Monstrosity from the Inside Out [1 ed.] 9781848882249, 9789004374034

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Monstrosity from the Inside Out

At the Interface Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Lisa Howard Dr Ken Monteith Advisory Board James Arvanitakis Katarzyna Bronk Jo Chipperfield Ann-Marie Cook Peter Mario Kreuter S Ram Vemuri

Simon Bacon Stephen Morris John Parry Karl Spracklen Peter Twohig Kenneth Wilson

An At the Interface research and publications project. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/ The Evil Hub ‘Monsters and the Monstrous’

2014

Monstrosity from the Inside Out

Edited by

Teresa Cutler-Broyles and Marko Teodorski

Inter-Disciplinary Press Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2014 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.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087

ISBN: 978-1-84888-224-9 First published in the United Kingdom in Paperback format in 2014. First Edition.

Table of Contents Introduction: Shifting Faces, Monstrous Places Teresa Cutler-Broyles and Marko Teodorski Part I:

A Monstrous Society Reflecting the Monster’s Future: The Commodification of Sirens Marko Teodorski

Part II:

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3

The Monstrous Hermaphroditic Clone as Backward Progress: A Reading of Ralf Isau’s Thriller Die Galerie der Lügen oder Der Unachtsame Schläfer Angelika Baier

29

Postmodern Potencies: Interrogating the Monstrous Sign in Contemporary Society Janhavi Mittal

51

The Dark Defender: Dexter and Making Heroes out of Serial Killers Joanna Ioannidou

69

‘You Need Us’: Configuring the Family in Post-9/11 Zombie Cinema Emily Dezurick-Badran

85

Monstrous Nationality Haunted Communities: The Greek Vampire, or the Uncanny at the Core of Nation Construction Álvaro García Marín

109

Muslim Monsters/American Heroes: Sleeper Cell and Homeland as the New Face of Fear Teresa Cutler-Broyles

143

Part III: With/In the Monsters’ House ‘Thing without Form’: Peter Ackroyd’s Monstrous City Marta Komsta

161

A Bad Romance: Lady Gaga and the Return of the Divine Monster Lise Dilling-Hansen

183

Here Be Dragons (and Vampires, and Zombies): The Politics of Monstrous Communities Jack Fennell

203

Introduction: Shifting Faces, Monstrous Places Teresa Cutler-Broyles and Marko Teodorski Strangers, gods and monsters represent experiences of extremity which bring us to the edge. They subvert our established categories and challenge us to think again. And because they threaten the known with the unknown, they are often set apart in fear and trembling. Exiled to hell or heaven; or simply ostracized from the human community into a land of aliens.1 Until recently in human history, monsters were relegated to the shadows, feared and reviled, and kept at a distance through ritual and denial. Markers of the edges, stalkers at the boundaries, and given shape by the imagination, they emerged during times of upheaval or schisms in the social order. Once awakened, monsters were relentless and virtually impossible to vanquish, and often it was only through heroic effort and blind luck that societies battled them back to their dark lairs and took a collective breath, safe once again. For a while. It is no great revelation that monsters are in fact the darker side of us, that they represent a given society’s fears, unspoken desires, repressions and nightmares. Nor is it news to anyone who studies such creatures that their etymology and their nature are to warn us against what cannot be seen, often what is in fact closest to heart. No wonder people dread their coming and take such pains to ensure their hasty demise. Such is the nature of the relationship between society and monsters that the liminal space between us and them is both essential and alluring. Drawn to that space as though to their own reflection, societies can’t help but hope for a fleeting glimpse, something to get the heart racing and to reassure themselves that what’s out there is far more frightening than what’s inside; the status quo need not change so long as the shadowy creatures lurking on the other side draw the gaze. However, once these lines of demarcation between inside and outside, us and them, human and monster—and monstrous—are breached and the monsters stalk out of the shadows and into the commons, no longer can their warnings be ignored. And when they refuse to retreat, when they take up residence in the furniture, in the house next door, in local underground clubs, and when they haunt national psyches and popular culture, they have truly come into their own. The moment monsters appear in broad daylight is the moment we comprehend that the horror we experience emanates from deep down inside us, close to the imaginary wellspring of our beings where dwells a terror-driven desire burning fiercely. Its flame is black and cold and if we approach it too openly, we risk losing that we are naming ourselves. This desire entices us, seduces us to come closer and look directly into its heart. But its very voice hurts us, penetrates our skin from the inside, repelling us away. We cannot but desire this horror of torment, we yearn to

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__________________________________________________________________ be scared. From our own psyches rise the all-pervading horror that hunts our minds, our lives, and our self-knowledge. We are afraid of the monster under the bed or inside the closet, but what we fear the most is that once the monster announces itself and speaks to us in its anguished roar, we will hear its horror, comprehend its voice, and connect to its words. That is when we realize that the monstrosity we dread is the one within. From this primal impulse of a divided, monstrous self, humanity commences its long journey of representing. We cannot deal with the dread of our own skin, so we compel ourselves to express it, to render it intelligible. We write the monstrosity, paint it and sculpt it, rarely recognizing this exhausting and painful path of selfknowledge for what it is. A myth persists that a monster can be written about, or painted on a canvas. We read about vampires, and in those words we believe we see a whole, we are convinced that we have pinned the creature down. But the monster doesn’t actually exist—at least, not within those words—for to be representable the monster has to stop shifting and transgress to this side of the borderline of meaning. In order for words to capture it fully, to assign to the monster specific and permanent grapheme, the monster has to enter language and present itself as a being; in other words, it has to be. If there is a place where a monster can exist, even as a haunting glimpse of possibility, language is one such place. While language cannot capture monsters, it can channel their impossible existence, translating and exceeding what cannot be approached in being. A monster is abject, an expelled and forbidden entity, and language is its signifier. Writing monstrosity is giving existence to the impossible, one that changes even as it is articulated. Accordingly, reading monstrosity is reading a text without an object—a signifier without its signified. That is why a monster always destroys semiotic systems: it cannot be (re)presented, yet there it is, on paper, veiling itself with empty words and hollow images. The monster lurks from the eye, mouth, and hand of the beholder. This fundamental existential impossibility of the monster is densely connected to the notion of space. If it is non-representable, and still stares at us from these pages, where does it come from? Birthing from the interruption of a sentence, monsters dwell in the unknown white zone betwixt words, edged by two signs, referring to neither of them. What is this space that is comfortable enough to accommodate not one monster but many? How can a vampire coexist with a zombie in the same line, page, or text, when their non-existence is not of the same kind, when all they share is a cry of death engulfing the cracks of their perverted anti-beings? And still, they roam the pages of this book alongside sirens and golems and cyborgs, as in a space suitable for them all. They feed on each other, they coexist and commune. In representation, margins of imaginable possibilities collapse, opening up a new world freed of subject-object desperation in which

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__________________________________________________________________ there is a place for all non-imaginable impossibilities. This place where meanings implode is the place where the subject of the monstrous book is born. Its reader cannot but be seduced, admitting that the cry of the infringed bodies is both too sweet and beyond horrifying. She or he must submit him/herself and lend his eye to the ordering of these repulsive corporalities. As he reads, he transforms himself from the inside out because the text, even if it has been written by others, is coming from within. The text continuously recreates itself by simultaneous selfconstruction and deconstruction, in the process recreating the self of the reader, luring him closer to the heart of darkness that flickers inside his dreadful desire. The reader becomes the ‘tireless builder’2—he strays. As Julia Kristeva says, he wanders blind, on a journey, during the night, the end of which keeps receding. He has a sense of the danger, of the loss that the pseudo-object attracting him represents for him, but he cannot help taking the risk at the very moment he sets himself apart. And the more he strays, the more he is saved.3 The reader without a beginning or an end wanders through the monstrous text searching for salvation, for a catharsis that will never come because this kind of text leads nowhere but to itself, to its own rejected world, its own monstrous community, the Netherworld of creation. This volume arrives at this moment, when monsters no longer hide but proclaim their existence within the societies from which they have sprung. In the editing of these chapters, we were struck by the way this volume became a kind of literary moment in which these creatures have taken up residence. It has become a monstrous community of sorts, imagined as a shape-shifting space. It is on the move from one impossibility to another, breaking down coherent meanings and recreating them as simulacra. It subverts, it perverts, it opens and closes. In a way, it is a heterotopy. Inside these pages the unimaginable becomes representable. As such, it presents a perfect space for a monstrous community—a space out of place, deprived of time and linearity, a physical amalgam eager to accommodate all that which society ejects. All the authors of this book have set out on a journey into this Netherspace. They articulate this community by juxtaposing always a new piece of the mosaic, endlessly reaching towards the monsters as cultural expressions to be read, recognized, and recreated. In the opening chapter, Marko Teodorski journeys into this textual space through a glass darkly; he moves from the ancient past, exploring the slippage between human and object as reflected in the commodification and silencing of sirens, to the nineteenth century when these creatures lurked ‘among the house utensils and grooming appliances.’4 Their muteness not only a symptom but a

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__________________________________________________________________ cause, their monstrosity in their very ability to transform, and their desires forever changed by both, these sirens and the mirrors through which their presence—and their absence—permeated this new materiality produced in the Industrial Revolution, are explored with deftness and a style that itself reflects and refracts the image of monstrosity back on itself. Sometimes the only thing we can see in a mirror is all that does not exist. Teodorski approaches each of the sections of his chapter as a fragment, and in each fragment are the jagged-edged multiplicities of desire and commodification; objects and Others, mirrors and paintings that age, dolls and dandies, a hall of mirrors and a palace of glass, all take their place on the stage of history, anchors for the free-floating concepts that coalesce as foreground for the ‘sweetness of [siren’s] voices’5 and their inevitable silencing as they became merely objects—voiceless, but able to shatter our reflections as Mirror Mosaics,6 and we see ourselves as a thousand tiny pieces. With Angelica Baier we enter the realm of impossibility from another corner. The author follows Plato, Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin and Jean Baudrillard in a complex reading of Ralf Isau’s novel Die Galerie der Lügen oder Der Unachtsame Schläfer (The Gallery of Lies or The Careless Sleeper). Following the novel’s text and reading its subtext, she approaches hermaphroditic clones in their different pursuits of self-recognition as backward progress. Hermaphrodites— mythic androgenic beings, divided in two, deprived of their divine nature—haunt the individuation of modern identities by coming back as products of bioengineering—the clones. Monstrosity in this chapter crawls into language from the perspective of evolution. Genetically identical clones, capable of selffertilization and self-reproduction, point to a backward future, a backward progress where what comes next is what has been in the beginning—one, undivided self, primordial wholeness, the moment in which the borderline of the Self and the Other did not exist. Hermaphroditic clones come as utopian redeemers of humanity, transcending both the animal and the human, ascending toward divine conception of the world without differences and exclusions where ‘narrow-minded gender wars’7 are over and, in a twisted or hairpin curve, humanity expects to reach it’s mythical, ahistorical, aestheticized future. But, as Baier shows us in the end, that future is not yet here, because there is no a DNA mastering that can compete with the chaotic particularity of nature and reality. The fear of transgression will always come from within, or in her own words, ‘the hermaphroditic, divine, and animalistic clones are symbols of the unpredictable, monstrous potentiality within everyone.’8 Janhavi Mittal takes up the monster narrative in its perhaps most prototypical form, that of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and two late twentieth century adaptations, ‘The Postmodern Prometheus,’ a The X-Files episode, and Patchwork Girl, a novel by Shelley Jackson. Starting from the assumption that the body itself is a site of constructed meaning, this chapter questions how changes to the understood positionality of that body transform not only its meaning but the

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__________________________________________________________________ meaning of human—and that of posthuman. Bodily difference, explored through the lens of disability studies, becomes something both less monstrous and more Other. In her examination of the ‘altered position of the monstrous body in different postmodern narrative forms,’9 Mittal encounters—and introduces us to— a new monstrous sign and wonders: is the cyborg monstrosity embodied? In line with the way this entire volume explores both definitions and possibilities for the monsters’ existence, Mittal examines how, in her chosen texts, bodily difference comes to define monstrosity, and asks whether this is inevitable; in fact, she determines, it is not. Postmodern fragmentation of both subject and text allows for a ‘hollowing out of the monstrous sign’10; in a world made up of multiple subject positions the monstrous body loses its meaning. In the language of disability studies, the normative body is socially constructed. And the cyborg becomes the metaphor, its patchwork subjectivity the only possible approach to the monstrous sign. Joanna Ioannidou’s chapter, an exploration of a popular television show Dexter, and the transformation of this serial killer into a hero, follows on nicely. Classified as a monster by his own inner voices, Dexter allows us a glimpse into our own inner darkness, a reflection perhaps more monstrous than any figure that lurks outside. Ioannidou answers the question asked by a number of the authors in this volume—what makes a monster, anyway—and answers it by asking another: what makes a hero? In her intricate and intimate delving into how monster-is-asmonster-does equates to, in fact, why audiences find Dexter so disturbingly appealing, she awakens in readers the realization that the lines between good and evil, between right and wrong, and between hero and monster are not as clear as we might hope. As Dexter fulfils what he himself feels are his inevitable dark impulses—killing for pleasure, because he cannot help himself—he slips without volition, his our ours, from demon to defender. Perhaps the power in this exploration of Dexter’s inner darkness is due to our recognition of ourselves in his actions; he claims the site of both monstrosity and superhero, battling demons both inner and outer, and we are forced to recognize that true evil may in fact not be solely determinable by a creature’s deeds. In balance, we conclude that perhaps the edges of our moral codes are not as rigid as we thought, and we follow Dexter’s Dark Passenger as he ‘offers [us] a safe way to engage with a part of ourselves we usually try to suppress,’11 and we ultimately succumb to the forbidden desire that, finally, erases the distinction between the ‘human and the non-human, the human and the inhumane.’12 Fascination with murder, blood and death comes in many different forms and flesh-eating zombies can easily be seen as sign of troubled times, approximating the idea of Jeffrey J. Cohen that monsters always appear in times of crises.13 The beginning of the 21st century can be seen as one of the times in question when social norms are radically questioned; family being one of them. Emily DezurickBadran moves through contemporary zombie cinema following the zombie fairy

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__________________________________________________________________ tale of broken and reshaped families. Most of the zombie narratives of contemporary cinema address the prime question of catastrophe: if we are faced with an overwhelming danger and evil, how far would we go to protect ourselves? And how far would we go to protect others? If our loved ones are the source of danger, what do we do? Do we sacrifice ourselves for others, our mothers, fathers, sisters? And once we are alone, do we look for a companion, a substitute for those not anymore at our side? Dezurick-Badran addresses these questions by presenting the zombie-catastrophe narrative as a fairy tale, an aporetic text without an obvious, or even possible, way out, but one that paints social tensions on the canvas of popular culture. As spectators and symbolic survivors of these catastrophes, we inevitably come to the realization that, in accordance with the volume’s title, we are always already what we fear14 the most. The monster we fear, the monster we fight, the monster we slay—comes from within. And sometimes that monster comes from our own (national) past. Álvaro Garcia Marin follows the vrykolakas, a Greek vampire, right into the heart of European modernity. In the eighteenth century, at the moment of purification of Greece’s image in the eyes of western Europeans, this monster invades fissures and rifts of national identity’s construction, inviting and embodying the unheimliche of the ancient past, symbolically mourning this imaginary paradise lost. The signifier embodied in the ancient past and the signified embodied in the contemporary Western vision of Greek’s pureness create the vrykolakas that precludes their absolute overlap, leaving the blank space to be spectralised and made monstrous. Its undead feature, the revenant nature of its body, expresses the reality of discontinuous perception of Greeks and Others, disrupting ‘the ideal of a Western incorporeal intellectual space founded on a non-mediated continuity with Ancient Hellenes.’15 By interrupting the semiotic transparency presupposed by Enlightenment philosophy of the eighteenth century, the monstrosity of vrykolakas articulates the uncanny irruption, making Greece a haunted community, a land whose recent past would not die, so that the more ancient one can shine through. The romanticist disappointment with modern Greece and Philhelenistic obsession with the utopian historical narrative of Classical Greece raises the vampire from the depths of a grave, empowering it to possess the land, the literature and the body of the nation. But what if monstrosity shape-shifts so radically that it is no longer perceptible? When it moves from the margins of space, culture and imagination into the centre of our lives, when it invades our neighbourhood and buys the house we share our backyard with? What happens when monsters stop being ugly and obvious so we never know what should we fear? Teresa Cutler-Boyles embodies in her chapter the essence of this volume—when the monstrosity visually fades away, what we fear the most is our own within. In comparison to previous 20th century tradition, post-9/11 American cultural imagination took a different course in representing terrorist monsters: they have stopped being typically Middle Eastern

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__________________________________________________________________ wild men but instead became the people next door. Dealing with the issue of terrorist representation in block-buster TV shows Sleeper Cell and Homeland, Cutler-Broyles dives deep into the new mode of national identity’s construction that resides in the fear that literally comes from within. When it is impossible to distinguish between the monster and the hero, and when ‘the monster out there— the Arab, the Muslim, the terrorist—has become the monster within,’16 the national body morphs into something unfathomable and unfamiliar, allowing the monster to penetrate its cracks. ‘The Other-monster becomes the Sleeper-monster who, in turn, becomes the Hero-monster.’17 From this transmutation, which enables monsters to live in the light, is born a new national identity: the one that rests not on a monsterising of the Other, but of the Self. With Marta Komsta the mosaic of the textual monstrous space leads deep into the symbolic underbelly of an architectural beast. Finding her semiotic path through the serpentine streets of Peter Ackroyd’s London, the author breaks into the inner world of the spatial, urban monstrosity. Searching for their abjected selves in dark corners of London’s urbanscape, Peter Ackroyd’s characters lead us through a complex world of horror and abjection in which the city, the megalopolis, the monstropolis, consumes subjects only to violently expel them again. Haunted by their carnal, abject desires, protagonists of Ackroyd’s novels, reflected in the uncanny figures of Golem and homunculus, try to surmount the chaotic world of a postmodern metropolis that never stays still, is impossible to represent, and is a place where the Transcendental Signifier—a ‘sign which will give meaning to all others’18—has been displaced, never to be found. Komsta argues that the metropolis itself is that which illuminates the ‘radically separate, loathsome’19 countersign of the abject, ‘the expelled part of the self never forgotten and detached, through the agency of the monster that represents the repressed aspects of the character’s semiotic profile.’20 Loosing itself between violence and the language of the urban semiosphere, the violent subject rises from within to appropriate the skin of Akroyd’s torn characters, revealing the true monster—the ‘thing without form.’21 And what happens when what is revealed is a self-styled monster, one that recreates Self as hideousness incarnate, appropriating monstrosity in the pursuit of extraordinarity? Lise Dilling-Hansen posits in her chapter that Lady Gaga presents us with just such a realm, arguing that the singer/performer, ala Judith Butler, performs/is monstrosity—particularly in the music video ‘Bad Romance’— disrupting the norm and offering us a glimpse of ‘what the monster of the twentyfirst century looks like.’22 Existing in a milieu that is ultra-aware of body image, sexuality, power, and the interplay of all three, Gaga forces us to reimagine heteronormative relationships, donning the trappings of the Other and forcing us to expand our definitions of sexuality, inclusivity, and femininity. In drawing on Disability Studies, Dilling-Hansen offers us a way to think of the body different as less abnormal than extra-normal, and as Gaga crawls on-stage, emerging from a

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__________________________________________________________________ casket labelled Monster, she shatters our categories and upsets our understandings of both performance and the expected. In becoming extraordinary, in refashioning her concerts as freak shows and her fans as monsters, Gaga has in fact reset the norm, and the monster has taken centre stage. Our last piece in this volume, by Jack Fennell, takes us right to the heart of the matter, diving into the Netherworld and bringing monstrous communities to the fore. Starting with the concept of space as a defining characteristic of monstrosity, and deconstructing the concept of community itself, Fennell breaks open once and for all the tattered belief that the monster exists, anymore, on the boundaries, in the margins, outside the realm of human society. Monstrous space, it turns out, much like the space in these pages and in this volume, is a ‘created space wherein monstrosity is defined,’23 in which monsters act and enact, exist and resist, and in which it is no longer clear just how they differ from human. Questioning just who belongs in the monster pub—who is allowed admittance to the socially constructed monstrous space—Fennell expands on many of the themes that the preceding chapters initiate and asks not only just how we know anymore where the line is between our space and theirs, but how their deployment in political, cultural, social, and popular rhetoric encodes spatialities of human community. In this, Fennell articulates what this entire book interrogates: when monsters roam freely through imagined space, what do they tell us about the actual world in which we live? This mosaic—of authors, styles, monsters, identities—imposes upon us its kaleidoscope of impossibilities. In the true Foucauldian heterotopic sense, this book is a culturally secluded place where time runs backwards, or in circles, or it doesn’t run at all; it is a collection of extraordinary bodies that delineate a fragmented space in the middle of the contemporary literary culture. A place of potentialities, it undulates and flows in all directions; it evaporates in the process of reading. And deep within both text and reader is a small, elusive spot that stays true to its undying nature: the dark, burning desire that lures us down toward a pyre of dread and apprehension—the monstrous possibility. Together, we invite you to embrace that monstrosity that comes from within us all.

Notes 1

Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters (New York: Routledge, 2003), 3. 2 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 8. 3 Ibid. 4 Marko Teodorski, ‘Reflecting the Monster’s Future: The Commodification of Sirens,’ in this volume.

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Ibid., 13. Ibid., 16. 7 Ralf Isau, Die Galerie der Lügen oder Der unachtsame Schläfer (Bergisch Gladbach: Bastei Lübbe, 2005), 397. 8 Angelika Baier, ‘The Monstrous Hermaphroditic Clone as Backward Progress: A Reading of Ralf Isau’s Thriller Die Galerie der Lügen oder Der Unachtsame Schläfer,’ in this volume. 9 Janhavi Mittal, ‘Postmodern Potencies: Interrogating the Monstrous Sign in Contemporary Society,’ in this volume. 10 Ibid. 11 Joanna Ioannidou, ‘The Dark Defender: Dexter and Making Heroes out of Serial Killers,’ in this volume. 12 Ibid., 1. 13 Jeffrey J. Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven These),’ in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 1996), 6. 14 Cutler-Broyles, ‘Muslim Monsters/American Heroes: Sleeper Cell and Homeland as the New Face of Fear,’ in this volume. 15 Álvaro Garcia Martin, ‘Haunted Communities: The Greek Vampire, or the Uncanny at the Core of Nation Construction,’ in this volume. 16 Cutler-Broyles, ‘Muslim Monsters/American Heroes.’ 17 Ibid. 18 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 113. 19 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 8. 20 Marta Komsta, ‘“Thing Without Form”: Peter Ackroyd’s Monstrous City,’ in this volume. 21 Ibid., 1. 22 Lise Dilling-Hansen, ‘A Bad Romance: Lady Gaga and the Return of the Divine Monster,’ in this volume. 23 Jack Fennell, ‘Here be Dragons (and Vampires and Zombies): The Politics of Monstrous Communities,’ in this volume. 6

Bibliography Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses).’ In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 3-25. Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 1996. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

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__________________________________________________________________ Isau, Ralf. Die Galerie der Lügen oder Der unachtsame Schläfer. Bergisch Gladbach: Bastei Lübbe, 2005. Kearney, Richard. Strangers, Gods and Monsters. New York: Routledge, 2003. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Part I: A Monstrous Society

Reflecting the Monster’s Future: The Commodification of Sirens Marko Teodorski Abstract This chapter examines the changes in the historical conceptualisation of materiality of objects and monstrosity of sirens/mermaids in nineteenth century Europe. The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century gave birth to the commodity, the abstract product of humans’ alienation from their own labour, thus creating a blurred zone as the line that separated the product from human beings became ever harder to recognize. At the same time sirens and mermaids lost their lethal nature, became mute, transformed into innocent virgins. The chapter argues that the changes presented above were not separated from each other in a cultural vacuum, where words and things of a discourse changed autonomously and independently, but were all connected and communicated by a shift in the concept of mirrorreflection. The accelerated technical progress brought about a change in the way inanimate matter was perceived, and as a corollary in the way humanity was perceived. Moreover, it brought a change in the way perceiving was perceived. The combination of these changes has opened up a portal into that area of society where its unspoken desires and deepest fears materialise—the birthplace of monstrosity. Animated objects that started haunting the human imagination yielded to a change in monstrosity itself, allowing the sirens to become voiceless virgins in the search of their happily-ever-after while lurking among the house utensils and grooming appliances. By focusing on a very particular type of object—the mirror—as the centre of the themes of reflection and perceiving, and the common ground between the monstrosity of sirens and the monstrosity of objects, this chapter sheds light on the infinite play of presence and absence in the economy of representations of both sirens and commodities. Key Words: Siren, materiality, mermaid, object, commodity, mirror, reflection, fetish, monstrosity. ***** 1. Fragment 1 (The Mythical Times): Towards an Objectified Siren A long time ago, in a past so distant that one finds it imperceptible and hence natural, somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea, on a pile of bones and human flesh, stood two creatures called sirens, waiting to offer ignorant sailors the joy of ultimate knowledge and bliss. We could not see them,1 because the shape of their bodies was so utterly wrong that it was eclipsed by their voices. On the pile of cadavers they stood and sang of glorious deeds, promising futures and everlasting happiness, luring equally the innocent and the guilty, and abusing the deepest desires of souls. The water was deadly calm around them, there was no wind to warn or distract, and there were no signs that the beauty of their seductive voices

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__________________________________________________________________ was an entrance to Hades itself. For whoever approached these bodiless, aural beings left everything he possessed behind, all the loved ones, all the hated ones— left the reality and firmness of life itself. And in return he got nothing but blue depths, a watery grave waiting on the other side of promised bliss. But there were always those who managed to escape, whose eyes became witnesses to death and decay, beauty and joy, cruelty and love, without succumbing to any of the extremes. Their ears were stopped; their arms tied fast; and their ships sailed steadily between desire and death, silencing the great lure of the most intimate depths of their beings. Those extraordinary men fought wildly for their lot, and bequeathed the antidote to the sirens’ call to the generations of men to come. From the farthest corners of the Greek epic to the nineteenth century Europe, all men, each in their own fashion, bore the name of Odysseus. From the XII book of The Odyssey, through medieval scriptures and illustrations of the Bible, to the pre-Raphaelite portraits of women, sirens exchanged their feathers for a tail, their abject home for a life on the shore, their instruments for a fish, and the fish for a mirror. The one thing that had remained constant was their voice—the irresistible enticement arising from their monstrous bodies. Then the nineteenth century arrived. Like a great spiral of genealogical tendencies, technological progress, and gender disturbances, men’s deepest fears commenced a dance of change leaving the old monsters and monstrosities behind. And somehow, before people even noticed, sirens stopped singing. Hans Christian Andersen understood it properly, as did Franz Kafka. In the nineteenth century sirens stopped devouring their subjects; their home was no longer that of rotten human flesh and calm waters of the dead. Now they sought souls, wanted to become good Christians, craving human (male) love to wipe away their monstrous, soulless bodies. And for that they were prepared to give their voices away—the only part of their beings that had never changed. The nineteenth century was merciless to them. All that they had, all that they were, had been erased in the span of a hundred and fifty years, transforming them into ostensibly helpless, voiceless beings, enclosed in a mirror cover, gazing into nothingness from the store shelves in a desperate desire to speak—an act that their commodified Barbie-doll shape could not allow. Sirens, mermaids, Loreleis, naiads, nymphs—they finally became culturally possible, erupting from the sphere of everyday objects. But that possibility came with a price: they had to become commodities. At the same time that the sirens were losing their voices, people were losing their old, fixed identities. Linnaean structuration of the extant species was too old to be able to grasp the new structure of Western societies. The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, the Age of Industry, gave birth to another sort of life, another social phenomenon that needed to be explained. The commodity, the abstract product of humans’ alienation from their own labour,

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__________________________________________________________________ brought about another change, a blurred zone, as the line that separated the product from human beings became ever harder to recognize. New anxieties appeared, new fears for one’s own humanity—the unexplainable, disquieting feeling of losing the ground beneath one’s feet. The object became a monstrous entity, matter itself no longer a secure place to ground one’s identity. This chapter dives into the fissure that opened between humanity, monstrosity, and commodity. It studies both bird-shaped sirens and fish-shaped mermaids as equal elements of the same discursive field, since the semantic difference between them falls beyond the scope of this chapter, thus using both terms to signify the alluring monstrosity. It does not give a comprehensive study of material, mirrorreflective, and iconographic representations of sirens, mainly because I strongly doubt the possibility of such a project. What it gives, though, are ‘peaks and valleys of meaning,’2 as Lawrence Kramer calls it. Being a theoretician of music, he argues that ‘meaning, hermeneutically regarded, is not evenly diffused throughout a work of music but unevenly in peaks and valleys.’3 This thought can be applied to any work of art as Kramer continues: ‘The peaks are the points of endowment—installed by explicit sense-giving gestures, semantic performatives— from which meaning extends to cover the work as a whole.’4 This chapter navigates between those peaks and valleys of meaning, in a fragmented and mosaic-oriented way. It is comprised of five different fragments, ranging from mythical times through the present of the nineteenth century, to a very distant future of the beginning of the twenty-first century. Any other, more historically uninterrupted, and organized way would do injustice to the complexity of the symbolic game of representations of sirens. I argue that the changes presented above were not separated from each other in a cultural vacuum, where words and things of a discourse changed autonomously and independently, but were all connected and communicated by a shift in the concept of mirror-reflection. The accelerated technical progress brought about a change in the way inanimate matter was perceived, and as a corollary in the way humanity was perceived. Moreover, it brought a change in the way perceiving was perceived. The combination of these changes has opened up a portal into that area of society where its unspoken desires and deepest fears materialise—the birthplace of monstrosity. Animated objects that started haunting human imagination yielded to a change in monstrosity itself, allowing the sirens to become voiceless virgins in the search of their happily-ever-after while lurking among the house utensils and grooming appliances. By focusing on a very particular type of object—the mirror—the centre of the themes of reflection and perceiving, and the common ground between the monstrosity of sirens and the monstrosity of objects, this chapter sheds light on the infinite play of presence and absence in the economy of representations both of sirens and commodities. The mirror, this wondrous device, capable of the most marvellous powers of transformation, will lend its hand in the untying of the object/human/monster knot. It will reflect the monster’s future.

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__________________________________________________________________ 2. Fragment 2 (The Present): The Materiality of the Object Is it possible to understand humanity by looking at objects around us? This question can lead us through the first thread of the knot. ‘The definition of humanity has often become almost synonymous with the position taken on the question of materiality,’5 are the words of Daniel Miller as he struggles to develop a theory of things. What this author, along with other leaders in the anthropological field of material culture studies, rightly observed is that the question of humanity, of its historically contingent definition, is often, if not always, a question of objects themselves. Defining what makes humanity is a problem of the epistemological grounding of animate and inanimate matter itself. In this definition whole worlds are contained, the totality of mechanisms of social realities. Recognizing that there is a subtle differentiation between humans and objects is allowing the différance to slide in, to penetrate fixed appearances and to summon unknown possibilities. A deconstructive journey into the inquiry of Where is the human? is always already the inquiry of Where is the thing? Giorgio Agamben says that things are not properly anywhere: they are not outside of us, in measurable external space, like neutral objects (ob-jecta) of use and exchange; rather they open to us the original place solely from which the experience of measurable external space becomes possible.6 The man and the thing are an inseparable dialectical pair, in a constant play of mutual reshaping. We live with them—with material things—we live through them, we live by them, and (looking from a long durée perspective) recently we live for them. Materiality comprises our whole known world, but the way we conceptualise it is always a fantasy, full of historical imagination and preconceptions rooted so deeply into our phenomenology that they absolutely disappear out of sight. Miller calls it ‘the humility of things’7: objects are important not because they are common and obvious or because they have an evident power of agency, but because they are invisible. They determine what takes place to the extent that we are unconscious of their capacity to do so. Objects are so thoroughly embedded into the veil of material and social reality that they are the most active participants in the creation of men. Pierre Bourdieu argued that ‘a whole cosmology [can be instilled] through [...] seemingly innocuous details.’8 The more material objects are imperceptible, the more we take their materiality for granted—it’s just a book, it’s just a mirror, it’s just a chair—and the more we are constructing the abstractions from which the ultimate power of the objects derives. At the precise moment of saying it’s just a chair, the chair is given a new life, an introduction into cultural naturalization, a new phantasmagoria of inanimate matter that comes to life through its sinking into the world of cultural preconceptions.

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__________________________________________________________________ Judith Butler argues that materialisation is not something that simply is, but something that happens—a story that envelops like a palimpsest, a construction through performance of social norms, and a penetration of those norms through the cracks in their repetition.9 Finding its root in the 150-year-old tradition of historical materialism, it restates the Marxist argument that humanity is a product of its capacity to transform the material world through production, where the production is a mirror in which we create ourselves. Capitalism is condemned above all for interrupting this virtuous cycle in which the encounter with the material world creates an awareness of who we are and could be. Instead, commodities are fetishized and come to oppress those who made them.10 This is where our story begins. The nineteenth century was the age in which changed social relations, in connection with technological progress, made an impact on the fragile understanding of the human/object relation. Karl Marx described the mysterious character of commodity as following: [C]ommodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution, the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time supra-sensible or social.11 The commodity-form of objects appeared when social relations between producers were substituted in the minds of men for natural, objective relations between objects. As a corollary of this alienation of humans and their labourproduct, the estrangement of objects appeared, imbuing their use-value with a personified afterlife of commodity fetishism. The disturbing sentiment of this phenomenon was for Marx so strong that he compared it to the ‘misty realm of religion’ where creations of the human mind ‘appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own.’12 The play of symbolic substitution is essential for the understanding of the human/object differentiation in the age of accelerated technical progress. Once awakened, the change in social relations of the industrial era put into motion the uncanny transformation of everyday things into fetishized commodities. According to Agamben, from the Industrial Revolution on, ‘the owner of [the] object will never be able to enjoy it simultaneously as both useful object and as value.’13 The appropriator will be able to do anything with the object, even to destroy it, ‘but in this disappearance the commodity will once again reaffirm its unattainability.’14

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__________________________________________________________________ This unattainability is precisely the new life that object gained—the life of a fetish. The object became a negative reference, a summoning of presence into existence by an absence. The interplay of absence and presence in fetishized objects that will dominate the nineteenth and twentieth century, breaking the inanimate shell of the object, but, as shall be seen, also the animate shell of humans, will bring a truly pervasive, uncanny feeling toward humanity’s control over things and also toward humanity’s self-possession.15 This interplay that Agamben terms the ‘bad conscience with respect to things’16 would give rise to a whole genre of uncanny interests and literature among which are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus17 (published in 1818), Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann18 (part of Die Nachtstücke, published in 1817), and Android Clarinetist, a life-size robot created by Cornelis Jacobus van Oeckelen in 1838. All these works and many others played the same sonata of inanimate matter wondrously come to life, where the reawakening was understood as a real event or as a personal nightmare of real and unreal, of alive and dead, as in the case of Hoffmann’s Olympia. Der Sandmann and its disturbing subtext actually helped Freud in 1919 to develop his famous concept of the uncanny—repressed fears and desires coming back to haunt the subject, a peculiar feeling of strangeness aroused by the encounter with something vaguely recognized.19 The commodity ceased to be an innocent object. In Marx’s world, from the moment it appears as a commodity, a table not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.20 The commodity fetishism opens a vortex to a new area of object’s being, ‘the mystery that has now become familiar to anyone who has entered a supermarket or been exposed to the manipulation of the advertisement: the epiphany of the unattainable.’21 But it would be unfair to allow commodity to take all the blame. If the borderline of non-crossing became blurred on the lower, imperceptible level of unquestioned preconstructions, the change must have influenced the figure of the human also. And that change materialised itself in a very specific and important image—a dandy. Capable of sitting for hours in front of a mirror, tracing every movement and tiniest expression, the dandy could be named a pioneer in the deliberate objectification of the self. Agamben thought of the dandy as a redeemer of commodity.22 Sabine Melchior-Bonnet perceived him as a recurrence, a ‘son of the eighteenth-century petit-maître, or fop, [who] reveals the subject’s need to become his own spectator, transcending himself by constructing a harmonious image with the aid of

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__________________________________________________________________ artifice.’23 In order to transgress the state of commodity, and return innocence to things, the dandy has to push the commodity to its extreme—he has to become artifice itself. The dandy has to become the undead, a living corpse, constantly tending toward the Other, a creature essentially nonhuman and antihuman. He has to become a commodity so that the Other can be cancelled, the commodity destroyed as the opposite of humanity. He has to become a human object so that Grandville’s rebelled objects24 can return to their proper place. The man who has lost his self-possession and who makes of elegance and the superfluous his raison d’etrê, teaches the possibility of a new relation to things [...] He is redeemer of things, the one who wipes out, with his elegance, their original sin: the commodity.25 As we can see, there is a chain of events or, better, a ball of strings that pervades the disturbance caused by change in social relations. ‘The fundamental process of objectification,’ as Miller puts it, ‘where everything that we create has, by virtue of that act, the potential both to appear, and to become alien to us,’26 unravelled the alienation of humans from the products of their labour, giving a new life to objects, the phantasmagoria of commodity fetishism, but at the same time giving a new life to humans themselves. Something important for the age materialised in the image of the dandy, a shift in perception which, in turn, allowed other displacements to happen. What materialised in the dandy was the ‘commodification of the real’27 or ‘appropriation of unreality,’28 a substitution of terms, an interplay of absence and presence, where the real stood for the unreality, and the men/object relation turned up-side-down. Leaving aside the issues of nineteenth century commodification and its symbolism, let us return to the image of the mute mermaid Barbie doll. It is precisely at the moment of Industrial Revolution that sirens/mermaids started losing their voices, summoned from the peripheries of the symbolic into the hard materiality of toys and everyday objects. The trajectory of this section into the conceptual realm of nineteenth century materiality, as well as of the next one into mirror-image and reflection, is to prepare the ambience for this unfortunate event. Those in literature who happened to silence the sirens did so because the semiotic climate was right, and the expression of those deepest desires and fears that sirens always stood for took this silent form. Sirens lost the battle of the industrial age, and became encapsulated in objects. But before we visit the gates of the future and interrogate these speechless siren/mermaid objects and their celluloid movie relatives, we have to go back to the past and follow the second thread of the human/monster/object knot. We have to face our own mirror-image.

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__________________________________________________________________ 3. Fragment 3 (The Past): Looking in the Mirror In 1891, through the pen of Oscar Wilde, Lord Henry said to Dorian Gray: ‘It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.’29 As fleeting as it might be, this remark embodies in itself a great deal more than it reveals on the surface. As every other cultural creation, it reaches deep down into the pool of culturally possible and impossible imageries, bringing back to the surface an inner structure of society itself. If such a thing as appearance, which has been for centuries conceived of as a synonym for the superficial, could have emerged as its opposite, this substitution tells us more about the specific cultural moment of fin-de-siècle than it does of the inner demons that haunted Dorian Gray. At the core of this remark, we find the familiar inversion of form and content, absence and presence, humanity and commodity. Putting it into the wider context of the novel in which it appeared, what Dorian Gray allowed himself was to abstract his existence and transcend his humanity. By doing that, he entered into the game of blurring categories, raising with this act the aforementioned fears of uncanny transgression of commodity. He became an object, materiality deprived of growing old, eternally stored in the picture frame which became his reward and punishment. The dandy of the era, in one evanescent remark, captured the spirit of the age. But he could not do it alone. He did it with help of a mirror. Gazing into oneself in order to see the Other, and imagining the Other in order to embrace oneself—these are only two of limitless possibilities of a mirror. The mirror can tell us who we are if we know how to look. But it also can show us what we want to see, along with the fears and desires that we could never fathom. As an instrument of self-knowledge, a mirror allows for endless possibilities of the play of the Self and the Other, reaching toward the inside while exteriorizing the unwanted self. There is always a monster behind a mirror; because we can only see fragments of possibilities, we never know if the next time the reflection will show something opposite. As Melchor-Bonnet observes, ‘monstrosity—the part representing the whole.’30 The eternal dread of facing fragments of self, while imagination and culture do the rest, leads a fixed gaze right into the centre of appearance only to realize that the monster is lurking on the other side, the monster whose right arm is left, and left arm is right—the unfathomable Self. This game of reflections and appearances has always been, more or less, the same. But how one manages the monster, and more importantly, how one explains it, is never the same. If we want to understand the culturally specific Same (or the Other), we have to dig deeper into the reflection of our own gaze. But what happens when the gaze penetrates so deeply its own reflection that the spot, from which the up-side-down world emerges, disappears? The subject summons his will to penetrate his own reflection, but the image he perceives does not come to life. As Melchor-Bonnet shrewdly observes it is the ‘subject that becomes artificial by overinvesting in the image: the subject disappears behind the character he produces and takes pleasure in himself as he would in a realized

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__________________________________________________________________ fiction,’31 as, for instance, in the photograph taken by Philippe Morillon titled Andy Warhol—I’ll be the Mirror (ca. 1970), in which Andy Warhol faces his tripled image telling us that man exists only in series, as an object expelled from a factory. If one overinvests in one’s image, the price paid is that of humanity itself. That was the destiny of Dorian Gray. That was the destiny of the dandy. But then, it was the destiny of sirens too. Dandies and mirrors together in the nineteenth century, and especially at the turn of the century, capture in their images the all-pervasive fear of the object, technological progress, and loss of humanity. ‘As much as nature, with its stenches and its untidiness repelled the dandy, the enclosed, artificial environment of the interior appealed to him,’32 says Melchior-Bonnet. But in order for this to happen, in order for the dandy to appear and for the mirror to become able to transcend the shackles of hard-defined boundaries of commodity, it was necessary for the mirror to become a commodity itself. For what we can conclude from the desire and will of Dorian Gray—understanding his picture as his mirror—is not only that he gave away his soul for the life of an object, but he gave his soul to the object itself. By the end of the nineteenth century, the mirror, as an artefact, had come a long way from being a rare object used only by nobility, highly expensive and hard to both make and get.33 When a Murano faction of Venetian glassworkers was founded in the 1200s, the mirror, although it had existed in various forms for centuries, was a miracle of technology.34 Venice held a monopoly over the production of mirrors so pure and so clean that they were called crystalline.35 Only in the second half of the seventeenth century, when, by a series of events worthy of the best espionage-contra-espionage novel of the Cold War, did France break the Venetian monopoly and found the Royal Company of Glass and Mirrors. The Sun King was crazy about mirrors and for another century the mirror basically remained limited to those connected to the court. What a number of authors emphasize is the difference between the way mirrors were perceived in the centuries leading up to Dorian Gray’s existence, and the way the subject looked at it (and the fantasy he saw in it).36 One of the examples was its size. The mirror was never larger than what could be cut from a glass ball, and the curvature gave it a bulging shape that can be found in Flemish paintings and German engravings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.37 This is the mirror on the table in Quentin Metsys's Moneychanger and His Wife and on the bedroom wall in Van Eyck's Arfolini Portrait; no larger than a tea saucer and reflecting a distorted image. One hundred and fifty years later Velásquez’s Las Meninas, and De Witte's Interior with a Woman Playing a Virginal present perfectly flat mirrors of large dimensions.38 So for far longer than not, the game of looking into oneself had different rules because what one could see was only a distorted picture of reality, darkened and twisted. The attributes that were generally connected with a mirror were those of lies and deceit—one could

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__________________________________________________________________ not trust it nor identify with it. Mirrors were regarded as miraculous, or demonic, capable of predicting the future through catoptromancy. As long as the mirror stayed rare and luxurious, existing but somewhere else, the possibility of disappearing inside one’s own image, of objectifying oneself, did not exist. Clear reflection and persistent gaze, the kind of which a dandy would be proud, were still quite far away. But things changed fast. Within the aristocracy, the crystal mirror gradually replaced the metal one which almost completely disappeared from estate inventories in the last third of the seventeenth century.39 When the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, a joint project of architects Charles Le Brun and Jules HardouinMansart, was presented to the public in 1682, it met with resounding admiration. In the eighteenth century mirrors started being embedded in furniture, giving rise to the cabinet de toilette. ‘Mirrors thus invaded household decor,’ explained Melchior-Bonnet, ‘and transformed furniture throughout the eighteenth century.’40 A certain amount of time was needed to acclimate to mirrors, however, for their visual effects ‘turned the relationship between empty and full surfaces on its head and defied equilibrium. But soon people could not do without the light brought by looking glasses.’41 The mirrored armoire reigned in the nineteenth century42 capturing one of the paradoxes of commodity. Once a mirror of God or Satan, held by Vanity or Pride, it now held piles of sheets and household linens and utensils, but became stronger, pulling the subject into his own reflection. The more common mirrors became, the more enchanting they were. This amazing architectural discovery of the mirrored armoire made another shift in the human/object mirror game—in order to see themselves humans gazed into the furniture. Their images were now part of objects, not framed in gold, ivory or wood, but enveloped in shelves and blankets. These are all peaks and valleys of meanings spreading throughout the cultural space. The offspring of changed relations of production, the alienated human child created a background from which the disturbance of categories leaked back into the relationship of humans and objects. In the nineteenth century, to see one’s own face was to see a commodity. To gaze into oneself was to gaze into one’s own commodified nature. By the nineteenth century the fetishisation of the mirror and its turning into a commodity became evident at the Universal Exposition, which Walter Benjamin defined as ‘pilgrimage-sites of the commodity-fetish.’43 Tracing the steps of Marx, Agamben concluded that Marx’s visit to London in 1851 when the first Universal Exposition took place in Hyde Park led his thinking to the analysis of commodity fetishism. ‘The “phantasmagoria” of which he speaks in relation to the commodity,’ argues Agamben, ‘can be discovered in the intentions of the Exposition’s organizers who chose, from among the various possibilities presented, Paxton’s project for the enormous palace constructed entirely out of glass.’44 This exhibition used the glass and the reflection game to capture,

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__________________________________________________________________ the transfiguration of commodity into an enchanted object. [...] In the galleries and pavilions of its mystical Crystal Palace, in which from the outset a place was reserved for works of art, the commodity is displayed to be enjoyed only through the glance at the enchanted scene.45 The mirror proved itself as a commodity, an object miraculously come to life by acquiring the ‘bluish halo’46 of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. The nature of a nineteenth century commodity was to be apparent but not to be seen; gazed upon but not recognized, elevating the object into the sphere of the imagination and endowing it with the eternal aura of that most powerful phenomenon—sameness. This is the aura of Agamben’s enchantment, of illusion woven from threads of uncanny desire and directed toward objectification that made humans into objects, objects into monsters, monsters into commodities—an endless displacement of symbolic categories spinning around the crisis of materiality. Humans in the mirrors, mirrors as humans—the everlasting dance of the commodity. The symbolical crisis that pervaded the materiality of the nineteenth century was the crisis of the mirror and reflection. Provided by the mirror commodity, it came back from it, in the infinite strokes of symbolical displacements. Difference, mother and daughter of sameness, entered into the human/object reflection to dismiss old monstrous creatures and summon new ones. The whirligig has now been swung. The materiality of commodity and mirror reflection is spinning fast. Only one thread is missing and that is the monstrosity of sirens. The two previous parts were necessary in order for the reflection of the sirens’ future to become possible. Generally, when something stands in front of a mirror, its reflection appears, but monster have always been allowed to transgress the rules. Only a monster can stand in front of a mirror and not see its image; this is due to its existential and cultural impossibility. And as the third thesis of Cohen’s monster theory states, monsters always appear at times of crisis.47 Unfortunately, the sirens will not appear at times of crisis, they will disappear. But only to be born again mute, with a mirror or made from it. The nineteenth century is the time when sirens lost their voices. But, that was not all they lost. They also lost their mirrors—at least for a while. 4. Fragment 4 (The Future): The Silence of the Sirens It is truly hard to find a being, or image, as elusive and evasive as the image of sirens. Extant for millennia, spread all over the Earth, sirens continue to enflame the imagination of men, promising them love, promising knowledge, promising everything that a man could dream of. Universal seductresses that have been beaten but never defeated, sirens lure their prey into the dark depths of a watery grave. By being the heralds of danger, death, and oblivion, these extraordinary creatures escape any possible means of fixing their meanings and of

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__________________________________________________________________ straightforward explanations. As Linda Phyllis Austern notes in her essay ‘“Teach Me to Heare Mermaids Singing”: Embodiments of (Acoustic) Pleasure and Danger in the Modern West,’ sirens are ‘things feared and desired, things unknown and hoped for, banished to the liminal spaces between life and death, memory and renewal, briny sea and blooming meadow.’48 From the bodiless predators of The Odyssey to Wilde’s siren49 and Andersen’s mermaid,50 they sing and call for the ecstasy that will transgress death. Without pain, without consciousness, there is only joy, only jouissance. The tradition of the acoustic la femme fatale is at the heart of the representation of sirens. In The Odyssey they inhabited the abject landscape of rotten flesh, in the Middle Ages they became harlots in constant need of human (male) prey.51 As Austern has argued, in the Middle Ages the siren was literally ‘banished to the margins in the context of the sacred Word of illuminated manuscripts and illustrated bibles, her unheard song the brazen flourish of eternal doom.’52 Most of the illustrations from this period depict her with a fish in her hand, a Christian symbol for a human soul, but a great number of them through time depict her with a mirror too, like the siren from The Book of Hours (ca. 1400)53 who holds a comb and a mirror, or the siren/mermaid combination with legs, tail, comb, and a mirror from the thirteenth century Psalter.54 A woodcut from the Nuremberg Bible (1483),55 kept in the Victoria and Albert Museum, shows two mermaids swimming around Noah’s ark, one of them holding a mirror, a tiny reflective surface capable of returning her image. Officially excluded from the accepted world and undeserving of being saved from the Great Flood, mermaids were literally beyond redemption, capable of reflecting themselves only in the object of The Father of Lies. Austern concludes: The first and the greatest sin of the mirror in the Middle Ages and early modern times was that of fabricating and providing a simulacrum of Creation. For the Fathers of the Church and the Church Doctors of the Middle Ages, the mirror replaced divine reality with a deceptive world. The almost perfect resemblance of reflection opened it up to the same condemnation as a painting: superficial imitation representing a plagiarism instead of a truth.56 During this period, the mirror was the sirens’ greatest weapon, deceiving, lying, and cheating sailors to their tenebrous grave, amplifying the seduction of their voices but also transforming their images into irresistible monstrosities. When one stares into the small hand-mirrors held by sirens/mermaids of this period, only a part of them can be seen, only the face, only beauty, only humanity, deceitful and cunning like their voices. ‘The mirror will always remain haunted by what is not found in it,’57 and that is particularly true for a siren. From the mythical times of

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__________________________________________________________________ Odysseus, the power of sirens lay in the sweetness of their voices and in invisibility of their bodies. From this perspective, there probably was no better object to put in sirens’ hands than the one that corresponds best with the seduction of their voices and paradoxicality of their figures. Comprised of love and death, sirens kept their reflective artefacts throughout the Renaissance, they stuck to the mirrors as they populated capitals and architectural elements of churches and miniatures well into the seventeenth century. And then—their mirrors disappeared. Austern argues that ‘more than any other quality, it is the siren’s music that positions her in the flowing spaces between past and present, danger and delight.’ She perceives these spaces as the ‘substance of myth and the arts, severed from Western-style science by the “Scientific Revolution” of the seventeenth century, and even more so since the “Age of Enlightenment” a century later.’58 The siren’s body and voice were severed by scholars during the eighteenth century as completely as her literary and natural histories. One part of the siren was reduced to zoological specimen to be studied, the other to an impossible fantasy. Kramer argued that they were literally banished from the Enlightenment.59 By the nineteenth century sirens stopped singing. And when they started again, their song was radically different. It was a song of silence. In 1837 Hans Christian Andersen wrote a story which would, in the next century and a half, become the archetype of mermaids.60 The Little Mermaid, the mother of all future mermaids, fell helplessly in love with a prince and with a human soul. In order to get them she was willing to give up everything, but what happened to be enough was her voice. Approximately 150 years later, in 1989, Walt Disney studios would make its comeback into the cinemas by adapting into a cartoon this love story of pain, suffering, and silence, erasing from it everything hurtful left in the mermaid’s image—but that is another’s story to tell. We will go back to the 1920’s to take a look at another silencing praxis, an astonishing reversal of a two-thousand-year-old tradition. Let us let Kafka speak for himself. In The Silence of the Sirens Kafka says: [N]ow the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. And though admittedly such a thing has never happened, still it is conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never.61 This parable follows Ulysses in his encounter with the Sirens. He had stopped his ears with wax but when he approached the Sirens they actually did not sing because they knew that their silence was stronger than their song and because they were seduced by the bliss on Ulysses’ face. But the highlight of the parable is the fact that for a moment Ulysses did hear them sing: ‘For a fleeting moment he saw their throats rising and falling, their breasts lifting, their eyes were

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__________________________________________________________________ accompaniments to the air which died unheard around him.’62 What we can read here is not the simple fact that the sirens stopped singing but that the appearance of their song was what for Ulysses mattered the most. In the eighteenth and particularly in the nineteenth century all men became Ulysses, ultimately seduced not by the object itself, but by its abstraction, its appearance, its story. Kramer explained that, [F]or Homer’s Odysseus, the siren’s song is a lure to simple dissolution; for his modern descendants, the dissolution is the sirens’ song itself, the pleasure of which is its own fatality. [...] Their silence [of Kafka’s sirens], which is equivalent to the modern condition, is also the condition of possibility for imagining their song. As Rilke put it, the song is only the other side of the silence.63 What matters here is the fantasy, not the thing itself. In the age when objects lost their innocence, the silence of the sirens was the condition of possibility for imagining the phantasmagoria of the object Agamben was talking about. Installed in the fissure pervading their representation, the commodification of sirens became possible. Once they had lost their voices, the main vehicle for their seduction, the allure of irresistibility transgressed to the sphere of the object, of silent seduction, moulding the modern subject by the rules of the capitalist commodity-fetish. Sirens finally gain an entrance into the commodified space of advertisement and marketing. The crisis of representation of sirens was the crisis of materiality itself. But it was a crisis of monstrous/human reflection also. It is very hard to find images from the eighteenth, and especially the nineteenth century, in which mermaids hold mirrors. That doesn’t mean they disappeared entirely; a trend in representation is not something that works in totalities. But the overall impression is that they are gone. Out of nearly one hundred and fifty paintings and illustrations from the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, ranging from Arthur Rackham’s illustrations of The Little Mermaid, through Collier Smithers, Arthur von Ferraris, Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Arnold Böcklin, Sir Edward John Poynter, Herbert James Draper, John William Waterhouse, to Pablo Picasso, Edward Munch and René Magritte—to name only a few of those who engaged themselves with the topic of sirens, mermaids, nymphs, and tritons—not one represents them with mirrors. Out of sixteen objects from the Victoria and Albert Museum collection (one of the best collections of everyday objects in UK) dated to the nineteenth century and featuring sirens/mermaids on them, not one handles a mirror. Considering the fact that mirrors and mermaids were still quite frequent in the seventeenth century, this is a sharp change in representation.

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__________________________________________________________________ At the turn of the nineteenth century when, as Pendergrast said, ‘[T]he mirror, once a rare object that reflected sacred purity, had truly entered the modern era— individualistic, ironic, capitalistic, self-promoting, self-conscious, and vain,’64 and when it appeared literally everywhere, sirens lost both of their weapons, aural, as well as visual. The more mirrors became naturalised phenomena, not recognized but present, the more powerful grew their influence on representation. The previous Father of Lies entered the game of monstrosity, reflection, and materiality, rendering the modern subject through this game as a commodified, silent object, irresistibly woven into the fabric of appearances aroused by the commodity fetish. Through the changed relation of reflection and materiality, the monstrosity of the sirens disappeared, robbing them of their lethal, carnal nature, stealing their voices, stealing their reflections, and transforming them into Oscar Wilde’s The Fisherman and His Soul, a love story where the death and silence of a mermaid mean more than the Wisdom of the Mirror, transforming them into Barbie dolls. In the twisted world of fetish, absence is what calls presence into existence, a negative reference ready to be displaced. Analysing Edward BurneJones’s famous The Depths of the Sea from 1887 (image 1) where, in an empty cave, a mermaid holds a firm grip around a nude male character, Lawrence Kramer argued that, the painting pretends [that] nothing else is involved by the simple device of showing exactly that. It gives us virtually nothing but a male form in the fatal grip of a female one. [...] But then nothing is not a mere absence; it signifies. The loving but mindless grip of the mermaid’s femininity effaces not only her victim’s masculinity but also the symbolic foundation of his identity, his whole familiar world of signs, projects, and possessions. The painting makes this explicit in the bareness of the cavern to which its couple sinks [...] Culture itself is stripped bare.65 Through the mindless grip of the mermaid, her voiceless act of symbolic absence, the man is transformed into an object to be handled, a dandy, an empty mirror. After this crisis in the economics of representation, the grip of a mermaid will become the grip of a commodity, of advertised fantasy, sunk so deeply into the pool of cultural representations that it will go completely unnoticed. For Kramer the sirens were called back to life in the nineteenth century ‘not simply to help cope with modern forms of identity and desire, but to help cope with the form of modernity itself.’66

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Image 1: Edward Burne-Jones, The Depths of the Sea, 1887 © President and Fellows of Harvard College

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__________________________________________________________________ In their numerous versions, ‘the sirens and their song represent precisely what modernity and the modern subject have lost, precisely that which they must lose or alienate from themselves to become modern.’67 What modernity must lose is its old way of structuring humans and objects, the distinction that prevents the subject from becoming modern. To reflect one’s self is to reflect commodity, in the commodity, by the commodity. To reflect one’s self is to reflect monstrosity, but of a different kind, silent, not powerless but deeply embedded in the capitalist fabrics of commodity fetishism. Melchior-Bonnet says that representing a monster is to tame it.68 While this is certainly true, not to represent it or to reflect it can be even more powerful. What is socially invisible is not necessarily non-existent. On the contrary, what we do not perceive is what creates us the most. When, in 2004, Celeste Lacroix analysed Walt Disney’s female characters, she considered Ariel from The Little Mermaid as one more girl whose image has been Westernized.69 Ariel was paired with Belle from The Beauty and the Beast, not for a moment recognised as actually not human but half-fish. Laura Sells did the same in her famous paper ‘“Where do the mermaids stand?”’ where she analysed Ariel’s upward girl’s nature, completely oblivious of her monstrous body-shape.70 Today sirens are everywhere but invisible and unrecognized. In the very moment when we proclaim the death of a monster, we give birth to it again, more powerful and more influential than before because we are making it invisible. That is how sirens finally became culturally possible—as merchandise. 5. Fragment 5 (A Distant Future): The Empty, Broken Mermaid In 2006 the city of Norfolk, Virginia, exhibited across its public space dozens of life-size mermaids. These mermaids were part of a project to boost tourism and attract people to certain places in the city. They were all of the same shape, originating from the same mould, in one of the traditional mermaid postures with one hand stretched in front as in the act of swimming through the sea. They were all decorated in different fashions, and some of them were even left bare for people to artistically express themselves. But one of them, standing at the corner of St. Paul's Boulevard and Main Street, attracted particular public attention. She was called Mirror Mosaic and was constructed of pieces of glass, of irregular shapes and sizes. As people passed by, what they could see in the body of the mermaid was their own reflection in the mirrors. And not only one reflection, but many of them, juxtaposed to compile a unique experience of selfhood. An empty, dead, commodified mermaid’s body was pulled into the reflective maze of the selfprojections of subjects. In the second part of the twentieth century mermaids regained their mirrors but not their voices. Now products of big film companies (like Disney Studios), they are allowed to have their toys back, but their bodies remain firmly embedded in the body of commodity. Ann Blyth in Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid (1948), Glynis Johns in Mad About Men (1954), and Sherri Stoner in The Little Mermaid (1989)

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__________________________________________________________________ all repossessed their reflections, but only in the greater commercial context. None of them regained her carnal features. From the crisis in materiality and reflection that started in the nineteenth century along with the fetishism of commodity, the sirens/mermaids emerged as Barbie dolls, with shiny tails and plastic smiles. But precisely because they sank into the third world of commodities, because they emerged from the imperceptible outside of objects, they became culturally possible. What does it mean to become culturally possible? How can we explain this? Where does the strength of cultural possibility come from? Jacques Derrida could help us answer that question if we follow his idea of the event. In The Future of the Profession Derrida asks: That which is called event, what is it? As long as I can produce and determine an event by a performative act guaranteed, like any performative, by conventions, legitimate fictions, and a certain “as if,” then to be sure I will not say that nothing happens or comes about, but what takes place, arrives, happens, or happens to me remains still controllable and programmable within a horizon of anticipation or precomprehension, within a horizon period. It is of the order of the masterable possible, it is the unfolding of what is already possible. It is of the order of power, of the “I can,” or “I may.” No surprise, thus no event in the strong sense.71 What he insists on here is that in order for an event, a phenomenon, to happen, to truly arrive, it has to irrupt from the field of the impossible, of ‘impossible possibility.’72 It has to arrive from that somewhere that Donna Haraway calls ‘elsewhere’73 promised by the monsters, the invisible and unrecognizable possibility. At the turn of the twentieth century, words that come from the almost century-old Kafka’s parable are truer than ever: ‘[T]he very moment when they [the Sirens] were nearest to him [Ulysses aka modern subject] he knew of them no longer.’74 At the end of the twentieth century, sirens arrive from the elsewhere of commodity, abstracted, commercialized, silenced in the form of a broken mirror. They become omnipresent, but absolutely unacknowledged. They stare at us from public fountains, parks, cemeteries, cups, celluloid tapes, tables, advertisements, album covers, and lamps. But most of all they stare at us from mirrors. The twentieth century saw an amazing proliferation of mirrors decorated with mermaids. A few examples from the nineteenth century exist, such as the mirror created by French sculptor August Moreau, but 100 years later mermaid mirrors are a general thing.75 Turned into commodities, banished into the realm of cultural preconceptions, they really happen, they arrive and irrupt from the unrecognized sphere of material culture to construct and displace human identity. Materially so

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__________________________________________________________________ close, but semantically so far away, at last sirens and mermaids can exist, they can emerge as a full event by the price paid in the nineteenth century—the price of their bodies, their voices, and their representations. They can exist but as a commodity, as a fetish. Being a negative reference, fetish is a place that makes impossible possible. Sirens and mermaids embodied in everyday things are not new. Numerous examples ranging from ancient Greece to the twenty-first century abound. Ewers, candelabras, pendants, and dishes from the Victoria and Albert Museum testify that material representations of sirens are not something unique. But they became something unique when the concept of the things themselves changed, when the society that produced them changed, when social relations embedded in these objects changed, when the game of materiality and reflection changed. For sirens to become possible, they had to disappear through mirror reflection, towards the monstrous body of a commodity. And the only way that could happen is for the mirror to let them through. In Orpheus, the movie from 1950, Jean Cocteau said that ‘mirrors are the gates through which death comes and goes,’76 not the death of annihilation, but the promise of an elsewhere. Melchior-Bonnet calls the twentieth century mirror the ‘empty mirror,’77 one that does not reflect anything anymore, because there is nothing to be reflected. The subject is dead because the game of reflections and appearances has gone too far. She concludes that, [c]rossing the mirror leads to nothing. The world represented in the mirror is curiously neutral in that its image depicts only the appearance of an appearance, a dream existing only as a pale and colourless reality that is uncertain of its existence. [...] There is no wonderland that the creative imagination might bring about.78 The siren’s empty mirror, though, still leads to the elsewhere from whence it came—now more than ever. Commercialized bodies of silent mermaids construct the gaze ready to penetrate the surface of the image, the gaze astonished to find out that what it sees on the other side is not a world put on its head, or turned insideout and up-side down as in Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.79 It is a world unstable and shifting, with boundaries blurred and undefined, full of cracks through which the silent voices of commodified sirens penetrate social reality. Staring at the mermaid’s mirror brings mermaids back into play. Looking at oneself in order to know oneself seems no longer possible, because there is nothing more to be known. Gazing at the Mirror Mosaic in Norfolk reveals nothing— dozens of shards, dozens of faces, dozens of monsters lurking from the fissures in the glass. The Mosaic does not reveal because the revelation is dead. But it still plays the game nevertheless, it still constructs, still changes. What is left is a difference, a displacement, a game itself; a game from a distance, without

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__________________________________________________________________ possibility of approach. But, as Derrida says, ‘[t]his distance (which is lacking) is necessary. Il faut la distance (qui faut).’80

Notes 1

In The Odyssey, the Sirens were not visually represented. Lawrence Kramer, ‘Longindyingcall: Of Music, Modernity, and the Sirens,’ in Music of the Sirens, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 201. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Daniel Miller, ‘Materiality: An Introduction,’ in Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 2. 6 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis and London: Minneapolis University Press, 1993), 59. 7 Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1987), 85-108. 8 Pierre Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1981), 69. 9 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 9-10. 10 Miller, ‘Materiality,’ 2. 11 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 164-165. 12 Ibid., 165. 13 Agamben, Stanzas, 37. 14 Ibid. 15 By humanity's sefl-possesion, I would like to present the idea of semiotic instability—the ever harder struggle of retaining control over fixed definitions of humanity. An emphasis here is on control, on the inability of humanity to dominate semiotic earthquakes of nineteenth-century materiality. 16 Ibid., 47. 17 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (London: Penguin Books, Ltd, 1994). 18 Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann, The Sand-man and Other Night Pieces (Coverley House, Carlton, Leyburn, North Yorkshire: The Taurus Press, 2008). 19 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny,’ in The Standard Edition of Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII. (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1919), 217-256. 20 Marx, Capital, 163-164. 21 Agamben, Stanzas, 37-38. 2

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__________________________________________________________________ 22

Ibid., 50. Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 177. 24 Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard (1803-1847), generally known by the pseudonym of J. J. Grandville, was a French caricaturist. Couple of years before he died, in 1843, he publish a book entitled Petits Misères de la Vie Humaine in which he presented series of disturbing images which will, in Agamben’s opinion, ‘become increasingly familiar to the modern age: a bad conscience with respect to things. In a leaky faucet that cannot be turned off, in an umbrella that reverses itself, in a boot that can be neither put on nor taken off and remain tenaciously stuck on the foot, in the sheets of paper scattered by a breath of wind, in a coverlet that does not cover, in a pair of paints that tears, the prophetic glace of Grandville discovers, beyond the simple fortuitous incident, the cipher of a new relation of humans and things. No one has shown better than he the disturbing metamorphoses of the most familiar objects [...]. Under his pen, objects lose their innocence and rebel with a kind of deliberate perfidy. They attempt to invade their uses, they become animated with human feelings and intentions, they become discontented and lazy. The eye is not surprised to discover them in lecherous attitudes,’ in Agamben, Stanzas, 47. 25 Ibid., 48. 26 Miller, ‘Materiality,’ 8. 27 Agamben, Stanzas, 50. 28 Ibid., 43. 29 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 30. 30 Melchior-Bonnet, Mirror, 226. 31 Ibid., 177. 32 Ibid., 181. 33 Geneviève Sennequier, Miroirs:Jeux et Reflets Depuis l’Antiquité (Somogy éd. d`art : Paris, 2000), 57. 34 Melchior-Bonnet, Mirror, 99. 35 Mark Pendergrast, Mirror, Mirror: A History of the Human Love Affair with Reflection (Basic Books: New York, 2003), 146. 36 Melchior-Bonnet, Mirror; Sennequier, Miroirs; Pendergrast, Mirror, Mirror; Jonathan Miller, On Reflection (National Gallery Publications: London, 1998). 37 Melchior-Bonnet, Mirror, 14. 38 Miller, On Reflection, 79. 39 Melchior-Bonnet, Mirror, 25. 40 Ibid., 81. 41 Ibid. 42 Pendergrast, Mirror, Mirror, 200. 23

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Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Harvard University Press: Cambridge (Mass.), 2002), 50. 44 Agamben, Stanzas, 38. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Jeffrey J. Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven These),’ in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 1996), 6. 48 Linda Phyllis Austern, ‘“Teach Me to Heare Mermaids Singing”: Embodiments of (Acoustic) Pleasure and Danger in the Modern West,’ in Music of the Sirens, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 68. 49 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Fisherman and His Soul,’ in A House of Pomegranates (Rockville, Maryland: Arc Manor, 2008), 49-85. 50 Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Penguin Young Readers Group, 2004). 51 Leofranc Holford-Strevens, ‘Sirens in Antiquity and the Middle Ages,’ in Music of the Sirens, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 28. 52 Austern, ‘“Teach Me to Heare Mermaids Singing”,’ 80. 53 The image reproduced in Holford-Strevens, ‘Sirens in Antiquity and the Middle Ages,’ 36. 54 The image reproduced in ibid., 37. 55 The image reproduced in Austern, ‘“Teach Me to Heare Mermaids Singing”,’ 74. 56 Melchior-Bonnet, Mirror, 192. 57 Ibid., 273. 58 Inna Naroditskaya and Lynda Phyllis Austern, ‘Introduction: Singing Each to Each,’ in Music of the Sirens, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 3. 59 Kramer, ‘Longindyingcall,’ 196. 60 Andersen, The Little Mermaid. 61 Franz Kafka, ‘The Silence of the Sirens,’ in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories & Parables, ed. Nahum Glatzer (New York: Quality Paper Book Club, 1983), 431. 62 Ibid. 63 Kramer, ‘Longindyingcall,’ 199-203. 64 Pendergrast, Mirror, Mirror, 156. 65 Kramer, ‘Longindyingcall,’ 196-197. 66 Ibid., 197. 67 Ibid. 68 Melchior-Bonnet, Mirror, 236.

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Celeste Lacroix, ‘Images of Animated Others: The Orientalization of Disney’s Cartoon Heroines from The Little Mermaid to The Hunchback of Notre Dame,’ Popular Communication 2:4 (2004): 213-229. 70 Laura Sells, ‘“Where do the mermaids stand?”: Voice and Body in The Little Mermaid,’ in From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender and Culture, ed. Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas and Laura Sells (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 167-192. 71 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Future of the Profession or the University Without Condition (Thanks to the “Humanities,” What Could Take Place Tomorrow),’ in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, ed. Tom Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 53. 72 Ibid. 73 Donna Haraway, ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,’ in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 295. 74 Kafka, ‘Silence of the Sirens,’ 431. 75 Amazon.com, the ultimate distributer of commodities, offers a great number of siren-mirrors. There are examples of Mermaid Hand Mirror (‘Mermaid Hand Mirror Collectible Sea Nymph Decoration Figurine Model’ viewed 25 March 2013, http://www.amazon.com/Mermaid-Mirror-Collectible-Decoration-Figurine/ dp/B001S5BHU8), as well as a Mermaid Swimming with Dolphins Mirror (‘Mermaid Swimming W/dolphins Mirror Cast Iron’ viewed 25 March 2013, http://www.amazon.com/Mermaid-Swimming-dolphins-Mirror-Cast/dp/B00331 OUC2) or a Collectible Mermaid Hand Mirror (‘Art Nouveau Collectible Mermaid Hand Mirror Nymph Model Decoration’ viewed 25 March 2013, http://www.amazon.com/Nouveau-Collectible-Mermaid-MirrorDecoration/dp/B002I0LV5S)—to name only a few. 76 Jean Cocteau, Orpheus, directed by Jean Cocteau, film (1950; USA: The Criterion Collection, 2000), DVD. 77 Melchior-Bonnet, Mirror, 264-265. 78 Ibid., 265. 79 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1994). 80 Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), 48.

Bibliography Agamben, Georgio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Minneapolis and London: Minneapolis University Press, 1993.

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__________________________________________________________________ Amazon. ‘Art Nouveau Collectible Mermaid Hand Mirror Nymph Model Decoration.’ Viewed March 25, 2013. http://www.amazon.com/Nouveau-Collectible-Mermaid-Mirror-Decoration/dp/ B002I0LV5S. ———. ‘Mermaid Hand Mirror Collectible Sea Nymph Decoration Figurine Model.’ Viewed March 25, 2013. http://www.amazon.com/Mermaid-Mirror-Collectible-Decoration-Figurine/dp/ B001S5BHU8. ———. ‘Mermaid Swimming W/dolphins Mirror Cast Iron.’ Viewed March 25, 2013. http://www.amazon.com/Mermaid-Swimming-dolphins-Mirror-Cast/dp/B00331 OUC2. Andersen, Hans Christian. The Little Mermaid. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York: Penguin Young Readers Group, 2004. Austern, Linda Phillys. ‘“Teach Me to Heare Mermaids Singing”: Embodiments of (Acoustic) Pleasure and Danger in the Modern West.’ In Music of the Sirens, edited by Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya, 52-104. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2002. Bourdieu, Pierre. Logic of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex.’ New York and London: Routledge, 1993. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1994. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses).’ In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 3-25. Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 1996.

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__________________________________________________________________ Derrida, Jacques. ‘The Future of the Profession or the University Without Condition (Thanks to the “Humanities,” What Could Take Place Tomorrow).’ In Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, edited by Tom Cohen, 24-57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ———. Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Haraway, Donna. ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.’ In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, 295-337. New York: Routledge, 1992. Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm. The Sand-man and Other Night Pieces. Coverley House, Carlton, Leyburn, North Yorkshire: The Taurus Press, 2008. Holford-Strevens, Leofranc. ‘Sirens in the Antiquity and the Middle Ages.’ In Music of the Sirens, edited by Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya, 16-51. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006. Jean Cocteau. Orheus. Directed by Jean Cocteau. 1950. USA: The Criterion Collection, 2000. DVD. Kafka, Franz. ‘The Silence of the Sirens.’ In Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories & Parables, edited by Nahum Glatzer, 430-432. New York: Quality Paper Book Club, 1983. Kramer, Lawrence. ‘Longindyingcall: Of Music, Modernity, and the Sirens.’ In Music of the Sirens, edited by Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya, 194215. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006. Lacroix, Celeste. ‘Images of Animated Others: The Orientalization of Disney’s Cartoon Heroines from The Little Mermaid to The Hunchback of Notre Dame.’ Popular Communication 2:4 (2004): 213-229. Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. I. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage Books, 1977. Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine. The Mirror: A History. New York and London: Routledge, 2001.

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__________________________________________________________________ Miller, Daniel. ‘Materiality: An Introduction.’ In Materiality, edited by Daniel Miller, 1-50. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. ———. Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. Miller, Jonathan. On Reflection. London: National Gallery Publications, 1998. Naroditskaya, Inna and Austern, Linda Phyllis. ‘Introduction: Singing Each to Each.’ In Music of the Sirens, edited by Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya, 1-15. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006. Pendergrast, Mark. Mirror, Mirror: A History of the Human Love Affair with Reflection. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Sells, Laura. ‘“Where do the mermaids stand?”: Voice and Body in The Little Mermaid.’ In From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender and Culture, edited by Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas and Laura Sells, 167-192. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Sennquier, Geneviève. Miroir: Jeux et Reflets Depuis l’Antiquité. Paris: Somogy éd. d`art, 2000. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. London: Penguin Books, Ltd, 1994. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1994. ———. ‘The Fisherman and His Soul.’ In A House of Pomegranates, 49-85. Rockville, Maryland: Arc Manor, 2008. Marko Teodorski is a PhD student at the University of Perpignan, France, and Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Germany. He researches the relationship between conceptual changes in materiality, monstrosity, and mirror reflection in the European nineteenth and twentieth century.

The Monstrous Hermaphroditic Clone as Backward Progress: A Reading of Ralf Isau’s Thriller Die Galerie der Lügen oder Der Unachtsame Schläfer Angelika Baier Abstract While a great deal has been written on both clones and hermaphrodites, this chapter focuses on hermaphroditic clones. Clones and hermaphrodites share central features that contemporary society considers monstrous. Whereas hermaphrodites transgress the gender binary, clones are illegally produced beings that seemingly copy another, already living person, questioning thereby the centrality of sexual procreation and death for humanity. Moreover, both clones and hermaphrodites hold a complex relation to temporality. Hermaphrodites are frequently conceptualised as primordial beings existing before the order of all things. As Plato’s Symposium tells us, today’s state of humanity can be seen as a result of the primeval, (partly) androgynous beings’ attack upon the gods, which led to a division of all creatures. In accordance with Plato, Baudrillard emphasises that even today humanity is driven by the desire to re-establish the earlier state of wholeness. Through the biotechnological means of (copy-)cloning, Baudrillard reasons, mankind attempts to regain control over its past and future by eventually superseding (sexual) differentiation, procreation, and death. In this context, the following chapter presents a reading of the German sci-fi-thriller, Die Galerie der Lügen oder Der Unachtsame Schläfer (The Gallery of Lies or The Careless Sleeper) by Ralf Isau, in which self-fertilising, hermaphroditic clones are manufactured as the next generation of mankind. I argue that the hermaphroditic clone, which superposes the past and the future, can be seen as a symbol of what this chapter calls backward progress, a concept that is further explored by referring to ideas developed by Plato, Baudrillard, Darwin, and Freud. By taking a look at the ways in which Isau’s thriller deals with its allegedly monstrous creatures, this analysis shows that the hermaphroditic clones and the thriller itself engage in complex temporalities that, in fact, undermine notions of controllability and dedifferentiation that are usually associated with clones. Key Words: Cloning, hermaphroditism, intersex, crime fiction, Ralf Isau, Die Galerie der Lügen oder Der Unachtsame Schläfer. ***** For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through the collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something

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__________________________________________________________________ that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however sceptical we might be.1 ‘“I’ve got one question,” I asked Zora one day. “Why did you ever tell anybody [that she was intersexed]?” […] Zora folded her long legs under herself. With her fairy’s eyes, paisleyshaped, blue and glacial looking into mine, she said, “Because we’re what’s next.’2 1. Introduction3 In recent years, much research has been carried out regarding the depictions of cloning and hermaphroditism/intersex in contemporary literature and film.4 This chapter connects both motifs by presenting a reading of the German sci-fi thriller, The Gallery of Lies or The Careless Sleeper (Die Galerie der Lügen oder Der Unachtsame Schläfer) by Ralf Isau (2005),5 whose protagonists are hermaphroditic clones. The motif of the hermaphrodite is frequently associated with classical Greek mythology that tells us about dual-sexed deities, who are then imagined as the creators of a primordial, possibly also dual-sexed humanity. At some point, however, the gods have established an order that has forced humanity to live life within finite categories. The theory of evolution, on the other hand, explains the process of differentiation by stating that over billions of years increasingly complex organisms have developed, one type descending from another by constantly adapting to ever-changing surroundings. Either way, to this day humans have been categorised as male or female, as being of a different kind than animals, as procreating by giving birth, as being mortal. Within the Western world, for instance, hermaphroditic, that is, intersexed persons who are born with physical characteristics of both sexes are routinely handed over to the medical apparatus for surgical and/or hormonal sex-assignment that eventually allows definite categorisation. In the passages that began this section we hear the voices of Jeffrey Eugenides’ Zora, and Julian Barnes’ third-person narrator of A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. In accordance with their statements, Isau’s thriller not only looks at the past of long-lost origins prior to differentiation and separation. Conversely, it is really about what comes next. The novel combines mythological concepts of the hermaphrodite as the putative primeval human with the world of science, that is, with the future means of procreation—the biotechnological means of reproductive cloning. As reproductive cloning is illegal in most contemporary nation states, it is by no means coincidental that Isau’s novel is a thriller, a subgenre of crime fiction. The fact that both the clone and its creator trespass the borders of civil law makes cloning particularly attractive to crime fiction writers. In fact, the hermaphroditic clone not only violates the law, it also transgresses the gender binary and thereby questions the importance of sexual unification, procreation, and death for

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__________________________________________________________________ humanity. Consequently, Isau’s protagonists pose a severe threat to today’s social order; indeed, for society they are monsters. However, similarly to the hermaphroditic clone that superposes antiquity and futurity, crime fiction holds a ‘complex relation to temporality,’6 as pieces of crime fiction focus on the past history of a murderous deed, the present time of investigation, and on the future when such an event will no longer be likely to happen. The complex temporalities of both the hermaphroditic clones and the structure of crime fiction are an important aspect of the following reading of Isau’s novel as they reveal the monstrous (over-)coding of both the clones and his thriller as a whole. In what follows, I will first examine in more detail the entanglements between mythology and science, and between notions of the past and the future in regard to hermaphroditism and cloning, referring thereby to theories and concepts developed by Plato, Baudrillard, Darwin, and Freud. These remarks will demonstrate the affinities between scientific and mythological explanations of the origin of all things. In a next step, I will explain why cloning appears to be a useful remedy to establish a backwards future, that is, a future that is oriented toward the past. In that context, I will illustrate both the utopian potential of the hermaphroditic clones and its limits. As these remarks present a rather abstract model of the hermaphroditic clone, I will subsequently take a look at the ways in which Isau’s thriller deals with its monstrous creatures. As living specimens of a biotechnological experiment, the novel’s protagonists have to live life in a particular societal frame, that of Great Britain in 2007. We will see how twentyfirst century society encounters the clones. 2. Looking Backward According to Luc Brisson, social order has been characterised by a predominantly heteronormative system of gender dimorphism since antiquity.7 In ancient times, humans who displayed the physical characteristics of both sexes were left to die as they were considered monstra, divine signs from the gods that the social, that is, divine order was in danger.8 Consequently, among humans the monstrous elicited fright because humanity feared the gods’ punishment for transgressive acts. In that context, ancient mythology provides a famous example for the gods’ lack of patience with their disobedient servants. In the famous speech held by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, the status quo of gender-differentiation among humans is in fact conceptualised as a form of divine punishment.9 Plato presents a story of primordial, globular-shaped beings that consisted of two halves—both male, both female, or one male and one female (the androgynes). These beings were of exceptional strength and planned an attack on the gods. In order to weaken their abilities, Zeus found no other remedy but separation. Hence, the emergence of men and women is depicted as a derivation from a former state of divine-like wholeness. Ever since the split, humans have devoted themselves to seeking their

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__________________________________________________________________ lost half. In that regard, sexual encounters make it possible to re-establish the longed-for unity, albeit only temporarily. Consequently, Plato presents sexual difference, sexuality, and sexual procreation as secondary inventions whose goal it is to bind the superfluous energy of the formerly recalcitrant beings. According to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, the ‘cleavage from the twin’10 can be regarded as the birth moment of the individual. Over time, individuality and difference have become the distinguishing features of humanity, promising autonomy. Besides sexual intercourse, Plato exemplarily mentions the new humans’ ability to work or engage in other activities. On the other hand, Plato’s story warns humanity to remain within its particular social realms, as further attempted attacks on the divine order would most likely lead to yet another separation, leaving men and women with only one arm and one leg. The process of individuation, however, entails a momentous dilemma, as Baudrillard remarks: And so we are individuated, and proud of it; but somewhere inside, […] we never overcome, we never fully accept this separation and this individuation. Is there not a terror of and a nostalgia for this double, and, to go further, for the whole multiplicity of semblances from whom we have divided ourselves in the course of evolution? Do we not, after all, deeply regret our individuation?11 For Baudrillard, the human of today is still ‘unable to brave its own diversity,’12 and humanity itself fosters a deep desire for regression. In this respect, Baudrillard refers to Sigmund Freud, who states that ‘It seems, then, that an instinct [drive] is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things.’13 Freud clearly detaches his ideas from a possibly divine realm and draws on biological explanations for humanity’s desire for regression. He adds accordingly, [t]hat all the organic instincts [drives] are conservative […]. It follows that the phenomena of organic development must be attributed to external disturbing and diverting influences. The elementary living entity would from its very beginning have had no wish to change; if conditions remained the same, it would do no more than constantly repeat the same course of life. […] Those instincts [drives] are therefore bound to give a deceptive appearance of being forces tending towards change and progress, whilst in fact they are merely seeking to reach an ancient goal by paths alike old and new. […] It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the instincts if the goal of life were a state of things which had never yet been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the

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__________________________________________________________________ living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads.14 Evolution as a process of differentiation and specification can therefore be seen as a constant adaption to disturbing influences from the outside. Plato’s myth also suggests that the beginning of all things and creatures is characterised by a state of harmonious completeness beyond all notions of difference—especially sexual difference, as we have seen. Charles Darwin, founder of the theory of evolution, similarly, holds that [i]t has now been ascertained that at a very early embryonic period both sexes possess true male and female glands. Some extremely remote progenitor of the whole vertebrate kingdom appears to have been hermaphrodite.15 Freud, in turn, also finds analogies in the evolutionary processes at the phyloand ontogenetic level; in reference to his concept of the human psyche’s primary bisexuality, for Freud it is only ‘natural to transfer this [Darwin’s anatomical] conception to the psychic sphere.’16 After all, even nowadays the theory of all vertebrates’ anatomical and psychical hermaphroditic condition is widespread. Hermaphroditism is seen as a natural developmental stage for every human—one to be overcome, however, as traces of physical or psychical bisexuality in the adult human being have to be associated with a lack of evolution. Here again, we see a dilemma: both Freud and Darwin worked at a time when scientific methodology was being revolutionised by technological professionalisation; due to the invention of innovative and more exact instruments of examination, the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century provided ever more detailed insights into the human body, its functions, and its developmental stages. The new humanity, detached from a divine sphere, became thoroughly measured. Standards and norms were established that determined what was considered normal; particularly an early and constant gender differentiation of the human body was deemed to be of major importance for a putative normal development.17 Still today, persons born with gender characteristics of both sexes, that is, intersexed persons, are subject to medical interventions that attempt to homogenize their ambiguous physical phenotype by means of a so called ‘surgical fix.’18 Over the centuries, the sciences therefore elaborated ever more methods to fix (gendered) difference—within the strictly limited range of two sexes. It was only at the end of the twentieth century that more and more of the people concerned entered the public sphere, telling stories full of critique of the discriminating medical procedures and their mutilating outcomes. Consequently, we see that difference and differentiation to a great extent mark today’s human social sphere. Categories

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__________________________________________________________________ provide security and diminish fear, as they enable us to approach the others around us according to established, often scientifically approved reading frames of gender, ethnicity, class, etc. However, the last centuries and decades have also shown that categorisation and standardisation have led to unjust hierarchisation and discrimination between representatives of the various (gender) groups. As a result, the human struggle to bring to an end all (gender) troubles by returning to a peaceful and harmonious stage prior to separation, difference, and power relations becomes understandable. In the following section, I will illustrate how and why the means of reproductive cloning seem particularly apt for putting this journey to a backward future into action. 3. Looking into a Backward Future In spite of the fact that the future of mankind appears to be determined by further evolution, that is, differentiation, Baudrillard stresses that ‘reversion is always possible’19 because, he posits, humanity deliberately works toward a state before the order of all things, in other words, toward a backward future. Hence, scientists attempt to reverse the evolutionary process initiated either by the gods, who used some sort of biotechnological device of their own to be able to split men into two parts, or the ever changing surroundings. Biotechnological methods, which have developed rapidly in recent decades, have evidently become the preferred area from where to attend this state: After the great revolution in the evolutionary process—the advent of sex and death—we have the great involution: it aims, through cloning and many other techniques, to liberate us from sex and death. […] We are actively working at the “disinformation” of our species through the nullification of differences.20 In this quote, Baudrillard illustrates that it is the biotechnological means of cloning that facilitates this movement back to a state of primordial wholeness. Clones share their genetic code with another person—not only duplicating the other person but also enabling him or her to overcome mortality. Consequently, cloning, or cell nuclear transfer, can be associated with processes of serial production that deem sexual difference and unification unnecessary for reproduction.21 The cloning process is controlled by a scientist, who chooses the DNA most suited for further replication. In the long run, the production of a hermaphroditic clone, able to self-fertilise, would free mankind even from technological prostheses. Doubtlessly, the utopian potential of such an idea lies in a hoped-for levelling out of hierarchies. When everyone is the same, there are no differences that would lead to discrimination. From a standpoint of contemporary Western societies, on

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__________________________________________________________________ the other hand, hermaphroditic clones may be regarded as monstrous if ‘[t]he monster functions as monster […] when it is able to condense as many fearproducing traits as possible into one body,’22 as Judith/Jack Halberstam suggests. In respect to the hermaphroditic clones, categories collapse. This makes socially established reading frames of others, which promise a certain feeling of security and control over the situation of encounter, useless. If the other cannot be categorised and thereby separated from the self, the boundaries between self and other seem to collapse. Accordingly, Foucault adds that the monster is, essentially a mixture. It is the mixture of two realms, the animal and the human […]. It is the blending, the mixture of two species […]. It is the mixture of two individuals […]. It is the mixture of two sexes […]. It is a mixture of life and death […].23 In that context, the hermaphroditic clones’ state of undifferentiated wholeness and genetic immortality can be attributed to protozoa and their asexual means of reproduction by cell division. The collapse of the animalistic and the human, however, marks the clones as monstrously backward, because parts of their bodies and minds appear to have stopped developing at an early stage, remaining at a lower level which humanity should have overcome. In that regard, the regress to a monstrously animalistic state produces fear due to the fact that mankind regularly defines itself as an animal rationale, as distinguished from other animals through intellect and the ability to perform self-reflection and self-control. On the other hand, the clones not only transgress the borders toward the primitive, but also to the divine, as their status beyond (gendered) difference and mortality is seemingly god-like. ‘You will be like gods,’24 the French writer Michel Houellebecq accordingly states in his essay Why I Want to Be Cloned (2003). Yet, with Plato we have seen that approaching the gods too closely is a form of hubris, a lack of humility combined with an over-estimation of mankind’s possibilities that may result in punishment. Many literary works on artificial humans reflect on the fact that the wish of man [sic!] to become the creator of his own offspring has rarely led to consequences of non-disastrous character. The famous example of Dr. Frankenstein illustrates that the creatures often repeat their creator’s hubris and turn against their fathers. In that sense, artificial beings elicit fear as their behaviour is anticipated as hardly controllable. We see the similar ways in which mythology and science conceptualise the origin of all things. I demonstrated why the hermaphroditic clone with its both animalistic and divine potentialities of transgression best embodies the concept of backward progress. As these remarks remain merely theoretical, the following reading of Die Galerie der Lügen explores how the thriller takes up the motif of hermaphroditic clones, their multiple monstrous deviances, and their ambivalent role as persons living within twenty-first century society. In the sections below, I

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__________________________________________________________________ will first introduce the plot line of the thriller. In a next step, I will illustrate how the novel’s characters evaluate the clone experiment. In a final step, I will contrast the thriller’s argumentative level with its formal structure in order to be able to reconstruct the various ways in which it engages in complex temporalities by juxtaposing different concepts of the future as backward progress. 4. The Gallery of Lies Ralf Isau’s thriller Die Galerie der Lügen oder Der unachtsame Schläfer (2005) is set in 2007. At the time of the book’s publication, the British Parliament was about to re-discuss the legal scopes of the reproductive cloning of humans. By then, the UK’s legal situation was regulated by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, which was passed in 1990, regulating the work with stem cells that were taken from embryos manufactured by in-vitro fertilisation.25 The work with stem cells taken from embryos created by means of cloning remained free from regulation until 2001 when two amendments to the 1990 act were facilitated: The Human Fertilisation and Embryology (Research Purposes) Regulations and the Human Reproductive Cloning Act.26 These regulations allowed therapeutic cloning, whereas reproductive cloning was explicitly prohibited. These actual events and decisions form the background of Isau’s narrative. Initially the novel focuses on a series of burglaries that have been committed in several European museums. The first break-in takes place in the Louvre, where one of the perpetrators blows him/herself up, together with a museum guardian and the famous antique sculpture of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite. In the course of the subsequent six burglaries, famous paintings are stolen, namely Renè Magritte’s Le Dormeur Téméraire (Tate Gallery, London), Lukas Cranach’s Paradise (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), Peter Paul Ruben’s The Judgment of Paris (National Gallery, London), Piero di Cosimo’s The Myth of Prometheus (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), and others. Besides the Magritte, the other stolen or destroyed masterpieces depict episodes from either Greek mythology or the bible, thereby also dealing with the origins of humankind. Magritte’s painting, on the other hand, which also alludes to the thriller’s subtitle, represents the whole enterprise’s code. On its homepage, the Tate Gallery in London describes the painting as follows: A figure sleeps in a wooden alcove above a dark cloudy sky. The way into this space is barred by a tablet embedded with everyday objects, which are displayed as in a children’s book. These objects are presented as if dreamed by the sleeper. As Magritte knew, some or all of them could also be read as Freudian symbols. This combination of different possible interpretations adds to the painting’s suggestion of unease and disorientation.27

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__________________________________________________________________ The painting’s eye-catchers are the symbolic objects—an apple, a candle, a bowtie, a hand-mirror, a bowler hat, a bird, and the sleeper’s blanket. Consequently, the thief uses these as code for his mission, as after each of the subsequent burglaries s/he leaves one of these behind as an artefact in place of the purloined work. Already in the Louvre, the police find fingerprints that lead to the British science journalist Alex Daniels, who is consequently arrested. In prison, she becomes acquainted with Darwin Shaw, an insurance detective at ArtCare, the company where all the stolen or destroyed art works were insured. Alex and Darwin become friends and engage in their own investigation. While still in prison, however, Alex is contacted by Theo, who offers to help her out in return for a favour: Theo wants Alex to publish comments on the stolen paintings and the artefacts left behind in the newspaper. She does as he desires, exposing more and more of the so-called Gallery of Lies, which reveals Alex’s own familial affiliations, formerly unknown to her since she grew up with foster parents. Following the thief’s journey through Europe, we learn that Alex, Theo, and the person who died in the Louvre are clone siblings, created at the beginning of the 1980s by means of reproductive cloning. When the illegal mission was brought to a halt shortly after the clones’ birth, the team leader Thorgrimm Gunnarsson was forced to change his name and profession. Under the alias of Martin Cadwell, Gunnarsson completed a degree in art, and became the head of the art insurance company ArtCare. Expecting the 2008 amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act to facilitate reproductive cloning, he plans to return to scientific research in order to continue his work on cloning technology. However, since the former illegal actions are not to be exempted from punishment, the clone siblings are to be eliminated. To carry out this job, Cadwell hires Theo, who has his own ulterior motives for taking on the mission. Besides Alex and Theo, there are fourteen additional clone siblings who are related by having Cadwell as their genetic father. All sixteen clones possess a chromosome set of 48, XXXY, which means that every clone is a true hermaphrodite who exhibits fully developed male and female genitals that are able to perform self-fertilisation. Furthermore, the clones possess different animal genes, causing, for example, fluorescent skin or a heightened sensitivity to electromagnetic radiation. Despite these similarities, after birth the fate of the clones differs. Following the common treatment principle for intersexed persons developed in the 1950s, some of the clones (like Theo) were surgically corrected and assigned to one sex; others (like Alex) were left complete.28 As a result of the operations, Theo feels stunted and mutilated, and attempts to kill those fellow siblings who had to endure the same treatment for betraying their true nature. Theo, as it turns out, is also responsible for the theft of the paintings insured by his genetic father’s company. The robberies are conceptualised as a personal vendetta against Cadwell; with the help of the newspaper comments on the Gallery of Lies,

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__________________________________________________________________ written by uninformed Alex, Theo plans to ruin his genetic father’s company and to impede Cadwell’s return to the research field by opening up the public’s and the Parliament’s eyes to the harmful outcomes of reproductive cloning and selfproclaimed scientific grandeur. By the end of the narration, Theo’s plan becomes a success. In that regard, the thriller mirrors real political decisions: In 2008, the UK Parliament facilitated an updated Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, still stipulating reproductive cloning as illegal.29 Theo himself, however, ultimately dies as he blows up the careless sleeper Cadwell, thereby finally committing suicide. Alex and Theo’s mission of The Gallery of Lies illustrates that the clone siblings assume a critical attitude toward Cadwell’s experiment. Therefore, the following section will take a closer look at the cloning experiment itself. I will first explore the premises of the experiment. Afterwards, I will scrutinise the ways in which the siblings evaluate the procedures, and their outcomes. 5. The Cloning Experiment A closer look at Cadwell’s mission reveals that it heads towards a refinement of humankind.30 The clones are determined to skip several steps on the evolutionary ladder by, above all, bringing an end to the ‘narrow-minded gender wars’ (‘kleinliche[r] Krieg der Geschlechter’),31 and Theo explains further: Sie [Cadwell’s team] wollten den neuen, den besseren Menschen erschaffen, einen, der den sich rasch vollziehenden Veränderungen in der Welt gewachsen ist […]. Offenbar glaubten sie, dieser neue Mensch könne nur ein „echter“ Hermaphrodit sein. Vorteile fielen ihnen genügend ein: Bei einer jahrzehntelangen Weltraummission bräuchte man sich nicht mehr über Quotenfrauen Gedanken zu machen. Man müsste einfach die Besten der Besten auswählen. In punkto Fortpflanzung wären sie beliebig austauschbar, ja, notfalls sogar in der Lage, sich eigenständig zu reproduzieren…32 They wanted to create the new, the better man, able to easily adapt to the rapidly changing world. Obviously, they believed that the new man should be a “true hermaphrodite.” Many advantages came into their minds: In the course of a decadeslong mission to outer space, quota women would be of no concern. One would feel free to choose the best for the job. In regard to procreation they would be interchangeable; in fact, in case of emergency they could procreate by themselves... In that sense, Cadwell indeed grants his creation utopian potential, as he plans to flatten out (gender) hierarchies. As Cadwell not only holds a degree in biology

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__________________________________________________________________ but also in art, it is hardly surprising that the design of his hermaphroditic clone creatures, who share his DNA code, relates to antique mythological concepts of perfection and harmony.33 Blurring the boundaries between art and science, Cadwell’s ideas of future and progress are influenced by the past. According to Baudrillard, the clone illustrates that ‘the very “progress” of science in fact does not follow a line, but a curve—a twisted or hairpin curve that turns back toward total involution.’34 Due to his fixation on flawlessness and unity, Cadwell follows Baudrillard’s concept of evolution as involution by promoting an ahistorical, aestheticised vision of perfection that puts himself in god-like control over the future development of his own DNA code. He thereby dismisses the theory of evolution’s focus on the randomness of natural selection. In that regard, the fact that he carries out his plans relatively ruthlessly also reveals Cadwell’s selfgrandeur. As has been said above, the cloning of humans is a complex biotechnological procedure; in order to clone the famous sheep Dolly, 277 attempts were necessary;35 similarly, Cadwell’s project required a ‘huge number of probands’ (eine ‘immens große Zahl an Probanden’),36 who carried the clones to term. These women mostly came from the Indian subcontinent, Africa, or South America, and sold their bodies for a ‘trifling amount of money’ (ein ‘Spottgeld’).37 Until the birth of Alex, Theo, and their siblings, many of the clone babies exhibited severe deformations; the scientists around Cadwell classified them as rubbish and disposed of the allegedly less-than-human corpses.38 Despite Cadwell’s vanity, his experiments may have been based on good intentions. Yet, the clone siblings’ lives illustrate that the scientist and his team neglected to take society’s attachment to social norms into consideration. In spite of the fact that, according to Freud, humankind longs for a return to its origins, to a state of wholeness and completeness, it is used to arranging the world in scientifically verified or, in other cases, allegedly natural categories that establish an order among the world’s chaos. In this regard, Isau’s thriller illustrates that anything that threatens the boundaries of the established categories is subject to mechanisms of regulation. Consequently, society forces the hermaphroditic clones to lead a life within one gender role. Whereas Alex lives as a female, defining herself as being 60% female and 40% male,39 Theo was surgically assigned to one sex and suffers under the painful outcomes of his various operations. In addition, the numerous medical examinations that the clones had to endure during childhood have led to traumatising experiences.40 Their physical otherness leaves them in isolation and loneliness; Alex is repeatedly confronted with the so called ‘monster thing’ (‘Monsterding’),41 a particular way in which those around her look at her when they find out about her special physicality. In this light, the clones’ putative perfection appears to be a transgressive monstrosity and their utopian potential cannot be put into action as the fear, elicited by the clones’ otherness, makes friendly and open encounters between the clones and their surroundings almost impossible. Even Darwin is shocked when he learns about Alex, whom he had

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__________________________________________________________________ previously found sexually attractive. He immediately starts to question his own identity, sexual orientation, and his feelings toward Alex, as her monstrous hybridity passes over to him: Etwas anderes als eine heterosexuelle Beziehung kam für ihn nicht in Frage. Ihm schwirrte der Kopf. War Sex mit einem echten Hermaphroditen eigentlich homo oder hetero?42 He could not imagine engaging in something other than a heterosexual relationship. His head was blurring. Was sex with a true hermaphrodite homo- or heterosexual? Although Darwin does not reject Alex, it takes a while before he is able to continue their (non-sexual) friendship. Generally, it turns out that the clones are too human not to care about their social exclusion, yet too monstrous to be accepted the way they are. So far, none of them has actually reproduced. As a result of Theo’s burglaries and Alex’s newspaper comments on the stolen paintings, the clone siblings criticise Cadwell’s failed experiment. Interestingly, this criticism, however, is based on a line of argumentation that—not unlike Cadwell’s—suggests an ahistorical, quasi-divine notion of perfection. Alex and Theo are followers of the so-called Intelligent Design (ID) movement that questions science conducted on the basis of the theory of evolution.43 The ID movement accepts microevolution involving natural selection and the speciation within one kind. Macroevolution however, for instance evolution between kinds, is only to be engendered through the intervention of an intelligent (god-like) designer,44 as existing kinds, like humans, exhibit genetic blueprints of an ‘irreducible complexity.’45 Thus, a deliberate change of these blueprints by biotechnological means challenges the (divine) natural order. Alex stresses that natural hermaphrodites (i.e. intersexed persons) have already demonstrated the destructive potential of mutations because intersexed persons have often been infertile.46 As a consequence, deliberate, biotechnologically created mutations inevitably lead, in her opinion, to harmful outcomes, as the hermaphroditic clones are unable to fit into contemporary (divinely natural) society.47 According to the ID movement, difference is a prerequisite for human life. Moreover, humanity has to live out particular, finite categories that remain the same over time. Control over the (DNA-)code is given to a god-like intelligent authority that, ultimately, acknowledges the monstrosity of the clones’ very existence. In the light of this understanding, Alex and Theo reject the theory of evolution in favour of a truth of their own. In summary, we see that at a certain level of argumentation Die Galerie der Lügen juxtaposes two concepts of backward progress that are both characterised by a fixed notion of what the past and the future should look like. Cadwell follows a vain, aestheticised idea of the primordial being as the next step of evolution,

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__________________________________________________________________ whereas Alex and Theo base their argumentation on the concept of intelligent, everlasting blueprints, created at the beginning of time. Although both conceptions thereby interweave scientific and mythological knowledge, Cadwell, as biotechnologist and artist, and the intelligent designer are in need of control over what they conceptualise as the backward future. In the last section of this chapter, however, I will illustrate that Isau’s novel introduces yet another understanding of the notion of backward progress by opening up a space of ambiguity that subverts the controlling eye of these authorities. 6. Backward Progress as Involution At first sight, the formal structure of Isau’s thriller mirrors the idea of a backwards future, an involution in Baudrillard’s sense of a hairpin curve. In accordance with genre conventions, the crime novel ends with the mystery solved. Generally, thrillers move back to the past in order to understand the present and to influence the future. Hence, their formal structure can also be characterised as backward progress, implying that information about the past can be retrieved (although not easily) and re-framed into a linear, coherent story that presumably relates everything about the criminals and their deeds. By taking a closer look at the ways in which Isau’s crime novel relates its story, it becomes clear, however, that the book plays with notions of the past’s controllability, and it does so at several levels. As has been said, the central code for the investigations is Magritte’s work Le Dormeur Téméraire and its symbols, which are lain out by Theo in the course of the burglaries. In reference to the painting and the thriller’s subheading, Alex and Darwin identify Cadwell as the careless sleeper who has not recognised Theo’s actual motives for collaboration. They interpret the alcove as a grave-like place and the tablet as a gravestone, in other words as symbols for Cadwell’s violent death. The painting’s objects, on the other hand, are read as signs for Cadwell’s thirst for knowledge (candle, apple), his self-grandeur, vanity and lack of self-reflexion (apple, mirror), his pursuit of scientific awards (bowtie), his search for a disguise as the boss of an insurance company (bowler hat, blanket), etc. Thus, the painting is of great help for the investigators who are in search of what happened in the past. However, the explanations of Theo and Cadwell’s murderous deeds are based on the interpretation of an art work that allegedly depicts Freudian dream symbols that could contain a multitude of meanings. Additionally, this total control over the code of investigation and its information about the past is subverted by the fact that Le Dormeur Téméraire does not actually mean The Careless Sleeper but The Reckless Sleeper. Quite recklessly, the author bases his thriller’s code and the mystery solution on a wrong translation. Accordingly, in regard to the clones and their DNA, Die Galerie der Lügen also stresses that the DNA as a code of life does not determine a given person’s development and future. In spite of the fact that Alex and Theo share their genetic

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__________________________________________________________________ code, both lead rather different lives. In regard to his embodied life as a clone, Theo tries to act like God, not unlike his father. Theo’s actual name is Kevin Kendish. Yet, in accordance with his alias, he executes his power over life and death by killing his surgically corrected clone siblings and Cadwell. His criminal deviance can be regarded as a deliberate sign of an antisocial positionality.48 On the other hand, Theo also remains within the social order of his surroundings by fighting through his Gallery of Lies for a prolonged legal ban of reproductive cloning. Alex, in turn, claims her status as a human by working on an integration of the hermaphroditic clones into the 2007 society of London. Despite her assessment of intersexuality as evidence of the harmful outcomes of genetic mutations, by the end of the thriller, she agrees to participate in writing a book on intersexed persons’ experiences within society. Alex also contacts her other clone siblings in all parts of the world, creating forms of kinship beyond the traditional family. In summary, Theo and Alex’s ambivalent positions clearly demonstrate that, regardless of their shared genetic code, they never fully resemble their progenitor, not to mention their siblings. Being the master of DNA does not mean being able to determine the past and the future.49 Cloning therefore does not lead toward controllability, uniformity, and a nullification of difference. Conversely, the DNA code shows that life is characterised by randomness; Alex and Theo’s different fates in regard to the medical treatment of their bodies seems of more importance for their personalities and their actions than their DNA is. Furthermore, every human’s DNA contains centuries-old information, hence the (monstrous) past is always present in the now and then. Here again we see that the future is, in fact, always a backward movement. According to Elisabeth Grosz, however, [t]his is the temporality of […] a reconstruction whose aim is never the faithful reproduction of the past so much as the forging of a play for the future as the new.50 This understanding of complex temporalities also mirrors Alex and Darwin’s interpretation of Magritte’s painting, which represents Cadwell’s past, present, and future simultaneously. Similarly, two of the other stolen paintings, namely Lukas Cranach’s Paradise and Piero di Cosimo’s The Myth of Prometheus, follow the same strategy, as the surface of their canvas simultaneously presents different stages of the stories they tell. Moreover, the thriller itself introduces every chapter with a small image that incorporates one of Magritte’s objects within another image, taken from the art of classical antiquity or technological imaginary. The images combine, for example, a male torso with a candle,51 a bowtie with antique columns,52 or a bowler hat with a clock.53 Furthermore, the chapters also start with quotations by dozens of famous writers and scientists, such as Richard Dawkins, Albert Einstein, Oscar Wilde, Sigmund Freud, Jonathan Swift, etc. For instance,

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__________________________________________________________________ the very beginning of the thriller is introduced by the following citation ascribed to Francis H. C. Crick, co-discoverer of the helix structure of DNA: Eine Theorie, zu der alle Fakten passen, ist mir ziemlicher Sicherheit falsch, da einige der vorliegenden Fakten mit Sicherheit falsch sind.54 A theory which all facts fit is most probably wrong, as some of the facts are wrong for sure. This reference makes it clear that Isau’s thriller not only questions theories that establish eternal truths about the past or the future, it also emphasises the fictional moment in science and the scientific moments in art by constantly interweaving scientific knowledge and artistic knowledge. This novel combines elements of numerous discourses (like the natural sciences, art history, Greek mythology, the intersex movement, post-colonial critique on the Western research field, intelligent design, cloning, etc.). With this overload of information, it is impossible to detect a coherent line of argumentation—progressive and conservative ideas are folded into each other. Die Galerie der Lügen presents itself as an ‘involuted phenomenon where otherwise unrelated texts are involved and entangled, intricately interwoven, interrupting and inhabiting each other,’55 as Sarah Dillon put it. In this regard, involution refers to a folding in or simultaneity of information that does not form a coherent whole. Having itself been marked as monstrous, Isau’s thriller illustrates that the future is always a product of the past and that the new has to come from what has gone before. Yet, in the present we find an ambivalent multitude of information that opens up a plethora of future potentialities. In this respect, Grosz emphasises that ‘while time and futurity remains [sic!] open-ended, the past provides a propulsion in directions, unpredictable in advance, which, in retrospect have emerged from the unactualised possibilities that it yields.’56 As a result, Isau’s novel illustrates that it is impossible to simply go back to one certain past, to a putative state before or beyond the order. Every movement has to take place within today’s order, which is characterised by multiple struggles over the real meaning of the past and its possibilities for the future. In that regard, the hermaphroditic, divine, and animalistic clones are symbols of the unpredictable, monstrous potentiality within everyone.57 They also illustrate, however, the hardships of representing such a potential—even though it is indispensable for creating anything new in society, those who embody it still experience social exclusion and isolation.

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Notes 1

Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (London: Vintage, 2009), 181. 2 Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (New York: Picador, 2005), 551-552. 3 This research has been conducted within the realms of the project Discursive Intersections in Literature on Hermaphroditism (P 22877-G20), funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). 4 For publications on cloning in literature and film, see John Marks, ‘Clone Stories: “Shallow Are the Souls That Have Forgotten How to Shudder”,’ Paragraph 33:3 (2010): 331-353; see also Stefan Halft, ‘Privacy—the Right to Clone? Zur Semantik und Funktion von “Privatheit” im Teildiskurs über das Reproduktive Klonen von Menschen,’ in Privatheit: Formen und Funktionen, ed. Dennis Gräf, Stefan Halft and Verena Schmöller (Passau: Karl Stutz, 2011), 183-212; for publications on intersex/hermaphroditism in literature and film, see Debra Shostak, ‘Theory Uncompromised by Practicality: Hybridity in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex,’ Contemporary Literature 49:3 (2008): 383-412; see also Angelika Baier, ‘Autobiografisches Erzählen zwischen den Geschlechtern: Der österreichische Dokumentarfilm Tintenfischalarm,’ in Performativität statt Tradition—Autobiografische Diskurse von Frauen, ed. Brigritte Jirku and Marion Schulz (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012), 69-89. 5 Ralf Isau, Die Galerie der Lügen oder Der unachtsame Schläfer (Bergisch Gladbach: Bastei Lübbe, 2005). As no English translation of the novel exists, all quotes have been translated by me. As the hermaphroditic clones in Isau’s thriller are manufactured according to antique notions of completeness and harmony, this chapter prefers the term ‘hermaphroditic’ over the term ‘intersexed.’ In regard to contemporary political struggles of intersexed persons, however, the term ‘intersexed’ is more appropriate; see Morgan Holmes, ed., Critical Intersex (Surrey, Burlington: Ashgate, 2008). 6 Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2003), 130. 7 See Luc Brisson, Sexual Ambivalence, Androgyny and Hermaphroditism in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2002), 7. 8 See ibid., 8-31. 9 Plato, Symposium, ed. Kenneth Dover (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 189c-193d. 10 Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Final Solution: Cloning Beyond the Human and the Inhuman,’ in The Vital Illusion, ed. Julia Witwer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 13. 11 Ibid., 13-14; author’s emphasis. 12 Ibid., 15.

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__________________________________________________________________ 13

Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle,’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920-1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, ed. James Strachey, viewed 15 January 2013, http://www.pepweb.org/document.php?id=se.018.0001a&type=hitlist&num=0&qu ery=zone1%2Cparagraphs|zone2%2Cparagraphs|origrx%2Cgw.013.0003a#hit1, 36; author’s emphasis. 14 Ibid., 38-39. 15 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, in Two Volumes: Vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1871), 207. 16 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Sexual Aberrations,’ in Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, trans. A. A. Brill (New York, Washington: Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Co., 1920), viewed 15 January 2013, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14969/14969-h/14969-h.htm. 17 See Brisson, Sexual Ambivalence, 7. 18 See Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 56. 19 Baudrillard, ‘Final Solution,’ 7. 20 Ibid., 8; author’s emphasis. 21 On the metaphor of copy-cloning in the literary discourse, see Corinna Caduff, ‘Die Literarische Darstellung des Klons,’ in Zukunft der Literatur—Literatur der Zukunft. Gegenwartsliteratur und Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Reto Sorg, Adrian Mettauer and Wolfgang Proß (Munich: Fink, 2003), 177-178. 22 Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 1995), 21. 23 Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974-1975, trans. Graham Burchell (London, New York: Verso, 2004), 63. 24 Michel Houellebeqc, ‘Why I Want to Be Cloned,’ The Guardian, last modified 1 January 2003, viewed 15 January 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/jan/01/genetics.science. 25 See Legislation Government UK, Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990, viewed 15 January 2013, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/37/contents. 26 See Legislation Government UK, Human Fertilisation and Embryology (Research Purposes) Regulations 2001, viewed 15 January 2013, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2001/188/contents; see also Legislation Government UK, Human Reproductive Cloning Act 2001, viewed 15 January 2013, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2001/23/contents. 27 Tate Gallery, ‘René Magritte: The Reckless Sleeper 1928,’ viewed 15 January 2013, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/magritte-the-reckless-sleeper-t01122.

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__________________________________________________________________ 28

For more information on the treatment of intersexed persons, see FaustoSterling, Sexing the Body, 56-63. 29 See Legislation Government UK, Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008, viewed 15 January 2013, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2008/22/contents. 30 Isau, Galerie der Lügen, 412. 31 Ibid., 397. 32 Ibid., 397-398. 33 Ibid., 143. 34 Baudrillard, ‘Final Solution,’ 9. 35 See Tara Robben Robinson, Genetik für Dummies (Weinheim: Wiley-VCH Verlag, 2006), 339. Dolly was cloned in 1996 by Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell, and colleagues at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh. 36 Isau, Galerie der Lügen, 584. 37 Ibid., 584. 38 Ibid., 605. 39 Ibid., 280. 40 Ibid., 64. 41 Ibid., 198, 275, 277. 42 Ibid., 350. 43 For further information on Intelligent Design and a critique on its theorems, see Christoph Schrader, Darwins Werk und Gottes Beitrag: Evolutionstheorie und Intelligent Design (Stuttgart: Kreuz Forum, 2007); see also the contributions in John Brockman, ed., Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement (New York: Vintage Books, 2006). 44 See Jerry A. Coyne, ‘Intelligent Design: The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name,’ in Brockman, Intelligent Thought, 19. 45 For further information on the concept of ‘irreducible complexity,’ see Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 39-48. 46 Isau, Galerie der Lügen, 124. 47 Ibid., 412. 48 For further information on the notion of the ‘antisocial,’ see Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2004). 49 See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), 102-103. 50 Elisabeth Grosz, ‘Darwin and Feminism: Preliminary Investigations for a Possible Alliance,’ Australian Feminist Studies 14:29 (1999): 42. 51 Isau, Galerie der Lügen, 444. 52 Ibid., 504.

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Ibid., 103. Ibid., 5. 55 Sarah Dillon, The Palimpsest. Literature, Criticism, Theory (London, New York: Continuum, 2007), 4. 56 Grosz, ‘Darwin and Feminism,’ 42. 57 Grosz defines it as ‘productive monstrosity’ in ‘Darwin and Feminism,’ 41. 54

Bibliography Barnes, Julian. A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. London: Vintage, 2009. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994. ———. ‘The Final Solution: Cloning Beyond the Human and the Inhuman.’ In The Vital Illusion, edited by Julia Witwer, 1-30. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Behe, Michael. Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, and Singapore: The Free Press, 1996. Brisson, Luc. Sexual Ambivalence, Androgyny and Hermaphroditism in GraecoRoman Antiquity. Translated by Jane Lloyd. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2002. Caduff, Corinna. ‘Die Literarische Darstellung des Klons.’ In Zukunft der Literatur—Literatur der Zukunft: Gegenwartsliteratur und Literaturwissenschaft, edited by Reto Sorg, Adrian Mettauer and Wolfgang Proß, 169-183. Munich: Fink, 2003. Coyne, Jerry A. ‘Intelligent Design: The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name.’ In Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement, edited by John Brockman, 3-23. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Vol. 1. London: John Murray, 1871. Dillon, Sarah. The Palimpsest. Literature, Criticism, Theory. London, New York: Continuum, 2007.

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__________________________________________________________________ Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2004. Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. New York: Picador, 2005. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974-1975. Translated by Graham Burchell. London, New York: Verso, 2004. Freud, Sigmund. ‘The Sexual Aberrations.’ Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex. Translated by A. A. Brill. New York, Washington: Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Co., 1920. Viewed January 15, 2013. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14969/14969-h/14969-h.htm. ———. ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle.’ In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XVIII (1920-1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, edited by James Strachey, 1-64. Viewed January 15, 2013. http://www.pepweb.org/document.php?id=se.018.0001a&type=hitlist&num=0&qu ery=zone1%2Cparagraphs%7Czone2%2Cparagraphs%7Corigrx%2Cgw.013.0003 a#hit1. Grosz, Elisabeth. ‘Darwin and Feminism: Preliminary Investigations for a Possible Alliance.’ Australian Feminist Studies 14:29 (1999): 31-45. Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham, London: Duke University Press, 1995. Halft, Stefan. ‘Privacy—the Right to Clone? Zur Semantik und Funktion von “Privatheit” im Teildiskurs über das Reproduktive Klonen von Menschen.’ In Privatheit: Formen und Funktionen, edited by Dennis Gräf, Stefan Halft and Verena Schmöller, 183-212. Passau: Verlag Karl Stutz, 2011. Houellebeqc, Michel. ‘Why I Want to Be Cloned.’ The Guardian. Last modified January 1, 2003. Viewed January 15, 2013. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/jan/01/genetics.science. Isau, Ralf. Die Galerie der Lügen oder Der unachtsame Schläfer. Bergisch Gladbach: Bastei Lübbe, 2007.

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__________________________________________________________________ Kosofsky-Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2003. Legislation Government UK. Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990. Viewed January 15, 2013. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/37/contents. Legislation Government UK. Human Fertilisation and Embryology (Research Purposes) Regulations 2001. Viewed January 15, 2013. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2001/188/contents. Legislation Government UK. Human Reproductive Cloning Act 2001. Viewed January 15, 2013. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2001/23/contents. Legislation Government UK. Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008. Viewed January 15, 2013. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2008/22/contents. Marks, John. ‘Clone Stories: “Shallow are the Souls that have Forgotten How to Shudder”.’ Paragraph 33:3 (2010): 331-353. Plato. Symposium. Edited by Kenneth Dover. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Robinson, Tara Robben. Genetik für Dummies. Weinheim: Wiley-VCH Verlag, 2006. Schrader, Christoph. Darwins Werk und Gottes Beitrag. Evolutionstheorie und Intelligent Design. Stuttgart: Kreuz Forum, 2007. Tate Gallery. René Magritte: The Reckless Sleeper 1928. Viewed January 15, 2013. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/magritte-the-reckless-sleeper-t01122. Angelika Baier is a research assistant in the German Department at the University of Vienna. Currently, she works on the Austrian Science Fund-project Discursive Intersections in Literature on Hermaphroditism. Her research interests comprise gender studies, contemporary literature and (deviant) corporealities.

Postmodern Potencies: Interrogating the Monstrous Sign in Contemporary Society Janhavi Mittal Abstract Looking through the lens of one of monster narrative’s most captivating example, that of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and its late twentieth century adaptations in an episode of The X Files entitled ‘The Postmodern Prometheus’ and Shelley Jackson’s literary hypertext Patchwork Girl, this chapter argues that the fragmented and denaturalised postmodernist reality has allowed for a shift in embodied monstrosity to the liminal figure of the cyborg. Furthermore, these two intrinsically postmodern meta-fictional adaptations of Frankenstein that resist the possibility of an overruling narrative, perform the analogous function of the monstrous sign itself—that of re-evaluating the constructed-ness of established narratives, both of literature and of the body in society. The chapter addresses the potential of the postmodern and posthuman metaphor to constantly disrupt conceptual systems steeped in ideas of centre, hierarchy, and uniformity, reinvigorating them instead with plurality and non-normative differences between subjects without dismissing their corporeality. The chapter appropriates these inferences from the purview of disability studies, engaging with issues pertaining to ways of representing bodily difference. Finally, after tracing a parallel social trajectory of the semantic shifts in the monster sign giving way to the cyborg, posthuman metaphor, the chapter examines the latter's ability of denaturalising the body with respect to challenging impairment as a pre-discursive category and the social production of disability. Key Words: Representation, monstrous body, cyborg, metaphor, spectacle, nonnormative difference, postmodernism(s), posthuman, disability studies, impairment. ***** The question of where science meets the humanities gains particular relevance in a technology-driven society, with the answer posited in the body. The body can be best understood as an interactive interface of culture, the site for construction of meanings and for addressing issues of identity formation, subjectivities of the self, and the semiotic codes within which corporeal presence is imbricated in society. The changing position of the body and its representation in various monster narratives provides an interesting entry point into this discussion. The label of monstrosity is contingent on an implicit recognition by its corresponding society. Writers across history and cultures have used the monster narrative to interrogate what Michel Foucault calls the ‘universal narrative paradigms’1 of their

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__________________________________________________________________ corresponding society. Building on Daniel Punday’s astute observation that the ‘body in narrative is constantly given meaning and is a part of textual representation’2 in the course of this chapter, I will be examining the altered position of the monstrous body in different postmodern narrative forms, and the corresponding implications for body, identity, and self. More specifically, I will be looking at the variations of the monstrous sign, from its representations in terms of embodied monstrosity in the early nineteenth century, to its redundancy in the context of postmodern culture. I will trace this trajectory through the lens of one of literature’s most captivating monster narratives, that of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), as well as its postmodern afterlives in an episode of The X Files entitled ‘The Postmodern Prometheus’ (1997) and Shelley Jackson’s hypertext novel Patchwork Girl (1995). I hope to demonstrate in the course of this chapter that there has been a hollowing out of the monstrous sign and a replacement by the cyborg metaphor. In the latter half of this chapter, I will be examining the socio-political implications of this shift in representation, particularly in terms of contemporary approaches to the anomalous body. The construction of monstrosity in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein3 provides a critical insight into nineteenth century ideas of the body. The representation of monstrosity in the text is shown to be universal, terrifying, and deviant to all those who can actually see the creature. Victor Frankenstein immediately labels his creation as monstrous, despite having knowingly sutured him from dead and decaying human parts. Society’s collective reaction towards him, as seen in the repeated rejections he suffers, is predominantly that of horror and revulsion. The label of monstrosity is temporarily suspended only when the creature’s bodily form cannot be seen. This happens at two given moments in the text. The first instance is that of the creature’s encounter with Mr. De Lacey and the gentle kindness of this aged blind man towards the creature. The other example, particularly significant to an analysis of viewing the anomalous body, is that of Robert Walton who momentarily gives the creature a fair audience, but not before Walton has closed his eyes. Most significantly, the label of monstrosity is first internalised by the creature himself on viewing his physical form in a reflection. This corporeality of the monstrous sign highlights how pivotal is the body to identity in the nineteenth century. Although the text subtly works at interrogating this arbitrary attribution of monstrosity, the overall consensus by those who encounter the creature and stigmatise him as monstrous merely on the premise of bodily difference, functions as an indictment of the homogenising societal ethos. In fact, this carries forward from the latter part of the eighteenth century where a new form of knowledge was, as Michel Foucault observes, ‘organised around the norm in terms of what was normal or not, correct or not, in terms of what one must do or not do.’4 However, it is significant to note that through the fractured form of Shelley’s narrative, sutured

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__________________________________________________________________ together much like Victor Frankenstein’s creation himself, the creature is enabled to be much more than a visual spectacle. Instead, he is allowed to have an equitable share in the narrative, where he expresses his well-developed thoughts most eloquently. The narrative structure of the text is of special importance in examining its potential to function as a disability narrative. The creature is not without a voice of his own. In narrating repeatedly the ostracisation he faces due to his visibly anomalous body, the creature articulates his own experience of disability. This self-articulation of society’s disabling effect is particularly relevant because it compellingly underscores how disability functions as a social and cultural construct, rather than naturalised fact. It is also interesting to note that despite the creature’s body being made of dead and rotting parts it is, for all medically functional purposes, an extraordinarily healthy body. The creature’s disabled status as monstrous in the narrative only appears after the internalisation of somatic difference as a marker of inferiority and deviance. This clearly demonstrates Stephen Edwards’s argument that disability is ‘both a relational concept and a value laden concept, implying a failure to match the competence and capabilities of bodies deemed normal.’5 Shelley’s text is also seminal as a monster narrative because it archives the different connotations that the monstrous sign can assume. The etymology of the term monstrous can be traced back to the term monstrare, meant to show by signifying something.6 In the homogenising nineteenth century society, where aesthetic beauty also presupposes connotations of morality, the monstrous sign retains its medieval sense of, as Chris Baldick notes, ‘revealing visibly the results of vice, folly and unreason as a warning to humanity.’7 However, even though the premise of monstrosity is contingent on deviance, it is a deviance from the human form. Bodily monstrosity is monstrous only to the point of being distortedly recognizable. Functioning within a normative framework, the body of Victor Frankenstein’s creation presents a frightening possibility to the viewer as a perverted possibility of oneself, a threat to the boundaries of his/her own identity and the integrity of the received images of a cohesive self. Within this homogenising nineteenth century paradigm, the emphasis on the normalcy of the human form was absolute, and the slightest variation from it was treated as a sign of aberrancy, finding its symbolic representation in the form of freakishness. The immense popularity of freak shows enjoyed in Europe from the mid-eighteenth century onward showcases the collective cultural response to somatic difference, and the two conflicting effects these exhibitions had on the viewers: as a challenge to the self’s stability, or as a reassurance of one’s own normalcy. However, with the gradual petering out of the freak shows’ popularity, within a century of their commencement, the metaphor of monstrosity in Europe underwent a paradigm shift. With the emphasis on taxonomy and classification, closely related to the increasing currency given to the post-Enlightenment empirical gaze, not only was

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__________________________________________________________________ bodily difference deeply abnormalised but also medicalised, losing its power to shock, awe, or entertain as spectacle.8 Even as the monstrous metaphor underwent various stages of semantic change, from a site of exciting wonder, fear, or fascination to pathologising physical variance, it remained predicated upon hierarchising difference. However, within the framework of contemporary postmodern society, the fragmentation of this cohesive self and the idea of the body no longer being a unified entity complicates the monstrous sign. By examining the recent re-workings of the Frankenstein myth within the larger premise that postmodern culture prides itself on—the celebration of difference—I argue that the monstrous metaphor has been replaced with that of the posthuman.9 The trajectory of the monster narrative in an episode from a popular American television series The X Files titled ‘The Postmodern Prometheus’ offers an interesting example, particularly in the way it drastically changes the climax of the original monster narrative.10 Two federal agents, Mulder and Scully, are invited to investigate the mysterious impregnation of a lady by the town’s local monster dubbed the Great Mutato. They do so accompanied by the music of Cher and The Jerry Springer Show in the background. The town also houses a modern variant of Victor Frankenstein, in the form of the ambitious Dr. Pollidori who is later revealed to be the progenitor of this creature. Although the exact details of the Great Mutato’s creation are not specified, Dr. Pollidori justifies his experiments in genetic mutation on a fly, simply because as he smugly states, ‘he can.’11 Even though the townsfolk have had only fleeting glimpses of the creature, he wildly captures the popular imagination. Their (and the viewers’) encounter with the actual monster is preceded by various discourses on monstrosity such as its representation in the Great Mutato comic books, the freaks in The Jerry Springer Show and in a delightfully postmodern intra-textual reference in Mulder and Scully’s conversation to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Though it initially mirrors Victor Frankenstein’s creation being hunted down by the villagers, the final monster chase after the Great Mutato in the episode leads up to a realisation that he is in fact ‘no monster.’12 What this shift underscores is the fact that bodily difference is no longer propounded as the grounds for exclusion, or of monstrosity. It is further revealed that he is also not the only ‘hideous progeny,’13 as the mysterious impregnations with the genes of different farm animals have begotten a few of the other townsfolk as well. What is particularly relevant to this chapter’s concerns is the brief discussion of monstrosity in The Jerry Springer Show within the episode, and its concluding scene with the show’s version of Victor Frankenstein’s creature, the Great Mutato, enjoying himself at a Cher concert. His clearly discernible resemblance to Joseph Merrick, cruelly dubbed the Elephant Man, is reminiscent of the nineteenth century’s propensity to make a spectacle out of the anomalous body. Unlike the sentimentalising and simultaneous medicalising of the body as presented in David Lynch’s film The Elephant Man (1980), the

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__________________________________________________________________ Great Mutato is integrated into society, with the townsfolk realising ‘he is no monster.’14 As seen in his nonchalant enjoyment of the concert, he is neither ostracised nor disabled. Moreover, in the closing glimpses of The Jerry Springer Show, a postmodern rendition of a penny freak show, one of the guests clearly rejects the label of monstrosity applied to a child produced from an alliance with the Great Mutato, with the angry rebuke of ‘what’s not to love.’15 It is this resounding response that signals the faltering metaphor of monstrosity—a change from an investment in the aesthetics of the normative body to a gradual acceptance of bodily difference without the associated tags of monstrosity. The semiotics of the episode—Cher, daytime talk shows, blazing tabloid headlines, comic books, etc.—indicate a postmodern setting. These signs, intrinsic to the post-modern condition, chip away at a distinct sense of reality. Postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard associates this sense of reality falling away with a world where there are only simulations. He argues that when signs are ‘wall to wall,’ distinguishing between truth and its various surrogates—‘science,’ ‘the real,’ ‘objectivity’—becomes practically impossible.16 Although questionably overstated, he makes a significant point by underscoring the extent to which cultural signs mediate reality. The media of postmodern culture, television being one of them, has, as Michael O’Day notes, contributed to a mutation in everyday perception, in so far as our view of the world is increasingly mediated by the vast mental image bank we each store in our mind.17 However, it is not just in the aesthetic detailing of the episode, such as its selfreferent status as fiction and the irreverence to any form of aesthetic hierarchy, but the very concern of the episode that makes it more pertinent to the question of monstrosity and its exploration of the posthuman metaphor. The significantly altered trajectory of the nineteenth century culture of freak shows displaying nonnormative bodies as bodily monstrosities, to the resounding what is not to love reaction to the child of a not exclusively human alliance on The Jerry Springer Show, emphasises the changing response to representations of monstrosity. What is at stake in such a change is a significant shift from an investment in the aesthetics of the normative body to an easy acceptance of bodily difference without the associated tag of monstrosity. In terms of creating an exaggerated spectacle of the non-normative, The Jerry Springer Show can be seen as a postmodern rendition of nineteenth-century dime shows. As David Joselit pithily observes: Despite the trappings of spontaneous discussion, the effect of these talk shows is to redirect subversive characteristics or activities into culturally acceptable forms. This occurs through the extraordinarily formulaic and repetitive comments of

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__________________________________________________________________ audience members, who tend to relentlessly censure unconventional lifestyles, as well as the anodyne and remarkably unimaginative pronouncements of psychologist-experts who inevitably serve up the same pabulum for every type of supposed disorder.18 It is the very medium of the show that throws up a repeated and endless ‘pastiche of difference.’19 Postmodern forms are especially helpful in gauging most closely the contemporary discourse on the body and situating it in the larger framework of gender issues, identity formation, and embodiment. This can perhaps be attributed to the world of the postmodern hyper-reality that Baudrillard claims we inhabit, where the difference between reality and fiction is being constantly blurred.20 It is in the face of such uncertain subjectivities, and techno-science culture intrinsic to postmodern sensibilities, that the monstrous sign gives way to the posthuman body. The last example this chapter looks at is Shelley Jackson’s hypertext novel Patchwork Girl where Jackson resurrects the aborted female monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to interrogate the monstrous sign from a postmodern feminist position.21 The digital landscape of the hypertext system is particularly suited to this purpose. A convergence of technological innovation with critical theory, digital hypertext emerges as another manifestation of the Barthesian ‘ideal text.’22 Coined by Theodore Nelson, the term refers to ‘non-sequential writing, a text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen.’23 To highlight the similarities, hypertext can best be described as a text composed of blocks of words/images linked electronically by multiple paths, chains, or trails in an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality described by the terms link, node, network, web, and path.24 However, it is this emphasis on the fragment that often makes postmodernist theory a much-maligned discourse with limited political or social potential. Leela Gandhi, in her essay Manifesto for Anticolonial Thought, astutely traces the driving principle and the trajectory of the postmodernist movement as stemming from an anti-essentialist response to an already determined, uniformly homogeneous Marxist or Kantian self-sufficient subject. The first wave of postmodernism in its propounding of a hedonistic sense of unchecked desire expressed in multiple subjectivities over an essentialist principle of identity formation was reactionary and equally solipsistic. Citing Maurice Blanchot’s arguments in The Unavowable Community, Gandhi astutely observes that the Manichean divide was incorrectly polarized since the opposite to self-sufficiency lies not in self-excess but in a certain kind of self-insufficiency.25 With this regard, the postmodern ethics of

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__________________________________________________________________ fragmentation assumes a more political, revisionary potential. The insufficient subject of this postmodern discourse entails with it an inherent sense of vulnerability but also an openness to the other, an acceptance and acknowledgement of difference without assimilating the other or remaining closed to the possibility of change. As in the case of Victor Frankenstein’s monster, the female monster in Jackson’s hypertext is an outcome of technology itself. Since the position of the body in narrative provides meaning to the body, a cohesive representation of it is resisted and prevented by the endless reading routes enabled by the form of the literary hypertext. This is best exemplified in the metaphor made literal of the patchwork body. The hypertext medium is analogous to the monstrous sign in its function of re-evaluating established narratives, be it of literature or of society. As Hayden White notes: To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself; far from being one code among many that a culture may utilize for endowing experience with meaning, narrative is a metacode, a human universal on the basis of which trans-cultural messages about the nature of a shared reality can be transmitted.26 The hypertext form embodies the very quality innate to post-modernity, which Lyotard calls ‘an incredulity towards meta-narratives.’27 Similar to Mary Shelley’s use of the term monster which the narrative subsequently renders ambiguous, Jackson too refers to the patchwork hypertext creation as a monster, but systematically proceeds to subvert the claim. The selfacclaimed monster after a unit titled ‘Hideous Progeny’ follows it up with the pithy speculation ‘Why Hideous’: They tell me each of my parts is beautiful and I know that all are strong. Every part of me is human and proportional to the whole. Yet I am a monster because I am multiple, and because I am mixed.28 This is significant for two reasons. Firstly, the monstrous sign is no longer grounded in the body, but instead in the patchwork assemblage. Secondly, the argument for monstrosity that pivoted on multiple subjectivities becomes increasingly redundant in postmodern society, as the idea of a unified self is rapidly dismantled. This however does not imply a denial of the corporeality of the body. The body of this female monster is held together by patchwork, each part contributing not to an overall disembodiment, but the corporeal embodiment of

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__________________________________________________________________ multiple subjectivities. Different from Victor Frankenstein’s creation that was resurrected from parts of decaying flesh, Jackson’s figure is made of living parts, each retaining the distinct personality of its previous owner. For example, the monster in the lexia titled ‘Left Leg’ describes it as ‘always twitching, jumping, jogging. It wants to go places, it has had enough of waiting.’29 This restlessness, one can note, is attributed to the personality of its source: [A] nanny who harboured under her durable grey dresses and sensible undergarments a remembrance of a less sensible time: a tattoo of a ship and the legend Come Back To Me.30 In a microcosm of the hypertext form itself, each part, as Katherine Hayles notes, ‘has a story, and each part constructs a different subjectivity.’31 Jackson, in an accompanying essay to the novel, further engages with the question of embodiment in hypertext: Hierarchies break down into chains of likenesses; the self may have no clear boundaries, but do we want to lose track of it altogether? I don't want to lose the self, only to strip it of its claim to naturalness, its compulsion to protect its boundaries, its obsession with wholeness and its fear of infection. I would like to invent a new kind of self which doesn't fetishize so much, grounding itself in the dearly-loved signs and stuff of personhood, but has poise and a sense of humor, changes directions easily, sheds parts and assimilates new ones. Desire rather than identity is its compositional principle.32 As argued previously, monstrosity itself is contingent on the beholder/viewer. In the case of hypertext, however, the beholder/reader occupies a very slippery position. In the world of hyper-reality comprising shifting subjectivities, the externality/internality supposition between the reader and writer dissolves. The hypertext reader is truly, as George Landow notes, an ‘active reader.’33 The reader of Jackson’s hypertext not only interprets the various meanings of the body, but helps construct it. The female monster cajoles the reader into giving meaning to the body. For example, she says in the lexia entitled ‘Graveyard’ that, ‘I am buried here, you can resurrect me but only piecemeal, if you want to see the whole you will have to sew me together yourself.’34 The hypertext reader himself/herself becomes a cyborg reader not only due to, as Carolina Carazo notes ‘his/her prosthetic relation with the creature, but because the text forces us to adopt a gaze which is equally modular and fragmentary.35 It can well be observed that the hypertext form allows for the re-embodiment of postmodern fragmentation. The bodily corporeality of the reader in the text allows

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__________________________________________________________________ for a blurring of borders between man and technology, innate to the model of the cyborg paradigm.36 Exploring the politics of hypertext, Diane Greco observes that: Hypertext shares not only the cyborg insistence on patchwork subjectivity, a narrative “art of making do,” but also the cyborg resistance to final determination or characterization, a resistance with consequences that are not only intellectual and theoretical, but also political—as a technology with consequences for material bodies as they ground actual lives.37 The hollowing out of the monstrous sign, the shift away from representations of embodied monstrosity to the posthuman, postmodern body is concomitant with the realisation of multiple subjectivities, and the increasing awareness of the impossibility of a unified human subject. Though the concept of embodied monstrosity becomes redundant in postmodern culture, the figure of the posthuman retains in its stead the climacteric function of constantly disrupting conceptual systems steeped in ideas of centre, hierarchy, and uniformity, and reinvigorates them instead with ones of plurality, extended networks, and non-normative differences. The importance of these inferences from the purview of disability studies is close at hand. The study of monstrosity and of disability is intertwined particularly in the social history of the nineteenth century. As David Turner points out, it is the nineteenth century that marks the turn from the natural to the normative.38 Both natural and normative, however, have been used as parameters for discerning what was deviant within their respective time frames. While the monstrous sign was taken to represent a transgression of the natural, the discourse of normativity, particularly in terms of embodiment, came to signify the extraordinary body not just as deviant but regressive. Turner indicates the crucial semantic shift in the nineteenth century regarding discussions of disability, which was increasingly beginning to be believed as a hindrance to economic and social progress.39 It is with this shift that the positive potential of the monstrous sign to delegitimize and denaturalise preconceived discourses begins to lose its power, once immersed in the completely negative vocabulary of undesirable, non-normative deviance. The overlapping focus of the fields of both disability and monster studies have common ground in their treatment of somatic difference, although Kevin Stagg notes that this is sometimes overshadowed by their symbolic potential.40 Rather than choosing between a polarised relation between these two fields, I seek to establish the possibility that they are not merely symbiotic, but mutually beneficial, particularly when examined through the lens of extraordinary embodiment. The predominant aspect of the monstrous sign this chapter has dwelt on so far has been its use as a metaphor for delineating hierarchised differences. The representation of monstrosity is a process without a static object, one that

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__________________________________________________________________ constantly changes along with the shifting meanings of norm. The fluctuating normative construct that this chapter will further examine through the trajectory of the monstrous sign is that of the ordinary, abled Western body, and how deviation from this construct has been interpreted and depicted, as well as what the postmodern potentialities of these representations mean in contemporary society. This necessitates an underscoring of the dual nature of representation itself. As Nicholas Mirzoeff argues: The body in art must be distinguished from the flesh and blood it seeks to imitate. In representation, the body appears not as itself, but as a sign. It cannot but both represent itself and a range of metaphorical meanings, not fully within the artist’s control.41 However, any foray into the field of disability studies necessitates, as Deborah Marks argues, an approach that simultaneously appreciates that disability is shaped by ‘people’s particular social and cultural identities and their positions,’42 while recognising that social and medical discourses, institutional practices, and spatial environments also act to shape bodies and experiences. The figure of embodied monstrosity in monster narratives is not only the site for signification, but also a signifier. Approaching the monster metaphor from the purview of disability studies signifies not only social constructions of what constitutes the normative body, but underscores the issue of representing the nonnormative one. Indeed, the issue of representation is significant within the field of disability studies, not just in terms of societal perceptions of the somatic difference, but also regarding questions of policy making, media visibility, healthcare funding, and rights embedded in this perceptual matrix. Literary representations of bodily difference, including monster narratives, are often contentious because of their proclivity to over-exploit the symbolic potential of anomalous bodies. The litanies of complaints disability theorists have against this practice centre primarily around the naturalisation of bodily difference rather than seeing it as socially created, a product of social structures that implicitly or openly regulate what the body should and can do.43 Furthermore, the social realist critique of representing physical impairment in literature protests against its tendency to adopt a static, individualised outlook or a medicalised perspective, susceptible to romanticisation or negative characterisation, with personhood being reduced to a mark of bodily difference.44 These grounds for metaphoric opportunism serve to affirm the presumed normality of the reader in contrast to the stigmatised aberrancy of the impaired figure. Although this underscores the need for socially realistic depictions of disability and a greater necessity for selfarticulation in the form of biographies and autobiographies, new historicist approaches to the issue do not arbitrarily dismiss even negative representations of bodily diversity, as they too form an archive for examining cultural attitudes

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__________________________________________________________________ towards physical difference. Such approaches can be seen, for example, in the arguments of David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder in Narrative Prosthesis.45 More importantly, an analysis of these negative representations is instrumental in realising how disablement is socially and culturally produced. Much like monstrosity, disability is also, as Rosemarie Garland Thompson notes, a culturally imposed category, extrapolated from biological differences.46 Although the world of the text and the reality of the inhabited world are not identical due to their belonging to two different semiotic systems, their relation is extremely symbiotic and precariously balanced. For representation is not only the template for recording cultural categories, but also a way of organising, ordering, and perceiving one’s world. The risk, as recognised by Thompson, is that people construct interpretative schemata that make their world more knowable and predictable, thus producing ‘perceptual categories that may border into stereotypes when commonly shared and culturally imbued.’47 In contrast to this constructed simplicity, monster narratives, though not delving into great detail about individual social experiences of disablement, do not resort to an oversimplified depiction of otherness or a spectacle of corporeal difference. Thus, they not only provide a schema of the social ethos of the time depicted in terms of embodiment, identity, and subjectivity formation, but also undertake an interrogation of what constitutes the norm, subsequently resisting its mindless perpetuation. The significance of the failure of the metaphor of embodied monstrosity can be foregrounded in what Paul Ricoeur, in his multidisciplinary study of metaphor, deems as the ‘strategy of the metaphor’48 to novelise reality through its redescription. With the renegotiating of the human’s relation with technology, and the semiotic and material nature of the body, the very experience of embodiment changes as a plethora of inter-corporeal potentialities is opened up. Retaining the power of the monstrous sign to explore the permeability between culture and science, the metaphor of the posthuman/cyborg signals what Judith/Jack Halberstam and Ira Livingstone call the ‘dependence or interdependence of bodies on the material and discursive networks through which they operate.’49 With the exploration of the possibilities of new linkages, what is understood is a burgeoning emphasis on the performative aspect of the body over its perception as a static biological absolute. It is within this contemporary framework that questions of bodily difference, categorisation of impairment, and its subsequent demolition in a postmodern arena of disability studies can be addressed. Although the experience of disability is communally produced within the dominant model of social disability, impairment is treated as a pre-discursive construct. This, however, is not too different from the treatment of physical deviance in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when impairment was a determining factor in identity formation, the site for personhood to be converted into an abnormalised spectacle or a medical text to be analysed, pathologised, and normalised. Applying Foucault’s concept of bio-power, disability theorist Shelley

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__________________________________________________________________ Tremain de-naturalises impairment to reveal it as a heterogeneous social construct, rendered undifferentiated within a homogenised rubric. She astutely observes that: As effects of the discourse of bio-power, impairments are materialized as universal attributes of subjects through the iteration and reiteration of rather culturally specific human norms and ideals about human functions and capabilities.50 Without compromising on its material reality, a greater emphasis on the performativity of the body and a recognition of impairment as a constructed, always already, social category allows for the creation of a flexible matrix within which the multiplicity of experiences of embodiment can be examined in political and social contexts. The cyborg metaphor seen in this context is of great significance; it has, as Donna Haraway notes, the ability to use ‘prosthesis as semiosis, a source of making meanings and bodies not for transcendence but for charged communication.’51 And in the end, this is the transgressive potential of the posthuman cyborg metaphor that it shares with the liminal figure of the monster, albeit with the crucial difference of embracing hybridity to challenge social conformity.

Notes 1

Michele Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sherdian (London: Penguin Publishers, 1991), 304. 2 Daniel Punday, Narrative Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Narratology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 85-117. 3 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, ed. Maya Joshi (New Delhi: Worldview Publications, 2010). 4 Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974-75, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003), 59. 5 Steven D. Edwards, Disability: Definitions, Value and Identity (Oxford and Seattle: Radcliffe Publishing, 2005), 7. 6 St. Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, ed. and trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1063-1064. 7 Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity and Nineteenth Century Writing (London: Clarendon Press, 1990), 116. 8 See Martin Jay’s discussion of the empirical gaze in Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (Berkley: University of California Press, 1993), 381-434. 9 Detractors of postmodernism find the exhilarating idea of limitless differences suspect. Marxist critic Fredric Jameson has dubbed this the outcome of ‘cultural

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__________________________________________________________________ logic of late capitalism,’ in Postmodernism Or The Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 1-55. 10 Chris Carter, ‘The Postmodern Prometheus,’ The X Files, Episode 505, directed by Chris Carter, TV show (1997; USA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 1998), DVD. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Shelley, Frankenstein, 84. 14 Carter, ‘The Postmodern Prometheus.’ 15 Ibid. 16 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, trans. Shiela Glaser (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 77-78. 17 Michael O’Day, ‘Postmodernism and Television,’ in The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. Stuart Sim (London: Routledge, 2001), 113. 18 David Joselit, ‘The Video Public Sphere,’ Art Journal 59: 2 (2000): 46-53. 19 Expressing doubts similar to Jameson’s, Susan Bordo in her book Unbearable Weight argues that ‘instead of distinctions, endless differences remain an undifferentiated pastiche of differences,’ in Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkley: University of California Press, 2003), 215-31. 20 Baudrilard, Simulacra and Simulations, 1-43. 21 Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl (Watertown: Eastgate Systems, 1995). 22 Barthes’ book S/Z offers an insight in the Barthesian notion of the ideal text: ‘The networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable; the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language,’ in Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (London: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974), 4-5. 23 Theodor H. Nelson, Literary Machines (Swarthmore: Self-published, 1981), 1-2. 24 George Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 3-4; author’s emphasis. 25 Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anti-Colonial Thought and The Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 25-29. 26 Hayden White, Narrative Discourse and Historical Representations (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987), 1-26. 27 Jean Francis Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Fredric Jameson (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11.

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__________________________________________________________________ 28

Jackson, Patchwork Girl, ‘Why Hideous.’ Ibid., ‘Left Leg.’ 30 Ibid., ‘Graveyard.’ 31 Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 148. 32 Here Jackson draws heavily on Donna Haraway’s argument in her Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, in asserting that the cyborg is a useful figure for feminist theory in its denaturalisation of the body, and simultaneously about the common assumptions about it; see Shelley Jackson, ‘Stitch Bitch: The Patchwork Girl,’ MIT Communications Forum, viewed 1 November 2011, http://web.mit.edu/commforum/papers/jackson.html. 33 George Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 13. 34 Jackson, Patchwork Girl, ‘Graveyard.’ 35 Carolina Carazo and Manuel Jiménez, ‘Gathering the Limbs of the Text in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl,’ Atlantis Journal 28:1 (2006): 116. 36 While this organic relation between men and machine in the cyborg form has not always been seen in a positive light. Lyotard in The Inhuman expresses his apprehensions about techno-science propelling humanity towards an era of digital disembodiment, leaving humanity as a reduced essence of thought. Lyotard examines the insidious implications of this inhuman condition as leading to an ultimate authorial control, for by eliminating the body one snuffed out any potential for difference. This forms one pole of the debate relating to the question of human autonomy in postmodern society. Cyborg theorists on the other hand, see this altered relation between body and technology as opening up an interstice for a reorganised embodiment of the self, rather than regard it as a form of disembodiment; see Jean Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (California: Stanford University Press, 1991); and Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). 37 Dianne Greco, ‘Cyborgs Among Us: Bodies and Hypertext,’ Hypertext '96: The Seventh ACM Conference on Hypertext, viewed 7 January 2012, http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/ht/greco4.html. 38 David Turner, Introduction to Social Histories of Disabilities and Deformities, ed. David Turner and Kevin Stagg (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1-17. 39 Ibid. 40 Kevin Stagg, ‘Representing Physical Difference: The Materiality of the Monster,’ in Social Histories of Disabilities and Deformities, ed. David Turner and Kevin Stagg (New York: Routledge, 2006), 17-38. 41 Nicholas Mirzoeff, Bodyscape: Art, Modernity and the Ideal Figure (New York: Routledge, 1995), 2. 29

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__________________________________________________________________ 42

See Deborah Marks, Disability: Controversial Debates and Psychosocial Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 87-88; this work is cited in Turner, Introduction to Social Histories, 1-17. 43 See David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s grounding of debates surrounding literary representations of disability in their remarkable book Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 2-34. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Rosemarie Garland Thompson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 5-8. 47 Ibid., 5-15. 48 Paul Ricouer, The Rule of Metaphor (London: Routledge, 2003), 271-302. 49 Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingstone, Introduction to Posthuman Bodies, ed. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingstone (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1885), 17. 50 Shelley Tremain, ‘On the Government of Disability: Foucault, Power and the Subject of Impairment,’ in A Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard Davis (New York: Routledge, 2006), 185-195. 51 Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, 249.

Bibliography Baldick, Chris. In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and NineteenthCentury Writing. London: Clarendon Press, 1990. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. London: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulations. Translated by Shiela Glaser. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Publishers, 1972. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkley: University of California Press, 2003. Brooks, Peter. Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. London: Harvard University Press, 1993.

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__________________________________________________________________ Carazo, Carolina and Manuel Jiménez, ‘Gathering the Limbs of the Text in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl.’ Atlantis Journal 28:1 (2006): 116. Carter, Chris. ‘The Postmodern Prometheus,’ The X Files, Episode 505. Directed by Chris Carter. TV show. 1997. USA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 1998. DVD. Edwards, Steven, Disability: Definitions, Value and Identity. Oxford and Seattle: Radcliffe Publishing, 2005. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridian. London: Penguin Publishers, 1991. ———. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974-75. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2003. Fuery, Patrick. Visual Cultures and Critical Theory. London: Arnold Publishers, 2003. Greco, Diane. ‘Cyborgs among Us: Bodies and Hypertext.’ Hypertext '96: The Seventh ACM Conference on Hypertext, 1996. Viewed January 7, 2012. http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/ht/greco4.html. Halberstam, Judith, and Ira Livingstone, ed. Posthuman Bodies. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Hayles, Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl. Watertown: Eastgate Systems (Hypertext), 1995. ———. ‘Stitch Bitch: The Patchwork Girl.’ MIT Communications Forum. Viewed November 1, 2011. http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/jackson.html. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought. Berkley: University of California Press, 1993.

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__________________________________________________________________ Joselit, David. ‘The Video Public Sphere.’ Art Journal 59:2 (2000): 46-53. Landow, George. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Lyotard, Jean-Francis. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Fredric Jameson. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. ———. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. California: Stanford University Press, 1991. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. Bodyscape: Art, Modernity and the Ideal Figure. New York: Routledge, 1995. Mitchell, David and Sharon Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Punday, Daniel. Narrative Bodies Towards a Corporeal Narratology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor. London: Routledge, 2003. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, edited by Maya Joshi. New Delhi: Worldview Publication, 2010. St. Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans. Edited and translated by R. W. Dyson Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Stagg, Kevin and David Turner, ed. Social Histories of Disability and Deformity. New York: Routledge, 2006. Thompson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Literature and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Tremain, Shelley. ‘On the Government of Disability: Foucault, Power and the Subject of Impairment.’ In A Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard Davis, 185-95. New York: Routledge, 2006. White, Hayden. Narrative Discourse and Historical Representations. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987.

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__________________________________________________________________ Janhavi Mittal is a final year M.A. student at the Department of English, Hindu College, University of Delhi. Her current research interest veers to representations of the non-human within literary discourse and their ability to challenge an anthropocentric view of life and literature.

The Dark Defender: Dexter and Making Heroes out of Serial Killers Joanna Ioannidou Abstract Although we do not typically make heroes out of serial killers, Dexter manages to have us supporting the monster. Inspired by and loosely based on the Jeff Lindsay novel series of the same name, this uniquely set up television show challenges its viewers by featuring a character of ambiguous nature. The eponymous protagonist is a forensic blood spatter analyst for the Miami Metro Police by day and a serial killer by night. Even though one would expect audiences to read the main character as antipathetic because of his monstrous tendencies, a positive reading of Dexter is possible. In fact, as this chapter argues, the protagonist is sympathetic not despite his monstrous traits, but because of them. Viewing Dexter through such a lens is made possible by a series of elements in his character’s construction, his choice of victims being the quintessence of his acceptance by audiences. By targeting murderers who have escaped lawful punishment, Dexter is transformed from a typical serial killer into an enforcer of justice. As a result, his need to kill is no longer the irrational urge of a psychopath, but can be seen as a heroic action ridding the world of evil. This chapter explores Dexter’s elevation to (vigilante) hero status, arguing that the protagonist’s killings are presented as acceptable and even desirable by responding to anxieties regarding un-punishment and fantasies of moral accountability. It also discusses Dexter’s main opponents and their role in presenting his character as a new type of superhero. Finally, the chapter aims to raise questions regarding the significance of a new order of heroes that manifest our ideas of natural justice, and the role of these dark heroes in the blurring of boundaries between the human and the non-human, the humane and the inhumane. Key Words: Dexter, vigilantism, anti-heroes, justice, moral accountability, human monsters, television. ***** 1. Introduction1 Never before has a serial killer been so accepted in society. Dexter Morgan,2 the protagonist of the eponymous Showtime series, has us rooting for him even when we recoil in horror from his actions. The Miami Metro Police Department blood spatter analyst, who spends his nights engaging in violent, ritualistic murders, is not a typical monster. Although his murderous nature should be appalling—and some viewers and critics reject the show because they are disturbed by its violence—Dexter manages to invite feelings of sympathy3 rather than sheer contempt.

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__________________________________________________________________ Despite its violent plot, the show is quite popular: since its release it has attracted a steadily increasing viewer base, while it also holds Showtime’s audience records. The last episode of Season Four, which aired on December 13, 2009, had a record-breaking audience of 2.57 million viewers, making it the network’s most-watched original series episode ever. Its success has also managed to withstand the test of time; on December 16, 2012, 2.7 million viewers watched the finale of Season Seven at its original airing time of 9 p.m., ensuring the show maintained its status as Showtime’s most-watched original series.4 If the numbers are any indication, it seems that audiences respond well to Dexter’s appeal. Critics, however, remain rather torn, as many of them feel it crosses the line by asking its viewers to sympathize with a serial killer, while at the same time they cannot help but praise it. For example, Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times condemns Dexter for eroticizing violence, while confessing she ‘cannot wait to see the next episode.’5 Similarly, Star-Ledger’s Alan Sepinwall characterizes the show as ‘warped,’6 but he cannot deny its appeal either, as he admits ‘if [he] had the other episodes in hand, [he] wouldn’t have gotten anything else done for the rest of that day.’7 Finally, Bambi Haggins, in her FlowTV essay, clearly states her appreciation of this controversial series regardless of the moral dilemmas it poses: ‘I love Dexter, and, if loving him is wrong, I don’t want to be right.’8 Looking at the character’s construction, one can clearly see that the creators of the show use a series of elements to transform its protagonist from a psychopath who claims to feel no remorse, to a relatable brother/husband/father figure.9 This strategy largely focuses on Dexter’s choice of victims. Targeting those who have escaped punishment by the criminal justice system, Dexter becomes a protector whose actions can even be read as heroic. Tracing the character’s transformation from a self-proclaimed monster to a (vigilante) hero, this chapter explores the ways Dexter’s victims and adversaries allow for his actions to be deemed acceptable and even desirable. Furthermore, the chapter discusses the significance of dark heroes that test our moral boundaries and raises questions regarding their role in defining the borders between humanity, inhumanity, and monstrosity. 2. Seeing the Dark Passenger as Dark Defender In the series, Dexter is almost immediately revealed as a serial killer and he never tries to make any excuses for his behaviour. In fact, in his voice-overs he tends to refer to himself as a monster. Traumatized as young child by witnessing his mother’s murder and staying trapped in the crime scene for days, Dexter is plagued by homicidal urges that he seems unwilling (or unable) to resist. Though he accepts succumbing to this part of himself as an inescapable fate, he does not stop seeing his actions, and himself by association, as monstrous. Even when his actions reveal his humanity he continuously advocates for his own monstrosity,

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__________________________________________________________________ and perhaps the audience would share his point of view as well if he were not so careful about choosing his victims.10 Dexter openly admits to taking lives to please the side of him that he refers to as his Dark Passenger; still, he channels these urges towards other killers who have managed to avoid formal punishment. He abides by a code set up by his foster father Harry, a police officer. This set of principles and standards guides, controls, and restricts Dexter’s actions. By stressing the fact that the protagonist does not kill at random, his victims not being innocent law-abiding members of the community but murderous outlaws, Dexter’s character is related to a long line of anti-heroes in film (where Dirty Harry and Avenger, for instance, centre on characters that bend the rules in order to ensure that justice is served) and television (where the leading characters of shows, such as Dark Justice and Knight Rider, take law into their own hands). This association aims to imply that Dexter’s dark urges are being used for good, and thus portray his character more as a vigilante and less as a bloodthirsty serial killer. The first character that brings this association to the audience’s attention is Dexter’s stepfather Harry. In the first episodes of the series we learn that when faced with Dexter, a rather difficult teenager with violent impulses, Harry saw an opportunity to channel his stepson’s homicidal urges in a way that could protect society instead of becoming a menace to it. In one of the flashbacks in which Harry educates young Dexter in the ways of the code, he says: Okay we can’t stop this. But maybe we can do something to channel it; use it for good. Son, there are people out there who do really bad things. Terrible people. And the police can’t catch them all.11 A well-respected police officer who frequently voiced his frustration about violent criminals escaping punishment, Harry projects his views of vigilante justice onto Dexter. In other words, having witnessed first-hand the system’s inability to prosecute certain criminals, he trains his stepson to accomplish beyond the law what he could not accomplish within it. It can be argued that Harry gave up on helping his stepson avoid his fate as a violent criminal and guided young Dexter further towards the dark side, thus contributing to him channelling his dark urges through murder.12 However, Harry’s rationalisation of Dexter’s acts as a form of vigilantism helps viewers see him as one of the good guys. Ultimately, it is Dexter’s code that ascribes redeeming qualities to his actions and thereby separates him from the multitude of serial killers that plague Dexter’s Miami. In addition to Harry’s justification of Dexter’s crimes as a means of punishing culprits, in the fifth episode of Season Two the idea of Dexter as a protector/vigilante is made rather explicit. The Miami Metro Police Department is called in to investigate a murder at a comic book store. While at the crime scene,

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__________________________________________________________________ Dexter sees a poster of The Dark Defender, a character who visually bears a lot of similarities to Batman and is inspired by the crimes of the Bay Harbor Butcher, a serial killer the police are investigating that is in fact Dexter. Upon seeing his killing spree represented heroically in a comic book, Dexter dreams of himself as the comic book character saving his mother from her gruesome end at the hands of three men when he was just a boy. Superheroes are largely seen as defending the world against evil, even though their actions may not always adhere to the law. Confined to a life in the shadows, with no one (or almost no one) knowing their true identity, they are willing to protect society and punish those who brutalize the innocent, risking their own lives in the process. By associating Dexter with this well-known schema in the minds of the viewers, the show’s creators further establish their protagonist’s image as a dark protector. Throughout its seven seasons, the show regularly revisits the idea of Dexter as a vigilante, as the character battles to reconcile the light and darkness inside him. In the seventh season, it becomes rather a focal point, as the protagonist finds an unexpected ally in his sister Debra. Though initially joining the police academy to follow her father’s steps and win his approval, Debra becomes a very passionate officer. Her career quickly surpasses even her father’s, as she is soon promoted to detective and then lieutenant in the homicide department of Miami Metro. Both of Harry’s children serve the criminal justice system, but Debra is the one who always follows the rules and wholeheartedly believes in the power of the law. Thus, when she finally finds out about her brother’s homicidal past (and present), it comes as a surprise that she is tempted to make use of his services. Although she is at first disgusted by the realisation that he is a killer, and even tempted to turn Dexter in, through a series of events that highlight the system’s inability to formally prosecute certain criminals—even though there is ample evidence of their guilt—Debra entertains the idea of vigilantism as a means to seeing justice served. Having a character who has continuously advocated for doing things by the book, willing to accept Dexter’s ways as a potential form of punishment, strongly reinforces the protagonist’s image as a vigilante. 3. Vigilantism, (Dark) Heroes and Monsters of Darkness Vigilantism responds to the anxiety sparked by the fear of rising levels of violence combined with a disbelief in the power and efficiency of the justice system. Vigilantes aim to reduce crime or other social infractions by offering assurances of security through violently punishing those who escape the law. Although it is an illegitimate and unregulated activity, as private individuals engage in establishing order, vigilantism is rationalised by anxieties regarding nonpunishment and the fear that the criminal justice system is either non-existent or insufficient. The idea of someone taking the law into his own hands seems less irrational when police forces and the legal system are considered inadequate.

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__________________________________________________________________ Utilising the audience’s need for moral accountability and their mistrust in the ethical adequacy of legitimate governance, Dexter’s crimes can be rationally justified. ‘[If] justice cannot be served in the court of law, then, at least, it can find a home in the court of Dexter,’13 as Douglas Howard puts it. In other words, in a society that wishes for justice to be served, but is dissatisfied by the efficiency of the justice system, Dexter’s actions, targeting those who have gone unpunished, seem more acceptable or even welcome. In Howard’s words: ‘[Dexter’s] murders come off as a kind of public service, a bizarre, psychopathic waste management of society, if you will.’14 Thus, by presenting Dexter’s killings as a way of enforcing justice, his character is transformed from an un-relatable serial killer to a protector. Furthermore, the feeling of injustice, which results from the fact that Dexter’s victims have committed crimes without facing the consequences of their actions, evokes the need for catharsis.15 Even if one does not agree with people taking justice into their own hands in a real world setting, within a fictional universe the majority of the audience will wish for villains to be punished (by any means necessary). Punishment restores the balance of good and evil, allowing the audience to experience a feeling of catharsis. The struggle between light and dark can be found at the core of numerous narratives both ancient and modern. Carl Jung identified the relationship between the hero and the shadow archetypes16 as the foundation in all these stories, where a similar pattern can be traced: the protagonist fights to overcome the dark forces and restore balance.17 Similarly, in Dexter, as the eponymous character is presented as a vigilante and not an irrational serial killer (whose killings would only offer satisfaction to his dark urges), his actions can be read as cathartic. In other words, Dexter can be seen as restoring the balance between good and evil, becoming the story’s hero. And since every hero needs a villain, Dexter’s adversaries play a big role in his portrait as a vigilante. Although almost each episode portrays a victim, each season features a main antagonist, who becomes Dexter’s focal point.18 The Ice Truck Killer, Lila Tournay, Miguel Prado, the Trinity Killer, the Barrel Girl murderers, The Doomsday Killers; all these characters are presented as irrational, unjustified, and malevolent, aiming to create a clean-cut contradiction between them and Dexter. Each season nemesis represents the darkest side of humanity, the monsters of darkness the hero needs to overcome. In the first seasons, the protagonist is drawn to them initially as potential companions (who would even accept his dark side, the side he usually has to hide from others), however he eventually recognizes that he needs to kill them as they embrace their murderous nature in a way he never would. They are what he would be if he did not keep his Dark Passenger in check. According to Murray Smith, when engaging with a fictional narrative audiences tend to judge characters in relation to the situations these characters experience, and in comparison to other characters in the narrative.19 Therefore, Dexter’s assessment does not rely as heavily on a universal set of standards that can also be applied to real life situations. He is largely judged in relation to the events and

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__________________________________________________________________ characters of the fictional world he inhabits. Consequently, as these villains are presented as almost exact opposites of the main protagonist, his character appears more sympathetic in comparison. In contrast to Dexter’s murders, the criminal acts committed by his main adversaries have no redeeming qualities. They are depicted as killers of innocents, and there is no room for their actions to be interpreted as anything other than acts driven by the need for the satisfaction of a sadistic desire. This encourages viewers to be sympathetic towards Dexter, since highlighting the violence these troubled characters are capable of makes his own actions appear almost benign. As Dexter himself says in Season Five: Despite having considered myself a monster for as long as I can remember, it still comes as a shock when I am confronted with the depth of evil that exists in this world.20 Not only do Dexter’s actions offer a sense of satisfaction that comes from seeing the culprits punished or justice served, but they also diminish the audience’s guilt in siding with the protagonist portrayed as the lesser of two evils. Therefore, by lessening the effect of Dexter’s murderous impulses through comparing him with more malevolent characters and associating his killings with restoring justice, Dexter ensures that the series’ leading man will not be perceived as the frightening, destructive monster he claims to be. 4. The Darkness within Us Paul Kooistra has argued that though serial killers may fascinate and intrigue us, we do not typically make heroes out of them.21 In Dexter’s case, however, we side with the monster, and hope that he evades capture to continue hunting in the streets of Miami night after night. ‘You can’t be both a killer and a hero, it doesn’t work that way,’22 the Ice Truck Killer tells Dexter in Season One. However, as the series progresses the protagonist defies this ominous statement with a warped sense of justice. Dexter tests our moral boundaries by being both a protector of innocents and a serial killer in need of taking lives in order to calm his Dark Passenger. On the one hand, we want to embrace him as the hero who helps restore the balance of good and evil; on the other, we feel the need to condemn his actions as unlawful. Consequently, watching Dexter choose yet another victim, our need for seeing the guilty punished collides with our obligation to obey the law. This causes what psychologists refer to as cognitive dissonance: a feeling of discomfort that arises from simultaneously holding two or more conflicting cognitions (where the term cognitions is in reference to ideas, beliefs, values, or emotional reactions).23 According to Leon Festinger, ‘[t]he existence of dissonance, being psychologically uncomfortable, will motivate the person to try to reduce the dissonance and achieve consonance.’24 It follows that when faced with Dexter’s homicidal acts, we will try to justify our impulses to support him. Instead

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__________________________________________________________________ of seeing his character as a serial killer, we will be inclined to see him as a protector of innocents, a hero that is enforcing justice by any means necessary. In other words: Dexter’s victims and methods provide viewers with an acceptable level of morality for them to root for Dexter to kill, even though Dexter himself does not share the viewer’s lofty moral justifications.25 Although Dexter frequently reminds us that he sees himself as a monster, we conveniently forget the fact that a defining part of him enjoys murder, and we read even his darkest actions in such a way as to constantly verify our perception of him. We are determined to see this serial killer as a hero. Harry’s code allows for this favourable reading of Dexter’s character, by tapping into our fantasies of dark justice. Dexter and other narratives that deal with issues of natural justice reflect some general truths about the human condition and our need for seeing judgement passed that seem to run deeper than our devotion to the traditional order. Responding to anxieties regarding non-punishment and our desperate need for moral accountability, Dexter makes us rethink our sacred codes and forces us to wonder how far we would go to see justice served. ‘Way to take out the trash!’26 a fan cheers during a fantasy sequence in the final episode of Season One, and even though few of us would ever truly be able to adopt Dexter’s philosophy, we cannot help but (at least partly) justify his sense of justice. The part of us that mistrusts the ethical adequacy and the effectiveness of the judicial system appears to be capable of understanding Dexter’s warped sense of values. Or, in Christopher Ryan’s words: Knowing what we do, both about the criminal underworld and about Dexter’s traumatic past, we accept his perverse hunger as the price of justice, cheering him on as he battles “real” evil.27 The majority of the audience would not go so far as to take the law into their own hands, especially in the cold, meticulous way that Dexter approaches the matter, but the ever-growing list of films and television shows whose central characters enforce their own type of justice indicates the strength of our need for seeing the guilty punished. At the same time, although very few of us would contemplate spending our free time hunting down criminals, we all have our own Dark Passengers. Many psychoanalysts, such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, have devoted their life’s work to understanding the human psyche. Though approaches may vary, a common ground can be found: a light and a dark force co-exist within each of us. In most psychoanalytical theories an individual’s dark side is associated with

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__________________________________________________________________ amoral, selfish, and animalistic behaviours, and regardless of how good one may be, that side is always present. The darkness we foster can be harmless (we want to indulge in chocolate), or more sinister (we wish someone physical harm). Dexter and his Dark Passenger bid us to accept this side of ourselves, and let our demons out to play for an hour. In imagining what we would do in the protagonist’s place, and rooting for him to evade capture and continue his ‘cleansing’ of the streets of Miami, we entertain our dark impulses. Or, as Melissa Burkley and Edward Burkley put it, we are given ‘a socially acceptable way to feed [our] own Dark Passengers.’28 Dexter, thus, offers a safe way to engage with a part of ourselves we usually try to suppress, and its leading man becomes the incarnation of our darkest desires. 5. The Blurred Line between Human and Monster As a character constantly struggling to find the balance between the darkness and light inside himself, Dexter does more than merely embody our shadow selves. A self-proclaimed monster that looks human and at times acts in very human ways, Dexter invites us to ponder over how thin the line between human and monster actually is. On the surface, the protagonist might as well be our next-door neighbour. He is neither an unwavering psychopath, completely incapable of human bonding, nor someone who does not fit into society. Dexter holds a whitecollar job, he has friends and a family of his own; and all of these are real and meaningful to him. Admittedly, at first glance one could argue that his character is a textbook definition of a psychopath. Psychopathy refers to a set of personality traits that include ‘emotional shallowness, superficial charm, impulsivity with poor judgement, deceitfulness, unreliability, manipulation, and disregard for the feelings of others,’29 and is frequently associated with criminal behaviour. The lack of remorse or guilt, and the ease with which Dexter manages to deceive and manipulate the people around him, are definitely features that would classify him as a psychopath. He has no empathy for his victims, and uses his glib manners to set up a mask of normality that keeps the world from seeing his true self. He confesses: ‘My sister puts up a front so the world won’t see how vulnerable she is. Me, I put a front so the world won’t see how vulnerable I’m not.’30 His saving grace, however, and what makes it hard to simply label him as a complete psychopath, is that he truly can develop emotional attachments to others. As Jared DeFife explains, ‘[w]hen it comes to emotions, a psychopath knows the words, but not the music,’31 a sentiment that Dexter often shares with the audience in his voice overs during the first seasons. ‘People fake a lot of human interactions, but I feel like I fake them all, and I fake them very well,’32 he says as he guides his boat through the Miami waters in the very first episode. Nonetheless, despite his attempts to convince us (and himself) otherwise, it is evident that Dexter has genuinely emotional experiences. Put differently, although he claims he

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__________________________________________________________________ is emotionally empty, his statements are inconsistent with his actions. He exhibits a growing ability and willingness to connect to other people (that started at an early age, as he developed an attachment to his stepfather Harry and tried to keep his stepsister Debra safe and content), and even seems to feel something very close to love for the people in his life. Later in the series he has to admit: ‘The relationships I cultivate… They are not just disguises anymore. I need them, even if they make me vulnerable.’33 His character matures over the course of the seven seasons, and we get to see him evolve emotionally and become more human. However, even though through his emotional development Dexter can invite sympathy as a very human character and his lifestyle may be rather ordinary— when he is not hunting for his next victim—still the fact remains: he commits acts that could be classified as monstrous. Even if we justify his actions as a means of seeing justice served, and thus see him as a character who confronts, judges, and condemns evil, in a society that denounces the murder of another human being Dexter is evil himself. As Friedrich Nietzsche has warned: ‘He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster.’34 Accordingly, as Dexter gives in to his homicidal impulses, he becomes much more like his victims than we would like to admit. However, as his monstrosity is internal rather than external and his actions can be partly justified as vigilantism, it is difficult to label Dexter as unambiguously evil and condemn him as a monster. This dilemma renders us unable to maintain a clear distinction of the boundaries between human and monster, the humane and the inhumane. As Ashley Cocksworth states, ‘it would be tempting to identify evil as something that the demonic other does,’35 but Dexter’s ordinary nature does not allow us to do that. ‘Murderers are, in an obvious sense, so very different from ordinary people and yet in another sense they seem disturbingly like us,’36 David Schmid states, and (especially) in Dexter’s case we have no choice but to agree. Watching the protagonist take yet another life and seeing someone who looks and acts human performing monstrous acts, we are forced to realise the close connection between humanity and monstrosity. We expect humans to act as their nature dictates for them, but in fact they have the potential to be more monstrous than anything we could have ever imagined. We tend to see monsters as a representation of the other, implying a safe distance between us and them. Seen as creatures found outside of the boundaries of what it means to be human, our monsters haunt us without crossing the border. In fact, we frequently adopt the concept of the monstrous other in defining what we perceive to be human. Where we are moral, they are sinful; we are familiar, while they are unnatural and abnormal; we represent the light, whereas they lurk in the shadows. During the last decades, however, we are frequently faced with the fact that the worst monsters in fact look rather human and can hide in plain sight in our modern societies. Consequently, it is increasingly difficult to maintain a safe distance between the two.

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__________________________________________________________________ ‘We’re all good, Dexter, and we’re all evil,’37 says Lila in the beginning of Season Two; setting the tone for the uncomfortable truths we will have to face as viewers of the show. Though it may be more comforting to see evil as something the demonic other does, and imagine monsters as creatures kept outside the borders of humanity, maybe even inhabiting a ‘fantastical realm that is not our creation and therefore not our responsibility,’38 Dexter does not allow us to hide behind such beliefs, and forces us to reconsider our binary definitions of human and monster. Clean-cut distinctions become almost impossible when actions that could be seen as humane (protecting future victims) are at the same time inhumane (murdering someone in cold blood). Accordingly, Dexter’s ambiguous nature blurs the boundaries of what we define as human, and reflects the notion of a potential monster hiding in each and every one of us. 6. Conclusion Dexter is a unique case of a serial killer who becomes sympathetic not despite his monstrous traits but because of them. Channelling his homicidal urges strictly in order to punish murderous outlaws, he is portrayed as a vigilante hero instead of a mere psychopath who finds pleasure in killing to satisfy his dark impulses. Touching upon our fears and concerns regarding the efficiency of the traditional justice system as well as our need for moral accountability, Dexter becomes a dark defender that brings our fantasies of justice to life. By believing in a fair world where the guilty are punished for their crimes, we are willing to read Dexter’s actions as cathartic, and especially when confronted with his adversaries, who exemplify human behaviour at its most abominable, we cannot help but welcome his actions as a means of restoring the balance between good and evil. By siding with Dexter, however, we are forced to consider how far we are willing to push our moral boundaries in our quest for justice. Although most of us would not follow Dexter’s example and take the law into our own hands, it becomes increasingly difficult to reject the idea of vigilantism outright in a time when the faith in the justice system is decreasing. While accepting Dexter as our protector however, we are confronted by our own darkness: the thoughts and desires we do not dare admit and try to suppress. Watching Dexter administer his vigilante justice, we have to reconcile what we want (for him to get away with murder), with what we believe we should want (to reject all homicidal acts as evil). Through his character we explore our own Dark Passengers, and come to realize how difficult it is to clearly distinguish between the self and the other. Though we would like to seek comfort in the notion that there can be clean-cut distinctions between good and evil, light and dark, Dexter’s ambiguous but at the same time rather familiar nature brings the blurred boundaries to our attention. When we allow ourselves to root for dark heroes, the borders between humanity, inhumanity, and monstrosity blur, and we cannot help but see how human the monsters can be.

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Notes 1

This chapter focuses on the television adaptation and does not discuss Dexter’s character as portrayed in the novels. 2 Jeff Lindsay and James Manos Jr., Dexter, directed by John Dahl and Steve Shill, TV Show (2006-2011; USA: Showtime Entertainment/Paramount Home Video, 2007-2012), DVD. 3 Sympathy here is used to describe the emotional reaction to another’s situation, in which one comprehends the other person and his/her situation, and experiences (positive) feelings in response to that situation, without necessarily sharing the emotional state of that person; see Amy Coplan, ‘Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fictions,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 (2004): 145. 4 Michael O’Connell, ‘Showtime Breaks Network Record with “Dexter,” “Homeland” Continues to Grow,’ The Hollywood Reporter, last modified 11 December 2012, viewed 03 January 2013, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/showtime-breaks-network-recorddexter-400531. 5 Alessandra Stanley, ‘He Kills People and Cuts Them Up. But They Deserve it. Besides, He’s Neat,’ New York Times, last modified 29 September 2006, viewed 10 December 2012, http://tv.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/arts/television/29dext.html. 6 Douglas Howard, ‘Introduction: Killing Time with Showtime’s Dexter,’ in Dexter: Investigating Cutting Edge Television, ed. Douglas Howard (London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010), xvii. 7 Ibid. 8 Bambi Haggins, ‘Darkly Dreaming of Dexter: If Loving Him Is Wrong I Don’t Want to Be Right,’ FlowTV, last modified 16 November 2007, viewed 10 December 2012, http://flowtv.org/?p=942. 9 Joanna Ioannidou, ‘Sympathizing With a Serial Killer: The Case of Dexter,’ in The Film and Media Reader 1. Proceedings of the FILM AND MEDIA 2011, 12-14 July 2011, The Institute of Education, University of London, London, ed. Phillip Drummond (London: The London Symposium, manuscript in editing). 10 There are a few cases when Dexter kills people who are not murderers, but the way these killings are presented as acceptable is not within the scope of this chapter. 11 James Manos Jr., ‘Dexter,’ Dexter, Episode 101, directed by Michael Cuesta, TV show (2006; USA: Paramount Home Video, 2007), DVD. 12 Stephen Livingston, ‘On Becoming a Real Boy’ in The Psychology of Dexter, ed. Bella DePaulo (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2010), 97-99. 13 Douglas Howard, ‘Harry Morgan: (Post)modern Prometheus,’ in Dexter: Investigating Cutting Edge Television, ed. Douglas Howard (London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 67.

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Howard, ‘Introduction,’ xiv. Catharsis here is used in the Aristotelian sense to refer to a feeling of restoration, renewal and revitalisation (experienced by the audience or characters in the play) as the result of the release of pent-up emotions, see Hamilton Fyfe, trans., Aristotle in 23 Volumes, vol. 23 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1932), 21-28. 16 Jung makes note of yet another archetype that re-occurs in this type of narratives, the Wise Old Man. How this archetype manifests in Dexter is not within the scope of this chapter. 17 Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc, 1964). 18 Season Seven is an exception. Though Isaac could be considered Dexter’s main adversary, the dynamic between the two characters is not developed according to the pre-established pattern. 19 Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 62. 20 Scott Reynolds, ‘In the Beginning,’ Dexter, Episode 510, directed by Keith Gordon, TV show (2010; USA: Showtime Entertainment, 2011), DVD. 21 Paul Kooistra, Criminals as Heroes: Structure, Power and Identity (Bowling Green OH: Bowling Green S U Popular P, 1989), 21. 22 Daniel Cerone and Melissa Rosenberg, ‘Born Free,’ Dexter, Episode 112, directed by Michael Cuesta, TV show (2006; USA: Paramount Home Video, 2007), DVD. 23 Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), 3. 24 Ibid. 25 Matthew Jacovina, ‘Faster, Dexter! Kill! Kill!’ in The Psychology of Dexter, ed. Bella DePaulo (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2010), 237. 26 Cerone and Rosenberg, ‘Born Free.’ 27 Christopher Ryan, ‘Being Dexter Morgan’ in The Psychology of Dexter, ed. Bella DePaulo (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2010), 246. 28 Melissa Burkley and Edward Burkley, ‘The Dark Passenger in All of Us’ in The Psychology of Dexter, ed. Bella DePaulo (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2010), 138. 29 Jared DeFife, ‘Predator on the Prowl,’ The Psychology of Dexter, ed. Bella DePaulo (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2010), 7. 30 Clyde Phillips, ‘Crocodile,’ Dexter, Episode 102, directed by Michael Cuesta, TV show (2006; USA: Paramount Home Video, 2007), DVD. 31 DeFife, ‘Predator on the Prowl,’ 9. 32 Manos Jr., ‘Dexter.’ 15

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Daniel Cerone and Melissa Rosenberg, ‘The British Invasion,’ Dexter, Episode 212, directed by Steve Shill, TV show (2007; USA: Showtime Entertainment, 2008), DVD. 34 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Reginald Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990), 102. 35 Ashley Cocksworth, ‘The Dark Knight and the Evilness of Evil,’ The Expository Times 120:11 (2009): 543. 36 David Schmid, ‘The Devil You Know,’ in Dexter: Investigating Cutting Edge Television, ed. Douglas Howard (London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 134-135. 37 Lauren Gussis, ‘See Through,’ Dexter, Episode 204, directed by Nick Gomez, TV show (2007; USA: Showtime Entertainment, 2008), DVD. 38 Elizabeth Nelson, Introduction to Creating Humanity, Discovering Monstrosity: Myths & Metaphors of Enduring Evil, ed. Elizabeth Nelson, Jillian Burcar and Hannah Priest (Oxford, UK: The Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010), E-Book, xii.

Bibliography Burkley, Melissa and Edward Burkley. ‘The Dark Passenger in All of Us.’ In The Psychology of Dexter, edited by Bella DePaulo, 129-146. Dallas: BenBella Books, 2010. Cerone, Daniel and Melissa Rosenberg. ‘Born Free.’ Dexter. Episode 112. Directed by Michael Cuesta. 2006. USA: Paramount Home Video, 2007, DVD. ———. ‘The British Invasion.’ Dexter. Episode 212. Directed by Steve Shill. 2007. USA: Showtime Entertainment, 2008, DVD. Cocksworth, Ashley. ‘The Dark Knight and the Evilness of Evil.’ The Expository Times 120:11 (2009): 541-543. Coplan, Amy. ‘Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fictions.’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 (2004): 141-152. DeFife, Jared. ‘Predator on the Prowl.’ In The Psychology of Dexter, edited by Bella DePaulo, 5-16. Dallas: BenBella Books, 2010. Festinger, Leon. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962. Fyfe, Hamilton, trans. Aristotle in 23 Volumes, vol. 23. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1932.

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__________________________________________________________________ Gussis, Lauren. ‘See Through.’ Dexter, Episode 204. Directed by Nick Gomez. 2007. USA: Showtime Entertainment, 2008, DVD. Haggins, Bambi. ‘Darkly Dreaming of Dexter: If Loving Him is Wrong I Don’t Want To Be Right.’ FlowTV. Viewed December 10, 2012. http://flowtv.org/?p=942. Howard, Douglas. ‘Introduction: Killing Time with Showtime’s Dexter.’ In Dexter: Investigating Cutting Edge Television, edited by Douglas Howard, xiixxiv. London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010. ———. ‘Harry Morgan: (Post)modern Prometheus.’ In Dexter: Investigating Cutting Edge Television, edited by Douglas Howard, 61-77. London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010. Ioannidou, Joanna. ‘Sympathizing with a Serial Killer: The Case of Dexter.’ In The Film and Media Reader 1. Proceedings of the FILM AND MEDIA 2011, 12-14 July 2011, The Institute of Education, University of London, London, edited by Phillip Drummond. London: The London Symposium (manuscript in editing). Jacovina, Matthew, ‘Faster, Dexter! Kill! Kill!’ In The Psychology of Dexter, edited by Bella DePaulo, 229-242. Dallas: BenBella Books, 2010. Jung, Carl. Man and His Symbols. New York: Doubleday and Company Inc., 1964. Kooistra, Paul. Criminals as Heroes: Structure, Power and Identity. Bowling Green OH: Bowling Green S U Popular P, 1989. Lindsay, Jeff, and James Manos Jr. Dexter. Directed by John Dahl and Steve Shill. 2006-2011. USA: Showtime Entertainment/Paramount Home Video, 2007-2012, DVD. Livingston, Stephen. ‘On Becoming a Real Boy.’ In The Psychology of Dexter, edited by Bella DePaulo, 95-112. Dallas: BenBella Books, 2010. Manos, James Jr. ‘Dexter.’ Dexter. Episode 101. Directed by Michael Cuesta. 2006. USA: Paramount Home Video, 2007, DVD.

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__________________________________________________________________ Nelson, Elizabeth. Introduction to Creating Humanity, Discovering Monstrosity: Myths & Metaphors of Enduring Evil, edited by Elizabeth Nelson, Jillian Burcar and Hannah Priest, xi-xxi. Oxford, UK: The Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010, EBook. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Reginald Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990. O’Connell, Michael. ‘Showtime Breaks Network Record with “Dexter,” “Homeland” Continues to Grow,’ The Hollywood Reporter. Viewed January 03, 2013. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/showtime-breaks-network-recorddexter-400531. Phillips, Clyde. ‘Crocodile.’ Dexter, Episode 102. Directed by Michael Cuesta. 2006. USA: Paramount Home Video, 2007, DVD. Reynolds, Scott. ‘In the Beginning.’ Dexter, Episode 510. Directed by Keith Gordon. 2010. USA: Showtime Entertainment, 2011, DVD. Ryan, Christopher. ‘Being Dexter Morgan.’ In The Psychology of Dexter, edited by Bella DePaulo, 243-256. Dallas: BenBella Books, 2010. Schmid, David. ‘The Devil You Know.’ In Dexter: Investigating Cutting Edge Television, edited by Douglas Howard, 132-142. London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010. Smith, Murray. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Stanley, Alessandra. ‘He Kills People and Cuts Them Up. But They Deserve it. Besides, He’s Neat.’ New York Times. Viewed December 10, 2012. http://tv.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/arts/television/29dext.html. Joanna Ioannidou is a graduate of Media and Performance Studies from Utrecht University. Her research, presented at various conferences in Europe and the U.S., largely focuses on monstrous narratives and their effect on audiences as well as emotional engagement with fictional characters.

‘You Need Us’: Configuring the Family in Post-9/11 Zombie Cinema Emily Dezurick-Badran Abstract Since the 1968 release of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, the nuclear family has been a source of both peril and comfort for living survivors in zombie films.1 Zombies have many meanings, but generally represent social crises of some sort, as well as the general human proclivity for violence. Family is a source of both grief and comfort in times of crisis, so families, whether comprised of blood relatives or other survivors, are central to zombie film narratives. Thus, zombie films can function as bellwethers of social tensions. These zombie films, with their internal contradictions and significantly different ideologies can be compared to the fairy tale, a literary tradition drawn from folklore, which contains justifications of violence—might makes right—alongside utopian imaginings of the world. The most recent cycle of zombie films—starting in 2002 with 28 Days Later... and Resident Evil—offers a conflicted version of the family. 28 Days Later... challenges social norms and offers a hopeful vision of a self-selected family. However, the film is also conflicted, presenting some degree of human violence as necessary or positive, insisting on shifting the abject always away from its protagonists. Meanwhile, films like Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead and, to a less extent, the Resident Evil film series, display a pessimistic, retrograde ideology, implying that the destruction of the nuclear family will doom humankind. Nonetheless, some radical zombie films have been made, which suggests that regressive social tendencies regarding family configurations may have arisen because of changing values, leaving open the possibility for social change and increased justice. Key Words: Zombies, families, nuclear family, horror films, 28 Days Later..., Dawn of the Dead, Danny Boyle, Zack Snyder, fairy tales, folklore. ***** 1. Introduction Since the release in 1968 of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, nuclear families have been sources of considerable peril in zombie cinema. In the past century zombie films have enjoyed multiple resurgences in popularity, with an increased production in American zombie films occurring during times of social upheaval.2 The most recent spike of zombie popularity took place over the past decade (with a large increase in film release between 2004 and 2007 in particular), starting with the American releases of Paul W. S. Anderson’s Resident Evil (2002) and Danny Boyle’s seminal zombie film 28 Days Later… (2002, released in

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__________________________________________________________________ America in 2003). Both films achieved significant commercial success, grossing over $40 million in America.3 Although zombies are no longer necessarily undead (in 28 Days Later... they’re living people, mutated by a virus into cannibalistic monsters called Infected), they still overrun towns and cities, attacking remaining bands of the living uninfected survivors. These survivors co-operate with uninfected strangers out of mutual need, and over time their bonds tend to deepen and become familial. While survivors don’t necessarily have many options to choose from regarding who their new family is comprised of (mirroring traditional blood-related families), the fact that there is any choice involved at all somewhat inverts the family structure. In most zombie films, survivor families suffer losses significant to the group. Groups of survivors generally contain no more than one or two pairings of blood-related relatives or romantic couples, and these more traditional pairings are usually destroyed by infection or death by the conclusion of the film. In the most recent cycle of zombie films (2002-2012), some survivor families have changed in ways more optimistic than those of preceding decades, while others repeat the retrograde (and often pessimistic) ideologies of the past. The success of zombie films with both types of survivor families helps us to understand the boundaries of the popular imagination because, [i]n the wake of historical crises and social unrest, popular culture narratives frequently emerge to suggest the bounds of our cultural imagination—what is and is not conceivable, and what should and should not be permissible. Genre films likewise offer cultural indices on how specific filmic regimes respond to these lived tensions.4 In the case of zombie cinema, the portrayal of nuclear families—blood-related or not—tells us a great deal not only about general human fears and longings, but about specific contemporary social and political concerns regarding the family. The films contain conflicting ideologies, aporias (irresolvable contradictions) that suggest larger social trends. As Tony Williams writes, [f]ilms reflect social contradictions. They never, in themselves, change society, but they may reveal tensions forming the basis for future movements. What actually counts is not the text or aligned genre but the degree of contradiction involved in each particular film that suggests the necessity for progressive alternatives to be realized in a world outside the cinema.5 Thus it becomes possible to diagnose retrograde beliefs and concerns alongside the more radical utopian elements present in zombie films of any decade.

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__________________________________________________________________ 28 Days Later…—from which many subsequent zombie films copied motifs and style (if not substance)—reveals strong doubt about the sustainability of the nuclear family. The film is an aporia, maintaining uncertainty about possibility for any kind of family to sustain in a world so violent. Conversely, 28 Days Later… has a strong utopian undercurrent. Some of 28 Days Later…’s cinematic descendants are considerably less radical, including some of the later films in the Resident Evil film series, and Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, which (unconsciously, one suspects) repeats white supremacist motifs.6 All of these films and others in the recent cycle of zombie cinema struggle to imagine a sustainable present or future, and many end in total destruction.7 In order to understand the varied social indicators of the zombie film, one must first locate zombie cinema’s place in the social consciousness. To fully understand the place of the zombie film and its contradictions, we turn to another popular and highly conflicted story form: the fairy tale. 2. Utopia and Aporia: Zombie Films as Fairy Tales In times of crisis, art becomes an important vehicle for political rhetoric. Chris Hedges writes that, [w]ar and the nationalist myth that fuels it are the purveyors of low culture—folklore, quasi-historical drama, kitsch, sentimental doggerel, and theater and film that portray the glory of soldiers in past wars or current wars dying nobly for the homeland.8 But horror cinema—a traditional form of low culture—remain an outpost of ambiguity, even during times of crisis. Apocalypse and zombie films are aporia machines not only reflecting but also expressing ambiguity about myths of nationalism and war. Ideologically, the body of zombie cinema is as conflicted as the ideologies found in a collection of traditional fairy tales. Perhaps this is because zombie films share more than a few features in common with both folk and fairy tales. In his book Film, Folklore and Urban Legends, Mikel Koven admirably links zombies to traditional Western folkloric tale types in the Aarne-Thompson Classification System. However, Koven finds that, [e]xamination of both the folklore itself and several zombieoriented films [...] sheds light on the folklore themes and motifs within zombie films but also challenges and problematizes many of the methodologies drawn on in studying the intersections of folklore and popular film.9

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__________________________________________________________________ Perhaps this is so because, as Kyle Bishop states, the contemporary zombie is not a literary creature. Zombies draw their power from the physical, the moving image: The zombie genre does not exist prior to the film age because of its essentially visual nature; zombies do not think or speak—they simply act, relying on purely physical manifestations of terror.10 Moreover, it’s difficult to imagine a zombie horde, as per Night of the Living Dead and its progeny, appearing before the horrors of World War II—the mass graves of the Holocaust and the seemingly instantaneous decimation of Hiroshima and then Nagasaki in particular. Is it possible that the masses of dead weighed on the American unconscious, repressed only to return,11 visually, viscerally, as the zombie? In fact, the visual nature of the zombie is essential to its horror. As Kyle Bishop writes: Decapitations, disembowelings, and acts of cannibalism are particularly effective on the screen, especially if the audience does not have time to look away. Moreover, the recognition of former heroes as dangerous zombies realizes an uncanny effect, eliciting an instantaneous shock on the part of the film characters and the audience members alike.12 One could propose the zombie film as its own kind of cinematic folklore—a folklore of the purely visual (and aural). However, the zombie film cannot be folkloric, because folklore is defined elsewhere as a, pre-capitalist folk-form (Volksmärchen) in an oral tradition […] which then gave rise first in France and then in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century to a bourgeois art form (Kunstmärchen) that has its own modern literary tradition.13 The zombie film has not organically arisen, nor is it formed by a cacophony of different voices.14 So perhaps the term fairy tale is a more apt term to describe zombie cinema. Fairy tales are defined as ‘the literary production of tales adapted by bourgeois or aristocratic writers [...] who wrote for educated audiences.’15 While the intended audience of the zombie film is not necessarily limited to the educated, the films are authored by specific, authoritative sources, not polyphonies. Zombie cinema’s cannibalism of Haitian mythology and folklore16 for commercial ends parallels the fairy tale’s re-imagining of Volksmärchen.17 Fairy tale collections, such as the

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__________________________________________________________________ Grimm’s, borrowed oral retellings of other literary fairy tales (like Charles Perrault’s). Early zombie films like White Zombie (1932) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) based their stories on twisted, paranoid versions of voodoo lore, which continues to ideologically influence contemporary zombie cinema.18 Moreover, both the zombie film and the fairy tale tend to be rife with aporias, in main because of their tendencies to present multiple ideologies, which leave them open to interpretation. Zombie films are easy to interpret in multiple manners not only due to the manner in which the zombie offers a ‘blank, dead visage [...] an allegorical screen upon which audiences can project their fears and anxieties [...] a monstrous tabula rasa,’19 but also because of the films’ adherence to the fairy tale’s basic ideology, which comes from the folktale: might makes right. The might makes right ideology arose from the feudal system and, allowed [the people, das Volk] to believe that anyone could become a powerful knight in shining armor or a lovely princess, [while] they also presented the stark realities of power politics without disguising the violence and brutality of everyday life.20 Early folktales reflected a brutal social system and the monstrous aspects of human nature while also providing visions of radical hope for change or difference. Similarly, whichever conflicted ideologies are present in any given zombie film—its protagonists usually achieve their ends through might, and can often be interpreted by the audience as right, although this is by no means a rule, and is subject to pressures both internal (is the character an antihero?) and external (social pressures and individual viewer perceptions). The exploration of violence is essential to the horror film. Violence is what creates horror. The zombie film embraces the abject and is thus able to negotiate a liminal space, functioning as a, polysemic narrative platform […] that unlike other catastrophe films that reaffirm the very conservative ideology that gave rise to the narrative crisis in the first place [...] offer diegetic spaces in which alternative social formations and narrative resolutions may be explored.21 Thus an aporia can be located within the body of zombie films: many of these films are rooted in time yet transcendent because of their larger, human themes (love, violence), implying the possibility for contemporary social change while foregrounding human potential for violence.

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__________________________________________________________________ 3. The Post-9/11 Zombie Zombie films tend to gain popularity in the wake of destruction, war, and social upheaval.22 The body of zombie cinema doesn’t redress one particular crisis but invites readings that suggest multiple, intersecting catastrophes: war, dehumanizing social systems and labour practices, epidemics, increasing urbanization, environmental crises, racial or gendered tensions, and economic failure. And this is not to mention the most basic of crises, the one of human beings ‘count[ing] a powerful share of aggression among their instinctual endowments.’23 From Night of the Living Dead onward, George Romero’s films have drawn on the imagery of real-life catastrophe, not least by employing Tom Savini, a former Vietnam war photographer, on Dawn of the Dead (1978) and other Romero films.24 28 Days Later... also drew visually on the real atrocities. The infection of the blood, on which the film’s initial horrors hinge, is borrowed from Richard Preston’s book about the Ebola virus, The Hot Zone.25 The scene in which the film’s primary protagonist, Jim, finds money blowing around on the ground and stuffs it desperately into the small sack he’s carrying is an image ‘taken from Pol Pot’s rule: when the National Bank of Cambodia was blown up by the Khmer Rouge [...] money was left lying in the streets’26. In the film a massive conflagration consumes Manchester, which Boyle says he ‘wanted to show burning like Dresden.’27 Boyle goes on to explain: Visuals for the film were sourced from the incredibly disturbing images which came out of Serbia and Rwanda: from the massacres and the dumping grounds for the dead bodies [...]. There were stories of people who escaped those massacres by playing dead, which inspired the scene at the end of the film in which Jim escapes from the soldiers and plays dead amongst a pile of inert bodies.28 Although 28 Days Later... was written and green-lit before the attacks of September 11 2001 on the World Trade Center in New York, the shooting started on the first of September 2001, and continued during and after attacks of the 9/11.29 Boyle comments, ‘We set out to make a film about social rage and instead it became a more complex response to 9/11. [...] It was the first film off the block that was about the vulnerability we felt post-9/11.’30 Due to its subject matter and the time during which it was released, 28 Days Later... also invokes the invasion of Afghanistan and the war in Iraq. It was released in the United Kingdom in November 2002—just over a year after the invasion of Afghanistan, and in June 2003 in America—just months after the beginning of the war in Iraq. The most appalling characters in 28 Days Later... are not the Infected (zombies), but uninfected human soldiers who behave immorally. The discourse of

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__________________________________________________________________ war guides the film. In one scene Major West prompts the film’s protagonist, Jim, ‘Since it began, who have you killed? You wouldn't be alive now if you hadn't killed somebody.’31 Jim’s hesitant confession (‘I killed a boy’32) parallels that of the young American veteran of the Iraq war in Sarah Carvill’s 2011 essay, ‘Veteran’: ‘I killed a kid. A nine-year-old kid,’33 demonstrating again that while 28 Days Later... might not have been created as a response to Iraq, the film has a disturbing symmetry with actual events that took place around the time of its release.34 During the climax of 28 Days Later..., Jim attacks and kills a number of soldiers—an act that, seems entirely beyond him until the middle of the film when he kills the boy mentioned above—presaging the conclusion of the young man in Carvill’s essay: ‘You can't be the same person after that.’35 But, though changed, Jim is not scarred in the same way as the veteran, because the truly abject in the film—the immoral act—remains outside Jim’s remit. This presents one of the most troubling aporias in the film. Jim becomes a creature of violence, like the soldiers and the Infected, but is then exculpated because he acts for survival and out of love for his chosen family, Selena and Hanna. 4. The Family (in) Horror As Tony Williams writes, ‘The [horror] genre’s very form has an intrinsic relationship with family situations.’36 Williams locates the severe assault on the family in American horror films as appearing in the late 1960s and 1970s, times when the Vietnam War and political movements related to race, gender, and sexuality caused panic and uncertainty about the tenability of the traditional family structure. In the original Night of the Living Dead blood-related families are cruel to one another, and eventually become zombies and turn on each other. Parents are murdered by their children; siblings attack one another. Zombie films require representations of families in order to reflect meaning. The overwhelming majority of zombie films concern themselves with the affections and tensions of survivor groups (families). Thus, the resurgence of popularity in zombie films provides an opportunity to examine contemporary anxieties and hopes about family structures. Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents may help make sense of the fundamental role of the family in zombie cinema. Freud postulates that two forces of the psyche are at work in regards to civilization: the drive for love (Eros) creates and supports civilization, while the death drive (Thanatos) opposes and destroys civilization. Extrapolating from Freud, Chris Hedges writes: In the wake of catastrophe, including the attacks of September 11, 2001, there is a desperate longing by all those affected to be in the physical presence of those they love. [...] [T]his love, like death, radiates outwards. It battles Thanatos at the very moment

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__________________________________________________________________ of death’s sting. These two fundamental human impulses crash like breakers into each other. And however much beyond reason, there is always a feeling that love is not powerless or impotent as we had believed a few seconds before. Love alone fuses happiness and meaning. Love alone can fight the impulse that lures us toward self-destruction.37 Although all types of familial love are susceptible to social mores, its meaning is often interpreted or understood more broadly. As Michael Lerner writes, [f]or most people, family is a code word that expresses their hopes for a long-term loving and committed relationship. It is this that people yearn for, and this yearning represents a positive and hopeful fact.38 In the terms of deepest human needs, family has no precise form. It simply represents security and affection, even while real life families can be bastions of all of the worst human aggressions. It is these two conflicting drives—for Eros (love), and Thanatos (death)—so aptly expressed in the traditional family structure, that are the sources of so many aporias. Eros and Thanatos also explain the power of Freud’s concepts of canny (heimlich) and uncanny (unheimlich): the heimlich is comforting and familiar (love), the unheimlich terrifying, yet in some way familiar (death). The two categories of the heimlich and unheimlich—seemingly opposing modes—have a great deal in common. As Freud wrote, ‘Heimlich thus becomes increasingly ambivalent, until it finally merges with its antonym unheimlich.’39 In other words, heimlich and unheimlich are unstable categories. Both can be applied to families and civilization itself in 28 Days Later... and other zombie films. The protagonists of 28 Days Later... find themselves in a world shaped by a surplus of Thanatos, but once they become a pseudo-family unit, they thrive, developing an authentic affection for one another that begins to satisfy the positive and hopeful yearning for love. However, this new family is unable to imagine their world without the tenets of civilization—the world as it was before Infection—and it’s their desire and nostalgia for that world that (almost) destroys them. 5. 28 Days Later...: Progeny, Rebel, Polysemy 28 Days Later... furthers themes and ideas found in earlier zombie films, especially George Romero’s Dead trilogy.40 Although scriptwriter Alex Garland is a Romero aficionado, Danny Boyle, the director of 28 Days Later..., claims not to be a fan of other zombie films. Nonetheless, Boyle mimics twenty-first century documentary filmmaking style by using hand-held digital cameras and natural lighting, mirroring the ‘naturalistic cinematographic techniques41 of Night of the

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__________________________________________________________________ Living Dead, which lent it a documentary aesthetic. 28 Days Later... seems to be a continuation, rather than a break from the themes (if not the style) of Romero’s films. One of the most obvious of these is the manner in which 28 Days Later... expounds of Romero’s interracial survivor groups. Romero’s protagonists usually include a black male and a white female42 who would be paired visually, if not (explicitly) romantically. In 28 Days Later…, Jim and Selena have a clear romance, sharing several passionate onscreen kisses and a deep and genuine affection.43 Garland and Boyle borrow another important theme from Romero: while the Infected of 28 Days Later... are destructive and dangerous, only the other uninfected people—the platoon of soldiers in Manchester—are genuinely immoral. The soldiers have control over their behaviour, but nonetheless choose to be physically and sexually violent, unlike the zombies, who are more or less a tabula rasa, acting on instinct, completely with without guile or critical faculties. Jim also eventually reveals a capacity for violence, but when he does, he becomes visually more like the Infected, not like the soldiers. This is in itself presents a paradox: Is the film indicating that the death drive is necessary for survival, but should otherwise be suppressed? In this case, how is survival defined? 28 Days Later...44 opens with scenes of genuine news footage, grainy images of beatings, murder, and war, looped endlessly. The camera pulls back to show a chimpanzee strapped to an operating table angled toward the bank of screens. A group of animal activists break into the lab and are horrified to find the chimps in tiny cages, being subjected to violence images. The animal activists are warned by a scientist that the chimps are infected with rage (in other words, the death drive), but they ignore the scientist’s warning, free a chimp, and are immediately infected with the rage virus. Thus the zombie plague is born. Twenty-eight days later a young man named Jim, the protagonist of the film, wakes in the coma ward, splayed naked on a hospital bed. He pulls on clothes and walks tentatively through the empty, trashed hospital, out into London proper— Westminster, Trafalgar Square, Oxford Circus, all of it empty and abandoned. Jim’s first words in the film are a querulous call, ‘Hello?’ searching for human connection. Jim’s calls are eventually heard by the Infected, who chase him. He’s rescued by two other survivors, one of whom is soon infected, leaving Jim alone with Selena, a brusque young black woman from London. Jim and Selena find Frank, a middle-aged white working class taxi driver, and his teenaged daughter Hannah. Despite the collapse of the country, Frank and Hannah remain in relatively good spirits, greeting their visitors with offers of makeshift beds and Creme de Menthe. Unable to remain in London due to dwindling water supplies, the four decide to drive in Frank’s taxi cab to Manchester, where a radio broadcast promises they will find the cure to Infection. The adventures on their road trip—a close brush with some Infected in a blocked tunnel, an ebullient shopping spree for

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__________________________________________________________________ food in an abandoned Budgen’s supermarket, a picnic in the countryside—bring the four close. The traumatised Selena begins to thaw in the presence of Frank and Hannah’s familial warmth, and she and Jim develop a rapport. After the picnic, they skip down to sleep in the woods, and Jim, Selena, and Hannah take Valium in order to sleep. Jim has a drugged nightmare, but Frank wakes him and tells him it was only a dream, after which the doped Jim replies with thanks, dad, thus cementing the implication that the four have formed a makeshift family. In between the cosy familial hijinks, Jim begins to reveal his own capacity for violence, though not to his new family. When the four survivors stop at a country gas station to refuel, Jim goes to investigate a shop, where he finds piles of dead bodies. He halloos and an Infected boy rushes at him. Jim manages to wrestle the Infected child to the floor and kill him. He doesn’t report the event to Selena, Frank, or Hannah, although he’s clearly unsettled by his own actions. The small survivor family heads toward the cure to Infection in Manchester—a promise that almost causes their demise. On arrival, they find Manchester burning. The soldiers are nowhere to be found, until Frank is accidentally Infected by a drop of blood in his eye, at which point the soldiers turn up and shoot Frank on sight. Jim, Selena, and Hannah are spirited away to the soldiers’ heavily defended Regency mansion, where they’re met by the dispassionate, dry Major Henry West, who behaves in a pseudo-paternal manner but will soon reveal his own madness. Major West gives Jim, Selena and Hannah a place to sleep, but soon reveals his own agenda. During a chat with Jim, Major West asks Jim whether he’s killed anyone. Jim explains that he killed an Infected boy, and Major West immediately absolves Jim, saying, ‘But you had to kill him. Otherwise he’d have killed you.’ After a few beats, Major West follows this statement with the declaration that reveals his monstrousness: ‘I promised them women.’ The radio broadcast that initially lured them is intended to draw in women, so that West and his soldiers can rape them and start a new civilization, a ‘mad Garden-of-Eden idea.’45 Major West is now revealed to be the true monster of the movie, an uncanny father to a violent band of soldiers. When Jim tries to rescue Selena and Hannah, he’s sentenced to death. While the soldiers are fighting, Jim slips away. They run out of the clearing, searching for Jim, but the camera lingers on the pile of dead Infected. Jim pops up out of the pile; he’s been hiding with the corpses. This is the moment when the film shifts and Jim begins to appear onscreen at the same angles and with the same shaky camera motion as used to show the Infected. Jim escapes over the wall, falls on his back in the woods, and sees a plane passing overhead: a sign of civilization. This hope, combined with his grief and his rage, complete his transformation, revealing to the viewer who is unnatural and abject (the soldiers) and who is merely dangerous (the Infected Jim). Thus the film both accepts the abject (the Infected), and locates it outside of the realm of human behaviour: ‘We spectators would rather identify with the zombie and its savage,

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__________________________________________________________________ unthinking cannibalism than avow our resemblance to the violent but rational humans and the institutions they represent.’46 It’s in this moment that the greatest aporia of the film, previously mentioned, comes to fore. When Jim appears onscreen, he’s shot so that he mimics the Infected, who are unmoral but not immoral, because they do not choose their own actions. However, the careful viewer will be aware that Jim is not one of the Infected, but merely behaving like one. Jim is, like Major West and the other soldiers, choosing to behave as he does out of his own free will. Is Jim’s subsequent violence immoral? Who does he most resemble: the Infected, the soldiers, or something else entirely? In other words, where does the monstrosity lie, and where does the hero, Jim, fit within that schema? In this sort of world, where does Eros fit, and can a family truly survive? Jim frees an Infected former soldier named Mailer (the ultimate veteran?), who the soldiers kept chained up as a kind of neglected family pet. Mailer attacks, allowing Jim to pick off the remaining soldiers one by one in a violent rampage that ends with him killing Corporal Mitchell by jamming his thumbs deep into the man’s eye sockets. Jim’s violence is so shocking that Selena suspects he has become one of the Infected and nearly kills him. Once Jim’s uninfected status is established, the two kiss joyfully. 28 Days Later... destabilises categories: Jim comes to be a creature of Thanatos, but in the service of Eros, killing to preserve his small family. The Infected, at first abject, are now merely unsettling (in other words, they have moved toward being heimlich); the soldiers—ambassadors of civilization—pose the real threat (and are suggested to be unheimlich in the extreme). As Jim, Hannah, and Selena flee the mansion, Major West shoots Jim. Jim survives and wakes up in a cottage in the Lake District, living a quiet life with Selena (his partner) and Hannah (both daughter and sister), waiting for a military plane to fly overhead. In the concluding scene of the film, the three hear a military plane coming and put out a giant sign (made of sewn cloth)—hello! Thus Jim’s story ends as it begins—with the word hello—but this time, he is not alone. Yet there is also a softer, more pessimistic interpretation to this ending: despite the endless problems civilization causes the survivors, they continue to seek it. This could be extrapolated to suggest that Jim, Selena and Hannah will meet adversity once they are rescued by the military plane, and that their struggles, and ours, are far from over. Family stability and love are possible, but only temporarily. The film’s uncertainty about civilization, and the uses of violence, is clear throughout the second half. The meaning of Jim’s violence remains unresolved. The audience is present for all of the events that lead to his transformation, from passive to active. The saving grace is the implication that while his actions are violent, his motivation is a tender, familial love from Hannah and Selena. But when we consider Jim’s real-life parallel, with the young man in Carvill’s essay Veteran, Jim is cast into an increasingly unfavourable light. The young veteran of

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__________________________________________________________________ the essay is traumatised in part because of the degree of cruelty with which he acted during his time in Iraq. At one point he shows Carvill his own images from notorious Abu Ghraib prison, which include a familiar image of a hooded man. The veteran explains that the image was taken after he himself doused the hooded man in battery acid.47 Of course Jim doesn’t perpetuate this sort of torture in 28 Days Later..., but it’s not unimaginable that his perfunctory acts of violence might turn cruel. While the film goes to great lengths to separate Jim’s actions from those of the soldiers, the film itself condemns violence of all types, leaving unresolved a number of large societal questions. Although Jim’s violent actions are excused, the metaphor of Jim-as-survivalistkiller, becomes disturbing if extrapolated. Muntean and Payne argue as much in ‘Attack of the Livid Dead,’ suggesting that the remaining protagonists, Jim, Selena, and Hannah’s experiences in the soldiers’ stronghold causes them to face the horrors of torture (of the Infected), mirroring the American social response to the revelation of the torture that took place in Abu Ghraib.48 They also argue that just as America reacted to real images of violence with horror, recrimination and a disavowal of responsibility, so the film exculpates its protagonists (and Jim in particular) from responsibility for the soldiers’ behaviour.49 That the film was made several years prior to the start of the Iraq war and the atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib does not lessen the eerie parallels among them, especially because the American release of the film in 2003 dovetails with both the start of the war in Iraq and the beginning of the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib. It’s interesting to note that the film originally ended with Jim’s death in yet another hospital, and Selena and Hannah’s departure into an uncertain world. This ending was shown in American cinemas after the credits, preceded by the words ‘But what if...’50 and can also be seen on the DVD. Again, 28 Days Later... destabilises itself—even its ending, its conclusion about the reformed family, is uncertain, insecure. 28 Days Later... is ultimately unable to settle, straining toward civilization even as it demonstrates the ways in which current social conditions and group human behaviour cause destruction. Yet its ambivalence errs toward the hopeful, suggesting that only by creating new types of families—non-traditional configurations, self-selected families, allowing desire to transgress boundaries of race and gender—can the family be truly loving, and thus ‘fight the impulse that lures us toward self-destruction.’51 Subsequent zombie films tended to regress, and by 2004, Thanatos became the ruling principle of the zombie films such as Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, as the family narratives moved back into retrograde formations, rigid, unbending, and leading always toward death.

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__________________________________________________________________ 6. New Zombies, Old Families With Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004) released, the death drive and bathos began to overwhelm zombie films.52 Dawn of the Dead53 opens in a hospital where its protagonist, a white middle class woman named Ana works as a nurse. The audience is treated to a few scenes of suburban normality between Ana and her husband Luis, who appear to have a close, loving relationship. They even have a surrogate child, a neighbour girl named Vivien. After an evening of affectionate lovemaking with Ana, Luis wakes up to see Viv standing in the shadows in their doorway. ‘Honey, Viv’s here,’ he says casually, suggesting the girl’s appearance is a regular occurrence. The image of a child in her nightgown, appearing in the adult’s bedroom, strongly implies a childparent relationship. Luis then goes to see if Viv wants anything; she steps into the light and reveals that she’s a zombie, and tears flesh from his neck. Luis almost immediately becomes a zombie, and he and Viv chase Ana out of the house. She flees through a burning suburban development, its lawns strewn with carnage. From here the family formation will only disintegrate, with no real hope for reformation or recovery. Cut to credits, spliced with grainy news footage similar to the opening of 28 Days Later..., although it does also include snippets of zombie carnage and brief shots of cells multiplying. The opening of Dawn of the Dead includes content that could pass for real news footage: one of the first images is of a group of Muslims praying in a mosque, ‘inherently suggesting Dawn of the Dead’s political subtext,’54 which seems significantly different from the subtext of 28 Days Later.... This is especially striking because of the way Dawn of the Dead chronologically reverses the news footage and hospital scenes that open 28 Days Later.... Dawn of the Dead mimics aspects of 28 Days Later... (and also Resident Evil, whose score Dawn of the Dead mimics) while completely neglecting the latter film’s ideological strivings. Ana encounters another survivor, a black policeman and ex-marine, Kenneth, and after deciding to temporarily work together they meet another small survivor group: a white man, Michael, and an interracial couple, a black man named Andre and his pregnant white wife, Luda. While Andre and Luda will share a bit of onscreen tenderness, they are doomed from the start. Unlike Jim and Selena from 28 Days Later..., Andre and Luda will not survive their ordeal. Ana and Kenneth agree to accompany the other survivors to the mall. Over the course of the film Ana and Michael develop a relationship that appears odd on screen: sometimes they seem to be flirting; in other scenes, perhaps because of their similar appearances (in particular their blonde hair), they almost resemble siblings. Regardless of the reading (romance, siblings, both?), Ana and Michael are parted in the last scene of the film, suggesting, like the rest of the film, that even

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__________________________________________________________________ the pseudo-family of the survivor group is unstable, that Thanatos dooms all relationships. The survivor group is, for the most part, presented as moral and sympathetic, while the zombies are wholly abject. Moreover, the nuclear family is presented as the only kind of moral family (traditional blood-ties are privileged in the film, and the survivor group even acquire a family dog named Chips). Perhaps this is because, despite being a remake of a zombie film generally considered a critique of consumerism, Dawn of the Dead has little to say about capitalism or social conditions. It fails to question the capitalist system. As Tony Williams writes, Freud’s definition of an Oedipus complex, generated within a family situation, still usefully explains psychic mechanisms operating within an exploitative patriarchal capitalist system. The family is the ideal launching pad for producing gendered beings. It has a specific social and psychic function, policing desire, social relationships, and artistic expression [...] [but] the oedipal trajectory is not a natural course of individual development. [...] What appears as instinctual actually results from an oppressive behavioral pattern within bourgeois society.55 The social critiques present in Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead are only critiques of phenomena that occur within the boundaries of the capitalist society. Thus, the zombies in this film—who are certainly anti-capitalist creatures (they have no use for money, they are all equally alone and together, all equally wealthy and poor in un-death)—inherently oppose the nuclear family. Instead of putting forth fresh critiques, Dawn of the Dead simply reproduces the surface (but usually not the substance) of its antecedents. Dawn of the Dead’s survivor group eventually discover that zombie bites both kill people and reanimate them. Once they discover this, several members of the group insist they should kill anyone who has been bitten. A middle-aged white father, Frank has been bitten. When the original survivor group agrees to kill the father, his teenage daughter Nicole begs them not to and collapses crying in her father’s arms like a little girl. With tears in his eyes, Frank says, ‘You have to understand that she’s lost everyone: her mother, her two brothers. I’m all she’s got.’56 Cut to Andre checking on his pregnant wife, Luda. Luda has been bitten in an earlier scene but she and Andrew have concealed it from the other survivors. Luda’s in a store that sells children’s toys and clothing. Andre asks to see her arm; she says it hurts; he lies, saying, ‘It’s already starting to heal,’57 despite knowing that the bite will kill her. They argue, but quickly reconcile and hug. Andre pretends to be in good spirits, but a shot of Andre’s face, seen over Luda’s shoulder, shows him looking grave.

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__________________________________________________________________ Cut to a medium shot of Nicole’s face over Frank’s shoulder; they’re hugging. They share an emotional goodbye, both crying, while Frank says, ‘I couldn’t ask for anything more in a daughter’ and Nicole replies, ‘I love you too.’58 Frank is quarantined until he turns, with Kenneth, who has agreed to shoot him as soon as he reanimates. Several scenes later, it’s revealed that Luda has gone into labour. Andre has hidden her in a room that he’s kitted out with baby paraphernalia including a crib. Andre has used restraints to strapped Luda to a bed. Luda is midway through labour when she dies. However, her stomach is still rippling even after she dies (the baby moving), and it is obvious immediately (at least to anyone who’s seen a horror film) that the baby will be an uncanny baby. Luda reanimates and starts trying to bit Andre. He attempts to gag Luda. Meanwhile Norma, the group’s mother/grandmother figure, goes to check on them. Andre has the baby in his arms, hidden from view by a pink blanket. He’s looking tenderly at the bundle. Norma shoots the zombified Luda, who Andre is still tenderly referring to as family. Andre pulls a gun and he and Norma both kill each other in the subsequent shoot-out. Hearing gunshots, the survivor group go, see the carnage. Ana unwraps the baby, which of course is a zombie baby. She shoots it. While both scenes certainly pay tribute to traditional horror films—undead parents, killer children, the destruction of families—they present nothing new when compared to their source material (from Romero’s Night of the Living Dead to Rosemary’s Baby (1968)) and in fact, seem considerably more retrograde than many horror films they reference. The rigidness of the film—nuclear family or nothing at all—is reified by the final scenes of the film. The few remaining survivors (including Ana and Kenneth) have all lost someone from either their nuclear family or the survivor family over the course of the film. They sail away, leaving an infected (but not yet zombified) Michael on the dock with his gun to his chin; the screen goes black, and we hear a gunshot. The remaining scenes are shot on a low quality digital camera, spliced between the credits. On the boat the survivors have found a digital camera (referencing 28 Days Later... and The Blair Witch Project (1999), among others). They use the camera to record their journey. The remaining survivors quickly run out of food and water, and their interactions become tense. They find an island and dock. Their dog, Chips, runs out onto the island barking, drawing zombies directly to the dock. Kenneth defends the other survivors, shooting at the zombies, but eventually falling. The camera is dropped, and the screen fills with bloodied zombie faces. We are left uncertain as to the fate of Ana, Nicole, Terry, and Chips, but they seem condemned to die—or at least lose more members of their group. Their family is doomed.

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__________________________________________________________________ As this demonstrates, the frisson of hope of 28 Days Later... has disappeared. Even the sequel to 28 Days Later..., 28 Weeks Later (2007) regresses back into a narrative that ends with the blood-related family mostly destroyed, and bound to spread Infection globally. Likewise, the Resident Evil films routinely kill off any pseudo-familial ties that Alice, its superhuman protagonist, tries to make while fighting off the zombie hordes. By the end of the third film, Resident Evil: Extinction (2007), the only people Alice can count on are, literally, clones of herself. 7. Conclusion The ambiguities of 28 Days Later... present an intriguing, if also troubling, view of alternate family structures and the ideological conflicts surrounding them. Despite other films in the zombie film cycle—particularly Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead—maintaining a retrograde ideology, the popularity of not only 28 Days Later... but also subsequent, more radical zombie films such as Bruce La Bruce’s queer zombie film, Otto; or Up with Dead People (2008) and Andrew Currie’s zomcom, Fido (2006)—have left their own rather more radical (and entirely Canadian) mark. While George Romero’s 2005 zombie film Land of the Dead continues to perpetuate some racial stereotypes present in Romero’s previous films, it also builds on Day of the Dead by transforming the previously abject zombies into semi-sentient and socially organised beings who live in an egalitarian society and form an implied pact with less violent human survivors to live side-byside in peace. While few of these films are without ideological conflict, the paradoxes found in most zombie films do reveal a societal curiosity in new, egalitarian family structures—in real life, and not just in the land of zombies.

Notes 1

Alex Garland, 28 Days Later..., directed by Danny Boyle, film (2002; Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2003), DVD. Hannah’s comment is in response to Selena, who suggests Hannah and Frank are useless. Hannah says, ‘You need us as much as we need you.’ In the context of the film, the words turn out to be accurate, as Hannah and Frank will help Selena to begin to heal from the trauma she’s suffered since the outbreak of Infection. 2 Annalee Newitz, ‘War and Social Upheaval Cause Spikes in Zombie Movie Production,’ Annals of Improbable Research 15:1 (2009): 16-19. 3 ‘28 Days Later...(2002)—Box office/business,’ viewed 1 February 2013, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289043/business; ‘Resident Evil (2002)—Box office/business,’ viewed 1 February 2013, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120804/business. The subsequent quantity of zombie films (many box office successes) were released in the years following the aforementioned films. For more about zombie film cycles, see Kyle Bishop,

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__________________________________________________________________ American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture (Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2010), 9-36. 4 Nick Muntean and Matthew T. Payne, ‘Attack of the Livid Dead: Recalibrating Terror in the Post-September 11 Zombie Film,’ in The War on Terror and American Popular Culture: September 11 and Beyond, ed. Andrew Schopp and Mathew Hill (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), 254. 5 Tony Williams, Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 16-17; emphasis mine. 6 This is aptly demonstrated by Justin Ponder in his 2012 paper which highlights the parallels between white supremacist discourse and representations of interracial couples and mulatto babies in zombie films; see Justin Ponder, ‘Dawn of the Different: The Mulatto Zombie in Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead,’ The Journal of Popular Culture 45:3 (2012): 551-571. 7 Perhaps most notably, the original ending to 28 Days Later... in which Jim dies (later presented on cinemas and DVD releases as an alternate ending), and of course the bleak conclusion to Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. 8 Chris Hedges, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (Oxford: Public Affairs Ltd, 2002), 62. 9 Mikel Koven, Film, Folklore and Urban Legends (Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press, 2008), 37. 10 Kyle Bishop, ‘Raising the Dead: Unearthing the Non-Literary Origins of Zombie Cinema,’ Journal of Popular Film and Television 33:4 (2006): 197. 11 Sigmund Freud writes, ‘The frightening element is something that has been repressed and now returns. This species of the frightening would then constitute the uncanny, and it would be immaterial whether it was itself originally frightening or arose from another affect,’ in Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 199. 12 Bishop, ‘Raising the Dead,’ 201. 13 Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales, Revised and Expanded Edition (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 23. 14 It should be noted, however, that the 28 Days Later... script was certainly the effort of a group: it had at least two major contributors besides Alex Garland, and went through around fifty different revisions; see Alex Garland, 28 Days Later... (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), vii. 15 Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell, 24. 16 Kyle Bishop says that the ideology of zombie mythology ‘is directly linked to the political and social life of postcolonial Haiti,’ in Bishop, American Zombie Gothic, 37. 17 Thus, perhaps we can examine Romero and post-Romero zombie films as cinematic fairy tales in the sense that they have a limited author, their aim fits

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__________________________________________________________________ within a capitalist framework (e.g. the production of a saleable object, which of course is very different from the aim of an oral folktale that is passed around!). 18 When racial undertones are mishandled by directors and writers or ignored by critics, they often reproduce aspects of white supremacist discourse, as demonstrated by Justin Ponder, ‘Dawn of the Different.’ Kyle Bishop also further enumerates the ideology of early American zombie flicks: ‘The real threat and source of terror in these early, voodoo-themed zombie films [...] is the prospect of a Westerner becoming dominated, subjugated, symbolically raped, and effectively colonized by pagan representatives. The new fear—on larger than merely death itself—allowed the voodoo zombie to challenge the pantheon of cinematic monsters from Europe, becoming the first thoroughly postcolonial creature from the New World to appear in popular horror movies,’ in Bishop, American Zombie Gothic, 65-66. 19 Muntean and Payne, ‘Attack of the Livid Dead,’ 240. 20 Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell, 35. 21 Muntean and Payne, ‘Attack of the Living Dead,’ 244. 22 Newitz, ‘War and Social Upheaval,’ 16-19. 23 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 48. 24 Andy Black, The Dead Walk (Hereford: Noir Publishing), 68. 25 Amy Raphael, Danny Boyle in His Own Words (London: Faber and Faber), 180. 26 Ibid., 181. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 185. Even the some of the shooting locations had real, dystopian parallels. While shooting the scenes in a derelict tower block, the cast and crew of 28 Days Later... were forbidden by security guards to access the third floor. Eventually they discovered that the guards were renting sleeping-bag sized floor spaces to local and migrant labourers for £2-3 per night; see ibid., 185-186. 29 Ibid., 174-175. 30 Ibid., 175. 31 Garland, 28 Days Later…, 84. 32 Ibid., 84. 33 Sarah Carvill, ‘Veteran,’ North American Review 296:3 (2011): 4. 34 Muntean and Payne, ‘Attack of the Livid Dead’, 244-250. 35 Carvill, ‘Veteran,’ 5. 36 Williams, Hearths of Darkness, 17. 37 Hedges, War is a Force, 160. 38 Michael Lerner, Surplus Powerlessness: The Psychodynamics of Everyday Life and the Psychology of Individual and Social Transformation (Oakland, CA: Institute for Labor & Mental Health, 1986), 321.

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__________________________________________________________________ 39

Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 187. 40 Romero’s zombie series initially included Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985). It has recently expanded to include new Romero films such as Land of the Dead (2005). 41 Matt Becker, ‘A Point of Little Hope: Hippie Horror Films and the Politics of Ambivalence,’ The Velvet Night Trap 57 (2006): 42. 42 Ponder, ‘Dawn of the Different,’ 451. Visual pairings of interracial couples feature in Night of the Living Dead (Ben and Barbara) and Dawn of the Dead (Peter and Francine), arguably Romero’s most influential films. 43 Garland writes that, ‘Selena’s race—specified as black rather than just happening to be black—is a kind of a reference to George Romero’s Night-DawnDay trilogy, which was notable for the black leading characters. Similarly, Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and The Omega Man (1971). It was a convention I liked for nostalgic rather than politically correct reasons,’ in Garland, 28 Days Later..., vii. It’s interesting that Garland makes such a marked choice (one Romero never fully commits to), then tries to explain it away as nostalgia. 44 Alex Garland, 28 Days Later.... 45 Raphael, Danny Boyle, 187. 46 Jennifer Fay, ‘Dead Subjectivity: White Zombie, Black Baghdad,’ CR: The New Centennial Review 8:1 (2008): 82. 47 Carvill, ‘Veteran,’ 5. 48 Muntean and Payne, ‘Attack of the Livid Dead,’ 255. 49 Ibid., 256. 50 Garland, 28 Days Later.... 51 Hedges, War is a Force, 160. 52 Or at least, Thanatos was creeping into most zombie films. It would be impossible to talk about all the zombie movies made in a decade. Thus, this description rather unfairly excludes Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004), a zombie comedy (zomcom) popular in both the United Kingdom and the United States. In the usual Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg style, Shaun of the Dead simultaneously lampoons and pays homage to its source material. The film takes its strength from its use of the usual survivor group (comprised, as is typical, of a few blood related or paired individuals), although the fact that nearly everyone in the group differentiates it from most other zombie films (and is a significant source of its humour). However, Shaun of the Dead is not a horror film—it doesn’t concern itself with fear or the uncanny, and is considerably more interested in humour and the personal relationships of its characters, in particular Shaun, Liz, and Danny. 53 George Romero and James Gunn, Dawn of the Dead, directed by Zack Snyder, film (2004; London: Entertainment in Video, 2004), DVD.

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Derry goes on to note: ‘[In Dawn of the Dead] the Secretary of Defense who talks about the apocalypse on TV physically resembles Vice President Dick Cheney. With apocalypse near, how do Americans try to escape the horror? By declaring “We’re going to the Mall!”—an ineffective strategy suggestive of Bush’s advice that Americans fight the economic terrorism of 9/11 by being good consumers and buying durable goods. Notably, at the center of the mall in Dawn of the Dead is a coffee shop with the ironic name Hallowed Grounds—the designation so often used to refer to the Ground Zero site where the World Trade Center towers once stood,’ in Charles Derry, Dark Dreams 2.0: A Psychological History of the Modern Horror Film from the 1950s to the 21st Century (Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2009), 244. 55 Williams, Hearths of Darkness, 15-16. 56 Romero and Gunn, Dawn of the Dead. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid.

Bibliography Becker, Matt. ‘A Point of Little Hope: Hippie Horror Films and the Politics of Ambivalence.’ The Velvet Light Trap 57 (2006): 42-59. Bishop, Kyle. American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture. Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2010. ———. ‘Raising the Dead: Unearthing the Non-Literary Origins of Zombie Cinema.’ Journal of Popular Film and Television 33:4 (2006): 196-205. Black, Andy. The Dead Walk. Hereford: Noir Publishing, 2000. Carvill, Sarah. ‘Veteran.’ North American Review 296:3 (2011): 3-6. Derry, Charles. Dark Dreams 2.0: A Psychological History of the Modern Horror Film from the 1950s to the 21st Century. Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2009. Fay, Jennifer. ‘Dead Subjectivity: White Zombie, Black Baghdad.’ CR: The New Centennial Review 8:1 (2008): 81-101. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. Translated by David McLintock. London: Penguin Books, 2002.

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__________________________________________________________________ ———. The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Garland, Alex. 28 Days Later… London: Faber and Faber, 2002. ———. 28 Days Later... Directed by Danny Boyle. Film. 2002. Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2003. DVD. Hedges, Chris. War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Oxford: Public Affairs, Ltd, 2002. Internet Movie Database. ‘28 Days Later... (2002)—Box office/business.’ Viewed February 1, 2013. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289043/business. ———. ‘Resident Evil (2002)—Box office/business.’ Viewed February 1, 2013. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120804/business. Koven, Mikel. Film, Folklore, and Urban Legends. Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press, 2008. Lerner, Michael. Surplus Powerlessness: The Psychodynamics of Everyday Life and the Psychology of Individual and Social Transformation. Oakland, CA: Institute for Labor & Mental Health, 1986. Muntean, Nick and Matthew T. Payne. ‘Attack of the Livid Dead: Recalibrating Terror in the Post-September 11 Zombie Film.’ In The War on Terror and American Popular Culture: September 11 and Beyond, edited by Andrew Schopp and Matthew B. Hill, 239-258. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009. Newitz, Annalee. ‘War and Social Upheaval Cause Spikes in Zombie Movie Production.’ Annals of Improbable Research 15:1 (2009): 16-19. Ponder, Justin. ‘Dawn of the Different.’ The Journal of Popular Culture 45:3 (2012): 551-571. Raphael, Amy. Danny Boyle in His Own Words. London: Faber and Faber, 2011. Romero, George and James Gunn. Dawn of the Dead. Directed by Zack Snyder. Film. 2004. London: Entertainment in Video, 2004. DVD.

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__________________________________________________________________ Williams, Tony. Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales, Revised and Expanded Edition. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002. Emily Dezurick-Badran is an American independent scholar living in the east of England. When not researching zombies, she works with pleasant people and chthonic documents in the Manuscripts Reading Room at Cambridge University Library.

Part II: Monstrous Nationality

Haunted Communities: The Greek Vampire or the Uncanny at the Core of Nation Construction Álvaro García Marín Abstract The reason why Greece—once known as The Home of Nymphs and Vampires— has been cleansed from any monstrous connotations and promoted as a paradise of beauty and sunbathing has remained unexplained so far. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, most references to Greece in Western texts include some allusion to the exotic and despicable superstition of the vrykolakas, the autochthonous vampire, known to Europeans even before the 1730 which saw an influx in depictions of the vrykolakas’s Slavic cousin—the vampir—in Western literature. Just before the heyday of the Enlightenment Philhellenism, allusions to the vrykolakas contributed to construing Greece’s Orientalistic or Balkanistic difference from the West in terms of theology, history, and development. Philhellenism itself was haunted from its very birth by this uncanny mark of Otherness and monstrosity at the core of the aesthetic, rational, and ahistorical utopia that was to be embodied by modern Greeks. Modern Greece itself, in the process of its national construction, had to face this undead and embarrassing part of its own past and present. Unwilling to remain tied to images of Orientalism or Balkanistic phantasies in the West’s mind, the Greek state tried to cleanse or integrate these revenants to the point that such an influential tradition has nowadays been almost completely effaced from collective memory. Following Renée Bergland’s concept of haunted communities, my aim in this chapter is to explore a set of Greek vampire texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that have previously been neglected by vampire scholarship, in order to underscore the ways in which this figure undermines the national narrative by linking the monstrous to ethnic difference inside the community. I shall argue that an intense embodiment of the Freudian Unheimliche is taking place at the core of the Greek national construction as a fear of reverse self-colonisation. Key Words: Greece, vampires, revenants, vrykolakas, vampire fiction, Unheimliche, nation construction, haunted communities, Philhellenism. ***** 1. Hauntings from the Outside: The (Vampiric) Invention of Greece1 If we accept Derrida’s statement that ‘all national rootedness […] is rooted first of all in the memory or the anxiety of a displaced—or displaceable—population,’2 Benedict Anderson’s notion of ‘imagined communities’3 could be easily refined by Renée Bergland’s ‘haunted communities.’4 Although this concept was originally suggested in the context of an inquiry on American Gothic literature, and not fully

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__________________________________________________________________ developed as a theory of the nation, I will be using it here as a supplement, and not a mere substitute, to Anderson’s theory. Instead of just a collectivity whose members presuppose and foster the abstract idea of mutual belonging, a haunted community entails the active, though spectral, influence of some unwelcome legacy of the past—allegedly erased or overcome in the very process of imagining—that undermines the stability of the prevailing, monological identity. The displacement and doubling inherent to the uncanny as theorised by Freud would be thus inextricably linked to the very process of nation construction. According to Freud, the uncanny consists basically of a double time split between sameness and difference, simultaneously reunited and dissociated by repression. In the occurrences of the uncanny, we have to deal with the once familiar that returns as strange, or with the strange that returns as familiar. It is repression in fact that brings about estrangement, both in the past memory and in its present recovery.5 ‘The unheimlich [original German form of the uncanny] is what was once heimisch, familiar; the prefix un is the token of repression.’6 The invention of the nation, of every nation, implies thus the rejection of some elements once associated with the community, and the incorporation of new ones once alien to it. In the context of postcolonial studies, Homi Bhabha has explicitly connected such a paradoxical and mutually conflictual double temporality of the nation with the Freudian uncanny.7 He has also referred this process to the notion of repetition, suggesting a certain haunting always at work there: It is the repetition of the national sign as numerical succession rather than synchrony that reveals that strange temporality of disavowal implicit in the national memory. Being obliged to forget becomes the basis for remembering the nation, peopling it anew, imagining the possibility of other contending and liberating forms of cultural identification.8 Repetition brings us to the sphere of signs, with which the uncanny has been associated by later (mostly poststructuralist) theorists such as Helène Cixous, Samuel Weber, or Nicholas Royle,9 as the instance of undecidability that prevents the closure of the signifier over the signified. Every new occurrence of a sign entails repetition, that is, return with a difference. There is always a displacement operating in the logic of the sign: an unbridgeable distance between the time, the space, and the substance of the referent, and the moment, the context, and the implications of the reference. Each iteration of a sign is uncanny since it involves an estrangement stemming from a surplus that did not seem to be there before. This corresponds with the mechanism of national constitution insofar as, in the attempt to perfectly fit a cultural, ethnic, historical, religious, or linguistic content into a predetermined signifier, there are continuous and uncontrollable overflows, excesses, and, above all, spectralizations on the unresolvable dialectic

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__________________________________________________________________ presence/absence. 10 According to Susan Bernstein, ‘the uncanny puts in question the possibility of definition itself.’11 The state of Greece is less than two centuries old, but its name brings to mind a civilisation older than two thousand years. Its modern (re)constitution, often addressed in terms of repetition—restoration, rebirth, resurrection, or sequel—can be considered a perfect example, if not a paradigmatic model, of such psychic and semiotic uncanniness. The emergence of Greece in modernity cannot be conceived of from its very beginning, but as reappearance. In this sense, it is inextricably entwined both with modernity itself and with the emergence of the uncanny. For, what is modernity but the recognition of the insurmountable gap between the present and the Ancient civilization—namely, the Greeks—and the need to reactualise the latter in contemporary times? Such a reactualisation has to necessarily be a displaced one, consequently emphasising difference, dislocation, and the impossibility of a perfect, proper re-presentation of the Classic Greek model. It is probably not a coincidence that Philhellenism—i.e., the aspiration at the construction or recovery of contemporary Greece on the ground of the Ancient model—as a prevailing discourse appears in Europe during the eighteenth century, precisely when, according to some scholars like Terry Castle or Mladen Dolar, the uncanny, previously confined to the external but socially accepted space of the supernatural, emerged for the first time to haunt normative culture, and the modern subject, from within.12 Both Philhellenism and the uncanny are closely interwoven with the Enlightenment and, therefore, with the invention of the notion of Western culture. Greece is claimed to have been the origin of the rationalistic epistemology and the social structures reinstated by the Philosophes, and is thus reified as the cradle of the West. This lineage allows the Occidental civilization to distinguish itself from the barbaric and the Orientals, and to delineate a geographical and intellectual space where empiric knowledge and human progress predominates over superstition and backwardness. The most ambitious project of the Enlightenment, the Encyclopaedia, is precisely founded on the belief of perfect definition, conceptual delimitation, and semiotic transparency.13 Signifier and signified, language and world, were believed to potentially be able to fit perfectly into one another, without remainders. Such a purified, scientific language, was to be the instrument of Western domination of the world and nature, and is at the basis of the future European colonial enterprise. This attempt to expel and reduce the unaccountable elements of human experience brought back, as a consequence, the haunting of the uncanny, inherently reinscribed and simultaneously produced by the rationalist project, as Mladen Dolar has argued: There is a specific dimension of the uncanny that emerges with modernity. What I am interested in is not the uncanny as such, but the uncanny that is closely linked with the advent of

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__________________________________________________________________ modernity and which constantly haunts it from the inside. To put it simply, in premodern societies the dimension of the uncanny was largely covered (and veiled) by the area of the sacred and untouchable. It was assigned to a religiously and socially sanctioned place in the symbolic from which the structure of power, sovereignty, and a hierarchy of values emanated. With the triumph of the Enlightenment, this privileged and excluded place (the exclusion that founded society) was no more. That is to say that the uncanny became unplaceable; it became uncanny in the strict sense. […] There was an irruption of the uncanny strictly parallel with bourgeois (and industrial) revolutions and the rise of scientific rationality―and, one might add, with the Kantian establishment of transcendental subjectivity, of which the uncanny presents the surprising counterpart.14 In my opinion, Greece, the very founding referent of enlightened epistemology and Western modernity, came to undermine the logic of semiotic accuracy and indisputable delimitations by spreading uncanniness and dismantling accepted binary oppositions. Philhellenism tried to find the essences of the Ancient Hellenic civilisation in contemporary Greece, but the travels to the mythic lands of Pericles and Aristotle frequently resulted in disappointment.15 In the eighteenth century, the territorites of Ancient Hellas were no more than the southern edge of the Balkanic possessions of the Ottoman Empire. The inhabitants of the alleged cradle of the West were basically Orientals under Muslim rule, with no apparent memories of their past glory in their everyday customs. Even their religion (Christian Orthodoxy), though Christian and thus to some extent Occidental, was disturbingly schismatic and strange to the core of European civilisation. Therefore, the Orientalist or Balkanist factor haunts the discourse of Western Philhellenism from its very beginning, introducing into the modern concept of Greece an excess irreducible to the rationalist logic of identification.16 Not only two symbolic spaces were at stake in the rediscovery of Hellas, but also two different temporalities: making Greece return implied unleashing a process of revenance and undeadness. The corpse of a civilisation, embodied by the Ancient ruins and the intangible remainders of the Hellenes, such as the language or the topography, had to be reanimated in order to make it present. Unsurprisingly, such a presence was inherently undermined by an uncanny historical gap that spectralized every attempt to re-present Greece in modern times. Such an attempt allegorises its own uncanniness, inasmuch as familiarity and strangeness, presence and absence, the Occidental and the Oriental, undermine each other by relentlessly (re)appearing at its core and thus preventing its historical or ontological meaning from closure. A haunting is already at work here.

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__________________________________________________________________ The uncanniness elicited by the (founding) return and displaced repetition of Greece was reinscribed in Enlightenment and Western civilisation itself. If Greekness was the origin of Europe and the new rational epistemology, its very internal dislocation revealed the impossibility of pure origin and challenged the claims of uncontaminated lineage it was supposed to sustain. The inspiring source of the West happened to be at the moment in the margins of Europe, so the project to bring it back home became a common aim of Philhellenes from quite early in the eighteenth century. The ideal of a restoration or rebirth of Greece was formulated as the need to revivify the primary cultural model of the Occidental paradigm and thus qualitatively approximate modernity to its prototype, Antiquity. Uncannily enough, the self of the new civilization was to be found outside it. Hence the urgency to transmit this ideal to contemporary Greeks—certainly a Greek-speaking and Christian Orthodox community, but first of all a millet (i.e., a religious community) among others in the Ottoman Empire. This population used to refer to themselves as Romioi (Roman) or Graikoi (the Latin term for Greek) instead of Hellenes, and their daily cultural practice was far enough from the Ancient Hellenic civilization, which in most cases they were not even aware of. Philhellenism, however, tried to wrench them free from the realm of the Orient and to convince them that their proper place was at the core of Western European modernity. The incipient diaspora Greek bourgeoisie—especially merchants living in Western Europe—was probably the first autochthonous group to assimilate the Philhellenic discourse, for two main reasons: they were under the direct influence of the new ideas in the countries where they originated, and the possibility of carrying on business in a new national framework, apart from Ottoman imperial structures, appeared extremely attractive to them. Due to the alleged shameful Oriental alienation of such a proto-Occidental land under the Turks, the symbolic construction of the new identity was conceived in terms of purging and modernisation. Language, customs, populations, and ethnicities underwent a process of meticulously planned purification, perfectly emblematised in the name conveyed to the official idiom of the new state: katharevousa, the cleaned or purified language.17 This conflictual and imperfect process, which configured the Greek identity to come as inherently dissociated, has been conceptualised in terms of ‘metaphoric colonialism,’18 ‘colonization of the ideal,’19 ‘crypto-colonialism,’20 and, more accurately, in my opinion, ‘self-colonization.’21 The classicist ideal of Western Philhellenism embraced by modern Greeks themselves gave birth to a nation compelled to fit an abstract model built by European Enlightenment in its own image rather than the daily practice of the Greek community itself. Nonetheless, the cultural and symbolic purification intended by both Europeans and the autochthonous elite was doomed to fail, since, .

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__________________________________________________________________ the Enlightenment Western concern for resuscitating dead white people through classical Greeks obliged modern Greeks to assume a “white man’s burden” of their own, the racial impurity of not living up to the West’s image of them.22 The excluded elements of the national identity recurrently came back to prevent any attempt at an ontological closure of the sign Greece, and challenged every political, historical, or ethnic definition of the nation, thus confining it to the liminal realm of the uncanny: the iterative and undesired return of the repressed that brings about undecidability and defies the Encyclopaedic epistemology. A two-way haunting is operating here between Greece and Europe in a complex game of semiotic and symbolic underminings, interpenetrations, and destabilisations. From the very first testimonies of Philhellenism, this haunting appears epitomised by a disturbing figure undecidably split between times, discursive spaces, and geographical belonging: the revenant. Before the Serbian epidemics of vampirism in the 1730s spread the fame of the Balkan vampire across Europe, the Greek vrykolakas or its Cretan variant, the katakhanas, recurred in German, French, Italian or English treatises from the beginning of the fifteenth century.23 The founding recovery of Greece as the cultural genealogy of Europe and modernity, and thus as the base of a new discursive model based on truth and accuracy, brings with it an unsettling element of Otherness that not only questions from within the epistemological consistency of European knowledge, but also destabilises the proper sense of Greece as a discursive, historical, and geographical factor. As a result, the self-definition of the West and its scientific rationalism as a direct offspring of the diachronic Greek civilisation becomes problematic. At the inception of a paradigm of delimitation between Self and Other, such categories uncannily contaminate each other. The vrykolakas is the first vampire widely known in the West in early modernity. (Re)appearing at the same time as Greece, it emblematises the irreducible remainders which endlessly return in the process of purification and clarification entailed by the construction of European identity and modern discursivity. In Antonio de Ferraris’ De situ Japygiae, composed between 1506 and 1511—though published in 1558—we find the earliest European mention of the monster. It is featured as an instance over which Western and Eastern epistemological spaces can be demarcated. An interrogation about a civilisational difference based on the status of the signifier is at stake in this text, where a rational and spiritually healthy we is opposed to a superstitious and unhealthy them: Similis est Brocolarum fabula, quae totum Orientem capit: Aiunt eorum, qui sceleste vitam egerunt, animas, tanquam flammarum globos noctue sepulcris evolare solitas, notis, et amicis apparere,

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__________________________________________________________________ animalibus vesci, pueros fugare, ac necare, deinde in sepulcra reverti. Superstitiosa gens sepulcra effodit, ac scisso cadavere, detractum cor exurit, atque in quatuour ventos, hoc est in quatuor Mundi plagas cinerem projicit: sic cessare pestem credit; et si fabula ea sit, exemplum tamen praebet nobis, quam invisi sint, et execrabiles omnibus iis, qui male vixerunt, et viventes, et mortui.24 It is like the fable of Brocolae, which exists in the entire East: they affirm that the souls of the persons who devoted themselves to a wicked life use to fly in the night as balls of flames over their graves, to haunt acquaintances and friends, to feed on animals, to scare and kill the children, and then to return to their tombs. Superstitious people dig the graves and, after pulling the heart out of the corpse, they burn it and scatter the ashes to the four winds, that is, to the four corners of the world: so they believe they will stop the plague. Even if this is a fable, it provides us with an example of how all those who lived according to evil, either dead or alive, are hated and cursed.25 De Ferraris orientalises the vrykolakas, ascribing it to the universe of fables and superstition in opposition to the Western realm of reason and exactitude. By discursively expelling it, however, he is paradoxically reinscribing the monster and its Otherness at the core of Europeanness, since the vrykolakas belongs to the cultural tradition the Renaissance is claiming as the source of Europe’s civilisational uniqueness. The vampire is thus a strange body that disrupts the ideal of a Western incorporeal intellectual space founded on a non-mediated continuity with Ancient Hellenes. To a certain extent, it becomes the ineffaceable bodily rem(a)inder of the historical difference inherent in that narrative. The coarse corporealness of Greek revenants not only subverts the Catholic and Protestant doctrine about the separation of body and soul—Platonic in origin, and therefore Greek—but also unsettles the Western notion of transparency and immateriality associated with the phenomena of the mind and with the essence of the subject. In De Occulta Philosophia (1531), Cornelius Agrippa connects the wickedness of the Cretan katakhanas to its corporality, implicitly opposing it to the spiritual nature of virtue in the European imaginary: Legimus etiam in Cretensium annalibus, manes quas ipsi Catechanas vocant, in corpora remeare solitos, et ad relictas uxores ingredi, libidinemque perficere: ad quod evitandum, et quo amplius uxores non infestent, legibus municipalibus cautum

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__________________________________________________________________ est, surgentium cor clauo transfigere, totumque cadaver exurere.26 We read also in the Chronicles of the Cretensians, that the ghosts which they call Catechanæ were wont to return back into their bodies, and go to their wives, and lie with them; for the avoiding of which, and that they might annoy their wives no more, it was provided in the common laws that the heart of them that did arise should be thrust through with a nail, and their whole carcase be burnt. The return of the (repressed) body functions here also as the uncanny mark of Orientalism and backwardness haunting (from within) the new age of disembodied rationality. Excessive corporality, a superseded factor of cultural backwardness, arises back precisely from Greekness, the symbolic realm that founds modern spirituality. Most allusions to the vrykolakas during this period served to orientalise Greece at the same time it was being constructed as the cradle of the West. Similarly to the later Serbian, Hungarian, or Romanian cases, these monstrous bodies threatening the integrity of European logic from an unclassifiable inbetween space and time—neither completely European nor totally Oriental, neither dead nor alive—became the touchstone of Greece’s Orientalistic or Balkanistic difference from the West, in theological, epistemological, or developmental terms. The founding text of Philhellenism, Martin Kraus’s Turcograecia (1584), already involves this paradox. In the context of an incipient Orientalism, the author advocates the emancipation of Greece from the Ottoman yoke on account of its being the source of the Occident, but cannot fail to note the disturbing tradition of the vrykolakas which blurs the boundaries between the barbaric Turks and the civilised Greeks: In Sabbato Pentecostes, Turcae combusserunt Graecum, biennio antè defunctum: quod vulgo crederetur, noctu sepulchro egredi, hominesque occidere. Aliij autem ueram causam perhibent, quod XV. pluresue homines, spectrum eius uidentes, mortui sint. Sepulchro extractus, consumpta carne, cutem ossibus adhaerentem integram habuit. 27 In Pentecost Saturday, the Turks burned a Greek dead two years before, which the crowd believed to come out from his grave in the night, and to kill men. Others hold that the true cause is that fifteen men, after seeing his spectre, died. They unburied him, and saw how his flesh was consumed but his skin was intact and stuck to his bones.

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__________________________________________________________________ During the seventeenth century, references to the Greek vampire primarily emphasise religious difference. Most of them appear in theological treatises that controversially address the spiritual division of Europe into two blocks: Catholics and Protestants on the one hand, and Christian Orthodox on the other. Under this schism it is quite easy to perceive the most conventional East/West divide. Christian Orthodoxy, the Eastern pole, is attributed a whole series of Oriental features that contemptuously distinguish it from the more enlightened Occidental versions of Christianity. The absurd and heretic superstition of the vrykolakas fostered, in the opinion of Western theologians, by Orthodox authorities and beliefs, evinces the discursive inferiority and barbarism of Eastern Christians. Such an irreducible difference with Western religion is systematically constructed, and then condemned, through the term schismaticism. The vampire embodies this schism distinguishing the proper and the defective Europe. Most Western authors use the monster to delve into this axiological distinction and to reinforce their own position. That is especially the case of Leo Allatius, a Catholic Greek living in Rome, many of whose theological works are intended to discredit Greek Orthodox dogma. His is the most influential account of the vrykolakas in the seventeenth century, an important part of the treatise De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus (1645), where he narrates his own experiences in the island of Lesbos, as a child, with the tradition of undecayed corpses.28 From a theological perspective, the vrykolakas becomes the excuse to mock the Orthodox doctrine of the excommunication that, according to the tradition, is at the basis of vampirisation. The terms employed by Allatius to comment on such beliefs, however, not only concentrate on doctrinal error, but evoke as well the discourse of epistemological despisal of the Others of the West: ‘imaginations,’ ‘fantasies,’ ‘absurdities,’ ‘stupid opinions.’29 Likewise, François Richard, a Jesuit missionary in the Cycladic Islands by this time, dismissed beforehand any possibility for this tradition to belong to the sphere of truth by titling his chapter on the vampire ‘On the False Resurrected That the Greeks Call vrykolakes.’30 Almost every instance of (theological or not) scopic power towards southeastern Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century focused on the monster as the mark of Greece’s Otherness and in-betweenness.31 The fascination was such that a monograph on the subject, Johann Heineccius’s Dissertatio Theologica Inauguralis De Absolutione Mortuorum Excommunicatorum vel Tympanicorum in Ecclesia Graeca, was published in 1709.32 Though some theological works still approached the vrykolakas in the eighteenth century, the paradigm shifted to scientific and philosophical discourse.33 Greece continued to be orientalised through the vampire, but the arguments changed genre. Schismaticism was not the problem anymore; it had been replaced with backwardness and superstition. The disturbing paradox about Greece as simultaneously the source of rationalism and the contemporaneous remainder of superstition returned to the texts to haunt the very methodology their authors were

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__________________________________________________________________ applying. Vampirism became in the eighteenth century a challenge to scientific thought, which on the one hand had to demonstrate its omnipotence by solving the riddle of dead corpses walking, and on the other saw its very language questioned by such logic impossibility. The status of truth and the limits of the discourse of the sciences were under scrutiny at each and every examination of the vampiric cases. The most quoted and influential description of the vrykolakas in this period was without doubt the narration of the French botanist Joseph de Tournefort in his Rélation d’un voyage de Levant. Commisioned by King Louis XIV in a scientific mission, he travels around the Eastern Mediterranean in 1700-1701. At the end of 1700, in Mykonos, he comes upon a case of mass hysteria unleashed by the alleged nocturnal wandering of a vrykolakas who is wreacking havoc on the village. Tournefort, in the role of the self-confident Western scientist dealing with Oriental infants, scornfully disdains the stories about the vampire and tries to explain away the whole thing. In his conversations with the villagers, everyone seems to be aware of the existence of two conflictual epistemological models, one belonging to the Latins, the West, and the other to the Greeks, who stand here for the East. Both the narrator, through the rhetorical devices he deploys, and the villagers, considering it more reliable than their own, locate authority in the former: Quand on nous demanda ce que nous croyions de ce mort, nous répondîmes que nous le croyions très bien mort; mais comme nous voulions guérir, ou au moins ne pas aigrir leur imagination blessé, nous leur représentâmes qu’il n’était pas surprenant que le boucher se fût aperçue de quelque chaleur en fouillant dans des entrailles qui se pourrissaient; qu’il n’était pas extraordinaire qu’il en fût sorti quelques vapeurs, puisqu’il en sort d’un fumier que l’on remue; que pour ce prétendu sang vermeil, il paraissait encore sur les mains du boucher, que ce n’était qu’un bourbe fort puante. […] Dans une prévention si générale, nous prîmes le parti de ne rien dire. Non seulement on nous aurait traités de ridicules, mais d’infidèles. Comme faire revenir tout un peuple! Ceux qui croyaient dans leur âme que nous doutions de la vérité du fait, venaient à nous comme pour nous reprocher notre incrédulité, et prétendaient prouver qu’il y avait des Vroucolacas, par quelques autorités tirées du Bouclier de la foi du P. Richard, missionnaire Jésuite. Il était Latin, disaient-ils, et par conséquent vous devez le croire. Nous n’aurions rien avancé de nier la conséquence: on nous donnait tous les matins la comédie, par un fidèle récit des nouvelles folies qu’avait fait cet oiseau de nuit: on l’accusait même d’avoir commis les péchés les plus abominables.34

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__________________________________________________________________ When they asked us what we thought of this body, we told them we believed it to be very thoroughly dead: but as we were willing to cure, or at least not to exasperate their prejudiced imaginations, we represented to them, that it was no wonder the butcher should feel a little warmth when he groped among the entrails that were then rotting; that it was no extraordinary thing for it to emit fumes, since dung turned up will do the same; that as for the pretended redness of the blood, it still appeared by the butcher's hands to be nothing but a very stinking nasty smear. […] When the prepossession was so general, we thought it our best way to hold our tongues. Had we opposed it, we had not only been accounted ridiculous blockheads, but atheists and infidels. How was it possible to stand against the madness of a whole people? Those that believed we doubted the truth of the fact, came and upbraided us with our incredulity, and strove to prove that there were such things as vroucolacas by citations out of the Buckler of Faith, written by François Richard, a Jesuit missionary. He was a Latin, say they, and consequently you ought to give him credit. We should have got nothing by denying the justness of the consequence: it was as good as a comedy to us every morning, to hear the new follies committed by this night bird; they charged him with being guilty of the most abominable sins. But Tournefort notices, by the end of his narration, the paradox inherent here. As long as his epistemology is considered a by-product of Ancient Hellenic civilisation, Greek after all, the irreducible Otherness of the vrykolakas undecides the mapping of both Greekness and modernity. The colonising logic of European epistemology is being colonised by this haunting creature and its undermining of discursive authority. Tournefort feels then compelled to enunciate a difference between proper and improper Greeks, inscribing thus a historical difference in the core of Greekness governed by revenance itself: ‘Après cela ne faut-il pas avouer que les Grecs d’aujourd’hui ne sont pas grands Grecs et qu’il n’y a chez eux qu’ignorance et superstition!’35 (‘After such an instance of folly, can we refuse to own that the present Greeks are no great Greeks and that there is nothing but ignorance and superstition among them?’). The most emblematic voice of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, expressed a similar bewilderment. Disappointed by the fact that, after the Serbian episodes in the 1730s, the vampires had become a matter of controversy and debate in the age of les Lumiéres, he included an entry on this subject in his Philosophical Dictionnary.36 His aim was to underpin the discourse of the Enlightenment against the uncanny recurrence of superseded beliefs and ways of thinking. But what struck him the most was the fact that such beliefs had a

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__________________________________________________________________ Greek origin. So, to safeguard the (also) Greek origins of the modern epistemology he was speaking on behalf of, he had to distinguish a good Ancient Greece and a contemporary one marked by deviance from Europeanness, on the sole basis of the presence or not of the vrykolakas: ‘Who would believe, that we derive the idea of vampires from Greece? Not from the Greece of Alexander, Aristotle, Plato, Epicurus and Demosthenes; but from Christian Greece, unfortunately schismatic.’37 Although the famous Serbian epidemics of vampirism, which occupied scientists and philosophers during the 1730s and popularized the monster across Europe,38 somehow overshadowed the vrykolakas, it continued to be considered by experts as the source of all other Eastern European vampires. Dom Calmet, in his most relevant Dissertation sur les vampires, acknowledged the primacy of the Greek vampire, stressing the difference inscribed in the notion of Greece by this strange body undermining Ancient Hellenic spirituality.39 So did the famous physician Gerhard Van Swieten, who had been commissioned by the empress of Austria Maria Theresa to erradicate—on a scientific basis—the belief of vampires so dangerously widespread by then in her domains.40 While erudite or occultist studies and treatises about the vrykolakas continued to be published until well into the nineteenth century, from the second half of the eighteenth century the vampire became predominantly a fictional character in European literature. For such fictionalisations, most writers selected the model based on the more impressive and recent Serbian cases.41 Nonetheless, by the first quarter of the nineteenth century, in the heyday of Philhellenism that preceded and fostered the Greek War of Independence against the Turks, a symptomatic revival of the vrykolakas was observed in Western fiction. In 1797, Goethe had already set his vampiric poem The Bride of Corinth in a symbolic space blending features of Ancient and Modern Greece, though the female undead in it does not seem to be particularly reminisicent of the traditional vrykolakas.42 A scholarly footnote in Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer in 1801, where he quotes Tournefort to explain the presence of a vampire in his poem, demonstrates that the Greek monster was still considered at this moment to be the mother of all vampires.43 Nevertheless, it was the most famous and active of Philhellenes at the time, Lord Byron, who fully introduced the vrykolakas into English letters. He did so in the poem Giaour (1813), an explicitly Philhellenic work where he featured a Christian of mixed racial origins who fights the Turks in search of Greece’s resurrection, and is cursed by his Ottoman enemy to become a vampire after his death. Even if Byron supported modern Greeks’ claims for autonomy, it seems as if the spurious population of contemporary times could only (re)emerge as a vampiric counterfeit of their glorious ancestors, precisely because of the Oriental impurity and the historical difference inscribed in them. Personal and collective fate intermingle here once more in paradoxical terms.44

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__________________________________________________________________ The vampires in the Giaour and, especially, the one in Byron’s unpublished Fragment produced on the renowned 1816 summer evening at Villa Diodati where Gothic was reinvented—attended, not coincidentally, by Philhellenes—are at the origin of the most important and successful vampire fiction in this period: John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819).45 The monster in this novel, the first of a line that will culminate in Stoker’s Dracula, is modelled on the vrykolakas and resuscitates itself for the first time in Greece, though of English origin. He seems to allegorise the haunting of Europe by repetition and undecidability associated with the uncanny restoration of Greece itself—a revenant in its own right—as long as his dualistic nature (re)emerges in Hellenic lands to haunt back the bourgeois England where he once belonged. He embodies the fear, not only of miscegenation but also of the uncanniness inherent to the newly adopted epistemology and to modernity itself insofar as it implies a historical gap that denaturalises death and continuity. In short, it expresses the fear of contamination by an uncanny Greekness belonging at the same time to self and to other.46 The success of Polidori’s novel after its publication in 1819, when Philhellenism and the cause of Greeks were highly topical, exceeded all expectations. During the 1820s, while the Greeks were fighting for their secession from the Ottoman Empire, Lord Ruthven, the half-Greek protagonist of The Vampyre, was relentlessly replicated in European letters. Charles Nodier’s theatrical adaptation of Cyprien Bérard’s novel Lord Ruthwen ou les vampires in 1820 unleashed a long series of sequels that filled the French, English, and German stages.47 Within a few weeks after Nodier’s play premiered, in June 1820, at least six vampire plays were simultaneously performing in the theatres of Paris. The vampire craze hit England as soon as August 1820, when James Planché’s The Vampire or the Bride of the Isles, an English version of Nodier’s play, premiered in London.48 The whole decade saw an uninterrupted flood of adaptations, revivals, and sequels in France, England, and Germany, intermittently continued until at least the 1880s, not only in the theater but also in the opera.49 Interestingly enough, from the very first versions of Polidori’s novel, the vampire was cleansed of its Greekness and the setting was displaced from Greece to other intra-European spaces of Otherness: either internalised in Romantic lands of historical alterity such as Scotland, or relegated to vague regions of cultural difference identified as Eastern Europe. Given that Greece was being cleansed itself of Slavic features in the eyes of the West as a condition to provide it support in its occidentalising struggle, it could have been politically and symbolically disturbing to re-orientalise it at this moment by permanently associating it with the vampire. This connection was not less disquieting for Europe, engaged at the moment in the project of grounding its genealogy on Hellenicity. If, as I have said, the construction of the West as an offspring of the Ancient Greek culture implied itself an unsettling story of revenance, re-emphasising such inherent uncanniness through the literal allegory of the undead did not seem a good idea. The French historian Jules Michelet

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__________________________________________________________________ provides one of the few explicit evidences of this in his work La sorcière (1862). There, he criticises Goethe’s The Bride of Corinth for contaminating Greece with the Slavic tradition of the vampire: ‘Goethe, si noble dans la forme, ne l’est pas autant d’esprit. II gâte la merveilleuse histoire, souille le grec d’une horrible idée slave.’50 (‘Goethe, so noble in the form, is not as noble in the spirit. He spoils the wonderful story soiling Greekness with a horrible Slavic idea.’) When the figure of the vampire crystallizes finally as a myth of modernity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the spatial domain of the monster has been reduced to Slavic Eastern Europe and no trace of (uncanny) Greece can be found. 2. Haunting (the) Self: Vampires from the Inside Such an external development, if we may speak in such terms when it comes to a colonial process that inherently undecides the categories outside and inside, is transposed and reflected in the internal construction of the nation. Due to the colonization of the ideal by the West, soon transformed into what Evangelos Calotychos has called a self-colonization, the Greeks had to strive from the beginning to conform to the ideal of Hellenism—the notion exclusively based on the conception of Ancient Greece that was created by Europe in modernity, and which consequently operated as a mirror for Europe itself. But, as well as the later version of the vampire, Modern Greece could not reflect in the mirror. Turning now to a Lacanian interpretation of the uncanny, we can establish a difference between the effects this non-reflection had in Westerners and in Greeks. For the West, the reapparition of Greece might be read as the irruption of ‘the lack of the lack,’51 the realization that there—where the void of Hellenic culture was perceived as a constitutive stimulus to be filled with a resuscitated culture—a living corpse was already staring back at this side of the mirror, a living corpse disconnected from the image projected. Just like the vampire, Greece was found to exist in the Real as something other, an uncategorisable abjection, exactly when its semiotic place in the imaginary had been devoided and it was expected to lack forever.52 For the Greeks, on the contrary, this disconnection elicited the need to privilege the imaginary dimension, the iterative nature of the signifier over the physical immediacy of customary social practice, in order to achieve a reflection in the (other’s) mirror. In other words, they had to obliterate everyday performance and attach to a new model provided by external and internal pedagogy.53 The actual necessity of burying—sometimes literally, as with some pieces of Ottoman architecture—previous strata of collective identity, such as Ottoman, Slavic, Byzantine, or even Jewish, became a requirement to leave behind backwardness and fully access modernity and Europeanness. All reminders of cultural and historical discontinuity tried to be suppressed, so as to erase any traces of uncanny revenance from the otherwise denominated resurrection of Hellas. This brought about anxiety regarding self-identity and, most of all, the construction of Greece as a haunted, and not just an imagined, community. Nonetheless, as in any story of

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__________________________________________________________________ revenance, the repressed elements of identity kept returning from the grave. Michael Herzfeld has employed the term disemia to describe such endless alternation of classicist and presentist versions of the nation, none of which have been able to prevail and to exclude a permanent haunting by the other.54 Greece is thus constructed as uncanniness as long as it never becomes a fulfilled presence, but unavoidably refers to absences and spectres of the past. While Greece claimed, in the Philhellenic mentality of the early nineteenth century, to embody the culmination of ontology and of enlightened epistemology through its modern refoundation, it represents instead the basic instability of every ontological process; in short, what Derrida has called ‘hauntology.’55 The allegorical and discursive significance of the vampire is still essential in the whole process of national construction. Indeed, the vrykolakas is directly involved in the debates about the fixation of the cultural contents acceptable for the new nation. Adamantios Korais, an intellectual of the Enlightenment and one of Greece’s founding fathers, immediately realised the symbolic value of this figure. He sought to establish the limits of the language and culture of the community in a sort of encyclopaedic dictionary that should gather the concepts admissible under the label of Modern Greece. In this work, Atakta, he included the term vrykolakas, but not without strategically purifying it of any Slavic or Ottoman elements. He not only found a (false) Classical etymology for the term, but also traced the tradition back to Plato’s times, not forgetting however to exonerate contemporary Greeks of such an absurd belief: The advances of education have much chilled the belief on vrykolakes; only the populace believes now what among the Ancients was even believed by many of those who did not belong to the populace. According to Plato (Phaedo page 81), the souls contaminated by iniquities of every kind become vrykolakes.56 The relevance of this purifying gesture for the legitimation of Modern Greece before the West is demonstrated by the fact that it became an article of faith for most foreign ethnologists in the following decades, especially those engaged in survivalist theories about Greekness.57 These folklorists focused on supernatural figures just insofar as they could serve as potential evidence of the nation’s ancient pedigree. Neraides, mermaids, and of course vrykolakes, were isolated from their contemporary context and studied as survivals of Ancient Greek culture.58 Continuity was thus preserved, and the shadow of uncanniness and revenance cast by the allegorical significance of the vampire over the re-emergence of Greece was dispelled.59 Despite the efforts to appease the vrykolakas and bury the tradition once and for all in the new (modern and European) nation, however, the revenant kept

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__________________________________________________________________ predictably doing what it does the best: returning from the grave. These recurrent returns reminded the Greeks of the impossibility of achieving an ontological closure for their identity and of confining Greece to a singular definition. Not only did the epidemics of vampirism flourish during the identity-defining anxiety brought about by the War of Independence,60 but through the whole century foreign ethnologists and travellers continued to mention the vrykolakas as a mark of Greek exotism, Otherness, and backwardness.61 As late as 1910, John Cuthbert Lawson affirmed to have known firsthand about the burning of some alleged vampires in small villages62 and, though in decline due to manifold factors, he considered the tradition to be still completely alive: The superstition, which had so firm a grip upon the Greeks of two or three centuries ago, has by no means relaxed its hold at the present day, in spite of the efforts made by the higher authorities civil and ecclesiastical, native and foreign, to suppress those savage and gruesome ceremonies to which it leads. […] The administrative action of the Venetian in the Ionian Islands in requiring proof to be furnished of the vrykolakas’ resuscitation, and official sanction to be obtained for exhuming and burning the body; the more vigorous suppression of such acts by the Turks in the Aegean Islands and probably also on the mainland; the somewhat half-hearted condemnation of the superstition by the Greek Church, which, as we shall see later, maintained the belief in the non-decomposition of excommunicated persons and notorious sinners, hesitated between denying and explaining the further notion that such persons were liable to re-animation, but certainly endeavoured to repress or to mitigate the atrocities to which that notion led; and at the present day the forces of law and order as represented on the one hand by the police and on the other by modern education, the chief fruit of which is a desire to appear “civilised” in the eyes of Europe; all these influences combined have certainly succeeded in reducing the proportions of the superstition and curtailing the excesses consequent upon it.63 In the 1940s, indeed, Dorothy Demetracopoulos Lee interviewed a number of Greek and Asia Minor immigrants in the United States, who could perfectly remember the details about vrykolakes from stories heard during their childhood in their native places.64 Nonetheless, as Lawson suggests, the Greek authorities and intelligentsia made the biggest efforts to purge such belief and all its traces from the national narrative in order to project an image of Europeanness, modernity, and progress. Both in

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__________________________________________________________________ daily practice and in cultural and official discourse, superstition was fought off as Greece’s mark of Orientalism. This attempt seems to have been successful if we consider how the Cycladic Islands, once known as ‘the home of nymphs and vampires’65—as in the title of George Horton’s 1929 tourist guide—have now been cleansed of dark connotations to become the paradise of sunbathing and youth. Of course, the economic interest of the Greek authorities to attract visitors from abroad has been essential, but the advertising campaigns of the National Tourism Organisation have appealed to a specific kind of pre-existent images and notions about their country. Landscapes, values, and objects reminiscent of Ancient Greece have been privileged, taking advantage of the common knowledge about Hellenic culture spread among Westerners by secondary education. Classical columns, deep blue waters evocative of Homer’s epic poems, references to the pleasures of life, to youth and freedom, or slogans such as ‘Live your myth in Greece,’66 suggest a universe of cultural and existential authenticity where tourists can heterotopically67 return to their origins. This rhetoric indubitably draws from the axiom that Greece is the cradle of (Western) civilisation, and participates in the ideological repertoire of a specific understanding of Greekness. As a result of all this, not only foreign visitors but even the inhabitants of islands with such a vampiric tradition as Santorini or Mykonos know at the present day nothing at all about the vrykolakas, which they suppose just to be a disembodied ghost in the Northern European sense. The tradition seems to have been successfully eradicated as well in the rest of the country, where no traces of it remain today. Unlike Romania, which has exploited its vampiric memories for the sake of tourism, Greece has repressed its own inasmuch as they recalled unwelcome associations: Balkanism, backwardness, and cultural discontinuity. The effacement of vampirism from the national discourse, however, was neither complete nor uninterrupted. Vampires reappeared in specific periods to allegorise what I call the economy of revenance governing Modern Greece, and to bring back to the fore the latent anxiety about national identity. After the first period of radical Classicism following the foundation of the Greek State in 1830, the controversial racial theories of Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, who advocated the idea that the Hellenic population of the Southern Balkans had been replaced during the early Middle Ages by Slavic peoples,68 unleashed among Greek intellectuals a historiographical and scholarly frenzy aimed at restoring the cultural and ethnic continuity questioned by the Bavarian professor.69 Interestingly, such attempts did not limit themselves to reformulate the dogma of a despicable void existing between Ancient Hellenic civilisation and the Modern Greek nation. It focused instead on examining the intermediary stages of national identity as necessary links to bind the chain. This tendency crystallized with particular force from the 1880s onwards in the new period of national culture and discourse known as demoticism.70 With it, the stages of Greek history previously despised, such as Byzantinism and Ottoman Greekness, as well as popular language and customs,

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__________________________________________________________________ were re-appropriated and integrated for the first time in the repository of national identity. Even if criticised through a patronising discourse about necessary modernisation, superstition reappeared in Greek public space at that moment. As long as the folklore could provide arguments to support both the exceptionality of the nation and its cultural continuity, many intellectuals delved into it. Among the traditions unearthed, the vrykolakas received its share of attention. From around 1870, in contrast to the prior absence of the term in Greek press and books, references to the vampire multiply and can be tracked in diverse genres. Logically, folkloric or ethnographic studies dominate, but there are also an interesting number of poems and satirical narratives featuring the monster.71 As long as they were primarily in the service of national construction, the ethnographic studies on the vrykolakas insisted on Korais’s arguments in favor of cultural continuity and deployed a rhetoric of intellectual condescension towards popular beliefs, on the one hand celebrating them as exotic markers of identity, and on the other disapproving them as indicators of backwardness and discursive inferiority to be overcome in the future. In the same period, the vrykolakas entered for the first time the realm of Modern Greek literature. A number of fictions featuring the revenant were published between 1867 and 1933, which posed a threat to the dominant realism and pedagogical tendency of the national literature under construction. Fantastic tales did not seem to have a place in a corpus of texts consciously arranged to fit the needs of a nation still lacking totalizing narratives. To be acceptable, Greek literature had to say something about Greeks and Greekness, both from a descriptive and from a normative point of view.72 Maybe that is one of the reasons why these incipient samples of Greek Gothic underwent in their turn censorship and repression in two forms: not assuming Gothic generic conventions as their counterparts in Western countries, but the conventions of the narrative of customs and manners; and becoming almost totally excluded from the national literary canon. The other reason, in my opinion, is that, both structurally and thematically, they brought to the fore the uncanny that, as we have seen, had been distinguished as a taboo from the very inception of the new nation insofar as it revealed its constructed nature. Unsurprisingly, these short stories have been mostly forgotten. Nevertheless, in recovering the folkloric vampire for serious literature—even if it was to ban the belief from the space of national acceptability—these texts thematised the very economy of revenance underlying the oscillations of disemia. The vrykolakas allegorised the fears and the uncanniness implicit in recovering and giving visibility to Greece’s popular and intermediary strata between Ancient Classicism and modernity. In un-burying such relegated parts of the collective self, alien and undesired components of identity could have been brought to light. Not only an anxiety about difference, but also an anxiety about sameness was powerfully at work here.

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__________________________________________________________________ Taking for granted Fredric Jameson’s theory about narrative as an allegory of the nation in colonised countries,73 we can affirm that Greece’s structural hauntology is clearly allegorised in these stories. The plurality of identities haunting the contemporary Greeks and undermining each other are embodied in the corpse that returns from the grave to pursue, and occasionally kill, the living. In comparing Greek vampire fiction with European depictions, there is an obvious dissimilitude that betrays Greece’s (self-) colonial difference. While in Western stories the monster is often a foreigner, usually an Eastern European who threatens the inner harmony of the community from outside, the literary vrykolakes, like the folkloric ones, belong to the national community, even to the same village as their victims, and haunt their friends and relatives from the inside. Like the famous Serbian vampire Arnold Paole, however, they carry a mark of Otherness usually indicating contact with Turks or, in the case of Greece, even Slavs. This fulfils one of the criteria for the Freudian uncanny—the vrykolakas is the familiar that suddenly shows up as strange, and thus the strange embodied in the familiar. The plurality of identities through whose repression Greece was initially constructed reappears now under a monstrous form to destabilise and weaken the foundations of the community. The first of these texts is Aristotelis Valaoritis’ Thanasis Vagias (1867), a narrative poem about the homonymous commander, an extremely controversial personality of the Greek War of Independence. While some sources refer to him as a national hero, others consider him a traitor who revealed state military plans to the Turks. His liminality regarding the configuration of national identity seems to play a role in his fictional vampirisation. In the poem, he pays a posthumous visit to his terrified widow and is thus relegated to a parallel existential liminality between life and death.74 Similarly, the alleged vampire in The Grave of the Excommunicated (1926) is discovered to have had secret commercial dealings with Turks, whose revelation to his family and fellow countrymen is the only aim of his return as a revenant.75 Interestingly, in The Son of the Vampire (1933), a Greek midwife is forced by the monster to assist his partner in the birth of his first child. Though it is not explicitly stated that the vrykolakas is a Turk, the description— through the eyes of the woman—of the cave where he lives is reminiscent of Ottoman Palaces, particularly of those that the Turkish governors of Greek regions, renowned—in the national imaginary—for their cruelty, used to inhabit.76 Slavic connections are also present in the spurious lineage of those who become vampires. In Andreas Karkavitsas’ The Excommunicated (1888), the Orthodox Church excommunicates a man for theft; it must be remembered that in folk tradition, it is usually excommunication that causes vampirisation after death. The pressure of the whole village, combined with his fear of becoming a vrykolakas once he dies, compel the man to abandon his home and go to live among the nomadic Slavs of the mountains, the Sarakatsani, a group considered ethnically non-Greek. After adopting their way of life, he dies of fear before the victim of his

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__________________________________________________________________ crime, firmly believing that he will return as a revenant.77 In other cases, exclusion from the community does not occur on an ethnic, but on a moral or religious basis. The sorceress in Christos Christovassilis’s She Did Not Decompose (1908) has transgressed the communal boundaries of gender and belief by practising magic in order to attain sexual intercourse with some respectable husbands in the village, while the young man in Kostas Pasagiannis’s The Vampire (1895) becomes a vrykolakas for not recognising the effectivity of collective superstitions and trying to be stronger than they are.78 A fear of not belonging, of not being sufficiently pure as a Greek, is at stake here. This is reinforced by the anxiety regarding the possibility of procreating with vampires and thus expanding the spurious lineage of the nation. A motif in folklore itself, intercourse or even marriage with vrykolakes is thematised both in Thanasis Vagias and The Son of the Vampire as the uttermost horror that a Greek woman might endure. The protagonist in the former proposes to his wife to have a child, which appears to horrify her more than the posthumous apparition itself. In the latter, the son of the vampire and a Greek woman kidnapped by him has already been born, and bears several monstrous marks that distinguish him as nonhuman.79 For all these reasons, I contend that these fictions allegorise with special intensity the economy of revenance and the uncanniness involved in the construction of Modern Greece, and express the anxiety about discovering fearful secrets in the body of the national self, especially alien ethnicities and deviant identities. However, unlike the Western representations of alterity through vampirism, the vrykolakas in such a postcolonial context does not embody the fear of ‘reverse colonisation,’80 in Stephen Arata’s terms regarding Dracula, but of ‘reverse self-colonisation.’ Structurally entrenched in the core of the national discourse, the uncanny cannot be expelled through linguistic, ethnic, or even literary purifications. It keeps returning and exceeding, time and again, the semantic integrity of the nation. On this account, Greece can be considered as a paradigmatic sample, maybe the paradigm itself, of nations and nationhood as haunted communities.

Notes 1

This research was supported by a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship within the 7th European Community Framework Programme. It is also part of the project referenced FFi2011-296-C02-01, sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Economy. 2 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994), 83. 3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).

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Renée L. Bergland, ‘Diseased States, Public Minds: Native American Ghosts in Early National Literature,’ in The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imaginations, ed. Ruth Bienstock and Douglas L. Howard (Jefferson: McFarland, 2004), 102. 5 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny,’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), 219-252. 6 Freud, ‘The Uncanny,’ 245. 7 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,’ in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 291-322. 8 Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation,’ 311. 9 See Hélène Cixous, ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms: a Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche,’ New Literary History 7 (1976): 525-548; Samuel Weber, ‘The Sideshow, or Remarks on a Canny Show,’ Modern Language Notes 88 (1973): 1102-1122; Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 1-31; Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2003). For a chronological overview of the history of the concept in the last decades, see Anneleen Masschelein, The Unconcept: the Freudian Uncanny in Late-TwentiethCentury Theory (New York: New York State University, 2011). 10 I use the term ‘spectralization’ as initially formulated by Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 127. For a full explanation of the term, see Justin D. Edwards, Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature (Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 2005), 49. 11 Susan Bernstein, ‘It Walks: the Ambulatory Uncanny,’ Modern Language Notes 118 (2003): 1112. Immediately afterwards, she states: ‘The differences between presence and absence, and sameness and difference, self and other, are of course particularly at stake here. All of these pairs are troubled by the destabilization of binary opposition that Freud formulates as one of the fundamental features of the uncanny, that is, between the “heimlich” and the “unheimlich,” the “homey” and the “foreign,” the familiar and the strange. While the uncanny is often discussed in terms of these pairs, most importantly, the opposition itself is untenable,’in Bernstein, ‘It Walks,’ 1113. 12 Mladen Dolar, ‘“I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding Night:” Lacan and the Uncanny,’ October 58 (1991): 5-23; Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 2-20. 13 See Mladen Dolar, “‘I Shall Be with You,’” 7-14; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2005), 136179. 14 Mladen Dolar, ‘“I Shall Be with You”,’ 7.

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From this perspective, it might not be a coincidence that two of the most influential Philhellenes in the eighteenth century, Winckelmann and Hölderlin, never visited Greece. The disappointment felt by the protagonist of Hölderlin’s Hyperion when fighting for the freedom of the Hellenic territories may be considered an instance of this uncanniness and dissociation elicited by Greece in modernity. 16 About the concept of ‘Balkanism,’ see Katherine E. Fleming, “‘Orientalism,” the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography,’ The American Historical Review 105 (2000): 1218-1233. 17 For a full account of these questions, see Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1991), 13-48; Vangelis Calotychos, Modern Greece: A Cultural Poetics (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 23-60; Roderick Beaton, ‘Introduction,’ in The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, and the Uses of the Past (1797-1896), ed. Roderick Beaton and David Ricks (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 118. 18 See Fleming, “‘Orientalism”,’ 1221-1222. 19 See Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford: University Press, 1996). 20 Michael Herzfeld, ‘The Absent Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism,’ The South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (2002): 900-902. 21 ‘For the Greeks “self-colonization” is born out of their internalization of the lessons of Hellenism, which they perceive as both foreign and native, both Other and the Same. […] An autonomous self-conception of modern Greek identity devoid of the political and cultural values and categories of Europe is impossible, since the fashioning of neohellenic identity, its textualized determination, occurs at the same time as Western penetration. Moreover, the colonization of a culture that is within Europe and even considered to be Europe’s point of origin complicates any totalizing notions of “Europe” at this time. Parts of the “West” and “Europe” are themselves Other and subject to colonizations, as anyone in the Balkans need not be reminded. Within this paradigm, Greeks are not weak agents violated by discourse from without. The implication is that they have wielded their own selfcolonization all along―they are both their own “aggressors” and “victims”,’ in Calotychos, Modern Greece, 52-53. 22 Ibid., 50. 23 For the Serbian cases of the 1730s, see Erik Butler, Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film: Cultural Transformations in Europe, 1732-1933 (Rochester: Camden House, 2010), 27-50. 24 Antonio de Ferraris, De sytu Japygiae (Basel: Petrus Perna, 1558), 620-621. 25 All translations are mine, unless otherwise stated.

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Cornelius Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia Liber III (Lyon: Beringos Fratres, 1531), 430. 27 Martin Kraus, Turcograecia, book VII (Basel: Leonardus Ostenius, 1584), 490. 28 Leo Allatius, De Templis Graecorum recentioribus, De Narthece Ecclesiae Veteris, nec non De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus (Colonia: Iodocus Kalcovius, 1645), 142-158. 29 Allatius, De Templis Graecorum, 145, 151 and 157. 30 François Richard, Rélation de ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquable à l’isle de Sant-Erini, Isle de l’Archipel, depuis l’établissement des Pères de la Compagnie de Jésus en icelle (Paris: Sébastien Cramoisy, 1657), 208. 31 See for example Jean de Thévenot, Rélation d’un voyage fait au Levant (Paris: Thomas Joly, 1664); Jean-Baptiste Cotelier, Ecclesiae Graecae Monumenta (Paris: François Muguet, 1677); Paul Ricaut, The Present State of the Greek and Armenian Churches, Anno Christi 1678 Written at the Command of His Majesty (London: John Starkey, 1679); Thomas Smith, De Graecae Ecclesiae hodierno statu Epistola (Utrecht: Halma, 1698); Robert Saulger, Histoire nouvelle des anciens ducs et autres souverains de l’Archipel (Paris: Etienne Michallet, 1698); Paul Lucas, Voyage au Levant (Paris: Guillaume Vandive, 1704); François Pétis de la Croix, État présent des nations et Églises grecque, armenienne et maronite en Turquie (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1715); John Covel, Some Account of the Present Greek Church (Cambridge: Cornelius Crownfield, 1722). 32 Johann Michael Heineccius, Dissertatio Theologica Inauguralis De Absolutione Mortuorum Excommunicatorum vel Tympanicorum in Ecclesia Graeca (Helmstedt: Georg Wolfgang Hamm, 1709). 33 Apart from the works quoted below in detail, see, for example, Pierre Daniel Huet, Huetiana ou pensées diverses de M. Huet (Paris: Jacques Etienne, 1722); Antoine de la Barre de Beaumarchais, Lettres sérieuses et badines sur les ouvrages des savans, et sur d’autres matière (The Hague: Jean Van Duren, 1730); Joseph Heinrich Zedler, Großes vollständiges Universal-Lexikon aller Wissenschaften und Künste (Halle: Publisher unknown, 1732-54). 34 Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Relation d’un voyage du Levant (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1717), 133-134. 35 Ibid., 136. 36 Voltaire, A Philosophical Dictionary, Vol. VI (London: John and Henry L. Hunt, 1824), 304-308. 37 Ibid., 305. 38 About the overwhelming bibliography generated all across Western Europe by these events, see Hagen Schaub, Blutspuren. Die Geschichte der Vampir (Graz: Leykam, 2008), 119-146.

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Augustine Calmet, Dissertation sur les apparitions des anges, des démons et des esprits et sur les revenans [sic] et vampires de Hongrie, de Bohème, de Moravie et de Silesie (Paris: De Bure, 1746), 251-253. 40 Gerard Van Swieten, Abhandlung des Daseyns der Gespenster, nebst einem Anhange vom Vampyrismu (Augsburg: Publisher unknown, 1768), 6. 41 See Erik Butler, Metamorphoses of the Vampire, 52-105. 42 Johann Wilhelm von Goethe, Poems and Ballads (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1859), 24-34. 43 Robert Southey, Thalaba the Destroyer, Vol. II (London: Longman, 1821), 108118. 44 George Gordon Byron, The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. III (London: John Murray, 1900), 65-112. For more details about Byron’s paradoxical Philhellenism and the vampire in the Giaour, see Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (London: Routledge, 2004), 27-30; and Matthew Gibson, Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth-Century Near East (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 26-27. 45 John William Polidori, The Vampyre: A Tale (London: H. Colburn, 1819). 46 For some interesting considerations about the Philhellenic implications of Polidori’s Vampyre, see Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire, 30-34; and Matthew Gibson, Dracula, 15-41. 47 Cyprien Bérard, Lord Ruthwen ou les vampires (Paris: Ladvocat, 1820); Charles Nodier, Pierre Carmouche and Achille Jouffrey d’Abban, Le Vampire (Paris: 1820). A detailed study of this long line of vampire theatre derived from Polidori’s The Vampyre in the nineteenth century can be found in Roxana Stuart, Stage Blood: Vampires of the Nineteenth-Century Stage (Bowling Green: State University Press, 1994). 48 James Planché, The Vampire or, the Bride of the Isles (London: 1820); see Stuart, Stage Blood, 65-74. 49 Stuart, Stage Blood, 110-175. 50 Jules Michelet, La sorcière (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), 23. 51 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire livre X: L’angoisse (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 62-63. 52 For the parallels of this schema with the Lacanian account of castration and its links with the uncanny, see ibid., 142-171. 53 For further explanation of the terms ‘performance’ and ‘pedagogy’ in the (postcolonial) nation, see Homi K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation,’ 297-299. 54 Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 111-122. 55 See Derrida, Spectres, 10. 56 Adamantios Korais, Atakta, Vol. II (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1832-35), 85 (my translation); see also Atakta, Vol. V, 31.

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See Herzfeld, Anthropology, 7-10l; and Charles Stewart, Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 5. 58 Stewart, Demons and the Devil, 5-7. 59 Some of the most relevant ethnographical works that support the survivalist theory are Curt Wachsmuth, Das alte Griechenland im neuen (Bonn: Max Cohen, 1864), 116-125; Bernhard Schmidt, Das Volksleben der neugriechen und das hellenische Altertum (Lepizig: Publisher unknown, 1871), 157-159; Rennell Rodd, The Customs and Lore of Modern Greece (London: David Stott, 1892), 188-189; Lucy Mary Jane Garnett, Greek Folk Poesy, Edited with Essays on The Science of Folklore, Greek Folkspeech, and the Survival of Paganism (London: Guildford, 1896), 83-84; and John Cuthbert Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 377-384 and 412-430. While most of them do not accept Korais’s ancient etimology, they consider the belief to be of Classic origin. 60 See for example the episodes of mass hysteria in Naxos in 1826, narrated by Ion Dragoumis, Istorikai Anamniseis (Athens: Vilaras, 1874), 80-82. 61 See for example William Martin Leake, Travels in Northern Greece, vol. IV (London: Rodwell, 1835), 216-217; Robert Pashley, Travels in Crete, vol. II (Cambridge: John W. Parker, 1837), 226-227; Antonin Proust, ‘Voyage au Mont Athos,’ Le Tour du Monde (1858): 103-138; Charles Newton, Travels and Discoveries in the Levant (London: Day & Son, 1865), 212-213; Earl of Carnarvon, Reminiscences of Athens and the Morea: Extracts from a Journal of Travels in Greece in 1839 (London: John Murray, 1869), 161-164; M. Valentine Chirol, ’Twixt Greek and Turk or Jottings During a Journey Through Thessaly, Macedonia and Epirus, in the Autumn of 1880 (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1881), 102-103; James Theodore Bent, The Cyclades, or the Life among the Insular Greeks (London: Longmans, 1885), 45-46; and Roandeu Albert Henry Bickford-Smith, Cretan Sketches (London: Richard Bentley, 1898), 52-53. 62 Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore, 364. 63 Ibid., 371-372. 64 Dorothy Demetracopoulou Lee, ‘Greek Accounts of the Vrykolakas,’ The Journal of American Folklore 55 (1942): 126-132. 65 George Horton, Home of Nymphs and Vampires: The Greek Isles (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1929). 66 This was the slogan for a famous 2005 Greek National Tourism Organisation advertising campaign. The TV commercial showed exactly all the elements listed above (‘Live your Myth in Grece,’ viewed 15 January 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCWDdZYY1Bo. 67 On the concept of ‘heterotopia,’ see Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces,’ Diacritics 16 (1986): 22-27.

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‘Das Geschlecht der Hellenen ist in Europa ausgerottet. Schönheit der Körper, Sonnenflug des Geistes, Ebenmaß und Einfalt der Sitte, Kunst, Rennbahn, Stadt, Dorf, Säulenpracht und Tempel, ja sogar der Name ist von der Oberfläche des griechischen Kontinents verschwunden. […] auch nicht ein Tropfen echten und ungemischten Hellenenblutes in den Adern der christlichen Bevölkerung des heutigen Griechenlands fließet’ (‘The race of the Hellenes has been wiped out in Europe. Physical beauty, intellectual brilliance, innate harmony and simplicity, art, competition, city, village, the splendour of column and temple—indeed, even the name has disappeared from the surface of the Greek continent. […] Not the slightest drop of undiluted Hellenic blood flows in the veins of the Christian population of present-day Greece’), in Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea während des Mittelalters (Stuttgart: Gottaschen, 1830), iii. 69 About the Greek reactions to Fallmerayer’s theories, see Gourgouris, Dream Nation, 140-152. 70 See Peter Mackridge, Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 228-230. 71 Some of the ethnographic studies are: Nikolaos Politis, ‘Ai peri vrykolakon prolipseis para to lao tis Ellados’ (‘The superstitions about the vrykolakas among the Greek people’), Ilissós 2 (1870): 401-408; A. Papadopoulos, ‘Oi vrykolakes para Byzantinois’ (‘The vrykolakes among the Byzantine’), Omiros 5 (1877): 502505; Antonios Valintas, Kythniaka itoi tis nisou Kythnou Horografia kai Istoria meta tou viou ton synhronikon Kythnion (Kythniaka, or Geography and History of the Island of Kythnos with the customs of contemporary Kythnians) (Ermoupoli: Proodos, 1882), 125-126; H. K. Vozikis, ‘Vrykolakes,’ Athinais 7 (1882): 54-55; Nikolaos Politis, Meletai peri tou viou kai tis glossis tou ellinikou laou: Paradoseis (Studies on the Life and the Language of the Greek People: Traditions) (Athens: Sakellariou, 1904), passim; Spyros Lambros, ‘Markou Monahou Serron: Zitisis peri Voulkolakon’ (‘Monk Markos of Serres: Inquiry on Vrykolakes’), Neos Ellinomnimon 1 (1904): 337-352; K. Konstantinos, ‘I dynami ton vrykolakon’ (‘The Strength of Vrykolakes’), Imerologion Skokou 24 (1909): 264-267. An instance of poems published in periodical press: Stefanos Martzokis, ‘O vrykolakas: paradosis’ (‘The vrykolakas: tradition’), Estia 28 (1889): 206-207; Don kai Hotos (pseudonym), ‘O vrykolakas’ (‘The vrykolakas’), Asty 5 (1890): 3. As for the satirical narratives, see especially Leonidas Kanellopoulos, ‘O vrykolakas,’ Estia 37 (1894): 238-239; and Yorgos Stratiyis, ‘O vrykolakas,’ Imerologion Skokou 14 (1899): 193-196. 72 See Vassilis Lambropoulos, Literature as National Institution: Studies in the Politics of Modern Greek Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); and Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity. 73 Fredric Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,’ Social Text 15 (1986): 65-88.

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Aristotelis Valaoritis, Thanasis Vagias (Athens: Mermingas, 1990). Konstantinos Kazantzis, ‘To mnima tou aforesmenou,’ in To eliniko fantastiko diigima, vol. I, ed. Makis Panorios (Athens: Eolos, 1987), 75-82. 76 Achileas Paraschos, ‘O gyios tou vrykolaka,’ in To eliniko fantastiko diigima, vol. II, 185-190. 77 Andreas Karkavitsas, ‘O aforesmenos,’ in Diigimata (Athens: Estia, 1982), 90130. 78 Christos Christovassilis, ‘I alioti,’ in To eliniko fantastiko diigima, vol. III, 319324; Kostas Pasagiannis, ‘O vrykolakas,’ in To eliniko fantastiko diigima, vol. I, 235-240. 79 Valaoritis, Thanasis Vagias, 24; Paraschos, ‘O gyios tou vrykolaka,’ 188. 80 Stephen Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization,’ Victorian Studies 33 (1990): 621-645. 75

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__________________________________________________________________ Garnett, Lucy Mary Jane. Greek Folk Poesy, Edited with Essays on the Science of Folklore, Greek Folkspeech, and the Survival of Paganism. London: Guildford, 1896. Gelder, Ken. Reading the Vampire. London: Routledge, 2004. Gibson, Matthew. Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth-Century Near East. New York: Palgrave, 2006. Goethe, Johann Wilhelm von. Poems and Ballads. Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1859. Gourgouris, Stathis. Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Heineccius, Johann Michael. Dissertatio Theologica Inauguralis De Absolutione Mortuorum Excommunicatorum vel Tympanicorum in Ecclesia Graeca. Helmstedt: Georg Wolfgang Hamm, 1709. Herzfeld, Michael. Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. ———. ‘The Absent Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism.’ The South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (2002): 900-902. Horton, George. Home of Nymphs and Vampires: The Greek Isles. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1929. Huet, Pierre Daniel. Huetiana ou pensées diverses de M. Huet. Paris: Jacques Etienne, 1722. Jameson, Fredric. ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.’ Social Text 15 (1986): 65-88. Jusdanis, Gregory. Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1991. Kanellopoulos, Leonidas. ‘O vrykolakas.’ Estia 37 (1894): 238-239. Karkavitsas, Andreas. Diigimata. Athens: Estia, 1982.

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__________________________________________________________________ Kazantzis, Konstantinos. ‘To mnima tou aforesmenou.’ In To eliniko fantastiko diigima, vol. I, edited by Makis Panorios, 75-82. Athens: Eolos, 1987. Konstantinos, Kostís. ‘I dynami ton vrykolakon’ (‘The Strength of Vrykolakes’). Imerologion Skokou 24 (1909): 264-267. Korais, Adamantios. Atakta. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1832-35. Kraus, Martin. Turcograeciae Libri Octo: Quibus Graecorum Status Sub Imperio Turcico, in Politia et Ecclesia, Oeconomia et Scholis, iam inde ab amissa Constantinopoli, ad haec usque tempora, luculenter describitur. Basel: Leonardus Ostenius, 1584. Lacan, Jacques. Le séminaire livre X: L’angoisse. Paris: Seuil, 2004. Lambropoulos, Vassilis. Literature as National Institution: Studies in the Politics of Modern Greek Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Lambros, Spyros. ‘Markou Monahou Serron: Zitisis peri Voulkolakon’ (‘Monk Markos of Serres: Inquiry on Vrykolakes’). Neos Ellinomnimon 1 (1904): 337-352. Lawson, John Cuthbert. Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910. Leake, William Martin. Travels in Northern Greece. London: Rodwell, 1835. Lucas, Paul. Voyage au Levant. Paris: Guillaume Vandive, 1704. Mackridge, Peter. Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Martzokis, Stefanos. ‘O vrykolakas: paradosis’ (‘The vrykolakas: tradition’). Estia 28 (1889): 206-207. Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept: the Freudian Uncanny in Late-TwentiethCentury Theory. New York: New York State University, 2011. Michelet, Jules. La sorcière. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966. Newton, Charles. Travels and Discoveries in the Levant. London: Day & Son, 1865.

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__________________________________________________________________ Nodier, Charles, Pierre Carmouche and Achille Jouffrey d’Abban. Le vampire. Paris: 1820. Panorios, Makis. To eliniko fantastiko diigima. Athens: Eolos, 1987. Papadopoulos, A. ‘Oi vrykolakes para Byzantinois’ (‘The vrykolakes among the Byzantine’). Omiros 5 (1877): 502-505. Paraschos, Achileas. ‘O gyios tou vrykolaka.’ In To eliniko fantastiko diigima, vol. II, edited by Makis Panorios, 185-190. Athens: Eolos, 1987. Pasagiannis, Kostas. ‘O vrykolakas.’ In To eliniko fantastiko diigima, vol. I, edited by Makis Panorios, 235-240. Athens: Eolos, 1987. Pashley, Robert. Travels in Crete. Cambridge: John W. Parker, 1837. Pétis de la Croix, François. État présent des nations et Églises grecque, armenienne et maronite en Turquie. Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1715. Planché, James. The Vampir, or the Bride of the Isles. London: Publisher unknown, 1820. Polidori, John William. The Vampyre: A Tale. London: H. Colburn, 1819. Politis, Nikolaos. ‘Ai peri vrykolakon prolipseis para to lao tis Ellados’ (‘The Superstitions About the vrykolakas Among the Greek people’). Ilissós 2 (1870): 401-408. ———. Meletai peri tou viou kai tis glossis tou ellinikou laou: Paradoseis (Studies on the Life and the Language of the Greek People: Traditions). Athens: Sakellariou, 1904. Proust, Antonin. ‘Voyage au Mont Athos.’ Le Tour du Monde 2 (1858): 103-138. Ricaut, Paul. The Present State of the Greek and Armenian Churches, Anno Christi 1678 Written at the Command of His Majesty. London: John Starkey, 1679. Richard, François. Rélation de ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquable à l’isle de Sant-Erini, Isle de l’Archipel, depuis l’établissement des Pères de la Compagnie de Jésus en icelle. Paris: Sébastien Cramoisy, 1657.

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__________________________________________________________________ Rodd, Rennell. The Customs and Lore of Modern Greece. London: David Stott, 1892. Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. New York: Routledge, 2003. Saulger, Robert. Histoire nouvelle des anciens ducs et autres souverains de l’Archipel. Paris: Etienne Michallet, 1698. Schaub, Hagen. Blutspuren: Die Geschichte der Vampir. Graz: Leykam, 2008. Schmidt, Bernhard. Das Volksleben der neugriechen und das hellenische Altertum. Lepizig: Publisher unknown, 1871. Smith, Thomas. De Graecae Ecclesiae hodierno statu Epistola. Utrecht: Halma, 1698. Southey, Robert. Thalaba the Destroyer. London: Longman, 1821. Stewart, Charles. Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Stratiyis, Yorgos. ‘O vrykolakas.’ Imerologion Skokou 14 (1899): 193-196. Stuart, Roxana. Stage Blood: Vampires of the Nineteenth-Century Stage. Bowling Green: State University Press, 1994. Thévenot, Jean de. Rélation d’un voyage fait au Levant. Paris: Thomas Joly, 1664. Tournefort, Joseph Pitton de. Relation d’un voyage du Levant, fait par ordre du Roy. Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1717. Valaoritis, Aristotelis. Thanasis Vagias. Athens: Mermingas, 1990. Valintas, Antonios. Kythniaka itoi tis nisou Kythnou Horografia kai Istoria meta tou viou ton synhronikon Kythnion (Kythniaka, or Geography and History of the Island of Kythnos with the Customs of Contemporary Kythnians). Ermoupoli: Proodos, 1882. Van Swieten, Gerard. Abhandlung des Daseyns der Gespenster, nebst einem Anhange vom Vampyrismus. Augsburg: Publisher unknown, 1768.

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__________________________________________________________________ Voltaire. A Philosophical Dictionary. Translated by John G. Gorton. London: John and Henry L. Hunt, 1824. Vozikis, H. K. ‘Vrykolakes.’ Athinais 7 (1882): 54-55. Wachsmuth, Curt. Das alte Griechenland im neuen. Bonn: Max Cohen, 1864. Weber, Samuel. ‘The Sideshow, or Remarks on a Canny Show.’ Modern Language Notes 88 (1973): 1102-1122. ———. The Legend of Freud. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Zedler, Joseph Heinrich. Großes vollständiges Universal-Lexikon Wissenschaften und Künste. Halle: Publisher unknown, 1732-54.

aller

Álvaro García Marín is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University. He is currently conducting research on Modern Greek fantastic fiction, and especially on the figure of the Greek vampire, the vrykolakas, and its implications in the process of national construction.

Muslim Monsters/American Heroes: Sleeper Cell and Homeland as the New Face of Fear Teresa Cutler-Broyles Abstract The fears: Muslims take over the world, impose Sharia law; Muslims wreak havoc, violently and indiscriminately attack Western values; Muslims infiltrate society, blend in until they cannot be seen for what they are. The reality: Muslims, generally conflated with Arabs, have populated American film since its inception. Drawing on a legacy of European Orientalism and fuelled by a distinctly American Orientalism, filmic representations have both created and fed the stereotype of the sinister Muslim who is inherently to be feared: a monster. They have long stood in as celluloid enemies regardless of storyline or plausibility across genres. Portrayed as always violent and untrustworthy, often incoherently fanatical, and sometimes easy to fool, their monstrosity has been unquestioned and understood as natural, part of the Muslim nature. Typically, these monsters lived out there and had to travel from their lairs to perform their evil deeds. They were easy to identify—by their crazed eyes and unruly hair, by their accents and strange fanaticism—and although terrifying were not terribly resilient. Since September 11, 2001, however, Muslims villains have become adept at blending in. Though the stereotype is still alive and well in Hollywood movies, on the small screen Muslims have become slippery, chameleon-like, able to assume the guise of their surroundings. This makes them harder to identify and therefore far more monstrous. I discuss this phenomenon as it manifests in two American television shows post-9/11, Sleeper Cell and Homeland, and show how the Muslim monster has shape-shifted from crazed fanatic to coldly efficient sociopath, and how this is in lockstep with American policy. When these television representations show the Muslim monster as the boy—or girl—next door, they become perfect embodiments of the larger fear of the future that runs rampant online, in internet TV talk shows, and in foreign relations between states. Key Words: Muslims, Arabs, monsters, representations, fear, Sleeper Cell, Homeland, popular culture, Orientalism. ***** 1. Introduction: Our Monsters/Ourselves ‘An American POW has been turned.’1 For an American television audience late in 2011, these words, spoken by Claire Danes’s character Carrie Mathison in the pilot for the television show Homeland (2011),2 reverberated loudly. In conjunction with the visuals of the opening scene—a confrontation in an Iraqi prison between Mathison and an Iraqi

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__________________________________________________________________ prisoner—this deceptively simple statement encapsulated a myriad of fears running deep in the American psyche3: of the Muslim, of Islam, of other. These fears existed long before September 11, 2001, though were exacerbated on that date which marks a new era of both real and representational blowback that is visually evident in American culture, particularly in film and TV. The monster out there—the Arab, the Muslim, the terrorist—has become the monster within. Mathison in the above quote is referring to an American soldier she has been given word of who has gone over, become enemy. In essence, the body—of the soldier and by extension the nation—has changed into something other, following a centuries’ long tradition of monstrous metamorphism that is often unpredictable and always terrifying. Typically when a monster shape-shifts, he or she becomes something else, an Other. That is how we know to be afraid. Ordinary men and women become flesheating zombies, blood-sucking vampires, fanged wolves, physically repulsive serial killers. But when the monster’s transmutation makes him or her look more like us instead of more monstrous, this shape-shifting takes on a darker aspect. That metamorphosis—that evolution, as it were—and the assumptions that underlie these representations of Muslims-as-monsters in Sleeper Cell (2005-2006)4 and Homeland, present us with an opportunity to face not just the creatures that live beyond our boundaries but the ones that live next door. These two series, of course, were not the first to represent the Middle East,5 Middle Easterners, and/or Muslims as enemy. Muslims—conflated regularly with Arabs, terrorists, and the Middle East—have long been America’s go-to monster in television and film, crossing genres as well as national borders to wreak havoc in stories ranging from comedy to thriller to science fiction to children’s animated entertainment. Innumerable studies have been done on the way Orientalism6 laid the groundwork for the utility of using characters coded as Middle Eastern, Muslim, and Arab in visual representations for Western audiences; these representations have been an effective shorthand for exoticism, eroticism, and redemption for Americans since the nation’s inception. Intimate involvement with that area of the world, and America’s long-term interests including religion, oil, and war have created a distinctly American Orientalism that has manifested in a number of ways; fear has been one such manifestation. Since September 11, this fear has been exploited in ways both subtle and overt by the American entertainment media, and the message is unmistakable: Muslims will try, one way or another, to conquer the world, typically through violence, with the intent of imposing their ideology on innocent—American—people. Since the birth of film and TV, these representations have been utilized as readily available shorthands for evil, for Other, for danger. Historically, most of these Muslim monsters in American popular entertainment have been portrayed as terrorists, wild-haired, wild-eyed men—and some women—who had in their irrational fanaticism travelled a great distance from their home to attack the Great

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__________________________________________________________________ Satan by, generally, attempting to blow up an American city or a sports arena or a government building. Typically, because they were so easily identified, they were also thwartable, their plots subverted by the hard work and intuitive leaps of logic by American anti-terrorism heroes. When the World Trade Center fell, however, television Muslim monsters morphed into something both less visible and more everyday, ubiquitous, reflecting a new sense of American vulnerability, and doubling down on the fear. While there has been a concerted effort recently on the part of TV executives to portray Muslims more even-handedly, the representations in Sleeper Cell and Homeland are almost inevitable in the evolution of the Muslim film monster from Valentino’s Sheik of the 1920s,7 through the evil caliphs as exemplified in 1942’s Road to Morocco, to the arbitrarily violent shooters in Back to the Future (1985) and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wild-eyed, crazy-haired nemesis in True Lies (1994), into quieter, less visible but no less deadly monsters of today—and of the future. In essence, the Other-monster becomes the Sleeper-monster who, in turn, becomes the Hero-monster. Of course one of the most popular television shows to come out of the post9/11 milieu was the television show 24 (2001-2010). In its eight seasons it attracted much criticism for its portrayal of Muslims as terrorists. Because much has already been written8 about 24s’s villains, many of whom were coded as Middle Eastern and, in accordance with Orientalist structures, therefore Muslim, terrorist, and monster, I have chosen to focus instead on two other shows which have received less attention.9 In large part while I believe 24 deserves this critical attention, my decision to pass it by rests on the fact that its Muslim monsters were typically highly visible villains, easily recognizable as both villainous and of Middle Eastern origin. In Homeland and Sleeper Cell this stereotype is deconstructed, the monsters are not so easily identifiable, and therefore neither are the heroes. 2. Representing the Terrorist What does it mean to represent something visually? How does a representation of something come to mean anything, and more important for this discussion, how does it come to mean the same thing to large groups of people? Stuart Hall tells us that to represent means ‘to symbolize, stand for, to be a specimen of, or to substitute for’10 a particular concept or cultural truth. He also tells us that this meaning-making occurs within groups where there are shared understandings of the world, and that images never carry meaning on their own but that they accumulate meaning over time and across texts.11 In an American context—one could argue a Western context in general—this shared culture includes a history of Orientalism that has incorporated in no small part the use of the Middle Eastern and/or Muslim and/or Arab other as something to be feared.12 Within this framework, American TV has functioned as a channel for meaning, through news programs and drama—and sometimes both together. Immediately

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__________________________________________________________________ following the collapse of the Twin Towers, news programs ‘took on a new mission, which was to package the events for ongoing consumption,’13 transforming them into a ‘form of public drama’14 that blurred the distinction between truth and fiction. This had the effect of endowing television shows that dealt with this drama—this trauma—with the power to represent something different from the typical Orientalist figure Americans assumed they knew, and to have it read by audiences in particular ways that would lend believability to its message. It is with this in mind that I begin my investigation into the representation of the way Muslims/Arabs/Middle Eastern Others have changed, and the ways they have continued to be markers for ever-shifting boundaries between us and them. 3. What’s in a Name? This collection examines various embodiments of what Stephen Asma has identified as a prototype category, i.e, that ‘[t]he term and the concept of monster is a prototype category.’15 Prototype theory, postulated by Ludwig Wittgenstein,16 boils down to the concept that not any one instance of an object or animal or, indeed, monster, will contain or exhibit all the characteristics that the term itself can encompass. Frankenstein’s creature, a zombie, a serial killer, a siren, a clone, a vampire—each of them is unique, none of them holds within it the essential ingredient needed by all in order to be defined as monster, and yet they all have been grouped together in not only this work but in the public imagination as belonging to the category of monster. They share some overlapping similarities that allow this. Asma lists a number of characteristics that have been understood to be part of this overlap, including the one that he states is universal, persistent, and yet I would argue is shifting in today’s cultural reality. He tells us that ‘inner monstrosity is supposed to manifest itself on the physical body of the creature; evil and ugly are enduring correlations’17 and that ‘[t]he correlation of moral character and physical morphology is an enduring aspect of monsterology.’18 However, a number of the authors in this collection have examined monsters that in fact do not display this outer ugliness, and in so doing have countered this contention. Monsters, it appears, do not in fact need to be ugly; they can be beautiful, handsome, intelligent, seemingly innocuous. They can even be human. Such are the Muslim monsters of my examination. 4. Contamination and Purity The plot of Sleeper Cell focuses on Darwyn al-Sayeed, a black man who is an undercover FBI agent, and Muslim. These characteristics are significant as he infiltrates a terrorist cell, all of whose members are also Muslim, and as he must make choices that put his values, but never his patriotism, to the test. The hero stays a hero, the enemy is always the enemy—identifiable not because he or she

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__________________________________________________________________ exhibits all the right characteristics but because, despite an outer appearance far less frightening than we have been led to expect through a century of filmic, and then television, exposure, the monstrous characteristics become visible despite their lack of visible deformity. With the opening of the first episode we hear pseudo-Middle Eastern music and see the title written in letters shaped to resemble Arabic; the assumption here is that this image, combined with the music, will connect to the title—Sleeper Cell—and play on our pre-existing expectations and fears: Middle East equals Arabs equals terrorists. The next image is that of minarets, and we simultaneously hear a call to prayer and add another element to the mix—Islam. Again, image and sound combine to reinforce what we have already begun to piece together, and our expectations are both satisfied and confounded when the camera pulls back to reveal prison bars and a praying black man. For the American audience, this combination is filled with easy-to-read symbolism. The notion of equating blackness with criminality is deeply embedded in American culture. This adds a twist to the Muslim/terrorism image we have been presented with to this point and makes the perceived monster that much more monstrous. When we find out at the end of the first episode that this black Muslim is also our hero, an ex-special operative and an undercover FBI agent, we relax. We dismiss the initial assumptions of which we may not even have been aware, and hold onto the politically correct hope that he is a good man despite his religion. After all, he is an American military man, so, by default, a hero. Our trust is rewarded as he infiltrates the terrorist cell and roots out the real Muslim monsters. The plot of Sleeper Cell could fall into the category of just another terroristthemed suspense drama about Muslims if not for one significant difference—its exposure of a particular kind of enemy, and the fear this generates in the audience. Primed to recognise monsters, we are at first confused, then frightened, and finally horrified when we realise this is a different kind of creature than those we are familiar with. Rather than conforming to our expectations, the members of the cell are not wild-eyed fanatics easily picked out in a crowd by their furtive behaviour and darting looks. They are, as stated on the DVD cover, our ‘friends, neighbours, and husbands’19: Tommy Emmerson, blond, Berkeley-born and raised, works in a bowling alley; Christian Aumont, a French playboy, drives a tour bus in Los Angeles; and Ilija Korjenić, an Eastern European, likes to rap and to sing karaoke. The only familiar monstrous trait is the one we have been taught to deem inevitable—they are all Muslim. Yet, because they are not coded as Middle Eastern we would not take a second look if we passed them on the street, we would not search them at the airport, we would not put them on watch lists. Two cell members do fit our expectations superficially; both are Middle Eastern, both have dark hair and dark eyes, and following Asma we might be forgiven if we default to the stereotype and believe them to be evil. Yet they confound us, and make us question what we (think we) know. One acts just like an

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__________________________________________________________________ everyday American, talking about his daughter and throwing her a birthday party in the park, yet there he plots to pull off the next terrorist attack. The other is the cell leader, a Saudi named Farik, and finally we see someone who is appropriately fanatical. He talks of jihad and commitment to the cause and he is coldly psychopathic as he executes a member of his own cell. Yet, in the world at large he passes as a respected Jewish community member and owns a high-profile security company. Season Two adds a Mexican-American ex-con and a German woman as additional Muslim monsters/terrorists and our fear ratchets up a notch. These people do not function the way such monsters are supposed to, they do not hide in the shadows and in fact are living in the open, just like us. In this breaking away from the Middle Eastern monster Americans expected, Sleeper Cell marked an important moment in American television.20 No longer were Americans able to take comfort in the belief that the Muslim monsters they thought they knew were outside the boundaries, on the periphery and relatively easy to identify. With Sleeper Cell, they became everyday people in our places of worship, our spaces of leisure, our methods of transportation, and our hallowed tourist sites. This is a theme that will carry through to Homeland, culminating in an important—and even more powerful—juxtaposition between and correlation of hero and monster. Yet, we could still cling to the belief that they were different from us. Our hero was an American military man, a soldier, a defender of the country’s morals and values and the lives of its citizens. Most importantly, despite exposure he maintained his purity and never became the monster he battled. Even their shared religion did not pull him into their darkness. Into this relatively stable representation of the Muslim monster entered Showtime’s 2011 series Homeland. As with Sleeper Cell, the conjunction of sound and image in Homeland’s opening credits for all of Season One goes to work on our psyche immediately. It is a montage of sound bites from the real world, featuring presidents past and present decrying terrorism and terrorists, images of the World Trade Center in flames and of various after-effects of terrorism worldwide, combined with screen shots from the fictional world of the show and lines spoken by characters that reinforce the theme. The documentary feel of the opening adds verisimilitude, and the show hooks us immediately, effective in large part due to our conditioned expectations: Muslims are the bad guys, the liars and cheats, the fanatics, the suicide bombers. These opening images for Homeland are reinforced by the aforementioned significant line in the pilot episode—that of Danes’ character, Carrie Mathison: ‘An American POW has been turned’21—and we’re primed to suspect anyone.22 Perhaps everyone. We meet our hero—a true, American hero—Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody, as he is being rescued from eight years as a prisoner of war, and while accolades are being heaped upon him suspicions accrue as Mathison sets out to prove that he is not what he appears. Throughout most of Season One Brody is the personification of a hero—he is a U.S. soldier, a prisoner of war who has endured

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__________________________________________________________________ torture at the hands of al Qaeda operatives. He is publically upheld as an example of how pure American values can defy and defeat any evil. Yet the viewer is privy to far more than Mathison is and we discover before she does that she is right; the hero has been turned. Brody, after all, is not as pure as he seems. First we find out that he has converted to Islam and this puts a chink in our blind hero-worship, but until he dons the suicide vest, we hold out. After all, Sleeper Cell taught us that heroes can be Muslim. But Brody betrays us, and this betrayal is particularly devastating. We have given him our trust. He is what we most admire, Yet, he becomes the Other we most fear. The body—physical, national, and political—has been split and the monster has entered through the cracks. It is here and it is us/U.S. We watch him donning a suicide vest, recording a suicide video, and pushing the suicide/murder button. His motivation? Revenge for the killing of Pakistani children, including the son of the al Qaeda leader who has both kept him captive and accepted Brody into his family. Islam contaminates the body American; Islam and the Middle East are still the threat, but the carrier of meaning has changed. The American-turned-terrorist is now the enemy. The revelation that the archetype of the soldier/hero/good guy is easily transmutable into the bad guy, is particularly striking when it takes place in the realm of popular culture. Film theorist James Snead tells us that images can have ‘political, ideological, and psychological effects.’23 Because we recognize in these images something that concerns us—in this case both heroism and terrorism— they, and the story in which they are embedded, become ‘a social and political statement about the nature of things.’24 This works on our psyches in a number of ways. Snead discusses an important aspect of this when he tells us that film makes claims on the truth. He suggests that film is ‘a series of recorded and repeatable moving images that aims to make a viewer believe in the story or reality it claims to portray,’25 This is not to be understood as a claim that films tell us the whole truth, or that they do not also tell us tales of fantasy, but that our tendency to want to believe—or, our suspension of disbelief—is reinforced by both the images on screen and the context in which we view them. In this case, the context is postSeptember 11, 2001, America, when fear of Muslims runs rampant in, especially, the American media, and the images are crafted so that they invoke already-extant, filmic-based cultural knowledge: Arab/Muslim=terrorist/other. As Snead says: ‘Clearly one believes what one expects to believe, or what one is prepared to believe.’26 So we buy into the truths we are presented with on the small screen: the Muslim monster from Sleeper Cell has evolved and Homeland has envisioned the next logical step—the hero-monster. This evolution is America’s fears made manifest, coalescing, finally, in a representation that is both out there, and inside. This slippage, from hero to monster, is significant not only in American popular culture but also in the country’s internal politics and foreign relations. This process is vital to recognize. Without making claims on direct cause and effect, it

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__________________________________________________________________ seems clear, as Stephen Asma tells us, that ‘[d]emonizing or monstering other groups has […] become part of the cycle of American politics’27 and that ‘[s]eeing other races and ethnicities as monstrous has […] aided much of the international warfare of the twentieth century.’28 The last ten years are a vivid example of how this plays out. And yet, there exists a layer beyond this easy, one-to-one relation. While ostensibly about Americans threatened by Muslims, in actuality these shows are less about the reality of the threat than they are about the way their images of Muslims function; specifically they are vivid examples of how U.S. identity is constructed in relation to the monsters created through those images. Slavoj Žižek tells us: Whenever we encounter such a purely evil Outside, we should gather the courage to endorse the Hegelian lesson: in this pure Outside, we should recognize the distilled version of our own essence.29 Seeing this play out as an archetypal hero transforms into an archetypal monster is indicative of just how closely the two are entwined. This shift, this transmutation is, I believe, a function of the evolution of these particular American monsters, and speaks to the core of why we need to pay attention to not just these particular representations but to the process as an indicator of a deeper reality. In Sleeper Cell the only thing standing between us and them was our hero, a soldier who had to fight to prove himself as one of them while maintaining his identity as one of us. Ironically this created for the viewer a dual identity for the hero that, like all dualities, is always suspect. In Sleeper Cell this duality ultimately does not push him over the edge into the abyss, but as the television Muslim monster evolved Homeland illustrates a darker path. Brody the soldier, our hero, is the bulwark against all that threatens us, the knight between us and the monster, and he betrays us. In this light, Franco Moretti’s suggestion that ‘the monster expresses the anxiety that the future will be monstrous’30 rings true. The future will be monstrous because, if even those whose historic job it is to protect us against the denizens of the periphery have failed and in fact have become what we most fear, what chance do the rest of us have? Even more chilling is Moretti’s contention that ‘modern monsters […] threaten to live forever and to conquer the world,’31 a sentiment echoed stridently by any number of vitriolic voices in the U.S.32 Rush Limbaugh33 tells us that Islam is: a religion that practices Sharia law; that kills anybody who won't convert; that holds horrible public executions; cuts off people's heads in revenge killings with rusty knives and kills their own

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__________________________________________________________________ daughters and wives in honor killings; hates puppies, doesn't like dogs; invades countries like parasites and refuses to assimilate, and it's growing by leaps and bounds.34 His hate rants35 reflect an extreme but not uncommon fear that Muslims’ worldview36 is fundamentally different than those of the nation Limbaugh purports to be speaking for. And he is not alone. Michael Savage is another hate-monger on talk radio in the U.S. He has this to say on the subject: I'm not gonna put my wife in a hijab. And I'm not gonna put my daughter in a burqa. And I'm not gettin on my all-fours and braying to Mecca. And you could drop dead if you don't like it. You can shove it up your pipe. I don't wanna hear anymore about Islam. I don't wanna hear one more word about Islam. Take your religion and shove it up your behind. I'm sick of you.37 In the face of this kind of rhetoric, we cannot be surprised when our mediated heroes cross the boundaries, blur into our monsters, and blend into the very fabric of our social identity. They have become contaminated. In effect, what this heromonster is warning us about is that we are no longer, if we ever were, pure. We have already become—perhaps we are always already—what we fear. And as we continue to project impure and undesirable traits—traits that we suspect we ourselves have—onto a surrogate so that it stands for all things impure, and then destroy that surrogate in order to rid ourselves of that impurity, we continually reset the norm. We can go about our daily lives secure in the belief that we have indeed gotten rid of something out there that threatened us. Yet Homeland debunks this, and does so with a not-so-subtle critique of American policy. Implicit in the story line is the reality of U.S. involvement in the creation of its own monsters. While this critique ran through Sleeper Cell, it was the terrorists who spoke it; in Homeland, it is the American hero-monster. As we watch, horrified at the actions taken by this creature who looks just like we do, we realize that the dangers he warns us against are not so much about the violation or transgression of the boundaries between us and them. Instead, these representations of Muslim monsters as not just everyday Americans, but the ultra-American, rupture the illusion that there is any separation at all between the two. 5. Cleansing For most people, however, the monstrous characteristics that Limbaugh and Savage’s Muslims exhibit are so far removed, so outlandish, that it seems impossible that any American could embody them, could become so monstrous. Yet, this possibility is in fact what the entire plot of Homeland hinges on. Sergeant Brody does indeed complete this transformation. But he does not simply decide

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__________________________________________________________________ one day while in captivity to become a terrorist, to perform acts of violence directed against his own country. He has a reason. Unlike our understanding of a Middle Eastern terrorist who is violent and heartless by nature—a characterization that is profoundly incorrect—Sergeant Brody chooses the path of terror only after a (an Arab) child he loves is killed, along with a large number of other children, by an American drone strike in Pakistan that is subsequently covered up. This is an intriguing point, a critique of the American military and the American government’s callous actions, and offers a moment of reflection which is significant. It gives reason to otherwise irrational actions, and viewers are stymied as a result. If an Americans can act like a monster at such provocation, his identity shaken to such a degree, and the most American of heroes can become something Other, what would we do in that situation? And how real is that/our American identity in the first place? Rene Girard tells us that ‘[w]hen differences begin to shift back and forth the cultural order loses its stability.’38 History, cultural theory, psychology, countless novels, and films from the outset of the medium tell us that the only way to right that instability is to kill the monster. But if our popular culture bombards us with images that are no longer Other, that do not follow the scripts we have been taught, and that dress in different clothing, this only gives us more reason to fear those monsters who have shape-shifted so successfully they have become indistinguishable from ourselves. 6. Conclusion: Burning at the Stake Dr. Frankenstein stitched together pieces of dismembered humans to create a creature so impure, so transgressive a bricolage, that its destruction was inevitable. We can identify it easily; its inner monstrosity is visible on its body. Many of today’s monsters are less easily identifiable, and are the more monstrous for it. In both Sleeper Cell and Homeland, the monsters pass as non-monstrous. We are fooled both as ‘knowledgeable and cooperative viewers’39 and as post-9/11 subjects, and our expectations are destabilized. We shouldn’t be surprised, though, at the ease with which these monsters blend in. The blurring of boundaries is a common monstrous trait, and these new Muslim monsters are no exception. In Sleeper Cell these monsters are destroyed in appropriately horrific ways, satisfying the viewers’ need to cleanse the world—and the airwaves—of the dangers inherent in a life lived in proximity to those we fear. Homeland is still on the air so it’s hard to know what the outcome will be; if history is any judge, Sergeant Brody will meet a satisfyingly gruesome end, despite his recent unconvincing turn toward redemption. We won’t be satisfied with less; we need him to be the monster because we have identified him as such, and in a world in which the monsters are no longer identifiable by their appearance we are afraid that if he escapes us we will be faced with yet another possible construct that, unlike Frankenstein’s creature, displays no easily identifiable marks. This (desired)

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__________________________________________________________________ ending precludes any chance at redemption—though it has been offered—and we feel justified in our bloodlust due to our shared culture; we know what this representation signifies, and it is a truth we cannot yet face. Asma tells us that ‘perceived monsters bring out monstrous reactions.’40 The monster out there becomes the monster in us/U.S. And when our only response to a monster is to set out, pitchforks in hand, to capture and burn him in effigy, this bars any other possibility. This spectacle becomes a ‘ceremony of punishment […] an exercise of “terror”,’41 and we complete our own transformation, becoming the very thing we fear as the flames rise and the monster writhes, impaled by manufactured fear and held to the fire by our refusal to see ourselves at its core.

Notes 1

POW refers to Prisoner of War. Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, Homeland, created by Gideon Raff, TV show (2011-2013; New York: Showtime, Teakwood Lane Productions, Cherry Pie Productions, Keshet Media Group, and Fox 21, 2011-2013), DVD. Homeland is based on an Israeli TV show, Hatufim, which aired in 2010 on Israel’s Channel 2. With the English-language title Prisoners of War, the series began airing in the UK on Sky Arts in 2012. 3 This fear is not just American, nor is it specific to post-9/11, which I discuss in this chapter. 4 Ethan Reiff, Sleeper Cell, directed by Ziad Doueiri (2005-2006; New York: Showtime, 2006-2007), DVD. 5 The Middle East is not a specific entity. It is first of all a term inextricably linked to colonial and empirical projects perpetrated by European countries against those eastward from Europe—i.e., the East—and has included different areas and nations at different periods of time. This ever-shifting entity is therefore a political construct, and as such is hard to pin down. I use the term here as it is used in the United States to refer to those countries we are politically and/or militarily involved with: Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Egypt, and so on. 6 A citational discourse whereby the Orient is delineated by various, specific, gendered, and power-related relationships to the West. It is a well-established discipline in Cultural Theory, and was originally discussed by Edward Said in his 1978 book Orientalism. Since its publication, Orientalism has become one of most important lenses through which the Middle East is studied. 7 In The Sheik (1921) and The Son of The Sheik (1926). 8 See, for example, Stacy Takacs, Terrorism TV: Popular Entertainment in Post9/11 America (Kansas: University Press, 2012); Jennifer Weed, Richard Davis, and Ronald Weed, 24 and Philosophy: The World According to Jack, 1st Edition (New Jersey: Blackwell, 2007); as well as Daniel Pipes, ‘“24” and Hollywood's Discovery of Radical Islam,’ Viewed 1 March 2013, 2

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__________________________________________________________________ http://www.danielpipes.org/2332/24-and-hollywoods-discovery-of-radical-islam. 9 This is true as of this writing in early 2013. If online sources are any indication, however, Homeland has the potential to rack up a comparable amount of attention, if it continues to be renewed for Showtime. 10 Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage Publications, Ltd., 2002), 16. 11 Ibid., 238. 12 For more on this phenomenon, see especially Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2001); Jack Shaheen, Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs after 9/11 (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2008); and Tim Semmerling, ‘Evil’ Arabs in Popular Film: Orientalist Fear (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008). For further exploration of this concept as well as the phenomenon of Orientalism and American Orientalism, see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Hilton Obenzinger, American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Melanie McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media & U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does it Feel to be a Problem: Being Young and Arab in America (New York: The Penguin Group, 2009); Malini Johar Schueller, U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790-1890 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); Lester I. Vogel, To See a Promised Land: Americans and the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993); and Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Three Leaves Press/Doubleday, 2004) for some background in the roots of today’s terrorism in U.S. foreign policy. 13 Takacs, Terrorism TV, 30. 14 Ibid. 15 Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of our Worst Fears (New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2009), 282. 16 As discussed in Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence, ed., Concepts: Core Readings (United States: Bradford, 1999). 17 Asma, On Monsters, 283. 18 Ibid. 19 This phrase is paraphrased from the cover of Sleeper Cell’s Season One DVD boxed set released by Showtime in 2006. It was written originally as ‘Friends. Neighbours. Husbands.’

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__________________________________________________________________ 20

This moment was shared in part by the TV show 24 (see endnote 8), and for an indication of how Muslim stereotypes began to change, see Souheila Al-Jadda, ‘“Sinister Muslim” stereotype fades,’ USA Today, Viewed 6 January 2012, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/NEWS/usaedition/2009-12-15column15_ST_U.htm. 21 Alex Gansa, Howard Gordon, Gideon Raff, Homeland, ‘Pilot,’ Episode 101, directed by Michael Cuesta, TV show (2011; New York: Showtime, 2011), DVD. 22 Carrie’s statement, made to her boss, kicks the plot of Homeland into a new direction; it is her point of view, and her suspicions, that the viewer is made to identify with. 23 James Snead, White Screens/Black Images (New York: Routledge, 1994), 132. 24 Ibid., 133. 25 Ibid.,134. 26 Ibid. 27 Asma, On Monsters, 234. 28 Ibid. 29 Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Desert and the Real,’ last modified 17 September 2001, viewed 15 August 2012, http://www.lacan.com/zizek-welcome.htm. 30 Franco Moretti, ‘The Dialectic of Fear,’ New Left Review 136 (1982): 68. 31 Ibid. 32 This stridency is echoed as well by many across the world in relation to Muslims, and the voices are getting louder. 33 Rush Limbaugh bills himself as a Conservative radio talk show host. He is positioned politically on the far right wing of the Republican party, and he is known for his vehemence when it comes to matters of culture and politics; typically this is directed at Democrats, Liberals, and Progressives, as well as anyone who does not share his views. See ‘The Rush Limbaugh Show online,’ Viewed 28 March 2012, http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/. 34 ‘“Party of Limbaugh” is Polling Great; Islamophobic is New Racist,’ last modified 7 September 2012, viewed 28 March 2013, http://webtest1.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_090710/content/01125112.gues t.html. 35 This is but one example. Many more can be found across the Internet by searching for Rush Limbaugh + Islam. 36 In itself this exposes a fundamental flaw; the belief that more than 2.5 million people would share one worldview is patently, measurably, ridiculous. 37 This excerpt can be found in numerous formats online and in print; see Michael Savage, ‘Does the U.S. Tolerate Anti-Muslim Speech?’ Think Progress, last modified 4 December 2007, viewed 28 March 2013, http://www.cair.com/ArticleDetails.aspx?ArticleID=23608&name=n&currPage=1.

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__________________________________________________________________ 38

Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1979), 158. 39 Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 3. In film theory, different viewers—or spectators—are postulated and assumed to be present in the viewing of any particular TV show or film. A knowledgeable and competent spectator understands and makes sense of what’s on the screen, and interprets these images—these representations—in a way consistent with the cultural milieu of which he or she is part. 40 Asma, On Monsters, 239. 41 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1977), 49.

Bibliography Asma, Stephen T. On Monsters. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Bayoumi, Moustafa. How Does it Feel to be a Problem: Being Young and Arab in America. New York: The Penguin Group, 2009. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1977. Gansa, Alex, and Howard Gordon. Homeland. Created by Gideon Raff. TV show. 2011-2013; New York: Showtime, Teakwood Lane Productions, Cherry Pie Productions, Keshet Media Group, and Fox 21, 2011-2013. DVD. Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1979. Hall, Stuart. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London, Sage Publications, 2002. Kearney, Richard. Strangers, Gods and Monsters. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Limbaugh, R., ‘The Rush Limbaugh Show.’ Viewed June 27, 2012. http://webtest1.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_090710/content/01125112.gues t.html.

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__________________________________________________________________ Mamdani, Mahmood. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. New York: Three Leaves Press/Doubleday, 2004. Marr, Timothy. The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. McAlister, Melanie. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media & U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Moretti, Franco. ‘The Dialectic of Fear.’ New Left Review 136 (1982): 68. Obenzinger, Hilton. American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Reiff, Eithan, Cyrus Voris, Angel Dean Lopez and Alexander Woo. Sleeper Cell. Directed by Ziad Doueiri. 2005-2006; New York: Showtime, 2006-2007. DVD. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Press, 1979. Savage, Michael. ‘Does the U.S. Tolerate Anti-Muslim Speech?’ Think Progress. Last modified December 4, 2007. Viewed March 28, 2013. http://www.cair.com/ArticleDetails.aspx?ArticleID=23608&name=n&currPage=1. Schueller, Malini Johar. U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790-1890. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Semmerling, Tim. ‘Evil’ Arabs in Popular Film: Orientalist Fear. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. Shaheen, Jack. Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs after 9/11. New York: Olive Branch Press, 2008. ———. Reel Bad Arabs. New York: Olive Branch Press, 2001. Snead, James. White Screens/Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side. New York: Routledge, 1994. Staiger, Janet. Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

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__________________________________________________________________ Tutt, Daniel. ‘“Homeland,” Islam, and the Battle Within.’ Viewed June 23, 2012. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/altmuslim/2012/03/homeland-islam-and-the-battlewithin/. Vogel, Lester I. To See a Promised Land: Americans and the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. Weed, Jennifer, Richard Davis, and Ronald Weed. 24 and Philosophy: The World According to Jack, 1st Edition. New Jersey: Blackwell, 2007. Žižek, Slavoj. ‘The Desert and the Real.’ Viewed August 15, 2012. http://www.lacan.com/zizek-welcome.htm. Teresa Cutler-Broyles is a PhD student and Lecturer at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA. As a cultural theorist, scholar of film and performance theory, and teratology, she studies the meaning-making that occurs at the conjunction of visual media and culture. http://www.inkwell-inc.biz.

Part III: With/In the Monsters’ House

‘Thing without Form’: Peter Ackroyd’s Monstrous City Marta Komsta Abstract The chapter examines three monstrous archetypes presented in the selected novels by Peter Ackroyd—The House of Doctor Dee (1993), Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994),1 and The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008)—as an indication of a peculiar alignment of the uncanny with the urban, a transgressive alliance resulting in the creation of a contemporary urban mythology based upon the idea of artificial life. The homunculus, the golem, and Frankenstein’s monster are approached here as an instance of the urban abject as well as the doppelganger of the novels’ main characters. The core of my analysis is the complex relationship developed between the abject protagonist and the city, in which the latter both encompasses and rejects the former. As it happens, such ambivalence points to the maladies plaguing the polis in times past and present, as well as signals the potential threats to its future. It is, at the same time, a question about the very nature of the city, its semiotic underworld and the possibility of discovering the Transcendental Signifier in the serpentine streets of the postmodern urbanscape. It is therefore my contention that the subversive semiotic potential of Ackroyd’s characters and their monstrous incarnations paradoxically condition the metaphysical foundations of the megalopolis. Key Words: The city, monster, the abject, semiosphere, golem, homunculus. ***** 1. Introduction2 According to Peter Ackroyd, a writer who was once hailed as ‘the man who would be king of literary London,’3 to know the city is to let one be consumed and transformed by the metropolis. What William Gibson calls ‘metrophagy’4 is Ackroyd’s lifework: an essentially carnivalesque endeavour suspended between the practice of psychogeography and occult literary rituals with which the writer attempts to call forth the monstrous nocturnal London that lurks disconcertingly close to its daytime double. The task of reading the city-text may be thus described as a continual process of challenging the palimpsestic nature of the postmodern urbanscape in search of singularity. As Ackroyd argues, ‘London seems to be all flow without any solidity, it is a mobile and fluid city; it’s constantly being rebuilt and vandalized, there’s no thing as a fixed condition.’5 His novels, commencing with the 1982 debut, The Great Fire of London, up to 2008 The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, reveal the London-based writer’s incessant striving to approximate the postmodern megapolis, a seemingly unstructured semiotic system that has displaced its Transcendental Signifier, the ultimate ‘sign which will give meaning to all others.’6 According to Richard Lehan,

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__________________________________________________________________ [w]ithout a transcendental signifier, urban signs begin to float, and meaning gives way to mystery. [...] What we bring to the city is what we get back: the “echo” principle becomes the basis for our reality. […] The signs—failing to point toward a redeeming God […], or a redeeming history […], or a redeeming nature […], or a redeeming art […]—become self-referential.7 The semiotic complexity of Ackroyd’s literary urbanscapes is reflected in the relationship his protagonists establish with the city. By attempting to restore meaning to their existence by the means of the polis, these characters share the inherent maladjustment with the tangible reality that compels them to, as Susana Onega observes, ‘undertake a quest for knowledge that would allow them to transcend phenomenological reality and to master the transcendental reality that gives meaning and coherence to the cosmos.’8 Semiotic-wise, the protagonists’ transformation is a process of radical re-appropriation that is negotiated through the exploration of the peripheries of the urban semiosphere.9 Such places, frequently associated in Ackroyd’s fiction with specific London districts, constitute the (un)natural habitat for the monstrous Other that one is forced to confront in order to assert one’s identity.10 The centre/peripheries dichotomy is also reflected in multiple oppositions between the Self and the Other, the subject and the abject, human and monster. As Elaine L. Graham notices, ‘monsters have a double function […] simultaneously marking the boundaries between the normal and the pathological but also exposing the fragility of the very taken-for-grantedness of such categories.’11 The monster hence symbolises the city’s impact upon the individual that forces one to challenge the Other-within, whose presence is progressively externalised as the protagonist ventures deeper into the urban landscape.12 At the same time, Elana Gomel reminds us that ‘[t]he word “monster” comes from the Latin “monstrum,” i.e., “portent,” deriving from monere, “to warn.” A monster is a warning flag of danger, striking the eye with terror […].’13 The monster is therefore a symbolic representation of the disruption within a familiar semiotic system, which Slavoj Žižek defines as ‘a certain void in a symbolic structure,’14 as the transgression brought forth by a monster engenders massive semiotic upheaval. I argue that the process of identity-making in Ackroyd’s fiction is developed through the agency of the monster that represents the repressed aspects of the character’s semiotic profile, the ‘radically separate, loathsome’15 countersign of the abject that is illuminated by the influence of the metropolis. The resulting selfawareness is then an identity-forming process as interpretative mechanisms employed by the protagonists are radically transformed by a new reading of the city as well as of themselves. Accordingly, the novels selected for the purpose of this chapter, The House of Doctor Dee (1993), Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994), and The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008), share the idea of

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__________________________________________________________________ monstrosity as the embodiment of transgressive semiosis as well as an alternative meaning generator in the narratives’ semiotic framework.16 In Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem and The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, the main protagonists are urban serial killers whose monstrous Other—represented by the figure of the golem and the undead, respectively—thrives on what Gomel defines as ‘the violent sublime’ which ‘involves ecstasy or intoxication, sometimes paradoxically coupled with revulsion and horror, in which doing harm to another’s body becomes an end in itself.’17 Such characters function in Ackroyd’s texts as the conduit for the city’s malodorous nature; the killers become envoys of the semiotic Netherworld of the novel’s urbanscape, as the symbol of violence engendered upon its streets. In the case of The House of Doctor Dee, a reversal in perspective takes place as it is now the victim who struggles to overcome the effects of abuse. In contrast to the previous narratives, here the monster symbolizes the protagonist’s inability to convey the experience of victimhood through language as well as his wilful separation from the surrounding reality. The homunculus, the miniscule man entrapped within a glass phial, represents therefore both the trauma-induced amnesia through which the character shields himself against the memory of the harrowing experience, and his failure to come to terms with the hardships of life. Finally, I would like to suggest that the abject enables the transcendental layer in Ackroyd’s novels. At the same time, the restoration of fractured identity through the experience of abjection is coterminous with the characters’ deepening relationship with their city. By reconstructing the semiosis incapacitated by violence and abuse, the mystical Eternal City is called into being as the two Selves—that of the individual and the city—merge in a union identified by Susana Onega as ‘transhistorical connectedness,’18 a profoundly intimate connection with the city’s cultural and spiritual heritage. 2. In Search of Self In her study, Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject, Elana Gomel delineates the figure of the violent subject who functions as the central element of what she calls the ‘narrative interaction of violence.’19 The violent subject is a character, whose opposition to the law is so extreme that he is presented not just as a social but as a narrative outcast, defying all conventional stories of the self. Such a subject paradoxically merges with the mutilated body of the victim, which marks the area outside the Symbolic, the realm of language and representation.20 What is significant in the quotation above is the interlocution between the body of the victim and language which strives to contain it within the dominant semiosis. It is, however, an attempt doomed to failure since violence represents a semiotic implosion that disrupts the flow of narrative, incapacitates meaning, and

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__________________________________________________________________ renders the experience of assault untranslatable.21 In consequence, a new mode of communication is established by the perpetrator of the violent act: the language of the violent subject is structured upon ‘the body in pain’22 in which the abused body functions as the core sign of the abject semiosis. The tortured body of the victim is juxtaposed with the monstrous body of the victimizer whose physical unnaturalness (as it is the case with the figure of the golem or the undead) further intensifies its semiotic incomprehensibility. The monstrous protagonist, thus, defies the semiosis employed by other characters in the narrative as it both constitutes and engenders abjection. Ackroyd’s violent subjects are semiotic constructs built upon the rejection of the normative meaning, being simultaneously the embodiment of its negation (the grotesque body of the monster) as well as the catalyst of the abject signs (the victim’s fragmented bodies). For the character of a serial killer, the monster is an alter ego, the antiprotagonist whose core semiotic paradigm is based upon continual subversion of the central semiosis. In the urban semiosphere of Ackroyd’s fiction, the monstrous signifies those aspects that are subdued and suppressed, a semiotic ‘vortex of summons and repulsions’23 that stands in opposition to the normative semiosis. Ackroyd’s monsters are inevitably the doppelganger of his protagonists, functioning as the reversal of their socially viable counterparts. Most importantly, however, the confrontation with the monster marks the turning point in the protagonists’ development, forcing them to become the Other—the abject whose core semiotic paradigm is based upon continual subversion of the central semiosis. For Elizabeth Cree, a murderess extraordinaire in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, the eponymous entity functions as her double through which she is allowed to transgress the cultural preconceptions of femininity. The notion of performativity is at the forefront here. Elizabeth is an actress actively performing herself in many different guises—that of Lambeth Marsh Lizzie, a penny gaff entertainer; Elizabeth Cree, the wife to John Cree; and finally, the Limehouse Golem, a male serial killer. The monster constitutes the only fixed part of the fragmented self, a name that evokes the myth of the protector as well as its subversive re-appropriation since the golem is now a prowler, a flaneur of murderous inclinations.24 By taking on the role of both a man and a murderer, Elizabeth actively re-enacts and overthrows the established assumptions pertaining to the role of woman as that of the nurturer. The Other gives her the chance to abolish the dominant semiosis and manifest her role of the transgender killer, the defender turning oppressor, the victim becoming the punisher. It is also an act of violent rebellion against the affixed morality of the centre. The Limehouse Golem is a divine messenger that brings punishment upon the inhabitants of the dark city, the ominous doppelganger to God’s life-giving competence. ‘I am the scourge of God,’25 Elizabeth proclaims. ‘I saved [God] half the job,’ the protagonist adds, ‘I took away.’26

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__________________________________________________________________ What is repeatedly highlighted in the course of the narrative is the complex relationship between language and body. ‘Our two rooms were bare enough, except for the pages of the Bible which [the mother] had pasted to the walls,’ the protagonist reminisces about her life with a mentally unstable mother.27 ‘There was hardly an inch of paper to be made out between them, and from earliest childhood I could see nothing but words.’28 Significantly, the two biblical excerpts that the protagonist remembers best are associated with the body made incomplete through an act of violence. The first, Leviticus 8:16, depicts a sacrificial offering: ‘And he took all the fat that was upon the inwards, and the caul above the liver, and the two kidneys, and their fat, and Moses burned it upon the altar.’29 The other, Deuteronomy 23:1, reads: ‘He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord.’30 At the same time, Elizabeth’s religiously fixated mother tortures her daughter by abusing the child’s private parts, an act of violence further foregrounding the precarious connection between textuality and violence: There is a place between my legs which my mother loathed and cursed—when I was very little she would pinch it fiercely, or prick it with her needle, in order to teach me that it was the home of pain and punishment.31 As a result of the abuse, Elizabeth comes to disdain any form of sexual contact and her abhorrence of carnality is transposed upon the lacerated bodies of the Golem’s victims.32 The protagonist perceives carnality solely in terms of fragmentation and the killings committed by the Limehouse Golem are based upon methodical mutilation of the victim’s bodies, each part a word in a language of violence that seems decipherable to the serial killer only. The Golem’s first victim, a prostitute named Jane Quiq, is found dismembered near the Thames: She had been left upon the old steps in three separate parts; her head was upon the upper step, with her torso arranged beneath it in some parody of the human form, while certain of her internal organs had been impaled upon a wooden post by the riverside.33 The second victim, a Jewish scholar Solomon Weil is murdered in his own flat, mutilated in a most strange manner; his nose has been cut off and placed upon a small pewter plate, while his penis and testicles had been left upon the open page of a book […].34 The third person to be slain by the killer is another prostitute, Alice Stanton, whose ‘tongue had been cut out and placed within her vagina, while her body itself

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__________________________________________________________________ was mutilated […].’35 Finally, the killing streak ends with a massacre of the Gerrard family at the infamous Ratcliffe Highway (the place of the factual Marrs family murder by John Williams), the multiple bodies becoming a testimony to the developing linguistic competence of the monster. Yet, despite the pretensions to legibility symbolised by Elizabeth’s childhood abode, the Limehouse Golem’s mutilated victims point to the conclusion that contradicts the assumption that violence can be read and rendered comprehensible. The disruption of the dominant semiosis by the serial killer is therefore concomitant with an ultimately futile attempt at communicating the experience of the violent sublime. Concurrently, Elizabeth’s inability to name the ‘place between her legs’ that has been subjected to abuse points to the core tension in Ackroyd’s novel: that of the impossibility of approximating violence within the familiar semiotic system.36 Interestingly, the composition of Ackroyd’s novel seems to validate such a conclusion as the text, made up of fragments of a court transcript, a third-person narrative, and two journals, reflects the mutilated narrative of Elizabeth Cree who strives to give expression to her monstrous Self. The act of semiotic haunting as the protagonist becomes possessed by the abject is also foregrounded in The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein in which, akin to its literary predecessor, the infamous scientist becomes obsessed with the idea of creating artificial life. A close correspondence between the central character and the Other is developed in which the latter signifies the repressed elements of the former’s personality. The monstrosity brought into existence is the abject embodied that stalks its creator with questions pertaining to the morality of creating unnatural life. The desire to build a ‘sentient human being […] unencumbered by class or society or faith,’37 quickly turns into ungodly usurpation of divine prerogatives as the monster almost immediately asserts itself as the double of the scholar, its physical deformity and malevolent character reflecting Victor’s vanity and egotism. The subsequent killing spree commenced by the undead is a parodic rendition of Victor’s attempts at restoring life and simultaneously an act of vengeance exerted upon the creator who refuses to take responsibility for the existence he has brought into the world. ‘There is no substance […] without a shadow,’38 states the creature, forcing the protagonist to acknowledge the affinity between them. The final revelation of the undead being the emanation of the scientist’s split personality points acutely to the function of the abject as that of the generator of transgressive semiosis that succeeds in overpowering the moral norms of the centre adopted by the protagonist.39 As it was the case with Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, the violent subject’s semiosis is grounded in abuse, and his means of communication are based upon grievous bodily harm. It is no accident then that the place the protagonist frequents most is a dissecting room. Crammed with bodies waiting for examination, the place uncannily resembles the word-infested room of Elizabeth

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__________________________________________________________________ Cree, the difference being here that the pages upon the walls are literally replaced by body parts: The corpses were placed on the dissection tables, in the middle of the room, with six or seven students intent upon rummaging about their bones and entrails. Some concentrated on an arm, others on a leg or bowel. […] There were glass cages ranged along the walls with bodily specimens of every conceivable kind. In a large fireplace, on one side of the room, stood a copper pan that was used for boiling the bodies when the work of a knife became too slow. The bones could be then wrenched from the boiled flesh with ease.40 Just like Elizabeth Cree, Victor Frankenstein is a serial killer, a schizophrenic prone to unrestrained brutality; parallel to Elizabeth’s attempts at conveying her message through the mutilated flesh of the golem’s victims, Victor’s narrative consists of strangled bodies that are both physically and symbolically rendered mute by the perpetrator. Lethal asphyxiation as modus operandi signifies Victor’s unawareness of his alter ego since his victims cannot speak. As a result, the protagonist’s possession by the violent subject marks a distinctive dichotomy between the two languages appearing in the narrative: Victor Frankenstein strives unsuccessfully to decipher the language of the abject (employed by his doppelganger) whose implicated silence is paradoxically the very clue the scientist is vying for. Eventually, the narrative produced by the monster’s victims is a whodunnit tale in which the detective turns out to be the killer he was trying to apprehend. Strikingly, the body of Frankenstein’s monster is a poignant reflection of the semiotic ambiguity it represents. The physical uncanniness of the undead is an acute sign of the innate monstrosity of the violent subject, its corporeal unnaturalness emphasising its abject status: Now his appearance resembled nothing so much as wickerwork. His eyes had opened, but where before they had been of a bluegreen hue they were now grey. The body itself had not been deformed in any way: it was as compact and as muscular as before, but it was of a different texture. It looked as if it had been baked.41 The description of the monstrous body as baked is a clear reference to the creation of a golem that, according to the most popular accounts, was ‘made out of dust and red clay.’42 The correspondence between the Limehouse Golem and Frankenstein’s creature is further emphasised in a conversation between

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__________________________________________________________________ Frankenstein and one doctor Polidori (sic) who recapitulates the legend of the Golem of Prague along with the supposed power of holy words that may destroy the creation by the hand of its own maker.43 The incantation that is supposed to annihilate the abject is therefore a divinely inspired counter-narrative that enables the process of semiotic reconstruction. Confronting the Other allows Ackroyd’s characters to transcend the limitations of selfhood, to redeem and rewrite themselves as they successfully challenge the monster inside. In The House of Doctor Dee, Matthew Palmer inherits a house that once belonged to the famous Elizabethan magus John Dee. The house, ‘a transdimensional door’44 that enables the protagonist to cross the boundaries of time and space, shelters Dee’s most cherished achievement—the recipe for creating the homunculus, a creature of minuscule proportions that represents the divine spark of creation, ‘that fire which drives the spheres.’45 Imbued with potent spiritual significance, the homunculus represents the cosmic man, ‘the secret of all secrets’46 endowed with eternal life. The discovery of the recipe marks a turning point for the protagonist by activating concealed information connected with his past. As Matthew becomes gradually convinced that he himself is the alchemic progeny of the renowned scholar, a semiotic correlation is formed between the protagonist and the Other. The homunculus’ generic amnesia—‘it remembers nothing about its past or future until it returns home at the end of its thirty years’47—is mirrored in Matthew’s lack of childhood memories which, it is revealed, are suppressed by the experience of abuse. ‘I remember very little about my childhood,’ he recounts, ‘Sometimes it is hard to believe that I had one at all.’48 The memory gap is connected, as it turns out, with the sexual abuse committed by the protagonist’s father. The resulting sense of isolation and decrepitude is symbolically reflected in the figure of the homunculus entrapped within a glass tube. Likewise, Matthew’s inability to communicate the dramatic event is effectively sublimated through amnesia. The protagonist becomes virtually unreadable to himself as the signs constituting his identity have been rendered indecipherable through abuse. The struggle to read oneself is of prime importance here: as a researcher by occupation, Matthew strives to reconstruct his identity through books. ‘[I]t is as if I were entering a place I had once known and then forgotten,’ he says of his research assignments, ‘and in the sudden light of recognition had remembered something of myself.’49 Alongside Matthew’s story, we have a narrative of John Dee whose yearning for knowledge seems initially to be of a much grander scope than that of his twentieth-century counterpart. Dee aims for nothing short of eternity, of overcoming the limitations of mortality by creating the homunculus through which the scholar might be granted eternal life. Books are Dee’s life and it is through the wisdom that he wishes to extract from them that the protagonist aims to transcend the mysteries of life and death. ‘Books do not perish like humankind,’50 Dee asserts. ‘True books are filled with the power of the

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__________________________________________________________________ understanding which is the inheritance of the ages: you may take up a book in time, but you read it in eternity.’51 Still, there is the inevitably carnal underlining to the protagonists’ feverish pursuit of words. The juxtaposition of words and bodies is persistently accentuated throughout Ackroyd’s novel, pointing towards the characters’ attempt to exorcise their dread of carnality through language. Appropriately, words function as divine incantations that are to guard the protagonists from the experience as well as memory of the abject. For Doctor Dee, the body is associated with filth and mortality that can only be expunged through the cleansing power of words. ‘She must be washed before she can partake,’52 is the scholar’s demand before commencing a sexual act with a prostitute. Then, as Marion began to undress herself, I recited the grace before meat. “All that is and shall be set on this board, be the same sanctified by the Lord’s word. He that is king and lord over all, bring us to the table of life eternal. Amen. Fetch me a pitcher and a basin, and a cloth, that I may wipe her filthiness.”53 Dee’s fear of physicality which the protagonist attempts to purge with words is also reflected in his turbulent dreams: in one of the nightmares the scholar sees himself dead and dissected, in another he witnesses his wife’s abortion of a still birth that turns out to be ‘a volume with a black cover which stuck to my fingers,’54 and eventually he dreams of himself changed into a book. For Matthew, books are carcasses to be dissected before one can explore their content. ‘It was as if I were lifting down corpses wrapped in their shrouds,’ he describes the volumes he consults during his research on the history of Dee’s House.55 ‘[...] [T]his was precisely what they contained—names, signatures, the long-dead set down in lists, lying one upon another just as they might have been buried under the ground.’56 In effect, the body/language correlation reflects the relationship between violence and amnesia as the protagonist’s inability to convey the traumatic experience corresponds with an abusive approach towards the body. At one point in the novel Matthew defecates in public; later he invites a prostitute to his home where he proceeds to commence a pseudo-ritual of sex magic in the House’s basement.57 During the ritual, the protagonist physically attacks the hapless girl. ‘Mary lay on the floor, bruised, dirty, stinking of the whisky poured over her,’ he recounts, ‘I think I was spitting at her.’58 The brutality of the act immediately triggers a series of follow-up events that lead the protagonist to the moment of epiphany where he is forced to challenge the abject aspect of his own identity— that of a child abused by his own father: I was now so drunk that I could hardly remember what had happened, and I staggered out of the house in search of someone

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__________________________________________________________________ else—some other woman, or girl, to continue the ritual I had begun. Everything had changed, and the houses towered above me as if I were lying down on the road. […] I was inside a pub, or night-club, leaning against a video game which spun and danced before my eyes. Then I found myself crouched in a urinal with the piss running down my legs. There was an old man there. He leaned across me, and put part of me in his mouth. I lay back, and laughed. Enough. It was complete. This was the night when I discovered the truth about my father.59 Acknowledging the existence of the repressed is the decisive factor in the cathartic transformation ‘from ego to eidos, from the individual to the archetypal,’60 as the confrontation with the abject enables one to reconstruct him/herself. For Matthew Palmer, the nightmarish reminiscences of abuse are validated only a day later when his mother reveals the grim details of his childhood.‘ You were so small at the time,’ she confesses, ‘But I protected you. […] I stopped him. I only caught him with you once, but I threatened to take him to the police.’61 During the same conversation Matthew also learns that he is an adopted child whose parentage remains unknown. As he comes to comprehend the origins of his amnesia, the powers of articulation are restored to the protagonist who is finally able to challenge the abject symbolised by the mythical figure of the homunculus. The holy words that have destroyed the golem are rendered into Matthew’s sudden realisation of his victimhood: I had grown up in a world without love—a world of magic, of money, of possession—and so I had none for myself or for others. That was why I had seen ghosts rather than real people. That was why I was haunted by voices from the past and not from my own time. That was why I had dreamed of being imprisoned in glass, cold and apart. The myth of the homunculus was just another aspect of my father’s loveless existence—such an image of sterility and false innocence could have come from no other source. Now everything had to be changed.62 The act of liberation is also granted to Doctor Dee whose obsession with the homunculus is contrasted with the gradual disintegration of his personal life—his father dies in a charity house, his demise followed by the death of Dee’s beloved wife Katherine, poisoned by the scholar’s duplicitous assistant, Edward Kelley, who later sets fire to Dee’s house. Nevertheless, the scholar’s ultimate transformation is provoked by a vision in which the spirit of his wife shows him ‘the world with love.’63 In the chapter entitled appropriately ‘The Garden,’ Katherine takes her husband for a walk through ‘the garden of the true world,’

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__________________________________________________________________ where one ‘by heart [...] must learn its lessons,’64 implying the necessity of Dee’s conversion to the world of emotions. The search for the homunculus, the symbol of Dee’s striving towards transcendence, is revealed to be an elaborate illusion that has obstructed the protagonist’s metaphysical ascension for, Katherine explains, ‘faith must be placed in love and not in wisdom.’65 Ultimately, the recognition that enlightenment is found in ‘surrendering and not in power’66 allows Dee to confront the fear of mortality that he strives to overcome through occult research. By abjuring his scholarly work, the protagonist successfully confronts his monstrous Self represented by Dee’s own creation—the homunculus—that blinded the scholar to the fatal consequences of his obsession. 3. Exploring the Monstropolis Typically for Ackroyd, the monstrous body has its unique spatial correlates upon the map of the city. As Yuri M. Lotman observes, the peripheries of the given semiosphere represent ‘chaos, the anti-world, unstructured chthonic space, inhabited by monsters, infernal powers or people associated with them,’67 signifying accordingly the semiotic underbelly of the megalopolis. In the case of the narratives in questions, such monstrous space(s) correspond with specific London sites that have been considerably marked by abjection.68 In Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem and The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, the Limehouse district becomes a place where both the golem and Frankenstein’s creation come to their monstrous existence and wreak havoc upon the poverty-stricken East End population. In The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, the eponymous scholar purchases an abandoned warehouse in Limehouse in which he conducts his resurrectionist experiments. For the Limehouse Golem, the Ratcliffe Highway site (where the murders of the Marrs and Williamsons’ families took place) is ‘hallowed ground’69 and ‘the site of the offering’70 where the killer, akin to a demonic high priest of the city, re-enacts the act of sacrifice committed upon the Gerrard family as ‘a great testimony to the power of the city over men.’71 In what follows, the notions of violence and transgression constitute the foundations of the peripheries of the urbanscape. In Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, George Gissing, Ackroyd’s fictional rendition of the actual author of Workers in the Dawn (1880), takes a nightly stroll throughout the capital’s peripheries. He sees there ‘some stray dogs […] feeding off the scattered remnants of rubbish or excrement,’72 children degraded by poverty and depravation as well as male prostitutes accosting their prospective clients for a meagre shilling. Ultimately, the protagonist wanders in the vicinity of manufactory reminding him at first of ‘some medieval spectre bathed in fire’ where he sees ‘a line of women in dark gowns’73 engaged in backbreaking labour. Similarly, in The House of Doctor Dee, the scholar enters the vision of ‘the world without love’74 in which London is inhabited by tormented citizens who ‘seemed to be pacing the dungeon of the night, a night which was a nurse of cares, a mother of despair, and a daughter of

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__________________________________________________________________ hell itself.’75 The infernal landscape forces the protagonist to confront his dread of mortality as he witnesses his own execution followed by a ‘lesson in anatomy’76 conducted by Queen Elizabeth I upon the battered corpse of the magus. These urban mirages function then as the reflection of the characters’ inner turmoil, as well as a reminder of the two-way connection between the protagonist and the city, in which the megalopolis, mankind’s very own monster, is responsible for the abject semiosis that deconstructs its inhabitants.77 In this context, the monstrous functions as a vessel that channels the forces of the underworld, its semiosis transgressing the accepted norms. In Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, the golem symbolises ‘some dark spirit’78 of the city that is believed to be ‘somehow responsible for the evil.’79 The Other is here the master of ceremonies that conducts savage rituals upon the stage of the urban theatrum mundi. The act of murder appearing ‘before the scenery of a massive and monstrous city’ is a sacrifice to ‘a sinister, crepuscular London, a haven for strange powers, a city of footsteps and flaring lights, of houses packed close together, of lachrymose alleys and false doors.’80 London, ‘a labyrinth of stone, a wilderness of blank walls and doors,’81 is transformed into a city-beast, a monstrous entity whose emissaries are, among others, serial killers both real (such as John Williams) and fictitious (Elizabeth Cree), possessed by its malodorous spirit. ‘[I]t seemed to me as if the whole city were trembling in anticipation of some great change,’ states the Limehouse Golem and adds, ‘at that moment, I felt proud to be entrusted with its powers of expression. I had become its messenger as I walked towards Limehouse.’82 Another example of what might be described as urban possession appears in The House of Doctor Dee in which the peripheries are represented by the London of the abject, the homeless and the vagabonds, ‘the army of the night’83 spiritually and physically debilitated by the malignant influence of the metropolis that ‘by some strange alchemy drained away their spirit.’84 The city is a carnivore that ‘had grown steadily larger by encroaching upon, and subduing, the energy of its inhabitants.’85 Eventually, the city of the abject is the reflection of an even greater monstrosity—the entirety of human civilisation. In The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, London is the new Babylon whose underworld, ‘this fetid body,’86 flaunts its depravity in front of the protagonist, its monstrousness depriving him of ‘the last vestiges of Christian faith.’87 As it was the case with the golem, Frankenstein’s creation is a conduit for the city’s violent impact upon its dwellers. The connection between the monster and the capital becomes obvious through the indication of moral and physical hideousness of both parties, the former clearly indicating the latter’s ‘malevolent presence.’88 The metropolis, ‘some great, dark shape brooding in the distance,’89 is depicted as humanity’s ultimate creation and a bitter commentary to its creative abilities. ‘Man had created London,’90 Victor concludes. The city thus represents the civilisation in miniature, a microcosm of

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__________________________________________________________________ suffering whose inherent depravity is confirmed in the words of the undead: ‘Am I monstrous? Or are you monstrous? Is the world monstrous?’91 At the same time, the journey through the urban underworld commences the process of redefinition for the polis and its dwellers.92 The act of re-constructing meaning occurs at the semiotic boundary of the urban semiosphere as the characters cross the often imperceptible line between what is deemed socially and morally acceptable and what lies beyond the fixed norms and regulations, where ‘texts of an alien semiotics’93 (meaning here the language of the abject) become translated into the holy language of the centre. The boundary is also the site where one can encounter specific liminal loci that are endowed with the power of semiotic transmutation that renders the abject semiosis ineffective. In The House of Doctor Dee, the eponymous house is responsible for Matthew’s final understanding of both himself and the city as the connection established with Doctor Dee through the transdimensional properties of the place in question allows the protagonist to reclaim his identity. Matthew’s growing insight into the city is paralleled with Dee’s attempts to locate the buried remnants of the ancient ‘mystical city of London,’ inhabited by a ‘sacred generation’ of ‘giants […] of spiritual power.’94 The scholar’s subsequent revelation is based upon the realisation of the need to construct a spiritual abode for, as the scholar becomes aware, ‘is it not true that each man must spend eternity in the house he has built for himself?’95 The Eternal City is thus present within the fabric of the novel’s presented world as an emanation of the absolute in the form of the divine spark. The reality of the ‘fire-world’96 is that of completeness and unity; it is the sacred hidden within the mundane of the metropolis that allows the novel’s protagonists to abolish the semiosis of the abject through the language of love. As both Matthew and Dee are granted powers of expression towards their loved ones (Matthew’s mother and Dee’s wife) and undertake the task of reconstructing their lives, the entire urbanscape of the novel is changed into sacrum. Ultimately, Dee’s House becomes the Holy Centre, operating as both the intimate space of the protagonist and the sacred space within the novel’s presented world in what becomes the Eternal City.97 In Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, the character of Dan Leno, one of the greatest actors of the nineteenth century London music halls, functions as the major antagonist to the demonic force of Elizabeth Cree as the place of theatre becomes a site of exorcism where the darkness consuming the London streets evaporates under the illumination of stage lights.98 Appropriately, as Onega observes, Leno is endowed with a ‘shamanistic power to put an end to the serial murders committed by the Limehouse Golem,’99 through the very notion of a comic spectacle whose language of joy and exultation function as the holy scripture abolishing the violent language of the killer. Simultaneously, the spectacle becomes the only remedy for the dread of linear temporality, a vessel into the ‘perpetual, infinite London,’100 in which the dwellers become ‘stage heroes’101

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__________________________________________________________________ in ‘some distinctive human family.’102 As the novel’s Karl Marx notices, it is possible to ‘make a cabbala out of a music-hall’103 signifying the mystical potential locked within the confines of a meagre theatrical performance, revealing the universe of ‘hidden connections,’104 graspable for visionaries such as Dan Leno who possess the ability to conjoin the sorrow and mirth of the city during a fleeting moment of a spectacle. At the same time, what is accentuated here is the existence of arcane knowledge accessible to those who have crossed the boundary between the centre and the peripheries, the knowledge of a transcendental connection shared by those who are by definition ‘always set outside.’105 Pondering upon the grisly urban environment, Doctor Dee observes that, [y]et it was here […] that I conducted my studies philosophical and experimental; among the clamour, and almost in the very midst of the stinking crowd, I searched within the bright glass of nature and the exhalations of the spiritus mundi.106 The city of the abject becomes a gateway into transcendence as the protagonists must acknowledge their defilement before they can reach for the Absolute ‘in the belly of the monster Leviathan.’107 It is also a process consisting of semiotic crises while Ackroyd’s characters attempt to ‘find a way out of this mundus tenebrosus’108 in their search for the urban Transcendental Signifier. For those who have successfully followed the path from agos (defilement) to katharmos (transcendence), the ultimate convolution is the confirmation of the mystical link between the city and its inhabitants.109 The mysterious narrator appearing at the very end of The House of Doctor Dee describes a walk through the Eternal City: And as I walked through the city, I saw so many houses and streets fading before me that I seemed to be forever treading upon shadows. There were citizens standing in doorways, and when their doors opened they were flooded with light […].110 In Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, George Gissing suddenly realizes that ‘perpetual, infinite London’ can only be found within himself and ‘in each of the people he had encountered that night,’111 since the Eternal London is made up of its dwellers, past and present.112 As exemplified in the closing paragraph of The House of Doctor Dee, this communion, symbolised by the ‘shimmering bridge’113 that connects the city with its inhabitants, is the moment of redemption for those who have successfully penetrated the urban Underworld: Oh you, who tried to find the light within all things, help me to create another bridge across two shores. And so join with me, in

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__________________________________________________________________ celebration. Come closer, come towards me so that we may become one. Then will London be redeemed, now and for ever, and all those with whom we dwell—living or dead—will become the mystical city universal.114 Taking into consideration Ackroyd’s predilection for pastiche and parody, it might be therefore possible to approach the idea of monstrosity as a parodic act of creation as the writer brings forth new texts, the progeny of more famous predecessors. The Golem of Jewish legends, Paracelsus’ homunculus, and Frankenstein’s creature are revitalised in Ackroyd’s fiction in the manner of a peculiar homage that aims both ‘to enshrine the past and to question it.’115 It may thus be argued that Ackroyd’s monsters are emblems of the city’s rejuvenating abilities, its powers of regeneration, as well as testament to the creative forces of humanity. ‘You asked me if I raised the dead; no, I raise new life…’116 is Doctor Dee’s response to the accusation of practising black magic. The monster, the offspring of man’s intimate affiliation with the cityscape, is the embodiment of Adam Kadmon, the Universal Man, striving to break free from the shackles of mortality. It is ‘an emblem of Klippoth and a shell of degraded matter. […] We give it life in our own image. We breathe our own spirit into its shape.’117 The abject, the inseparable part of selfhood, a semiotic countersign to be acknowledged and re-appropriated, is both a guide to follow and an obstacle to overcome on the urban stairway to heaven that many of Ackroyd’s characters begin climbing but few actually reach the summit. The monstropolis and the Eternal City intertwined account then for the metaphysical potential in what Gibson called: a city in which the eternal suffering of the poor may perpetually serve some mysterious and driving purpose in the life of the whole some hidden dynamo of torture and sacrifice dating back to something stranger and less easily articulated than the hungry ghosts of Hawksmoor.118 Perhaps this something points to Ackroyd’s ambivalent understanding of the city as the golem of ‘no meaning and form,’119 a monster with the divine word etched upon its forehead.

Notes 1

Peter Ackroyd, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (London: Vintage Books, 1998), 4. 2 The research for this contribution was financed by the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University/Faculty of Humanities grant no. MPK: BS-05-0000-D012, ZFIN:00000040.

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Will Self, ‘“Don’t have any more, Mrs Moore”: Is Peter Ackroyd a Cockney Mystic or One of Our Greatest Scholars? A Visionary or Bombast? Will Self on the Man Who Would Be King of Literary London,’ New Statesman, last modified 4 November 2002, viewed 10 April 2012, http://www.newstatesman.com/node/144170. 4 William Gibson, ‘Metrophagy: The Art and Science of Digesting Large Cities,’ Whole Earth 108 (2001): 38. 5 Jeremy Gibson and Julian Wolfreys, Peter Ackroyd: The Ludic and Labyrinthine Text (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: Macmillan Press, 2000), 258. 6 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 113. The passage contains proceedings from the 10th Global Conference on Monsters and the Monstrous, eBook publication, forthcoming 2013. 7 Richard Lehan, The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1998), 265-266. 8 Susana Onega Jaen, ‘The Descent to the Underworld and the Transition from Ego to Eidos in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd,’ in Beyond Borders: Redefining Generic and Ontological Boundaries, ed. Ramón Plo-Alastrue and María Jesús Martínez (Heidelberg: Alfaro Winter, 2002), 163. 9 I am using the term ‘semiosphere’ in accordance with Yuri M. Lotman’s definition of the term as ‘the whole semiotic space of the culture in question,’ see Yuri M. Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (London, New York: I.B. Tauris and Co. Ltd, 1990), 125. 10 Proceedings from the 10th Global Conference on Monsters and the Monstrous, eBook publication, forthcoming 2013. 11 Elaine L. Graham, Representations of the Post/human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 39. 12 Proceedings from the 10th Global Conference on Monsters and the Monstrous, eBook publication, forthcoming 2013. 13 Elana Gomel, Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject (Columbus: The Ohio University Press, 2003), 2. 14 Ibid., xxv. 15 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2. 16 Proceedings from the 10th Global Conference on Monsters and the Monstrous, eBook publication, forthcoming 2013. 17 Gomel, Bloodscripts, xv. 18 Susana Onega, Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1999), 191.

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Gomel, Bloodscripts, xxx. Ibid. 21 Ibid., xx. 22 Ibid., xxiv. 23 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 1. 24 I am referring here to the legend of the Golem of Prague allegedly created by Rabbi Loew in the sixteenth century. For further reference see, for example, Graham, Representations of the Post/human. 25 Peter Ackroyd, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, 266. 26 Ibid., 273; Proceedings from the 10th Global Conference on Monsters and the Monstrous, eBook publication, forthcoming 2013. 27 Ackroyd, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, 12. 28 Ibid., 12. 29 Ibid., 12-13. 30 Ibid.,13. 31 Ibid. 32 See also Onega, Myth and Metafiction, 144. 33 Ackroyd, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, 5. 34 Ibid., 6. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 13. 37 Peter Ackroyd, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (London: Chatto & Windus, 2008), 121. 38 Ibid., 163. 39 Proceedings from the 10th Global Conference on Monsters and the Monstrous, eBook publication, forthcoming 2013. 40 Ackroyd, Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, 42. 41 Ibid., 132. 42 Ibid., 221. 43 Ibid., 221-222. 44 Onega, Metafiction and Myth, 121. 45 Peter Ackroyd, The House of Doctor Dee (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 104. 46 Ibid., 123. 47 Ibid., 125; Proceedings from the 10th Global Conference on Monsters and the Monstrous, eBook publication, forthcoming 2013. 48 Ackroyd, The House of Doctor Dee, 80. 49 Ibid., 13. 50 Ibid., 66. 51 Ibid., 67. Gibson and Wolfreys discuss the notion of ‘architexture’ which implies that the city ‘can only be given form through the textual act, an act which is a response recognising the already textual condition of the city’ in Gibson and 20

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__________________________________________________________________ Wolfreys, Peter Ackroyd: The Ludic and Labyrinthine Text, 202.The act of reading oneself (as it is the case with both Matthew and Dee) would obviously correspond here to the act of reading the city in which the process of reconstructing one’s identity is synonymous with the aforementioned providing form to the city. 52 Ackroyd, The House of Doctor Dee, 119. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 71-72. 55 Ibid., 89. 56 Ibid. 57 Interestingly, the structure of the House also resembles that of a body, leading Onega to assume that Dee’s household is an instance of monas hieroglyphica, ‘the materialization of Doctor Dee as cosmic man or anthropos,’ in Onega, Myth and Metafiction, 121. 58 Ackroyd, House of Doctor Dee, 172-173. 59 Ibid., 173. 60 Onega, ‘Descent to the Underworld,’163; Proceedings from the 10th Global Conference on Monsters and the Monstrous, eBook publication, forthcoming 2013. 61 Ackroyd, House of Doctor Dee, 177. 62 Ibid., 178. 63 Ibid., 246. 64 Ibid., 251. 65 Ibid., 256. 66 Ibid.; Proceedings from the 10th Global Conference on Monsters and the Monstrous, eBook publication, forthcoming 2013. 67 Lotman, The Universe of the Mind, 140. Proceedings from the 10th Global Conference on Monsters and the Monstrous, eBook publication, forthcoming 2013. 68 Onega also asserts that ‘the underworld as inferno in Ackroyd’s novels [...] is simply to be found in certain areas of London such as Whitechapel or Limehouse,’ implicating the fact that Ackroyd’s fiction is both ‘real and mythical,’ in Onega, ‘Descent to Underworld,’ 164. 69 Ackroyd, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, 160. 70 Ibid., 127. 71 Ibid., 160. 72 Ibid., 243. 73 Ibid., 245. 74 Ackroyd, House of Doctor Dee, 205. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., 216. 77 Proceedings from the 10th Global Conference on Monsters and the Monstrous, eBook publication, forthcoming 2013. 78 Ackroyd, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, 162.

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Ibid. Ibid., 38. 81 Ibid., 39. 82 Ibid., 85. 83 Ackroyd, House of Doctor Dee, 47. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., 48; Proceedings from the 10th Global Conference on Monsters and the Monstrous, eBook publication, forthcoming 2013. 86 Ackroyd, Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, 15. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid., 233. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid., 293; Proceedings from the 10th Global Conference on Monsters and the Monstrous, eBook publication, forthcoming 2013. 92 Proceedings from the 10th Global Conference on Monsters and the Monstrous, eBook publication, forthcoming 2013. 93 Lotman, The Universe of the Mind, 136. 94 Ackroyd, House of Doctor Dee, 190. 95 Ibid., 257. 96 Ibid., 42. 97 See also Onega, Myth and Metafiction, 122. 98 According to Ackroyd, Leno represents the so-called ‘Cockney visionaries,’ artists endowed with ‘a particular London sensibility [...] in which pathos and comedy, high tragedy and low face, are effortlessly combined,’ in Peter Ackroyd, ‘London Luminaries and Cockney Visionaries,’ in The Collection, ed. Thomas Wright (London: Chatto & Windus, 2001), 345; see also Onega, Metafiction and Myth, 181; and ‘Descent to the Underworld,’ 158. 99 Onega, ‘Descent to the Underworld,’ 169. 100 Ackroyd, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, 246. 101 Ibid., 137. 102 Ibid., 138. 103 Ibid., 67. 104 Ibid., 68. 105 Lotman, The Universe of the Mind, 140; author’s emphasis. 106 Ackroyd, House of Doctor Dee, 62-63. 107 Ibid., 62. 108 Onega, ‘Descent to the Underworld,’ 171. 109 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 84; Proceedings from the 10th Global Conference on Monsters and the Monstrous, eBook publication, forthcoming 2013. 110 Ackroyd, House of Doctor Dee, 275-276. 80

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Ackroyd, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, 246. See also Onega, Metafiction and Myth, 136. 113 Ackroyd, House of Doctor Dee, 17. 114 Ibid., 277. 115 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York, London: Routledge, 1996), 126. 116 Ackroyd, House of Doctor Dee, 36. 117 Ackroyd, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, 68. 118 Gibson, ‘Metrophagy,’ 38. 119 Tim Teeman, ‘London Is a Uniquely Brutalising and Ugly City; Interview— Peter Ackroyd,’ The Times, 23 September 2000, viewed 20 March 2012, http://www.thetimes.co.uk; Proceedings from the 10th Global Conference on Monsters and the Monstrous, eBook publication, forthcoming 2013. 112

Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter. Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. London: Vintage Books, 1998. ———. The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein. London: Chatto&Windus, 2008. ———. The House of Doctor Dee. London: Penguin Books, 1994. ———. ‘London Luminaries and Cockney Visionaries.’ In The Collection, edited by Thomas Wright, 341-351. London: Chatto&Windus, 2001. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Gibson, Jeremy and Julian Wolfreys. Peter Ackroyd: The Ludic and Labyrinthine Text. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: Macmillan Press, 2000. Gibson, William. ‘Metrophagy: The Art and Science of Digesting Large Cities.’ Whole Earth 108 (2001): 38. Gomel, Elana. Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject. Columbus: The Ohio University Press, 2003. Graham, Elaine L. Representations of the Post/human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

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__________________________________________________________________ Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York, London: Routledge, 1996. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Lehan, Richard. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1998. Lotman, Yuri M. The Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. London, New York: I.B. Tauris and Co. Ltd, 1990. Onega, Susana Jaen. ‘The Descent to the Underworld and the Transition from Ego to Eidos in The Novels of Peter Ackroyd.’ In Beyond Borders: Redefining Generic and Ontological Boundaries, edited by Ramón Plo-Alastrue and María Jesús Martínez, 157-74. Heidelberg: Winter, 2002. ———. Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1999. Self, Will. ‘Don’t Have Any More, Mrs Moore: Is Peter Ackroyd a Cockney Mystic or One of Our Greatest Scholars? A Visionary or Bombast? Will Self on the Man Who Would Be King of Literary London.’ New Statesman. Last modified 04 November 2002.Viewed 10 April 2012. http://www.newstatesman.com/node/144170. Teeman, Tim. ‘London Is a Uniquely Brutalising and Ugly City; Interview—Peter Ackroyd.’ The Times. Viewed 20 March 2012. http://www.thetimes.co.uk. Marta Komsta is a lecturer at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin. Her main areas of research are contemporary gothic narratives as well as utopia/dystopia in film and literature.

A Bad Romance: Lady Gaga and the Return of the Divine Monster Lise Dilling-Hansen Abstract In the Middle Ages, a monster was often considered a prodigy and a sign of the divine power of God, and it was not until the eighteenth century that the monster was put on display as a freak to horrify and amuse audiences. Scholars from the field of disability studies have claimed that the understanding of the so-called freak as abnormal is a socially constructed discourse and have suggested the less degrading term extraordinarity instead. This chapter adapts this theoretical approach to examine how the role of the monster has acquired new significations in modern societies. It argues that the monstrous body can actually be considered extraordinary, rather than disabled and wrong, and thereby questions the category of normal. Today this shift makes it possible for a pop star to be worshipped as a monster in mainstream pop culture. Based on Lady Gaga’s music video ‘Bad Romance’ and drawing on a number of the artist’s live performances as well as the videos ‘Paparazzi’ and ‘Telephone,’ this chapter investigates how Gaga transgresses dichotomies through her performances and establishes a new kind of bodily discourse in which monstrosity and beauty go hand in hand. Analysing the visual aesthetics, I show how Gaga imitates, yet still manages to stay recognisable within, a heterosexual matrix and normative body discourses, while deconstructing them from the inside with her crippled spine, enormous eyes, spastic movements, aggressive femininity, posthuman appearance, murderous mind, and her rah rah ah-ah-ah monster voice. Briefly reviewing the history of the monster and its social context, this chapter suggests that Gaga is an example of what can disrupt the order of society today, and thereby of what the monster of the twenty-first century looks like. The thesis of this investigation is that Lady Gaga offers us a glimpse of a possible future where the monster is no longer tied to the freak show, where deviations from the normative beauty discourse are a prodigious plus, and where we are all invited to the Monster Ball. Key Words: Performativity, gender, discourse, post-humanity, extraordinarity. ***** 1. Case Presentation The artist Lady Gaga had a major breakthrough in 2008 when she released the single ‘Just Dance.’ She quickly became visible on the music charts and in the media. A further five singles (‘Beautiful, Dirty, Rich,’ ‘Poker Face,’ ‘Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say),’ ‘Love Game’ and ‘Paparazzi’) were released from her first album, The Fame, and established Gaga as a hip, ground-breaking artist of

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__________________________________________________________________ daring visual expressions. Between the first album and the next, The Fame Monster, she began a heavy flirtation with monstrosity. Gaga moved from a glitter disco look to a performative style where blood dripped down her body,1 with her own feminine hand replaced by a giant skeletal hand.2 At the 2010 Grammy awards show, one of Gaga’s stage performers yelled out, ‘She’s a monster and she’s turning all of you into monsters,’3 and that was exactly what she did. During the time of the creation of her monster discourse, the artist started to call her fans ‘little monsters’4 and it did not take them long to adopt the nickname. The videos accompanying her super-hits made it clear that Gaga’s visual aesthetics differed from most music videos in modern pop culture5 in their monstrous touch, and that her goal, in contrast to singers like Jessica Simpson, Shakira, and Britney Spears, was not to fulfil a stereotypical ideal of beauty and perfection. Instead, she challenged the categories of beauty and sexiness. She did this for the first time when she appeared as crippled Gaga in ‘Paparazzi’; but it was ‘Bad Romance,’ the video that followed ‘Paparazzi,’ in which Gaga appears physically deformed in various ways, that once and for all integrated monstrosity as part of her image. At the beginning of the video ‘Bad Romance,’ lights are played over white coffins marked with red crosses6 and labelled Monster. The music starts, and out of the coffins comes Gaga and her dancers. Hence the question is not whether Gaga is a monster or not, but rather what kind of monster is she, and what values are linked to the monster in ‘Bad Romance.’ During her The Monster Ball Tour, the artist stated the following, between the songs ‘Vanity’ and ‘The Fame’: The best thing about The Monster Ball is that I created it so that my fans have a place to go. A place where all the freaks are outside and I lock the fucking doors. It doesn’t matter who you are … because tonight and every night after you could be whoever it is that you wanna be.7 What is worth noting here is the declaration that those who are not at this concert, who are not little monsters, are the freaks. As a result, being a monster is constituted as normal. The monstrous space Lady Gaga is creating for her fans is a space of possibilities. It is a space in which boundaries can be crossed, and where fitting into the category of normalcy is what is considered outside the norm. This chapter argues that the same pattern is repeated in the video ‘Bad Romance.’ Here, Gaga exemplifies how the categories of normalcy can be deconstructed and how what is usually considered bad can be transformed into positive and joyful deviations. In the videos ‘Paparazzi’ and ‘Telephone,’ the focus is on the fun and power of the respectively crippled and bio-technologised body which, rather than letting other people stand in its way, murders its way out of the restricting conventions of society.

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__________________________________________________________________ 2. Theoretical Framework The theoretical approach of this chapter is social constructivist. It draws on the work of Judith Butler and on the fundamental understanding of gender as performative and as repeated by citational practices that reiterate the heterosexual matrix—a hegemonic, discursive model of gender.8 In other words, rather than containing a real core, gender and identity are constructed through everyday bodily and verbal practices. The works by Butler cited here mostly revolve around sex and gender as bodily social constructions, but these analytic tools are also highly relevant when working with other social constructions, such as the discursively constructed normative bodily representation in modern pop culture. In order to elaborate the discourse of the normal body, the following two aspects of marginalisation are central: the disabled body and the monstrous body. As for the first aspect, the field of disability studies will be represented by two scholars: Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Tobin Siebers. They argue that being disabled in our society also means being worth less, deserving only of pity, and in general being wrong.9 The negative connotations associated with disabled persons are caused by discourses verbally constructed and repeated by society, and by the way society is designed. In an effort to find vocabulary to talk about disabled people without being derogatory, Garland-Thomson suggests the word extraordinary, rather than disabled or abnormal.10 The bodily or mental features that deviate from the average or the majority can thus be understood as positive extras, or at least as features that are not necessarily negative deviations, placing them outside the dichotomy of good and bad. What is central here is the detachment from normalcy, the divergence from the ab or dis prefix, and their replacement by extra in order to think of them as possibilities rather than deviations. This theorisation of extraordinarity will be applied to the understanding of the monstrous body in this chapter. As for the second aspect of marginalisation, the approach to monster adopted here understands this figure as something that disturbs our way of thinking, rather than shocking or horrifying us. Jacques Derrida and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen both claim that the monstrous is hard to grasp and describe.11 It is thus not necessarily a huge creature with hair all over its body, continuously drooling; it is something for which we have not established a category and therefore do not have a language— the disturbing outside. Consequently, the deconstructive point here is that a monster is monstrous exactly because it can never really fit the already existing categories, and at the same time because its very existence deconstructs the established categories. The monster would lose its monstrous status if it were compared to the norms, analysed, and symbolically mastered.12 It has to be understood as a deconstructive entity, ambiguous in form and, consequently, disruptive to our minds. Using these theoretical approaches, this chapter investigates how Lady Gaga breaks free from the normal structure of the human body by playing with the

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__________________________________________________________________ boundaries between animal/woman, machine/human, insane/sane, and disabled/ abled, thus becoming monstrous and abnormal yet still recognisable as a sexy pop star in modern culture. The thesis of the chapter is that through her bodily performances, Gaga manages to detach the monster from the category of bad and marginalised, and prove that extraordinarity can actually be an advantage. 3. The Ambiguous Gaga Several aspects of ‘Bad Romance’ qualify Gaga as a monster. When Gaga’s coffin opens, she sticks out her hands and makes spastic movements with her fingers. Then she licks her lips, bares her teeth, mimics a wild animal with a rah rah sound and crawls out. When Gaga and her dancers rise from the coffins, they are dressed in white latex body suits with implants resembling the ribs of starved animals and headgear covering their eyes. They move to the music in a rhythmic and somewhat coordinated way, but the movements are fast, edgy, and sudden. What we encounter here is a creature that is close to—but not quite—human. It moves like an animal: it sounds like an animal; it acts like an animal (baring its teeth and licking its lips), and it looks like one. Considered the windows to the soul, the eyes can be perceived as one of the crucial bodily features of humanity— their invisibility reinforces the animalistic character of Gaga’s artistic performance. In the next scene of the video, Gaga’s eyes are visible but are much enlarged so as to look like the eyes of a Disney princess or a plastic toy doll. She is looking straight into the camera with an empty, blank expression. The huge-eyed Gaga is listening to the song (‘Bad Romance’) through earphones, and is either staggering around with robotic movements, lying in a bathtub singing along, or moving her hand spastically to the rhythm, as if the music has taken over her body. Again, Gaga is difficult to define—is she a woman or a mechanical doll? The question also arises whether she is sane or insane. When the word love is sung for the last time in the first verse, Gaga first points her hand like a gun, then rolls her eyes as if she has gone insane. In the following chorus, two nurses pull the patient out of the bathtub. Gaga tries to fight them, but in the end is forced to drink a liquid. This implies either that the artist is being treated for insanity caused by a bad romance, or that she is trying to fight the prison of normality constructed by society (represented by the nurses). Is Gaga then under the spell of love, or is she trying to break free from the heteronormative discourse of a woman in a romantic relationship? 4. Enjoying the Role of Object of Lust In the second verse of the ‘Bad Romance,’ Gaga is led into the role of object by the nurses at the bathhouse, who display her in front of a semi-circle of men waiting to bid on her in an auction. Although the performer is being forced, she does not seem to resist. As she dances in front of the men, she sings such lines as, ‘I want your horror, I want your design, cause you’re a criminal as long as you’re

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__________________________________________________________________ mine’13 and ‘I want your psycho, your vertigo stick.’14 Gaga apparently wants everything from the male observer, and the situation is erotic not only for the men but also for Gaga herself who is touching her own crotch—a very rare sight compared to the enormous number of music video scenes where a women is being touched by a man. Also, taking a closer look at the video, it is easy to see that Gaga is not really forced to take her clothes off, nor is she thrown to the floor, even though it looks like it; she takes off her designer coat herself, then drops on her knees and crawls towards one of the men, repeating the ‘I want your love’15 section of the song. Just before the men place their bid on Gaga, she gives one of them a lap dance while saying, ‘you know that I want you, cause I’m a free bitch, baby.’16 Lady Gaga is sold for one million dollars, and then shown off as an immovable body frozen in a rain of diamonds, trapped in silver planet rings and dressed in gold shoes and clothes in which it is impossible to move freely. She has become interwoven with material goods, ensnared as an object. The classical cinematic gaze17 is ‘largely a male gaze, relying on Freud’s twin mechanisms of voyeurism and fetishism,’ in which the woman figures ‘as fetishized object, when the woman is given phallic attributes to lessen her threat’ or ‘as a woman that is degraded by a voyeuristic gaze, her body set up as mere object of sexual desire.’18 The body of Lady Gaga has become a commodity, comparable to diamonds, silver and gold, and buyable for money. Should we now feel sorry for the object Gaga has become? Certainly not! The recent feminists Cathrine Redfern and Kristin Aune, who inscribe themselves in an anti-postfeminism, arguing that women still have much to fight for, have claimed that women like Lady Gaga keep the female gender imprisoned inside an oldfashioned structure, despite the fact that she represents herself as a free woman.19 They accuse her of not even trying to dissent from the object role constituted by the male (cinematic) gaze. I argue, though, that the artist evokes a new femininity, in which it is possible to be an object and yet still to be in control. Gaga is, indeed, the one in charge. She ends up killing the man who bought her, stating that although she is a sexy, female body full of desire, she is not an object to be had, and thus she disrupts the phallic order. She is also the one pressing the Play button at the beginning of the video, the one wearing the black crown, and the one being a ‘free bitch.’20 Here, Gaga deconstructs the category of woman as embodied desire as something degrading and wrong, and thus performs a female monster that transgresses the dichotomy of female and male sexuality in the heterosexual matrix. 5. Rethinking and Redoing the Abnormal Body In her music videos Lady Gaga is the object being performed, but at the same time she is the subject enacting the embodied performances. Gaga both is and does the body. Amelia Jones argues in her book Body Art/Performing Subject that body art ‘provides the possibility for radical engagements that can transform the way we

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__________________________________________________________________ think about meaning and subjectivity (both the artist’s and our own),’21 a performative strategy exemplified by artists like Cindy Sherman, Orlan, and Andy Warhol who saw himself as nothing but surface. I claim that ‘Bad Romance’ can be seen as a work of body art, where Gaga is both the artist (the subject) and the work of art (the object). Because of this double role, Gaga, as subject, has the power to use herself as an objectified tool to deconstruct and thereby change discourses of normalcy. The human visualised in ‘Bad Romance’ deviates from the norm of the human (a crippled spine, enormous eyes, staggering gait, possible insanity, etc.) and is constructed as monstrous (because of the uncategorisable, ever-changing appearance and deviant way of acting), but it is not represented as a victim. Instead, Gaga performs a powerful creature full of lust and vitality, with a look worth a million dollars of desire. In ascribing positive values to the non-normative body, the artist can both be recognised within and deconstruct the discourse of the normative physical appearance that lingers in most mainstream music videos. She performs a female physicality that would not normally be accepted in popular culture, and by this means exemplifies how the bodily features of abnormality and monstrosity can transgress the dichotomy of accepted and non-accepted bodies, becoming positive, extraordinary deviations. Through her embodied performance of the monstrous, Lady Gaga states that real fun is for the monsters, and thereby challenges the viewer’s fixed category of (ab)normalcy. This is not the only Gaga video in which the normative discourses can be deconstructed and changed and I therefore turn to other monstrous performances in her videos. 6. The Murderous Female The man who is killed at the end of ‘Bad Romance’ is far from being Lady Gaga’s only murder victim in her music videos. In ‘Paparazzi,’ the video that came before ‘Bad Romance,’ Gaga’s boyfriend tries to kill her. When she is back on her feet the artist returns to their shared home to take revenge, first by mass-murdering their housemates and, second, by poisoning her partner. When his heart has stopped, Gaga picks up the phone and turns herself in with the words, ‘I just killed my boyfriend.’22 Another phone call connected with murder is to be found in the video that follows ‘Bad Romance,’ titled ‘Telephone.’ Here, as a prison guard yells out in the video for ‘Telephone,’ ‘Beyoncé is on the line for Gaga’23 to tell the prison inmate, Gaga, that she has been bailed out by Beyoncé herself. The two women then hit the road in their Kill Bill Pussy Wagon, and when Gaga, later in the same video, asks her soon-to-be partner in crime if ‘she is sure she wanna do this,’24 the audience knows that the singer is up to no good, again. While Beyoncé puts off her rude boyfriend, the other part of the killing duo is cooking poisoned food in the kitchen, which later kills every guest in a diner. After a short dance the couple is on their way again, going far, far away in best Thelma-and-Louise style.

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__________________________________________________________________ What is being performed by the artists in these videos is not only murderous action, but also female monstrosity. While men are often represented positively in a violent discourse, e.g. as action heroes and war heroes, women are not supposed to be violent, and the ‘discomfort with female violence reflects the continued salience of the stereotype of women as innocent and incapable of violence.’25 Men are the ones to take action and, if necessary, kill, while women are supposed to stay passive and meek if they do not wish to risk becoming monsters. The violent female monstrosity is, in medical scientific discourse, understood as a ‘biological flaw that disrupts their femininity,’26 because it questions biological reproduction.27 Lady Gaga kills her partner after sexual relations in both ‘Bad Romance’ and ‘Paparazzi,’ which in itself does not exclude reproduction, but certainly disrupts the idea of a nuclear family. As Gaga approaches her bidder in ‘Bad Romance,’ she is listing all the things desirable about her partner, which, by means of the Hitchcock references in the song to Psycho and Vertigo, adds madness to their bad romance. The words that follow are, ‘I want you in my rear window, Baby you’re sick,’28 also a Hitchcock reference (Rear Window), which emphasises the play with voyeuristic gaze in the video. These lines, compared to the rest of the lyrics, are a bit off the beat. Listening to the song, the slight displacement between words and beat makes the lyrics sound like, ‘I want you in my room, when your baby is sick,’29 which means that the baby, who in the correct lyrics is Gaga’s lover, refers to a small child in this version. The misinterpretation of baby is emphasised by Gaga’s folded hands, which move in a curve from under her breasts to the lower part of her stomach, thereby forming the shape of a pregnant body. The reproductive triangle of (passive) woman, (active) man and baby is thus once more disrupted, and although Gaga is stating ‘you’re sick’30 and hereby referring to the male object of her desire, what seems to be sick here is mainly Gaga’s own desire, as Gaga makes a kind of metonymic connection between her lover and a baby, indulges her post-intercourse killing habit, and seems to turn most of her desire inwards in the video’s numerous crotch-grabbing shots. The female subject in these music videos is aggressive, violent, murderous and definitely not typical mother material. Not only is she a killer, she is herself the crime scene, wrapped in yellow Do not pass plastic tape (in ‘Telephone’), and is continuously taking the lives of men standing in her way. How do we interpret the femininity that the artist is embodying? Is this all about women’s power, as suggested by the female gender symbol at the end of ‘Telephone,’ or does it go beyond this? 7. Killing Men or Conventions? In Jack Halberstam’s reading of ‘Telephone,’ the question ‘Is this film about castration?’ is answered with a prompt ‘Oh yeah baby,’ and Halberstam continues:

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__________________________________________________________________ Your phone is going to be off the hook, your land line is now cordless, your cordless lost reception, your mobile is turned off, your girlfriend is turned on and she is escaping in a pussy wagon with another woman!31 ‘Telephone’ is thus, according to Halberstam, all about women castrating men, dumping (and killing) their partners and, at the end, running off together in a femme liberation. The music video builds its narrative upon, at least, two films:32 Chicago and Thelma and Louise. The first of these tells the story of women who are doing time in a women’s prison for murdering their partner. Practising singing and dance moves behind the bars, the inmates hope their performances will be their way out of jail. In the video, Gaga is in a women’s prison for the murder of her boyfriend, and she is dancing away with the other inmates. The second film reference deals with two women who are getting away from a controlling husband and a rapist (whom they kill), who are on the road escaping together at the end. In ‘Telephone,’ Lady Gaga and Beyoncé hesitate, in a dialogue close to the ‘Let’s keep going,’ ‘You sure?’33 part of Thelma and Louise, then hit the road together after the murder scene. Thelma and Louise has been read by many critics as a feminist movie34 in the same sense as the three Gaga videos examined in this chapter: as women getting together to take revenge on men who treat them badly. The writer of Thelma and Louise is of a different opinion and states, ‘Thelma and Louise is not about feminists, it’s about outlaws.’35 I would like to suggest that we stop talking about feminism and start talking more about outlaws when it comes to Lady Gaga. In Chicago, Roxie Hart, one of the two female main characters who kills her boyfriend Fred Casely because he lies to her about being able to make her a star, is desperate to become famous in order to find her way out of jail. But without an act, Roxie turns to the butch prison guard (again, as in ‘Telephone,’ butchness is the norm in prison), Matron Mama Morton, for advice, and gets the answer, ‘Killing Fred Casely was your act. It’s all the stiffs in the audience want.’36 I will argue that the killings in the videos of Gaga are not mainly about feminism, castration or femme libération, but more about liberation and breaking the law. Gaga’s act is not to perform as feminist, but simply to kill, with murder as an ongoing metaphor for escaping the existing structures of society. As argued in section 3, Gaga’s fight with the nurses in ‘Bad Romance’ could either imply that she is being treated for insanity, or that she is trying to fight the prison in which the subject is kept by the norms of society. Since she spits the liquid back into the face of one of the nurses—thereby spitting the rules and regulations of society directly in the face— the latter possibility is the likelier interpretation. All three videos, ‘Paparazzi,’ ‘Bad Romance’ and ‘Telephone,’ can be read as a performative spit in the face of normalcy, I will claim. Lady Gaga is not just killing partners who have betrayed her, as in Chicago and Thelma and Louise; she is taking the life of anyone

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__________________________________________________________________ (including women and a dog) who stands in the way of this ‘free bitch.’37 In order to maintain her monstrous state, the artist can never be tied to one particular position and has to spit, bite, crawl, pull, and kill her way out of the bonds of normalcy. As it is for Roxie, killing is the very act of Gaga. It is what secures that she never loses her fame for good (as in ‘Paparazzi’), that she stays ever selfdeconstructive and changing in her appearances (as in ‘Bad Romance’), and that she can go without a hitch at full speed (as in ‘Telephone’):—it is what the stiffs in the audience want. I am not arguing here that Lady Gaga is not portraying a woman, or that feminist issues are not relevant to discussion of the artist here. Still I hope to have shown that the performativity of Gaga goes beyond feminism, and that although these issues are a significant percentage of the whole act of the artist, the central deconstructive element of the act is more about performing the positivity of mental and physical deviations, about staying monstrous and being able to break the law— of killing conventions. 8. ‘You Can Call all You Want’38 Today, Donna Haraway has claimed, we live in a time where ‘dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilised are all in question ideologically.’39 This world is thus post-gendered and here, we are all cyborgs. Adapting the thought of the monster as something that is uncategorisable and deconstructs dichotomies to Haraway’s cyborg theory, I will claim that today we have all become monsters. So far I have shown that Lady Gaga indeed does question many of the dichotomies listed above. Building on the idea of Gaga as a representation of the post-gendered subject, this section examines how she exemplifies the blurredness of the boundary between organism and machine in our time, and consequently how we can all be considered undefinable monsters. In the video ‘Paparazzi,’ Lady Gaga appears with a powerful prosthetic body, performing with a broken neck in a wheelchair and dancing on her crutches in a cyborg-like gold outfit. Here the artist makes it clear that a crippled body is not the end of abled-ness and stardom, rather the contrary: she becomes the new ‘it girl’40 with her post-accident body. In both ‘Paparazzi’ and ‘Bad Romance’ Gaga performs a posthuman subject, which is taken even further in ‘Telephone.’ Here brands, commodities, and technology have been woven into the fabric of the human body to a degree where it is impossible to determine where the boundary between human and non-human is to be found: a Virgin mobile phone is bought for a kiss, Chanel is the label that covers the eyes, and Coca Cola (diet, of course) cans are part of the hair. The main object of interest in this video is, no surprise, the telephone. While the lyrics in ‘Telephone’ tell the story of the phone as a part of our technological world, where we cannot escape the speed, immediacy, and demands that come with being connected with the whole world (almost) wherever

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__________________________________________________________________ we go, in the video Gaga is no longer bound by technology. Instead, the telephone is the object that gets her out of jail and also the object she has become; the phone is woven into her hair, making her ring, beep, and stutter. We can call her all we want, but she will only pick up when it suits her. What is being performed in Gaga’s three videos exemplifies what is also central in actor-network theory (ANT).41 As in ANT the ‘distinction between human and non-human is of little initial analytical importance: people are relational effects that include both the human and the non-human.’42 This means that we can no longer study the subject alone. We have to incorporate all objects with which the subject interacts and with which it is interwoven. In so doing we will be able to ‘discover more revealing patterns by finding a way to register the links between unstable and shifting frames of reference rather than by trying to keep one frame stable.’43 In this posthuman time, the human has to be understood as unstable, and so does the non-human. The subject is indefinable, not just through its performativity, but also through its interaction with the non-human, which again changes the position of the non-human, depending on whether the telephone is used as a practical tool to call Gaga, as a life saver that gets Gaga out of jail, or as part of a hairstyle. As well, the non-human is impossible to separate from the human. Without her prosthetics, Gaga would never be able to move, dance, or kill again; without the telephone, she would still be in prison. Although Lady Gaga makes posthumanity clear for everyone to see in her videos, it is not as part of a closed performative world, but rather as a part of everyday life for all living in the world today. In the posthuman, as put by Kathrine Hayles, ‘there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals.’44 This however does not mean the end of humanity. Rather, it signals ‘the end of a certain conception of the human,’45 in which technology now has a great influence on our lives, but has not taken them over. Instead, we have incorporated it into our bodies and minds, and have thus become powerful creatures of a modern time. So far the analyses have shown that Gaga is indeed monstrous, with her physically deviant body, her aggressive femininity, her animalistic traces, her violent tendencies and her hyper-technological body, which together wipe out every possibility of finding the authentic, essential human behind all the layers. In fact, there is no such authentic essential human to be found behind Gaga’s performances—nor is there in any person. In a posthuman and post-gendered world, where we to a greater and greater degree interact with technology, modify our looks, and question the essentialistic understanding of gender, we have all become monsters. The element of potential inner monstrosity is what keeps us drawn to and at the same time repelled by the monster. What characterises the monster of today are characteristics found within us all (this point will be elaborated later in the chapter). Before trying to define this new monster, let us

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__________________________________________________________________ take a short walk through representations of the monster and how it has been understood as reflections of the threats posed to society from the Middle Ages through to the present day. 9. A Change of Times In Joshua D. Bellin’s Framing Monsters, the film King Kong is seen as ‘the exemplar, if not the prototype, of a long-standing (and ongoing) tradition in fantasy film that identifies marginalised social groups as monstrous threats to the dominant social order,’ 46 which in the case of King Kong reflects the fear that lingered in the racial discourse of the time. I suggest that this framing of monsters can be adapted to the concept of the monstrous outside the genre of fantasy film, in order to understand the monster as a reflection of what is considered threatening or other in the society concerned. Here I will present some examples of how monsters can reflect the society of their time, and the possible social threats connected. In the sixteenth century, monsters were understood as ‘things that appear outside the course of Nature,’ 47 and the first two reasons mentioned for monstrous existences were the glory and the wrath of God. In Christian countries in the Middle Ages, the power of God had a considerable influence on daily life. The Lord was considered almighty, with the power to punish or reward people for their bad or good deeds. What people feared most at that time was the anger of God as a consequence of their wrong behaviour, anger which could overturn the order of society by disrupting nature. Therefore an example of the monster of that time could be represented as an aberration in the natural world created by God. No matter whether these were negative or positive signs, these divine interventions were ‘a visible symbol through which the Almighty exhibited his will, and wrath, for all to see.’48 The social threat consisted of changes in the natural world, and thereby in God and all his power. The monster of Frankenstein saw the light of day in an era when a ‘Christian myth’ had been replaced by a ‘scientific myth’49 and where the nature of man had become ‘the subject of inquiry’.50 Here the omnipotence of God was questioned since man now had the power to change the course of nature. Frankenstein’s monster can be read as a monstrous example of a fear of this change: that man is given the interventionist power to play with nature which used to belong only to God, and thereby to create a threat to humankind. The ultimate horror in the Frankenstein story consists of the monster finding his bride, mating, and thereby creating a world, which is taken over by terrible monstrous beings. Later, discoveries such as the theory of evolution revealed the plasticity51 of nature and thereby ‘opened up a space wherein hitherto unthinkable morphic structures could emerge.’52 One monstrous exemplification of this threat to society is the shifting character of Dr. Jekyll, where the evolving of mankind has lost control and is enabling new expressions of human evil to emerge.

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__________________________________________________________________ According to Halberstam, the vampire Dracula can be read as a ‘stereotypical anti-Semitic nineteenth-century representation of the Jew.’53 With his dark hair, pale skin, hooked nose, Eastern background and his greed (for more blood) Dracula lives up to the stereotypical prejudice of the Jew. Bram Stoker’s vampire novel saw the light of day at a time when nationalism was emerging throughout Europe. At the end of the nineteenth century, anti-Semitism was ‘one articulation of a rising tide of nationalism and racism.’54 Around the same time, the monstrous vision of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) could be read as an indication of the worship of vanity, of good form and superficiality in the time of Victorianism. Before getting lost in time, let us skip back to the present and take a look at the possible threats of today. In newer monstrous time, much of high and low culture grows ever fascinated with the abuse of the flesh, violence signifies, in all its glorious splendor, an attempt to grasp the feel of the real. Nothing, for the moment, screams “this is real” better than skin and bone under assault.55 The earlier fascination with the monster that has human traces, but is clearly non-human, is currently becoming an obsession with the destruction of the (real) human body and mind. In contemporary horror the monster is the next-door neighbour; a socially well-functioning person turning out to be a mass-murdering psychopath (e.g. Dexter, and Patrick Bateman in American Psycho), and the focus on the victims is on the perfectly broken body. This means the monsters are no longer represented as the terrifying other coming from the outside, but rather as someone who could have been us and therefore reflects the monstrous coming from inside ourselves. We never know when our perfect bodies will be broken apart; more importantly, we never know when we will act like monsters.56 If we read this into the Bellin’s framing of the monster as a reflection of our social fears, the greatest threat in today’s society is to lose control of our own bodies and minds and fall apart in self-destruction. This is what draws us to the familiarity of the monster, but at the same time horrifies us more than anything else. 10. Recognising the Monster Within Though the freak show is today considered to have been a degrading abuse of non-normative people,57 it was not necessarily unambiguous during the time when the freak show flourished.58 Although the deviant body served as a pleasurable reassurance to the audience of their own normalcy, this body also ‘symbolised a potential for individual freedom denied by cultural pressures toward standardisation.’59 Besides offering a space of recognition for the personal flaws of the people in the crowd, the freaks also challenged the normative valuation system of society and were thereby ‘muddying the waters of normality.’60 Another duality

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__________________________________________________________________ of the freak body—or the monster—is the attraction and repulsion that are at work side by side in our fascination with the monstrous. The satisfaction of staring at the other is our tacit acknowledgement of us not being them. At the same time, the audience is reminded that the difference between the so-called freak and the socalled us is not quite as clear-cut as we might like it to be, since the freaks emphasise the instability of the human body and indicate how easily it can become monstrous.61 I will claim that the same dynamics of attraction/repulsion are to be found in the popularity of Gaga. Although the music videos of Lady Gaga are not part of the horror genre, I argue that the monstrous figure the artist represents is comparable to the threats that linger in the horror film. Living in a time when correct behaviour and bodily perfection are required for women, and when they are constantly ‘instructed that their bodies are unacceptable’62 by the fashion industry, women’s magazines, etc., Gaga performs the unthinkable for women of the modern world: she throws away (some of) her femininity and thereby becomes monstrous. At the same time, the artist is also performing a kind of Bakhtinian carnival, ‘[which] celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norm, and prohibitions.’63 Here, in the carnival of Gaga, she serves as an entire freak show all by herself, by representing multiple versions of the deviant human body and mind. Audiences are drawn to her because of the pleasure of pointing the finger at her freakiness, and because they can recognise varying flaws in another body— especially a body that works in a system, the pop culture industry, of human perfection. She masters the dangerous outside, while she continuously is changing the structure of the monster from the inside. 11. Conclusion In this chapter I have argued that we need to rethink the concepts of monster and monstrous when confronted with a phenomenon like Lady Gaga. The figure we are dealing with here is a monster because of its eternal shape-shifting and its deconstruction of the existing discourses normally performed and cited in mainstream music videos. Gaga destabilises the category of human nature by suggesting that humans might be closer to animals or machines than we like to think. She also questions the status of woman as an object of lust, by hinting that being an object can actually be positive, rather than degrading. Most importantly, Lady Gaga shows how it is possible to have a monstrous body and yet still be a desired, vital role model. I have in this chapter argued that Gaga demonstrates a way to integrate monstrosity—in the shape of physical deformity, mental illness, and deviating performances of the female gender—into an acceptable and desired bodily discourse in mainstream culture. By performing the non-normative marked as positive, Gaga manages to question the category of normalcy and turn monstrous features into extraordinary ones—features which can makes her a ‘free

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__________________________________________________________________ bitch,’64 capable of breaking out of conventional structures by spitting in the face of normalcy and murdering her way out of the bonds people try to put on her. The monster earlier enjoyed its prime in the freak show many years ago. Now it is time to recognise it once again—not as a sign of divine power but as a sign of future possibilities, where norm-deviating bodies are taking control. Gaga has led the way. She has shown that we are all monsters, even if the monster inside us has not yet shown its ever-changing face.

Notes 1

E.g. Gaga’s performance of ‘Paparazzi’ at MTV Europe Music Awards in 2009. E.g. Gaga’s performance of ‘Lovegame’ during The Monster Ball Tour (20092011). 3 Lady Gaga performing a medley at the 2010 Grammy Awards, viewed 28 March 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehJ4PB5o6cA. 4 ‘Little Monster’ Viewed 20 March 2013, http://ladygaga.wikia.com/wiki/Little_Monsters_(fan). 5 The understanding of the term pop culture or popular culture addapted here comes from John Storey and his introduction to popular culture as a culture that is widely favoured and is defined through its contradiction to high culture; see John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, 6th Edition (Essex: Pearson Education Limited, 2012), 1-14. 6 The coffin and the cross are just some of the many religious symbols in the visual aesthetics of Gaga. Though these are important, it calls for a whole other chapter and will therefore not be examined here. 7 Lady Gaga, Lady Gaga Presents the Monster Ball Tour: At Madison Square Garden, directed by Laurieann Gibson, TV film (2011; New York: Studio Polydor, 2011), DVD. 8 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 34, 208; Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), xxi-xxii. 9 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 7; Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 17. 10 Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 9. 11 Jacques Derrida, Points...: Interviews, 1974-1994 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 385; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Preface in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), x. 12 Derrida, Points..., 386. 2

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Stefani Germanotta and Nadir Khayat, ‘Bad Romance,’ directed by Francis Lawrence, music video (Los Angeles: © Interscope Records, 2010), viewed 26 December 2012, http://www.ladygaga.com/media/default.aspx?meid=5404. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Although much has happened in film studies since Laura Mulvey’s article on the cinematic gaze in the 70s, including both a feminist and a post-feminist wave (see, for example, David Gauntlett, Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction, 2nd Edition (New York: Routledge, 2008), 22-45.), I claim that the male gaze in music videos have not evolved far beyond the voyeuristic and fetishistic gaze. 18 Ann E. Kaplan, Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture (New York: Routledge, 1987), 91; author’s italics. 19 Cathrine Redfern and Kristin Aune, Reclaiming the F Word: The New Feminist Movement (London: Zed Books Ltd, 2010), 171-173. 20 Germanotta and Khayat, ‘Bad Romance.’ 21 Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 14; author’s italics. 22 Stefani Germanotta and Rob Fusari, ‘Paparazzi,’ directed by Jonas Åkerlund, music video (CA: © Interscope Records, 2009), viewed 30 December 2012, http://www.ladygaga.com/player/default.aspx?meid=4931. 23 Stefani Germanotta et al., ‘Telephone,’ directed by Jonas Åkerlund, music video (CA: © Interscope Records, 2010), viewed 30 December 2012, http://www.ladygaga.com/media/default.aspx?meid=5599. 24 Ibid. 25 Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics (New York: Zed Books Ltd, 2007), 2, 17. 26 Ibid., 36. 27 Nina Lykke and Rosi Braidotti, ed., Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine and Cyberspace (London: Zed Books, 1996), 139. 28 Germanotta and Khayat, ‘Bad Romance.’ 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Jack Halberstam, ‘You Cannot Gaga Gaga,’ viewed 28 December 2012, http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/you-cannot-gaga-gaga-by-jackhalberstam/. 32 The list of intertextual references in ‘Telephone’ is endless, spanning from the dance moves and outfits of Michal Jackson to other films revolving around other murderous females like Monster (2003) and Kill Bill (2003), and this chapter only provides a scrap of them.

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Callie Khouri, Thelma and Louise, directed by Ridley Scott, film (1991; Bakersfield, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 2002), DVD. 34 Michael Dunne, Intertextual Encounters in American Fiction, Film and Popular Culture (Chicago: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2001), 89-90. 35 Karen Hollinger, Feminist Film Studies (New York: Routledge, 2012), 265. 36 Bill Condon, Bob Fosse and Fred Ebb, Chicago, directed by Rob Marshall, film (2002; Chicago, Illinois: Buena Vista, 2003), DVD. 37 Germanotta and Khayat, ‘Bad Romance.’ 38 Stefani Germanotta et al., ‘Telephone,’ 39 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 150, 163. 40 Germanotta and Fusari,‘Paparazzi.’ 41 Although the tradition of Actor Network Theory is originally a critique of social constructivism and its lack of focus on technology in social relations, it is not inconsistent with the theory of Judith Butler as a theoretical foundation of this chapter, I will claim. Rather ANT functions as a supplement for social constructivism through which it is possible to analyze how identity performatively is created through interaction with non-human actors. Karen Barad successfully combines Butler and physics theory; see Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28:3 (2003): 801-831; and Jette Kofoed and Jessica Ringrose for their use of an Deleuzian approach brought together with Butler, in ‘Travelling and Sticky Affects: Exploring Teens and Sexualized Cyberbullying Through a Butlerian-Deleuzian-Guattarian Lens,’ Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 33:1 (2012): 5-20. 42 John Law, ‘Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics’ last modified 25 April 2007, viewed 28 December 2012, http://heterogeneities.net/publications/Law2007ANTandMaterialSemiotics.pdf. 43 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 24. 44 N. Kathrine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3, 286. 45 Ibid. 46 Joshua D. Bellin, Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 2, 6. 47 Ambroise Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, trans. Janice Pallister (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3. 48 Bellin, Framing Monsters, 170. 49 Roy Porter, The Enlightenment (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 19. 50 Ibid., 15.

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Plasticity is here to be understood as the changeability and evolvement of nature, which goes against the thought of God designing the world as it should be from the beginning, and the lack of possibilities for humans to intervene with this. 52 Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin-de-Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7. 53 Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 86. 54 Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 203. 55 Jonathan Lake Crane, Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History of the Horror Films (California: Sage Publications, Inc., 1994), 168. 56 Ibid., 8, 141. 57 Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 68. 58 Although the freak show is here appropriated as a past tense phenomenon, I am not suggesting that we are living in a post freak show era, but instead that the freak show has had a change of scene. For examples of freak shows as medical documentaries, see Jose van Dijck, The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 22; and as daytime shows, see Niall Richardson, Transgressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular Culture (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 168. 59 Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 68. 60 Niall Richardson, Trangressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular Culture (Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010), 4-5. 61 Ibid., 8. 62 Kathy Davis, Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery (New York: Routledge, 1995), 3. 63 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 10. 64 Germanotta and Khayat, ‘Bad Romance.’

Bibliography Barad, Karen. ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28:3 (2003): 801-831. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Bellin, Joshua D. Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.

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__________________________________________________________________ Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex.’ New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2006. Cohen, Jeffrey J. Preface to Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey J. Cohen, vii-xiii. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 1996. Condon, Bill, Bob Fosse and Fred Ebb, Chicago. Directed by Rob Marshall. Film. 2002. Chicago, Illinois: Buena Vista, 2003. DVD. Crane, Jonathan L. Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History of the Horror Films. California: Sage Publications Inc., 1994. Davis, Kathy. Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery. New York: Routledge, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. Points...: Interviews, 1974-1994. California: Stanford University Press, 1995. Dijck, Jose van, The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. Dunne, Michael. Intertextual Encounters in American Fiction, Film and Popular Culture. Chicago: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2001. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Gauntlett, David. Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction, 2nd Edition. New York: Routledge, 2008. Germanotta, Stefani and Nadir Khayat, Bad Romance. Directed by Francis Lawrence. Music video. Los Angeles: © Interscope Records, 2010. Viewed December 30, 2012. www.ladygaga.com/media/default.aspx?meid=5404. Germanotta, Stefani and Rob Fusari, Paparazzi. Directed by Jonas Åkerlund. Music video. CA: © Interscope Records, 2009. Viewed December 30, 2012. http://www.ladygaga.com/player/default.aspx?meid=4931.

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__________________________________________________________________ Germanotta, Stefani, Rodney Jerkins, LaShawn Daniels, Lazonate Franklin and Beyoncé Knowles. Telephone. Directed by Jonas Åkerlund. Music video. CA: © Interscope Records, 2010. Viewed December 30, 2012. http://www.ladygaga.com/media/default.aspx?meid=5599. Halberstam, Jack. ‘You Cannot Gaga Gaga.’ Viewed December 28, 2012. http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/you-cannot-gaga-gaga-by-jackhalberstam/. Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York; Routledge, 1991. Hayles, N. Kathrine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Hollinger, Karen. Feminist Film Studies. New York: Routledge, 2012. Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin-de-Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Jones, Amelia. Body Art/Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Kaplan, E. Ann. Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture. New York: Routledge, 1987. Khouri, Callie. Thelma and Louise. Directed by Ridley Scott. Film. 1991. Bakersfield, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 2002. DVD. Kofoed, Jette, and Jessica Burns. ‘Travelling and Sticky Affects: Exploring Teens and Sexualized Cyberbullying Through a Butlerian-Deleuzian-Guattarian Lens.’ Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 33:1 (2012): 5-20. Lady Gaga Presents the Monster Ball Tour: At Madison Square Garden. Directed by Laurieann Gibson. TV film. 2011. New York: Studio Polydor, 2011. DVD. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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__________________________________________________________________ Law, John. ‘Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics.’ Last modified April 25, 2007. Viewed December 30, 2012. http://heterogeneities.net/publications/Law2007ANTandMaterialSemiotics.pdf. Lykke, Nina, and Rosi Braidotti, ed. Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine and Cyberspace. London: Zed Books, 1996. Paré, Ambroise. On Monsters and Marvels. Translated by Janice Pallister. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Porter, Roy. The Enlightenment. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Redfern, Cathrine, and Kristin Aune. Reclaiming the F Word: The New Feminist Movement. London: Zed Books Ltd, 2010. Richardson, Niall. Trangressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular Culture. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010. Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Sjoberg, Laura, and Caron E. Gentry. Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics. New York: Zed Books Ltd, 2007. Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, 6th Edition. Essex: Pearson Education Limited, 2012. Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Lise Dilling-Hansen is a PhD student in the Department of the Aesthetics and Communication at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research explores the gender and bodily discourses performed by Lady Gaga, how Gaga’s fans imitate her, and how this is creating new discourses in modern culture.

Here Be Dragons (and Vampires, and Zombies): The Politics of Monstrous Communities Jack Fennell Abstract In recent years, it has been increasingly common to depict monsters (by which I mean the bestial kind, rather than supposedly monstrous humans) as having spaces of their own within our world. Monster lairs have changed down through the centuries, from the cave in the woods to the suburban house. Traditional monsters were lonely pariahs; the monsters of today are members of vibrant communities, with spaces for recreation (as seen in Constantine and The Monster Club) and commerce (the Goblin Market in Hellboy II: The Golden Army, for example). Interestingly, these spaces are, in a sense, multicultural: different varieties of monster associate within these spaces. In this chapter, I wish to examine the political significance of both this re-zoning of the monster lair and the expansion of monstrous space to include places of recreation, commerce, and worship. However, I must briefly give a caveat that this chapter will focus on monsters in the folklore and popular culture of the West, and my arguments are not intended to be universal. Key Words: Space, utopia, heterotopia, politics, community. ***** 1. Introduction Monsters are traditionally held to define the boundaries of human agency and creativity, and therefore their existence is implied to be of vital importance to social cohesion. They enforce boundaries by their grotesque nature, embodying the qualities that society pushes to the margins in order to exist. As Donna Haraway puts it, [t]he Centaurs and Amazons of ancient Greece established the limits of the centred polis of the Greek male human by their disruption of marriage and boundary pollutions of the warrior with animality and woman. Unseparated twins and hermaphrodites were the confused human material in early modern France who grounded discourse on the natural and supernatural, medical and legal, portents and diseases—all crucial to establishing modern identity.1 The concept of monstrosity has a definite spatial dimension, and it is possible to trace the historically-variable definitions of monstrosity by looking at the spaces

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__________________________________________________________________ in which they live; thus, the monsters of the ancient world inhabited places that were not readily amenable to human commerce or leisure, such as caves and swamps and mountains, because monsters were conceived of as creatures that placed limits on human activity. For Edward Soja, space is neither solely an objective physical context nor an expression of class structures determined by patterns of production, but ‘a dialectically defined component of the general relations of production, relations which are simultaneously social and spatial.’2 Thus, for discursive purposes, Soja makes a distinction ‘between space per se, space as a contextual given, and socially-based spatiality, the created space of social organization and production.’3 So, to be precise, what I referred to as ‘monstrous space’ in the abstract is technically monstrous spatiality, a created space wherein monstrosity is defined. Fredric Jameson makes a similar point, and a disturbing implication, when he argues that, the empirical institutions and situations of the city stand as allegories of the invisible substance of society as a whole; while the very concept that citizens are able to form of society as a whole becomes allegorical of their empirical possibilities, their constraints and restrictions or, on the other hand, their new potentialities and future openings.4 To make a long story short, we construct spatiality, and in turn, spatiality constructs us. Modern monster habitats, however, have combined to form communities that mirror our own in unsettling ways. They contain places for recreation, such as the monster pubs and nightclubs of Constantine (2005), The Monster Club (1980), True Blood (2008-present), and countless others, places for commerce such as the Goblin Market in Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), and even places for spirituality such as the werewolf hippy commune in The Howling (1981). There are even some texts that raise questions about monstrous labour, albeit for comic effect—such as Monsters, Inc. (2001), in which scaring humans is an industry in itself,5 The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), in which the practice is more like a vocation, and is carried out without any genuine malice,6 and in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), in which the condition of being a monster has many job-like aspects: for example, monsters ‘take the night off’ for Halloween.7 This shift from the wilderness to the suburbs poses a number of questions. Why are monsters forming complex societies? Why do these societies look like ours? Do they sincerely want to be like us, or do they even have a choice in the matter? One question in particular should give us pause: if spatialities produce particular subjects, and there exists a kind of aberrant spatiality that produces monsters, what

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__________________________________________________________________ does it mean for human societies that monstrous spatialities are now almost identical to our own? 2. Join the Club One particular trope which has become increasingly popular in horror and fantasy fiction since the middle of the twentieth century is the monster pub, in which werewolves, vampires, mummies, and demons enjoy each other’s company and let their hair down. The patrons of these establishments are from a variety of different species, so to speak, but are all members of the same community by virtue of the fact that they are not human. In fact, the question of whether or not humans should even be allowed in these places becomes a central issue in a number of works. In the film Constantine,8 adapted from the comic-book series Hellblazer (1988-2013) created by Alan Moore, access to Papa Midnite’s nightclub is granted only to those humans who possess a psychic or occult ability (specifically, the ability to read the bouncer’s mind). Amicus Productions’ final film, The Monster Club, climaxes with a speech, delivered by a vampire played by Vincent Price, testifying to the monstrous nature of humankind and arguing that any monster club worth the name should have at least one human member: Can we truly call this a “monster club” if we do not boast among our membership a single member of the human race? [...] “What can he do?” In the past sixty years, [humans] have exterminated over a hundred and fifty million of their own kind. No effort has been spared to reach this astronomical figure, and the methods that they have used must demand our unstinted admiration. You know, [humans] began with certain very serious disadvantages, but these they overcame with wonderful ingenuity. Not having a fang or a claw [...] they invented guns, and tanks, and bombs, and aeroplanes, and extermination camps, and poison gas, and daggers and swords and bayonets, and booby-traps and atomic bombs and flying missiles, submarines, warships, aircraft carriers—and motor cars. They have even perfected a process whereby they can spread a lethal disease on any part of this planet! Not to say anything about nuclear power. Haha! Oh, during their short history, you know, [humans] have subjected other [humans] to death by burning, hanging, decapitation, strangulation, electrocution, shooting, drowning, crushing, racking, disembowelling, and other methods far, far too revolting for the delicate stomachs of this august assembly!9 To this, the awestruck Club Secretary, a werewolf, responds, ‘I had no idea [they] were so… talented!’10 The prospective human member, horror writer R.

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__________________________________________________________________ Chetwynd-Hayes (played by John Carradine), counters this by saying, ‘We don’t like to boast.’ In this case, monstrosity is defined by action, and monstrosity has a straightforward, moral definition. Another kind of monstrous space is presented in Clive Barker’s Cabal (1988) and its film adaptation, Nightbreed (1990). Again, entry and belonging are central issues to the narrative. Aaron Boone seeks out the mythical locale known as Midian because he believes himself to be a serial killer. It is said that in Midian monsters are welcome, and Boone wishes to remove himself from human society completely. He does not realise, however, that he is innocent of the murders and that his psychiatrist (the real murderer) has tricked him into taking the blame upon himself. Though he is convinced of his guilt, he does not belong in the quasi-utopia he longs for, a fact recognised by Midian’s residents. “I’ve spilled blood...” Boone murmured. “Killed eleven people.” The blue eyes focused on him. There was humour in them. “I don’t think so,” Peloquin said. “It’s not up to us,” Jackie put in. “You can’t judge him.” “I’ve got eyes in my head, haven’t I?” said Peloquin. “I know a clean man when I see one.” He wagged his finger at Boone. “You’re not Nightbreed,” he said. “You’re meat. That’s what you are. Meat for the beast.”11 The Nightbreed are selective about those they accept into their community, seeming to take only those who are notionally evil or antisocial. Their existence is revealed to Boone by Narcisse, a fellow lunatic who has been trying to prove himself worthy of citizenship in Midian for many years—and eventually convinces them by peeling off his own face.12 Once again monstrosity has a moral definition, but in this case the issue is more complex. Midian is an underground warren beneath the graveyard of a long-forgotten gold-rush town, a safe haven for the undead established by their leader, the god Baphomet. There, the Nightbreed can fulfil their needs (such as the consumption of human flesh and the avoidance of sunlight), and even raise families, in some kind of peace and prosperity. The supposed evil they seek in prospective members is not actually evil per se, and more a divergence from human norms. However, even though Midian is an oppositional space, in a very profound way it mirrors human society, and in particular, its history mimics that of the USA—just as immigrants travelled to the Americas in pursuit of better lives, so too have monsters come to Midian, seeking a space of their own away from the interference of humans. The utopian longing of the migrant, a fundamental element of American culture, is present here in the way Midian is presented as a promised land for huddled monsters yearning to breathe free. When Boone’s lover Lori comes to Midian

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__________________________________________________________________ searching for him, she enters the graveyard and sees concrete evidence of the heterogeneous origins of both Midian and America: Here was a place sacred to the dead, who were not the living ceased, but almost another species, requiring rites and prayers that belonged uniquely to them. She was surrounded on every side by such signs: epitaphs in English, French, Polish and Russian; images of veiled women and shattered urns, saints whose martyrdom she could only guess at, stone dogs sleeping upon their masters’ tombs.13 The parallels with US history continue towards the novel’s climax, as the refugee monsters must defend their home against a gang comprised of human lawgivers: a psychiatrist, a priest, a sheriff, and his deputies (the film version is even more pointed, depicting the assault on Midian as a lynching, with the human gang as a redneck militia in pickup trucks).14 If the defining characteristic of monstrosity is an old-fashioned moral one, however, what are we to make of the increasing number of horror and fantasy texts in which humans are the villains, and monsters a persecuted minority? It seems that traditional moral concepts are no longer sufficient to describe what a monster actually is, since the monster is not always defined by its immorality. In Nightbreed, the monster-woman Rachel casts doubt on this old moral definition when she explains to Lori that, To be able to fly? To be smoke, or a wolf? To know the night and live in it forever? That’s not so bad. You call us “monsters,” but when you dream, you dream of flying, and changing, and living without death. You envy us.15 It is worthwhile to consider how much of our moral precepts of monstrosity are due to a simple case of sour grapes. In fact, one could revisit Donna Haraway’s assertion from the beginning of this chapter, and make the argument that there has never been a place that is completely off-limits to human beings: our species has always hunted, mined, fished, and cut down trees, and historically the only limits to our growth tended to be technological. The periphery of the human world was thus not made up of spaces from which we were forbidden, but rather, spaces that we could not make full use of. Monsters, on the other hand, did not have this problem because they did not try to change the spaces they occupied—the kappa simply owns the river, as the yeti owns the mountain, the sea-serpent owns the ocean, and the pooka owns the bog. As Rachel points out, perhaps it is not our fear or hatred that monsters must endure, but our jealousy.

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__________________________________________________________________ 3. The Same Difference In horror and fantasy fiction, multi-species communities are usually bound together by a looming human threat from outside. This existence on the margins of history has even given rise to hybrid monsters which have been appearing in popular fiction with increasing frequency since at least the nineteenth century. One notable example is The Story of Baelbrow (1898) by E. and H. Heron (the pseudonyms of Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard and his mother Kate, creators of the occult detective Flaxman Low), wherein the eponymous mansion, built on an ancient burial ground, turns out to be haunted by a mummy which has been reanimated by the ghost of a vampire.16 Even creatures which are commonly depicted as adversaries (such as vampires and werewolves) implicitly acknowledge a common marginality, and in many texts, they pursue their mutual animosity in such a way as to never alert humanity to their existence. The problem with this kind of oppositional identity, however, is that it paradoxically re-inscribes humanity as the norm and gives rise to a raft of other definitional problems: if a monster is simply non-human, should the category include non-human animals? The notion seems ridiculous, but human popular culture is teeming with monstrous creatures that are just that. Leaving relatively normal creatures such as man-eating beasts and giant radioactive arthropods aside, fictional monsters are often nothing more than bizarre animals hitherto unknown to science (such as the Alien series’ xenomorph). Another problem is that, for those of us raised on vampire stories in particular, the word ‘monster’ can often carry a connotation of sapience, and to define a monster simply as a sapient non-human does not work. While the sapience of arthropods, fish, and non-human mammals might still be a subject for debate, some non-human species are unquestionably intelligent and self-aware, such as gorillas and chimpanzees, and the categorization of these species as monsters would be self-evidently ludicrous. The problem recurs when one considers the sapient non-human extraterrestrials of science fiction space texts such as Star Trek and Star Wars, who are not really monsters either, no matter how bizarre their appearances or how threatening their behaviour. There clearly must be some other quality that accounts for why the friendly ‘vegetarian’ vampires of modern horror/fantasy fiction are still considered monsters, while the most despicable extraterrestrials are not—the distinction is sufficiently ingrained in popular culture to have been taken as the premise for at least one text, the animated film Monsters vs. Aliens (2009).17 If this uniquely monstrous quality is not a moral one, or simply a case of being non-human, then perhaps it is something internal. In his essay ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ Thomas Nagel argues that, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something that it is like to be that organism [...] an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism—

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__________________________________________________________________ something that it is like for the organism [...] We may call this the subjective character of experience.’18 Nagel suggests that there is a frontier of otherness beyond which language and the ability to hypothesise cease to function. We cannot discover what it is like to be a bat, for example, by imagining what it would be like to have wings, to eat insects, or to hang upside-down during the day. That only tells us what it would be like for a human to imitate those behaviours. We cannot accurately gauge the subjective experiences of another creature by simply imagining additions, subtractions, or modifications to our own being.19 Monsters, however, are as different from each other as they are from human beings. If they do belong to some over-arching category, it therefore must be social or political rather than innate or biological, since ‘monster’ does not imply the common denominator of experience of any other taxon (such as ‘bat’ or ‘human’). The only real commonality between the werewolf, the vampire, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon is, in Nagel’s terms, a shared subjective experience, and thus, ‘monster’ becomes an explicitly political category. If this shared experience of a particular kind of non-humanity is sufficient to form the basis of a community, the next question is how such a community would actually work. Briefly returning to the theme of the previous section, another problem with any moral definition of monstrosity is, of course, that it encourages moral judgements of traits which are not under the control of the individual being judged. The British TV series Ultraviolet (1998) tackled this problem in its sciencefictional treatment of vampires (though in the series they are never referred to as such). The lore of the series states that vampires are essentially just animals, and consistently asserts that they are part of the Earth’s ecosystem.20 This particular treatment of monsters has become more and more common in Western popular culture, repeatedly posing the problem of whether a creature can be called ‘evil’ if it’s simply trying to prolong its own existence—lions, for example, need to consume between five and ten kilograms of meat per day, but they do not murder other animals to meet this dietary requirement. If monsters share a common political identity, that identity necessitates a discussion of how monstrous politics are conducted—in other words, how multicultural communities of monsters arrange space and material resources. In all the multi-species societies of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, the governing paradigm is the interplay between powers and needs. Natural powers (also referred to as animal functions and physical needs) are the functions and processes common to all living creatures. Bertell Ollman elaborates: Animal functions are the processes that living creatures undergo and the actions they undertake in order to stay alive; while

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__________________________________________________________________ physical needs are the desires they feel for the objects and actions required to keep them alive and functioning.21 Natural powers are coupled with impulses through which they are fulfilled— ‘Taking eating as a natural power, man’s impulses which drive him to eat are clear enough: he is hungry.’22 The addition of a biological consideration further complicates moralistic definitions of monstrosity. Applying this logic to a monster, however, gives rise to questions of moral relativism, especially as more and more popular fiction depicts such creatures living openly alongside humanity. In China Miéville’s fantasy city of New Crobuzon, each xenian (non-human) species has specific spatial requirements necessitated both by culture and biology. This gives rise to specialised structures and environments, which then serve as ghettoes, limiting the xenian community’s movements—the cactacae, being sentient plants, need a neighbourhood with a glass canopy to replicate the climate in which they evolved the garuda (humanoid eagles) who inhabit the city need high-altitude eyries; the aquatic vodyanoi cannot move too far from water; and the khepri, the females being insect-human chimeras, require a lax attitude towards public sanitation for the sake of their fully-insect males. Natural and species powers also find their fulfilment in external objects, and thus there is always a spatial element to species-being. For example, the garuda have the ability to fly. It is therefore vitally important to them—on cultural and psychological grounds— that they do fly, and the external object in which this need is fulfilled is the sky.23 In practice, these spatial arrangements help to maintain the human-dominated status quo: a human inhabitant of Miéville’s city need never interact with any of his or her xenian neighbours, because those creatures’ movements are limited by their biological/psychological needs—the greenhouse, eyries, canals, and khepri districts are essentially ghettoes that keep most of the non-humans separated from the rest of society. In other texts, however, humans and monsters are not so easily segregated. The issue of space becomes important when one considers that the most common monstrous power is spatial. As regularly seen in horror cinema, when a monster appropriates a new territory, its presence fills the entire space; it becomes omnipresent, able to move from place to place almost instantaneously. Take, for example, the titular antagonists from Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979)24 and John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982)25 or even (at the risk of stretching the definition of ‘monster’ out of shape) the villains of the slasher-movie subgenre, all of whom are possessed of an uncanny ability to infiltrate the protagonists’ territory: all that is required is a dark corner to lunge out of. The monster’s presence reaches beyond its physical form, until its persona packs the space (appropriating a phrase from Roland Barthes) to ‘an egg-like fullness.’26 This is the main reason why monsters have to be kept at a remove from human society, and this becomes a much more pressing concern as humanity increasingly finds itself living next door to monsters.

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__________________________________________________________________ 4. Good Fences Make Good Neighbours Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the difference between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’ societies is that limitations acknowledged in the former are refuted in the latter: The magician imitates demons. [...] Although his task was impersonation he did not claim to be made in the image of the invisible power, as does civilized man, whose modest hunting ground then shrinks to the unified cosmos, in which nothing exists but prey.27 Monsters no longer define the limits of human civilization, not necessarily because rationality and progress have banished superstition from the world, but because we no longer accept the notion that human civilization should have any limits. Whereas the traditional view of monsters, outlined at the beginning of this chapter, is that they inhabit places that are not amenable to human activity and commerce, the fact is that there are no such places anymore. There are no spaces on planet Earth that cannot be exploited to one extent or another; there are only spaces that are no longer economically viable. The limitless appropriation of space is no longer just a monstrous species-power, but a human one, meaning that monsters are no longer our predators, but our neighbours and competitors—this dynamic is emphasised in the Hellboy entertainment franchise, in particular the film Hellboy II: The Golden Army, which establishes that the root cause of the animosity between humans and monsters was in fact territorial competition.28 This presents us with another possible reason for monstrous multiculturalism: they have to get along with each other because we have appropriated all the other space. The implication is that in doing so, they are merely biding their time until this situation can be remedied: in Cabal, an infant monster innocently quotes an unnerving article of Midian’s faith to the human outsider, Lori, revealing that the Tribes of the Moon are waiting for the sun to go out and usher in an eternal night: ‘We’ll live on the earth. It’ll be ours.’29 Another inter-species dynamic which has become popular in recent fantasy and horror fiction is that of monsters joining human society, a development that can prove problematic to all parties concerned. The most high profile recent example of this kind of narrative world is True Blood, the television adaptation of Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries (2001-2013) novels, in which the invention of artificial blood inspires vampires all over the world to ‘come out of the coffin,’ only to discover that coexistence with mortals is not going to be easy—for one thing, they are now expected to pay taxes to human governments.30 On the human side, tensions are always going to run high since, as Slavoj Žižek argues, we already regard neighbours as,

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__________________________________________________________________ primarily a thing, a traumatic intruder, someone whose different way of life (or, rather, way of jouissance materialised in its social practices and rituals) disturbs us, throws the balance of our way of life off the rails, when it comes too close.31 This trope of the monstrous neighbour is, of course, largely a legacy of a series of post-World War II cultural shifts across the Western world, which saw an enormous popular push towards the acceptance of difference across Western societies, a push summarised thus by Saul Alinsky: You are white, native-born, and Protestant. Do you like people? You like your family, your friends, some of your business associates […] and some of your neighbours. Do you like Catholics, Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, Mexicans, Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and Chinese? Do you regard them with the warm feeling of fellow human beings or with a cold contempt symbolized in Papists, Micks, Wops, Kikes, Hunkies, Greasers, Niggers, Spics and Chinks? If you are one of those people who think of people in these derogatory terms, then you don’t like people.32 In the USA, the cause of racial equality gathered momentum. Segregation in public schools was struck down in 1954, and segregation on public transport was ruled unconstitutional in 1956, following the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott. Through the 1960s, black campaigners become more and more vocal: Malcolm X consistently advocated black self-reliance and self-defence up until he was assassinated, and while Martin Luther King, Jr. always stressed the importance of non-violence, his pacifism did not equate with being peaceable. Alongside these, other social movements became more forceful and vocal: from the early 1960s, second-wave feminism went beyond just tackling legal inequalities between men and women to confront ingrained social, cultural, and political misogyny; and following the Stonewall riots in June 1969, the gay rights movement assumed a different character, abandoning the genteel politics then favoured by groups such as the Mattachine Society in favour of radical, confrontational tactics. The emergence of activism and liberation movements in post-war America was so widespread and unexpected that the apparatuses of the status quo were prone to overreactions that merely strengthened the counterculture’s position, as seen on May 4th, 1970, when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on unarmed students protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia at Kent State University, and in 1971, when the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation—notionally an effort to collect information on subversive groups, but disproportionately focused on civil rights groups—was exposed by investigative journalists.

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__________________________________________________________________ It is only natural that developments such as these, which have had such a profound and lasting effect on Western political discourse, would resonate through popular culture and find expression in a number of different forms, such as nonrealist narratives. The most common expression of these issues in such terms is the re-presentation of them in the form of a fantastical figure—the robot, the vampire, the elf or what have you—as a persecuted minority in a human world. Divorced from literal reality, these figures can be made to represent any number of realworld minorities, sometimes many within the course of a single text. On the human side of this equation, the problem of powers, needs, and moral relativism resurfaces, intensified by the capacity of horror and fantasy to figure an absolute difference that does not exist in our interactions with other human beings. In the True Blood scenario, the invention of artificial blood may have removed the immediate threat of vampire predation upon humans, and thus made peaceful coexistence possible, but the fact remains that these creatures are practically immortal, and many individuals have been around for centuries without any such means of circumventing their needs—thus, there is a very high probability that the vampire next door is a mass murderer. While the series draws numerous parallels between vampires and other minority groups (most notably the gay community), the comparison does not work because humans have a good reason to fear vampires—regardless of what one might hear from religious extremists, homosexuality does not impart a biological imperative to kill. Similarly, the horror-comedy film American Zombie (2007)33 initially portrays its subjects sympathetically, comparing the zombie minority to the gay community on the one hand (‘We’re here, we’re dead, get used to it’34), and to illegal immigrants to the USA on the other (in the film, non-sapient or cognitively impaired zombies are exploited as a low-cost labour force). As the film progresses, however, this portrayal gradually changes, until the film-makers are confronted with the disturbing aspects of zombie sub-culture, including pervasive nihilism, paramilitary organisations, and the ritualised consumption of human flesh; neither the zombies’ appropriation of gay rights rhetoric nor their exploitation by unscrupulous industrialists does anything to mitigate the fact that they are dangerous to human beings. This kind of problematic relationship with the neighbour, the newly urbanised monster, is central to the story of the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink (1991).35 When playwright Barton Fink moves into the Hotel Earle in Los Angeles, he finds himself living next door to a gregarious man who introduces himself as Charlie Meadows after Barton complains to the management about his neighbour’s obnoxiously loud laughter. Barton becomes fond of his new neighbour, seeing in him ‘the common man’ he believes great art should endeavour to serve, though he continually ignores Charlie’s offers to ‘tell [him] some stories.’36 Unfortunately for Barton, Charlie is not who he claims to be. During one of Charlie’s business trips, two homicide detectives inform Barton that Charlie is actually a serial killer, and

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__________________________________________________________________ throughout the narrative there are several hints that Charlie might not even be human. Charlie is afflicted with an unspecified ear infection, which produces a nearconstant flow of pus—hinting at a sort of corporeal corruption, or possibly a disguise breaking down. Barton is repeatedly tormented by a mosquito in his room, but the mosquito only appears when Charlie is in the building and, as another character (Tony Shalhoub) points out, mosquitoes are not supposed to breed in Los Angeles’ desert climate. Also attendant with Charlie’s presence is an increase in temperature, causing the wallpaper to peel away from the walls—during Charlie’s absence, the temperature is not remarked upon at all. Charlie somehow murders Barton’s love interest Audrey (Judy Davis) while she is asleep in Barton’s bed, with Barton’s door locked from the inside. The sense of evil surrounding Charlie reaches a crescendo when the detectives arrive to arrest him, only for the hotel to erupt into flames. Charlie kills them both, and calmly murmurs, ‘Heil Hitler’ while delivering a coup de grace. When Barton asks why Charlie has attached himself (itself?) to him, Charlie answers: Because you don’t listen! You think you know pain? I live here! You’re just a tourist with a typewriter! And you come into my home, and complain that I’m making too much noise!37 Charlie makes a valid point. The Hotel Earle’s only residents are Barton and Charlie, and the only employees we see are Chet the bellhop and Pete, the ancient lift operator. Barton is the only outsider to enter the Hotel and survive—Audrey and the two hard-boiled detectives meet grisly ends. There are shoes placed outside the doors of the other rooms, apparently awaiting a complementary shine, but other things reveal this sign of human habitation to be a red herring: for one thing, there is no sound in the hotel apart from that made by Barton and Charlie. For another, when the hotel erupts into flames, there is no evacuation, no panicked escape attempts, nobody even sounds an alarm. The Hotel Earle is a cave in which the monster calling itself Charlie Meadows has taken up residence. As previously noted, monsters once inhabited places that were not amenable to human commerce or leisure. In the modern age, however, there are no spaces that are off-limits to humanity: there are only spaces that used to be financially viable, and are no longer—such as run-down hotels. Trying to join human society has not worked for Charlie—his varied appearances as a demon, a serial killer, and a Nazi are too-obviously excessive, perhaps suggestive of a mid-life crisis. Having made the effort to fit into the human world, all he wants in return is to be left alone in his cave when his work is done. Even there, however, the human world encroaches, in the shape of a neurotic neighbour who complains because he is laughing too loudly.

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__________________________________________________________________ 5. Conclusion Modern monsters have societies very similar to our own, both in terms of history and the division of space. Michel Foucault argues in ‘Of Other Spaces’ that the modern world can be characterised as a ‘space of arrangement’: space has to be divided, categorised, and apportioned according to ‘patterns of ordering.’38 In having separate spaces for commerce and recreation, implying both a public and private sphere, monsters are enacting spaces of arrangement that are identical to ours, and vary according to the definitions of monstrosity they embody. In texts that equate monstrosity with immorality, monstrous spatialities have strict rules for admission, i.e. the human visitor normally has to demonstrate that he or she has some kind of supernatural power, or that he is of sufficiently evil character. From the point of view of the monsters, however, it seems as though they have been termed evil out of simple jealousy, because they can access places we cannot go and can do things we cannot do. It is possible that this may be linked to orthodox religious views of magic and pagan folk-tradition, whereby the supernatural is equated directly with immorality. In works that treat monsters as simply sapient creatures with non-human powers and needs, and thus cast ‘monster’ as a political category rather than a moral one, sapient non-humans’ environments are shaped by their biological needs, and thus in effect become ghettoes. Lastly, in texts where monsters become our neighbours, they are often illegitimately employed as ciphers for one or more human minorities. More interesting than the instances of monsters being used as stand-ins for racial, sexual, or religious minorities are those works that, by incorporating the monster into the everyday human world, contrast the legacy of post-war multiculturalism and acceptance with an ingrained fear and distrust of the neighbour: we suspect that the strange person living next door has a shadowy past, a fear intensified by constant news coverage of crime and foreign atrocity. Here, one might well ask what the point of this speculation is. Though I have referred to monsters throughout this chapter as though they were an actual group, the fact is that they do not exist, and therefore they have no real relevance to human politics. Any politician who made mention of monsters literally, rather than metaphorically, would be laughed out of office: one does not cogently criticise multiculturalism or moral relativism by asking voters to consider how they would feel if a vampire moved in next door; it contributes nothing to the immigration debate to warn that your constituents would lose their jobs to zombies. Rather, monsters are politically useful in that they represent how human civilizations encode spatialities—the monstrous spaces created in popular culture are a useful indicator of hegemonic cultural values, which is why they bear closer scrutiny. In my own opinion, monsters have moved from the periphery to the centre of human civilization for the simple reason that there is no periphery anymore. They now control only a few pockets of space, to which they reserve the right to refuse

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__________________________________________________________________ admission, but this change of habitat has created unified societies that require complex infrastructures to accommodate all their members. In spite of the varied powers and needs served by these infrastructures, however, monster societies are most commonly depicted as being broadly similar to our own. Leaving aside the facetious suggestion of a lack of imagination, there are two possible reasons for this. The first is that the modern, capitalist way of commerce is the only model under which such a society could be possible—different types of monster have different powers and needs, so one could argue that monetary compensation would be required in order to accommodate all members of a community while creating a fair exchange of value, and that such a system would naturally give rise to entrepreneurship and the division of space into discrete places for work, recreation, worship, and so on. I personally do not find this explanation satisfying, since the pseudo-progressive defence of laissez-faire economic liberalism it entails is predicated on the assumption that human beings are essentially violent. The other possibility is that, by coming to the centre, monsters have entered an environment in which no other form of social organisation is possible. They have no option but to try and fit in with us, but this rarely goes smoothly—we already fear the neighbours we have, and the monsters’ attempts to integrate necessitate alienation from their species-being, leading to psychological trauma. The consequences for humanity are no less ominous. In his essay ‘Seeing Only Corpses,’ Barry Langford points out that urban spaces constitute the physical enactment of prevailing hegemonic ideologies: Whatever does not cohere with or conform to the disciplinary construction of urban space is subjected to a ruthless process of extirpation as garbage, wreckage, urban blight. […] Once, however, the clean and proper urban body is itself revealed as a fiction, then it is the city as a whole […] that is abjected.39 In their own way, by mimicking the structures of our society within monstrous spatialities—abjected spaces and heterotopias that exist outside of the ideological norm even as they are enveloped within it—monsters reveal that cleanliness and order to be a fiction, just as the criminal spatiality of the ghetto inverts and reveals the ideological underpinnings of law and order, and political legitimacy. By reserving the right to refuse admission to their spaces, monsters invert human standards of privilege and belonging. In mimicking human histories of migration and persecution, they confront us with our own cruelty and hypocrisy. In mimicking our behaviours and discourses, they challenge our anthropocentric views of what constitutes sapience and social cohesion.

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Notes 1

Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 180. 2 Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989), 78. 3 Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 79. 4 Fredric Jameson, ‘Is Space Political?’ in Re-thinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), 256. 5 Andrew Stanton and Daniel Gerson, Monsters, Inc., directed by Pete Docter, film (2001; Burbank: Walt Disney Pictures, 2002), DVD. 6 Tim Burton, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, directed by Henry Selick (1993; Burbank: Touchstone Pictures, 1997), DVD. 7 Steven S. DeKnight and Joss Whedon, ‘All the Way,’ Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Episode 606, directed by David Solomon, TV show (2001; Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox Television, 2004), DVD. 8 Kevin Brobdin and Frank Cappello, Constantine, directed by Francis Lawrence, film (2005; Burbank: Warner Brothers Studios, 2006), DVD. 9 Edward Abraham and Valerie Abraham, The Monster Club, directed by Roy Ward Baker, film (1980; Shepperton: Amicus Productions, 2006), DVD. 10 Ibid. 11 Clive Barker, Cabal (Glasgow: Fontana Paperbacks, 1989), 51. 12 Ibid., 37-8. 13 Ibid., 85; author’s emphasis. 14 Clive Barker, Nightbreed, directed by Clive Barker, film (1990; Los Angeles: 20th century Fox, 2011), DVD. 15 Ibid. 16 E. and H. Heron, Ghost Stories (Rockville, Maryland: Wildside Press, 2007), 6078. 17 Maya Forbes et al., Monsters vs. Aliens, directed by Conrad Vernon and Rob Letterman, film (2009; Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 2009), DVD. 18 Thomas Nagel, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ Philosophical Review LXXXIII: 4 (1974): 436; author’s emphasis. 19 Ibid, 439. 20 Joe Ahearne, Ultraviolet, Episodes 101-106, directed by Joe Ahearne, TV show (1998; London: Channel 4 Television Corporation, 2001), DVD. 21 Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 77. 22 Ibid., 78. 23 China Miéville, Perdido Street Station (London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 2001).

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Dan O’Bannon, David Giler and Walter Hill, Alien, directed by Ridley Scott, film (1979; Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 2003), DVD. 25 Bill Lancaster, The Thing, directed by John Carpenter, film (1982; Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 2005), DVD. 26 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974), 65. 27 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002), 6. 28 Guillermo del Toro, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, directed by Guillermo del Toro, film (2008; Los Angeles: Universal Pictures, 2008), DVD. 29 Barker, Cabal, 131. 30 Alan Ball, True Blood, directed by Alan Ball, TV show (2008-2012; United States: Home Box Office Inc., 2009-2012), DVD. 31 Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books Ltd., 2009), 50. 32 Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 7. 33 Grace Lee, American Zombie, directed by Grace Lee, film (2008; Los Angeles: Cinema Libre Studio, 2008), DVD. 34 Ibid. 35 Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, Barton Fink, directed by Joel Coen, film (1991; Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 2003), DVD. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,’ in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), 350-1. 39 Barry Langford, ‘Seeing Only Corpses: Vision and/of Urban Disaster in Apocalyptic Cinema,’ in Urban Spaces and Cityscapes: Perspectives from Modern and Contemporary Culture, ed. Christoph Lindner (New York: Routledge, 2006), 41-42.

Bibliography Abraham, Edward and Valerie. The Monster Club. Directed by Roy Ward Baker. Film. 1980. Shepperton: Amicus Productions, 2006. DVD. Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Ahearne, Joe. Ultraviolet. TV show. 1998. London: World Productions (for Channel 4), 2001. DVD.

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__________________________________________________________________ Alinsky, Saul D. Reveille For Radicals. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Ball, Alan. True Blood. Directed by Alan Ball. TV show. 2008-2012. New York: Home Box Office, Inc., 2009-2012. DVD. Barker, Clive. Cabal. Glasgow: Fontana Paperbacks, 1989. ———. Nightbreed. Directed by Clive Barker. Film. 1990. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 2011. DVD. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. London: Jonathan Cape, 1974. Brobdin, Kevin, and Frank Cappello. Constantine. Directed by Francis Lawrence. Film. 2005. Burbank: Warner Brothers Pictures, 2006. DVD. Burton, Tim. Tim Burton’s The Nightmare before Christmas. Directed by Henry Selick. Film. 1993. Burbank: Touchstone Pictures, 1997. DVD. Coen, Joel and Coen Ethan. Barton Fink. Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. Film. 1991. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 2003. DVD. DeKnight, Steven S. ‘All the Way.’ Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Episode 606. Directed by David Solomon. TV show. 2001. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox Television, 2001. Del Toro, Guillermo. Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Directed by Guillermo del Toro. Film. 2008. Los Angeles: Universal Pictures, 2008. DVD. Forbes, Maya. Monsters vs Aliens. Directed by Conrad Vernon and Rob Letterman. Film. 2009. Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 2009. DVD. Foucault, Michel. ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.’ In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, edited by Neil Leach, 350-356. London: Routledge, 1997. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, 1991. Heron, E. and H. Ghost Stories. Rockville, Maryland: Wildside Press, 2007.

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__________________________________________________________________ Jameson, Fredric. ‘Is Space Political?’ In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, edited by Neil Leach, 255-269. London: Routledge, 1997. Lancaster, Bill. The Thing. Directed by John Carpenter. Film. 1982. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 2005. DVD. Langford, Barry. ‘Seeing Only Corpses: Vision and/of Urban Disaster in Apocalyptic Cinema.’ In Urban Spaces and Cityscapes: Perspectives from Modern and Contemporary Culture, edited by Christoph Lindner, 38-48. New York: Routledge, 2006. Lee, Grace. American Zombie. Directed by Grace Lee. Film. 2008. Los Angeles: Cinema Libre Studio, 2008. DVD. Miéville, China. Perdido Street Station. London: Macmillan Publishers, Ltd., 2001. Nagel, Thomas. ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ The Philosophical Review LXXXIII: 4 (1974): 435-450. O’Bannon, Dan, David Giler and Walter Hill. Alien. Directed by Ridley Scott. Film. 1979. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 2003. DVD. Ollman, Bertell. Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. Cambridge: Camridge University Press, 1976. Sayles, John, and Terence H. Winkless. The Howling. Directed by Joe Dante. Film. 1981. Culver City: Sony Pictures Entertainment, 2003. DVD. Soja, Edward. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. New York: Verso, 1989. Stanton, Andrew, and Daniel Gerson. Monsters, Inc. Directed by Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich and David Silverman. Film. 2001. Burbank: Walt Disney Pictures, 2002. DVD. Žižek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books Ltd., 2009. Jack Fennell is a researcher at the University of Limerick. His primary interests are Irish literature, science fiction/fantasy/horror literature, cultural studies, and history.