Edgelands: a Collection of Monstrous Geographies [1 ed.] 9781848884816, 9789004370531

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Edgelands

Inter-Disciplinary Press Publishing Advisory Board Ana Maria Borlescu Peter Bray Ann-Marie Cook Robert Fisher Lisa Howard Peter Mario Kreuter Stephen Morris John Parry Karl Spracklen Peter Twohig Inter-Disciplinary Press is a part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net A Global Network for Dynamic Research and Publishing

2016

Edgelands: A Collection of Monstrous Geographies

Edited by

Erin Vander Wall

Inter-Disciplinary Press Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2016 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing

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

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press.

Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087

ISBN: 978-1-84888-481-6 First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2016. First Edition.

Table of Contents Introduction Erin Vander Wall Part I

Event Horizon Within and Without: Human-Monster Boundary in Attack on Titan Ya-han Chang

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Stadtschaft and Urban Wildscapes Weronika Maćków

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Christchurch as Lisbon: The Legacy of the Seismic Sublime Jacky Bowring Part II

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Fringe The Triangle: A Narrative Portrait of Place-Gathered Monstrousness Yasmine Musharbash

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The Devil Comes to Visit Deirdre Nuttall

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Part III Frontier The Australian Gothic as a New Mode in Australian Landscape Photography Rebecca Dagnall

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The Persian and Muslim Conquest of Byzantine Palestina: Monstrous Invasion or Peaceful Occupation? Eliya Ribak

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A Monster Painting Monsters: Norval Morrisseau and His Painted Images Carmen Robertson

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Part IV

Outer Limits Satan’s Architecture of Fear: Landscape, Body and Emotion in Paradise Lost Hsin Hsieh

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The Dystopian Geography Elisabetta Di Minico

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Citypunk: Transgeographies in Science Fiction Comics Joao Rosmaninho DS

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Introduction Erin Vander Wall The 3rd Global Conference: Monstrous Geographies: Spaces and Places of Monstrosity held 14-16 May 2014 in Lisbon, Portugal, featured the work of two dozen delegates from around the world. One aim of this inter-disciplinary project is to explore a variety of approaches and provide an opportunity for scholars to look beyond the customary practices of their own discipline, thereby constructing new pathways and modes of enquiry. This range of both subject matter and approach highlights the complex and shifting boundaries of Monstrous Geographies while charting the edges of the field. What are monstrous geographies? The term ‘monstrous’ encapsulates a variety of emotions, actions, behaviors, and responses. In general usage it draws attention to the physicality of bodies, the fear and repulsion that have so often driven societal response, and the marginal status of those defined by such terms. ‘Geographies’ shifts the consideration from bodies to places and spaces, away from corporeality and toward the sites or landscapes within which bodies move; away from the monstrous form of the Yeti and toward the environment in which the Yeti thrives, an environment that must be monstrous to produce and sustain such a being. Monstrous geographies draw on the unease and uncanniness at the core of the monstrous. Considering such geographies allows for a nuanced understanding of the places, both real and imagined, subtle and fantastic, that make up our world. Films such as The Ruins (2008), with its hill of carnivorous vines, the vengeful plants of The Happening (2008) that strike at humanity, or the triple threat of Pompeii’s (2014) lava, tsunami, and ash storm, are extreme visual examples of monstrous geographies. While examples such as these have a place in the conference enquiry, our intent is to push beyond identification of physically extreme landscapes or sites that simply provoke fear. Dierdre Nuttall’s chapter ‘The Devil Comes to Visit’ considers the legend of the night the devil paid a visit to Loftus Hall. A description of the austere and derelict hall and its isolation on a strip of land in the Celtic Channel sets the expected stage for a creepy tale. However, Nuttall’s examination extends beyond the potentially haunting elements of this tale to consider the local, social, and architectural resonances the legend has had on Loftus Hall itself, and ways in which the legend and its association with Loftus Hall serve as reminders of social, religious, and colonial oppression. The work of the monstrous geographies project is diverse, spanning monsters and the places or spaces they inhabit (the Yeti and its environment), monstrous events that leave their mark, either physically or emotionally, on a geographic location (Chernobyl, Auschwitz), and a geography that itself acts in monstrous ways (Pompeii, sulfur pits, quicksand). With examples such as these, it is natural to assume that all monstrous geographies stem from trauma, destruction, or crisis and therefore to connect all monstrous geographies to evil. While this is frequently the

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__________________________________________________________________ case, this volume attempts to reflect that such geographies can also be generative and generous. The thread that runs through all considerations of monstrous geographies is that of marginality, spaces and places that exist, either physically or metaphorically, on the edge. These ’edgelands,’ a term coined by environmentalist Marion Shoard, is defined in Weronika Maćków’s chapter ‘Stadtschaft and Urban Wildscapes,’ as ‘wild greenspace[s] on the fringes of the city that [are] often desolate and unplanned.’ Maćków introduces edgelands to discuss industrial ruins, the inevitable and wildly overgrown in-between spaces of industrial progress. Through identifying such spaces, spaces that are not formed out of evil or destruction but through the day to day practice of living, Maćków draws attention to that which already exists: industrial detritus, the inevitable in-between spaces of industrial progress, such as railways, warehouses, or landfills. In discussing spaces that are often discarded or marginalized as cities develop, Maćków brings such spaces into focus, reincorporating them back into the city of their creation. Sites such as these discussed by Maćków draw attention to physical markers of cultural limits within cities while also signaling a social tendency to overlook such spaces. As they pertain to monstrous geographies, edgelands extend into a consideration of places and spaces that draw our attention to borders and boundaries, to the often overlooked, the liminal space in the midst of the change. This volume seeks to identify and explore these edgelands. In these chapters, edgelands connote ‘limit,’ ‘outer extremity,’ ‘the rim,’ ‘the brink.’ While each of these terms signifies an end or a conclusion they also signal the beginning of something new. To be on the rim is to be balanced on the edge but there is always something beyond the rim, something different and new. While words such as ‘brink’ and ‘verge’ are synonymous with ‘edge,’ they are more often associated with new beginnings rather than abrupt conclusions and they nudge a consideration of edges into a curiosity for what lies beyond or within that edge space. It is this formulation of edgelands that the sections in this volume explore. Spanning time and the globe, the chapters of this volume consider landscapes, cities, events, and architectures: the earthquakes of Lisbon in 1755 and Christchurch in 2011, the Australian bush, the liminal space where the bush meets the city of Alice Springs, the site and structure of Loftus Hall, and John Milton’s Hell. It considers past and future civilizations, 7th century Palestinia, indigenous and colonized Canada, real cities and industrial locations, fictional cities with walls of concentric circles made out of monsters, and dystopian cities filled with skyscrapers that highlight their extreme verticality. These geographies intrigue and inform as they explore the edges within this monstrous enquiry. The first section, Event Horizon, takes its name from the theory of general relativity and the concept of spacetime. The event horizon is the point of no return, the point at which the opportunity to turn back vanishes. The event horizon incorporates both an external boundary and a center that continually tugs upon the subject.

Erin Vander Wall

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__________________________________________________________________ In this volume, the event horizon allows for a consideration of place that invites investigation into both boundary and center. The geographies addressed in this section — a three-tiered city whose walls are made of the very monsters they are built to keep out, the wilds that inevitably crop up around the ruins of industry, and cracked and devastated sections of a city made monstrous by an earthquake — draw attention to geographic monstrosity tied to a center that is linked with the city’s various boundaries. The included chapters specifically draw attention to monstrous geographies within cities and in doing so replicate the relationship between center and boundary, positioning cities at a central point from which the various edgelands that follow extend. Fringe, the second section, includes two chapters that explore liminal geographies. In her chapter, ‘The Triangle: A Narrative Portrait of Place-Gathered Monstrousness,’ Yasmine Musharbash draws on Edward Casey’s concept of placegathered monstrousness to explore the liminal space where bush and civilization overlap. The palimpsest of place that forms through layers of action and story is indicative of the geographies defined here as fringe. Nuttall’s Loftus Hall and Musharbash’s Triangle are fringe geographies in that they are physically located beyond city limits, beyond yet easily accessible to nearby communities. More importantly, they are places where monstrosity has collected over time. The third section, Frontier, focuses on geographies of conquest and occupation. This section considers the edges that explorers pushed into and beyond in the name of religion, progress, and culture. These sites were then modified in order to adhere to an invading religious, cultural, or physical mode. The chapters in this section examine the Australian bush as shaped by colonizing efforts which in turn speaks to the aesthetic of Australian Gothic, sites marking the invasion and subsequent colonization and/or destruction of 7th century Palestinia, and the colonial geography of Canada as expressed through visual art and associated narratives of the indigenous Anishinaabe. These sites invite contemplation regarding the nature of the geographies produced through invasion, conquest, or occupation. These spaces and places are transformed, perceived as monstrous by outsiders and made monstrous through the inevitable occupation that follows. This volume concludes with Outer Limits, monstrous spaces and places beyond the boundaries of this world. The first chapter considers Satan, fear, and the landscape of Hell in Paradise Lost. The final two chapters address urban dystopias: cities and architectures such as those found in George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1921), and Kurt Wimmer’s 2002 film Equilibrium. The geographies in these latter examples revisit the ideas put forth in the original section of this volume. Outer limits are, by definition, located farthest from an established center. The spaces and places that make up this section engage with that center while embracing the distance their alternative worlds, experiences, and realities provide. These final chapters return the focus to futuristic cities like 2023 Paris

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__________________________________________________________________ (The Nikopol Trilogy, 1980, 1986, 1992) and the Cité (The Long Tomorrow, 1976) that draw attention to the physical, social, and cultural limits within civilizations and how those limits exploit or are exploited The works in this volume demonstrate the ways in which monstrous geographies encapsulate a variety of meanings, perspectives, and approaches. This collection expands upon the concept of monstrous geographies rather than attempting to isolate or pin it down through establishing a definition. Instead, the geographies collected here chart the edges of this concept and in doing so, establish connections across seemingly disparate spaces and places, events and discoveries.

Part I Event Horizon

Within and Without: Human-Monster Boundary in Attack on Titan Ya-han Chang Abstract When it comes to monstrosity and geography, isolated geographical locations usually act as the center of monstrosity. However, in the Japanese manga series Attack on Titan, written and illustrated by manga artist Isayama Hajime, it is humanity that is isolated from the outside world. The serialization of the series began in September 2009 and has been collected into 13 volumes as of April 2014. Attack on Titan is set in a fictional world where human cities are surrounded by three enormous concentric walls. Human beings live within the walls to protect themselves from the Titans, gigantic humanoid creatures that swallow humans for unknown reasons. At the beginning of the story, the outermost wall is destroyed by an outsized Titan. This event leads to the invasion of the Titans and the destruction of human communities, families, and the social system within the walls. The attacks of the Titans reduce the realm of human world. Humans must repeatedly redefine self and otherness to survive with limited resources. The disasters gradually uncover the evil of human beings. The investigations and adventures of the protagonist and his friends reveal that humans can transform themselves into Titans. At the same time, it turns out that the walls protecting humans are actually formed by petrified Titans. I argue that these findings blur the boundary between the human world within and the chaotic world without. The blurred definition of the safe world challenges the concept of self and otherness, normal and aberrant. The geographical uncertainty reflects the obscurity of the line between humanity and monstrosity in the human society, and questions the necessity of this distinction. Key Words: Attack on Titan, Walls, Boundary, Humanity, Monstrosity, Humanoid. ***** 1. Introduction When it comes to monstrosity and geography, isolated geographical locations usually act as the center of monstrosity. Monsters are often placed in locations of evil which are distant from the center of human civilization and separated from the outside world. However, in the Japanese manga series Attack on Titan, written and illustrated by manga artist Isayama Hajime, it is humanity that is isolated from the outside world. The serialization of the series began in September 2009, and has been collected into 13 volumes as of April 2014. The story of Attack on Titan is set in a fictional world, where the human world is divided into three areas by three enormous concentric walls: Wall Maria, Wall Rosé and Wall Sina. Human beings

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__________________________________________________________________ live within the walls to protect themselves from the Titans, gigantic humanoid creatures between three and fifteen meters tall. The creatures have very low intellect and devour humans for unknown reasons. A hundred years before the beginning of the story the Titans suddenly appeared in the human world. Human beings escaped into the land surrounded by three high walls to secure their lives. The story begins with the destruction of the outermost wall, Wall Maria. Just after the protagonist, ten-year-old boy Eren Jaeger, shows his worries about people’s obliviousness to crisis and indifference to a possible better life, Wall Maria is destroyed by the Titans. A sixty-meter-tall Colossal Titan opens a hole on the fiftymeter-tall wall of the barbican, and then an Armored Titan with petrified skin destroys the gate to Wall Maria. The event leads to the invasion of the Titans and the destruction of human communities, families, and the social system within the walls. Eren has lost his parents: his mother is eaten by a Titan in the invasion, and nobody knows where his father has gone. The attacks of the Titans reduce the size of human world. Humans must repeatedly redefine self and other, labeling different groups as competitors, to survive with limited resources. The disasters gradually uncover the evil of human beings. Eren swears revenge and that he will kill all the Titans. He, his foster sister Mikasa and his friend Armin become refugees in Wall Rosé. To revenge on the Titans and to release human beings, they join the army at the age of twelve as the members of the 104th Training Corps and receive three years of military training. Their investigations and adventures with the Survey Corps reveal that humans can transform themselves into Titans. At the same time, it turns out that the walls protecting humans are actually formed by petrified Titans. I argue that the new findings on the formation of the walls break the boundary between the human world within and the chaotic world without. Monstrosity can be found inside of the walls. Humanity can be found outside of the walls. People must rethink if they own safety within the walls, if their friends are real friends to them. The blurred definition of the safe world challenges the concept of self and other, normal and aberrant. The geographical uncertainty reflects the obscurity of the line between humanity and monstrosity in human society, and questions the necessity for this distinction. 2. Monsters in Humans In 845, after a hundred years of safe life in the walls, most human beings have lost their awareness of the potential for physical or social crisis and their desire to explore the outer world. The sudden destruction of Wall Maria also destroys social systems: refugees who lived within Wall Maria escape into Wall Rosé and the construction of the societies inside of Wall Rosé is changed. Though twenty percent of the population was devoured by the Titans, the diaspora of the refugees still bring heavy pressure to the human world within Wall Rosé. Humans have lost one third of the land and the resources within the inner two walls cannot support the population. Hence humans in the walls have to struggle to survive. The refugees from

Ya-han Chang

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__________________________________________________________________ Wall Maria, who lost all the material and social resources they have, suffer the most. The cruelty and monstrosity of men is gradually shown in these struggles. The citizens in Wall Rosé are indifferent and unfriendly to the refugees from Wall Maria. Every refugee, including children and elders, is forced to develop new fields for the reproduction of food. The next year, a huge group of refugees, including Armin’s grandfather, are given simple weapons and sent out of Wall Rosé. The government claims the act as recovering Wall Maria. However, the aim of the crusade is actually to reduce the population within the remaining two walls. In 850, the second attack of the Colossal Titan makes the situation within the walls worse. After five years of peace, humans have once again become oblivious to the danger. Facing attack, merchants show their selfishness by putting other citizens’ lives in danger, forcing the soldiers to let them and their oversize wagons enter the gate of inner wall first. The wagons block the gate and stop everybody from fleeing. Mikasa stops the guild leader’s selfish act and the citizens can finally enter the inner wall for shelter. Conflicts, greediness and selfishness also exist in the era before the attacks of the Titans. During the battles with the Titan, Mikasa remembers her parents’ death: they were killed by human traffickers because the Asian faces of Mikasa and her mother were worth a lot on the market.1 With one of the main characters, Annie Leonhart’s, participation in the Military Police Brigade, readers see the corruption of the military police, who should be the elites that defend the peace of the capital. Most soldiers who serve in the brigade actually aim to gain a steady and luxurious life in the capital. Annie and her colleagues also see their two corrupt superiors selling guns to black marketers. Among the classes higher than the military divisions, the nobilities only care about their own safety and happiness when the attacks take place. The royalty and the religious leaders are hiding the secrets of Titans to consolidate their authority. At first, humans consider the Titans their biggest enemy. With the progress of the story, Eren and his friends gradually find out that the true enemies might not be Titans who live outside of the walls, but the humans who live inside. Humans are as gluttonous as Titans. The discoveries in the 9th and 51st episodes present the tight connection between humans and the monsters: certain human beings can transform themselves into Titans with mind 2 and the existing Titans metamorphosed3 from humans. ‘It is said that before there are the Titans human beings had been fighting against each other because with religions or races without end. And somebody had said, “If there is a strong enemy of human beings, people will stick together if they have a common enemy.” Do you believe it?’(「巨人に地上を支配 される前、人類は種族や理の違う者同士で果てのない殺し合いを続けていたと言わ れておる。その時に誰かが言ったそうな：もし…人類以外の強大な敵が現れたら、 4 人類は一丸となり争いごとをやめるだろうと…お主はどう思うかの？」) Dot Pix-

is, the Administrator of the Southern Region Military, asks Eren in the 12th epi-

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__________________________________________________________________ sode. Eren denies this possibility, pointing out that humans do not stick together even when they face great enemies like the Titans. The transformations of humans to Titans are the physical manifestation of the human mind’s tendency toward into monstrosity. The evil of humans exists in different classes of the society. The attacks of the Titans in 845 and 850 remind people of the conflicts in the society and the monstrosity inside humans. 3. Humans in Monsters The finding that with the help of poison, some humans can transform themselves or be transformed into the humanoid monsters, Titans, displays the embodiment of the monstrosity within humans. However, this also shows that there is humanity within the monsters. In the 7th episode, the humans are fighting a battle against the second invasion of the Titans. The Survey Corps, a group of the most experienced soldiers, leaves the human world to investigate the Titans, trying to figure out a way to defeat them. Their absence makes the war extremely tough. It is especially difficult for the young trainees, even Mikasa, who is the best trainee in the 104th Training Corps. When a Titan is about to attack Mikasa, another Titan suddenly appears and saves her. The latter Titan has good fighting skills and kills most of the Titans surrounding the trainee. The incident gives Armin, Mikasa and other trainees time to make up a plan to save themselves. It turns out, in the 9th episode, that the Titan who saves them is Eren, who is believed to have been eaten a few hours before the attack on Mikasa. Dot Pixis decides to apply Armin’s plan of letting Titan Eren block the hole on the wall to stop the invasions. Even though Eren is not completely aware in his Titan form, he still manages to remember his wish to defend humans and his belief in freedom. The remnants of his human mind and the desire for freedom push him to complete the mission. In later episodes, the Survey Corps discover that the Titans who led the invasions were actually human beings. They are actually the trainees of the 104th Training Corps: Bertolt, the Colossal Titan, broke the barbican walls; Reiner, the Armored Titan, broke the gate of Wall Maria; and Annie, who also has the Titan power, gathered the Titans and led them into the human towns.5 When their true identities are revealed, the Titan trainees show their unwillingness to kill and their fondness for their human friends. Through the dialogues between them and the human trainees, readers are also informed, though not with details, the oppression of humanity on the Titan people. There is another trainee, Ymir, who had once given up her Titan power and reawakens it to protect her friends in the Corps. Showing the readers the montages of the Titan trainees’ painful past and the bond between Titan and human trainees, Isayama on one hand questions the righteousness of humans, on the other hand reveals that the ‘evil’ Titans also have emotions like human beings. He makes the reader rethink who is evil, the monsters or the humans?

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__________________________________________________________________ During the investigating journey outside of the walls, young soldier Conny leads the corps back to his village to find shelter from the attacking Titans. There he finds his townspeople have disappeared and a Titan with weak limbs lies in his parents’ house. In the 38th episode, the weak Titan says to Conny, ‘you are home?’6 Conny suddenly recognizes his mother’s face in the Titan’s. The military scientist, Zoe Hange, claims in the 51st episode that this mindless Titan is indeed Conny’s mother, and assumes that the existing Titans actually are transformed from human beings. Extra flesh and bones grow from human body, cover the person, and form the Titan body. A human is encased within the huge body of each Titan. Where the human body is encased, is the weak point of a Titan. The finding that the killed Titans were once human causes panic among the Survey Corps members. Soldiers who know this truth have to rethink the killing of the Titans. The presence of pain, care, anger, and emotion show that the beings which are considered ‘monsters’ still possess human feelings. This fact questions the boundary between human and Titan, and between good and evil. 4. Walls between Monsters and Humans The three protecting walls in Attack on Titan separate the world into two: inside and outside, humans and monsters. Yet they are not simply guarding the human realm as a whole. Humans settle between them and build their villages and towns. The three walls also distinguish social classes. The royalty and people of high social status live in the center of the walls, which is considered the safest place to inhabit. After the fight of Titan Eren and Titan Annie in the capital, Mikasa discovers a Titan in Wall Sina. The three walls that defend humans from Titans are actually three groups of petrified Titans. This discovery directs the Survey Corps to investigate the secret of the royalty and religious leaders. The walls also blur the boundary of human and Titan. The Titans who are considered to be dangerous and evil are also defending humans from danger. In contrast, the higher-class humans who live inside the walls are hiding secrets from other people to maintain their power and wealth. In Attack on Titan, Isayama Hajime continuously poses the question: who is the true enemy? Who are the real monsters? The locations of the three walls reflect this ambiguity of human and monster, good and evil. The walls stand between the three human communities. The petrified Titans are standing in the walls. They are like the young soldiers who are actually Titans. The Titans in the walls and the Titan soldiers are monsters mingling themselves with the human world. However, though constructed out of monsters, the walls protect humans better than other human beings, and the Titan soldiers save their friends from danger time after time. At the same time, the leaders of human society only care about their own benefits. It becomes difficult to tell evil from good.

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__________________________________________________________________ 5. Conclusion By setting the walls in between the humans, Attack on Titan presents a world with monsters among humans and with humans among monsters. The plots of the series gradually reflect on human monstrosity, and the ambiguous distinction between and mixture of humanity and monstrosity. Nevertheless, the doubt and question of the artist is already presented in the geographical setting of the story. The world itself is a place where humans and monsters mix. The geographical setting of the series does not only trigger the development of the plot, but also embodies the philosophy of the work.

Notes 1

Hajime Isayama, Attacks on Titan (Taipei: Tongli Publishing Co., 2014), 2:41. Ibid., 2:79. 3 Ibid., 13:31. 4 Ibid., 3:123. 5 Ibid., 10:78. 6 Ibid., 9:148. 2

Bibliography Isayama, Hajime. Attacks on Titan. Vol. 1-13. Taipei: Tongli Publishing Co., 2014. Ya-han Chang obtained her M.A. degree from Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures in National Taiwan University in August 2014.

Stadtschaft and Urban Wildscapes Weronika Maćków Abstract The presence of nature in urban landscapes and the role it plays in the everyday human experience of the city has long been the subject of various academic inquiries which focused on the aesthetic, social, economic and health aspects of city life. This chapter aims to study an often unrecognized kind of urban landscape which Marion Shoard calls the edgeland, i.e. a wild greenspace on the fringes of the city that is often desolate and unplanned. Usually littered with ruins, sewage facilities and every kind of industrial waste edgelands are spaces of exclusion characterized by Siegfried Lenz as the elements of urban Stadtschaft. Human experience of Stadtschaft is that of mourning and resentment as well as selfaccusation. The following chapter recognizes the potential of these ‘leftover’ places which have lost or never possessed fixed functions and are open to diverse uses and new meanings. The study of wildscapes in this respect seems especially promising due to wildlife’s ability to appear in urban interstices regardless of any plans or control. Degenerated wildscape of industrial ruins and empty allotments may in this light express its critical potential and therefore reconcile the two types of experience of abandoned urban spaces – that of grief and of hope. However, it seeks to evade simple dichotomies (wild / cultivated, natural / cultural, loose / controlled) by engaging them in a dialogic process. The displacement of oppositions follows the logic that governs smooth and striated spaces as described by Deleuze and Guattari. Shifts of meanings that structure the relations between wild and civilized spaces are perceived here as inherent to and constitutive of heterotopic urban space. Key Words: Urban space, greenspaces, nature, urban experience, stadtschaft, postindustrial city. ***** 1.

Introduction Among numerous utopian ideas about cities, a garden city seems to be the most appealing. Not only does it entail a rational management of urban planning, but it connotes the allure of primal experience of nature that has been lost in the process of urbanisation. However, every process of modernisation produces leftovers. Post-industrial urban landscape has generated sites littered with remnants, ruins, sewers and every kind of debris. Such urban wildscapes are not necessarily green – they are typical landscapes of urban waste and they bear the signs of industrial activity: detritus, sewage works, railways, interchanges, chimneys, ruins, warehouses, landfills, superstores, old mills etc. 1 Being on the

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__________________________________________________________________ margins, they serve as sites of illicit behaviour: drinking, drug use, prostitution, all of which Shoard calls ‘the dark underbelly of urban wildscape’. The functions of these places are obscure for no particular meaning has been assigned to them. Urban wildscapes exist beyond socialized spaces, they rarely bear a name or are charted on maps. Abandoned sites become greenspaces. What makes them elements of monstrous geography is the ambiguity that stems from wildlife’s ability to take control over remnants of human activity. 2. Geographies and Landscapes of Horror Noël Carroll in his Philosophy of Horror provides an insight into the birthplaces of monsters. Usually they originate either from remote places, such as outer space, the underground, or from marginal and abandoned sites like graveyards and decrepit castles. 2 This geography spatializes the fear that lies within the core of Carroll’s theory of horror – all these places lie beyond human knowledge that categorises the surrounding environment and with it social interactions. The places of monsters’ origin incorporate monstrosity themselves by alleviating codified rules of social behaviour and refusing to subject to any attempts of description. They lie on the fringes of the known world that has been mapped and tamed. The act of mapping always involves an element of control and domination. This act is done in response to the fear of losing one’s control over the environment which translates into dissolution of one’s subjectivity. Therefore, the plight for mapping a space becomes a quest for ensuring a sane, unified self. In this light, places that do not adhere to the scheme, that lie outside a map or on its very fringes may seem monstrous as the threat they pose is not merely physical but most importantly, as Carroll asserts, a cognitive one. Naming, planning and organizing are expressions of human desire to make the world habitable, safe and comprehensible. Natural landscape has been shattered by man-made interventions: bridges, pastures, roads, shrubberies and gardens – the signs indicative of human power to ‘improve’ nature. Siegfried Lenz uses the term ‘civilisation landscape’ (Kulturlandschaft) 3 to mark dominant experience with nature. The archetype of the civilisation landscape is a city where the shaping and cultivating power of a man is clearly visible in the street pattern, division into quarters, central squares etc. If nature is present in this landscape, it remains closed within boundaries like garden walls or park fences. However, in cities and more often on their boundaries there exist spaces that bear the marks of Kulturlandschaft but they remain in a sphere between civilisation and nature. Once outside human control, the sites are overtaken by wilderness that simultaneously marks and confirms their peripheral – in a geographic as well as symbolic sense – position. In opposition to Kulturlandschaft which as a ready-made product has lost its power to affect the viewer, these spaces have extraordinary abilities for affecting. For the most part, the evoked feelings are those of fear and disgust. They become wastelands populated by pestilence and outcasts. Such a monstrous landscape can

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__________________________________________________________________ be found in Bram Stoker’s short story ‘The Burial of the Rats’. The protagonist goes to Paris and after a few days of sightseeing he finds himself beyond the trodden paths: ‘Having made sundry journeys to the better-known suburbs, I began to see that there was a terra incognita, as so far as the guide book was concerned’.4 He reaches ‘the city of dust’, a Parisian slum built of mud, garbage and rags whose citizens are ragpickers and rats. The landscape he sees bears no signs of hope or aestheticization: There were a number of shanties or huts (…), rude places with wattled walls, plastered with mud and roofs of rude thatch made from stable refuse – such places as one would not like to enter for any consideration, and which even in water-colour could only look picturesque if judiciously treated.5 In this remote place the protagonist encounters the most vile and dangerous of people from whom he finally manages to escape. This horrific site is populated by rats and rags – Montrouge in Stoker’s narration becomes the dumpsite of everything that the metropolis had expelled. Stoker provides an insightful map of horror. The 19th century Paris is the centre that governs its suburbs. It reminds the protagonist of an octopus with a gigantic head and tentacles and whose main trait is the centralization of power, wealth and knowledge. The city of rags that lies beyond this civilized centre is in every way its negative counterpart. Montrouge is portrayed as the caricature of Paris – a city infested with rats and houses of rags instead of stone and marble where paths go round and round with no reference or signs for orientation. Its material form and geographical location prevents the protagonist from understanding it – instead of clear cut boulevards and squares, he faces winding paths between piles of garbage. As he cannot read the space, he gets lost and this I believe reflects his cognitive disorientation. Moreover, what enhances his sense of lost is the presence of nature which takes a distinctive mark in Montrouge. Nature bears signs of decay: All before me was dark and dismal, and I had evidently come on one of those dark, low-lying places which are found here and there in the neighbourhood of great cities. Places of waste and desolation, where the space is required for the ultimate agglomeration of all that is noxious, and the ground is so poor as to create no desire of occupancy.6 A barren land can only serve as a dump site, a place outside the norms of urban society. When a land does not fulfill its life-supporting function, it becomes a dangerous and hideous wilderness: The water and the mud (…) was filthy and nauseous beyond description (…). Never shall I forget the moments during which I stood trying to

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__________________________________________________________________ recover myself almost fainting from foetid odour of the filthy pool, whose white mist rose ghostlike around.7 For the protagonist, the sewage site presents an unnatural, eerie scene. Nature that is unsuited for human habitation and use is therefore not only barren but also threatening in a metaphysical sense. The fear of finding oneself outside controlled urban environment corresponds with the human need of regulating, planning, dividing the space. What is left is in Lenz’s words, Stadtschaft, ‘urbanscape’ littered with debris of industrial towns.8 Stadtschaft is the reality of the postindustrial city where the space is polluted with piles of garbage that accumulated during nearly two hundred years of urbanisation. However, instead of fear, the predominating feeling now is that of nostalgia and remorse. ‘Urbanscape’ bears the testimony of human control that has been lost; these sites, now overpowered by wild nature, lie forgotten on the margins of urban consciousness. 3. Abjection and Affection The question arises as to how landscapes of urban deterioration affect individuals which eventually turns attention to the problem of identity construction in relation to the physical environment. Cartesian subjectivity requires a catalogued ‘other’ so that he remains a coherent self. In order to establish ‘I’, he needs to distinguish himself from not-I: the natives, women, the insane, for example. An inquiry into one’s being becomes, in this sense, an enterprise of positioning – asking about the place in nature while separating from it. However, the unity of the subject constantly finds itself questioned by what Julia Kristeva calls the abject. The abject is simultaneously outside the self but remains part of it nonetheless. Abject to Kristeva is anything which Western culture considers impure: food, dung, vomit, waste, a corpse. It is ‘something to be scared of’ because of its undefinable position in relation to ‘I’.9 Abjection annihilates meaning and therefore threatens the entity of the subject because it cannot serve as the object that correlates to ‘I’ while it remains a part of ‘I’. It evokes fear but also loathing and disgust. Impurity and incompleteness are characteristics of horror. 10 Monsters are impure because they violate the cultural conception of the organisation of nature by mixing categories that normally are set apart, eg. the living dead. What ‘I’ fears is their power to undermine the schemata of knowledge and ontological anchorage in the world. The abject is horrific because it represents the very idea of something incomplete and impure, a thing that does not have a name but exists nonetheless. It possesses the potential for destabilising established orders, identities and systems of control. Fear and disgust are the protective mechanisms that help to retain the shattered ‘I’ within its boundaries.

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__________________________________________________________________ The narrator of Stoker’s story gives a literary account of the process of abjection. The metaphors of convulsions, body fluids and defilement are omnipresent in the short story. They are profound in the description of the city of dust and its surrounding environment strained with faeces and waste. Montrouge is a spatial abject – a peripheral space to where all the impure and the undesired in the metropolis are banished. The metaphor of Paris as a devilfish’s digestive system focuses attention on the repulsive ‘waste’ of the city – its ragpickers, the poor, the old, rats. The relation between Paris and Montrouge does not rely on a simple structural reflection of the city and its slum; it needs to be recognized in the terms of the abject, a space apart that is also a part of the city’s identity. The discussion on the power of abject in the context of urban ‘greenspaces’ is legitimate inasmuch as it helps to explain the dynamics of affective processes that concern urban landscapes. Abject evokes strong feelings – in Stoker’s short story, the narrator feels repugnance but also fascination. Urban edgelands, the typology of which is presented by Marion Shoard,11 are also spaces that evoke particular emotions, mostly negative. Edgelands make people uneasy for various reasons. First of which is that the preference for neatness and organization is aesthetically dominant; wilderness is accepted only when it lies outside city borders like moorlands, woodlands or highlands to which we have learnt how to respond. The notions of the uncanny, unheimisch, the sublime are now well established in western cultural symbolic heritage. In contrast, urban ‘brown spaces’, if noticed at all, meet with apprehension and distance. What is more, as parts that constitute post-industrial ‘urbanscape’ are now sites of mourning and dread. Symbolically, they lie in the peripheries of the orderly city space and due to their marginality, they serve as ‘a frontier where normal rules are suspended’. 12 These sites have either lost or have never possessed fixed meanings that would allow for their unproblematic categorisation. Their ambiguous character that stems from their physical and symbolic emplacement is what accounts for their notoriety. The point made here is that edgelands gain their infamy due to their potential to destabilize set orders as well as the power to affect urban dwellers in the ways that question the dwellers’ existence in relation to surrounding environment. These two qualities require further explanation. According to Lenz, Stadtschaft resonates with the feelings of remorse and sorrow. What is the source of these specific affective states and why can they be perceived as threats to identity? This, I believe, can be explained by employing Tim Ingold’s ‘dwelling perspective’. 13 The ontological position of the subject, according to Ingold, can be recognized only by accepting its immersion in the landscape that is not a given natural backdrop for human habitation nor is it just a symbolic construct. Landscape is understood here as a condition necessary for the existence of a subject that acquires its significance through dwelling – the acts of everyday activities. Landscape is constituted as an enduring record of – and a testimony to – the lives and works of past generations who have dwelled in it:

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__________________________________________________________________ [Landscape] enfolds the lives and times of predecessors who, over the generations, have moved around in it and played their part in its formation. To perceive the landscape is therefore to carry out an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image, stored in the mind, as of engaging perceptually with an environment that is itself pregnant with past.14 Landscape in this respect embodies activities that take place in it. Human activity is not inscribed in the environment but it enfolds in the process of incorporation of the landscape into one’s life: ‘human life-stories are woven along with life-cycles of plants and animals (…) it’s never complete, always under construction’. 15 Identity is inseparable from the surrounding environment. Landscape, as a basic domain of dwelling in its material and symbolic form, is ‘with us’. The acknowledgment of this perspective opens up interesting interpretations of the sites that have been ‘left over’ but which still bear marks of human habitation. On the one hand, they are remnants of people’s past - evidence that once they were integral part of someone’s existence which is now gone which I believe, resonates with the feelings of mourning, feelings that are associated with cemeteries and death. However, being still in the close surrounding they constitute a significant part of the present generation habitus. Following the logic of abjection, these sites are the background for activities that are considered illegal, shocking and threatening and that very often incorporate bodily activities such as defecation or drug use. Thus the sites can be perceived as spatial representations of the monstrous, the impure, the incomplete. Apart from remorse and mourning, they evoke fear that is articulated by resentment and unrecognition. Edgelands are a visible evidence of passing of time as the sites of on-going deterioration but they also represent the natural cycle of birth and death. They are ‘dead’ in the sense that they offer no or very few possibilities of productive uses; however, there are also sites of various other – suspicious – activities. Finally, they are material embodiments of the collapse of meanings that are the perimeters of culture. Being categorically interstitial and formless, urban wildspaces are symbolically removed from consciousness by not having cartographic representation. 4. Geographies of Horror Revisited One short passage from ‘The Burial of the Rats’ serves as an inspiration for the concluding remarks of the urban wildscapes analysis. In his description of Paris, the narrator says: ‘I began to see that there was a terra incognita (…) in the social wilderness lying between these attractive points’.16 What he means by wilderness is, naturally, the unrecognized but constant presence of beggars from Montrouge in the city centre from where they collect rubbish. In this passage the narrator places part of the city of dust in the very heart of the civility and culture that

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__________________________________________________________________ Paris represents. The disorder that lies on the fringes on the city stays at the same time, within its – both metaphorical and material – centre. The fluidity of meanings between centre and peripheries, controlled and abandoned sites is best described in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of smooth and striated spaces. 17 The relation between them remains indefinable as they are translated one into another. Sea, that is a smooth space par excellance, is subject to measurement and calculations. City on the other hand as a product of striation is ordered and controlled but it also gives rise to opposing movements such as sprawling or the emergence of shanty towns. The translation of spaces from one into another happens constantly, so the smooth and striated spaces can develop simultaneously. Such is also the nature of urban wildscapes and cultivated green spaces. Wildscapes can be found on the peripheries and in city centres alike. They may undergo a process of revitalization which makes them more ‘legitimate’ but they also can function as sites of leisure. Shoard’s postulate to appreciate edgelands and create maps that would name and represent them is an example of striation process. On the other hand, greenspaces possess a potential for diverse uses. Such as Stadtschaft, wildscapes can be seen as a subversive response to the oppressive geometry of urban space.

Notes 1

Marion Shoard, Call to Arms, Viewed 10 March 2014, http://www.urbanwildscapes.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/UW-Marion-Shoard-ACall-to_Arms.pdf 2 Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror (New York: Routledge, 1990), 34-35. 3 Siegfried Lenz, ‘Wpływ krajobrazu (landszaftu) na człowieka’, trans. Z. Kadłubek, in Miasto w sztuce-sztuka miasta, ed. Ewa Rewers (Kraków: Universitas, 2010), 80-81. 4 Bram Stoker, The Burial of the Rats, Viewed 10 March 2014, http://www.litgothic.com/Texts/stoker_burial_of_the_rats.pdf 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Lenz, ‘Wpływ krajobrazu’, 84-85. 9 Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 11-12. 10 Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, 32-33. 11 Shoard, Call to Arms. See: Marion Shoard, ‘Edgelands’, Viewed 10 March 2014,

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__________________________________________________________________ http://www.marionshoard.co.uk/Documents/Articles/Environment/EdgelandsRemaking-the-Landscape.pdf 12 Ibid. 13 Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment (London: Routledge, 2000). 14 Ibid., 189. 15 Ibid., 198. 16 Stoker, Burial of the Rats. 17 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 478-482.

Bibliography Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror. London: Routledge, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment. London: Routledge, 2000. Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Lenz, Siegfried. ‘Wpływ krajobrazu (landszaftu) na człowieka’. Trans. Zbigniew Kadłubek, in Miasto w sztuce-sztuka miasta, edited by Ewa Rewers, 71-86. Kraków: Universitas, 2010. Shoard, Marion. Call to Arms. Viewed 10 March 2014, http://www.urbanwildscapes.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/UW-Marion-Shoard-ACall-to_Arms.pdf Stoker, Bram. The Burial of the Rats. Viewed 10 March 2014, http://www.litgothic.com/Texts/stoker_burial_of_the_rats.pdf. Weronika Maćków is a PhD student at the Institute of Cultural Studies of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Her doctoral dissertation is devoted to the presence of artistic communities in modern cities. She is the co-author of a book on urban cultural studies where she discussed a concept of a neighbourhood as a subject of cultural research.

Christchurch as Lisbon: The Legacy of the Seismic Sublime Jacky Bowring Abstract In 2010 Christchurch, New Zealand, suddenly became possessed by something monstrous as a series of earthquakes began to shake the city to pieces. Some 3 years, 185 deaths, and over 13,000 aftershocks later, only 20% of the central city remains, and there are vast voids, houses crushed by rocks, and teetering on the edges of cliffs. Wracked by a geological version of Tourette’s syndrome, the landscape behaved unpredictably, shaking and shouting profanities. The simultaneous fascination and horror with the events and their impact exceeds comprehension; the Sublime has come to Christchurch. Another city, another time: Lisbon, 1755, a massive earthquake of over magnitude 8.5 sets off a tsunami and the city is on fire. This calamitous event shocked Europe and brought vivid focus to the aesthetic of the Sublime. Already an emerging concept, the Sublime was amplified and moulded by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, providing a frame for the terror and strange beauty of the earthquake’s power and devastation. Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke leveraged off the Lisbon earthquake to shape their theoretical positions on the Sublime, including Kant’s term Erschütterung, which describes the agitation of the mind from the Sublime - a word which can be translated as ‘a shuddering vibration, disruption, blow, shock, trauma.’ All of this resonates with the experience of Christchurch’s earthquakes, and this chapter tracks this legacy of seismic Sublimity from its origins in Lisbon’s catastrophe to a contemporary disaster. Connections are also made to other seismic events including Chile’s and Japan’s earthquakes and tsunamis. Key Words: Sublime, Seismicity, Earthquakes, Beauty, Horror, Aesthetics, Monstrosity, Nature. ***** 1. The Sublime ‘Never did any eye behold so awful, so tremendous a scene ….’ James O’Hara on beholding the immediate aftermath of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake1 ‘It is indeed most wonderful to witness such desolation produced in three minutes of time.’ Charles Darwin on the experience of the Chilean earthquake, 18352

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__________________________________________________________________ ‘In a way it’s quite magnificent looking at those cliffs. It is quite a magnificent sight what Mother Nature did to us.’ Christchurch resident Gail Dowgray on the aftermath of the earthquake, 20123 At its heart the sublime presents a paradox, a dilemma. How could a scene of devastation be simultaneously ‘awful’ and ‘tremendous’, or be described as ‘wonderful’ or ‘magnificent’? The sublime revolves around a push-pull tension between fear and fascination, shuttling from repulsion to attraction. As a complex and contradictory concept, the sublime provides an imprecise map for navigating the enigma of a love of terror. Core to the sublime is the unrepresentable, accompanied by the terror of the infinite, the formless and the objectless. The sublime is in contrast to the aesthetic of beauty, forming opposite ends of a continuum of aesthetic frames for encounters with the landscape. Thomas McEvilley captures the gulf between these two poles when he explains, The experience of awe is characteristic of encounters with the sublime, and is traditionally the opposite of the satisfying delectation provided by beauty; the experience of awe is the aura of the gust of frenzy with which the sublime breaks through the pretty surface.4 Bridging between the sublime and the beautiful is the third aesthetic convention, the picturesque. At one end of the spectrum is the limitless and awe-inspiring sublime, and at the other the smooth and gently curvilinear of the beautiful, and the picturesque provides a middle ground – a bridge. The picturesque’s position as a middle ground offers the prospect of a type of refuge from the sublime, a place to try and run to when the going gets tough. The two extremes overlap at the point of the picturesque, and thus it is infected with both, and continues to colour the experiences of the sublime explored here, lingering as a less awe-ful alternative. The sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque were sought on the continent by Englishmen on their Grand Tour. As the forerunner to the now taken-for-granted practice of going on holiday to look at scenery, the Grand Tour was an exercising of the learned principles of aesthetic convention. This artificial distancing from the environment through aestheticising was a privileged position, as Gene Ray explains, To be able to find pleasure in avalanches and fissured glacial fields, sets English nobles and bourgeois travelers on the Grand Tour apart from the Swiss peasants, for whom such natural features are a despised daily danger.5

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__________________________________________________________________ Distancing was one of the sublime’s strategies for holding the monstrous at arm’s length, as Edmund Burke pointed out, ‘when danger or pain press too nearly they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible.’6 Distance can be achieved in time or space, or within the mind, Dariusz Gafijczuk calls this ‘adjustable remoteness’ which in Kantian terms is ‘an indirect encounter with the immensity of the unknown from a safe distance.’7 The sublime has persisted as a potent aesthetic convention, while the picturesque and the beautiful have become smooth and comfortable after centuries of wear. Embracing melancholy and the uncanny, the sublime remains an engine for unease, a device for the destabilising of the self. The sublime is a frame for grappling with catastrophe, disaster, evil and monstrosity, and the seismic sublime is proposed here as a mining of its possibilities. 2. Lisbon and the Seismic Sublime In his autobiography, Goethe described how the Lisbon earthquake ‘spread[. . .] enormous terror over a land grown accustomed to peace and quiet.’8 It is therefore no coincidence that the sublime expanded in significance in mid-eighteenth century Europe. As a widely experienced and reported event the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 was of a magnitude that ruptured prevailing understandings of the world. The earthquake was a catastrophe, amplified by the accompanying fire and tsunami, leading to between 60,000 to 100,000 deaths.9 Shaking up ideas of cause and effect embedded within religious protocols, the earthquake hastened the development of both scientific understandings of the world, and aesthetic theory. Writings by Kant, Burke, Voltaire, Rousseau, and later Benjamin, positioned the earthquake as a key moment in philosophy and aesthetics.10 The ripples from the Lisbon earthquake are still felt in the raw and aweinspiring nature of earthquakes. The earthquake precipitated broad theorizing on the sublime in terms of the experience of awe and terror, but also set in place a specific type of sublimity that is associated with seismic activity. Kant proposed two kinds of sublime: the mathematical sublime (the experience of being overwhelmed by quantity and scale, such as the vastness of the ocean, the infinity of the starry sky), and the dynamic sublime (the imagination’s recognition of the body’s impotence in the face of the violence of nature). The seismic sublime represents both kinds of awe, being quantitatively overwhelming through the extent of damage, and dynamically sublime because of the very real terror in the face of shaking and collapse. The development of the theory of the sublime was associated with the development of a characteristic vocabulary, including Kant’s Erschütterung, which describes the agitation of the mind, translated as ‘a shuddering vibration, disruption, blow, shock, trauma.’11 Other terms used by Kant in setting out the theory of the sublime draw indirectly upon earthquake-related experiences, and suggest a conflation of the Lisbon earthquake with thinking on the sublime. Kant’s writing on the

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__________________________________________________________________ sublime includes words like agitated, tremor, rapidly alternating, gushing and effusing, and abyss.12 This intertwining of seismic terms and the sublime continues throughout aesthetics, with Adorno using Erschütterung to describe the shocks that viewers of sublime art experience, of ‘losing the ground beneath their feet.’13 The coinciding of the Lisbon earthquake and Kant’s theorizing on the sublime positions seismicity as a critical component of the shaping of the aesthetic. The naturalization of the language sees the seismic terms embedded within the sublime, and the consequential violence that is associated with an earthquake is situated within the convention. It may have been very different, for example, if another type of natural disaster had triggered the escalation of theorizing on the sublime, bringing instead an underlay of flooding or volcanism. Importantly the elision of sublimity and violence has continued to be at the core of the associated discourse on aesthetics, including in particular the paradox and potential moral failure of finding pleasure in pain. 3. Lisbon’s Legacy: Valdivia, Talcahuano and Concepción, Chile The intertwining of science and aesthetics in the birth of seismology and the amplification of the sublime resulting from the Lisbon earthquake leads to a legacy of simultaneous objective and subjective responses to earthquake events. While contemporary perspectives on science and art often tend to corral each into its own language and its own domain, arguably Kant’s parallel writings in these two spheres yoked them together in the context of the seismic sublime. Charles Darwin’s witnessing of the 1835 earthquake in Chile reveals the enduring legacy of Lisbon’s seismic sublime. Darwin was near Valdivia in the south of Chile when he felt the earthquake strike, but he was alone and out in the wilderness with no cultural points of reference – no buildings, or other context of ‘civilization.’ It was not until he returned to Valdivia and saw the horror expressed by the population, and the damage to the city, that he could frame it within the sublime. As Paul White notes, ‘In Valdivia, Darwin reported the horror of others and how their fear registered in him.’ 14 As a visitor, Darwin had a distance from the fear and terror, as did Captain O’Hara who arrived in the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake and spoke of being witness to the ‘awful’ and ‘tremendous’ scene.15 After his experience in Valdivia, Darwin travelled up the coast to Talcahuano and Concepción, reporting that ‘the two towns presented the most awful yet interesting spectacle I ever beheld.’16 At Talcahuano the waves produced by the earthquake had almost completely washed away the town, moving the scene emphatically from the middle condition of the more comforting picturesque into the pleasing terror of the sublime. There were no ruins at all, capturing the sense of the sublime as objectless, vast, and desolate. Ruins are often seen as the domain of the picturesque, with their gently mouldering softness being evocative of associated feelings such as nostalgia. Yet, even where there were ruins, as at Concepción, Darwin found the picturesque an

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__________________________________________________________________ insufficient distancing device. White explains Darwin’s challenge where, ‘The landscape had been shattered like bones, not withered away by time.’17 The sudden violence on the landscape promotes the sublime, as opposed to the gentle weathering that leads to the picturesque. Darwin’s experience in Chile presents another milestone in the legacy of the seismic sublime. Darwin, along with fellow geologists Humboldt and Lyell extended the earlier theorising of Kant, continuing the simultaneous aesthetic and scientific exploration of seismic phenomena. On one hand seismology and the sublime might be presumed to have continued to move in opposite directions, pulling themselves apart into the world of positivist science pitted against art and emotion. But, arguably, the two remain yoked together, where the science itself is sublime. 4. Christchurch as Lisbon Christchurch was once the most anglophile of cities. Established as a Church of England settlement in 1850, it reflected Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s colonising vision of bringing a slice of England to New Zealand. Once called Junior England by the visiting Mark Twain,18 Christchurch could be recast as Little Lisbon, with a devastating series of earthquakes beginning in September 2010, followed by over 13,000 aftershocks, one of which caused 185 deaths. The central city has been shaken to bits, and following the demolition of remaining unsafe or irreparable buildings, only 20% of the urban fabric remains. There are vast voids throughout the city, and in the suburbs houses have been submerged into mud, crushed by rocks, or are left teetering on the edges of cliffs. The government has bought nearly 8,000 homes and will demolish them, with the land red-zoned as not fit for residential construction. The experience of the earthquakes was violent, intense and terrifying. The city experienced ‘the loss of innocence’ as people ‘once trusted the ground and the environment and now they don’t.’19 Suddenly an evil other, as though wracked by a geological version of Tourette’s syndrome, the landscape behaved unpredictably, shaking and shouting profanities. Brook captured the sense of fear: ‘This once English of New Zealand cities is like a war zone, but there is no sign of the enemy.’20 As with Lisbon’s earthquake, Christchurch’s experience was completely unexpected, ‘out of the blue. It has just happened in the blink of an eye.’21 Earthquakes’ unpredictability characterises the seismic sublime, augmented by the repeat nature of the events, as aftershocks can continue for months or even years after then initial tremor. In Christchurch it was assumed that the worst had happened with the first 7.1 quake in September 2010, but the most damaging event was some months later when one of the aftershocks occurred close to the city and at a shallow depth, causing devastation and death. The presumption that the worst was over in September intensified the impact of this most damaging of aftershocks on 22 February 2011.

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__________________________________________________________________ Gafijczuk’s ‘adjustable remoteness’ generates the necessary distance for the sublime. Looking at the horror detached from the physical violence and ongoing travails creates a spectacle of the event. Many books and a film have been produced about the Christchurch earthquakes, and a fictionalised television series is nearing completion.22 The imagery in the media made the experience remote, and even Christchurch locals who had electricity found themselves watching the scenes of terror relayed on the screen. Television provided an optical distance, and also provided visual access to Red Zone which was out of bounds. In the weeks that followed, visual media also connected viewers to the seismic sublime of the Japan’s 11 March earthquake and tsunami. The terrifying scenes of Tokyo’s skyscrapers swaying wildly and the tsunami making its way across neat fields and towns were mesmerising. At the same time that it was clear that this was a major catastrophe, and that our own city was still in a state of national emergency, the seduction of these images spoke loudly of the conflicted emotions of the seismic sublime. At the time of the most devastating of the earthquakes in Christchurch any intimation of taking aesthetic delight in the events was unthinkable. But from a Kantian safe distance, the paradoxical pleasure could be played out, as in a remarkable event some 300 kilometres away, high in the Southern Alps. At the Tasman Glacier tourists travel across the huge glacial lake by boat, and on the 22 February witnessed 30 million tonnes of ice breaking from the glacier and collapsing into the lake, as a result of the earthquake in Christchurch. The massive lump of ice broke into smaller icebergs, and 3.5 metre high waves agitated the surface of the otherwise serene lake. This is believed to be the largest-ever glacier calving caught on camera. Located hundreds of kilometres away, this glacier’s fracturing was within Kant’s safe distance, allowing for the paradox of pleasure in danger to be played out without invoking moral discomfort through being associated with death and destruction in Christchurch. Aristocrats on the Grand Tour of the eighteenth century created distance from the sublime through sketchbooks, Claude Glasses, and written records. For Christchurch it was a Bus Tour that provided viewing distance, taking tourists and locals in to see the horrors of the inner-city Red Zone. The bus tours began nine months after the February quake, and evoked a journey to a foreign place – a place that required the domestic equivalent of a passport to be able to enter through the armymanned checkpoints. On board, the bus tourists were given a briefing about the horrors they would encounter on the visit, and several opportunities were offered for people to leave the bus before it crossed into the Red Zone. The buses carried Red Cross staff ready to assist in case of panic, and were followed by a car in case passengers needed to escape from the experience of being in the ruined city. Other than in an emergency, it was not permissible to leave the bus, as the streets were still extremely dangerous. From the seemingly safe distance offered by viewing the scenes from the bus, the tour of the central city became a procession of the sub-

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__________________________________________________________________ lime. Images of bus tourists viewing the scenes through the windows, and taking photographs, evoke echoes of the Grand Tourists of the eighteenth century. Grasping for the means to express the inexpressible, observers of the Christchurch earthquakes turned to a metonym of the contemporary sublime – the horror film. Time and time again, reports of the earthquakes’ horror compared scenes to those from the cinema, offering an aesthetic distance through the parallel of watching a film rather than experiencing reality. In the first earthquake in September 2010, in the nearby town of Darfield, ‘Sharon Smith [reported that she] thought she was in a horror movie.’23 Another report described how ‘It seemed like something out of a dream, surreal and unimaginable. It was real - but it felt like something out of a video game.’24 Prime Minister John Key visited the city, describing scenes of ‘utter devastation,’ remarking that it looked ‘like a movie set.’25 Months later, following the fatal February earthquake, Greg Murphy wrote how ‘The first pictures of the Christchurch earthquake resembled a Hollywood movie and it took me some time to digest the reality of devastation.’26 A resident of Christchurch’s adjoining port town of Lyttelton recounted that ‘It was extremely violent. I was sitting there with a friend and the building just like exploded. It was like a movie. It took two or three seconds to comprehend what was going on ... and then we ran onto the street and the front fell out of the building right in front of me.’27 As in Darwin’s experience of Talcahuano and Concepción, the sublime of Christchurch’s central city was as much about absence as it was about the dramatic scenes of ruined buildings. Damaged structures were very quickly cleared in Christchurch – often amidst controversy in the case of heritage buildings – leaving vast open spaces of a scale that was incomprehensible. Even three years later, with the cordon finally removed, the voids remain sublime, as journalist Jane Bowron wrote, they are ‘vast existential open spaces taken back by nature or temporarily groomed while the land waits to know its fate…’28 The city seems unnaturally vast, but at the same time building sites seem to have become diminished in size, making it difficult to reconcile the city that once was with what is there now. A further distancing device is found in the safety of numbers. Most Christchurch residents are able recite a litany of earthquake data – the magnitudes of the quakes experienced, their quantity, how many homes abandoned, how long they have had to wait for their repairs or rebuild. The construction of an exhaustive, almost absurd, quantitative frame of reference is an expression of the unrepresentability of the earthquakes, a way of grasping their excess. This is Kant’s mathematical sublime, where the individual is overwhelmed with the great magnitude of things, a sense of the vastness and incomprehensibility of all that is beheld. The passing of time is a distancing that permits the delight in horror. Resident Gail Dowgray’s comment in the third epigraph for this chapter would have been considered inappropriate at the time of the earthquakes. But nearly a year later the temporal distance provides licence for the sublime to be called in, and the fatal collapse of the cliffs can be called ‘magnificent’.

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__________________________________________________________________ 5. Reflecting on the Seismic Sublime The sublime is bound up in paradox and dilemma. Finding pleasure in pain challenges a sense of empathy and moral integrity. This dilemma is negotiated via devices such as distancing through time or space allows for an aestheticising of the horrors. The seismic sublime presents a species of horror which is distinctive in its physical violence and sudden transformation of the landscape. The spectacles sought by Grand Tourists or contemporary scenic tourists tended to be less violent in their nature, like glaciers and waterfalls. Earthquakes, by contrast, are inherently violent and force themselves into cities, into homes, erupting up through floors in silt volcanoes, crashing through roofs as enormous boulders are set in motion. Even so, tourists seek out ruins and devastation, as they do in other sites of violence including war-torn cities. The sublime continues to be perplexing in its aesthetic attraction, resulting in a discourse which circles moral conflicts and guilty pleasures. Monstrosity has at its core this very conflict of attraction and repulsion. The Lisbon earthquake was not only catastrophic in itself, but in addition the fire and tsunami which followed compounded the sublimity of the event. Compound events were also experienced in the Chilean earthquake witnessed by Darwin in 1835, and in the world’s largest ever recorded earthquake in Valdivia in 1960, a 9.5 magnitude quake that sent a tsunami across the Pacific Ocean, killing people as far afield as Hawaii and Japan. The 2011 Japanese earthquake evoked the seismic sublime not only in its earthquake and tsunami, but in the ensuing nuclear disaster that gave a chilling contemporary dimension to the horror. Christchurch’s multiple events were not as destructive as those in Lisbon, Chile, or Japan, but even so the experiences aroused the sense of an apocalyptic happening, and the latent nature of the monstrous in the everyday landscape.

Notes 1

Alexander Regier, Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 84. 2 Paul White, ‘Darwin, Concepción and the Geological Sublime,’ Science in Context, 25, no.1 (2012): 49-71, 49. 3 ‘House Doesn’t Matter, Says Owner.’ The Press, 18/02/12, page 2 4 Thomas McEvilley, ‘Turned Upside Down and Torn Apart’, in The Sublime, ed. Simon Morley (London and Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, 2010), 168-173. 5 Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 26.

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Edmund Burke quoted in Rodolphe Gasché, ‘…And the Beautiful?: Revisiting Edmund Burke’s ‘Double Aesthetics’’ in The Sublime: from antiquity to the present, ed. Timothy M Costelloe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 27. 7 Dariusz Gafijczuk, ‘Dwelling within: the Inhabited Ruins of History,’ History and Theory, 52 (2013): 149-170, 156. 8 Goethe quoted in Alexander Regier, Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 75. 9 M Degg and J Doornkamp, Earthquake Hazard Atlas: 7. Iberia (Portugal and Spain) including the Azores, Balearics, Canary and Madeira Islands, (London: London Insurance and Reinsurance Market Association, 1994).. 10 Useful anthologies include Timothy M Costelloe (ed.), The Sublime. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Simon Morley (ed.), The Sublime, (London and Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, 2010); Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla (eds.), The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 11 Ray, Terror and the Sublime, 28. 12 Ray, Terror and the Sublime, 28-29. 13 Ray, Terror and the Sublime, 32. 14 Paul White, ‘Darwin, Concepción and the Geological Sublime,’ Science in Context, 25, no.1 (2012): 49-71, 56. 15 Regier, Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism, 84. 16 Charles Darwin quoted in White, ‘Darwin, Concepción and the Geological Sublime,’ 56. 17 White, ‘Darwin, Concepción and the Geological Sublime,’ 57-58. 18 Mark Twain, Beyond the Equator (Stilwell, KS: Digireads.com, 2008, first published 1895), 134-135. 19 Denise Irvine referring to Dr Gerald Johnstone’s comment’s about Christchurch, in ‘Nurturing stressed souls’ Your Weekend, March 16, 2013. 20 Kip Brook, ‘Living in an Earthquake Zone,’ Australian Geographic (23 February 2011), online http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/blogs/agblog/2012/02/living-in-an-earthquake-zone 21 Constable Briar Douglas quoted in Jarrod Booker, ‘Images of Quake Tragedy Will Help City.’ New Zealand Herald, (23 September 2011), A002. 22 For example, Bruce Ansley, Christchurch Heritage (Auckland: Random House, 2011); Peter Morath, Christchurch: A Nostalgic Tribute (Christchurch: Caxton Press, 2011); Gerard Smyth (writer and director), When a City Falls, (Christchurch: Frank Film, 2012). 23 Martin van Beynen, ‘Cantabrians Rudely Shaken.’ The Press, online edition updated 6 September 2010, downloaded 14 March 2014. http://www.stuff.co.nz/thepress/news/4098321/Cantabrians-rudely-shaken

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‘Totally Unprepared.’ The Press online edition, last updated 6 September 2010, viewed 14 March 2014 http://www.stuff.co.nz/thepress/technology/4099737/Totally-unprepared 25 ‘PM - Uninsured Facing Big Costs from Quake.’ TVNZ (5 September 2010) viewed 14 March 2014 http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/pm-uninsured-facing-bigcosts-quake-3760853 26 Greg Murphy, ‘Tributes to Disasters.’ Sunday News, (20 March 2011), 46. 27 ABC News, ‘Christchurch Earthquake: In Their Own Words.’ Tuesday 22 February 2011, viewed 14 March 2014 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-0222/christchurch-earthquake-in-their-own-words/1953106 28 Jane Bowron, ‘Time to Leave Christchurch and Move “Home” to Capital’. The Press, March 10 2014, A8.

Bibliography ABC News, ‘Christchurch Earthquake: In Their Own Words.’ Tuesday 22 February 2011, viewed 14 March 2014 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-0222/christchurch-earthquake-in-their-own-words/1953106 Ansley, Bruce. Christchurch Heritage. Auckland: Random House, 2011. Ashfield, Andrew and Peter de Bolla, eds. The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Booker, Jarrod. ‘Images of Quake Tragedy Will Help City’. New Zealand Herald, 23 September (2011): A002. Bowron, Jane. ‘Time to Leave Christchurch and Move “Home” to Capital’. The Press, March 10 (2014): A8. Brook, Kip. ‘Living in an Earthquake Zone,’ Australian Geographic, 23 February. 2011), Viewed 12 February 2014 http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/blogs/ag-blog/2012/02/living-in-anearthquake-zone Costelloe, Timothy M,ed. The Sublime. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

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__________________________________________________________________ Gafijczuk, Dariusz. ‘Dwelling Within: The Inhabited Ruins of History’. History and Theory, 52 (2013): 149-170. Gasché, Rodolphe. ‘…And the Beautiful? Revisiting Edmund Burke’s ‘Double Aesthetics’’. In The Sublime: from Antiquity to the Present edited by Timothy M Costelloe, 24-36. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. ‘House Doesn’t Matter, Says Owner.’ The Press, 18 February (2012): 2. McEvilley, Thomas. ‘Turned Upside Down and Torn Apart.’ In The Sublime, edited by Simon Morley, 168-173. London and Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, 2010. Morath, Peter. Christchurch: A Nostalgic Tribute. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 2011. Morley, Simon, ed. The Sublime. London and Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, 2010. Murphy, Greg. ‘Tributes to Disasters’. Sunday News, 20 March (2011): 46. ‘Nurturing Stressed Souls’. Your Weekend, March 16, 2013. Ray, Gene. Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ‘PM - Uninsured Facing Big Costs from Quake.’ TVNZ. 5 September 2010. Viewed 14 March 2014 http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/pm-uninsured-facing-bigcosts-quake-3760853 Regier, Alexander. Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Smyth, Gerard, written and directed. When a City Falls. Christchurch: Frank Film, 2012. ‘Totally Unprepared.’ The Press online edition, last updated 6 September 2010. Viewed 14 March 2014. http://www.stuff.co.nz/thepress/technology/4099737/Totally-unprepared

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__________________________________________________________________ Twain, Mark. Beyond the Equator. Stilwell, KS: Digireads.com, 2008, first published 1895. van Beynen, Martin. ‘Cantabrians Rudely Shaken’. The Press, online edition updated 6 September 2010, viewed 14 March 2014. http://www.stuff.co.nz/thepress/news/4098321/Cantabrians-rudely-shaken White, Paul. ‘Darwin, Concepción and the Geological Sublime.’ Science in Context, 25, no.1 (2012): 49-71. Jacky Bowring is a designer, researcher, teacher and critic, and is based at the School of Landscape Architecture at Lincoln University, Christchurch, New Zealand. She is the editor of Landscape Review, and author of A Field Guide to Melancholy (2008).

Part II Fringe

The Triangle: A Narrative Portrait of Place-Gathered Monstrousness Yasmine Musharbash Abstract In this chapter, I consider notions of the sentient landscape from a philosophicallyinspired anthropological perspective, specifically, Edward Casey’s postulation that places ‘gather’. I provide a narrative portrait of the subject of my analysis: a triangular valley in central Australia bordered by ranges on two sides and a storm water drain at its base, crisscrossed by paths and tracks, vegetated by prickles, grasses, and small bushes, and inhabited by insects, small reptiles including poisonous snakes, birds, rock wallabies, and the occasional kangaroo and dingo. To the south, The Triangle is directly bordered by the affluent Alice Springs suburb of Eastside. To its north lies ‘the bush’, stretching for well over a thousand kilometres to the sea. I focus on how The Triangle ‘gathers’ in regards to the relationship between the monstrous and the geographic, and relate this through three case studies: (1) Nature and culture: The Triangle is all that stands between Eastside and ‘the bush’, and its body (‘scarred’ by paths and weed poising, exuding seeds, snakes, and sand) literally constitutes the threshold between the built environment and a perceived untamed nature. (2) Wildness and domestication: During recent drought-like conditions, dingoes flocked to the triangle and began killing the pets of Eastsiders. Critically, the latter often are part-dingo ‘camp dogs’ from Aboriginal communities, adopted by Eastsiders employed in the ‘Aboriginal Industry’. (3) Interwoven history: The Triangle’s neocolonial Indigenous/non-Indigenous entanglements are layered on top of its heritage WW2 site history, and its past as an Arrernte camping and hunting ground adjacent to a major sacred site. The central aim of my chapter is to develop a Triangle-centric narrative from which to consider questions pertinent to the relationship between monstrousness and geography: Can the Triangle express or experience monstrousness, or is monstrousness inscribed on and through it? Key Words: Sentient Landscape, Casey, Alice Springs, Central Australia, Indigenous/non-Indigenous Relations, Colonialism, Post-Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Domestication, Canines. ***** 1. Introduction In this chapter, I consider notions of the sentient landscape from a philosophically-inspired anthropological perspective, specifically, Edward Casey’s postulation that places ‘gather’. He puts forward that

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__________________________________________________________________ places gather things in their midst – where ‘things’ connote various animate and inanimate entities. Places also gather experiences and histories, even languages and thoughts. Think only of what it means to go back to a place you know, finding it full of memories and expectations, old things and new things, the familiar and the strange, and much more besides. What else is capable of this massively diversified holding action? … The power belongs to place itself, and it is a power of gathering.1 I consider this gathering power of place in relation to the Triangle: a wedge-shaped valley located in the middle of Australia, bordered by ranges on two sides and a storm water drain at its base, crisscrossed by paths and tracks, vegetated by prickles, grasses, bushes, and trees, and inhabited by characteristic central Australian fauna. My aim is to portray the Triangle through a series of vignettes, and through these, to explore how the Triangle’s gathering power compels contemplation of the monstrous. The Triangle is a place in arid central Australia, in the southern part of the Northern Territory, located on crown land within the confines of the town of Alice Springs, the regional service centre for settlements located within a radius of a thousand kilometers. If we take a more triangle-centric view, to its south, there is Eastside, one of Alice Spring’s more affluent suburbs, from which it is separated by a stormwater drain. To its north lies ‘the bush’. To the east, there are ranges and hills, and to the west flows the Todd River (that is, after the rains, at all other times, there is the only the sandy bed of the Todd, as the river is generally dry), and between them a hill. The hill is called Tyeretye (also spelled Choritja) by its Aboriginal owners and custodians, and Spencer Hill by the non-Aboriginal residents and by Australian mapmakers. (It is named after Walter Baldwin Spencer, who, originally as a biologist, left Adelaide in May 1894 to explore inner Australia with the W.A. Horn scientific expedition, and turned anthropologist. At Alice Springs, he met Francis James Gillen, the post and telegraph Station Master, who became his collaborator and colleague. Together they extensively documented central Australian Aboriginal culture, at the turn of the nineteenth century, informing amongst others the work of Frazer and Freud). If the fact that the Triangle is adjacent to the suburb of Eastside is most relevant in contemporary geography, it was its vicinity to the hill, Tyeretye, that meant most in the past. Tyeretye was considered a principal sacred site in the wider Alice Springs area, called Mbainda (now spelled Mparntwe) by the Aboriginal traditional owners. The interconnections between sites and people were first documented in written form, in fact, by Spencer and Gillen. In their work on ‘the Arunta’ (now spelled Arrernte) they identify the traditional owners and custodians of Alice Springs as Arunta Mbainda:

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__________________________________________________________________ that is, Arunta belonging to what is called the main camp. This forms the central division of the tribe, and inlcudes the following localities: Choritja (Alice Springs), Bond Springs, Imanda, Henbury, Idracowra (Chambers Pillar) and Ooraminna.2 The triangle itself has no recorded traditional Aboriginal name, nor do contemporary Arrernte people name it (apart from describing it as ‘east of Tyeretye’). Neither does the non-Indigenous population have a name for it, although some refer to it as ‘Spencer Valley’. It certainly is not called the Triangle by anybody but myself, and I use this appellation only in the context of this chapter – to identify a ‘place’ that is marked mostly by its proximity to other places that are more important, more visually prominent, more assertive, perhaps. The Triangle is there, between or next to those other places, without anything much to make a distinction for itself, and yet it is a place in Casey’s sense, it gathers in a particular configuration, exuding a ‘sense of an ordered arrangement of things in place even when those things are radically disparate and quite conflictual’, it draws to it and releases from it plants, animals, humans, as well as stone, wind, and weather, and it certainly gathers thoughts and memories.3 My specific focus is on how the Triangle’s gathering can be read in regards to the relationship between the monstrous and the geographic, and I develop such a reading through the three ensuing vignettes on, respectively, (1) Nature and culture, (2) Wildness and domestication, and (3) Interwoven histories. 2. Nature and Culture In the imagination of Eastsiders, the Triangle is all that stands between Eastside and ‘the bush’, and its body literally constitutes the threshold between the built environment and a perceived untamed nature. The first house in Eastside was erected in 1950, and, by the mid-1960s most of the current suburb was established, the parallel streets, large blocks, straight houses, a square of geometrically arranged squares. Photographs from that era (before the native trees planted in Eastside began to envelop Eastside) demonstrate the incongruity between the straight angles of Eastside streets and homes and the flowing curves of the environment within which it is embedded: the contours of the ranges, the creekbed, the rocky outcrops undulating out of the red desert. Today, Eastside’s streets are the leafiest in all of Alice Springs, its houses among the most ‘historic’, and its population affluent, overwhelmingly white, and educated. In fact, many employees of what is called the Aboriginal Industry, art and women centre coordinators, anthropologists, health professionals, linguists, heritage protection officers, and the like love living in Eastside exactly because of its charm, native gardens, and closeness to the ranges and the desert. On the other side of the storm water drain, accessible from the suburban side via steps the triangle lies just beyond a small climb up the other bank.

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__________________________________________________________________ The triangle is home to a myriad of insects and of reptiles, including goannas and poisonous snakes, and, of course, kangaroos, rock wallabies and dingoes, as well as an astonishing array of birds, including budgerigars, galahs, and cockatoos, but also falcons and other birds of prey. The Triangle’s plant life is diverse, ranging from prickles and grasses, via witchetty and other bushes to white ghost gum trees. Its soil is the typical central Australian coarse desert sand, easy to walk on, interspersed here and there by some smallish rocky boulders, and the occasional small creekbed, into which feed rivulets and then small streams during the rain. The air is full of bird noises, in summer the chirping of cicadas and the buzzing of the ever-present flies, and there is the rustling of the bushes in the breeze. The Triangle is a perfect suburban vision of the bush, or, rather, a kind of manicured bush beyond the border of civilization proper and before the actual wild: that much is visually clear through the paths that criss-cross the Triangle. There are old single file ones, hardly visible to the untrained eye, there are the rough roads making access possible for service vehicles, and the brand new cycle paths, welts made of packed earth darker than the Triangle’s orangey and brown sands, that meander across The Triangle reminiscent of scars; tangible metaphors of the operations that make the triangle fit for human recreational use. 3. Wildness and Domestication Many Eastsiders own dogs as pets, and one way in which to tell an Eastsider who works in the Aboriginal Industry from one who does not, is by their dogs: people who work in the Aboriginal Industry tend to own camp dogs that they acquired from their Aboriginal friends in one or another of the remote Aboriginal communities they work in. (I should mention that I work in a remote Aboriginal community, live in Eastside, and own a camp dog). Camps dogs are mix breeds with varying degrees of dingo thrown in, and people take pride in just how much dingo their dog is, some even having full dingos. For many years, Eastsiders with camp dogs used to take their dogs walking around the Triangle, making the Triangle an excellent place to catch up with friends, and for one’s dog to play with other like-minded dogs. During recent drought-like conditions, dingoes flocked to the triangle and began killing the dogwalkers’ pets. Horror stories abounded, amongst dog walkers, neighbours, and in the news, including the Alice Springs online news branch of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), which ran an news piece on 22 October 2013 called Pet Owner Calls for Dingo Signs.4 In it, a dog owner’s demand for dingo warning signs is quoted, and the story of the attack of her dog ‘Luna’ by three dingos next to Spencer Hill is recounted. Mentioned also are two further dog fatalities: one a bull terrier, also killed at Spencer Hill by dingos, the other the dog of an ‘Eastside resident’ killed by six dingos just to the east of the Triangle. This particular dog owner acquired a new dog, who also was attacked. She is quoted to say:

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__________________________________________________________________ I’d just come back from doing the circuit around Spencer Hill and I was not very far from the houses, fifty meters from the back gate and all of a sudden there was a really young, healthy dingo pretend gamboling around my dog, Oxy, and the next thing I know this dingo lunged for him and bit him on the back.5 The article is accompanied by a grisly photo showing the large and deep stitched bite wounds on the shaved hindleg of one of the attacked dogs, and before giving the council’s opinions (dog owners should walk their dogs on leashes & report all dingo attacks), space is given to Oxy’s owner calling for the dingos around Spencer Hill to be shot. As far as I know, no dingoes have been shot, although the rangers attempted to trap them, but, so rumour has it, mostly trapped Eastsiders’ camp dogs. As a result of these incidents, the number of Eastsiders walking their dogs at the Triangle has shrunk drastically: since that convenient piece of controlled wilderness has become uncontrollable, they now walk the better laid, wider, and more well-trodden paths along the river. At the same time, an inverse process of undermining the Triangle’s wilderness is taking place, also bemoaned and fought by Eastsiders: Introduced Buffel Grass is colonizing the valley. The first strains of Buffel Grass are said to have originated a hundred years ago with the camels used across the interior for transportation before roads were established. Buffel spread around the camps of Afghani camel drivers, one of which was in the Triangle. Further strains of Buffel were introduced by the pastoral industry and by scientists to control dust storms. The problem is that Buffel Grass is an aggressive colonizer which grows vigorously after rain. It takes a lot of nutrients out of the ground and is displacing native grasses and sedges along riverbanks, alluvial flats and moist localities. 6 In a recent documentary, one Eastsider laments the effect of Buffel on the Triangle, describing how Spencer Valley used to be a picture of wildfowers after the rains, and mushrooms used to grow there. Now, with the buffel and all, haven’t seen a mushroom in ten years, bushbeans, native plants, haven’t seen any in years. We put a big footprint in the valley.7 Volunteer members of the Arid Lands Environment Centre put in countless hours spraying the Buffel grass, and bursts of colour provided by wildflowers are replaced by the pink, yellow and orange tags they leave on trees to remind themselves which patch has been sprayed and which has not.

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Image 1: Orange and yellow plastic tags indicating areas sprayed for Buffel Grass. © 2014 Yasmine Musharbash. Used with permission. 4. Interwoven Histories The 64 years that have passed since the erection of the first house in what was to become the suburb of Eastside, are but a blink in the Triangle’s existence. The Arrernte people of Alice Springs (or, Arrernte Mparntwe) say that the wider Alice Springs scape (which is also called Mparntwe), was created through the deeds of totemic beings at the beginning of time. Ancestral Caterpillar, Kangaroo, and Dog beings as well as the Two Sisters and Uninitiated Boys dreamings shaped Mparntwe’s natural features; in a process focussed on by Spencer and Gillen, and summed up by Brooks as sometimes ‘by physical means, sometimes calling them into existence by naming them’. 8 After the creation period, countless generations of Mparntwe people lived and moved across the area, performed ceremonies, hunted, gathered, camped, travelled and welcomed visitors. Things began to change with the construction of the overland telegraph line, and especially the construction of the Telegraph Station building at the actual Alice Springs in 1871. European settlement disrupted traditional Mpartntwe use first of the area around the telegraph station, and later the expanding town. In fact, until the beginning of the second world war, many Mparntwe camped around Tyeretye.

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__________________________________________________________________ On April 22, 1901, for example, Gillen recorded the following in his diary:9 ‘Alice Springs, Tchauritji [sic]. Up before daylight breakfasted frugally on pea soup’ and during the preceding evening, he said: several blacks visited our camp – they are camped up on the range above the rock hole amongst them were several old favorites of mine including poor old Lulu who is now a widow with six children Tom her husband having died several months ago. I named two piccaninnies one, a boy, “Spencer” and a little girl “Chappie” after the Profs. [sic] little daughter.10 Older Mparntwe alive today remember living there themselves, for example, one senior lady doing a voice over on the under today DVD, reminisces: there was humpies right along the river up into the hills until 1956, that’s where Arrernte mob camped [people from other tribes were to the north and south], and the Afghans stopped here, too, there were dates east of Tyeretye.11 During the second world war, the removal of Aboriginal and so-called half cast children from the area began, and then, from 1943-1945 there was a curfew for people of colour, who were not allowed to enter the town areas. The military appropriated the area, flattened the humpies and set up ammunition depots and latrines, the remnants of which today are heritage protected. After the war, the government set up new settlements for Mparntwe, over an hour’s drive away from the growing town of Alice Springs. In the seventies, the last empty Eastside lots were filled with houses, including a limited number of housing provided to Aboriginal people. Soon after, there were plans to develop and subdivide the Spencer Valley, which were stopped by local – whitefella – opposition. Aboriginal people continued to camp on the fringes of the emerging suburb, including in the river, at Tyeretye and the Triangle and over the past few decades, successive governments have experimented with a variety of strategies of various degrees of severity of ‘moving on’ Aboriginal people. The Intervention, a drastic sweep of policies ostensibly to protect Aboriginal people that started in 2007, has seen Aboriginal camps dwindle, and the Aboriginal presence around the Triangle now is reduced to occasional drinking camps, usually cleared quickly by police on motorbikes and horses. 5. Conclusion As I hope to have shown, the Triangle gathers manifold things in manifold ways. Every morning, when I walk my dog along the eastern side of the Triangle and Alhekulyele comes into range just behind Tyerteye, I cannot help but think

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__________________________________________________________________ about Spencer and Gillen writing about how the Arrernte totemic ancestors created some places simply through naming them.

Image 2: At the eastern side of the Triangle: Alhekulyele (Mt Gillen) coming into view behind Tyeretye (Spencer Hill). © 2014 Yasmine Musharbash. Used with permission. Today, Tyeretye and Alhekulyele are known as Spencer Hill and Mt Gillen, respectively, a mocking testament to both, how whitefellas appropriated Mparntwe through re-naming, and the power of naming. The irony goes further. Alhekulyele, or Mt Gillen, was formed by the activities of the wild dog. … The story involves an extended battle between a local dog and an interloper from the west [or south-east] … They fought over a female, whose cave (and resting place to this day) is up on the main ridge … During the fight, a lot of hair (Akurle) came off and this now comprises the prominent hill on the flat below the ridge. The local dog also wounded the outsider and some nearby outcrops (Yarrentye)

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__________________________________________________________________ were formed from its intestines. From this area the fighting raged to Heavitree Gap, where the intruder was finally beaten and buried. … After defeating his antagonist … [the dog ancestor] travelled for only a short distance and then metamorphosed into a boulder embedded in the ground … Linked with this site are a number of aggregations of small rocks [close to Tyeretye, that] represent the puppies of the adult wild dogs, and are regarded with particular affection by the custodians.12 It is around this spot, where the vista opens onto the dog dreaming, that my dog behaves uncharacteristically every morning: rather than following scents, sniffing around, and being his normal bouncy and curious self, here, he stays on the paths, and here, also, he always refrains from peeing on the bushes. Here, I guess, is dingo territory. Both, the dog and I, feel weighed down at this spot, and it appears to me that perhaps this is so because the monstrousness of what has happened, of what is happening, is palpable, is gathered.

Acknowledgements I am deeply grateful to Dr Sophie Creighton of the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority in Alice Springs, who helped me brainstorm ideas, pointed me towards relevant references, and made me aware of things I did not know. Time spent on this chapter was made possible by an ARC Future Fellowship FT130100415.

Notes 1

Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place. Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009), 327-328. 2 Baldwin Spencer and Francis J. Gillen, The Arunta. A Study of a Stone Age People. In Two Volumes. Vol. 1 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1927), 62. 3 Casey, Getting Back into Place, 328. 4 Rohan Barwick and Emma Sleath, ‘Pet Owner Calls for Dingo Signs,’ ABC Alice Springs, October 22, 2013, viewed on 4 May 2014, http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2013/10/22/3874267.htm 5 Barwick and Sleath, ‘Pet Owner Calls for Dingo Signs’. 6 Northern Territory Government, ‘Nature Notes – Buffel Grass’, Alice Springs Desert Park.com, no date, viewed on 4 May 2014, http://www.alicespringsdesertpark.com.au/kids/nature/plants/buffel.shtml

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__________________________________________________________________ 7

Under Today. Traces of Eastside, dir. Dani Powell. Alice Springs: Red Shoes Performance-Makers and Brown’s Mart Productions, 2012, DVD. 8 David Brooks, The Arrernte Landscape of Alice Springs (Alice Springs: Institute for Aboriginal Development, 1991), 6. 9 Francis J. Gillen, Gillen’s Diary. Gillen’s Diary. The Camp Jottings of F.J. Gillen on the Spencer and Gillen Expedition across Australia 1901-1902 (Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia, 1968), 45-46. 10 Gillen, Gillen’s Diary, 45. 11 Dani Powell, Under Today. Traces of Eastside. 12 David Brooks, The Arrernte Landscape of Alice Springs, 7-10.

Bibliography Brooks, David. The Arrernte Landscape of Alice Springs. Alice Springs: Institute for Aboriginal Development, 1991. Casey, Edward S. Getting Back into Place. Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009. Gillen, Francis J. Gillen’s Diary. The Camp Jottings of F.J. Gillen on the Spencer and Gillen Expedition across Australia 1901-1902. Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia, 1968. Powell, Dani (dir.). Under Today. Traces of Eastside. Alice Springs: Red Shoes Performance-Makers and Brown’s Mart Productions, 2012, DVD. Spencer, Baldwin and Francis J. Gillen. The Arunta. A Study of a Stone Age People. In Two Volumes. Vol. 1. London: Macmillan and Co., 1927. Yasmine Musharbash is an ARC Future Fellow with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Interested in everyday life, emotions, the senses and embodiment she has published widely on such themes as sleep, death, fear, monsters, the night, and Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations in Australia.

The Devil Comes to Visit Deirdre Nuttall Abstract Loftus Hall is a derelict stately home on the isolated Hook Peninsula in Wexford, Ireland. Because of the strong prevailing winds, the peninsula is largely treeless; the house stands in a bare field, visible for miles and a constant reminder of the awful events that are said to have happened there in the eighteenth century when the devil came to call. Locally famous, and widely believed to be true, the story of when the devil came to Loftus Hall, played cards with the family there, and left devastation in his wake is an example of migratory legend ML 3015 (as classified by Reider H Christiansen). In its telling, the story embodies many diverse commentaries; resentment on the part of the local peasantry of the privileged lifestyle of the wealthy landlord; a sense of spiritual superiority on the part of the (usually Catholic) narrator – despite many attempts to vanquish the devil, the only person who can get him to leave is the local parish priest, a humble man of extraordinary faith; attraction and revulsion in the face of a way of living and believing that seemed completely alien to the people who lived around this wealthy family. Although the wealthy family is long gone, Loftus Hall is still a very prominent feature on the Hook Peninsula; a permanent reminder of the long and unjust reign of the privileged classes over the ordinary people of this tiny corner of Ireland. The house has been, at various stages, a holiday home for nuns, a hotel, and the home of an eccentric couple rumoured to have been driven mad by the house’s ghosts. Closed for years, it has recently reopened and is undergoing restoration. How long before the new owner fails too? The devil is gone but a curse remains. Key Words: Stately Homes, Grand Architecture, Devil, Migratory Legends, Divided Landscapes. ***** 1. Getting to Know the Hook Peninsula Loftus Hall is a stately home located on the Hook Peninsula in Co Wexford in the southeast of Ireland. This is an area of outstanding natural beauty; a thin stretch of land that extends into the Celtic Channel. Geographically isolated from the rest of Wexford, the Hook can be a very lonely place. On the other hand, over the years many of the local inhabitants have been employed as sailors and fishermen, and some have travelled widely in this capacity. For everyone in the wider area, the Hook Peninsula and Loftus Hall in particular are noteworthy also, or especially, because of a house call from a particularly unwelcome guest many years ago.

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__________________________________________________________________ Hook Peninsula is characterised by a distinctive form of vernacular architecture – low lying buildings at right-angles to the road – and by the distinctive forms of the tree and shrubs, which incline because of the direction of the prevailing wind. The form of the traditional homes, low and long, also developed in response to the harsh winds. The landscape is flat and green, punctuated by grey stone walls. The air is salty, and there are areas from which it’s possible to see the sea on both sides. At the very end of the peninsula is an enormous lighthouse, said to be the oldest in continuous operation in Europe. In this context the grey monolith of Loftus Hall, once the home of the local aristocrats, who owned almost everything in the area, can be seen from far and wide. 2. Loftus Hall Loftus Hall is an impressive building, but nobody could call it beautiful. A sunken quad outside suggests a long-ago attempt to create a formal garden, but gardening is difficult here, and today the large, dark grey building stands alone, surrounded by flat green fields with the sea to one side and no garden to soften its harsh lines. From a distance it looks intact but actually, despite various attempts at maintaining the building over the years, it is in a state of dereliction. The first building on the site was constructed in the middle of the fourteenth century by the Redmond family, tenants on the land of a local Manor. 1 In the 1650s, a time of huge upheaval, when Oliver Cromwell and his troops were destroying churches and cathedrals, when massacres were carried out in various locations in Ireland, the building became the property of the Loftus family as part of the project of confiscating land and properties of those who were not loyal to Britain and its government. This is when the house acquired the name ‘Loftus Hall’. The Loftus family originally arrived in the area as English ‘planters’ – loyal citizens who were granted land in Ireland – in the late sixteenth century. They lived for a while in Fethard Castle, a few kilometres away, and settled in Loftus Hall in 1666. The current building, which replaced an earlier home, was constructed between 1870 and 1871 by the fourth Marquis of Ely and equipped with all the most modern conveniences, including hot-air central heating, gas lights with Waterford Glass chandeliers and running water, as well as a majestic Italian staircase. In 1871, a detailed description of the demesne refers to the house as ‘the seat of the ancient and noble family of… Loftus whose characters were always conspicuous not only for their hospitality but for their warm support of the Protestant interest…’2 The Loftus family did not enjoy their fancy new house for long. In 1913 it was purchased by an order of nuns who ran it as a holiday venue for nuns from various orders. From 1983 it has been owned and run, in varying states of decay, by a number of owners.

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__________________________________________________________________ In 1776, another aristocratic family, the Tottenhams (also huge landowners in the area), are said to have come to stay in Loftus Hall’s earlier incarnation to take care of it while the Loftuses were away. And that is when things started to get interesting. 3. A Dark and Stormy Night…3 It was a dark and stormy night and all the young people in the family were playing cards. Everyone was surprised when there was a knock on the door, but they were mollified when they opened it and saw a most distinguished looking young gentleman who asked them for refuge for the night, because the weather was so awful. Of course, seeing that he was from the upper classes, the family readily offered him hospitality. His horse was taken to the stable, and he was invited to play cards. As the storm raged, the card players played furiously and the visitor played with them. Everyone was drinking and talking and having a wonderful time. Anne Tottenham, the daughter of the house, was fascinated by the visitor. She was just a teenage girl, and she was very taken by him. He seemed to be quite interested in her too. Her heart was fluttering because it wasn’t every day that such a handsome man came to this isolated spot, where Loftus Hall was the only home of any note for miles around. When Anne had the opportunity to partner with the visitor in their game, she didn’t hesitate. Everything was going fine until Anne moved to show her partner her hand of cards, pleased that they were winning. One of the cards fell on the floor and when Anne bent to pick it up, she noticed that under the table the handsome young stranger wore a fine highly-polished riding boot on one foot but on the other he wore no boot… because, instead of a human foot, he had the cloven hoof of a goat! Instantly realising that this visitor was, in fact, the devil, Anne screamed and fell into a faint. The card-playing stranger laughed and transformed into a ball of fire, which crashed through the ceiling in the room. What happened next is a question of debate. For some narrators, the story stops there, but for others, that’s just the beginning. Despite the fact that the current house was built almost a hundred years after the one in which these dramatic events were said to have taken place, today visitors to Loftus Hall are shown a crack in the ceiling, left when the fireball smashed through, that resists all efforts to repair it.4 Everyone conveniently overlooks the fact that the house is not the same one that the devil visited, but was built a century later. I grew up in the town of New Ross, not far from Loftus Hall, and like every other child in the area, any visit to the Hook Peninsula was accompanied by a telling of this story. Looking at Loftus Hall, which was often swathed in mist or beaten by heavy rain, it was easy to believe it – and in fact the story is always told as ‘true’. Even if we didn’t believe it to be literally true (and I think a lot of us did), it

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__________________________________________________________________ was very much part of our cultural knowledge about our area, with layers of information about our folk understanding of our shared past. The story of the devil playing cards at Loftus Hall isn’t just an intriguing supernatural tale. It’s actually a migratory legend with its very own classification number: ML 3015, and a name: The Devil and the Cardplayers. 4. Migratory Legends Because the word ‘legend’ is used in a variety of ways, it resists precise definition; it takes a folklorist to tease out the difference. It overlaps significantly with the categories of ‘myth’ and ‘tale’ in some ways. For example the devil, the star of our story, often pops up in mythology and folktales. A myth is essentially sacred, which implies ‘something wholly different from the profane’. 5 Instead, the historical nature of legends, which are supposed to have really happened at a particular point in time, and in a particular place, plants them in a familiar environment. The events described as presented as plausible, if unusual. If, in a myth, a baby were to speak at birth, this would be interpreted as a sign of future heroism, or of godhood, or of something equally monumental. A similar event in a legend is generally a sign that the film between the natural and the supernatural worlds has been torn – and this is usually not a good thing. Unlike a tale, which is told for fun, possibly by somebody who specialises in narrating a story for the purpose of entertainment, a legend doesn’t need to be told with any particular expertise, and is all the more compelling because it’s typically related in a matter-of-fact way, as are historical events. After all, a legend is supposed to be true. A legend is not always composed of a series of distinct dual oppositions (natural versus supernatural), unlike most myths and tales, and distinctions between what is natural and what is not are often unclear. Unlike either myths or tales, legends do not necessarily implicate the narrator on an artistic, intellectual or spiritual level. A myth explains some of the big things of life – how the world was created and so on. A tale is a story told for fun that the listener knows not to be true. A legend, while it may well deal with supernatural affairs, is given a historical and social context. Legends also play an important role as social barometers, encapsulating communally held anxieties, fears, resentments, hopes, and so forth. Migratory legends, as the name suggests, are stories that are found, in almost identical form, being told as true in a range of geographical and historical settings. They travel. In practice, this means that the same story can attach itself to a different place and set of characters and be related as a ‘true’ story, notwithstanding the fact that it is actually a version of a legend that pops up all over the place. In 1958, folklorist Reidar Christiansen published a catalogue of migratory legends, using as his starting point the versions that he found in Norway, among them the Devil and the Cardplayers, which is found all over Europe and beyond. His classifications are used to this day. 6

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__________________________________________________________________ I believe that the best way to understand migratory legends is to conceive of them as being almost like biological entities; cultural ‘seeds’ that grow and flourish when the social environment is accommodating to their development. In the manner in which they develop and adapt, migratory legends and plants share many features. Both adapt to environmental challenges by either acquiring or losing a characteristic. For example, in many of the tellings of the legend of Loftus Hall, the devil is described as speaking with an English accent, or of looking like an English gentleman. In the socio-historical context of Ireland, this makes perfect sense; there were lots of reasons to associate the devil with Englishmen, who ruled Ireland and often passed laws that were discriminatory towards the majority. The same story told in a cultural context that is different will not describe the devil as having this attribute. If the legend were recounted in a pro-English context, or if the reasons for associating English accents with injustice disappear, the legend will either lose this attribute or cease to exist, because it no longer makes sense. 7 As legends are extremely adaptable, they tend to persist and simply shape-shift. This adaptable quality is another feature that distinguishes legends from myths. Mythical stories are more likely to remain constant because they belong to a sacred realm that is beyond society (and, in literate societies, because they are generally written down). Legends persist for as long as the story can be told as something that might well have happened. Even if not everyone who hears a legend considers it literally true, they provide an accepted explanation of something that is otherwise unexplained, that is reasonable within the local belief system, and because of the metaphoric truths that it contains. 5. The Devil at Loftus Hall In legends about the devil, he can take on various guises, and sometimes several in the context of the same story; he can appear in human form, vivid and real, and often handsome and seductive, or he can be shapeless and terrifying… there are many variations on the theme. However, when the devil appears in the form of a man, the legend typically contains compelling information about society, relationships between different types and classes of people, and how history is remembered. The story of when the devil visited Loftus Hall presents us with a microcosm of Irish society at a particular period in history, seen through the spine-chilling lens of the supernatural and placed in the dramatic setting of Loftus Hall, which remains to this day a monument to not only the incredible events said to have taken place, but also to a time of great social injustice. In many versions of the story related above, there is a corollary. Instead of simply vanishing in a ball of fire, the devil lingers on. There are various versions of the legend – he stays in the form of a man, simply refusing to leave like a distant cousin who has come to stay for Christmas and hasn’t got the message that it’s time to go well into the new year, or he lingers in a more ethereal form. Either way,

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__________________________________________________________________ it’s a terrible situation for the family, and the young daughter of the house, so very impressed by the handsome visitor, is already showing signs of the madness that is going to be her lot of the rest of her short and miserable life (in some versions she spent the rest of her life holding onto her knees, rocking back and forth in a catatonic state until her body was deformed; when she died, a special coffin had to be built to accommodate her). In Irish legends and beliefs about the devil generally, he is most frequently associated with buildings or local boundaries that are connected in one way or another to the ruling classes. Over the years, Irish economic and political conditions provided the devil with a ready-made, familiar identity. Using the image of a landlord or English person to illustrate the devil must have been a particularly satisfying way to express distress and resentment, and examples of similar reflexive behaviour can be found in most cultures in which an oppressed population is ruled by a privileged minority. The society depicted in this legend, and very visibly embodied by the grey mass of Loftus Hall in its dramatic setting on the Hook Peninsula, reflects the social reality of a time that may be long ago, but is still remembered. Many of the Loftus Hall versions of the card-players and the devil recount that the family, Protestants, loyal to the English establishment, called on their local minister to come and perform an exorcism. Despite his best efforts, he failed. Eventually they realised that they had no choice but to call on the local Catholic parish priest, a man of the cloth who ministered not to the wealthy and privileged but to the poor, humble small farmers and fishermen of the area – people who were obliged to pay rent to the landlords who apparently spent this money on cardplaying and entertaining dubious strangers. Given the role of Catholicism in Irish culture and self-image, especially at a time in history when most very wealthy people were Protestants, it’s not surprising that in many legends the parish priest turns up as the opposite number of the devil. Thankfully for all present that night, Father Broaders (a humble man whose real power is by no means immediately apparent) succeeds in banishing the devil, and normality returns. It’s worth noting that Father Broaders, like the Tottenham and Loftus families, was a real person; he worked and was buried locally. How satisfying to think of a local man, a good man, being able to banish the devil himself. It is easy to read the legend of when the devil came to visit Loftus Hall as a piece of social commentary, and it certainly is that. Indeed, most of the people who tell or hear the story understand this quality very well. Those who would like to assure sceptics that there must be at least an element of truth can point to various evidences to support their contention; the grave of the heroic Father Broaders, for example, and that of the foolish young Anne, even the crack in the ceiling that lingers despite the fact that the current house is a more recent construction. In fact, a legend can manifest many properties at once. For one person, or within a single community, the devil may be a supernatural figure from popular reli-

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__________________________________________________________________ gious iconography, and a symbol of an oppressive or rival social group (and their territorial interests), and a didactic figure who can be used to warn people away from certain types of behaviour (gambling and lusting after handsome strangers, in this case), and so on and so forth. These qualities are not exclusive and can happily coexist in the mind of a single person. Even when most of the narrators or listeners have ceased to believe literally in a legend, it can continue to express metaphoric or symbolic truths. In our story of when the devil came to visit Loftus Hall, that great grey building and the strange events associated with it remain as monuments to the truth of historical oppression. For as long as the folk memory of the oppression remains, so will the account of that dark and stormy night when the devil came to visit.

Notes 1

Billy Colfer, Hook Peninsula, County Wexford (Cork: Cork University Press, 2004), 176-9. 2 Colfer, Hook Peninsula, 147. 3 This narrative synthesises the very large number of versions of this migratory legend collected by the author in fieldwork, and obtained from the National Folklore Archive of Ireland, which is housed in University College Dublin, maintained by the Irish Folklore Commission and is a vast repository of folklore, including two major collections, the Schools Collection, which was gathered in the 1937/38 academic year, and collections carried out by the Irish Folklore Commission. 4 Both the representations of the devil as handsome and seductive and, later, as terrifying and non-human, are consistent with ideas found in popular Christianity in general. Russell, Jeffrey Barton The devil in the Middle Ages. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984), 63. 5 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, the Nature of Religion. (New York: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1967), 5. 6 Reidar Th. Christiansen, The Migratory Legends: A Proposed List of Types with a Systematic Catalogue of the Norwegian Variants. (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia Academia Scientarum Fennica), 1958. 7 Beyond the scope of this chapter, but interesting to note, is that version of this legend that were collected by this author in Newfoundland, while closely resembling the Irish version in most respects, contain a rather different social commentary.

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Bibliography Christiansen, Reidar Th. The Migratory Legends: A Proposed List of Types with a Systematic Catalogue of the Norwegian Variants. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia Academia Scientarum Fennica, 1958. Colfer, Billy. The Hook Peninsula, County Wexford. Cork: Cork University Press, 2004. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane, the Nature of Religion. New York: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1967. Russell, Jeffrey Barton. The devil in the Middle Ages. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984. Deirdre Nuttall is a folklorist, researcher and writer. She is based in Ireland, has worked in Ireland, Newfoundland, Mexico and Guatemala and has a particular interest in ethnic minorities and subcultures and stories of social class and collective memory.

Part III Frontier

The Australian Gothic as a New Mode in Australian Landscape Photography Rebecca Dagnall Abstract The term Australian Gothic found its way into cultural analysis via literary critic Gerry Turrcotte’s (1998) paper aptly titled Australian Gothic, and quickly established a niche of its own in Australian literature. My chapter addresses the curious absence of new inquiry pertinent to the Australian Gothic in the visual arts, and especially in contemporary Australian landscape photography. I do so, firstly, by presenting some of my own photographic work focusing on the monstrous in the Australian landscape, and secondly, by providing a retrospective genealogy of the Australian Gothic in the Australian visual arts. I am an internationally exhibiting Australian artist and in this chapter I present some examples from my recent photographic series In Tenebris. Through my creative research I examine the heterotopic experience of camping, concentrating specifically on the psychology of darkness, the unfamiliarity experienced when sight is limited and the narrative possibilities this creates. My images draw on the contemporary postcolonial imaginary of the Australian bush, steeped with references of dingoes taking babies, backpacker murders, and the dangers that may lurk. I place my work within a contextual history of other Australian artists, particularly photographers, in order to draw out a retrospective genealogy of how the Australian Gothic was created in and embraced by the visual arts. I ponder the extent to which the Australian Gothic is (or should be) gaining traction as a considered mode within contemporary Australian landscape photography. I proceed by analysing the close relationship between the Gothic and the sublime, and put forward that recognition of their intertwining is integral to understanding portrayals of the Australian landscape in the contemporary visual arts. I conclude by contemplating the Australian Gothic as a succinct approach to viewing a post-colonial Australian landscape photography. Key Words: Visual Art, Australian Gothic, Uncanny, Landscape Photography, Heterotopia, Colonialism, Post-colonialism. ***** 1. Introducing Darkness There is certain darkness in the Australian imaginary of the landscape that is tangled in a history that holds both a presence and an absence, a knowledge and yet a denial of past colonial deeds. It is as though this history haunts the landscape, like a ‘ghost’ with unfinished business. Given that 75% of the Australian population lives an urban/suburban reality, the renewed interest of contemporary artists in depicting the landscape may seem

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__________________________________________________________________ curious. Yet, as I put forward in this chapter, for fundamental reasons there is a fascination with the landscape that will not leave the Australian psyche. Its representation in Australian cultural production continues, suggesting a function that is reflective of our history rather than a direct documentation of a current condition.1 As a contemporary photographer researching through practice, I have a particular interest in the landscape and what representations of landscape say about how Australians relate to ‘the bush’. I define 'the bush' as an Australian cultural construct, pertaining to land covered in dense vegetation that sits in-between the urban and the outback. The notion of ‘the bush’ is important to note, as it is representational of the way that Australians position a unique relationship to land. It is for this reason that ‘the bush’ is the site of enquiry for this body of landscape based research. Through my research I have identified a dark and haunting sensibility manifest in contemporary photography made lucid through the Australian Gothic. Currently accepted as a mode of literary analysis, Australian Gothic is gaining traction in the visual arts and in this chapter I consider this mode as a decisive approach in the viewing and analysis of post-colonial Australian landscape photography. My particular interest in the idea of darkness and its relationship to the Australian landscape is explored through my photographic research. The current series In Tenebris2 (Latin for 'in darkness') explores this idea through camping as both physical act and as metaphorical representation. Camping in this context indicates a specific instance of our relationship to landscape and how we position ourselves within that landscape and is located in my broader exploration of how the Australian Gothic manifests in our sense of the Australian bush. 2. Camping Camping as a site of cultural investigation gains its significance in Australia through its changing purpose and necessity. Its lineage links different temporal instances, from the leisurely camping holiday of contemporary Australia to the more sinister acts of colonization and nation building. The expeditions of explorers formed camps as they surveyed the land in preparation for settlement. As gold was discovered, expansive tent communities developed to accommodate the large influx of people that came to Australia to seek wealth.3 While the act of pitching a tent has connotations of the ephemeral; evoking the presence of a visitor, or a passer-through, in Australia it also constitutes an invading force. Interesting to note however, that many colonists from squatter to gentry did not see themselves as settlers but rather believed Australia to be the place to secure their fortune before returning ‘home’. 4 This attitude is exemplified in the hand written letters people sent ‘home’ to family, like this excerpt from squatter George Leslie’s letter to his Aunt:

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__________________________________________________________________ Australia, is a very nice agreeable country for a person to stay a few years in, but to settle in ultimately would never enter my head…. A little money is yet to be made and accordingly I mean to try and then spend it in old Scotland. 5 Colonial past events and settler circumstance articulate a relationship to the land, economic, pragmatic or leisurely that has contributed to the integral role camping plays in Australia’s postcolonial culture. For contemporary Australians camping is a means of getting away from and temporarily simplifying their busy lives. Perhaps people envisage a connection with nature when they leave their houses and the comforts of modern living behind to enter a space where erecting a new sleeping shelter is a necessity and day to day tasks are renegotiated on the basis of the vicissitudes of the environment. Bill Garner suggests in Born in a Tent, that there is more to camping than the leisurely holiday. The tradition of camping connects people to the land and ‘to the past’.6 However, there are many ways to camp in Australia each of which expresses an aspect of our relationship to the bush. One manifestation of the camping experience that communicates a particular relationship to landscape is the ‘campsite’. 3. The Campsite These familiar and congenial places dominate the contemporary experience of holidaymakers wanting to leave the city. Campsites are strangely contrived spaces where the sense of being in connection with the land and experiencing nature is seemingly undermined; with its small ‘streets’ the campsite often reflects the suburban residential areas where many Australians live. Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia is instructive in understanding the peculiar nature of these spaces. He defines heterotopias as; …something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within a culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.7 Campsites can be antithetical places; in contradiction with their own intention. The ideal of the campsite as a place to get away from the chatter of life or to relax and experience nature has in a sense been sabotaged by the place itself. Often equipped with basic amenities, clean drinking water with well-graded roads and sometimes a small shop, the campsite offers comforts of home. Although this space may seem to mimic suburban living, its contraventions of the bush and the Australian bush narrative afford an opportunity for a more in-depth analysis. This gives rise to the proposition that the heterotopic space of the campsite articulates the con-

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__________________________________________________________________ temporary condition of an Australian post-colonial relationship to the bush. In partitioning domestic spaces from the bush, the campsite marks a clear line between nature and the safety supplied by this disjunction. There is a certain sterility in the way well constructed paths and signs mirror the urban environment, distancing the possibility of confrontation with anything that is ‘really’ out there in the imagined chaos. In the safety of other humans, who also perversely are one of our few predators, bush walks take place in the comforting company of strangers. The menacing thought of a snake or a spider hidden in the undergrowth is diffused by a clear and regularly trodden track. This ordered demarcation from the natural environment could be read as evidence of a continued cultural anxiety about the Australian bush; a strong signifier denoting a fear deeply rooted in the psyche of all Australians. The campsite then acts as a protector from the dark imaginings and hauntings of the bush keeping the gothic safely at bay. So what is it that creeps in from outside that safety zone? How can this dark presence be analysed and what does it reflect about Australia’s contemporary imaginings of the landscape? Established as a literary mode by literary critics such as Gerry Turcotte and Ken Gelder, the Australian Gothic seems a promising and concise mode for an analysis of contemporary landscape in the visual arts. Befitting the histories and anxieties of our country the Australian Gothic articulates more than the physical and political circumstance of Australian culture, broadening the analysis to a psychological understanding that is pertinent to a continued narrative and discussion of the Australian landscape. The Australian Gothic originates in the European psyche, in the construction of the land as monstrous– the idea of the antipodes was a land of inversions and a land to be feared.8 This mythology set the stage for a gothic history as the landscape’s unfamiliarity was confirmed and after placing Indigenous cultures under erasure, colonial anxieties were soon reflected in responses to the bush. The idea of disorientation, evident in the following passage, is characteristic of the gothic mode. The landscape was at odds with the recognisable imagery of a familial homeland creating a sense of the uncanny that is evoked in the works of colonial writers such as Marcus Clarke. .

The Australian mountain forests are funereal, secret, stern. Their solitude is desolation. They seem to stifle in their black gorges a story of sullen despair. No tender sentiment is nourished in their shade. In other lands the dying year is mourned, the falling leaves drop lightly on his bier. In the Australian forests no leaves fall. The savage winds shout among the rock clefts. From the melancholy gums strips of white bark hang and rustle. The very animal life of these frowning hills is grotesque and ghostly. Great gray [sic] kangaroos hop noiselessly over the coarse grass. Flights of white cockatoos stream out shrieking like evil souls.

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__________________________________________________________________ The sun suddenly sinks, and the mopokes burst out into horrible peals of semi-human laughter . . . There is a poem in every form of tree or flower, but the poetry which lives in the trees and flowers of Australia, differs from those of other countries. Europe is the home of knightly song, of bright deeds and clear morning thought . . . In Australia alone is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribbling’s of nature learning how to write. 9 The notion of the uncanny as explored by Freud links closely to the notion of disorientation of the Australian Gothic. 10 The uncanny conveys the idea of the unheimlich, a feeling of unfamiliarity that when set in opposition to the heimlich, the familiar or homely ‘can easily become frightening’.11 This idea of the uncanny is illustrated through the description of the landscape, as either silent and deathly or omitting shrieks that are disturbing ‘like evil souls’, this dark description accentuated by the description of Europe as bright, homely, and comforting. In Clarke’s writings there is an emphasis on the foreignness of the landscape, an exacerbated positioning that distances the observer from that which he observes to speak of this land as other and in doing so reveals a fear that is endemic to the colonial settlers way of approaching the new world, and most specifically, the bush. Themes of disquiet, fear of the unknown and isolation are not only characterizations of the gothic mode but are the very experience of colonisation.12 The melancholy and anxiety that is consistently referred to in scholarly texts as integral to the colonial imagination 13 can be attributed to a psychological state of spiritual unease that corresponds to the gothic mode.14 Earliest accounts of this can be observed in the litany of ‘long and painful’ reports written by explorers detailing disappointment and despair.15 It is of little wonder then that in the minds of the early settlers a blanket of melancholia should cover the continent. The loss that often accompanies melancholia is not only nostalgia for a lost familial homeland but also in a direct and conscious relationship to the disappearance of explorers such as Leichhardt and his expedition in 1848. A conflict arises here that goes against the heroic mythology of the explorer ideology, where with loss comes a deep ‘suspicion’ that the land will not ‘surrender itself to its new owners’.16 4. Australian Gothic in the Visual Arts Although rarely discussed as a mode in the visual arts, the Australian Gothic has a genealogy that accounts for a landscape that is specific to the particular histories and narratives that have contributed to a contemporary view of the Australian landscape. The picturesque landscapes of the painter Conrad Martens for instance move beyond a pre-romantic study of sublime beauty. In the painting Forest, Cunningham’s Gap, 1856,17 there is a distinct dark oppressive sensibility, the way the forest seems to overpower resonates with the notion that the landscape will some-

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__________________________________________________________________ how swallow the traveller, enticed by the light only to disappear into the abyss. Poet and literary critic Judith Wright refers to the oppositional readings evident in cultural narrative as the ‘double aspect’ in that its binate form gives rise to both a representation of ‘the reality of newness and freedom’ and the ‘reality of exile’. Graeme Turner builds on this discussion and in reference to Judith Wright’s ‘double aspect’ explains the dualistic nature in the promise of the new world as a ‘hesitation before the reality of Australia’.18 An often discussed image of the Australian bush and the construction of bush mythologies is Freddrick McCubbin’s ‘Down on his Luck’.19 A duality can be seen in this particular work. On one side there is the more common interpretation of the work as a depiction of the bushman as hero epitomising the idea of man conquering nature, however this image can also be read as a man defeated by it. This counter narrative evident in many early visual works concerning the landscape can be further explained through the gothic mode, encapsulated in Turcotte’s notion that the gothic condition contains a ‘paradoxicality’ that is well suited to a colonial and a post-colonial discussion. Although it is a mode that exists because it is set against a ‘defining other- the Eurocentric other’, in a post-colonial context it also performs the task of discrediting the other.20 In contemporary Australian photography the eerie often-empty landscape recurrently appears. Emptiness has been written into the narrative of bush landscape. In colonial works this absence spoke of a disregard and a denial of Indigenous people. Professor William Stanner in his 1968 lectures titled After the Dreaming, puts forth the premise that Australia has perpetually lived in a state of ‘forgetfulness’.21 Indigenous people were systematically massacred in an attempt to actualize the country’s founding declaration of Terra Nullius, the first sign of this awful forgetting. The relentless and unforgiving building of a nation advanced in this vain with continuing injustices and inhumane governmental policies. Throughout this history there has been only a gradual concern with what Stanner coined ‘the great Australian silence’. In a culture where there has been a silence as great as this it seems that there is a contemporary need to re-inscribe meaning to the landscape that recognises its darkness as a reflection of the recent colonial brutalities in an act of remembering the past. This remembering is not always conscious or intended by the artist however it can be seen in their work. In the series Between Worlds 2009-2012 22 for instance the work of Polixeni Papapetrou depicts the empty landscape and each image is populated by one colonial character. In one image, an enclosing landscape, central to the scene stands The Visitor, a rabbit in a Victorian hoop dress of the 1850s/60s who does not look like she is going anywhere. In another sits the The Pastoralist, squatting in a landscape taking claim of the land with no legal stance. The masked characters in Papatetrou’s work border on the grotesque and their presence in the landscape rather than in an urban environment speaks of the displacement of Indigenous people rather than a negation of their existence.

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__________________________________________________________________ In the works of internationally renowned photographer Bill Henson there is a distinct gothic sensibility. The cold blue and grey palette suggests a temperature close to death. Teetering on either side of life in a kind of purgatory, the images seem not to be of this world, implying perhaps, a psychological space conveying a ‘haunting’ that illustrates the darkness in question. Ross Gibson in Seven Versions of an Australian Badland, explains this ‘haunting’ as a way of naming ‘a perturbance that lingers in the Australian consciousness.’23 The work Turon River by Kurt Sorenson depicts an area of land that once belonged to the Bularidee people, settled as a gold mining area and now scarcely populated at all. Post colonial Australia’s fear of the landscape and the acknowledgement of its darkness and its ‘haunting’ is an articulation of the monstrous act of attempted genocide that needs to be confronted. 5. Closing Darkness The repressed histories of a not so distant past are surfacing through the landscape’s ghosts, appearing in the dark images of photographers, this work serves to shift the way landscape is viewed in Australia. To gaze into an image of the Australian landscape is to become privy to its possible histories. The paradoxicality of the gothic translates the duality that many scholars acquaint with Australian cultural production. Offered by the gothic mode is a counter-narrative that gives rise to stimulating discussion allowing for a more latitudinous response to the landscape. Taking into account a psychological analysis, the Australian gothic speaks of a multi-layered history that continues to be reflected in the Australian bush. The gothic mode can lead to an understanding and analysis of a nation’s imagined psyche.

Notes 1

Graeme Turner, National Fictions: Literature, Film and the Construction of Australian Narrative (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 32. 2 The photographic series In Tenebris can be viewed at www.rebeccadagnall.com 3 Bill Garner, Born in a Tent: How Camping Makes us Australian (Sydney:Newsouth Publishing, 2013), 70. 4 William Lines, Taming the Great South Land: A History of Conquest of Nature in Australia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 75. 5 Ibid. 6 Garner, Born in a Tent, 20. 7 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’. Diacritics 31 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986), 24. 8 Gerry Turcotte, ‘Australian Gothic’, In The Handbook to Gothic Literature (Ba-

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__________________________________________________________________ singstoke: MacMillan, 1998), 1. 9 Lyn Innes, The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 80. 10 Gerry Turcotte, Peripheral Fear: Transformations of the Gothic in Canadian and Australian Fiction (Brussels: P.I.E Peter Lang, 2009), 64. 11 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 2. 12 Turcotte, Peripheral Fear, 18. 13 Ian McLean, White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 18. 14 Turcotte, Peripheral Fear, 18. 15 Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998), 380. 16 McLean, White Aborigines, 45. 17 Conrad Martens, Forest, Cunningham’s Gap, Accessed April 3 2014, https://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0013/60016/varieties/Popup_ 800.jpg 18 Graeme Turner, National Fictions: Literature, Film and the Construction of Australian Narrative (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 25. 19 Frederick McCubbin, Down on his Luck, Accessed April 3 2014, http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/australianimpressionism/education/insights_national.ht ml 20 Turcotte, Peripheral Fear, 52. 21 William Stanner, After the Dreaming: The Boyer Lectures 1968 (Sydney Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1968), 24. 22 Polixeni Papapetrou, Between Worlds, Accessed April 8 2014, http://www.polixenipapapetrou.net/ 23 Ross Gibson, Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (Queensland: Queensland University Press, 2002), 162.

Bibliography Beville, Maria. Gothic-Postmodernism: Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2009. Accessed March 31, 2014, http://RMIT.eblib.com.au/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p=556472 Bromhead, Helen. ‘The Bush in Australian English’, In Australian Journal of Linguistics. Vol 31, No 4. London: Routledge Press, 2011. Accessed March 31, 2014, http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cajl20/31/4#.UzpbRccZlIs

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__________________________________________________________________ Foucault, Michel. ‘Of Other Spaces’. Diacritics 31. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. London and New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Garner, Bill. Born in a Tent: How Camping Makes Us Australian. Sydney: Newsouth Publishing, 2013. Gelder, Ken and Jane Jacobs. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998. Gibson, Ross. Seven Versions of an Australian Badland. Queensland: Queensland University Press, 2002. Innes, Lyn. The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Lines, William. Taming the Great South Land: A History of Conquest of Nature in Australia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. McLean, Ian. White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Organ, Michael. Conrad Martens and Illawarra 1835-1878: In Search of the Picturesque. Woonona: Illawara Historical Press, 1991. Accessed 1 April, 2014, http://www.uow.edu.au/~morgan/graphics/cmillintro.pdf Punter, David and Elizabeth Bronfen. ‘Violence, Trauma and the Ethical’, In The Gothic: Essays and Studies 2001, edited by Fred Botting. Cambridge. D.s Brewer, 2001. Stanner, William. After the Dreaming: The Boyer Lectures 1968. Sydney Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1968. Turcotte, Gerry. Periferal Fear: Transformations of the Gothic in Canadian and Australian Fiction. Brussels: P.I.E Peter Lang, 2009. Turcotte, Gerry. ‘Australian Gothic’, In The Handbook to Gothic Literature. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1998. Accessed 23 August, 2012, http://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/60

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__________________________________________________________________ Turner, Graeme. National Fictions: Literature, Film and the Construction of Australian Narrative. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1986. White, Richard. Inventing Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1981. Rebecca Dagnall is a photographic artist and lecturer at Curtin University of Technology in Australia. Her current PhD research at RMIT University has taken her work out of the Australian suburbs and into the realm of the Australian landscape where she examines narratives of anxiety and the Australian Gothic.

The Persian and Muslim Conquest of Byzantine Palestina: Monstrous Invasion or Peaceful Occupation? Eliya Ribak Abstract The Persian and Muslim invasions of Palestina brought with them large-scale changes to the whole region. It is unclear from written evidence exactly what took place in Palestina during and after the Persian and Muslim invasions in the 7th century. Many scholars ‘take for granted’ what they see as the destructive and monstrous results of these invasions and of the consequent Muslim occupation. Large numbers of excavators also state that the occupation of Byzantine sites in Palestina continued until the end of the Byzantine period, but few provide any evidence in support of such a statement. The chronological analysis of Byzantine sites in Palestina is problematical but despite the poor data quality, it has been possible to assemble a limited number of sites for which the dating evidence can tentatively be said to be reliable. These data appear to confirm the impression that the Persian and Muslim invasion in the seventh-century AD caused the abandonment and destruction of sites. They do not clearly indicate a widespread monstrous geography, however. There is some evidence for a gradual process of abandonment of religious and even secular sites. There is also evidence for the replacement of Jewish and Christian communities by Muslims. It is uncertain whether the Muslims themselves actively destroyed Byzantine buildings and settlements or whether these were merely abandoned by a shrinking population. However, several Christian religious structures that were not destroyed or abandoned sometimes became fortified complexes, suggesting a perceived threat of violence and indicating that the occupation of Palestina made it more hostile to its former rulers.1 Key Words: Palestina, Palestine, Holy Land, Byzantine, Muslim, Persian, Invasion, Conquest, Occupation ***** Textual evidence regarding the impact of the Persian and Muslim invasions on Byzantine Palestina is varied and contradictive. It is nevertheless widely believed by historians that the new Muslim rulers showed tolerance to the Jews and Christians of Byzantine Palestina. This chapter will use reliable archaeological dating of Byzantine sites in Palestina to better understand the impact of the Persian and Muslim invasions of Palestina. The evidence will show that the Persian conquest had some monstrous consequences, but the Muslim occupation, despite the abandonment of many Byzantine settlements, was probably largely peaceful.

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__________________________________________________________________ A brief review of historical events will be beneficial in assessing the impact of the invasions. In AD 614 Jerusalem fell to the Persian invaders and this was accompanied by destruction and looting of Christian churches and monuments. From AD 612 onward, the entire province was under Persian rule for almost a decade.2 In AD 630 Heraclius re-conquered Palestina and restored the relics that the Persians had removed from Jerusalem.3 However, this Byzantine victory was short lived, as the Muslim conquest of Palestina began in AD 634, culminating in the fall of Caesarea in AD 640.4 Despite the widespread belief in the tolerance of the new Muslim rulers, the monstrous results of these invasions appear to be ‘taken for granted’ by many archaeologists. Many excavators state that the occupation of their site continued until the end of the Byzantine period, but few provide any evidence in support of such a statement. The analysis in this chapter is based on data from the Catalogue of Excavated Sites in Byzantine Palestina,5 as well as a number of newly published sites and updated publications.6 Unfortunately, complete reliance on the excavator’s dating in Byzantine Palestina is seldom possible. Only in those cases where sealed finds are reported and the site is dated using them, or where scientific methods such as radiocarbon dating are employed, is it possible to rely upon the excavators’ conclusions. However, in many cases excavators say only that they base their dating on ‘stratigraphical analysis’ without giving more details, even in what are apparently intended to be ‘final reports’ of excavations. It is difficult to treat these sites without suspicion if nothing more is known about this alleged analysis and it cannot be examined and commented on by other scholars. A good example of the ‘patchy’ quality of chronological evidence available can be seen in Gideon Avni’s recent analysis of seven concentrations of human bones around the walls of Jerusalem.7 It includes three reliably dated burial contexts and four unreliably dated sites. Ordinary Byzantine burials are usually single shaft burials or burial caves. These bone concentrations are remarkable and could be the result of a monstrous event. Each mass burial contained the bodies of between one to three hundred skeletons and an analysis of some of the bones indicates these were young man and woman with no pathologies. Avni argues that the location of the burials precludes the possibility of a plague as victims would have been buried further away from the city to avoid contamination. Two of the sites contained artefact evidence identifying the inhabitants of the tombs as Christians,8 and one of the sites included a chapel. The same two sites (Mamilla and Damascus Gate) and a third site (Albright Institute) provided sealed finds that dated the burials. The Mamilla burial was dated to the early seventh century by sealed coins and finds. Sealed finds and coins from the late sixth century were found in the Damascus Gate site and sixth/seventh century type artefacts were found in the Albright Institute site. This data provides a clear chronological connection to the historical data which describes the massacre of the Christian population of Jerusalem.9 This provides some support for the

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__________________________________________________________________ monstrous impact of the Persian invasion on Byzantine Palestina as described by Christian sources. Nevertheless, in order to hastily bury the victims, survivors must have remained and were not only allowed to bury their dead, but even to construct a chapel in the Mamilla site. This indicates a remaining vital Christian population in Jerusalem. No further evidence of massacre can be found in the archaeological record. Other data makes it difficult to distinguish between the impact of the Persian and Muslim invasions on Palestina, since they refer to the disuse of sites. Only a small number of these sites have reliable disuse dates and dependable dating is quite scarce. The following statistics are based on these reliably dated sites. The majority of reliable dates available for my sites are Terminus Post Quem (TPQ thereafter) dates. These are the dates after which a feature, or artifact must have been deposited and can provide fixed points in a site's stratigraphy. But they are not absolute dates. Starting with church sites, four have TPQ dates for the end of the seventh century, three for the eighth’s century and a further two for the tenth century. Although reliant on a small numbers of sites, this shows an interesting trend (see Image 1). The data indicates the continued existence of the Christian community in Palestina and the fact they were allowed to continue to worship. This shows their survival of both the Persian and Muslim invasions. The decreasing number of churches in use as the centuries pass does indicate that the community is shrinking in size.

Figure 1: TPQs for the Disuse of Churches © 2014. Courtesy of Eliya Ribak For synagogues, we have even fewer cases with TPQ dating. One synagogue has a TPQ of the fifth-century, three have sixth-century TPQ dates, one has a seventh-century TPQ and one has an eighth-century TPQ. Yet one more is dated to the end of the Byzantine period and another one could be dated to the twelfthcentury, although this dating is not wholly convincing. The picture emerging from these data is not entirely clear (see Image 2). If taken at face value it seems that from the fifth-century onward synagogues began to be abandoned in Byzantine

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__________________________________________________________________ Palestina. This trend, like that of churches, did not seem to markedly increase in the wake of the Persian and Muslim invasions.

Figure 2: TPQs for the Disuse of Synagogues © 2014. Courtesy of Eliya Ribak The final phase of secular structures complements the picture derived from religious structures. Again, dating is mostly in form of TPQs, although other reliable evidence such as the existence of Arabic inscriptions is also taken into account. I have divided the secular structures into military and civilian structures and the spread of end dates is, not surprisingly, different in these two categories. Military sites appear to have TPQs in the seventh-century in two cases and the eighth-century in one case (see Image 3). This suggests that some military communities remained in place after the Arab conquest, presumably as civilian villages. Yet the data are not so easily explained, as the defence in the last century of Palestina’s Byzantine frontiers, according to historical sources, was no longer through the limes but rather through a confederation of Bedouin tribesmen loyal to the empire and organized by the Ghassanides.10 It may be necessary to treat these military sites as ordinary secular sites, or perhaps they were destroyed and abandoned as a symbolic act or warning.

Figure 3: TPQ for the End of Military Sites © 2014. Courtesy of Eliya Ribak

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__________________________________________________________________ In the case of civilian sites, two have a sixth-century TPQs; three in the seventh-century, two in the eighth-century, two in the ninth-century and one 10th century settlement (see Image 4). Another one is said by the excavator to have been abandoned at the end of the Byzantine period and another has been firmly dated to after the Muslim Conquest. Sixth-century abandonment is not easy to explain, but could be related to the Persian invasion,11 worsening economic conditions or the Justinian plague in the mid-sixth-century.12 When the figures for military and civilian sites are combined, the seventhcentury emerges as the peak time (in terms of TPQs) for the end of the sites. This is unsurprising in view of the political history of Palestina. These patterns may support the validity of those noted above, despite the scanty database of well-dated sites and our reliance on TPQ dating. However, it is, of course, important to bear in mind that the number of sites used in all these graphs is necessarily small and TPQ dates need not coincide closely with either dates of foundation or disuse.

Figure 4: TPQ for the End of Civilian Sites © 2014. Courtesy of Eliya Ribak Secular sites were probably being abandoned just before, during and after the Muslim invasion. There may be several reasons for this. Fear and the resulting immigration of Byzantine citizens cannot be discounted, although monstrous destruction of civilian property is also likely. As this process had already begun in the sixth-century, then this could suggest that the population of Palestina was already diminishing before the arrival of the Persians or Muslims. Combining the figures from both religious and secular sites we find a similar picture: a steady growth in the number of sites deserted through the fifth to seventh centuries with declining numbers in the eighth and ninth centuries. Of course, most of these dates are TPQs and so do not provide absolute dating for disuse.

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__________________________________________________________________

Figure 5: TPQ for the End Dates for All Sites© 2014. Courtesy of Eliya Ribak Image 5 appears to show most clearly what happened to these sites at the end of the Byzantine period. The steady increase in abandoned sites in the sixth-century, reaching a peak in the seventh-century and falling off again in the eighth and ninth centuries bears witness to the effect, for whatever reason, of the Persian and Muslim invasions on the people of Byzantine Palestina. The number peaks in the seventh-century, the time of the Persian and Muslim invasions, after beginning to rise in the sixth-century, when the Empire was suffering from a range of demographic, military and economic problems. It may also be relevant that the numbers of abandoned settlements fall off rapidly after the period of the Persian and Muslim invasions. Stability appears only to have been reached by the ninth and 10th centuries under new Muslim rulers. Claudine Dauphin, in her seminal work on the Byzantine population of Palestina, reaches much the same conclusions as regards population decline in Byzantine Palestina after the Arab conquest. She uses architectural evidence to note that some churches become self-contained monasteries, Byzantine secular structures were used until they collapsed and that large urban centres, such as Beth Shean, deteriorated and were abandoned. In her opinion also, Christians became, once again, a minority in the area after the Arab conquest. If so, this suggests a radical decline in the population during and after the sixth-century. This could best be explained by disease, emigration, or large-scale casualties as a result of warfare. Textual and epigraphic sources suggest that conversion to Islam was not a significant feature of social change among Jews or Christians in either Palestina and Syria in the seventh-century.13 Examination of the reasons excavators gave for site abandonment as well as continued usage patterns would be helpful in clarifying the situation after the Muslim and Persian conquest.

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__________________________________________________________________ Table 1: Reasons given by excavators for site abandonment/continuation on reliably dated sites Status at End of Byzantine Period

Secular Sites

Continued Occupation Abandonment Destruction Fire Earthquake New Muslim Construction

5 1 1 -

Churches/ Monasteries 9 1 (?) 1 + 1 (?) 1 1 1

Synagogues 1 1 1 1 1

The data is summarised in Table 1. Five secular sites, nine churches and one synagogue show signs of continued occupation into the Muslim period. Interestingly, there is possible evidence for continued use of the synagogue at Nabratim. Magness suggests it has been in use after the 7th century. 14 I have not used it in my site statistics since the excavators disagree with Magness’s view and claim use after the Muslim conquest was by squatters only.15 The contrast between the numbers of Churches and Synagogues that remained in use after the occupation is noteworthy. One must bear in mind that Byzantine Palestina boasted far less synagogues than it did churches,16 which casts doubts on the significance of these numbers. It is significant that more reliably dated sites show continued use than otherwise. This may cast even more doubt on the large number of unreliable sites claimed to have ended by the Muslim and Persian invaders. With more reliable dating we may find far more sites showing continued occupation. Further signs of occupation are seen with new Muslim construction, yet since one was a new mosque and the other a new house, these appear to have catered to the new Muslim population, rather than the pre-existing Jewish and Christian communities. This may indicate the replacement of Jewish and Christian communities by Muslims, which is suggested by Magness.17 There are several possible reasons for the destruction of these sites. These include accidental fires, natural events (such as earthquakes), destruction by communities abandoning them and religious intolerance leading to destruction or demolition. Donald Whitcomb suggests that natural disasters explain the apparent destruction at the time of the invasions.18 However, assigning such destruction to these causes has been shown to be fraught with problems.19 Our evidence for natural destruction isn’t very strong. Table one shows it can only account for five sites out of 24 reliably dated sites. Conversely, there is evidence to support a growing atmosphere of tension after the Arab conquest. Several Byzantine churches became fortified monasteries in the Muslim period. Shepherds’ Field church, for example, became the focus of a monastery, enclosed by a wall with

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__________________________________________________________________ four watchtowers. An atmosphere of tension might imply that deliberate destruction, either by departing communities or by aggressors, may be possible. The Muslim conquest soon became the subject of propaganda from all sides in the political and religious controversies of the seventh and later centuries. Some texts paint a picture of violence and bloodshed. For example, Theophanes mentions the flight of monks from Palestina and Syria to Cyprus in AD 812-3, apparently fleeing from Arabs and informs the reader that those people who did not flee were martyred.20 Another text tells of Byzantine refugees fleeing to Cyprus in the seventh-century.21 Other sources indicate conversions by Muslims, or of the complicity of Jews and non-Orthodox Christians (such as Monophysites) against Orthodox Christian populations.22 The destruction and abandonment of churches is represented in the archaeological record, as we have seen, but it is possible that forced conversions described by the Byzantine texts are – at most – exaggerations. Few churches or synagogues were changed into mosques. While some sources lament the moral laxity of the Christians easily converted to Islam and ascribe the Muslim victories to the weakness of the Christians,23 this is likely to be rhetorical. Such individual cases may be cited because this may not have been the general rule. Similar accusations were repeatedly presented some centuries before, when Christian clerics wanted to berate their flock for their moral laxity when the Western Empire collapsed.24 Similarly, although according to some texts,25 Jews welcomed the Persian or Muslim invaders and opened the gates of towns for them, at least some of these accusations are likely to be yet another example of rhetoric aimed at presenting the invasions in the most melodramatic way.26 In this case, the strong evidence for peaceful co-existence shown by the archaeological record 27 tends to negate the possibility that many Jews assisted the invaders against their Christian neighbours because of inter-religious hatred. The small number of synagogues in continued use in our record after the invasion also negates the theory that Jews and Muslims were allied together against the Christians. The exodus of Christians and Jews from Palestina as a result of the conquest is another subject of controversy. Although some historians have argued that only a small number of high-status Byzantines fled the provinces, Anthea Harris has suggested that refugees from the conquest may have been found in the West, specifically in the towns of Narbonne and Orleans, let alone the surviving Eastern provinces and Constantinople. However, these sources refer to Jews rather than immigrants from Palestina and their numbers remain unknown.28 It is striking that Byzantine Christians and Jews seem more apparent in the West from the mid-sixthcentury onward, as we see, for example, in the work of Gregory of Tours, who refers to Jewish populations in Frankia. Of course, this could simply reflect the quality of textual sources for the sixth-century in Frankia, as opposed to the fifthcentury.

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__________________________________________________________________ Information on the Muslim poll tax from both Jewish and Samaritan sources indicates the harsh living conditions after the Arab invasion and economic difficulties for everyone who was not Muslim. This was true for Jews and Samaritans, let alone Christians, who might be more directly associated with the ‘enemy’ Byzantine state. Milka Levy-Rubin argues that the poll tax was the reason for the conversion of many Samaritans to Islam, although this could also reflect their longstanding enmity toward both Jews and (especially) Christians.29 As we have seen, the Persian behaviour in Jerusalem can be considered monstrous. Mass burials surrounding the city do indicate a large scale massacre. Yet the archaeological record does not appear to clearly indicate large scale monstrous behaviour by the Persians outside Jerusalem or by the Muslim invaders. Neither extensive violence nor mass conversion to Islam is evident. Although a few churches and synagogues may have become mosques, this was not usual. Instead, typically synagogues and churches either continued in use or were abandoned or destroyed. This appears to suggest that the Muslim invasion brought difficulties to the Jewish, Christian and Samaritan communities of Palestina. Nevertheless, we have 14 examples of continuous occupation, nine of which of churches indicating continuous worship in the Muslim period and one synagogue. The picture we get from the evidence, therefore, is very mixed. It is evident that different communities in diverse locations were differently affected by the Persian and Muslim invasions.

Notes 1

This chapter is an extended and updated version of a part of my PhD. Please see Eliya Ribak, Religious Communities in Byzantine Palestina – The Relationship between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, AD 400-700. BAR International Series 1646 (Oxford: Archeopress, 2007), 68-76 for the original. 2 Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom, (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1987), 203-204. 3 Walter E. Kaegi, Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests, (Cambridge: Princeton University Press, 1992), 28-31. 4 Robert Schick, ‘Palestine in the Early Islamic Period – Luxuriant Legacy’ Near Eastern Archaeology 61:2 (1998), 74-108. 5 Eliya Ribak, Religious Communities in Byzantine Palestina – The Relationship between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, AD 400-700. BAR International Series 1646 (Oxford: Archeopress, 2007), 115-234. 6 Leah Di Segni and Yotam Tepper, ‘A Greek Inscription Dated By The Era Of Hegira In An Umayyad Church At Tamra In Eastern Galilee’, Libber Annuus 54 (2004): 343-350; Yoram Tsfrir, Rehovot in the Negev Jerusalem: Institute of

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__________________________________________________________________ Archaeology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1988); Jodi Magness, The Archaeology of the Early Islamic Settlement in Palestine (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 191-94; Dan Urman, Nessana. Excavations and Studies (Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2004); Gideon Avni ‘The Persian Conquest of Jerusalem (614 C.E.)-An Archaeological Assessment’ Bulletin of the American Schools for Oriental Research 357 (2010): 35-48; Jolanta Mlynarczyk, ‘Churches and Society in Byzantine and Umayyad Period Hippos’ Aram 23 (2011): 253-284. 7 Avni ‘The Persian Conquest of Jerusalem’, 35-48. 8 See Eliya Ribak, ‘Everyday Artefacts as Indicators of Religious Belief in Byzantine Palestina’ in Secular Buildings and the Archaeology of Everyday Life in the Byzantine Empire, ed. Ken Dark, (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2004), 123-132. 9 For overview of historical sources see Avni ‘The Persian Conquest of Jerusalem’, 35-36. 10 Hugh Kennedy, ‘Change and Continuity in Syria and Palestine at the Time of the Moslem Conquest’ ARAM 1-2 (1989): 258-267. 11 See: Robert Schick, The Christian Communities of Palestine from Byzantine to Islamic Rule (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1995), 20-47. 12 See: Dionysios C. Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2004). 110-154. 13 Dauphin Claudine, La Palestine Byzantine, Peuplement et Populations 2 (BAR International Series 726 (Oxford: Archeopress, 1998); Clive Foss, ‘Syria in Transition A.D.550-750: An Archaeological Approach’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 51 (1997): 189-269; Kaegi Early Islamic Conquests; Hugh Kennedy, ‘From Polis to Madina: Urban Change in Late Antique and Early Islamic Syria’ Past and Present 106 (1985): 3-27; Hugh Kennedy, ‘The Last Century of Byzantine Syria: a Reinterpretation’, Byzantinische Forschungen 10 (1986), 141-183; Frank Trombley, ‘War and Society in Rural Syria c. 502-613 AD: Observations on the Epigraphy’ Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 21 (1997), 154-209. 14 Jodi Magness, ‘The Ancient Synagogue at Nabratein’ Review of The Excavations at Ancient Nabratein: Synagogue and Environs, by Eric M. Meyers and Carol L. Meyers, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 358 (2010): 61-68. 15 Eric M. Meyers and Carol L. Meyers ‘Response to Jodi Magness's Review of the Final Publication of Nabratein‘ Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 359 (2010): 67-76. 16 The catalogue of Byzantine Palestina identified 104 church sites and 38. synagogue sites. See Ribak, Religious Communities in Byzantine Palestina, 47. 17 Magness, The Archaeology of the Early Islamic Settlement in Palestine, 216.

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__________________________________________________________________ 18

Donald Whitcomb, ‘Islam and the Socio-Cultural Transition of Palestine - Early Islamic Period (638-1099 CE)’ in The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, ed. Thomas E. Levy, (London: Continuum, 1995), 488-501. 19 Ribak, Religious Communities in Byzantine Palestina, 64. 20 Cyril Mango and Roger Scott, ed., The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor. Byzantine and Near Eastern History, AD 284-813, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 21 Walter E. Kaegi, Heraclius. Emperor of Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 278. 22 Demetrios J. Constantelos, ‘The Moslem Conquests of the Near East as Revealed in the Greek Sources of the Seventh to Eighth Centuries’ Byzantion 42.2 (1975): 325-357. 23 Ibid. 24 David M. Olster, Roman Defeat, Christian Response and the Literary Construction of the Jew, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 107. 25 Kenneth G. Holum, ‘Palestine’ in The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander P. Kahzdan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991),1563-1564. 26 Herrin, The Formation of Christendom, 212. 27 See Ribak, Religious Communities in Byzantine Palestina. 28 Anthea Harris, Byzantium, Britain and the West: The Archaeology of Cultural Identity AD 400-650, (Stroud: The History Press, 2003), 61. 29 See for example Milka Levy-Rubin, ‘New Evidence Relating to the Process of Islamization in Palestine in the Early Muslim Period - The Case of Samaria’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 43 (2000): 257 and Shlomo D. Goistein, ‘Evidence on the Muslim Poll Tax from Non-Muslim Sources’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 6 (1963): 278295.

Bibliography Avni, Gideon. ‘The Persian Conquest of Jerusalem (614 C.E.) - An Archaeological Assessment’. Bulletin of the American Schools for Oriental Research 357 (2010): 35-48. Constantelos, Demetrios J. ‘The Moslem Conquests of the Near East as Revealed in the Greek Sources of the Seventh to Eighth Centuries’ Byzantion 42.2 (1975): 325-357.

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__________________________________________________________________ Dauphin Claudine. La Palestine Byzantine, Peuplement et Populations 2 BAR International Series 726. Oxford: Archeopress, 1998. de Varies, Berton. ‘Urbanization in the Basalt Region of North Jordan in Late Antiquity: The Case of Umm el-Jimal’ Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan II, ed. Adnan Hadidi. Amman: Department of Antiquities Jordan, 1985, 249-261. Di Segni, Leah and Tepper, Yotam. ‘A Greek Inscription Dated by the Era of Hegira in an Umayyad Church at Tamra in Eastern Galilee’, Libber Annuus 54 (2004): 343-350. Foss, Clive. ‘Syria in Transition A.D.550-750: An Archaeological Approach’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 51 (1997): 189-269. Goistein, Shlomo D. ‘Evidence on the Muslim Poll Tax from Non-Muslim Sources’ Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 6 (1963): 278295. Harris, Anthea. Byzantium, Britain and the West: The Archaeology of Cultural Identity AD 400-650, Stroud: The History Press, 2003. Herrin, Judith. The Formation of Christendom, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1987. Holum, Kenneth G. ‘Palestine’ in The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, edited by Alexander P. Kahzdan, 1563-1564. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Kaegi, Walter E. Heraclius. Emperor of Byzantium. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Kaegi, Walter E. Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests. Cambridge: Princeton University Press, 1992. Kennedy, Hugh. ‘From Polis to Madina: Urban Change in Late Antique and Early Islamic Syria’. Past and Present 106 (1985): 3-27. Kennedy, Hugh. ‘The Last Century of Byzantine Syria: A Reinterpretation’. Byzantinische Forschungen 10 (1986): 141-183.

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__________________________________________________________________ Kennedy, Hugh. ‘Change and Continuity in Syria and Palestine at the Time of the Moslem Conquest’. ARAM 1-2 (1989): 258-267. Levy-Rubin, Milka. ‘New Evidence Relating to the Process of Islamization in Palestine in the Early Muslim Period - The Case of Samaria’. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 43 (2000): 257-276. Magness, Jodi. The Archaeology of the Early Islamic Settlement in Palestine. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2003. Magness, Jodi. ‘The Ancient Synagogue at Nabratein’ review of The Excavations at Ancient Nabratein: Synagogue and Environs, by Eric M. Meyers and Carol L. Meyers. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 358 (2010): 61-68. Mango Cyril and Roger Scott. ed. The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor. Byzantine and Near Eastern History, AD 284-813. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Meyers Eric M. and Meyers Carol L. ‘Response to Jodi Magness's Review of the Final Publication of Nabratein‘ Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 359 (2010): 67-76. Mlynarczyk, Jolanta ‘Churches and Society in Byzantine and Umayyad Period Hippos’. Aram 23 (2011): 253-284. Olster, David M. Roman Defeat, Christian Response and the Literary Construction of the Jew. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Piccirillo, Michele. ‘Forty Years of Archaeological Work at Nebo-Siyagha in Late Roman Byzantine Jordan’ in Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan I, edited by Adnan Hadidi, 291-300. Amman: Department of Antiquities Jordan, 1982. Randsborg, Klavs. The First Millennium AD in Europe and the Mediterranean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Ribak, Eliya. ‘Everyday Artefacts as Indicators of Religious Belief in Byzantine Palestina’. In Secular Buildings and the Archaeology of Everyday life in the Byzantine Empire, edited by Ken Dark, 123-132. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2004.

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__________________________________________________________________ Ribak, Eliya. Religious Communities in Byzantine Palestina – The Relationship between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, AD 400-700. BAR International Series 1646. Oxford: Archeopress, 2007. Schick, Robert. The Christian Communities of Palestine from Byzantine to Islamic Rule. Princeton: Darwin Press, 1995. Schick, Robert. ‘Palestine in the Early Islamic Period – Luxuriant Legacy’. Near Eastern Archaeology 61:2 (1998): 74-108. Stathakopoulos, Dionysios C. Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire. Ashgate: Aldershot, 2004. Trombley, Frank. ‘War and Society in Rural Syria c. 502-613 AD: Observations on the Epigraphy’. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 21 (1997): 154-209. Tsfrir, Yoram. Rehovot in the Negev. Jerusalem: Institute of Archaeology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1988. Urman, Dan. Nessana. Excavations and Studies. Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2004. Whitcomb, Donald. ‘Islam and the Socio-Cultural Transition of Palestine - Early Islamic Period (638-1099 CE)’. In The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land, edited by Thomas E. Levy, 488-501. London: Continuum, 1995. Eliya Ribak is an associate lecturer with the New York University London and the Open University.

A Monster Painting Monsters: Norval Morrisseau and His Painted Images Carmen Robertson Abstract When early explorers encountered Indigenous peoples in the Americas they imagined original peoples as the ‘monstorous race’ in ways similar to established frames of encounters with the Other throughout Western culture. Such notions endure. Racialized constructions remain present in popular culture in Canada. Throughout the last five hundred years stereotypical tropes related to monsters, often describes as the attributes of the ‘ignoble Savage,’ have been mapped onto the bodies of Indigenous peoples. Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau was the first Indigenous artist in Canada to enter the terrain of the mainstream art world when he exhibited his artwork at the Pollock Gallery in Toronto, Ontario in 1962. His identity and his art were characterized as monstrous in press reports. Much of the discourse surrounding Morrisseau’s art implies the concept of the monstrous. Because Morrisseau mostly painted spiritual beings from Anishinaabe culture such as the so-called water monster Micipijiu, the media used those dramatically unsettling images to symbolically conflate the artist and his espied behaviors with that of the monsters he created on paper and canvas. Misread as the monstrous, the spirit beings instead function within a complex cultural milieu. This chapter will examine how the media has fused an artist’s colonized and Othered identity to painted imagery relying on imagined tropes. Upon closer analysis, I argue that it is the Canadian nation-building process that, while mapping the monstrous onto Indigenous bodies, has been the menacing presence in this equation. Morrisseau’s painted beings, then, ‘read’ semiotically in two ways. First, as personal and cultural expressions that reflect his interpretation of Anishinaabe narratives, and second, as visual expressions of an ongoing colonial geography mired with monsters. Key Words: Indigenous, art, colonialism. ***** 1. Introduction Demonizing or ‘monstering,’ the other—a verb used by Stephen T. Asma in his text On Monsters —has been part of the colonizing process of the Americas since contact and it endures.1 When early explorers encountered Indigenous peoples in the Americans they imagined them as a ‘monstorous race’ in ways similar to established frames of encounters with the other throughout Western culture.2 Such notions endure. Racialized constructions remain present in popular culture in Canada. Throughout the last five hundred years stereotypical tropes related to

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__________________________________________________________________ monsters, often describes as the attributes of the ‘ignoble Savage,’ have been mapped onto the bodies of Indigenous peoples. Lurking in a proverbial darkness of the seemingly untamed geography of what was to become Canada, Indigenous peoples, to naïve explorers, at least, appeared in need of taming. Taking possession of the land was a first step as the new nation building process.3 The birthing of the nation demanded both control of an unsettled land and a seemingly unruly people—a monstrous geography populated by monsters. In this way, monsters play an integral role in the colonizing and the nation building processes in Canada that continues today. The monstering of the Other has been charted by many scholars in many disciplines and reaches beyond the scope of this investigation. I will instead consider monsters through an intersection of colonialism, racism, art, and cultural narratives within a Canadian context in direct relation to the art of Norval Morrisseau. 2. Monsters in Our Midst Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau grew up on a reserve in northwestern Ontario in the 1930s and 1940s, shaped by the disciplining forces of colonialism that exacted policies such as the residential school system and an apartheid-like reserve structure that separated and managed Indigenous peoples outside civilized space of Canadian culture. As a young boy, he attended a Catholic residential school where, according to curator Greg Hill, he suffered both physical and sexual abuse.4 Yet, in addition to cultural adaptations and assimilationist policies demanded by the Canadian nation, Morrisseau also received a second education from his Shaman grandfather who made certain he understood the stories and protocols of Anishinaabe culture. American Indian art scholar and curator David Penney argues that as a result, ‘Morrisseau was deeply familiar with the traditional practice of signifying knowledge, for purposes of instruction or promoting memory, with images inscribed on birchbark scrolls or painted and carved into rock in sacred purposes.’5 This is significant as it means that the artist’s contemporary art practice drew inspiration from tangible sources, oral narratives that were more than personal machinations. His subjects were often, but not exclusively borrowed from a rich pantheon of spirit figures and cultural stories. When the artist was ‘discovered’ by a mainstream gallery dealer who then displayed his art in a reputable contemporary gallery in Toronto, Ontario in 1962 a proverbial clashing of monsters occurred. Morrisseau’s art filled with images of serpents, water beings, Thunderbirds, bears, birds, and fish appeared as fantastical beings framed and hanging on the walls of the gallery. A stereotypical construction of the Imaginary Indian6 plagued the internationally renowned artist until his death in 2007, diminishing his importance in Canadian art history as a creative trailblazer. The media fused the artist’s colonized and Othered identity to that of the seemingly monstrous he painted

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__________________________________________________________________ conflating the two, which served as an omen or a warning, ‘a kind of cultural category,’ according to Asma, that in this case alerted mainstream Canadians to the dangers lurking in this monstrous geography.7 Much of the discourse surrounding Morrisseau’s art reveals a larger issue involving the mapping of the monstrous onto Indigenous bodies. A monster painting monsters satisfies the mainstream Canada’s cultural imagination in the formation of the cultural category. Morrisseau’s painted beings can, clearly, be understood in other ways. They relate to specific and enduring cultural narratives. The imagery is his own, creatively wrought in ways that formulate a new visual vocabulary used by Morrisseau throughout his career, adopted and adapted by generations of other Indigenous artists interested in painting subject matter in a similar manner. In the mythology that surrounds the artist Morrisseau’s early life growing up at Sandy Lake First Nation and Beardmore in northwestern Ontario, his home has been cast as a catalyst for the artist’s monstrous behaviours. Canadians have viewed Indian reservations, a product of the Treaty system, as dark and uncivilized spaces in an otherwise civilized geography. Morrisseau emerged from such a place, sparking an imagined construction fraught with colonial signifiers. In his personal memoirs Jack Pollock written in 1990, the gallery director and art dealer credited as Morrisseau’s discoverer reinforces the frame when he describes the artist as living in filth and squalor. In a description of his first meeting with the artist, Pollock stated that Morrisseau was, ‘disgusting—drunk and he had pissed his pants’ and that ‘his house was in the middle of a garbage dump.’8 The passage illustrates Pollock’s monstering of Morrisseau. The obscure memoir in itself had little effect on popular culture or the larger mythic construction of Morrisseau except that this passage was subsequently reprinted in the Ottawa Citizen, a daily newspaper printed in the Nation’s capital on the occasion of Morrisseau’s historic retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada in 2006.9 Such caustic language in the first 100 words of the approximately 1,000-word essay published to ostensibly celebrate the artist’s achievements decidedly reinforced negative stereotypical constructions that promote a version of Morrisseau’s life that had little to do with his art prowess but much to do with racial identity.10 Pollock’s exaggerated claims easily fit into a larger a historic effort to transcribe onto Indigenous peoples a framing as a monstrous race. Canada’s newspapers routinely reported on Morrisseau throughout his career. Much of the coverage positioned him within a discourse of disciplining in a foucaultian sense. In the 1960s through the 1980s, for example the press promoted an imaginary image fraught with stereotypical tropes that both rationalized and confirmed Canada’s historic move toward imperialism and conquest. In 1972, for example, Toronto Star staff writer Wayne Edmonstone, after the headline, ‘Indian Artist Clings to Legend,’ reports on a ten-year retrospective exhibition of Morrisseau’s work mounted at the Pollock Gallery in Toronto. Morrisseau ‘survived a decade of recognition by a non-Indian public from whom he is almost

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__________________________________________________________________ wholly alienated, by clinging to the mythic-mystical subjects of Indian legends, interpreting and at times involving his own persona in them’ posits Edmonstone.11 Terms such as ‘survived,’ ‘alienated,’ and ‘clinging’ signify moribundity. Explaining that ‘he is almost wholly alienated’ from Canadians alerts readers to Morrisseau’s difference, his otherness, and his separation from mainstream Canadian society. An espied binary surfaces in press reports in relation to civilization and nation. Embracing mainstream values means assimilation. A reproduction of Morrisseau’s Self-Portrait of the Artist as Christ also from 1972, where he paints himself dressed as a Medewiwin shaman but with a cross on his chest and a halo around his shaman hood further distances the artist from the mainstream. Edmonstone explains that while artistic themes remain focused on interconnectedness, Morrisseau does not exhibit such balance. The reporter claims: ‘…the confusion, mistrust and instinctive pride of an intelligent and talented man torn between two cultures (in Morrisseau’s case not a cliché, but a fact) can be seen in his portraits of haughty pre-Columbian ancestors and relatives.’12 Morrisseau’s audacity to represent himself as Christ would have concerned a largely Christian readership. More than a decade later when Morrisseau ended up in an alcoholic haze after returning to drinking the press was giddy in its efforts to report on his aberrant behaviour. Headlines from across the nation captured the attention of readers in a three-day period in May 1987. A rollercoaster ride of news stories chart Morrisseau’s extreme ups and downs during this destructive period in his life. Such pronouncements as: ‘Drink of Tequila Started Painter On Road to Despair,’13 ‘Artist Sells Quickies For Price of Booze,’14 ‘Native Artist Roaming City Trading His Art For a Bottle,’15 ‘Morrisseau Hits The Bottle, Wanders The Streets,’16 filled the papers on 11 May 1978. On May 12 papers followed up with: ‘Street Life Suits Morrisseau,’17 ‘Artist “Dry Again”,’18 ‘Morrisseau Says He’s Quit Drinking,’19 ‘Native Artist Leaves Street Scene: Morrisseau Says He’ll Sober Up, Return to Work.’20 One day later the Vancouver Sun announced, ‘Artist Taken to Hospital,’21 and the Windsor Star exclaimed ‘Morrisseau Tottering on Brink.’22 On the streets, off the streets and off to hospital in the course of three days, this sensational news event captured the attention of readers across Canada. The Ottawa Citizen announced, ‘Norval Morrisseau, a well-known Canadian artist, is today wandering the downtown streets, sleeping in parks and alleys and selling his sketches for the price of a bottle of liquor.’23 Most reports from this period include a similar narrative and information taken from the Canadian Press wire. Such behaviours aided in convincing Canadians of his monstrousness. From 1962 until 2007 the ongoing casting of Morrisseau within a confining racialized discourse formed an image of the artist for Canadians that reinforced stereotypical frames long established in the press and popular culture. Morrisseau stands in as a monolithic construction of the imaginary Indian. A mythical figure, he is framed as larger than life but not fully formed. His art was more difficult to

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__________________________________________________________________ manage, yet the press found ways to frame it so as to align it within the confines of the narrow categorization accorded all things Indigenous in Canada. 3. Painted Monsters The visual narratives Morrisseau painted were, especially early on, cultural beings often found in oral Anishinaabe stories, yet to most Canadians, they appeared to be monsters. Morrisseau’s unique way of presenting his figures, complete with interior segmentation and a defining use of line reinforced the misinterpretation. One spirit figure commonly painted by Morrisseau, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, is Micipijiu. Sometimes describes as a horned water lynx, Micipijiu serves as a powerful spirit figure displaying both good and evil attributes in Anishinaabe culture, a supernatural being who must be placated in order to navigate the lakes and rivers of the Canadian Shield. Many stories are told of this being and rock art images of Michipijiu can be found on rock faces through out the shield. A famous example is found at Agawa Rock on the shore of Lake Superior.

Image 1: Agawa rock art, Photo credit: D. Gordon E. Robertson, © 2011, Wikipedia Creative Common. Used with Permission. Said to conjure a storm on the lake with the flick of his tail, Micipijiu’s might is legendary throughout the Canadian Shield region and visual articulations on rock, birch bark, and portable items such as carrying bags also exist. Most Canadians consider myths of Micipijiu as amusing legends or stories about a colourful creature. Anishinaabe cultural scholars Alan Corbiere and Crystal Migwans explain that the Anishinaabe understand that the ‘world expands outward in layers.’24

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__________________________________________________________________ Thunderbirds rule the sky and their counterparts and nemeses are the mishibizhiig (underwater panthers), including Michipijju.25 Museum scholar David Penney relates that in an early episodes of the Anishinaabe creation story Michipijju was tricked and thwarted by Nenaboozhoo, a trickster and cultural hero, who submerged a previous world: …(T)he king of the watery underworld, an omnipotent, horned half feline/half serpent attended by snakes, bears…. His death at the hands of Nenaboozhoo, dressed in the skin of a frog and pretending to heal him but in truth avenging the death of his brother, created a torrent of water that flooded the world. 26 This sets the stage for the well-known flood narrative where a muskrat swims down and finds mud for Nenaboozhoo to rebuild the world on turtle’s back. In 1965, Morrisseau wrote Legends of My People: The Great Ojibway to better help mainstream Canadians understand his painted images. The text includes a description of the artist’s understanding of the water spirit beings. 27 Morrisseau tells of Micipijiu in a first-person narration, ‘This big water god, or spirit, knew both good and evil. It all depended on what kind of nature the Indian had. If he were good then he would have the power to do good.’28 Morrisseau’s text was meant to offer viewers of his art a sense of what the work is about, clarifying that the images were more than simple renderings of monsters. A forceful image painted by him in 1972, Water Spirit captures visually this oral narrative.29 This imposing image visually conjures the spiritual, dualistic power embodied by this Anishinaabe Manitou or spirit figure. Utilizing a visual language inspired by rock art and the incised birch bark scrolls, Morrisseau fashioned a unique and contemporary artistic imagery. The image, recognizable from the noted Agawa rock art [fig.1], imposingly dominates the otherwise blank field devoid of background. Morrisseau similarly paints his Micipijiu in a palette common in many of his early 1970s paintings recalling the red ochre of rock art and the earth tones of traditional incised birch bark representations yet his rendering is a contemporary one. The twisting being, dynamically thrashes, a forked tongue operating both as a physical element of the being but also as a uniting aesthetic element of the composition, menacingly warning viewers of its mite. Key to Morrisseau’s visual rendering here and in most of his work is the unifying element of line. The black line, which emerges as a tongue from his mouth, continues on to his tail and then emerges once more at the foot to follow the body back to one of his horns. This device articulates the duality of the being, encapsulated in the circular forms that symbolize megis, the cowry shell that gave balance in life to the Anishinaabe and a sacred symbol that appeared in the sky to the Anishinaabe to signal their return to their homeland during an early period of

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__________________________________________________________________ exile.30 The strong black line also defines the image with interior segmentations that illustrate the embodiment of spiritual and physical power. Beyond cultural narratives, Morrisseau’s personal story further complicates this reading. The undulating body visually signifies the turbulent waters of northwestern Ontario lakes and the spiritual presence of the being, but also illustrates the rocky times Morrisseau faced as he struggled with the attention and success since his 1962 debut exhibition at a Toronto gallery. Morrisseau’s life was punctuated by turbulence—public and private—and the thrashing dynamism of the image mimics this.31 Micipijiu turning left could be interpreted as looking forward toward the future or looking back to his past. The work remains ambiguous and open to interpretation. This example references monster for mainstream Canadian viewers, yet the work also symbolizes past, present, and future realities for Morrisseau in the monstrous colonial geography he navigated. 4. Conclusion Haunted by press reports that were most interested in reporting on his demons rather than promoting his art, Morrisseau found refuge from this negativity with his paintings. Yet, there too resided demons and monsters—at least that is how they appeared to those without the benefit of esoteric knowledge of Anishinaabe culture. Escaping from such a frame appeared futile in the disciplining force of colonialism. Yet, while Canadian popular culture easily labelled Morrisseau a monster, is it not the Canadian nation and its particular brand of colonialism that remain the real monsters in this equation? A simple illustration of monstrous beings, which is what many saw when they viewed his art, was not his intention. This misreading is in line with the larger misguided identification of Indigenous peoples as exotic monsters. The monster rears its head, more aptly, as a colonial agent of nationhood in Canada. The writers of the treaties, the designers of the reservation system, the agents of the Indian Act, and the architects of the destructive Residential school policy should be characterized as monsters. Canadian colonialism created and continues to recreate a cultural geography that ascribes the monster to the bodies of Indigenous peoples to deflect its own monstrous ways. The Canadian nation building process that, while mapping the monstrous onto Indigenous bodies, has been a menacing presence in this equation resulting in the monstering of the artist. Morrisseau’s painted beings are complex and while they have been interpreted as monstrous, they can also be semiotically ‘read’ as visual expressions of an ongoing colonial geography mired with monsters.

Notes 1

Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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__________________________________________________________________ 2

Peter Mason argues that there are pre-1492 European images of America because of a ‘tendency to portray unfamiliar peoples in terms of a stock of figures—the socalled ‘Plinian’ monstrous human races (88). For a more complete analysis of early imagery of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, See: Peter Mason, The Lives of Images (London: Reaktion Books, 2001). 3 Seed demonstrates the different ways European colonizers laid claim to the New World by examining practices and rituals of possession taking. British and French practices of possession taking influenced the colonial patterns created in Canada. Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 4 Greg Hill, Norval Morrisseau: Shaman Artist (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2006). 5 David W. Penney, ‘Introduction,’ in Before and After the Horizon: Anishinaabe Artists of the Great Lakes, by David W. Penney and Gerald McMaster, (Washington DC: National Museum of the American Indian, 2013), 16-17. 6 I borrow the term Imaginary Indian from Daniel Francis. Daniel Francis, Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture. (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1992). 7 Asma, On Monsters, 13. 8 Jack Pollock, Dear M: Letters from a Gentleman of Excess, (London: Bloomsbury, 1990). 9 Paul Gessell, ‘Taming Their Demons,’ Ottawa Citizen, January 29 2006, B: 1. 10 Gessell, ‘Taming Their Demons,’ B: 1-4. 11 Wayne Edmonstone, ‘Indian Artist Clings to Legend,’ Toronto Star November 3, 1972, np. 12 Edmonstone, ‘Indian Artist Clings To Legend.’ 13 ‘Drink of Tequila Started Painter On Road to Despair,’ Globe and Mail May 11, 1987. 14 ‘Artist Sells Quickies For Price of Booze,’ Ottawa Citizen, May 11, 1987. 15 ‘Native Artist Roaming City Trading His Art For a Bottle,’ Vancouver Sun May 11, 1987. 16 ‘Morrisseau Hits The Bottle, Wanders The Streets,’ Montreal Gazette May 11, 1987. 17 ‘Street Life Suits Morrisseau,’ Globe and Mail May 12, 1987. 18 ‘Artist “Dry Again”,’ Vancouver Province May 12, 1987. 19 ‘Morrisseau Says He’s Quit Drinking,’ Edmonton Journal May 12, 1987. 20 ‘Native Artist Leaves Street Scene: Morrisseau Says He’ll Sober Up, Return to Work,’ Vancouver Sun May 12, 1987. 21 ‘Artist Taken To Hospital,’ Vancouver Sun May 13, 1987. 22 ‘Morrisseau Tottering on Brink,’ Windsor Star May 14, 1987. 23 ‘Artist Sells Quickies for Price of Booze’.

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__________________________________________________________________ 24

Alan Corbiere and Crystal Migwans, ‘Animikii Miinwaa Mishibizhiw: Narrative Images of the Thunderbird and the Underwater Panther,’ Before and After the Horizon: Anishinaabe Artists of the Great Lakes, eds. David W. Penney and Gerald McMaster, (Washington DC: National Museum of the American Indian, 2013), 37. 25 Corbiere and Migwans, ‘Animikii Miinwaa Mishibizhiw: Narrative Images,’ 3749. 26 Penney, ‘Introduction,’ 9. 27 Norval Morrisseau, Legends of My People: The Great Ojibway, Ed. Selwyn Dewdney( Toronto: McGraw-Hill, Ryerson, 1965), 26-27. 28 Morrisseau, Legends, 26-27. 29 Because of copyright issues, the author is unable to reprint works discussed in this essay. For examples of described paintings by Morrisseau, see Sinclair Lister and Jack Pollock, The Art of Norval Morrisseau (Toronto: Methuen, 1979). Mishupishu (Water Spirit), nd,[1972] 93 X 184 cm. Collection of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, Gatineau, QC. 30 Basil Johnston, Anishinaubae Thesaurus (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2007), 19; Dewdney explains that megis or the cowrie shell was carried in the Midé pouch to signify that a person had achieved a particular degree. Selwyn Dewdney, The Sacred Scrolls of the Southern Ojibway, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 88. 31 See: Hill, Norval Morrisseau: Shaman Artist.

Bibliography Anderson, Mark Cronlund and Robertson, Carmen. Seeing Red: A History of Natives in Canadian Newspapers. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2011. ‘Artist “Dry Again”’, Vancouver Province 12 May 1987. ‘Artist Sells Quickies for Price of Booze,’ Ottawa Citizen 11 May1987. ‘Artist Taken to Hospital,’ Vancouver Sun 13 May 1987. Asma, Stephen T. On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Brehm, Victoria. ‘The Metamorphoses of an Ojibwa Manido,’ American Literature 68, 4 (Dec., 1996), 677-706. Corbiere, Alan and Migwans, Crystal. ‘Animikii Miinwaa Mishibizhiw: Narrative Images of the Thunderbird and the Underwater Panther,’ Before and After the

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__________________________________________________________________ Horizon: Anishinaabe Artists of the Great Lakes Edited by David W. Penney and Gerald McMaster, Washington DC: National Museum of the American Indian, 2013. Cree Syllabics. The Canadian Encyclopedia. Viewed on 4 February 2011. http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=a1AR TA0002007. Dault, Gary. ‘Ojibway Artist May Soon Find He’s Turned into a Living Legend.’ Toronto Star 28 August 1975. ----. ‘Painter Gives Canadians a Masterpiece,’ Toronto Star, 29 August 1977, D: 5. Dewdney, Selwyn. The Sacred Scrolls of the Southern Ojibway. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975. ‘Drink of Tequila Started Painter On Road to Despair,’ Globe and Mail 11 May 1987. Edmonstone, Wayne ‘Indian Artist Clings To Legend,’ Toronto Star 3 November 1972. Francis, Daniel. Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1992. Gessell, Paul. ‘Taming Their Demons,’ Ottawa Citizen, 29 January 2006, B: 1-4. Grim, John. ‘Ojibway Shamanism,’ Shamanism: A Reader. Edited by Graham Harvey, 92-102. London: Routledge, 2003. Hill, Greg. Norval Morrisseau: Shaman Artist. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2006. Johnston, Basil. Ojibway Ceremonies. Toronto: McLelland & Stewart: 1982. ----. Anishinaubae Thesaurus. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2007. Lister, Sinclair and Pollock, Jack. The Art of Norval Morrisseau. Toronto: Methuen, 1979.

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__________________________________________________________________ Mason, Peter. The Lives of Images London: Reaktion Books, 2001. ‘Morrisseau Hits the Bottle, Wanders the Streets,’ Montreal Gazette 11 May 1987. Morrisseau, Norval. Legends of My People: The Great Ojibway. Edited by Selwyn Dewdney. Toronto: McGraw-Hill, Ryerson, 1965. ‘Morrisseau Says He’s Quit Drinking,’ Edmonton Journal 12 May 1987. ‘Morrisseau Tottering on Brink,’ Windsor Star 14 May 1987. ‘Native Artist Leaves Street Scene: Morrisseau Says He’ll Sober Up, Return to Work,’ Vancouver Sun 12 May 1987. ‘Native Artist Roaming City Trading His Art For a Bottle,’ Vancouver Sun 11 May 1987. Penney, David W. ‘Introduction,’ in Before and After the Horizon: Anishinaabe Artists of the Great Lakes. Edited by David W. Penney and Gerald McMaster, Washington DC: National Museum of the American Indian, 2013. Pollock, Jack. Dear M: Letters from a Gentleman of Excess London: Bloomsbury, 1990. Seed, Patricia. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ‘Street Life Suits Morrisseau,’ Globe and Mail 12 May 1987. Weaver, Sally. Making Canadian Indian Policy: The Hidden Agenda, 1968-70. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981. Carmen Robertson, an Associate Professor of Art History at University of Regina in Canada, researches Indigenous arts and visual culture. This chapter is part of a larger Social Science and Humanities Research Council grant-supported project that has resulted in a book-length manuscript.

Part IV Outer Limits

Satan’s Architecture of Fear: Landscape, Body and Emotion in Paradise Lost Hsin Hsieh Abstract John Milton’s Paradise Lost begins with ‘men’s first disobedience’ and Satan’s fall into Hell after his bold challenge to God. Satan’s body and Hell echo each other, for Hell is a region of ‘sorrow’ where only ‘sights of woes’ exists. Satan’s tremendous body, which is compared with Leviathan, generates fear for the spectators. The current studies on Satan usually focus on the fearsome effect of the satanic figure and excessively passionate satanic language. However, the mechanism behind Satan’s fearsome behaviour and motivation in Paradise Lost is neglected. ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.’ Being inferior to God, Satan reasons to use his emotion to change his status quo. Furthermore, Satan appears to be bold to encourage his comrades toward revenge, but the immortal Satan deems God as a threat, and is afraid of a ‘heavier punishment.’ ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ (Proverbs 9:10.) Satan reads fear in a literal sense, as fearsome and horrifying. His false reading could be a result of his emotional architecture. Thomas Aquinas has discussed the object of fear in his Summa Theologica, which helps us to understand Satan from the external body and landscape of Hell to mental interaction of the past experience, shame and guilt. Hence, I would argue that in Paradise Lost, instead of excessive passion, fear is Satan’s reason. This study with a history of emotion will reveal Satan’s spectrum of fear, which builds the landscape of hell, his monstrous body and satanic language. Key Words: Satan, Paradise Lost, Milton, landscape, body, hell, fear, emotion. ***** 1. Introduction John Milton’s Paradise Lost begins with ‘men’s first disobedience’ and Satan’s failure after challenging God, and the scenery in Hell (1.1)1 According to Oxford English Dictionary, Hell is ‘a place of suffering and evil’ or a ‘place or state of punishment of the wicked after death.’2 Based on the definition, Hell is a place attaching physical suffering to wicked individuals, but the relationship between the place and the mental punishment remains obscured. In Paradise Lost, Milton attaches human emotions in the description of Hell, where is a ‘region of sorrow’ with ‘sights of woes.’ (1.65-7) These emotions become Milton’s special effects to construct architecture of fear to the readers, and Satan and his temptation are the very medium to convey the hellish images. Readings on Satan’s temptations usually focus on his fake appearances and passionate tongues. Gordon Teskey

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__________________________________________________________________ suggests the central theme of Milton’s works is temptation. He argues that Milton understands it as ‘testing.’ 3 However, reading temptation focuses only on the tempted targets, instead of the tempter. In Paradise Lost, Satan succeeds in tempting Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, but when Adam and Eve find hope in the end, Satan fails. Butler argues that Satan’s failure is Milton’s attempt in using Virgil’s Aeneid as the classical heroism model for Satan, the impious counterpart.4 However, whether Satan being the classical hero or the symbol of evil, the mechanism behind Satan’s fearsome behaviour and motivation is neglected. I would further argue that in Paradise Lost, fear is Satan’s reason to plan and also the reason of his endless failure. The study of history of emotion in Milton’s context will firstly depict Satan’s emotional relationship to God and the environment of the Heaven and the Hell, which reveals Satan’s spectrum of fear and his fearful motivations. Therefore, in order to decipher Milton’s construction of Satan and Hell, this chapter aims to explore Satan’s external appearances and internal motivation by pivoting on his fear. 2. Emotional Relationships with God and Space In Paradise Lost, hope and fear contrast the Garden of Eden and Hell in terms of its landscape and emotions. The Garden of Eden presents ‘all delight of human sense,’ and is a place with ‘A happy rural seat of various view.’ (4.206) The light and delight in the Garden of Eden set up the emotional environment, which is different from the sight of Hell: ‘A dungeon horrible, on all sides round, As one great furnace flamed yet from those flames No light; but rather darkness visible Served only to discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell, hope never comes That comes to all, but torture without end Still urges, and a fiery deluge, fed With ever-burning sulphur unconsumed.’ (1.61-9) In comparison with the infinite darkness and ‘torture without end’ in Hell, God is love without end. However, the two places actually share same kind of emotions but in contradictory contexts. Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologica has analysed how objects differently trigger emotions, but ‘All the emotions are rooted in a single principal, which is love and in which they are mutually involved.’ (ST, 29)5 Love is the cause for every emotion, and under love, there are four major emotions: delight, sorrow, hope and fear. (ST, 3) God’s love connects Adam and Eve, and also connects Satan, and love is perceived as positive fear, which generates hope, but for Satan it is a negative fear that is attached to punishment.

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__________________________________________________________________ Satan does perceive God’s love, which turns to negative fear. Based on St. John Damascene’s argument, fear is related to a desire for something disagreeable in the future, and hope is a desire for what is agreeable. (ST, 29) Love is the cause of every emotion, including fear. The object for fear to be generated is the disagreeable future, just as hope is anticipating for future happiness. Therefore, since love is the cause, and hope and fear share the same mechanism in opposition, Satan’s relationship with God also begins with love. Adam considers God as liberal, and it is different from Satan’s understanding, for he thinks it’s better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, which becomes his new ‘hope,’ resulting from fear. After tricking Uriel, Satan is now in Eden. However, Satan follows his previous argument that one’s mind decides if the place is Heaven or Hell, but he now realizes wherever he flies, he flies with infinite wrath and despair – he himself is hell. (4.75) Satan refers God as his ‘punisher’, for he doesn't understand there is always room for repentance. God explains that hope is not offered to Satan. (4.1014) Finally, he concludes by saying ‘farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, Evil be thou my good.’ (4.108-10) From this moment of departure from hope, Satan has fixed his destiny with disagreeable future and his fear starts to affect his perspective and behaviour, as an opposite to Adam and Eve. Thus, in the spectrum of fear, for Satan, the beginning of literally fear of God is his beginning of everlasting failure. I now want to turn to Satan’s spectrum of fear, which will be analysed from his external appearance to internal emotion chaos, and to reason his behaviour and decisions driven by fear. 3. Cause of Fear Satan’s excessive fear comes from his past experience. According to Aquinas, one may fear future reproach or disgrace because of a past action, a kind of fear known as shame, and in this sense shame is a species of fear. After the war against God, Satan and his crew suffer pain by the sin of disobedience. Both the physical pain and the fear of being ‘self-raised’ without God building the fear. Satan conceals his fear again after the first battle, when the angels experience their first fear and pain by the sin of disobedience. (6.394) In Hell, the physical suffering triggers negative emotion. ‘But pain is perfect misery, the worst / Of evils, and excessive, overturn / All patience.’ (6.461-3) The negative emotion shows its power again, which makes the agents lose their patience. Patience can also be explained as patience in expectation of a future, known or unknown event, known as hope it is good, but unknown it can be a source of fear. Thus, Satan’s comrades are now contaminated with fear by physical pain, and start to lose hope. ‘Then first with fear surprised and sense of pain / Fled ignominious, to such evil brought /By sin of disobedience, till that hour/ Not liable to fear or flight or pain.’ (6.394-97) Milton could only be talking about fear of physical pain because Satan’s fallen trajectory begins with fear of being overpowered.

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__________________________________________________________________ When the fallen angels further complain about the wound and the unwounded enemies, in reply, Satan firstly describes the beautiful plants as being superficially beautified, but the plants are sprouted from deep, dark ground. This explanation presents the imbalance between appearance and true self, and also suggests Satan’s bold fraud wrapping his inner turmoil, masking his inner fear. In short, Satan asks them to ‘abandon fear’ and to ‘think nothing hard, much less to be despaired.’ (6.495-6) It suggests that fear is very much on his mind. This solution Satan offers is not workable, for fear is his construction, and abandoning fear means avoiding the disagreeable future, which will be paradoxical. It speaks of Satan’s conflicted state. In Summa Theologica, ‘Article 3. Is guilt an object of fear?’ Aquinas defines guilt from a Christian context, and quotes from Augustine that ‘man fears, by a chaste fear, separate from God,’ as we read ‘Isaiah, your iniquities have divided you from God.’ (ST, 43) Guilt can be painful and saddening, and is also a fear of religious isolation. Satan’s particular fearsome engine magnifies the isolated state. Fear is self-centred. The anonymous publication: Theologica Germanica (1518) suggest a moderate desire lead to being a perfect man, who desires goodness not for himself, but for others and for God. In this discussion, fear is also understood positively and negatively.6 The perfect man desires Eternal Goodness for God, and ‘he feareth always that he is not enough so, and longeth for the salvation of all men.’ (TG, 33) When the men have this kind of positive fear, they are in the state of freedom, for they have lost of the fear of pain and the hope of reward. Although hope is a positive emotion contradictory to fear, the hope of reward focuses on the personal reward, rather than the true understanding God. This self-centred emotion is fear, and in Theologica Germanica, the writer emphasizes the evil that focuses too much on ‘I, Me, Myself.’ In Chapter III, ‘How Man’s Fall and going astray must be amended as Adam’s Fall was’ suggests the crucial moment of Adam’s fall is not eating the apple, but it is the moment when he claims something as his own. When one counts an earthly thing to be one’s own, God is hindered. This action makes Adam turn away from God, and thus loses his obedience, and the negative fear appears. Therefore, fear is related to excessive consciousness of self. The wrong kind of self-love, as one of the essential features of fear, leads to Satan’s development of a temptation strategy for Eve. Satan speaks to Eve twice, the first time in her dream, and the second time in the form of a serpent. Satan calls Eve as a goddess twice. Eve recalls her dream: ‘Taste this, and be henceforth among the gods / Thyself a goddess, not to earth confined, / […] / What life the gods live there, and such live thou.’ (5.77-81) The second time, Satan speaks to Eve: ‘who should be seen / A goddess among gods, adored and served/ By angels numberless […]’ (9.546-8) In Theologica Germanica, sin is defined when one turns away from ‘the unchangeable God’ to ‘the changeable’ for one’s own sake, such as substance, life, knowledge and power. (TG, 23) Satan’s temptation of being a powerful goddess does not merely mean to challenge God, but demonstrate his

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__________________________________________________________________ emphasis on self-love, an enhanced desire made by fear. Hence, Satan is built with fear, and generates this particular self-centred fear on Eve. 4. Body and Hell Satan’s fear overflows and is presented with his monstrous appearance and the landscape of hell. Milton’s description of Satan’s body focuses on the vast size. Satan’s arms are compared with flood, which stretch through Hell. His torso is compared with Titanian, Briareos and the sea-beast Leviathan, which is mistakenly recognized as an island. Milton uses pagan monster to create a sense of unfamiliarity, and magnify its physical quantity to an extreme. In addition to the vastness, Milton uses Leviathan again in Book Seven, which dwells in the sea, being described with gold and pearl as the sun's reflection on the ocean waves, and the sea is decorated with fish's shining fins and scales. (7.400-416) The similar objects and quantity are used in different emotional contexts, whereas in Book Seven, Milton uses bright colours to suggest the delight God has created. Satan’s monster size is attached with flame and darkness, which reaches to its spectators with contagious fear. However, the monstrous-size not only appears to be fearsome, but also reflects the monster’s inner fear, betraying his inability to overpower in any other way. The geographical descriptions, which relate Satan’s body with flood and island, refer to Satan’s isolated status and echo the scenery in Hell. In Paradise Lost Book One, Hell is a place ‘only darkness visible,’ which is related to emotions such as ‘sights of woe,’ ‘regions of sorrow’ and ‘doleful shades.’ (1.63-65) In addition to sadness, the darkness also refers to fear, for the contradictory emotion, hope, will never come to this place. (1.66) The description not only shows darkness with negative emotions, but also suggests movement and disturbance for peace and rest are never here. His despair and hate, emanating from his initial fear of being overpowered, makes him understand God wrongly. Satan tries to conceal his emotion and cheats the spectators and his comrades. This behaviour can be read as actively controlled but his fear is unconsciously exposed. The body is also self-defiance, concealing Satan’s true fear, his body literally rebelling against his will. He is the ‘dark design’ and is part of the landscape in Hell. Satan's emotion is continuously shown on his pale appearance reflecting his despair. (4.115) This negative emotion is so powerful that the torture will not end. Even though Satan tries to control his fear by his tremendous body, his body is actually generated by his fear, which can be spotted through his interactions with other fallen angels. Being cast away from Heaven, Satan and his comrades have been traveling ‘nine times the space that measures day and night,’ and finally ‘lay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf’ and confounded. Satan is tormented by ‘both of lost happiness and lasting pain’ from the war, and his doomed fate leads to wrath, pride and hate. The scenario shows that the emotion is triggered by past experience. He is taunted by his memories from which there is no escape and

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__________________________________________________________________ which in turn perpetuate his fear. His doom created hate and wrath, and his emotion becomes ‘fiercer by despair.’ The interaction among all his negative emotions shows Satan’s emotional imbalance, i.e. he has no hope. Satan asks his comrades for advice whether to start a war to regain heaven. His horror crews aren’t that horrible, and express the difficulty to regain Heaven. ‘Though all our glory extinct, and happy state / Here swallowed up in endless misery.’(1.141-142) Asking for opinions is a way to cover up and express Satan's own fear of God, and his comrades speak for him. In fact he sets up such a fearsome portrait of the hero who might lead them out of this mess that no one volunteers. He then steps up to it himself, only to then subsequently complain about how difficult it is to lead when he is himself afraid. In order to encourage his comrades, Satan breaks the horror silence with ‘bold words,’ which mirrors his physical disguise to hide his own fear. Satan says: ‘All is not lost—the unconquerable will, /And study of revenge, immortal hate, /And courage never to submit or yield:/ And what is else not to be overcome?/That glory never shall his wrath or might /Extort from me. ‘ (1.101-111) In the previous lines, they just realized that ‘once yours, now lost,’ but Satan’s speech presents something opposite, for there leaves revenge and hate, the negative emotions. His speech is parallel with his dark design, and the paradox reveals his fear. In short, the landscape of Hell, Satan’s body and speech all show Satan’s attempt to display fear as armors, but he fails to control his unconscious fear from being exposed. It shows that Satan’s emotion overpowers him, and it is this excessive emotion that will dominate Satan’s subsequent behaviour in Paradise Lost. 5. Conclusion: ‘Fearless’ Satan If Paradise Lost can be described as Adam and Eve’s journey to find the true obedience toward God, Satan’s endless frustration can be read as his confrontation with fear, and finally recognizes this particular emotion as his core that empowers and torments him simultaneously. However, built and fed with fear, this denying of fear also suggests Satan’s ‘fearless’ status. By rejecting his fear or deducting it, Satan actually weakens himself. ‘Yet, not rejoicing in his speed, though bold / Far off and fearless […] Now conscience wakes despair, / That slumbered; wakes the bitter memory / Of what he was, what is, and what must be / Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue.’ (4.13-26) Finally, he gains his conscience, which slumbers in his fearless status. The bitter memory reminds him of his goal, and he can goes further. When Satan confronts the Eden couples, he watches Adam from a distance, for he thinks Adam is much more intellectual, has strength, or ‘courage haughty,’ and Satan is not. (9.482-87) Satan ‘fearlessly’ returned to Eden, and he wants to be armed with ‘stealth,’ ‘mist’ and intends to be ‘unsuspected,’ which again suggests his fearlessness has distracted his power. (9.57-75) Later, when Satan luckily finds Eve alone, which is presumably ‘the weaker,’ but he is struck by ‘the sweet recess

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__________________________________________________________________ of Eve.’ (9.456) There is a moment that Satan is disarmed of negative emotions: guile, hate, envy and revenge, which are Satan's goodness, his crucial weapons. Satan is stunned by Eve's goodness and purity. This fearless moment empties him and takes away his purpose. In order to cease this temptation of goodness, he reminds himself with inferno fire and ends his delight. ‘But the hot Hell that always in him burns, / Though in mid-Heav’n, soon ended his delight, / And tortures him now more, the more he sees / Of pleasure not for him ordained: then soon / Fierce hate he recollects, and all his thoughts / Of mischief, gratulating, thus excites.’(9.467-73) This behaviour demonstrates fear being his fuel to motivate himself. Satan further elaborates, these ‘thoughts’ lead him to think of joy he has lost and finally brings hate to him. (9.473-79) After regaining his ‘reason’, Satan becomes ‘all impassioned’ to tempt Eve. (9.678) Thus, although the negative fear disturbs human’s reason, it is for Satan a powerful emotion to control his behaviour, and plan a most desirable strategy for any situations. From denying his fear and being tortured by the physical pain, Satan comes to the realization that his sin will not be forgiven, and fear becomes his only reason to continue the temptation trials for human minds with deep-rooted fear that is the image of Hell.

Notes 1

John Milton, Paradise Lost, (London: Penguin Group, 2003) ‘hell, n. and int.’. OED Online. March 2014. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/85636?rskey=xyTROj&result=1, Accessed 14 March 2014. 3 Gorden Teskey, ‘Milton’s Early English Poems: The Nativity Ode, “L’Allegro”, “Il Penseroso”,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, Ed. Nicolas McDowell. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 66-88 4 George Butler, ‘The Fall of Tydeus and the Failure of Satan: Statius’ Thebaid, Dante’s Commedia, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.’ in Comparative Literature Studies. Vol.43. No.1-2. 2006. 134-52. 5 Aquinas concludes hope as a kind of expectancy, which is based on Apostle’s ‘But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.’ Thomas Aquinas and J.P. Reid. Summa Theologiae: Volume 21, Fear and Anger: 1a2ae. 40-48. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 6 Franckforter, . Theologia Germanica: Which Setteth Forth Many Fair Lineaments of Divine Truth, and Saith Very Lofty and Lovely Things Touching a Perfect Life. Grand Rapids, (Mich: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1990). Internet resource. 2

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Bibliography Milton, John. Paradise Lost. London: Penguin Group, 2003. Teskey, Gorden. ‘Milton’s Early English Poems: The Nativity Ode, “L’Allegro”, “Il Penseroso”,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, edited by Nicolas McDowell, 66-88. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Butler, George. ‘The Fall of Tydeus and the Failure of Satan: Statius’ Thebaid, Dante’s Commedia, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.’ Comparative Literature Studies 43.1-2 (2006): 134-52. Aquinas, Thomas and J.P. Reid. Summa Theologiae: Volume 21, Fear and Anger: 1a2ae. 40-48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Franckforter. Theologia Germanica: Which Setteth Forth Many Fair Lineaments of Divine Truth, and Saith Very Lofty and Lovely Things Touching a Perfect Life. Grand Rapids. Mich: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1990. Internet resource. Hsin Hsieh is an M.A. Student at Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures in National Taiwan University.

The Dystopian Geography Elisabetta Di Minico Abstract Dystopia is the dark, disenchanted opposite of the optimistic utopia. It describes the worst of all possible realities, where people are heavily manipulated, conditioned and repressed. In such degenerative and fictitious societies, geography becomes a ‘tool’ as any other to control the population: it is not just a physical factor, it is also a political, economical and a social agent, because regimes can use architecture as propaganda or intimidation. Indeed, scenery is one of the key elements of dystopian fears and settings are obscure and suffocating. Usually authors insist on descriptions that include dark colors, like black or gray. Dystopian cities embody injustice and terror and they physically trap citizens in delusional and claustrophobic realities. In these contexts, individuals and buildings are tied together up, psychologically and symbolically. Architecture is perceived like an huge and imposing organism able to swallow men. Intimidated by alienating urban majesty, people feel increasingly powerless. In this way, it’s easier for the system to abolish individualism and confine the shapeless mass that lives in these distorted worlds. The deeper the dystopia is, the more geographic limits are delineated and fixed, while outside the metropolitan borders, usually, there is liberty and hope for a better society. Nature is primitive and chaotic, but, at least, there is still place for free will. I will analyze how monstrous geography contributes to dystopian works, starting from a general introduction of the genre and focusing on its best examples, as George Orwell’s 1984, Ayn Rand’s Anthem or Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The geography of the habitat of a given community seems to reflect the society it belongs to, since urbanism can show states’ livelihood conditions, traditions, governance of a state and many more. If reality is infected, geography will recognize and assimilate the infection. Keywords: Dystopia, Authoritarian Architecture, Control, Fear. ***** 1. Introduction to Dystopia The word ʻdystopiaʼ comes from ancient greek (δυσ-τόπος) and literally means ʻbad placeʼ. Dystopia is a dark, disenchanted genre. Opposing optimistic utopia, it describes the worst of all possible realities, where people are heavily manipulated, conditioned and repressed by heartless governments. There, geography becomes a ‘tool’ like any other to rule the population. Not just a physical factor, but also a political, economical and a social agent, as can be seen when regimes use architecture and environment for propaganda or intimidation. The geography of the habitat of a given community seems to reflect the society it belongs to, since urbanism

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__________________________________________________________________ reveals states’ livelihood conditions, traditions, governance and many more. If reality is infected, geography will epitomize the infection. Dystopia is born from the ruins of utopia, a genre that describes an ideal and potentially perfect form of government, often opposite to reality. While the movement develops in its full potential from the 16th century, starting with Utopia (1516), Thomas More’s most important work, the proto-utopian aspirations have grown since the dawn of humanity and they work as substrate for mythology, philosophy and religion.1 Unfortunately, after centuries of efforts, it is clear that the good place is just a yearning. As explained in 1890 by William Morris’s News from Nowhere, utopia isn’t a real spot in the continuum of space; it is relegated into a dream and traumatically lost in the oneiric dimension. From the 18th century, especially during the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, utopia gains democratic aspirations and promotes citizens’ natural and universal rights. These expectations increase when the Industrial Revolution starts. The Revolution brings growth and positivism and promises a better life, transforming the ‘machine’ into a symbol for a new world. However, the majority of these promises die with the crisis that follows the post-revolutionary Terror and the social impacts of Industrialization. In fact, alongside the undoubted technological and cultural progress of the 18th century and the 19th century, complex social issues emerge, such as class struggles. These are aggravated by the alienating living conditions of the proletariat. Industrialization leads to a radical change in landscape: factories and unhealthy suburbs for poor people rise, and cities start to be overcrowded and polluted. Culture can no longer cherish the idea of a good place, but it can and must warn against the bad place, that is the dystopia. The new genre of dystopia starts in the 19th century, predicting tenebrous futures, dominated by machinery and automated or enslaved men, with factories and cities turned into twisted jails. One of its fathers is Herbert George Wells. The allegorical ‘things to come’ that his works bring to life are atrocious. Human history is described by the english author as involution. The society is not able to counteract the distortions of the present, so it is condemned to apocalypses. This apocalyptic fate is shown in his masterpiece, Time Machine (1895), a novel that tells about the horrifying transformation of class struggle fighters into foul creatures. After Wells paves the way for the genre, dystopian works increase exponentially, creating frightening worlds that take inspiration from history and exacerbate tragic problems that are already present in society, such as the aforementioned machinerelated terrors. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the dystopian fears multiply, together with the real nightmares of world wars, conflicts, terrorist attacks, totalitarianisms, genocides, atomic, chemical or environmental hazards, pandemic diseases, etc. The actual settings from which dystopia draws themes are many: nuclear and ecological disasters, overpopulation and hyper-urbanization, corporations, consumerism, over-

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__________________________________________________________________ production, advertising and television, science and genetic experiments, racial issues and xenophobia, political distortions and dictatorships, etc. 2. Dystopian Urbanism and Architecture Even if all of these kinds of dystopia frightfully and perfectly built a spatial reality able to emphasize their plots, the political ones uses urbanism in a powerful way. In said contexts, in fact, frame is not just a scenic effect and cities aren’t just a background in which hopeless characters look for redemption or revenge. Urban areas are not just haunted spots or decaying post-war or post-apocalyptic ruins that remind of furious human madness. Buildings, houses, monuments are all agents of authority. The societies described in political dystopian works are generally hierarchical and racist. They use propaganda, manipulation of history and reality, torture, constant surveillance and abuse. The rulers are futuristic versions of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor and they emanate a charismatic power, like that analyzed by sociologist Max Weber. Around the leader or around the State is a worship service, that ritualizes and sacralizes the political processes. People are domesticated by fear, pain or drugs: traumatized or persuaded, citizens are convinced that their way of life is the only or the best possible. They believe that individuality and feelings are negative and that full conformity and obedience are necessary. Culture and education are slaves to the authority. Dissidents and minorities are executed for the regime’s sake. The submission of the individuals can be obtained by different levels of force and aggression. They rank from amiable conditioning to the complete physical and psychological annihilation of the subjects, as in George Orwell’s 1984. The dystopian apparatus also imposes itself through constructions, that gain symbolic energy and implications. As explained by historian George Mosse talking about nazi architecture, frame is a primary component of authority because urban majesty can transmit the force and the severity of command, intimidating the population and dramatizing the division between rulers and ruled. Urban subdivision can be read as a metaphorical representation of social injustice and conflicts. The prototype of this trend is Metropolis, the expressionist film directed by Fritz Lang in 1927. The city of Metropolis is a conflicted area: a rich and powerful class lives a blissful life in magnificent skyscrapers, while exploited workers are literally under the feet of their masters, constrained in an infernal underworld. In this frame, space is limited. Everyone must remain in his place in order to keep order. This vertical subdivision becomes a representation of tyrannical domination. Dystopian cities have to display central power’s grandeur and indestructibility. At the same time, they have to be easy to supervise and have to facilitate coercion and monitoring of individuals. The hapless citizens have to be like the architecture that surround them: rigid, ordered, unchangeable. The cityscapes originated from

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__________________________________________________________________ this suffocating use of urbanism are enchained to an obscure chromaticism, where black, gray, brown or deep blue are essential colors. In the Kurt Wimmer movie Equilibrium (2002), the city-state of Libria has arisen after a destructive World War III. Population is desentimentalized and sedated to avoid violent degeneration trough emotions. Long story short, to avoid war, people must also give up on love. Due to an unexpected error, cleric John Preston, a policeman deeply devoted to power, turns himself into a disturbing element of totalitarianism. Equilibrium’s spaces are neoclassical, monumental, gloomy and wide-angled. They serve to minimize individuals, making them feel like pointless pawns in comparison to the impressive state. Significantly, part of the shots are filmed in symbolic locations of nazi-fascism and soviet socialism, such as the EUR district in Rome, built in the ‘30s at the behest of Mussolini, the Olympic Stadium and the Deutschlandhalle in Berlin, constructed for the 1936 Olympics Games, and abandoned military bases and decrepit blocks in East Germany. In a uniformly dark world, the only dissonance is associated with Mary, a rebel who wins the protagonist’s heart and becomes one of the reasons for his disobedience. Everything about this woman revolves around the repeated and evocative use of red color: her lipstick, her silk ribbon, the mantle that she wears when she is led to the pyre, the flames that burn her body. These are the only hints of bright chromaticism in the entire movie. And when the Cleric finally defeats the dictatorship, he holds in his hands that red ribbon, a memento of the love that he will never live completely. In dystopian works, fate of citizens usually seems connected, inversely or directly proportional, to the one of urban landscape and buildings, as in V for Vendetta (both 80s Alan Moore&David Lloyd’s comic and 2005 James McTeigue film). The story tells us about a repressive and racist United Kingdom, where population is subjugated, censored and manipulated by a fascist party called Norsefire. The regime has surged after a terrible nuclear war and it easily imposes its power, taking advantage of the population’s anxiety after atomic tragedy. This reign of terror is overthrown by V, a disfigured anarchist hidden behind the mask of Guy Fawkes, an english revolutionary involved in the so-called Gunpowder Plot of November 5th, 1605. Organized by a group of catholic conspirators, the intent of this failed attack was to blow up the Parliament during the State Opening, to kill King James I, the royal family and the entire state political body. The protesters were discovered and executed and the massacre was avoided. After centuries, V completes their plan. Modifying London cityscape, he manages to kindle revolution’s flame. When the Old Bailey and the Parliament are blown up, the merciless authority embedded in the architecture also collapses. Symbols of past freedom, these buildings stand like a declined society symbols: destroying them is a way to set the society free. In such uniform backgrounds, power reaches an impenetrable level of restriction because it can easily identify those who differ from the crowd. Every act of rebellion is noticed by controllers and by citizens, because individuals are also

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__________________________________________________________________ subject to the supervision of their community. In this way, it’s easier for the system to prevent or suppress riots and confine the mass. Urban life is predetermined and ritualized: everyone has a role and there is no freedom of action in the city, nor, often, at home. Architecture helps authority to expand its control into personal space, with devastating psychological results: people don’t ever have privacy, they have to completely adhere to the state. At work, walking on the streets, in their own rooms, they have no shelter for their souls. Everyday actions are in the public eye because reality is transparent, due to espionage, surveillance (especially video survellaince) or architectural tricks, like glass buildings. The source of inspiration for these see-trough societies is the Panopticon, designed in 1791 by english philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham. This ideal prison consists in a circular building for prisoners and in a central tower for guards. In this way, officers would have a full view of convicts, who, aware of omnipresent observation, would maintain correct behavior. The most relevant examples of this pattern are Orwell’s 1984 (1948) and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921). The first novel tells about the regime of Oceania. Dominated by an omnipresent leader called Big Brother, it is a paradoxical world where culture of war, propaganda and constant terror ‘domesticate’ the society. The Orwellian London is in decline, as is its humanity. Houses are crumbling, often with broken windows and damaged roofs. Here and there, there are ruins and huge holes left by bombs. In this faded and dirty landscape, only massive and oxymoronic2 government buildings stand out. Clearly, in this regime, personal space is the first victim of authority. The ʻBig Brother is watching youʼ is the perfect manifesto of the constant vigilance that authority, with the complicity of urbanism, exploits to submit citizens to its power. Each apartment in Oceania is equipped with a screen that, in addition to broadcasting, also records everything that happens in its field of vision, like a surveillance camera. Tentacular and alert, it becomes a parody of the religious eye of God. In the second work, We, the engineer D-503 describes his life in the One State, an authoritarian regime that exalts the egalitarianism to a ruthless point: life don’t belong to individuals anymore, but to the mass. Masses are like a wave in which millions of different egos drown. The author interprets the value of equality as a dehumanizing neurosis; power spreads not for democratic aspirations, but with the aim to standardize and humiliate the population, to maintain control over it. The utopia promised by Russian Revolution turns itself into a nightmare. Citizens are treated like machines and act like machines: their behavior and their happiness are mathematically exact and their lives are scheduled in every detail. Any kind of disobedience is punished by lobotomy and to avoid insubordination as well as to support the vigilance procedures, cities are almost transparent: apartments are made from glass.

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__________________________________________________________________ These several works clarify how cities, places and houses, as imposing organisms, physically and psychologically confine men in delusional and claustrophobic realities. 3. Utopian Nature Limited and restrictive, dystopian urbanism and geography protect themselves from the outside, to avoid external contaminations. As a matter of fact, outside metropolitan borders or underneath the ground, there is free land for unconventional and rebellious values and behaviors. In said areas, there is usually no control, no oppression, no anger. Rural or clandestine settings are primitive and chaotic, but they save an arcadian spirit, a chance for free will and an hope for a better society. In V for Vendetta, the Shadow Gallery, the hidden refuge of the main character, is the last shelter of human culture. In its rooms, works of art, movies, musical instruments, furniture, books, vinyl records, photographs, prints are saved from the forgetfulness. In 1984, the enchanted sanctuary is the antique shop of Mr. Charrington, full of relics of a time gone by. It is located in a degraded area of London, inhabited by the proles, the poorer class of Oceania. Here the protagonist, Winston Smith, buys some objects able to make him feel ‘alive’, as the diary that will start his personal and ruinous revolt. This is also the place where he secretly meets his lover Julia for a physical and intimate relationship, forbidden in the area he lives in. On the surface, also Equilibrium’s Libria is a neat, anemic environment, but, in the tunnels below the town, there is a vibrant alternative community, run by rebels: revolutionary headquarters, black markets, shelters for people that suffer of ‘emotional’ sickness, etc. Paradoxically, repressed people rediscover their humanity by transgression. Thus, the subsoil becomes a metaphor of humans and their souls, that display rigor and tranquility on the facade, while a profound tumult of feelings dwells inside. Dystopia exposes a strong dichotomy between nature and city. In Equilibrium, the so-called Hell is an unlawful zone, free from the direct control of the undisputed leader of Libria, The Father, and lead by the Resistance. Here, the scenery is decadent and dominated by abandoned houses, declining building and ruins. It is theatrically fascinating due to the permeating memory of ‘irrational’ past times. Indeed, reigned by instinct and passion, the area is ready to redeem itself and promote political changes suited to break the linear self-celebrating perfection of the state. In We, a Green Wall separates the town from the external chaos, a wild frame populated by ʻsavagesʼ. Small groups of fugitives survive in a primordial state of nature, struggling for survival, but enjoying freedom and independence. These possibilities are restrained to ʻcivilizedʼ inhabitants, who, as Dostojevski’s Grand Inquisitor foretells, prefer comfort over liberty. The same can be said about Ayn Rand’s Anthem, a 1937 novel that tells the story of Equality 7-2521, a janitor who lives in a totalitarian state. The only value that the regime exalts is community: every man is a collective ownership. Egos are crushed and confused with thou-

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__________________________________________________________________ sands of other egos, the personal pronoun ʻIʼ loses all meanings. After audacious adventures, the protagonist runs away from the city and takes refuge in the Uncharted Forest, followed by Liberty 5-3000, the girl he is in love with. In the uncontaminated nature that surrounds them, the couple learns how to survive and how to be selfishly happy. While exploring, they discover an abandoned house of the Unmentionable Times, full of unknown objects, such as mirrors, colorful clothes and books. Always eager for knowledge, Equality reads everything he finds and, thanks to culture, understands how to erase the ʻWeʼ concept that his former state requires. He then understand the real meaning of the forbidden word ʻIʼ. He is, he thinks, he wants, autonomously from the majority. Returning to nature, mankind transforms dystopia into utopia again. Rand compares Equality and Liberty to greek mythological figures Prometheus and Gaea. He took the light from the gods and brought it to men, while she was the Great Mother of the Earth. From them, a new progeny and a new order will be born. Like Adam and Eve, they are the beginning of a new era, they embrace the promise of human redemption.

Notes 1

Space is fundamental to utopia, since geography is fundamental to mankind. In order to survive, especially in ancient times, humankind had to fight to adapt itself to its environment. An environment full of dangers, like famines, floods, droughts, cold, etc. Therefore, in response to this roughness, legends were born that describe uncontaminated, peaceful and prosperous times or places, in which people are surrounded by a fertile and astonishing land, plenty of food and a mild climate. They don’t age, get sick or die, and they live in harmony with each other and with nature. The examples are plentiful, from the christian Garden of Eden to the ancient greek Golden Age, passing through mythical islands, like Thule or Hyperborea, or the buddhist Shambala. But all these frameworks don’t show an ethical or political program, which will be the features of Utopian mainstream. Utopia starts in the 16th century and its father is english writer Thomas More. In 1516, he coins the term with his masterpiece, titled, precisely, Utopia. The protagonist, explorer Raphael, tells of his journey on an island where King Utopos has established a free and tolerant society. The meaning of the author’s neologism is torn between two signifiers: ευ-τóπος, ʻgood placeʼ, and oύ-τóπος, ʻno placeʼ. The genre easily becomes popular, also because the public is fascinated by the impressive geographical discoveries of the time, and many writers and thinkers understand its educational force. Examples are italian philosopher Tommaso Campanella in The City of the Sun and english philosopher Francis Bacon with his work titled New Atlantis. 2 Orwellian London is dominated by huge government buildings, ironically called

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__________________________________________________________________ oxymoronic names. The Ministry of Love, which oversees Security, manages the Thought Police and deals with the rehabilitation of dissidents by means of torture, is a frightening structure without windows, surrounded by barbed wire and machine guns. The Ministry of Truth, that controls press and systematically manipulates history, is in a white, pyramidal building. On it, political slogans are enthroned: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. Similar architectures also characterize the Ministry of Peace, that presides over war, and the Ministry of Plenty, that manages the economy and organizes rationing.

Bibliography Baccolini, Raffaella & Moylan, Thomas. Dark Horizons. Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, New York-London: Routiedge, 2003. Booker, M. Keith. Dystopian literature: a theory and research guide, Westport: Greenwood press, 1994. Booker, M. Keith. The Dystopian impulse in modern literature: fiction as social criticism, Westport: Greenwood press, 1994. Colombo, Arrigo. Utopia e Distopia, Milano: Franco Angeli, 1987. Dostoevskij, Fëdor. I Fratelli Karamàzov, Milano: Mondadori, 1994. Kumar, Krishan. Utopia and Anti-utopia in modern times, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Manferlotti, Stefano. Anti-utopia: Huxley, Orwell, Burgess, Palermo: Sellerio, 1984. Mayhew, Robert. Essays on Ayn Rand’s Anthem, Lanham: Lexington-Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Moore, Alan; Lloyd, David. V per Vendetta, Roma: Magic Press, 2006. Mosse, George. La nazionalizzazione delle masse, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007. Muzzioli, Francesco. Scritture della Catastrofe, Roma: Meltemi, 2007.

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__________________________________________________________________ Orwell, George. 1984, Milano: Mondadori, 2010. Rand, Ayn. Antifona, Macerata: Liberilibri, 2003. Ragani, Vittorio & Ragone, Eugenio. Il Gioco dei Mondi – Le idee alternative della Fantascienza, Bari: Dedalo, 1984. Sobchack, Vivian. Spazio e Tempo nel Cinema di Fantascienza, Bologna: Bononia University press-Università degli Studi, 2002. Zamjatin, Evgenij. Noi, Milano: Lupetti, 2007. Elisabetta Di Minico has a PhD in History (Denomination: Sociedad y Cultura) from UB – University of Barcelona. She works on political, social and cultural control, used by governments in order to manipulate and repress the population, starting the historical and sociological analysis from dystopian novels, comics and movies.

Citypunk: Transgeographies in Science Fiction Comics Joao Rosmaninho DS Abstract In the history of cyber-fiction in comics there have been bizarre cities with both utopian and dystopian foundations. Mostly located in the future, those urbanscapes are built in space to be recognizable from the present. In fact, they are inevitably linked to variations of our everyday territories. In comics like Dan O’Bannon and Moebius’ The Long Tomorrow (1975) or Warren Ellis and Darick Richardson’s Transmetropolitan series (1997-2002), cities are characterized and designed as merged environments and inverted punk territories. Urban places become sites of addiction and starvation while technological enterprises continue rising. Mainly set in Europe and North America, the future exposed in these science fiction comics seems rather ungracious and grotesque. Metropolises have grown overscaled and overrated as Paris, London, the generic Cité or The City (a continental compound of New York City, Chicago and San Francisco) have turned into recognizable cities with disturbances and awkward morphologies. Banal places and exquisite architectures become obsolete and opposite versions of themselves. Economic conflicts or politic scandals bring social anarchy and urban-biological ambiguity to these places and their inhabitants. In science fiction comics, protagonists like Pete Club, Alcide Nikopol, Spider Jerusalem or Michael (Desolation) Jones drift through the streets, towers and trash, solving mysteries, testing drugs, and exploring vicious media circles. Paradoxically, these fictions produce a common and complex sense of disenchantment in human and urban promises, as if fiction was just a symbol of our monstrous realities. Mostly based in science fiction comics, this chapter aims at revealing resonances and representations of the contemporary human and urban aberrancies within the graphic genre. Key Words: Science Fiction, Comics, City, Punk, Space, Trans-, Mobility, Media. ***** When there’s no future, how can there be sin? We’re the flowers in the dustbin We’re the poison in the human machine We’re the future, we’re the future. Glen Matlock, John Lydon, Steve Jones, and Paul Cook1 1. Geographies and Humans In science fiction (sf), the city is the place. Often overcrowded and famous for being unfair, the city enhances the battleground to every human revolution. Yet,

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__________________________________________________________________ since the Classical polis, social and democratic rights have been addressed in the square, the core of the city, right in the midst of the public realm. From the 1960’s to the 1980’s, in Europe and North America, a radical shift of significant civilizational issues happened. Public and private domains got closer while their boundaries became blurred and undistinguished. Matters like security, surveillance, new media, and deregulated markets and corporations fabricated a discriminatory scenario amidst liberalist regimes. Parallel to this arose several counter cultures. From situationism to punk and hippie, a new leftist agenda appeared as a unique alternative to the established and unfair Western world. At the same time, in places like Paris, London, NYC or San Francisco, urban studies researchers were regarding the global and the post-industrial systems through the effects of information networks and worldwide communication. Authors and essayists like Henri Lefebvre, Manuel Castells, and David Harvey were exploring the city as a built subject of capitalist nature. Through fiction based in the future, writers and scholars like Bruce Bethke, Pat Cadigan, William Gibson, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Rudy Rucker, Neal Stephenson, or Bruce Sterling were linking political visions to high tech versions of the human. Unprecedented works like Daniel Francis Galouye’s Simulacron-3 (1964) alongside Aldous Huxley’s reports on drugs and Philip K. Dick’s experiments were models to explore. Simulations, artificial intelligence and altered realities became a matter of study and discussion. Indeed, during those same years, through sf comics, artists like Enki Bilal, Warren Ellis, Alejandro Jodorowsky or Jean Giraud ‘Moebius’ were developing disruptive urban representations as settings for their comics. Between the late 1970’s and early 1980’s the political and social sense became even more focused on the city. In literature, themes like structuralism, digital systems, 2 organic and robotic possibilities, become permanent leitmotivs to every narrative. In sf literature, in both New Wave and Hard Science sub-genres, the optimistic view of technology had been giving way to the deceptive effect of already old technology and, at this point, eugenics had reached its limit while authors like Gibson or Stephenson used their literary and philosophical exercises to form new anxieties, new spaces and new uses. In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), for instance, the city evolves into a noir fantasy of aerial and ubiquitous commercial screens, quite common in the contemporary Los Angeles (LA) metropolitan area.3 A decade later, in the early 1990’s, Rem Koolhaas examines metropolises as fragmented and comprehensive geographies all at once. In his S,M,L,XL giant book (1995), the author argues that ‘the generic city is the city liberated from the captivity of centre, from the straitjacket of identity. The generic city breaks with the destructive cycle of dependence (…). It is the city without history.’4 In fact, it seems that Blade Runner’s LA is the contemporary architects’ dream city. Highly populated and permanently congested, the city became neither tangible nor physical. Its centre got distant to the old one while its form went different from the canonical terms.

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__________________________________________________________________ 2. SF Comics and Punks In the late 1970’s, sf comics were already exploring infinite references. Sprawled morphologies, zoning areas, gated communities, and a particular disregard for human equalities were used to achieve future visions strongly anchored in the existent postmodernity. Moebius and Dan O’Bannon’s two-part story The Long Tomorrow (1976) represents an overcrowded and vertically (dis)connected city. Its main character, Pete Club, a Rick Deckard 5 human prototype, runs indifferently through the levelled environment, solving mysteries and fighting for his own survival. In Cité, the ‘generic’ name given to the literally underground city, the Cartesian detective calls himself a ‘confidential nose’,6 even if he is dressing like a private eye with a strange fireman hat. In this work, Cité is structured from the powerful and bourgeois top to the poorest bottom. The narrative, as well as the city, is organized between the Earth surface and the ‘dump, the [-]199th level’,7 with stops at the [-]97th level, the protagonist’s office, and the [-]12th level, the client, Dolly Vook von Katterbar’s, home. The 1980’s and 1990’s were of great significance to the sf comics sub-genre. Works like Jodorowsky’s L’Incal (1981-1989), Toshimichi Suzuki and Tony Takezaki’s A.D. Police: Dead End City (1989-1990), Jodorowsky and Juan Giménez’s La Cast des Meta-Barons (1992-2003), Howard Chaykin and Don Cameron’s Cyberella (1996-1997), or Paul Pope’s Heavy Liquid 8 series (19992000) have all become graphic and imagetic examples of cyberpunk interpretations. Enki Bilal’s La Foire aux Immortels (1980) and La Femme Piège (1986) fictionalize the city between 2023 and 2025 as a place of mixing apparatus and merged atmospheres with humans, gods, aliens and wild animals co-existing in Paris, London and Berlin. European cities are built underground and filled with permanent smog, resembling both familiar and recognizable to current pollution patterns. Each city became helpless despite its futuristic approach. On the other hand, North-American cities are mainly built upperground and filled with high and low-tech apps. Warren Ellis and Darick Richardson’s Transmetropolitan9 (1997-2002) and Warren Ellis and J. H. Williams III’s Desolation Jones10 (2006) claimed then a new visualization for the obsolete near future. In Transmetropolitan, the City is a vast urban sprawl (incorporating New York City, Chicago and San Francisco) crowded with cybernetic organisms. In all these comics, visions of the contemporary city have become as corrupted and toxic as the bodies and political relations humans and gods maintain.11 From Europe to America and from Africa to Asia, every city has turned monstrously similar to Blade Runner’s urban environment. As Tom Maddox states, ‘Cyberpunk had arrived, however you construe the idea.’12 The Long Tomorrow’s protagonist Pete Club, La Foire aux Immortels or La Femme Piège’s Alcide Nikopol, and Transmetropolitan’s Spider Jerusalem fulfill a true commitment with the streets, as all their actions take place there. In fact, Pete, Alcide and Spider are all independent men living as punks do, in the lower parts of the city amidst the dead-

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__________________________________________________________________ liest areas. They are contemporary pirates, lonely drifters in crowded places, representing institution-less figures such as those stalked by Joseph Dredd, the complete law enforcement agent in John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra’s Judge Dredd (1977) comic series. As in the fictional Mega City One,13 every city is frequently an urban response to fascist or violent scenarios. Protagonists are placed in either political or spatial monstrosities in order to act and react against institutional powers and crooked figures. For instance, Pete and Spider are both activists recording their everyday experiences14and moving through each decadent city to explore its flaws. Pete’s places are ‘rather disreputable (…)’15 as they are called by Von Katterbar, or ‘ratholes’16 as they are called by Lieutenant 3; Alcide’s Earthly awakening happens in decrepit ‘Port d’Orleans-Porte de Clignancourt’s closed tube station’;17 and Spider’s urban rejection is written in the streets with the ‘I HATE IT HERE’ formula,18 as he calls to his newspaper New Columns, edited by Mitchell Royce. In fact, the places where they live and circulate are old, dirty, and essentially hostiles to the political authority. 3. Cities and Hackers In the late 70’s, New York and London are becoming focal points of the West. In these cities, punk culture emerges as an urban visual routine. Bands like the Ramones in New York City and The Sex Pistols and The Clash in London were the ultimate examples of the punk genre. Ramones (1976), Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols (1977), and London Calling (1979) are three musical examples of one culture made by relegated icons and subversive quotes.19 Poster collages, pins, piercings, and tattoos make a point alongside the ‘do it yourself’ culture, as well as graffiti and stencil art. As an example, one could recall Christopher Morris’ photographic series NYC subway 1981 (1981) in which the resonances between reality and fiction seem improbable today. The underground built environment full of trash and painted with spray tags turned a new space typology, continuously busy with the indigent and homeless. In effect, in these alternative urbanscapes, characters previously regarded as marginalized crooks turned into central elements. In the early 1980’s, it is not strange that leading anti-heroes come always as outcasts. Software’s Cobb Anderson, Neuromancer’s Henry Dorsett Case and Molly Millions (aka Sally Shears), or even Snow Crash’s Da5id are, actually, anarchists, hackers, and fugitives. Blade Runner’s Rick Deckard roams through the neon streets looking for relegated replicants, former ‘Off-world (…) slave labour (…), declared illegal on earth’20, but ends up caught as one of them. Between mid 1980’s and the 1990’s, sf was recreating its own counter culture regarding the representation of ‘rebel cities’21 and the visions about the genre. In sf cinema, after Blade Runner, there have been other experiences that relate cyberculture to the digital rise with a punk attitude. Films like Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995), Robert Longo’s Johnny Mnemonic (1995), Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel (1998), or the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix (1999) became

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__________________________________________________________________ refined examples in which the hacker emerges as an adult character. However, if one includes John Badham’s WarGames (1983), James Cameron’s Termitator 2: Judgement Day (1991), or Iain Softley’s Hackers (1995), it is clear that part of the cast always seems sufficiently young to deal with a computer game turned into a global menace but insufficiently adult to be responsible for it. In addition, in sf magazines and fanzines, the same genealogy on city and punk is possible. Omni (1979-1998) and Mondo 2000 (1984/1989-1997)22 come on as two fine examples, even if their end came simultaneously by the late-1990’s following the arrival of Wired (1993), the only global on-going publication dedicated to new technologies and the merging fiction and reality. 4. Transgeographies and Posthumans Since Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Men (1486), monstrosity theme has been connected to Western literature.23 In sf terms, one could frame the origin of the mutable nature of human beings somewhere between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Since then, a (his)story of camouflage and disguise has been explored and further developed with fascinating clues to the body and the city. Expanded and limitless geographies have been linked to amend and degenerate humans. SF comics protagonists like Pete Club, Alcide Nikopol, Spider Jerusalem or Michael Jones deal easily with the boost to their body and mind maintain their social relations and urban territories. Indulgent renegades, they live through the ‘filth’24 and the fury, as John Lydon25 shouts. Captive in their geographies, they are reduced to alien metamorphosis and prosthetic extensions. In La Foire aux Immortels, Horus, an ancient God, uses and abuses Alcide’s body in order to rebel himself against the local Parisian fascist government.26 In Transmetropolitan, on the other hand, Spider looks alienated from political power. His goggles with round-red and rectangle-green coloured lenses allude to the supposition that politics, reality and geography come all together in more than three dimensions. Maybe the monstrosity comes in its figurative ‘domestication’, as left activist and award winning ‘weird’ fiction author China Miéville argues. There is a ‘hegemonic domestication of the dread in humanity and the monstrous’27 and even if it is rather obvious that information and communication have turned to important issues, geographies will maintain their relations with their inhabitants, human or not, widely known or anonymous.

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Notes 1

Written by all the Sex Pistols band members. Now, even if the song’s lyrics were much related to the originally ‘No Future’ title, the track did come out to be ‘God Save the Queen’, due to the Jubilee year. 2 William J. Mitchell, ‘Pulling Glass’ in City of Bits (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). 2-5 3 Based in K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), the narrative location was transferred from San Francisco to LA in order to expose a 2019 humid and dark city. 4 Rem Koolhaas, ‘7. Guide: the Generic City’ in S,M,L,XL edited by Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995). 1239. 5 Blade Runner’s main character. 6 Moebius and Dan O’Bannon, ‘The Long Tomorrow’ in Heavy Metal, Vol. 1, #4. (Rockville Centre-NY: Metal Mammoth Inc., July 1977). 81. 7 Ibid. 82. 8 With its main narrative based in New York City. 9 It is curious that the title of the series is a compound term: ‘trans’ is a Latin prefix meaning ‘through to, [and] beyond’; and ‘metropolitan’ is an adjective with Latin and Greek origins (in the word ‘metrópolis’) meaning ‘uterus’ and ‘city’, as the ‘mother of all cities’. 10 With its main narrative based in Los Angeles. 11 One could yet mention the curious names given to the main genre publishers from that era such as Métal Hurlant magazine and Les Humanoïdes Associés publishing house. 12 Tom Maddox, ‘After the Deluge: Cyberpunk in the ‘80s and ‘90s’ in Thinking Robots, an Aware Internet, and Cyberpunk Librarians (San Francisco: Library and Information Technology Association, 1992). Viewed 5 May 2014,

13 The city’s name of the Judge Dredd narrative in 2000 AD magazine. 14 As Pete is a detective and Spider a journalist. 15 Moebius and Dan O’Bannon, ‘The Long Tomorrow’ in Heavy Metal, Vol. 1, #4. (Rockville Centre-NY: Metal Mammoth Inc., July 1977). 82. 16 Ibid. 84. 17 Enki Bilal, La Foire aux Immortels (Paris: Les Humanoïdes Associés. 1980). 18 18 Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson, ‘Year of the Bastard #4: Hate’ in Transmetropolitan #3 (New York: DC Comics/Vertigo. 1998-1999). 69. 19 The first two albums, specifically, were quite short in length (29min and 34min respectively) but pretty strong in urban content and ideology.

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Ridley Scott (director), Blade Runner [motion picture] (United States of America: Warner Bros. 1982). 21 David Harvey. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London/New York City: Verso. 2012). 22 This one changed its title into Reality Hackers (1988). 23 Imre Bárd, ‘The Doubtful Chances of Choice’ in Frontiers of Cyberspace edited by Daniel Riha (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2012). 5. 24 Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson, ‘Tales of Humans Waste in Transmetropolitan #0 (New York: DC Comics/Vertigo. 2004). 62. 25 The Sex Pistols’ vox. 26 Moreover, one may evoke performing artists like Orlan or Stelarc and the work on their own bodies, as it happens to Alcide and his iron right leg implanted. 27 China Mièville, ‘Marxism and Halloween’ in Socialism: A Weekend of Radical Debates, Politics and Entertainment (28 June 2013).

Bibliography Abbott, Carl. ‘Cyberpunk Cities: Science Fiction Meets Urban Theory’ In Journal of Planning Education and Research, #27, 122-131. November 2007. Bilal, Enki. La Foire aux Immortels. Paris: Les Humanoïdes Associés. 1980. ---, La Femme Piège. Paris: Dargaud. 1986. ---, Froid Équateur. Paris: Les Humanoïdes Associés. 1992. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacros e Simulação, Lisbon: Relógio d’Água, 1991. De Haven, Tom; and Bruce Jensen. Neuromancer: The Graphic Novel, Vol. 1. Epic Comics. 1989. Ellis, Warren; and Darick W. Robertson, et. al. Transmetropolitan [series]. New York: DC Comics/Vertigo. 1997-2002. Erk, Gul Kaçmaz. ‘Architectural Space and Cyberspace as Represented in Science Fiction Film’ In OASE, #66, 6-27. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005. Gibson, William. Neuromante, Lisbon: Gradiva, 2004.

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__________________________________________________________________ ---. ‘Disneyland with Death Penalty’ In Wired – No1. #04, London/New York City: Condé Nast Publications, September 2008. Viewed on 23 June 2014. Haraway, Donna. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. 149-181. New York: Routledge, 1991. Heuser, Sabine. Virtual Geographies: Cyberpunk at the Intersection of the Postmodern and Science Fiction. Amsterdam/Nova Iorque: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2003. Lemos, André. ‘Ficção Científica Cyberpunk: o Imaginário da Cibercultura’ In Conexão – Comunicação e Cultura, Vol. 3, #6. 9-16. Caxias do Sul: UCS, 2004. Miller, R. Bruce; and Milton T. Wolf ed. Thinking Robots, an Aware Internet, and Cyberpunk Librarians. San Francisco: Library and Information Technology Association, 1992. Mitchell, William J.. City of Bits. Cambridge-MA: MIT Press, 1996. Moebius; and O’Bannon, Dan. ‘The Long Tomorrow’ In Heavy Metal, Vol. 1, #4. 80-87. Rockville Centre-NY: Metal Mammoth Inc., July 1977. ---. ‘The Long Tomorrow: Part 2’ In Heavy Metal, Vol. 1, #5. 65-72. Rockville Centre-NY: Metal Mammoth Inc., August 1977. Office for Metropolitan Architecture; Rem Koolhaas; and Bruce Mau. S,M,L,XL. New York: Monacelli Press, 1995. Riha, Daniel ed. Frontiers of Cyberspace. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2012. Scott, Ridley (director). Blade Runner [motion picture]. United States of America: Warner Bros., 1982. Joao Rosmaninho DS has a BA in Architecture, a MSc in Communication Sciences, and is a PhD student in Architectural Culture. He is faculty staff at the University of Minho. Joao was a visiting fellow at Harvard University in 2013 and a visiting research student at the University College London in 2014.