Where Fear Lurks

Edited by

Michèle Huppert

Where Fear Lurks

At the Interface

Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Dr Nancy Billias

Advisory Board Dr Alejandro Cervantes-Carson Professor Margaret Chatterjee Dr Wayne Cristaudo Mira Crouch Dr Phil Fitzsimmons Professor Asa Kasher Owen Kelly

Martin McGoldrick Revd Stephen Morris Professor John Parry Paul Reynolds Professor Peter Twohig Professor S Ram Vemuri Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E

An At the Interface research and publications project. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/ The Evil Hub ‘Fear, Horror and terror

Where Fear Lurks: Perspectives on Fear, Horror and Terror

Edited by

Michèle Huppert

Inter-Disciplinary Press Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2009 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/

The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multidisciplinary publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press. Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087

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

ISBN: 978-1-904710-55-4 First published in the United Kingdom in paperback in 2009. First edition.

Contents Introduction

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Hawthorne’s Short Fiction: Compassion or Castigation for those Fated to Fear and Horror? Naela Danish

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The Destruction of the Hero: An Examination of the Hero’s Purpose in Lovecraft’s Works James L. Aevermann

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Terror and the Gothic Sublime: Presenting the Unrepresentable Maria Beville

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Post-memory in Art Spiegelman’s Maus Siao-Jing Sun

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Horrifying Quixote: The Thin Line between Fear and Laughter Stephen Hessel

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And the moral of the story is…: Horror Cinema as Modern Day Fairy Tale David Carter

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It scares me, but I like it. Considering why Children Enjoy Terror in Ancient Mexican Legends and Recent Children’s Literature Rita Dromundo Amores

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Terrified and Terrifying: An Examination of the Defensive Organization of Fundamentalism Michèle Huppert

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Sexing the Doppelgänger: A Recourse to Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ Susan Yi Sencindiver

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Zionism, Post Zionism and Fear of Arabness Henriette Dahan Kalev

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Fear and Horror in a Small Town: The Legacy of the Disappearance of Marilyn Wallman Belinda Morrissey and Kristen Davis

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An Immediate Recoiling Approach: Georges Bataille and Richard Kearney on the Transmutations of Dread Apple Zefelius Igrek

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‘Witches, live witches! The house is full of witches!’ The Concept of Fear in Early Modern Witchcraft Drama Madeleine Harwood

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A Traditional Female Vengeful Ghost or the Machine in a Ghost? Narrative Dynamics and Horror Effects in Ringu Eric K.W. Yu

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Rending the Terror-Horror Nexus: The Manifest Lie and its Role in Facilitating Acts of Illegitimate Political Violence C. Ferguson McGregor

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Introduction Living in a globalised world, or a ‘liquid life’ as Zygmunt Bauman describes it, has seen us, as inhabitants of the world, grapple with a multitude of confrontations and contradictions. The essence of globalisation is to open spaces and diminish time and distance. Virtual walls that protect the local culture are breached by the flood of difference that is facilitated by the machinations of technologies. These technologies pay no heed to the insecurities that rapidity of change engenders in the human psyche. Change in and of itself may not be the cause for fear, or terror, but when the change is too demanding and too rapid for the individual, or collective, to assess it can be experienced as an onslaught – an onslaught that can provoke fear, horror and terror. For some change heralds opportunity – it can provide an enrichment of ideas, possibilities and meanings. For others change signifies a challenge to stability, and a threat to existence. It is perhaps ironic that we can see illustrations of the challenge of diversity within our own academic world. As academics we are schooled in disciplines – each discipline has its own language, its own ‘heroes’, its own ‘disciples’. For those of us who teach, the demands of providing students with a working knowledge of the discipline often prohibits providing exposure to alternative, sometimes complimentary, sometimes contradictory, explanations or explorations. The outcomes from such a limited process are often myopic and self perpetuating. With the benefit of globalising technologies, such as the Internet and aviation, huge international conferences are held and attended by participants from all over the academic globe. But if one has ever attended any of these mega-conferences, then one will have experienced the compression of insularity that is a by-product of managing the enormity of delegates and the plethora of research interests. The corollary is that research ‘streams’ become even more specific and the opportunity for exposure to differences in approach and outlook is diminished. In general, psychologists attend psychological conferences; sociologists attend sociological conferences and so on. I for one, as a psychologist, have been asked what I was doing presenting at a sociological conference, as if I had nothing of value to contribute to such a forum. What is manifest here is an example, I suggest, of the insularity, either intentional or accidental, that is a response to too much choice. It seems obvious to me that no one discipline, no one religion, no one political perspective, can manage to explain the complexity of human existence. It is the nexus between disciplines where the most exciting explorations can occur. The limitations of one disciplinary interpretation can be beautifully exploited by another to yield a far richer and more meaningful

understanding – an understanding that opens up discussion rather than defensively shuts it down. This e-book is a tangible representation of the experience of the first global conference of Fear, Horror and Terror, hosted and facilitated by the Inter-Disciplinary.net organization, which was held in September, 2007 at Mansfield College, Oxford University. What this e-book cannot convey, unfortunately, was the collegiality and camaraderie that was endemic. At this conference, each discussion that ensued after every paper was thoughtful and thought provoking, and the atmosphere of open minded intellectual curiosity was palpable. The significance of this collection of papers is that it truly reflects an inter-disciplinary approach to a single conundrum – one that seems interminably part of our lives and our minds – fear, horror and terror. Each author has added a dimension to the ways in which this disturbing aspect of our lives can be examined. One of the central themes running through the papers presented is the concept of ‘otherness’ and this concept is engaged with through a variety of representations and manifestations. The visual representation of the other, the emotional and psychological approach to the other and the literary and philosophical experience of the other are all presented here. As an attendant at the conference one of the aspects that struck me was the complimentarity of the perspectives from the various disciplines. The richness of understanding that can be gained from looking at an issue through a different lens was exhilarating. From Pan’s Labyrinth through to the Gothic literature of Lovecraft; from witches to Doppelgangers; from the Holocaust to the disappearance of an Australian child, the concepts of fear, horror and terror are explored and exemplified in precious diversity with each contribution weaving into the fabric of the next. It was my privilege to attend the inaugural conference of Fear, Horror and Terror, and it has been my honour to edit this inaugural representation of an extremely successful gathering.

Michèle Huppert Australia

January 2008

Hawthorne’s Short Fiction: Compassion or Castigation for those Fated to Fear and Horror? Naela Danish Abstract Whether in fact or fiction, reality or romance, legend or life, fear and horror has always been the cynosure of a premise that has lured people to its fold to contemplate incessantly as to its role in human life and to ensure its feasibility in their lives. The involvement of fear, horror and terror in generating a state of volatility in human temperament dates back to the times even before that of the advent of Adam and Eve to the earth. Man was created in the presence of Mephistopheles and ever since has conceded to either engendering fear and horror, or allowing his innate character to be victimized by it. The psychosomatic correspondence is presented in a compelling and forceful style because Hawthorne drives his source and authority from the fact that his lineage afforded to him the vibrant and challenging amalgamation of the Salem witches with his ancestral loyalties towards Puritanism. This paper will focus on the ethos of fear and horror as portrayed by Hawthorne in understanding the human psyche, with reference to ‘Young Goodman Brown’ and The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne displays that characters are totally disoriented. This traumatic crisis rises to a crescendo when they expose themselves to avenues of fear and horror. At first, their innocence and ingeniousness is the cause of their vulnerability and later, their blatantly vehement nature persuades them to become the source of instigating fear and horror. Keywords: Hawthorne, individual perspective, ethos of fear, psychosomatic correspondence, loss of identity, advent of horror, fear psychosis ***** Whether in fact or fiction, reality or romance, legend or life, fear and horror has always been the cynosure of a premise that has lured people to its fold to contemplate incessantly as to its role in human life and to ensure its feasibility in their lives. The involvement of fear, horror and terror in generating a state of volatility in human temperament dates back to the times even before that of the advent of Adam and Eve to earth. Man was created in the presence of Mephistopheles and ever since has conceded to either

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______________________________________________________________ engendering fear and horror, or allowing his innate character to be victimized by it. Moving towards modern literature written with the aspect of constructing new and challenging facets of fear and horror through individual perspectives, the short fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne, explores this aspect of fear and horror being created even in the most peacefully congenial surroundings. In an extremely explicit manner, he displays the fact that human disposition is tantamount to acquiesce to terror when faced with fear and horror. This is distinctly comprehensible in his shorter fiction like Young Goodman Brown and The Scarlet Letter. The psychosomatic correspondence is presented in a compelling and forceful manner because Hawthorne drives his source and authority from the fact that his lineage provided to him the vibrant and challenging amalgamation of the evil deeds of the Salem witches along with the earnestness of his ancestral loyalties towards Puritanism. This paper will focus on the ethos of fear and horror as portrayed by Hawthorne in understanding the human psyche, with reference to ‘Young Goodman Brown’ and The Scarlet Letter. Just as when a child is overtaken by his fears and he creates monsters to give himself the reason not to enter the dark room, people often create scenarios of horror and terror to justify their own fears. Hawthorne was much ahead of his time in demonstrating how the absence of an eclectic outlook leads to the frequent occurrence of fear and horror and henceforth the procreation of terror. He could envisage the fact that one person’s psychosis of fear and horror can hold at ransom the peaceful existence of the entire society. To exemplify his idea Hawthorne creates details of the possible dream journey of Brown deep into the forest to the Witches Sabbath. Through the forest, ’Hawthorne emphasizes the split between convention and the unconscious by having Brown move from the town to the country as he follows his impulses. The deeper he moves into the forest, the more completely he becomes one with his ‘evil’.1 Spectral evidence - such as the devil changing into the shape of Brown’s deceased father - to the night time bonfires and finally to the dramatic invitation of the devil for Brown to enter into communion all are offered as part of a possible soul-shattering experience. Even the apparently essential staff carried by the old man assumes an extremely fearful connotation for Brown due to the overincidence of his fear and horror. Hawthorne suggests that fear and horror, and therefore power, are evident in the strange antics of the twisted staff; the symbolism is that of a struggle, a universal struggle for possession of the mind.2 This is exactly how fear and horror is enacted upon the human mind. Goodman Brown’s love for others is diminished and his self created fear and horror take precedence once he learns that he is from a family that

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______________________________________________________________ has hated the Quakers enough to lash the “Quaker woman…through the streets of Salem”, and to “set fire to an Indian Village”.3 Hence it is easy for Goodman Brown that instead of being concerned for his own neighbour, he turns against Goody Cloyse, willingly condemning her to the powers of darkness: “what if a wretched old woman do chooses to go to the devil…?”4 Goodman Brown is actually Everyman Brown. He is like anyone of us. While some of us are lucky and retain our faith despite the challenges, others are doomed and allow themselves to be lost in the world dominated by fear, horror and terror. Fear and horror persistently act as a negative force and finally makes some lose their faith in themselves, their families and their societies. As Morris asserts, “Goodman Brown goes against the greatest virtues of love; love for his neighbour, his family and his community”.5 Just as fear, horror and terror are tantamount to evil and vice, faith in the power of the good is synonymous to virtue. Brown is deprived of all the finer observances ever since, “He shrank from the bosom of Faith and turned away… No hopeful verse - for him the dying hour was gloom”.6 He first turns against his wife Faith, and eventually against God Himself. He surrenders to his fear completely and yields to his imagination that believes in a world overtaken by terror. When the pink ribbon, that had adorned his beloved wife, falls from the cloud, he does not hesitate to overlook the fact that it could have been, after all, a lapse or an oversight. With absolute finality he says “Come, devil; for to thee is the world given”.7 Goodman Brown loses the key to all salvation; total loss comes later and gradually he allows himself to be completely overtaken by fear and horror, doubt and despair. He utters, “My faith is gone! There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name”.8 Goodman Brown projects a sceptical dual outlook towards life. Association with a varied milieu and exposure to contemporary ideas convinces Goodman Brown, like any member of the modern society, of the need for the social display of responsibility and humanistic concern.9 This dual outlook of Goodman Brown causes his doubts to become stronger and his scepticism to increase manifold. The mixture of reality and imagination assigns Goodman Brown to make his own interpretations. Whilst Brown thinks he recognises the voice of the Minister, the Deacon and his wife, he is not certain because it is dark and he cannot see their figures.10 What gives Goodman Brown the license and the provocation to pass a negative verdict against all - family, community, God? His own fears and horrors lead him to deal with a sense of terminal dismissiveness. His outlook is so tainted with fear and horror that he concedes to building up a terrorised scenario to satisfy his fears. He shrinks from the blessings of the good old Minister, he shirks the prayers of the deacon, snatches the child away from the moralising of Goody Cloyse. All this negation arises due to the incidence of fear and horror that is of his own creation. It leads to his isolation and then

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______________________________________________________________ accelerates his self-condemnation that propels him toward hell. Fear and horror definitely lead to confusion, and Goodman Brown transforms all apparent signs into aspects that generate terror. This paradox is the key to understanding the interaction of fear and horror, which leads to the creation, and conviction of the world of terror. The atmosphere of fear and horror predominates, “It is chill and damp and even the flaming altar becomes covered with cold dew”.11 In the prevailing circumstances, it is difficult to come to a summation. Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamt of a wild witchmeeting?12 Not only Brown, but the readers too are overwhelmed by the fearsome atmosphere where they are given the choice to treat the story either as a dream or as a reality. Hawthorne confirms that the consequence of fear and horror that is inherent in human nature, does not necessarily lead to faith and peace. It can create only further confusion. The confused and searching Goodman Brown is unable to see whether his experience is a reality or a dream. Hence, he denounces every strand of familiarity to accept the unfamiliar. He resolves to live in a world pervaded by horror and concedes to the prevalence of terror because he is unable to fight back his fears. Nonetheless, Brown is a changed man; fear, horror and terror are intertwined with the reality and imagination of human existence since the moral demise of Adam. Moreover, Hawthorne chooses to project his belief that the fall of Man is through his own contrivance, and that “damnation is not inherited but chosen and is redeemable through human agency”13 , hence Goodman Brown chose his own damnation. In the forest Brown saw a mixture of pious and dissipated people and it was strange to see that “the good shrank not by the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints”.14 This paradoxical display of fear, horror and terror is not an unusual overture of human society. While on one hand fear, horror and terror encourages Goodman Brown to imagine all possible eventuality of evil existing in the social strata he is supposedly so well aware of; on the other hand he allows this same fear, horror and terror to overtake him strongly enough to dismiss any hope of redemption for the friends, family and community that he discerns so well with. The only way out for him now was to adopt a life of isolation, to shrink from his faith and his fellow men. As Canby remarks, Hawthorne was aware of “a treasure house of frailties of human certitude which sceptics love to brood on”15 and these are the frailties that abound in the human mind due to the interaction of fear, horror and terror. Hawthorne validates the belief that an overactive imagination can only surmount to utter perplexity. To mistrust one’s self, one’s neighbour, one’s teacher, and one’s very mind, cannot produce faith. After his experience in the woods, the matured and bitter Goodman Brown maybe equated to the paradigm of the hardened terrorists of the modern society. Salem village, instead of offering any solace or stability, is now completely

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______________________________________________________________ tainted by Brown’s imagination and the outlook polluted by fear and horror, makes him view the scenario as “the centre of the witchcraft delusion, in the witching times of 1692, and it shows the populace of Salem Village, those chief in authority as well as obscure young citizens like Brown, enticed by fiendish shapes into the frightful solitude of superstitious fear”.16 The statement that Hawthorne creates for ‘Young Goodman Brown’ is that “in distrustful and depraved society personal evidence such as a dream or vision grows into allegations and disbelief; just as the distrustful society that Puritans created themselves for a prosperous congregation would only return harm to them”.17 By showing the failures of the Puritan society in dealing with the problem of the members and specifically the experience of their adaptation to a new environment, a new-fangled society, Hawthorne speaks about the possible consequences of the interaction of fear, horror and terror with imagination. Specific historical evidence is used to question the validity of Puritan doctrine. For example, the ‘devil’ in Young Goodman Brown is seen not only as an apparition of Goodman Brown’s psychological trauma due to his lack of a healthy experience and the psychological effects of catechism but also may be seen as the reaction to a modern day scenario. The fear and horror that lurks in man’s soul has been rendered incapable of all types of the self-examination that is required to effect ratification. Frank Shuffelton’s work ‘Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Revival movement’ states that: To accept one’s almost solipsistic isolation from humanity, Goodman Brown turns his back on Salem village in order to venture into dark nature and his darker self….reject(ing) the society which has nurtured him from the self-willed terrors of imagination. This perception is for Hawthorne the central truth of the story and it is simultaneously the old error toward which Puritanism tended and the mistake of the contemporary revivalists.18 By placing so much importance on the imaginative experience despite evidence for election to heaven from the scriptures, while granting neither the self-trust nor the self-worth to its behaviours, people like Goodman Brown can only be seen to enter into an unending cycle of misery in which man is the most depraved and most unworthy - exactly what the modern day Goodman is traumatized with. Levy asserts, that Brown is Everyman. The bargain he has struck with Satan is the universal one . . . giving up his faith in exchange for fears, doubts and misery. Initially, he is a naive and immature

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______________________________________________________________ young man who fails to understand the gravity of the step he has taken . . . [which is] succeeded by a presumably adult determination to resist his own impulses.19 Fogle also confirms that his fear and horror allows him to “accept both society in general and his fellow men as individuals at their own valuation, [who] in one terrible night are transformed ever since Brown is confronted with the vision of human evil…”20 Extrapolation, inferring of the unknown from the known is what confronts Brown from hence onwards. Brown has not gone far, before he meets the devil in the form of a middle aged, respectable man, with whom Brown makes a bargain to accompany on his journey. Although Brown does realize who the companion is, he does not try to get rid of the Devil and continues to work with him deeper into the forest. Brown is further shocked to learn that his well revered ancestors were in reality all through the followers of the Devil.21 In the process he progressively undermines the young man’s faith in the institutions and the men whom he has heretofore revered.22 Brown’s unfounded fears and doubts do not even spare to create an image of terror out of the innocent appearance of his young and innocent wife. He speculates that “The pink ribbons that adorn the cap which Faith wears . . . are a badge of feminine innocence”.23 The ribbons are in fact an explicit link between two conceptions of Faith, connecting sweet little Faith of the village with the woman who stands at the Devil’s baptismal font. As Levy observes, They are part of her adornment of dress, and they suggest, rather than symbolize something light and playful, consistent with her anxious simplicity at the beginning and the joyful, almost childish eagerness with which she greets Brown at the end.24 However, Ferguson intensifies the role of fear and horror in Brown’s imagination when he asserts, neither scarlet nor white, but of a hue somewhere between, the ribbons suggest neither total depravity nor innocence, but a psychological state somewhere between. Tied like a label to the head of Faith, they represent the tainted innocence, the spiritual imperfection of all mankind.25

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______________________________________________________________ Goodman Brown’s faith is completely eroded as is the case of any modern day example of a terrorist’s faith being overtaken by fear and then his desperate but drastic resolution of spreading terror similar to the case of the most recent incidence of the Glasgow bombers. Desperation and despair due to fear and horror, leads to the building up of a greater frenzy; an urge to commit further erroneous deeds in order to justify the individual unfounded and tenuous fears. Likewise, in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, representation of fear and horror is used throughout the novel to portray the character of Roger Chillingworth. His acts of revenge embody the prospect of his being confounded by fear and horror through which he opts for tormenting Hester Pyrenne with terror, which fundamentally leads to the decomposition of his own character along with the depiction of a densely dark and dismal setting. The nature of fear and horror is explicitly represented by the characters, and setting, throughout the story. Chillingworth’s gruelling battle with fear and horror embodies his confrontation and preoccupation with terror. As Johnson observes, Hawthorne projects the theory that the prognosis of fear and horror is actually being fuelled by imagination. Thus, sending out the feeling that terror emanates from within the mind. The exact horror that is being relayed is the notion that ordinary people can have a genuine and spiritual persona from the outside but on the inside a dark and black man is awaiting their actions.26 Roger Chillingworth appears as a character whose symbolic relationship with fear and horror is clearly evident. Chillingworth first emerges as a stranger of the new colony. After being held captive by Indians subsequent to being shipwrecked a year before, he learns of Hester’s sin. At first he tries his best to pretend that all is fine. “The Stranger entered the room with the characteristic quietude of the profession to which he announced himself as belonging”.27 Later however, his fear gets the better of him and in Chapter 4, we find that he disguises himself as a physician, and provides a new identity for himself as Roger Chillingworth. “…said Old Roger Chillingworth, as he was hereafter to be named”.28 After changing his name to Roger Chillingworth and categorising himself as a great physician, he is able to deceive the people of the colony. This aspect of his character definitely insinuates him as being overwhelmed with the fear and horror of being discovered. This reinforces his urge to intentionally create an atmosphere of terror for others, behind which he can conveniently hide his own trepidation. The primary and deadly fear that seems to haunt Roger

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______________________________________________________________ Chillingworth vividly, is that of vengeance. It is this crucial fear that eventually leads to his defeat and death. As Jonathan Swift states, “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another”. What once began for Chillingworth as an act of fear, slowly transforms into a life of endless obsession. The rationale for it is that Chillingworth is too afraid to let go of Dimmesdale. He is afraid that once this happens, he will be removed from the pedestal of heroism and instead the glamour of martyrdom will be bestowed upon Dimmesdale. The fear of losing this reputation inflames his urge to further terrorise Dimmesdale. “Not the less, he shall be mine”.29 Roger Chillingworth tells Hester that the father of her child will be made known to the people. Chillingworth also makes it certain that he learns about the man, and confronts him. The intensity of Chillingworth’s plans for the future is evident, as the foreshadowing of his obsession with the fear and horror of the discovery of his own past becomes perceptible. As the passion of his fears grows, Chillingworth’s actions become more horrifying and terrorising. However, he succeeds in professing more intimate relations with Dimmesdale, “…this learned man was the physician as well as friend of the young minister”.30 Chillingworth decides to become good friends with Reverend Dimmesdale, the father of Hester Prynne’s child, in order to ensure the slow and painful torture of the Reverend. “These black weeds have sprung up out of a buried heart to make manifest of an unspoken crime”.31 Chillingworth speaks to the Reverend about the blackness of secrets in order to intensify the trauma of terrorising the Reverend by increasing the pain of his guilt. Chillingworth’s own fear and horror is also apparent here in his obsession with destroying the Reverend. Although Chillingworth was the only character free of problems at the start of the novel, his indulgence in his fear and horror of being discovered as an impostor leads to his defeat, as he remains the only character who never repents for any of the terrors that he has allowed to emanate from his fears. The structure of Chillingworth’s character is carefully directed towards a state of total decomposition in the course of the novel in order to display his psychosomatic distress brought about by fear and horror. Hester had been looking steadily at the old man, and was shocked, as well as wonder-smitten, to discern what a change had been wrought upon him in the last seven years. But the former aspect of an intellectual and studious man, calm and quiet, which was what she best remembered in him, had altogether vanished and had been succeeded by an eager searching, almost fierce, yet carefully guarded look.32

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______________________________________________________________ The quote greatly relates to what has happened to Chillingworth throughout the novel. After dedicating his life to fear and horror, he begins to change for the worse. Soon, Chillingworth learns that the Reverend may have the strength to escape from his destiny for him. Chillingworth realises that, if Dimmesdale finally makes public of his sin, he will escape Chillingworth, because Chillingworth will no longer be able to slowly destroy him through guilt. “The physician knew, then, that, in the minister’s regard, he was no longer a trusted friend, but his bitterest enemy”.33 Chillingworth gains a deeper abhorrence for Dimmesdale now as he becomes stronger. Later, as Dimmesdale finally decides to reveal his shame, Chillingworth grabs him violently and screams, “Do not blacken your fame and perish in dishonour. I can yet save you”.34 This in fact is the fear psychosis of Chillingworth. He is afraid to lose his self-importance. However, as Dimmesdale displays a firm hold over himself, he does not allow his fears to intimidate him, he confesses valiantly and escapes Chillingworth; he has been utterly defeated by Chillingworth’s fearlessness. After dedicating the last seven years of his life to terrorising and tormenting the Reverend, Chillingworth’s motive for living to create terror, and his obsession with fear and horror, is no longer present. After Dimmesdale dies upon the scaffold, Chillingworth does very little with the rest of his life, and dies a year after the death of the Reverend. The delineation of Chillingworth’s character is defined as his adherence to observe fear, horror and terror is exposed. It conveys meanings that are very compelling in order to understand a character completely overtaken by fear. First, his attitude towards nurturing an unshakeable faith in the observation of fear and horror on a personal level and hiding behind its facade, and then the effect of his retribution in extending an ultimate sense of terror to victimise others, describe the effects of his own qualms, uncertainties and fears on the external level. Not only did he slowly decompose the life of Reverend Dimmesdale, but after the death, he lost the reason to live, and died also. A certain empathy can be felt for Chillingworth in the earlier part. Many can relate to having a traumatic loss of identity or even being a victim of treachery, corruption or fraud. This leads to a total loss of faith in the system that sustains us, causing a spate of fear and horror to descend relentlessly on the enduring party. Resolution of such a trauma seems to be only through generating an atmosphere of further terror, fear and horror in search of self worth and self-proclamation by overwhelming others with terror to relieve the personal anguish. At first, it is easy to side with Chillingworth: even to understand the need for the prognostic reaction he displays. Yet, as his inclination to embrace horror and unleash terror is shown

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______________________________________________________________ through his actions, thoughts, looks, and feelings, a need to re-evaluate the true significance of his actions. Chillingworth appears as a character, brought into a ‘destined for perfection’ society, as one who might turn out to be a prominent inhabitant of the colony. However, it is fated otherwise and his callous tactics led to the deaths of two men, and these sinister plans tainted his future prospects in society. Although he was originally the only character without a problem or a transgression, he became the one who made the worst mistake of all. It is the knowledge that he is allowing his fears to surpass him that makes Chillingworth a monster. It is through this awareness that the ambitious and the ruthless side emerges. His fears and doubts make him dive deeper into questions of morality, egotism and human selfishness, which are a much bigger horror story in themselves. In all the misery he imagines and dreads, he does not conceive even an iota of the anguish he was destined to endure and to inflict on others. Along with the prevalence of fear, horror and terror, many other more complex themes are interwoven into this aspect. Hawthorne wants to focus on the fact that when a society rejects such a character they become ever more caught in the vortex of fear and horror from which they do not desist from inflicting terror on others. This, identically, mirrors the actions and reactions of Goodman Brown and Chillingworth when confronted with fear and horror. We see them ruining their own lives, and that of their families, and in the long run the entire humanity as a result of their myopic outlook. Fear of the inner self leads to the creation of external horror and terror. Those suffering from a fear of psychosis imagine or create a world of horror and terror to convince themselves that their fear is legitimate. If Goodman Brown and Chillingworth had not been afraid of what they had imagined to be a world of fear and horror, they could have fought their fears and may not have led the life of the living dead. Undiminishing fear arising of the inner self induces a psychosomatic condition that can be devastating in terms of acting as a precursor to horror and terror. An absolute loss of faith develops into a drastic outcome that produces fear and horror and ascertains the subsistence of their belief in terror. Goodman Brown and Chillingworth both experience some sort of a loss in faith - personal and social; which is enough to make them unable to overcome fear. They have an unyielding belief that they are fated to live in a world wrought with fear and horror; relief from such a world will come only through engendering terror. Goodman Brown imagines that there exists a divergent world of fear and horror that leads to doubting every soul around him and creates a convincing response to horror and terror as his only option. Such elements are becoming a palpable component of the modern society. The Glasgow bombers caused a bomb to explode having undergone an impression of fear, that everything around them could become tangible,

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______________________________________________________________ once a sense of horror and terror is generated. They too imagined that their personal fear could be erased with the conviction that generating horror and terror is the last resort. The fact is that we are manipulated to feel empathy towards the character giving into horror, especially when the focus of the horror leads to the embrace of terror as a last resort. Should we then choose to indulge in compassion or castigation in such a case? A person engulfed by his fear and horror ends up in rejecting society, parenthood and love, finally choosing to die far away from his family. Whether it is Goodman Brown, Chillingworth, or the likes of the Glasgow bombers, all willingly give in to fear and spread an aura of horror and terror because of their innate loss of faith in communal love. While Goodman Brown and Chillingworth facilitate the process of imagining horror and terror whilst living with their own distress, the Glasgow bombers enacted it to a practically appalling crescendo. The results are however the same: while Goodman Brown and Chillingworth smoulder in a fire of horror and set ablaze the entire scenario with terror all throughout their conscious lives, so too it became apparent in the outrageously disgruntling outburst of the Glasgow bombers recently. Apart from personal anguish, their psychosomatic status leads them to ruthlessly generate a more devastating incidence of terror and torment for the society they patronised. Such individuals not only put at stake their own existence, but also jeopardise the survival of others. Hence, in order to combat horror and terror, there is a stringent need for a globalised effort to establish a debate as to whether castigation or compassion is appropriate for those wallowing in fear and consequently generating horror and terror that engulfs not only their innate selves, but also the intimate community that had sustained them all along! Hawthorne initiated the premise, it is time now we reach out and enact a feasible solution.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

6

N Bunge, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Study of the Short Fiction, New York: Twayne, 1993, p. 13. J K Hale, The Serpentine Staff in ‘Young Goodman Brown’ Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, 19 (Fall 1993), p. 18. N Hawthorne, ‘Young Goodman Brown’ 1835, The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Ed. Paul Lauter et al., 2nd ed., Vol. 1, Lexington: Heath, 1944, p. 2131. ibid., p. 2136 C D Morris, ‘Deconstructing ‘Young Goodman Brown.’’ American Trancendental Quarterly 2 (March 1988), p. 33. N Hawthorne, op. cit., p. 2139

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______________________________________________________________ 7 8 9

10 11 12 13

14 15

16

17 18

19

20

21 22 23 24 25

26

27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34

N Hawthorne, op. cit., p. 2137 N Hawthorne, op. cit., p. 2138 C D Johnson, The Productive Tension of Hawthorne’s Art, University of Alabama P, 1981, p. 35 N Hawthorne, op. cit., p. 2133-34 N Hawthorne, op. cit., p. 2137. N Hawthorne, op. cit., p. 2132. L Ziff, Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America, New York: Viking Press, 1981, p. 140. N Hawthorne, op. cit., p. 2135 H S Canby, Classic Americans: A Study of Eminent American Writers from Irving to Whitman, New York: Russell and Russell, 1939, p. 236 D Abel, Moral Picturesque: Studies in Hawthorne’s Fiction, Indiana: Purdue UP, 1988, p. 133. C Mather, ‘A Discourse on Witchcraft’ Levin, p. 97. Frank Shuffelton, ‘Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Revival Movement’ The American Transcendental Quarterly 44 (Fall 1979): 311-321, p. 319. L B Levy, ‘The Problem of Faith in ‘Young Goodman Brown.’’ Modern Critcial Views: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ed. Harold Bloom, New York: Chelsea House, 1986, p. 117. R H Fogle, Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Light and the Dark, Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1952, p. 15. ibid., p. 54. ibid., p. 17. Abel, op. cit., p. 130. Levy, op. cit., p. 124. J M Ferguson, ‘Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown’ Explicator 28 (Dec 1969): Item 32, p. 45. C D Johnson, The Productive Tension of Hawthorne’s Art, University of Alabama P, 1981, p. 25. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, A Romance. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1850, p. 76. ibid., p. 81. ibid., p. 78. ibid., p. 109. ibid., p. 129. ibid., p. 103. ibid., p. 211. ibid., p. 235.

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Bibliography Primary Sources Hawthorne, N. ‘Young Goodman Brown.’ 1835. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter et al. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. Lexington: Heath, 1944, pp. 2129-38. Hawthorne, N. The Scarlet Letter, A Romance. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1850 Secondary Sources Abel, D. The Moral Picturesque: Studies in Hawthorne’s Fiction. Indiana: Purdue UP, 1988. Baym, N. The Scarlet Letter: A Reading. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Benoit, R. ‘‘Young Goodman Brown’: The Second Time Around.’ The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 19 (Spring 1993): 18-21. Bunge, N. Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Canby, H. S. Classic Americans: A Study of Eminent American Writers from Irving to Whitman. New York: Russell and Russell, 1939 Ferguson, J. M., Jr. ‘Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown.’ Explicator 28 (Dec. 1969): Item 32. Fogle, R. H. Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Light and the Dark. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1952. Franklin, B V. ‘Goodman Brown and the Puritan Catechism.’ ESQ 40 (1994): 67-88. Hale, J K. The Serpentine Staff in ‘Young Goodman Brown.’ Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 19 (Fall 1993), pp. 17-18. Johnson, C D. The Productive Tension of Hawthorne’s Art. University of Alabama P, 1981. Keil, J C. ‘Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown’: Early NineteenthCentury and Puritan Constructions of Gender.’’ The New England Quarterly 69 (March 1996), pp. 33-55. Levy, L. B. ‘The Problem of Faith in ‘Young Goodman Brown.’’ Modern Critcial Views: Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 115-126. Mather, C. ‘A Discourse on Witchcraft.’ Levin, pp. 96-105. Morris, Christopher D. ‘Deconstructing ‘Young Goodman Brown.’’ American Trancendental Quarterly 2 (March 1988): 23-33. Murfin, R. C. ‘Introduction: The Biographical and Historical Background.’ Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism: Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘The Scarlet Letter.’ Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1991, pp. 3-18.

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______________________________________________________________ Shuffelton, Frank. ‘Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Revival Movement.’ The American Transcendental Quarterly 44 (Fall 1979): 311-321. Ziff, L. Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America. New York: Viking Press, 1981.

Dr Naela Danish is an Associate Professor specialising in Modern Criticism and Post Modern Trends of Literary Craft. She has published numerous papers on related topics.

The Destruction of the Hero: An Examination of the Hero’s Purpose in Lovecraft’s Works James L. Aevermann Abstract Fear has always been a fascinating topic for humankind, and to study fear without looking to the master of the subject is to leave a rather large hole in the dialectic of fear, horror, and terror. The master of the weird, H. P. Lovecraft, has been known to have a somewhat dim view of humanity, but his stories may yet offer insight into our lives and our societies even so long after their inception. One common element that must be taken into account is Lovecraft’s treatment of the heroes in his stories. Taking a view of the hero that is in contradiction to the stereotypical, or generally accepted, protagonist, we find that readers are left feeling vulnerable and uncomfortable with reading stories such as Lovecraft’s. An explanation of this occurrence, and the reasoning behind such writings, must be explained. Keywords: Cthulhu, R’yleh, mythos, monomyth ***** There will always be a part of us that fears the dark corner in the back of our closets. We will always have this eerie feeling of someone watching us from some unseen location, and making our skin crawl and our hair stand on end. Is this simply a massively spread out fear that has been built into all of us, or is there something greater at work making this fear more than irrational. Lovecraft, a true genius of horror, sees deeper into this human condition of fear and uses this against us to create a lasting impression upon our minds and our culture. The hero in any story serves as a very important focal character from which we, the readers, may gain an insight into the world around us and humanity in general. However, there is a darker view of the hero which leaves us questioning humanity and our purpose in this world far more than giving any answers. Lovecraft’s works are such stories in which the hero, instead of achieving the goal and being lauded for it, becomes utterly destroyed by the fulfilment of his task. This impending doom has fascinated people, and has caused fear in all of us as we continue to read his works long after his death. Lovecraft’s works have spawned a multitude of cult classics and literary hysteria since its appearance in the late 1920’s. The perseverance of the Lovecraftian lore since his death may point to an underlying truth about

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______________________________________________________________ human nature, and what draws us to the darker side of literature. One of the common elements in Lovecraft’s mythos is the destruction of the hero. Throughout the course of this paper, we will examine the role of the hero in Lovecraftian horror in contrast to the stereotypical, proper hero of Joseph Campbell. This comparison will show not only what an anti-humanist view of the hero can do for the horror genre, but also what causes people to be drawn to this bleak outlook on human nature. We will also discuss the methods of creating fear through skilful manipulation of the hero, and how that fear manipulates our outlook on life as readers. One may, by this point, question what exactly the mythos is, and how it has pervaded our society if it has at all. How is it that this mythological niche is a part of us without us knowing what it is? As something that is quite subtle, one may not realize how much the legends have affected us and how they surround us without our knowledge, and only become truly noticeable when we look hard and long for them. The Call of Cthulhu, a short story originally written in 1926, tells the story of a young man, Francis Wayland Thurston, who attempts to put together the pieces of a puzzle left behind in the form of letters and newspaper clippings by his late grand-uncle, Professor George Angell. From the mysterious box of documents, he finds a world of nightmares and mysterious alien imagery. The story itself is told in three segments, making it much like three scenes which the narrator moves through. The first scene serves as a gateway through which Thurston is drawn into the mythos through the reading of his great-uncle’s notes on the recorded dreams of a sculptor. The second scene reveals more of what Professor Angell has discovered in the way of Cthulhu and the cultists’ intentions through the eyes of Inspector Legrasse. The third and final scene of the story has Thurston follow the clues from a newspaper article to New Zealand where the manuscript of a shipwreck survivor detailed an actual account of the appearance of Cthulhu himself, followed by a pessimistic ending of Thurston foreshadowing his own doom. Throughout the story, Cthulhu is described as a grotesque mixture of creatures in a bizarre chimerical combination. Much as a gryphon is a cross between a hawk, a lion, and a camel, so is Cthulhu a combination of an octopus, a man, and a dragon. It is described in the story in the following manner: If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly

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______________________________________________________________ body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.1 What this shows is a wildly imaginative description of a horrible beast that is as much beyond description as its name is difficult to explain. Cthulhu is, above all other things, an evil demigod of sorts, sleeping until the day the stars are right and he is brought to life again. He is said to be sleeping in the lost city of R’yleh, far beneath the sea. He does make a rather amazing appearance towards the end of the novella when the Norwegian sailors accidentally come across the forsaken city and awaken the sleeping god. He kills all but one, and it is only luck which saves him, for he flees in his steamship as the island sinks beneath the sea, once again putting Cthulhu to sleep. With these understandings of the dark world of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, we may move on to understand more of the purpose behind these stories. Lovecraft purposely instils fear into his readers through the dark imagery and the bleak outlook on life and humanity in general. If Shakespeare is said to have been a genius in consideration of the human condition of betrayal and social interactions, Lovecraft is his counterpart for the realm of the dark fears and loathing that we all have deep within our own hearts. Lovecraft wrote his stories very much like a parody or perversion of the typical mythic cycle. Even simply calling it the Cthulhu Mythos is akin to announcing that these are the darkest, bleakest collection of myths that man has yet to offer. These can be seen through comparison to Joseph Campbell’s definition of what a hero is. According to Campbell, there is an element of mysticism called the monomyth. This monomyth is the central peak of any heroic myth, for as Lowell explained it, “In the monomyth, a herald calls a hero into a realm of myth and the unconscious where he confronts various tribulations and emerges with a boon for his fellow men.”2 This is somewhat far removed from what Lovecraft has in store for his heroes at the culmination of his stories. Take the story The Music of Erich Zann for example. That particular story ends with the hero being destroyed. Lovecraft wrote: And then, by some miracle finding the door and the large wooden bolt, I plunged wildly away from that glassy-eyed thing in the dark, and from the ghoulish howling of that accursed viol whose fury increased even as I plunged.3

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______________________________________________________________ This is in direct contradiction to Campbell, who argues that the hero is one who benefits in the end. He wrote that: The […] monomyth requires that the hero shall now begin the labour of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleeces, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may rebound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds.4 This concept of the monomyth culminating in a benefit of the general populace for whom the hero is venturing is a common occurrence in storytelling going as far back as the Greek epics. For Lovecraft to destroy his characters in such an utter, and ultimately unimportant, way, represents a reflection of his true view of humanity. Though many do not wish to see it as thus, Lovecraft was in fact quite anti-humanistic. His stories reflect this in their bleakness, not only in language and imagery, but in the way the heroes were obliterated as shown in the previous example. Price once wrote about Lovecraft’s outlook on humanity as being quite pessimistic, “Lovecraft scoffed at the notion that humankind is central in the scheme of things. … He considered humanity no more important in the big picture than the vanished pterodactyl.”5 Such an outlook is indeed depressing, and it is no small wonder that people still think of and read his works, but it may be due to the fact that humanity is by nature self-destructive. Perhaps that is why Lovecraft’s stories appeal to the audience as it does, for with our own self-destructive nature, we gravitate towards those stories in which we can see humanity’s, and our own, downfall without so much as hurting a hair on our heads. One may consider that through manipulation of the hero, Lovecraft was in fact also manipulating us as readers. He creates a fear in us through the destruction of the hero. In the deepest corners of our minds, human beings desire to experience situations and feelings without having to go through the actual experience themselves. Human beings are curious about death and destructions, yet wish to steer clear of death and destruction themselves. Lovecraft toys with our inner curiosity of these subjects by showing us what can become of us in the fantastical yet horrific stories that he creates. Knowing how Lovecraft used our own human condition to create fears in us that are as compelling as they seem real, we may in turn use the same knowledge to create and manipulate fears in our readers, for those who are writers ourselves. It seems simple enough to take one fear and attempt to superimpose that fear onto others, but it takes more than that to create a

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______________________________________________________________ lasting impression. To create something that lasts beyond the story, and even our own generation, the fear must be something universal, and that all people can relate to. It may seem strange that this is being put forth as the proper way to create fear when Lovecraft’s stories revolve so much around a completely made up town located somewhere in the U.S., but his works reach back to the primal fears of our ancestors. When every sound was a potential predator, and every shadow had the potential to be hiding a lurking creature, fears become more instinctual than is reasonable. Because of these constant fears, people have had need of stories in which the good triumphs over the evil in the shadows. Lovecraft, however, takes these stories and our own hopes and utterly dashes them by creating this anti-heroic myth. This in turn has serious repercussions on the readers’ outlooks on life. If the reader were to seriously consider these anti-heroic stories as the way things in life really are, then they too may turn out to be extremely pessimistic and an anti-humanist just as Lovecraft was. But, for all his skilful manipulation of the hero and the readers, Lovecraft was not out to create a cult nation of pessimistic anti-humanistic peoples. Instead, this alternative to the heroic myth is just that, the other side of the mirror in which good does not always triumph, and reaching the ultimate goal is not always the best thing that could happen. By presenting readers with an alternative to the highly formulaic monomyth set forth by Campbell, Lovecraft is balancing the equation, if you will. He is teaching readers, by showing them the “other side,” what the world would be like if things were completely different and goals were not something that people desired to be reached. Alternately, Lovecraft could have simply been showing his readers what that close encounter with the world beyond the shadows is like. One must remember that though everyone will face death, it is something that we will only have one opportunity to face. Lovecraft, through his writings, gives us a taste for death and destruction, in the most macabre way that his mind could think of. In many ways, Lovecraft lives on as a literary genius and a master of the weird. His works have left a lasting impression on humanity, no matter what his thoughts on them, and have permeated into our culture almost to the point of subconsciously becoming our mainstream. Though Lovecraft may have been anti-humanistic as Price once wrote of him, this does nothing to diminish his knowledge of the human condition. If anything, his pessimistic outlook serves only to further strengthen his position as a leader in the gothic horror genre of writing. His works have influenced countless artists through the decades, and will continue to do so for as long as there are people on this earth. Until the day that Cthulhu rises out of R’yleh, Lovecraft will have the dominance in our nightmares.

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Notes 1

2 3 4 5

H P Lovecraft, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ in S.T. Joshi (ed), More Annotated H P Lovecraft, Dell, New York, 1999, p177 M Lowell, ‘Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos’, Explicator, vol. 63, issue 1, Fall 2004, p 48. H P Lovecraft, ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ in S.T. Joshi (ed), The Dunwich Horror and Others, Arkham House, Sauk City, 1984, p91. J Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1968, p193. R Price, ‘H.P. Lovecraft: Prophet of Humanism’. The Humanist, vol. 61, issue 4, 2001, p 4.

Bibliography Campbell, J., The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1968. Lovecraft, H.P., ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ in S.T. Joshi (ed), More Annotated H.P. Lovecraft. Dell, New York, 1999. Lovecraft, H.P., ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ in S.T. Joshi (ed), The Dunwich Horror and Others, Arkham House, Sauk City, 1984. Lowell, M., ’Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos’. Explicator, vol. 63 issue 1, Fall 2004, pp. 47-50. Price, R., ‘H.P. Lovecraft: Prophet of Humanism’. The Humanist, vol. 61, issue 4, 2001, pp. 2-27.

Terror and the Gothic Sublime: Presenting the Unrepresentable Maria Beville Abstract This paper analyses terror in relation to the philosophical strands of the sublime in Gothic fiction. Emphasising the role of terror in Gothic aesthetics, and in fulfilling the obligation to the ‘unrepresentable’, I will consider a number of Gothic texts from different historical and social contexts (namely, the early and late nineteenth century, modernism and postmodernism) to analyse whether similar events in the evolution of culture have contributed to the re-emergence of terror in literature as a particularly Gothic expression of the fear and angst that plagued society as it developed toward capitalism and globalisation. The Gothic in many respects may be regarded as a discursive site for various aspects of dislocated subjectivity. In its dealings with these arguably unrepresentable attributes of being, terror has been the primary power of the Gothic; a liminal state that problematises concepts of self, reality and the nature of existence. This quality of terror has been underlined as sublime by philosophers from Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke to Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. This paper will sketch out how this range of philosophical approaches to terror has been presented to us in Gothic fiction. The focus of textual analysis will be on the Gothic concern with arousing transcendental aspects of the imagination and the sublime effect of ‘genuine heterogeneity’, with reference to Jean Francois Lyotard, on the subject. Brief studies of terror in works such as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses will offer a perspective on the history of the philosophy of terror as it has been expressed in literature as a means of exploring those aspects of being that remain mysteriously unknowable and unrepresentable in art. Keywords: Gothic; postmodernism

sublime;

terror;

unrepresentable;

subjectivity;

***** Terror has been the primary occupation of Gothic literature since it first emerged in the turbulent years of the eighteenth century as an exorsive force; as a sublime element in fiction which allowed for the expansion of subjectivity through a play of fear and fascination on the imagination. Terror

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Terror and the Gothic Sublime: Presenting the Unrepresentable

______________________________________________________________ is a term that has acquired a new significance as a commodity of political discourse in recent times. However, with reference to the Gothic, it should be understood in the most basic sense: as a personal experience. To be terrified, is to be in a state of hesitation or suspension, as terror merely hints at unimaginable horrors and the mind is left to wander, while it waits to uncover what will happen next. It can be considered then as an experience that effects an altered and arguably sublime state of consciousness, one in which a narrowed focus allows us to absorb fundamental aspects of our being; those which arguably are unknowable in our ordinary subjective frames of reference. Jean Francois Lyotard’s theory of ‘the unrepresentable’ is central to this approach to terror as it establishes the concept that an encounter with the unrepresentable or unimaginable results in the interruption of subjective action and a split between rationality and imagination.1 The condition according to Lyotard is sublime, one of exultation/terror, or in terms of Kantian philosophy: ‘pleasure displeasure’. Kant’s analytic of the sublime is the basis for Lyotard’s theory and accounts for the situation in terms of ‘negative pleasure’. When the subject has this sublime experience, it is one of simultaneous ‘terror’ at the loss of ‘time moving’ and ‘exultation’ at the comprehension of the ‘finite’. The feelings are the result of a conflict of reason as it comprehends the sublime and imagination as it fails to ‘re-present it’.2 Lyotard was one of the first theorists to link this experience to postmodern culture when he said: The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience. Under the general demand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the realisation of the fantasy to seize reality.3 What the self can know, how the self knows, and what it can be through its own imaginary existence is essentially the driving force behind postmodernism. Lyotard states that the sublime has the effect of “genuine heterogeneity on the subject”.4 This proposes that an innate incommensurability lies at the heart of sublime experience in the form of “the naked convulsions of differends”5 and that through these differends one has the potential to exist for a moment beyond the perceived homogeneity that governs our acceptance of the imposed realities that dominate our subjectivity. This acknowledges the sublime as significant not for its infinite

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______________________________________________________________ or transcendental qualities which were valued by Kant, but for its subjective and self-realising properties, as Ross Abbinnet expresses it, for its “extension of the domain of the perceptible”.6 In the 18th century, Edmund Burke and Anne Radcliffe made similar comments on the nature of terror and the sublime. Writing in 1757, Edmund Burke claimed in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful that: ‘terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime’ and went on to add that: …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.7 In his treatise he also notes that for terror, the Romans used the verb stupeo, a term which in his opinion “strongly marks the state of an astonished mind”.8 Significantly, terror in relation to astonishment is apprehended by Burke as a state of suspension of the self in which the mind is completely occupied by the object of terror, the imagination is in a state of excitement and cannot comprehend with reason anything beyond that object. In relation to the cause of sublime terror he states: “I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure”; his reason being that “it is considered as an emissary of this king of terrors” [death].9 In this we see that negative experiences are more powerful than positive, an idea that Immanuel Levinas would later explore in relation to experiences of ennui, anxiety and insomnia. There is also one other factor that Burke deems as essential to the experience of sublimity and that is obscurity, noting how experiences of terror are more intense during the nighttime hours and when veiled by darkness. This suggests that the sublime experience of terror is one of heightened experience and imagination, one in which cognitive reason and objectivity are neglected in favour of fantasy and desire. Literary history has revealed that Burke’s perspective of the sublime is one of the most fundamental philosophies underpinning Gothic aesthetics. It has therefore had a remarkable impact on the ‘original’ Gothic, and its orientation toward the dark side of human experience. What is notable in terms of this paper is that the Gothic as it evolved retained this preoccupation with sublime terror and its relationship to the unrepresentable. In her critical writing, notably in On the Supernatural in Poetry, ‘mother of the Gothic’: terror writer Anne Radcliffe notes that terror, unlike horror, bears only a

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Terror and the Gothic Sublime: Presenting the Unrepresentable

______________________________________________________________ suggestion of the grotesque. It therefore stimulates the imagination, causing simultaneous fear and fascination. It is, according to Radcliffe a route to sublime experience for this reason and should be taken as the prime focus of Gothic narrative.10 Radcliffe, of course, led by subtle example in works such as The Mysteries of Udolpho and A Sicilian Romance and her approach to the role of literature in the evocation of feelings of ‘pity and terror’ is clearly inspired by Burke’s Of Words: But as to words; they seem to me to affect us in a manner very different from that in which we are affected by natural objects, or by painting or architecture; yet words have as considerable a share in exciting ideas of beauty and of the sublime.11 We can thus conclude that terror, from the very earliest stages of philosophical and literary analysis, was regarded as sublime: unique, timeless and unquantifiable. It was regarded as a totalising experience in which one could encounter self in its most basic of ‘knowable’ forms through imagination; and the most profound subject matter for avante garde literature. In our postmodern world the real has become something of a marginalised concept. In this context, the writings of Emmanuel Levinas have a particular relevance to my perspective on terror and postmodernity. Levinas in his critique of ontology, Existence and Existents, does not write directly about terror, but his ideas on ‘becoming’ are nonetheless extremely relevant. His approach to ‘being’ is one of his most transparent moments of thought. Essentially, he sees that the self can determine itself to be what it wills. It has the potential to dominate ‘reality’12. In his work, to achieve this perspective, he focuses on a condition that he terms Il y a, or ‘there is’. This meant attempting to imagine non-existence, for when we try to imagine nothing, the result is always something. This something is Il y a: pure existence, and in a way this could be regarded as an explanation of ‘the unimaginable’ or unrepresentable, in Kantian and Lyotardian terms. Importantly, this process of experiencing Il y a is for Levinas only possible during states of experience defined by hesitation. Ennui, insomnia and significantly, terror are typically postmodern examples of this, with particular relevance to the Gothic when we consider how David Punter notes that in Gothic fiction, “[t]error has more to do with trembling, the liminal, the sense of waiting so fully adumbrated by Blanchot and by Beckett”.13 Jean Baudrillard, in his analysis of postmodernity as hyper-real existence in which simulation eclipses reality in a system of reproductive representation leading to a collapse of the binary of ‘real’ and imaginary,

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______________________________________________________________ brought terror to my attention as central to the postmodernist enterprise. Interestingly, his discourse of terror, akin to that of Jacques Derrida, draws heavily on Marx’s concept of the ‘spectre’ that haunts the Western world. In Baudrillard’s words ‘the spirit’ of terrorism inhabits us all. Linked to Lyotard’s ideas, there is a suggestion in his essay that we crave terror for its realizing capabilities. Terror, in presenting symbolic death as an ‘absolute’ event, as in the September 11th attacks, provokes a ‘virulent excess’ of reality. Its symbolic nature is more powerful than any ‘knowable’ reality as it can generate singularity - what Lyotard inversely termed ‘genuine heterogeneity’. As we all desire the self-destruction of the global hegemony of capitalism and the restoration of the real, we all ‘crave’ terror as a route to elusive truth and validation of the self and of the world. Interestingly, it is as a route to self and reality that the terror of the Gothic novel primarily relates. It functions in a way to resurrect the real and the fictional in that sublime, supernatural moment when binary ideologies are destabilised and we are confronted with the unrepresentable. In this way the reader of the Gothic can be seen as reviving within themselves what Baudrillard referred to as the “terroristic imagination [that] dwells in all of us”14, that same sublime faculty that Anne Radcliffe spoke of in her treatise on terror. Significantly, according to Baudrillard, this spirit is “all about death… a death that is far more than real: a death which is symbolic and sacrificial – the absolute, irrevocable event”15, and in line with this theory, Devendra Varma’s observation that the Gothic “from the surface of life, point[s] towards the darker, latent powers of creation and fertilised life from the newness of death, ghastliness and the mysterious unknown”16 is particularly poignant. Death, identified in Burke’s early writing as “the King of terrors”17 (and by Freud as the unimaginable) and the paraphernalia of death, are a focus in the Gothic, for the expression of that terror that haunts our collective unconscious as part of our culture of fear. In Gothic literature, the most common manifestations of this terror of death are the ghosts or spectres that haunt, for example, the eerie passages of T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land, which quite openly portrays the idea of the metropolis of death. Eliot’s characters are presented as part of the indeterminate existence that is being lost in language, present in that they are inscribed through the vague mutterings that make up the poem but effectively ‘dead’ as they do not appear to exercise free will and seem to be summoned by Madame Sesostris, the clairvoyant of the text. They occupy a sort of liminal, purgatorial existence and the modern reality which they linger on the borders of is comparable to Dante’s mythological hell. In a postmodern context, the culture of fear from which such ghosts emerge is arguably fuelled by the spirit of terror which is the manifestation of our subjective desire for its return and for discourse to open unto the darker side of our known ‘realities’.

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Terror and the Gothic Sublime: Presenting the Unrepresentable

______________________________________________________________ The Gothic in principle alludes to the unimaginable; the ‘unrepresentable’ through terror. It too is embodied by a spirit of terror that seeks to achieve the dismantling of the modernist and realist enterprises. In line with Baudrillard’s theories, the sublime aspects of terror explored in Gothic texts have the effect of giving us readers a sense of our own reality through the creation of the symbolic event of terror. To quote from Burke again, terror “is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling”18, and the popularity of Gothic works can thus be accounted for. In a secular world where the transcendent is marginalised in favour of the material, terror is the new creed of a new hyper-real generation. In Baudrillard’s view it is everywhere as the object of desire. It is no wonder then that Jerold Hogle sees the Gothic has having ‘saturated’ modern culture.19 Gothic literature has always been aware of its artistic obligation to the unrepresentable and as a protean genre it has since its beginnings consistently appropriated itself to contemporary thought and culture through its redefinitions of terror. In the late 19th century the genre took a significant turn and began to grow less identifiable as literary conventions were adapted and developed. The growing interest and awareness of the human psyche at this time became the fulcrum for literary exploration in many Gothic works such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. The fin de siecle presented a world that was diminishing in terms of reality and meaning. The Gothic, with its focus on the blurring of distinction between reality and fiction via use of the supernatural and sublime terror, thus became the perfect outlet for critiquing the age and its effects on the individual, through literature. The Picture of Dorian Gray offers an example of how the Gothic sublime presents the unrepresentable through the evocation of terror. The Gothic concept of internalised evil and the horror of the duplicity of the self and reality was in general the prime focus for the creation of terror in literature of this period. Oscar Wilde’s character Lord Henry Whotton makes an interesting claim early in the novel when he says: “[t]he reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are afraid of ourselves.20 That ‘the basis of optimism is sheer terror”21, identifies a significant psychoanalytic viewpoint which extends to Wilde’s analysis of society, one that has always been central to Gothic literary exploration, and that is fear of the self as a created entity, in this case, created and shaped by oppressive society. This is clearly an echo of Lacan’s theory that the self is a fictional construct, shaped by an optimistic ‘phantasy’ of unification and autonomy that can never achieve fulfilment.22 We might consider the nightmare of fragmentation as summarized in Wilde’s image of the terror of “Caliban seeing his own face in a glass”.23 Dorian’s encounter with a painted image of self (the product of an ‘other’) is a self that is terrifyingly, a fictional construct, not just of the

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______________________________________________________________ subject but of external and possibly supernatural creative forces. This fits quite well with Lacanian analysis, even more so when it is revealed that the painting, following supernatural transformation mysteriously becomes “some foul parody”24 and that later in the text the painting is interpreted by Dorian as representing the ‘true face of my soul’, which coincidentally “has the eyes of a devil”.25 This Gothic take on subjectivity presents Dorian haunted by the brittle fiction of his own ego to the point of self-destruction and the painting as an effective representation of the unrepresentable, true knowledge of the fragmented nature of the self which is terrifying in its degeneration. David Punter, who has written extensively on the Gothic as the literature of terror, has put forward the question: is it possible for a text to terrorise? And when discussing the particular terrorism of the Gothic novel, suggests that “we misrecognise the operational space of Gothic/Terror literature”; that in this space, terror literature delivers the ‘real world’ “in inverted form” often representing “those areas of the world and of consciousness which are, for one reason or another, not available to the normal process of representation”.26 In dealing with terror, he says: the “Gothic deals with the unadmitted”.27 In agreement with Stephen Bruhm, that the Gothic is “the voice for the event that cannot be spoken”.28 With the emergence of modernism, almost as a direct response to the writings of Saussure, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the Gothic began to explore the terror that haunted modernist writers such as Eliot and Woolf, namely: the terror in the vacuum of subjective representation in an alienating world of language where all reality and meaning has been dissolved. The problem with language for Eliot was “that you can say anything… there is… enormous possibility… [but you] can’t state meaning”.29 In a sense, we can view Eliot’s use of reference and allusion, particularly in The Waste Land as a metapoetical technique evincing a concern with a breakdown in speech in Derridean terms where language is deconstructed in order to relieve the “speaker’s ‘terror’ [which] is that he can’t escape from the maze of this fallen language”.30 This terror is one in which identity cannot be sustained and Eliot demonstrates this in the voices and perspectives that constantly shift in the form of a disoriented and incessantly mutating protagonist, the modern man of the modern waste land. A succession of hauntings provides the basic structure for the poem, hauntings that the reader cannot evade because of the disturbed and jumbled way in which the ghostly voices speak over each other trying to give account of their lives in the unreal city of London. We don’t know who these voices belong to or from where they are spoken. They are among other ghosts present in name only: Queen Elizabeth I and her lover; a young girl named Marie; a drowned Phoenician sailor, and their utterances are reduced eventually to a Beckettian murmuring, much like the nightingale whose once invigorating song is reduced to: ‘Twit twit twit/ Jug jug jug jug jug jug’. But a reader can experience through the hallucinogenic passages, the

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______________________________________________________________ true terror of Eliot’s allusions: Dante’s Inferno; ritual sacrifice; apocalyptic biblical scenes; rape and drowning all draw on a central theme: the inability to be truly alive without an understanding of the nature of our existence in the world of language. Speech is transcended: “I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing”31, silence prevails, and the reader must look beyond it to the Gothic realm of occult presence in order to interpret our ‘selves’ and the terror of the modern condition. According to Davis Morris’s analysis of Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream, “a scream is the original and recurrent language of terror”.32 It is expressive of the un-sayable, the unrepresentable; the sublime terror that can only be understood by the subject on an abstract and non-verbal linguistic level. Morris notes in the same essay with reference to Lacan and Zizek that “[t]he potential terror of what lies outside of language – not simply reserved in silence but incapable of speech – is among the most troubling and crucial contributions which Gothic novels bring to the sublime on its journey from emotion to interpretation”.33 The terror that existence is, in and through language, essentially limiting, absurd and chaotic, as expressed in Eliot, is therefore easily recognizable as Gothic and sublime. Angela Carter made the comment that we live in “Gothic times”34, and one could go so far as to say that nowadays we all openly display a demand for terror. As Johnathan Lake Crane put it in his book on terror and horror in film: Terror and Everyday Life: “living in violent times has not diminished our taste for blood”35, and this he says, is far more frightening than even the most brutal on-screen assault. Baudrillard, Lyotard and Derrida have all argued that our postmodern condition has ultimately caused a shift in the nature of our collective imagination, a shift toward and enigmatically oriented by terror, and so, it is not surprising that an art-form functions to fulfil our needs. Although many critics would disagree, the Gothic has come to be, not less, but more intense, and functions today as an intrinsic force behind the expression of our postmodern concepts of life in literature through the excitement and expression of terror and the unrepresentable. In modern times, belief in wholeness and finity has resulted in terrifying realities. Fascism, genocide in the name of liberal democracy and nuclear threats have effectively ‘given us as much terror as we can take’. With Baudrillard’s theories in mind we now, in the postmodern age, crave the destruction of ‘the whole’ (Western culture as it presents itself) and the reinstatement of ‘pure heterogeneity’, that sublime effect of the unrepresentable, recognisable in feelings of terror and exultation. This sublime experience, achieved in and through terror is what defines the Gothic text and also the Gothic-postmodernist text. Interestingly, in some cases sublime terror becomes self-reflexive; a tool for exploring concepts of terror in postmodern society and culture. This is a situation that is quite evident in Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses where the terror

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______________________________________________________________ of terrorism and racism becomes the source of the sublime realisation of self and identity in the disillusioning context of postcolonial Britain. Notably, in Rushdie’s novel it is an experience of terror during his captivity on a plane hi-jacked by terrorists that gives Gibreel Farishta a sense of his ‘transcendental’ self as the angel Gibreel and a new vision of reality as apocalypse. Similarly for Saladin Chamcha, a new vision of self, a demonised one, emerges from his experience of immigrant life in London, and his vision as the novel unfolds becomes one of duality, deconstructive of binaries such as good and evil, that struggles against homogenising representations of the world. For this reason the novel is considered as a postcolonialist text, often by overlooking that though a very complex postmodernist work, it concerns itself with a traditional Gothic terror, that of losing the self to some unknown external force. David Punter in his extensive study of terror has observed that in the Gothic, the meanings of terror “hover undecidedly between the psychological and the political – between the sense of autonomous self and of being deselfed by external forces”.36 This is demonstrated quite succinctly in the opening of Rushdie’s novel where we meet the pair of characters falling from the sky, waiting, terrified, for their impending death. It is in this moment, quite interestingly, that their metamorphosis occurs, that they enter into their new selves and to their surprise their waiting period continues when they find that miraculously they have somehow survived the fall. This initiates what Punter refers to as another central terror in Gothic literature: that “primal fear of being in a limitless flow… where all the defences around our sense of a central self are endangered”.37 This limitless flow is the centre of the Gibreel/ Saladin plot in the novel, in which we see the identities of the two characters disintegrate and intermingle with each other so that they become self and other to each other on the level of their metamorphosis. As a postmodernist work of terror, The Satanic Verses may be regarded as proof that contrary to statements made by Varma and Botting to the effect that the Gothic is dead, it is possible to reason that in a world that is today one of prolific linguistic or symbolic reality, the terror beyond the compass of words is apprehended in the Gothic in a subtle way and that the Gothic is very much alive. One might also claim that we do not need the paraphernalia of the Gothic as much today, as it is all around us. Our fascination with the Gothic text is entirely narcissistic and it has to do with terror. It is to do with explorations of self and reality and the terror of the end; with issues that we cannot know or directly represent. Possibly, for this reason, the novels can be even more frightening as they touch on those fears and anxieties that we cannot expel; that are intrinsic to our being and we are fascinated by them because they are sublimely terrifying

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Notes 1

J F Lyotard, The Lyotard Reader, edited by A. Benjamin. Blackwell, Oxford, 1991, p210. 2 I Kant, The Critique of Judgement, Transl. James Creed Meredith, 2004, Etext at: http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/k/kant/immanuel/k16j/ 3 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1986, p81- 82 4 Lyotard, The Lyotard Reader, edited by A. Benjamin. Blackwell, Oxford, 1991, p210. 5 Ibid. 6 R. Abbinnett, Culture and Identity: Critical Theories, Sage, London, 2003, p46. 7 E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into The Sublime And The Beautiful, Penguin, London, 1998, p86. 8 Burke, p101. 9 Burke, p 86. 10 A Radcliffe, On the Supernatural in Poetry, (1826). Extracts at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html 11 Burke, p187. 12 B C Hutcheon, Levinas: A Guide for the Perplexed, Continuum, London, 2004, p43. 13 D Punter, ‘Terror’, p236. 14 J Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, Transl. C Turner, Verso, London, 2002, p5. 15 Ibid p17. 16 D P Varma, The Gothic Flame. Being a History of the GOTHIC NOVEL in England: Its Origin, Efflorenscence, Disintegration and Residuary Influences, Arthur Barker ltd., London, 1957, p2. 17 Burke, p86. 18 Ibid. 19 J E Hogle, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, p287. 20 O Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Penguin, London, 1994, p88. 21 Ibid. 22 According to Lacan this fantasy begins at the mirror stage of subjective development: ‘The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation – and which manufactures for the subject… the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body image to a form of its totality’ J Lacan, Ecrits, A Selection, Transl. Alan Sheridan, Routledge, Bristol, 1995, p5.

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______________________________________________________________ 23 24 25 26

27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37

Wilde, p5. Wilde, p179. Wilde, p180. D Punter, The Literature of Terror Vol.2: The Modern Gothic, Longman, London, 1996, p15. Punter, The Literature of Terror Vol.2: The Modern Gothic, p18. Hogle, p271. M Edwards, Eliot/Language, Clarke, Graham (ed.) T.S Eliot: Critical Assessments. Vol I., Christopher Helm, London, 1990, p339. Edwards, p342. Eliot, pp38-41 D B Morris, Gothic Sublimity, New Literary History, 16:2, 1985, p313. Ibid. Hogle, p285. J Lake-Crane, Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History of the Horror Film, Sage, London, 1984, p3. Punter, Terror, p240. Ibid.

Bibliography Primary Baudrillard, Jean, The Spirit of Terrorism, Transl. Chris Turner, Verso, London, 2002. Baudrillard Jean, Symbolic Exchange and Death, Transl. Mike Hamilton Green, Sage, London, 1993. Beckett, Samuel, First Love and Other Novellas, Penguin, London, 2000. Beckett, Samuel, Trilogy. Molloy. Malone Dies. The Unnameable, Picador, London, 1979. Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry Into The Sublime And The Beautiful, Penguin, London, 1998. Carter, Angela, Fireworks, Virago Press, London, 2006. Derrida, Jacques, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, Transl. Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, London, 1994. Eliot, T S, ‘The Wasteland’, in Abrams. M. H, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th edition, Vol. 2, W.W Norton & Co., London, 1993. Freud, Sigmund, The Uncanny, Transl. David McLintock, Penguin, London, 2003. Kant, Immanuel, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?, 1784, Etext at: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/kant.html

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______________________________________________________________ Kant, Immanuel, The Critique of Judgement, Transl. James Creed Meredith, 2004, Etext at: http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/k/kant/immanuel/k16j/ Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits, A Selection, Transl. Alan Sheridan, Routledge, Bristol, 1995. Levinas, Emmanuel, Existence And Existents, Kluwer Academic Publishers, London, 1995. Lyotard, Jean, Francois, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 198285, University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, 1992. Lyotard, Jean, Francois, The Postmodern Condition, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1986. Radcliffe, Anne, On the Supernatural in Poetry (1826) Etext at: http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/Group/chris.terror.html Rushdie, Salman, The Satanic Verses, Picador, USA, 1998. Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Penguin, London, 1994. Wittgenstein, L, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, Routledge, London, 1992. Secondary Abbinnett, Ross, Culture and Identity: Critical Theories, Sage, London, 2003. Abrams. M. H, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th edition, Vol. 2, W.W Norton & Co., London, 1993. Allison, H. E, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, Yale University Press, London, 1983. Borradori, Giovanna, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2003. Botting, Fred, ‘Horror’, Mulvey-Roberts, Marie (ed.), The Handbook to Gothic Literature, Palgrave MacMillan, London, 1998. Botting, Fred, Gothic: The New Critical Idiom, Routledge, London, 1996. Botting, Fred, Making Monstrous: Frankenstein, Criticism, Theory, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1991. Dick, B.F, ‘The Waste Land as a Descent to the Underworld’ Brooker, J.S (ed.), Approaches to Teaching Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, Modern Language Association of America, New York, pp 108-114, 1988. Edwards, Michael, ‘Eliot/Language’, Clarke, Graham (ed), T.S Eliot: Critical Assessments. Vol II, Christopher Helm, London, 1990. Gelder, Ken, ‘Postcolonial Gothic’, Mulvey-Roberts. Marie (ed.), The Handbook to Gothic Literature, Palgrave MacMillan, London, 1998. Gelder, Ken (Ed.), The Horror Reader, Routledge, London, 2000. Hogle, Jerold, E, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002.

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______________________________________________________________ Horrocks, Chris & Jevtic, Zoran, Introducing Baudrillard, Icon Books Ltd., Cambridge, 1999. Hutcheon, B.C, Levinas: A Guide for the Perplexed, Continuum, London, 2004. King, Stephen, Danse Macabre, Warner, London, 2000. Lake-Crane, Jonathan, Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History of the Horror Film, Sage: London, 1994. Lyotard, Jean Francois, The Lyotard Reader, Benjamin. A (ed.), Blackwell, Oxford. 1991. McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction, Routledge, London, 1987. Mishra, Vijay, The Gothic Sublime, State University of New York Press: New York, 1994. Morris, David. B, ‘Gothic Sublimity’, New Literary History, 16:2. 1985. Punter, David, ‘Terror’, Mulvey-Roberts. Marie. (ed.) The Handbook to Gothic Literature, Palgrave MacMillan, London, 1998. Punter, David, The Literature of Terror Vol.2: The Modern Gothic, Longman, London, 1996. Scruton, Roger, Modern Philosophy: A Survey, Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 1994. Spooner, Catherine, Contemporary Gothic, Reaktion Books, London, 2006. Underwood, Tim & Chuck Miller (eds.), Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, New English Library, London, 1989. Varma, Devendra. P, The Gothic Flame. Being a History of the GOTHIC NOVEL in England: Its Origin, Efflorenscence, Disintegration and Residuary Influences, Arthur Barker ltd., London, 1957.

Maria Beville is a doctoral candidate and tutor at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. She is completing her thesis: Defining GothicPostmodernism: A Theoretical Approach to Contemporary Terror Literature.

Post-memory in Art Spiegelman’s Maus Siao-Jing Sun Abstract Art Spiegelman’s celebrated comic books, Maus, including the stories My Father bleeds History, and And Here My Troubles Began highlights the central role of the narrator, Artie, in telling his father’s survivor story. Artie, a second generation of Holocaust survivors, grows up under the shadows of his traumatised parents. Though Maus is entitled A Survivor’s Story, Maus actually depicts Artie’s post-memory of the Holocaust and his own trauma. Here ‘post-memory’ is adapted from Marianne Hirsh’s idea of ‘post-memory,’ which: characterises the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.1 As ‘visual narratives’ and ‘prose pictures,’ family photos, reveal concealed and unacknowledged relations between the viewers and the photography.2 Based on Roland Barthes’ theories of photos, Hirsh aims to look for the relationships beyond the familial pictures that compose one’s post-memory. By adopting Hirsh’s idea of post-memory, I intend to go back to Barthes’ ideas of ‘stadium’ and ‘punctum’ in Camera Lucida, and investigate two notions of the spectators’ post-memory in Maus: one is represented through the narrator, Artie, who has a direct relationship with the pictures he presents, and the other is the readers of Maus that perceive the memory indirectly through the narrator. Keywords: Holocaust, Maus, post-memory, punctum, stadium, trauma ***** In Camera Lucida, Barthes examines photos from the spectator’s point of view and suggests that he finds his mother’s essence in a photo of her as a five-year-old girl. What interests Barthes is the ‘duality’ within photography. Barthes defines duality as the co-presence of two elements; studium, and punctum.3 The functions of studium, Barthes states, are ‘to inform,’ ‘to surprise,’ ‘to signify,’ and ‘to waken desire.’4 Punctum, however, ‘breaks the studium’ and ‘pricks’ the spectator, suggests Barthes.5 Punctum

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______________________________________________________________ may be revealed in four situations: ‘partial details,’ ‘satori,’ ‘after-the-fact and silence,’ and ‘blind field,’ and he concludes in Part One of Camera Lucida that punctum “is a kind of subtly beyond”: it permits us to see a whole “being, body and soul together”.6 Punctum and studium, as Barthes states, are the features that exist in the pictures that interest him. He explains the functions and the locations of punctum and studium, and he also points out that by chance punctum and studium may co-exist in one photograph. Marianne Hirsh borrows Barthes’ ideas of punctum and studium and further interprets the relationship between the spectator and the photos. She points out that the referent of a photo is both “present (implied in the photograph) and absent (it has been there but is not here now)”.7 Thus, the referent “haunts the picture like a ghost”, asking “a return of lost and dead other”.8 The absence is the concealed relationships behind the photos. These unacknowledged relationships are the familial experiences that Barthes left unspoken: he did not explain how the punctum of his mother’s picture pricks him. What Barthes does do is to point out the functions and locations of punctum and studium and leaves the subtle relationships, the relationships behind the photographs, unsaid. Thus, when Hirsh looks at the familial pictures, she is searching for the subtle relationships that construct the ‘individual subject in the family’ and one’s family as a “culture and society in the visual field”.9 She points out that Maus that Spiegelman’s “delayed, indirect, secondary” memory is “post-memory”, for he lacks the understanding of an unspeakable history.10 Writing Maus is a process of rewriting his family’s history that breaks the ‘silence’ of his family’s photos.11 Moreover, it is also an act that rewrites his own history by tracing his origin and finding out his identity.12 Let us go back to Barthes’ punctum and studium again. These two features of photography can also be found in pictures, paintings, and comics. Thus, in Spiegelman’s comics, the spectators - the narrator and readers could find punctum and studium in the comics, and could further examine the subtle relationship behind them. From Artie’s point of view, by presenting his father’s memory, Artie begins to deal with the void of family history: the memory concealed in the family frames. Artie, a second generation Holocaust survivor, is traumatised by the post-memory - the past that happened beyond his memory. Growing up in a Holocaust family, Artie’s childhood was gloomy. Victoria A. Elmwood indicates that Maus begins with a young and confused Artie, who “grows up in the shadow of the Holocaust and for whom all experience withers in comparison to his father’s wartime trials”.13 Not every child would have parents that often impose their Holocaust experience on them. Artie, however, learns the bitter knowledge of true friendship from his father, Vladek, when only ten or eleven years old: Vladek said, “If you [Artie] lock them [Artie and his friends] together in a room with no food for a

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______________________________________________________________ week, then you could see what it is, friends!”14 Even though Artie denies that he is obsessed with and fears the Holocaust, Artie is apparently traumatised by the post-memory of it: he is “haunted by events to which he has no direct connection”.15 Artie explains to his wife, Françoise that he also has “nightmares about S.S. men” coming to his class and dragging all the Jewish students away.16 Traumatised by his post-memory, Artie has been through several breakdowns. In fact, even before his mother’s suicide, Artie had been sent to a psychiatric hospital for recuperation. Moreover, Artie confesses that he feels depressed when he is working on Maus.17 The sorrowful familial history causes Artie’s breakdowns. His depression is caused not only by his mother’s suicide and his father’s camp condition, but also by the ghastly competition with his dead brother, Richieu. As Michael E. Staub points out, Artie’s agony and guilt toward his mother’s death in the episode of Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History (fig. 1), Artie’s guilt is derived from refusing her the last time he saw her, and his agony that his mother left no notes, nor explained her motivation.18

Figure 1. From The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, ©1986 by Art Spiegelman, permission of The Wylie Agency.

With Spiegelman’s gloomy drawing techniques, this episode shows his mother’s confused mad eyes, his father’s exaggerated mournful outburst depicted by his jumping on the coffin, and his own traumatic imprisonment, crying “You murdered me. Mommy, and you left me here to take the rap!!!” (fig. 3).19 Without explaining her suicidal attempt, Artie’s mother murdered Artie’s ‘heart’ and threw him into the abyss: his heart becomes ‘numb.’ (fig. 2)20 In addition to numbness, Artie is thrown into confusion by his mother’s death. His mother has imprisoned him with melancholia. In Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, patients who suffer from ‘melancholia’, lose their self-respect and feel ashamed. Artie feels ashamed by his mother’s

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______________________________________________________________ death and “the guilt was overwhelming!” (fig. 3)21 Also, in front of his father’s friends, who attend the funeral, Artie loses his self-regard by agreeing with them that it is his fault that his mother kills herself(fig. 3).22 His mother’s suicide thus becomes one of the catalysts for Artie’s breakdown.

Figure 2. From The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, ©1986 by Art Spiegelman, permission of The Wylie Agency.

Figure 3. From The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, ©1986 by Art Spiegelman, permission of The Wylie Agency.

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______________________________________________________________ In addition to the example of ‘true friends,’ Vladek suffers from his camp experience: “in some ways he didn’t survive”.23 Unwillingly and unconsciously, Vladek keeps acting out his trauma, for even after the end of the Holocaust, he still lives in a camp, always dealing with people as if managing business as he did when he was in the camp: turning on the gas burner all day in order not to waste the rent, returning the unused groceries, that had been opened, to the store, and always finding ways to fix things himself to avoid paying someone. Vladek’s action apparently is caused by his past experience. According to Artie’s impression of Vladek, though Vladek might be a millionaire in reality, he lives as if he was poor. Even in the peace and comfortable land of United States, Vladek adopts his lifestyle in the camp. In the story, Richieu, Artie’s brother who perished in the Holocaust, is the ghost haunting Artie. The repressed does return: Richieu, though now only a snapshot hanging in Artie’s parents’ room, is a living person that repeatedly returns to the family and thus traumatises Artie. Richieu is living in Vladek’s and Anja’s hearts: For them, he never died. Because of this, Elmwood suggests that Artie blames Richieu for “block[ing] the work of forgetting”.24 There is no memory for Artie to erase as he shares no memories of Richieu. Moreover, Elmwood states that Richieu’s photo is the ‘site’ that embodies Artie’s “troubled relationship with his parents”.25 For Richieu and his parents, Artie is a complete ‘outsider’: Artie does not share ‘the crucial bond’ - the experience of the Holocaust. Artie thus is exiled from “the family order”.26 In this sense, Richieu is ‘alive’ not only in his parents’ memory, but also in his family’s present. In addition to being an outsider, Artie is forced to compete with his dead brother. To his parents, Richieu is ‘an ideal kid’ who “never threw tantrums or got in any kind of trouble”, and Artie is only “a pain in the ass”, who “couldn’t compete’ with his dead brother at all”.27 Artie imagines Richieu following his parents’ expectation to become a doctor or some other respectable career, and himself a rebel, a ‘useless’ artist, not ‘practical’ at all. Efraim Sicher also comments that indeed in Vladek’ eyes, Artie is incompetent and inferior. Compared to his father, who has been through the Holocaust, Artie confesses his ‘infantile incapacity.’28 On the one hand, Artie is “incompetent because he had not survived the Holocaust”.29 On the other hand, Artie could never replace Richieu, given that he “would never match up to what Richieu might have been”.30 In short, Artie is traumatised by the ghost of his brother. He feels agony and hostility toward his brother Artie blames his family for treating him as an outsider and as an inferior in his own family. Artie, bearing the burden of familial post-memory, is ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’ his trauma by rewriting his history, Maus. 31Feeling guilt and inferiority without the experiences of the Holocaust, and thus has ‘an easier life’ (fig. 4) than his parents did, Artie suffers melancholia.32

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Figure 4. From The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, ©1986 by Art Spiegelman, permission of The Wylie Agency.

Artie acts out his trauma as a rebellious child not following his parents’ expectation. Rebellion is the way that Artie fights against his fear of the Holocaust, to be more specific, the post-memory of the Holocaust. However, Artie’s rebellion does not help him work through his trauma. Only by accepting his trauma could Artie work through it. Cathy Caruth states that: what really matters is not the event itself, but the reception of the experience.33 Caruth further states that people who are traumatised need to pass on their experiences so as to pass on “the isolation imposed by the event”. There is a demand of the listeners, for ‘the history of a trauma, in its inherent belatedness, can only take place through the listening of another.’34 Thus, retelling his father’s story of survival allows Artie to accept his own trauma, not to resist it. By interviewing his father, Artie begins to communicate not only with his father but also with his own past. Through rewriting his father’s story, Artie composes his own history by tracing his familial origin and filling the lost memory of the Holocaust. Sicher indicates that the second generation of the Holocaust survivors are actually “telling the story of their own origins and identity, literally writing themselves into history through retelling their relatives’ stories”.35 Therefore, preserving testimony is so important for the second generation in order to find their ‘self-definition.’ That is why Artie is so furious when he finds out that his father “destroys’ his mother’s diary: He calls his father a ‘murderer’”, (fig. 5),36 who destroys not only his mother’s existence but also the “historical memory”.37

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Figure 5. From The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, ©1986 by Art Spiegelman, permission of The Wylie Agency.

The history of Anja, one of the most important parts of the memory for Artie, is lost forever. Vladek thus also murders one part of Artie’s history - as Sicher says “killing his[Artie’s] story”.38 Testimonies are important to the second generation as they fill in the blanks of the lost and unspoken history. In Artie’s case, he begins to deal with his trauma through making his own history and ‘self-definition’.39 He examines his relations with both his parents and ghost brother and tries to fill the void between them. Artie thus gradually accepts the burdens of post-memory and passes this legacy to the next generation, his children Nadja and Dashiell, by dedicating the second volume of Maus to them. Post-memory, interestingly, is not only passed on to the generations of Holocaust victims but also to the readers. As another kind of spectator, readers of Maus, also perceive punctum and studium from the pictures. Certainly readers may experience different punctum and studium from the narrator, for readers only grasp the Holocaust memory indirectly from the narrator. From the comics or the three photographs in the book, readers can easily build their own historical sense of the Holocaust. Their emotion may also be stirred by other comics of this traumatic catastrophe- the studium in the comic pictures. Whilst reading the comic, or look at the photos, readers are ‘to be informed,’ ‘to be surprised,’ ‘to be signified,’ and ‘to waken desire.’ Punctum, on the other hand, is even more subjective since every one may have different feelings toward the same thing. Yet, still some pictures could prick readers, especially after they are informed of the subtle

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______________________________________________________________ relationships behind the pictures presented by the narrator. In front of Death represented by the Nazi - human beings, especially the Jews, are reduced to nothingness. For the Nazis all Jews were equally useless, no matter how talented or how wealthy he or she may have been. What distinguishes human beings from animals had disappeared: The Nazi erased the line for the Jews and also eliminated their dignity. One of the sentences that recurs in Maus is Vladek’s claim to live like human beings, in other words, to live with respect and dignity. No one wants to be forced to die only because the other race (the Nazi) labels them (the Jews) as “undoubted a race, but [. . .] not human”, said by Adolf Hitler.40 Through the vivid images, readers witness the cruelty of the Holocaust and may also be moved by the punctum and studium of the comics. Just as readers could indirectly perceive the memory from the narrator, they could also be affected by the punctum and studium aroused by the narrator. No one should be numb to this crucial event of the twentieth century; as Staub concludes in his paper “no one can claim to be a stranger”.41 Here Staub raises the ethical concern that remembrance is important. Reflecting u[on the complexity of the Holocaust that Spiegelman presents, Michael G. Levine, like Staub, also claims the need for ethics by entitling his article ‘Necessary Stains: Spiegelman’s Maus and the Bleeding of History.’ Levine points out that the second generation of the Holocaust survivors become “the unwitting bearers of a traumatic legacy”. As an unwitting and unwilling bearer of this post-memory, Spiegelman tries to deal with “the interminable nature of The Holocaust itself”.42 This interminable nature of trauma is what Caruth called ‘belatedness’ in her paper Unclaimed Experience. She explains that victims may not be aware of trauma until it “returns to haunt the survivor later on”.43 Post-memory, in a sense, also has this nature of ‘belatedness.’ Victims traumatised by the memory they do not directly own are often unconscious of the cause of their trauma –their parent’s dominant memory imposing on them. Thus, only through rewriting the unsaid memory and passing on the history to other listeners, can the victim find the way to work thorough the trauma. Both types of spectator, the narrator and the reader, can re-examine what post-memory is and how it asserts its influence. For the narrator, Artie, it is important to find the way to work through his trauma caused by his parents’ ghastly experiences of the Holocaust. Only after he knows how to accept this trauma, can he work through it and pass the legacy on to others. Readers, on the other hand, through perceiving the memory of the Holocaust from Artie, also inherit this legacy. Whether or not the spectator, either the narrator or the reader, have the responsibility to pass on the legacy is not my concern in this paper. What I try to do here is to point out that it is the subtle relationship behind the pictures that the spectator perceives as the postmemory.

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Notes 1

M Hirsch, Family Frames: Photograph, Narratives and post-memory, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2002, p 22 2 Ibid, p.8 3 R Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photograph, Trans. R Howard, Noonday Press, New York,1993, p.25Punctum is revealed in partial details of a photograph (Barthes 43). Partial details are the ‘involuntary feature’ of punctum, for it is not the photographer’s intention to make the spectator notice the details, and it is impossible for the photographer to separate the partial object (the partial detail) from the total object (the whole photograph) (47). Second, a photograph may provoke a ‘satori, the passage of a void’ (Barthes 49). A photograph with ‘satori,’ like Haiku, is ‘undevelopable’ (since everything is given) and has an ‘intense immobility’ (Barthes 49). Third, punctum reveals in latency after the fact and silence. Fourth, punctum revealed in blind field are ‘the figures’ that ‘do not emerge, nor leave’: they are like the pinned butterflies (57). Moreover, for Barthes, blind field distinguishes erotic photographs from pornography: an erotic photograph without showing sexual organs takes the spectator outside its frame to see the object in the blind field, while pornography simply presents the sexual organs without punctum 4 Ibid p.26 Studium basically refers to ‘classical body of information’ used for educational purposes. Barthes explains that some photos with the element of stadium do stir his emotion, but such emotion only comes from an “ethical and political culture”. 5 Ibid pp26 - 27 6 Ibid p 59 7 Hirsch, op cit, p.5 8 ibid 9 ibid, p12 10 ibid, p.13 11 ibid 12 E Seicher, The Holocaust Novel, Routledge, New York, 2005, p.144 13 V A Elmwood, Happy, Happy Ever After: The Transformation of Trauma Between the Generations in Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Biography, vol.27, 4, 2004, p695 14 A Spiegelman, The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Pantheon, New York, 1997, p6 15 Elmwood, p 697 16 Spiegelman, p 176 17 ibid, p 201 18 ibid, p 40 19 ibid, p 105

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______________________________________________________________ 20

ibid ibid, p 105 22 ibid 23 ibid, p 250 24 Elmwood, p 702 25 ibid 26 ibid, p 703 27 Spiegelman, p 175 28 Sicher, p 145 29 ibid 30 ibid 31 D LaCapra, Trauma, Absence and Loss, in N Levi and M Rothberg, The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 2003, p200 32 Spiegelman, p 176 33 C Caruth, Trauma and Experience, in Levi and Rothberg op cit, p 193 34 ibid, p197 35 Sicher, p 144 36 Spiegelman, p 161 37 M Staub, The Shoah Goes on and on: Remembrance and Representation in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Melus, Vol 20, 3, 1995, p 36 38 Sicher, p 146 39 ibid, p144 40 Spiegelman, p 3 41 Staub, p 44 42 M Levine, Necessary Stains: Spiegelman’s Maus and the Bleeding of History, American Imago, Vol 59, 3, 2002, p 317 43 C Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1996, p4 21

Bibliography Barthes, R., Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photograph. Trans. Howard, R, 1981. Hill & Wang, the Noonday Press, New York, 1993. Caruth, C., ‘Trauma and Experience’ in Levi, N. and Rothberg, M., The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings. Rutgers UP, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2003, pp. 192-98. ---, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins UP, Baltimore, 1996. Elmwood, V. A., ‘Happy, Happy Ever After: The Transformation of Trauma Between the Generations in Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale’. Biography, vol. 27, 4, 2004, pp. 691-720.

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______________________________________________________________ Freud, S., ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ in Gay, P., The Freud Reader. Norton, New York, 1989, pp. 584-89. Hirsch, M., Family Frames: Photograph, Narratives and post-memory. 1997. Harvard UP, Cambridge, MA, 2002. LaCapra, D., ‘Trauma, Absence, Loss’ in Levi, N. and Rothberg, M., The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings. Rutgers UP, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2003, pp. 199-205. Levine, M., ‘Necessary Stains: Spiegelman’s Maus and the Bleeding of History’. American Imago vol. 59, 3, 2002, pp. 317-341. Rothberg, M., Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. U of Minnesota P, Minneapolis, 2000. Sicher, E., The Holocaust Novel. Routledge, New York, 2005. Spiegelman, A., The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. Pantheon, New York, 1997. Staub, M., ‘The Shoah Goes on and on: Remembrance and Representation in Art Spiegelman’s Maus’. Melus, vol. 20, 3, 1995, pp. 33-46. Siao-Jing Sun is at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan

Horrifying Quixote: The Thin Line between Fear and Laughter Stephen Hessel Abstract This piece analyzes the peculiar relationship between comedy and horror, fear and laughter, and their many bizarre co-manifestations. Why does one laugh and tremble simultaneously? Why do some people encounter humour in places where others find abhorrence and shock? These questions can be addressed by viewing both actions as reactions to a similar stimulus. In this sense both are inextricably tied to one another. The fact of the matter is that this assertion is not commonly considered due to the differing aesthetic systems that divide these two genres. Simply put, an audience is predisposed to a specific reaction according to how a work is presented. But does the generic and aesthetic posturing of a work speak to the primal nature of both emotional states? Miguel de Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote serves here as a point of departure that allows an analysis of both issues previous to the solidification of a horrific and comedic aesthetic practices in the era of the gothic novel and its later variations. The late Renaissance and Baroque context provide evidence, as seen within Don Quixote, which exhibits how crisis and doubt are issues that provoke both types of reactions and show that prior to the creation of canonical generic practices the issues cannot be seen as separate fields of interpretation. This leads to contemporary questions about both genres. In a day and age of genre-bending works, is it still possible to consider one without the other? The assertion of this work is that a more fruitful understanding of both can be arrived at by carefully viewing their relationship beyond the determinate factors of style and tradition. Keywords: Don Quixote, Baroque, horror, comedy, madness, genre studies ***** The border between the realms of laughter and fear is easily traversed. Furthermore, if this border is considered in all its complexity it becomes difficult to decide on which side one stands in any particular moment. It is true that there exist several impediments that inhibit life’s incessant oscillation between both realms but these are mere molehills in comparison to the severity of these reactions’ supposed state of opposition. Most simply, we laugh with ease and likewise are startled by trifles, despite

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______________________________________________________________ the fact that there is certain strangeness in the matter when both reactions occur simultaneously or in quick succession. Laughter and fear have both become inextricably linked in our modern and post-modern worlds to heavily defined and codified systems that tend to ignore the nebulous area that separates them. Both adhere to a complex matrix of aesthetic, narratological, moral, and iconographic systems (to name a few) that dictate how we laugh and fear, yet they tend to blur the conception of what we laugh at and what we fear. In some sense our genres of comedy and terror have caused the connections between reaction and stimuli to be blurred and diverted. But these systems, which are of the utmost importance in portraying these emotional responses, stand on the historical foundations of western literary/artistic practice. Therefore, they can be analyzed for what they are (or seem to be) and by following the path of their genesis some of their roots can be uncovered. In resignation to the fact that roots run deep and bifurcate, the intention here is to pick a crucial nexus in this system and elaborate what can be said from that point. The point of intersection in this case is Cervantes’ work Don Quixote, which is considered by many to be the first modern novel and therefore located at a crucial point in the development of the western tradition. From here the ridiculous/tragic knight-errant and his context will be strained through an uncustomary filter; the filter of fear. The first and most obvious question is what is so terrifying about a withered old knight with a barber’s basin set atop his head astride an emaciated nag? At first, second, and perhaps thousandth glance the answer may be absolutely nothing. The two major readings of Don Quixote have been either comic or romantically tragic. Daniel Eisenberg spells out the comic approach most clearly in his essay “Teaching Don Quixote as a Funny Book”.1 Conversely, Anthony Close has devoted a whole tome to analyzing the history of the romantic reading titled The Romantic Approach to “Don Quixote”: A Critical History of the Romantic Tradition in Quixote Criticism.2 These are no doubt the most popular readings but they are by no means the only two. In 1996 Henry Sullivan published a study of Don Quixote titled Grotesque Purgatory: A Study of Cervantes’s “Don Quixote”, Part II. Despite its less than enthusiastic reception in some scholarly communities and its focus on the religious aspects of the characters’ journeys, this work introduced two important points to the debate of how to read this book: the vocabulary of fear (i.e. grotesque) and the idea of preoccupation being based on an uncertain end (i.e. purgatory).3 In Sullivan’s reading Don Quixote is no longer merely a clown or an object of pity, but rather a man engaged in the grotesque and frightful search for certainty and salvation. Don Quixote like

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______________________________________________________________ the archetypical everyman shares with the rest of his society an anxiety that is difficult to represent and much more difficult to assuage. The religious focus of this work is thought provoking but this anxiety and fear can be seen as something that is almost universal in the culture of the Spanish baroque. In José Antonio Maravall’s Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, Spanish society is defined as a culture of crisis.4 Spain is a country that has been tipped onto its head despite its magnificent and opulent façade. The rise of mercantile capitalism, the economic gap between the haves and have-nots, the splintering of the church, the rise of new sciences and technologies, the discovery of a “New World”, et cetera, created an atmosphere of uncertainty and sensationalism. Fervour and despair both produced their respective manifestations of terror: monsters, heretics, witches, spirits, etc. Yet, the fearful and the fearsome were not the only voices to be heard in the cacophony of culture. Others looked around and laughed at the mad state of affairs. Those that chose to seek answers and certainty through definitive and unalterable avenues were parodied and mocked. The chivalric knight became the target for Cervantes’ barbs, the politician and clergyman suffered the wrath of Baltasar Gracian’s El Criticón, and playwrights like Lope de Vega frequently portrayed and made light of the relationship between the nobles and the people.5 In these cases, comedy had become an alternative response to the same situation. The crises that permeated every aspect of society demanded a reaction from every member of the culture and in the more historically preserved literary world many responses can still be seen. The crises present within Don Quixote, like those of its contextual environment, are diverse and complex but some can be identified and tracked throughout their history. Perhaps the most well-known is that of madness. The mad knight-errant is a caricature of the issue of how to deal with madness. As Foucault pointed out in his work Madness and Civilization: This world of the early seventeenth century is strangely hospitable, in all senses, to madness. Madness is here, at the heart of things and of men, an ironic sign that misplaces the guideposts between the real and the chimerical, barely retaining the memory of the great tragic threats—a life more disturbed than disturbing, an agitation in society, the mobility of reason. 6 Madness here is a very apt symbol for what has been framed as the stimuli of laughter and fear. The inability for one to apply reason to the world and therefore make sense of the surrounding environment is a terrifying notion and the prevalence of this inability in this epoch strengthens the

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______________________________________________________________ consensus that it is perhaps more of a case of impossibility than inability. The fool is a horrific example of madness’s grinning yet macabre gaze. Yet on the flipside of the coin the fool is the epitome of comedy and laughter. The works of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Calderón, Lope de Vega, and many others reformulate the role of the fool within stories. The idiot, buffoon, or clown frequently take centre stage in the works of these authors and elucidate as much as they entertain. This occurs to such a degree that the foolishness of the fool loses its footing in the archetypal character and is projected upon the supposedly reasonable players of the story. Frequently, Don Quixote steps into the role of the wise man and through his madness is found to have reason. In the episode of the Knight of the Green Coat, aka Don Diego de Miranda, judging Don Quixote as mad or sane proves to be a difficult endeavour. The knight’s son, Don Lorenzo, discusses many matters with the book’s protagonist and part way through the colloquium admits that he cannot truly define this withered man as mad.7 Don Quixote may not be able to tell giants from windmills but he can paint himself a sufficiently reasonable man. So what is so terrifying about madness or what could be called everyone’s burden of uncertainty and doubt? A frequent set of questions that arose throughout the seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created by Joss Whedon, may offer some clarification.8 Am I nobody? Is this truly the real world? What is the point of it all? These types of questions plague the series viewers (and non-viewers) as much as they do the protagonists of this horrifying comic drama; the story of a special woman chosen to fight the forces of darkness. It seems that the most popular remedy or answer that is relied on is the assignment of everything within the dichotomy of good and evil. If this system were to hold water then the enemies would be identified and allies easy to find. Half the fear of any situation is not knowing where everything stands. The most terrifying vampire is the vampire who does not appear to be a villain. The psychological aspects of suspense within fear are facilitated by the inability of the system of good and evil to be infallible. In Buffy we find demons that have become human, vampires with souls, and rogue slayers who just want to be loved, but we also see the monstrous things that good people do. The so-called Buffyverse is impossible to navigate using a strict system of polar oppositions; yes/no, good/evil. Yet, in the face of the failing system the viewers and characters are forced to react, forced to do something that will allow them to keep living in the face of such an inexplicable existence. Frequently, the reactions are giggles and gasps. In many ways Buffy is very similar to Don Quixote. Both live by a code that when applied to the world in which they live is shockingly inadequate. Both of them battle monsters not always seen by everyone around them. Both must struggle with a heroic persona that frequently

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______________________________________________________________ appears ineffective when faced with the difficulties of an unreasonable world. These two “heroes” play a role that is constantly challenged by the context in which they live offering no two-sided systems to make their decisions simple. The true fearful and comic nature of their struggle is more about the decisions of how to act or if one should act than the act itself. This then begs the question when comedies and horror stories are considered of why these two genres have so long existed in distinct traditions. What distinguishes a monster from comic relief? At its most basic the answer can be found in the needs and reactions of the audience. In the 16th and 17th centuries the two audiences reacting in fear or in laughter did not frequently see eye to eye. Like the audiences of the 20th century, these people opted to prefer fear, comedy or a controlled combination of both. Ask a group of friends today if they prefer comedy or horror and many will praise one and deride the other. This is no different for the early modern period except that their desires and reactions facilitated the construction of each genres aesthetic system. There is no denying that the monsters of the ancient folklore were reinvented in the period directly following the late Renaissance and the Baroque. To this day authors and artists persist in portraying monsters within the context of their own renaissance. Anne Rice’s vampire Lestat exudes the style of an 18th century gentleman. Bram Stoker’s Dracula of 1897 is a result of folklore and the aesthetic context of that time. Frankenstein is also a result of this period. The gothic novel was at the height of its popularity. All these examples portray the style of horror as it is typically known but the preoccupations of these stories are not very dissimilar from those of the preceding time periods. A vampire is an immortal being untouched by the ravages of time but still susceptible to the uncertain nature of the world. The Frankenstein monster is at its root an analysis of life and what it means to be alive. All monsters despite their other-worldly nature exist in the world and beg society to question the very nature of this existence. But what of comedy? How does it relate? In short, comedy was also swept up in the transformative whirlwind of the emerging literary systems. To relate the word comedy as applied to Shakespeare’s works and its use in the following periods is to force a square peg into a round hole. As Anthony Close states in The Romantic Approach the Cervantine comedy of Don Quixote was not frequently identified by the readers of the Romantic period as something more than a superficial level of the work.9 Comedy, just like horror, transformed and broke away from its relationship with fear. Fear had little to do with laughter and vice versa. It is true to say that most of the world’s story-addicted audience do not think of laughter and fear as two reactions to similar stimuli but that is not to say that the links have been fully eradicated. Today is, in reality, the

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______________________________________________________________ perfect time to resuscitate this near dead relationship. The recent surge in generic parody is in many ways a digression to the quixotic satire of Cervantes. The Scary Movie series is a prime example in that it allows us to laugh at an altered version of a movie that previously proved terrifying, but this only scratches the surface of the phenomenon.10 Mystery Science Theatre 3000 takes one more step by leaving the original work of horror unchanged and producing all its comedy from the antiquated style, or ambience of the work, and humorous commentary provided by two robots and a human watching the films in the distant future.11 In both cases the practice of parody is linked to the genre of horror for humour producing products. This renewed parodist spirit has been accompanied by many other genre bending manifestations which could be directly related to Cervantes’ assumed project within Don Quixote, but unfortunately the issue is not so simple for those in Cervantes studies. The idea that this work is strictly a parody has fallen from favour for several camps (including those who stand by the Romantic reading). Despite the fact that the narrator explicitly states twice that the work is a parody of the works of chivalric literature, many choose to not find these declarations as credible, and with just cause. The entirety of the work includes numerous different narrators and an almost innumerable amount of drastic contradictions. So if the work cannot be seen as clear parody then the link between the previous examples becomes tenuous. But this work cannot be framed as true parody if fear and laughter are seen to be as similar as they seem to be. Don Quixote is a novel that in its uncertainty provides opportunities to laugh and cringe. In a recent survey class of the work, I found that some students found the misadventures of Don Quixote incredibly funny while others abhorred the sadistic torture that he suffered. For others the reaction was mixed but what was most fascinating was their initial aversion to analyzing why they feared or laughed at something. The next step was dominated by explanations of the aesthetically superficial nature. Dracula is scary because he wears a black cloak and has bloody teeth and clowns are funny because they wear big pants and have red noses. It was not until the stylized aesthetic features of comedy and horror were seen as symbolic placeholders used to evoke a specific reaction that the realization that both fear and laughter are constituted by both their form and their origins/stimuli became widespread. It is through this avenue that the studies of both these genres can be brought into contact and equally enriched. Despite the fact that the baroque is specifically identified by Maravall as an epoch of crisis, every age must cope with its own dramatic and world-shaking problems.12 Both comedy and horror have been reactions that allow humanity to cope with some of the most ever-present issue such as the impossibility of certainty, the essence of faith, and its absence. By seeing their similar utilitarian possibilities and their

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______________________________________________________________ seemingly many stylistic differences a greater understanding of how we think, feel and our practices can be arrived at. Our only choice is to fear it or laugh at it.

Notes 1.

D Eisenberg, ‘Teaching Don Quixote as a Funny Book’ in R Bjornson (ed), Approaches to Teaching Cervantes’ ‘Don Quixote’, Modern Language Association of America, New York, 1984, pp. 62-68. 2. A Close, The Romantic Approach to “Don Quixote”: A Critical History of the Romantic Tradition in Quixote Criticism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977. 3. H Sullivan, Grotesque Purgatory: A Study of Cervantes’s ‘Don Quixote’, Part II, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 1996, p. 2. 4. J A Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986, p. 20. 5. B Gracian, El Criticón, Ediciones Catedra, Madrid, 2004. 6. M Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Vintage Books, New York, 1988, p. 37. 7. M de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Ecco, New York, 2003, p. 569. 8. J Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 20th Century Fox Television, 19972003. 9. A Close, op. cit., pp. 16-17. 10. K I Wayans, Scary Movie, Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, 2000. 11. J Hodgson, Mystery Science Theatre 3000, Best Brains Inc., 1988-1999. 12. J A Maravall, op. cit., p. 20.

Bibliography .Cervantes, M., Don Quixote. Trans. Edith Grossman. Ecco, New York, 2003. Close, A., The Romantic Approach to ‘Don Quixote’: A Critical History of the Romantic Tradition in Quixote Criticism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977. Eisenberg, D., ‘Teaching Don Quixote as a Funny Book’ in R Bjornson (ed), Approaches to Teaching Cervantes’ ‘Don Quixote’. Modern Language Association of America, New York, 1984, pp. 62-68 Foucault, M., Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. Vintage Books, New York, 1988. Maravall, J. A., Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure. Trans. Terry Cochran. Ed. Wlad Godzich and Nicholas Spadaccini. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986.

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______________________________________________________________ Sullivan, H. W., Grotesque Purgatory: A Study of Cervantes’s ‘Don Quixote’, Part II. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 1996.

Stephen Hessel is a doctoral scholar and instructor at the University at Buffalo. His primary area of research is Golden Age Spanish Literature with a special focus on the works of Miguel de Cervantes.

And the moral of the story is…: Horror Cinema as Modern Day Fairy Tale David Carter Abstract The article looks at the cultural progression from traditional ‘fairy tales’ to their modern equivalent the horror film. A range of works is examined including classic horror series as Friday the 13th and similar ‘slasher’ films, Frankenstein and other sci-fi, through more recent works such as Roth’s Hostel and the Saw trilogy. Though culturally frowned upon, horror films present moral themes that are similar in tone and intent to fairy tales. The article examines both the subtle and overt socially conservative and repressive messages present in the horror genre. Many of horror’s most clichéd images (promiscuous teens being murdered, scientists destroyed by their own hubris) are reinforcements of traditional Judeo-Christian values; the intended purpose of fairy tales and other moral lesson works aimed at children. Each film genre is examined along with the moral or religious ideas it espouses, in addition to films that deviate from this model. The paper’s primary focus is to examine the mixed signals sent by many horror films; glorifying certain unacceptable behaviours (e.g. violence) by using them to punish other unacceptable behaviours (e.g. sex, drug use), and the origins of these concepts in traditional folktales and children’s literature. Keywords: horror, fairy tales, slashers, cinema, morality ***** Horror cinema exists in a dark, segregated corner of the film industry. The genre might well be considered the ‘black sheep’ of cinema. Studios allocate few resources to the genre, instead opting to merely reiterate successful formulas ad nauseam. Horror rarely fares well with critics either. ‘Dismissed with contempt’ is an apt description of most critics’ reaction to horror films and far more choose to ignore the genre in total.1 Their dismissal stems from the majority of horror films’ documented lack of technical finesse and their unceasing devotion to clichés; a combination that does not endear the genre to those seeking a more artistic experience at the theatre. Lastly, the public themselves have historically been the loudest voices speaking out against horror cinema, albeit for far different reasons. The public sector has at times gone well beyond the studio or the critics’ simple dislike of horror’s technical or artistic merits to attack the genre’s very existence.

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______________________________________________________________ The United States and the United Kingdom have both seen publicled movements call for the censorship of certain films and tighter restrictions on the genre as a whole. The British government took the most well known step with Parliament’s passing of the Video Recordings Act of 1984. A reactionary move brought about as a response to growing public outcry, the act resulted in the so-called ‘video nasties’ list which almost exclusively impacted horror cinema2. The Act’s passage made not only the sale but also the ownership of certain films illegal, resulting in several search and seizure missions by law enforcement3. Films like The Last House on the Left and The Evil Dead that had been readily available before the Act’s passage found themselves labelled as contraband, with some bans lasting until as recently as three years ago. Five years after the ‘video nasties’ list came into being, several US states passed laws granting local authorities the ability to prohibit certain video titles from their communities with horror cinema again taking the brunt of the attacks. The reason most commonly cited by those calling for cinematic censorship is the morally objectionable content in horror films, be it graphic violence, sexuality and nudity, or general depravity. Their claims are not merely sensationalized attacks on the genre; however. Sex, violence, and the highly-controversial mingling of the two have grown to be the calling cards of the horror film. The depiction of visceral imagery is the easiest, but certainly not the only, way to achieve the stated goal of the horror film: to scare the audience. Herschell Gordon Lewis created an archetype with his 1963 precursor to both the slasher and splatter cycles Blood Feast; inadvertently starting the trend of each successive horror film having to ‘outdo’ its predecessors in terms of blood and guts. Sexuality, too, has been a part of horror cinema since its inception, but it is an aspect that greatly increased over time. The damsel in distress has shared top billing with the monster since horror’s earliest days; Fay Wray is as integral a part of King Kong as the ape himself. As restrictions loosened so did clothing; by the midseventies, female nudity was de rigueur in American cinema overall, with horror being no exception. The group that those calling for censorship are attempting to protect from horror’s corrupting influence are children and young adults. Seen as far too impressionable to be exposed to morally objectionable material, young people are the same group that are the intended audience of fairy tales, fables, and nursery rhymes. These stories are used primarily as entertainment, but more importantly they function to educate and instruct children in appropriate and inappropriate social and moral behaviour.4 Originally intended as crossgenerational entertainment, the educational potential of folk stories was realized once they were adapted from oral tales into literature. Though innocuous at first glance, the moral lessons in fairy tales are often revealed through some rather objectionable behaviour.5 A prime

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______________________________________________________________ example is ‘The Juniper Tree’, a tale included in the Brothers Grimm’s first collection. In the story, a stepmother’s hatred of her stepson leads to her downfall. The overt moral lesson is that wickedness and hatred are evils and will inevitably lead to harm; no doubt a useful lesson for a young person. Yet to relay this message the story uses the rather unpalatable acts of murder, cannibalism, and violent revenge. These elements enter and exit the story rather matter-of-factly, as if they are events that any child would be familiar with and accustomed to seeing. Though ostensibly a morality tale, ‘The Juniper Tree’ subverts our traditional ideas of right and wrong. The stepmother’s preference of her own child over the stepson is depicted as being more unacceptable than her murder of him, and her own eventual violent death is the ‘happy ending’ of the tale. ‘The Juniper Tree’ is but one example of several shared themes between horror cinema and fairy tales. Many of the most familiar stories contained murder, dismemberment, and death in their original forms, some even retaining these elements after being edited for a younger audience. Violence is depicted as an inevitability of life and is the primary method used to punish evil. Children are conditioned to believe that unacceptable behaviour will lead to violent punishment, thereby discouraging them from engaging in those actions. Horror cinema uses a similar style; depicting various immoral behaviours and then showing those engaging in them punished by violence and death. Ironically, it is often the most maligned horror films which embody this concept the most. There are groups to whom depiction of a behaviour is endorsement of said behaviour, or at least tacit approval. Due to their frequent depiction of murder, promiscuous sex, and drug use, slasher films are accused of glorifying those behaviours. Viewed in isolation, a scene of a masked man decapitating a beautiful blonde complete with a carefully timed arc of crimson flying through the air certainly seems to be an attempt to make something horrific appear beautiful, appealing, or even less-thanreprehensible. However, when analyzing the film as a whole this act takes on an entirely different meaning. The mute killer in the hockey mask is communicating something to the audience, and it is not the oft-cited endorsement of destruction. The stated motivation for Pamela and Jason Voorhees’ killing sprees in the Friday the 13th series is to get revenge on the immoral teens that are to blame for Jason’s drowning. This non-specific vendetta is applied to any person who breaks the unspoken moral code of the films by using drugs or having sex, the two behaviours associated with those who were guilty for young Jason’s accident. This particular plot point is the single most integral part of the series, and serves as the impetus for all action in each film. It is so all-encompassing a concept that the series itself parodied it in Jason X when the now-bionic Voorhees is distracted by a virtual reality simulation of nude,

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______________________________________________________________ pot-smoking girls.6His internal moral compass forces him to abandon the victim he is currently pursuing to attack those who are perceived as being in greater violation of his laws. Horror films are usually absent from discussion of technical brilliance, but the Friday the 13th series delivers a commentary on morality through a technique in line with Lev Kuleshov’s theories on montage; with meaning being directly linked to the order in which events are shown.7 By showing two teens engaging in drug use shortly before they are brutally murdered, the viewer’s mind links the two. The former causes the latter. The time between the commission of the act and the character’s demise is brief. Retribution and punishment are automatic. The majority of the victims are killed during the commission of the immoral act, concretely linking the behaviour as the cause of their deaths. In stage one of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, the individual assigns a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ value to a behaviour based on whether it results in reward or punishment, with the degree of the result directly correlating with perceived degree of the action8. This first stage is the equivalent moral level of a slasher film. The ‘good’ or ‘evil’ nature of the characters is only discernable when viewed in conjunction with what fate befalls them. This device is present in children’s stories as well, with the dividing line between good and evil being easily discerned by looking at who dies and who lives happily ever after. The Voorhees’ quest for revenge is an all-consuming one, the sole motivation for their existence. In some regards, their inclusion in the films is coincidental; a fact evidenced in the amount of screen time they receive in relation to other characters. Jason is the deus ex machina of the series; he shows up to execute the judgment that the audience has been manipulated to believe is required. Once the campers begin their illicit behaviour, Jason arrives, machete in hand, to deliver the punishment they have earned. This particular aspect of the series mirrors the ‘just-in-time’ arrivals from children’s stories: the father in “Hansel and Gretel,” the hunter/woodsman in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, and others. Each arrives late in the story to enact the comeuppance to the villain, something the weaker main characters are unable to deliver themselves. Friday the 13th uses a similar yet inverted model: Jason, the hero, arrives to murder the wicked, the teens, something the powerless audience is unable to do. Rare is it in Friday the 13th that Jason himself is shown as being punished; however. His defeat at the end of each chapter is both anticlimactic and impermanent. His actions go unpunished for the most part since, in essence, he is doing ‘good’ by punishing the wicked. The helpful woodsman in the tale of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is the de facto hero of the story simply because he murders the wolf. His sole purpose in the story is to commit murder; the same goal the wolf had. As in the Friday the 13th series, his

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______________________________________________________________ actions are considered “good” because the preceding story has established the ‘bad’ of the wolf. That there can be such a thing as a morally acceptable murder is a concept borrowed directly from stories like ‘The Juniper Tree’, ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, and several others. The Camp Crystal Lake setting is another area that unites the series with the fairy tale.9 In fairy tales, the woods alternately represent the correct natural order and the source of mystery and danger. Frequently they represent ‘the unknown’, that which is in some way removed from the dominion of society. ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and others found that the forest held many secrets, ranging from witches to wolves, all linked by a common desire to cause harm to those who entered their domain. Symbolically, the forest represents the break between civilization and barbarism. Once a character enters the woods, he or she must tread carefully. The teens are drawn to the abandoned and maligned Camp Crystal Lake because of its seclusion and the illusion of freedom from the societal restrictions they have in outside world. By leaving the realm of the civilized, they symbolically and later literally give in to animalistic desires, unknowingly putting themselves in harms’ way. Not all messages in horror cinema are as cut and dried as “have premarital sex, get killed.” Some deliver a subtler message, yet one that retains many of the concepts of the traditional folk tale. In Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, none of the eventual victims engages in copious drug use, casual sex, or any other unacceptable behaviours10. What, then, is their crime? Sally Hardesty and her travelling companions violate one of the most repeated messages in folk tales, parables, and other forms of child indoctrination: they stray from ‘the path’. The path in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is both literal and metaphorical. Ignoring the warnings of their elders, the group ventures to locate Sally’s grandparents’ home. It is a place quite literally off the map; a place from her distant memories. They are travelling from the known and into the unknown. The small detail that the house they eventually find uses a generator for power symbolizes a complete separation from the world of the civilized. Leatherface and his clan are an anomaly in the horror world. They did not seek out their victims, but merely took advantage of an opportunity in the same way a predatory animal would. The monsters of folktales share this quality. Past the edges of the path is their realm, and by disobeying and leaving the path, one is inviting their own demise. This concept of inviting your own demise is key to the film and to several fairy tales. The first kill in the film remains one of the most terrifying images in cinematic history. It comes without any foreshadowing, in broad daylight, and is over in a matter of seconds. The uncinematic nature of it instils an impression in the viewer’s mind that what they are watching is real, not a film. The reality of the situation reinforces the idea in the audiences’ minds

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______________________________________________________________ that this fate could befall them as well. The success of the educational aspect of fairy tales depends highly on the child’s ability to put his or her self in the place of the main character and understanding that their own moral choices guide their destinies. Though quite often drowned out by the chainsaw’s buzz and a cacophony of screams, the message of the film is evident: stay on the path, there are things lurking outside the boundaries that will do you harm. Sally Hardesty is often pointed to as the prototypical ‘innocent victim’ of horror lore. Her innocence is only superficial; however. It is on her insistence that the group goes to explore outside of the known paths. Her curiosity about reclaiming something she lost leads them to their fates. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s message is a repressive one. Do not be curious. Do not go where you are not supposed to go. Listen to your elders and do as you are told. Unappealing though they are, they are directly in line with three of the four functions of folklore as outlined by Bascom, particularly educating children about ‘bogey-men’ and instilling conformity.11 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is folk tale in its purest form; raw, threatening, and leaving an indelible impression on its audience. Curiosity as character flaw is a concept that has origins in stories like ‘The Three Bears’. Goldilocks not only trespasses in the bears’ home but also transgresses against them, taking their possessions and being disrespectful to their property. The teens in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre violate Leatherface’s home by entering uninvited. As the ‘bears’ of the film, Leatherface and company do far more than scare young Goldilocks in the form of Sally. Sally and Goldilocks even choose the same ultimate method of escape: jumping from a window. Leatherface and the bears are both nonhuman threats designed to scare the reader or viewer from engaging in any behaviour that would cause their paths to cross. Curiosity is represented in each story as something very dangerous and potentially life-threatening. This ‘stay on the path’ mentality is something common to many nursery rhymes and fairy tales. Had Little Red Riding Hood only listened to her mother and ran as hard as she could to Grandma’s she could have escaped the Big Bad Wolf’s clutches. The similarity of messages was not lost on Wes Craven, always one to take the genre to new extremes of brutality and intellectual depth. Therefore, he structured his The Hills Have Eyes with the fairy tale in mind, even to the point with throwing out subtle clues to the audience as to his inspirations12. It is no accident that the Carter family’s dogs are named Beauty and Beast, nor is it coincidence that Beauty is the first casualty.13 The events of the film are set in motion when patriarch Big Bob Carter deviates from the planned route and attempts a short cut rather than sticking to the map. Thus, the Carters’ happy nuclear family is pitted against their demonic inversions in the form of Jupiter and his brood. Clearly

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______________________________________________________________ echoing the structure of a fairy tale but not a specific example, Jupiter was born sideways and covered with hair, physical manifestations of his internal nature. He and his family live on the outskirts of civilization, exacting their revenge on any foolish enough to trespass in their domain. They stalk the Carters like a predator stalks its prey; a subtle reminder of the thin line between civilization and barbarism and further reinforcing the idea that sticking to the accepted way of doing things is critical to survival. Few slasher films have been the subject of as much ire as 1984’s Silent Night, Deadly Night. The Parent-Teacher Association tried unsuccessfully to have the film pulled from theatres due to the use of a villain dressed as Santa Claus. In one of the most famous examples of critical backlash, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert read the list of the crew members on their television show At The Movies, singling each member out for individual scorn. Despite being the impetus of one of the few public campaigns directed against a single film, Silent Night, Deadly Night features an across the board reinforcement of Judeo-Christian values.14 Young Billy Chapman witnesses his mother and father being murdered by a criminal dressed as Santa Claus. He then grows up in a strict Catholic orphanage where any rule violation is severely physically punished, a lesson not lost on Billy. Billy’s traumatized mind begins to rationalize the events of his life in the only way he knows how: the wicked deserve punishment, and Santa Claus is the agent that punishes the wicked. Thus, when the now mature Billy is asked to wear a Santa Claus suit at his toy store job, he naturally begins punishing the wicked (through inventive and graphic murders) with cries of “Naughty!” and “Punish!” Billy’s psychosis causes him to believe he is the actual Santa Claus and therefore has the right and duty to punish those who do evil. Parents have traditionally used Santa Claus as a tool of fear: misbehave and Santa will not visit. Silent Night, Deadly Night transforms that concept into “misbehave and Santa will kill you.” Billy makes the parents’ idle threat into a transgressive reality. He punishes a wide variety of “sinners,” including an attempted rapist, two teens that have premarital sex, and even a pair of young bullies. The film makes no effort to assert that Billy’s actions are anything less than insane. However, he believes he is doing good according to the values instilled in him, likely the same values that have been instilled in the audience at some point. He is acting out a traditional Judeo-Christian value system, replacing the eventual punishment of Hell with the immediate punishment of murder. The police and a Catholic nun pursue Billy; both of who, no doubt, would agree with his assessment of those he is hunting and yet would disagree with his method of addressing the situation. Billy’s religious indoctrination is of no small importance to his eventual acts of violence. The Bible is rife with examples of wickedness punished with violence or death. In Exodus, God advises death as the

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______________________________________________________________ punishment for murderers with all violent acts to be repaid in kind.15 In Genesis, God slays Judah’s sons Er and Onan for being “wicked…in the sight of the Lord”.16 These examples of the often-violent Old Testament show how Billy is both a product and an example of Judeo-Christian values. The pantheon of ‘classic slashers’ punished the wicked by design, but legions of slashers that followed inadvertently drove home the same message through their simple repetition of the popular formula. One such film is The Slumber Party Massacre, which has the interesting distinction of being one of the rare slasher films written and directed by women. In it a deranged killer slaughters more teens after engaging in illicit behaviour, but the moralizing is gone and the film is more concerned with blood and flesh. Two female-helmed sequels followed, each parodying the execution of genre without the implied message. Notable only for its cast of future stars, The Burning was a Friday the 13th clone timed to coincide with the release of the film’s second chapter. The film features dozens of teenaged campers terrorized by a disfigured killer, but there is no correlation between their behaviour and their fates. Two slashers that are held in high esteem by aficionados but also do not follow the same moral retribution pattern are Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street. In each film, the onus is placed the villain on rather than their victims. In both, the filmmakers made a decidedly obvious effort to show the evil of the villain. In Halloween, Dr. Loomis provides Michael Myers with an impressive back-story in which he is labelled ‘pure evil’. His victims are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time as Myers slashes his way back to his childhood home. Halloween’s teens do engage in pre-marital sex; however, Michael’s attacks on them are coincidental since he is not motivated to kill anyone other than his own siblings. A Nightmare on Elm Street’s teens are also blameless, forced to face Freddy Kruger’s revenge for their parents’ actions. Victims are targeted for whom or where they are rather than for what they do, showing that moral content in a slasher film is a conscious choice of the filmmaker’s and is done so by design rather than accident. The slasher films of the seventies and eighties were not the first to introduce moral issues in horror films. Frankenstein had a powerful impact on both horror and science fiction cinema upon its release in 1931 and is one of the few films to have the distinction of being viewed as not only a classic of the genres, but of cinema as a whole as well. The film deviates greatly from Shelley’s novel; Frankenstein’s monster on film is not Shelley’s eloquent malcontent but instead a grunting murderer.17 Where the novel attributed the creature’s eventual hatred for his creator to a combination of neglect and indoctrination, the film version has a much simpler reason for the monster’s murderousness: he was given a criminal’s brain. A single plot device shatters Shelley’s complex nature versus nurture argument. In the

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______________________________________________________________ film, the monster is clearly villainous by nature; his criminal’s brain being the root of his evil from ‘birth’ and therefore incapable of redemption. Again we see the simplistic fairy tale morality: individuals are either wholly good or evil and their actions should be viewed accordingly. Dr. Henry Frankenstein is held largely blameless for the monster’s behaviour, but not for his decision to tamper with the law of God. By emulating the creation act, Frankenstein commits blasphemy from a JudeoChristian moral standpoint. The Hays Code dictated that “no picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it,” which most often practically translated a requirement that all evildoers had to be punished before the end of the film. Oddly, it is only the monster that is punished at the end of Frankenstein. The doctor himself ultimately survives, despite logically sharing an equal portion of the blame for the monster’s actions. The doctor is pure good and the monster is pure evil. As is shown countless times in fairy tales, Henry Frankenstein’s blasphemy is dismissed in the face of wickedness of the monster, however similar their crimes may be. The lack of punishment for the scientist’s hubris would be an anomaly and punishment would become a prominent feature of the genre in post-1945 science fiction. Post-1945 science fiction regularly dealt with the new novelty of atomic energy. Rather than focusing on a single mad scientist, the barbs were usually directed at society as a whole. Much like in Shelley’s novel, a criticism of the Industrial Age, films like THEM! and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms were indictments of the Atomic Age. Even before atomic energy was fully understood it was hailed as a panacea and a pariah, a fact on to which horror and sci-fi immediately latched. Much like the Brothers Grimm’s Three Doctors whose belief in their own abilities lead them to mutilate themselves in the name of medicine, the typical science fiction film of the fifties and sixties depicted a society wantonly wielding the power of the atom with little thought of potential consequences. The evil of the individual is morphed into the evil of a society that chooses to put their faith in new technology rather than traditional ideas of right and wrong. The most famous of the anti-atomic films is Godzilla and the cycle of sequels it spawned. In an extrapolation of the Frankenstein plot, the United States government creates a monster through tampering with the natural order. Much like in Shelley’s novel, it is the innocent, in this case Japan, which suffer rather than the ones responsible for the monster’s creation. Again, like Frankenstein’s creature, Godzilla ultimately became a sympathetic character and the hero of the subsequent sequels. The humanizing of monsters is a recurring theme in fairy tales as well. In tales like ‘Bearskin’, those who have the outward appearance of a monster are often kind and well meaning. Things not being as they seem, also a shared theme in fairy tales and horror, is key here.

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______________________________________________________________ After 1945, the ‘unknown’ for humanity moved from the woods and the sea to outer space. As our knowledge of the universe around us increased, the picture of what we did not know became increasingly clear. Films like The Blob and The Thing masterfully translated these fears to the big screen. Earth was portrayed as defenceless; a single meteorite in each film brought massive destruction to unprepared citizenry. Though intended as simple drive-in entertainment, the outer space terror film metaphorically addressed fears that had existed for centuries. The Blob and The Thing would have been witches or vampires in previous incarnations. They both represent that which is unknown, unstoppable, and waiting just outside the bounds of human society. The human desire to put a face to the unknown that was the impetus for earlier societies to invent stories of pixies and goblins is the same one that motivation sci-fi filmmakers to imagine a universe filled with malevolent beings. The mad scientist and atomic menace subgenres of science fiction all but faded from movie screens by the close of the sixties. Three decades later, market over-saturation and declining quality contributed to a downturn of the horror industry as a whole and caused the virtual demise of the slasher film. Horror cinema would return to prominence with the releases of Saw and Hostel, two films that combined traditional horror trappings with morally conscious outlooks. Horror had shifted away from the realm of the fantastic and toward a more concrete realism. Post 9/11 horror audiences still want buckets of blood, but demand more plausibility in their scenarios. Even with the infusion of reality, horror cinema cannot escape its espousal of traditional morality in a manner akin to children’s literature. The results of combining a newfound need for reality in the genre with horror’s historical reliance on traditional morality lead to the creation of a different breed of villain. Saw’s Jigsaw Killer’s goal is not to kill his victims, but instead ‘enlighten’ them using clever traps to force them to make a difficult ethical choice or face death.18 Unlike a killer like Jason, whose moral lessons are implied and only revealed through examination after the fact, the Jigsaw Killer’s stated modus operandi is moral education. Dying from cancer himself, Jigsaw’s motivation is to help his victims appreciate their own lives more through a trial by fire. A woman addicted to heroin is forced to choose between killing an innocent man or being killed herself by a gruesome trap, forcing her to have a strong enough will to live to commit a horrible act; a different kind of moral lesson, but a lesson nonetheless. Like the Voorhees family, Jigsaw chooses his victims based on their character flaws. The difference is that he allows them a chance for redemption rather than immediately murdering them. The success of Saw and Eli Roth’s Hostel brought a new vigour into the horror genre and a new wave of criticism as well. Labelled ‘gorenography’ or ‘torture porn’ by its detractors, Hostel concerns a group of

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______________________________________________________________ American tourists who meet their demise in Eastern Europe.19 Tempted with the promise of sex, the boys are lured into a secret cabal of wealthy elite who pay to murder.20 Many of the familiar fairy tale tropes are there: the unknown is represented by the remote area of Slovakia, the tempting red apple appears as beautiful women, and murder is depicted as just vengeance. Hostel contains both a well-thought out indictment of American arrogance and quasi-comedic levels of gore, but the single message most audiences will take away is the familiar warning of staying on the path and conforming to accepted behaviours. Almost all moral lessons in both fairy tales and horror films are reinforced with the threat of death or bodily harm. ‘Pinocchio’ discourages children from lying using the same type of instruction that Friday the 13th uses to discourage them from having promiscuous sex. Fear of death or injury is a cross-cultural and cross-temporal fear. Every artistic medium has dealt with the concept, but portraying death and violence as an all-pervasive inevitability and as a punishment for evil is almost exclusively the domain of horror films and fairy tales. The fact that few, if any, characters are alive at the end of any of the Friday the 13th films is a subtle metaphorical reinforcement and acknowledgement of death’s grip on humanity. The ultimate message about morality made by fairy tales and horror films is the same: the individual holds the power to avoid death by behaving in certain ways. Any disobedience invites death into your life. Be it Silent Night, Deadly Night or ‘The Three Little Pigs’, heeding the lessons of your elders may mean the difference between life and death. Children arrive at the same conclusion when confronted with the wicked stepsisters in ‘Cinderella’ or the promiscuous campers at Crystal Lake: wickedness inevitably leads to punishment. The horror film continues the tradition of simple moral lessons told through violent stories in the modern day. Each medium reiterates the message that disobedience and immorality invite the monsters lurking in the shadows. In the end, only the obedient and pure live to see their happy ending when the credits roll.

Notes 1

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R. Wood. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. New Jersey: Scarecrow, 1984. D Kerehes & D Slater, See No Evil: Banned Films and Video Controversy, Critical Vision, London, 2000. Ibid. J Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization, Routledge, New York, 1983, p. 14

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M Tartar (ed.), The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, WW Norton & Company, New York, 2002. Jason X, DVD, New Line Home Video, 2004. D Cook, A History of Narrative Film, Fourth Edition, WW Norton & Company, New York, 2004, p. 119 D Shaffer, Social and Personality Development, 5th Ed, Wadsworth Publishing, New York, 2004. CJ Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the modern horror film, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1992. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, DVD, Dark Sky Films, 2006. W Bascom, “The Four Functions of Folklore”, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 67, No. 266 (Oct. - Dec., 1954), pp. 333-349. The Hills Have Eyes, DVD, Starz Home Entertainment, 2006. M Brottman, Meat is Murder!: an illustrated guide to cannibal culture, Creation Books International, New York, 1998, p. 108. Silent Night, Deadly Night, DVD, Anchor Bay, 2003. King James Bible, Exodus Chapter 21, verses 12 and 23-27 King James Bible, Genesis Chapter 38, verses 7-10 Frankenstein, DVD, Universal Studios, 2006. Saw, DVD, Lion’s Gate, 2005 D Edelstein “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn”, New York Magazine. February 6, 2006. Hostel, DVD, Sony Pictures, 2006.

Bibliography Bascom, D., “The Four Functions of Folklore”. The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 67, no. 266, Oct-Dec 1954, pp. 333-349. Brottman, M., Meat is Murder!: an illustrated guide to cannibal culture. Creation Books International, New York, 1998. Clover, CJ, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the modern horror film. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1992. Cook, D., A History of Narrative Film, Fourth Edition. WW Norton & Company, New York, 2004. Edelstein, D., “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn”. New York Magazine. February 6, 2006. Frankenstein. DVD, Universal Studios, 2006. The Hills Have Eyes. DVD, Starz Home Entertainment, 2006. Hostel. DVD, Sony Pictures, 2006. Jason X. DVD, New Line Home Video, 2004. Kerehes, D. & Slater, D., See No Evil: Banned Films and Video Controversy. Critical Vision, London, 2000. King James Bible

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______________________________________________________________ Saw. DVD, Lion’s Gate, 2005 Shaffer D., Social and Personality Development, 5th Ed. Wadsworth Publishing, New York, 2004. Silent Night, Deadly Night. DVD, Anchor Bay, 2003. Tartar, M (ed.), The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales. WW Norton & Company, New York, 2002. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. DVD, Dark Sky Films, 2006. Zipes, J., Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. Routledge, New York, 1983.

It scares me, but I like it. Considering Why Children Enjoy Terror in Ancient Mexican Legends and Recent Children’s Literature Rita Dromundo Amores Abstract Some parents and teachers pretend to keep their children far from evil, in a world of fantasy, but our kids have to deal with many adversities every day. If so, why children demand scary tales? Isn’t reality sufficient? The fact is that young people have always loved stories that take them to the limits. Mexican children still ask for ancient stories from indigenous cultures such as the Aztec and Maya, where there are mean characters like a magic woman that enchant men, little devils, sorcerers that take animal forms. Kids love to listen to this kind of narration although they know that they will become scared. In recent literature there have been many terror stories among the best sellers, in Mexico and worldwide We also consider that although the biggest fears are related to death, the day of the dead in Mexico is scary only for foreigners, because for Mexicans it’s a day of feast, when alive and dead people share meals. We suppose that children love to feel fear, as long as it’s only fiction, and there is a happy end, also dealing with fictional terror will help them to understand reality and consider it in a positive way. Keywords: fear literature enjoy children ***** 1. What Causes Fear? Fear comes in all colours and sizes. What fits one, not necessarily fits all, because we are not always afraid of the same things. And fear can be pale pink or definitely red, depending on how big it is. What scares us is what we cannot control. It can come from nature like earthquakes, floods, fires; from other people, animals or beings, which have, or we believe they have, some kind of, physical or psychological power. Generally we are afraid of the unknown, when we do not really know what could happen. That makes us consider that the real factory of fear is our mind, because the source of concern is sometimes real, and represents a

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______________________________________________________________ menace for survival, but most of the time our mind plays tricks on us, and makes us believe that things are worse than they are. Fear is due to human evil, but can also be produced by magic, witchcraft or any supernatural force related to the underworld, and the power of mean beings or people, used to hurting overpowering the helpless. Good people will have to use all the resources they have to defend themselves from their aggressors. And fear has been also the source for tales, all over the world, since ancient times. This kind of literature has always been there for adults and children, as part of their life 2. Some Mexican legends Mexico is not an exception. Literature was very much appreciated and developed for ancient cultures such as the Aztec and the Maya. The indigenous writers said that they did not create their poems, legends or chronicles. They considered themselves like middlemen between gods and humans. Unfortunately a lot of prehispanic literature was destroyed by the Spanish conquerors, but many legends remained through oral transmission. Aztecs and Mayas used literature to educate their children. Through myths and legends they developed ethical principles in their infants, the same way that mothers do now a days: they used fear to protect their young people from danger. Teachers, in ancient times told their students beautiful stories to introduce them to the beauty of art, but also to show them, in a soft and nice way, the convenience of obeying their parents and following the commands of their religion. In the Mexican legends that remained, we can find different kind of beings, depending on the region where they belong. Sometimes they seem common people, but others, they show their evil from the beginning. Let us consider some examples.

A. The nahual One of the most fascinating beings in Mexico is the nahual. His original name was nahualli, a word related to the moon and magic, used to describe nasty sorcerers. A little bit before the Spanish conquest it was told that the nahual scared men and children. His appearance could be very

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______________________________________________________________ attractive. Sometimes he is described as a monster, half jaguar and half man, but most of the references tell that he is a very clever sorcerer who has the ability to turn himself into an animal in order to frighten or hurt people, and sometimes kidnap young girls. He can also hypnotize his victims leaving them helpless. The Colonial period partially modified the conception of the nahual; for example, they say that he needs to say the Lord’s Prayer, backwards, to turn into an animal, but before he has to leave his blanket the wrong way round, but if someone moves the blanket, he will remain as an animal forever.

B. The Xtabai1 For some of the Mayas she was the wife of Kizin, the god of the death, but she remained as a bad spirit in the shape of a beautiful woman who has an enchanting voice that matches her beauty, with long silky black hair and flowing gown, and whose back looks like a hollow tree. She is always luring men to follow her and make love with her. She appears very late at night in lonely roads. Every young man, she has met, in many years, lusted after her, but she was indifferent to their shows of affection. She seduces men, turned them mad, turn them into dogs, or she just made them disappear off the face of the earth. In both legends we find the same purpose: to protect young people from danger. They should not be far from home, especially at night and alone, and should not to be influenced by strangers, no matter how handsome or beautiful they are. Another purpose is to promote religion, because the way someone could defend himself from bad beings, is with a cross, or praying. When a young boy or girl considered staying late at the party, or going out without permission, he or she would think twice about it, because the nahual or the Xtabai could be waiting.

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Something similar happened with the voice of the owlcxl because it was considered a warning of death. Everybody were afraid of these animals, that is why they called them Yautequiua, which means messengers of Mictlantecutli the god of the underworld, the land of the death. These birds were entrusted to tell people when the time of their death was coming. Owls are night animals, so only those who were out at night, may hear this warning.

3. Death in a Mexican Way The biggest fears are related to death. Most people worry about dying, and are also afraid of dead people. In this case Mexicans are an exception, because we have a different way of considering it. Something we can be sure of when we are born is that we will die someday, but would it be the same if we were sure that we will come back to visit the people we love? Will it cause us the same fear and anguish? More important than the act of dying, is what happens afterwards. The cult of death is one of the basic elements in the religion of ancient Mexico. For the prehispanic cultures death is not the end of existence, it is the process of an infinite cycle. It is a transitional way towards something better. They believed that death and life constituted a unity. The way they die, will determine which of the heavens they will go to. Also

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______________________________________________________________ Aztecs believed that those who die could return to visit their relatives as a bird or a butterfly. It is a fact that death exists, but nobody thinks about his own death. We Mexicans don’t think much about our own death either, but we are less afraid of it because we are more familiar with it. On November 1st and 2nd most schools set an altar in honour of the dead and you can see a lot of them in many houses. We interchange with our friends at school or work, little sugar skulls, with the name of our friend on the head and if we have some poetical skills, we will also give them some verses joking about their death, giving it a humoristic end. The Day of the Dead has the purpose to unite children and adults with the idea of the death. We really believe that our relatives that pass away return, at least once a year, to visit us, and share what we prepare for them, because we put up an altar where we put the food and drinks that they used to like. We decorate the altar that we call “ofrenda”, where we offer skulls of sugar, very colourful tissue paper, cut in artistic figures, coloured skeletons, yellow, purple and orange flowers, the portraits of our dead relatives, bread made especially for the day, decorated with bones, pumpkin cooked with fruits and brown sugar…copal, incense, and the light of numerous candles are intended to help the departed find their way. This is not a sad celebration, it is the feast of the dead, and we are happy to share meals, at least for one day, with our relatives that passed away, We also prefer to establish a friendship with the death, by turning her into something humorous and ironic, so we called it “calaca,” bony, skinny, scrawny, and skeletal, and represent it in funny and colourful ways. An expression that defines our relationship with the Death is A mi la calaca me pela los dientes that means death make me show my teeth, that signify she makes me laugh. If we cannot avoid Death, at least we can look at her in kindly way. 4. Fear in Recent Literature for Children When we ask ourselves if the books for children are becoming too dark, we must remember some of the classical short stories where children are devoured, cooked, cut, abused, not only by mean strangers, but sometimes by their own parents, but people go on buying those books because they do not analyze them. Some parents and teachers try to keep their children far from the evil, and try to create for them a world of fantasy, where everyone is happy and nothing bad happens; unfortunately true real world is not like that, and our kids have to deal with big amounts of wickedness, and many adversities every day. In this context it is not easy for adults to understand why children demand scary tales. Isn’t reality sufficient? The fact is that young people

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______________________________________________________________ have always loved stories that take them to the limits. Kids love to listen to this kind of narration, although they know that they will become scared. There have been many horror stories among the best sellers worldwide. The number one best seller at Fondo de Cultura Economica, a very important Latin American publisher, is a horror story, written by a Mexican, about a terrible woman who abuse both physically and psychologically the inhabitants of a small towncxli. Also the Ministry of Education applied a national literary survey in Mexico, and the favourite book in middle school was a horror storycxlii. I think adults are more worried of the sinister parts in children’s books than the children are. Some people even think that they are not sinister enough, considering the chaos of the real world. We cannot take children away from reality so, how can literature help to make the world better? We consider that as children like to get scared, recent literature is answering that question in several ways: When the readers identify with the fictional victims, literature becomes cathartic, especially with those boys and girls who have been abused in any way. They need to talk about it and literature allows them to do it. Some books in modern literature try to soften fear with humour, but most of the times the result is poor. Humour really helps when a book is well written, and depends, for example, like in some Mexican legends, on the intelligence of the subject to defeat the bad guys or in the devils or bad spirits that enjoy playing with humans. Recent books show characters, boys and girls, who are conscious of good and bad, and do not stand there waiting to become victims. They bravely face their aggressors, with a positive attitude, and often they defeat the bad guys. As an educator I will always suggest those well written books that may cause fear or horror, where good guys are good people and finally win. They show that no matter how difficult life is; there is always a chance to improve it. This will increase self confidence and positive thoughts, about real life in the readers. About fear of dying, it will always be less if we consider death as a part of life, as a step in the spiral up of eternal return. We believe that children love to feel fear, as long as it’s only fiction, and there is a happy end. Dealing with fictional terror will help them to understand reality and consider it in a positive way. They can also take from literary characters the strength they need to handle real causes of fear, in order to create a better world, because as Dorothy Bernard said:, “Courage is fear that has said its prayers”.

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Notes 1 2 3 4

Two forms of La X’tabai :Illustration from Characters and Caricatures in Belizean Folklore Owl according to a codex from Mixtec culture Hinojosa, Francisco. La peor señora del mundo. México, FCE Quiroga, Horacio. La gallina degollada y otros cuentos.

Bibliography Animales fantásticos y más leyendas. Mexico, CONAFE, Colibri, 1987. Fernández, S. El Nahual. Cuentos y leyendas de Tlaxcala. México, 1995. Gonzalez Torres, Yolotl. Diccionario de mitología y religión de Mesoamérica. México, Larousse, 1995. Leon-Portilla, Miguel. La filosofía nahuatl. Mexico, UNAM, 1979. Soustelle, Jaques. La vida cotidiana de los aztecas en vísperas de la conquista. 2ª ed. Mexico, FCE, 1970. Thompson, J. Eric S. Grandeza y decadencia de los mayas. 3ª ed. Mexico, FCE, 1984. Valadez Azúa, Raúl y María del Rocío Téllez Estrada. “Entre monstruos te veas”. Correo del Maestro Núm. 65, octubre 2001. www.correodelmaestro.com

Terrified and Terrifying: An Examination of the Defensive Organization of Fundamentalism Michèle Huppert Abstract The targets of terrorism are not the mortal casualties of the act but the audience that bears witness to it. With the advent of globalisation and the sophistication of multimedia communications networks the attacks on the twin towers in New York on 9/11 were almost instantaneously witnessed around the globe. Around 3,000 people were killed but the impact reached a far greater population as it infiltrated into our lounge rooms and across our breakfast tables. Al Qaeda’s message was to all those who allegedly participate in or collude with Western democratic hegemony – be afraid, be very afraid. The psychological processes that facilitate both the perpetration and response to terror are multidimensional and complex. A common response to 9/11 was to label Mohammed Atta and his fellow hijackers as monsters that were mad or evil and thus dehumanise them. The inability to deal with the terror unleashed was displaced so that it was the terrorists that became unfathomable – the anxiety exposed that required recognition that humans could be capable of such devastation and cruelty was split off and projected in to an enemy that could not be identified with as human. Our reaction to the terror created saw us employ the same defence mechanisms that allowed the acting out of the paranoid world that religious fundamentalism is itself accused of. It is only in this light of recognition and identification that we can begin to understand the processes at work. In a world where the only certainty is death, fundamentalism and its concomitant lack of reflexivity provides a structure of rigid and uncompromising certainty. This paper intends to explore the defensive organisation of religious fundamentalism by using psychoanalytic theory, with particular reference to its understanding of paranoia and object relations. The paper will utilise material from the World Wide Web to illustrate both the lure of fundamentalism and its function for both the individual and collective identities of those that are engulfed by it. Keywords: terrorism, defensive organization, fundamentalism ***** This paper will examine the use of religious fundamentalism as a defence against the intolerable anxiety created by uncertainty. The examination of uncertainty will recognize the external world as a reflection of

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______________________________________________________________ the internal mind of the individual with the need and desperation for certainty being fought on both frontiers simultaneously. An examination of the impact of the assault of modernity on previously relied upon external structure will be shown to mirror the fear of internal psychic disintegration. This fear of disintegration threatens to unleash unconscious terror of the death of the ‘self’ and its concomitant psychic annihilation. The paper will then provide an examination of the function of the psychoanalytic concept of defensive organizations which will provide an illustration of the nexus between the internal and external world and the difficulty of extricating one from the other. An analysis of material from the World Wide Web will provide further illustration of the projective identification of an external enemy as a way of warding off the terror which threatens the precarious sense of self provided by the defensive organization. Finally, an explanation of the reaction to the terror, by in fact employing the mechanisms that were employed to enact it, will highlight the complicit relationship between the terrified and the terrifying. 1. Religious Fundamentalism and the Psychoanalytic Concept of Defensive Organizations Freud described religion as being a tool to create the illusion of the fulfilment of infantile wishes, the wishes for omnipotence and omniscience1. Other psychoanalytic theorists have been less critical of religion in general but concerned about the ability to potentially ‘misuse’ religion2. Other social scientists, such as Allport, are also concerned with the potential harm that can be caused by the misuse of religion. It thus appears that religion can be used in varying ways and degrees and the motivations for such usage should be examined. In the 21st century it is those expressions of religion dubbed as ‘Fundamentalist’ by the western world that creates a major source of concern, fear, indeed terror. Paradoxically, religious fundamentalism is itself a reaction to terror. The term ‘fundamentalism’ has become part of common vernacular. It has gained a derogative connotation to describe anyone who is to the right of the observer’s own political, religious, or moral position. This over usage and misrepresentation has seen some social commentators questioning whether the term has lost all usefulness. Indeed it can be argued that the descriptor can be as divisive as the phenomena it purports to describe but the temptation to replace the term with another, more specifically chosen, one is just as problematic. It is argued here that rather than replace the designate ‘fundamentalism’ with another, the academic community should continue the debate of definition and accept that misusage and misunderstanding in the general community may be inevitable but not an argument for abandonment.

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______________________________________________________________ As Ruthven states, “[t]he term may be less than wholly satisfactory, but the phenomena it encompasses deserve to be analysed”3. Fundamentalism as a social and religious descriptor is most often traced to its deliberate inception by a morally outraged and threatened sector of the Protestant movement in the United States early in the twentieth century4. Fundamentalism as a phenomenon of the 21st century has gone beyond the intention of the movement first established in America. It at once describes a protestation and reaction to certain aspects of ‘mainstream’ society and a return to non-reflexive and uncompromising tenets of ‘truth’, ‘life’ and ‘identity’ as prescribed by tradition. Certain key components are manifested by oganisations that can be described as fundamentalist: a ‘truth’ that is irrefutable and derived from a doctrinal origin or sacred text; a messenger who is the personification of that truth and the ultimate authority on the interpretation of its divine content; the community that is established and sustained by its adherence to the truth; the claim to a future or destiny which is accessible only to adherents of the truth; and the identification of evil from which the community must defend itself 5. The use of an almost diagnostic criterion for deciding then what ‘qualifies’ as being fundamentalist can be a reductionist method that does little but categorise. What is missing from such a checklist is an understanding of the psychological processes that underlie the manifestation of these observable phenomena Riesbrodt argues for a distinction to be drawn between two possible reactions by fundamentalist groups to the threat of change in social order. He draws this from the Weberian dichotomy that distinguishes “between affirmation of the world and rejection of the world on the one hand, and between mastery of the world, adaptation to the world, and flight from the world on the other” 6 .The ensuing responses to “rejection of the world” are twofold – fight or flight. For those that flee the world a retreat into isolation in an attempt to create an existence that is ideologically pure and out of reach from contaminants is attempted. This is the function of the enclave. The concern for members of the enclaved community is thus to protect its members from outside threats of persuasion or contradiction. If left alone there is no need for the members of the enclave to interact with those outside its boundaries. If however the threat from the ‘outside’ continues to metaphorically ram against the boundary walls then conflict and territorialmarking violence may ensue. The fight response is more revolutionary in nature and has a messianic quality. Riesbrodt terms this response as “revolutionary fundamentalism” – one that holds the position that society should adapt to and adopt a particular group’s ideology as the only legitimate expression of existence. Groups that express this type of fundamentalism not only seek to save the world but regard themselves as the sole authentic power base .Whilst this is a useful and important distinction it is argued here that the

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______________________________________________________________ advent of globalisation has reduced the distinction to the point that the differences between the behaviours of the two expressions of fundamentalism are almost imperceptible. What is observable is the conflict and ensuing violence – what is no longer obvious is the identity of the protagonist. There is another distinction that must be acknowledged when examining the behaviour of fundamentalist groups – that of action and reaction. The percentage of those that commit violence in the name of their beliefs is far smaller than those that applaud the violence. Thus when investigating why certain fundamentalist groups commit violent acts one has to distinguish between the individuals who fantasize or wish for the destruction of the ‘other’ and those that act out that wish. This is where the debate becomes potentially problematic. Examination of collective behaviour often ignores the influence of and on the individuals that make up that collective. Similarly, the examination of an individual’s behaviour without acknowledging the influence of the individual’s social context does not reveal the entire montage. The nexus between the nomathetic and idiographic is however where examination must take place and to assume an homogeneity within a group and dismiss or eradicate differences between members is to perform the very act of imposing a pseudo certainty that fundamentalist movements have been charged with. Having said that, it is however impossible to take into account every person’s perspective, motivation and raison d’être for membership of fundamentalist organizations or groups. Certain similarities or patterns of behaviour can be suggested, certain theoretical understandings can be applied but reflexivity and flexibility cannot be abandoned. What is being suggested here is ONE theoretical paradigm that explains the impact globalisation has on sectors of humanity that react in particular ways to the perceived threat of uncertainty and insecurity. Psychoanalytic theories propose that the mind of the individual will attempt to restore the individual to a status of psychic equilibrium – a status that rids the individual of excessive and intolerable levels of psychic conflict or anxiety. Defence mechanisms are employed by the psychic apparatus to fend off that which cannot be tolerated by the individual. Defensive organizations are intra psychic structures that are constructed by the use of defence mechanisms to create a safe haven for the vulnerable self. But the ‘relationship’ between the self and the defensive organization is not between two distinct entities but rather a fusion of one with the other7 8. The self becomes encased or engulfed by the defensive organization which stymies individuality and autonomous functioning. This fusion then creates the illusion of a ‘perfect’, or idealized, self, so long as the fusion is not interrupted. Religious Fundamentalism, or rather the use of religion as a defensive organization, can thus be argued to be one way of conjuring up a perception of the self that is idealized because of the individual’s fusion with

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______________________________________________________________ it. Any perceived attack on the external representation of the defensive organization, which is the religion itself, will be perceived and experienced as an attack on the self that is fused with it. Thus perceived attack engenders psychic terror – the threat of the death of the self. 2. Terror as a Psychoanalytic Concept Terror has the ability to bridge the realms of the real and the imagined. The intended victims of the terrorist attack on 9/11 were not the 3,000 dead but the world wide audience who witnessed planes slicing effortlessly through monolithic buildings, a vibrant city shrouded in dust and decay, innocent people forced to jump out of burning buildings and the desperate search of families for their missing loved ones. We watched on in horror, in disbelief, but the terror engendered was our identification with the tragedy – that could be me. Terror requires a personal identification with the horror and this is what the terrorist attack intended – the potential threat of anytime, anywhere. Thus the reality of the horror that was witnessed on 9/11 combines with the unreality of the fear that we could be next, to produce the terror which is designed to render us helpless and impotent 9. Terror not only undermines the sense of certainty of the self but threatens our sense of trust in the world – both the internal and external worlds are rendered impotent to provide a safe haven. Paradoxically, this is the same phenomenon that saw the terrorist act being manifest in the first place – “acts of terrorism are themselves the product of loss of trust in the very ground of being”10. 3. The Terrified and the Terrifying Terrorism, by definition, is targeted against a group or society’s sense of safety and well being 11 12It is not the devastation of the attack itself but the heightened insecurity and helplessness that follow from the unpredictability promised by the threat13.Terrorism itself is produced by the fear of annihilation where the impotence of terror is transmuted in to the potency of rage. What we thus have is a paradox where terrorism is being used by some fundamentalist religions in an attempt to restore the potency stripped from the defensive organisations that keep the self safe from uncertainty. Due to the paranoid nature of defensive organisations, and those that are fused with them, the uncertainty presented by the intrusion of globalisation and concomitant modernity is seen as an attack on the very structures that are designed to protect from intolerable uncertainty. How does one minimise the sense of vulnerability and uncertainty engendered by the threat of terrorist attack? One way would be to make as many variables as ‘certain’ as possible, to build an illusion of control and manageability. Having a sense of ‘knowing’ the enemy, of putting a ‘face’ to

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______________________________________________________________ they that wield the threat allows those who feel threatened to at least ‘know’ who it is that threatens them. The need to be able to identify and recognise those who wish to do harm becomes urgent. The border that separates ‘Us’ from the ‘Other’ is no longer obvious when we are unable to recognise the ‘Other’ that is possibly in our midst. The unfortunate corollary of this is the suspicion that is then directed at all Muslims within our communities Karen Horney’s concept of arbitrary rightness points to the attempts by individuals to reduce the potentially destabilising impact of doubt and unpredictability. Horney explains that the individual tries to impose order and control on that which provokes conscious anxiety and unconscious psychic conflict. Horney states that “[d]oubt and indecision are invariable concomitants of unresolved conflict and can reach an intensity powerful enough to paralyse all action”14. The anxiety provoked by fear of uncertainty needs to be reduced back to a tolerable level. This is facilitated by dispelling doubt and uncertainty and replacing it with the belief in an infallible certainty as certainty and doubt are mutually exclusive phenomenon. Horney further explains that arbitrary rightness is a “rigid rightness [which]…constitutes attempts to settle conflicts once and for all by declaring arbitrarily and dogmatically that one is invariably right” thus dispelling the anxiety that uncertainty and doubt may generate. The need to impose order on that which is disordered, certainty on that which is uncertain, and security on that which is insecure, is also arbitrary in nature. It can be argued that the greater the inability to tolerate uncertainty, the greater the need to arbitrarily construct certainty. This may be done by imposing arbitrary rightness on ambiguous situations or by arbitrarily ‘ignoring’ risks or difficulties associated with a given situation. The interruption of this arbitrary and artificial control may then be experienced as traumatic and destabilising. It can render the individual incapacitated on two levels – the conscious level of the interruption and the unconscious level of what the interruption symbolically represents. In this discussion it is suggested that the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Bali and London have brought the repressed fear of uncertainty to consciousness in the guise of the fear of terrorism. The reason this technique is so effective is that it strips away the arbitrary constructs designed to conceal the uncertainty that cannot be tolerated. What the terrorists in effect are saying is “You do not control your fate – it is in our hands; you can be certain of nothing for we control your future”. The counter response, as mentioned previously, is twofold – the reaction to the threat of a terrorist attack and the response to having the initial repressed fear of uncertainty exposed. The counter response is vested with the need to shore up the arbitrary structures in order to reduce that which is intolerable. The terrorist

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______________________________________________________________ becomes responsible for the two levels of disruption – the known and the unknown. It is at times of threat and destabilization, both from without and within, that intolerance to difference becomes blatant. In situations that do not present threat fear of difference is tolerable; in the tempest of uncertainty the need to ‘manage’ difference becomes acute. It is part of the process of reestablishing the arbitrarily defined equilibrium. It is suggested that as an individual’s fear of uncertainty increases his/her ability to tolerate difference decreases. The ‘driving force’ behind anger and hatred can be argued to be a way of transposing intolerable levels of fear into something potent. Fear can leave the individual helpless, intolerable fear can lead to a terror of the end of existence. Anger and hatred can be seen as attempts to not only eradicate the primary emotion, fear, but as an attempt to mobilize against that which provoked the primary fear. This paper argues that the primary emotion of fear is part of the psyche of the individual and is tolerated by maintaining a delusional sense of control and safety. When an external threat, such as a terrorist attack, smashes through this delusion the individual is left to deal with the ever-present primary fear at an intolerable level. Mechanisms are engaged to restore the delusion as quickly as possible and make ‘safe’ the environment that has been disturbed. 4. Fundamentalism and Modernity The inability to tolerate uncertainty has been acknowledged by theorists such as Bauman 15 and Elliott and Lemert 16 as a driving force for people to manufacture certainty, even if it is an illusion. Religious Fundamentalism is one such method that attempts to eradicate uncertainty. The imposed structure of fundamentalism thus provides a defensive organization designed to protect both the individual and the collective from the potential destabilization of insecurity that leaves the very essence of both group and individual identity exposed to the threat and challenge of alternative ways of being that would introduce doubt and uncertainty. For the individual adopting or creating a defensive organization in an attempt to ward off the terror of intolerable uncertainty there is an inability to think about the ‘self’ as the self, unless it is fused with the divine. Without a perception of self outside its fusion with the divine the individual must also fuse with the group in order to have an identity. The collective identity becomes then paramount for survival of the self, for without it there would be an intolerable threat of psychic annihilation. As there is no ability to be reflexive, there is no ability for the individual to see his/her ‘self’ in any other context than the one he/she has given up selfhood to preserve. Perhaps this is one of the factors that can enable suicide bombers to act – the self has already

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______________________________________________________________ been sacrificed for the survival of the group and with no sense of ‘self’ the body is merely a corporeal vessel and of little consequence. The fusion between self /group/divine is precarious – the fall of any one will herald the demise of the others. Vigilance and high alert for potential threat are consuming, anxiety provoking and exhausting – for an illustration of this, one need only remember the emotional aftermath throughout the entire world after the attacks in the United States on September 11. But there is an added burden for those in possession of ‘absolute truth’ – the limitations of being human which cannot be tolerated in a world that is fused, and dependent for existence, on the divine. To be in a constant state of grace means to disown aspects of the self, the self that is now manifest in the collective identity. This sentiment is captured by the phrase from Matthew 18:9: And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire. However, when one plucks out the offending eye, what does one do with it? The identification of one ‘good’ eye and one ‘evil’ eye exemplifies the defence mechanism of splitting where good and bad must be separated lest the bad contaminate the good. To disown it completely, to deny it as part of the self, employs the defence mechanism of denial. And the need for it to be tossed away into the ‘outer’ where it can no longer contaminate the ‘inner’ employs the psychic defence mechanism known as projection– what cannot be tolerated by the psychic self due to its anxiety provoking nature, must be ‘split off’ from the self, disowned as part of the self and tossed, or projected, to a ‘safe’ distance, into the ‘other’. Thus preoccupation with sexual sinfulness is an illustration of how highly defended the fundamentalist self/group must be. In fact, all human desires that are not considered ‘holy’ will be disowned by the fundamentalist, split off and projected into the outside from whence it can now justifiably feel under threat – but by threat of its own projection. 5. Reflections of Fundamentalism in the Mirror of the World Wide Web Using the psychoanalytic principle that external manifestations and projections are a reflection of internal mechanisms and structure the examination of the self representations of Fundamentalist organizations as they appear in a group’s web presence provides an opportunity to examine the juxtaposition between the internal representation, the self, and its relationship with the external.

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______________________________________________________________ Due to my linguistic limitations sites that have an English language interface have been selected. Space constraints have meant the limitation to three web sites for examination. In particular the aspects of ‘absolute truth’, doctrinal infallibility, and descriptions of how the ‘other’ is represented will be the focus here. Quotes have been taken directly from the identified websites and syntax, emphasis by use of bold font and peculiarities of spelling have been maintained. I have italicized all extracts for ease of differentiation from my text. There was no particular method in selecting the following websites for analysis, nor were they selected completely randomly. I stumbled upon them by using the keywords “true Islam/Judaism/Christianity” in to the Google search engine. I can tell you little about the groups represented here other than what can be gleaned from their own representation but this, after all, is what is being examined. How do these groups identify themselves and how do they classify others? How do they justify or rationalize their particular orientation? For what purpose are they expressing their presence on WWW? The answers to these questions will help develop an understanding of a fundamentalist position. A. Allah Akbar17 Our Aim is to establish and propagate Islaam according to the True teachings of the “Qur’ân” and the “Sunnah” in line with the understanding of the first three generation of Muslims The doctrinal infallibility of the Koran and the Sunnah is foundational here. It is not only the establishment and maintenance of Islam according to this group’s particular interpretation that is the objective dissemination of this particular interpretation is also chartered as a raison d’être for the group. The express reference to “the first three generations of Muslims” establishes a contextual reference point – a return to a tradition of the past that establishes a link with the present and future which thus precludes an acceptable juxtaposition with the modern era. It also identifies this particular group’s religious orientation. The reference to the first three generations of Muslims alludes to the split between the Sunni and the Shiis over the question of authority after the death of Mohammed and marks this group as Sunni. The Shiis belief was in the lineage of Mohammed, holding that only descendents of Mohammed could be regarded as the legitimate heirs. The Sunni belief was that the leadership title was an honour not a birth rite and that it should be granted to the most learned and pious. The Sunni

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______________________________________________________________ further charge that the Shiis were deligitimising and insulting the first three caliphs after Mohammed, who were not descendents of Mohammed 18. The movement seeks to purify our lives from deviation and innovations in the Deen and various idolatrous practice (shirk), Religious Innovations (Bid’ah) and fabricated traditions falsely attributed to the prophet, “Muhammad” (s.a.w.s) which continue to distort the beauty of Islaam and hinder the advancement of the Muslim’s to attend to the unadulterated under-standing of the Tawheed and the correct worship of “Allaah” almighty from the original Authentic sources. this will enable us to live and die as Muslims Insha’Allaah, no matter under what circumstance and secures the blessings, protection, guidance and help of Allaah almighty, unity of the Muslims on the basis of Qur’ân and Sunnah is of paramount importance to it and it strives to make the Ummah strong and shielded from the influence of un-Islaamic or non-Islaamic systems and ideologies and manipulations. The reference to ‘Religious Innovations’ and ‘fabricated traditions’ is another assertion of the corruption of Islam for which Sunni hold Shiis accountable. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism, rejected certain Shii interpretations of Mohammed’s teachings (hadith) as fabrication with the false and deceptive intent to legitimise the supremacy of Mohammed’s descendents over all other Muslims. This, al-Wahhab argued, was in contradiction with the Quran that declared all Muslims to be equal in the eyes of God and thus did not permit the quasi-deified status that was being endowed on Mohammed’s descendents19. Thus it is clear that non-Muslim and those deemed ‘non-authentic’ Muslims are to be the target of the dissemination of this group’s message. It is also interesting to note that the charge of differing in opinion from that which is deemed here as ‘authentic’ is that of manipulation, implying a devious and conscious mischief designed to lead the Muslim astray and corrupt, and thus weaken, the community. The Messenger of Allaah said: “Everyone of them in the Hellfire, except for one group that which I and my companions are upon. “A time of Great calamity is dawning upon us. This time it is not from the Serbs, Jews, Fascist Hindus, US, UK, or Other Enemy of Islaam but from our own ranks. Like the Jews of Turkey who converted

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______________________________________________________________ to Islaam during the latter part of the Ottoman rule, to gain positions of power and destroy Islaam from within, a certain group of people have joined ranks to discredit Islaam. This group of Munafiqeens are openly saying that homosexuality is not Haraam. They launch their campaign in Los Angeles in the United States during a Gay Festival. They are also launching a video and will start a publicity campaign shortly. let us tell all believers that the followers of the Great Munafiq Abdullah Ibn Saba who brought death and destruction during the Caliphate of Othman (RA) are in action again. Abdullah Ibn Saba the great Munafiq succeeded in breaking the Muslims into groups and eventually brought about the division of the Muslims into Sunnis and Shias. But this group in the USA has a much greater mission: that of destroying Islaam and disgracing the Muslims in the eyes of the non believers. AND THIS THEY THINK IS THE ONLY WAY TO STOP THE SPEED AT WHICH ISLAAM IS SPREADING IN THE WEST (sic). This idea that people are “born” homosexual is from the Kufaar and is not based on Islamic Law, after all homosexuality is a CRIME, and as such is punishable by death...” Both non-Muslims and ‘adulterated’ Muslims are damned to “hellfire”. “Innovators” of Islam are regarded as even more threatening to the Ummah than non-Muslims, presumably because of the ability and opportunity to make contact with unsuspecting Muslims. Whilst not explicitly identifying acculturalist or ‘modern’ Muslims, one can see that the Muslim who does not maintain separation from Western influences and indeed incorporates some aspects with religious practice would be regarded as a threat to purity. So too are those who may regard themselves as the ‘true’ Islam from the Shiite persuasion. The penultimate and ultimate excerpts above, the one dealing with innovators and the other with homosexuals, clarify the perceived danger from those who do not follow what is deemed acceptable. The long list of enemies from ‘without’ is joined by those who seek to destroy Islam from ‘within’. But not without the reminder that the idea of homosexuality as anything other than an evil ‘choice’ is an invention of the

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______________________________________________________________ Kufaar (the non-believer). The juxtaposition of the non-Muslim enemies with the openly homosexual Muslim highlights two methods of disciplining those who are straying from the ‘path’. The ridicule and humiliation of being aligned with identified enemies of Islam - especially the Jews who are blamed for the destruction of the Ottoman Empire – together with the proclamation of a crime punishable by death, is an attempt to frighten and intimidate. The double bind that is presented, come back to the fold or be damned, is a reflection of the double bind that the existence of something like homosexuality poses for fundamentalists. Who should be more feared – the enemy from ‘without’ or the enemy from ‘within’? And once the possibility of the unthinkable is raised, that someone calling themselves ‘Muslim’ can also perform an abomination, the sense of security within the enclave is disturbed. B. Exclusive Brethren20 “Who are They? Exclusive Brethren are believers on the Lord Jesus Christ. They hold the truth of His deity, and accept the authority of Scripture as the inspired word of God. Separation The Exclusive Brethren practice separation from evil, recognising this as God’s principle of unity. They shun the conduits of evil communications: television, the radio, and the Internet. Their charter is 2 Timothy 2:19 “The Lord knows those that are his; and, Let every one who names the name of the Lord withdraw from iniquity.” As a matter of conscience, their social activities and links are reserved exclusively for those with whom they celebrate the Lord’s Supper. This sacred remembrance of the Lord Jesus and His death is the core of their Christian fellowship, and the inspiration to live a life apart from worldly pleasures and pursuits; a precious heritage passed down the generations. Again, the absolute ‘truth’ as dictated by a holy scripture is evident. But what is different here is the prescription of separation – that only those who partake in the “Lord’s Supper” are considered pure enough to socialize with. Thus the Exclusive Brethren also use restrictions with regard to food to

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______________________________________________________________ keep members from socializing with the outside world. The protection of members from the evil of the ‘unclean’ coupled with the Assemblies’ right to discipline those members who err imposes a strict discipline designed to maintain the boundaries of the community. Testimony To Government Exclusive Brethren believe in Government and are subject to it as outlined by Paul in Romans 13:1. They do not live in countries that do not have a Christian Government. Their approach is non-political. They do not vote , but hold Government in the highest respect as God’s ministers , used by Him to restrain evil and provide conditions for the promotion of the glad tidings. Exclusive Brethren hold formal prayer meetings every week and include prayers for the support and guidance of right Government which is clearly of God , and also for divine resistance to the devil’s efforts to influence it. Contact with members of parliament or congress is encouraged to express a moral viewpoint of legislation in relation to the rights of God and this ongoing communication is found to be acceptable and productive. Although socialization with those outside the community is forbidden, the involvement in politics is seen as an extension of their ‘divine right’, even though Brethren do not vote. Thus they are not content to remain within the confines of their enclave but find justification to influence Government to follow what the Brethren perceive as the “rights of God”. Thus what is evident in both the examples of Allaah uakba and the Exclusive Brethren is the wish to persuade those outside the enclave to follow the righteous path. Their mission is to serve God, preach the glad tidings in Gospel Halls and in public, represent Christian conscience to Government and those in authority and to train their families to take their place in the testimony of our Lord. The Exclusive Brethren describe themselves as not only the sole encompassment of purity but also as the only group that can be relied upon to provide morality and Christian values to the rest of humanity. Of course, they are only interested in Christian humanity as they only live in countries that have Christian Governments. Furthermore, it is their obligation and duty to

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______________________________________________________________ keep Governments on the righteous path and we are assured that they will ‘train’ future generations of Brethren to maintain this vigilism. The fact that the fellowship continues to exist and thrive, strengthened in its universal commitment, without moving away from the fundamental tenets of its origin, is well known to be a tribute, not only to its success, but also its inherent truth. These features live on, in spite of the absence of a hierarchical organisation of the kind which the average religious mind may look for. This extraordinary piece of logic – we’re still here so we must be right – highlights the selectivity that the Exclusive Brethren adopt. The fact that ‘other’ groups also exist, and in some cases have existed longer, is not seen as problematic. These words: “withdraw,” “separate” and “with those” are key to the fellowship. They believe that common social activities involve fellowship. These include: -

eating and drinking: (1 Corinthians 5:11) - memberships: directorships, associations, clubs, life assurance, shares or stock in public companies, health plans, etc: (2 Corinthians 6:14) - - entertainment: (2 Timothy 2:19 and 2 Corinthians 6:17). Consequently, as a matter of conscience, their social activities and links described as the fellowship and are reserved exclusively for those with whom they eat the Lords Supper. The ‘fellowship’, or the relationship with God, is seen as part of every transaction and aspect of life. This fellowship must be kept pure and so all activities with the non-Brethren must be avoided so as not to degrade this perpetual state of fellowship. Thus, those who do not subscribe to the Exclusive Brethren’s interpretation are not worthy of a relationship with God. This sacred remembrance of the Lord Jesus and His death at the Lord’s Supper is the core of their Christian fellowship, and the inspiration to live a life apart from worldly pleasures and pursuits; a precious heritage passed down the generations.

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______________________________________________________________ As true to this position of separation, they are promised and experience the blessings of being in the divine family: “Be not diversely yoked with unbelievers, for what participation is there between righteousness and lawlessness? or what fellowship of light with darkness?... Wherefore come out from the midst of them, and be separated, saith the Lord, and touch not what is unclean, and I will receive you; and I will be to you for a Father, and ye shall be to me for sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty” (2 Corinthians 6:14-18) Again the assertion is that those who belong to the Brethren are exalted to a privileged position that highlights purity and righteousness but now it is twinned with being exalted to a level that ascribes their own divinity. They alone are in a familial relationship with God and all others are deemed “lawless”, “dark” and “unclean”. Assembly Discipline The apostle Paul was commissioned by Christ to establish the administration of local assemblies according to a universal standard of doctrine based on his teaching “ as I teach everywhere in every assembly” ( 1 Cor 4:17). Also, as in the holy city in Revelation 21:21 “ And the twelve gates , twelve pearls ; each one of the gates , respectively , was of one pearl ; “ In his teaching , Paul outlines the functions of the local company, and includes the provisions for the maintenance of the believer’s soul. The possession of the Holy Spirit is invaluable but it is also envisaged that Christians can render a service to one another to give strength to overcome in the tests of life. Hebrews 5:2 speaks about “being able to exercise forbearance towards the ignorant and erring.”However, Paul also provides for stronger action, where necessary, to maintain a pure position in loyalty to Christ. Such scriptures are 2 Thessalonians 3:14, Matthew 18:18, Galatians 6:1, 2 Timothy 2:19, John 20 :23 and 1 Corinthians 5:5 and 5:13. These provisions are only applied when all else has failed to produce a change of mind.

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______________________________________________________________ The “wall of virtue” is highlighted here. Not only do those within the Fellowship have to contend with God but also with their fellow Brethren who have an obligation to protect the souls of individuals within the enclave. This is described as a “service” which suggests a benefit – a “we’re doing this for your own good” approach. It is not clear what is meant by “forbearance” but together with “stronger action, when necessary” it has a punitive and intimidating tone to it. The desired result of the intervention is to “produce a change of mind” – a mind that is not at one with that deemed appropriate by the group cannot be tolerated here. C. Neturei Karta21 “WHAT IS THE NETUREI KARTA? Neturei Karta opposed the establishment of and retain all opposition to the existence of the so-called “State of Israel” !NetureiKarta is the Aramaic term for “Guardians of the City. The name Neturei-Karta originates from an incident in which R. Yehudah Ha-Nassi (Rabbi Judah the Prince) sent R. Hiyya and R. Ashi on a pastoral tour of inspection. In one town they asked to see the “guardians of the city” and the city guard was paraded before them. They said that these were not the guardians of the city but its destroyers, which prompted the citizens to ask who, then, could be considered the guardians. The rabbis answered, “The scribes and the scholars,” referring them to Tehillim (Psalms) Chap. 127. (Jerusalem Talmud, Tractate Hagiga. 76c). The above translation and definition of this group’s name indicates its perception that it is the moral and righteous caretaker of Judaism. Any ‘other’ that proclaims authority is not only seen as incorrect but as destructive. Reference to revered Rabbis from the past is used to legitimize the group’s status in the present. The name was given to a group of Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem who refused (and still refuse) to recognize the existence or authority of the so-called “State of Israel” and made (and still make) a point of publicly demonstrating their position, the position of the Torah and authentic unadulterated Judaism.

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______________________________________________________________ Neturei Karta also pronounces that all other interpretations of Jewish Law, both written and oral, are fraudulent and corrupt. They alone have the correct understanding of the ‘truth’. Neturei Karta is not - as is often alleged - a small sect or an extremist group of “ultra-orthodox” Jews. The Neturei Karta have added nothing to nor have they taken anything away from the written and oral law of the Torah as it is expressed in the Halacha and the Shulchan Aruch. The Neturei Karta are fighting the changes and inroads made by political Zionism during the past one-hundred odd years. Guided by the rabbis of our time and under the inspiring leadership of the late Reb Amram Blau, the Neturei Karta refuse to recognize the right of anyone to establish a “Jewish” state during the present period of exile. This is an interesting statement as it seems to anticipate the possibility that others may charge them with being unrepresentative extremists. The reassertion that Neturei Karta alone is authentic is coupled with the responsibility and duty to not just refrain from participating within the State of Israel but to fight against it. Any alternative to their position cannot be tolerated, nor even exist. Neturei Karta oppose the so-called “State of Israel” not because it operates secularly, but because the entire concept of a sovereign Jewish state is contrary to Jewish Law. All the great rabbis who in accordance with Jewish Law opposed Zionism at its inception did not do so merely due to consideration of the secular lifestyles of the then Zionist leaders or even for their opposition to Torah heritage and rejection of its values and practices, but due to the fact that the entire concept of a Jewish state is in direct conflict with a number of Judaism’s fundamentals. Condemnation of and segregation from anything connected to or affiliated with the so-called modern day “State of Israel” is based on the Talmud, the key fundamental doctrine of the Oral Tradition handed down by G-d to Moses on Mt. Sinai. The Zionist state employs a set of chief rabbis and uses religious parties to ornament their state with a clerical image. They study the Torah with

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______________________________________________________________ commentaries altered to clothe the words with nationalistic nuances. Our rabbis have countless times proclaimed that it matters little which individuals or parties govern in the Zionist state because the very establishment and existence of the state itself is to be condemned and to be deplored. The true Jews remain faithful to Jewish belief and are not contaminated with Zionism. The castigation of those that do not agree with the ‘inerrant truth’ of Scripture, as interpreted by revered Rabbis, is blatant. Zionism is a contaminant and ‘true Jews’ must separate from any interaction with the ‘unholy’ state. The claim of authenticity in the interpretation of the Oral tradition, a link with the past, and the laws of Torah justify the enmity and public demonstrations aimed at shaming the ‘other’ to capitulate. 6. Summary Psychoanalytic interpretation of the observable phenomena manifested by the fundamentalist individual and/or group reminds us that the propensity for us to dehumanize our ‘enemy’ is a reflection of the same intrapsychic processes at work. It is not necessarily the identification of the threat that is faulty for the necessity of the unconscious invocation of paranoid defences – it is the exaggeration of and preoccupation with the threat that leads to a hostile and often violent reaction. Psychoanalytic theories offer much by way of understanding the unconscious reaction to and retreat from perceived threat and its ensuing insecurity that make the formation of a defensive organization comprehendible. This paper has attempted to identify and explore the underlying psychological processes that may orient both the individual and the collective to take refuge in the fundamentalist structures. The action and reaction to perceived threat of psychic annihilation is projected away from the self in order to protect the fusion with the idealized object. Terrorism and terrorist acts of violence are invoked in order to turn the paralyzing consequence of terror into a potent response and defence. The response to terrorism itself unleashes the same response by way of the same defensive mechanisms of splitting and projection. Common to both the terrorists and those who are reacting to terrorism is the belief that to kill off the ‘evil other’ is good, and should one die in the attempt it is not only a just and courageous act it also confirms the evil of the enemy 22.

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Notes 1 2 3 4

5

6

7 8

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Sigmund. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, ed. James Strachey, W.W. Norton & Co., New York; London, 1961. Erich. Fromm, Psychoanalysis & Religion, Yale University Press, New Haven & London 1950. Malese Ruthven, Fundamentalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York 2004, pg9. Robert Wuthnow, and Matthew P.Lawson, ‘Sources of Christian Fundamentalism in the United States’, in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds.), Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2004. Robert. E. Frykenberg, ‘Accounting for Fundamentalisms in South Asia: Ideologies and Institutions in Historic Perspective’, in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds.), Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements: University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2004. Martin Riesbrodt, Pious Passion: The emergence of modern fundamentalism in the United States and Iran, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1998. Neville Symington, Narcissism: A new theory, Karnac Books, London, 1993. John Steiner, ‘The Interplay between pathological organizations and the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions’, in Elizabeth Bott Spillius (ed.), Melanie Klein Today Volume 1: Mainly Theory, BrunnerRoutledge Hove and New York, 1988; N. Symington ibid Donald Meltzer, ‘Terror, persecution, dread - a dissection of paranoid anxieties’, in Elizabeth Bott Spillius (ed.), Melanie Klein Today Volume 1: Mainly Theory, Brunner-Routledge, Hove & New York 1988. Ruth Stein, ‘Fundamentalism, Father and Son, and Vertical Desire’, Psychoanalytic Review (April 2006) , 93 (2), 201 - 29. Albert Bandura, ‘Mechanisms of moral disengagement’, in W Reich (ed.), Origins of Terrorism, Woodrow Wilson Centre Press, Washington, 1998. Vamik Volkan, Blind Trust, Pitchstone Publishing, Virginia 2004. Leonard Nosek, (2003), in Sverre Varvin and Vamik Volkan (eds.), Violence or Dialogue? Psychoanalytic Insights on Terror and Terrorism, International Psychoanalytic Association, London, 2003. Karen Horney, Our Inner Conflicts, W.W. Norton & Co. New York, London, 1945

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______________________________________________________________ 15 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: the human consequences, Columbia University Press New York, 1998. 16 Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert,, The new individualism : the emotional costs of globalization, Routledge, London ; New York, 2006. 17 http://www.allaahuakbar.net 18 N. DeLong-Bas, Wahhabi Islam, Oxford University Press, Oxford; New York, 2004. 19 ibid 20 www.theexclusivebrethren.com 21 www.nkusa.org 22 Lord J. Alderdice, ‘Terrorism and the Psychoanalytic Space’, in Joseph Cancelmo, et al. (eds.), Terrorism and the Psychoanalytic Space: International Perspectives from Ground Zero, Pace University, New York, 2003.

Bibliography Alderdice, Lord John (2003), ‘Terrorism and the Psychoanalytic Space’, in Joseph Cancelmo, et al. (eds.), Terrorism and the Psychoanalytic Space: International Perspectives From Ground Zero (New York: Pace University Press). Bandura, Albert (1998), ‘Mechanisms of moral disengagement’, in W Reich (ed.), Origins of Terrorism (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press). Bauman, Zygmunt. (1998), Globalization : the human consequences (New York: Columbia University Press). Delong-Bas, Natana (2004), Wahhabi Islam (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press). Elliott, Anthony and Lemert, Charles. (2006), The new individualism : the emotional costs of globalization (London ; New York: Routledge). Freud, Sigmund (1961), The Future of an Illusion, ed. James Strachey (New York; London: W.W. Norton & Co.). Fromm, Erich (1950), Psychoanalysis & Religion (New Haven & London: Yale Universit Press). Frykenberg, Robert Eric (2004), ‘Accounting for Fundamentalisms in South Asia: Ideologies and Institutions in Historic Perspective’, in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds.), Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Horney, Karen (1945), Our Inner Conflicts (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Co.).

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______________________________________________________________ Meltzer, Donald (1988), ‘Terror,persecution, dread - a dissection of paranoid anxieties’, in Elizabeth Bott Spillius (ed.), Melanie Klein Today Volume 1: Mainly Theory (Hove & New York: Brunner-Routledge). Nosek, Leonard (2003), in Sverre Varvin and Vamik Volkan (eds.), Violence or Dialogue? Psychoanalytic Insights on Terror and Terrorism (London: International Psychoanalytic Association). Reisbrodt, Martin (1993), Pious Passion: The emergence of modern fundamentalism in the United States and Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press). Ruthven, Malise (2004), Fundamentalism (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press). Stein, Ruth (April 2006), ‘Fundamentalism, Father and Son, and Vertical Desire’, Psychoanalytic Review, , 93 ((2)), 201 - 29. Steiner, John (1988), ‘The Interplay between pathological organizations and the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions’, in Elizabeth Bott Spillius (ed.), Melanie Klein Today Volume 1: Mainly Theory (Hove and New York: Brunner-Routledge). Symington, Neville (1993), Narcissism: A new theory (London: Karnac Books). Volkan, Vamik (2004), Blind Trust (Virginia: Pitchstone Publishing). Wuthnow, Robert and Lawson, Matthew P. (1994), ‘Sources of Christian Fundamentalism in the United States’, in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds.), Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Websites http://allaahuakbar.net/aboutus.asp viewed Wednesday, 14th March, 2007 http://www.theexclusivebrethren.com/index-1.asp viewed Wednesday, 14th March, 2007 http://www.nkusa.org/AboutUs/index.cfm viewed Wednesday, 14th March, 2007 Michèle Huppert is a Lecturer in Behavioural Studies, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University, Australia

Sexing the Doppelgänger: A Recourse to Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ Susan Yi Sencindiver Abstract The fictional doppelgänger resists narrow categorisation and definition, yet exhibits a peculiar feature: it is claimed to be the exclusive property of the male gender. As a sole male phenomenon, the doppelgänger would seem to fortify the essentialist scheme of a gendered identity. However, as the doppelgänger decisively decentres the idea of a unified subjectivity, it cannot be presumed that gendered identity remains miraculously intact. I seek to extend the traditional critical approaches to the iconography of the doppelgänger narrative by inquiring how the otherness of sexual difference - under the guise of castration - forms a conceptually coherent nucleus at the interface of both the uncanny and the doppelgänger motif. Doppelgänger narratives are racked with the persistent themes of the unreliability of vision that pertain to the transposition of symbolic castration. It is not only blindness that figures as a displaced trope for castration, but also the sight of the castrated female and sexual difference; a danger circumvented by veiling the female body. However, this veiling remains tenuous as the uncanny dialectic between veiling and unveiling also operates according to a fetishist logic in which sexual difference is both disavowed and affirmed. This fetishist logic and the doppelgänger, moreover, become two versions of the same doubling-mechanism, in which the self is narcissistically protected from castration and death by duplication of the penis and self respectively. However, the repressed returns as other: sexual difference - one in which womb is equated with tomb as seen through the lens of male anxiety - indelibly marks the alterity within male subjectivity and the latter’s concomitant crisis. To substantiate this framework, this paper will read Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ as a paradigmatic example, in which its title character emerges as a terrifying Medusa-like doppelgänger. Keywords: Doppelgänger, Gender, the Uncanny, Castration, Fetishism ***** No nos une el amor sino el espanto; será por eso que la quiero tanto.1 - Jorge Luis Borges, Buenos Aires Je est un autre - Arthur Rimbaud

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______________________________________________________________ The fictional doppelgänger as a recurring literary device generates uneasy perplexity and anxiety for its readers as it articulates the disturbing crisis of self-division and identity as alterity. It renders explicit Rimbaud’s maxim above: the elementary yet incongruous conjunction of self and other. However, what happens when the double is female; i.e., already ‘other’ in a phallocentric confine? Does she necessarily entail a subjectivity that differs sexually from itself? What implications, if any, do the differing gendered configurations of host(ess) and double have? These are some of the questions I would like to cover with reference to Poe’s short story ‘Ligeia,’ in which we witness the impossible resurrection of its title character by virtue of metempsychosis. While previous criticism has compellingly characterised the overt doubling of the narrator’s first wife by his second wife, Ligeia and Rowena respectively; my argument, instead, pursues the critical implications of reading Ligeia as the narrator’s double, in order to further elucidate the source of her threat and potency as a transgressing figure - one that ostensibly resides in the fatality that the female body presents for the male observer. There are ubiquitous doppelgänger elements in Poe’s tales, and although these have been subjected to various critical frameworks, surprisingly, the question of female doubles that looms largely in his work has been treated with relatively little exposition - despite the fact that a number of his tales belong to the earliest examples of explicit female doubling in literary history. The cause hereof pertains to the lack of currency for the ‘doppelgängerin.’ A female license for doubling has been overlooked in previous criticism, or perhaps even deliberately marginalized, apparently on account of a faulty premise: the doppelgänger motif has been claimed to be the exclusive property of the male gender. According to Robert Alter ‘there is something intrinsically, and weirdly, sexless about … most of the arid Doppelgänger bachelors.’2 Similarly, Otto Weininger, Freud’s contemporary, avers that the double solely appears in the male form. On the other hand, it can be argued that their assertions merit partial validity. Compared to the male doppelgänger, there are only a few literary instances of an explicit female version - the pressing question is why? Weininger’s own notoriously misogynist and anti-Semitic treatise entitled Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung offers a dubious, yet unwittingly telling, account for the resistance towards the notion of the doppelgängerin. He writes: die Tiere erschrecken nie, wenn sie sich im Spiegel sehen, aber kein Mensch vermöchte sein Leben in einem Spiegelzimmer zu verbringen. Oder ist auch diese Furcht, die Furcht vor dem Doppelgänger (von der bezeichnenderweise das Weib frei ist) ‘biologisch,’

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______________________________________________________________ ‘darwinistisch’ abzuleiten? Man braucht das Wort Doppelgänger nur zu nennen, um in den meisten Männern heftiges Herzklopfen hervorzurufen.3 This passage includes an interesting footnote: ‘Noch hat niemand von Doppelgängerinnen gehört ... Es gibt eine tiefe Furcht, die nur der Mann kennt.’4 This excerpt intends to adduce the singular aspect of subjectivity left unexplained by the contemporary empirical approach to psychology - an autonomous subjectivity certified by ‘the acute heart-palpitation’ that the doppelgänger excites. This fear presupposes the existence of (male) subjectivity since the double causes the subversion of, yet is also intrinsic to, the fundamental basis of identity. Since their subjectivity is not at stake, Weininger’s objectified women do not manifest ‘the fear of the doppelgänger’ nor can they figure as a hostess for a doppelgängerin. Weininger’s homology, in which sexual difference is predicated upon the opposition between subject and object, has long permeated Western cultural tradition and systems. As Simone de Beauvoir vindicates in The Second Sex: femininity has been formed by relation to - and differentiation from - a male standard, thus the corollary construction of the former as the quintessential ‘other,’ as ‘lack,’ or as ‘absence.’ Likewise, it follows that the female doppelgänger can only remain the silent other of the term available in a phallocentric economy as it is ostensibly incompatible for an other to accommodate another other. As a sole male phenomenon, the doppelgänger would seem to fortify the essentialist scheme of a securely gendered identity. However, this categorical characterization can be contested: an androcentric paradigm already implicitly incorporates the female double in the name of ‘woman’ owing to her allocation as man’s second self, his alter ego. In addition, as the doppelgänger decisively decentres the subject by subverting the logic of identity, it cannot be presumed that gendered identity remains miraculously intact. In effect, Weininger’s contention of the ‘deep fear that only the man knows’ also tacitly subsumes patriarchal fears about sexual difference, since gender - an essential specification of identity - is jeopardized. In fact, man’s ‘deep fear’ is repeated in Weininger’s tract - and in this particular context the deep fear concerns the fear of woman: ‘jene tiefste Furcht im Manne: die Furcht vor dem Weibe, das ist die Furcht vor der Sinnlosigkeit: das ist die Furcht vor dem lockenden Abgrund des Nichts.’5 The dangerous spectres of female sexuality, ‘deviant’ sexual desire and its transgressive power insidiously mark the alterity within male subjectivity and the latter’s concomitant crisis. However, it is exigent to emphasize that the early cases of female doubling are typically conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters. The early literary

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______________________________________________________________ doppelgängerin embodies the same destabilizing effect of eroding conceptual categories as her male counterpart, in which demarcations between identity and difference, self and other, and the absolutes of life and death are undone; but she introduces an added dimension: the ‘enticing abyss of … nothing’ is within man and is understood in terms of sexual difference as seen through the lens of male anxiety. In other words, sexual difference is misperceived as ontological difference - a difference that Slavoj Žižek defines as ‘the bare minimum of a difference not between beings but between the minimum of an entity and the void, nothing.’6 Hence, the femininity of the doppelgängerin is discursively constituted, an androcentric construct in which the actual woman is absent: the doppelgängerin functions as a mirror upon which the male protagonist projects his own fears, desires, and the failure to coincide with himself. He misconceives female sexual difference in terms of his own fears; i.e., as castration - a pervasive trope for sexual difference - that violates the narcissistic conception of body integrity and its self-image as whole while generating the unbearable fear of loss. Weininger’s masculine fantasy of the ontological nullity of woman returns in the figure of the castrating doppelgängerin to haunt both the existential and intimate sexual borders of the masculine ‘I.’7 I would like to illustrate how in ‘Ligeia’ the persistent themes of the unreliability of vision rely on the transposition of castration anxiety - in particular its relation to the role played by women, since female genitalia have often been culturally construed as a signifier for castration.8 Freud’s discussion on The Sandman in his essay ‘The ‘Uncanny’’ focuses to a large extent on the role played by vision: the idea that the ‘anxiety about one’s eyes, the fear of going blind’ is a displaced trope for castration anxiety.9 Blinding represents displaced castration fear, not only in terms of the substitutive relation between the eye and the male organ as Freud explicates, but also in terms of the castrated maternal body.10 Its terror is also of a visual nature: it is derived from the sight of something, or to be more precise, from something absent from sight: the negative perception of an absent maternal penis. Hence, it is befitting that among Freud’s manifold selected examples in ‘The ‘Uncanny,’’ female genitalia are presented as unheimlich.11 However, Freud himself failed to advert to this connection. Jane Marie Todd, in her article ‘The Veiled Woman in Freud’s ‘Das Unheimliche’,’ keenly discerns Freud’s curious parapraxis in the 1919 edition of ‘The ‘Uncanny’;’ here, ‘the name ‘Schleiermacher’ [which literally means ‘veilmaker’] is substituted for Schelling’ whose definition of the uncanny Freud endorses.12 In his inadvertent, but telling, slip of the pen Freud unwittingly reveals how he himself is a veil maker: by dismissing the uncanniness of the doll Olympia in favour the castrating father-imago of the Sandman, Freud elides or veils the terrifying peril posed by the castrated female body - ‘If he failed to see the

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______________________________________________________________ veiled woman, if he adverted his eyes, it was because he, too, was afraid of being blinded.’13 Similarly, visual ambiguity and ocular anxiety informs Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ and this is most conspicuously rendered by Ligeia’s ‘most brilliant of black’ eyes and the black and/or golden interior of the bridal chambercum-crypt.14 These are weaved together forming a concatenating network that all share attributes associated with the phantasmagorical effect of the draperies: the distorting and distorted light of the parti-coloured fires of the censer and the ‘leaden hue’ of the tinted chamber window - entities which augment the changing appearance of the interior.15 As the chamber’s illusory quality, deceptive light, and Ligeia’s black, yet luminous, eyes suggest: vision is always double and duplicitous. Ligeia’s otherworldly eyes constitute the site for the unnamed narrator’s scopophiliac-epistemophilia. They are ‘the source but also the failure for his analytic abilities.’16 They are likened to stellar bodies emitting light: the ‘radiant lustre’ of ‘her large and luminous orbs’ renders the dark and occult passages of transcendentalist texts legible and their medial function enables him to acquire ‘a wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden.’ Not only does her absence, i.e., the loss of her eyes, create the narrator’s figurative blindness, which becomes a ‘child groping benighted’; but her eyes also represent the ‘failure of his analytic abilities’ in the additional sense in that they themselves confound the narrator. He tries in vain to ‘trace home [his] own perception of ‘the strange.’’ ‘The ‘strangeness,’ however, which I found in the eyes … must, after all, be referred to the expression. Ah, word of no meaning!’17 Her eyes are of a textual nature, but for the narrator their expression resists interpretation and becomes mere sound or an empty signifier. ‘What was it that something more profound than the well of Democritus - which lay far within the pupils of my beloved?’ Poe’s phrase ‘the well of Democritus’ may be a reference to the latter’s conception of the bottomless void or empty space between atoms, or his axiom: ‘truth is in an abyss.’ The secret and ‘strangeness’ of Ligeia is deeply hidden in a most unheimlich place: in her eyes, a displaced trope for her sexuality - the loci of both an abyss and a truth beyond man’s reach. The narrator’s scopic obsession - his ‘intense scrutiny of Ligeia’s eyes’18 - that pertains to his epistemological quest converges with his castration anxiety. The truth to be found in Ligeia’s eyes translates into the narrator’s (and Weininger’s) fear of woman’s latent and alluring boundlessness - ‘the enticing abyss of the nothing.’ Hence, we understand the necessity the narrator has felt to assume the role of a ‘Schleiermacher.’ The covering of Rowena’s corpse is particularly significant to the narrator’s preoccupation with troubling bodies. Not only is the corpse veiled, but, in fact, the narrator obsessively veils ‘with child-like perversity’ the entire chamber with the most remarkable ‘gorgeous and fantastic draperies.’19 Their deceptive appearances and phantasmagorical

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______________________________________________________________ effect reinforce the significance of their function - the disavowal of perception: the veil engenders the illusion that there is something substantial beneath it, while at the same time concealing the nothingness of the castrated body. However, once removed, the mirage is dispelled: the seeker of truth only finds a gaping void, lack of meaning, and the emergence of death. Ligeia’s duplicitous eyes in the final scene are unveiled as strictly corporeal with their former luminosity absent. Her eyes are revealed as abysmal black holes signalling the lack of a castrated being and this horrifying sight of ‘nothing’ attests that castration can occur - or if read along Lacanian lines that symbolic ‘castration’ has occurred. The narrator assimilates the fetishist who disavows woman’s castration and instead posits the possibility of the phallic mother - the mother endowed with an imaginary penis or its substitute.20 The fetishised draperies dissimulate a phallic veil that replaces and masks the pernicious lack of the castrated body. This is most evident in the depiction of Ligeia as a Medusa figure, whose decapitated head represents a fetish object par excellence.21 The motif of Medusa remains latently present throughout the tale and is portrayed in its ubiquitous snake imagery: the references to the arabesque patterns of the chamber’s interior, the serpentine pattern of the vine and trellis, the censer - that is ‘Saracenic in pattern’ from which light exudes in a writhing form ‘as if endued with a serpent vitality,’ and the multi-branches of the candelabra which connote Medusa’s phallic hair.22 The most explicit reference to the terror of Medusa occurs before the final revelation of the resurrected Ligeia. A glance at Medusa’s head turns the viewer into stone, and likewise the narrator dares to glimpse the spectacle and is immediately petrified: I trembled not - I stirred not … the stature, the demeanour of the figure, rushing hurriedly through my brain, had paralyzed - had chilled me into stone. I stirred not - but gazed upon the apparition.23 Ligeia-Medusa serves as a fetish in that she both frightens and reassures; she functions as both a site of castration and what covers the lack: the illusion of a penile possession. Although the fetishist denies the castrating sight, he can never fully eliminate the smouldering acknowledgement of its lack and the inadequacy of the substitute. The ‘nothing’ to be transpired behind the veil of the penis’ representations always has the potential to violently emerge. Ligeia is a Medusian double who uncannily returns as ‘other’. According to Otto Rank and Freud, the double was originally a narcissistic wish-fulfilment ‘against the destruction of the ego’, an ‘energetic denial of

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______________________________________________________________ the power of death.’ However, once ‘this stage had been surmounted, the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.’24 Correspondingly, the narrator adheres to an ambitious Faustian enterprise intending to transcend the bounds of life and death. Although his vision of immortality is in fact implemented, it becomes unintentionally and irretrievably secular. The final indelible image of Ligeia’s reconstitution in the flesh renders the possibility of life after death, yet it asserts the return of a strictly physical and fatal corporeality abridging the synthesizing moment of transcendence. In a parallel fashion, Freud highlights how this invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of dreams, which is fond of representing castration by a doubling or multiplication of a genital symbol.25 The male double originally served as a guarantee against the threat of death, homologously, the female double in the form of Medusa originally averted castration anxieties. Her phallic hair and the male double express two versions of the same doubling-mechanism, in which the self is narcissistically protected from castration and death by a tropic replacement of excess, the unbounded doubling of the penis and self respectively. In the same way the male double outlines a reversal of aspect, the phallic female double returns as an uncanny harbinger of violent dismemberment in terms of the mutilated female genitals - the abysmal black holes of Ligeia’s eyes. It would be more accurate, however, to say that this perception of the absent penis or ‘incompleteness’ of the female body defines the subject in his own absence and incompleteness to himself. As harbingers of death and castration respectively, both the male and female double present a mortal danger directed at the body and dislocate the idea of presence. Regardless of its gender, the double features a host-subject split, severed, and alienated from himself. The doubling-mechanism intended to ward off death and castration inverts its effect signalling its affiliation with the compulsive repetition of the death drive. The narrator is confronted with a dreadful sight, but the paralysing power of Ligeia’s gaze remains ambiguous. Does the sight of Ligeia repel and/or attract? Fetishism operates according to the paradoxical logic of seeing while not seeing. Similarly, Medusa summarises the perceptual duplicity of seeing vs. being seen. Who gives rise to the process of petrifaction? Is it the narrator-observer’s sight of Ligeia-Medusa or is it the Medusian gaze itself? Not only does the cause of the narrator’s medusation present a fundamental ambiguity, but also its effect: castration or penile

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______________________________________________________________ possession? Does Ligeia’s revival arouse the narrator’s terror or is his beloved’s returning a cause for elation? In fact, the responsibility for petrifaction can be located with the narrator-observer. In the critical moment when he is chilled into stone, it is he who ultimately observes Ligeia and assumes the unconditional role of seer: ‘I stirred not - but gazed upon the apparition.’ Ligeia does not open her eyes until after the unveiling of her ghastly cerements in which he himself is subjected to her observation and is turned into the object in the act of seeing - but here, the moment of medusation has elapsed. The indecidability of the Medusian fetish, its both/and logic, is undone in the final scene, as narrator himself states: ‘Here then, at least … can I never - can I never be mistaken - these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes - of my lost love - of the lady - of the LADY LIGEIA.’26 Although the final unveiling and her abysmal black eyes-as-holes ostensibly suggest the disclosure of the nothingness of the castrated female, what this spectacle presents can neither be the phallic and/or castrated woman. The moment of infallible certainty - that he can ‘never be mistaken’ cancels the indecidability and binary oppositions of the fetish, suspends the logic of castration and the primacy of phallic value. Furthermore, the phallocentric functioning of the gaze, through which female castration is affirmed, is unsettled by Ligeia who looks back. Thus, one can surmise that what the narrator glimpses is actual sexual difference or sexual différance beyond binaries - one that disrupts what Irigaray coined hommosexualité.27 Actual sexual difference is veiled as the castrated woman who, in turn, is veiled as phallic; thus, non-binary sexual difference is twice removed. Does this doubly veiled woman ultimately divest her ghastly cerements? But here at the climax of the tale - meant to afford a final anagnorisis - the tale abruptly yet appropriately ceases, since sexual différance can only remain unrepresentable in a signifying system that privileges the signifier of the phallus. Hence, Weininger’s comment on woman’s lack of ontological actuality surprisingly proves equitable when modified and read in the light of the Lacanian ‘la femme n’existe pas’: woman’s non-being results not from the non-existence of female empirical reality, but from the inability of Woman to be defined and integrated adequately in the linguistico-cultural register of a patriarchal Symbolic - of which Ligeia’s incomplete name unmarked by a patronymic also betokens. However, according to Žižek, Weininger falls short in recognizing that the ‘nothingness’ he discerns in woman constitutes ‘the very negativity that defines the notion of the subject’: ‘Weininger’s aversion to woman bears witness to the fear of the most radical dimension of subjectivity itself: of the Void which ‘is’ the subject.’28 ‘Ligeia’ forces us to rethink the categories of the doppelgänger by resisting the latter’s monopolization by one sex: it opens up alternate ways of conceptualizing the bodily and sexual economy of the doppelgänger. However, it is important to differentiate between the doppelgängerin’s

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______________________________________________________________ various visages. The doppelgängerin presented in this tale is viewed through a male optic; hence, she does not designate a radical alterity within or divided states of the psyche of women, but rather the irreducible existential lacunae within male consciousness; i.e., the male doppelgänger dons the veil of a female doppelgänger. According to the myth of Medusa, Perseus can never catch a direct glance of her actual appearance, since he makes use of his reflecting shield as a mirror in order to avoid petrifaction. He can only gaze at her refracted specular-image. Her true (sexual) difference exceeds representation, and thus she is only present as an index of the unrepresentable. The mirrored simulacrum of Ligeia-Medusa’s castrated-decapitated head constitutes the reflections and projections of a castrated incompleteness hidden deep within the narrator’s own psyche: the intolerable ontological nullity around which subjectivity is structured - that intimate, yet abysmal part of the self which we endeavour not to see. On the other hand, if we ventured to look at the Medusa straight on, we would in Cixous’ words discover that ‘she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.’29

Notes 1

2 3

4

5

6 7

8

‘

We are united, not by love but by horror; that must be why I love her so. Robert Alter, ‘Playing Host to the Doppelgänger,’ TLS (1986): 1190. [no animal is made afraid by seeing its reflection in a mirror, but no man would be able to spend his life in a room surrounded with mirrors. Or can this fear, the fear of the doppelgänger (the female is characteristically devoid of this fear) be explained ‘biologically’, ‘Darwinistically’? One need only mention the word doppelgänger in order to call forth acute heart-palpitation in most men.] Otto Weininger, Sex and Character with Interlinear Translation, Ed. Robert Willis, 267268, accessed 25 Mar. 2007. www.theabsolute.net/ottow/geschlecht.pdf. My translation. Female doppelgängers are not heard of ... There is a deep fear that only the man knows. ibid, 269. that deepest fear in the man: the fear of the woman, that is the fear of meaninglessness: that is the fear of the enticing abyss of the nothing. ibid, 405. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006, 24. Das Weib hat keinen Teil an der ontologischen Realität.’ [The woman has no part in ontological reality] ibid, 389. By presenting the notion of castration, I do not endorse psychoanalytically based theories of sexual difference. As Juliet Mitchell points out ‘psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a

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9

10

11

12

13 14

15

patriarchal society but an analysis of one.’ Indeed, it is rather the fuller implications and preteritions of a masculine theoretical economy that will be illustrated ensuing. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975, xv. Sigmund Freud, ‘The ‘Uncanny’’. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Ed. Vincent B. Leitch, et al., NY & London: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc, 2001, p939. The threat of castration is effected by way of two procedures. In contrast to the direct threat of castration posed by the father precipitating the subsidence of the Oedipal phase, the maternal body plays an indirect role. On apprehending the anatomical differences between the sexes, the deemed maternal absence of a male organ, the child’s ‘infantile theory of sexuality’ - i.e., the theory that every human being, regardless of sex, is equipped with a penis - is replaced by a new assumption: that females have been castrated, which in turn renders the possibility of castration visible to the child. Sigmund Freud, ‘On the Sexual Theories of Children’, 1908, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Ed. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974, p207. The female genital organs are the ‘entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning.’ The uncanny marks the return of something ‘familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.’ In this sense, our once intimate relationship with the heimlich womb - i.e. inanimate state anterior to life - returns as a reversion of the repressed, thus becoming frightening and uncanny. Women’s sex organs pose an uncanny fear in more than one sense. In ‘Fetishism,’ Freud states that ‘[p]robably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital … it is as though the last impression before the uncanny and traumatic one [the sight of the female genital] is retained as a fetish.’ Freud, ‘The ‘Uncanny’’, pp944-947. Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Ed. Vincent B. Leitch, et al. (NY & London: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc, 2001) 954. My italics. Jane Marie Todd, ‘The Veiled Woman in Freud’s ‘Das Unheimliche’’, Signs 11.3 (1986): 522. ibid, 523, 528. Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Tales, (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1994) 50. ‘[T]he rays of either the sun or moon, passing through [the pane], fell with a ghastly lustre on the objects within.’ ibid, 57.

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17 18 19

20

21

22 23 24 25 26 27

Elizabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992) 331. Poe, 49-54. ibid, 50-51. ‘The lofty walls, gigantic in height … were hung from summit to foot, in vast folds, with a heavy and massive-looking tapestry - tapestry of a material which was found alike as a carpet on the floor, as a covering for the ottomans and the ebony bed, as a canopy for the bed, and as the gorgeous volutes of the curtains which partially shaded the window.’ ibid, 57-58. The Freudian schema of the fetish constitutes an operation of indecidability that permits the feminine body to be seen as both whole and castrated, since the construction of the fetish rests simultaneously on two contrary premises: ‘both the disavowal and the affirmation of … castration.’ Hence, the fetish functions to allay man’s castration anxiety, to elude the threat that sexual difference represents to his narcissism. Freud, ‘Fetishism’, 955. The ur-text on this ambiguous motif is naturally Freud’s essay, ‘Medusa’s Head.’ Since ‘[t]o decapitate = to castrate,’ Perseus’ decapitation of Medusa’s head violently inflicts upon her a vaginal wound. The terror of Medusa stems from the sight of the castrated and ‘terrifying genitals of the Mother.’ However, the phallic serpentine hair upon Medusa’s head alleviates the castration fear for the male observer: ‘frightening they may be in themselves, they nevertheless serve actually as a mitigation of the horror, for they replace the penis, the absence of which is the cause of the horror.’ Furthermore, Freud extrapolates the mythological petrifaction to the erection of the penis: ‘[t]his sight of Medusa’s head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone … becoming stiff means an erection … he is still in possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of the fact.’ Sigmund Freud, ‘Medusa’s Head,’ Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (NY: Collier, 1993) 212-213. Poe, p57. ibid, pp63-64. Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, p 940. ibid,p 940. Poe, p64. My emphasis. Hommosexualité designates the homogeneity of a same-sex system, in which sexual difference is defined in terms of one denomination: the unitary presence or absence of the penis/phallus. ‘To castrate the woman,’ as Irigaray writes of the Freudian/Lacanian paradigm ‘is to inscribe her in the law of the same desire, of the desire for the same.’

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28

29

Hence, the male/female binary remains within a single sexual economy, a male universalism that merely dissimulates a difference between the sexes but is, in fact, a disavowal of this difference. Likewise, the phallic mother and the fetish are to be subsumed under the heading of hommosexualité as they both serve as a conduit for a phallic economy. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, Tr. Catherine Porter, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985, 55, 194-196. Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality, London & NY: Verso, 2005, 143-145. Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Tr. Keith & Paula Cohen, Signs 1.4, 1976, p. 885.

Bibliography Alter, Robert. ‘Playing Host to the Doppelgänger,’ TLS (1986): 1190. Bronfen, Elizabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992. Cixous, Hélène. ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s ‘Das Unheimliche’’. New Literary History 7.3 (1976): 525-548. ---. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’. Tr. Keith & Paula Cohen, Signs 1.4 (1976): 875-893. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Fetishism’. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch, et al. NY & London: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2001. 952-956. ---. ‘Medusa’s Head’. Sexuality and the Psychology of Love. NY: Collier, 1993. 212-213. ---. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974. ---. ‘The ‘Uncanny’’. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch, et al. NY & London: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2001. 929-952. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Tr. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. Mitchell, Juliet. Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Poe, Edgar Allan. Selected Tales. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1994. Todd, Jane Marie ‘The Veiled Woman in Freud’s ‘Das Unheimliche’’. Signs 11.3 (1986): 519-528. Weininger, Otto. Sex and Character with Interlinear Translation. 2nd Ed. Tr. Robert Willis (2005): 267-405. 25. Mar. 2007. <www.theabsolute.net/ottow/geschlecht.pdf> Žižek, Slavoj. The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality. London & NY: Verso, 2005.

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______________________________________________________________ ---. The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.

Zionism, post Zionism and Fear of Arabness Henriette Dahan Kalev Abstract In this talk I shall discuss the fear of Arabness of the Ashkenazim (Jews of European and American origin) and its impact on the Mizrahim. I shall explore the Mizrahim’s reaction to the fear of Arabness and examine it in the light of the post Zionist critic of Arab-Jewishness. Keywords: Arabness, fear, postzionism, Mizrahi, Ashkenazi ***** I begin by relating to two incidents with two episodes. When I was 10, there was a boy in my class whose name was Baruch (in Hebrew it means blessed). He had dark skin, black eyes and curly hair. He lived in Beit Saffafa, an Arab village in South Jerusalem. At school he spoke very little but when he did one could hear his Arab accent. His family name was Salman – a name common both to Arabs and Jews. This has always puzzled me: How come an Arab boy was given a Jewish first name ‘Baruch. It was only many years later when we met on the street that I dared asking him about it. He told me that the teachers changed his name from Muhamed to Baruch explaining that it would make it easier for him in a class where he was the only Arab pupil amongst 35 Jewish pupils. As our conversation went on both of us agreed that while changing his name made it easier for Jewish children and the teachers to relate to him it certainly did nothing to ease his social difficulties in the class. A colleague of mine once told me this second episode. She is a woman of Ashkenazi origin. As a child, she said, her parents have always warned her to never cross the street but did not explain to her why. She grew up in a middle class Jewish neighbourhood in the Arab-Jewish mixed town of Lead [in Hebrew Lod] and left it after she had completed her mandatory military service. Only when she became a peace activist, a couple of decades later she recall, that her parents reason not to allow her to cross the street was because Arabs lived on the other side of the street, and like all the Jews in this street, they did not want their children to mingle with Arab children. These two incidents, minor to Jewish young girls and critical to Arabs who lived amongst them demonstrate Orientalism1 at work. Clearly, these incidences conceal deepest fears that Ashkenazi Jews have both of Arabness and of the Palestinians who lived around them and amongst them.

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______________________________________________________________ They show how easy it was to erase Arab names, bodies, entire neighbourhoods while simultaneously living in their midst. But could they eliminate the fear of the Arabs who lived inside them, the fear of the Arab-Jews? And what did the Arab-Jews do with this fear? In other words, how did the fear of Arabness, fuelled by the Israeli establishment, an establishment consisting largely of Ashkenazis, affect those Israelis who were both Jewish and Arab? What did the Arab-Jews do when they realized that they lived amongst people who envision their Arabness as frightening and as contradicting their Jewishness? Unlike the Palestinian whose Arabness was regarded by Zionist nation builder as compatible with their enmity, the Jews of the Arab countries confused them. As the Zionist project saw itself as the redeemer of the Jews, the idea of redemption in the case of Arab-Jews was taken further to redeem the Arab-Jews of their own Arabness2. For a couple of decades that is until the late 1960s some success had been achieved in separating Arabness from the Jews. Assimilated Mizrahim showed loyalty and condemned the Arab enemy, internalizing the derogatory sense of Arabness. Moreover, they participated in national tasks that the decision makers had place on the Israeli agenda – they contributed their share to the militaristic efforts, occupying the territories, and governing the Palestinians people’s lives. For a while this helped to create an illusion amongst many Israelis - both Ashkenazim and Mizrahim - a belief that Arabness was finally being tamed and that the source of the fear within them was under control. But this went for only one decade. Some post-Zionists in the late 1980s involved attempts to bring Arabness back in and to problematize it within the Israeli discourse, has shacked up this belief and re- awakened the old fears. The catalyst for this was publication of the breaking through paradigm of Edward Said, Orientalism. The Iraqi-American Jewish scholar Ella Shohat was among the first to apply Orientalism to the analysis of the Mizrahi-Ashkenazi social tension in Israel. Shohat has treated the Israeli cinema and film industry as texts and narratives that display the deepest fears of Arabness that is embedded in the Zionist project3. Shoat claimed that Zionism was more or less a particular case study of Orientalism, saturated in fears of Islam and Arabness. Her genuine contribution to the criticism of Zionism, in The Israeli Cinema in1991, was later continued in her post-Iraq war article “Dislocated Identities”4. In both these works she put forward an analysis with which she laid stress on the idea of erasure of the hyphen that joined Arabness to Jewishness, and demonstrated it as an Orientalist project. Moreover, what was threatening to the Ashkenazis and the Ashkenazified Mizrahim in her works was that she has re-hyphenated it ruining Zionist tireless efforts to dehyphen the connection between Arabness and Jewishness for decades5.

Zionism, post Zionism and Fear of Arabness 119 ______________________________________________________________ Shohat’s bringing the hyphen back in has re-inflamed the hibernated fears of the Arabness of Israeli Jews, both Mizrahim and Ashkenazim. This brought to consciousness hurtful experiences of the past which began to occupy public intellectual discourse in Israel. Nevertheless, Shohat’s views were criticized from all sides: from Ashkenazified Zionist seculars to Mizrahi activists; right wing nationalists as well as left wingers, and the UltraOrthodox Mizrahim of the third largest political party Shas. This multifaceted criticism of Shohat’s view of the Mizrahim did touch a nerve of fear but did it in a monolithic and anachronistic in nature6. It reduced significant categories and Mizrahi diverse voices into a homogenized group such as the vocal Left Bank internet website7. In this website for example articles on the Mizrahi woman trial charged for accusation of Mizrahi woman for collaboration with Palestinian terrorists, Taly Fahima 25.9.048; or religious Mizrahim discourse on Jewish tradition and religion discussed by prominent scholars as Zvi Zohar who wrote innovative pieces as “Sephardic Rabbinic Response to Modernity: Some Central Characteristics” unveiling other faces of Mizrahim9. Yet another facet of Mizrahim is reflected in the left wing Mizrahi discourse, in for example the Democratic Mizrahi Rainbow 10 who also launched a website that administers social justice issues discussions. Other aspects such as national-religious position are also fiercely put on the public agenda and generate public debates 11. Shohat’s view spurred a debate which showed that Mizrahim do play an active role in the intellectual public discourse in Israel and that they are not necessarily ashamed or contemptuous or afraid of their Arabness. Indeed, I find it difficult to understand the absence of the discussion of what seems to be the ‘Mizrahim’s’ consent and not just subordination, or Mizrahi dispute with the Zionist de-hyphenisation in Shohat’s work. The Mizrahim’s position is very difficult to be summed up. Shohat insists on the Arab-Jews victimization, as the title of one of her article’s announces: ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims’12. Shohat reduces the Mizrahim’s diverse reaction to one that is politically passive and uniform. Mizrahim appear to be objects who accepted the Zionist imposition of the ‘de-hyphenisation’. This is a monolithic standpoint which does not coincide with possible political heterogeneity and cultural diversity, which Shohat herself attributes to them. Moreover, she treats all varieties of the Arab Jewishness just the same, and what Zionism has done to the Jewish Arabness she also treats in a monolithic manner. Shohat hardly discusses Jewish religion and Jewish tradition in itself. She discusses negation of the Diaspora only in the context of Zionism’s goal to eliminate the Arab-Jews history from the school curricula. Shohat’ attempt was to bring it back. She argued that Jewishness when related to the Arab-Jews it was presented in civilian and cultural terms, as Jewish Iraqi language, family life, customs and space13. Jews distinguished themselves as a community only from the Moslems but not from the Arabs.

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______________________________________________________________ This was a religious distinction which divided the Arabs into groups of Jews and Moslems14. Her conclusion is that in the Diaspora the Arabs-Moslems and the Arab-Jews were not alienated from each other. This indeed was the common description repeatedly mentioned by Israeli Jews who came from the Arab world. But while Shohat and other scholars such as Shlaim give us a peaceful description of the community life in Iraq till the emergence of the Zionist movement, even somewhat nostalgic, Albert Memmi, the author of the powerful work The Colonizer and The Colonized15, discusses his JewishArabness rather furiously insisting that fear of Arabs was part of the Jews experience, back there in the Arab countries. In an article titled “Who is an Arab Jew?” published in Israel Academic Community on the Middle East in February 197516 he responded to Muammer Khadafi’s (the Libyan leader) call to the Jews to return to the Arab countries, rhetorically asking them “Are you not Arabs like us - Arab Jews?” Memmi agrees with Shohat that the similarities between Jews and Moslems are rooted in their Arabness and that Arabness is a cultural similarity. But while Shohat sees culture with a capital C and includes history, geography politics and space, Memmi’s culture is written with a small c. He claims that Jews Arabness was displayed in habits, music and menu. But he also claims that “Jews were at the mercy not only of the monarch but also of the man in the street.”17 Thus pointing to the constant threat, on Arab-Jews, politics is being drowned as at least two histories. Memmi’s different view of culture, I want to suggest, results from the time in which he wrote his reply to Khadafi, the mid-70s. Shohat on the other hand, is writing in the post- era, post modernist, post colonialist and post Zionist era. To use Shohat’s brilliant explanation of the post- in the article “Notes on the ‘Post Colonial’18, the focus in the idea of the post here is on new modes and forms of colonial actions rather than on something that moves beyond. When applied to the above point, this results both in continuities and in discontinuities. In other words, experiencing a phase of othering within what is imagined as one’s own country, as the Mizrahim did, had a sobering effect of post naiveté. And therefore we can conclude that Mizrahim from Arab countries have indeed suffered both from being Jews in Arab countries and from being Arabs in Israel. Zionism looked down upon then, racializing them for being partly Arabs, and in this sense they in Israel were Jewish victims of Zionism and Jewish victims of Arabness. However, they have learned how to survive both in the Arab countries and in the Zionist country. That is to say that they suffered because of being classified along racial lines. What I centre on here is how they have survived this racialisation in Israel. Although severely economically deprived, in three decades they have

Zionism, post Zionism and Fear of Arabness 121 ______________________________________________________________ learned how to play the Israeli political game and have became a significant if not the significant actor on the political arena. This talk is in a way a continuation of the paper “The Israeli Palestinian Conflict and the Israeli Arab-Jews” which I delivered in a conference in Al-Kuds University in January 2005. 19 Then I argued that the Mizrahim - the Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries - are a diverse social category, and their political orientation, in general, and their position towards the Israeli Palestinian conflict, in particular, ranges from the right to the left of the political parties map. Unlike their political image as right wingers, their political considerations are complex and influenced by factors which are connected to the peace process directly and indirectly and in any case are influenced by economic factors and bitter experience of deprivation. Therefore it would be myopic to see them as Shohat does only as passive and victims and not to consider their impact on the Israeli Palestinian conflict, though indirect impact. Today they are scattered across the political map although their voice is mainly heard from the right wing. Why it is so is a question that still needs to be studied .From this point of view Shohat’s proclamation of Arab-Jewish victimization of Mizrahim remains an abstract idea that might attract intellectuals but is contradicted by daily life practices. As their racialisation experience was completely different from that of the Palestinians from within and from out of the green line, therefore I suggest seeing them exclusively neither as Arabs – victims of Zionism nor as Israelis identical to the Ashkenazis. This turns the gaze to the Palestinians, and to how they see them? This complication was fairly well discerned by many Palestinians who have been impatient with the abstruse arguments surrounding epistemological foundations of post-Zionism. They have concentrated instead on more historically informed studies of the political conditions and biases of particular knowledge claims, as works of Bishara, for example, demonstrate 20 . Such works ultimately derive from Said and they usually want to preserve some kind of distance from Mizrahim as well as from the post-Zionist discourse. The Mizrahim post-Zionist, like Shohat however, who want to bring Arabness back in to the Israeli Palestinian conflict, deny this impatient to exist or to be contestable. In conclusion the Arab-Jewish idea offers no model of conflict resolution beyond disputes as to how to remove from Zionism the fear of Arabness or how to move to political action. Given this contested position, relations between Palestinians and leftists Mizrahim, have been wary. Mizrahim in the left wing organizations such as Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow and Ahoti - Mizrahi Women Organization have paid little explicit attention to the issues raised by Palestinians outside the academic world. From a recent draft published in the internet site one can immediately identify the Zionist middle class spirit blowing in it. There is not even one

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______________________________________________________________ issue of the conflict, be it Jerusalem, the right of return or the refugees, that is talked. Like Shohat, the Mizrahi intellectuals in Israel enjoy the game of pulling Zionism from the hands of the mainstream establishment and delivering it to the hands of critical, perhaps post-Zionist activist. But the problem is that this does not accurately mirror the complex relations between the Mizrahim and Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thus the belief that Mizrahim who hold Arab-Jewish views and who are often identified as left wingers do not enjoy the sympathy of the Palestinians on the common ground of being Arabs; while other Mizrahim want the occupation in the territories to continue the oppression of Palestinians. Such belief would be both misleading and synthetic as there is no such a single Mizrahi view of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. It is impossible to ignore Mizrahim right wingers who contest from the extreme right and from religious and Orthodox the idea of Arab-Jews. Shas, the Ultra-Orthodox Party representing religious people of Arab-Jewish origin, whom I did not include in this analysis, proclaim being the true Zionists. They don’t even call themselves Arabs or Mizrahim but Sepharadim. Zionist Sepharadim. However, it would be too easy and superficial to put all of them in the same pot as right wingers. It is my contention that understanding the fear of Arabness as it is expressed in Israeli society both among, Ashkenazim as well As among Mizrahim, can help throw some light on the exploration of the fear of Islam and Arabness in general as it is expressed in other places in other historical times such the writings of Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington, and the making of political decisions such as the invasion to Iraq, are not in vain rooted in the fear of Islam. The fear of Islam is not imaginative only, as Said himself points out: Yet where Islam was concerned, European fear, if not always respected, was in order. After Mohammed’s death in 632, the military and later the cultural and religious hegemony of Islam grew enormously.21 [my emphasis]

Notes 1 2

3

4

E. Said, Orientalism, Vintage, New York, 1978 H. Dahan-Kalev, ‘You Are So Pretty, You Don’t Look Moroccan’, Israeli Studies, Vol. 6, 2001, pp.1-14 E. Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, Univ. of Texas Press, 1989 E. Shohat, ‘Dislocated Identities: Reflections of an Arab-Jew’ Movement Research: Performance Journal, 5, Fall-Winter, 1992

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9

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11 12

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14 15 16

17 18

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Ibid Left Bank internet site http://www.hagada.org.il/hagada/ Ibid Article on the Mizrahi woman trial charged for accusation of Mizrahi woman for collaboration with Palestinian terrorists, Taly Fahima 25.9.04. Left Bank internet site http://www.hagada.org.il/hagada/ Z. Zohar, “Sephardic Rabbinic Response to Modernity: Some Central Characteristics”, in: S. Deshen and W.P. Zenner (eds.), Jews Among Muslims: Communities in the Pre-Colonial Middle East, London, Macmillan and New York University Press, 1996, pp. 64-80. Left wing Mizrahi discourse forum Democratic Mizrahi Rainbow internet site www.hakeshet.org.il http://www.haokets.org/ Shohat, Ella, ‘Sephardim In Israel:Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims’, Social Texts,19-20 1988 pp. 1-37 E. Shohat, ‘Dislocated Identities: Reflections of an Arab-Jew’ Movement Research: Performance Journal Vol. 5, Fall-Winter, 1992 p. 8. Ibid A. Memmi, The colonizer and the colonized Boston: Beacon Press,1967 A. Memmi, ‘Who is an Arab Jew?’ Israel Academic Community on the Middle East, February, 1975 Ibid E. Shohat, ‘Notes on the Post-Colonial’, Social Text 31/32, 1992, pp. 99-113. H. Dahan Kalev ‘The Israeli Palestinian Conflict and the Israeli ArabJews’, The Faculty For Israeli – Palestinian Peace, FFIPP, The 4th International Academic Conference on An End to Occupation, A Just Peace in Israel-Palestine :Activating an International Network January 3rd – 5th, 2005 Al Quds University East Jerusalem A. Bishara, ‘On the Question of the Palestinian Minority in Israel’ Theory and Criticism, Jerusalem, 1993, vol. 3 (1) Said, Orientalism, op.cit p. 5

Bibliography Bishara, Azmi, ‘On the Question of the Palestinian Minority in Israel’, Theory and Criticism, 1993, vol. 3 (1) Dahan Kalev, Henriette ‘The Israeli Palestinian Conflict and the Israeli ArabJews’, The Faculty For Israeli – Palestinian Peace, FFIPP, The 4th International Academic Conference on An End to Occupation, A Just Peace in Israel-Palestine :Activating an International Network January 3rd – 5th, 2005, Al Quds University East Jerusalem

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______________________________________________________________ Dahan-Kalev, Henriette, ‘You Are So Pretty, You Don’t Look Moroccan’, Israeli Studies, 2001, Vol. 6, pp1-14 Memmi, Albert, The colonizer and the colonized Boston: Beacon Press, 1967 Memmi, Albert, ‘Who is an Arab Jew?’ Israel Academic Community on the Middle East, February 1975. Said, Edward, Orientalism, Vintage, NY, 1978 Shohat, Ella, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, 1989, Univ. of Texas Press Shohat, Ella, ‘Dislocated Identities: Reflections of an Arab-Jew’ Movement Research: Performance Journal, 5 , Fall-Winter, 1992. Shohat, Ella, ‘Notes on the ‘Post Colonial’, in Social Texts, 1992, 31/32 Zohar, Zvi, ‘Sephardic Rabbinic Response to Modernity: Some Central Characteristics’, in: S. Deshen and W.P. Zenner (eds.), Jews Among Muslims: Communities in the Pre-Colonial Middle East, London, Macmillan and New York University Press, 1996 http://www.haokets.org/ www.hakeshet.org.il Picard, Avi, Book Review: ‘Were the Sephardim Religious?’ in Shasha’s internet website The Shepharadic Heritage September 2004,10 http://student.cs.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/journals/SephardicHeritag eUpdate.php Taly Fahima, 25.9.04 http://www.hagada.org.il/hagada/

Fear and Horror in a small town: The Legacy of the Disappearance of Marilyn Wallman Belinda Morrissey and Kristen Davis Abstract On 21 March, 1972, fourteen year old Mackay schoolgirl, Marilyn Wallman, rode her bike down a country lane which led from her house to the main road where she usually caught her school bus and vanished a mere 180 metres from her home. Her two brothers, walking only ten minutes behind their sister, found her bike lying in the road, its front wheel still ominously spinning. Her school bag was flung on the ground, its contents scattered in the dust. Her school hat lay a few metres away, resting in the six feet high sugar cane which lined both sides of the track. No trace of Marilyn has ever been found. This paper will demonstrate how this inexplicable event altered the social fabric of the small town of Mackay both at the time of the disappearance and into the present. Using interviews with witnesses to the crime, Marilyn’s family, and residents of the town, it will show that Marilyn’s vanishing sent shockwaves into her community that still reverberate, creating a lasting climate of horror and fear. The people of Mackay continue to speak of pre- and post-Marilyn, and even though the town has more than quadrupled in size, the legend lingers on, poisoning all suggestions of safety and ruining all illusions of autonomy for the children of Mackay. The freedom in which other children in small country towns live their lives is, for these children, only a treacherous dream. Instead, the fear of the ‘bogeyman’ is entirely real for these citizens; they know what it is to have a child gone forever, to never have the comfort of closure through an arrest, to live the endless waiting for ‘normality’, for ‘pre-Marilyn’, life to return. Fear and horror have become ordinary, an everyday state of being, as indeed they have been for 35 years and continue to be as the nightmare tale of ‘Marilyn’ continues to haunt the populace. Keywords: Disappearance, fear, horror, community, township, trauma ***** Marilyn Joy Wallman: Born on the 6th March 1958 at Lister Private Hospital, Alfred Street, Mackay, weighing 9 pounds 8 ounces. ‘A lovely baby with red brown hair.’1

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______________________________________________________________ This paper is not concerned with the ordinary details of this ordinary girl’s life. Those stories are still kept locked far away in the vault of her family’s memories. They can’t, don’t or won’t remember Marilyn for others. They rarely ever speak of her outside their own tiny world. For Marilyn, you see, is gone; lost so profoundly that remembrances are too precious and painful for sharing. Marilyn has become the souvenir, the exoticised memento of her own life that must be protected at all costs. This paper is concerned instead with her vanishing: all we will ever truly know of Marilyn Joy Wallman. On March 21, 1972, fourteen year-old Eimeo2 schoolgirl, Marilyn Wallman, rode her bike down a country lane which led from her home to the main road where her school bus would collect her and take her to school, as she did every school day. She never made it to the road or the bus. Instead, she vanished a mere 180 metres from her home, in a section of the track which lay in a dip invisible from the house. Her two brothers, David, aged eleven, and Rex, aged nine, straggling along the lane just ten minutes after her, found her bike lying in the road, its front wheel still ominously spinning. Her school bag was flung on the ground, its contents scattered in the dust. Her school hat lay a few metres away, resting in the six feet high sugar cane which lined both sides of the track. David immediately ran home to alert his mother. Rex sat with his sister’s belongings, and while he waited he claimed to have heard a voice, which he believed to be Marilyn’s, complaining that her legs hurt. Extensive searches were conducted within minutes of the site of the disappearance, culminating in the biggest search ever launched in the Mackay district. More than 300 police and volunteers conducted shoulder to shoulder searches through the canefields and bush in the vicinity of her disappearance, and through more than 160 kilometres of highways, roads and tracks in the district. Hundreds of creeks, gullies and bridges were searched, and scores of people interviewed. Dams and individual properties were searched on the advice of two clairvoyants. The only real lead the police ever obtained, however, were the details of three cars seen in the area on the morning of the disappearance. Two of these cars were located and their occupants cleared of any involvement. The third car has never been found. Despite a continued campaign for information, lasting months after the event, no further material of evidentiary value has ever turned up. A mere six days after Marilyn Wallman’s disappearance, the police ruled that she was abducted and murdered by persons unknown, in a place and by methods unknown.3 This conclusion didn’t stop the stories from mushrooming, of course. In Marilyn Wallman’s case, such tales proliferated from the very first moments of the search. The searchers were informed by one clairvoyant that the girl was several hundred kilometres down the road in Gladstone, hitchhiking.4 Another fellow employed the use of his trusty diviner’s rod to

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______________________________________________________________ insist that not only was she still alive, but that she was on the Gold Coast!5 The police canvassed the possibility that she had been kidnapped for ransom as her grandfather was a wealthy sugar cane producer, and the president of the national Sugar Cane Growers Association. This theory was quickly disputed, however, when no ransom note ever arrived. Marilyn was also considered to have perhaps run away willingly, although no reasons for her having desired to do so were ever uncovered from family and friends. Her friends did suggest she had been ‘permissive’, but police claimed to have given this idea little credence, and the girl’s father, needless to say, hotly denied it.6 A possible sighting of her days later in a car in Mount Isa with three ‘long haired youths’ and a couple of girls proved insubstantial.7 Another sighting of her in Habana in another car, again with a couple of ‘youths’, was also dismissed. White slavery came in for a mention as a likely explanation for her disappearance in some national papers. The best story, though, came from the police themselves, with the superintendent in charge of the investigation stating only days after her apparent abduction that ‘an unknown suitor was holding Marilyn prisoner’. He went on to explain that: ‘It could be that some young member of a migrant family has got the idea from a custom in some European countries - where men abduct … girls to force them into marriage’.8 In the end, all of these theories came to nought. All that mattered was that Marilyn never came home and no trace of her was ever found again. This paper will demonstrate how this inexplicable event altered the social fabric of the small town of Mackay both at the time of the disappearance and into the present. Using interviews with witnesses to the crime, Marilyn’s family, and residents of the town, it will show that Marilyn’s vanishing sent shockwaves into her community that still reverberate, creating a lasting climate of horror and fear. The people of Mackay continue to speak of pre- and post-Marilyn, and even though the town has more than quadrupled in size, the legend lingers on, poisoning all suggestions of safety and ruining all illusions of autonomy for the children of Mackay. The freedom in which other children in small country towns live their lives is, for these children, only a treacherous dream. Instead, the fear of the ‘bogeyman’ is entirely real for these citizens; they know what it is to have a child gone forever, to never have the comfort of closure through an arrest, to live the endless waiting for ‘normality’, for ‘pre-Marilyn’, life to return. Fear and horror have become ordinary, an everyday state of being, as indeed they have been for 35 years and continue to be as the nightmare tale of ‘Marilyn’ continues to haunt the populace. The rest of the paper will consist of a series of overlapping quotes from the people of Mackay using their own words to attempt to explain this phenomenon. We feel that only by hearing the voices of those who live this

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______________________________________________________________ nightmare, can we do justice to Marilyn and the terrible fate both she and her home town have suffered, and suffer still. 1. The Search Charlie (member of search team): ‘The whole community really did search. People just came from all around. It was unbelievable. It went on for weeks. All that time the bakers donated bread, and someone donated fillings for the bread. The women were cooking every night. The women fed the men.’ Jack (member of search team): ‘The response at that time was excellent. It was a big search. People came on motor bikes, 4 wheel drives, horses, just combing the area, over and over.’ Slim Jones (citizen of Mackay): ‘I’d say 50% of the total population of that time were on the road looking around. You couldn’t go anywhere, there was people walking sort of arm in arm up the sides of the roads, looking in the grass. Every time you saw something you would wonder. You know, like a plastic bag or something. Charlie: ‘But I always felt it was disorganised. They only mounted roadblocks two days later. I felt as though the police shot themselves in the foot that first day.’ John Wallman (Marilyn’s father): ‘It was huge, but it was disorganised. We were often asked to search the same paddock or gully someone else had just finished searching.’ Daphne Wallman (Marilyn’s mother): ‘Even by the time they searched the crime site properly, it was the next day. Close to 200 people had already tramped all over it.’ Rob (citizen of Mackay): ‘The police led the search parties. They combed everywhere. They went through the drills of the cane paddocks to see if there were any holes. They found this bloke up in the sand dunes over here. There was 50 blokes walking side by side right through that area and they found him in the sane dunes. He had two big plastic bags and a plastic bin and a shovel with him and the copper said, ‘What are you doing up here?’ and he said, ‘I’m just looking for some good sand.’ Now, he’d walked over sand that you could have filled seven bloody Sydney Harbours up with, and the bloody cops didn’t even suspect anything. If he’d searched he would most probably have found blood in that bin and that’s where she is. She’s up there in them sand hills. I reckon if they took a cadaver dog out there, they’d find her in those bloody sand hills out there. Charlie: One of the greatest things I would have loved to have done was to find her watch. Or something. Just for poor old Johnny. Because him and I used to do a lot of fencing, boundary fencing. You could see all day,

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______________________________________________________________ what we were doing, there was always an eye out, looking for something of hers. I think we all did that. All of the neighbours.’ 2. Suspicion Charlie: ‘The whole community was so much on edge. Our poor old dog died two days later (after the disappearance) and we would not do a thing with the dog. We weren’t game to dig a hole. We weren’t game to burn him. Because we felt as though they’re looking for evidence. One of the worst things I felt, there was a lot of suspicion on a lot of people in the area for a long time after. I had an uncle who was shell shocked from the war who was in and out of mental institutions and there was one bloke who just used to wander the roads who’d had a nervous breakdown and they were questioned and let go. But that suspicion stayed in the community for a long time after. Years after. The finger was pointed to a degree – there was a lot of suspicion. Even on the neighbours who’d killed beasts and there was a little bit of blood in their car.’ 3 Horror Daphne: It was on the Tuesday night that something bad happened to Marilyn. It happened on Tuesday night and I’ll take that to my grave with me. She needed me so bad and I know it’s funny that people say things but I could see her all in her clothes coming, running up to try to get up the stairs. ‘Let me in Mum, Mummy help’. I can still see her to this day. And I remember in a daze walking out to open the door and I really think that something bad happened to her that night.’ 4 Aftermath David Wallman (Marilyn’s brother): ‘When we were kids we could go anywhere on our farm and the neighbours’. We’d go off on our pushbikes, drive a tractor, go to the neighbours, mucked around with kids on our bikes. We’d have a time to be home by, and off we’d go, bare feet, we roamed the countryside and everyone felt safe. I don’t even think Mum and Dad had a lock on the door. If there was, there wasn’t a key. Nobody would lock a door and I don’t think anyone had anything stolen. You’d walk straight into someone’s house and the doors’d open and there’d be no-one home. There was no ‘now you be careful kids, don’t go near the road’, but now, my kids growing up, I wouldn’t let them out of my sight. I feel sorry for my two girls because I’ve had a pretty tight rein on them and ‘cause of Marilyn’s incident, they’ve suffered too. It’s not just Marilyn and Rex and I and Mum and Dad sort of thing, it’s our kids as well. They weren’t even born when it happened, but they’ve been affected by it too because its ‘Don’t you go there. No, you’re not going to that party.’ Don’t roam outside, especially when you

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______________________________________________________________ know they’re two girls. … I wouldn’t let them go to certain birthday parties because I thought, ‘I don’t like that mother. She’s a bit irresponsible.’ So they’d know they’re not going and they’d sit and cry and thought Dad was a big meany for not letting them go. And I couldn’t get them to realise just why I couldn’t let them go. We told them the Aunty Marilyn story, but that’s just some lady in pictures and on the TV. ‘Til they got a bit older and then they realised.’ Dory (citizen of Mackay): ‘It took me all my time not to stay with my children the whole time. You had to really hold yourself back from overprotecting after Marilyn vanished.’ Merrill (school friend of Marilyn’s): ‘Marilyn disappeared the day before my birthday. I was just about to turn 15 and being a child at that stage, we were all pretty concerned, but we went on with our own lives. But for me personally it’s affected me in that I’ve thought about it. And even my husband who doesn’t even come from Mackay, whenever he reads something about Marilyn’s case, he’ll bring it home to me. But in the long term, it’s affected me in the way I bring up my children. I’ve very overprotective of them, very strict with them in what they can and can’t do. I’ve only ever left them with people that I trust and to the extent that they’ve told me I’m overprotective because everybody else’s parents let them do this, that and everything else, and I’m very careful with them.’ Slim Jones (citizen of Mackay): ‘It was a very, very nasty business. And the whole town was in shock. It lasted weeks, probably months. And that shock, it’s still there. It frightened a lot of mothers and fathers to the point where they drove their kids to school and waited for them to come home. You’ll drive along the road now and you’ll see a couple of kids waiting for the bus and Mum or Dad’s waiting with them It’s still going on. You don’t trust anybody. Mackay was a sleepy little place. It didn’t have any problems and that shook everybody up. It really shook us up. I don’t really think Mackay has been the same since. There’s been a couple of other abductions or rapes or whatever they were since then but they didn’t have that impact. They’re still alive. You don’t sort of trust everybody. Before, well we didn’t know not to trust. I know it spoilt Mackay. 5 Fear Rex Wallman (Marilyn’s brother): ‘It changes your whole way of looking at things. You go through different periods in your life when your moods change from down and out and other times you’re feeling just bloody angry and other times then you’re just really possessive about the people around you, and all of those things together doesn’t necessarily create a normal happy friendly lifestyle. It just puts pressure on the whole situation. Makes things extremely tough. I can remember one instance when Julian was

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______________________________________________________________ only 12 weeks old. My wife had a salon, she’d gone back to work. Julian was with a day-care mum. We spent ages and ages going through people to find the right person. This one afternoon, like every afternoon, I’d gone to pick Julian up. Then one afternoon I got there, house was dark, there was no-one there. I sat outside in the driveway making phone calls. About half an hour later, she pulls into the driveway. She’d decided to take them down to the beach for a while. So, you know, I lost it and grabbed Julian. He wasn’t going back there again. Just about that whole night I sat in his room, either holding him or sitting beside his cot. I just could not make that lady understand …’ 6 Sadness Daphne: ‘Both boys have had breakdowns. It gets to them. The police gave Rex a terrible gruelling: ‘Are you sure you’re not telling lies?’ – about what he heard in the cane. It was one of the worst things they ever did to him. It haunts him. It’s the cause of a lot of his problems today.’ 7 Still Searching Daphne and John: ‘We’ve been everywhere following information over the years. We’ve been to Shepparton and Townsville and Gin Gin. We’ve even been to Western Australia looking. Most of the time you know you’re on a wild goose chase. But you can’t say no. We’ve done a lot of miles. David: It’d be nice to be able to say no, go away, leave us alone when someone rings with ideas about what happened. But you can’t because otherwise the case’ll stay in the files, in the cobwebs forever.’ 8 Speechless David: ‘I never find myself sitting down having a conversation about Marilyn. It’s too hard to talk about her. It shouldn’t be hard to talk about your sister. And even with friends who we’ve grown up with and known for years. They grew up with us. I never find myself talking about Marilyn. If we do, I have to change the subject. Talk about something else.’ Rex: ‘There was nothing then for us. We never got any sort of help. No trauma counselling. If I’d have had someone to talk to as a young teenager it would have changed my reactions, how I react to things, would’ve explained why I’d be so angry when someone mentions Marilyn. I only have half a dozen people to talk to, and most of them are family. It’d be nice to have a wider group of friends …’

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______________________________________________________________ 9 Goodbye Daphne: ‘Our memories get all jumbled, remembering our Marilyn in so many different things, so many different ways, who she was, and all the things of her life. Things we didn’t do, things we missed out on. This will never bring our Marilyn back. I wish it could. I know what happened on that fateful Tuesday morning, 21st March 1972 on her way to school as normal. Only not to get there. My son – horrible mishap at the bottom of one of the big hills. What we still pray to know and we continue to pray for answers to her unknown fate to help us tormented souls. I wish we had more photos from that time in her life, or a video, just to be able to hear her voice or little things relating to life, like they have nowadays. We just, at the moment, we only have our memories to rely on. It is nice, especially, when we come across some of her friends or people who still remember her and people who like to help us in anyway they can. It’s nice to know that she is not forgotten. Thank you. Thank you for bearing with me.’

Notes 1 2 3

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Personal interview with Daphne Wallman, January 2005. Eimeo is a small town situated near Mackay in northern Queensland. This information is taken from the various newspaper accounts listed in the bibliography and from the personal interviews conducted with Mackay citizens. ‘Still no trace found of missing teenager’ The Daily Mercury [Mackay], 25.3.72, 2. ‘Diviner certain missing girl alive’ The Daily Mercury [Mackay], 7.4.72, 2 ‘Missing Teenager - Murder link is not ruled out’ The Daily Mercury [Mackay] 23.3.72, 1, 40. ‘Mt. Isa lead on missing girl case?’ The Daily Mercury [Mackay], 5.4.72, 2; ‘Search for girl switches to Mt. Isa’ Rockhampton Morning Bulletin 5.4.72, 3 ‘Police search will end today’ Courier-Mail [Brisbane] 27.3.72, 1

Bibliography ‘Diviner certain missing girl alive’ The Daily Mercury [Mackay], 7.4.72, 2. Personal Interviews with citizens of Mackay, January 2005. ‘Missing girl searches fail again’ Rockhampton Morning Bulletin 24.3.72, 1. ‘Missing Teenager - Murder link is not ruled out’ The Daily Mercury [Mackay] 23.3.72, 1, 40.

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______________________________________________________________ ‘Mt. Isa lead on missing girl case?’ The Daily Mercury [Mackay], 5.4.72, 2. ‘Police search will end today’ Courier-Mail [Brisbane] 27.3.72, 1. ‘Search for girl switches to Mt. Isa’ Rockhampton Morning Bulletin 5.4.72, 3. ‘Search is called off’ The Daily Mercury [Mackay], 1.4.72, 2. ‘Search on for cars’ Courier-Mail [Brisbane] 30.3.72, 3. ‘Still no trace found of missing teenager’ The Daily Mercury [Mackay], 25.3.72, 2. ‘They’re still hoping’ The Daily Mercury [Mackay], 15.4.72, 2. ‘300 searchers find no trace of girl’ The Daily Mercury [Mackay] 24.3.72, 1, 28.

Belinda Morrissey Dr Belinda Morrissey teaches media and communication studies at the University of Canberra, Australia. She is the author of When Women Kill: Questions of Agency and Subjectivity (2003: Routledge), and has also published in journals including Social Semiotics, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies and Australian Women’s Law Journal. Most recently she has had chapters included in the following edited collections: Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence (2006: Wilfred Laurier University Press, Canada), and Inflections of Everyday Life (2006: University of Canterbury Press, NZ). Kristen Davis Kristen Davis works in the School of Creative Communication, University of Canberra, Australia, and is a PhD student at the Australian National University. She has recently been published in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies and Traffic. She has previously published experimental fiction in a range of Australian journals under pseudonym, Kristen de Kline.

An Immediate Recoiling Approach: Georges Bataille and Richard Kearney on the Transmutations of Dread Apple Zefelius Igrek Abstract In all of Bataille’s works, a contradictory impulse is methodically and obsessively studied. Erotic debauchery and “flights of Christian religious experience” are said to have a common source. The outcasts of society, the pariahs, the sick, the mad, the criminals, belong to the same world as the good, upright, and proper. Bataille’s attempt to think through such ambivalent limits is closely connected to his study of social taboos, and he ultimately argues that the nucleus of society is formed by a recoiling movement of prohibition, which is likewise a manifestation of irrational terror. An alternative approach to excess forms of irrationality is provided by Richard Kearney. Critiquing the idea that the strangeness of things, or the strangeness of life itself, should be our primary focus in ethics and social life, Kearney demolishes extreme binaries in hopes of constructing a dialogue between the transcendent and concretely immanent. While acknowledging the need for Kearney’s “middle path” as one solution to the disappearance of ethical relations in postmodernism, I will nevertheless defend Bataille’s position as a necessary condition of collective practices; for the urgency of social life is ineluctably bound up with its immediate horror of purposeless nature and absolute loss. Keywords: Exuberance, Fear, Violence, Pragmatism, Hermeneutics, Mysticism, Transformation, Alterity, Nihilism

Diacritical

***** The meaning of eroticism, in Bataille’s most concise definition of the word, is an affirmation of life to the point of death.1 In all of his writings Bataille makes this connection explicit: life and death, taboo and transgression, good and evil are inextricably bound together. Man is thus haunted by his own elemental passions, and these passions cannot be denied. Every social regulation which brings us closer to happiness, and even closer to self-possession, furthermore accentuates what we most fear: there is no release from life which is not predicated upon its violent affirmation. Although, according to Bataille, there are two primary taboos in social life, these can be addressed as having a common object, namely, violence. Sexuality and death threaten us to the core precisely because they are so intimately connected to one another: they overlap, cross over, and converge

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______________________________________________________________ into the same nothingness that deconstructs all forms of human existence. The nihilistic emptiness of life is in this way a primary concern of man’s: every experience that heightens our sense of continuity with nature, which threatens to overwhelm us with both desire and suffering, unites the selfpossession of mankind with a formidable awareness of death. Contrary to the objections detailed below, I will defend the view that we are able to affirm this awareness without succumbing to its pure immediacy. There is a balanced approach to otherness to be found in the writings of Terry Eagleton, Richard Kearney, John Stuhr, and several other contemporary thinkers. This approach embraces the middle way to death, the progressive way, as the one to pursue for ethical reasons; but the narrative they offer blinds us to what is irreversibly urgent within ourselves. In a somewhat arbitrary construction, it can be argued that man’s affirmation of life and eroticism meets with paradoxical dread in three distinct but overlapping stages. First, as soon as we oppose ourselves to violence, we tragically fuse ourselves with its passionate intensity: “This is the nature of the taboo which makes a world of calm reason possible but is itself basically a shudder appealing not to reason but to feeling, just as violence is”.2 The second stage is a continuation of the first: internalized taboos cannot be broken without revealing something obscene and something anguished. In the earliest texts of Bataille, something animalistic and monstrous is revealed in the metamorphosis of human reality: “There is, in every man, an animal thus imprisoned, like a galley slave, and there is a gate, and if we open the gate, the animal will rush out, like the slave finding his way to escape”.3 Later writings reveal a more sophisticated account of this dynamic, one less nostalgic for metaphysical innocence, but the point remains the same: self-transformation is a grotesque operation, and necessarily so. The third stage brings us to an anguished, unavoidable conclusion: the human awareness of nature, the repression of its violence, far from separating us from its dim logic, simply magnifies what we cannot conquer - our own instincts. Bataille thus writes that “When all is said and done human reactions are what speed up the process; anguish speeds it up and makes it more keenly felt at the same time”.4 The process is that of excess life and excess annihilation, and our refusal of death can only underscore its tragic dimension. It is therefore exactly what raises us out of the muck of life that throws us immediately back into it: we reject the horror of violence on the condition that we act from an immediate fear of the world, the internalization of which ensures that we are cognizant of our own changing, animalistic nature. The tragedy of this nature is not to be found in the purity of concrete drives, none of which can be fully satisfied, but in the human idealization of a moral truth that takes itself to be removed from the undying end of those same mediated instincts: the amoral and apolitical extension of everything within us beyond the bounds of human recognition.

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______________________________________________________________ Responding to the claim that moral reasoning is founded upon violent emotions, that it is neither objective nor innocent, it is sometimes argued that we need to rethink our materialist assumptions. Terry Eagleton, for instance, views the bodily reality of moral truth as a necessary condition of self-transformation. If it is valid that all morality is derived from local conditions and bodily projects, this in itself does not preclude the possibility of a materialist kind of universality. Social prohibitions are perhaps very closely related to that which they repudiate and overcome, in the sense that they never absolutely transcend their deeply emotive basis, but if morality were purely objective and neutral it would also cease to be human. In this way, Eagleton argues for a connection between what we fear and what we want: “It is the mortal, fragile, suffering, ecstatic, needy, dependent, desirous, compassionate body which furnishes the basis of all moral thought”.5 The violent passions of life, if properly acknowledged and transformed, are in this way the foundation of morality as opposed to its destructive negation. Beyond culture and tradition, what we have in common with the rest of mankind is the capacity to feel pain. This implies that we are capable of identifying ourselves with the suffering of others. Hence Eagleton’s version of universal morality: it is not detached from life, but it compels us to think of ourselves as mutually dependent upon one another. We need not believe in the predetermined dialectics of history to accept morality as a teleological affair: we all desire to be happy and this desire should be united with a sense of shared, progressive values. A materialist version of these values would therefore be receptive to change - not the sort of change which is pure death drive or an obscene destruction of purposive narrative, but instead an affirmation of courage in the ongoing construction of fragile but hopeful ideals This is a pragmatic, community-oriented moral perspective. Human behaviour, in this light, is best guided through a critical engagement with practical values and practical intelligence. We ignore the consequences of our actions at our own peril. This implies a teleological approach - one steeped in a constructive awareness of our social and political context. All values are susceptible to change, and in fact they should be changed when they no longer facilitate what we need and desire. Perhaps, then, there is something monstrous or terrifying about the animalistic side of metamorphosis, but the pragmatist tradition still emphasizes growth, development, and the centrality of experience in the possibilities of instrumental intelligence. It is very difficult indeed, as John Stuhr writes, to imagine human practice apart from the goals that we set for ourselves: “Human organisms pursue purposes, have interests, project ends, and establish goals, and strive to fulfil those purposes, satisfy those interests, act to attain those ends, and work to meet their goals”.6 The tragedy of human existence, in part, is that we never totally achieve our ideals: we are perpetually frustrated in our attempts to close the gap between

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______________________________________________________________ reality and imagined fulfilment. But we are no less actuated, according to Eagleton and Stuhr, by our desires for happiness and self-realization. To only emphasize difference, destruction, and dissolution is to sacrifice, unnecessarily, concrete possibilities for an empty deconstructive gesture. Social progress requires critical genealogy, not for its own sake, but on behalf of strengthening our democratic communities and leading more satisfying lives: “Pragmatism thus challenges postmodernism to become political, to situate and localize wills to oppositionality in social practices of resistance, transformation, and reconstruction”.7 The anguished exuberance that one finds in Bataille is obviously tempered in the pragmatist tradition. The infinite nature within us that cannot be contained, which is both terrifying and exhilarating, serves mediated purposes for those who identify social and political problems with utilitarian conceptions.8 This is so much the case today, across a diverse philosophical spectrum, that mystical beliefs are increasingly under attack for their seemingly non-ethical character.9 Bataille’s influence on the likes of Blanchot and Derrida, especially in terms of his general economy, is often viewed, whether explicitly or not, as an apolitical preoccupation with difference and otherness. The predominant trend in the pragmatist and neopragmatist literature is to show the irrelevance, and in some cases the danger, of deconstructive mysticism. The reorientation of religion toward the historical ends of mankind, in John Dewey’s A Common Faith, is perhaps the most sophisticated yet fair-minded rejection of supernatural beliefs in 20th century American philosophy. His main arguments have been appropriated and developed by contemporary thinkers who are more interested in political and social critique than postmodern notions of the radically sublime. What we absolutely have to do, then, is redirect our energy from the supernatural to the real and concrete: “The objection to supernaturalism is that it stands in the way of an effective realization of the sweep and depth of the implications of natural human relations”.10 This argument stems from a concern, found in the majority of Dewey’s writings, that if we abstract certain values and insights from the actual conditions of experience, we do ourselves an extreme disservice by neglecting what is best within ourselves - our capacity for radical self-transformation. Many today would argue that this form of pragmatic empiricism, as it construes the role of critique within a broader frame of inspired social change, anticipates a much needed correction to the one-sided views of otherness associated with deconstructionist writers. If this is true at all, it would be most true of Georges Bataille. The borderline experiences that Bataille associates with death, eroticism, religious sacrifice, and certain forms of literature can be described as borderline only insofar as they bring us closer to something unknown and unknowable. The shapelessness of things within us, the unbearable movement of excess desire, surpasses every identifiable name that we can

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______________________________________________________________ attach to it. The problem with this form of alterity, as understood by Richard Kearney, is that it provides us with no means for distinguishing good from evil: the ineffable quality of mysticism, even one marked by atheistic tendencies, outstrips every hermeneutic attempt to categorise it with normative powers. When we move beyond the horror of tragedy, in the sense of transforming pain and suffering into cathartic mourning, we do so through the moral representations of practical engagement. If we cannot say what difference there is between the nihilistic fading away of meaning, on one hand, and the ecstasy of spiritual oneness, on the other, then what follows is a profound complicity between what is high and low, holy and unholy, such that we are no longer prepared to think of one as altogether different from the other. Kearney is very much concerned with this issue when he writes that we need to forge a middle path between extreme otherness and extreme sameness. To lose our way and slide into an abyss of deified nothingness returns us to “the old Gnostic notion of God as a composite of good and evil – a notion which leads all too easily to a relativizing of ethical thinking: i.e. deep down we are all rapists, murderers, child molesters, SS torturers, etc”.11 A diacritical hermeneutics of alterity, by contrast, brings together the inside and the outside, ethical discernment and deconstructive suspicion, in a way that does not collapse distinctions. It would therefore be wrong to claim that genealogical fragmentation is its own end: the disappearance of meaning can and should be supplemented by more creative narratives. The political scope of this kind of work is marked by the development of self-understanding that mitigates fear and the projection of that fear onto others. A truly just society is one in which we no longer distract ourselves from our own failings and finitude by exploiting others as sacrificial victims. How we identify others in this scapegoating logic reveals what we ultimately know and hate about ourselves: “The ‘alien’ is revealed accordingly as that most occluded part of ourselves, considered so unspeakable that we externalize it onto others. The more foreign someone is the more eligible to carry the shadow cast by our unconscious”.12 Phenomenological hermeneutics, at its best, provides us with an opportunity to change our habits and find common ground between the self and the marginalized other. This simply cannot work without some form of selfidentity capable of reaching out and responding to the singularity of difference. Hospitality to the foreign implies that we have not reduced the self to pure abjection: we must have a certain degree of self-reliance in order to morally distinguish between peaceful and belligerent others. If the abject is nothing else but the sublime, and the sublime exceeds every moral concept, then we have little basis for putting an end to the hateful social dynamics of scapegoating. In his conclusion to Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, Kearney consequently writes not only “that the human self has a narrative identity” but moreover “that our very existence is narrative, for the task of every finite

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______________________________________________________________ being is to make some sense of what surpasses its limits – that strange, transcendent otherness which haunts and obsesses us, from without and from within”.13 The foregoing accounts of heterogeneity, stemming from socialist, hermeneutic, and pragmatist traditions, express three fundamentally shared arguments: 1) the intrinsic horror of life should be mollified as much as realistically possible; 2) human practice, including the utilitarian view intimated in the first argument, should be purposeful and progressive; and 3) mystical experience needs to be viewed in light of cultural and ethical relevance. These are powerful arguments, and they cannot be overturned entirely. One point of emphasis, however, can be made: they repeat the very fallacy which they strive to rectify in their dialectical appropriations. If it is right to say that one primary factor of experience should not be weighed to the exclusion of another, at the risk of selective emphasis, then each of these approaches to an incommensurable outside is deeply flawed. The practical ends of human activity cannot be separated from that which surpasses them; to the extent that we build up our world as if it were subordinate to practical activity, we pretend that we are untouched by what we shun. But the objection to this nihilistic focus is a valid one: it is impossible to reflect upon human values when we are submerged in the ecstasies of self-annihilation. Bataille’s answer may not be wholly satisfactory: the breaking down of social taboos, he often wrote, can never return us to a pure state of immediacy. This would assume that we can reach a summit of absolute contingency without addressing our resistance to it in the many forms of self-attachment. This falls short as a sufficient response, but it points us in the right direction. Ethical boundaries are dissipated at the height of Bataille’s expenditure – even if those boundaries are necessary – because the expenditure is nothing other than being overwhelmed. But if we keep those boundaries partially intact, and refrain from giving ourselves over to a measureless expenditure, then mystical otherness can be redefined. Hermeneutic reductions of the outside to a process of narrative, by way of defining the self and the other as dialogical, neglects a primordial feature of experience, namely, the unconditional element of nature that supersedes every practical thought. This element is pure negativity and change, and when it is simulated according to a logic of totalitarian scapegoating or terrorizing violence, it will be evident that it is no longer one element among others, for in either case we succumb to a political version of absolute sacrifice. In this space of simulated nothingness, we lose our humanity; and we only regain it when we lose ourselves without utterly doing so.

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Notes 1

2 3

4 5 6

7 8

9

10

11 12 13

G Bataille, Erotism, trans. M Dalwood, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1986, p. 11. Bataille, Erotism, pp. 63-4. G Bataille, Encyclopædia Acephalica, ed. A Brotchie, Atlas Press, London, 1995, p. 60. Bataille, Erotism, p. 61. T Eagleton, After Theory, Basic Books, New York, 2003, p. 155. J Stuhr, Genealogical Pragmatism, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1997, p. 70. J Stuhr, Genealogical Pragmatism, p. 108. There are exceptions in certain respects. James should be differentiated from other pragmatists on the question of mysticism; but there is general agreement nonetheless on the role of teleology and the overarching goals of happiness and social harmony. R Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, Routledge, London, 2003, p. 221. J Dewey, A Common Faith, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1934, p. 80. Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, p. 122. Ibid, p.74. Ibid, p.231.

References Bataille, G., Erotism. Trans. M Dalwood. City Lights Books, San Francisco,1986. Bataille, G., Encyclopædia Acephalica. Ed. A Brotchie. Atlas Press, London,1995 Dewey, J., A Common Faith. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1934. Eagleton, T., After Theory. Basic Books, New York, 2003. Kearney, R., Strangers, Gods, and Monsters. Routledge, London, 2003. Stuhr, J., Genealogical Pragmatism. State University of New York Press, Albany, 1997.

Apple Zefelius Igrek received his Ph.D. from the philosophy department at Vanderbilt University in 2005. He is currently lecturing at Central Washington University and continues to do research on Bataille, Foucault, eroticism, death, the philosophy of religion, and pragmatism.

‘Witches, live witches! The house is full of witches!’1 The Concept of Fear in Early Modern Witchcraft Drama Madeleine Harwood Abstract: The years of the witch-hunts in Early Modern England saw an uprising in the publication of literature on the subject to coincide with the obvious increase in interest among the masses. The vast majority of these works take an instructional or informative stance: discussing the religious implications of witchcraft; publishing accounts of more high-profile trials; or simply telling the tale of some strange, abhorrent or wonderful occurrences attributed to supposed witches. The period also spawned a number of more entertaining pieces – drama and balladry – that, although still a minute percentage of the dramatic literature published during those years, represent the most concentrated cluster of theatrical publications on the subject in history. The purpose of the drama seems to have been to engage, rile and strike fear into both audiences and readers of the text. This paper, therefore, intends to analyse the themes, language and stage-direction used by playwrights in the Early Modern period – namely Middleton; Heywood and Brome; and Shadwell – and to attempt to present how these authors created an atmosphere of fear, or otherwise, in relation to witchcraft in their text. Keywords: witchcraft; witch; Early Modern; drama; fear; sensationalism ***** The infamous witch-hunts of the Early Modern period leave us, today, in no doubt that witchcraft provided great fascination for the contemporary society. The fame of the newly reported cases, such as those in Essex and Pendle, increased public awareness of the mechanics of witchcraft and the widespread hysteria increased accordingly. As with anything fashionable, there is always someone there to capitalise on the popularity and, like modern day merchandising for popular entertainment, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was professional playwrights who seized upon the popularity of the witchcraft phenomenon, and produced works that reflected society’s opinions of the craze. Anthony Harris notes, in Night’s Black Agents, that ‘Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses were microcosms of their wider societies and it therefore seems likely that the majority of spectators would have seen in the theatrical portrayal of witchcraft and enactment of actuality’2, and it is this fact - that the public would have

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______________________________________________________________ accepted the situations portrayed in such plays as authentic - that lends the adjective ‘sensationalistic’ to the witchcraft drama of the period. Contemporary accounts of happenings purported to be witchcraft and the trials of those accused display both fascination and fear of the subject and so the playwrights - in their microcosmic representations had to attempt to genuinely reflect the fear with which many people viewed witches and their actions. This they achieved in a number of different manners, and the three most prevalent are to be discussed here. The first and, perhaps, most predictable method is purely rooted in the visual representation of the witch characters’ maleficia - their purportedly magical insalubrious actions - and related unsavoury activities. In 1609, three years after the most famous dramatic witch appearance in Macbeth, Ben Jonson wrote and published his court masque The Masque of Queens at the explicit request of Queen Anne of Denmark for whom he had already written The Masque of Blackness and The Masque of Beauty. Jonson’s ‘hags’ are more supernatural creatures than human and take great pride in reporting to their ‘Dame’ the horrific acts they have carried out: taking a skull from a charnel house; sucking the breath from a sleeping child; killing an infant with a dagger to obtain his fat; and taking sinew and hair from a murderer hung in chains.3 The witches are all referred to as ‘Hag’ and so adhere to the traditional opinion that witches were ugly, aged women. As a masque for the court of King James I, The Masque of Queens had to reflect the King’s attitude to witchcraft - which was not always favourable. The vivid portrayal of the witches’ maleficia goes a little way to highlight that which James despised. Furthermore, Thomas Middleton, in his 1615 play The Witch, makes effective use of similar shock tactics to induce and rile his audience. At the first appearance of his witches in Act 1, Scene 2, the most appalling of these becomes apparent. Hecate calls upon Stadlin - a fellow witch - to ‘take this unbaptised brat’4, a dead baby, and to ‘Boil it well, preserve the fat; … ‘tis precious to transfer/ Our ‘nointed flesh into the air’5. Primarily, this indicates that the death of the baby was not natural, and that it was almost certainly brought about by the witches themselves - the fact that the child is ‘unbaptised’ signifies that he was ‘unprotected from the witches’6. Hecate’s seeming contempt for the child is also apparent, employing the insulting term ‘brat’ and referring to the baby as ‘it’, objectifying a human infant until he becomes just another ingredient, on a par with the ‘seeton’7 and the ‘serpents’8 Hecate also mentions as components of the concoction. Not only was the idea of a dead baby being used in a witches’ brew appalling to the contemporary audience, but it would also have been recognised as against the law. Less than a year after his accession to the throne of England, James I created his Statute of 1604, which stated that it was an offence to:

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______________________________________________________________ ‘take any dead man or child out of his or her grave, or the skin bone or any other part of any dead person, to be employed or used in any manner of Witchcrafte, Sorcerie, Charm or Inchantment And that any person found to be guilty of such action “shall suffer the pains of deathe”.9 Overt sexuality is another aspect of the characters that Middleton produces. Several instances in the scenes in which they are involved are highly sexually charged, with lewd references to the taking of young men. Hecate’s sexual appetite is robust and directed towards the more youthful echelons of society. She asks Stadlin “What young man can we wish to pleasure us”10, which not only indicates her power to obtain such a man and a lecherous nature, but the inclusion of the collective ‘us’ signifies the possibility of an orgy - another act traditionally associated with Continental witches. She also adds that Stadlin had formerly enjoyed a sexual encounter with the Mayor of Whelpie’s son - a youth of just seventeen - and claims that she will “have him the next mounting”.11 This word, ‘mounting’, debases the sexual act by conjuring up bestial imagery and lending, perhaps, an element of force to the proposed encounter. She is now witch and whore. Even more scandalous is the incestuous behaviour that is hinted at when Firestone Hecate’s clown-like son - asks for permission to “overlay a fat parson’s daughter” one evening, and she replies “And who shall lie with me then?”12. Although it could be interpreted as Hecate simply being jealous and apprehensive of being alone - physically and sexually, in Firestone’s absence - the stronger implication is that, if her son is elsewhere ‘overlaying’ the parson’s daughter, then he will not be able to lie with Hecate, his mother. The notion of a mother lying with her son in, almost certainly, a sexual manner would have disgusted a contemporary audience just as much as it would audiences today, not only for its incestuous aspect, but also as the exposure of a corrupt mother. Bringing the clear run of witchcraft drama to a close is Thomas Shadwell’s version of the infamous Lancashire happenings - The Lancashire Witches. The first, and most striking, impression that this writing of the case of the Pendle witches provides is one of horrific violence - on the part of the witch and the witch-hunter. Here, the witches’ actions are immediately referred to as ‘business’13 - synonymous even today with ‘serious’. There is still an element of humour in their actions, but it is not one that holds a ‘comical’ place in the text - instead it simply serves to accentuate the sheer cruelty of their actions - if they are able to laugh and joke about their murdering, then they must be heartless and inhuman, and their immorality is most poignant here. The language of their conjuring is, firstly, the root of the

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______________________________________________________________ violence and the pain, with words such as ‘groaning’ pervasive throughout the text. However, they are still simply words - no matter how horrific and pro-active the language seems, they still remain on the page. The difference in Shadwell’s piece is that there are many instances in the text where the script is followed by a definite instruction to the players to act. For example: Into the hold I le poure a flood Of Black Lambs bloud, to make all good. The Lamb with Nails and Teeth weel tear. Come wheres the Sacrifice? appear.14 Then, later that same page, comes the stage direction “They tear the Black Lamb in pieces and poure the Blood into the hole”. So not only do the audience experience auditory and implied violence, but they are also then party to visual, physical enactments of that violence. On their own, the acts of violence and malevolence in both Middleton and Shadwell’s work are shocking and, one can imagine, visually disturbing. The true basis of the fear, however, lies in the attitudes of the perpetrators. These actions are carried out in retaliation to, often, the most trivial of happenings - the refusal of flour and milk; the basic unkind word; even a look that is perceived to be unfavourable. The accused witches in these circumstances seem to experience very little provocation for such profound reaction and so the general public viewing and believing the playwrights’ representations begin to live in fear of speaking an unkind word to the stereotypical witch - old, widowed and crippled - lest they themselves fall foul of retaliatory enchantments. However it was not always the witches themselves that were to be approached with apprehension in the Early Modern drama, and it is this observation that leads us to the second of the most prevalent fear inducers in use by the contemporary playwrights - society and its inhabitants, and this theme can be considered from two different angles. Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome composed their The Late Lancashire Witches in 1634, even before the Pendle witches who had inspired their work had been brought to trial15. The fact that the play was first performed in London - at the Globe Theatre - shows just how far-reaching the knowledge of the Pendle witches was and, more importantly, the King’s Men - the performers of the play - successfully petitioned the Lord Chamberlain to prevent the performance of any other play with witchcraft as its subject at the time16. This was an important exercise in sensationalism - gaining the actors, theatre and writers a very important monopoly over the extremely popular contemporary market. What followed was that The Late Lancashire Witches essentially became a ‘one of a kind’ - it was exclusive and the public desire

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______________________________________________________________ and excitement for viewing it would have been greatly increased. To be allowed to view the play would not only have satisfied the contemporary desire for witchcraft drama but it would have instilled a sense of privilege in the public - viewing a play which held so much power over the rest of the dramatic world. It was performed several times and “For a repertory company like the King’s Men to perform a play three times in succession indicates enormous popularity”.17 The overpowering theme in Heywood and Brome’s work is one of the subversion and reversal of society. The most poignant of these takes place in the upper class Seely household, in which a charm cast by the witches causes upset in the normally accepted social hierarchy. Under the spell, the children dominate rather than respect their parents and the servants, Lawrence and Parnell, find themselves in a position to become the heads of household. Further still, the gender roles are consistently reversed with Mistress Generous - a member of the witch coven - continuing to seek greater freedom from her husband and, symbolically, bridling and riding a male servant to a meeting of her fellows. This particular act asserts dominion both socially and sexually over the males in the play. This can be seen again through the control taken by the servant Parnell following the magicallyinduced impotence of her new husband on their wedding night. The fear being highlighted here, then, is not one of witchcraft per se - although they are responsible for the events in the Seely household - but of the mutinous capabilities and possibilities of the lower classes. Likewise, in Jonson’s masque, the witches intend to “loose the whole hinge of things’”18, intent on causing a social upheaval and, perhaps, even a state of misrule, such as that achieved by Macbeth. This kind of upheaval may seem comical to us today, and was meant as such in this dramatic situation in the 17th century, but it has to be understood that this was a circumstance greatly feared by Renaissance minds19 and the idea of such an event would strike home, particularly in the mind of James, the monarch, who was targeted as a victim of witchcraft while James VI of Scotland. The final factor is a device used by the playwrights to deliberately worsen and widen the witch hysteria. In a small number of the plays Middleton’s for example - the witches are, without doubt, something supernatural: demonic; inhuman; and more difficult to fear due to their intangibility. For the most part, however, the witches are wives; daughters; sisters; girls next door. They are those that the audience of the play would socialise with on a daily basis with no qualms or worries for their safety and that of their family and goods. They are old and young; ugly and beautiful; married, betrothed and single. The authors are fuelling the terror here, warning that society must constantly look over their shoulders; be alert and suspicious. Anybody could be a suspect and it is this that relates closely to our social situation today, with the fear of terrorist attacks and the constant

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______________________________________________________________ reminders to be vigilant and wary of our surroundings. This factor is expounded yet further by the knowledge that the acts of witchcraft are sometimes caused - or even ordered - by those that do not personally participate. In Middleton’s play Almachildes desires the witches to provide him with a love charm to win the heart of his conquest, Amoretta; while the Duchess actively seeks the aid of the witches in attempting to murder Almachildes. The intention – here lust and murder - originates outside of the witch characters themselves and, thus, lends yet another dimension to the echelons of society that require suspicion. The playwrights give a feeling that, in truth, nobody is protected from accusations of witchcraft or accessory to witchcraft. The fear, then, is twofold: not only would one fear those nearby as either witches or those plotting to bring about some injury by means of the maleficia of others; but one would also fear that those nearby may be suspicious of them as an individual, and that they may become subject to the well-publicised trials, torture and execution reserved for those accused of the crime. This fear and fascination pervaded all. The witchcraft drama of the 16th and 17th centuries can be likened to modern day tabloids - and this is an opinion shared by Diane Purkiss in her book The Witch in History.20 They poached the ‘real’ stories from the previously published books and pamphlets, and used the information in a creative way to capitalise on the public craving for witchcraft related items. In doing so, however, they not only temporarily sated the appetite, but consequently increased it. Like an addiction, 16th and 17th century audiences needed more and more representations to achieve their desires. Worse still, more and more was needed to induce fear in, and rile the crowd until the lists of violence and shocking deeds became so common and so long that, as Purkiss asserts, ‘Dead children become simply one exhibit among many… The specificity of a dead child is lost.21 The different plays all seek to follow their own agenda. The early seventeenth century saw an increase in the scaremongering - an increase in people’s fears and suspicions of anyone seen as ‘ungodly’. As the furore and number of reported cases declined in the following years, Shadwell took the bold step of releasing the seventeenth century equivalent of the ‘video nasty’ - more graphic and horrific than any that had come before in its visual representations of violence, and the perpetrators enjoyment in their actions. It was a stark reminder of the situation; a sure-fire way to gain notoriety; and a new attempt to sensationalise a declining obsession. In the heyday, all levels of society were affected by the craze. The lower classes revelled in the vulgarity and feared the unknown, while the upper classes - and even royalty - did not escape the fascination, permeating as it did into the very heart of the court of King James, a kind of politically subversive tool employed by Anne of Denmark to support her separate Court, and her separate identity, and ultimately to rebel against James - displaying

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______________________________________________________________ herself as a powerful woman (on the stage, as Witch), while still paying homage to James’ unfavourable opinions towards the witchcraft phenomenon. A parallel can obviously be drawn here between Anne’s subversive intentions and the inversion of gender roles previously discussed in the plays. The playwrights were, however, above all, “professionals … aiming to satisfy popular tastes and reflecting rather than leading current opinion”.22 They over-dramatised witchcraft and, without a doubt, sensationalised both its existence and prevalence; and its actions. Hidden behind many of the grim and gory descriptions of maleficia; the hysterical characters worked into a frenzy by the presence of witchcraft; and the all-singing, all-dancing spectacle of the witchcraft plays were deeper social comments, often more frightening than the witches themselves. The drama entertained but, above all, bred the suspicion, fear and hysteria that deepened the awareness of witchcraft and increased the accusation, and consequently the conviction, rate.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15

T Shadwell, The Lancashire Witches, Printed for John Starkey, London, 1682, 3:1 line 128. A. Harris, Night’s Black Agents: Witchcraft And Magic In Seventeenth Century English Drama, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1980, p. 7. B. Jonson, ‘The Masque of Queenes’(1609) in H. Morley (ed.) Masques and Entertainments, Routledge & Sons, London, 1890, p. 111-112. T. Middleton, ‘The Witch’ (c.1615) in E. Schafer (ed.) The Witch: New Mermaids Edition, AC Black, London, 1994, Act 1 Scene 2 Line 18. Ibid. Act 1 Scene 2 Lines 19-21. Ibid. Note to the text 18, p.13. Ibid. Act 1 Scene 2 Line 11. Ibid. Act 1 Scene 2 Line 15. James I, Statute of 1604 (1603 1. Ja I.) Middleton, Act 1 Scene 2 Line 30. Ibid. Act 1 Scene 2 Line 36. Ibid. Act 1 Scene 2 Line 94. T. Shadwell, The Lancashire Witches and Tegue O Divelly, the Irishpriest a comedy acted at the Duke’s Theatre / written by Tho. Shadwell, Printed for John Starkey, London, 1682 , Act 1 p.10. Ibid. p.11. A quarto of the play was published in the autumn of 1634 displaying the title as The Late Lancashire Witches, an attempt to draw attention to the fact that it dealt with the recent, lesser known, trials rather than those in

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16

17 18 19 20 21 22

1612. However, contemporary accounts of performances – the most notable being a letter from Nathaniel Tomkyns (Clerk to the Queen’s Council) to Sir Robert Phelips, dated 16th August 1634 - refer to Heywood and Brome’s play as The Witches of Lancashire, and one of the British Library copies of the 1634 quarto has this same title as a running header. It is referred to here as The Late Lancashire Witches to differentiate it from Thomas Shadwell’s play of a similar name. The Tomkyns letter is reproduced in H. Berry (ed.) Shakespeare’s Playhouses, AMS Press, New York, 1987, p.123-4. T. Heywood & R. Brome ‘The Witches of Lancashire’ in G. Egan (ed.) The Witches of Lancashire, Nick Hern Books, London, 2002, Editor’s introduction p.X.. Ibid. Ibid. p109. Harris, p.71. D. Purkiss, The Witch in History, Routledge, London, 1997, p.205. Ibid. Harris, p.7.

Bibliography Clark, S. (ed.), Languages Of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology And Meaning In Early Modern Culture, Macmillan Press, Basingstoke, 2001. Gibson, M (ed.), Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases In Contemporary Writing, Routledge, London, 2000. Gibson, M., Reading Witchcraft: Stories Of Early English Witches, Routledge, London, 2000. Goodcole, H., The wonderfull discouerie of Elizabeth Savvyer a witch late of Edmonton, her conuiction and condemnation and death. Together with the relation of the Diuels accesse to her, and their conference together. Written by Henry Goodcole minister of the Word of God, and her continuall visiter in the gaole of Newgate. Published by authority. Printed for William Butler: London, 1621, Copy from the British Library online at EEBO (STC 2nd Ed./12014) http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.882003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99852787 Harris, A., Night’s Black Agents: Witchcraft And Magic In Seventeenth Century English Drama, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1980. Heywood, T. & Brome, R., The Witches of Lancashire (1634), Globe Quartos Edition, Egan, G. (ed.) Nick Hern Books, London, 2002.

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______________________________________________________________ Jonson, B., ‘The Masque of Queens’ in Morley, H. (ed.), Masques and Entertainments by Ben Jonson, George Routledge & Sons, London, 1890. Macfarlane, A., Witchcraft In Tudor And Stuart England :A Regional And Comparative Study (2nd Ed.), Routledge, London, 1999. Middleton, T., The Witch (c.1615). New Mermaids Edition, Schafer, E. (ed.), A C Black, London, 1994. Oldridge, D., The Witchcraft Reader, Routledge, London, 2001. Poole, R. (Ed.). The Lancashire Witches: Histories And Stories. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2002. Potts, T., The vvonderfull discouerie of witches in the countie of Lancaster VVith the arraignement and triall of nineteene notorious witches, at the assizes and general gaole deliuerie, holden at the castle of Lancaster, vpon Munday, the seuenteenth of August last, 1612. Before Sir Iames Altham, and Sir Edward Bromley, Knights; barons of his Maiesties Court of Exchequer: and iustices of assize, oyer and terminor, and generall gaole deliuerie in the circuit of the north parts. Together with the arraignement and triall of Iennet Preston, at the assizes holden at the castle of Yorke, the seuen and twentieth day of Iulie last past, with her execution for the murther of Master Lister by witchcraft. Published and set forth by commandement of his Maiesties iustices of assize in the north parts. By Thomas Potts Esquie.. Printed by W. Stansby for Iohn Barnes, and are to be sold at his shop neare Holborne Conduit, London, 1613. Copy from University of Illinois Library, online at EEBO STC (2nd ed.) / 20138. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.882003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99850200 Purkiss, D., The Witch In History, Routledge, London, 1997. Rosen, B. (Ed.). Witchcraft In England 1558-1618 (2nd Ed.). University Of Massachussetts Press, Massachussetts, 1991. Shadwell, T., The Lancashire-witches and Tegue O Divelly, the Irish-priest a comedy acted at the Duke’s Theatre / written by Tho. Shadwell. Printed for John Starkey ..., London, 1682. Copy from the British Library, online at EEBO (Wing / S2853; Arber’s Term cat. / I 463; Wrenn / IV 96; Woodward & McManaway / 1074) http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.882003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:12484003 Shakespeare, W., ‘Macbeth’ in Greenblatt, S., Cohen, W., Howard, J.E. & Eisamann-Maus, K. (eds.), The Norton Shakespeare, W.W. Norton and Company Inc., London, 1997. Sharpe, J., Witchcraft In Early Modern England, Pearson Education, Edinburgh, 2001.

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______________________________________________________________ Madeleine Harwood is currently researching her PhD Changing Perceptions of Witchcraft in Literature in England: 1560 to the modern day in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Bristol.

A Traditional Female Vengeful Ghost or the Machine in a Ghost? Narrative Dynamics and Horror Effects in Ringu Eric K.W. Yu Abstract The Ring series written by the celebrated Japanese fantasy writer Koji Suzuki has been immensely successful and given birth to a cycle of hugely popular horror films. In this short paper I wish to explore how, in the film cycle, some important motifs and iconographies derived from traditional Japanese folklore and literature fuse with what is unmistakably modern and urban, producing a peculiar kind of horror that cannot be explained simply as the invasion of the modern by the archaic. The main narrative of the cycle is structured by two opposing tendencies. One is the main characters’ endeavour to search for the ‘origin’ of Sadako Yamamura’s resentment, believing that retrieving her remains and a proper burial would lay the unhappy ghost to rest. Contradicting this anthropomorphic understanding of evil is Sadako’s endless propagation and proliferation by means of videotechnology, evoking the ideas of mechanical reproduction and simulation. Focusing on Hideo Nakata’s Ringu, I wish to demonstrate that the very undecidability between the traditional female vengeful ghost and a decentred machinic evil force, along with a number of visual motifs drawing simultaneously on old Japanese ghostlore and advanced cinematic techniques, account for the striking horror effects created. Keywords: Japanese horror film, Ringu, Hideo Nakata, Sadako, traditional ghostlore, simulation, the posthuman, iconographies, narrative dynamics ***** The Ring series written by the celebrated Japanese novelist Koji Suzuki in the 1990s has been immensely successful and given birth to a cycle of hugely popular cinematic adaptations. Sadako Yamamura, or her American counterpart Samara Morgan, has now become a well known human- turned-monster familiar to many horror fans in Asia and the west. The scene in which the dripping Sadako crawls out of an old well and emerges into a living room through the TV screen, frightening the male protagonist to death, has become one of the most striking scenes in film history. The main part of the Ring story centres on a mysterious videotape, cursed by Sadako’s paranormal power, that would kill its victims exactly seven days after viewing it. The only cure is to copy the tape and have other people watch it - thus the tape will multiply endlessly and the curse spread

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______________________________________________________________ globally. While some critics understand the video curse simply as the invasion of modern everyday life by some kind of occult power exercised by the psychic Sadako, a late twentieth century variant of the avenging female spirit not uncommon in old Japanese folktales and drama, a few critics have insightfully attended to the motif of mechanical reproduction or simulation absent in earlier Japanese horrors. Referring to Ringu (1998), the first film in the cycle, Eric White argues that the film “associates ubiquitous technological mediation – that is, the cameras, television sets, videocassette recorders, telephones and other such hardware fore grounded throughout the film – with the intrusion of ‘posthuman’ otherness into contemporary cultural life”.1 Is Sadako the reincarnation of some traditional tormented, vengeful ghosts, to which the film obviously alludes? Or is she better conceived as a ‘posthuman’ being thriving on and integrated with modern technology, a machinic force no longer ‘humanly intelligible’?2 To give a more satisfactory answer to this question in this paper, I will closely examine the narrative dynamics and the horror effects in Ringu. Directed by Hideo Nakata, Ringu is one of the pioneering works which inaugurated a new wave of Japanese horror films characterized by tension building and psychological horror. ‘J-Horror’ does not rely heavily on special effects, nor is it affected by the comic-horror mixing trend we find in such popular cycles as Scream and Friday the 13th.3 Despite its occasional evocations of extreme dread, Ringu is slow-paced and akin to the mysterydetective genre. The narrative can be divided into the sub-plot of a ‘crime story’ about what leads to the strange deaths and the main plot of a ‘detective story’ concerning the two protagonists’ enquiry into the cause of the deaths and their search for a way to dispel the curse.4 Instead of professionals like police officers or private eyes, we have two amateur detectives here - an investigative journalist Asakawa Reiko and her ex-husband Ryuji, a mathematics professor apparently good at conducting research. It is through Reiko’s and Ryuji’s hypotheses and findings that Sadako’s ‘crime story’ is gradually reconstructed and presented to us. Unlike most western mysterydetective stories, what we find underlying the narrative logic of Ringu is not exclusively rational, scientific explanations but a curious mixture of science and mysticism, belying a deep ambivalence towards modernity. The film begins with the inexplicable deaths of four high-school students: they all die with eyes wide opened and mouths gaping as if suddenly terrified to death but no circumstantial explanations can be found. As her job for a TV station required, Reiko looks into the ‘urban legend’ about a cursed videotape which might account for the tragedy. It so happens that one of the victims is her own niece Tomoko, so Reiko is able to get some clues from Tomoko’s residence that help her discovers the cursed tape in a resort. Watching the video in the log cabin visited by Tomoko, Reiko is utterly baffled by the montage of oneiric images. Soon the telephone rings, as predicted by the

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______________________________________________________________ legend, though instead of a clear verbal warning of her death in seven days, Reiko only hears something like metallic screeching on the phone. Bewildered and scared, she enlists the help of Ryuji. Initially, the scientificminded professor does not believe there are such things as the video curse, yet he quickly learns that, as with the four students’ case, Reiko’s photograph taken after viewing the tape shows an eerie image of distorted facial features. Later he himself feels the visitation of a female form while sitting on a bench in broad daylight. To her shock, Reiko soon finds that their child has also watched the tape. Ryuji and Reiko’s ‘detective work’ thus becomes a more personal matter of self-preservation and saving their innocent little boy. What propels the development of the main plot, in short, is their need to understand the ‘crime story’ in order to rescue their lives. A great sense of urgency and suspense is built up as the two protagonists are desperately struggling to solve the riddles about the video within the span of merely seven days. Established in the west during the nineteenth century, the mysterydetective genre is primarily a product of modern secular culture, founded on an optimistic belief in the rational, scientific methods of criminal investigations. In Ringu we do see various conventional means of enquiry. Ryuji and Reiko interview people, examine the video images closely and repeatedly, and go to the library to look up news archives in order to follow up on the clues they obtain from the tape. Ryuji once seeks help from a linguist in order to decipher a sentence in the video spoken in a little-known dialect. Again and again Ryuji demonstrates to us the strength of his deductive reasoning and how quick he is capable of making hypotheses. With their hard work and some luck, the enigmatic video begins to make sense. The time and place of the particular volcanic eruption obscurely presented there is identified, and soon the combing woman is found to be Shizuko Yamamura, a woman from Izu Oshima possessing psychic power, who successfully predicted that disaster. Further explorations indicate that Shizuko used to work with Professor Heihachiro Ikuma, an expert on ESP, and that their illicit affair brought them a daughter, later revealed to be Sadako Yamamura, the very source of the video curse. At two turning points in the plot, Reiko also shows us her attentiveness to details and analytical power. Making no progress on Oshima Island in the supposedly last but one day of her life, Reiko suddenly recalls that the strange telephone call only occurred after viewing the tape in the log cabin but not elsewhere, hence she surmises that since Sadako’s haunting seems to be most powerful there she is probably buried there. Due to this timely deduction, they are able to go back to the resort and find the well to retrieve Sadako’s remains in time to save her own life. Another instance can be seen shortly after Ryuji’s death. Even though she is shaken by the news and under great distress, Reiko still manages to concentrate and figure out what she did but Ryuji failed to do that explains why she survived the curse but he did not. The answer, as every

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______________________________________________________________ audience knows, is that she copied the tape and let someone else watch it. With this finding she saves their child, who would otherwise meet his father’s fate. If most initially puzzling incidents and phenomena are given scientific or pseudo-scientific explanations as what the original novel tends to do, the atmosphere of brooding mystery in Ringu would have been ruined, leaving us a conventional detective story celebrating the triumph of rationality over mysticism. Many little things in the film like the strange photographs with distorted facial expressions and the exact duration of seven days between watching the tape and the viewer’s subsequent death are never fully explained. In fact, mysterious elements suggestive of the archaic and the occult are found from time to time, especially towards the end of the film. Apart from the visitation befalling Ryuji, involving a female whose upper body he dares not look at, an unexpected breeze and the sudden disappearance of the apparition, Reiko also sees a ghostly figure reflected on the TV screen right after she finished watching the tape in the cabin, a fleeting form which is no longer visible when she turns around. Besides, after Reiko tells him that their child has watched the tape, Ryuji recalls he did feel a strange presence in her house. On Oshima Island, Shizuko’s cousin discloses that Sadako used to speak to the ocean in a non-human language, and on another occasion he stresses that the ocean is to be dreaded, as though it were a primitive monstrous force. Later when Reiko asks why Professor Ikuma murdered his own daughter, Ryuji suggests that maybe Sadako’s real father is not Ikuma but a preternatural being. So far as the procedures of ‘crime investigation’ are involved, it is noteworthy that Ryuji finally discovers Sadako murdered one of the hostile reporters during her mother’s press session through his previously unannounced psychic power. Instead of looking up archives and making logical deductions as usual, this time round he simply touches Shizuko’s cousin’s arm and the entire pressroom scene sort of ‘replays’ in his mind. Even more startlingly, right after this flashback sequence Reiko is seen fainting when Sadako’s ghostly hand grasps her and leaves marks on her hand - as if Reiko had witnessed Sadako’s dark secret, too. When she eventually puts her hands on the concrete lid covering the old well, Reiko clearly ‘sees’ how Sadako’s father push her down the well. One can say that Reiko finally gains an intimate and sympathetic understanding of Sadako’s sufferings and her holding Sadako’s skull close to her breast implies a kind of mother-daughter reunion, a gesture of reconciling Sadako’s grievances. Whether scientific and pseudo-scientific explanations are offered or the supernatural and the occult are suggested, the workings of the entire ‘detective story’ in Ringu and much of Sadako’s ‘crime story’ can be understood in terms of conventional, if not necessarily universal, human motives or feelings, such as self-preservation, paternal love, resentment and

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______________________________________________________________ revenge. Even when the narrative gets too ‘laconic’, that is, when no satisfactory accounts are given regarding some local details, it is not difficult to follow the overall logic of plot development. Ryuji and Reiko’s indefatigable ‘detective work’ is motivated by the strong hope that by getting to the root of the mystery, they can find the cure and save their lives and that of their child. As for Sadako’s story, at first sight it differs little from those of female vengeful ghosts in traditional Japanese folklore and literature.5 Two old ghost stories are of direct relevance here. One is about the maid Okiku, who threw herself into a well in shame after breaking a plate in the baron’s house. Some versions say that the baron killed her and threw her body into the well. In either case, people could hear her nightly sobs by the well. In all Ring films, Sadako was murdered by someone who threw her into a well and, unable to escape, she died slowly at the bottom of the well, a good cause for her ‘grudge’ or resentment. If Okiku is not angry enough to be a lethal vengeful ghost, Oiwa resembles Sadako more. In the Kabuki version, Oiwa’s husband poisoned her to death in order to remarry a rich woman. The potion used was so powerful that it also disfigured her, turning her into a one-eyed monster-like figure. In a hideous form she came back to haunt him on his wedding day, driving him mad. The close-up of Sadako revealing just one eye is obviously an allusion to Oiwa. Yet to be exact, unlike some other vengeful spirits, Oiwa did not kill her husband directly; it was her brother who eventually avenged her death. Ryuji and Reiko’s plan to locate and retrieve Sadako’s remains depends on the traditional Japanese idea about the avenging ghost or the onryou. They believe that it is essential to understand Sadako’s grievances in order to redress them, hoping that some rituals such as a proper burial in her homeland, symbolizing social reintegration, will lay the maltreated unhappy ghost to rest. The surprise ending of Sadako’s ‘crime story’, however, utterly shatters this old anthropomorphic understanding of evil. It turns out that what Sadako ‘wants’ is neither justice nor pity - neither the punishment of her murderer nor people’s sympathetic understanding of her sufferings. The curse simply entails the viewers’ deaths or their reproducing the video to ‘infect’ more and more people. Sadako is completely unlike traditional vengeful ghosts in at least 3 respects. First, such ghosts are almost always local beings. Because they were murdered or tragically wronged, these discontented spirits would not depart for the underworld but keep haunting a particular locale closely related to their personal life, such as their former residences (as exemplified by the Ju-on series) or the places where they were killed as in Okiku’s case. Insofar as Sadako could travel to whichever place along with one of the cursed videotape and emerge from any television sets, she is able to cross geographical boundaries. Second, as the cursed videotapes multiply by mechanical reproduction, Sadako’s self is inevitably decentred. We could imagine countless Sadakos crawling out of the television in many different

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______________________________________________________________ places, without necessarily knowing what other Sadakos are doing at the same time. In a sequel to the original novel, we do see the stunning picture of many ‘copies’ of Sadako spreading all over the places but not having any interactions at all. Traditional ghosts, in comparison, are always imagined as more or less unified beings. When Sadako’s copies are everywhere, we can hardly tell which one is the original. Furthermore, when Sadako no longer cares about who maltreated her and seeks them out for revenge, when she does not even want social acceptance as represented by a proper burial in her homeland, it were as though the details of her previous traumatic personal life, and even her social identity, had become irrelevant. As if oblivious of her past history, none of the Sadakos could enjoy some sort of ‘authentic’ selfhood. In a Baudrillardian fashion, one might as well claim that the murder of Sadako never happened. This is not to deny that, at the diegetic level, the murder did happen, but that at the end of the story whatever happened then no longer matters now, that the ‘aura’ or ‘eventness’ of the ‘orignary’ event has waned.6 The power of the crime scenes being ‘replayed’ in black-andwhite old-movie fashion via Ryuji’s and Reiko’s visions can hardly match the kind of dread aroused by Sadako as some kind of ‘posthuman’ evil. The ‘grudge’ based on an individual life history, so important in the understanding of the traditional vengeful ghost, has transformed into an irresistible force attacking the human world indiscriminately. In the world of simulations or endless mechanical reproduction, even the most powerful ghost has lost her human ‘origin’.7 Finally, we must note that while traditional ghosts can perform relatively simple tasks, Sadako is capable of producing a video and can propagate through video technology. Even her curse on the viewers, causing them to die in exactly seven days, implies the working of uncanny mechanical precision. Such capabilities are of an entirely different order when compared with conventional supernatural happenings. Instead of merely interfering with the normal functioning of electrical appliances temporarily causing such phenomena as the ‘white noise’, Sadako has become truly machine-like in order to produce a ‘psychic video’ and to unfailingly effect the seven-day curse. If we see her as a malicious ghost invading and haunting the machine, we should also note that once merged with the machine she started functioning just like a machine. In this view Sadako is not a mere ‘ghost in the machine’, for this idea still implies a human psychology with its conflicting desires and weaknesses, a tormented self that could never let go of its unique past history. Neither is she a mysterious preternatural monster whose behaviours could sometimes be unpredictable and beyond human understanding. Towards the end of Ringu, as a ‘contingent mechanism blindly following its path’, to borrow Slavoj Zizek’s words, and completely indifferent to her victims’ needs and reactions, Sadako has in effect turned into ‘the machine in a ghost’ - for the simple drive to multiply and infect and the superb technological power

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______________________________________________________________ involved with its precision and efficiency no longer entail a fallible humanlike subjectivity wishing to revenge and caring about the victims’ reactions at all.8 Having explicated the ‘posthuman’ implications in Sadako, I would like to proceed to an analysis of the creation of horror effects in Ringu, exploring if traditional ghostlore and related iconographies are still important. At least three visitations in the film do not involve any radical revision of our conventional understanding of spirits and they are all capable of producing eerie feelings: Reiko’s son tells her that Tomoko appeared and asked him to watch the curse video, Reiko herself sees a fleeting figure reflected on the TV screen, and Ryuji’s feeling of a threatening woman approaching him in the park, a phantom-like figure which disappears before Ryuji gathers up his strength to take a look at her face. Much more intriguing are the treatments of death under video curse. The simplest case concerns the inexplicable death of Tomoko’s two friends, who went to the log cabin with her and also watched the tape. The two died in a car with doors locked, presumably just when they were about to make love. Instead of allowing the audiences to watch the death scene directly on the spot, the film shows Reiko and her colleague examining a news video concerned. The terror-stricken face of the girl is revealed to us while Reiko’s colleague is operating the machine, using such mechanical functions as reverse, slow motion and freeze-frame. The earlier sequence about Tomoko’s death, in comparison, is more meticulously and directly depicted, and the tension is very effectively built up. It begins with Tomoko joking with a close friend about the curse video at home while her parents are attending a nightly ball game. The telephone suddenly rings, scaring the two girls because they are just talking about the mysterious death warning via the phone in the ‘urban legend’. When Tomoko’s friend courageously picks up the phone, they are much relieved to find that it is just Tomoko’s parent calling her. But not long after this false alarm, when Tomoko is left alone in the kitchen, she finds the television being strangely turned on. She turns it off and goes back to the kitchen. Very soon she feels some phantom presence behind her. When she turns around, she is immediately scared to death. Again the audiences are not even given a glimpse of the ghost and the camera focuses only on the face with eyes wide opened and mouth gaping. As with the treatment of her two friends’ deaths, the horror effects are not evoked by the vision of the hideous ghostly appearance, the naked exhibition of blood-soaked mutilated corpses, or the depiction of the physical attack as we see in most horror films, particular western versions popular in the 1980s and 90s: what is emphasised here is the victims’ reaction to the ghost, an intense terror causing immediate death. It is as though we as audiences are commanded to feel the instantaneous psychological effects of horror. Referring to the idea of simulation, one might as well contend that the film is offering us a ‘model’ to emulate – we are to

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______________________________________________________________ directly ‘copy’ the fear registered by the facial expression of intense fear. Another common feature of the two death scenes is the conspicuous reference to a postmodern culture dominated by mass media and addicted to the technology of telecommunication. Apart from the prominent presence of equipments such as telephone and television, in the case of Tomoko’s two friends, as we have observed, death is presented to us through news recording. In Tomoko’s own case, right at the moment of her supposed death, we are shown her face turned from the flesh-and-blood form into a blackand-white image like a photographic negative. Such images of death are very suggestive. On the one hand, they may connote the absolute demise of the physical body. The victims are ‘reified’, rendered no longer human. But at the same time, captured in a photo or a video, they become ‘undead’ and can be further ‘copied’ in a manner not entirely unlike Sadako’s way of propagation. If for Baudrillard it is in death that we humans escape the signs, the ubiquitous technological mediation of contemporary culture, in Ringu there is an ironic twist: victims of the video curse become more obviously the slaves of the symbolic when they die.9 If I seem to have valorised the postmodern, ‘posthuman’ aspects of the film, I must clarify that the most impressive, if not the most terrifying scene in Ringu is created by the ingenious hybridization of the more traditional kinds of horror visual motifs with images alluding to advanced mediated culture. I have dwelled at some length on the machine-like nature of Sadako. However, I have also pointed out that the film obviously draws on or alludes to traditional vengeful female ghosts like Okiku and Oiwa. In her embodiment as a female form emerging out of the television rather than a machine-like decentred being, with long black hair, a single eye on an ugly face, white gown, dripping body, leper-like skin, and blood-stained, nailbroken fingers, Sadako certainly reminds us of traditional Japanese ghost figures. It is fitting that when she attacks Ryuji towards the end of the film she appears as a woman - it is not simply because most powerful vengeful spirits in old Japanese ghostlore are female, but that in a feminist perspective, the association of women with demonic otherness fits well with the paranoiac patriarchal fear of female empowerment in modern-day Japan.10 One might add in passing that the old well, Sadako’s original haunt, with its deep container shape, darkness and water inside, might be considered a womb-like symbol, evoking what Barbara Creed calls the ‘monstrous-feminine’, the terrifying and abject affects associated with the female body in the male imagination.11 Even when Sadako appears in a form reminiscent of traditional vengeful female ghosts, nevertheless, two startling innovations are found. Instead of presenting Sadako to the audiences as a powerful spirit attacking Ryuji right away, the film initially shows her climbing out of the well and crawling towards him slowly. The appearance of the well and Sadako’s

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______________________________________________________________ struggle to move away from it reminds us of her long suffering, of her original status as a victim being tortured and murdered. On the other hand, the slow crawl, along with the emotionless expression on her face revealed later, suggests primitivism and bestiality, impressing us as a zombie-like being rather than a more human-like ghost capable of higher thoughts and delicate emotions. To complicate the scene, when Sadako comes out of the well and crawls on the ground, she is still moving ‘inside’ the video. The blurring of the video image, her jerky forward movement, and especially her eventual emergence out of the television set into the living room, albeit representing another level of reality, very dramatically brings out what Samuel Weber sees as the inherent strangeness of television as a modern technology which undermines the traditional conceptions of time and space.12 I would venture to suggest that perhaps the extraordinary uncanniness of this sequence has also to do with the undecidability regarding Sadako’s ‘true nature’: is she essentially primitive or modern, an aggressor or a victim, a fully material body or a hyperreal simulacrum, having a tormented soul or machine-like? It is the evocation of such intriguing ambivalences or indeterminacy, rather than the sheer hybridization of traditional horror iconographies with postmodern visual motifs in itself, that marks Ringu as one of the most challenging pieces of J-Horror in film history.

Notes 1

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E White, ‘Case Study: Nakata Hideo’s Ringu and Ringu 2’ in J McRoy (ed), Japanese Horror Cinema, University of Hawai’I Press, Honolulu, 2005, p. 41. White, p. 40. D Kalat claims that J-Horror is not a traditional kind of film genre and more like an art movement characterised by a common iconographic language with ‘recurring visions of ghostly schoolgirls, dark water, viral curses, and disrupted families’. See Kalat, J-Horror, Vertical Inc., New York, 2007, p. 12. The idea of the detective story consisting of two stories comes from T Todorov. For a concise introduction, see S McCracken, Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1998, p. 54. For summaries of the Oiwa and Okiku legends, see L Bush, Asian Horror Encyclopedia, Writers Club Press, New York, 2001, pp. 138141. I am indebted to W Merrin’s lucid interpretations of the Baudrillardian term ‘non-event’ and of the seemingly absurd claim that the Gulf War did not take place. See Merrin, Baudrillard and the Media, Polity, Cambridge, 2005, pp. 63-97.

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For Baudrillard’s own explanation of simulation, see his essay ‘Simulacra and Simulations’ in M Poster (ed.), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Polity, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 166-184. 8 S Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, Verso, London, 1997, p. 40. 9 Baudrillard distinguishes between the ‘semiotic’ and the ‘symbolic’ in a Durkheimian fashion. The former refers to ‘an immediately actualized, collective mode of relations and its transformative experience and communication’, while the latter refers to ‘fallen’ human relations mediated by mass media and signs. See W Merrin, pp. 10-20. 10 Referring to the motif of the avenging female ghost in general, Jay McRoy explains its popularity in recent Japan cinema with reference to the male fear originated from ‘transformations in the national economy begetting an influx of women in the workforce, as well as radical changes in both family dynamics and the conceptualisation of domestic labour’. See J McRoy, ‘Introduction’ in McRoy (ed.), Japanese Horror Cinema, p. 4. 11 For an introduction to the notion of ‘monstrous-feminine’, see B Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, Routledge, London, 1993, 1-7. 12 See S Weber’s ‘Television: Set and Screen’ in Weber, Mass Mediauras, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1996, 108-128.

Bibliography Baudrillard, J., ‘Simulacra and Simulations’ in M Poster (ed.), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Polity, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 166-184. Bush, L., Asian Horror Encyclopedia, Writers Club Press, New York, 2001. Creed, B., The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Routledge, London, 1993. Kalat, D., J-Horror: The Definitive Guide to The Ring, The Grudge, and Beyond. Vertical Inc., New York, 2007. MaCracken, S., Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1998. McRoy, J., ‘Introduction’ in J McRoy (ed.), Japanese Horror Cinema, University of Hawai’I Press, Honolulu, 2005, pp. 1-11. Weber, S., ‘Television: Set and Screen’ in Weber, Mass Mediauras, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1996, 108-128. White, E., ‘Case Study: Nakata Hideo’s Ringu and Ringu 2’ in J McRoy (ed), Japanese Horror Cinema, University of Hawai’I Press, Honolulu, 2005, pp. 38-47. Zizek, S., The Plague of Fantasies, Verso, London, 1997.

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______________________________________________________________ Dr. Eric Yu teaches literature and popular film genres at National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. He is currently the director of NCTU Film Studies Centre.

Rending the Terror-Horror Nexus: The Manifest Lie and its role in facilitating acts of illegitimate political violence C. Ferguson McGregor Abstract Fallacious language plays a central role in the complex relationship between political violence and power. This paper aims to reveal the mechanisms by which the manifest lie, that which is overt, facilitates, and provides meaning for, illegitimate acts of violence. Central to my argument is the notion that the manifest lie operates at the interface between terror and horror, a site eminently suited to promoting the operation of doublethink - the art of concurrently knowing and not knowing, of seeing contradiction, repudiating it, forgetting the repudiation and then forgetting the forgetting. It is our ability to engage in this practice that allows us to remain morally indifferent in the face of overt acts of violence - such as those we have seen transpiring at Camp Delta, Guantánamo Bay - while being acutely aware of the demonstrative brutality of such acts. In essence then, the manifest lie, in its unapologetic transparency, works to magnify the terrifying visceral impact of political violence, while diminishing the moral condemnation, or horror, of that violence. It is at this point, where horror and terror part company, that we see political violence at its most effective, for where horror is absent, terror is most capable of corralling power. Keywords: Manifest lie, political violence, legitimacy, fear, horror, terrorism, Iraq ***** When devils will the blackest sins put on, They do suggest at first with heavenly shows Shakespeare In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible George Orwell Hanging proudly on the outer perimeter of Camp Delta, Guantánamo Bay, shrouded by coils of razor wire, is a sign that reads Honour Bound to Defend Freedom.1 That this sign should be hung here, in a space defined by its very capacity to deny freedom, beggars belief. The

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______________________________________________________________ logical discordance between the sign and the space of violence to which it refers renders the message absurd. This incongruity however is not the result of bureaucratic incompetence or some terrible oversight. It is in fact a deliberate attempt to manipulate political perceptions of the critical relationship between violence, terror and horror. This form of ‘deception’ has long been part of political practice. Former US President, Harry Truman, for instance, in discussing the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima - by the innocuously named Little Boy -stated, “the world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in the first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians.”2 Hiroshima was of course a regional capital with a civilian population of approximately 350,000 - of which some 130,000 died as a direct result of the attack.3 More recently, this type of lying has, under the tutelage of George Walker Bush, reached its democratic nadir. Indeed, so pronounced has this tactic been that former Vice President, Al Gore, has charged the current administration with engaging in an “unprecedented and sustained campaign of mass deception.”4 We have, for example, seen President Bush present fraudulent intelligence information - the infamous sixteen words - to Congress and the American people, in support of his claims that Saddam Hussein was attempting to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger for the purpose of manufacturing nuclear weaponry.5 This same President brazenly maintained that “the American people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war [with Iraq].”6 Further, we have seen the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, work to justify the invasion of Iraq by repeatedly linking Saddam Hussein to Osama Bin Laden and terrorist activity.7 Indeed Powell claims to have been aware of a “sinister”, although entirely mythological, “nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist network.”8 More recently, we listened as Bush steadfastly declared, before an incredulous Panamanian media, that “we [the United States of America] do not torture.”9 All of these claims, and dozens more to boot, constitute nothing less than lies of the greatest magnitude - lies that unashamedly defy reality. 1011 In a recent interview, the renowned US Professor of Law, Jonathan Turley, puzzled over the apparent absurdity of such lies. In particular, he was perturbed by Bush’s resolute denial of US military engagement in the practice of torture. “What is bizarre about all of this”, noted a bewildered Turley, “is that they [Bush and Cheney] would try and maintain the sort of not-so noble lie. The whole world knows that we’ve waterboarded.”12 While Turley’s confusion is understandable, there is in fact nothing bizarre about this type of lie. The key to understanding this seemingly bizarre logic lies in separating the personal, or common sense understanding of the lie, from the political. By this, I am suggesting that the operation of a lie is dependent upon the context in which it is performed. Thus, within the realm of the personal, a lie is effective only in so far as it works to deceive; to persist with

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______________________________________________________________ a lie beyond the point of discovery is an act of futility - it is, to use Turley’s term, “bizarre”. The political lie however, or at least the specific form of political lie that I have thus far been discussing - that I refer to as the manifest lie - does not rely on deceit for its effectiveness but on the complex psychological processes of fear and faith. And while it is not my intention to embark upon a psychological investigation of lying, it is crucial that we recognise this basic distinction - between lies that rely on deception for their effectiveness and those that do not. In this way, we may forge a more lucid understanding of the complex relationship between terror, domination and political duplicity. In writing this piece, I aim to detail the terror-horror nexus and outline the process by which the manifest lie (when used effectively) works to rend it. That is, to separate the visceral and petrifying impact of political violence from the moral and intellectual condemnation, or horror, of that violence. It is at this point, where horror and terror part company, that we see political violence at its most effective, for where horror is absent, terror is most capable of facilitating political domination. Indeed, in the absence of moral outrage political resistance cannot long survive. It is no coincidence that the great majority of lies currently emanating from the White House address issues of direct relevance to the conflicts within Iraq and Afghanistan. These nations sit at the epicentre of an ongoing campaign of US state terror, a campaign boldly set out in the White House’s 2002 National Security Strategy - better known as The Bush Doctrine. According to the eminent social theorist, Walden Bello, this doctrine constitutes “a strategy of permanent intimidation”, a strategy “designed to make future applications of force unnecessary because of the fear they would engender among friends and foes alike.”13 And while the document is new, the strategy is not. The US state has, for many decades, sought to achieve political, military and economic domination through illegitimate political violence and terrorism - techniques well known for their ability to induce fear and facilitate social control.14 However, what is most interesting about Bello’s work in this particular instance is his underlying conception of violence, a conception that runs counter to that presented by a great many liberal theorists. If we accept Bello’s interpretation, then we must also accept the fact that the type of violence that we have seen the US military engage in - torture, indiscriminate bombing, intimidation, arbitrary arrest and detention, disappearances15 - is not directly, nor entirely, instrumental in character. It is, in fact, largely demonstrative. We are thus confronting a form of violence that, in and of itself, achieves very little. It is rather a violence that, through its exemplary nature, is capable of creating conditions favourable to the attainment of certain political ends - those which depend, for their utility, on the paralysing quality of fear. This distinction, between the demonstrative and instrumental aspects of violence, must be fully appreciated if one is to grasp the intricacies of political violence and

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______________________________________________________________ thus be able to penetrate the all too often obfuscated relationship between terror and horror. The efficacy of violent action may not be judged on the basis of instrumentality alone. We would do well to keep the United Nation’s Academic Consensus Definition of Terrorism in mind when examining all forms of violent action: the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims...serve as message generators. Threat- and violence-based communication processes between terrorist (organization), (imperilled) victims, and main targets are used to manipulate the main target (audience(s)), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a target of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propaganda is primarily sought.16 Where violence is clearly understood to exist on this continuum from the purely instrumental to the purely demonstrative and through the infinite combination of the two - it becomes possible to more accurately assess the ongoing instances of violence in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thus, an examination of arrest and detention practices in Iraq, as recorded by the Red Cross, affords one great insight: Arresting authorities entered houses usually after dark, breaking down doors, waking up residents roughly, yelling orders, forcing family members into one room under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further breaking doors, cabinets and other property...Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly, handicapped or sick people…pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking with rifles. Individuals were often lead away in whatever they happened to be wearing at the time of arrest - sometimes in pyjamas or underwear.17 Within such action there exists an element of instrumentality; there are clear and compelling reasons why action of this sort exists within a war zone. However, one must always be aware and concerned with the demonstrative aspects of such practices. Thus, when one learns that “between 70% and 90% of persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq ha[ve] been arrested by mistake”18 one does not immediately assume that this is the consequence of some terrible blunder or an ill-considered strategy for the eradication of

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______________________________________________________________ resistance. On the contrary, it becomes possible to understand this not as a mistake but rather as a successful attempt to foster terror and spread fear throughout the Iraqi population. To judge the effectiveness of this practice on its ability to bring specific rebels to justice, or to impede their action, is to miss the point; the arrestee is not, in this instance, the target but the victim of the violence. The target, of course, is the potential insurrectionary. This then is inherently illegitimate violence, for this is a violence that, quite strategically, makes victims of innocents. In fact if this violence was legitimate it would lose much of its ability to terrify. If it were possible for invading troops to locate, arrest and charge specific insurgents, based on sound incriminating information, then this would not be the terrifying, and thus politically useful, form of violence it clearly is. Furthermore, an assessment of the operation of such specific action could feasibly be founded on its instrumental effectiveness. This however is not the case. The primary motivating factor here is the creation of fear - in relatives, friends and neighbours - anyone who might be tempted to strive for political or ideological independence. By the same logic, it is possible to view the situation in Iraq as something more than a noble incursion gone wrong, as liberal thinkers such as Gore have asserted, or as another unfortunate military defeat for the United States - logical conclusions drawn where violence is viewed as a simple matter of instrumentality.19 It is clear that the conflict has been a significant financial boon to many US capitalists, particularly those engaged in the production and sale of billions of dollars worth of weaponry and armaments and those involved in the massive redistribution of publicly owned Iraqi assets, including of course Iraqi oil.20 Beyond this, however, the conflict has, through its dramatic exhibition of violence and destruction, served to secure the wider interests of the American empire. The destruction of Iraq, her economy, social services and infrastructure has sent a clear message to the Middle East and the world at large: abide by the rules of US empire or face the devastating consequences. When violence is used in this way, that is, as a spectacle, it of course becomes counterproductive to attempt to shroud the action, as one might in the case of purely instrumental violence. Indeed, the terrorising state must make a display of its cruelty. Demonstrative violence, as we have seen, requires an audience - be it visual, verbal or textual - if it is to operate effectively. It is at this point that the nexus between terror and horror becomes apparent. For where there is an audience there is judgement, and, in cases such as this, where we see terrifying acts of illegitimate violence, that judgement tends towards horror. To be horrified is to understand a thing to be immoral, and to perceive a state to be immoral is the first step towards holding that state to be illegitimate - a disastrous consequence for those in power.

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______________________________________________________________ In this case however, the United States is embroiled in a relationship of legitimacy with not one but two populations: with the people of Iraq and with the domestic population of the United States. Consequently, when the US state feels compelled to engage in illegitimate action, that is, in the various forms of violence discussed previously, violence specifically designed to cow the Iraqi population, she finds herself facing condemnation from a domestic population horrified by that action, a population enamoured with the accoutrements of state: with law, with human rights rhetoric, and with a faith in peaceful democracy. It is with good reason that Bello argues this is a “war being waged on many fronts, including that of worldwide public opinion and, most significant, in the hearts and minds of the American people”.21 If the US is to maintain its domestic legitimacy and its hold on Iraq it must be able to rend this problematic nexus that binds horror to terror. It must be able to indulge in illegitimate acts of violence, in an open way, while maintaining a façade of legitimacy - it must, as we have seen, make use of the manifest lie. There were, as I previously mentioned, considerable and ongoing efforts made by those in the White House to concoct the perception that there existed a bond of evil between Al-Qaeda and the Iraqi state under Saddam Hussein. Bush even went so far as to say “you cannot distinguish between alQaeda and Saddam”.22 Of course these notions are quite ridiculous: there is not a shred of credible evidence linking Saddam’s Iraq with the events of 9/11. Nonetheless, the manifest lie was fantastically effective in this instance. Some 70% of American citizens accepted this obvious fabrication as truth. 23 Here we begin to see the effectiveness of the manifest lie. For, to acknowledge this lie as truth is to begin the process of legitimating the illegitimate through justification and necessity. Thus, the decision to invade Iraq, that is, to kill thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children, in an attempt to enact regime change, begins to seem reasonable. And of course, where violence is perceived to be necessary or just, it loses its ability to horrify. This then is a lie that has done its job; it is a lie that has facilitated state terrorism by rending the terror-horror nexus. But how is this possible? How can a lie, a lie that runs counter to all the evidence, do anything but invite scorn? The answer, as I noted earlier, lies not in peoples’ gullibility but in the complexities of fear and faith. This is something Adolf Hitler understood very well. He once noted, in an inspired and incarcerated moment The magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility…the great masses of the people...more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a little one...they will not be

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______________________________________________________________ able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery.24 This is a very perceptive acknowledgement and one that goes some way to explaining the working of the manifest lie. People do in fact fall victim to the great lies not through gullibility but through fear. The realm of the ‘monstrous’ is, by definition, terrible - it is a realm to be avoided or, if that proves impossible, to be denied. In many cases this requires an abdication of political responsibility, that is, to become passive and defer power to the experts, to accept truth as authority presents it. In other cases this means denial in the face of strong evidence, or what Orwell would term doublethink. That is, the art of controlled insanity; of concurrently knowing and not knowing, of seeing contradiction, repudiating it, forgetting the repudiating and then forgetting the forgetting. This is a process that facilitates escape from the monstrous - from horror that overwhelms. This is something we saw quite clearly in the so-called Argentine Dirty War of the late 70s and early 80s where the practice of disappearing was relatively common. The victim was abducted, often yelling or screaming for help, by a group of heavily armed men...the group would drive away, recklessly, flaunting. Yet no one was supposed to see or, more specifically, admit to seeing what was going on...The scenario became increasingly surreal as the junta disavowed the state terrorism that people saw with their own eyes...The military blinded and silenced the population which had to accept and even participate in this production of fictions.25 Likewise, in Germany under the Nazi regime a great many citizens existed, as Roberts makes clear, in a kind of “twilight moral world...simultaneously aware of atrocities...and yet profess[ing] ignorance of their existence...double-think...seems to have pervaded the German psyche of the period”.26 Fear however does not need to be quite so extreme to facilitate the operation of the manifest lie. Indeed, in many cases the fear we are looking at is little more than the fear of contradiction, of social embarrassment, and of disapproval. The provocative American political theorist, Michael Parenti, taking his lead from the work of Alvin Gouldner, writes Our tendency to accept a datum or an argument as true or not depends less on the content and substance of it than it does on how congruent it is with the background

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______________________________________________________________ assumptions we already have. But those background assumptions are of course established by the whole climate of opinion and the whole universe of communication that we are immersed in and constantly hear.27 That is, our willingness to accept a proposition depends in large part on our pre-existing understanding of the world, our experiences and our beliefs and, importantly, the beliefs of those around us. The more deeply ingrained these beliefs are, the more one’s sense of self becomes tied up with them and the more they tend towards dogma. So strong is this faith that even clear and patent evidence may be dismissed if it runs counter to a comfortable internalised understanding. Those propositions that conform to what we understand to be the truth of the world tend to have more resonance and are more easily accepted than those that do not; these are, after all, propositions that work to validate our sense of self and our place in the social world.28 It is through this insidious churning that the manifest lie operates, for, it appeals to, and creates, faith through repetition. Clearly then one must be aware of orthodoxy and its construction if one is to have any chance of breaking out of this bind. And, while there is a great deal of room herein to engage in a psychological exploration of the relationship between fear, faith and denial, such an undertaking is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this paper. Irrespective, recent events have demonstrated the critical dialectical interplay between the operation of state power and the representation of that power, or more accurately, the political understanding of that power. Lying, it seems, is crucial to the operation of state power, particularly that which is more than likely to be deemed illegitimate by the citizens of state. In contrast to personal lies, which rely on deception for their effectiveness, political lying may well operate in an outrageously overt manner - brazen untruths are effective as ‘lies’ if they conform to certain orthodox beliefs. Such lies are tools specifically designed to rend the politically problematic terror-horror nexus; these are tools that facilitate the operation of terror without the damaging imposition of horror and the inherent threat to legitimacy that it brings. It is crucial that we learn to appreciate the significant distinctions between fear, terror and horror, and understand the complex interaction between these concepts, if we are to effectively fulfil our political responsibilities as citizens of state.

Notes D Rose, Guantanamo: America’s War on Human Rights, 1st edn, Faber and Faber, London, 2004.

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D Corn, The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception, Three Rivers Press, New York, 2004, p. 3. MJ Hogan, Hiroshima in history and memory, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1996. A Gore, The Assault on Reason: How the Politics of Fear, Secrecy and Blind Faith Subvert Wise Decision-Making, Degrade Democracy and Imperil America and the World, 1st edn, Bloomsbury, London, 2007, p. 103. SM Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 To Abu Ghraib, Penguin, Melbourne, 2004, pp. 234-5.; M Curtis, ‘Psychological Warfare Against the Public: Iraq and Beyond’, in D Miller (ed.), Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq, Pluto Press, London, 2004, pp. 70-9. GW Bush, President Says Saddam Hussein Must Leave Iraq Within 48 Hours, The White House, 2003, viewed 24 August 2007, . C Powell, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell Addresses the U.N. Security Council, The White House, 2003a, viewed 26 July 2007, . C Powell, Remarks to the United Nations Security Council, U.S. Department of State, 2003b, viewed 24 July 2007, . GW Bush, President Bush Meets with President Torrijos of Panama, The White House, 2005, viewed 24 August 2007, . E Herman, ‘Normalising Godfatherly Aggression’, in M Thomas (ed.), Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq, Pluto Books, London, 2004, pp. 176-84. S Dorril, ‘Spies and Lies’, in M Thomas (ed.), Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq, Pluto Press, London, 2004, pp. 108-14. J Turley, Countdown with Keith Olbermann for Oct. 27, MSNBC, 2006, viewed 25 August 2007, . W Bello, Dilemmas of Domination: The Unmaking of the American Empire, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2005, pp. 55-56. P Green & T Ward, State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption, Pluto Press, London, 2004, p. 110. See P Green, ‘A Question of State Crime?’ in P Scranton (ed.), Beyond September 11: An Anthology of Dissent, Pluto Press, London, 2002, pp. 75-6.; AW McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2006,

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Ch 4.; N Chomsky, ‘Who Are the Global Terrorists?’ in K Booth & T Dunne (eds), Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order, Palgrave MacMillian, New York, 2002, p. 133.; MGAM Taguba, The Taguba Report, Article 15-6 Investigation of The 800th Military Police Brigade, 2004.; SM Watt, ‘Torture, “Stress and Duress,” and Rendition as Counter-Terrorism Tools’, in R Meeropol (ed.), America’s Disappeared: Secret Imprisonment, Detainees, and the “War on Terror”, Seven Stories Press, New York, 2005, p. 73.; K Williams, American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination, South End Press, Cambridge, 2006, Ch 2. AP Schmid, United Nation’s Academic Consensus Definition of Terrorism, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 1988, viewed 24 August 2007, . Red-Cross, 2004 Report of the International Committee of The Red Cross (ICRC) on the Treatment by The Coalition Forces of Prisoners of War and Other Protected Persons by the Geneva Conventions in Iraq During Arrest, Internment and Interrogation, as cited in M Danner, Torture and Truth, Granta Books, London, 2004, p. 248. Ibid. p. 249. A Gore, The Assault on Reason: How the Politics of Fear, Secrecy and Blind Faith Subvert Wise Decision-Making, Degrade Democracy and Imperil America and the World, Bloomsbury, London, 2007, P. 103. D Fortson, A Murray-Watson, & T Webb, Future of Iraq: The spoils of war, How the West will make a killing on Iraqi oil riches, The Independent, 2007, viewed 25 August 2007, . ; G Muttitt, Crude Designs: The Rip-Off of Iraq’s Oil Wealth, Global Policy Forum, 2007, viewed 24 August 2007, . HA Waxman, Halliburton’s Iraq Contracts Now Worth over $10 Billion, Committee on Government Reform U.S. House of Representatives, 2004, viewed 25 August 2007, .; M Parenti, Lies, War, and Empire: Part II, Antioch University, Seattle, 2007, 12 May, . Time: 05:10. W Bello, Dilemmas of Domination: The Unmaking of the American Empire, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2005, p. 61. GW Bush, President Bush, Colombia President Uribe Discuss Terrorism, The White House, 2002, viewed 07 August 2007, .

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A Gore, The Assault on Reason: How the Politics of Fear, Secrecy and Blind Faith Subvert Wise Decision-Making, Degrade Democracy and Imperil America and the World, Bloomsbury, London, 2007, p. 109. A Hitler, Mein Kampf, Houghton Mifflin company, Boston, 1943, pp. 231-232. P Green & T Ward, State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption, Pluto Press, London, 2004, p. 116. M Parenti 1994, The Control of History, Alternative Radio, Los Angeles, 11 May, Audio Cassette. P Green & T Ward, State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption, Pluto Press, London, 2004, p. 116. R Roberts 2007, ‘Sleepwalking into Totalitarianism: Democracy, Centre Politics and Terror’, in R Roberts (ed.), Just War: Psychology and Terrorism, 1st edn, PCCS Books, Ross-On-Wye, p. 184 Parenti, M 1994, The Control of History, Alternative Radio, Los Angeles, 11 May, Audio Cassette.

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