghosts - the real (the diggers) and the unreal (Angelica) - share an ‘air de famille,’ but how to define it? This ‘air de famille’ is something Petrarca, the Italian poet from the XIV century, told his pupil Giovanni Malpaghini to look forward to in his paintings: not a copy, but a shadow of similarity - like the one between a father and a son, an ‘air de famille’ that is not definable, that is not in an eyebrow, nor in a nose, but in the whole. Even if it is possible for the ghost of the matter to reveal itself in the screen as an experience, a perception, and not as a visibility, if this ghost reveals itself as ‘more real than reality itself’ (Oliveira), allowing a glimpse to such indescribable ‘parenthood,’ we still ‘live in a secret beyond reach,’17 says Oliveira. We can only communicate it, but not explain it. The mystery remains.

Manoel de Oliveira acknowledges that: ‘In a film, as in any other work of art, there is always a great deal of the artist’s subconscious that he is not aware of.’18 More than ever, his nephew, Ricardo Trêpa (the actor who plays Isaac) represents a double of his grandfather (the wardrobe is unequivocally the style we are costumed to recognise in the Portuguese famous director - the felt hat, the dark suit with a white shirt, his gestures). If we deny our own death through the representation of the deaths of others (as Freud put it), in this film, while Isaac falls into his melancholic delirious, Manoel de Oliveira claims: ‘we cannot get out of life for nothing.’19 Thus, Oliveira keeps on shooting: at the age of 103 years old he already finished another film. For Paul Ricoeur, ‘the work of memory is the work of mourning. And both are a word of hope, torn from what is unspoken.’20 From Oliveira’s perspective, death is not an end but a passage, a moment, a state. As he himself refers:

In War and Peace there is a noble man who knows he will soon die and asks himself what is death. At one point, he looks to a corner of his room where a door is to be found. And there he has a vision: death is a gate. This is something that always stayed with me, I found it extraordinary.21

Manoel de Oliveira, by transferring his melancholy view of the world to his

work, by doing his work of memory and of mourning - even with all its pessimism (his horror for the extinction of a gesture, a human activity) - he makes an effort to move on, leaving us his heritage. Like Camilo, his passion is for the Absolute.

Notes

1 (Note: all translations into English are my own). Antoine de Baecque and Jacques Parsi, Conversas com Manoel de Oliveira (Porto: Campo das Letras, 1999), 166.

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2 An expression from Wittgenstein. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Bemerkungen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964). 3 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996 to 1999). 4 Jean-Philippe Tessé, ‘Une Nouvelle Joconde’, Cahiers du Cinéma (March 2011): 78. 5 Zygmunt Bauman, Medo Líquido (Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2008), 8. 6 FranciscoValente, ‘O Cinema é o Espelho da Vida, não Temos outro’, Público - Ípsilon (April 29, 2011): 26. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 25. 9 Manoel de Oliveira, ‘La Recherché de L’Absolu’, Positif 601 (March 2011): 29. 10 Valente, ‘Cinema Espelho da Vida’, 26. 11 Ibid. 12 Gérard Grugeau and Marie-Claude Loiselle, ‘Entretien: Manoel de Oliveira’, 24 Images 95 (Inverno 1998/99): 24. 13 Oliveira, ‘La Recherché’, 30. 14 Grugeau and Loiselle, ‘Entretien: Oliveira’, 23. 15 Ibid., 26. 16 Ibid., 24. 17 Valente, ‘Cinema Espelho da Vida’, 26. 18 Ibid., 25. 19 Tessé, ‘Nouvelle Joconde’, 76. 20 Paul Ricoeur, Living Up to Death - Mourning and Cheerfulness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 39. 21 Valente, ‘Cinema Espelho da Vida’, 26.

Bibliography A.A.V.V. Manoel de Oliveira. Lisboa: Catálogo da Cinemateca Portuguesa, Cinemateca Portuguesa, 1981. Baecque, Antoine, and Jacques Parsi. Conversas com Manoel de Oliveira. Porto: Campo das Letras, 1999. Bauman, Zygmunt. Medo Líquido. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2008. Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996 to 1999.


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Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. De Oliveira, Manoel. ‘La Recherché de L’Absolu’. Positif 601 (March 2011): 27–30. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. In The Standard Edition of the 116 Psychoanalysis and Wartime Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated and edited by James Strachey. Vol. 14. London: Hogarth, 1917. Grugeau, Gérard, and Marie-Claude Loiselle. ‘Entretien: Manoel de Oliveira’. 24 Images 95 (Inverno 1998/99): 22–28. Molder, M. Filomena. Semear na Neve. Lisboa: Relógio de Água, 1999. Ricoeur, Paul. Living Up to Death - Mourning and Cheerfulness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Tessé, Jean-Philippe. ‘Une Nouvelle Joconde’. Cahiers du Cinéma (March 2011): 78–80. Valente, Francisco. ‘O Cinema é o Espelho da Vida, não Temos outro’. Público - Ípsilon (April 29, 2011): 25–26. Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophische Bemerkungen. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964. Rita Benis is a PhD candidate in Comparative Studies at Lisbon University, where she investigates the figure of the screenplay as an area of contamination between the worlds of literature and cinema, focusing on the work of Manoel de Oliveira and João César Monteiro. Since 2000, she has been working regularly in the area of screenwriting and assistant director for several film directors, Teresa Villaverde, Teresa Prata, Inês Oliveira, Vincent Gallo, Catherine Breillat, among others.

The 9/11 Fetish: Manufacturing Fear, Horror and Terror through ‘Event-ness’

Amanda D. Watson

Abstract Two weeks after U.S. President Obama declared Osama bin Laden killed by U.S. personnel, The New Yorker magazine marked the historical event with the banner on its May 16th issue reading, ‘After Bin Laden.’ U.S. media coverage explicating the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s death adopted similarly temporal titles: the ‘Post-Bin Laden World,’ (New York Times, May 2nd, 2011) a ‘Post-Bin Laden Cash Crunch,’ (Time Magazine, May 3rd, 2011) and, demarcating a new historical period, the ‘Post-Bin Laden Era’ (The Economist, May 5th, 2011). In U.S. media, Osama bin Laden’s death was fetishised as the event bookending a new chapter in American culture. Returning to the past 10 years, widely known as the ‘post-9/11 era,’ my mixed media art project (entitled September 10th) and corresponding chapter address the concept of ‘event-ness’ as it is occurs in hindsight descriptions and depictions of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The artwork critically represents ‘9/11,’ mapping it in non-metric space and nonlinear time, disrupting the modernist notion of temporality as even and homogeneous. Suggesting that dividing time periods by events, as is commonplace under Western capitalism, is a way of both recolonising history and manufacturing terror, this piece elucidates the gross misrepresentation of actors and processes surrounding the events of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden’s recent death. Relying on Jasbir Puar’s notion of ‘temporal qualifications,’ and both Puar and Sherene Razack’s use of ‘monstrosity,’ this piece asks how ‘event-ness’ facilitates the construction of fearful enemy. Key Words: Event-ness, temporality, fear, monstrosity, 9/11, ‘war on terror,’ modernity, postcolonial thinking, art, memory.


This chapter is a companion piece to my mixed media art piece, September 10th.1 The title of this piece is meant to emphasise my intervention as a critical representation of time and space at the particular event of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I call this chapter ‘The 9/11 Fetish’ to depict the significance of this demarcated time for the manufacturing of fear since the September 11th attacks. I use the feminist psychoanalytic tradition of fetish to mean the heralding of myth or metaphor as truth or fact.2 This fetishising of time at September 11th, 2001 through what Stuart Elden calls the ‘lazy shorthand,’3 is surely represented in U.S. country music megastar, Alan Jackson’s,

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‘Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)?’ a 9/11 tribute song in which he sings,

I’m not a real political man/ I watch CNN but I’m not sure I can tell you/ The difference in Iraq and Iran/ But I know Jesus and I talk to God …4

First performed acoustically at the Country Music Awards in November 2001, the song helped Jackson set the record for most CMA nominations in a single year. It was nominated for the 2002 Grammy Song of the Year, won the Grammy Country Song of the Year, and was parodied in the South Park episode, ‘A Ladder to Heaven,’ which aired the following November. A Billboard chart topper (for five weeks) and a Top 40 pop hit, ‘Where We You …?’ seemed to capture, according to one reviewer, the ‘myriad of emotions unleashed by the terrorist attacks on an unsuspecting nation.’5 The critically-acclaimed song transcended the country music genre, quickly becoming an anthem for U. S. Americans post-9/11. Like religious and national anthems, the song acted as a symbol of celebration, not of grief.

Illuminated by the spectacle of the Alan Jackson song, I suggest that the hyper-representation of 9/11 in this ‘post-9/11 era’ has distanced us from critical engagement with and complicity in the socio-political context of the attacks. Considering the success of song together with September 10th, I attempt to depict a microcosm of what Jasbir Puar calls ‘event-ness,’ that is: reifying certain events as ‘particular turning points or central generators of desires for expediency, rapidity, [and] political innovativeness, caught in a binary debate of rupture versus continuity.’6 I elaborate event-ness as the practice of remembering an occasion as a unified snapshot that occurred at a singular place and a point in time. I apply it to the September 11th case to show how the practice of recalling an event as a unified snapshot creates the infrastructure for manufacturing fear and terror.

I begin by situating the September 10th piece in ‘modern time’ to problematise the Western notion of temporality as even, linear and homogeneous. Invoking Jasbir Puar and Sherene Razack’s7 theorising on representations of terrorist monstrosity with Bliss Cua Lim’s temporal critique,8 I argue that event-ness, or the fetishising of time, privileges and is privileged by particular nationalist bodies at the expense of bodies that fall outside of the national imaginary.9 Temporal critique offers the potential to expose techniques of fear and terror by uncovering the construction of exalted and abhorred subjects in narratives surrounding events. Deconstructing the conceptual practice of dividing time by events, as is commonplace in academia10 and politics under Western capitalism, I explore the implications of event-ness and unpack it in order to show how alternative temporal imaginings might not only install richer and more inclusive historical narratives, but they might also produce resistance to techniques of fear.

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2. Temporal Imaginings In this art, I map irregularly to unmap or unravel what we are trained to see as

real or scientific representation of space and, correspondingly, of time. September 10th is a mixed media piece: laser gloss paper, Bristol board, acrylic, ink and high gloss adhesive on canvas. The backdrop is a collage of New York City travel guides muted with white paint, overlaid with a fanned map of the Middle East and Asia that is spliced along lines of longitude. Placed over the map is a distorted clock, the implied arms of which provide imaginary axes for a graph that has been made uneven with smudges and wrinkles. This is topped with an angular silhouette of the Manhattan skyline where Ground Zero - a name that itself demands unpacking - now lies, before the moment of the attacks on September 11th.

Using this imagery, I attempt to bear witness to the construction of time in modern Western culture. The modernist understanding of time as linear, progressive, and measurable by even units (what Puar refers to as metricity) narrows the window of temporal imaginings of subjective and affective time and, in the 9/11 case, conceals the production of fearful enemy in the aftermath of the event. This artwork disrupts the notion of time as universal and rational, suggesting it exists subjectively and is both constituted and interpreted emotionally. 3. Modern Homogenous Time

In Translating Time, Lim critiques ‘modern homogeneous time,’ arguing for acknowledgement of supernaturalism and multiple times that ‘fail to coincide with the measured, uniform intervals quantified by clock and calendar.’11 Weaving visual metaphors and genres of film and the occult, Lim illustrates how temporal impressions shift and multiply with cross-cultural reception. Her critique of coherent temporal logic is visualist:12 regarding time as homogeneous requires seeing an empty space ‘in which increments of time can be laid out for measurement.’13 Modern temporal imagination is also visualist in the sense that the modern emphases on surveillance technology and on historical documentation using visible material as primary source information imply what Puar refers to as the ‘privilege of seeing.’ The September 10th piece attempts to capture a triply visualist critique of regarding time as see-able, spatial and ordinal; the map is split apart and the numbers on the clock are distorted and seen from behind. The clock itself is armless and tilted away from a wrinkled graph, and the graph’s lines are unmarked and peeling.

As depicted by the graph in September 10th, a distinctive feature of event-ness is its reliance upon the representation of time as numerical. The time of the event is conceptualized as t=0 under modernist epistemology. Even though ‘the event’ has occurred in the past and could therefore be represented by a negative value, time is viewed to be determined in relation to marked events and thus constitutes the origin point of the graph. This conceptualising is evident in the standard practice of counting backwards in time units before an event occurs. A common example is

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the countdown before the launch of a spacecraft in which the time leading up to the launch is described as ‘T minus Time’ and the launch hour is called zero hour.14 Other examples include the traditional countdown on New Year’s Eve and the countdown sequence on the head leader at the start of films. These cases show how processes are seen to lead up to and stem from the fixed (zero) point of a marked event. The event is represented and becomes understood through its temporal categorisation, by which we achieve the sensation of living in ‘post’ time and, in doing so, we participate in the hallmark of modernity - not only are we looking toward the future, we take pleasure imagining we exist inside of it. It is a futurist orientation towards time under capitalism, which relies on our imagining future pleasures, future purchases and future leisure time as reward for our present work.

I discuss the modernist bonding of pleasure and future to point out the modernist lean toward potential, and the corresponding practice of a culture of potentials to write terror into historical narratives. For example, a judicial effect of our modernist exercise of event-ness, or time categorization, is found in the risk component of actuarial justice, pre-emptive punishment. Pre-emptive punishment, justified in relation to an event from which certain bodies come to represent a threat to nationhood, illustrates how two components of event-ness are sutured. First, imagining the event suspended in time allows for past events or processes to be narrated as leading up to and culminating in the event. This linear visualisation of time serves to rationalise rights violations at the expense of bodies deemed suspicious. Second, the event frozen in time, now passed, allows those privileged by this imagining to feel they are living in the future: living in (an advanced, progressive) ‘post’ condition.

The privileging of national subjects in the linear progression model of time in ‘the modern world’ is prominent in contemporary media depictions of ‘unrest’ in the ‘Arab world,’ especially in the demarcation of the ‘Arab Spring.’15 Demystifying the Western epistemological treatment of time is how these notions of ‘us’ as modern and ‘them’ as pre-modern (and in need of rescuing) can be further problematised. In September 10th, the map of parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia that are commonly seen by the West as ‘developing’ is fanned from the clock-graph-skyline image. This representation imbricates the spatial mapping of the East (by the West) with the modernist notion of time, as symbolised by the Manhattan skyline. In the artwork, time and space are represented as overlapping in a disorganised way to disrupt the colonialist divide between modern and pre-modern society, in turn challenging notions of developed and developing. The clock image, black ink transferred to adhesive film, is transparent, unsettling its supposed scientific coherence and reliability under modernity. The Manhattan skyline is also made of ink transferred to film to symbolize its construction as a stable image by privileged viewers and its corresponding potential to be critically deconstructed.

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4. Monster Terrorist Event-ness at 9/11 creates the breeding ground for narratives of fear and terror

as character bodies are constructed as monstrous or modern. In Casting Out, Razack introduces the concept ‘monster terrorist’ which she describes as the embodiment of Muslim irrationality. With regard to portraits of the terrorist body, monster terrorists are ‘figures that enable the West to feel its own civilizational superiority and to make the case that exceptional violence is required to keep in line those whose uncivilized natures are so much in evidence.’16 The symbolism of monster terrorist is useful for elaborating how event-ness distorts through (mis)representation of processes. The monster terrorist figure is of course related thematically to event-ness at the attacks of 9/11, but we might abstract the spectacle of the monster terrorist body to help conceptualise fall-out issues (i.e., who is represented and not?) of event-ness in other contexts, such as putative ‘natural’ disasters, forms of resistance or acts of war. Using the spectacle of bodies that exemplify fearful characters whose lives and motives are narrated in relation to events by privileged narrators, the representation of prominent voices versus alternative narrators can be further examined. For example, Razack writes that the image of the terrorist monster precludes ‘any examination of the socio-political causes of terrorism.’17 Here I take that further to argue that the event-ness of 9/11 results in the same preclusion.

Stuart Elden, in his work on the relation between terror and territory, explicates the uniquely spatial and temporal angles of the ‘war on terror,’ from which to further understand the distorted narration of enemies in the aftermath of 9/11. He argues that the lack of a single geographic site for the September 11th attacks requires its temporal demarcation - with a date marker rather than a geographical one (as in Pearl Harbor). He writes:

The events of September 11, 2001 in New York City, Washington DC, and the field in Pennsylvania are a political, spatial and temporal marker. The lazy shorthand, September 11th, or worse, 9/11, masks the spatial contexts of the events in favour of a temporal indication …, one that seeks a privileging of the date for American grief, occluding other events on that day in this and other years.18

He reminds us, ‘more than twice as many children died of diarrhoea on this same day than died in the more publicised events.’19 The practice of marking an event obscures the multiple techniques of power and agency that are exercised in the processes surrounding and operating through the event, and allows for techniques of terror to lurk below the surface.

In describing the production of the monster terrorist through event-ness at 9/11, it is useful to consider how, through event-ness, time is artificially confined to the

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visual domain. The capture of the snapshot image of an event - in the 9/11 case, a horrific streetscape - concretises processes in history. The visual privilege of modern time has territorial implications, as through the elevation of a moment to event status, victims and heroes are deemed deserving or undeserving, threatening bodies are captured and cast out, and everybody is under surveillance.

This illustration of embodied monster terrorist is useful for imagining the psychic effects (and the affective domain) of event-ness. Like Puar’s discussion of the representation of turbaned bodies as ‘monstrous,’ the event is represented so that it can be allayed into justifications for entire belief systems. Like the monster, the event as a snapshot stores memories of shock, horror, injustice and death. The body of the terrorist monster and the outline of the Manhattan skyline sans Twin Towers evoke images to which we can return to summon our feelings of fear, anger and sadness. In the 9/11 example depicted in September 10th, the embodied monster terrorist serves to illustrate the embodied component of time and space in event-ness. Thinking of the embodiment of multiple subject positions encountering each other at various points of intersection in time and space allows for a more nuanced imagining of alternative narratives with, most importantly, alternative protagonists. 5. Imagined Bodies

Out of a snapshot in time grows ‘us-versus-them’ nationalist rhetoric. The ‘victims of terrorism’ become the ‘liberators’ of other victimized bodies (i.e., ‘women’ and ‘homosexuals’ in the Middle East). Citing Foucault’s ‘biopower’ and Rey Chow on the ‘ascendancy of whiteness,’ Puar reiterates how the Western epistemological tendency toward classification to ‘render the world a knowable object’ results in obscuring the most lauded and reviled subject positions.20 As Chow claims, this classification of knowledge, or objectification of knowing processes, mystifies the ‘primary beneficiaries of the epistemological project: European subjectivities’21 and creates the distinction between those who theorise and those who are theorised about. Consideration of biopower as masking epistemic privilege is necessary to scrutinise the exaltation22 of the privileged citizen body in the ascendancy of whiteness, or the mobilising of cultural difference to serve the racially dominant population in the United States.23 The snapshot of the event freezes characters into heroes and villains, both of these categories profoundly sexed and racialised. Crucial for future consideration, the demarcating of bodies illustrates the embodied implications of event-ness.

Expanding upon Puar’s understanding of the colonial underpinnings of modern time, Lim describes how modern historical time and a view of time as homogeneous is ‘epitomized by the ideology of progress.’24 Modern time is framed as neutral, undeniable, inevitable, scientific - closed to alternative temporal imaginings and interpretations that shift contextually or across subject positions - and its ideological link to progress, pure and simple, is desirable. In response to

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how time gets fetishised, I argue that reconceptualising the ‘event’ as process or memory work, similarly to how Axel reformulates the ‘homeland’ as ‘cohered through sensations, vibrations, echoes, speeds, feedback loops, recursive folds and feelings,’25 we might problematise our practice of ‘era-cising’ time and consider how the event (or era) is a spatial and temporal contingency. It exists only in memories that are constructed in states of flux. With this artwork, I suggest following through to the implications of fetishising time in this way. We might go on to ask whose bodies are reflected in representations, who consumes them, and whose lives are made unliveable by them.

6. Implications of Time Fetishized at 9/11: Fear Production

Event-ness allows a privileged photographer to create the angle from which we view an historical occurrence. The angle, legitimated by the modernist privileging of sight, is a biased representation that produces biased narrative offshoots with regard to fear, anger, blame, victimisation, and who is able to express what version of the story. This art calls for a reimagining of time with appreciation for the historical locatedness of events that are fetishised and commodified.26 Despite specificities, 9/11 is remembered as monolithic. The processes of 9/11 proceeding across time/space contexts are recalled as a singular moment/place. In event-ness, that moment is frozen into an image that is given life in subjective memory - inducted with the power of disturbing, threatening, installing terror. The event can then be calcified as the endless future, distributing knowledge capital to exalted subjects and possessing othered bodies with visible terrorist (non)-capital. 7. Conclusion: Creation and the Paradox of Event-ness

In creating this piece, I reflect on what it means to theorise event-ness through the representation of 9/11. I recall a sense of control with paintbrush and scissors in hand, a sensation of employing technology for representation that is in line with the theme of event-ness in terms of the colonial techniques exercised through Western temporality. Perhaps illustrative of the paradox of representing event-ness,27 the sensation of cutting the map and smudging the graph for this project was disconcerting. The map seemed to hold a sacred power, and cutting it, especially cutting only the sections of the world map that I have been socialized to understand as ‘other,’ felt uncomfortable.

The aim of invoking event-ness also reveals my colonial desire. In other words, the artist’s desire to demarcate time according to ‘universal’ or ‘global’ experiences (as I would argue is my representation of the 9/11 attacks) is paradoxical in the sense that it urges alternative temporal imaginings through visible symbols, reprivileging the visual. Even the coining of the terms themselves in this writing is an ironic recolonising of time - the process of employing the terms ‘post-9/11 era’ or ‘pre-9/11 examples’ of ‘pre-emptive’ state actions reinforces the era-cising of time. The process imbues writers with a knowledge-

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power with which to describe events linearly and be legitimated. Not only is the explicit content of ‘9/11 era’ laden with psychological effects for the reader, the exploitation of a sensitive event in time to categorise based on time empowers the writer, adding a stream of disempowering effects for the reader, that is - this writer knows of what s/he speaks, regardless of images the event itself evokes.28

Notes

1 Amanda Danielle Watson, September 10th, 2011, Ottawa, Canada. 2 See Donna Haraway, ‘How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Donna Haraway’ (London: Routledge, 1999), 92; and Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995), 61. 3 Stuart Elden, ‘Terror and Territory’, Antipode 39, No. 5 (2007): 821. 4 Alan Jackson, ‘Where Were You [etc]’, on Drive, Company Number, compact disc. 5 Deborah Evans Price, ‘The Eloquent “Drive” of Alan Jackson’, Billboard 29 December, 2001, 5. 6 Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (London: Duke University Press, 2007), xviii. 7 Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 47. 8 Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 2. 9 See discussion of how the ‘exalted subject’ body of the Canadian national imaginary continually reinforces a white supremacist and masculine citizenry in Sunera Thobani, Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 3-7. 10 For example, see Mustapha Pasha’s praise for Razack’s Casting Out: Casting Out is ‘a fabulous contribution to a growing literature on new modes of imperial management since 9/11…’ (back cover, emphasis mine). 11 Lim, Translating Time, 2. 12 Here Lim relies on Henri Bergson’s critique of spatialised time in Time and Free Will, translated by F. L. Pogson, M.A. (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1910 [1889]). Bergson renounces modern notions of the present, arguing that nothing is instantaneous since every moment is imbued with memory and exists in a depth of time. 13 Lim, Translating Time, 44. 14 Zero hour has also become a common epithet for the 9/11 attacks. See ‘Inside 9/11: Zero Hour.’ YouTube video, televised on the National Geographic Channel on 22 August 2005, posted by ‘daviddangerman,’ on 11 September 2007, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-B6c6xxXug.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-B6c6xxXug

Amanda D. Watson

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169

15 See Arab Unrest: ‘Final offensive’ is launched to topple Ivory Coast’s Gbagbo,’ ‘Gaddafi looking for an exit strategy,’ ‘Egypt’s military keeps repressive practices in place,’ and ‘Syrian security forces crack down on “Friday of Martyrs”’, The Guardian Weekly, 1 April 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/apr/01/mainsection. 16 Razack, Casting Out, 47. 17 Ibid. 18 Elden, ‘Terror and Territory’, 821. 19 Ibid. 20 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 25. 21 Ibid. 22 Thobani, Exalted Subjects, 3-7. 23 Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and The Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 2-3. 24 Lim, Translating Time, 12. 25 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 171. 26 Specific to this piece: in our current legitimation of 9/11 narratives. Other examples include the commodification of sites of violence for tourism, like Auschwitz or Ground Zero. 27 In choosing to theorise through art, I reveal my own desire for a temporal representation that, if alternative in its inquiry, privileges the visual.

Bibliography

Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will Translated by F.L. Pogson, M.A. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1910 [1889]. Chow, Rey. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Elden, Stuart. ‘Terror and Territory’. Antipode 39, No. 5 (2007): 821–846. Haraway, Donna. How Like a Leaf : An Interview with Donna Haraway. London: Routledge, 1999. Lim, Bliss Cua. Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. London: Routledge, 1995.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/apr/01/mainsection

The 9/11 Fetish

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Price, D. E. ‘The Eloquent “Drive” of Artista’s Jackson’. Billboard 113, 29 December, 2001. Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. London: Duke University Press, 2007. Razack, Sherene. Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Thobani, Sunera. Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Watson, Amanda. September 10th [Mixed media art]. Ottawa, Canada: Available from [email protected], 2011. Amanda D. Watson is PhD candidate at the Institute of Feminist, Women and Gender Studies, University of Ottawa. Her dissertation project explores how recent media representations of motherhood reflect race panic in the post-9/11 eugenics turn.

ISBN 978-1-84888-145-7 £6.95

This collection represents a sample of the proceedings of the 5th Annual Fear, Horror and Terror: At The Interface Conference, held at Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom in September, 2011. The volume has been organised around three ‘fearful symmetries’, reflecting tensions running throughout the conference regarding how fear is configured with sameness/otherness, power/powerlessness and voice/voicelessness. Contributors explore these symmetries from a range of disciplinary perspectives, from a psychological inquiry into how fear is involved in acquiring cultural competence, to a classicist review of ancient Greek concepts of pleasurable and stupefying horror, to a visual artistic consideration of the silencing terror manufactured post-9/11. The collection’s relevance lies not only in the ways in which authors interrogate fearful histories, but also in how they take up the contemporary context, in which our understandings of fear, horror and terror have been so altered as to immeasurably mark our personal and political thinking.

Riley Olstead is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at St. Francis Xavier University, Canada. Her research for the past 15 years has examined fear and its relationship to gender. In particular, her work has focused on gendered experiences of panic disorder, the psychiatrization of fear and the gendered meanings attributed to high-risk leisure sports.

Katherine Bischoping is an Associate Professor in Sociology at York University. Her present interests – in interviewing methods, the sociology of the theatre, and family narratives about the Third Reich – find their through-line in questions about language use and story-telling strategies.

Cover design: Nebojsa Dolovacki

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Fear in Intercultural Competence Development: The Blind Spot Diagnosed in a Health Care Setting

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