Monstrous Geographies: Places and Spaces of the Monstrous [1 ed.] 9789004399433, 9781848882218

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Monstrous Geographies

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 ‘Monstrous Geographies’

2013

Monstrous Geographies: Places and Spaces of the Monstrous

Edited by

Sarah Montin and Evelyn Tsitas

Inter-Disciplinary Press Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2013 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: 978-1-84888-221-8 First published in the United Kingdom in Paperback format in 2013. First Edition.

Table of Contents Introduction Sarah Montin and Evelyn Tsitas Part I

Political Darkness: Making Monstrous Places ‘The Only Thing to be Deplored is the Extraordinary Mortality’: Flinders Island and the Imagination of the British Empire Tom Lawson

Part II

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3

Zombies in the Colonies: Imperialism and Contestation of Ethno-Political Space in Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide Robert A. Saunders

19

The Perilous Sites of the Atlantikwall Rose Tzalmona

47

Where Darkness Grows: Hidden Monstrosity ‘Monstrous Homes’: How Private Spaces Shape Characters’ Identities in 19th-Century Sensation Fiction Christina Flotmann

75

Enchanted Microcosm or Apocalyptic Warzone? Human Projections into the Bug World Petra Rehling

97

Monstrous Breeding Grounds: Creation, Isolation and Suffering at Noble’s Island, Hailsham and Rankstadt Evelyn Tsitas

121

Part III The Dark Earth: Monstrous and Alive How the Earth Went Bad: From Wells’ The War of the Worlds to the Zombie Apocalypse in the 21st Century Simon Bacon

145

‘Strange Outlandish Star’: Spaces of Horror in the Poems and Memoirs of the War Poets Sarah Montin

165

Unsettling Empty Spaces, Displacing Terra Nullius Thea Costantino Part IV

185

The Dark Stain: Monstrous Legacies Morgues, Museums and the Ghost of Errol Flynn Erin Ashenhurst

209

Architecture after Fukushima: Spaces of Bara Bara, Spaces of Reciprocity Yukata Sho

225

Introduction Sarah Montin and Evelyn Tsitas Monsters fascinate, from the spectre on the movie screens to the erudite publications that explore the myriad of meanings behind the manifestations of the fear that murmurs its name deep within our collective subconscious. But the place where monsters dwell, or monstrous acts grow or are carried out also evokes our profound curiosity. Can a place be inherently evil, or is it rendered so because of the unspeakable acts committed within it? The chapters within this anthology arose from the First Global conference: Monstrous Geographies: Places and Spaces of Monstrosity, an interdisciplinary conference that took place in Oxford in July 2012. The critical currency of the discussions was tragically revealed when on July 20, the final day of the conference, news broke that twelve people had been shot dead in a movie theatre in Denver, at the opening of the new Batman film. A fresh monstrous space had been born of a monstrous act, for atrocity has always left its stain on spaces. How we understand this legacy on place is revealed by the statement of condolence released by Christopher Nolan, the British film director, who said I believe movies are one of the great American art forms and the shared experience of watching a story unfold on screen is an important and joyful pastime. The movie theatre is my home, and the idea that someone would violate that innocent and hopeful place in such an unbearably savage way is devastating to me.1 As the themes of this book will reveal, seemingly innocent, bucolic or benign space is rendered monstrous because of acts of monstrosity that have taken place within it. Likewise, intimate, domestic and personal space can be considered monstrous because of the way the space is used to psychologically cower its occupants. Acts of extreme violence, such as the Denver massacre and the horrors of war leave their inevitable mark on both the landscape and enduring perceptions of how a place is known to future generations, a perhaps mundane landscape or interior transmogrified by the swift and bloody reality of death. These then are the palimpsest memories of monstrosity; the blood that stains theatre seats and the bloody battle of the trenches of war forever changing the space. Drawing together scholars established and emerging from across the globe and disciplines, this conference sought to define the many different ways that monstrous geographies could be expressed. An important and on going discussion was to try to pin down, to locate, as it were, the monstrous. What is it? Where is it? Is it born? Is always already there? Is it inherent to the place, created by the features of a landscape or monstrous acts of history? It is produced by an outside power or does it stem from its inhabitants?

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__________________________________________________________________ The monster or the savage, according to Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, always inhabits a ‘refused place,’ ‘a monstrous place where madness and melancholia reign supreme.’2 The term ‘refused place’ is particularly emblematic, suggesting both notions of refuse (that which is disposed of, rejected) and negation (that which is hidden out of sight and thus denied an existence). And indeed, in every cultural tradition, the monster is rejected to another space, a ‘peripheral space,’ an ‘outside’ dimension that is apart from but parallel to and intersecting from the human community:’3 Frankenstein’s monster travels to the North pole, just as one-eyed monsters and human-animal hybrids always dwell in the unchartered territories of old maps, the heart of oceans or the unexplored darkness of continents. And even when they come to our cities, monsters lurk in sewers, abandoned houses or, more politically perhaps, the suburbs. Set apart from humanity while holding up a mirror to it, the monster always lurks in the margins, be they geographical, political, social, or metaphorical. ‘Great border wanderers’ (‘micle mearstapan’ in Beowulf),4 monsters inhabit the betwixt and between because of what they ultimately represent: ‘an embodiment of difference, a breaker of category, a resistant Other known only through process and movement never through dissection table analysis,’5 in J.J Cohen’s terms. And it is always against this transgression of categories and fearful hybridity monsters emblematize that humanity constructs its own identity. From the wide range of papers within the conference, eleven were finally selected for this publication, chosen for their combined ability to reflect the very fruitful discussion that was had about specific types of monstrosity in locale – especially around the boundaries, and our focus on spatial monstrosities. The emphasis is put on ‘space’ so as to distinguish this book from its counterparts in the Inter-Disciplinary Press series, which already explore the concept and figure of the monster (and monstrous) in depth. Each paper explored this concept of space from a different perspective, and what emerged for us in this book were four distinct themes that mediated on the concept of spatial monstrosities. These chapters reflect the inter-disciplinary approach of the conference, and contribute distinct voices to notions of politics of space, aesthetics of space, intimacies of space and ethics of space. 1. Political Darkness: Making Monstrous Spaces The agency of political power in the construction of monstrous geographies was undoubtedly the most recurrent and important topic of the conference. Exploring places such as the United States, Australia, Europe or Asia, many papers analysed how imperialist policies and world conflict have shaped a horrifying cartography of monstrosity with enduring effects on national policy, public memory and artistic enterprise. This particular focus on the political origin of spatial monstrosity is unsurprising in view of Foucault’s theory that the history of space is essentially the history of power6 – a history inherently based on man’s

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__________________________________________________________________ uneasy relation to the Strange, the Other, the Unknown, and ultimately the Monstrous, always conceived as the embodiment of Difference. Through an everincreasing control of space (expansion, normalization, marginalization, compartmentalization) imperialist power seeks to normalize and regulate strange spaces by transforming them into familiar places, reforming their inhabitants, restructuring territories or imposing their own narratives on indigenous lands. Edward Said’s exploration of how the West constructed and narrated the ‘Orient’ as an exotic and monstrous space (‘a living tableau of queerness7’) in order to better discipline and normalize it, is a case in point. What interests us specifically however is how, through the political effort to normalize territories and their inhabitants, space itself can simultaneously become an actor, victim, and symbol of monstrosity. This is particularly the case for ‘micros-spaces’ of power (such as Foucault’s asylums or Agamben’s concentration camps), coercive environments which seek to control the outer space by containing the inner. A parallel can be drawn between these ‘micro-spaces’ of power and Flinders Island which Tom Lawson investigates in his chapter. In what was deemed a historical experiment in humanitarian concern, the surviving indigenous population of the British colony of Van Diemen’s Land was removed to Flinders Island (Australia) and confined to a settlement known as Wybalenna (1831 to 1835). The intention was that the indigenous population would be transformed into an ersatz European peasantry, taught to farm the land, sell their produce and worship a Christian God. But the reality of ‘civilization’ turned out to be very different, and Flinders Island became defined by death, disease, genocide. By analysing the changing interpretations of Flinders Island throughout time, Lawson show how this particular island has come to be the historical embodiment of colonial guilt, emblematizing the British monstrous imperialist past. While also proposing a reading of monstrous space as a colonial creation, Robert A. Saunder’s chapter focuses on the popular figure of the zombie, working as a critique of the militaristic and imperialistic advance of Western Civilisation throughout history. In his analysis of the very recent satirical self-help tutorial, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead (2003), and the accompanying graphic novel, The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks (2009), Saunders shows that nearly every ‘recorded’ instance of zombiism involves a zone of contested political and/or ethnic space. By positioning zombies as defenders of territory against colonialists, Brooks’ monsters function as subaltern avengers, eating the flesh of white conquerors and delaying (though not ultimately denying) the march of imperialism across the globe. In doing so, Saunders argues, Brooks subtly rewrites our historical narrative of the coming of globalization. As Saunders shows in his exploration of the ‘zombie yarn,’ the mixture of the metaphorical/mythical and the real forms an inherent part of the monstrous political geography, more often than not defined by the extreme violence (physical or symbolic) that has been exerted within its borders. Rose Tzalmona’s chapter on

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__________________________________________________________________ the construction of the Atlantikwall, a defensive line built by Nazi Germany (built between 1941-45 and stretching from Norway to Southern France), focuses both on the material impact such policies had on natural landscapes and architecture and on the psychological/ memorial impact on civilian populations. Redefining the Atlantikwall as a large-scale territory rather than an extended border line, Tzalmona analyses the monstrous architecture of military installations and international slave labor camps, showing that the remains of the Atlantik Wall stand today, in the midst of renewed ‘civilization’, as a testament to man’s enduring monstrosity which should be memorialized as such. 2. Where Darkness Grows: Hidden Monstrosity Turning inward, many papers discussed the realm of the monstrous space within intimate spaces. Where we live, where we are born, and even our bodies can all become monstrous. We fear not just what is around us but what is near us, and ultimately what could be in us. While the horror film is a vehicle that allows us to safely indulge in our enjoyment of being frightened and to feel power at the overcoming of the monsters and their horrors,8 an intimate monstrous space makes us fearful precisely because we feel we cannot escape. In a powerful inversion of Bachelard’s celebrated theory9 where the house, primary universe of man and space of safe boundaries, shelters humanity and wards off terror, the chapters of this part explore how inner spaces can become monstrous, threaten man and endanger his identity by violating borders that should not be crossed. The interior space that is pervaded with fear and tension is the private spaces that shape character’s identities in 19th-century sensation fiction is discussed in the chapter by Christina Flotmann. She explores how in literature, the gothic is a setting in the home which foregrounds psychological drama. Here, spatial analysis explores power relations. There is a distinction between place and space, and in Victorian ideology, home is supposed to remain a place and is one that precluded individuality. With sensation fiction, which often deals with destroyed homes, the fiction addresses the changing roles of women. In this disturbed domestic dystopia, monstrosity is linked with women and embodies the fear of women’s changing roles in the 19th century. In her chapter, Petra Rehling looks at the prolific non-human creatures that share our world. Often invisible to us, bugs can fight back and invade our homes and our bodies. We do not have appropriate borders to keep these ‘monsters’ out. We secretly fear that we are not in control of our world and that it has a life of its own, and dub these microscopic creatures that can live off our discarded flesh (skin cells) ‘monstrous.’ Rehling explores how bugs can virtually change any space into a ‘monstrous geography’ for humans, including our bodies when we die. Her analysis of two contrasting documentaries on bugs explores how we have a fascination with insects that has infiltrated our imaginations and burst into fantasy, science fiction and children’s stories. Horrifying for many people is the fact that

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__________________________________________________________________ insects can be heard but not seen, carrying with them the threat of disease, and the knowledge that they live among us in our clothes, beds, in the walls and in the air. Rehling argues that our mixed relationships to insects also mirror our ambivalent feelings about monsters, to whom we harbor secret love and admiration for they are superior to us. In Japan, the view of bugs is different ‘I have a bug in my stomach that wants to hate you’ for example – and yet, in western culture, we fear bugs even though they are in our bodies. We try and eradicate them from our houses. We see them as aliens and portray aliens in films as bug like. We fear the dirty aspect of bugs, and both bugs and aliens in films are seen as sexual predators and females. The very homes we live in, the bodies we inhabit and the isolated places of beauty where monsters are created are all horrifying because they are seemingly benign. The need to hide from, turn within, or burrow down into a place to commit secret monstrous acts, such as making monsters, is actually a reflection of our monstrosity, or our monstrous fears. Fiction that depicts the creation of monstrous creatures via science, such as with monstrous hybrids, fuse the monster with a monstrous location and a terrible age-old fear and curiosity. Since antiquity humans have told stories about human and animal hybrids such as the Satyr to the Chimera, and writers have continued this tradition, turning to science to seek ways of exploring these transpecies horrors. Evelyn Tsitas explores in her analysis of three works of science fiction how such monsters, both human clones and humananimal hybrids, are created, in locations we can’t control. We need to keep monstrosity somewhere, so we cast it out to places no one can see it. Monsters are created in secret because they force us to ask what is human, and are we human? What is a monster? Could it be us? Creating a transpecies, monster disrupts what we hold sacred – our human appearance. 3. The Dark Earth: Monstrous and Alive In Paradise Lost, Milton memorably ascribed all monstrosity, ‘perverse’ and ‘prodigious,’ to nature and nature alone: ‘Nature breeds,/ Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,/ Abominable, unutterable, and worse/ Than fables yet have feign’d or fear conceived.’10 However one of the most important questions raised by the conference, touching equally on the anthropological, the philosophical and the biological sphere, nuances Milton’s stance: how to determine whether monstrosity is a natural or a cultural construct? While our first part clearly focused on monstrous man-made political spaces, we chose to concentrate here on literary and artistic depictions of naturally monstrous (or monstrously natural) spaces: animated, hostile, repellent environments, often portrayed as the opposite of the welcoming, attractive, ‘beloved space’11 theorized by Gaston Bachelard. Far from the idyllic vision of an enfolding and protective ‘Mother Nature’ (the ‘bower of bliss’ or the ‘shell,’ where man and nature are harmoniously united), these chapters retrace, through the portrayal of alien and alienating spaces of horror, the growing

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__________________________________________________________________ rift between man and nature while bearing witness to the monstrous scars history leaves on the earth. Simon Bacon’s chapter explores this theme by adroitly contrasting the numerous literary and cinematic adaptations and avatars of H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds (1889). Written at the end of the Victorian period, Wells’ novel is underpinned by the feeling of a declining nation and the collapse of empire. The Earth that Wells portrays is one that is ripe for plunder and the monstrous, inhuman invaders from Mars are only thwarted by humanity’s relationship with its home world. If older adaptations insisted on the idea of the Earth as being an (almost) living being that has a special relationship with its inhabitants, more recent cinematic versions have overturned this trend by speaking not just of the Earth defending itself against aliens but from any species that threatens its existence – including humanity itself. These fantasies of earth fighting back (recently theorized in James Lovelock’s Revenge of Gaia, 2006) combined with the recurrent image of the violation of physical boundaries between man and his environment, that are at the heart of monstrous natural spaces. It is the nightmare image of nature turning on man that we find in the ‘battlefield gothic’12 of the British war poets, which Sarah Montin investigates in her analysis of First World War poetry. Far from proposing romantic images of the symbiosis of man and nature, the soldier-poets revealed their growing alienation from nature in the mechanized fury of modern war by ‘monstering’ (showing and transfiguring) the pastoral landscape of their poems. By turning it into an alien, unnatural, and obscenely living space, intent on destroying man in the war of attrition, the war writers signalled the ‘perceptual crisis’ brought about by the war, the breakdown of the relationship between man and his natural environment, and ultimately the redefinition of man’s place in the modern world. These portrayals of hostile nature bear witness to the ways in which history and conflict haunt the imaginations and memory of nations, while distorting or recreating aesthetic visions of nature. It seemed fitting that so many Australianfocused chapter ‘returned home’ to Oxford and a green and pleasant land to speak of the monstrous beginnings of the convict nation and the monstrous outseiders that had been cast out of their mother country. The impact of history on artistic depictions of natural space and landscape is made clear in Thea Constantino’s analysis of Australian literature, film and visual art where Australian spaces portrayed as uncanny, empty or ‘gothic,’ are unavoidably linked to questions of colonial legitimacy and belonging. These images of a hostile and apparently void (terra nullius) Australian landscape, reveal the presence of the colonial repressed in a land which has become both a symbol and battleground for competing perspectives on place and memory. Constantino shows how parallel to this tradition of depicting nature as monstrous, powerful counter-representations are gaining force in Australian culture, working to reinscribe putatively ‘empty’ and ‘silent’ spaces with Indigenous histories and

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__________________________________________________________________ presence. Ultimately it is this artistic confrontation with Australia’s unresolved colonial history, whether through fraught encounters with the landscape or the reassertion of Indigenous presence within national space that may assist Australians with the difficult task of working through and coming to terms with the past. 4. The Dark Stain: Monstrous Legacies The final theme of this book turns to notions of ethics of space. Our interpretation of space and the layers of history that we place over locales can indeed be monstrous. Does a place become monstrous because of acts that happened there, such as crimes, or because of some connection with an individual who may have been famous or notorious? Or because that space has some natural disaster or man made disaster occur there? The relation between space, aesthetics, and ethics gives form to and sustains the experience of place, and it is the nexus of all three elements and the interaction between the three that can sustain bioregional sense of place.13 The final two chapters in this section take up the quest to explore this nexus. Erin Ashenhurst explores a Canadian enterprise that seeks to ‘renovate’ its landscape and create a fetish out of material remains of monstrosity, in this case, in a victim’s show, with a killer’s belt. A place where movie star Errol Flynn might have stood and looked. Monstrosity is then both carved in the landscape’s psyche and it is also ephemeral. Going further than the process of ‘memorialization’ promoted by public authorities (such as in the creation of museums and memorials) this example, which Ashenhurst details in ‘Reimaginings – Morgues, Museums and the Ghost of Errol Flynn’, questions the individual response to monstrous geographies. Is dark tourism or volunteer tourism a new manner, beyond memory, of negotiating the monstrous in our postmodern world, bent on the marketing and exploitation of horror? What is man’s rightful place and role in sites of past monstrosity? At this nexus of space, aesthetics and ethics Ashenhurst explores the curious allure of ghastly narratives, and the human desire to make tangible the ephemeral monstrous – a death, a crime. Many questions are raised which in turn pose uncomfortable reflections on the dark side of curiosity; why visit these sites? Perhaps we are driven to be part of the narrative, no matter how monstrous the crime in a locale. Are we then ghouls? If not, what drives us to do this? Perhaps the justification is to memorialize death in such a way. In a ‘young’ city like Vancouver, which has rebuilt its past by necessity the Errol Flynn tour is a tour of stories (narrative) as not a lot of visual evidence is left in Vancouver. So this tour makes strange the everyday landscapes, and fetishizes objects like displays at the police museum of petri dishes with organs showing how the organs look after death. Audiences can take comfort in the fact that they are being ‘educated’ about stab wounds. Yet the desire is to get as close as possible to ‘real’ in the imaginary. We need to look for the monstrous in the city or landscape when it might simply be

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__________________________________________________________________ in the act itself, the memory of violence. Yet we feel we can conjure it us if we revisit the site or the material evidence. Aesthetic experience promotes an awareness of landscape space and its ecological content, which can then engender ethical response.14 In Yukata Sho’s chapter, ‘Images of Post-Quake Japan or How to Stop Bara-Bara,’ she explores how in the wake of a disaster, a landscape is changed across space/across time/across classes. We watch on TV – but it is ourselves who could be affected in various degrees. In Japan, what was destroyed in the Tsunami was modern architecture – the marker for the development of modern life for people. ‘Equality of consumption’ was mimicry, a powerful way of improving lives. Without the illusion of everyone being middle class that the architecture provided, the truth that we are not equal after all is revealed. And yet westerners (safe from disaster) make a fetish of spaces of morbid beauty (aesthetics of slums) but this powerlessness, and exploitive image-making reveals again inequality. Sho’s chapter explores the idea of the modern marketing of the monstrous, such as dark tourism or memory tourism, a topic that verges on the all-too contemporary subject of economic and financial monstrosity.

Notes 1

S. Henderson and R. Sanchez, ‘Batman Shooting at Denver Cinema: As It Happened,’ The Telegraph, 20 July 2012, accessed on 30 May 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9414279/Batmanshooting-at-Denver-cinema-live.html. 2 Quoted in V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994), 9. 3 David. D. Gilmore, Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and all Manners of Imaginary Terrors (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 12. 4 Howell D. Chickering, ed., Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition (New York: Anchor Press, 1977), 1384a. 5 J. J. Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis, University of Minneapolis Press, 1996), x. 6 Foucault does not develop his theory of space in one work in particular, but the starting point to his systematic examination can be dated back to his analysis of ‘micro-spaces of power’ an din particular prison, in Surveiller et punir, naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). 7 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 103. 8 B. F. Kawin, Horror and the Horror Film (London, New York, Delhi: Anthem Press, 2012), 208. 9 Gaston Bachelard, Poétique de l’espace (Paris: Gallimard, 1958). 10 John Milton, The Poems of John Milton (London: H. Hughes, 1779), II, 623-26. 11 Bachelard, Poétique de l’espace, 17.

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Samuel Hynes, The Soldier’s Tale, Bearing Witness to Modern War (New York: Viking Penguin Books, 1997), 26. 13 J. C. Ryan, ‘Humanity’s Bioregional Places: Linking Spaces, Aesthetics and the Ethics of Reinhabitation’, Humanities 1.1 (2012): 80. 14 Ibid.

Bibliography Bachelard, Gaston. Poétique de l’espace. Paris: Gallimard, 1958. Chickering Howell D. ed. Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition. New York: Anchor Press, 1977. Cohen, J. J. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis, University of Minneapolis Press, 1996. Foucault, Michal. Surveiller et punir, naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Gilmore, David. D. Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and all Manners of Imaginary Terrors. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Henderson, S. and R. Sanchez, ‘Batman Shooting at Denver Cinema: As It Happened,’ The Telegraph, 20 July 2012. Accessed on 30 May 2013. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9414279/Batmanshooting-at-Denver-cinema-live.html. Hynes, Samuel. The Soldier’s Tale, Bearing Witness to Modern War. New York: Viking Penguin Books, 1997. Kawin, B. F. Horror and the Horror Film. London, New York, Delhi: Anthem Press, 2012. Milton, John. The Poems of John Milton. London: H. Hughes, 1779. Mudimbe, V. Y. The Idea of Africa. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994. Ryan, J. C. ‘Humanity’s Bioregional Places: Linking Spaces, Aesthetics and the Ethics of Reinhabitation’, Humanities 1.1 (2012). Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.

Part I Political Darkness: Making Monstrous Places

‘The Only Thing to be Deplored is the Extraordinary Mortality’: Flinders Island and the Imagination of the British Empire Tom Lawson Abstract Between 1831 and 1835 the surviving indigenous population of the British colony of Van Diemen’s Land was removed from what is now Tasmania to the outlying Flinders Island and confined to a settlement known as Wybalenna. A population of around 200 was held there, perhaps voluntarily, perhaps not, until 1847. To some English colonists Wybalenna was an experiment in humanitarian concern. The intention was that the indigenous population would be transformed into an ersatz European peasantry, taught to farm the land, sell their produce and worship a Christian God. But the reality of ‘civilisation’ was very different, and Flinders Island became defined by death and disease. By 1847, fewer than fifty Tasmanian Aborigines survived to be transported back to a deserted penal station near Hobart. Some thirty years later none of the indigenous inhabitants of the Flinders Island settlement would survive. The purpose of this chapter is to critically analyse changing interpretations of Flinders Island, especially those separated from it by space and time. Because of this distance, Flinders Island has consistently been a blank canvas onto which attitudes to the British Empire could be painted. For humanitarians looking on from Britain in the 1830s, Wybalenna briefly became the answer to the pressing moral problem of the ‘fatal impact’ of Western colonisation. The prevalence of death meant that by the 1840s it had been transformed and made synonymous with the very idea that it had been established to prove wrong. Later in the 19th century it was represented both in the heroic literature of Empire and in scientific debates about human origins. In these very different discourses it became a fantasy island which offered access to an almost stone-age past. In the 20th century it has become the historic embodiment of colonial guilt – the ghost of an imperial tragedy and the embodiment of a monstrous past. Key Words: Tasmania, genocide, British Empire. ***** 1. Introduction The British invasion of the island we now call Tasmania (and the British named Van Diemen’s Land) had a particularly devastating impact on the indigenous population. Between the first contacts in 1803 and 1876, an indigenous population of somewhere between 5 and 8000 was reduced to next to nothing.1 When the ‘last’ indigenous Tasmanian man died in 1864 it was reported in the London Times with the words ‘we have exterminated the race in Tasmania’.2 This ‘achievement’ was reported with a combination of pride, shame and dread that characterised

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‘The Only Thing to be Deplored is the Extraordinary Mortality’

__________________________________________________________________ contradictory attitudes in Britain to the ‘fatal impact’ of empire on indigenous populations abroad. Extraordinarily Van Diemen’s Land was witness to the only state supported campaign of ethnic cleansing in the British Empire.3 After a military struggle during the 1820s reduced the number of indigenous peoples in the colony to a few hundred by the end of 1831, the survivors were (for the most part) tracked down over a period of the next three years and deported (under threat of force) away from the Tasmanian mainland to the outlying Flinders Island. On Flinders Island indigenous peoples were the subject of a policy experiment to transform them from ‘rude savages’ into civilised Europeans under the stewardship of George Augustus Robinson. While Robinson continued with his experiment, Wybalenna (the name of the settlement) became a place of death and disease. As Robinson noted, in a kind of deluded fantasy, the settlement was a great success – if you ignored the fact that the population was rapidly diminishing. As he wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London, the ‘only thing to be deplored’ about Flinders Island was the ‘extraordinary mortality’ of the indigenous people confined there.4 By the time Robinson left to take up a post on continental Australia in 1839 there were just 60 of the 123 inhabitants who had been there when he arrived surviving.5 In 1847 the indigenous inhabitants of Flinders Island successfully campaigned to be returned to the mainland. In 1876 the last survivor of that community, Truganini, died. Although Truganini was not by any means the last Tasmanian, in Britain it was universally understood that the indigenous Tasmanian community had been extinguished. Although located on the other side of the world, the settlement at Flinders Island quickly became part of the geographical imagination of Empire in Britain. In essence it was a ‘fantasy island’,6 in that the role that it and much of the Empire played in the British mind was an imaginary one. Most of those who wrote and read about it in the 19th century would never visit even Tasmania let alone its remote outlying island – yet what Flinders Island represented was widely understood. By the 20th century the ‘Aboriginal establishment’ there had become a memory fixed in an extermination fantasy – that bore little relation to the reality of the island as the home for an enduring Tasmanian indigenous community throughout the twentieth century.7 As a ‘fantasy island’, this was a geographic space on which assumptions about Empire and about Britain too, could be easily projected and was a site which, in various ways, appeared to confirm the superiority of the British. As such the purpose of this chapter is to consider those projections as a case study in how Britain imagined its Empire and itself in the light of such fantasies. Ultimately such an investigation of the history and memory of the Flinders Island settlement will demonstrate the instability of the past, and the degree to which the monstrous places and spaces of Empire have been used to construct a sense of imperial self in Britain.

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__________________________________________________________________ But the chapter also reveals something important about the nature of monstrous geographies, and as such is a case study in the instability of the very idea of monstrosity. To my mind Flinders Island is a clearly monstrous space – the project of cultural transformation that was attempted there amounted to an effort at cultural eradication that we might call cultural genocide. Yet for the British, both in colonial Tasmania and in London, it was far from monstrous in the 1830s. Indeed it represented quite the opposite – a space that promised salvation both for the colony and indeed the indigenous people confined there. Across the 19th century its significance changed, and Flinders Island came to embody the monstrous impact of the British Empire on indigenous peoples – which was a source of shame, dread and imperial pride. But even today, the idea that Flinders Island was simply a monstrous geography would not be universally accepted – indeed modern Tasmanian historiography holds that the community on Flinders Island should not be defined by the death and disease that ultimately destroyed it. Modern scholars argue for example that much greater significance should be awarded to the cultural achievements of the Flinders Island community, which represented an example of the manner in which indigenous communities adapted to the challenges of colonisation. As such the very idea of what is a ‘monstrous’ geography is unstable and the subject of unending debate. 2. Genocide From the outset British actions in Van Diemen’s Land articulated a set of assumptions about the indigenous population that were projections of themselves. When they established the colony in 1803 (in order to forestall any French claims to the island), they thought little of its indigenous inhabitants. In theory the indigenous population was automatically awarded the protection of the crown, but in truth the British had little idea as to how they might manage relations with the Tasmanian Aborigines who they assumed would just retreat from British might.8 Very soon however, relations with indigenous peoples became violent. At the settlement at Risdon Cove in May 1804 there was a bloody confrontation between colonists and indigenous clans, although it is difficult to know how many people were killed. It appears that an indigenous group (from the Big River nation) were fired upon by settlers who assumed their hostile intent.9 The British fantasy of indigenous populations as inherently violent may well have contributed then to violence itself. When relations became more and more antagonistic in the 1820s, the British further assumed that the massacre at Risdon Cove had been of tremendous importance in setting the tone for relations between the two communities. Van Diemen’s Land underwent, prompted by London, massive colonial development during the 1820s. As settlers took over more and more of the land, especially in terms of cattle and sheep farming, the threat to indigenous communities became more and more severe. As a consequence those communities

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__________________________________________________________________ began to fight a guerrilla war in order to expel the invaders from their land. Known in Britain as the ‘Black War’ this military conflict for control of the island itself became a canvas on to which assumptions about Empire were projected – the indigenous leaders who fought the British were dismissed as irrational maniacs hell-bent on revenge for example, rather than a community attempting to resist and forestall the destruction of its traditional way of life. The settlers who fought them, in what was increasingly cast as a war of extermination, were also constructed as a violent underbelly of British society that needed to be controlled.10 The British assumed that the best way to save the indigenous population from these British savages was to ensure further and more measured colonial development and to confine the Aborigines to a small portion of the mainland or to deport them altogether. The British were the benign protectors then, the settlers their errant children from whom the further infantilised indigenous people required protection. At the same time as the military pursuit, the colonial government had since 1830 deployed George Augustus Robinson in a more ‘conciliatory’ approach to the indigenous community. Robinson’s ‘Friendly Mission’ to the indigenous community ensured that he became a ‘colonial celebrity’ in Britain too – cast as an evangelical pied piper who lured indigenous Tasmanians to accompany him.11 In truth he was probably little more than a conduit for the indigenous people themselves – he was accompanied by indigenous guides who actually led any negotiations with their fellow islanders.12 Whatever the reality, Robinson and his followers were successful – he had captured 51 islanders by February 1831 and was then sent by the colonial government to continue his campaign in the aftermath of their failure to strike a decisive blow in the military conflict. Robinson’s mission then helped negotiate an end to military conflict at the beginning of 1832, before touring the Tasmanian bush to round-up the survivors. This was achieved in conjunction with the looming threat of force. Some indigenous peoples were captured at gun-point, others were just persuaded that they were surrounded by a settler population that wished to exterminate them.13 This was an impression that Robinson himself deliberately fostered – he continually reminded indigenous Tasmanians that they were not safe alone. But the memory of the settlers exterminatory intent surrounded indigenous Tasmanians too, their communities had been virtually destroyed and the efforts of government and people were even etched into the landscape itself.14 Yet the question as to who held the agency in the transfer of indigenous people to Flinders Island is important in our understanding of the significance of the island and the indigenous settlement upon it. If indigenous Tasmanians negotiated an end to the conflict with colonial authorities, and then between themselves negotiated a peaceful transfer to Flinders Island, then the very fact of this place appears rather different than if we view it as the site to which the indigenous population were forcibly deported under threat of force. In the latter scenario, Flinders Island is a site which embodies the kind of ethnic clearances from the nineteenth century

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__________________________________________________________________ Empire that look rather like what we would call genocide. But if in fact the former is correct, then Flinders Island is transformed into a space which represents the achievement of an indigenous community in negotiating an end to a conflict which would have destroyed it. Very far from a monstrous space, in the light of such an analysis Flinders Island becomes a site of indigenous salvation and survival. 3. Flinders Island George Augustus Robinson moved permanently to Flinders Island in the middle of 1835. He began his efforts to establish a community on the island and transform the indigenous population into a kind of European peasantry – a task he believed was ‘decisively the work of God’.15 This would be done by encouraging the indigenous community to live in settled dwellings in the creation of a kind of model European village. The population would also be ‘taught’ to farm the land, to sell their produce and the things that they made at a regular market. There was to be a settlement newspaper, and regular Church services by which indigenous people would learn to worship a Christian God. Through these means the previously nomadic hunter gatherers of Tasmania would be shown the benefits of colonisation. Flinders Island was then to be the physical manifestation and the logical end point of the assumptions played out by the British in Van Diemen’s Land across the first three decades of the colony. The institution that Robinson wished to establish on Flinders was an articulation of an underlying colonial fantasy that was held throughout the Empire – that colonisation was of benefit to indigenous peoples as well as the British. Indeed, this was the basis on which the British government had approved of the deportation of indigenous Tasmanians in the first instance – in that it would provide the opportunity to protect indigenous peoples from the exterminatory settlers. Although there is some controversy about this, there seems little doubt that Robinson was motivated by a deep desire to prevent the extermination of the indigenous Tasmanians. Yet ironically he wished to do this by utterly expunging indigenous culture in a process that was itself genocidal.16 Indeed Robinson believed that he was the literal and metaphorical saviour of the indigenous people – he had rescued them from the clutches of exterminatory settlers and in particular by introducing them to a Christian God he was saving their souls from the darkness of unbelief. As such indigenous Tasmanians were delivered from both the settlers and from themselves. The settlement at Flinders Island was a local innovation, but it also articulated a much wider set of British assumptions about the nature of Empire. Although from very different social backgrounds, both the Lieutenant Governor George Arthur and Robinson were intellectually from the tradition of evangelicalism that had been articulated in the campaigns against the slave trade in Britain and which then had in turn dominated the approach to an humanitarian Empire in the 1830s.17 Robinson’s diary for example continually recalls his efforts to treat indigenous

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‘The Only Thing to be Deplored is the Extraordinary Mortality’

__________________________________________________________________ Tasmanians as his brothers in Christ in a manner which directly referenced the rhetoric of anti-slave abolitionists.18 Such evangelical rhetoric was met favourably in the metropolitan centre of Empire. The Colonial Office, both in terms of its permanent staff and successive Secretaries of State, was also populated by abolitionists in the 1830s. Because of this, accounts of Flinders Island sent back to London during this period convinced officials that the vision of ‘protection’ that Flinders represented might hold the key to the treatment and transformation of indigenous peoples certainly within the wider Australian empire and perhaps even beyond. In the aftermath of an investigation in London as to the impact of the British Empire on indigenous peoples, the Colonial Office recommended to all Australian colonies that they follow the Flinders Island model for the transformation of indigenous communities.19 George Robinson too believed that his Flinders Island settlement could be applied to the rest of the British Empire. Yet if Flinders Island was established to prevent extermination, then its impact on the indigenous community was calamitous. During Robinson’s time at the settlement 50% of the population died, this coming after a very high mortality rate amongst those collected together by Robinson’s missions from 1830 onwards.20 Regardless of this ‘extraordinary mortality’ the British government not only attempted to recreate Flinders Island settlement in New South Wales and in the new colonies around what would become Melbourne, and they appointed Robinson to oversee such an initiative. He became ‘Chief Protector of the Aborigines’. In the later 1830s then Flinders Island was very far from being perceived as a monstrosity. Indeed it as far as the British were concerned it represented salvation. Although Robinson regarded the settlement as a success despite the deaths, faith in the Flinders Island experiment soon dissipated in the colonial metropole partly because Robinson failed in any degree to protect or transform the indigenous populations he encountered on continental Australia. As failure became apparent both in Australia and on Flinders Island, the institution designed to ‘save’ the indigenous community of Tasmania became the subject of a new and much more enduring colonial fantasy. Instead of being the means to prevent the extermination of indigenous peoples, it became evidence of the inevitability of the decay of indigenous populations in the face of the might of the British Empire. The idea that individual Tasmanians were heading for extinction became embedded in a variety of cultural media, from travel guides to newspapers and even children’s comic fiction. What this discourse, and the events at Flinders Island in particular, appeared to fix in the public mind in Britain at least was the idea that the indigenous Tasmanian population had been exterminated.21 Indeed that vision of extermination itself became an important part of the colonial imagination. The idea that the helpless Tasmanian population had been hunted down like dogs, an imagery which conjured pictures of indigenous people as the helpless quarry of their imperial British masters, became utterly fixed.22

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__________________________________________________________________ The most prominent representation of indigenous Tasmanians in British culture in the 1830s came from the landscape painter John Glover, who had emigrated to Tasmania at the beginning of the decade. In 1835 he sent back a series of paintings to London that were exhibited in a Bond Street gallery and reported in the national press. Glover had been an important artist, sometimes referred to as the ‘English Claude’, and as such a new exhibition of his landscapes was much anticipated. The majority of works exhibited attempted to capture the settler’s transformation of the forbidding landscape into an English pastoral paradise. But as well as a hymn to colonial triumph, Glover also attempted to capture the former inhabitants of the island. Several of the pictures exhibited in London recorded indigenous subjects in the landscape. Invariably Glover represented indigenous Tasmanians in the shadows of twilight, while settlers and specifically their transformation of the environment were represented in the bright sunshine of a new day.23 Glover’s exhibition catalogue acknowledged that indigenous Tasmanians were ‘now nearly extirpated’.24 While he deliberately avoided depicting conflict between settlers and indigenous Tasmanians, his use of light and shadow was a figurative representation of the indigenous past and colonial future of the island. The most obvious example is the painting Mount Wellington and Hobart Town from Kangaroo Point. This depicts the new and thriving colonial port of Hobart bathed in sun-light, while in the shadowed foreground are a group of indigenous Tasmanians. These people were, in part at least, one of the groups collected by Robinson before they had been transported to Flinders Island. Indeed Glover was a contemporary of Robinson, and they shared the same views as to the importance of indigenous protection. Glover did not paint the Flinders Island settlement however, despite being invited there by Robinson. Perhaps Glover avoided it because he did not, as his other paintings suggested, regard indigenous Tasmanians as a people with a future. Flinders Island could be easily located within this narrative of indigenous Tasmanian decline and decay. Both in Australia and in Britain, the idea that the settlement was in fact not concerned with physically saving the indigenous community but just with supervising their exit from history became embedded in politics and culture. In 1847 the British Government ordered that the Flinders Island settlement ought to be closed. The population was transferred back to the Tasmanian mainland. As far as the London government was concerned, they were simply being sent back home to die. In literary culture too, Flinders Island began to represent the decay of indigenous populations. Consider for example a Routledge annual from the end of the 19th Century which featured an account of a sailor’s journey to Tasmania which ventured past Flinders Island. The ship’s-crew was ‘not favourably impressed with the condition of the Aborigines’ at Wybalenna. ‘They were degraded and seemed to be fast fulfilling the destiny that consigns to decay and extinction all these native races when they come into contact with the civilisation of the white man’.25 Such a

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‘The Only Thing to be Deplored is the Extraordinary Mortality’

__________________________________________________________________ narrative was typical, and it was a recognition of Flinders Island as the site of something both monstrous and yet somehow majestic too. The ‘extinction discourse’ that surrounded indigenous Tasmanians and the fantasy of Flinders Island was rarely an open celebration of indigenous people’s apparent passing but there was consistently a reluctant acknowledgement that such developments reflected upon the power of western civilised man. ‘English speaking men are destined to cover the planet’ wrote The Times in 1869, ‘squeezing other races out of existence … the aboriginal Tasmanians have actually vanished’.26 The accepted image of decaying, helpless, zoomorphic, Tasmanians became fixed in British culture despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary. Indigenous Tasmanians had fought a guerrilla campaign against the colony in Van Diemen’s Land, which had throughout the 1820s threatened its existence. They had then negotiated an end to the conflict, and as such were political and military actors in their own history. On Flinders Island, the survivors continued to assert their own rights to self-determination. They refused to submit to Robinson’s attempt to ‘civilise’ them, and continued their own cultural practices despite the fantasies of their captors. And indeed in 1847, they collectively petitioned the Queen to assert their right to self-determination and their desire to be returned to the mainland. According to Henry Reynolds, it was that petition which led directly to the community at Wybalenna being sent back to Van Diemen’s Land.27 Despite this articulation and identification of the desires of the ‘free people’ of Van Diemen’s Land, the idea of extermination dominated understanding for the best part of the next century and a half. In a wide range of media Flinders Island became the fantasy location at which we could see the unhappy meeting of present and past, in which the Tasmanians were cast as the survivors of a stone-age past that could not survive the collision with the modern world. In the Darwinian debate on human origins for example, indigenous Tasmanians were cast as a kind of cultural hangover, destined to be swept from the earth by the more culturally advanced British.28 This idea that the Flinders Island community was a kind of fossilised remnant also fed a grisly trade in their remains at the end of the century. Tasmanians, like William Lanne, were denied the respect of a traditional resting place – their bodies exhumed and sent back to England for display in ethnological exhibitions on the origins of man.29 Although it is difficult to be accurate as to precise numbers, by the end of the 19th century Tasmanian human remains were held in a variety of institutions in Britain and many were on display. They had for the most part been stolen from the graves on Flinders Island. For early anthropologists it was as if they had discovered in Australia, and particularly Tasmania, ‘primitive’ man itself and the grave site at Flinders Island represented an easy store of these human fossils. It was plundered accordingly. As Adam Kuper argues, the ‘seductive analogy of Darwin’s explorations which had shown that isolated island populations were particularly instructive, sometimes nourishing primitive biological forms which had died out

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__________________________________________________________________ elsewhere’ and this insight was applied to indigenous Tasmanians in the debate as to how human types related to one another. Under such an illusion, the declining Tasmanian population appeared to be ‘cultural dinosaurs’.30 They were seen as survivors from an earlier stage of evolution ‘not from the stone age in general but from the earliest stages of the stone-age’,31 who were capable of ‘giv[ing] us some idea of the conditions of the early prehistoric tribes of the Old World’.32 This scientific discourse often lamented the passing of such an ‘interesting’ people as the Tasmanians, if not always in strictly moral terms then as a loss to human science. Yet at the same time such a discourse continually also proffered a justification for genocide, and indeed required the disappearance of an indigenous population to function. Indigenous Tasmanians were a people of the past, cultural hangovers whose time was up – what more evidence did you need than their rapid exit from History itself. As George Stocking has written: ‘extinction was simply a matter of straightening out the scale and placing the Tasmanians back into the dead prehistoric world where they belonged’.33 Or as Professor Sollas from the University of Oxford argued at the beginning of the twentieth century: the destruction of Tasmanians, their society and culture was ‘a sad story, [but] we can only hope that the replacement of a people with a cranial capacity of only about 1200 cc by one with a capacity one-third greater may prove ultimately of advantage in the evolution of mankind.’34 By the end of the 19th century indigenous Tasmanians had become a cultural short-hand for the ‘fatal impact’ of western imperialism, a discourse which by referring to the forces of nature or providence absolved the protagonists of any responsibility for the calamities of population decline. Within this discourse Flinders Island became representative of the kind of institution whereby cultural transformation of indigenous peoples could be enacted.35 As such by the beginning of the twentieth century, Flinders Island (and indigenous Tasmanians more generally) had been fixed in the public mind in Britain. Contrarily, by the 1930s, it was alleged that Tasmanians were so little talked about that they (and I am aware of the contradiction here) were forgotten. Yet in fact there were traces of the memory of indigenous Tasmanians and indeed from Flinders Island, all around in Britain; especially the alleged extermination of Tasmanians. The remains of indigenous Tasmanian culture were displayed in museums across Britain (from Exeter, to Saffron Walden and Swindon), and indeed the remains of Tasmanians themselves were still displayed in institutions such as the Royal College of Surgeons, the Natural History Museum and the Anatomy museum at the University of Edinburgh. Indeed at the latter the skull of William Lanne was displayed into the 1980s.36 Indeed since 1876 Flinders Island was almost a part of the British landscape too – George Augustus Robinson was buried in a grave in Bath in that year. The inscription on his grave referenced Robinson’s time on Flinders Island when it described him as the ‘pacificator of Tasmanian Aborigines’.

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__________________________________________________________________ Flinders Island did not only play a role for the champions of imperialism. It also became part of a particular fantasy in the radical critique of Empire throughout the twentieth-century. HG Wells referenced the destruction of Tasmanians in the preface to The War of the Worlds in a critique of Empire which also accepted to some degree the ideas of racial differentiation which underpinned imperial conceit. Elsewhere in this volume Simon Bacon explores the contradictions both in Wells and then others renderings of the War of the Worlds. If Bacon is correct and Wells foresaw a decadent humanity who had rendered their home ‘hell on Earth’ then the destruction of indigenous Tasmanians was part of that image,37 and the idea that Tasmanians had been exterminated became a rhetorical fail safe in anti-imperial histories of the British world, especially in the aftermath of the Second World War. VG Kiernan typified such an approach, informed by an understanding of the Holocaust, when he described Tasmania and Australia more widely as the site of Britain’s ‘Final Solution’.38 This is a tendency that is still evident. Robert Hughes described Flinders Island as a benign ‘concentration camp’, a choice of words deliberately designed to associate the British Empire with memories of Bergen Belsen in Britain.39 More recently still Benjamin Madley has described Wybalenna as a British Gulag.40 Such language seems to be the perpetuation of the fantasy in which the helpless Tasmanian population are the perpetual victims of the British colonial strong-men. Flinders Island is also a space utilised by post-colonial novelists, and indeed enduringly colonial historians in contemporary debates about the meaning of Empire.41 In what might be imperfectly called modern post-colonial historiography however Flinders Island plays a quite different role. Instead of being a place of death and disease, in the work of historians such as Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan, Flinders Island is remembered first as a place of significant cultural and indeed political achievement. As I described above, in the 1840s the indigenous people of the Flinders Island community lobbied the British government in order to protest against their mistreatment at the hands of a colonial official. According to Henry Reynolds this petition led directly to the transfer of the surviving Flinders Island community back to the Tasmanian mainland. He describes the protest that the community sent to Britain as one of the most important documents in colonial history – in part because it speaks to indigenous political action in the 1840s and in part because it also suggested that Tasmanians original transfer to Flinders Island had been part of a negotiated settlement in the 1830s and as such is the island might be seen as more broadly representative of indigenous politics and agency.42 Lyndall Ryan’s histories of Tasmanian Aborigines also imply rejection of Flinders Island as a monstrous space. First Ryan points to the cultural vitality of the community there and the degree to which it resisted the kinds of cultural transformations attempted by Robinson. Second Ryan details the history of the indigenous community on Flinders Island in the later nineteenth and into the twentieth century – a largely mixed heritage community which survived while it

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__________________________________________________________________ was believed in Britain that indigenous Tasmanians had been entirely exterminated.43 From 1835 then Flinders Island has been truly a fantasy island onto which a series of assumptions could be projected. It began its imaginative life in Britain as the site in which the British Empire could bring salvation to the savages, but very quickly came to represent the opposite – the site at which the inevitability of the decline of indigenous peoples became confirmed. In the century and half since then, Flinders Island has been able to represent symbolically the British Empire as brutish genocidaires or as protective humanitarians. It is either the site of indigenous Tasmanians genocidal decline, or the space in which they were first able to articulate a political self-determination that has only very recently been acknowledged. As an historian first and foremost it is difficult to escape the conclusion that what this case study demonstrates is just how unstable and chimerical the past really is.44 As part of the effort to understand the role that monstrous geographies play in contemporary identities, one is also struck that Flinders Island also demonstrates the instability of the idea of the monstrous. This same site has been understood as a place of monstrous decline and salvation at the same time. And finally the various fantasies of Flinders Island seems to offer some insight into precisely the way in which the Empire functioned in Britain – as a place and space into which narratives of any kind could be projected.

Notes 1

For the latest estimates on the numerical scale of the indigenous population see Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2012), 13-14. 2 The Times, 30 December 1864, 6. 3 James Boyce uses the term ‘ethnic clearances’ in his Van Diemen’s Land (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2010), 258. 4 George Augustus Robinson, ‘Report on the Aboriginal Establishment at Flinders Island’, reprinted in the British Parliamentary Papers Australian Aborigines: Copies or Extracts of Despatches Relative to the Massacre of Various Aborigines in the Year 1838, and Respecting the Trial of their Murderers (1839), 6-19. 5 Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996), 193. 6 James Boyce used the term ‘fantasy island’ in a characterisation of the account of the history of indigenous settler relations in Tasmania by Keith Windschuttle. See James Boyce, ‘Fantasy Island’, in Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, edited by Robert Manne, (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2003), 17-78. 7 For a summary of that history see Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, 275-359 which deals with the history of the community in general after ‘extermination’.

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Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People (Camberwell, VIC: Penguin Australia, 2004), 88. 9 For a detailed narrative of the Risdon Cove massacre see Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, 49-54. 10 Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980 (St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1981), 16. 11 Anna Johnston, ‘George Augustus Robinson, the ‘Great Conciliator’: Colonial Celebrity and Its Postcolonial Aftermath’, Postcolonial Studies 12.2 (2009), 153172. 12 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, 137. 13 For a specific example of the use of force in persuasion see George Augustus Robinson’s journal entry for 18 September 1832, N. J. B. Plomley, Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson 18291934 2nd Edition (Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery and Quintus Publishing, 2008) 693. 14 Robinson’s diary records coming across structures built at the time of the line – a physical manifestation of the enmity of the settler community. See for example entries for October 1831 in Plomley, Friendly Mission, 523, 526. 15 See Plomley, Friendly Mission, throughout for references. See in particular, 229, entry for 8 August 1830 which describes a service, see also 296, 1 November 1830 when Robinson comments that he is ‘confident it was the work of God’ that he was kept safe; and 326, entry for 17 December 1830, when he confides that he has ‘reason to know that the work which I am engaged in is the work of God’. 16 See Robert van Krieken, ‘Cultural Genocide in Australia,’ in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. Dan Stone (London, Palgrave, 2010), 128-155. 17 Andrew Porter, ‘Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery and Humanitarianism’, in Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 198-221. 18 Entry for 15 November 1830 in Robinson’s journal, Plomley, Friendly Mission, 310. See also the entry for 11 October 1829 where he compares the situation in Van Diemen’s Land to a ‘slave trade in miniature’, 91. 19 For example the Colonial Secretary instructed Governor Gipps that he should create an establishment like Flinders Island in New South Wales. See Glenelg to Gipps, 31 January 1838, reprinted in Australian Aborigines, 4-5. 20 For details of deaths before reaching Flinders Island see NJB Plomley, Weep in Silence: A History of the Flinders Island Aboriginal Settlement (Sandy Bay, Tasmania, Blubber Head Press, 1987) 937-40. 21 For a general discussion of the role of extermination discourse in the British Empire see Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races 1800-1930 (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2003).

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__________________________________________________________________ 22

The British Press reported the conflict in such terms – see for example The Examiner, 18 May 1831. That this image is enduringly set in the British imagination of empire is confirmed by the fact that it is repeated in Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the World (London: Penguin, 2003), 108. 23 David Hansen, ‘The Picturesque and the Palawa: John Glover’s Mount Wellington and Hobart Town from Kangaroo Point’, in Art and the British Empire eds. Timothy Barringer, Geoff Quilley and Douglas Fordham (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 2007), 51. 24 A Catalogue of Pictures Descriptive of the Scenery, and Customs of the Inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land, together with views in England and Italy painted by John Glover esq. (London: 1835). 25 ‘A Sailor’s Log’, Routledge Every Boy’s Own Annual, Undated. 26 The Times, 29 July 1869. 27 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, 7-26. 28 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: Penguin, 2004), 212. 29 For an account of the theft of Lanne’s skull see James Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians or the Black War of Van Diemen’s Land (London, Sampson, Low, Son and Marston, 1870), 397-400. 30 Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion (Routledge: London, 1988), 92. 31 Henry Balfour, Introduction to The Evolution of Culture and Other Essays, ed. J. L. Myers (Clarendon: Oxford, 1906), xvi. 32 Henry Ling Roth, The Aborigines of Tasmania (Halifax: F. King and Sons, 1899), v. 33 George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), 283. 34 Sollas, Ancient Hunters, 87. 35 See for example a review of James Henry Kerry-Nicholls, The King Country which speculates as to the provision of a ‘Flinders Island’ for survivors of the final conflict over land in New Zealand. The Graphic 30 August 1884. 36 There is some question as to whether the skull was Lanne’s, but Lyndal Ryan reports that it was displayed. Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, 319. 37 See Simon Bacon, ‘How the Earth Went Bad: From Wells’ The War of the Worlds to the Zombie Apocalypse in the 21st Century,’ in this volume. 38 V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes to the Outside World in the Imperial Age (London, Penguin, 1972), 277. 39 Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of Transportation of Convicts to Australia 1787-1868 (London, Penguin, 2003), 422 40 Benjamin Madley, ‘Patterns of Frontier Genocide 1803-1910: The Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia’, Journal of Genocide Research 6.2 (2004), 167-92.

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__________________________________________________________________ 41

Matthew Kneale, English Passengers (London, Penguin, 2001) and Ferguson, Empire. 42 See Reynolds, Fate of a Free People. This is not the place to discuss whether or not Reynolds interpretation is correct. I offer a critique in my forthcoming book on the subject. See Tom Lawson, The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013). 43 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, 275-312. 44 For my extended discussion of the instability of historical narratives see Debates on the Holocaust (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2010).

Bibliography Bonwick, James. The Last of the Tasmanians or the Black War of Van Diemen’s Land. London, Sampson, Low, Son and Marston, 1870. Boyce, James. Van Diemen’s Land. Melbourne: Black Inc., 2010. Brantlinger, Patrick. Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races 1800-1930. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2003. British Parliamentary Papers. Australian Aborigines: Copies or Extracts of Despatches Relative to the Massacre of Various Aborigines in the Year 1838, and Respecting the Trial of their Murderers. 1839. Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: Penguin, 2004. Ferguson, Niall. Empire: How Britain Made the World. London: Penguin, 2003. Hansen, David. ‘The Picturesque and the Palawa: John Glover’s Mount Wellington and Hobart Town from Kangaroo Point’. Art and the British Empire, edited by Timothy Barringer, Geoff Quilley and Douglas Fordham. Manchester University Press: Manchester, 2007. Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore: A History of Transportation of Convicts to Australia 1787-1868. London, Penguin, 2003. Johnston, Anna. ‘George Augustus Robinson, the ‘Great Conciliator’: Colonial Celebrity and its Postcolonial Aftermath’. Postcolonial Studies 12.2 (2009).

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__________________________________________________________________ Kiernan, V. G. The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes to the Outside World in the Imperial Age. London, Penguin, 1972. Kneale, Matthew. English Passengers. London, Penguin, 2001. Kuper, Adam. The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion. (Routledge: London, 1988) Madley, Benjamin. ‘Patterns of Frontier Genocide 1803-1910: The Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia’. Journal of Genocide Research 6.2 (2004). Manne, Robert, ed. Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History Melbourne: Black Inc., 2003. Plomley, N. J. B. Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson 1829-1934. 2nd Edition. Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery and Quintus Publishing, 2008. ———. Weep in Silence: A History of the Flinders Island Aboriginal Settlement. Sandy Bay, Tasmania: Blubber Head Press, 1987. Porter, Andrew. ‘Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery and Humanitarianism’. Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, edited by Andrew Porter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Reynolds, Henry. Fate of a Free People. Camberwell, VIC: Penguin Australia, 2004. Ryan, Lyndall. The Aboriginal Tasmanians. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996. ———. Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2012. Stocking, George. Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press, 1987. van Krieken, Robert. ‘Cultural Genocide in Australia’. The Historiography of Genocide, edited by Dan Stone. London, Palgrave, 2010. White, Richard. Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980. St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1981.

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__________________________________________________________________ Tom Lawson is Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Winchester. He is the author of The Church of England and the Holocaust (Boydell, 2006) and Debates on the Holocaust (Manchester University Press, 2010). He is the co-editor of the journal Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, and also of several other books including (with James Jordan) The Memory of the Holocaust in Australia. In 2012/13 he was a Mid Career Fellow of the British Academy, during which time he wrote his forthcoming book The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania (I.B. Tauris, 2014).

Zombies in the Colonies: Imperialism and Contestation of Ethno-Political Space in Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide Robert A. Saunders Abstract All zombie yarns are about geography. Traditionally, this has meant the securitization of territory against marauding hordes of flesh-eating undead. From George Romero’s iconic Night of the Living Dead (1968) to AMC’s current hit television series The Walking Dead (2010-present), the goal of the living has been to make space that is impervious to zombies. However, in this chapter, I will explore another side of the zombie-geography conjugate. Drawing on analytical tools from the field of popular geopolitics, this essay explores the construction of monstrous geographies of imperialism as a critique of the militaristic advance of Western Civilization. In the satirical self-help tutorial The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead (2003) and the accompanying graphic novel The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks (2009), Max Brooks posits zombies as defenders of territory against the tender mercies of European colonialists. In Brooks’ geographical imagination, nearly every ‘recorded’ instance of zombiism involves a zone of contested political and/or ethnic space. Particularly relevant examples involve ‘first contact’ narratives in colonial settings, from Roman Britannia to German Southwest Africa. In other reports, Brooks focuses on inter-ethnic tensions over ‘living space’ in world history, weaving Jewish pogroms, interracial violence, and indigenous rights movements into his work. By positioning zombies as carnivorous defenders of the ‘land’ against colonial avarice, Brooks’ ghouls function as subaltern avengers, eating the flesh of white conquerors and delaying (though not ultimately denying) the march of imperialism across the globe. In doing so, he subtly rewrites our historical narrative of the coming of globalization. Key Words: Geographical imagination, popular geopolitics, zombies, Max Brooks, imperialism, ethnic conflict. ***** All zombie yarns are about geography. Traditionally, this has meant the securitization of territory against marauding hordes of flesh-eating undead. From George Romero’s iconic Night of the Living Dead (1968) to AMC’s current hit television series The Walking Dead (2010- ), the goal of the living has been to ‘make space’ that is impervious to zombie incursions and preserve or rebuild civilization.1 However, in this chapter, I explore another side of the zombiegeography conjugate. Drawing on analytical tools from the field of popular

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__________________________________________________________________ geopolitics, this essay explores the construction of monstrous geographies of imperialism as a critique of the militaristic advance of Western Civilization. In the satirical self-help tutorial The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead (2003) and its accompanying graphic novel The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks (2009) illustrated by Ibraim Roberson, Max Brooks posits zombies as (mindless) defenders of space against the violent incursion of European colonialists. In Brooks’ geographical imagination, nearly every ‘recorded’ instance of zombiism involves a zone of contested political and/or ethnic territory. Particularly relevant examples involve ‘first contact’ narratives in colonial settings, from Roman Britannia to German Southwest Africa. In other reports, Brooks focuses on inter-ethnic tensions over ‘living space’ in world history, weaving Jewish pogroms, interracial violence, and contemporary indigenous rights movements into his work. By positioning zombies as carnivorous defenders of the ‘land’ against colonial avarice, Brooks’ ghouls function as subaltern avengers, eating the flesh of white conquerors and delaying (though ultimately not denying) the march of imperialism across the globe. In doing so, he subtly rewrites our historical narrative of the coming of globalization. As they are intended as entertainment, these geography-centric tales of humanzombie encounters can certainly be read as simply highly-detailed explorations of the macabre, thus situating Brooks’ oeuvre alongside the fiction of other American writers from H. P. Lovecraft to Stephen King. However, given the increasing academic interest in zombiism within the fields of sociocultural anthropology,2 international relations,3 and geography,4 as well as Brooks’ oft-cited sobriquet as the ‘Studs Terkel of zombie journalism,’5 I argue for a deeper analysis of The Zombie Survival Guide (ZSG) and its ancillary projects (a graphic novel, web site, smart phone applications, etc.) with the aim of investigating what Peter Y. Paik calls the ‘contingencies governing political life.’6 Employing a critical geopolitical lens, these fanciful albeit gruesome retellings of history present a revisionist history of the globe, and thus contribute to a peculiar form of geographical imagination that condemns the march of Western Civilization and its primary agent: imperialism. For purposes of clarity, I define geographical imagination is the faculty wherein space and its key complements are perceived without actually having been seen. Geographical imagination is highly susceptible to influences from popular culture.7 Guided by the groundbreaking work of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979), a number of scholars undertaken an interrogations of the representation of everyday geographies via popular culture (film, novels, comic books, TV series, etc.), from the portrayal of the USSR in Reader’s Digest to James Bond’s sculpting of exotic threats to Captain America’s embodiment of U.S. national identity.8 Through the lens of critical geopolitics, it is possible to peel away certain accretions of such situated knowledge, often taken as Truth, in order to delve into the workaday praxes of power in international relations and how popular

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__________________________________________________________________ representations of place and space ‘permeate’ geopolitical thought.9 Indubitably, as work in the field have demonstrated, the more culturally distant, foreign, or uncanny a place or society seems, the more likely it is to suffer from what Harvey calls ‘biased’ or ‘empty’ geographical knowledge.10 According to geographer Simon Dalby, [The] vocabulary of geopolitics has now changed and…imperial themes…have proliferated in the current decade, the link between geographical specifications of cultural identity, and the invocation of specific geographies of danger linked to matters of military strategy, remains an important venue of contestation.11 Guided by an ‘explicit rejection of imperialism and domination’12 and its radical reconceptualization of geopolitics as a ‘complex and problematic set of discourses, representations and practices,’13 critical geopolitics provides a toolkit for exploring our own cultural assumptions about space, place, territory, and the peoples who inhabit these overlapping zones. Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide, targeted at young readers whose grasp of the outside world is both shallow and malleable (particularly in regards to current events, international relations, world geography, and historical narratives), clearly functions as a palimpsest upon which at least a portion of global history has been recorded. Accordingly, as scholars, we should view the text as a work of popular critical geopolitics, and thus seek to understand how Brooks’ representations of zombies (and the various terrains they inhabit) shape quotidian conceptualizations of how the world really works. 1. Max Brooks: The New God of Post-9/11 Zombiism For those unfamiliar with Max Brooks’ place within the epiphenomenon that is the current zombie turn, a brief overview is in order. Brooks is the son of acclaimed actor, writer, and director Mel Brooks and actress Anne Bancroft. Following a stint as a writer for NBC’s late-night sketch-comedy program Saturday Night Live and work as a correspondent for the BBC, he published The Zombie Survival Guide. Marketed as a satirical send-up of American self-help guides and the larger do-it-yourself (DIY) culture, the tongue-in-cheek handbook for surviving the rise of the undead skyrocketed on the New York Times bestseller list, selling approximately 1.5 million copies to date. Crisply written and infused with biting social satire, ZSG has spawned dozens of imitations, including U.S. Army Zombie Combat Skills (2009), The Zombie Combat Manual: A Guide to Fighting the Living Dead (2010), and Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies (2011). However, none of these texts has achieved the recognition of Brooks’ guide, with perhaps the exception of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Centers Disease Control and Prevention’s Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic (2012). Ironically, Brooks’ parody of the post-9/11 renaissance

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__________________________________________________________________ of survivalist ideology has actually come to function as a catalyst for the movement, now branded as ‘prepperism,’14 with the ZSG appearing on many doomsday blogs as ‘required reading’ for those who fear (or fantasize about) an impending interruption in the civilizational paradigm. Brooks followed up his guide with the more substantive World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006), described as an ‘infectious and compelling’ tour de force,15 driven by ‘attention to historical detail, geopolitical issues, and nuances of social and applied sciences’;16 WWZ was adapted to audio form in 2007 and included an all-star cast featuring Alan Alda, Rob and Carl Reiner, Jürgen Prochnow, Mark Hamill, and Henry Rollins among others. A major motion picture production of WWZ, starring the A-list actor Brad Pitt, is slated for release by Paramount Pictures in 2013; however, the film departs dramatically from the content of the original text. An avid fan of the comic book milieu, Brooks worked with established artist Ibraim Roberson to develop a graphic novel tie-in to his first book, publishing Recorded Attacks in 2009. Due to his notoriety as ‘one of the world’s foremost zombie preparedness experts,’17 Brooks has appeared in a number of forums to discuss the living dead and how to mitigate the looming threat, including the Discovery Channel’s Sons of Guns series and Spike TV’s Deadliest Warrior. The Zombie Survival Guide is first and foremost a user’s manual to the impending zombie apocalypse, consisting of chapters on zombie ecology, weapons and combat, defensive tactics, shelter requirements, escape plans, and long-term strategies for surviving in an ‘undead world.’ Brooks instructs his readers to avoid large groups, monitor the behavior of wildlife, and provides lessons on the comparative benefits of shotguns versus pistols in a dead-undead melee. The final segment of the text, ‘Recorded Attacks,’ provides 61 short vignettes, beginning in Katanda, Central Africa circa 60,000 B.C. and ending in St. Thomas in 2002. Of these reports, one dozen also appear in the graphic novel. It is these historicallyinformed zombie tales that this essay explores; however, a précis of Brooks’ particular brand of zombies is in order to scaffold the ensuing analysis. The zombie, ghoul, or Zack – Brooks’ interchangeable terms for the undead – differs greatly from the classic Haitian zombie or zonbi, a forlorn and pitiable creature condemned to a life of servitude under the direction of a bokor (Vodun priest). Drawing on George Romero’s infectious, carnivorous zombie (which in turn, was inspired by the vampire-like hordes of Richard Matheson’s 1954 horror novel I Am Legend),18 Brooksian zombies are slow-moving yet deadly wraiths that endlessly pursue the living, attacking without remorse or stratagem. Brooks refers to them as a unitask machine: ‘To call them predators and us prey would be inaccurate. They are a plague, and the human race their host.’19 While Brooks does not endow his zombies with the speed and calculation of the ‘rage’ zombies made popular by the 28 Days Later (2002), its sequel 28 Weeks Later (2007), and a host

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__________________________________________________________________ of first-person shooter games such as Left 4 Dead and Resident Evil, the zombies of Brooks’ imagination are more pernicious than most. In the zombie-filled universe crafted by Brooks, the (fictitious) Solanum virus, transmitted through fluidic contact, causes the host to expire in less than 24 hours, after which, the brain’s frontal lobe ‘melts away’ and reanimation occurs.20 The resulting undead creature does not require oxygen, water, or food, though it is somehow compelled to seek out the living (humans and animals alike) and devour flesh; yet, no matter how much a zombie consumes, it cannot be satiated. Decomposition occurs at a scientifically-impossible rate (three to five years); the head will remain active even after being severed from the body, and, though the zombie can be frozen solid, it will reanimate when its internal temperature rises above freezing. All forms of fauna and non-sentient life, including microbes, instinctively avoid zombies. While the pseudo-science of Solanum is faulty at best (critics have pointed out that transmission of fluids is rather unlikely since these creatures lack blood flow and do not produce secretions; likewise, their locomotion capabilities are never explained, nor are they feasible given the laws of physics), the Brooksian zombie does create conditions wherein a global, civilization-ending event is possible, assuming the outbreak is not contained and is permitted to spread across countries, continents, and eventually oceans.21 Consequently, the Solanum zombie embodies and evokes many of the fears associated with the post-9/11 milieu, from unmitigated migration to transnational terrorism to unchecked pandemics.22 2. A Zombified World: The Brooksian Guide to Global History and World Geography While most of The Zombie Survival Guide is dedicated to preparedness tactics and survival strategies for the inevitable zombie apocalypse and is thus forwardlooking, the ‘Recorded Attacks’ section and the supporting graphic novel are retrospective in nature. Both aim to reveal how earlier cultures have dealt with the ancient viral plague of Solanum; according to Brooks, ‘By immersing ourselves in past horror, we may yet prevail over the coming outbreak in our time.’23 However, a critical reading of these historical zombie outbreaks presents two interesting and arguably contradictory themes. On the one hand, Brooks uses ‘first contact’ stories to expose the villainy and avarice of colonialism and high imperialism (see Table 1). Furthermore, a number of recorded attacks are linked to institutional and actual violence against non-whites and other minorities, often through the masking of zombie outbreaks (and the ensuing violence) as ‘social unrest.’ In doing so, Brooks laces his texts with a palpable anti-racist morality while simultaneously presenting a revisionist narrative of the coming of globalization. Herein, we see an example of anti-geopolitics, i.e., a challenge to the ‘material (economic and military) geopolitical power of the state…[and] representations imposed by political elites upon the world and its different people that are deployed to serve their geopolitical

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__________________________________________________________________ interests.’24 In effect, Brooks is challenging ‘modern geopolitical imagination,’ which, according geographer Michael A. Innes, is built upon the notion that the world as a whole can be envisioned and everything in it can be classified within a hierarchy based on a metric of ‘civilization.’ The 1800s were a period of Western exploration and discovery of ‘new’ lands that were to be colonized. The seizure of territory and the enslavement of its inhabitants required the binary representation of the world divided between the civilized Christian and the barbarian. The subhuman status of the barbarian allowed for the fiction that the lands were ‘empty,’ so colonialism was not grand larceny, and gave the Western powers the legitimizing cloak of a ‘civilizing’ mission.’25 In Brooks’ reportage of the past, we see an unveiling of this rather depressing assertion. However, the employment of peripheral geographies as sites of zombiism undermines the author’s seemingly progressive project by inextricably linking non-Western space with monstrosity, and more subtly, cannibalism, the Grand Guignol of colonial representation of the ‘savage.’26 Like the Western cultural producers who have preceded him, Brooks uses the hoary trope of cannibalism, a ‘linchpin’ of the Othering process in the ‘European imagination,’27 to produce easily understood binary of good and evil. Consequently, I contend that Brooks’ recorded attacks embody a postmodern continuation of Western literature’s ‘worlding’ process, in that, these tales exhibit an ‘ethnocentric and reverse-ethnocentric benevolent double bind.’28 If we treat zombies as nonsignifiers in these texts, it becomes clear that the ‘native’ becomes the ‘object for enthusiastic information retrieval.’29 Thusly, Brooks’ subaltern zombies are elements (though not agents) within the ‘ideological landscapes’ that constitute the widely-accepted narrative of the ‘rise of the West.’30 The ramifications of Brooksian retelling of world history are not trivial given the graphic (both meanings of the word are intended here) nature of his work. Given the target markets of both The Zombie Survival Guide and The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks, Brooks enjoys a particularly acute influence vis-à-vis the imagecentric, iconographic, and undeniably visual culture of the twenty-first century citizen of the developed Global North. A. To Boldly Go: First Contact and the Undead Response Science fiction’s roots in imperial thought are so well-established that novelist Joseph Conrad once remarked, ‘Having no place on Earth left for the radical exoticism of unexplored territory, writers invent places elsewhere.’31 As such, scifi should be treated as a genre of the beyond in which: ‘What is said is less interesting than how the beyond is used.’32 Classic works of science fiction

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__________________________________________________________________ frequently employ the metaphor of exploration (and thus conquest, either in real or symbolic terms), from Conan Doyle’s Lost World (1912) to the long-running Star Trek series (1966-present). New worlds represent the ultimate ‘beyond’; however, in most works of science fiction, these spaces are not so alien that they exist beyond our ken; instead, they are liminal zones, sitting at the ‘edge’ of our understanding, and thus allow us to conceive of the ‘realities’ of these strange places and apply lessons to our own world(s). According to literary theorist Peter Y. Paik: By compelling us to imagine a different order, science fiction cultivates in us a capacity to conceive of our contemporary situation in a dynamic manner, whether in terms of its disintegration or rejuvenation, making it a literary genre that perhaps actively fosters a sense of historical as well as – in the Nietzschean sense – unhistorical consciousness of the present.33 The liminality of zombies is particularly relevant then, when situated within this field of analysis. As I have written elsewhere, ‘Zombies are not ‘undead’ in the traditional sense, as they continue to decompose and rot and (in most cases) lack cognitive abilities. In fact, they may be more rightly called ‘post-dead,’ meaning that they have passed beyond the threshold of life, but continue to exist in a form that at least gives the impression of life.’34 By their very nature, zombies are thus the ultimate disrupters of order, a sort of fantastical and horrific überKulturzerstörer. In his writings, Brooks has appropriated the liminality of both imperial space and the zombie for his own purposes, situating the walking dead at the locus of colonial ‘first contact’ in order to demonstrate both the ferocity of imperialism and its inevitability, even in the face of an undead onslaught.35 The ‘Recorded Attacks’ section of The Zombie Survival Guide, and particularly those anecdotes which are graphically retold in Recorded Attacks, are steeped in the imperial project, specially referencing more than a dozen historical empires and situated in twice that number of colonial settings. The most obvious example is that of a zombie yarn involving the Roman Empire and its ‘Army Order XXXVII.’36 The fictive directive came in response to a large-scale zombie conflict at Fanum Cocidi in modern-day Scotland. The living-undead confrontation began when ‘local barbarian chieftains’ failed to recognize the ghoulish threat and inadvertently sent their men against a group of walking corpses. The Scots were quickly transformed into a necrotic swarm that threatened all of Roman Britannia. Following the successful dispatch of 9,000 zombies by a single Roman cohort, Emperor Hadrian ordered a study of the conflict ultimately resulting in the distribution of a written copy of the aforementioned order to every legion across the empire. In a case of imperial overkill, Hadrian – according to Brooks – erected his namesake wall that spanned the ‘entire width of northern Britain’ to guard

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__________________________________________________________________ against an enemy ‘all feared would rise again.’37 Contrasting the Roman Empire with its temporal and religious successors, Brooks lauds the Roman attitude toward the living dead: ‘no fear, no superstition, just another problem requiring a practical solution.’38 Brooks is similarly generous in his praise of the pragmatism of the Mongol Emperor, Kublai Khan, who came into possession of a preserved (and still animate) zombie head pilfered from Baghdad (ostensibly by his brother, Hülegü, the infamous conqueror of Persia and founder of the Il-Khanid dynasty). However, as modernity approaches, Brooks finds little to commend as Europeans set out across the globe in search of riches, souls, and power, encountering zombies along the way, yet concealing their existence under a shroud of superstition, prejudice, and bigotry. In Spanish America, the Catholic Church conspires to destroy native knowledge about the dangers of the ‘sickness that darkens the soul,’ condemning indigenous accounts of zombiism as elaborate and blasphemous hoaxes. In North Carolina, the Roanoke Colony falls to the undead, but ‘bands of savages’ are blamed instead. In Sub-Saharan Africa, when British explorers come face to face with zombies while negotiating with the Zulu or seeking the source of the Nile, they chalk up such experiences to ‘queer’ behaviors of savages. All in all, Brooks uses more than 25 colonial settings as backdrops for his human-zombie encounters. In a number of cases, these are ‘first contact’ narratives, including Hanno of Carthage’s confrontation with zombies on the coast of West Africa in the sixth century B.C. and Sir Francis Drake’s discovery of an ‘Isle of the Damned’ in the Central Pacific in 1579. In two cases, Greenland and Roanoke, zombie infections are posited as the cause of ‘lost’ colonies of European settlers in ‘new world,’ whereas zombiism is blamed for the loss of at least one of the Spanish expedition in search for El Dorado in the jungles of South America. While Brooks is reliably anti-imperialist in his writings, the most overt critique of colonialism occurs in the Russian context (not surprising given the penchant for American Jewish humorists to target Cossacks for past wrongs to the Jewish people).39 In a story told in both texts, a scouting party of the ‘infamous’ Cossack Yermak is welcomed into the village of ‘an indigenous, Asiatic tribe’ (likely Dolgans or Evenks based on the map provided in the graphic novel, which situates the settlement in the Taymyr Autonomous Okrug in extreme northern Siberia). The Russians quickly resort to murder and cannibalism, consuming all the indigenes before moving on to the local burial ground in search of more meat. Attempting to roast one frozen corpse, the Cossacks inadvertently reanimate a native zombie which extracts a fitting revenge on the anthropophagic invaders. In this, arguably the most overtly political of all the recorded attacks, cannibalism serves as a metaphor for imperialism, with the man-eating Cossacks being deliberately conflated with zombies in the first panels of the graphic novel (the initial images show only teeth tearing at flesh and the consumption of entrails before a subsequent rendering reveals a scene of mock-etiquette, with the Cossacks

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__________________________________________________________________ deporting themselves rather formally around a campfire as they masticate the remains of the slain Siberian villagers). As Brooks would have us believe, the tsar’s raggle-taggle paramilitaries literally ‘ate’ their way across the continent, much like an eventual zombie horde might.40 Despite the damning condemnation of imperial praxes, Brooks’ use of ‘zombie defenders’ of the land inevitably presents the reader (and via the graphic novel, viewer) with a morbid simulacrum of the ‘cannibal myth,’ which was repeatedly invoked during the long history of Western conquest and subjugation of the nonwhite ‘Other’ from sub-Saharan Africa to the Americas to the islands of the South Pacific. Anthropologist Beth A. Conklin reminds us that: Cannibalism marks the distance between the civilized and the savage, between the colonizers and the colonized, between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Negative representations of native people as cannibals have served as tools of domination, providing moral legitimacy for government officials, entrepreneurs, missionaries, and others who promoted self-serving images of savage natives to justify their subjugation.41 Whereas engravings by Theodor de Bry, travelogues of missionaries such as Hans Poulsen Egede, and novellas by Herman Melville ‘highlighted the symbolic difference’ between ‘us’ and ‘them,’42 and the traditional zonbi presents a sort of ‘barbaric racial blackness,’43 Brooks undead fiction goes a step further than both forms of representation. His ocularcentric, representational ‘othering’ of indigenes qua zombies pushes them even beyond the threshold of the living, turning the victims of colonialism into ‘subhuman beasts’ that, collectively, represent a ‘somnambulistic plague’ the likes of which humanity has never witnessed.44 Whereas cultural producers like Hergé, author of the Adventures of Tintin series (1929-1976), tacitly participated in the imperial project by portraying ‘positive, more modern forms of colonialism,’ Brooks too ‘saturates’ his work with ‘stark representations of colonial superiority,’ even as he seeks to condemn it.45 B. The Ethnic Question: Zombies and Race Relations The Zombie Survival Guide makes frequent reference to race and ethnic conflict. In doing so, Brooks continues the hallowed tradition established by the founding father of modern zombie cinema, George Romero, who, it should be remembered, chose an African American protagonist, Ben (Duane Jones), for his first film Night of the Living Dead. In the film’s coda, Ben is shot dead by a ‘posse’ of whites after being ‘mistaken’ for a zombie.46 In the vein of Romero’s film, which takes a progressive stance on race relations by critiquing the ease at which a non-white is assumed to be a zombie,47 ZSG likewise casts a critical eye towards ethnic conflict. In one of Brooks’ reports set in 1762 Castries, St. Lucia, an

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__________________________________________________________________ outbreak of zombiism purportedly occurred in the ‘poor white area of the small overcrowded city.’48 The virus quickly spread through the European population, forcing the remaining whites to barricade themselves in two fortresses, thus leaving the colony’s African slaves, free blacks, and mulatto population to their own devices. Possessing a ‘deep cultural understanding’ of the walking dead, St. Lucia’s people of color quickly cleared St. Lucia of the zombie menace, while ‘those whites within the forts refused to join their struggle, as their racial bigotry matched their cowardice.’49 Through this turn of events, we witness an embodiment of the classic ‘American zombie narrative,’ which hinges on an ‘apocalyptic undoing of the social order’ (somewhat reminiscent of the assertive black man in Night of the Living Dead).50 Shortly thereafter, British and French colonial troops landed and under the banner of putting down a ‘slave revolt,’ returned the African population to bondage and slew the mulattoes for good measure (continuing the analogy, Rushton and Moreman point out that this turn of events mirrors the [white] ‘posse’s’ violent dispatch of Ben).51 The scene is poignantly ‘flagged’ with British and French standards shown flapping in the Caribbean breeze just before fusillades are unleashed on the unsuspecting liberators of the island; subsequent panels depict the horrific ‘return to normalcy’ with blacks back in chains and in the fields, thus affirming the infrangible bond between the zombie and the plantation.52 Adapting geographer Jeff May’s seminal work on zombie films and urban space, the Castries narrative provides a colonial example of how ‘new forms of otherness and difference’ can be constituted by linking ethnicity, living space, and power through the metaphor of the walking dead.53 Like the Castries tragedy, the transatlantic slave trade is similarly explored in both the original guide and the accompanying graphic novel, though with greater nuance (at least in the latter). Brooks tells of a Portuguese merchantman, the Marialva, which went missing after leaving Bissau with a cargo of slaves bound for the New World. Three years later it was discovered by a Danish vessel in the South Atlantic with a hold filled with still-chained undead Africans. The Danes quickly scuttled the boat (ostensibly loosing an army of pelagic undead, one of which likely made its way to St. Lucia, thus triggering the aforementioned outbreak). In the book, Brooks posits ‘patient zero’ to be one of the Portuguese crew, but in the graphic novel, another scenario is put forward: African slave traders deliberately included a bitten captive among their cargo of human chattel, thus unleashing a low-tech biological plague on their white partners in the ‘peculiar enterprise’ that was the Middle Passage. Accordingly, we see a reification of postmodern ‘worlding,’ wherein non-whites are actively seeking to retard, even destroy, the efforts of Europeans (albeit, it can be argued, for very good reasons). In subsequent tales of zombiism, Brooks returns to his more straightforward critique of the onslaught of Western civilization, sardonically recounting a 1901 report from a an American sailor in Formosa (Taiwan), which postulated the

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__________________________________________________________________ undead plague as ‘God’s punishment on the Chinamen for not taking in His word.’54 Herein we see a rare linkage to Biblical zombiism reminiscent of the Christian Book of Revelation. Once a common referent in yarns about the walking dead,55 the post-9/11 characteristics of zombie fiction has shifted away from this association, thus allowing Brooks to use Christian explanations for zombiism as a marked reference to historical thinking (along the lines of the racial prejudice that permeates other ‘Western’ descriptions of the phenomenon in ZSG). In another anecdote, this one set in German-controlled Tanganyika, Brooks illuminates the harsh realities of colonial rule and racial inequality in colonial Africa. The account matter-of-factly details the ‘heroic’ (and hygienic) decapitation of the ‘infected’ white hunter Karl Seekt by a native named Simon. Despite the quick response to the threat posed by the undead colonist, Simon was convicted and hanged for his actions (which undoubtedly prevented an outbreak of ‘horrible flesh-eating monstrosities’ who rise ‘again and again, until none is left upon our Earth’).56 Ironically, the implied horrors of widespread zombiism pale in comparison to the actual imperial violence inflicted upon black Africans under German colonial rule, particularly the Herero peoples of modern-day Namibia, which some authors claim to be the first genocide of the twentieth century. Eerily reminiscent of the ‘orgy of violence’ requisite in any zombie film,57 historian Adam Jones discusses the ‘mass orgy of killing’ dictated by Lieutenant-General Lothar von Trotha’s infamous ‘annihilation order’ (Vernichtungsbefehl).58 Not only were there repeated machine gunnings and cannonades, but Herero men were slowly strangled by fencing wire and the hung up like crows, while young women and girls were…bayoneted to death. The old, the sick, the wounded were all slaughtered or burnt to death. Nor were the children spared, one account describing how men, women, and children were corralled into a high thorn and log enclosure before doused with lamp oil and burnt to a cinder.59 Brooks also uses American campfire stories to deconstruct the history of racial prejudice, recounting a tale from Vitre, Louisiana. On October 31, 1911, a number of white youths tempted local legend by venturing into a bayou where supposed zombies roamed. After they failed to return, a search party went in after them only to encounter dozens of ghouls (including the missing boys who were now reanimated corpses). Following a couple of false starts, locals doused the zombies with kerosene; the ensuing conflagration consumed most of the town and resulted in scores of deaths. As Brooks reports, ‘Official government records in Baton Rouge explain the attack as ‘riotous behavior from the Negro population,’ a curious explanation as the town of Vitre was entirely white.’60 While this was not the last accounting of zombiism to spuriously conflate European/white

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__________________________________________________________________ incompetence towards the undead with the ‘disruptive’ behavior of non-whites, it is probably the most blatant – and thus pedagogical – to be recorded in the Zombie Survival Guide. C. Producing/Consuming Space: Controlling Terrain in an Undead World Historically, zombie fiction revolves around threats to the control of space, and the comforting notions that the ordering of geography provides. While easily conflated, the zombie threat is qualitatively (and quantitatively) different from the ones posed by the ‘European’ vampire, werewolf, or Frankenstein’s monster; this is partly due to its Afro-Caribbean origins, as well as later accretions to the motif of the walking undead.61 Deleuze argues that the zombie is the ‘only modern myth;’62 however, as a number of scholars attest, the Marxist-Freudian context of this oft-quoted remark fail to capture the true essence of the ‘viral zombie,’63 which may indeed be the mythopoesis of our time. Forged in the early twentieth-centuryoccupation of Haiti, catalyzed by hybridization with Cold War fears of contagion and mutation, and multiplied by the variegated angst associated with the ‘unleashing’ of globalization since the late 1970s, contemporary zombies invert the ‘perfect worker’ paradigm established by William Seabrook, who midwifed zombiism in the American geographical imagination via his novel The Magic Island (1929).64 The undead contagion – depicted in films like 28 Days Later (2002) and the AMC series The Walking Dead – demonstrate the socio-political nature of geographic control of terrain by invoking civilizational-level threats to ‘made’ space.65 Geographer Stuart Elden defines terrain as such: ‘[A] relation of power, with a heritage in geology and the military, the control of which allows the establishment and maintenance of order. As a ‘field,’ a site of work or battle, it is a political-strategic question.’66 Inarguably, zombie-human conflicts are about terrain as much as they are about bodies (the typical locus of academic analysis of zombie fiction);67 consequently, the current era of geopolitics, which is strongly influenced by the notion of securitization (against the poor, disease, migrants, terrorism, cyber-attacks, etc.),68 is strongly reflected in the ‘zombie turn’ in popular culture. While Brooks’ engagement with this idea not as fundamental to The Zombie Survival Guide as it is to World War Z (which employs incisive analysis of current issues in securitization, most notably the ‘security wall’ between Israel and Palestine, Apartheid-era plans to mitigate the effects of an indigenous revolution, etc.), it does merit analysis. Brooks’ most outlandish nod to the historical securitization of territory against walking dead, the erection of Vallum Aelium (Hadrian’s Wall) in 122 A.D., has been mentioned previously, as have a number of other instances of colonial/imperial securitization of terrain against subaltern threats. Consequently, I will use this last section to discuss modernity and the transformation of imperial power as it relates to monstrous geographies. Both the The Zombie Survival Guide and the graphic novel address the WWIIera Japanese biological weapons (BW) program, including – we are led to believe

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__________________________________________________________________ – a failed ‘zombie soldier’ scheme known as ‘Operation Cherry Blossom.’ Brooks sets the story in Harbin,69 the capital of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and site of some of the worst atrocities of the Pacific War. Brooks’ fictive zombie experiments provide an effigy of medical experiments conducted under the leadership of General Shiro Ishii and the notorious Unit 731. According to historian Sheldon H. Harris, Ishii’s labs in Manchukuo engaged in scientific misconduct which to this day remains almost beyond imagination. The subjects – facetiously referred to as maruta (logs) – suffered all manner of torments, including one test involving bubonic plague: [F]orty mice…were captured in a natural plague area along the Manchurian-Soviet border. Some fleas were lured from the mice, and a bacterium produced from the plague-infected fleas was injected into [three guerrilla] prisoners. All three prisoners were soon delirious with fever. On the twelfth day, one guerrilla was observed with a temperature of 40 degree Celsius. Another’s fever was recorded at 39 degrees Celsius on the nineteenth day of his ordeal. There is no record for the third patient. However, all three were dissected while unconscious.70 As the war progressed, such experiments gave birth to an applied science of BW as Japanese soldiers were given vials of typhoid and paratyphoid germs to be emptied into wells, water supplies, and private homes.71 In the closing days of the war, Chinese officials state that the Japanese BW technicians purposefully released hordes of test animals in order to spread infection among advancing Allied troops and the local population, ultimately causing mass outbreaks.72 Driven by quasi-religious fanaticism and an ethnocentrism sui generis, Japan’s zombie weaponization program, under the direction of the ultranationalistic Black Dragon paramilitary group, seems an almost natural outcome of the BW program. According to tracts supposedly taken from The Sun Rose on Hell (1951), the memoirs of a U.S. Army Intelligence officer, Brooks informs us that the Black Dragons created several platoons of zombies. After a series of predictable mishaps during ‘training,’ the commanders decided to simply unleash these recalcitrant recruits on Allied forces in Burma and Chinese Communist guerrillas in Yunnan Province by fitting them with parachutes and dropping them from the air. Luckily for the British, antiaircraft guns took out the flight before it could unleash its undead cargo; in the case of the Chinese, whose People’s Liberation Army sharpshooters were trained to always take head shots, all the zombies were quickly dispatched, save one which was transferred to Mao Zedong’s headquarters for ‘further study.’73 After the war, Operation Cherry Blossom continued its fetid bloom in both the USSR and the People’s Republic of China, with each of these totalitarian (and

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__________________________________________________________________ imperial) states picking up where the Japanese left off.74 Rather than destroying the zombies and the ‘science’ associated with them, both Moscow and Beijing saw in the walking dead the ultimate masters of terrain: a creature that will remorselessly and indefatigably conquer any environment into which it is placed. Eerily echoing the establishment of the Soviet biological weapons plant in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), infamous for its anthrax outbreak in 1979 (sometimes called the ‘biological Chernobyl’), Brooks informs us that the Soviets took what they gleaned from Unit 731 (that is, the Black Dragons) and established their own zombie factory in Byelgoransk (a fictitious site somewhere in Yakutia) with the aim of creating the perfect weapon for the ‘eventual Third World War.’75 Operating under the codename ‘Sturgeon,’ the BW site cum political prison was ultimately incinerated by a thermonuclear blast following an outbreak of zombiism in the autumn of 1960. Deeping the nuclear-zombie link, the ZSG subsequently provides an account from Khotan, Xinjiang in western China in which U.S. spy satellite photos purportedly revealed a riot outside a nuclear power plant. According to official Chinese sources, this event involved a ‘malfunction’ caused by counterrevolutionary elements; however, we are informed that U.S. satellite surveillance showed mobs of civilians feasting on the remains of the power plant’s defenders.76 Subsequent reports from dissident sources describe the event as the dramatic denouement of the PRC’s zombie program, poignantly titled ‘Operation Eternal Walking Nightmare.’ In keeping with the theme of this collection of essays, Brooks’ linking of militarism, totalitarianism, and amoral scientific and technological advancement with certain ‘monstrous geographies’ such as Harbin, Sverdlovsk (qua Byelgoransk), and Chernobyl (qua Khotan), we are presented with dark even traumatic visions of humanity’s inhumanity, particularly when it is embedded in the crushing Weltanschauung of ‘progress.’77 As Jessica Rapson’s chapter in this volume, ‘The Cosmopolitan Nuclear Memoryscape of Chernobyl,’ discusses, the nuclear ‘city of the future’ Prypiat, Ukraine, once a model of techno-scientific development, is now the ‘paradigm for the way nuclear disaster is remembered, imagined, and feared in a global age.’78 According to one commentator, ‘The entire city of Pripyat is a grave, a place that died more than 20 years ago and will never come back to life.’79 However, as Rapson points out, Prypiat has been recently ‘reanimated’ by tourism (though with its high levels of radiation, this revivification is qualified at best). The zombiesque nature of Prypiat is both literally and figuratively played out in the recent horror film Chernobyl Diaries (2012). In the film, six ‘dark tourists’80 hire a local to take them around the abandoned and irradiated workers’ paradise of Prypiat. After surveying the ghostly city, they are trapped overnight when their guide’s van fails to start. Eventually, the group is set upon by carnivorous mutants, who closely resemble the ‘zombies’ of the Left 4 Dead variety or those depicted in I Am Legend (2007). In the closing moments, we learn that (post-)Soviet scientists have been keeping these ‘survivors’ of the

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__________________________________________________________________ Chernobyl disaster, as well as their pitiful offspring, in prison hospitals for nefarious purposes (likely a covert biological warfare program). In their ‘ambivalent pursuit’ of leisure associated with ‘places of human misery and death,’81 in this case, Prypiat, the dark tourists are literally consumed by the (denizens of the) monstrous geography that beckoned them. 3. Conclusion By presenting a series of important milestones in world history in a farcical narrative and comic book form, Brooks taps the ability of both satire and sequential art to map territorial space in deeply meaningful ways, while simultaneously creating, perpetuating, and revising geopolitical stereotypes. Through the constructive capacity of these two distinct media, specifically, the ability to distort images and influence ‘ways of seeing,’82 for which comics are (in)famous,’ Brooks’ ZSG and the corresponding graphic novel work to shape perception of the ‘real,’ creating consumable and reproducible simulacra that are often more meaningful than lived reality. In the words of Lipschutz, ‘Culture is dynamic but also a product of accretion, and the ‘knowing’ viewer or reader, through her awareness of this culture, becomes part of an appreciative historical/cultural community in the know.’83 By linking the colonial subaltern with the zombie, ‘a devastating word, unrivaled in its power to conjure up so many memories and emotions,’84 Brooks (inadvertently) works towards the political end of ‘imagining’ non-Western geographies as monstrous. While Brooks is often at pains to stress his anti-racist credentials – from condemning the bigotry and cultural ignorance of white explorers to lambasting the natural tendency toward the rapine among all conquerors – his zombie lore inevitably and ineluctably links zombiism with the colonial/non-white periphery, thus bringing the phenomenon, which began as a tool for othering Afro-Caribbean cultures, full circle.

Notes 1

For an analysis of the ‘making’ of space, see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991). 2 See, for instance, Kyle W. Bishop, ‘Raising the Dead,’ Journal of Popular Film and Television 33 (2006): 16-25; Kyle W. Bishop, ‘Dead Man Still Walking,’ Journal of Popular Film and Television 37 (2009): 16-25; Kyle W. Bishop, ‘The Idle Proletariat: Dawn of the Dead, Consumer Ideology, and the Loss of Productive Labor,’ Journal of Popular Culture 43 (2010): 234-248; Gayle R. Baldwin, ‘World War Z and the End of Religion As We Know It,’ Crosscurrents 57 (2007): 412425; Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz, ed., Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011); Christopher M. Moreman and Cory James Rushton, ed., Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition (Jefferson, NC:

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__________________________________________________________________ McFarland, 2011); and Christopher M. Moreman and Cory James Rushton, ed., Zombies Are Us: Essays on the Humanity of the Walking Dead (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011). 3 Kyle W. Bishop, ‘The Sub-Subaltern Monster: Imperialist Hegemony and the Cinematic Vodoun Zombie,’ Journal of American Culture 31 (2008): 141-152; Daniel W. Drezner, ‘Night of the Living Wonks: Towards an International Relations Theory of Zombies,’ Foreign Policy 180 (2010), 34-38; and Daniel W. Drezner, Theories of International Politics and Zombies (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011). 4 Jeff May, ‘Zombie Geographies and the Undead City,’ Social and Cultural Geography 11 (2010): 285-298 and Robert A. Saunders, ‘Undead Spaces: Fear, Globalisation, and the Popular Geopolitics of Zombiism,’ Geopolitics 17 (2012): 125 (2012). 5 Christopher Borrelli, ‘It’s the Dawn of the Zombie Zeitgeist,’ Chicago Tribune, 4 May 2009. 6 Peter Y. Paik, From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 7 See Joanne P. Sharp, Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Andrew Crampton and Marcus Power, ‘Reel Geopolitics: Cinemato-Graphing Political Space,’ Geopolitics 10 (2005): 193-203; Jason Dittmer and Klaus Dodds, ‘Popular Geopolitics Past and Future: Fandom, Identities and Audiences,’ Geopolitics 13 (2008): 437-445; and Kyle Grayson, Matt Davies, and Simon Philpott, ‘Pop Goes IR? Researching the Popular Culture-World Politics Continuum,’ Politics 29 (2009): 155-163. 8 See, respectively, Sharp, Condensing the Cold War; Klaus Dodds, ‘Screening Geopolitics: James Bond and the Early Cold War Films (1962-1967),’ Geopolitics 10 (2005): 266-289; and Jason Dittmer, Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013). 9 Oliver Dunnett, ‘Identity and Geopolitics in Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin,’ Social and Cultural Geography 10 (2009): 583-599. 10 David Harvey, ‘The Sociological and Geographical Imaginations,’ International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 18 (2005): 211-255. 11 Simon Dalby. ‘Imperialism, Domination, Culture: The Continued Relevance of Critical Geopolitics,’ Geopolitics 13 (2008): 413-436. 12 Ibid., 417. 13 Marcus Power and David Campbell. 2010. ‘The State of Critical Geopolitics,’ Political Geography 29 (2010): 243-246. 14 See Emily Matchar, ‘Boom Times,’ Outside 37 (2012): 67-70.

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__________________________________________________________________ 15

Karl G. Siewert, ‘World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (Review),’ Library Journal 131 (2006): 56-56. 16 Jayme Sutton, ‘World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (Review),’ Naval War College Review 63 (2010): 166-167. 17 Max Brooks, ZSG (iPhone application) (New York: Crown Publishing, 2012). 18 For more on the evolution of the ‘Western’ zombie, see Saunders, ‘Undead Spaces’; Elizabeth McAlister, ‘Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites: The Race and Religion of Zombies,’ Anthropological Quarterly 85 (2012): 457-486; and Kevin A. Boon, ‘Ontological Anxiety Made Flesh: The Zombie in Literature,’ in Monsters and the Monstrous: Myth and Metaphors in Enduring Evil, ed. Niall Scott (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 33-44. 19 Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003), xiii. 20 Ibid., 184. 21 In the final recorded attack, a ocean-crossing zombie is hinted at, beginning its ‘life’ in Morocco and making its way across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean to the U.S. Virgin Islands. 22 See Saunders, ‘Undead Spaces’ and Becky A Graham, ‘Post-9/11 Anxieties: Unpredictability and Complacency in the Age of New Terrorism in Dawn of the Dead (2004),’ in Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition, ed. Christopher M. Moreman and Cory James Rushton (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 124-138. 23 Brooks, ZSG (application). 24 Paul Routledge, ‘Anti-Geopolitics’ in The Geopolitics Reader, ed. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Simon Dalby, and Paul Routledge (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 245. 25 Michael A. Innes, Denial of Sanctuary: Understanding Terrorist Safe Havens (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), 36. 26 Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne, trans. Rosemary Morris (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). 27 McAlister, ‘Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites,’ 477. 28 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,’ Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 243-261. 29 Ibid., 245. 30 Robert A. Saunders, ‘Hungry Lands: Conquest, Cannibalism, and the Wendigo Spirit’ in Undead in the West: Vampires, Zombies, Mummies, and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier, ed. Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012), 182-203. 31 Quoted in John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 4.

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__________________________________________________________________ 32

Geoffrey Whitehall, ‘The Problem of the ‘World and Beyond’: Encountering ‘the Other’ in Science Fiction,’ in To Seek Out New Worlds: Exploring Links between Science Fiction and World Politics, ed. Jutta Weldes (Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 172. 33 Paik, From Utopia to Apocalypse, 2. 34 Saunders, ‘Undead Spaces,’ 86. 35 In her essay, ‘Slaves, Cannibals, and Hyper-Whites,’ anthropologist Elizabeth McAlister links the colonial ‘space of death’ to core notions of zombiism. 36 Brooks, Zombie Survival Guide, 187. 37 Max Brooks and Ibraim Roberson, The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2009), 50. 38 Brooks, Zombie Survival Guide, 189. 39 Brooks takes aim at medieval Christendom’s persecution of his ancestors in an account of zombiism set in 850 somewhere in an ‘unknown province’ in Saxony. A friar on pilgrimage to Rome witnessed a massive outbreak of undead, which was ultimately blamed on the ‘lack of faith’ of local Jews who suffered unspeakable reprisals; Brooks, Zombie Survival Guide, 191. 40 This vignette interestingly mirrors the content critical orientation of the motion picture Ravenous (1999), which employs the Native American myth of the cannibalistic wendigo as a ‘the embodiment of America’s insatiable appetite for consumption.’ The film is set in the Sierra Nevada mountains and closely ties U.S. geographic expansion with violence and amorality; see Saunders, ‘Hungry Lands,’ 183. In WWZ, Russia suffers greatly from the zombie outbreak with no natural geographic barriers to stanch the spread of Solanum, a situation that is contrasted with the U.S., as the military and various militias make a stand at the Rocky Mountains, thus protecting the western seaboard from compete annihilation. 41 Beth A. Conklin, ‘Consuming Images: Representations of Cannibalism on the Amazonian Frontier,’ Anthropological Quarterly 70 (1997): 68-78. 42 Ibid., 68. 43 McAlister, ‘Slaves, Cannibals, and Hyper-Whites,’ 472. 44 Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide, xiii. 45 Dunnett, ‘Identity and Geopolitics,’ 590; one chronicle clearly bucks this trend as we learn the story of European businessman living in French Indochina shortly before its fall to the Viet Minh. The entrepreneur runs a spectacle called the ‘Devil Dance’ wherein a living human armed with a small blade (likely a poor Vietnamese from the account) is placed in a cage with a zombie for the amusement of paying onlookers. Such entertainment is presented in the ultimate in imperial decadence akin to the blood sports of the failing Roman imperium. 46 See Christopher M. Moreman and Cory James Rushton, ‘Introduction: Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition,’ in Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-

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__________________________________________________________________ Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition, ed. Christopher M. Moreman and Cory James Rushton (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 1-12. 47 Shane Borrowman, ‘Remaking Romero,’ in Fear, Cultural Anxiety, and Transformation: Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy Films Remade, ed. Scott A. Lukas and John Marmysz, 61-84 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010). 48 Brooks, Zombie Survival Guide, 201. 49 Ibid., 202. 50 McAlister, ‘Slaves, Cannibals, and Hyper-Whites,’ 474. 51 Moreman and Rushton, ‘Introduction,’ 10. 52 Ibid. 53 May, ‘Zombie Geographies.’ 54 Brooks, Zombie Survival Guide, 213-214. 55 See Kevin J. Wetmore, Back from the Dead: Remakes of the Romero Zombie Films as Markers of Their Times (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001). 56 Ibid., 215. 57 Kim Paffenroth, Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006), 69. 58 See, for instance, Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (Abingdon, UK: Taylor and Francis, 2010). 59 Ibid., 122. 60 Brooks, Zombie Survival Guide, 216. 61 Markman Ellis, The History of Gothic Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). 62 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), 368. 63 See Moreman and Rushton, ‘Introduction’ and Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry, ‘A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Ear of Advanced Capitalism,’ Boundary 2 35 (2008): 85-108. 64 See Saunders, ‘Undead Spaces’; Cynthia Hendershot, I Was a Cold War Monster: Horror Films, Eroticism, and the Cold War Imagination (Madison, WI: Popular Press, 2001); and Ann Kordas, ‘New South, New Immigrants, New Women, New Zombie: The Historical Development of the Zombie in American Popular Culture,’ in Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition, ed. Christopher M. Moreman and Cory James Rushton, 15-30 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011). 65 See Saunders, ‘Undead Spaces.’ 66 Stuart Elden, ‘Land, Terrain, Territory,’ Progress in Human Geography 34 (2010): 799-817. 67 See, for instance, Moreman and Rushton, Zombies Are Us. 68 See, for instance, Vanessa A. Massaro and Emma Gaalaas Mullaney, ‘The War on Teenage Terrorists,’ City 15 (2011): 591-604; Mike Bourne, ‘Netwar

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__________________________________________________________________ Geopolitics: Security, Failed States and Illicit Flows,’ British Journal of Politics and International Relations 13 (2010): 490-513; Alan Fowler and Kasturi Sen, ‘Embedding the War on Terror: State and Civil Society Relations,’ Development and Change 41 (2010): 1-27; and Alan Ingram, ‘The New Geopolitics of Disease: Between Global Health and Global Security,’ Geopolitics 10 (2005): 522-545. 69 In reality, Unit 731 – the military unit responsible for Japan’s BW program – conducted most of its lethal experiments outside the city in the Zhongma Fortress in Beiyinhe, one hundred kilometers from Harbin. With its diverse population which included large numbers of Russians and other Europeans, as well as Manchus and Chinese, the Harbin region allowed the Japanese military to harvest test subjects from across Eurasia’s various ethnic groups for testing purposes, a requisite factor given the Social Darwinist orientation of many Japanese scientists (other sites included Mukden and Pingfan; see Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-1945, and the American Cover-Up (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 70 Harris, Factories of Death, 27. 71 Ibid., 111. 72 Ibid., 67. 73 Brooks, Zombie Survival Guide, 222. 74 For more on the imperial nature of domestic rule in the USSR and the PRC, see Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001); Barry Sautman, ‘Colonialism, Genocide, and Tibet,’ Asian Ethnicity 7 (2006): 243265; and Douglas Howland, ‘The Dialectics of Chauvinism: Minority Nationalities and Territorial Sovereignty in Mao Zedong’s New Democracy,’ Modern China 37 (2011): 170-201. 75 Brooks, Zombie Survival Guide, 226. 76 Ibid., 234-5. 77 It should be noted that liberal, democratic regimes are not above such praxes, as Harris’ book points out. As part of the postwar settlement, many Japanese scientists who should have been tried as war criminals were granted immunity for sharing their results and expertise with the U.S., while others continued their work in Japan long after the end of the war; see Harris, Factories of Death. 78 Jessica Rapson, ‘The Cosmopolitan Nuclear Memoryscape of Chernobyl’, This Darkened Space: A Geography of the Monstrous, ed. Sarah Montin and Evelyn Tsitas (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013). 79 Maryann De Leo, ‘Chernobyl Revisited,’ Discover 28 (2007): 68-75. 80 John Lennon, and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Continuum, 2000). 81 Erika M. Robb, ‘Violence and Recreation: Vacationing in the Realm of Dark Tourism,’ Anthropology and Humanism 34 (2009): 51-60.

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Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001). 83 Ronnie D. Lipschutz, Cold War Fantasies: Film, Fiction, and Foreign Policy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 5. 84 Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 1.

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__________________________________________________________________ Dunnett, Oliver. ‘Identity and Geopolitics in Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin.’ Social and Cultural Geography 10 (2009): 583-599. Elden, Stuart. ‘Land, Terrain, Territory.’ Progress in Human Geography 34 (2010): 799-817. Ellis, Markman. The History of Gothic Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Fowler, Alan, and Kasturi Sen. ‘Embedding the War on Terror: State and Civil Society Relations.’ Development and Change 41 (2010): 1-27. Graham, Becky A. ‘Post-9/11 Anxieties: Unpredictability and Complacency in the Age of New Terrorism in Dawn of the Dead (2004).’ In Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition, edited by Christopher M. Moreman and Cory James Rushton, 124-38. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. Grayson, Kyle, Matt Davies, and Simon Philpott. ‘Pop Goes IR? Researching the Popular Culture-World Politics Continuum.’ Politics 29 (2009): 155-63. Harris, Sheldon H. Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-1945, and the American Cover-Up. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Harvey, David. ‘The Sociological and Geographical Imaginations.’ International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 18 (2005): 211-55. Hendershot, Cynthia. I Was a Cold War Monster: Horror Films, Eroticism, and the Cold War Imagination. Madison, WI: Popular Press, 2001. Howland, Douglas. ‘The Dialectics of Chauvinism: Minority Nationalities and Territorial Sovereignty in Mao Zedong’s New Democracy.’ Modern China 37 (2011): 170-201. Ingram, Alan. ‘The New Geopolitics of Disease: Between Global Health and Global Security.’ Geopolitics 10 (2005): 522-545. Innes, Michael A. Denial of Sanctuary: Understanding Terrorist Safe Havens. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007.

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__________________________________________________________________ Jones, Adam. Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction. Abingdon, UK: Taylor and Francis, 2010. Kordas, Ann. ‘New South, New Immigrants, New Women, New Zombie: The Historical Development of the Zombie in American Popular Culture.’ In Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition, edited by Christopher M. Moreman and Cory James Rushton, 15-30. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. Lauro, Sarah Juliet and Karen Embry, ‘A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Ear of Advanced Capitalism.’ Boundary 2 35 (2008): 85-108 Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991. Lennon, John, and Malcolm Foley. Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster. London: Continuum, 2000. Lestringant, Frank. Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne. Translated by Rosemary Morris. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Lipschutz, Ronnie D. Cold War Fantasies: Film, Fiction, and Foreign Policy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. Louison, Cole. U.S. Army Zombie Combat Skills. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press, 2009. Ma, Roger. The Zombie Combat Manual: A Guide to Fighting the Living Dead. New York: Penguin, 2010. Martin, Terry. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001. Massaro, Vanessa A. and Emma Gaalaas Mullaney. ‘The War on Teenage Terrorists.’ City 15 (2011): 591-604. Matchar, Emily. ‘Boom Times.’ Outside 37 (2012): 67-70. May, Jeff. ‘Zombie Geographies and the Undead City.’ Social and Cultural Geography 11 (2010): 285-98.

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__________________________________________________________________ McAlister, Elizabeth. ‘Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites: The Race and Religion of Zombies.’ Anthropological Quarterly 85 (2012): 457-486. Mogk, Matt. Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies. New York: Gallery Books, 2011. Moreman, Christopher M. and Cory James Rushton. ‘Introduction: Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition.’ In Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on CrossCultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition, edited by Christopher M. Moreman and Cory James Rushton, 1-12. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. ——— ed. Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. ——— ed. Zombies Are Us: Essays on the Humanity of the Walking Dead. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. Paffenroth, Kim. Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006 Paik, Peter Y. From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Power, Marcus, and David Campbell. ‘The State of Critical Geopolitics.’ Political Geography 29 (2010): 243-246. Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Robb, Erika M. ‘Violence and Recreation: Vacationing in the Realm of Dark Tourism.’ Anthropology and Humanism 34 (2009): 51-60. Rose, Gillian. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001. Routledge, Paul. ‘Anti-Geopolitics.’ In The Geopolitics Reader, edited by Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Simon Dalby and Paul Routledge, 245-255. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

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__________________________________________________________________ Saunders, Robert A. ‘Hungry Lands: Conquest, Cannibalism, and the Wendigo Spirit.’ In Undead in the West: Vampires, Zombies, Mummies, and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier, edited by Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper, 182203. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012. ———. ‘Undead Spaces: Fear, Globalisation, and the Popular Geopolitics of Zombiism.’ Geopolitics 17 (2012): 1-25. Sautman, Barry. ‘Colonialism, Genocide, and Tibet.’ Asian Ethnicity 7 (2006): 243-265. Sharp, Joanne P. Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Siewert, Karl G. ‘World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (Review).’ Library Journal 131 (2006): 56-56. Silver, Maggie. 2012. Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic. Atlanta: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Centers Disease Control and Prevention, 2012. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.’ Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 243-61. Sutton, Jayme. ‘World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (Review).’ Naval War College Review 63 (2010): 166-67. Wetmore, Kevin J. Back from the Dead: Remakes of the Romero Zombie Films as Markers of Their Times. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001. Whitehall, Geoffrey. ‘The Problem of the ‘World and Beyond’: Encountering ‘the Other’ in Science Fiction.’ In To Seek out New Worlds: Exploring Links between Science Fiction and World Politics, edited by Jutta Weldes. Houndsmills, 169-194. UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Robert A. Saunders is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, Economics, and Politics and Chair of the Science, Technology and Society (STS) program at Farmingdale State College, a campus of the State University of New York. He holds a Ph.D. in Global Affairs from Rutgers University. Dr. Saunders’ research explores the impact of mass media and popular culture on national identity, geopolitics, and international relations.

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__________________________________________________________________

Appendix Table 1: Recorded Attacks in The Zombie Survival Guide Total Reports

63 (The Zombie Survival Guide); 12 (Recorded Attacks)*

Colonial Settings

Carthaginian Empire (western Africa); Hellenic Empire (Afghanistan); Roman Empire (Scotland*, Algeria, Germany, France); Seljuq Empire/Crusader Kingdoms (Jerusalem); Viking Lands (Greenland); Mongol Empire (China); Spanish Empire (Mexico, Amazon Basin); British Empire and Command of the Seas (Central Pacific*, North Carolina, St. Lucia*, South Africa, Kenya, Sri Lanka); Russian Empire (Siberia*); Portuguese Empire (Guinea-Bissau*); French Empire (Algeria*, Vietnam); Japanese Empire (Taiwan, Caroline Islands, Manchuria*); German Empire (Tanzania); Dutch Empire (Surinam)

Ethnic Conflicts

Jewish pogroms in Germany (850); Crusader massacres of Jews in Jerusalem (1073); Cossack slaughter and cannibalism of native Siberians (1583)*; CroatanEnglish conflict in North America (1587); transatlantic slave trade (1690)*; racial violence in the Caribbean (1763)*; Arab resistance to French rule (1893)*; Indian massacres in the U.S. (1848); African-European violence in German East Africa (1905); interracial violence in Louisiana (1911); Mau Mau Revolt (1957); indigenousrancher conflicts in Brazil (1980)

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__________________________________________________________________ Political Action

Building of Hadrian’s Wall (2nd century)*; Roman Catholic Church’s suppression of early history of the New World (16th century); enslavement of all free blacks and mulattoes in St. Lucia (1763)*; WWII-era Japanese biological warfare program including use of zombies against Chinese forces (1942-45)*; Soviet detonation of nuclear bomb over Byelgoransk, Russia (1960)*; U.S. firebombing in Laos (1968); Israeli incursion into Egypt (1975); cover-up of a nuclear power plant malfunction in Xinjiang, China (1987); border skirmish between India and Pakistan (1996)

The Perilous Sites of the Atlantikwall Rose Tzalmona Abstract The Atlantikwall (1941-1945), a defensive line comprised of 12,000 bunkers, beach obstacles, mines, and a rail and road system, was constructed along seven countries stretching from northern Norway to southern France in order to protect ‘Greater Germany’ from an impending Allied invasion. This chapter sets out to redefine the Atlantikwall as a large-scale territory, a frontier that was not only comprised of military installations, but also included a network of international slave labour camps. The devastation wrecked upon civilian populations, urban environments and coastal landscapes, due to the construction of this defence line both by the Germans and by the Allied forces, are examined here with respect to the psychological wounds they left behind. Today, these former perilous landscapes of the Atlantikwall bear witness to the war crimes committed by the Third Reich. As such, a strategy that would want to address the future of these remains towards the creation of a pan-European heritage park would have to focus on a process of recovery through remembrance. Key Words: Atlantikwall, Atlantic Wall, bunkers, collective amnesia, war landscape, war crimes, Organisation Todt, building processes, psychological impact, future heritage. ***** 1. Imagined Frontiers Only a polis (city, state, society) can war: ‘The only source of war is politics’, said Clausewitz. ‘Politics is the womb in which war develops.’ For war to emerge from this womb there must be an enemy. … Mind you now: there may not actually be an enemy! All along we are speaking of the idea of an enemy, a phantom enemy. It is not the enemy that is essential to war and that forces wars upon us, but imagination. … The imagined phantom swells and clouds the horizon, we cannot see beyond enmity. The archetypal idea gains a face. Once the enemy is imagined, one is already in a state of war.1 The 20th century will be remembered as the bloodiest period in the history of humankind. It was a century characterised by unprecedented levels of mass slaughter aided by technological advancements that induced humanity to surrender to its most primitive urges and confront its darkest shadows. The war that was

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__________________________________________________________________ meant to end all armed conflict (1914-1918) marked in fact the beginning of total destruction. Total War as Clausewitz predicted would traumatise all layers of society and permanently alter the notion of mortal combat by removing it from the open field to the urbanised areas of the home front. Large-scale territories become monstrous geographies when they begin to necessitate a reinterpretation of spatial interventions and planning processes used to create war landscapes, that once remembered would gradually transform the devastation left behind on cultural landscapes and urban fabrics into lieux de mémoire. Could the land want war? …Instead of searching the minds of men for the reasons for these dead, I wondered if the earth that now held their bodies has asserted a claim to them. Is not the presence of the earth the underlying fact of battle; does not the field participate in the battle? Do not the cessations of hostilities often come about when demarcation lines are laid upon the land: this parallel or that; boundaries, borders, no-man’s-land into neutral zone? Out of the land come great walls and forbidding fences. They stand; but the ideals the men fought for…the loyalties and miseries all vanish in the aftermath. What’s left on the field are the fields and the invisible blood drained into the land.2 In his book Landscapes of Culture and Nature, Giblett sets out to compare the mechanisms of the World Wars using both space and time to differentiate between soldiers and civilian experiences, as well as the four elements (air, earth, fire and water) upon the physical environments as they affect the five senses. World War One trench warfare involved soldiers fighting a strategic deadlock on the Western Front while confronted with a monstrous murky earth (as explored in Sarah Montin’s chapter in this volume, ‘Strange Outlandish Star’) as it combines with water and offer its participants the use of sight and taste.3 Conversely, World War Two combined strategic planning with speed by inflicting instantaneous ravages to cities of both sides brought about by airborne bombings, thus instigating blazing firestorms triggering touch and sound (since sight was absent from within the permanent concrete shelters that replaced the trenches). Smell, ironically, was present in both wars – the horrid smell of explosives and the stench of decomposing corpses.4 The indestructible shell-proof bunkers of the Atlantikwall, that were built for military purposes, resemble the medieval metallic body armour which provided the vulnerable soldiers with the illusion of being protected from death by a ‘concrete’ one.5 The Wehrmacht soldier, unlike his ancestor who fought in the Great War, would be spared the hell offered by mud and be shielded instead by manufactured ‘standardised concrete’, covered with dry earth. Sheltered and camouflaged.

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__________________________________________________________________ Indeed, Hitler himself had used his wartime experience in the trenches of Langemark (in the vicinity of Paschendelle, Belgium) to ensure that such slow and excruciating warfare would not be repeated again – at least, not along the Western Front. Yet, while the frontier of No Man’s Land did not extend past enemy trenches several kilometres ahead, The Atlantikwall’s immense territory along a lengthy coastline was bounded by the ephemeral physicality of the Atlantic Ocean. To allude to Hilman’s cerebral quotations above, the initially imagined monstrous enemy was far away – beyond visibility and beyond the reach of radar – psychologically threatening from a distance. This imagined frontier would soon become a reality in psychological warfare. 2. Perilous Landscapes Ideologies as concepts of the world are often substitutes for beliefs… Such ideologies often develop as movements, associated with new ideas and aim to reform the thoughts of man and his activities. When guided solely by ideology projects often become rather utopian in character.6 The Atlantikwall (1941-1945) was a colossal defence line comprised of 15,000 bunkers (of which 12,000 were built), anti-tank beach obstacles trenches, ditches, walls, mines, an infrastructural network of railways and roads, and an intricate system of slave labour camps to house its workers. It was constructed along the Atlantic coastlines of seven countries from southern France through to northern Norway (approximately 5000km long) to protect ‘Greater Germany’ from an impending Allied invasion, thus transforming this territory into a monstrous war landscape. Despite the widely acknowledged official explanation given for the construction of these vestiges, no territorial or geopolitical claims by the Third Reich was ever conducted without any racial or ideological principles to support it. In fact, it was the possibility of losing those very principles, and not the physical space, which the Atlantikwall sought to defend. Again, the monstrosity of these vestiges lay not only in the unparalleled scale of the endeavour and its destructive mechanisms, but also in the values which it defended. The Atlantikwall as a defensive and offensive military architecture was cartographically represented as a definitive border condition of Nazi geopolitical expansion. Constructing such a bounded territory did not only legitimise an ideology that stood in sharp contrast to modern western democratic values such as liberty, equality, state sovereignty and justice, but whose erection gave way to war crimes (mobilising between 800.000-1.4 million international civilians and POWs to construct it) committed in the name of ‘innocence and truth’.7 In addition to the constructed ‘death factories’ for the Jews, the Nazi regime had distinguished between civilian conscripted labour with its multifaceted racial classification, and

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__________________________________________________________________ the use of Üntermenschen (Jews, Eastern labourers and POWs) as slaves. The Atlantikwall provided the spatial condition where forced labour and slavery could be justifiably employed as an instrument in warfare, thus becoming the perfect expression of the totalitarian state, where all material and human resources were deployed in the process of defending the spatial and racial ideology it represented. The Atlantikwall was not only the largest building project of the Reich, but also its most multi-disciplinary undertaking that involved geologists and geographers, land surveyors and aerial photographers, spatial and urban planners, architects, civil-, structural-, mechanical-, electrical-, hydraulic-, and military (field) engineers (Pionierstab who were responsible for fortification design), building contractors, manufacturers and suppliers. All those professionals were either directly hired, or brought together under the supervision of Organisation Todt (that was initially headed by the engineer Fritz Todt and later by his successor the architect Albert Speer and its chief engineer at the main headquarters in Berlin Xaver Dorsch) with its numerous branches stationed across the occupied counties. Building this defence line formed an integral part of a standardised German war production that required the complete cooperation of these professionals who attempted to apply of 250 ‘siteless’ universal types in standard ensembles upon any given location while taking into account climate, geology and topography, infrastructure and transportation, communication and supply channels, building material, equipment and machinery, artillery as well as labour force. The Atlantikwall was built in sections and each section expanded its territorial claims over time (even up to tens of kilometres in certain regions) to what became known as the Second Front. Furthermore, urban settlements and ports were carefully studied in order to strategically locate and optimise the location of military installations, submarine and torpedo boat bases and bunkers which needed above all to be sheltered and camouflaged from enemy patrollers either with vegetation, or fresco paintings that blended them with their environment. Moreover, the Germans possessed maps of all the coastal towns and used them to spatially plan the locations for building bunkers, for laying out new infrastructure, determine water systems and communications networks, and determine the best strategic points to insert bunkers into pre-existing structures8 such as 16th-17th century fortifications designed by Vauban. The Atlantikwall may therefore be classified as a spatial planning exercise that complied with Germany’s territorial policies.9 Landscape design, as well as architecture, has always been a political and social construct. The inherent ideology in any landscape may be well camouflaged during peace time, yet during the Second World War a projected ideology acted as an agency not only to facilitate population control (e.g. Lebensraum), but to establish a new ordering system on the coastline. In this particular case one may postulate that despite its ‘grand’ vision of unifying the coastline into a single military space, the imposed intervention by the Atlantikwall as an intricate system was hardly Hitler’s envisioned utopia – but a dystopia – which according to his plan,

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__________________________________________________________________ necessitated the New Order. This utilitarian and symbolic dystopia manifested itself likewise in the confiscation of private and public properties, civilian evacuations, depletion of natural and material resources, and the demolition of coastal urbanised settlements, ecological and environmental damages, thus lengthening the list of crimes. 3. The Shadow But what could they have done? In Hitler, every German should have seen his own shadow, his own worst danger. It is everybody’s allotted fate to become conscious of and learn to deal with this shadow. But how could the Germans be expected to understand this, when nobody in the world can understand such a simple truth? The world will never be in a state of order until this truth is generally recognised.10 In 1943, seven Organisation Todt war correspondents and a Propaganda Kompagnie photographer produced a journalistic account of their visits along Atlantikwall construction sites, where a romanticised version of the harsh reality was portrayed, and where slave labour was presented as a hard but rewarding undertaking justified for the sake of total war.11 There was, however, nothing romantic about a labour force of Russian, Polish, Ukrainian and North African POWs from the French colonies; or a French, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish civilian (among many other European nations) who had endured the heaviest tasks under the most abominable living conditions. It is important to consider that as an ideologically driven state Germany had set-up a hierarchical system by which foreign labourer (Fremdarbeiter) could be racially classified. Thus ‘Arian’ workers would be treated better, while the lowest conscripted waged civilian Western labourer was ‘worth’ more than his Eastern Soviet unwaged prisoner counterpart, who was in fact a slave (Zwangarbeiter).12 A total of 300,000 men workers were waged.13 This classification would also be reflected in how a system of labour camps were designed and managed. Coastal labour camps were small ensembles of temporary wooden barracks which were shortly dismantled upon the completion of a section of the ‘wall’. The furthest camp located from any given construction site was 30km away. The design of the barracks were standardised into several types and accommodated between 78 to 150 labourers of the same nationality. The average camp contained about 500 men, while camps that held more than 2000 men were considered impractical for the camp supervisor to manage.14 These included 500 small Norwegian camps that accommodated approximately 140,000 people15 (36,000 POWs, 8000 deserters from the German Army, 10,000 civilian workers from other Axis-occupied countries, 30,000 construction workers enrolled in the Organisation Todt, 8000 political prisoners and 48,940 foreign workers

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__________________________________________________________________ distributed in northern Norway16), the most famous being Falstad and Grini. Grini Prison Camp in the vicinity of Oslo was originally a penitentiary that underwent conversion and expansion between 1942-1943 to include a labour and concentration camp, and where its inmates were engaged in building coastal fortifications. An extraordinary diary was kept by one of the camp’s political prisoners, the architect and resistance fighter Odd Nansen, who was forced to design the labour camp’s new barracks. Nansen had smuggled his diary rolled inside blueprints, and at other camps inserted on the back side of six wooden breadboards.17 With clear precision he observes the arbitrariness and lack of skill associated with its design and construction as the basis for endless discussions and the project’s inevitable delay: The conference was comic, as conferences between halfeducated gangsters usually are. First they rejected the new plan which had been adopted and turned up a fresh one. Now one of the toughs had been in Dachau and had seen how the hutments there were laid out; another had been in Buchenwald, and I think that all of them including Storm Prince [Grini’s camp commandant], had been in Oranienburg near Berlin. In such a case it is not easy to agree. In one place it was flat, whereas another had been rugged and hilly. And obviously that brings up a series of problems which must be well thrashed out, especially when there is to be an electric fence going right around the prison camp, making it impossible for prisoners to escape. Besides, this fence has to be visible all its length from the watch tower, so that the guards can aim their tommy-guns or machineguns at any point of it where a prisoner might be escaping. Nor must the terrain be of such a nature or form as to afford the prisoners any sort of cover. In short, there were deep problems, and the man who had been in Dachau naturally could not agree with the man who had been only in Buchenwald, where it is flat, to say nothing of Storm Prince, and then Oranienburg…18 Building the Atlantikwall in Denmark and in the Netherlands was carried out by locally contracted construction firms that employed labourers who resided at their homes. More than 42,000 Danish workers,19 were employed to construct the Atlantikwall, who became known for damaging building equipment such as concrete mixers.20 The only known forced labour camp that had accommodated for foreign labour in Denmark (Oksby, north of the German Danish border) housed mostly Russian prisoners who constructed the major coastal batteries at Tirpitz after D-Day invasion.21 In the Netherlands ten camps (two OT camps) were known to exist22 (situated primarily along the Dutch Frisian Islands, the northern part city

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__________________________________________________________________ of the Netherlands such as Groningen, the islands of Zeeland including Flushing) since most labourers were hired by local contractors who then were permitted to reside at their homes and became known for their high quality workmanship under minimal supervision. Numerous French camps were clustered in the region of Pasde-Calais (between Calais and Étaples), known as the Dannes-Camiers Camps, which mostly housed evacuated Jews from Belgium, southern France and the British Channel Islands for an extended period prior to their final deportation to Auschwitz.23 Another list pointed at the presence of camps in Dieppe, Cherbourg, St. Malo, Brest, Lorient, Vannes, St. Nazaire, Châtelaillon-Plage (near La Rochelle), and Jalles (near Bordeaux).24 In addition, Organisation Todt had set up a system of four concentration camps in Alderney, five labour camps in Guernsey and additional fourteen camps in Jersey.25 German satellite labour camps such as the Neuengamme sub-camps26 and the Emsland camps were managed by the SS. Neuengamme’s sub-camps in the vicinity of Bremen, Hamburg and Wilhelmshaven were used to accommodate slave labourers working on U-boat bunker construction such as and ‘Hornisse’ and ‘Valentine’27 (this bunker never held u-boats but was a factory for the production of submarines manufactured by slave labourers using assembly-line techniques28), while several of the Emsland camps located along the German-Dutch border (Meppen-Versen, Meppen-Fullen and Meppen-Dalum29) accommodated those workers engaged in digging the Frisenwall30 – a 237 km long and 4m deep anti-tank coastal ditch which required approximately 25,000 slaves to complete that stretched between Brunsbüttel (DK), Cuxhaven, Wilhelmshaven (DE) until Delfzijl (NL).31 Once the camps were dismantled the prisoners would be transported to other coastal sections in order to continue with their building activities. Several exceptions were documented by the Allied forces who were confronted with an unexpected phenomenon of POWs guarding coastal batteries: One significant feature about fighting around the beaches has been the fact that whole batteries were manned by prisoners of war without a single German officer or N.C.O. over them. Among these was a Russian battery, the members which surrendered to us in a body. The entire gun crew was composed of Russian prisoners, only one of whom could speak or read German. They had accepted service on the Western Front as an alternative to imprisonment. The incident is graphic evidence of the strain to which Germany is being put to maintain her manpower in the fighting line.32 However, this incident was more likely ‘graphic evidence’ of the mental strain to which the Russian prisoners were subjected to when the only choice available to them was either a possible shameful death as ‘German soldiers’ or a probable

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__________________________________________________________________ death in a labour camp. Ultimately, the Atlantikwall might be best regarded as ‘graphic evidence’ to the magnitude of human suffering, and the manner by which human freedom was with great deliberance denied. 4. Lacunar Memories From late 1942 onwards all the beaches, and certain urbanised areas, were defined as militarised zones physically bounded by barbed wire, antitank ditches and obstacles and surrounded by minefields, and unless recruited for construction work entry to the beaches was prohibited. The Atlantikwall did not only take its toll upon conscripted civilians under Saukel’s labour Programme, but also affected those who resided in coastal settlements and cities. Civilian evacuations from coastal settlements ran parallel to demolition works of entire urban quarters in order to accommodate for free-shooting ranges. In the case of The Hague – the only coastal city that held a Rijkskommissariaat (Protectorate) for the Occupied Territories – special measures were taken to ‘fortify’ it. Several waves of meticulously organised evacuations were executed over the course of a year and a half, which resulted in displacing 135,000 people (a quarter of its population) to other neighbourhoods at first, but later to the eastern part of the Netherlands.33 This was followed by demolition works of approximately one third of the city’s built-up area.34 Similar cases are found for Hook of Holland and Flushing among other towns(NL), Ostend (BE), and the French Cities: Dieppe, Lorient, Cherbourg, Le Havre and Caen, from which evacuations continued as long as the fighting in France did.35 It is important to note that without the compliance of civil authorities the process of civilian evacuation and subsequent demolition works would not have taken place. It is imperative to try and distinguish between the manner the totalitarian state threatened individuals into making impossible choices and the manner in which institutions succumbed to crime. Questions concerning accountability, moral judgement and their relationship with ethical behaviour and law were raised for the first time by Hannah Arendt as she discussed the nature of the totalitarian state as the ‘killer of the moral being’.36 This discussion may also be extended to include those municipal governments who collaborated. In 1945 Europe was painfully emerging from the rubble the war had left behind as souvenirs on its urban landscapes. Hundreds of thousands were either displaced or homeless, and those returning from the inconceivable horrors of the camps would have their dreams of a home-front shattered.37 The story behind the Atlantikwall’s collective space would be incomplete without referencing those very post-war years, characterised by an elated building boom that not only changed the face of modern cities, but attempted to erase all physical traces left by their former occupiers. The drive to forget the traumas inflicted by the occupier was great. The need to move on was even greater. And yet, like with personal traumas, collective ones must be addressed or the wounds that were once inflicted

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__________________________________________________________________ never heal. Always present, they eventually fester into a collective resentment that carries through to the following generations. As coasts and beaches were restored, and many bunkers demolished, the remainder were either buried, turned into vacation houses, or left abandoned on the shorelines to slowly erode into their present ruinous state. This process commenced directly after the liberation and managed by the Allied Forces who had deployed German POWs to clear minefields from the former occupied coastlines. Operation ‘Big Bang’ for example on the island of Helgoland off the German coast aimed at the complete disarmament of the German Armed Forces and the destruction of all its fortifications. Demolition works on the submarine shelter (Nordsee III) and all underground batteries and tunnel systems was conducted with one large aerial explosion in addition to detonating more than 4500 tons of explosives.38 In this period recovery was equated with forgetting and the restoration of the life one had prior to the war. Few symbolic traces were left behind for future generations, and as all collective mourning and recovery takes place in the public realm, erasing the symbols upon which it is built, this would result in a collective amnesia, characterised by those historical narratives sent to oblivion. This is a period which marks the transition of the Second World War from a remembered experience to a historical event. It delineates a search for remnants of a buried history, a growing interest in preserving war remnants and in narrating an inaccessible monstrous past to younger generations.39 Reinstating the Atlantikwall back into the public realm implies an overarching understanding of diverse geographical, topographical, cultural and urban conditions pertaining to each country and coastal region along the Western European front. The grieving and recovery process of cities like Le Havre, The Hague and Bremen are three cases which exemplify civilian struggle against commemorating the remnants of the Atlantikwall. Due to repeated Allied area bombings which culminated during Operation Astonia, where fortifications and other military installations were targeted, Le Havre lost 82% of the city’s urban fabric (12,500 buildings totally and 4500 were partially destroyed) while its military installations of Festung Le Havre remained intact.40 Moreover, it had proved advantageous when the ground was to be desorbed in a manner by which enemy movement would be hindered. Nevertheless, Major Douglas Home, had made an heroic but futile attempt to evacuate the remaining civilians, and was sentenced for a year’s hard labour for his public protest.41 Major Home had watched the dropping of 5000 tons of bombs on the city had concluded: ‘This isn’t war, its murder.’42 As a result the city’s entire identity was permanently obliterated and irreconcilable trauma where liberation would become equated with devastation. Due to Auguste Perret’s exceptional reconstruction plans (1945-1964), Le Havre was awarded the status of a UNESCO Heritage Site. Yet its inhabitants continue to experience a trauma expressed through their search for nostalgic symbols and meaning that lie dormant behind their losses.43 It

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__________________________________________________________________ is the tragic persistence of this lacunar memory that hold the Haverians trapped in their own city. The true sentiment of grief and mourning was powerfully expressed after the war by the French poet Jacques Prévert who had captured the tragedy of Brest’s total destruction by 80 large-scale air raids44 that reached a death toll of 10,000 casualties: Oh Barbara What a bloody farce the war What’sbecome of you now In the rain of iron Of fire, of steel of blood And the one who clasped you in his arms Lovingly Is he now dead, missing, or still alive Oh Barbara It’s raining endlessly on Brest As it rained before But now it is not the same, and all set abased It is a rain of mourning, terrible and desolate Now it is even no longer the storm Of iron, of steel of blood Merely clouds That die like dogs Dogs that go missing Along the current over Brest And will go pouring in a distance A long long way from Brest Of which there’s nothing left.45 Of this entire coastal city only four buildings were left standing, among which the actual target – the U-Boat bunker. After the war The Hague underwent a similar process of rebuilding, where grief was expressed through humour, and rejoicing in the new and the innovative quickly replaced mourning. It isn’t that the Dutch chose to forget the war, but they carefully selected the aspects they felt were relevant to commemorate, while allowing the physical emblems of the Atlantikwall to vanish below grade into the subconscious realms of amnesia. Out of sight out of mind... In a process equally complex to their erection, bunker demolition and mine clearing along The Hague’s coastline took the Hydraulic engineers more than ten years complete, primarily due

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__________________________________________________________________ to financial shortages and the overwhelming strength of the structures. One tender document after another was produced. Construction firms that participated in building bunkers were not allowed to participate in their demolition. Detailed drawings were produced of structures of which no other record exists today. In addition, in order to contain the unmanageable rubble that would be spread by exploding the bunkers, an implosion technique was devised where their openings were sealed, and filled with water then dynamite. This method proved so successful that it was later sold to the French.46 Lastly, Bremen, as an important German harbour with two U-Boat bases (Valentin and Hornisse), submarine assembly-line factory and the countless bombproof air-raid shelters all erected by foreign POWs. Commemorating Third Reich crimes was not one of Bremen’s priorities. While all Nazi symbols were removed the U-boat bunkers proved impossible to destroy. Plans to demolish or convert the bunkers included a marina, a grain silo and a synthetic fertilizer container, all of which were rejected. In the 1960 the bunkers were renamed and even erased from the maps. The paradigm shift towards commemorative practices allowed for memorial plaques to be placed on the walls of the former bunkers and local initiatives were vital for the transformation of these structures to memorial centres that facilitate today cultural and educational programmes.47 5. Beyond the Pleasure Principle: A Strategy But this attitude of ours towards death exerts a powerful influence upon our lives. Life becomes impoverished and loses its interest when life itself, the highest stake in the game of living, must not be risked.(...)It is obvious that the war must brush aside this conventional treatment of death. Death is no longer to be denied; we are compelled to believe in it. People really die and no longer one by one, but in large numbers, often ten thousand in one day. It is no longer an accident. ... the accumulation of deaths ends the impression of accident. Life has indeed become interesting again; it has once more received its full significance.48 In his article ‘Reflections on War and Death’ Freud discusses how individuals as well and nations are driven by two forces – the tendency to pursue and gratify passions and pleasures, and the drive towards death (Thenatos), which corresponds to instinctual subconscious inclinations towards aggression. These instincts have expressed themselves in the desire to war, as Freud concluded in 1918 after the First World War. Freud’s hypothesis has been subjected to criticism from the day it first appeared, since it challenged the principles civilised society held dear

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__________________________________________________________________ including people’s inability to imagine their own death and hold reverence for the dead that far exceeded the respect given for the living.49 While many scholars have attempted to come to terms with the phenomenon of ‘dark tourism’, or thenata tourism,50 it may actually be argued that, more often than not, this form of tourism has become an agency for coming to terms with the ‘death drive’ as well as with the pleasure principle. In fact, by going to sites of former atrocities and murder, tourism as a pleasurable activity merges with the death drive, giving it a legitimacy and acceptance which has been suppressed and denied by civilization’s aberration of war as a ‘pleasurable’ undertaking.51 The origin of dark tourism may be traced to the aftermath of the Great War, as the first case of visiting former battlefields as a form of individual and collective grief and mourning that persists till this very day. The vogue of Dark tourists who visit sites of former mass killings and who indirectly go to confront their shadows, implies that Western society has not gone beyond the pleasure principle toward the death drive, but has in fact found a way to merge with it. The former factories of death, the concentration camps, are in some respect no different than the fields of No Man’s Land, where mass slaughter took place, and where the land has absorbed large quantities of blood or ash. Despite the differences in time frames, ideology, location and nature of the killing, the monstrosity lies not in the actual landscape but with man who seems all too willing to supply its blood quota. When the body becomes the vehicle for the violence to be experienced, it is the mind of the poet (to refer again to Sarah Montin’s chapter) which reinterprets the suffering projected upon his environment. The fields of the Great War have healed. The ‘memory’ of the war can be perceived in the healed scars of white blankets of gravestones, silently waiting to be acknowledged. The former concentration camps, however, did not heal. The ‘memory’ of the mass killings is experienced through a repetitive exposure to the open wounds that continue to fester, thus preventing real recovery from taking place. Conversely, in the case of the Atlantikwall, death lies hidden except perhaps in Normandy. The losses have only been sporadically commemorated in the landscape, and yet the coast speaks of loss. Once the buildings and other remnants are ‘discovered’ they tell a story to those who are perhaps not ready, or unwilling, to listen. The starkly elusive and enigmatic bunkers fascinate, captivate, draw the visitors in who then fail to ask the questions – Who built this? Why are they here? and above all, what do they represent? Almost seventy years have passed since the D-Day invasion and the disjunction between remembrance and amnesia continues to grow. The nature of trauma appears to define not only local identity but extends beyond the boundaries of a city or region to encompass national and even trans-national dimensions. Bunkers – as ruins of modernity – have turned into adventurous places for those who use them as a vehicle for re-enacting their militaristic fantasies52 or to house their Nazi memorabilia.53 All across Europe bunkers are still being demolished, camouflaged

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__________________________________________________________________ and even renovated into housing; and always looked upon as individual objects rather than placed within a broader context as part of a comprehensive defence line. As such, Atlantikwall remnants should not be dealt with without their collective stories – stories which have been erased and which demand to be rewritten to accompany these relics. Presently, the Atlantikwall cannot be classified under ‘Fields of fatality’ (battlegrounds, concentration camps, or cemeteries), ‘Houses of horror’ or even as ‘Themed thanatos’ (morbid museums), and it has yet receive consideration or categorisation.54 In fact, the Atlantikwall needs to first be (re)searched, (re)defined before it can even be subjected to classification and subsequent redesign.55 In a chapter entitled ‘Management on modern military sites’ Anderton urges for archaeologists to examine the possibilities of retrieving information from multiple sources; such as landscape analysis gathered over an extended period of time to illustrate how these former military grounds have transformed into ‘cultural signifiers’ for new generations.56 Such practices may be relatively new for archaeologists yet they form an integral part of standard practice for spatial planners, urban designers and landscape architects, therefore alluding to a possible interdisciplinary collaboration. If, however, contemporary archaeologists would collaborate with historians, (landscape) architects and urban designers, geologists and geographers, alternative readings of the physical landscape could arise – where buildings would be studied in relation to their spatial arrangement on their sites and within a broader design and planning related issues. Dealing with social landscapes can also prove vital the relationship between the former occupants of these military vestiges and the physical spaces they inhabited. In addition, experts in social and cultural studies may wish to examine the psychological impact the Atlantikwall had on those geographical locations as instruments in propaganda on the civilian evacuees of coastal urban settlements, and on the forced labourers. A vision or strategy for the Atlantikwall implies asking the questions that would redefine its essence and in developing the context by which the Atlantikwall could be read as an integral part of cultural landscapes through its historical, cultural and spatial organisation, morphological and symbolic value. The relationship between the physical objects, military installations, infrastructure, their site and significance must also be determined. This integrated approach aims to synthesise the individual components (buildings and ensembles, infrastructure and circulation networks, natural features), with the totality. Cross-referencing between historically significant sites with landscape and archaeological surveys may suggest which areas are historically significant and site surveys will determine the fortifications’ current state, site conditions, and broader relationships to cultural landscapes, beaches, harbours, urbanised areas and coastal villages, ecology and land use. Change over time through its reuse or demolition, damage or restoration and even neglect, misuse and abuse should be indicated and mapped. This survey will include vanishing traces of the Atlantikwall – what was once there as opposed

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__________________________________________________________________ to what can be found today. Tracing the remnants of wartime spatial organisation as they were cartographically represented while instigating landscape and archaeological surveys for former camps and bunkers (places that no longer exist), may ultimately help to reconstruct the magnitude of the committed crimes, in locations that offer the possibility to do so. Which strategic framework and vision may be conceived in order to bring the remnants of the Wall and its forgotten narratives back into the public realm, while incorporating and (re)using these relics in the future? Can the Atlantikwall be strategically ‘reunited’ to serve as a continuous trans-national monument without transforming it into a new type of monstrous heritage? At this stage, where a consensus does not yet exist regarding the future of this contested heritage, asking when is it appropriate to allow natural processes to decay these emblems of destruction and when, conversely, human intervention is required to preserve these remnants as built evidence to Third Reich war crimes for future generations. The danger exists that preservation and reuse, taken to an extreme, may produce a megalomaniac, commercialised and commoditised heritage. With an increase in coastal erosion and rising sea-levels many of the structures are slowly drifting into the ocean, gradually sinking from their sheer weight. To closely observe this poetic phenomenon one must visit both the Danish and the French coasts. But, to discover their ultimate fate, one should explore the sub-aquatic world off the southern coast of France. It is while diving to the bottom of the ocean to search for ‘wrecked’ bunkers, that maritime archaeologists and marine biologists from GRAMASA and DRASSM discovered their new role as a fertile base for Elgin and seaweed growth, creating an extraordinary biodiversity for sea-life.57 Certainly, the task at hand may even exceed the complexity of the one that was set in place by Organisation Todt since contemporary public spaces provide not only a backdrop to the bunkers (or a singular experience) but for multi-layered democratic, historical and contemporary cultural frameworks and social networks. Moreover, the purpose of such a framework will set the stage for social activities and for collective rituals, from commemorative events to artistic interventions, which in turn will induce a process of recovery. It might be interesting to consider employing the current volunteer bunker clubs’ members to become their future stewards, under the guidelines of legislation based upon historical accuracy and integrity with more contemporary museographical practices. Defining the Atlantikwall remnants as a topology of remembrance while addressing three to four scales – local, regional, national and pan-European, necessitates again that local and national political and legislative bodies collaborate with an exclusive interdisciplinary collaboration to create a topology, or network of localised parks where the Atlantikwall ‘layer’ may be isolated and reintegrated a broader cultural heritage framework organised on a pan-European scale that would go beyond the pleasure principle.

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__________________________________________________________________ 6. Raison d’etre: A Postscript Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function. The image say: This is a human beings are capable of doing – may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, aching by, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our nature as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us….Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of collective history. …To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.58 These words were written by Susan Sontag as she attempts to discuss the relationship between war photographs and remembrance, and the prerequisite of amnesia in the process of reconciliation. On some level she is correct in het assertion, as history proved that, in order to be able to work together with Germany, ‘forgetting’ was a necessity. Yet history would ultimately prove her wrong as reconciliation during the Cold War existed on a superficial level while the world stood still waiting for someone to ‘press the button’. The human mind will always try to resort to self-preservation by putting its traumas behind. Once they resurface, unlike memories, traumas tend to open all the old wounds which never properly healed. Forgetting may indeed be natural and even necessary, but ultimately only undergoing a cathartic ritual in the public realm, where the wounds are reopened, cleaned and properly sewn back, followed by accepting apology for the committed crimes, will provide the strength and impetus to heal the inflicted traumas. Seventy, or even eighty years, must pass before the Atlantikwall is able to provide such a space where second and third generations of already reconciled nations would come to face each other in the public realm before the silent witnesses and built evidence to war crimes.59 Officially or unofficially it is only in their willingness to forgive, as an ethical act of resistance against the heartlessness and amnesia that would ensure lasting peace. To make peace is to remember. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory should be preserved intact. Odd Nansen survived four concentration camps by writing a diary, originally intended to be read solely by his wife. As long as he wrote he was able to persevere

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__________________________________________________________________ and carry on. He ended his stupendous testimony with the following postscript to his readers: Accounts of what happened in the shadow of the Nazi dictatorship have ceased to be sensational reading, or entertainment. They are a call to arms! And they are burningly topical as long as there is still a danger that it may happen again. The worst crime you can commit today, against yourself and society is to forget what happened and sink back into indifference. What happened was worse than you have any idea of – and it was the indifference of mankind that let it take place!60 Nansen was liberated from Neuengamme in 1945 already a free man – a man whose liberation existed first and foremost in his mind. Free of the monstrous hatred, resentment and need for retribution that haunted so many survivors, he was able to resume not only his architectural practice and provide humanitarian assistance to refugees, but also continue his fight for justice, human freedom and the rights of the child as the founder of UNICEF. He has served as an inspiration to his former inmates61 and ultimately to us all.

Notes 1

James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 2425. 2 Ibid., 92-93. 3 Rod Giblett, Landscapes of Culture and Nature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., 2009), 55-58. 4 Ibid., 83. 5 Paul Virilio, Bunker Archeology (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), 38-39. 6 Dietrich Denecke, ‘Planned Order upon the Land in Germany’, Ideology and Landscape in Historical Perspective: Essays on Meaning of Some Places in the Past, ed. Alan R. H. Baker and Gideon Biger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 306. 7 For an elaborated discussion on the justification of war crimes by ‘innocence’ see: Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (London and New York: Vintage International Random House, 1984). 8 United States National Archives (NARA), Atlas French See Ports 1940, Oberbefehlshaber der Luftwaffe Seehafenatlas Frankreich /MIL/Geo F/3/Copy #1. 9 For a detailed account on the design and construction process, see Rose Tzalmona, ‘The Atlantikwall: from a Forgotten Military Space Towards Places of

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__________________________________________________________________ Collective Remembrance’, in: Ordnance: War+Architecture and Space, edited by Gary A. Boyd and Denis Linehan (Farnham: Ashgate Publishings: 2012), 139-155. 10 Carl Gustav Jung, ‘The Fight with the Shadow’, Essays on Contemporary Events.1936-1946 (London and New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2002), 7-10. 11 Hans Schuhmann, OT. im Einsatz. Als Kriegsberichter bei den Frontarbeitern (München: Verlag Knorr and Hirth 1943). 12 Franz W. Seidler, Die Organisation Todt. Bauwen für Staat und Wehrmacht 1938-1945 (Koblenz: Bernard and Graefe Verlag, 1987), 140-147. For extensive research on the difference between forced and slave labour see: Cord Pagenstecher, ‘‘We were treated as slaves’: Remembering Forced Labour for Nazi Germany,’ in Human Bondage in the Cultural Contact Zone: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Slavery and its Discourses (Münster, New York, München, Berlin: Waxmann, 2010), 278-285. 13 The Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force Counter-Intelligence Sub-Division, MIRS/MR-OT/5/45, Handbook of the Organisation Todt(O.T.), London: MIRIS, March 1945(Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1992), 123-125. 14 Ibid., 131. 15 M. N. Sloeim, ‘Sovjetiske krigsfanger I Norge 1941-1945: Antall, organisereing og repatriering’ as cited in Marek E. Jasinski, ‘Reinforced Concrete, Steel and Slaves: Archaeological Studies of Prisoners of World War II in Norway – The Case of Romsdal Peninsula,’ Prisoners of War: Archaeology, Memory, and Heritage of 19th and 20th Century Mass Internment, ed. H. Mytum and G. Carr (New York: Springer Science + Business Media, 2013), 146. 16 NARA, OSS.PWE.1945, Anonymous Report, Location of Concentration Camps, Labor Camps and other Housing which might be Used for Displaced Foreigners in Germany and German Occupied Countries of Western Europe, 12-13. 17 Odd Nansen, Day After Day (London: Putnam and Company, 1949), v-vii. 18 Ibid., 22-23. 19 Jens Andersen and Rudi Rolf, German Bunkers in Denmark: A Survey (Middelburg: Prak Publishings, 2006), 30. 20 Claus Bundgard Christensen, Niels Bo Poulsen and Peter Scharff Smith, Danische Arbeitskraft – Deutsche Befestigungsanlagen (Blåvandshuk: Blåvandshuk Egnsmuseum, 1997), 93-107. 21 Vibeke B. Ebert, The Atlantic Wall: From Nymindegab to Skallingen (Blåvandshuk: Blåvandshuk Egnsmuseum, 1992), 57-59. 22 NARA, OSS.PWE.1945, Location of Concentration Camps, 7-11. 23 Peter Gaida, ‘Camps de tavail sous Vichy’ as cited in Jérôme Prieur, Le Mur de L’Atlantique. Monument de la Collaboration (Paris : Editions Denoel, 2010) ,139144. 24 NARA, OSS.PWE.1945, Location of Concentration Camps, 2-4.

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Michael Ginns, The Organisation Todt and the Fortress Engineers in the Channel Islands (Jersey: Channel Islands Occupation Society, 2004), 74-87. 26 Marc Buggeln, ‘Building to Death: Prisoner Forced Labour in the German War Economy, The Neuengamme Subcamps’, 1942-1945. European History Quarterly, 39 (2009): 606-632. For additional information on all of the Neuengamme subcamps, see: http://www.kz-gedenkstaette-neuengamme.de. 27 Marc Buggeln and Inge Marszolek, ‘Concrete Memory: The Struggle over AirRaid and Submarine Shelters in Bremen after 1945,’ in Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past, ed. Rosenfeld, Gavriel and Jaskot (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 188-190. 28 Buggeln, Building to Death, 616. 29 Pieter Albers, Gevangenen in het Veen. De Geschiedenis van de Emslandkampen. 15 onbekende Duitse concentratiekampen langs de grens van Groningen en Drenten (Groningen: Uitgeverij Noordboek, 2005), 83-105. 30 Please Note: The Friesanwall which was executed by forced labourers has been researched by several scholars, but as far as this author is aware it was never previously been classified under Atlantikwall infrastructure. Pieter Albers, Gevangenen in het Veen, 85-86; Marc Buggeln, Building to Death, 608, 614; Neuengame sub-camp Lager Ladelund near Hamburg, http://www.kz-gedenkstaette-ladelund.de/. 31 Hitler had commanded to dig the Friesenwall as a continuous antitank obstacle in Directive nr. 62 from 29/08/1944; H. R. Trevor-Roper, Hitler’s War Directives 1939-1945 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1964), 184-186. 32 Liddll Hart Military Archives, KCL London, Christopher Buckley, ‘Stories from the Beachhead: German Officers Disappeared: A Battery Manned by Russian Prisoners,’ Manchester Guardian, 10 June, 1944. 33 Koos Bosma, Shelter City (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 284-287. 34 Ibid., 276-284. 35 J. S. Torrie, ‘For their Own Good’. Civilian Evacuations in Germany and France, 1939-1945 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010), 2, 63-67, 113-127. 36 For a discussion regarding moral and ethical conduct please see: Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken Books, 2003); and ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ in The Burden of Our Time (London: Secker and Warburg, 1951), 376-387, 424-425. 37 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Random House, 2005), 13-18, 24-29. 38 Imperial War Museum Misc. 269/3662, Report on the Demolition of the Fortifications on Helgoland: Operation ‘Big Bang’, 1-23.

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For further discussion on Collective Amnesia please see: Rose Tzalmona, ‘Traces of the Atlantikwall or The Ruins that were Built to Last…’ in: Third Text. Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture 25.6 (2011): 775-786. 40 Andrew Knapp, ‘The Destruction and Liberation of Le Havre in Modern Memory,’ in War in History 14 (2007): 477. 41 W. Douglas Home, ‘Old Men Remember’ (London 1991), 66-67 as cited in Knapp, Le Havre in Modern Memory, 485. 42 Liddell Hart Military Archives, KCL London, Major Elliott’s Papers, ‘The Attack on Le Havre – Operation Astonia’, document 4/14/11/ 2. 43 Knapp, Le Havre in Modern Memory, 490-491. 44 Gordon Williamson, U-Boat Bases and Bunkers 1941-45 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2003), 41; http://uboat.net/flotillas/bases/brest.htm. 45 Jacques Prévert, ‘Barbara’, 1946, http://sedulia.blogs.com/sedulias_translations/2005/04/remember_barbar.html Original French excerpt from the poem: ‘Oh Barbara Quelle connerie la guerre Qu’es-tu devenue maintenant Sous cette pluie de fer De feu d’acier de sang Et celui qui te serrait dans ses bras Amoureusement Est-il mort disparu ou bien encore vivant Oh Barbara Il pleut sans cesse sur Brest Comme il pleuvait avant Mais ce n’est plus pareil et tout est abime C’est une pluie de deuil terrible et désolée Ce n’est même plut l’orage De fer d’acier de sang Tout simplement des nuages Qui crèvent comme de chiens Des chiens qui disparaissent Au fil de l’eau sur Brest Et vont pourrir au loin Au loin très loin de Brest Dont il ne reste rien.

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__________________________________________________________________ 46

Hoogheemraadschap van Delfland, archival material (Hydraulic Engineers of Delfland), tender (bestek) 304, 345, K-mijnen box 200, Storm 1953 box 201, box financing (financiering) 1949. 47 Buggeln and Marszolek, ‘Concrete Memory’, 196-203. 48 Sigmund Freud, ‘Reflections on War and Death’, Project Gutenberg Ebook nr. 35875 (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1918), 10-11. http://gutenberg.org/3/5/7/35875, 1-16. 49 Ibid, 13-14. 50 Needless to say that this observation does not take into account all aspects of dark tourism like those who go to mourn their relatives or for educational purposes. For a wide selection of scholarship on dark tourism and battlefield tourism see: Richard Sharpley, ‘Shedding Light in Dark Tourism: An Introduction’, in The Darker Side of Travel. The theory and Practice of Dark Tourism, ed. Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone (Bristol, Buffalo, Toronto: Channel View Publications, 2009), 6-17, Frank Baldwin and Richard Sharpley, ‘Battlefield Tourism: Bringing Organised Violence Back to Life’, in The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism, ed. Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone (Bristol, Buffalo, Toronto: Channel View Publications, 2009), 186-206, John Carman, ‘Paradox in Places: Twentieth-Century Battlefield Sites in LongTerm Perspective’, in Matériel Culture: The Archaeology of Twentieth-Century Conflict, ed. John Scofield, William Gray Johnson and Colleen M. Beck (London and New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2002), 9-21, Bruce Prideaux, ‘Echoes of War: Battlefield Tourism,’ in Battlefield Tourism: History, Place and Interpretation, ed. Chris Ryan (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007). 51 Freud, Reflections on War and Death, 6, 11, 14; and James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War, 116-118,126-127, 148,158. 52 Marek E. Jasinski, ‘Reinforced Concrete, Steel and Slaves: Archaeological Studies of Prisoners of World War II in Norway: The Case of Romsdal Peninsula’, in Prisoners of War: Archaeology , Memory, and Heritage of 19th and 20th Century Mass Internment, ed. H. Mytum and G. Carr (New York: Springer Science + Business Media, 2013), 153-154. 53 Gilly Carr, ‘Dark Tourism and Bunkers as Memorials? A Case Study from the Channel Islands’, in The Atlantikwall as Military Archaeological Landscape, ed. Michaela Bassanelli and Gennaro Postiglione (Seracusa: LetteraVentidue, 2011), 174-177. 54 Richard Sharpley, Shedding Light on Dark Tourism, 10-11. 55 Rose Tzalmona, ‘Towards Collective Remembrance: The Atlantikwall as a Cultural Landscape’ in The Atlantikwall as Military Archaeological Landscape, ed. Michela Bassanelli and Gennaro Postiglione (Siracusa: LetteraVentidue, 2011), 145-159.

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Michael J. Anderton, ‘Social Space and Social Control: Analysing Movement and Management on Modern Military Sites.’ In Materiel Culture. The Archaeology of Twentieth Century Conflict, ed. John Schofield, William Gray Johnson and Colleen M. Beck (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2002), 191-193. 57 Hugh Schofield, ‘Hitler’s Atlantic Wall: Should France Preserve It?’ BBC News Magazine, Bay of Arcachon, 13 September 2011, in http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ world-europe-10632543. For additional information on GRAMASA: http://gramasa.free.fr/. DRASSM: http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/archeosm/archeosom/drasm.htm. 58 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London and New York: Penguin Group, 2004), 102-103. 59 Tzalmona, ‘Traces of the Atlantikwall’, Third Text, 786. 60 Odd Nansen, Day After Day, 600. 61 Thomas Buergenthal was only a boy of 10 upon his arrival to Sachsenhausen where he met with Odd Nansen. He survived several camps including Birkenau and was reunited with his mother after the war. In his autobiography Buergenthal tells of his subsequent meeting with Nansen and of the lasting impression they left upon each other. It is partially through their encounter that he managed to liberate himself from the legacy of resentment left by the war. Buergenthal immigrated to the United States where he studied international law. Since 2008 he serves as a High Court judge at the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. Thomas Buergenthal, A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy (London: Profile Books, 2007), 181-196.

Bibliography Albers, Pieter. Gevangenen in het Veen. De Geschiedenis van de Emslandkampen. 15 onbekende Duitse concentratiekampen langs de grens van Groningen en Drenten. Groningen: Uitgeverij Noordboek, 2005. Andersen, Jens and Rudi Rolf. German Bunkers in Denmark: A Survey. Middelburg: Prak Publishings, 2006. Arendt, Hannah. Responsibility and Judgment. New York: Schocken Books, 2003. ———. The Burden of Our Time. London: Secker and Warburg, 1951.

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__________________________________________________________________ Anderton, Michael J. ‘Social Space and Social Control: Analysing Movement and Management on Modern Military Sites.’ In Matériel Culture: The Archaeology of Twentieth-Century Conflict, edited by John Schofield, William Gray Johnson and Colleen M. Beck, 189-198. London and New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2002. Baldwin, Frank and Richard Sharpley, ‘Battlefield Tourism: Bringing Organised Violence Back to Life’. The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism, edited by Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone, 186-206. Bristol, Buffalo, Toronto: Channel View Publications, 2009. Bosma, Koos. Shelter City. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012. Buergenthal, Thomas. A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy. London: Profile Books, 2007. Buggeln, Marc. ‘Building to Death: Prisoner Forced Labour in the German War Economy, The Neuengamme Subcamps’, 1942-1945. European History Quarterly 39 (2009): 606-632. Buggeln, Marc, and Inge Marszolek. ‘Concrete Memory: The Struggle over AirRaid and Submarine Shelters in Bremen after 1945.’ In Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past, edited by Gavriel Rosenfeld and Paul Jaskot, 185-208. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Camus, Albert. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. London and New York: Vintage International Random House, 1984. Carman, John. ‘Paradox in Places: Twentieth-Century Battlefield Sites in LongTerm Perspective’. Matériel Culture: The Archaeology of Twentieth-Century Conflict, edited by John Scofield, William Gray Johnson and Colleen M. Beck, 921. London and New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2002. Carr, Gilly. ‘Dark Tourism and Bunkers as Memorials? A Case Study from the Channel Islands.’ The Atlantikwall as Military Archaeological Landscape, edited by Michaela Bassanelli and Gennaro Postiglione, 173-183. Seracusa: LetteraVentidue, 2011. Christensen, Claus Bundgard, Niels Bo Poulsen and Peter Scharff Smith, Danische Arbeitskraft – Deutsche Befestigungsanlagen, 93-107. Blåvandshuk: Blåvandshuk Egnsmuseum, 1997.

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__________________________________________________________________ Denecke, Dietrich. ‘Planned Order upon the Land in Germany’. Ideology and Landscape in Historical Perspective: Essays on Meaning of Some Places in the Past, edited by Alan R. H. Baker and Gideon Biger, 303-329. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Ebert, Vibeke B., The Atlantic Wall: From Nymindegab to Skallingen. Blåvandshuk: Blåvandshuk Egnsmuseum, 1992. Freud, Sigmund. Reflections on War and Death. New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1918, 1-16. Giblett, Rod. Landscapes of Culture and Nature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., 2009. Ginns, Michael. The Organisation Todt and the Fortress Engineers in the Channel Islands. Jersey: Channel Islands Occupation Society, 2004. Hillman, James. A Terrible Love of War. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. Jasinski, Marek E. ‘Reinforced Concrete, Steel and Slaves: Archaeological Studies of Prisoners of World War II in Norway, The Case of Romsdal Peninsula.’ Prisoners of War: Archaeology, Memory, and Heritage of 19th and 20th Century Mass Internment, edited by H. Mytum and G. Carr, 145-165. New York: Springer Science + Business Media, 2013. Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. London: Random House, 2005. Jung, Carl Gustav. ‘The Fight with the Shadow’. Essays on Contemporary Events, 1936-1946. London and New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2002. Knapp, Andrew. ‘The Destruction and Liberation of Le Havre in Modern Memory.’ War in History 14 (2007): 476-498. Nansen, Odd. Day After Day. London: Putnam and Company, 1949. Pagenstecher, Cord. ‘‘We were treated as slaves’: Remembering Forced Labour for Nazi Germany’. Human Bondage in the Cultural Contact Zone: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Slavery and its Discourses. Münster, New York, München, Berlin: Waxmann, 2010.

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__________________________________________________________________ Prideaux, Bruce. ‘Echoes of War: Battlefield Tourism.’ Battlefield Tourism: History, Place and Interpretation, edited by Chris Ryan, 17-27. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007. Prieur, Jérôme. Le Mur de L’Atlantique : Monument de la Collaboration. Paris: Editions Denoel, 2010. Schofield, Hugh. ‘Hitler’s Atlantic Wall: Should France Preserve It?’ BBC News Magazine, 13 September 2011. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ world-europe-106325. Schuhmann, Hans. OT. im Einsatz. Als Kriegsberichter bei den Frontarbeitern. München: Verlag Knorr and Hirth 1943. Seidler, Franz W. Die Organisation Todt: Bauwen für Staat und Wehrmacht 19381945. Koblenz: Bernard and Graefe Verlag, 1987. Sharpley, Richard. ‘Shedding Light in Dark Tourism: An Introduction.’ The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism, edited by Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone, 3-22. Bristol, Buffalo, Toronto: Channel View Publications, 2009. The Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force Counter-Intelligence SubDivision, MIRS/MR-OT/5/45, Handbook of the Organisation Todt(O.T.), London: MIRIS, March 1945. Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1992. Torrie, J. S. ‘For their Own Good’: Civilian Evacuations in Germany and France, 1939-1945. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010. Trevor-Roper, H. R. Hitler’s War Directives 1939-1945. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1964. Tzalmona, Rose. ‘Traces of the Atlantikwall or The Ruins that were Built to Last…’. Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture 25.6 (2011): 775-786. ———. ‘Towards Collective Remembrance: The Atlantikwall as a Cultural Landscape’. The Atlantikwall as Military Archaeological Landscape, edited by Michela Bassanelli and Gennaro Postiglione, 145-159. Siracusa: LetteraVentidue, 2011.

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__________________________________________________________________ ———. ‘The Atlantikwall: from a Forgotten Military Space towards Places of Collective Remembrance’. Ordnance: War+Architecture and Space, edited by Gary A. Boyd and Denis Linehan, 139-155. Farnham: Ashgate Publishings: 2012. Virilio, Paul. Bunker Archeology. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994. Archival Sources: United States National Archives (NARA), Atlas French See Ports 1940, Oberbefehlshaber der Luftwaffe Seehafenatlas Frankreich /MIL/Geo F/3/Copy #1. ———. NARA, OSS.PWE. Anonymous Report, Location of Concentration Camps, Labor Camps and other Housing which might be Used for Displaced Foreigners in Germany and German Occupied Countries of Western Europe, 1945. Liddll Hart Military Archives, KCL London, Christopher Buckley. ‘Stories from the Beachhead: German Officers Disappeared: A Battery Manned by Russian Prisoners’. Manchester Guardian, 10 June, 1944. Imperial War Museum Misc. 269/3662, Report on the Demolition of the Fortifications on Helgoland. Operation ‘Big Bang’. Hoogheemraadschap van Delfland, archival material (Hydraulic Engineers of Delfland), tender (bestek) 304, 345, K-mijnen box 200, Storm 1953 box 201, box financing (financiering) 1949. Rose Tzalmona is a registered architect in The Netherlands, currently a doctoral candidate at the VU University in Amsterdam (interdisciplinary research institute for Cultural Landscapes and Urban Environments/CLUE) and at the Technical University Delft (Dept. Urbanism and Landscape Architecture). Her interest in the ‘architecture of war’ originated during her architectural thesis project (University of Waterloo, Canada) with a design for a theatre and memorial park on the former landscapes of the Western Front around Ieper (Ypres), Belgium. After several years of practical experience Rose Tzalmona decided to return to her preoccupation with the relationship between the built environment, memorial landscapes, war remnants and the process of recovery with her current ongoing investigation into the Atlantikwall’s spatial and cultural history leading to a design strategy for its future as a European heritage landscape.

Part II Where Darkness Grows: Hidden Monstrosity

‘Monstrous Homes’: How Private Spaces Shape Characters’ Identities in 19th-Century Sensation Fiction Christina Flotmann Abstract The chapter explores the close connection between private spaces, women and monstrosity in 19th-century sensation novels. The latter frequently focus on female aberrant or monstrous behaviour and as middle and upper-class women were largely confined to the domestic sphere during the Victorian era, the chapter assumes that the home and the ideologies adhering to it reinforce or even partly produce monstrosity. The analysis will centre on the appropriation of places by the female characters and its (monstrous) consequences in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and Armadale. Key Words: Monstrosity, the home, ideology, gender roles, place, space, the 19th century. ***** Victorian upper and middle-class homes were places steeped in ideology. They were constructed as shelters from the outside world, refuges which certain realities could and should not penetrate.1 On the level of architecture, this need to exclude some of the less pleasant aspects of life showed in the clear segregation of rooms according to function. There were parts of the house that were reserved for the master and his male guests and those that were assigned to the mistress, such as for instance the boudoir, where others would rarely enter.2 Children, too, were relegated to particular parts of the house, and the often beautifully decorated living quarters, which were also open to visitors, were strictly separated from the less opulent bedrooms as well as the lavatories and the kitchen. Smells or noises from bathrooms and kitchen were kept as far away as possible from the noses and ears of the family members and their visitors.3 This separation was highly ideological as it parted the home into representative spaces in which the family could present itself to its best advantage and rooms which were associated with the gratification of physical needs not openly acknowledged at the time. Among the representative spaces the parlour was paramount, and as Thad Logan notes, its symbolic function pointed beyond itself: The Victorian parlour – extraordinarily rich in detail, situated in a central position within the theory and practice of Victorian culture – can be taken as a kind of synecdoche for that culture itself, a microcosm of the middle-class Victorian world, miniaturized, as if under glass.4

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The parlour thus was a representation of how Victorian society perceived itself and at the same time drew attention to its underside by being ostentatiously decorative and focused on the surface. The home not only contained that which people wanted to present to the outside world but also that which was literally relegated to the back chambers, because it was considered unclean such as bodily desires. The strict emphasis on moral principles during the Victorian era was often counterproductive as those aspects of life considered less wholesome were simply pursued in stealth. The home was the embodiment of this double standard. It was the site of contesting principles in more than one way; but the gender divide was one of the most prominent examples. The ideology of the ‘angel-woman’ so closely connected to the representative parts of the house, complemented the ideologies of righteousness and propriety. And it, too, hinted at its opposite and gave rise to specific kinds of ‘monstrosity.’ For the ‘angel in the house’ the home functioned as site of power and prison at the same time. The sublimation of female sexuality into the ideal of the angel who mastered her sphere in a mild and detached manner of course could not account for the ‘human’ side of woman, her emotions and desires which had to be split off and turned into another rather extreme icon, that of the demon or fiend-woman.5 These two constructions of women mainly served to alleviate male fear of female power. In addition to incorporating the opposing principles of outward rationality and repressed drives, the clearly separated spheres of husband and wife, and the elder and the younger generation, the home also upheld strict class barriers. The lowerclass servants were expected to mix as little as possible with the aristocratic or middle-class family and many houses were intricately designed to keep the classes apart.6 The idea of the home as the place where the comfortable and familiar as well as the repressed come together, is perfectly expressed in Sigmund Freud’s essay on the uncanny. The effect of the uncanny is produced by something that is known and unknown at the same time,7 i.e. something that belongs to the self and is familiar as such but has been repressed. The original German term Freud used, ‘unheimlich’, contains the word ‘Heim’ meaning ‘home’,8 which in a figurative sense links the home with both the open and commonly accepted and the repressed. The contesting principles at work in the Victorian middle-class house make it a space of borders, both actual and ideological. The border-crossings evoked by the title of this section of the book, suggesting the ways in which the individuals inhabiting a particular space negotiate and undermine the ideologies that constitute them, are at the core of the stories that will be analysed in the following. The eruptions caused by the clash between the ideologically intended use of place and the appropriation of space by individual characters drive the stories and probe the tensions between containment and subversion in sensation fiction. If, as Kathy Mezei and Chiara Briganti hold, who compare houses to narratives, ‘[n]ovels and houses endeavour to make sense of the world, to construct ways of being at home in a world from which we feel estranged’9, sensation novels which

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question the ideologies surrounding homes partly deconstruct the assumption that either houses or narratives can afford any security for their alienated characters and ‘subjects in ideology’.10 Janet Larson, Francesca Saggini and Anna-Enrichetta Soccio also reject the problematic construction of the home as shelter: It also becomes increasingly difficult to imagine houses as secure shelters in a world in a state of flow, its living spaces continually renegotiated, rewritten, reconstructed or dismantled by diasporas, resettlements, border-crossings, the forced migrations of war and extreme weather events, and the myriad other transformations of identity, economics, culture, society and habitat that attend globalization and, most recently, the upheavals of ‘democratization’.11 In England, some of the processes described above were already initiated by the demographic changes during the 19th century. Gail Cunningham, for instance, sees the origins of postmodern alienation in ‘the explosion in suburban living that characterized late nineteenth-century London’.12 So obviously 19th-century fiction already starts to problematize space and the relation between people and places. Before the spatial turn which gave prominence to the analysis of places as ideologically laden, the focus of literary studies was on the analysis of places as settings. Settings, especially houses of various kinds, were often used to express the idea of the return of the repressed. Basements usually contain the uncanny which characters need to confront to develop a balanced attitude towards life. In Gothic fiction, for instance, castles, old mansions or abbeys very often metaphorically stand for the human mind in whose recesses the protagonists’ own demons (often represented as monsters or supernatural appearances) lurk and attack at some stage. The analysis of literary settings thus very often focuses on the psychological function of places and uses them to explain characters, their moods and motivations.13 It therefore helps construct and uphold the ideological frameworks within which characters (and readers) move. Spatial analysis goes beyond this approach by considering the relations between different settings in works of literature, the boundaries between them and their connections to real-life spaces.14 Thereby it facilitates the exposure of social and cultural ideologies. For my analysis of the house in Victorian fiction this means that it functions as both externalised soul space where the monstrous emanates from the characters themselves and as a site of (contesting) social ideologies which produce monstrosity through the moral demands and restrictions to which they subject people. Monstrosity, as that which is ‘unnatural’ or falls short of the norm is in a dialectical relationship with normality and it informs and propels the stories to be analysed by drawing attention to the fact that what is believed to be normal and

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natural is itself a social and ideological construction. Since it is so difficult to trace ideologies informing monstrosity to a particular human agent, they come to inhabit an uncanny in-between space: they are man-made but also exist as a force outside human grasp that has a (possibly malign) influence on people. It is not hard to see how inanimate objects such as houses can come to be imagined as agents infused with and permeated by a malign spirit shaping, even controlling human fates. Spatial analysis has facilitated a discussion of spaces as developing their own uncanny agency through the ways in which they are ideologically charged, and shaping people as much as people shape them. The idea of space as a (potentially monstrous) and independent agent also pervades some of the other chapters in this volume such as Simon Bacon’s essay on adaptations of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, Evelyn Tsitas’ analysis of dystopian spaces like Ishiguro’s Hailsham and Sarah Montin’s treatment of ‘Monstered Spaces in First World War Poetry’. From a Victorian point of view monstrosity was man-made and arose whenever people did not act according to the ideological rules which held society together. For the home, too, this meant that people had to move within its ideological framework, i.e. keep up the divisions between genders, age groups and classes as well as between appearances and reality. A quote from John Ruskin’s lecture ‘Lilies: Of Queens’ Gardens’ perfectly expresses this: This is the nature of home – it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. In so far as it is not this, it is not home: so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, and the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile society of the outer world is allowed by either husband or wife to cross the threshold, it ceases to be home.15 The quotation functions as a naturalisation of the Victorian ideology of the home. (‘This is the nature of home (…).’) The home is not a but the place of Peace with a capital P, i.e. it is supposed to be a stable and harmonious centre which is unaffected by the gyrations of the world. It is interesting that Ruskin constructs the home as a shelter from ‘division’, because as was already established, the Victorian home consisted of almost nothing but divisions – a good example of ideology ‘distorting’ reality.16 The binary opposition between inside and outside also becomes very clear, as does the repression of everything irregular or ‘unknown.’ The threshold of the house acquires metaphorical value by representing the boundary between alleged outer chaos and inner peace.17 This, too, is obviously intended to veil the fact that the home itself was divided between the presentable and the repressed. This veiling, however, again rather emphasises that which is supposed to be hidden, or, as John O. Jordan puts it: ‘(...) the threshold in effect defines the home by what it keeps out; yet at the same time, as the point of contact

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and transition between the separate spheres, it allows and perhaps even invites transgression.’18 For my analysis it is significant that Ruskin sees the success or failure of home as dependent on human agency and especially on women. In ‘Lilies: Of Queens’ Gardens’ he goes on to say: And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always round her. The stars only may be over her head; the glowworm in the night cold grass may be the only fire at her foot: but home is yet wherever she is (...).19 The concept of home was not necessarily connected to a specific place but explicitly to a gendered ideal. As the continuation of this ideal presupposed a static, socially prescribed and identical handling of the house, for Victorians the home was obviously supposed to remain a place in the sense of de Certeau. The spatial theorist makes a distinction between place defined as the order of objects in a particular location, and space which is characterised by the individual use of place.20 Quite a number of Victorian writers seem to have been caught in this field of tension between ideology and individual assertion. They were often torn between wishing to keep the Victorian value system intact and subverting it.21 The home and the ideologies surrounding it play a particularly large role in sensation fiction of the 1850s and 60s, a genre commonly associated with monstrosity in the form of excesses and spectacular breaches of law and order which were condemned by ‘proper’ Victorians. The latter were, nevertheless, avid readers of this sort of fiction, which again shows the concurrent abhorrence of and fascination with moral depravity, emphasising the split between the acknowledged and the repressed in the Victorian psyche. As long as the monstrous was not part of one’s own home, one could consume it and even find secret pleasure in it. To a certain extent writers have always of necessity questioned repressive systems of belief precluding individuality, as stories are always propelled by characters who, to be interesting to the reader, need to show at least some kind of individual activity. In this vein, the analysis will seek to find out how the characters of exemplary sensation novels appropriate places and turn them into individual spaces in the sense of de Certeau and in what ways they are still rather confined by them. Female characters are especially interesting in this respect, and since women’s close connection to the home was already established, they will be in the focus of this analysis. They embody the double-function of sensation novels as on the one hand reinforcing and on the other subverting contemporary morality. As Dan Bivona puts it: [T]he female subject of the sensation novel is invested with a powerful emotionality that operates in double fashion as both

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distinguishing middle-class trait and implicit protest against the constraints under which woman must operate in the bourgeois order.22 The first novel to be analysed is Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). The story is set at Audley Court, an upper-class mansion owned by Sir Michael Audley, whose life drastically changes when he chooses Lucy Graham for his second and very young bride. The novel’s title connects the female protagonist with the mansion and hints at secrets in her past which already sets the stage for a story about the disruption of an ideal home by a fiend-woman. The story starts with a very detailed description of Audley Court which points to the importance of the home-space for the depiction of upper- and middle-class Victorian propriety and morality. However, this initial characterisation does not show the mansion in an entirely positive light. Although it is ‘[a] glorious old place’,23 its decay is visible in the ‘dry moat’24 and the ‘broken ruin of a wall’ surrounding it.25 It is ‘everywhere overgrown with trailing ivy, yellow stonecrop, and dark moss’,26 often a sign that the house has acquired a certain sentience and might be an uncanny, almost human entity influencing the characters. This interpretation supports the idea that Victorian ideologies of the home held a (monstrous) sway over people. The description also sets up a contrast between the oaks surrounding the house27 and the ivy. In the 19th century, the oak was often symbolically associated with men/husbands, while the vine ‘cling[ing] to the oak for shelter and protection’ was seen as embodying the role of the ‘proper’ wife.28 Here, the nourishing vine becomes the poisonous ivy, growing over and slowly conquering the house.29 On a symbolic level the text thus powerfully evokes male Victorian fears of the fiend-woman and the overthrowing of the patriarchal order. The house itself is ‘very old, and very irregular and rambling.’30 All these factors would have told a Victorian reading audience that something was amiss, because the building lacks the usual order and regularity. And although the narrator tries to make clear that the house and grounds are ‘a spot in which Peace seemed to have taken up her abode’,31 (note that as in the quote by Ruskin, peace is spelled with a capital P to stress the ideological significance of the concept for the Victorian home), other statements contradict the seemingly harmonious atmosphere. At the end of the avenue, leading up to Audley Court, there is an old clock tower with a half-broken clock ‘which had only one hand; and which jumped straight from one hour to the next, and was therefore always in extremes.’32 Since extremes of any kind were considered unwholesome by Victorians, the clock seems to foreshadow the extreme events to come. The old oaks ‘circl[ing] the house and gardens with a darkening shelter’33 allude to the protective function of the home which, however, is obviously decreasing here, as the shelter is ‘darkening.’ Supporting the notion that the sheltering capacity of the house is diminished is the fact that ‘[the] principal door was squeezed into a corner of a

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turret at one angle of the building, as if it was in hiding from dangerous visitors, and wished to keep itself a secret.’34 Here, the house is directly personified as it seems to shrink from the dangers which will soon enter into it indeed. This first description of the house lends itself to both an interpretation of it as setting, mirroring the state of the (class of) individuals inhabiting it and an interpretation as space. The door hiding from dangerous visitors hints at the human agency in the creating of monstrous spaces. It is people who bring their desires and psychological dispositions to the house and inscribe particular hierarchies or power-relations into its architecture. Still, the depiction of the door also evokes the feeling that the place itself develops an uncanny life of its own. It thus calls forth the complex relationship between people, spaces and ideologies: People shape places and produce ideologies which in turn create people. The inside of the house is also ambivalent. Apart from grand representative rooms, it also contains ‘secret chambers’,35 mirroring the afore-mentioned split of the rational and the repressed the Victorian house embodied. The fact that the ‘secret chambers’ are explicitly mentioned has two reasons: First of all it situates the story in the literary tradition of formulaic (especially Gothic) fiction in which secret chambers figure prominently and influence the readers’ perception of characters’ psychology. Secondly, the direct mention of ‘secret chambers’ which would have been impossible in real-life discourse surrounding the Victorian house, questions the ideal of the home as the carefree and beautiful haven. From the beginning thus, Audley Court is not the idyll usually associated with a Victorian home. And note that by this time Lucy Graham/Audley has not even entered the scene. So if we look at the description of the mansion and grounds as setting, it foreshadows events to come and comments on the psychology of the characters. The setting thus becomes complicit in constructing and upholding ideologies. The spatial perspective, and especially the way characters appropriate places helps us understand that renderings of space constitute a great part of the novel’s subversiveness. In Lady Audley’s Secret it becomes clear that the Victorian ideology of the home is questioned from the beginning, without Lucy Graham in the picture. Lucy Audley, as soon as she has entered the scene, violates several laws governing Victorian households, the most severe of them being her intimate contact with her maid Phoebe Marks,36 which breaches class-boundaries. In a de Certeauean appropriation of spatial individuality, Lady Audley furthermore leaves for London one day, locks her rooms and takes her keys with her. Her stepdaughter Alicia is indignant about this as she wishes to show the rooms to her cousin Robert Audley and his friend George Talboys.37 Lady Audley hides the dark secret of her bigamy and the child which she has abandoned to find her fortunes, in her private chambers at Audley Court and wishes to keep her past under lock and key. The novel’s protagonist is a good example of the fiend-woman in Victorian literature, first presented as the angel who beautifies the home for her husband and

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then demonised as more and more of her past and her ‘guilt’ are revealed. This becomes abundantly clear as Robert Audley and Georges Talboys enter Lady Audley’s boudoir, her ‘lair’, via a secret passage. The boudoir, Nicole Reynolds confirms, was particularly ideology-ridden. It ‘manifested an eroticized, fetishized notion of female privacy.’38 This means that Lady Audley’s private rooms are associated with potentially subversive female (sexual) power.39 The ‘elegant disorder of [her] dressing-room’40 shows that Lady Audley does not represent the ideal of the Victorian housewife who would keep her rooms neat and clean. ‘The atmosphere of the room [is] almost oppressive’41 and the jewellery and garments lying around create the impression of some kind of uncanny presence. Although Lady Audley herself is absent, her spirit seems to dominate the room. Her picture underscores the uncanny atmosphere and the monstrous side to Lady Audley’s nature: There is a ‘lurid lightness to the blonde complexion, and a strange, sinister light to the deep blue eyes [and the] pretty pouting mouth [has a] hard and almost wicked look (...).’42 Once more, as with the description of Audley Court in the beginning, this scene has a double function. On the one hand it emphasises Victorian ideology: the setting firmly establishes Lady Audley as the fiend-woman who disrupts the harmony of the home. On the other, it could be argued that Lady Audley and Sir Michael would probably have lived happily ever after, had not Robert Audley started prying into Lucy Audley’s secrets. In this scene, Alicia and Robert Audley, as well as Georges Talboys, incidentally Lady Audley’s first husband, act as much against the rules of decorum as Lady Audley herself. They, too, individually appropriate space in a very de Certeauean manner by invading Lady Audley’s privacy, thereby initiating and co-authoring the ‘monstrous’ events to come. The setting here is intended to highlight Lady Audley’s monstrosity and establish her as the fiend destroying the home, one of the symbols of Victorian society. However, the appropriation of space by Robert Audley at the same time criticises the way in which Victorian ideologies created monstrosity. Robert’s actions mirror the contemporary custom of surveillance and people’s propensity to have their eyes on the failings of others rather than on their own. The use of space shows Lady Audley to be perpetrator and victim alike, trapped by the ideologies of the home which construct the ideal of womanhood and desperately trying to assert herself as an individual and make her fortune in life. The end of the novel sees Lady Audley declared mad and sent to a lunatic asylum, where she eventually dies. As is often the case in Victorian fiction, men cannot bear female assertiveness and can only come to terms with it when they label it as madness, as departing from the norm.43 The lunatic asylum is the place which houses those (women) who did not manage to keep their own homes ideal, clean, and free from excess of any sort. ‘Audley Court is shut up’44 and its dereliction continues. It was unable to defend the ideology of the Victorian home: the sordid outside world was allowed to enter into it, so that it can never again be a

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happy untainted sanctuary. To keep the ideology intact, the space in which it was disrupted needs to be ostracised. However, this does not quite work out. Despite the happy relocation of righteous Robert Audley and all his loved ones to a little cottage in which the domestic ideal can be better pursued, the main setting remains Audley Court and its failure of domestic ideology reigns paramount in the novel. (The mansion is not pulled down but remains standing as a mouldering monument of failure.) And we need to remember that this failure was hinted at already before Lady Audley had entered the scene, so we can conclude that the novel comments on and criticises the Victorian ideal of the home as such. Like the house, Lady Audley is ostracised and dies in the end to allow the triumph of the (seemingly) virtuous. However, like the house, a trace of her fantastic beauty as well as her fiendish nature remains in the form of her picture, which is at times exhibited to visitors by the old housekeeper of Audley Court.45 Thus, although conventional order is re-established by the end of the novel, some subversive potential remains in the form of the picture, and the threat to domestic ideology is not completely banned. The connection between females and the home-space is also stressed in Wilkie Collins’s novel The Woman in White. The story features three characters who embody different versions of femininity, all linked with their ways of using space. There is the feminine male represented by Frederick Fairlie, the feminine female embodied in Laura Fairlie and the masculine female of Marian Halcombe. Mr Fairlie, Laura’s uncle and a hypochondriac, is a travesty of the ‘proper’ Victorian man. Upon the whole, he had a frail, languidly-fretful, over-refined look something singularly and unpleasantly delicate in its association with a man, and, at the same time, something which could by no possibility have looked natural and appropriate if it had been transferred to the personal appearance of a woman.46 In this one sentence, which describes Mr Fairlie as unnatural in every sense, the narrator gives us his view of what both ideal Victorian men and Victorian women should be like. The men were supposed to be hearty, resourceful and make the outside world their sphere of action. Women were expected to be passive, mild, silent and caring. Mr Fairlie embodies the worst qualities women could have during the Victorian era. He is too fond of material wealth,47 he thinks only about himself,48 and he indulges in largely imaginary ailments of a nervous sort, frequently associated with Victorian women.49 He is also, of course, confined to the house, a situation women would usually have found themselves in. In short, Mr Fairlie becomes a sort of hybrid creature, blurring the boundaries between the male and the female, something that would clearly have been considered monstrous in Victorian society. Mr Fairlie’s unnatural condition and behaviour are very closely

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connected to and contrasted with the rooms he occupies, whose regularity in terms of furniture and decorations are particularly emphasised. [The bookcase] was not more than six feet high, and the top was adorned with statuettes in marble, ranged at regular distances one from the other. On the opposite side stood two antique cabinets (…). On my right hand and on my left, as I stood inside the door, were chiffoniers and little stands (…). At the lower end of the room, opposite to me, the windows were concealed and the sunlight was tempered by large blinds of the same pale sea-green colour as the curtains over the door.50 So here, the perfect symmetry and order of the house which is associated with femininity does not match its inhabitant, suggesting that the Victorian ideal distorts ‘reality’ and transforms people, in this case turning a man into a monstrous version of a woman. Victorian ideology thus, represented by the house, has the potential of affecting people’s demeanour and sense of self. Mr Fairlie does not create space the way he wishes to, but is influenced by the place. He shows the unexpected and undesired results the era’s double standard adhering to the home (outward order and inward repression), could produce. He embodies the return of everything that was meant to be repressed by the Victorian fixation on order: the erosion of the penchant for categorisation and the possibility of (social) hybridisation going along with it. And most disturbingly, the indeterminateness Mr. Fairlie represents is planted at the very heart of the home, in the midst of all the Victorian neatness. His niece Laura Fairlie, the feminine woman, possesses all the desirable feminine charms.51 She is meek, submissive, rather passive, demure and pretty. Despite the fact that there are several narrators in the story, Laura never gets the chance to tell her own version of it. She is objectified by the men around her. Walter Hartright particularly, who loves her and means well with her, nevertheless turns her into his ideal of a woman. Her first husband Sir Percival Glyde uses her as a means of becoming rich. Whenever we see her, and we do not do so very often, because most of the time she is rather spoken about than present herself, she comes across as a part of the setting, an adornment, more than as a person in her own right. When Hartright sees her for the first time for instance he remarks: The one room of the summer-house, as we ascended the steps of the door, was occupied by a young lady. She was standing near a rustic table, looking out at the inland view of moor and hill presented by a gap in the trees, and absently turning over the leaves of a little sketch-book that lay at her side.52

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Far from turning place into space in a de Certeauean way, Laura seems to be one of the objects constituting the place. The scene instantly calls to mind iconic paintings of the period which either show women in their ‘rightful place’ (note how the expression stresses women’s rightful place and not space) or use them as symbols of social problems and failings.53 When confronted with Sir Percival’s baseness, Laura is completely helpless and can be as easily disposed of as any odd object. Incidentally, like her uncle Mr. Fairlie, Laura is characterised by a lack, which Walter Hartright explicitly addresses by mentioning his impression of ‘something wanting in her’ at their first meeting.54 Obviously, the Victorian ideal of the angel woman is not entirely condoned in the novel as it turns women into mere puppets completely submitting to male power. Her ‘lack’ links Laura with her uncle. In Mr Fairlie’s case this lack is of a moral nature, while Laura wants energy and strength of will. Although she fulfils the Victorian ideal of the angelical woman, the ideal proves to be demeaning and impracticable in real life. In her way, Laura is as much a monstrous creation of the Victorian house in its function as a microcosm of society as her uncle. Marian Halcombe, Laura’s half-sister embodies what I called the masculine female. She is bold, outspoken and energetic. Walter Hartright instantly acknowledges this when he first meets her.55 These character traits qualify her for becoming one of the story’s narrators, so unlike her sister Laura, Marian gets to speak for herself. She tells a fairly large portion of the second part of the story which is set at Blackwater Park, Sir Percival Glyde’s country home. Her narrative begins with her arrival at Blackwater Park and a description of the house and grounds. ‘The house is situated on a dead flat, and seems to be shut in almost suffocated, to my north-country notions, by trees.’56 As in Lady Audley’s Secret the setting acquires a symbolic quality. Marian renders it in terms of stagnation: the ‘dead flat’57 it is built upon, the moat ‘it had (…) round it once’,58 which has presumably run dry, and the ‘lake in the park,’59 a stagnant body of water from which the estate got its name. It can be assumed at this point already that Blackwater Park will not be a very fertile place. Marian’s descriptions also stress the mysterious and even threatening nature of the mansion and the surrounding grounds. The trees enclosing the house give it the appearance of a prison and at the same time close the place off from the outside world. The feeling that is created here is that no one will be able to get out but no one from the outside world can enter either. The black lake, too, suggests unfathomable depths and secrets hidden at its ground. Marian’s astute depiction of the place indeed foreshadows what will happen later on in the story: the two women will be imprisoned there, at the mercy of Sir Percival Glyde and his more polite but infinitely more frightening friend Count Fosco. Despite these adversities Marian Halcombe’s energetic and strong-willed character cannot easily be daunted and expresses itself in her individual use of the place. On a first inspection of the house, Marian still betrays her Victorian

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upbringing by declining to see the older wings of the mansion for fear of ruining her ‘petticoats and stockings.’60 On this occasion she even remarks upon the housekeeper’s ‘admiration of [her] extraordinary common-sense’,61 thereby indicating that even an independent-minded young woman like her is trapped in Victorian ideologies, in this case the naturalised assumption that no matter what happens, a woman should always look neat and tidy. A little later, when Marian explores the grounds, she reverses this behaviour. On one side of the black lake she comes upon a former boat-house where she discovers an injured dog.62 Without thinking about soiling her clothes this time, she picks up the bleeding animal and takes it back to the house. The scene shows that in really important situations, Marian acts decisively. She is a caring, nurturing woman and as such sufficiently represents the female ideal of the time not to put the readers off. At the same time, she is active and resists an environment that is hostile and life-denying. One could say that the scene not only contrasts with Marian’s behaviour on exploring the house but also with the scene in which Walter Hartright first sees Laura Fairlie. Laura, too, occupies a little place apart from the main house, a summer-house in the garden, at that moment. In contrast to Marian, however, she does not turn the place into a space but remains passive. By investigating into the strange sounds she hears in the dismal boat-house and rescuing the dog, Marian overcomes her fears of the place and appropriates it spatially. The pivotal scene in which Marian truly overcomes her Victorian propriety is the one in which she climbs out of her sitting room window and onto the roof of the veranda to eavesdrop on Count Fosco and Sir Percival, a very individual, active and masculine use of space.63 Once more, she conquers a hostile environment and directly opposes the patriarchal order represented by the two men who wish to keep her and her sister in ignorance of their doings. Marian actively tries to dispel the monstrosity of the place in which she and her sister are imprisoned by demystifying it, robbing it of its symbolic power. She counters the gloom of the boathouse with its strange noises by bravely investigating their cause and she attempts to discover the mystery of the two men by leaving well-trodden paths. Still, it has to be mentioned that the novel domesticates Marian to a certain extent at the same time. Obviously, although it explores the possibilities of a strong woman, it does not finally dare to present Marian to the reader as the absolute model of modern femininity.64 As was mentioned at the beginning, Marian is too manly. Like Frederick Fairlie, the feminine male, and Laura Fairlie, the feminine female, Marian lacks something that is hit upon by Hartright from the first: she is ‘ugly.’65 Her want of beauty notably caused by the masculinity of her features66 makes her fall short of the Victorian ideal of women. On the one hand this is positive, as the attention is detracted from her physical appearance and she is allowed to become a strong character who asserts herself in a world dominated by men. On the other hand, however, her not meeting the ideal for women arguably made it easier for Victorian readers to dismiss her and her active role. In the end,

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none of the characters is really sufficient in him- or herself. After all mysteries have been solved, the main characters return to Frederick Fairlie’s estate. Mr Fairlie is dead, Laura and Walter Hartright are married with a son, who conveniently inherits Fairlie’s house and grounds, and Marian lives with the happy family. The feminine male Frederick Fairlie has been replaced by the more masculine version Walter Hartright, who is joined to the feminine female Laura Fairlie. In between them, like a mediator, stands the masculine female Marian Halcombe. It can be assumed that the trio will make the once decadent house a happy place (or space?), in which the traditional role of the angel in the house is counterbalanced by the more active Marian Halcombe. The house as a monstrous place undermining masculinity and thus patriarchy is turned into a rather neutral space. A semblance of patriarchy remains but female power is also asserted through Marian. This happy ending makes The Woman in White more positive than Lady Audley’s Secret. The narrative not only shows the characters overcoming the problems in their home(s) but also presents in non-diabolic terms a female figure who self-confidently and independently appropriates (masculine) space(s). Wilkie Collins’s Armadale is the story of two men sharing the same name and a dark secret in their past but it is just as much the story of a strong woman who tries to rise in society using her knowledge about this secret. Lydia Gwilt perfectly embodies the double-nature of monstrosity relating to the home. She is an active woman constantly on the move but she certainly does not fulfil Ruskin’s ideal of the good woman.67 Like Lady Audley, she is a beautiful fiend who does not bring the home but monstrosity wherever she goes. However, her story shows, as well as Lady Audley’s, how much the ideology of the home constricted and confined women and thereby helped create this monstrosity. Victorian society did not treat women who had lost their family, fortune or reputation mercifully. They were basically left to fend for themselves. In many cases, their education did not prepare them for such a situation and thus many unfortunate single women fell into poverty or were reduced to prostituting themselves for a bit of money.68 Miss Gwilt, who is on her own in life, does nothing of the sort. She acts in a masculine way and tries to help herself. Compared with Marian Halcombe, however, who acts in a masculine way but mostly to help and protect others, thus retaining her ‘maternal’ qualities, Miss Gwilt is presented as masculine in a negative way. She denies the soft and caring aspects of her nature and works only for herself. Acquiring false references she establishes herself as governess at Major Milroy’s house so that she can try and lure the rich Allen Armadale into marrying her. The ‘evil’ governess is a cliché widely used in sensation fiction. Lucy Graham, too, works as a governess when she meets Michael Audley. This position was associated with evil, because it contradicted Victorian notions of order and ‘propriety’. Governesses did not concur with the Victorian construction of femininity. They were unmarried and had to work for their living and as a result of their poverty and lack of family connections they

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were rather independent and could freely move across the country. All these characteristics could be seen as potential threats to patriarchy. Lydia Gwilt is a prime example of this female menace. She explodes the quiet life of Major Milroy, his wife and his daughter as the lawyer Pedgift suggests: ‘Take my word for it, sir, there’s something wrong upstairs in that pretty cottage of yours; and Miss Gwilt is mixed up in it already.’69 Lydia Gwilt arouses the jealousy of Major Milroy’s wife and temporarily robs Neelie Milroy of Allen Armadale’s affections. She also disrupts the quiet life at Thorpe-Ambrose, Allan Armadale’s estate. Most of the other places she is associated with are considered unwholesome, too, such as for instance Mother Oldershaw’s beauty-clinic and the place she inhabits with Ozias Midwinter after their marriage. However, all the homes Lydia Gwilt enters are already tainted before she even appears – just like Audley Court, which is in decay already by the time Lucy Graham arrives there. Pedgift does not specify the exact place in the cottage in which something is amiss by accident. He refers to the upper floor of the house from where the sick and cranky Mrs Milroy watches over and influences the goings on. Once more we have a reference to a part of the house which is not displayed to the public and where the more unpleasant realities of life are hidden. Thorpe-Ambrose, too, is burdened by the misconduct of Armadale’s mother, her deception of her father and running away with her good-for-nothing husband.70 Lydia Gwilt only enters upon and exacerbates conditions that are already problematic. So like Lady Audley’s Secret, Armadale seems to partly undermine the Victorian ideology of the demon woman ruining the fortunes of innocent people and suggests that some of the problems are not caused by woman falling short of her ideal but by the society constructing this ideal, confining women and leaving them almost no chances to lead an honest life once they have erred. Like Lady Audley, Lydia Gwilt is associated with an asylum at the end of the novel. In Lady Audley’s Secret the asylum functions as the place that purges society of women such as Lady Audley. By declaring them mad, social ideologies of the home and the angel-woman ruling it can be maintained. Armadale (published two years later than Lady Audley’s Secret) goes one step further. Lydia Gwilt is not committed to the asylum, but she uses it in a desperate final attempt to achieve her aims. The asylum, a monstrous place of surveillance as such,71 which takes away the inmates’ privacy and individuality and makes them conform to social norms once more through the administration of drugs, becomes the symbol of the costs of Victorian ideology. It is therefore appropriate that Lydia Gwilt turns it into a space to put her murderous plans into practice. She is so self-confident that she is not even afraid of using the place which would normally be used to sacrifice women such as her to safeguard the social norms. Obviously, this is a very strong statement about women’s independence and it cannot be left standing like that at the end of the story. Lydia Gwilt’s plan to murder Allan Armadale goes wrong, because Ozias Midwinter steps in. As she ultimately loves Midwinter, she cannot

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let him die and rather kills herself to set him free. Her suicide out of love has the same function as Lady Audley’s proclaimed madness. It removes Lydia Gwilt from a society that cannot contain her. Her finally revealing her love for Midwinter reestablishes Lydia Gwilt as ‘a good woman at heart’ who cares more for others than for herself. The danger emanating from her as an independent, active and ‘evil’ female is thus twice removed: she dies and cannot do harm anymore and she is shown to have had feelings after all. However, in a final twist, one could see Lydia Gwilt’s self-chosen death as an ultimate act of independence. She freely chooses to avoid prison or the asylum, institutions that would have punished her ‘abnormal’ behaviour, and removes herself from their levelling influence. She does not let anyone turn her into a passive puppet and the hold she has over the story and the imagination of the readers is not diminished by her death. In this sense, the novel’s ending is again reminiscent of Lady Audley’s Secret, where Lady Audley, too, maintains a hold over the people’s imagination after her death in the form of her expressive painting. In summary, it can be said that Victorian houses and the ideologies revolving around them are closely connected to women constructed as either angelic or demonic, reinforcing or disturbing the façade of the perfect home and by extension society. Characters, especially women, who do not heed the ideology of the proper home create monstrosity but monstrosity is also produced by the ideology as it confines and restricts people. Victorian sensation fiction seems to be aware of the ambiguous role of the ideology of the home and plays with it. It presents the readers with strong female characters who break the symbolic power of settings by using places in their own ways. They turn places into spaces in a de Certeauean sense, thereby asserting their independence and undermining the prerogatives of patriarchy. The three novels discussed display varying degrees of progressiveness. They all level their criticism of Victorian ideology by returning to some form of order in the end. Each of the stories closes with a marriage and the establishment of a new home or the relocation to a previous one that has been purged of bad vibes. Still, the narratives also have in common their emphasis on the home as a potentially problematic space. Furthermore, they all particularly address the difficult relation between women and the home. Lady Audley’s Secret and Armadale use the negative examples of Lucy Audley and Lydia Gwilt to show how ideological constructions of gender and the home can turn women into ‘monsters.’ The Woman in White manages to neutralise the gendered home space by positioning the assertive Marian Halcombe as a mediator between the man (Walter Hartright) and the typically meek and submissive Victorian female (Laura Fairlie). Marian’s positive example of female strength and spatial appropriation thus makes The Woman in White the most affirmative and progressive of the novels discussed. The threat to patriarchy (embodied by Marian) is placed next to the ideal family (Hartright, Laura and their son) in the end. It is thereby contained but not completely banned.

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Notes 1

Cf. Judith Flanders, Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003), 5. 2 Cf. Ibid., 9. 3 Cf. Elizabeth Langland, Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 42. 4 Thad Logan, Preface to The Victorian Parlour, by Thad Logan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), xiv. 5 Cf. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, ‘The Madwoman in the Attic’, in Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd ed., ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 820.; cf. also Robert M. Polhemus, ‘The Favourite Child: David Copperfield and the Scriptural Issue of Child-Wives’, in Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination, ed. Murray Baumgarten and H. M. Daleski (New York: AMS Press, 1998), 8. 6 Cf. Langland, Nobody’s Angels, 43-44. 7 Cf. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 124. 8 Cf. Ibid., 126. 9 Kathy Mezei and Chiara Briganti, ‘Reading the House: A Literary Perspective’, Signs 27.3 (2002): 840. 10 Cf. Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd ed., ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 698. 11 Janet Larson, Francesca Saggini and Anna-Enrichetta Soccio, ‘Housing Fictions in Time: An Introduction’, European Journal of English Studies 16.1 (2012): 1. 12 Gail Cunningham, ‘Houses in Between: Navigating Suburbia in Late Victorian Writing’, Victorian Literature and Culture (2004): 421. 13 Cf. Ansgar Nünning, ‘Formen und Funktionen literarischer Raumdarstellung: Grundlagen, Ansätze, narratologische Kategorien und neue Perspektiven’, in Raum und Bewegung in der Literatur: Die Literaturwissenschaften und der Spatial Turn, ed. Wolfgang Hallet and Birgit Neumann (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009), 36. 14 Cf. Ibid., 37, 40-41. 15 John Ruskin, ‘Lecture II: Lilies: Of Queens’ Gardens’ in Sesame and Lilies, Bartleby.com, Viewed 20 May 2012, . 16 Cf. Roland Barthes, ‘Myth Today’, in Structuralism in Myth: Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Dumézil, and Propp, ed. Robert A. Segal (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 21. 17 Cf. Efraim Sicher, ‘Bleak Homes and Symbolic Houses: At-homeness and Homelessness in Dickens’, in Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination, ed. Murray Baumgarten and H. M. Daleski (New York: AMS Press, 1998), 34.

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John O. Jordan, ‘Domestic Servants and the Victorian Home’, in Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination, ed. Murray Baumgarten and H.M. Daleski (New York: AMS Press, 1998), 80. 19 Ruskin, ‘Lecture II: Lilies: Of Queens’ Gardens’. 20 Cf. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117. 21 Cf. also Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 5051. 22 Dan Bivona, ‘The House in the Child and the Dead Mother in the House: Sensational Problems of Victorian ‘Household’ Management’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal 30.2 (2008): 112.; cf. also Anna Despotopoulou, ‘The Abuse of Visibility: Domestic Publicity in Late Victorian Fiction’, in Inside Out: Women Negotiating, Subverting, Appropriating Public and Private Space, ed. Teresa Gómez Reus and Aránzazu Usandizaga (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 90-91. 23 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (London: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1997 [1862]), 4. 24 Ibid., 3. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Cf. Ibid. 28 ‘Female Character’, The Lady’s Magazine 1.5 (May 1828): 197 quoted in Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 10. 29 Cf. Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, 3, 4. 30 Ibid., 3. 31 Ibid., 4. 32 Ibid., 3. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 4. 35 Ibid., 5. 36 Cf. Ibid., 43. 37 Cf. Ibid., 54. 38 Nicole Reynolds, ‘Boudoir Stories: A Novel History of a Room and its Occupants’, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 15.2 (2004): 103. 39 Cf. also Ibid., 119. 40 Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, 56. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 57.

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43

Cf. Andrew Radford, Victorian Sensation Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 100-101. 44 Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, 354. 45 Cf. Ibid. 46 Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (London: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1993 [1860]), 31. 47 Cf. Ibid., 30. 48 Cf. Ibid., 31-34. 49 Cf. Ibid., 31. 50 Ibid., 30. 51 Cf. Ibid., 37-38. 52 Ibid., 37. 53 Cf. Murray Roston, ‘Disrupted Homes: The Fallen Woman in Victorian Art and Literature’, in Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination, ed. Murray Baumgarten and H.M. Daleski (New York: AMS Press, 1998), 96. 54 Collins, The Woman in White, 39. 55 Cf. Ibid., 25-28. 56 Ibid., 153. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 157. 61 Ibid. 62 Cf. Ibid., 159. 63 Cf. Ibid., 250-252. 64 Cf. also Alison Milbank, Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 74. 65 Collins, The Woman in White, 25. 66 Cf. Ibid. 67 Cf. Ruskin, ‘Lecture II: Lilies: Of Queens’ Gardens’. 68 Cf. Roston, ‘Disrupted Homes’, 95-96. 69 Wilkie Collins, Armadale (London: Penguin Books, 1995 [1864-66]), 270. 70 Cf. Ibid., 46. 71 Cf. Ibid., 637.

Bibliography Primary Sources Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley’s Secret. [1862]. London: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1997.

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Collins, Wilkie. Armadale. [1864-66] London: Penguin Books, 1995. ———. The Woman in White. [1860]. London: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1993. Secondary Sources Althusser, Louis. ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’. In Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed, edited by Julie Rivkin, and Michael Ryan, 812-825. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Barthes, Roland. ‘Myth Today’. In Structuralism in Myth: Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Dumézil, and Propp, edited by Robert A. Segal, 1-29. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996. Bivona, Dan. ‘The House in the Child and the Dead Mother in the House: Sensational Problems of Victorian Household Management’. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal 30.2 (2008): 109-25. Cunningham, Gail. ‘Houses in Between: Navigating Suburbia in Late Victorian Writing’. Victorian Literature and Culture (2004): 421-34. Cvetkovich, Ann. Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Despotopoulou, Anna. ‘The Abuse of Visibility: Domestic Publicity in Late Victorian Fiction’. In Inside Out: Women Negotiating, Subverting, Appropriating Public and Private Space, edited by Teresa Gómez Reus, and Aránzazu Usandizaga, 87-106. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Flanders, Judith. Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. [1919]. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. ‘The Madwoman in the Attic’. In Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed, edited by Julie Rivkin, and Michael Ryan, 812-825. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

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Jordan, John O. ‘Domestic Servants and the Victorian Home’. In Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination, edited by Murray Baumgarten, and H. M. Daleski, 79-90. New York: AMS Press, 1998. Langland, Elizabeth. Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Larson, Janet, Francesca Saggini, and Anna-Enrichetta Soccio. ‘Housing Fictions in Time: An Introduction’. European Journal of English Studies 16.1 (2012): 1-8. Logan, Thad. Preface to The Victorian Parlour, by Thad Logan, xiii-xvi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Mezei, Kathy, and Chiara Briganti. ‘Reading the House: A Literary Perspective’. Signs 27.3 (2002): 837-46. Milbank, Alison. Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Nünning, Ansgar. ‘Formen und Funktionen literarischer Raumdarstellung: Grundlagen, Ansätze, narratologische Kategorien und neue Perspektiven’. In Raum und Bewegung in der Literatur: Die Literaturwissenschaften und der Spatial Turn, edited by Wolfgang Hallet, and Birgit Neumann, 33-52. Bielefeld: transcript, 2009. Polhemus, Robert M. ‘The Favourite Child: David Copperfield and the Scriptural Issue of Child-Wives’. Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination, edited by Murray Baumgarten, and H.M. Daleski, 3-20. New York: AMS Press, 1998. Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984. Radford, Andrew. Victorian Sensation Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Reynolds, Nicole. ‘Boudoir Stories: A Novel History of a Room and its Occupants’. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 15.2 (2004): 103-30.

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Roston, Murray. ‘Disrupted Homes: The Fallen Woman in Victorian Art and Literature’. In Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination, edited by Murray Baumgarten, and H.M. Daleski, 91-110. New York: AMS Press, 1998. Ruskin, John. ‘Lecture II: Lilies: Of Queens’ Gardens’. In Sesame and Lilies. [1865]. Bartleby.com. Last Modified 2012. Viewed 20 May 2012. http://www.bartleby.com/28/7.html. Sicher, Efraim. ‘Bleak Homes and Symbolic Houses: At-homeness and Homelessness in Dickens’. In Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination, edited by Murray Baumgarten, and H.M. Daleski, 33-49. New York: AMS Press, 1998. Christina Flotmann teaches British Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Paderborn (Germany). Her research interests include contemporary popular literature and culture as well as the literature of the mid-19th century and the 19thcentury fin de siècle.

Enchanted Microcosm or Apocalyptic Warzone? Human Projections into the Bug World Petra Rehling Abstract Many children, until the moment they become conditioned to fear bugs, harbour a natural curiosity for these creatures. Chinese and South African children raise silkworms for fun, Japanese kids hold jumping spider tournaments, and in Western schools bugs are investigated in science projects, kept in glass enclosures, and watched with mixed feelings of disgust and satisfaction. In childhood the tiny animal ‘landscapes’ are observed with fascination, after all, a lot of childhood play takes place on ‘bug-level,’ but for adults there are spaces in the house where they are scared to look, the corners and crannies that invade nightmares and give rise to phobias. Revolving largely around two influential and contrasting (pseudo)documentaries, The Hellstrom Chronicle (USA, 1971) and Microcosmos: Le peuple de l’herbe (France, 1996), this chapter is an excursion into our fascination with habitats and bodies of insects and other arthropods in daily life and fiction. We often use technological or combat terminology to describe bug world. Consequently, visions of war and the apocalypse are riddled with insect bodies and landscapes. For the civilized world, bugs or bug-like features contribute to definitions of archetypal ‘otherness’ and to envision enemies of mankind on a regular basis. The two documentaries discussed here present their different world views as strong and opposing metaphors for the man-sized universe. They are remarkably similar in their portrayal of alien beings in bizarre landscapes, but one is magical, the other threatening. Conspicuously, both films feature the birth of a mosquito; except while the insect is displayed as a grotesque invader in the American Hellstrom Chronicle, it turns into an angelic creature in the French documentary. The filmmakers did not have to go very far to find a both terrifying and enchanting foreign landscape close by. Key Words: Bugs, fear, fascination, landscape, documentary, projection. ***** 1. The Alter Ego Pity the animal that lives only as a shadow of the human, the animal forced to react rather than respond, the animal whose task is to give flesh, spirit, and meaning to the human, the animal whose melancholy fate is to be humanity’s other.1

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__________________________________________________________________ The interesting thing about bugs is that they can virtually change any space into a ‘monstrous geography,’ including our very own bodies before and after we die. Yet it is not their mere presence that makes a location become monstrous, if that were so, Australia and all the rainforests on Earth would be called monstrous by default, but their incredible and truly unique transformative power to demonize any object, body or geography essentially lies in the perception of the very ‘owners’ of spaces and places. Other than the permanent change from cherished place to ‘no man’s land’ during times of war, as discussed by Sarah Montin in this volume,2 the monstrous geographies created by bugs often revert back to their original ‘innocent’ state immediately or some time after the monsters have left. Principally, when it comes to bugs, we are part of their world, but they are not welcome in ours. Instead, they live in some kind of parallel universe right beside our own in which familiar objects have ‘secret identities.’3 Gilbert Waldbauer writes that we tend to fear the unknown and look upon bugs as our natural enemies, despite their unsurpassed contributions to the planet’s ecology.4 Insects, and for the layman this term usually includes spiders (arachnids) and worms (analids), belong to the animal kingdom. Entomologist May Berenbaum complains that most of us think only warm and furry creatures do.5 When talking about the living environment of bugs, many people speak about a ‘world,’ thus hinting at something infinitely larger than the simple habitat of another species as summarized in biology books. Although the insect world is, more than any other animal territory, shrouded in mystery and otherness, mankind has found in it models for health, architecture, robotics and countless other sciences. Bugs are eaten, fought, feared, copied, killed, harvested, or cultivated and make us stock up on weapons that can also harm ourselves. Even though their existence is sorely needed for the survival of this world, bugs are often hated for this reason. There is only one location that rivals bug world as terra incognita on this planet, the depths of the oceans. But unlike voyages into the deep sea, where humans truly submerge into another locale, observations of the world of insects and other arthropods require a level of imagination and projection not found anywhere else in dealing with the animal kingdom. When we see lions feeding or birds nesting, they still very much reside in our world, in our presence, on our plane of existence. Bugs have always been excluded from this ‘honour’ and are outcasts from the community of venerable beings on this globe; they live somewhere else. We can relate to bug world on two levels. First, in our actual physical relationship and the efforts we make to mimic or approximate sensual experiences of the insect world, mostly in science or art projects, museum exhibits or film, and, second, in metaphor. Only in metaphor we truly discover ourselves in bug world. On this plane it is a resourceful story universe. We have an ambivalent relationship to these creatures, which figure prominently in our fantasies about the apocalypse and are often seen as mankind’s greatest scourge. At the same time we see ourselves as godlike in their presence. Most of our fears spring from the

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__________________________________________________________________ imagination, but there are real dangers too. ‘The choice of insects as a phobic object may be random, symbolic, or perfectly logical.’6 Bugs do not only ‘bear the burden of our dreams … but they also assume the task of living out our nightmares,’ Hugh Raffles confirms.7 A closer look reveals that they are in fact our dark and beautiful alter egos and their world the ideal location to find ourselves. Very much like humanity, bugs deal in extremes: large numbers, incredible strengths, and excessive killing or survival skills. They bring wealth, joy and luck as well as suffering and death to humans. Raffles sums up this enigma: It might appear as if their astonishing behavior is an exterior manifestation of an interior life. But that would be entirely wrong. They act without consciousness and without selfknowledge. They follow instincts they have possessed since the Creation, instincts that are blind, rigid, and innate, that are not learned but are instead possessed fully formed from birth, perfect and infallible, highly specialized to their function and peculiar to each species. These instincts possess ‘wisdom’: they generate flawless behavior that solves the most complex problems of physical existence.8 How can humans deal with this kind of perfection? Only a few have come to love and admire it, the majority of people find it monstrous. Thus, our mixed relationships to insects also mirror our ambivalent feelings about otherness, because in many ways it is monstrous to be different, let alone superior to men. Bugs trigger a very violent streak in humans, the desire to destroy and kill. As monsters, they are a canvas for the human psyche. In symbolism, most of the time bugs mirror our fears and aggressions against our own kind. It is thus in the insect world, that we encounter fundamental monster archetypes of the human race. Numerous grotesque creatures in art and fiction have one way or another been based on insects. Feelings of envy, fear and loathing do, however, not deny that humans also harbour love and admiration for these beings. After all, a woman that is called a butterfly is inclined to receive this comparison as a most pleasant compliment. Bugs are a large part of our culture, ‘as illustrated by their infiltration of our language, arts, history, philosophy, and religion.’9 Still, as human society has become progressively more urbanized, insects have become progressively more estranged.10 We are tempted to see their lives as one-dimensional. ‘Isn’t their whole existence about turf, food and reproduction?’ we ask. Common sense denies them intelligence, despite entomologists’ frequent attempts to point out different skills, e.g., the language of bees or the hive mind of social insects. Insects have a ‘likability deficit’ that is underlined by overrepresentations of the prettier and more charismatic types on conservation lists. For that reason, Berenbaum states with little disguised sarcasm, does the name of the ‘pygmy hog sucking louse,’ although

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__________________________________________________________________ equally endangered, not endear it to anybody.11 In fact, a lot about bug world is ironic, because despite our advantage of size, we usually have to lower ourselves, when we choose to observe this universe. While heaven is the place of birds, the ground belongs to the insect. If we come to understand bugs with either dread or love is profoundly shaped by our social and cultural history, though.12 Often the insect world scares us not for what it can literally do to us, but by what we imagine our world would be like if it had bug world quality. One example is overpopulation, which forces more and more people to live in undesirable enclosed and small hive-like constructions. Lewis Thomas writes: Nobody wants to think that the rapidly expanding mass of mankind, spreading out over the surface of the earth, blackening the ground, bears any meaningful resemblance to the life of an anthill or a hive.13 While people in the West harbour only few positive sentiments for these animals, the Japanese, probably the most bug loving people on Earth, openly invite them not only into their philosophy, education, art and popular culture, but also into their homes and lives. Critters do make convenient pets in tiny Tokyo apartments, and through tradition this nation is also very familiar with hive-like family and business hierarchies. By contrast, when too many individuals are crammed together in Western countries, proximity often becomes a breeding ground for social unrest and crime. As a focal point of this chapter, two famous film documentaries have been taken into account. The French documentary Microcosmos: Le peuple de l’herbe (1996) shows bug world from an upward looking perspective and presents it as some kind of spiritual realm devoid of human presence.14 The US film The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971) adopts a downward perspective and ‘grounds’ reservations against ‘the insect,’ which the fictitious narrator of the film consistently addresses as a singular ‘he,’ in science. By doing so, the speaker takes countless species and turns them into a single personified enemy in a million disguises.15 2. Rejection In this chapter, I want to start by focussing on how two very private spaces in Western civilization frequently become monstrous through bug encounters: our own bodies and homes. Western countries do not face starvation or famine, even if numerous crop fields are lost to a plague. In some cultures of the world, however, people have to deal with very real and devastating insect invasions that cause the loss of harvests and livestock, intense bodily discomfort, disease, and even death. For these affected people, bugs are genuine enemies. In the Western world, on the

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__________________________________________________________________ other hand, insect fears are often triggered responses, based on childhood conditioning, education or social standards. Frequently, they are just psychological anomalies, even fashionable whims; very much symptoms for the quirks of Western civilization. In Western cultures it is not only people with intense cases of phobia or psychosis that are unable to coexist with insect intruders in the same body or room. Few ‘average’ people have the ability to cope with bug invasions without turning to radical measures. Private spaces or bodies have to be purged from bug assaults with the harshest means imaginable. Despite our knowledge of endless harmful effects, we are willing to poison ourselves, our food and environment with pesticides to a certain extent in order to get rid of often harmless critters. These acts of destruction, although causing the greatest mayhem on bug level, frequently reach into other species’ lives, and over the past have been known to bypass insect pests altogether and harm humans instead. Most insects are no threat to our bodies; they are a threat to our equilibrium. Insects have a very strong influence on our feelings of comfort inside our homes and bodies. A home or a body infested with bugs becomes enemy territory or a no-body and we desire to distance ourselves. A room infested with bugs turns into the most nightmarish space imaginable. Infestations with ants, termites, cockroaches, wasps, woodlice, worms, hornets, spiders and others turn our cosy abodes into battlefields. As a result, some countries, where bug problems are more serious, are held in low esteem by those who have turned a bug-less existence into proof for a high living standard. Many insect encounters leave us with immediate physical reactions. Other than with symbolic monsters, encounters with ‘live’ monsters make us rationalize less, and vocalize and react more; we scream, jump, cringe, swear, and often flee. Consequently, we avoid places that are inhabited by insects inside our houses or remove intruders if possible. There are spaces in the house where grown-ups are scared to look, the cupboard under the sink or the corners in the basement. Some of the scariest, even phobic moments in a household can result from insect encounters, such as the sudden confrontation with twitching feelers in the sink, ant nests between the clothes, miniscule black bugs inside food containers, or a giant spider on the wall. Instantly, private space is turned into enemy territory and human property into ‘their’ property. Some feelings of revulsion have to do with our sense of hygiene. ‘The vivid associations of some insects with the disgusting objects on which they feed … may render all insects disgusting.’16 Bugs symbolize dirt and sloppy housekeeping in an over-sanitized world. To have a clean kitchen or house is equivalent with high social standard in industrial societies.17 Furthermore, in our homes we need to identify any source of sound to feel safe. At night, when silence sets in, we may block out other sounds from the outside, a passing car, a neighbour’s stereo, a barking dog, but a tiny scratching noise can literally make our skin crawl, and the buzz of a mosquito comes with a certainty that we are about to be violated. In the past, the disembodied sounds coming from

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__________________________________________________________________ bugs in the house were even considered to be a sign of death and the presence of ghosts.18 Faced with these subtle noises, we become very much aware of our position, body, skin and heartbeat, and our proximity to the source. At such a moment, any touch could make us jump ‘right out of our skin.’ When we discover an insect on our body, we feel invaded, disgusted, and dirty. As a result, insects are not killed; they are exterminated by the millions, because they are unruly variables that cannot be tolerated in close proximity, let alone in our bodies and homes. One more horror adds to this scenario, which is the moment when we come across actual carcasses crawling with insects, or just imagine our own body in death. After we die, our bodies will turn into living and nightmarish landscapes of a feast. The dead body, death itself, turns into a frightening imitation of ‘life’ that even for the strongest of heart might be too much to stomach. In this volume, Sarah Montin talks about the gradual ‘embodiment’ of war landscapes, which come alive like a dead body crawling with worms, where the tiny human figures turn into ‘writhing maggots vomited out of the diseased mouths of trenches.’19 Similar to the ‘monstering’ of battlefields, for the onlooker of an actual carcass, the dead body loses its original identity and becomes a hideous object outside space and time. For once, when we compare it to other bug invasions, this transformation may even become permanent; an image branded in the viewer’s memory forever. Typically, with the life force of the former host departed, a dead body undergoes a conversion into something else. In Genesis 3:19 this is described as ‘you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.’ In funeral rites it is expressed this way: ‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ The words contain recognition of a body’s reintegration into the land from which it once came, usually with the help of bugs. Fact is, for insects our bodies are part of their geographies, they do not distinguish between natural and artificial, wild and cultivated, other animals and us. Berenbaum reminds us that it is bad enough that insects pester us in our daily lives, but that it adds insult to injury knowing that they will continue to do so after we are dead and supposedly gone.20 Raffles remarks, ‘Despite death, they enter our bodies and make us shiver with apprehension. What other animal has this power over us?’21 Again, we encounter the great irony in human-bug relationships. We imagine ourselves at the top of the food chain, but in the end we are still food for bugs. The truth is the greatest enemy of mankind is not a large, ferocious predator, but a rather tiny creature, on occasion less than one-millionth as large as its target.22 3. Attraction As children we are curious about insects, we bend down into their worlds and try to comprehend their ‘landscapes.’ Much childhood play takes place close to the ground and natural curiosity leads to explorations of bug world. Children often study insects and follow their tiny battles and actions. In Japan, for example, kids pit tiny jumping spiders against each other for fun, copying adult samurai spider

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__________________________________________________________________ gambling from the town Kajiki. In the West, children are often negatively conditioned and prevented from touching or playing with bugs. They might also develop fear after being stung or bitten.23 Fortunately, kids are still encouraged to explore bugs in school projects, although adult inhibitions might intrude on these explorations at times.24 One cannot deny that the loving recreation of bug worlds in terrariums or aquariums, as well as the world of reptiles, amphibians and fish, require a great deal of understanding and passion in the ‘maker,’ who becomes the one and only controlling force of this ‘universe in a bubble,’ which, ‘God forbid,’ may never spill out into the real world. A journey into the psychology of these fans of ‘animal dioramas’ might be an interesting task for another research project, I believe. Children do not have the same ‘food boundaries’ as adults. ‘They react with disgust to bad tastes, but not culturally forbidden substances. Preschoolers happily put dead flies, earthworms, and old gum into their mouths.’25 Scientists are unresolved if insects trigger some deep instinctive fright in humans, although some studies speak of a higher level of fear in children and females.26 Berenbaum writes that entomophobia, the fear of insects, is most likely to develop in young children between the ages of two and seven years. They may outgrow it around the age of twelve. However, a more reasonable theory, she continues, is that phobias develop from innate fears of potentially dangerous objects or situations in general.27 How differently children and adults perceive bugs can be seen in stories for their age groups. Famous children’s books, films and television series, such as Maya the Honey Bee (1975-1976), a Japanese TV series after a German book by Waldemar Bonsels (1912), Czech writer Ondřej Sekora’s Ferda the Ant (1936-1938), E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952), Eric Carle’s picture book The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969) and the animation films A Bug’s Life (1998) or Antz (1998), are predominantly nonthreatening stories. However, a child’s curiosity has its darker side too, and it may yet turn out to be the root for some adult hostility toward bugs. Other than mammals or rodents, it is officially sanctioned to kill bugs. Children often play with them, because they can inflict fear and death on these tiny creatures, even if the act of killing may be underlined with feelings of guilt, especially when children have already grasped the concept that to hurt and kill is not sanctioned by adults. Many kids like to torture and play with bugs in a destructive way; they rip out wings and legs, burn or cut them into pieces. ‘With careless hands a child kills an ant, many ants. Flies are far trickier, though once caught, they have little chance.’28 Hollingsworth writes that as grown-ups we often return with discomfort to our childhood experiments with insects which have impressed themselves on our mind as ‘our first taste of what it means to have absolute power and, through identification, what it is to suffer from it.’29 He suspects that writers who use the self as insect are quite aware that it resonates with this sort of recollection.30 Childhood insect play is bound up with fantasies of control and power. It happens at a time when a child’s

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__________________________________________________________________ sense of and relationships with various social powers are formed. Children find in the insect society perfect order, a frightening strength in numbers and fascinating vulnerability.31 These interactions would all be very disturbing, if they were carried out in the human world, thus psychiatrists occasionally link violence committed by grown-ups to childhood animal abuse. Yet insect cruelty is often overlooked as it regularly happens out of sight anyway. There are some lessons for children to be learned by engaging in this universe. They can discover the strange anatomy and life force of bugs that enables them to survive cruel treatment, or they can just enjoy how the funny insides of a living creature turn into a gooey blob when squashed. Elias Canetti writes: The destruction of these tiny creatures is the only act of violence which remains unpunished even within us. Their blood does not stain our hands, for it does not remind us of our own. … They have never – at least not amongst us in the West – had the benefit of our growing, if not very effective, concern for life.32 For adults, very few insects actually ‘remain’ endearing. Beauty is found in those that adhere to certain standards, vibrant colours, softness, elegant movement or ‘cute,’ round shapes. Prickly and multi-legged critters seldom earn any compliments. Even bug lover Hugh Raffles describes his conflicted feelings when visiting a museum of entomology: How strange that we look at insects as beautiful objects, that in death they are beautiful objects whereas in life, scuttling across the wooden floor, lurking in the corners and under benches, flying into our hair and under our collars, crawling up our sleeves… Imagine the chaos if they came back to life. The impulse, even in this place, would be to lash out and crush them.33 Why this contempt? If adults entered this universe like children do in order to understand it, would it resolve the conflict? What would it feel like to be inside the insect? We can speculate that it would be a total different, strange and alien experience; an experience that countless scientists and artists have attempted to find. That’s the letter A: the first thing not to forget. There are other worlds around us. Too often, we pass through them unknowing, seeing but blind, hearing but deaf, touching but not feeling, contained by the limits of our senses, the banality of our imaginations, our Ptolemaic certitudes.34

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__________________________________________________________________ For artists and writers, bugs have always held a powerful attraction.35 ‘The insect society is a miniature world whose motives are written in the hieroglyphs of an alien biology,’ Christopher Hollingsworth writes admiringly.36 Insects are moulds for our definitions of otherness. They seem alien to us for the simple reason that they exist on a fundamentally different ecological scale, both spatially and temporally.37 Robert Evans Snodgrass realizes that despite their otherness, insects have attached themselves to our emotions by knowing how passionately the scientific human mind craves a sign of the supernatural.38 In some climate zones, people get glimpses into bug world ‘magic’ through the sounds, smells and colours of spring and summer, seasons which, along with sunshine and warmth, hold the chirping and humming of birds and insects. For many people, the ‘unthreatening’ sounds of insects on a summer’s day can, as long as their makers are out of sight, contribute to feelings of harmony, warmth, and tranquillity. In other places magic may not be on people’s minds when summer cicada concerts with the deafening volume of an airport disturb sleep and concentration.39 However, the sense of mystery associated with bug world, Kellert elaborates, can be a basis of curiosity, interest, and even wonder, even if the more typical reaction is one of disdain and fear of the unknown.40 The differences of humans and insects, Erich Hoyt and Ted Schultz agree, make the similarities seem all the more uncanny.41 Therefore, in light of these propositions, one way to understand bugs is to look to entomologists for guidance, whose observations over time have frequently bordered on philosophy, and to compare their findings to depictions of bug world in popular fiction. There is a yearning in humans to understand these creatures from inside their world, inside their bodies. Raffles understands this desire as being fuelled by two opposing mindsets, the rational and the fantastic.42 Hollingsworth confirms that where insects are concerned, we think with science and through romanticism.43 Raffles insists that to find insects, we have to find a way into their mode of existence.44 This means that we have to enter their world, as much as they come into ours, and confront a confusing alien-bug-machine triangle, where somewhere in the middle – or maybe on the outside – we find ourselves, who despite all our efforts may never truly comprehend where the one ends and the other begins. 4. Transformations When dealing with the insect world, we often transform it or alter ourselves. In stories we visualize the playground where humans face their fiercest and scariest enemy. There are two ways of dealing with bugs in fiction, one is in stories with actual bugs, and the other are metaphorical or symbolic bugs or bug worlds, which are the more interesting kind of the two. There are times when bug world only appears as an abstraction, most of all in film, and remains largely unnoticed by the audience. Humans ever feel ‘small’ in the world when facing grand structures in nature, architecture or art. To see our

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__________________________________________________________________ cities as bug world means to de-individualize people while at the same time realizing how we have become victims of our own superstructures. For example, a view from a high building renders people in the street trenches below into indistinguishable, ant-like dots. In architecture only few endeavours have been made so far to really copy insect hives or bodies in so called biomimicry; the hivelike Habitat 67 in Montreal, or Osaka’s National Museum of Art, which is shaped like an insect, are two examples. Constructions like these that openly relate to bug world are few though. As a result, bug world is more often found in our dealings with battlefields. From that perspective, human cities with their skyscrapers are nothing else but human hives and – increasingly so – embattled, apocalyptic spaces. Science fiction movies and TV shows regularly imitate bug world in alien landscapes and battlegrounds, on which humans scatter and hide like bugs amongst immense architecture and formations. One of the reasons why time and again New York and Tokyo have been used as playgrounds in disaster movies is their likeness to bug world. When man-made structures topple like sandcastles, thousands of people are flattened and crushed in an instant and tiny people hide in the dark caverns of subways and basements, we are strongly and uncomfortably reminded of life in the insect world. These images, especially since globally televised disasters and attacks, such as September 11 or the Japanese earthquake-tsunami, recollect our tininess and immense vulnerability in our own universe. When real insects do appear in films, size has become their major attraction nowadays. There is a lot of fear-mongering going on in films that contain actual bugs.45 We can barely fathom that something as tiny as an insect can scare or kill us, thus in many fantasy worlds in literature, film and game bugs are enlarged in order to play out conflicts on a much more ‘manageable’ scale, thereby turning human geography into bug world. However, while some fear factors are amplified in these giant bugs, most of all their alien shapes, several characteristics that scare us in the real world lose some of their power through size. What is lost in the transformation is the threat caused by their enormous numbers and the uncanny ability to ‘invade’ every inch of the human body the way only insects and not humans do. Gigantic bugs have a long tradition in Western cinema since the monster spider in The Thief of Bagdad (UK 1940).46 For the big screen, huge monsters are much more extravagant than small ones and are also much easier to kill. From a special effects perspective, this happens in a more satisfactory manner than the extermination of bee, fly and ant invasions in 1970s disaster movies. While the intelligent ants in Saul Bass’s cult movie Phase IV (USA/UK 1974) managed to cause goose bumps in its audience, today’s bugs usually are supersized, for if we can see them, we can kill them – and spectacularly so. The classic way of utilizing insect phobias in film found only a brief revival in Arachnophobia (USA 1990). But, no matter the size, in film, humans have always stood a chance against this enemy. In Peter Jackson’s King Kong, a film with a giant ape and dinosaurs, the most disturbing scene takes place in the ‘bug pit,’

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__________________________________________________________________ where Jackson, an experienced horror film maker, brilliantly amplifies our insect phobias. There is something incredibly terrifying about the slimy, toothy worms eating a man alive, the monstrous crickets clinging to people’s bodies, the silent attack and the number of assailants, but most of all the sucking slimy sound of the mud from whence they come. This is a landscape coming alive in ways that can traumatize a viewer for a lifetime. It brings up any uncomfortable insect encounter the viewer might ever have had in life. Fortunately, these bugs are conquered with machine guns in the end. Nobody would truly disagree that there is something ‘alien’ to bugs. From a human point of view, insects are aliens, denizens of another world, shadow opposites with whom we share planet Earth. But by nearly any objective measure, it is really we who are the aliens and they who are the Earth natives.47 Bugs or bug-like shapes are common tropes of terror in fantasy, science fiction and horror films.48 Fantastic genres have always benefitted from utilizing bug world. ‘Stories, movies, and myths in Western culture often represent evil, the enemy, or the alien in insect form.’49 This goes so far, as Hollingsworth points out, that writers have difficulties abstaining from the ‘entomological template’ when creating an alien order.50 Adam Roberts agrees that ‘insectoid’ has become such a ubiquitous way of representing alien life that it has become almost a cliché.’51 Some typical insect-like features of aliens in science fiction are exoskeletons, shiny bodies, huge eyes, and many arms, antennae, legs or spikes in places that viewers might not be comfortable with. Also, aliens do have insect-like bizarre breeding, feeding and nesting habits; they lay eggs inside prey, eat humans alive, or spin webs. Aliens often swarm and invade, move fast and quietly, walk on walls and cling to the roofs, emit strange hissing, clicking sounds, or use other inhuman forms of communication. They have a single-minded agenda which is survival at all costs. They live in hives and sometimes think and act as one, have no compassion for other creatures, can metamorphose and – most importantly – make humans scream. Audiences have always relished in the both gruesome and erotic delight of imagining themselves as victims to this otherness in fiction. Therefore, in many alien or monster stories humans suffer through the encounter as ‘prey.’ There is something oddly sexual about the consummation through a bug or insectoid creature in fiction, as acts of penetration and biting are closely related to rape and invasion, which means that in these stories the common perception of men as primary sexual predators is reversed and rather ample satisfaction found in the insect world of ‘femme fatales.’ There is a reason why Ridley Scott’s Alien (USA/UK 1979) still remains one of the most apocalyptic and frightening creatures in film history to this day and reminder of a fact: In the insect world the war of the sexes has already been won. Among bugs and aliens the most common ‘rapist’ is

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__________________________________________________________________ female. They are the dominating and most predatory gender, a piece of information that the professor in The Hellstrom Chronicle blatantly ignores when he insists on addressing the insect as ‘he.’ On the other hand, aforementioned real life bug invasions or infestation of human bodies and homes are translated into ‘human style’ assaults of rape and torture, both of individuals and civilizations, as well as raids on man-made places and structures in film. Although great efforts have been made to create countless other monsters and monstrous geographies in fiction, we always return to those that are scarier than anything one could ever imagine, the beings and places that are truly part of our world. 5. Case Study: The Hellstrom Chronicle and Microcosmos Very much like science fiction films, most documentaries present bugs as monsters by focussing on the cannibalistic and destructive attributes of this animal world and by utilising human bug phobias. In the Animal Planet series Bug Wars (2011-present), insects and spiders are showcased against each other like exotic creatures in the fighting game Tekken (1994-present). 3D images of insect bodies rotate on the screen before battle and combat scenes are accompanied by snarling and growling animal sounds. Nonetheless, compared to the average production, the two documentaries discussed here are somewhat untypical. Both films have won several awards in their time and have been repeatedly lauded for their outstanding insect cinematography. Noticeably, in the 1970s, The Hellstrom Chronicle was marketed as a science fiction movie at first.52 The film begins with volcanic eruptions and an epic introduction: ‘The Earth was created not with the gentle caress of love, but with the brutal violence of rape.’ From the start, the speaker, a fake professor by the name Nils Hellstrom, sets the booming and self-ironic tone for the following ninety minutes, alarming mankind to its most potent enemy, the insect. He questions, if we can ever have a comfortable relationship with bug world. What follows is a summary of why we are well advised to fear it. The film covers all the renowned frantic stereotypes about bugs, their ‘frightening tour de force of adaptability,’ their greed, programming, suicidal energy, efficiency, soulless perfection and their rumoured ability to survive a nuclear disaster. Hellstrom draws the viewer into disturbing battlefield scenes of ant wars, with close-ups of dismembered, but still moving corpses like in a zombie movie, and comments: ‘Like a battle of gruesome robots, once they begin they cannot stop.’ Hellstrom’s voice is needed to confirm that we are dealing with a most profound ‘computer-like’ opponent that probably cannot be conquered. In the 1970s computer technology was still in its virgin state but had already been established as threatening in previous films, such as 2001 – A Space Odyssey (UK/USA/FR 1968). Along with the eerie soundtrack, Hellstrom’s commentary, although rich in praise for insect skilfulness, gradually guides viewers toward fear and contempt. At the time of the film’s making, the ongoing

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__________________________________________________________________ hysteria about communist and fascist ideologies made findings about the hive mind of social insects into rather threatening concepts. The documentary, for example, inspired science fiction author Frank Herbert to write a book about a powerful and daunting human hive.53 Hellstrom’s look on bug world uncovers destruction, murder, war, and cruel, mindless bio-machines that he respectfully calls ‘miracles of engineering.’ The endlessly patronizing voice of the fake scientist, his data and matter-of-fact-like manner in presenting ‘truths’ with compelling metaphors convert our world into a threatening place to live in. He accepts ‘the insect’ as a worthy foe of humanity, and expects it to outsmart us in the long run. It is we who are the dwarves, he says, and he, the insect who is the giant. The speaker utters a lot of praise for this animal world; in fact, Hellstrom admits that the most beautiful image of harmony in all of nature’s symphony is the butterfly and flower. Still, when the ‘incomplete’ body of a caterpillar is observed, he implies that human ‘completeness’ is the worthier life form. At one point he goes as far as to remind us that people often perceive the ‘faces’ of bugs as evil. Hellstrom, whose own name implies the documentary’s motto, plays devil’s advocate throughout the film, drawing parallels between human and bug world at will. ‘Is it possible that these creatures are us, and in the eyes of the universe we are mere insects that can be destroyed at will?’ he asks. The film ends with a frightening sequence about driver ants that leave behind a barren, apocalyptic landscape. The dominion of insectoid features in science fiction film underlines how close Hellstrom’s notions follow those of common sense in Western culture, even if chances we might ever see a human-insect endgame are very slim at most. The French film Microcosmos clearly departs from the visual and verbal language of The Hellstrom Chronicle. Here the animals glow inside a sensuous, hidden world, and the camera flatters the animals which are incredibly beautiful ‘ornaments’ or artworks that shine in primary colours.54 With their skeletons on the outside, insects have the appearance, at least in the eyes of those who appreciate them, of intricate, miniature sculptures, sometimes more baroque than our wildest human imaginings. In contrast, our soft and squishy flesh hangs from internal skeletons.55 Billy Bud Vermillion concedes that all the abstraction and stylization in this film does not deny that ‘something of the weirdness of this world is actually out there.’ Every shot, he continues, is ‘absurdly beautiful,’ wanting us to think about the experience of time and physical reality at such a small scale.56 Bug lovers typically lower themselves into the insect realm; they speak of ‘disappearance’ inside and of transporting themselves into insect bodies, thus locating the ‘structure of the cosmos … in its most compact form’ in bug world.57 Berenbaum insists that for a complete understanding, we have to perceive the environment as bugs do,

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__________________________________________________________________ ‘and since they see, hear taste, touch, and smell things differently from the way humans do, much has to be left to the imagination.’58 In Insectopedia Raffles discovers these deeply immersive feelings in several scientists and artists; Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, for instance, who studied the deformations of leaf bugs near Chernobyl, and pioneer entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre. He also takes the reader deep into the transcendent effects of insect drawings by Flemish miniaturist Joris Hoefnagel in 1582: [Hesse-Honegger] ‘loses herself in the animal.’ At these moments, she says, she feels ‘very connected, extremely connected’; she feels a deep bond, as if, perhaps, she herself had once been such a creature – a leaf bug – ‘and had a body remembering.’59 ‘It’s a discovery of a new world,’ she says. ‘The more I look, the more I dive into this world, the more I can connect.’ … ‘I would like to go deep, deep, deep, deep …’60 Facedown on the ground, lens in hand, as close as his quarry allows, Fabre permits no detail to escape him, hour after hour, an eager giant spying on a Lilliputian world.61 Hoefnagel draws us into the tiny creatures’ scale. We become small, as if we have passed through his looking glass. Variations in the animals’ size – from the teeniest flies to the most monstrous spiders – are startling, frightening, but also exciting … This encounter wrought by the mimetic magic takes us further and further into a secret realm. Deeper and deeper, closer and closer, up against the limits of communication, up against the ineffable.62 Asher E. Treat explains that we are too big for our world and that the microscope ‘takes us down from our proud and lonely immensity and makes us, for a time, fellow citizens with the great majority of living things.’ The magic of the microscope, he continues, lies not in its capacity to make little creatures larger, but in making large ones smaller. We are invited, he concludes, to share with bugs a strange and beautiful world where ‘a meter amounts to a mile and yesterday was years ago.’63 In Microcosmos insect ‘technology’ is familiar and unthreatening. The day starts with the animals washing and cleaning their bodies and ‘faces,’ warming up their ‘engines’ in the sun and finally lifting off into a day’s work of eating, mating, and commuting. There are small social dramas happening: an ant is tending to a

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__________________________________________________________________ flock of leaf bugs and chases off a ladybug, which then goes on to mate with another ladybug. There is nothing predatory about the sex scenes of ladybugs and snails in this film. The makers of Microcosmos go out of their way to ‘disarm’ many of their predecessor’s most threatening imagery and allusions. For them ants are not the apocalyptic army of The Hellstrom Chronicle, they are the busybodies and construction workers of this world, who also look like tiny office workers viewed through the transparent window fronts of a skyscraper from afar. It feels ridiculous the way they hurry about their business, but we are reminded of how we dash around like ants in our own lives. There is familiarity and strangeness in every action we see. There is the story of the dung beetle, for instance, a sympathetic, hard worker who solves a very dire problem. Captivated by its struggle, we are suddenly reminded of where we are, when the camera zooms away from the action on the sunlit path and returns the beetle and its world to tininess. In Microcosmos there are no humans. Narration is reduced to less than a minute at the beginning and end, and the film enchants the viewer from the start with a haunting child’s voice in the title song. We feel as if we are entering a sundrenched and glowing fairytale world. The potentially disquieting scuttle of bugs is rendered less ‘itchy’ by their slow movements. The film’s lack of narrative avoids the major fear factors of The Hellstrom Chronicle, which are the professor’s statistics and data. In short, controlled ‘rationality’ is missing. What we get is not irrationality, but elevation. The film insists on suppressing alienation by overwhelming the senses with beauty, even when it is dealing with ultimate strangeness. Microcosmos uses the bug-lovers view of this world, as opposed to the 1970s film, which adopts the gaze of the godlike human. Hellstrom presents us with a very ‘physical’ interpretation of the insect world, but in Microcosmos the ‘voice of nature’ speaks for itself. Slow motion, time-lapse and other visual and audio effects compose a sentient nature in which all parts come together like a symphony, a place where trees and flowers are ‘holding hands’ and raindrops are ‘dancing’ on the surface of a pond. All of nature is part of this symphonic life cycle, including death, which does not enter the flow as a disruption or threat, but as a major player of this animate cosmos. Viewers are drawn into a timeless place where they can rediscover memories of a lost childhood or romance filled with the enticing ‘sounds of summer.’ While Hellstrom accuses bugs of having no faces, the French film goes out of its way to create them. Yet, like in the American documentary, Microcosmos is equally undecided if we are actually dealing with human or machine metaphors. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to speak of cyborgs and understand human-bug encounters as one more tapestry for rehearsing the clash of technology and nature in the human world. In The Hellstrom Chronicle we are repeatedly reminded of insects’ similarities to mindless machines and warned we might be overrun by an army of better equipped mechanical soldiers that kill without mercy by way of capabilities beyond our imagination. We are

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__________________________________________________________________ meant to believe that humans have plenty of other ways to kill, that killing in the human world actually has meaning. Both documentaries play on our imagination and capability for abstraction and work hard to position the viewer amongst the creatures they want us to understand. They are both equal projections into this animal realm. Each film has its own agenda, which rules out objectivity and portraits the insect world with forceful anthropomorphism. In Microcosmos it is humans who are invisible to bug world, and not the opposite. The soundtrack, however, revokes our presence. Yet in both films, humans remain at a distance. In The Hellstrom Chronicle we are appalled and rejected by bug world, in Microcosmos we remain awestruck tourists in a fairy universe, whose colours and blurry backgrounds appear as if through a lookingglass. This bug world has no depths, only foregrounds, which helps to keep away the human realm. The two documentaries rather complete than negate each other. In Microcosmos the story begins up in the clouds from where it descends into the microcosm below. The camera often cuts back into the sky to remind the viewer that this is not an educational, but spiritual journey. There are also inserted shots of landscapes from a human perspective, which are oddly static, with the insect world at a distance and acting as a mere soundscape to our world. This idea of worlds listening to each other from afar is reversed in the final moments of the film, when we hear church bells, a choir and a rooster announcing that another day for humans is beginning. One of the most magical moments in Microcosmos is the birth of a mosquito, which, according to The Hellstrom Chronicle, is humanity’s greatest insect enemy. In evolution’s greatest irony, one of the first creatures to appear would be the last to remain. For incubating in the darkened womb of prehistory, was a seed of grotesque variation, a foetus with the capability to dominate all. In fact, both films feature this birth of a mosquito; The Hellstrom Chronicle at the very beginning, and Microcosmos close to the end. While the American film finally freezes the image of the bug in an Alien-like pose of danger and weirdness, the French documentary constructs a feeling of utter innocence in this tiny being. The creature does not look humanoid at all, but it is human shaped. Unquestionably, this birthing scene is a thing of utter beauty, with the insect lit from behind and gracefully unfolding its ‘arms.’ If angels are born, this is what we would want it to look like. How does this breathtaking scene correspond with our knowledge of mosquitoes as mankind’s greatest plague?64 It does so simply by disarming a very grim fact of life. While The Hellstrom Chronicle begins its story with the birth of mankind’s greatest curse, Microcosmos ends with the delivery of an ‘angel of death.’ With discomfort we realize that we are staring into death’s face and that for one fleeting moment it is staring back. A line in the title credit of the

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__________________________________________________________________ film, ‘Open your eyes before you die,’ contains an appeal to accept this fact. There is a kind of beautiful and intended heaven and hell symbolism to these two documentaries, which makes them into exceptional snapshots of the same world. 6. The Final Transformation The two documentaries sum up basic feelings of Western cultures about bug world and uncover both threatening and mystical features. Usually, we do not really connect with bug world. In general it is only sound that links the universes, which are basically invisible to each other. Microcosmos explores this idea at length and with great beauty. Although all the bugs in this metaphorical cosmos are humanized, they still remain oddly alien, as the birth of the mosquito demonstrates. The Hellstrom Chronicle also anthropomorphises bugs, but focuses on scary human behaviour, invasion, rape, war, and murder. Here bugs personify the dark sides of the human soul within their own universe of inhumanness from which ‘spectres as limitless as the imagination of the insane’ emerge to infect ‘our’ world like viruses. According to Hellstrom, bugs are sometimes killed by other creatures in return acts of ‘revenge.’ Despite his fear mongering, Hellstrom towers over bug world in a semi-loving way, even posing like the godlike creator humans want to be oftentimes, marvelling at the elaborate joke he has played on the world he created. Hellstrom does not differentiate between humans and bugs by size. At one point he stares into the eyes of an enlarged insect model and faces an equal adversary, whose main power lies in sheer numbers. Despite the fantastic macro photography of the film, Hellstrom never appears to truly lower himself into this universe and to see it from a bug’s perspective. Both films keep humans at a distance, but all the analogies to our world in this microcosm make it hard not to acknowledge its inhabitants as our alter egos. This bears the question if there is actually a neutral visual or verbal language to talk about bug world at all. The Hellstrom Chronicle shows a clash of universes. Microcosmos flirts with a universe inside a universe, one world that vanishes inside another. As viewers we turn into Alice, shrinking into Wonderland, or into the children, walking through the wardrobe into Narnia. At the same time we are well aware that this is not a fantasy universe, but something that does really exist. However, Microcosmos avoids juxtaposing the two worlds in a way The Hellstrom Chronicle and countless science fiction films do, thereby avoiding the conflicts that arise when something ‘bug-like’ enters our realm. From this abstract perspective, bug world is enchanting. When the worlds do not actually touch, they can coexist, but only then. However, the moment the worlds touch in fiction, metaphor is also introduced to the plot. As a consequence, the human-bug conflict itself is seldom sole theme of a film outside the documentary genre. Bugs turn private and personal spaces into foreign and abhorred objects by inspiring fear, disgust, phobias, and helplessness. The everydayness of these encounters makes it even more gruesome when humans project their craving for

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__________________________________________________________________ bug extinction into interpersonal confrontations and use the same justifications, excuses and vocabulary for man-sized slaughter. Most of the time, we see the world of insects with human eyes and apply our laws, ethics, and standards. For grown-ups in the West, cultural understandings of ‘beauty’ and ‘nature’ normally sabotage positive feeling toward bug world. When we tend to over-interpret and humanize animal worlds, this does not bode well for bug world, because by comparison it is so alien. By tradition, wilderness or the natural world in general is supposed to be beautiful and romantic and has been depicted this way in art and photography. Few efforts are made to cast aside these concepts to see bug world as an ontological, self-guided, and closed system. We rather prefer to see bugs as monsters, cyborgs, and distorted incarnations of our distorted selves. ‘Hence, the insect metaphor is often used to make power relations visible and to establish or refine an ethical principle.’65 Hollingsworth writes that in order to figure something or someone as an insect, we must imagine ourselves in a position superior to it.66 When we evoke bug world as metaphor or negative association for our civilization, we usually de-individualize single beings and focus on humans as a group or mass and use social insects as primary means of comparison. This method of using insect metaphors has been applied through numerous genocides in the past, when one group of people invented undesirable characteristics in another to justify the purging of landscapes infested with pests (people) and meticulously wiped the dehumanized antagonists’ faces from the surface of the earth without second thoughts. Without a doubt, genocide can be called the most hideous human projection into bug world. While the insect escapes any racial stigmata, humans are unable to escape insect stigmata. Their strangeness has enabled humans to call other humans insects and to ‘exterminate,’ for instance, Jews like lice.67 One may concur that it is unfair to project the worst human characteristics into bug world, because we do have higher intelligence, we do have reason; our urges to kill are not instinct, but design. For bugs, too, our world can be heaven or hell, a rich source for food and shelter, or a trap, a place of fly-swatting hands and hard heels, where death can come in an instant. But there is hardly a way to avoid anthropomorphising bugs, especially when recent findings suggest that insects may in fact have ‘personalities.’68 What a fascinating concept, if it is true. Hollingsworth reminds us that when we figure ourselves as bees or flies, even though only as a matter of speaking, we have also, however implicitly, figured insects as human beings.69 Therefore, we should remember that we are as much monsters in their world as they are in ours, and there are always multiple perspectives on telling the story of life.

Notes 1 2

Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 199. Sarah Montin, in this volume.

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Raffles, Insectopedia, 304. Gilbert Waldbauer, What Good Are Bugs? Insects in the Web of Life (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard University Press, 2003), 1. 5 May R. Berenbaum, Bugs in the System: Insects and Their Impact on Human Affairs (n.c.: Helix Books, 1995), 6. 6 Phillip Weinstein, ‘Insects in Psychiatry,’ Insects.org (website), Cultural Entomology Digest, no. 2, originally published in print, February 1994, accessed May 1, 2012, http://www.insects.org/ced2/insects_psych.html. 7 Raffles, Insectopedia, 120. 8 Ibid., 57. 9 Weinstein, 1994. 10 Ibid. 11 May Berenbaum, ‘Insect Conservation and the Entomological Society of America,’ American Entomologist 54.2 (2008): 117-120, accessed May 20, 2012, http://www.entsoc.org/PDF/Pubs/Periodicals/AE/AE-2008/Summer/BerenbaumlSym9.pdf. 12 Raffles, Insectopedia, 308. 13 Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 108. 14 Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou, Microcosmos: Le peuple de l’herbe, 1996, film, Miramax. 15 Ed Spiegel and Walon Green, The Hellstrom Chronicle, 1971, film, Cinema 5. 16 John R. Wood and Heather Looy, ‘My Ant Is Coming to Dinner,’ Proteus: A Journal of Ideas 17.1 (2000): 54, accessed May 20, 2012, http://www.kingsu.ca/academic-departments/psychology/My%20Ant%20Is%20 Coming%20to%20Dinner.pdf (accessed May 20, 2012). 17 Dr. Steve Kellert, ‘Values and Perceptions,’ Insects.org (website), Cultural Entomology Digest 1 (1993), accessed May 1, 2012, http://www.insects.org/ced1/val_perc.html 18 Richard Coyne, The Tuning of Place (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2010), 206. 19 Sarah Montin, in this volume. 20 Berenbaum, ‘Insect Conservation and the Entomological Society of America,’ 246-247. 21 Raffles, Insectopedia, 44. 22 Berenbaum, ‘Insect Conservation and the Entomological Society of America,’ 194. 23 Wood and Looy, The Hellstrom Chronicle, 54. 24 Louise Gray, ‘Teachers who are Afraid of Insects Stop Children Learning about the Natural World,’ The Telegraph, August 07, 2010, accessed May 1, 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/7930611/Teachers-who-areafraid-of-insects-stop-children-learning-about-natural-world.html. 4

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Wood and Looy, The Hellstrom Chronicle, 54. Kellert, ‘Values and Perceptions’. 27 Berenbaum, ‘Insect Conservation and the Entomological Society of America,’ 301-302. 28 Raffles, Insectopedia, 42. 29 Christopher Hollingsworth, Poetics of the Hive: The Insect Metaphor in Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001), 203. 30 Ibid., 195. 31 Ibid. 32 Canetti in Raffles, Insectopedia, 121. 33 Raffles, Insectopedia, 44. 34 Ibid., 12. 35 I recommend the following article for further reading: Dr Charles Hogue, ‘Cultural Entomology by Dr Charles Hogue,’ Insects.org (website), originally published in print in Annual Review of Entomology 32 (1987), accessed May 1, 2012, http://www.insects.org/ced1/cult_ent.html. 36 Hollingsworth, Poetics of the Hive, xii. 37 Kellert, ‘Values and Perceptions’. 38 Robert Evans Snodgrass, ‘The Double Life,’ in Insect Lives: Stories of Mystery and Romance from a Hidden World, edited by Erich Hoyt and Ted Schultz (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999), 241. 39 Berenbaum, ‘Insect Conservation and the Entomological Society of America,’ 46. 40 Kellert, ‘Values and Perceptions’. 41 Erich Hoyt and Ted Schultz (eds.), Insect Lives: Stories of Mystery and Romance from a Hidden World (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999), 2. 42 Raffles, Insectopedia, 310. 43 Hollingsworth, Poetics of the Hive, 64. 44 Raffles, Insectopedia, 381. 45 Berenbaum, ‘Insect Conservation and the Entomological Society of America’. 46 The list includes Them! (USA 1954), Tarantula (USA 1955), The Incredible Shrinking Man (USA 1957), Starship Troopers (USA 1997), Eight Legged Freaks (USA 2002), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (UK/USA 2002), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (NZ 2003) and many others. 47 Hoyt and Schultz, Insect Lives, 1. 48 For instance The Fly (USA 1986), Men in Black (USA 1997), Lost in Space (USA 1998), The Mummy (USA1999), King Kong (NZ/USA 2005), The Mist (USA 2007) and countless others. 49 Wood and Looy, The Hellstrom Chronicle, 55. 50 Hollingsworth, Poetics of the Hive, 183. 26

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Adam Roberts, ‘Introduction,’ Hellstrom’s Hive, by Frank Herbert, London: Orion, (1972) 2011 (Introduction), 5. 52 With the release of the film on DVD forty years later, a reviewer discovered what an impression it had had on him, as some images had seared themselves on his cortex for the intervening forty years since he had seen the film for the first and only time as a child. Paul Di Filippo, ‘The Hellstrom Chronicle,’ The Barnes and Noble Review, January 23, 2012, accessed April 19, 2012, http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/In-the-Margin/The-HellstromChronicle/ba-p/6763. 53 Frank Herbert, Hellstrom’s Hive, London: Orion, 1972. 54 Hoyt and Schultz, Insect Lives, 1. 55 Ibid. 56 Billy Bud Vermillion, ‘The ‘Wondrous Truth’ of Microcosmos.’16:9 in English 5.11 (.2007), accessed May 1, 2012, http://www.16-9.dk/2007-04/side11_inenglish.htm. 57 Raffles, Insectopedia, 125. 58 Berenbaum, ‘Insect Conservation and the Entomological Society of America,’ 42-43. 59 Raffles, Insectopedia, 15. 60 Ibid., 19. 61 Ibid., 53. 62 Raffles, Insectopedia, 137. 63 Asher E. Treat, ‘An Earful of Mites,’ in Insect Lives: Stories of Mystery and Romance from a Hidden World, edited by Erich Hoyt and Ted Schultz, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999, 268. 64 Berenbaum, ‘Insect Conservation and the Entomological Society of America,’ 219. 65 Hollingsworth, Poetics of the Hive, xix. 66 Ibid., 196 67 Raffles, Insectopedia, 155. 68 Olivia Solon, ‘Insects may have ‘personalities’ like humans,’ Wired UK, March 9, 2012, accessed June 5, 2012, http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-03/09/insects-have-personalities. 69 Hollingsworth, Poetics of the Hive, 190.

Bibliography Berenbaum, May R. Bugs in the System: Insects and Their Impact on Human Affairs. N.c.: Helix Books, 1995.

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__________________________________________________________________ Berenbaum, May. ‘Insect Conservation and the Entomological Society of America.’ American Entomologist 54. 2 (2008): 117-120. http://www.entsoc.org/PDF/Pubs/Periodicals/AE/AE-2008/Summer/BerenbaumlSym9.pdf. Coyne, Richard. The Tuning of Place. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2010. Di Filippo, Paul. ‘The Hellstrom Chronicle.’ The Barnes and Noble Review. January 23, 2012. Accessed April 19, 2012. http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/In-the-Margin/The-HellstromChronicle/ba-p/6763 Gray, Louise. ‘Teachers who are Afraid of Insects Stop Children Learning about the Natural World.’ The Telegraph, August 07, 2010. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/7930611/Teachers-who-areafraid-of-insects-stop-children-learning-about-natural-world.html. Herbert, Frank. Hellstrom’s Hive. London: Orion, 1972. Hogue, Dr. Charles. ‘Cultural Entomology by Dr Charles Hogue.’ Insects.org (website). Originally published in print in Annual Review of Entomology 32 (1987). http://www.insects.org/ced1/cult_ent.html (accessed May 1, 2012). Hollingsworth, Christopher. Poetics of the Hive: The Insect Metaphor in Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001. Hoyt, Erich, and Ted Schultz (eds.). Insect Lives: Stories of Mystery and Romance from a Hidden World. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999. Kellert, Dr. Steve. ‘Values and Perceptions.’ Insects.org (website). Cultural Entomology Digest. No. 1. Originally published in print, June 1993. Accessed May 1, 2012. http://www.insects.org/ced1/val_perc.html. Nuridsany, Claude, and Marie Pérennou. Microcosmos: Le peuple de l’herbe. 1996. Film. Miramax. Raffles, Hugh. Insectopedia. New York: Vintage Books, 2010.

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__________________________________________________________________ Snodgrass, Robert Evans. ‘The Double Life.’ In Insect Lives: Stories of Mystery and Romance from a Hidden World, edited by Erich Hoyt and Ted Schultz. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999, 241-246. Solon, Olivia. ‘Insects may have ‘personalities’ like humans.’ Wired UK, March 9, 2012. http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-03/09/insects-have-personalities (accessed June 5, 2012). Spiegel, Ed, and Walon Green. The Hellstrom Chronicle. 1971. Film. Cinema 5. Thomas, Lewis. The Lives of a Cell. New York: Bantam Books, 1984. Treat, Asher E. ‘An Earful of Mites.’ In Insect Lives: Stories of Mystery and Romance from a Hidden World, edited by Erich Hoyt and Ted Schultz. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999, 267-279. Vermillion, Billy Bud. ‘The ‘Wondrous Truth’ of Microcosmos.’16:9 in English 5. 11 (2007). Accessed May 1, 2012. http://www.16-9.dk/2007-04/side11_inenglish.htm. Waldbauer, Gilbert. What Good Are Bugs? Insects in the Web of Life. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard University Press, 2003. Weinstein, Phillip. ‘Insects in Psychiatry.’ Insects.org (website). Cultural Entomology Digest 2 (1994). Accessed May 1, 2012. http://www.insects.org/ced2/insects_psych.html. Wood, John R. and Heather Looy, ‘My Ant Is Coming to Dinner.’ Proteus: A Journal of Ideas 17.1 (2000): 52-56. Accessed May 20, 2012. http://www.kingsu.ca/academic-departments/psychology/My%20Ant%20Is%20 Coming%20to%20Dinner.pdf. Petra Rehling is Associate Professor in the English Department at Da-yeh University, Taiwan. She works in media and cultural studies and has published a book on Hong Kong cinema as well as articles on television, fantasy, science fiction, and the Harry Potter phenomenon.

Monstrous Breeding Grounds: Creation, Isolation and Suffering at Noble’s Island, Hailsham and Rankstadt Evelyn Tsitas Abstract Monsters cannot be created under the gaze of society. In fiction, subverting the natural law by creating clones and hybrids is done in secret. The monstrous locations explored in this chapter range from an uncharted island, an isolated town in the wilderness, and a secluded country house. What they have in common is that they are the breeding grounds for monsters. In Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro’s clones, raised in the isolated Hailsham boarding school, horrify because of their function as live organ donors. The species ambiguities played out in the humananimal hybrids in The Island of Doctor Moreau, by H.G. Wells and Lives of the Monster Dogs, by Kirsten Bakis, have their beginnings in unvisited locations where their violent ‘births’ go without witness by those who would judge. Moreau’s Noble’s Island ‘the only island known to exist in the region’; and the eponymous Rankstadt ‘on an obscure creek high in the Canadian wilderness, at a site chosen for its utter isolation’ are sites of violence, restriction and incarceration. Ironically, these rugged places of ‘untamed beauty’ provide a stark contrast to the work of Moreau and Rank, who tamper with nature, making over animals into human form. Historically ‘the other’ has helped define oneself within society. Gender theorist Judith Halbertsam says the Gothic monster represents many answers to questions of who must be removed from the community at large. Hailsham boarding school, while appearing to be a nurturing site, serves the monstrous purpose of separating the clones from society so they can be psychologically primed as spare parts factories. Monstrous geographies are not stable ones. The hybrids they spawned retaliate and destroy their breeding grounds. Only the clone, the weak copy of the human, is forever tied psychologically to the monstrous locale that provided its group identify. Key Words: Human-animal hybrids, clones, islands, wilderness, monstrous birth. ***** 1. Introduction The places where monsters dwell has always been in the darkness of the human imagination; dragons in caves, unimaginable creatures at the edge of the world, terrors that lurk in places where we should not go; these are all spaces where monsters live. This chapter explores where a particular sort of monster is first created. These monsters are scientifically created human monsters in fiction, be they clones or human-animal hybrids. An examination of the following novels explores

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how these monsters have been created by scientists, and how this distinguishes them from those conjured by supernatural means, as told by folklore; or by the Gods, as with mythology. The secret locations chosen as the birth place for these creatures, part human, part animal, or human clone, are specifically selected for their isolation and serve as a particular incubator for the monster. It is a vital first stage in the scientifically created human monster’s lifecycle that they must begin their short and painful journey through an unnatural birth that involves both scientific assistance and surveillance to monitor their evolution to almost human. Of particular interest is the relationship between the monster and the monstrous locations in which they were created and raised. These will be explored in the following: the secret laboratory in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), uncharted Noble’s Island in H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), the isolated town of Rankstadt in Kirsten Bakis’ Lives of the Monster Dogs (1997) and Hailsham boarding school in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). These dystopian spaces cast their shadow over the monstrous work carried out in their midst. Yet they are imaginary spaces, only charged with power when monstrous creation is taking place. These monstrous locations are rendered benign and disappear from public view when the monstrous inhabitants leave. No one can find the ruins of Rankstadt, despite a media search; Kathy H can no longer find Hailsham as it is lost in the past; and after fleeing Nobel’s Island, Prendick refuses to talk about his experience or where he has been after he realizes that the captain of the ship that rescues him from sea assumed the ‘solitude and danger’ of being left on Noble’s Island had caused him to imagine the monsters there. 2. Monsters Monsters have always been that which is deemed unnatural, reviled, abject, suspect, different, the other. Monsters are in turn shunned, cast out, relegated to the outskirts of society or dragged back in as spectacle. The history of literature features monsters that scare the reader, shock our sense of propriety and blur the biological distinctions between human and ‘other’. Literary monsters can take many forms. The first is from the mystical to the grotesque, and such monsters reflect aspects of the human subconscious that we would hope to deny or escape. According to film theorist Barbara Creed, some of the most compelling images of horror in modern cinema are ‘were creatures’ whose bodies signify a collapse of the boundaries between human and animal.1 History provides many examples of satyrs, fauns, dragons, griffins and other mythical hybrids, which blend the body parts, and attributes of humans and animals across a fantastical spectrum. These creatures represent a surreal bestiary of the human imagination.

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__________________________________________________________________ The scientifically created hybrid is a monster spawned in the dawn of the industrial age. First described by novelist Mary Shelley in her 1818 novel Frankenstein, her creature became the archetype for the industrial age monster. In this chapter, we will trace the influence of Shelley’s monster on more recent examples of the monster that results from a hybrid construction of human and animal parts that has been scientifically constructed. We will also look at clones; these are human monsters created by genetic engineering. In his foreword to Speaking of Monsters: A Teratological Anthology, David J. Skal reminds us that monsters demonstrate things, usually of a cautionary kind. Originally the province of teratology, (from the Greek word teras, meaning monster) Skal outlines how from antiquity on, anomalous births were considered ominous, portents of disease and disaster. The births examined in this chapter are indeed ominous, yet the monstrosity rests on those who have created these creatures, these scientifically created human monsters and hybrids. As Skal argues, ‘monsters, ultimately, are supreme paradoxes, dreamlike constructions that attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable…both living and dead, human and animal…’.2 Historically ‘the other’ has helped define oneself within society. Gender theorist Judith Halbertsam says the Gothic monster represents many answers to questions of who must be removed from the community at large.3 In Never Let Me Go, Hailsham, while appearing to be a nurturing site as a boarding school in fact serves the monstrous purpose of separating the clones from society so they can be psychologically primed for their destiny as live organ donors. For Ishiguro’s clones, a closeted life at the Hailsham boarding house shelters them until adolescence. But while nurturing them, it also serves a function for society by keeping them away from view. A Hailsham guardian explains to Kathy H: The world didn’t want to be reminded how the donation programme really worked. They didn’t want to think about you students, or about the conditions you were brought up in. In other words, my dears, they wanted you back in the shadows.4 3. Monstrous Spaces Petra Rehling observes that ‘our mixed relationships to insects also mirror our ambivalent feelings about monsters. In many ways monsters are perceived as superior to men.’5 In Never Let Me Go, the clones at Hailsham are feared as being like spiders by the visiting guest, Madame: As she came to a halt, I glanced quickly at her face – as did the others, I’m sure. And I can still see it now, the shudder she seemed to be repressing, the real dread that one of us would accidently brush against her. And though we all felt it; it was like

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we’d walked from the sun right into a chilly shade. Ruth had been right: Madame was afraid of us. But she was afraid of us in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders. We hadn’t been ready for that. It never occurred to us to wonder how we would feel, being seen like that, being the spiders.6 The clone’s movements around the boarding house are also bug like – they find places to hide in the corners, the shadows, watching, looking in or out, and always being observed. Protagonist Kathy H recalls: If, say, you were somewhere you shouldn’t be in the main house or in the grounds, and you heard a guardian coming, you could often hide somewhere. Hailsham was full of hiding places, indoors and out: cupboards, nooks, bushes, hedges.7 It is as though Hailsham acts as an enormous observational bell jar, and the clones are either fragile, exotic insects ready to be pinned down on a board or contaminated, scurrying intruders who have invaded the space. Rehling notes ‘the interesting thing about bugs us that they can virtually change any space into a ‘monstrous geography’ for humans’. Christina Flotmann examines how the home and the ideologies adhering to it reinforce or even partly produce monstrosity.8 There is much resonance with Flotmann’s arguments in my chapter, especially in the analysis that in these fictions; the home functioned as a site of power and prison at the same time. Nobel’s Island is literally a prison. It is a place where Moreau escapes after being driven out from England because of revelations in the press about the methods of his research. For Prendick, who is stranded on the island, the place is entirely monstrous and filled with danger; from lush and demanding forest filled with disturbing ‘bestial-looking creatures’, to the safety of the ‘enclosure’ where the Beast Men can be kept out: The thought of return to that pain-haunted refuge was extremely disagreeable, but still more so was the idea of being overtaken in the open darkness, and all that darkness might conceal.9 Prendick, as the uninvited outsider, is shown where he will sleep – and is told ‘our little establishment here contains a secret or so, is a kind of Bluebeard’s Chamber, in fact.’10 The main entrance is ‘framed in iron and locked’ and inside the apartment where he will sleep, Prendick notes the inner door would be locked ‘for fear of accidents’11 As Prendick observes with prescient foreboding, ‘what could it mean? A locked enclosure on a lonely island, a notorious vivisector, and these crippled and distorted men?’12

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__________________________________________________________________ 4. Background of Theory Frankenstein was the first Gothic horror novel to introduce the scientifically created human monster. While the natural breeding ground for monsters may be assumed to be science fiction, the scientifically created human monster in fact resides in Gothic fiction, a genre that has been defined according to its interest in transgression and decay and its commitment to exploring the aesthetics of fear.13 Lucie Armitt argues that critics widely regarded Frankenstein as an early example of cross-fertilization between the Gothic romance and science fiction, and the roots of the science fiction genre are within the Gothic tradition.14 The Gothic novel began to emerge in the eighteenth century when the forces of industrialization were transforming the structures of society and the very idea of what it meant to be human against the groundswell of rapid technological change. According to Gothic theorist David Punter, discoveries in the sciences only served to aggravate a sense of alienation and further disturb notions of human identity.15 There is a strong parallel between the last half of the eighteenth century with its technological changes, and the early twenty first century, where huge advances have occurred in biotechnology.16 Just as in Mary Shelley’s age, there is now an enormous debate in society about what these technological leaps have meant for humanity. This prospect of the end of the human race through scientific, rather than divine intervention is one that fictions such as the Gothic confront. The power of Gothic horror stems from the manner in which it helps us address and disguise some of our most important desires, quandaries, and sources of anxiety, from the internal and mental to the widely social and cultural.17 Halberstam argues that while studying science can tell us about our dreams of transformation, studying horror can lead us to contemplate our fears and misgivings about the human, the posthuman, the unhuman and the deliberately non-human.18 Feminist literary critics within the past two decades have explored the Gothic as female, and focused on the monstrous body. Anne K. Mellor’s psychoanalytic perspective (Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters), Barbara Creed’s theories on the primal uncanny and monsters (Phallic Panic Film: Horror and the Primal Uncanny) and Feminist philosopher Elaine. L Graham (Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture), provide an insight into what happens when science takes over from the role of the maternal. 5. Case Studies Shelley captured the zeitgeist of the early nineteenth century when scientific discovery gave rise to the fear that we play God with nature at our own peril. Her scientist, Dr Victor Frankenstein, bypassed the laws of nature and role of woman

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as creator of life when he animated a creature made from the body parts of animals and the dead and then abandoned it to a hostile world with tragic consequences. In The Island of Doctor Moreau, science fiction novelist H.G. Wells portrays a scientist capable of using scientific tools to attain godlike powers of creation. Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein was a scientist obsessed with unnatural objectives. In the same way, Dr Moreau is obsessed by the task of blurring the boundaries between human and animal species, transforming animals into Beast Men using vivisection and chemical and mental adjustments. The 21st century incarnations of Frankenstein’s creature and Moreau’s Beast Men are Ishiguro’s clones and Bakis’ human-animal hybrids. In Lives of the Monster Dogs, elegant and intelligent dogs with great wealth, artificial voice boxes and prosthetic hands arrive in New York from Rankstadt, an isolated town in the Canadian wilderness and try to integrate into human society. Never Let Me Go picks up the Frankenstein theme and focuses on human reproduction. Ishiguro writes about children who are born and bred with a specific purpose: to be live organ donors. These children are raised at the isolated boarding school Hailsham and socially conditioned to accept their fates to the extent that they act as carers for each other throughout the deadly surgical procedures. Sarah Franklin dubs these creatures ‘transbiological’. Franklin explains that transbiology – biology that is not only born and bred, or born and made, but made and born – is indeed today more the norm than the exception.19 6. Origins: The Workshop of Filthy Creation Frankenstein draws on the long tradition linking monstrosity with maternal aberration20 and the creature’s designation as monster goes back to the mortuary graveyard, where Dr Victor Frankenstein ‘collected bones from charnel-houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame.’21 While the creature is the result of Frankenstein’s desire to create a new species who would ‘bless’ him as its creator and source, he is instantly repelled by the ugly creature, and then frightened by it. Like a fearful parent rejecting a deformed child, he turns away from his creation: ‘Now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.’22 Mellor says Frankenstein ‘transgressed against nature’23 when he brought his creature to life in a secret laboratory from illegally obtained body parts of dead humans and animals. Graham says it was ‘being formed from fragments of morality’ and emerging from the world of death that is the key to the creature’s monstrosity.24 Mellor argues that Victor Frankenstein’s unhealthy and obsessive imagination at the moment of conception could only result in creating a monster. She says that by originating a new life form quickly, by chemical means, he reverses the evolutionary ladder described by Darwin.25 Shelley’s actual description about how the scientist animates the creature reveals little about the scientific process,

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__________________________________________________________________ concentrating instead on Frankenstein’s lonely endeavour. Where did he ‘pursue nature to her hiding places?’ Where did he do his ‘secret toil’? In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all other apartments by the gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation.26 In Frankenstein, The Island of Doctor Moreau and Lives of the Monster Dogs, the secret laboratory serves as an incubator for monsters. In Horror and the Horror Film, Bruce F. Kawin argues that ‘the lab itself links the scientist with the sorcerer and alchemist and is a place to meddle with nature, which is dangerous.’27 Indeed, the three doctors who create monsters in these novels; Dr Frankenstein, Dr Moreau and Dr Rank, see themselves as the progenitors of a new race of beings. In Never Let Me Go, a modern retelling of the scientifically created human monster, we have carer Kathy H willingly going to her destiny. Because of her status as an outsider, her death and those of the other monster-clones is justified by society. Hailsham guardian Miss Emily tells Kathy H and Tommy when they confront her about the possibility deferring their donations by a few years: How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days? There was no going back. However uncomfortable people were about your existence, their overwhelming concern was that their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not die from cancer, motor neuron disease, heart disease.28 For the clones, no matter how dire their fates, they are reminded that society needs them and their sacrifice. Dr Rank (with a moniker derived from Frankenstein) wanted to create a perfect army of dog soldiers; ‘its members fierce, numerous, and disposable (for more could always be made), capable of remorseless killing and of loyalty stronger than their instincts for self-preservation.’29 The monster dogs would have enhanced intelligence, intricate mechanical hands grafted onto their forelegs and speechsynthesizing apparatus implanted into their throats. Creed says that monsters have embodied particularly modern fears and anxieties arising from Darwinian debates over human nature, Freudian theories of civilization and repression, and the results of scientific experimentation such as artificial birth and cloning.30 In The Island of Doctor Moreau, the Beast Men provide us with a human-animal hybrid monster. Unlike the werewolf in film, which Creed says almost always represents the man about to metamorphose as a

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helpless victim of his own body,31 Moreau’s Beast Men are animals who have been surgically altered to be men. Dr Moreau explains to Prendick that he has created these Beast Men through vivisection and altering chemical reactions and mental structures. He did so in the knowledge no one would be censuring him as in London. He tells Prendick: It is nearly eleven years since we came here, I and Montgomery and six Kanakas. I remember the green stillness of the island and the empty ocean about us as though it was yesterday. The place seemed waiting for me.32 The place is Noble’s Island, where Prendick, the shipwreck survivor finds himself. He very soon encounters men who unnerve him with their strange gait, ugliness and oddity. Prendick’s fear and confusion points to the abject nature of the creatures. He discovers these are the ‘Beast Men’ created by Dr Moreau. These monsters are human-animal hybrid creatures that present a total challenge the natural order and reproduction of the species and their reproduction. Science fiction author Margaret Atwood says that these monsters were produced ‘by the very agency that was seen by many in late Victorian England as the bright, new, shiny salvation of mankind: science.’33 It is ironic that an isolated island of natural beauty can also serve as an incubator for Dr Moreau’s experiments in making a new species. The island also becomes Dr Moreau’s training ground in making the Beast Men human. Atwood observes that Noble’s Island ‘is both semi-alive and female, but not in a pleasant way’ and the locale becomes the site of a moral breakdown that is specifically sexual when the Beast Men lose their humanity.34 Graham says that one way of defining what was quintessentially human was to contrast it with bestiality and hybrid creatures of mythology represented a sexualized nature ‘which rampaged through the ordered institutions of city and family.’35 Lives of the Monster Dogs explores the demise of the artificially created monster dogs; highly intelligent dogs with artificial voice boxes and prosthetic hands, whose tragedy is longing to be human while trapped in an existence that confines them to being neither truly animal nor human. They believe they are inflicted with a terrible illness, which will turn them back into dogs. Unlike Frankenstein’s creature, Ishiguro’s clones or Moreau’s Beast Men, the monster dogs are accepted by society. After killing their masters and destroying their home in the Canadian wilderness, the monster dogs take their newfound great wealth to New York, where they become celebrities. As Graham observes, for many cultures, the existence of any living thing that seemed to transgress the laws of nature was an object of curiosity.36

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__________________________________________________________________ Ludwig von Sacher, unique among the monsters in this chapter in that he has a full name, is a dog scholar who is compelled to tell the story of the monster dog’s creation to student journalist Clea Pira before he loses the power to communicate. He tells her how Dr Augustus Rank secretly created the monster dogs as perfect soldiers for the world’s strongest army. The scientist ‘discovered his passion for dismembering living creatures about three months after his mother’s death in 1875, when he was eleven years old.’37 Rank fled Russia, where his work began, when he feared his research would be derailed. In the Canadian wilderness he founded Rankstadt, where he could create his great dog army. Ludwig recalls: The town was not idyllic. It merely stayed away from some specific evils, while other, different evils were enacted there in the laboratory and the operating theatre. There is no living dog who does not remember those rooms with deep horror.38 What provides the monster dogs with their freedom is the common bond forged through the communal knowledge of their painful births. Graham says that it is recognition that humanity has a shared origin in birth, which necessarily embeds us in common experiences, both biological and social, and commits all living beings to sociability, interdependence and embodiment.39 In Never Let Me Go, the clones are raised at isolated boarding houses and socially conditioned to accept their fates to the extent that they act as carers for each other throughout the deadly surgical procedures. Ishiguro’s clones are also motherless. Although they are denied a biological identity, the clones have a social identity forged through a childhood at Hailsham, which the other monsters lack.40 By giving them an idyllic time at Hailsham, Ishiguro has provided his clones with something very human: a childhood despite their inhuman provenance. This is part of the monster’s evolution, because it provides a sense of belonging and a past, and is what sustains the clones. Miss Emily tells the clones what Hailsham meant: ‘We sheltered you during those years, and we gave you your childhoods.’41 While Dr Frankenstein creates his monster from the parts of dead bodies, Ishiguro’s clones are constructed from those outside society. In this contemporary version of Frankenstein’s creature, Ishiguro turns to modern science to create his monsters. While IVF technology has decoupled reproduction from the sexual act, cloning goes one step further by obviating the need for the coming together of egg and sperm and taking us from the paradigm of sexual reproduction to the paradigm of twins.42 In Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro uses the Gothic motif of the double by creating a world of clones. The double (also referred to as the ‘Doppelganger’) constitutes a recurrent trope in Gothic and horror literature, ultimately coming from the anthropological belief in the innate duality in man.43

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The clones do not rebel at being used as live organ donors because they have been trained to accept authority and have been ‘educated’ at Hailsham to embrace their fate. At Hailsham the power of the group reigns supreme and students are very careful to watch each other and make sure they conform to the group in every way possible. Hailsham is like an old fashioned orphanage in that the clones have no parents or family, and the guardians watch over them. Even after they leave for the cottages, the clones observe social rituals such as buying each other birthday cards, for they belong to each other, and this bond gives them an identity and a buffer from the outside world. Unlike the monster dogs who grew up knowing about their creation as it formed the town’s history and collective memory, the clones feel their origins are a mystery. At Hailsham the students are not told of the pain they will endure after donations, but even when Kathy H and the others realize the full extent of being a live organ donor, their response is not to rage against the system and refuse to participate, but hatch a romantic plan to ask for a deferral from the donations if they can prove they are really in love. What is surprising is that even after they are told that deferrals are only a myth, the clones choose to accept their fate. Critic William Patrick Day explains that the protagonist in the Gothic Fantasy is ‘victimized, isolated, in a sado-masochistic relationship both to the other and to itself.’44 In such a definition of the Gothic protagonist, it is quite acceptable for Kathy H not to fight against her fate. The clones, unlike the Beast Men or the monster dogs, do not destroy their birthplace. They long for Hailsham, as diaspora long for home in exile. Flotmann discusses how in Victorian sensation novels, the concept of a home is not necessarily connected to a specific place, but explicitly to a certain ideal. Ishiguro uses Hailsham as a place of control for the clones, providing the isolated place where the clones are raised and conditioned for their monstrous fates. In the same way, the clones can never return to Hailsham as it no longer exists. Lost in the miasma of memory, its relevance to the clones is in providing a locus of group identity. The clones do not rebel against their fates as Hailsham has provided a monstrous space where they were socially isolated and raised to be fearful of leaving the safety of the group. The menacing woods outside the grounds of Hailsham serve to protect them from the outside gaze, and make sure their focus is always internalized; the group supporting each other and learning and sharing its identity together. For the clones to be allowed to be raised as individuals would be to go against the nature of their creation. The clones have been bred to be used by other humans, organ by organ, until, ultimately, it is their hearts that they sacrifice to the greater human good. By having to rely on each other in Hailsham, as they have no family or genetic identity, the clones are from the beginning conditioned for their future roles as carers, where they have to take post-operative care of each other throughout donations. Even in their most vulnerable, they are distanced from ‘ordinary’ humans who do not wish to be reminded of the systematic slaughter of

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__________________________________________________________________ the clones in their midst. The answer as to why the clones allow themselves to be used in this way lies in the power of surveillance at Hailsham. 7. Surveillance Hailsham, as a monstrous space, also serves as panopticon, where the clones are watched and punished if they do not adhere to the rules of conduct designed to shape their personalities along with work being done to keep their bodies and vital organs in perfect health. The theories of surveillance proposed by David Lyon in his books, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surviellance Society and Surviellance Studies: An Overview are useful in understanding why the clones in Never Let Me Go do not rebel against their fate, and why the isolation and surveillance of Hailsham is so crucial in cementing their acquiescence.45 In his 1970 book, Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault wrote of surveillance with a particular focus on prisons and social hierarchy.46 Lyon maintains that Foucault’s work popularized the idea of the panopticon as the epitome of social control in modern times, with subjects constantly participating in their own surveillance. With the panopticon, power is extended effortlessly as it produces subjects with desires to improve their inner lives.47 In this way, Rankstadt, Hailsham and Nobel’s Island are used as panoptic devices of social control. In Lyon’s theories on surveillance we are all in a sense implicated in surveillance, both as watchers and as the watched.48 With surveillance, Lyon argues, some purpose is present, which may appear on a continuum between care and control. Moreover, in order to work, many surveillance processes depend on the involvement, witting or not, of those who are watched. Here, ‘such persons are not merely subject to surveillance, but subjects of surveillance.’49 Flotmann explains that from a Victorian point of view monstrosity was manmade and arose whenever people did not act according to the ideological rules which held society together. In The Island of Doctor Moreau, the rules are laid down specifically by Dr Moreau, in order to make sure that the Beast Men to not revert to their ‘animal natures’. These rules, about how not to act like animals, are disseminated by the Sayers of the Law and to break the law is to risk punishment and ‘none escape’. ‘For everyone the want that is bad,’ said the grey Sayer of the Law. ‘What you will want, we do not know. We shall know. Some want to follow things that move, to watch and slink and wait and spring, to kill and bite, bite deep and rich, sucking the blood…It is bad. ‘Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men? Not to eat Flesh or Fish; that is the Law. Are We Not Men?’50

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Foucault observes that the exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation.51At Hailsham, the clones are always watched. Even in the garden ‘you could clearly be seen from the house.’52 As Foucault observes, ‘the perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly.’53 This insularity forces the clones to fiercely bond and identify with the group, and explains the popularity of the regular Sales, where outside van drivers deliver the flotsam of discarded urban childhood detritus from the outside. These Sales are eagerly anticipated, and important for the clones, because ‘we got hold of things from outside’.54 Lyon says a crucial definition of surveillance is that it is always hinged to a specific purpose, but, at what point, Lyon asks, does using surveillance technologies to watch over children become an acceptable form of control?55 In translating Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Alan Sheridan discusses the complexity of the terms used by the French philosopher. The noun ‘surveillance’ has a restricted and technical use, related to the control of others. Jeremy Bentham used the term ‘inspect’, ‘supervise’ or ‘observe’ and each of these words has different associates with varying intonations around aggression. Lyon argues that some basic ambiguities of surveillance may be traced above all to the split that proceeded from Bentham’s panoptic proposals, between ‘control’ and ‘care’ motifs. Bentham’s late eighteenth-century design for a panoptic prison relied on an elaborate apparatus of blinds on the inspection tower windows to prevent inmates seeing their observer. However the panopticon’s power does not reside simply the supposed presence of a guard, but in the way the system normalises the prisoner into rehabilitation, or as Bentham conceived it, moral reform.56 Implicit in the theme Lyon identified as important in surveillance – that is coordination – is the need to manage risks. In place of parents, the guardians at Hailsham act in loco parentis. It is this desire, to reduce uncertainties and to control outcomes that helps set the standards, by which the Hailsham guardians surveillance practices operate. Lyon argues that Foucault sees knowledge and power as inextricably bound up with each other. These are created by observing, monitoring, shaping and controlling power. Obtaining knowledge of those living in a social context becomes a means of supervision and administration.57 Flotmann writes that the asylum is a monstrous place of surveillance which takes away the inmates’ privacy and individuality and makes them conform to social norms once more through the administration of drugs, becoming the symbol of the costs of Victorian ideology.58 This can be observed in what happens when Moreau calls the Beast Men together after a rabbit is killed and eaten. Prendick watches as Moreau sounds a horn in a ‘shallow natural ampitheatre’ to call the creatures to attention. Moreau does a head count, and notices four missing from the sixty-three gathered. When he

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__________________________________________________________________ looks into the eyes of Leopard Man, he warns him, with the Sayers of the Law’s assistance, that he who breaks the law is evil and shall go back to The House of Pain.59 This being the brutal vivisection laboratory. Lyon argues that whatever the purpose of surveillance, to influence, manage, protect or direct, some kind of power relations are involved. Those who establish surveillance systems generally have access to the means of including the surveilled in their line of vision, whether that vision is literal or metaphorical.60 In Never Let Me Go, the clones never opt to break the boundaries of Hailsham and leave. They have been terrified by stories of what happens to students on the outside, and live in fear of being away from the gaze of the place they call home. It is as if the natural landscape around Hailsham is evil, monstrous, rather than the building itself, where the true monstrosity lies. It is the landscape which the guardians use to terrify the students. It stands in for the threat of the outside world. Kathy H explains: There were all kinds of horrible stories about the woods. Once, not so long before we all got to Hailsham, a boy had a big row with his friends and had run beyond the Hailsham boundaries. His body had been found two days later, up in those woods, tied to a tree with the hands and feet chopped off.61 Moreau’s Noble’s Island ‘the only island known to exist in the region’62; and the eponymous Rankstadt ‘on an obscure creek high in the Canadian wilderness, at a site chosen for its utter isolation’63 where Dr Augustus Rank created the monster dogs, are sites of violence, restriction and incarceration. Rugged places of ‘untamed beauty’, these monstrous spaces provide an ironic contrast to the work of Moreau and Rank, who tamper entirely with nature, making over animals into human form. The isolation of Rankstadt is important because it also focuses the attention of generations of scientists and workers who support Dr Rank’s vision to create the dog army. ‘Deprived of almost any external influences, each generation lived much as the first had, in the same houses.’64 There are rumours that Rank had embezzled from his original patron, the ruler of the German empire, and when he seeks his escape to complete the project completely under his control, he takes flight into Canada, a journey that takes almost two years after leaving Bavaria He finally locates a place where he can create Rankstadt. The social panopticon Rank created meant he had a loyal and unquestioning team around him, supporting him through successive generations as he tried to perfect his creation of monsters. The clones from Hailsham are envied for the halcyon and cloistered world created for their childhoods, though the boarding school in the English countryside hides a more sinister purpose. Halisham has been created as a special school by a

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group of enlightened educators who wish to prove their charges are in fact human; this is in direct contrast to their brief from the British government, which is to raise human clones for live organ donation. Flotmann writes that her analysis of the house in Victorian fiction means that it functions as both externalized soul space where the monstrous emanates from the characters themselves and as a site of (contesting) social ideologies which produce monstrosity through the moral demands and restrictions to which they place on people. In this analysis, Hailsham becomes a monstrous space that serves to condition the clones into accepting their destiny without question. 8. The Destruction of the Home Monstrous geographies are not stable ones. The human-animal hybrids they spawn retaliate and destroy their breeding grounds. In Lives of the Monster Dogs, the hybrids stage an uprising, and sack Rankstadt. Leader of the hybrid rebels, Ludwig Von Sacher, tells of how he and the other hybrids destroyed Rankstadt, burning it to the ground and killing all the human occupants. A crucial part of any quest for identity is knowing one’s parents. Like Frankenstein’s creature, the clones are compelled to seek them out, yet unlike him, they do not know of their genetic origin and can only speculate from whom they were cloned. The clones have only first names and initials; Kathy H, the protagonist, and her close friends, Tommy and Ruth. This reinforces the fact that the clones are not part of any blood family and have no continuity. As their conception and birth, via cloning, is institutionalised and not localised to one particular scientist, the clones must turn to the only parent figures they have known: their Hailsham guardians. Ostensibly to find out whether they can get a deferral from donating because they are in love, Kathy H and Tommy track down Madame and question her about the meaning of their lives. There is a strong emphasis placed on creativity at Hailsham, and Tommy is mocked and ostracised because his art work isn’t deemed worthy. The competitive nature of the clones’ creativity is exacerbated by the periodic visits to the school by the mysterious Madame, who chooses the best work to take away. The reason is never revealed to the students, who speculate it is destined for a special gallery. Kathy H and Tommy finally put the theory to Madame that she collected their artwork so she would know if they were really in love, as their work would reveal their inner selves. Why did we do all of that work in the first place? If we’re just going to give donations anyway, then die, why all those lessons? Why all those books and discussions?65 The clones and the reader are never given a satisfactory answer. Although Madame and Miss Emily prided themselves on Hailsham’s humane approach to

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__________________________________________________________________ producing educated and cultured clones, they admit that while they showed the world it was possible for the clones to grow to be ‘as sensitive and intelligent as any ordinary human being’66 given the right environment, that didn’t change the clones’ status in society. Tommy, who had such a hard time at Hailsham because he wasn’t creative, continues to draw his imaginary animals even after he learns that there will be no ‘deferral’ in starting organ donations. This is part of the evolution of the monster, for despite the fact that society has decided that the clones did not have souls, and therefore there is no cruelty in keeping them alive and using them as needed, the clones display a free will and creativity of their own. At the end of the novel, it transpires that the Hailsham clones are unique in being allowed be reared in ‘humane, cultivated environments’ by supporters who saw them as human beings and not monsters. Kathy H learns that other clones are raised in less enlightened boarding houses around England, which are more like battery farms. However, the Hailsham Kathy H knew is lost in the past. The movement to recognize the clones as humans has succumbed to more powerful, commercial imperatives to use clones systematically as spare parts factories. In order to achieve this large scale ritual murder, clones must be seen as sacrificial monsters and removed from society. Yet the Hailsham experiment was profoundly important, for the clones, despite its deficiencies. The reason the clones do not need to destroy Hailsham as the monster dogs destroyed Rankstadt is because they were given something the other monsters examined in these case studies lacked – a sense of home, stability and group identity. Bonded by rules and surveillance, though mercifully free of the pain and brutality endured by the Beast Men and the Monster Dogs – that is, until they are forced to donate their organs – the clones could afford to retain the memories of their halcyon days at Hailsham as something they could revisit in their own times of loss and post-operative pain. Still, monstrous or not, for the clones there is profound loss at not being able to locate Hailsham again. The book’s protagonist, Kathy H, reflects at the end of the novel that not only has she lost her two closest friends to the donation process, ‘I suppose I have lost Hailsham too.’ 9. Conclusion Frankenstein, Never Let Me Go, The Lives of the Monster Dogs and The Island of Doctor Moreau all share an interest in the ‘scientific’ or technological processes that contribute to the creation and reproduction of artificial life. The full title of Shelley’s work is Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, and in using the Promethean motif for her novel, Shelley casts a warning about the role of science in usurping the natural laws of nature and procreation. Never Let Me Go also questions how far society will go in achieving its desires in an era when reproductive technology, stem cell experimentation and therapeutic cloning are realities. Ishiguro’s monsters are clones bred to be passive organ donors until

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they die. In The Island of Doctor Moreau, the Beast Men devolve into animals once the surveillance structure of the island and Moreau’s control cease upon his death (like the humans complicit in the creation process at Rankstadt) at the hands of his monsters. The island’s artificial social structure collapses, as does the Beast Men’s humanity. Prendick observes: It would be impossible to detail every step of the lapsing of these monsters; to tell how, day by day, the human semblance left them; how they gave up their bandages and wrappings, abandoned at last every stitch of clothing; how the hair began to spread over their exposed limbs; how their foreheads fell away and their faces projected; how the quasi-human intimacy I had permitted myself with some of them in the first month of my loneliness became a horror to recall.67 Mellor says that from a feminist perspective, Frankenstein is a book that explores a man trying to have a baby without a woman. As such, the novel is profoundly concerned with natural, as opposed to unnatural, modes of production and reproduction.68 Victor Frankenstein uses science to create life without women. Dr Moreau creates Beast Men using only his brilliance and instruments of pain, and Dr Rank does the same with the monster dogs. Ishiguro’s clones are developed through science and raised communally, without family or history. Creed says that these scientists are ‘womb monsters’ who make it clear that science cannot control the birth process; the result is monsters.69 The monsters featured in this chapter represent a clear evolution of the creature in Frankenstein. They each represent aspects of the Gothic horror novel, which use both the body and location as a site of horror. These monsters also embody the ambitions of scientists whose aims and methods may have gone disastrously off course.

Notes 1

Ken Gelder, The Horror Reader (London: Routledge, 2000), 66. D. J. Skal, ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Monsters’ in Speaking Of Monsters: A Teratological Anthology, ed. J. S. Picart and J. E. Browning (Macmillan, NY: Palgrave, 2012). 3 Halberstam J 2012, ‘Seed of Chucky: Transbiology and the Horror Flick’, in Speaking Of Monsters: A Teratological Anthology, ed. J. S. Picart and J. E. Browning (Macmillan, NY: Palgrave, 2012). 146. 4 Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2005), 32. 5 Petra Rehling, in this volume. 6 Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, 40. 2

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H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, ed. Patrick Parrinder with an Introduction by Margaret Atwood and Notes by Steven Mclean (London: Penguin, 1896/2005), 75. 8 Christina Flotmann, in this volume. 9 Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, 44. 10 Ibid., 32. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid, 35. 13 Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, eds., The Routledge Companion to Gothic (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 1. 14 Lucie Armitt, ed., Where No Man Has Gone Before: Women and Science Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 4. 15 David Punter and Glennis Byron, The Gothic (MA, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 20. 16 Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith, eds., Modern Gothic: A Reader (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), 4-5. 17 Jerrold E. Hogle, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4. 18 Picart and Browning, Speaking of Monsters, 146. 19 Ibid. 20 Marie-Helene Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993), 162. 21 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus 1818 (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 55. 22 Ibid., 58. 23 Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), 102. 24 Elaine L. Graham, Representations of the post/human: monsters, aliens, and others in popular culture. (New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, 2002), 70. 25 Mellor, Mary Shelley, 101. 26 Ibid., 55. 27 Kawin, Bruce F. Horror and the Horror Film. (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2012), 79. 28 Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go, 240. 29 Bakis, Kirsten. Lives of the Monster Dogs. (New York: Warner Books.1997), 115. 30 Barbara Creed, Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2005), intro. 31 Ibid.,127.

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Wells, H.G. The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896. Edited by Patrick Parrinder; with an introduction by Margaret Atwood and notes by Steven Mclean. London: Penguin, 2005), 75. 33 Ibid., Intro. 34 Ibid. 35 Graham, Representations of the post/human, 47. 36 Ibid., 81. 37 Bakis, Kirsten. Lives of the Monster Dogs, 30. 38 Ibid., 120. 39 Graham, Representations of the post/human, 81. 40 Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go, 245. 41 Ibid. 42 Klotzko, Arlene Judith. A Clone of Your Own? The Science and Ethics of Cloning. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 110. 43 Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ed., The Handbook to Gothic Literature (London: Macmillan, 1998), 264. 44 William Patrick Day, In The Circles of Fear and Desire: A study of Gothic Fantasy (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 21. 45 Lyon, David. Surveillance Studies: An Overview. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press, 2007. Lyon, David. Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life. Philadelphia PA: Open University Press, 2001. Lyon, David. The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press, 1994. 46 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth Of A Prison. (Trans. A Sheridan, Alan Lane, London. 1977), 170-171. 47 David Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life (Philadelphia PA: Open University Press, 2001), 114-115. 48 David Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press, 2007), 1. 49 Ibid., 4-7. 50 Wells, H.G. The Island of Doctor Moreau, 60-61. 51 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 170-171. 52 Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go, 23. 53 Foucault Michel, Discipline and Punish, 173. 54 Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go, 37. 55 Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, preface. 56 Ibid., 114-115. 57 Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview, 84. 58 Flotmann, in this volume. 59 Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, 90-91. 60 Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview, 23. 61 Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go, 46.

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Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, 123. Bakis, Lives of the Monster Dogs, 119. 64 Ibid., 119 65 Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go, 237 66 Ibid., 239 67 Wells, H.G. The Island of Doctor Moreau, 123. 68 Mellor, Mary Shelley, 40. 69 Barbara Creed, Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2005), intro. 63

Bibliography Primary Sources Bakis, Kirsten. Lives of the Monster Dogs. New York: Warner Books.1997. Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2005. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. 1818.London: Penguin Classics, 2003. Wells, H.G. The Island of Doctor Moreau. 1896. Edited by Patrick Parrinder; with an introduction by Margaret Atwood and notes by Steven Mclean. London: Penguin, 2005. Secondary Sources Armitt, Lucie, ed., Where No Man Has Gone Before: Women and Science Fiction.London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Atwood, Margaret. In other worlds: SF and the human imagination. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, c2011. Baldick, Chris. In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity and Nineteenth– Century Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Brown, Marshall. The Gothic Text. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Creed, Barbara. Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2005.

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Daffron, Eric. ‘Double Trouble: The Self, the Social Order and the Trouble with Sympathy in the Romantic and Post-Modern Gothic.’ Gothic Studies, Volume 3, Issue 1 (2001): 75-83. Day, William Patrick. In The Circles of Fear and Desire: A study of Gothic Fantasy. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985. Foucault Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth Of A Prison. Trans. A Sheridan, Alan Lane, London. 1977. Gelder, Ken. The Horror Reader. London: Routledge, 2000. Graham, Elaine L. Representations of the post/human : monsters, aliens, and others in popular culture. New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, 2002. Hogle, Jerrold E, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2002. Huet, Marie-Helene. Monstrous Imagination. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993. Kawin, Bruce F. Horror and the Horror Film. London and New York: Anthem Press, 2012. Klotzko, Arlene Judith. A Clone of Your Own? The Science and Ethics of Cloning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Lyon, David. Surveillance Studies: An Overview. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press, 2007. Lyon, David. Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life. Philadelphia PA: Open University Press, 2001. Lyon, David. The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press, 1994. Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York and London: Routledge, 1988. Mulvey-Roberts, Marie, ed. The Handbook to Gothic Literature. London: Macmillan, 1998.

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__________________________________________________________________ Newman, Jenny. ‘Mary And The Monster: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein And Maureen Duffy’s Gor Saga.’ In Where No Man Has Gone Before: Women and Science Fiction, edited by Lucie Armitt. 85-96. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Picart, Caroline Joan S and John Edgar Browning, ed. Speaking of Monsters: A Teratological Anthology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2012. Punter, David and Glennis Byron. The Gothic. MA, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell Publishing: 2004. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. London and New York: Longmans, 1980. Sage, Victor and Allan Lloyd Smith, ed. Modern Gothic: A Reader. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996. Spooner, Catherine and Emma McEvoy, ed. The Routledge Companion to Gothic. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Tsitas, Evelyn and Dethridge, Lisa. ‘The Mum Button: The Mobile Phone as a Parenting Panopticon’. Mobile Technology in the Urban Field Symposium, edited by Marsha Berry and Kate Church. Melbourne, Vic.: RMIT University. Design Research Institute, 2010, 5-15. Viewed 10 March 2013. http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=237919705419842;res=IELH SS. Tsitas, Evelyn. ‘The Role of the Creative Arts in Bioethical Debates.’ The Queensland University of Technology Law and Justice Journal, SpecialEdition – Law and Bioethics 6, No. 2 (2006): 255-265. Evelyn Tsitas is a PhD student in Creative Writing at RMIT University, Australia. She is a published author and Sisters in Crime Scarlet Stiletto crime fiction winner.

Part III The Dark Earth: Monstrous and Alive

How the Earth Went Bad: From Wells’ The War of the Worlds to the Zombie Apocalypse in the 21st Century Simon Bacon Abstract Since its publication in 1898 H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds has had many literary and cinematic adaptations, some following the original narrative and its intentions more closely than others. Yet always at the heart of these works is the idea of the Earth as being an almost living being that has a special relationship with its inhabitants. This symbiosis works for their joint survival but ultimately it can be seen as the planet defending itself. However, this chapter aims to show, in recent cinematic versions, this is no longer the case. Written at the end of the Victorian period Wells’ novel is rife with the feeling of a declining nation and the collapse of empire. The Earth that he creates is one that is ripe for plunder and the monstrous, inhuman invaders from Mars are only thwarted by humanity’s relationship with its home world. This is shown in mankind’s immunity to the invisible microbes that are seemingly a product of the planet’s self-defense system that so easily infects and destroys the bodies of the alien invaders. If one extends this trope from the novel of the Earth defending itself from outside invasion by the use of invisible microbes it is possible to see that the War of the Worlds speaks not just of the Earth defending itself against aliens but from any species that threatens its existence – including, as will be shown, humanity itself. The present chapter focuses on literary and cinematic instance which show that what was once home to mankind has now become, literally, a hell on Earth. Key Words: Ecology, Gaia, alien invasion, zombie apocalypse, vampire, monstrosity, geography, immune system. ***** 1. This Earthly Haven The nineteenth century was in its last years. At that time, no one would have believed he was being watched by beings of much greater intelligence. But the people of Earth were being studied – just as someone with a microscope might study creatures swarming in a drop of water!1 Written in 1898, The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells can be seen to be part of a larger group of works that all expressed a certain anxiety at the end of the 19th century that the British Imperialism was on the point of dissolution. After years of successful exploration and colonisation, both ideological and commercial, the tide

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__________________________________________________________________ was about to turn and that just as the Empire had once greedily eyed other lands for its own furtherment so too would others eye what they now possessed. As summarised by Stephen Arata, this position came about due to: The decay of British global influence, the loss of overseas markets for British goods, the economic and political rise of Germany and the United States, the increasing unrest in British colonies and possessions, the growing domestic uneasiness over the morality of imperialism – all combined to erode Victorian confidence in the inevitability of British progress and hegemony. Late-Victorian fiction in particular is saturated with the sense that the entire nation – as a race of people, as a political and imperial force, as a social and cultural power – was in irretrievable decline.2 Arata is actually writing in regard not to Wells’ novel but to another one of the period which expressed very similar views, that of Dracula by Bram Stoker. In fact the comparison between the two novels is very instructive and will form part of this chapter, not least in their respective uses of vampirism to construct the idea of an insatiable and alien ‘other’ but also in their contrasting uses of technology as a tool of evolution. Published a year earlier than War of the Worlds, it too saw the empire being eyed greedily by a creature that wanted to suck its life blood and possess its riches. Whilst Wells’ novel saw the greedy eyes belonging to Martians from outer space and Stoker situated his monster in the equally alien lands of Eastern Europe it is curious that both the vampire Count and Space aliens all require human blood to survive. Perhaps this is not so surprising as Wells and Stoker configure an innate connection between blood not only as the life of the human but also as the connection to nation and even the earth itself. The vampire in Dracula makes this link between the land and blood explicit, whilst relating his family history to his newly arrived guest from England, Jonathan Harker, when he tells him: ‘it was the ground fought over for centuries by the Wallachian, the Saxon, and the Turk. Why, there is hardly a foot of soil in all this region that has not been enriched by the blood of men, patriots or invaders.’3 This blood that has soaked the land is also connected to Dracula himself, and he continues: We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights... the Szekelys – and the Dracula as their heart’s blood, their brains, and their swords – can boast a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach.4

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__________________________________________________________________ Dracula easily equates blood with the belonging to a place and to history; he quite literally lives off the blood of the land. This we see in the fact that he has to carry his home soil around with him otherwise he will die. His nefarious plot is to enter the ‘bloodstream’ of the Empire and contaminate it with his own. As Dracula explains to Harker, ‘I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.’5 It is also intimated, and this is something which occurs in some of the early cinematic adaptations of Stoker’s novel, that Dracula has ‘used up’ his homeland and needs fresh new lands to consume.6 In very much the same way Wells describes the Martians as leaving their homeland to ‘drink’ the Earth dry: They did not eat, much less digest. Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of other creatures and injected it into their own veins... But sqeamish as I may seem, I cannot bring myself to describe what I could not endure even to continue watching. Let it suffice to say, blood obtained from a still living animal, in most cases, from a human being, was run directly by means of a little pippette into the recipient canal.7 However, in the case of the Martians this proves to be their undoing, as, unlike Stoker’s vampire, they are not resistant to the many microbes and diseases that contaminate the human blood stream.8 As a result, they begin to fall ill and eventually die due to the bacteria of the common cold, but like Stoker, Wells links this to the notion of history and blood which links humankind to the soil they live upon: Already, when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are.9 In both novels then it is the link to the land that saves the stories’ heroes but dooms its villains; or, more precisely, it is those that are no longer connected to the land they inhabit or occupy that are inevitably doomed. Of equal importance within these two works is the role of technology, for in both it is a key factor in defining the relationship between the land and those that live on it. In War of the Worlds it is the Martians that have technological superiority. Because their intellect had advanced so far, ‘the greater part of the structure was the brain,’10 they are described as being little more than very large heads that have replaced their biological framework with one of metal. As such, the huge metallic

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__________________________________________________________________ monsters that stride across the English landscape are not just craft for the Martians but an elaborate exoskeleton. As the narrator in the novel observes: ‘I began to ask myself what they could be? Were they intelligent mechanisms? Such a thing I felt was impossible, or did a Martian sit within each, ruling, directing, using, much as a man’s brain sits and rules in his own body?’11 Not only did they also possess weapons far greater than any human machinery but their biological development was such that they did not even need to speak to each other but ‘interchanged thoughts without any physical intermediation.’12 This ‘development’ suggests that the Martians have evolved away from a biological connection to the land that they were once part of, and are now dependent only on machines and technology to exist: their only connection to the flora and fauna of a world is not as part of a symbiotic unit but is as something to eat or consume. The only real relationships they have are to technology or to each other; both of which they can communicate to with their minds without the interaction of any exterior mediation. This notion of degeneracy through evolution is one that informs other works by H. G. Wells, not least his novel The Time Machine from 1895. Here a man from Victorian England invents a time machine and travels many thousands of years into the future. Upon leaving the machine he discovers that the earth is now populated by two degenerated forms of humanity, the Eloi and the Morlocks: the ‘Eloi were mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon.’13 The Martians in Wells’ story are configured very similarly in that their evolution through time has made them mentally superior but physically and constitutionally weaker – a fear that echoed a similar anxiety in the late Victorian. Many saw the Empire in the same way that Wells envisioned the Morlocks – as increasingly degenerate because ‘man had been content to live in ease and delight upon the labours of his fellow man...[also exampling] wretched aristocracy in decay.’14 Such devolved creatures could not live in harmony with the land but only feed of it and suck it dry – an idea that immediately links it to how Stoker saw the vampire. Though not a creature from the future, Count Dracula has been alive for hundreds of years and rather than rely on his own resources he feeds off of those around him: being at once an example of the old aristocracy and the new capitalist overlord that feeds off the land and those around him.15 Interestingly, the Count too has evolved to a point where he no longer needs mechanical devices to communicate with those joined to him but exchanges thoughts directly with them. As noted by Dr. Seward in the novel, after Mina and the vampire have shared each other’s blood, they have a special relationship where ‘the Count sent her his spirit to read her mind.’16 This is particularly interesting within the narrative as those that are trying to catch the vampire utilise many forms of communication technology – the typewriter, telegraph and stenograph – to which the vampire has no access or understanding of because of his, as Van Helsing sees it, ‘child-mind.’17 However, perhaps if we consider this alongside Wells’ view of evolution it might be that Dracula actually examples what the users of modern technology in the novel will become; that

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__________________________________________________________________ although Van Helsing and the vampire hunters think they utilise the most modern of technology to catch the out-of-date undead Count, they are in fact well on the way to becoming like him themselves. This notion is not as far fetched as it may sound for the vampiric nature of the technology used within the novel has been much commented upon. Jennifer Wicke in her chapter ‘Vampiric Typewriting’ focuses on the communications media used within the novel and, in particular, to its structure as a series of diary entries and other information, the transcripts of which are all typewritten by Mina Harker, but also on how it correlates to the dissemination and consumption of the text of Dracula itself:18 The reading of the mass of typewriting is the labor of consumption the text requires of us. This mass is vampiric typewriting, this vampire is mass typewriting, this typewriting is mass vampirism. Under the sign of modernity we are vampires at a banquet of ourselves, we are Dracula and Madame Mina, the one who bites and the one who is bitten, the one who types and the one who is typewritten.19 If the technologies used in the novel configure the mass consumption and consumerism of late capitalism for Wicke, then Judith Halberstam in ‘Technologies of Monstrosity’ sees technology as an economy and as a carrier of ideological intent. Here the body of the monster contains the scars or marks of the culture and times that make it, as Halberstam explains: The monster, in its otherworldly form, its superatural shape, wears the traces of its own construction. Like the bolt through the neck of Frankenstein’s monster in the modem horror film, the technology of monstrosity is written upon the body. And the artificiality of the monster denaturalizes in turn the humanness of his enemies.20 Dracula, then, is constructed of the racism, sexism and consumerism of the society that makes him, which in turn shows the monstrosity of that very society. We can then read the figures of those that try to kill him in the novel, and indeed the technologies that they use to defeat him as equally monstrous, at least in terms of being carriers of monstrous intent. Possibly the only difference between the two is that Dracula can be seen as an undiluted form of the monstrosity carried by Van Helsing, Dr. Seward et al., and the technologies they control or rather a future glimpse of what they will evolve in to. Equally in War of the Worlds there is an odd sense that the earthlings are actually killing their future selves, and that the weapons and artifacts that they retrieve from the Martian craft to study and examine will only speed up the process

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__________________________________________________________________ of degeneracy rather than forestall it. Consequently, both Wells and Stoker end their respective works with a certain sense of unease for the future. Whilst the bond that, almost umbilically, joins one to one’s homeland has remained intact, lessons from the previous encounter need to be learned. Dracula, though dead, still seems to haunt those that survived the encounter and as we know, vampires do indeed have time on their side. And even Wells’ protagonist feels the events with the Martians ‘have left an abiding sense of doubt and insecurity in my mind.’21 It would be mere speculation to say that this is because they fear that they, one day, will become the same as the vampire or the Martians, or that they example an inevitable stage of human evolution/devolution. Curiously, however, this is not a doubt shared by many of the subsequent cinematic version of Wells’ book, and it is to these this chapter now turns. 2. This Island Earth22 Most of the films that explicitly site Wells’ War of the Worlds as their inspiration usually take the connection between humanity and the earth as implicit in the story, showing that the Martians were inevitably doomed from the moment they landed as they do not share in the symbiotic bond that humanity shares with the Earth. This is seen in the 1953 version of War of the Worlds by Byron Haskin, though set in America rather than England.23 As previously mentioned by the author, in ‘From Haven to Hell’ this particular adaptation by Haskin: again sees humanity’s super powers and super weapons as ineffectual against the Martian invaders, and again it is the earth that comes to our rescue. Interestingly, this only happens after we see the Martians destroy a church, making the spiritual link between the earth and its inhabitants even stronger – its not just evolutionary but a God given right that Eden [the Earth] remains ours.24 What we begin to get is a sense that the Earth is somehow defending itself and that diseases and viruses, such as the common cold, operate as some kind of planetary immune system to which humans are largely safe from.25 Steven Spielberg’s film War of the Worlds from 2005 continues in a similar vein.26 Starring Tom Cruise, the start of the story moves the action to a large city, and even the more advanced weapons of the 21st century would seem to have little affect on the alien craft. Oddly though, there is the suggestion that human spirit itself would be enough to overcome the invaders. In Wells’ novel huge warships, such as the ‘Thunderchild,’ were required to take down an alien machine, but here it only requires Mr. Cruise, a grenade and sufficient determination to bring destruction upon the normally invincible craft.27 Whilst this intimates that given enough time humans, or possibly Cruise himself, could free themselves from the Martian invaders, the Earth decides

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__________________________________________________________________ it cannot wait that long and so steps in to see off the aliens with the usual common cold germs. Independence Day directed by Roland Emmerich from 1983 needs no such planetary intervention, and the human characters actually concoct their own virus to destroy the aliens. Constructed very much as a breed of inter-planetary locusts, the aliens search space for planets to plunder of all their natural resources. Once again the ‘super’ weapons of humanity have no effect at all on the futuristic craft from outer space, largely due to the sophisticated force fields they have protecting them. It requires a scientist to come up with the idea of infecting the aliens onboard-computers with a virus which disables their defenses, allowing humanities weapons to destroy their ships.28 This notion of humans not needing the earth to help them is taken even further in Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers from 1997.29 Here the roles are reversed and it is seemingly the humans that have left the Earth to invade other worlds. Whilst the narrative of the film indicates that is was the aliens, in this case Arachnids, or ‘Bugs,’ that attacked the Earth first, we are purposely given the impression that it was not the case, and that it is humanity’s expansionist policies that began the conflict.30 This plotline actually mirrors that of a story that came out in the same year as Wells’ novel and that is, Edison’s Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss. Written as a response to Wells’ narrative, it shows human technology, specifically under the auspices of Thomas Edison, to be superior to that of the Martians and sees a group of American travellers landing on Mars to claim it for themselves. This idea that humanity can fend for itself and no longer needs the help of Mother Earth is also seen District 9 by Niell Blomkamp (2009) and Super 8 by J. J. Abrams from 2011. Both of these show the Earth as unwelcoming to alien species, but not because of any form of bacterial defence system, but due to the humans that live on it. Consequently, these films begin to configure the humans as superior to alien races through their greater intellectual and technological evolution; a development that sees us no longer explicitly linked to our home world but which requires us to leave it behind and explore other ones. The film which examples this notion in its most extreme sense is Avatar from 2009 by James Cameron which, in effect, reverses the plot of Wells’ novel making the inhabitants of Earth the greedy invaders from space. The narrative sees humans as almost vampiric Martians, that, like the aliens in Independence Day, travel through space ‘sucking’ the life and resources out of any planets they come across, in this case Pandora.31 As Stephen Baxter observes: Earth is evidently a world where the problems we face today have run to extremes, a world of overpopulation and overdevelopment, of resource exhaustion and climate collapse, of pollution and extinctions. And its a world of warfare too...and we

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__________________________________________________________________ see plenty of military technology on Pandora in the course of the movie.32 Baxter’s last comments are of particular interest, for indeed the main difference between the humans and the inhabitants of Pandora, the Na’vi, is technology. The humans are totally dependant upon theirs, whilst the Na’vi have no use for it at all. Not unlike Wells’ vision of inevitable devolution through a dependence upon technology, we never see the human explorers without theirs. Whether it is mechanical exoskeletons to move objects and load ships, craft to travel anywhere, or the ubiquitous computer terminals and holographic displays to access information or communicate, the human invaders are nothing without technology, much of which has militaristic intent or usage.33 In contrast, the Na’vi, who are ten feet tall and blue, live in harmony with their planet and its ecosystem, they hunt for food with bow and arrow and knives, and use horse-like animals to travel long distance and even large pterodactyl-type creatures to fly. All of these they control, or join with, through a symbiotic link, not just to the animals but also the mother spirit of the planet, Eywa.34 As such, they are specifically configured as an evolved species but one which is in harmony with the planet they live on, forming a single, symbiotic, ecosystem. Consequently, Pandora is a true Eden for them, and the fruit from the tree of knowledge, as signified in the idea of technology, has not corrupted them.35 The Earthlings, blinded by their technology and virtually helpless without it, attempt to break the link between the Na’vi and their planet so that they can plunder all that both possess. However, the planet itself rises up against the humans, almost infecting its own inhabitants, human and animal, with a singularity of intent to protect the ecosystem as a whole.36 Fortunately for the invaders, unlike Wells’ Martians, they are not killed but expelled from Pandora. Oddly though, we can see that it was not greater fire power or military might that sealed the fate of the humans but rather, like the Martians before, the fact that they had no link to the world they were on, and that whilst Pandora might not have used a virus to kill off the foreign bodies invading its system, it did activate its own immune system to combat them.37 This notion of the planet or eco-system activating some kind of immune system to protect itself can then be seen to be one of the main tropes that comes out of War of the Worlds, and one which is specifically activated by a body that the homeworld sees as foreign, or rather a body that the home-world no longer recognises as its own. The body that evolves to a point of technological dependence beyond that of the biological or ecological system it was once symbiotically linked to means that it will inevitably be seen as alien. As such, if we take the idea of a human society that is no longer linked to its natural habitat, or become alien to it, that is then attacked by an unknown virus which causes its destruction, we can see that it is like a very different genre of films – that of the vampire/zombie apocalypse.

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__________________________________________________________________ 3. Hell on Earth .

It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague.38 The first work to envision the notion of a vampire/zombie apocalypse is Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I am Legend.39 Not only can it be shown to have influenced, directly or indirectly, all such representations that came after it but it encapsulates perfectly the nature and development of the forces that propel the death-drive ever onward. Not only has it informed all zombie films from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) onwards, but has inspired three major films of its own: The Last Man on Earth (1964), Omega Man (1971), and I am Legend (2007).40 Coming after the Second World War, Matheson’s novel is situated in a time when the ‘super weapons’ that were used to defend the Earth in Haskin’s 1953 War of the Worlds, have been turned on its own inhabitants. Not only were these technological weapons capable of destroying hundreds of thousands of people but also, possibly, the world itself and the after effects, particularly that of radiation, were still largely unpredictable and unknown. As such, it made humans not only dangerous and antagonistic to each other but to the planet itself. I am Legend, reflects these fears and begins after an unspecified catastrophic event which has caused dust storms to rage across the earth and spread disease.41 This disease is unusual in that it causes an incurable plague which has surprising effects, ‘everyone he [Neville] knows has succumbed to what he discovers is a bacterium that infects the blood, causes the canine teeth to elongate, and creates a thirst for blood.’42 Seemingly, the only person unaffected is Robert Neville, who suspects his immunity to the disease is because when was stationed in Panama during the war he was bitten by a vampire bat.43 Though rather a spurious reason, it does work on one level, that Wells would have been familiar with, that of the right to survive because of one’s past. Whilst the rest of the earth’s population have lost their connection to the planet, Neville seems to have found some, accidental, connection to it which has earned his right to survive against the plague that has spread across the globe. This plague is quite interesting, for it can be seen to have been created by the planet itself. While the population in the novel guesses that it

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__________________________________________________________________ must have been the result of a bomb, or a war, they do not actually know. Here then the virus that creates the vampire/zombies, or what Victoria Nelson calls ‘zampires,’44 is analogous to the common cold that causes the death of Wells’ Martians. Matheson’s virus also lives in and is passed on by the blood and so we can see it as being equally the result of some sort of planetary immune system. The humans in the novel have developed weapons that can not only unbalance the Earth’s ecosystem but actually destroy the planet itself. Consequently, the symbiotic bond is broken between the planet and its inhabitants; the humans have become a foreign invader to be destroyed. What is quite ironic in this situation is that the humans, who were once the ‘plague’ over-running the planet, have now, as ‘zampires,’ been turned into a ‘virus’ that will consume itself.45 George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead from 1968 can be seen to start a series of films, which continues to the present day, where an often unknown or mysterious event causes humans to become zombies or dead bodies to re-animate and start a plague that spreads across the globe.46 Coming at the end of the twentieth-century and the start of the twenty-first, it is possible to see that this represents a time when humanity has severed its link to the planet it lives on; not being a symbiotic part of a biosphere but an all-consuming invader that needs to be stopped. The inevitable effect of the zombie virus is that much of the technology we now depend upon becomes useless: electricity fails and communication systems breakdown. This then forces those that survive to live off the Earth again, as our ancestors once did, reforming the bond of dependence between humans and the Earth. Not coincidentally, many of these films – Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), its remake by Zack Snyder in 2004, and also the award winning television series, The Walking Dead (2010-present) – all show that when humans try and return to their old lives, as exampled by cities and shopping malls, they almost inevitably get infected by the virus.47 As a result, the zombie apocalypse not only works as a planetary immune system but one which governs how far human evolution, at least in terms of technological dependence, can progress. Its result is not always to destroy the invaders, as seen in Wells’ novel, but to achieve a halfway position between that and what we saw in Avatar – humans are not expelled from the planet but returned to a level where they have to depend upon it again. This is the situation we see in the film Stakeland (2010) by Jim Mickle, a Western version of Matheson’s I am Legend, which sees humanity reverting to its own past, in a return to the lifestyle of America at the end of the 19th century, and even more strongly in the novel World War Z (2006) by Max Brookes. In Brookes’ novel the world’s economic and powers structures are forced to reorganise themselves after a mysterious zombie outbreak spreads across the world.48 As such then, we can see that the zombie apocalypse is not just about the possible end of humanity but can also be viewed as the Earth trying to rid itself of foreign bodies that it perceives as a threat.

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__________________________________________________________________ 4. Conclusion: Growing Apart? This chapter has argued that Wells’ novel War of the Worlds is not only about the fear of reverse colonisation and that the ‘greedy eyes’ of imperialism will one day be turned upon ourselves, but that our own evolution will lead us away from a world that we once called home. In this scenario humanity evolves beyond its biologically symbiotic connection to the eco-system which it was both part of and sustained by. This idea of the Earth being a biosphere, or an autonomous entity, is often referred to as Gaia, not unlike the world spirit of Eywa from the film Avatar. Popular advocate of this idea, James Lovelock, explains it thus: ‘The entire surface of the Earth including life is a self-regulating entity and this is what I mean by Gaia.’49 Within this he sees that ‘our contact with the Earth is fundamental, for we are part of it and cannot survive without a healthy planet as our home.’50 Not unlike Wells’ premonition as seen in the War of the Worlds and even in the Time Machine, our unchecked evolution as a species will see us inevitably degenerate, not necessarily in terms of intellect or intelligence, but in the vitality and connectedness to the world around us. The inescapable result of this, and which the Martians found out to their cost, is that the planetary body no longer welcomes you and does all it can to fight against what it sees as a life-threatening infection. As Lovelock further observes: ‘if we fail to take care of the Earth it surely will take care of itself by no longer making us welcome.’51 This separation from the world is inevitable linked to technology, as seen in the Martians, whose biological bodies are largely helpless without the mechanical appendages and exoskeletons they have created for them. Whilst the technology itself is not implicitly bad, the uses to which it is put mark it out as the focus of human degeneration, specifically when it is used for expansionist and militaristic ends. Both of these subjects are discussed in other chapters in this volume in particular, technology and expansion in Thea Constantino’s work on colonised Australia and technology and military weaponisation in Sarah Montin’s poets and World War I. This is seen in later adaptations of War of the Worlds where not only does military technology fail to protect humanity from alien invasion but, as the twentieth century draws to a close, becomes the very reason that the Earth, and other worlds, no longer wish to be a home to humans. A somewhat ironic twist in this, is that these same technologies, that break our link to the Earth, actually, through telecommunications, facilitate greater connection to each other.52 As seen with various versions of the alien invaders, from Wells’ novel to Independence Day and beyond, technology seems to facilitate a telepathic link between the super-evolved species. Even humanity uses technological communications in an attempt to protect itself, either from the aliens or from marauding zombie hordes. Interestingly, in Independence Day it is these very means of communications that the humans infect, resulting in the invaders from space becoming easy targets for our less advanced weaponry. This would appear to create a further link to the idea of the zombie apocalypse film being a

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__________________________________________________________________ version of War of the Worlds, for here, more often than not, the plague of zombies causes human communication systems to break down, making the collapse of civilisation inevitable. As such, then, the Earths’ immune system, as seen in the body of the zombie horde, specifically targets that which it sees as the focus of human ‘otherness’ – technology and communications.53 Communication, then, becomes central to this configuration. As seen in Avatar, the Na’vi are in constant communication with the eco-system around them. This is explicitly shown as being both a spiritual and biological connection and one which humans, in being ‘aliens,’ can never have unless at the allowance of the world spirit itself.54 Consequently, we can see that it is when humanity can no longer speak to, or hear, the Earth that the human race becomes an alien and foreign body; and one which needs to be destroyed. Having said that, the zombie apocalypse always maintains an element of hope to it. As mentioned above, many of the narratives that use this device, often show that the humans that move away from the cities and technology and depend on the land and natural resources around them stand a chance. It is only those that purposely try to return to their past lives that inevitably end up being killed. What is also of particular note within the trope of the zombie horde as an embodiment of the planetary immune system is its rapacious consumption, which might suggest that the Earth, in these narratives, is not without a sense of humour. In the versions of War of the Worlds where the invaders are from outer space the planet’s immune system just infects and kills them. However, when it is humanity that becomes the ‘foreign body’ something else happens. The immune system of the planet does not just only kill us, it quite literally consumes us, as such mirroring humanities thoughtless consumption of the world and its resources. This too would seem to intimate a breakdown of communications, where our own concerns outweigh those of the larger biosystem around us to the point where we can no longer hear its warnings. If we cannot regulate the way we live off the world, it might just have to start living off us.

Notes 1

H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (Maryland: Arc Manor, 2008 [1898]), 3. Stephen D. Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist: ‘Dracula’ and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’. Victorian Studies 33, No. 4 (1990): 622. 3 Bram Stoker, Dracula (London: Signet Classics, 1996 [1897]), 23-24. 4 Ibid., 32-33. 5 Stoker, Dracula, 22. 6 Robert Siodmak’s 1943 Son of Dracula explicitly makes this point when one of the characters from the film, Dr. Brewster, says about Dracula (or Count Alucard as he is called in the film): ‘maybe that’s why he left there [his homeland] and came here [America] to a younger country, stronger and more virile?’ to which 2

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__________________________________________________________________ another character, Professor Lazlo, replies: ‘of course, he will fasten on it and drain it dry just like he did his homelend.’Son of Dracula, directed by Robert Siodmak, 1943. 7 Wells, The War of the Worlds, 139. 8 Wells actually used this idea in the novel and was supposedly based on recent reports in British newspapers of the effects of British settlers landing in Tasmania. This is reflected in the following lines from the novel: ‘And before we judge them [the Martians] too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished Bison and the Dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?’ Ibid., 14. 9 Ibid., 197. 10 Ibid., 111. 11 Ibid., 56. 12 Ibid., 142. 13 H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (Rockville: Arc Manor, 2008 [1895]), 64. 14 Ibid., 64. 15 See Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: Verso, 1988). 16 Stoker, Dracula, 369. 17 Ibid., 372. 18 Dracula has actually never been out of print since first being published in 1897. 19 Jennifer Wicke, ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media’, ELH 59, No. 2 (1992): 492. 20 Judith Halberstam, ‘Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Victorian Studies 36, No. 3 (1993): 349. 21 Wells, The War of the Worlds, 199. 22 The title of a 1955 science fiction film directed by Joseph M. Newman. Here a highly advanced race of aliens, the Metalunans, visit the Earth in search of uranium to save their homeworld which is under attack by another alien race called the Zagons. The Metalunans, not unlike Wells’ Morlocks and Eloi, are divided into two species – one highly intelligent and one used as a slave class. More important than the uranium though is the fact that the Metalunans want to exploit the Earth’s most important resource, its scientists (a kind of intellectual blood if you will) for its own purposes. 23 For Haskin’s film the setting of the story was moved to America, mainly so that the American audience could relate to it better. But moving the location to Linda Rosa in California, as an example of little-town-America, mirrors the way that

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__________________________________________________________________ Wells saw Woking, where his novel is set, as representative of small town England, in the home counties near London, as the heartland of the Empire. 24 See Simon Bacon, ‘From Haven to Hell: How the Earth Went Bad in Recent Adaptations of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898)’, in Monstrous Spaces: The Other Frontier, eds. Niculae Liviu Gheran and Ken Monteith (Oxford: InterDisciplinary Press, forthcoming). 25 This view is also present in Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 radio broadcast of the story, whilst the first parts of the narrative are given as ‘live’ broadcasts, intimating that an invasion of some kind is actually happening. After an intermission, in which it is announced that the previous broadcast was fictional, Welles himself returns, as a character called Professor Pierson to describe the aftermath of the attacks and how the Martians succumb to earthly pathogenic germs to which they have no immunity. 26 There is an interesting mirroring in Spielberg’s film with the 1953 version. Where Haskin’s story ended with a church being destroyed, Spielberg’s begins with one being razed to the ground. 27 The ‘sufficient cause’ in this case being the threatening of his family, a trope that was also part of Emmerich’s earlier movie Independence Day. 28 The role of the scientist is always an important one in adaptations of War of the Worlds. Largely seen as a figure that, given the chance, could save humanity from the Martians, their attempts are, more often than not, destroyed by an hysterical humanity. Oddly though, as argued by this chapter, they are also the harbingers of humanity’s eventual degeneracy and separation from the Earth. 29 The film is based on a book by Robert Heinlien from 1959. 30 Vorhoeven says that the film is his statement on certain aspects of American society. ‘‘Interview: Paul Verhoeven’, by Scott Tobias, The A.V. Club, published April 3, 2007’, accessed March 24, 2013, http://www.avclub.com/articles/paulverhoeven,14078/. 31 The humans have come to the planet is search of a mineral called ‘unobtanium,’ a name which suggests that it is both unobtainable and a signifier of an unquenchable desire to possess or consume. 32 Stephen Baxter, The Science of Avatar (London: Victor Gollancz, 2012), 9. 33 Even the atmosphere of Pandora is poisonous to humans and so they require breathing apparatus wherever they go. 34 Very much in the spirit of Gaia as being the spirit of Mother Earth. 35 Interestingly, the biblical story of the Tree of Knowledge in Eden, bearing the fruit that sees humans expelled from the garden, is replaced here by the Tree of Souls, which provides knowledge that links the inhabitants more closely to the past and the planet itself.

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__________________________________________________________________ 36

A similar idea can be seen in J. R. R. Tolkien’s series of novels, The Lord of the Rings and in recent films such as Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) by Rupert Sanders. 37 An earlier film by Cameron, The Abyss from 1989, shows a contrasting scenario to this one where the aliens, that have taken up residence deep beneath the ocean, are actually more symbiotically joined to the Earth and its eco-system than the humans. In this case it is the outsiders than appreciate the ‘homeworld’ of another species more than its indigenous inhabitants. 38 Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski, Matrix (Warner Bros Pictures, 1999). As spoken by the character Agent Smith. 39 The more recent novel by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, The Strain (London: Harper, 2009), continues the vampire/virus symbiosis and sees it described by one of the characters thus: ‘These vampires were viruses incarnate’, 343. 40 The films discussed here are The Last Man on Earth, dir. Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow (American International Pictures, 1964), Omega Man, dir. Boris Segal (Warner Bros, 1971), and I am Legend, dir. Francis Lawrence (Village Roadshow, 2007). According to Perry Martin’s documentary The Dead Will Walk (2004), the screenplay for Night of the Living Dead was adapted from an original if rough short story of Romero’s called Night of Anubis, a tale of isolation and supernatural peril that borrowed heavily from I am Legend. There was also a ‘not so major’ release I am Omega (Furst, 2007) aimed to coincide with the much larger budgeted I am Legend which starred Will Smith. 41 This is not unlike Mary Shelley’s earlier novel of 1826 The Last Man Earth, where Lionel Verney is the lone man left alive after an incurable plague kills the inhabitants of the Earth. 42 Katherine Ramsland, The Science of Vampires (New York: Berkley Boulevard Book, 2002), 46. 43 Richard Matheson, I am Legend (London: Gollanz, 2007 [1957]), 133. 44 Victoria Nelson, Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2012), 154. 45 An interesting version of this idea is seen in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening from 2008, where plants and trees release chemicals into the air that cause humans to kill themselves and each other. 46 Not surprisingly the other main reason for the start and/or spread of the disease is military bio- or chemical testing. 47 The city is quite often a focus for the attack in recent War of the Worlds adaptations, either as a point of attack for aliens from outer space, see Skyline (Strause, 2010) and Battle Los Angeles (Liebesman, 2011), or for the Earth to concentrate its own attack on humanity Godzilla (Emmerich, 1998) and Cloverfield (Reeves, 2008).

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The novel is due to be turned into a film starring Brad Pitt. At the time of writing it is in the process of ‘re-shooting’ with possible release in June 2013. 49 James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2000), ix. 50 Ibid., iix. 51 James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back and How We Can Still Save Humanity (London: Penguin, 2007), 3. 52 Here one can think of things such as the internet and hand-held devices that mean we can be in constant communication with each other, no matter where we are in the world, and yet this takes place in a virtual space that is not linked to any actual geographical location. 53 A zombie film called Pontypool by Bruce MacDonald from 2008 specifically uses this idea and shows the ‘virus’ starting from a radio broadcast and subsequently being spread through language. 54 This we see at the end of the film with the avatar of Jack Scully. Before his acceptance by the world spirit the avatar used by Scully can only survive through the intervention of technology.

Bibliography Arata, Stephen D. ‘The Occidental Tourist: ‘Dracula’ and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’. Victorian Studies 33, No. 4 (1990): 621–645. Bacon, Simon. ‘From Haven to Hell: How the Earth Went Bad in Recent Adaptations of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898)’. In Monstrous Spaces: The Other Frontier, edited by Niculae Liviu Gheran, and Ken Monteith. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, forthcoming. Baxter, Stephen. The Science of Avatar. London: Victor Gollancz, 2012. Brookes, Max. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. London: Duckworth, 2006. Del Toro, Guillermo and Chuck Hogan. The Strain. London: Harper, 2009. Halberstam, Judith. ‘Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula’. Victorian Studies 36, No. 3 (1993): 333–352. Heinlein, Robert A. Starship Troopers. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2005 [1959].

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__________________________________________________________________ Lovelock, James. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2000. ———. The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back and How We Can Still Save Humanity. London: Penguin, 2007. Marion, Isaac. Warm Bodies. London: Vintage Books, 2010. Matheson, Richard. I am Legend. London: Gollanz, 2007 [1957]. Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms. London: Verso, 1988. Nelson, Victoria. Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2012. Ramsland, Katherine. The Science of Vampires. New York: Berkley Boulevard Book, 2002. Serviss, Garret P. Edison’s Conquest of Mars. Hamburg: Tredition Press, 2012 [1898]. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London: Signet Classics, 1996 [1897]. Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings. London: Harper Collins, 2007 [1954]. Tobias, Scott. ‘‘Interview: Paul Verhoeven’, The A.V. Club, published April 3, 2007’. Accessed March 24, 2013. http://www.avclub.com/articles/paulverhoeven,14078/. Wicke, Jennifer. ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media’. ELH 59, No. 2 (1992): 467–493. Wells, Herbert George. The Time Machine. Rockville: Arc Manor, 2008 [1895]. ———. The War of the Worlds. Maryland: Arc Manor, 2008 [1898].

Filmography Abrams, J. J., dir. Super 8. Paramount Pictures, 2011. Blomkamp, Niell, dir. District 9. TriStar Pictures, 2009.

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__________________________________________________________________ Cameron, James, dir. The Abyss. 20th Century Fox, 1989. ———. Avatar. 20th Century Fox, 2009. Darabont, Frank, dir. The Walking Dead. Fox International, 2010-present. Emmerich, Roland, dir. Independence Day. 20th Century Fox, 1983. ———. Godzilla. Tristar Pictures, 1998. Furst, Griff, dir. I am Omega. The Asylum, 2007. Haskin, Byron, dir. The War of the Worlds. Paramount Pictures, 1953. Lawrence, Francis, dir. I am Legend. Warner Bros Pictures, 2007. Liebesman, Jonathan, dir. Battle Los Angeles. Columbia Pictures, 2011. Mickle, Jim, dir. Stake Land. Dark Sky Films, 2010. Newman, Joseph M., dir. This Island Earth. Universal Pictures, 1955. Ragona, Ubaldo, and Sidney Salkow, dirs. The Last Man on Earth. American International Pictures, 1964. Reeves, Matt, dir. Cloverfield. Paramount Pictures, 2008. Romero, George A., dir. Night of the Living Dead. The Walter Reade Organization, 1968. Sanders, Rupert, dir. Snow White and the Huntsman. Universal Pictures, 2012. Segal, Boris, dir. Omega Man. Warner Bros, 1971. Shyamalan, M. Night, dir. The Happening. 20th Century Fox, 2008. Siodmak, Robert, dir. Son of Dracula. Universal Pictures, 1943. Snyder, Zack, dir. Dawn of the Dead. Universal Pictures, 2004. Spielberg, Steven, dir. War of the Worlds. Paramount Pictures, 2005.

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__________________________________________________________________ Strause, Brothers, dirs. Skyline. Universal Pictures, 2010. Verhoeven, Paul, dir. Starship Troopers. TriStar Pictures, 1997. Wachowski, Andy, and Larry Wahowski, dirs. Matrix. Warner Bros Pictures, 1999. Simon Bacon is an Independent Researcher based in Poznań, Poland. He is the editor of the journal Monsters and the Monstrous and is currently working on the book Undead Memory: Vampires and Human Memory in Popular Culture.

‘Strange Outlandish Star’: Spaces of Horror in the Poems and Memoirs of the War Poets Sarah Montin Abstract Space, not time, was man’s greatest enemy in the First World War. Our mind’s eye has remained fixed on Nash’s nightmarish wastelands, Otto Dix’s grotesque organic landscapes or the horrific ‘battlefield gothic’1 of war literature. It is as if innumerable literary and artistic hells had suddenly taken shape in the mud of the trenches, forming the modern archetype of the demonic space, the ‘world of nightmare and the scapegoat, of bondage, pain and confusion’2 described by Northrop Frye. For it is in space itself, rather than in traditional human or inhuman figures, that evil seems to originate in the works of the First World War artists, and in particular in those of the war poets. Basing my chapter on the British memoirs and poems of the First World War, I will examine how the writers reacted to the extraordinary living conditions in the trenches and the ‘perceptual crisis’3 it engendered, by ‘monstering’ the landscape of their poems. By turning it into an alien, unnatural, and obscenely living space opposed to man’s own stillness in the war of attrition, the war writers signalled the breakdown of the relationship between man and his environment, and ultimately the redefinition of man’s place in the modern world. Key Words: First World War, war poetry, war memoirs, poetics of space, monster, monstrous feminine. ***** War and space are inextricably linked in the pursuit of power, through the annexing of territories, establishing or displacing of boundaries and the altering of geography and landscape to suit the needs of the forces in play. Yet some wars are undoubtedly more materialized, more territorialized, and ultimately more spatialized than others and their artistic representation more distinctly rooted in the physical universe. Svend Larsen reminds us that in Homer’s or Virgil’s classical depictions of war, ‘landscape is quantité négligable – it is present in stereotypical descriptions, maybe with a touch of mythology, like a sunrise, a sunset, a storm, a river, a mountain and so on.’4 Conversely, the literature of the First World War, with its emblematic no man’s land and its sunken trenches, skeletal trees, scarred earth, is all landscape. No longer prettified décor or symbolic background to man’s action, landscape becomes a sign in an extreme and violent form of spatialization, which created a ‘new [paradigm] for the experience of space in the twentieth century’.5 The shattering life conditions in the trenches engendered a new relational structure to the material universe,6 redefining man’s sensory and artistic

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__________________________________________________________________ relationship to space. In poems, letters, memoirs, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden or Siegfried Sassoon insist on the soldier’s heightened awareness of the material world and the re-evaluation and redefinition of bodily experience. No longer an abstraction, a neutral plane inhabited by man, space became a concrete force to be reckoned with, a living element of destruction which defied comprehension and precipitated, in the retelling of experience, ‘a return to the world of myth and monsters’.7 It is this association of space and the ‘world of myth and monsters’ I would like to explore here. In their representation of the horror of war, the war-poets did not localise the monstrous in some archetypal symbol of evil but in the space of war itself. This chapter mainly focuses on the poems and memoirs of the War poets who, inspired by the horror and fascination provoked in them by the geography of the trenches, ‘monstered’ the space of war in their writings. Following J.J. Cohen’s definition of the monster (‘the monster is best understood as an embodiment of difference, a breaker of category, a resistant Other known only through process and movement never through dissection table analysis’8) I will see how the portrayal of space as monstrous highlights the breakdown of the relationship between man and his environment, and, ultimately, points to the redefinition of man’s place in the modern world. 1. Unchartable Lands No man’s land, virtually undistinguishable from the fields that now surround it, lives on today mainly through artistic or literary representation. Wilfred Owen’s letter to his mother has become a textbook reference, framing the image we have of that now legendary place: It is like the eternal place of gnashing of teeth; the Slough of Despond could be contained in one of its crater-holes… It is pock-marked like a body of the foulest disease and its odour is the breath of cancer. I have not seen any dead. I have done worse. In the dank air, I have perceived it and in the darkness felt. [It] is the face of the moon, chaotic, crater-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.9 In a manner typical of writers recounting their first view of no man’s land, Owen’s description immediately shies away from the real and plunges into the phantasmagorical, the hallucinatory, the poetic. The poet’s account is so thoroughly literary, so de-contextualised by its allusions to traditional hell-scapists (Bunyan, Dante, St-John) and their demonic worlds that it is easy to forget that the landscape in question embodies a modern reality (in fact one of the most emblematic landscapes of the Machine Age). Yet the writer’s medium is not here

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__________________________________________________________________ at fault: in his own description to his wife, the painter Paul Nash proves just as incapable of resisting allegory and poetic hyperbole: I have seen the most frightful nightmare of a country more conceived by Dante or Poe than by nature, unspeakable, utterly indescribable…no pen nor drawing can convey this country…Evil and the incarnate fiend alone can be masters of this war, and no glimmer of God’s hand is seen anywhere. Sunset and sunrise are blasphemous, they are mockeries to man, only the black rain out of the bruised swollen and swollen clouds all through the bitter black of night is fit atmosphere for such a land.10 In both cases (and despite their equal mastery of analogy and metaphor) the hyperbolic images, prolonged enumeration and juxtaposition, betray the impossibility of sketching a coherent and natural likeness of no man’s land, of actually showing it to the reader instead of telling it in poetic terms. The place as it is described remains mysterious, purely fictional in its conception (‘more conceived by Dante or Poe than nature’): a non-place, removed from concrete realities. This escape from reality is enhanced by the quasi epiphanic terms of the poet’s experience (‘I have felt, I have perceived it’) and religious allusion ( ‘Evil and the incarnate fiend’, ‘God’s hand’) that remove it to the realm of the incommunicable. It is this supra-natural dimension which ultimately resists representation: a true understanding of this place, the texts suggest, is a privilege of the initiate. Wilfred Owen and Paul Nash are by no means the only artists to have hinted at the spiritual and magical quality, the ‘enchantment’11 or the ‘spell’12 cast by the Front. Lying behind a thick web of barbed wire and extraordinary rumours (the ‘false news’13 famously analysed by Marc Bloch), the war-zone quickly acquired legendary status among the soldiers, whose propensity for magical thinking Eric Leed explains by their living conditions: Many report that the physical setting of war effected a peculiar narrowing of comprehension, a stripping away of any sense of periphery, a fixing of the gaze to narrow strips of uninteresting ground. This radical curtailment of vision enhanced the possibilities for projection … The impossibility of ‘visual synthesis’ creates a climate of fear and anxiety that is an appropriate setting for the practice of magic.14

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__________________________________________________________________ Robert Graves, although careful to give a deliberately un-dramatic, disenchanted description of the place in his memoirs,15 cannot refrain from evoking the eerie hallucinations he experienced upon seeing no man’s land at night: The darkness seemed to move and shake about as I looked at it; the bushes started travelling singly at first then both together. The pickets did the same. I was glad of the sentry beside me.16 Although altogether different from Owen’s vision, no man’s land here plays the same essential function: it represents the ultimate Other place, the place of others belonging to the enemy or the barbarian. More than a reality, no man’s land becomes a symbol for the great Unknown, the ‘strange outlandish star’ in Ivor Gurney’s terms, upon which the fear and quasi metaphysical horror induced by day-to-day life in the trenches, is projected and inscribed. Thus, while being firmly rooted in the harshest of realities, the Front paradoxically and simultaneously becomes a place of ‘reinvigorated myth’,17 abounding in miracles and monsters. In this sense, the Front (and no man’s land in particular) enters Foucault’s category of heterotopias, or other spaces that exist but which function ‘like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within culture are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted.’18 This heterotopia possesses, de facto, many attributes of the archetypal other/monstrous space: its marginal position between two national borders, between city and country and centre and periphery, suggests the liminal space where ‘in every cultural tradition, monsters are said to live…inhabiting an ‘outside’ dimension that is apart from but parallel to and intersecting from the human community.’19 Many poets arriving on the Front experienced the dizzying feeling of having come to the edge of the horizon: ‘it felt as if we were at the end of the world. And so we were, for that enemy world…had no relation to the landscape of life’,20 just as Owen’s soldiers in ‘Exposure’ fall over the edge of the world as they go over the top (‘Plunged and fell away past this world’s verge’). The same notion of periphery is contained in the intimations of madness, ugliness, chaos, ‘uncreation’ which permeate the landscape of war poems. As such, it does not belong to the stable harmony of the cosmos, but to the profane world (‘the formless expanse that surrounds our world’21 according to Mircea Eliade), a desecrated, ‘unholy’22 ground where sunrise comes as a ‘blasphemy’.23 Existence in no man’s land is indeed characterized by chaos and dissolution, marked by ambivalence and juxtaposition,24 a constant transgression of natural order (life/death, man/animal man/machine) which threatens social and moral boundaries and inevitably the soldier’s own identity.

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__________________________________________________________________ Thus it is seems surprising that no man’s land should frequently be depicted as a petrified landscape (evoking a frozen lunar setting) when it is in fact a place of crisis, energy, flux and eternal transition. Constantly shattered by guns and renewed by the natural cycle, it is a place of transitory and unfixed identity. The numerous metaphors and references to water, mud and clay signify the terrifying malleability and fluidity of space, its perpetually imminent dissolution. Every day, a parody of creation is played out in the primeval mud of the trenches, the ‘drab uncreation’ Blunden evokes in ‘Third Ypres’. Constantly shifting and changing shape, delocalised from one day to the next, it is space rather than time that appears here thoroughly out of joint: Below, among mighty trees of golden leaf, and some that lie prone in black channels as primeval saurians, there is a track across the lagooned Ancre. A trolley line crosses too, but disjointedly; disjointedness now dominates the picture …we come into a maze of trenches, disjointed indeed…And Thiepval wood is two hundred yards on…disjointed, burnt, unchartable.25 ‘The repetition of ‘disjointed’ insists on the literal meaning of the word, that is, the separation at the joints, the dislocation of the body of the landscape. The landscape is ‘unchartable’ because it is indeed dis-located, removed from its original place and changed beyond recognition. Blunden’s reflection on man’s changing identity through time (through the quotation of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts : ‘Time glided away, Lorenzo, like a brook/ In the same brook none ever bathed him twice’26) can thus be also seen in the light of this spatial dislocation, as a reflection on the Heraclitean nature of space. For indeed, the incredible fluidity of space in no man’s land implies a lack of local identity ( a place of ‘obliterated identity’27 according to Blunden) that in turn threaten man’s sense of his own identity. No man’s land unstable identity was accurately pinpointed by David Jones (author of the war epic In Parenthesis) who called it a ‘space between’, a geographical bracket composed of ‘sharp contours and unformed voids’.28 It is this intermediary position, this oscillation between two places but also two paradoxical states that renders no man’s land difficult to define, to categorize and ultimately to represent. Space is double, caught between two opposite states as Blunden reveals in ‘Illusions’, where the sweet moonlight pastoral of ‘dewy grass’, ‘sighing orchards’ and ‘weedy wells’ is also, simultaneously, a landscape of death and desolation, corpses dangling on the wire ‘for the moon’s interpretation’. In Geoffrey Howard’s ‘The Beach by the Road’, the pastoral space is shadowed by the space of the battlefield: innocent daffodils grow in ‘battalions’, ‘blowing their trumpets’ and ‘shaking their glancing spears’. This spatial porosity is a subtle feature of many poems, increasing the circulation between different spaces within the text or the fading in and out of dream states and reality as in Owen’s

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__________________________________________________________________ ‘Exposure’ or Sassoon’s ‘Death-bed’. But spatial instability is also most effectively illustrated by antithesis, in the poets’ unusual celebration of ‘firm roads’ (Aldington), ‘four-squared edifices’ (Gurney) and the ‘solid people’ ( C.S. Lewis) that inhabit them. Houses of all types contrast with the open, exterior world of the battlefield and recall Bachelard’s sheltered stable cosmos29 where man is meant to recompose himself. But despite all their efforts at fixing and appropriating the identity of the Front (specifically through naming as in Blunden’s ‘Trench Nomenclature’), it always remains an alien and forbidding space, ‘a corner seeming saturnine’, a place they cannot take possession of and from which they will always be exiled. As such, the Front remains a space rather than a place, which is bounded, defined and constructed in terms of the lived experience of its inhabitants. The unstable identity of the space explains the difficulties of scientific rationalization or naturalistic representation of the geography of the Front. In ‘The Prophet’ Blunden mocks the clumsy classifications of a dated tourist guide and the ironic disparities between the text and the place as he has come to know it: He comes from Menin, names the village names ...Crosses a river ( so he calls that blood-leat Bassevillebeek), a hill (a hideous hill) And reaches Ypres ‘a pleasant, well-built town’. However the same criticism can be applied to the maps of the war-zone prefacing many memoirs. Noticeably sketchy and partial, they seem to foreground the very futility of representing a space that clearly exceeds its frames and constantly changes scales. Indeed the discrepancy between the maps and the experienced geography of the trenches is so great that following the narrator’s progress on the map often proves to be a near-impossible task for the reader. The narrators’ themselves point to the clear hiatus between the lines of official army ordnance maps and space as it is experienced daily by the soldier. Indications of local landmarks (rivers, farms, villages, infrastructure) point to places that do not exist (‘The village pond, so blue on the map, had completely disappeared’30) revealing the complete breakdown between signifier and signified. According to Bernd Huppauf, the official maps had indeed failed: ‘the Front did not match the blueprints; and the blueprints which should have taken the changes on the Front into account, followed outmoded military codes.’31 This temporal and spatial hiatus is responsible for the breakdown of linearity and spatial logic, illustrated by the recurrent topos of the maze in war literature. The resulting disorientation takes on metaphysical proportions and remains long after the end of the war, as Blunden’s poems hauntingly reveal:

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__________________________________________________________________ A hounded kern in this grim No Man’s land I am spurned between the secret countersigns Of every little grain of rustling sand. ( ‘Estrangement’) What need of that stopped tread, that countersign? (‘Quinque Rue’) The poet returns ceaselessly to the No man’s land although he has lost his way and does not possess the ‘secret countersign’ (the password) to understand it. This is perhaps why poets often resorted to a form of allegorical map and names that evokes the feeling, rather than the topography, associated to a landscape. Graves in ‘The Assault Heroic’ (‘The dungeon of Despair’, ‘the Desolate Sea’) or Blunden in Undertones of War (‘one immediately entered the land of despair’32) infuse the geography with affect and personal meaning so as to find their way through a maze of broken signposts and dissolved paths, trying to recover ‘the emotional orientation of the battlefield’33 in order to understand and decipher it. 2. Embodied Landscape Indeed ‘Teeth’, ‘body’, ‘odour’ ‘face’ are four of the key words Owen uses to describe no man’s land in his letter to his mother, as if the poet were trying to organize the landscape into coherent, readable, human terms. Owen is not the only artist to have relied on corporeal metaphors to materialize the monstrosity he obscurely ‘perceived’ in no man’s land. Indeed, analogies with the human body often suggested an unnatural animation of space, inversely proportional to the reification of the soldiers in the trenches. Otto Dix’s painting ‘Flanders’ (1934) famously depicts German soldiers slowly sinking into the landscape, their petrified hands and feet sprouting leaves and branches, their bodies undifferentiated from the mounds of earth and rotting tree stumps surrounding them. The powerful feeling of unease which derives from the painting comes from the intermediary state of the soldier’s bodies, caught between character and setting, life and death, flesh and plant – until the viewer starts wondering whether it is the soldiers’ bodies turning into landscape or the landscape turning into soldiers’ bodies. It is in this moment of floating hesitation, brought about by the violation of physical boundaries between soldier and landscape, animate and inanimate, that the monstrous is situated. The movement of nature slowly taking over and morphing into the soldier’s body is indeed a horrifying inversion of the body’s traditional return to nature in death (embodied in the English pastoral tradition by Shelley’s ‘He is made one with nature’, ‘Lycidas’). This pastoral trope was persistently used by the more patriotic poets, the most popular example being Rupert Brooke’s cycle of sonnets (with the celebrated image of the mingling dusts of man and earth: ‘In that rich earth a richer dust concealed’). In this poetic context, the pervasive image of the

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__________________________________________________________________ ‘flesh garden’ is a direct perversion of the reassuring life cycle promised by the pastoral. In one of Graves’ first war poems, the war-poet visits a garden budding with the corpses of men (‘Before the Battle’), just as Ernst Jünger’s first encounter with the Front is characterized by the vision of corpses on the battlefield: ‘as though we walked in a dream through a garden of strange plants’.34 Where Brooke’s poem conceals the body in the embracing earth, Graves (and Jünger) on the contrary expose it, thrust it out of the protective natural fold. Thus instead of incorporating and covering the dead body, the war poets choose obscenity over closure by focusing on the exteriorization and the outpouring of the body in, into and on a landscape ‘all splashed with arms and legs’ (‘Third Ypres’). The natural landscape is transformed into a geography of flesh: There the deep dugouts, which faced the German guns, were cancerous with torn bodies, and to pass an entrance was to gulp poison; in one place a corpse had been thrust in to stop up a doorways’ dangerous displacement and an arm swung stupidly. The whole zone was a corpse and the mud itself mortified.35 The embodiment of the landscape clearly goes beyond the traditional personification (pathetic fallacy) of the landscape in poetry: the place has not been invested with abstract human traits but has turned into a corpse, a Frankensteinian body made up of the human and the non-human, the living and the dead, the being and the non-being. Carved out of decomposing, dead flesh, the embodied landscape already monstrous in its violation of the natural order, is almost invariably represented as sick and polluted. In her study in the concept of the abject (Powers of Horror), Julia Kristeva theorizes that physical abjection (relating to bodily impurity and sickness) disturbs identities, systems, order. The abject is terrifying because, like the monstrous, it does not respect rules or limits.36 Thus the numerous references to the pollution of the war landscape only reinforce its inherent monstrosity. Images of weakened, cancerous bodies prompt parallel images of sickened landscapes. Symbols of corruption are frequent, but the worm, with its connotations of the ambiguous, the indeterminate, the unclean,37 figures prominently among the list of polluting creatures. In Richard Aldington (‘The terror of the worm’, ‘Terror’), in Rosenberg (‘The Worm that ate the heart of Corinth’) or in Owen (‘The Show’), the worm signals the corruption of space by invisible forces or man himself and, ultimately, the breakdown of the relationship between man and his environment. For the Georgian poets who enjoyed a notoriously uncomplicated relationship with nature, these symbols also signal the corruption of the pastoral space, consecrating a poetic and a political rupture between man and nature, and more generally, a breakdown of the symbolic order.

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__________________________________________________________________ As an example of this, Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘the Show’ depicts the battlefield seen from above as a leprous, putrefied body : the land is ‘weak with sweats of dearth’, disfigured by ‘great pocks and scabs of plaques’, ‘myriad warts’ and ‘foul openings’. It is noticeably opposed to the ‘green fields’ (model of the Edenic landscape) which presumably refer to the clean pastures of an idyllic pre-war England. The tiny human figures are seen from above as writhing maggots, vomited out of the diseased mouths of the trenches. The surprisingly direct references to bodily wastes, to the sweat and smells of disease, insist on the ‘foul’ abjection of the landscape. In fact, many signs of the abjection analysed by Julia Kristeva appear here: the corpse, the deformed, diseased body, the bodily fluids etc, and the more symbolic reference to cannibalism (‘and ate them and were eaten’) which suggests a violation of the moral order. Still more disconcerting is the evocation of the mouth, appearing in between brackets, as if to defuse (but in fact reinforcing) the obscenity of the image: (And smell came up from those foul openings As out of mouths, or deep wounds deepening) Clearly it is the exposure of the inside of the body that is considered here most horrifying, to the extent of being symbolically concealed by the brackets. For the mouth, the ‘foul opening’ fleetingly evokes the image of the female sex (although the landscape is at first portrayed as male, as would seem to indicate the presence of a beard), often designated and portrayed as a wound or ‘gash’. Pursuing this thought, the image of the worms clambering out of these ‘openings’ suggest a grotesque parody of birth compounded with the fear of an all-absorbing (‘deep’ and for ever ‘deepening’ as the polyptoton insists) and diseased womb, archetypal locus of abjection. Indeed, Kristeva underlines that the mother’s body, whose maternal functions entail a greater closeness to nature than the male body, is the incarnation of the abject.38 In fact mouths and in particular devouring mouths are a regular feature of the war poet’s imagination, and they often suggest a cross between the medieval hellmouths and the vagina dentada. Tree-tops, barbed wire, broken houses, and even the more poetic image of dawn are obsessively endowed with or compared to teeth, fangs, jaws: Cramped in that funnelled hole, they watch the dawn Open a jaded rim around; a yawn Of death’s jaws which has all but swallowed them Stuck in the bottom of his throat of phlegm. (‘Cramped in That Funnelled Hole’)

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__________________________________________________________________ But the primal fear of being eaten or ingested by the monster (or the mother) is mostly embodied in the ground, in the ‘hungry swamps of Flanders’ (Muriel Elsie Graham). Owen described the horrifying phenomenon in a letter to his mother: ‘The ground was not mud, not sloppy mud, but an octopus of sucking clay’39 or ‘the mud there…it was a curious kind of sucking mud.[…] Not like quicksand but a real monster that sucked at you’.40 Indeed, The soldiers considered the mud as a ‘definite malevolent force’, which provoked what Santanu Das calls ‘combined disgust and horror with a sense of almost metaphysic bewilderment’,41 and explains the recurrent images of drowning among the war poets. But in the almost all-male world of the army, the most obsessive images are those of threatening liquidity (blood, mud, slime) which all relate to the monstrous feminine. The rare overt sexualisations of the war-space (in the earth, the ground, the trench) always portray fearsome and unnatural feminine sexuality, perverted fecundity and monstrous births. In Isaac Rosenberg’s ‘Dead Man’s Dump’, earth copulates savagely with war and gives birth to stillborn children: Howling and flying, your bowel Seared by the jagged fire, the iron love, The impetuous storm of savage love[…] What dead are born when you kiss each soundless soul? In Apollinaire’s prosopopoiea of the trench (‘La tranchée’), he replaces the traditional reference to mother earth by that of a vampiric female sex, finding erotic pleasure in young men’s deaths: Je suis la blanche tranchée au corps creux et blanc Et j’habite toute la terre dévastée Viens avec moi jeune homme dans mon sexe qui est tout mon corps Viens avec moi pénètre-moi pour que je sois heureuse de volupté sanglante (I am the white trench, my body is hollow and white And I inhabit all the devastated earth Come with me, young man, in my sex that is my whole body Come with me, penetrate me so that I can rejoice in bloody ecstasy).42 In destabilizing and reversing the natural order, these spatialised images of devouring female sexuality redefine traditional categories of space, earth, landscape and, ultimately, the concept of nature itself. The deformed, monstrous landscape signifies abject terror because it violates natural but also cultural, moral

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__________________________________________________________________ and even aesthetic categories. No man’s land as it is portrayed in war poetry, blurrs the categories of space and the human body, the liquid and the solid, the exterior and the interior, life and death, the male and the female, the natural and the symbolic, and reveals the transformation in man’s rapport to space and the universe. 3. Man’s Place In The Storyteller (1936), Walter Benjamin articulates a reflection on the decay of modern experience and its devaluation during and after the First World War, ‘one of the most monstrous experiences in world history’:43 For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged except the clouds and, beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.44 The shift in the apprehension of the material universe, so powerfully illustrated by the transition from the ‘horse drawn streetcar’ to the tiny body, standing still in the destructive ‘field of force’, was engendered by the crisis of experience the soldiers endured during the Great War. The war, in the words of Paul Valéry, changed how matter, time and space had been perceived since time immemorial,45 prompting a transformation of the very structure of human perception. The war-poets represented this perceptual crisis by no longer defining space as an inert concept, a ‘passive, abstract arena on which things happen’46 but as a form of action founded in physical energy, exemplified by Benjamin’s own expression ‘field of force’. Bernd Huppaüf reminds us that the First World War created a new space whose ‘morphology requires constant destruction and is signified by movement without changing places.’47 Indeed movement and in particular the paradoxical idea of ‘movement without changing places’ we saw illustrated in the permanent dislocation of the Front is what defines the space of war. Animated from within by destructive energy, its perpetual mobility is also the origin of its monstrosity. A close reading of war literature shows us a space that is no longer represented as inhabited or animated by man, but rather as an independent force, threatening to submerge or to engulf him. Its excess of presence, its heightened visibility (in particular its obscene embodiment) and its strange and violent animation is accompanied by a change in nature, scale and dimension. The general glut of war induces indeed a dilatation of time and space: ‘each moment puffed into a year

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__________________________________________________________________ with death’/ Still swooped into the swamps of flesh and blood’ (‘Thrid Ypres’) which takes on vertiginous proportions. An infinite space opens up under the feet of the soldiers in Owen last poem ‘Spring Offensive: And the green slopes Chasmed and steepened sheer to infinite space The slopes ‘chasm’ and ‘steepen’ of their own volition, engulfing the soldiers and the battlefield. In ‘Strange Meeting’, the association of ‘titanic’ and ‘groined’ evokes a tunnel of surprisingly cathedral-like proportions: ‘long since scooped/In granites that titanic wars had groined’. This striking and sometimes unsuspected depth of space is suggested time and time again in Blunden’s poetry, where sudden movement under clear surfaces provokes a feeling of anxiety and vertigo in the poet. Immensity and great distance are also conjured by sudden drops and prospect views, as for example in Rosenberg’s ‘Daughters of War’. The soldiers are seen from far above, struck in their ‘human quagmire’; as in sad faded paintings, far sunken and strange, a melancholy image that suggests infinite remoteness in space, time and memory. The soldiers themselves are often portrayed from afar, silhouetted and shadowed as if they were losing their shape, slowly falling from humanity as space engulfs them, ‘Dusky figures…hobbling to avoid slipping, inhuman forms going to and from inhuman tasks’.48 The same ‘fade-out’ effect is produced in Paul Nash’s war paintings where the soldiers appear to melt or vanish into the darkened landscape. As space expands, so man shrinks and in shrinking (‘shrivelling’, ‘grovelling’, ‘cowering’) inevitably loses his human shape and returns to his primal animal nature: Cower shrinkingly against the ground/ Dark shadowy forms of men (‘Machine Guns’, Richard Aldington). Man’s gradual loss of shape and consistence in the writings of the war is inversely proportional to the growing presence and animation of space, as Rosenberg drives across so powerfully and simply: The grass and coloured clay More motion have than they (‘Dead Man’s Dump’) For the battlefield is not only represented as a space of violence, a space where public violence is unleashed and contained but also, as an essentially violent space. Indeed the constant mobility of the war-space is not turned towards reconstruction

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__________________________________________________________________ and rebirth but destruction and murder, as Blunden’s striking line indicates: ‘A whole countryside amuck with murder’. Critics of war literature often develop the theme of the devastation of nature by man, while disregarding the fact that poets also insisted on the innate barbarism and monstrosity of nature at the Front. Nature is portrayed as having reverted to an untamed wilderness, a state of nature, characterised by chaotic movement, without control or direction, undecipherable by the poet. This state of nature indicates a resurgence of primitivism and ‘a return of the violence that pervaded pre-modern space’.49 Indeed, the sense of a regressive, pre-historical space, untouched by the rationalization of history, is repeatedly evoked in the references to the ‘primal’, ‘primeval’ or ‘barbaric’ in Blunden’s descriptions. Owen himself refers to the mythological time of the ‘titanic wars’, before the birth of humanity, in the beginning of ‘Strange Meeting’. Despite the Great War’s technological advance, the war poets’ representation of nature thus ostensibly rejoins Frye’s vision of the demonic world, personifying ‘the vast, menacing, stupid powers of nature as they appear to a technologically undeveloped society’.50 Far from a humanized, controlled or mechanised representation of nature, the reader is confronted to an anti-landscape, inhuman in its savagery, unordered, incapable of serving as a stable setting or backdrop to a poem. The latent animosity of nature and its unnatural animation (attested by the striking amount of dynamic verbs associated to the landscape) create unstable and uncanny spaces. Both ‘attracted and appalled’, the poet in ‘Quinque Rue’ is filled with dread upon revisiting a place belonging to his past: Why do dreadful rags Fur these bulged banks, and feebly move to the wind? That battered drum, say why it clacks and brags? …Why clink those spades, why glare these startling suns And topple to the wet and crawling grass, Where the shrill briars in taloned hedges twine? (‘La Quinque Rue’). Each separate element of the landscape holds different and potentially monstrous or repulsive associations (the dreadful fur, the bulged banks, the glaring suns, the crawling grass, the taloned hedge). Presented together, they conjure up the silhouette of an unspeakable creature camouflaged in the landscape. The lack of agent behind the animation of nature and the hostile aspect of its features (the glaring suns, the shrill briars, the taloned hedge) drive the poet to desperation: ‘who’s behind?’ he cries, to the empty space. And although there is never any answer, the gratuitous violence of nature is particularly resonant: ivy ‘whirs’, bats ‘shrill’:

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__________________________________________________________________ In these parched lanes where the gray wind maligns Oaks, once my friends, with ugly murmurings Madden me, and ivy whirs like condor wings : The very bat that stoops and whips askance Shrills malice at the soul grown strange in France (‘Estrangement’). The neutrality of nature has been replaced by a terrifying malignancy (‘the gray wind maligns’, the bat ‘shrills malice’) and it is the whole landscape that turns against the soldiers in Owen’s ‘Spring Offensive’: ‘instantly the whole sky burned/ With fury against them; earth set sudden cups/ In thousands for their blood’. Such a powerful animation of space rests mainly on personification, a device handled with an unexpected twist by war writers. Indeed the personification of space or landscape in war literature frequently entails the depersonalisation of man: where space is augmented by personification, men conversely are reduced and suffer a loss of being. When the war poets insist on personifying the landscape, on giving it a body and feelings, they reveal that nature ‘saps real persons of feelings, of features, of agency’.51 In this manner ‘personification…discloses the surrogation of life, the transfer of life from persons…to impersonal force.’52 This has for effect that the more space is animated and incarnated, the more men are represented as inert, passive or absent. Sven Larsen explains that since the aesthetic change in the Renaissance conception of landscape and the invention of linear perspective, man has become central in the construction of landscape (stress on individual perception rather than divine view, appropriation of landscape through individually controllable position).53 There is a clear shift of this paradigm in the poetic landscapes of the Great War, no longer organised around the human subject, but around elements of nature or machines, that have taken the place of man. Nature itself becomes an independent subject while man is objectified: the agency of verbs in war poetry attest to this reversal of positions– in Blunden’s ‘Third Ypres’, nature and war are subject of the active verbs while men are mere passive recipients of their actions. But the transfer of the gaze from man to space is perhaps the most striking example of the reversal of their positions. The landscape is given eyes while man is portrayed as blind, lost in labyrinthine tunnels. Instead of being the objects of man’s controlling gaze, the landscape and nature are the ones watching man: from the very beginning of Blunden’s ‘Third Ypres; ’The light was peering/ Halfsmiling upon us’ and ‘through the window the red lilac look[ed]’. Soldiers in a 1917 Front line newspaper described the uncanny feeling of being watched like prey by the mud: ‘At night, crouching in a shell-hole, the mud watches, like an enormous octopus’.54 And the same uneasy sensation of being observed by nature is reported by Carrington: ‘That ghastly hill […] seemed to leer at you like an ogre in a fairy-tale. It loomed up unexpectedly, peering into trenches when you thought

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__________________________________________________________________ you were safe’.55 From everywhere the landscape comes alive and the moon, like a gigantic eye in the sky, watches man: The wolfish shadows in the eerie places Sprawl in the mist light Sharp-fanged searches the frost, and shackles The sleeping water in broken cellars, And calm and fierce, the witch-moon watches, curious of evil (‘Full Moon’). In this space where the soldiers are either reduced to shadows or objects, and where the landscape takes on multiple shapes and shades, man gradually loses his identity as a subject. The war space is the land of the ‘no man’, the man without identity: And although this landscape is suffused with bodies- not to talk about corpses – the landscape looks abandoned because someone who assimilates to the elements of a landscape becomes a no man. For identity is based on the order of a dividing line. Without the line, this order breaks down. In the zone identity is negated.56 Rather than space conforming to man, man is made to conform to space and assimilated (by camouflage, underground trenches, strategic placement) until he is no longer distinct from the landscape. This is the last step in the destruction, ingestion and incorporation of man by the monstrous space of war. The Front, which dissolves man into its hostile space, appears as the very reverse of Bachelard’s ‘beloved space’ (l’espace aimé), the space which ‘concentrates being within the limits it protects’.57

Notes 1

Samuel Hynes, The Soldier’s Tale, Bearing Witness to Modern War (New York: Viking Penguin Books, 1997), 26. 2 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (London: Penguin, 1990), 147. 3 Sanatanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 36. 4 Svend Erik Larsen, ‘Landscape, Identity, War’, New Literary History, 35, n°3 (2004): 473. 5 Bernd Huppaüf, War, Violence and the Modern Condition (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1996), 24. 6 Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy, 36.

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Ibid. J.J. Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis, University of Minneapolis Press, 1996), x. 9 Dominic Hibberd, ed., Wilfred Owen: War Poems and Others (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), 63. 10 Paul Nash quoted in Charles Harrison, English Art and Modernism, 1900-1939 (London: Allen Lane, 1981), 138-9. 11 David Jones, In Parenthesis (London: Faber, 2010), x. 12 Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (London: Penguin, 2000), 110. 13 Marc Bloch, Réfléxions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre (Paris: Editions Allia, 1999). 14 Eric Leed, No Man’s Land, Combat and Identity in World War One (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 124-127. 15 ‘Between us and them lay a flat meadow with cornflowers, marguerites and poppies growing in the long grass, a few shell holes, the bushes I had see the night before, the wreck of an aeroplane, our barbed wire and theirs.’ Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 1982), 89. 16 Graves, Goodbye, 88. 17 Paul Fussel, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 115. 18 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Heterotopias’, tr. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986), 22-27. Within Foucault’s typology of heterotopias, no man’s land would no doubt come under the first kind, heterotopias of crisis where in ‘socalled primitive societies…there are privileged, or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to the situation and society where they live, in a state of crisis.’ 19 David D. Gilmore, Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and all Manners of Imaginary Terrors (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 12. 20 Siegfried Sassoon quoted in Paul Fussel, The Great War, 136. 21 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (Florida : Harcourt, 1987), 9. 22 Blunden, Undertones, 93. 23 Harrison, English Art, 138. 24 Leed, No Man’s Land, 19. The author gives a rich and extensive study of the liminality and transgressive space of no man’s land. 25 Ibid., 84. 26 Bluden, Undertones, 60. 27 Ibid., 165. 28 Jones, In Parenthesis, x. 29 Gaston Bachelard, Poétique de l’espace (Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1957). 30 Blunden, Undertones, 97. 8

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Bernd Huppaüf, With the Sharpened Axe of Vision: Approaches to Walter Benjamin (Oxford: Berg, 1996), 50. 32 Blunden, Undertones, 97. 33 Huppaüf, With the Sharpened Axe, 50. 34 Ernst Jünger, The Storm of Steel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), 23. 35 Blunden, Undertones, 98. 36 Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror, an Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. 37 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2001), 57. 38 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 102. 39 Wilfred Owen quoted in Sanatanu Das, Touch and Intimacy, 36. 40 Ibid., 45. 41 Ibid., 36-37. 42 Guillaume Apollinaire, Oeuvres poétiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1965). My translation. 43 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken books, 2007), 84. 44 Ibid. 45 ‘Ni la matière, ni l’espace, ni le temps ne sont depuis vingt ans ce qu’ils étaient depuis toujours.’ Paul Valéry, ‘La conquête de l’ubiquité’ in Œuvres II (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 1284. 46 Michael Keith, Steve Pile, Place and the Politics of Identity (London : Routledge, 1993), 2. 47 Huppaüf, War, 24. 48 Siegfried Sassoon quoted in Das, Touch and Intimacy, 64. 49 Ibid., 16. 50 Frye, Anatomy, 147. 51 Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton University press, 2010), 115. Although Mary Favret’s excellent analysis of the working of personification is focused on the depersonalization of man through the personification of war, the same process can be recognized in the treatment of landscape. 52 Ibid. 53 Sven Larsen, Landscape, Identity, War, 480. 54 Das, Touch and Intimacy, 35. 55 Paul Carrington quoted in Fussel, The Great War, 137. 56 Huppaüf, War, 54. 57 Bachelard, Poétique, 17. My translation.

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Bibliography Bachelard, Gaston. Poétique de l’espace. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Shocken Books, 2007. Bloch, Marc. Réflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre. Paris : Editions Allia, 1999. Cohen, J. J. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1996. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine. London: Routledge, 1993. Das, Santanu. Touch and Intimacy in the First World War Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 2003. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. Florida: Hartcourt, 1987. Favret, Mary.A. War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Foucault, Michel. Dits et Ecrits, 1954-1988. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. London: Penguin, 1990. Fussel, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Gilmore, David.D. Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts and all Manners of Imaginary Terrors. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Harrison, Charles. English Art and Modernism, 1900-1939. London: Allen Lane, 1981. Huppaüf, Bernd. War, Violence and the Modern Condition. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1996.

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__________________________________________________________________ Huppaüf, Bernd. With the Sharpened Axe of Vision: Approaches to Walter Benjamin. Oxford: Berg, 1996. Hynes, Samuel. The Soldier’s Tale, Bearing Witness to Modern War. New York: Penguin Viking Books, 1997. Keith, Michael, Pile, Steven. Place and the Politics of Identity. London: Routlege, 1993. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror, an Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Leed, Eric. No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Norbert-Shultz, Christian. Genius Loci. Paysage, Ambiance, Architecture. Bruxelles: P.Mardage, 1989. Sarah Montin is a PhD student at the Sorbonne University, Paris. She is working on the question of identity and literary genre in the works of the British War Poets.

Unsettling Empty Spaces, Displacing Terra Nullius Thea Costantino Abstract The effects of European imperialism – the violent transformation and dislocation of lands, cultures and bodies – often find creative expression in monstrous forms, bearing witness to the ways in which imperial histories haunt the imaginations of nations. Freudian processes of repression and displacement are often played out in the cultural life of places grappling with memories of empire, where buried histories resurface in the form of uncanny returns. Such excavations and eruptions of the colonial repressed find expression in a range of cultural sites, including public space, political rhetoric, historiography, literature, film and visual art. As the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner writes in a phrase evocative of the revenant returned from the dead to wreak havoc upon the living, the suffocating silence around colonial atrocities that characterises Australian popular memory and identity ‘…sticks out like a foot from a shallow grave.’1 An examination of the soil in which this grave is situated can illuminate much about Australian culture’s relationship to this history, as representations of the Australian landscape as empty and the site of monstrous inversion bear the trace of the colonial past. In Australia, the land itself has become both a symbol and battleground for competing perspectives on place and memory. Ongoing depictions of Australian places as empty, yet hostile to the body of the invader, are unavoidably linked to questions of colonial legitimacy and belonging. Parallel to this tradition, powerful counterrepresentations are gaining force in Australian culture, working to re-inscribe putatively ‘empty’ and ‘silent’ spaces with Indigenous histories and presence. Confrontations with Australia’s unresolved colonial history, whether through fraught encounters with the landscape or the reassertion of Indigenous presence within national space, may assist Australians with the difficult task of working through and coming to terms with the past. Key Words: Australia, colonialism, post-colonialism, landscape, visual art, film, literature, Gothic, uncanny. ***** The origins of monsters are often narrated in terms of transgression and rupture, as in the case of Frankenstein’s creature, assembled from stolen, dismembered corpses and granted life through profane science. Likewise, the effects of European imperialism – the violent transformation and dislocation of lands, cultures and bodies – find literary expression in the monstrous characters of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Antoinette/Bertha in Wide Sargasso Sea, and the ghost of Beloved, amongst many other examples. These characters become monstrous as a result of

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__________________________________________________________________ confrontations with, or the exercise of, hegemonic violence, forcing a dramatic rupture with their former selves. That such transformations are bound up in the fractured relationship between past and present, rendering monstrosity a symptom of traumatic memory, and born from frontier spaces, bears witness to the ways in which imperial histories haunt the imaginations of nations. Freudian processes of repression and displacement are often played out in the cultural life of places grappling with memories of empire, where buried histories resurface in the form of uncanny returns. Such excavations and eruptions of the colonial repressed find expression in a range of cultural sites, including public space, political rhetoric, historiography, literature, film and visual art. As the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner writes in a phrase evocative of the revenant returned from the dead to wreak havoc upon the living, the suffocating silence around colonial atrocities that characterises Australian popular memory and identity ‘…sticks out like a foot from a shallow grave’.2 An examination of the soil in which this grave is situated can illuminate much about Australian culture’s relationship to this history, as representations of the Australian landscape as empty and the site of monstrous inversion bear the trace of the colonial past. Like Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States of America, contemporary Australia is a nation marked by a violent history of British colonial settlement, and several conflicting views of home and history continue to exist simultaneously within national culture. These views have been the source of fierce quarrels in the public realm, as Australia’s white majority generally resists calls to probe more deeply into the atrocities of the past, and the nation’s Indigenous peoples fight for land rights, social equality and recognition of the lasting impact of colonialism upon Aboriginal cultures, families and individuals. In this climate, the land itself has become both a symbol and battleground for competing perspectives on place and memory. Since the earliest encounters of the British with the continent at the end of the eighteenth century, representations of the Australian landscape have been characterised by an underlying anxiety and apprehension of monstrous inversion; as is well known, Europeans’ imaginings of the Antipodes as a site of fantastic otherness prefigure their earliest contact with the island continent.3 Depictions of Australian places as sites of emptiness, negative spaces haunted by an unseen presence that threatens to consume the outsider, repeatedly appear as a nightmare of the colonial imagination. In such visions, the familiar landscape of home is transformed by the Freudian uncanny into something alarmingly alien.4 Such unhomeliness, or homelessness, makes repeated incursions into Australia’s self-representations, both in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Ongoing depictions of Australian places as empty, yet hostile to the body of the invader, are unavoidably linked to questions of colonial legitimacy and belonging. These visions are troubled by the race of a repressed ‘other’, recalling Samira Kawash’s statement that, ‘The ‘empty’ landscape perceived by the colonizer is shadowed by an uncanny double, a landscape traversed to the ‘non-existent’

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__________________________________________________________________ colonized’.5 Parallel to this tradition, powerful counter-representations are gaining force in Australian culture, working to re-inscribe putatively ‘empty’ and ‘silent’ spaces with Indigenous histories and presence. Confrontations with Australia’s unresolved colonial history, whether through fraught encounters with the landscape or the reassertion of Indigenous presence within national space, may assist Australians with the difficult task of working through and coming to terms with the past. Despite its having been continuously settled for tens of thousands of years and home to 250 distinct Indigenous nations, at the end of the eighteenth century the British colonised ‘New Holland’ in accordance with the (as yet unnamed) doctrine of terra nullius, behaving as though it were unclaimed and unoccupied, a waste land belonging to no one. However, the newcomers were aware of and in contact with the original inhabitants from the first days of their arrival.6 As Stuart Banner has written, the invaders’ decision to simply take the territory that they desired was uncommon in British colonialism up until that point, as most land acquisitions had been made through a policy of purchases and treaties.7 While such wholesale appropriation had been in effect in Australia since the landing of the First Fleet, it was not formalised in law until Governor Bourke’s Proclamation of 1835, apparently as a means to restrict the sale and taxation of Crown land after John Batman’s attempts to establish a treaty with Aboriginal ‘natives’.8 Despite many dissenting voices from within Britain and the colony, the government operated under the assumption that the continent’s first peoples were simply too uncivilised to be considered in possession of their own territory. Widespread notions that colonised Aboriginal peoples were doomed to extinction, unable to withstand the impact of modernity, bolstered the colonists’ attempts to downplay their own accountability in the dispossession of Indigenous land. While European notions of civilisation were tied to the improvement or cultivation of the soil through agriculture, the British failed to recognise the land management techniques practiced by Aboriginal people that had successfully sustained the continent’s population for millennia. The government also disregarded ample evidence that the original inhabitants considered their land to have been invaded by the newcomers and intended to defend it. Maintaining that the colony was not, by the definitions of the British government, a conquered or ceded province, it was regarded the property of the king, ‘as desert and uninhabited’,9 effectively denying the existence of Indigenous people along with their status as human beings. This position was enshrined in the Australian constitution of 1900, in which Aboriginal Australians were explicitly denied the rights of citizenship and excluded from the national census, until these clauses were removed in 1967.10 Indeed, the nation’s founding documents made clear that Australia was imagined a space for white bodies only, as legislation was enacted to expel ‘Kanaka’ labourers of the Pacific Islands, restrict non-white immigration and prevent Indigenous people from participating in public life.11 The doctrine of terra nullius was not overturned until the Native Title

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__________________________________________________________________ Act of 1993, after lengthy struggles in legal and political spheres, and the public airing of hysterical fears that non-Indigenous Australians could lose their own homes to Aboriginal land claims.12 With the possibility of Native Title, it seemed, the legitimacy of European presence in Australia was threatened to an unprecedented degree. While the earliest interactions between colonists and Indigenous people were generally peaceable, as the colony became established settler violence and Indigenous resistance soon escalated. A wave of escalating atrocities committed by the British was to set the hegemonic tone of relations between white and Indigenous groups.13 From the beginning, property, particularly possession of land, was at the heart of conflicts between invaders and Aborigines, as well as within the militarised society of the penal colony itself, which incongruously attempted to transplant agrarian British culture to an alien climate while transforming it into a vast prison for undesirables, a great many of them thieves,14 in exile from the homeland. Such contradictory overlapping of utopian and dystopian characteristics contributed to European impressions of the new colony on the other side of the world as a horrific yet luring place, a place of isolation, extreme punishment and boundless opportunity, where the seasons were reversed and unfamiliar animals such as the black swan seemed to embody a sense of England inverted. Indeed, as Robert Hughes asserts in his sensationalist history of Australia, The Fatal Shore, the colony seemed to operate as Britain’s geographical unconscious, ‘a cloaca, invisible, its contents filthy and unnameable’,15 or as the nineteenth century writer Marcus Clarke described it, a ‘fantastic land of monstrosities’.16 However, the story of Australia’s founding as it has been popularly celebrated by later generations is a triumphalist myth featuring pioneers, wayward sons of the British Empire, who toil to subdue an alien environment and bring forth its treasures. In this version of history, the terror of Antipodean otherness evinced by earlier generations of colonists is transformed into a narrative of mastery. Ann Curthoys has argued that in Australia’s origins myth the Biblical story of Expulsion is transformed into Exodus: banished from a green and pleasant land by a vengeful monarch, the convicts-cum-pioneers build Arcadia in the desert.17 Key to this myth is its characterisation of the Australian wilderness as barren and threatening, and the pioneer as a victim struggling against incredible odds. In this context, Australia’s irreconcilable difference from the domesticated landscape of Britain is understood to be a source of physical and psychological torment for the white settler. Curthoys argues that in nationalist mythology the many casualties of the tough environment, such as the explorers Burke and Wills, are claimed as martyrs, supporting notions of ‘…the land as won through suffering’.18 The work of late nineteenth- and early twentieth century artists and writers such as Banjo Patterson and Frederick McCubbin helped to establish a mythology of the bush and its conqueror, the swagman or itinerant labourer, the freeborn successor of the convict. Here, the hostility of the environment is incorporated into a heroic

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__________________________________________________________________ narrative in which white men triumph at great personal cost, and, according to Curthoys, their ‘suffering…becomes a means for conferring right of ownership to the land’.19 Rather than a territorial battle between colonist and colonised, this narrative conceals the trace of Indigenous presence, representing the conflict as one between the pioneer and the native environment. It is significant that bush romanticism gained particular force in Australia when much of the work of exploration and invasion had passed. These narratives write the nation’s recent history in terms of trial and conquest, casting the landscape as a worthy adversary. Here, its threatening aspect is claimed in support of a heroic narrative of entitlement, or as Ian McLean argues, spurious indigeneity.20 Artists such as McCubbin presented the swagman as a romantic relic of the Australian frontier. Corresponding to this hero are his vulnerable charges: the nation’s wives and daughters. McCubbin’s 1886 painting Lost depicts a European girl imprisoned by a mass of bushland; the artist presents the moment of her disappearance.21 This work contributes to a pre-existing folklore in Australia of the lost child and the woman held in ‘native’ captivity.22 Colonial anxieties about belonging, nation building and maintaining social order are expressed through such narratives. They draw from the high mortality rate of European children on the frontier, but are also fuelled by anxieties regarding close contact between pioneers and Aborigines, particularly the fear of sexual activity between white women and Indigenous men. Women and children are represented as the collateral of the nascent nation, the nursery from which a new identity may spring. (‘Populate or perish’ was to be the catch cry of white Australia well into the twentieth century.23) To lose them to the voracious emptiness of the bush, and implicitly the voracious influence of the ‘native’, is to risk losing the fragile foothold of nationhood. The painful irony of such narratives lies in their omissions: the image of the lost European child is shadowed by a long and still recent history of forced removals of Indigenous children by settlers and government agencies, and the white woman defiled in ‘native’ captivity glosses the abduction and rape of Indigenous women by men of the colony. Such narratives suggest an art of displacement. However, the revival of these themes in later twentieth century works such as Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves (1976) signals a revival of an uneasy relationship to landscape evident in white Australian culture since its earliest days, and with it, a reappraisal of colonial belonging. As Peter Pierce has argued, the ongoing investigation of these themes has ‘…focused anxieties not only over land tenure, but of Europeans’ spiritual and psychological lodgement’.24 Contemporary artist Kate McMillan’s photographs of ‘lonely graves’ in the Western Australian goldfields consider such anxieties through a documentary mode, referencing the nationalistic myth of the pioneer in conflict with the ‘empty’ landscape.25 Roughly dug into non-consecrated ground, the isolated graves that pepper rural areas in Australia, especially its dry heart, bear witness to the struggle

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__________________________________________________________________ for survival on the colonial frontier. Some graves are barely discernable within the landscape, while others have markers, plaques or fences erected to memorialise the deceased and to warn passers by. They are sites of pilgrimage for tourists, particularly Grey Nomads in search of the ‘real’ Australia, trying to locate unknown lives in the story of settlement. It can take several hours’ drive from the nearest town to reach a particular grave. The urge to travel vast distances to reclaim these graves within a popular memory of nation is comparable to the ritual mourning that accompanies monuments to unknown soldiers; it creates a fragile relationship between the living, in the present, and the life that was erased long ago. These rituals characterise the attempt to transform the losses of history into memory: to ‘feel’ history. McMillan’s photographs record graves in prospecting country and tell a story of gold fever, displacement and desperation. They mark the remains of miners, camel drivers and woodcutters, men who sought a living from the riches hidden in unfamiliar territory. On this uncharted frontier, death from thirst and disease was common, as well as murder and suicide. Victims were usually buried where they fell; this landscape is not conducive to European funeral rites. Yvonne and Kevin Coate’s compendium of lonely graves in Western Australia offers some insights into the historical context in which they are situated. In 1907 the North Coolgardie Herald printed a rather lyrical report of a body discovered near the Pinnacles, north of Perth: The victims that our bush has claimed as sacrifice for the lust of gold must be innumerable. … The exultant search for riches in any new country has this melancholy retrospect, and the man who succeeds can claim no greater credit than he who dies.26 In addition to oral histories regarding gravesites, the anthology reproduces reports of grisly discoveries in isolated areas, where a body may have lain exposed for months or years. Strange details emerge, for example, those dying of thirst typically stripped themselves of all clothing, and many dying men fashioned their own grave markers; one scratched his initials into a tree, while another hung a bell near the spot where he killed himself, which pealed when the wind picked up at dusk. Several forensic reports convey an urgency to determine whether or not the remains are those of a ‘white man’; the bodies of Aboriginal people are evidently ignored when they are discovered and are not subject to criminal investigation or funeral practices. This preoccupation with racially categorising the dead is indicative of a hierarchy that situates the white body as a marker of both humanity and national inclusion, even in death, while the Indigenous body is relegated to the landscape. While according to Curthoys, fallen pioneers are claimed as nationalist martyrs in ‘…a series of competing victim narratives’,27 it is also possible to read the white corpse as simultaneously object and antithesis of monumental histories of

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__________________________________________________________________ Australia; an object of mourning when safely sequestered in the grave, but in its corporeal, exposed state it is the abject trace of colonial failure, a horrific no-thing that troubles the seamless memorialisation of the past. Indeed, McMillan’s photographs play upon tensions of nostalgia and horror to complicate the reading of this history. She has used the antiquated framing device of the cameo to signal a memorial mode, however the images encircled by these frames are deliberately unromantic; their rich colours and unsentimental composition thrust the viewer into the cold detachment of the present. In her optic, the tragic narratives that the graves represent are remote, swallowed by the landscape. These photographs depict the ‘pioneer’ as an outsider who does not possess the local knowledge that would support survival; a foreigner engaged in a futile struggle to subdue the land. While McMillan’s images are characterised by motifs of abandonment and absence, her engagement contests the characterisation of this landscape as empty or the property of the white settler. For example, the hundred-year-old grave of Ahmed Kachy, camel driver, bears witness to the significant role that Afghanis played in the building of Australia, despite the overarching emphasis on European men in national historiography. Her photographs also map the historical moment when gold was discovered in the region and the local Wangkatha people were displaced from their country. McMillan’s series of gravesites depicts traces of conflict between pioneers and the Australian landscape. Although the dominant national narrative asserts that the settlers mastered nature and made it productive, her images counter this history by presenting evidence of individual failures, suggesting that the colonial project need not be viewed as triumphant. Her focus on settler corpses in the landscape recalls Stanner’s likening of Australian popular memory to a shallow grave that barely conceals the repressed horrors of the colonial past. Such ground has proven fertile for the Gothic imagination, indeed, many scholars have pointed to the suitability of the Gothic mode for giving form to Australian anxieties about culpability, belonging and the oppressive influence of history.28 Andrew McCann argues that the Gothic, in staging ‘an encounter with difference’,29 ‘anticipates the dynamics of an analytical process in which the critic unearths the ‘repressed’ of colonization: collective guilt, the memory of violence and dispossession, and the struggle for mastery in which the insecurity of the settler-colony is revealed’.30 In these anxious excavations, emphasis is often (dis)placed onto conflicts between the native landscape, colonial architecture and the body of the European outsider. Indigenous presence frequently haunts works of Australian Gothic in absentia, as lacunae. Such glaring elisions alternately collude with and trouble notions of the landscape as vacant and available to the settler. In this sense, through representations of a hostile, empty landscape, evocations of terra nullius indicate the presence of the colonial repressed: the knowledge of a history of violence, dispossession and dislocation that threatens the legitimacy of non-Indigenous belonging in Australia.

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__________________________________________________________________ The Gothic mode provides a means to examine, if not necessarily manage, such uncanny returns. Clarke’s 1874 novel on the convict experience, For the Term of His Natural Life, employs classic Gothic conventions of ruinous landscapes, oppressive architecture, moral degeneration and institutional despotism to portray the penal colony.31 Clarke describes the Antipodean landscape as a natural prison, a perversion of the agrarian ideal, and life in its confines a living hell: ‘All around breathes desolation; on the face of nature is stamped a perpetual frown’.32 Here, in the isolated wilds, petty sadists discipline criminals and imperial theories of social reform prove rotten. The environment is plagued by a grotesque atmosphere of corruption, suffocation and consumption: the shoreline has been nibbled away by rats, the oozing river poisons the fish, the harbour opens its jaws, and the bush threatens to swallow its victims. Most forcefully, the land is marked and transformed by scenes of extreme punishment, such as floggings which flay the flesh from the spine and drown the earth in blood. Imprisoned by dense, infertile bushland, vast mountains and rock-strewn oceans, the tortured bodies of the convicts begin to resemble the scarred and weathered environment that they inhabit. The prisoners’ physical, mental and moral health, particularly their will to live, is leached away by their confinement. Their ever-worsening abjection is shown as the inevitable condition of prolonged captivity in the colony, where the institution and nature collude in their brutality. The transportation system is both corrupt and corrupting; for Clarke, civilisation is in decline in the Antipodes as a consequence of having been dislocated, and the primordial, alien landscape mirrors this atavistic descent. Despite the unjustly convicted protagonist’s prison-honed abilities to survive in this wilderness, his redemptive death in a storm at sea reasserts the sublime power and destructive will of the native environment. Clarke’s depiction of a malevolent symbiosis between the native landscape and the colonial system reinforces his characterisation of the penal colony as a site of pain, exile and deculturation. Indeed, as Bernard Smith has claimed, Clarke was one of the first Australian writers to present ‘…a dark vision of Australian nature which contained in its kernel the pain and guilt of the colonial experience’.33 That much of the novel takes place on Van Diemen’s Land testifies to, and has perhaps contributed to, this place’s special lodgement in the Australian Gothic imagination. As the nation’s southernmost point and home to some of the most brutal penal settlements of the transportation period, the island has at times seemed to exemplify extremes in isolation, perversity and cruelty; the Antipodes par excellence. With its impenetrable, primordial forests, rugged mountains and exceptional fauna including marsupial ‘devils’ and ‘tigers’, throughout the nineteenth century the island was regarded as hellish and labyrinthine, a landscape seemingly designed to torment the outsider. In 1827 the surveyor Henry Hellyer described the very air as ‘putrid and oppressive’,34 while in 1842 David Burn described ‘…dense, dank, unblest forests of live, dead and fallen myrtle and

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__________________________________________________________________ sassafras trees, their trunks and limbs strewed and intertwisted with the most regular irregularity, forming a complication of entanglements, to which the famous Gordian knot was simplicity itself’.35 Van Diemonian convicts were regarded as the worst of the worst, chiefly due to the Port Macquarie penal settlement’s status as a place of secondary punishment for recidivists. Its many absconders seemed simply to melt into the landscape, some resurfacing to gain notoriety as bandits, or worse, cannibals, reborn from the wilderness only to intensify the culture of violence already endemic to the colony. In a vivid illustration of repression, Van Diemen’s Land was renamed Tasmania in 1856 in an effort to purge the island of its reputation for barbarism, backwardness and the ‘convict stain’. While its picturesque wilderness, convict heritage of ruined prisons and melancholic folklore are now powerful drawcards for Tasmania’s tourism industry, another aspect of the island’s history has proved much more difficult to reconcile, and has divided historians over the ethics of Britain’s colonial projects in Australia and their ongoing legacies. The vast inventory of colonial outrages against Australia’s Aboriginal peoples – including massacres, abductions, rapes, thefts and epistemic violence – were also enacted in Van Diemen’s Land, but as Tom Lawson argues, the colony’s militarised counter-resistance against Tasmanian Aborigines, banishment of survivors and contribution to a discourse of Indigenous extinction is unique, possibly ‘…the only state supported campaign of ethnic cleansing in the British Empire’.36 Depictions of the Tasmanian landscape as an empty, yet haunted space are unavoidably entwined with this history. John West’s historiography of Tasmania, written in the middle of the nineteenth century, provides a damning account of the colony’s treatment of Aboriginal people. After describing murders, abductions, abuses and cover-ups by Europeans, the military campaigns that comprised the ‘Black War’ and the eventual expulsion of Tasmanian Aborigines to Flinders Island, West poses the question, ‘The original occupation of this country necessarily involved most of the consequences which followed: was that occupation, then, just?’37 While not excusing the guilt of individuals, he ultimately blames Britain and its ‘statesmen and legislators’38 for unleashing atrocity upon the island. Such critical perspectives brought colonial iniquities into sharp focus and would later pose a threat to the project of recasting Australian history in a heroic light. The gradual silencing of dissenting voices such as West’s, and even references to the existence of Aborigines in Australia, was to characterise the nostalgic and nationalistic historiography that emerged in the twentieth century.39 In the nineteenth century, however, more ambivalent attitudes about the impact of colonialism prevailed amongst subjects of the Empire, with particular emphasis, as Lawson notes, upon the deportation of Indigenous survivors to the Wybalenna settlement on Flinders Island (ostensibly for their own ‘protection’ under the supervision of their ‘saviour’ George Augustus Robinson) and the mythologised ‘extinction’ of Tasmanian Aborigines.

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__________________________________________________________________ Flinders Island became, according to Lawson, a ‘fantasy island’ in the British imagination associated with conflicting narratives of both protectionism and extermination. He argues that Flinders Island ‘…began its imaginative life in Britain as the site in which the British Empire could bring salvation to the savages, but very quickly came to represent the opposite – the site at which the inevitability of the decline of indigenous peoples became confirmed’.40 Although the death rate of Indigenous people during this period was indisputably catastrophic, the fiction that Tasmanian Aborigines had permanently ‘died out’ was ultimately to serve imperial notions that so-called ‘primitive’ peoples were remnants of an archaic, natural order and were destined to wither away in the modern world. Whether the ‘last’ members of the race, such as Truganini, were publically eulogised by whites, regarded as anthropological curiosities or simply forgotten, this discourse contributed to an illusion of completeness in the colonial project wherein the fantasy of terra nullius was achieved retrospectively, and Indigenous people were segregated on reserves and missions or, if light skinned, ‘absorbed’ into the white population. As such, the Tasmanian landscape was regarded as having been purged of Indigenous presence. Yet as living Aboriginal people were relegated to a mythic, pre-contact past, the natural world was increasingly seen to emblematise the condition of their extinction. Thus, the colonial artist John Glover’s paintings of Aboriginal figures dwarfed by Gothic landscapes of towering mountains and serpentine trees can be read as memorials to a vanished world, as distinct to his pastoralist vistas of productive farmlands which, devoid of human bodies, have transformed the Tasmanian landscape into a British agrarian ideal.41 Gerry Turcotte situates such associations within a process by which …colonial subjects are made ‘archaic,’ fixed, by a colonial history that insists that the colonized object be read as part of the landscape, as therefore inhuman, and thus as non-existent. It is this existential crisis that marks the colonized as the ‘living dead’… Indigenous Australians have been made insubstantial – ghosts haunting their own land – by invader discourses.42 Such visions still circulate in contemporary Australia, albeit with pronounced ambivalence, particularly in depictions of the Tasmanian wilderness as empty, hostile and possessed by a mysterious force that threatens and transforms the (white) interloper. Developing the themes of the Australian Gothic mode as inaugurated by Clarke, in such works the landscape functions as an antagonist with the potential to unsettle myths of white belonging, goodness and triumph. In this context, the torments and travails of characters in Australian Gothic point to unresolvable tensions that exist between the landscape and the body of the invader. The representation of the wilderness as a cursed site signals the entwined culpability and vulnerability of the settler, while staging a confrontation with

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__________________________________________________________________ repressed histories of colonialism. A recent example is Jonathan auf der Heide’s 2009 film Van Diemen’s Land, which dramatizes the real life case of Alexander Pearce, an escaped Port Macquarie convict who was hanged for murder and then anatomised in 1824.43 Based on his confessions, the film traces Pearce’s escape with seven other convicts into the as yet uncharted wilds of western Tasmania. Citing Dante’s Inferno, the absconders descend into worsening spheres of hell, as the unfamiliar, almost sentient environment thwarts their attempts to navigate and find food. The film is an exercise in alienation: the picturesque landscape celebrated in tourism campaigns is here revealed in near-monochromatic bleakness, slow panning shots emphasising the labyrinthine denseness of forests, the chilly austerity of mountain ranges and the mud that defiles the already filthy bodies of the escapees. Pearce’s sparse Gaelic narration is broken by terse dialogue in Irish, Scottish and English accents, signalling a further estrangement from received notions of a homogenous and ready-made Australian identity originating with the colony.44 Certainly, auf der Heide’s slow, melancholic staging of the Pearce case is designed to subvert heroic depictions of national history and frustrate the conventions of adventure films, instead stressing conflicts between the convicts’ bodies and the colonial landscape. The film’s opening sequence, which tracks the path of the Gordon River as it incises the wilderness, courts associations with the Congo River in Heart of Darkness. As the convicts journey deeper into the unknown, motifs of consumption are brought to the fore – both the hunger that drives them to murder and eat their companions, and the unyielding landscape that swallows them whole. The characters’ painful progress across this unforgiving terrain is emphasised in claustrophobic sequences in which their bodies are dwarfed by masses of bushland and appear to merge with the earth, interspersed by visions of the rippling, empty forest which seems to watch over and influence the violence below. Amidst such ethereal scenes, the convicts’ base corporeality is emphasised as one by one their bodies are bludgeoned, bled, dismembered, cooked, chewed and, at one point, violently excreted. Any temptation to sentimentalise these characters as victims of the transportation system or martyrs of the nation is thwarted as their bodies and actions become increasingly abject, emptied of redemptive power. In citing Clarke’s Gothic aesthetic, Van Diemen’s Land can be viewed as a counternarrative to the heroic mode of Australian history which positions the nation as having been hard-won by the suffering of European settlers, reversing the colonial myth of progress by presenting a cycle of decay and degeneration. Part of the grim appeal of the Pearce case in colonial history perhaps lies in its inversion of the myth that posits cannibalism as the speciality of the atavistic ‘native’. Having been transformed by his time in the wilderness and his growing pleasure in the act of cannibalism, it is tempting to read Pearce’s monstrosity in relation to other white characters who have turned ‘savage’ through prolonged exposure to the native environment in colonial fiction. However, both Van Diemen’s Land and the case

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__________________________________________________________________ that it is based upon might suggest that such voracious bloodlust stems more properly from the heart of the colonial power structure. As Katherine Biber has stated, ‘In the case of colonial discourses of cannibalism, the creation of the flesheating native, and the designation of that identity as an atavistic practitioner of abject horror, can be read as arising out of the need for the British to disavow their own anthropophagy’.45 Indeed, the historical occurrence of cases like Pearce’s, European maritime survival cannibalism and the torturous conditions of the penal settlements challenge colonial binaries of the progressive, cerebral modern and the regressive, sensual ‘savage’. Auf der Heide’s rendering of the Pearce story makes clear that the outsiders’ inability to negotiate an alien environment is the catalyst for their transgressions, however in investing the landscape with such a pronounced atmosphere of supernatural menace he invites a parallel reading in which the island wreaks a special vengeance upon the invaders. The escape of Pearce featured in the film (he was recaptured and then escaped another time from Macquarie Harbour, once again murdering and eating his accomplice, prior to his execution in 1824) predates the Black War and the expulsion of Van Diemonian Aborigines to Flinders Island. Pearce claimed that he and Greenhill, his final victim in the earlier escape, had stolen food from an Aboriginal camp, so the absence of Indigenous characters in auf der Heide’s retelling should not necessarily be read in relation to an extinction narrative. However, Pearce’s anecdote is not referenced in the film, in which the Tasmanian landscape is presented overwhelmingly as lifeless, empty, and haunted by an invisible, inhuman presence. Paul Collins’ history of the Pearce case speculates that people from the Braywunyer and Larmairremener bands of the Big River tribe were likely to have observed the escapees’ journey, their failure to utilise local food sources, their disturbing behaviour and their improper treatment of the dead.46 In this light it is possible to propose another reading of Van Diemen’s Land in which the ghostly, sentient quality of the landscape in fact points to a real but unseen human presence. However, such speculations would seem at odds with the film’s principal approach, which establishes the wilderness as already deathly, evacuated of all life other than that of the doomed convicts. Overwhelmingly, auf der Heide’s twenty-first century treatment depicts the Tasmanian landscape as a repository of historical trauma, almost as though an elemental memorial feedback loop drives the convicts’ psychic and moral decline, recalling Hughes’ description in The Fatal Shore: Between convict and black, much blood is mingled in the soil of this green, lovely, lugubrious island – so much, in fact, that parts of it seem to be emblematic spots, places where ordinary nature is permanently corrupted by the leaching of history.47

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__________________________________________________________________ Despite Tasmania’s special associations with the horrors of transportation and a mythologised ‘extinction’, depictions of empty landscapes on the Australian mainland can also be viewed in relation to anxieties surrounding the notion of terra nullius and the legacies of the colonial past, as in the case of McMillan’s series of lonely graves. Visual representations of natural sites that are inherently hostile to the body of the invader utilise the landscape genre as a vehicle for bringing to the surface repressed histories that threaten colonial belonging. Contemporary artist Rebecca Dagnall’s digital photographs of suburban nature reserves stage a confrontation with colonised spaces by literally envisaging the dual quality of the Australian landscape as domesticated, yet autonomous, and as empty, but somehow haunted. Her series There is unrest in the forest, there is trouble in the trees coaxes viewers into a series of dense, cavernous environments that are simultaneously enticing and menacing.48 These luminous patches of semiwilderness, like the fabled forests of fairy tales, seem to offer some tantalising rite of passage, luring the unwary, soon to be lost child off the beaten track. Dagnall’s nocturnal landscapes are steeped in the iconography of evil: she employs a Rorschach-like mirroring effect to reveal horned skulls and other demonic forms emerging from the scenery. The Gothic character of the images is highly constructed; she cites the Satanic aesthetic of heavy metal culture to disclose an apocalyptic quality of the Australian landscape. The demonic images that form amongst clusters of branches and thicket quote the album art of bands such as Iron Maiden and Motörhead, and the title There is unrest in the forest, there is trouble in the trees is borrowed from a song by Rush. This linking of the landscape genre and metal music highlights the cultural trajectory that connects metal culture to the romantic sublime. Here, the Satanic or Dionysian character of metal is transformed into a suburban nature cult, marking Crown Land as an apocalyptic site. This entwining of high and low culture also lends something transgressively populist to Dagnall’s work, as the sci-fi-fantasy character of her landscapes seems to hint at a more marginal cultural space than ordinarily consumed by ‘fine art’ audiences; appropriate for a series that explores geographical liminality. These suburban nature reserves, illuminated by car headlights, are neither wild nor domesticated, and notions of territory and belonging seem precarious at best. This is the site that the artist has chosen to suggest an apocalyptic battle between a colonised land and its inhabitants. Dagnall’s landscapes present the contradictory space of the suburban wilderness as a site of vertiginous self- and other- reflection. Her employment of the trope of mirroring as a way to envision liminal space ties in with Michel Foucault’s description of heterotopias, real spaces which are also somehow ‘other’ to the everyday places of a given culture. Among heterotopic spaces Foucault lists cemeteries, brothels, ships and, significantly, colonies as sites in which several different experiences of space and time intersect. Heterotopias are isolated and yet permeable, and also function as segregated places where deviant or marginal

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__________________________________________________________________ experiences can occur, exiled to the cultural fringe. Foucault uses the example of the mirror to describe the experience of inhabiting the heterotopia: … the mirror functions as a heterotopia, since it makes the place that I occupy, whenever I look at myself in the glass, both absolutely real – it is in fact linked to all the surrounding space – and absolutely unreal, for in order to be perceived it has of necessity to pass that virtual point that is situated down there.49 These photographs approximate Foucault’s paradoxical mirrored space by presenting real sites mediated by a trick of perspective, where multiple views of place overlap, yet the sinister atmosphere of Dagnall’s images is suggestive of collapse and dissolution rather than harmonious coexistence. As in auf der Heide’s film, her anxious vision of a haunted, never entirely colonised landscape implies an elemental, vengeful force lurking just beyond the purview of the interloper. Here, visibility is restricted and the danger of trespass is emphasised, frustrating the panoramic landscape convention in which nature is laid bare, open to the consuming eye of the settler. Through such convolutions, Dagnall’s vision of demonically possessed suburban bushland appears to call for a reappraisal of place in Australia through an encounter with the colonial uncanny. While the natural environment has traditionally been used as the site of a crisis of belonging in Australian art and fiction, the urban landscape also offers a potent ground on which to enact a confrontation with narratives of possession and dispossession. Jonathan Jones’ 2012 art work ‘untitled (car parks)’ was an ephemeral installation in the subterranean space of a multi-story car park in Perth, Western Australia. Jones occupied three parking bays throughout the complex by erecting temporary structures resembling tents made from blue tarpaulin and internally lit by fluorescent tubes. Tarpaulin and fluorescent lighting are affordable domestic materials in Australia, so despite the minimalist appearance of the shelters, Jones’ work elicits associations of home and comfort. The pattern of the lights, which could suggest industrial signage, is in fact a zigzag design traditional to Jones’ Indigenous heritage. The Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi nations to which Jones belongs are located in the east of Australia; in installing the work on Noongar land in Perth, the artist was careful to observe cultural protocols for entering the country of another. Jones’ work engaged with public space at a time when it was particularly charged with ideas of protest and social change. Appearing in the wake of the Arab Spring and close to international Occupy demonstrations, ‘untitled (car parks)’ also coincided with a highly publicised Aboriginal Tent Embassy protest in Perth, in response to the West Australian government’s attempt to strike a deal which would lead to the extinguishment of all future native title claims in the state. Jones’ intervention emphasises ways in which Australia’s development as a nation has been, and continues to be, marked by the exclusion of ‘others’. His staking out

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__________________________________________________________________ and occupying of the parking bays offered ‘space for refugees, the homeless and the displaced,’50 illuminating ways that notions of territory, belonging and home operate even within the supposedly neutral space of the parking complex. During the launch of the project, it was revealed that one patron had been personally aggrieved that Jones had taken his regular bay. This exchange points to the potency of Jones’ work as a tool for provoking reflection about the occupation and ownership of space in Australia, and for reasserting Indigenous presence in a landscape frequently depicted as empty and as ‘belonging to no one’ but the colonists. ‘Untitled (car parks)’ subverts depictions of the Australian landscape as the site of a menacing emptiness, and the merging of a ghostly Indigenous presence with the ‘natural’, or pre-colonial, wilderness that effectively represses the knowledge of the survival of Aboriginal culture into the present day. Jones’ eye-catching, glowing designs and intrusive structures demand to be seen, disputing the invisibility and marginality – the ghostliness – of those groups deemed to be peripheral to the concerns of the nation. In this way, Jones’ installation powerfully evokes the colonial uncanny, rendering the customary territory of the coloniser, the built environment, disconcertingly unhomely. For Jones, such a confrontation with the colonial repressed facilitates a bicultural moment, where conflicting ways of occupying landscape may be productively experienced within a single space. Similarly, Brook Andrew’s public artwork Jumping Castle War Memorial (2010) uses an architectural staple of the fairground, the bouncy castle, to draw attention to marginalised aspects of Australian popular memory while playfully displacing that most ritualised and venerated figure, the ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) soldier. While Andrew’s memorial is adorned with a hallucinatory pattern referencing Wiradjuri dendroglyphs51 and features an inflatable figure inspired by Aboriginal warriors who resisted British dominance, he nevertheless states a desire that the work not be read solely as a memorial to Indigenous Australians, rather offering a more universal memorialisation of conflict from his own specific perspective.52 It seems that for Andrew, as well as for Jones, cultural exclusivity is not a productive condition for remembering an interconnected global history or for contemplating an entwined future. These works provide a fertile point on which to close this investigation of ways in which the legitimacy of colonial occupancy in Australia has been constructed, questioned and subverted in national self-representation. The Australian landscape, as disputed territory and the site of contested histories, is frequently the screen on which colonial anxieties are projected. However, as Jones and Andrew’s work suggest, this is also the site where national culture may be tested and transformed.

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Notes 1

W.E.H. Stanner, ‘The History of Indifference Thus Begins’, Aboriginal History, Vol. 1 (1977), 22. 2 Ibid. 3 Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (London: Pan Books / Collins, 1998). 4 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2003). 5 Samira Kawash, ‘Terrorists and Vampires: Fanon’s Spectral Violence of Decolonization’, Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, ed. Anthony C. Alessandrini (London and New York: Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005), Kindle edition, 254. 6 Beck Cole and Rachel Perkins, First Australians: The Untold Story of Australia (Blackfella Films / First Nation Films, Special Broadcasting Service Corporation, Screen Australia, New South Wales Film and Television Office, South Austrlaian Film Corporation, ScreenWest, 2008). 7 Stuart Banner, ‘Why Terra Nullius?’ Anthropology and Property Law in Early Australia’, Law and History Review, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Notre Dame: American Society for Legal History, 2005), 112, Viewed 10 October 2012, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30042845. 8 Governor Bourke’s Proclamation 1835 (UK). 9 Ibid., Banner, ‘Why Terra Nullius?’. 10 Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900. 11 Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly, Creating a Nation: 1788 – 2007 (Network Books, 2011), Kindle edition. 12 David Mercer, ‘Aboriginal Self-Determination and Indigenous Land Title in Post-Mabo Australia’, Political Geography 16, No. 3 (Great Britain: Elsevier Science, 1997). 13 Cole and Perkins, First Australians. 14 As Hughes notes, the majority of convicts transported to the colony were petty thieves; Jeremy Bentham memorably described it as a ‘thief-colony’. 15 Hughes, The Fatal Shore, 1-2. 16 Gerry Turcotte, ‘Australian Gothic’, in The Handbook to Gothic Literature, ed. Mulvey Roberts, M (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 5, Viewed 13 May 2012, http://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/60/. 17 Ann Curthoys, ‘Expulsion, Exodus and Exile in White Australian Historical Mythology’, Journal of Australian Studies 25, No. 61 (Taylor and Francis Online, 1999), Viewed 19 May 2012, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14443059909387469. 18 Ibid., 18. 19 Ibid., 3. 20 Ian McLean, ‘White Aborigines: Cultural Imperatives of Australian Colonialism’, Third Text 7.22 (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). 21 ‘Lost’ (National Gallery of Victoria), Viewed 20 May 2012,

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__________________________________________________________________ http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/col/work/5975. 22 Kate Darian-Smith, ‘‘Rescuing’ Barbara Thompson and Other White Women: Captivity Narratives on Australian Frontiers’, in Text, Theory, Space; Land, literature and history in South Africa and Australia, ed. Darian-Smith, Gunner and Nuttall (Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005), Kindle edition, 99; Peter Pierce, The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 23 Grimshaw et al, Creating a Nation. 24 Ibid., xiii. 25 Thea Costantino, ‘Lonely Country’, ‘Spaced: Art Out of Place’, ed. Marco Marcon (Kellerberrin: IASKA, 2012). 26   Yvonne and Kevin Coate, More Lonely Graves of Western Australia (Carlisle: Hesperian Press, 2000), 432.  27 Curthoys, ‘Expulsion, Exodus and Exile’, 3. 28 Gerry Turcotte, ‘Vampiric Decolonization: Fanon, ‘Terrorism,’ and Mudrooroo’s Vampire Trilogy’, in Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire, ed. Alfred J. Lopéz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). 29 Andrew McCann, ‘Colonial Gothic: Morbid Anatomy, Commodification and Critique in Marcus Clarke’s The Mystery of Major Molineux’, Australian Literary Studies 19, No. 4 (October 2000): 399. 30 Ibid., 400. 31 Marcus Clarke, For the Term of His Natural Life (A Public Domain Book, 1874), Kindle edition. 32 Ibid. 33 McLean, ‘White Aborigines’, 22. 34 Paul Collins, Hell’s Gates (South Yarra: Hardie Grant Books, 2004) 277. 35 Ibid. 277-278. 36 Tom Lawson, in this volume. 37 John West, History of Tasmania, Volume II (1852), Kindle edition, 129. 38 Ibid., 131. 39 Curthoys, ‘Expulsion, Exodus and Exile’. 40 Lawson, in this volume. 41 David Hansen, ed. John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque (Hobart: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Art Exhibitions Australia, 2004). 42 Turcotte, ‘Vampiric Decolonization’, 111-112. 43 Jonathan auf der Heide, Van Diemen’s Land (Noise and Light, 2009). 44 Jonathan auf der Heide, email to the author, 18 April 2012. 45 Katherine Biber, ‘Cannibals and Colonialism’, in Sydney Law Review, Vol. 27, No. 4, (2005), Viewed 8 November 2010, http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/research/handle/10453/1479.

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__________________________________________________________________ 46

Collins, Hell’s Gates. Hughes, The Fatal Shore, 120. 48 ‘Rebecca Dagnall: There is unrest in the forest, there is trouble in the trees’, Viewed 20 May 2012, http://www.turnergalleries.com.au/exhibitions/12_dagnall.php 49 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, Vol. 31 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986), 24. 50 Jonathan Jones, email to the author, 9 July 2012. 51 The Wiradjuri and the Kamilaroi (also known as Gamilaroi) people of New South Wales have traditionally carved sacred symbols into trees, which are known as dendroglyphs. 52 Ashley Rawlings, ‘Brook Andrew: Archives of the Invisible’, ArtAsiaPacific, Issue 68 (New York: ArtAsiaPacific Publishing: 2010). 47

Bibliography Arrow, Michelle. ‘That History Should Not Have Ever Been How It Was: The Colony, Outback House, and Australian History’, Film and History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 7:1. Center for the Study of Film and History, 2007. Viewed 20 May 2012. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/flm/summary/v037/37.1arrow.html. Banner, Stewart. ‘Why Terra Nullius?’ Anthropology and Property Law in Early Australia’, Law and History Review 23, No. 1, Notre Dame: American Society for Legal History, 2005, 112, Viewed 10 October 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30042845. Bell, Duncan S. A. ‘Mythscapes: Memory, Mythology, and National Identity’. British Journal of Sociology 54.1 (2003). Biber, Katherine. ‘Cannibals and Colonialism’, Sydney Law Review 27, No. 4. (2005), Viewed 8 November 2010, http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/research/handle/10453/1479. Bratlinger, Patrick. ‘‘Black Armband’ versus ‘White Blindfold’ History in Australia’, Victorian Studies 46, No. 4. (2004), Viewed 19 May 2012. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/vic/summary/v046/46.4brantlinger.html. Briggs, Ronald and Jackson, Melissa. Carved Trees: Aboriginal Cultures of Western NSW. The State Library of New South Wales, 2011.

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__________________________________________________________________ Bullen, Clotilde. ‘Jonathan Jones: Untitled (Car Parks)’. Perth: The Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority in partnership with the Department of Culture and the Arts, 2012. Clarke, Marcus. For the Term of His Natural Life. A Public Domain Book, 1874, Kindle edition. Coate, Kevin and Yvonne. More Lonely Graves of Western Australia, Carlisle: Hesperian Press, 2000. Cole, Beck and Perkins, Rachel. First Australians: The Untold Story of Australia, Blackfella Films / First Nation Films, Special Broadcasting Service Corporation, Screen Australia, New South Wales Film and Television Office, South Austrlaian Film Corporation, ScreenWest, 2008. Collins, Paul. Hell’s Gates,South Yarra: Hardie Grant Books, 2004. Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900. Costantino, Thea. ‘Lonely Country’, ‘Spaced: Art Out of Place’, ed. Marco Marcon, Kellerberrin: IASKA, 2012. Coté, Joost. ‘Terra-ising the Homeland: Recent Debates on Australian National Identity’, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, Vol. 12, No. ½, Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences, University of Debrecen, 2006, Viewed 10 October 2012, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41274349. Curthoys, Ann. ‘Expulsion, Exodus and Exile in White Australian Historical Mythology’, Journal of Australian Studies 23.61. Taylor and Francis Online, 1999, Viewed 19 May 2012. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14443059909387469. Darian-Smith, Kate, Gunner, Liz and Nuttall, Sarah, ed. Text, Theory, Space; Land, literature and history in South Africa and Australia. Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005, Kindle edition. Donoghue, Jed, and Tranter, Bruce. ‘Colonial and Post-Colonial Aspects of Australian Identity’, The British Journal of Sociology 58: 2 (2007).

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__________________________________________________________________ Dunlap, Thomas R. ‘Remaking the Land: The Acclimatization Movement and Anglo Ideas of Nature’, Journal of World History 8, No. 2 (1997), Viewed 11 October 2012. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hwj/summary/v058/58.1lake.html. Ellinghouse, Katherine, ‘Biological Absorption and Genocide: A Comparison of Indigenous Assimilation Policies in the United States and Australia’, Genocide Studies and Prevention 4, No. 1 (2009). Viewed 18 December 2012. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/gsp/summary/v004/4.1.ellinghaus.html. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. London and New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Foucault, Michel. ‘Of Other Spaces’, in Diacritics, Vol. 31. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986. Gardner, Anthony. ‘Monstrous Nationalism: Wolf Creek and the Un Australian’, Dark Reflections, Monstrous Reflections: Essays on the Monster in Culture. Sorcha Ni Fhlainn, ed. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2006, Viewed 20 May 2012, http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing-files/idp/eBooks/drmr%201.3c.pdf. Grimshaw, Patricia, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly. Creating a Nation: 1788 – 2007. Network Books, 2011, Kindle edition. Haltof, Marek. ‘In Quest of Self-Identity: Gallipoli, Mateship, and the Construction of Australian Identity’. Journal of Popular Film and Television 21:1 (1993), Viewed 19 May 2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01956051.1993.9943973. Hansen, David, ed. John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque. Hobart: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Art Exhibitions Australia, 2004. Harper, Graeme, and Rayner, Jonathan, ed. Cinema and Landscape. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2010. Highfield, Jonathan. ‘Suckling from the Crocodile’s Tit: Wildlife and Nation Formation in Australian Narratives’. Antipodes. ProQuest Central, 2006. Hirst, J. B. ‘The Pioneer Legend’, Historical Studies 18.71 (1978). Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore. London: Pan Books / Collins, 1998.

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__________________________________________________________________ Kawash, Samira. ‘Terrorists and Vampires: Fanon’s Spectral Violence of Decolonization’. Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, ed. Anthony C. Alessandrini. London and New York: Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005, Kindle edition. Lake, Marilyn. ‘The White Man under Siege: New Histories of Race in the Nineteenth Century and the Advent of White Australia’. History Workshop Journal 58 (2004), Viewed 18 December 2012. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hwj/summary/v058/58.1lake.html. Lopéz, Alfred J. ed. Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005, Kindle edition. McCann, Andrew. ‘Colonial Gothic: Morbid Anatomy, Commodification and Critique in Marcus Clarke’s The Mystery of Major Molineux’. Australian Literary Studies 19, No. 4 (2000). ———. Marcus Clarke’s Bohemia: Literature and Modernity in Colonial Melbourne. Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2004. McLean, Ian. ‘White Aborigines: Cultural Imperatives of Australian Colonialism’. Third Tex 7: 22 (1993). Mercer, David. ‘Aboriginal Self-Determination and Indigenous Land Title in PostMabo Australia’. Political Geography 16, No. 3 (1997). National Gallery of Victoria. ‘Lost’. Viewed 20 May 2012. http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/col/work/5975. Osborne, Michael A. ‘Acclimatizing the World: A History of the Paradigmatic Colonial Science.’ Osisris, 2nd Series, Vol. 15, Viewed 10 October 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/301945. Paisley, Fiona. ‘Introduction: White Settler Colonialisms and the Colonial Turn: An Australian Perspective’. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4: 3. Viewed 20 May 2012. http://muse.jhu.edu.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_co lonial_history/v004/4.3intro.html. Pierce, Peter. The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

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__________________________________________________________________ Rainbird, Paul. ‘Representing Nation, Dividing Community: The Broken Hill War Memorial, New South Wales, Australia’. World Archaeology 35, No. 1. Viewed 10 October 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3560210. Ryan-Fazilleau, Susan. ‘Samson and Delilah: Herstory, Trauma and Survival’. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 11.2 (2011). Viewed 20 May 2012. http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/viewArticle/1949. Stanner, W. E. H. ‘The History of Indifference Thus Begins’. Aboriginal History 1 (1977). Turcotte, Gerry, ‘Australian Gothic’. The Handbook to Gothic Literature. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. Viewed 13 May 2012. http://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/60/. ———. ‘Ghosts of the Great South Land’. The Global South 1, No. 1 (2007). Viewed 10 October 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40339235. West, John. History of Tasmania, Volume II (1852). Kindle edition. Thea Costantino, Phd., School of Design and Art, Curtin University.

Part IV The Dark Stain: Monstrous Legacies

Morgues, Museums and the Ghost of Errol Flynn Erin Ashenhurst Abstract The remnant of a woman’s shoe appears in a glass display case; a child-sized crutch is discovered in a plundered backyard; blocks from the beach, an apartment building sags with the trappings of former glamour. Are these landscapes of the mundane – or the ominous? In this research, I consider the nature of several urban geographies reimagined through the eyes of voyeurs. Each site sheds its everyday familiarity as it is encoded with the menacing narrative of past events. On the Errol Flynn Walking and Drinking Tour, artist David Look reports from the neon-lit interior of a stretch limo skulking through Vancouver. On the 51st anniversary of Flynn’s death revellers retrace the sites of the star’s fateful visit in 1959. On a heritage tour of the Penthouse Nightclub, guests are granted backstage access to this club once frequented by Hollywood’s finest. Now featuring exotic dancers (and less discerning of its clientele), the space is haunted by tales of better days. At the Vancouver Police Museum, formerly the home of the Coroner’s Morgue, Errol Flynn’s post-mortem stopover is honoured by a painting of the actor hung beside a wall of organs in murky Petri dishes. While the historic autopsy facilities seem to epitomize morbidity, the museum’s chamber of historic murders showcases crime scene evidence, transporting the viewer into tales of horror. Here, the display of personal items denotes the distressing absence of their original owners. This work inspects how memory and history are matched with site-specific experience to construct monstrous landscapes out of familiar spaces. Exploring how museums and tours fuel the imagination, this research looks to stimulate dialogue around the curious allure of ghastly narratives. Key Words: Narrative; memory; heritage; Vancouver; monstrous; museum; morgue; spectacle; Errol Flynn. ***** 1. Influential Narratives In the following research, I present instances of places and objects made unfamiliar, exciting, and monstrous through narrative. In the city of Vancouver, a dozen participants are taken on a tour of the sites visited by the late Errol Flynn shortly before his death. Staged as a moving party, the group becomes absorbed in the gory details of the actor’s debauchery. Plato described the nature of Place as being ‘grasped intuitively on the fringes of reason and perceptions.’1 For these residences, the everyday spaces of their city take on new identities in the evening’s interactions. Plots of urban space are transformed into stages for psychogeographical spectacle.

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__________________________________________________________________ With its own connection to the late Flynn, the Vancouver Police Museum makes use of items entered into evidence to create morbidly effective dioramas of historic crimes. Mundane personal items become ghoulish vessels through which to construct story and heighten the viewer’s engagement.

Image 1: A painting of Errol Flynn hangs beside a wall featuring human remains from the historic Coroner’s Morgue displayed at the Vancouver Police Museum. © Erin Ashenhurst, 2011 At the Penthouse Nightclub, a group of history enthusiasts tour the backstage of the now-gentlemen’s club in search of traces from a time when Cary Grant and Sammy Davis Jr. frequented the piano bar. After anecdotes illustrated by a wall of black and white photos and framed newspaper clippings, the club opens for its usual evening spectacle. Tour participants mix with regulars. Glamour turns garish. It is their connections with history that give these places and objects new value as triggers for imagination and new experience. While these instances of tourism are less recognizably ‘dark’ than those discussed in Yutaka Sho’s ‘Architecture after Fukushima: Spaces of Bara Bara, Spaces of Reciprocity’, these cases stitch salacious details to play with transference of collective memory and indulge their audiences’ delight in the perverse and the uncanny.

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__________________________________________________________________ In each case, narrative is about creating a relationship between the past and the present. In Italo Calvin’s novel Invisible Cities, the character of Marco Polo describes the fictional city of Zaira to the Great Kublai Khan. Rather than articulate the materials and proportions of the city, Polo states: The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn…2 2. Intoxicated Voyeurs On October 14, 1959, actor Errol Flynn died in a penthouse apartment at 1310 Burnaby Street in Vancouver’s West End. Flynn was on his way to the airport to catch a flight to New York when he began complaining of extreme back pain and called for a stop at the residence of physician Grant Gould. Once there, an impromptu party began. After captivating guests with tales of hedonistic Hollywood, Flynn retired to a bedroom to rest before dinner. The party continued until Beverly Aadland, Flynn’s girlfriend, slipped in to check on him. Her screams brought an end to the festivities.3 Fifty-one years later to the day, I find myself waiting with two companions at The Sylvia Hotel, a stop along the evening’s tour. With Virginia creeper encasing much of the brick facing the bay, The Sylvia retains the clunky charm of its predepression era construction. Although the room is far from lively, the drink menu pays tribute to the hotel’s 1954 notoriety as the first cocktail bar in town. Located only six blocks from where Flynn’s body was found, it is not surprising that the then-manager of the hotel, Art Cameron, was reported to be among the guests at the Baywest Apartments that evening. It is now 9:30 pm and our limousine seems to be running late. The Errol Flynn Walking and Drinking Tour (later renamed the Errol Flynn Walking and Drinking and Driving Tour), was the first ‘expedition’ put on by The Society for the Preservation of Historic Revelry, of which artist David Look is a founder. Look appears outfitted in the 1950’s fashions of a man-about-town – apart from his digital accessory, a taser-like recording device, which he is using to create a podcast from the evening’s events. Wedging ourselves into the white stretch limo waiting outside the Sylvia, I take note of the several participants sporting period costumes and wonder just how dissimilar we appear from the original party guests of 1959. At almost 10 pm, we are latecomers to the tour. It set out earlier that evening, first cruising to Vancouver International Airport to visit the site where Flynn first

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__________________________________________________________________ landed in the city with his ‘protégé’ Beverly Aadland. A shriek of glee can be heard on the recording as tour co-host Adam O. Thomas reveals that, although at the time Flynn was still married to his third wife, 17-year-old Beverly was known to be his lover. More yelps accompany the announcement that, according to Aadland’s mother, Flynn’s relationship with her daughter had begun several years earlier when the girl was a mere 15. Guests debate the three instances of statutory rape Flynn was charged with throughout his life (none of which involved the young Beverly), and the legend that a pubescent Flynn was expelled from boarding school for engaging in sexual relations with the school laundress. ‘In like Flynn!’ The excitement grows. The hosts of the podcast are questioned as to their own motivations in planning the event and why they have interest in the notorious actor. With the clinking of ice landing in a tumbler, Thomas answers: You know what, it’s not even about identifying with Errol Flynn, …tonight is really more about uncovering these interesting and unique titbits of historical moments and connections in the city that we live in… the mission would be to discover, uncover. Although Vancouver is a young city by most standards, urban development seems keen to demolish any unmarketable traces of the past in favour of chain restaurants and towering glass residences. When viewed from the South, glossy condos create a jagged line of teeth below the mountainous skyline of downtown. In his discussion of experience and the history of place, E. V. Walter writes, ‘historically, the renewal of a city was experienced as a mental and emotional transformation, an improvement in the spirit, a rebirth of psychic energies.’4 As the group relinquishes the confines of the limo to smoke in the parking lot beside the airport, the topic of Vancouver’s aggressive renewals is met with scepticism. David Look describes the much-celebrated arrival of Errol Flynn and his adolescent companion on October 9, 1959. Unaccustomed to famous visitors, city newspapers and spectators came out to observe, and were reportedly shocked by the bloated, haggard appearance of the star. Look comments that YVR has undergone much renovation in the last fifty-one years, adding ‘...I think along many stops of our tour tonight you’ll find that nothing really exists anymore and it hasn’t been a very long time.’ His tone indicates a loss. With buildings demolished and landscape restructured, participants will need to displace their modern interactions to seek new meaning in familiar spaces. Walter suggests, ‘the quality of a place depends on a human context shaped by memories and expectations, by stories of real and imagined events – that is, by the historical experience located there.’5 On this tour, guests are tourists in their own neighbourhoods, constructing a more evocative city around the tantalizing narrative spun by their hosts.

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__________________________________________________________________ Nicotine and gin levels replenished, the tour departs from the airport and heads towards Vancouver’s West End. In Timothy Taylor’s novel Stanley Park, a passage reads, ‘he woke with the sun, which slanted in between the towers of the West End, prismed itself off the tall aquarium-green glass of the monolithic condominium that stood at the foot of Haro Street.’6 As the West End gives way to the downtown core, the limousine comes to a stop in front of 826 Hornby Street at the former site of the Cave Supper Club. Now the heart of the business district, it is near impossible to imagine what the street would look like without dwarfing sheets of glass. The height and girth of structures in the downtown core demand the pedestrian navigate slim channels with little visual clarity of her journey as a whole. Susan Stewart writes about the experience of walking in such as city in her book, On Longing: To walk in the city is to experience the disjuncture of partial vision/partial consciousness. The narratively of this walking is belied by a simultaneity we know and yet cannot experience. As we turn a corner, our object disappears around the next corner. The sides of the street conspire against us; each attention suppressed a field of possibilities.7 Parked across from the Starbucks coffee shop that now occupies the site, Look describes Flynn’s experience at the Cave. In the 1950’s, the grotto-inspired design of the club regularly attracted celebrities and flashy Vegas acts. On the night of his visit, Flynn managed to charm admirers and reporters alike – all from a seated position. From his table of admirers, he gave what would be his last interview. Look reads aloud one of Flynn’s more ominous comments: ‘I love this town… The people, the mountains, the sea. I’ve travelled a lot, and I’ve lived… and loved a lot – that’s what I’m expected to say isn’t it? – but I’ve seldom found a country as magnificent as this. It would be a wonderful place to die.’8 The limo erupts in glee and gasps of disbelief at the foreshadowing. More merriment ensues as Look describes how Flynn had to remain seated due to a slipped disk in his spine, which he was self-medicating with a combination of heroin and morphine. ‘And where else would you get it, but Vancouver… Welcome to Vancouver: chase the dragon!’ cackles Thomas to a fanfare of approval. Jazz music blares from the car speakers as the tour moves on to its next stop. When discussing the notion of a dérive, Guy Debourd explained, ‘…cities have a psychological relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.’9 Perusing the ghost of

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__________________________________________________________________ Flynn, these zones seem fluid. At once our city seems both more known and more unknowable. Having crossed the forest of Stanley Park, and the Lions Gate Bridge, the limo snakes up the hillsides of the British Properties to the site of the onceopulent mansion of millionaire George Caldough. Guests are warned that the residence has been demolished under new ownership. A friend of Flynn’s, Caldough was also experiencing financial distress in 1959. The two men conspired to profit by staging a promotional exploration with Flynn’s magnificent yacht, the Zaca (site of at least one alleged statutory rape years earlier). It was these dealings with Caldough that brought Flynn to the city. Turning up the suitably named ‘Robin Hood Road’, the limo skulks past looming gates in the aristocratic neighbourhood, which at one time exclusively favoured fair-skinned residents. The crowd is unfamiliar with the topography and we are momentarily lost in the night. After asking a curious pedestrian for directions, Moogie, the limo driver who earlier revealed he was studying for his high school algebra test during tour stops, pulls the car up to a lot with minimal construction. Guests disembark to stand on what might have been the front yard of the Caldough estate. On the other side of the foundational trenches that act as the only indication of a structure, shine the lights of downtown Vancouver. Look narrates: We are up in the British Properties, one of the most beautiful locations in Vancouver. I mean obviously Errol Flynn would have emanated that statement, ‘I want to die here,’ because the view that I’m looking at right now is to die for! Moans and snickers splash against a backdrop of quiet unique to a neighbourhood where sprawling yards buffer residents from enduring one another’s company. On the dirt bank, participants break into small groupings, lighting cigarettes and exchanging flasks. Backs to the road, we take in the view: the dark water of the Georgia Straight, and the city beyond. Fog veils the night sky, but below, clusters of amber lights mark our stops earlier in the evening. The tour is billed as a recreation, a celebration of historical events retracing the steps of a fated man. It is through a narrative of his interactions with the city that familiar surroundings are imagined and reimagined. We have made strange the everyday landscape and gleefully lost ourselves in a monstrous yarn. In Invisible Cities, Calvino describes a traveller in a metropolis where he is unable to keep the features of the landscape distinct in his mind. He writes, ‘What line separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of the wheels from the howl of the wolves?’10 Back in the protective shell of the limousine, we resume the tour, ravenous voyeurs in time and space.

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__________________________________________________________________ 3. Amateur Detectives The execution of the painting, like many elements of the museum, feels charmingly clumsy. Drastic contrasts and rudimentary brushstrokes flick across the canvas, and Flynn’s saltwater eyes, his eyebrow like a whiplash, and his cleft chin all come together to create a rather endearing portrait of the actor. Beside the painting are pinned several photographs of Flynn as Robin Hood, and some laminated slips of paper: a report on the inquiry into the cause of death, a list of ‘fun facts’ on his film career, and a quote from Glen MacDonald, Vancouver coroner from 1954–1980, attesting to the body’s overnight stay in the Vancouver morgue. On the Errol Flynn Walking and Drinking tour, David Look joked, ‘they said he died of everything!’ In fact, the death certificate lists: ‘myocardial infarction, coronary thrombosis, coronary atherosclerosis, liver degeneration, liver sclerosis and diverticulosis of the colon.’11 By the time the paramedics reached the penthouse bedroom where he collapsed, there was nothing to be done. It is not difficult to envision Flynn’s collection of bodily disorders as one stands before the painting. Flynn’s portrait hangs in a bright, white-tiled room at the Vancouver Police Museum, the former home of the city morgue. Here, Flynn’s body was examined – quite possibly on one of the steel operating tables worryingly still inhabiting the room – before being shipped to Hollywood. On the wall to the right of the portrait, Petri dishes occupy a rough grid, each containing a discoloured organ. Like pickled sea creatures, a brain with a stab wound, a cancerous lung, a malformed foetus, etc. act to educate viewers on the horrors of inner dysfunction. Above the doorway, a banner professes the standard Latin inscription of Western autopsy facilities. Translated, it reads: ‘Let idle talk be silenced. Let laughter be banished. This is a place where death rejoices to teach those who live.’ This is clearly not a place where Errol would choose to hang out. The Museum is located in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side, an area boasting the lowest incomes in the country.12 Drug addiction and its accomplices seem to be at work on several of the pedestrians I pass on my way to the inconspicuous brick building. The Museum hosts school groups with its main hall of mannequins sporting historic police uniforms, display of police motorcycles, and enlarged archival photographs of officers on horseback smiling protectively down on those viewers with more impressionable minds. Before continuing on to the three other rooms of the museum, a sign offers a warning, ‘Exhibits beyond this point are graphically depicted and may not be suitable for all persons.’ Apart from the gloomy organs and gurneys of the morgue operating room, there are other troubles. One room displays a collection of weapons confiscated by police from Vancouver streets. Hung in glass cases, objects such as: a medieval-looking flail fashioned from a chainsaw chain and duct tape; a glove outfitted with every variety of nail; a wide array of brass (and non-brass) knuckles; a knife with a furry deer foot acting as a handle; and homemade poison dart shooters complete with

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__________________________________________________________________ brightly-dyed feathers. One does not need a Petri dish display to understand what terrible damage was intended by the making of these weapons. Between the weapon room and the morgue, is a room I find the most curiously monstrous. The room is the site of exhibits on the city’s historic murders. Of history, Walter Benjamin wrote, ‘history is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.’13 In the room of historic murders, there is a temporal shift. Six tall wooden display cases with glass windows each host a case study. Collections of photographs and ‘evidence’ can be examined and interpreted with present-day sensibilities and reflection. Recent crimes (such as that involving serial killer Robert Pickton, who used the Downtown East Side as a hunting ground), are thankfully absent; however, mid-century mysteries move through time into the space of legend. In the case housing ‘The Babes in the Woods’ display, dry leaves and a propped branch create a forest floor. Amongst the brush sit casts from the skulls of two children whose skeletons were found in Stanley Park in 1953. The mystery of the murdered children was never solved, but continues to play on the collective imagination. In the display case, the casts of skulls are accompanied by the various items found at the crime scene: two child-sized aviation-style helmets, a child’s shoe, a child’s belt, a woman’s shoe, and jacket zippers. These articles of clothing, weathered into hard lumps, are the original evidence. Reading the fading letterset cards describing the display, one comes to the realization, that what is economically styled in the modest cabinet, are the actual aviator caps, the actual shoes from a murder. In the ‘Kosberg Murders’ display, an axe hangs centrally, surrounded by grisly crime scene photos of the slain family. A card asking visitors to look for the blonde hair still stuck to the blade points out the authenticity of the axe. In cases where the evidence is not on hand, attempts are made to approximate items. In ‘The Milkshake Murderer’ a dated White Spot take-out cup symbolized the numerous arsenic-laced vanilla milkshakes a man fed his wife. These objects, original or not, take on a chilling aura. Much like the locations on the Errol Flynn tour, these familiar items, through their association with the macabre, have been given new meaning. There is an inclination towards fetishism of the objects (the real axe, the real helmets), and a desire to connect with one’s own experience (as a kid, I loved White Spot milkshakes…). When discussing the notion of aura, Benjamin described, ‘the associations which, at home in the mémoire involontaire, tend to cluster around an object of a perception.’14 Infected with the grisly narrative around each object, I look upon them with new distress and fascination; my understanding, built through my own experience, being redrafted by their new, sinister identities. Standing close to the glass, I sense the sunlight from the octagonal skylight, the vibration of the aging air ducts, the musty carpeting, and the precariousness of the hanging wire cramped around the neck of the Kosbergs’ axe.

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Image 2: Outside The Penthouse Nightclub, Vancouver BC. © Erin Ashenhurst, 2012 4. Nightlife Tourists ‘There aren’t any photos of Errol Flynn here, but what a great place it would have been to visit after the Cave…’ I thought, as we stood in the night looking up through rain at the neon sign. It was December 11 of 2012 and Heritage Vancouver is putting on their annual tour of 1010 Seymour Street. Huddled in wool coats or the West Coast’s signature Gore-Tex, some participants are hugging wine glasses or bottles of beer protectively under folded arms. In this city, open alcohol is still not permitted in public. The sign is not the original, but the design is much the same, with a bolt of flamingo pink shooting up the contour of the building. The name of the club, ‘The Penthouse,’ appears outlined in electric green piping against an image of the cityscape backlit with purple radiance. The marquee reads: ‘Liquor, Lust & The Law. Avail. In Stores Now.’ This is the title of a book written

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__________________________________________________________________ by Aaron Chapman, who has joined Danny Filippone, the owner of the club, on this night’s tour. On another night, the sign would read something like ‘Top exotic entertainment,’ or, as it did last November, ‘Dancer, Prancer, Vixen. We Got ‘Em All.’15 In its present incarnation, the Penthouse Nightclub is one of the city’s few remaining gentlemen’s clubs. This club has been in the Filippone family since it was founded in 1947, as a steak house, piano bar, and afterhours club. Danny tells of his father going to work in a tuxedo to greet guests at the door. Today’s average patron is perhaps more comfortable in jeans – or the occasional dowdy tracksuit. We are here for a narrative of glamorous Vancouver history: the fifties, the sixties, when it was the destination of Hollywood celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole. However, our ticket includes admission for the (unmistakably contemporary) dancers a few hours later. Danny Filippone is stocky and gregarious. Inside we will see photos of his father and uncles and the resemblance will be apparent. In the glow of the sign, our attention is shifted from the club to the building next door, a house, unremarkable but for its unique domesticity in the context of the commercially-zoned street. It is the family home and the office of operations for the family businesses. We see the window of the room where Danny’s uncle Joe, known by some as the Godfather of Seymour Street (xv1), was shot and killed by intruders. We are told the footprint of the house is 100 feet long, a massive space one would never imagine looking at the innocuous mask of grey stucco presented to the public. The space between the roof of the home and the roof of the club can’t be more than a meter and a half. We are told it has been successfully jumped. This night, we will not be seeing the roof. In 2011, a fire, started in the dressing room, caused extensive damage and closed the club for several months. A jewellery box of additions and renovations, but with very few windows to the outside, fire-fighters had to rip open the roof of the building to get to the flames.16 We are ushered inside under the buzz of the sign. Upstairs, past the table with the hidden cabinet for a quick stash of bottles on those occasions when the dry squad visited on liquor raids in the fifties, to a room bare but for a disembowelled piano propped against the wall with its keys like broken toes. The instrument is from the original piano bar. These days the space is often rented as a film set. It is hard to get new walls to look old on film and the real thing is in demand, we are told. Beside the piano bar is a room that was used as a steak house, and beside that, a hallway to the stairs. Filing down the hallway one by one, we each take our turn peering past the roped-off landing to the staircase, a network of steps and rooms leading down into the bowels of the building. Danny explained that in the glory days of the club, how far one was permitted to descend down the stairs reflected how highly regarded one was in certain social circles. If you made it into the depths, you were really ‘somebody.’ I wondered how far down the steps went and recalled the labyrinthine line-ups of theme parks. Just when you think you’ve made

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__________________________________________________________________ it, you turn a corner into a new room and realize you have a long way to go – but by then, you’ve already committed. On the tour, we will not be going down the stairs. After the fire, the dancers’ dressing room was relocated to this area of the building. From the landing, we can see the doorway across the chasm of steps. It looks like the dressing room from a movie set with makeup counters, mirrors framed with burning light bulbs and fuchsia fabric folded into a frill along the edge of the ceiling, a banner of kitschy femininity. It glows. In the main bar downstairs, Danny stands behind a pool table surrounded by framed photos. He uses a pool cue to point out faces: Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Gary Cooper, Sammy Davis Jr., Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong, Billy Holiday, Diana Ross. I stare at an image of Carmen Miranda being kissed on the cheek by Danny’s uncle Joe. I scan for a hint of Flynn. Several men with gelled curls pique my interest, but he is absent. Danny reaches with his pool cue to a photo of chorus girls at the Cave Nightclub. He identifies one as his beloved mother. We are lead to a different room upstairs via shallow steps of raw wood, perhaps hastily reconstructed after the fire, to the green room. ‘Sammy Davis Jr. slept here once,’ Danny announced. With aging textured wallpaper, the room seems to function as storage with a cabinet of top shelf liquor, cases of beer, and an oversized framed poster of Nina Hartley. In one corner of the poster, The text ‘Top Adult Film Star’ is stacked in bold type while Nina poses in the nude with her hair teased into a wild mullet. Although also in black and white, this artefact clearly reflects the more recent persona of the club – one we are politely circumventing. Her autograph in marker reads, ‘To the Penthouse Nightclub – A true class act.’ Tour participants whisper and take photos for their social media of choice. Drilled beside the doorframe is a yellowing doorbell with the label ‘Beverage Room’ etched above it. Danny explains that in past years, when poker games went on in the room, guests could ring the bell for private bar service. In a newspaper interview, Aaron Chapman says, ‘The Penthouse has survived because it has always served up sin stylishly, in one way or another.’17 The tour ends downstairs where Danny and Aaron chat with visitors and sign copies of Liquor, Lust, and the Law. We sit around the stage to watch a slide show of old photos set to the music of Frank Sinatra. Then it is 9:30pm. The first dancers slink out to classic songs of seduction: Let Me Entertain You and a platinum blonde. Couples hold their seats with gazes aimed high and small, respectful smiles. After a couple of dances end in graphic detail, the tour crowd thins and the regulars move into position. The third dancer enters the stage in a bright pink bra and matching chaps with ‘Barbie’ stitched across the backside in sequins. It seems unlikely this costume is approved of by the doll’s franchise. The front row is empty but for three lone men in baseball hats and apathetic eyes, but a few rows back

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__________________________________________________________________ several fans of the Heritage Vancouver tour remain. From the shadows, we continue to watch as the dazzling narrative spirals and fractures. 5. Sentimental Trespassers ‘Despite his words, ‘I will return’, he did not return [from that bedroom], but in effect, he did return, tonight – with us!’ announces David Look, describing the final words of Errol Flynn spoken to his party guests before he retired to the bedroom where he would expire. The limo sent home for the night, the remaining participants have crept into the back lot of Dr. Grant Gould’s apartment building. The building is disappointingly unremarkable and the party has grown gentle in the late hour. I am reminded of another instance of trespassing when I was a young art student. In the interest of finding unusual footage for a video, I took two friends to investigate abandoned houses in the suburban landscape where I grew up. At our first stop, we came upon a bomb shelter in the woods. There was little sign of its intended purpose, but pornography littered the ground around it. We stepped tentatively, took our photos, and got back in the car. At our next stop, we found a house set back from the street, going to seed. It was boarded up, but accessible with little effort. Inside, the insulation hung down from the ceiling like foreboding cotton candy and the floor crunched with broken Styrofoam. There were only textures of the family that once inhabited the space – orange shag carpet, curled linoleum. It smelled damp like the weeds were working to reclaim it from below. The final home we came upon contained an unusual number of personal items, the large family of residents having stiffed their landlord by fleeing in the night. Amongst the discarded report cards, jars of collected walnuts, posters and drawings, we found a small crutch. It was well constructed, but clearly homemade and built for someone the height of a small child. I took it home in the trunk of my car. One friend took a small pouch with a gold star stitched on it, the other, a working table scale. Although the history of these items was unknown to us, we were quick to delve into speculation. The objects became powerful, disconcerting in the way they signified the absence of their owners. Through our imaginations, they became haunted. Cormac McCarthy, in his novel, The Crossing, describes a man’s experience of a series of journeys crossing through Mexico. In one encounter the man is told: Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes… When their meaning has become lost to us, they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place. And that is what was found here. The corridor. The tale.18

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__________________________________________________________________ Even in a young city like Vancouver, stories can be imagined to collect in layers on the landscape, building a patina on door handles, and objects set adrift in the bay. In the discovery of these stories, though they are sometimes monstrous in nature, we find ourselves revelling in the novelty of our surroundings; renewing our relationships with the everyday spaces of the city, and growing euphoric in the small way we ourselves are given a new sense of significance.

Notes 1

E. V. Walter, Placeways : A Theory of the Human Environment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 131. 2 Italo Calvino, Invisible cities (London: Vintage, 1997), 9. 3 Diane Purvey and John Douglas Belshaw, Vancouver noir, 1930-1960 (Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2011), 183. 4 Walter, Placeways, 2. 5 Ibid., 117. 6 Timothy L. Taylor, Stanley Park (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001), 109. 7 Susan Stewart, On Longing : Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 2. 8 Paul King, ‘He Picked It Out Himself: A Wonderful Place to Die,’ The Vancouver Sun, October 16, 1959. 9 Guy Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive,’ in Theory of the Dérive, ed. Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 1996), 22. 10 Calvino, Invisible Cities, 89. 11 Byron Moore, ‘All Shook up: From Elvis to Beatlemania, Vancouver Has Enjoyed Some Marquee Acts over the Past 125 Years,’ The Vancouver Sun, April 7, 2011, accessed 20 December 2012, http://www.vancouversun.com/ entertainment/shook+From+Elvis+Beatlemania+ Vancouver+enjoyed+some+marquee+acts+over/4517260/story.html. 12 Ken MacQueen, ‘The Worst and Best of Canada,’ Maclean’s, March 12, 2008, accessed 20 December 2012, http://www.macleans.ca/canada/national/article.jsp? content=20080312_110944_110944andpage=2. 13 Walter Benjamin, ‘Thesis on the Philosophy of History,’ in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 267. 14 Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’ in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 186-88. 15 ‘Fire Strikes Famous Strip Club,’ Vancouver 24 Hrs, November 30, 2011, accessed 13 December 2012, http://vancouver.24hrs.ca/News/local/2011/11/30/ 19043186.html. 16 Ibid.

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__________________________________________________________________ 17

Dana Gee, ‘Liquor, Lust and the Law: Penthouse nightclub stuff of legends,’ The Province, November 26, 2012, accessed 13 December 2012, http://www.theprovince.com/news/Liquor+Lust+Penthouse+nightclub+stuff+legen ds/7611345/story.html#ixzz2GHNCZMl2. 18 Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (New York: Random House, 1994), 142.

Bibliography Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 1969. Calvino, Italo. Invisible cities. London: Vintage, 1997. Debord, Guy. ‘Theory of the Dérive.’ In Theory of the Dérive, edited by Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa, 22. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 1996. ‘Fire Strikes Famous Strip Club.’ Vancouver 24 Hrs, November 30, 2011. Accessed 13 December 2012. http://vancouver.24hrs.ca/News/local/2011/11/30/ 19043186.html. Gee, Dana. ‘Liquor, Lust and the Law: Penthouse Nightclub Stuff of Legends.’ The Province, November 26, 2012. Accessed 13 December 2012. http://www.theprovince.com/news/Liquor+Lust+Penthouse+nightclub+stuff+legen ds/7611345/story.html#ixzz2GHNCZMl2 King, Paul. ‘He Picked It Out Himself: ‘A Wonderful Place to Die.’ The Vancouver Sun, October 16, 1959. MacQueen, Ken. ‘The Worst and Best of Canada.’ Maclean’s, March 12, 2008. Accessed 20 December 2012. http://www.macleans.ca/canada/national/article.jsp? content=20080312_110944_110944andpage=2. McCarthy, Cormac. The Crossing. New York: Random House, 1994. Moore, Byron .’All Shook up: From Elvis to Beatlemania, Vancouver Has Enjoyed Some Marquee Acts over the Past 125 Years.’ The Vancouver Sun, April 7, 2011. Accessed 20 December 2012. http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/shook+From+Elvis+Beatlemania+ Vancouver+enjoyed+some+marquee+acts+over/4517260/story.html.

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__________________________________________________________________ Purvey, Diane and John Douglas Belshaw. Vancouver noir, 1930-1960. Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2011. Stewart, Susan. On Longing : Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Taylor, Timothy L. Stanley Park. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001. Walter, E. V. Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Erin Ashenhurst is a researcher, artist and educator based in Vancouver, Canada. Much of her work explores narrative, visual culture, and the oddity of the everyday. When not seeking out sites of monstrosity, she teaches courses in design at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Architecture after Fukushima: Spaces of Bara Bara, Spaces of Reciprocity Yutaka Sho Abstract Images circulating around the world after the Tohoku earthquake in Japan in March 2011 were so extreme and surreal that they would not let our eyes go. Once the news coverage subsided, two types of spaces emerged. First were those in which life continued as usual. Some say that the disaster made the country barabara: broke it apart. But Japan had long since broken apart geographically, when post-WWII redevelopment projects segregated energy production in the rural areas from consumption and development in urban areas. Nuclear risk was concentrated in aging and poor regions such as Tohoku, and metropolises were protected from a distance. The post-war redevelopment strategy thus gave birth to a monster named Fukushima No.1. In the face of bara-bara, and after entire towns were fenced off against radiation, a second type of space created alternative networks that eliminate regional discrepancies. The second type offers reciprocities between spaces, generations and disciplines and suggests a potential for new solidarity. The role they played in rapid development after the Second World War and the impending energy crises after the nuclear catastrophe make architecture and planning in reconstruction more important than ever. This chapter explores the images and spatial ideas that circulated before and after the Tohoku disaster in order to project an architectural and planning agenda for the future of Japan. Key Words: Architecture, disaster, energy, Japan, Fukushima, Hiroshima, Metabolist, nuclear, planning, Tohoku. ***** 1. Introduction On March 11, 2011 at 2:46 PM, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake occurred 175 kilometres from the Fukushima Number One Nuclear Power Plants on the Pacific coast of Japan (Fig. 1). The subsequent 13 meter tsunami incapacitated the reactors’ cooling systems and led them to meltdowns and hydrogen explosions. According to the International Nuclear Events Scale, the Fukushima disaster marked level 7 – same as the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. The radioactivity map of the Fukushima updated by the municipality shows a zone of high radiation stretching northwest for over 30 kilometres, while the federal government supports the evacuation of residents within 20 kilometres.1 As of December 2012, 156,000 refugees have fled Fukushima, either because their homes have been destroyed or the radiation levels are too high.2

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__________________________________________________________________ In the wake of the earthquake, images of the tsunami flooded media all over the world. We watched, not without a sense of shame because it was obscene to be thrilled by the destruction. But we could not avert our eyes. Editors have choreographed the destruction on wide screens and glossy magazine spreads, featuring rich colors, textures and wild juxtapositions of scale. Yet after the initial shock from the images faded, one may have noticed that the electric lights were still ablaze in Tokyo even though Fukushima’s nuclear reactors, the source of Tokyo’s power, continued to spread radiation. This regional discrepancy seems to confirm the sentiment that Japan had been bara bara, or broken apart.3 Nation-wide protests attest that since the Tohoku earthquake, nuclear technology has come to epitomize the fallacy of the post-war rapid economic growth and the consequence of unchecked energy consumption. This is not a new realization. In 1986, the same year as the Chernobyl disaster, Ulrich Beck warned of the coming of a ‘risk society’ in which unknown liabilities would threaten all aspects of life.4 Beck addressed temporal, spatial and social realms within which uncontainable risks would permeate. Beck therefore identified future generations, all countries and all social classes for whom we need to imagine reciprocities of our actions and with whom to build solidarity. Today the threat of radiation from Fukushima has been touching people in unpredictable, unequal and unquantifiable ways. Symptoms of the radiation may manifest tomorrow or in many years (temporal); here or many kilometers away (spatial); or regardless of one’s associations (social). In addition, the probability of developing an illness depends on age, genetics or lack of income which may hinder access to medical care, all of which are beyond the control of ordinary people. Philosopher Masachi Osawa points out that this fact has revealed another, fourth partner for solidarity: with ourselves of the future, the other we contain within us yet cannot see. Instead of a calamity happening to someone else, somewhere else, or to members of another society, it is us within our lifetimes that could be affected in unpredictable ways. While images of destruction are ubiquitous, the difficulty of imagining the fourth solidarity challenges the reconstruction of sustainable society in post-quake Japan. Architects and planners are struggling with this challenge. While they must proceed with care to ensure a safe environment for current and future Japan, the resettlement of affected people requires urgency, as it did after WWII. In October 2011 and December 2012, I visited Miyagi, Fukushima and Tokyo. Through observations and research in both academic and popular reports, I came to believe that reconstruction for the first calamity, WWII, seamlessly fused with the preconditions for the second by creating a nuclear monster for the benefit of Tokyo. The nuclear village, the term coined after the quake to describe a mafialike consortium of the government, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), academics and the media turned a blind eye to safety of aging plants in rural regions. But more than the political and economic backstage rigging that surrounds

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__________________________________________________________________ nuclear power business in Japan, my focus is on the architectural strategies that were deployed to ensure that the regional discrepancy remained invisible, which resulted in the concentration of the nuclear risk in poor and politically underrepresented places such as Fukushima. Imagining the connection with others in risk areas remains difficult, and today that fact hinders a regionally equitable redevelopment of Japan. By reviewing images of destruction and subsequent reconstruction projects, I seek alternative directions for architecture and planning that may be able to construct solidarity among presently disparate communities. Two types of reconstruction strategies, one that broke spaces apart and one that sought solidarity will be considered. Many reconstruction proposals after WWII in 1945 and the post-Tohoku quake in 2011 were grand and heroic, built on destroyed grounds and societies as if they were tabulae rasae (clean slates). Images depicting the total devastation of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the coastal areas of Tohoku justified a sweeping strategy as necessary and desirable. Some tabula rasa projects in the forms of masterplans and megastructures promoted an overhaul of old systems, but in effect they were in direct lineage with the approach of previous administrations. Other tabula rasa projects were more nuanced, taking advantage of the scale and iconicity of the dramatic images to question the path that lead to the calamity. In parallel, strategies to connect disparate places and peoples suggested the possibility of a new solidarity. These projects spanned across public and private, rural and urban, and the past, current and the future, answering Beck’s call to counter pervasive risk. However, the same exploitive representations of destruction propelled these diverse architectural strategies. 2. Tsunami Porn The first images of the earthquake that suffused mass-media depicted the unreal, violent forces of the tsunami. But they soon gave way to the numb expectation of something more. Film set designers must have rushed to Tohoku to record the ‘realistic’ special effects for future productions, as they did at the time of the Kobe earthquake in 1994 (Tsutsui 2010). As Kleimnan and Kleimnan state, Ultimately, we will have to engage the more ominous aspects of globalization, such as the commercialization of suffering, the commodification of experiences of atrocity and abuse, and the pornographic uses of degradation.5 Spaces of morbid beauty such as the post-industrial landscape and the aesthetics of slums have established a place in the discourse of architecture. The downfall of the Detroit cityscape, known as ‘decay porn,’ is well-documented.6 Media depictions of the slums of developing countries use similar images of powerlessness, exoticism and eroticism.7 Motives varying from the solicitation of

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__________________________________________________________________ donations for relief efforts to supposedly neutral newspaper photography employ them to highlight extraordinary poverty, violence and unfamiliar cultures. In such exploitive image making, Detroit’s decay and resource deprived countries’ poverty solidify the identities of the places and the residents. They disregard alternative projects, such as the urban agriculture movement in Detroit to take back access to food that is transforming vacant lots.8 Or in Africa, studies of the middle class contradict westerners’ assumption about the continent’s low economic status,9 and the documentation of modern architecture demonstrates architectural aspirations in this so-called primitive continent.10 The alternative projects produce images that problematize and complicate our understanding, yet their work is usually overwhelmed by catchy simplifications that make them appear marginal or insignificant. In a similar manner, the persistence of pornographic images of devastation and violence shapes the impressions of decision makers and affects real political and economic patterns. These impressions created by images of Detroit and Africa as volatile explain why investments are persistently low, as well as their systematic exclusion from political processes.11 Cases of destruction porn attest that architecture and planning create not only buildings but also images that form and are formed by economics and politics. For example, architects may apply culturally biased images that can influence real estate speculation; such is the case in any suburban subdivision with the ‘middleclass’ aesthetics of a pitched roof and a front yard. On the other hand, control of access may injure particular constituents: one example is the exclusion of the homeless from public spaces in affluent neighborhoods.12 Architecture becomes part of the image of the place, and that image influences economics and politics as much as reports by journalists or pictures by photojournalists. Therefore architecture is complicit when it remains silent, leaving the pornography of exoticism and subjugation to represent a place and its inhabitants. Early Tohoku earthquake reports followed the conventions set by exploitive image making, and locked the identity of Tohoku people in victimhood. Reports suggest that victims were expected to be unconditionally good and innocent, suffering from homogenous challenges, and to accept whatever they were given. In a temporary shelter, for example, the organizers were forced to decline donations unless they were identical and there were enough for all. They found that jealousy among refugees was creating animosity in the camps, betraying the donors’ assumption that victims would play nice.13 Conversely, hastily built temporary shelters were inconsiderate of people with disabilities, the elderly and the foreignborn, ignoring the diversity of needs. These cases attest that when people are identified as victims, decisions are made for them for the sake of timeliness and material necessity. Violent images that paint a singular victimhood risk denying the humanity of the affected. The same could be said for a place: when post-calamity spaces are labeled as clean slates, existing communities, cultural specificity and diverse needs may be ignored in the process of reconstruction.

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__________________________________________________________________ In parallel with the image of helpless victimhood, people and spaces of calamity are feared as monstrous. As Petra Rehling and others in this book have pointed out, although monsters are often blamed for causing calamities, they may be the true victims. Consider Frankenstein or Godzilla: it is human agency that created their monstrous characters and conditions. Or in the case of insects in Rehling’s chapter, cultural perceptions turned them into objects of disgust and fear. And Fukushima’s monster was created by TEPCO with government subsidies. Fear of Fukushima and its radiated people is exacerbated by the pornographic effect of disaster images. 3. Spaces of Bara Bara This monster named Fukushima No. 1 tends to destroy social ties at multiple scales. Tohoku is not only the source of energy for Tokyo but it is also Tokyo’s breadbasket. But due to rumors and unreliable government information in the aftermath, people in Tokyo stopped buying produce from Tohoku (Fig. 2). Streaming reports of farmers who have committed suicide continue to shake the country. Despite the risk of radiation, however, 97% of the residents of Fukushima have decided to remain within the area. For some it has less to do with the cost of relocation than with their sense of self being bound with the land.14 It is true that many were sustenance farmers who had been sending family members to big cities as seasonal migrants, and they need a government subsidy in order to relocate. But in areas of Fukushima, life is closely tied to the land: people grow their own food, drink well water, and heat their baths with wood harvested in the mountains. Their houses were built on the terrain that their pioneer ancestors cultivated. It is difficult to give cash value for all the properties and resources, not to mention the culture and history, and it is unlikely that they will receive the equivalent funds needed to start life elsewhere.15 Some farmers go back to the evacuation zone daily to feed their livestock even though they know well that they cannot sell the products. They do so out of sympathy for the animals and to defy the monster. Well-meaning people blame stayers, citing that they are risking their children’s health. Pictures of deformed newborns under the influence of nuclear radiation are carelessly shown to make a point – a typical pornographic use of calamity without considering how they may criminalize and ostracize the Fukushima people. Outside of Fukushima, municipalities across the nation are struggling to convince their citizens to process millions of tons of radioactive debris. But picket lines appear to block the transport of debris coming into the prefecture proper. This is not without reason: after the Fukushima disaster, the government increased the level of acceptable radiation in debris to be processed at normal facilities eight hundred times. As with the debris, refugees from Fukushima are treated as contaminated bodies and face discrimination in new communities, schools and work places.16 It has become clear that implementation of nuclear power plant technology in Japan required that the country be conceptualized as a collection of

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__________________________________________________________________ disparate pieces. It is by design that Fukushima bears the burden of the nuclear calamity while Tokyo remains as if nothing had happened. A. Distributing Development and Risk Concentrating risk in some areas and insulating it from others allows life to go on as if nothing had happened. In October 2011, as judged by the blazing lights and the number of shopping bags being carried on any given night after the quake in Tokyo, the city appeared normal. This was despite alarming reports of the quake’s economic impact and the fact that electricity may soon need to be rationed. In December 2012, there was hardly any talk of saving electricity. In parallel, grocery store owners published radiation levels next to the price tags for each food item to assure customers. Consumers refused to buy produce from Fukushima, and the farmers received little federal assistance. For those watching the disaster unfold in Tokyo, there was no obvious logic for the lives taken in the Tohoku quake, or those who will be claimed by nuclear radiation in the future: there was only the probability that reduced people to numbers and formulas that were opaque, as opaque as the nuclear technology itself. Jungkt says that, due to the requirement of specialized knowledge, nuclear technology is inherently susceptible to centralized control, creating opportunities to mishandle and conceal information by a select few.17 Such was the case after the Tohoku earthquake. Secrecy and ignorance delayed the evacuation and as a result many were needlessly exposed to radiation.18 Compounded with economic uncertainty and the invisible threat of radiation, it is understandable that those in Tokyo would rather pretend as if nothing had happened. The assumption of equality has been shattered by the quake as well. During the post-war rapid economic growth era, the motto in Japan had been ‘ten million people all middle class’ and widespread similarity of consumption habits gave an impression of equality: what has been termed as ‘equality of consumption.’19 Architecture and planning were an integral part of the trend. Mass manufactured housing in suburban New Towns had created containers as proof of equality, demanding their neighbors and the ‘developed world’ to respect the inhabitants’ achievement. However, the illusion of the endless supply of energy to support the consumption gave way to unequal regional development. The Tohoku quake showed that those with financial means could rebuild their homes, or better yet, they could leave, while others were stuck in temporary houses or living with radiation. Risk does not mean catastrophe. Risk means anticipation of catastrophe. …Without technique of visualization, without symbolic forms, without mass media, etc., risks are nothing at all.20

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__________________________________________________________________ The thrill of the risk may have turned tsunami images into pornography for some, while driving others to the panic-stricken stock piling of food, water and gasoline. This may be the continuation of the habitual risk consumption perpetuated by popular media since the post-war era. Attacks of radioactive giant insects, alien invasions and the sinking of the entire archipelago occurred frequently on screens, in comic books and novels.21 Sontag theorized that disaster science fiction acts as ‘beautification of the unbearable humdrum through destruction on one hand and neutralization of fear for real catastrophe on the other.’22 It was in the midst of familiar and unbearable humdrum that the Tohoku quake occurred. Pornographic images of an all-encompassing disaster and its unpredictable radiation risks brought a sudden break in the endless everyday.23 When the anticipated big bang finally came, however, the country did not rebuild itself in time for the weekly attack by Godzilla but it transformed the geography forever: large swathes of coastal land disappeared under the sea; debris and radiation fenced off towns for unknown lengths of time; and took away centuriesold communities, native knowledge and unique land- and cityscapes with them. The quake has shown that Japan is broken apart. Life in Tokyo for the most part seems to continue as if nothing had happened. As of August 2012, 95% of the top 100 companies believed that the nuclear power plants should continue to operate in Japan, citing the need to boost the economy.24 Among 1.3 million people who responded to the on-line questionnaire, 34% answered that they agreed with the reopening of nuclear power plants compared to 29% that was against it. Yet half of all participants answered that they would refuse to build them in their own towns.25 At the House of Representatives election held on December 16th, 2012, Japanese people gave 68% of the seats to the Liberal Democratic Party which promised to continue the use of nuclear energy. In Risk Society, Ulrich Beck identified three levels in which incalculable risks could have indiscriminate effects: spatial, temporal and social.26 Environmental degradation, financial crises and nuclear radiation were risks that would transcend all arbitrary demarcations that exist in our society. However, an independent committee commissioned after the quake by the National Diet of Japan found that risks were never discussed in the history of nuclear technology deployment in Japan.27 Nuclear technology was assumed to be perfectly safe and infallible, and the nuclear village reinforced the myth. It explains the complete absence of emergency measures and evacuation plans in case of a disaster. After the meltdown at Fukushima No.1, damages already inflicted and that would be inflicted in the future were systematically concealed, and government relief efforts were delayed and ineffectual. In some cases, residents were left in high radiation areas up to two months, only to be evacuated without a clear explanation of possible risks.28 Hiding the power plants in remote regions helped to maintain the safety myth among the voters in Tokyo.

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__________________________________________________________________ The federal subsidies named Three Laws for Electric Power Resource Sites had been concentrating nuclear risk in rural, poor, aging and depopulating regions.29 In Fukushima, the grants amounted to 26 million USD per year on average.30 In addition to federal funds, TEPCO had been making private donations since the 1960’s, totaling 520 million USD to date.31 The following quote by a politician in Tokyo corroborates, Tohoku might have been heavily damaged by this earthquake, but they contribute only 4.5% to the country’s GDP. Considering that the damages were concentrated in the coastal zones where it is sparsely inhabited, the loss must be less than 1%. Why should we spend millions to rebuild such places?32 The general conclusion to draw from this is that the economy defines geographical concentration of investments in some areas and risks in others. In Japan, however, the ‘equality of consumption’ might also have concealed the discrepancies in regional development. The formula has been: abundant electricity was essential for development; nuclear power plants were built in poor, rural prefectures to sustain the energy consumption of cities; expensive public facilities were built in shrinking host municipalities with federal grants so they could develop like Tokyo; and the cycle went on. We know today that the damages of the disaster cost 15 times the federal funds Fukushima had received in the past 36 years.33 B. Post-War Architecture and Preconditions for Bara Bara At the end of the war, Japan’s population turned to development fervor toward ‘ten million people all middle class,’ resulting in a miraculous growth rate that placed Japan at the world’s second largest GDP in a mere 26 years. The influential post-war architects’ group of Metabolists proposed megastructures with everexpanding networks, and offered a vision of architecture fit for national development aspirations. With Kenzo Tange at the helm, the Metabolists included the most acclaimed Japanese architects of the 20th century, with Arata Isozaki close but outside of the circle. A review of post-war reconstruction of Japan through the evolution of the Metabolists’ work reveals how Japan came to be constituted of disparate parts. Post-war Japan may have been a tabula rasa in many ways: physically, with bomb-ravaged cities; politically, with the native government castrated by the U.S. occupation; and socially and culturally, weighed down by the defeat. But the clean slate for architectural interventions was also a constructed ground, imaged and promoted by architects with state ideologies at the core of its motivation. Metabolist projects were enabled by the support and occasional back-stage arrangements of a government bureaucrat Atsushi Shimokobe.34 During the war,

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__________________________________________________________________ the Metabolists’ mentors were active in the Manchurian colonial government as public officials, architects and city planners, and they worked on high-profile projects such as planning of the Manchuria Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and the region of Inner Mongolia. The development of the vast and flat Manchurian territory (in contrast to the small and mountainous island of Japan) was interrupted by the loss of the war, but their ambition was passed on to their disciples. Metabolism was a vision of social and physical restructuring, directly inherited from the colonial empire.35 Upon returning to Japan, the colonialism was reverse-imported to rural regions with a harsh climate and difficult topography, and they were considered to be tabulae rasae to be developed in service of metropolises. Contested spaces were the cause for many major civil disobedient events that shook post-war Japan. They were protests against the colonialist tendency of development policies of the government. For example, the people of Okinawa fought for independence from the U.S. occupation until its return to Japan in 1972. Their struggle against the American military occupation on over 70% of their land and the Japanese government’s complacency continues to this day. The 1960’s protest movement was united against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty which allows the U.S. military occupation nation-wide including in Okinawa. The 1966 decision to build a new international airport in Narita and the subsequent forced eviction of land owners, many of them low-income farmers, ignited a strong resistance among farmers and students alike. All cases are consistent in that nuisance facilities were built in poor and underrepresented territories, away from Tokyo, in the name of development. New industrial zones along the flatter Pacific coast attracted rural migrants and by the 1960s, depopulation of the mountainous rural areas, their subsequent financial decline and aging population had become apparent. On the other hand, population growth in urban areas ignited the construction rush. A typology modeled after Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City took hold. Modern, efficient and clean suburban New Town housing projects were the symbol of the new society, and they became the object of desire for young nuclear families. Members of the Metabolists participated in their planning. But by this time Metabolists had begun to diverge from their patron’s visions. Masato Otaka, for instance, worked on one of the pioneering projects Tama New Town. His concept was to take advantage of the natural topography and locate vehicular circulation in the valley and pedestrian circulation on the ridges of the hills. He valued community connectivity over the profit driven model of the state. Otaka’s aim was to apply what he and his fellow Metabolist Kiyonori Kikutake called group form that achieved collectivism through the amalgamation of individual units. But in Tama New Town his plan was rejected, topography was flattened, and mass-produced homes were built by government developers.36 Flat sites for housing construction were engineered by cutting the hill tops and filling the valleys. During the 2011 Tohoku earthquake,

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__________________________________________________________________ hastily filled artificial ground proved to be 26 times more vulnerable compared to hill-tops which retained their original soil structures.37 By 1954, less than ten years after the atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a representative and future Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone founded the Atomic Energy Commission to start nuclear energy production in Japan. Nuclear power reactors by General Electric were imported from the U.S. without a thorough safety evaluation process.38 In 1974 as the Minister of Trade and Industry, Nakasone underwrote and rushed to pass the aforementioned Three Laws of Electric Power Resource Sites. The earmarking of funds for the Three Laws, however, coincided with the end of the rapid economic growth era, and energy consumption began to level out. Despite this, and despite the catastrophic nuclear reactor accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and at Chernobyl in 1986, the plant constructions increased in Japan (Osawa 2012). Millions of government subsidies continued to flow into rural regions, resulting in the clientelism of the nuclear village.39 Meanwhile, for none of the Metabolist projects was energy provision planned. Even Arata Isozaki, who had been critical of the Metabolists’ over-optimism, candidly acknowledges the shortsighted considerations of energy and technology plans in his postwar work (Isozaki 2011, 20-37). A plan for an artificial island the Mirage City for Zhuhai, China was exhibited at 1996 Venice Architectural Biennale. Because Isozaki could not come up with a better idea, he reluctantly left an umbilical cord to supply fuel from the mainland. His 1972 proposal Computer Aided City was based on a cybernetic environment concept that depended all aspects of its daily working on a central supercomputer inspired by HAL in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. There was no visualization of fuel supply in this project. Soon after the oil crisis in 1973 the Metabolists would leave Japan to practice abroad, especially in oil-rich Middle Eastern countries.40 By the time of the earthquake in March 2011, the role of the Tohoku region as the supplier of energy, labor force, industrial resources and food for the benefit of metropolises had been institutionalized. The rural, urban and suburban separation of spaces for production, distribution and consumption at the national scale was complete. The segregation of these activities was accompanied by the economic and political disparities and concentration of risks which paved the ground for the Fukushima disaster. 4. Spaces of Reciprocity A. Representing Reciprocity: Post-1945 Sociologist Wataru Tsurumi, who coined the term the endless everyday, claims that the rapid economic growth era ignored social solidarity in the name of development, and drove the ordinary Japanese to withdraw. His book The Complete Manual of Suicide, a national best seller, listed lethal drugs and weapons and accompanying techniques to liberate oneself from the impossible life that the

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__________________________________________________________________ development era had created.41 The book was never meant to be a lure to take one’s own life but to recognize modern struggles that everyone knew but did not dare to mention. Tsurumi’s work shows that Japan has been broken apart long before the Tohoku quake. The Complete Manual of Suicide is science fiction in that it hypothesizes a world in which the status quo is turned upside down. Instead of criminalizing or ignoring suicide as a way out for the weak, it provides technical instructions, the availability of each method and ratings in six useful categories (pain, labor intensity, unsightliness, nuisance to others, dramatic effects and lethality), as if suicide is a normal option. As in all good SF, the book identifies issues that lurk beneath the surface of a society and offers an oblique trajectory to address them. It chronicles the events leading to case studies and scrutinizes the society that pushed the victims. It does not, however, rely on futuristic technological inventions to stimulate the imagination. Instead, the meticulous and objective laying out of the suicide processes reveals the unimaginable pain inflicted on the victims. Along the lines of imagining individual deaths, The Complete Manual of Suicide paints a picture of a future world with nobody left. In typical SF, it is a prerequisite that people should survive Armageddon or the story would not resonate with human readers.42 If SF stories killed all humans they would disable readers to have faith in the premise of the SF genre. Therefore it is not the survivors in the story that are saved but it is the SF genre itself.43 But Tsurumi mercilessly obliterates possible salvation of existing society. What differentiates Tsurumi and the following artists from SF writers or disaster pornographers is the representation of the world without humans that brings home Beck’s warning. Arata Isozaki’s 1968 image of Hiroshima also distinguishes itself from the typical pornographic exploitation of destruction and the grand visions of Metabolist social engineering. For the Milan Triennial Isozaki created a photomontage entitled Hiroshima Ruined for the Second Time which portrayed megastructures over the atom-bomb ruin (Fig. 3). The megastructures could be seen either as part of the ruins of the past war or as under construction. The background is certainly Hiroshima, but it could well be a decimated landscape anywhere. Isozaki commented that, after 20 years since witnessing destroyed Japan (he was 14 years old), he could only imagine cities of the future as ruins.44 Isozaki re-depicted Hiroshima’s total decimation as the future of Japan at the height of the rapid economic growth period. There were similar efforts to document the destruction of the war, including paintings by Iri and Toshi Maruki of the purgatory of Hiroshima (Fig. 4). Genbaku no Zu or Images of the A-Bomb series of fifteen paintings are each 7.2 meters long and 1.8 meters tall, a scale that fills the human spatial experience. They create paintings as an environment in which foreground and background are infused and the depth is lost. Life-sized people and animals are shown to be at one with the burned landscape. In the context of post-earthquake Tohoku, their work invokes

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__________________________________________________________________ the cyclical nature of destruction and the short life of human memory. In Isozaki’s and the Marukis’ Hiroshima, specificities in the temporal, spatial and social realms are absent. They are post-human landscapes that memorialize what had been lost, for no one. Their work does not construct a complete and comprehendible story but simply communicates the demolition of ‘we.’ Another architect who provided an alternative to post-war architecture was Seiichi Shirai. He belonged to the generation before the Metabolists and began his career by creating small public buildings in Tohoku.45 While Tange, the leader of the Metabolists, was designing the heroic and public Hiroshima World Peace Memorial at Ground Zero in 1954, Shirai privately designed another Hiroshima Memorial to house the collection of the Marukis’ paintings. A cubic exhibition hall floated above water and was accessible only via an underground passage. If realized, paintings of fire and black rain would have transformed Shirai’s gallery into a space of its own world without a future or a context. The works of Isozaki, the Marukis and Shirai and the writings by Tsurumi were inquiries into a path that resulted in post-human imagery and a condemnation of the present course of development. By visualizing and writing about the end world without narratives, their work reciprocates with the victims instead of with the audience. The imagination of this para-SF lacks heroism or eroticism due to the absence of future humans. The connection with the future subject, the fourth other, is also decimated by the disaster along with the temporal, spatial and social connectivities that were identified by Beck. The work depicts silence and absence of future populations, instead of a straightforward solidarity with them. A fable by German philosopher Günther Anders is recalled, in which the biblical character Noah orchestrates a theatrical public mourning for tomorrow’s dead, today, before the flood destroys them. Villagers who were able to imagine the future loss helped him build the Arc.46 Similar to Noah, the post-war Japanese artists above had shown that tomorrow there will be nobody left to mourn. It is true that they only offer images and concepts, and not a viable proposal for constructing solidarity with un-representable others. However, by recognizing the ability of images to impact real policy making, their work resonates more than an idealistic call for sustainable development. B. Imagining Reciprocity: Post-2011 Once the tsunami porn subsided, image and space making in post- earthquake Tohoku began to respond to their post-war predecessors. The post-quake imagemakers dissented against the central management of nuclear technology and the irresponsible and incompetent government relief policies. Newspapers published easy-to-understand diagrams of the reactor’s mechanism.47 Technical terms such as ‘Sievert’, ‘caesium 137’ and ‘suppression pool’ became household knowledge within days. Coincident with the media’s effort to demystify nuclear technology in pictures and text, housewives purchased their own Geiger counters, measured and

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__________________________________________________________________ published the radiation levels in their neighbourhoods, created maps and demanded action.48 Keeping memories of the disaster alive, as well as memories lost at the disaster were important tasks. Private companies such as Google Japan, Yahoo! Japan and Fuji Film, municipalities in Tohoku and academic institutions nationwide launched websites that archived images and testimonies of the affected. The East Japan Earthquake Archive, a plug-in for GoogleEarth created by a lab at Tokyo Metropolitan University, is one of them (Fig. 5).49 It shows the faces of the survivors, their testimonies and the places where they reside linked on a map of Japan. In contrast to the tsunami porn, the Archive communicates the disaster as lived experience by recording people’s voices directly. Sorrow and confusion are present, but they are never reduced to the fetishized aesthetics of destruction. Instead they coexist among aspirations and mundane pleasures chosen by the story tellers. Another project, Kikigaki (verbatim) by RQ Citizen Disaster Rescue Center documents the histories and livelihoods of towns lost in the earthquake.50 Many of the records stored at city halls and public libraries were swallowed by the tsunami, and the ones in Fukushima are off-limits. Survivors’ memories of the towns will be the only remaining proof of their existence. Earthquakes are an ordinary matter in Japan. Small quakes occur frequently, and larger tremors occur cyclically. Earthquakes assume a seasonal character, and assert themselves in a variety of ways: in everyday routines such as emergency evacuation drills at schools and offices, in high culture as shown by a haiku written in 950 AD about the Jogan earthquake 100 years before,51 and as scientific knowledge as shown by cutting-edge seismic-proof structures built throughout the country. Yet in Tohoku, the natural disaster was accompanied by a deprivation of infrastructure and investment, and the concentration of risks assisted by development-oriented architecture and planning. The projects below attempt to reconnect societies severed by such designs. C. Architecture of Reciprocities in Post-Quake Japan Unlike other temporary housing, one in Shinchi, Fukushima was well-received by the residents. About 100 houses of this settlement were built by the government using lumber instead of the usual plastic. And unlike the shared partition walls that let noise from the neighbours intrude, each unit had its own walls separated by about a 30cm buffer zone. Each unit had an engawa (narrow terrace) just enough for two people to sit. The engawa ran the length of the settlement’s two community centers, allowing the residents to gather. Even though usable outdoor spaces were limited, life in Shinchi happened between indoor and outdoor, private and public, thanks to engawa. Shinchi was also the work site of a long-standing cooperative called Seikatsu Club in Tokyo.52 Seikatsu Club has been working to counter the post-war planning schemes that created regional discrepancies, including the economic gap between

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__________________________________________________________________ Fukushima and Tokyo. Since 1968, the members, mostly housewives in wealthy suburbs of Tokyo, have been directly contracting rural producers and distributing the goods without middlemen. The members research and create new products to minimize waste and environmental impact. Their work alters rural, urban and suburban landscapes. For instance, vegetables for all 60,000 members of the Tokyo area are produced locally. Their retail stores are equipped with solar panels and they sell back the excess energy to the state. Their 300,000 members nation-wide are involved in not only organic food projects but also consultation in ecologically conscientious housing construction, the operation of elderly daycare centers, and the running of a political party of representatives consisting of house wives, to name a few. Seikatsu Club has been assisting those affected by the quake in Tohoku in various ways. One of the projects is the monthly open market in temporary settlements like Shinchi. Without organized events like this, my guide told me, the refugees do not go out but tend to dwell on their misfortune in solitude.53 The majority of the residents in Shinchi were refugees from the nuclear power plant’s 20 km-radius evacuation area. It is expected to take 30 years to dismantle Fukushima No.1. The refugees do not know when they may return to their homes, if ever, and this settlement is likely to become more than temporary. The cooperative hardly makes money at open markets. But women come out of their houses and children make rice cakes on an engawa. Another project by Seikatsu Club is the collaboration with PARCIC in Ishinomaki in Miyagi prefecture, one of the towns that were hardest hit by the tsunami. PARCIC, an international NGO, started a community gathering space in a house they restored. The coastal geography of Ishinomaki was drastically altered and surviving community members were scattered to different refugee settlements. For those who have never been to Ishinomaki, the town seemed normal at first, if less dense than the average Japanese fabric. Upon closer look, however, what appeared to be vacant lots were occupied by the underground foundations of homes swept away by the tsunami. For the structures that were still standing, first floor walls were absent. The affluent rebuilt their homes quickly but many houses remained as they were on March 11th, gouged interiors exposed. Most of the debris had been cleared and the streets were orderly. Vacant lots with foundations, wall-less homes and a few reconstructions coexisted in Ishinomaki. PARCIC’s community Town Station Ochakko (‘a little tea’) offers lunch, snacks and beverages and above all a place where survivors can gather to share their experiences and find ways to rebuild their town.54 Seikatsu Club has been providing fiscal and organizational support for this project. Across from Ochakko were a garden and a hand-made pizza oven in a vacant property. One of the PARCIC organizers related that the municipality had no plan yet for this area and people have begun to organize themselves. At Ochakko, tools for planning such as maps, internet access, and workshops for understanding the ramifications of

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__________________________________________________________________ municipal policies were offered to the locals. They have also built several workshops for processing seaweedfor the fishermen’s union, and a community garden with a local junior high school. At Ochakko and Shinchi temporary housing, there was a stack of free newspapers called WaWa, meaning My Circle in Tohoku’s dialect. Architects and artists from Tokyo and Tohoku together founded the publication to address life in the affected areas of Tohoku, and six issues have been printed to date. Articles range from reports on relief and reconstruction projects to the mental health issues of those who must remain in temporary housing for extended periods of time.55 Issue No.01 showcased different temporary settlements across Tohoku that considered ‘not just an upgrade of containers but an upgrade of humanity, community and livelihood.’ Some of them were designed in collaboration between residents and architecture schools, while others employed local contractors to create jobs and to use their knowledge. Temporal refugee housing is a material necessity, but its poor materiality and spatiality, and the potential for them to be used as an excuse to postpone permanent solutions are bound to betray the residents. WaWa and the featured projects do not merely make life in limbo tolerable: they redefine temporality in a real scope, 30 years and more, with architectural means. WaWa must have been what Masami Chiba has been longing for. He has been looking for a way to share information between communities coping with life in temporary housing, and seeking to relocate permanently to higher ground. Chiba is the chairman of a traditional community organization and land sharing custom called kō in Isatomae, one of the fishing villages in Miyagi that were severely affected by the tsunami. Kō is a Tohoku custom in which a collection of privatelyowned properties are shared and managed among the members.56 Chiba has been leading the project to build new houses by deploying shared land, and their traditional yet unique solution to the housing crisis has offered an alternative to the slow government reconstruction process.57 When kō was conceived in the Heian period (794-1189 CE) it was an exclusive Buddhist society in which members of the sect shared resources and organized cultural events. Later, its organizational system was adopted by various local administrations, which gave up religious association and oversaw the economic, political and social affairs of the community. Prior to the earthquake, Isatomae kō had been managed and accessed by the founding families’ descendants from 1693.58 Isatomae kō organized cultural events such as weddings and funerals, seasonal festivals, traditional drumming and dance lessons and maintained town treasures, including a 120-year-old festival float. Kō maintained natural resources in the mountains by regularly clearing undergrowth, cultivating lumber and renting out properties for income, and at sea by regulating overfishing. The kō chairmen used to work closely with municipal leaders to represent his members’ interests. It had been a comprehensive institution parallel to that of the government, influential in shaping the landscape, cityscape

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__________________________________________________________________ and their resources. However, access to and profits from the common land were available only to members prior to the earthquake. On the day after the earthquake, Isatomae, a small town of 400 families, found that 74 of 77 kō member families lost their homes to the tsunami, and the nonmembers were severely affected as well. The kō leaders decided to make available all fifty hectares of their common land to be shared among the entire community regardless the kō membership so they may resettle together. With knowledge that waiting for the federal government’s support would drag on, and facing a term limit of two years’ stay in temporary housing, all the kō land owners agreed to donate their property without protest. Any resettlement project of this scale is not easy, however. One of the reasons is that, while Isatomae wants to open the new settlement to whoever would like to join from the affected neighbourhoods, the government would not fund the construction of the homes for non-residents.59 Many of the town’s people have been living in temporary settlements far from Isatomae since the earthquake. Chiba knows that the longer it takes to construct the new settlement the less likely it is that people will return, and the 300-year-old community may slowly expire. Chiba will focus his efforts on the revival of the oyster industry in order to complete the settlement project. 5. Representation of Reciprocity Development-oriented post-war architecture and planning was complicit in the concentration of nuclear risk in Tohoku and other poor rural regions that service metropolises. Planning projects initiated by the state, as the ones in which early Metabolists participated, also enabled the monster that is Fukushima No. 1. Today, the government has been trying to seal off Fukushima’s contaminated and unruly body while the local residents try to protect their community at the cost of their lives. Perhaps those stayers are the ones capable of imagining the future and, despite the fact it was forced upon them, made a decision to embody and represent it. People in Hiroshima and Nagasaki did the same in 1945.60 Isozaki, the Marukis, Shirai and Tsurumi responded in solidarity with the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki via images, spaces and text. Seikatsu Club, PARCIC, WaWa and Isatomae kō have demonstrated that connecting with Tohoku regions and implementing networking structures are necessary and more productive means for the construction of a sustainable society. Imagining a future filled with intangible risk is difficult. It is especially true when that risk is isolated in faraway places such as Fukushima, affecting a society a thousand years from now with an invisible threat like nuclear radiation. Yet the construction of spaces of solidarity – networked spaces that compel us to recognize the risk as our own – depends on the ability to imagine that future. The reconstruction of Japan and other communities striving to regenerate starts with representing reciprocity.

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Notes 1

Fukushima Prefecture, ‘Fukushima Prefecture Radiation Level Map,’ Fukushima Prefecture 2 Fukushima Prefecture Communications Department, 2012 Tohoku Region Pacific Coast Earthquake Damage Report (Issue 815) (Fukushima, Japan: Fukushima Prefecture [2012]). http://wwwcms.pref.fukushima.jp/pcp_portal/PortalServlet?DISPLAY_ID=DIREC TandNEXT_DISPLAY_ID=U000004andCONTENTS_ID=24914. 3 Hiroki Azuma, ‘The Disaster Broke Us Apart,’ Shisochizu Beta 2, After the Disaster (Autumn, 2011). 4 Ulrich Beck, Risikogesellschaft: Auf Dem Weg in Eine Andere Moderne, 1 Aufl, Erausg ed., Vol. 1365 = n.F., Bd. 365 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 391, [1]. 5 Arthur Kleimnan and Joan Kleimnan, ‘The Appeal of Experience; The Dismay of Linages: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in our Times,’ in Social Suffering, eds. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das and Margaret M. Lock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 19. 6 Georgia Daskalakis, Charles Waldheim and Jason Young, Stalking Detroit (Barcelona: Actar, 2001). 7 Jon Hegglund, ‘Modernism, Africa and the Myth of Continents,’ in Geographies of Modernism: Literature, Cultures, Spaces, eds. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (New York: Routledge, 2005), 43-53.; Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 25th Anniversary ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 2003; 1994; 1979), 394.; Niranjan S. Karnik, ‘The Photographer, His Editor, Her Audience, their Humanitarians: How Rwanda’s Pictures Travel through the American Psyche,’ Bulletin, no. 50/51 (Winter/ Spring, 1998).; Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘Invisible Again: Rwanda and Representation After Genocide,’ African Arts (Autumn, 2005). 8 I have visited and/or interviewed following organizations in D-Town Farm of Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, http://detroitblackfoodsecurity.org/index.html, SEED Wayne at Wayne State University http://www.clas.wayne.edu/seedwayne/, the EarthWorks of the Capuchin Soup Kitchen, http://cskdetroit.org/, the Greening of Detroit http://greeningofdetroit.com/ and Detroit Collaborative Design Center at University of Detroit Mercy http://www.facebook.com/DCDC.UDM, in October 2009. All websites viewed on 24 June 2012. 9 Joan Bardeletti, ‘Middle Classes in Africa,’viewed 24 June 2012, http://www.classesmoyennes-afrique.org/en/ 10 David Adjaye and Peter Allison, Adjaye, Africa, Architecture: A Photographic Survey of Metropolitan Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 2011). 11 James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 257.

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Don Mitchell and Lynn A. Staeheli, ‘Clean and Safe? Property Redevelopment, Public Space, and Homelessness in Downtown San Diego,’ in The Politics of Public Space, eds. Setha Low and Neil SmithRoutledge, 2006). 13 Daisuke Tsuda, ‘Can Social Media Regenerate Tohoku? Reconstructing Autonomous Local Communities,’ Shisochizu Beta 2: After the Disaster (Autumn, 2011), 52-72. 14 Tamaki Saito, ‘Land in the Root of Humanity,’ Mainichi Shinbun, sec. Culture, October 18, 2012; Shuji Shimizu, Looking Back at Nuclear Power Plants: What it Means to Live in Fukushima Today [原発とは結局なんだったのか －いま福島で生きる 意味] (Tokyo: Tokyo Shinbun, 2012), 223. 15 Asahi Shinbun, The Trap of Prometheus: Unreleased Truth of Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Accident [プロメテウスの罠] Gakken Publishing, 2012); Shimizu, Looking Back at Nuclear Power Plants. 16 Ibid. 17 Robert Jungk, The Nuclear State [Atom-Staat.] (London: J. Calder, 1979), 178. 18 Asahi Shinbun, The Trap of Prometheus; Shimizu, Looking Back at Nuclear Power Plants. 19 Azuma, The Disaster Broke Us Apart. 20 Ulrich Beck, ‘Living in the World Risk Society,’ Economy and Society 35, no. 3 (August, 2006), 329-345. 21 William M. Tsutsui, ‘ Oh no, there Goes Tokyo: Recreational Apocalypse and the City in Postwar Japanese Popular Culture,’ in Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City, ed. Gyan Prakash (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010). 22 Susan Sontag, ‘The Imagination of Disaster,’ in Against Interpretation, and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966). 23 Wataru Tsurumi, The Complete Manual of Suicide [完全自殺マニュアル] (Tokyo: Oota Shuppan, 1993). 24 http://sankei.jp.msn.com/economy/news/120818/biz12081820520009-n1.htm. 25 http://info.nicovideo.jp/enquete/special/genpatsu/201208/index.html. 26 Beck, Risikogesellschaft: Auf Dem Weg in Eine Andere Moderne, 391, [1] 27 NAIIC, The National Diet of Japan Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission Report, Executive Summary (Tokyo: The National Diet of Japan and NAIIC,[2012]), http://warp.da.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/3856371/naiic.go.jp/en/index.html. 28 Asahi Shinbun, The Trap of Prometheus. 29 電源三法交付金制度 (Three Laws of Electric Power Grants): 発電用施設周辺地域整備 法 (Improvement Act for Areas Surrounding Power Generation Facility), 電源開発促 進税法 (Electric Power Development Promotion Tax Law) and 電源開発促進対策特別 会計法 (Electric Power Development Promotion Law on Special Accounting Measures). Yu Miyoshi, ‘Nuclear Power Plants and Local Government Finance:

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__________________________________________________________________ Case of Tsuruga City, Fukui Prefecture,’ Ritsumeikan University College of Economics 58, no. 4 (November, 2009), 634. 30 Asahi Shinbun, ‘Fukushima Moves Toward Off-Nuclear Energy, Warning from Fukushima Series, Vol.2, Issue 5,’ Asahi Shinbun, December 16, 2011. 31 Asahi Shinbun, ‘TEPCO has been Donating 40 Billion Yen to Nuclear Power Plant Host Cities, Part of Municipal Budget for 20 Years,’ Asahi ShinbunSeptember 15, 2011. 32 Tsuda, Can Social Media Regenerate Tohoku? 33 Shuji Shimizu, ‘The Damage is 15 Times the Benefit: ‘Questioning Federal Policies’ Series- with Shuji Shimizu,’ Okinawa Times Via WEB Shinsho 1 (March 1, 2012), June 23, 2012. 34 Rem Koolhaas and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Project Japan: Metabolism Talks (Koln ; London: Taschen, 2011), 719; Hajime Yatsuka, Metabolism Nexus [メタボリズム・ ネクサス], Vol. April 25 (Tokyo: Ohmsha, 2011), 454. 35 Arata Isozaki, ‘Architecture: From Invisible to Invincible,’ AtPlus 08 (May, 2011), 20-37.; Koolhaas and Obrist, Project Japan; Hajime Yatsuka, ‘Overcoming of Modernism Via Metabolism Nexus,’ in Metabolism, the City of the Future: Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present-Day Japan [メタボ リズムの未来都市] (Tokyo: Mori Art Museum, 2011), 10; Yatsuka, Metabolism Nexus. 36 Yatsuka, Metabolism Nexus. 37 Asahi Shinbun, ‘Artificial Fill Terrain Faces Challenges in Improvement: How to Identify Risks,’ Asahi Shinbun, November 3, 2012. 38 Osawa cites a TV interview with the GE representative who said that TEPCO was easier to convince than the U.S. equivalent. Masachi Osawa, Toward Awakening Deeper than Dreams – Philosophy after 3.11 [夢よりも深い覚醒へ －3.11 後の哲学] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho, 2012). 39 Shimizu, Looking Back at Nuclear Power Plants. 40 Koolhaas and Obrist, Project Japan. 41 Tsurumi, The Complete Manual of Suicide. 42 Mick Broderick, ‘Surviving Armageddon: Beyond the Imagination of Disaster,’ Science Fiction Studies 20, no. 3 (November, 1993), 362-382, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4240277. 43 Osawa argues that the flood in the bible saved not Noah and the animals but god and Christianity itself. Osawa, Toward Awakening Deeper than Dreams. 44 Yatsuka, Metabolism Nexus. 45 Ibid. 46 Cited in Masachi Osawa, ‘Possible Revolution 5: Future, Like a Ghost?’ AtPlus 11 (February, 2012), 158-168. 47 Asahi Shinbun, ‘Diagrams: Fukushima No.1 Nuclear Power Plant Accident and its Effects on Civilian Life (1).’

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Iichiro Tokumaru and Hiroyuki Oba, ‘Chernobyl in Tokyo: Radiation Map of 180 Locations in the Kanto Region,’ Sunday Mainichi (September 18, 2011), May 26, 2012, http://webshinsho.nikkansports.com/webshinsho/mainichi/sundaymainichi/product/ 2011090800008.html. 49 shinsai.mapping.jp 50 http://kikigaki.rq-center.jp 51 Hiroki Azuma, Naoki Inose and Takashi Murakami, ‘Going Beyond the Severed Time: Thinking as the Kacho,’ Shisochizu Beta 2. 52 For more information on Seikatsu Club in English, see their website http://seikatsuclub.coop/about/english.html. The author is intimate with the organization because her mother was an employee then the executive for over 35 years. Therefore the accounts may be biased but the information is based on extensive first-hand knowledge. 53 An interview with Isamu Arai who guided the author in the disaster sites. He is a retiree who returned to work for the disaster relief efforts on behalf of Seikatsu Club. 54 Ochakko has since been closed due to building remodel. 55 WaWa, September 13, 2011. wawa.or.jp. 56 Tsuda, Can Social Media Regenerate Tohoku? 57 RQ’s Kikigaki Project, http://kikigaki.rq-center.jp/tag/伊里前; Daisuke Tsuda’s journalistic account of his traveling symposiums and interviews throughout the Tohoku region http://okuno-hosomichi.tumblr.com/; and a 2012 documentary film To the High Sea by Takuya Nakakawa, http://blog.murakawa-takuya.com/2012/04/blog-post.html. 58 Shun Makino, the last mayor of Utatsu before it was merged with Minamisanriku in 2005. Makino is a descendent of the three brothers who founded the Isatomae kō. Kikigaki, ‘Yu-u-Hito: A Weaver, Shun Makino,’ accessed November 4, 2012, http://kikigaki.rq-center.jp/jibunshi/s-makino/. 59 Interview with Masami Chiba, Leader of Isatomae Kō Contractual Organization, video, directed by Daisuke Tsuda USTREAM, 2012), http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/20358347. 60 Kenzaburō Ōe, David L. Swain and Toshi Yonezawa, Hiroshima Notes [Hiroshima nōto.], 1 Grove Press pbk ed. (New York; Emeryville, CA: Grove Press; Distributed by Publishers Group West, 1996; 1995).

Bibliography Adjaye, David and Peter Allison. Adjaye, Africa, Architecture: A Photographic Survey of Metropolitan Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 2011.

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__________________________________________________________________ Asahi Shinbun. ‘Artificial Fill Terrain Faces Challenges in Improvement: How to Identify Risks.’ Asahi Shinbun, November 3, 2012. ———. ‘Fukushima Moves Toward Off-Nuclear Energy.’ Warning from Fukushima Series, Vol. 2, Issue 5.’ Asahi Shinbun, December 16, 2011b. ———. ‘TEPCO has been Donating 40 Billion Yen to Nuclear Power Plant Host Cities, Part of Municipal Budget for 20 Years.’ Asahi Shinbun, September 15, 2011c. ———. The Trap of Prometheus: Unreleased Truth of Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Accident, edited by Asahi Shinbun Special Report Unit [プロメテウスの罠] Gakken Publishing, 2012. Azuma, Hiroki. ‘The Disaster Broke Us Apart.’ Shisochizu Beta 2, no. After the Disaster (Autumn, 2011). Azuma, Hiroki, Naoki Inose, and Takashi Murakami. ‘Going Beyond the Severed Time: Thinking as the Kacho.’ Shisochizu Beta 2, no. After the Disaster (Autumn, 2011): 72-93. Bardeletti, Joan. ‘Middle Classes in Africa.’ Accessed June 24, 2012. http://www.classesmoyennes-afrique.org/en/. Beck, Ulrich. ‘Living in the World Risk Society.’ Economy and Society 35, no. 3 (August, 2006): 329-345. ———.. Risikogesellschaft: Auf Dem Weg in Eine Andere Moderne. Edition Suhrkamp. 1 Aufl, Erausg ed. Vol. 1365 = n.F., Bd. 365. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. Broderick, Mick. ‘Surviving Armageddon: Beyond the Imagination of Disaster.’ Science Fiction Studies 20, no. 3 (November, 1993): 362-382. Daskalakis, Georgia, Charles Waldheim, and Jason Young. Stalking Detroit. Barcelona: Actar, 2001. Ferguson, James. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006.

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__________________________________________________________________ Fukushima Prefecture Communications Department. 2012 Tohoku Region Pacific Coast Earthquake Damage Report (Issue 815). Fukushima, Japan: Fukushima Prefecture, 2012. Hegglund, Jon. ‘Modernism, Africa and the Myth of Continents.’ In Geographies of Modernism: Literature, Cultures, Spaces, edited by Brooker, Peter and Andrew Thacker, 43-53. New York: Routledge, 2005. Isozaki, Arata. ‘Architecture: From Invisible to Invincible.’ AtPlus 8 (2011): 2037. Jungk, Robert. The Nuclear State. Atom-Staat, London: J. Calder, 1979. Karnik, Niranjan S. ‘The Photographer, His Editor, Her Audience, their Humanitarians: How Rwanda’s Pictures Travel through the American Psyche.’ Bulletin no. 50/51 (Winter/ Spring, 1998). Kikigaki. ‘Yu-u-Hito: A Weaver, Shun Makino.’ Accessed November 4, 2012. http://kikigaki.rq-center.jp/jibunshi/s-makino/. Kleimnan, Arthur and Joan Kleimnan. ‘The Appeal of Experience; the Dismay of Linages: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in our Times.’ In Social Suffering, edited by Kleinman, Arthur, Veena Das and Margaret M. Lock. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Koolhaas, Rem and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Project Japan: Metabolism Talks. Koln ; London: Taschen, 2011. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. ‘Invisible Again: Rwanda and Representation After Genocide.’ African Arts (Autumn, 2005). Mitchell, Don and Lynn A. Staeheli. ‘Clean and Safe? Property Redevelopment, Public Space, and Homelessness in Downtown San Diego.’ In The Politics of Public Space, edited by Low, Setha and Neil Smith: Routledge, 2006. Miyoshi, Yu. ‘Nuclear Power Plants and Local Government Finance: Case of Tsuruga City, Fukui Prefecture.’ Ritsumeikan University College of Economics 58, no. 4 (November, 2009): 634.

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__________________________________________________________________ NAIIC. The National Diet of Japan Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission Report, Executive Summary. Tokyo: The National Diet of Japan and NAIIC, 2012. Ōe, Kenzaburō, David L. Swain, and Toshi Yonezawa. Hiroshima Notes [Hiroshima nōto.]. 1 Grove Press pbk ed. New York; Emeryville, CA: Grove Press; Distributed byPublishers Group West, 1996; 1995. Osawa, Masachi. ‘Possible Revolution 2: Commune of Fellowship and a Pseudo Sophie’s Choice.’ AtPlus 8 (2011): 4-17. ———. ‘Possible Revolution 5: Future, Like a Ghost?’ AtPlus 11 (2012): 158-168. ———. Toward Awakening Deeper than Dreams: Philosophy After 3.11 [夢より も深い覚醒へ －3.11後の哲学]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho, 2012. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 25th Anniversary ed. New York: Vintage Books, 2003; 1994; 1979. Saito, Tamaki. ‘Land in the Root of Humanity.’ Mainichi Shinbun, October 18, 2012, Evening, sec. Culture. Shimizu, Shuji. ‘The Damage is 15 Times the Benefit: ‘Questioning Federal Policies’ Series- with Shuji Shimizu.’ Okinawa Times Via WEB Shinsho 1, (March 1, 2012): June 23, 2012. ———. Looking Back at Nuclear Power Plants: What it Means to Live in Fukushima Today [原発と は結局なんだっ たのか －いま福島で生きる意味]. Tokyo: Shinbun, 2012. Sontag, Susan. ‘The Imagination of Disaster.’ In Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. Tokumaru, Iichiro and Hiroyuki Oba. ‘Chernobyl in Tokyo: Radiation Map of 180 Locations in the Kanto Region.’ Sunday Mainichi (September 18, 2011): May 26, 2012. Tsuda, Daisuke. ‘Can Social Media Regenerate Tohoku? Reconstructing Autonomous Local Communities.’ Shisochizu Beta: After the Disaster 2, (Autumn, 2011): 52-72.

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__________________________________________________________________ Tsurumi, Wataru. The Complete Manual of Suicide [完全自殺マニュ アル]. Tokyo: Oota Shuppan, 1993. Tsutsui, William M. ‘Oh no, there Goes Tokyo: Recreational Apocalypse and the City in Postwar Japanese Popular Culture.’ In Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City, edited by Prakash, Gyan. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010. WaWa. WaWa, September 13, 2011. Yatsuka, Hajime. Metabolism Nexus [メタボリ ズム・ ネクサス], April 25, Tokyo: Ohmsha, 2011. Yutaka Sho’s research focuses on the role of architecture in international development discourse. Sho is a partner at GA Collaborative, a non-profit design firm that works with community, municipal and academic partners. She teaches architecture at Syracuse University in New York.