Patrick McGrath and his Worlds: Madness and the Transnational Gothic 9781138311190, 9781003007944

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Patrick McGrath and his Worlds

Following the publication of Ghost Town (2005), a complex, globally conscious genealogy of millennial Manhattan, McGrath’s transnational status as an English author resident in New York, his pointed manipulation of British and American contexts, and his clear apprehension of imperial legacies have all come into sharper focus. By bringing together readings cognizant of this transnational and historical sensitivity with those that build on existing studies of McGrath’s engagements with Gothic and madness, Patrick McGrath and his Worlds sheds new light on an author whose imagined realities reflect the anxieties, pathologies, and power dynamics of our contemporary world order. McGrath’s fiction has been noted as parodic (The Grotesque, 1989), psychologically disturbing (­Spider, 1990), and darkly sexual (Asylum, 1996). Throughout, his corpus is characterized by a preoccupation with madness and its institutions and by a nuanced relationship to the gothic. With its international range of contributors, and including a new interview with McGrath himself, this book opens up hitherto underexplored theoretical perspectives on the key concerns of McGrath’s ouevre, moving conversations around McGrath’s work decisively forward. Offering the first sustained exploration of his fiction’s transnational and world-historical dimensions, Patrick McGrath and his Worlds seeks to situate, reflect upon, and interrogate McGrath’s role as a key voice in Anglophone letters in our millennial global moment. Dr. Matt Foley is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Manchester Met. The author of Haunting Modernisms (Palgrave, 2017), he is a member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, the administrator of the International Gothic Association’s Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prizes, and academic lead for Haunt Manchester. He works predominantly on modernist literature, the gothic, and literary acoustics. Dr. Rebecca Duncan teaches literature in English at Stirling University. She is the author of South African Gothic (University of Wales Press, 2018), a member of Stirling’s International Centre for Gothic Studies, and—from 2020—the recipient of a Crafoord Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at Linnaeus University. She researches in postcolonial- and world-literature, speculative fiction, and the gothic.

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature

37 Dissent and the Dynamics of Cultural Change Lessons from the Underground Presses of the Late Sixties Matthew T. Pifer 38 Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English Art of Crisis Wojciech Drąg 39 Patrick McGrath and his Worlds Madness and the Transnational Gothic Edited by Matt Foley and Rebecca Duncan 40 The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction Deindustrialisation, Demonisation, Resistance Phil O’Brien 41 Reading Contingency The Accident in Contemporary Fiction David Wylot 42 Death-Facing Ecology in Contemporary British and North American Environmental Crisis Fiction Louise Squire 43 Poetry and the Question of Modernity From Heidegger to the Present Ian Cooper 44 Apocalyptic Territories Setting and Revelation in Contemporary American Fiction Anna Hellén For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com

Patrick McGrath and his Worlds Madness and the Transnational Gothic

Edited by Matt Foley and Rebecca Duncan

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Matt Foley and Rebecca Duncan to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-31119-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-00794-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Acknowledgments Foreword Introduction: McGrath in the World: Madness, Gothic, and Transnational Consciousness

vii ix

1

R E B E C C A D U N C A N A N D M AT T F O L E Y

SECTION I

Transnational McGrath

19

1 Writing and Reading the Spider: McGrath’s Web

21

DAV I D P U N T E R

2 Martha Peake and the Madness of “Free Trade”

32

E V E RT J A N VA N L E E U W E N

3 “A cell without a nucleus is a ruin”: Vampiric Creations of the Unhealthy Disabled in Patrick McGrath’s “Blood Disease”

49

A L A N G R E G O RY

4 Revisiting the Spanish Civil War: An Interview with Patrick McGrath

63

X AV I E R A L DA N A R E Y E S

SECTION II

Theorizing McGrath

19

5 Madness, Tragedy, and the Implied Reader of Patrick McGrath’s Spider

73

B E N J A M I N E . N OA D

vi Contents 6 The Terrors of the Self: The Manipulation of Identity Mythologies in Patrick McGrath’s Novels

88

DA N I E L S O U T H WA R D

7 Patrick McGrath and Passion: The Gothic Modernism of Asylum and Beyond

103

M AT T F O L E Y A N D R E B E C C A D U N C A N

SECTION III

Millennial McGrath 8 The Price of Suffering and the Value of Remembering: Patrick McGrath’s Trauma

19 119

M I C H E L A VA N O N A L L I ATA

9 “You have to be a warrior to live here”: PTSD as a Collective Sociopolitical Condition in Patrick McGrath’s Writing

137

DA N A A L E X

10 The Liar, the Bitch, and the Wardrobe: Resisting Political Terror, Anti-Semitism, and Revenants in Patrick McGrath’s The Wardrobe Mistress

152

DA N E L O L S O N

Afterword

167

PAT R I C K M C G R AT H

Appendix: A Patrick McGrath Bibliography: Thirty Years of Select Criticism (excluding short reviews) and Interviews, 1988–2018

169

DA N E L O L S O N

Notes on Contributors Index

175 179

Acknowledgments

This edited volume was inspired by a conference held at Stirling University in January of 2016, which was entitled “Asylums, Pathologies, and the Themes of Madness: Patrick McGrath and his Gothic Contemporaries.” For the funding and support that made that event possible, we gratefully acknowledge the Wellcome Trust, the International Gothic Association, and Stirling University itself. We would also like to thank Karl Magee, curator of the Patrick ­McGrath Archive, which is held at Stirling, for his ready assistance across the duration of this project. To all our contributors, for their original chapters and their consistent hard work and energy, we are hugely grateful, and we’d like to thank Patrick McGrath in particular for his generosity, his time, and his enthusiasm for the project since its inception. Special mentions go, too, to Benjamin E. Noad—who put together an excellent McGrath exhibition that was featured at the Stirling ­symposium—and to Danel Olson who has kindly provided the appendix here: a wide-reaching bibliography of scholarly work published so far on ­McGrath’s writing. We are also hugely grateful to Sue Zlosnik for her encouragement and for penning the Foreword to this collection. Thanks are extended, too, to Routledge and their editorial team for their interest and support over the course of the publication process— particularly Mitchell Manners and Jennifer Abbott. And lastly, but certainly not least, thanks to Naomi and Finn, whose patience and encouragement has—as ever—been fundamental to the progress of the volume from the outset.

Foreword Sue Zlosnik

It’s been almost 30 years since my first encounter with Patrick McGrath’s fiction: early days in his writing career. His short story collection Blood and Water and Other Tales (1988), quickly followed by his first novel, The Grotesque (1989), gave me enormous pleasure, and I recognized that this was an original voice. Their playful macabre parody and pastiche revealed a dark sense of humor and delight in language. This was, after all, the heyday of postmodernism, and here was an exponent par excellence. I was reminded of my initial response when I read McGrath’s remarks to a symposium held at the University of Stirling in January 2016 to celebrate its acquisition of his archive. “I’ve come to believe that the ‘imagination’ is in fact the unconscious mind in ludic mode,” he observed (McGrath 2016, 3). “Ludic” is a word that readily sprang to mind in reading that early work. My own burgeoning interest in gothic through the 1990s, encouraged by the seemingly inexorable emergence of gothic studies (literary and otherwise) in the academy, meant that I turned to McGrath’s novels of that decade with the eye of a gothic scholar. He himself had played a significant part in the evolution of the term “gothic” that lifted it out of its categorization as a historically based genre. In the introduction to The New Gothic (1992), a collection of short stories by contemporary writers, he and his coeditor Bradford Morrow identified gothic as a practice resistant to boundaries, “transgression and decay” being its key elements. In a sense, therefore, McGrath has been the author of his own discomfort at being categorized as a “gothic” novelist. Over the years, he has resisted the label, saying repeatedly that it would lead to his novels being “pigeonholed,” regarded as genre fiction. However, it is undeniable that transgression and decay stalk his fiction with dramatic and profound effect. McGrath’s fictional world is a haunted world; ghosts both literal and metaphorical inhabit his pages. In my plenary address to the 2016 symposium, I suggested that McGrath was a “reluctant gothicist” and that in spite of the disavowal, his writing identity was haunted by the gothic. His written remarks to the delegates—entitled “Coming Home to Stirling”—suggested that he had (perhaps reluctantly) come to agree,

x Foreword acknowledging that “the ludic unconscious has distinct tendencies. Mine tends to the gothic” (2016, 3). In fact, he had already implicitly acknowledged this in 2012, conceding in his afterword to the papers from a symposium in Perpignan dedicated to his writing that “the new gothicist finds it impossible not to indulge his congenital gothic sensibility, but is at the same time compelled to sustain an ironic and even parodic detachment from it” (McGrath 2012, 145). The expansion of our understanding of gothic as itself an unstable practice has enabled this accommodation. In McGrath’s fiction, the initial gothic impulse, while at some level repudiated, is, I suggest, uncontainable, and the gothic sensibility along with traces of historical representation remains insistent in his fiction. His writing illustrates in all its richness the hybridity that is now understood to be intrinsic to gothic. His worlds are always recognizably quotidian, if often strangely lit. The possibility of the supernatural often hovers but is shrouded in ambiguity. The fictional status of his ghosts is unstable; where they occur, the possibility that they are projections of the psyches of his disturbed protagonists remains open. His fascination with pathological states brings a new sophistication to madness as a gothic trope. His pages are peopled by those with profound mental disturbance, their derangement providing the narrative engine for the fiction. Spider (1990), for example, is a tour de force of narrative structure and point of view. In the later fiction, trauma is explored as the source of mental dysfunction. However, it is important not to fall into the trap of reading the novels as fictionalized case studies of varieties of mental illness, a kind of dramatization of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). They are part of a larger fictive vision in which experienced reality is always open to question and the specifics of history can never be ignored. For all the haunting, there is always a recognizable everyday world, minutely observed and evocatively portrayed. Often this is the recent past, particular historical moments, but it is a past that is always slightly off-­ kilter. McGrath has a tendency to name his characters with Dickensian idiosyncrasy, often suggesting a flaw or distortion or evoking some intertextual resonance. He is also acutely sensitive to cultural variation. He may, with justification, be called a transatlantic novelist: “made in England” but having lived much of his life in North America. The three novels of the 1990s—Spider, Dr Haggard’s Disease (1993), and Asylum (1996)—paint an unsettling picture of the England of the recent past in which the mental agony of the central characters is deeply embedded in the culture of the time, their condition framed in a medical discourse that is shown to be unreliable and unable to contain what the fiction presents to us. In the millennial novel Martha Peake (2000), McGrath turns to an earlier period of history and enacts the moment of rupture between Britain and the United States through a pastiche of early period gothic and unreliable narration that challenges the authenticity of received versions of history.

Foreword  xi For much of the twenty-first century, McGrath has set his fiction on the far side of the Atlantic, for the most part the United States, where he has lived for much of the time. Some of the essays in this collection explore his preoccupation with trauma in this post-9/11 fiction. His trilogy of tales about Manhattan (Ghost Town (2005)) looks to the figure of the ghost as a way of mediating the traumas of the past, both distant and near. The ghosts in these tales are far from the quasi-comic figure of the late Sidney Giblet’s apparition in The Grotesque; rather, they evoke past tragedies that provide a context for recent collective grief. In the third story, “Ground Zero,” the rationality of its psychiatrist narrator is tested beyond its limits when confronted by this collective trauma. The prostitute/artist girlfriend of her patient becomes a racialized, abjected “other” in her eyes, an emblem of a great betrayal whose lover, dead in the twin towers, appears to her in ghostly form in the subway. McGrath returns to his English roots in his most recent novel, The Wardrobe Mistress (2017), which is both disturbingly evocative of the time in which it is set and almost prescient in its warning to the reader of the dangers of the rapidly changing political environment of our own times. Like his earlier work, it gothicizes the past through the vividly imagined representation of a cultural moment imbricated with an exploration of an individual’s psychopathology. His 1947 London creates a vividly rendered portrait of a city, gothic in its aspect, in the grip of austerity in the coldest winter in living memory. Joan, the eponymous wardrobe mistress, cycling home from her work at the theatre, sees “bombed-out buildings near the docks, with their high, empty windows and air of unutterable desolation” and is “swept with sadness” at the ruin and waste. McGrath’s ear does not falter, either. His characters speak as I remember people in my childhood speaking. For a population accustomed to the privations of war and its aftermath, the most unlikely treat is relished: “a nice tin of pink salmon,” “a nice bit of tongue,” and a meal might consist of “shredded cabbage and corned beef, with cold semolina for pudding as a treat” (2017, 185). The national myth of the plucky island nation valiantly standing alone against the Nazi foe has cast a long shadow. It was the dominant discourse of our childhood—mine and Patrick’s, for we are the same age— when World War II was a recent and all too vivid memory for our parents. The novel’s revisiting of the immediate postwar period seems particularly apposite at the present time, when as Brexit propaganda takes hold the myth is being revived (the 2017 Joe Wright film Darkest Hour being an egregious example). McGrath has, perhaps unconsciously, prompted a reminder of a famous work from the period, as echoed in the parodic title of Danel Olson’s essay in this volume. In 1950, C. S. Lewis published the first in a series of novels that would form a sustained allegory of postwar resurrection and redemption: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In Lewis’s novel, ostensibly written for children, the wardrobe is a liminal

xii Foreword space between two worlds, a threshold. His child protagonists are wartime evacuees who pass through the wardrobe in their temporary home to enter the world of Narnia where it is always winter but never Christmas until they play their part in its salvation. Unlike Lewis’s parable, however, McGrath’s tale is unrelentingly bleak and gives little cause for optimism. He draws on the classic gothic trope of the wardrobe or closet, which represents a repository of secrets, the enclosed space that encrypts the object of fear. No wonder it comes to be inhabited by the ghost of Joan’s recently dead actor husband, the charismatic Charlie Grice or “Gricey”: a fascist closeted, it would appear, only to his Jewish wife. No wonder Joan is traumatized. British Fascism remains an ugly and barely concealed secret unaccommodated by the national myth. In the austerity-strapped London of McGrath’s novel, the bohemian people of the London theatre are the focus. This provides a rich milieu for the exploitation of the resonances of the word “wardrobe”—both a piece of furniture and a set of clothes—and the metaphorical implications of dress in role playing as identity becomes destabilized. In a London miserably short of cakes and ale, the misanthropic puritanism of Malvolio seems to hold sway. The ubiquitous voice of the Chorus serves to emphasize behavior as performance and the wardrobe metaphor is persistent from the moment when Joan dresses the young Jewish actor Frank in “borrowed robes,” to the point when the sight of a fascist uniform proves the culmination of her haunting and she kills its wearer with the tools of her trade, the tailor’s shears. Reading the novel as a study of bereavement psychosis (which I have heard suggested) only works by ignoring the complexity of its narrative and the import of the social and political issues it confronts. It is not a didactic novel. McGrath would only ever claim (as he did to me) to be “trying to move the story on.” But its tale of the dark side of human nature was written in the context of the present day and can only be read as such. “Austerity,” the keyword for Britain in the late 1940s as its economy recovered from total war, was revived by Britain’s post-2010 coalition government to label policies that brought disproportionate suffering for the poorest. The rise of populism on both sides of the Atlantic, its roots deep in dispossession, provides a chilling reminder of the popularity of Hitler in interwar Germany. The Wardrobe Mistress is a timely reminder that Britain’s history is not free from the stain of Fascism. Thus McGrath’s novel is both historical and of its own time. It carries a warning. The impulse for hatred of a scapegoated “other” is unfortunately all about us. There are always those who will be seduced by the charismatic performance of a narcissistic sociopath, and perhaps many of us are potentially such. When they are numerous enough to pave their way to power, then we are in real trouble. We eagerly wait for the forthcoming novel about the Spanish Civil War, in the full expectation that it will be a historical novel and so much more.

Foreword  xiii Meanwhile, this volume will provide food for thought for McGrath’s readers. Literary criticism at its best is not parasitic upon the texts it discusses. Rather, it engenders a dialogue with the original and plays a vital part in the life of these texts as they live in the world. These new critical essays work at the interface between McGrath’s created worlds and the world in which the reader encounters them. It is a testament to the stature of his fiction that the debate just becomes richer. We are talking about one of the most important writers of his generation.

References McGrath, Patrick. 2012. “Afterword.” In Patrick McGrath: Directions and Transgressions, edited by Jocelyn Dupont, 143–145. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ———. 2016. “Coming Home to Stirling.” Written for Asylums, Pathologies, and the Themes of Madness: Patrick McGrath and His Gothic Contemporaries, Symposium, University of Stirling, January 16, 2016. Unpublished. ———. 2017. The Wardrobe Mistress. London: Random House.

Introduction McGrath in the World: Madness, Gothic, and Transnational Consciousness Rebecca Duncan and Matt Foley Although Patrick McGrath himself has sometimes resisted such readings, the author’s work has persistently been associated with the gothic literary mode. His fiction characteristically probes the darker recesses of the psyche and often operates (self-consciously at times) in gothic’s supernatural or visceral vocabularies of threat. McGrath’s is an oeuvre that so far spans 30 years, from the late 1980s to the second decade of the new millennium, and thus it covers a period that has entailed vast geopolitical shifts. These can be linked, in the first instance, to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989—the year following the release of ­McGrath’s Blood and Water and Other Tales (1988)—and, in the second, to the events of 11 September 2001, and to their fraught aftermath. ­McGrath’s work, and his mobilization of gothic forms in particular, can be understood as taking shape within the context of these upheavals, not least ­because—as in his Ghost Town (2005), for example—they are frequently thematized at the level of narrative. Gothic, as David Punter has pointed out, was born in a moment of systemic change. It first appears on the eve of industrialization in eighteenth-century Britain (1996, 192), and the unease it discloses in its hyperbolized forms should be seen to derive, at least to some extent, from the anxieties that breed as this jagged social transformation takes hold. In taking this approach to McGrath’s gothic work, this collection seeks to bring to the fore the transnational dimensions of the author’s writing. In one sense, McGrath’s fiction invites discussion in these terms because the author himself left his native England in 1981, taking up residence eventually in the United States. This move is reflected in his fiction, which shifts frequently between British and American settings; as Sue Zlosnik notes in her critical monograph, McGrath engages—­ especially latterly—with the complex relationship between “worlds old and new” (2011, 87). Building on this insight, and expanding it, this collection reads across McGrath’s oeuvre to map these and other transnational connections, showing—further—not only that McGrath’s gothic narratives trace linkages between multiple localities across the globe but also that gothic is mobilized to address, and at times interrogate, shifts unfolding on a planetary scale. By “transnational,” then, we do not only intend the location of nation within a wider global field. Beyond this, a

2  Rebecca Duncan and Matt Foley transnational consciousness can, in the words of Yogita Goyal, “unsettle nationalist myths of cultural purity, reveal through comparison the interconnectedness of various parts of the world […] and offer an analysis of past and present imperialisms” (2017, 9). Across the body of this introduction, such a consciousness will be explored through readings of McGrath’s work, which also foreground the author’s long-standing literary preoccupation with scenes and experiences of psychic discord and fragmentation. So central are these thematics to McGrath’s corpus that a collection of his early and later work was released in 2017 under the title Writing Madness (ed. Olson). In considering the threads of madness that weave themselves throughout McGrath’s corpus, critics have frequently both noted the integration of psychoanalytic theory into the author’s fiction and themselves drawn on psychoanalytic paradigms to illuminate narrative subtleties and mechanics.1 McGrath is himself well versed in the language of analysis, in part as a result of his upbringing at Broadmoor, the high-security institution where his father—a psychiatrist—was medical superintendent. He incorporates Freudian and post-Freudian paradigms into his fiction with immense skill, frequently, as Anna Powell notes, in order to underscore their shortcomings (2012, 265). Contributors to this collection continue to explore how the dual lenses of gothic and psychoanalytic theory—which are long-related, not least as a result of Freud’s own engagement with quasi-gothic fiction—make visible new and productive possibilities in McGrath’s work. At the same time, however, this collection explores alternative approaches to the question of madness in McGrath’s fiction and specifically to the ways in which themes of madness articulate with elements of that transnational consciousness noted above. Madness appears, on this perspective, as a trope that branches out from the individual psyche across national boundaries, frequently operating to make newly visible the violences through which geopolitical connections—active in the present—have been forged over the history of modernity. These ideas are explored more fully in the introduction below, in which we consider the roles of psychic disarray in McGrath’s fiction, before turning to the imperial gothic as an illuminating critical framework via which to approach the relationship between madness and the transnational in his work. This is a discussion which both points to the transnational histories and resonances informing McGrath’s narratives at the level of imagery and plot and which presents these fictions as registering and, at times, interrogating the dynamic of transnational relations shaping the historical moment of their production.

Unsound Minds, Unsound Medicine McGrath’s novels of the 1990s—Spider (1990), Dr Haggard’s Disease (1993), and Asylum (1996)—are remarkable for their consistent concern

Introduction  3 with experiences of psychic discord or fragmentation and with the literary representation of these states as madness. In this same vein, these texts are engaged also with the therapeutic process, which is most frequently presented under the sign of psychiatric medicine. These ­preoccupations— with unsound states of mind, medicine, and medical institutions—define much of McGrath’s work, as we have seen, and their presence is visible, if differently handled, also in his previous tales. As Zlosnik notes, “the motifs, themes and modes of writing to be found in McGrath’s later fiction have their genesis in the early short stories” (2011, 13). Psychoanalytic theory, for example, is frequently a structuring presence in Blood and Water: it appears in “Ambrose Syme”—a tale that explains sublimation via the mechanics of a refrigerator—and it is explicitly thematized in “The Skewer,” which features a self-destructive protagonist plagued (in ways misleadingly linked to castration anxiety) by miniaturized members of the Freudian school. Madness appears, too, as (mis)diagnosed psychosis in “The Skewer,” and it emerges similarly in “Blood and Water,” where— as Zlosnik shows (2011, 25)—it is knitted to a commentary around class (a point to which we will return). Spider, Dr Haggard’s Disease, and Asylum develop and extend McGrath’s earlier figurations of madness, unanimously handling this as a precarious and porous category: one that is never wholly separable from the therapeutic and institutional activities to which it is subject. Doctors, as Zlosnik notes, are not to be trusted in McGrath’s fiction (2011, 71), as the eponymous Edward Haggard demonstrates with particular clarity. Initially a coherent and convincing narrator, the protagonist of McGrath’s third novel is, it becomes clear over the course of narrative, addicted to morphine and increasingly delusional, believing—at last— that the wounded and traumatized son of his lost lover is transforming physically into his dead mother. Haggard’s unreliability as narrator is yoked, further, to a wider interrogation of medicine, which, as he practices it, is deeply flawed—and, indeed, fatal. This critical project extends beyond Dr Haggard’s Disease to McGrath’s corpus generally: drawing on Michel Foucault and Sander Gilman, Christine Ferguson writes that, implicitly, “[m]edicine regards illness from the comforting vantage of health. In McGrath’s fiction, however, this paradigm is reversed; it is the world of health and reason which becomes subject to the scrutinizing gaze of madness” (1999, 235). This undermining of reason via madness takes place, Ferguson goes on, through narratives that work by “combining the use of first person form with … blatantly diseased narrators” (235), a strategy most vividly performed in Spider. In this narrative, delivered by an apparently schizophrenic voice, unreliability implicates the reader, who is “drawn into the web of the narrative” and thus compelled to “a conscious act of interpretation” where it is necessary to judge where the line between madness and sanity lies (Zlosnik 2011, 50). When McGrath’s unreliable narrators are themselves medical professionals, as in the case of Haggard and later Asylum’s Peter Cleave,

4  Rebecca Duncan and Matt Foley the effect is a destabilization of the curative medical endeavor, whether this is oriented toward physical ailment or mental illness. This destabilization is borne out further in several ways. In McGrath’s work, psychiatric institutions and medical practice are shown to be ineffectual, as in Spider, in which the powerfully disturbed protagonist is deemed fit for release from the Ganderhill facility where he has been held since murdering his mother. They are exposed as themselves chillingly violent, as in Asylum, where the psychiatrist-narrator Cleave emerges at the narrative’s conclusion as disturbingly predatory, engaged in what Powell describes as a kind of “human taxidermy” in respect to his patients, the protagonists Stella and Stark (2012, 267). Curative medical practice is also, as this last suggests, ultimately presented as inseparable from what is framed in McGrath’s narratives as madness itself: it is, as Powell notes in her Deleuzean reading, “pathologies derived from […] the Oedipal institution” that drive Cleave’s actions in Asylum, and a similar point is exemplified, as we have seen, by Haggard whose “diagnoses” of what he calls “Haggard’s Disease” are only the symptoms of his own mental instability. Points in the same vein can be made of the later psychiatrist characters in McGrath’s Ghost Town and—in a less critical sense—in his Trauma (2008), so that across his oeuvre, medical institutions and therapeutic practices are handled, as unstable edifices, with unease and suspicion.

Gothic and Madness In one sense, medicine and clinical practice can be seen to reflect a particular epistemic perspective in McGrath’s work, which is allied—­ importantly—to Enlightenment modernity. From this position, to paraphrase Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, the world appears transparent to the observer: it takes shape as “the stuff of mere classification” (1947, 6). Such an approach is memorably demonstrated by Asylum’s Cleave, “who behaved towards humanity like an insect collector, skewering them in glass cases with labels underneath” (1997, 123). It is precisely because this “taxidermic” logic is shown in Asylum to undergird the psychoanalytic program that Powell—also citing Cleave—seeks a mode of reading McGrath’s texts which does not rely on psychoanalysis. In all its forms, Zlosnik reminds us, “medicine is […] a product of modernity” (2011, 71). And yet, “we have never been modern”—as Bruno Latour has influentially put it (1991, 47). The practice of taxonomizing an ostensibly transparent world produces what Latour calls “hybrid” states that resist taxonomy (12), and these circumstances are thematized in McGrath’s fiction as it invokes those places where science shades into madness. Since its earliest moments, gothic has taken up those sites of experience where the codes of Enlightenment modernity come under pressure.

Introduction  5 Gothic has recast these ambivalent territories as belonging to an antiquated history, or an alien culture or geography, but it never quite manages to maintain this fabricated distance. Rather, it incipiently shows that what is given as external to modernity, as lying beyond illumination, is, in fact, immediate and internal to the culture in which Enlightenment is the modus operandi. 2 Especially as it shapes those uneasy medical figures who confound any distinction between scientific reason and rational disarray, gothic in McGrath’s work continues to function as a rhetoric for the diverse permutations of a failing Enlightenment and one that is often characterized, as we have seen, specifically by themes of madness. In his contribution to this collection, David Punter locates ­McGrath’s gothic engagement with madness within a transnational body of texts that draws particularly on the unsettling or phobic image of the spider. This diverse corpus, which Punter names “spidery writing,” is linked precisely under the sign of Enlightenment modernity. Spidery writing is the writing of what resists illumination as this has taken shape differently in distinct historical moments: it is that which “threatens our clear, encylopaedist catalogue of forms of life.” The spider, as a figure of madness amenable to gothic representation, thus becomes a figure for “alternative narratives [which] can place their weight against the overpowering edifice of ideology.” From this perspective, Punter shows, McGrath’s Spider is rendered comparable with—among other works— Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s writing from the postcolonial Caribbean, in which the spider invokes histories of Enlightenment modernity from the vantage point of those trafficked, murdered, and enslaved at its behest. Such histories would, Punter goes on, “otherwise merely reflect all the trappings of imperial dominance.”

Imperial Gothic It is here, with a particular vision of empire as it appears from the perspective of modernity, that we might begin to see a connection between madness and the transnational taking shape in McGrath’s writing, an intersection that occurs, from the early work to recent texts, in gothic forms. A transnational aesthetic is evident in McGrath’s Blood and Water as a shifting between British and American contexts, but it is also present in a vocabulary of tropes drawn from a fin de siècle narrative tradition, one associated with imperial adventure narratives as these emerge from the likes of H. Rider Haggard or John Buchan. This tradition, which represents colonial contexts and colonized peoples in the language of hyperbolized dread, rational decline, and sensuous excess, is influentially named the “imperial gothic” by Patrick Brantlinger (1988, 227). Zlosnik remarks on McGrath’s engagement with this corpus, especially via the tropes of (African) colonization that recur in his early fiction. Drawing on McGrath’s own comments, she notes that the Africa

6  Rebecca Duncan and Matt Foley that appears in this work is summoned, as part of a self-reflexive postmodern play on literary genre, from the pages of novels such as Heart of Darkness (1899). On this account, Africa takes shape as a motif in ­McGrath’s writing through—in his own words—an “interest in pastiching nineteenth century fictions” (McGrath, qtd in Zlosnik 2011, 18), and this Zlosnik links to the author’s prevailing interest in madness. Emerging in a gothic rhetoric borrowed from fin de siècle imperial writers, Africa seems thus to appear in the early short stories as a locus of rational and moral degeneracy: of darkness and insanity. What distinguishes McGrath’s vision from the work of the imperial writers themselves, however, is a critical insistence, which takes place on the surface of the text, that the supposed madness of Africa is a quasi-­ pathological fictional construct. The continent is not, to paraphrase Brantlinger, itself “dark” (1988, 195–196). Rather, that darkness—that rational and moral degeneracy—is shown in McGrath’s writing to be endemic in metropolitan culture. This scenario is memorably outlined, for example, in Blood and Water’s “Ambrose Syme,” a tale which also exemplifies, as we note above, the author’s fluent mobilization of psychoanalytic theory. The Ambrose of the story’s title is a “man of god and superb classicist” (1988, 57), whose negotiation of his unusually voracious “carnal appetite” (61) is described in carefully Freudian terms as a process of repression and sublimation: “he learned to convert them [his sexual urges] into long, ponderous sentences […] which he then translated into Latin verse […] until the heat generated in his nether organs had been drawn off” (60). This practice, which in the tale precisely maps the imbrication of the sensuous and the mad with the neoclassical structures of post-enlightenment rationality, is ultimately unsuccessful. It is revealed that Ambrose—losing control of his own psychosexual mechanics—has violently assaulted and murdered a young boy from the local area, and when the body is discovered, he falls from the gothic tower of the boys’ school in which he is a teacher. His last vision—an outline of Africa fed by a “perversely backward-flowing Nile” (1988, 68)—recasts the sublimating process as the process of imperial expansion, framing colonization from the metropolitan North not as the conquest of a darkness that lies outside this metropole but as the violent transmutation of repressed metropolitan madness into the “Enlightening” project of a “civilising mission.” This last effect is explicitly summoned in the text by the school’s rector. The character takes his name from Mungo Park, whose eighteenth-century accounts of West Africa and its peoples worked to give credence to the exploitations and enslavements entailed in imperial expansion over the succeeding century. It is no accident, in this sense, that the school itself was built by a “Liverpool merchant with a fortune made in the slave trade” (59), nor that Ambrose’s father was a wealthy businessman “with holdings in Malayan rubber” (60). Thus, much as madness is situated within scientific rationalism in the novels of

Introduction  7 the 1990s, threats apparently linked with colonized peoples and places are discovered seething within empire itself.

Transatlantic Anxiety But there is also more to the self-consciously critical deployment of imperial tropes in McGrath’s fiction. Brantlinger shows that imperial gothic is remarkable not only for its projection of metropolitan anxieties onto colonial settings but also because, as a genre, it registers fin de siècle conditions of British imperial decay: “[D]escents into the primitive experienced by fictional characters seem often to be allegories of the larger regressive movement of civilisation.” At stake here, in Brantlinger’s account, are late nineteenth-century fears around “the weakening of Britain’s imperial hegemony” (1988, 229). Stephen Shapiro, in his own assessment of late-nineteenth century Gothic narratives, has argued in a similar vein that figures of threat associated in fin de siècle fiction with visions of racial and cultural otherness in fact register anxieties around competition in the context of the world economy. “The Age of Empire,” as E. J. Hobsbawm writes, “was essentially an age of state rivalry” (1989, 51), in which Britain—long dominant among the industrialized nations of the world—set about securing its increasingly tenuous position through the aggressive annexation of those parts of the world deemed as-yet undeveloped. The late nineteenth century was thus also an age of instability for Britain, in which other industrialized and imperial nations threatened to usurp its position of world-economic primacy. It is these tensions that Shapiro identifies as emerging in Gothic narratives of the fin de siècle period. These fictions are, he writes, “the medium for anxieties about inter-state antagonism, where one […] member fears it might fall in hierarchy to another” (2008, 36). Scenes of gothic degeneration located in British colonial contexts thus triangulate threats to Britain that come not from the colonies themselves but from rival metropolitan states and which thus signal—in the way Brantlinger argues—a sense of Britain’s failing hegemony as a global power. Zlosnik notes that Blood and Water, in certain of the stories set in the United States, engages with “fears that many harboured in the America of the 1980s.” “McGrath has commented,” she goes on, “that as he was living in the United States during the Reagan era, he and many others found themselves speculating on what it would be like after a nuclear holocaust” (2011, 29). The Cold War climate of pervasive nuclear threat makes itself explicitly felt, as Zlosnik points out, in the apocalyptic perspectives of McGrath’s “The Boot” and “The E(rot)ic Potato”; however, a sensibility specific to this moment in history is also discernible more widely across the collection, especially in those narratives that make recourse to fin de siècle imperial gothic tropes. In his study of late–Cold War literature, Daniel Cordle frames the 1980s as “a radical decade” in

8  Rebecca Duncan and Matt Foley large part “because it was a period of hard line reform by governments on the right” (2017, 5). This was the era of Ronald Reagan in America, as McGrath notes above, but it was also the time of the alliance between the Reagan administration and Britain under Margaret Thatcher. It was, in this sense, “the decade in which the neoliberal worldview became entrenched, shaping the fundamental restructuring of the state by governments in both Britain and the United States” (5). This restructuring was, as Cordle notes, inseparable at the time from nuclear issues, and as a result what he calls “nuclear texts” are not limited to a direct engagement either with the threat of apocalypse or with the source of that threat for the West in the Soviet Union. The thought here is that nuclear texts might also be those which take up the structures and effects of neoliberalization in its originary moment (142) and which attest—from the vantage point of 1980s Britain or America—to a transatlantic relation. If tropes of the imperial gothic are summoned in Blood and Water as emblems of British decline, then this sense of terminal decadence is critically linked to the rise, in the 1980s, of a new and aggressive economic agenda. “The Black Hand of the Raj” ultimately makes this connection explicit, but to begin with, the tale announces its concern with what it calls the “soft face of Imperialism” (1988, 32). McGrath’s narrative voice, self-consciously florid, invokes that mode of colonial discourse named “orientalism” by Edward Said, which invents (in this instance) the Indian sub-continent as “a place of romance, exotic beings […] and remarkable experiences” (1979, 1). This vision of empire is preferred by the narrator over the assessment given in the story’s opening lines, which is taken from Lenin’s famous discourse on the subject: “Nineteenth-­ century imperialism […] appeared when the great European capitalists began to have difficulty finding sound investment opportunities for superfluous wealth at home” (McGrath 1988, 33). Expansion is the result of these conditions, and it is also the downfall of imperial capitalist powers, whose competition for territories will ultimately devolve into war and death. The narrator dismisses all of this, although they also show an affinity for the capitalist agenda which suggests their judgment is not to be trusted. Indeed, the story that follows effectively collapses the two implied faces of empire, while invoking gothic visions of imperial decline in ways that bear on the 1980s. It is particularly important, in this last respect, that neoliberalism is a late-twentieth-century response precisely to the problem of “superfluous wealth,” one that functions—as David Harvey reminds us—by releasing assets previously under state control into the private domain as new sites for the investment of overaccumulated capital (2003, 145–153). “The Black Hand of the Raj” recounts the story of a young engaged couple, Lucy and Cecil, whose future plans are hampered because Cecil, a member of the Indian Civil Service, has been cursed, and now, hidden under his pith helmet, he has a hand growing out of his skull. Eventually

Introduction  9 the hand strangles him, and the narrative closes with the suggestion that a number of Cecil’s colonial peers share his affliction. It is notable that across the tale, tenets of Lenin’s dismissed imperial thesis surface, insistently dismantling the narrator’s colonial romanticism. The image of the hand first appears in the figure of “a one handed leper, who […] shoved his begging bowl in Lucy’s face” (McGrath 1988, 35). From the outset, it is thus associated with wealth and with an inequality that is drawn along the lines of the colonizer and the colonized. As a result, there is an important sense in which Cecil and his fellow, helmeted colonials, double and reflect the grasping action of the beggar, relocating this as— in Lenin’s terms—the driving action of the imperial project. The hand, after all, is connected “to the brainstem” (37) and so its behavior quite possibly expresses not a “sensual” indigeneity (32) as the narrator suggests but rather covert colonial machinations. It is thus something like a visible incarnation of Adam Smith’s famously spectral spirit of the free market, and as such it functions to unmask the capitalist agenda undergirding empire (even in its “soft” form). At the same time as it critically reinvents a nineteenth-century lexicon of the imperial gothic in this way, “The Black Hand of the Raj” is also a narrative suggestive of decline. In the most immediate sense, it offers Cecil’s body (and the future bodies of the wider afflicted) as evidence for Lenin’s assertion that imperial capitalist expansion “breeds only death” (32), and it is salient, also, that Lucy first feels pangs of apprehension as her transport “slipped down the Suez Canal” (33) in 1897, where, half a century later in the midst of a geopolitical crisis, Britain’s failing global influence would seem to be confirmed.

Nuclear Decline Read in the transatlantic context of the neoliberalizing 1980s, “The Black Hand of the Raj” invokes the decadent language of the imperial gothic and mobilizes this both to critically relate the economic agenda of Blood and Water’s present to the imperial agenda of the late nineteenth century and to interrogate this present, prognosticating a future that entails death on all sides. In the nuclear decade Cordle describes, this forecast—though suspended in the story—weighs especially heavily. In “The Lost Explorer,” intimations around the future are given more tangible, if not fully fleshed out, form. This tale links the imperial scene to domestic shifts within late twentieth-century Britain and can be seen to explore transatlantic Cold War anxieties in the way Cordle suggests of fiction of the period more widely: through an intimation of the “struggles within Western societies about social organisation” (2017, 142). In “The Lost Explorer,” the young Evelyn Piker-Smith finds a British explorer encamped in the back garden of her parents, London home. This is a bourgeois household, overseen by her father—an “eminent surgeon”

10  Rebecca Duncan and Matt Foley (McGrath 1988, 19)—and the surreal new arrival functions, in the first instance, to bring a contemporary vision of British society into contact with its imperial history. What might be considered the imperialization of the domestic sphere is further underscored by the quasi-fictional quality of the explorer himself, who appears to step, as Zlosnik also notes, from the pages of “male adventure fantasy” (2011, 20). The man spends much of the narrative wittering imperial stereotypes about “pygmies” and their anthropophagus practices (McGrath 1988, 18), but—as Evelyn sensibly points out— these fears are entirely unfounded. The tale thus summons an imperial gothic lexicon of threat, but it undermines this immediately and also— importantly—transfers the self-consciously textual motif of cannibalism into the material realm of the bourgeois home. Evelyn’s father is, we are told, “very particular” about meat. He is repeatedly shown making “delicate incision[s]” (McGrath 1988, 24) in his dinner, handling it as he would the body of a patient. The beef that is treated with surgical precision here is also presented in the narrative explicitly as a commodity, its price forming the central topic of dinner-table conversation. This vision of cannibalism as bourgeois consumption is further yoked symbolically to that condition of overproduction to which Lenin is shown referring above and which is the impetus also for the neoliberal agenda in late twentieth-century Britain. Discussion of the meat is followed, tellingly, by the surgeon’s description of “a rather uninteresting colostomy” (24), and all of this together suggests an economy which, glutted by a surfeit of commodities, cannot metabolize these in the usual way. Neoliberalization is further registered and critiqued in images of the bourgeois Piker-­Smiths sipping “a rather nice South African sherry” (23) in a house heated by a crackling coal fire, and respectively these pointed details recall the Thatcher administration’s infamous refusal to cut trade links with the Apartheid state and the devastating closure of British collieries that is one grim hallmark of the same government’s legacy. Inflected by suggestions of cannibalism that are displaced in the narrative from an imperial imaginary, these effects of transatlantic neoliberalization are both exposed as violent and tainted by suggestions of decline and death. The explorer himself offers one vision of this decay, his elaborately wasted body eventually giving out to the desire “slip away, let go” (25). But the text also forges another vision of deathliness, which resonates with Cordle’s assessment of nuclear policy pursued on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1980s. The protective armament strategies driven by the Thatcher and Reagan administrations garnered resistance, Cordle writes, founded on the “the tendency of nuclear fallout […] to evade geographical containment.” Commenting on responses to Reagan’s “Star Wars” project in particular, Cordle notes that protesters understood that “a shield over one part of the planet would not offer […] security because the planet would remain vulnerable.” At stake in

Introduction  11 such ideas is thus a “globalised conception of humanity” (2017, 19), one that transcends even reinforced national boundaries and is enmeshed, also, in the systems of the planetary biosphere. Such a vision is summoned in “The Lost Explorer,” where it appears along with suggestive images of useless border defense: we are shown dead “flies […] their tiny legs curled pathetically over them […] in a final and futile gesture of self-closure” (McGrath 1988, 30). These are contrasted with a basic and transcendent state of ecological connectivity: in the Piker-Smiths’ garden shed, signs of “regression and breakdown” are legion. Here, objects have “begun to coalesce, as if attempting […] to abandon structure and identity, all that could distinguish and separate them.” These lines present a homogeneous condition of “slime” (29) as the state to which the biosphere ultimately returns. If, like the imperial moment of Lenin’s estimation, the neoliberal age inaugurates a decline, then it is to a generalization of this amorphousness that such a decline— accelerated, perhaps, by a nuclear event—leads in the text. Confronted by the contents of the shed, we are told that Evelyn had “no time to relish regression today” (30), but this deferral is finite: it is no comfort, in this sense, that she leaves the tale having decided to follow her father and become a doctor.

American Exceptionalism, Millennial Empire Transnational concerns, muted in the psychological novels of the 1990s, return to prominence in McGrath’s work after the millennium, a corpus in which Zlosnik notes a historical turn (2011, 87). This last is perhaps most clearly visible in Martha Peake (2000), which is subtitled “a novel of the revolution” and maps the eponymous heroine’s transatlantic journey from England to the new world at the time of the American War of Independence. Noting the novel’s self-conscious debt to the eighteenth-­ century gothic, Zlosnik describes it as a fraught “exploration of the genesis of ‘the American dream’” (2011, 89). Building on a similar claim in this collection, Evert Jan van Leeuwen notes that Martha Peake is also, however, a critical excavation of the capitalist world-system, one that mobilizes gothic scenes to diagnose a twenty-first-century culture of “affluenza”—of unbridled, indeed, mad, accumulation. As such, and drawing on Shapiro, van Leeuwen argues that the novel seems sinisterly to predict the financial crisis of 2008, the effects of which resonate outward from the powerful US economy. Related concerns acquire a still sharper significance in McGrath’s Ghost Town, which maps a genealogy of Manhattan, from independence to the aftermath of the attacks of 11 September 2001. Together, the three tales in this collection engage critically with mythologies of American nationhood, invoking these in the context of transnational relationships forged through global flows of capital from the eighteenth century—and

12  Rebecca Duncan and Matt Foley before—onward. The effect is a destabilization of an exceptionalist rhetoric that informs certain geopolitical visions of North America. Within this discourse, the United States is “the apotheosis of history” (Kaplan 2004, 5): a nation immune from the histories in which other states are mired, and one that is thus in a sense invulnerable. Such a worldview is traumatically fractured—rendered unreal—by the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, and in Ghost Town’s “Ground Zero,” this unreality is made visible with recourse to haunting gothic forms. The same worldview is also, however, reinforced by the so-called War on Terror. This, as Amy Kaplan writes, “reduces the complex interactions of the United States with the world to a Manichean conflict ‘to rid the world of evil,’” a process that entails “incursions against civil liberties, the rights of immigrants, and the provision for basic human rights” (2003, 1–2). These measures are explicitly referenced in “Ground Zero” and replicated by the psychiatrist-narrator, who precisely comes to believe in the existence of evil, locating this specifically amid immigrant and minority communities. The narrator thus becomes one of McGrath’s many clinical protagonists whose role it is in part to reveal that madness—here a “primitive, destructive rage” (McGrath 2006, 196)—is encysted in the edifice of rationality and all its cognate structures. While state rhetoric around the 2001 attacks operates in a discourse of robust nationhood, strong borders, and exceptional US power, Kaplan also notes—significantly—that it discloses anxieties pertaining to “the weakness and incoherence of US global dominance” in the new millennium (2004, 3). She refers to the appearance of out-and-out imperialism at the highest echelons of the US administration and points out that this is, among other things, a language in which the scope of North American authority is paradoxically curtailed, bounded as imperial formations are by “spatial and temporal limits.” The narrative of empire is always, Kaplan writes, a “narrative of rising and falling” (2004, 3), and with this thought we are returned to the late-nineteenth-century gothic scene as Brantlinger has described it: as a mode of imagining the failing of a state’s global hegemony. Port Mungo (2004) is a novel written amid the discursive shifts that Kaplan identifies in respect to US nationhood and also a text in which, eventually, McGrath returns to the literary lexicon of an imperial gothic. To begin with, the narrative follows the artist Jack Rathbone, born into the privilege of “old family” in England, and is narrated after his death by his sister Gin (2005, 15). Disenchanted with a stagnating Europe, a 17-year-old Jack leaves London for New York with Vera Savage, the Glaswegian artist with whom he has an affair, but on arriving in the city, he is disorientated and disarmed: “there was no solid ground under his feet, nothing familiar to cling to” (45). The romantic promises of the new world, a place “of unfettered creativity, of artistic freedom, of aspiration” (28), are thus debunked, as Jack understands that the possibility for self-determination which has drawn

Introduction  13 him to America in fact translates to a demand that he work to prove himself: “It hadn’t occurred to him that anything was expected from him here”(45), Gin relates, and this is because the inherited privilege into which Jack is born means that, as yet, nothing has been expected of him. Jack is—and importantly remains until the end of the novel—a gentleman in the old sense of the word: he does not work but is sustained by his ancestral estate. When Jack leaves New York in search of a place to produce a body of work that will increase his American standing, this flight is thus, in an important sense, motivated by a desire to find somewhere that—unlike the metropolis—does feel “familiar.” This is salient, because on the surface, the journey the couple makes to Port Mungo—a small dilapidated town in the Gulf of Honduras—appears to be driven by an artistic quest to get beyond the metropole and into a landscape that is exotic and strange. This, indeed, is the critical perspective taken by Magali Falco in her reading of the novel, which suggests that “Port Mungo is […] the real setting of wild and uncivilised imagination where Jack has the revelation about his deep artistic nature” (2007, np). While the narrative will eventually reveal truths about Jack and his creative work, the strangeness ascribed to Port Mungo in the novel seems less robust that it immediately appears. In the first instance, this is suggested by the mobilization of an imperial gothic vocabulary of exotic decadence and decay to describe the Honduran setting: “there were flies everywhere, noise, blood, the stench of butchered meat mingling with the fragrance of mango and papaya” (McGrath 2005, 57). We have already seen in McGrath’s earlier stories that such a lexicon is knowingly deployed by the author to register, in Brantlinger’s terms, a rot that inheres in the imperial center. In this sense, we are called to remember that Honduras is the location of successive imperial regimes. The presence of Afro-Honduran characters in the narrative registers the legacy of Spanish slavery, and that Jack and Vera reside in an old banana warehouse recalls, too, the informal colonization of the region by foreign capital across the postcolonial early twentieth century. Jack thus chooses to settle amid imperial ruins, and in a sense, it is not surprising that this is the case. The remnants of various imperial hierarchies in Port Mungo replicate the hierarchy into which he is born, and this gravitation toward familiarity is ultimately revealed in the work he produces. Unlike Vera, who grows up in a working-class tenement in Glasgow and displays a “genuine curiosity about the world beyond this obscure little riverside town” (83), Jack creates largely in isolation, “every day […] in his studio from dawn till dusk” (84). The result is work that exploits and, indeed, gothicizes the aesthetics of the Central American setting—we are shown “raw, passionate, chaotic” canvases (79)— but in which the presiding trope is a Narcissus figure: “he paints himself over and over again,” Gin remarks. “Even his jungles are self-portraits”

14  Rebecca Duncan and Matt Foley (203). This scenario resonates with Brantlinger’s comments around the Victorian production of the “Dark Continent,” a mythology forged from their own metropolitan anxieties (1988, 195) and which feeds widely into imperial gothic imaginaries as we have seen. In a further resonance with imperial gothic, Jack’s artistic solipsism is transmuted in the narrative into an image of dynastic decline. Although Gin never accepts the matter, it emerges that he has sexually abused his oldest daughter, which leads to her suicide, and that he makes similar advances toward his estranged younger daughter when she seeks him out after his return to New York. As it concerns itself with incest, Port Mungo retrieves a theme central to gothic fiction since its inception. Here, as in earlier narratives (e.g., by Walpole), endogamy suggests the end of a familial line, which in Jack’s case is representative more widely of a declining social organization. This, in one sense, refers to the aristocracy into which he is born, but the symbolic imbrication in the novel of feudal English and colonial systems suggests also that Jack’s incestuous impulses, and his own eventual suicide, relate to an imperial demise. It is not unimportant that Jack’s narcissistic isolation, his incessant inward focus, appears at a time when, as Kaplan has it, “the United States shuts itself off from the world,” while simultaneously reactivating imperial vocabularies (2004, 2). Indeed, ­Johan Höglund, drawing on Brantlinger, has argued that what he calls the “American imperial gothic” emerges with force “in the wake of 11 September 2001,” where it voices “anxieties that accompany moments of perceived imperial decline” (2016, 3). However, while the corpus ­Höglund considers “maps the perceived need to aggressively defend […] the ideological and territorial boundaries the United States has established” (3), McGrath’s engagement of gothic forms to negotiate US exceptionalism and imperialism offers a different, more critical vision. Despite Gin’s (albeit ambivalent) loyalty to her brother, Jack emerges ultimately as a violent, manipulative, and pathologically self-interested character, who—as Zlosnik points out (2011, 106)—finally represents nothing new, only the replication of older orders. If it is possible to read the trajectory of Jack’s narrative against the instability of US hegemony, then his death suggests the decline of that Manichean figuration of nationhood, for which the psychiatrist in “Ground Zero” also stands. It is salient in this respect, too, that while Jack dies, Vera lives on, settled on the banks of the Hudson. With her, the text retains that different perspective to the transnational to which she is linked, and thus also a vision of America that is not only inward-looking, or closed off from the world.

Patrick McGrath and his Worlds This collection is divided into three parts, entitled “Transnational ­McGrath,” “Theorizing McGrath,” and “Millennial McGrath.” The first begins with David Punter’s “Writing and Reading the Spider: McGrath’s

Introduction  15 Web,” which is followed by Evert Jan van Leeuwen’s “Martha Peake and the Madness of ‘Free Trade’”—both of which we have outlined above. In a chapter entitled “‘A Cell Without a Nucleus is a Ruin’: Vampiric Creations of the Unhealthy Disabled in Patrick McGrath’s ‘Blood Disease,’” Alan Gregory considers constructions of disability in McGrath’s short story, and also in his first novel The Grotesque (1989), showing that disabled figures intersect in both texts with visions of colonial Africa. Gregory demonstrates that McGrath engages an imperial gothic mode, but that this is ultimately reworked in the narrative, so that the anxieties it invokes are identified within an English class structure, and not in the colonial landscape itself. Fears of a more properly transnational nature emerge, in Gregory’s account, in McGrath’s motifs of vampirism, which appear both in “Blood Disease” and elsewhere. In the following chapter, “Revisiting the Spanish Civil War,” Xavier Aldana Reyes speaks to McGrath about his forthcoming novel, which is set in Spain and responds to the conflict of 1936–1939. In questions and responses that range— as McGrath’s novels range—across a number of periods and cultural contexts, the conversation both explores the author’s current interest in Spain and embeds this project within the wider scope of his corpus, mapping connections between his present work and earlier English and American novels. As it does this, the chapter shows that links between these sites in McGrath’s literary imaginary often take shape in figures— like that of the ghost, for example—which are legible in gothic terms. Benjamin E. Noad’s “Madness, Tragedy, and the Implied Reader of McGrath’s Spider,” begins the part of this collection entitled “Theorizing McGrath.” Noad opens by posing questions around the reception of gothic depictions of madness among readers suffering from mental illhealth. Key to the argument he goes on to pursue is the possibility that, in presenting conditions such a schizophrenia in gothic terms, literature risks excluding those for whom these conditions are a lived reality. However, across his reading of McGrath’s Spider, in which Noad theorizes a conception of “Gothic tragedy,” the author shows that gothic fictions which are sensitive to the constructed status of “madness” as a category and to its alienating potential have the capacity to critique—and thus forestall—this marginalizing action. In his chapter entitled “The Terrors of the Self: The Manipulation of Identity Mythologies in Patrick McGrath’s Novels,” Daniel Southward identifies and explores a presiding tension in McGrath’s fiction between visions of identity maintained by the self and traumatic realities that work to undermine or render inadequate precisely these visions. Southward investigates the distinct and recurring patterns through which this scenario unfolds across McGrath’s oeuvre, tracing homologies between diverse characters from different novels. As it offers a detailed and extensive reading, as well as a new approach to McGrath’s work, Southward’s chapter also argues that the author’s gothicism inheres, at its foundation, in its treatment of identity, which appears always as haunted: inevitably constructed in relation

16  Rebecca Duncan and Matt Foley to ­circumstances—differently realized—that resist and exceed this very act of construction. In our chapter “Patrick McGrath and Passion: The Gothic Modernism of Asylum and Beyond,” we next examine the modernist inflection that is present alongside a gothic impulse in much of McGrath’s work and which surfaces especially clearly in the author’s ambivalent treatment of passion. Reading Asylum and Port Mungo against a range of modernist texts, the chapter shows that the effect realized in these novels—a radical and interrogative destabilizing of reason, madness, and their cognates—is achieved through a dual recourse to literary Impressionism and a modernist tradition of “primitivism” and to the terrors most frequently associated with the gothic mode. Michela Vanon Alliata’s “The Price of Suffering and the Value of Remembering: Patrick McGrath’s Trauma” opens the part entitled “Millennial McGrath.” In this chapter, the author traces the trajectory of traumatic resolution that unfolds in McGrath’s 2008 novel, a text which self-consciously engages with psychiatry and the psychoanalytic process. At the same time, Vanon Alliata examines the novel’s exploration of trauma as a condition that might be contracted through empathic connections within the clinical encounter, showing further—via an examination of McGrath’s characteristically unreliable narrator—that Trauma not only witnesses but also comments on psychiatric discourse. Also considering Trauma, Dana Alex’s “‘You have to be a warrior to live here’: PTSD as a collective sociopolitical condition in Patrick McGrath’s Writing” examines the efficacy of the Freudian definition of trauma to any reading of the novel which understands its presentation of traumatization as a collective condition related to the legacy of the Vietnam War. The chapter charts a theoretical shift from psychoanalytic to cognitive theorizations of trauma, ultimately offering a perspective that draws on Catherine Malabou’s rereading of Freud via neuroscience to suggest that McGrath’s millennial fictions are populated by “the new wounded.” In the final chapter, (provocatively) entitled “The Liar, the Bitch, and the Wardrobe: Resisting Political Terror, Anti-Semitism, and Revenants in Patrick McGrath’s The Wardrobe Mistress,” Danel Olson locates McGrath’s 2017 novel in the context of fascist resurgence in postwar England. The chapter draws on a range of theoretical work to assess the The Wardrobe Mistress’s uncanny aesthetics, to map out the discourse of monstrosity shaping the xenophobic violence it traces, and to explore the text’s complex themes of haunting. Throughout, the chapter makes visible McGrath’s critique of right-wing extremism as this emerges in the early twentieth century, and it shows that this interrogation functions, too, as a critical stance toward contemporary rightward shifts that have taken hold in various parts of the globe after the turn of the millennium. Thus, the chapter presents the novel as engaged with and critical of its moment of production, simultaneously affirming that transnational consciousness to which we have drawn attention above.

Introduction  17

Notes 1 See, for example, Zlosnik (2011), Armitt (2012), and Powell (2012). 2 For critical work on the gothic in the same vein, see Botting (1996, 2012), Hogle (2002), and Castle (1995).

References Armitt, Lucie. 2012. “The Magical Realism of the Contemporary Gothic.” In A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 510–522. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Botting, Fred. 1996. Gothic. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2012. “In Gothic Darkly: Heterotopia, History, Culture.” In A New Companion to Gothic Literature, edited by David Punter, 13–24. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Brantlinger, Patrick. 1988. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Castle, Terry. 1995. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cordle, Daniel. 2017. Late Cold War Literature and Culture: The Nuclear 1980s. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Falco, Magali. 2007. “The Painting of the Urban Dreamscape in Patrick ­McGrath’s Port Mungo.” E-rea: Revue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone 5, no. 2. http://journals.openedition.org/erea/168. Ferguson, Christine. 1999. “McGrath’s Disease: Radical Pathology in Patrick McGrath’s Neo-Gothicism.” In Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography, edited by Glennis Byron and David Punter, 233–243. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Goyal, Yogita. 2017. “Introduction: The Transnational Turn.” Journal of Transnational American Studies 8, no. 1:1–18. https://escholarship.org/uc/ item/2x74s415. Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1989. The Age of Empire, 1875–1914. New York: Vintage. Hogle, Jerrold E. 2002. “The Gothic in Western Culture.” In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Literature, edited by Jerrold E. Hogle, 1–20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Höglund, Johan. 2016. The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence. Abingdon: Routledge. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1947. Kaplan, Amy. 2003. “Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today.” Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, Hartford, CT, October 17, 2004. American Quarterly 56, no. 1:1–18. doi:10.1353/ aq.2004.0010. Latour, Bruno.1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. McGrath, Patrick. 1988. Blood and Water and Other Stories. New York: Simon & Schuster.

18  Rebecca Duncan and Matt Foley ———. 1992. Spider. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. ———. 1994. Dr Haggard’s Disease. London: Penguin, 1993. ———. 1997. Asylum. London: Penguin, 1996. ———. 2001. Martha Peake. London: Penguin, 2000. ———. 2005. Port Mungo. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. ———. 2006. Ghost Town. London: Bloomsbury, 2005. ———. 2009. Trauma. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Powell, Anna. 2012. “Unskewered: The Anti-Oedipal Gothic of Patrick ­McGrath.” Horror Studies 3, no. 2: 263–279. doi:10.1386/host.3.2.263_1. Punter, David. 1996. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Volume 2: Modern Gothic. London and New York: Longman. Said, Edward W. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Shapiro, Stephen. 2008. “Transvaal, Transylvania: Dracula’s World-system and Gothic Periodicity.” Gothic Studies 10, no. 1: 29–47. doi:10.7227/GS.10.1.5. Zlosnik, Sue. 2011. Patrick McGrath. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Section I

Transnational McGrath

1 Writing and Reading the Spider McGrath’s Web David Punter

In thinking through matters related to Patrick McGrath’s Spider (1990), I need to begin with a joke, or at least a pun, to which I shall return later: there is a definition of “spidery writing” in the Free Dictionary on the Web. The definition has to do with writing which “resembles a web,” and which is “very fine” (Free Dictionary 2019); not, perhaps, the first thing we might think of when attending to “spidery writing,” which is most obviously the stuff of gothic fiction—the idea of wills, testaments, documents of all kinds being completed in a “spidery handwriting,” which suggests something coming down from a remote past, something that might be easily erased, something difficult to decipher. We could extend the series of metaphors in relation to the gothic: for example, there is a current website called spiderywriting.com, which actually turns out to provide “ghost-writing” skills. Spiders and the ghostly; spiders and the secret, or secretive; spiders as those presences which you see, if you see them at all, out of the corner of your eye, in the corner of the room. Spiders and corners; spiders live in places which are difficult to reach, difficult to sweep clean, and are therefore emblematic, perhaps, of all those aspects of life which cannot be cleansed by the ubiquitous broom of modernity, to which all things that might be considered as dirt are abhorrent, as I have demonstrated in my book Modernity (2007); they are that which “lives on,” that which threatens our clear, encyclopaedist catalogue of forms of life, perhaps even of “form” itself. Spiders write, and are writ large in our fantasies. Though these, of course, are not the earliest reference points for the textual life of the spider, for the role of the spider as mythological creator has far earlier beginnings. For that we have to turn back to the myth of Arachne who was the female human weaver—or perhaps spinner—who, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, challenges the goddess Athena to a contest. At this point the myth goes in two separate directions. One has it that Arachne unacceptably depicts the male gods as debauched and abusive; according to the other one, Arachne’s weaving is simply more accomplished than Athena’s. Either way, the Arachne myth is about transgression, about mortal encroachment onto the territory of the gods. But it is also a myth about freedom of speech, about being allowed, or not

22  David Punter allowed, to display truths which are forbidden by the voice of authority. And either way, Arachne wins the battle but loses the war: Athena sprinkles her with a potion derived from Hecate, the goddess of night, and dooms her to life as a spider. It is perhaps not irrelevant that Hecate is, however, not only the goddess of night and darkness but also the goddess of household rubbish, of all that cannot be accommodated in a well-ordered, cleansed society, all that is left over just when we think we have banished the darkness, inspected the corners, destroyed those scary webs that flutter just out of our eyesight. But Arachne’s rebirth as a spider, of course, also marks in one sense the apotheosis of weaving, and thus the origin of text itself in a notion of the “textile”: when there is form in narrative, or in story, then we could say that we are in the continuing presence of Arachne, the human maker of tapestries, teller of tales free from the undue, unfair influence of the gods, creator of a paradoxically anthropomorphic form of writing. This is where text begins: in an arachnid weaving, in the evolution of a thing of fragility and beauty, blown like gossamer, yet with a strength, as scientists love to tell us, greater than that of steel. The idea of narrative I am working with here is essentially similar to that proposed by Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle in their Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, where they offer five propositions about the nature of story: 1 Stories are everywhere. 2 Not only do we tell stories, but stories tell us: if stories are everywhere, we are also in stories. 3 The telling of a story is always bound up with power, with questions of authority, property and domination. 4 Stories are multiple: there is always more than one story. 5 Stories always have something to tell us about stories themselves: they always involve self-reflexive and metafictional elements. (2009, 54) In what follows, we shall find that in tracing the web of the spider, all of these propositions are borne out. The narratives of the spider are ubiquitous; it is, in the end, perhaps the spider that gets to tell the story and we humans are only bit-part players in a longer and wider narrative; at all points the relations between spider and human are freighted with issues of power; the narrative of the spider cannot be reduced to a singularity; and in the texts I will look at, including McGrath’s own, there is a constant reflexive dimension. So a first question, given the concerns of this volume, would be how far these myths spread globally. Certainly we can next turn to the figure of Anansi, the African spider-figure who appears as a trickster, somewhat akin to the Asian monkey-god, across a vast swathe of legendry—and

McGrath’s Web  23 across an equally vast geographical span, because, according to Philip Sherlock, in his Anansi the Spider Man (1956), a collection of Jamaican folk tales, Anansi also made the slave journey across the Atlantic: “Anansi’s home was in the villages and forests of West Africa. From there long years ago thousands of men and woman came to the islands of the Caribbean” (1956, 1). And so on: Sherlock’s book is written, it seems, for children—we might think of Rudyard Kipling’s Just-So ­Stories (1902). Nevertheless, the spider’s ability to escape from any possible trap—“[w]hen things went well he [Anansi] was a man, but when he was in […] danger he became a spider” (Sherlock 1956, 1)—appears to have a multitude of ideological relevances: as with, for example, limbo dancing, we might say that Anansi’s journey across the ocean represents in displaced form these other, hideous journeys, and at the same time the wish to hide from terror. In this case, at least, the spider is not itself a figure of fear, as it is within the alarming and enduring vocabulary of arachnophobia, but rather an emblem of escape, even of empowerment, albeit in the twilight, in the shadows, in the dusk where the spider can never be seen. In order to elude the reach of power, it is necessary to have access to hidden spaces, to disguise, to locations where the eye cannot see properly or fully; here the sight and inscription of the spider can offer opposition, resistance, without ever needing fully to confront the forces of oppression. To speak of representing in displaced form is, of course, to enter onto the complex terrain of definitions of ideology. Here I have only space to say that I am accepting a basic, classic Marxist definition, which speaks of ideology as the set of false relations to the material world that is forced on people by the economic order in which they live; but, as Terry Eagleton has pointed out, this is not merely a matter of a “set of doctrines” but rather “signifies the way men live out their roles in class-society, the values, ideas and images which tie them by their social functions and do prevent them from a true knowledge of society as a whole” (1976, 16–17). I would myself add only one cautionary note to this formulation, namely that the very notion of “true knowledge of society as a whole” may increasingly appear as a utopian chimera; the question for literature and for narrative is rather about sites of resistance, places where alternative narratives can place their weight against the overpowering edifice of ideology in such as a way as to at least facilitate a crack in the wall—through which, of course, spiders might emerge. And the spider, this spider, has not gone away, as the contemporary Caribbean poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite shows. In “Sunsum,” the poem in which legacies of transatlantic passage are made present as an umbilical connection to the African continent, “Kwaku Ananse” remains half-buried in the dark earth. His song, as Braithwaite writes, “captures our underground fears” (1973b, 149). In this last line, we might wonder what meaning is here being attributed to “captures:” “captures” in the

24  David Punter sense of providing our fears with a kind of haven, where we can abject them onto a thing of night and darkness; “captures” in the other sense in which we might capture a feeling or a sensation by representing it? Or, perhaps, indeed, both senses are, here at least, inseparable. We can trace the spider at much greater length in a poem of Brathwaite’s which is actually called “Ananse” (1973a). Here the spider continues or returns down the generations: whatever it signifies, it cannot be kept down, it cannot be erased. Braithwaite invokes memories of the Caribbean slave revolts in the figures of Tacky and Toussaint L’Ouverture. They heard the beat of Anansi’s drums, the poem tells; they encountered his “webs of sound” (165). While such deeds may now be distant, the spider—still “threading […] stories” (166)—preserves their history. It continues—literally, in the poem—to occupy those corners of the present where the past cannot be swept away. It is the revenant, the phantom, which returns and recurs. Perhaps, indeed, it would not be going too far to say, as I have briefly mentioned, that the spider is the abjected, loaded with all the ideological baggage which civilization cannot retain or stand to look at. In the face of the spider, or perhaps in that absence of faciality which reflects our own fears of “loss of face” in many of the senses of that complex phrase, we are reduced, forced to encounter our own fears. And these fears may otherwise appear motiveless because, in fact, few if any spiders in the “developed world” (with the exception of Australia) are actually dangerous; yet strongly motivated in a different sense, because spiders can also represent all that may be brought in, reimported into the West, the contamination of trade—how many times have we read about the strange spiders which arrive on our shores concealed in, for example, a crate of bananas? The spider in Brathwaite’s hands recalls all the deaths, the terrors of history: from “dead lobster-pot crews” to “nodding skulls” and “black iron bells” (1973a, 166), all those things that might have been deemed buried live on through the memory of the spider, which here becomes the very emblem of the poor, the afflicted, and the dispossessed. Yet although abjected, he is not powerless; on the contrary, he is “plotting” (166). He carries within him, or perhaps she carries within her in one of the places where spiders carry their eggs, the seeds from which a new order might be born, as the spider ceaselessly threads the night with stories, with textualities, with ways of reviving versions of history that would otherwise merely reflect all the trappings of imperial dominance. Let me turn, in this lengthy approach to McGrath’s gothic writing, to another textual field; it might be better to call it a different web. In Jeremias Gotthelf’s The Black Spider, which was first published in German in 1842 (not all of these texts are originally Anglophone, but successive English translations of The Black Spider into English were hugely popular), the spider figures as an intergenerational curse. I cannot recount the whole plot here; it is complex and involves a number of framing and

McGrath’s Web  25 framed narratives. But at the heart of it lies a typically gothic fantasy of the arbitrary cruelty of a feudal baron and the heart-rending uncertainty of his peasantry as to whether to accept—or not—the help of the Devil in performing the mindless and back-breaking tasks which they have been set. The price of the Devil’s help is, as is traditional, the blood of a new-born baby; but it turns out that whether this price is paid or refused, the fatal spider emerges, haunts, and kills the villagers. At length imprisoned in a log of wood, there continues to be the temptation to let him out. The spider, then, figures here as a kind of writing, an inscription which comes back from the past; as a sign that the past can—in true gothic style—never be buried. Although it is true that it is the spider itself that appears in this case to suffer premature burial, there is never any certainty that it can remain buried; old memories and reflections of the violence of feudalism, even down many generations, as with the agonizing reminders of slavery we have already seen clustering around the spider’s web, do not die so fast; the memory of past ideological formations cannot be so easily sublated. So here the spider acts as what one might call a relic, with the log in which he is “buried” as a reliquary, which can only be opened at the risk of enormous cost to life and limb. That which lies in the shadows should remain in the shadows; but, as with for example Pandora’s box, the temptation to open that which should remain closed is too strong to resist. This fantasy of what returns—or rather of what has never gone away—is hardly new and is all too frequently related to the animal. One might think, for example, of W.W. Jacobs’ emblematic short story of empire and what returns from empire, The Monkey’s Paw (1902). But here, as in Gotthelf’s narrative, there is also a terrifying sense of proximity: the spider is buried not in some distant place but in the very lintel of the door; it is buried, or interned, or incarcerated, in the threshold, precisely that threshold, that liminal place, that should safely separate domestic space from the wild. And so we see that the spider is liminal in itself; we tend, for example, to distinguish “house spiders” from “garden spiders,” but presumably that distinction is reflexively anthropomorphic. After all, spiders were not born to live in houses, any more than seagulls were born to live on fish and chips, but the spider is, it would appear, endlessly adaptable——hence its reputation for guile and deceit, for never being quite where you expect it to be, for being able to vanish at the drop of a hat; for, perhaps, surpassing humans in its ability to survive. Spiders play, however, an apparently different role in The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, which was Italo Calvino’s first, and, indeed, entirely atypical, novel. It was published in 1947, and here is perhaps the moment to say that I am only touching on the vast library of spiders, the textual, web-like entanglements which connect the spider with the movements and suppressions of history. I could cite the Scottish poet’s Kathleen

26  David Punter Jamie’s first book Black Spiders (1982); or, in the field of children’s literature, E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952); or Manuel Puig’s wellknown Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976); Thierry Jouquet’s Tarantula (2005); or the half-hidden corners of Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird (2014)—or, indeed, David Cronenberg’s film Spider (2002), a version of the novel by Patrick McGrath which I will talk about in a little while— but I am not going to talk about all of those for the moment. Instead, let me return to Calvino. This is the story of a young boy in Second World War Italy, caught up in frightening matters vastly beyond his understanding. His place of refuge in a small-scale, childhood world is on the banks of a stream, where he has discovered the “haunts,” if I may put it that way, of spiders who make themselves nests fully equipped with doors and the like. I confess I am not sure about these spiders; of course there are plenty of trapdoor spiders across the world, but they are, as far as I can ascertain, not known in Europe. Their behaviors and workings are as yet far from fully understood, although it seems they make, interestingly, use of silk to hinge their trapdoors. However, I am getting carried away on a wave of that rare condition, arachnophilia. The point in Calvino’s novel is that these dwellings of the spiders form a kind of refuge for the protagonist of the story: they represent something which is known, small-scale, almost familial, as against the huge forces of war—and, indeed, sexuality as the boy approaches the cusp of adulthood—which are playing themselves out all around him. One could go further and say that the doors themselves represent some kind of imagined domestic space of a kind which he no longer possesses as his previous life falls apart as the result of military operations and the effects of insurgency. Spiders, again, in the corners; surviving all change, outlasting and outliving the human, providing an alternative means of hiding, representing a fantasy life outside and beyond the sometimes impossible demands of the real. This may, though, be a rare example of the spider as reassuring. In Calvino, the boy derives some kind of comfort from the knowledge that there is a kind of life that can go on oblivious to the raging of war; a kind of life that can continue to care for its own even when the possibility of being protected by one’s own parents or community has been unaccountably withdrawn. The important point about the spiders in this context is their relation to the secret; they are secret in themselves, but they also represent the boy’s own need for secrecy, for a world which only he knows about, and which can therefore represent the origins of a fantasy realm. This does not mean that the boy treats the spiders as some kind of imaginary friend; the ways of the spiders remain as abstruse to him as does the wider world outside, but it is this very abstruseness that forms their attraction, their curious allure. However, more common, we may suppose, is the spider, specifically in the form of the tarantula, as deadly and poisonous—and this poison,

McGrath’s Web  27 as we know from folk-legendry, conduces to madness. One of the most obvious loci here is in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), where the dance known as the tarantella serves a number of symbolic functions. Actually, the connection between the tarantula and madness goes back a very long way, to, as some sources claim, around 1100 BC. The dance itself has been variously regarded as the consequence of the bite of the wolf-spider and as a means of exorcizing the effects of such a bite, a neat example of ideological inversion. In A Doll’s House, of course, the tarantella performs a very specific function, namely to emblematize the poison which Nora sees as spreading from her husband Krogstad; but it also signifies a liminal possibility of escape, as the madness induced by the spider encourages a dance which goes beyond any possible social order, and offers both the threat and the promise of an escape from the doll’s house in which Nora increasingly sees herself as constrained. The spider’s bite, then, as poison, as contagion, but also, as Foucault might have it in Madness and Civilization (1961), as the strange hope that a certain type of madness, depending on how it is seen and from what perspective, might be liberating. Indeed, some types of what is conventionally known as madness might be the very state of affairs which will occasion revelation as it produces civilization’s most brutal clampdowns, an eruption of the pure animal which reminds us of all that has been lost by submitting to, in this case, patriarchal power. But now I want to turn at last to McGrath’s novel, Spider, which draws together more tightly, through the spider, these themes of madness, writing and fantasy. As Sue Zlosnik says of this novel, “the web is the structuring metaphor in Spider, the narrator spinning a narrative that can trap the reader” (2011, 52). Here is a very swift abbreviation of the story. The crux, one might say, is that the narrator is schizophrenic. He is trying throughout, it seems, to tell the story of his father, an apparent murderer; but our focus comes to be more on the narrator and protagonist himself, Spider, than on the tale he seems to be telling. For he himself is falling apart, disintegrating; he has, we are told, “long spidery fingers […] stained a dark yellow round the tips […] the nails […] hard and yellowy and hornlike” (McGrath 1992, 13), and, perhaps more to the point, he believes himself to be hosting within his own body a colony of spiders. The form of his narrative is, in some ways, astonishingly similar to the general form of Freud’s case histories, and it comes replete with all the doubts we might feel while reading these consummate illustrations of the narrator’s art. Whom, for example, to believe? In the case of Spider, as in that of the swathe of short stories by Edgar Allan Poe from which McGrath has acknowledged he gained considerable inspiration (McGrath 2017, 549– 551), we are given very little choice. We are enmeshed in the web woven by the narrator, continuingly stuck, incapable of escape, unable to use the senses which should allow us to see past the spider’s mesmerism, the legendary threat of paralysis. The spider’s web—or the web woven by

28  David Punter Spider the character—comes to symbolize the impossibility of making a single, unitary and unifying textual history of the past; instead what we have is a variety of threads, all leading in different directions, all finally ungraspable, yet constituting the only vestigial certainty onto which we can hold. The web of the spider may, in fact, be a miracle of symmetry; but it may also not appear that way if we are stuck in the labyrinth, to which only its own author, its scriptor, the spider, knows the solution that might lead to a rare escape. And so, we might begin to put the question, perhaps a curious but, nevertheless, an important one: what is the ideology of the spider? What is certainly apparent is that there is a continuing thread here of resistance—resistance to oppression, resistance to custom, resistance to master narratives. From Brathwaite to McGrath (and we could include here, for example, the role of Renfield and his interesting relationship to spiders in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)), there is the sense of stories, tales told “in the corners;” the tales that can never be truly in command, because they are told by those who are not, and can never be, in power. Yet in the end, perhaps the spider’s story, what I would term “arachnographia,” challenges us to wonder about where power actually lies. We might say that behind this there lies a further mythic twist, which is that Athena’s own power has turned back on herself, and has formed the very means—perhaps the very invention of textuality itself, the invention of weaving—by which, to challenge Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1988) phrase, the subaltern speaks. Writing as a spider, to pervert and develop Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) thoughts on writing as an animal, will involve speaking back from the corner. The spider may be joyous, as in those Jamaican folk-tales I mentioned, or he may be scared out of his wits, as in McGrath, but the fact remains that his voice can never be fully assimilated. The spider remains: even, of course, as he presides over “remains,” human remains, for instance. Where death is, so the old gothic stories and also more recent ones like M.R. James’s The Tractate Middoth (1911) go, there the spider is also. McGrath’s Spider, for example, sometimes sees himself as merely an “egg-bag” (1992, 176), thus signifying—and this thought recurs in Calvino’s text—the illimitability of the spider, the endless unseen reproduction which will undermine the apparent security and safety of any prevalent ideology. But this must, of course, remind us of something to which I have alluded before, namely the gendering of the spider. And this can move us on from McGrath to perhaps the most prominent locus for the spider of recent decades, namely Louise Bourgeois’s sculpture—or installation if you prefer to call it that—Spider (2000). One of the most remarkable things about this colossal work, which is more than nine meters high, is that Bourgeois also knows it by an alternative name, and that name is Maman: “Mama.” The original steel and marble sculpture began its exhibited life in London and is now in Qatar—and of course, one can

McGrath’s Web  29 read into that all the commentary on ideology, cultural superstructure and capitalism one wants. However, to step back for a moment, here is Bourgeois on the work: The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. My family was in the business of tapestry, restoration, and my mother was in charge of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitoes. We know that mosquitoes spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother. (Bal 2001, 71–72) In fact, there are only two species of spider known to eat mosquitoes, but that is hardly the point. What we apparently have here is the image of the spider as protective and maternal: its great, arching legs forming a protective barrier between us and the feared outside world. This is no longer the spider in the corner, this is the spider as protection against an otherwise even more devastating world; one is reminded of many recent discourses on the psychoses, often conceived now not as detrimental in themselves but rather as complex, sometimes apparently incomprehensible, protections against a further, unimaginable but feared problem, namely the dissolution of the very self. So I now turn back to the question, the topos, of spidery writing. We might speak of its adaptability to widely differing ideological purposes; but also of a retention through all these transmutations of a sense of the resistant, and also of an ambiguous sense of proximity—after all, in most cases the spider shares our home, whether we know it or not, whether we want it to or not. It is, in some sense, a codependent, our constant hidden, shadowy companion. As, to return to my previous dreadful pun, it shares the web. It shares the web, to give a specific example, with the second novel of David Wong. Wong was the (pseudonymous) author of what was often heralded as the first full-length novel to be completed— in instalments—on the Web. It was called John Dies at the End (2007); his second novel—like his first now in a print version—is called This Book is Full of Spiders (2012). It is not, unfortunately, a good novel: the characterization is incompetent, the settings often difficult to map, the plot, in the end, virtually incoherent. But it does develop our stock of fears of the spider. In this case, an arachnid invasion is gruesomely portrayed, especially insofar as the spiders—if they are truly spiders, and this is never made fully clear—manage their takeover of the human world (which is of course foiled before the end by our two rather infantile protagonists) by occupying the human head and replacing the brain. What is thereby produced, one might say, is a kind of spider/human hybrid; but what also happens here is that the resultant scenario replicates

30  David Punter more or less precisely the scenario of a swathe of current, global films: namely, the invasion of the zombies. To develop the theme of the zombie at length would require an entirely different focus, and would take me away from my main theme, which is the spider. Nevertheless, it might return us to one of the points from which I began, which is the spider as a figure for colonization and the resistance to colonization, for what returns from—having survived—the depredations of a prevalent exercise of power. Although Louise Bourgeois may choose to refer to her spiders as mother figures, that does not remain the last word on the matter. If this is a mother’s protection, it is also, and simultaneously, a figure of irrational fear and terror. We need to remind ourselves here that the original Arachne myth was about women exclusively; the only men who figure in it at all are the male gods, who are laughed at, scorned, in the very texture, the textile, the text of Arachne’s weaving. However, what Wong’s novel, weak though it is, reminds us of is the difficulty of communication among species and the consequent abjection of the different, and it is thinkable that this is the force of the spider throughout all of the examples I have mentioned. That the spider is the textually abjected, that which is thrown into a corner, when it is not swept away, killed, destroyed in the name of a cleaner world which will forever be free of the cobwebs which are themselves the weird corruption of the gossamer which we have for so long in Western culture admired for its beautiful fragility. What about the form of writing? What would it, in fact, mean to “write like a spider?” Well, there is the “spidery handwriting,” which is where I began. Is it possible that, as handwriting and the realm of the signature disappear, all such endeavors will be seen as weak, fragile, related back to the always temporary realm of the spider, that our words, when not cast in the conventional forms of the machine, will seem as though they were—not exactly writ on water, but writ on the fragility of a web which will inevitably disappear before morning, and shrivel in the cold light? So perhaps the spider, in McGrath as well as in the other writings to which I have alluded, figures as that which needs to be superseded, to be erased, as we proceed into a new world; it is a strange stain on modernity. But on the other hand, it may signify a limit of our power: whatever ideology we may adopt, preach or succumb to, there may also always be the spider, unconcerned with these petty modulations. Let me conclude with an eco-question: have there ever been, is it likely there ever will be, major campaigns for the preservation of the spider—or, indeed, for any particular species of spider, so many of which are, in fact, endangered? Certainly there are research facilities dedicated to the preservation of some of those species, and we may applaud their endeavors; while they are doing their valuable work, they might, I suppose, invite us from the arts side of matters to investigate what “writing like a spider”

McGrath’s Web  31 might actually look like, although perhaps it is better that we imagine or invent it for ourselves—because otherwise, we might find ourselves in altogether more difficult waters: namely, what might it be to write like, for example, a mosquito? Not a comfortable thought, although it may be one not entirely foreign to our fantasies; but then, the spider does not in general come to remind us of comfort, although it may well come to enable us to think about the very form of writing, and of the resistance to the merely human—in which, in fact, “writing,” in some sense of that term, might be, at least in our fantasies, a crucial part.

References Bal, Mieke. 2001. Louise Bourgeois’ “Spider:” The Architecture of Art Writing. Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press. Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. 2009. An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory. 4th Edition. Harlow: Pearson Education. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eagleton, Terry. 1976. Marxism and Literary Criticism. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1988. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Michael Howard. New York: Vintage Books, 1961. Free Dictionary. 2019. “spidery,” adj. www.thefreedictionary.com/spidery. Kamau Brathwaite, Edward. 1973a. “Ananse.” In The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy, 165–166. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1973b. “Sunsum.” In The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy, 148–149. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGrath, Patrick. 1992. Spider. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 2017. “Poe’s Dank Vaults.” In Writing Madness: Patrick McGrath, edited by Danel Olson, 549–551. Lakewood, CO: Centipede Press. Punter, David. 2007. Modernity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sherlock, Philip. 1956. Anansi the Spider Man. London: Macmillan & Co. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Wong, David. 2011. John Dies at the End. London: Titan, 2007. ———. 2012. This Book is Full of Spiders. London: Titan. Zlosnik, Sue. 2011. Patrick McGrath. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

2 Martha Peake and the Madness of “Free Trade” Evert Jan van Leeuwen

Patrick McGrath’s Martha Peake: A Novel of the Revolution (2000) inherits from the more radical novels of the 1790s, such as William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), the use of traditional gothic conventions to explore contemporary political anxieties. Stephen Shapiro explains that the gothic has prospered specifically in moments of great economic anxiety about the (re)shaping of “the capitalist world-system” (2008, 35). Not only do gothic texts register anxieties concerning the development of, and changes within, capitalist expansion, but “Gothic narratives,” Shapiro argues, “often seem prophetic about oncoming crises” (2008, 33). Martha Peake falls firmly within this category by laying bare the madness of “free trade” seven years before the first global financial crisis of the new century. Much of the story is set in London and New England in the period directly leading up to the American War of Independence. The two narrators, William and Ambrose Tree, together reconstruct the tragic history of Harry Peake—a disgraced smuggler turned grotesque prophet of the Revolution—and his daughter Martha—the victim of her father’s excesses—as both fall under the spell of the libertarian discourse of the day and the popular motto “no taxation without representation.” This now iconic slogan of the American Revolution appeared as a headline on page 89 in the London Magazine for February 1768, around the same time that Harry and Martha Peake entered London (McGrath 2000, 24). Despite being a historical gothic fiction, McGrath’s novel builds a bridge between the late eighteenth century and the turn of the twenty-first century because William and Ambrose Tree play the role of historians, rather than actors in a historical drama. By drawing parallels and oppositions between the mid-eighteenth-century Cornish smuggling culture into which Harry Peake was born and the American Revolution, Ambrose and William get caught up in a debate about the interpretation of historical events, giving the novel a meta-textual character. In this way, the history of the Peakes becomes a story about the efficacy and ethics of unbridled free-market capitalism today, as much as yesteryear. In 1776, the year in which Thomas Paine published Common Sense and the American “Congress finally accepted the need for independence” (Countryman 1991, 122), Adam Smith wrote in his Wealth of

Martha Peake  33 Nations that “commerce, which ought naturally to be, among nations, as among individuals, a bond of union and friendship, has become the most fertile source of discord and animosity” (1976, vol. I, 493). This central paradox of capitalist ideology, illustrated by the American War of Independence, has been critically explored by many intellectuals in Western culture ever since Marx and Engels claimed that the rise of capitalism has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. (76) In 1964, Herbert Marcuse pointed out that “freedom of enterprise was from the beginning not altogether a blessing. As the liberty to work or to starve, it spelled toil, insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population” (2). The “wealth” that a free-market economic model promises its many and various participants is one of (prospective) material prosperity, not spiritual and communal well-being. As Cynthia C. Kaufman argues, “the world’s current form of capitalism has resulted in severe inequality and poverty” (2012, 2), rather than the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Since the time of the American Revolution, the setting of McGrath’s novel, an ever-increasing focus on the accumulation of private property and liquid assets in Western culture has led to the spread of affluenza: “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more” (De Graaf et al. 2014, 1). Ambrose and William Tree construct the tragic character of Harry Peake, as well as the American colonists, as early victims of this modern and global plague, described by Immanuel Wallerstein as “the endless accumulation of capital,” which serves the purpose to “accumulate still more capital, a process that is continual and endless” (2004, 24). Even if many people in Western culture have become infected with “the obsessive, almost religious quest for economic expansion that has become the core principle of what is called the American dream” (de Graaf et al. 2014, 2), the rise of various popular as well as intellectual “anti-globalist” movements at the end of the twentieth century has shown that total conformity to consumer-capitalist ideology is not inevitable. In the wake of the most recent global banking crisis (2007–2008), the popular media have transformed the stereotypical businessman from a model citizen into a monster. Noël Carroll (1990) has argued that within fictional narratives “the monster is a being in violation of” what is believed by most people within a society to be “the natural order” of things (40).

34  Evert Jan van Leeuwen Yet, within these narratives, the monster undeniably exists, alive and well, and confronts society with the “faultlines” (Sinfield 1992) inherent in the dominant ideologies that uphold the status quo. Through their real and threatening presence within the story-world, monsters challenge the normality, naturalness, and desirableness of a specific social, cultural, political, and/or economic system. When the stereotype of the successful businessman is stripped of its glamorous trappings and becomes a monstrous figure—Greg Stillson in Stephen King’s The Dead Zone (1979), Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), and Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991)—a “faultline” within the dominant ideology becomes visible, allowing the reader to develop a critical stance toward what may have appeared commonsensical and desirable at first. Harry “America” Peake functions as just such a monster, drawing attention to the destructive powers of unbridled “free trade.” In McGrath’s novel, Harry “America” Peake’s physical monstrosity is the result of a freak accident. This accident, however, is largely the result of his smuggling practices and addiction to alcohol, which in turn can be understood as a response to the British government’s taxation policies, exemplified by the conflict with its North-Eastern American colonies. Considered by many Cornish families as the only available form of “free trade” (McGrath 2000, 14)—in the sense of being entirely free from governmental interference—the Cornish smuggling practices into which Harry Peake is initiated are a direct response to the failure of “free trade” economics to turn its promises of prosperity into an improved daily experience for all. The mental transmogrification that Harry undergoes after his accident is a corruption of his soul brought on by the Cornish culture’s growing alienation from a Britain increasingly invested in the capitalist world-system. By drawing parallels between the glorious rise and grotesque demise of Harry Peake and the lives of the American colonists rebelling against a centralized authority intent on exploiting its colonies to fill its coffers, McGrath’s novel suggests that the ideologies and institutions in which this authority is grounded are producing the very monsters they fear most. By the end of the novel, the incestuous child of Martha Peake, the American-born Harry junior, is shown to have magically inherited his father’s physical deformity: a dark prophecy for a nation born out of a civil war and the rise of global free-market capitalism. Harry Peake’s turn to the Cornish form of “free trade” needs to be understood in the context of colonial smuggling practices as chronicled by historian Alan L. Karras. He points out that “most [smugglers] were simply trying to improve upon the economic circumstances of their lives,” even if “the unintended consequence of this was a weakening of the very state whose support they depended upon for the protection of life and liberty” (2010, 69). According to Edwin S. Todd, ideally, to ensure a stable government dedicated to public welfare, “every citizen, and

Martha Peake  35 every species of property potentially or actually productive, so far as it may be compatible with economical tax administration, should directly or indirectly contribute to the support of all grades of government” (1936, 334). For Todd, the duty to support government is universal; consequently, the greater number of people brought into the tax field, the greater will be the ‘tax consciousness’ which will manifest itself in a more lively interest in public expenditures and in public fiscal administration. (1936, 334) In other words, taxation can work for the benefit of all, but only if all participate in the system to the best of their ability. Full participation can only be relied upon when all citizens have faith that the system is fair, and will lead to a just distribution of public money, so that it is well spent for the benefit of the body politic.1 Unfortunately, as Kaufman explains, history has shown that “capitalism […] allows the wealthy to invest their profits as they please, control government processes, and allow people’s fates to be determined by market forces” (2012, 3). To collect tax on the profits amassed by free traders successfully playing the market has proven as notoriously difficult as the fair public spending of the tax collected. The Cornish, in Ambrose and William Tree’s reconstruction of Harry Peake’s youthful life at Port Jethro, clearly have no faith in their government’s ability to fairly collect and spend taxes and feel they are losing out under the government’s current economic policies. In response, they have developed their own more radical version of “free trade” that by maximizing profits and minimizing costs actually exemplifies the ideal theoretical trade model. Significantly, the Cornish smugglers’ enterprise, like most colonial enterprises begins with the theft of another’s property, and as such is fundamentally unethical. William Tree’s history of Harry’s youth reveals that the mid-­eighteenthcentury economic system—like smuggling—was unethical in not fairly distributing the nation’s wealth among its citizens. Ambrose Tree learns from his uncle that Harry’s mother was a “poor ragged soul” who “lived on the seashore near the harbour” of Port Jethro “in a shack built of fishing net and ship’s planking,” where she spent her days “cutting seaweed on the beaches thereabouts, which she sold for a few pence the cartload to a farmer inland” (McGrath 2000, 8). For contemporary readers, Maggie Peake’s plight might bring to mind the Morecambe Bay cockling disaster of 2004, which grimly highlights the continuing exploitation of labor in the twenty-first century.2 The significance of William’s account of Harry’s history is not that he reveals to Ambrose the tragic hero’s poverty-stricken childhood, but that he romanticized it. Rather than explaining to Ambrose that Harry was born into poverty, William paints a picture of “one of those cursed few[…]to whom Nature in her

36  Evert Jan van Leeuwen folly gave the soul of a smuggler, and the tongue of a poet” (McGrath 2000, 6). For William, Cornish wildness is in the blood: “his mother was a whore and a drunkard, and probably mad” (McGrath 2000, 9); Harry is “distinguished for wickedness […] a scoundrel […] a thief and a liar,” a born rebel who “recognized no authority” (McGrath 2000, 9). Rather than countering his uncle’s romanticization of rural poverty, Ambrose reflects that “there is often more love to be had in a hovel than a palace” (McGrath 2000, 8), further strengthening the cultural stereotype of the authenticity of peasant lives. William foregrounds his idea that individual human character is tied strongly to the land by emphasizing that at “the age of seventeen Harry had yet to cross the Tamar” (McGrath 2000, 11). William further romanticizes Harry’s smuggler’s soul by telling Ambrose that having reached adulthood—and despite “a flaw in his nature” (McGrath 2000, 12)—Harry “prospered, bought his own boat, and came in time to be regarded as one of the first men of Port Jethro” (McGrath 2000, 13). In fact, he tells Ambrose, “there was not a man, not a family in Cornwall which was not involved in the free trade” (McGrath 2000, 14). To be one of the “first men of Port Jethro,” William suggests, is to be the most successful smuggler in town. For the Cornish, William believes, smuggling is a way of life; it is the natural order of things in the West Country. And Harry’s tragic fate, therefore, is the result of his lifestyle. Just before fate struck Harry down, William points out, he “came home from a landing—a ship from the West Indies on her way up to Bristol—with a dozen casks of rum stowed in the back of his wagon” (McGrath 2000, 14). Smuggling and alcohol, as much as the government’s tax policies, cause Harry’s downfall. The often-sardonic tone of William’s narrative is crucial. William paints a portrait of Harry as a died-in-the-wool smuggler who sincerely believes in his right to dodge “the damned Excise” (McGrath 2000, 15). He turns the hellish adjective into a verb when he informs Ambrose that Harry “was damned if the night’s work was to go for nothing” (McGrath 2000, 16). William’s Harry Peake is a ruthless, greedy, and drunken opportunist who gets his comeuppance. This portrait pastes over a faultline in eighteenth-century Britain’s economy, however. Karras explains that the restrictions in trade and shipping—meant to ensure maximum profits for British traders and the Crown—were, in fact, hindering the import of perishable luxury goods that were eventually smuggled to meet demand: “consumers in both Europe and the Americas were […] put in the position of having their personal interests as consumers put at odds with their own government’s legal restrictions” (2010, 58). He also points out that it was among the governing class, including those who made the laws, that demand for luxury perishable goods was greatest. Therefore, “as consumers, they regularly failed to respect the laws they created if it was inconvenient to do so” (2010, 59). Maybe smugglers “acted out of simple consumer self-interest, without regard to the rest of

Martha Peake  37 civil society” (Karras 2010, 65), but so did the governing class, whose demand for luxury goods at low prices fostered the smuggling practices. In the early part of William Tree’s narrative, the ethics of taxation, as much as the moral condemnation of smuggling, is at stake. As Cathryn Pearce explains, “the growth of Customs was part of the increasing centralization and bureaucratization that was occurring in England” and “taxes were seen by the Government as necessary for two purposes: to protect locally made goods and to collect funds to finance the wars against France” (2010, 38). Indirectly, British taxpayers helped to stabilize the nation’s economy by subsidizing its military forces, which in turn had the task, sometimes literally, of clearing the waters for British merchants trading with the colonies. Peter D.G. Thomas explains that in the wake of “Britain’s vast expenditure on behalf of America during the recent [Seven Years’] war” (1994, 108), George Grenville introduced the now infamous “Sugar Act” (1764) followed by the equally infamous “Stamp Act” (1765), which, after “news of colonial protests,” shifted the political debate from one about “the collection of revenue to the assertion of sovereignty” (1994, 110). In other words, the tax issue shifted from concerns about the fairness of government taxes to the right of the government to tax its citizens, a right the government further insisted upon when it introduced the Townshend Acts in 1767, which in part were meant to control American smuggling practices (Chaffin 1994, 126). Ultimately, of course, this conflict boiled down to the question of who owned the money made through supposedly free trade, the industrious individual or the state. For William, smuggling, the “free trade” par excellence, is a private, not a public, issue, a form of lunacy in fact, a symptom of a sinful life. William makes his stance on smuggling clear when he tells Ambrose that, when living in poverty in London with his daughter Martha, Harry “had renounced that greed for profit which he had come to see as the root of the evil whose fruit was the death of his wife” (McGrath 2000, 36). Of course, greed is one of the seven deadly sins. The Biblical overtones  of his phrasing here suggest that, for William, the Cornish tradition of smuggling is a sign of the ungodliness of the county’s people: “Martha never tired of listening to tales of her father’s smuggling days” (McGrath 2000, 32), just as young Harry had listened to his mother’s “old tales and legends” (McGrath 2000, 9). As with Harry, “the smuggling was in her blood” (McGrath 2000, 32). According to William, smuggling is the “natural” Cornish way of life. Thus, the Cornish are an inherently ungodly race and can be opposed to the Englishmen at the center of power who, supposedly, exemplify Adam Smith’s more positive description of human nature as motivated by “self-love, sympathy, the desire to be free, a sense of propriety, the habit of labor, and ‘the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange’” (Dowd 2004, 29). Douglas Dowd points out, however, that “many other motives” are “just as ‘natural’”

38  Evert Jan van Leeuwen to mankind and that “many of the latter are irrational, some are downright ugly: ‘the seven deadly sins,’ plus fear, shame, hate, and others” (2004, 29). Ambrose’s history of the American Revolution that follows supports Dowd’s contention, by casting a darker shadow over the ideal of free trade. The paradox of man’s simultaneously good and evil nature is revealed through William’s sentimental musings on Martha’s plight. He tells ­A mbrose how her father wondered how Martha might one day escape that corruption and find a place where the evil inherent in man’s nature […] withered and fell away, and the natural virtuous man within could stand forth. That place, that great good place, he called America. (McGrath 2000, 57) By seeing America and its people as the good, and the British government as evil, Harry does little else but recast in geopolitical terms the maxim that the grass is greener on the other side. This maxim is meant to highlight the chimerical nature of such naïve optimism, but Harry, already infected with affluenza, cannot help but place his hopes in the American dream, as the harsh realities of life in London have sapped his faith in the benevolence of his home nation. In London, Harry earns a living by showing off his grotesque body and becomes aware, as Kaufman argues, that “under capitalism everything gets reduced to its exchange value” (2012, 21). William concludes that “all England was corrupt in Harry’s view, because governed by corrupt men” (McGrath 2000, 57). William emphasizes that this is Harry’s view, not his own. In fact, William “sniffed” (McGrath 2000, 47), Ambrose relays, when he spoke of “the popular view of” the unfolding American crisis. In the popular view, the enforced taxation of Americans was considered an “assault upon the natural rights of the colonists by a king as mad, savage and greedy as the Sea.” This perspective of events is featured in Harry Peake’s popular ballad “Joseph Tresilian,” which is understood to explore themes of “liberty, taxation, and Empire,” and the setting of which is “the New World” (McGrath 2000, 47). For William, it seems, Harry’s transformation from Port Jethro’s premier smuggler into “the Cripplegate Monster” (McGrath 2000, 35) is above all a punishment for his youthful sins. Showing off his grotesque backbone in public, for a meagre return, is “a spiritual labour, a kind of penance” (McGrath 2000, 34). For William, Harry’s physical deformity is “the outward manifestation of a spiritual deformity” (McGrath 2000, 30), but the reader knows that it is actually no more than a broken bone that has “mended crooked” (McGrath 2000, 20), “making him monstrous” in the eyes of a sensation seeking public, but far from the “accursed being” that William tries to make him out to be (McGrath

Martha Peake  39 2000, 21). If anything, the curse that lies upon Harry “America” Peake, is the curse that Sue Zlosnik calls “revolutionary myth-making and the genesis of ‘the American Dream’” (2011, 89). As William and Ambrose contest the true character of Harry—he is either a debauched smuggler or revolutionary prophet—both men are guilty of making a monster. Zlosnik has warned that “a simplistic reading of [Martha Peake] might tempt one to see old decadent England represented as Gothic in contrast to the Romantic freedoms demanded by the New World” (2011, 93). In such a reading, uncle William’s voice represents the “old decadent England” and Ambrose’s voice “the Romantic freedoms” embodied by Harry’s and Martha’s naïve vision of New England. Both narrators seem adamant to stamp their version of events with a seal of authority. But the further from Drogo Hall their story takes them, the more the reader is shown that Ambrose and his doting uncle are both tapping into their own imaginations and ideological prejudices to produce—rather than reconstruct—a meaning from supposedly historical events that may never have happened. In the process, both narrators reveal that the American Revolution, rather than symbolizing the natural progression of Western civilization toward a utopian end, was really a transatlantic continuation of a domestic socioeconomic conflict concerning control over profits brought about by the increasing hegemony of “free trade” ideology that promised the possibility of welfare for all, but in reality, as Dowd has emphasized, seemed to ensure that the material prosperity “went mostly to the top of the social pyramid” (2004, 30). As the Cripplegate monster, drunk, lascivious, and out of control, Harry Peake’s violation of his own daughter becomes, for William, a symbol representing the corruptive power of the popular revolutionary philosophy. For Ambrose, however, Harry’s rape of Martha is the grotesque result of Harry’s corruption by a corrupt market place in which everything, even human dignity is for sale. As the two narrators struggle to convince each other that their understanding of events is the truth of the matter, the reader is able to step back and take a more critical view of either William’s or Ambrose’s conflicting story, both of which support Kaufman’s contention that “under capitalism, ethical and legal limits to the destructive aspects of markets face an uphill battle” (2012, 18). William’s portrait of Harry as the illegal exploiter of the legal free trade system and cheater of the Crown, corrupted by his own smuggler’s blood, is counterbalanced by Ambrose’s image of Harry as the exploited victim of a socioeconomic status quo founded on the unequal distribution of wealth. Since both versions cannot be true simultaneously, and eventually neither version turns out to be accurate, the reader is forced to critically explore both portraits, neither of which looks much like the idealistically rendered painting of Harry hanging in Drogo Hall: the ultimate fiction of Harry as the personification of the American Dream—a dream that turns out to be more disturbing than Harry and Martha had expected.

40  Evert Jan van Leeuwen Martha’s escape to New England provides the reader with crucial information that undermines both William’s and Ambrose’s version of events in Cornwall and London. It is at New Morrock, a colonial fishing village in New England, that Martha realizes that the central economic issues underlying the revolutionary rhetoric of the colonists are in many ways identical to those faced by her family in Cornwall: “it all reminded Martha of her childhood, she remembered her father, in Port Jethro, and visitors who similarly came in the night and left before dawn” (McGrath 2000, 166). Pearce explains, “besides mining and agriculture, fishing was one of the most important economic activities” in Cornwall and “made up a significant sector of Cornwall’s international exports” (2010, 29). Cornish fishermen, Pearce explains, often “were also involved in […] smuggling” (Pearce 30), which despite being a clandestine operation was also “a well organised, complex business venture integrating nearly all levels of society, which included far-­reaching distribution networks, was financed through the use of extensive credit, and had large ship-building operations” (McGrath 2000, 30). This network clearly stretched out across the Atlantic. The Rind family in New Morrock closely mirrors the Peake family in Cornwall. Both are concerned primarily, and understandably, with their own welfare in the face of an increasingly competitive and even hostile trading environment seemingly run on the motto: exploit or be exploited. Early on in the novel, William had told Ambrose that Harry smuggled hundreds of gallons of spirits—not to say tobacco, lace, glass, tea, silk, satin, and china—and every local man was ready to help bring the cargo ashore, to carry it up the shingle, to load it into carts and wagons, and see it safely cached inland, all before dawn. (McGrath 2000, 14) In New Morrock, Martha learns from Adam Rind that it was cod they caught, which they salted down in barrels and sold in the sugar islands. They came away with sugar and molasses, he said, and made rum of it […]. They sold the rum in Africa […] and came away with, oh—he was vague—various goods. (McGrath 2000, 186) At this moment, William’s interruption reveals a faultline in the revolutionary ideology. As he “wheezed with malice” (McGrath 2000, 186), uncle William exclaimed, “slavers were they […] these Sons of Liberty” (186). Significantly, Ambrose reveals that he “ignored this interruption” (186) and simply continues on to his account of New Morrock business practices: “which they then sold to those same plantations where they bartered their salt cod. And in this way, said Adam, men grow rich” (McGrath 2000, 186).

Martha Peake  41 The shift to New England is a crucial point in the novel because at this point Ambrose, the romanticist, becomes the dominant narrator and reveals that he ignores the critical insights that his uncle William is now able to express in response to his nephew’s story. By taking on the role of narrator and listener in turns, Ambrose and William are able to both construct their own version of events and illuminate ideological faultlines in each other’s histories. As the narrators continue to struggle with each other over whose version of events has more authority, the meta-textual theme of the struggle for meaning in the construction of historical narratives is foregrounded. The American Revolution will become a war of independence or an unlawful rebellion, depending on whose account of the story is rhetorically most powerful. To retain narrative coherence, both William and Ambrose have to “ignore” each other’s troublesome interruptions and paste over the ideological faultlines that the gaps in their stories bring to the fore. In Ambrose’s account of what happens in New Morrock, Adam is allowed to explain to Martha (like Harry before him): “your king threatens our prosperity by levying taxes which obstruct our trade and turn us into smugglers. Small wonder we talk of taking up arms to assert our natural rights” (McGrath 2000, 186). Adam insinuates here that if only the Crown would not levy taxes, free trade and thus prosperity would be ensured for all. However, Adam ignores that if the Crown would not levy taxes, the colonies could not be defended against various powerful forces also seeking to profit from the natural resources available on the North-American seaboard: France, Spain, not to forget the Native Americans defending themselves against colonial infringement of their territories. Martha’s uncle Silas, Ambrose reveals (again like Harry), “had a vigorous instinct for commerce, and had grown rich from his various enterprises” (McGrath 2000, 157), including “cod fishery” (167). This explains why he had been “long outraged at the despotism of a distant empire and a distant king” (McGrath 2000, 157). The Crown’s taxation policies were hindering his personal financial interests. Harry Peake had discovered too late that legal free trade was hardly ever fair trade, and that the taxes levied by the state did not transform, visibly at least, into benevolent practices beneficent to the majority of the nation’s citizens. Similarly, Silas Rind has no confidence in the efficacy of governmental spending policy, even if the British military presence in the colonies, paid for with taxes raised, had been instrumental in allowing him to successfully pursue his business ventures. As a consequence, he “pursued [Martha’s] father’s old occupation” of smuggling (McGrath 2000, 186). Adam Rind, Silas’s son, reveals the extent to which the colonists have come to believe that the resources provided on North-American seaboard are their property, rather than aspects of a natural landscape that should serve all those who dwell on it equally: “we only want what is ours by natural right” (McGrath 2000, 161). Importantly, just as Ambrose

42  Evert Jan van Leeuwen is able to highlight ideological faultlines in his uncle’s narrative, and ­ illiam in his nephew’s, Martha’s questions pierce through the libertarW ian rhetoric of the Rind household: “what is a natural right?” (McGrath 2000, 161) she asks in response to Adam’s impassioned speech. Ambrose fails to answer this question, leaving the reader of the novel to dwell on it. Is it the Rind family’s and the other colonists’ natural right to exploit the land and its resources for their own benefit, at the detriment of others? Should they share the wealth of natural resources they have found in New England with Old England, or the Native Americans? Does the Crown have a right to share in the New Englanders’ prosperity in order to safeguard the home nation and its many colonies? The men of New Morrock clearly think not. They are convinced the land and sea are theirs and only theirs, and Martha is drawn into their libertarian ideology. Ignoring her father’s poverty-stricken childhood, Ambrose’s version of Martha wonders how “in Cornwall the free-trader worked solely for profit, whereas Silas’s men worked for a cause, and worked all the better for that reason” (McGrath 2000, 189). The cause Martha is alluding to here is that of so-called freedom; but Kaufman, echoing Marx’s thesis on alienation, 3 warns of the danger of associating the capitalist freetrade ideology with freedom, pointing out that “capitalism puts people in a situation where they must sell their ability to work for a wage, and in this selling they give up their ability to control their everyday lives” (2012, 9). What McGrath’s novel reveals through Ambrose’s and William’s portraits of the Peake family and their arguments about the meaning of the American Revolution is that the American Revolution was as much a capitalist Revolution as a democratic one. When the Reverend John Crow propounds that “Free trade is all we ever asked!” (McGrath 2000, 194), he refrains from mentioning that the colonists’ so-called free trade has been made possible only after wars had been fought and won with Native American tribes and by profiting from the transatlantic slave-economy. As mentioned above, Adam Rind refrains from mentioning the institution of slavery when he explains how New Morrock is able to turn cod into gold. The freedom New Morrock is seeking, is the freedom for its citizens to accumulate more capital, not the liberty of all individuals or communities on the North American seaboard to live a way of life that genuinely benefits all. What the Rind’s really desire to achieve in the colonies is what Wallerstein calls “a quasi-­ monopoly” (2004, 26), in which they can control the accumulation of their capital through international trade. As such the novel’s representation of the American colonists’ motivations to fight for liberty supports Wallerstein’s contention that “the capitalist world economy” (2004, 25) rewards those individuals and groups “who act with the appropriate motivations” and penalizes those “who act with other motivations” (2004, 24).

Martha Peake  43 Knowing her father’s history, which was one of smuggling goods often produced in the slave-economy of the American colonies and the West Indies, Martha should have realized that “people come into the world with vastly different resources at their disposal” (Kaufman 2012, 11), and that the ability to amass any kind of wealth through the legal free trade system will depend very much on the starting capital available. However, ­Ambrose’s history of Martha in New Morrock ignores what Martha must surely have known. Harry had nothing at birth, and thus turned to illegal free trade to amass the starting capital on which he built his fortune. Harry’s ultimate misfortune should have revealed to Martha that the systematic degradation of her father’s psychological well-being was linked to his drive to accumulate wealth that is ever more material. As an exploited Cornishman, Harry had nothing; but by becoming a player within the exploitative market, Harry had allowed himself to be corrupted. Similarly, the inhabitants of New Morrock had moved from a position of being exploited at home to becoming the exploiters themselves in the New World. Ambrose is taken in with the romanticization of the colonists: how close to the elements these people lived […] clinging to a Cliffside with their faces to the sea, and the forest and the mountains at their backs, they had created plenty from the wilderness, and from their surplus had established a thriving commerce. (McGrath 2000, 189) Just as Adam Rind is willfully blind to the slavery that forms the foundation of his prosperity, Ambrose ignores the historical fact that the New England colonists’ economic exploitation of the North-American seaboard’s natural resources was made possible only by appropriating the land from the native inhabitants of the region, as Hugh Brogan notes, “the respectable, typical, farming English wanted the Indians’ land; and, as time was to show, they wanted all of it. In due course they gained the strength to take it,” and mostly by foul means (1985, 60). No mention is made by any figure in the novel of the early Pequot War between ­British colonists and Native Americans, or the lengthy French and ­I ndian War that played a crucial role in the political and economic future of ­A merica. The lack of any reference to the aggressive and destructive aspects of American colonization opens up a gulf between the reader’s understanding of Ambrose’s history of the Peake’s and the narrator’s own. Ambrose’s failure to acknowledge the colonist’s exploitative behavior reveals the extent to which he has subscribed to the Romantic rhetoric of Harry Peake’s revolutionary ballad. In contrast to Ambrose’s narrative, McGrath’s novel reveals that within an economic system that increasingly relies on competition for profit between “free” agents, the agents are turning into each other’s enemies as they compete for control and exploitation of the limited

44  Evert Jan van Leeuwen resources available to all; “all” here should be understood as those socalled free agents who subscribe to free-market ideology. As the darker side of America’s colonial history has shown, the “free” competition between agents over the exploitation of natural resources was made possible only through “Treachery” (Brogan 1985, 61) and “Cruelty” (Brogan 1985, 62) in their dealings with those peoples who originally lived on and off the land. The colonists may well have profited from the American wilderness, and free trade may well have been the thing they most desired, but Ambrose’s story of Martha’s plight in this supposed promised land reveals that a world organized according to the free-trade ideology of the colonists is also “an uncertain and unfriendly world” (McGrath 2000, 203), full of mutual suspicion, distrust, and trickery, and grounded in an aggressive foundational act: the illicit appropriation of natural resources. In his portrait of Adam Rind, Ambrose reveals how the colonists’ free-trade ideology has led to a primary concern with material prosperity: “he would build her a house when the war was over, and […] they would live there in peace and grow rich and old surrounded by their children, and their grandchildren, and more yet in this vein” (McGrath 2000, 205). The key phrase here is “more yet in this vein.” Adam’s personal dream became a widely shared ambition in American (and Western) society. The endless desire to have “more yet in this vein” is what is now called affluenza, brought about by the hegemony of a capitalist ideology that, according to Kaufman equates “success with commercial success, and happiness with consumption” (2012, 22). Ambrose’s Martha learns that in New Morrock, absolutely everything can be bargained for. The British captain Giles Hawkins responds to her plea for information about her father with “and what […] will you tell me in return” (McGrath 2000, 235). Ambrose’s narrative reveals that the rebels he had come to admire—and whom uncle William d ­ espised— were willing to perpetuate a lie in order to further their own cause; they made “an effort to promote a different version of the story” of Martha’s eventual attack on the two-timing Hawkins, “one in which Martha Peake played not the traitor,” which they had at first accused her of, “but the patriot […] a heroine […] a martyr to the cause” (McGrath 2000, 306). It is at this point that William’s and Ambrose’s understandings of events seem to converge. Ambrose learns that what really counts is not the truth, which is often near impossible to unearth, but “the accepted version of events” (McGrath 2000, 309). Silas Rind knows this very well: “we need her legend […] it does not matter that the legend is a lie?” (McGrath 2000, 317). However, does it really not matter? Like Ambrose’s and William’s account of the tragic life of Harry Peake, Silas Rind’s fictional account of Martha’s heroism is merely a myth that upholds his own fantasy of how things should be and as a consequence hides a harsher reality. The tale of how a young woman’s prolonged

Martha Peake  45 suffering under social and economic oppression has been marginalized to make room for an astute piece of political propaganda that Rind hopes will get him and his family what they want “and more yet in this vein.” Both Harry and Martha have been lured, baited, and sold in the name of free trade. Property, rights, and ownership are age-old gothic themes, staged in an array of texts from The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Poltergeist (1982). Martha Peake is quintessentially gothic in this respect. Recounting his arrival at his uncle’s residence, Drogo Hall, Ambrose reflects, “I had speculated that his property would come to me when he passed on” (McGrath 2000, 3). Similarly, William Tree must have speculated that Drogo Hall would pass into his hands after the demise of “his benefactor, the great anatomist Lord Drogo” (McGrath 2000, 3). Ambrose configures many events and relations between people in terms of investment and exchange. He distrusts Drogo’s motives for bringing Harry to the Hall, believing the anatomist “wanted to own Harry’s spine,” and when Harry had become a hopeless alcoholic simply “capitalized on his good fortune!” (McGrath 2000, 72; original emphasis). According to Ambrose, Harry “had sold his soul” (McGrath 2000, 70) for money, with which he could by more drink and had ruined himself in the process (McGrath 2000, 73). Ambrose’s language shows that, despite his romanticizing of the American Revolution, he has fully imbibed the capitalist discourse he is trying to critique. Ironically, Ambrose is also wrong about Lord Drogo and his uncle. He finds out that Harry was, in fact, taken in rather than ruthlessly exploited by Lord Drogo. Charity and benevolence do still exist, it seems, even if they are no longer recognizable to someone like Ambrose. As much as William may be wrong in portraying Harry as a wild man running on the poisoned smuggler’s blood of his Cornish ancestors, Ambrose is equally wrong in romanticizing the American revolutionaries as freedom fighters. The Cornish smugglers, the American Revolutionaries, and the British ruling classes are all equally concerned with filling their coffers, which necessarily has to be at the expense of each other, since one man’s profit entails another’s loss; they have all been struck with the curse of “free trade,” and the affluenza that it brings about. When Ambrose reveals that “large structures were collapsing in my mind” (McGrath 2000, 325), he seems to be referring to all his preconceived notions about Harry, Martha, Lord Drogo, the shadowy Clyte, and even uncle William. Each of these figures, at one point or other, could have proved the gothic monster intent on gobbling up Ambrose as he wandered the labyrinthine passages of Drogo Hall. Instead, Ambrose realizes that the true gothic specter haunting the house and his revolutionary tale is the madness of “free trade,” the thirst for “more yet in this vein,” that has struck Harry Peake down and has unleashed yet another war.

46  Evert Jan van Leeuwen Significantly, recent historical scholarship on the American Revolution has raised some difficult questions concerning the libertarian idealism popularly believed to have inspired it. Michael A. McDonnell has shown that the “collective memory of the Revolutionary War as a nation-­ building event stands in marked contrast to the historical realities of the War for Independence” (2013, 21). He explains, “the Revolution went on for so long because of the many divisions among colonists themselves over whether to fight, what to fight for, and who would do the fighting” (2013, 21). Rather than coming together as a nation, he explains, “most people’s sense of their country extended no farther than the boundaries of their own local communities” (2013, 22). Consequently, “it was for local defense that most people fought and died” (24). Those who fought were generally not citizen-soldiers fighting for love of country. They were most often the poor, the landless, the young, and the foreign-­ born, looking for a wage and individual advancement, whether in the form of bounty in money, land, slaves, or even a new set of clothes. (McDonnell 2013, 24) As such, the American colonists resembled the Cornish smugglers among whom Harry Peake was born. McGrath’s novel is a disturbing rendering of the ways in which two British men of different generations struggle to enforce their understanding of the American Revolution on each other. Their narratives highlight above all the role that “interest” played in this war, in all its various meanings. Free trade, as the citizens of eighteenth-century Cornwall had found out, did little to alleviate the poor quality of life they experienced; understandably, from their impoverished position, they looked with increasing interest at the luxury goods that were imported and exported from Cornish ports, but which they could not afford. From a desire to participate in the consumption of such luxury items, the Cornish took to smuggling. Only by circumventing the excise man, could the Cornish “free-traders” maximize their interest and amass the wealth that allowed them to indulge in the consumption of luxury items. In a commercial hub like London, where there was great demand for and consumption of exotic produce, Harry and Martha Peake learned that anything can be sold, as long as it is made desirable; profit can be had even by cleverly marketing a crooked backbone through a sensational and sufficiently repeated legend. Martha learns that the colonies, even more than the motherland, have perfected the system of free trade and are willing and able to sell a traitor for a patriot if it is in their interest to do so. Harry Peake, having experienced the corruptive allure of money, still desired to give his daughter a better, more comfortable life; but he needed more money to do so, which eluded him because of a lack of

Martha Peake  47 capital in London. The Rind family in New Morrock had prospered in New England, but in the process had entered the competitive market place, turning their home nation into a space of business rivalry, and ultimately corrupting their apparently utopian community, as they, like the motherland, turned to smuggling and slavery to prosper personally and as a community. Ambrose Tree, in failing to overwrite his uncle William’s reactionary version of revolutionary events, and supplanting it with his own romanticized narrative, reveals in the end that there is true madness in unbridled free trade and that affluenza can infect us all—a horrible prospect.

Notes 1 Todd’s depression-era essay exploring “the fundamental problem of justice in taxation” (334) has become topical again after the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for Realists (Bloomsbury 2017), stunned the world at the 2019 Davos Economic Forum by berating international business leaders, and the wealthiest classes of the world population in general, for failing to pay their fair share of taxes, and in doing so hindering efforts to achieve greater financial equality within the capitalist world system. 2 In the winter of 2004, 23 illegal workers drowned while picking cockles in Morecambe Bay, highlighting that the immoral exploitation of human beings in order to maximize profits continues to this day. Nick Broomfield’s film Ghosts (2007), a dramatic interpretation of the Morecambe Bay tragedy, paints a dark yet clear picture of the grim and hopeless daily-lived experience for those individuals and groups on the bottom rung of the capitalist ladder. 3 Marx developed his thesis on alienation over many writings; William T. Blackstone summarizes it as follows: “In the capitalist system man sells his soul—his creative work—in the marketplace and becomes a mere commodity. Everything becomes a commodity or a saleable item. All aspects of the culture become capitalistically oriented, with a monetary or product value assigned to everything, and even the very desires and needs of men are oriented to fit the products produced […]. The ‘needs’ and goals of men are manipulated by the capitalist system in the interest of greater profits, not in the interests of men” (1973, 162–3).

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48  Evert Jan van Leeuwen Dowd, Douglas. 2004. Capitalism and its Economics: A Critical History. New Edition. London: Pluto Press. Ellis, Bret Easton. 1991. American Psycho. New York: Vintage. De Graaf, John, et al. 2014. Affluenza. San Francisco, CA: BK. Karras, Alan L. 2010. Smuggling: Contraband and Corruption in World ­History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Kaufman, Cynthia C. 2012. Getting Past Capitalism: History, Vision, Hope. Lanham, MD: Lexington. King, Stephen. 1979. The Dead Zone. London: Futura, 1984. London Magazine; Or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer; for February, 1768. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ pt?id=mdp.39015021278141&view=1up&seq=11. Marcuse, Herbert. 1991. One-Dimensional Man. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 2012. The Communist Manifesto, edited by Jeffrey C. Isaac. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. McDonnell, Michael A. 2013. “War and Nationhood: Founding Myths and Historical Realities.” In Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War, edited by Michael A. McDonnell, Clare Corbould, Frances M. Clarke, and W. Fitzhugh Brundage, 19–40. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. McGrath, Patrick. 2001. Martha Peake. London: Penguin, 2000. Pearce, Cathryn J. 2010. Cornish Wrecking, 1700–1860: Reality and Popular Myth. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Shapiro, Stephen. 2008. “Transvaal, Transylvania: Dracula’s World-system and Gothic Periodicity.” Gothic Studies 10, no. 1: 29–47. doi:10.7227/GS.10.1.5. Sinfield, Alan. 1992. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, Adam. 1976. The Wealth of Nations, edited by R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1776. Stone, Oliver, dir. 1987. Wall Street. Twentieth Century Fox. Thomas, Peter D.G. 1994. “The Grenville Programme, 1763–1765.” In The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, edited by Jack P. Greene and J.R. Pole, 107–112. Oxford: Blackwell. Todd, Edwin S. 1936. “An Ideal Tax System.” The Tax Magazine 14 (June): 334–340 & 384. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2004. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zlosnik, Sue. 2011. Patrick McGrath. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

3 “A cell without a nucleus is a ruin” Vampiric Creations of the Unhealthy Disabled in Patrick McGrath’s “Blood Disease” Alan Gregory The various literary configurations of physical disability that punctuate Patrick McGrath’s work germinate from his early short fiction, particularly in his presentation of the anthropologist, William “Congo Bill” Clack-Herman, of “Blood Disease,” which appears in the short story collection Blood and Water and Other Tales (1988). This chapter will read the transnational scope of “Blood Disease” as a vehicle for the creation of what Susan Wendell defines as the “unhealthy disabled.” Clack-Herman returns from Congo a physically emaciated figure whose body has been ravaged by malaria, a tropical disease transmitted by the bite of an infected mosquito. The bite that Clack-Herman is given by the mosquito is subsequently mirrored in the insect bite sustained by his son, Frank, when a flea emerges from the fur of the Colobus monkey that has accompanied Clack-Herman home. William and Frank’s respective wounds, inflicted by creatures who originate from “exotic” topographies, code imperial expansion as a mechanism for the creation of sick, or disabled, bodies. McGrath’s revised model of vampirism at this early juncture in his prolific writing presents visible traces of chronic illness and physical debilitation that are subsequently projected onto several other male bodies featured in his later works, marking a critical synergy between gothic studies and disability studies that ­McGrath explores throughout his literary corpus. In the current critical zeitgeist, it is tempting to suggest that McGrath’s short fiction displays those anxieties concerning globalization, which are central to Glennis Byron’s conception of “globalgothic”: “Globalisation itself […] becomes a gothic manifestation, a material and psychic invasion, a force of contamination and dominance […] globalization is gothicked—made […] vampiric” (2013, 5). Yet, at least to begin with, the tale resists interpretation in these terms, its transnational lexicon suggesting, in the first instance, anxieties that appear at level of the nation. There are multiple different instances of disability in the story, as well as a doubling of African and European blood diseases, and these are quite explicitly connected to issues of class (in Britain), albeit via tropes that summon a

50  Alan Gregory history of colonial domination (in Africa). Reworking what we may term the imperial gothic mode, McGrath’s story does not so much “other” Clack-Herman’s colonial encounters, but instead uses images of illness and disability at home (as well as abroad) to suggest the degradation of once entrenched British class structures. McGrath’s careful representation of these sick and disabled bodies signals the decay and decline of both the colonial project and the English upper classes of the 1930s.

Disability Studies, Illness, and the Gothic In his introduction to The Disability Studies Reader (2013), Lennard J. Davis demonstrates how notions of normality govern cultural representations of the body and mind. The power of normality as a mark of human standardization, Davis contends, manifests in “the way that normalcy is constructed to create the ‘problem’ of the disabled person” (1). Davis subsequently suggests that literature can operate to reinforce social and cultural fixations on notions of normativity by highlighting that disabled figures in fictional narratives are invariably decentralized: “the very structures on which the novel rests tend to be normative, ideologically emphasizing the universal quality of the central character whose normativity encourages us to identify with them” (9). Constructions of normativity do not, however, extend indiscriminately across all modes of literary representation, with the gothic emerging as a space in which physical disability can be renegotiated, and where established cultural configurations of normativity can be challenged. McGrath’s intermittent but sustained attention to psychological and corporeal difference exemplifies an impulse in contemporary gothic writing to recognize its own cultural history—awash with excess and monstrosity—and to shift the disabled body into a centralized position, locating this on a boundless continuum of corporeal configurations. The gothic’s affinity with excess and monstrosity makes it a fertile narrative space in which to interrogate and depart from standardized measures of corporeal normativity. Gothic is a mode that remains fascinated by the disabled body. As David Punter notes, the history of […] dealings with the disabled body runs throughout the history of the Gothic, a history of invasion and resistance, of the enemy within, of bodies torn and tormented or else rendered miraculously, or else, catastrophically, whole. (2000, 40) Punter’s recognition of the myriad ways in which disabled bodies permeate the gothic sheds critical light on the diverse corporeal archetypes that manifest in a literary and cultural mode synonymous with nonnormative forms of embodiment, and, moreover, locates these bodies as imperative

Vampiric Creations  51 to the mechanics of narrative. Despite the gothic’s evident fixation on archetypes of physical disability, manifest in the excessive contours of a multitude of monstrous bodies textually configured as disabled, arguably no contemporary exponent of the gothic has demonstrated a fascination with this penchant for representing extreme configurations of non-normative embodiment more clearly than Patrick McGrath. Critical appraisals of McGrath’s writing are typically framed through psychoanalytic discourses, a remnant of McGrath’s fascination with the tortured minds that populate the short fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. McGrath, however, perpetually extends the parameters of his tortured protagonists’ psychological distortions and writes them onto the body as physical impairments. As Sue Zlosnik states: “Madness in McGrath’s work is always manifested corporeally, the permeability of the boundaries of self often manifesting itself in unstable bodies and a context in which entropy is immanent” (2011, 49). Although Zlosnik ties its presence to psychological disturbance, the recurrent presence of the physically impaired body is worthy of critical consideration independent of psychological discourses. The impairments endured by figures including Sir Hugo Coal of The Grotesque (1989), Edward Haggard of Dr Haggard’s Disease (1993), and Harry Peake of Martha Peake (2000) contribute to a reconfiguration of the gothic as a literary and cultural space in which the physically impaired or disabled body can be renegotiated. Zlosnik initiates her critical analysis of McGrath as a gothic author by stating that: “The motifs, themes and models of writing to be found in McGrath’s later writing have their genesis in their early short stories” (13). McGrath’s evident and long-standing interest in disability demonstrates this consistency: the persistent vegetative state endured by Coal; the pronounced limp exhibited by the traumatized Haggard; and the contorted corpus of Peake (the Cripplegate Monster) are antedated by the emaciated figure of anthropologist William Clack-Herman in “Blood Disease,” which, as mentioned, appears in McGrath’s inaugural collection of short fiction. The debilitating symptoms of malaria made manifest on Clack-­ Herman’s weakened body may seem, at least on first reading, to be more clearly aligned with discourses of illness than with the configurations of disability represented by various bodies in McGrath’s subsequent writings. Susan Wendell’s research has, however, facilitated a critical framing of chronic illness as a form of disability which, when applied to McGrath’s fiction, integrates William Clack-Herman’s condition into McGrath’s continuum of physical impairment. Considered in this way, Clack-Herman’s enfeeblement renders him as a literary configuration of “the Unhealthy Disabled” (Wendell 2013, 161). In defining her terms of differentiation between healthy and unhealthy disability, ­Wendell ­suggests that the “healthy disabled” encompasses “people whose physical conditions and functional limitations are relatively stable

52  Alan Gregory and predictable for the foreseeable future” (162). Wendell goes on to ­identify a spectrum of chronic illnesses, including “HIV/AIDS, fibromyalgia, myologic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome” (162). These are conditions affiliated with the “unhealthy disabled” because, they can behave like recurring acute illness with periods of extreme debility and periods of normal (or nearly normal) health, or they can have virtually constant symptoms […] and/or [they are] characterised by recurring acute episodes that leave behind permanent losses of function. (163–164) It is noteworthy that Wendell’s definition of unhealthy disability does not explicitly reference malaria. Nevertheless, the extreme debilitation visited on William Clack-Herman’s emaciated musculature throughout “Blood Disease” is clearly legible in Wendell’s terms, rendering the aftereffects of the eponymous tropical disease a chronic illness, which transforms its victim into an unhealthy disabled person. McGrath’s representation of Clack-Herman as debilitated by malaria suggests a productive intersection between gothic and disability studies. On first inspection, it seems, too, to frame travel and the specters of the British empire as catalysts for the creation of the unhealthy d ­ isabled body. As Zlosnik recognizes, McGrath’s early short fiction betrays a “preoccupation with the colonial aspect of British history” (18). Utilizing “The Lost Explorer” (1988), featured in Blood and Water, as ­illustrative of this interest, Zlosnik notes that “[t]he cultural history of colonial exploration […] finds expression in the hearts of the bourgeois family” (18). In her scrutiny of McGrath’s early fascination with colonial discourses, Zlosnik identifies Joseph Conrad as especially influential in informing McGrath’s approach to the representation of the English gentry in their entitled navigation of British colonies (18). The shadow that Heart of Darkness (1899) casts over McGrath’s writing corresponds to the significance that Lennard J. Davis attaches to Conrad’s fiction as a litmus test for the subsequent emergence of literary disability studies. As Davis asserts: Although he is not remembered as a writer on disability, Conrad is a good test case […] because he wrote during a period when eugenics had permeated British society and when Freud had begun to write about normal and abnormal psychology. (Davis 2013, 10) Davis’s perspective on Conrad as an accidental exponent of literary disability reframes Conrad’s writing as a prototype for the affinity between literary disability and blood culture that is subsequently taken up by

Vampiric Creations  53 McGrath in his gothic narratives. Yet it is not only “Congo Bill” who is afflicted by a blood disease in McGrath’s story, and there are more complex textures at work. Even if the story starts with a recounting of William’s sickness in Congo, the real space under interrogation is E ­ ngland, where, after arriving at Southampton, William is set, supposedly, to begin a period of convalescence. The Blue Bat Inn, where William, his wife Virginia, and son Frank stop for a night on their journey from Southampton, is home to a group of working men who suffer the effects of pernicious anemia, and are ready to drink the blood of any of the upper classes foolish enough to lodge there. On introducing this anemic cult or “cell,” McGrath’s narrator soon notes: “The fall of the Roman Empire has been attributed in part to malarial epidemics, and also to the effects of pernicious anemia caused by lead in the plumbing” (1989, 95). The fall of an empire, then, can be symptomatic of both “exotic” illnesses contracted abroad, and of systemic and self-inflicted failures that are closer to home. In “Blood Disease,” McGrath therefore complicates, and to an extent unpicks, the imperial gothic’s tendency to debate or explore “the existence of otherness and alterity, often in order to demonize such otherness” (Smith and Hughes 2003, 3). One symbol of “exotic” otherness in the story would seem to be a Colobus monkey, which, indigenous to central Africa, accompanies William Clack-Herman home as an intended gift for Frank. Suggestive of a parody of the imperial gothic, and its correlate representations of anxieties surrounding reverse colonization, Frank comes to find that the monkey is in fact dead; its supposed otherness is negated almost from the outset of the story. Instead, a parasitic flea, which has travelled with the monkey, provides the surprisingly tame bite of Africa. Although the bite Frank sustains does not precipitate a corporeal degeneration identical to his father’s, it does function as a grim motif of patriarchal inheritance, gesturing to “the decay of the gentry” that is abundant in McGrath’s fiction (Zlosnik 2011, 42). The disease of amorality that grips the colonizer is still at work amidst Clack-Herman’s own family on English soil. When Virginia encounters an old friend and flame—Ronald Dexter—in the dining room of The Blue Bat, she signals that she is open to his advances even if, as it is revealed, they are distantly related and share a certain “consanguinity.” In this way, the centrality of blood and bloodlines in “Blood Disease,” reinforces the disintegration of the British bourgeois that informs much of McGrath’s early work. The Clack-Herman’s family structure falls apart in various ways and the relationship between father and son is just one such point of tension in the story. That said, an emphasis on notions of patriarchal inheritance features as part of the extensive repertoire of gothic tropes and motifs deployed in McGrath’s writing, and it is one that resonates thematically with the origins of the gothic novel itself. It is not insignificant that in Horace Walpole’s inaugural Castle of Otranto (1764), the plot turns

54  Alan Gregory precisely on the failure of the tyrannical Manfred’s to prevent the end of his bloodline, which is signaled in the novel by the death of his son Conrad. The relationship between William and Frank Clack-Herman echoes this fascination with the familial inheritance of the English gentry. What is striking about “Blood Disease,” however, is that, in gesturing toward William’s travels in Africa, the narrative identifies (colonial) exploration specifically as the catalyst for degenerating bloodlines. And in presenting travel as the antecedent to William’s chronic and debilitating illness in this way, McGrath is also referencing another archetypal gothic figure: the vampire.

McGrath’s Vampire Gothic: Images of Globalization and Impairment Indeed, vampirism is invoked more widely in “Blood Disease”—and not only in the title. The origins of Clack-Herman’s hemoglobic affliction are attributed—as noted—to the bite of an infected mosquito. While ­McGrath’s representation of this fluid transaction does not rely on conventional figurations of the vampire, the mechanics of infection are coded in the narrative as identical to those of the vampire’s kiss, presenting the mosquito as an alternative instrument of vampiric creation: From the thorny tip of her mouthparts she unsheathed a slender ­stylus, and having sliced neatly through Bill’s skin tissue, pierced a tiny blood vessel […]. Two powerful pumps in the insect’s head began to draw off blood while simultaneously hundred of tiny parasites were discharged into his bloodstream. (McGrath 1989, 84) The methodical, objective description of the transference of blood drawn from the body and parasitic needle penetrating the nucleus of the victim’s red blood cell invokes a scientific appropriation of the vampiric act of feeding. This vampiric analogy extends from the administering of the infected blood to the lifelessness that Clack-Herman exhibits in the aftermath of the bite: [T]he Congo Bill who docked at Southampton one morning in the summer of 1934 was not the vigorous young man who’s left for ­A frica a year previously. He was haggard and thin, and forced to walk with a stick. His flesh was discoloured, and his fingers trembled constantly. He looked, in short, like a man who was dying. (McGrath 1989, 85) The power of the insect to condemn McGrath’s seasoned traveler to a state of physical weakness echoes the languidity that Stoker attributes

Vampiric Creations  55 to bitten heroine Lucy Westenra, and simultaneously frames the severity of his chronic illness as disability. This notion is reinforced by Clack-­ Herman’s reliance on a walking stick: an overt symbol of impairment. In McGrath’s gothic imagination, this impairment is presented as a product of vampiric process. “Blood Disease” therefore adheres to David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s notion of “narrative prosthesis,” a concept which “indicate[s] that disability has been used […] as a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representative power, [and]  disruptive potentiality [… demonstrating …] that the disabled body represents a potent symbolic site of literary investment” (Mitchell and ­Snyder 2008, 49). The vampire features among the stock figures and archetypes that have recurred across the history of the gothic into the present day. This longevity tells of a capacity for crystallizing social and cultural anxieties that shift and change with time, as Byron notes in her discussion of ­gothic’s affinity with contemporary discourses of globalization: While the gothic is obviously not unique in registering the effects of globalisation, it does appear to have a particularly intimate relationship with the process, offering a ready-made language to describe whatever anxieties might arise in an increasingly globalised world. From [Arjun] Appadurai’s cannibal culture to [Ulrich] Beck’s zombie concepts to Hardt and Negri’s golems and vampires, the discourses of globalisation repeatedly turn to gothic tropes in articulating the social, cultural and economic impacts of the new world order. (2013, 2–3) Although in her introduction Byron cites Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s vampiric figures as totems of globalgothic, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) perhaps remains the vampire who retains the most cultural capital. His iconic embodiment of anxieties pertaining to contagion and Otherness has endured, and continues to be fundamental to the gothic mode. Dracula is also arguably the most high-profile figuration of a vampirism that suggests a generative relation between gothic studies and disability studies, one that also—importantly—facilitates a critical appraisal of how discourses of globalization and impairment intersect in the fiction of McGrath. McGrath’s emphasis on blood as a dominant motif—both in “Blood Disease” and beyond—forms part of the wider cultural trend that binds gothic and disability studies together. Michael Davidson utilizes Stoker’s Dracula to establish the relationship between disability studies and blood culture, stating that the vampire’s need for fresh blood is often identified with sexual and racial transgressions. Dracula’s aristocratic appearance and

56  Alan Gregory behaviour—pale skin, pale complexion, polite manners, elegant dress—become a monstrous perversion of Eastern European refinement […] Dracula marks an anxiety over “foreign” or “ethnic” insemination into Christian life that, as [Judith] Halberstam says “weakens the stock of Englishness by passing on degeneracy and the disease of blood lust.” (Halberstam 1995, 95, qtd in Davidson 2008, 43) Stoker’s vampire is utilized effectively to illustrate blood’s social and cultural significance as a marker of an individual’s national identity. Davidson’s citation of Halberstam’s pioneering study of discourses of monstrosity (see Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995)) forges a pathway toward a triad of blood culture, disability studies, and gothic studies. The third component of the triad creates a new lens through which to examine anxieties concerning national identity, while simultaneously demonstrating how such concerns might be imagined through images of blood or the impaired body. Furthermore, the gothic may be employed to demonstrate how hematological maladies may generate the overt manifestations of physical impairment, as vampiric processes are deployed to precipitate the creation of what Wendell refers to as the unhealthy disabled: that is, the framing of chronic illness as long-term disability. While Stoker’s Dracula remains a popular symbol of the archetypal processes of vampiric creation, several exponents of contemporary configurations of the gothic mode retain a fascination for vampiric forms of transformation, and how the degeneracy spreading within the collective consciousness of the social body can be applied to the constraints visited on a disabled body enduring chronic illness, such as malaria as a form of physical impairment. Contemporary figurations of gothic tropes retain a fascination with vampiric processes that inextricably link blood culture to gothic discourses. Markers of chronic illness and disability, however, remain predominantly excluded as a determinant of blood’s status as a corruptible liquid circulating around increasingly gothicized, unhealthy bodies, as a direct consequence of a figurative vampiric bite. The symbiotic relationship between disability and blood has gothic connotations that have remained largely unexplored in scholarly work so far. As I have noted elsewhere, “Gothic literature is full of monstrous and unusual bodies but has hitherto been neglected by the emerging field of literary disability studies” (Gregory 2019, 291). Contemporary gothic writers such as McGrath, however, deliberately cultivate a textual space which renders the relationship between the gothic and disability explicit. Physically impaired bodies are a recurrent motif in McGrath’s fiction. McGrath’s representations of bodily impairment include the

Vampiric Creations  57 public realm of freakery, spectacle, and exaggerated corporeality exhibited in Harry Peake’s contorted skeleton, in Martha Peake, and by Harry Tallboys, the eponymous angel of McGrath’s early short story in Blood and Water and Other Tales. Both are figures who exhibit their marked, corporeal differentiation for public consumption. McGrath’s disabled protagonists, however, also extend beyond the public sphere, a form of diversity marked by the presence of figures such as the involuntarily silent quadriplegic Sir Hugo Coal of McGrath’s debut novel The Grotesque. Sir ­Hugo’s body is secreted away to maintain an illusion of domestic normalcy within the confines of Crook, the Coal family’s ancestral home. Confined to a wheelchair in a persistent vegetative state caused by a cerebral hemorrhage, Sir Hugo is simultaneously interned within his ­inanimate body and the architectural parameters of his stately home, generating parallels between Coal’s figurative and literal marginalization within his own home. McGrath’s consignment of Sir Hugo to the periphery of Crook, the domestic totem signaling both his financial affluence and his ancestry is echoed by the disrepute with which he is regarded by his peers in the paleontological community. Sir Hugo’s discovery, and subsequent reconstruction of the incomplete selection of the Phlegmosaurus Carbononesis that he perceives as his unique contribution to knowledge precipitates the stressor that triggers the physical markers of impairment that subsequently afflict him. Coal’s able-bodied endurance of “the single most humiliating event of [his] scientific career” initiates a process of professional debilitation that is mirrored physically by the effects of the cerebral hemorrhage that imprisons him in corporeal stasis and renders him disabled (­McGrath 1990, 126). Coal’s paleontological discovery, the totemic agent of disease and decay which McGrath deliberately parallels with Sir Hugo’s physical ­decline, is foreign in origin: the product of a paleontological dig that Sir Hugo leads in Africa accompanied by gardener, George Lecky, who Sir Hugo perceives as vital in the procurement of the artefact that represents his sole scientific legacy. Sir Hugo’s faithful gardener is symbolically bound to his employer throughout The Grotesque, in ways that are synonymous with the onset of Coal’s absolute state of physical impairment. George Lecky’s wrongful imprisonment for the murder of Stanley Giblet, the prospective fiancé of Sir Hugo’s prodigal daughter, Cleo, creates a parallel between Lecky’s incarceration and Sir Hugo’s imprisonment within his own ­cerebrally damaged corpus. In light of the severity of Sir Hugo’s immobility, the travel to Africa, and its gesture toward notions of mobility and movement, signals the origin of George’s association with Sir Hugo. The two men’s relationship is imbued with aligned significance. Lecky is coded as a contributor to his master’s disability because of his role in a tropical expedition and his recovery of the bones of the

58  Alan Gregory Phlegmosaurus Carbononesis, which is the embodiment of Sir Hugo’s professional self: [I]t was in large part due to an infestation of fleas in Tanganyika in 1926 that George and I ever met. It is no exaggeration, I think, to say that without George Lecky I would never have brought Phlegmosaurus back to Crook, and my contribution to British palaeontology would have been nil. I was in Africa for the bones, of course, nor was mine by any means the first expedition to take the steamer from Dar es Salaam down to Lindi, that torpid, mosquito-­ridden little hellhole on the Indian Ocean ten degrees below the equator. (McGrath 1990, 38) Sir Hugo’s memories of the origins of his friendship with George Lecky are triggered by the presence of a persistent insectile irritant in his present, augmenting the detail with which he is able to recollect the menagerie of insect life infesting the African topographies that he subsequently excavates. The fascination with colonial territories and the spectrum of the insectile life-forms that are able to flourish in the tropical conditions there are foreshadowed in his earlier short fiction, manifesting most overtly in “Blood Disease.” The debilitation exhibited by Clack-Herman as a consequence of his exposure to the bloodborne symptoms of malaria can be understood according to the spectrum of blood disorders cited by Soren Frohlich and Michael Davidson in their scholarship on the relationship between disability and blood. They suggest that during the late nineteenth century, Western physicians and social reformers increasingly interpreted blood as a potential threat to health, whether social of biological. Diseases like tuberculosis, cholera and syphilis infected both the idealized personal body as well as the social body. (2016, 262) Frohlich and Davidson’s collaborative research on the synergy between disability and blood emerges from Davidson’s earlier writing: “drawing on the work of Michel Foucault […] of a ‘culture of blood’ that functions through the tension between the bonds of ‘shared bodily fluids, tissues, and genetic codes’ and the bonds of family, racial or even national characteristics” (Davidson 2008, 38, qtd. In Frohlich and Davidson, 2016, 262). In its excessive representation of the debilitating effects of the m ­ alaria virus on the human body “Blood Disease” represents, in microcosm, the infection of the personal body, and the shared bodily fluids and national characteristics that are central to blood culture.

Vampiric Creations  59 By populating his tale with a series of vampire analogues, McGrath is able to map the intersection between blood and disability onto ­discourses of globalization that are pivotal to Byron’s conception of globalgothic. Byron recognizes the vampire embodies gothic’s enduring threat: Rapid flows in the globalised world mean that globalgothic is as likely to focus upon such figures as soucouyants, La Llorana, pontianaks and onryō as upon the ghost, doubles or so on familiar to readers of Western gothic, but the vampire nevertheless continues to hold its own and demonstrate what might appear to be an unnerving global reach. (2013, 7; original emphasis) The vampire’s endurance as a gothic figure stems from the fluidity with which it manifests on the gothic landscapes it frequents, gifting it a kaleidoscopic and mercurial configuration of selfhood as compared to the fixed subjectivities embodied by other figurations of monstrosity or haunting on the gothic spectrum that Byron here constructs. The parasitic contagion inflicted on William Clack-Herman’s ruined corporeality, and McGrath’s coding of his affliction as the product of vampiric processes, means that Clack-Herman’s body demands a gothic story that manufactures narrative fusion between the gothic, blood culture, and literary disability studies. William Clack-Herman’s use of a walking stick is a product of his endurance of chronic illness, wherein the walking aid represents a visual marker that facilitates a literary configuration of Clack-Herman’s malaria symptoms as disability. McGrath’s literary representation of Clack-Herman on his return to Southampton, his diminished body ravaged by illness and supported by a crutch, presents his corpus as disabled: the walking stick functions as physical and narrative support, simultaneously. As Alice Hall articulates through an engagement with the scholarship of G. Thomas Couser: The “demand for explanatory narrative” remains culturally ever-­ present, as people with disabilities are often expected to describe and explain their bodies and histories in ways that those perceived as normal are not; “the scar, the missing limb, or the obvious ­prosthesis—­calls for a story.” (Couser 2013, 457, qtd in Hall 2016, 3) McGrath’s embracing of gothic convention to facilitate the telling of the extraordinary story frames his literary configuration of malaria as a precursor to Wendell’s critical treatment of chronic illnesses as disabilities. It also positions “Blood Disease” within a radical literary space that precipitates an interrogation of critical and cultural intersections between literary disability studies and the gothic.

60  Alan Gregory Ultimately, the trail of false indicators of vampirism that McGrath weaves intermittently into the fabric of the narrative are signals that “‘Blood Disease’ is both a vampire story and an anti-vampire story” ­(Zlosnik 2011, 22). In making this convincing case, Zlosnik draws attention to several parodic markers of vampirism in the story. Clack-­ Herman’s wife, Virginia, even bears some of the markers of the vampire herself: ‘Her dress was of dead white satin and cut extremely low. She was wearing a rope of pearls, her face was as white as her pearls, and her lips a vivid scarlet’. (2011, 23) The apparent containment of the hemoglobic parasite to the ravaged body of the increasingly impaired William, and the false traces of vampirism that are visited on his wife and son are components of McGrath’s narrative, suggest that the threat of destruction lies elsewhere. And, indeed, it does; the “cell of untreated anemics” (1989, 98) who populate The Blue Bat are the most dangerous blood drinkers of the story. McGrath, then, deploys markers of false vampirism in order to open a literary space in which more realist forms of blood drinking may thrive. That is, his alternate figurations of vampirism code the able-bodied as prospective victims of scientifically-inflected variations of vampirism. McGrath’s reimagining of a vampirism fueled by scientific discourses inverts his initial representation of travel and chronic illness as threatening. Instead, “Blood Disease” confines William’s ventures into the “paradise” of the Congo forest to the realms of memory, while his enforced immobility, conferred on him by the ravages of malarial fever, is configured as William’s salvation from destruction in England. The delirium-induced fugue that claims the exhausted William Clack-­ Herman after finding refuge in “The Blue Bat” precipitates a nocturnal return to the Congo: Nearby lay Congo Bill, who had returned in the depths of his sleeping mind to the eerie twilight of the rain forest, where huge trunks of mahogany and African walnut reared two hundred feet over his head to form a densely woven canopy that effectively blocked out all sunlight. (McGrath 1989, 94) Clack-Herman’s cerebral retreat, a subconscious compounding of the memories of his global escapades and a product of the delirium included in the spectrum of malaria symptoms ravaging his body, absents him from the horrors that unfold at The Blue Bat. His immobility, a remnant of his treks through the vast jungle’s tropical topographies, facilitates a marginalization which marks him as safe from the process of

Vampiric Creations  61 exsanguination, itself a vampiric form of extreme and enforced bloodletting, against the other members of his family. This act is perpetrated by the inn’s proprietor, Kevin Pander, assisted by a number of anonymous accomplices: “flabby men with waxy skin and big, soft faces as round and pale as the rising moon” (McGrath 1989, 94). The execution and subsequent draining of the other members of Clack-Herman’s nuclear family ensures the survival of McGrath’s chronically ill protagonist. The prior contamination of his blood precludes him from being exsanguinated by his bloodthirsty human—as opposed to parasitic—host (McGrath 1989, 98). As I have suggested, the triad of blood culture, literary disability studies, and the gothic represented in McGrath’s early short story marks the genesis of a focus on disability that is sustained throughout his writing to date. A complex renegotiation of gothic convention is made manifest in “Blood Disease” through an interrogation of Clack-Herman as a patriarch and colonial explorer; but this critique is complex, parodic, and in many ways moves beyond the binaries between colonizer and the “exotic” or excessive “other” that so often structure the imagery and iconography of the imperial gothic. More clearly, “Congo Bill” represents a Gothic variant of Wendell’s concept of the “unhealthy disabled” borne out of McGrath’s revised model of vampirism. The mosquito’s vampiric penetration of the nucleus of Clack-Herman’s red blood cells, which McGrath frames as the epicenter of his familial bloodline, formulates a hemoglobic malady characterized by the recurrent, acute nature of the contagion proliferating within his diminished corpus, rendering him a literary symbol of the unhealthy disabled. In spite of his illness, though, “Congo Bill” himself survives until the story’s end without full awareness of The Blue Bat’s horrors and the other, more pleasurable transgressions that have taken place there. Ultimately, the anemic, working class cell of the story is disbanded by the police, and the threat posed by the men (or monsters) of The Blue Bat is, at least temporarily, defused. But not for long, the narrative suggests. The colobus monkey, with its resident colony of fleas, is mysteriously resurrected—much as Clack-­ Herman is himself resurrected—in the tale, which thus ends suggestively, implying the potential generalization of Clack-Herman’s condition. It is significant in this sense, however, that while anemia, as this appears in the murderous cohort at The Blue Bat, is linked to violence, the same predatory behavior—the narrative explicitly states—has never been ­recorded in malaria sufferers. The future toward which the conclusion of the tale gestures, while quasi-apocalyptic, is thus one in which the transnational vampiric relation seems to lose some of its horrifying charge. Again, the imperial gothic, with its hallmark dread of reverse ­colonization, is subverted. Indeed, the transnational trajectory which emanates outward from Africa, and which is incarnated in the contagious monkey, appears at the tale’s end ambivalently to foresee a social

62  Alan Gregory organization that is not structured via those vampiric relations that have been mapped out across the narrative in knowingly gothic terms.

References Byron, Glennis. 2013. “Introduction.” In Globalgothic, edited by Glennis Byron, 1–10. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Conrad, Joseph. 2004. Heart of Darkness. London: Penguin, 1899. Couser, G. Thomas. 2013. “Disability, Life Narrative, and Representation.” In The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J. Davis, 456–459. New York: Routledge. Davidson, Michael. 2008. Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the ­Defamiliar Body. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Davis, Lennard J. 2013. “Introduction: Disability, Normality and Power.” In The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J. Davis, 1–16. New York: Routledge. Frohlich, Soren, and Michael Davidson. 2016. “Introduction: Blood Bound.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 10, Special Issue “Disability and Blood.” edited by Soren Frohlich and Michael Davidson, no. 3: 261–268. doi:10.3828/jlcds.2016.23. Gregory, Alan. 2019. “Disability and Horror.” In The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature, edited by Kevin Corstophine and Laura R. Kremmel, ­291–299. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Halberstam, Judith. 1995. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hall, Alice. 2016. Literature and Disability. London: Routledge. McGrath, Patrick. 1989. “Blood Disease.” In Blood and Water and Other Tales, 84–106. London: Penguin, 1988. ———. 1990. The Grotesque. London: Penguin, 1989. ———. 1994. Dr Haggard’s Disease. London: Penguin, 1993. ———. 2000. Martha Peake. New York: Viking. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. 2008. Narrative Prosthesis: ­Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Punter, David. 2000. “A Foot Is What Fits the Shoe: Disability, the Gothic and Prosthesis.” Gothic Studies 2, no. 1: 40–49. doi:10.7227/GS.2.1.4. Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes, eds. 2003. Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Stoker, Bram. 2004. Dracula. London: Penguin, 1897. Walpole, Horace. 2002. The Castle of Otranto. London: Penguin, 1765. Wendell, Susan. 2013. “Unhealthy Disabled: Treating Chronic Illnesses as ­Disabilities.” In The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J. Davis, 161–176. New York: Routledge. Zlosnik, Sue. 2011. Patrick McGrath. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

4 Revisiting the Spanish Civil War An Interview with Patrick McGrath Xavier Aldana Reyes Patrick McGrath has long been interested in the gothic’s power to ­channel ideas of repression, psychological turmoil and national trauma. He finds himself currently at work on a new novel set in Spain which will deal directly with the legacy of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). This is a hot topic in Spain in 2018, with the exhumation of Franco’s remains having been approved in August by the Socialists, with the aid of the Basque and Catalan nationalist parties. This interview provides a fascinating insight into the thematic, national, and political contexts that have drawn McGrath to select the Spanish Civil War as the topic of his next novel, as well as his opinions on Spain’s fascist past and the gothic’s enduring appeal. NB. This interview took place on 10 September 2018. Xavier: Your fiction has tended to focus on England and North America. What has brought you to Spain this time? Patrick: Why a novel set in Spain? In large part because for a long time I have been spending summers in Spain, in an old finca that has been in my wife’s family for many years. Every summer I seemed to be busy with a novel set elsewhere, so I came late to the notion of a Spanish novel. But once the idea had occurred, I set about reading Spanish history and learning the language. I soon decided that the Civil War of 1936–1939 was where I wanted to be. I realized that a novel set in 1975, the year of Franco’s death, could very plausibly be narrated by a British or American character who had been in Spain during the Civil War, as a member of the International Brigades, or as part of a humanitarian effort, a ­British ambulance unit, for example. Xavier: The turn to the Spanish Civil War in Spanish letters is relatively recent, as is its gothic treatment, not least because of the legacy of the Pact of Forgetting (“el pacto del olvido”) that was given legal basis following Franco’s death in order to ensure the country’s transition to democracy. In a sense, it could be argued that the country is only now beginning to process the Civil War. How do you see yourself contributing to a growing field of writing on this conflict, and how do you think your perspective as a British writer might offer a fresh outlook on it?

64  Xavier Aldana Reyes Patrick: It’s difficult to identify how a novel still under construction might influence anything at all! But that said, the Civil War has been viewed as the prelude, or first act, even, of World War II, in that it pitted, broadly speaking, democracy against fascism. Certainly Franco had very considerable assistance in terms of men and materiel from both Hitler and Mussolini. His relationship with those fascist dictators, and his at times pathetic need to be a full partner in the Axis group of powers, is a fascinating part of Paul Preston’s great biography of the man. As a British writer I have access to the many dozens of memoirs and histories by British and American authors, outstanding writers like Gerald Brenan, Josephine Herbst, Martha Gellhorn, Orwell of course, Koestler, Hugh Thomas, etc. A fresh outlook will depend on how fertile my imagination is as I slog on! But there is much to stimulate it. Martha Gellhorn was one of many American writers who knew they had to be in Spain. She famously wrote, “Me, I am going to Spain with the boys. I don’t know who the boys are, but I am going with them.” She soon found them, on a train from Andorra to Barcelona. Also in Spain was her friend Veronica Cowles, another war journalist, famous for her gold bracelets, smart outfits and high heels. Cowles was one of the first to visit Guernica after the bombing. “A lonely chaos of timber and brick,” she wrote, “like an ancient civilization in the process of being excavated.” The German Condor Legion was responsible for the bombing, but in the strenuous denials of the Francoists, the Basques were blamed for blowing up their own ancient holy city. T.S. Eliot was among the many respectable Europeans who believed this propaganda, in the face of the first twentieth-century manifestation of total war: the attempted obliteration of an entire civilian population. I’ve found much else that at once summons the reality of this very ghastly war. The church bells in Madrid clanging when the bombers were approaching. The dropping of “hand bombs”—small bombs disguised as boxes of chocolates, intended to blow children’s hands off when opened. Orwell’s description of the excremental stink of a battlefield. Arthur Koestler’s detailed account of his days and nights awaiting death in the Nationalist prison in Seville, and what it is to be tried and sentenced—“La Muerte,” the invariable verdict—and the uncertain wait for the sentence to be carried out. It could be four days, or four months. It always happened between midnight and two, a priest would be present, and the Angelus bell would be rung. Koestler was freed after 94 days in a prisoner exchange. He later wrote that he had never felt so free as he did then: knowing he was going to die, not knowing when, but no longer afraid. Xavier: What about your conversations with contemporary Spaniards? How have these influenced your view of the conflict and its impact on Spain? I am only asking because, of course, opinions can vary wildly depending on whom you ask.

Revisiting the Spanish Civil War  65 Patrick: I don’t have a good take on what contemporary Spaniards are thinking, beyond my reading of the newspapers. One is diffident about it, as an outsider, because it seems still so very raw. That’s my i­mpression. For example, this summer I came upon the obituary of P ­ edro Alcorisa, age 97, of Valencia, the son a Republican fighter who was arrested by the Guardia Civil in 1947. Where was Pedro when his father was taken? In the mountains. He was a maqui, a guerrilla, one of the last, still fighting Franco years after the end of the war. The father was tortured for weeks, then hanged with his own shoelaces. Pedro and his brothers spent 70 years trying to find out, first, where he had been buried, and then going to law so they could disinter him from a communal grave and bury him properly. They succeeded in the end. By then Pedro was 86 years old, and still fighting for his father’s honor. Xavier: We will go back to the issue of the War being within living memory for many very soon. But to return to fiction briefly, the 2017 novel El monarca de las sombras (King of Shadows) by Javier Cercas, author of the Spanish Civil War fiction bestseller Soldiers of Salamis (2001, publ. in English in 2003), seems to mark a departure in terms of the good (Republicans) against evil (Francoists) narrative that has epitomized simplistic approaches to the Civil War. It gives some purchase to the idea that Falangists may have, at least initially, thought the political movement to have socialist and democratic leanings. Will there be sympathy for those who may have “fallen on the wrong side of history,” to paraphrase Cercas, in your new novel? Do you think this is at all important? Patrick: Cercas is terrific. I have only read Soldiers of Salamis so far, and was astonished by his story of Sánchez Mazas, the fascist intellectual who lost his spectacles. The idea of a “fascist intellectual” is itself surprising, considering Sartre’s conclusion that fascists simply don’t operate on the basis of rationality, that they laugh at rationality. Looking at old photos of Franco’s circle, often one can find the bespectacled Sánchez Mazas hovering in the background. He became a strange, isolated, nocturnal figure, after the war, who wished only to read. Certainly, I’d like to look at the idea of the fascist-as-monster in my novel, and see if I can open up a chink or two, without of course resorting to sentimentality. Xavier: One of the subplots of The Wardrobe Mistress includes the remnants of the British Union of Fascists. Your new novel seems to suggest a return to fascism. What is it about these types of ideologies that attracts you as a thinker and as a writer? Do they travel across nations? Patrick: Yes, this interest in fascism follows on from the remnant of the British Union of Fascists that I discovered in its resurgence in my research for The Wardrobe Mistress. They existed, and hung on until about 1949. But in Spain the Falangistas were an earlier and more potent, dangerous, full-blooded incarnation of fascism, contemporaries of the Nazis and the Italian fascisti. I suppose my interest stems from

66  Xavier Aldana Reyes a growing awareness that we haven’t seen the last of fascism, that to certain groups it remains an attractive system of government, at certain moments in history. It does travel across nations. It would be hard to claim that any state is impervious to its allure, even a great bastion of democracy like America. Xavier: To follow on from the previous question, The Wardrobe Mistress also marked the return of the ghost to your writing, last seen in Ghost Town (2005). Is there going to be another in your new novel? What is it about this particular figure and trope that you find appealing? Patrick: The ghost! I’m a bit crazy about ghosts these days. I much enjoyed creating the ghost in The Wardrobe Mistress, who was a sort of dybbuk, from Yiddish folklore. (Unless he was a figment of Joan’s imagination.) There will be a major ghost in the new book but I’m not permitted to say more about it. But what a rich, complicated thing a ghost is, and so versatile, capable of articulating so many ideas to do with time, identity, memory, history, libido, on and on. Xavier: On this note, I would say your writing is, like the gothic and historical fiction (both of which are labels that have been at times attached to your works), particularly concerned with the return of the past and with its mediation in the present. How and why do you engage with the notion of “haunting” in your writing? Patrick: I suppose ghosts and haunting go hand in hand, and that haunting can be about much more than mere terror. I am curious about the needy ghost, and the haunting as a kind of supplication, a plea for help. I am curious about the socialized ghost, I mean a situation in which the haunted one must introduce the ghost or the fact of the ghost into the household, so as to escape the terrible isolation of being haunted and given no credibility or sympathy. And then the complicated reactions of the household to the haunted one—who did, incidentally, in the new book, sustain trauma during the Civil War—enough! Xavier: How do you feel about having been nominated for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction? Do you see yourself as a historical novel writer and/or what is your relationship to this genre? Patrick: I was astonished to be shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. I remember a reviewer once calling me a historical novelist and I didn’t give it much thought. I wrote an eighteenth-century novel, Martha Peake, definitely historical. A couple of novellas in Ghost Town. But novels written at a time when my parents were alive never seemed “historical.” The criterion, I was told, was 60 years or older. So all my mid-­t wentiethcentury stories are now old enough to be historical, even though people drive cars and wear trousers. I don’t know why I write stories set in that period. Am I yearning for a lost childhood idyll? But such terrible things happen! Xavier: Is your engagement with the past (the Civil War) really a parable for talking about the present?

Revisiting the Spanish Civil War  67 Patrick: I think the Spanish Civil War is of interest in part because the fascists won. And Franco had 40 years in power, all told. And it was 40 years of hell. Repression, summary executions, austerity, famine. Spain somehow slipped out of Europe, entered a dark age all of its own that was unconstrained by the rule of law, respect for human rights, and the workings of a liberal democratic politics. Inasmuch as we glimpse similar antidemocratic tendencies in the world at present, then the Civil War and its aftermath can certainly be seen as a kind of dystopian beacon, an illustration of what life can look like when a modern state turns to a despotic leader and old freedoms are crushed underfoot. So Franco’s 40 years of hell should not enjoy the protection of a pacto del olvido any longer. Xavier: Speaking of historical writing, I was wondering if you could tell me more about your own researching process when it comes to historical sources and, in particular, within the context of your new novel. I hear you visited Spain and spoke to historians as part of the background research. What did you learn and how will this influence your writing? Patrick: My research methods are haphazard. I began with the histories, Hugh Thomas, and Antony Beevor. I went back to Orwell. I read Martha Gellhorn, I reread Hemingway, and then was diverted down all sorts of byways, some profitable, some less so. The discovery of Gerald Brenan was a great day, and came about through my friend Colm Tóibín, who has spent years in Spain. I have met other writers who know about the period, and talked about it whenever the possibility arose. I can now get through El País, more or less, a wonderful newspaper, and through it have come to understand that that history is by no means forgotten, despite the laws of silence and forgetting. The fate of Franco’s own remains is the subject of fierce debate currently, in part because his burial place, El Valle de Los Caídos, is a gathering place for neo-Nazis and others who dream wistfully of a fascist resurgence. Or not so wistfully. Franco spent 20 years of his life building that great tomb, and it still stands as a monument to his dictatorship. So the past it seems is an odd bird when it comes to Spain. And the gothic, with its enormous predilection for the past, and how it gnaws upon the present, like a hound, is well suited to the imaginative exploration of Spain, where the past, as Faulkner said of the American South, is never dead, it’s not even past. So it seems. Xavier: Yes, I find it interesting when people say the Civil War should not be spoken about, so as to keep it from affecting the present. As someone born in Barcelona I may be somewhat biased here, but, without wanting to defend the Catalan independentist movement, it is not too difficult to see why some Catalans reject centralist policies and a government (Mariano Rajoy’s) that did not do enough to engage with the scars of Francoism. Looking ahead, I wanted to ask you about the Stirling archive, acquired in 2015. What are your thoughts about it, and what type of objects do you think might eventually make it there for this new novel?

68  Xavier Aldana Reyes Patrick: I am desperately proud of my archive at Stirling University, and very grateful, indeed, to Karl Magee, the archivist who along with Matt Foley first invited me to offload to Stirling many leaky cardboard boxes of old clippings, etc., which I was very happy to do. Not only did Stirling give me an archive, it awarded me an honorary doctorate, of which I’m also very proud. Whenever I write a novel, and I’m not alone in this, a number of bookshelves fill up with the reading matter involved in the research: “project clusters,” I’ve heard them called. Then there are the workbooks, in which, in longhand, the first drafts are done, and corrected, and abandoned, and various bits and pieces end up in those workbooks, photos, newspaper clippings, menus, recipes, street maps, cartoons, notes to self […]. All this, the detritus that gathers in the three or four years of this writer’s work, will one day be boxed up and sent to Karl. I still have a research trip to Spain coming up, starting in Madrid and then moving south and east, and it will I’m sure add to the heap. Xavier: Are you allowed to say any more about this trip? Patrick: Yes, as regards the trip, we will start in Madrid, where I’m eager to see as much of Goya’s work as I can. I have an extraordinary book on my table, it is Los Caprichos, the whims, the caprices, 80 aquatint prints he made in 1799, after being deeply affected by accounts of the French Revolution. They are whimsical and grotesque, their meanings often occluded, and feature witches, huge bats, fantastical creatures, goats, donkeys, giant owls, hobgoblins. One of the best known is titled The sleep of reason produces monsters. I want to see El Valle de Los Caídos, which may or may not still contain Franco’s remains when we arrive in January. I want to see wild flamenco, but am told that Seville is the town for that. I will also be fascinated to see what remains of the Battle of Madrid, which raged on through the Civil War as the city, besieged, held off Franco’s armies even as Mussolini’s bombers unloaded high explosives upon the townspeople, nightly. I want to see El Prado and also El Pardo, Franco’s presidential palace where he retired after the Civil War, surrounded by sycophants, and growing more isolated by the year but no less vindictive. Not content to have won the war, he wished to annihilate every man, woman or child who had stood against him. Torture and execution continued in Spain until the very end of the dictator’s life, in November 1975. Then to Toledo and Seville, and Cordoba and of course Granada. I was fascinated to learn that the great mosques of the centuries of Islamic civilization in Spain were not destroyed, but formed the foundations of the gothic cathedrals that followed. I will also try and see what remains of the Visigoths, who ruled Spain before Islam arrived. Granada is also, of course, where Federico García Lorca fled in the summer of 1936, thinking to find safety in his family home. He was unlucky. He was picked up by fascists and shot near the village of Viznar. Apparently, he was forced to dig his own grave. His remains have yet to be identified.

Revisiting the Spanish Civil War  69 Xavier: Yes, the search for García Lorca continues, as does the unearthing of mass graves. The Civil War is likely to continue to hover ominously over Spanish politics, it seems. It will be interesting to see what happens with El Valle de Los Caídos too. It has been a real pleasure to speak to you, Patrick, and I am very excited about your new novel. I realize it is hard to write critically about something that is still in process, so thank you for your time and good will.

Section II

Theorizing McGrath

5 Madness, Tragedy, and the Implied Reader of Patrick McGrath’s Spider Benjamin E. Noad

Patrick McGrath’s fictional portrayals of madness reflect late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century fears about deinstitutionalization. This term, which I will contextualize below, refers to the widespread closure of asylums in the United Kingdom prompted (among other factors) by the Mental Health Act of 1959. Specifically, McGrath’s dealings with madness highlight issues of otherness in society. McGrath’s writing which deals with madness and mental breakdown is alluring, frightening, and compelling; yet his novels such as Spider (1990) and Asylum (1996) are hardly positive about the prospects of those living with extreme mental illness. There is an extent to which McGrath’s use of disorientating and violent gothic imagery reiterates problematic conceptions of mental illhealth. On the other hand, such imagery reflects an experience of mental ill-health that unfolds under, and is compounded by, socioeconomic conditions. McGrath’s use of the gothic, particularly in Spider, demonstrates how the concept of mental ill-health is a criterion for marginalization. To analyze the effect of this dynamic, this chapter interrogates the implied reader of McGrath’s portrayal of schizophrenia in Spider. In demonstrating what kind of reader is constructed within the narrative, I examine whether McGrath’s handling of schizophrenia risks marginalizing readers who themselves might be living with this condition. The purpose of such an inquiry is not to show that McGrath’s portrayal of schizophrenia is merely problematic or somehow wrong—his novel and this portrayal are far more complex than this. Instead, I am concerned with a broader question about the notion of madness in the gothic: is there an element of tragedy that accounts for the subversive appeal of these haunting depictions of ill-health? To begin answering such a question, this chapter firstly outlines and defines its key terms that pertain to the question of Spider’s implied reader. In so doing, my argument remains sensitive to the complex historical and cultural issues surrounding the sometimes-contested diagnosis of schizophrenia. The primary question with which this chapter is concerned is this: what can Spider contribute that is self-affirming or positive for the “schizophrenic reader?” Of course, charting the legal, historical, and

74  Benjamin E. Noad cultural definition of a “schizophrenic” reader is a perilous process. Schizophrenia remains a contested diagnosis on several fronts, and it would be absurd to assume that McGrath’s novel requires a single homogeneous “schizophrenic reader” in order to appreciate it. A broader problem is that it is relatively straightforward to obtain critical reviews of novels written by authors whose medical credentials are well recognized; whereas a critical review of a novel written by somebody who has a diagnosis of schizophrenia is, for obvious reasons, more difficult (if not currently impossible) to come by. Spider’s usefulness to the medical establishment has been well documented, but this medical establishment surely ought to include, too, the wider medical community and those with lived experiences of schizophrenia. At present, the critical appreciation of McGrath is (paradoxically) limited by the idea that the reader can define the boundaries between fictive madness and their own mental wellbeing. Such an assumption ignores the idea that readers with d ­ elusive symptoms themselves may be alienated by the narrative deception which occurs in Spider; that is, that the novel’s use of false memories delegitimizes a reader’s own relationship with psychosis, where the presence of delusion is ontologically real for them. By interrogating the notion of the implied reader of McGrath’s novel, this chapter argues that Spider does, in fact, through its construction of madness, demonstrate a vigorous and dynamic critique of practices of social exclusion.

The Gothic and Madness Spider can be considered as belonging to a trajectory of late twentieth-­ century gothic writing that deals with madness, but more specifically a madness that has been relocated from the asylum—an historical building often represented as haunted by institutional wrongdoings, mistakes, and abuse (Noad, 2019, 176–190). This body of writing concerns the fear of an unregulated insanity left to its own sadistic and dangerous tendencies. On the surface, mid-twentieth-century gothic fiction shares Michel Foucault’s view that madness has been cast out of society as “the domain of the inhuman” (2009, 3). Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959) and Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory (1984) are two other novels in this tradition that deal with the socioeconomic effects of deinstitutionalization—where madness is linked to monstrosity. Critical discussions of madness in the gothic frequently center around the medical nature and interpretation of specific psychopathologies that are encountered in various texts.1 If mad women in attics epitomize gothic anxieties in early Victorian fiction, then, by contrast, the early 1960s demonstrates a readily discernible fear of the “psychopath next-door.” The character of Norman Bates, for instance, is archetypical of this idea, which has to do with the refiguring of the monster as a product of their (more monstrous) socioeconomic environment

Madness, Tragedy, and the Implied Reader  75 (cf. Botting 2002; Spooner 2006). Gothic writing—especially M ­ cGrath’s use of gothic imagery—tends to pathologize political and social institutions far more than it attempts to diagnose the madness of individuals produced by such institutions. While the precise origin of this era of deinstitutionalization is debatable, the gothic fiction that anticipates the rise of therapeutic communities in the 1960s has a persistent tendency to reimagine the asylum. Even before psychiatric patients were released from the overcrowded and underfunded madhouses, gothic, as a literature mesmerized by the legacy of punitive functional sites, retained a fantasy of such old regimes of power. Historically, the advent of deinstitutionalization was made easier, in part, with the synthesis of antipsychotic medication such as chlorpromazine and lithium (Eghigian 2008, 356). In the United Kingdom, the Mental Health Act of 1959 reformulated patients’ access to psychiatric services and voluntary treatments, although its legacy remains disputable owing to its highly politicized vision of “sub-­normality.”2 Writing in the British Journal of Psychiatry, Adrian Grounds commented of the 1959 Mental Health Act that its “reputation became tarnished by concerns about failures of services and abuses of professional power” (2001, 387). In 1961, the Conservative healthcare minister Enoch Powell delivered his “Water Towers” speech, prompting the closure of psychiatric institutions in favor of more economically sustainable community treatments, and, in 1962, the Hospital Plan for England and Wales called for the permanent closure of many Victorian asylums which had arisen since the passing of England’s Lunacy Act of 1845. Greg Eghigian claims that “[d]einstitutionalization was both a cause and an effect of a change in thinking about how to understand and treat mental disorders” (2008, 357). However, it is worth noting that while plenty of progress has been made in helping people to better manage symptoms of mental illness, knowledge of how to maintain good mental health remains inconsistent. Many of the community care programs that arose throughout the 1960s were inappropriate in their support services and underfunded by local governments. One of the most prominent examples of this was the failure of America’s “Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centres Construction Act of 1963,” which was largely a financial means to an end in reducing hospital maintenance costs. 3 While Foucault has referred to an era of “Great Confinement” from the eighteenth century onward, the modern and contemporary gothic’s concern with deinstitutionalization signals an era of “great releases.” As a result of the hesitancy conveyed toward psychiatric institutions present in McGrath’s fiction, his readers are drawn further into the cultural anxieties of a gothic mode intrinsically haunted by notions of madness and the specter of the madhouse.

76  Benjamin E. Noad

The Construction of the Reader in Spider Reader-response theorists such as Wolfgang Iser have referred to the implied reader: a hypothetical entity who possesses the appropriate cultural and historical knowledge to realize and understand the fullest impact of a given text (Iser 1974, xii–xiii). This conceptual figure is not necessarily the actual reader but an ideal and presupposed one. Regarding the reception and composition history of McGrath’s Spider, the implied reader would appear, on the one hand, to be someone well-versed in psychoanalytic theory. This is supported by the positive reviews of the novel that have come from the medical profession, and specifically, by psychiatrists. Harold Camel, for instance, in Psychiatric Services, comments: Patrick McGrath is an extraordinarily perceptive observer of those with psychiatric illness and of those who care for them, particularly in forensic hospitals. He uses his literary talent to tell compelling— although hardly upbeat—stories. His literature is an excellent fictional depiction of our work, its possibilities and its failures. (1998, 111) Such an appraisal confirms that McGrath’s portrayal of psychiatry resonates with the real-life experience of healthcare professionals. It is worth noting, however, that McGrath is singled out as an “observer of those with psychiatric illness,” albeit a “perceptive” one. In Camel’s review, McGrath’s novel is disconnected from a firsthand perspective of psychiatric illness—it seems (according to the review) to be written exclusively for an implied reader who is removed from any lived experience of mental ill-health themselves. However, McGrath’s novel does not rely on one single homogeneous implied reader to achieve a realization of madness: rather, it puts the reader into the “mad” narration of the first-person perspective, and in doing so, raises awareness of the shortcomings of historical psychiatric services. While it is true that McGrath’s fictions take great care to demonstrate true-to-life instances of mental ill-health, it is equally true that they ­critique the way that people living with such experiences are treated by society and its institutions. In Spider, for example, the schizophrenic narrator, Dennis Cleg, is told by his doctors that the hospital is overcrowded: “I need your bed, Mr Cleg” (McGrath 1990, 187). In composing the novel, McGrath sought advice on the representation of schizophrenia from his father, who was once chief superintendent at the British high-security institution Broadmoor Hospital. In McGrath’s “A Boy’s Own Broadmoor,” the author recalls that my father enjoyed talking about his work, and I was of course eager to listen. He told me of his frustration at public attitudes towards his

Madness, Tragedy, and the Implied Reader  77 patients, and of the difficulty he faced in his attempts to discharge men and women who, in his judgement, no longer posed a risk to the public. He hated the stigma attached to mental illness, and was furious whenever he heard Broadmoor described as a prison, or his patients as criminals, or himself as the warden of some fearsome jail inhabited by howling legions of homicidal maniacs. (2012, para 22)4 McGrath originally planned for Dennis to survive the events of Spider, but the elder McGrath explained, “that is not what happens to men like that” (Murphy 2008).5 Though the novel is well-informed by the direct clinical experiences of McGrath’s father, and while it self-consciously invites psychoanalytic interpretation, the portrayal of mental illness that it offers is far from unproblematic. Dennis’s memories are false; his unreliable narration cannot be trusted, and, in a long-standing fictional tradition hearkening back to Bloch’s Psycho, delusive behavior (namely, schizophrenia) is associated with violence. Since Spider’s publication in 1990, hospital beds for the mentally unwell have remained lacking; the secure wards in Britain are overcrowded, and, most troublingly, the schizophrenic is still portrayed, for the most part, unsympathetically and unrealistically in popular culture. Spider exploits and critiques these issues, but it does not really suggest ways forward from this, and to some extent, it partakes in a negative portrayal of schizophrenia. This is not, of course, the cultural work intended by McGrath, whose main focus is on giving voice to madness. The mad first-person narration of the novel allows the reader, as Sue Zlosnik ­observes, “to make a judgement about where s/he stands on the spectrum of mental soundness” (2011, 51). Considering this, and while there is an extent to which Spider portrays schizophrenia in a troubling light, McGrath’s novel also invites its readers to critically reevaluate the relationship between madness and society. Spider also invites consideration of madness through the dissociative perspective articulated by R.D. Laing in The Divided Self (1959). Laing proposed an existential phenomenological interaction with mental ­illness—an ambitious and controversial effort “to make madness, and the process of going mad, comprehensible” (2010, 9)—where, indebted to Carl Jung’s understanding of metanoia and his theory of individuation,6 Laing proposed that psychosis is a result of ontological insecurity: a conflict where authentic self-disclosure is complicated by an unconscious self-identification with an embodied or unembodied self (c.f. 42, 46, 47, 65–105). In other words, a sense of existence becomes easily fragmented depending on the affirmation or dismissive appraisal of others (e.g., meeting the expectations of one’s parents), leading to the subject experiencing “unembodied” thoughts represented by inauthenticity, a sense of depersonalization, or developing a notion that they maintain a

78  Benjamin E. Noad “false self.”7 This work encouraged therapists to empathize with their patients’ frame of reference by entering it directly, and in doing so, to accept their own potential for madness. While it is tempting to read Denis as unembodied self, it is more accurate to say that this category better reflects the perspective of the implied reader as Spider presents madness and sanity as two separate links belonging to a fragmented chain. The reader of McGrath’s gothic novel is drawn into the disturbing mind of somebody who is extremely mentally ill, yet they are also exposed to an all too familiar reality of underfunded mental healthcare provision. Reading Spider involves questioning the binary essentialisms between madness and sanity, reason and unreason, health and sickness. In her critical appraisal of the novel, Charley Baker comments that McGrath’s dazzling portrayal of an individual locked inside a terrifying madness completely tricks the reader, drawing them into and through Spider’s version of reality before revealing something very different. Through slowly unpacking the singular experiences that led to Spider’s totally mad reality, McGrath suggests something that is of great importance in psychiatry: listening to the whole rather than the part; understanding both the structure and the content of madness. (2010, 30, original emphases) This emphasis on the holistic, therapeutic potential of the novel is telling, as is the use of the word “tricks” to describe the effect of Spider’s unreliable narration. To trick is usually associated with deception, and Spider does feature a schizophrenic who lies for the greater part of the novel; furthermore, trickery implies a moment of sudden realization: that the reader will eventually find themselves in on the joke. Given the gothic imagery, to which the following section devotes its attention, and the tragic ending of the novel, the reader does not find a sense of closure with the portrayal of schizophrenia that McGrath offers. Rather, the construction of the reader obfuscates our anger at the failure of the healthcare system to prevent Denis’s death: the reader is more generally disturbed and unnerved by the narrative they have engaged with, which places them in close proximity to madness. The effect of this draws parallels to real-life situations where the fundamental story of those living with extreme and fatal cases of mental illness seldom have their experiences heard on their own terms.

Spider as Gothic Tragedy The tragic ending of McGrath’s novel relies on a sense of gothic terror. Throughout Spider, disembodied voices and presences are constructed

Madness, Tragedy, and the Implied Reader  79 to emphasize the extreme and isolated sense of Denis’s madness. While the implied reader of Spider confronts the reader with questions about the otherness of madness, the aspect of tragedy—the sheer fact that ­Denis cannot survive in the world—is a message worth problematizing on the one hand, yet also considering on the other, as it highlights wider ­polemical and subversive issues surrounding social exclusion. Spider also works as a novel critical of psychoanalysis and psychiatry. The anti-­ Oedipal potential of the text, as inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, has already been convincingly considered by Anna Powell (2012, 263–279). However, it is crucial to note that schizoanalysis as a theoretical approach has little to do with clinical schizophrenia, and Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the schizophrenic figure, the mad “Body-Without-Organs,” is not intended literally.8 The value of such an approach does allow for a creative subversion of mental derangement: it shows that McGrath considers true madness to exist outside of the asylum and at the heart of society itself. Indeed, schizoanalysis offers a way into making sense of Dennis’s narration, his madness, and his own sense of perceived bodily changes. On the one hand, the application of Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas do resonate with, and somewhat enrich, Dennis’s claims of losing “the easy, fluid sense of being-in-the-body that I once had; the linkage of brain and limb is a delicate mechanism, and often, now, for me, it becomes uncoupled” (10). On the other hand, this application of theory to text could potentially reduce such a reading of Spider to a fictional translation of Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia; one that reads the text’s representation of madness from Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective as a series of breaks-in-flow, rather than on its own terms or the terms of Dennis Cleg. Christine Ferguson, in her reading of Spider, attends to the function of madness in the novel. In Spider, there is not a gentle, interpretative madness which knocks at the door of reason, but one which is utterly alien, apart and divorced from all notions of the possible. McGrath is clearly not interested in subsuming disease within the nobler “room” of health. […] What his fiction does suggest, however, is a restructuring of the traditional rhetoric at work in literary depictions of sickness. (1999, 239) According to Ferguson, the total othering of madness present in Spider consolidates the normalizing strategies adopted by contemporary society; in Ferguson’s words, “the more raving and monstrous the ‘Other,’ […] the more healthy and rational the society which is able to define it as such” (1999, 240). In approaching the topic of schizophrenia in Spider,

80  Benjamin E. Noad we must be wary of the extent to which we continually cast out, or in Julia Kristeva’s terms, abject madness. As Kristeva explains: I experience abjection only if an Other has settled in place and stead of what will become ‘me.’ Not at all an other with whom I identify and incorporate, but an Other who precedes and possesses me, and through such possession causes me to be. (1982, 10) There is a dimension to the novel that appears to trigger the implied reader’s relationship to schizophrenia with the message that “society does not want you.”9 In another sense, the novel exposes its reader to extreme otherness, and in doing so, articulates a vigorous critique of social exclusion practices. Part of the element of the gothic tragedy involves the idea that this body of writing takes an anxious view of any shared living space between the sane and the insane. For example, the “boarding house” ­(Spider, 9) where five other residents (presumably with mental illnesses of their own), also take shelter, is a kind of purgatory. Dennis refers to how “[t]hey never go out, they are passive, apathetic creatures, dead souls” (10) and later repeats this “dead soul” image as he observes their “stupefied, wordless abstraction” (15). There is regime in this halfway house, but it is, in Dennis’s view, robotic and monotonous: We take our meals in the kitchen here. Mrs Wilkinson has a small bell; she stands at the foot of the stairs and shakes it, and slowly the dead souls emerge from their rooms and come drifting down with blank faces and rigid limbs, and when I appear—I’m always the last, living as I do on the top floor—they will all be seated around the table in the kitchen, silently eating porridge. (14) Just as he perceives himself to be the last to appear for breakfast, Dennis sees himself as the last real madman in the novel. By describing the other residents of the boarding house as “dead souls” with “rigid limbs,” he reduces them to animated corpses. Curiously, the mad narration is unsympathetic to other people’s madness; Dennis regards the other residents merely as background forces. When recounting his early schooldays, Dennis mentions how the other social misfits “hated each other more bitterly than the other children hated us, because to each other we presented an image of our own pathetic isolation” (25–26). This abject threat of what the other reflects about ourselves persists in the novel. Dennis is haunted by the other residents, who remind him of his own social limitations and loneliness. As readers, the madness of Dennis Cleg forces us to reflect on our own sense of prejudice: madness

Madness, Tragedy, and the Implied Reader  81 is demonstrated as something that is continuously cast out and excluded from the homogeneous, lawful realm of able-bodied reason. This view of the novel coincides with Foucault’s observation that “[i]n madness, man is separated from his own truth, and exiled into the immediate presence of surroundings in which he loses himself” (2009, 380). Spider does not ask its readers to understand the madness it displays, but rather to experience it. Furthermore, the novel encodes schizophrenia as a lonely experience, and while perhaps this is the real-life case for some schizophrenic readers, we ought to question the extent to which this depiction of isolated mental illness appears universal. Spider, recalling its composition history, is the tragic story of how one chronically ill schizophrenic cannot survive his madness and live with the knowledge of his murderous actions. In turn, this tragedy forces us to reflect on why this is allowed to occur in society and whether extreme otherness can ever really be accommodated. This tragic aspect is observable when Dennis recounts the trauma of being forcibly removed to a mental hospital, the fictional London based Ganderhill, “[w]ith […] walls of faded red brick, […] barred gates and locked doors, […] courtyards and corridors” (138). Set prior to the passing of the Mental Health Act of 1959 into law, Ganderhill invokes a Victorian appearance of the District Asylum. Dennis, though confessing to “remember very little of that period” (137) in which he was taken there, describes a blur of men and rooms, and the air everywhere crowded with thought patterns, always a sense of terrible tension […]. Then I felt catastrophe was imminent, and I felt my own wrongness most intensely. […] I seemed always to be in shadow and so did the others, the men who went with me from room to room, all in thick shadow, […] the air, the dusk, through which I moved was thick with thought patterns not my own. I lived and moved in terror then. (137, original emphasis) Dennis retreats into the “back parts” (137) of his mind, where his Spider-­ self lives. As Dennis explains it, “the back of my head was the real part of my life, but in order to keep everything there fresh and healthy then I had to have a front head to protect it, like tomatoes in a greenhouse” (98). The repeated reference to “crowded thought patterns” suggests hearing voices. This portrayal is medically well informed, but Spider’s reference to sensing his own “wrongness” (and it is poignant that this word is italicized in the text) is intriguing. His sense of wrongness refers both to his repressed knowledge that he has murdered his mother and buried her in the garden, and it also demonstrates how alien he perceives himself to be. Though tragic, for as readers we do sympathize deeply with Dennis’s situation, we are also reminded that it is a truly horrific

82  Benjamin E. Noad ordeal to be taken away to the mental hospital. One of the more positive parts of this narration, and also one of its more gothic effects, is that the reader realizes just how overwhelming hearing voices can be. For example, Edwin Fuller Torrey, in Surviving Schizophrenia (2013), quotes one of his patients as saying, “[a]n outsider may see only someone as ‘out of touch with reality.’ In fact, we are experiencing so many realities that it is often confusing and sometimes totally overwhelming” (2013, 36). In this sense, Dennis’s narration encourages the same response: that madness is not “out of touch with reality” but invested in a wider picture of reality that those outside the mad experience are incapable of comprehending. It is important to note here that this approach risks romanticizing madness, and also associating madness (uncritically) with genius. McGrath recalls how David Cronenberg, who directed the film adaptation of Spider, was unwilling to accept Spider as a madman, and instead informed him that “what you have written is a picture of the artist—the lonely man with an individual, eccentric vision of the world. That, to me, is who I am” (Didcock 2013). Though this statement might empower the mad-speech of Spider, it dismisses and ignores the negative aspects of living with schizophrenia altogether. This statement is also a troubling co-option of schizophrenic experiences. While madness may have its moments of lucidity, or contain traces of a rich perspective, it is still harrowing, painful and disturbing for the affected individual— and equally so for the friends and family of such a person. Spider does, however, present the reader with the haunting proximity of madness; the novel forces a confrontation with the limits of reason, and it demands that readers should be unsettled by madness. During a sudden interruption that breaks Dennis’s account of gardening while at the hospital, he announces, I lived among the criminally insane, and I knew routine, community, and order. Whatever strength or structure I had, it came from without, not within, and if you need proof of that then look at what’s happened since my discharge—look at me now, scribbling away out of terror in this lonely room, engaged in some pitiful attempt to drown out the voices from the attic. And not even institutional structure was enough at times! […] But the important thing is that I slowly pieced together an account of what happened, and as the story grew firmer, I grew firmer with it. (148–149, original emphases) This notebook, which the reader also assumes they are reading, is used by Dennis to map out the secrets of the past; this is much like the palimpsestic mode of the early gothic, which configured the counterfeit past to situate present-day cultural anxieties. With this process comes the fear

Madness, Tragedy, and the Implied Reader  83 that writer and reader will learn what they do not know about themselves. The notebook offers a vicarious experience of mental breakdown and breakthrough, although the breakthrough it offers is not liberating, as it may be in a clinical therapeutic situation. Instead, the breakthrough is a bursting eruption of madness, a madness which, in Foucault’s words, “stands out against the backdrop of an outside world” (2009, 181). As the novel reaches its conclusion, and as Spider comes to terms with how, as a boy, he deliberately turned the gas oven on and killed his mother in an explosion, his delusions increase. In third-person narration, Spider recalls seeing a “night-hag crawl out of the wall” (217) and observes himself naked, “covered with a small black fungus” (217). During these hallucinations (and, indeed, throughout the greater part of the novel), Spider is haunted by the smell of gas, and the realization that he has killed his mother leads him to contemplate suicide. This tragic realization is somewhat problematic. The only way for Spider to live with the knowledge of his murderous actions is by not living at all. Beneath this is a punitive discourse that sees criminal wrongdoing paid in full. Spider describes how: The oppressive sense that everyone and everything around him was dead rarely left him now, and for this he knew himself to be responsible. He became aware too that a terrible catastrophe was about to occur, but he had no clear idea what it was or from which direction it would come. It was at around this time that he decided to be buried at sea. (217) Given that we read this in Dennis’s notebook, the text offers a suicide note and conveys his last wishes (including the desire for sea burial). Furthermore, the statement clarifies acceptance of responsibility, although this has the damaging effect of Dennis feeling responsible for all the wrongdoing in his world. This problematizes the notion of readerly empathy: ought we to sympathize with a killer—especially one whose motives are blurred by madness? Mary Elene Wood has pointed out that those living with schizophrenia have continued to find ways to make their voices heard, writing with and against psychiatric and popular narratives that describe them as being different beings whose language is at worst unintelligible and at best, tainted by the incoherent sentences of their psychotic episodes. (2013, 2) Spider is by no means a “failed” attempt to portray schizophrenia; it is a genuinely insightful, beautifully constructed novel. On the one hand, it embraces psychoanalytic interpretation; on the other hand,

84  Benjamin E. Noad this invocation of psychoanalysis is actually a counterfeiting measure. Dennis utilizes psychoanalytic tropes as a means of compounding his repression and of hiding—from the reader, and not from himself—what has happened to his mother. What needs to be remembered, however, is that Spider is the result of imagining what it is like to inhabit a mentally unsound mind. For all of its positive attributes, the extent to which it remains relatable for a schizophrenic reader necessitates further problematizing. This is a novel critical of the failures of psychiatry and society, an attempt to engage directly with the discourse of madness, but it is also guilty of perpetuating the negative stereotype of the psychopath next-door. In reading Spider as a gothic tragedy, however, and not as a celebration of painful madness, readers are exposed to a societal prejudice and passivity which compounds the stigma of mental illness. This makes for uncomfortable reading, yet this sense of tragedy also encourages a critical questioning of the historical and economic circumstances that lead to madness being continually cast out of society. Mirroring his own move across the Atlantic, as McGrath eventually has come to live in New York City, his fiction has adopted this new American setting and has been reinvigorated, although, on closer examination, many of the defining tropes of his work persist. The British asylum is not an immediately observable ghost in the novels that have emerged since the publication of his historical fiction Martha Peake (2000), but the influence of Broadmoor is far from absent in these more recent novels. As Sue Zlosnik observes, “[t]he later fiction is concerned more overtly with ‘history,’ and individual histories. Medicine and the diseases of the mind are ever present, however” (2011, 87). In fact, the madness on display in these novels—and it exists in some form in each text from Martha Peake to Constance (2013)—is much removed from the clinical portraits ­observable in McGrath’s British fictions like Spider. The portrayals of madness are now interwoven with discourses of trauma: in his later fiction, McGrath’s representations of mental illness offer images of loss, grief, and the haunting proximity of the past. In the absence of the asylum and the mental hospital (the appearance of which in McGrath’s later work, perhaps with the exception of Old Main in Trauma (2008), seems only referential), psychiatry moves from the public domain of the institution to a more personal realm of private, individual psychotherapy. The first of his fictions to do this is McGrath’s short story “Ground Zero,” which appeared in the collection Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now (2005); the second is his novel Trauma. These fictions offer something different to the reader regarding madness: they speak to notions of the familiar, rather than to what is alien; they demonstrate locatable crises (both in a psychological sense and a geographical sense) and encourage their readers to identify more convincingly with the fluctuations between reason and unreason. In other

Madness, Tragedy, and the Implied Reader  85 words, McGrath’s newer American writing showcases a spectrum of madness rather than displaying specific psychopathologies. In recognizing this, madness is (in a readerly sense) liberated from the clutches of old institutions and hurled into the domestic territory of the familiar, personal, and relatable. The asylum becomes psychiatry, and the medical bays are transformed to private for-profit counseling rooms. While all of McGrath’s fiction is haunted by the sheer notion of an asylum, and especially by the question of what is meant by madness, his work continues to be of interest (and contention) to the mental health community. In considering his portrayal of mental illness, the asylum, and its doctors haunted by notions of a lost past, and of what these stories have to offer in terms of stigma and subversion, McGrath’s use of the gothic uniquely reflects the concerns of medical humanists in the twenty-first century. Spider is a haunting invocation of disorientating and violent gothic imagery, but it draws such representations to show how concepts of mental ill-health are used for purposes of marginalization. McGrath’s work reminds us that we still need to pay more attention to the wider story of the sometimes incomprehensible voices of madness.

Notes 1 For examples, see Scott Brewster. 2012. “Seeing Things: Gothic and the Madness of Interpretation.” In A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 481–495. Chichester: Blackwell; Ed Cameron. 2010. The Psychopathology of the Gothic Romance: Perversion, Neuroses and Psychosis in Early Works of the Genre. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company; Margaret McAllister and Donna Lee Brien, “Haunted: Exploring Representations of Mental Health through the Lens of the Gothic.” Aeturnum Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies 2, no. 1: 72–90; Helen Small. 2009. “Madness.” In The Handbook of the Gothic, edited by Marie Mulvey-­ Roberts. 2nd Edition. New York: New York University Press, 199–203; Sue Zlosnik. 2011. Patrick McGrath. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 2 According to the Mental Health Act of 1959, severe sub-normality meant that “the patient is incapable of independent life or of guarding himself against serious exploitation” (1959, 2). 3 For more on this, see Steven S. Sharfstein’s article “Whatever happened to Community Mental Health?” Psychiatric Services May 2000 (51): 616–620. 4 McGrath, who has since returned to visit Broadmoor, claims that despite its many controversies and scandals in recent years, “Broadmoor continues to offer safe harbour to the lost and bewildered psychotic souls who fetch up there […] Broadmoor remains an asylum in the best sense of the word” (“A Boy’s Own Broadmoor,” 2012). While such sentiments are to be respected, in part, the discourses of the prison have infiltrated Broadmoor over the years, and the association of mental illness with criminality has previously been inscribed in law. Broadmoor Hospital offers 70 high security places for the Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder (DSPD) program, and its staff follow Category B prison (high risk) procedures. While the Victorian grounds themselves were declared unfit for purpose in 2003, a redevelopment, including a new treatment care plan, is currently underway (see the West London Mental Health NHS website).

86  Benjamin E. Noad 5 Cf., as the introduction to the ten-year anniversary Penguin Essentials edition of Asylum (1996) reveals: “Only once did my father correct me. I intended for my character, Spider, to survive his return to the streets of the East End of London, which was also a return to the traumas of his extremely disturbed childhood. But oh no, said Pat McGrath. Men like this don’t survive” (2015, xiv). 6 Cf. Jung’s writings on “The Undiscovered Self” (1978, 245–302). 7 Laing describes this “false self” by comparing it to the notion of an “inner self” where the “aim is to be a purse subject, without any objective existence” (2010, 95). This “false self,” according to Laing, “arises in compliance with the intentions or expectations of the other, or with what are imagined to be the other’s intentions or expectations” (2010, 98). 8 For Deleuze and Guattari, the “Body-Without-Organs” is a radical metaphorical entity that is always in the process of becoming. Anti-Oedipus addresses the ethics of desire, and to that extent, it is a critique of Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis. Though their “schizo” figure is not intended literally, both theorists have been engaged in contesting the social stigma of mental illness; as they argue, “[a] schizophrenic out for a walk is a better role model than the neurotic on the analyst’s couch’” (2015, 12). 9 Regarding the term “schizophrenic reader,” this chapter refers to any individual who has been clinically diagnosed with any form of schizophrenia. This is not so much to reify any particular medical gaze, as the aetiology of schizophrenia remains contested, but to realize that there are individuals for whom this diagnosis provides a frame of reference and a way of contextualizing hallucinatory symptoms. See, for instance, the NHS web page “Schizophrenia: Causes” (2016).

References Baker, Charley, Paul Crawford, Brian J. Brown, Maurice Lipsedge, and Ronald Carter. 2010. Madness in Post-1945 British and American Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Botting, Fred. 2002. “Aftergothic.” In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, edited by Jerold E. Hogle, 277–300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Camel, Harold. 1998. “McGrath’s Fiction from the Forensic Asylum.” Psychiatric Services 49: 109–111. doi:10.1176/ps.49.1.109. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 2015. Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury, 1984. Didcock, Barry. 2013. “Patrick McGrath Revisits Darkness, Broadmoor and the ‘Less than Wholesome’ Jimmy Savile.” The Herald, May 12, 2013. www. heraldscotland.com/arts_ents/13104313.patrick-mcgrath-revisits-darknessbroadmoor-and-the-less-than-wholesome-jimmy-savile/. Eghigian, Greg, ed. 2008. From Madness to Mental Health: Psychiatric Disorder and its Treatment in Western Civilization. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. Ferguson, Christine. 1999. “Dr McGrath’s Disease: Radical Pathology in Patrick McGrath’s Neo-Gothicism.” In Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography, edited by Glennis Byron and David Punter, 233–243. New York: Macmillan Press. Foucault, Michel. 2009. History of Madness. New York: Routledge, 1972.

Madness, Tragedy, and the Implied Reader  87 Grounds, Adrian. 2001. “Reforming the Mental Health Act.” British Journal of Psychiatry 179: 387–389. doi:10.1192/bjp.179.5.387. Iser, Wolfgang. 1974. The Implied Reader. London: John Hopkins Press. Jung, Carl G. 1978. “The Undiscovered Self.” In The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: Civilisation in Transition, edited by Adler, Gerald and R.F.C. Hull, vol. X, 245–302. New York: Princeton University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1989. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Laing, Ronald D. 2010. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. London and New York: Penguin Classics, 1959/1960. McGrath, Patrick. 1991. Spider. New York: Vintage. ———. 2005. “Ground Zero.” In Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now, 175–243. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2009. Trauma. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. ———. 2012. “A Boy’s Own Broadmoor.” The Economist. September/October 2012. www.1843magazine.com/content/ideas/a-boys-own-broadmoor. Murphy, Peter. 2008. “Patrick McGrath – Confessions of a Dangerous Mind: Interview with Peter Murphy.” http:/wordpress.hotpress.com/petermurphy/ 2008/10/14/patrick-mcgrath-confessions-of-a-dangerous-mind/. NHS 2016. “Schizophrenia: Causes.” Last modified 11 October, 2016. www. nhs.uk/conditions/schizophrenia/causes/. Noad, Benjamin E. 2019. “Gothic Truths in the Asylum.” Gothic Studies 21: 176–190. doi:10.3366/gothic.2019.0021. Powell, Anna. 2012. “Unskewered: The Anti-Oedipal Gothic of Patrick McGrath.” Horror Studies 3: 263–279. doi:10.1386/host.3.2.263_1. Sharfstein, Steven S. 2000. “Whatever Happened to Community Mental Health?” Psychiatric Services 51: 616–620. doi:10.1176/appi.ps.51.5.616. Spooner, Catherine. 2006. Contemporary Gothic. London: Reaktion Books. Torrey, Edwin Fuller. 2013. Surviving Schizophrenia. New York: Harper Perennial. United Kingdom, House of Commons. Mental Health Act, (1959). United States Public Law. Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centres Construction Act of 1963, Public Law 88–164, (1963). Wood, Mary Elene. 2013. Life Writing and Schizophrenia: Encounters at the Edge of Meaning. New York: Rodopi. Zlosnik, Sue. 2011. Patrick McGrath. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

6 The Terrors of the Self The Manipulation of Identity Mythologies in Patrick McGrath’s Novels Daniel Southward What is happening to Harry Peake? In the first act of Martha Peake (2000) alone, Harry breaks his spine, has his life upturned, and loses the majority of his children, yet he still manages to find some semblance of contentment with Martha as the “Cripplegate Monster” (McGrath 2000, 35), before, once more, another upheaval. Following a seemingly innocent conversation, the man becomes a monster; a sea change from a “saintlike” (26), idyllic poet’s impoverished life with his loving daughter, the eponymous Martha Peake, to the life of a mad drunk with incestuous desires. Yet, why? The text suggests a certain oblique traumatic breakdown on Harry’s part, seeming to place the blame for his sudden transformation on the return of buried memories of his wife, killed indirectly by his actions as a rum smuggler. Undermining this explanation, however, is that Harry never seemed to have repressed these memories, living his life in a form of theatrical “penance” (34) for the incident. So, once more, what is happening to Harry Peake? One argument that can be made, and, indeed, will be made hereafter, is that Harry’s change is not merely a trauma-driven breakdown but rather a matter of a collapse of self-identity or, perhaps more accurately, a specific contradiction between self-mythology and traumatic reality.1 Further, such a contradiction is not only central to the collapse of the great poet Harry. This questioning of identity is a significant and antagonistic force across ­McGrath’s oeuvre. Admittedly, it can hardly be called a novel idea to suggest that the quest to question self-identity is central to narrative; the question of “who am I” being, after all, so often touted as the central motivator for narrative production. Yet in the works of McGrath identity becomes problematized in such a manner as to suggest a unique development of this monomythical question. In McGrath the quest is not to answer, “Who am I?” so much as “Why can’t I be who I am?” Characters continually struggle to maintain the self-mythologies on which their sanity so often hinges in the face of overwhelming, often traumatic forces which undermine the core concepts by which such myths are created. Time and again, beyond Harry, we see McGrath’s characters seemingly coming

The Terrors of the Self  89 to grips with traumatic revelations that collapse certain structures on which the self has been built, and this motif takes three distinct and recurring forms within his work. Sue Zlosnik has already identified several recurring categories of identity within McGrath’s fiction, namely, the figures of the “orthodox medical man,” “the psychoanalyst,” and “the tortured artist” or madman (2011, 11). While these identity roles return over and over within the narratives, they, too, may fall into the distinct series of (none mutually exclusive) identity categories which permeate the works: that is, those seeking resolution, those seeking repression, and those fighting against restraint. Or to elaborate: 1 Historiographic editors: those who attempt to rewrite the narratives of others within their stories, imposing new identity myths on others in order to resolve, or assuage, personal trauma. 2 Self-mythologizers: those who attempt to impose a new identity on themselves in order to bury or repress traumatic events that may otherwise compromise personal happiness. 3 Identity victims: those whose identity is dictated by others who would impose narratives and identity mythologies over the victim’s own, often inchoate, sense of self. First, then, let us turn to the historiographic editors. Predominantly found in McGrath’s earlier novels, these are characters whose central concern is to impress an identity myth on an external figure in order to affect their own sense of self-identity. The Grotesque (1989), Spider (1990), and Dr Haggard’s Disease (1993), as three major examples, each present a protagonist actively working to rewrite the identity of key figures in their pasts in order to assuage certain guilts and traumatic incidents that clearly still haunt their contemporary lives. Taking these first few novels chronologically, then, the first example to demonstrate the implications of the manipulation of identity for self-assurance is found in the shape of the protagonist narrator of The Grotesque, Sir Hugo Coal. Following what Hugo refers to as his “cerebral incident” (McGrath [1989] 1995, 16), he is “confined” (11) to a wheelchair as the story begins, presenting himself as a “humped and cadaverous” man with “clawlike” hands, a permanently open mouth (12) and a disintegrated capacity for speech (15). Our narrator, confined to a wheelchair and “unable to lift a finger, nor even blink at will,” nevertheless reveals himself to be “ontologically alive […] [though] cocooned in bone” (16; original emphases). As such, his only recourse is to relive the events leading to his cerebral incident with a particular focus on the seemingly malicious butler Fledge. Hugo’s narrative is a desperate attempt to regain agency from within his apparent “vegetable” state (16) via the vilification of Fledge, rewriting his own narrative in order to both justify his revenge quest against the

90  Daniel Southward butler for taking over as lord of the manor, and in order to assuage his own psychosexual guilt regarding his latent homosexual desires for the man. As McGrath states: It’s hard to trust Hugo when he’s talking about Fledge because there are elements in their relationship that I think Hugo is not prepared to admit, even to himself. I think the fact that he is physically attracted to Fledge is hinted at fairly clearly at the beginning, and this of course—knowing what we do about Hugo’s sexual nature—is going to produce a whole string of distortions in its wake. […] Hugo can only see Fledge as a snake in the grass. (Morrow and McGrath 1989, 31) In the same interview McGrath makes clear that Hugo has “never been able to own his sexuality” (31) due to the pressures of position and the standards of the time period. Hugo, McGrath writes, “lives at a ­moment in time and in a class in society in which it wouldn’t be appropriate for him to own to his homosexuality, to come out of the closet” (31). While there is no great revelation here—the traumatic cerebral incident occurring as a result of Fledge forcibly kissing Hugo, after all—these comments do frame our narrator as a man of suppressed desire. Hugo, unable to parse his own homosexual feelings toward the “tall and straight and sleek and elegant and handsome” form of Fledge (McGrath 1995, 172), instead produces a biased version of events in order to paint the object of his desire as the more dominant force, a “doubly inverted” (138) creature, who comes to ruin Hugo’s life. While Fledge does appear to be every bit the conniving “monster” (138) that Hugo paints him to be, the unreliability of the narrative (with even Hugo admitting that, in sections, his “chronology is all skewed” (120)), alongside Hugo’s imaginings of the physicality of Fledge’s body, and in particular his penis and pubic hair (138, 163), reveal Hugo’s ­homosexual desire is in conflict with his desire to reconstruct the narrative. Fledge must be painted the villain, the “deviant,” and Hugo the poor victim of this man’s apparent perversions. In this manner, Hugo seems to appease his own homosexual guilt by turning his desires into a form of forced acquiescence, and by impressing on Fledge, in his recollections, this new identity of the sexual, social, and monetary predator. Through this, Hugo is able to regain some degree of control over his sense of self and his physical functions. Only after the tale has been retold, with Fledge vilified further in Hugo’s narrative of events, does he hear himself speak, murmuring the family motto Nil Desperandum (186).2 Hugo’s psychosexual guilt has led to a selective editing of the past, with the protagonist forming a warped historiographic metafiction of his own story in order to make the present more viable, a theme which finds itself expressed all the clearer in McGrath’s next novel, Spider.

The Terrors of the Self  91 Much as Hugo attempts to rewrite Fledge into a more active villain, so, too, does Dennis Clegg rewrite, in a very literal sense, his mother with an entirely new persona—the prostitute Hilda Wilkinson. Dennis, as a boy, is confronted with his mother as a sexual object, after which he struggles to comprehend his own sexual desires and kills his mother in an attempt to resolve the incestuous guilt. He then spends time in an asylum where he reconstructs a version of events; that is, a narrative is constructed which would allow his psyche a more stable base from which to recover from the trauma of his own actions. Set loose from the asylum as the novel begins, Dennis is given board and begins to rewrite this narrative. This identity manipulation is of interest to my argument here. The narrative of Spider follows Dennis’s attempts to forge a new self-identity (as the victim, again) through the act of physically rewriting new memories and imposing a new identity construct on an external presence, all in order to create a foil against which his new self-­construct may be tested. As with Hugo, Dennis seeks to rewrite the past so that he may find a palatable, livable identity. Both here and in Dr Haggard’s Disease, the reader becomes acutely aware that they are witnessing someone “desperately trying to hold on to some form of coherence in the midst of—often inner—worlds falling apart” (Dupont 2012, 3). In an effort to hold together his failing timeline, Dennis begins to write his own history down in a journal, though the act is continually linked to self-creation rather than autobiography, as he states of his own work: [I] frame the first words of the first sentence that will once more promote the flow my memories and the construction, alongside, of a reasonable edifice of plausible conjecture, I begin to write [… The pencil almost] had a will of its own, almost as though my memories of the events preceding the tragedy at Kitchener Street were not contained within the stubbled leather helmet of this head of mine but in the pencil itself. […] I have the curious sensation not of writing, but of being written. (McGrath [1990] 1992, 134; original emphases) The act of writing, of historiographic editing of the past, comes to help Dennis define himself in the present as a new sustainable persona. Yet only through the introduction of the Hilda Wilkinson persona, which intercepts any conception of incestuous desire or maternal sexual disgust, does this form find the coherence Dennis so desperately desires. Dennis overwrites his mother’s identity, inventing an entirely new narrative in order to retroactively edit his personal trauma into a more palatable form in which his sense of identity, as with Hugo, is more defensible from the consequences of traumatic memory. Unlike Hugo, however, who experiences a form of transcendent bliss at the end of his narrative when

92  Daniel Southward he finds himself with “a sensation of immense, oceanic peace” (McGrath 1995, 186), Dennis’s construct ultimately fails to support any new form of identity creation. Confronted with the truth of his actions, he first blends his identity with his father’s, then turns to an omniscient third person narration as he describes his resolve to commit suicide by hanging (McGrath 1992, 221). Hugo succeeds in his construction of a new self-mythology, while Spider fails, even if each attempt is made through the creation of a vilified other: Fledge rewritten, Hilda created anew. In Dr Haggard’s Disease, we encounter much of this same identity play, with the protagonist seeking to impose an identity on an external figure in order to resolve the traumas that plague the self. In this text, Edward Haggard begins to superimpose the identity of Fanny Vaughan, the ex-love interest of a previous life, on her son, James. Somewhat differently to Hugo and Dennis, Haggard attempts to actively overwrite the persona of a living (though dying) individual with an identity of his choosing. If Hugo and Dennis look to change their memory, Haggard attempts instead to press his memories on another, namely, James, whom Haggard describes as “the direct erotic manifestation of [Fanny and Edward’s] spiritual communion” (McGrath 1993, 96) with “skin like [his] mother’s” (155). Haggard becomes increasingly anxious about James’s body. His various descriptions of corporeality paint James as an androgynous figure, hairless with breasts and nipples, infantilized sexual organs (157), and a “feminoidal” fat distribution (159). Haggard even comes to wonder if James is perhaps undergoing a “visible change in [his] body’s sexual characteristics” (159). Ultimately, the pathology Haggard begins to diagnose James with brings him to the conclusion that Fanny, having died as a result (Haggard believes) of their affair, has returned to him through the body of her son: [Fanny] was, yes, viable still in the world, and inhabited the body of her son: she had come back to me. […] I climbed the stairs to the top of the house, where I could gaze at the sea and attempt to assimilate the idea. The profound physical likeness of mother and son, and your [James’s] emergent womanhood. (169) Haggard comes to believe in “the movement of [Fanny’s] spirit into [James’s] body” (169); that is, the displacement of her soul onto his. Here, however, he fails where Hugo and Dennis succeed. Hugo finishes his tale, finalizing his narrative, and emerging with the potential for healing at the final moments; Dennis does, for a time, manage to sustain the illusion of the Hilda Wilkinson persona over that of his mother, though only to ultimately experience the collapse of his delusion. ­E dward, however, comes to the realization of the apparent slow

The Terrors of the Self  93 physical and spiritual possession of James by Fanny far too late to affect any significant change or reconciliation. Instead, he must retroactively retell his story in the last moments of James’s life in order to achieve the spiritual reunion that he so desperately desires. Haggard attempts to resurrect another in order to mollify his own guilt over the role he played in the other’s, Fanny’s, death. This death of a loved one and the subsequent desire to build a narrative assuaging aspects of the self brings us back to Harry Peake. Harry has no identity constructs placed over him by an uncertain narrator. Indeed, Ambrose’s concentration is honed in on, almost exclusively, any detail of Martha, maintaining a somewhat neutral position toward her father. The man suffers a great trauma, his body distorted as Hugo’s, his lover killed, as Haggard’s, yet as far as the text reveals, he does not attempt to reconstruct his memories, or the identity of another character, in order to alleviate the symptoms of his guilt over the events of the death of Grace Foy. Instead, Harry takes the burden solely on his own identity, resolving to prostrate his twisted body before the masses of London in order to earn the money required to sustain himself and his daughter. As Ambrose is told: This [Harry] saw as a spiritual labour […]. To humiliate himself before the crowd was to invite the contempt and disgust he felt he deserved. For he wanted to cauterize his soul, he wanted to burn off all that was in him that stank of indulgence and pride, having, as he saw it, a great debt to discharge […]. (McGrath 2000, 34) Despite the popularity of these penance performances, Harry is unable to entirely free himself from the “debt” of his past actions. After Lord Drogo’s visit to Harry, enquiring about the poet’s past and spine, a sea change occurs in the man, one implicitly triggered by Drogo’s questions about Grace, after which Harry “at once [grows] quiet” (55). Gazing into Harry’s eyes following this event and his subsequent decline, Martha recognizes that “something in him had died” (64) as a result, Ambrose suggests, of the extensive destruction “wrought in that man’s soul by the awakened memory of the loss” (64). The trauma renewed, Harry rapidly declines into a more monstrous form in the narrative, yet he does not attempt to overwrite the identity of others, nor does he seem to construct any identity myths to assuage his own trauma as one might expect. Harry has, it is clear, already attempted to rewrite his own identity, to self-mythologize his life, his sense of self, the result of which, and after the resurfacing of the memories of Grace Foy, is the failure of this construct—a similar fate to Dennis in Spider. Harry is the first in a series of McGrath characters whose response to trauma is not to impress guilt over the other, but instead to formulate a

94  Daniel Southward new sense of self entirely independent of the incident. Harry constructs a new identity for himself in the form of the “Cripplegate Monster,” the penitent poet who parades the scars of his shame for spectacle and profit. Ultimately, though, this performative persona offers little comfort when reminded of the sins of the past, and the trauma of his wife’s death as a result of his own mistakes. Harry, in his attempt to “make himself anew” (79) in confrontation with the failure of the “lodestar of his own soul” comes to remember himself, to know “[his soul’s] heft and value” (79), and subsequently to find it wanting. The self collapses, his humanity is “jettisoned,” and he embraces “the monster” (79), the mad Harry, the dangerous Harry, that lingers on until the final revelations of the text. Such a change is not merely due to the resurgence of traumatic memory that affects Harry so deeply, but instead to the collapse of the self-mythology that is apotropaic to the disturbing implications of said traumas. If, indeed, the contemporary gothic, as Steven Bruhm suggests, “time and again […] provides us with traumatized heroes who have lost the very psychic structures that allow them access to their own experiences,” (2002, 269) then McGrath’s novels begin to show us one attempt to assuage the loss of such structures. Until the publication of Port Mungo, McGrath’s characters, in his novels at least, had followed a pattern of identity manipulation, self or other, in order to answer the ontological difficulties raised by traumatic experience. On first inspection, Jack Rathbone’s characterization can be read as bucking this trend. Jack’s identity crises are entirely a form of self-obsession, and his own traumatic experiences center on his inability to achieve the identity he longs for. For Jack, self-identity is a construct tied to the process of artistic creation, which is in and of itself an act of self-discovery, or rather, as Jack suggests, “primarily a vehicle for the externalization of psychic injury” (McGrath [2004] 2005a, 11). One must create to know the self, and one may only know the self through cathartic creation. He describes the act of painting as sinking “into regions of the mind” so as to “grope towards some primitive understanding of what he was about” (11). He indelibly ties his own sense of self to artistic output in a self-consuming loop. Art reveals the identity, but the only identity revealed in Jack’s painting is that of a self—no revelations, only mirrors of the self, as evident in his production of the painting “Narcissus in the Jungle,” and in Gin’s later revelation that Jack “paints himself over and over again […] it’s all he ever does. Even his jungles are self-portraits” (203). Jack’s paintings are self-mythologizing and his creative journey, if we may term it that, is one of extended, warped, self-creation. He drags Vera, his fiercely independent teacher-cum-lover, from location to location in the pursuit of an idyllic painter’s life, the “dream that drove him from England:” “he wanted to have [Vera] working beside him, in an adjoining studio, and for them to come together at the end of the

The Terrors of the Self  95 day, to talk of what they had done, to criticize, to learn, to encourage, to develop” (43). This is Jack’s vision of the painter he wishes to be, the ideal which he chases to New York and then, he hopes, to fruition in Port Mungo; ultimately, the dream collapses. Bridging the categories of historiographic editor and self-mythologizer, Jack attempts both to create a persona—the painter in the jungle—and to enforce this on Vera. She becomes a conduit for his creation, a part of the whole that he chases and, as such, subject to the identity role of the subservient muse that Jack forces on her. She vehemently refutes this role by leaving for extended periods, “travel[ing] to get away from Jack” (228), the dream unsustainable in the face of Jack’s “cruelty,” his “sneering and critical” (227) attitude toward the work of others, thereby collapsing the dream and, by extension, the artist identity which Jack chases. 3 In this pursuit, Jack fosters an encompassing self-myth that envelops the identity of those others around him, driving those victims of his machinations to further harm. The manipulation of identity roles is the force that drives his wife away, and subsequently leads his daughter Peg to be subsumed into the myth as a surrogate for the absentee Vera, forming the conditions for Jack’s incestuous actions toward Peg that drive her to suicide. Furthering this exploration of the constructed self as a buttress against the ontological assaults of underlying trauma, McGrath’s Trauma (2008) bears witness to a large cast of characters, each seeking the means to rebuild the self in the wake of personal tragedy. The text, perhaps more than any other within McGrath’s current oeuvre, bears witness to the overarching theme of the works as “a necessary literary answer to some of our deepest existential fears in a potentially healing process,” as Dupont describes (2012, 5). Crucially, it is the promise of this healing process that Trauma is chiefly concerned with, indeed, more specifically with how the manipulation of identity may provide not just a ward against existential instability but perhaps temporary relief from it; if “in the realm of the physiological the expression of breakdown is disease” (McGrath 1989, 243), then Trauma explores the possibility of a cure. This potential “cure”—the means by which to assuage traumatic memory, and a central concern of the novel—is skillfully articulated early on by protagonist and psychotherapist Charlie Weir: The most potent charge of emotion weakens over time, unless it’s repressed. Then it can wreak havoc in the psyche for years to come, which was what happened to [Charlie’s PTSD-afflicted patients]. Their buried material was throwing up nightmares and other symptoms, and would continue do so until the trauma could be translated into a narrative and assimilated into the self. (McGrath [2008] 2009, 29; my emphases)

96  Daniel Southward The “working assumption” (30) of Charlie and his direct supervisor is that the specific construction of the self may work as a salve for the buried material of the traumatic past; this is a sentiment that resonates throughout McGrath’s novels. In Trauma, though, the assumption becomes particularly prescient considering the novel’s final revelations, when Charlie comes to recognize the narrative that he has constructed surrounding the traumatic incident in which his mother pushed a gun to the back of his head and pulled the trigger. Having displaced the action onto his father, it being “unthinkable” (206) to Charlie that his mother could act this way—“The unconscious wouldn’t sanction it for a moment” (206)—Charlie becomes fundamentally unable to resolve the trauma. Having no access to the story of the trauma, the recognition and assimilation of which “into the conscious memory—into the self” (57; original emphasis) he describes as fundamental to recovery, he is without the necessary tools to achieve resolution. As such, Charlie’s identity, his need to help specifically women in distress and those who have suffered gun violence, evidences a pathological need to assuage these hidden traumas. Much as Dennis in Spider seeks to construct an identity to placate past trauma, Charlie has here succeeded in successfully repressing the memory and constructing an identity that repels the ontological issues raised by the traumatic moment. He attempts to help his “haunted women” (26) —his patients, Agnes, his mother—in direct response to the underlying memory of having displeased the latter so severely that she reacted with violence. Equally, Charlie’s work with veterans of the Vietnam War, and his collapse into depression following Danny’s suicide-by-shotgun, evidences a desire to seek resolution for his own hidden pathology. In encountering Danny’s body, Charlie not only is reminded of subconscious trauma but also comes into direct conflict with his desire to appease the women in his life, having “failed” Agnes in not curing Danny of his traumas, but actively, though accidentally, being responsible for triggering Danny’s own traumatic memories and his resulting suicide. The anticipated cure—that is, the identity that Charlie forms for himself following the incident with his mother—does bury the trauma for decades, not collapsing until he approaches 40. Ultimately, though, it fails in the face of the repeated traumas of everyday existence that provoke the repressed to rise to the surface, unconsciously affecting him and “wreaking havoc” on his attempts to live in the face of his neardeath as a child. While Trauma subtly explores the underlying inability of self-mythology to deal with repressed trauma, Constance (2013) handles the same themes in a more overt manner. The titular Constance Klein makes clear from the beginning her desire to make herself anew. “I intended,” she narrates during the novel’s opening, “to become my own woman […] I saw myself reborn. […] If before I trod the streets of New York City with the diffident step of a stranger, I exulted now in all that had so recently

The Terrors of the Self  97 troubled me” (McGrath [2013] 2014, 1). Constance, from the beginning, is a woman concerned with forming a new self-mythology in direct opposition to her previous life of “Ravenswood and Daddy and all that went before” (1). Immediately, however, the construct falters, as Constance, shaken by a lunch with her father and sister, begins to question whether she is “a proper person” (2), describing how the new world that she has attempted to create, away from the influence of her past, “crumbled like a balled sheet of paper thrown in the fire” (2). Identity is immediately problematized in the text, with Constance’s own attempts to produce a new self quickly foiled. The identities of the supporting cast become fluid—constructs are invoked, repealed, denied: “Howard [Sidney’s son from a previous marriage] already had a mother” (3), Constance argues, and she initially refuses the role; Sidney longs for an image of Constance with no “real interest” (4) in who she is; and Constance equally “wanted [Sidney] for a daddy” (4) in order to rectify the issues of her youth. Beyond Constance’s own admission of wanting to become in some way a “proper person,” a new woman, Sidney’s first narrative interjection, too, makes clear that Constance’s identity is in a state of crisis. He  describes the active effort of identity creation in a moment when Constance tries “to remember who she thought she was” (50), as opposed to remembering, tellingly, who she is. As Sidney later describes, her sense of self is a malleable thing, though inextricably tied to her relationship with her father: “Constance remained a kind of work in progress. She was unformed and indistinct as yet […] she was still shackled that her father had wrecked her life” (53). Fluid, or half-formed in some manner, what form of identity Constance is able to maintain is supported by the idea of her Father as a “monster,” unable to love her, though she does not understand “what she was, what she represented to him” (53; original emphasis). Her sense of self equally relies on proving that the wound is not within herself, but with Daddy, hence the search for the new father figure. Constance’s issues with her father, in particular, precipitate her psychological collapse following the revelation that she is the product of an affair, a confession from her father that, as she states “undermined my whole idea of who I was, not a sturdy construct to begin with” (84–85). Confronted with the knowledge that she is the “living embodiment of [her] mother’s infidelity” (84), Constance asks her father, “Who am I, Daddy?” underscoring that, despite her revelations that they are not genetically related, her father still controls the way in which her sense of self is built. From here, the text explores Constance’s crisis of self, as she seeks to find fragments of a narrative to absorb, beginning to imagine the “fragile ghost” (98) of her paternal father, yet the self-identity she seeks is always connected to an external, paternal figure. She sleeps with Iris’s partner, a man described as similar to Daddy by Iris (15), while also continuing to hear the voice of her paternal father Walter Knapp. The crisis

98  Daniel Southward in Constance, then, is one of self-identity, and the fractured ways in which attempting to build a self-mythology ultimately cures little when supported by unstable foundations. Yet, much like Port Mungo, the text also deals with the idea of identity oppression, so that characters actively rebel against the constructs placed on them by others. Constance cannot conform to Sidney’s initial image of her, while Sidney cannot be the new, perfect Daddy that she longs for. Instead, as the climactic railway scene explores, Sidney must become something else. If Constance’s biological father and adopted father both commit suicide by falling beneath trains, Sidney instead survives his near-brush with death-by-subway-train, intimating a potentially new discourse for Constance to invest in. Although, as she states at the very end of the novel, Sidney has become “Daddy” (229), and thus the victim once more of a role that she must have him fulfil. While this may be a somewhat chilling end to the novel, one which is ambiguous as to whether the incident at the subway has broken the repeated cycle of failed father figures for Constance or merely begun the cycle anew, Sidney (and equally Constance) is not the first of McGrath’s characters to suffer under this form of identity dictation. Port Mungo also explores characters, specifically Peg and Vera, who suffer under Jack as he forces specific identity roles, or characters, on them. Equally in Dr Haggard’s Disease, James becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the attention of Haggard, attempting to repel the latter’s affections. Finally, we turn to a brief examination of the novels that deal primarily with this idea of an identity victim; one whose identity is an oppressive construct that is fostered on them by another. Only one of McGrath’s novels thus far deals with this as a primary narrative concern, that being Asylum (1996), while another, The Wardrobe Mistress (2017), can be said to take a metafictional approach to this issue, with characters seeming to repel the influence of the gothic mode. The issue of identity, particularly gender, within Asylum is well documented as a central concern of the text.4 The novel initially seems to fit into the established themes of McGrath’s early works, with a narrator reaching into the past, retroactively altering events, or at the very least recounting them with a distinct bias, in order to assuage their own guilt. Dr Peter Cleave reminisces about Stella Raphael, the wife of a former colleague, and the events leading to her suicide. Told by Cleave, the novel focuses on Stella’s struggles against those who would impose identity roles on her: as meek wife to a psychiatric ward superintendent Max Raphael; as the muse to the mad sculptor Edgar Stark; then as the dutiful wife and mother taken away to live in the country. Ultimately, Stella seems to rebel against the identity roles assigned to her by allowing her child, Charlie, to drown. After this incident, Stella is presented as (relatively) settled back under the psychiatric care of Dr Cleave who himself seeks to fashion her as his future wife. She again resorts to a form of violence, here more active, when her husband returns and begins to dictate the

The Terrors of the Self  99 terms of her identity to her once more. Max tells Stella that the shock of watching their child die will “wear off, and you’re going to start feeling guilty […] you’ll just be terribly, terribly sad, and you won’t lose that sadness for the rest of your life” (McGrath [1996] 1997, 202). After which Stella attempts to attack Max and “get her fingernails into his face” (202). She rebels only against the consistent identity myths pressed on her. As McGrath states of Stella, “the novel couldn’t allow her full dominion over the meaning of her experience” (McGrath 2015). While “poor Stella is oppressed by patriarchy, marriage, the law and the asylum, all at the same time” ­(McGrath and McRobert 2011), she rebels against these identity impositions at every turn, refuting the traumatic, disturbing, effects of the identity roles forced on her. In McGrath’s latest novel, the problem of identity versus trauma is reduced to one of costume; The Wardrobe Mistress deals with the issue of self-burial—wrapping the identity of the self in that of another, be that fictional or “real”—and the consequences of such on the typical cast of McGrathian, psychologically fallible protagonists. Thematically linked to costumes in terms of both those worn on and off the stage, the cast being mostly actors or living in the acting sphere, clothing is presented as an external identifier of internal desire or persona. Again echoing some of the themes of Dr Haggard’s Disease, Frank Stone, for example, is initially treated by Joan as a “delicate vessel” (McGrath 2017, 43) for her dead husband’s soul, a connection which she aims to foster by dressing Frank in Gricey’s clothing to ease the transition of her husband’s soul into Frank’s body. Gricey’s identity itself is a central plot concern, with the validation of his alleged fascist sympathies confirmed through Joan’s discovery of the fascist uniform and hidden pin among his clothes. Here the external projects the internal and the clothes make the man. Joan struggles to reconcile her own notions of Gricey’s identity with the revelatory external identifiers, coming to associate him with the fascist uniform itself. This identification ultimately precipitates her descent into a frenzied state in which she stabs a fascist wearing a similar uniform, mistaking them for Gricey returned to life. Beyond this link between clothing and identity, the text also concerns Vera, Joan’s daughter, and her metafictional rebellion against those trappings of the gothic to which she initially seems to adhere. Described as “fragile” (1), with a “wan, tragic face, lovely even in grief” (5), Vera presents as an archetypical gothic heroine of the novel—inasmuch as she seems trapped in the house of a dominant male, frightened by dark shadowy figures around her home, and slowly embroiled in the covert desires of the house’s master. She, too, inhabits the attic at home (21), a move that, coupled with Vera’s seeming fragility and her previous “touch of hysteria” (22), is all too familiar to the gothic in a post-Jane Eyre world. The attic being, as Joan asserts, where you “put the madwomen” (25). Vera, appearing to be headed on her way further into

100  Daniel Southward madness, is presented as “feverish” (50), with nerves that play up (52), appearing sometimes as though her “total nervous collapse [was] imminent” (78). This last descriptor, however, comes as Joan recognizes a certain resilience in her daughter in the face of just such a collapse. Instead of the madwoman in the attic becoming increasingly frenzied, Vera, instead, despite the apparent pressures of her upcoming theatrical role, is described as “on top of it” (237). She is not subsumed by the gothic setting, or her preestablished gothic heroine identity, and instead her characterization becomes a self-aware comment on McGrath’s own potential desire, as “Reluctant Gothicist,”5 to move away from and disturb such generic tropes so as to better analyze them. Joan’s death scene recalls Henry Wallis’s significant Romantic painting The Death of Chatterton (1856): Joan Grice [is] splayed sideways, recumbent, on a wooden bench pushed up against the wall. One arm is hanging limp to the stone floor, fingers trailing. Her hair is unkempt, her eyes are open, as is her coat, and so is the front of her blouse, with several buttons undone. (McGrath 2017, 304) This image reflects the positioning of Chatterton in Wallis’s painting. By reflecting a recognizable image of the Romantic movement, and the subsequent links to Gothicism of such, McGrath may be painting an implicit critique of the mode. The “traditional” gothic heroine Vera succeeds in overcoming the generic assumptions of her role. Yet a recognizably Romantic death is reflected in Joan’s suicide, and she has adhered to little gothic convention, but been central to the gothic nature of the story nonetheless. The standard conventions of the gothic no longer have the power to drive characters to the psychological distress that it is so often centered around. Instead, Vera, whose death reflects part of the origins of the genre via ties to the beginnings of Romanticism, “achieves” the gothic end—psychological terror, frenzy, death—through the psychological pressures and trauma of her narrative. Identity in the novels of McGrath is malleable; it extends beyond the self to affect all beyond it. These questions of identity complicate the categorization of McGrath as a purely gothic novelist; the set pieces of the gothic, as in The Wardrobe Mistress, fall by the wayside in favor of an exploration of the problematized self. Instead, McGrath’s worlds are inherently gothic in a different manner. They deal with a quintessential psychological terror of the genre; one based on subjective self-created identities that are in direct conflict with the external history of the self. McGrath’s historiographic editors take their own histories as malleable narratives able to be crafted through retelling and, in doing so, they forge a new history that denies the terrors of the present self. Similar are

The Terrors of the Self  101 those self-mythologizing characters who impose on themselves rather than a perceived antagonist within their history—characters who, in the face of the terrors of trauma, subconsciously or otherwise attempt to build themselves a new gestalt persona from the wreckage of the traumatic past. In such attempts, the thin veneer of the new self is doomed to crack under the resurgence of the ghosts of the pasts. Finally come the characters who are victims of the identity games of others. The identity victims who rebel, or suffer, under the needs of a stronger identity in order to support the desires of the oppressor. Such problematized identities lend themselves to the standard identifiers of the gothic mode in which characters are haunted by the reappearance of a past they wished long passed, or are otherwise trapped by oppressive, dominant personalities. McGrath’s worlds, however, increasingly shy away from the standard practices of the gothic; instead of castles of dominant lords and dark monsters, we are presented with mazes of the mind, overbearing personalities bent in pursuit of stability, and dark traumas. The manipulation of identity within McGrath’s oeuvre presents the reader with a form of the gothic that is ever tied to the genre’s past but, too, represents a desire to move from the mansion to the mind: from the ghost of another, to the ghosts of the self.

Notes 1 By self-mythology, I refer specifically to narratives of self-identity crafted by, or for, characters who underpin their sense of self. Dennis Cleg in Spider, for example, builds a specific self-mythology in his creation of an identity narrative that will sustain his preferred self-identity. In short, these are the identity-shoring stories that the characters build, accept, or have fostered on them. 2 Similarly, Hugo’s own displacement of the murder of Sidney (depending on whether we believe the confession of George Leckey or not) removes his own role in the man’s death and places it firmly on Fledge. If Hugo murdered Sidney in response to the accusations of blackmail regarding knowledge of Hugo’s homosexuality, or if Hugo merely murdered Sidney in response to his own internal struggles to, again, comprehend his own sexual desires, it would make sense for Hugo to displace these actions onto Fledge and paint the man as a villain and, in doing so, himself as the victim. 3 Telling of the control Jack exerts over Vera during this period is the admission that he took an unfinished painting from Vera’s workshop and painted over it (McGrath 2005, 217). If art is the expression of the unconscious, of hidden identity, then this action becomes highly symbolic of Jack’s desire to foster an identity for Vera, and to manipulate the identity role that she must play within the sphere of his self-mythology. 4 For example, see Hélène Machinal’s “The Turn of the Screw in McGrath’s Asylum,” or “McGrath’s Women” by Sue Zlosnik, both of which are chapters in Patrick McGrath: Directions and Transgressions (ed. Dupont 2012). 5 Named so by Sue Zlosnik in her opening address at the Asylums, Pathologies and the Themes of Madness: Patrick McGrath and His Gothic Contemporaries conference, held in Stirling on 16 January 2016.

102  Daniel Southward

References Bruhm, Steven. 2002. “Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It.” In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, edited by Jerrold E. Hogle, 259–276. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dupont, Jocelyn, ed. 2012. Patrick McGrath: Directions and Transgressions. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Morrow, Bradford, and Patrick McGrath. 1989. “Patrick McGrath.” BOMB 28 (Summer): 30–31. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/patrick-mcgrath/. McGrath, Patrick. 1989. “Afterword: The New Gothic.” Conjunctions 14 (Fall): 239–244. www.conjunctions.com/print/article/patrick-mcgrath-c14. ———. 1992. Spider. London: Penguin Books, 1990. ———. 1993. Dr Haggard’s Disease. London: Viking. ———. 1995. The Grotesque. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1989. ———. 1997. Asylum. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1996. ———. 2000. Martha Peake: A Novel of the Revolution. London: Viking. ———. 2005. Port Mungo. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2004. ———. 2009. Trauma. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2008. ———. 2014. Constance. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2013. ———. 2015. “Patrick McGrath on Writing Asylum.” Penguin.co.uk. 2015. www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2015/patrick-mcgrath-on-writing-asylum/. ———. 2017. The Wardrobe Mistress. London: Random House. McGrath, Patrick, and Neil McRobert. 2011. “Patrick McGrath Interviewed by Neil McRobert.” The Gothic Imagination. 2011. www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/ blog/patrick-mcgrath-interviewed-by-neil-mcrobert/. Zlosnik, Sue. 2011. Patrick McGrath. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

7 Patrick McGrath and Passion The Gothic Modernism of Asylum and Beyond Matt Foley and Rebecca Duncan As many critics have noted, McGrath’s prose psychologizes and contemporizes the received gothic aesthetic, with the writings of Edgar Allan Poe being one of his principal influences. There is, though, also a modernist influence upon his writing—particularly if we take literary modernism, which so often is associated with the avant-garde of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, as including the “Impressionist” work of Henry James, Ford Madox Ford (then Heuffer), and Joseph Conrad around the turn of the twentieth century. As we argue in this chapter, a selection of McGrath’s fiction, particularly Asylum (1996), can be read as gothic modernist: that is, as drawing together modernist technique and concerns with images of gothic excess. This modernist influence has not gone unnoticed by critics. Toward the culmination of our argument, we draw, for example, from Sue Zlosnik’s revealing reading of Port Mungo’s (2004) critique of modernist myth-making and artistry (2011, 100–105). Indeed, McGrath himself has signaled his debt to modernism in a number of interviews and in his critical work. Yet there is still much to be said about the complex influences that modernism has both on McGrath’s signature first-person narration and regarding the ways in which his fiction explores and critiques modernist concerns. In what follows, we suggest that modernist aesthetics is an important influence upon McGrath’s neo-gothic writing. In particular, critics are yet to explore the ways in which the various representations of what McGrath’s narrators often term “passion”—that is, a radical excess of affect that defies rationalization and even socialization—can be understood in light of modernist discourses surrounding “primitivism,” including those that surface in D. H. Lawrence’s theories of the unconscious and of sexual liberation. Modernism, then, shapes McGrath’s writing, and this influence is particularly apparent in Port Mungo’s interest in modernist painting, as well as in Asylum’s handling of narration and its interrogation of “passion.” McGrath’s neo-gothic writing achieves much of its power by employing a method that speaks to one of the most oft-cited definitions of the gothic mode but that, too, can be understood in terms of modernist innovation. Penned in 1992—and therefore contemporaneous with

104  Matt Foley and Rebecca Duncan McGrath’s and Bradford Morrow’s edited collection of stories The New Gothic (1992)—Chris Baldick’s influential understanding of the gothic argues that the mode combines “a fearful sense of inheritance in time with the claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration” (Baldick 1993, xix). In other words, the gothic conjures up moments or atmospheres of terror only to redouble their traumatizing effects by exposing the reader to one final, culminative horror. Rather than bring closure or transcendence, the gothic—particularly gothic horror—moves toward “disintegration,” to use Baldick’s terminology and this descent is deeply unsettling; usurped by tragedy and pain, fantasies of hope, redemption, or reconciliation reach their limit. Fittingly, Baldick’s introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales prefaces a collection that, even as it ranges from the mid-eighteenth century to the contemporary in the stories that appear within it, includes McGrath’s own “Blood Disease” (1988). Distinguishing their contemporary gothic from the influential writings of Poe, who fused the “historical” concerns of the genre with his own interest in psychological disintegration and space, McGrath and Morrow argue that “the new gothicist” begins by addressing and representing “interior entropy—spiritual and emotional breakdown—and addresses the exterior furniture of the genre from a contemporary vantage” (1992, xii). The point of “vantage” or gaze that McGrath’s narrators often take upon the gothic means that its “furniture” is invoked for the purposes of pastiche and occasionally parody. Admittedly, this “new” gothic is placed directly in conversation with the mid-nineteenth century aesthetic of Poe. However, the very brevity of McGrath and Morrow’s introduction leads to a stripping back of a more nuanced modern gothic heritage—and by modern we mean, here, the historical period after Poe, up until the interwar years of the twentieth century—that feeds into this “new” writing, particularly McGrath’s. In Asylum (1996), for instance, we find a narrative technique influenced by literary Impressionism that interrogates early-to-mid-twentieth-century modernist understandings of artistry and passion. Asylum is concerned thematically with madness, betrayal, institutionalism, and sexual possession. Its setting in 1959 is particularly telling too; this is the year before the birth of the 1960s, a decade that was not only a time of comparative sexual liberation, but also a period in which the distinction between asylum and hospital would begin to be eradicated. Thus, the asylum of McGrath’s novel rests upon V ­ ictorian ­principles of psychiatry that will soon be made archaic through transformative legislation, particularly the 1959 Mental Health Act. We may, too, consider Asylum as forming part of the range of texts that critics now recognize as characterizing the field of gothic medical ­humanities; that is, those gothic texts that “[b]eyond critiquing individual practitioners’ ­detachment or ambition […] may be useful in critiquing institutions

McGrath and Passion  105 themselves” (Wasson 2015, 7). Asylum is narrated by consulting psychiatrist Peter Cleave and his first-person narrative is delivered in the cold, seemingly objective tone of the medical practitioner. Even if Cleave’s voice, as Sue Zlosnik has put it, conjures up “the empiricism of the doctor,” we soon begin to discern that he provides an unreliable point of view, with his own conflicting passions and predilection for treachery shaping the tale itself. It is Asylum’s themes that, for Zlosnik, most speak to its gothic credentials. She argues that the text’s transgressive turns are “shaped around a powerful symbolic structure relating to boundaries.” More specifically, Asylum makes “the boundary between passion and delirium unstable, while yet again drawing attention to the instability of the category of madness itself” (Zlosnik 2011, 75–76). Indeed, this unveiling of unruly, transgressive passion that is hidden by a narrator’s facade, their social face of decorum that itself is a construct connected with class and profession, owes much of its power to M ­ cGrath’s fusion of modernist and gothic narrative techniques. As an early review of Asylum in The New York Times notes, itself provocatively entitled “Sex With a Psycho, Just for Starters” (1997), the narrative action of the novel, particularly Stella Raphael’s affair with Edgar Stark, can be read as a pastiche of Oliver Mellors’s encounters with Constance Chatterley in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). The reviewer describes Stella’s passion for Edgar in Asylum as “a dark sendup” of Lawrence’s novel. One that “does not lead to liberation or transcendence; as in so many McGrath stories, it leads to obsession, death and everlasting guilt” (Kakutani 1997, para 1). While we would make the case that Asylum is more of a carefully constructed pastiche— rather than a “sendup”—of Lawrence’s censored novel, it is useful, particularly when readings of McGrath so far have been dominated by those critical methodologies that we associate with literary gothic and/ or medical humanities, to consider the novel’s broader debt to modernist aesthetics. Even if the narrative trajectory of Asylum—its descent into madness; its refusal to grant the reader “liberation or transcendence”— is indebted to the gothic imagination, its mode of narration is recognizably modernist. As Mara Reisman has noted (2017, 157), while the story’s narrative arch of adultery and transgression alludes, in part, to Lawrence’s writing, its mode of narration is indebted to Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (1914) and that book’s narrator, John Dowell. Peter Cleave’s style of narration, the way in which his account is at once elusive and suggestive of his darker desires, recalls Dowell’s untrustworthiness. Both narrators, though, self-fashion as trustworthy and detached. They purport to give an objective account of the passions that lead to the tragedies and falls from grace, socially speaking, of the characters at the heart of their respective stories. We will not recount its plot here, but it suffices to say that The Good Soldier is paradigmatic

106  Matt Foley and Rebecca Duncan of the pre-modernist Impressionist movement in literature that was theorized and led, primarily, by Ford and by Joseph Conrad, a writer whose influence McGrath has long acknowledged upon his own work. Notably, McGrath writes appreciatively of the role that the “texture” of Impressionist aesthetics plays in opening up certain moral depths and complexities: One of the many joys of Conrad’s work is the deft grace with which he splices together the narrative and moral strands of his stories: as they advance, they deepen, and no texture in fiction is richer in this regard. (McGrath 2018b, 521) Along with this carefully constructed ethical complexity, it is the Impressionists’ recognition “that all art must be the expression of an ego” (Heuffer 1914, 167), which speaks to McGrath’s writing, or at least his preference for shaping his stories, predominantly, as unreliable first-­ person narratives. In Asylum, the ephemeral quality of the Impressionist text—think of Marlow amidst the mists of the Thames at the outset of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899)—is replaced by the clinical gaze of the psychiatrist. Nevertheless, there is still always in McGrath’s writing an ego at work that the (implied) reader must judge for themselves and, in some senses, psychoanalyze. That ego may present itself and self-fashion as objective, as our supposed way in to discovering the desires and motivations of those whose stories are being told, but they will, perhaps inadvertently, soon signal the pathologies of their own desire. The reader, in turn, may infer the ways in which such desire frames and infects the telling of the story in hand. The narrator may unravel rather quickly (as in McGrath’s Poe-inspired stories such as “The Smell” (1992)) or give themselves away increment by increment (such as with Peter Cleave in Asylum). In comparing Cleave to Dowell, we somewhat disagree with Mara Reisman’s judgment that “while readers of The Good Soldier quickly suspect the accuracy of John Dowell’s tale and his motivation for telling it, readers of Asylum trust Peter and his narrative until late in the text” (2017, 157). There are signposts in Cleave’s narrative from the outset— such as his confession that he advised Jack Straffen, the asylum’s medical superintendent, against hiring Max Raphael (McGrath 1997, 2)—that he has his own motivations and that they conflict with what is best for the Raphaels. Yet, as Sue Zlosnik has observed: It is in the final phase of the novel that the affinity between Edgar and Cleave becomes apparent. Indeed, the significance of Cleave’s name, with its connotations of splitting as well as clinging, is thrown into relief as the doubling so common in Gothic fiction is made

McGrath and Passion  107 clear. Edgar is Mr Hyde to Cleave’s Dr Jekyll. Both are driven by the impulse towards possession: with Edgar this leads to the atrocities perpetrated on the body of another; in the case of Cleave the desire for possession takes a different form, but the implication is that psychiatry itself holds the potential to be a Gothic undertaking. (2011, 85) The novel’s title, then, is somewhat ironic; it signals the impossibility of Stella finding “asylum” with Cleave or with Edgar and also foregrounds the connotations of parolement and containment that we may associate with the psychiatric institution. Both men seek to possess Stella absolutely, both are monomaniacal, but they have learned to enforce their will upon others by different means. Cleave attempts to exert his will over Stella through cunning and by using Stella’s gendered social position, in this postwar context, against her. Edgar’s reputation, his clinical history and former transgressions, always seem ready to irrupt into the present. That is, his very demeanor threatens “subjective” (we borrow this term from Slavoj Žižek’s Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2009, 8–33)) or interpersonal violence toward Stella, particularly after he becomes convinced that she is trying to flee him—and their life on the margins in London—to return to Max. Indeed, it was a delusion of being betrayed by his lover—what Cleave describes as a paranoiac mania that, although “fantastic,” has a “ghostly resemblance to logic” (McGrath 1997, 40)—that convinced Edgar to murder his wife Ruth. We will return in due course to the gruesome details of that act. As well as the direct threat of violence that Edgar poses to Stella, there is also the transgressive violence against social norms that Edgar invokes in her: a passion that is destructive, excessive, and that cannot be mediated or controlled. Indeed, she is so damaged by her encounters with Edgar, and the resulting exclusion of her and Max by their former community at the asylum, that her maternal instinct is almost entirely corrupted. Nowhere is this absence of the maternal instinct more evident than in Stella’s failure to act as Charlie, her son, drowns in front of her on a school excursion in North Wales: the final home of the Raphaels before their family unit is destroyed beyond repair. Asylum is, too, the product of a writer whose own father was Medical Superintendent at Broadmoor. The young boy of the narrative, Charlie Raphael, McGrath himself admits, shares his author’s childhood interests: “[Charlie’s] fascination with toads and watery places and football and the parole patients who came out every day to look after the grounds of the estate, and whom he treated as benign, this was me” (McGrath 2015, xii). Familiar with the desperate circumstances of the insane at Broadmoor, McGrath, observing and then adopting his father Pat McGrath Sr’s deep understanding of his patients’ needs, is able to represent even the criminally insane, such as Edgar, in a way that speaks to their everyday

108  Matt Foley and Rebecca Duncan existence, while also paying heed to the horrors that they experience and are capable of. Patrick’s memory of his father at Broadmoor encapsulates both McGraths’ sensitivity to those labeled “mad”: I remember being with him [my father] once, at dusk, crossing a yard inside the hospital. I was eight or nine years old at the time. A scream came from a high window in Block Six. Even now, more than half a century later, the words “block six” arouse an echo of the dreadful fascination I once felt with that building. It was where the most disturbed male patients were housed. New admissions went into Block Six, if they presented any risk—men who had in most cases committed grievous acts of violence while psychotic. But it wasn’t a scream of demented fury that I heard that evening; it was a scream of the most wretched misery. I turned to my father. “Poor John,” he murmured, and I understood that he understood what his patient was suffering; and the fact that he understood it robbed the scream of much of its terror for me. (McGrath 2012, para 2) McGrath, then, even at this tender age, moved from a “dreadful fascination” with the insane to an understanding of the pain they feel—a sympathy that may be ostensibly understated by his father’s murmuring but connotes, in actuality, a profound depth of feeling. In his fiction, McGrath writes of the insane so convincingly because he is able to move beyond the “dreadful fascination” that can be symptomatic of viewing the mad as alien, as other, as ghouls whose actions we read of to reaffirm our own sense of “normality.” His neo-gothic moves beyond this “dreadful fascination,” but much contemporary horror and gothic does not. McGrath’s understanding is as clinical as it is empathetic. He is well versed in psychoanalytic thought, of course, but the inspiration for writing Edgar’s mania is very specific: On a visit home, browsing through my father’s bookshelves […] I found a slim volume about a rare psychiatric disorder. It was called Morbid Jealousy and Murder […]. [T]hat book gave me all I needed both to establish Edgar Stark’s pathology, and to suggest the gravity of the danger Stella faced. (McGrath 2015, xiii) The excesses of Edgar’s condition and the parameters of his paranoiac delusions, then, are drawn from psychiatric literature. The thematic consequences of his madness, however, are carefully connected to the broader concerns of McGrath’s fiction—transgressive artistry, passion (sex and anger), and self-destruction—and the connections between them. It is in exploring such concerns that McGrath positions Asylum as

McGrath and Passion  109 a Lawrentian novel. Other critics have noted, too, the influence of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) upon “the blinds, screens, illusions and distorted images” of Cleave’s narration and, in terms of space and psychology, to the lakeside scene of Charlie’s tragic death that demonstrates Stella’s complete isolation from society (Machinal 2012, 78, 73). The modernist influence on McGrath has at times been overlooked by critical work on his writing because of the perceived disjunction between modernism and the gothic (i.e., the critical lens through which much of McGrath’s work has been read). Yet, an important intertext for McGrath, Henry James’s refined and narratively complex The Turn of the Screw disrupts any supposed opposition between the gothic—here the ghost story—and modernist aesthetics. Thematically, in its interest in sex, artistry, passion, and transgression, Asylum is, though, more indebted to Lawrence’s modernist project. In one of the novel’s many pastiches of Lawrence’s prose style, for instance, Stella is described as finding vitality in the sexual encounter: “she hugged herself and remembered the nights they’d had in London, and how alive she’d been, alive with passion for that poor disturbed man” (McGrath 1997, 151). Where there is love and attraction, there must, too, be its polar opposite of hate. As Stella and Max’s relationship disintegrates, McGrath’s adoption of Lawrentian prose reinforces Stella’s “entrapment” by her emotions— and here we may recall Baldick’s oft-cited definition of the gothic—and how these are tied to her jailer, Max: “she hated him simply because he wasn’t Edgar. He wasn’t Edgar, yet he was there, and because he was there he was hateful” (1997, 154). The parallelism and careful repetition of McGrath’s prose mirrors Lawrence’s style, certainly, and it does so to emphasize the inescapability of the Raphaels’ situation. The focus on feeling “alive”—on sex rejuvenating the self—and, too, in other sections of the novel on the dark regions of the human animal that are beyond rationality and socialization, connect McGrath’s writing to those broader issues of modernist “primitivism” with which Lawrence’s work so often engaged. Importantly, we can come to recognize McGrath’s writing as a critique of such concerns. As much as it may promise liberation from repression, for McGrath Lawrentian passion can be a dangerous and destructive force. Edgar Stark’s propensity for psychotic violence and the helpless servitude that Stella Raphael finds herself in when she is overcome by her passions are crystalized in McGrath’s description of a particularly fierce sexual encounter between the pair: This overwhelming appetite they had, this ravenous lust, it alarmed her [Stella], she hated being constantly out of control. There was desperation in it now, and aggression, she worked off her anxiety and frustration in the sex, and this time, as they clung blindly to one another, she bit his shoulder hard. The effect was dramatic. He reared

110  Matt Foley and Rebecca Duncan up and slapped her face, but they didn’t stop, and it wasn’t until a minute or two later, when they came apart, that she rolled away from him and buried her face in the pillow. (McGrath 1997, 119) Stella’s passion for Edgar manifests itself, here, as a form of subjective violence—that is, a bite—that should bring gratification. Edgar meets it in response with an abusive slap; one that seems to be given in anger rather than in lust. This violence produces a more perilous sense of danger than the transgressive frissons of pleasure that Stella once enjoyed in her encounters with Edgar in the asylum. Nevertheless, the sex continues, and their tryst speaks to a powerful force that is not merely indecent; it suggests, in fact, the obscene violence that the murderer enacts against his victim. In his position as outsider—and in the “passion” he arouses in Stella—Edgar is clearly a Lawrentian figure but one who is more extreme and excessive than the originate Lawrentian outcast. ­McGrath’s characterization here fuses the transgressive sensibilities of the modernist moment with the paranoia of the dangerous ­psychopath—the latter being a figure who is all too familiar to contemporary horror writing. McGrath’s interest in Lawrentian aesthetics is not, then, restricted to his reworking of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, even if it was this dimension that reviewers recognized on the publication of Asylum in 1996. The most enduring concepts of Lawrence’s worldview concerning the power of the corporeal unconscious (what he termed the “blood consciousness”) and the importance of the “primal” side to the human are reiterated and revisited across his fiction from The Rainbow (1913) onward. Time and again, Lawrence represented reservoirs of human feeling to celebrate the “aliveness” of being. And he saw this vitality represented in the African sculpture that influenced the “primitivistic” turns of early-twentieth-century European modernism. To his credit, Lawrence was one to challenge the hierarchical relationship between African and supposedly “superior” Western modes of art posited, for instance, by the Bloomsbury critic Roger Fry. Rupert Birkin’s admiration of African sculpture in Women in Love details the terms of this debate over aesthetic worth. At one moment in the novel, Gerald Crick beckons Rupert over to ask him what he makes of an African sculpture—its country of origin is not stated—of a woman in labor. Birkin declares it “art” as the sculpture “coveys a complete truth.” And he goes on to defend it as “high art” at that: “But you can’t call it high art,” said Gerald. “High! But there are centuries and hundreds of centuries of development in a straight line, behind that carving; it is an awful pitch of culture, of a definite sort.”

McGrath and Passion  111 “What culture,” Gerald asked, in opposition. He hated the sheer African thing. “Pure culture in sensatritiion, culture in the physical consciousness, really ultimate physical consciousness, mindless, utterly sensual. It is so sensual as to be final, supreme.” But Gerald resented it. He wanted to keep certain illusions, certain ideas like clothing. (Cited in Rodden 2016, 173; original emphases) Pure culture is sensation, writes Lawrence, and this is a culture that recognizes the primacy of the physical consciousness. Notably, in Edgar’s modus operandi for murder there is the echo of Lawrence’s interest in “primal” sculpture. Indicative of his rage, Edgar had “killed his wife with a hammer,” and, as if to redouble and intensify the horror of this act, as Jack Straffen elaborates to Stella, he disfigures the corpse postmortem: “He decapitated her. Then he enucleated her. He cut her head off, and then he took her eyes out” (McGrath 1997, 65, 69). The novel’s final lines imply that Cleave’s sense of possessing Stella is rendered complete only after she has committed suicide and he has attained ownership of Edgar’s representations of her. In life, Stella allowed Cleave to believe they were to be married; with her death, she reaffirms her passion for Edgar and the very destructiveness of that attraction. With the law and its systemic power on his side—the police “were most accommodating” (McGrath 1997, 249)—Cleave takes ownership of a number of the “morbidezza” drawings and sketches that Edgar made of Stella in his studio and in the asylum’s vegetable garden (ibid.; original emphasis). Cleave has, too, Stark’s highly symbolic sculpture of Stella’s head, which he has had “fired and cast in black bronze,” and the description of which, far from suggesting beauty and delicacy, brings to mind the “anguished” distortions of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893). Stark had “so worked it down, that it became slim and tiny in the end” (McGrath 1997, 250; original emphasis).To recall the language of literary Impressionism, the “ego at work” that provides us with an account of Stella’s case is by no means disinterested. In the novel, both art and society are presented as dangers to Stella, even if the former at first promises escape from the passionless paternal world that pervades the asylum and that Max comes to represent. Edgar Stark embodies a deeply gothic incarnation of the dark passions explored so often in Lawrence’s modernism and this makes the novel just as much of a critique of modernist artistry as Port Mungo, which we turn to reading below. Cleave, on the other hand, represents a more systemic form of violence that contributes to Stella’s suicide by restraining her desire. In setting this trap, McGrath asks his readers to analyze their own assumptions about the privileges of masculinity, power, gender, and the primacy of the passions through examining Cleave’s motivations,

112  Matt Foley and Rebecca Duncan which are ominously signposted in his twinning with Edgar. Once the gruesome details of Edgar’s attack upon his first wife are made clear, the correlating shift in register toward horror—and that genre’s particular fascination with dismembered and penetrated corporeality—is carefully managed by McGrath, and its impact is striking. This horror is a gothic modernist image through which the Lawrentian antihero is positioned as psychopath. Clearly, such descriptions of mutilation do not conjure up the haziness of the impressionistic mode in which “The horror! The horror!”—to borrow Conrad’s famous parallelism—is more pervasive and less easily defined. The invocation of enucleation signals, instead, in no uncertain terms, the gothic depths of deprivation to which the novel can reach, as well as the peril of Stella’s situation with Edgar. If Asylum’s interest in exploring transgressions between sanity and insanity and its questioning of the gendered gazes and institutions that entrap Stella lead to moral and ethical ambiguity, there is little doubt that Edgar is capable of extreme harm. His status as artist, clearly, is thematically connected to his working of the deceased Mrs. Stark’s head—mirrored in the sculpture of Stella that he makes, and which Cleave comes to possess. Indeed, Edgar is a striking example of McGrath’s recurring interrogation of the dangerous artist; one whose excessive passions and habits (and sometimes their art, too) lead them to radically challenge, and so therefore be excluded from, the mainstream. He takes up this theme in his postmillennial novel Port Mungo. As a way in to reading Port Mungo, the category of “passion” can be considered in more detail by turning to the opening of “The Black Hand of the Raj,” which is one of McGrath’s early, published short stories collected in Blood and Water and Other Tales (1988). In the story’s short epilogue, the framing narrator suggests provocatively that “it was in the torrid climates of the various far-flung corners of the Empire that many Europeans first confronted the nature of passion” (McGrath 2018a, 49). If we take the Lawrentian influence upon McGrath as serious—rather than as a source for parody—then it is possible to read this confrontation with “passion” as being with something that is not entirely alien or beyond the reach of the European; instead, this encounter involves a recognition of a power that is universal—not necessarily exclusive to “far-flung corners” of the Imperial project—but that has been repressed in European culture. Indeed, it is the artist, rather than the explorer, per se, in McGrath’s fiction who seems to have access to “passion;” through their transgressive work, their position outside the mainstream, they experience both the intoxicating and the dangerous effects of tapping into this surplus. Sue Zlosnik has neatly encapsulated some of the important and recurring concerns of McGrath’s writing, which, as she puts it, interrogates “the degeneracy of the upper classes; the limitations of the scientific perspective, specifically that of the medical profession; and a gothic fascination with the instability of bodily forms” (2011, 25–26).

McGrath and Passion  113 The destructive side to McGrath’s passion seems to be at work in the degeneracy of the upper classes—passion equates to excessive sexual desire and, more broadly in his fiction, such as in Port Mungo, to transgressing the limit of the incest taboo, with horrific consequences. We may also say that the “scientific perspective” cannot account for the sheer force of passion. This is at work in Asylum when Cleave underestimates Stella’s enduring desire for Edgar. While Edgar’s passion is dangerous for the very reason that it is “mad”—that it conjures in him a violence that can pierce and mutilate the female “bodily form.” Passion, then, is at work in various guises in McGrath’s writing. As much as it may promise liberation, in true gothic fashion it often turns out to be a destructive force. The realization that this passion can be an ugly thing—that following it leaves McGrath’s characters in peril, cast off by society—is important to Port Mungo. What Port Mungo confirms is that there is always an ego at work in the European adoption of the so-called primitivist aesthetics. Even the Lawrentian attitude to promote instinct over self-reflection needs to be seen in the context of the narcissism of the European artist, and their totalizing gaze. In McGrath’s transnational novel, the most troubling ego on display does not belong to the first-person narrator, Gin, but to her brother Jack Rathbone. A promiscuous youth and talented artist, Jack comes to elope to New York with his art teacher Vera Savage, who declares in Camden Town, London that “the war had done for Europe” and that New York is now “the greatest city in the history of the West” (McGrath 2005, 27). Jack finds New York not to his taste. He struggles to be recognized there as the talent he believes himself to be. In turn, he encourages Vera to travel south with him, and eventually they come to live in Port Mungo: “a once-prosperous river town now gone to seed, writhing and steaming among the mangrove swamps of the Gulf of Honduras” (55). Temporally speaking, the novel begins in the London of the late 1950s—and so its setting is somewhat detached in time from the modernist moment—yet, aesthetically speaking, modernist painting infuses the narrative: from the work of Paul Gauguin, to Edouard Manet, to the New York abstract expressionism of Mark Rothko. Indeed, Rathbone is described by Gin as a “latter-day Gauguin” (80) and his journey to Honduras—toward the “exotic”—is a parallel to, and possibly a parody of, Gauguin’s own influential work in French Polynesia in the mid-1890s and early 1900s. Zlosnik has already provided a revealing reading of the modernist turns to Port Mungo; she sees the narrative as a “distinctive postmodern critique of the modernist quest for artistic authenticity” that, in so doing, draws from “a set of accumulated conventions from Gothic literature” (2011, 102). Like the early gothic novel, the narrative presents the transgression of the incest taboo through paternal abuse. Jack and Vera’s younger daughter Anna reveals, or at least accuses her father of, abusing their elder daughter Peg who takes her own life. Jack later provides

114  Matt Foley and Rebecca Duncan a drunken confession of the horrific deed. Once more, the “passion” that infuses Jack’s young life in London becomes, as the novel develops, dangerous and indecent. The point is that this excess of desire is always already present in the (modernist) artist; it is not activated, per se, by journeying beyond Anglo-American culture to the “exotic” Gulf of Honduras. Instead, it is a pathology—a sickness, one might say—that, much like Edgar Stark’s propensity to murder, can be termed “evil” and that does lasting damage to social structures (McGrath 2005, 232). Even if in the days of high Empire, as the opening to “The Black Hand of the Raj” argues, the Western imperialists were first “confronted” by the “passion” of the East, there was perhaps always already a perversion of this category at work in Western culture. This perversion of “passion” is more dangerous because it has been systemically repressed. And, in turn, it manifests itself in those pathologies that flout the age-old ­taboos of murder (Asylum) and incest (Port Mungo). An understanding of McGrath’s gothic modernism, as we are tempted to term it, is important to locating the development of his contemporary approach to both modes. The neo-gothic effect of Asylum, as we have shown above, draws at least some of its underpinning technique from impressionistic, early modernism, particularly in its carefully crafted first person narration and its numerous narrative ambiguities. McGrath’s fusing of the gothic and modernism could, too, be explored in light of recent, historicized critical studies that have uncovered several connections between them, including monographs by Daniel Darvay (2016) and Sam Wiseman (2019). The critical field to which these studies belong—and with its nascent roots to be found in the early 2000s (see Smith and ­Wallace 2001), gothic modernism is now a fully formed field of enquiry in its own right—challenges the old assumptions that the gothic and high modernism are absolutely oppositional. On first inspection, given its excesses and its enduring, popular appeal since the late eighteenth century, the gothic would seem the absolute antithesis to the restrained, classical aesthetic models lauded, in particular, by the British modernists. Many of the modernist intertexts for McGrath’s writing that influence his neoGothic aesthetic, of course, do not engage with the gothic in any sustained way in their original contexts of production. Yet McGrath draws consistently from early-to-mid modernism and its often bleak view of urbanity and the family in the concerns and atmospheres of his early novels—­Spider (1990), Dr Haggard’s Disease (1993), Asylum—that are set in his England of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. And when his corpus takes a turn toward the transnational, such as in Port Mungo, the modernist influence endures. In that sense, McGrath goths-up the modernist tradition consistently across his work; or, at least, he continues to draw out modernism’s fascination with artistry and primitivism into moments of gothic excess that cast these discourses in a deeply sinister light. We come to see modernism, then, through a glass, darkly.

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References Baldick, Chris. 1993. “Introduction.” In The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, edited by Chris Baldick, xi–xxiii. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Darvay, Daniel. 2016. Haunting Modernity and the Gothic Presence in British Modernist Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Heuffer, Ford Madox. 1914. “On Impression.” Poetry and Drama 2, no. 6 (June 1914): 167–175. Kakutani, Michiko. 1997. “Sex with a Psycho, Just for Starters.” New York Times, February 14, 1997. www.nytimes.com/1997/02/14/books/sex-with-apsycho-just-for-starters.html. Machinal, Hélène. 2012. “The Turn of the Screw in McGrath’s Asylum.” In Patrick McGrath: Directions and Transgressions, edited by Jocelyn Dupont, 65–79. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. McGrath, Patrick. 1997. Asylum. London: Penguin Books. ———. 2005. Port Mungo. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. ———. 2012. “A Boy’s Own Broadmoor.” The Economist, September/October 2012. www.1843magazine.com/content/ideas/a-boys-own-broadmoor. ———. 2015. “Writing Asylum.” Introduction to Asylum, by Partick McGrath, xi–xv. London: Penguin Random House. ———. 2018a. “The Black Hand of the Raj.” In Patrick McGrath: Writing Madness, edited by Danel Olson, 49–57. Lakewood, CO: Centipede Press. ———. 2018b. “Joseph Conard’s ‘The End of the Tether.’” In Patrick McGrath: Writing Madness, edited by Danel Olson, 519–522. Lakewood, CO: Centipede Press. McGrath, Patrick, and Bradford Morrow. 1992. “Introduction.” In The New Gothic: A Collection of Contemporary Gothic Fiction, edited by Patrick McGrath and Bradford Morrow, xi–xiv. London: Pan Books Limited. Reisman, Mara. 2017. “Destabilizing Institutional and Social Power in Patrick McGrath’s Asylum.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 58, no. 2: 156–173. doi:10.1080/00111619.2016.1178099. Rodden, John. 2016. Between Self and Society: Inner Worlds and Outer Limits in the British Psychological Novel. Austin: University of Texas Press. Smith, Andrew, and Jeff Wallace, eds. 2001. Gothic Modernisms. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Wasson, Sara. 2015. “Useful Darkness: Intersections between Medical Humanities and Gothic Studies.” Gothic Studies 17, no. 1: 1–12. doi:10.7227/ GS.17.1.1. Wiseman, Sam. 2019. Locating the Gothic in British Modernity. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2009. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books Ltd, 2008. Zlosnik, Sue. 2011. Patrick McGrath. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Section III

Millennial McGrath

8 The Price of Suffering and the Value of Remembering Patrick McGrath’s Trauma Michela Vanon Alliata

Patrick McGrath’s fascination with the innermost dark recesses of the psyche, with insanity tout court, and his familiarity with psychiatric-­ clinical literature and discourse are trademarks of his fiction, and, as is well known, they connect to his own biography. Growing up in close proximity to the mentally ill, in the shadow of Broadmoor, Britain’s foremost secure psychiatrist hospital, where his father, Dr. Pat McGrath, was in 1957 appointed the tenth and last medical superintendent of what was then called Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum, was a unique experience which largely helped shape his fictional world. But with Trauma (2008), undoubtedly the most Freudian of his novels, while remaining faithful to the accurate representation of consciousness and subjectivity, his most powerful source of inspiration, McGrath achieves a subtler degree of complexity in probing the labyrinths of the human mind. Structured as a kind of confessional narrative and written in a spare prose, Trauma is an eloquent exploration of memory and suffering, love and self-delusion. More than anything, as the title unequivocally indicates, it addresses with sharp clinical lucidity, as well as with emotional involvement, the disruptive psychological experience of trauma and the connected issues of survival and guilt. The novel is set at the close of the 1970s, in premillennial New York, at the time when the twin towers, “two massive, fretted frames of red girders poking into the sky,” were under construction (McGrath 2008, 12)—an allusion forward to the collective trauma of September 11—and it subtly intertwines the vicissitudes of its protagonist and first–person narrator, psychiatrist Charlie Weir, with the evocation of the horrors and unspeakable sufferings of the ill-starred Vietnam war. One of Charlie’s patients and his future brother-in law is Danny, a mentally unstable and severely traumatized Vietnam veteran, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an ailment first officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980 to designate the development of symptoms such as “amnesia, dissociation, dysphoria, flashbacks, hallucinations, hyperarousal, intrusion, nightmares, numbing, social withdrawal, and suicidal preoccupation in response to horrific events like natural disasters, combat, rape, and torture” (Kacandes 2005, 615).

120  Michela Vanon Alliata Since this ailment appears to be caused by an inability of the individual to integrate trauma into consciousness, PTSD has been often defined as “fundamentally a disorder of memory” (Leys 2000, 2). Drawing mainly on Freud, Caruth, LaCapra, and other leading specialists in trauma studies, and focusing in particular on the psychoanalytic notions of acting out and working through, which are different but interrelated modes of responding to trauma, I will argue that ­McGrath’s novel illustrates not only the narrator’s eventual coming to terms, affectively and cognitively, with his unrecognized and displaced ­traumatization—his belief that the most formatively shattering incident in his childhood was just a dream which involved his father putting a gun to his head—but the ways in which trauma may be induced by the perception of another’s suffering, through identification with another’s traumatic story. As I show, this perfectly describes the relationship between Charlie and his patient Danny and may be taken as an exemplification of the dynamic inherent in psychoanalysis itself where the therapist is called on to empathize with and listen to the traumatized voice of another. While reconfiguring recent American history as a trauma that needs to be acknowledged and worked through, McGrath gives added complexity to his novel by having it told by a doubtful, overly self-­critical, and impaired psychiatrist who increasingly finds himself suffering from the same pathologies he diagnoses in his patients. Trauma thus provides a commentary on and departure from the procedures of psychiatric discourse. Yet the end of the novel seems to endorse the view of psychiatry as an art that can assess, heal and make sense of human suffering. To his wife who says, “‘People don’t change, Charlie’, the narrator replies, ‘Not without help we don’t’” (McGrath 2008, 165). As the novel opens, the melancholic voice of Charlie, an intelligent, sensitive man, aged barely forty but who has reached a point where he “no longer regards [his] life as possessing unlimited potential” (McGrath 2008, 19), flashes back to his childhood and adolescence and to his largely dysfunctional family. He is the son of a depressive and irascible novelist mother and a shiftless, largely absent father, whom he only calls by his name, Fred. Charlie’s precocious caring disposition, self-blame and decreased self-worth, typically brought about by parental conflict, as well as his empathy for others’ suffering, a necessary prerequisite for psychoanalytic understanding,1 are signaled in the very first paragraph: “My mother’s first depressive illness occurred when I was seven years old, and I felt it was my fault. I felt I should have prevented it. This was about a year before my father left us” (McGrath 2008, 3). Charlie’s hopeless devotion to his neglectful mother, an unstable, hard-drinking, and emotionally abusive woman, and conversely his hostility toward his feckless, violent, and volatile father Fred, point to a classic Oedipal scenario, with the ambivalence and emasculation anxiety toward the parent of the opposite sex this configuration often entails.

McGrath’s Trauma  121 The story moves back and forth in time, providing fragmented and alarming hints not only of Charlie’s spiteful and sadistic mother but of his self-deception and false memories. Predicated on self-awareness and the search for self-knowledge, the confessional narrative is a genre that “may involve a kind of hind-and-seek, where the reader finds that what is confessed by the narrator is not the whole or the pertinent truth” (Brooks 2005, 82). Whenever Charlie had tried to protect his mother, whether as a child or as a man, she would turn on him for interfering, and snap that he was “Always trying to help people who don’t want it” (McGrath 2008, 152). She ranked and compared her sons, setting up competition between them, idealizing Walt, her first born, and constantly disparaging Charlie: “‘Oh, anyone can be a psychiatrist,’ she said. ‘It takes talent to be an artist’” (139). Predictably, Walt who never cared much for his mother, emerged from this unhealthy family background entirely unscathed, eventually becoming a cynical, ferociously ambitious, and successful painter.

Lasting Wounds and Latent Memory Lonely and divorced, still pining for his ex-wife Agnes and reflecting on his mother’s death, Charlie is in private practice with a small office on Park Avenue. He is portrayed as an “earnest” and competent psychiatrist (McGrath 2008, 25), and from the start elicits sympathy in the reader. When he confesses that his is not “a scientific endeavour,” his intuition into his patients’ experience being based on “little more than a few years of practice, and reading, and focused introspection; in other words, there is much of art in what I do” (5), one can see how McGrath, while acknowledging psychiatry’s healing and creative power, questions the scientific perspective as a rational and exclusive discourse, a persistent concern in his fiction (Zlosnik 2011, 25). 2 This is achieved in the novel by showing the complex dynamic inherent in the analytic setting and especially by throwing light on the psychological functioning of the psychotherapist himself and to the unconscious motivations for practicing therapy. Charlie soon establishes a connection between his early experiences of neglect, rejection, and abandonment, and his choice of profession: “I do professionally that which you do naturally for those you care for, those whose welfare has been entrusted to you. […] I chose this line of work because of my mother, and I am not alone in this. It is the mothers who propel most of us into psychiatry, usually because we have failed them” (­McGrath 2008, 4). On a deeper level, this indicates how the role of therapist appears to represent for Charlie a way of dealing with guilt regarding aggressive impulses toward his abusive mother. This anxiety is typically transformed “via reaction formations, into a desire to heal and nurture,” which “may result in an overzealous need to cure and

122  Michela Vanon Alliata rescue clients” (Sussman 2007, 178). By the same token, it seems that Charlie’s feelings of omnipotence and arbitrariness, as well as his unacknowledged wish to manipulate patients are the real motivations for engaging this profession: Mine is a profession that might on the surface appear to suit the passive personality. But don’t be too quick to assume that we are uninterested in power. […] I guide you toward what I believe to be the true core and substance of your problem. (McGrath 2008, 5) As Sussman argues, “the therapist’s position of authority and power can provide potent narcissistic gratifications” (2007, 178), while individuals who were “excessively dominated by their parents may compensate for feelings of powerlessness by dominating and controlling their clients” (179). Charlie has specialized in the psychological impact of trauma and with his mentor and friend, doctor Sam Pike, has written a book about trauma in order to make “the world remember—for it had forgotten, yet again the clinical reality of the post-traumatic disorders.” Consistent with some of the fundamental assumptions underlying trauma therapies, Charlie believes that recovery requires emotional engagement with trauma memories through storytelling. By giving “special emphasis to the creation of the trauma story, the detailed narrative of the emotion, the context and the meaning of trauma” (McGrath 2008, 123–124), and by reliving the emotions related to the traumatic experience, patients are able to develop a coherent autobiographical story and in so doing the memory of trauma can be understood. Charlie uses talking therapy to treat patients suffering from post-traumatic disorders with symptoms of anxiety, intrusive thoughts and memories, helping them “to confront and eventually disrupt such patterns of compulsive behaviour” (114). Before discussing how memory relates to the construction of identity— from its opening pages Trauma clearly presents itself as a trauma narrative, as well as a novel of remembering—I will briefly account for the notion of trauma, a core issue for both psychoanalysis and history, and try to identify its main characteristics. The term, which comes from Greek τραῦμα, meaning wound, has long been used in medicine to designate an injury, that is to say, a physiological trauma, and its effects “upon the organism as a whole” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1974, 465). When the concept was adopted by psychiatry, it retained the original meaning though referring to “a wound inflicted […] upon the mind” (Caruth 1996, 3). According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), trauma pertains to experiences where an individual witnesses an event that involves “actual or threatened death or serious injury, or other threat to one’s physical integrity,” and whose response “must involve intense fear, helplessness,

McGrath’s Trauma  123 or horror” (DSM-IV 1994, 2000). Trauma, which was identified in the early days of psychoanalysis as a factor triggering neurotic symptoms, is “an event in the subject’s life defined by its intensity, by the subject’s incapacity to respond adequately to it, and by the upheaval and l­ong-lasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organization” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1974, 465). Freud first developed a theory of traumatic neurosis, that is to say psychic or endogenous trauma, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) in relation to the death drive, as the outcome of an extensive breach of the “protective shield” (Freud 1978a, 27) or defense mechanisms, leading to a compulsion to repeat, 3 and in Moses and Monotheism (1939), the last of his works to appear in his lifetime. He famously argued that the forgotten shocking event returns after a period of latency, a temporal delay—Nachträglichkeit in the original, a neologism coined by Freud, translated into English as “deferred action.” The victim gets away from the scene of the accident “apparently uninjured” since the event is not experienced as it occurs, but is fully evident only later, in connection with another place and in another time: It may happen that a man who has experienced some frightful accident—a railway collision, for instance—leaves the scene of the event apparently uninjured. In the course of the next few weeks, however, he develops a number of severe, psychical and motor symptoms which can be traced to this shock, the concussion or whatever else it was. He now has a “traumatic neurosis.” It is a quite unintelligible—that is to say, a new—fact. (Freud 1978b, 67) Freud posits trauma as synonymous with a period of amnesia, of latent memory during which the source of the originating trauma is not available to the sufferer’s memory. The persistent effects of traumatic events on the individual, which can only be traced to this shock, are later revealed in the form of compulsive repetition, defensive behaviors, repression, amnesia, and displacement—a whole set of severe psychical symptoms which constitute an attempt at both warding off and controlling the memory of a passively experienced, overwhelming incident. In essence, as Luckhurst persuasively argues, “the psyche constantly returned to scenes of unpleasure because, by restaging the traumatic moment over and over again, it hoped belatedly to process the unassimilable material, to find ways of mastering the trauma retroactively” (Luckhurst 2008, 9). Elaborating on Freud’s definition of trauma as a phenomenon of latent memory, an experience which makes itself known in the patient only by its unsummoned, recurring presence long after the traumatic event is over, Caruth describes trauma as a missed or unclaimed experience of

124  Michela Vanon Alliata the threat of death. She underscores the haunting quality of trauma with its insistent repetitions and returns, which shed, however, little light on the original event. Since the traumatic experience is not assimilated fully at the time, but only belatedly and thus not integrated into one’s consciousness, it cannot be possessed in the forms of memory or narrative. It appears thus that one of the main features of trauma is its original inaccessibility since its impact lies not in its demonstrative effect or the forgetting of said effect, but in “an inherent latency within the experience itself” (Caruth 1996, 17).

Surviving Trauma The most critical aspect of psychic trauma appears to be the experience of survival. It was Freud, in his attempt to account for the symptoms of shell shock and traumatic neurosis in soldiers during World War I, who provided, a deeply disturbing insight [...] between trauma and survival: the fact that, for those who undergo trauma, it is not only the moment of the event, but of the passing out of it that is traumatic; that survival itself, in other words, can be a crisis. (Caruth 1995, 9, original emphases) In the third section of Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud discusses a passage from Tasso’s romantic epic Gerusalemme Liberata (1575), “the most moving poetic picture of a fate” as an example of the unconscious repetition-compulsion of trauma and its belated apprehension. Tancred unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest […]. He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again. (Freud 1978a, 22) Freud’s reading of this tragic story allows him to illustrate a mechanism by which individuals suffering from traumatic neurosis tend to repeat and revive through the repetition-compulsion what cannot but bring discomfort and displeasure to the ego, “since it brings to light activities of repressed instinctual impulses” (Freud 1978a, 20). It is only when Tancred, away from the battlefield, enters the haunted forest and in a hallucinatory state unwittingly stabs Clorinda for a second time that he apparently becomes conscious of his suffering. Tancred’s symbolical second killing of Clorinda represents the way psychological trauma repeats

McGrath’s Trauma  125 itself, an event which can be suppressed, but always returns and where the victim repeats an unassimilated experience that was unknowable in the first instance. The crying voice Tancred hears emanating from the tree prompts him to belatedly recognize his past actions and perhaps also permits the specter of his violence to become instrumental in helping him to incorporate the traumatic event into his self-representation. In her interpretation of this famous passage, Caruth observes: Tancred does not only repeat his act but, in repeating it, he for the first time hears a voice that cries out to him to see what he has done. The voice of his beloved addresses him and, in this address, bears witness to the past he has unwittingly repeated […]. At the core of these stories, I would suggest, is thus a kind of double telling, the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival. (Caruth 1996, 2–3, 7; original emphases) The drama of survival, its concurrent shame and guilt, and the idea that the pathology of trauma consists in its repeatedly intruding itself into the present, permeates McGrath’s novel which, like all trauma narratives, resists a linear ordering of events favoring instead, in the continuous deployment of analepses and prolepses, disjunctive and fragmented modes of telling. The stories of the traumatized veteran Danny as well as that of his estranged psychiatrist, driven at the end of the novel to breakdown to near destruction, are told through a radical subversion of chronology and consequent breakdown of narrative memory. Danny is unable to cope with his own guilt and with the “violence, and insanity and death” (McGrath 2008, 38) he has witnessed, experienced and caused, and he eventually commits suicide. Through a stream-of-consciousness technique and in a manner reminiscent of his Dr Haggard’s Disease (1993), a novel set in England during World War II, McGrath deftly foreshadows catastrophe by taking the reader both into his narrator’s damaged past and his uncertain future. Although Haggard’s voice throughout the novel addresses James, a young Spitfire pilot and the son of his deceased lover Fanny, there is also “an implicit address to the reader, as Haggard’s version of events unfolds and his state of mind reveals itself” (Zlosnik 2011, 67). As in Trauma, the shifts in time and memory, the repetitions and fragmentation, mirror, at a formal level, the narrator’s tormented subjectivity and disorientation. Among Charlie’s patients is Elaine Smith, an attractive young attorney, who as a child had suffered “sustained sexual abuse at the hands of her father” (McGrath 2008, 118), and the suicidal Joe Stein who “through no fault of his own had killed a pedestrian when he’d lost control of his car on an icy road. Having taken a life, he did not know why he himself should

126  Michela Vanon Alliata be allowed to live” (McGrath 2008, 60). Like many victims of childhood sexual abuse, Elaine experiences dissociation, a disruption in the functions of consciousness, memory, and identity—a phenomenon common to trauma survivors which ostensibly serves as a means of self-protection against the horror of the abuse and which Freud understood as “a dynamic reaction to conflict’” (Bohleber 2010, 131). Referring to Elaine’s devastating experience—when her father came in she went out, by which she meant she left her body. She became expert at dissociating from the experience and watching as though from a high place, the corner of the ceiling, she said, what happened to the girl on the bed. —Charlie observes that “it was time for her to start talking about what had happened. It was time for her to remember” (McGrath 2008, 171–172). In line with Freud’s insight that part of the cure of trauma is precisely “the possibility of integrating the lost event into a series of associative memories” (Caruth 1995, vii), to tell one’s story as a way of allowing the event to be forgotten, talking about Joe, Charlie comments: what I was trying to elicit from him was the trauma story itself: what happened, what were the details of the thing, what did he feel […]. Only when we had the trauma story, and he’d assimilated it into conscious memory—into the self—could we move on the last stage, which involved reconnecting him to the world, specifically his family and the community in which he lived. (McGrath 2008, 60, original emphasis) Since helplessness, loss of control and isolation are central to trauma, putting their emotional experience into words is a stepping-stone for reconnecting victims of post-traumatic stress disorder to the world around them. By recasting victims’ relationships with their traumas and allowing them to confront what happened to them, rather than being ambushed by them, verbalization may promote acting out, coping, and advance recovery. During group therapy sessions, Vietnam veterans diagnosed with PTSD were encouraged to translate the psychological ravages of their traumas into language. Whether acting out, that is, revisiting, traumatic memories is necessary for healing or whether it may, in fact, even be harmful is a question that reverberates through the account of Charlie’s treatment of Danny.

The Vietnam War: Victims and Perpetrators The central case study around which the entire plot revolves concerns the veteran Danny, the beloved brother of Charlie’s wife Agnes. A “raw-boned

McGrath’s Trauma  127 and taciturn man who gave off a strong feeling of separateness,” Danny “spoke as if there were a gun to his head, and in a way there was: he had an alien inside his brain, a foreign body he could neither assimilate nor expel” (McGrath 2008, 37–38). McGrath problematizes the issues of survival, reconstruction and revelation underlying trauma by choosing as a narrator neither a dispassionate nor a self-confident psychiatrist. Indeed, Charlie empathizes with Danny’s vulnerability and suffering to the point that at times he regards him as his own child (45). Fresh from his residency at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and back in New York, he had once run group therapy sessions for Vietnam veterans in an old city hospital, planning “to turn the unit into a model of the sort of progressive mental-health treatment” he had been exposed to (29). Charlie is a politically engaged young man, painfully aware that in those war years “America played the part of a mad god eager to devour its young, the willing slave of its own death instinct” (44). As Kerler suggests, through the allusion to the Greek myth of Kronos who devoured his children, McGrath “tries to meaningfully articulate the unspeakable trauma(s) of the Vietnam war, especially the soldier’s oftentimes unrecognized sacrifices” (2013, 89). This was after all the first war that America lost, and thus the first where veterans found so much less than a hero’s welcome on their return. To Charlie’s mother—who callously says, “Such a waste. To make that sacrifice, and then turn against this country”—Agnes retorts that “Danny hasn’t turned against his country. […] Danny thinks his country’s turned against him” (McGrath 2008, 43). In an interview McGrath has said that he was influenced by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton’s influential book Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans—Neither Victims nor Executioners (1973) which was based on two years’ participation in weekly “rap groups” with veterans that met in the New York office of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and which became “the basis for diagnosis and treatment of PTSD.” These experimental meetings, begun in December 1970, were “a form of group therapy in which veterans talked through their experiences during and after the war” (Spinrad 1998, 355). Most of them, as the passage below indicates, exhibited the symptoms associated with PTSD: hypervigilance, hyperarousal, exaggerated startle responses, and drug and alcohol abuse, in the attempt to deaden the repercussions of war and the disorientation of coming home. With surgical precision and in elliptical prose McGrath recreates the despair and rage the Vietnam war survivors had to bear. Their suffering bodies and facial expressions are a “text” in which can be read all the survivors’ conflicts: death anxiety and death guilt, suspiciousness and psychological numbing. As Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart maintain, when people are exposed to trauma, they experience “speechless horror.” The experience cannot be organised on a linguistic level, and this failure to arrange the memory

128  Michela Vanon Alliata in words and symbols leaves it to be organised on a somatosensory or iconic level: as somatic sensations, behavioural re-enactments, nightmares, and flashbacks. (1995, 172) And here we turn to McGrath’s description of the veterans: I see them grinning as though for a group photo, each of those emotionally shattered but still defiant men […], men in their twenties mostly who’d seen what no human being should ever have to see and the pain of it stamped on their faces like boot prints. […] They’d seen their buddies die and wanted to know why it wasn’t them. They felt defiled. They felt, many of them, that they were already dead. (McGrath 2008, 29–30) Danny, whose look betrays “the vigilance of a man who expects at any moment to be ambushed, sniped at, booby-trapped, wasted” (McGrath 2008, 139), is the “worst damaged of the group” suffering from all the symptoms of post-traumatic disorder, a pathological syndrome described in the text as “the expression of memories the mind couldn’t process and therefore repressed” (102). An alcoholic, entirely disconnected and isolated, and with a history of parental abuse, Danny constantly flashes back to the war: “He couldn’t help it. In his mind he was still in the jungle” (McGrath 2008, 39).

Acting Out and Working Through A stoic, tough soldier, Danny had watched his buddy bleed to death in an ambush. After that loss, “he had shut down his humanity” becoming “embittered to the point of numbness,” going “on a sustained rampage” (McGrath 2008, 38). He is a victim who also became a perpetrator. “I was an animal, I just wanted to kill” (143). In Danny’s nightmares, “the Vietnamese he’d killed rose up from the earth and came after him. Night after night they came back, night after night he was pursued by the running corpses of his victims” (38). Here one can see at play the well-known defense mechanism known as acting out, a repetitive and self-destructive behavior through which the victim involuntarily returns to the moment of crisis. LaCapra, referring to Freud’s distinction between melancholia and mourning, argues that psychic trauma, if not confronted critically, that is, if not worked through, works as melancholia, “an arrested process in which the depressed, self-berating, and traumatized self, locked in compulsive repetition, is possessed by the past, faces a future of impasses, and remains narcissistically identified with the lost object” (LaCapra 2001, 66).

McGrath’s Trauma  129 In the novel, this resistance to working through trauma and the state of passive helplessness whereby the patient feels imprisoned are exemplified by another case, that of a judge who has been sexually assaulted in her own chambers: She felt that her future was foreshortened, that she was living on borrowed time. […] She was a mature woman of high professional standing yet she couldn’t think of herself as anything but worthless because she’d been raped. Because someone else had treated her as worthless. (McGrath 2008, 140) However, it is especially Danny’s confession that he did not want to come home alive, which points to the crucial drama of survival trauma: “What a wealth of pathology lay in that admission. It was the first time I’d encountered a man so profoundly alienated from his own humanity that he felt already dead” (134). Realizing that Danny “was haunted by repressed memories he hadn’t yet found a means of articulating” (48) and that “he’d gone through a worse ordeal than the others and that they knew it too” (47),4 Charlie understandably would like to bring to light the source of his trauma which, midway through the book, is revealed to be cannibalism: “Danny ate the dead” (McGrath 2008, 124). Soon after, faced with this unspeakably shameful atrocity, Danny blows his brains out. As Charlie retrospectively reasons, in this instance, his professional need “to excavate far beyond what was comfortable, beyond what was even reasonable, logical, or comprehensible” (McGrath 2008, 51), together with his failure “to recognize the extent of [Danny’s] frailty” (McGrath 2008, 49) in encouraging him to revisit the traumatic event and create a narrative about it, 5 have proved a fatal and perhaps unpardonable professional mistake. While, as Lifton observes, “killing Vietnamese enabled men to cease feeling themselves guilty survivors and impotent targets, and to become instead omnipotent dispensers of death who had ‘realized’ their ‘mission’” (Lifton 1991, 60), cannibalism shows to what an extent the brutalization and dehumanization of the war was internalized by its victims. A revolting practice and, along with incest, one of the central taboos of Western culture since the dawn of humanity, cannibalism is according to Kristeva the abject par excellence (1982, 2–4), threatening the foundations of the self’s sense of individual integrity, as well as a breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of distinction between subject and object. West persuasively remarks that eating one’s fellows, comes by extension to symbolically connote “eating oneself,” since “without others as mirrors of my limits, I would lose my constitutive contours; to devour my Other is to devour myself. Cannibalism thus stages a radical dissolution of the self” (2007, 236).

130  Michela Vanon Alliata While the men in group, though “upset, saddened and angered” were not “surprised” by Danny’s suicide (McGrath 2008, 152), the event is conversely a traumatic experience for their psychiatrist. It obsesses him to the last pages of the novel, bringing an end to his marriage, eventually compromising his professional career: “It did more than haunt me, it became yoked in my psyche to the guilt I felt” (2008, 154). ­Charlie’s reaction to this unfortunate, if wholly predictable, death, provides further evidence of the ways in which trauma affects memory. As with war veterans, victims of rape, violence or natural disasters, the specifics of trauma are forgotten but not the feelings associated with it. They continue to possess traumatized individuals in dreams and nightmares, assuming a vivid, haunting quality. As the story, appropriately punctuated by flashbacks and dreams, progresses, Charlie becomes less and less confident of his therapeutic abilities. He questions his role as “the indispensable figure of succor and healing,” believing that his will to get Danny to confess to what he did in Vietnam may have been determined by his own “narcissism” (101). At one stage, he even thinks that Agnes, whom he has guiltily abandoned soon after her brother’s suicide, with her “scalpel-like ability to penetrate other minds” would have made “a much better psychiatrist” than himself (92, 117). Similarly, reflecting on his patient Stein, he comments, “For one thing, he had the support of his wife, and while this may be heresy in my profession, it is often by means of simple courage and a good woman that psychological problems are overcome” (McGrath 2008, 62–63). Though paraplegic after his suicide attempt, Stein, by offering his blood “for the blood he had spilled” (186) has entirely regained his mental health and will to live. Unlike his doctor, who feels “[he]’d never finish with [his] guilt” (McGrath 2008, 185), Stein has succeeded in working through trauma and is no longer haunted by the man whose death he had innocently caused.

A Divided Man, Doctor and Lover After a seven-year silence, Agnes, who has in the meantime married a fireman, reconnects with Charlie, apparently taking pity on him after the death of his mother. The two meet in hotels “for illicit sex in the middle of the day in Manhattan” (McGrath 2008, 92). Yet, although Charlie is persuaded that “Agnes was the only woman [he] had ever properly loved” (McGrath 2008, 29; original emphasis), he becomes erotically involved with a beautiful but dangerously unstable freelance art historian named Nora, introduced to him by his brother, a sort of femme fatale, “famous only for destroying men” (McGrath 2008, 61). Started on a tenor of “lightness and even, yes, at times, of joy” (McGrath 2008, 70), this new relationship soon becomes strained. Nora begins to have nightmares and hysterical attacks and Charlie realizes he has become “a divided man, doctor and lover, each contending with the other over

McGrath’s Trauma  131 the unstable psyche of Nora” (McGrath 2008, 115). Feeling somehow responsible for Nora’s illness and aware of the fact that he could not treat her (111) in the end he breaks up with her. He also belatedly finds out that she had been his brother’s lover—“Poor Nora. Had she really believed she could control this exotic triangle, mistress to two brothers, one a shrink and the other an artist?” (McGrath 2008, 201). With his ex-wife’s husband now dead, and desperate to escape his “aloneness,” he begins to “entertain domesticity scenarios in which Cassie once again had her real father, and Agnes and I grew old together” (180). But Agnes refuses to have him back, claiming that he is driven by “isolation, not by love” (177), although it is apparent that her decision is dictated by her jealousy of Nora. The destruction of this fantasy is a blow to Charlie who starts having nightmares about Danny. Yet, though aware of his need to consult someone, he resists the idea. Charlie gradually spirals downward into a state of panic, regression, and inertia. His emotional involvement with Danny’s memory intensifies to the point that he entirely identifies with him, feeling like Danny had felt, “Not truly alive. Already dead, then” (125). As McGrath has said in an interview, Danny’s suicide for which Charlie holds himself responsible, sets off what appears to be “a traumatic reaction in him.”6 While this reaction typically exemplifies countertransference, one of the key concepts in psychoanalytic treatment theory—that is, the incorporation of the analyst’s subjectivity in a treatment as “a result of the patient’s projective identification dynamics” (Waska 1999, 155)—it can also be taken as the illustration of Caruth’s argument in response to the passage from Tasso’s poem cited by Freud. For Caruth the resonance of that passage is to be found in “the voice that cries out” and is “paradoxically released through the wound” (Caruth 1996, 8, original emphases). She reads the figure of Tancred addressed by the speaking wound as the story of the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound. (Caruth 1996, 8) In a Jamesian metaphor, Charlie’s increasing anxiety determined by his urge to repeat the past (McGrath 2008, 203) and thus reenact his trauma is compared to the stirring of “a beast in its den” (McGrath 2008, 180). The memory of his past returns to plague his present actions, and it appropriately takes the shape of an old photograph his brother gives him before leaving for Italy: It was a photograph. Thirty years old at least, a creased print in which I saw my mother, my brother and myself standing outside

132  Michela Vanon Alliata an old hotel somewhere in the mountains upstate […]. My fingers ­trembled as I held it. I felt nauseous. (188) Traumatic memory is fixed at an iconic, not a linguistic, level. Images play such an important role in the trauma process and in its representation that Luckhurst claims that it is probably in the image that “the psychic registration of trauma truly resides” (2008, 147). It is not surprising that the old photograph triggers a crisis by bringing forth Charlie’s long-buried trauma as well as its resolution. In her seminal On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag describes the process by which photographic images have come to be a substitute for experience and for memory. They seemingly bring the distant past to the viewer, offering the possibility of reexperiencing it for the first time without subjective mediation. This lure, however, is disturbing because, as Roth points out, when entering into the past depicted in the image we also remain aware of what happened after the picture was taken. The time ­frozen in the image is preserved from death or decay, but it also reminds us of the death and decay outside the image. (2012, 179) The old photograph Charlie holds in his hands functions as a trace, a material presence, and an objective testimonial of his past. Yet, to his troubled subjectivity, it is more than the moment that is captured in the image. The time frozen in the photograph does not only convey feelings of loss and unrecoverable times, but uncannily reminds Charlie of the proximity to death he had experienced in his youth, and of his survival.

Lost Souls The novel reaches its dénouement away from Manhattan, in a remote valley in the Catskills where the increasingly disturbed Charlie, a broken man prey to dissociative states and numbness, yet still resisting the idea of consulting anyone, has sought refuge. Here he will find a new job in a large, decaying Victorian asylum known locally as the Old Main: “As I h’d predicted, the work offered little stimulation, just backward psychiatry for lost souls; I was far more preoccupied with my own state of mind” (2008, 208). A pitiful and tormented figure, very much like Dr Haggard, the morphine-addicted doctor of McGrath’s earlier novel, who progressively falls apart both professionally and personally in his effort to come to terms with the mysterious death of Fanny, a colleague’s wife, who has obsessed him for many years, Charlie gradually descends into incoherence. He finds out that the Old Main is located

McGrath’s Trauma  133 near the place where the old photograph had been taken: “the coincidence was uncanny, and I felt that somehow I’d been intended for Old Main” (206, original emphasis). It is here in this snowy backwater suggestive of a mental landscape that he will be confronted with the dire reality of his infantile trauma. In a melodramatic final revelation in the best Gothic tradition, Charlie discovers not only that “[his] childhood nightmare in fact was true. It had happened” (McGrath 2008, 218, original emphasis) but that it was his mother who would have killed him had not his despised father prevented her from doing so. Grinning, she pointed the gun at the boy’s head and told him to turn around. He pleaded with her but she just shouted at him to turn around and then pushed his face against the wall. […] “She said, This is what you get for going into other people’s bedrooms, Charlie.” When she pulled the trigger, nothing happened, just a click. The boy slid down the wall in the mess he’s made in his shorts. It was Fred who stopped it. (McGrath 2008, 221–222, original emphases) The experience of being threatened with death by one’s own mother is a trauma not only in its unimaginable devastating intensity and concurrent sense of powerlessness but in the impossibility of assimilating the truth of what was happening without feeling entirely annihilated. Hence the recourse to the well-known psychological defense mechanism of repression, dissociation, and displacement (222). Faced with the immensity of this revelation, McGrath’s narrator for a moment contemplates committing suicide as Danny did. Our situation was identical, the booze, the awakened trauma, the gun. […] I shifted around until I was in the exact position Danny had been when I found him. I put it between my teeth, then pushed it hard against the roof of my mouth so it hurt, because I wanted to do it right, like Danny. […] When my mother pulled the trigger that night, how did she know it wasn’t loaded? Did she know? Did she care? (McGrath 2008, 225) In light of Freud’s claim that memory can be a psychological wound, that is, a trauma, and that its power can be removed not through forgetting, but rather by the discharge of energy that results from recollections, one can see how Charlie’s final coming to terms with the ghosts of his past emerges out of a process of mourning. The drive toward self-destruction,

134  Michela Vanon Alliata the acting out, is superseded by working through the trauma “wherein one is able to remember what happened to one in the past but realizes one is living in the here and now with future possibilities” (LaCapra 2001, 46–47). The novel’s closure, with the protagonist’s decision to entrust himself to psychiatrist Joan Bachinsky—“Her empathy was like balm” (McGrath 2008, 211)—reads as an unambiguous endorsement of psychoanalytic therapy as a mode for connecting with and representing a past with which one can live, an art, that not unlike literature itself, can help, by recovering memories, to give meaning and shape to ­unspoken suffering.

Notes 1 In his essay “Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis” (1959), which prefigured his subsequently developed self-psychology, Heinz Kohut reinstated Freud’s original claim that empathy should be acknowledged as a powerful therapeutic tool. The recognition of the inseparable unity of psyche and soma led Kohut “to consider introspection and empathy as the essential ingredients of the method of psychoanalysis” (Ornstein 2011, 439, original emphases). See also Stefano Bolognini’s insightful book on the notion of empathy in psychoanalytic theory and practice (2004). 2 In the opening pages of Asylum, Dr Peter Cleave, whom the reader eventually realizes is not to be trusted, claims an affinity between art and psychiatry: “I have always been fascinated by the artistic personality, I think because the creative impulse is so vital a quality in psychiatry, certainly it is in my own clinical work” (McGrath 1997, 3). 3 Freud’s thesis on the death drive has been described as “one of the most original theories in the history of ideas that potentially provides a viable explanation to the conundrums that beset the problems of human civilization, subjective suffering, collective aggressivity, and self-destructiveness” (Mills 2006, 373). 4 “‘I’m fucked, Charlie. Don’t worry about it.’ But he would never tell me his story, not of what had happened to him those last four months. He was too ashamed, I think, of what he’d done. I saw the men in the group formed a defensive circle around him emotionally, as well as spatially” (McGrath 2008, 46). 5 By using art, literature, videos, and autobiographical accounts of Holocaust and war survivors, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub argue in their book Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History that only when there is a connection between the act of witnessing and testifying, speech and survival, there is an opportunity of working through trauma, and therefore to recover and resume life (Felman & Laub 1992). 6 Mississippi Public Broadcasting. “Don’t Lecture Me – Patrick McGrath.” YouTube video, 8:31. Posted [January 2009]. Accessed January 2019. www. youtube.com/watch?v=un88iK_37Zk.

References Bohleber, Werner. 2010. Destructiveness, Intersubjectivity and Trauma: The Identity Crisis of Modern Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books.

McGrath’s Trauma  135 Bolognini, Stefano. 2004. Psychoanalytic Empathy. London: Free Association Books. Brooks, Peter. 2005. “Confessional Narrative.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 82–83. London: Routledge. Caruth, Cathy. 1995. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. DSM-IV. 1994. 4th Edition. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. 1991. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund. 1978a. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works (1920–1922).” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, vol. XVIII, 3–74. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1978b. “Moses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis and Other Works (1937–1939).” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, vol. XXIII, 3–132. London: Hogarth Press. Kacandes, Irene. 2005. “Trauma Theory.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 615–619. London and New York: Routledge. Kerler, David. 2013. “Trauma and the (Im)possibility of Representation: Patrick McGrath’s Trauma.” Culture, Language and Representation, vol. XI: 83–98. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Van der Kolk, Bessel A., and Onno Van der Hart. 1995. “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, 158–182. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Laplanche, Jean, and Jean Bertrand Pontalis. 1974. The Language of Psycho-­ Analysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton. Leys, Ruth. 2000. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lifton, Robert Jay. 1991. “Home from the War: The Psychology of Survival.” In The Vietnam Reader, edited by Walter H. Capps, 54–67. New York and London: Routledge. Luckhurst, Roger. 2008. The Trauma Question. London and New York: Routledge. McGrath, Patrick. 1997. Asylum. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 2008. Trauma. New York: Vintage Books. Mills, Jon. 2006. “Reflections on the Death Drive.” Psychoanalytic Psychology 23, no. 2: 373–382. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0736-9735.23.2.373. Ornstein, Paul H. 2011. “The Centrality of Empathy in Psychoanalysis.” Psychoanalytic Enquiry 31 (August): 437–447. doi:10.1080/07351690.2011.552047.

136  Michela Vanon Alliata Roth, Michael S. 2012. Memory, Trauma and History. New York: Columbia University Press. Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Spinrad, Phoebe S. 1998. “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).” In The ­Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History, edited by Spenser C. Tucker, 334–335. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sussman, Michael B. 2007. A Curious Calling: Unconscious Motivations for Practicing Psychotherapy. 2nd Edition. Lanham, MD, Boulder, CO, New York, and Toronto: Jason Aranson. Waska, Robert T. 1999. “Projective Identification, Countertransference, and the Struggle for Understanding Over Acting Out.” The Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research 8, no. 2: 155–161. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ PMC3330531/. West, Russell. 2007. “Abject Cannibalism: Anthropophagic Poetics in Conrad, White, and Tennant.” In The Abject Desire: The Aestheticization of the Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature and Culture, edited by Konstanze Kutzbach and Monika Mueller, 235–254. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. Zlosnik, Sue. 2011. Patrick McGrath. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

9 “You have to be a warrior to live here” PTSD as a Collective Sociopolitical Condition in Patrick McGrath’s Writing Dana Alex It changed. I lifted my head. I turned to the east. The first light was touching the turrets of Old Main; and when a few minutes later I heard Joan’s car in the distance I sank to my knees in the snow and wept. I was going home. (McGrath 2008, 210)

“I was going home”—these are the last words of Patrick McGrath’s novel Trauma (2008). But who is going home and from where? One might imagine a soldier who returns from combat, or a refugee who had to leave home behind in order to be safe from war and terror. The protagonist Charlie Weir, who utters these last words is, indeed, leaving a battlefield. It is, however, the space of an internal battle of an underlying trauma. Only in the very last chapter of the novel is it revealed that Charlie’s nightmare—which has been tormenting him since his ­childhood— is a “screen memory” (Freud 2006, 542). Since he was six years old, Charlie assumed that Fred, his own father, held him at gunpoint after he entered his fighting parents’ bedroom. The shocking revelation that brings Charlie to his knees is that his childhood trauma was not caused by his despised father but by his mother who was the one to point a gun at him. “She said, This is what you get for going into other people’s bedrooms, Charlie” (McGrath 2008, 206; original emphases). It cannot be ignored that Charlie’s hatred for his father and idealization of the [m]Other invokes Freudian thought. Yet the novel demands much more than an entirely Oedipal reading. The following chapter will focus on the depiction of trauma in McGrath’s writing. Discussing at first the Freudian definition of trauma and the reconfiguration of trauma in cognitive terms (PTSD) these accounts will then be called into question. My reading will ask whether they are sufficient when considering trauma as a collective condition, or whether McGrath’s writing connects more closely with Catherine Malabou’s concept of “the new wounded.”

138  Dana Alex

McGrath’s Freudian Trauma In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud argues that “[i]n the unconscious, cathexes can easily be completely transferred, displaced and condemned” (Freud 2001, 34). Charlie, a psychiatrist who focuses on the treatment of trauma and especially war trauma, realizes that he unconsciously displaced the blame onto his father: “Displacement. Unthinkable, that my mother could do that to me” (McGrath 2008, 206). Following Freudian theory, Thurschwell points out how and why the memory of the neurotic is altered: If neurotic illnesses are rooted in events, memories and fantasies of childhood which were never properly understood at the time, the reason why people leave these memories behind is that they are still living through and with them. Neurotics repeat and replay their pasts—they can’t escape from them. […] [I]t is a repetition that they unconsciously hide from themselves by disguising it. (Thurschwell 2009, 84–85) The events of the night when Charlie’s mother threatened to kill him resonate here. Charlie was not able to understand them at the time and even his own family prevented him from doing so. If Charlie should ever mention the incident, his brother Walter, for example, was to tell him that “it was just a bad dream” (McGrath 2008, 206). Charlie’s unawareness of the consequences of the event is clear: “When [his mother] pulled the trigger, nothing happened, just a click” (McGrath 2008, 206). It is curious that Charlie is stating that nothing happened when it is ­apparent that the incident was the beginning of a lifelong trauma. In this instance, Charlie only considers that he was not physically harmed; he neglects that, in understandings of trauma, physical and psychological wounds are intertwined. It is the click that has evoked Charlie’s trauma and which keeps coming back to him in his nightmares. Even though no shells were fired, the shock remains. According to Freud, soldiers who have not been physically harmed are those who will suffer from a traumatic neurosis, as a physical wound halts the development of the traumatic neurosis (Freud 2001, 12). Charlie’s understanding of trauma is very much Freudian. It is therefore surprising that he never considers that, while it left him physically unharmed, the click must have affected his psyche. The click of the traumatic event is, in terms of temporality, part of Charlie’s past, yet it very much remains in the present through its unnerving repetition. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud writes about the traumatic neurosis in connection to his elaborations on drives. Thurschwell ­argues that “Freud’s [theories on drives] initially suggested that there are two sets of [drives]—[a drive] towards pleasure and [a drive] towards

PTSD in McGrath’s Writing  139 self-preservation—which worked together despite their opposite aims” (Thurschwell 2009, 82). The term pleasure is defined as “the drive towards happiness, wish-fulfilment” and “the release of sexual energy” (Thurschwell 2009, 83). To understand the regulation between pleasure and unpleasure it is best to speak of an excitation (unpleasure) and the diminishing of excitation (pleasure). Freud argues for a correlation between these categories, yet he also depicts the limit of both by stating that whereas we ultimately strive for pleasure, there are instances when pleasure cannot be achieved immediately. In such cases, we ­temporarily allow the pleasure principle to be replaced by the reality principle, for example, to protect ourselves from harm and danger (Freud 2001, 9–10). If we understand the human organism as consisting “of an inside and an outside” (Thurschwell 2009, 82–83), then it is precisely the diminishing of excitation that is the reason for pleasure. The inside regulates the energy from the outside as a buildup of too much tension in the inside would be fatal. An example to illustrate a desired correlation is sexual tension as “[t]he build-up towards sexual release may be seen as a form of pleasurable tension” (83). But what happens if the excitation cannot be diminished? Freud suggests that a traumatic neurosis occurs, particularly when the inside of the organism is no longer able to cope: [w]e describe as “traumatic” any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield. […] There is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from being flooded with large amounts of stimulus, and another problem arises instead—the problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus which have broken in and of binding them, in the psychical sense, so that they can then be disposed of. (Freud 2001, 29–30) The cause of trauma, according to Freud, is “fright” (12). The terms “fear” and “anxiety” (Freud 2001, 12) are often wrongly used as synonymous terms to “fright.” The feeling of anxiety denotes an expectation of something horrible. It is the preparedness of the subject that makes it impossible to evoke trauma. Fear, relatedly, requires a specific object of which the subject can be afraid (Freud 2001, 12–13). Both terms include an expectation of danger that prevents them from traumatizing the subject. Fright, on the other hand, describes a moment that one cannot be prepared for. In other words, it is the moment of surprise, which shocks and ultimately traumatizes (Freud 2001, 12, 31): “[trauma] is not just any event but, significantly, the shocking and unexpected occurrence of an accident” (Caruth 2016, 6). Shortly after the end of World War I, Freud was confronted by a problem in his theory: not everyone instinctively strives for pleasure, he realized. Soldiers who returned from war reexperienced unpleasurable

140  Dana Alex moments in their dreams without having the possibility of gaining pleasure from them. Freud, as a result, introduces his concept of repetition compulsion. He illustrates the significance of the compulsion to repeat by using the example of a little boy, who played what Freud describes as the fort-da game. The young boy, who is, in fact, Freud’s grandson, threw toys away from him and “[a]s he did he gave vent to a loud, long-drawnout ‘o-o-o-o’ [‘fort’, meaning ‘gone’] accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction” (Freud 2001, 14). One day, the boy would play with a wooden reel that had a piece of string attached to it, which he, again, threw away and shouted o-o-o-o before pulling the string to get the reel back. The conclusion of the game was that the toy returned to the boy, which is when he would excitedly shout da, which means there (Freud 2001, 15). Freud’s first interpretation of his grandson’s game was that he was trying to cope with the situation of his mother leaving him, yet always returning. Yet another interpretation had to be considered, as the game not always ended with the toy being returned. It did, however, always begin with the child throwing the toy away (Freud 2001, 16). The act of throwing the toy away can be understood as a revenge not only toward his mother for temporarily leaving him alone (16) but also toward his father. At this stage, Freud reveals that his grandson’s father was at the Front and that the boy was hoping that his father stayed there so that he would not have to share his mother’s attention (16). But how does the example of a young child relate to the repetitive nightmares that WWI soldiers encountered? When a soldier was traumatized during combat, they found themselves in a position of passivity. Through dreams, soldiers attempted, though unsuccessfully, to become an active part of the event. By repeating the event in their dreams, s­ oldiers would go back to the traumatic event in order to gain control over a situation that will always remain out of their control. The assumption that “[t]he ‘fort/da’ game […] involves playing at repetition in order to master a painful situation” (Thurschwell 2009, 85) thus becomes problematic for Freud in connection to war trauma. Freud states that there are instances when the repetitive compulsion is not able to derive pleasure by repeating certain memories (Freud 2001, 20). What Freud is referring to here is the traumatic neurosis. The compulsive repetition of the traumatic event will never bring any pleasure to the soldier and thus “overrides the pleasure principle” (Freud 2001, 22). Freud argues that the death drive, “or Thanatos, as it [is] also known, in contrast to Eros (the pleasure principle)” (Thurschwell 2009, 86) may be at the heart of why even traumatic events are repeated in dreams. The reason, Freud writes, why those suffering from a traumatic neurosis keep repeating their traumatic memories in dreams is because a drive attempts to return to a state of control (Freud 2001, 37–38). It is the return to the “inanimate state” (Freud 2001, 38), the death, that can diminish the excitation that was caused by the traumatic event.

PTSD in McGrath’s Writing  141 Death, Thurschwell summarizes, “promises the ultimate experience of stasis and complete calm. Re-enacting unpleasurable experiences comes to seem like a rehearsal for our own death” (2009, 86–87). In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996), Cathy Caruth writes on trauma from a psychoanalytic perspective, drawing from Freud’s theories. In her consideration of the death drive, Caruth asks, “Is the trauma the encounter with death or the ongoing experience of having survived it?” (Caruth 2016, 7). She argues, in a later passage, that “the mind cannot confront the possibility of its death directly that survival becomes for the human being, paradoxically, an endless testimony to impossibility of living” (64). Trauma is ultimately destructive and deadly. Caruth continues: [M]odern neurologists point out […] that the repetition of the traumatic experience in the flashback can itself be retraumatizing; if not life threatening, it is at least threatening to the chemical structure of the brain and can ultimately lead to deterioration. And this would also seem to explain the high suicide rate of survivors, for example, survivors of Vietnam […] who commit suicide only after they have found themselves completely in safety. (65; original emphasis) Whereas these observations predominantly affect the individual, Caruth also points out the ways in which Freud’s writing also understands trauma as a collective condition. In the 20th anniversary edition of Unclaimed Experience (2016), Caruth discusses the development of trauma studies since its first publication and claims that individual and collective trauma “cannot be extricated from each other” (121). She refers back to Freud in order to argue that the connection of the individual to the collective is not a new concept at all but was possibly already implied by Freud himself. Caruth suggests that we cannot equate the singularity of the event to the single individual: Freud articulates his notion of repetition not only through the example of individual soldiers but also through the encounter Freud has with a strange little child playing the game of fort-da. […] Freud is already articulating here a kind of temporality that cannot be limited to, or fully understood from within, the perspective of the individual […]. (Caruth 2016, 122) In light of this elaboration of how Freud defines trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, it seems reasonable to reconsider the last chapter of McGrath’s novel, particularly the revelation of Charlie’s trauma, through this Freudian lens. Charlie is six years of age when he hears his parents

142  Dana Alex having a fight. He enters their bedroom when out of nowhere his mother points an unloaded gun at him and pulls the trigger. From the moment of fright when his mother lifted the gun, until the second when she pulled the trigger, the tension builds up to be overbearing, causing Charlie’s trauma. The overflow of energy cannot be bound and diminished, which is why pleasure cannot be derived from the event. Considering the Oedipal setup of the novel, Charlie’s trauma and its displacement are very much connected to castration anxiety. That traumatic night, Charlie’s mother was in possession of the phallus (the gun). Charlie simply could not imagine that it could be his mother who castrates him because it should be his father who would do so. In light of Caruth’s reading of the death drive, it can be argued that Charlie was also unable to grasp the thought of his own death and, as a result, he repressed the traumatic event. In his dreams, Charlie is reminded of the events that he has been repressing since he was six years old. These memories, however, are not only repressed but also falsified by the displacement of blame. Charlie himself elaborates that he is aware of how “very fickle the human mind is” (McGrath 2008, 46) and that in some cases we ignore and twist those memories that we would rather not remember. He makes this statement when speaking about his ex-wife Agnes, yet Charlie, again, does not realize that his depiction of the human mind is also appropriated for him. In the incident with his mother, the displacement comes into place when Charlie tries to “deny the intolerable” (McGrath 2008, 46). Taking his recurring nightmares into account (55), we can observe that Charlie’s way of dealing with his trauma mirrors, to an extent, the experience of the WWI soldiers that Freud refers to. In Charlie’s nightmares, he is attempting to master the traumatic event he experienced as a child. Yet Charlie is unable to ever derive any pleasure from the repetition. Unarguably, Charlie’s mental state declines from the first to the last page of the novel. The culmination of the plot is the final battle with his brother at the place where Charlie’s trauma was triggered. His father and brother make Charlie remember what he has not been able to understand. What happens in this passage of the story—the reason for the dramatic ending—is also connected to Caruth’s thought: Charlie is “retraumatized” (Caruth 2016, 65). When the survivor repeats the traumatic event, they are still unable to “[grasp] the threat” (Caruth 2016, 64) to their lives. This point is not only claimed by Caruth but is also very much supported by Freudian theory. Thurschwell writes that the psychoanalytic cure is intended to return the patient to the moment that traumatized them: “[t]he analyst leads the patient back through their memories […] but not so that the patient can blindly repeat the experience of the initial trauma, feeling the same unmasterable emotions” (Thurschwell 2009, 85). Without thinking of the consequences, his father and brother lead Charlie to remember the traumatic event and,

PTSD in McGrath’s Writing  143 unsurprisingly, Charlie not only collapses but almost kills himself as a result. The event is just as unmasterable as it was the first time and Charlie finds himself as helpless as he did when the trauma was triggered. He is again overwhelmed by the fact that his mother would do this to him, yet unlike the first time, Charlie is directly confronted with the truth and cannot displace it; and, for this reason, he now needs to seek help (McGrath 2008, 210). In the scene nothing happens to Charlie, yet he is close to pulling the trigger to kill himself. The reason he is able to stop himself is because he is reminded of Danny: a patient, a Vietnam veteran, and Charlie’s brother-in-law. He is described as one of Charlie’s most challenging patients and, most probably, one of the most severely traumatized (McGrath 2008, 27). Charlie explains that Danny would rarely speak during their group sessions and when he spoke, he would do so only quietly (36). Danny was visibly suffering, yet Charlie has been unable to help him. Even though he is physically present at the meetings, “in his mind he was still in the jungle” (37). When Danny was still alive, Charlie was obsessed with the wish to help him to overcome his trauma.

The Rise of PTSD and the Fall of McGrath’s Warrior But when reading the trauma of a Vietnam veteran, such as Danny, we may ask, should we shift away from a Freudian understanding of trauma to considering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? In his writing, Patrick McGrath plays with temporality. Trauma, as such, is situated in both the past and the present. The traumatized subject may live in the present, yet they are inevitably stuck in the past, or more specifically, stuck within the memories of the traumatic event. This is also true for the novel that bears its name. Trauma is set in the past (shortly after the Vietnam War and, in this sense, it is a historical novel), and yet to some extent in the present (or at least the postmillennial moment) as it subtly hints at the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to come. The narrative demonstrates the constant shift between past and present through a series of flashbacks to traumatic events that make the present seem less significant. The understanding of trauma that McGrath’s novel suggests, then, does, indeed, include both older, Freudian models and more current cognitive models of trauma, such as PTSD. By the time the Vietnam War ended, terminology such as “combat ­fatigue” or “shell shock” was no longer used commonly to describe the suffering of soldiers who returned from war: a new term was needed. The term that was coined was PTSD. One of the differences between forms of war trauma and the concept of PTSD is that the latter is not exclusively directed toward soldiers but understands that trauma can affect anybody. It retains, however, its link to the distressed Vietnam veterans in so far as PTSD was first, however briefly, known under a different name. The psychiatrist Chaim Shatan introduced “post-Vietnam syndrome”

144  Dana Alex (Alford 2016, 10) in The New York Times in 1972, as there was no “standard diagnostic label” (Shatan 1972) appropriate at the time to describe the mental struggles of veterans. Even though only loosely defining its symptoms as “guilt, rage, psychic numbing, and alienation” (Alford 2016, 10), this definition still marked the beginning of what we understand of PTSD today. To some extent, the term post-Vietnam syndrome was just another term for war trauma, yet, as a concept, it functioned as an important transitional term between Freudian models of the mind and the reconfiguration of trauma in cognitive terms. The definition of PTSD by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) first “recognised that psychological trauma could cause lasting mental disturbances, even when there was no physical injury” (Bremner 2013, 1). PTSD and its inclusion into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) III in 1980, marked a significant moment for the understanding of trauma as it finally demonstrated “the detachment of PTSD from war” (Alford 2016, 12). The first key definition of PTSD became the following: The essential feature is the development of characteristic symptoms following a psychologically traumatic event that is generally outside the range of usual human experience. The characteristic symptoms involve re-experiencing the traumatic event; numbing of responsiveness to, or reduced involvement with, the external world: and a variety of autonomic, dysphoric, or cognitive symptoms. The stressor producing this syndrome would evoke significant symptoms of distress in most people. (APA 1980, 236) There are many passages within the book that identify the Vietnam veteran Danny as suffering from PTSD. McGrath incorporates the symptoms of PTSD that can be found in the DSM-III into his novel. Charlie, Danny’s psychiatrist, explains precisely how Vietnam veterans feel after having experienced the traumatizing events of combat. “Their buried material was throwing up nightmares and other symptoms and would continue to do so until the trauma could be translated into a narrative and assimilated into the self” (McGrath 2008, 29). The state of traumatized veterans is even more clearly defined whenever Charlie speaks about Danny. Danny is described as “[giving] off a strong feeling of separateness” (36). Indeed, he “seldom talked” (McGrath 2008, 36), “he became cold and isolated, embittered to the point of numbness” (McGrath 2008, 37) and “he shut down his humanity” (37). In the DSM these symptoms are described as “autonomic, dysphoric and cognitive” (APA 1980, 236). With the inclusion of PTSD in the novel, it can be argued that more than a solely Freudian understanding of trauma is required in order to explore in its entirety how trauma is incorporated into McGrath’s fiction.

PTSD in McGrath’s Writing  145 From the beginning of the novel, the reader is aware that Danny killed himself. And it is precisely Danny’s suicide that leads us back to Freud and the death drive. Again, Freud argues that the traumatized subject strives to move back to state where they can regain control (2001, 36). It appears that Danny also wanted to regain a state of control, yet the earliest state that he was able to reach was death. Perhaps this should not be surprising as Caruth has elaborated that the suicide rate of Vietnam veterans is fairly high (2016, 65). Chapter 11 of Trauma depicts the circumstances of Danny’s death in detail. Telling Charlie about his return from combat, Danny states that he “never expected to get home alive,” “never wanted to” and “never did” (McGrath 2008, 126). The traumatized individual should not be led back blindly to memories that trigger them, and Charlie fails to protect Danny from being retraumatized. Sitting in a bar, Charlie asks him about the incident in Vietnam, where Danny’s friend had been killed. In this moment, Danny is mentally brought back to the traumatic event and he becomes as overwhelmed with the situation as he was in Vietnam, which, ultimately, makes him run away and hours later commit suicide. Charlie “knew his abrupt departure wasn’t good. Though [he]’d got him to open up some, [he had] no chance to give him any sort of help in handling the storm of feeling that came with the arousal of those memories” (McGrath 2008, 135). Charlie’s observation is very much an understatement of what happens to Danny. To borrow Caruth’s words, “the chemical structure” (2016, 65) of Danny’s brain was affected by being retraumatized, which ultimately caused Danny’s suicide. The chapter concludes with Charlie recounting how he found Danny in his apartment: “he’d blown his brains out” (140).

PTSD as a Collective Condition After (almost) 40 years of widening the understanding of PTSD, its definition is still not without flaws. Aspects that are largely missing in the DSM are, for instance, how PTSD does not only affect an individual but can also affect a collective. At the time when Patrick McGrath was writing his novel Trauma (2008), the most recent available edition was the DSM-IV TR. A fundamental problem with defining PTSD in the DSM is that the APA focuses entirely on the individual but does not consider individuality. The traumatic event is too precisely defined as the “extreme traumatic stressor” involves “direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened death or injury, or other threat to one’s physical integrity; or witnessing an event that involves death, injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of another person” (APA 2000, 463). Another problematic aspect in the diagnosis of PTSD according to the DSM is that it is required that the individual has directly experienced the traumatic stressor and that the individual or at least an individual that is close to them is under threat. But how does this criterion work in respect

146  Dana Alex to what is now recognized as one of the most extreme forms of traumatic stressor: the terrorist attack? The DSM-IV-TR includes terrorism as an “extreme traumatic stressor” (APA 2000, 463), yet the APA has not considered the scale of the affect that a terrorist attack has on not only the individual but on a collective. Without a doubt, terrorist attacks, such as 9/11, are not attacks on individuals but affect the collective and make trauma a (trans)national condition. To what extent can the public be affected by trauma? And are the paradigms that have been discussed so far adequate to depict McGrath’s understanding of collective trauma? To answer these questions, one has to move beyond definitions and studies of psychology and epidemiology to consider trauma as a sociopolitical and collective condition. In his study Trauma, Culture and PTSD (2016), Alford argues that PTSD “is a good political diagnosis […] for it says that anyone can suffer the symptoms of severe psychic pain when placed in a hostile environment” (2). He further makes the case that “[p]eople are more traumatised by violent acts of individuals and groups than they are by natural disasters” as it “reveals the sheer vulnerability of individuals to events beyond their control” (Alford 2016, 2). How then do we need to understand the idea of collective trauma in the twenty-first century? Jeffrey Alexander, for one, states that “collective trauma is political trauma” (qtd. in Alford 2016, 32). He argues that “[t]rauma is constructed by society” (Alexander 2012, 7) and defines cultural trauma in the following way: Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways. (66) This definition can be applied to the aftermath of the events of 9/11. After the planes hit the towers and the Pentagon building, America and the Western world were not only physically harmed. Smelser argues that the attacks could not have been performed on “two more symbolically perfect targets—the single most salient symbol of American-dominated global capitalism and the single most visible symbol of American military domination” (Smelser 2004, 264). In the foreword of Arundhati Roy’s The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2002), John Berger states that “[o]n 11 September 2001, the pilots who attacked New York and Washington put an end for ever to a ‘normalcy’, and thus a sense of security, which had prevailed in the First World” (Roy 2002, xiii). And even Roy herself states, when discussing the aftermath of 9/11, that “what happened on 11 September changed the world forever” (2002, 217). All these statements reiterate that the target of these events was, indeed, a

PTSD in McGrath’s Writing  147 collective of people. Furthermore, they suggest the traumatizing effect that 9/11 had on the Western world. McGrath realizes this trauma and his writing evokes very specific memories of 9/11. A number of subtle instances in Trauma suggest that the narrative engages knowingly with the terrorist attacks of 9/11. One of these scenes, for example, is when Charlie is looking out of the window at the Twin Towers being built (McGrath 2008, 12). Reading this scene of construction, I would suggest, does something to the memory of the reader. We suddenly feel a flashback ourselves. The words Twin Towers have a triggering connotation that immediately reminds us that the World Trade Center is no more. When reading this passage, we not only know exactly when the towers that are just being built will be destroyed, we are also aware of what this means in terms of temporality. The subtle allusion to 9/11 and its consequences to society underlines the general notion that trauma is not only affecting the individual but the collective. For instance, Nora, Charlie’s girlfriend, is also suffering from a traumatic event that left her with repetitive nightmares and a pervasive emotionlessness. She explains her trauma to Charlie in the following way: “Listen, you live in New York, you have bad dreams, it’s the city. It’s a war zone, Charlie, you have to be a warrior to live here” (102–103). This statement encapsulates the idea that sociopolitical conditions, which span from terrorist attacks to other social and financial crises, can ultimately traumatize everyone. Of course, Trauma is not the only story by McGrath that explores the events of 9/11; his novella “Ground Zero” is set only a few days after the attacks. Collected in his trilogy of tales Ghost Town, the story follows a psychiatrist, who is unaware of her own trauma. The unnamed narrator has a maternal relationship with one of her clients: Dan, a lawyer who is telling her about the prostitute he has not only slept but also fallen in love with shortly after the Twin Towers have been attacked. The narrative predominately follows the struggles that Dan has with that woman and her ex-lover who was inside the World Trade Center when the planes crashed into it. There are clearly many similarities between Trauma and “Ground Zero”—not only in terms of the setting and overall theme of trauma, but also as the names of two of the psychiatrist’s patients are identical: Danny in Trauma and Danny Silver in “Ground Zero”—the latter, however, is mostly referred to as Dan. What becomes even clearer in “Ground Zero” is that we not only encounter a large number of traumatized individuals, but it is demonstrated that trauma affects the collective. The story includes those directly affected by losing a loved one, those indirectly affected by watching the events from a greater distance, and even those who were not in New York at all when the terrorist attacks happened. The fact that all these people are traumatized by sociopolitical circumstances, meaning the terrorist attacks and their consequences (including becoming homeless, losing one’s job, etc. (Malabou 2012b, 14)),

148  Dana Alex again raises the question of collective trauma and what trauma does to society. When speaking of it in its collective sense, trauma no longer only includes those who have been considered by psychoanalysis or those individuals suffering from PTSD. Collective trauma calls for a new paradigm of investigation as it broadens the scale of those affected.

A New Condition of Traumatic Wounding? “Ground Zero” is shaped by a sense of emotionlessness or, at least, emotional atrophy. Dan, for instance, sleeps with prostitutes regularly; he cannot build romantic connections with others. Even the “traditional” relationship that is depicted in the story is anything but loving. His girlfriend is eaten up by guilt after losing her former partner in the attacks, which she witnessed from her window. And, lastly, McGrath’s narrator herself appears to be emotionally cold and indifferent. Indeed, there are only a few moments when the reader is allowed to sense her emotions: first, when she visits Ground Zero (McGrath 2006, 193–196) and, second, when she is left by Dan (241), who is “like a son” (175) to her. The title of the collection of novellas that “Ground Zero” is part of—Ghost Town—is fitting in that New York City itself is experienced as a place of the undead. Like robotic automatons, people continue their work as if “nothing happened” (187; original emphases), yet everything and everyone has been changed irrevocably. And it is not only those who were present in New York during the terrorist attacks but the entire Western world that is affected. For instance, when the narrator visits Ground Zero, she states, “As I began to walk back uptown I attempted to find a few sticks of thought with which to build a structure that might explain why those men had done what they did to us. To us” (McGrath 2006 196; original emphasis). As I have argued, McGrath’s understanding of individual trauma is predominantly consistent with a Freudian approach but draws also from the development of the medical discourses around PTSD. When considering his depiction of collective trauma, however, we realize that it fits neither with Freud’s thought nor those definitions of PTSD that I have cited so far. McGrath demonstrates that representing the traumata of sociopolitical circumstances thus demands an entirely new condition of writing traumatic wounding. Slavoj Žižek’s discussion of Catherine Malabou’s The New Wounded makes an interesting connection to the conception of a traumatized Western society as, for Žižek, “we live in a ‘disenchanted’ post-­religious era” (Žižek 2010, 292), which is the reason why traumatic events are now understood as “meaningless intrusions of the Real” (Žižek 2010, 292–293). Unlike Freud, Malabou “accepts the direct destructive power of external shock” (293) that is beyond repair. Malabou has developed a rereading of Freudian psychoanalysis, especially considering Beyond the Pleasure Principle, by combining it with modern neuroscience.

PTSD in McGrath’s Writing  149 In The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage (2012), she argues that there is very little difference between what sociopolitical trauma does to the subject and the effects of organic trauma (e.g., ­Alzheimer’s) (Malabou 2012a, xviii). As the title of her book suggests, Malabou develops the concept of what she refers to as “the new wounded” who “come together around a single fact: the radical rupture the trauma introduces into the psyche” (Malabou 2012a, 156). In a nutshell, the new wounded are those suffering from sociopolitical or organic trauma with one central factor in common, which is that “they all display permanent or temporary behaviors of indifference or disaffection” (Malabou 2012a, 10; original emphases). To understand what exactly happens to these new wounded, it is significant to consider another turn to Malabou’s philosophy, namely the idea of “neural plasticity.” When Malabou speaks of the wound, she understands that it has a “plastic power upon the psyche” (2012a, 17). Using the term plastic that we are usually more familiar with from, for instance, art, Malabou states that the term has three different meanings. The first two meanings are that a plastic can receive or give form (17). Yet it is particularly the third meaning that is significant as it describes the process of destructive plasticity. The word plastic, coming from the French word plasticque, also means “bombing” (17), explosion or more appropriately, the annihilation of all form. Destructive plasticity comes into play when a subject is traumatized. The traumatic event has a “metamorphic power” (152; original emphases), which catalyzes an annihilation of form that irrevocably transforms the subject. Once put into a certain shape plastic remains that way. The traumatic event, which comes out of nowhere and shocks the subject, makes people “[become] strangers to themselves” (Malabou 2012b, 13). In Self and Emotional Life (2013), Malabou sums up what happens to the subject—the new wounded—after the traumatic event: [a]fter brain damage, [the] emotional brain is traumatised, and […] the subject loses any interest in life in general. Surprise, interest in novelty, amazement, astonishment just disappear. Detachment, “cold blood,” unconcern determines the patient’s behavior. (Malabou 2013, 11) Malabou understands the new wounded to be entirely detached from their past. Throughout this chapter thus far, in connection to both Freudian trauma and PTSD, one aspect that has been significant is the idea of death. In Malabou’s work, death is strongly connected to the idea of the new wounded. Malabou argues that the new wounded are, in a sense, dead because they are no longer connected to their pre-plasticized selves: “[t]he body can die without being dead” (Malabou 2012b, 34). Death is like trauma

150  Dana Alex an unpredictable accident and is therefore always a risk as “destructive plasticity reveals the possibility […] of becoming someone else at any moment” (Malabou 2012a, 200; original emphases). One aspect that is difficult to grasp is the idea that the subject “survives its own death” (Žižek 2010, 294). The traumatized subject becomes an entirely new being as the result of the “death (or erasure) of its symbolic identity” (294). There is a definitive cut in the history of the subject; the new wounded can, then, mostly be characterized, as Žižek puts it quite rightly, as living “death as a form of life—his or her life is the death drive embodied” (294). Malabou underlines that sociopolitical trauma no longer only ­affects the individual but also affects the collective. PTSD “does not only occur in countries of war; it is everywhere. It constitutes the new face of the social—bearing witness to an emergent, globalized psychic pathology that is identical in all cases and all contexts” (Malabou 2012a, 155–156; original emphases). On the “battlefields of contemporary society” (161), we are, indeed, “all susceptible to becoming new wounded” (213; original emphases). McGrath’s understanding of trauma, then, knits together a variety of accounts. As demonstrated, Freudian trauma and PTSD certainly find their place in his writings, yet it is Malabou’s suggestion of a new paradigm that allows us to look beyond Freud’s pleasure principle and the definitions of the APA. McGrath understands that trauma can be a universal condition and that anybody is at risk of encountering a traumatic event. Nobody is safe from becoming the new wounded, not even psychiatrists themselves. Both Trauma and “Ground Zero” show that trauma is not only evoked by war but that other sociopolitical conditions, such as terrorist attacks, the sudden loss of a lost loved one through an accident, or sexual abuse (McGrath 2008, 111), to name but a few, also result in trauma. As we follow the narrators of the two stories through the traumatized crowds of New York, one aspect is apparent: the city is (in a Malabouian sense) inhabited by the living dead and has become a ghost town.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2012. Trauma: A Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Alford, C. Fred. 2016. Trauma, Culture and PTSD. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US. American Psychiatric Association. 1980. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-III. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association. ———. 2000. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSMIV-TR. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association. Berger, John. 2002. “Foreword.” In The Algebra of Infinite Justice, edited by Arundhati Roy, xiii–xxiii. London: Penguin Books Ltd. Bremner, J. Douglas. 2013. “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).” In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Neuroscience: Volume 2: The Cutting

PTSD in McGrath’s Writing  151 Edges, edited by Kevin N. Ochsner and Stephen Kosslyn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199988709.013.0027 Caruth, Cathy. 2016. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 2001. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud Volume XVIII (1920–1922), edited and translated by James Strachey, vol. XVIII, 7–68. London: Vintage Books. ———. 2006. “Screen Memories.” In The Penguin Freud Reader, edited by Adam Phillips, 541–560. London: Penguin Books Ltd. Malabou, Catherine. 2012a. The New Wounded. Translated by Steven Miller. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2012b. Ontology of the Accident. Translated by Carolyn Shread. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2013. “Part I. Go Wonder: Subjectivity and Affects in Neurobiological Times.” In Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience, edited by Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou, 1–72. New York: Columbia University Press. McGrath, Patrick. 2006. “Ground Zero.” In Ghost Town, edited by Patrick McGrath, 175–243. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. ———. 2008. Trauma. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Roy, Arundhati. 2002. The Algebra of Infinite Justice. London: Penguin Books Ltd. Shatan, Chaim F. 1972. “Post-Vietnam Syndrome.” The New York Times, May 6, 1972. www.nytimes.com/1972/05/06/archives/postvietnam-syndrome.html. Smelser, Neil J. 2004. “Epilogue: September 11, 2001, as Cultural Trauma.” In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, edited by Alexander, Jeffrey C., Ron Eyerman, Bernard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka, 264–282. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thurschwell, Pamela. 2009. Freud. London: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj. 2010. Living in the End Times. New York: Verso Books.

10 The Liar, the Bitch, and the Wardrobe Resisting Political Terror, Anti-Semitism, and Revenants in Patrick McGrath’s The Wardrobe Mistress Danel Olson Released during an upswing in Alt-Right rhetoric and anti-immigrant and anti-minority violence in America (with media criticism rising for the US President’s dismissal of the crisis),1 Manhattan-resident Patrick McGrath’s tenth novel, The Wardrobe Mistress (2017), explores fascist and familial tensions among London theatre people in 1947. Set largely in Stepney, Pimlico, 2 and Golders Green (a locale to which many Continental Jews fearing persecution moved after 1933), the novel recasts and investigates the discrimination, scapegoatism, and street fighting directed by Sir Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists (BUF). It also explores the dilemmas of those who would infiltrate and resist them. The Wardrobe Mistress meditates on the return of dark forces seemingly defeated and on the resurrection of an ideology thought ­defunct following the victory of the Allies over Nazi Germany. Simultaneously, it records the acts of a revenant. The protagonist’s flat seems to become a crypt, and her dead husband Charlie Grice, or “Gricey,” can be heard inside, tap-tap-tapping like “a frantic fingernail inside a coffin” (McGrath 2017a, 48). As in the popular C. S. Lewis wartime fantasy to which my title alludes, entering this wardrobe becomes the first step for Joan Grice in her visit to a threatening alternate reality that had been before her all along yet invisible. Gathering information from the wardrobe, taking another identity, penetrating into fascist circles in order to ruin them, and becoming part of a sacrifice, Joan takes the risks that few of her friends could have foreseen at the book’s beginning. Toward all this mystery, the concepts of Jacques Derrida, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, and Slavoj Žižek—concerning the ghostly, the monstrous, and the pathology of anti-Semitism, respectively—can help open and illuminate the portals hidden inside The Wardrobe Mistress. The key conflicts of the text arise around the containment of the most sordid truths that can explode a family’s life and self-perceptions, the rebuilding of a life after the death of a longtime spouse, and enduring the sinisterly growing attentions of a ghost without losing one’s mind.

McGrath’s The Wardrobe Mistress  153 The troubles come to us not in the narration which characterizes almost every McGrath novel up until now save for Constance (2014)—that is, a single unreliable voice—but through a chorus of voices. It is a chorus intimate with the theatre, not obviously dishonest or uninformed as his earlier narrators (though future scholars may yet find that its reported reality is partial or biased), and acquainted with the thoughts of most characters, though not those of Charlie’s. 3 Joan Grice, the novel’s namesake and accomplished costumier for many of London’s premier stages,  uncovers that her deceased husband (a longtime stage actor, dandy, and half-hearted adulterer) was a secret BUF member, speechmaker, and inciter. The BUF, we recall, was a political party formed in 1932. It was banned by the British government in 1940 when it approached 20,000 members under suspicion that it was a possible Fifth Column for pro-German attack, with five percent of its members interned, and then freed from internment following 1945, with Mosley liberated in 1943 for health reasons (Thurlow 2006, 80–96). Joan’s discovery that her Charlie was part of a prohibited racist party comes from a telltale lightning “flash and circle” BUF badge on one of his coats and a Blackshirt uniform stashed in his theatre wardrobe (all later abetted by racial outrages that form a quasi-confession from Charlie’s spectral voice). The novel then becomes a mystery of a secret agent in the house, a human monster unknown and unidentified until after his death. Like an intriguing palimpsest, this novel overlaps the story of detection with an appropriate allegory for the political monsters of its era and perhaps ours. It is a narrative of miscreants that can enrage, yet also frighten, f­ atigue, paralyze and traumatize us with their degrading talk and v­ iolence against Jews. Appropriate for McGrath’s long literary sojourn tracking and recasting the Gothic—this impulse that forever reveals how the return of the dead threatens the living—another layer covers the detective story and the monster’s tale. Events supernatural collude with far-right ideology to torment the usually unsuperstitious, apolitical Joan Grice with spectrality. No novel of McGrath’s yet has more ghostly sightings. What Joan Grice will do against spectral invasion and the threats inherent to anti-Semitism is the key fascination of the novel. The question, springing to us from Nietzsche’s “Epigrams and Interludes” in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), is whether Joan can fight monsters without becoming one herself. Like many of its predecessors from McGrath—in particular, “Blood and Water” (1988), The Grotesque (1989), Asylum (1996), “The Year of the Gibbet” and “Ground Zero” (2005), and Trauma (2008)—The Wardrobe Mistress features the unrelenting dilemmas that a spouse or lover may face in the wake of a partner’s disappearance, physical or emotional disability (deformity, paralysis, madness, homicidal jealousy), or death. For example, as a widow, Joan could continue a quieter life without men, cultivate her loss and mourning for her husband like a

154  Danel Olson small herb, or she could open up the portals of the heart to take in a younger new romance. As a mother and unlikely avatar of a pre-1960s Mrs. Robinson from The Graduate (1968), Joan becomes caught in an affair with the magnetic man, Frank Stone, who her daughter (outside her own marriage) is now loving. Joan could shun him after the revelation of her daughter’s emotional and physical stake in this man. Joan could end the romance with protest, shouts and slaps, but that is not the wardrobe mistress’s way. Joan quietly gives him some money, looks away, and closes the door on young Frank’s bitter and confused face, even though her married daughter is urging Frank to go to her mother as a sexual and emotional comfort. This love triangle, a motif that nearly every novelistic work of McGrath possesses, seems more a love square on second glance. Every time she takes Frank to her bed, she takes a­ nother man, too. Joan finds a living vessel for her dead, once cheating husband’s dissembling spirit. That living vessel for Charlie Grice’s incorporation or encasement, then, is Frank Stone. What eluded those destroyers across the English Channel—to find living bodies to encase the warriors of old, a style of occult Nazism practiced by the Third Reich’s Schutzstaffel (SS)—has been achieved by their supposed enemy, a Jewish woman of London.4 Our route of inquiry into the characters’ relationships toward one another shall be through the wardrobe. Through the clothes plucked and tailored from it, their look on the host Frank Stone and how it changes him and Joan, and the ghostly calls from within, including Charlie’s curse at his wife as the wardrobe closes on her, before its doors magically open and she hears dead but distinct Gricey scream at her, “Fucking hard-case East End yids!” (McGrath 2017a, 267; original emphases). In a loose, almost unconscious ritual, Joan very slowly entrances her younger lover and by encouraging this striving actor to both take Charlie’s acting roles and wear Charlie’s clothes—with some handsome flourishes of stitch witchery which proves her well the wardrobe mistress—she makes clothes that fit her new lover, but also beckon and house the unclean spirit of the dead. For some readers, this will recall a curious history of injunctions in British law against witches using the clothes of another to gain power. In the first year of his reign, James VI and I prevailed on parliament to enact harsher penalties for witchcraft. The possession of any portion of a sovereign’s clothes used for witchcraft was thought criminal enough to kill the defendant under Statute I. That is, until King James, in later age, recanted some of his belief in the practice and the supposedly deleterious outcomes of witchery. Indeed, Agnes Sampson—who confessed to James that she sought “some fragment of the linen belonging to the king, [… and by] applying her incantations to the fragment, [to] have been able to undermine the life of the sovereign” (Godwin 1876, 244–245)—was garroted and burnt at the stake at Castlehill in Edinburgh. Nearly three

McGrath’s The Wardrobe Mistress  155 centuries later, in America, we may look to the fiction of Henry James, in particular “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (1868), which I had chance to discuss with McGrath in person as he was composing this novel, to find the misfortunes and murder that attend opening the trunk of a dead woman’s clothes; particularly when one usurps her place in the bed of marriage (even if one is her sister). Such necromancy, then, may be the necessity a mad heart demands to bring one’s loved one back to prevent one’s loneliness, silence, alienation, depression, substance ­addiction, and even suicide from sorrow. Nevertheless, the penalties for tampering with the essence or trace of people that remains in their clothes (what is called in French sillage) may never be far from mind for characters. Political, folkloric, and literary traditions insist on a negative outcome or retribution for such clothes-magic, and McGrath complicates and updates this convention. Becoming a medium to speak with the dead has inherent hazards for Joan, but she cannot resist the pull. “Imagination is,” as William Godwin, the father of the literary creator of Frankenstein (1818/1831), once remarked, “the peculiar province of witchcraft” (Godwin 1876). Every success in this supernatural endeavor becomes a failure in the larger sense of preserving who she thought her Charlie was. At least six factors enmesh us in the misery of communing with the dead—born from that fateful moment when she returns Charlie’s call and dresses and converses with her new lover Stone as if Charlie was within him: a

Charlie makes a ghostly return but not at times for which Joan is prepared or calling him. He haunts, shocks, and torments Joan rather than helps her mourn. b The information Charlie gives is partial and bewildering, at best. No more indication for his baffling, self-destructive, hateful, or bizarre motives for anti-Semitism and Hitler adoration comes after death than existed when he was alive. Thus, this spirit is a malicious catalog, lacking index, access, or reliable interpretation. c The spirit holds the promise to open to her nostalgia, to embrace, and partially heal her loneliness. And the spirit is also like a history of this couple’s senses: it holds secrets and conjures the desires and fantasies of an early time in their marriage—those days when “Heaven itself [was] a quick shag in the men’s stockroom” for Joan and Charlie (McGrath 2017a, 20)—yet it willfully resists helping Joan or facilitating peace. d Charlie has a ghostly agency or what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen calls “an uncanny independence” (1996, 4). He can move things around, including his hat. He can appear anywhere. He makes unwelcome sexual advances, thrusting phantom hands all over her body, and even gives Joan the physical sense he will kill her.

156  Danel Olson e

f

He appears at the stage’s edge, panicking Joan before her daughter’s performance as lead in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1614). Thus does a ghost softly upstage a frantic live performance of carnage. His presence gives voice to real terror. Joan screams and ushers remove her, the curtain falls, his daughter’s performance suffers, and the audience is unsettled early for all the wrong reasons. Charlie will never leave. Joan can neither now exile nor exterminate him, for how does one kill a ghost? And tied to the horror of Charlie’s politics, how does one exterminate fascism, which returns specter-like around the world from one decade to another? The only way to ensure he will not haunt her living days is to die herself as mourning him seems impossible.

Considering these factors, one could argue that Charlie’s spirit is only faithful to the theatre—not to family or love or reputation. He merely takes on the part of a phantom, plays it adequately, but does not show enough of his soul and motivation. Throughout this sartorial/paranormal-drama of Charlie and Joan’s making, where she dresses her lover in her dead husband’s clothes and Charlie in dybbuk fashion inhabits Frank, there are three other plays that drape the narrative, adding great tension. Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), which stars Joan’s daughter Vera as the eventually discontented and awakened Nora, mirrors some of Joan’s own restlessness with the older Jewish Briton and stage owner named Julius Glass who eventually weds Vera. In the middle of the novel comes Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1602), where Frank Stone will end up playing the part Charlie once took, Malvolio. Malvolio’s lines of outrage over false imprisonment, in the classic McGrath-locale of an insane asylum, are actually muttered not only by the living Frank on the stage but by Charlie as a ghost in the house of his widow. Finally, the novel concludes with performances of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, wherein Vera plays the doomed Duchess whose voice will echo from her grave in what Webster calls a “deadly accent” to her lover Antonio Bologna, played by actor Frank Stone, who incidentally is Vera’s real lover, but who has also bedded her mother and is wearing Gricey’s clothes. This last play expresses so forcefully all its iconic Jacobean dramas of corruption, lust, power abuses, dissimulation, revenge, sexism, and punishment for independence that we may forget that these actors’ actual selves, private lives, and sexual imbroglios are eerily revealed by their stage clothes. In a novel about hiding and projecting, constantly donning masks and throwing off clothes, we become accustomed to everyone becoming something other for a time, even when they are in bed with a lover and at their most naked and intimate, perhaps as Charlie himself was in life to Joan. But there are times when the change of costume

McGrath’s The Wardrobe Mistress  157 reveals who they truly are. It is a non-actor, Joan, who perceives best the hidden life, correspondences, and silent speech of clothes, and hence her reverence: It was an assault, what was suffered by the costumes in which actors stepped out each night, then ripped off between scenes, until Joan and her girls took them in hand, applied sharp needles, and whispering soft words, brought them back good as new before sending them out to be ravaged again the next night. (McGrath 2017a, 184) She will even don Charlie’s vile Blackshirt outfit in what seems a dark communion with him. Her awareness makes her a promising “ ­ sensitive” to hear and react to Charlie’s spectral voice. Her conspicuously morbid identification with his clothes and his supposed emotional emanations or the mental fossils—as the American psychometrist Joseph Rodes Buchanan spoke of in his Manual of Psychometry: The Dawn of a New Civilization (1885)—that she searches for emerge as she sniffs the crotch of his trousers; or when she dresses herself in his fascist uniform, standing ramrod straight before an uncanny mirror; or places Charlie’s garments on her new lover and literally goes to bed with them. This is a case of the living becoming a ghost of the dead, introducing Joan to the madness of being torn between two worlds. Entombing the past in the present, Joan’s actions make a parallel to Charlie’s dark activities. Just as the seemingly impossible presence of a spirit in Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger (2009) reflects and exposes the cover-up of a once great and now decaying house’s secrets, so now the ghost of Charlie evokes the seemingly implausible return of racist exclusion (speeches in the streets by British fascists) and terror (Blackshirts marching on to London’s East End, propped up by their uniforms, buttons, belts, and faux Iron Crosses). All this evil is still not banished by the total defeat of Germany. Incongruously, at the same time British viewers are watching newsreels of Auschwitz’s liberation, Blackshirts are on the streets pushing for fascism in the UK. While the British public discovers more fully the tortures the Gestapo enacted on its suspects, especially Jewish partisans (one of whom is in this novel: “Auntie” Gustl), the seeds of anti-Semitism still sprout in London gutters. It is sown often by those who believe they know better to all the ignorant around them, those desperate to be at last “superior” to at least one person on earth, to that wandering Jew from the Romantic age on, or to whom the Jewish scholar George Steiner (whose family had escaped Austria during the Nazi years) termed that “eternal guardian of alienation and foreignness in the nationalistic bourgeois world” (quoted in Žižek 2010, 143). Anti-Semitism is not typically thought of in ghostly terms. It has been equated with revenge, which can be a ghost’s pressing mission (indeed,

158  Danel Olson in his study In Bluebeard’s Castle (1971) Steiner maintained that the Nazi moment constituted Europe’s vengeance against Jews for conceiving “conscience”). Yet anti-Semitism perpetually returning like a revenant and holding many enigmas as a ghost might for the living world is a metaphor that seems supported by this text and others. Further, as Žižek divines it, “The true mystery of anti-Semitism […] is why it is such a constant, why it persists through all its historical mutations” (2010, 140). With blunt clarity, Žižek reminds us that from the eleventh century onward to the late nineteenth century in Europe, Jews were prejudiced against and associated with “exploiting Christians, murdering their children [for Passover bread], raping their women; ultimately, betraying and murdering Christ” (140). Žižek could have added that outrageous, yet fiercely held, accusation that Jews brought the bubonic plague to Europe causing the second Black Death pandemic in the fourteenth century. Indeed, in a number of studies on anti-Semitism in Britain of the 1930s and 1940s, the image of this constantly returning cultural/ political/social ailment of anti-Semitism is not mentioned once in terms of a ghostly metaphor or in possessing a revenant capability, yet British fascists themselves will label Anglo Jewry a spectral presence (as did the anti-Semite Andrew Hackney Mosleyite in Linehan 1997, 280–281). McGrath, I would argue, aligns anti-Semitism fully and uncannily with the ghostly. He formulates anti-Semitism as a presence beyond reason, nearly beyond explanation, an abiding spirit. Nazism can seem to be crushed in Germany, its leadership gone to a Berlin bunker suicide or Nuremburg trial execution, but this desire in the United Kingdom to denigrate Jews floats back like the uncanny, akin to the return of traumatic memories, secrets, omissions, all of that which has been repressed, and even the dead themselves. This raises the central question of what should be done in the face of anti-Semitism—its printed matter, uniforms, exhortations in the street, malicious graffiti on synagogues and Jewish storefronts, and the extravagant displays of racial hatred as its minions march and fight in the streets. Julius, the character at the center of BUF infiltration who himself risks his life for the cause of human dignity, even has moments of doubt and confusion over fighting the fascists, as he admits to his family, It’s not so bad for these—[anti-Semitic] opinions—to be expressed, yet again. Perhaps they’ll exhaust themselves. And it’s not likely these people will command real influence in the country, not now. Pah! Their day has passed […]. Draw attention to it, you only make it worse! And of course, it is a matter of the balanced point-of-view. Free speech, what we’ve been fighting for. This appears to be the government position, and perhaps they’re right. (McGrath 2017a, 169–170)

McGrath’s The Wardrobe Mistress  159 Nevertheless, a moment later he quite rightly slams the table and rages: “But it matters [….]. It matters to these men [returning veterans, some of whom are Jewish] who risked their lives, who died, some of them, fighting fascism” (170, original emphasis). This implication, perhaps in the mind of the veterans, of whether a Nazi-like state could grow to a menacing size in the UK must be mooted and settled by Julius; he must have envisioned the terrible what-if, which many in Germany could not until it was too late, and knows his course of violent reaction to the BUF is the right one. Julius, who houses the escaped Jewish dissident/operative Gustl who the Germans could have tortured to death while she was on the Continent had they been able to keep her there, may also be thinking of all those who appeased the anti-Semites before Hitler became Chancellor and after. The world waiting for fascists to “exhaust themselves” did not save the millions of Poles, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, disabled peoples, and Jews who found themselves dying in concentration camps. The brutal lesson, in this case, seems to be that allowing opinions of hatred, a long tolerance of expression no matter its level of specific malice, may simply help load many innocents on to cattle cars and straight to the gas chambers later. Our protagonist Joan has been moved by a radicalizing spirit, and she will not cower before the ghost of an anti-Semite that is her husband. Like the emboldened speaker in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” (1965), who tolerates a Nazi vampire-father long enough and then “put[s] a stake in [his] fat black heart,” Joan now prefers to act, no matter the cost, than to be acted on, and may be called the novel’s prime and heroic resister. Discovering something where it should not be is both a description of the uncanny and a definition of Joan’s widowhood, as she keeps finding evidence of moral corruption surrounding Gricey she had not imagined before. Freud unfolds the uncanny as presence always reminding us in a subtle way of our own deaths, that sometime and somehow a stranger death will interrupt where vigorous life was, a concept of extinction for which the unconscious has no reality, according to Freud: “Our unconscious […] does not believe in its own death […]. The deepest strata of our minds, made up on instinctual impulses—knows nothing that is negative: […] it does not know its own death” (1915, 296). This intrusion must seem the most impossible to accept or explain of all for Charlie himself, suddenly pushed down the garden steps to his death by someone he knew (that infiltrator who spied him spewing death to Jews at a Blackshirt gathering). Charlie’s son-in-law Julius notes that Gricey was mad at the end. He’d gone mad. Not mad like a rabid dog, but a rabid exterminationist. Kill them all, it was frightful. It was as though the mask had got stitched on so tight he couldn’t get it off again. (McGrath 2017a, 172, original emphasis)

160  Danel Olson Through nearly three decades of marriage, Joan did not see this. Anti-­ Semitism, following Derrida’s description of the paradox of a ghost, is at once visible and invisible in the narrative (McMullen 1983). The novel’s implied question on what to do about a ghost spreads like a widening canopy to occupy not only the mother but her daughter, Vera. Vera hears Daddy’s voice and sees a shadow in the garden wall that could be him. The question raised is whether the mother/daughter team should ignore it, placate it, fight it, or will it away, reversing the conjuring that may have helped bring it near. One of the bitterest imponderables of the entire novel is how to explain (or whether to explain) to a daughter, how the father that doted on her and gave career advice to enter his profession also would have wanted her dead because of her Jewishness. The blood that courses in her veins made her what Charlie’s hero Hitler and his millions of followers called “Untermensch” (subhuman), “Stücke” (pieces), “Parasiten” (parasites), “Judenscheisse” (Jewshit), and a ­“Judenschwein” (Jewsow). We could almost believe that her father’s weird communications with Joan are his sublimated desires and repressed pain over his basest unfinished business, that he could not crush his daughter or the Jew that she would fall in love with. This ghost, like Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s monsters, seems to signify in Derridean fashion “something other than itself; it is always a displacement, always inhabits the moment that created it and the moment into which it is received” (Cohen 1996, 4). This is the essence of his vitality-in-death, that he is unpredictable. We cannot forget that at times he is ironically reassuring (at first, the ghost voice of Charlie urges his wife to be brave before others during his wake), but at other times blindingly destructive, tearing down all the walls of Joan’s confidence and leaving her in physical and psychic ruin until she discovers the purpose and power that a resistance movement to racism can give to her life. As we have explored, the novel asks what a person of reason can do during a time when the reactionary right grows in power and displays itself on the streets, along with its anti-Jewish and anti-immigrant sloganeering. But an obvious question that lies beneath that one is, “why is all this anti-Semitism is directed on Joan?” What has she ever done to attract such hate, especially from her apparently nearest and dearest, beyond being born a Jew and moving to a new Jewish lover after her old Gentile one dies? No compelling reason is baldly given and none seems to be subtly implied to explain the paradox of why Charlie would marry a Jew, stay married for twenty-seven years to her, have a child, and tolerate this child being wed also to a Jew. An “old hoofer in a wheelchair now,” Joan’s friend Delphie Dix suggests first that this anti-Semitism is “Just lads being stupid” (McGrath 2017a, 168), but then implies that this hatred is what some soldiers came back to Britain with after World War I. Perhaps this is meant to imply that those veterans are jaded, convinced

McGrath’s The Wardrobe Mistress  161 that their mates died in the trenches for little reason save a series of monarchic, misguided, prideful orders delivered throughout Europe, or perhaps a grand banking and armaments conspiracy abetted by the wealthiest families in Europe (automatically labeled entirely “Jewish”). Joan believes some unnamable wrong has caused Charlie’s silent enmity all these years: “how much longer she could carry this burden, the knowledge that whatever it was she’d done to Gricey all unknowing, it had aroused such hatred” (359). The chorus, a presence constantly observing the theatre productions and Joan’s life and seemingly less obviously biased than McGrath’s other unreliable narrators from his preceding novels, says that Charlie’s contempt “had nothing to do with her [Joan]. He hated her because he could. He’d have hated anyone. It was the fascist way” (359). The chorus’s idea is worth inspecting through the lens of monster theory. If Charlie is the necessary ghost for this novel’s almost cinematic and gothic storytelling, then Joan and the Jewish characters are deemed its monsters outwardly by the BUF and secretly by Charlie for decades. For the BUF and other xenophobes, as suggested by Cohen and Kristeva’s analysis of the social fright from monsters, Jews in Britain are the “uncanny Freudian-Lacanian return of the repressed, [for] the monster is always coming back, always at the verge of irruption” (Cohen 1996, 20). There is sometimes, too, the secret appeal of the monster, or whatever seductive yet abject thing it was that prompted Charlie to marry a Jew. Cohen perceptively observes the ambivalence: “The monster will always dangerously entice […]. The monstrous lurks somewhere in that ambiguous, primal space between fear and attraction” (20). Like the accounts of seduction of bold and true (and possibly English) knights encountering ladies that “are, of course, demons in lascivious disguise” (19), there is a “simultaneous repulsion and attraction at the core of the monster’s composition” (17) that, from the BUF’s view, makes the Jewesses more dangerous. Cohen cogently argues that the monster is actually “cultural, political, racial, economic, [and] sexual” differences “made flesh, come to dwell among us. [… A]n incorporation of the Outside, the Beyond,” for which extermination becomes “heroic” (7). We could complicate this with an insight from Žižek. Hitler, Žižek reminds us, vowed to National Socialist party members and to Germany that “We have to kill the Jew within us.” Žižek has, I believe, a strong defense for adding a paradoxical line to Hitler’s command: “What Hitler fatefully forgot to add is that he, the anti-Semite, in his identity, is also in the Jew” (Žižek 2010, 136). Though Žižek has taken much criticism for this idea (cf. John Gray’s “The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek,” 12 July 2012, New York Review of Books), I believe his larger point is being misread. The idea is perhaps that a Nazi’s self-concept wraps around his or her anti-Semitic ranting, fantasies, and imagined quest to purify and to burn what threatens his purity through a

162  Danel Olson holocaust. The point is that “You take away the anti-Semitic fantasy, and the subject whose fantasy it is itself disintegrates” (Žižek 2012). Thus one more underpinning reason for a fascist’s hatred of a Jew is that the fascist needs the Jew, is dependent on this “monster,” and would cease to exist or have a reason for being without this enemy. But Charlie has ceased to exist in his mortal frame: what does he need Joan for now, and what is his desire for her? Much of the terror in The Wardrobe Mistress, I maintain, builds on the ambiguity over what the ghost Charlie wants. He engages in a range of malign activity, from upsetting Joan with moving his hat from the wardrobe to the kitchen, prompting her to resist his control by finally taking the Jewish Frank Stone into the bed she once shared with Charlie, to his trying to rape her in the wardrobe, to infecting scenes witnessed by the whole family with a kind of unnamable dread, but all to what end? When Charlie’s spirit hovers about, he infuses the sorrows of Continental Europe during World War II into objects in post-war London; trees suddenly become made for hanging people and lamps crafted for displaying skin from concentration camp inmates. For instance, when Joan and Frank sit next to each other after making love, and Joan shows she is more concerned for another than herself—urging Frank to go back to his old Mother and to comfort her in her loneliness—the presence of Charlie and images of hanging, rigor mortis, morbid lampshades, and blackness subtly confront her: “above them the dim bulb crackled in its stiff linen shade all veined in black, and hanging from a twisted cord, as the clock ticked” (McGrath 2017a, 188). Moreover, it is not by accident that a presence is detected thrice near the stairs where Charlie was killed—near the “bare hanging branches of the weeping willow” (161) of Julius and Vera’s backyard—and these scenes, too, take on the patina of death and hauntings: At the far end of Julius’ narrow garden the branches of a weeping willow in the alley beyond fell bare and thin over the back wall like ropes, swaying a little […]. Her eyes came up, wide with astonishment. I saw something move, she whispered, over by the fence. It was like a crouching shadow, that’s what it looked like, then it was creeping along the fence! (65) The wall is seamed with ice, and icicles still hang dripping from the branches of the weeping willow at the bottom of the garden. There’s no moon. The only sounds are the shunting trains, and the banshee screeching of iron wheels on rails. Julius knew it would be a long night. (192)

McGrath’s The Wardrobe Mistress  163 “Creeping,” “weeping,” “ropes swaying,” “ice,” “screeching,” and “no moon” all connote the most dismal and haunted of scenes, suggesting the approach of death. Moreover, aligning a willow above to repeatedly indicate Charlie’s grim presence reminds us of its famed use in Shakespeare, whose plays Vera and Frank perform. Though she is never able to finish her song, Shakespeare’s Desdemona choses the willow tree (as well as sycamore) to sing of after Othello accuses her of unfaithfulness, a song which bemoans loss and insensibility, and leads to her to discuss falseness, infidelity, and abandonment with her lady servant, Emilia. Joan, who has also been meditating on willows, actually does take another man in her marital bed, after ghostly Charlie places his hat in the kitchen to assert some type of restored dominance over hearth and home—all an act of unfaithfulness, if looked at from the ghost’s skewed perspective. My argument, then, is that the ghost wants to spread corruption and infuse threats of death everywhere, a last chance at intimidating and controlling his wife’s life. His purpose is for her to feel the despair of loving someone and something that hates you, namely, himself, and in feeling such despair, doubt in the promise of ever loving a man who truly loves her back, as Frank Stone could, without furtively and perversely despising her as Charley Grice did. On October 4, 1936, two to three thousand BUF Blackshirts led by Oswald Mosley planned to march through London’s East End, protected by six thousand Metropolitan Police (some on horseback). They were met by a stiff pushback of twenty thousand anti-fascists. One hundred and seventy-five people were injured (Kushner and Valman 1999) by the end of the day, and a film reel unmistakably shows the Metropolitan Police going out of their way to charge their horses and club the anti-fascists. Despite the police brutality against their opposition, the Blackshirts did not manage to proceed on their marching route (Reuters 2006). When I shared photos of the fierce London mural of the Cable St. Riots to McGrath, he reflected on the significance of ordinary people standing up during extraordinary times: Cable Street, yes. That was 1936, I think. Heroic effort by all sorts of East Enders to keep out Mosley and his fascists—and they succeeded. Even poured the contents of their chamber pots onto the ghastly Blackshirts! A great day. Thanks for remembering it. (e-mail from McGrath, 19 March 2016a) McGrath’s Joan inherits this spirit, too, committing an act unforgettable during a Blackshirt assembly, metamorphosing into a street fighting mam. Besides agreeing to fake being an anti-Semite herself to handicap the Mosley movement, she will take draper’s shears from her own costume shop to a BUF rally, step up, and repeatedly stab in the stomach a

164  Danel Olson young, preening, and now dead Blackshirt, one whose own family hours before mocked his appearance in the black uniform. It is the quintessential example of the most shocking protest and perhaps the most potent, for here is a “respectable” lady of the theatre, a successful business owner, a mam, and generally a pragmatist to all who know her, who faces an enemy and kills him at close range. If she can take up the shears and gut a fascist before the frothing crowd, the novel implies, then why cannot anyone else? Readers often understand other McGrath protagonists as insane in the extreme by their acts—incest, ill-fated adultery, murder, cannibalism—but here is one who in her extreme state may have taken the sanest course when streets grow evil. Perhaps there is a deeper doubt (than with other McGrath protagonists) over whether she really is mad. A mystery remains about the angel of death. Joan will die in police custody with a hatpin to the heart before formal charges can be a­ rraigned against her for the murder of the Blackshirt Edgar Cartridge. That this constitutes suicide, which seems to be how the figures in the text understand it (as no formal inquiry of her death follows before her funeral), is debatable, however. Granted, the most evidence for this pointing to suicide is that we watch a woman grown troubled, partly by the inability to have Gricey as she once had him, and more anguished by the fact that she cannot get rid of the phantasm Gricey. Moreover, it is hard to imagine her giving up her independence to rot in a prison. Last, the novel specifies no one else who was near her in her jail cell at time of death. Yet with a ghost husband about, along with fuming, vengeful right-wingers and sympathetic, possibly complicit jailers and a suspect Metropolitan Police (some of whose complicity with the Blackshirts was on public view during the Cable Street battle), we could be just as concerned that this is a disguised murder. McGrath responded to the doubt over Joan’s end being suicide with openness: This is the first I’ve heard of this dark suspicion. You may be right. I can tell you’ve already built a case, and it’s persuasive. I would certainly support your argument, having always believed that I do not have the last word by any means as to what really happens in my stories. And you’re right, there were fascists about, also a vindictive ghost of a husband. (2017b, 189) While so many dimensions are left finely ambiguous in McGrath’s fictional oeuvre, typically the identity of a murderer is not. Only the most benighted detective, for example, would not deduce that Hugo Coal killed, with malice aforethought and a dinosaur bone, the wimpish suitor of his daughter, Sidney Giblet in McGrath’s first novel, The Grotesque (1989). Should future scholars establish, with textual details and strands of logic so far unidentified, that the agent of death during incarceration

McGrath’s The Wardrobe Mistress  165 is not Joan’s own hand in this latest novel, but her anti-Semitic enemies instead, then another victory would come to this wardrobe mistress who actively resisted hate. Joan, like her sainted French namesake, will live in Kierkegaard’s truth: “The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and [her] rule begins” (1996, 352).

Notes 1 Sadly, this novel (a finalist for the 2018 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction) could not be more timely, as dismissals of anti-Semitic threats are ongoing in the time of this chapter’s writing. Asked by Jake Turx of Ami Magazine about “an uptick in anti-Semitism and how the government is planning to take care of it,” (or the over two dozen bomb threats to US Jewish centers in January 2017), President Trump responded, “Not a fair question. So here’s the story folks. No. 1, I am the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life. No. 2, racism. The least racist person. In fact, we did very well relative to other people running as a Republican. Quiet, quiet, quiet… See he [the Jewish reporter] lied about—he was going to get up and ask a very straight, simple question. So, you know, welcome to the world of the media” (Watkins 2017). 2 Pimlico was the novel’s original placeholder title, according to the author (e-mail from Patrick McGrath, 17 March 2016b). This name of a central London location evokes the one-time home of Winston Churchill, headquarters of the Free French, but also their polar opposites, including the residence of BUF leader Oswald Mosley. 3 McGrath notes of this novel’s point of view: “I much enjoyed the departure from first person (usually unreliable) narrator. Did a little research on the Chorus in ancient Greek drama. It seems there’d be a group, a small community, somewhere on the stage, which would narrate the action, and from which actors would from time to time emerge, to dramatize the ongoing story, and then return to the Chorus, which kept the whole thing going, commenting and emoting and so on” (e-mail from Patrick McGrath, 19 March 2016a). 4 One of the most alarming documentaries on the extent to which SS Reichsführer Himmler went to help create a neo-pagan mythos for the SS is The Occult History of the Third Reich), which includes commentary on SS officers making love with their wives in cemeteries of fallen German heroes in order to capture their spirits in the fertilized eggs of Aryan wombs near Aryan tombs (Dirs. Dave Flitton and Joan Baran). Another fine source on Nazi supernatural work is Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Occult Roots of Nazism: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1890–1935 (The Aquarian Press, 1985), which was republished by NYU Press in 1992, and I. B. Tauris in 2004.

References Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1996. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Freud, Sigmund. 1953. “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” (1915) In The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIV, edited and translated by James Strachey, 275–302. London: Hogarth.

166  Danel Olson Godwin, William. 1876. Lives of the Necromancers: or, An Account of The Most Eminent Persons in Successive Ages, Who Have Claimed For Themselves, or to Whom Has Been Imputed by Others, the Exercise of Magical Power. London: F. J. Mason, 1834. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1996. Papers and Journals: A Selection. New York: Penguin. Kushner, Tony, and Nadia Valman. 1999. Remembering Cable Street: Fascism and Anti-fascism in British Society (Parkes-Wiener Series on Jewish Studies. Hertfordshire: Valentine Mitchell & Co. Linehan, Thomas P. 1997. East London for Mosley: The British Union of Fascists in East London and South-West Essex 1933–40. London: Frank Cass & Co. McGrath, Patrick. 2016a.”Re: Chorus.” Received by Danel Olson, 19 March 2016. ———. 2016b. “Re: Pimlico.” Received by Danel Olson, 17 March 2016. ———. 2017a. The Wardrobe Mistress. London: Hutchinson. ———. 2017b. “The Brewery Interview.” By Danel Olson. Weird Fiction Review 6: 189–204. McMullen, Ken, dir. 1983. Ghost Dance. Perfs. Pascale Ogier, Leonie M ­ ellinger, Robbie Coltrane, and Jacques Derrida. Channel Four Films. Reuters. 2006. “Battle of Cable Street, 1936” (newsreel). YouTube. Posted October 2006 www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AQDOjQGZuA. Steiner, George. 1971. In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Thurlow, Richard C. 2006. Fascism in Britain: from Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to the National Front. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. Watkins, Eli. 2017. “Trump Tells Jewish Magazine’s Reporter to ‘Sit Down,’ Blames Anti-Semitism on ‘the Other Side.’” CNN, February 16, 2017. www. cnn.com/2017/02/16/politics/donald-trump-news-conference-anti-semitism/. Žižek, Slavoj. 2010. Living in the End Times. Brooklyn: Verso. ———. 2012. “Slavoj Žižek Responds to His Critics.” Jacobin, Jacobin Magazine, March 7, 2012. www.jacobinmag.com/2012/07/slavoj-zizek-respondsto-his-critics/.

Afterword Patrick McGrath

Writing fiction is for the most part dogged unromantic work. Flaubert spoke of his writing life in these terms, saying he could spend a whole day deciding to insert a comma into a page of text, and the next day deciding to take it out again. Worst still is that black hour when the story loses the clear pure trajectory of its first promising chapters, and in a chill silent midnight the writer knows a familiar clammy sensation: I’m bored with this. I’ve lost my way. It’s gone awry. Why? What happened? It can then seem a miracle that anyone ever finished a novel at all. In this fine collection of essays I have been delighted to read discussions of serious gothic themes associated with madness, identity, passion, and history. Also disability, and the economic and social aspects of colonial and imperial narratives. And not least, spiders. A large part of the pleasure of reading such incisive commentary and explication arises from the impression given that the writer has been working to a plan all along. No such luck. I think what we call the imagination is actually the unconscious mind in ludic mode, which is where I believe most gothic writers sink their probes. Some kind of structure is then imposed on the material thus exhumed, which we choose to call the first draft. At which point we stare at it, worry at it, despair of it, attempt to organize it—and in the fullness of time, and with a bit of serendipity, we do. Then onward, until it all breaks down again. This is the paleontologist’s theory of creativity: up come the bones, and from them we try to make a plausible skeleton. It is an idea I employed in my first novel, The Grotesque (1989), where the joke was that the paleontologist kept getting the bones all wrong. In the hands of the scholars published in these pages, the bones are all exactly where they’re supposed to be. I’d like to offer my sincere gratitude to all the contributors to this very fine collection, in particular editors Matt Foley and Rebecca Duncan. The value and the pleasure of these essays, for me, is the intriguing light they shed on various of the disorderly plots and characters, settings, and themes that have occurred in my work so far. Thank you. London, 2019

Appendix

A Patrick McGrath Bibliography Thirty Years of Select Criticism (excluding short reviews) and Interviews, 1988–2018 Danel Olson Criticism Antor, Heinz. 2001. “Unreliable Narration and (Dis-)Orientation in the Postmodern Neo-Gothic Novel: Reflections on Patrick McGrath’s The Grotesque.” Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 19, no. 24: 187–191. https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=305250. Antoszek, Patrycja. 2016. “The Neo-Gothic Borderlands: Liminal Spaces in the Stories of Shirley Jackson, Patrick McGrath and Joyce Carol Oates.” In Borderlands: Art, Literature, Culture, edited by Ewelina Bańka and Zofia Kolbuszewska, 221–234. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL. Armitt, Lucie. 2012. “The Magical Realism of the Contemporary Gothic.” In A New Companion to The Gothic, edited by David Punter, 510–522. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Baker, Charlotte, Paul Crawford, Brian J. Brown, Maurice Lipsedge, and Ronald Carter. 2010. “Mental States.” In Madness in Post-1945 British and American Fiction, 18–60. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Banita, Georgiana. 2012. “Scapegoating in ‘Ground Zero’: Patrick McGrath’s Allegory of Historical Trauma.” Textual Practice 26, no. 2: 1–25. doi:10.1080/ 0950236X.2011.618462. ———. 2012. “Sex and Sense: McGrath, Tristram, and Psychoanalysis from Ground Zero to Abu Ghraib.” In Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture After 9/11, 109–164. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Battisti, Chiara. 2015. “Mental Illness and Human Rights in Patrick McGrath’s Asylum.” In Literature and Human Rights: The Law, the Language and the Limitations of Human Rights Discourse, edited by Ian Ward, 133–154. Berlin: De Gruyter. Beard, William. 2006. “Spider (2002).” In The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg, Revised Edition, 471–504. Toronto: University of ­Toronto Press. [Maps the evolution of Cronenberg’s film Spider from an analysis of McGrath’s novel and script]. Butter, Stella. 2007. “The Grotesque as a Comic Strategy of Subversion: Mapping the Crisis of Masculinity in Patrick McGrath’s The Grotesque.” Orbis Litterarum 62, no. 4 (August): 336–352. doi:10.1111/j.1600-0730.2007.00896.x. Carmel, Harold. 1998. “McGrath’s Fiction, from the Forensic Asylum: Asylum, Dr. Haggard’s Disease, Spider, The Grotesque.” Psychiatric Services 49, no. 1 (January): 109–111. doi:10.1176/ps.49.1.109.

170  Danel Olson Davidson, Carol Margaret. 2011. “His Dark Materials: Gothic Resurrections and Insurrections in Patrick McGrath’s Martha Peake.” In 21st Century Gothic: Great Gothic Novels Since 2000, edited by Danel Olson, 385–396. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. Duggan, Robert. 2010. “Ghosts of Gotham: 9/11 Mourning in Patrick McGrath’s Ghost Town and Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 46, no. 3: 381–393. doi:10.1080/17449855.2010.4 82426. Dupont, Jocelyn. 2009. “‘In a Glass Grotesquely’: Patrick McGrath’s Quaint Old England.” Revue de la Société dʼétudes 37: 87–98. http://journals. openedition.org/ebc/3685. ———. 2009. “Parody and Displacement of the Gothic in Patrick McGrath’s Work.” In Rewriting/Reprising: Plural Intertextualities, edited by Georges Letissier, 39–49. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. ———, ed. 2012. Patrick McGrath: Directions and Transgressions. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. [Essays by Max Duperray, Tanya Tromble, Jérôme Dutel, Ineke Bocting, Hélène Machinal, Sue Zlosnik, Marc Amfreville, Gérald Préher, Claude Maisonnat, with Introduction by Jocelyn Dupont and Afterword by Patrick McGrath]. Dupont, Jocelyn, and Magali Falco. 2009. “Patrick McGrath’s American New Gothic.” In Gothic N.E.W.S. Vol. I, edited by Max Duperray, 272–282. Paris: Michel Houdiard. Falco, Magali. 2004. “Patrick McGrath’s Case Histories or the Ruin(s) of Psychoanalysis.” Anglophonia: French Journal of English Studies 15: 94–104. ———. 2007. “The Painting of the Urban Dreamscape in Patrick McGrath’s Port Mungo.” E-rea: Revue électronique d’études sur le monde Anglophone 5, no. 2: n.p. http://journals.openedition.org/erea/168; doi:10.4000/erea.168. ———. 2007. La Poétique néo-gothique de Patrick McGrath. Paris: Publibook. Ferguson, Christine. 1999. “Dr. McGrath’s Disease: Radical Pathology in Patrick McGrath’s Neo-Gothicism.” In Spectral Readings: Toward a Gothic Geography, edited by Glennis Byron and David Punter, 233–243. London: Macmillan. Foley, Matthew. 2017. “Patrick McGrath.” In Horror Literature through History: An Encyclopedia of the Stories that Speak to Our Deepest Fears, Vol. II, edited by Matt Cardin, 602–603. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Freirera, Francisco. 2002. “Une arantèle de signes: Spider de Patrick McGrath.” Otrante 12 (Fall): 158–171. Green, Colin. 1990. “Back to School: A Note on Patrick McGrath’s ‘Ambrose Syme’.” Peake Studies 1, no. 4 (Summer): 5–8. www.jstor.org/stable/24775875. Harper, Stephen. 2009. “The Suffering Screen: Cinematic Portrayals of Mental Distress.” In Madness, Power and the Media: Class, Gender and Race in Popular Representations of Mental Distress, 59–102. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hogle, Jerrold E. 2014. “History, Trauma and the Gothic in Contemporary Western Fictions.” In The Gothic World, edited by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, 72–82. London: Routledge. Hopson, Jacqueline. 2014. “The Demonisation of Psychiatrists in Fiction (and Why Real Psychiatrists Might Want to Do Something About It).” The Psychiatric Bulletin 38, no. 4 (August): 175–179. doi:10.1192/pb.bp.113.045633.

Appendix  171 Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik. 2005. “Men Writing Men.” In Gothic and the Comic Turn, 136–164. New York: Palgrave. Johnson, Greg. 1988. “Isn’t It Gothic?” The Georgia Review 42, no. 4 (Winter): 840–849. www.jstor.org/stable/41399479. Kerler, David. 2013. “Trauma and the (Im)Possibility of Representation: Patrick McGrath’s Trauma.” Cultura, lenguaje y representación: revista de estudios culturales de la Universitat Jaume I 11: np. doi:10.6035/clr.2013.11.5. Kuo, John Sheng. 2007. “9/11 as American Gothic: Terror and Historical Darkness in Patrick McGrath’s Ghost Town.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 33, no. 1 (March): 53–73. www.concentric-literature.url.tw/issues/ The%20Gothic%20Revisited/3.pdf. Lewis, Mitchell R. 2007. “The Gothic Gaze: The Politics of Gender in Patrick McGrath’s Asylum.” Special “Teaching Contemporary British Fiction” issue of A & E: Anglistik und Englischunterricht 69 (Winter): 159–174. Lima, Maria Antónia. 2014. “Psychos’ Haunting Memories: A(n) (Un)common Literary Heritage.” Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry 1, no. 1: 62–76. http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/41. McGrath, Patrick. 2002. “Problem of Drawing from Psychiatry for a Fiction Writer.” Psychiatric Bulletin 26, no. 4: 140–143. doi:10.1192/pb.26.4.140. [Concentrates on Asylum and Spider and originated from his talk at the ­A nnual Meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, 10 July 2001]. ———. 2015. “On Writing Asylum.” Penguin Books Limited. Accessed 27 July, 2019. www.penguin.co.uk/articles/on-writing/on-writing/2015/jul/27/ patrick-mcgrath-on-writing-asylum/#2oZXgZerFppZz3We.99. ———. 2017. “Writing Madness.” In Writing Madness (Collected Short Fiction of Patrick McGrath), edited by Danel Olson, 389–396. Lakewood, CO: Centipede Press. [Meditates on Spider’s composition and originated as his presentation at Florence’s annual Festival degli Scrittori, 12 June 2013]. Ng, Andrew Hock-soon. 2004.”Monstrous Body.” In Dimensions of Monstrosity in Contemporary Narratives: Theory, Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism, 144–174. London: Palgrave Macmillan. [Focuses on McGrath’s story, “The Angel”]. Oates, Joyce Carol. 2017. “The Storyteller: Patrick McGrath.” In Writing Madness (Collected Short Fiction of Patrick McGrath), edited by Danel Olson, 13–17. Lakewood, CO: Centipede Press. [Examines startling beginnings and images in a range of McGrath stories]. Olson, Danel. 2017. “Afterword.” In Writing Madness (Collected Short Fiction of Patrick McGrath), edited by Danel Olson, 589–598. Lakewood, CO: Centipede Press. [Traces European and American writers’ influences on his oeuvre of stories]. Oyebode, Femi. 2004. “Fictional Narrative and Psychiatry.” BJPsych: Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 10, no. 2: 140–145. doi:10.1192/apt.10.2.140. Palmer, Paulina. 2012. “Queer Spectrality.” In The Queer Uncanny: New Perspectives on the Gothic, 66–104. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Powell, Anna. 2012. “Unskewered: The Anti-Oedipal Gothic of Patrick ­McGrath.” Horror Studies 3, no. 2: 263–279. doi:10.1386/host.3.2.263_1. Quinlivan, Davina. 2014. “The Red Keep, the Spider and the Dead Explorer.” Litro Magazine. www.litro.co.uk/2014/10/horror-the-red-keep-the-spider-andthe-dead-explorer/.

172  Danel Olson Reisman, Mara. 2017. “Destabilizing Institutional and Social Power in Patrick McGrath’s Asylum.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 58, no. 2: 156–173. doi:10.1080/00111619.2016.1178099. Spooner, Catherine. 2006. “Conclusion: The End of Gothic?” In Contemporary Gothic, 154–165. London: Reaktion. Thornton, Sara. 1996. “To Bite or to Typewrite? Transmissions in Patrick McGrath’s ‘Blood Disease’ (1988) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).” In Dracula: Insemination. Dissemination, edited by Dominque Sipière, 83–94. Amiens: UFR de Langues, U. de Picardie-Jules Verne. Uytterschout, Sien, and Bollen Katrien. 2015. “Mens Sana in Corpore Sano? Interiority and Peripheral Insanity in Patrick McGrath’s ‘Ground Zero’ (2005).” English Studies 96, no. 2: 173–190. doi:10.1080/0013838X.2014.983776. Zlosnik, Sue. 2011. Patrick McGrath (Gothic Authors: Critical Revisions). Cardiff: University of Wales Press. ———. 2016. “Patrick McGrath.” In The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, edited by William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith, 435–438. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Interviews with Patrick McGrath Falco, Magali. 2007. A Collection of Interviews with Patrick McGrath. Paris: Éditions Publibook. McGrath, Patrick. 1989. “Artists in Conversation.” Interview by Bradford Morrow. Bomb 28, Summer. Accessed 25 August, 2019. https://bombmagazine. org/articles/patrick-mcgrath/. ———. 1989. “An Elegant Weirdness.” Interview by Peter Crowther. Fear: Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction 11 (November): 27–30. ———. 1990. Interview by Kevin B. Parent. Wired 3 (Summer/Fall): 32–51. ———. 1991. “Audio Interview with Don Swaim.” Wired for Books (31.19 m.). Accessed 25 August, 2019. http://donswaim.com/PatrickMcGrath1991.mp3. ———. 1998. Interview with Gilles Menegaldo. Sources 5: 109–127. ———. 2003. “Along Came a Spider: Interview with David Cronenberg and Patrick McGrath.” Interview by James Hoberman. The Village Voice, 26 ­February–4 March, 2003. www.villagevoice.com/issues/0309/hoberman.php. ———. 2004. Interview by Charles Ruas. Clocktower, MoMA/PS1. Accessed 25 August, 2019. http://clocktower.org/show/patrick-mcgrath. ———. 2004. “A Writer’s Life: Patrick McGrath (on Port Mungo).” Interview by Jasper Rees. The Telegraph, 2 May. www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/ books/3617055/A-writers-life-Patrick-McGrath.html. ———. 2005. “Haunted by Wraiths of New York.” The Scotsman, 18 September. www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/books/haunted-by-wraiths-ofnew-york-1-1403832. ———. 2005. “In Pursuit of Sublime Terror.” Interview with Suzie Mackenzie. The Guardian, 2 September. www.theguardian.com/books/2005/sep/03/­ fiction.features. ———.2005. “Patrick McGrath on Spider.” Screenwriters’ Masterclass: Screenwriters Discuss Their Greatest Films. Interview by Kevin Conroy Scott. London: Faber & Faber.

Appendix  173 ———. 2007. “The Possibility of Secret Passageways.” Interview by Geoff Manaugh. BLDGBLOG, 30 July. www.bldgblog.com/2007/07/the-possibilityof-secret-passageways-an-interview-with-patrick-mcgrath/. ———. 2008. “All in the Mind.” Interview by Nicholas Wroe. The Guardian, 11 July. www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jul/12/saturdayreviewsfeatres. guardianreview19. ———. 2008. “Author Patrick McGrath Talks to The Interview Online.” Interview by Nicola Barranger. YouTube (1.31 m.), 12 November. www.youtube. com/watch?v=xLHU6rEC93g. ———. 2008. Interview by John Self on Trauma. Asylum: John Self’s Shelves, 4 April. https://theasylum.wordpress.com/2008/04/04/patrick-mcgrathinterview/. ———. 2008. “Patrick McGrath on David Cronenberg’s Spider.” Interview by Kevin Conroy Scott. Focus Features, 17 September. www.focusfeatures.com/ article/patrick_mcgrath_on_david_cronenberg_s_spider. ———. 2009. “Don’t Lecture Me.” Interview by Ron Brown. Mississippi Public Broadcasting. YouTube (8.51 m.), 13 January. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=un88iK_37Zk. ———. 2010. Interview by Robert McKee. Storylogue, 14 February. www.­ storylogue.com/docs/interviews.html?documentId=26. ———. 2011. Interview by Neil McRobert. The Gothic Imagination, 13 July. www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/blog/patrick-mcgrath-interviewed-by-neil-mcrobert/. ———. 2012. “The Past, the Present and the Process.” Interview by Liz Axelrod. 12th Street (a Journal of the New School), 23 March. https://yourmoonsmine. com/2013/03/20/the-past-the-present-and-the-process-patrick-mcgrath/. ———. 2013. Interview by Tim Martin. The Telegraph, 17 May. www.­telegraph. co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/10061844/Patrick-McGrath-In-the-­ shadow-of-Broadmoor.html. ———. 2013. “Novelist Patrick McGrath on Writing, Setting, and Psychology.” Interview by Ryan D. Matthews. Huffington Post, 10 June, 2013. www. huffpost.com/entry/post_b_3412948?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0c HM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAIQLO 5u7s1Sk96yGoErfGVF0y2XAwUdzDUU8-VHB5uXIFYqpYcTJfy6OcQ5 UrPNb8cuYcMeiaKDhYZjTkudlfRbH1Gz0097qcDfBTC2tmn85yGQQilcp 8tropjvoZvllJLO2Kt16SS4dpW0xlnpF_GBnV1TSvMW-I25oIq9EXUVG. ———. 2013. “Through Haunted Minds: An Interview with Patrick McGrath.” Interview by Danel Olson. Weird Fiction Review 4: 244–253. ———. 2013. “Trauma and Creativity: Patrick McGrath and Olivia Laing.” Interview by Sigrid Rausing. Charleston Trust. YouTube (1:07:36), 24 May. www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL_uJjnl25k. ———. 2017. “I Get More and More Interested in Ghosts…” Interview by Alice O’Keeffe. The Bookseller: 32–33. 22 August. www.thebookseller.com/ profile/patrick-mcgrath-i-get-more-and-more-interested-ghosts-569816. ———. 2017. “Patrick McGrath: The Brewery Interview.” Interview by Danel Olson. Weird Fiction Review 8: 189–214. ———. 2017. “TCQ&A: Patrick McGrath.” Interview by Tribeca Citizen Staff. Tribeca Citizen, 28 September. https://tribecacitizen.com/2017/09/28/ tcqa-patrick-mcgrath/.

174  Danel Olson ———. 2018. “Shortlist Spotlight: Patrick McGrath.” Interview by Walter Scott Prize Staff. The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, 21 May. www.­ walterscottprize.co.uk/shortlist-spotlight-patrick-mcgrath/. ———. 2019. “Honorary Graduate – Patrick McGrath.” Interview by University of Stirling, Scotland Staff. Summer Graduation Video Gallery: University of Stirling, 6 June. www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbRf-eTx7Ik.

Notes on Contributors

Xavier Aldana Reyes  is Reader in English Literature and Film at ­Manchester Metropolitan University and a founder member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. He is the author of Spanish Gothic (2017), Horror Film and Affect (2016) and Body Gothic (2014) and the editor of Horror: A Literary History (2016). Xavier is chief editor of the Horror Studies book series run by the University of Wales Press. Dana Alex is an AHRC (technē DTP)-funded PhD researcher at Kingston University, London. Her research explores gothic fiction as the fiction of the nerves. By using the approaches of “the philosopher of the brain,” Catherine Malabou, Dana is (re)reading Gothic tales through a neuroscientific, neuro-philosophical, and neuro-­psychoanalytic lens. Since October 2018, Dana is also the postgraduate representative of the International Gothic Association for the United Kingdom and Ireland. Rebecca Duncan teaches literature in English at Stirling University. She is the author of South African Gothic (University of Wales Press, 2018), a member of Stirling’s International Centre for Gothic Studies, and—from 2020—the recipient of a Crafoord Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at Linnaeus University. She researches in postcolonial and world literature, speculative fiction, and the gothic. Matt Foley is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Manchester Met. The author of Haunting Modernisms (Palgrave, 2017), he is a member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, the administrator of the International Gothic Association’s Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prizes, and academic lead for Haunt Manchester. He works predominantly on modernist literature, the gothic, and literary acoustics. Alan Gregory has a PhD from Lancaster University, UK. His publications include “Staging the Extraordinary Body: Masquerading Disability in Patrick McGrath’s Martha Peake,” “Fabricating Narrative Prothesis: Fashioning (Disabled) Gothic Bodies in Tim Burton’s Batman

176  Notes on Contributors Returns,” and, in The Palgrave Handbook to Literary Horror (2018), “Disability and Horror.” Evert Jan van Leeuwen is a lecturer in English-language literature and culture and specializes in the history of gothic, horror, and science fiction. He has researched and published on, among others, William Godwin, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Stephen King, as well as genres such as graveyard poetry and the Spaghetti Western. He is currently developing a new project on the history of Dutch-­ language horror and science fiction. Patrick McGrath is the author of two short story collections and nine novels, including the international bestseller Asylum. He is also the author of Writing Madness, a collection of his short fiction and selected nonfiction. His novel Trauma was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award, and Spider was filmed by David Cronenberg from McGrath’s adaptation. He coedited an influential anthology of short fiction, The New Gothic, and recent nonfiction includes introductions to The Monk, Moby Dick and Barnaby Rudge. Patrick McGrath lives in Manhattan and London. Benjamin E. Noad completed his PhD thesis on the history of asylums in Gothic Literature at the University of Stirling in 2018. He is currently a teaching assistant and enjoys lecturing on Victorian literature and culture. He has also worked as the Wellcome-funded Research Administrative Assistant for the archival exhibition of McGrath’s works at the University of Stirling’s 2016 symposium, Asylums, Pathologies and the Themes of Madness: Patrick McGrath and His Gothic Contemporaries. Danel Olson is a two-time finalist for the Bram Stoker Award and winner of Shirley Jackson Award and World Fantasy Award. He has conceived and edited a six-volume print anthology series premiering stories from established and emerging Gothicists from 2007 to 2012, Exotic Gothic (Ash-Tree Press and later, PS Publishing). His three edited collections on film include The Exorcist: Studies in the Horror Film, Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining”: Studies in the Horror Film, and Guillermo del Toro’s “The Devil’s Backbone” and “Pan’s Labyrinth”: Studies in the Horror Film (all from Centipede Press). Danel’s edited study on novels is 21st Century Gothic: Great Gothic Fiction Since 2000 (Scarecrow Press/Rowman & Littlefield). His most recent project is a 2017 collection of all the short fiction to date from Patrick McGrath, with an introduction by Joyce Carol Oates: Writing Madness (Centipede Press). Danel earned his PhD (on why 9/11 victims use gothic language) from the University of Stirling, Scotland.

Notes on Contributors  177 David Punter is Professor of Poetry Emeritus and Senior Research ­Fellow in the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Bristol, UK. As well as hundreds of articles and essays, he has published many books on the Gothic and other areas of literature. His best-known work is probably The Literature of Terror (1996); his most recent book on the Gothic is The Gothic Condition (2016). His other books include Writing the Passions (2001); Rapture: Literature, Addiction, Secrecy (2009); Metaphor (2007); Modernity (2007); and The Literature of Pity (2013). He has also published six books of poetry. Daniel Southward  is an independent scholar and researcher, currently working on a monograph exploring the effects of the shift into the Metamodern on contemporary, gothic, and metafictional literatures. His work focuses on these aspects, with a particular focus on the manipulation of the sublime in the post-postmodern era, as well as the need for continued development within metafictional modes. Michela Vanon Alliata is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Ca’ Foscari, Venice. The author of Haunted Minds: Studies in the Gothic and Fantastic Imagination (2017), she has worked on Henry James and R.L. Stevenson, as well as on the relationship between literature and the visual arts. She has written essays on various authors from Mary Shelley to Charlotte Brontë, to Conrad, Coetzee, and Atwood. She has recently edited and translated J. S. Le Fanu’s Green Tea (Marsilio 2017). Sue Zlosnik  is Emeritus Professor of Gothic Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, and former copresident of the International Gothic Association. She is the author of Patrick McGrath (2011) and has published essays on writers as diverse as J. R. R. Tolkien and Chuck Palahniuk. With Avril Horner, she has published a number of books, including Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination (1998) and Gothic and the Comic Turn (2005). She is coeditor (with Avril Horner) of Women and the Gothic (2017) and (with Agnes Andeweg) of Gothic Kinship (2013).

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. 9/11 xi, 1, 11, 14, 119, 143, 146–148 Adorno, Theodor 4 affluenza 33, 38, 44, 45, 47 Alexander, Jeffrey 146 Alford, Fred: Trauma, Culture and PTSD 146 Alzheimer’s 149 American Dream 11, 38, 39 American Psychiatric Association 119, 144–146, 150 American Revolution 11, 32–33, 38, 39–41, 42, 45–46 Anansi 22 anti–Semitism 153, 155, 157–158, 160, 165n1 Arundhati Roy: The Algebra of Infinite Justice, 146 Asylum x, 2–4, 16, 73, 98–99, 103, 104–112, 114, 134n2 Baker, Charley 78 Baldick, Chris: The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales 104 Banks, Iain: The Wasp Factory 74 Berger, John 146 Blackshirts, 157, 163, 164 Bloch, Robert: Psycho 74, 77 Blood and Water and other Tales ix, 1, 112; “Ambrose Syme” 3, 6–7; “The Angel” 57; “The Black Hand of the Raj” 8–9, 112, 114; “Blood and Water” 3; “Blood Disease” 15, 49; “The Lost Explorer” 5, 9–11; “The Skewer” 3 blood culture 52, 55–56, 58 “A Boy’s own Broadmoor” 75–76, 85n4

Bourgeois, Louise 28, 30 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau 5; “Ananse” 24; “Sunsum” 23–24 Brantlinger, Patrick 5, 7, 12, 14 Brexit xi British Union of Fascists (BUF) see fascism Broadmoor 2, 75, 107–108, 119 Byron, Glennis 49, 55, 59 Calvino, Italo: The Path to the Spiders’ Nest 25–26 Camel, Harold, 76 cannibalism 10, 129, 164 capitalism 32, 33, 34–35, 38–39, 42; see also madness; neoliberalism Carroll, Noël 33, 47 Catskills, the 132 Cercas, Javier: El monarca de las sombras 65; Soldiers of Salamis 65 Chaffin, Robert J. 37 clothes as motif 154, 155, 156, 157 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 152, 155, 160, 161 Cold War, the 7, 9 collective trauma 16, 146–148, 150 colonization and colonialism: in Africa 6–7, 15, 49, 54, 59–62; in the Caribbean 13; in India 8–9; in North America 34–35, 37, 41–44, 46 “Coming Home to Stirling” ix Conrad, Joseph 103, 106, 112; Heart of Darkness 6, 52, 14, 34, 106 Constance 84, 96–98 Cordle, Daniel 7–8, 9, 10 Countryman, Edward 32 Cowles, Veronica 64 Cronenberg, David 82

180 Index Davidson, Michael 55–56, 58; see also Frohlich, Soren Davis, Lennard J. 50, 51 deinstitutionalization 73–75 Deleuze, Gilles 4, 28, 79, 86n8 Derrida, Jacques 152, 160 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders x, 122–123, 144, 145–146 disability: and gothic 49, 50–51, 52, 55–56, 59; ‘unhealthy disabled’ 49, 51–52, 56, 59, 61; see also blood culture; vampires and vampirism Dowd, Douglas 37, 38, 39 Dr Haggard’s Disease x, 2–4, 51, 92–93, 125, 132 The Duchess of Malfi 156 Eagleton, Terry 23 Eghigian, Greg 75 empire and imperialism 5–7, 8–11, 13–14, 23–25, 30, 112, 114; see also colonization and colonialism Engels, Friedrich 33 Enlightenment 4–5 exceptionalism (US) 12, 14 Falco, Magali 13 fascism 16, 64–66; British Union of Fascists 65, 152, 153, 158–159, 161, 163, 165; contemporary resurgence of 66, 67 Faulkner, William 67 Ferguson, Christine 3, 79 Flaubert, Gustave 167 Ford, Ford Madox 103, 105–106; The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion 105 Foucault, Michel 27, 58, 75, 81, 82, 83 Franco, Francisco 63, 65, 67, 68 free trade: and colonization 42–44, 46; critiques of 33, 39, 42, 43–44; and gothic 32, 34, 45; and smuggling 34–35, 36, 37, 41, 43 French Polynesia 113 Freud, Sigmund 2, 16, 123–124, 126, 128, 133, 134n3, 137, 138–142, 145, 159, 161; Beyond the Pleasure Principle 123, 138, 141, 148; death drive 145; deferred action 123; fort–da 140, 141; fright 139; Moses and Monotheism 123; mourning and melancholia 128; repetition

compulsion and the death drive 140–141; screen memory 137 Frohlich, Soren 58 Fry, Roger 110 Fuller Torrey, Edward 83 García Lorca, Federico 68–69 Gauguin, Paul 113 Gellhorn, Martha 64, 67 ghosts ix–xi, 66, 84; see also The Wardrobe Mistress Ghost Town xi, 1, 4, 11, 12, 66, 84, 147–150 globalgothic 49, 55, 59 Godwin, William 32, 154–155 gothic ix–x, 2, 15–16, 25, 32, 45, 64, 66–67, 100, 104, 108, 113, 115, 133, 167; and madness 4–5, 15, 73, 74–75, 84–85; and the transnational 1, 11, 12, 30, 33, 39, 49; see also imperial gothic; globalgothic Goya, Francisco 68 Goyal, Yogita 2 gothic tragedy see Spider Gotthelf, Jeremiah: The Black Spider 25–26 Graaf de, John 33 The Grotesque ix, xi, 15, 51, 57–58, 89–90, 169 Grounds, Adrian 75 Guattari, Felix 28, 79, 86n8 Gulf of Honduras 113–114 Halberstam, Judith 56 Hall, Alice T. 59 haunting 66, 162; see also ghosts Historical Fiction 66–67, 84 historiographic editors 89–93, 95 Hitler, Adolf xii, 155, 159, 160, 161 Hobsbawm, E. J. 7 Höglund, Johan 14 Horkheimer, Max 4 hospital plan for England and Wales 75 identity victims 89, 98–100 imperial gothic: and the decline of global hegemony 7, 8, 12, 14; McGrath’s critical reworking of 5–6, 8–9, 10, 13–15, 50, 53–54, 61; nineteenth–century 5, 7 Ibsen, Henrik: A Doll’s House 27, 156

Index  181 ideology: capitalist 33–34; fascist 65–66; Marxist definition of 23, 27, 29, 30; and normativity 50 interest 46–47 Iser, Wolfgang 76 Jacobs, W. W.: The Monkey’s Paw 25 James, Henry 103, 109; “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” 155; The Turn of the Screw 109 Jung, Carl 77 Kaplan, Amy 11, 14 Karras, Alan L. 34, 36, 37 Kaufman, Cynthia C. 33, 35, 38–39, 42, 43–44 King, Stephen 34 Koestler, Arthur 64 Kohut, Heinz 134n1 Kristeva, Julia 80, 129 Kronos 127 LaCapra, Dominick 128 Laing, R. D. 77–78 Latour, Bruno 4 Lawrence, D. H. 103, 105, 109–111, 113; Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 105, 109, 110; Women in Love, 110–111 Lenin, Vladimir 8–9, 10, 11 Lewis, C. S.: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe xi, 152 Lifton, Robert Jay 127, 129; Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans—Neither Victims nor Executioners 127 literary Impressionism 16, 104–106 London xi–xii, 81, 113–114, 152, 157, 162, 163, 165n2 Luckhurst, Roger 123 Lunacy Act (1845) 75 McDonnell, Michael A. 46 McGrath Archive 67–68 McGrath Sr, Pat 76–77, 107–108, 119 madness 16, 27, 52; and the abject 80–81; and capitalism 32, 45, 47; and empire 5, 6; and medicine 3, 4, 12, 15; and the transnational 2, 3, 5; see also deinstitutionalization; gothic; Laing, R. D.; Foucault, Michel; Spider Malabou, Catherine 16, 137, 148–150; the new wounded 137, 148–150; The New Wounded:

From Neurosis to Brain Damage 149; plasticity 149–150; Self and Emotional Life 149 Manet, Edouard 113 Marcuse, Herbert 33 Martha Peake x, 11, 51, 57, 66, 84, 88, 93–94 Marx, Karl 33, 42, 47 Mental Health Act (1959) 73, 75, 81, 85n2, 104 mental illness 73, 75, 76–78, 80–81, 84, 85 Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act (1963) 75 monsters and monstrosity 33–34, 38–39, 50–51, 56, 65; see also The Wardrobe Mistress Morrow, Bradford: The New Gothic ix, 104 Mosley, Oswald 152, 153, 158, 163, 165n2; see also British Union of Fascists Munch, Edvard: The Scream 111 neoliberalism 8, 10, 11 New York 84, 95, 96, 113, 119, 127, 144, 146, 148, 150; Ground Zero 148; Manhattan, xi, 130, 132; Twin Towers 147; see also World Trade Centre, the The New York Times 105, 144 nuclear threat 7, 8, 10–11 Ovid 21–22 passion 103, 104, 109–110, 112–114 Pearce, Cathryn 37, 40 Pentagon, the 146 Perpignan x Poe, Edgar Allan 27, 51, 103–104 Port Mungo 12–14, 16, 94–95, 98, 103, 112–114 postmodernism ix Powell, Anna 2, 4, 79 Powell, Enoch 75 psychiatry 3–4, 16, 75, 76, 121–122 psychoanalysis 2, 3, 16, 51, 76–77, 83–84; see also Freud, Sigmund PTSD 16, 119–120, 126, 127, 137, 143, 145–146, 149–150; as a collective condition 145 Punter, David 1, 5, 50

182 Index Reisman, Mara 106 Rothko, Mark 113 Said, Edward: orientalism 8 schizophrenia 15, 27, 73–74, 77–78, 80 self–mythologizers 89, 93–98, 101n1 Shapiro, Stephen 7, 11, 32 Shatan, Chaim 143 Sherlock, Philip: Anansi the Spider Man 22, 28 Sinfield, Alan 34 slavery 23–24, 40, 42–43, 46, 47 “The Smell” 106 Smelser, Neil 146 Smith, Adam 32, 37 smuggling and smugglers 32, 34–39, 41, 45 Sontag, Susan: On Photography 132 Spanish Civil War xii; and contemporary Spain 64–65, 67, 69; and the pacto del olvido 63, 67, 69; as a setting 63, 66–67 Spider x, 2–4, 15, 27–28. 91–92; implied reader of 74, 76–78; treatment of madness in 73–74, 78, 80, 82–84; as gothic tragedy 78–85 spidery writing 21, 25, 28, 29, 30–31 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 28 Steiner, George 157, 158 Stoker, Bram: Dracula 28, 54–55, 56 survival 127, 132 Tasso: Gerusalemme Liberata 124–125, 131 theatre, the 152, 153, 156, 161, 164 Thomas, Peter D.G. 37 Thurschwell, Pamela 138–140 Todd, Edwin S. 34, 35, 47 transnational, the 1–2, 15, 16, 113, 114, 146; transatlantic 8, 9, 10, 11, 23; see also empire and imperialism; colonialism and colonization; gothic Trauma 4, 16, 84, 95–96, 119–122, 126–134, 137–138, 141–145, 147–150

trauma 16, 64, 66; and trauma studies 120, 122–124, 137–143, 149–150 Trump, Donald 165n1 Twelfth Night 156 unconscious, the ix, 96, 101n3, 103, 110, 121, 124, 138, 167 unhealthy disabled see disability University of Stirling ix; see also McGrath Archive unreliable narration 3, 16, 76–78, 80, 82, 105–106 vampires and vampirism 15, 49, 53, 55–56, 59–61; see also blood culture El Valle de Los Caídos 67, 68–69 Vietnam War 127, 141, 143, 145; veterans of 119, 126–128, 141, 143 Walpole, Horace: Castle of Otranto 53 The Wardrobe Mistress xi–xii, 16, 65–66, 98–99; ghosts in 152, 153, 155–159, 160, 162–163; monstrosity in 153, 160–163 Washington (D.C.) 146 web as a metaphor 22, 24, 25, 27–28, 29, 30 Wendell, Susan 49, 51–52, 56, 59, 61 Wood, Mary Elene 83 Wong, David: John Dies at the End 29; This Book is Full of Spiders 29 World Trade Centre, the 12 World War I 124, 140 World War II xi, 64, 125, 162 Žižek, Slavoj 107, 148, 150, 152, 157–158, 161–162; Violence: Six Sideways Reflections 107 Zlosnik, Sue 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 27, 39, 51, 53, 60, 77, 84, 89, 103, 105, 106, 112