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
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permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press.
Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland,
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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
3
Hawthorne’s Short Fiction: Compassion or Castigation for
those Fated to Fear and Horror?
Naela Danish
5
The Destruction of the Hero: An Examination of the Hero’s
Purpose in Lovecraft’s Works
James L. Aevermann
19
Terror and the Gothic Sublime: Presenting the Unrepresentable
Maria Beville
25
Post-memory in Art Spiegelman’s Maus
Siao-Jing Sun
39
Horrifying Quixote: The Thin Line between Fear and Laughter
Stephen Hessel
51
And the moral of the story is…: Horror Cinema as Modern Day
Fairy Tale
David Carter
59
It scares me, but I like it. Considering why Children Enjoy
Terror in Ancient Mexican Legends and Recent Children’s
Literature
Rita Dromundo Amores
73
Terrified and Terrifying: An Examination of the Defensive
Organization of Fundamentalism
Michèle Huppert
81
Sexing the Doppelgänger: A Recourse to Poe’s ‘Ligeia’
Susan Yi Sencindiver
103
Zionism, Post Zionism and Fear of Arabness
Henriette Dahan Kalev
117
Fear and Horror in a Small Town: The Legacy of the
Disappearance of Marilyn Wallman
Belinda Morrissey and Kristen Davis
125
An Immediate Recoiling Approach: Georges Bataille and
Richard Kearney on the Transmutations of Dread
Apple Zefelius Igrek
135
‘Witches, live witches! The house is full of witches!’ The
Concept of Fear in Early Modern Witchcraft Drama
Madeleine Harwood
143
A Traditional Female Vengeful Ghost or the Machine in a
Ghost? Narrative Dynamics and Horror Effects in Ringu
Eric K.W. Yu
153
Rending the Terror-Horror Nexus: The Manifest Lie and its
Role in Facilitating Acts of Illegitimate Political Violence
C. Ferguson McGregor
165
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
6
Hawthorne’s Short Fiction
______________________________________________________________
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
Naela Danish
7
______________________________________________________________
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
8
Hawthorne’s Short Fiction
______________________________________________________________
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
Naela Danish
9
______________________________________________________________
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
10
Hawthorne’s Short Fiction
______________________________________________________________
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
Naela Danish
11
______________________________________________________________
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
12
Hawthorne’s Short Fiction
______________________________________________________________
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
Naela Danish
13
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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
14
Hawthorne’s Short Fiction
______________________________________________________________
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,
Naela Danish
15
______________________________________________________________
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
16
Hawthorne’s Short Fiction
______________________________________________________________
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.
Naela Danish
17
______________________________________________________________
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.
18
Hawthorne’s Short Fiction
______________________________________________________________
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
20
The Destruction of the Hero
______________________________________________________________
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
James Aevermann
21
______________________________________________________________
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
22
The Destruction of the Hero
______________________________________________________________
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
James Aevermann
23
______________________________________________________________
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.
24
The Destruction of the Hero
______________________________________________________________
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
26
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
Maria Beville
27
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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
28
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,
Maria Beville
29
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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’.
30
Terror and the Gothic Sublime: Presenting the Unrepresentable
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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
Maria Beville
31
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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
32
Terror and the Gothic Sublime: Presenting the Unrepresentable
______________________________________________________________
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
Maria Beville
33
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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
34
Terror and the Gothic Sublime: Presenting the Unrepresentable
______________________________________________________________
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.
Maria Beville
35
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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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Terror and the Gothic Sublime: Presenting the Unrepresentable
______________________________________________________________
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.
Maria Beville
37
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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.
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Oxford. 1991.
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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
40
Post-memory in Art Spiegelman’s Maus
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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
Siao-Jing Sun
41
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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
42
Post-memory in Art Spiegelman’s Maus
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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.
Siao-Jing Sun
43
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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
44
Post-memory in Art Spiegelman’s Maus
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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
Siao-Jing Sun
45
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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
46
Post-memory in Art Spiegelman’s Maus
______________________________________________________________
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.
Siao-Jing Sun
47
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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
48
Post-memory in Art Spiegelman’s Maus
______________________________________________________________
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.
Siao-Jing Sun
49
______________________________________________________________
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
52
Horrifying Quixote: The Thin Line between Fear and Laughter
______________________________________________________________
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
Stephen Hessel
53
______________________________________________________________
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
54
Horrifying Quixote: The Thin Line between Fear and Laughter
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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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Horrifying Quixote: The Thin Line between Fear and Laughter
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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
Stephen Hessel
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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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Horrifying Quixote: The Thin Line between Fear and Laughter
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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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And the moral of the story is....
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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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And the moral of the story is....
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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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And the moral of the story is....
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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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And the moral of the story is....
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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
2
3
4
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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And the moral of the story is....
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5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
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
David Carter
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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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It scares me, but I like it.
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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
Rita Dromundo Amores
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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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It scares me, but I like it.
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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
Rita Dromundo Amores
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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
78
It scares me, but I like it.
______________________________________________________________
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”.
Rita Dromundo Amores
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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 Terrified and the Terrifying
______________________________________________________________
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 Terrified and the Terrifying
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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.
Michèle Huppert
97
______________________________________________________________
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
98
The Terrified and the Terrifying
______________________________________________________________
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.
Michèle Huppert
99
______________________________________________________________
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
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
100
The Terrified and the Terrifying
______________________________________________________________
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.).
Michèle Huppert
101
______________________________________________________________
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,’
Susan Yi Sencindiver
105
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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
Susan Yi Sencindiver
107
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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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Fictional Fear
______________________________________________________________
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
Susan Yi Sencindiver
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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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Fictional Fear
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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
Susan Yi Sencindiver
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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
112
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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.
Susan Yi Sencindiver
113
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16
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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Fictional Fear
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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.
Susan Yi Sencindiver
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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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Henriette Dahan Kalev
______________________________________________________________
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
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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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Henriette Dahan Kalev
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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
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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
122
Henriette Dahan Kalev
______________________________________________________________
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
Zionism, post Zionism and Fear of Arabness
123
______________________________________________________________
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
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
124
Henriette Dahan Kalev
______________________________________________________________
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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Fear and Horror in a Small Town
______________________________________________________________
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
Belinda Morrissey and Kristen Davis
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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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Fear and Horror in a Small Town
______________________________________________________________
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,
Belinda Morrissey and Kristen Davis
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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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Fear and Horror in a Small Town
______________________________________________________________
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
Belinda Morrissey and Kristen Davis
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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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Fear and Horror in a Small Town
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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
4
5
6
7
8
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.
Belinda Morrissey and Kristen Davis
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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.
Apple Zefelius Igrek
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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
Apple Zefelius Igrek
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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.
Apple Zefelius Igrek
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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:
Madeleine Harwood
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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
Madeleine Harwood
147
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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
148
‘Witches, live witches! The house is full of witches!’
______________________________________________________________
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
Madeleine Harwood
149
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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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‘Witches, live witches! The house is full of witches!’
______________________________________________________________
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
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Ed./12014)
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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.
Madeleine Harwood
151
______________________________________________________________
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.
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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)
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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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‘Witches, live witches! The house is full of witches!’
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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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A Traditional Female Vengeful Ghost or the Machine in a Ghost?
______________________________________________________________
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
Eric K.W. Yu
155
______________________________________________________________
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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A Traditional Female Vengeful Ghost or the Machine in a Ghost?
______________________________________________________________
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
Eric K.W. Yu
157
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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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A Traditional Female Vengeful Ghost or the Machine in a Ghost?
______________________________________________________________
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
Eric K.W. Yu
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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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A Traditional Female Vengeful Ghost or the Machine in a Ghost?
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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
Eric K.W. Yu
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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
2
3
4
5
6
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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A Traditional Female Vengeful Ghost or the Machine in a Ghost?
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7
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.
Eric K.W. Yu
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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
172
Rending the Terror-Horror Nexus
______________________________________________________________
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.
C. Ferguson McGregor
173
______________________________________________________________
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
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,
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030317-7.html>.
C Powell, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell Addresses the U.N.
Security Council, The White House, 2003a, viewed 26 July 2007,
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030205-1.html>.
C Powell, Remarks to the United Nations Security Council, U.S.
Department
of
State,
2003b,
viewed
24
July
2007,
<http://www.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2003/17300.htm
>.
GW Bush, President Bush Meets with President Torrijos of Panama,
The
White
House,
2005,
viewed
24
August
2007,
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/11/20051107.html>.
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, <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15484374/>.
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,
174
Rending the Terror-Horror Nexus
______________________________________________________________
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
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,
<http://www.unodc.org/unodc/terrorism_definitions.html>.
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,
<http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2132569.ece>.
; G Muttitt, Crude Designs: The Rip-Off of Iraq’s Oil Wealth, Global
Policy
Forum,
2007,
viewed
24
August
2007,
<http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/2005/crudedesigns.htm>. 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,
<http://www.truthout.org/mm_01/5.120904A-1.pdf>.; M Parenti, Lies,
War, and Empire: Part II, Antioch University, Seattle, 2007, 12 May,
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaTPDFsDdIk&mode=related&sea
rch=>. 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,
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09/20020925-1.html>.
C. Ferguson McGregor
175
______________________________________________________________
23
24
24
24
25
26
27
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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