Konstanze Kutzbach and Monika Mueller The Abject of Desire The Aestheticization of The Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature and Culture 1 PDF

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

The Aestheticization of the Unaesthetic
in Contemporary Literature and Culture
Edited by
Konstanze Kutzbach and Monika Mueller
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007
Illustration cover: Monika Mueller

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

Hanjo Berressem
19
in
49
The Bhibhitsa Rasa in Anglophone Indian Cultural Discourse:

The Repugnant and Distasteful at the Level of Gender, Race,
and Caste
Nilufer Bharucha
69
The Gothic-Grotesque of Haunted: Joyce Carol Oatess Tales

of Abjection
Susana Arajo
89
Now we know that gay men are just men after all: Abject
Sexualities in Leslie Marmon Silkos Almanac of the Dead
Dorothea Fischer-Hornung
107
Consuming the Body: Literal and Metaphorical Cannibalism

in Peter Greenaways Films
Tatjana Pavlov
129
Shape-Shifters from the Wilderness: Werewolves Roaming

the Twentieth Century
Andrea Gutenberg
149
Queer Transformations: Renegotiating the

Contemporary Anglo-American Lesbian Fiction
Paulina Palmer
Abject
The Two-, One-, None-Sex Model: The Flesh(-)Made

Machine in Herman Melvilles The Paradise of Bachelors
and the Tartarus of Maids and J. G. Ballards Crash
Konstanze Kutzbach
181
Fear, Melancholy, and Loss in the Poetry of Stevie Smith

Ruth Baumert
197
American Environmentalism and Encounters with the Abject:

T. Coraghessan Boyles A Friend of the Earth
Sylvia Mayer
221
Abject Cannibalism: Anthropophagic Poetics in Conrad,

White, and Tennant Towards a Critique of Julia Kristevas
Theory of Abjection
Russell West
235
A Wet Festival of Scarlet: Poppy Z. Brites (Un)Aesthetics

of Murder
Monika Mueller
255
Interior Landscapes: Anatomy Art and the Work of Gunther

von Hagens
Alison Goeller
271
Violence, Transgression, and the Fun Factor: The Imagined

Atrocities of Will Selfs My Idea of Fun
Frank Lay
291
Notes on Contributors
309
Introduction

The reception of the unaesthetic as a category which derives from and
also influences aesthetic norms has been covered extensively in its
historical perspective by criticism. Clive Cazeaux gives an overview
of the changing implications of the term aesthetic in his introduction
to The Continental Aesthetics Reader (2000). He identifies three
senses of the term (xv) which locate it diachronically: in ancient
Greek philosophy aisthesis was associated with lived and felt sensual
experience as opposed to eidos, knowledge derived from reason and
intellection (xv). It was only in the eighteenth century that the
aesthetic began to be associated with (class-bound) notions of beauty
and was defined as the study of the beautiful in art (xv).
Romanticism shifted the emphasis from classicistic definitions of the
aesthetic as related to the proportionally, mathematically beautiful to a
valuation of individual sense impressions and artistic expression; this
process is considered as the beginning of subjective autonomy and the
birth of the individual. By introducing the idea that notions of the
aesthetic are constructed rather than given, Immanuel Kant questioned
the increasing polarization of subjective experience versus objective
knowledge (see Cazeaux 2000, vxi) and paved the way for more
dynamic and inclusive, yet also more contestable definitions of
aesthetics. Since the borders between what is considered aesthetic or
not have become negotiable and context-dependent, divergent notions
of what may be defined as (un)aesthetic coexist a tendency reflected
by the articles in this collection. Providing discussions of different
strategies of aestheticizing the unaesthetic by and in cultural
representations, the contributions exemplify the wide range of
conceptualizations of the un/aesthetic body enabled by this opening up
of philosophical definitions of what is aesthetic.
Criticism has drawn attention to the close connection between
concepts of (gendered) identity and categories of the (un)aesthetic as,
for example, Tracey Warr points out in her foreword to The Artists
Body (2000) with regard to twentieth-century art. In cultural
production, what is perceived as disgusting or unaesthetic is often
correlated with insights into the instability and the fragmentary nature
of the self: Everything seems at risk in the experience of disgust. It is
a state of alarm and emergency, an acute crisis of self-preservation
THE ABJECT OF DESIRE
(Menninghaus 2003, 1). By focusing on such instances of crisis, the

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

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

violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back
under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling (1982, 13).
KUTZBACH AND MUELLER
What is expelled continues to be perceived both as attractive and as a

threat to the separated self.
Encounters with the abject thus jeopardize personal and collective
identity because they threaten the border of the subject and are
accompanied by feelings of loss and loneliness. To escape the
attraction of this dangerous otherness that is represented by decay,
filth, and excrement but still signifies a desired dissolution of
bodily boundaries because of the continuing attraction of the maternal
body , the individual must reject the abject in order to be able to
define and defend the boundaries of identity. Referring to the abject
and abjection as safeguards and primers of my culture (2),
Kristevas concept suggests that this mechanism works for entire
cultures as well as for individuals. In this approach to the unaesthetic,
desire functions as a volatile chiffre which constitutes (gendered)
subjectivity in relation to an object that is not always clearly definable
as not me.
Kristevas theory, which proceeds from the dyadic mother-child
relationship, has been expanded into a social theory by several critics,
as for example Iris Marion Young, who points out that marginalized
groups, such as people of colour and homosexuals, often become the
victims of a body aesthetic that defines some groups as ugly or
fearsome and produces aversive reactions in relation to members of
those groups (1990, 145). This is very pernicious since [t]he
association between groups and abject matter is socially constructed;
once the link is made, however, the theory of abjection describes how
these associations lock into the subjects identities and anxieties
(145). According to Winfried Menninghaus, some of these abjected
groups have engaged in affirmative abjection by condemn[ing]
their own cultural abjection as a repressive function of patriarchal
authority, while, on the other hand, provocatively affirming their
abject existence as a socially unaccommodated way of life and source
of pleasure (2003, 389). Winfried Menninghaus as well as Hanjo
Berressem (in the opening article of this collection) scrutinize
variations of the notion of the abject: Menninghaus speaks about a
potential falsification of the abject, which reduces the ambivalent
concept to a focus on thematic affirmation (Menninghaus 2003,
398). Berressem, in On the Matter of Abjection, also conceptualizes
a modification of the original idea by distinguishing between real and
faux-abjects/abjection a distinction which, as will be elaborated, also
relates to the elusiveness of the differentiation between what is
considered as aesthetic/acceptable versus unaesthetic/unacceptable in
contemporary culture.
10
A recent example that illustrates this complex relationship between

aesthetic and unaesthetic and abject and faux-abject is the case of the
Cannibal of Rotenburg (or Rohtenburg, according to the title of the
2006 American movie production directed by Martin Weisz). The
cannibal case points to the dynamics implied by the title of this
collection of essays: the aestheticization of the unaesthetic codifies the
real cannibalistic act as well as its filmic rendition. Just as the film
represents a medialized aestheticization, the real cannibalistic act
itself thoroughly prepared, executed, and filmed as well also
entails its own staged aestheticization. The a/object of desire is thus
evoked in the act of cannibalism, which ambivalently centres on the
trope of the desired dead body. Moreover, it is implied in the deeds
filmic representation, in which watching the body in the act of
cannibalism is accompanied by desire as much as fear.
When, at the age of twelve, Armin Meiwes first started thinking
about dismembering and eating a classmate, he was already motivated
by the idea of obtaining emotional closeness and security through
incorporation (see Knobbe and Schmalenberg 2003, 48). In 2001, he
implemented his plan when he met his future victim, Bernd
Brandes, in an online forum; Brandes offered to have his genital cut
off, and Meiwes consented to perform the act and eat the body
together with his victim, so that through this act of incorporation they
would always be together (see Knobbe and Schmalenberg 2003, 42,
48). In a first trial Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter by the
district court of Kassel and sentenced to eight and a half years in
prison. This verdict was annulled by the German Federal Court of
Justice, and a second verdict pronounced by the Frankfurt district
court in May 2006 ruled the deed a murder and desecration of a
corpse and sentenced Meiwes to life. His defense attorney, who had
pleaded that this was a case of voluntary euthanasia, might still
appeal the decision (Badische Zeitung 2006, online). The
fictionalization of the crime also made the headlines when
Rohtenburg, the movie version of the Meiwes case, which was
scheduled for release in March 2006, was banned in Germany after
Meiwes claimed that the movie violates his privacy rights (see Landler
2006, online).
As to the media attention, it is striking that both the real crime and
the film have been perceived and treated as manifestations of
unprecedented cruelty, even though there are criminal offences as well
as filmic representations (splatter films or even snuff movies, the latter
of which also constitute a criminal offence) which are more brutal and
explicit, and which represent a more severe transgression of moral
11
taboos, too. What makes this a special case is the fact that sexual
offences are usually not based on mutual consent, a circumstance
which is corroborated by the difficulty in finding legal categories that
could define Meiwess deed appropriately. A possible explanation as
to why the real cannibalistic act and its filmic representation have
been received as so extraordinarily unsettling may be found in one of
the central arguments of Hanjo Berressems article, namely in the
distinction between the real abject, which is (perceived as)
fundamentally threatening, and the culturally mediated, and thus less
intense faux-abject. In contrast to faux-abjects, which work on the
basis of a juxtaposition of an official symbolic order and its
disruption (44) and which are the subjects and cultures cultural
others, real abjects are
disruptive material forces that are operative in the subject and in culture. []
There is a fundamental, inherent disruption to abjects that points beyond
cultural abjections. Abjects drain life out of organic systems. Foul things tend to
be abjects, for instance, because in foulness, an abundance of life is rotting
from within. (44)
The cannibals deed, as we suggest, shares features of the real abject

inasmuch as it goes beyond a mere disruption of the symbolic order,
as for example the lack of appropriate legal discourse shows; the
cannibal and his deed cannot be relegated to the realm of the what is
other for the subject and culture. It is so disconcerting and intense
because we (as the recipients of the news or the audience of the film)
are denied received and distinctly opposable cultural categories of the
symbolic order because discourses of gender (male versus female or,
by implication, self versus other), legal discourse, (perpetrator versus
victim) and physiological and ethical discourses (life versus death) are
permanently upset and renegotiated. The disruptive material impact of
this abject act of incorporation based on mutual consent, in which we
are perpetually denied an object that can be directly opposed to the
subject, thus comes to represent the ultimate trope of abject horror.
This material impact of the abject and of its counterpart, the fauxabject, is what Hanjo Berressem explores in the opening article to this
collection, On the Matter of Abjection. He investigates cultural
production between the materiality of the abject on the one hand and
faux-abjection as the cultural marking of events|objects as
disgusting (19) on the other, presenting John Waterss movie Pink
Flamingos and Samuel Delanys short story On the Unspeakable as
examples which negotiate this ambivalent intersection. As Berressem
argues, Pink Flamingos incorporates a wide range of abjects/abjection
12
as its epilogue extends the films representational framing beyond

cultural abjection towards abject materiality, while Delanys On the
Unspeakable succeeds in making abjects speakable and readable.
Departing from the concept of the abject, different interpretations,
which are based on conceptual distinctions between different modes
of abject/abjection (affirmative/faux abjection), will provide the
conceptional as well as structural basis for the categorization of the
contributions in this book. Centring on representations of Anglophone
culture from the twentieth century, the articles address the
aestheticization of the unaesthetic through a range of different topics
and genres and are arranged into three sections according to a possible
classification with regard to the categories referred to above. The
articles in the first part negotiate the aestheticization of the unaesthetic
by presenting works that put the abject in the service of affirmative
abjection which generates the faux-abject by juxtaposing the official
symbolic order and its disruption (Berressem, 44). The second part
features examples that deal with the aestheticization of the unaesthetic
at the intersection between real abject and faux-abject, providing a
combination of both modes. The third part contains contributions
which look at works that emphasize the characteristics of the real
abject as disruptive material forces that are operative in the subject
and in culture (44). Yet, this classification, which presumes a
predominant influence of either one of the two modes, conceives of
neither the aesthetic/unaesthetic nor the real/faux-abject as discrete
categories.
The articles in the first section are connected through their focus on
affirmative abjection. While the articles by Paulina Palmer, Nilufer
Bharucha, and Susana Arajo trace the abject by stressing its function
as a mode of empowerment which calls for personal and collective
agency, Dorothea Fischer-Hornungs and Tatjana Pavlovs texts
reference affirmative abjection by exposing the contradictions
inherent in hegemonic structures. In her analysis of People in Trouble
by Sarah Schulman and Affinity by Sarah Waters, Paulina Palmer
discusses the authors strategies of deconstructing and renegotiating
the lesbians (abject) role in American and British society. Her article
demonstrates that while Schulman evokes the faux-abject by rendering
a realistic picture of the instrumentalization of the homosexual abject
in the context of the 1980s New York AIDS crisis, Waters does so by
recoding the lesbian abject against the backdrop of generic literary
conventions of the gothic. She thus examines representations of the
lesbian abject in its socio-political context and traces its pejorative
implications and stereotypes and, by criticizing the coding of lesbians
13
as monstrous and abject, she aims at a resignification of gender codes

in order to establish lesbian agency.
Nilufer Bharucha shows how the authors of two Indian plays,
Girish Karnad in The Fire and the Rain and Mahesh Dattani in Dance
Like a Man, criticize cultural practices that label dancing as abject. In
this tradition dancing is read in light of the concept of Bhibitsa Rasa
(disgust that arises out of seeing what is unwholesome). According to
Bharucha, both authors call for a redefinition of received notions of
what is repugnant and distasteful (pure/impure, aesthetic/unaesthetic)
with regard to caste and gender. Her reading of Fire and Rain shows
that the play questions traditions of purity and impurity by correlating
the disgusting act of acting to the sexual defilement of women and
the loss of caste; her analysis of Dance like a Man correlates the
transgressive and defiling act of dancing to deviant sexualities,
thereby revising, by implication, pejorative images of homosexuality
and prostitution.
The grotesque female body of the gothic heroine in Joyce Carol
Oatess short story collection Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque is at
the centre of Susana Arajos analysis. She argues that Oatess
rendering of the gothic-grotesque gives insight into the veiled,
regulated, and coded (104) lives of women in contemporary
American society. Oatess gothic narratives ultimately critique such
social representations of femininity in the gothic tradition. Since Oates
questions conventional constructions of femininity through
documenting female victimization, her resignification of the abject
body can be read as a faux-abject instrument of empowerment.
Dorothea Fischer-Hornung investigates why Leslie Marmon Silko,
herself a representative of a minority, in The Almanac of the Dead
presents her Native American protagonists as violent, repulsive
homosexuals. By focusing on the bloody rituals in which Silkos
Native American protagonists engage, she shows that Silko aims at
deconstructing the perverted European (American) values grounded in
the Law of the Father. She comes to the conclusion that Silko, by
reversing the gaze and by mirroring what the West considers barbaric
in terms of race and gender, foregrounds the destructiveness and
corruptive force of the patriarchal colonizers and thereby alters
established connotations of what is considered abject by society.
Tatjana Pavlov analyzes how film director Peter Greenaway
instrumentalizes anthropophagy in order to criticize hegemonical
structures such as the religious establishment, patriarchy, and
consumerism. She argues that in his movies he uses cannibalism as a
metaphor of the devouring nature of Western consumer society
14
founded on patriarchy and shows that Greenaway, through ingenious

intertextual references to the Bible, mythology, and English drama,
employs anthropophagy in order to renegotiate traditional hierarchies
between subject and object, consumer and commodity, and men and
women.
The contributions in the second section of this collection present
arguments that are conceptionally located at the intersection of real
and faux-abject(s)/-ion. Gutenbergs and Kutzbachs articles take a
historical approach towards figurations of the unaesthetic and thus
cover primary sources whose representations of the unaesthetic
between faux- and real abjection are diachronically structured. The
articles by Baumert, Mayer, West, and Mueller emphasize the
synchronic dimension of this distinction. Andrea Gutenbergs reading
presents the figure of the werewolf from a historical perspective,
showing that the werewolf figure goes beyond an affirmative social
category. Despite the fact that especially twentieth-century
werewolves have also been appropriated in the service of affirmative
abjection, the changing normative impact of werewolf narratives and
their tendency to subvert contemporary norms manifests itself in a
shift from the logic of moral transgression and punishment to
uncertainty and undecidable moral issues (175), as Gutenberg claims.
While the earlier representations of werevolves tend to reflect an
opposition of the symbolic order and deviations from it, the later ones
may be [s]een against the contemporary cultural background of
revised notions of the body and the subject, namely as permeable,
instable, and performative (178).
Konstanze Kutzbach analyzes implications of physical annihilation
and dysfunctional bodies as tropes of the unaesthetic in Melvilles
short story The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids and
J. G. Ballards novel Crash, and relates these works to different
concepts of gender and body such as the nineteenth-century two-sex
model and a postmodern variation of the one-sex model, respectively.
This is correlated with a progression from a metaphorization which
focuses on the social implications of (faux-)abjection within the
cultural matrix of the nineteenth century to a twentieth-century
representation of the abject as featuring the universal anonymity of a
death (Berressem, 44).
Ruth Baumerts analysis focuses on the poet Stevie Smith, who saw
herself in a socially abject and ambivalent position and used poetry to
come to terms with social stigmatization as well as her own
melancholia. Baumert traces this strategy with regard to three aspects:
the status of the speaker, poetic form (style and language), and subject
15
matter. On the one hand, she reads the abject in Smiths poetry as a
strategic device to give voice to female concerns by pointing up
pejorative implications and stereotypes about women. On the other
hand, her autobiographical poetry also reflects the impossibility of
such a strategic approach due to the highly contradictory workings of
the abject, which often bring about death and annihilation rather than
salvation. Baumerts reading thus places Smiths poetry at the
intersection of the strategic faux-abject and the direct and
uncompromising abject.
In her article on T. C. Boyles A Friend of the Earth, Sylvia Mayer
observes that the ecological catastrophe described in the novel will
ultimately cause the dissolution of all life. Mayers reading indicates
that (faux-)abjection serves as a metaphor for showing the effects of
man-made ecological catastrophe. Via his protagonists struggle for
male identity within the framework of American environmentalism,
Boyle investigates how deteriorating environmental conditions attack
the human self. As the ecological catastrophe advances, the
metaphorical function of the abject loses importance since the real
abject represented by the ultimate and uncompromising death of
nature has no (metaphorical) function. Since the forces of nature are
beyond human control, individualized death is subsumed under an
anonymous and universalized death as nature and humankind are
rotting from within.
By tracing the presentation of cannibalism along the lines of gender
and civilization in selected works by Joseph Conrad, Patrick White,
Jeanette Winterson, and Emma Tennant, Russell West pursues an
analysis of how established dichotomies of meaning are inscribed and
reproduced to varying degrees. Whereas in Tennant, for example,
distinctions such as friend and foe, family and foreigner (244), are
absorbed into a single regime of killing (245) by a warrior culture,
the works by Conrad and White share characteristics of what could be
called faux-abject as they attempt to draw cannibalism into the realm
of the social (241). Wests argument suggests yet another example of
reading the abject between the position of real abject (as a visceral
reaction) and faux-abject (as the social projection of cannibalism), and
it ends with a critical revision of Kristevas theory of the abject.
Monika Muellers reading of Poppy Z. Brites extremely disturbing
Exquisite Corpse argues that by positioning herself within a long
tradition of philosophical thought on violence (represented by
Edmund Burke, Thomas de Quincey, and Georges Bataille), Brite
focuses on violence and disgust to pursue an aestheticization of the
unaesthetic. In her novel, she fictionalizes the real abject life
16
rotting from within represented by reality-based serial murders and

cannibalistic acts; as implied in Muellers reading, she
instrumentalizes the real abject for her artistic agenda and turns it into
a faux-abject that has an aesthetic rather than a socially affirmative
purpose.
The closing articles by Alison Goeller and Frank Lay reflect yet
another shift in focus, as their discussions of the aestheticization of the
unaesthetic evoke conceptualizations of the real abject, which are not
clearly opposable to symbolic concepts within the cultural matrix as
they are disturbing on their own ground (Berressem, 46). Thus,
abjects escape a full (counter)politicization [] because they ignore
the political, working instead on a directly a-personal, affective, and
thus less easily contained level (45). Alison Goeller focuses on how
the work of the anatomist and body artist Gunter von Hagens calls into
question stable notions of (gendered) identity. She investigates how
von Hagenss depersonalization and degendering of flayed, dead
bodies, some of which can no longer be identified as male or female,
transforms individual deaths into the anonymity of a death
(Berressem, 44) and serves as a source of anxiety. As her reading
implies, the particularity of the faux-abject is here extended to the
universal scope of the real abject.
Frank Lays analysis of Will Selfs My Idea of Fun also focuses on
such instances of the abject that are not understandable as acts of
opposition within a cultural matrix. As Lay points out, Selfs
protagonist Ian Wharton murders and tortures out of boredom, but
fails to enjoy his transgressive acts: the novel plays [] with the idea
of transgression as liberating [], but in the end there is clearly no
liberation in sight, only plain addiction (306-307). Thus, acts of
violence and abjection cease to have a social function or use value.
As Selfs novel corroborates Kristevas thesis that the horror of the
abject lies chiefly in its failure to function as a forbidden other
(301), it reflects the end of representation in pure horror.
The contributions in this collection reflect a variety of approaches
that aestheticize the unaesthetic and are situated on a continuum from
social abjection to the real abject. The different manifestations of the
abject/abjection relate to a negotiable and flexible sign system within
which they produce various representations of gender between
conservative and progressive approaches. As different as these
representations may be, they all reference identity as dependent on an
unequivocally dialectic relationship of fear and desire: the German
cannibal case and the ensuing discussion once more testify to the
dialectic between a human desire for more and more powerful stimuli
17
in times where taboos are increasingly suspended, and a return to

tradition and conservative values which safeguard our boundaries. As
Colin MacCabe states with reference to Georges Bataille: [S]exuality
is constructed from taboos and to abolish taboos is to abolish desire
(MacCabe 2001, xv).
Works Cited
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http://www.bz-online.de/popup/nachrichten/welt/54,51-9503197.html (accessed 25
June 2006).
Baumert, Ruth. 2003. Unpublished excerpt from Fear, Melancholy, and Loss in the
Poetry of Stevie Smith for The Abject of Desire: The Aestheticization of the
Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature and Culture, edited by Konstanze
Kutzbach and Monika Mueller. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Cazeaux, Clive. 2002. The Continental Aesthetics Reader. London: Routledge.
Knobbe, Martin, and Detlev Schmalenberg. 2003. Der Kannibale. Stern, 24 July,
41-54.
Kristeva, Julia. [1980] 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by
Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
Landler, Mark. 2006. Cannibal Wins Ban on Film. The New York Times, March 4,
online. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/04/movies/MoviesFeatures/04cann.html?
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s (accessed 16 April 2006).
MacCabe, Colin. 2001. Introduction. In Eroticism, Georges Bataille. [1962] 2001,
vii-xvi. London: Penguin.
Menninghaus, Winfried. [1999] 2003. Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong
Sensation, translated by Howard Eiland and Joel Golb. New York: State University
of New York Press.
Schwab, Gabriele. 1994. Subjects without Selves: Transitional Texts in Modern
Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
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Princeton University Press.
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On the Matter of Abjection
Hanjo Berressem
a small green frog He didnt jump; I crept closer He was a very small
frog with wide, dull eyes. And just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and
began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin emptied
and drooped He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football
Soon, part of his skin lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the
water: it was a monstrous and terrifying thing I had read about the giant
water bug It seizes a victim with [his] legs and paralyzes it with enzymes
injected during a vicious bite through the puncture shoot the poisons that
dissolve the victims muscles and bones and organs all but the skin and
through it the giant water bug sucks out the victims body, reduced to a juice
The frog I saw was being sucked by a giant water bug.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
indecent exposures
pink flamingos
John Waterss film Pink Flamingos (1972) is probably one of the most
comprehensive and at the same time one of the most entertaining
introductions to the world of abjects and abjection (terms that I will
use in the first case to highlight the materiality of what is normally
called the abject and in the second case to differentiate the
production of disgust from abjection, the cultural marking of
events|objects as disgusting). In fact, Pink Flamingos provides an
almost complete lexicon of abjects|abjection, stringing a number of
increasingly revolting scenes that centre on gluttony, vomiting,
spitting, sodomy, voyeurism, exhibitionism, masturbation, rape,
incest, murder and cannibalism along a plot that follows the lethal
contest between Divine and the Marbles for the title of the filthiest
people alive.
In terms of a logics of abjects|abjection, three of these scenes are of
particular interest. The first one, in which Divine buys a raw steak that
she keeps squeezed between her thighs for the rest of the day,
introduces the close relation between abjects and the material realm of
flesh|meat. In the second one, which addresses the project to make
even the most intimate and private spaces uninhabitable through
abjection, Divine and her son cover the interior of the Marbles home,
from beds to banisters and from couches to cutlery, with saliva
20
(symptomatically, the movies production company is called Saliva

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

which the subject experiences absolute dread. The excessive intensity
of this experience is directly related to the topologics of abjects, which
differs from that of objects, which are by definition safely distanced
and thus separated from the subject. In the visual field, these
separations proceed along specific lines of vision. The logic of the
sublime, for instance, which is in many ways the abjects other, is
measured along such spectacular lines because the idea of sublimity
can only arise in the subject when it is not too near to the material
object that triggers the idea (it must be at a safe distance) but also not
too far away from it (it must be near enough to be affected by it).
Abjects, in contrast, are experienced, much like traumatic events if
Lacan defines trauma as a missed encounter with the real. [The
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21
function of the tuch, of the Real as an encounter the encounter in so

far as it may be missed first presented itself in the history of psychoanalysis in a form that was in itself already enough to arouse our
attention, that of the trauma (Lacan 1978, 55).] One might think of the
encounter with an abject as a direct encounter with the real as|in
an unbearable nearness that does not allow for the
distancing|separation that is the prerequisite for objectification.
Not only does the abject lie quite close (Kristeva 1982, 14), it
actually emanates from a curiously ambiguous place that overturns
the very differentiation between inside and outside, an exorbitant
outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the
tolerable, the thinkable (Kristeva 1982, 1; my italics). Too close to
the subject to be experienced as either sublime, beautiful or ugly
objects, abjects cannot be assimilated (14) and thus they cannot be
contained by aesthetic (or also anti-aesthetic) parameters. They are
never merely tasteless or ugly for instance. As the final scene of Pink
Flamingos shows, they are positively disgusting.
The fact that abjects are not objective, however, does not mean that
they are immaterial. It merely means that abjects cannot be contained
within the registers of the subjects psychic reality unlike objects
which are, as the subjects reflection or other, always already
integrated into the subjects psychic reality and its representational
logics|economics and thus always already domesticated|humanized.
Actually, abjects are extremely, one might even say excessively,
material. Not only are they material things|events, they also relate to
physical|material realities, such as lifes uneconomical disruptions and
ultimately to death as the end of the subjects material economy. As
Kristeva notes, they are related to an archaic force, on the near side
of separation, unconscious, tempting us to the point of losing our
differences, our speech, our life; to the point of aphasia, decay,
opprobrium, and death (107).
Lacan thinks of the subjects psychic reality as spread out over the
surface of a projective plane, one of the many figures of unilateral
space used in the Lacanian topologics [as when he notes that the
subjects psychic reality, as described by his Schema R, is not that of
bilateral space but that of a projective plan [sic] (1977, 223)]. The
topological conceit of a unilateral surface allows Lacan to
conceptualize the imaginary and the symbolic surfaces as twisted into
each other, with the Real functioning as the agency that sutures the
two but is excluded in the topology only as the fundamental
cut|twist that brings this topology about. [In semiotic terms, the
22
Lacanian topologics relates the signified and the signifier through the
exclusion of the referent.] In these topologics, abjects, as nonobjective, material things|events as Kristeva notes, the abject has
only one quality of the object, namely that of being opposed to I
(1982, 1) lie at the threshold of the Real, as something that resists
symbolization absolutely (Lacan 1988b, 66) and the spectacular
Imaginary.
[diagram of the projective plane]

If Lacans linguistic turn ensures precisely that psychic space is closed
off from physical space, abjects, in edging with the Real, disrupt the
sutured topologics of psychic space and with it, the linguistic logics of
an unconscious that is structured like a language (Lacan 1978, 20).
This is why, when dealing with abjects,
we are no longer within the sphere of the unconscious [which would be the
unilateral space of the imaginary|symbolic] but at the limit of primal repression
[which is situated at the threshold of the imaginary|real] [...]. There is an
effervescence of object and sign not of desire but of intolerable significance;
they tumble over into [sublime] non-sense or the impossible real. (11; my
brackets)
[In the Lacanian topologics, the cut between the Real and the
Imaginary is directly symmetrical to the cut that defines the border
between the Symbolic and the Real, at which Lacan positions the
sublime, which means that in Lacanian topology the abject and the
sublime border on one another. Kristeva notes in particular the
similarity of abjects and the sublime in relation to non-objectivity:
[I]f the abject is already a wellspring of sign for a non-object, on the edges of
primal repression, one can understand its skirting the somatic symptom on the
one hand and sublimation on the other [...]. In the symptom, the abject
permeates me, I become abject. Through sublimation, I keep it under control.
The abject is edged with the sublime. It is not the same moment on the journey,
but the same subject and speech bring them into being. For the sublime has no
object either (1982, 11; my italics).
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23
The carnivals semantic ambivalences, for instance, pair the high

and the low, the sublime and the abject (135).
In the Lacanian topologics, both the sublime and the abject are related
to the weight of meaninglessness (2) of the Real. Once, this
meaninglessness is approached regressively through material
fragmentation [the corps morcel] and once progressively through the
stupid traumatic kernel that resides within the symbolic order. In
fact, the sublime can only be thrown into relief on the background of
the abject and vice versa.
As soon as I perceive it, as soon as I name it, the sublime triggers a spree of
disseminating perceptions and words that expand memory boundlessly [...]. Not
at all short of but always with and through perception and words, the sublime is
a something added that expands us [...] and causes us to be both here, as
dejects, and there, as others and sparkling. A divergence, an impossible
bounding. Everything missed, joy fascination. (Kristeva 1982, 12)
If both denote borders to the realm of materiality, then abjects point

towards the sensation of a material dissolution through a regression to
a state before the Imaginary, while the sublime points towards a sense
of spiritual dissolution through a progression to a realm beyond the
Symbolic.]
Topologically, then, the dreadfulness of abjects lies in that they
fundamentally disturb the subjects psychic space. Designating
simultaneously a border (3), a space of in-between (4), and
something that turns the subject inside out (3), they introduce a
fundamental ambiguity and ambivalence into the subjects world that
threatens it in its very constitution as a coherent psychic aggregate.
abject
time
The abject chronologics is easily as ambiguous as the abject

topologics. Although abjects are directly related to a driven time
before the constitution of the ego, they simultaneously designate a
24
stage that leads up to this constitution. As Kristeva notes, the abject

might then appear as the most fragile [] the most archaic []
sublimation of an object still inseparable from drives (12).
It is in fact for the benefit of the ego or its detriment, drives,
whether life drives or death drives, serve to correlate that not yet ego
with an object in order to establish both of them (14). Drives, this
chronologics implies, are always already in the service of an ego, even
if this ego needs as yet to be developed. In order to negotiate this
chronological dilemma, Kristeva relates the abject to two subsequent
versions of the ego, the first of which is a still unfinished, largely
corporeal|material ego. As the egos main function is to create the
object, it comes into existence only to the degree that it performs this
function, which is why this ego under construction is fundamentally
uncertain, fragile, threatened, subjected just as much as its non-object
to spatial ambivalence (inside/outside uncertainty) and to ambiguity of
perception (pleasure/pain) (62). As long as the object is not yet
constituted, in fact, the ego remains to a large degree auto-objective.
In psychoanalytic terms, this ego is the ego of primary narcissism
for which the only outside is constituted by its own inside. As
Kristeva notes,
narcissism is predicated on the existence of the ego but not of an external
object; we are faced with the strange correlation between an entity (the ego) and
its converse (the object), which is nevertheless not yet constituted; with an
ego in relation to a non-object. (62)
By the time that this ego has pulled itself completely out of the moat
of material in-differences by creating the object as its other, and by
establishing, together with that creation, the differentiation between
inside and outside, it has become more and more
projective|immaterial. In psychoanalytic terms, this fully constituted
ego is the ego of secondary narcissism.
According to the retroactive chronologics that define Lacanian
psychoanalysis, it is invariably from the time of repression proper,
which means from the time not only after the constitution of the fully
constructed imaginary|ego but after the Imaginary has been
reflected|twisted into the Symbolic, that the subject regresses
nachtraeglich [retrospectively] to the first, fundamentally ambiguous
stages of ego-formation and thus to the limit designated, in
psychoanalytical terms, by primal repression.
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25
Because the topologic ambiguities instigated by abjects cannot be

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

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

banishes abjects into the Real where they can only be enjoyed
painfully and intensively. [The sense of abjection that I experience is
anchored in the superego (15).] As in the logic of the sublime, the
subject finds itself only negatively, as that which is subtracted from
pure jouissance. As psychoanalysis argues, abject jouissance can only
26
be reached by invert[ing] the direction of desire because castration

means that jouissance must be refused so that it can be reached on the
inverted ladder (lchelle renverse) of the Law of desire (Lacan
1977, 324).
In returning the subject to the fundamentally ambiguous space|time
before and during its constitution, abjects, as themselves inbetween, ambiguous [abjection is above all ambiguity (Kristeva
1982, 9)] and composite (4), bring about de-differentiations. As in
states of jouissance, for instance, in states of abjection pleasure and
pain are disturbingly, even dreadfully, undifferentiated. [In this
context, one of the most intriguing questions is: from what moment of
organization onwards can an organism be said to feel pain, or a
pleasure|pain conglomerate, rather than, say, a purely
neuronal|nervous excitation caused by sudden shifts from equilibrium
to disequilibrium, such as shifts in energy related to, for instance,
excessively violent and intensive separations|disruptions. When, one
might ask, does excessive excitation turn into trauma?]
These de-differentiations fundamentally oppose abjects to the
subjects difference- and integration engines, the most complex and
comprehensive of which is language. In order to protect the coherence
of these difference engines against abject disturbances|dedifferentiations, the symbolic order, as the representative of these
engines, installs a number of powerful taboos. [[A]bject and
abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture (Kristeva
1982, 2).] One of the most important of these is the incest taboo.
Prohibiting an uneconomical sexuality in which the subject,
fluctuating between inside and outside, pleasure and pain, word and
deed, would find death, along with nirvana (63-64), it protects the
subject from falling into the violent, abject enjoyment [jouissance].
Although Kristeva constantly stresses the disruptions abjects cause
within the subjects psychic reality and within representational
registers in general, and although she has a very ambivalent relation to
the symbolic super-ego as the phallocratic agency of abjection, her
work always remains within the framework of the Lacanian topologics
and its retroactive chronologics. This can be felt not only in the fact
that she points to the function of difference engines and to future
orders that will contain the de-differentiating power of abjects by
subjecting them to powerful mechanisms|strategies of exclusion, but
also in the fact that the trajectories she describes invariably proceed
from a logic of differentiation back to abject ambiguity and
ambivalence according to the chronologics of nachtraeglichkeit
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27
[retrospectivity]. In the context of abject pain, for instance, the

important moment for Kristeva is not so much the moment when the
notion of a logic of pain emerges from a more general logic of
excitation [in material terms: when the economy of various centripetal
forces of coherence have become greater than the uneconomical
centrifugal forces of disseminating excitations], but the moment when
the pleasure|pain differentiation, and with it, differentiation in general,
becomes representable. In other words, when language enters the
game. If the non-distinctiveness of inside and outside would [] be
unnamable, a border passable in both directions by pleasure and pain
(61; my italics), Kristeva notes, then naming the latter [the outside],
hence differentiating them (61; my brackets) in actual fact amounts
to introducing language, which, just as it distinguishes pleasure from
pain as it does all other oppositions, founds the separation
inside/outside (61).
Although Kristeva continually stresses the material origins of
abjects, she invariably thinks these origins nachtraeglich
[retrospective] from the position of the subject and of language as the
retrospective thresholds from which abjects are theorized and
negotiated. Like any psychoanalytically informed theory of the
confrontation with abjects, her theory is organized around the
symbolic logic of regression|repression, which means that abjects are
always already contained fully within the realm of
representation|differentiation precisely because they are always
already the result of the threat to break it up. In fact, abjection, as a
primal sublimation, is the very strategy to deal with that threat.
Somewhat paradoxically, for psychoanalysis the abject, although it is
the boundary between nature and culture, between human and nonhuman (75), [Freudian disgust originates in the interstices in fact
as the fracture of nature and civilization (Menninghaus 2003, 190)]
is always already the result of the cultural operation of abjection. In
other words, although the process of abjection finds its origin in
material processes [There, I am at the border of my condition as a
living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that
border (Kristeva 1982, 3); the immemorial violence with which a
body becomes separated from another body in order to be (10).] and
although the defilement from which ritual protects us is neither sign
nor matter (73; italics in original), significance is always already
inherent in the human body (10). Even though material processes
are the objective referents of abjection, these are, like the Real, always
already lost: [T]he abject is the violence of mourning for an object
that has always already been lost (15). Because of this logic, in which
28
the effect comes always already before the cause, Kristeva does not
need terms such as abject or abjection which denote the material
causes of abjection.
Menninghauss positioning of disgust partakes of this
psychoanalytic chronologics, although it deflects it into a
predominantly linguistic one:
[I]t [disgust] does not stand under the sway of consciousness, but rather makes
itself felt within consciousness as a voice arriving from somewhere else. In the
volume of this voice from elsewhere, in this scandalous invasion of a
heterogeneity, disgust brings eminent affective powers to bear: it processes
elementary civilizing taboos and social distinctions between what is foreign and
ones own. At the same time, it is a medium for the intercourse with strong
libidinal impulses. (2003, 2)
In both approaches, the material realm is contained, like the Real, in

the symbolic universe only as an inner exclusion. For
psychoanalysis, in fact, anything material that bleeds into the subjects
psychic reality from what it considers an impossible outside is
excluded not only from that reality, but, one might argue, from the
reality of psychoanalysis as well. It is somewhat symptomatic that the
psychoanalytic logic positions abjects in an excluded, tabooed and
unspeakable position. For both psychoanalysis and for the subject of
psychoanalysis, abjects that threaten to undo their topologics are first
and foremost unspeakable things|practices that return both the subject
and psychoanalysis to the ambivalent time and the space of primal
repression.
abjection
abjection
As an agent in the pay of the differential symbolic order,

psychoanalysis excludes abjects through operations of abjection in
order to secure that order and with it itself, from disruptive, dedifferentiating forces. Against the ambiguities|ambivalences of
abjects, it sets sublimation, mathematical integration and the paternal
metaphor, whose function is precisely to secure desire and to suture
the subjects psychic reality. As Kristeva notes, in a sentence that
follows step by step the instigation of the Lacanian topologics, the
paternal metaphor functions as
the necessary condition of one and only one process of the signifying unit,
albeit a constitutive one: the process of condensing one heterogeneous set (that
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29
of word presentation) with another (that of thing presentation), releasing the one
into the other, and insuring its unitary bent. (1982, 53)
Ultimately, the paternal metaphor ensures the existence of the sign,

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

abject because it shows how in a linguistically constructed universe
abjected groups unviable (un)subjects abjects, we might call
them who are neither named or prohibited within the economy of the
law (Butler 1991, 20) can subvert, shock and disorganize that very
culture from within. [For Butler, at that time, lesbianism is not even
abjected because it has not even made its way into the thinkable, the
imaginable, that grid of cultural intelligibility that regulates the Real
and the nameable (20).]
Ironically, however, at this point of complete cultural saturation, the
limits of the psychoanalytic logic of abjects|abjection come into view.
30
In a universe in which denotations are infinitely malleable and plastic

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

subjects, groups or practices does a violently heteronormative culture
mark as unspeakable|abject? And: how do these cultural mechanisms
operate, especially in relation to a politics of representation? The
project it develops from this is a theory of the subversion of culture
and its representational modes that is based not so much on the
shifting around of the objects of abjection or on the disruption of
language via the use of an abject writing (a project Kristeva
develops in Revolution in Poetic Language), but on the overall
reorganization of the space of representation. On the Unspeakable
asks: what new poetopologics can come to terms with mechanisms of
abjection? and its answers are eminently Lacanian.
On the thematic level, the story treats abjection as a problem of
unrepresentability or unspeakability. As the narrator notes, the story is
about the unspeakable as that tiny part of the freedom of language
associated with abjection (Delany 1993, 155:2; my italics). A more
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31
fundamental Lacanianism, however, lies in its creation of a projective,

unilateral writing space, a surface on which sexual and social
abjects|abjections can become speakable|readable. In assembling the
story on two separate vertical textual columns, Delany in fact transfers
Lacans projective topologics directly onto the printed page. From
within this Lacanian space, however, the story comes to
fundamentally criticize psychoanalysis investment in a
heteronormative cultural order, which means that, like Kristeva, On
the Unspeakable, even while it subscribes structurally to its
topologics and chronologics, reads psychoanalysis against itself in
terms of a cultural practice.
The story opens with an arbitrary cut into the grammatical and the
semantic continuum, and thus into the material realm of the signifier
as well as into the immaterial realm of the signified. The beginning
consists of a subordinate clause that implies a prior clause to which it
will have referred the positioning of desire which always draws us
to The Unspeakable in the first place (141:1) and as such it
implies an earlier, lost continuity that will always already have been
cut. As in the retrospective chronologics that organize the relation of
primal repression and repression proper, it is only in the mirrorical
return to the beginning at the end of the story that everything that has
constituted a past at the beginning will have been a past; a past that
comes to the reader in and from the future of the completed story, as
in Lacans automotive image of the past that comes to the driver from
the future space of the rear-view mirror. [For, in this rear view
[] all that the subject can be certain of is the anticipated image
coming to meet him that he catches of himself in his mirror (Lacan
1977, 306).]
If culture considers the unspeakable abject as evil and
extralinguistic (141:1), the story explores ways of speaking the
unspeakable and thus confronts culture with its abject other(s). How
can one give a voice|space to the abject and how can one (re)inject it
into a culture that has always already excluded it other than by
destroying|disrupting the text?
When the narrator notes that the unspeakable is an area, a topic, a
trope impossible to speak of outside [...] The Everyday (141:1; my
italics), he points to the fact that both the abject and the quotidian
have a problematic relation to representation. While the unspeakable
is representationally difficult (141:1) because it is invisible and
outside of the discursive realm, the everyday is representationally
difficult because it is all too visible and fully inside the discursive
realm. While the unspeakable cannot be easily represented because it
32
is taboo, the everyday cannot be easily represented because of its very

banal[ity] (141:1). To represent them, the former has to be
stylistically downgraded, its rhetorical figure being the euphemism
(142:2), while the latter has to be stylistically upgraded, its
corresponding rhetorical figure being the hyperbole (see 142:2).
For Delany, as well as for a cultural and literary studies informed
by social|linguistic constructivism, the strict division between these
two realms is crucial because it forms the matrix for the topologics of
the social field in general. As the narrator comments, the division
between everyday and unspeakable, difficult and extralinguistic, banal
and evil may just be the prototype for all social division (141:1).
After its essayistic opening, which lays down its
theoretical|topological coordinates, the text begins its project of
making abjects speakable|readable. For this, it morphs into the story
of Rose and Red, two strangers who meet in a porn-theatre on Eighth
Avenue above 43rd Street in New York City, an unspeakably abject
urban wasteland that designates, from the perspective of
heteronormative culture, a fundamentally repressed, unspeakable and
tabooed site. It is described as a densely abject conglomerate made up
of death, drugs, sexuality in particular a sexual loneliness
emblematized by masturbation and mechanical arousal and, as in the
world of Pink Flamingos, an all-pervading presence of filth.
If each of these elements alone is enough to threaten the psychic
coherence of the ego|subject and thus of the cultural order in general,
in their combination, they cause, much like the sites of Pink
Flamingos, an abject overkill. In psychoanalytic terminology, each
takes the ego back to its source on the abominable limits from which,
in order to be, the ego has broken away it assigns it a source in the
non-ego, drive, and death (Kristeva 1982, 15). In particular, each
element denotes a transgression of precisely the dividing lines []
between society and a certain nature (65) at which Kristeva had
positioned the abject. Each one of them brings about a dissolution of
inside and outside. Through intermixing and the erasing of
difference the abject ensemble of all of these singular abjects poses a
terrifying threat to identity (101).
Symptomatically, the description of the site is interspersed with
comments on the disruptions of the spatial borders between the inside
(society|psyche) and the outside (nature|physics), such as the remark
that the Strip [...] yearns to become a metaphor for the whole great
American outside (Delany 1993, 145:1) or that [t]he meaning of the
following exterior urban portrait is entirely in terms of what it tells us
of this momentary travesty of theatrical interiority (143:1). The pun
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33
on theatrical here connects the banal and the unspeakable in

referring simultaneously to the fictionality of the scene as well as to
the represented, but also unrepresentable site of the porn-theatre in
which the story unfolds. Symptomatically, the parallel textual site
deals with a similar reversal, noting that the events inside the theatre,
in particular the masturbating young white male, tell only of what is
exterior to this tightly conventionalized and wholly contained
commercial, public space (143:2).
After the white male in the theatre has asked Rose for the fourth
time whether she can use another hand (151:1), the story is
interrupted by a metafictional aside that proposes that, similar to the
way that the males insistence runs counter to cultural|sexual norms,
the literary rendering of this repetition runs counter to narratological
ones: This much repetition is, of course, narratively unacceptable,
aesthetically unspeakable: its only excuse is accuracy of transcription;
its only meaning is the patient persistence of it: repetition, said Freud,
is desire (151:1; my italics). In this gesture, Delany links the
culturally transgressive repetition-compulsion depicted by the story to
the stylistically transgressive repetition compulsion of the story,
embedding the actual transgression (the text does in actual fact
repeat itself) within a theoretical, metafictional frame.
The motif of transgression is crucial for the logics|logistics of the
story because the borders between the unspeakable and the banal are
always policed by a symbolic order that demarcates spaces for itself
and its other, with the everyday and the unspeakable only the
linguistic [...] shadows of this legalistic system: the passive
surveillance and the aggressive attack of the law spoken of, written of
(figured) as an inside and an outside (152:2). Whether this border is
philosophical or social in nature, the subject is either within symbolic
space or without it, so that a crossing of the border can only be
thought of as a transgression. Simply put: the banal|lawful is
completely inside while the abject|unspeakable is completely outside.
For Delany, the setting up of such specific borders, rather than the
specific things|practices that are excluded by them, is truly abject:
The notion that anyone should clearly and committedly believe in the
absolute locatability of such a boundary is, for many of us (if not most
of us), unspeakable (152:2). Against such static demarcations, the
story sets the concept of a social topologics in which the unspeakable
is no longer a semantically fixed, excluded site (the site of culturally
defined and stigmatized abjects), but part of any number of local sites
and thus open to cultural interpretation|negotiation. In such a shifting
34
topologics, unspeakability no longer defines a specific object

(Cartesian abjection) but a specific representational site (topological
abjection).
Once its content is no longer fixed, one can begin to think of other
unspeakabilities and other abjections, such as that of the abject
character of the law|norm, as in Pink Flamingos, which is suffused
with images of abject white-trash trailer-park existence. The questions
that follow from such a mobilization of the abject are: from where
does the agency that controls the access to specific spaces take its
legitimation? And, according to whose desire are groups and
individuals localized and abjected?
What the topologics of Delanys story problematize, ultimately, is
the twofold vectorization of the abject, in which the attempt at
exclusion (abjection) is coupled to the need to transgress (jouissance).
Symptomatically, the text turns around the masturbatory act of the
young white male, with the story's opening cut occurring precisely
at the probably most abject moment immediately following the storys
moment of jouissance. After the ejaculation, the white male raise[d]
his thumb to his mouth, and (155:1). After the white silence of the
cut, the story resumes on the other side with: suck[ed] it clean
(141:2).
Ironically, the ejaculation itself already occurs on the more
metafictional and thus symbolic side of the story, which presents a
literary-social commentary on the fictional and thus more imaginary
side, so that the moment of jouissance is curiously abstracted and
framed. Although the narrator starts thinking about the problems of
representation, in the projective space of the story the fictional side
remains part of the metafictional side and vice versa. This inmixing is
underscored by the fact that the metafictional metaphors are identical
to the objects that define the fictional story, such as the needle and
drugs: I find myself at that particular boundary of the everyday that
borders the unspeakable, the narrator notes, where language, like a
needle infected with articulation threatens to pierce some ultimate and
final interiority (145:2).
The limit of this interiority is when we attempt analytic seizure
(145:2; my italics), a statement that is again ambiguous, because
seizure can denote capture as well as spastic attack, which is often
related to jouissance. At this point and it is of course always
important to note the exact point because every word in the story is
site-specific the narrator once more takes up the topological
discussion of borders|bordering, arguing that pure transgression is not
possible and thus cannot become a political strategy:
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35
The unspeakable, of course, is not a boundary dividing a positive area of

allowability from a complete and totalized negativity [...]. If we pursue the
boundary as such, it will recede before us as a limit of mists and vapors [...]. It
is not a fixed and locable point of transgression. (146:2)
The border cannot be crossed|transgressed because it always already

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

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

unspeakable and the speakable eventual, local and thus mobile, in
order to allow for the development of scenarios in which specific
social geographies create specific unspeakabilities. In the social
portrayed in the story, these abject geographies are defined
36
particularly in relation to the inmixing of sexuality and violence. As

the narrator notes, [t]he unspeakable is as much about cruelty as it is
about sexuality. Indeed, for many of us it is where they meet (148:2).
How then to speak the unspeakable abject? Symptomatically, the
narrator goes through a series of unsuccessful beginnings I have
something I really have to explain to you (148:2), [a]llow me to
make a special point here (149:2), [y]ou mustn't take it
personally, but ... (149:2) or I feel I just have to say ... (149:2) in
his effort to show how difficult it is to speak this unspeakable and to
show that the unspeakable demands a transgression of stylistics.
Generally, the narrator notes, in order to become speakable, the
unspeakable needs to be bracketed, as the passage about the repetitive
transgression had shown. Now, however, the bracketing is taken up
literally on the material level of the text: I don't know how to tell you
this, but ... (The unspeakable comprises the wounds on the bodies of
abused children, the mutilations and outrageous shrieking or tightlipped murders at the hands of parents) (148:2).
[It is in tune with the concept of abjects as culturally constructed
that Delany relates the framed unspeakable|abject invariably to human
acts of terror. If it is already difficult to speak these human acts, the
next sentence is even more difficult, because it comprises in particular
the pleasure at such abuses, even private, pornographic, onanistic
(148:2-149:2). Abjection and here the prevailing theory of abjection
blends into the prevalent logic of trauma plays itself out and is
theorized in a fully humanized field. In a psychoanalytically informed
politics, in fact, the abject is by default a human abject, if only
because the frames|brackets for abjects are culturally produced. The
dilemma is that to transgress the cultural framing|bracketing means to
destroy the frames and to speak the abject directly.] If to speak abjects
directly [t]o speak the unspeakable without the proper rhetorical
flourish or introduction (150:2) undoes every rhetorical
incorporation, the only way to incorporate the unspeakable into a
coherent discourse is indeed to frame it, which means to quote it in
a speakable context (see 149:2).
To illustrate this logic, the narrator provides a culturally
controversial statement: [I]n common circles it would be unspeakable
to suggest that commercial pornographic films are relatively less
sexist than the commercial non-pornographic cinema (153:2), adding
that this statement is made speakable|possible by a rhetorical frame
(154:2), in this case the discourse of social analysis which makes
speakable the analysis of the sociology of pornography (in the literal
sense of writing about prostitutes) that is to follow (154:2).
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37
Crucially, according to the topologics of the story, this is a

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

direct effects on the identity of that text whose narrative web is a thin
film constantly threatened with bursting (141). On the level of
content, one knows that one is reading an abject text when narrated
identity is unbearable, when the boundary between subject and object
is shaken, and when even the limit between inside and outside
becomes uncertain (141). On the level of style, one knows that one is
reading an abject text when
the narrative is what is challenged []. If it continues nevertheless, its makeup
changes; its linearity is shattered, it proceeds by flashes, enigmas, short cuts,
incompletion, tangles, and cuts. [...]. [T]he theme of suffering-horror is the
ultimate evidence of such states of abjection within a narrative representation.
(141)
Abject writing, then, perverts language style and content (16). It

expresses the sudden irruption of affect (53). This affect, however, is
invariably a written affect (203), because in abjection, revolt is
completely within [] the being of language (45).
Perhaps the most important point of On the Unspeakable is that it
goes beyond these abjections which it takes up in the story of Red
and Rose, however figuring that one way of transcending the
38
dissolutions|disruptions of abject writing lies in creating a new,

projective writing space:
[T]he gap between probe and presentation, between interpretation and
representation, between analysis and art. It is as if we must establish two
columns, with everything of one mode relegated to one side and everything of
the other relegated to the other. Its as if we had to figure the impossibility of
such a task, such a split, such a gap figure it in language rather than write of
it, speak of it. (Delany 1993, 150:2; my italics)
Such a projective writing space allows for a semantic dynamization

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

discursive rules, Delany ties himself into the tradition that uses
abjects|abjection as tools for cultural subversions and he reclaims the
tactics of abject jouissance for political means. In this struggle, for
both Delany and Kristeva the enemy is a hegemonic, heteronormative
culture which abjects subjects and groups that are already feeling the
full force of many other exclusionary mechanisms and practices of
that culture. In fact, their abjection is only the final step in the project
of excluding these groups and their languages from the
cultural|discursive field.
While I do have a strong sympathy for such a counter-politics, and
while I applaud subversive uses of the abject, I also believe that
psychoanalytically inspired counter-politics tend to forget that abjects
are coupled to very specific intensive productions|affects that have to
do with the break-up of material organization(s). As Menninghaus
notes, generalizations of abjection often turn Kristevas unsettling
theory which he considers, going maybe a step too far, as
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39
universally and biologically grounded (in the maternal body) (2003,

392) into simple fable[s] of repression and liberation (392). If in
the political field, various groups that felt themselves to be abject
in the sense of discriminated against or rejected have used
Kristevas idiom in order to give a new articulation to their struggle
for recognition (389), this all too often implies a simple thematic
[affirmation] of the abject (398).
In the final part of this essay, therefore, I want to provide a possible
corrective to the prevalent logics|politics of abjection, with the
decided aim of making abjects|abjections not less but more politically
effective. The idea is not to replace the cultural politics of abjection
but to relate it to a level of material machinics and material politics.
This implies to also address non-cultural levels of abjection, as
Vilm Flusser does when he relates the abject to the historical frame
of and the memory operative in biological evolution. From these two
perspectives, Flusser argues that the disgust humans feel for other
creatures is directly proportional to the evolutionary distance between
them: Disgust recapitulates phylogenesis []. The further away from
the human on the evolutionary tree, the more disgusting. [Der Ekel
rekapituliert die Phylogenese []. Je ekelhafter, desto entfernter vom
Menschen im Stammbaum] (Flusser and Bec 1993, 14; my
translation). In what follows, I will take this evolutionary argument to
its limit, arguing that for the subject, the most disgusting thing is,
beyond the scale of evolutionary distances, death as the end of the
individuals evolution in general.
To recapitulate: although Kristeva would be the first to stress that
abjects have to do with the realm of materiality and although she has
been seminal in opening up the Lacanian logic to matters of the body,
she does not truly address these levels because her critique of Lacans
neglect of the pre-symbolic Semiotic and of the pre-symbolic chora
remains fully within the frame of the Lacanian topologics, in which
materiality is recuperated only in|as language and in which abjects are
considered only negatively as things fundamentally excluded from
language and representation precisely as the unspeakable grounds of
abjection. The limit is always that of primal repression.
What then would it mean to address the fact that abjects also relate
to a level of material, lived reality beyond primal repression; to a
realm that Deleuze, in The Logic of Sense, calls that of states of
affairs: [B]odies with their tensions, physical qualities, actions and
passions, and the corresponding states of affairs (1990, 4). As I
have argued, in Lacanian psychoanalysis the separation into subject
and object involves the installation of the ego|subject as immaterial
40
agencies of psychic organization. The result of this separation is that

the field of representation closes itself off from the field of material
production(s). At the end of the process of ego-formation, an
immaterial, psychic reality has separated itself, for all psychoanalytic
purposes, fully from a productive|intensive material reality. Lacan
stresses this process when he notes that the speaking body in actual
fact comes before the living body: [T]he first [speaking] body
produces the second [physical] one, because it incorporates itself in it
(1988a, 12). In other words, the Lacanian subject has always already
uncoupled itself completely from itself as a living, material subject.
Even if abjects bring the material level back into the psychoanalytic
play, they are always already subjected to the retrospective
chronologics that rule over the subjects psychic reality, which means
that they only function psychoanalytically from within a
representational logic that they threaten to disrupt. As I noted, the
abject is the result of abjection. In the light of these logics, the
questions are: is there a way to recombine the psychic and the material
subject and what would the position of abjects|abjection be in such a
recombination?
To answer these questions, one has to reconceptualize the material
realm excluded by Lacanian psychoanalysis. One step towards such a
re-conceptualization is to no longer think of it in terms of a field of
dead materiality but in terms of what might be called an intelligent
materialism. Such a materialism treats nature as machinic and as
fully informed or, as Deleuze would say, signaletic (1989, 33).
Before they become retrospected, abjects are parts of the intensive
dynamics of this intelligent material field. In particular, they are
systemic fallouts of the machinic, self-organizing process of the
assembly|emergence of a more and more cohering organism|aggregate
and of its gradual uncoupling from a complex, equally machinic
environment. Translated into a Deleuzian terminology, they have to
do with the dynamics according to which a subjective aggregate or
consolidate [consolid] (Deleuze 1986, 66) develops within an
affective, a-personal, undifferentiated and continuous plane of
immanence. These organizations integrate the forces and dynamics
of a life into those of a specific life, developing a field of personal
affection from one of a-personal affects, and translating a-personal
percepts into personal perceptions. Many, if not most of the processes
that lead up to such an organization, as well as many of the processes
that threaten to disrupt it, take place on material plateaus and they
follow an intensive, affective logic that deals in degrees of forces and
formations rather than in representational registers.
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41
From this point-of-view, the process of ego-formation as described

by Lacan addresses only the level of psychic organization. From a
Deleuzian angle, however, abjects relate psychic organizations to
particular intensive material processes of organization and
disorganization. For instance, they mark moments when a complex
corporeal organism|consistency, held together by a set of both material
and psychic forces, is confronted with directly material and biological
rather than immaterial and psychological forces|dynamics that threaten
to disrupt that organism.
Ultimately, abjects all relate to forces that cause the organism to
fall apart into un-differentiation and they mark first of all material
responses to such dissolutions. As Kristeva notes and Edgar Allan
Poe knew fully well when he wrote The Facts in the Case of M.
Valdemar the most condensed|intensive abject is
a decaying body, lifeless, completely turned into dejection, blurred between the
animate and the inorganic, a transitional swarming, inseparable lining of a
human nature whose life is undistinguishable from the symbolic [] the corpse
represents fundamental pollution. (1982, 109; my italics)
If the quote shows once more the extent to which Kristeva is aware of
the materiality of the abject, it also shows the force exerted by the
Lacanian logics. Even while she talks about the natural life Deleuze is
so interested in, by reconceptualizing it as machinic and signaletic, the
quote recuperates the level of this life only within|as the field of
language: a human nature whose life is undistinguishable from the
symbolic.
The quote also shows that although there is little disagreement
between psychoanalysis and an intelligent materialism on the thematic
level of abjects for both, the ultimate perspective-point of the abject
is material death|decay psychoanalysis is mainly interested in
cultural abjection, while Deleuze is interested in abjects and their
relation to violent material disassemblies, such as biological
death|disorganization, of living systems. In particular, these abjects
relate to mechanisms of auto-disassembly (endo-death) built into these
systems. [In fact, this might be where meetings with abjects differ
from meetings with trauma, which is mostly to do with disassemblies
originating from the outside (exo-death).] In topological terms, the
fundamental difference between a Deleuzian and a Lacanian logics is
the one between a general immanence and a purely psychic
immanence, a difference that entails that between a psycho-physical
projective plane [Deleuze] and a psychic projective plane [Lacan].
42
Because the systemic assembly of living systems proceeds through

machinic cuts into the unthinkable continuity of the plane of
immanence, this assembly takes place, especially in its early stages, in
the field of an unconscious that Deleuze considers not as structured
like a language but as structured like a material machine and thus
as part of the intensive, productive field of states of affairs. After the
advent of human consciousness and of language, the unconscious
productions that define the realm of states of affairs remain feedbacked with states of events|utterances rather than excluded.
The fundamental difference between a Lacanian and a Deleuzian
logic, then, lies in the fact that the machinics of the
unconscious|material, productive level(s) remain operative within the
conscious|immaterially representational level(s), so that this
opposition in actual fact no longer makes sense. Operations of an apersonal, material reality are never excluded from the operations of
the subjects psychic reality. From this angle, abjects are related to
material operations that threaten the material as well as the psychic
organization of a human system, although there are abjects without
abjection in the non-human realm as well. Ultimately, for the human
system, they threaten the coherency of what Deleuze calls the
unilateral|projective surface of sense.
An intelligent materialism, therefore, does not understand the abject
merely as something always already culturally excluded and tabooed
and therefore, paradoxically, as something culturally completely
malleable, but as a nodal point between material and psychic registers;
as a node, for instance, between material disgust, chemical disgust and
an aesthetics of disgust or also between material pain, a neurologics of
pain and an aesthetics|anti-aesthetics of pain. It thus opens up
investigations into the various modes in which abjects affect the
subject (a phenomenology of disgust) but also into the field of purely
material affects caused by abjects, such as the physical, maybe even
chemical reaction to watching Divine eat excrement.
The gradual uncoupling of the soon to be human organism from
its environment creates an aggregate that is both materially and
psychically more and more closed off and stabilized. At some point,
for instance, the maternal breast is no longer experienced as an
integral part of the organism. It is because abjects invariably point to
the impossibility of a full closure and stabilization that they disrupt
phantasms of order and coherence.
This brings me back to Pink Flamingos, which showed that abjects
tend to centre around bodily openings through which exchanges with
the environment are materially regulated and channelled. Abjects are
BERRESSEM
43
created when these exchanges get out of bounds: for instance, when
they become uneconomic|excessive, as when one confronts
unstoppable flows and fluxes such as diarrhea or haemorrhaging, or
when they are reversed for example in the case of vomiting or
refuelling waste into the system through an opening that is normally
used to fuel the system with nourishment as in eating excrement , but
also when they are completely stopped or plugged up as with anorexia
or constipation. As Simon Taylor notes, the identity of the subject is
continually threatened from within by traces of abjection, such as
corporeal wastes (excrement, urine, blood, breast milk, vomit, pus,
and spit) that are jettisoned or leaking from the body (1993, 60).
On a material as well as on a cultural level these differentiations
ultimately lose their meaning in a fully machinic world such
excesses and reversals are detrimental to the system that experiences
them, and they are ultimately symptoms of systemic illness, sterility
and death. There are thus two vectors of abjects|abjection: 1. too
many, or disorganized exchanges with the environment threaten the
coherence of the organism that is abjected 2. the entropic slope that
every living organism finds itself sliding down continually threatens
its material and its psychic organization with dissolution|death.
When Kristeva notes that it is culture that makes abjects repugnant,
this is true only if one is prepared to read them within an
ethical|moral, cultural context. In fact, I would propose that images
such as Mapplethorpes Self-Portrait, which have become culturally
highly contested sites, and which are often celebrated as abject art, are
hardly abject. Homosexual practices, such as anal intercourse, a
sexual practice that is obviously not restricted to homosexuality but
which has become a powerful cultural icon of gay sexuality, are only
detrimental to the human system from a position that considers these
acts as unnatural and|or unethical. They form such a powerful
ammunition for both a subversive logic and a logic of containment
precisely because they lend themselves so readily to a false,
essentializing biologics, according to which they introduce a logic of
waste into what can only be thought of as a procreative|productive act.
[For similar reasons, cultural abjection attaches itself very easily to
differences of race, which has, of course, no direct relationship to the
abject.] The politics of an economical sexuality cover anal practices
with a cultural taboo and with laws of prohibition. [This does not
mean that the homosexual is inherently or essentially abject; rather, that
homosexuality becomes abjected in the construction of normative
heterosexuality (Houser 1993, 86).]
44
Curiously a purely culturally conceived politics of abjection finds

especially faux-abject images disturbing such as some of
Mapplethorpes photographs or Andres Serranos Piss Christ (1989)
because these take their power precisely from the juxtaposition of an
official symbolic order and its disruption (heterosexual
sexuality|homosexual practices, metaphysical order|physical waste). A
number of Cindy Shermans photographs, one might argue, are more
directly|intensively abject because they portray directly physical
waste(dness). They point to the fact that if abjects are read in a
material context, it is not only the Symbolic that has the power to
disgust. [Sherman a visceral as well as psychic [] response
(Taylor 1993, 62).] Abjects are repugnant on material levels as
things|events that threaten an organisms material coherence. Even
more, they are repugnant on a purely a-personal level as forces that
disrupt or reverse life-processes and as such bring the subject back to
the level of the anonymity of a death. As Menninghaus notes, to
the extent that disgust says no to life itself, it inverts the Kantian
function of life-preservation into its opposite and becomes the agent of
a will to decline (2003, 148). Or, in Kristevas words, the abject is
death infecting life (1982, 4).
A Deleuzian counter-politics of abjects would need to reach the
material level of abjects. As long as it does not differentiate between
abjects and faux-abjects, it will remain caught within the economies
of the cultural|linguistic matrix. Abjects, however, invariably go
beyond the cultural matrix. In fact, one might argue that there can be
no metaphorical abjects. They are so dreadful for both culture and the
subject precisely because they are not merely its cultural others it is
in this realm that faux-abjection operates, as when it juxtaposes
puritan cleanliness to dirty things but disruptive material forces
that are operative in the subject and in culture. Mostly, these forces
operate in silence and imperceptibly, and although one might well
think of imperceptible abjects, it is only when these forces become
perceptible that they are experienced as abjects. What this means is
that there is a fundamental, inherent disruption to abjects that points
beyond cultural abjections. Abjects drain life out of organic systems.
Foul things tend to be abjects, for instance, because in foulness, an
abundance of life is rotting from within.
Some of David Lynchs images tap into this process of draining,
which in his movies invariably concerns the level of a material,
muscular, nervous, or visceral repulsion that is not immediately
culturally symptomatic, such as the car-crash sequence in Wild at
Heart, the sequence in which Jeffrey finds the severed ear in Blue
BERRESSEM
45
Velvet, which, although it is related to Frank Booth as a cultural

operative, ultimately points to a realm beyond culture, or the
enigmatic figure behind the diner in Mulholland Drive. I would
maintain that the response to such abjects is different from the
response to culturally charged images such as those of Mapplethorpe
or Serrano. [As a true Lacanian, Ziek deals with such bodies as
images of the Lacanian Real which, he says, is the flayed body, the
palpitation of the raw, skinless red flesh (1994, 116). In general,
Ziek talks more about the traumatic Thing (181) than about the
abject.] While these images can always be sublated into a
(counter)politics of representation, abjects escape a full
(counter)politicization precisely because they ignore the political,
working instead on a directly a-personal, affective, and thus less easily
contained level.
But even such images, I would argue, can still be sublated because
they are fictional. Ways to de-fictionalize such images are to
document them, as Waters did with the epilogue of Pink Flamingos
or, in Polyester, with the introduction of the smell-o-rama
technology, which directly addresses the olfactory, chemical aspect of
the abject. Another way to de-fictionalize such images is to make
them happen. In fact, there is a particular affinity between the abject
and happenings. When Bob Flanagan includes himself as part of his
own art exhibit, however, even the logics of the happening are
transcended. [In the commentary on Skullfuck, Houser highlights
specifically that although convincingly made, this scene is obviously a
farce (1993, 94).] In this case, the power of the image does not only
and not predominantly lie in its social commentary the sick artist
and his sick art are simultaneously displayed in the museum-ashospital|hospital-as-museum although it invites such readings, but in
that it is an image|fact of an organisms and a subjects long history of
material pain and of the fight against material dissolution. From this
perspective, the exhibition becomes an example of the birth of art
from intense pain; especially a pain that has become, once more, pure
intensity. [Symptomatically, an art-criticism informed by linguistic
constructivism cannot read this level other than as a nave
biographism: While Chave perceives [artist Eva] Hesses work in
terms of the abject, she believes it to have been permeated by the
artists self-definition as a sick, decomposing, abject being. Such
biographical and essentializing notions completely disregard Hesses
work as a conscious and intellectual art practice (Jones 1993, 45).]
In the events excessive economics, this pain is put into the service
of life, which means that the event is more than a spectacle of abject
46
jouissance. In fact, it gives a positive spin to jouissance that involves

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

from the meaninglessness of nature, matter, and the physical realm.
For an intelligent materialism, however, nature is not at all
meaningless, but eminently informed and machinic. Within these
overall machinics of the material realm, abjects have specific
positions. Abjects suck life out of biological systems, not so much
from the outside, as with the introductory frog, but from the very
inside. Sometimes Kristeva gets close to this level, as when she notes
that the body's inside [...] shows up in order to compensate for the
collapse of the border between inside and outside, adding that in
these moments, it is as if the skin, a fragile container, no longer
guaranteed the integrity of ones own and clean self but, scraped or
transparent, invisible or taut, gave way before the dejection of its
contents (1982, 53). Again, however, she sees such corporeal
involutions from the position of the subjects psychic reality: I expel
myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion
through which I claim to establish myself (3).
In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze goes a decisive
step further in relegating the abject fully to the body: It is not I who
BERRESSEM
47
attempts to escape from my body, it is the body that attempts to escape

from itself by means of [] in short, a spasm []. Perhaps this is
Bacons approximation of horror or abjection (2004, 15). In these
moments, the body attempts to escape from itself through one of its
organs in order to rejoin the field of material structure (16). From
this, one might extrapolate an eminently political statement that goes
beyond the common politics of abjection: It is only in a world
completely without subjects, in what Flusser calls the geoevolutionary slime of a pure life before the advent of singularization
or subjectivation and thus before the advent of death, [die Biosphre
[]. Es handelt sich um einen viskosen Schaum, nmlich um
Meerwasser, in welchem solide Partikel und Gasblschen schwirren.
Ihre chemische Komposition ist komplex, besteht aber vorwiegend
aus Kohlenstoff, Sauerstoff, Wasserstoff und Stickstoff. Dieser
Schleim hat sich seit seinem Entstehen vor etwa vier Millionen Jahren
ber den ganzen Erdball verbreitet. [] Von Tod ist bei dieser
Perspektive auf die Evolution keine Rede. Er kommt erst spter im
Verlauf dieser Entwicklung zu Wort. Seltsamerweise tauchen nmlich
aus der Biomasse Auswchse (Organismen) empor, die wie Schleifen
im langsamen Voranflieen dieses Schleims funktionieren [...]. Was
das Leben interessiert, ist Sex, und Tod ist nebenschlich. Allerdings
ist das nicht der Standpunkt des einzelnen Lebewesens. Es scheint am
(sich fr seinen Tod nicht interessierenden) Leben bleiben zu wollen.
Das Interesse der Lebewesen fr das Lebenbleiben ist nicht im
Interesse des Lebens. Sie sollen geflligst die in ihnen enthaltene
genetische Information in den Lebensstrom weitergeben und dann
verschwinden. Jedes legt noch schnell ein Ei, und dann kommt der
Tod vorbei (107)] rather than in a culture that has been politically
subverted that abjection becomes splendor; the horror of life
becomes a very pure and very intense life (45).
Works Cited
Ben Levi, Jack et al. 1993. Abject Art: Revulsion and Desire in American Art. New
York: Whitney Museum of American Art.
Butler, Judith. 1991. Imitation and Gender Insubordination. In Inside/Out: Lesbian
Theories, Gay Theories, edited by Diana Fuss, 13-31. New York: Routledge.
. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York:
Routledge.
Delany, Samuel R. 1993. On the Unspeakable. In Avant-Pop: Fiction for a
Daydream Nation, edited by Larry McCaffery, 141-155. Boulder, CO: Black Ice
Books.
48
Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, translated by Hugh

Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
. [1969] 1990. The Logic of Sense, translated by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale.
New York: Columbia University Press.
. [1991] 1994. What is Philosophy?, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham
Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press.
. [1989] 2004. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, translated by Daniel W.
Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
, and Felix Guattari. [1980] 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
, and Claire Parnet. [1977] 2002. Dialogues, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press.
Flusser, Vilm. 1998. Vom Subjekt zum Projekt. Menschwerdung, edited by Stefan
Bollmann and Edith Flusser. Frankfurt: Fischer.
, and Louis Bec. 1993. Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: Eine Abhandlung samt Befund
des Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste. European Photography,
Goettingen.
Houser, Craig. 1993. I, Abject. In Ben Levi et al., 85-100. New York: Whitney
Museum of American Art.
Jones, Leslie C. 1993. Transgressive Feminity: Art and Gender in the Sixties and
Seventies. In Ben Levi et al., 33-57. New York: Whitney Museum of American
Art.
Juno, Andrea, and Vivian Vale, eds. 1993. Bob Flanagan: Super-masochist. Volume
1 of Re/Search People Series. San Francisco: Re/Search Publications.
Lacan, Jacques. [1966] 1977. Ecrits, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton.
. 1978. Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. New
York: Norton.
. 1988a. Radiophonie. Weinheim: Quadriga.
. 1988b. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book I: Freuds Papers on Technique,
edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and translated by John Forrester. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
. [1973] 1990. Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment,
translated by Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson. New York:
Norton & Co.
Menninghaus, Winfried. 2003. Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong
Sensation, translated by Howard Eiland and Joel Golb. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Taylor, Simon. 1993. The Phobic Object: Abjection in Contemporary Art. In Ben
Levi et al., 59-83. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art.
Ziek, Slavoj. 1994. The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and
Causality. London: Verso.
Queer Transformations: Renegotiating the Abject in Contemporary Anglo-American Lesbian Fiction1
Paulina Palmer
Introduction: The Lesbian, the Abject, and Anglo-American
Fiction
While, as Julia Kristeva points out, the female body in general
signifies the abject body in that it is penetrable, exudes blood and,
when pregnant, changes shape (1991, 71-99), there is one particular
female figure who has traditionally been regarded by sexologists and
guardians of morality as especially abject and monstrous. This is the
woman who identifies as lesbian or forms primary relationships with
members of her own sex (see Faderman 1992, 1-59; Hart 1994, 47134). My aim in this essay is to explore the socio-political context of
the lesbians abject representation and to examine some of the
derogatory images and stereotypes to which, over the centuries, it has
given rise. This will furnish a starting-point for an enquiry into the
struggles waged by members of the lesbian/gay community, including
activists, theorists and writers of fiction, to contest and renegotiate her
position. Taking as the focus of my discussion the novels People in
Trouble (1990) by the American Sarah Schulman and Affinity (1999)
by the British Sarah Waters, I shall then proceed to investigate some
of the strategies which writers utilize to interrogate and challenge the
lesbians abject role with the aim of contributing to the process of her
resignification.
Kristevas theorization of the abject, along with the interpretation of
her ideas with specific reference to lesbian/gay culture and politics in
the work of Barbara Creed and Judith Butler, furnishes us with an
explanation for the relegation of the lesbian to the abject domain.
Kristeva defines the abject as what disturbs identity, system, order
and refuses to respect borders, positions, rules (1991, 4). In citing
examples of such transgressions, she refers to the traditional
prohibition of homosexual relationships in Western society, alerting
attention to the biblical injunction which forms its basis: Intercourse
between same and same will have to be prohibited neither
1
To Cambridge Lesbian Line
50
promiscuity within families nor homosexuality (103). The lesbian

represents a particularly complex example of the taboo against
intercourse between same and same and the abjection it signifies,
since she transgresses moral and social codes and disturbs identity,
system, order in more ways than one. In addition to refusing to take
up the position that the phallocentric system assigns to woman by
rejecting the role of mans specular other and object of exchange
between men, she also poses a threat to the Symbolic Order in that she
usurps mans role by taking a woman as a lover (see Zimmerman
1992, 1-5). In this way she destabilizes gender boundaries and
problematizes codes of sexual difference. The disruption of system
and order that she enacts, as Luce Irigaray argues, extends beyond the
perimeter of her personal partnerships and the lesbian/gay community
to affect, or from a hetero-patriarchal viewpoint, infect women in
general. By means of her sexual identification the lesbian
problematizes heterosexual femininity, exposing it as a performance
and uncovering its compulsory aspect. As Christine Holmlund,
summarizing Irigarays argument, observes, the lesbian
exposes mature femininity as, in effect, mere masquerade, imposed on
women by men. By desiring another woman like a man, the lesbian mimics
and plays with the masculinity and femininity of psychoanalytic discourse,
thereby making both visible as constructions and performances. At the same
time she discovers, creates, what an exhilarating pleasure it is to be partnered
with someone like herself. For Irigaray, then, the lesbian demonstrates that
women are not simply reabsorbed by a male-defined femininity: They also
remain elsewhere []. (1991, 288)
However, like the other abject figures discussed by Kristeva, the

lesbian, as well as posing a threat to moral and social order, also
exerts a contradictory attraction by impressing people, heterosexual
men in particular, as ambiguously fascinating, threatening and
dangerous (Kristeva qtd. in Holmlund, 67). Images of nude women
performing pseudo-lesbian love scenes in pornographic magazines or
sex shows indicate her perennial fascination as an object of male
voyeurism and fantasy. The portrayal of her in the uncanny roles of
spectral visitor, witch and vampire in popular gothic fiction and horror
film
also
illustrate
her
reputation
as
ambiguously
fascinating/dangerous (see Palmer 1999, 14, 60, 101-105; Weiss 1992,
84-108; Zimmerman 1984, 153-163).
Given the threat which the lesbian poses to the symbolic order,
combined with the fascination which her transgressive sexuality
exerts, her typecasting as abject is understandable, as too are the
PALMER
51
pejorative images and stereotypes, stigmatizing her as monstrous and

weird. The significance of some of these is explored by Barbara Creed
in her discussion of the different cultural representations assigned to
the lesbian body. The lesbian, Creed illustrates, has been represented
in literature and art as masculinized and virile; in earlier periods she
was sometimes portrayed with an extra large clitoris which she was
assumed to use for sexual penetration (1995, 88-96). Alternatively,
she has been depicted as animalistic, disturbing the boundaries
between the animal and the human, by being represented as a vampire
or a hare (96-99). Another abject image assigned to the lesbian which
Creed discusses is the lesbian-as-double (101); this, she argues,
develops the concept of female narcissism since the representation of
the lesbian couple as mirror-images of each other constructs the
lesbian body as a reflection or an echo (100). The threat which this
image poses, Creed suggests, resides in the fact that, as well as
challenging our cherished belief in individualism, it evokes a closed
world of female sexuality from which men are excluded.
Other images representing the lesbian as physically abject, besides
those mentioned by Creed, include the witch and the phantom.
Catherine Clment discusses the witchs association with deviant
sexuality and the realm of the uncanny, describing her as dressed in
crimson and bear[ing] signs of violence and love (1987, 3). Clment
relates the witch to the repressed dimension of the Imaginary and, by
association, to the figure of the hysteric, traditionally regarded as
bisexual and distrusted as a disruptive sexual presence in society.
With reference to the phantom, as Terry Castle illustrates, works of
fiction dating from the eighteenth to the twentieth century frequently
portray the lesbian in imagery of ghosts and haunting, with the effect
of rendering her physically insubstantial and decorporealizing her
desire. The depiction of the lesbian in spectral terms, Castle observes,
has the effect of negating female intimacy and denying the carnal
bravada of lesbian existence (1993, 30). The ghost carries, of course,
abject connotations. Like the corpse, it destabilizes the boundaries
between life and death, this world and the next, while simultaneously
evoking a sense of the uncanny (see Freud 1955, 242; Jackson 1981,
64-70).
However, the relegation of the lesbian to the domain of the abject,
though continuing to exert a destructive pressure on womens lives
and partnerships, has in recent years been contested. With the advent
of the lesbian/gay liberation movements of the 1970s and the growth
of queer politics in the 1990s, members of the lesbian/gay community
are starting to challenge it, along with the prejudice and
52
discriminatory treatment that it incites. The queer theorist Judith

Butler documents this struggle, discussing its ideological significance.
Having illustrated the tendency of heterosexual society to repudiate or
disavow homosexual identifications and, as a result, relegate lesbians
and gay men to the domain of abject beings, those who are not yet
subjects, but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the
subject (1993, 3), she proceeds to discuss the strategies of resistance
which she sees as available to members of the lesbian/gay community.
Alerting attention to the political efficacy of individual acts of
coming out and the parodic enactment of episodes from the history
of gay oppression staged by groups such as the American ACT UP
and Queer Nation, she describes these activities as vital strategies in
renegotiating the boundaries of the abject and combating
discrimination and homophobia. Reminding us that these boundaries
are by no means fixed but are open to debate and reassessment, she
argues that the contentious practices of queerness might be
understood not only as an example of citational politics, but as a
specific reworking of abjection into political agency (21). This, she
maintains, will have the effect of resignifying the abjection of
homosexuality into defiance and legitimacy (21). It will hopefully
create the form of society in which people with AIDS, instead of
being rejected as pariahs and left to die, will survive, and the lives of
individual lesbians and gay men will be regarded as valuable and
worthy of respect.
It is, however, not only political activists and queer theorists who
seek to renegotiate the boundaries of the abject by challenging the
position of social outcast traditionally assigned to lesbians and gay
men. Writers of fiction also contribute to this project. As I illustrate in
my study Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions (1999), AngloAmerican writers utilize a variety of different narrative strategies to
achieve this end. Instead of portraying the lesbian as other and
monstrous, as she has often been depicted in the past, they confer on
her a subjectivity, agency and viewpoint, exploring her personal
response to the acts of oppression and humiliation which she often
encounters in her day-to-day life. By positioning her as the narrator or
focalizer of events, they realign the viewpoint of the narrative in
which she features and the values it encodes. They also challenge the
conventional image of the lesbian as doomed to isolation and
loneliness by foregrounding the relationship she forms with the
interactive network of the gay community and by illustrating the
contribution she makes to its vitality. Another strategy that writers
adopt is to rework the motifs and images traditionally employed to
PALMER
53
render the lesbian abject, such as the representation of her as an

outcast who exists on the fringes of urban life and the portrayal of her
as an insubstantial ghost, depicting them, instead, from a lesbian/queer
perspective. Images of the monstrous, conventionally utilized in
fiction and film to stigmatize and demean the lesbian, are interrogated
and their oppressive effects exposed (see Palmer 1999, 8-23).
These strategies, in the deconstructive and transformative approach
which they apply to traditional values and narrative structures, are, in
general, postmodern in character. Although, as Linda Hutcheon
illustrates, feminist/lesbian perspectives differ from postmodern ones
in their focus on agency and their commitment to a political agenda
(see Hutcheon 1989, 140-168), they nonetheless reveal significant
ideological and intellectual connections with them. Strategies of
denaturalization and deconstruction, typical of the postmodern, feature
prominently in feminist/lesbian culture and literature in relation to
institutions such as the family and heterosexuality, along with the
reworking of genre and convention. However, feminist/lesbian
writers, in contrast to their postmodern counterparts, utilize these
strategies with a specific end in view; they employ them to investigate
issues of gender and sexuality. And, while recognizing the role that
social context, economics and the unconscious play in the formation
of the subject, they seek to foreground, with differing degrees of
emphasis, concepts of agency and self-determination (see Palmer
1997, 156-180; Wiegman 1994, 1-20).
These observations are relevant to Schulmans People in Trouble
and Waterss Affinity, the two fictional texts on which I have chosen
to concentrate my discussion. Both novels, though differing radically
in style and genre, seek to interrogate and challenge hetero-patriarchal
value-schemes by recasting and transforming narrative forms and
conventions. Whereas People in Trouble gives a realist account of the
tense relationship existing between the gay/lesbian community and its
heterosexual counterpart in the context of the AIDS crisis in 1980s
New York, Affinity is a work of historiographic metafiction with
Gothic affiliations. Located in Victorian London, it reworks, from a
queer point of view, the lesbians traditional associations with the
uncanny phenomena of the ghost, the vampire, and the witch.
In addition, despite the differences they display, both novels
represent lesbian desire, in conceptual terms, as signifying a form of
excess (see White 1991, 142-172; Zimmerman 1992, 4) This excess,
as Kristeva comments, disturbs borders, positions, rules (1991, 4)
and is shown to have a destabilizing effect on heterosexual institutions
such as the family and society in general. Forming a striking contrast
54
in content and style, the two novels offer the reader an insight into the
diversity of strategies and tactics which Anglo-American writers
employ to recast the theme of the lesbians abject signification and, by
so doing, renegotiate her position and status.
Sarah Schulmans People in Trouble: Gay/Heterosexual Interaction in the New York AIDS Crisis
Schulmans People in Trouble is unusually ambitious in scope since,
in contrast to the majority of works of lesbian fiction published in the
1990s, which, while treating the politics of lesbianism/homosexuality
indirectly, generally eschew a directly political emphasis, it
interweaves a narrative with a socio-political focus centring on the
struggle waged by the New York gay community to achieve justice
and medical facilities for people with AIDS, with a narrative that is
personal in nature. The latter centres on the triangular relationship
which develops between the heterosexual Peter, his bisexual wife
Kate, and the lesbian Molly, with whom Kate is having an affair. The
two narratives are, in fact, closely linked, since the storyline treating
the relations between Peter, Kate and Molly represents, in its focus on
the misunderstandings and conflicts that arise between heterosexuals
and homosexuals, a microcosmic version of the AIDS storyline.
Discussing the uneasy and frequently hostile relationship which exists
between lesbian/gay and heterosexual communities, the theorist Diana
Fuss describes the two haunting one another in abject fashion in the
manner of a ghostly visitation. She writes:
Heterosexuality can never fully ignore the close psychical proximity of its
terrifying (homo)sexual other, any more than homosexuality can entirely escape
the equally insistent social pressure of (hetero)sexual conformity. Each is
haunted by the other, but here again it is the other who comes to stand in for the
very occurrence of haunting and ghostly visitation. (1991, 3)
Fusss description of the tense relationship existing between

lesbian/gay and heterosexual communities serves as a useful gloss on
Schulmans novel, evoking the socio-political problems and
contradictions which it depicts. The two narratives which Schulman
interweaves, the AIDS storyline and the storyline focusing on the
triangular relationship between Peter, Kate, and Molly, are linked, in
fact, by the concept of the abject. Heterosexual individuals and society
are represented as expressing both fear and fascination with their
lesbian/gay counterpart(s), while the latter strive, in different ways
PALMER
55
and with varying degrees of success, to resist and challenge this abject
classification.
In addition to the concept of the abject, there is also another device
which Schulman employs to link the two narratives. This is the figure
of Molly, which is central to both. However, Molly plays a radically
different role in each storyline. Whereas in her personal relations with
Peter and Kate her role tends to be limited to that of abject object, in
her dealings with the gay community, on the contrary, she is portrayed
as transcending this position by assuming a strong degree of agency
and playing the role of a hero. Schulman represents her caring for
friends and acquaintances who are HIV positive, encouraging them to
fight for civil rights and medical facilities, and acting as a coordinator
of the Justice movement, the organization that the gay community
establishes to combat discrimination. By ascribing to Molly these two
very different roles and representing her from a variety of different
viewpoints that of her lesbian and gay friends, as well as the
bisexual Kate and the heterosexual Peter Schulman interrogates the
abject image which society assigns to the woman who identifies as
lesbian, while simultaneously renegotiating and resignifying her
position.
Schulmans representation of the triangular relationship between
Peter, Kate, and Molly is characterized by ironies and contradictions
and she subtly delineates the psychological and emotional conflicts
which the three characters experience as they struggle to cope with
emotions and responses which, despite their good intentions, they find
themselves unable to fully understand or control. Peter, though
intrigued by lesbianism and homosexuality and priding himself on his
liberal attitudes, is one of the worst culprits in committing the act of
bigotry described by Butler of relegating homosexuals to the domain
of abject beings (1993, 3) and denying them full subject status. On
first discovering that Kate is engaging in a lesbian affair, he is in no
way worried since, typecasting lesbian partnerships as superficial and
ephemeral, he assumes that it will collapse in a week or two. When, to
his surprise, the affair continues, he responds to the fact with a
mixture of fascination and unease. On accidentally encountering
Molly in the street, he scrutinizes her closely and, with a sense of
relief, contemptuously dismisses her appearance as ugly and
unfeminine: She has a moustache, he thought. And shes fat. Not fat
exactly, but definitely out of shape. Her clothes dont fit well
([Schulmans italics] 1990, 107). The character vignette which he
proceeds to construct mentally and to foist upon Molly further exposes
56
his prejudices, reflecting his view of lesbians as manipulative, strident

man-haters:
This one swaggered. Hed have known she was gay immediately. As soon as
there was any real difference of opinion shed be a real bitch, not conceding
anything to a man, just for the principle. Then hed have to make excuses to get
away before she accused him of being a sexist. They were all like that. (1990,
107)
Schulman goes on to describe how Peters encounter with Molly,

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

striding round New York city in a suit. Peters concern with keeping
his personal boundaries intact assumes at times a strongly physical
manifestation. His fascination with the phenomenon of gay funerals
prompts him, on one occasion, to enter a church and participate in the
service. Once inside, however, he experiences a distressing sensation
of suffocation and is overcome by feelings of nausea. The attraction
which homosexuality holds for him is, in fact, potent enough, he
remembers, to have impelled him, in the pre-AIDS era of the 1970s, to
engage in a brief sexual encounter with a colleague who identifies as
gay. However, while willing to perform the act of fellatio, he admits
to feeling a pronounced sense of relief when the colleague does not
insist that he swallow his semen.
Another figure who relegates lesbianism/homosexuality to the
domain of abject beings is Kate, a fact which may surprise the reader
since, as well as being sexually involved with Molly, she is largely
responsible for initiating the relationship with her. However, like her
husband Peter, though for different reasons, Kate is deeply concerned
to keep her psychological and social boundaries intact. Though
passionately infatuated with Molly and becoming increasingly
dependent on the sexual aspect of the relationship, she is terrified that
her lover, as she vividly expresses it, will want to eat me up [], trap
me, try to turn me into a lesbian (21). In order to prevent the love
affair from impinging on her marriage, Kate determines to protect her
domestic life and never to grant her free access, not in one lump sum
and not piece by piece (20). As a result, she forbids Molly entry to
the marital apartment and, on accidentally encountering her in the
street when she is with Peter, refuses to acknowledge her. Treatment
of this kind understandably humiliates and hurts Molly, as does Kates
dictum that she will see her only at times of her own choosing when
Peter is occupied elsewhere. Nonetheless, although the narrative
emphasizes that it is Kate who controls the relationship, she refuses to
recognize the fact, but, entrenched in an abject fantasy which blinds
her to the reality of events, persists in regarding Molly as a dangerous,
disruptive force. Pondering the problematic aspects of the situation
which, ironically, she herself has engineered, she angrily concludes
that Molly had successfully insinuated herself right into the middle of
her habit of living and had then started agitating from the inside for
change []. Molly had power over her (20).
As well as occupying the role of Peters wife, Kate is also a
successful artist, and this is another area of her life which she attempts
to compartmentalize and protect from Mollys influence. She is
58
entranced by Mollys appearance and, as a result, feels a strong desire

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

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

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

visits at the Mount Sinai Hospital, in just such a state of physical
60
disintegration. She describes him as propped up in bed with his hair

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

Whereas Schulman, in interrogating the abject signification of the
lesbian and seeking to renegotiate her position, adopts a contemporary
focus and employs a realist style, Waters, while involved in a similar
project, utilizes tactics of a very different kind. Locating her narrative
in an earlier period of history and appropriating Gothic conventions,
she recasts from a lesbian viewpoint the motifs of the ghost, the
vampire and the doppelgnger traditionally used in fiction and film to
render the lesbian monstrous, employing them instead to represent the
disruptive effects of lesbian desire and to explore the restraints
imposed on female sexuality in Victorian England.
The motif of spectrality is, in fact, central to Waterss novel since
the context of its action is the spiritualist movement which came to the
fore in England in the 1860s and 1870s. During this period female
mediums, claiming to communicate with the spirits of the dead and to
enable them to materialize in physical form, organized sances which
frequently attracted large audiences. As the historian Alex Owen
illustrates, the role of medium could furnish, in fact, a route for the
working-class woman to transgress barriers of class and gender and, if
her trafficking in the supernatural met with success, achieve fame and
fortune (1981, 144-235). Waters teases out the contradictions of
power/powerlessness which the spiritualist movement posed for
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61
women and, by utilizing it as a context for a lesbian Gothic romance,

illustrates its transgressive potential as a vehicle for subverting
conventions of class and sexuality.
Waters utilizes reference to the spectral not only in relation to the
spiritualist movement and its representatives but also to portray the
abject designation which Victorian society assigned to the spinster and
to the woman who forms a lesbian attachment, denying both figures
full subject status. Her heroine Margaret Prior, who occupies both
roles, is portrayed as an isolated, haunted figure. Sitting writing her
diary at night in the dim light of a lamp, she thinks [h]ow my mind
runs to ghosts, these days (Waters 1999, 126). She describes the fogs
engulfing the city in abject manner as disturbing the boundaries
between outside/inside, as they press against the windows []
seeping into the house through the ill-fitting sashes (125).
The personal tragedies which have reduced Margaret to this
melancholy plight are conveyed to us gradually, filtered through her
memories and thoughts. The death of her father, an academic working
in the field of history whom she enjoyed helping with his research, as
well as being an emotional blow, has put an end to her intellectual life,
frustrating the plans for the research trip to Italy which the two had
planned to make together. She has also, we learn, suffered an even
more devastating loss, one about which convention dictates that she
keep silent, confiding the anguish it causes her only to her diary. Her
lover Helen, whom she first encountered at one of her fathers lectures
and who was due to accompany them on the trip to Italy, has deserted
her. Tired of the secrecy and subterfuge which the lesbian relationship
involved and seeking to lead a normal life, she has accepted a
proposal of marriage from Margarets brother Stephen and born him a
son. These events have left Margaret feeling depressed and alienated,
an image, in fact, of Irigarayan dereliction (see Whitford 1991, 91,
107).
With the aim of achieving respite from her sorrows and escaping
the tedium of her upper middle-class home, Margaret, to the dismay of
her mother who associates the inmates with depravity and disease,
decides to volunteer as a Lady Visitor (46) at Millbank prison. It is
here that she encounters the working-class medium Selina Dawes,
who has been sentenced to five years incarceration for the part she
allegedly played in the death of a woman who attended one of her
sances, when, she maintains, the spirit she caused to materialize
proved unruly. Selina carries a number of different associations with
the abject. Her connection with blood, stemming from the crime she
has allegedly committed, is the most obvious. The novel opens, in
62
fact, with a description of her gazing in horror at her hands stained

with the blood of the deceased woman. Foregrounding its physicality,
she comments, I did not even know it for blood at first, it looked so
black, & seemed so warm & thick, like sealing-wax (Waters 1999,
2). Kristeva describes blood as a fascinating semantic crossroads, the
propitious place for abjection where death and femininity, murder and
procreation, cessation of life and vitality all come together (1991, 96;
Kristevas italics). Selina herself, and the transgressive social and
sexual role she plays in Waterss narrative, vividly embody these
binaries. In addition, her profession as a medium and the
communication with the spirits of the dead which it involves, result in
her performing the taboo act of crossing the border between life and
death. Yet another boundary, one particularly relevant to her current
situation as prisoner in Millbank gaol, which she claims to be capable
of traversing with the assistance of her spirit friends, is that between
the prison and the city that lies beyond.
Selina also reveals a connection with two uncanny figures with
abject connotations whose appearance in fiction and film frequently
has the effect of stigmatizing lesbian identification and desire. These
are the witch and the vampire (see Dyer 1988, 47-72; Palmer 1999,
29-58, 99-125; Weiss 1992, 84-108). Selinas seductive beauty and
enchanting words, like those of the sorceress in John Keatss La
Belle Dame Sans Merci, enthrall Margaret sexually, prompting her to
credit her protestations of love. Infatuated with her person and
unconsciously regarding her as a substitute for her former lover
Margaret, she agrees to use her inheritance to assist her escape from
gaol and elope with her to the continent.
Selinas vampirish aspect is reflected in the way she devours
Margarets energy and resources. As well as stealing her heart and her
money, as the indirect allusion to suicide in the concluding paragraph
of the novel signals, she takes her life. Reference to vampirism also
occurs in relation to other female characters in the novel. In a bitter
altercation with her former lover Helen, Margaret describes the bed
they shared as haunted by their kisses, grotesquely envisaging the
kisses hanging in the curtains, like bats, ready to swoop (Waters
1999, 204).
However, while associating both Selina and Margaret with motifs
relating to the uncanny, including the ghost, the witch and the
vampire, Waters avoids portraying either character as conventionally
monstrous. On the contrary, by giving the reader an insight into the
troubled histories of the two women and exploring their subjectivities
and motivation, she positions the reader to understand and empathize
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63
with them. In this way, she interrogates the application of these

uncanny motifs to the figure of the lesbian, questioning their
appropriateness and contesting the lesbians traditionally monstrous
representation.
Another role with abject connotations, which Waters utilizes in
depicting the relationship between Margaret and Selina, is that of the
doppelgnger. On first encountering Selina in her prison cell Margaret
interprets the sigh which she utters as the complement (26) to her
own melancholy state of mind. Perceiving that, like herself, Selina
nurses personal griefs, she thinks, You are like me (82). It is, in fact,
this sense of identification which Selina exploits in persuading
Margaret to assist her escape from gaol. Combining the dual meaning
of the word, the conventional meaning of resemblance with that of
paramour which it signified in nineteenth-century spiritualist circles
(see Owen 1981, 38), she ardently tells her, You were seeking me,
your own affinity (Waters 1999, 275). In the interplay of doubles
which, as this episode illustrates, pervades the relationship between
the two women, Selina plays a particularly complex role. On the one
hand, she signifies the image of the sexual jouissance which Margaret
hopes she will enjoy if only she dare transgress the law and assist
Selina in engineering her escape from gaol while, on the other hand,
she reflects a darker message. In gothic fiction and film, as Ruth
Parkin-Gounelas points out, the protagonists encounter with her/his
double frequently acts as a harbinger of death (2001, 109-110). The
novels concluding paragraph, with its indirect allusion to Margarets
suicide, hints at this grim doom.
However, as is the case with her treatment of the images of the
witch and vampire, Waters, while utilizing the motif of the double to
explore the emotional dynamics of the relationship between Selina
and Margaret, also questions its appropriateness. The two women, the
reader perceives, appear as doubles and mirror images in only a very
limited sense. While sharing a common gender and sexual orientation,
they differ radically in terms of class affiliation, personality and
attitude to sex. Whereas the romantic Margaret is genuinely infatuated
with Selina, the hard-headed Selina does not reciprocate her love, but,
on the contrary, opportunistically exploits it in order to escape from
gaol. By giving a detailed representation of the subjectivities and
histories of the two women and highlighting the significant
differences they display, Waters refutes the myth of the lesbian
relationship as a form of narcissistic doubling.
Another Gothic motif with abject connotations which Waters
subjects to lesbian transformation is the haunted house. Margarets
64
upper middle-class home and Millbank prison both represent, in fact,

innovative recastings of the motif. Although the two establishments
initially strike the reader as having little in common, they reveal on
closer scrutiny, from an ideological point of view, significant
similarities. Both are hetero-patriarchal institutions, the former
embodying the oppressive power of the Victorian family and the latter
of the state, which entrap their female inhabitants. Mrs. Prior,
disapproving of Margarets activities outside the home, seeks to
restrict her movements by means of keeping her under surveillance,
while Millbank prison is constructed on the model of the panopticon,
the architectural structure associated by Michel Foucault with state
surveillance and control. Both home and prison, moreover, carry
spectral connotations. Described in imagery of darkness and shadows,
they are haunted by their inmates memories and frustrated desires,
which relate to lesbian love in the case of both the middle-class
Margaret and her working-class counterpart Selina. Spectrality
assumes, in the case of the latter, distinctly physical manifestations.
Selina is a medium by profession, and in the narrative reference
occurs to spirit matter, the curiously oxymoronic substance of which,
according to nineteenth-century spiritualists, the spectral body was
composed. The floor of her prison cell is also described as specked
with tell-tale drops of wax, the material the medium used to trace the
bodys outline.
The correspondence between the domestic world of Margarets
middle-class home and the public institution of Millbank prison is
accentuated by the fact that Margaret, on entering the latter, rather
than being struck by the difference between the women prisoners and
herself, as the reader might expect, finds herself identifying with
them. In fact, in a passage heralding her feelings of attraction for
Selina, she fantasizes about an exchange of hearts taking place
between herself and the prisoners. A comment voiced by a male
warder suddenly alerts her to the beating of her own heart, prompting
her to wonder [h]ow it would be to have that heart drawn from me,
and one of those womens coarse organs pressed into the slippery
cavity left at my breast (Waters 1999, 26). Margarets fantasy of the
prisoners heart entering her breast, in its reference to the invasion of
her body by an alien organ and the strongly physical manner in which
it is described, carries connotations of the abject and is disturbingly
sexual in implication. She appears both fascinated and repulsed by the
thought of contact with the working-class prisoners coarse organ, a
phrase which is, of course, as applicable to the genitals as it is to the
heart.
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65
As is evident from the quotation cited above, Affinity, while

differing from Schulmans People in Trouble in content, location, and
style, shares with it, like many works of contemporary lesbian fiction,
a pronounced emphasis on the physical and the material. The readers
attention is frequently directed to abject objects and substances.
Reference is made to the insalubrious nature of the food served to the
prisoners all of it horrible (35), in Margarets opinion. She
describes, the potatoes boiled in their skins and streaked with black
(35) and observes that the soup was cloudy, and had a layer of grease
upon the top that thickened and whitened as the cans grew cool (35).
The sensation of disgust which the layer of grease, the interface
between the soup and the individual drinking it, provokes in Margaret
reminds us of the sensation of nausea which Kristeva records having
felt when the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of
milk (1991, 2). The prisoners clothing strikes Margaret as similarly
sordid, and she describes in a tone of disgust their linsey dresses
smelling of sweat. A woman whom she engages in conversation
complains that her dress returns from the laundry very stained,
while the flannel under-things are awful rough, and tend to scratch
(39). Taken together, these references to the unpleasant food and the
female inmates shabby clothing create the impression of Millbank
prison as an abject world of female entrapment and suffering, physical
as well as mental.
My discussion of Schulmans People in Trouble and Waterss
Affinity illustrates the different strategies which writers of lesbian
fiction utilize to renegotiate the lesbians relations with the abject,
with the aim of resignifying her position. Whereas Schulman gives a
realist account of the relationship between lesbian/gay and
heterosexual communities and individuals in the context of the 1980s
New York AIDS crisis, depicting the uneasy and on occasion hostile
interaction between the two, Waters appropriates and recasts gothic
conventions and structures. Locating her narrative in Victorian
London, she employs motifs relating to the spectral, the vampire and
the doppelgnger in order to explore the disruptive effects of lesbian
desire in the repressive culture of nineteenth-century England and to
represent the element of excess which, regarded from a phallocentric
viewpoint, this desire signifies.
The two writers also differ in their treatment of the abject and the
particular aspects that they foreground. Schulman concentrates on
relating the physical and political dimensions. She prompts the reader
to compare and contrast Peters perception of Molly in her shabby
clothes as fat and dowdy with the heterosexual communitys rejection
66
of people with AIDS on account of their physical infirmity and

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

Discourse: The Repugnant and Distasteful at the Level of
Gender, Race, and Caste
Nilufer E. Bharucha
Marking out and identifying the Other often involves stigmatizing,
demonizing, judging as inferior, repugnant and/or distasteful. These
acts surface in cultural discourse as representations of disgust and turn
difference into inferiority, the disgusting, the abject. The marking of
someone as disgusting or treating them as abject can thus become an
act of victimization as the Other and his/her disgusting abjectness
can be blamed or made to carry the burden of the insufficiencies of the
self. This could be manifested in the internalization of inferior status
on grounds of both gender as well as race and thus becomes obvious
in the discourse of women and those who have/had been colonized to
experience self-hatred and low self-esteem. The disgusting and abject
are complex notions, and, as Miller has put it, they can attract as well
as repel (1997). Thus, in spite of its negative connotations, the
disgusting has featured in different forms of art both in the East and
in the West and theories of aesthetics have taken notice of it.
Aristotles Poetics assigns these feelings to the lower orders in the
context of the comic. However, even in the higher genre of tragedy, in
classical Greek drama, for example in Oedipus Rex, there are elements
such as incest, which evoke disgust and repel.
The theory of Indian Aesthetics, elaborated upon as the Rasa
theory, is related in the Natyashastra, wherein the Bhibhitsa is one of
the Rasas which signifies disgust and is conveyed by the artiste the
actor or dancer through facial expressions and bodily gestures. The
Natyashastra is supposed to have been created by Lord Brahma, the
Supreme Creator of the Hindu trinity, (the other two being the
Preserver Vishnu and the Destroyer Shiva); its more earthly
authorship, however, is generally attributed to Bharata. Bharatas
Natyashastra could have been composed anytime between 200 B.C.
and 200 A.D. (see Malshe 2003, 32-34). Bharatas Natyashastra
Natya meaning drama and shastra being the theory of dramaturgy
classifies dramatic art, which includes dance and music as these were
considered inseparable from drama. It also elaborates upon the
varieties of Bhasha language, chhanda metre, abhinaya acting,
the styles of presentations dharmis, types of rupas plays and the
70
eight Rasas aesthetic emotions. Rasa literally means flavour or taste:

the Natyashastra has codified the Rasas as different kinds of feelings
and human emotions that may be portrayed by the artiste (see
Vatsyayan 1996). Bharatas Natyashastra lists nine Rasas, though
Brahma had specified only eight. The ninth Rasa, Shantam, peace, is
believed to be Bharatas own contribution. The eight other Rasas are
Sringara, the Rasa of love, beauty, and the erotic; Roudra, that of
anger; Veera, bravery and courage; Hasya, happiness and laughter;
Karuna, pity and compassion; Bhaya, fear and horror; Adbhuta, the
strange and unique; and Bhibhitsa, the disgusting. Sringara, Roudra,
Veera and Bhibhitsa are the primary Rasas and the others are derived
from them. Hasya is derived from Sringara, as the beautiful and erotic
can result in laughter or smiles; Karuna from Roudra, as
paradoxically enough anger can be dissipated through pity and
compassion with the object of anger; Adbhuta from Veera, as that
which is brave is also often unique or at least unsual, and finally
Bhaya, fear or horror.
Bharata has defined the Bhibhitsa Rasa as the Juguptsa or disgust
that arises out of seeing what is displeasing or unwholesome, such as
vomit, faeces and bad odour. It can also arise upon hearing or
discussing similar things. It is usually expressed on stage through
anubhabas (expressions/gestures) such as the distortion of limbs or
the rolling of the eyes and the shaking of the head (see Malshe 2003,
73-84). The Bhibhitsa Rasa, although a primary Rasa, is/was rarely
used for long stretches in Indian classical dance or drama as it was
considered to be repulsive and hence unsuitable for depiction in long
stretches of time.
The relationship of this Classical Indian theory of drama to
Anglophone literature becomes evident when one keeps in mind that
this literature draws upon both the Indian and the Western literary and
critical traditions. Anglophone literature has emerged after the
colonization of India by the British and has hence functioned as a
cultural discourse with an in-built hybridity, due to the impact of
Western thought on Indian scholarship. Postcolonial theory has drawn
attention to how such evocation of the Western tradition can begin
with apparent mimesis but is ambivalent and not merely dependent on
identification with the colonial. Homi Bhabha has also said that the
menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the
ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority (1994,
88; emphasis in original). He has further looked at hybridity as a
liminal space, in-between the designations of identity which opens
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71
up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference

without an assumed or imposed hierarchy (1994, 4).
With regard to the Indian tradition right from the early years of
Indian literature in English, the influence of Indian epics, myths and
legends has been felt in the poetry of Henry Derozio, Toru Dutt,
Sarojini Naidu and A. K. Ramanujam, among many others. The
influence of Indian narrative modes has more particularly manifested
itself in the texts of postcolonial Indian novelists such as Salman
Rushdie and Vikram Chandra, again among many more. It is thus
fitting that the expression of the abject/disgusting be mapped on this
literature using the concept of the Bhibhitsa Rasa. The target texts,
plays written by two of Indias best-known dramatists Girish Karnad
and Mahesh Dattani focus on Indian myths (in the form of drama
and dance) and draw upon the Natyashastra in many different ways.
Dattani writes in English while Karnad writes first in Kannada and
then translates his plays into English. For the mapping of the
Bhibhitsa Rasa, I have chosen The Fire and the Rain (1998) by
Karnad and Dance Like a Man (1994) by Dattani.
In The Fire and the Rain, the Bhibhitsa Rasa is manifested at two
levels, that of gender and that of caste. There is also a third level, that
of the supernatural, where the acts/events that arouse disgust are
recreated in the liminal form of the Brahma Rakshasa, the demon
soul, who wanders between life and death, seeking relief from eternal
bondage. The play was commissioned in 1993 by the Guthrie Theater,
Minneapolis, USA, has had several performances in India and the
West, and was turned into a film with the same title in 2003. The
focus here though is entirely on the play and not the film. The original
Kannada title of the play is Agni Mattu Male. Agni is the Sanskrit,
classical word for a sacred fire, while the rest of the title is in
Kannada. In his notes to the play, Karnad explains that the word Agni
has connotations of holiness, ritual status, ceremony", which the
more common Kannada word for fire benki does not possess.
Agni is what burns in sacrificial altars, acts as a witness at weddings
and is lit at cremations. It is also the name of the god of fire (1998,
63). Male is the Kannada word for rain and mattu, in Kannada is a
concord which functions like the copula and.
The plot of the play has been drawn from the Indian epic,
Mahabharata, chapters 135-138 of the Vana Parva (Forest Canto).
Karnads source for the epic is Chakravarti Rajagopalacharis
translation of the epic. The play is based on the myth of Yavakri that
narrates the tale of the two sages, Bharadwaja and Raibhya. Raibhya
has two sons, Paravasu and Aravasu (Arvasu in the play), while the
72
son of the ascetic Bharadwaja is named Yavakri. Raibhya and his

elder son Paravasu are well-established scholar priests, and when the
play opens, Paravasu is performing a seven-year-long fire sacrifice
(Yagna) to propitiate the Rain God, Indra, as it has not rained for ten
years. Yavakri and his father, on the other hand, are comparatively
unknown and this incenses the son who seeks to avenge himself
against what he considers the unmerited neglect of his father and the
consequently high repute of Raibhya and Paravasu. In the Hindu
tradition there are at least two kinds of sages, those who seek
knowledge and salvation through total renunciation like Bhardwaj and
those who continue to interact with society at large and offer their
wisdom to kings and other powerful figures and guide them in the
running of the state. The latter thus have higher visibility but are in no
way considered superior to the ascetic sages. In spite of this, Yavakri
feels badly treated and retires to the forest to practise severe penances
through which he hopes to be granted a boon from Indra that would
destroy Raibhya and his sons. When he returns from the forest, though
Bhardwaj cautions him otherwise, he seeks out Paravasus wife,
Vishaka, and violates her to avenge himself on the men. Then ensues a
chain of events that includes the summoning of a Brahma Rakshasa
(demon soul) by Raibhya to destroy Yavakri. Raibhya also invokes a
beautiful girl who distracts Yavakri as he performs his morning rites
and pours away his sacred water thus leaving him open to attack by
the demon soul. Also in the story in the Mahabharata is the unwitting
slaying of Raibhya by Paravasu, who gets his younger brother
Aravasu to take upon himself the sin of patricide. Later, however,
Paravasu betrays his brother and denounces him as a Brahmin-killer.
Aravasu retires to the forest to seek a boon from the Sun God. He
succeeds in restoring life not just to his father but also to Raibhya and
Yavakri. The gods admonish Yavakri and henceforth ask him to
follow the path of righteousness, while Paravasu is made to forget his
lapses and becomes a good man (see Rajagopalachari 1951a, 118122).
Karnad has changed many aspects of the original myth in his play:
while the role of the gods does remain important, human agency is
given greater weight. One could read this as an aspect of Karnads
cultural hybridity, i.e. the influence of Western culture and literature
by the early modern period, the role of the gods, fate and destiny, were
replaced by individual character. Also foregrounded are the aspects of
gender and caste. This makes Karnads text much more complex than
the original tale. The manner in which both Paravasu and Yavakri
abuse Vishakha sexually brings in the element of the disgusting in
BHARUCHA
73
male-female equations. As regards the issue of caste, the tribal girl

Nittilai is Karnads chosen vehicle in the play for showing how the
lower castes and the tribals (outside the pale of the caste system) are
considered a defilement of upper caste society.
Also of import is the troupe of players who seek to perform a play,
as this brings in the device of the double-frame, the play within the
play, which can be found in the Natyashastra. The actor-manager is
also utilized by Karnad to elaborate upon the origins of drama and the
matter of the caste of the actors themselves. Even though they had
originally been Brahmins (upper caste) they are debased to the Sudra
(lower) level by their chosen profession. This is because as the last
chapter of the Natyashastra tells us the human preceptor of drama,
Bharata, had offended the Brahmins with one of his performances and
they had cursed the actors to be outcastes like the Sudras (see notes to
The Fire and the Rain, 72). The appearance of the actor-manager and
the permission granted to him to stage the play against the backdrop of
the Yagna provides the prologue that sets the scene for a flashback of
the three acts followed by the tightly constructed epilogue where the
man and the mask, the actor and the character portrayed by Arvasu
merge in the enactment of the play and result in the final denouement.
The performance of plays during Yagnas was a common practice in
Vedic and even later times in India. During the British Colonial period
Indian theatre was influenced by Western modes, and although the
folk tradition did survive, the classical Indian theatre, which had
earlier been disrupted by the Mughal (Islamic) invasions was to be
found no more, except in the kind of revivals attempted by a writer
like Karnad, whose drama itself is a hybrid construct influenced by
both the East and the West. Other contemporary Indian dramatists
writing in different Indian languages are also influenced by Western
traditions, although their plays are also informed by classical Indian
drama and its techniques, especially that of the sutradhar the
narrator as in the case of the Marathi playwright Vijay Tendulkar.
However, interestingly enough, at times this revival of Sanskrit
dramatic techniques is routed through the theatre of Bertolt Brecht,
which has had a major impact on modern Indian drama.
Gender is debased in the play in the form of both Vishakha and
Nittilai, the tribal girl beloved of Paravasus younger brother Arvasu.
The younger Vishakha, who used to be the beloved of Yavakri, (the
Yavakri-Vishakha relationship is Karnads creation and does not
feature in the original myth) was abandoned by him when he had gone
off to the forest in search of the boon from Indra. The only memory of
her that he had carried with him to the forest was the sight of her
74
young, half-formed breasts that she had bared to him in the moment of
parting. This is the memory with which he confronts her years later in
the play. Vishakha, now twenty-six, has gained much sexual
experience during the years that she has been married to Paravasu and
scoffs at Yavakri you think a woman is only a pair of half-formed
breasts (16). During the first year of their marriage Vishakhas body
had been plunged into bliss by her husband, but after that he had said,
Enough of that. We now start our search (16). The decision to
search was a unilateral one and Vishakha had no say in the manner
in which he used her body until Nothing was shameful, too
degrading, even too painful. Shame died in me. And I yielded. I let my
body be turned inside out (16).
After these sexual practices/perversions that left Vishakha drained,
Paravasu continued on the path of knowledge, sought power and was
finally appointed chief priest of the Yagna, the ritual performed by the
King to propitiate Lord Indra and bring rain to the land which had
been parched for ten long years (although not mentioned in the text,
Paravasu was presumably trying to be a Tantrik, one who seeks power
and knowledge through the Bhog Marg, i.e. the physical route).
Paravasu had not returned home once in the seven years that he was in
the service of the King and Vishakhas body had become dry like
tinder. Ready to burst into flames at a breath (16). Here one could
link Vishakhas parched body to the parched earth and see how
Karnad has mapped the kingdom/land across the body of the woman.
This is also consonant with the manner in which Yavakri attempts to
avenge his family honour by assaulting the wife of his enemy. This is
in keeping with patriarchal practices, where an assault on the
woman/property of a man would be a proxy blow directed against the
man.
In the Manusrmiti, the most popular of Hindu scriptures, which is
widely considered to be a handbook on behaviour regarding familial,
social, and religious duties, women did not enjoy an independent
existence. According to Manu (generally placed in the Indian epic
period, ca. 1110 B.C.), before marriage women were the property of
their father and in his absence that of the brother. After marriage
women belonged to their husbands, and in widowhood they were
under the care of their sons or other male relations by marriage. Manu
is also credited with having felt that the more you beat a woman, a
Sudra, and a drum the better they became. Such opinions on women
were also voiced in the epics. In the Mahabharatha, the patriarch
Bhisma had opined that women were the vilest creatures on earth and
the root of all evil. In the Ramayana, the other Indian epic, the sage
BHARUCHA
75
Agastya had observed that women loved their husbands in prosperity

but left them in adversity and that their nature was fickle and sharp.
The Rigveda, for example, says that women were seducers of men and
could lead men astray (see Mukherjee 1993, 10).
Given such a backdrop, the manner in which Paravasu treats
Vishakha, making her a partner in his perverse sex acts, probably for
his own tantric gains, as well as the fact that Yavakri also has sex with
her only to get back at her husband and father-in-law, comes as no
surprise. Vishakha, ignorant of this agenda on the part of Yavakri,
mistakenly exults in what she thinks is the possible knowledge and
comfort her body can provide him. When Nittilai, who was with
Arvasu (Vishakhas brother-in-law), inadvertently sees them having
sex behind some bushes, she tries to shield Vishakha (in an act of
female bonding) by drawing Arvasu away but fails. Nittilais gesture
of support is notwithstanding her lack of acceptance by the upper
castes and thus cuts across caste boundaries. Also unlike Vishakhas,
Nittilais sensitivity is not steeped in knowledge physical or
intellectual. Vishakha runs back home to Raibhyas hermitage. After
Vishakha leaves, Yavakri swaggers out from the bushes and threatens
Nittilai with imminent death, in case she disclosed what she had seen.
Raibhya becomes suspicious when Vishakha returns home without
her pot of water the pot she had left behind when accosted by
Yavakri. He begins questioning Arvasu, who had followed her home.
When Arvasu tries to find excuses for her he grabs Vishakha by the
hair and starts beating her. Vishakha admits that she had met Yavakri
and her father-in-law explodes, You whore you roving whore!
(Karnad 1998, 20). There is an ambiguity in Raibhyas anger as
Vishakhas later discussion with her husband Paravasu reveals;
Raibhya could have used Vishakhas body during the absence of her
husband, a fact left ambivalent in the play which in itself is a
Bhibhitsa act as a daughter-in-law was considered to be like a
daughter to the father-in-law. Raibhya creates a Brahma Rakshasa
from a hair from his head and sends him out to destroy Yavakri.
Arvasu runs to Bhardwajs hermitage and alerts the Andhaka the
blind man who is the caretaker, to tell Yavakri when he gets home,
to stay inside the hermitage, as he would be safe from the Brahma
Rakshasa there. Vishakha in turn rushes off to warn Yavakri, who
spurns her by saying that he had deliberately set up the situation where
he would be discovered with Vishakha, in order to insult Raibhya and
avenge himself for the degradation of his father at the hands of
Vishakhas father-in-law. He even tells Vishakha that if she had not
yielded to him, he would have had to take her by force (23). This
76
revelation traumatizes Vishakha, who sees it as one more instance of

male betrayal and deliberately pours away the sanctified water in her
pot, the water that would have saved Yavakri from the attack by the
Brahma Rakshasa. In the myth, it is an alluring maiden created by
Raibhya who tricks Yavakri and pours away the water, but here it is
Vishakha who is provided with female agency and tries to right at
least one of the wrongs done to her. This once again makes Karnads
play more complex and interesting than the myth that inspired it. A
distraught Yavakri, chased by the Brahma Rakshasa, runs to his
fathers hermitage but is denied entry by the Andhaka, whose lack of
sight is just then compounded by impaired hearing and hence fails to
recognize Yavakris footsteps. Yavakri thus dies, being denied the
safety of the hermitage where the Brahma Rakshasa could not have
harmed him; but the travails of Vishaka, Arvasu and Nittilai have just
begun.
The good-hearted Arvasu could not let Yavakris corpse lie outside
the hermitage to be torn apart by wild animals, so he decided to
cremate him. This makes him late for the appointment he had with
Nittilais tribe. He was supposed to meet her father and the tribe elders
and ask for her hand in marriage. Slighted by what they thought was a
Brahmin youth, trifling with the affections of an outcaste girl, they
decide to give her away in marriage to a young man from the tribe.
When Arvasu returns home he finds that his brother Paravasu has
stolen away from the sacrifice and come home to investigate the
rumours he has heard about his wife and Yavakri. Raibhya is horrorstruck at the enormity of his action; the rivalry between the father and
son, professional and personal, comes to a head and we learn that the
old man grudged his son the status of the chief priest at the sacrifice
and recalls that he had warned the King, Mark my words, my son
defecates wherever he goes. And he will defecate in your sacrifice
(29). This is yet another clear reference to the disgusting and odious
the Bhibhitsa as defecation in itself was a disgusting act according to
the Natyashastra. Yet to imply that Paravasus being made chief priest
for the Yagna would lead to its desecration by his metaphorical acts of
defecation in its sacred fire, is doubly disgusting. Riled by the fact that
it was his sons youth that had won him the coveted position, he says,
Tell the King I shall outlive my sons. I shall live long enough to feed
their dead souls. Tell him the swarm of dogs sniffing around my
daughter-in-laws bottom keeps me in good shape (29). The gross
reference to Vishakha reiterates the possibility of physical relations
Raibhya might have had with her. He then rushes out of the hermitage.
Arvasu too is sent out and Paravasu is finally alone with his wife.
BHARUCHA
77
Vishakha admits to having had sex with Yavakri and wants her
husband to kill her. She also hints that she wishes to be rid of
Raibhyas lust, An old mans curdled lust [], wizened body, the
scratchy claws, and the blood, cold as ice (32-33). However, instead
of killing her, Paravasu shoots an arrow at his father and kills him.
This is a deliberate act and not an error of judgement as in the myth.
As Vishakha says, Now youll never know if I told you a lie (33).
Having got rid of his father, maybe not so much because he had
supposedly defiled his wife, but because his envy would have
ultimately got in the way of the successful completion of the fire
sacrifice (and consequently his own ambitions), Paravasu transfers the
guilt of patricide onto his younger brother, Arvasu, who becomes an
unwilling scapegoat for the actions of his brother.
The play now opens up to bring in matters of caste into the acts of
disgust and defilement. The division of the Hindu society into four
castes is first mentioned in the text Purusa Sukta and was originally
initiated to conserve the traditions of the Aryans when they migrated
into India and had to contend with the Dravidians and other
inhabitants they found there. This is how the division of Hindu society
into Brahmins (the Priests), the Kshatriyas (the warriors), the Vaisyas
(the traders), and the Sudras (the menials/untouchables) came about.
Since the majority of those designated Sudras came from non-Aryan
stock the tribals and the Dravidians the caste system was based as
much on race as it was on occupation (see Radhakrishnan 1999, 1112). Over time, the caste system became hereditary and fixed.
However, by acts of defilement, members of the upper castes, even the
Brahmins, could become debased and be grouped with the lowest
caste. This development is the central focus of The Fire and the Rain.
The actor-manager says in the Prologue, The sons of Bharata were
the first actors in the history of theatre. They were Brahmins but lost
their caste because of their profession. A curse plunged them into
disrepute and disgrace. If one values ones high birth, one should not
touch this profession (3). The actor-manager delivers a message from
Arvasu, who has joined forces with the players. Defiled by Paravasu
having foisted on him the sin of patricide, he did not see a reason to
shrink from further defilement of becoming an actor. As Arvasu
relates to Nittlilai, Soldiers pounced on me. Kicked me. Dragged
me to some cemetery. Tore my sacred thread []. Did he think I was
married to you? Did he think I had become a low-caste actor? No, no.
I remember. He clearly said, Out! Out! Demon []. Away with
you (41). The sacred thread is the symbol of the Brahmin and he is
invested with it in a solemn ceremony and the tearing off of this
78
thread is akin to excommunication in the Christian church. In the act

of excommunication, though, the offender is thrown out of the
Christian fold; here the offender remains within the caste system, but
is debased and assigned to the Sudra caste, i.e. he loses caste. The
marriage to Nittilai, a tribal girl, would have meant loss of caste for
Arvasu, but what happens to him is more dreadful as he is taken to a
cemetery (the supposed haunt of demons and roving souls denied
release, Moksha). There he is shunned and driven away as if he were a
demon himself.
Linked thus to the question of defilement by association with the
lower castes is the defilement by demons (the supernatural) this
introduces the third element of the Bhibhitsa into the play. It was
believed that demons gather around the sacred spaces of the fire
sacrifice and try to defile it, especially as it draws to an end. This
prompts Paravasu to take the risk of letting the players, who are of a
lower caste, perform the play as there was already danger of demonic
defilement to the Yagna. The play at least would provide relief to the
king, his court and the priests themselves.
At the beginning of the play, Arvasu is portrayed as a rather nave
youth, but by the time he is falsely accused of patricide and deprived
of his beloved Nittilai, he becomes bitter and almost paranoid and says
to Nittilai:
Its a conspiracy, dont you see, it's all planned because I wanted to marry
you. Because I was ready to reject my caste, my birth []. You hunters you
only know minor spells and witchcrafts spirits slithering in shallow caves or
dangling on trees. But Yavakri and Father and Brother can bring out the terrors
from the womb of the earth and play with them. They can set this foul nature
against you [] like a stink emanating from that sacrifice. (43)
Here the victim finally stops believing himself to be vile and

disgusting. Instead, he has come to realize that it is Paravasu, the
Chief Priest, who is vile: [I]f such an evil man continues as the Chief
Priest of the sacrifice, itll rain blood at the end (43).
Preoccupied though Arvasu is with these thoughts, he is fascinated
enough with the craft of theatre to demonstrate his prowess as a
dancer to the actor-manager who finds him excellent; the problem,
however, is that, because of Nittilai, Arvasu will not be able to
perform with the players, even though his brother grants the
permission. Nittalais brother and husband have run to ground the
runaway bride, and she is mortally afraid of being killed by them and
wants to run away to safety with Arvasu. However, when she learns
that Arvasu danced like a celestial being (49), she decides to hide in
BHARUCHA
79
the jungle and join him after the performance. The play within the
play is called The Triumph of Lord Indra a struggle between
Lord Indra and the demon Vritra (50). Arvasu takes on the role of
Vritra as he has to dance, and the actor-manager plays Indra. As he
puts on the mask of Vritra, the actor-manager cautions: [O]nce you
bring a mask to life you have to keep a tight control over it, otherwise
itll try to take over. Itll begin to dictate terms to you and you must
never let that happen. Prostrate yourself before it. Pray to it. Enter it.
Then control it (52).
The mask does gain control of Arvasu as the similarities between
the play and his own situation become apparent not just to him but
also to Paravasu and the Brahma Rakshasa, who had manifested
himself next to Paravasu. The actor-manager, who has donned the
mask of Indra, appears to Arvasu as the betrayer Paravasu, who also
recognizes himself in that role, as does the Brahma Rakshasa. The
Brahma Rakshasa, who had been evoked by Raibhya to kill Yavakri,
claims brotherhood with Paravasu (since Raibhya had evoked him, he
considered him his father) and seeks release from him a relationship
denied by the Chief Priest with as much ruthlessness as the denial of
his actual brother Arvasu. Arvasu attacks Indra/the actormanager/Paravasu with a burning torch. His frenzy takes the latter by
surprise and he cries out, Its the mask its the mask come alive.
Restrain him or therell be chaos (57). Arvasu, however, cannot be
restrained and he enters the sacrificial enclosure and sets it on fire
with a burning torch; behind him surges the audience of weak and
hungry villagers (57) who enter the sacred space to get access to the
sacrificial viands kept there to feed the gods, while they themselves
starved. The Yagna is thus defiled many times over, once by the entry
of Arvasu into the sacred spaces, meant only for the priests, and then
by the common folk who loot the sacrificial food meant for feeding
the sacred fire. Seeing his years of work as chief priest desecrated
the Yagna would now not be acceptable to the gods Paravasu walks
into the blazing enclosure and becomes the human sacrifice. Nittilai
rushes in to rescue Arvasu, but is killed by her husband and brother.
Here Nittilai, who had dared assume female agency by running
away from her husband, is punished for this by being deprived of her
life. The fact that her brother accompanied the husband makes for a
more comprehensive assertion of patriarchal rights over a woman.
What makes this patriarchal domination of Nittilai intriguing is the
fact that she belonged to a social group that had not always embraced
Hinduisms laws regarding the ownership of a woman by the males in
her family. Tribal societies, however, by association with Hindus,
80
have over the centuries adopted Hindu laws, including the ones
unfavourable to women. In modern India, the bride price demanded by
tribal laws has been replaced by a dowry payable by the brides family
instead. As in the case of women who internalize male supremacy and
wield the stick over their own sex, such adoptions of strictures
applicable to a higher social group, by a group cast out by the superior
group, becomes an attempt to seek kinship and even a matter of social
climbing. It is instructive to note that Arvasu, defiled though he is by
his alleged patricide and association with actors, is not killed by the
avenging duo, it is only Nittilai whose throat is slit. Karnad tells us
that she lies dying like a sacrificial animal (58). Even Arvasu
blames only Nittilai for her own end: Serves you right! Who asked
you to meddle with this world? [] What do you expect? (58). He is,
however, willing to die with her and moves towards the Yagna,
offering the fire two more victims himself and Nittilais corpse
after the flames had already been fed by Paravasus body.
Even as Arvasu moves towards the sacred precinct of the Yagna,
Indra, the King of the Gods and the rain god, too, appears to him
pleased by the sacrifice and tells him to ask for a blessing. Karnad
leaves ambivalent what actually pleased the God; was it Arvasus own
courage in chasing the actor who played Indra and in trying to kill
him, or was it Paravasus sacrifice and Nittilais humanity (59).
Almost in the manner of Jehovah in the Book of Job, Indra dissuades
Arvasu from trying to comprehend the ways of the Gods: The point
is we are here and you can ask for anything (59). This can be read as
one more instance of cultural hybridity in Karnads text, as access to
Western literary/Biblical sensibilities as well as Indian mythological
ones. In fact in the notes at the end of the play, Karnad has
acknowledged a further influence and said how the
shape of the myth [he] was dealing with had uncanny parallels with that of
Aeschyluss Oresteia. The plot naturally fell into three parts, like a trilogy, each
part with its own central action and lead character. The first two parts opened
with the protagonist returning home after a prolonged absence while the third
part culminated not in some dramatic event, but in a debate on human frailty
and divine grace. Then there was the presence in both of a supernatural agency
bent on avenging a crime. (74)
Now begins the conflict of interests that leads to the climax of the
play. The crowd wants Arvasu to ask Indra, the Rain God and the
King of all the Gods, who has appeared before him, for rain. The
Brahma Rakshasa wants Arvasu to ask Indra for his release. Arvasu
himself wants Nittilai restored to life. The moral dilemma is finally
BHARUCHA
81
resolved when Arvasu, unlike the treacherous Indra of the play/his

brother Paravasu in real-life, chooses to keep faith with his brother,
the Brahma Rakshasa, and asks for his release from a life within
death. The liberation of the demon spirit heralds the coming of the
much-needed rain, and at the end of the play Arvasu exults to the dead
Nittilai, Its raining. Nittilai! Its raining (62). Ultimately, it is the
women in the text who are sacrificed to public weal and order
Nittilai is killed; Vishakha is deprived of her husband Paravasu dies
in the Yagna. This aspect of female sacrifice for the larger good of
society can itself be considered Bhibhitsa women are viewed as
more expendable than men. However, the text can also be read in an
alternative manner: those who were thought to be disgusting, the
defiled Arvasu and the outcaste Nittilai, are the ones who bring
salvation not just to the Brahma Rakshasa, but to the rain-scorched
earth and the starving villagers, too. The text thus reverses the notions
of purity and impurity, that which is aesthetically pleasing and
appealing and that which is considered Bhibhitsa.
The second play under consideration has certain links with The Fire
and the Rain. Dattanis Dance Like a Man is also centred on the
performing arts the Bharat Natyam dance. Here, too, the performing
artiste is belittled and considered debased and defiling by a traditional
society, a society which from the times of Manu has been strongly
patriarchal in its orientations. Arvasu as a Brahmin lad could not give
free rein to his desire to dance, to perform. It is only when he is an
alleged father-killer and already defiled, that he joins the players. In
Dattanis play Jairajs traditionalist father keeps him from becoming a
dancer. Amritlal Parekh not only considers a male dancer effeminate
but also thinks that women who dance are little more than prostitutes.
Parekh looks upon dancers, especially male dancers, with disgust
regardless of the fact that the celestial dancer Shiva, also known as
Natraja (the Lord of Dance), was male, and is held in great reverence
by Hindus as part of the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva the
creator, the preserver, the destroyer. Parekh had been active in the
freedom struggle of India and as an avowed disciple of Gandhi, who
had led Indias struggle against colonial rule he should have been
more progressive in his views, as social reform, aimed at caste and
gender oppressions, was one of the platforms which Gandhi had used
to mobilize the Indian masses against the imperial forces.
Dance Like a Man is set within two time levels and has a double
frame stage setting, too. The first time level is one immediately after
independence, i.e. in the late 1940s and 1950s, and the second time
level is placed a generation later. The actors, too, perform double
82
duties the young Jairaj and the young suitor of his daughters hand,
Viswas, are played by the same actor; the older Jairaj and the Amritlal
Parikh are also played by just one actor; the role of the young Ratna,
Jairajs wife and that of Lata, Jairaj and Ratnas daughter, are played
by the same actor, too. Dattani insisted on this role-change, and
although he has put this directive down in the published version of his
play, he has not stated a reason other than that it is vital to the play
(1994, 109). One could, however, conjecture that the passing of time
can thus be seen as not linear, but as circular, when the son becomes
the father and the mother the daughter. One could also read this
doubling as a subversion of patriarchal authority, which gains
further complexity given the sexual orientation of the playwright
himself.
Dattani has also prefaced the play with a Playwrights Note in
which he has explained the degradation of the classical dance form,
Bharat Natyam. From being associated with temples and worship in
the Vedic period, it became the preserve of Devdaasis, who were
professional female dancers known as the slaves of the Lord, in later
times. The Devdaasis were often sexually exploited by priests, kings
and feudal lords. Yet these women continued to perform within the
temple, before the sanctum sanctorum, and their presence was not
considered to defile the deity. With the advent of the Islamic invaders
and later the European colonizers with their own brands of
Puritanism dancers were truly marginalized and were removed to
dancing platforms outside the temples and later to brothels in the
marketplace (see Dattani 1994, 107-108). The average upper caste
Indian considered them impure and their very presence was supposed
to defile the Brahmin and his household, though this did not prevent
many of them from patronizing these dancers. As for the European
colonizers, while they too thought these women to be morally
repugnant, they were often patrons of what they called the nautch
girls, nautch being a corruption of the Hindustani word natch
meaning dance.
In the first half of the twentieth century, however, Bharat Natyam
and other classical Indian dance forms enjoyed a renaissance under the
influence of social reformers and freedom activists, as they sought to
revive native traditions and rehabilitate oppressed women. The
institution of the Devdaasi was abolished and at the same time women
from respectable homes began to learn the dance forms, usually
from the Devdaasis, as they were the only exponents available at that
time. An interesting aside at this point is that in recent years the
renowned Odissi dance exponent, Sanjukta Panigrahi, shocked
BHARUCHA
83
reformist circles in India by wanting to become a Devdaasi in the Kasi

Vishwanath temple in Benares, the holy Hindu city. She saw this as an
ultimate act of worship and surrender to the Lord but was prevented
by a progressive bureaucracy that since Indias independence had
tried to abolish anti-woman practices not always with absolute
success.
Dattanis own position as a gay man cannot be ignored in his
depiction of the status of the male dancer in India of the 1950s and
even the 80s. In this play one can see Dattanis reference to
intolerance by traditional Indian society towards men who engage in
so-called feminine occupations such as dancing. However,
postcolonial India has produced several eminently respected and
lauded male dancers and gurus, such as Kelucharan Mahapatra and
Birju Maharaj, and the caricaturing of male dancers is more the bane
of popular Indian cinema than Indian society at large.
In Dattanis play, Parekh thinks his sons teacher is effeminate, if
not gay, because he wears his hair long and walks in a particular way.
Dattani appears to see these sexual stereotypes and intolerance
towards alternative sexual preferences as Bhibhitsa disgusting and
makes Jairaj retort, This is disgusting! You are insane (1994,
153). Parekh also believes that anyone who learnt such a craft
[dancing] could not be a man (137). He felt that a mans happiness
lay [i]n being a Man (164). These stereotypical constructs of
masculinity suggest that [a] woman in a mans world may be
considered being progressive. But a man in a womans world is
pathetic (166). For a traditional man like Parekh, a man in a womans
world, even if the celestial dancer Shiva is a man, is unacceptable.
Years later Jairaj still carried the searing memory of his father
saying to him, The craft of a prostitute to show off her wares what
business did a man have learning such a craft? Of what use could it be
to him? No use. So no man would want to learn such a craft. Hence
anyone who learnt such a craft could not be a man (137). Jairaj
accuses his father of double standards and says, Where are your
progressive ideas now? [] You didnt fight to gain independence.
You fought for power in your hands. Why, you are just as
conservative and prudish as the people who were ruling over us!
(150). When Parekh defends himself by saying that We are building
ashrams (shelters) for these unfortunate women [the Devdaasis]!
Educating them, reforming them , Jairaj counters with Send them
back to their temples! Give them awards for preserving our art , but
Parekh is horrified with that and says, I will not let our temples be
turned into brothels (151).
84
Interestingly, it is not just the Devdaasis who are considered to be

prostitutes because they dance, but also middle-class, upper caste
women like Ratna are vulnerable to male advances when they become
dancers. This is evident in the text when, angered by Parekhs hostility
to their art, Jairaj and Ratna leave his house and take shelter in Ratnas
uncles home. This man, however, asks Ratna to go to bed with him.
Jairaj comments on this by saying, Do you think your uncle made
such interesting proposals to all his nieces? No! That would be a great
sin. But you were different. You were meant for entertainment
(143).
There are many other elements that arouse disgust within the actors
themselves in the play and provide material for the deconstruction of
the audiences/readers own notions of what is aesthetic/beautiful and
what is considered to be Bhibhitsa. In this category falls the guilty
secret that Jairaj and Ratna carry within them the death of their son
Shankar, another name of Shiva, the Lord of Dance. Shankar was
killed by an overdose of opium administered to him by Ratna when
she had left him at home to go and perform, not knowing that her
maid had already given the baby some of the same, so that he would
be quiet and not trouble her. The story of Shivaratri provides an
interesting comment here; Shivaratri literally means the night of
Shiva. The story goes that when the Devas, the gods who were in
search of a potent nectar (the amrut, which would destroy their
enemies the Asuras, the dark, demonized race), requested Shiva to
drink the poison they churned up from the ocean, which welled up
from the seas ahead of the amrut. Of the Hindu trinity Brahma, the
Creator, Vishnu, the Preserver, and Shiva, the Destroyer only the
latter could drink this poison and neutralize it. If this had not
happened, the poison would have spread throughout the world and
destroyed it. When Shiva drank this poison churned up by the gods,
his consort, Parvati (also manifested as Shakti, the female principle,
Durga, the benevolent mother, and Kali, the dreadful destroyer of evil)
held his throat to prevent the poison from going any further and kept
him awake all night so that his body could neutralize it. Even though
the poison was neutralized, it stained Shivass throat dark blue. As a
result, Shiva is also called Neelkanth, the blue-throated one. Devotees
of Shiva stay up all night emulating Paravatis act of devotion on
Shivaratri. Jairaj and Ratna are unable to rise to such heights and
instead descend to the abject level of having poisoned Shankar even
if inadvertently and being the ones responsible for his death rather
than his salvation.
BHARUCHA
85
By the time Shankar was killed, Ratna and Jairaj had become
professionals, though it was Ratnas career that flourished as she had
made a disgusting (Bhibhitsa) deal with her father-in-law he would
let her dance if she kept his son away from it. She therefore
deliberately sabotaged Jairajs career, and when he turned to alcohol
she treated him with open contempt. Jairaj knew that his father was
the root cause of the way his wife treated him and he pinned his hopes
on his infant son Shankar; through him he would get back at his
father, who doted on his grandson: Ill teach him how to dance the
dance of Shiva. The dance of a man. And when he is ready, Ill bring
him to his grandfather and make him dance on his head the tandav
nritya (185). Tandav nritya is generally translated as the dance of
anger the Roudra Rasa. This, however, remains in the realms of
dreams alone, as Shankar/Shiva, the ultimate symbol of masculinity
and worshipped by Hindus in the form of the lingam the penis is
killed, albeit inadvertently, by Ratna (perhaps a reference to the
Freudian stifling mother?). He is replaced by a girl child, Lata, whose
name means the clinging vine, through whom she now wants to live
out her own unfulfilled dreams of stardom. Is it perhaps possible to
read gay politics into this section of the play? And is it perhaps also
possible to read the play as a debasement of the female principle
Shakti, in Hindu cosmology and the valorization of the male
Principle, Shiva, the Purusha?
The lack of proper understanding of dance in contemporary India is
also in the realm of the Bhibhitsa at the aesthetic level. The patronage
of the state, which has replaced the earlier patronage of the king and
the chief priests, has meant the abasement of the dancer to the new
patrons. The state, in the form of politicians, has the financial
wherewithal to dole out largesse by way of awards and foreign dance
tours. Dattani critiques this in the manner in which Ratna pays, what
she considers subtle obeisance to Dr. Gowda, the minister in charge of
culture, so that he would consider Lata for a dance tour abroad. When
Jairaj chides her for sounding almost obsequious, she retorts, You
say Im pushing myself by talking to him, Chandra Kala is probably
sitting on his lap (169). The reference to Chandra Kala here brings to
mind the real-life dancer Chandralekha, who was said to have a rather
bohemian reputation in conventional, South Indian dance circles.
Contemporary dance critics are also in the realm of the Bhibhitsa
when they debase their calling by writing reviews of dance
performances without actually seeing the performance, or else whose
accolades can be bought with a few well-placed favours. Ratna is not
above such behaviour when it comes to ensuring that Latas
86
performances receive rave reviews: Ive taken care of the critics

already. Ive promised C.V. Suri Ill make him the chief guest at the
Navratri festival. That old fogey loves to be garlanded on stage. And if
he gives Lata a rave review, the others wouldnt dream of doing
differently (145-146). This could be read as defilement of the sacred
art form by the modern world a defilement that should arouse
disgust.
Bharat Natyam, which originated as an act of worship and was
symbolized by the divine dancer (Nataraja), also embodied the
ultimate union of Shiva and Shakti, the male and female principles,
manifested in Nataraja sculptures which often show Shiva in his
Ardhanareshwar form half-female, half-male. Jairaj and Ratna in
their initial desire to score points against one another and later, in
pursuing worldly success for their daughter even when her steps are
not in consonance with the beat of the tablas (drums) were unable to
achieve through their dance this divine union between their physical
selves and ultimately with the divine. However, at the end of the
play, when first Jairaj and then Ratna die, the physical and egotistic
obstacles to their Ardhanareshwar manifestation are removed. In the
monologue voiced by Jairaj, when they meet in heaven, [We]
embrace. We smile. And we dance. We dance perfectly. In unison.
Not missing a step or a beat (193). Jairaj attributes the mistakes they
have committed in their lives and their art to the fact that [w]e were
only human. We lacked the grace. We lacked the brilliance. We
lacked the magic to dance like a God (193-194). The curtain falls and
the light and the music fade over the reified man and woman and their
divine dance male and female together in perfect unison like the
Ardhanareshwar Natraja. One could read into this the ultimate gay
subversion of the patriarchal notion of maleness by foregrounding the
one Hindu God who is the symbol of maleness the lingam and yet
in his Natraja form incorporates and subverts this very in-your-face
celebration of male superiority.
In death, if not in a life that was considered Bhibhitsa by others,
their life and their art is finally able to achieve aesthetic heights. The
Bhibhitsa Rasa is transcended and turned into not just the Rasa of
Sringara love and beauty but the ultimate Rasa of blissful peace
Shantam the emotion which is not just the beginning but the end, an
emotion achieved very near the state of release from the cycle of death
and rebirth (Moksha). Taken together, The Fire and the Rain and
Dance Like a Man provide new interpretations of the classical Indian
concept of the Bhibhitsa Rasa; they thereby redefine notions of what
is or should be repugnant and distasteful.
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Works Cited
Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Dattani, Mahesh. 1994. Dance Like a Man. In Final Solutions and Other Plays,
111-194. Delhi: Manas [Affiliated East West Press Ltd].
Jha, Ganganath. 1932. Manusmriti with the Manubhasya of Medhatithi. 2 Vols.
Calcutta: The Asiatic Society of Bengal.
Karnad, Girish. 1998. The Fire and the Rain. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Malshe, Milind. 2003. Aesthetics of Literary Classification. Mumbai: Popular
Prakashan.
Miller, William Ian. 1997. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Mukherjee, Prabhati. 1993. Hindu Women, Normative Models. Calcutta: Sangam
Books Limited.
Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli. 1999. Indian Philosophy. Vol. 1. Delhi: Oxford University
Press.
Rajagopalachari, Chakravarti. 1951a. Mahabharata. Bombay: Bhartiya Vidya
Bhavan.
. 1951b. Ramayana. Bombay: Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan.
Vatsyayan, Kapila. 1996. Bharata: The Natyasastra. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.
The Gothic-Grotesque of Haunted: Joyce Carol Oatess Tales

of Abjection
Susana Arajo
Body is earth, territory of violent metamorphosis and substitution. We
are all in peril of becoming thing. The grotesque gap between our
humanity and this thing the body killed, damaged, wounded is held
open by metaphors.
Stephen Owen, Mi-lou: Poetry and the Labyrinth of Desire
In literature, as in the visual arts, images of the body have come to
assimilate many of the collective changes of the postmodern world. In
a recent review for the New York Times, the critic Laura Miller
describes Joyce Carol Oatess novel Blonde as the most ferocious
fictional treatise ever written on the uninhabitable grotesqueness of
femininity (2000, 6). Oates, for whom the greatest realities are
physical and economic (Oates qtd. in Allen 1987, 61), has chosen the
female body to stage many of the social changes of the last fifty years.
Contemporary artistic and academic interest in the body is a
consequence of the profound transformations of Western industrial
societies brought about by a number of related processes such as the
new systems of production, consumption, and distribution which
characterize post-Fordism as well as the cultural framework of
postmodernism. With the movement of industrial capitalism towards a
post-industrial system based on a global economy, service industries,
advertising, advanced consumption, and the manipulation of
communications through public relations industries, the traditional
relationship between employment, property, and the body has changed
dramatically. For women, these changes have been accompanied by
paradoxical facts. Having achieved a degree of economic power which
would have been unthinkable some decades ago, women have become
powerful consumers supporting an economy whose cultural logic and
marketing industries continue to objectify womens bodies through the
stylized eroticism of advertising campaigns, themselves promoters of
always-innovative notions of beauty, fashion and health. But new
perspectives on the body have also been a consequence of the many
90
transformations in the private sphere. The experience of physical

intimacy has also changed within personal relations. Relationships are
no longer exclusively based upon a property contract, nor dominated
by the heterosexual paradigm but depend on a series of new
expectations about personal satisfaction through intimacy and sexual
contact. Womens bodies are subject to other kinds of sexual control
and scientific regulation as they are made more efficient and sexy
through reproductive technologies, plastic surgery, etc.
These changes are responsible for the contemporary commercial
interest in the body and for the pervasiveness of corporeal images not
only in consumer culture, but also in art, where the body is exposed as
increasingly malleable and accessible. It is thus not surprising that
Western contemporary art returns to the body, no longer as a private
and unified space, but made public, commodified, and disjointed. In
the photographs of Cindy Sherman, for instance, the body is often
presented as an assembly of fragments where the female sexual organs
are, critically, fetishized. Other examples of deconstructed bodies can
be found in the sculpture of Louise Bourgeois, where the fragmented
body is the site of challenging gender-metamorphosis and Robert
Mapplethorpes work, where the male sexual organ is paradoxically
both domesticated and sublimated.
Diverging from many caricatured bodies in popular art and
literature, which shock the eye of the viewer (or reader) but often
cannot dispute their own commodified status, Joyce Carol Oatess
characters always struggle to resist commodification and exploitation.
Oatess bodies fight back, interrogating the visual/textual frames in
which they are inscribed. Her characters do not, however, undergo the
fantastic emancipation possible in the work of authors such as
Angela Carter, whose magical realism offers a more drastic rewriting
of our social reality. Oatess characters can only change their own
plots by renegotiating their roles within the logic of the social world.
Their bodies are always contextual bodies, bodies in time and bodies
in history. As Marilyn C. Wesley points out, Oatess characters are
universally repelled by the chaotic. It would be impossible for Oatess
characters to remain within the undifferentiated state of the imaginary
rather than attempt to participate in the cultural organisation of the
symbolic (1995, 120). Her characters are always represented in social
frameworks, whose logic they have to recognize and understand so
that they can eventually translate it into gestures of defiance. Novels
such as Them and Marya convey that socializing process by staging
their female protagonists entry into the world of language and
culture, through a process which implies the redefinition of their
ARAJO
91
physical selves and often the rejection of their own sexuality. The
disturbance of gender categories, which is presented as a reticent
process of Oatess novels, finds an interesting terrain in her short
fiction. By generating tensions between her stories, Oates creates
visible dialectics within her collections which show how cultural
constructions of the female body are not only painfully experienced,
but also actively challenged and transformed by her heroines.
The Abject Female Body in Oatess Gothic-Grotesque

Joyce Carol Oatess conscious involvement with the gothic as a
specific genre which she has called Gothic with capital G (qtd.
in Johnson 1994, 18) starts in 1977 with her short story collection
Nightside and is pursued in the early eighties with Bellefleur (1980), A
Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), and Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984).
Displaying traditional gothic devices in terms of imagery and methods
of characterization, this trilogy examines America through the
prismatic lens of its most popular genres (Oates 1988, 373).
Oates returns to the gothic genre in 1994 with Haunted: Tales of the
Grotesque, where she takes a more conspicuously metafictional
approach to the genre. This can be seen, for instance, in Oatess
rewritings of Poes The Black Cat into her own The White Cat, or
in her revision of Henry Jamess Turn of the Screw as The
Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly. In the first story, Oates
voices the repressed sexuality of Jamess ambiguous tale, and in the
second story, she frames the seemingly unmotivated violence of Poes
protagonist in the context of power/gender relations within a
contemporary middle-class American family. Both stories give bodies
and voices to canonic female characters the murdered wife of Poes
narrator and Miss Jessel, the famous governess of Jamess story.
These two literary allusions disclose Oatess feminist intent in
reshaping the moulds of gothic literature, in order to place the female
body and female subjectivity in other positions than that of ghosts or
victims.
Oates uses the term grotesque in the afterword of Haunted to
define a specific aesthetic practice within gothic fiction. Referring to
literary and visual arts describing works as generically different as
Gogols stories, Goyas paintings, or Cronenbergs films as
representatives of the art of the grotesque Oates characterizes the
form by a blunt physicality that no amount of epistemological
exegesis can exorcise (1994, 117), a feature which according to her
92
distinguishes the grotesque from the more genteel narrative of the

Victorian ghost-story (304).
As far as its emphasis on the physiological and visceral is
concerned, Oatess notion of the grotesque conforms to the notion of
female gothic as described by Ellen Moers in the pioneering Literary
Women. Positing that female experience can be distinguished by the
tendency to visualise the self (1977, 90), Moers finds in the modern
female gothic a specific type of spatial imagery based on portrayals of
physical distortion and disfigurement. Moerss view is supported by
other feminist critics such as Juliann E. Fleenor and Claire Kahane,
who argue that the treatment of spatial and physical imagery in gothic
literature in general, and female gothic in particular, has been
dominated by feelings of fear, disgust, or self-loathing towards the
female role and female sexuality. Claire Kahane, for instance, rejects
the dominant Oedipal paradigms in the study of gothic fiction, arguing
that gothic fiction by women is defined by a primal apprehension
which is directed not towards the father but towards the motherwoman experienced as global, all-embracing, all-powerful (1983,
243). This apprehension illustrates womens conflicts with their
physical selves and is translated into the blunt physiological imagery
of gothic writing by women. In this sense the fiction of Joyce Carol
Oates can be placed within a tradition of women writers, which goes
back to eighteenth-century author Ann Radcliffe, and is rearticulated
with great disparity in the contemporary popular gothic of authors
such as Phyllis Whitney and Victoria Holt, or the canonized gothic of
Isac Dinesen, Carson McCullers, and Flannery OConnor. The horror
of female physiology, described by many of these women writers and
inscribed within the logic of patriarchal society, is often considered a
result of a sense of defectiveness enforced by the patriarchal paradigm
which valorises the visible phallus as the image of autonomous
power and suggests that women [who are] encouraged to see
themselves as congenially impaired [], experience a disturbed sense
of self, a feeling of lack or estrangement that gives them a special eye
for the imagery of self-hatred (244).
A useful way to explore the female gothic appropriation of the
female body can be found in Kristeva's concept of abjection in Powers
of Horror. Drawing on Freuds work, particularly on Totem and
Taboo and Civilization and its Discontents, Kristevas concept of
abjection plays a crucial role in explaining the formation of individual
subjectivity from a pre-Oedipal perspective. For Kristeva, the abject is
a result of the process of individuation and complex experience of
loss, which follows the separation from the mother. This loss, which
ARAJO
93
constitutes language and desire, is accompanied by a necessary

rejection of borderline elements (such as hair, excrements, etc.) which
threaten the autonomous identity of the subject with the presence of
disorder, filth, and chaos. The rejection of these polluting fluids and
substances reminders of absolute connection with the mothers body
is imposed socially by means of social rituals (such as religious
practice) articulated within the logic of the Symbolic. According to
Kristeva, the idea of the mothers body as an unreachable point of
origin is always associated with those defiling elements.
Subsequently, all that is female is, in a way, a reminder of the
mothers abject body and is therefore presented as a threatening
presence to the symbolic order.
Kristevas specific emphasis on the maternal body has been
criticized, most notably, by Judith Butler, who highlights that the
Kristevan maternal is problematically presented as a pre-cultural
reality. In Butlers view the abject female body is not really external
to the Law of the Father: [T]he repression of the feminine does not
require that the agency of repression and the object of repression be
ontologically distinct (Butler 1999, 119). The female body is
constructed within paternal law, and the spectral or mythological
constructions of the maternal should be understood within the
Symbolic or in Lacanian terms according to the Law of the Father.
Butler thinks that in order to avoid a self-promoted repression of the
female it is necessary to take into account the full complexity and
subtlety of the law and to contest the illusion of a true body beyond
the law.
Whilst Kristevas notion of abjection is an extremely helpful
concept for the analysis of Oatess gothic-grotesque, where the female
body is often translated into images of physical excess and disgust, it
is also important to stress that, for Oates as for Butler the
female/maternal body is always socially constructed, always
experienced within the Symbolic. Oatess fiction has been
continuously engaged in investigating the social practices which
reinforce womens problematical relationships with their bodies by
creating various plots where her female characters always try, if
unsuccessfully, to rewrite their own relationship with their mothers
bodies and their inherited narratives. For Oatess heroines the
subversion of gender discourses remains possible only through the
recognition of the inscription of these categories within signification.
At a metafictional level, this recognition of the Law of the Father can
be seen in Oatess own approach to the Gothic genre. Oates draws
from the mainstream discourse of canonized gothic horror (of male
94
authors such as Poe and James, Wells and Stoker) in order to reverse
gothic plots and manipulate gothic conventions, transforming the
conventional gothic scripts into feminist gothic narratives.
Oatess gothic fiction explores how the internalization of gender
dichotomies has been perpetuated by aesthetic traditions. In the
afterword of Haunted, Joyce Carol Oates refers among other writers to
Bram Stoker and H. G. Wells as important practitioners of the
grotesque. It is worth noting that the works by Stoker and Wells are
well known for their exploration of the monstrous feminine, which
Oates analyzes and rewrites in her fiction. As Kelly Hurley points out,
nineteenth-century gothic fiction epitomized by Stoker and Wells
tended to portray the female body as intrinsically pathological
(1996, 120): [T]he disorders of the female body were inextricably
linked to the female reproductive system, so that sexuality emerged as
both casual and symptomatic of female abhumanness (120). Along
with the female vampire of Dracula, which conveys anxiety about the
new women promoted by fin-de-sicle feminism, the central
female character of Lair of the White Worm (1895) by Stoker is
another example of incompatible perceptions of femininity (as
obtrusively sexual or asexual and chaste) of nineteenth-century gender
discourses (see Hurley 1996, 122-124). The abject female body in
Stokers work is obviously that of the sexualized female, portrayed in
the later novel as the metamorphosed Lady Arabella, a halfhuman/half-worm creature, which lives in slime and disregards gender
distinctions and modes of sexuality. The same kind of anxiety is
conveyed in The Island of Dr Moreau (1897) by H. G. Wells, another
text referred to by Oates in the afterword of Haunted, where the
female human-beast is portrayed as extremely repulsive (more so than
her male counterpart) due to her power to provoke desire in men
(human males) despite her indistinct species. In twentieth-century art,
film has been the privileged form for the exploration of the monstrous
feminine. In the same afterword, Oates refers to David Cronenbergs
Dead Ringers (1979) and The Brood (1988). These two films are
particularly interesting because of their use of female physiology as a
form of grotesque. The protagonist in Dead Ringers possesses a
terrifying triple uterus, while in The Brood an external womb houses
monstrous creatures. In both films it is the female reproductive
capacity, a dominant sign of sexual difference, which is rendered
grotesque. In her study of the monstrous female body in contemporary
film, Barbara Creed has pointed out that, like Cronenbergs films,
many other contemporary science-fiction horror movies which
represent woman as monstrous also define her primarily in relation to
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her sexuality, especially the abject nature of her maternal and

reproductive functions (1993, 151). Oatess allusion to these texts
conveys her interest in the exploration of the grotesque female body as
written by male artists. Most of the stories of Haunted are, as we will
see next, a feminist revision of the motif of the monstrous female.
In Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque Oates brings back the female
body to the prosaic realities of everyday life, allowing the grotesque to
emerge from familiar and naturalistically constructed scenarios. The
abject and its defiling substances are literalized in the daily lives of
her characters. As Mary Allen points out, the female body is a
liability always out of control, the centre of pain and the source of
excretions that proliferate in Oatess work: vomit, blood, diseased
tissue, menstrual blood, and the newborn child itself, the most terrible
excretion of all (1987, 64). However, Oates rewrites the female body
against the extra-social bodies fashioned by Wells, Stoker or
Cronenberg: hers is irretrievably a socially constructed body, a body
always already contextual. Oates uses physiological imagery to
describe specific contexts of womens lives in a great variety of
everyday scenarios: regulation of adolescent sexuality (Haunted),
isolation and sexual fantasies (Phase Change), private and public
images of femininity (The Doll), pregnancy and motherhood
(Extenuating Circumstances), abortion (Dont You Trust Me?)
and domestic abuse (Martyrdom). Whilst many of these stories have
the documentary purpose of disclosing quotidian narratives of female
victimization, we also find in Haunted a significant number of stories
which draw away from the documentary portraits suggested above to
create different scenarios where the female body is an instrument of
empowerment for the gothic heroine. These other stories explore the
traditional grotesque imagery associated with the female body but
subvert plots and structures in order to challenge conventional
constructions of femininity.
The Bingo Master: Female Abjection and the Eye

I will start by looking at The Bingo Master, which belongs to the
first type of female gothic stories mentioned above narratives which,
in the tradition of the female gothic, explore instances of female
oppression. The grotesque is employed here as a means of social
critique combining the horrifying tragicomic mode of Flannery
OConnors Wise Blood with the angry mode of Charlotte Perkins
Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper. The Bingo Master tells the story
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of an ageing virgin and her troubled relation to sexuality. Rose Odom

is a retired novelist from a provincial American town, who lives with
her sick father after the death of her mother. One day she decides to
take up the project to divest [herself] of [her] damned virginity
(Oates 1995, 54). She goes out every Thursday evening, telling her
father and aunt that she is going to the library, when instead she goes
out to look for male candidates for her self-actualizing project. She
looks for the perfect man in singles bars, in cocktail lounges of fancy
hotels, in the local movie theatre, and even attends conferences on
esoteric scientific matters but not with much success. One night she
decides to try her luck at the local bingo hall and hits the jackpot in
her first game. In this auspicious setting, she meets Joe Pye, the
glamorous manager of the bingo hall, the only halfway attractive
man in the place [], in his dashing costume, with his daring white
turban held together by a golden pin, in his graceful shoulders, and
syrupy voice (60). Despite Roses initial nervousness, Joe Pye offers
her several drinks and invites her up to his room. In the intimacy of
his room, the Bingo Master unclips the golden cock and undoes his
turban (67), a gesture which Rose takes as sexual invitation. Anxious
about the act of sexual penetration, thirty-eight-year-old Rose tries to
think about the loss of her virginity as a medical procedure. She
associates the spreading of her mothers disease with the perpetuation
of her own virginity and is haunted by the vision of her mothers
body:
She will think of it, I must think of it, as an impersonal event, bodily but not
spiritual, like a gynaecological examination. But then Rose hates
gynaecological examinations. Hates and dreads them and puts them off,
cancelling appointments at the last minute. It will serve me right, she often
thinks, if [...]. But her mothers cancer was elsewhere in her body, and then
everywhere. Perhaps there is no connection. (67; Oatess italics)
Both the medical examination and the sexual intercourse reveal her
self-perceived abnormality: she views her lack of sexual knowledge
as a deficiency in the process of her individuation, which goes back to
a pre-Oedipal closeness to her mothers body. Roses mother was
unable to stop the cancer from spreading throughout her body,
therefore Rose insists on reversing her own condition, hoping to
regulate her body through the sexual act. If the gynaecological
procedure implies a full physical examination, sexual activity is also
envisioned, here, as an evaluation parameter. Nervously Rose begins
to unbutton her dress a gesture which astonishes Joe Pye. The
Bingo Master looks at the woman with disbelief: Rose Odom, who
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had folded her $100 check, ashamed to receive her bingo prize, now
gives herself to a stranger without any resistance, any elegance or any
romance. Decent people dont do like this he tells her not this way,
not so fast and angry (68; Oatess italics). The Bingo master sets
the rules of the game, as his gaze is translated into power: Rose tries
to shield herself from Joe Pyes glittering gaze with her arms, but she
cannot: he sees everything; her pale-brown nipples turn hard with
fear and cold and clarity (69). The frosty clarity of Roses breasts
highlights the authority of the Masters stare, whereby the act of
looking is overdetermined by the act of knowing. Power is reaffirmed
when Joe Pye throws her out of his room. Rose, now too drunk to
walk, almost falls down the stairs:
On the first landing of the fire stairs [Rose] grows very dizzy suddenly, and
thinks it wisest to sit down. To sit down at once. Her head is drumming with a
pulse beat she cant control, and his angry voice too scrambles in her head,
mixed up with her own thoughts. A puddle grows at the back of her mouth
she spits out blood, gagging and discovers that one of her front teeth has come
loose and the adjacent incisor also rocks back and forth in its socket. (70)
Unfortunately, Rose learns the language of blood but not

through the longed-for rupture of her hymen. Her blood, nevertheless,
marks an initiation: Roses teeth rocking back and forth symbolize her
own precarious status as a woman, suspended in contradictory
ascriptions of gender. You are a highly attractive girl, especially
when you let yourself go (65), Joe Pye had said softly when he was
trying to seduce her. But now that Rose has really let herself go,
weaving down the corridor like a drunken woman, one hand holding
her ripped dress shut, one hand pressing the purse clumsily against her
side (70), her body conveys her inability to sustain the logic of Joe
Pyes discourse of seduction. Rose does not know how to perform for
the male gaze. Roses body vulnerable, out of control, abject is an
excruciating reminder of her mothers cancerous undesirable body and
becomes a parodic literalization of the fallen woman. Roses body
can be read as a symbol of castration according to which, as Laura
Mulvey points out, womans desire is subjugated to her image as
bearer of the bleeding wound (1989, 14). Roses portrait achieves a
pathetic quality beyond the tragic pathos, as it underscores the
fetishistic power of Pyes vision. Roses body is inscribed under the
signature of paternal law. This inscription of gendered power
underpins the last scene of the story, where Rose looks inside her
handbag and finds her $100 prize cheque with Joe Pyes large, bold,
black signature on it (71). Through the juxtaposition of Roses
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abjected body and Pyes signature, the ending of The Bingo Master
registers a feminist reflexivity, which exposes male power and its
controlling gaze, showing how Joe Pye becomes Joe P(e)ye.
Positing the above story as a counterpoint, I will discuss, now, how
other stories in Haunted challenge the controlling power of the male
gaze. Rather than simply conveying womens conflicting relation with
their physical selves, these other stories take advantage of the assumed
omnipotence of the male gaze in order to challenge dominant
constructions of the gendered body. The following examples, The
Premonition and Thanksgiving, subvert the traditional gothic
narrative by making explicit use of clichs of grotesqueness associated
with the female body. Whilst in The Bingo Master the ambivalence
toward the female body is internalized, in these other stories womens
reconciliation with their bodies is openly staged through a
reappropriation of traditional gothic scenarios.
The Premonition: Revenge and Excess

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

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

behaviour of the three women a distinctly female atmosphere in the
room [] with an undercurrent of hysteria (181); their eyes
glittering manic (182) he sees this excitement as part of their role in
organizing the Christmas festivities. He remains unaware of the
possibility that the typical family gathering and intended celebration
of peace might have been replaced by a most gruesome ceremony. A
particular detail, the accumulation of Christmas packages in the
Paxtonss kitchen, introduces a crucial hint: Quinns corpse has
probably been dismembered and disposed of in the midst of the
Christmas packages, in a ritual which subversively echoes another
great Christian ritual, the symbolic division of Christs body amongst
the apostles. Here we have a sabotage of Christian festivities: in a
carnivalesque inversion of the Christian calendar, Christmas assumes
the symbolism of Easter.
The Premonition ironically confirms Kristevas idea that
abjection accompanies all religious structuring (1982, 17). The
abject is here temporarily controlled and regulated (Quinns body is
hidden and kept under control) but only in order to upset and attack
the religious and social practices which support and perpetuate
traditional family structures. The image of the corpse is presented by
Kristeva as the ultimate form of abjection, as it represents the most
decisive abject stage where the I is expelled (4). By curtailing,
dividing, and dissecting the body which used to oppress them, the
women seem to celebrate the erasure of his physical power an
extinction, which is reaffirmed by the absence of Quinn's name on the
beautifully wrapped package the girls entrust to Whitney: To Uncle
Whitney with love Ellen, Molly, Trish. Quite pointedly, Quinns
name had been omitted, and Whitney felt satisfaction that Ellen had
taken revenge of sorts upon her selfish husband, however petty and
inconsequential a revenge (Oates 1995, 186). The Christmas
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presents, which the Paxton women have wrapped, are added to the list
of commodities such as indoor pools, saunas, Volvos, Diet Cokes,
and baseball caps which describe the familys upper-middle class
lifestyle. In this setting characterized by multiple reminders of bodily
pleasures, Quinns corpse is not only objectified but transformed into
a beautifully wrapped present a symbol of revelation and desire.
Following the tradition of female-revenge films, The Premonition
evokes a crime no doubt horrific and grotesque. However, it is worth
noting that those terrifying acts around which the narrative is woven
Quinns murder or the dismantling of his body are never explicitly
mentioned in the narrative. It is therefore highly significant and ironic,
that in the only clearly grotesque moment in the text, abjection is
conveyed, not through the image of the corpse, the dead male body of
Quinn, but through the felt presence the female body. The episode of
Whitneys visit to the guest bathroom is built around a convergence of
disturbing memories and incoherent signs, which in the impossibility
of being fully articulated, are associated with the abject female. This is
how Whitney describes the impressions caused by the smell of blood
in the bathroom:
[T]here was a peculiar odor a cloying, slightly rancid odor, as of blood.
Washing his hands, Whitney puzzled over it, uneasily for it reminded him of
something but what? Suddenly the memory returned: Many years ago, as a
child at summer camp in Maine, Whitney had seen the cook cleaning chickens,
whistling loudly as she worked ducking the limp carcasses in steaming
waters, plucking feathers, chopping and tearing off wings, legs, feet, scooping
out, by hand, moist slithery innards []. With a thrill of repugnance he
wondered now if the blood heavy odour had to do after all with menstruation.
(185)
Although the memory of cleaning the chickens might correspond to a
description of Quinns murder, this image is immediately effaced in
the presence of the all-devouring and disturbing imaginary presence of
female menstruation. Instead of the female body, it is the external
male gaze that becomes grotesquely distorted. The characters of The
Premonition retrieve the mystifying power associated with the female
body in order to divert the male eye from the abject crime. While the
female body is empowered by the possibilities of material and
physiological excess, the masculinity inscribed in Quinns corpse is
reduced to nothingness. Vulnerable and ultimately disposable, the
memory of the male body stages here the ultimate form of abjection.
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Thanksgiving: Motherhood and Initiation

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

replacing more traditional gothic images such as the castle, the
monastery or the haunted house but reproducing the same enclosed
atmosphere traditionally evocative of the female body. As Cynthia
Griffin Wolff points out, the gothic building has been used by both
male and female artists as a siege of conflict over sexual stimulation
or arousal (1983, 210). And as Mary Russo shows, the grotesque
evokes the cave the grotto-esque (1994, 1): Low, hidden, earthly,
dark, material, immanent, visceral. As bodily metaphor, the grotesque
cave tends to look like (and in the most gross metaphorical sense tends
to be identified with) the cavernous anatomical female body (1).
Likewise, in its metaphoric landscape of perforations the gothic
supermarket of Thanksgiving establishes an explicit analogy with
bodily orifices, namely with female genitals, their odours and fluids,
emphasizing the curiosity and repulsion generated by the image of the
female body:
[T]here was a gaping hole in the floor about the size of a full grown horse.
Overhead, part of the ceiling missing, too: you could look up into the interior of
the roof at the exposed girders. Rust-coloured drops of water fell from the
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girders heavy as shot. Here were fairly well-stocked shelves of detergent, dish
washing soap, toilet cleanser, aerosol insect sprays, ant traps []. The rust
coloured drops fell in my hair, on my face and hands. Dont look down. Dont. I
leaned over as far as I could, stretching my arm, my fingers, reaching for a box
of detergent. (Oates 1995, 226)
This parodic representation of domestic horror assumes even more

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

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

Here, the contemporary horror scenario is directly related to the
feminine/maternal, and presented as a menacing space to the
masculine. The girls entrance into the caves of abjection and her
mastering of everyday horror is depicted as a rite of initiation for her
entrance into adulthood, a rite which implies an identification with the
mothers body, but which is in no way deterministic.
Thanksgiving is also a witty satire on consumer culture with an
implicit critique of the division of domestic tasks in a white workingclass household, which associates the highly stylized paraphernalia of
gothic literature with the use of female physiology in contemporary
advertising. Although the caves of the abject are still associated with
the feminine, the invasion and conquest of this space by the masculine
is denied in opposition to the conventional gothic plot. In Oatess tale
the traditional roles of the main characters are manifestly inverted: it
is the daughter who assumes the part of the heroic rescuer, entering
and defying the locus of abjection, while her father comes out as a
passive and powerless figure in need of being rescued. The father is
obviously emasculated by his new role in the family and disorientated
in a society whose signs of power are no longer translated in terms of
capacity of production, but are instead regulated by the consumer
world. The end of the story makes clear that the protagonist is
reminiscent of what Carol Jay Clover called the final girl (1992,
35):
The lights of the store that had seemed dim before now seemed bright, and
there was Father standing close by hunched over the grocery cart waiting for
me []. He was so surprised at something, the size of the turkey maybe, or just
the fact that Id done what Id done, blinking up grinning at him, wiping my
filthy hands on my jeans as I stood to my full height, he couldnt speak at first,
and was slow to help me lift the turkey into the cart []. Father was breathing
harshly, his face unnaturally white, so I wasnt surprised when he told me he
wasnt feeling all that good and maybe shouldnt drive home. This was the first
time Id been a witness to any adult saying any such thing but somehow wasnt
surprised and when Father gave me the key to the ignition I liked the feel of it
in my hand. (Oates 1995, 231)
The maternal anagnorisis, the revelation and enabling exploration of

the maternal space, shapes the narrative: Oates reworks the typical
motif of the gothic heroines masochistic identification with her
mother by dwelling on the protagonists uncanny sensation that the
past is repeating itself through her (Modleski 1996, 68). Yet this
identification is transformed here into a clearly empowering
experience. By exploring the abject insides of the grotesque female
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body, the protagonist of Thanksgiving comes to terms with her own

maturity and strength. Here, the female body refuses to be categorized
according to the traditional gothic conventions and is instead
demystified, explored and understood as an ally rather than an
adversary. Alongside the rite of passage narrative, the story also
examines the performance of female labour as exemplified by the
mothers domestic tasks (not only through the purchasing of domestic
goods but also through the gruesome dealings with foods and products
of all kinds) whose efforts are recognized as somehow heroic. The
value and efficiency of womens labour is acknowledged as such, but
only to be transposed beyond typical roles ascribed to women. The
driving motif and the image of the car mark, thus, the conquering of
the male sphere, thereby concluding the story in a socially pragmatic
feminist gesture.
Oatess manipulation of the Gothic-grotesque provides an incisive
analysis of the tabooed contexts of womens lives and of the processes
through which these have been veiled, regulated, and coded in
contemporary American society. In their unflinching re-examination
of the abject female body, Oatess gothic narratives mount pertinent
critiques of social constructions of femininity as sustained by male
and female Gothic traditions. In doing so, they challenge traditional
Gothic roles and parody inherited generic structures and conventions.
The endings of The Premonition and Thanksgiving correspond to
rare but significant moments in Oatess work because they are
scattered in a fictional world that is not safeguarded by happy endings.
These acts of insurrection emerge alongside the prevailing instances
of suffering and exploitation which articulate the complex Oatesian
universe of tales of American life. Oatess examination of the female
abject body plays, in this sense, a fundamental part in the authors
extremely detailed extensive exploration of the social contexts of
womens lives in contemporary America.
Works Cited
Allen, Mary. 1987. The Terrified Women of Joyce Carol Oates. In Modern Critical
Views: Joyce Carol Oates, edited by Harold Bloom, 61-82. New York: Chelsea
House.
Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New
York: Routledge.
Clover, Carol J. 1992. Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in Modern Horror Film.
London: British Film Institute.
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Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis.
London: Routledge.
Hurley, Kelly. 1996. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degenerations at
the Fin de Sicle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, Greg. 1994. Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York:
Twayne.
Kahane, Claire. 1983. The Maternal Legacy: The Grotesque Tradition in Flannery
O'Connor's Female Gothic. In The Female Gothic, edited by Juliann E. Fleenor,
242-256. London: Eden Press.
Modleski, Tania. 1996. Loving With a Vengeance. New York: Routledge.
Moers, Ellen. 1977. Literary Women. New York: Doubleday.
Mulvey, Laura. 1989. Visual and Other Pleasures. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Oates, Joyce Carol. 1988. Five Prefaces: Mysteries of Winterthurn. In (Woman)
Writer: Occasions and Opportunities, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, 372-375. New
York: Dutton.
. 1995. Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque. New York: Plume.
Owen, Stephen. 1989. Mi-lou: Poetry and the Labyrinth of Desire. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Russo, Mary. 1995 The Female Grotesque. London: Routledge.
Wesley, Marilyn C. 1993. Refusal and Transgression in Joyce Carol Oates Fiction.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. 1983. The Radcliffean Gothic Model: A Form for Feminine
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Eden Press.
Now we know that gay men are just men after all: Abject
Sexualities in Leslie Marmon Silkos Almanac of the Dead
Dorothea Fischer-Hornung
O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life
destroy.
William Blake, The Sick Rose
Early on in Silkos monumental novel Almanac of the Dead she
drastically exemplifies the voyeuristic exploitation of the ancestor
spirits of the Laguna Pueblo people, a set of stone ancestor figures
displayed in a small museum outside Santa Fe:
The theft of the stone figures years ago had caused great anguish. Dark gray
basalt the size and shape of an ear of corn, the stone figures had been given to
the people by the Kachina spirits at the beginning of the Fifth World, present
time. Little Grandmother and Little Grandfather lived in buckskin bundles
gray and brittle with age. Although faceless and without limbs, the little
grandparents had each worn a necklace of tiny white shells and turquoise
beads. Old as the earth herself, the small stone figures had accompanied the
people on their vast journey from the North. (1991, 31)
In their harmonious balance of male and female, the figures had been
cared for as spiritual ancestors by generations of the Laguna people.
Their theft and exposition had reduced them to objects, figures to be
stared at in a glass case. When a delegation of Laguna people visits
the gallery in an attempt to liberate the spirits by taking them back
into the care of the tribe, Silko relates the vast gulf between the
cultural and spiritual values of the colonizer and the colonized:
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The delegation walked past the display cases slowly and in silence. But when
they reached the glass case in the center of the vast hall, the old cacique began
to weep []. He seemed to forget the barrier glass forms and tried to reach out
to the small stone figures lying dreadfully unwrapped. The old man kept
bumping his fingers against the glass case until the assistant curator became
alarmed. The Laguna delegation later recounted how the white man had
suddenly looked around at all of them as if he were afraid they had come to take
back everything that had been stolen. In that instant white man and Indian both
caught a glimpse of what was yet to come. (33)
The exposure and alienation of the ancestor figures, their

pornographic objectification, reflect the materialist, anthropological
and aestheticizing gaze of the colonizer which disrupted the cosmic
symmetrical harmony of the male and female spiritual ancestor forces,
initiating the time of abject destruction. Before conquest, a
clanswoman had lifted them tenderly as she once lifted her own
babies, calling them esteemed and beloved ancestors (31).
Generations of clanswomen and a male relative had cared for the
stone figures, had fed them and given them rainwater to drink. Now
the ancestor spirits lay exposed, on display and isolated in a glass case
in a gallery, with only material traces of the care they had received in
the past reflected in the tiny shell and bead necklace they wear.
Five hundred years after colonization by Europeans, it is this vision
of the apocalyptic final days of the rule of European Americans with a
return of the original lands and state of harmony to the indigenous
peoples of the Americas that marks Silkos project. In this early scene,
Silko defines the terms of inhumanity perpetrated by European
Americans a scene of stark abjection in the alienation of male and
female spirit forces. Silkos novel goes on to explore a proliferation of
seemingly unending horrific, tabooed and literally disgusting
examples of (in)human depravity, the world of cannibal queers and
vampire capitalists. Her novel opens, however, with a vision of the
lost harmony of the ancestor spirits as a clue to both the cause in the
past and the potential transcendence of abjection in the future. Thus,
the dialectic of harmony and disharmony offers a vision of a condition
as old as the earth itself, as well as specific clues to deciphering the
nature of crimes against indigenous peoples of the Americas and
Africa. In an attempt to force the reader to confront and potentially
internalize this negative vision thereby possibly overcoming it in a
process similar to psychotherapy Silko portrays the abjection of
(in)human acts specifically in the context of patriarchy and
colonialism.
If the harmony of male and female marks the one end of Silkos
visionary spectrum, alienated exposure delineates the other end of
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109
Silkos representation of present-day vampire culture. Cannibal queers

become Silkos guiding metonym for the approaching apocalypse, the
end of all days. These days of Dead-Eye Dog characterize
contemporary time in the cyclical time calculations of the Mayan
Almanacs. The late twentieth century is described as a time in which
the alien invaders would become obsessed with hungers and
impulses commonly seen in wild dogs [...]. This period was male and
therefore tended to be somewhat weak and very cruel (251). What
could be more abject for many Western readers than the perverse
appetites of male homosexual lovers? What could be more cruel and
repulsive than, for example, a homosexual who exploits his partners
despair and suicide commercially by turning photos of his lovers
corpse into highly stylized and aestheticized art photography:
Death had not been any more peaceful for Eric than his life had. The extreme
angles of Erics limbs outlined the geometry of his despair. The clenched
muscles guarded divisions and secrets locked within him until one day the
gridwork of lies had exploded bright, wet red all over. Only a few weeks earlier
Eric had helped David carry the glossy white backdrop paper into the studio.
David had wanted the backdrop for an all-white series in the bedroom. But
white shows everything, darling, Eric had teased. David stared back silently.
Shows all the dirt. Shows all the nasty! (106)
Not only does Silko show all the nasty, she clearly stakes out this
territory to be white and male. In a process of de- and (re)construction,
Silko provides us with metonymic clues as to the locus of evil. The
descendants of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the
contemporary reader as well, of course must try to decipher the
clues in the fragments of the Mayan almanacs that have been passed
down over the ages. These almanacs, literally blotted with food and
human body fluids, function as a central, unifying trope in the
fractured narrative time structure of the novel. Almanac of the Dead
provides the fragmentary history of the dead who have gone before in
the holocaust of the Americas and the living dead, the cannibal
homosexuals and vampire capitalists in Silkos contemporary scenario
of abjection. Silko situates the specific blood, race, and sexual crimes
depicted in a much larger social and political context, locating the
causes and resulting horror specifically in contemporary blood crimes
and the death of Eros. Sexualities and certainly not only
homosexuality have become exploitive and abject in their emptiness,
commodification, and disassociation from human love.
110
A number of critics have pondered Silkos savage characterization

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

with Silkos exceedingly uncomfortable depiction of homosexuality.
Daria Donnelley, like St. Clair, essentially throws in the towel after
speculating in a footnote on Silkos possible concept that an
indigenous resurgence is being realized partly through birth rates
among non-Europeans accounts for why in her imagined version,
homosexuals seem particularly decadent (1999, 257n) read:
homosexuals cannot procreate and indigenous people need
procreation. She is unable to resolve the contradiction between the
generally positive role allotted to male cross-dressers, the bedarch, in
many Native American cultures and the negative portrayal Silko
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111
provides. Silko herself remarks on this in her collection of essays,

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

psychopathological but that this, of course, holds true for
heterosexuals as well (see Lewes 1988, 22).
David Moore also relegates his comments on Silkos abject
portrayal of homosexuals to a footnote by now we can see a pattern
developing and excludes a discussion of the issue by stating that
Silkos undiluted representation of homosexuals as murderous
degenerated in Almanac poses a significant problematic beyond the
scope of this paper (1999, 178n). Nevertheless, he also recognizes
that [s]he is equally excoriative of heterosexual and homosexual
exploitation, especially in the colonial and the racial frame (178n).
Fruitfully, he directs us to Richard Trexlers evocative book Sex and
Conquest, where Trexler explores the unequal power relations in the
Amerindian and Euroamerican encounter, providing us with a clue to
Silkos intention. His study will become important to my own
interpretation later in this paper.
What are we to make of Silkos seemingly brutal portrayal of
homosexuality, which leads to so much critical hemming and hawing?
In numerous places throughout Almanac of the Dead, Silko herself
points us toward Freud and Marx. In their writings, both Marx and
Freud give us a sense of the fundamental significance of an oral
culture and take the victim of oppression seriously certainly not an
insignificant priority for Silko. Further, Marx serves as a model for a
112
materialist analysis of the greed resulting from vampire capitalists,

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

own efforts to decipher the meanings of the 500-year occupation of
the Americas and its indigenous population by Europeans, clearly
associating the past holocaust of the Americas with the Jewish
holocaust: Freud had sensed the approach of the Jewish holocaust in
the dreams and jokes of his patients. Freud had been one of the first to
appreciate the Western European appetite for the sadistic eroticism
and masochism of modern war (174).
The distinction Freud makes between repression and displacement
is also particularly enlightening in this context. On the one hand, the
unsuccessful repression of a guilt-ridden past will come back to haunt
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113
not only the individual, but in the larger context of civilization, will
haunt whole societies as well. Sublimation, according to Freud, in its
positive integration of the uncontrolled forces of infancy, on the other
hand, is used for a higher purpose in the work of civilization: No
feature, however, seems to characterize civilization more than its
esteem and encouragement of mans higher mental activities his
intellectual, scientific and artistic achievements and the leading role
that it assigns to ideas in human life ([1930] 1989, 47).
At this point we might again ask, then, why Silko singles out male
homosexuality with only one short reference to the existence of
lesbian sexuality (see Silko 1991, 440-441) but no direct portrayal of
female homosexuality in the novel whatsoever to play a particularly
destructive role in her horrorscape of the colonial encounter. In
Civilization and Its Discontents Freud gives us a further clue to the
homostructural aspect of modern industrialized cultures:
The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men; it
confronts them with ever more difficult tasks and compels them to carry out
instinctual sublimations of which women are little capable. Since a man does
not have unlimited quantities of psychical energy at his disposal, he has to
accomplish his tasks by making an expedient distribution of his libido. What he
employs for cultural aims he to a great extent withdraws from women and
sexual life. His constant association with men, and his dependence on his
relations with them, even estrange him from his duties as a husband and father.
Thus the woman finds herself forced into the background by the claims of
civilization and she adopts a hostile attitude towards it. (59)
European American society is increasingly a world of exclusive

maleness which causes men, in order to enable them to shore up
sufficient energy for the civilizing project, to withdraw from women
and fatherhood. Women, seen as inadequate, are pushed out of the
civilizing project of industrial capitalism, are pushed into the
background, consequently, becoming hostile to the male project and,
inevitably, toward their own offspring. Therefore, it is not accidental
that fathers not mothers and young children are the great absence
in Silkos novel. Freud was quite straightforward on this point: I
cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a
fathers protection ([1930] 1989, 20). What we are confronted with,
then, in Almanac of the Dead are the psychologically ravaged adults
who are the product of their own civilization, the rejection by their
mothers and the total absence of their fathers. This recognition and it
is a radically gendered one helps to explain Silkos aggressive
vampire mothers who abort or abandon their progeny and, although
fathers are essentially absent in Silkos world, it is, nevertheless, the
114
Law of the Father that is executed by the phallic mother, making

female agency at worst a contradiction in terms and at best relegated
to Kristevas presymbolic realm of the Semiotic (see Spiegel 1995,
17).
But the question still remains why Silkos portrayal of
homosexuality seems so particularly vindictive? Although Silko is
indeed a Freudian, Julia Kristevas theory helps us to define the
particularly abject effect of Silkos portrayal of homosexuality and
why it is so disturbing. For Kristeva the abject is violent and
elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin; nothing is familiar,
not even the shadow of a memory (1982, 5). The opening description
of the indigenous encounter with the abject pornographic display of
their ancestors, exposed to a voyeuristic white gaze in a showcase and
turned into an object, becomes clear in this context. The
objectification of the ancestral body, disruption of the harmony of
male and female, are fundamental to the horrors of the holocaust of
the Americas: Eyes, exhibitionism, and shame run together in the
Freudian world and implicate disgust only because what is shameful is
often also disgusting (Miller 1997, 80).
It is the particular character of disgust at the loss of humanity and
Eros in the specific context of Native American and European history
that Silko shows in such proliferating detail. The West fails to
recognize its own kin, its own ancestors and can therefore only be lost
in the world of the abject, ultimately imposing their own abjection,
according to Kristeva, onto the other: What he has swallowed up
instead of maternal love is an emptiness, or rather a maternal hatred
without a word for the words of the father; that is what he tries to
cleanse himself of, tirelessly (1982, 6). Because of this fundamental
lack of community, both from the immediate parent to the wider circle
of kin, the individual and society as well are consigned to mourning
for the object that is always already lost (12). Abjection is, therefore,
clearly related to perversion and [i]t kills in the name of life (15).
For Freud, perversion is not eliminable and remains manifest in three
principle ways: active practice for some; the repressed constituent of
neurosis in others; the unstably sublimated basis of civilization
(Dollimore 1992, 182). It is these three principle manifestations of
abjection in the West that Silko explores.
According to William Ian Miller, for the patriarchal order in
Western culture the determinant of what is disgusting drawn by
culture rather than nature there is nothing more disgusting and abject
than the male homosexual and the attendant fear of contamination.
This fear is associated with the most male of all substances, semen, a
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115
substance that has almost magical powers to feminize. Of all

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

sodomy turns men into women. The failure of psychoanalysis to
deal adequately with homosexuality is surely partly due to an original
gynophobic stance, making homosexuals deeply flawed and defective
because they share certain psychic characteristics with women (see
Lewes 1988, 237). But where is the connection between gynophobia
and homophobia in Silkos novel?
Luce Irigaray notes that the exchanges upon which patriarchal
societies are based take place exclusively among men, thereby making
women commodities, passing from one man to another; they are the
object of transactions among men and men alone (see Irigaray 1985,
192). In this context the homosexual relation becomes particularly
abject and potentially subversive: Because they openly interpret the
law according to which society operates, they threaten in fact to shift
the horizon of that law and show what is really at stake (193;
italics in original). Irigaray marks all economic processes as
essentially homosexual, and, since women are always already a part of
the economics of exchanges among men, the desire for women is a
part of the dynamic as well: Woman exists only as an occasion for
116
mediation, transaction, transition, transference, between men and his

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

they elicit in him will disappear: The reappearance of Lecha was
another sign it was time for him to retire with Jamey and enjoy life far
from the dirt landing strips and desert jeeps. Ferro wanted to escape
the stink of women in the ranch house (692).
Most interesting in this context, however, is the triangle of David,
the artist/photographer, Eric, his model and lover, and Beaufrey, the
seller of pornographic movies of abortions and torture. These male
triangular relationships shift continually like quicksand. Silko
constantly destabilizes the narrative point of view and judgment of her
characters, making it impossible to trust any individual perspective.
Silko raises the stakes and introduces Seese as the female element in
the triangular relationship based on David and Erics (homosexual)
wish for a child. Eric sees Seese as a tool to cover-up the male-male
relationships in public: Seese was the decoy. Because Beaufrey was
FISCHER-HORNUNG
117
as anxious as David was about his masculine image (59); Seese

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

as being even stronger, more heavily determinant of actions and
choices, than anything in the bond between either of the lovers and the
beloved (21). But she also alerts us to the danger of seeing the erotic
triangle as an ahistorical Platonic form apart from gender, language,
class, and power because the erotic triangle is a sensitive register
precisely for delineating relationships of power and meaning, and for
making graphically intelligible the play of desire and identification by
which individuals negotiate with their societies for empowerment
(27). Silkos characters are caught in a dance of death in which
sexuality becomes a tool, clearly based on Silkos reading of the
economic structure of exchange within patriarchy, colonization, and
118
individual aetiology, wherein the effect of perversion arises from the

fact that it is integral to just those things it threatens (see Dollimore
1992, 172). These factors strongly determine the actions and choices
of her characters.
Nevertheless, Beaufrey, whose portrayal is one of the most extreme
examples of perversion in Silkos novel, is also portrayed as a victim.
Before becoming a perpetrator of terror and abjection, he was a victim
of the systematic destruction of the mother/child relationship:
Beaufrey only laughed because he could imagine himself as a foetus,
and he knew what they should have done with him swimming
hopelessly in the silence of the deep, warm ocean. His mother had told
him she tried to abort herself []. Beaufrey had started by hating his
mother; hating the rest of them was easy (Silko 1992, 102).
If the roots of homophobia, as we have seen, lie in the hatred of
what is perceived and labelled as feminine in men, in societies where
women are subjugated, feared and discriminated against because men
feel contaminated or polluted by them, feminine character traits in
males will be despised. Silko, I would argue, does not reject male
homosexuality as such and universally, rather she rejects the strong
gynophobia that determines so much of European American culture.
Homosexuality, as elaborated earlier, serves as a metonym.
Two of her Native American characters, Lecha and Sterling,
speculate on the deeper implications of homosexuality in particular
and masculinities in general. First, Lecha, the decipherer and guardian
of the almanacs from which the novel gets its name, is also a mother
who has abandoned her son, Ferro, leaving him to be raised by her
twin sister. She notes that white society likes its women weak: Lecha
made fun of men who secretly desired young boys instead of real
women. Lecha said the white men kept their women small and weak
so the women could not fight back when the men beat them or pushed
them around (597). The age differential in men who desire young
boys moves Lechas example beyond gender, defining the inequality
of power relations in the exploitation of boys by men. Then Sterling,
who is a Laguna Pueblo Indian exiled from his reservation (the
occurrence which sets the novels overarching plot structure in
motion), is also Seeses friend. Both Sterling and Seese see no great
difference between homosexual men and men in general:
Sterling had found out a little from Seese about homosexual men. She said they
were no different from other lovers, or other couples. Sterling could not explain
his curiosity without sounding prejudicial. Paulie would have been strange even
if he had not been gay. This was Sterlings point. (450)
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119
Silkos project is most assuredly not about gay bashing her

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

art. The aestheticization of a lovers suicide as well as the art
markets addictive vampirization of such perverted images intensify
Silkos apocalyptic vision of absolute abjection. As suggested earlier
120
in this paper, Eric, unable to endure the cold dance of death of evershifting love triangles, commits suicide. David, his lover, utilizes the
images of Erics destruction in the ultimate aestheticization of the
nasty (106), systematically adjusting the lights and reflectors
illuminating and aestheticizing Erics destruction in death so that the
blood appeared as bright and glossy as enamel paint (108).
Deliberately posing, structuring and cold-heartedly photographing
Erics corpse, David incorporates the images in his white-on-white
series: White on white: the pure white background of glossy paper;
white cat in a snowstorm, white Texas fag boy naked on white
chenille (107). Silko ironically levels the racial implications in
whiteness and also changes the usual paradigm of a female corpse
aestheticized in the male view (see Mercer and Julien 1988, 143-144).
In a redefinition of the terms portrait and still life (Silko 1991, 553;
italics in original), Davids emotional death is mirrored in Erics
physical death:
All that mattered in the landscape was the human form, the human face, which
was our original landscape as an infant. So-called still lifes and landscapes
were only analogues for the artists perceptions and emotions. Erics body had
become a new landscape, and his colors had been scattered all over the
bedspread, ceiling, walls, and floor. (555)
Eric, [f]everish with love and need (107), reaches out to Davids
aesthetic fixations, achieving the final, irresistible contact with his
lover in death: Eric had made his suicide a sort of visual event or
installation, which Eric had somehow known would be irresistible to a
visual artist such as David. Eric had performed the last act of his life
farce perfectly; uncanny how Erics blood and flesh had become a
medium consumed by a single performance (537).
Only the guaranteed commercial value of Davids pictures enables
the absolute elimination of the human body and soul. Critics comment
on the rich intensity of the reds against the white of the background:
One critic wrote of the pictorial irony of a field of red shapes which
might be peonies cherry, ruby, deep purple, black and the nude
human figure nearly buried in these blossoms of bright red (108).
In a voyeurism driven to its extreme, a steady parade of buyers filled
the gallery before the opening where [e]veryone wanted to see
(108). In the end critics agreed that David had found a subject to fit
his style of clinical detachment and relentless exposure of what lies
hidden in flesh (108). In ironic consistency, when David is later
killed in a riding accident on Serlos finca in Argentina his pictures
dramatically increase in value:
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121
David was worth more dead than he had been worth alive. The Eric series
would appreciate in value, and even pictures of Davids corpse would bring a
good price []. Every ounce of value, everything worth anything, was stripped
away for sale, regardless; no mercy []. Capitalism stayed ahead because it
was ruthless. (565)
This is the real nasty danse macabre and almanac of the dead
indeed!
In her study Photography, Susan Sontag portrays our contemporary
need not only to have reality confirmed but also enhanced by
photographs in aesthetic consumerism, turning us into imagejunkies (1977, 24). The camera enables the annihilation of moral
boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any
responsibility toward the people photographed (see 1997, 41). It is the
total absence of responsibility to and emotional relationship with the
photographed subject that Silko portrays in the fictional triangle of
Eric, David, and Davids critics. Yet, Sontag maintains that because
each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight
depends on where it is inserted; the specific context of the photo is
essential (see Sontag 1977, 105-106). Therefore, Silkos point of
insertion cannot be overlooked capitalist exploitation and the death
of Eros.
Seese, who in her own way simultaneously loved and exploited
both Eric and David, recognizes this clearly: She had not actually
seen Erics body. Only the photographs. Davids photographs, but
somehow that had been worse. All she knew was that something had
happened to her eyes, something had diminished her vision (Silko
1991, 53). Seese seems to be the only one who cannot separate herself
from Erics reality as an individual, the subject in the photo, and
Davids cold-blooded objectification. What she sees, the point of
Davids photographic insertion, changes her vision. She sees not the
reality of death, but a generally diminished, abject reality. In turn, her
vision is changed and diminished as well. It is the intrusion of death
into life without the protection of a higher order (spirituality) or the
objectification for a higher purpose (science), which, according to
Kristeva truly characterizes the abject and the uncanny:
The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection.
It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does
not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary
uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us []. It is
thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs
identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The inbetween, the ambiguous, the composite. (1982, 4)
122
Neither art nor science, Davids photos lack the sublimely purifying
moment. His is an aestheticized consumer product and therefore it
remains in the realm of the abject.
Yet Silkos perpetrators are always also victims of individual and
societal perversions rejected by their mothers, the all-consuming
vampires, and haunted by their fathers, the unspoken absence. Serlo,
for example, in all his nauseating repulsiveness, is clearly a victim of
the death of love:
The old man did not attempt to hide the nature of his relationship with Serlo.
His parents were divorced and neither had wanted him. The old man did not
consider massaging the boys arms and legs at night homosexuality.
Homosexuality involved others, other men who attempted to penetrate or who
wanted to be penetrated. Serlo had learned sexual penetration was silly,
unnecessary, and rotten with disease. (1991, 546)
Nevertheless, in Silkos scenario this kind of perversion does not have

exclusively European cultural roots, but also extends back to the days
of the Aztecs and Inca, to a time when blood sacrifice began to spread
in the South before conquest, forcing many tribes to flee to North
America:
The old parrot priests used to tell stories about a time of turmoil hundreds of
years before the Europeans came, a time when communities had split into
factions over sacrifices and the sight and smell of fresh blood. The people who
went away had fled north, and behind them dynasties of sorcerers-sacrificers
had gradually taken over the towns and cities of the South. In fact, it had been
the sorcerers-sacrificers who had called down the alien invaders, sorcerercannibals from Europe, magically sent to hurry the destruction and slaughter
already begun by the Destroyers secret clan. (475)
In the ancient blood sacrifices to the gods and in the abuse of boys by
men, Silko mirrors ancient and contemporary perversions: The old
priest wanted the boy so they did not take the boy with the others [].
At night he whispers to the sleeping child there are other gods they
must serve now (593). Silko locates the perversions a society most
abhors within itself and in those it conquers as well. The fact that the
definition of perversion is inherent in European American society
explains, I believe, Silkos choice of homosexual male relations as the
paradigm of the days of the dead, the epoch of Death-Eye Dog;
Silkos scenario of abjection coincides with five hundred years of
European American exploitation of the indigenous peoples and the
land of the Americas and Mother Earth.
In Mimesis and Alterity, Michael Taussig refers to the colonial
mirror of production, whereby the colonizer projects the worst
FISCHER-HORNUNG
123
imaginable traits onto the colonized: [B]arbarism does double

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

specifically because the latter practiced sodomy, by which they
usually meant homosexual behaviour. A discourse on sexuality
becomes a rationale for colonial hierarchy, dominion, and
subordination, a discourse that is fundamentally about power relations.
(see Trexler 1995, 1-3). These texts provide us exclusively with the
view of the conqueror and no matter how sympathetic to the
Amerindians a given author may have been at the time, all of them
viewed sodomy as a sin and as evidence of barbarism. Nevertheless,
as contradictory as it might seem, Trexler clearly documents sodomy
as a form of punishment imposed by the conquistadores upon the
indigenous population during conquest, clearly symbolized by
erecting a picota or penis shaped garrot outside the gate of every new
American city. Since the shape of the picota so clearly resembled the
erect penis, at least subliminally it indicated that sodomy is barbarous
and that it will be punished along with other serious crimes (see 1995,
12, 167). In a twist of logic the conquerors reconciled their
categorization of homosexuals, that is sodomy, as sinful for the
natives on the one hand, but a type of justified punishment meted out
by themselves on the other hand. Since penetration masculinizes the
124
penetrator and feminizes the penetratee, there is a certain perverse

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

fiction is always set in direct relation to the land, to Mother Earth. She
too has been raped, sodomized, degraded and perverted during
conquest. Here Silkos apocalyptic vision comes full circle in the
unity of both present abjection and visionary future triumph of
humankind and the land. The mimesis between womans soul and the
spiritual cosmos rests on the notion that the earth is in an important
sense the mother (see Taussig 1993, 121). Jonathan Rutherford fleshes
out the details of this association of woman/earth both as threat and
redemption:
Men have associated women with the earth, the flesh subordinate to mens
reason. Mother Earth, green fields and lush pastures that men can bask in, that
fed us. But she is also the mud and the dirt of womens bodies, the menstrual
blood, the female sexual desire that instils panic. She is to be feared and
controlled. She is the vast mother with a cave between her legs. She embraces
us when we were infants and ever since threatens to swamp us and swallow us
up. She is the maternal body we must separate ourselves from. And woman is
the temptress, the harlot who threatens our self-control, the body we objectify in
our pornographic defence against our mothers bodies. The mother and the
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125
whore, two images of femininity that mens heterosexuality invents to reconcile

our contradictory desires for mother love and sexual love. Freud summed up
this aspect of our sexuality, which he insisted was a universal affliction []
not confined to some individuals, with the sentence Where they love they do
not desire and where they desire they do not love. (1988, 50-51)
In a process similar to psychoanalysis, Silko presents us with the

fragments of her vision of both the horror and the potential to
overcome the relentless laws of patriarchy. Her perverts are
themselves the victims of this system, the conundrum of our sexuality
in the death of Eros. Silkos intention is not to pillar homosexuality to
the absolute norms of heterosexuality, but rather to enable us to
overcome the male-male, male-female, and female-female binaries, to
transcend them in a new level of liberation. As in psychotherapy,
images are the fragments of the deeper truth and lead to the source of
the illness and ultimately to recovery. In this sense both Silko, as
writer, and we, her readers, are part of this process.
Eric, the lover who performs the death of Eros in his suicide, comes
to the following conclusion: So now we know that gay men are just
men after all. [] Irrational and piggish like all the rest. I thought I
had already whipped that demon back to the underworld (Silko 1991,
51). But Silko refuses to let us whip the demons back into the
underworld; she demands that we view the demons head on by
radically exploring the psychological and material abjection of the
European American tradition. She enables the reader to explore a
higher order, a vision of non-abjection where sexualities could be
restored to their rightful and positive context in the realm of our
imagination, the healing context of kinship and Eros. In this vision,
Little Grandmother and Little Grandfather, the ancestor spirits,
would be liberated from their glass prison, returned to the care of their
kin, and the balance between male and female, male and male, female
and female, between Mother Earth and Father Sky would be restored
a world where, to paraphrase Silkos own vision in Yellow Woman,
differences [would be] celebrated as signs of Mother Creators
Grace (1996, 67).
Works Cited
Barker, Francis, et al., eds. 1998. Cannibalism and the Colonial World. Cambridge:
Barnett, Louise, and James L. Thorson, eds. 1999. Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection
of Critical Essays. Albuquerque: University Press of New Mexico.
126
Bristow, Joseph. 1992. Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay
Writing. London: Routledge.
Bronfen, Elisabeth. 1992. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic.
Chapman, Rowena, and Jonathan Rutherford, eds. 1988. Male Order: Unwrapping
Masculinity. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Dollimore, Jonathan. 1992. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to
Foucault. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Donnelley, Daria. 1999. Old and New Notebooks: Almanac of the Dead as
Revolutionary Entertainment. In Barnett and Thorson, eds., 245-259.
Farrel, Kirby. 1998. Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the
Nineties. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Freud, Sigmund. [1930] 1989. Civilization and Its Discontents, translated and edited
by James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton.
Hulme, Peter. 1998. Introduction: The Cannibal Scene. In Barker et al., eds., 1-38.
Irigaray, Luce: [1977] 1985. The Sex Which is Not One, translated by Catherine Porter
and Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Irr, Caren. 1999. The Timelessness of Almanac of the Dead: Or a Postmodern
Rewriting of Radical Fiction. In Barnett and Thorson, eds., 223-244.
The Lebensborn . n.d. The Jewish Virtual Library. http://www.jewishvirtual
library.org/jsource/Holocaust/Lebensborn.html (accessed 10 September 2003).
Lewes, Kenneth. 1988. The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality: Freuds
Theory Unfinished. New York: Meridian.
Mercer, Kobena, and Isaac Julien. 1998. Race, Sexual Politics and Black
Masculinity. In Chapman and Rutherford, eds., 97-164.
University Press.
Moore, David L. 1999. Silkos Blood Sacrifice: The Circulating Witness in Almanac
of the Dead. In Barnett and Thorson, eds., 149-183.
Rutherford, Jonathan. 1988. Whos That Man?. In Chapman and Rutherford, eds.,
21-67.
Schmidt, Peter, et al., eds. 1998. Maya. Milan: Bompiani.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press.
Siegel, Carol. 1995. Male Masochism: Modern Revisions of the Story of Love.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. 1991. Almanac of the Dead. New York: Penguin.
. 1996. Yellow Woman and the Beauty of the Spirit. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
St. Clair, Janet. 1999. Cannibal Queers: The Problematics of Metaphor in Almanac
of the Dead. In Barnett and Thorson, eds., 207-221.
Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses.
New York: Routledge.
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Trexler, Richard C. 1995. Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and
the European Conquest of the Americas. Cambridge: Plity Press.
Consuming the Body: Literal and Metaphorical Cannibalism

in Peter Greenaways Films
Tatjana Pavlov
In a colonial context cannibalism has been used to dissociate
civilized from primitive people. As Kay Schaffer points out,
cannibalism represented the ultimate denial of a common humanity,
the ultimate sign of depravity, the ultimate mark of savagery, and
above all, a guarantee of European superiority (1995, 108). However,
the absence of anthropophagy in so-called civilized society is an
illusion. In stark contrast to the assumption that cannibalistic practices
do not exist in the Western world, the case of the Rotenburg cannibal
(Armin Meiwes) in Germany of 2001 proves the opposite. The
incident constituted a major problem for the court trying the case.
Since there is no German law prohibiting anthropophagy, the court
lacked a legal basis for reaching a verdict. In the decision of January
2004, the court opted for a verdict of manslaughter. The Rotenburg
cannibal acted in accordance with his victims sexual desire to be
killed, cut in pieces, and be consumed (apparently, they opened their
sexual ritual by eating the putative victims penis while the latter
was still alive). The agreement was mutual and could, therefore, not
be treated as a murder. Meiwes compared his deed with the Holy
Communion, explaining that he wanted to become one with the man
he consumed. From an anthropologists point of view, it could be
argued that this is a form of endocannibalism (eating a member of the
same group), which is associated with sacrifice, familial devotion,
reincarnation, and other sentiments of group welfare and continuity. It
stands in contrast to exocannibalism (eating a member of another
group), which has to do with revenge or the destruction of enemies
(see Eliade 1987, 3:60; White 2001, 58-60). The prominence of
religious and sexual elements in the Meiwes case makes evident the
full complexity of anthropophagy when it appears in our culture. In
this essay I will focus on these various aspects of anthropophagy in an
analysis of the metaphorics of cannibalism in the films of Peter
Greenaway.
By alluding to different forms of cannibalism, most of them
metaphorical, Greenaway manages to destabilize familiar categories
within Western civilization that set up rules of what is to be
considered as either aesthetic or unaesthetic. Regarded as a barbaric
130
and taboo practice, anthropophagy is consequently associated with the

unaesthetic. In the Western world it is, with occasional exceptions,
metaphorical rather than literal cannibalism that is all pervasive and
that is closely linked to the devouring nature of consumer society.
Greenaway formulates his ideology critique of patriarchal uncivilized
societies by representing the unaesthetic consumption of the body in
highly aesthetic ways, so that the distinction between the uncivilizedunaesthetic and civilized-aesthetic can no longer hold.
Greenaways work can thus be situated close to the realm of the
abject, which according to Julia Kristeva is what disturbs identity,
system, or order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules
(1982, 4).
A number of films since the 1960s have used cannibalism as a
metaphor for the brutal functioning of capitalist society, for example
Porcile/Pigsty (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy, 1969), Themroc (Claude
Farraldo, France, 1973), and Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, France,
1967). These films more or less explicitly draw upon Marxs
nineteenth-century vision of capitalism as a dynamic in which the
means of production become means of absorbing the labor of others.
Here, as Marx points out, it is no longer the laborer who employs the
means of production, but the means of production that employ the
laborer. Instead of being consumed by him [...] they consume him, as
the ferment necessary to their own life-process (Marx 1990, 425).
Kevin Dwyer claims that filmmakers such as Godard, Farraldo and
Pasolini have all spoken about their work in Marxist terms of
exploitation, materialism, and alienation (2003, 260-261).
Films of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Olivier Smolderss
Adoration (Belgium, 1990), Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caros
Delicatessen (France, 1991) or Greenaways The Cook, The Thief, His
Wife and Her Lover (England, 1989; screenplay 1989), Dwyer argues,
display cannibalism as a metaphor for patriarchy in crisis (265).
Against the backdrop of this widespread anthropophagic metaphor,
traditional gender and power relations between parents and children,
men and women, rulers and subjects (265) are laid bare and thus
called into question. In many of these films, cannibalism becomes an
implement of terror for confused, and often risible, males. However,
[t]he alimentary delinquents are apocalyptically punished [...], giving
victory to the purity of the childlike figures and romantic couples
(265).
I would argue that in the case of Peter Greenaway, Dwyers
observation does not merely apply to The Cook, the only Greenaway
film in which a human body is actually served as food at a
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131
cannibalistic horror banquet. Rather, Greenaway also presents forms

of cannibalism (both endo- and exo-) which go far beyond the literal
consumption of ones own kind. In The Draughtsmans Contract
(1982; screenplay 1984) womens bodies are generally equated with
gardens; different parts of their bodies are equated with fruits that
evoke both sexual desire and death. The Baby of Mcon (1993;
screenplay 1994) deals with the progressive exploitation of the body
of a child believed to be miraculous. In The Pillow Book (1995;
screenplay 1996) human skin is used as writing paper for sexual
satisfaction and aesthetic pleasure, culminating in a scene where a
corpse is exhumed and flayed, and its skin transmuted into a pillow
book while the rest of the body is thrown into the garbage. Food,
waste, and the corpse, the central domains of abjection (see Kristeva
1982, 2-4) intersect in these films in a way that dissolves the border
between the unaesthetic and the aesthetic. My analysis thus extends
from literal cannibalism in the case of The Cook, via partial bodily
dismemberment and exploitation in The Baby of Mcon and The
Pillow Book, to purely metaphorical consumption in The
Draughtsman's Contract. I take the literal consumption of the body in
The Cook as a template for deep structures of consumption within
patriarchal societies across this selection of Greenaway's films.
In showing how human bodies are transformed into commodities
before being consumed (either literally or metaphorically), Greenaway
alludes to the greedy, devouring nature of consumer society and its
operative structures, one of whose central pillars is patriarchy (see
Morris 1999, 393-395). By virtue of his critique of consumer society
behaviour, I would argue that Greenaway employs cannibalism
principally as a metaphor for patriarchy in crisis.
In my reading of Greenaways films, I will show why the respective
exemplifications of power finally fail in each case. Here, traditional
gender and power relations are not only called into question, but also
reversed. Subtle ironical references to the Bible, to literature and art,
to political and historical events are used to point out the many
examples of metaphorical cannibalistic acts that are tolerated in
Western civilization and that are connected with patriarchy and
consumer society. In the late twentieth century, traditional patriarchal
systems are increasingly beleaguered, as is the distinction between
civilized and primitive people, as Schaffer describes it (1995,
108). Greenaway reveals and questions the double standards of
civilized society, exemplified by the practice of the Catholic Church
in particular, and offers, in films such as The Cook, The Pillow Book,
and The Draughtsmans Contract, matriarchy as an alternative.
132
The Catholic Church represents one of the major patriarchal

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

(John 6:55)
In the Bible, the Eucharist, the central act of Christian worship, is
expressed in cannibalistic terms: He that eateth my flesh, and
drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him (John 6:56). The
theological interpretation of the Eucharist varies widely among the
Christian denominations and has been the cause of endless dispute.
While Roman Catholics understand the presence of Christ literally,
Protestants prefer to emphasize the role of the Eucharist as an act of
commemoration (see Eliade 1987, 5:186). If the Holy Communion is
understood by the Catholic Church as the actual consumption of the
body of Christ, it can be argued that this is a form of endocannibalism,
as mentioned above. Defined as a ritual act that protects the living
against the negative effects of death, people from so-called
primitive societies believe that in (endo)cannibalism the powers of
the deceased are ingested along with their remains (see Eliade 1987,
3:60). This is not far from Catholic belief that considers the Eucharist
in terms of sacrifice, as a renewed offering of Christs immolation in
death. The need for redemption is central to the doctrine of salvation
and, therefore, allows traits of cannibalism within the Catholic
Church, traits implied both in The Baby of Mcon and in The Cook in
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133
a most exaggerated manner. In both films avatars of Christ-figures are

sacrificed, their bodies being consumed literally and metaphorically,
in order to bring salvation. However, the longed-for redemption
remains doubtful, as the following analyses will show.
The Baby of Mcon tells the story of a morality play performed in
1659 at the height of the counter-reformation. At a time when the
community of the cathedral city of Mcon is struck with famine and
infertility, a beautiful, healthy boy is born to an old and hideous
woman who has long passed the normal childbearing age.
Consequently, the boy is regarded as a miraculous child and is used as
a moneymaking device in a world of avarice and religious fanaticism.
After the Child is born, the midwives examine the boy, touch the
afterbirth and lick their fingers, superstitiously believing that this
consumption will enhance their own fertility. The abject here given
visual expression by the afterbirth is what is thrown away (ab-ject),
cast off (see Kristeva 1982, 4). In this context, the bodys waste is
regarded as something sacred and, therefore, allows the representation
of the unthinkable: namely cannibalism. Even though it is
metaphorical rather than literal anthropophagy that is represented in
The Baby of Mcon, it is no less cruel.
The exploitation of the Childs body is carried out in several steps.
In the beginning, the boys sister, simply called the daughter, takes
him away from his mother and offers his blessings in exchange for the
affluence of her family. Encouraged by a credulous public she
identifies herself with the Virgin Mary and claims the Child is her
own. Building upon familiar religious beliefs and traditions, she
dresses as the Madonna and clothes the Child both literally and
symbolically following the conventions of Catholic iconography.
Later on, the Church takes the Child away from her and carries its
exploitation to even greater extremes. Most cruelly, its spittle, phlegm,
urine, excrement, tears, condensed breath, and blood are extracted and
auctioned off to the wealthier inhabitants of Mcon. In order to obtain
the boys tears, they pinch and whip him, and to get his phlegm, they
wet the boy and leave him shivering by the back door of the church.
The Child endures each torture patiently, repeating at regular intervals
a kind of incantation: This is a fluid of my body. These are the
liquids of my life (Greenaway 1994, 94-95). The boy is aware of and
complicit in the consumption of his body and accepts the part he has
to play in this patriarchal system.
The daughter finally ends the boys agony by suffocating him; since
a law in Mcon forbids the execution of virgins, the Church condemns
the daughter to be raped to death. The Child is subsequently declared
134
a saint, and the local populace, eager for relics, violently dismembers
his body. There are numerous examples of saints bodies being cut up,
by peasants or the ecclesiastical elite, in order to transform them into
relics (see Angenendt 1994, 149-213). As Bhme points out,
Christianity expanded, taking the form of a culture of death which
was characterized throughout Europe by fetishist and magical
practices. The sacred became the medium of guarantees insuring both
life and after-life, guarantees which like all magic functioned in a
utilitarian and manipulative manner, and this on two levels at once: on
the one hand, by warding off perils and menaces; on the other hand by
promising advantage and good luck (2003, 119; my translation).
Both aspects are presented in the film: before the auction of the
Childs fluids, the Church orders some of the midwives and wetnurses to dress as saints and group themselves around the boy. Among
them are Agatha with her breasts on a silver plate, the beheaded
Catherine with a giant wheel, Lucy with her eyes on a stalk, and
Cecelia carrying her severed head. The resurrection of martyrs
reinforces the communitys belief in religious miracles; and they
willingly pay for the boys liquids. Since dismemberment seems to
belong to martyrdom, the film consequently ends with the Childs
body being divided into parts and distributed like the body of Christ in
the Holy Communion.
The Childs body fluids as well as its final dismemberment belong
to the realm of the abject. As Kristeva explains: Such wastes [in the
context of the film, the body fluids or the childs various bodily parts]
drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in
me and my entire body falls beyond the limit cadere, cadaver
(1982, 3). As a matter of fact, the process of cadere is accelerated in
the film. The Childs body is violently exploited until nothing
remains. The boys dismemberment is the most revolting
representation of the abject. By transforming the various body parts
into relics, the abject becomes something sacred. It is via the
sacralization of the abject that the Catholic Church implicitly justifies
its own transgression of taboo practices. The desired salvation,
however, is missing. Instead, the film ends as it begins: famine,
disease and sterility return to the community.
With these horrifying practices in mind, one could ask whether the
behaviour of civilized societies may be no less savage and brutal
than that of so-called primitive ones. The Baby of Mcon exemplifies
the way in which the Catholic Church exploits, indeed consumes, its
own members. The deaths of the daughter and of the Child foreground
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the consumption of the body within patriarchal-ecclesiastical

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

(Kristeva 1982, 4), is at once fascinating and grotesque. Georgina,
holding a gun, forces her husband to eat. As Albert takes his last bite,
she shoots him, uttering the last word of the film Cannibal. Here,
the metaphorical consumption is transformed into a real one. An
unintentional exocannibalism takes place at the horror banquet, where
the tyrant is compelled to eat his enemy literally. In contrast to The
Baby of Mcon, cannibalism is here turned against the patriarch in
this case Albert. This Last Supper alludes to yet another meaning of
the Eucharist the transformation of the word into flesh, to which I
now turn.
And the Word was made flesh (John 1:14)

In The Cook and The Pillow Book text and body are made one, albeit
in totally different ways. Whereas in The Pillow Book the human body
is considered as book and vice versa, the written text and the body in
The Cook are associated with food. Both films represent forms of
136
cannibalism that are closely connected with the well-known biblical

quotation the Word was made flesh.
Reading and eating are both acts of consumption. As Genesis most
explicitly demonstrates, knowledge is figured as food. Like Saint
John (see Revelation 10:8-11), we devour books, but we also swallow
food for thought, then ruminate upon it or chew it over until it
is well digested. In The Cook, the protagonists are not only
characterized by what they eat, but also by what they read. While
Albert Spica is literally presented as the speaker, whose vulgar
prattle dominates the whole film, Michael is shown as the silent
reader, who even consumes his books while eating in the restaurant.
Albert, who has neither table manners nor taste, takes Michaels
reading as a personal affront: Hello what are you doing? Reading
again? This is a restaurant, not a library. All you are allowed to read
here, you know, is the menu. Youre insulting the chef. Reading gives
you indigestion didnt you know that? Dont read at the table!
(Greenaway 1989, 44). Albert and his cronies do not read all they
can do with books is destroy them. This is most explicitly shown in
the book depository, where they create havoc and kill Michael by
stuffing pages from his favourite book, The French Revolution, down
his throat.
Michaels death is presented as a bloody event, like the French
Revolution. His preferred book, which constantly accompanied him,
has not only become a harbinger of death but also the murder weapon
that causes his dreadful end. Ironically, Georgina once asked her
lover: What good are all these books to you? You cant eat them!
(70). But this is exactly what Michael finally does, albeit not
voluntarily. When Richard tells Georgina that his favourite cookery
book even contains instructions for cannibalism, she asks him: Could
you cook him? [...] You have a reputation for a wide range of
experimental dishes. He might taste good. What would taste best? His
heart? His liver? The cheeks of his backside? His prairie oysters?
(84-85). Her ambiguous remarks could be taken to refer to the
(endo)cannibalistic tendency of human sexual behaviour. Georgina
has indeed tried her lovers prairie oysters and that is why
Richard mistakenly assumes that she will be the one to eat Michael in
order to become one with her lover and to achieve eternal communion.
She corrects him with a smile and they both know that it will be
Albert who will consume Michael. Albert will be forced to eat his
own words which have become flesh Ill kill him and Ill bloody
eat him! (66-67) but in the act of eating Michael, Albert will not
receive the Word of God. Surprisingly, Richard at first seems appalled
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by the idea that Georgina could be the one to consume her lover as an
act of endocannibalism. The idea of Albert eating Michael, however,
challenges Richards capabilities as a master cook. He willingly
agrees and astonishes everyone with his unusual culinary creation.
Furthermore, cooking Michael for Alberts consumption shows that
Richard belongs to the group of readers. He is well educated and
knows that in traditional revenge tragedies, such as William
Shakespeares Titus Andronicus or John Marstons Antonios
Revenge, the villain is forced to perform cannibalism. When Albert
kills Michael, he tells his cronies: I dont want this to look like a sex
murder. It is what it is a revenge killing. An affair of the heart (78).
It sounds as if he were familiar with revenge tragedy conventions, but
as Georgina informs the audience, Albert does not read (see
Greenaway 1989, 69). He is totally surprised by Georginas reaction
and does not, until the very last moment, expect death. Obviously he
has no literary education, for otherwise he would have known that
revenge tragedies always rely on retaliation. Ironically, it is also
Albert who explains the difference between literal and metaphorical
meaning. While torturing Michael to death Albert tells Mitchell: I
didnt mean you literally have to chew his bollocks off, you sad little
whippet. I meant it metaphorically (78). In the end, it is Albert who is
made to take himself literally: Try the cock, Albert, Georgina tells
him, its a delicacy, and you know where its been (92).
Alberts first exclamation when he sees Michaels corpse is: God!
Georgina corrects him: No Albert its not God its Michael (92).
Ironically, Michael shares the name of the archangel, meaning the
one who is like God. In the Book of Revelation (12:7-9) Michael is
the principal fighter of the heavenly battle against the devil. Contrary
to the archangel, Greenaways Michael fails to defeat Satan (Albert).
To accomplish his task, he needs the help of Georgina, whose name
derives from Englands patron Saint George. The legend tells how
Saint George killed the dragon that terrorized the country. Georgina
acts like the saint insofar as she kills the tyrant that threatened the
community. She has not only avenged the death of her lover but also
all the sufferings Albert caused other people to endure. Georgina
brings the final salvation, which demands the prior death of her lover.
Thus, the consumption of Michaels body as an allusion to the
Eucharist means an involuntary literal exocannibalism for Albert, but
at the same time a metaphorical endocannibalism for Georgina and
her followers for whom it signifies a redemptive act. Here, the
patriarch is destroyed by a woman who reverses the traditional
structure of the archangel (Michael) as a male figure assisted by St.
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George. It is the feminized, yet no longer subordinate Georgina who

achieves victory.
In The Pillow Book the Word [is] made flesh through the creative
act of writing on the body. In 1996 Greenaway observed:
It may be that there are two simulations in life that can be, sooner or later,
guaranteed to excite and please sex and text, flesh and literature. Perhaps it is
a commendable ambition to try to bring both these simulations together, so
close together in fact that they can be considered, at least for a time perhaps
for the length of a film inseparable. (qtd. in Pascoe 1997, 158)
Greenaway has clearly blurred the boundaries between book and

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

last dangling paragraph that is the reason for the next books
sprouting (Greenaway 1996, 102). The publisher passionately
consumes both the text and the body: there is one scene in the film
where we see the publisher first reading the text on Jeromes body,
then kissing it (both the body and the text). In a subsequent scene, we
see the publisher from behind, kneeling in front of Jeromes loins.
This hint at oral sex figures a kind of endocannibalism. Nagiko is
jealous and angrily decides to continue her writing on other men, then
sending these human texts to the publisher. This, in turn, makes
Jerome jealous and he desperately tries to win her back. One of
Nagikos admirers proposes that Jerome should fake his own suicide,
which tragically results in his real death. Nevertheless, his death
seems to be a necessary precondition for Nagiko to become an
independent professional writer.
Grief-stricken, she writes the sixth book, an erotic poem entitled
The Book of the Lover, on Jeromes corpse before burying it. The
publisher, finding out about this, has the body exhumed and flayed
and the skin made into a personal pillow book. As Bridget Elliot and
Anthony Purdy remark, Jeromes body is reduced to pure surface, his
flesh, organs and even bones [are] discarded; his body spiritualized by
its transformation into text, the text sensualized by its perfect
embodiment (1997, 89-90). Although the act of transforming
Jeromes skin into a book is a grotesque and horrifying idea, it is
presented in a very aesthetic manner. When the skin is carefully
flayed, skilled bookbinders, working closely with individual handsewn stitching, labour in deep concentration, oblivious to the nature of
the material they are working with, to make a superbly fashioned book
of some seventy pages (87). The publisher uses the pillow book for
his own sensual communion: Cradling the book in his hands, and
putting his finger in among the most intimate of the skin-pages, he
places his hands and the book on his lower belly. Soon he is breathing
very deeply (88). The way in which the publisher holds the
remains of Jeromes body close to his lower belly is a metonymic
figure of sexual consummation and endocannibalism.
Nagiko, pregnant with Jeromes child, is determined to get the
pillow book back. She sends the publisher the remaining body books
and demands, in turn, the one made of Jeromes skin. Since this
publisher constantly refuses the exchange, a messenger, upon whose
torso the last body book is inscribed, is sent to kill him. This thirteenth
human volume is appropriately called The Book of the Dead, and after
reading it, the publisher finally returns the pillow book and accepts his
140
own death. The young man slits the publishers throat with a small
blade and takes the book back to Nagiko.
The Book of the Dead is essential since it not only contains
Nagikos personal indictment of the publisher but also indicates her
liberation from a patriarchal structure:
This is the writing of Nagiko Kiyohara no Motosuke Sei Shonagon, and I know
you have blackmailed, violated and humiliated my father. I suspect you also of
ruining my husband. You have now committed the greatest crime you have
desecrated the body of my lover. You and I now know that you have lived long
enough. (112)
Nagiko does not only avenge the humiliation of her father, the ruining
of her husband, and the death of her lover; she also symbolically frees
herself from the restrictions of a patriarchal world. For this reason it is
important that she mentions her whole name, involving that of her
historical model Sei Shonagon from whom she got her first name. The
film pays direct homage to an original Japanese Pillow Book written
by Sei Shonagon at the close of the tenth century. She was a member
of the imperial court during the Heian period (794-1185), and her
pillow book represents a collection of reminiscences, lists, literary
quotes, and amorous stories (see Pascoe 1997, 163; Krewani 2001,
297-298). The link between text and sex appears to have inspired
Greenaways version:
I regard the most important and essential two pervading sensibilities Sei
Shonagons enthusiasm for writing and her abiding excitement of physicality,
or one might simplify by saying her continuing enthusiasm for text and sex as
valuable and important now as then (qtd. in Willoquet-Maricondi and
Alemany-Galway 2001, 290)
Nagiko, too, derives the most intense carnal pleasure from having her
body written upon. Shonagons text is witty and ironic about the war
of the sexes; she is equal, if not superior in erudition to the males
who are socially above her. All this is reflected in Nagiko, who battles
against restrictions of all kinds to attain her independence and refuses
to limit her sexuality.
There are two rituals on Nagikos birthday that are central to her
liberation process: her face being written on by her father and her
aunts reading of Sei Shonagons pillow book. The annual face
painting is accompanied by a ceremonial speech is reminiscent of
Gods creation of man: When God made the first clay model of a
human being, He painted in the eyes [...] and the lips [...] and the sex.
And then He painted in each persons name lest the person should
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forget it. If God approved of His creation, He breathed the painted

clay-model into life by signing His own name (see Greenaway 1996,
31). Greenaway himself remarks in his script that this action, though
innocent and ritualized and performed with domestic affection, is,
nonetheless, a little odd, perhaps disturbing. The Child is no more, for
a moment, than something to write on. And the fathers signing is a
little too Godlike (31). On the one hand the face painting gives
Nagiko an identity, and on the other hand it marks her dependence on
her father. It comes as a shock for Nagiko when the face painting
stops on her eighteenth birthday. She feels lost and desperately tries to
find substitutes, but none of the other men, apart from Jerome, can
replace the ritual. Even though the separation from her father and the
later death of her lover are cruel experiences for Nagiko, they are also
necessary conditions for asserting her own individuality. In the course
of the film she becomes increasingly self-confident and independent.
She holds her ground in a patriarchal world and eventually becomes
herself the pen and not the paper (100). She no longer offers her
own body as an object to be written on, but starts writing herself. This
is an important development that connects Nagiko closely with Sei
Shonagon.
To complete the circle, the film concludes with Nagiko writing a
greeting card on the face of her daughter. Traditional gender roles are
thus reversed. The consumption of the body as text becomes a
metaphor for the end of patriarchy, which is superseded by daughtermother bonding. Whereas previously her father had taken up the
position of Writer/Creator, now Nagiko usurps the part of God/Father
and thereby symbolically implies the replacement of patriarchy by
matriarchy.
In the following section I will discuss the metaphorical
consumption of the female body in The Draughtsmans Contract in
connection with fruits. Here, as in The Pillow Book, the birth of a
child, which demands the prior death of its father, signifies a new
beginning that privileges feminine power structures.
Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant
fruits (Song of Solomon 4:16)
Lovers sometimes say that they would like to eat each other,
expressing their tender desire for incorporation. Oral sex, as not quite
an act of endocannibalism, is surely one of the forms closest to
consuming the lovers body. In the Old Testament this form of
142
metaphorical endocannibalism is most explicitly expressed in the

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

his film. As Amy Lawrence observes: Greenaways insistence on the
bodys inescapable vulgarity at once liberates it (and him) from the
strictures of middle-class respectability and lowers it by calling
attention to the less exalted attributes of the human animal (1997,
49). In the first scene of the film, one of the gentry is eating a plum
and talking about a Mr. Chandos and his passion for his garden. The
people of Mr. Chandoss estate have been regaled every year with
the fecundity of his plum trees, until their guts rumbled and their
backsides ached from overuse (Greenaway 1984, 47). It would
appear, as Lawrence points out, that not all fruit nourishes, often
passing directly into excrement with much discomfort for the
unpleasantly surprised epicure (1997, 49). Mr. Chandos eventually
builds a chapel where the pews are made of plum wood. The narrator
concludes with relish that those who visit the gentlemans chapel still
have cause to remember him through their backsides, on account of
the splinters (47). This is only one of many anecdotes about the
unpleasant side effects of gardens and fruits, hinting already at the
ambiguous tenor of the film.
From beginning to end the film is dominated by images of fruit.
They decorate tables and represent the wealth of Compton Ansteys
residents. The gardener demonstrates his talent daily by offering the
most exotic specimens. These hothouse fruits, however, are not
always as tasty as they look, which is also true of the fruits that are
used as metaphors for the erotic parts of the female body. Gardens and
wives are the focus of attention, and the fruit of fertility is central.
Womens fruits are as much consumed as real fruits, and they
sometimes leave a bitter taste. Mentioned in the same breath as fruitful
gardens, women find themselves objects of consumption. The first
sexual encounter between Neville and Mrs. Herbert is brutal and
ruthless, as Neville transforms Mrs. Herberts body into a fruit tree:
The trees have been poorly cared for. The angle between the
branches and the main trunk is too steep, he says lifting her arms,
but the original work is good. And what of the pears themselves,
Madam? In season, are they presentable? (56). Comparing her
breasts with pears, he later talks about limes while looking at her
genitals: Madam, they smell so sweet. Especially when they are
allowed to bloom without hindrance (71). Even though Neville does
not belong to the upper class, he feels superior. He makes fun of Mr.
Talmann, treats Mrs. Herbert as a sex object, and enjoys making
ambiguous remarks in the presence of the whole company:
144

Gentlemen, Mrs. Herbert pays no price she cannot afford and, thanks to her
generosity, I am permitted to take pleasure without hindrance on her property,
and enjoy the maturing delights of her country garden and, gentlemen, there is
much there to be surprised at and applauded. (68)
Neville constantly stresses his masterful dominance as a male

consumer of women. The power relationships between
women/gardens and men/gardeners are, however, to change with the
second contract made by the new generation of women. Mrs. Talmann
will liberate herself and her mother from traditional gender roles and
prove that they are not just parts of mens property. Interestingly,
Compton Anstey originally belonged to Mrs. Herberts father. Unable
to inherit as a woman, she was married to Mr. Herbert, who then took
possession of the estate. It seems that after Sarahs birth, Mr. Herbert
lost interest in his wife. Sarah, for her part, was married to Mr.
Talmann, a man who is not sexually interested in his wife, and is
accused by her of being impotent. Given the fact of their husbands
legal standing, Mrs. Herbert and Mrs. Talmann are confronted with
issues of inheritance. If they remain childless, Mr. Talmanns nephew
Augustus will inherit their property without having any direct
connection with the Herbert family. Being well aware of this fact,
Mrs. Herbert and her daughter make plans to guarantee their position
at Compton Anstey, plans which involve the exploitation of Neville
for their purposes. The fruit and consumption metaphors are central to
these plans. Although fruit metaphors are unflattering to women when
used by men, womens discourse on fruit seems much more ingenious.
By the end of the film, the traditional roles of consumer and
consumed are reversed. When Neville returns to Compton Anstey, he
offers Mrs. Herbert a gift of three pomegranates. Mrs. Herbert invites
him to a final sexual encounter, this time to our mutual satisfaction
(110), as she says, and asks him to do one last drawing. After having
sex, Mrs. Herbert tells Neville the story of Persephone. In the myth,
Persephone is raped and carried off by Hades into the Underworld.
Her mother, Ceres, the goddess of fields and gardens, searches for her
daughter but her quest makes the world barren. When she finally
locates Persephone, Hades refuses to release her daughter, who has
eaten seven seeds of a pomegranate, a fatal fruit, which confines her to
the Underworld. A contract is made and Persephone is restored to
Ceres and, with her, fertility, and fruitfulness to the world but only
for half of each year. Neville does not know the myth but senses that
her story is certainly a cautionary tale for gardeners (110). And for
mothers with daughters (111), Mrs. Herbert adds as her daughter
enters the room. Neville finds that the two women have been ahead of
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him all along. Mrs. Herbert assures him, [i]n our need of an heir you
may very likely have served us well (111). Mrs. Talmann reminds
him that a contract is always made between two partners for mutual
profit. As it turns out, the fruit she offered him to consume was as
fatal as the one offered by Hades to Persephone. Now that he has
consumed her fatal fruit and fertilized her garden, he will be sent
to the Underworld. Already Mrs. Herbert points to this necessary
consequence when she squeezes the pomegranate whilst talking of the
blood of the newborn and of murder, thus referring to the dual
symbolism of the fruit. The pomegranate with its blood-like juice
signifies both life and death. The blood of the newborn hints at the
baby Mrs. Talmann is awaiting a baby that will guarantee their
position at Compton Anstey. At the same time the birth of this baby
demands the prior death of its father who does not belong to Compton
Anstey and whose existence must, therefore, be erased. As Bakhtin
remarks, [t]he end must contain the potentialities of the new
beginning, just as death leads to a new birth (1968, 283). This is
perhaps why, as in other Greenaway films, liberation from patriarchy
most often demands a sacrifice.
Conclusion
Is the portrayal of a delicately cooked human body on screen, and its
cannibalistic consumption before our eyes, something aesthetic or
unaesthetic? According to standard Western categories which regard
anthropophagic practices as barbaric, they can only be associated with
the unaesthetic. In Greenaways films, however, the most horrible and
unimaginable things, such as the steaming brown body of Michael in
The Cook or the flaying of Jeromes skin in The Pillow Book, are
presented in a very aesthetic manner. Here, Greenaway blurs the
boundaries between the aesthetic and unaesthetic between the
civilized and the uncivilized between various forms of consumption,
from literary cultivation to literal cannibalism. Consequently, he
questions all kinds of categories that guarantee order in a given
society. By employing images and metaphors of cannibalism,
Greenaway makes us conscious that even within our so-called
civilized society whose feeling of superiority is based upon the
condemnation of what it pleases to label primitive these distinctions
are doubtful.
Greenaways exaggerated images of literal and metaphorical
cannibalism make us explicitly aware of rules within Western
146
civilization that continue to privilege patriarchal structures, structures

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

systems that exploit and consume the social body, and in particular
that of women. Cannibalism in his films is thus used as a metaphor, on
the one hand, for the devouring nature of Western consumer society,
and on the other, for patriarchy in crisis. In The Baby of Mcon,
Greenaway most explicitly formulates his critique of the brutal
functioning of patriarchal structures in which a child and a young
woman are the victims of the masculinist-ecclesiastical institution.
While the Child accepts the traditional role of the martyr, the young
woman tries to defy the church, but fails. In other films such as The
Cook, The Pillow Book, and The Draughtsmans Contract, traditional
gender and power relations are not only revealed and called into
question, but are replaced by structures which privilege the feminine.
Greenaway creates transgressive and disturbing connections
between dichotomies such as greed and thrift (The Baby of Mcon,
The Cook), eating and cooking (The Cook), consuming art and
creating art (The Cook, The Pillow Book, The Draughtsmans
Contract), revenge and salvation (The Cook, The Baby of Mcon, The
Pillow Book). His subtle ironical references to literary intertexts, such
as the Bible, mythology or English drama, employ anthropophagy as a
means of showing that received power relations between subject and
object, consumer and commodity, men and women, are revealed as
unsustainable and that they also open up new perspectives for less
hierarchical gender structures.
Works Cited
Angenendt, Arnold. 1994. Heilige und Reliquien. Die Geschichte ihres Kultes vom
frhen Christentum bis zur Gegenwart. Mnchen: Beck.
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Bakhtin, Mikhail. [1965] 1968. Rabelais and His World, translated by Helene
Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bhme, Hartmut. 2003. Der Krper als Bhne. Zur Protogeschichte der Anatomie.
In Bhnen des Wissens: Interferenzen zwischen Wissenschaft und Kunst, edited by
Helmar Schramm, 110-140. Berlin: Dahlem University Press.
Ciment, Michel. 2000. Interview with Peter Greenaway: The Baby of Mcon. In
Gras and Gras, 154-165.
Dwyer, Kevin. 2003. Alimentary Delinquency in the Cinema. In Eating Culture:
The Poetics and Politics of Food, edited by Tobias Dring, Markus Heide, and
Susanne Mhleisen, 257-271. Heidelberg: Universittsverlag Winter.
Eliade, Mircea, ed. 1987. Vol. 3 of The Encyclopedia of Religion. New York:
Macmillan.
, ed. 1987. Vol. 5 of The Encyclopedia of Religion. New York: Macmillan.
Elliott, Bridget, and Anthony Purdy. 1997. Peter Greenaway: Architecture and
Allegory. West Sussex: Academy Editions.
Gras, Vernon, and Marguerite Gras, eds. 2000. Peter Greenaway: Interviews.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Greenaway, Peter. 1984. The Draughtsmans Contract. Screenplay. LAvant-Scne
Cinma 333:44-117.
. 1989. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Screenplay. Paris: Dis Voir.
. 1994. The Baby of Mcon. Screenplay. Paris: Dis Voir.
. 1996. The Pillow Book. Screenplay. Paris: Dis Voir.
The Holy Bible. King James Version. [1611] 1991. New York: Ivy Books.
Krewani, Angela. 2001. Hybride Formen: New British Cinema Television Drama
Hypermedia. Trier: WVT.
Lawrence, Amy. 1997. The Films of Peter Greenaway. Cambridge: Cambridge Film
Classics.
Marston, John. [ca. 1600] 1999. Antonios Revenge, edited by Reavley W. Gair.
Marx, Karl. [1867] 1990. Vol. 1 of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy,
translated by Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
University Press.
Morris, Meaghan. 1999. Things to do with Shopping Centers. In The Cultural
Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, 391-409. London: Routledge.
Pascoe, David. 1997. Peter Greenaway: Museums and Moving Images. London:
Reaktion.
Schaffer, Kay. 1995. In the Wake of First Contact. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge
University Press.
Shakespeare, William. [ca. 1593] 2002. Titus Andronicus, edited by Jonathan Bate.
London: The Arden Shakespeare.
White, Tim. 2001. Once Were Cannibals. Scientific American 11:58-65.
Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula, and Mary Alemany-Galway, eds. 2001. Peter
Greenaways Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow
Press.
Shape-Shifters from the Wilderness: Werewolves Roaming

the Twentieth Century
Andrea Gutenberg
Werewolves have been regarded as prime emblems of the marginal, of
deviance and hybridity for more than two millennia. These shapeshifters between the human and the animal world are an integral part
of Western classical mythology (Lycaeon, Leto), and even the medical
notion of lycanthropy as a mental disease (the patient thinks he is a
wolf and is prone to cannibalism and the desecration of corpses) dates
back to ancient times (see Eickhoff 1986; Steiger and Ruehl 1999,
104-108). Consequently, the dimensions of morality and pathology
have always provided the ramifications for changing perceptions of
the werewolf figure, with a gradual shift of focus from early Christian
and medieval theological treatises on the position of monsters within
Gods creation to a secularized medical treatment of the monstrous
in modern times (see Ginzburg 1986, 207). Apart from its historically
continuous significance, the werewolf seems to be a transcultural
phenomenon, i.e. a constant anthropological factor or archetype of
sadistic fantasies, with man-tigers, man-hyenas, man-leopards, manbears and man-panthers replacing the werewolf in non-European
cultural contexts (see Jones 1951, 131). The shape-shifters habitual
transgression of basic rules of civilized behaviour, rooted in its
association with cannibalism, uncontrolled violence and/or sexual
excess, has always made it a potential social threat requiring rigorous
control as well as a figure of abjection threatening the integrity of the
human subject. It necessarily disturbs any clear-cut notions of identity,
system or order in that it takes up the position of what Julia Kristeva
in Powers of Horror has called the in-between, the ambiguous, the
composite (1982, 4). Its characteristic hybridity and mutability
account for a shifting affiliation with the realms of the real and the
marvellous. This peculiarity partly explains the historical occurrence
of werewolf trials, which, according to Ernest Jones (see 1951, 143),
only ended in 1720 with the execution of a supposed werewolf in
Salzburg.
The idea of the werewolf shares with other notions of abjection an
ambiguity of effect the witness of its metamorphosis is typically
overwhelmed by feelings of disgust and repulsion as well as by an
inexplicable fascination. In the case of the werewolf, the abject
150
connotes primitiveness, wildness, brutality, unbridled instinct and

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

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

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

werewolf generally reverses the process of giving birth. Read against
Batailles theory in Eroticism, the werewolf lives out the repressed
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desire of the ardent lover to incorporate, that is kill, the object of his
love in order to create a continuity where discontinuity reigns (see
2001, 20).
Psychoanalytically, the werewolfs incorporation/jouissance could
be interpreted as a phantasmatic construction of the maternal, where
the infant introjects the m/other and still has to learn that it can only
establish borders between itself and the other, between inside and
outside, through rejection and expulsion. If we turn to fairy-tales
featuring wolves, such as Little Red Riding-Hood or The Wolf and
the Seven Little Goats, however, it becomes evident that the
devouring wolf can function just as well as a trope for (male)
motherhood (see Ellmann 1993, 91), i.e. for pregnancy and for (a
violent) birth/repulsion. Both tales end with the wolf being forcibly
delivered of the contents of its belly. As Marjorie Garber remarks in
Vested Interests, the cross-dressed fairy-tale wolf perhaps fascinates
us so much just because of its feminine, motherly appeal in
conjunction with its masculinity: Is it the figure of the male as
female, the wicked wolf as benign (grand-)mother, that terrifies and
pleases, seduces and warns? (1992, 376). My thesis would be that its
two-faced significance, which can be derived from a psychoanalytic
reading, helps explain the werewolfs transitory position of nonbelonging always on the border between the presymbolic realm and
the symbolic order, struggling desperately for separation from the
other but always ultimately failing.
As a typical borderliner denied entry into the symbolic order, the
werewolf also stands outside the system of human communication and
even affects or contaminates the latters proper workings in that it
seems to verbally incapacitate victims and spectators alike. In view of
its animal-like and even, to some extent, thing-like condition, the
werewolf can be correlated with Kelly Hurleys concept of the
abhuman and its spectacle of a body metamorphic and
undifferentiated (1996, 3), which she develops on the basis of
Kristeva's notion of abjection. Werewolf narratives share a typical
feature with the Gothic texts Hurley analyzes, namely an inadequacy
of language due to the non-containment of abhuman realities (see
Hurley 1996, 14). Moreover, werewolves could be considered
things and thus to belong to the abhuman insofar as their state of
bodily indifferentiation shows a contamination of form by matter, or,
vice versa, the failure of form to hold amorphousness at bay. Such a
concern is of course highly relevant on an aesthetic level, and the
werewolf narratives changing negotiation between amorphous textual
154
chaos and the attempt to organize this in literary terms will provide a
central focus of my textual analysis.
The contention of my paper is that, especially in the twentieth
century, the werewolf becomes intimately connected to the realm of
the sexual, and, above all, to perverse forms of sexuality that call
into question the hegemonic system of heterosexuality. Homoerotic
undertones characterize a number of werewolf stories, some of which
present all-male or all-female communities. As will be shown,
werewolf tales serve not infrequently to uncover the deficiency of
mothers who fail in their task to watch over the racial and bodily
boundaries of their kin (see Doyle 1994, chapter 1), while werewolves
themselves can take the place of the (abject) mother. From the point of
view of literary history, the werewolf figure experiences a particularly
successful career in twentieth-century anglophone prose, where it is
increasingly embraced and aestheticized as a marker of abjection and
of cultural, sexual and/or bodily difference revalued. The texts chosen
here prose narratives spanning roughly one century and featuring
male as well as female werewolves will be studied semiotically,
narratologically and psychoanalytically, taking into account the
impact of cultural discourses such as Darwinism, imperialism,
decadence, feminism, and gay identity politics on the werewolf
paradigm. More specifically, convergences of the abject and the
werewolf raise the following questions: How does the species change
of human into beast affect notions of sex and/or gender? How does the
werewolf motif relate to female reproduction and fantasies of
masculinist self-birthing? What are the erotic constellations yielded by
the werewolf theme?
Wolfish Transgressions
Traditionally, the werewolf fable follows the rigid narrative formula
of an initial transgression resulting in a curse, of metamorphosis into a
monstrous beast, identification of the wrongdoer and his/her ritual
killing (see Brittnacher 1994, 200). In the ancient Greek myth of
Lycaeon, the crime which is punished by the Gods consists in
Lycaeons presumptuous behaviour (he kills a hostage and serves his
flesh to Jupiter in order to test the latters divinity). Jupiters
sanctioning he turns Lycaeon into a wolf seems consistent to the
extent that it mimics Lycaeons (failed) attempt to cross a fixed
cosmological borderline and condemns him to an existence below the
level of humanity. What the myth inaugurates is a logic of sinful
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transgression and punishment, accompanied by a law-and-order

mentality calling for an authoritarian and possibly violent
reconstitution of the social order. Not only subject and object but also
cause and effect are clearly outlined and opposed to each other. Apart
from cosmological or religious presumption, the breaking of taboos
involved in werewolf tales includes sins against nature and offences
against territorial rights or legitimate succession. The formula of myth
or fable usually requires that both the transgressive act and its
punishment occur within the narrated time of the fictive present. Less
formulaic texts such as short stories and novels, by contrast, typically
unfold a genealogical prehistory, sometimes reminiscent of the Gothic
principle outlined by Horace Walpole in his preface to The Castle of
Otranto, the sins of fathers are visited on their children to the third
and fourth generation ([1765] 1986, 41).
Twentieth-century werewolf narratives tend to obey the
genealogical principle, although they use it to embed a different kind
of logic. Sexual, and, more specifically, reproductive transgression or
perversion become the most important catalysts for werewolf
phenomena, but, at the same time, moral condemnation increasingly
gives way to pathological diagnosis. The werewolf in twentiethcentury tales is thus regarded less as a morally disgusting sinner than
as a degenerate case, requiring sympathy and understanding on the
one hand, and, possibly, measures against contamination and
unhealthy genetic reproduction on the other. A (pseudo-)medical
frame can correlate werewolf symptoms with an underlying mental
disease (lycanthropy) or with an insane disposition prone to violent
and perverse sexual acts which produce bad offspring. Where the
werewolf ceases to be regarded as a special case and appears instead
as a phenomenon spreading over several generations, the dangerous
impact of werewolf natures on society as a whole is thus considerably
enlarged. Hope for relief then naturally centres on a medical or
psychiatric pathologizing of werewolf occurrences, as this seems to
promise that a reliable scientific distinction can be made between
abnormal, diseased cases and the healthy majority a precondition for
curing and/or institutionalizing patients. The objectification of a
certain type affected by such syndromes helps to keep the horrors of
abjection at bay. The negotiation of werewolf cases and their impact
on narrative literature is thus not exempt from the rule that, from the
nineteenth century onward, biomedical sciences take over the
authority of religious institutions and experts in distinguishing
between good and bad, normal and abnormal, healthy and degenerate.
156
One of Sigmund Freuds best known psychiatric cases, his 1914

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

years past. In the night of the New Year, an inebriated Englishman
called Fleete commits a phallic act of pollution against the statue of
the monkey-God Hanuman (he presses his cigar butt against the
forehead of the idol and afterwards leans against it). This sacrilege is
immediately revenged by the Silver Man, a naked, faceless leper,
who bites Fleetes breast and thereby repeats the transgressive act of
contamination.
Fleetes gradual transformation into a wereleopard progresses
through various stages: at first a leopard spot, which grows darker
every hour, develops on his breast and his sense of smell becomes
more acute. He then has cravings for raw meat, which he devours with
an insatiable appetite; after that he rolls on the ground in the garden,
suddenly prefers the dark and wants to dine outside in the bitter cold.
His horses are terrified when he approaches them. When he tries to
jump out of the window, his English friends grab him and tie him up.
His bodily metamorphosis is not described in detail but only indicated
through the fact that he loses his voice, can only utter a beastly growl,
and that his eyes mysteriously change into those of a big cat: His
eyes were horrible to look at. There was a green light behind them, not
in them, if you understand, and the man's lower lip hung down
([1891] 1994, 300).
In his story, Kipling thus clearly places his wereleopard Fleete in
the context of degeneration theory by attributing to him conventional
signs of degeneration or atavism. It seems highly significant, however,
that these are brought to the readers attention by a degenerate,
monstrous other, only slightly reminiscent of a human being, instead
of being presented as a punishment meted out by some divine power.
The power of the Gods and Devils in Asia alluded to in the very
first sentence of the story is thus centred in the racial other himself,
whose threatening alterity is thereby intensified. The medical expert
whom Fleetes friends consult proves to be ineffective in surroundings
where magic appears to be so much stronger than science. The doctor
diagnoses a fatal case of hydrophobia, but it is only when the two men
decide to tackle what they consider as the real cause of the problem
the leper himself that relief seems possible. They deal with the man
by taking recourse to a primitive, anachronistic form of torture,
reminiscent of inquisitional Christian practices in the Middle Ages
(the burning of witches is actually referred to). When the leper puts
his hand to Fleetes left breast, the moment of healing takes place; and
his transformation back into a human state, evidenced by bodily
markers, is almost instantaneous: as a sign of his soul returning, his
158
eyes change and the leopard rosette disappears (although a horrid

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

guise of a panther. Putting into action the Draconian moral code of
the time and place (185), which he himself has to obey, Jenner shoots
at the beast, only to find out when he follows its bloody traces that it is
Irene he has killed. Unlike the all-male and latently homoerotic world
of the Kipling story, which reintegrates the transgressive male
wereleopard at the end, the heterosexual matrix in The Eyes of the
Panther seems to require the female werepanthers ritual killing, and
the female transgressions that occur in the narrative are punished in a
much harsher way: Irene's sexually transgressive mother has to die,
whereas her father, who after all initiated the series of transgressions,
is the only family member to survive at the end and to mourn the
family deaths.
The dangers and fascination of homoeroticism are at the heart of
Sakis short story Gabriel-Ernest (1910), in which the werewolf is
an attractive young man who liberally presents himself in an animallike state of showy, aestheticized nakedness. In the seemingly
nameless boy, the protagonist and main focalizer, Van Cheele, is
confronted with an abject other of male sex, who speaks inaudibly to
his own latent homoerotic leanings. By his intrusion into private
grounds and later into the primly ordered house (13), the boy
transgresses proprietorial rights and threatens to introduce chaos and
anarchy into a meticulously ordered world. Van Cheeles reaction of
outrage and alarm not only at the boys trespass but above all at his
nudity (in panic he covers the boy with a newspaper when he spots
him gracefully asprawl on the ottoman, in an attitude of almost
exaggerated repose, 14) hints at repressed erotic desires. Sakis story
is exceptional in that the origin of the boys werewolfish dispositions
are deliberately left open to speculation. The actual metamorphosis
and act of werewolfish aggression remain informational gaps in the
narrative. Van Cheele only learns about the transformation of the boy
into a large wolf, blackish in colour, with gleaming fangs and cruel,
yellow eyes (16) through another eye-witness, his artist friend
Cunningham, who had warned him of a wild beast roaming his woods.
Most significantly, Sakis story implies that the werewolf/boy may
have managed to escape unharmed after attacking and devouring a
child, an especially cruel crime not totally devoid of pederastic
overtones. The traces he leaves are just as ambiguous as Van Cheeles
feelings for him: nothing is found except the boys discarded clothes,
which allows for two different constructions of what may have
happened. According to the village people's rational and harmless
reconstruction of events, the child must have fallen into the brook and
160
the boy stripped and jumped into the water in order to save it from
drowning. Van Cheele, however, influenced by his imagination, is
certain at the end that the werewolf has attacked and eaten the child.
Notions of normative behaviour and bourgeois respectability as well
as of poetic justice are thus turned upside down in a highly satirical
manner. Ironically, it is the respectable aunt who at the beginning
provides the openly sensual, immoral and morbid werewolf boy with
clothes and gives him the nice, suitable names (15) of GabrielErnest an attempt at verbal domestication. In the end she has a
memorial stone put up for him in memory of his allegedly heroic
deed. This decadent inversion of traditional values can work only
because the two mutually excluding reconstructions of events offered
within the story remain ultimately unverifiable. A reading of the boy
as an abject other (a werewolf and murderer) is juxtaposed with an
apparently more rational but less likely version of events, in which the
boy figures as a responsible subject of the symbolic order (a selfless
hero figure).
While Gabriel-Ernest implicitly criticizes the twentieth-century
negation of things magic and irrational as nave, Sakis short story
The She-Wolf approaches the problem from the opposite angle in
making fun of an esoteric interest symptomatic of modern, highly
technologized society. The very first sentence of this comical story
places any potentially fantastic occurrence to come in a psychological
and therefore rationalizable context: Leonard Bilsiter, in decadent
fashion, abhors everyday reality and looks for compensation in the
unseen world of his own imagination. He has the reputation of a
magician, not least because of his knowledge of Eastern European
folklore and Siberian Magic (86). At a party at a friends house,
Leonard is asked by the hostess, Mary Hampton, to turn her into a
wolf as a test of his prowess a request he puts into action with the
help of a tame wolf, to the horror of the other guests. The story is
actually devoid of a real (were)wolf but uses the motif in order to
uncover the absurd degree to which the party guests obey conventions.
The initial outrage at Mrs. Hamptons transformation is soon followed
by an absurd discussion on social etiquette: If our hostess has really
vanished out of human form, said Mrs. Hoops, none of the ladies of
the party can very well remain. I absolutely decline to be chaperoned
by a wolf! It's a she-wolf, said Clovis soothingly (91).
Compared to the stories discussed so far, Isak Dinesens The
Monkey (1934) appears almost postmodern in certain respects,
although the story is located in some magical world long past; it draws
on popular generic conventions and is therefore rightly included in a
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collection called Seven Gothic Tales. The protagonist, Boris, whose

vaguely indicated sexual perversities have got him into difficulties at
court, pays his aunt, a prioress, a visit at Closter Seven. Marriage
seems to him the only possible solution, which is why he follows his
aunts advice to woo Athena Hopballehus, a friend of the family, and
to ask her father for her hand. Athena rejects his proposal but follows
the prioresss invitation to Closter Seven where they have a supper of
seduction (97) together. Boris goes up to her room after his aunt has
given him a love potion and they fight almost to the death in a highly
eroticized, bloody, animal-like manner, in a strange room strongly
reminiscent of a womb a place of violence and intense feelings. The
prioress convinces Athena that she will have a child after this strange
night and makes her promise to marry Boris, never to tell her father
about what has happened, and to kill Boris as soon as she gets the
chance. At precisely this moment, a monkey enters the room through
the window and hunts the prioress, who gradually turns into a monkey
herself, while the original monkey is transformed into the true
prioress. Towards the end (after numerous adumbrations, especially
on the level of body language) the weremonkey pretending to be
Boriss aunt is thus revealed to be a usurper, the non-legitimate
prioress of Closter Seven. In an ironic twist, the story ends
unconventionally, but with the telos suggested right from the
beginning: through the revelation of her true nature, the ostensible
prioress plays matchmaker to the young couple, Boris and Athena;
they become accomplices in some strange world of their own: [F]rom
now on, between, on the one side, her and him, who had been present
together at the happenings of the last minutes, and, on the other side,
the rest of the world, which had not been there, an insurmountable line
would be for ever drawn (116).
However, nothing is definite at the end, no clear distinction can be
made between fact and fiction. As readers, we are left without a clue
as to the history of the prioresss transformation into a weremonkey
and have to speculate on the nature of the relationship between the
two she-monkeys, one legitimate and the other illegitimate. This
implicit textual denial of a reliable, underlying reality of things is
aptly accompanied by Boriss passion for the theatre and for roleplaying (see 82, 98-99). Athenas comment on the double-faced
Wendish goddess of love (one side monkey, one side woman)
suggests the core around which the story revolves: But how, asked
Athena, did they know, in the case of that goddess of love, which was
the front and which the back? (90).
162
In his psychologically complex novel The Werewolf of Paris

(1933), Guy Endore retains the mythic, magical dimension
exemplified in Dinesens story, but at the same time introduces a
double focus by drawing on the biomedical model of lycanthropy.
Central to the narrative, not only on a thematic but also on a
poetological level, is the metaphor of non-containable organic growth:
Where shall I begin my tale? This one has neither beginning nor end,
but only a perpetual unfolding, a multi-petaled blossom of strange
botany ([1933] 1944, 3). The protagonist, Bertrand Chaillet, owes his
existence to a criminal act of sexual transgression committed by a
Catholic priest with werewolf ancestry. The frame narrator, an
American scholar who has found a manuscript dealing with the life of
Bertrand Chaillet, adds the story of a medieval rivalry between two
families to explain the background to the case: a Pitamont was shut
up in a well and fed on meat and suet and after long years could not
speak any more but only howled like a wolf (130). He then shifts to
the time level of the Galliez report (Paris of the 1850s), i.e. of
Bertrand Chaillets activities. Bertrand develops into a psychopath
who leads a double life as a respectable military man by day and a
voracious attacker at night. Eventually he finds a suitable companion
in the necrophile Sophie, who rejoices in having her skin cut and her
blood sucked. Bertrands personal life story is far from being the sole
concern in this novel. The occurrences during the war are described in
even more cruel and bloody terms than Bertrands crimes so that the
text suggests werewolfishness to be a collective, political and
possibly epidemic phenomenon rather than an individual or unique
one:
Bertrand, it now seemed to Aymar, was but a mild case. What was a werewolf
who had killed a couple of prostitutes, who had dug up a few corpses, compared
with these bands of tigers slashing at each other with daily increasing ferocity!
[...] Instead of thousands, future ages will kill millions. It will go on, the figures
will rise and the process will accelerate! Hurrah for the race of werewolves!
(290-291)
From the 1970s onward, the werewolf motif has been taken up by
feminist writers such as Angela Carter and Tanith Lee in order to
explore its affinities to specifically female ways of experiencing the
world. In her short story collection The Bloody Chamber (1979),
Carter deals with the subject in no less than three stories, including
two revisionist rewritings of the fairy-tale of Little Red RidingHood. In Carters The Werewolf the positions of wolf,
grandmother and girl are conflated at the end and wolfish cruelty and
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voraciousness are transferred onto Little Red Riding-Hood herself,

who is unpleasantly revealed to collude in patriarchal law and to act as
an unscrupulous usurper. The girl cuts off one of the wolfs front paws
and when the paw subsequently transforms into an old womans hand
and the girl discovers her grandmothers bloody stump where the hand
used to be, she denounces her grandmother to be a witch so that the
neighbours stone her to death. Through linking the image of the
werewolf with the witch-hunt Carter pays tribute to a historical
dimension which mainly affected (old) women (see Jones 1951, 140)
and thus points up its gender-specific significance. The grandmothers
werewolfishness is a specific kind of perversity. Not only does she
change species, but she also takes up a traditionally male position
that of the aggressor and thereby loses all attributes of femininity
and motherliness. This loss of femininity also applies to Little Red
Riding-Hood, who acts the part of a castrating male and ruthless
defender of the symbolic order.
In The Company of Wolves, Carter draws on numerous
variations of the wolf theme from fairy-tales, superstition, the fantastic
and old sayings. This rewriting of Little Red Riding-Hood plays
with the idea that the child is in fact a teenager on the verge of
adulthood and that the fairy tale can be read as a parable of sexual
initiation. The girl meets a hunter in the woods, who is in fact a
werewolf and whose desires only she can satisfy. At the end she has
tamed him and they live on together in sexual intimacy, so that in this
narrative the wolfs legendary insatiability is displaced onto the sphere
of sexuality and questions of guilt and punishment become irrelevant.
The third werewolf story in the collection, Wolf-Alice, has a
female protagonist who could be described as a mixture between
Kaspar Hauser, Alice in Wonderland and Romulus and Remus. The
girl, who has been brought up by wolves and walks on all fours
Two-legs looks, four-legs sniffs (1987, 119) is forcibly introduced
to the world of civilized humanity, which seems as grotesque to her
as the world at the end of the tunnel does to Lewis Carrolls Alice.
When the nuns, who have taken her in and tried to tame her, lose their
patience, she is given away to the Duke, who turns out to be a
vampiristic werewolf. In the end she saves him from the murderous
attacks of the village people and redeems him from his curse by
turning fully wolfish again, licking his wounds and dirt (without
hesitation, without disgust, 126) until the face of the Duke reappears
for the first time in the mirror. The werewolf world is thus revalorized
as a realm of archaic, healthy instincts and tender intimacy and
contrasted with a human world characterized by brutality and hate.
164
Another feminist rewriting of the werewolf horror story, the Gothic

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

As a paradigm for the monstrous body, the werewolf is a highly
significant figure with regard to the culturally specific constitution and
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normalization of meaning. This is due to its power to call into

question the ostensibly ordinary and typical, in other words,
predictable corporeality (see Thomson 1996, 1). Its abnormal
morphology illustrates the precarious borderline between the
dimensions of the characteristically human and the non-human or
abhuman. This oscillation between two species and forms of existence
is undisputably more than a mere surface anomaly. For once, the
werewolfs bodily deviation from the norm of human entelechy, that
is organic development controlled by some vital force, subverts
notions of human progress and of classifiable boundaries of species
and points to its affiliation with a world beyond (or below) a
scientifically and technologically controllable everyday reality.
Furthermore, the werewolfs actual metamorphosis usually remains
untold/invisible in narrative texts, and therefore appears even more
mysterious and threatening to the witnessing subject. It functions as
the textual blind spot, as that which is unrepresentable and therefore
abject: Abjection [...] is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a
terror that dissembles (Kristeva 1982, 4). On a narrative level, this
failure to find adequate words for the phenomenon effectively
increases suspense: the horror of the werewolfs violent acts of
aggression is heightened if these have to be imagined purely on the
evidence of scanty, not even necessarily bloody, traces.
Werewolf spotting can be facilitated, however, through knowledge
of the catalogue of age-old putative werewolf markers (see Steiger and
Ruehl 1999, 83-86). Among the corpus of narratives considered here,
Guy Endores novel features the greatest number of werewolf traits.
Bertrand is the offspring of a sinful and violent sexual encounter
between a young, innocent and nave maidservant called Josephine
and a perverted Catholic priest. The rape results in Bertrands birth on
Christmas Eve, a date connected in folklore with werewolf births due
to the supposed blasphemy of the mother who has dared to conceive
on the same day as the holy virgin (see Jones 1951, 140). An eerie
scream, uttered precisely at the moment when transubstantiation takes
place at mass, announces Bertrands birth (see Endore [1933] 1944,
56). Josephines mistress, Mme Didier, serves as a mouthpiece for
popular superstition in the text and declares this date to be a sign of
the devil inside her (see Endore [1933] 1944, 54). Even as a newborn
baby, Bertrand seems to belong to the realm of the monstrous. To
Aymar, its fatherly mentor, the baby is a living contradiction of all the
artistic stylizations and sentimental idealizations he is familiar with as
a cultivated gentleman: Brought up with the belief that new-born
babies were such as one sees borne by Madonnas in Italian paintings,
166
or such as are depicted in the canvases of Greuze, he was shocked by

the scrawny, spidery, fuzzy and wizened little monster that Josephine
was gently hugging to her breast (61). The baby shows some
unmistakably degenerate, atavistic traits: his eyebrows join above the
nose (see 67) and hair grows on the palms of his hands (see 68, 104).
He takes to making strange canine sounds (see 70-71) when Mme
Didiers health starts to decline and announces her death with a
howl like a moonstruck dog (73) a traditional omen of death
according to popular belief (see Jones 1951, 145). Nine years later, the
fragile and highly sensitive Bertrand shows symptoms of lycanthropy:
he confesses to certain dreams, which involve him in wolfish
behaviour (see Endore [1933] 1944, 105-106, 117, 133), and is
obviously prone to sleepwalking. The incident that seems to have
triggered his disease is an accidental taste of animal blood occasioned
by his first shot at a squirrel which he wounds and then kisses out of
pity: And it burned my tongue like pepper, only it wasnt bitter but
sweet, only not sweet like sugar (106). During his secret nightly
rambles, which awaken in him animal instincts (including an acute
sense of smell), his first victims are sheep and fowl, but he soon starts
to practise his voraciousness on humans. His psychological dilemma
manifests itself in the inability to control his attacks, despite the
warning symptoms of a reduced appetite by day, and the inability to
recall afterwards what he has done. As a consequence, the abject
evidence consisting of torn-off human limbs (see 185) or remainders
of his own fur (see 186-187) appears even more bewildering and
terrifying to himself than to the reader: [H]e could not remember
whether he had been a beast or only a man acting like a beast (188).
After having slept with his mother as well as having killed his best
friend and sucked his blood unawares, he is so much disgusted by his
own idea of taking some of the dead mans limbs along to snack on
during the journey that he nearly retched (147). This instance of
abjection can be read on two levels: a corporeal level, which would
revert the act of incorporation, and a mental or psychological level on
which two selves in psychoanalytic terms, the id and the superego constantly battle against each other: Where do such ideas
come to me from? he exclaimed in horror (147). Bertrands decline
is only stopped when he enters into a sado-masochist relationship with
Sophie. The stab wounds he inflicts on her body are not only visible
marks of a sexually arousing violence but are described in a highly
aestheticized manner as a non-verbal but poetic body language:
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There was scarcely a portion of her body that had not one or more cuts on it.
The older ones had healed to scars that traversed her dark skin with lines that
were visibly lighter than the surrounding area. The newer ones were angry
welts of red, or hard ridges of scab. In the candlelight the latter were like old
jewelry or polished tortoiseshell. (252)
The bridal gift he offers her is a bodily proof of his strong desire for
her and the unspoken promise of death, while she gives herself to him
entirely in a nurturing, motherly and self-renouncing way:
[T]hey desired nothing, night and day, but he to inflict pain and she to feel her
body bruised and cut, so as to realize keenly at every moment that they were
alive [...]. He grew insatiable. Her body was a fountain of blood to him. And it
was as if her body responded to his needs. She grew heavy, sultry with blood,
like a nursing mother with milk. (256)
The fact that the mutual satisfaction of their perverse desires is

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

predominantly presented as a psychological burden to the individual,
Endore gives the text a blatantly unaesthetic turn at the very end by
using one of the prime tropes of abjection the rotting dead body.
This can only be understood as a deliberate attempt to confront the
readers with their own voyeurism as well as their lust for sensation
and need for empirical evidence. Obviously, it is not the living,
performative body with its perverse acts of sadistic sexuality and
cannibalism but the scientifically described dead body which is meant
to evoke strong feelings of disgust in the reader.
On the whole, werewolf bodies in narratives of the twentieth
century tend to be depicted as fascinating and beautiful, even more so
168
in the case of feminine (Bierce) or feminized (Saki) werewolf figures,

which are typically associated with the stereotype of the femme fatale
or with an aesthetics of camp. This is especially true for Bierces The
Eyes of the Panther, where Irene, the female werepanther, is
described as lithe ([ca. 1900] 1963, 178), with a strong resemblance
to a wild cat with eyes that are gray-green, long and narrow (178),
of feline beauty (179) and wearing a gray gown with odd brown
markings (178). A paradox surrounds this figure from the beginning:
even though the heterodiegetic narrator seems perfectly capable of
describing her outer appearance, he/she pretends to be unable to name
her thoughts and feelings: one could not readily say [], with an
expression defying analysis (178) so that the mystery surrounding
this woman is only resolved at the end, when Jenner, her former lover,
hunts her down and discovers her true nature to be half-human, halfbeastly: The panther, which must be wounded because it gives a
wild, high scream [] so human in sound, so devilish in suggestion
(186), eventually proves to be a truly feminine leaky body (see
Shildrick 1997) when one of the men following its traces slips in a
pool of blood. The body of the werepanther is used in this story to
exemplify and visualize classical stereotypes of femininity from an
unambiguously male point of view: a dangerous, animal-like sexuality
is correlated with the womans lack of control over her own mind and
is finally restrained and overcome by a symbolically phallic act
Jenners firing of a pistol as a substitute for the sexual penetration
denied to him.
Judging from the stories considered here, the werewolf body tends
to be presented as a highly erotic body, no matter whether it is of male
or female sex. In Eroticism, Georges Bataille argues from a malebiased viewpoint that eroticism requires a beautiful woman as man's
love object, whose beauty serves as a stimulating contrast to the
ugliness of the sexual act (see [1957] 2001, 145). Interestingly, it is
the womans hair which, according to Bataille, reminds man of her
animal origins and provides erotic stimulation (see [1957] 2001, 143).
Transposed to the werewolf paradigm, the werewolfs fur could be
read as an intensifier of erotic attraction. Where animal nature is
married to (feminine) grace of comportment and movement, as is the
case in most werewolf narratives, it appears to be devoid not only of
ugliness but also of beastly behaviour, which is typically shifted to the
humans in the stories. According to Christian morality, the animal
aspect in humans is perceived as a deviance from divine law since
God created man in his likeness and therefore human value must be
measured against the animal world (see Bataille [1957] 2001, 136).
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While Christianity links animal traits with the devil and the sphere of
humiliation, animality is revalued in most modern werewolf stories as
a regenerative source.
Angela Carters and Tanith Lees werewolf stories show how the
sublime abject associated with ecstasy and excess can successfully be
appropriated by females whose conventional role is reduced to the
merely beautiful. In Wolf-Alice, Carter portrays a girl who believes
herself to be a wolf but lacks a wolfish body. This can be interpreted
as a mode of naturalization or more precisely as a form of
anthropological/psychological realism in the sense of Homo homini
lupus we all bear the beast inside us. The (human) body is
foregrounded as an unreliable marker of species affiliation, notions of
the abject and the revolting are turned upside down, and the realm of
the pre-Symbolic is revalued over the symbolic order. The girl has
adopted the repertory of wolfish body language and behaviour she
runs on all fours with panting tongue (Carter 1987, 119), curls up to
sleep and howls inarticulately instead of speaking. The forcibly taught
elementary rules of what is considered civilized human behaviour in a
convent are depicted as unnatural constraints to which the girl can
only react in her familiar wolfish ways: [S]he arched her back, pawed
the floor, retreated to a far corner of the chapel, crouched, trembled,
urinated, defecated (120). A narrative comment makes it clear that
Wolf-Alices curse is not her half-wolfish existence in a civilized
world but the fact that she is denied access to the Eden of our first
beginnings where Eve and grunting Adam squat on a daisy bank,
picking the lice from one anothers pelts (121). This almost utopian
scenario of the earliest stage of human development is precisely what
the story ends with when the girls wolfish skills and her animalspecific pity (she was pitiful as her gaunt grey mother, 126) save the
wounded Duke from an unbearable interim state of wolf, not-wolf
(123). Ironically, her masquerade as a woman fails to work as a
visible sign of her difference from them [the wolves] (125) but turns
out to be a rescuing device she has donned a white gown which
belonged to one of the Dukes victims and frightens the village mob
with this appearance so that they are distracted from their original
target, the Duke himself. The text suggests that the male werewolf is
eventually being metamorphosed back into a human being (the bodily
sign is that his face becomes visible in the mirror for the first time)
through an act of female birthing, but leaves entirely open whether
this change is for better or for worse.
Paul Magrss novel Could It Be Magic? (1997) includes another
example of a werewolf narrative linked with fantastic forms of
170
conception and birth. When Andy, the young gay, who has been
attracted by leopards since his childhood, suddenly starts to develop
leopard spots and notices another physical abnormity, namely that his
left calf muscle is more developed (219) and that something stirs
under the skin, he believes that he is expecting a child. He connects
his symptoms to his intercourse with a married man, whose body
tattoos he seems to have incorporated in werewolf fashion when the
condom split at the fatal moment: Whatever was in Mark was in
Andy now (85); I swallowed a man with tattoos (92). The leopard
spots are not the only beastly/motherly markers because he wakes
each morning with my teeth black and my mouth full of fresh blood
(221). Although these symptoms are explicable in terms of medical
treatment for an ulcer of the tonsils and the spotted skin might be a
psychosomatic reaction (see 217), Andys subjective view of them as
signs of pregnancy appears to be validated when, with the help of a
friend, he gives birth in a public toilet to a very white creature (232)
nestled in a red plush sac. The creature seems to be so much of an
abject, untouchable body that the male midwife (who cuts Andys
skin open with a knife) refuses to take it up. At first, Andy loves and
nurtures his strange furry and clawed boy-child unconditionally, but
after some time he decides to shave him in order to make the leopard
spots disappear an attempt to adjust him to human bodily standards,
which he later acknowledges to have been completely futile and
absurd (Im such a stupid prick. Ive been shaving the proverbial,
247). Through juxtaposition, this episode is connected to past
warnings issued to Andy not to dye his hair red in order to avoid
attracting peoples attention to his gayness (see 246). This apparently
fantastic episode of a monstrous birth by a male, depicted here as a
markedly natural process, serves to illustrate on the level of body
morphology and texture the central idea of the novel that every
individual has a right to difference and needs to be respected for it.
Despite their pronounced differences in theme, setting and
atmosphere, Isak Dinesens and Tanith Lees short stories about
werewolves and related creatures share with Paul Magrss novel the
central concern of subverting traditional notions of bodily beauty and
attractiveness. Thus the weremonkey is not the only deviation from an
ideal body in Dinesens story. The whole family of Hopballehus,
including Athena, are of herculean strength ([1934] 1986, 87) and
gigantic height; Athena, who has been brought up like a boy, is
characterized by her lack of femininity (no claim to beauty, 89;
strong woman [...] broad in proportion, 89; unromantically big,
89) and given animal traits (a pair of eyes for a young lioness or
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eagle and the habit of standing on one leg just like a big stork, 89).
In the love scene with Boris, her attraction seems to lie precisely in
her masculine body and her resemblance to a male warrior (see 109)
so that Boriss homoerotic desires are titillated. In Lees Wolfland,
Lisel undergoes a dual process of unlearning through reading bodily
signs differently and dispensing with conventional notions of gender
and species. The wolves she meets on the way to her grandmother
trigger deep-seated, primordial fears in her of being attacked and
devoured; at the same time the wolves bodies with their jewel-like
eyes (1989, 128) appear strangely beautiful even if terrifying and an
affinity exists between her and them right from the start (Her eyes
also blazed, her teeth also were bared, and her nails raised as if to
claw, 127). In her feminist werewolf story, Lee allows the reader to
participate in a similar hermeneutic effort as the protagonist herself by
hinting at Lisels own wolfish dispositions long before her
grandmother turns her into a werewolf by means of a magic drink, so
that the grandmothers remark, Ive put nothing on you that was not
already yours (146), seems perfectly justified.
Both Dinesens and Lees short stories contain numerous analogies
between humans and animals, stress the existence of animal-like
desires in human beings and portray sexuality as a basically sadistic
drive. Dinesen erotically conflates sexual intercourse and
murderousness in the encounter between Boris and Athena and
thereby seems to validate sado-masochistic relationships (there is an
explicit reference to the Diana myth, according to which Boris is
doomed to lose his life, see Dinesen [1934] 1986, 95; Boris dreams of
Athena as a skeleton and finds her attractive in this fleshless state, see
103). Civilization (the convent) as well as animality (represented by
the prioress-as-monkey), Apollonian and Dionysian forces are
revealed to be an integral part of human life and love (see James 1983,
148-149). In stark contrast to Dinesens, Lees story deliberately
situates werewolfish behaviour in human males by depicting their
sexual urges as sadistic, violent, and potentially murderous. At the
same time, womens magical bodily metamorphosis into werewolves,
that is their recourse to corporeality and animality, is presented as the
only effective form of self-help available to them (the grandmother is
revealed to have torn her husband to pieces), so that Lees narrative
runs the danger of reproducing the conventional, essentialized notions
of femininity and the patriarchal logic it so strongly criticizes.
172
Werewolf Worlds: Ontologies, Language, and Narration

The werewolfs inherent hybridity is reflected in the morphology of its
name: both werewolf and its medical analogon, lycanthrope, are
composite lexemes. A multiple ontological system frequently
corresponds to the creatures hybrid and changeable state of existence
as a wanderer between two worlds: For it is out of such straying on
excluded ground that he (the deject) draws his jouissance (Kristeva
1982, 8). Counterworlds such as foreign countries and their sacred
sites (Kipling), the wilderness of the forest (Bierce) or a fairyland
world (Dinesen) constitute werewolf settings and are opposed to what
is evoked as homely or familiar terrain (England, domestic interiors,
the world of Christian orthodoxy). Apart from these specific spatial
dimensions, werewolf narratives tend to generate possible, multiply
stratified worlds such as miracles, dreams or hysterical projections.
Their ontological status reaches from a clearly indexed virtuality to a
complete naturalization as part of the fictionally real (with radical
ontological uncertainty as an intended effect). Numerous distancing
devices such as dramatic irony (Lee), temporal framing (Kipling,
Bierce), or the marking of incidents as miraculous anachronisms
(Saki) serve to meet the twentieth-century readers scepticism
concerning things magical and fantastic, and, on the level of narration,
to bring under control the threats of anarchy and chaos associated with
the werewolf. That its anarchism can easily infect the narrative itself is
most clearly expressed by the already cited metanarrative comment in
Endores novel, where the narrator muses on the endless proliferation
of his story and the arbitrariness of any kind of closure.
The narratorial comment in Angela Carters Wolf-Alice that
wolves live without a future and inhabit only the present tense, a
fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without
hope as it is without despair (1987, 119) accounts for the tense shifts
within this story. Furthermore, it renders plausible the fact that the
werewolf figure usually functions as an object of observation and
analysis rather than as a focalizer or first-person narrator because
living in the present tense would seem to preclude a self-reflexive
consciousness. However, there are exceptions to the rule. Endores
novel about a lycanthrope, but also the more recent stories by Carter
and Lee, allow the reader glimpses into the werewolves
consciousness. Significantly, these are precisely the stories which deal
with humans that either feel like wolves or are only transformed into
werewolves right at the end. On the whole, werewolf stories are told
either by more or less omniscient and intrusive narrators uninvolved in
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the story (Bierce, Carter, Lee, Magrs) or they are presented from the
perspective of an eyewitness (Kipling, Saki) or fictive editor (Endore).
In the stories analyzed here, distancing effects are often achieved by
the choice of narrative transmission. The extent to which narratorial
reliability and evidence of werewolfish existence are evoked varies
not only according to the narrative situation but also according to its
semantic impact.
All of the werewolf stories analyzed have in common a
problematization of language. Of course, if the werewolf is female (as
in Lees and Carters stories) its embrace of a non-verbal, semiotic
realm is questionable from a feminist viewpoint because it appears to
reinforce an essentialist concept of femininity as an alternative to
masculinist
logocentrism.
The
speechlessness
of
most
narrators/character-focalizers in view of the horrors they perceive and
the significant gaps in the narrative this produces could be regarded as
a specific kind of contamination attributed to werewolf figures. Again,
the only werewolf novel proper in the corpus is of prime significance
in this context. For Aymar no words can express the horrible things
which have occurred: He (Bertrand) was being tried for [...] and
there my tongue failed me. For nothing in the world would I have
dared to say it. I could not have pushed that word over my tongue had
I tried with all my might. There are some things that cannot be done
(Endore 1944, 16). As a narrative effect, this works most obviously to
increase suspense, but at the same time the narrator seems to conform
to an unwritten rule regarding werewolf narratives. The werewolfish
deeds are made to appear sacrilegious so that their verbal articulation
would constitute another moral/religious offense in the sense that
putting them into words would repeat, on the linguistic level, the act
of cannibalist appropriation.
The credibility of Kiplings story is presented as precarious because
the first-person narrator involved as a witness tells it in retrospect and
implies that he may have judged appearances incorrectly and that
neither medicine nor law nor Christian religion were able to find out
the truth. The undecidable ontological status of the past events but
also the linguistic failures and instances of self-censorship inscribed in
the story seem to underline the abject-ness of what is being told. In the
enforced encounter of the transformed Fleete with the leper, certain
things occur that are unmentionable: Several other things happened
also, but they cannot be put down here (304). The scene of torture is
another transgression which cannot be put into words, or at least not
into print: This part is not to be printed (304).
174
Satirical effects are achieved in Sakis Gabriel-Ernest by the

discrepancy between empirical evidence and action. Even though the
werewolf boy provides all the evidence himself when he speaks
frankly about his carnivore preferences, such as feeding not only on
small mammals but also on childrens flesh (see [1910] 1994, 12) and
hunting on all fours at night, Van Cheele persistently refuses to
believe his words until it is too late. When he is convinced of the
boys dangerousness, he dismisses his initial idea of sending a
telegram because he realizes that the words Gabriel-Ernest is a
werewolf would cause confusion instead of clearing things up (16).
Van Cheeles failure to read the werewolf signs correctly constitutes
on the one hand an implicit critique of the mental rigidity reigning
supreme in a rationalized, demystified modern world, and appears on
the other to mirror his negation or repression of homoerotic titillation
implied in the encounter with the boy.
Ambrose Bierces story of a werepanther is narrated by a
heterodiegetic, rather explicit, and sometimes intrusive narrator who
tries to heighten the credibility of the tale by replacing the young
womans narrative with his own words: In deference to the readers
possible prejudice against the artless method of an unpractised
historian the author ventures to substitute his own version for hers
([ca. 1900] 1963, 179). This deliberate act of male narratorial
appropriation, apparently motivated by the unreliability of the girls
hybrid, half-animal, half-human and therefore abject status, constitutes
a transgression in itself. In a very conventional way, the male figures
rationality and matter-of-factness (Jenner is likened to a scientist and a
detective) is contrasted with the female werepanthers insane, morbid
mind and [...] fertile fancy (184), which need to be excluded as they
cannot be contained and fully controlled.
Sakis story and Magrss novel resemble each other in their
deliberate confusion of ontological boundaries. If Gabriel-Ernest
suggests that the fantastic and the perverse as represented by the
werewolf can indeed intrude into the realm of reality and normality,
Magrss novel proceeds one step further. Could It Be Magic? contains
a magical, fantastic ontological dimension indexed as a central
concern by the title and can be read as a positive appropriation of the
abject inspired by gay identity politics. The wereleopard in the text
grows up into a bright, leopard printed boy (1999, 328), a passionate
coffee drinker with spotted fur, who functions as an aestheticized
representative of conventionally abjected bodies homosexuals and
especially AIDS patients.
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Magrss text is not the only example in which the werewolf figure
is used for affirmative abjection (see Menninghaus 1999, 549-555).
Most of the narratives mentioned above can be read as critiques of
certain perversities of the civilized world be it fox hunting,
imperialist arrogance, lack of respect for nature or for deviant sexual
orientations, non-legitimate appropriations of office or property. As
far as the diachronic axis of literary werewolf figures is concerned, an
increasingly positive outlook can be observed. My analysis has shown
that an obsession with genealogy and the dangers of degeneration in
the early stories turns into a fascination with (re)generation in the later
ones, albeit without narrowing the focus to the werewolf's
conventional association with masculine generative power. The
aesthetic and ethic potential inherent in the perverted gender-bender
the mothering wolf is preferably explored in postmodern werewolf
stories. While Athenas father in Dinesens story, for instance, is
obsessed with the sin of having turned his daughter into a boy and its
results barrenness and a stop to his familys genealogy ([1934] 1986,
94) Magrs in Could it Be Magic? creates an almost sublime scenario
of a birthing male and his peculiar offspring, and Carters WolfAlice portrays a seemingly paradoxical, animalistic birth of
humanity.
On the whole, the changing normative impact of werewolf
narratives and their tendency to subvert contemporary norms
manifests itself in a shift from the logic of moral transgression and
punishment to uncertainty and undecidable moral issues. This goes
along with a tendency to deviate from the rigid scheme of the
traditional werewolf fable: the not-so-abject monster survives, cannot
be killed or commits suicide (and thereby turns human again); lawand-order mentalities and totalitarian practices of discipline make way
for feminist, gay and other visions of a deeper and mutually
stimulating understanding between humans and werewolves. At the
same time, magic is reintroduced into a demystified, enlightened
world via the werewolf figure: Aymar, who takes the
religious/superstitious position against the doctor in Endores novel
(see Endore 1944, 311-312), is proved right about Bertrands
werewolfishness at the end: as the postmortem indicates, Bertrand has
metamorphosed into a dog in his grave. The novel leaves open,
however, whether this discovery will change peoples opinions: In
this terrible age of disbelief and gullibility, people will swallow any
tale of monsters of the past, but unless we find the bones of a centaur,
no one will credit that myth (87). Endore thus reverses the usual
order of things: the werewolf is not freed from his curse at the end like
176
the werepanther Irene in Bierces story, who undergoes a posthumous

metamorphosis of panther into woman at the moment of her death, but
Bertrand, the lycanthrope, seems finally to have come into his own by
assuming the bodily shape of a wolf. Sinful transgression is in this text
replaced by nature and psychology (Aymar was moved. He had been
cruel. It was the boys misfortune, not his sin, 244), and the
werewolfs/lycanthropes suffering, Bertrands uncertainty about his
own identity (see 188) as well as the nature of his disease, are
foregrounded. Not only in this novel but also in several of the other
texts (Kipling, Bierce, Saki) a sceptical attitude towards medical
experts is discernible and cures are shown to be unattainable: He
learnt that his disease was known, that is to say, it had a name, but
observers classed it either as a fraud or as a delusion, and as far as
curing it goes, no one had any suggestions to offer except that the
medieval method of burning was an unmerited cruelty (Endore 1944,
198). Institutions such as mental asylums and sanatoriums, which
isolate deviant individuals while refusing them treatment, are
eventually revealed to be the truly cruel and misanthropic places,
genuine hell-hole(s) (303) in an enlightened, scientific world.
Therapies, even if they fail to cure the patient, depend on whether
the werewolf is regarded as a magic creature or as a whim of nature
which might have been prevented by an appropriate life-style, dietary
discipline and the avoidance of incestuous relationships, in short: by
body management. The notion of the docile body is crucial in
Endores novel where Aymar tries to control and discipline Bertrand
primarily in corporeal fashion: he whips him, locks him up and
changes his diet. In Kiplings story, the body also plays a central but
totally different role. It is through a religious laying on of hands that
Fleete is saved the leper is forced to lift the curse from him by
touching him a second time. In the majority of recent werewolf tales
(Carter, Lee, Magrs) therapies or cures are superfluous concepts
altogether because being a werewolf is no longer considered a curse
but rather a regenerative source and viable alternative to the dominant
conception of the human subject.
If the inadequacy of language pays tribute to the abhuman and
abject non-containment of the werewolf, the fact that traditional
familial structures are often substituted, not only by illegitimate
marriages of deficient wives and mothers (Bierce) but also by
sometimes vaguely homoerotic, predominantly male (Kipling, Saki)
or female (Lee) worlds must be counted as another subversion of the
laws of the symbolic order. While Kipling and Saki portray a closeted
male homosexuality in their stories, Endores novel implies that even
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hunting for the culprit can assume erotic overtones. Aymar, in whom
empathy and hatred constantly alternate, seems to be as much
attracted as he is taken aback by Bertrand and his deeds. Another
perversion, which can be generated by werewolf figures, is the
production of female nymphomaniacs, as Endores text suggests
(Bertrand turns the necrophile Sophie into a sex addict just as his
father, the priest, awakened an insatiable sexual urge in his mother).
The metamorphosis of human into beast, which as an epitome of
abjection tends to remain vague on the story level or is so sudden
that it cannot be perceived properly, affects gender relations in
manifold ways. First of all, it is important to note that in comparison
with a related figure of abjection, that of the vampire, the werewolf
seems to have taken much longer to accommodate feminine variants.
However, these seem to catch up on their masculine counterparts in
the course of the twentieth-century. Both male and female werewolf
figures increasingly feature as ciphers of sexual deviance, including
perversions such as sado-masochistic relationships, homoeroticism,
androgyny, bigamy and transvestism. As Sakis story The She-Wolf
points out in a highly comical way, the real problem is not the change
of species the werewolf undergoes but the phantasm of sexual
metamorphosis it implies, which appears to be a burden much harder
to bear:
I wish you would turn me into a wolf, Mr. Bilsiter, said his hostess at
luncheon the day after his arrival. My dear Mary, said Colonel Hampton, I
never knew you had a craving in that direction. A she-wolf, of course,
continued Mrs. Hampton; it would be too confusing to change ones sex as
well a ones species at a moments notice. ([1910] 1994, 87)
The werewolfs subversive potential with regard to gender would thus

seem to lie in its disregard for the crucial binaries which traditionally
found human subjectivity and in its monstrous violation of the
classificatory cultural systems through which experience is
meaningfully organized.
Not only the utopian potential but also the ontological status of the
werewolf have been shown to vary considerably. Its normative impact
has shifted to a similar extent. While late nineteenth-century and early
twentieth-century werewolf narratives such as Kiplings The Mark of
the Beast or Bierces The Eyes of the Panther still represented the
werewolf as a morally transgressive figure who incurs rightful
punishment either for having broken a taboo or for inheriting the sin
of an older generation, questions of guilt and the boundaries between
good and bad become increasingly blurred in the later decades of the
178
twentieth century. This is reflected by a significant change in narrative

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

of the body and the subject, namely as permeable, instable, and
performative, the werewolf assumes special significance as a
destabilizer of fixed identities and a construct somewhat truer and
closer to (post)modern notions of the self.
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The Two-, One-, None-Sex Model: The Flesh(-)Made

Machine in Herman Melvilles The Paradise of Bachelors
and the Tartarus of Maids and J. G. Ballards Crash
Konstanze Kutzbach
Sometime in the eighteenth century, sex as we know it was invented.
The reproductive organs went from being paradigmatic sites for
displaying hierarchy, resonant throughout the cosmos, to being the
foundation of incommensurable difference ([1990] 1995, 149). Thus
writes Thomas Laqueur in his influential study Making Sex: Body and
Gender from the Greeks to Freud, proposing a paradigm shift
concerning the philosophical premises of (gendered) identity from the
one-sex model to the two-sex model. Against the backdrop of
Laqueurs argument, I will, in a contrasting reading of two literary
examples from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, foreground
possible anachronistic characteristics in contemporary cultural
representations and poststructuralist theoretical assessments of the
subject in crisis: whereas the nineteenth century took the two-sex
model as its foil, contemporary representations often negotiate the
crisis of the subject by resorting to identity concepts recalling pre- and
early modern scientific/medical discourses, thus referencing the
conceptual premises of the one-sex model. The short story The
Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids by Herman Melville
(1855), even though it can be read as a critique of patriarchal
hegemony, conceives of gender identity as based on two opposed,
natural categories. In contrast to that, the novel Crash by J. G. Ballard
(1973), representative as it is of postmodern ideas of dissolution,
resorts to a concept of gender identity that is closer to the Galenic onesex model (see Laqueur) and culminates, as I suggest, in a none-sex
model as [the characters] go hurtling toward annihilation, as
Gravestock writes with regard to David Cronenbergs filmic
adaptation of the novel (2003, online).
This article will approach the crisis of the subject by focusing on
the aspect of incomplete bodies the fragmentation of the body,
missing body parts, as well as substitutes of body parts, prostheses,
and show how these dysfunctional bodies figure as a trope of the
unaesthetic, as artistic and intellectual expressions of contemporaneous negotiations and social conceptions of gender identity. In her
182
seminal work Purity and Danger (1966), Mary Douglas emphasizes

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

Dehumanization and the Rigidity of Boundaries
Herman Melvilles diptych contrasts two narratives which both deal
with a secluded realm assigned to each of the sexes: the first part, as
Rgis Durand points out, represents a timeless, womanless paradise
of Bachelors, [] a Walhalla for aging barristers (1990, 54). The
second part of the story in the tradition of nineteenth-century social
realism presents the reader with exploited women (virgins) literally
KUTZBACH
183
working themselves to death in a mill and thus suggests a reading in

the vein of Marxist-feminist criticism (see Karcher n.d., online). As a
critique of the industrial exploitation of women, which correlates
economic and sexual modes of production, it testifies to Melvilles
prescient insight he displays into the central problems of our culture:
alienation; violence against women and the repression of the
feminine in man that usually accompanies it; the widening gap
between a decadent ruling class and the workers it immiserates
(Karcher n.d., online). Referencing Mary Douglass idea that the most
vulnerable spot of each bounded system lies at the margins, as they
are prone to perforation and dissolution, one could say that Melvilles
short story focuses on two damaged systems, both of which are
connected by the logic of the two-sex model: nineteenth-century
industrial society and the working girls bodies. In the following, I
will focus especially on the second part of the story, The Tartarus of
Maids, showing how the story accommodates the idea of the
destruction of society and, by implication, the body, as bounded
systems (see Douglas 1985, 121). The bounded system is here taken
as a possible and intact foil, whose cracks are presented in the story:
the physical fragmentation and final death of the maidens is linked to
cracks in society and might be read as an indication of Melvilles
pessimistic vision of societys decline.
The second part of the story, which deals with the topos of the
infamous dark satanic mills described by Blake in his poem
Jerusalem, is set up in contrast to the first part, The Paradise of
Bachelors, which represents a decadent haven of jovial patriarchy.
This becomes clear quite early in the story, when the first person
narrator describes what he sees as he approaches the Devils
Dungeon paper-mill where he wants to order my future paper
(Melville [1855] 1949, 197): This is the very counterpart of the
Paradise of Bachelors, but snowed upon, and frost-painted to a
sepulchre (199-200). Rgis Durand corroborates the narrators
impression: The contrast [] could not be greater: there lies a world
of [] feminine sexuality discovered at the end of a freezing, perilous
journey in a nightmare of implacable whiteness (1990, 54-55).
This colour imagery, especially of the colour white, closely relates
to the above mentioned implications of fragmentation and fragility in
the story. As the narrator approaches the mill, he sees, for example,
[a] snow-white hamlet amidst the snows (Melville [1855] 1949,
198). In the narrators subsequent observations upon entering the mill,
the discourse about sexuality is introduced and added to the imagery
of the colour white as he discovers the girls who are doomed to work
184
the machines, feeding the iron animal (201); he sees rows of blanklooking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all
blankly folding blank paper (201). The imagery of colour, sexuality,
and machine has been read, as indicated above, along the lines of
Marxist-feminist criticism. Whiteness in the story signifies a new
labor discipline (Roediger qtd. in McGuire 2003, 296), and the story
reflects, as McGuire writes,
the barrenness and inhumanity of the new industrial conditions via the repeated
motifs of sexual sterility and ubiquitous, man-made whiteness. De-eroticized
and condemned to perpetual virginity, the factory girls in Tartarus become, to
the eyes of Melvilles narrator, ever more pallid, blank, white, and ever more
part of their machines. (296)
Each culture has its own special risks and problems. To which
particular bodily margins its beliefs attribute power depends on what
situation the body is mirroring (Douglas 1985, 121); taking this quote
as a point of reference, one could argue that nineteenth-century
industrial society, which was strongly dependent on the safeguarding
of its system-sustaining hierarchies and trajectories of power, paid
special attention to the bodily margins referring to the distinction
between the sexes: Political struggles over power and position within
the post-revolutionary public sphere were fought out in the scientific
arena in terms of sex, race and class (Martain 1996b, online). In
order to be able to sustain the (seemingly intact) system, it was
necessary to justify the inequality, especially the inequality between
man and woman. This justification was to be found in what Thomas
Laqueur (based on Galen) calls the two-sex model, which appeared in
the context of the Enlightenment and replaced the rationale of social
inequality as a category which was not in keeping with the ideals of
the French Revolution by positing a natural and biological
inferiority of the female (among other categories):
Desire was given a history and the female body was distinguished from the
males []. A biology of cosmic hierarchy gave way to a biology of
incommensurability, anchored in the body, in which the relationship of men to
women, like that of apples to oranges, was not given as one of equality or
inequality but rather of difference. This required interpretation and became the
weapon of cultural and political struggle. (Laqueur 1995, 207)
This radical naturalization, the reduction of women to the organ that now, for
the first time, marked an incommensurable difference between the sexes and
allegedly produced behavior of a kind not found in men, did not itself logically
entail any particular position on the social or cultural place of women. What
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185
mattered was the mode of argument itself, the move from sex to gender, from
body to behavior. (216)
In Melvilles story, as in Crash, bodily fragmentation/death pertains to

sexual discourse. In contrast to Crash, however, Melvilles story
thematizes the naturalization of social categories in a fashion typical
of the nineteenth century. The safeguarding of physical and social
bounds is here metaphorically connected through the imagery of
colour, sexuality, and machinery, all of which reference the
mechanisms of the two-sex model. Melville indeed criticizes the
restrictive boundaries of a society that feeds on the relegation and
exploitation of those in a naturally marginalized position. How
much the story depends on the naturalization of the sex and gender
relationship as an ideological foil, even though it is criticized by the
author, becomes clear once more through the narrators description of
the girls working on the machines: The girls did not so much seem
accessory wheels to the general machinery as mere cogs to the
wheels (Melville [1855] 1949, 202). Thus, the girls, according to
their natural position, are not even part of a machine, but rather a
part of a part of a machine (i.e. cogs). The girls insignificance and
meaninglessness culminates eventually in their final absorption and
annihilation through the machines themselves, where the colorless
female operatives are drained by and then absorbed into the devices
they operate (McGuire 2003, 298). Karcher also describes the girls
final annihilation as Melvilles critique of the typical nineteenthcentury inequality of the sexes: [T]he women are silent and only the
noise of their work is heard. [] Melvilles story comments on how
women factory operatives are deprived of a home life and turned into
machines (n.d., online). Turning into and merging with apparatuses
and machines in Melvilles story thus represents a metaphorized
deconstruction of the body.
Even later in the story, when the absorption and annihilation are
presented in a very matter of fact way, as the girls are murdered and
fragmented by the sharp blades of the death machine, the voiced
critique is based on a high degree of metaphoricity: the girls
annihilation functions as an expression of societys (moral)
annihilation both are caused by boundaries that are too rigid. This
becomes obvious in what could be called the climax of the story,
where the connection between the central motifs, sexuality, death, and
machines, is emphasized once more. The narrator gives the following
impressive description of the scene, where the machine that brings
about the white girls (physical) annihilation and death, is described in
186
highly charged sexual imagery, and, according to Douglass concepts,

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

boundaries that are too rigid, with regard to physical as well as social
implications (see Mary Douglass idea mentioned above). This
dehumanization culminates in the absorption and bloody destruction
of the girls through the scythes of the machines they work and in their
fragmentation prepared by their own hands: Their own executioners;
themselves whetting the very swords that slay them (205); this
passage metaphorically lays bare the weak spots at the margins of the
body and society. The bodies of the girls, who, by the hands of men
and with the ironic support of machines, are forced to extinguish
themselves, here reflect on the all-pervading mechanisms of injustice
and not only sexual inequality characteristic of nineteenth-century
society, where women are marginalized and live according to the
dictum of obedience and chastity. The presentation of the senseless
fragmentation of both the body and society which the story criticizes
works on the basis of static, i.e. inverted, essentialism: although it
questions the conflation of sex and gender in the sense that women are
weak and subservient by nature as the central premise of the two-sex
model, it does not go beyond an implicational connection of sex and
gender. This means that although the story criticizes roles ascribed to
men and women, the scope of identity envisioned for both sexes does
not exceed the framework of the two-sex model, implying that women
will always remain different from men.
In the following part I will show how both, theoretical attempts at
describing the body and identity before the nineteenth-century two-sex
model, as well as those that followed it, such as postmodern ideas,
envision, by implication, a higher degree of possible equality between
the sexes. The two-sex model, for example, and even its critique
precludes any idea of processuality, as for example represented by the
pre-modern one-sex model, where even women could reach the
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187
highest degree of perfection. Nor does it envision a possible synthesis,

which could bring about an equalizing fusion of separate identities, as
theorized, for example, by Georges Bataille. As the reading of
Melvilles story has shown, identity is still understood as working
according to the principle of an assumed entity or whole, the
destroyed or fragmented body reflecting a par(t)s pro toto structure.
I will now, by turning to the analysis of the novel Crash by J. G.
Ballard, show how this par(t)s pro toto principle is turned into a
par(t)s pro nihil model, which takes as its starting point the one-sex
model and dissolves it into a none-sex model.
Crash Dehumanization and the Absence of Boundaries

Crash by J. G. Ballard (1973), [a]fter Borges [] the first great
novel of the universe of simulation, as Baudrillard claims (1997,
119), draws the reader into a decadent world of sex, violence, and
death brought alive by characters that share a special fetish: carcrashing, which includes a voyeuristic as well as a sadistic and
masochistic component. Like the previous example, this novel also
recalls Mary Douglass ideas of the connection between the human
body and society, and in this case as man and car literally merge
machine and society. In the introduction to the 1995 Vintage edition,
Ballard himself draws a similar connection as he describes the car
not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for mans life in
todays society (6). In contrast to Melvilles story, however, the
dehumanization is not caused by the presence of boundaries that are
too rigid, but in fact by the absence of physical as well as social
boundaries in what Frazer calls a demonstration of psychosexual
decadence (n.d., online). Thus, I suggest, in the fictional universe
presented in the novel, the idea of an intact and bounded system is not
only denied at the plot level, but also does not even exist as a foil
anymore. Although the novel like the Tartarus of Maids deals
with a form of self-effacement, in this case the dehumanization is selfinflicted and is not an expression of the failure of meeting rigid
boundaries, but of postmodern masturbatory excess caused by an
absence of boundaries. This absence of boundaries, which, as Horst
writes, brings about a vagueness and an ennui that is at the basis of the
characters fetishistic desires (see Horst 1996, online), suggests a
reading of the conception of the characters as dependent on the one/none-sex model.
188
Early in the novel the reader obtains an impression of the overall

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

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

body parts and killed people; it becomes clear that whenever sex
meets death in combination with a machine/car, the people involved
are stripped of their sexual distinctness and reduced to an unsexed
generic physicality often expressed through bodily materials that
cannot be contained in the body whose surface structure is not intact.
This can be read, with Mary Douglas, as a form of social pollution
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189
where the symbolism of the bodys boundaries is used [] to

express danger to community boundaries (1985, 122). However, one
might as well argue that the mechanisms at work in Douglass model
cannot completely apply in Crash anymore, since the decadent and
dehumanized society presented in the novel no longer assumes
intact borders as a foil or objective correlative. As Horst states,
deviance has become the normal and all-encompassing paradigm as
Crash reflects a society which has been working on the dissolution
and transgression of taboos so insistently that nothing that remains has
the potential to shock anymore (1996, online; my translation).
In this sick community, where taboos and boundaries have
vanished, actions are interchangeable, [the protagonists who watch
and participate in the car crashes] might as well do something else
collect stamps, for example (1996 online; my translation). As the
actions become interchangeable, so do the people and their sexes; both
are blanks of indifference regarding difference. As the base material
of organs, the generic matter, matters more than the persons to whom
the matter belongs, we are moving toward a model of gender identity
which in contrast to the two-sex model envisions an egalitarian
scope. This model is not based on unchangeable biological/social
ascriptions but opts for the same degree of perfection, thus referencing
the one-sex model. (The concept of degree of perfection in the
postmodern context, however, contains a cynical subtext since it
pertains to annihilation and destruction, not, as in the original model,
to generation and procreation). The one-sex model according to
medical discourses and descriptions like those by Galen as well as by
contemporary critics like Laqueur conceives of all bodies as
equipped with the same material substance, with the sexes located on
a continuum and the differences between them merely a matter of
degrees of perfection, not of incommensurable biological or natural
difference. The degree of perfection, that is, the rank or place in the
Great Chain of Being, is, according to Galen, dependent on the
amount of vital heat in the body (men were usually assumed to have
more heat than women, which caused their reproductive organs to
be outside rather than inside the body); yet this model of identity
even though it might appear phallocentric at a first glance conceives
of the boundaries between the sexes as permeable because (literally)
every/body could reach the highest level of perfection (see Martain
1996a, online).
With reference to the diachronic dimension of these concepts of
gender identity, Crash represents an anachronism as it transforms the
gendered markers of the two-sex model into the generic blueprint of
190
the one-sex model, as the crashes and the violence eliminate sex- and
gender differences. This idea of extreme situations which are
characterized by [m]ens excess of heat (Martain 1996a, online) and
combine eroticism, violence, and death in heading toward a total
elimination of gender differences (and differences between separate
identities in general), is also, by implication, central to the theory of
Georges Bataille, when he emphasizes the ultimately equalizing
nature of the moment of being in the fusion of different (sexual)
entities:
Dissolution this expression corresponds with dissolute life, the familiar phrase
linked with erotic activity. In the process of dissolution, the male partner has
generally an active role, while the female partner is passive. The passive,
female side is essentially the one that is dissolved as a separate entity. But for
the male partner the dissolution of the passive partner means one thing only: it
is paving the way for a fusion where both are mingled, attaining at length the
same degree of dissolution. (Bataille [1957] 1998, 17)
It is interesting to note the conceptual similarities between Batailles

quote and the following observation by the first-person narrator
Ballard, both of which emphasize the universal or generic character of
the body on the verge of annihilation: In his mind Vaughan saw the
whole world dying on a simultaneous automobile disaster, millions of
vehicles hurled together in a terminal congress of spurting loin and
engine coolant (Ballard 1995, 16). And Ballard reflects after
Vaughans death: I thought of Vaughans body, colder now, its rectal
temperature following the same downward gradients as those of the
other victims of the crash (18). Moreover, there are also striking
correspondences between Batailles postulates and those of John
Sadler, who in his book The sicke womans private looking glass
(1636) provides advice on how to treat women so that the female will
also participate substantially in the act of conception. The following
quote testifies to the importance of both male and female [taking] fire
and be inflamed in order to enable successful procreation. He
suggests that men handle her secret parts and dugs, that she may take
fire and be inflamed in venery, for so at length the wombe will strive
and waxe fervent with desire of casting forth its own seed, and
receiving the mans seed to be mixed together therein (Sadler qtd. in
Martain 1996a, online). What unites these examples is the egalitarian
assumptions expressed in the descriptions of the final moment of
eroticized excess, since all of them posit a strong contrast to the way
the nineteenth century conceived of the relationship between the
sexes. Although there are seemingly patriarchal (or even misogynist)
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191
aspects to the given examples, they are still more ambiguous in

character than the two-sex model. In all of the examples one finds a
moment where the sexism and androcentrism are erased in a unisex
fusion, which could not possibly be conceived of within the
framework of the two-sex model with its stable connection between
sex and gender on the basis of a naturalization of (the insurmountable
barrier between) the sexes. Thus, contrasting the two stories, the
sexual markers that were still valid in Melvilles short story do not
apply as the two-sex model is turned into a one-sex model, or, one
might even say, a none-sex model.
The mutilations of the bodies in Crash, I would argue, even though
they represent an extreme form of de(con)struction, at the same time
have a procreative and constructive quality since static and traditional
patterns of (gender) identity are not reshuffled, but new ones are
generated. Following the argument presented by Elizabeth Grosz in
Volatile Bodies (1994), I suggest that in Crash, via the destruction of
and reinscription on the body surface (through rupture of skin,
prostheses, mutilation, etc.) new forms of eroticism, new structurings
of desire, and new codings of (violence-based) identity are generated
(see also Bataille [1957] 1998). Referring to Lingiss ideas on the
difference between civilized and savage practices and rituals of body
inscription presented in Excesses: Eros and Culture (1984), Grosz
describes how primitive inscriptions enable a restructuring of sexual
trajectories: These incisions and various body markings create an
erotogenic surface; they create not a map of the body but the body
precisely as a map (Grosz 1994, 139). This idea reflects Baudrillards
concept of simulation as a counter-state of existence, where the map
[] precedes the territory (1997, 1). In the chapter Crash in
Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard further elaborates that in
Ballards novel violence done to technology itself and [] the
violence done to the body combine into a semiurgy of the body
neither an anatomy nor a physiology, but a semiurgy of contusions,
scars, mutilations, wounds that there are so many sexual organs
opened on the body (112).
This restructuring of body surfaces through their mutilation and
destruction brings about, one could argue, a creative newness
according to which puncturings and markings of the body do not
simply displace or extend from already constituted, biologically
pregiven libidinal zones; they constitute the body in its entirety as
erotic, and they privilege particular parts of the body as selfconstituted orifices (Grosz 1994, 139). Thus, destruction is procreative, and in Ballards novel this becomes obvious through the fact
192
that to the degree that conventional (two-sex) markers of sexuality

and sexual difference are violently destroyed as the body is written
upon through eroticized incisions, bruises, cuts, or even the
amputation of limbs, a restructuring takes place and generates a
surreal, yet also blatantly and brutally real fusion of body and
machine, i.e. cars, into a (n)one-sex model. This becomes obvious in a
scene where the narrator, Ballard, and Gabrielle, a woman whose
body is already deformed as a result of car crashes and marked by
scars, braces, and prostheses, have sex, once more, in and with a car.
Ballard comments, [e]ach of her deformities became a potent
metaphor for the excitements of a new violence (Ballard 1995, 175).
Corroborating Baudrillards comment on Crash that all the erotic
terms are technical (1997, 115), the narrator makes clear, in the
following scene, that simulation is favoured over reality, since the
reality of traditional (female) markers of sexual difference has become
devoid of erotic energy:
I [] examined the breast carefully. For some reason I had expected it to be a
detachable latex structure, fitted on each morning along with her spinal brace
and leg supports, and I felt vaguely disappointed that it should be made of her
own flesh. [] As she sat passively in my arms, lips moving in a minimal
response, I realized this bored and crippled young woman found that nominal
junction points of the sexual act breast and penis, anus and vulva, nipple and
clitoris failed to provide any excitement for us. (Ballard 1995, 177-178)
In this decadent universe that has long since abandoned its boundaries,
taboos, and fears perhaps, as the most vital one, the fear of death
we are faced with an attitude on the characters and societys part that
is characterized by the dispensability of death (in favour of erotic
thrills). As indicated above, the example reflects an ideology that
works according to similar principles as the one-sex model, where
bodies differ only in degree of perfection. Dead matter (prostheses,
scars, braces, etc.) has replaced living matter bodily flesh as the
most perfect form and highest degree of perfection. Vital heat, as
the desired quality, is provided through the machines, or through the
fusion of man and machine; the two-sex-markers are neutralized as
sex takes place in universal orifices:
[I] celebrated with her the excitements of these abstract vents let into her body
by sections of her own automobile. During the next few days my orgasms took
place within the scars below her breast and within her left armpit, in the wounds
on her neck and shoulder, in these sexual apertures formed by fragmenting
windshield louvres and dashboard dials in a high-speed impact, marrying
through my own penis the car in which I had crashed and the car in which
Gabrielle had met her near-death. (179)
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What becomes obvious in this example is an ironic reversal of the

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

perfection through the ever more complex generation of orifices from
the creation of a new and exciting orifice [], neither vagina nor
rectum over dozens of auxiliary orifices to orifices of ever greater
abstraction and ingenuity. In Ballards infinite visions, markers of
gender identities are increasingly removed and replaced by the
different forms of orifices as blanks, which may be an expression of
aporia that culminates in a none-sex model. The none-sex model, as it
combines the contradictory moments of simultaneous creation and
194
destruction, velocity and inertia, recalls the laws of Baudrillards

simulation and his concept of metastasis. As he describes, the
functionalism in Crash devours its own rationality, because it does not
know dysfunction (1997, 118). As the natural or rational laws of
signification are suspended in the universe created by the author
Ballard, the destruction and annihilation is unlike in Melvilles story
not to be understood as a critical metaphor, but first and foremost to
be taken at face value. Since signification is no longer possible as the
space between signifier and signified has collapsed in a universe of
simulation, metaphors do not work anymore and the implosion of
meaning generates a realm without boundaries which has become
simulationally real as radical functionalism [] reaches its
paradoxical limits and burns them (118). Baudrillard further refers to
the processes of signification in the novel Crash as non-meaning,
[] savagery, of this mixture of the body and of technology [from
which] results a sexuality without precedent a sort of potential
vertigo linked to the pure inscription of the empty signs of this body
(112). And he continues to argue that death and sex are read on the
same level as the body, [] without metaphor (113).
Referring to Mary Douglass ideas, this article has contrasted two
pieces of fiction that feature instances of the unaesthetic as they
negotiate the dehumanization and annihilation of gendered bodies
through machines as mirroring a society whose boundaries are too
rigid against one with absent boundaries. With regard to the
negotiation of gender identity, the comparison of the two works of
fiction exemplifies an anachronism in concepts of gender identity.
Whereas The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids
criticizes the premises of the two-sex model yet at the same time
functions within them, Crash recalls the Galenic one-sex model and
envisions by means of a simulational restructuring of trajectories of
desire and eroticism a model which is based on total indifference
towards the difference between the sexes a none-sex model. In
Crash we encounter a realm where normal categories of human
psychology have ceased to work because it lacks the necessary levels
and foils of psychological ontology it could set itself off against; there
is [n]o affect behind all that, no psychology, no flux or desire, no
libido or death drive (Baudrillard 1997, 112). And, as Horst argues,
mechanisms like repression and concepts like the unconscious are not
valid anymore, therefore Angstlust no longer exists (1996, online;
my translation).
The representation of the none-sex model in Crash thus allows for a
reading of the body and sexuality as blanks, as exchangeable free
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195
variable parameters, as Horst suggests (see 1996, online). If this is the

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

of the machine works according to a par(t)s pro toto structure, in
which the fragmentation takes place in view of a possible whole, in
Crash the reader finds him- or herself in a (par(t)s pro nihil) universe
where a whole as a possible backdrop is no longer imaginable since,
according to critics like Bataille and Horst, all taboos have
disappeared so that nothing that is left has the potential to shock. In
this apocalyptic universe of the accident, where neither dysfunction
nor perversion are possible (Baudrillard 1997, 113), we find a
circularity in which pre-modern concepts of gender coincide with
postmodern ones, combining into a universal template of identity in a
hyperreal and hypertechnical scenario that abolishes both fiction and
reality without finality is it good or bad? We will never know (see
Baudrillard 1997, 118; 119).
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Vintage.
. [1973]. 1995. Crash. London: Vintage.
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Baudrillard, Jean. [1990] 1993. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme
Phenomena, translated by James Benedict. London & New York: Verso.
. [1981] 1997. Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Douglas, Mary. [1966] 1985. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of
Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge.
Durand, Rgis. 1990. Herman Melville: The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus
of Maids The Signs of Origin. In Die englische und amerikanische
Kurzgeschichte, edited by Klaus Lubbers, 52-59. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft.
Frazer, Bryant. n.d. Crash. http://www.deep-focus.com/flicker/crash.html (accessed
15 September 2004).
Gravestock, Steve. 2003. Crash. http://www.filmreferencelibrary.ca/index.asp?
layid=44&csid1=69&navid=66 (accessed 15 September 2004).
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana UP.
Horst, Sabine. 1996. Spiel mit den letzten Dingen. Frankfurter Rundschau, 10
October. http://www.davidcronenberg.de/frcrash.html (accessed 15 September
2004).
Karcher, Carolyn L. n.d. Herman Melville. http://college.hmco.com/english/heath
/syllabuild/iguide/melville.html (accessed 15 September 2004).
Laqueur, Thomas Walter. 1995. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to
Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
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September 2004).
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/sexuality/enli.htm (accessed 7 September 2004).
McGuire, Ian. 2003. Who aint a slave?: Moby Dick and the Ideology of Free
Labor. Journal of American Studies 37.2:287-305.
Melville, Herman. [1855] 1949. The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of
Maids. In The Complete Stories of Herman Melville, edited by Jay Leyda, 185211. New York: Random House.
Fear, Melancholy, and Loss in the Poetry of Stevie Smith
Ruth Baumert
Nobody writes or wishes to
Who is one with their desire
Stevie Smith, Mrs. Arbuthnot
This paper will examine the ways in which abjection functions in
writing, especially in poetry. I will look at the strategies by which the
English poet Stevie Smith (1903-71) attempts to cope with the abject
experience of loss, in other words, melancholia, in her poems. Stevie
Smiths work is frequently read against her rather colourful biography.
The temptation to do so is great as her life has been laid bare to the
public partly through her own writings (essays, letters,
autobiographical novels) as well as through performances, interviews,
her lifestyle, and the various monographs and biographies written
about her after her death. However, it is the aim of this paper to focus
mostly on the writing itself and the way the texts operate. In Powers of
Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva elaborates a theory
which tries to answer the question she poses herself: And yet, in
these times of dreary crisis, what is the point of emphasizing the
horror of being? (1982, 208). In her reasoning, horror and fear are
closely related to language and writing: [A]ny practice of speech,
inasmuch as it involves writing, is a language of fear (38) and she
points out that, ironically, the anxious subject uses language in a
frantic attempt to ward off fear and take control of a situation which
was generated by the appearance of language in the first place. A few
years later, in Black Sun, Kristeva specifically discusses melancholia
and loss in relation to art and literature. She argues that the denial of
loss is the origin of melancholia, consequently, the most efficacious
way of overcoming the latent loss (129) is to name it and so exert a
certain amount of control and mastery over it. The artist is privileged
in that, through the sublimational activity of writing (200), s/he can
find an antidote to melancholy and ameliorate loss. These notions
seem to offer an apt theoretical starting point to examine the poetry of
198
Stevie Smith. In Stevie Smiths considerable poetic uvre, the attempt

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

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

controlled by it. In these terms, writing, and especially poetry, can be
seen as a continuous attempt to bring those things into signification
which otherwise cause anxiety. But this only succeeds at a price, and
the price is the loss of the Thing: To speak, to venture, to settle
within the legal fiction known as symbolic activity, that is indeed to
lose the Thing (Kristeva 1989, 146).
At first sight abjection seems to demand materiality bodily
emissions, flesh, blood, skin, hair, putrefaction, decay, dirt, slime,
broken bodies, dismembered limbs, corpses but in a brilliant shift
Kristeva transposes it to literature, where it can take less material and
more subversive forms. She argues that the disruption and blurring of
borders that signify abjection can also be traced in phenomena which
bring it closer to texts and writing: It is thus not lack of cleanliness or
health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order.
What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the
ambiguous, the composite (Kristeva 1982, 4). To this list can be
added phenomena such as want, fear, negation, perversion, corruption,
lack of authenticity in short everything she terms horror. In texts,
therefore, abjection can be detected in amorphous forms, in ambiguity
and ambivalence, in lack of coherence and unity, and, last but not
least, in forms of transgression and sublimation.
In Powers of Horror, Kristeva shifts the focus of transgression from
experience and content which Georges Bataille stresses to form
and style and the violation of discursive and literary norms. In other
words, the transgression is in the writing itself, not necessarily in what
is written about, the subject matter of the text: Writing is violence
(Rose 1991, 37), and the writer or the artist speaks horror (Kristeva
1982, 38; my emphasis). In the first section of Black Sun Kristeva
outlines the origins and causes of melancholia and explains its
relations to loss. Later in the text, she develops a theory to show how
this loss can be named and worked through in art, and the process has
many similarities to that described in Powers of Horror. In Black Sun,
however, the focus is melancholia, and she expresses the view that in
writing, especially in poetry, it can be overcome by sublimation,
which, following Freud, she posits as the other side of melancholy
(see Kristeva 1989, 98). Through sublimation and poetic language, the
loss, the disinheritance, can be named, symbolized or metaphorized
(see Kristeva 1989, 171). By integrating the lost Thing into his or
her discourse, which has become a song by dint of seizing the Thing
(146), the poet finds a means of overcoming his or her melancholy. In
conclusion, it seems that the poet is especially privileged in that, by
200
means of poetic language, s/he can speak horror and combat

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

Florence Margaret Smith (from the early 1930s Stevie) was born in
Hull, England in 1902. In 1906 her father deserted the family
running off to sea and her mother and her unmarried sister,
Margaret, moved to London with Stevie and her older sister, Molly.
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The two sisters had very little money between them and only by
pooling their resources from a paternal legacy were they able to
survive. In Palmers Green, a middle class suburb of London, the four
moved into the house which was to be Stevie Smiths home for the
rest of her life. These biographical details are faithfully rendered in the
poem A House of Mercy, in which Stevie celebrates the strength
and female solidarity she experienced in her home: It was a house of
female habitation / Two ladies fair inhabited the house (1985, 410).
Although only thirty-three lines long (six irregular stanzas), the poem
tells the story of Stevies life the two feeble babes, the defecting
husband, the lack of money, the death of her mother (when Stevie was
seventeen), her sisters leaving home, ultimately leaving Stevie alone
with her Aunt Margaret for the rest of her life. Now I am old I tend
my mothers sister / The noble aunt who so long tended us (411).
Born two months premature, Stevie was always an ailing child, and
she remained very small, thin and not very robust throughout her life
(she was only five feet tall). At the age of twenty-three she became
secretary to a London publisher and worked there for the whole of her
working life, retiring, not entirely of her own free will (after a suicide
attempt at work) in 1953. From then on, she supplemented her not
very generous pension with reviewing. Smith looked after her Lion
Aunt in Palmers Green until she died in 1968 at the age of ninety-six.
Stevie only survived her by three years, dying of a brain tumour in
1971, aged sixty-eight, and leaving an uvre of three novels, eight
collections of poetry, a radio play, and a considerable number of
stories, essays, and reviews.
The name Stevie needs some explanation. To her family she always
remained Peggy or Florence Margaret. Stevie was coined after some
boys jokingly shouted Come on Steve when she was out riding in
the early 1930s (they were referring to a popular jockey of the time,
and her slight build must have given rise to the joke). The nickname
stuck and it was the name she herself preferred; from this time on,
Stevie Smith had two names, two personalities and two lives: at home
she was the single, suburban, middle class, rather isolated, eccentric,
working woman, living in a shabby house in an unfashionable suburb
with an old maiden aunt, whereas outside she was gradually becoming
part of the London literary scene. Her literary reputation began to
grow from the late 1950s on; up until then, publishers had been loath
to publish her poetry, finding it simply too unconventional and
eccentric. In the sixties, Stevie Smith became a cult figure on the
London scene, where her unconventionality suited the mood of the
time and her eccentricity was appreciated. The BBC called her in to
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do broadcasts and her poetry performances were the height of literary

fashion (see Sternlicht 1990, 1-16).
As a person Stevie Smith was undoubtedly odd small, thin, and
birdlike, she frequently appeared at poetry readings in little-girl
dresses and funny hats and as a poet she was no less unconventional.
She is often classed as a writer of humorous poetry lightweight, odd,
even freakish and eccentric. Philip Larkin used the adjective faussenave to describe both the woman and her work, and other critics
gladly adopted it, but this is only half the story. In his article Stevie,
Good-bye, Larkin admits to initially rejecting her poems as
facetious bosh, and he maintains that for some readers, she was
simply not to be taken seriously at all (1991, 115). He initially
divided the poems into serious and silly, expressing the opinion that
many of them should never have got outside the family (Frivolous
1991, 77), but later came to realize that the silliness was part of the
seriousness (78), especially in the later work. Although eccentric,
many of the poems are anything but silly and illustrate her constant
preoccupation with religious, philosophical, and social problems the
nature of God, the state of the (Anglican) church, faith and sin, as well
as the great imponderables love, life and death, isolation and the
difficulties of human relations, especially for a woman, in Britains
class-ridden society. Smiths eccentricity is, however, always evident,
even when she is pondering the most serious questions, and she
always seems to find a totally surprising angle. For instance, in the
poem Was He Married?, which sounds rather conversational, the He
in question is Christ. There are two voices in the poem, one asking
nave questions about the nature of Christ and his life and the other
supplying the answers. Finally, the clever voice states that man creates
gods according to his needs: A god is Mans doll, you ass / He makes
him up like this on purpose (1985, 390) (note the small letter for god
and the capital for Man). But it adds that at least man can be given
credit for creating a god of love. The poem concludes with the
statement that the best solution will be found when men / Love love
and hate hate but do not deify them (391). The poem thus destroys
the basis of religion and provides a secular solution to a religious
question.
In its formal aspects, Stevie Smiths poetry seems to respect the
decorum and traditions of discourse. On closer scrutiny, however, the
reader becomes aware of the incongruities and heresies and the
subversive way in which she undermines traditional aesthetics and the
demand for coherence and unity in poetry to speak horror. Indeed,
Sternlicht calls her the great subversive of modern poetry, speaks of
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her carpet bag of [] tricks and the way she sells profundity in
pop bottles (1991, 72). Abjection can be traced in Stevie Smiths
poetry in the way she violates, transgresses, and even corrupts,
discursive and poetic norms, in her permanent ambivalence, and in her
general refusal to abide by the rules of the symbolic game. She uses
transgression and ambivalence, modes associated with the Semiotic, to
put pressure on the Symbolic, but her attack is launched in a subtle,
seemingly harmless, even playful way, a technique which is
subversive in the extreme. In an insightful article on Smith, Martin
Pumphrey points out this playfulness and the way she scorns the
power play of poetic tradition and asks the interesting question, which
critics until then had ignored, why someone who so manifestly
enjoyed playing games should refuse, throughout a long career and at
the obvious risk of critical obscurity, to play the game (1991, 99;
italics in original). Stevie Smiths subversion can be interpreted in
different ways, but by applying Kristevas theories of the semiotic
disposition, abjection, and melancholia, a great deal of insight can be
gained. Using Kristevan terminology, one might say the Semiotic
breaks through in her poems, disrupting the code and cracking the
socio-symbolic order, splitting it open, changing vocabulary, syntax,
the word itself (Kristeva 1984, 80). In so far, Stevie Smith seems to
demonstrate what Kristeva calls the semiotic disposition, by which
the poet constantly attempts to renew the order in which s/he is
inescapably caught up (see Kristeva 1985, 217). For this reason, she
cannot be compared with any poet that went before, and many critics
and readers admit to being nonplussed by her idiosyncratic way of
writing. Her poetry avoids or transmutes existing formulae, belongs to
no school or movement, disregards authority; she does not give a hoot
for the paraphernalia of traditional poetry, for metaphysical
transcendence, sublimation, and romanticization, indeed she might
even be said to oppose all the notions traditionally associated with the
poetic. At the same time, she never disregards these, but parodies
them, perverts them, and takes issue with them again and again, even
if she sets them up only to call them into question. In Kristevas
words, she turns them aside (1982, 15). This can be seen in the
various poems in which she shifts from a heavily literary mode of
expression to a prosaic, even throw-away tone. A good example of
this is the six-line poem The Murderer, in which she seems to move
deliberately from the sublime to the ridiculous, both of which are
representational modes that obfuscate the binary laws of the symbolic
order. The poem begins with the speaker proclaiming: My true love
breathed her latest breath / And I have closed her eyes in death and
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ends with the laconic remark: She was not like other girls rather
diffident, / And that is how we had an accident (Smith 1985, 117).
The voice here, in keeping with the principles of the ridiculous and the
sublime as modes which deny the idea of an object as defining the
subject (see Kristeva 1982, 12), seems to be speaking from a position
which is neither fixed in the Semiotic nor in the Symbolic but in a nomans land between the two. All these aspects make it possible to link
Stevie Smith to the notion of the abject. When Kristeva says, [t]he
abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a
prohibition, a rule, or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts;
uses them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them (1982,
15), this seems to me a very good description of how Stevie Smith
operates. Her poetry can be read as an attack on the smoothness and
coherence, the comfort and safety offered by the Symbolic, and as an
attempt to show the inadequacy of traditional poetry when it comes to
expressing the view of the world of someone who has always been
only on the margins. Smith never presumes to speak for humanity at
large but uses poetic language to express in her own terms her own
view of the world, her own condition and that of her kind.
Stevie Smiths subversive technique, her general refusal to abide by
the rules of the symbolic game, can be traced in the permanent
ambivalence which permeates her poetry. Catherine A. Civello uses
the category of gender to explain the phenomenon:
Two modes of behaviour typify womens reactions to their female status in
society: the acceptance of their role or the impulse to change it [...]. Stevie
Smith embraced neither of these extremes, but opted for the complex area
between the polarities. Ambivalence permeates her work. (1997, 2)
Civello sees this ambivalence as arising from the relationship of the

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

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

Although Stevie Smiths voice is unmistakable, her uvre does not
present the reader with a strong, unified poetic persona/speaker.
Instead, she impersonates a wide range of speakers and voices,
including those of animals, often even switching within one poem. In
this way she avoids creating a dominant, homogeneous voice, and
refuses the master narrative in favour of a more heterogeneous, anti-
206
hierarchical one. Many of the poems are dialogic in that either two
characters speak (Mary and Eve in A Dream of Comparison), or a
distanced narrator and a character, or even groups of people (Not
Waving But Drowning). Even when only one speaker is present, an
inner dialogue seems to be going on between an outer voice and a sad,
quirky or wistful inner voice as in In My Dreams, where the speaker
admits how happy and relieved she is to be always saying goodbye
and riding away but adds I am glad, I am glad, that my friends dont
know what I think (Smith 1985, 129). Because of these many masks
and voices, the reader never has a feeling of being in touch with an
authoritative and consistent voice, but rather with many disparate
voices old, young, male, female, serious, funny discussing an
issue, quarrelling, questioning, commenting, reflecting, revealing,
ridiculing. It also becomes clear that nearly all of Stevie Smiths
speaker-characters are abjected, rejected, helpless, bereft, isolated,
depressed, disturbed, morbid: the deserted wife who is visited every
night by a black man who comes uninvited. His name is Despair
(The Sea-widow, 569), the betrayed woman, desperate to believe,
despite all the evidence to the contrary, that He loves me so much,
my heart is singing (Infelice, 107), the daughter, exhorted by her
mother to accept the womans lot and embrace the headache and the
crown (The Queen and the Young Princess, 313), the woman
whose pain is more than she can bear, begging the doctor so give me
some bromide / And then I will go away for a long time and hide
(The Doctor, 105) and, last but not least, the countless speakercharacters who are tired of life and longing for death (Come Death
(1), 108; Come Death (2), 571; Longing for Death Because of
Feebleness, 368; Oblivion, 562; Scorpion, 513 to name only a
few). These personae speak from the margins, from muted areas and
helpless positions (see Showalter 1986, 261). A typical example is the
secretary in the probably semi-autobiographical Deeply Morbid
one of Smiths most abject characters: Deeply morbid deeply morbid
was the girl who typed the / letters, her name was Joan and at
lunchtime / Solitary solitary / She would go and watch the pictures / In
the National Gallery / All alone all alone (1985, 296); or they are
disturbed like the deserter to ill health, who admits The world is
come upon me, I used to keep it a long way off (The Deserter, 259)
and who is now scorned by his friend for being cowardly and giving
up the fight. Others are even unable to speak for themselves (Do take
Muriel out / She is looking so glum, 250; Drugs made Pauline
vague, 264). Rather than accept the norms and give in gracefully, the
characters escape they ride off: In my dreams I am always saying
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goodbye and riding away (In My Dreams, 129); they withdraw into
worlds of their own, into fairytale spaces: the dark wood at night (I
rode with my darling , 260), or they resolve to keep their own
company: I shall quite simply never speak to the fellow again (The
Deserter, 259). It becomes evident that Smiths speaker-protagonists
are never fully at ease with the language, the discourse, or the
conventions of their environment (bourgeois society, suburbia, the
church); they are not at home in the world it even seems like alien
territory to them. They long to escape from it and from human society,
and, when they do so, like Joan in Deeply Morbid, who is sucked
into a Turner painting, they are envied: But I say shes a lucky one /
To walk for ever in that sun (298). By refusing to establish a
coherent, authoritative voice and a stable persona, by confronting the
reader with multiple perspectives, conflicting or ambivalent points of
view, with ambiguity and disturbed/abject speakers, Stevie Smith
evades textual closure and frustrates the natural wish for unambiguous
readings. As a result, the reader finds it difficult to identify with her
speaker-characters and is unsettled by them rather than being given a
feeling of stability and safety.
The Poetic Form Style and Language

When we examine the formal elements of Stevie Smiths poems, some
of them seem so egregiously bad that the question arises can she not
or does she not want to, as, for example, in her poem From the
Greek: To many men strange fates are given / Beyond remission or
recall / But the worst fate of all (tra la) / s to have no fate at all (tra
la) (1985, 31). Is she purposely writing bad poetry? Is she
incapable of maintaining the rhythm and metre of the lines, of finding
apposite rhymes, or is she purposely doing her worst? Why does she
not write free verse as so many of her contemporaries did if she finds
prosody so difficult? Critics have frequently read Stevie Smiths odd,
jarring, ugly, absurd rhymes, faulty metre and rhythms simply as
devices to arouse laughter, seeing her primarily as a writer of
humorous, even nonsense verse (see Kristevas discussion concerning
the disruptive properties of poetic language in Powers of Horror
[1982, 133-139]). If we compare her technique to that of Englands
great writers of nonsense verse, however, for instance Edward Lear
and Lewis Carroll, we find a great difference precisely in the attitude
to form. Lear and Carroll are great versifiers, meticulous in their
attention to prosody in all its variations, whereas Stevie Smith
208
manipulates and parodies the literary stance and conventions of

ninteenth-century and Romantic poetry. Many of Stevie Smiths
rhymes and rhythms, as well as her handling of metre are distressing
to the sensitive ear. In his article The Art of Sinking in Poetry,
Christopher Ricks goes into great detail on Stevie Smiths distinctive
[...] ways with rhythm and rhyme (1991, 205) and especially on her
foible for Simpsonian rhymes, which rhyme on the second syllable
of a disyllabic word where metre forbids that syllable to carry stress
(206), for instance waving / drowning, moaning / larking (Smith
1985, 303). Such rhymes are disturbing to our sense of harmony and
thus function perfectly as distress signals (Ricks 1991, 206), or as a
Kristevan language of fear (1982, 38). Ricks points out that one of
Stevie Smiths favourites is couple / rubble (see Smith 1985, 174;
207; 415); another egregiously sardonic rhyme is mother / smother,
emphasized even by the repetition Ah mother, mother, your tears
smother (248). Many others seem simply amusing: praevalebit /
prevail in a bit (372), hippopotamus / lost in the fuss; ill-fed /
Wilfred (332), orthodox / shut in a box (21), jungle path /
photograph (425). Very often, these rhymes link together terms
which seem incongruous, such as in the eye/half rhyme womb /
bomb (337).
Smith uses zeugma in the same way to yoke two incongruous terms
together (as in Donnes conceits): embrace the headache and the
crown (303). Other disturbing juxtapositions are the shifts in register
between the poetic and the prosaic. The lofty and authoritative
statement [t]his night shall thy soul be required of thee, a biblical
quotation, is transformed into the wistful, tentative question [w]ill
my soul be required of me tonight perhaps? (513). Because of their
incongruity, all of these techniques succeed in alerting the reader to
Smiths underlying message and the distress of her speakers. Her
metaphors and images function in the same way; they are surprising,
often funny (Wan / Swan / On the lake / Like a cake / Of soap, 40),
or she chooses dead, over-used metaphors, casting doubt on the
sentiments and emotions expressed in these figures and highlighting
their lack of meaning for the mid-twentieth century: Satin-clad, with
many a pearl / Is this rich and wretched girl (214); forests old and
grim are another favourite and she truly rubs in the clich in her
poem Nor We of Her to Him (543), repeating the phrase three times
in five lines. Another typical feature of Stevie Smiths handling of
poetic form can be seen in the way she uses metre. Many poems have
simple, traditional metric forms such as ballad metre (4/3/4/3) and
nursery rhyme jingles, which gives rise to the first impression of
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lightness, harmlessness, even playfulness. Often, metrical devices

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

of handling form. There are two speakers. The first stanza resembles
ballad metre (though without the typical rhyme scheme) and is
particularly fitting for the male speaker, who is offering his dialogue
partner an extremely unromantic, though eminently practical, proposal
of marriage. His lack of imagination is emphasized by the
monotonous and not very skilful rhymes they all circulate round the
sound [o] but are all slightly off-centre. In the second and the third
210
stanzas the unconventional lady answers. Abandoning all pretensions

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

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

The majority of Stevie Smiths most memorable poems, even the
funny ones, present abject topics primarily death, the most abject
topic of all, and the related topics of suicide, fear, and rejection.
Readers of Stevie Smiths poetry cannot help but notice its
deathwards slant (Dick 1971, 48), an aspect critics draw attention
to. Sternlicht suggests that her major subjects, particularly in the late
works, are disintegration and death (1991, 71). Stevie Smith herself
commented again and again on the fact that death was her primary
preoccupation, and she is particularly explicit about it in What Poems
Are Made Of. The essay begins by listing the things that inspire her
and give her pleasure colours, the suburb where she lives, the parks,
the city, the sea, the countryside. She goes on to tell how she loves to
watch the birds, the animals, and the children, but then, in a typical
Stevie Smith shift, she adds and to think how fortunate I am they are
not mine (Smith 1981, 128). She then asks the rhetorical question:
212
Why are so many of my poems about death, if I am having such an enjoyable

time all the time? Partly because I am haunted by the fear of what might have
happened if I had not been able to draw back in time from the husband-wiveschildren and pet animals situation in which I surely should have failed. (128)
Quoting Seneca, she comments explicitly on her fear of life and her
love of death: I think if there were no death, life would be more than
flesh and blood could bear (129). And in one of her poems she
writes, My heart goes out to my Creator in love / Who gave me
Death, as end and remedy (Smith 1985, 368).
She also referred to this fear of life and love of death in talks and
interviews. In a much quoted conversation with her friend Kay Dick
she says being alive is like being in enemy territory (1971, 45),
whereas being dead is like feeling at home. Stevie Smiths idea of
death and the state of being dead can be deduced from her many death
poems, but it never becomes absolutely clear: going off on a solitary
journey, disappearing, riding away into a place that cannot be named
or described an empty space, a nirvana, a miasma. Words fail when
it comes to describing the state exactly; it is always a place an open
space, grass (park), the sky, an empty beach, the sea stretching to the
horizon, the forest and, perhaps most important, one where she is
entirely alone. A few lines from Scorpion illustrate this particularly
well:
I should like my soul to be required of me, so as
To waft over grass till it comes to the blue sea
I am very fond of grass, I always have been, but there must
Be no cow, person or house to be seen.
Sea and grass must be quite empty
Other souls can find somewhere else. (1985, 513)
Some of these pictures are reminiscent of corny video clips: the lone
cowboy riding off into the setting sun, a solitary sailing boat
disappearing over the horizon. Others bring to mind powerful literary
images, especially images of isolation and emptiness King Lear
alone on the heath, Frankensteins monster disappearing into the
desolate, icy wastes: [H]e was soon borne away by the waves, and
lost in darkness and distance (Shelley [1818] 1994, 191). Such
images are chosen when words fail; they are examples of what
Kristeva calls semantic fuzziness (1982, 191). A typical example of
the diffuse writing Stevie Smith uses when describing death is the
poem Oblivion: It was so sweet in my oblivion / There was a sweet
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mist wrapped me round about / And I trod in a sweet and milky sea,
knee deep (1985, 562).
Death is, broadly speaking, leaving the world, escaping. It seems to
offer rest, relief, solitude, and freedom. Sometimes it is referred to as a
return back but it is never quite clear to where. In the philosophical
dialogue between Eve and Mary in A Dream of Comparison, Eve
wishes for death while Mary loves life: Oh to be Nothing , said
Eve, oh for a / Cessation of consciousness , whereas Mary
paradoxically states: I love Life, I would fight to the death for it .
In Eves terms, Nothing is a return to where you were before you
were born (314). In Smiths own words perhaps what one wants is
simply a release from sensation, from all consciousness for ever
(Smith Too Tired for Words 1981, 113). In Deeply Morbid, the
girl is sucked into a Turner painting a seascape, full of sunlight
where, all alone, She went upon the painted shore / And there she
walks for ever more (Smith 1985, 298). In other poems, death
welcomes the speaker home, whereby what home is is again only a
vague idea. Stevie Smith certainly does not harbour the Christian
notion of resurrection and eternal life but rather mistrusts
Christianitys solutions, as she makes clear in the darkly funny poem
Mrs Simpkins. Bored with life, Mrs. Simpkins becomes a
spiritualist, and, at her first sance, hears from those who have
crossed over (21) that nothing changes: death isnt a passing away
/ Its just a carrying on with friends and relations and brightness (22).
When she tells her husband the good news that death is just a great
reunion (22), he cannot bear the thought and shoots himself. It is
typical that many of the poems about death are rather funny. In a letter
to a friend, Stevie Smith explains the genesis of Scorpion, which:
though rooted in utter despair has alas perhaps come out funny, or
rather funny (qtd. in Spalding 1988, 294). Her biographer, Frances
Spalding, sees it as another instance of her ability to metamorphose
into poetry the miseries of her existence (1988, 294). In many poems,
death is personified and invoked as a friend, as, for example in Come
Death (1) and Come Death (2) (Smith 1985, 108, 571). In Do take
Muriel out, the speaker is addressing a prospective suitor, and only at
the end does it become clear that the suitor is death and the venue not
a bar but the blasted heath:
Do take Muriel out
Although your name is Death
She will not complain
When you dance her over the blasted heath. (250)
214
Death also turns out to be the lover in Tender Only to One, which
reads like a childish game of he loves me he loves me not. Only in
the last line does the speaker reveal who the lover is: His name, his
name is Death (93). Sometimes deaths words are ceremonious,
evoking images of the apocalypse: This night thy soul shall be
required of thee (Scorpion, 513), or he is described in traditional,
poetic terms like quiet death, sweet death, kind death, bitter
death (454-455), and conventionally associated with poppy and
sleep. In other poems, death is treated in an off-hand way: the lady
condemned to die at dawn in The Hostage feels guilty because she
admits she has always wanted to die and always wished it was over
and done with (325). In a typical Stevie Smith twist, the priest
hearing her confession absolves her with the words: Meanwhile,
since you want to die and have to, you may go on feeling elated
(325). In Voice from the Tomb (1), which the poet hears in a
nightmare, the voice categorically states: [I]n Deaths clime / Theres
no pen, paper, notion, / And no Time (461). To sum up, the diffuse
writing, the limitless spaces, the timelessness, the isolation and feeling
of non-individuation, all evoke the notion of Kristevas Semiotic and
the wish to return to a place of jouissance and wholeness, where there
is no lack. Yet Smith refuses to allow herself to fall back into this
completely however tempting it may seem. Again and again her
speakers break the illusion and come back down to earth again, which
is not to say that the language signifies a return to the Symbolic, with
all its demands of coherence, order and closure. She avoids landing in
either realm. Instead she positions herself somewhere in-between,
where she creates and defends her own space, never allowing the
reader to be sure whether she is waving or drowning. This seems
to be the only tolerable position.
The notion of death as escape and refuge explains Stevie Smiths
attitude to suicide. It was always an alternative and this belief seems
to have made life tolerable: life can only be borne if one always has
the option of ending it. This idea is expressed again and again in the
poems and she had no inhibitions about expressing it in her essays and
interviews. In the essay Too Tired for Words, Smith talks of her
frequent spells of melancholia, tiredness, and despair and the comfort
she derives from the knowledge that suicide is always a viable choice:
It is then that the great thought of death comes to puff one up for
comfort. For however feeble one may seem, [...] Death lies at ones
command, and this is a very invigorating thought and a very proud
thought too [...] commanding the great god Thanatos (1981, 112).
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Stevie Smiths ambivalent attitude to writing as a means of fending

off death through compensating loss, yet at the same time also as a
medium for celebrating death, echoes Kristevas ambivalent thesis
from Black Sun. The possibility of ending her life seems to have
enabled her to live with her fear of life and to face up to it stoically.
Voicing the fear through her speaker-characters was her way of
coping with it, even if the fearful creature is only a dog, as in O Pug.
The speaker is trying to comfort the dog, who is so desperate from
lack of love and existential fear that panic walks in his eyes. She
seems to identify with the dogs plight for the poem ends with the
exclamation: O Pug [...] / How ones heart goes out to you! (Smith
1985, 548). In poems such as Harolds Leap, Stevie Smith expresses
her admiration for those who commit suicide despite their fear.
Although afraid of heights, Harold felt he should try, and so He
leapt from one rock to the other / And fell to the seas smother. The
speaker concludes Although he succeeded in doing nothing but die /
[...] It was a brave thing to do (233). For her, fear is simply inherent
in the human condition, so it must be confronted bravely. She summed
this up in the words: For I said, if you cry for fear you are an abject
character (Smith qtd. in Couzyn 1985, 35).
Stevie Smiths strategy seems to have worked. In 1953, at a
peculiarly low point in her life, she attempted suicide at work and
suffered a nervous breakdown; in the end, though, she lived her time
out to its natural end, dying in hospital at the age of sixty-eight,
practically bereft of speech due to a brain tumour, but writing poetry
almost to the last. Critics frequently point out that Stevie Smiths
uvre does not develop, that there is little difference between the
early poems and those written at the end of her life (see Larkin
Good-bye 1991, 115). She corroborates this impression herself
when she says I dont think my poems have changed very much since
I started writing (Smith qtd. in Orr 1966, 227). Nevertheless, the
collection Scorpion, the last poems of which were written shortly
before she died, seems to provide a culmination of sorts. Sanford
Sternlicht remarks that it bundles up the iterative themes of her
poetry and that she finally reconciles and blends her poetic voices:
the girl child and adolescent; the cynical, lonely woman; and the
skeptical philosopher (1990, 98). In her study of female suicides in
About Chinese Women (1977), Kristeva states that when the subject
fails in her desperate attempts to identify with the symbolic paternal
order, [...] death quietly moves in (Kristeva qtd. in Moi 1986, 157).
Unlike other women writers of her time Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton,
even Virginia Woolf Stevie Smith seems to have found a coping
216
style that saved her from ending her own life. Part of this is
undoubtedly due to the way she developed her own strategies of
handling language and poetic form, but perhaps the most important
factor was that she learned to accept her marginality and even to make
a virtue out of it. Realizing early in her career that she would never
find a place in the mainstream, she withdrew to the margin, thus
avoiding all head-on confrontation. She chose her place in a no-mans
land on the dangerous frontier between the logical and the illogical,
conscious and unconscious, madness and sanity (Wheeler 1998, 127)
and she remained in it until the end, despite the anxiety and isolation it
involved and the suffering it caused her. As Kristeva points out in her
theory of marginality, the margin is an ambiguous place; it is both an
outer edge, a frontier which protects what it surrounds, but at the same
time it has access to whatever lies outside and beyond it (see Moi
1985, 164). As in abjection, inside and outside are not clearly separate
and defined. In an interview by Peter Orr, Stevie Smith speaks about
her isolation as a person and her marginal position in the literary
establishment. Rambling on in her own inimical fashion, she admits:
I like company very much. Of course, I live rather alone, really. I live with an
aunt who is ninety. [...] [B]ut we live alone [...]. I dont know many poets. I
know some novelists. But most of my friends are just friends and I dont really
know what they are. [...] I like to meet writers. I dont know where they meet in
London. I mean they dont go and sit on the pavement cafs. But of course the
pavements are so awfully cold. I dont know where they meet. I think you must
be friends with them to begin with. (1966, 230)
Although she was clearly ambivalent about her isolated situation

and although it often caused her considerable pain, both as a poet and
as a woman, she never left it. Contemporaries describe her as gladly
emerging from her shabby home in Palmers Green to stay with
friends or to dazzle on the London literary circuit, but she always
returned home where she disappeared, like an animal into its lair.
(Spalding 1988, 249). Her stable domestic situation and her mental
habits seem to have provided her with a safe position from which she
could defy society and the literary establishment through her strange
way of life, her eccentric behaviour, and her idiosyncratic novels and
poems. As I mentioned earlier, her home, from which she derived
such strength, was a house of female habitation, and perhaps this
links it to Kristevas notion of the semiotic disposition and semiotic
mobility (see Lechte 1990, 140, 157), which are defined as energy
drives that have their origins in the maternal and are present in and
potentially disruptive of [] language and representation (Lechte
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1990, 157). Her early attempts to publish her poetry made her acutely
aware of the potential censorship and the general cultural hostility
towards womens achievements in patriarchal areas, in her case in the
field of poetry. In fact, she could only get her first poems published by
smuggling them into her novels. Stevie Smith makes no bones about
her attitude to these gender problems in her three novels, but in the
poems they are only addressed obliquely. In the Summation to his
study of Stevie Smith, Sanford Sternlicht says:
Stevies childhood, particularly the loss of her fathers presence and love, and
her long, stable, supportive, symbiotic relationship with her Aunt Margaret
formed the foundation of the emotional structure from which she mounted her
attack on life, her taunting of God, and her revenge on men. (1990, 103; my
italics)
The phrase mounting an attack on life seems to be particularly

appropriate to describe Stevie Smiths poetic uvre. She mounts her
attack by persistently uncovering what Kristeva terms horror, and
then undercutting it with ridicule, pastiche, and parody. By keeping
herself on the edge in this way, she transcends the pain, or distances
herself from it through stoicism or laughter, thus enabling herself to
carry on despite her physical alienation and anxieties. By choosing her
position on the margins of life and of the literary world, which she
knew she was never really part of, Stevie Smith seems to have found a
way of coping with her situation. She realized she did not fit into the
times, but with amazing bravado declared: Im as much part of our
time as everybody else. The times will just have to enlarge themselves
to make room for me, wont they (Smith qtd. in Orr 1966, 229). She
certainly made no attempt to adapt to the times, disdaining any
attempt at integration. Instead, she chose to act against the accepted
norms: in her life by refusing all the traditional female roles, and in
her work by continually writing at odds with poetics and tradition. By
emphasizing the horror of being in her poetry, she copes with it
through abjection. Stevie Smith seems to have known instinctively
that she was writing from beyond the pale, from what Kristeva called
a foreign land: In womens writing, language seems to be seen from
a foreign land (qtd. in Marks and de Courtivron 1980, 166), but she
braves the danger and even turns it to her own advantage. From her
point of attack on the fringe, Stevie Smith is able to avoid the either/or
of the Semiotic/Symbolic bind, which demands either regression or
conformity. Instead she takes up her position on the borders of these
two economies, or in the gap between them, developing a signifying
practice that ceaselessly oscillates from one to the other but never
218
gives in to either. This is the place of abjection a dangerous place

where the drives have complete and uninhibited reign (Lechte 1990,
159) but at the same time a place of refuge and protection. A place
where Stevie Smith could find herself and develop her unique voice.
Works Cited
Barbera, Jack, and William McBrien, eds. 1981. Me Again: Uncollected Writings of
Stevie Smith. London: Virago.
Civello, Catherine A. 1995. Stevie Smiths Ecriture Fminine: Pre-oedipal Desires
and Wartime Realities. Mosaic 28.2:109-122.
. 1997. Patterns of Ambivalence. Columbia: Camden House.
Couzyn, Jeni. 1985. The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women: Eleven British
Writers. Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books.
Dick, Kay. 1971. Ivy and Stevie. London: Duckworth.
Hughes, Ted, and Frances McCullough, eds. 1982. The Journals of Sylvia Plath. New
York: Dial Press.
Kristeva, Julia. [1974] 1977. About Chinese Women, translated by Anita Barrows.
London: Boyars.
. [1979] 1981. Womens Time, translated by Alice Jardine and Harry Blake.
Signs 7.1:13-35.
. [1980] 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S.
Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
. [1974] 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language, translated by Margaret Waller. New
York: Columbia University Press.
. 1985. The Speaking Subject. In On Signs, edited by Marshall Blonsky, 210-220.
Oxford: Blackwell.
. [1987] 1989. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, translated by Leon S.
Larkin, Philip. 1991. Frivolous and Vulnerable. In Sternlicht, 75-81.
. 1991. Stevie, Good-bye. In Sternlicht, 114-118.
Lechte, John. 1990. Julia Kristeva. London: Routledge.
Marks, Elaine, and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. 1980. New French Feminisms: An
Anthology. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Moi, Toril. 1985. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London:
Methuen.
, ed. 1986. The Kristeva Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.
Orr, Peter, ed. 1966. The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets
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London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Pumphrey, Martin. 1991. Play, Fantasy, and Strange Laughter: Stevie Smiths
Uncomfortable Poetry. In Sternlicht, 97-113.
Ricks, Christopher. 1991. Stevie Smith: The Art of Sinking in Poetry. In Sternlicht,
196-210.
Rose, Jacqueline. 1991. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. London: Virago.
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Shelley, Mary. [1818] 1994. Frankenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Criticism, edited by Elaine Showalter, 243-270. London: Virago.
Smith, Stevie. [1938] 1981. My Muse. In Barbera and McBrien, 125-126.
. [1956] 1981. Too Tired for Words. In Barbera and McBrien, 111-118.
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. 1991. In Search of Stevie Smith. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Wheeler, Kathleen. 1998. A Critical Guide to Twentieth Century Women Novelists.
Oxford: Blackwell.
American Environmentalism and Encounters with the Abject:

T. Coraghessan Boyles A Friend of the Earth
Sylvia Mayer
In A Friend of the Earth, T. C. Boyles satire about radical
environmentalism, seventy-five-year-old Tyrone Ty Tierwater
tells the story of his life as an environmentalist. Tierwater lives as the
keeper of a pop stars private zoo on the American west coast in the
year 2026, at a time when the biosphere has collapsed, when the
climate is characterized either by uninterrupted rainstorms or by
excessive heat, when the ozone layer is gone, when many animal and
plant species are extinct, and, as a consequence of all this, when the
basis for human diet has been dramatically altered. Thirty-five years
earlier, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tierwater had been part of
the radical environmental organization Earth Forever! for which he
had performed ultimately unsuccessful acts of monkeywrenching, of
ecosabotage mainly against lumber companies.
There are several devices that indicate that Boyles novel displays a
postmodern, parodic mode of dealing with environmentalist icons and
issues: these are, for example, the novels title, its ecologically
dystopian setting, and the intertextual reference (Earth Forever!) to the
contemporary environmentalist group Earth First! Additionally, the
references to the history of American environmentalism (to
nineteenth- and twentieth-century icons Henry David Thoreau, John
Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Edward Abbey, for instance), to the deep
ecology movement, to politically influential texts such as Bill
McKibbens The End of Nature, or to the spotted owl as an issue of
heated political debate, also testify to the novels critical assessment
of contemporary U.S. environmentalism.
The novel presents Tierwaters account in a sequence of chapters
that alternate between the 1980s and 1990s on the one hand and the
years 2025 and 2026 on the other. The chapters that focus on the
situation in 2025-26 are presented by Ty as an autodiegetic narrator,
while the chapters that present the events of the years 1989 to 1997
are focalized by him as well, yet related by a heterodiegetic narrator.
This change in narrative perspective is one narrative means that points
toward the novels concern with questions of subjectivity and identity
formation. Another one is the multilayered web of intertextual
references which foregrounds the protagonists subjectivity as
222
constituted in discourse. Still another narrative means of highlighting

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

ecocatastrophe both on the single human beings sense of self and on
the dynamics of symbolic and semiotic signification. Moreover,
Boyles choice of a male protagonist and the fact that Tierwaters
descriptions of experiences of disgust and loathing are frequently
related to the presentation of male characters in the novel suggest that
different concepts of masculinity are also at stake in the process of this
environmentalists identity formation. In the first part of this essay, I
shall thus delineate how A Friend of the Earth conceptualizes human
subjectivity and identity in an ecological dystopia. Confrontation with
the abject shows that drastically changed environmental conditions
destabilize both bodily integrity and received notions of the self. In the
second part of the essay, I shall focus on how Boyles text employs
experiences of the abject for the purpose of addressing issues of male
identity in the context of American environmentalism.
On the first pages of his account, in the Prologue that delineates
the situation in the year 2025, Ty Tierwater introduces himself as
someone whose conditions of living keep confronting him with
experiences that challenge common notions of cleanliness and bodily
comfort. Ty recalls feeding the animals in Maclovio Pulchriss zoo
and cleaning up after one of the regularly occurring heavy storms. He
remarks that there are trees down everywhere and the muck is
tugging at my gum boots like a greedy sucking mouth, a mouth thats
going to pull me all the way down eventually, but not yet (Boyle
2001, 1). About the atmosphere that has been created by the weather
he comments: The sky is black not gray, black and it cant be past
three in the afternoon. Everything is still, and I smell it like a
gathering cloud, death, the death of everything, hopeless and stinking
and wasted (2). Even the thought of the alternative to storm, rain, and
darkness namely sunshine cannot provide him with a moment of
relief, because, so Ty ponders, once the sun comes back it will pound
us with all its unfiltered melanomic might (2). Altered environmental
conditions spell pollution and, more often than not, bear the threat of
lethal disease several times Ty mentions the mucosa epidemic which
had spread three years before and killed thousands of Americans,
including his third wife, Lori, and which in the year 2025 is rumoured
to have once more befallen the American east coast (see, for example,
72). Experiences of disgust and loathing are, however, not limited to
confrontations with weather conditions outside. The effects of climate
change have also penetrated the places inhabited by human beings,
and they have made them almost uninhabitable. Tys home is a two-
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room house, of which the storm has torn off the gutters and threequarters of the shingles (6). There are
smells of mold what else? and rats. The rats an R-selected species, big
litters, highly mobile, selected for any environment are thriving, multiplying
like theres no tomorrow [...]. They have an underlying smell, a furtive smell,
old sweat socks balled up on the floor of the high-school locker room, drains
that need cleaning, meat sauce dried onto the plate and then reliquefied with a
spray of water. Its a quiet stink, nothing like the hyena when shes wet, which
is all the time now, and I forgive the rats that much. (6)
In the restaurant where Ty meets his former wife, Andrea, he is

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

the relation between nature and culture.
The concepts of nature, culture, and the human that have dominated
Western societies ontological and ethical thought as well as the
socioeconomic practices founded upon them, have been structured by
dualistic thought since the beginning of the modern era and the
emergence of the modern sciences in the Europe of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries (see Pepper 1997, 123-165). According to
ecological philosopher Val Plumwood, the root dualism of nature
versus culture, which regards nature as strictly separate from and
inferior to culture, has spawned a whole system of dichotomies,
among them matter versus reason or body versus mind , female
versus male, and master versus slave (see 1997, 41-68). In the
ontological system that has dominated modern Western history, the
human being is positioned as separate from the rest of nature. It is
conceptualized as an essentially rational, and, by implication, cultural,
that is non-natural, being. The ethical systems, which operate on such
an ontological premise, are strictly interpersonal and instrumentalist
systems, which is to say that they do not address the question of
expanding the moral universe in terms of including (parts of) nonhuman nature and that they neglect addressing the problem of a finite
nonhuman resource base (for an overview of the development within
the field of practical philosophy and environmental ethics see Krebs
1999 and, for the Anglo-American context, Nash 1989). In contrast to
this dualistic paradigm, ecologically oriented ontological and ethical
thought has proceeded from the premise that nature and culture are
interrelated and that their relationship is characterized by reciprocity.
The anthropological notion that follows from this premise is that
human beings are a part of nature and dependent on it, that they are
not only firmly rooted in processes of cultural production and
consumption, but also in ecological processes that involve both the
human and the nonhuman world. In this context Plumwood develops
the concept of the ecological self (1997, 142), a notion of the self as
relational or mutual, which recognizes not only the human other, but
also the natural other as another self, a distinct centre of agency and
resistance, whose needs, goals and intrinsic value place ethical limits
on the self and must be considered and respected (145).
The concept of the relational self, the concept of the human being
as part of nature, as body and mind, emerges in A Friend of the Earth
most significantly by means of foregrounding sensual experience in
the constitution of subjectivity sensual experience that illustrates the
importance of the strategy of abjection. In many passages Boyle, for
226
example, uses the depiction of experiences of the old body, the sick
body, the body in pain, and the body as a victim of pollution or of
insufficient diet for the purpose of rejecting the concept of the human
as an essentially rational being. His protagonist Ty Tierwater
thematizes his failing body again and again: Im an old man. My
teeth hurt, my knee hurts, my back and theres a dull inchoate
intimation of pain just starting to make its presence known deep in the
intertwined muscles of my stitched-up forearm (72). In another
passage, set in November 2025, he has to spend an extended period of
time on the toilet. The seventy-five-year-old man has resigned himself
to the effects of age such as constipation and he calmly accepts
that he has to sit here waiting it out, [] my own familiar odor rising
poisonously about me (75). While sitting there, he reflects on the
deaths of various loved ones. He remembers the death of his uncle Sol
at a moment when they were working together on his Safari ranch in
San Diego, both up to our elbows in urine-drenched straw and the
exotic shit of exotic beasts (72-73), and he remembers the death of
his third wife Lori, the mucosa so thick in her lungs and throat she
couldnt draw a breath (73). These death-related memories that
originate in disgust-provoking sensual perceptions and the realization
of the effects of old age on his own body all demonstrate the power of
the abject for both the constitution of subjectivity and for the process
of identity formation. Moreover, the fact that they make Ty sneer at
the promise of the medical sciences to be able to cure all disease
(73) indicates that he has long given up on notions of scientific and
technological progress that are rooted in the Wests dualistic thought
and have been foundational for its social and economic development
in the modern era. Ty has relinquished notions that are, ultimately,
founded in the Baconian creed of power over nature and its
accompanying instrumentalist ethics.
In the years 2025-26, both nonhuman nature and human nature as
concretized in the body have reasserted themselves. The changes in
local, regional, and global ecosystems have led to hostile living
conditions and to the acknowledgement of natures ultimately superior
power; the natural environment has defied human aspiration to exert
total control, and the body still proves to be beyond the total control of
the mind. Ironically, the majority of American society in the years
2025 and 2026 does not acknowledge these facts. Tys frequent
descriptions of his contemporaries who still pursue twentieth century
Western consumerist attitudes and practices in spite of the drastically
limited resource availability demonstrate that insight does not even
prevail in such ecologically dystopian conditions, in a situation that
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has proved environmentalists earlier warnings to be correct. These

observations underline the weakness of the human mind and parody a
concept of the human that regards rationality as its central defining
feature.
Tys realization of how little the mind is able to achieve and how
wrong it is to define the human as separate from the rest of nature also
becomes explicit in his many rejections of the absolute ontological
gap between human and animal. When Ty introduces himself, Im an
animal man (1), at the beginning of the novel, he seems to refer only
to his job as zookeeper. In the course of the novel, however, the
foregrounding of sensual perception, of bodily experience, and the
repeated comparisons of human beings and animals make clear that he
no longer accepts the conceptual dualism. He remains aware of
differences between human and animal, but rejects the hierarchical
dualist notion that legitimizes absolute human domination. His remark
Im an animal man must ultimately be understood as an
acknowledgment of the close evolutionary relations between the
species. Another comparison of human and animal nature that Ty
makes again illustrates Boyles reliance on the narrative strategy of
employing encounters with the abject. Memories of prison emerge in a
situation when Ty is again preoccupied with the problem of
constipation:
My guts are rumbling: gas, thats what it is. If I lie absolutely still, itll work
through all the anfractuous turns and twists down there and find its inevitable
way to the point of release. And what am I thinking? Thats methane gas, a
natural pollutant, same as you get from landfills, feedlots and termite mounds,
and it persists in the atmosphere for ten years, one more farts worth of global
warming. Im a mess and I know it. Jewish guilt, Catholic guilt, enviro-ecocapitalistico guilt: I cant even expel gas in peace. Of course, guilt itself is a
luxury. In prison we didnt concern ourselves overmuch about environmental
degradation or the rights of nature or anything else, for that matter. They
penned us up like animals, and we shat and pissed and jerked off and blew
hurricanes out our rectums, and if the world collapsed as a result, all the better:
at least we would be out. (106-107)
With its focus on the bodys excretions and on the link between
human and animal this passage rejects the human-animal dualism as it
firmly locates both within the realm of organic nature. By reflecting
on the effects of methane gas, which is produced by both human and
animal organisms, Ty depicts humans as well as animals as
participants of the biochemical, ecosystemic dynamics.
Finally, in addition to rejecting the human-animal dualism and to
expressing a critique of a rationalist ontology, the passage critically
228
addresses a third issue that is of central significance to the novel. It

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

serving his prison sentence demonstrates that his role as an ecowarrior was motivated less by strongly internalized deep ecological
principles than by feeling deeply wounded and wronged by the events
that followed the failed protest action against the lumber company in
the Siskiyou in 1989 by his humiliation at the hands of the police
and the courts, and by his loss of custody of his daughter Sierra.
In other passages of A Friend of the Earth such critical assessment
of radical environmentalist stances is tied to conflicting concepts of
masculinity. Many of Tys recollections of his time as a member of
Earth Forever! reveal that his identity as an environmentalist was
formed in confrontation with a concept of masculinity that Andrew
Ross has called the concept of the ecological superman (1995, 167).
The ecological superman is one of the latest manifestations of what
historian Michael Kimmel has shown to be the most powerful concept
of masculinity in the U.S. since the beginning of the nineteenth
century, namely that of the self-made man, who according to
sociologist Erving Goffman, usually bears the following attributes:
young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant,
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229
father, of college education, fully employed, of good complexion,

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

processes that accompany the manufacture of leather and fur goods
namely the death and biological decomposition of the animals used
Teo tries to interrupt the successful performance of the strategy of
abjection. He tries to further the case of animal rights activism by
profiting from the effect that the customers are caught unawares, that
they are shocked by the sight and the smells of the process of rotting.
Teos purpose is to challenge their notions of self by exposing them to
the abject ideally in such a way that will make them refrain from
wearing leather and fur products in the future. The fact, moreover, that
Ty recalls this scene more than thirty years after the event testifies to
230
the possible impact of such an experience. At the same time, however,

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

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

most attractive concept of masculinity, and as a result he begins to
watch closely the responses of his daughter Sierra, and, especially, of
his wife, Andrea, to Teo van Sparks.
Another character that adds to Boyles representation of successful
environmentalists, who may be categorized as a self-made man, is
Philip Ratchiss, the wealthy American who supports Earth Forever!
financially. After the failed Siskiyou action and its many disastrous
results for the family, he provides Ty, Andrea, and Sierra with a
refuge by allowing them to hide in his cabin in the woods. Ratchiss is
introduced as a grotesque figure,
a strangely muscled man muscled in all the wrong places, that is, ankles,
wrists, the back of his head with a bush-ravaged face and a stingy hook of a
red and peeling nose stuck in the middle of it as if noses were purely accidental.
Hed killed whole herds of animals. He drank too much (gin and bitters). In his
blood he harbored the plasmodium parasites that gave rise to malaria. He was
loud, boastful, vain, domineering. (123)
Later, the reader is provided with the story of Ratchisss life. He grew
up on Long Island, but then spent twenty years in East Africa as a
professional game hunter because of a traumatizing experience: during
a family wilderness trip to Yosemite National Park he had to watch a
bear kill and devour his sister and badly injure his father (see 129131). Confrontation with the abject with violent, bloody, and painful
death is again used here for the purpose of demonstrating its
significance for processes of identity formation. It is this traumatic
experience that was formative in the creation of Ratchisss dual
identity as a wildlife hunter and an environmentalist. Moreover, the
fact that Ty and the other listeners are shocked and at the same time
fascinated by this story implicitly once again raises questions
concerning the formation of an environmentalist identity in general.
Ratchisss experience with a violent, indifferent nature forbids any
idealization of the wilderness experience, it rejects a simplistic reading
of the deep ecologist call for identification with nature. The notion
that an environmentalist identity has to rest first and foremost on a
love of wilderness is dismissed.
Of central importance for the argument of this essay is, however,
that Tys suspicious attitude toward the ecological superman Teo
van Sparks and his irritation concerning Philip Ratchiss hint at a
political danger that Andrew Ross addresses in his essay. Ross argues
that the ecological superman is one more example of creating heroic,
white male identities such as the frontiersman, the cowboy, the
232
Romantic poet, the explorer, the engineer, the colonizer, the

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

value of AIDS, Third World starvation, and even nuclear war as a
form of population control (Gottlieb 1993, 198). At this moment
Tierwater is not aware of the fact that he has often been a part of
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American consumerist society; and he is not aware of the fact that he

loves driving his car as probably most of the others on the highway
do; and he is also not aware of his privileged position as a well-off,
white, middle-class person who lives comfortably in a Californian
suburb. When he talks about collective guilt, he refers to them. He
thereby distances himself from the rest of society and assumes a
superior position. He completely disregards that people in his society
and people globally, for that matter lead different lives and that
differences in terms of class, ethnicity, and gender lead to very
different degrees of contribution to environmental degradation. This
collective of people, which he defines in this emotional outburst,
becomes a threatening, polluting other that needs to be abjected for
the purpose of guaranteeing the existence of a bearable notion of self.
It becomes part of an abject that Tierwater tries to thrust aside in
order to live (Kristeva 1982, 3).
In A Friend of the Earth, Boyles strong reliance on the narrative
means of encounters with the abject works well for the purpose of
presenting a subjectivity that might be typical of life after a global
environmental catastrophe. It does not only shed light on the function
of abjection in general, on its function to allow the human being to
resist life-threatening forces and fortify his or her sense of self, but in
addition to that draws special attention to its specific implications in
an environmentally precarious situation. It shows that abjection may
involve the repression of the insight that many of these forces are, in
fact, human-made. In the case of environmental catastrophe it calls for
the recognition and the acknowledgement of the fact that the threats to
the health of body, soul, and mind, which result from climate change,
are anthropogenic to a large extent.
By highlighting the impact of abjection for the creation of human
subjectivity and for the processes of identity formation in the
characterization of his protagonist Ty Tierwater, Boyles novel
ultimately points successfully toward many issues that are crucial for
early twenty-first-century environmentalism: it envisions what
ecological collapse might mean for human (and animal) sensual,
bodily perception and it addresses the issue of local, regional, and
global spatial experience. In pointing out the pivotal problems of
dualistic ontological thought and its ethical consequences, the novel
raises the question of how a notion of progress should be defined;
thereby it critically reflects and deconstructs the gendered quality of
contemporary environmentalism.
234
Works Cited
Bachelard, Gaston. [1958] 1994. The Poetics of Space, translated by Maria Jolas.
Boston: Beacon Press.
Boyle, T. Coraghessan. 2001. A Friend of the Earth. London: Bloomsbury.
Devall, Bill. 1994. The Deep Ecology Movement. In Ecology: Key Concepts in
Critical Theory, edited by Carolyn Merchant, 125-139. Atlantic Highlands, NJ:
Humanities Press.
Gottlieb, Robert. 1993. Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American
Environmental Movement. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.
Kimmel, Michael. 1996. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: The
Free Press.
Krebs, Angelika. 1999. Ethics of Nature. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Kristeva, Julia. [1980] 1982. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated
by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
Naess, Arne. 1995. The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A
Summary. In The Deep Ecology Movement: An Introductory Anthology, edited by
Alan Drengson and Yuichi Inoue, 3-9. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
Nash, Roderick Frazier. 1989. The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental
Ethics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Pepper, David. 1997. Modern Environmentalism: An Introduction. London:
Routledge.
Plumwood, Val. 1997. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge.
Ross, Andrew. 1995. The Great White Dude. In Constructing Masculinities, edited
by Maurice Berger et al., 167-175. London: Routledge.
Abject Cannibalism: Anthropophagic Poetics in Conrad,

White, and Tennant Towards a Critique of Julia Kristevas
Theory of Abjection
Russell West
It is curious that in the boom experienced by cultural analyses of
abjection and disgust in recent years one cultural phenomenon has
gone virtually unnoticed. Cannibalism has repeatedly figured as a
trigger of disgust in European culture and its texts since the
Renaissance, but it is mentioned nowhere in analyses of disgust
(except very tangentially; see Miller 1997, 46, 48). This absence is
odd, for cannibalism, in its function as one of the central taboos of our
culture, would appear to be a close neighbour of incest and the
Oedipal taboo, which, if we are to follow Julia Kristevas account of
disgust, are central sites of abjection. Given the all-encompassing
cultural validity to which Kristevas theory aspires (see Menninghaus
1999, 547) it should come as no surprise that cannibalism too can
plausibly be integrated into the theory of abjection. In this essay, I will
read five twentieth-century literary texts, ranging from the modernist
to the postmodern in tenor Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness
(1900) and Falk (1903), Patrick Whites A Fringe of Leaves (1976),
Jeanette Wintersons The Knave of Coins (1997), and Emma
Tennants Philomela (1975) to place cannibalism within the field
of Julia Kristevas theory of abjection but also to question some of
the basic assumptions upon which her theory is based. I also hope
thereby to be able to query some of the Eurocentric subtexts of the
notion of cannibalism itself, a notion which has attracted increasing
critical scrutiny in recent postcolonial writing and theory (see Atwood
1991, Barker et al. 1998, de Certeau 1986, Rony 1996, Root 1996,
Tracy 1991).
The cannibalism taboo can be understood as functioning in a
similar manner as the incest taboo. Lvi-Strauss documents numerous
examples of cannibalism understood as alimentary incest (1966,
105-106). Like avoidance relationships within traditional societies (for
instance in Australian indigenous law, see Bourke and Edwards 1998,
106), such taboos regulate relationships within the social group which
could potentially place excessive strains upon its internal coherence.
Conversely, they anchor the group in its broader social environment
and open it outwards to other neighbouring groups (see Saint
236
Augustine [first published in English 1427] 1972). Such taboos ensure

that social relationships maintain a happy medium between proximity
and distance. Both cannibalism and incest would appear to embody an
excessively close relationship to an other, in the oral and genital
modes respectively an excessive proximity which the taboo works to
avert.
The individual cultural correlate of the incest taboo in our culture is
the Oedipal prohibition (see Kristeva 1982, 58-68; Grosz 1989, 76).
The parallel taboos imposed upon cannibalism and Oedipal desire
point towards structural homologies shared by these two forms of
transgression. In her psychoanalytic work on the instinct to ingestion
and breast-feeding, Melanie Klein repeatedly speaks of the childs
sadistic-aggressive relationship to the breast as a cannibalistic
impulse (Klein 1990, 5, 27, 33, 44, 68n, 76-77, 157). It is not
difficult to imagine how the literal ingestion of the maternal other in
the breast-feeding phase, upon which the child is both absolutely
dependent for survival, but which must also be rejected if the child is
to attain individual autonomy and a clear sense of its own corporealsubjective boundaries, may come to be marked with the visceral
warning signals of disgust. The breast is connected with the genesis of
the subject, and thus, by extension, with the danger of the obliteration
of the subject and this danger is the central drama of abjection.
Cannibalism, the eating of another self (humans eating humans) can
thus be understood within European representations of anthropophagy
as an avatar of the ingestion of that primordial Other from whom the
subject emerges and who evermore represents the threat of
regression to an undifferentiated fusional existence.
Abjection, suggests Kristeva, and the spasmic, gagging revulsion
which marks it, is the impulse to vomit up myself (1982, 3). In this
primary state of identification, observes Maggie Kilgour of the early
childhood phase of breast-feeding, the eater is the eaten or at least
imagines it (1990, 12). In the transitional space between fusion and
separation, where the fusional structures are still residual, eating the
Other simultaneously signifies devouring myself. Similarly,
cannibalism as the ultimate figure of eating ones fellows, comes by
extension, to symbolically connote eating oneself for without
others as mirrors of my own limits, I would lose my constitutive
contours; to devour my Other is to devour myself. Cannibalism thus
stages a radical dissolution of the self.
It is logical, then, that cannibalism as a revolting practice is
contiguous with several of the principle domains of abjection-disgust,
namely, food, waste products, and above all, the human corpse as the
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abject par excellence (see Kristeva 1982, 2-4; Menninghaus 1999,

7). In Joseph Conrads story Falk, to anticipate upon one of my
textual examples, several of these domains of disgust eating, the
corpse and the body as a waste product itself can be seen to
converge: They might have died as it were, naturally of starvation.
He shuddered. But to be eaten after death! He gave another deep
shudder [...] ([1903] 1998, 182).
Such an approach to cannibalism grounds it in the intersection
between nature and culture, between body and society, at the point
where the one blends into the other and endows it with a quasiuniversal status. However, the cannibalism taboo has also historically
taken quite specific forms. Here, too, it has performed a distancing
role, keeping cultural entities apart. Certainly since the Renaissance,
and as recently as the nineteenth century, the cannibalism taboo was
mobilized to allow civilized peoples to delineate themselves from
their barbaric neighbours, commonly in situations of colonial contact:
in Elizabethan Ireland with regard to the Irish native inhabitants (see
Klein 2001, 176-182; Orgel 1987, 40-66), in British-occupied
Australia with regard to the Aboriginal inhabitants, where
intimations of cannibalism (Carr 2001, 31-32) frequently served the
white settlers ideological purposes. Kay Schaffer observes that
[w]ithin a colonial mentality, cannibalism represented the ultimate
denial of a common humanity, the ultimate sign of depravity, the
ultimate mark of savagery, and, above all, a guarantee of European
superiority (1995, 108). In such cases the disgust experienced at the
thought of cannibalism was a visceral reaction keeping those potential
fellow creatures at bay.
In this essay I shall play off these two forms of the social functions
of cannibalism against each other. The psychoanalytic model clearly
underpins the explanatory value of the collective, historical model of
anthropophagy and its visceral rejection. Conversely, however, the
second, patently ideological function of cannibalism-disgust should
make us ask about the ideological character of the first model as well.
Following this logic, I shall investigate four literary texts from the
twentieth century which explicitly address the issue of cannibalismrevulsion, in order to interrogate the ideological agenda of that
cultural form of disgust. Finally, I shall mobilize this literary critique
in order to query Kristevas theory of abjection.
In Conrads classic Heart of Darkness, cannibalism is strongly
associated with disgust. Conrads elliptical references to the
fascination of the abomination you know [...] the powerless disgust,
the surrender, the hate (Conrad [1900] 1990, 140) are clear markers
238
of what the reader eventually comes to understand as cannibalism.

Disgust makes its presence known in an attempt to keep something
awful at bay, to keep it below the threshold of utterance: I dont
want to know anything of the ceremonies used when approaching Mr.
Kurtz, I shouted. Curious, this feeling that came over me that such
details would be more intolerable than those heads drying on the
stakes under Mr. Kurtzs windows (221-222). The signs are
unmistakable, however, when we gain our first glimpse of Kurtz: I
saw him open his mouth wide it gave him a weirdly voracious
aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all
the men before him (224).
Equally prominent are the markers of the abject which are strewn
through the text. The journey into Africa itself is a journey into
abjection, a voyage inland from the formless coast [...] in and out of
rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud,
whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted mangroves
[...] (152). The associations of a threatening approach to a continent
coded as maternal and suffocating, as the colossal body of the fecund
and mysterious life (226) are anything but subtle. Thus a dying
native, succumbing to white mens beatings, arose and went out
and the wilderness without a sound took him into its bosom again
(167). Quite logically for an encounter with an abject maternal,
[g]oing up that river was like travelling back to the earliest
beginnings of the world (92).
Marlowe continually circles around the unnameable abomination
(140) so unnameable that it has gone into literary history as
metonymy for cannibalism: Maloufs half-white half-indigenous
Gemmy is suspected of having tasted all the abominations they went
in for. Were they actually looking at a man, a white man [...] who had
[...] (Malouf 1994, 39). The disgusting practices are elided, or, on
one occasion, inverted, so that it is Africa which consumed his flesh,
and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of
some devilish initiation (Conrad [1899] 1990, 205). Cannibalism is
resistant to language, it can barely be spoken, for it takes us back to an
archaic stage before language. Significantly, Kurtzs pamphlets
written before his let us say nerves, went wrong, and caused him
to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites,
which as far as I reluctantly heard from what I heard at various times
were offered to him do you understand? to Mr. Kurtz himself
(207-208). For the abjection of cannibalism, the oral fusion with an
Other which threatens the Self with a dangerous loss of
differentiation, is also a threat to language itself. Language is based
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upon difference, and it is the access to the Symbolic and the Law and
language of the Father which extracts the subject from maternal
fusion. Language is one defence mechanism against the feared loss of
barriers which evokes the abject. Thus the loss of symbolic distinction
via language and the intimate connection with psychotic aphasia is a
central aspect of disgust. Abjection is and must remain the
unnameable (see Kristeva 1982, 61). Disgust, repulsion, revulsion and
nausea are atavistic, spasmic reactions which ensue in the absence of
the distancing mechanism of language. When the abject resurges in
adult subjectivity, speech is abruptly usurped by regurgitation. The
role of speech to connect but also separate subjects is replaced by a
more primitive extrusion of half-digested material. The well-ordered
distinctions between eating and speaking, between food and words,
become confused (see Ellmann 1993).
Whereas Kurtz is lost to civilization forever through his
cannibalistic practices, absorbed into the Real (Lacans term seems to
describe accurately the unrepresentable, oppressive mass of the jungle
as Conrad characterizes it), Falk, the hero of Conrads later story of
that title, brings the cannibal back into the heart of civilization, back
into the Symbolic. The narrator of the story, Marlowe in one of his
many guises, tells of a tugboat captain named Falk known for his odd
behaviour: [H]e would, now and then, draw the palms of both his
hands down his face, giving at the same time a slight, almost
imperceptible shudder (Conrad [1903] 1998, 123). This bodylanguage, this passionate and meaningless gesture (159) is an index
of a mute fact so shocking that it can only provoke disgust in others
when they discover its cause: a case of cannibalism on a becalmed
ship. Falk confesses: Imagine to yourselves [] that I have eaten a
man (178). His interlocutor Hermann very appropriately choked,
gasped, swallowed, and managed to shriek out the one word, Beast!
[...] Hermanns raving [...] was contemptible, and was made appalling
by the mans overmastering horror of this awful sincerity, coming to
him suddenly, with the confession of such a fact (178). Hermanns
choking appears as an attempt to regurgitate the news he has aurally
ingested, though he does swallow it at a second go, only to
compensate with an extended expulsion of shrieking breath. Some
readers appear to have shared Hermanns disgust, with Conrads wife
Jessie reminiscing: I remember I was quite physically sick when I
typed those pages. Sick with disgust at the idea of human beings
having been cooked (qtd. in Tanner 1976, 19 who wryly observes
that in fact no-one is cooked in this story).
240
Ironically, it would appear that overweening oral desire is quite

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

signal against the undifferentiated sea of contemporary signs bereft of
real expressive power and points the way back to the raw difference
in which speech arises.
Conrads modernist aesthetic was shared by the Australian 1973
Nobel Prize winner Patrick White, albeit with increasingly acute
anachronism (half a century had passed since high modernism had
passed its acme) by the time his novel about cannibalism, A Fringe of
Leaves (1976), was published. White employed cannibalism, like
Conrad, as a defamiliarizing effect to mobilize the shock of the new.
Like Conrad, White also wanted to draw cannibalism into the realm of
the social. However, Whites novel is distinguished from Conrads in
one essential aspect: cannibalism does not bring merely the male into
dangerous regressive proximity with the feminine; far more, for
White, anthropophagy reveals the woman as cannibal par excellence.
Cannibalism emerges very early on in the novel as an index, indeed as
the index of primitivism in its colonialist Australian setting. The first
mention of the natives associates them with cannibalism, immediately
eliciting a reaction of horror on the part of Miss Scrimshaw (see
White 1983, 20). And following this, there is a blurring of the
cannibal reference, which allows it to be attached also to Irish convicts
or immigrants: loathsome savages (20), says a repulsed Mrs.
Merivale. White thus has the double function of the cannibal motif in
British cultural history, as a colonial differentiating mechanism
wielded against the Irish and the Australian indigenous peoples,
converge in a single epithet. He, however, wants to break down such
colonialist dichotomies, insisting upon the intimate connections
between civilization and savagery in service of a caustic dismantling
of a petit bourgeois morality in its Antipodean form. To this end he
employs cannibalism as an alienation-effect within a modernist
aesthetic which aims at pater les bourgeois.
Whites protagonist Mrs. Ellen Roxburgh is shipwrecked on the
Queensland coast and taken captive by a local native tribe. The disgust
experienced by Ellen when she comes upon evidence of cannibalism
is an indication of her own process of ascesis, as layers of artificial
civilization fall away, and is also intended by White as a strategy
designed to outwit the readers own repressive shield. But Ellens
visceral reactions to cannibalism self-disgust (206), the horror
which paralysed her (229), her gasping and sobbing (230)
culminate in her own participation in an act of cannibalism which
White describes in vivid detail:
242
Mrs. Roxburgh [...] tried to disentangle her emotions, fear from amazement,
disgust from a certain pity she felt for these starving and ignorant savages, her
masters, when she looked down and caught sight of a thighbone which must
have fallen from one of the overflowing dillis. Renewed disgust prepared her to
kick the bone out of sight. Then, instead, she found herself stooping, to pick it
up. There were one or two shreds of half-cooked flesh and gobbets of burnt fat
still adhering to this monstrous object. Her stiffened body and almost audibly
twanging nerves were warning her against what she was about to do, what she
was, in fact, already doing. She had raised the bone, and was tearing at it with
her teeth, spasmodically chewing, swallowing by great gulps which her throat
threatened to return. But did not. She flung away the bone only after it was
cleaned, and followed slowly in the wake of her cannibal mentors. She was less
disgusted in retrospect by what she had done, than awed by the fact that she had
been moved to it. [...] But there remained what amounted to an abomination of
human behaviour, a headache, and the first signs of indigestion. In the light of
Christian morality she must never think of the incident again. (244)
Of particular significance is Whites use of the past continuous, which

signals that the subject is already engaged in the action described.
Language, suggests White in this manner, is always in some way
secondary, supplementary. Language is permanently retarded with
regard to something which was always already there and to which it is
a mere reaction. Whites style dramatizes the death of the autonomous
Enlightenment subject-of-language, just as the disgust portrayed
embodies the visceral return of the repressed upon whose
suppression civilization is ostensibly built.
Whites strategies are, however, not as progressive as they might
appear. By utilizing the discourse of cannibalism he becomes
complicit in the extremely ethnocentric assumptions of early white
settlers, for which no substantial evidence has ever been found (see
Schaffer 1995, 107). In the process of confirming stereotypical
notions of the savagery of the indigenous people, he also reinforces
convictions of the primitive essence of woman. For White, it is her
closeness to nature which ideally equips her for the vanguard work of
embodying our repressed primitive nature. Devouring desire is
deemed to be the domain of women. Woman, proverbially equipped
with less reason than man (We must keep our head, Ellen, 203,
admonishes Mr. Roxburgh), and traditionally deemed to be closer to
nature (White compares Ellen to a beast of nature, 205), is logically
more likely to lose control of primitive passions and cede to the desire
to eat. Her quasi-maternal love for the children the tribe assigns to her
care is expressed in cannibalistic terms: She would have eaten them
on such a morning, but only when they were safe inside her allowed
them to share her joy (248). Later on, regarding her convict rescuer
Jack, in the moment of their love-making: She would have
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swallowed him had she been capable of it (269). The assertion of

feminine will is rendered physical in the figure of bared ugly teeth
(119) the uncontrollable woman as cannibal. This topos goes back to
early modern notions of South American cannibalism as a feminized
phenomenon (see Schlting 1997, 104). Other more recent examples
include Kleists Amazon heroine Penthesilea, who alternates between
kissing and devouring her lover, and who ruefully admits that for a
true lover, the rhyming terms Ksse and Bisse (kisses and bites) are
easily confused. A last kiss farewells her dead lover, not without her
experiencing disgust at her own excess (see Kleist [1808] 1996, 432
460-461, 473-474). Whites text positively stresses the upsurge of
instinct typified by Ellen Roxburgh (see 1983, 92) but this does not
alter the fact that he leaves the misogynist dichotomization, with its
concomitant fantasy of the vagina dentata, intact (see Lvi-Strauss
1966, 107).
But primitive nature is always already culture, as is increasingly
understood with regard to the extraordinary sophistication and
complexity of indigenous social forms. Likewise, cannibalism, far
from being a merely bestial practice, has been understood as a social
ritual designed to appropriate the attributes of another subject. Indeed,
cannibalism was taken up as a metaphor for a movement of cultural
self-assertion in 1920s Brazil by Harald and Augusto de Camposs
Antropfagista Movement (see Bassnett 1993, 153-158; PerroneMoiss 1987, 47-50). And disgust itself, a visceral phenomenon which
appears to short-circuit processes of intellection, is mediated by
eminently cultural processes of selection and transmission. Indeed,
disgust would appear to cast into question the very distinction
nature/culture, given that it is at once both intensely visceral and
culturally overdetermined (see Menninghaus 1999, 8-9). In contrast,
White mobilizes a one-sided reduction of an extremely complex
cultural phenomenon so as to make cannibalism the point of
convergence of nature/culture and feminine/masculine dichotomies of
the most conservative sort. Far from dissolving the sorts of
dichotomies that Western patriarchal epistemologies have erected,
White actively reinforces their cultural agency.
It should not come as a surprise to discover that contemporary
women writers contest such notions. Jeanette Winterson, in a story
from the collection Gut Symmetries, has a male narrator declare: My
wife believed that she had a kind of interior universe as valid and as
necessary as her day-to-day existence in reality. [...] She refused to
make a clear distinction between inner and outer. She had no sure
grasp of herself or of herself in relation to the object. At first I mistook
244
this pathology as the ordinary feminine (1997, 191). Here we have all
the hallmarks of the threatening feminine abject associated with the
devouring woman. But the story rapidly takes another turn:
I fell into a kind of dream, almost a trance, I suppose, and I was a child again
and my mother was feeding me. [...] I made the cut so carefully. I made it like a
surgeon not a butcher. My knife was sharp as a laser. I did it with dignity,
hungry though I was. I did it so that it would not have disgusted either of us.
She was my wife. I was her husband. We were one flesh. [...] I parted the flesh
from the bone and I ate it. (195-196)
Winterson implicitly combats typifications such as Whites by

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

critique implicitly launched here by Tennant resembles the way in
which Michael Taussig reads in accounts of cannibalism their colonial
authors own displaced acknowledgement of the nature of the colonial
machine itself: an overwhelming force which devours the body politic
and the bodies physical of indigenous peoples in ghastly acts of
genocide (see Taussig 1986, 105-107). The Euro-American neocolonial economic- and war-machine, suggests Deborah Root,
perpetuates such patterns (see 1996, 1-25). Tennants strategy is thus
comparable to Whites with the exception that it does not depend
upon the reinforcement of stereotypes of feminized primitivism.
The universal rule of war finally rebounds upon Tereus himself as
he ingests his own offspring. Perhaps only bloodshed kept him
young, Procne ruminates (Tennant 1987, 407) but if masculine
livelihood in its warrior form is at the cost of others, it finally becomes
self-vitiating in the same way that cannibalism is coded as eating the
other/self: Tereuss youthfulness annihilates that of his son. The
warrior habitus terminates its self-perpetuation by severing its own
lineage: The pie was brought in. Tereus sat down like a child and ate.
When he had eaten a few mouthfuls, he nodded his approval (413).
Not only does the father eat his own son he is also portrayed as a
child himself, and thus as never having attained the adult maturity
which would enable him to control the savagery of his appetites and
submit them to the rule of civility.
Revulsion marks a point of rupture in the text when Procnes
husband demands that she also eat the pie: He offered some to his
favourites. [...] Then he turned to me. I shook my head. Black, dizzy
sickness. Inside me an ill-tempered sea rolled violently. [...] As I half
fell, as all the eyes there in that room merged together and one eye,
lidless, staring shone out at me (413). The single eye Procne refers to
is that of the one-eyed sea monster which lurks wounded in the cave
where the two sisters kill the son Itylus prior to cooking him up for his
father. The one-eyed monster, significantly, excites the small boys
belligerent sense of manhood, which he then attacks at the very
moment he is slaughtered by the vengeful women. Procnes disgust is
triggered by a masculine gaze which reduces everything in sight to a
single common denominator of destruction. Killing, raping, and
devouring are mere variants of a single predatory drive. This equation
is one which was made by many cultural productions of the 1970s, as
Gaye Poole has pointed out: Many horror cannibalism films made in
the Vietnam and post-Vietnam war period draw implicit and explicit
246
parallels between the defoliation of human life in war and the mowing
down of human life via cannibalistic attack (1999, 77).
It is in the moment of infantile imitation of the warrior ethos of
adult males that the women arrest the spiral of inherited violence. The
demise of the second generation of incipient warriors is, however,
merely a local effect whose broader cause is revealed in the fathers
own cannibalistic feasting upon the son itself a displaced
consequence of his violence towards women, the guarantors of human
perpetuity. Cannibalism is not the domain of the feminine, but rather
of masculinity, claims Tennant, in a gesture of reversal which echoes
similar phenomena during first contact periods: the Hawaiian people,
branded with the stigma of cannibalism by the British, themselves
assumed that the British were cannibals, on the basis of the atrocities
they witnessed; even earlier, the Indios appeared to have believed the
same of Columbus and his party (see Schaffer 1995, 111; Holdenried
2001, 121). Or, in the words of a (fictional) contemporary Australian
indigenous speaker: Your laws covered in blood. Its washed its
hands in blood. [...] Thats cannibal (Gray 2001, 5). Even closer to
home, anthropologists fascination with cannibalism in non-European
societies has obscured ongoing institutionalized medicinal practices of
cannibalism in Europe up to the early twentieth century (see GordonGrube 1998, 405-409).
At this point in Tennants story, the silence which legitimizes and
perpetuates masculine violence is broken by feminine speech: It is
for you to eat your son Itylus, I said. You destroyed us long ago
(1983, 413). In this context, speech is not the males defence against
the disgust of abjection at the suffocating proximity of the maternal
body. On the contrary, speech represents female retribution against a
masculine culture of war which reduces all of life to the dual figure of
victim or perpetrator.
The association of the mothers body with a place beyond language,
as a pre-verbal domain of primitive fusion and engulfment
characterized by sadistic oral desires is implicitly rejected by
Tennants fiction. The silence reigning over Philomela is not the
silence of something which escapes from representation because it
belongs to an epoch before the subjects emergence within language.
To this extent, Tennant casts into question polarizations which
identify the unnameable preverbal with the maternal, and language
with the masculine Symbolic. Rather, for Tennant, silence is imposed
as an act of violence perpetrated upon women by men. Exemplary
here is Tereuss act of cutting out Philomelas tongue after raping her.
Kristevas Symbolic is also an inherently masculine order, one which
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by nature resists the resurgences of the feminized the domain of the

Semiotic; but the Semiotic nonetheless consigns femininity to a site
before the thetic, communicative Symbolic. By contrast, Tennant
suggests that women are always already engaged in communication:
Philomela [...] spoke the thoughts I hardly knew I had (1983, 407);
I watched her all the time for signs of happiness, or discontent, or
simply to see what her eyes would say to me (410). Before speech
and after speech (Philomelas mutilation) women communicate with
each other.
In Tennant, cannibalism is not moralized as in Conrad or White.
Rather, by a process of indexicalization (it points out, accuses,
illuminates causal connections) it is functionalized. It is a figure which
demonstrates the real workings of masculine warrior culture namely,
the destruction of its own offspring, the vitiation of its own future. The
figure of cannibalism, reinforced by revulsion, lays bare a selfannihilating contradiction at the very heart of a phallic virility in
which the capacity to engender is subsumed to the power to destroy
life. In her cannibalism narrative, Tennant shifts the focus from the
mother to the father specifically, and to masculinity in general. In
consequence, the revulsion provoked by cannibalism is situated within
a quite different relational complex to the one which underlies the
notion of disgust as explained in Kristevas theory of abjection.
It is not by chance that the child which must separate from the
mother to attain full subjectivity is for Kristeva a male (see Oliver
1993, 61) and this male child becomes the adult which henceforth
strives to keep the maternal abject at bay. To this extent, Kristeva
appears to reproduce uncritically as a basic component of her theory
the hegemonic drama of separation from the feminine upon which
masculine autonomy, indeed the Western patriarchal order, is
predicated (see Chodorow 1978, Dinnerstein 1978, see also Danahay
1993 on cultural manifestations of masculine autonomy). To
generalize this division of the world into two parts for all cultures and
all human subjects, however, is deeply problematic and must make us
question Kristevas theory of abjection.
The overwhelming duality of Kristevas basic conceptual scheme
from Revolution in Poetic Language onwards reduces all gendered
identity to a rigid dichotomy of the feminine/maternal pre-verbal
chora/Semiotic and the verbal paternal Symbolic (see Kristeva 1984).
Granted, these two domains interlock: the Symbolic is dependent upon
the Semiotic to provide the raw signifying material which it then
orders, while the Semiotic can only be given expression by erupting
within the Symbolic. The dichotomizing force of the theory remains
248
primary, however, continuing to furnish the background against which

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

Kristeva as essentializing the maternal function, in contrast to many
other interpretations of her work. I have recourse below to the work of
Irigaray, in turn often branded as an essentializer of feminine
corporeality, as providing a more dynamic model of subject
formation.
Paradoxically, at the very heart of Kristevas theory of the semiotic
chora, which serves as the foundation for her later work on abjection,
there is an etymological hint of an alternative direction for exploring
archaic mother-child relationships. Kristevas term is partly drawn
from Aristotle, whose closely related term chorion signifies the
membrane which separates the mother and foetus. The chorion is
clearly to be seen in the anatomical drawings of early modern medical
texts (see for instance Sharp 1671, Sig. L3v-L4r). In modern biology,
this membrane is also the transmitter of hormonal signals crucial to
the development of the foetus, that is, a semiotized in-between space
which both connects and separates mother and child (see Payne 1993,
168-169). What this alternative etymology within the genealogy of
Kristevas theory suggests is that signs, communication, difference
were always already operative even at this early stage of pre-Oedipal,
pre-subjective existence a stage of existence which is otherwise
equated by Kristeva with non-thetic productivity and fusion. At the
heart of Kristevas thesis there is a hint that the dichotomy between
the Semiotic and Symbolic (upon which the resurgence of the
Semiotic within the Symbolic in the form of avant-garde textuality
and artistic practice is posited) may itself be quite artificial. The
semiotic chora, if we are to reread it in this sense, may not precede
communication between discrete subjects, but heralds forms of
communication between subjects whose dialogue has already
commenced before the putative caesura of birth.
A philosophical equivalent for this alternative genealogy can be
found in Luce Irigarays work on the mucus membranes as a
physiological metaphor for the space which both separates and joins
subjects, affording both the autonomy from and the proximity to
others necessary for social existence. It is significant that mucus, as
the epitome of the gooey, oozy, slimy internal bodily objects of
disgust (Miller 1997, 58) is chosen by Irigaray as one central vehicle
of her theory of interpersonal ethics. Unsurprisingly, Irigarays recent
work focuses on intersubjectivity, made concrete in her essays on the
interval or the in-between, as the essential condition for
subjectivity (see Irigaray 1992).
250
With regard to the relationships between the maternal body and

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

routes of escape from the prison of patriarchal norms.
In this essay, in particular in my reading of Emma Tennants work,
I have attempted to offer an alternative perspective upon
anthropophagy. My aim in doing so was to question theories of
cannibalism in which disgust founds and reinforces misogyny and
racism. If the idea of cannibalism is indeed frequently structured by
patriarchal stereotypes of women, thus masking patriarchys own
contempt for human life, feminist perspectives may point towards
more life-affirming economies of orality. In this spirit, I would like to
return to one of the central abjects of cannibalism-revulsion: skin
(see Miller 1997, 52-54). In White, for instance, one of the most
important indicators of cannibalist-regressive abjection is skin, as
on warm milk (White 1982, 59; 142-144). One final text on
anthropophagy reformulates this abject to give a glimpse of the
manner in which a respectful intersubjective space may recode the
metaphorics of the feminized cannibalism motif. In the joyfully
unrepulsive notion of eating skin, Elspeth Probyn creates a poetic
image of a novel oral-eroticized relationship to the other. Probyns
metaphor of oral-erotic ingestion is one which is contained and
celebrated in language and allows the coexistence of two intimately
related yet distinct subjects:
My desire for her skin, for its shades of history and difference, her desire for
mine: as my skin eats hers, and her skin eats mine, could we find a way of
desiring that [...] through osmosis lets us learn to be together differently. [...]
The figure of eating skin [...] suggests for me a way of being overwhelmingly
close to difference, without subsuming difference into the same, or the sameother. (Probyn 2001, 89-90)
In this configuration of orality, figurations of anthropophagy are reencoded to make space for alternative paradigms of intercourse and
discourse. Contemporary body theory has figured kissing, in
opposition to the aggressive tenor given to that erotic activity by
writers such as Kleist, as one of the privileged sites of a reworking of
overdetermined notions of anthropophagy. In the notions of
delicacy and delicatessen, kissing, tasting without devouring,
consuming without annihilating the other, eating skin can unfold its
full metaphorical potential: The kiss involves the extremes of a
fluttering touch light as breath (touching with the mouth without
touch) and touch as greedy consumption (Connor 2004, 269). The
kiss and the caress have textual equivalents in Ouaknins notion of
reading as caress, a textual consumption which respects the fluid
252
space between self and other, thereby eschewing the dichotomizing

thought which drives the customary poetics of anthropophagy
(Ouaknin 1994, v-vi). By thinking of reading as an activity which
itself may subvert restrictively gendered understandings of our
oralized relationships to our fellow subjects, we may be able to reread
the racist and misogynist discourses our culture has produced around
cannibalism and work towards their gradual replacement by more
democratic discourses.
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A Wet Festival of Scarlet: Poppy Z. Brites (Un)Aesthetics

of Murder
Monika Mueller
Exquisite Corpse (1996), by renowned New Orleans writer Poppy Z.
Brite, who places herself in the tradition of Edgar Allen Poe and H. P.
Lovecraft, tells the love story of two men who both happen to be
homosexual serial killers. Brites novel has been widely criticized
because of its controversial content: before it was published by Simon
and Schuster, Dell Books broke its three-book contract with Brite
because of Exquisite Corpses extreme subject matter and nihilistic
worldview (Sage 1995, online), that is its detailed and realistic
retelling of the necrophilic and cannibalistic murders committed by
Jeffrey Dahmer in the United States and Dennis Nilsen in Great
Britain.
Homosexuals might find the book offensive because it portrays
them as perverted murderers, and the general reader might feel
taken aback by the fact that due to Brites superb command of
language s/he actually finds her/himself enjoying the grizzly
descriptions of human slaughter. In the following discussion of the
novel, I want to suggest that while Brite certainly aims to shock, she
also pursues an ambitious aesthetic and social agenda with Exquisite
Corpse, which indicates her indebtedness to the thought of Edmund
Burke, Thomas De Quincey, and Georges Bataille.
The novel begins with British serial killer Andrew Comptons
escape from a prison hospital near Birmingham, England. Compton,
who is based on Dennis Nilsen (see Ramsland n.d., online), kills two
doctors and an American student, assumes his American victims
identity and flees to New Orleans, where he meets Jeffrey Dahmerclone Jay Byrne in the French Quarter. After they have come to realize
that they share the same obsession of killing young, attractive
homosexuals, they fall in love and go on a killing spree together,
which culminates in the murder of Vincent Tran, a young second
generation Vietnamese immigrant. A second plot focuses on the failed
love story of Tran and the aspiring writer and talk show host Luke
Ransome, a.k.a. Lush Rimbaud, of WHIV radio. Trans short life
spirals out of control when he leaves Luke after the latter, enraged that
only he is infected with the aids virus, threatens to inject him with his
256
blood. Tran eventually dies in a most violent manner at the hands of

Jay Byrne.
Both Jay Byrne and Andrew Compton view themselves as artists
when they inflict death. Compton explains his psychological and
aesthetic motivation at the beginning of the novel. He kills young men
in order to abate his loneliness and then goes to bed with the corpses:
I would take him into my bed and cradle his creamy smoothness all
night. For a day or two days or a week I wouldnt feel alone. Then it
would be time to let another one go (Brite 1996, 3). The pleasure of
dealing with creamy, smooth, immobile bodies clearly has an
aesthetic component for Andrew: I found no joy in gross mutilation
or dismemberment, not then; it was the subtle whisper and slice of the
razor that appealed to me. I liked my boys as they were, big dead dolls
with an extra weeping crimson mouth or two (2-3). This aesthetic
pleasure also extends to the olfactory: I did not find the odor of death
unpleasant. It was rather like cut flowers left too long in stagnant
water, a heavy sickish sweetness that coated the nostrils and curled
into the back of the throat with every breath (3).
Andrew Compton loves death and the dead and defines himself as a
true necrophiliac: At the trial they called me necrophiliac without
considering the ancient roots of the word, or its profound resonance. I
was a friend of the dead, lover of the dead. And I was my own first
friend and lover (7). Over a period of years he teaches himself to
become like a corpse and to achieve a hovering state between
consciousness and void, a state where my lungs seemed to stop pulling
in air and my heart to cease beating (7). The perfection of this art of
suspended animation eventually allows him to flee from the prison
hospital because the staff there thinks that he actually is dead. In the
US he meets Jay Byrne, who shows him how to dismember, rape, and
cannibalize a victim all at once. After having observed Jays artistry,
Andrew has to concede that even at the height of his own murderous
art, he had not perfected it: I did not come to appreciate the aesthetics
of dismemberment until much later (3). This finally happens after he
has intently watched Jay, who derives aesthetic pleasure from
dismembering bodies and viewing them as both delicious sex objects
and food. Jays delights are described as follows:
The heat of freshly exposed organs wafted up at him. [] He pulled out yards
of intestines that felt like soft boudin sausages in his hands, the shrunken pouch
of the stomach, the hard little kidneys, the sluttish liver, big and gaudy as some
flamboyant subtropical blossom. [] [H]e liked the symmetrical arrangement
of its various muscles and sacs, so different from the slick jumble of the belly.
MUELLER
257
And the ribs, their connective cartilage severed, spread open like wings of
scarlet streaked with snow. (102)
Throughout her novel Brite uses two main strategies of making

these murders and the perpetrators appear almost acceptable to the
reader. She naturalizes the horrible deeds by rendering their
inevitability through the internal logic of the serial killers perception
and she aestheticizes them through her consistent use of verbal
imagery, whose dark beauty is difficult to resist. The stunning
description of the dismembered body of a victim, split wide open
from crotch to thorax, in terms of a wet festival of scarlet (102)
which displays the silken textures of [the] wounds, their slick
interiors (103) almost makes the reader forget the horrific aspect
which is also aestheticized the abject visceral stink, the stew of
blood and shit and secret gases, the innards rare perfume (102).
Brite thus presents murder as an aesthetic experience according to
the De Quinceyan notion of the sublimity of murder. Thomas De
Quincey was the first to point out the aesthetic component of murder
in his essay On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts (1827).
He argues that not only the murderer, but also the spectator who
inadvertently witnesses a murder (and by extension the reader of a
murder story), experiences a feeling of rapture that entails a violent
rupture with reality (Black 1991, 53). This feeling can be explained
in terms of Burkes and Kants idea of sublime aesthetic experience as
terror. In the twentieth century Georges Bataille has introduced a
notion of deathly eroticism into the discussion of the aesthetics of
murder: Where De Quincey focuses on the murderers [] or the
witnesss [] aesthetic experience of rapture with respect to murder,
Bataille zeroes in on the erotic event of rupture, when the isolated
body overcomes its own limits in a burst of excess (110). As the
following discussion will show, both rapture and rupture play an
important role for the aesthetic experience that Brite creates in
Exquisite Corpse.
As a point of departure of his reflections on the aesthetics of
murder, Thomas De Quincey reports about a London based Society
for the encouragement of murder, whose members profess to be
curious in homicide, amateurs and dilettanti in the various modes of
carnage, and, in short, Murder-Fanciers. Every fresh atrocity of that
class [] they meet and criticize as they would a picture, statue or
other work of art ([1827] 1890, 9-10). He devotes his essay to the
aesthetic component of murder, quoting from a lecture held at the
society, in which the lecturer claims that [p]eople begin to see that
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something more goes into the composition of a fine murder than two
blockheads to kill and be killed, a knife, a purse, a dark lane. Design,
gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now
deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature (12). According to
these aesthetic principles, De Quincey elevates the murderer to the
status of the artist in his essay. As part of his aesthetic theory of
murder, he calls the act of murder sublime due to its inherent terror
and outrageousness. De Quincey thus becomes the first writer to
include artful murder within the nomenclature of the sublime. He
analyzes this sublimity in On Murder Considered as one of the Fine
Arts and in On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth (1823). Both
Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, as theorists of the sublime, deem
concrete natural objects such as the agitated ocean or a majestic rock
formation sublime; but they also apply the designation to more
abstract phenomena such as that of infinity. Burkes definition of the
sublime is a good point of departure for De Quinceys reflections on
the sublimity of murder because it explains the notion of the terrible
sublime and stresses the significance that death has for the sublime:
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to
say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or
operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is
productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. []
But as pain is stronger in its operation than pleasure, so death is in general a
much more affecting idea than pain; because there are few pains, however
exquisite, which are not preferred to death. [] When danger or pains press too
nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at
certain instances, and with certain modifications, they maybe, and they are
delightful, as we every day experience. (Burke [1757] 1958, 39)
By drawing attention to the fact that a public execution could serve as

a popular spectacle, Burke developed a theoretical stance on
voyeurism and also further inspired De Quinceys thoughts on the
fascination exerted by murder. On the occasion of the execution of
Lord Lovat in mid-eighteenth century Burke noted that the live
execution of a state criminal of high rank would immediately
empty all cultural centres and in a moment the emptiness of the
theatre would proclaim the comparative weakness of the imitative
arts (47).
In his essay On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth De Quincey
analyzes Shakespeares presentation of murder in Macbeth on the
basis of Kants interpretation of Burkes thoughts about the sublime,
which stresses the dimension of the sublime as disposition of soul
(Kant [1790] 1952, 98). According to De Quinceys logic, what is true
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for the [b]old, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks (110)

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

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

Kantian disposition of soul. While Burke defines the sublimity of
objects according to spatial dimensions and the potential of terror that
results from them, Kant reasons that it is the disposition of soul,
which is evoked by a particular representation engaging the attention
of the reflective judgement, and not the Object, that is to be called
sublime (Kant [1790] 1952, 98). He explains this as follows:
If, however, we call anything not alone great, but, without qualification,
absolutely, and in every respect (beyond all comparison) great, that is to say,
sublime, we soon perceive that for this it is not permissible to seek an
appropriate standard outside itself, but merely in itself. It is a greatness
comparable to itself alone. Hence it comes that the sublime is not to be looked
for in the things of nature, but only in our own ideas. But it must be left to the
Deduction to show in which of them it resides. (97)
260
As part of an analysis of the terrible sublime, murderous rapture can

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

in his Macbeth-essay: But when I saw that first drop of blood
always, when I saw that first drop of blood something melted inside
me. Like a wall of earth crumbling and dissolving in the hard rain, like
a sheet of ice breaking apart and letting a river run free ([1823]
1890a, 188). Jay Byrne, fresh from a murder, is likewise described as
an enraptured being, a specter, who is temporarily out of this world:
As Jay glided through the parlor, he caught sight of his reflection in the
enormous mirror that stood in one corner, heavy gilt frame succulent with
carved fruit and vegetation. He was a silver-white specter awash in the
waterlight of dawn, his naked flesh luminously pale. His chest and abdomen
were crisscrossed with dark spray patterns of blood, delicate as sea foam. (Brite
1996, 74)
When they kill a young male prostitute, the two murderers are taken
out of the region of human things like the murderer in De Quinceys
Macbeth-essay and experience an orgiastic murderous frenzy (with
which Brites readers may or may not be able to identify):
As Jay stood by smiling, I savaged the headless body he laid out for me. I
gripped its rigid shoulders as I fucked it. I slashed its bloodless flesh with
knives, scissors, screwdrivers, everything Jay put into my hand. When I had
reduced it to little more than a smear on the ancient bricks, I wallowed in its
scraps. Then Jay joined me and licked me clean. [] [T]he intimacy between
us was terrifying. We drank until we collapsed in the boys shredded ruins.
(158-159)
When morning light woke us, we rose aching and stinking, staggered into the
house, and leaned on each other in the warm spray of the shower. Clean as
babes, we burrowed into bed and slept for the rest of the day, half unnerved and
half comforted by the nearness of each others breathing body. (160)
In this instance, the murderers in Brites novel encounter both the

aesthetic experience of rapture and the erotic event of rupture
(Black 1991, 110), during which they undergo a Bataillean moment of
union between eroticism and death.
Before discussing the implications of the fact that Brites
description of a necrophilic act renders an instant of rupture, where
life is mingled with death, but simultaneously death is a sign of life, a
way into the infinite (Bataille [1962] 2001, 91), I want to focus on
the inevitable criticism that Brites graphic, reality-based,
fictionalization of the bloody murders committed by Dennis Nilsen
and Jeffrey Dahmer has met with. As one reviewer puts it, with Poppy
Z. Brite you have an author whos all but guaranteed to offend a
262
major segment of the population (Bracken 2001, online). In an

interview conducted in September 1998, Brite defended her subject
matter on aesthetic as well as moral grounds:
What Im looking to prove is that it is possible to find beauty in that sort of
thing. I know that that is true for me, it always has been, and Id like to be able
to communicate this to the reader. To make them see beauty in something that
they would otherwise find disgusting, and beyond that to possibly make them
disturbed at their ability to see this beauty. To put something in their mind that
wasnt there before, but then they will never be able to get rid of it. (Brite
1998b, online)
As Joel Black argues in The Aesthetics of Murder, the aesthetic

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

though it is fictionalized, it remains too solidly grounded in the real.
Reading Brites novel gives the modern-day spectator, the reader, the
feeling that s/he indeed is involved in one common guilt with the
perpetrator. This feeling becomes rather uncomfortable if the reader
finds out that the whole episode leading up to the slaughter of Tran
(including the polices sad failure to act), is closely based on
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Dahmers murder of a 14-year-old Laotian boy named Konerak

Sinthasomphone (see Bardsley n.d., online). As Brite says, with
Exquisite Corpse something is put in the readers minds that was not
there before this something seems to be a voyeuristic implication
that many reviewers and readers have deemed problematic.
Brites presentation of homosexuals as murderous is equally
problematic. Brite, who has repeatedly described herself as a gay
man that happens to be born in a female body (1998a, online)
certainly does not intend to reinforce stereotypes about the perverted
and criminal homosexual (Aaron 1999, 67), but might nevertheless
inadvertently do so with Exquisite Corpse. Both Diana Fuss and
Michele Aaron have discussed the homoeroticisation of murderous
intent (Aaron 1999, 67) in recent film and fiction. While Aaron
concedes that working with the homophobic stereotype can, at least in
some cases subvert its authority (see Aaron 1999, 68), Fuss less
optimistically argues that [i]n the specific case of Jeffrey Dahmer, the
homosexual-murderer-necrophilic-cannibal equation has proved
particularly fertile ground in the late twentieth century for activating
old phobias and breeding new justifications for the recriminalization
and repathologization of gay identity (1993, 197).
Fuss reveals the deep structure of the stereotype of the
cannibalistic homosexual by tracing it to Freudian psychoanalysis
(see Fuss 1993, 183-188). Freud describes the homosexual as trapped
in the early oral-cannibalistic stage of libidinal organization because
he refuses to give up the first object choice of the maternal breast. He
swallows the mother, puts himself in her place, identifies himself
with her, and takes his own person as a model in whose likeness he
chooses the new objects of his love (1953-1974, 4:100). This oralcannibalistic ingestion of the mother fosters a homosexual object
choice as well as sadistic urges; Freud thus argues in Three Essays on
the Theory of Sexuality that aggression in sexuality is a relic of
cannibalistic desires (7:159). And in his General Theory of the
Neuroses he lists homosexuals among a class of perverts who, in
their multiplicity and strangeness [] can only be compared to the
monsters painted by Breughel (16:305). These monsters include
several types of perverts, who replace the vulva [] by the mouth
or anus, derive erotic pleasure from the excretory functions, or
desire partial objects as fetishists. Last but not least Freuds list of
perverts also includes cannibalistic murderers, who require the whole
object indeed, but make quite definite demands of it strange or
horrible even that it must have to become a defenceless corpse, and
who, using criminal violence, make it into one so that they may enjoy
264
it (16:305-306). Jeffrey Dahmer, the German cannibal Armin

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

enters the realm of culture, the law, and the Symbolic because it
threatens the newly established borders of identity. Yet the abject,
nevertheless, exerts a strong fascination because the separated self
yearns to be reunited with the maternal chora in spite of having
rejected it. As Kristeva observes, devotees of the abject [] do not
cease looking, within what flows from the others innermost being,
for the desirable and terrifying, nourishing and murderous, fascinating
and abject inside of the maternal body (1982, 54). The quotations
from Exquisite Corpse have shown that this is precisely what, due to
their psychological disorder, Brites cannibalistic murderers cannot
cease to do. It is interesting to note that in the case of Armin Meiwes,
who like Dennis Nilsen and Brites Andrew Compton ingested his
victim in an attempt to abate his loneliness, the court psychiatrist
diagnosed an identity disorder based on a failure to separate from
the mother (see Knobbe and Schmalenberg 2003, 50).
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The above discussion has made it clear that Brites decision to base
her characters on real life criminals Dahmer and Nilsen complicates
her stated aim of debunking stereotypes that criminalize
homosexuality and that are deep-seated even in contemporary society.
Yet she nevertheless attempts to provide an (albeit slightly ironic)
rationale for the outrageously violent acts committed in Exquisite
Corpse. This implies that their violence does not have anything to do
with their homosexual penchants. She simply attributes the depravity
of her serial killers to common psychological and genetic aberrations:
Andrew Compton, who insists that he did not have any traumatic
experiences in his youth and boasts I emerged from the womb with
no morals, and no one has been able to instill any in me since (Brite
1996, 159), lacked oxygen at birth and was a blue baby. And Jay
Byrne, whose great-great-uncle was famous New Orleans serial killer
Jonathan Daigrepoint, was possibly poisoned by dangerous waste
material that emanated from his fathers chemical factory.
The character of Luke Ransome, the violent ex-lover of Jay and
Andrews victim Tran, however, highlights a connection between
homosexuality and violence that cannot be traced to any kind of
psychological aberration: his example illustrates that homosexuals kill
because AIDS is killing them and because they are hated by a large
part of society. Thus, Luke threatens to inject Tran with his AIDS
infected blood because he is HIV positive and Tran is not, because
Tran will live and he will not. Under the radio personality name of
Lush Rimbaud, Luke hosts a radio programme on pirate station WHIV
which broadcasts only AIDS-related news. The name is an obvious
spoof on right-wing radio show host Rush Limbaugh, on being a lush,
and on Rimbaud, the French poet of excess. On WHIV, Luke/Lush
repeatedly expresses his death wish against heterosexuals, or breeders,
as he calls them:
Heres a nifty item from yesterdays paper. Shandra McNeil of Gertrude,
Loooz-i-anna, was convicted on three counts of attempted murder, which may
be upgraded to first-degree murder if any of her victims dies before her.
McNeil, who has AIDS, engaged in unprotected sex with several men she met
at singles bars. Her reason: she desperately wanted a child before she died.
Shandra McNeil is now five months pregnant. Well, if it wasnt for that fetus,
Id say pin a medal on her. Shes wiped out at least three breeder assholes,
probably a lot more, and all because her biological clock didnt stop ticking
when the time bomb in her cells started. (192)
He later explains that his rage is a reaction to right wing

fundamentalists and a world which shrinks away from us in hatred,
terror and disgust (196) and admits that instead of redesigning the
266
world by means of his heterophobic hate speeches, he just wants to

take it down with him (198).
Feeling that there is nothing left inside [him] but broken glass and
rusty nails (199), Luke, who admires Rimbaud as a poet of abjection
because blood and shit were among his greatest passions (126),
actively embraces blood, death, and abjection. Blood actually is a
prime site of abjection in Brites novel: Jay and Andrew engage in
bloody murder rituals during which they mix blood and sperm and
feed on blood in vampire-like fashion. Luke wants to inject Tran with
his lethal blood, and Lukes friend Johnnie, having given up his fight
against the virus after his lovers death, commits a gory suicide by
shooting himself in the head: [B]lood exploded from the top of
Johnnies head, cascaded out of his mouth and nostrils, painting the
wasted flesh of his throat, fountaining into the water (202). As in
Kristevas description of blood as an abject body fluid, blood here
functions as a fascinating semantic crossroads, the propitious place
for abjection where death and femininity, murder and procreation,
cessation of life and vitality all come together (Kristeva 1982, 96;
Kristevas italics).
While Brites character Luke seems to be forced by AIDS into a
Bataillean embracing of death and abjection, Jay and Andrew do so as
a symptom of their mental disturbance. Unlike Luke, who would
rather live and Tran, who had only courted death as a Goth fashion
statement, the two serial killers actively seek death and even welcome
the lethal AIDS virus into their bodies. Andrew concedes that
contracting AIDS is a logical consequence of his lifestyle and Jay,
who says, HIV? If it finds me, I accept it with my blessing. Maybe
its already found me. If so, I welcome it (Brite 1996, 186), at one
point actually asks Andrew to infect him.
Peter Straub calls attention to the Bataillean component of Brites
aesthetics by introducing her collection of short stories Are You
Loathsome Tonight? (2000) with several short excerpts from
Batailles The Tears of Eros (1961). These quotations stress the
diabolical aspects of Bataillean eroticism which are closely related
to (human) sacrifice (see Straub 2000, 13, 20). Batailles work often
focuses on the interconnectedness of love and death, sexuality and
horror. In Eroticism ([1957] 2001), he thus presents death as a sign of
life, a way into the infinite (91) and calls attention to the fact that the
shocking external violence that is exerted during a sacrificial act
allows insights into the inmost human being: The external violence
of the sacrifice reveals the internal violence of the creature, seen as
loss of blood and ejaculation. The blood and organs brimful of life
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were not what modern anatomy would see; the feeling of the men of
old can be recaptured as an inner experience, not by science (91).
This inner experience that the men of old had is also felt by
Brites serial killers Andrew Compton and Jay Byrne during their
atavistic deeds, which suspend the Christian taboo that should have
rendered them obsolete. Their sacrificial murders are atavistic
because, according to Bataille, the possibility to experience piety in
sacrifice and in untrammelled eroticism which might by chance
befall one person [] vanished with Christianity where pity eschewed
the desire to use violent means to probe the secrets of existence (91).
Brites description of the bloody rapture and rupture that Jay delights
in while cannibalizing a victims body captures Batailles notion of a
murderous erotic ecstasy that entails a violent fusion of the bodies of
victim and murderer:
Then [Jay] fell to his knees and buried his face in the hanging mans belly. He
sank his teeth into flesh that had gone the consistency of firm pudding. He
ripped at the edges of the wound, pulling off strips of skin and meat,
swallowing them whole, smearing his face with his own saliva and what little
juice remained in this chill tissue. [] At some point he ejaculated, and the
semen ran down his inner thigh almost unnoticed, a small sacrifice to this
splendid shrine. (Brite 1996, 144)
Bataille points out in Eroticism that there is a natural, erotic link

between sacrifice and love: [There is a] similarity between the act of
love and the sacrifice. Both reveal the flesh. Sacrifice replaces the
ordered life of the animal with a blind convulsion of the organs. So
also with the erotic convulsion; it gives free rein to extravagant organs
whose blind activity goes on beyond the considered will of the lovers
([1957] 2001, 92). Sacrificial rituals of the sort that Jay and Andrew
engage in follow a Bataillean logic according to which the animal
activity of the swollen organs of the lovers eliminates the control of
reason (92). These rituals entail a special type of love which
suspends the confines of individuality and merges formerly separate
identities into a continuity of existence:
If transgression is not fundamental then sacrifice and the act of love have
nothing in common. If it is an intentional transgression, sacrifice is a deliberate
act whose purpose is a sudden change in the victim. The creature is put to
death. Before that it was enclosed in its individual separateness and its
existence was discontinuous []. But this being is brought back by death into
continuity with all being, to the absence of separate individualities. (90)
268
In Exquisite Corpse Jay discusses this type of continuity of being with

Andrew and even suggests that the victim actively collaborates in it:
[I]t becomes a collaboration. But surely theyre just trying to get it over with
faster? I dont know. Jays eyes were dreamy. I think once the body
realizes its definitely, irrevocably going to die at your hands, it begins to work
with you. You might be choking a boy, or cutting, or burning him, or your
fingers might be knuckle-deep in his guts, but at a certain point his body not
only stops resisting it falls into your rhythm. (Brite 1996, 178)
According to Batailles sacrificial logic, ritual murder culminates in

a communion feast following on the sacrifice. The human flesh that
is eaten then is held as sacred (71). This certainly is also the case in
Brites novel, about which Peter Straub says that it treats the human
body like a communion wafer (see Brite 1998b, online). After Luke
has murdered Jay in retaliation for Trans murder, Andrew ingests part
of Jays body in order to assimilate as much of him as possible so
that he might quench his loneliness for good: When I awoke, he
would be with me always, and all the worlds pleasures would be ours
to revel in. This time I was not corpse but larva (Brite 1996, 242).
The ending of Exquisite Corpse thus indeed suggests with Bataille that
death is a sign of life, a way into the infinite (Bataille [1962] 2001,
91).
Summing up the thematic concerns of her article Monsters of
Perversion, Diane Fuss asks To what degree is it possible that we
could identify with a figure of abjection with a Jame Gumb, a
Hannibal Lecter, or a Jeffrey Dahmer? (1993, 199). Brites Exquisite
Corpse suggests that this is possible at least to some degree. By means
of her extremely clever linguistic and philosophical aestheticization
of both the abject murders and murderers presented in her novel, Brite
succeeds in creating a hell within the murderers into [which] we are
to look (De Quincey [1823] 1890a, 391). This inner hell seems
almost inevitable and therefore almost acceptable. Through its
rigorous logic of abjection, which culminates in Bataillean acts of
sacrifice, Brites novel achieves its aim of putting something in the
readers mind that wasnt there before and that they will never be
able to get rid of (Brite 1998b, online). Exquisite Corpse thus can be
viewed as a novel that has the potential to make its readers question
their voyeurism.
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Works Cited
Aaron, Michele. 1999. Til Death Us Do Part: Cinemas Queer Couples Who Kill.
In Dangerous Desires and Contemporary Culture, edited by Michele Aaron, 6784. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Bardsley, Marilyn. n.d. Butt Naked. www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious
/dahmer/naked1.html (accessed 11 November 2004).
Penguin.
Black, Joel. 1991. The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and
Contemporary Culture. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Bracken, Mike. 2001. Review of Exquisite Corpse, by Poppy Z. Brite. 30 December.
www.culturedose.net/review.php?rid=10002211 (accessed 2 July 2003).
Brite, Poppy Z. 1996. Exquisite Corpse. London: Phoenix.
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Interior Landscapes: Anatomy Art and the Work of Gunther

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

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

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

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

them. In raising these issues his work poses major philosophical and
moral questions that link him to some of the great works of literature,
namely Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevensons Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and his short story The Body Snatcher. Finally,
von Hagenss work interrogates the way we think about and represent
gender and human identity. His rendering of flayed females,
sometimes in reclining positions to resemble artists models, or slit
from the sternum to the genitals, to expose a fetus, can be read
variously as yet another instance of woman as object, as an obvious
tribute to some of the worlds great artistic renderings of the female
body, or as a physiological specimen. And yet von Hagenss bodies
are not always gender-specific, calling into question the slippery
notion of gender identity that Julia Kristeva explores in Powers of
Horror. As she argues in her important work on the abject, the
boundary of the skin being dissolved produces anxiety about the
bodys individuality. Claudia Benthien, echoing Kristeva in her book
Skin, historicizes the notion of skin as a boundary, pointing out that
only in the last two centuries it has been an important site of comfort,
a cultural border between the self and the world as the subtitle to her
book suggests. In this way, the case can be made that Krperwelten
marks a major contribution to the ongoing debate over the aesthetics
of the body, our anxiety concerning matters of human anatomy and
mortality, and our concept of gender and identity.
One way in which to view von Hagenss bodies is to place them
within the tradition of body preservation, a process that can be traced
back at least as far as the mummification of bodies practiced by the
ancient Egyptians. Bodies were disemboweled, treated with fragrant
resins and sodium bicarbonate, then dried and wrapped in linen strips,
presumably to permit the dead to live on. In contrast to the
plastination performed on von Hagenss specimens, the ancient
Egyptian process of mummification did not expose the fascination
beneath the surface as suggested by the subtitle of von Hagenss
and Whalleys book (2001) since only the skin and bones were
preserved. Moreover, the Egyptians stressed the aesthetic aspect: The
linen strips, for example, were coated in a kind of plaster of Paris and
painted with bright colours. Other early examples of body
preservation were the European ossuaries or charnel houses, where, in
order to make room for new corpses, old bones were dug up,
separated, sorted, regrouped anatomically, and stored. Very often
when they were stored, they were arranged in artistic ways. One of the
most well-known examples of this can be found in Kunta Hora, Czech
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Republic, at the All Saints Church. Here, in 1860 a wood carver,

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

is that it links aesthetics, anatomy, and issues of death and
immortality. In fact, despite some viewers attitudes that his work
represents a twenty-first century disrespect for and perversion of the
276
human body, this link has a long history. The ancient Greeks were
perhaps the first to become interested in human anatomy. Around 500
B.C. they founded medical schools where they used animals to study
human anatomy. Aristotle is considered by many to be the first
anatomist (see von Hagens and Whalley 2001, 9). Aristotles work
enabled him to distinguish between nerves and tendons, paving the
way for future anatomists. Plato, under whom Aristotle studied, was
thought to have performed the first human dissections, justifying them
on the grounds that the body and soul were entirely different entities,
thus preserving the sanctity of human life. Galen of Pergamum (131201 A.D.), who studied in Alexandria and settled in Rome, produced
some 150 drawings based on animal anatomy and apparently
influenced anatomical thought for the next 1300 years (see von
Hagens and Whalley 2001, 9). Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), a
Belgian professor at the University of Padua, published the first book
on human anatomy, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Workings
of the Human Body), which showed probably for the first time
dissected bodies in life-like poses and skeletons and bones assembled
in upright positions. This was an important development in the history
of art and anatomy because artistic means were employed to
demonstrate the authenticity and individuality of the illustration;
shadows caused by the light coming in through a window, for
example, made clear what time of day that particular specimen was
dissected (von Hagens and Whalley 2001, 11). Vesalius is now
considered the founder of the science of anatomy.
A further breakthrough came with the work of Bernhard Albinus
(1697-1747), who studied organ systems, and with the help of his
illustrator, Wandelaer, was able to provide the foundation for
developing schematic diagrams of anatomy. Instead of organs being
drawn individually, they were drawn together with their associated
functional structures []. A kidney, for example, was not just drawn
along with the adrenal gland []. [T]he ureters and bladder were
included as well (11). Cross-sectional anatomy was developed by the
Russian anatomist Nikolas Pirogov (1810-1881), who published 213
illustrations of the human body, including one of a pregnant woman,
which shows a striking resemblance to von Hagenss reclining
pregnant woman.
Although von Hagens has repeatedly denied that his exhibits are
intended to be art I have been called an artist, but I reject it. I give
an aesthetic feeling to my exhibits but in the way you would do in
designing a book (von Hagens A Body of Knowledge 2002,
online) and that anatomical works of art become works of art [only]
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through the judgment of the visitors (von Hagens and Whalley 2001,
31), fifty percent of the viewers at the Mannheim exhibit said they
looked at von Hagenss work as art. This most likely was because
after the first show in Tokyo, visitors complained that his work was
too medical, so von Hagens began studying Renaissance art in the
hopes of changing the impact of his exhibited corpses. He then quite
consciously designed and shaped many of his bodies based on famous
paintings, similar to the tradition of painters copying the great artists
in order to develop as a painter or sculptor. His The Runner, whose
muscles have been decribed as splayed out aerodynamically like a
fan (ORorke 2002, online), for example, is said to be based on
Umberto Boccionis Prototypes of Movement in Space (see von
Hagens and Whalley 2001, 268). And The Open Drawer, where
chunks of the body are pulled forward in order to view threedimensionally, closely resembles Dalis Anthropomorphic Cupboard.
One can detect Cubist connections as well in many of von Hagenss
exploded and open drawer specimens, where different viewpoints
are possible in one plastinated body.
One of von Hagenss most startling bodies, and the one he chose for
the entry to his webpage, is The Muscle Man. This shows an erect
male, his muscles and genitals exposed, holding his own flayed skin
draped over his arm. Based on Michelangelos portrait of St.
Bartholomew in the Last Judgment section on the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel, it is a nod to von Hagenss regard for the great painter
and most especially to Michelangelos work in the area of anatomy. It
is well-known that Michelangelo, like many Renaissance painters and
sculptors, dissected human bodies in order to better represent the
human form in his work because beauty was not just a superficial
quality, but was attributed to internal structures and harmonious
proportions (von Hagens and Whally 2001, 237). In the portrait of St.
Bartholomew, the martyred saint stands at the Last Judgment holding
his own skin. This is first of all Michelangelos silent
acknowledgment of his indebtedness to anatomical research. But also
if one looks closely at the saints arm, a likeness of Michelangelo
himself can be seen. Several critics have suggested that
Michelangelos identification with the saint indicated his feeling of
not being understood by his public; in other words, he felt flayed
alive by them (Lecaldano 1965, 258). Could von Hagenss copying
of Michelangelos saint be his way of similarly responding to a public
that does not understand him and a hint that he is indeed carrying on
the work of previous generations?
278
A more direct link with von Hagens is Leonardo da Vinci (14521519), the famous Renaissance painter, scientist, and inventor whom
von Hagens has acknowledged as an influence. Da Vinci began
dissecting and studying human anatomy, particularly the nervous
system, when he was in Milan (1487-1495) during the same period he
painted his famous Last Supper. Both da Vinci and Michelangelo
were able to persuade the Church to lift the sanctions against human
dissection on the grounds that the accurate portrayal of saints and
[] Christ himself could only be accomplished through the visual
documentation of human anatomy (Giegerich 2001, 204), again
drawing on the notion that external beauty could only be fully
represented with knowledge of what lay beneath the surface. Together,
he and Michelangelo performed as many as five hundred human
dissections. His so-called Tree of Veins sketch comes from this
period in his career (see Zubov 1968, 18), which most presumably
was a model for many of von Hagenss blood vessel specimens. In his
native Florence, where da Vinci was forced to flee after the French
had invaded Milan, the artist renewed his study of anatomy, this time
internal organs (heart and lungs), the skeleton, and the muscles in
order to understand the fundamental physiological laws of
movement (Zubov 1968, 29) so that he could paint those movements
as accurately and authentically as possible. He also then made
sketches of these anatomical specimens, and from every angle
possible. According to his biographer V. P. Zubov, da Vinci felt that
his anatomical drawings must give a comprehensive picture of the
object, reveal it in all its aspects, sculpture it, so to speak (58). Da
Vinci was so insistent on representing the various parts of the body
accurately that he drew them from many different angles, what he
called dimostrazioni, and also drew the parts in relationship to one
another. In his Notebooks on Anatomy he describes this process:
The true knowledge of the shape of any body will be arrived at by seeing it
from different aspects. Consequently, in order to convey a notion of the true
shape of any limb of man who ranks among the animals as first of the beasts, I
will observe the aforesaid rule, making four demonstrations of the four sides of
each limb, and for the bones I will make five, cutting them in half and showing
the hollow of each of them. (qtd. in Zubov 1968, 59)
Da Vincis skill in drawing allowed him to give a plastic feeling

(58) to the sketches, similar to sculpture, and to the effect that von
Hagenss process of plastination produces. Von Hagenss
indebtedness to da Vinci can be seen in several of the Krperwelten
specimens. In one exhibition piece he has placed a plastinated figure
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279
in front of an anatomical drawing by da Vinci. And one of his body

slices is clearly a variation on da Vincis famous Proportions of the
Human Body sketch.
Von Hagenss work has also been influenced by the tradition of
anatomy lesson paintings, made famous by Rembrandt, though many
of his contemporaries also painted anatomy lessons and dissections,
among them Thomas de Keyser, Pieter M. van Miereveld (see Aris
1985, 182-183), Aert Pietersz, and Nicolaes E. Pickenoy (see
Schwartz 1985, 143). In fact, according to one of Rembrandts
biographers, it was a minor tradition to display paintings of
anatomical demonstrations in the surgeons guild (143). Rembrandt
painted several anatomy paintings. His most famous, The Anatomy
Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632), shows a group of seven
prominent Amsterdam surgeons who watch as Dr. Tulp, the main
figure in the painting, is about to sever the exposed left arm of a
corpse. Although at the time public dissections were routine in
Amsterdam, as well as in Leiden, Padua, and Heidelberg, in England
after the Reformation (1565) the right to perform dissections was
granted only to the Royal College of Physicians; before this the
Church, operating on the belief that resurrection was impossible if the
body was dissected, prohibited dissections in the hopes of curtailing
the practice of dismembering and boiling the bodies of Crusaders
killed in battle (see von Hagens and Whalley 2001, 15). This
particular painting depicts Dr. Tulp performing a dissection for the
instruction of the other surgeons only. The painting shows the
influence of seventeenth-century Dutch group portraiture, focusing
more on Dr. Tulp than on the corpse. Several lessons were supposed
to be gleaned from paintings like this one. According to Tulp himself,
for example, the main purpose of anatomy paintings was to show
the sympathy between body and soul (Schwartz 1985, 143). A
contemporary of Rembrandts, a poet, claimed that anatomy paintings
put to shame artists whose skill does not come close to Gods skill
in making human beings and that knowing [w]hat our skins encase /
What keeps all our parts in place is simply part of knowing oneself
(144). A final lesson comes from the well-known fact that the corpses
used in dissections were almost always those of criminals (in fact, in
England the Murder Act of 1752 made dissection of murderers
compulsory; see Marshall 1995, xiii); it thus acted as a deterrent, a
warning to its viewers to obey the law. That many of the surgeons,
Tulp included, were also government officials simply reinforced this
warning. Three hundred and seventy years later after Rembrandt
painted Tulp, Dr. Gunther von Hagens donned a hat nearly identical to
280
Tulps and performed a public dissection in London, claiming the

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

into the nineteenth century, illustrating the close nexus between
knowledge of the human body and art. The American painter Thomas
Eakins, whose oil painting The Gross Clinic is one of his most wellknown, formally studied anatomy as part of his training as an artist,
signing up for courses at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia in
1864. According to his biographer, Lloyd Goodrich, Eakins was so
interested in anatomical study that his knowledge of anatomy was as
great as that of most physicians and considerably greater than that of
most artists (1982, 13). Eakins returned to Jefferson after studying
painting in France in 1873 and in 1875 began work on The Gross
Clinic, one of his most ambitious paintings. Similar to Rembrandts
Anatomy Lesson, Eakinss innovation is to show not a dead corpse
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281
being dissected but a live human whose thigh has been sliced open in
order to remove a piece of dead bone. The viewers eyes are primarily
drawn to three areas in the painting: the high forehead of Dr. Gross
himself, the thigh and buttocks of the patient, and Dr. Grosss hand,
holding the bloody scalpel, much as Eakins himself would have held
his paint brush. In fact, the scalpel bears close resemblance to a
paintbrush, while the blood on the scalpel could easily be red paint.
Presumably, this was a strategy on Eakinss part to suggest the doctor
as artist, an idea that, as medicine advanced, became more and more
tenable, so that now, in the twenty-first century, virtually every part of
ones body can be sculpted into a different shape.
Although Eakinss painting avoids showing the face and even most
of the patients body, the realistic rendering of blood and muscle
tissue horrified many of his contemporaries, even though most agreed
it was a great work (Goodrich 1982, 132). One Philadelphia
newspaper critic wrote: It is not a subject to be thus vividly
presented upon canvas. It is rather a subject to be engraved for a textbook on Surgery (132). Consequently, the painting was rejected by
the art committee for the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where
Eakins had hoped to display it. It was eventually accepted at the
Centennial, but was relegated to the medical exhibition only. Today, it
hangs in the halls of Jefferson Medical College, apparently still
considered more medical or perhaps even abject than artistic.
In addition to the links between von Hagenss Krperwelten and
anatomy art there are provocative similarities to several famous and
infamous literary doctors. Imogen ORorke of the Observer, for
example, likens him to Hannibal Lecter, the cannibal doctor made
famous in the film The Silence of the Lambs as well as to Ed Gein, the
model for Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He has also
repeatedly been accused of Faustian attempts at playing God, linking
him, of course, to Dr. Faust who sells his soul to the devil for
unlimited earthly power and to Robert Louis Stevensons Dr. Jekyll,
who turns himself into Mr. Hyde in order to separate the evil parts of
himself from the good and thus eliminate guilt:
If each, I told myself, could but be housed in separate identities, life would be
relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from
the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk
steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he
found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the
hands of this extraneous evil. (Stevenson [1886] 1991, 43)
282
Stevensons story is a classic allegory of the Victorian penchant for

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

cases to kill in order to keep them supplied with corpses. Tim
Marshall, in his study, Murdering to Dissect: Grave-robbing,
Frankenstein, and Anatomy Literature, points out that stealing corpses
became so widespread that the city of Edinburgh built high walls and
guard towers around cemeteries to keep the body snatchers out. The
most famous body snatchers of the nineteenth century were the
notorious Irishmen Burke and Hare, who supplied bodies for Dr.
Robert Knox, an eminent Edinburgh anatomist. Such practices led to
widespread public suspicion of the medical profession because of its
close connection to the body snatchers. Even worse, when Burke and
Hare ran out of graves to rob, they took up killing their victims.
Burkophobia became a popular subject of novels and short stories,
among them Robert Louis Stevensons The Body Snatcher (1881),
Charles Dickenss The Black Veil, and more elusively in
Frankenstein through the deaths of Frankensteins brother, wife, and
friend Henry. In a ghastly ironic twist, the Creature burks the
bodies, reminding Frankenstein that he used dissected bodies in order
to create his monster in the first place. Thus the novel underlines a
crucial anxiety in anatomy work: the slippage between creation and
dissection, between art and destruction.
It is not surprising, then, that one of the accusations waged against
von Hagens, a modern-day Frankenstein, is that of grave-robbery. The
head of the regional forensic medical examination bureau in
Novosibirsk, Vladimir Novosyolov, has been on trial since April 2001
for plotting to export fifty-six dead bodies for von Hagens (see
Stewart 2003, 3). Apparently, von Hagens was asked to return the
corpses, but it is not clear whether he in fact did, as some journalists
claim they saw a Russian orthodox cross and the word father in
Cyrillic letters on an arm of one of the bodies on display in Berlin
(Siegl 2002, 3). Von Hagens, of course, has repeatedly denied such
accusations both in public as well as on his website (see Gunther von
Hagens Body Worlds, n.d., online). Recently, in Heidelberg,
Germany, charges that von Hagens was using executed criminals as
well as crime victims and that he sometimes used bodies without the
permission of relatives or the people themselves were dropped after a
prosecutor determined that von Hagens had received the bodies from
legitimate sources and that the display of the bodies did not constitute
a violation of laws governing respect for the dead (Prosecutors Drop
Investigation 2004, 3).
284
We murder to dissect, Marshall writes, but we also dissect in

order to heal (1995, 13). Quoting the anatomist Cecil Helman,
Marshall emphasizes this paradox:
In the dissecting room we come to realise the true paradox of anatomy. For the
real agenda of dissection is the taming of Death, or rather the fear of Death.
Because of this, we are asked to perform impossible alchemies. We must turn
the cadaver into a three-dimensional textbook, a limited edition of tissues and
organs. To do this, we must transform a dead body into the creation of a living
body. The cadaver must become raw clay or pigment, the medical student a
special type of performance artist. Our task is to create, or rather re-create, the
body as a public sculpture, or as a series of sculptures. We must give to the
body a posthumous life, through the rebirth of its parts. They must be reborn as
objets dart, as named, labelled, living commodities. (Helman qtd. in Marshall
1995, 82)
This fear of death that Helman refers to as a cause of our anxiety was,
of course, famously taken up by Sigmund Freud in his classic Totem
and Taboo and may help to explain negative reactions that many
viewers of von Hagenss work report. Horror, Freud suggested, is
aroused by viewing dead bodies because they are stark reminders of
the gazers own mortality. And this is not just a modern attitude; in
fact, Freud felt that fear of death was more prevalent among many socalled primitive societies:
Among the Maoris anyone who had handled a corpse or taken any part in its
burial was in the highest degree unclean and was almost cut off from
intercourse with his fellow-men, or, as we might put it, was boycotted. He
could not enter any house, or come into contact with any person or thing
without infecting them. He might not even touch food with his hands, which,
owing to their uncleanness, had become quite useless. ([1913] 1968, 51-52)
However, such taboos, as von Hagenss work has demonstrated, are

not restricted to primitive societies; even in our so-called
sophisticated world, physical reminders of death are so abhorrent that
family members are willing to pay morticians thousands of dollars to
create the illusion of life in death. Indeed, in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, mortuary science has become an art whose success
depends upon how life-like the treated corpse appears. Morticians
become artists in rendering their subjects palatable for viewing.
Elisabeth Kuebler-Ross, who has written extensively on the art of
dying, has made this point over and over in her research on death and
dying. She points out that our contemporary society has such a horror
of deaths appearance that it has created, in addition to the highly
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285
lucrative industry of mortuary science, dozens of euphemisms to avoid

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

abject quality of a corpse to its roots in biblical injunctions, aligning it
with the soulless, an idea that Aristotle ironically used to justify his
anatomical interest:
A decaying body, lifeless, completely turned into dejection, blurred between the
inanimate and the inorganic, a transitional swarming, inseparable lining of a
human nature whose life is undistinguishable from the symbolic the corpse
represents fundamental pollution. A body without a soul, a non-body,
disquieting matter []; it must not be displayed but immediately buried so as
not to pollute the divine earth. (1982, 109)
The removal of the skin and the exposure of the inner organs and
internal systems of von Hagenss bodies adds another dimension of
horror for the gazers, not because it is unclean but because, according
to Kristeva, skinlessness produces anxiety about the bodys personal
identification. She likens the skin to a border or boundary that is
crucial to ones identity or individuation, the cover that guarantees
corporal integrity (101), [] the border of my condition as a living
being (3). Indeed, it is not the lack of cleanliness or health that
causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order (4). This
attitude toward the bodys identity seems to be a fairly modern one
and may explain the common practice of using cadavers in art up to
the nineteenth century. In her fascinating study Skin: On the Cultural
Border Between Self and the World, Claudia Benthien notes that it
was only after the eighteenth century that skin was considered a wall:
the surface of the body was not yet regarded as a smooth wall but as
a three-dimensional layer interwoven with the world. Not until the late
eighteenth century did a hygienic concept appear that no longer
identifies invisible fluid relationships inside the body as the cause of
286
disease but rather attributes it to external infection so that only during

the last two centuries the collective body image has changed to that
of a closed, demarcated individual body whose boundary is the skin
(2002, 62). This notion is reinforced by Tim Marshall in quoting a
passage from Ruth Richardsons Death, Dissection and the Destitute
(1989): Dissection represented a gross assault upon the integrity and
identity of the body and upon the repose of the soul (Richardson qtd.
in Marshall, 1995 221), again echoing Kristevas notion that lack of
skin constitutes a site of anxiety and perhaps even trauma as it
problematizes the identity of the corpse.
Gender identity is, thus, another issue that von Hagenss work
interrogates and subverts. As with so many of his displayed corpses,
his Reclining Nude, with her elbow supporting her head and her
ideal (in Western terms) figure, is a direct tribute to the use of female
models in art studios and to the traditional rendering of the female
nude, invoking the likes of Ingres, Monet, and others who painted
women in such a position. The fact that von Hagenss nude happens to
be skinless, however, marks a significant difference. In her article on
the aesthetics of disgust as seen in the work of artist Jenny Saville,
Michelle Meagher points out that the female nude has been,
traditionally, the embodiment of art in Western aesthetics, so that
variations on the female nude serve as acts of disruption, a breaking of
the rules (see Meagher 2003, 10). Representing the female in
grotesque ways, as Saville presumably does, or as skinless corpses, as
von Hagens does, interrogate[s] what is aesthetic and suggest[s] that
what is repellant is defined by implicit social agreements (6). In
other words, Meagher says, disgust reveals [] the way our social
orders are structured (6) and calls into question centuries of maleproduced art that have defined womens bodies and womens beauty
(2). Thus it is a threat not only to the social order but also to ones
personal stability (6) because it forces the viewer to feel her own
body, to call into question her own sense of herself relative to her
cultures notion of beauty.
Von Hagenss skinless females, whether one wants to consider
them nudes or not, produces a similar threat to the viewers personal
stability and questions the notion of female aesthetics. Rather than
presenting milky blubber, however, he exposes female genitalia
ovaries, Fallopian tubes, uteruses as well as cross sections of breasts,
breast tissue, and fetuses both inside the mothers womb as well as
out. Many viewers have expressed disgust at the exposure of genitalia,
either attached to bodies or not, presumably viewing them as
pornographic or unsuitable for public viewing. And yet, one asks, why
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287
should markers of female sexuality be considered pornographic? Why

have they often been sources of anxiety and even fear when they are
necessary to the reproduction of life?
More specifically, the exposure of fetuses inside the mothers belly
or of fetuses alone has been a source of repulsion among so-called
Right-to-Lifers even though they themselves use photos of fetuses in
their demonstrations and protests against abortion to shock the public.
If, as is planned, the show eventually goes to America, one can only
assume that further demonstrations will be carried out against von
Hagenss exhibit.
Von Hagens has insisted, however, that his public display of bodies
democratizes medicine, removing the mystique of the body from the
physicians purview, so that knowledge of the body, internally as well
as externally, becomes an important source of power for laypersons,
enabling them to better make their own decisions about medical
matters (see Professor Gunther von Hagenss Body Worlds 2002,
online). Women, of course, have been particularly victimized by this
mystique, as their genitals are not as exposed as male genitals and
they are thus often at the mercy of doctors who conduct examinations
but do not always reveal or explain the results.
Although there are plenty of gendered specimens in von Hagenss
exhibitions, many of the bodies displayed cannot be identified as male
or female. For instance, in whole body specimens showing the internal
organs or the blood system, the genitalia as well as any surface
indicators (such as breasts) are stripped away, leaving the corpse
genderless. Taking Kristeva one step further, one could make the case
that the inability to detect the gender of the body is yet another source
of anxiety since gender is one of the major signifiers of human
identity.
Thus, the work of Gunther von Hagens, highly provocative, often
contested, is an important site for a full range of philosophical, moral,
ethical, and aesthetic considerations, calling into question notions of
identity, beliefs surrounding death and mortality, as well as what it
means to be human. Although for some, the shock of seeing our
interior landscape may be too unsettling to appreciate the issues
Krperwelten raises, the fact that the exhibit has been extremely
successful suggests that our curiosity and need to better understand
ourselves inside and out is a powerful human drive.
288
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World, translated by Thomas Dunlap. New York: Columbia University Press.
Body Parts Not Welcome. 2003. International Herald Tribune (F.A.Z. Weekly),
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Dissection Goes Live. 2002. International Herald Tribune (F.A.Z. Weekly), 22
November, p. 2.
Elkins, James. 1999. Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Executor: Ted Williams Wanted to Be Frozen. CNN.com Law Center.
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2002).
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Finn, Peter. 2001. Art of Controversy: Anatomy as Entertainment. Washington
Post, 5 March, sec. C1.
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229-233.
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Gateway to Becoming a Doctor. New York: Scribner.
Goodrich, Lloyd. 1982. Thomas Eakins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hagens, Gunther von. Interview with Deborah MacKenzie. 2002. A Body of
Knowledge. http://www.newscientist.com (accessed 23 March 2002).
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. n.d. Prof. Gunther von Hagens Body Worlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of
Real Human Bodies. www.koerperwelten.com/en/home.asp (accessed 8 March
2002).
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(Catalogue). Heidelberg: Institute for Plastination, Heidelberg.
Kuebler-Ross, Elisabeth. 1969. On Death and Dying. New York: Macmillan.
Lecaldano, Paolo, ed. 1965. The Sistine Chapel. Vol.1, with text by Roberto Savini.
New York: Harry N. Abrams.
Marshall, Tim. 1995. Murdering to Dissect: Grave-Robbing, Frankenstein, and the
Anatomy Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
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Penguin.
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Frankfurter Allgemeine (English edition). 2 May, p. 3.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. [1884] 1906. The Body Snatcher: The Merry Men and
Other Tales. Vol. 3, edited by Charles Curtis Bigelow and Temple Scott. New
York: The Davos Press.
. [1886] 1991. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Mineola, NY: Dover.
Stewart, Fiona. 2003. Autopsy Professor Linked to Illegal Body Parts. The
Scotsman, 15 February, p. 3.
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MA: Harvard University Press.
Violence, Transgression, and the Fun Factor: The Imagined

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

At the beginning of the novel Ian Wharton is introduced as an almost
normal boy almost, except for his paranormal psychic gift of
eidetics, which enables him to create photorealistic images and visual
copies of reality in his mind. This gift allows him to manipulate the
outside world by means of influencing the eidetic images in his mind.
His ability makes him an agent of transition as it obscures received
concepts of reality; his fantasies and visualizations are not only
realistic, but they are real. Since he is able to project the world
through the power of his eidetic propensities, Ian could be called a
Baudrillardean hero, who celebrates the simulacrum that his mind
constitutes. The scope of his ability becomes clear as he points out
how he can manipulate his mental images:
292

I can summon up faces from my yesteryears and hold a technicians blowtorch
to their cheeks. And then, once the skin has started to pollulate, I can yank it
away again and count the blisters, one by one, large and small. I can even dig
into them and savour the precise whisper of their several crepitations. (16)
During the enigmatic and disturbing prologue, Ian already hints at the
fact that he is not fully in control of himself most of the time he
actually is not in control at all. Among other major influences, his
mother seems to be the most important one. The relationship between
Ian and her is very peculiar indeed. She is described as omnipresent to
him:
[T]here is the Mummy smell. For the world has always smelled of Mummy as
far as I am concerned. By this I mean that if bacon isnt frying, tobacco burning
or perfume scintillating, I am instantly aware of the background taint. Its
something milky, yeasty and yet sour, like a pellet of dough thats been rolled
around in a sweaty belly button. It is the Mummy smell, the olfactory
substratum. (19)
The imagery used bears witness to Selfs clichd use of Freudian

concepts. Ian has obviously never been able to sever the umbilical
cord, which in his imagination still seems to tie him to his mothers
body in a very corporeal sense. The prospect of drinking mothers
milk still appeals to him; this is hinted at by means of the mothers
omnipresence as a smell. Ians wish to kill his father, who abandoned
him when he was a child, fits nicely into this Oedipal scenario.
Characteristically, his motive is not wounded pride or overt jealousy,
but the fact that [the fathers] presence would be an affront to [Ians]
body (20). In him, he sees an imperfect version of himself, and
reveals a profound self-hatred when he wants to enjoy the
bludgeoning of [his] own features (20). His mother is an
overwhelming presence in his life, while his fathers mere existence is
treated as taboo. And his mother is not only important in a nurturing
sense, she has also clearly set the standards of quality for his sexual
preferences: Oh Mummy, Mummy! That was real sex everything
else, everything that has followed, has just been afterplay (25-26).
While he is not referring to penetrative sex, he refers to her touching
him in an obviously sexually charged manner: [T]he way you toyed
with me, raised me up, so that my first intimations of the fleshly have
remained for ever fused to your nylon armature (26). His mother,
who characteristically remains unnamed throughout the narrative, uses
her sexuality to exert control over Ian; she even tries to make him a
substitute for the lover she longs for and the husband she has lost.
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293
Consequently, his adolescent sexuality is a source of anxiety and

frustration for him. He does not like his looks which do not
correspond to his fantasy image of himself: I was tubby, pink and
unappealing. My body was awash with glandular gunk and my face
dusted over with pustules (46). Since eidesis is closely linked to
autism, it comes as no surprise that Ian finds himself an outsider who
is not able to participate in the communal talk about sex. At this
point his eidesis becomes a vehicle for the systematic reenactment of
reality, a substitute for the shortcomings of Ians real experience as a
pubescent boy. When he is bullied by another boy, he only retorts by
imagining violence: I found myself eidetically slamming his gullet
against the sharp jam of the classroom door. The vacuum-nozzle
ridging of his slashed oesophagus was far more revolting than
anything I could have invented (50). This blunt description shows the
realness of his visions which he uses to satisfy his constant wish for
transgression. The fact that he perceives his own visions as revolting
shows that he does not feel in control of them. Here, Ians eidetic
ability is identified as potentially hazardous; it threatens to cut all ties
that link Ian to his peer group: I sought frantically for methods of
controlling my gift, ways of staving off chaos. I became certain that if
I didnt do something I might be sucked out of the fuselage of reality
altogether and sent rolling and tumbling into the void (50). The one
major change in his life his crossing the abyss comes as he
intensifies his relationship with the enigmatic Mr. Broadhurst, who
becomes his male role model and his master in a Faustian pact (55).
Broadhurst turns out to have eidetic faculties himself, which seem to
be much more advanced than Ians. He is not only able to visualize
detailed simulacra of reality, but also to move in them and even to
access the particular history of any single item in the picture. In
addition, he has the capability to transfer this ability to Ian, who is
very amazed at this sudden expansion of his gift. Mr. Broadhurst, the
self-appointed Magus of the Quotidian (62), has singled out Ian to
refine his eidetics and to facilitate his integration into society by
providing him with a set of rituals designed to act as a profane
countermeasure to the paranormal experiences of eidetic vision; thus
they function as rituals of sanity. More than that, they are sanity, dye
see? (63). These rituals allow Ian not to lose his mind and to be able
to act like a normal boy. The rituals some of which are as profane as
nosepicking with semi-dried snot (63) provide Ian with something
to occupy his otherwise overstrained mind and senses. Moreover, Mr.
Broadhurst explains that to see through the rituals of daily life enables
294
an acute awareness of the mechanisms of realityconstruction as a

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

populated by anthropomorphic trains that are favourites with children
in the English-speaking world the best known among these is
Thomas the Tank Engine. The Fat Controller controls all the
movements and tracks in the stories. By referring to this well-known
childrens series, the narrator addresses the collective imaginary of the
reader and also Ians.
The Fat Controllers real name in Awdrys stories is Sir Topham
Hatt; he is only called by his nickname behind his back. Since the Fat
Controller of the stories is a benevolent character, Mr. Broadhurst
only resembles him in his outer appearance: both are strikingly obese.
Broadhurst, however, can be compared to the Fat Controller with
regard to the control he is able to exert over others:
I am the fat controller, said the Mr. Broadhurst in my eidetic vision. I
control all the automata on the island of Britain, all those machines that bask in
the dream that they have a soul. I am also the Great White Spirit that resides in
the fifth dimension, everything is connected to my fingertips by wires. (75)
As the narrative progresses, the reader realizes that the concept of the
Fat Controller as a subtle and scheming seducer and malevolent
trickster, is used as a negative foil for the popular character. The
Controller thus represents the embodiment of the border between
reality and fiction. This is made clear as he decides to murder a
woman with whom he once had an argument. The woman is sitting in
the theatre in front of Ian and the Controller, when the Controller
poisons her with a lethal injection of curare. Since Ian did not witness
the poisoning, he does not believe that the murder has actually
happened until he reads about it in the newspaper the following day.
The Fat Controller, however, is completely sure of his powers:
When I wish to kill I kill. The voice was lubricious, polite but insistent.
And nothing that people say or do can detract from this. Fortunately I am not
driven to this expedient that often, because I have many other stratagems that I
have devised for attaining the same object. But every so often, such as now,
killing does seem the best possible option [...]. (85)
Significantly, this episode illustrates the way in which Ian perceives

reality; he does not take the Controllers word for granted, but has
to look for another kind of evidence, in this case the newspaper.
Whereas the Controller is able to manipulate fact and fiction, Ian still
needs to establish some kind of truth. His bodily reaction to reading
about the womans death shows that he actually did not believe in it
before: I began to tremble violently and would have fainted, had he
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not grabbed me by the elbow and guided me to a low wall, where I

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

embody, namely the promise of an ultimate liberation from the factfiction duality, an abstraction from the very idea of fiction.
Psychosis or the Reassurance of the Real

In the story, inside and outside appear to be intermingled, and in these
surroundings, nothing and no one can be trusted, neither from the
point of view of the narrator nor that of the reader. The distinction of
inside and outside, however, does only gradually become irrelevant,
since Ian continues to cling to the realness of his life in spite of all
the startling experiences that seem to hint at the contrary. Ian tries to
convince himself that the Fat Controller had been a mere, albeit very
elaborate, fantasy. From this perspective, his eidetics also gain a
distinctly autistic quality; Ian views the excesses of his imagination as
symptoms of a lacking paternal role model. The Controller thus
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assumes the role of the father who has never been present for Ian, who
subsequently muses, [p]erhaps I wasnt the plaything of a mage, who
was determined to drag me into a frightening and chaotic world of
naked will, only a seriously neurotic person in need of help (Self
1994, 125). The next step he takes is consistent with this evaluation to
seek advice from the student counsellor and psychiatrist, Dr. Gyggle.
This counsellor resolves to experimentally test Ians allegedly
paranormal abilities, and he soon finds out that although Ians eidetic
capabilities are remarkable, they do not constitute real extra-sensory
experiences. Ian discovers that Dr. Gyggles presence seems to cancel
out the paranormal characteristics of his eidetics. When Gyggle tries
to prove Ians claims by experiments, Ian is unable to demonstrate his
gift. The retroscending that worked so amazingly with the Fat
Controller has ceased to function: I conceptually fumbled, struggled
to get some purchase on the sempiternal sheen of the visual image; but
there was nothing, no movement, no astral agility, it remained frozen
(137). According to Dr. Gyggle, there is only one possible
interpretation of the results of this experiment: Ian must be suffering
from a complex delusion about the nature of his perceptions and the
role of the imagination. To prove his point, he tries Ian with a tricky
test. If Ian were actually able to move in the representations of reality
in his head, he should also be able to see what is behind a sofa that is
shown in a movie. But then he asks Ian what would happen if the
movie was an animated film, in which case there could be nothing
behind the sofa because it would only be the drawing of a sofa. This
thought experiment clearly demonstrates that any possibility of
retroscending can only be the product of Ians imagination, because
he either cannot do it at all, or if he can it must be pure
imagination. As Gyggle puts it: There can be no picture of the world
in your head that exists independently of your assertions and beliefs
about it. [...] Your whole belief in your eidetic powers rests on a
misconception of the nature of consciousness itself (138).
In the following, the reader is led to believe that Ian accepts his past
history as characterized by psychosis, while his later life is marked by
the effort to be normal. Ian accepts a job as a marketing expert and
continues his therapy with Dr. Gyggle. His psychotic imaginations
seem to become perfectly explicable as the fantasies of an autistic
outsider in search of a father figure. In this situation the Fat Controller
has taken over the vacant position. The fact that the Controller also
has eidetic faculties and that he is a real master of the art enables
him to be a role model for Ian. Thus, the Controller is pictured as an
adept, a virtuoso of the borderline, the one who can show Ian what to
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achieve with his gift and talent. His real father, by contrast, is
repeatedly called the contemptible Essene both by the Controller
and Ian, marking him as the one who resisted the Controllers
temptations. As a consequence, for Ian the father gains the quality of
the other, and this is why he must hate him. Paradoxically, the
father, whom Ian perceives as weak and unwilling to accept his
responsibility, might in fact be the only one who had the strength to
resist. What he actually resisted can only be glimpsed on the margins
of the narrative, but obviously he had known the Controller as well;
therefore he could have been an eidetic who chose not to follow the
path of the Controller, but who found his own way of dealing with the
eidetic gift. Since he is repeatedly called an Essene, one might
surmise that his way of dealing with his eidetics had to do with
forsaking the pleasures of manipulating others that the Controller
stands for and concentrating on mental improvements instead.
Since Dr. Gyggle has identified the Controller as a psychotic
fantasy, Ian is willing to undergo further therapy in order to overcome
the remainder of his problem and finally achieve full genitality, as
Gyggle formulates the goal (205). The episodes of a nightmarish
dreamscape which are conjured up by an artificial coma experiment
devised by the psychiatrist are unsettling, yet they further corroborate
the concept of an ongoing and multiple psychotic delusion on Ians
part. Meanwhile Ians work self, as the narrator calls it, gives his
colleagues no hint of his continuing inner conflict. The entailed
objectification is paralleled on the formal level by the shift in
perspective from the first person to the third.
However, even in this presumably controlled environment, there
remains an intimation of uncanniness, and of the shadow of madness
lurking beneath the surface of quotidian lives. The colleagues all have
to compensate for the painful nullity of their emotional lives by
infusing their work, introjecting it into their psyches (210). Thus, all
the elements of a healthy imagination are reduced to product
placements (210), and the cynical view of the marketing expert
prevails. Predictably, this is the type of company that Ian feels
comfortable with, because none of the colleagues feels any urge to
deal with the uncertainties of emotions or imagination. They are
totally focused on material things. One could argue that the
description of Ians work self adds an additional sombre substratum
to the narrative by implying that the cynicism of his own psychotic
experiences can be aligned very well with the inhumane, materialistic
rules of a neo-liberal market economy. Ians imaginary travels
combined with the actions of the Controller have led him to believe
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that he can manipulate people and even reality itself at will.

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

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

Ians haunted past reemerges as the Fat Controller shows up again in
the person of Samuel Northcliffe, who is behind the marketing deal
300
that commissions D. F. & L. to market an edible financial product

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

which connects the loose ties and unites the tripartite figuration of
Ians personality: his work self, his schizoid self, and Richard. He
thereby fulfils a similar role to that of the Controller in the original
childrens stories. The Land of the Childrens Jokes seems to reflect
Selfs own drug experiences. His own and also vicarious experiences
seem to have supplied him with the dark and perverted cartoon
versions of the characters that have their origin in childrens stories,
just like the Controller. Particularly revolting in this context is Ians
second visit to the horrid dreamscape, where he sees a baby cutting
itself up by eating razors an observation accompanied by the
tasteless joke by Ians guide Doug, a man with a spade in his head:
Whats red [...] and sits in the corner? (261). The entire Land of the
Childrens Jokes consists of instances and manifestations of the
abject, from Doug with the spade over the razor-eating baby, to the
pink man in the corner who tells him about the worm that lives inside
his body.
The complexity of the narrative forms a stylistic parallel to Ians
borderline personality and the transgression of borders in this case,
the borders between Richards and Ians consciousness. Kristevas
theory of the abject as a non-object (1982, 8), an entity which is
dissociated from the self, but not (yet) transformed into a true object,
describes this phenomenon. The narrative mirrors this notion by
continuously questioning the limits of the self. This is obviously
paired with the willful transgression of aesthetic borders and the
invocation of the abject through the perversion of the harmless, both
of which are crucial techniques employed throughout the novel. These
techniques testify to Kristevas claim that the horror of the abject lies
chiefly in its failure to function as a forbidden other. Instead, its
being rooted in the harmless allows a glimpse at the horrors lying at
the very centre of the quotidian. The abject exposes the arbitrary and
oppressive character of religion and (moral) law: The abject is
perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule
or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes
advantage of them, the better to deny them (15).
It is precisely the blending of characters and their consciousness
which underlines the importance of the use of tautology for the
narrative process. In this fashion the action is experienced by different
personae in different contexts, although the underlying principles
remain the same. Tautological representation of transgression, in the
blended narrative form as well as on the plot level, suggests total
transgression, a final elimination of borders that have already been
302
blurred and weakened before. The border between fiction and fact,
reality and fantasy is thus constantly questioned. This is only the
beginning of the challenge that the novel poses regarding the
definition of the real, as the Controller prepares for the next
transgression. This time, the Controller chooses to manifest himself
again in the form of Samuel Northcliffe. Taking a taxi from Heathrow,
he refuses to obey the no smoking sign, and when the cab driver gets
angry and asks him to leave his taxi, the Controller threatens to kill
him if he does not drive on. He not only uses his mohair tie to strangle
the driver, but also tortures him with cigar burns, leaving a neat line
of blisters (Self 1994, 232). The Controller eventually kills the driver
and addresses his victim with gloating irony:
I would wager, sir The Fat Controller addressed the cabbys slumped
corpse, whilst pulling his suitcase from the back of the cab that that was as
good a death as you could reasonably have expected to have [...]. Granted that I
can have no idea of what your prospects might have been, but on the sound
principle that every man is responsible for the nature of his own countenance, I
would wager, sir, that you would never have become a creature capable of those
nice distinctions, the contrivance of which serves, as it were, to define
refinement. (233)
The Controllers style at this point is bombastic and euphuistic as

always. The archaic eloquence that he displays can be seen as a sign
of his status. The Controller is modelled after Sir Topham Hatt, who
represents a patriarchal system of control. There might even be a
parallel to the figure of the English colonialist, who mingles racist
abuse with refined manners and speech, and whose likeness can
perhaps be glimpsed in the Controllers appearance as well: He was
wearing his travelling kit, Donegal tweed jacket, grey flannel trousers
and brogues (227). With the Controllers material re-entry into the
narrative, his presence has become visible and bluntly violent as
well. A dead cab driver cannot be dismissed as the mere product of
Ians (or Richards) imaginations or drug fantasies. The abject,
according to Kristeva, is characterized as death infecting life (1982,
4), and at this point the real death of another man does indeed taint the
life of Ian Wharton by perversely uniting his schizoid self with his
work self.
Ians second trip to the Land of the Childrens Jokes reveals his
personal involvement with the actions formerly associated with the
Controller. Finally, it dawns on him that he, or his schizoid other, is in
fact the killer and the rapist. As Dr. Gyggle says in one of Ians
visions:
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You see, Ian, all your adult life you have been committing these little
outrages. It has been Samuels and latterly my own responsibility to cover
things up, to clear up the mess. I dont mean literally, of course, although many
of your activities have left quite a few stains, I mean clear up the mess in here.
And then Gyggle made a gesture identical to the one The Fat Controller had, all
those years ago. He tapped his temple with his bony finger, forcefully, as if
requesting admission to his own consciousness. (267)
As Ian rejects the thought, the Controller and Gyggle, still emanating
from his drugged dream, compel him to retroscend and relive two of
his more recent outrages, the torturing and killing of a dog, and the
robbing and killing of a passer-by in order to get hold of his clothes.
The violence is pictured very graphically here, as the narrator revels in
blood and gore, giving detailed accounts of the disembowelling of the
dog as well as the ripping out of the mans eyeballs. After this
disconcerting experience, there is another boundary crossing as the
three men simply walk out of the dreamscape and right into Londons
Roman Road, on the way to discuss Samuel Northcliffes mysterious
financial product Yum-Yum with a man called the Money Critic.
From this moment on, Ian seems to be reconciled with his criminal
past, to see the world the way the Fat Controller saw it (278), that is,
as a mere mass of undifferentiated flesh which is completely at his
disposal. When he gets a glimpse of a woman similar to his girlfriend
Jane, he thought of the love he felt for her and how much he looked
forward to tearing both it and her, apart (284). The Money Critic
himself appears as the Controllers antipode and brother-in-thought at
the same time. He is silent and secretive, and he embodies the esoteric
aspects of the virtualized system of money money as the ultimate
ritual, as the motto of the chapter, taken from Mary Douglas,
suggests (253).
The borderline character of the narrative is nicely illustrated by the
episode that introduces Jane Carter. Jane first comes to meet Richard
Whittle, after seeing Dr. Gyggle for an interview for voluntary service
at the Lurie Foundation Hospital for Dipsomaniacs. After this
somewhat sobering experience, she runs into Ian at a PR date, thereby
completing the Controllers earlier prediction of elective affinity
(238). Not surprisingly against the rather bleak backdrop of the novel,
their relationship is far from romantic. Both are emotionally incapable
of deeper feelings and are rather frustrated. Jane sees herself as
unattractive, and even tries to wound herself out of self-hatred (see
235); she too is plagued by the presence of the Fat Controller, just like
another one of his engines. Consequently, their lovemaking is
remarkably void of passion:
304

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

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

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

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

narrative should not be dismissed as easily as that. The Fat Controller,
after all, may not be an external persona, but a part of Ians own
personality a part of his schizoid self. Such a reading opens new
layers of meaning and reveals the abyss which becomes visible
through the double blurring of borders. Not just Ian Whartons
identity, but the whole construct of a received reality is at stake,
while transgression as such is turned into the central motif. It is
mainly a transgression that is free from motivation, a purely selfreferential action. Given this premise, it becomes explicable why the
306
moment of transgression is not connected to any kind of ecstasy.

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

higher and higher doses of shock to achieve the same effect (see
Menninghaus 1999, 565). It is obvious that this result is very different
from Batailles insistence on the tension between taboo and
transgression as a prerequisite for a continuity of being (see Bataille
[1957] 2001, 40-54) Instead, Self exhibits a fractured and material
being driven by addictions and schizoid fantasies. The constant
transgressions neutralize the power of the taboos behind them, defying
Batailles notion of transgression, which does not deny the taboo but
transcends it and completes it (63).
My Idea of Fun presents an ambitious project: Self, perhaps
motivated by his own extensive psychiatric and addictive history, is
obsessed with ridiculing the typical pattern of explanation for psychic
disorders. Almost every common way of interpreting split identities
and schizoid fantasies is incorporated in the narrative, from the
classical Freudian approach hinted at in Ians pseudo-Oedipal feeling
for his mother, to the claim that transgression liberates, made by
Bataille and, especially with respect to art, by Kristeva. And every
single one of these explanations is shown to be grossly inadequate; the
only possible deduction seems to be that there is no soul and,
accordingly, no personality, only floating signifiers.
Will Self has claimed that he writes to amuse himself because [he]
really get[s] bored the whole time (Henchman 1997, 53). His idea of
fun, then, is the ultimate challenge of our perception of the real
only that it has nothing to do with fun as we know it. And while Self
insists that his protagonist has managed to cross the abyss, the reader
is far from being able to follow and at best remains pondering over the
implications, at worst just bored.
Works Cited
Barber, Lynn. 2000. Self Control. The Observer, 11 June. Online edition.
www.observer.co.uk/life/story/0,6903,329703,00.html (accessed 15 December
2003).
Penguin.
Henchman, Anna. 1997. Will Self: An Enfant Terrible comes of Age. Publishers
Weekly 244.37:52-53.
Kristeva, Julia 1982 [1980]. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by
Empfindung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
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Review
of
My
Idea
of
Fun,
by
Will
Self.
www.amazon.de
/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140234004/qid=1093966700/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_8_2/3027891465-1723259 (accessed 16 December 2003).
Self, Will. 1994. My Idea of Fun: A Cautionary Tale. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Seligman, Craig. 1994. Buster Keaton in Hell: My Idea of Fun by Will Self. The
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309
Notes on Contributors
Susana Arajo is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of
Sussex, UK, where she also teaches literature and visual culture.
Ruth Baumert () was a Lecturer of English at the University of Cologne,
Germany.
Hanjo Berressem is a Professor of American Studies at the University of
Cologne, Germany.
Nilufer Bharucha is a Professor of English Literature at the University of
Mumbai, India.
Dorothea Fischer-Hornung is a Senior Lecturer of American Literature at
the University of Heidelberg, Germany.
Alison Goeller is a Senior Lecturer of American Literature at the
University of Maryland, Europe.
Andrea Gutenberg is a Senior Lecturer of English and American
Literature at the University of Cologne.
Konstanze Kutzbach is a Lecturer of English Literature at the University
of Cologne, Germany.
Frank Lay works at the Bundessprachenamt (German Federal Language
Service) in Huerth, Germany.
Sylvia Mayer is a Professor of American Literature at the University of
Bamberg, Germany.
Monika Mueller is a Senior Lecturer of American and English Literature
at the University of Stuttgart, Germany.
Paulina Palmer has retired from the English Department at the University
of Warwick, UK. She teaches part-time for the Gender Studies MA at
Birkbeck College, University of London, UK.
Tatjana Pavlov is a freelance writer and has taught at the Technical
University of Berlin, Germany.
Russell West is a Professor of English at the Free University of Berlin,
Germany.

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The Abject of Desire

The Abject of Desire

Konstanze Kutzbach and Monika Mueller

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007

Illustration cover: Monika Mueller

On the Matter of Abjection

The Bhibhitsa Rasa in Anglophone Indian Cultural Discourse:

The Gothic-Grotesque of Haunted: Joyce Carol Oatess Tales

Consuming the Body: Literal and Metaphorical Cannibalism

Shape-Shifters from the Wilderness: Werewolves Roaming

Queer Transformations: Renegotiating the

The Two-, One-, None-Sex Model: The Flesh(-)Made

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

American Environmentalism and Encounters with the Abject:

Abject Cannibalism: Anthropophagic Poetics in Conrad,

A Wet Festival of Scarlet: Poppy Z. Brites (Un)Aesthetics

Interior Landscapes: Anatomy Art and the Work of Gunther

Violence, Transgression, and the Fun Factor: The Imagined

Konstanze Kutzbach and Monika Mueller

THE ABJECT OF DESIRE

(Menninghaus 2003, 1). By focusing on such instances of crisis, the

Every encounter with the abject is reminiscent of the initial abjection

Kristeva describes this process of separation from the mother as a

KUTZBACH AND MUELLER

What is expelled continues to be perceived both as attractive and as a

THE ABJECT OF DESIRE

A recent example that illustrates this complex relationship between

KUTZBACH AND MUELLER

The cannibals deed, as we suggest, shares features of the real abject

THE ABJECT OF DESIRE

as its epilogue extends the films representational framing beyond

KUTZBACH AND MUELLER

as monstrous and abject, she aims at a resignification of gender codes

THE ABJECT OF DESIRE

founded on patriarchy and shows that Greenaway, through ingenious

KUTZBACH AND MUELLER

THE ABJECT OF DESIRE

rotting from within represented by reality-based serial murders and

KUTZBACH AND MUELLER

in times where taboos are increasingly suspended, and a return to

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On the Matter of Abjection

THE ABJECT OF DESIRE

(symptomatically, the movies production company is called Saliva

For Lacanian psychoanalysis, abjects are things|events in the face of

function of the tuch, of the Real as an encounter the encounter in so

THE ABJECT OF DESIRE

[diagram of the projective plane]

The carnivals semantic ambivalences, for instance, pair the high

If both denote borders to the realm of materiality, then abjects point

The abject chronologics is easily as ambiguous as the abject

THE ABJECT OF DESIRE

stage that leads up to this constitution. As Kristeva notes, the abject

Because the topologic ambiguities instigated by abjects cannot be

Abjects cannot reach the status of objects o if these are considered

It is thus the Symbolic, or, more specifically, the super-ego, that

THE ABJECT OF DESIRE

be reached by invert[ing] the direction of desire because castration

[retrospectivity]. In the context of abject pain, for instance, the

THE ABJECT OF DESIRE

In both approaches, the material realm is contained, like the Real, in

As an agent in the pay of the differential symbolic order,

Ultimately, the paternal metaphor ensures the existence of the sign,