Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects: Imaging Gothic From the Nineteenth Century to the Present 9780719089770

Table of contents :
Title page
Imprint
Contents
Notes on contributors
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: monstrous media/spectral subjects
Part I Between text and image
2 Gothic wars - media’s lust: on the cultural afterlife of the war dead
3 Kingdom of shadows: fin-de-siècle gothic and early cinema
4 ‘A mirror with a memory’: the development of the negative in Victorian gothic
5 Modern phantasmagorias and visual culture in Wilkie Collins’s Basil
Part II Sounding spectres
6 ‘The earth died screaming’: Tom Waits’s Bone Machine
7 Ghosts of the Gristleized
Part III Moving media
8 ‘Nineteenth century (up-to-date) with a vengeance’: vampirism, Victorianism and collage in Guy Maddin's Dracula – Pages from a Virgin's Diary
9 Spectrality and the deconstruction of the cinema in Neil Burger’s The Illusionist and Steven Millhauser's short stories
10 Performing fabulous monsters: re-inventing the gothic personae in bizarre magick
11 Body genres, night vision and the female monster: REC and the contemporary horror film
12 You have been saved: digital memory and salvation
Index

Citation preview

Monstrous media/spectral subjects Imaging gothic from the nineteenth century to the present Edited by Fred Botting and Catherine Spooner

Monstrous media/spectral subjects

Board of General Editors Elisabeth Bronfen, University of Zurich, Switzerland Steven Bruhm, University of Western Ontario, Canada Ken Gelder, University of Melbourne, Australia Jerrold Hogle, University of Arizona, USA (Chair) Avril Horner, Kingston University, UK William Hughes, Bath Spa University, UK Editorial Advisory Board Glennis Byron, University of Stirling, UK Robert Miles, University of Victoria, Canada David Punter, University of Bristol, UK Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield, UK Anne Williams, University of Georgia, USA Previously published Globalgothic Edited by Glennis Byron EcoGothic Edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes

Monstrous media/ spectral subjects Imaging gothic from the nineteenth century to the present

Edited by Fred Botting and Catherine Spooner

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2015 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 0 7190 8977 0 hardback First published 2015 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Arno Pro by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow

Contents

Series editors’ preface page vii Notes on contributors ix Acknowledgements xii   1 Introduction: monstrous media/spectral subjects Fred Botting and Catherine Spooner

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Part I: Between text and image   2 Gothic wars – media’s lust: on the cultural afterlife of the war dead Elisabeth Bronfen   3 Kingdom of shadows: fin-de-siècle gothic and early cinema Paul Foster   4 ‘A mirror with a memory’: the development of the negative in Victorian gothic Gregory Brophy

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  5 Modern phantasmagorias and visual culture in Wilkie Collins’s Basil 56 Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

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Contents

Part II: Sounding spectres   6 ‘The earth died screaming’: Tom Waits’s Bone Machine 73 Steen Christiansen   7 Ghosts of the Gristleized Dean Lockwood

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Part III: Moving media   8 ‘Nineteenth century (up-to-date) with a vengeance’: vampirism, Victorianism and collage in Guy Maddin’s Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary 103 Dorothea Schuller   9 Spectrality and the deconstruction of the cinema in Neil Burger’s The Illusionist and Steven Millhauser’s short stories 116 Jean-François Baillon 10 Performing fabulous monsters: re-inventing the gothic personae in bizarre magick Nik Taylor and Stuart Nolan

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11 Body genres, night vision and the female monster: REC and the contemporary horror film Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

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12 You have been saved: digital memory and salvation Stephen Curtis

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Index171

Series editors’ preface

Series editors’ preface

Each volume in this series contains new essays on the many forms assumed by – as well as the most important themes and topics in – the ever-expanding range of international ‘Gothic’ fictions from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Launched by leading members of the International Gothic Association (IGA) and some editors and advisory board members of its journal, Gothic Studies, this series thus offers cutting-edge analyses of the great many variations in the Gothic mode over time and all over the world, whether these have occurred in literature, film, theatre, art, several forms of cybernetic media, or other manifestations ranging from ‘Goth’ group identities to avant garde displays of aesthetic and even political critique. The ‘Gothic Story’ began in earnest in 1760s England, both in fiction and drama, with Horace Walpole’s efforts to combine the ‘ancient’ or supernatural and the ‘modern’ or realistic romance. This blend of anomalous tendencies has proved itself remarkably flexible in playing out the cultural conflicts of the late Enlightenment and of more recent periods. Antiquated settings with haunting ghosts or monsters and deep, dark secrets that are the mysteries behind them, albeit in many different incarnations, continue to intimate what audiences most fear in both the personal subconscious and the most pervasive tensions underlying Western culture. But this always unsettling interplay of conflicting tendencies has expanded out of its original potentials as well, especially in the hands of its greatest innovators, to appear in an astounding variety of expressive, aesthetic and public manifestations over time. The results have transported this inherently ­boundary-breaking mode

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across ­geographical and cultural borders into ‘Gothics’ that now appear throughout the world: in the settler communities of Canada, New Zealand and Australia; in such post-colonial areas as India and Africa; in the Americas and the Caribbean; and in East Asia and several of the islands within the entire Pacific Rim. These volumes consequently reveal and explain the ‘globalization’ of the Gothic as it has proliferated across two-and-a-half centuries. The General Editors of this series and the editors of every volume, of course, bring special expertise to this expanding development, as well as the underlying dynamics, of the Gothic. Each resulting collection, plus the occasional monograph, therefore draws together important new studies about particular examples of the international Gothic – past, present, or emerging – and these contributions can come from both established scholars in the field and the newest ‘rising stars’ of Gothic studies. These scholars, moreover, are and must be just as international in their locations and orientations as this Series is. Interested experts from throughout the globe, in fact, are invited to propose collections and topics for this series to Manchester University Press. These will be evaluated, as appropriate, by the General Editors, members of the Editorial Advisory Board, and/or other scholars with the requisite expertise so that every published volume is professionally put together and properly refereed within the highest academic standards. Only in this way can the International Gothic series be what its creators intend: a premiere world-wide venue for examining and understanding the shape-shifting ‘strangeness’ of a Gothic mode that is now as multicultural and multi-faceted as it has ever been in its long, continuing and profoundly haunted history.

Notes on contributors

Jean-François Baillon teaches film and literature at the English Department of Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France. He has published articles on Ken Loach and Lindsay Anderson and on British horror cinema. He is currently writing a history of British cinema. Fred Botting is a Professor in English at Kingston University, London. His publications include Gothic, newly released in a second edition (Routledge, 2013), Gothic Romanced (Routledge, 2008) and Limits of Horror (Manchester University Press, 2008). Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor at the English Department of the University of Zurich. Publications include: Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester University Press, 1992), The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents (Princeton University Press, 1998), Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2004), Specters of War: Hollywood’s Engagement with Military Conflict (Rutgers University Press, 2013) and Night Passages: Philosophy, Literature, Film (Columbia University Press, 2013). Gregory Brophy is an adjunct lecturer in the Department of English at McGill University, Canada. He has recently completed his dissertation ‘Graphomania: Composing Subjects in Victorian Gothic Fiction’. He has published in Scope and Victorian Review and is a founding member of the Victorianist blog thefloatingacademy.com.

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Steen Christiansen is Associate Professor of English at Aalborg University, Denmark. His research focuses on visual culture, embodiment and media. He has recently published articles on Darren Aronofsky, zombies and post-cinema. Stephen Curtis is an Associate Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, UK, specialising in Shakespeare. His doctoral thesis was entitled An Anatomy of the Tragedy of Blood. His research interests also include contemporary Gothic in various media, and digital theory and literature. Paul Foster completed his PhD, ‘The Gaze and Subjectivity in Fin-deSiècle Gothic’ at the University of Chester and now teaches in further education. He has contributed to a collection of essays on screen adaptations of literature. Dean Lockwood is a Senior Lecturer in Media Theory in the School of Media, University of Lincoln, UK. His recent research has focused on the role of ‘noise’ in the affective politics of media ecologies. Cloud Time, a book written with Rob Coley, which extends these concerns to the culture of ‘cloud computing’, was published by Zero Books in 2012. Stuart Nolan is a Research Magician in Residence at Pervasive Media Studio and the University of Bristol working on The Mindreading Web. His Mindreading Robots, IdeoBird and OuijaBird, were featured in the BBC Click Christmas Special, The Guardian, and US Wired’s special Connectivity 2.0 publication. He works with traditional sleightof-hand conjuring, psychological illusion, memory feats, sideshow tradition, and bespoke technology. He recently deceived over 700 organisations just to prove a point. Dorothea Schuller is Subject Librarian for English at Göttingen State and University Library, Germany. She is writing her PhD thesis on H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and has taught extensively at the English Department of Göttingen University. Her publications include essays on Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, Shakespeare’s cross-dressing comedies and Richard Matheson’s, I Am Legend. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Her publications

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include The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic (Ashgate, 2010) and a co-edited volume with Justin Edwards on Pop Gothic: The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2012), as well as articles on the American combat film, queer theory, Edgar Allan Poe, War Gothic and the history of Gothic criticism. Catherine Spooner is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Lancaster University, UK, and co-president of the International Gothic Association. Her publications include Fashioning Gothic Bodies (Manchester University Press, 2004), Contemporary Gothic (Reaktion, 2006) and, co-edited with Emma McEvoy, The Routledge Companion to Gothic (2007). She is currently writing Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic for Bloomsbury. Laurence Talairach-Vielmas is Professor of English at the University of Toulouse (UTM) and associate researcher at the Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris. Her publications include Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels (Ashgate, 2007) and Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic (The University of Wales Press, 2009). She is also the editor of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Thou Art the Man (Valancourt Books, 2008). Nik Taylor is Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Huddersfield and co-editor of The Journal of Performance Magic. He is coordinator of the Magic Research Group and currently undertaking research in paranormal entertainment. A mystery entertainer himself, Nik specialises in Bizarre Magic, Sideshow, Séance and Divination. He recently advised on the Thackray Medical Museum’s The Magic of Medicine exhibition. He is a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians and The British Society of Mystery Entertainers.

Acknowledgements

This volume was inspired by papers from ‘Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects: the Ninth Biennial Conference of the International Gothic Association’, held at Lancaster University, 21–4 July 2009. As editors we would like to thank not only those speakers who ended up contributing to this volume, but also the two hundred or so other participants in the conference, who as speakers, chairs and audience members helped create an intellectually rich and exciting event. Members of the International Gothic Association’s Executive Committee were unstinting in their support for both the conference and this book, and we additionally would like to thank them for their advice and encouragement.

1 Fred Botting and Catherine Spooner

Introduction: monstrous media/ spectral subjects

Monsters and spectres might seem to be opposites: one embodied, tangible, chthonic; the other incorporeal, insubstantial and ethereal. They may conjure different fears too: horror, visceral shock and corporeal repulsion or uncanny sensations of psychic displacement, temporal disturbance and haunting. Yet, as this collection of essays demonstrates, both figures circulate around emergent media from the nineteenth century to the present, colliding with and contaminating one another. The contagion of the monstrous and the spectral is a characteristically gothic effect. In Goya’s celebrated eighteenth-century engraving, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799), the sleeper’s nightmares are monstrous bat and owl-like creatures projected on a shadowy backdrop, a hallucinatory recall of nothing so much as a late eighteenth-century phantasmagoria show. In Goya’s envisioning of the nightmare, monstrous imaginings and spectral effects interpenetrate. Monsters may be reason’s shadowy double, but their form is suggestively determined in the conjunction of technology and entertainment comprised by the magic lantern. The emergence of new technologies, the marvels of modernity and science, is intimately bound up with the production of monsters and ghosts. So much so, perhaps, that it is ‘not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 112). Monstrous media/spectral subjects: across these pairings relationships multiply and numerous configurations emerge. Underpinned (and undermined) by disturbing and obscure movements of monstrosity and spectrality, of monstering and spooking, a key polarisation

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is sustained in interrelations of political, normative systems and subjective orientations. Monsters are unacknowledged, wretched creatures, objects of exclusion and thence figures of fear and threat. But they also come to manifest the effects of systems of domination and dehumanisation that create them. Frankenstein’s creature is the most striking of these: a being of human parts made inhuman, he embodies not only Romantic systems of aesthetic self-production but the revolutionary polemics in which monstrosity concerns political and social change (Botting, 1991: 141–9). Monstrosity is an effect of systems of power, and, at the same time, an unreal, constructed figure; it manifests movements or forces within and beyond all relations, exceeding both objectification and domination. A spectre is an immaterial figure possessed of all-too-real histories and effects, preceding and retro-activating systems of law and subjectivity with an inescapably heterogeneous power; it is also a no-thing and a general disturbance of subjective and system boundaries: ‘it spooks’ [es spukt] (Derrida, 1994: 135). Distinguishing monstrosity and subjectivity in terms of media or spectres implies a distinction of interiority and externality in which the positions and inclinations of beings are defined by the imposition of outside forms and forces: monsters are cast out from human society or made monstrous by their inhumane norms and practices; spectres come back from unknown realms yet also lie at the origins of law and religion, calls for justice, vengeance, repayment of debts. Only temporarily distinguished in terms of inside and outside, however, monstrosity and spectrality remain associated with ambivalence, borders and otherness, disclosing any opposition to be ultimately unstable. Gothic fiction emerged in the middle of an eighteenth century undergoing shifts in the relations between social classes, between landed and commercial power, and amid challenges to colonial and political order. It was, from the start, a monstrous medium: Horace Walpole’s mixing of novel and romance forms was designed to have powerful effects on its readership, transporting them from an actual to an imaginative realm. Romances, opposed to the realism of the emerging novel form, were also monstrous: not only did they present improbable scenarios and fanciful worlds but, in breaking with a form that was attuned to social and moral didacticism, they were considered unnatural and dangerous for a growing, and indiscriminating, readership. Condemned as a ‘new species’ or as a ‘spawn’ threatening familial and political order, the rise of this type of fiction was portrayed as a monster threatening to explode the aesthetic and moral values binding

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society together and letting loose a tide of vicious, sexual and violent energies from within a burgeoning and undisciplined reading public (Matthias, 1805: 422). Monsters, appearing within a form that was itself criticised as monstrous, are linked both to social transformation and to changes in media. In his ‘Reflections on the Novel’, the Marquis de Sade notes the operation and interrelation of both types of change, as well as introducing another medium. Praising the work of Matthew Lewis and Ann Radcliffe, Sade observes that their fictions were the ‘inevitable result of the revolutionary shocks which all of Europe has suffered’ and goes on to explain that, having become ‘monotonous’ in comparison to a reality that was all too exciting, fiction needed to find more extravagant ways of engaging its readership (1989: 109). The germ of a curious and counterintuitive logic is evident: revolutionary excitement, it seems, demanded that fiction become more exciting rather than less; ­stimulating – shocking – readers (as Lewis’s writing certainly did) rather than calming them or assuaging their fears. Much later, the logic is taken up and developed in Walter Benjamin’s (1973) examination of the relationship between the (new) media of modernity – photography and film – and the shocks of industrial and urban life. Another figure, another medium, is also introduced in Sade’s discussion: describing the ‘sorcery and phantasmagoria’ of the new novels, he refers to a popular visual medium of the time, magic lantern shows (1989: 108). Fashionable across Europe during the period of the French Revolution, the shows often projected grisly scenes of death and ghostly visitation, aesthetically terrorising audiences in times of political terror: ‘phantasmagoria’ were bound up with concerns about mechanism, vitality, animism and reality (see Warner, 2006; Jones, 2011). As Terry Castle (1995) has argued, they also raised questions of representation and mediation: inaugurating a new and technological sense of the ghostly, they relocated spectres from a supernatural realm to one that was both medial and psychological, an interplay of reality and the unreal demanding a re-evaluation of ideas of empiricism, subjective perception and the literal and metaphorical power of fictional and visual media. Coleridge used the metaphor to describe the pernicious influence of popular fiction, concerned about how romance reading could reflect and transmit ‘the moving fantasms of one man’s delirium’ to a hundred others (1975: 28). As an apparatus for projection and as metaphor, phantasmagoria suggest the monstrous potential of media in terms of their spectral effects on consciousness, to the point

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that consciousness itself is rendered virtually spectral. In relation to mechanisms of projection, the understanding of reality and its perception change: media can present unreal images as though they were real and provide images of minds possessed by hallucinatory phantasms, simultaneously distorting perception and explaining misperceptions in rational, rather than supernatural terms. Such devices – literally and metaphorically – establish new relationships between mind and world and furnish new modes of understanding at the same time as they apparently obfuscate or blur extant perspectives. The camera obscura – a dark space into which light, through a small aperture, delivers an inverted image of objects ­outside – was an apparatus that furnished numerous metaphors for consciousness, perception and subjectivity. In this respect it participated in the production of individuality, inseparable from a ‘metaphysic of interiority’ defining positions of observation and privatised subjectivity in terms of a ‘decorporealization’ that reduced the body to a phantom (Crary, 1990: 39–41). It was also a metaphor for misperception. Optical devices were used by Karl Marx to describe the ‘mysterious character’ of the commodity and distinguish the effects of ideology on representations of reality: the former – as phantasmagoria – s­ ubstitutes a relation between things in place of social forms, the commodity occulting and the human role in production (1976: 164–9). Elsewhere in Marx’s writings the dominant ideas of a particular time – those of the ruling class – are viewed, through the metaphor of the camera obscura, as inverted, distorted or simulated reflections of reality. But, as Sarah Kofman reads Marx’s use of the figure, there is no simple reality behind the reflection that can be easily recovered: ‘ideology is not the reflection of real relations but that of a world already transformed and enchanted. It is the reflection of a reflection, the phantasm of a phantasm’ (1997: 11). Phantasmagoria, anticipating media operations more generally, do not present things or thoughts directly but increasingly envelop the world in folds of simulation. Indeed, Walter Benjamin’s use of the phantasmagoria extends to the point, it seems, of describing the entirety of modernity’s experience, from the effects of mechanical production to intoxications with commodities, shops, crowds and exhibitions (1999: 8–14). By the twentieth century (new) media crowd the aesthetic marketplace pressing literature with visual, sonic and graphic forms that disarm its apparent stability and open it to diverse and fluid movements. Based on the writing central to the ‘discourse-network’ ini-

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tiating modernity – the system of language, learning, recording and circulation that allowed bureaucracies and socio-political institutions to regulate the world, the Word of post-Romantic literature is pushed aside by media affecting different senses and using new techniques of inscription, storage and accessibility. These – photography, audio recording, typing and moving images – emerge in the nineteenth century and engender new spectres and, significantly, autonomous flows of data and different modes of ‘technological reproducibility’ (Kittler, 1999: 130). The spectral relation then changes from that haunting author and reader to the multiple discontinuities put into effect by the audibility or visibility of ghosts. It is a world perceived by Franz Kafka as increasingly – and fatally for humans – spectral: ghosts thrive amid new forms of communication, while humans are left to perish (Kafka, 1959: 229). Vampires, too, seem to thrive on the disjunctions of media autonomy: barely traceable in the Kodak prints, guide books, phonographs and legal and commercial ledgers and railway timetables of Dracula, it is only when this disparate, very modern, assemblage of information is unified that the undead can be tracked. Indeed, in the heady urban centres of Victorian Europe from the middle of the nineteenth century commodities became desirably and deliriously phantasmagorical, immaterial and fleeting, like the negatives and shadows that flickered on screen or crackled on wax cylinders. Media ghostliness appears originary, spectrality a primary if immaterial condition: negative, shadow, light, ink, acoustic trace. Though photography might capture life as though it were art – Henry Fox Talbot’s idea of the ‘pencil of nature’, say – the image is still, life frozen, paralysed, suspended, ripped from time and bound to death: ‘this will be and that has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake’ (Barthes, 1984: 96). Monsters and spectres appear, disperse and proliferate in the movements of and between media forms, leaving ghostly subjects in their wake. The movement itself displaces the habitual practices, perceptions and assumptions surrounding media circulations, receptions and reproductions thereby rendering familiar modes strange: from being the message, the glow of a new neon light visible rather than the word it spells out (McLuhan, 1964: 8–9); the medium must efface itself to produce spectral effects. When a medium is new it does not produce what Brian Rotman calls ‘ghost effects’. Spectres are secondary, a result of processes of remediation depending on habituation and effacement of their media origins. Effects become evident owing to transitions

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between media and their subjective correlates: from the gestural or proprioceptive sense of identity associated with the moving body in space to the spoken and written self, the medium must become familiar to the point of invisibility for a ‘media-enabled ghost construct’ to become perceptible (2007: 78). A ‘ghost effect’ marks the emergence of strangeness and signals displacements in the structures of media production, reception and naturalisation in which specific selves and normal realities take their bearings. With new media and their pluralised, networked selves (all at once gestural, haptic, spoken, visual, textual, simultaneously dis- and re-embodied), ghosts are traces of previous media formations and prior senses of (mediated) selfhood, belatedly visible, shadowy, both after-effects and after-affective. The ghosts of the digital age await, their emergence dependent on their media becoming unnoticeable: ‘only when the network-induced perturbations of the space–time of their users have stabilized, when their effect has become naturalized and invisible, can a unified, planet-wide subject position, an electronically mediated encounter able to refer, via the unified planetary network, to itself, become available’ (2007: 79). When, or if, that happens, there will be new ghosts. Teratology and hauntology have spawned their own disciplines and their own academic industries; nevertheless, their cross-contamination is seldom remarked. The essays in this volume animate monstrous and spectral figures in order to explore emergent media from the magic lantern and the photograph in the nineteenth century to the digital forms of the twenty-first. Paying attention to the media through which gothic narratives are disseminated, representations of media in those narratives and the gothicisation of media in wider culture, these essays demonstrate in dynamic and multiple ways how monstrous media and spectral subjects are inextricably linked. The first section of the book, ‘Between text and image’, explores the spectral effects that new imaging technologies trace in the text, ranging from the magic lantern in the mid-nineteenth century to the digital imaging of the present. It begins with Elisabeth Bronfen’s daring cross-mapping of First World War poetry by Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen with George A. Romero’s zombie films. Through Bronfen’s critical reading this initially unlikely pairing reveals, in Mieke Bal’s terms, the poetry’s ‘preposterous’ gothic resonances. Romero’s films, in turn, exhibit a concern with war, from echoes of Vietnam in Night of the Living Dead (1968) to a more extended exploration of the media reporting of war in Diary of the Dead (2007). According to Bronfen, the latter film maps an ethical crisis in

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which official reporting withholds crucial information while unofficial material provides an unmediated excess of information. As she argues, ‘Diary of the Dead uses the cinematic spectacle of the revenant to force us to confront an ethical crisis raised by the ubiquity of digital images and the visual lust that goes in tandem with a freedom to shoot and disseminate images at will.’ The remainder of the opening section excavates the historical emergence of new imaging technologies and their representation in nineteenth-century fiction. Paul Foster provides a comprehensive reading of proto-cinematic qualities in fin-de-siècle gothic fiction, suggesting that emergent cinema is a crucial interpretative context for their spectral and uncanny qualities. Key texts of the fin-de-siècle gothic canon, including The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1888), The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) and Dracula (1897), deploy effects reminiscent of filmic techniques such as reverse motion and double exposure. Foster concludes that ‘if there was something “gothic” about emergent cinema, there was something “cinematic” about the late-Victorian gothic revival’. Gregory Brophy presents a comparable reading of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) in relation to Victorian photographic discourses. Brophy explores the concepts of the ‘negative’ and the ‘optogram’, or image fixed on the retina at the moment of death, suggesting that Marsh exploits these figures in order to explore the interiority of his text’s narrators, creating a kind of ‘recalcitrant machine that performs its work stubbornly within’, gesturing ‘towards intensive experience without ever quite managing to express, externalise, or objectively account for what has been implanted’. Through the inverse gaze of the photographic negative, the subject is exposed, no longer the master of the gaze but curiously vulnerable to it. Finally, Laurence Talaraich-Vielmas reads Wilkie Collins’s early novel Basil; A Story of Modern Life (1852) as a deliberate modernising of the gothic, with the eponymous hero haunted by the phantasmagoric images produced by newly emergent urban consumer culture. Modern visual culture in the form of commodities and spectacle stimulates the nerves; new technologies such as the thaumatope and zoetrope offer new ways of conceptualising how the brain perceives and processes such images. As Talaraich-Vielmas argues, ‘Collins’s use of the trope of optical illusion to shape his gothic narrative reveals the ways in which, throughout the nineteenth century, optical devices figured as instruments of imagination even as they extended the faculty of sight.’ In all these chapters, gothic is insistently

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modern, ‘nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance’, as Dracula’s Jonathan Harker and the title of Dorothea Schuller’s essay later in the volume would have it. Our second section, ‘Sounding spectres’, explores the ways in which the monstrous properties of contemporary avant-garde popular music engage listeners in ways that are haunting and haunted. Steen Christiansen’s analysis of Tom Waits’s 1992 album, Bone Machine, proposes that monstrosity as a key means of understanding the work. For Christiansen, monstrosity is figured in Waits’s use of noise and timbre to disrupt conventional listening patterns. Drawing on David Wills’s concept of dorsality, in which the human is constituted in and through the technological, Christiansen argues that dorsal music employs unexpected sounds and disruptive musical technologies in order to surprise and sometimes disconcert the listener. This disruptive and disrupted listening experience enables Waits to realise in auditory form a tradition of American gothic that identifies with the outsider. In ‘Ghosts of the Gristleized’, Dean Lockwood continues to explore musical disruption, here produced by post-punk industrial band Throbbing Gristle (TG). As Lockwood explains, TG’s cacophonous experimentation with noise, mediated through a range of electronic instruments and devices, was intended to cause visceral bodily affect. Their ‘sonic assault’ challenged the notion of passive consumption and aimed to effect a bodily transformation that Lockwood reads in gothic terms, as becoming other or ‘abhuman’ (Hurley, 1996). While the moment of transgression that TG enacted has now closed, Lockwood argues that their ‘affective, acoustic mission is still a haunting, critical reminder to, in Shaviro’s phrase, “explore the contours of the prison we find ourselves in”’ (2010: 137). Despite the aggressive modernity of TG’s music, which might seem inimical to nostalgia, it evokes a lost moment when resistance still appeared possible. Our final section, ‘Moving media’, explores the transitions between different kinds of media and performance – novel, ballet, film, short stories, performance magic, documentary, digital technologies and television. Narratives move from one medium to another, but are also media in motion, capturing elusive effects or experimenting with illusion. Chapters 8 and 9 analyse cinematic adaptations of literary texts, with a twist. Guy Maddin’s 2002 film, Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, analysed by Dorothea Schuller, is not a straight dramatic interpretation of Stoker’s novel but captures a performance by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, set to a score by Mahler. Maddin draws on silent film

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iconography in order to re-envision Dracula as Aesthetic text, maintaining fidelity to the novel’s plot while simultaneously performing a critical reading that brings issues of gender and imperialism to the fore. Neil Burger’s film The Illusionist (2006), meanwhile, discussed by JeanFrançois Baillon, is based on a short story by Stephen Millhauser about performance magic, which enables the film-maker to ask far-reaching questions about the nature of cinematic illusion. Central to the portrayal of magic on screen is, again, the phantasmagoria show. Baillon suggests that through his careful manipulation of these effects, Burger’s film ‘display[s] the mechanics that lie at the heart of the cinematic illusion’ and therefore complicates easy divisions between reality and illusion: ‘we have entered the realm of fiction, a strange world in which such boundaries are intrinsically blurred’. Magic is also the subject of Nik Taylor and Stuart Nolan’s ‘Performing fabulous monsters’, but their concern is not with fictional representations of magic but rather the way that performance magic has been inspired by gothic fiction. In particular, they seek to draw academic attention to ‘bizarre magick’, an area of performance magic that has been overlooked in its contemporary manifestations. Bizarre magick is highly literary in form, emphasising story-telling and frequently drawing on gothic narrative in order to structure its performances, positioning the practitioner as Van Helsing or conjuring up Lovecraftian creatures. Taylor and Nolan suggest that in its characteristic tension between comedy and philosophical seriousness, bizarre magick is itself a kind of ‘fabulous monster’. The final two chapters explore the ways in which twenty-first-century technologies are imaged on screen. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet offers insight into the uses of new technologies in the horror film, focusing on Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s REC (2007) in order to explore the possibilities of the hand-held camera in the ‘found footage’ film. In particular, the ‘night vision’ effect counters the drive towards realism otherwise encouraged by the use of the hand-held camera, to create spectral and uncanny effects. As Soltysik Monnet shows, these effects inform the changing uses of the female monster and ‘final girl’ in the horror film. Stephen Curtis, on the other hand, finds that profound questions about ‘the impact of technology on our notions of individual subjectivity and consciousness’ are addressed in a double episode of the BBC TV series Doctor Who. In ‘Silence in the Library’ and ‘Forest of the Dead’, the Doctor’s escapades on a vast Borgesian library-planet in which the patrons’ consciousness is saved onto a giant computer

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reveal ‘anxieties about the uncanny nature of digital memory and what it means to save and to be saved’. For Curtis, the action of saving a digital file is inherently spectral: ‘We must put faith in the computer, give up our work to the invisible, and be prepared to conjure forth a ghostly revenant to interrogate and save again.’ Doctor Who explicitly collapses the religious and technological connotations of the words ‘saved’, evoking an ontological crisis for its digital/spectral subjects. As Curtis reminds us, gothicised technologies often function to disrupt the Whiggish teleology of scientific progress, short-circuiting the vision of an onward march towards an enlightened future. In each of the media considered here, gothic figures flourish, cross-contaminate and multiply, emerging in gaps and breaks, in ruptures between being and appearing, reality and representation, past and future. The media in question are, furthermore, crucial to this process: whether voice, writing, type, image, projection, vibration, hand, body, or something else, the modes that spectrally body forth or conjure up the gothic articulate the crises, emergences and ruptures of which they are born(e). Monstrous media/spectral subjects: the chapters that follow attempt to capture the specificities and complexities of technology’s monsters and ghosts. References Barthes, R. (1984), Camera Lucida, trans. R. Howard, London: Fontana. Benjamin, W. (1973), Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn, London: Fontana. Benjamin, W. (1999), The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, Cambridge MA. and London: Belknap Press. Botting, F. (1991), Making Monstrous, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Castle, T. (1995), The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coleridge, S. T. (1975), Biographia Literaria (1817), ed. George Watson, London: Dent. Crary, J. (1990), Techniques of the Observer, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. (1994), Specters of Marx, trans. P. Kamuf, London and New York: Routledge. Hurley, K. (1996), The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, D. J. (2011), Gothic Machine: Textualities, Pre-Cinematic Media and Film in Popular Visual Culture, 1670–1910, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Kafka, F. (1959), Letters to Milena, ed. W. Haas, trans. T. and J. Stern, New York: Schocken Books.

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Kittler, F. (1999), Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. G. Winthrop-Young and M. Wutz, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kofman, S. (1997), Camera Obscura of Ideology, trans. W. Straw, London: Athlone. Marx, K. (1976), Capital, Vol. I, trans. B. Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Matthias, T. J. (1805), The Pursuits of Literature, 13th edn, London: Thomas Becket. McLuhan, M. (1964), Understanding Media, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Rotman, B. (2007), ‘Ghost Effects’, differences 18.1: 53–86. Sade, D. A. F., Marquis de (1989), ‘Reflections on the Novel’, in One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, trans. A. Wainhouse and R. Seaver, London: Arrow Books, pp. 91–116. Shaviro, S. (2010), Post-Cinematic Affect, Ropley, Hants: John Hunt Publishing. Warner, M. (2006), Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors and Media into the Twenty-first Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Part I

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2 Elisabeth Bronfen

Gothic wars – media’s lust: on the cultural afterlife of the war dead

At the end of his remarkable elegiac poem in praise of war, ‘1914’, Rupert Brooke expresses the wish that, ‘If I should die, think only this of me:/ That there’s some corner of a foreign field/ That is for ever England’ (Roberts, 1996: 71). On first view, this image of a soldier’s grave seems to have little to do with gothic sensibility. Yet looked at ‘preposterously’, as Mieke Bal (2009) proposes of past art being read in terms of the effects of its subsequent recyclings, the text engenders productive critical reversals. To read it through the lens of George Romero’s Diary of the Dead (2007), as this essay proposes, treats the zombie film as a recycling of a notion of war’s haunting inherited from World War I, to the extent that the poetic rendition of a soldier, decomposing in foreign soil, assumes a far more sinister tone. Dislocating the boundary between the living and the dead precisely by virtue of the cultural afterlife with which Rupert Brooke endows the soldier’s corpse, the remains appear as part of an invading army which posthumously continues to contaminate the foreign country’s soil. This preposterous cross-mapping takes its cue from the start of Romero’s narrative, which begins with the discussion of a news event pertaining to an immigrant man who has killed his wife, his child and then himself. Under the implicit auspices of Homeland Security’s border paranoia after 9/11, this event prompts, in the film, a media discussion about the threat of the illegal entrance of foreign workers into the USA. In the course of the film, the discussion of an illicit border crossing turns into a far more toxic boundary transgression from death back to life. By cross-mapping Brooke’s lyrical imagery with the lore

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of voodoo zombies, my chapter proposes that what we get is a sense of an uncanny infestation being anticipated. Brooke’s sonnet anticipates this conflation of an actual geography with a blurring of the boundary between the living and the dead: his mournful metaphors summon up a body, which, left to rot in a foreign field, will, by virtue of physically merging with the soil, impregnate this foreign site with English culture. Forever a hybrid site, the grave combines two cultures, previously at war. By virtue of this violent death at the front, the notion of culture, in the sense of a set of socially transmitted beliefs connected with home, comes to be transformed into its biological definition, namely the cultivation of soil for growing plants. Indeed, over the dead body of an English soldier, the notion of culture deconstructs itself so as to show the visceral materiality that was always the hidden kernel inscribed in the poetic mediality of Brooke’s metaphors. The body, growing after death, emerges as the uncanny inversion of cultural values and institutions that increase in a foreign place, having been brought there by imperialist armed forces. And the poetic image of commemoration Brooke creates is also that of the dead soldier he will, in fact, become before the war is over. Implicitly English culture experiences an afterlife in this war zone precisely in the shape of bodily haunting: the rich foreign soil contains ‘richer dust’, English remains still representing the country the soldier fought and died for (Roberts, 1996: 71). Brooke’s poetical rendition turns a metaphorical relation into a literal one. The soldier, who symbolically stands in for his country, does so quite literally with his body. Even the dust lives on materially. An eternal dust, the decomposed body of a dead Englishman, merges with the decomposed materials of the foreign, enemy soil, to produce a cultural zombie – a foreign field which is forever England. To give historical substance to the preposterous cross-mapping it is worth recalling that the connection between war zones and zombies has a vibrant history in the American popular imagination. In his Book of the Dead, Jamie Russell (2006) traces the emergence of zombies back to the American military involvement in the Caribbean between 1900 and 1930. As US armed forces began introducing Jim Crow laws of segregation, the zombie proved useful to the occupation, serving as a powerful emblem for anxieties and fantasies about the other ‘black’ body of the Caribbean people. The desire to turn the strange, ethnically other, peoples whom the American troops encountered south of their national border into exotic bodies they could control, not least

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of all by feeding them into their own categories of racial segregation, in turn produced a strangely resilient conversation between military occupation of Haiti and anthropological research into ancient voodoo rituals and superstitions. Precisely because North American researchers and soldiers came to describe their experiences in this particular corner of a foreign field in travelogues and letters home, stories of the living dead entered the American popular imagination, helping to transform the nightmare about imperialist wars in exotic places into culturally useful narratives. As such, the dead who return from their graves break open not only the boundary between death and life. They also trouble the notion of geographic boundaries by importing a particular breed of Caribbean superstition into a predominantly white western rationality. The movement, of course, is in the opposite direction to the one described by Brooke. The dead who belong to a land foreign to the USA, and who initially return to haunt their own communities come, by virtue of a transferral on the level of mediality (the shift from Caribbean death rituals to American popular culture), to haunt the families back home of those who took part in the military occupation. The haunting of these translocated zombies no longer occurs on the level of ritual, as it initially did in Haiti, but precisely on that site where, in modern technological cultures, with the invention of photography and film, magic was relocated: the cinema screen. In terms of the correspondence between war and zombie culture, poets less idealistic about battles fought in the name of nation than Brooke drew out more explicit analogies between soldiers, rotting in No Man’s Land or the trenches of northern France, and the stock figures of vampires and ghosts known to them from gothic lore. Wilfred Owen, for example, not only embellishes the horror of seeing his friends dismembered in battle by offering visceral images of bodies that, in death, blend with the earth. ‘Strange Meeting’ explicitly invokes the gothic tradition of enemies re-encountering each other after death: ‘It seemed that out of battle I escaped/ Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped/ Through granites which titanic wars had groined.’ In this war heterotopia, a counter-site to the actual battlefield, his dead soldier encounters ‘encumbered sleepers groaning’, and while he is probing them, one springs up and stares at him with his dead smile. The final stanza explores what might be called a zombie’s fatal embrace: ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend./ I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned/ Yesterday through me as you jabbed and

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killed./ I parried; but my hands were loath and cold./ Let us sleep now’ (Roberts, 1996: 375). Owen self-consciously has recourse to a common trope of war literature, namely the reunion on the battlefield of friends turned enemies owing to a political struggle (as the two boyhood lads in D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation [1915]) or enemies discovering that while their politics may differ, they share a common culture (as is the case with the two officers in Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion [1937]). Yet what is pointedly gothic is Owen’s insistence that this conversation takes place between two dead men who have come alive again to address to each other and, in so doing, appeal to us as well: the poetic voice describing this uncanny encounter is marked as a spectral one, returning not just from some corner of a foreign field but from a mass grave. Owen’s alignment of the spectral voice of a dead soldier and the voice of poetry can be extended to the manner in which cinema (a visual poetry of sorts) is not only a spectral medium but one animating dead bodies: what we see flickering on the screen are visual effects of presence. The actors and their world are irrevocably absent, made present again simply by virtue of light projected through film onto a white screen in the dark. The expressionist film-makers who began bringing vampire literature to the screen, notably Robert Wiene (Cabinet of Dr Caligari [1920]) or Tod Browning (Dracula [1931]) understood film to be an art of revenants. By looking at George Romero’s Diary of the Dead in light of an understanding of film as a demonic or monstrous medium, I aim to address a specific conception of cinematic spectrality: its engagement with death produced by war. Two critical presuppositions subtend this cross-mapping. The first treats Romero’s fifth film in his zombie series as a sober comment on the Iraq War, particularly regarding the problematic limitation of the embedded journalism that has informed our understanding of it. At one point in the film we hear a bewildered woman explaining to someone interviewing her, ‘We’re in a war, but I don’t know who the war is with.’ If Romero thus taps into a widespread sense of unease regarding the censorship implicit in embedding journalists with fighting troops, it is fruitful to recall that the first of his zombie films, Night of the Living Dead, had already explicitly referenced the cultural influence of the Vietnam War. When the film came out in 1968, the American (and international) audience was more than familiar with search and destroy missions and could immediately see the connection between local militia and US combat units. They would immediately connect the sound of helicopters and the dehumanised

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language of the sheriff regarding the extermination of the zombies with what they were seeing in the news on TV each day: one commentator on the war claimed, after the event, that if Lyndon B. Johnson had seen this film he might never ‘have permitted the napalming of the Vietnamese’ (cit. Russell, 2005: 69). It is, however, equally important to remember that the Vietnam War was the first and only American war in which war correspondents were allowed to go wherever they wanted, photograph whatever they wanted and have these photographs published. The controlling of all images and stories coming from the battle front in Iraq, as deplorable as this censorship may be, is the cultural norm. In Diary of the Dead, such preference for an oblique war correspondence finds articulation in the fact that American military engagement in Iraq is encrypted in an ambivalent, multi-layered discussion of media coverage, ranging from paranoid fantasies about the editing of official news by the government to equally paranoid fantasies about the unmanageability of the mass of unofficial information transmitted through the Internet. Indeed, the curious paradox of embedded journalism in Iraq is that it has produced both a lack and a surplus. On the one hand, there are no memorable photographs of this military campaign, comparable to the naked Vietnamese girl running away from her napalmed village, or the Saigon police chief shooting an enemy Vietcong in the head. On the other hand, there is a more curious form of war reporting, and one indeed more befitting of the gothic sensibility Romero plays to when he encrypts his criticism of contemporary war correspondence into a zombie film. Given that the only people who were able to bypass the censorship imposed by the US government were the troops themselves, the most chilling war commentary from Iraq and Afghanistan has emerged from their ranks. Again, the soldier as reporter may not be new, but what is novel pertains to the fact that masses of images can now be transmitted almost immediately through cell-phones and the Internet, circumventing all instances of official control. And it was precisely such images that gained international notoriety when a group of MPs, working the night shift in the prison of Abu Ghraib, mailed their trophy shots to their friends. The second critical presupposition of my reading pertains to the way that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the new (and often unofficial) media of cell-phones and Internet have surfaced as a counter-zone to the official media of television and print news, producing and disseminating what photographic and filmic images always

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are: media revenants. Given this shift in reporting from a war zone, Romero’s gothic sensibility indeed offers one of the most adequate modes of thinking through contemporary war, war trauma and its mediated re-enactment in literary and visual representations. Before, however, looking at his gothic treatment not just of war but the media conflict this brings with it in more depth, two further pieces of historical contextualisation are called for. The first pertains to another writer of gothic fiction, Ambrose Bierce, who by the beginning of the twentieth century, had become well known for his supernatural tales. Yet his first collection of stories, ironically called In the Midst of Life, recalls his occupation as a cartographer for the Union army for three years during the Civil War. These stories not only take as their theme the lives of the soldiers and civilians, who, once the nation officially became divided against itself, found themselves embroiled in a battle that was to anticipate World War I in its technological monstrosity. They also anticipate the poetry that would be written in, and about, the trenches of the Great War, recounting scenes in which the dead transgress the boundary of the grave. Bierce’s writing about the Civil War in a gothic mode begins with an autobiographical piece entitled, ‘What I saw at Shiloh.’ After describing the horrific carnage, the ravaged landscape, and the confusion produced by the fog of war in graphic detail, Bierce ends on an elegiac note: ‘And this was, O so long ago! How they come back to me – dimly and brokenly, but with what a magic spell – those years of youth when I was soldiering!’ With the assurance, ‘again I see …’, Bierce moves to a description of the landscape of war, re-emerging as on a private cinema screen, to unfold its spectral glory: ‘dim valleys of Wonderland … the ghost of an odor from pines … Unfamiliar landscapes demanding recognition, pass, vanish and give way to others’ (2011: 677). The account is rhetorically structured through a process of re-presence and re-absence, reflecting not only on the way all memory and commemoration makes present again what is irrevocably lost, but also the way the mediality of representation (be it verbal or visual) involves a fragile process of re-appearance and re-vanishing. The final invocation of the piece is even more unsettling: ‘Is it not strange that the phantoms of a blood-stained period have so airy a grace and look with so tender eyes? – that I recall with difficulty the danger and death and horrors of the time, and without effort all that was gracious and picturesque? Ah, Youth … Give me but one touch of thine artist hand upon the dull canvas of the Present; gild for but

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one moment the drear and somber scenes of to-day …’ (678). Not only is he misrepresenting his own text (he has no difficulty in producing highly graphic representations of the dangers, death and horror of war), he also explicitly juxtaposes Shiloh with the present, asking to be haunted by zombies who stem from a traumatic past, so as to screen out the dreary scenes of consumerism and corporate violence characteristic of the post-war Gilded Age. He seeks to be consumed by these spectral zombies of his personal history, willing to sacrifice his present life to his recollection of the past: he would ‘willingly surrender an other life than the one that I should have thrown away at Shiloh’ (678). The present he is willing to surrender is decidedly different from the life he should have lost at Shiloh but didn’t. It works as a counterpoint to Brooke’s elegiac poetic voice: Bierce, in a letter, explains that if he were to ask himself what became of the young Ambrose who fought in Chickamauga, he would be tempted to reply that he is dead. A small part of him remains in his memory but the rest is dead and gone (Morris, 1995: 207). Those who return from the war are revenants of themselves and their visions are monstrous spectacles. This is Romero’s point when, in the final scene of Diary of the Dead, the last three survivors (a film professor and his two students) lock themselves in the panic room of a stately mansion and watch the unstoppable invasion of the zombies on the screens of the security cameras as they put the final touches on the film they have been making throughout. They are in a media interzone, between the dead who have returned to the living and the living who have been turned into dead images. Furthermore, our heroine assures us that the images they are sending out into the world are there to warn us, a message from the battle zone for those who hope to survive. The notion of cinema as the demonic medium on which cultural survival rests goes back to one of the first anti-war films, J’Accuse (1919). Romero’s living dead films can be traced back to the way Abel Gance deploys the traumatised war veteran as a visionary of a monstrosity that is the monstrosity of cinema itself (Kaes, 2009: 118). Before he became an officer in the French army, Jean Diaz was a poet, whose texts Gance visualised on screen as mythic visions of idyllic landscapes with scantily clad women. Now, having returned from a particularly horrific battle as the only survivor, he once again invokes his visionary powers, only this time their purpose is to warn the villagers that their deceased are on their way to visit them. The spectacular scene in J’Accuse, of course, offers a multiple vision.

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On the one hand, we see on screen the images which the words of the shell-shocked veteran evokes as the terrified villagers gather around him in the darkened living room of his house, lit only by the light of the fireplace and, as such, functioning as a mise-en-abîme of the cinema itself. The words of the visionary poet Diaz anticipate the coming of the dead and are issued as a warning to those who have survived the battle in their home village. They are called upon to ask themselves whether the lives they have led are worth the sacrifice of their fellow men. On the other hand, we have the poet’s embedded vision, that of the only survivor of battle looking back at the field to see his fellow soldiers replacing the crosses marking their graves and then rising up to form a spectral army which marches back toward the civil world of the living. As this vision unfolds on screen, it offers to the survivors, still huddled around the poet, a monstrous message about the afterlife of those slain in war. As a recollection of his personal vision it serves, of course, to articulate his personal trauma. There is, however, a further aspect to the extraordinary spectacle of the dead soldiers, returning home: a split screen shows, on its lower half, the victorious army marching through the Arc de Triomphe in perfect formation; its upper half presents the dead, with their bandages, crutches and torn cloths, forming a far less orderly but equally determined marching force. On the extra-diegetic level of the film’s narration, this double vision articulates Abel Gance’s radical critique of World War I by offering a visualisation of the two sides entailed in the return from battle, the triumphant survivors topped by their uncanny counterparts. Implicitly, however, this split screen sequence also serves as a self-reflexive comment on the monstrosity of the cinematic medium itself, resurrecting spectres of both the dead and the survivors of war on screen long after both have gone. Cinematic envisioning is inevitably caught up in a relay of revenants, regardless of whether their message concerns a wholesome sense of political life in post-war France, regenerated out of death, or whether it pertains to a more unsettling idea of war dead who refuse to remain buried. Splicing them together in a split screen sequence not only serves to illustrate the mutual implication of the casualties of war and the regeneration of political life through war, but perhaps more disturbingly, the cinematic medium’s implication in such a dialogue with the dead. If what the revenants of J’Accuse perform is not so much a universal fear of death than the need to commemorate very specific deaths – the

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human destruction in the trenches of modern technological warfare – equally noteworthy is the conciliatory ending in which Abel Gance’s depiction culminates. The poet has convinced the villagers not only of the veracity of his monstrous warning but also that they must confess their betrayal of the dead to the dead who have returned to them. Once the zombie soldiers have begun looking through the windows at those huddled inside, the terrified audience of a spectral vision which has suddenly taken on material shape, begins its collective confession, admitting to the partying, embezzling of money and profiteering that occurred during their absence. Precisely because the villagers are willing to engage in a conversation with the dead, willing to listen to and take note of the monstrous warning this zombie invasion entails, their lives will not be endangered. Though death has rendered them strange, those returning are familiar to the survivors, and, because their loved ones are willing to look at and listen to them, they can once again depart peaceably. The final shot of this sequence shows the zombie soldiers, supporting each other while carrying their crosses back to the mass graveyard which has taken the place of the battlefield. Presumably they will bury themselves. If Romero reiterates both aspects of this war-induced monstrosity – dead soldiers returning as zombies and a cinematic language returning them as spectral bodies on screen – he does so in order to pose two far more unsettling questions. Will anyone survive this invasion and is such survival justified? The very last piece of downloaded film in Diary of the Dead is far less uplifting than Gance’s final shots: crazed hunters, using zombies as target practice, have hung a woman by her hair on a tree and shot her in the face. The voice-over pointedly asks: ‘Are we worth saving? You tell me.’ Coming out of a tradition of American popular culture, in which the zombie has come to signify something far more complex than merely a cultural fear of death, Romero is far removed from Gance’s post-World War I restorative pathos. The zombie, growing out of a wide range of cultural anxieties relating to American imperialism and paranoia about political disenfranchisement, has become ‘a potent symbol of the apocalypse … a harbinger of doom. Its very existence hints at the possibility of a world that cannot be contained within the limits of human understanding’ (Russell, 2006: 8). Not reconciliation with the war dead, but rather doom is, indeed, the overarching mood of Diary of the Dead. The film starts with images a cameraman has secretly uploaded on the Internet so as to make public the fact that the corpses of three immigrants came alive again and attacked a news

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team reporting on the murder committed by a desperate father on his family and himself. Debra, the film student protagonist, explains while editing this material that the illegal upload may well have been the cameraman’s way of telling the truth about what was happening. By editing into a quasicoherent cinematic narrative what her boyfriend Jason, a casualty of the zombie invasion, had either filmed or downloaded, she, in turn, is emulating this quest for truth: ‘I’ve added music occasionally for effect hoping to scare you. You see, in addition to trying to tell you the truth, I am hoping to scare you so that maybe you’ll wake up.’ A gothic warning is implicitly the only way the truth can be told in such a catastrophic situation. In terms of the monstrosity of media coverage of war, the warning acknowledges ethical complexity: what is the position of the war correspondent, reporting, witnessing and commemorating while not intervening in a given scene of violence? In what sense does the production of images of death feed a desire for the very media violence that also consumes us? Can the boundary between a dedication to truth-telling and a lust for violent images actually be drawn any more neatly than the one between life and death crossed by zombie invasion? And how are we, the viewers, directly addressed by Debra’s voice-over? To what extent are we implicated in the shooting and editing of film material which, rather than killing, brings the dead back to life on the film screen? To briefly recall the plot: a group of college students, shooting scenes for a horror film project under the tutelage of their professor, Andrew Maxwell, suddenly finds their work interrupted by the first radio news about a zombie invasion. Two of the students leave immediately for the mansion in Philadelphia where the three survivors will ultimately find themselves locked up in a panic room. The other students along with their professor go on a road trip, throughout which Jason insists on recording everything they encounter, so as to use this real life footage for a different horror film, one he calls ‘the Death of Death’. Romero’s concern with the ethics of war reporting uncomfortably straddles various thematic issues. For one, his film students repeatedly address the way official news, under the pressure of government censorship, reedits and redacts material so as to screen out the real danger of the situation and appease the population. At the same time, the unofficial material being posted on the Internet, while giving voice to the clear and present danger, produces a clutter of images and information that is equally distracting. Panic sets in not only because people do not

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know the truth, but also because there are too many personal spins on what might be the truth on the part of uncontrolled bloggers. Given an oversaturation of information, the truth becomes hard to find. Any conscientious reporter may believe herself to be in an intermediary position, telling the truth which is being withheld even while discriminating between fact and hearsay. Yet in her voice-over, Debra admits that she can present the truth only by editing for effect, even if her intention of scaring her audience into waking up is morally justified. Her subjective version is as redacted as all the other media representations of this zombie war. Those reporting are, furthermore, themselves not immune to the fascination of media violence. As many war correspondents have openly admitted, the desire for watching and recording violent events consumes them. The ethical complexity of producing dispatches from a war zone is rendered most poignantly in a hospital scene, where the professor and his students have gone to seek medical help for Mary. She shot herself after driving over three people who were blocking the passage of the bus they are using as their escape vehicle. As they take note of the casualties, strewn on the deserted hospital floors, the film professor, recalling his past experience of battle, explains, ‘in wartime killing comes easily, especially when you don’t have to do it’. He is explicitly criticising the young man, who insists on recording everything with his camera. Watching their former friend, Mary, turning into a zombie, two modes of shooting are possible. While Jason continues to point his camera at her, the professor takes the revolver from one of the students and fires. Zombies undermine semantic meaning: the power to shoot is both physical and mental, with camera and gun. The ironic power of the scene consists in the fact that Maxwell, by invoking his previous wartime experience, can offer what seems to be an unequivocal reading: targeting a body as an enemy justifies cruelty. To the war correspondent, such killing is easy, because the camera allegedly shields him from taking responsibility for the death he is only recording. That the line between friend and enemy, however, is not quite so easily drawn is emphasised when it is their former friend Mary who has ‘turned’, as they put it. Over her dead body, the film professor (functioning as the director Romero’s mirror image), insists on drawing the line. For him and his students to survive, he must shoot his former friend. Yet Diary of the Dead troubles the very distinction between friend and enemy on which war strategy is predicated. The sequence in the hospital is doubled by a second, edited version, in

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which Debra’s spectral voice-over, emerging from the panic room in a Philadelphia villa, points to their complicity in producing images of death to surmount death. We see again vignettes of the shooting that occurred in the hospital, and of other students killing zombies they find lurking on beds and in the corridors as Debra observes: ‘It’s interesting how quickly we find out what we are capable of becoming. Up until that night we had lived predictable lives. Now, we would never be able to predict what might happen next. God had changed the rules on us and surprisingly, we were playing along.’ She is referring both to the ease with which they have become zombie killers and the ease with which her boyfriend Jason insists on recording their own turn from innocent film students to vicious soldiers. Her edited version, doubling and commenting on the actual event, is a cinematic zombie, the re-animation of a different mode of the uncut film material Jason produced at this scene of death. The ethical point of this hospital sequence is complicated by the fact that Debra offers a self-critical analysis of Jason’s lust for images, which clearly relates both to her and us as well. At one point in a shoot-out she hands her camera to her teacher, explaining that it is too easy to use. When Jason taunts her, reminding her that she used to shoot better than him, she replies, ‘That’s why I stopped, I don’t want to become you.’ As the scene dissolves into images of the way both the official and unofficial media are incessantly recording and reporting the catastrophe of the zombie invasion, one newsman explains, ‘Millions of them are out there, driven, compelled to broadcast their particular views of things.’ Debra picks up on the word ‘compelled’, and comments with her own voice-over, ‘Like the man said, Jason was compelled.’ While, on screen, we see her once more putting down the camera and handing it to her professor, we hear her belated reflection: ‘What gets into our heads when we see something horrible … something holds us, but we don’t stop to help, we stop to look.’ During this confession her image has turned into a montage of filmed images of an event of violence as these come to be projected on a series of television screens, until they turn first into the visual static of black and white dots, and then a completely white screen. ‘Compelled’ is an apt description of the mutual implication of zombies, consuming living body tissue, and people consuming images of this consumption because it turns force into a passive act. To be compelled means one is driven to do something by some force which cannot directly be named; one is driven by a desire with no definite

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object. Romero’s argument, I take it, is that a xenophobic culture, responding to the catastrophic events of 9/11 with a declaration of war, prompts fantasies of violence which turn against the American homeland itself. Out of a discussion of illegal immigrants a different form of unlawful boundary crossing emerges, that between life and death. But Diary of the Dead also argues that a culture obsessed with producing and consuming images of violence engenders violence, or at least a greater hunger for its mediated transition, turning us into media zombies. The film refuses to resolve the conundrum, leaving us hanging between a surplus of media information and a need to believe in the story that someone can tell the truth. In the midst of all the visual and vocal cacophony, Debra provides a critical voice, both commenting on Jason’s unflinching war-reporting and herself completing his war reportage. She is split between both positions, compelled to continue a project she has, throughout the film, also radically put into question. Romero’s own film narrative uses Debra to open up a third attitude I want to call the ethical space of a marked aesthetic refiguration. His own doubling of diegesis with meta-narrative, splicing together scenes of violence as they occur with his heroine’s visual and vocal redaction, addresses the troubling manner in which looking at events of violence through a lens or on a screen makes you immune and critically attuned to the affective force of these images, to their intended effect. We cannot be blind to the temptation images of violence have for us, even while we cannot afford to be cynical about the truth-telling power they also contain. In situations of catastrophe, iconoclasm is as unviable an attitude as is visual censorship. The monstrous body of the zombie, poised in an interzone between life and death, embodies not only an epistemological crisis regarding our intellectual ability to distinguish between the animate and the inanimate, the absent and the present body, human and non-human. Nor does the zombie simply bring us face to face with the limits of our human understanding of a world in which binary oppositions no longer hold. Diary of the Dead uses the cinematic spectacle of the revenant to force us to confront an ethical crisis raised by the ubiquity of digital images and the visual lust that goes in tandem with a freedom to shoot and disseminate images at will. As life and death fold into each other – in a panic room and in a movie theatre – our moral categories may come to be disturbed, but not necessarily obliterated. Instead, it is when categories are challenged that an ethical position opens up. The very images that produce such a fateful lust for media violence may well also be the site where

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this critical intervention can occur. What a performance of the mutual implication of zombies and cinematic images draws to our attention is precisely the need to distinguish ethically where we cannot distinguish epistemologically. Then perhaps we can find an answer to the question Diary of the Dead so compellingly leaves open: are we worth saving? References Bal, M. (2009), Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bierce, A. (2011), The Devil’s Dictionary, Tale, & Memoirs, ed. S. T. Joshi, New York: Library of America. Diary of the Dead (2007), [Film] Directed by George Romero. USA: Artfire Films/ Romero-Grunwald Productions. Kaes, A. (2009), Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Morris, R. (1995), Ambrose Bierce – Alone in Bad Company, New York: Crown Publishers. Roberts, D. (ed.) (1996), Minds of War: the Poetry and Experience of the First World War, London: Saxon Books. Russell, J. (2006), Book of the Dead: the Complete History of Zombie Cinema, London: FAB Press.

3 Paul Foster

Kingdom of shadows: fin-de-siècle gothic and early cinema

In Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Dracula visits the Cinematograph in London, which is made plausible by setting the scene in the year of the novel’s publication, 1897. Coppola forcefully reminds the audience that Dracula and film are contemporaneous. This chapter explores the significance of this fact, albeit with reference to finde-siècle gothic more generally, which is read in the context of emergent cinema. The latest form of popular visual entertainment was promoted in occult terms: ‘For only one franc see lifesize figures … come to life before your very eyes’, ran the advert for the Lumière’s first public film screening in December 1895 (cit. Nead, 2007: 1). The show was reported in kind, with reference made to the death-defeating potential of the technology. The absence of sound and colour prompted subsequent reporters to describe the new medium in (even more) recognisably gothic terms; most famously, perhaps, Maxim Gorky (1896). ‘Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows’, ran his frosty review of the Lumière programme at Nizhni-Novgorod: ‘Everything there … is dipped in monotonous grey’ (cit. Harding and Popple, 1996: 5). But if there was something ‘gothic’ about emergent cinema, there was something ‘cinematic’ about the late-Victorian gothic revival (Foster, 2009: 77). This chapter analyses protofilmic elements in works by (in order of discussion) Stevenson, Wells, Stoker and Wilde. To take one example, Dorian Gray’s living picture is not only a record of degenerative decay but an anticipation of cinema’s ability to animate the image. Film theorists have long since noted the ‘cinematic’ qualities of finde-siècle gothic. ‘A careful reading of Stevenson’s story confirms that

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there was such a thing as a cinematic imagination before there was a cinema’, writes Siegbert Prawer of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) in Caligari’s Children (1980: 105). Prawer’s examples include ‘close-ups’ of Utterson’s face, the externalisation of an internal conflict in the form of Jekyll and Hyde and, of interest here, the lawyer’s dream (1980: 90, 105). This is prompted by the story of Enfield’s encounter with Hyde, who has trampled a young child underfoot. The tale replays in what appears to be the cinema of his mind: Hitherto it had touched him on the intellectual side alone; but now his imagination also was engaged or rather enslaved; and as he lay and tossed in the gross darkness of the night and the curtained room, Mr. Enfield’s tale went by before his mind in a scroll of lighted pictures. He would be aware of the great field of lamps of a nocturnal city; then of the figure of a man walking swiftly; then of a child running from the doctor’s; and then these met, and that human Juggernaut trod the child down and passed on regardless of her screams. (Stevenson, 2006: 13)

To the modern reader, ‘a scroll of lighted pictures’ recalls the filmstrip and the moving pictures of cinematography, just as it may have recalled the magic lantern to an earlier generation of readers (see Annwn [2010], Colley [2004] and Warner [2002]). Stevenson’s technique of cutting between characters and scenes to create suspense also brings to mind the cinema (Stirling, 2004: 85). According to Joss Marsh (1995: 171), Utterson’s dream is ‘one of the most extraordinary presaging passages in fiction, penned several years before the invention of the flexible celluloid film stock that made cinema possible’, though it is possible to relate the image to ongoing developments. Brian Coe (1981: 54) has described the introduction of a flexible paper roll film by George Eastman in 1885, the year before the publication of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, as the most significant factor in ensuring that everything was ready for the appearance of cinematography by the middle of the 1880s. Indeed, Louis Le Prince shot a short film of the city of Leeds in 1888 using Eastman’s paper roll film (Coe, 1981: 55). While the film was only shown through single viewer machines, it predates the generally accepted birth year of cinema in Paris, 1895, by seven years (Cousins, 2011: 7). To accord filmic properties to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde may be less anachronistic than first might appear. Utterson’s protofilmic mode of dreaming is in tune with the suggestion of the lawyer’s photographic visual powers when he goes in search of Hyde for the first time. ‘He appears to want to add either a photograph or mental “snap shot” […] to his taxonomical gallery of

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criminal types’ (Mighall, 1999: 189–90). More interestingly perhaps, the protofilmic mode of dreaming informs his way of seeing when he goes in search of Hyde again, this time through fogbound Soho: A great chocolate-coloured pall lowered over heaven, but the wind was continually charging and routing these embattled vapours; so that as the cab crawled from street to street, Mr. Utterson beheld a marvellous number of degrees and hues of twilight; for here it would be dark […]; and there would be a glow of a rich, lurid brown, […]; and here, for a moment, the fog would be quite broken up, and a haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths. (Stevenson, 2006: 22)

According to Martin Tropp (2000: 107–8), ‘The fog that alternatively lifts and obscures his vision creates scenes like the scroll of pictures of his dreams, since each new vision is different, “changing glimpses” illuminated by “lamps, which had never been extinguished.”’ The extract displays the visual self-reflexiveness that Keith Williams (2007: 7) suggests is characteristic of the early writings of Wells, but which I suggest is often characteristic of fin-de-siècle gothic more generally. ‘Viewpoint and perspective are … foregrounded. Characters and narrators are constantly seeing or being seen through mediating frames – lenses, screens, windows, doors and apertures’ (Williams, 2007: 7). ‘Mr. Utterson beheld’ and ‘in the lawyer’s eyes’ help foreground point of view, while the character sees through the mediating frame of the cab window. In their introduction to Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz explain: As typified by flânerie, modern attention was conceived as not only visual and mobile but also fleeting and ephemeral. Modern attention was vision in motion. Modern forms of experience relied not simply on movement but on the juncture of movement and vision: moving pictures. One obvious precursor of moving pictures was the railroad, […]. The railroad journey anticipated more explicitly than any other technology an important facet of the experience of cinema: a person in a seat watches moving visuals through a frame that does not change position. (1995: 6, my emphasis)

In a sense, that ‘person’ is Utterson here. Although the fog has reduced the pace of the cab to that of a crawl, the powerful wind, ‘continually charging and routing these embattled vapours’, turns the spectacle of the city into a succession of partial and fugitive images (Stevenson, 2006: 22). Charles Baudelaire’s description of the flâneur as ‘a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness’ (1995: 10) is applicable to Utterson, even if the next scroll of pictures – ‘a dingy street, a gin palace, a low French eating house … many ragged children … and many women of

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different nationalities’ – depict the squalid milieu of the social explorer like Henry Mayhew rather than the thoroughfares of the stroller (Stevenson, 2006: 22). The revised edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) also features a protocinematic coach ride. Opium-addicted Gray watches ‘with listless eyes the sordid shame of the great city’ through the window of the cab, on his way to the den down by the docks (Wilde, 2003: 176). Unlike Dr Watson’s effortless drive to a similar locale in ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, published in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), the journey seems interminable as the cab loses its way and has to retrace its steps, suggestive of the passage into othered space. Gray’s craving for opium not only distorts his sense of time but heightens his visual perception of the city, whose shifting colours and shapes – ‘the sky like a yellow skull’, ‘the streets like the black web of some sprawling spider’, ‘the strange bottle-shaped kilns with their orange fan-like tongues of fire’ (Wilde, 2003: 177) – inform his nightmarish kaleidoscopic vision. Other qualities of Utterson’s dream bring to mind early cinema in particular. Cameramen and projectionists played around with the velocity of the image: speeding it up and slowing it down, stopping it and even reversing it (Nead, 2007: 25). The description of the dream continues: ‘if at any time he dozed over, it was but to see it […] move the more swiftly and still the more swiftly, even to dizziness, through wider labyrinths of lamp-lighted city’ (Stevenson, 2006: 13). If Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde seems to anticipate early cinema here, later fin-desiècle texts like H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) suggest ‘the direct influence of early cinema, in particular its play with velocity and with reverse motion’, as Laura Marcus notes (2004: 338). Such powerful ‘cinematic’ elements are less obvious in Wells’s more gothic The Island of Dr Moreau (1896). The novel merits little discussion in Keith Williams’s (2007) extensive study of the (proto)cinematic techniques and concerns of Wells’s texts, and no discussion at all in Kenneth Bailey’s (1990) essay on Wells’s ‘filmic imagination’. Nevertheless, such techniques are evident as the following example illustrates. Driven to investigate by what sound like human cries emanating from the laboratory, the narrator Prendick catches a glimpse of one of Moreau’s experiments inside: ‘Then through an open doorway beyond, in the dim light of the shadow, I saw something bound painfully upon a framework, scarred, red, and bandaged. And then blotting this out appeared the face of old Moreau, white and terrible’ (Wells, 2005: 50).

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Again, note how the description displays the aforementioned visual self-reflexiveness. Viewpoint and perspective are foregrounded as the narrator sees through the mediating frame of the door. Moreover, the placement of the disembodied and spectral image of Moreau on top of that of the vivisected puma is akin to the device of superimposition, the exposure of more than one image on the same film strip. The spectacle of the metamorphic body – conventionally read in terms of degeneration, or reverse evolution, as the human slides backwards into the animal – can also be read in the context of early cinema and its play with reverse motion known as ‘reversing’. Williams (2007: 2 and 185) notes that ‘though the Lumières’ first programmes consisted of actualities of under one minute […], they quickly discovered (by the serendipity of feeding the reel the wrong way) that cinematic time could run backwards too’, a visual effect that had already been achieved with Edison’s ‘peepshow’ machine. Moreau tampers with Darwinian evolutionary processes in order to accelerate animals into humans but ‘the stubborn beast flesh grows, day by day, back again’ (Wells, 2005: 77). The death of Moreau and the ensuing collapse of order on the island prompts the collective reversion of his creations, the Beast People. As Rosemary Jackson comments, ‘A lapse of the human back to the pre-human is brilliantly realized through a dreamlike sequence, as everything reverses to “a kind of generalized animalism”’ (1981: 117). If the sequence is akin to cinematic reverse motion, it also condenses time in the manner of time-lapse photography, which made its first feature film appearance in Georges Méliès’s Carrefour de l’Opéra (1897): It would be impossible to detail every step of the lapsing of these monsters; to tell how, day by day, the human semblance left them; how they gave up bandagings and wrappings, abandoned at last every stitch of clothing; how the hair began to spread over the exposed limbs; how their foreheads fell away and their faces projected. (Wells, 2005: 123)

In Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894), the dying villain provides a spectacle of metamorphosis that also brings ‘reversing’ to mind, her death ‘a flickering backward-run down the evolutionary tree’ (Eckersley, 1992: 283). Judith Mayne (1986) is another film theorist to have noted the affinity between fin-de-siècle gothic and cinema, this time with reference to Dracula. Her suggestion that the publication of the novel when cinema was emerging may not be coincidental has been given impetus by Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a paean to early cinema in narrative

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and stylistic terms (see Foster, 2009). In the words of Ken Gelder, ‘the project of filming Stoker’s novel about Dracula also involves filming the beginnings of film itself’ (1994: 89). The modern technological thrust of the novel has prompted critics to try to account for the absence of the Cinematograph, with Stacey Abbott for example suggesting: ‘One possible explanation … is that, to Stoker, the cinema was not a new technology, but rather the next stage in the development of technologies that had been around throughout the nineteenth century, such as the magic lantern, photography, X-ray, the phonograph, or even telegraphy and electricity’ (2007: 44). However, emerging cinema makes its presence felt in the shadowy descriptions of a novel replete with optical illusions and shocked spectators. For example, on the way to the castle, Jonathan Harker sees blue flames in the forest which the coach driver (Dracula) stops to examine. ‘Once there appeared a strange optical effect’, notes Harker of the view through the window: when he stood between me and the flame he did not obstruct it, for I could see its ghostly flicker all the same. This startled me, but as the effect was momentary, I took it that my eyes deceived me straining through the darkness. (Stoker, 2008: 13)

If ‘strange optical effect’ and ‘eyes … straining through the darkness’ is suggestive of cinema, ‘ghostly flicker’ brings to mind early film, be it the technical qualities that marred its potential realism, or when the pictures flickered in the transition from freeze frame into cinematic movement: as Gorky observed, ‘a strange flicker passes through the screen and the picture stirs to life’ (cit. IJsselsteijn, 2003: 24). The vampire’s transparent body, indicative of the vampire’s ability to ­de/ re-­corporealise, is also noteworthy, whether we link it to the Victorian interest in spirit photography, the discovery of the X-ray around the time Stoker was writing, or early films which drew on both using the trick of double-exposure. In G. A. Smith’s Photographing a Ghost, for example, made in 1898, ‘The ghost is perfectly transparent so that the furniture, etc., can be seen through his “body”’ (cit. Christie, 1994: 117). Orlok himself will hover over coffins in semi-transparent form and become transparent altogether when passing through walls in Nosferatu (1922), F. W. Murnau’s unlicensed version of Dracula, the body of the vampire akin to the strip of celluloid. The incident in the forest is indicative of how discrepancies in the observer’s scan of reality tend to be prematurely explained away; hence, Harker’s subsequent assumption that he is dreaming when he first encounters the shadowless female vampires. This is how he

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describes his second near encounter with them, as if commenting on what Horne, in reference to Nosferatu, calls ‘the spectral, spellbinding possibilities of cinema itself’ (2008): Something made me start up, a low piteous howling […] Louder it seemed to ring in my ears, and the floating motes of dust to take new shapes […] as they danced in the moonlight […] I was becoming hypnotized! Quicker and quicker danced the dust; the moonbeams seemed to quiver as they went by me into the mass of gloom beyond. More and more they gathered till they seemed to take dim phantom shapes. And then I started, broad awake and in full possession of my senses, and ran screaming from the place. The phantom shapes, which were becoming gradually materialised from the moonbeams, were those of the three ghostly women. (Stoker, 2008: 44–5)

‘For only one franc you’ll see life-size figures move and come to life before your very eyes’ (cit. Nead, 2007: 52). The description is striking: ‘phantom shapes … materialised from the moonbeams’; in other words, not unlike the projected images of cinema. The encounter bears striking parallels with film, even down to its mythic reception. In his shocked flight from the materialising vampires, Harker is like those apocryphal panic-stricken early spectators, who mistook the shadowy figure of the train for the real thing, although he labours under no misapprehension. Protofilmic ‘phantom shapes’ also haunt The Picture of Dorian Gray. Gray’s conscience operates in strikingly visual terms. After he has murdered the painter of the picture, Basil Hallward, Gray seems to see the eyes of the artist looking at him; he is the object of a disembodied and spectral gaze. Later, having spotted a face peering at him through the window, he wonders whether this too is a guilt-driven misapprehension: ‘If it had been merely an illusion, how terrible it was to think that conscience could raise such fearful phantoms, and give them visible form, and make them move before one!’ (Wilde, 2003: 191–2). If conscience is necromantic in the first example, then it is protofilmic in the second, as Gray’s guilt-ridden thoughts are projected within the framed space of the window in the form of animated ‘phantoms’. The eponymous picture offers itself as a more potent analogy for the cinema screen but first we shall consider the parallel between Gray and film. ‘I am wrinkled, and worn, and yellow’, Lord Wotton tells Gray in the penultimate chapter of the novel: ‘You remind me of the day I saw you first’ (Wilde, 2003: 205–6). As Ian Christie points out: is Dorian Gray itself not an uncanny anticipation of cinema’s ability to ‘freeze’ time, as Dorian remains perpetually young while all around him grow old? The

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implied effect is that of watching a film taken long ago: it has not aged, but its spectators have. (1994: 126–7)

Wotton’s admiration of his youthful beauty that first day, and the thought of its inevitable future devastation, prompts Gray to articulate the wish to be forever young and for the picture to grow old. The magical fulfilment of the wish sees Gray exchange identities with his portrait, which now hides the destructive effects of time and dissipation on his features, ‘thereby converting his face into a beautiful living mask’ (Seed, 1987: 51). In effect, his acquisition of the aesthetic permanence of the portrait embalms Gray: as André Bazin writes of the ‘mummy complex’: ‘To preserve, artificially, his bodily appearance is to snatch it from the flow of time’ (1967–72: 9). In other words, Gray’s living mask is akin to the phenomenon of photographic – and, by extension, ­cinematic – preservation (Gaines, 1991: 43). Gray’s mask helps discredit scandalous rumours about his private life – ‘I can’t believe them when I see you’, Hallward tells Gray (Wilde, 2003: 143) – but also makes him a spectral subject like ‘those grey or sepia shadows, phantomlike and […] undecipherable’ of the Bazinian photo album or that populate Gorky’s kingdom (Bazin, 1967: 14). ‘Movement’, says Gilbert in ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891), ‘that problem of the visible arts, can be truly realized by Literature alone’ (cit. Ellmann, 1969: 363). Dorian Gray features a painting that shifts within its gilt frame. After the exchange of identities, the portrait is subject to age and the corrosive effects of the sitter’s transgressions: from the initial ‘lines of cruelty round the mouth’ that appear after the suicide of Sibyl Vane, to ‘the face of a satyr’ that confronts Hallward eighteen years later (Wilde, 2003: 88, 150). Gilbert’s comment lacks prescience in that by the turn of the century, ‘it would have been easy to conclude that all images and the act of viewing itself involved some form of motion’ (Nead, 2007: 12). In his genealogy of the screen, Lev Manovich suggests three types of screen: the classical, the dynamic and the real-time (2002: 95–103). This period also saw the transition between the classical type of screen (a static, pictorial screen such as a canvas painting) and the dynamic type; a transition which Dorian Gray effectively documents. ‘This new type retains all the properties of a classical screen while adding something new: it can display an image changing over time’ (Manovich, 2002: 96). This is the screen of cinema with which the degenerating picture shares an affinity and provides Gray with visual delight in the process: ‘For there would be a real pleas-

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ure in watching it … This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors’ (Wilde, 2003: 103). The portrait also anticipates early cinema, what Tom Gunning calls the ‘cinema of attractions’ (1989: 33). According to Gunning: This aesthetic so contrasts with prevailing turn-of-the-century norms of artistic reception – the ideals of detached contemplation – that it nearly constitutes an anti-aesthetic […] These early films explicitly acknowledge their spectator, seeming to reach outwards and confront. Contemplative absorption is impossible here. The viewer’s curiosity is aroused and fulfilled through a marked encounter, a direct stimulus, a succession of shocks. (1989: 38)

One way the portrait addresses and holds Gray is by returning his gaze. No sooner has Gray dismissed the notion that the picture has altered than he becomes aware that it is watching him, an exchange of looks in keeping with the general reversibility of perspective in the novel, ­looking/being looked at; a kind of fictional anticipation of the shot/ reverse shot of classical Hollywood cinema, in fact. The sort of contemplative absorption embodied by the aesthete Wotton is possible the morning after, as Gray gazes at the portrait ‘with a feeling of almost scientific interest’ (Wilde, 2003: 93). But it is provisional. His detachment collapses with the thought that the picture has appropriated his soul: Was there some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms, that shaped themselves into form and colour on the canvas, and the soul that was within him? […] Or was there some other, more terrible reason? He shuddered, and felt afraid, and, going back to the couch, lay there, gazing in sickened horror. (Wilde, 2003: 93)

Yet the picture does not only produce the negative experience of fear. That very evening Gray longs one day to see the transformation occur before his eyes, ‘shuddering as he hoped it’ (Wilde, 2003: 101). He has recognised its capacity to ‘thrill’, that ‘particularly modern entertainment form’ (Gunning, 1989: 37): Often, on returning home from one of those mysterious and prolonged absences […] he himself would creep upstairs to the locked room, open the door with the key that never left him now, and stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and aging face on the canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass. The very sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his sense of pleasure. (Wilde, 2003: 124)

‘Seared’ and ‘crawled’ suggest that the picture is visibly decaying, thus enhancing his viewing pleasure, which is tinged with something like necrophilia or a relish of disease.

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Three differences between the portrait and the cinema screen conclude the discussion of Dorian Gray. Popular interest in the visual entertainments from which the cinema screen emerged including magic lantern shows, panoramas, dioramas and so forth, meant not only that the public was all set for cinema but that it was a huge event when it finally arrived (Manovich, 2002: 98). By way of contrast, Gray’s portrait becomes a screen for private viewing, one which must be hidden; Hallward’s renewed desire to exhibit the painting prompts him to lock it away in his old playroom. As Ronald Thomas suggests, ‘Gray’s portrait […] functions as the first Kinetoscope, a private peep show in which Dorian is both subject and spectator’ (2009: 190). Second, the picture also shares an affinity with the modern real-time screen, originated by the development of surveillance technology like the radar and which displays changes as they happen rather than after they have happened like the dynamic type (Howells and Negreiros, 2012: 291). ‘[The picture] had received the news of Sibyl Vane’s death before he had known it himself’, speculates Gray: ‘It was conscious of the events of life as they occurred’ (Wilde, 2003: 101). If, as Cohen suggests, ‘the portrait tells his story, it graphically reveals the details of all he does’ – a kind of oblique representation through symptom – his story unfolds in real time, shot in one continuous take (1996: 120). Third, putting to one side the issue of how a verbal medium represents a visual one, Gilbert’s comment is accurate in that the portrait actually moves and changes, whereas the movement on the cinema screen is an illusion, commonly ascribed to the ‘persistence of vision’. ‘The central paradox of film is that there is no movement on the screen’, states Nead, ‘only a succession of stationary images’ (2007: 22); just the sort of paradox that would appeal to Wotton, as his meditation on the opening page about those Japanese painters ‘who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion’, suggests (Wilde, 2003: 5). ‘Given its participation in acts of looking and mirroring’, writes John Sloan of Dorian Gray, ‘the story understandably attracted the early film industry’ (2003: 171). It makes sense to end our reading of fin-de-siècle gothic in the context of emergent cinema with the film industry itself. When Coppola’s Dracula visits the Cinematograph seventy years after Nosferatu, it is as if he goes in search of his own origins as one of the stars of the movie screen. According to Guiley (2005: 15), there have been more than 600 vampire films since 1897, with over 130 of them featuring Dracula. Chicago’s Selig Polyscope Company filmed the first

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Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1908 and over sixty film adaptations have since been made (Worland, 2007: 41). Implicit in Sloan’s comment is the idea of the compatibility between Dorian Gray and film; a compatibility the volume of adaptations suggests is even more evident of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Dracula. This is hardly surprising given the fact that fin-de-siècle gothic and film are not only contemporaneous but bound up in a model of mutual implication: emergent cinema in some sense ‘gothic’ and, as we have seen, fin-de-siècle gothic in some sense ‘cinematic’. ‘There is’, notes Misha Kavka (2002: 209), ‘something peculiarly visual about the Gothic’: and ‘peculiarly visual’ about the fin-de-siècle gothic, in particular, I suggest; ‘something’ that can only be accounted for by reading the revival in the context of emergent cinema. References Abbott, S. (2007), Celluloid Vampires: Life After Death in the Modern World, Austin: University of Texas Press. Annwn, D. (2010), ‘“The Gnome’s Lighted Scrolls”: Consumerism and Pre-cinematic Visual Technologies in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, Journal of Stevenson Studies 7: 9–31. Bailey, K. V. (1990), ‘“There Would Presently Come Out of the Darkness”: H. G. Wells’ “Filmic Imagination”’, The Wellsian 13: 18–35. Baudelaire, C. (1995), The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 2nd edn, trans. and ed. J. Mayne, London: Phaidon. Bazin, A. (1967–72), ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in What is Cinema?: Essays, I, sel. and trans. H. Gray (2 vols), Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 9–16. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), [Film] Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. USA: American Zoetrope. Charney, L. and Schwartz, V. R. (eds) (1995), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, London and Berkeley: University of California Press. Christie, I. (1994), The Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World, London: BBC Educational Developments. Coe, B. (1981), The History of Movie Photography, London: Ash & Grant. Cohen, E. (1996), ‘Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Representation’, in Lyn Pykett (ed.), Reading Fin de Siècle Fictions, London and New York: Longman. Colley, A. C. (2004), Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination, Hampshire: Ashgate. Cousins, M. (2011), The Story of Film, London: Pavilion. Eckersley, A. (1992), ‘A Theme in the Early Work of Arthur Machen: Degeneration’, English Literature in Translation 35.3: 277–87. Ellmann, R. (ed.) (1969), The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, Random House: New York.

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Foster, P. (2009), ‘“The Amazing Cinematograph”: Cinema and Illusion in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, in B. Baker (ed.), Textual Revisions, Chester: Chester Academic Press, pp. 58–82. Gaines, J. (1991), Contested Culture: The Image, The Voice, and The Law, Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Gelder, K. (1994), Reading the Vampire, London and New York: Routledge. Gorky, M. (1896), ‘A Review of the Lumière Programme at the Nizhni-Novgorod Fair’, in C. Harding and S. Popple (eds), In the Kingdom of Shadows: A Companion to Early Cinema (London: Cygnus Arts, 1996), pp. 5–6. Guiley, R. E. (2005), The Encyclopaedia of Vampires, Werewolves and Other Monsters, New York: Facts on File. Gunning, T. (1989), ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous spectator’, Art and Text 34: 31–45. Horne, P. (2008), ‘Kingdom of Shadows: Double Exposure in Vampire Films’ Guardian.co.uk, 8 September: www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/sep/08/dvd.con​ nections.vampyr (accessed 8 June 2012). Howells, R. and Negreiros, J. (2012), Visual Culture, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Polity Press. IJsselsteijn, W. A. (2003), ‘Presence in the Past: What can we Learn from Media History?’, in G. Riva, F. Davide and W. A. IJsselsteijn (eds), Being There: Concepts, Effects and Measurements of User Presence in Synthetic Environments, Amsterdam and Oxford: IOS Press, pp. 17–40. Jackson, R. (1981), Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, London and New York: Methuen. Kavka, M. (2002), ‘The Gothic on Screen’, in J. E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 209–28. Manovich, L. (2002), The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marcus, L. (2003), ‘How Newness Enters the World: The Birth of Cinema and the Origins of Man’, in J. Murphet and L. Rainford (eds), Literature and Visual Technologies, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 29–45. Marsh, J. L. (1995), ‘In A Glass Darkly: Photography, the Premodern, and Victorian Horror’, in E. Barkan and R. Bush (eds), Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 159–71. Mayne, J. (1986), ‘Dracula in the Twilight: Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922)’, in E. Rentschler (ed.), German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations, New York and London: Methuen, pp. 25–39. Mighall, R. (1999), A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nead, L. (2007), The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c.1900, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Nosferatu, 1922. [Film] Directed by F. W. Murnau. Germany: Prana-Film. Prawer, S. S. (1980), Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror, New York: Da Capo Press. Seed, D. (1987), ‘Oscar Wilde’s “Essay on Decorative Art”: The Picture of Dorian Gray’, Swansea Review 3: 42–55. Sloan, J. (2003), Authors in Context: Oscar Wilde, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Stevenson, R. L. (2006), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales, ed. R. Luckhurst, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stirling, K. (2004), ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Jackass: Fight Club as a Refraction of Hogg’s Justified Sinner and Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’, in S. Onega and C. Gutleben (eds), Refracting the Canon in Contemporary British Literature and Film, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, pp. 83–94. Stoker, B. (2008), Dracula, ed. M. Ellmann, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thomas, R. R. (2009), ‘Poison Books and Moving Pictures: Vulgarity in The Picture of Dorian Gray’, in S. D. Bernstein and E. B. Michie (eds), Victorian Vulgarity: Taste in Verbal And Visual Culture, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 185–200. Tropp, M. (2000), Images of Fear: How Horror Stories Helped Shape Modern Culture, 1818–1918, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Warner, M. (2002), Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wells, H. G. (2005), The Island of Doctor Moreau, ed. P. Parrinder, London: Penguin. Wilde, O. (2003), The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. R. Mighall, London: Penguin. Williams, K. (2007), H. G. Wells: Modernity and the Movies, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Worland, R. (2007), The Horror Film: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell.

4 Gregory Brophy

‘A mirror with a memory’: the development of the negative in Victorian gothic

Published in 1897 and immediately enjoying a popularity that not even Bram Stoker’s Dracula could rival, Richard Marsh’s The Beetle takes place in contemporary London, where a hideous creature has arrived from Egypt to exact vengeance upon Paul Lessingham, a respected British politician with whom the fiend shares a scandalous history. Though the narrator innocently notes that Lessingham’s portfolio has never included ‘Foreign affairs’, the politician has found himself entangled in some mysterious indiscretion (Marsh, 2004: 150). While travelling in Egypt, Lessingham is lured into the cult of Isis by the siren song of a beautiful woman. Drugged, seduced and held captive in a ‘mesmeric stupor’, he is forced to witness ‘orgies of nameless horrors’ and sacrificial rites ‘too bizarre, too hideous to be true’ (243). The ‘most dreadful part’ for Lessingham is the nauseating horror he feels toward the woman he has fallen for: an attachment that began as a seduction has quickly soured into loathsome bondage (243). Months pass before this dark cloud lifts, but at the first lapse of his persecutor’s captivating influence, Lessingham breaks free of her clutches and flees to England. However, he cannot escape before being confronted with the appalling sight of his own desire. Struggling in his arms, the woman suddenly transforms herself into ‘a monstrous beetle – a huge, writhing creation of some wild nightmare’ (245). What happens in Cairo does not stay in Cairo, and the scorned beetle pursues her lover, descending upon London, and exercising her hypnotic powers over each of the protagonists in turn. These acts of possession

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carry a charge that is as much physically and sexually invasive as it is psychic. In his introduction to The Beetle, Julian Wolfreys provides a thorough review of the text’s surprisingly modest critical reception, giving a general account of the confusions of race, species, gender and sexuality roused by the monster and claiming that, in the end, its ‘body is grotesque because it is unstable, excessive, ambiguously traced by so many fragments of identity’ (Marsh, 2004: 19). Wolfreys’s survey exhibits a number of very compelling cases made for the beetle as an embodiment of the Freudian ‘return of the repressed’. Incorporating as it does so many abjected materials, the abhorrent body of the beetle becomes legible as a material index of fin-de-siècle cultural concerns. Understandably, critical response has been singularly drawn to this captivating figure. However, my own analysis departs from this approach in turning to the other, perhaps initially less conspicuous, bodies that populate the text. These permeable bodies and ‘impressionable minds’ bear the physical imprint of the text upon them, and struggle to transmit the import and impact of their experience. Marsh’s persistent evocation of the impressionable mind is a trope that submits writing – and particularly photographic inscription – as a privileged figure for the subject’s permeability. The mechanics of photography allow for a reflexive understanding of the gaze that accentuates the vulnerability of perception as permeability, and haunts realism with the intimation that its ‘look’ may fail to guarantee the dominance of the subject thereby enlightened. Moreover, Marsh’s association of hypnosis with photography impels us to consider the contemporaneous development of ‘the negative’ within photographic and psychoanalytic discourse. If the larval process of metamorphosis undergone by beetles exemplifies the fluid transformation of bodies within the gothic, the liquid process of photography enacts the fundamental challenge to modern understandings of writing that derives from the genre’s uncanny belief in the transubstantiation of signs and bodies. The beetle’s affiliation with the idolatrous cult of Isis endows her with the power to animate signs. The superstitious veneration of symbols displayed by the Egyptian cult amounts to a colonialist update of the threat of Catholic iconophilia, a further disavowal of ‘the darkest age of Christianity’ referenced within Horace Walpole’s preface to his seminal gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (2003: 59). Notably, much of the creature’s horror derives from its uncanny aesthetic productions. From weaving

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to photogravure, the beetle produces living texts that trigger a distressing ontological confusion by exhibiting the fluid relation between signs and things themselves. The occult powers of photography are broadly attested to within nineteenth-century literature. A crucial difference to be marked in Marsh’s text, however, is that it disturbs the common alignment of mesmerist with photographer to be found within texts such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Robert Browning’s ‘Mesmerism’ (1855) and George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894). In each of these texts, the intensity of concentration involved in ‘fixing’ the photograph’s subject is imagined as a sadistic procedure. Conversely, Marsh depicts the photographic observer as passive, even masochistic. For if the stillness of the photographic sitter renders him conducive to trance, so too does the receptive stance of the viewer. In its depiction of the fixation of the operator’s gaze, The Beetle suggests that, as irrevocably as the subject of any photograph, the operator is fixed, in her own way captured by the camera eye. Marsh’s beetle has never been photographed, unless one counts the indelible images lodged within the minds of his witnesses. In their attempts at visual apprehension, Marsh’s protagonists repeatedly turn to photographic apparatuses. However, rather than functioning as the instruments of uncanny power that we see elsewhere in other photographic gothic fiction, they serve as emblems of a traumatic and ineffable sensitivity to the external world. The most striking incidence of this photographic receptivity occurs during Sydney Atherton’s first encounter with the beetle. Bearing witness to the spectacle of the creature’s astonishing transformation from human to beetle, Atherton finds himself in ‘a state of stupefaction’, and finds he can ‘do nothing but stare’ (Marsh, 2004: 150). Locked within this gaze, he attempts to convert his wide-eyed helplessness into an act of willed, rational observation: after the first shock of surprise had passed, I retained my presence of mind. I felt as an investigator might feel, who has stumbled, haphazard, on some astounding, some epoch-making, discovery. I was conscious that I should have to make the best use of my mental faculties if I was to take full advantage of so astonishing an accident. I kept my glance riveted on the creature, with the idea of photographing it on my brain. I believe that if it were possible to take a retinal print – which some day it will be – you would have a perfect picture of what it was I saw. (2004: 150)

With these curious words, the reader is conducted into one of The Beetle’s most climactic moments, in which the mysterious creature at

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last reveals him – or her, or it – self to our narrator. The scene treats readers to not one but two metamorphoses. There is, of course, the emergence of Atherton’s antagonist from his ‘loose draperies’, revealing the golden-green scales of a ‘glittering’, winged creature ‘six or seven inches high, and about a foot in length’ (150). But in the midst of this mutation comes another just as startling. Before the reader stands Atherton, and we watch him transform himself – through a technological fantasy that enframes the gothic nightmare – into a photographic machine. Marsh’s peculiar hero is a narrator less inclined to write than to be written upon. Departing from descriptive narrative techniques, he appeals to his own body as an archive of the event. Yielding his ‘brain’ and retina to the beetle, he will passively receive the imprint of the scene upon himself. In this way, the text orchestrates an ekphrastic relation to its secret, making of the novel a caption read underneath a photograph yet to be developed. Atherton’s invocation of this visual index would seem here to privilege photographic substantiation over the testimony of language, but for Marsh’s characters the appeal of the photographic metaphor lies not merely in the new model of writing it presents, but in the way the photographic process embodies a familiar sensation of being written. It is not the stylus, but the surface of inscription with which these characters identify. It is this strange affinity that prompts the conversation between novelistic and photographic method beyond consideration of the mimetic possibilities of aesthetic forms, to consider changes in the subject of representation itself. How is it, Marsh asks, that we are stared back at by the world, and altered by our own instruments of perception? Within the scope of the realist representational paradigm, the subject all too commonly escapes critical interrogation by posing as the a priori of representation. The camera cannot merely be considered as another tool at the disposal of a relatively stable viewing subject, endowed with an ever-widening arsenal of representational techniques to choose from. For the tool brings about not only the extension of the subject (through the colonisation or domestication of the perceptible world) but its metamorphosis as well. Consequently, genealogies of media cannot credibly organise their evolution of forms along the lines of a presumed shared genus, naming for instance the camera obscura as the primogenitor of the daguerreotype, which in its turn begat the cinema. This history of progressive invention obscures the true, miscegenous nature of machine and human lineage, an intertwined e­ volution that

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proceeds not along parallel lines, but as the double helix of a shared DNA strand. It is this entanglement of human and machine that makes every technological innovation appear to provide a concrete analogy for our own biological, psychological processes. The photographic camera was hardly the first optical instrument to inspire comparison with the physiology and psychology of human vision. The camera obscura had long been utilised as an illustration of the workings of the eye and mind, our internalised darkened chambers. Jonathan Crary speaks succinctly about the ‘metaphysic of interiority’ embodied by the camera obscura, exploring the manner in which this device facilitated the definition of ‘an observer as isolated, enclosed, or autonomous within its dark confines’ (Crary, 1992: 29). Stationed inside this chamber that essentially functioned as a giant eyeball, men of art and science cast themselves into a mise-en-abîme of the optical situation. The darkness of the room – this eye within an eye – established a private space of contemplation. The occupants of the camera obscura were not shackled like the slaves of Plato’s allegory, but entered the cave to see more clearly the exterior world. Inside this temple of the eye, the observer found sanctuary from the troubled dynamic of visual experience. Now one could see without being seen, without being touched by the things one viewed. The essential innovation of the photographic negative is that this mechanism apprehends not only the projection of light (as had the camera obscura), but also its inscriptive powers. These two distinct functions correspond to the paradigmatic shift that Crary identifies between the geometrical understanding of optics in circulation throughout the eighteenth century and the physiological theories that dominated nineteenth-century research on the topic. As a technology of visualisation, the photograph embodies this new way of understanding the phenomenology of vision. The camera obscura had literally removed the body from the field of vision so that it could organise objects in space by way of abstract geometries. Conversely, the seat of vision in photographic visuality is materially present to the objects it sees. Perceived affinities between photographic and human perception engender a new observer, one whose body is marked by the irreducibly physical acts of ‘exposure’ and incorporation that are the prerequisites of vision. This exposure of the body gives rise to what Steven Shaviro has described as ‘a new regime of the image, one in which vision is visceral and intensive, instead of representational and extensive’ (2004: 139). This subject experiences vision in a manner that has

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been theorised by Maurice Merleau-Ponty as ‘palpation of the eye’, a cross-examination that entwines seer and seen in a visceral chiasmus (2004: 252). Marsh’s narrative helps us to imagine this ‘carnal density of vision’, as his characters strain to grant expression to the palpable and traumatic experience of seeing. Scenes such as Holt’s initial victimisation communicate the equivocal nature of photographic capture, a process whereby the world acts upon viewers with or without their consent, imprinting indelible images upon bodies that emulate the responsive passivity of the index. This automatic writing, which proceeds without the inclination of the subject, challenges the integrity and autonomy of the subject’s interior life. The photographic method bars the subject from the process of inscription; the images that emerge from the negative are but the traces of prior writings that she has no ‘hand’ in. The primary shift to be recognised within the passage to photography is the movement it effectuates from a Cartesian model of consciousness (enframed within the camera obscura), to a model of the unconscious (embodied in the ‘negative’). The photographic process passes through a twilight zone that lengthens the shadow cast by the term ‘negative’, accentuating the darker connotations of the word, coined, along with ‘positive’ by John Herschel. John Abbott, writing for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1870, addresses these connotations in his piece on ‘The Negative in Photography’: The word negative, which the photographer applies to the first image which he obtains of the subject, whatever it may be, that he is to photograph, is rather a misnomer, inasmuch as the properties which characterise it, though striking and peculiar, do not seem very clearly to involve any idea of negation. If it had been called the reverse, instead of the negative, its name would have been perhaps more suggestive of its character. But the name negative is established, and must stand. (1870: 845–8)

Abbott opposes this name because it is not in accordance with his vision of photography that its processes should be carried out under the sign of negativity. And yet, he acknowledges that his own ‘positive’ image of the art will always be underwritten by the priority of this ‘misnomer’s’ indelible trace. ‘The name negative is established, and must stand’, Abbott concludes (845). This false name will always cast its shadow over any true name given to photography. If Abbott resists the medium’s undercurrent of negativity, Oliver Wendell Holmes, the nineteenth century’s premier mythologist of

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photography, exploits it with relish. For him, the photographic negative is ‘perverse and totally depraved … it might almost seem as if some magic and diabolic power had wrenched all things from their proprieties, where the light of the eye was darkness, and the deepest blackness was glided with the brightest glare’ (Holmes, 1859: 740). In Holmes’s writing, the negative emerges as a world of perversion in need of redemption: ‘the glass plate has the right part of the object on the left side of its picture, and the left part on its right side; its light is darkness, and its darkness is light. Everything is just as wrong as it can be, except that the relations of each wrong to the other wrongs are like the relations of the corresponding rights to each other in the original natural image. This is a negative picture’ (740–1). This darkness, however, is to serve as a prelude to a functional dialectic of photosynthesis (if we permit ourselves to play along with Holmes’s rhetoric). Holmes declares: ‘This negative is now to give birth to a positive, – this mass of contradictions to assert its hidden truth in a perfect harmonious affirmation of the realities of Nature. Behold the process!’ (741). In his own exploration of the kinship between camera and psyche, however, Sigmund Freud maintains the persistence of unconscious remainders. ‘Not every negative’, he reminds us, ‘necessarily becomes a positive; nor is it necessary that every unconscious mental process should turn into a conscious one’ (1966: 365). Freud employs the photographic analogy to demonstrate the ‘negative’ dialectic of the psyche, a darkroom littered with the unprocessed materials that form the ground of the unconscious (see also Freud, 1965: 574; 1955: 264). This photographic negative, embedded within a body waiting to be processed, emerges as a fitting emblem for gothic writing. It develops the genre’s tropes of haunted writing in the latency of the image and the automation of its inscription, an invisible presence that endures as the trace of a prior writing. Nearly twenty years before Freud, Joseph Mortimer Granville had opened his discussion of photographic memory with the suggestion that ‘subconsciousness’ might be structured like a camera. In an 1879 article for The Lancet, Granville asserts that, ‘although the brain is undoubtedly capable of a process analogous to instantaneous photographing, it rarely performs this function at the behest of the will’ (458). ‘The natural and only true basis of memory’, for Granville, ‘is a well-formed impression. It is not essential that the impression should be fully understood at the time it is made’ (459). The imposition of memories upon a subject is non-consensual, a relation of force rather

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than knowledge. Granville characterises this automatic ‘storing of impressions’ as a form of ‘instantaneous mental photography’, a faculty that is ‘more commonly the agent of the subconsciousness than of the supreme Consciousness’ (458). This recalcitrant, subterranean device ‘takes in the impressions we would gladly have effaced, while those it is desired to retain are obliterated almost as soon as they are registered’ (458). The essay’s title, ‘Ways of Remembering’, indicates its instructional tone, and Granville’s advice in the cultivation of mnemonic techniques strives toward the integration of understanding and memory. However, he describes the relationship between these two functions of the mind as amounting ‘almost [to] antagonism’, remarking that, for many, the faculty of apprehension is developed ‘at the cost of that of mental registration or memory’, while, on the other hand, ‘idiots have often extraordinary powers of retention and recollection’ (458). Stimuli make the most profound impression on bodies that fail to understand what they have experienced. The strength of the ‘idiot mind’ lies precisely in its weakness. It is impressionable in more than a figural sense: easily influenced because it is lacking powers of discrimination, but also possessing receptive capacities unattainable to the hardened wax of a more sophisticated mind. Marsh devotes no small amount of energy to delineating the relative impressionability of each of his characters, but even Lessingham, whose ‘impenetrability is proverbial’ (2004: 75), nonetheless finds that the name of ‘Rue de Rabagas’, the ‘dirty street’ upon which he first met the beetle, ‘has left an impress on the tablets of my memory which is never likely to be obliterated’ (238). All of Marsh’s characters possess an unusually acute sense of the physicality and the traumatic force of word and thought. Atherton, witnessing the beetle’s fierce expression of hatred for Lessingham, remarks that he ‘should hardly have been surprised if the mere utterance of the words had seared his lips’ (143). Holt describes the beetle’s tone as containing ‘a mixture of mockery and bitterness, as if he wished his words to have the effect of corrosive sublimate, and to sear me as he uttered them’ (65). Moments later, the beetle’s alleged wish begins to make its effect felt, and Holt struggles to explain how the creature’s ‘sentences, in some strange, indescribable way, seemed, as they came from his lips, to warp my limbs; to enwrap themselves about me; to confine me, tighter and tighter, within’ (66). It can hardly matter that, on a rational level, Holt remains unconvinced by the creature’s ‘wild and wanton’ words (66). They nonetheless

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p­ erform their incontrovertible work directly upon his body, circumventing the mind to orchestrate immediate and visceral communication between ‘lips’ and ‘limbs’. The optogram: ‘fleshing out’ the negative The traumatic dimension of this inscriptive memory is expressed vividly in the urban legend of the optogram. C. M. Archer’s fourth instalment of ‘The Anecdote History of Photography’ for Recreative Science (1861) stands as one of the first attempts to gather evidence supporting the theory of this optical phenomenon. Archer’s article devotes itself to a survey of materials that have been sensitised to receive photographic impressions. His overview considers the treatment of wood, marble and lithographic stone, and concludes with ‘The Human Eye and Its Similarity to the Photographic Camera’ (350). This final analogy requires no such manipulation of materials. Archer begins with the mechanics of the comparison, describing the eye’s ‘lens and dark chamber’ and explaining the way in which an image ‘is thrown on the retina and interior of the eye, just as the image is by the lens on the plate or paper on the camera, or on the Daguerreotype plate’ (351). From here, his argument continues in an interesting and speculative direction, one worthy of the fantastic fictions of Marsh and his contemporaries. Archer quotes R. W. Hackwood’s 1857 article for Notes and Queries, which claims, on the authority of unnamed American doctors, ‘that the last image formed on the retina of the eye of a dying person remains impressed upon it like the image on the photograph, and that [if] the last object seen by a murdered person was his murderer, the portrait drawn upon the eye would remain a fearful witness in death to detect him and lead to his conviction’ (268). Archer imagines death as the rigor mortis of perception, a final cooling and hardening of this impressionable wax. Say, for a moment, that life truly does flash before one’s eyes in that final moment. It would not strain the imagination much further to imagine that, ‘behind’ one’s eyes, death – the negative image of life – had imprinted itself. Veronique Campion-Vincent provides a fascinating history of this piece of modern folklore in her essay, ‘The Tell-Tale Eye’ (see also Evans, 1993; Gunning, 1995; Goulet, 2006). Campion-Vincent attributes its first mention to the French press in 1863, which reported on William H. Warner’s photographic experiments. Warner had allegedly fashioned a collodion reproduction of a steer’s eye, taken immediately

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after its death: ‘Examining this proof through a microscope he distinctly saw on the retina the lines of the slaughterhouse’s pavement, the last object having affected the animal’s vision as it was bowing its head to receive the fatal blow’ (qtd. and trans. Campion-Vincent, 1999: 14). The article concludes with Warner’s suggestion concerning the phenomenon’s forensic applications, surmising that: ‘if one reproduces through photography the eyes of a murdered person, and if one operates within twenty-four hours of death, one reflects upon the retina thanks to the microscope the image of the last object presented in front of the victim’s eyes’ (14). In June of 1866, Notes and Queries cited an article from the Memphis Bulletin: ‘which had asserted that the police had photographed and enlarged “with the aid of a microscope” the retina of a murder victim and found “perfectly delineated … a pistol, the hand and part of the face of the man who committed the crime”’ (Achende, 1866: 474). Such reports were investigated by scientists such as Dr Vernois of France’s Society for Forensic Medicine, whose bizarre and grisly experiments were conducted upon seventeen animals, each of which Vernois slaughtered ‘violently when their eyes were well-lit, and then immediately photographed their retinas’. Franz Boll’s 1876 discovery of ‘retinal violet’ brought new physiological evidence to the hypothesis that external light imprints itself in the eye to form visual images. A year after this discovery, a professor of physiology at the University of Heidelberg by the name of Wilhelm Friedrich Kühne produced perhaps the most distinct, even iconic, photochemical retinal image (which he was the first to name an ‘optogram’) in the dissected retina of a rabbit. In his 1877 address to the British Medical Association, Professor of Physiology Arthur Gamgee explained the rather grim process by which Kühne was able to obtain this elusive image: Kühne took a rabbit and fixed its head and one of its eyeballs at a distance of a metre and a half from an opening thirty metres [sic] square in a window shutter. The head was covered for five minutes with a black cloth, and then exposed for three minutes to a somewhat cloudy midday sky. The animal was then instantly decapitated; the eyeball which had been exposed was rapidly extirpated by the aid of yellow light, then opened, and instantly plunged into a 5 per cent. solution of alum. Two minutes after death, the second eyeball, without removal from the head, was subjected to exactly the same process as the first. (1877: 223)

Death never comes gently for these eyes: whether animal or human, the fatal tableau frozen upon its surface it is invariably a violent one. One begins to imagine, recalling Nietzsche’s painful history of

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­ nemotechnics as traumatic understanding, that its clarity has been m achieved precisely through this violence. ‘If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory’ (Nietzsche, 1989: 60–1). Gamgee insists that a clear retinal impression is dependent on the destructive force of the visual stimuli, even before its brutal extraction: ‘in order to obtain an obvious picture … upon the retina’, he advises, ‘the effect of light would have to be so prolonged or so intense as to destroy the balance between the destruction of the vision-purple and the power of the retinal epithelium to restore it’ (223). Conversant with the modern myth of the optogram, Atherton’s ‘retinal print’ and Holt’s mental photography (Marsh, 2004: 47) indicate Marsh’s interest in employing photographic analogies to develop a literalised understanding of the mind’s impressionability. Five years after The Beetle’s publication, the retinal photograph emerges as a piece of crucial forensic evidence in Jules Verne’s The Kip Brothers (Les Frères Kip 1902, English trans. 2007). An enlargement of a dead man’s photograph reveals the image of his true murderer engraved upon his retina, exonerating the Kip brothers who have been falsely accused and thereby bringing about the sort of photosynthesis envisioned by Holmes. In Marsh’s novel, however, the retinal photography theory remains firmly within the realm of speculation. Never objectively verified, this physiological negative goes unprocessed, a traumatic secret that remains lodged within the body. Though each one of Marsh’s characters is convinced they have been marked by their encounters with the monstrous beetle, they have no way of externalising or objectifying their experience. In accordance with Freud’s negative dialectic of photography, ‘not every negative … becomes a positive’ (1966: 365). As it did for Freud, technology only gives them the materials to indirectly express this inexpressibility. Photography submits these undeveloped materials that haunt the margins of the text, lying just beyond the edge of objective visible inscription. Oliver Wendell Holmes expresses the fantastic means by which technology fixates upon such passing impressions when he describes the daguerreotype as a ‘mirror with a memory’ (1859: 739, emphasis original). The phrase is an extremely evocative one, not least because it is a catachresis. To begin with, the mirror with a memory is a thoroughly useless apparatus. Like a solar-powered flashlight, or fireproof matches, the innovation directly contradicts the essential logic of the device. This new feature is no improvement or natural evolution of the

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instrument, but its very ruin. Holmes’s striking description reminds us that the mirror’s principal value was its dependable forgetfulness. Ordinarily, the mirror presents the viewer with an immaculate façade, gathering no accumulation of traces and no residue of former encounters. It is a perpetually innocent surface reflecting an eternal present. By contrast with this servile affirmation of the present moment, Holmes’s mirror preserves a history that will not be unwritten. Remembering when we would forget, accumulating a visual static of past moments that fill up the field of representation and choke the present and the living, this inimical object of representation emblematises the traumatic core of gothic narrative. On the final page of The Beetle we see this trauma at work in the novel when the reader is informed of Marjorie’s compulsive writing. ‘Told, and re-told, and re-told again’ (Marsh, 2004: 322), her story traces an endless circle, each recital beginning and ending with the scene of her seduction at the hands of the beetle. Countless versions ‘have all of them been destroyed, with one exception. That exception is herein placed before the reader’ (322). Like Atherton’s internal camera, Marjorie’s traumatised body produces an endless stream of negatives of narrative, destined never to see the light of day. This fantasy recasts fictional writing as an artefact possessing the singularity of an index, a piece of evidence ‘placed before the reader’ that retains the direct imprint of the body writing. The hallucination of reading thereby induced transforms the surface of the paper into a palimpsest, within which the manuscript (along with all of the destroyed versions lying underneath) has been buried. The indexical power of the photographic apparatus promises a documentary realism, but Marsh’s novel stakes its primary claim to authenticity on the incorporation of its narrative into bodies. Sharing the curiosity displayed within Archer’s ‘Anecdote History of Photography’, Marsh experiments with the photographic propensities of other materials, reserving its highest interest in the exploration of the human body as an impressionable surface. The truly innovative aspect of Marsh’s use of photography is that he denies the camera any objective presence in the narrative. Instead, it remains lodged inside the imaginations of its protagonists, a recalcitrant machine that performs its work stubbornly within, allowing the text’s narrators to gesture towards intensive experience without ever quite managing to express, externalise, or objectively account for what has been implanted. We are still waiting for a future when the body will be able to speak, and deliver itself from the

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burden of all it has seen. For now, all we hold as readers is this oblique text, which affords only glimpses of fragments embedded within the body, traumatic negatives of narrative. The photographic metaphor illuminates our inability to reflect, to know ourselves except in a mirror, through an other, in reverse and retrospect. It presents us with the possibility that our own processes of reflection might be as superficial as those commonly ascribed to the looking glass, our interior read only through compulsive reference to the outside. Marsh’s integration of Victorian optics and the psychophysiology of perception within The Beetle develops this deepening sense that the gaze radiates not from within the subject, but towards it from the objects it views. We find in Marsh’s novel a compelling depiction of the eye as an organ of exposed vulnerability rather than veiled power. The photographic model of observation requires that we look by first being looked upon, stared at by the sun. This mutual exposure and fixation constitutes the ‘apprehensive dilemma’ of the gothic: namely, that in order to capture whatever is out there, one always ends up having to expose oneself to that outside. The ‘negative’ bears witness to the impact of that inverse gaze, embodying the dimly understood influence of another that founds the shadowy substrate of our being. References Abbott, J. (1870), ‘The Negative in Photography’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 41: 845. Achende (1866), ‘Photographic Miracle’, Notes and Queries 3: 474. Archer, C. M. (1861), ‘The Anecdote History of Photography’, Recreative Science: a Record and Remembrancer of Intellectual Observation, 2: 348–51. Campion-Vincent, V. (1999), ‘The Tell-Tale Eye’, Folklore 110: 13–24. Crary, J. (1992), Techniques of the Observer: on Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Evans, A. B. (1993), ‘Optograms and Fiction: Photo in a Dead Man’s Eye’, Science Fiction Studies 20: 341–6. Freud, S. (1955), ‘A Note On the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis’, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XII, trans. J. Strachey, London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1965), On the Interpretation of Dreams, trans. and ed. J. Strachey, New York: Avon. Freud, S. (1966), Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, trans. and ed. J. Strachey, New York: Norton. Gamgee, A. (1877), ‘Forty-Fifth Meeting of the British Medical Association: Abstract of the Opening Address’, Medical Times and Gazette (1 September): 223–5.

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Goulet, A. (2006), Optiques: the Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Granville, J. M. (1879), ‘Ways of Remembering’, The Lancet: 458–60. Gunning, T. (1995), ‘Tracing the Individual Body: Photograph, Detectives, and Early Cinema’, in L. Charney and V. R. Schwartz (eds), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 15–45. Hackwood, R. W. (1857), ‘Impressions on the Eye’, Notes and Queries 92 (3 October): 268–9. Holmes, O. W. (1859), ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’, Atlantic Monthly 3: 738–48. Marsh, R. (2004), The Beetle, ed. J. Wolfreys, Peterborough: Broadview. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2004), ‘The Intertwining – The Chiasm’, in Maurice MerleauPonty: Basic Writings, vol. I, ed. T. Baldwin, New York: Routledge, pp. 247–71. Nietzsche, F. (1989), On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. and ed. W. Kaufmann, New York: Vintage. Shaviro, S. (2004), The Cinematic Body, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Walpole, H. (2003), The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother, Peterborough: Broadview. Warner, W. H. (1863), ‘Correspondences’, The Photographic News (8 May): 226.

5 Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

Modern phantasmagorias and visual culture in Wilkie Collins’s Basil

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, science was not only sensational but also highly visual. In England in 1814, as itinerant lecturers captivated audiences, Mary Shelley went to see André-Jacques Garnerin (1769–1823), a balloonist and scientific showman, lecture on ‘Electricity – the gasses & the Phantasmagoria’ (Feldman and ScottKilvert, 1987: I, 50). Science was spectacle engaging the audience visually, and Dr Frankenstein’s use of galvanism follows in Galvani’s nephew and assistant Giovanni Aldini’s footsteps, showing Shelley’s emphasis on science as (visual) performance. Shelley’s novel was a source of inspiration to many Victorian writers rewriting gothic topoi. As a case in point, Wilkie Collins’s Basil; A Story of Modern Life (1852) features an eponymous hero who is fatally pursued and persecuted by a monstrous being. However, though the monster is the work of the hero’s own hands, Collins highlights the extent to which the hideous creation also results from Basil’s lack of perceptual maturity. Indeed, the novel plays upon perception and the modern ‘transformation in the nature of visuality’ (Crary, 1992: 1), foregrounding the way in which visual experience and the development of new technologies went hand in hand with new theories of vision. Collins’s exploration of horror and subjectivity manifests the evolution of the gothic in mid-century Britain: if Mary Shelley moves away from ‘the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment’, Collins revamps dusty ghosts by setting his tale in London, the heart of modern culture. As a consequence, the sublime assault on the senses of the Romantic traveller exploring the Alps becomes an assault on

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the senses of the urban consumer where the environment appears as a defamiliarising space saturated with visual information – ghostlike and almost hallucinatory signs disrupting the link between the object and its perception. Yet perceptual experience provides no access to knowledge; on the contrary, it blocks all faculties of reasoning. While Dr Frankenstein is blinded to the horror of his experiment, Basil is bedazzled by the lures of commodity culture, which creates desires and fancies that haunt him. As Collins makes clear, the ownership of private property does not ensure social power: the more Basil loses control of his purse, the more he loses control of his mind, as the commodity he intends to consume – Margaret Sherwin, a linen-draper’s daughter – can never be consummated. Material culture is a ‘phantasmagoria’, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, which blinds and maddens the consumer. A story of modern life In the November 1852 issue of Bentley’s Miscellany, the reviewer argued that ‘in truth the writer of that work ought to have been called Mr. Salvator Fuseli. There is nothing either of Wilkie or Collins about it’ (Anon., 1974: 45). Like Fuseli’s The Nightmare, indeed, Collins’s Basil depicts a gothic world of self haunted by demons. Set in the heart of London, the novel traces the daydream of Basil, the son of an ancient family, who is lured by a linen-draper’s daughter. Blinded by his passion, he proposes to the socially inferior Margaret Sherwin, and agrees to postpone the consummation of his marriage for a year. Yet, the ‘beauty of the dream’ soon vanishes on the night before his year’s probation is completed. Basil sees Margaret and her father’s clerk, Robert Mannion, entering a hotel. Through the partition wall, Basil hears Mannion seducing Margaret. Out of anger, Basil then waits for Mannion and hurls him onto a newly ‘macadamised’ road, leaving him monstrously disfigured. Mannion is the son of one of Basil’s father’s employees who was hanged for forging Basil’s father’s name. Monomaniacally obsessed with taking revenge on Basil, and believing that ‘something less earthly and apparent … makes [him] … the instrument of a fatality’, Mannion follows Basil to Cornwall and causes him to be expelled from the superstitious Cornish community as ‘a curse’ (Collins, 1990: 252; 324). But as they meet on the cliffs, Mannion threateningly raises his hand in the air, loses his balance and falls down a precipice, disappearing into the mouth of a chasm. The novel explicitly borrows from Shelley’s Frankenstein. The

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u­nconsummated marriage, the hero’s unrestrained passion, which disfigures Mannion and makes a monster of him, Mannion’s narrative, explaining the curse that follows him, embedded in Basil’s confession, and the emphasis on dreams, ravings and deliriums which punctuate the plot, strongly connect the two novels. Tamar Heller notes other similarities, particularly those related to maternal figures (1992: 58–81). In Basil, ‘haunted media’, in Jeffrey Sconce’s terms, play a key part: the novel hints at imaging techniques which reveal the character’s imagination, desires and terrors. At the beginning of the novel, Basil comes out of his father’s bank in the city. He has just cashed his quarterly allowance, emphasising the role of the circulation of money in the narrative, and boards an omnibus in ‘the idle impulse of the moment’: this new amusement turns the city into a site of visual entertainment in which the kaleidoscope of faces assaults the senses of the idle and immobile flâneur. The vehicle, not the person, moves, to become a ‘perambulatory exhibition-room of the eccentricities of human nature’, ‘collecting together’ classes and temperaments, the ‘infinitesimal varieties of human character – as various even as the varieties of the human face’ (Collins, 1990: 27). It prepares the appearance of the ‘fashion freak’ Basil is about to see: a stranger soon boards the omnibus, a modern version of Frankenstein’s reanimated corpse, made up of assembled body parts. She electrifies Basil. He feels a thrill ‘in every nerve’ when he touches her arm, and his powers of observation, so far exerted in describing the passengers’ outfits, ‘desert[–]’ him (29–30). Mesmerised by the veiled stranger, thrilled by the sight of her, his rationality is simultaneously paralysed and teased by what lies beneath her veil. It is the position of the consumer: ‘in order to blunt the buyer’s calculating consciousness, a veil must be drawn around the object’ (Barthes, 1983: 272). Basil’s romance starts as visual experience, dazzled by the beauty of the stranger. The motion of the omnibus enhances the optical tease of lifting and lowering the veil, the movement reminiscent of Victorian optical devices making images appear and disappear. It hypnotises Basil, who loses his self-control and follows the stranger into a suburb of new houses. The inability to see the complete picture of the beautiful stranger forces the beholder to imagine what is hidden. Suburbia is depicted in similar terms: ‘[u]nfinished streets, unfinished crescents, unfinished squares, unfinished shops, unfinished gardens, surrounding [the hero]’ (Collins, 1990: 32). The lack of completion creates a sense of claustrophobia, not only recalling uncontrolled suburban growth,

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but also hinting at frustration: the unfinished picture prevents visual fulfilment. Basil’s experience is ultra modern, a feeling of imprisonment accompanied with a myriad of impressions assailing his senses and precluding reasoning: ‘My impressions wanted repose … My ideas were in utter confusion, all my thoughts ran astray. I walked on, dreaming in full day – I had no distinct impressions, except of the stranger beauty whom I had just seen’ (32). Collins emphasises how modern visual culture interrogates ‘the physiological makeup of the human subject’ as new technologies became available (Crary, 1992: 70). From the beginning of the novel, the succession of incomplete images which strike the hero’s senses already point to the gap between perception and its object: the former is not instantaneous but recalls the optical devices which played upon discontinuous series of images creating effects of motion by exploiting ‘the durational properties of retinal afterimages’ (Crary, 1992: 106), such as the thaumatrope, phenakitiscope or zoetrope. Basil’s mind has been literally impressed by the stranger’s face, his senses numbed by the experience. His voyage quickly changes the flâneur into a voyeur and a ‘monomaniacal stalker’, ‘turning his random wandering through the London streets into an obsessive quest’ (Wagner, 2006: 206, 200). Unable to ‘repress the desire’ (Collins, 1990: 33), Basil returns to Hollyoak Square, and notices that the blinds are all drawn down over the front windows to keep out the sun and that the pavement is ‘glaring’ (34). Blinded by the light of his own passion, as by the sunlight, Basil discovers the stranger is the daughter of a linen-draper and immediately looks for the shop and purchases something. By blocking his mental faculties, the mesmerising stranger has literally drawn Basil into her father’s shop, compelling him to buy her father’s wares. Margaret functions, in fact, like an advertising image. She has no depth and is simply invested with meaning: she is, therefore, insubstantial, a spectral vision, possessing the mind of the consumer as she dispossesses him of his money. The novel’s stress on the relationship between vision and possession is typically rooted in a capitalistic construction of the world which teases the viewers’ senses, promising possession through ocular deception. The third time Basil returns to North Villa, the stranger is posing at the now wide-open window: ‘every moment her figure naturally fell into the position which showed its pliant symmetry best’ (37). She is playing with a canary in a cage, proffering and withdrawing a piece of sugar. It re-enacts the teasing display with the veil on the omnibus, the

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canary moving from one bar of the cage to another. Though Basil is the onlooker, he is not just passively viewing it from outside. Symbolically experiencing the same frustration as the bird, Basil has been drawn into the cage, physiologically responding to the picture framed by the open window, increasingly frustrated as the sun goes down and the servant draws the blinds. The spectacle thus engages the hero’s body. The series of images created by the movement of the bird from one bar to the other increases Basil’s desire, stimulating a fantasy of – merely ocular – possession. For the second time, Basil is made ‘insensible … to all body reflections, careless of exercising the smallest self-restraint’. This ‘new sensation’, which he calls love, results in fact from the dazzling effects of modernity and its sensual temptations, stupefying the senses and subordinating man to his own uncontrolled desires. Margaret Sherwin is, indeed, a ‘living picture’, a foil to Basil’s sister Clara, who looks ‘almost statue-like in [her] purity and repose’ (38–9). Phantasmagoria of consumer culture If Basil is constantly bedazzled by the exotic beauty of Margaret, always positioned near windows, she soon becomes aligned with her father’s other commodities. When Basil enters the Sherwins’ parlour, he sees that Everything was oppressively new … Never was a richly furnished room more thoroughly comfortless than this – the eye ached at looking round it … There was no look of shadow, shelter, secrecy, or retirement in any one nook or corner of those four gaudy walls. All surrounding objects seemed startlingly near to the eye; much nearer than they really were. The room would have given a nervous man the headache, before he had been in it a quarter of an hour. (61)

The illusion of material plenitude hints once again at optical illusions: as in stereoscopic images, which created an effect of ‘tangible threedimensionality’ and subsumed ‘the tactile within the optical’, the parlour exchanges the gothic world of shadows and secrets for a space saturated with objects whose glitter reveal their depthlessness – the place is, in fact, as flat as a picture, constructing desire as a mere ‘bourgeois horror of the void’ (Crary, 1992: 127, 62, 125). Associated with the world of commerce, speculation and consumption, Collins’s ‘suburban Gothic’ (Wagner, 2006) turns derelict castles and wild scenery into dazzling new sitting-rooms and homes whose wild growth and dazzling profusion of commodities madden the beholder. Reality has become spectral and, as Basil is caught in the whirl of desire: his dream

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records a distracting story of possession. This is why terror, fear and threats deal with possession, from Sherwin, who wants to force Basil to ‘own [Margaret as his wife], and keep her as such’ to Mannion who seeks to prevent Basil from possessing her: ‘It was my fancy not to give her up, as your sole possession, even on her death-bed: it is my fancy, now, not to let you stand alone – as if her corpse was your property – over her grave’ (Collins, 1990: 214; 303). If the macabre terminology recalls Frankenstein’s discourse on the use of corpses as anatomical material, Margaret is here aligned with her father’s commodities, vainly trying through her marriage to Basil to walk round her father’s counter and become one of his customers. Her father promotes her accomplishments, obliges Margaret to ‘display’ her knowledge before Basil, and proceeds ‘to business’ with Basil (102; 77). Basil’s uncontrolled impulse to marry her – that is, possess her – while his social rank and money could simply buy her services, reveals the extent to which Margaret’s ‘use value’ is constructed as secondary. Delaying consummation for a year – the marriage certificate acting as a guarantee of possession – until the time comes to ‘show [his] wife to every one’, Basil can meanwhile study her at length, as when he turns the magnifying glass on her face instead of observing rare prints (98; 103). Inevitably the search for possessions induces the loss of self-­ possession, as exemplified by the linen-draper, a petit bourgeois who collects commodities at home while purveying wares in his shop. As the epitome of material culture, Sherwin cannot control himself: his eyes are ‘incessantly in motion’ just like all his features, ‘affected by nervous contractions and spasms which were constantly drawing up and down in all directions the brow, the mouth, and the muscles of the cheek’, mapping the mobility of goods and signs ‘whose identity is exclusively optical’ (Collins, 1990: 62; Crary, 1992: 62). Consumer society, constantly eliciting physiological responses, acts upon the nervous system of the individual. The frantic circulation of goods, if it enables social mobility, drains consumers of their senses as much as of their possessions. Furthermore, by agreeing to an unconsummated marriage, Basil links his act of purchase to a frustrating deferral of pleasure. Basil’s romance thus plays upon consumerist phenomenology to give shape to brand new spectres. As he realises that he has merely bought an illusory promise, Basil’s frustration after his marriage is revealingly couched in gothic terminology: instead of possessing Margaret, he

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is ‘possessed by a gloom and horror’ he cannot apprehend, his lips ‘quivering’, the nerves in his body ‘strung up to the extremest point of tension’ (Collins, 1990: 99). Basil’s convulsions manifest his loss of self-control and launch a narrative in which the hero cannot master his own creations. This time, the hero is less blinded by his own hubris than by the glitter of the object. Basil’s romance, just like the experience of modernity, is a study in perceptual delusions. Moreover, the discovery of the plot hinges upon his sensations, once again drawing on gothic motifs: like worms, sensations ‘creep over [him] … like a dead-cold touch crawling through and through [him] to the heart’ (159). Basil’s coldness and ‘icy insensibility’, his ‘dream-sensation’ as he follows Margaret and Mannion to the hotel, recalls Frankenstein’s loss of sensation and trance-like feelings during his experiment (160). At the railway station, ‘the fierce scream of the whistle, and the heaving, heavy throb of the engine starting on its journey’ prefigure the sounds he hears through the thin wall: ‘I listened; and through the thin partition, I heard voices – her voice, and his voice. I heard and I knew – knew my degradation in all its infamy, knew my wrongs in all their nameless horror’ (158; 160). Bound to modern culture, Margaret and Mannion’s heavings, just like Margaret’s later ‘pantings and shudderings’ strike Basil ‘with a supernatural terror’ (165). The supernatural, here, is self-created, resulting from the nerve-racking pace, sounds and sights of modern society, as the trope of the train suggests. Modern technology (the engines of a boat) and nervous malady (auditory hallucination) are also linked in Collins’s The Black Robe (1881). Basil’s ensuing delirium again strongly echoes Frankenstein: his burning passion – felt as a terrible heat ‘which seemed to have shrivelled and burned up the whole of the little world around [him], and to have left [him] alone to suffer, but never to consume in it’ – recalls the creature’s ultimate wish to extinguish his ‘burning miseries’ in consuming flames (Shelley, 1986: 496; Collins, 1990: 169). Yet, the creature is within: ‘It was as if something were imprisoned in my mind’ (Collins, 1990: 169). In addition, Collins fleshes out the significance of modern culture by using visual technologies to fashion his hero’s haunted self. From the beginning, Basil believes he may be dazzled by optical illusions, as on the evening when he visits Mannion at home and tries to understand the mysteries surrounding the character. Noticing how similar he and Mannion are, Basil fails to see the monster when the flash of lightning lights his face:

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Strangely enough, at the moment when I addressed him, a flash came, and seemed to pass right over his face. It gave such a hideously livid hue, such a spectral look of ghastliness and distortion to his features, that he absolutely seemed to be glaring and grinning on me like a fiend, in the one instant of its duration. For the moment, it required all my knowledge of the settled calmness of his countenance, to convince me that my eyes must have been only dazzled by an optical illusion produced by the lightning. (130)

Revealed by the flash of lightning, like Frankenstein’s creature hanging among the rocks, Mannion’s ‘spectral look of ghastliness’ reworks the gothic fiend into an optical illusion. Though Mannion fails to impress Basil, whose perceptions are ‘dazzled’ or ‘blinded’, Basil’s framing of the monstrous vision through optical terminology brings to light the significance of the hero’s senses in the construction of horror (108; 171, 224). Revealingly, as Basil becomes aware of his ‘golden illusions’, the plot against him is envisioned as a ‘hideous phantasmagoria’, which he replays over and over again in his delirium (210; 169). Like a magic lantern, his mind revisits the scenes of the past, this time positioning Basil as a spectator, who once again sees the hideous smile of triumph on Mannion’s face, ‘not as an illusion produced by a flash of lightning, but as a frightful reality which the lightning disclosed’ (170). Nightmarish phantasmagoria Collins’s use of the trope of optical illusion to shape his gothic narrative reveals the ways in which, throughout the nineteenth century, optical devices figured as instruments of imagination even as they extended the faculty of sight. Thus, Basil’s allusion to the phantasmagoria functions as a particularly modern projection of his inner vision. As Marina Warner explains, the phantasmagoria was the offspring of the camera obscura and magic lantern shows. It was after the French Revolution that the showman and inventor Étienne-Gaspard Robertson (1764– 1837) gave the name of ‘Fantasmagorie’ to his ‘son-et-lumière Gothic moving picture show’, featuring, among the special effects, the severed head of Danton changing into a skull. The images appeared to lunge forward towards the spectators, electrifying the public and provoking screams: they transformed fear. Increasingly, such shows shifted causes of fear from outside to inside, playing upon hallucinations and spectral illusions, and no longer compelling the audience to face monsters but their own fears: as the phantasmagoria played upon moving, changing and deceptive images, it forced the audience to control their

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own ­physiological responses and their own delusions (Warner, 2006: 147–8). Gradually, the mechanisms of the shows were made visible, increasing the audience’s participation in the making of the spectacle (Horton, 1995: 8). This is exactly what happens to Basil, who willingly succumbs to the lures of a linen-draper’s daughter – a young lady manufactured in the shop, a product fashioned by the glossy accessories sold by the shopkeeper. Basil gradually becomes aware that outside reality is just a projection of his own inner self, ‘all things, on all sides … reflecting before [him] the aspects of [his] own heart’ (Collins, 1990: 49). Reality is no longer the ‘friendly, familiar shop-window, filled with the glittering trinkets which had so often lured [him] in to buy presents for her’, or ‘the noisy street corner … once bright … with the fairy-land architecture of a dream’ (209), but a dark world ruled by desire and social ambition. The novel’s journey from the bright fairy-like commercial areas of London to the sombre passageways of the self reworks the gothic into a subjective visual experience. From the beginning, as Basil is bedazzled by the surface appearance of things, his blindness revealingly also acts as an unconscious refusal to acknowledge the depths of his own desire. Basil thus makes explicit how vision was increasingly considered to be subjective through the nineteenth century, becoming ‘physiological’ as the human body turned into ‘the active producer of optical experience’ (Crary, 1992: 69). After his first meeting with Margaret, Basil rephrases his moral dilemma in his dream, featuring a woman, dressed in pure white, descending from the bright summits of the hills, and a dark woman coming out of the woods. Following the dark woman and turning his back on the fair hills, Basil enters the ‘secret recesses that lay amid the unfathomable depths of trees’ (Collins, 1990: 46) – ­mapping out his desire through the trope of the forest. Basil misreads his dream as prophetic, failing to understand that the prediction of doom is, in fact, a ‘self-fulfilling fate’ (Maudsley, 1887: 83). His projection of feelings onto natural scenery goes further in his delirium, once he has discovered the plot and disfigured Mannion. While his feelings of guilt are symbolised through darkness and forests, as in the initial dream, heights and domes illustrate his soaring passion during his periods of raving. As in Frankenstein, hell is high above, on top of flashing ruby summits. Light gives way to shadow, sound to silence, heat to cold. The lifting of the veil, revealing Mannion and Margaret as two monsters, recalls Frankenstein’s dream. Basil’s modern urban world is inhabited by ghost-like individuals who epitomise a spectral reality:

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I plunged down through a vast darkness into a world whose daylight was all radiant flame … Far down the corridors rise visions of flying phantoms … and then, an apparition of two figures coming on out of the shadow – two monsters stretching forth their gnarled yellow talons to grasp at us; leaving on their track a green decay, oozing and shining with a sickly light. … each raised a veil which was one hideous net-work of twining worms. I saw through the ghastly corruption of their faces the look that told me who they were – the monstrous iniquities incarnate in monstrous forms: the fiend-souls made visible in fiend-shapes – Margaret and Mannion! (Collins, 1990: 172–3)

Basil’s raving reconstructs the dazzling reality into a wild and dark realm. The world behind the veil is a macabre and uncanny one which emerges when all powers of will have given way. William Carpenter, like other Victorian mental physiologists, believed that deliriums illustrated the weakening of volitional powers and triggered a succession of disconnected ideas and vivid images: ‘the torrents of disconnected ideas are so powerful as completely to arrest the attention, and the mind is gradually withdrawn altogether from the contemplation of external realities, being conscious only of its own internal workings (Carpenter, 1889: 640). As the rise of nervous diseases was increasingly related to the new tempo of modern society, definitions of delirium, characterised by the vividness of the images and the velocity of thoughts, align the raving man with the flâneur, subjugated to the variegated messages along the streets and the frantic pace of urban life. Collins makes this connection obvious through his protagonist. In fact, Collins constructs his hero’s brain disease in organic terms, foregrounding a protagonist literally contaminated by city life and its temptations. Mental physiologists, like Carpenter, believed that the delirium of fevers or other diseases was due to ‘the introduction of a morbid matter into the blood’ (Carpenter, 1889: 637). Basil and Margaret’s union is seen as an act worthy of ‘a patient in Bedlam’ (Collins, 1990: 259). It is also considered in terms of infection: Basil’s father believes his son to have been ‘contaminated by connection with a cheat’; the inhabitants of North Villa all seem ill, whether affected by ‘trifling illnesses’ or by more serious illnesses, like Mrs Sherwin – a ‘spectre-shadow’, dressed in white garments that ‘looked on her like the raiment of the tomb’ (197; 147; 215). Basil’s brain disease derives from the circulation of money, goods and germs. If Collins’s modern gothic world results from the hallucinatory experience of modern life, illusions and ravings are recast in organic terms. Margaret’s delirium after catching typhus fever when she visits Mannion at the hospital causes her to see him, his deformed face

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haunting her and ‘walling [her] up’ (294). In turn, her deformed feverish face – ‘smouldering fever in her cheeks; the glare of the bloodshot eyes; the distortion of the parched lips; the hideous clutching of the outstretched fingers at the empty air’ – turns the dazzling object into a sight of ‘horror’, a visual equivalent to Mannion, whose face, disfigured by Basil, ‘revolt[s] every human being’ (291; 240). Thus the ‘work of [Basil’s] own hands’ is not just a sensational transformation of the handsome-looking clerk into a monster but also reframes the characters’ hauntings and superstitions in medical terms (303). As the ‘evil spirit’ starts pursuing Basil, Mannion’s face, with ‘its ghastly discolouration of sickness’, aligns the medical and the moral, revamping the gothic narrative (264; 303). Gradually, Basil’s creation appears not so much as Basil’s monstrous double as an allegorical representation of repression. The creature, imprisoned in the hero’s mind and ‘moving always to and fro in it – moving, but never getting free’ recasts the gothic topos of confinement and tropes of persecution into an exploration of repression and guilt (169). The inaccessibility of the creature is eventually projected onto Cornish scenery, a few miles from Land’s End, using the cliffs and chasms to figure Basil’s mental recesses and haunting secrets. The setting is sharply contrasted with London, where ‘capitalism uproots and makes mobile that which is grounded, clears away or obliterates that which impedes circulation’ (Crary, 1992: 10). As firm boundaries, marked by crevices and holes, the Cornish cliffs stand out as counter-reflections of deceptively flat urban images, enabling the character to explore his own psychic instability. Indeed, the transposition of the setting from the civilised city to the wild Cornish precipices inhabited by superstitious people frames Basil’s repressed wildness. There, Basil’s forebodings increase: everywhere about the place, he feels ‘the unknown dangers which hang over [his] head … the threats of [his] deadly enemy strengthen[ing] their hold fearfully on all [his] senses’ (Collins, 1990: 314). Basil fears he is being followed, and reads the mist, which shrouds the scene, as ‘the dim and ghastly personification of a fatality that is lying in wait’ (314). In fact, as the mist precludes sight, Basil’s blindness draws him further inwards while he vainly seeks to flee his responsibility on the cliffs. The shift from the character’s figurative blindness to a literal sightlessness brings about the climax of the narrative – rock, abysses and holes acting as so many images of Basil’s limited freedom. Locked up within his own psyche, Basil walks along the edge of the precipices

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‘only by keeping the sound of the sea always at the same distance from [his] ear’ (320). As the cliffs excite Basil’s sensations, the scene revisits the cliché of the Romantic traveller looking for the sublime at the edge of the precipice. Collins reshapes the cliffs as a symbolic site revealing inner truth; but the truth lies in a medical exploration of the self, which leads Basil to reassess his fears in physiological terms: ‘Does this foreboding that Mannion’s eye is always on me, that his footsteps are always secretly following mine, proceed only from the weakness of my worn-out energies?’ (314). Basil ascends the cliff path in order to get to Penzance, climbs on ‘one of the great granite promontories which project into the sea’, which opens on ‘a black, yawning hole that slanted nearly straight downwards, like a tunnel, to unknown and unfathomable depths below’ (321). He then becomes aware of the dangers of the ‘narrow ledges and treacherous precipices’ he has just unconsciously passed, yet walks closer, morbidly longing, like many a man ‘led … to the very brink of a precipice’ to look on danger (322). The sight bewilders him, and the depths and wild shapes formed by the rocks foreshadow the appearance of Mannion – his creation. The encounter with the evil creature gives a modern twist to this gothic revision. In Radcliffean gothic, the sight of precipices punctuates the heroines’ journeys to sites of persecution: when Emily St Aubert approaches Udolpho in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) or when Ellena is kidnapped and taken to a convent in The Italian (1797) their journeys along cliffs and abysses are forced voyages, constructing the vertiginous chasms as illustrations of the weak women’s lack of control of the situation. Moreover, chasms and depths allegorise the villains’ fallen nature: at the end of Lewis’s The Monk (1796) Ambrosio is taken to the highest peak by the devil to be cast down the precipice (Lévy, 2007). The end of Basil reworks such stereotypes, with Collins using rocky scenery to illustrate the nature of his hero’s will as he struggles against his own repressed desires. Indeed, Mannion lays his hand firmly on Basil’s arm as the latter is visualising the depths of his own psyche, ‘tortured waters imprisoned in the depths of the abyss’, ‘boil[ing] and thunder[ing] in their imprisonment, till they seemed to convulse the solid cliff about them’ (Collins, 1990: 322). The sight of Mannion, his vacant eye glaring as a sign of madness, echoes the tumultuous abyss. Like the sprays steaming up like smoke, Basil feels his brain ‘turn[ing] to fire; [his] heart to ice’ (324). As suggested by the merging of fire and water, heat and cold – or as foreshadowed by the surrounding mist, fusing water and rock – boundaries dissolve

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and Basil loses his mental grip: he feels his own arms stretching to dash Mannion down the hole, but flees just in time. Mannion, on the other hand, shakes his hand threateningly in the air, losing his balance and falling backwards to slip into the mouth of the abyss. The sight of Mannion’s imbalance, which paralyses Basil’s faculties, haunts him through his following delirium, revealing his repressed feelings, in a glass darkly: The frightful scene that I witnessed yesterday still holds the same disastrous influence over me … Waking or sleeping, it is as if some fatality kept all my faculties imprisoned within the black walls of the chasms … I am afraid my mind is seriously affected; it must have been fatally weakened before I passed through the terrible scenes among the rocks of the promontory. (327–8)

As one of Collins’s earliest novels, Basil underscores Collins’s interest in the visual. Heavily influenced by De Quincey’s descriptions of opium dreams and reveries, the depictions of chasms, abysses and depths below depths, the collapsing of boundaries and the expansion of space, underline Collins’s oscillations between pictorial and symbolic representations. Little by little, his gothic sublimities and/or gothic locales function as allegorical representations of his characters’ minds – reaching a climax in The Haunted Hotel (1879). On the other hand, by choosing urban London as the place where Basil’s obsession with the linen-draper’s daughter originates, Collins revisits the hero’s gothic nightmare and turns it into a ‘hideous phantasmagoria’, leading the character on to the verge of madness, a feature which will mark Collins’s later novels, from Armadale (1866) to The Moonstone (1868), both playing upon the delusive appearance of reality and modern technologies. References [Anon.] (1974), Bentley’s Miscellany, xxxii (November 1852): 576–86, in N. Page (ed.), Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, p. 45. Barthes, R. (1983), The Fashion System, trans. R. Howard, New York: Hill & Wang. Carpenter, W. B. (1889), Principles of Mental Physiology with Their Applications to the Training and Discipline of the Mind and the Study of Its Morbid Conditions, 4th edn, New York: D. Appleton & Company. Collins, W. (1990 [1852]), Basil, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crary, J. (1992), Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Feldman, P. R. and Scott-Kilvert, D. (eds) (1987), The Journals of Mary Shelley, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heller, T. (1992), Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Horton, S. R. (1995), ‘Were They Having Fun Yet? Victorian Optical Gadgetry, Modernist Selves’, in C. T. Christ and J. O. Jordan (eds), Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1–26. Lévy, M. (2007), ‘La Montagne et la manière noire’. Paper presented at The Mountain conference, University of Toulouse-Le Mirail, 4–7 October. Maudsley, H. (1887), Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings, 2nd edn, London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. Sconce, J. (2000), Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shelley, M. (1986 [1818–31]), Frankenstein, in Three Gothic Novels, ed. P. Fairclough, London: Penguin. Wagner, T. (2006), ‘Sensationalizing Victorian Suburbia: Wilkie Collins’s Basil’, in K.  Harrison, and R. Fantina (eds), Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, pp. 200–11. Warner, M. (2006), Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Part II

Sounding spectres

6 Steen Christiansen

‘The earth died screaming’: Tom Waits’s Bone Machine

Tom Waits’s album Bone Machine (1992) employs an aesthetic tension between noise and music, a tension which takes on monstrous aspects. Usually thought of as a maverick and an outsider, resistant to categorisation, for Jay S. Jacobs however ‘Waits’s vision is an American Gothic of three-time losers, lost souls, and carnival folk’ (2000: 15). Jacobs positions Waits within an American gothic tradition which, as Eric Savoy points out, is ‘haunted by the dark recesses of its own history’ (2002: 187). As Jeffrey Weinstock observes in Spectral America (2004): ‘The ghost is that which interrupts the presentness of the present, and its haunting indicates that, beneath the surface of received history, there lurks another narrative, an untold story that calls into question the veracity of the authorized version of events’ (2004: 5). Waits does not expose the racial and gendered ghosts of American history, but does reveal clear sympathies with those who have fallen by the wayside of an American society geared only for success. Musically, Waits can be regarded as gothic in two primary ways: first, with the highly distinctive use of timbre in his performance and second, since Swordfishtrombones (1983), in the exploration of liminal musical states. On a broader level, Waits’s music is full of the creaking sounds of the production studio environment, which make it sound like a haunted house. The tension between noise, music and the recuperation of noise is a distinctive feature of Waits’s production, and makes his music sonically monstrous. Monstrosity can be broadly understood as the breakdown of intelligibility which would associate the monstrous with noise as the impure Other of music (Asma, 2009: 10). Yet it is

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more accurate to propose that the monstrous forms the articulation between what is ordered and what is undifferentiated (Botting, 2003: 344). What emerges is the realisation that sonic monstrosities occur when noise is introduced: the music remains intelligible but carries a tension with it, as the intelligible music is threatened by the unintelligible noise. Wavering between the two, sonic monstrosities emerge. Monstrosity For a sense of how monstrosity emerges in music, it useful to turn to David Wills’s concept of dorsality, which he defines as ‘a name for that which, from behind, from or in the back of the human, turns (it) into something technological, some technological thing’ (2008: 5). Wills’s primary argument concerns the technological constitution of the human. In terms of monstrosity and music, there are two main points to be made. First, drawing on Don Ihde’s classic account of music in Listening and Voice (2007), music is always already technological and musical technologies (primarily instruments but not exclusively) are incorporated into bodily practices. Musical practices become in part what constitute bodily practices. This looped construction of the human is always inherently unexpected and unknown: ‘In its guise of the technological, the dorsal therefore names, in a number of ways, what comes from behind to inhabit us as something other, some other thing, the other; an other beyond what can be conceived of within the perspective of our frontal relations’ (Wills, 2008: 11). In other words, our bodily practices are constituted in part musically, in everything from walking rhythmically to humming while cooking or typing on a keyboard in sync with the music playing. All of these practices are culturally constituted and, more importantly, completely habituated as normal. The same goes for the use of instruments in playing music: we are habituated into understanding the guitar as an instrument for playing chords, drums for dividing time through beats, and the microphone as an instrument for amplifying the human voice. We have now also become habituated into accepting distorted chords as part of the guitar, that beats can come from a sampler rather than drums and that pitch-shifting software can be used alongside a microphone to modify human vocals. Yet dorsality works in music when our cultural bodily practices are disrupted through the use of unexpected technology, such as playing guitar with a violin bow (although this practice has now also been habituated). Dorsal music, then, is music which not only

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uses unexpected sounds surprising our bodily practices but also music which employs disruptive musical technologies for which we have no immediate bodily practices. This brings us to the second point, which is the issue of monstrosity in relation to music and dorsality. The dorsal moment in music occurs when an undifferentiated element (preliminarily defined as noise) is introduced into the habituated bodily practice of music. Yet the very introduction of noise signals a need to understand noise as part of the music, assuming that the noise is part of the music and not faulty equipment. Music becomes monstrous in this dorsal moment of revealing music to be technologically dependent in a way we have not yet habituated. This also reveals that monstrosity is fleeting, as habituation will eventually recuperate these practices into a new norm. The moment of monstrosity, however, remains significant as a way of understanding changes in cultural practices. In this sense, media technologies constitute the human and human perception. Media technologies are, as Marshall McLuhan put it, ‘extensions’ of man and engender new sense ratios (2001). Early phonographic listeners were able to hear through the noise of recording and find it flawless in a way we could not do today. As sound recordings become clearer in sound reproduction, listeners demand less noise, clearer sound and so our senses are attuned ever more finely to the presence of recorded sound. As we also know from McLuhan, obsolete media forms are often retrieved in newer media: the presence of noise is no longer removed from recordings but added through filters and layers of dust and grime. Phonographic noise, detested by audiophiles, becomes a new aesthetic practice for dubstep artists such as Dollboy, Kode9 and Burial – and in a quite different genre, also Tom Waits. Technology thus prompts new aesthetic modes. While there might have been some resistance to turning a reproductive technology into an instrument for creating new music and new sounds in what could even be called a violation of this technology, other artists and genres found new use for making technology present as technology and in monstrous ways (Smith, 2000: 78). This monstrous dorsality of technologies is found everywhere on Bone Machine: ‘The Earth Died Screaming’ opens with the rising sound of sticks clattering against each other in a shaky rhythm. In the chorus the percussion comes in and Waits’s own instrument the ‘conundrum’ (a metal cross with found metallic objects hanging from it) is used, adding more noise. As the song comes to an end, the instruments stop

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playing until we are left with only the sticks again, which fade out while a strange organ sound emerges: this is the Chamberlin synthesiser, which in this case sounds like a wheezing church organ, pumping out the final notes before everything ends. Although the Chamberlin is fading out we do hear an abrupt stop as it is cut off, indicating a rupture rather than a smooth fade-out. This one song, as should be evident, brings in many different instruments, some of which are merely eclectic: the Chamberlin synthesiser is made to sound like a church organ, while others are barely instruments in the accepted sense. The sticks which form the basic rhythm are in fact simply sticks that were brought outside and drummed against the pavement for a diffused, almost industrial sound. The conundrum also generates atypical sounds: It’s just a metal configuration, like a metal cross. It looks a little bit like a Chinese torture device. It’s a simple thing, but it makes … It give you access to these alternative sound sources [sic]. Hit ’em with a hammer. Sounds like a jail door. Closing. Behind you. I like it. You end up with bloody knuckles, when you play it. You just, you hit it with a hammer until you just, you can’t hit it any more. (‘Percussion Instruments’: online, no date; omissions in original)

We find here a very distinctive expression of what a musical instrument might mean, and this is certainly not a run-of-the-mill instrument. Deliberately intended to be noisy, the conundrum challenges common conceptions of the purpose of an instrument. If a musical instrument is understood as a piece of technology, then we may begin to gain a deeper understanding of how these instruments work and their effect. Aden Evens argues convincingly that ‘technology does not take its cues from presencing or truth; rather, it sets upon the world, ordering that world to make it available for human being [sic]’ (2005: 64, emphasis in original). Evens occupies the same tradition as Wills, arguing that there is no easy, clear distinction between human and technology. As far as music goes, we ‘know’ what music is meant to sound like and the introduction of atypical instruments or even noninstruments disrupts this knowledge, challenging our conception of what constitutes music. In this way, our experience of music comes in part from the instruments used, the way they are used and how these instruments order our relation to the world. What the conundrum’s maximisation of noise suggests is that unusual instruments generate an experience of a sound coming from nowhere, since the sounds of the (non-)instrument used is not immediately recognisable. This is the dorsal effect of the conundrum in ‘Earth Died Screaming’ and in turn, also its monstrous nature because it creates a moment between

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undifferentiated noise and ordered music. In the same way, one needs to keep in mind that although the instrument is in many ways an extension of the musician the instrument never disappears but remains part of the creative process. Feedback between human and instrument is bilateral. As Aden Evens points out, the instrument operates on the player as the player operates on the instrument, and each is altered thereby. The player’s body (tissues, muscles, nerves, etc.) is reorganized around the instrument. Calluses, reflexes, ears, and fingers are attuned to the instrument until the player may no longer experience the physical divisions that separate her from her instrument. By resisting the player’s gestures, and by directing the application of force, the instrument guides desire and generates new ideas in the player. This blurs both the instrument and player at their edges and allows their sonic surfaces to enmesh. (2005: 83)

In the same way that the player and the instrument are enmeshed, listener and work are conjoined in the musical mediation. On the one hand, this enmeshing connects to dorsality in the way that an unknown force may come from behind and reconfigure our embodied relation to the work: when we hear the sticks and the conundrum, we no longer listen to recognisable sounds. Instead, these sounds waver between music and noise as the shakiness of the rhythm alongside the clankiness and dispersed ringing of the conundrum creates an unusual sonic space, one which is not directional in the same way as most instrumental sounds. With sound, experience cannot as easily be distinguished in the front/back relationship that is the case with sight. Instead, we are enveloped but at the same time experience the sound inside ourselves. Sound can therefore be an invasion, something which does not come from a recognisable place: dorsality is always behind us. This is the effect of using unusual instruments as well as unusual recording techniques. Sonic space is dispersed and the enmeshing which occurs is therefore less stable. Bone Machine was recorded partially outside, partially in a basement, precisely in order to add this layer of echo and dispersed sonic space, a space which immerses us from the inside because of its ambiguous directionality. For Goth music, musical spatiality has always been an identifying mark, as Michael Bibby suggests when he likens Joy Division’s sound to the looming, imposing spaces of the gothic cathedral (2007: 240). Isabella van Elferen similarly notes how ‘the instrumental timbres of Goth … get stretched to their extremes, are emptied out or filled up in postproduction, are overlaid with echo or mixed into thick textures or instruments, musical machines and software’ (2012:

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169). As is evident from the spatial metaphors employed, space and direction help create uncanny moods in music, within and beyond the ‘Goth’ genre. Dorsality therefore names the way in which technology adds a kind of uncanny agency to music, an agency based on unusual technological deployments. In fact, in the wavering moment before habituation, Waits’s music seems to come uncannily alive, to have a will of its own, intruding and invading our body. This is why dorsality is not simply an effect but the momentary eruption of agency. While all music depends on some form of technology (even the human larynx and vocal chords must be regarded as technological), we have become so habituated to certain forms of music that they appear natural, although they are not. Such agency is part of what makes the album monstrous, rejecting a safe positionality of the listener and instead casting the listener into what Ihde calls ‘polymorphic perception’, where our relation to sound is different (2007: 233). For Ihde, polymorphic perception relates itself to changes in technology. While perception of clear and distinct differences are always possible, this is a learned process and when technologies change, so does our perception of them. With new technologies or unexpected uses of old technologies, perception becomes polymorphous because our capacity to distinguish differences is missing. For this reason, it is significant that Waits’s album is primarily produced with a distinctive kind of materiality, a materiality that generates noise as something productive but which at the same time cannot be reduced to simple information. Noise Sangild defines acoustic sound noise as ‘sounds that are impure and irregular, neither tones nor rhythm – roaring, pealing, blurry sounds with a lot of simultaneous frequencies, as opposed to a rounded sound with a basic frequency and its related overtones’ (Sangild, 2002: 5). When we turn our attention to noise in music, we see that these noises may come from anywhere, any kind of source and are most often encountered today in the case of guitar distortion and feedback. For Waits, though, we have already seen how he seeks noises in his recording environment – the echo of a cement floor, the creaking of an old barn, etc. – but this does not make the noises any less integral to his music. As with much other rock music, it is significant to keep in mind that ‘instrumental tonal purity is irrelevant’ (Ihde, 2007: 230). Instead,

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the impurity becomes a significant element of the music; the noise becomes the music, as it were. Noise has been dealt with primarily in information theory as an entropic element. Historically first seen as an unfortunate side effect of poor communication, noise has since been recuperated into a productive part of every communicative action. For Bruce Clarke, ‘the productive ambiguity of noise emerged from the consideration that it too is information’ and ‘from the standpoint of art forms instantiated in informatic media (sonic sounds, visual images, linguistic signs), the noise is the art’ (2010: 164, emphasis in original). This point of view underlines why noise becomes a significant part of music’s aesthetic, but, as Sangild contends, ‘[w]hen you reverse a disturbance into a part of the music itself, it is not smoothly integrated but infuses the music with a tension. There is still a play on the formerly negative relation between noise and signal when a noise is legitimated. This tension is an important part of the musical power of noise’ (2002: 6). Noise is a tension but a productive tension aimed at the listener much as the musical instruments remain a tension for the musician. With a song like ‘Let Me Get Up On It’ it is not possible to separate the noise from the rest of the song, because there is nothing but noise – the song is noise and nothing else. This is not because the song is particularly noisy (although it is) but because the typical identifying markers of a song are missing since it has no melody, no chords and no notes. It does have percussion so there is a rhythm, shaky as it may be. Waits’s voice chants almost indecipherable words, his vocals so far back in the mix as to be practically indistinguishable from the percussion. What is most prominent in the song is the clanks and winding of some unknown instrument which sounds more like a torture instrument being wound up than a musical instrument being played. The peals and crashes are full of irregular sounds and simultaneous frequencies generating a chaotic ringing from which no immediate sense or meaning can be generated. This is not to denigrate the song but to emphasise its pivotal role in the album’s sonic monstrosity. Nor is ‘Let Me Get Up On It’ unusual for this album: most of the songs have a disruptive element to them, laced with noise or other dorsal strategies to complicate sonic space. ‘The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me’ sounds like a soulful dirge, Waits’s distorted voice lamenting the ocean’s rejection of the poetic speaker’s desire for suicide. A simple song, it has a percussion element which grinds out a syncopated rhythm, but alongside the repetitive rhythm there are also odd ­arrhythmical

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peals and rings, coming from some kind of bell. Pulled far back in the mix we find the Chamberlin again, here used primarily with an organ sound with a considerable range of vibrato although quite slow paced. This song does not have the insistent, cacophonic noise of ‘Let Me Get Up On It’ but offers a more dispersed and reverberating sonic space. The non-repetitive clangs of the bell disrupts the rhythm with no immediate direction, the Chamberlin buried in the mix provides layers of sounds and Waits’s voice is distorted through some form of vocoder or other technological device. Although ‘The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me’ is not as noisy as other compositions, we still find a disruption of sonic space which resists the listener’s experience until we accept that the vibrato smear of notes, the arrhythmic peals of the bell and Waits’s distorted voice are all part and parcel of the song. Filtering them out would destroy the effect, and reduce affective excess in this song. Yet this affect is not easily coded as pleasure, but rather as something much more uncanny and disturbing. Lawrence Grossberg argues that pleasure usually takes the form of readily available emotional investments, in other words, forms with which we are habituated (1992: 82). Affect, conversely, does not provide such easy investment. Considering Waits’s own musical career, his earlier songs such as ‘Martha’, ‘I Wish I Was in New Orleans’ and ‘Kentucky Avenue’ are examples of deeply emotional and sentimental songs that provide pleasure precisely because they belong so effortlessly into an established tradition of songwriting and musical arrangement that they are pre-packaged morsels of emotions, ready for consumption. That pleasurable consumption is not found on Bone Machine where even the sentimental songs such as ‘Who Are You’ and ‘Whistle Down the Wind’ are broken, beaten and scarred. While the listener must inevitably be able to recuperate the excesses of Waits’s album in order to enjoy it, to make some form of sense of it, it seems inevitable that part of what demands attention is precisely this notion of noise as a useful tension in the music, a tension which must be seen as monstrous because of the way it works in the moment between undifferentiated noise and ordered music. The noise and crackle force the listener to pay attention. As Waits adds unusual sounds to his music as part of its sonic soundscape, we still experience these sounds as uncanny, as a disruption of a pure sound that we have otherwise come to expect from most contemporary music, lodged in what is called the ideology of fidelity. According to Evens, ‘The only correct goal of high fidelity sound re-production, in our estimation, is a perfect re-creation of the musical experience’ (2005: 7). As he goes on

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to show, the ideal musical experience is presumed to be the live performance, but it is precisely in the live performance that one cannot differentiate between music and the reverberation of the concert hall (not to mention the audience). The ideology of fidelity is thus the belief that there is an ideal state of music and that the goal of sound reproduction technology is to give the listener unhindered access to this ideal state. Only this ideal state of music is the authentic experience. Waits’s music is a rejection of this ideology insisting instead on tension. He aims to incorporate as many disparate frequencies as possible, while at the same time manipulating the layers of sound in the mix, pushing distinctive sounds back and forth, usually with the effect of creating an excessive tension between pure and impure sounds. This mixing of pure and impure sounds not only creates a distinctive sonic space but also elicits ideas of the monstrous, where the monstrous has typically been seen as impurity. Voice Waits’s primary instrument is his voice. While the guitar may appear to be the most important instrument for Waits’s rock and blues hybrid, or the piano for his more ballad-like compositions, several songs on Bone Machine do not employ either of these instruments. Voice is always present. One of the characteristic features of Waits’s music has always been his gravelly voice, at first said to be a feigned performance but soon, after several years of drinking, smoking and touring, a marker of authenticity for a rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. Jacob Smith, in his book Vocal Tracks, distinguishes between two main vocal performances. One is the bel canto (clear vocal performance) and the other, of greater interest here, is that of the rasp: ‘a raspy vocal timbre is created by loose glottal closure, a raised larynx, and relatively less resonance in the cavities of the head’ (2008: 134). More significant is the encoding of the rasp. On the one hand, it is an index of ‘bad living’ and so connotes a certain outlaw authenticity; on the other, it has become ‘increasingly freighted with cultural meaning for male singers over the course of the century; it indicated blackness, class conflict, masculinity, and catharsis’ (2008: 117). The rasp developed as part of a black musical aesthetics, and might be thought of as an underbelly to culturally acceptable vocal performances, or perhaps even a monstrous version of the bel canto. With the advent of rock ’n’ roll, white singers began emulating the black rasp and incorporated

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it into their own styles, so much so that the rasp changed its cultural meaning, losing its racial coding to become indicative of a certain masculine style of singing. Nevertheless, and this is certainly so in Waits’s case, the rasp maintains a connotation of suffering and melancholy. Throughout the album, Waits employs a number of different vocal performances, from the doom-laden incantation of ‘Earth Died Screaming’, the tortured falsetto whine of ‘Dirt In The Ground’, a melancholic dirge on ‘Whistle Down the Wind’ to the rambunctious rocking of ‘Goin’ Out West’. Waits’s moaning, shrieking and shouting adds another layer to the sound of the album and works as a master of ceremonies, inviting all the ghosts of noise and other strange sounds into the mix. But there is more to his voice than that: it is mediated in all these instances. Different recording techniques are used to emphasise the crackle of his voice (consider his solo duet on ‘All Stripped Down’ or the strange echo; the echo again on ‘The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me’). In many ways, we listen to the grain of his voice rather than his voice itself. No amount of high fidelity can ever reproduce Waits’s actual voice, but that is precisely the point: his voice becomes a multitude through the use of technology, allowing him to perform things that were otherwise impossible. Loose glottal closure, raised larynx, microphone and speaker all at once, the vocal performance exists only in the sonically mediated space, and we cannot isolate it in any one place. It is evident that the mechanical aspects of the album are part and parcel of its aesthetic expression, expressed distinctly by Waits himself in an interview that on Bone Machine, ‘I wanted to explore more machinery sounds’ (‘Percussion Instruments’: online, no date). These machinery sounds extend beyond the deployment of unusual instruments and recording techniques, adding a distinctive layer to Waits’s vocal performance. In this way, his music again resists purity, for as a rock musician he is inevitably embedded in an ideology of authenticity. While his voice certainly has a high degree of authenticity, based on the toll exerted by a true rock ’n’ roll lifestyle of late nights with warm beer and cold women, it is also plainly evident that ever since Swordfishtrombones Waits has experimented with distorting his voice as much as his instruments. Bullhorns, vocoders and largediaphragm microphones have all become part of the techniques to manipulate his voice. In this respect Waits is a cyborg singer blurring the boundaries between performance and technology, while also employing techniques and markers which suggest authenticity. ‘Jesus Gonna Be Here’ sounds like Waits singing in a big, empty

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room with the twang of the guitar placed far away from the microphone, adding an echoey, hollow sound. To finish it all off, Waits is heard coughing at the end of the track, clearly having strained his vocal chords from the falsetto rasp he employs. Keeping this cough is obviously a deliberate choice, since it could easily have been removed from the final mix, but it adds to the crackle and fizz that characterises Waits’s musical production. This cough is also interesting because it sets up several contrasting ideas: it suggests a degree of authenticity to the vocal performance, the grain of the voice become the strain of the voice, revealing the actual performance that goes into it, rather than smoothing the performance through technical means. This would, at first glance, seem to associate the cough with the ideology of fidelity. But cracks in that ideology become evident: surely audiophiles would not want this cough to be part of the song proper, since the ideology is actually founded on the concept of disembodiment? Only the ‘pure’ musical experience should be reproduced, not the human playing the instrument. One might argue that the cough is a marker for those music fans who do not subscribe to the ideology of fidelity, who feel that there is too much recording technology in contemporary music. Yet Waits employs so many different recording technologies in this album that this line of thinking is not satisfactory either. Instead, the cough is best seen as part of a range of strategies meant to disrupt habituated modes of listening. Consider the layers of voice in ‘All Stripped Down’, which opens with warbling, tinny singing from Waits with so much reverb that it must have been sung into some form of container. After this intro, we find two main vocal performances from Waits: the main vocal is a strained falsetto not unlike the one employed in ‘Jesus Gonna Be Here’ but of even higher pitch and so even more strained, its sound produced mainly in the throat. The chorus vocal is a guttural croak produced far back in the throat and the chest. However, the most distinctive aspect of the chorus is the modification by a form of vocal distortion, making Waits’s voice much more machine-like. The effect is a strange kind of duet between two different vocal performances sung by the same person, which turns the performance into a kind of sonic doppelgänger. This doubling creates a moment of monstrosity, which consists not of the uncanny aspects of hearing two different voices from Waits, one distorted and the other not, but rather from the far more uncanny realisation that both vocal performances are distorted, one by machine technology and the other by Waits’s physical strain. The implication is

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that there is no structural difference between these two forms of distortion, only differences of degree not in kind. Whether the distortion is technological or bodily, our experience is much the same and such realisation shatters the idea of authenticity of performance. Performance cannot be distinguished into a human performance augmented by technology, but must be regarded as human-technology interaction, where the boundaries blur together, making the distinction impossible. There is thus no authentic performance with an origin in the human, only different configurations of human-technology interactions. This lack of origin makes the album monstrous because it denies human mediation pride of place over the technological, even to the point of refuting any difference between the human and the technological. What is evident in Bone Machine is the fact that all of these different dorsal techniques assist in generating an uncanny sonic space. Unusual instruments, regular instruments employed in unusual ways, emphasis on noise over clear musical reproduction, voice distortion of various kinds and an insistence on the use of technology to disrupt any sense of music as somehow originally and essentially a human thing are all instances of dorsal techniques. Habituated listening is challenged in these moments of monstrosity, and while eventually all these instances of monstrosity will be recuperated by avid listeners, this recuperation does not reinstate human performance as the locus of authenticity. In order to make sense of Bone Machine, it becomes necessary to accept a broader understanding of what constitutes music, which in turn alters our habituated mode of listening. Several of the songs on Bone Machine will disintegrate into nothing if the listener refuses to accept noise as an integral part of the music’s aesthetics which draw the listener into a different mode of listening, a mode of listening sensitive to the ­monstrosity of the album. References Asma, S. T. (2009), On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Words, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bibby, M. (2007), ‘Atrocity Exhibitions: Joy Division, Factory Records, and Goth’, in L. M. E. Goodlad and M. Bibby (eds), Goth: Undead Subculture, Durham: Duke University Press. Botting, F. (2003), ‘Metaphors and Monsters’, Journal for Cultural Research 7.4: 339–65. Clarke, B. (2010), ‘Information’, in W. J. T. Mitchell and M. B. N. Hansen (eds), Critical Terms for Media Studies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Evens, A. (2005), Sound Ideas: Music, Machines and Experience, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Grossberg, L. (1992), We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture, New York: Routledge. Ihde, D. (2007), Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, 2nd edn, Albany: State University of New York Press. Jacobs, J. S. (2000), Wild Years: The Music and Myth of Tom Waits, Ontario: ECW Press. McLuhan, Marshall (2001), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, London: Routledge. ‘Percussion Instruments’ (no date), at: www.tomwaitsfan.com/tom%20waits%20 library/www.tomwaitslibrary.com/instruments/percussioninstruments.html (no date). Sangild, T. (2002), The Aesthetics of Noise, Copenhagen: Datanom. Smith, J. (2008), Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media, Berkeley: California University Press. Smith, S. (2000), ‘Compositional Strategies of the Hip-Hop Turntablist’, Organised Sound 5.2: 75–9. van Elferen, I. (2012), Gothic Music: Sounds of the Uncanny, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Waits, T. (1992), Bone Machine, Island Records. Weinstock, J. A. (2004), Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Wills, D. (2008), Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

7 Dean Lockwood

Ghosts of the Gristleized

The new noise ‘We see emerging,’ wrote Jacques Attali in 1977, ‘piecemeal and with the greatest ambiguity, the seeds of a new noise, one exterior to the institutions and customary sites of political conflict. A noise of Festival and Freedom, it may create the conditions for a major discontinuity extending far beyond its field. It may be the essential element in a strategy for the emergence of a truly new society’ (1985: 133). Conceiving of music as prophet and agent of transformation, Attali hailed a new audio-social order of ‘composition’ about to rise from the ashes of the capitalist order of ‘repetition’ in which music had become subject to industrialisation (88). The music of repetition sounds a ‘cold social silence’, expressing the elimination of vital difference in the imperative to standardise and copy (122). However, composition – intimated in larval phenomena such as free jazz – entails a great thaw, a playfully improvisational collaborative invention. Music throws off the fetters of the old code in order to give vent to what will inevitably first appear as blasphemous, mutant noise, wild and chaotic. Crucially, for Attali, composition’s subversive liberation of difference is profoundly bound up with ‘the rediscovery and blossoming of the body’ (142). It ‘plugs music into the noises of life and the body, whose movement it fuels. It is thus laden with risk, disquieting, an unstable challenging, an anarchic and ominous festival, like a Carnival with an unpredictable outcome’ (142). Attali’s observations coincided with the emergence of British postpunk music. My focus here is on the band Throbbing Gristle (typi-

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cally abbreviated as ‘TG’) who created what they called ‘industrial’ music. TG, formed in 1975, originated as the musical incarnation of the performance art group, COUM Transmissions. Initially conceived as a Dadaist joke, the members of TG (Genesis P-Orridge, Peter Christopherson, Cosey Fanni Tutti and Chris Carter) immediately realised opportunities for experimentation existing at the interface between art practice and popular music culture. Here, I explore TG’s part in the adventure of composition hailed by Attali, how it took shape through an attempt to acoustically vibrate and decompose subjectivities and bodies as a precursor to recomposition, and what the significance of this mission might be today. TG’s activity overlapped with punk but needs to be differentiated from it. The aesthetics of punk were bound up with a concern for singularity. Punk was a powerful enactment of the failure of an identitarian, representational regime to respect difference. The Sex Pistols’ shambolic performances, for example, expressed the impossibility of expressing one’s truth, the impotence and worthlessness of performing at all, and in doing so resonated, as Reiichi Miura argues, biopolitically with audiences even if they lacked an explicit politics (2011). For Miura, however, the self-deprecation of bands such as the Pistols paradoxically resulted in the forging of a new identity based on self-marginalisation, celebrating the brutal honesty, authenticity and outsider status of the true punk as opposed to the sell-out. Punk replicated the identitarian exclusion its aesthetic ostensibly rejected and the movement could not but rapidly dissipate its energies. Post-punk aesthetics, however, entailed a more inventive approach. Post-punk proliferated by rhizomatically erupting from within arborescent forms of life (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004). TG rejected the idea of an authentic outsider identity and proceeded precisely by setting out to trouble and interrogate identity from within (Hegarty, 2007: 105). Attali’s insistence on music’s prophetic function can be understood in terms of its power to render perceptible the virtuality of the social order. TG sought not to self-marginalise but to bend towards an incipient event – an outside bursting from within, perhaps – of immanent selftransformation or becoming. The actuality of the situation in which post-punk emerged can be described in terms of crisis and decline. In naming their endeavours ‘industrial’, TG cultivated an ironic untimeliness. As frontman, P-Orridge explained to the audience at one of their first performances: ‘It’s basically about the post-breakdown of civilisation. You know, you

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walk down the street and there’s lots of ruined factories and bits of old newspaper with stories about pornography and page three pin-ups, blowing down the street, and you turn a corner past the dead dog and you see old dustbins. And then over the ruined factory there’s a funny noise’ (cit. Ford, 1999: 6.28). The band seized upon what was disintegrating in order to map new and emergent forces which were not yet susceptible to representation. They intuited a virtual, emergent regime of control at a time when possibilities for other becomings, other subjects and bodies, had not yet been deselected. My contention is that industrial music constituted an affective map (Flatley, 2008; Shaviro, 2010) of the forces underpinning social transformation in its time. According to Suzanne Langer, music should not be conceived in terms of representation or signification: ‘music is not a kind of language. Its significance is really something different from what is traditionally and properly called “meaning”’ (1953: 29). The significance of music is to be understood rather as ‘vital import […] by virtue of its dynamic structure (music) can express the forms of vital experience which language is peculiarly unfit to convey. Feeling, life, motion and emotion constitute its import’ (32). In terms of contemporary theory, we would describe such vital feeling as ‘affect’. Music is a power of abstraction, detaching itself from actuality to create strangely other ‘semblances’ which render perceptible virtual affects (45–7). Fundamental to affect is the processuality and changefulness of life. Even what appears to be permanent is only a particular pattern of changes (66). Musical semblance emancipates perception from habit, belief, the common-sensical and the familiar (49). Its function is ‘to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before’ (22). In the specific case of TG’s music, I submit, affective post-industrial futures were made audible to place audiences in an experimental relation to them. Industrial music’s affective acoustic map, ‘both symptomatic and productive’ (Shaviro, 2010: 2), can be understood as a ‘machine of self-estrangement’ (Flatley, 2008: 80) by which forces conditioning activity and resigning people to merely living life out in circumstances beyond their control were challenged: ‘Art is the technique of living life in – experiencing the virtuality of it more fully. Living it more intensely. Technique of existence’ (Massumi, 2011: 45). For Michel Foucault, modern power is disciplinary biopower, producing a standardised individual, a docile subject, through bodily regimentation lending enduring structure which could be shaped and

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mobilised according to exigency. Deleuze, drawing (as did TG) on William Burroughs’s paranoid vision of a society demonically binding its subjects through the occult power of word, image and media into the gyres of addiction, declared the ‘new monster’ of ‘Control’ to be in the ascendant, gradually replacing discipline (1995: 178). Control society does not so much produce or recognise individuals as digitally monitor and analyse ‘dividual’ patterns of behaviour which are then simulated and modulated in order to manage risk. With control society, the process is the product. In this context, for David Savat, ‘politics comes to be about the “management of flows”, or rather, the management of turbulence’ (2009: 57). Fluid, modulatory power does not simply replace discipline, it is superposed with disciplinary power. The effect is often one of discordance: ‘Indeed, as Foucault intimated, while power may be an orchestra, it is hardly ever well conducted’ (59). TG’s new noise experimentally anticipated this badly conducted orchestra, articulating the danger and the promise in turbulence-­ management and the superposition of discipline and control. Discipline, in TG’s hands (it was the title of their best-known song), could refer to the systematic behavioural training which Foucault claimed central to the modern mode of power. It could refer to deviant, sado-masochistic practices or to troubling cult incarnations of behavioural control as found in the Manson family. But discipline could also intimate a more subversive kind of training in preparation for resisting new forms of power, something akin to Burroughs’s ‘Academy 23’, wherein ‘Wild Boys’ would wage an information war, exploiting new media technologies in order to ‘decontrol’ themselves (Burroughs, 1984). Indeed, in TG’s later stages the notion of a community of ‘psychic youth’ was formulated, crystallising an imagined ‘anti-cult’ along the lines suggested by Burroughs. TG’s studio was sited in a disused factory in London’s East End, next to a burial site for plague victims, which inspired the band – merging ideas of contagion, industry and holocaust – to name the studio the ‘Death Factory’. In common with other post-punk bands, TG associated themselves with derelict, untimely spaces, spaces which had dropped out of successive time into another kind of time replete with unknown possibilities demanding to be acoustically mapped. What kind of music could decondition the sensibilities of its practitioners and audiences sufficiently to allow them to hear this environment, to take advantage of cracks in molar unity and express molecular flows of becoming? Music can territorialise, can amass sound like bricks,

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building by and for the human subject, or it can deterritorialise, pragmatically seizing upon available machines, media and bodies to hold open this liminal space in the aspiration to become something other, something monstrous (Braidotti, 2002: 154–5). Music for the dead Throbbing Gristle: Thee [sic] involuntary muscular spasms of death perhaps, sound throbbing, body, blood, air, cunt, throbbing air conveying sound, affecting thee metabolism. Throbbing, pulsing, rhythmic direct. Throbbing of pain, bruising, injury of existence, throbbing with excitement too. Gristle. Hard, tough, neither skin nor muscle, a paradox, on thee boundary. Gristle, rejected by everyday consumers when they buy meat at butchers: meat, sign of human animalism, death to feed life, of our assumption to have right to genocide of other species that we might live. (G. P.-Orridge, cit. Ford, 1999: 5.16)

TG’s ‘disconcerts’ did not involve slickly crafted musicianship. Instead, they valued non-musical layering of noise and were largely dismissive of traditional rock structures. It was as much a composting of sounds as composing, a forcing of sounds together into fluid shapes and textures, contriving a certain tactility such that, for example, vocals could be described as ‘slimy or wobbly’ (Reynolds, 2005: 228). The song, ‘Discipline’, employed a rhythm which parodied both regimental marching music and the industrial assembly line – the soul at war and at work – effecting a kind of lumpen, sonic idiocy over which instruments and vocals perpetrated an entropic squall. The band’s performances entailed playing over rhythm tracks preloaded onto a cassette machine. A specially designed keyboard numbered among its functions the triggering of other cassette machines made ready with a variety of recordings such as shortwave radio noise, screams, the voices of cult leaders, film and television dialogue, and assorted sound effects. Vocals, cornet, guitars and keyboards were directed through a collection of black boxes, custom-built modules known, infamously, as ‘Gristleizers’. ‘The ultimate Gristleizer effect’, according to the band’s technical expert, Chris Carter, ‘was the awesome “throbbing mayhem” effect – a cross between a fuzzbox and a ring modulator on acid’ (cit. Ford, 1999: 8.9). Above all, the aspiration was for sonic weapons in ‘a sound battle, trying to win people over’ (cit. Neal, 1987: 217). ‘The main area of research was in sound’s ability to affect both physical and psychological change in humans, what they called “metabolic music”’ (Ford, 1999: 8.7). Felt rather than heard, metabolic music targeted and vibrated

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the viscera, ‘a total body music, immersive and assaultive’ (Reynolds, 2005: 228). Enduring a TG performance, ‘the body literally became throbbing gristle’ (Ford, 1999: 8.10). High powered infrasonic and ultrasonic frequencies were employed ‘to make people do things that they wouldn’t want to do’ (cit. Neal, 1987: 222). Performance was treated as a way to disturb and move in unusual ways. Anecdotally, a range of responses were reported – aggression, seizures, vomiting, involuntary defecation and orgasm. The only agenda was a loosely anarchistic, experimental openness to the possibilities which would present themselves once ‘gristleization’ had begun. Improvisation was always deemed crucial, responding moment by moment to the singular set of circumstances any situation presented. TG came to view their mission in terms of a pedagogical imperative, making ready the psychic youth, training sensoria for the coming reality of post-industrial control. Although drawing on avant-garde aesthetics, their aims were populist. They conjoined the performance forms of rock and other popular genres with the acoustics of the death factory to diagram a monstrous becoming-other charged by a desire to break with limitative habits, to create a new body without model. In addition to bodily impacts, TG sought to create turbulence in audience preconceptions. Performances involved multimedia aspects such as films, disorientatingly harsh halogen lamps, strobe lights, and mirrors reflecting the audience back at itself. Early performances also involved self-mutilation (real and/or faked) and nudity, on the band’s part. Approximating a drug experience – an abyssal descent rather than a cosmic trip, perhaps – Simon Reynolds’s description of TG’s art as inverse psychedelia seems apt (2005: 224). Performances in the last couple of years of the band’s existence began to foreground themes of occult and shamanistic power, framing self-discipline in terms of alchemy and spiritualism. An alchemist, as P-Orridge explained, is ‘somebody who uses self-discipline to develop and maximise what they want to achieve. They take into account what they don’t know as well as what they do know. Part of the idea is that a random factor that you have no knowledge of completes the formula, and that’s how we try and work’ (cit. Neal, 1987: 27). The fluid, vibratory ontology fundamental to TG’s mission from the beginning began to be treated more as a kind of demonism, emphasising the mediumistic aspects of performance. P-Orridge’s vocals mutated into wordless Artaudian screams and cries, talking in tongues as he ostensibly became ‘a mere vessel for forces from “beyond”’ (Reynolds, 2005: 235).

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If TG performances increasingly resembled séances, the spirits being called were precisely those of the audience: ‘We try and imagine that they are all already dead’ (P-Orridge, cit. Ford, 1999: 8.12). The widespread sense of malaise in the seventies – a decade lost to urban decay, social antagonism and economic recession – offered singular opportunities. The ‘dead’ – numbed vessels emptied of preconceptions and desires – could be more easily manipulated and processed. TG aspired to break out of a commercial, entertainment model of performance aimed at passive consumption in which audiences understood that all that was expected of them was polite applause (a ‘trade deficit’, to cite the title of a track on the live album, Funeral in Berlin). The sonic assault aimed, beyond sheer disorientation, to possess the audience in order to innervate it, to galvanise. This could only proceed in the wake of precipitation of distrust towards message and meaning, pushing lyrics, for example, towards nonsense: ‘Instead of effortlessly furthering the cause of capitalist seduction, words become the raw material for a destructive process of transformation: the song is a factory that processes language into sound, taking aim at the principle means of communication and warping it in and out of recognition. Neither persuading you nor falsely claiming to free you from the grip of persuasion, the song enacts something else: a concrete auditory experience of transformation through action’ (Daniel, 2008: 88). In TG’s hands, then, Attali’s insistence on the compositional ‘rediscovery and blossoming of the body’ took a decidedly perverse turn. TG, in effect, sounded a gothic body, a body that had ceased to be entirely human, involving a melding of gothic and sonic materialisms. Kelly Hurley has suggested that the principal preoccupation of British gothic fiction of the fin de siècle was the ‘ruination of the human subject’ (1996: 3). It obsessively generated fictions of unstable, metamorphic bodies, disintegrating bodies, becoming porous, monstrously undifferentiated. Gothic bodies in the work of authors such as Machen and Wells were both invaded by and bled out into the world, losing their human contours, becoming hybrid, emphatically gross, material things. In gothic horror, culture slimily slides back into nature, seized by the dynamism and vitality of the material world. Hurley appropriates William Hope Hodgson’s term, the ‘abhuman’ – suggesting a wrong turn, a diversion from the human towards other conditions which actualise virtual potential buried within the human – to name the vital, anxious import of gothic expression at this time in both literature and scientific discourses. Evolutionist discourse, for example, had begun to

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posit ideas of degeneration, an animalising of the human. Suspicions ran rampant that the world had no insuperable transcendent telos, and was instead prone to decompose, to return to chaotic flux. Fin de siècle gothic both managed and ‘aggravated’ this anxiety (6). Hurley’s thesis suggests that gothic fiction constitutes a form of expression which is both ‘symptomatic’ and ‘productive’ (7), resonating with what I have earlier defined as an aesthetic of affective mapping. The gothic lends a form and a shape to felt concerns and anxieties in such a way that it refuses them closure, allows for something new (7). Gothic, in its ambivalence, renders perceptible a particular socio-cultural ‘moment of convulsion’ (20). As I have suggested, TG’s metabolic music for the dead emerges within just such a convulsive time-out-of-joint in the late twentieth century. Further, TG’s gothic materialism was a sonic materialism. Christoph Cox argues for a materialist theory of music which overcomes the separation between culture and nature imposed in much contemporary aesthetic theory founded upon certain assumptions around signification and textuality: ‘Nature is either cast aside as in-significant or deemed a cultural projection, a social construction’ (2011: 147). Culture must be conceived as part of processes of material becoming. Following Nietzsche and Deleuze, Cox claims that art is inseparable from the world’s immanent self-transcendence, its self-othering creativity and productivity. He commends ‘a thoroughgoing materialism that would construe human symbolic life as a specific instance of the transformative process to be found throughout the natural world’ (148). Music understood as a Dionysian art is not a matter of meaning, of representation, but of doing and moving, of escaping, exceeding and overcoming temporary boundaries and forms (151–2). It overcomes the occlusion of the ‘auditory real’, the inarticulate, asignifying noise which is the virtual condition of possibility of articulate, meaningful sounds (154). According to such a materialist theory, music ‘makes audible the dynamic, differential, discordant flux of becoming that precedes and exceeds empirical individuals’ (153), and, for Cox, a musician is an artist who ‘appropriates something’ from the impersonal, germinative flux of sonic matter (155). The import of death in TG’s sonic gothic connects the band up to a tradition of transgressive art best explored in the work of Georges Bataille (Hegarty, 2007: 108). Industrial music responds to sociopolitical despondency: revolt here takes the form of a negation of the actual and privileged in a momentary overcoming of the ­discontinuity

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between self and the world through a sacrificial act (Bataille, 1962). Bataille’s notion of sacrifice as profound communication with the matter of the world approximates Attali’s notion of the violence involved in the audio-social order of composition. For Attali, to compose ‘is to become both the sacrifice and the victim, to make an everpossible suicide the only possible form of death and the production of life’ (1985: 143). However, transgression can never wholly succeed, because taboo must always remain in place for the strategy to have any purchase. Transgressive art deals with the virtual, always more a matter of the potential for escape than actual escape. This, though, as Paul Hegarty observes, ‘does not stop Bataille, or Throbbing Gristle, acting as if it were possible, and these moments are the moments of noise much more than the literal noise’ (2007: 111). On the other hand, this sonic gothic makes just as much sense conceived in terms of intense life, opening ‘a space in the grid of identities (group-policed) categories of thought and action delineate, inventing new trajectories, new circuits of response, unheard-of futures and possible bodies such as have never been seen before. It maps out a whole new virtual landscape featuring otherworldly affects’ (Massumi, 1992: 101). Deleuze’s notion of the ‘logic of sensation’ offers another way of thinking about TG’s music (Deleuze, 2003). With reference to the art of Francis Bacon, which could also be described as ‘metabolic’, obsessed as it is with the malleability and mutability of flesh as opposed to the rigidity of bone, Deleuze suggested that ‘the flowing currents of flesh defy the hold of the face’s cranial scaffolding’ (Bogue, 2003: 112). The organised, scaffolded body is akin to the blank canvas, always already an occupied territory, full of cliché, memory, genre and habit, just as the song, before it is written, is already haunted by rhythm, genre, refrain. Bacon refused to trace around the existing scaffold, deeming it imperative, in Deleuze’s view, to allow the flesh to germinate, to flow, disorganised and chaotic. Bacon calls to the throbbing gristle in the bodies he paints. The logic of sensation cleaves to the imperceptible world of fleshly affect prior to the organisation of subject and object. Art is not representation of an external, objective world nor is it the expression of subjective inner states. It is the rendering perceptible of imperceptible, impersonal forces. Once again, these forces are of the virtual, the ‘outside’ inside, intense life. The event of sensation can nervously register in a way that perverts rational and conscious design. To affectively map is to – without quite knowing how or what to do – somehow capture this deforming event that carries us away from

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ourselves and the actual world and allows something new to appear. For Deleuze, art captures intense life, framing a chaos which is also the germ of a new order, a new rhythm. Spirits flying In the photograph on the cover of ‘Discipline’, released as a 12″ single in June 1981 after the band had split, the members of TG stand ranged in front of the Berlin building that once housed the Third Reich’s Ministry of Propaganda. The photograph superimposes TG over the building such that they appear spectral, already ghosts. Jacques Derrida’s coinage, hauntology, is a gothicisation of ontology, referring to the spectral undoing of the present (1994). This intriguing pun has captured the compulsive, imperative spectrality of the Zeitgeist. Simon Reynolds first appropriated the notion for music criticism in relation to the past’s ineluctable grip on popular music: ‘Did we run out of the future somewhere along the way? … It’s as though the sheer drag caused by the mass of its own memory flesh has arrested pop’s forward motion’ (2006: 33). Reynolds discusses a peculiar nostalgia (in contemporary artists on the Ghost Box label, for example) for once imagined futures, which harks back to early electronic music as expressive of post-war British confidence in social progress. This nostalgic hauntology is found juxtaposed with an occult imaginary of recent British history which frequently draws on the work of the gothic horror of the fin de siècle already mentioned above. In such manifestations, hauntology names a pop cultural critique of the present which embraces a revival of interest in post-punk spectres such as TG, who were also, of course, concerned with the possibility of a future in which things were otherwise. For Derrida, the ghost must be preserved as leverage to ‘dislodge any present out of its contemporaneity with itself’ (1994: 73), heeded as an untimely injunction ‘to produce new events, new effective forms of action, practice, organisation, and so forth’ (89). However, hauntology can also be understood in the context of the global flows and networked space of late modernity. A sense of absence is installed at the heart of experience as time and space become disjunctive, any given moment or given place interconnected with and traversed by a multiplicity of other moments and places. In the generalised indistinction of the non-place and the non-event, antagonism is difficult to sustain and we are, many commentators would argue, plunged into an era of

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post-political indifference. We could say that global hauntology effects a practical deconstruction of traditions, institutions and identities but offers little by way of an impetus towards alternative constructions. Mark Fisher conceives the hauntological injunction in the form of the return of ‘ghosts of the Real’ to be enlisted in a struggle against the terminal, zombie state of neo-liberalism which precisely suppresses the real (2006a). The Real which is, for Fisher (after Žižek), a founding trauma which we cannot remember but are nevertheless compelled to retrieve, can act as a psychic defibrillator, a nihilatory force to shock the ‘dead’ back into life: ‘If the revolutionary tumult of the post-punk era was characterised by restless dissatisfaction, anxiety, uncertainty, rage, harshness, unfairness – that is, by an atmosphere of relentless ­criticism – today’s Pop scene is suffused with laxness, bland acceptance, quiescent hedonism, luxuriant self-satisfaction … What Pop lacks now is the capacity for nihilation, for producing new potentials through the negation of what already exists’ (2006b). Fisher commends post-punk’s transgressive negativity as a force for destroying a complacent culture of distraction. What is the relevance of TG here? TG occupied the precise moment at which the superposition of discipline and control was actualising. TG’s psychic rallies had no pre-planned messages but were dedicated to constructing a liminal zone for a sort of ritual initiation into composition. Its mission in the virtual was the conception of a new body, a perpetually mutant, becoming body. Just as in Francis Bacon’s art unknown forces dictated involuntary, asignifying marks which could disrupt the effects of habit and convention to unlock new sensations and diagram the possibility of a different order, a different space, I have claimed that TG’s music sonically evoked difference. We can embrace their art today as a nervous, hauntological injunction to disarticulate the networked body of the society of control, to germinate an abhuman community of mutants from within the serpent’s coils. The ghosts of the gristleized are critical reminders of the power of the virtual, of what popular culture can do when it connects up with the virtual power of life to experiment with the aesthetics of existence and produce something other. Disciplinary society could not succeed in blocking out monstrous reflexivities, saboteurs and guerrilla forces. It might be presumed that control society similarly creates the conditions for new kinds of resistance, new subversions of media and new kinds of politics such as are suggested by TG’s activities. However, what we are faced with today is

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power’s harnessing of forces of resistance, sources of jeopardy, for its own purposes: ‘Networked power has learned from history and may use all variety of authority and organisation: centralised, decentralised, distributed, violent, coercive, desiring, liberating, and so on’ (Galloway and Thacker, 2007: 18). Indeed, if TG’s music exposes the viscera, seizes the compositional potential of a sonic gothic materialism, contemporary power has learned to mimic such strategies. Brian Massumi has indicated, in this vein, the new-found metamorphic powers of contemporary capital, which has sought to exert command over life itself. As he remarks of power’s digital ‘interactions’ with its subjects, ‘you are viscerally exposed, like a prodded sea cucumber that spits its guts. You are exposed down to your inmost sensitive folds, down to the very peristaltic rhythms that make you what you are. This is generative power, a power that reaches down into the soft tissue of your life, where it is just stirring, and interactively draws it out for it to become what it will be, and what it suits the system that it be’ (2011: 48). The dividuated subject is the manipulable subject, fractalised and flexibilised (Berardi, 2011). Writ large in a recent horror movie such as Saw (2004), subjects only ‘escape’ their traps if they prove willing to undergo the dismantling of the body. No one escapes intact. In a bitter twist of Attali’s dream of a new order of composition involving the ‘rediscovery and blossoming of the body’, contemporary power cultivates recombinant labour, affective puppets who are mere ‘carriers of abstract fractal ability to connect, devoid of sensitive empathy’ (Berardi, 2011: 132). Benjamin Noys has cautioned against any aesthetic that challenges complacency through recourse to the body, because, as he remarks, in the context of contemporary sovereign power, the ‘fundamental problem’ is that any flight to the body in transgressive ‘death’ must fail (2005: 116). Resistance on this front is futile, the war already lost. Bataille’s celebration of sacrifice commends an exposure to death which merely replicates the operation of power. Following Giorgio Agamben, Noys defines sovereign power in terms of the power to produce ‘bare life’. Bare life is life withdrawn from the protection of the law, rendered vulnerable, permanently exposed to the threat of death. The logic of bare life itself creates the apparently raw state of the body, of nature, into which the outlawed are thrust. This state is not truly raw, outside; it is, in fact, still held in the grip of power even as it is excluded (16). To be excluded, or to fly to the material body of one’s own accord, is simply to be marooned, suspended in a ‘zone of indistinction’ between the nonhuman and the human which is precisely

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sovereign power’s base of operations today (19). Bataillean sacrifice is complicit in power’s production of bare life (118). Similarly, for its part, Deleuze’s championing of the dismantling of the body as a gateway to experience of intense life ‘is also a confrontation with bare life, this time from the position of life rather than of death’ (117). This, finally, is the predicament to which the ghosts of the gristleized speak. Their injunction hails from the precise moment of convulsion prior to the closing of certain opportunities, the invasion and enclosure, by the capitalist order, of the compositional capacity of the virtual. TG’s battle tactics cannot be retrieved wholesale from the past and repurposed because to do so would be to fail to acknowledge the provenance of such approaches, power’s violent capture and exposure of the body. COUM Transmissions had a logo incorporating the phrase ‘COUM guarantees disappointment’. A willingness to frustrate expectations underpinned all that COUM and TG did. In part, this related to their refusal to delineate a positive programme, a clearly defined agenda. This remains a useful lesson. If the particular map TG produced has been rendered obsolete by developments in the intervening period, TG’s affective, acoustic mission is still a haunting, critical reminder to, in Shaviro’s phrase, ‘explore the contours of the prison we find ourselves in’ (2010: 137). As Shaviro remarks, this is a particularly vital project today, ‘when that prison has no outside, but is coterminous with the world as a whole’ (137). Citing Jameson, he adds that ‘(w)hat we need at such a moment … is precisely “a meditation on the impossible, on the unrealisable in its own right … a rattling of the bars and an intense spiritual concentration and preparation for another stage which has not yet arrived”’ (137). In this sense, TG’s mission is as relevant as ever. We must find ways to ‘compose’ ourselves. ‘We are here to go’, insisted Brion Gysin, Burroughs’s compatriot and another key inspiration for TG (Gysin and Wilson, 1985: xv). Even if there doesn’t seem anywhere else to go, it would be intolerable to resign ourselves to our present situation. We must create new semblances of ‘going’, act as if ‘goings’ were again possible. References Attali, J. (1985), Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bataille, G. (1962), Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood, London: Marion Boyars.

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Berardi, F. (2011), After the Future, Edinburgh: AK Press. Bogue, R. (2003), Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts, London: Routledge. Braidotti, R. (2002), Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Cambridge: Polity. Burroughs, W. (1984), The Job, London: John Calder. Cox, C. (2011), ‘Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism’, Journal of Visual Culture 10.2: 145–61. Daniel, D. (2008), 20 Jazz Funk Greats, London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. (1995), Negotiations, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (2003), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. D. W. Smith, London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2004), A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, London: Continuum. Derrida, J. (1994), Specters of Marx, trans. P. Kamuf, London: Routledge. Fisher, M. (2006a), k-punk blog, 23 January, at: http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/ Fisher, M. (2006b), k-punk blog, 31 January, at: http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/ Flatley, J. (2008), Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ford, S. (2009), Wreckers of Civilization: The Story of COUM Transmissions & Throbbing Gristle, London: Black Dog. Galloway, A. and Thacker, E. (2007), The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gysin, B. and Wilson, T. (1985), Here to Go: Planet R-101, London: Quartet Books. Hegarty, P. (2007), Noise/Music: A History, London: Continuum. Hurley, K. (1996), The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Langer, S. K. (1953), Feeling and Form, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Massumi, B. (1992), A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Massumi, B. (2011), Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Miura, R. (2011), ‘What Kind of Revolution Do You Want? Punk, the Contemporary Left, and Singularity’, Mediations 25.1, at: www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/ what-kind-of-revolution-do-you-want. Neal, C. (1987), Tape Delay: Confessions from the Eighties Underground, London: SAF. Noys, B. (2005), The Culture of Death, Oxford: Berg. Reynolds, S. (2005), Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-punk 1978–1984, London: Faber & Faber. Reynolds, S. (2006), ‘Haunted Audio’, The Wire 273: 26–33. Savat, D. (2009), ‘Deleuze’s Objectile: From Discipline to Modulation’, in M. Poster, and D. Savat (eds), Deleuze and New Technology, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 45–62. Shaviro, S. (2010), Post-Cinematic Affect, Winchester: Zero Books.

Part III

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8 Dorothea Schuller

‘Nineteenth century (up-to-date) with a vengeance’: vampirism, Victorianism and collage in Guy Maddin’s Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

Ever since their near-coincidental birth, the cinema and Dracula have shared a long and convoluted history. ‘Could not codak [sic] him – come out black or like skeleton corpse’ (Stoker, 2008: 21): lacking both shadow and reflection and, according to Bram Stoker’s working notes, registering only as a skeleton on photographic plates, the vampire’s innate elusiveness should have made him an unlikely film star. Dracula can only be seen in the flesh, and writing appears to be the only medium capable of reproducing and preserving any visual impression of him: ‘painters cannot paint him – their likenesses always like some one else’ (Stoker, 2008: 21). Yet despite these suggestions of an eerie unrepresentability, Dracula – at once ghostly and highly physical – has materialised on movie screens in countless shapes so remarkably diverse it is almost hard to believe they have all evolved from the same origin, Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. In fact, his formidable powers of metamorphosis may be regarded as one of Dracula’s most significant and, at least for his Victorian antagonists, most disturbing characteristics. His power to rejuvenate himself and to transform into a dog, a bat or swirling mist questions the very notion of a stable identity. A postmodern audience might be more comfortable with Dracula’s unfixed, mutating shape and appreciative of the work of generations of film-makers who have persistently resurrected Stoker’s truly un-dead vampire in fittingly polymorphous incarnations over the last century. Though nostalgic about the ‘warlike days’ of the past, Stoker’s Dracula, like most other literary vampires, is unsettlingly successful in his efforts to adapt to change (Stoker, 1997: 35). Determined to pass

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as a modern Londoner and anticipating that his Eastern European origin might be more conspicuous than his vampiric nature, the Count diligently prepares for his move to England by studying the language, the customs and even the train schedules of his future hunting grounds. Dracula, the novel, shares this paradoxical state of being strongly informed by one age, the late nineteenth century, and being endlessly adaptable. Having spawned a host of other literary works, like Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape (1975) and Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula (1992), it is in the cinema, that meeting place of science and magic, that Dracula seems to have found his true home, always shifting with the Zeitgeist and feeding on the changing cultural contexts. In his travel journal, Jonathan Harker describes the Carpathian region as ‘the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool’ (10), a phrase which also aptly characterises Stoker’s sprawling novel and its place in Western culture. A seminal text, it has crucially shaped twentieth-century ideas not only about vampirism but the Victorian age as well. Apart from its archetypal character, the persistent perception of Dracula as a sensationalist pot-boiler unworthy of critical study might explain why only a handful of film-makers have wanted (or dared) to engage on a deeper level with Stoker’s novel. Instead of reverting to the source material, screenwriters have usually drawn on the 1927 Deane-Balderston stage play with its more streamlined plot (Skal, 1990) or treated Stoker’s story as folklore, a cauldron of mythic imagery from which various ingredients may be selected and recombined. Both, of course, represent valid strategies for effectively translating narrative texts into cinematic language, a task often hampered by the strain of adapting ‘great literature’. One of the few exceptions is the 1977 BBC production starring Louis Jourdan, which has the look and feel of a solid, if somewhat slow-moving, literary adaptation. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version, explicitly titled Bram Stoker’s Dracula, reintroduced narrative details customarily omitted and succeeded in creating a mood of fin-de-siècle decadence; its proclaimed authenticity also involved a generic shift by transforming Stoker’s horror novel into a tragic romance with a conflicted and often sympathetic hero-villain. Guy Maddin’s Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002) is one of the most recent and – despite the absence of spoken dialogue and anything resembling realistic acting – most faithful (in a strictly descriptive sense) film adaptations of Stoker’s multi-faceted novel. Commissioned by CBC Television (Canada) and winning an International Emmy for Best Arts Programming in 2002, the film is based on the Royal Winnipeg

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Ballet’s dance version of Dracula, choreographed by Mark Godden and set to the music of Gustav Mahler. Neither the first nor the last attempt to put Dracula to music – other examples include Dracula – Ballet with a Bite (Columbia City Ballet, 1993) and Dracula (Northern Ballet Theatre, Manchester, 2005) – the ballet has enjoyed great popularity since its premiere in 1998. Despite the novel’s almost obsessive insistence on its textuality, Stoker himself was aware of the dramatic potential of his gothic story, but the opportunity for a staged performance never materialised. Given his work for the Lyceum Theatre, it is not surprising that Stoker’s characters are prone to adopt melodramatic poses. Indeed, taking nineteenth-century melodrama’s tableaux vivants and exaggerated gestures as a starting point, the expression of emotional states and dramatic scenes through dancing might be seen as the next logical step. Following Walter Pater’s aestheticist credo that: ‘All art constantly aspires to the condition of music’ (1998: 135), a Dracula ballet suits the novel’s turn-of-the-century atmosphere and lends an air of the artificial and archetypal to the realism evoked by the modern details of the plot. Not simply a filmed stage performance – Maddin privileges close-ups over long shots which would show the dancers’ legs – the film is a knowingly ironic yet sensual homage to a century of Dracula on film as well as a shrewd feminist and post-colonial reading of the original novel. The film’s subtitle, Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, points to its twin main interests, mediation and sexuality,1 themes which have been discussed extensively in the critical literature on Dracula. They are bound up with two features of Maddin’s film which both highlight its indebtedness to earlier cinematic adaptations of Stoker’s novel and set it apart from most of them. First, its palimpsestic use of collage techniques, a method harking back to the structure of Stoker’s text, which pieces together various materials representing different time-periods to form a complex and highly resonant whole; and second, its focus on the specifically Victorian issues negotiated in the story, an approach which suggests a detailed familiarity with the novel as well as its critical reception. The film’s collage approach immediately announces itself by its idiosyncratic look. Shot in black and white on a highly stylised set (with only a few splashes of red, gold and green and the occasional use of colour tinting to represent dawn, dusk as well as changes in mood – tinting typical for silent films) and employing the delirious editing of a music video, the film combines early silent cinema aesthetics with

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imagery reminiscent of more recent works in the gothic and fantastic genre such as the films of Tim Burton and Neil Jordan or the work of multi-disciplinary artist Floria Sigismondi. Thus, the graveyard, where Lucy is reanimated by Dracula, is part classic gothic setting and part nocturnal Carrollian wonderland filled with ambiguously formed tombstones resembling the reproductive organs of flowers. This kind of deliberately artificial dream imagery with its playful sexual symbolism is typical of Maddin’s style which is rooted in modernist avant-garde cinema. As Maddin comments: ‘I just like silent film because it aggressively says to its viewers: I am artificial. I am art. I am an art form; quit expecting realism from me. If you want realism, watch security camera tapes’ (Maddin et al., 2008: 185). The film opens with a prologue which introduces the main characters and shows Dracula’s journey by ship to Whitby and his first attack on Lucy, which is cross-cut with Renfield ecstatically announcing the advent of ‘the master’. The film’s opening quotation from the novel – ‘There are bad dreams for those who sleep unwisely’ (38)2 – is attributed to Bram Stoker on the title card. It is, in fact, a sentence uttered by Dracula himself when he advises Jonathan Harker not to sleep in any of the memory-laden rooms in the old part of the castle, a recommendation Harker, like any curious gothic heroine, rebelliously disobeys. Since Dracula is conspicuously absent as one of the narrating voices of the novel, it is significant that Maddin, even though he substitutes Dracula’s name with that of his creator, lets him introduce the film with a line that prepares the audience for the surrealist, quasi-Freudian dream-language they are about to encounter. The prologue combines Victorian and modernist aesthetics by referencing nineteenth-century melodrama, propaganda films, surrealist art by Max Ernst and Man Ray and, by its use of iris shots, blurry imagery, montage and strong contrasts between light and shadow, silent films by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Robert Wiene, Paul Wegener and Georg Wilhelm Pabst (especially the psychoanalysis-inspired Geheimnisse einer Seele, 1926). These allusions point towards cinema’s early fascination with supernatural themes and its fusing of gothic literature with modern technology. In true silent film fashion, dialogue and narration are supplied by title cards. The characters are almost exclusively given lines culled directly from Stoker’s text, mostly taken from passages rarely used in other adaptations and often specifically chosen to expose the imperialistic and misogynous attitudes held by the novel’s male characters. Also included are critics’ favourites like Lucy’s spontaneous heresy, ‘Why

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can’t they let a girl marry three men?’ (60),3 a wish that is horribly fulfilled when she receives blood transfusions from all of her three suitors and Dr Van Helsing in scenes that provide both novel and film with a complex subtext about sexual and racial purity. Complementing these nods to the source text are tongue-in-cheek commentaries in the style of tabloid newspaper headlines and Ed Woodian genre movie advertisements. The prologue opens with hysterical cries of ‘Immigrants! Others! From other lands!’ Renfield is introduced like a carnival geek as ‘Eater of Bugs’, and the vampire hunters’ ostentatious show of high duty during the final showdown in Transylvania is accompanied by the caption ‘Cuckold’s counterblow!’ Resembling mischievous yet perceptive annotations scrawled into the margins of the novel, these intertitles constitute additional levels of narrative and temporal discourse. The result is a palimpsestic filmic structure which highlights the story’s Victorianism while simultaneously signalling the film’s belatedness. Similar to John Fowles’s narrator in his postmodern novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Maddin’s film presents 1890s England as seen through the eyes of a knowledgeable twenty-first century viewer whose reading of the source text is shaped by decades of critical discussions of the novel and by the Dracula myth in popular culture. The novel’s characters and their different perspectives of the events are thus joined by an additional heterodiegetic narrative voice which intrudes into the story to present the audience with specific interpretations of selected scenes. Dracula, the novel, famously lacks a single, let alone an omniscient narrator but is pieced together from diary entries, newspaper reports, letters and business receipts. It combines the traditional epistolary form and the gothic device of the found manuscript with modern mass media and state-of-the-art techniques of reproduction and communication such as Seward’s phonograph and Mina’s typewriter. Interestingly, not much use is made of visual media. Harker’s Kodak camera is only used to supply Dracula with photographs of his London estate and the newly invented cinematograph, used so prominently in Coppola’s film, is not mentioned at all. As the vampire can only be contained by text, the final victory over Dracula is brought about by Mina’s copying of the various diaries. As a textual vampire, as Jennifer Wicke has argued, the typewritten manuscript which is presented to the reader absorbs all of these heterogeneous pieces, recorded by different people using different media, into itself, resulting in ‘a collage or bricolage of versions of print’ (1992: 36).

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The novel is prefaced by a short editor’s note which assigns the reader an active part in the construction of the tale about to be unravelled and serves as a clever metafictional device: ‘How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the reading of them. All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of latter-day belief may stand forth as simple fact’ (5). Intriguingly, the note states that the ‘mass of typewriting’ (326) produced by Mina Harker has been subjected to a process of editing. In fact, despite its wealth of documents, Dracula presents some tantalising gaps, and the various narratives are highly subjective, full of suppressed memories, misunderstandings and moments of hallucinatory confusion. The novel thus challenges its readers to develop their own theories about the actual unfolding of the reported events, initiating a play on possible meanings. Dracula’s protean form finds its parallel in the text’s polyvalence. Mirroring Dracula’s textual collage, the musical source material for Maddin’s film is manipulated in a similar fashion to the inventively edited, artificially distressed film stock. The score, to a Mahler purist, is a veritable Frankenstein monster, stitched together from his first two symphonies (premiered 1889 and 1895 respectively) with a focus on the second, also known as ‘Resurrection Symphony’. In fact, the tendency to combine elements from various sources, from both high and popular culture, often with a hint of irony, can also be found in Mahler, who often incorporated snatches of popular tunes into his symphonic works and was strongly influenced by Eastern European and Jewish folk music. A contemporary of Stoker’s, Mahler, like him, stood poised between the centuries, and his work may be described as a hybrid of late Romanticism and early Modernism. The thematic focus of the ‘Resurrection Symphony’ underscores Dracula’s role as an Anti-Christ figure who offers eternal life on earth and, in a parody of the Eucharist, makes Mina drink his blood from a wound in his chest. Dracula’s seduction of Mina is scored with parts of the symphony’s last movement, which features verses by Klopstock, remodelled and expanded by Mahler himself. The most pertinent line, in the context of Dracula, is ‘Unsterblich Leben! / Wird, der dich rief, dir geben!’ (Immortal life! He who called thee will give to thee!) (Mitchell, 1975: 417). The decontextualisation of Mahler’s music thus reproduces the novel’s blasphemous inversions of Christian symbolism. In addition to Mahler’s music, the film features a variety of subtly integrated sound effects, resulting in a many-layered soundscape remi-

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niscent of radio plays. The opening credits are accompanied by the sounds of Whitby harbour – the rushing of the waves, the wind in the rigging of boats and the cries of birds, all heard shortly before the arrival of Dracula’s ship on the shores of England. The coming of Dracula is thus linked with the sounds of nature, specifically of water with its feminine connotations. Readers of the novel will remember that the ship’s name – Demeter – also suggests a connection between Dracula and female power. In contrast, the arrival of the equally (if not more) threatening Van Helsing is announced by the shrill noise of a steam train, heralding the end of Romanticism, which brutally interrupts the ecstatic Lucy’s dance of transformation. Like the intertitles, the sound effects also serve both to underscore Maddin’s reading of the text and to add a dose of darkly ironic humour. The visceral horror of Van Helsing’s beheading of Lucy with a spade is accentuated by the addition of a sickening, yet campy, squelching sound. In contrast to most other major Dracula films, Maddin does not completely rewrite or update the plot. Instead, he performs a critical reading of the novel, taking it seriously as a piece of specifically Victorian literature. His interpretation of Dracula is marked by an emphasis on the cultural preoccupations and prevalent anxieties of turn-of-the-century England, such as the troubled discussions about changing gender roles and female suffrage (most disturbingly embodied in the figures of the femme fatale and the New Woman), imperialism and capitalism, as well as the fears of reverse colonisation and degeneracy roused by Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Stoker explicitly references Nordau, Lombroso and Charcot, whose work at the Salpêtrière hospital anticipated the rise of psychoanalysis. Money, which the immigrant vampire is hoarding in his lair, is another important motif which is usually ignored in Dracula films (see Halberstam, 1995: 102). Maddin includes a telling detail from the novel when Dracula, his coat slashed by Harker’s knife, literally bleeds English money. The over-determined symbolism of the scene is emphasised by the use of a rich golden colour for the coins and an accompanying tinkling sound as they hit the floor. As David J. Skal has noted, critics tend to regard Dracula as ‘a tantalizing Rosetta Stone of the darker aspects of the Victorian psyche’ (1990: 25). ‘Victorianism’, as Michel Foucault has argued, is often contrasted unfavourably with the allegedly more advanced and liberated present, the maligned half of a binary opposition favouring ‘the modern’. Accordingly, if ‘Victorianism’ itself is regarded as a fictional construct, Maddin’s film might also be considered as a comment on

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Dracula as the ultimate Victorian novel ‘whose critically accepted meanings both preface it and condition its reception, a quintessentially Victorian work whose preoccupations are apparently not wholly nineteenth century’ (Hughes, 2009: 3). Just as the vampire hunters are collecting data to help them explain the nature and limitations of their antagonist, readings of Dracula often use the text as a source for unveiling supposed cultural attitudes of the Victorians. The film’s function as commentary on the novel and its critical history is already announced in the prologue, which introduces the idea of the invasion narrative with the image of a huge blood-wave blotting out England on a map of Europe. Modernity’s progress is disrupted by Dracula, whose move to London initiates a return of, and to, the gothic past. The novel is much concerned with upholding a strict boundary between the modern, technological West and the backward, superstitious East, a contrast made clear on the first page when Harker notes that the further East one travels the less punctual the trains are. By using the word ‘immigrants’, a term which does not appear in Stoker, the film engages in a critical reading of the story by pointing to one of its main anxieties while at the same time drawing a parallel to more recent fears of various forms of alien attacks in both history and fiction. A true shape-shifter, Dracula has been played as rat-toothed, hollow-eyed monster (Max Schreck in Murnau’s Nosferatu), aggressive masculine force (Christopher Lee as Hammer Studios’ vampire) and smouldering Byronic lover (Frank Langella in John Badham’s Dracula). Maddin’s film emphasises Dracula’s status as a distinctly nineteenthcentury incarnation of ‘otherness itself’ (Halberstam, 1995: 88): sexually transgressive, of Eastern descent, aristocratic, animalistic and, of course, not properly alive, thus challenging the binary oppositions so fundamental to Western thinking. Dracula’s transformative influence on the female characters unleashes a hidden potential for murderous violence in the men who set out to safeguard the boundaries upset by the mere existence of the vampire. Highlighting Dracula’s racial ‘otherness’ by casting a Chinese-Canadian actor-dancer (Zhang WeiQiang), who also brings an androgynous quality to the character, and sidelining Jonathan Harker’s adventures in Transylvania to focus on the emotional journeys of Lucy and Mina, the film stresses the underlying xenophobia and misogyny of Stoker’s novel. Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is structured into two parts. The first focuses on Lucy’s transformation, undeath and final staking, the second on Mina’s reunion with her invalid fiancé, her seduction

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by Dracula and the vampire hunters’ final triumph. The first part of the novel, Jonathan Harker’s gothic adventure at Castle Dracula, after a journey not just to a place geographically removed from the civilised world but also backwards in time, is inserted as a short flashback in the middle of the film. This manages to cram in everything critics have loved to explore in this famous section of the book: Dracula’s hairy palm, sign of his sexual deviance and his link to the werewolf, the palpable homoeroticism of the dinner scenes and the nightly conversations between Dracula and his young guest – highlighted via a title card exclaiming ‘A manly temptation!’ – and Harker’s thwarted seduction by the three female vampires who, with their fangs hidden behind voluptuous red lips, emphasise the dissolution of sexual and gender identities (see Craft, 1984) and might be seen to represent ‘a hellish kind of “third sex” that needs to be vanquished with the help of Dr Van Helsing, the patriarchal guardian of traditional dualities and distinctions’ (Skal, 1990: 33). As in John Badham’s 1979 film version of Dracula, the paternalistic Van Helsing and his vampire killers, bent on controlling female sexuality and independence, emerge as the true villains of the story. In turn, Dracula comes to embody a liberating force enabling women to rebel against their claustrophobic lives and their socially prescribed gender roles. Maddin achieves this apparent role reversal, in which the ‘good guys’ are revealed to be at best unsympathetic, at worst violent criminals, not by dramatically altering the plot-line and familial relationships, as Badham did, but by simply pointing out and not glossing over the misogynous and imperialist attitudes of the vampire hunters. In keeping with his focus on the Victorian Zeitgeist, Maddin calls attention to the fact that two of Dracula’s main antagonists are doctors. Both Van Helsing and Seward are shown to abuse their power in their attempts to control apparently out-of-control women and the insane Renfield, who is pressed for information during a trepanning operation and then left for dead. Van Helsing is introduced with a shot in which he is wielding an enormous syringe, a fitting addition to the phallic stakes all the men are carrying later. His medical examination of the changing Lucy is depicted as borderline molestation as her body is manipulated and worked upon to determine the specifics of her abnormality. Robert Mighall discusses how Seward – and some Dracula critics – try to explain the supernatural by referring to medical theories of the time: ‘The evil and the bizarre are thus made intelligible by being eroticised, pathologised and classified’ (1998, 66). The final

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destruction of the un-dead Lucy carries the disturbing tone of sexual mutilation, as indeed does the scene in the novel when Lucy’s fiancé saves her soul by repeatedly plunging the ‘mercy-bearing stake’ (192) into her body, a combination of ritualistic rape and pseudo-medical procedure. The scene of Lucy’s second death is undoubtedly the most violent and traumatic in the book, her destruction being much harder to accomplish than the final destruction of Dracula himself. Maddin’s film uses Mahler’s dramatic music and the expressive dancing to great effect. Lucy’s dance of undeath is by turns gleeful, self-absorbed, aggressive and seductive, only interrupted by the four men holding her down and finally piercing her body with their stakes. In a departure from the novel, all three of Lucy’s suitors are engaged in her destruction, a change that forms a poignant parallel to the earlier blood-transfusions which are equally tinged with an air of sexual victimisation. Van Helsing’s smug smile of satisfaction incontrovertibly exposes him as the domineering patriarch he is, and the subsequent image of the four men washing their blood-smeared hands in a bowl of water gives Lucy’s second death an almost martyr-like quality. It also links the church-sanctioned killing ritual with inhuman medical treatments for ‘hysterical’ women. Dracula’s female victims are implicitly blamed for their transformations. According to Van Helsing’s arcane knowledge, the vampire has to be invited into the home, however unconsciously that invitation is communicated. Although enfeebling at first, Dracula’s bite actually awakens new energies in the women, particularly in the spirited Lucy, whose gradual shift from girlish flirt to powerful woman is expressed in her dancing, which changes from choreographies incorporating her three suitors to dancing for herself, with herself, ignoring the onlooking men. In Maddin’s film, Lucy obviously glories in her un-dead state, which is cruelly cut short by the vampire hunters, who are deeply disturbed by her changed personality and, first with horror, then with relish, put an end to what, in their eyes, is a case of blatantly improper behaviour. As Anne Williams has pointed out, they are not rescuing one individual woman, but are defending their ideal of how a woman should be (1995: 126). While the first impulse may be to identify one of the female characters as the eponymous virgin diarist of Maddin’s film, most of Dracula’s text is actually supplied by Dr Seward and Jonathan Harker, whose journal-keeping habit befits his role as a male version of the gothic heroine trapped in a labyrinthine castle. Mina, on the other hand, is

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responsible for putting together the diary entries and constructing a coherent story out of the various textual fragments. It is Harker’s diary which features as an important prop in a pas de deux between Mina and her fiancé in the ballet’s choreography, which is also included in Maddin’s film: after Mina has read his shocking travel journal, it is wrapped in cloth and becomes a symbol of their mutual trust (and a wealth of shameful memories). In the novel, after having disobeyed the Count and, like Bluebeard’s wife, explored the forbidden parts of the castle, Harker even unconsciously takes the place of a woman when he notes in his diary: Here I am, sitting at a little oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much thought and many blushes, her ill-spelt love-letter, and writing in my diary in shorthand all that has happened since I closed it last. It is nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill. (Stoker, 2008: 40)

Harker is trying to uphold a series of strong binary oppositions. He contrasts the ‘old times’ with his modern nineteenth century and himself, a middle-class man writing a travel journal which will later be used as quasi-scientific evidence, with ‘some fair’, possibly (like Dracula) aristocratic ‘lady’ who is writing a highly emotional ‘love-letter’. The hand-written letter, in turn, is distinguished from the more modern technique of writing in shorthand, a form of encoding that Dracula – who is not quite as up to date – will not be able to read. Harker has not yet realised that he is a character in a gothic story where the past always returns, even though he begins to sense its lingering traces. He decides ‘to sleep here, where of old ladies had sat and sung and lived sweet lives whilst their gentle breasts were sad for their menfolk away in the midst of remorseless wars’ (Stoker, 2008: 41). Shortly afterwards, three fair ladies, relics of the past, do in fact make an appearance, yet they quickly and traumatically overturn every idea Harker has had of what ladies should be like when they aggressively initiate a disturbing yet alluring form of sexual play. Dracula’s repeated blurring of different temporal layers and its instances of juxtaposition of the particular and the archetypal are made visible in Maddin’s palimpsestic film by the use of various styles representing different time periods and by its use of symbolically overdetermined imagery. Despite the film’s attention to period detail, the expressionistic dancing and silent movie acting in combination with Mahler’s symphonic music serve to underscore the emotions of the

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novel’s characters and manage to convey a sense of mythic timelessness. Vampirising various cultural artefacts from Caligari to Coppola, Maddin’s film ultimately manages to be both highly innovative and a knowing pastiche, both a fragmented collage of earlier attempts to visually represent the mythic figure of Dracula and an exhaustive analysis of the original 1897 novel, both – in the words of Jonathan Harker’s diary – ‘up-to-date’ and ‘nineteenth century … with a vengeance’. Notes 1 The title recalls that of Robert Aickman’s 1975 story ‘Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal’, which is set in the early nineteenth century and tells a tale reminiscent of John Polidori’s The Vampyre in a series of diary entries penned by an English girl staying with her parents in Italy. I thank Jeffrey Weinstock for alerting me to this story. 2 The film misquotes the line as ‘There are bad dreams for those that sleep unwisely.’ 3 The film substitutes ‘woman’ for ‘girl’.

References Auerbach, N. (1995), Our Vampires, Ourselves, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). [Film] Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. USA: Zoetrope/Columbia Pictures Corporation/Osiris Films. Count Dracula (1977). [TV programme] BBC2, 22 December 1977. Craft, C. (1984), ‘“Kiss me with those Red Lips”: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Representations 8 (1984): 107–33. Dracula (1958). [Film] Directed by Terence Fisher. UK: Hammer Film Productions. Dracula (1979). [Film] Directed by John Badham. USA: Universal Pictures/The Mirisch Corporation. Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002). [Film] Directed by Guy Maddin. Canada: Vonnie Von Helmolt Film/Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Dracula Productions Inc./Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Foucault, M. (1990), The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction, New York: Vintage. Halberstam, J. (1995), Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hughes, W. (2009), Bram Stoker: Dracula, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Maddin, G., Springer, J. and Werthschulte, C. (2008), ‘“If you want Realism, Watch Security Camera Tapes”: An Interview with Guy Maddin’, in W. R. Keller and G. Walz (eds), Screening Canadians: Cross-Cultural Perspectives of Canadian Film, Marburg: Universitäts-Bibliothek, pp. 183–92. Mighall, R. (1998), ‘Sex, History and the Vampire’, in W. Hughes and A. Smith (eds), Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 62–77.

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Mitchell, D. (1975), Gustav Mahler. Vol. 2: the Wunderhorn Years, London: Faber & Faber. Nosferatu – A Symphony of Horror (1922). [Film] Dir. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau. Germany: Jofa-Atelier Berlin-Johannisthal/Prana-Film GmbH. Pater, W. (1998), The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, Twickenham, Middlesex: Senate. Skal, D. J. (1990), Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula form Novel to Stage to Screen, New York: Norton. Stoker, B. (1997), Dracula: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Reviews and Reactions, Dramatic and Film Variations, Criticism, ed, N. Auerbach and D. J. Skal, New York: Norton. Stoker, B. (2008), Bram Stoker’s Notes for ‘Dracula’: A Facsimile Edition, annotated and transcribed by R. Eighteen-Bisang and E. Miller (eds), Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Wicke, J. (1992), ‘Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media’, English Literary History 59: 467–93. Williams, A. (1995), Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

9 Jean-François Baillon

Spectrality and the deconstruction of the cinema in Neil Burger’s The Illusionist and Steven Millhauser’s short stories

Steven Millhauser’s preoccupation with spectrality is an established feature of his fiction. In an interview following the release of his 2008 collection of short stories Dangerous Laughter, he confessed to a special interest in ‘ghostliness’, a term which applies with particular relevance to several of his narratives, which are also concerned with the unfolding of ‘vanishing acts’ – the latter phrase actually providing the title of a whole section within the same collection of short stories. Dealing with performers of magical acts as protagonists, these fictions eventually offer meditations about the act of writing – and more generally about the essence of art, which Millhauser, in the same interview, defines as ‘an appearance that smashes appearance’ (Sulzman, 2009). Following the same logic, many of Millhauser’s short stories feature inventors of machines or devices that often make the reader uncertain of the boundaries between fiction and reality, the world of fact and the world of dream, frequently finding inspiration in the uncanny potentialities of popular culture and its reliance on automata and the mechanical reproduction of life – some of the most brilliant examples being ‘August Eschenburg’ (1999), ‘The New Automaton Theater’ (1999), ‘The Invention of Robert Herendeen’ (2007b) or, closer to our theme, ‘A Precursor of the Cinema’ (2008). By choosing to adapt Millhauser’s 1990 short story ‘Eisenheim The Illusionist’ as The Illusionist (2006), Neil Burger captures the essence of Millhauser’s art of fiction and selects one among several of Millhauser’s pieces which bear upon the affinity between the art of the storyteller and the uncanny effects achieved by the ‘art of light and darkness’ – to borrow the title of

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Laurent Mannoni’s (1995) masterly study of the pre-history of film – known as the cinematograph. This pre-history implies an awareness of the use of magic lanterns in late Enlightenment and early Victorian society, especially by performers like Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, whose ‘phantasmagoria shows’ were a popular expression of the intermedial character of early gothic culture in Europe (Castle, 1995; Warner, 2008). Indeed, the gothic aspect of Millhauser’s writing has often been noticed and the legacy of Edgar Allan Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann can be felt in the reflexive dimension of his stories (Sammarcelli, 2004). Like many short stories by Millhauser, ‘Eisenheim The Illusionist’ relates to the culture of mid- and late-nineteenth century Mitteleuropa and suggests a parallel between the performing arts and their powers of suggestion, the development of hypnotism and psychoanalysis and the demise of ideologies of politics and gender associated with western imperialism. Neil Burger’s adaptation skilfully elaborates upon Millhauser’s themes and introduces characters and plots which at first sight look annoyingly like facile concessions to Hollywood conventions such as the so-called ‘love interest’, but which end up adding unexpected complexity in a way that remains fundamentally in keeping with the universe of Millhauser’s fiction. According to the usual practice of mainstream American productions, the choice of turning a short story into a 110-minutes-long feature film almost inevitably implied the introduction of additional material that was likely to threaten the delicate balance achieved by the printed source of the script. In the event, things turned out differently and it appears that the hybrid form developed by Neil Burger out of Millhauser’s short story resulted in the amplification of most of its themes and preoccupations, as well as in their transposition to another medium. As we shall see, some of the metaleptic potentialities of the narrative quite naturally found their way into a rather gratifying exploration of the powers of the cinematic apparatus itself. Burger’s The Illusionist (2006) features a central character, Eisenheim (Edward Norton), whose magic performances in fin-de-siècle Vienna undermine the authority of the state and the reliability of the testimony of the senses until the audience of his shows as well as the viewer of Burger’s film realise that he too was an illusion, some kind of ghost. In this literal ‘coup de theatre’, spectrality replaces actuality as Eisenheim himself unveils his own unsettling identity as spectral subject of an uncanny show. After the disappearance of the ghostly figure of Duchess

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von Taschen (Jessica Biel), whose apparition on stage has caused unrest among the theatre audience, the chief of police, Chief-Inspector von Uhl (Paul Giamatti), assisted by some guards, attempts to seize him, revealing in the process of taking hold of him that he, too, was just a ghostly presence that gradually vanishes under everybody’s eyes. Uhl’s hand grasps only thin air, then the figure of Eisenheim rises and walks towards the audience and literally disappears as his body becomes blurred and transparent, turning into some sort of greenish haze. This comes all the more as a surprise since the previous shots had seemingly established Eisenheim’s very palpable physical effort in the conjuring up of ghosts, especially through the use of close-ups that revealed a tense, sweating face which contrasted with the diaphanous, ethereal figure of the evanescent Duchess, who had allegedly come from the other world to make revelations about the circumstances of her death. This final realisation of the conjurer’s spectrality ultimately leads another character, Chief-Inspector Uhl, to question his own construction of the whole plot and to imagine an alternative to the story which has been told so far. More fundamentally, the whole fabric of reality and fiction dissolves as narrative possibilities open up as a result of the work of Unheimlichkeit. While on the face of it The Illusionist looks like a rather bland Hollywood production, a closer look at the editing reveals some unsettling devices in a film where loose ends do not fit so easily. A deconstructive approach to the spectres deployed by Neil Burger suggests a parallelism between the magic show and cinema itself. In both cases, the uncanny arises from the performance of a vanishing act unveiling the spectral nature of what was mistaken for a full presence, the latter being the illusion resulting from the cinematic apparatus. Thus, in a brief scene which takes place much earlier, we see a team of detectives demonstrating to a half-sceptical Uhl the possibility that the apparitions conjured up by Eisenheim on stage might just be projections of cinematograph reels on clouds of smoke or vapour. While this reconstruction may seem rather crude to twenty-first-century eyes, we should remember that such tricks were commonly used by practitioners of phantasmagoria shows such as Robertson and his followers from the late eighteenth century onwards (Heard, 2005; Warner, 2008: 131–44). Their verisimilitude within the diegetic universe was discreetly supported by the presence of magic lanterns glimpsed among Eisenheim’s paraphernalia in a previous scene. This, of course, hints at the similar creation of cinematic illusion by modern means such as

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CGI, which was used to create the kind of apparitions that form part of Eisenheim’s most elaborate tricks. Among Millhauser’s texts, ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’ is indeed one of the latest, but not the last, in a line of characters embodying the affinity between the art of fiction and early cinema. If we accept André Bazin’s intuition, in ‘What Is Cinema?’, that the emergence of cinema in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century liberated the fine arts from their traditional mimetic link to reality (Bazin, 2005), then we can understand Millhauser’s elaborate exploration of the figure of painters or designers who come close to an imitation of life through the means of painting or drawing – or, sometimes, clockwork animated figures as in the case of ‘August Eschenburg’ – and in the process invent a parallel variety of the cinematograph, such as that of Harlan Crane, the central character of ‘A Precursor of the Cinema’ (2008). In the latter case, we are told how the protagonist evolves from being a member of the ‘Verisimilist’ school of American painting, whose aim is ‘to reveal the world with ultra-photographic precision’ to joining the ‘Transgressives’, who are actually ‘a handful of disaffected Verisimilists who felt that the realist program of verisimilism did not go far enough’ (Bazin, 2005: 186–7). Following the break-up of the movement, Crane later creates the ‘Phantoptic Theatre’ in 1883, consisting in the dazzling disruption of the boundary between painting and real life, with the dancing figures in a huge oil painting set up on a stage appearing to move and to leave the canvas to go on dancing on the stage. Further, increasingly disturbing experiments made by Crane on this line are reported, until we learn about his final disappearance but also about devices which may evoke transgressions of the kind Woody Allen exploited in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1984). With the last paragraph, we find an extract from the diary of a secondary character referring to a visit to Vienna in 1896, thus linking together the birth of cinema, fin-de-siècle culture, modernity and psychoanalysis. Although Millhauser’s fiction sometimes takes place in other cultural and historical contexts, he has confessed to a special interest in the late nineteenth century as a particularly inspiring period, particularly as it was ‘the time of a new art form, motion pictures’ (Février, 2011). The link between magic and the demise of empire is made crystal clear by the narrator of ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’ in the opening paragraph of the short story: ‘In the last years of the nineteenth century, when the Empire of the Hapsburgs was nearing the end of its long

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d­ issolution, the art of magic flourished as never before […] It was the age of levitations and decapitations, of ghostly apparitions and sudden vanishings, as if the tottering Empire were revealing through the medium of its magicians its secret desire for annihilation’ (Millhauser, 2007a: 215). As the narrative progresses, we guess that at the heart of the uncanny art of the magician there lies an affinity with the unsubstantial, the elusive, which runs against everything that the notion of empire stands for – possession, power, control. Like many a Millhauserian anti-hero, Eisenheim lives a life that runs parallel with the emergence of a major artistic movement or invention and provides the narrator with an opportunity to display an impressive degree of erudition concerning the twists and turns of the development of magic, the puppet theatre, popular entertainment or the cinema. ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’ is no exception and the reader eventually comes across the oblique suggestion that the subversive power of Eisenheim’s tricks may be due to the use of the cinematograph: ‘Was it possible’, we are invited to ponder, ‘that one of the Lumière machines, directed onto slightly misted air above the table, might have produced the phantom objects?’ (229). Although the hypothesis is immediately dismissed through empirical enquiry, an earlier reference to eighteenth-century phantasmagoria reinforces a feeling that what we are confronted with is a kind of virtual catalogue of manifestations of the uncanny, of forces of the unreal that converge towards the same unsettling result as far as the stability of the fin-de-siècle Weltanschauung is concerned (228). As we progress through our reading of Millhauser’s narrative, we inevitably pick up scattered yet unmistakable allusions to Eisenheim’s complicity with the emergence of the cinematograph, while the narrator obliquely reveals the magician’s kinship with at least one real-life magician who became a pioneer of early cinema, namely, Georges Méliès. Among Eisenheim’s early tricks, we can notice the ‘Phantom Portrait’: a ‘large blank canvas’, illuminated by limelight, gives birth to ‘full-length portraits that began to exhibit lifelike movements of the eyes and lips’ (219). This reads uncannily like a premonition of the cinema – indeed, the adjective ‘uncanny’ is not infrequently used when it comes to characterise Eisenheim’s tricks. Of course, one of the real-life models for Eisenheim’s career as a magician is none other than Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805–71), who appears explicitly in the narration with the mention of the great French conjurer in connection with the trick of the Orange Tree (218). But there is a more

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subtle reference to Georges Méliès (1861–1938), who bought RobertHoudin’s theatre from the latter’s widow and transposed some of his most celebrated tricks from the stage to the cinema screen. Among the latter, the most famous was probably ‘The Vanishing Lady’, mentioned as part of Eisenheim’s repertoire (221). Also mentioned are Maskelyne’s Egyptian Hall and Robert-Houdin’s Theatre, two of the most important venues in Méliès’s career as in the emergence of early cinema in the cultural context of late-Victorian popular performing arts – located respectively in London and in Paris. Moreover, the narrator of Millhauser’s short story insists on Eisenheim’s association with the Devil, from the time when a rumour claims that he is ‘a wizard who had sold his soul to the devil in return for holy powers’ (220) to the popular naming of the shed that houses his collection of ‘trick cabinets, deceptive mirrors, haunted portraits, and magic caskets’ as ‘the Teufelsfabrik, or Devil’s Factory’ (226). Another rumour accuses Eisenheim of having spirited off his rival Benedetti ‘to hell’ (223). Now such associations with diabolical lore may well be ascribed to Millhauser’s playful use of gothic themes as a postmodernist writer. Yet in the context of a piece of fiction that neatly inscribes its characters and its plot within the emergence of new technologies of representation, among which the cinema figures prominently, we should pay attention to the fact that Méliès often presented himself in the guise of a devil in his own films: The Devil’s Manor [Le Manoir du diable] (1896), The Devil and the Statue [Le Diable et la statue] (1902), The Black Devil [Le Diable noir] (1905), The 400 Pranks of the Devil [Les 400 farces du diable] (1906) among many others. That Millhauser has chosen to set his narrative in the capital of a foundering empire, where many aesthetic and philosophical revolutions were under way, suggests a reading of the short story in which Eisenheim is an allegory for the deconstruction of representation actually taking place in late nineteenth-century Vienna, and which Millhauser used as material for his own fictional ends. This, of course, is consistent with a reading of Millhauser’s fiction in terms of a ironic debunking of the illusions of mimetic realism, as in Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1977) and virtually all of his short stories: ‘Like all of Millhauser’s heroes, Martin tropes upon the solid premises of the world and shows them to be less tangible and more amenable to the ego than their reputation in confidently mimetic realist fictions suggests’ (Salzman, 2001: 613). In ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’, one recurrent but discreet expression

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of such distrust of mimesis is the progression in the function ascribed to mirrors. Eisenheim’s first original trick features a ‘large mirror in a carved frame … facing the audience’ (Millhauser, 2007a: 219). One of the spectators, invited on stage, wears a red robe and faces the mirror. After a while, the spectator’s reflection begins ‘to show signs of disobedience – it crossed its arms over its chest instead of waving them about, it refused to bow’ (220). The next spectacular trick is the performance in which Eisenheim makes ghostly figures appear through the mere effort of his mind. We have a very detailed description of the magician’s effort, in a series of quasi-cinematic close-ups, one of which focuses on his eyes: ‘Suddenly Eisenheim raised his eyes, which one witness described as black mirrors that reflected nothing’ (227). This time, the mirrors have become a metaphor for the empty eyes of the magician, and it is a strange choice of metaphor since the usual justification for such a choice would be that the eyes do reflect something. The point here is precisely that the ‘materialisations’ which appear on stage owing to Eisenheim’s purely mental effort cannot be explained away as the effect of the ‘deceptive mirrors’ that belong to the typical magician’s paraphernalia. This initial conjuring trick initiates a series of disturbing performances which lead the Chief of Police to close in upon Eisenheim, on the grounds that the latter ‘deliberately crossed boundaries and therefore disturbed the essence of things. In effect, Herr Uhl was accusing Eisenheim of shaking the foundations of the universe, of undermining reality, and in consequence of doing far worse: subverting the Empire’ (235). As Carl E. Schorske has established in his seminal study of finde-siècle Vienna, the demise of the bourgeois Weltanschauung at the turn of the century in the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire shook the foundations of psychology, town planning, painting, music, poetry and novel writing, with such ground-breaking works as those of Sigmund Freud, Otto Wagner, Gustav Klimt, Arnold Schoenberg, Hugo von Hofmanstahl and Robert Musil. It remains to be seen how Neil Burger’s film elaborates upon the trace of the narrator’s reference to the cinematograph in a way that eventually turns the whole film into an allegory of its own deconstruction and parallels Millhauser’s distrust of mimesis in favour of a metafictional approach to the medium. In his latest study on what he calls ‘the body of the cinema’, Raymond Bellour has identified a recurrent trope of early cinema as a mechanical apparatus and the use of trains in key sequences: ‘Thus the railway may serve as a mirror-like apparatus through which the film is reflected and

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elaborated as closely as possible to its mental perception’ (2009: 80 [my translation]). Such a trope has actually permeated the whole history of film to this day, from the early Lumière films and Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) to David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) and Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (2007) – to mention but a few landmark titles. Thus it is no coincidence that the last sequence of Neil Burger’s film, which does not correspond to anything in the original literary material, takes place in a railway station. Chief Inspector Uhl, who suspects he has been tricked by Eisenheim, stands on a platform as the train, in which the Illusionist is probably escaping, prepares to leave. The escalating rhythm of the running train commands a growing tension between actuality and virtuality as Uhl imagines an alternative to the story which has been told so far. While he becomes a substitute for both spectator and film-maker, the railway station becomes a metaphor for the cinematic apparatus conceived of as a machine. This climactic last sequence combines a definition of film in terms of montage with the confirmation that, from the beginning, disappearing was on Eisenheim’s agenda – as he promised Duchess von Taschen. Thus a definition of the cinema as an art of disappearance – echoing Millhauser’s interest in ‘vanishing acts’ – also obtains, in a manner similar to Alain Fleischer’s approach in Les Laboratoires du temps: ‘The cinema only offers this to our gaze: that which appears but only to disappear’ (2009: 28 [my translation]). Jacques Derrida’s definition of spectrality as fundamentally deconstructive applies here: Eisenheim’s spectral presence (or absence) in the train triggers a rearrangement of shots we have already seen, mediated by Chief Inspector Uhl’s jubilant consciousness as he supplements hitherto unseen shots and creates a new version of the film. The notion of ‘self-consuming artifacts’ developed by literary critic Stanley Fish (1972) in the rather different context of seventeenthcentury metaphysical poetry may also come to mind here. These necessary supplements fill gaps and create new ones, thus generating yet more spectrality. The elusive, phantasmatic nature of the happy ending which looks rather like a coda to the film than a proper ending is strongly suggested by all sorts of markers of excess, in terms of lighting, focus, colour scheme and framing. Flashes of bright golden light, overexposure, nondiegetic sound underlining the editing of the shots, saturated colours, accumulation of low-angle shots on Chief-Inspector Uhl, quotations from the dialogue of former scenes heard in voice-over – such a combination of artificial effects tends to achieve opposite ends: occurring near the end of the film, it is i­mmediately read in terms of a ‘recapitulation

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scene’, faintly reminiscent of the disconnected montage effect at the end of Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1962). At the same time, the intrusion of hitherto unseen shots – as was already the case in the 1962 British film – and the elaboration of an alternative reading of the narrative – unlike in Richardson’s film – tend to substitute a meta-narrative perception of the sequence for a merely psychological reordering of the contents of the film. Instead of reading the final reunion of the two lovers as the maudlin fulfilment of the expectations of sentimental audiences, we should rather see it as the projection of Herr Uhl’s new capacity as ‘Grand Imagier’, to use Albert Laffay’s seminal concept, even as the Chief Inspector has now become a kind of successor to the magician, through the symbolic present of the plans of Eisenheim’s most popular trick, the ‘Orange Tree’ (actually inspired by one of Robert-Houdin’s bestknown original inventions). Very much like Millhauser’s novels and short stories, revelation takes precedence over illusion. As Mary Kinzie (1991) put it in a general study of Millhauser’s prose, ‘when reading Millhauser we do not suspend our disbelief. We are not caught in a seamless web. We observe the seams that bind his inventions together’. Likewise, in the last part of the film, Neil Burger allows the viewer to take a look at the seams that bind his shots together. Yet this final insistence on the nature of the cinematic apparatus as a machine that produces simulacra, in keeping with the mannerist aesthetics of the whole film, is directly connected to the reversal of values implied by the repetition of the key sentence: ‘everything you have seen is an illusion – a trick’. Initially addressed to Herr Uhl by Prince Leopold as a brutal denunciation of Eisenheim’s devious ways, it becomes the decontextualised revelation that loosens Uhl’s imagination and allows a reordering of many of the film’s shots devoid of any ontological consequences. Eventually, the fundamental iterability of the units that make up a film is exposed and the effects of presence that result from their most usual arrangement in conventional editing appear as arbitrary. Hence, the uncanny effect of the disruption of the apparatus: given the general parallelism of magic with film-making throughout the whole film, Eisenheim’s final stage act, with its unsettling revelation of his own spectrality, works as a metaphor of the disruption of the conventional use of the apparatus – an oblique deconstruction of cinematic devices, if we admit that ‘spectral logic is de facto a deconstructive logic’ (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 117). Only with this metaleptic reading of the sequence do we come to realise the

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appropriateness of Neil Burger’s decision to use the Chief Inspector as a focaliser of the whole narrative, instead of sticking to the neutral third-person narration of the original short story. Herr Uhl’s final exhilaration balanced with a strange melancholy are perfectly conveyed by Paul Giamatti’s acting and, together with the key-words hammered in echoing utterances woven into the voice-over (trick, illusion, delusion), they bring to mind one particular passage from ‘The Little Kingdom of Franklin J. Payne’, a short story in which Millhauser’s eponymous character’s musings on his trade – namely, the making of black-and-white, hand-drawn animated cartoons – evince a meditation on the essence of the cinema: He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been granted the secret of motion, his death-world with its hidden gift of life. But that life was a deeply ambiguous life, a conjurer’s trick, a crafty illusion based on an accidental property of the retina, which retained an image for a fraction of a second after the image was no longer present. On this frail fact was erected the entire structure of the cinema, that colossal confidence game. The animated cartoon was a far more honest expression of the cinematic illusion than the so-called realistic film, because the cartoon reveled in its own illusory nature, exulted in the impossible – indeed it claimed the impossible as its own, exalted it as its own highest end, found in impossibility, in the negation of the actual, its profoundest reason for being. The animated cartoon was nothing but the poetry of the impossible – therein lay its exhilaration and its secret melancholy. (Millhauser, 1993: 107)

In the end, all of Millhauser’s fictional creators turn out to be dreamers who enjoy their delusions in full awareness that this is what they are – mere delusions. As the voice-over commentator of a twin film by Christopher Nolan, The Prestige, also released in 2006 put it, we want to be ‘fooled’ (see Baillon, 2012: 317–19). In this state of waking dream theorised by Raymond Bellour as akin to a state of hypnosis, the status of fiction is no longer in logical contradiction with truth since the principle of contradiction no longer matters. Whether the last shots of The Illusionist unveil a truthful version of events or a new ‘trick’ no longer matters for we should realise that, for quite some time now, we have entered the realm of fiction, a strange world in which such boundaries are intrinsically blurred. We may suspect, although we cannot know for sure, that from the beginning no detail has been left to chance by a very cunning Eisenheim. Was the Duchess lying when she said she did not recognise him? Was everything that happened part of some plan they both devised at an early stage of the story? Was Chief Inspector Uhl actually tricked into helping the two lovers to escape? There is no

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way to achieve certainty and this is precisely the point: every detail, every shot, every utterance, can be combined into alternative designs and alternative plots. The same principle of uncertainty retrospectively applies to the opening sequence of the film, which shows a version of Eisenheim’s last show and his attempted arrest by Chief-Inspector Uhl, noticeably different from the longer, more elaborate version we see at the end of the film. This is followed by Uhl’s deceptively deferent visit to the Crown Prince, who becomes the recipient of the story told from his point of view, whereas in fact, as we eventually find out, Uhl has come to accuse the Crown Prince of the murder of Duchess von Taschen. By thus displaying the mechanics that lie at the heart of the cinematic illusion, Neil Burger’s film captures the essence of Millhauser’s allegories of the cinema through a transposition that lays bare its logic without diminishing its poetical quality. References Baillon, J.-F. (2012), ‘Itérabilité et hantise dans le cinéma contemporain: le retour impensable’, in L. Guillaud and G. Menegaldo (eds), Persistances gothiques dans la littérature et les arts de l’image. Colloque de Cerisy 2008, Paris: Bragelonne, pp. 310–26. Bazin, A. (2005), What is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bellour, R. (2009), Le Corps du film, Paris: P.O.L. Castle, T. (1995), The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Derrida, J. and Stiegler, B. (2002), Echographies of Television, trans. J. Bajorek, Cambridge: Polity Press. Février, E. (2011), ‘An Interview with Steven Millhauser’, Transatlantica 1 (http:// transatlantica.revues.org/5302). Fish, S. (1972), Self-Consuming Artifacts: the Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature, Berkeley: University of California Press. Fleischer, A. (2009), ‘Cinéma, ruines du temps’, in Les Laboratoires du temps. Écrits sur le cinéma et la photographie 1, Paris: Galaade, pp. 27–35. Heard, M. (2005), ‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t: The Magician and the Magic Lantern’, in R. Crangle, M. Heard and I. van Dooren (eds), Realms of Light. Uses and Perception of the Magic Lantern from the 17th to the 21st Century, London: The Magic Lantern Society, pp. 13–24. Kinzie, M. (1991), ‘Succeeding Borges, Escaping Kafka: On the Fiction of Steven Millhauser’, Salmagundi 92, 115–44. Mannoni, L. (1995), Le grand art de la lumière et de l’ombre, archéologie du cinema, Paris: Nathan Université. Millhauser, S. (1993), ‘The Little Kingdom of J. Franklyn Payne’, in Little Kingdoms. Three Novellas, New York: Vintage, pp. 11–115.

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Millhauser, S. (1999 [1981]), ‘August Eschenburg’, in In the Penny Arcade, London: Phoenix, pp. 3–64. Millhauser, S. (1999 [1998]), ‘The New Automaton Theater’, in The Knife Thrower and Other Stories, New York: Vintage, pp. 89–111. Millhauser, S. (2007a [1990]), ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’, in The Barnum Museum, Champaign, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, pp. 215–37. Millhauser, S. (2007b [1990]), ‘The Invention of Robert Herendeen’, in The Barnum Museum, Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, pp. 183–214. Millhauser, S. (2008), ‘A Precursor of the Cinema’, in Dangerous Laughter, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, pp. 179–208. Salzman, A. (2001), ‘A Wilderness of Size: Steven Millhauser’s Martin Dressler’, Contemporary Literature 42.3: 589–616. Sammarcelli, F. (2004), ‘Les voix sans origines chez Steven Millhauser’, in A. Ullmo (ed.), Steven Millhauser, une écriture sur le fil, Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, pp. 39–56. Schorske, C. E. (1961), Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Sulzman, D. (2009), ‘An Interview with Steven Millhauser’, The Southeast Review, 4 December (http://southeastreview.org/2009/12/steven-millhauser.html) The Illusionist (2006). [Film] Directed by Neil Burger. USA/Czech Republic: Bull’s Eye Entertainment/Bob Yari Productions/Contagious Entertainment Warner, M. (2008), Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors and Media into the Twenty-First Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

10 Nik Taylor and Stuart Nolan

Performing fabulous monsters: re-inventing the gothic personae in bizarre magick

Bizarre magick Performance magic research has primarily focused on historical studies of the nineteenth century’s ‘golden age’, an interest perpetuated by books such as Hiding the Elephant (Steinmeyer, 2003) and films such as The Prestige (2006) and The Illusionist (2006). Subsequent performance magic has been largely neglected by the academy. This is due to the misconception that performance magic ended as a cultural entertainment with the birth of cinema. In reality, performance magic found ways to inhabit and energise both film and TV, just as it is now inhabiting and innovating new media. The contemporary ‘magic assemblage’ (During, 2002) now rivals that of the golden age in terms of popularity and overshadows it both in invention and in its astonishing scope. Performance magic takes many forms and this chapter examines the particular genre of bizarre magick, which favours theatrical character, story-telling, overt allegory, symbolism, and themes of the supernatural, fantastic and weird. Having roots in Victorian spirit performance, such as that of the Davenport Brothers (1854–77), and the early twentiethcentury performances of Theodore Annemann (1907–42) and Stewart James (1908–96), it was realised as a movement in the 1970s through a counter-cultural reaction against the big boxes and card flourishes of a disenchanted contemporary mainstream stage magic. Bizarre magicians sought to re-enchant performance magic with the mysterious and the spiritual (re)discovering its deeper meaning. Evidence of this attempt at re-enchantment can be seen in the term ‘bizarre magick’ with practitioners often adding the ‘k’ to signal a con-

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nection with a spelling convention initiated by Aleister Crowley, itself an attempt to differentiate performance magic from occult practice. This spelling was popularised in the 1970s by contributors to the influential magazine Invocation (Andruzzi and Raven, 2007). However, it was primarily the British bizarrists Charles Cameron and Tony ‘Doc’ Shiels who were directly influenced by Western occultism, Celtic mythology and ceremonial magic. Throughout this chapter we have used the convention of the ‘k’ spelling not to suggest that bizarre magick always has strong links to these traditions but simply to distinguish it from other forms of performance magic. Fabulous monsters Max Maven is one of the pre-eminent performers of magic (with and without the ‘k’) working today and this chapter draws its name from a 2006 documentary about Maven, directed by Donna Zuckerbrot, in which he recalls a story from the book Harpo Speaks (Marx, 1985). This biography of Harpo Marx also tells the story of Alexander Woollcott, who, on the verge of adolescence, attended a birthday party and was required to participate in a ‘curious activity’, a game where each child was asked to write down what they wanted to be when they grew up. As we can assume, very few of them grew up to be what they had inscribed on their slips of paper. However, this was not true for young Alexander Woollcott, who would eventually become exactly what he had written down. On his paper, he had inscribed these words: ‘I would rather be a fabulous monster’ (Max Maven in Zuckerbrot, 2006). This chapter explores the relationship of bizarre magic to the gothic through notions of the fabulous and the monstrous. Maven, influenced by Woollcott’s words, chose to become a fabulous monster himself. He made a decision to create this new character/persona early on in his career. He was born Philip Goldstein and adopted the name Max ‘as it was a crisp dynamic name that had fallen out of fashion’, the ‘x’ being ‘sharp and distinctive’ coupled with Maven, a ‘Yiddish word for a wise expert or a know-it-all; the name contains many clues to Max’s identity and background’ (Steinmeyer, 2007: 57). Maven then transformed himself, with extreme, theatrical grooming: a deep widow’s peak, burnished black hair, sharp eyebrows and dark eye shadow, a Mephistophelean goatee, and a pierced ear. He looked like Ming the Merciless from the old Flash Gordon Comics. (Steinmeyer, 2007: 57).

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Claiming to have been born on ‘the day with most darkness’, Maven’s look references Ming the Merciless and Kabuki theatre while his personality mixes intellectual supremacy, dry wit and arch comedy (Zuckerbrot, 2006). He contrasts a visually cartoonish image with unashamedly intellectual and eclectic scripts. He is a stylish monster who speaks fluent Japanese and quotes theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Maven’s trademark opening line plays with the idea of a self-aware monster. He strides onstage, leans in to the microphone, smiles and quietly says, ‘Boo!’ This immediately plays with the audience’s expectations; by taking himself lightly, he is in fact taking himself seriously. The monstrous is fabulous and his persona becomes ‘the first effect in [the] show’ (Steinmeyer, 2007: 57). Maven’s attention to persona is mirrored in the bizarre magick literature. Just what manner of persona should the bizarrist adopt? While the idea of the magician developing a dramatic persona is not new, the bizarrist draws on elements largely rejected by the magic establishment. Bizarre magick rejects the notion of the traditional ‘bourgeois magician’ (Saville, 2004) while favouring story-telling, the uncanny and the gothic. A frequently quoted precept of modern magic is Eugene RobertHoudin’s ‘A magician is an actor playing the part of a magician’ (RobertHoudin and Hoffmann, 1878: 43). T. A. Waters interprets this to mean ‘a stage magician is an actor playing the part of a real magician’ advising the would-be bizarrist to ‘act as yourself, perhaps sceptical but curious; there are these rituals you know about, they’re probably just superstition, but why not give them a try and see if anything happens?’ Thus the performer takes the approach of an ‘interested student rather than omnipotent master’ (Waters, 1993: 243–4). Tony Raven advises that the magician should not appear like a character out of a grade B horror movie but rather play the part of a man demonstrating what he knows about the occult sciences. He argues that it is far too easy for a character to be seen as a ‘corny simulation of a man of mystery’, and that a ‘much easier and more credible’ approach to developing a character is to play the ‘role of savant, one who has interest in the occult and is willing to experiment with his discoveries as entertainment for his audience’. Tony Andruzzi has called this ‘the Van Helsing Approach’, referring both to the novel and to the various screen portrayals, particularly in the British Dracula films of the 1960s and 1970s featuring actors Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing (Magus, 2009: 17). In this performance, Van Helsing is portrayed as

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‘one who may, or may not, know what he is doing! Van Helsing here leads us into areas that perhaps he can’t handle, that he perhaps cannot control. We are led to the edge of credibility’ (Burger, 1991: 35). In adopting a persona the bizarre magician balances the real and the imaginary, the received truth and the actual truth. The magician is often portrayed as an ordinary man whose power comes from a study of the occult and supernatural. His power is derived from ‘secret, and conventionally rejected knowledge’ (1991: 35) and although being associated with the dark arts he is often on the side of good. Within the diversity of these characters we can see a ‘spectrum’ of persona and performance technique based upon the practitioner’s intention to produce hard or soft, monstrous or fabulous bizarre (Magus, 2009: 20). The examples which follow illustrate this spectrum and demonstrate a series of conscious decisions by the performer based on dramatic intent; this may involve directly using names and characters from the gothic, borrowing recognisable elements of the genre for their characterisation and performance, and even, in the case of ‘hard’ bizarre, performing magic as real. From Dracula to Van Helsing A number of bizarre magicians develop characters that make direct reference to the gothic within their work. Here we can ask questions as to just which elements of the gothic genre is the performer adopting. It would be difficult to perform a Dracula character as a magician and stay wholly true to Bram Stoker’s vision, and pragmatic concessions are made. These personas are often a jigsaw of the canonical gothic elements that make up the entire Dracula oeuvre, often having more in common with parodies such as Dracula, Dead and Loving It (1995) or The Munsters (1964–66) than with the original novel or the classic Expressionist film Nosferatu (1922). Charles Cameron

Charles Cameron, a key originator of the genre, was a psychic investigator and performer well known for his Friday Frighteners and Beyond the Unknown radio shows. Cameron was curator of the Edinburgh Wax Museum from its inception in 1976 until it closed in 1989. Here he created the Nights of Fear and, in the final years of its existence, Castle Dracula, a theatre devoted to bizarre magick and inspired by Maskeylene’s famous Egyptian Hall in London. Cameron produced

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and took the lead part of Count Dracula; other performers played Daemon, ‘a creature from the depths of Hell’, and the Vampiress. In Castle Dracula Mentalism (1997) Cameron describes a number of the routines he performed. They read quite differently from other bizarre magick effects that draw influence from gothic tales. They are very straightforward and have little serious dark symbolism attached to them, reflecting the stage show itself, which played out the gothic in a rather tongue-in-cheek manner, comparable to popular gothic horror themed television shows. For example, in The Book of Demons (Cameron, 1997: 19), a page from a book of horror tales is chosen by an audience volunteer. The page is torn from the book and marked with the outline of a human figure. While the page is held outstretched by the volunteer, the performer ‘holds a needle aloft and suddenly plunges it down on to the page’. The volunteer holds the page up to the light and sees that there is a hole through the ‘O’ in the word ‘forbidden’. The volunteer then tears the page into quarters and the performer burns it. When they re-examine the book the volunteer discovers that the torn-out page has returned. The edges of the page are slightly singed and charred. The outline of a figure is drawn on the page and there is a pinhole through the letter ‘O’ in the word ‘forbidden’. The volunteer takes the book home as a souvenir. Eugene Burger

Named as ‘One of the 100 most influential magicians of the 20th century’ by Magic Magazine, Burger is also a philosopher and historian of religion with advanced degrees in divinity (Yale University) and philosophy, and has taught comparative religion and philosophy. This background is apparent in his writing and performance. He argues that in the past magic, death, life and art were mixed, but that today’s magic has been reduced to tricks and tamed into the superfluous. Today’s magic should be about ‘fabricating reality to produce surprising results’ (Caplan, 1988). Burger’s work emphasises the importance of the structuring of deception, this frequently consists of considered story-telling, focusing on mystery and bizarre as opposed to ‘tricks’. Eugene Burger in his introduction to The Compleat Invocation (Andruzzi and Raven, 2007) states that the publication should stand ‘as a reminder to magicians that there is an older magic, a deeper and perhaps even darker tradition that has quietly spread underground for centuries’, an older magic that ‘stretches back in time and history far beyond the point where written records begin’ (Burger in Andruzzi

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and Raven, 2007). In contrast to the treatment of bizarre magick as a playful form of light-hearted gothic entertainment, the concept of the magician here is more closely related to that of that magus, with professional, ceremonial, ritualistic and spiritual duties (Butler, 1948). However, this serious concern with the deeper meanings of magic does not mean that Burger’s performing style is always serious. On the contrary, his routines are often mischievously humorous and his style influenced by the cinematic gothic. He states that if he had a style, ‘I think I got it watching Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff movies when I was young’ (Burger, 2007: online). In 1992 Eugene Burger and fellow magician Jeff McBride founded The Mystery School as a way of exploring new contexts for magic. McBride describes the school as, ‘not only an experiential retreat, but also a piece of living art, an adventure in theatre’ (Burger and McBride, 2003: 17). The intention was to create ‘interactive magical experiences for magicians’ (Burger and McBride, 2003: 17). Again, there was serious intent but also humour, as Burger says, ‘yes, we’re serious about this but, well, we’re not serious, we’re sincere’ (Burger and McBride, 2003: 31). Mystery School alumni, such as David Parr, see magic as fundamental to a human culture where, ‘the world of magic is not so separate from everyday reality’, stating that ‘the sciences grew from magic … alchemy gave rise to chemistry, astrology to astronomy. Magic is present in our religious and spiritual beliefs, it’s in our myths and folklore, it’s in our entertainment. And it’s in our daily behavior’ (Parr, 2002: online). Magical thinking may be a part of our everyday lives, but to explore the potential of the magical through The Mystery School requires a more sustained mode of thought; ‘not to believe or disbelieve in magic, but just to make believe magic was real, not in the childish sense, but in the very aware adult sense’ (Burger and McBride, 2003: 34). Some bizarrists have taken the mixing of performance and real magic further, choosing to pursue the bizarre without interruption and developing a reputation for being the trickster playing with the real and the imaginary. Here we see an imperative based upon ambiguity within the performance and, while still drawing on the gothic, Doc Shiels and Tony Andruzzi blur the edge between magic as performance and magic as lived reality.

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Tony ‘Doc’ Shiels

Like many other bizarrists, Shiels has drawn from gothic media to construct a performance persona. Shiels was heavily influenced by a number of characters: W. C. Fields ‘the quintessential snake-oil pitchman’; Werner Krauss’s doctor-cum-showman in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920); sinister carnival leader Mr Dark from Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962); along with ‘a dash of this and a sprinkle of that until the figure evolved’ (Shiels, 1988a: 31). Shiels refers to being a magician around the clock and adopting a media-savvy persona to exploit the role of magician and come across as real. Having decided that ‘magic could benefit from a strong injection of the stuff which curdles blood and causes nightmares’ (Caplan, 1988) he began introducing himself as a ‘cantrip-casting shamanic surrealchemist’ (Shiels, 1988b: 12). To Shiels, the artfully constructed hoax, such as his photographs of monsters – including Morgawr (a Cornish sea monster) and his now famous photograph of the Loch Ness monster taken during his 1977 ‘monster hunt’ – are a valid a form of performance. Shiels extends Waters’s concept of the real magician by arguing that the magician must not simply appear as an actor playing the part of a magician but must ‘BE an awesomely and demonstrably real cantrip casting magician’, with the magician’s experiments making the audience feel like they could be in some form of danger (Shiels, 1988b: 19). Tony Andruzzi

Tony Andruzzi presents a darker view of the bizarre persona, appearing as sophisticated Mephistopheles, occultist and edgy trickster. From 1981 until his death in 1991 he was editor of the seminal bizarre magick magazine New Invocation (Andruzzi and Raven, 2007). A pre-eminent founder, contributor and a revered name in the community of bizarre magicians, his primary bizarre magick persona was Masklyn ye Mage, a ‘psycho-dynamic experimentalist’ (Shiels, 1988b: 12). Eugene Burger identifies three central ideas to Andruzzi’s work: The first is the idea that one must be a magician 24 hours a day; the second is that the impact of a bizarre magick performance decreases as the size of the audience increases; and the third is that Tony did not seek laughter or applause from his audience, his objective was to shake up our sense of reality. (Burger and Parr, 2000: online)

Andruzzi’s work has not been without criticism and even today his ethical stance provokes debate (Swiss et al., 2009). He often encouraged magicians to do psychic readings and to ‘present themselves to

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the gullible, who are suffering, as one who has real powers that can help them with the problems in their personal lives’ (Burger and Parr, 2000: online). Although they would have ethical issues with Andruzzi’s use of the word ‘gullible’ there are many magicians today who see helping people as a part of their art. This may simply be a belief that magic is, as Max Maven has said, ‘about reminding us, first and foremost, that there is mystery’ (Cherniak, 1994) but there are also practising therapists who have written about how they introduce magic into therapy (Inglee in Burger and McBride, 2003: 257; Cushman, 2008). This complex debate aside, Andruzzi’s magick was deliberately disturbing and uncomfortable, leaving the ‘impression that there really are deep mysteries in the world’ (Burger and Parr, 2000: online). In bizarre magick these mysteries are often explored through the telling of stories. Bizarre story-telling Alongside the development of character/persona, attention to the importance of story is another key feature that distinguishes bizarre magick from other styles of performance magic. Burger suggests that the ancient tradition of using stories in conjuring performances has been trivialised by the childish stories used by contemporary magicians: These early stories were serious vehicles, whose telling evoked important truths for our ancient ancestors. It took magicians’ stories thousands of years to get to Billy Bunter, the Hippity-hop Rabbits, and Joanne the Duck. (Burger in Neale, 1991: vii)

Neale goes on to state that in most magic, ‘the presentation of a plot – that is, the physical event in a card trick, such as a transposition or vanish – usually amounts to communicating the events of the plot clearly’. He argues that this is ‘highly abstract and seemingly removed from all human concerns’. He compares such presentations to mathematics and while such presentations can be enjoyable, there are many other approaches. Neale concludes; ‘A presentation can point to matters beyond the plot’ (Neale, 2000: x). Story-telling magic uses the magic effects to point to other things and is fundamentally a symbolic form that is often allegorical in practice. In this sense it is closely related to gospel magic, which uses magic effects as a way of telling religious parable. Bizarre magic can also concern itself with matters of a spiritual nature and has been called ‘Gospel

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magic turned inside out’ (Burger, 1991: 14–15). As the game of magic plays with the participant’s concepts of truth, belief, illusion and the impossible it lends itself to the service of stories with similar themes to that of gospel magic. Neale refers to this as ‘reflexive magic’ (Burger and Neale, 1995: 187), magic that is about magic and which can refer to ‘deception in all areas of life’ (Burger and Neale, 1995: 187). The magic assemblage presents a complex series of reflections, mirrors, and meta-narratives that interpret and reinterpret the various rhetorics of magic. Within this, bizarre magick offers numerous examples of transformations/translations of classic and contemporary gothic rhetorics of the magical. Shiels describes the bizarrist approach to adapting stories from other media in terms of its taste for the gothic, noting that while ‘bizarre magick steals plots from films and books’ it is also familiar with ‘dusty grimoires and books of shadows, with the learned tomes of occult ­philosophy […] it is a force to be reckoned with’ (Shiels, 1988a: 41). To understand quite how great the bizarrist’s taste for adapting gothic stories was we need only consider that the 35-page booklet And Then There Were Three (Shiels, Fromer and Andruzzi, 1974) contained the following examples of bizarre effects all directly inspired by gothic fiction: Tony Raven’s The Great God Pan, based on Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894) and The White People (1904); Roy Fromer’s The Black Seal, based on Machen’s The Novel of the Black Seal (1895); Tony Raven’s The Mysterious Card, based on Cleveland Moffet’s tale of the same name (1896); and Roy Fromer’s The Yellow Sign, based on Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow (1895). Shiels has also created a number of effects inspired by ghost story author M. R. James including Fleshcreeper (Shiels, 1968: 21) and Who is this Who is Coming? (Shiels, 1981: 49), both inspired by ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’. His Casting the Runes (Shiels, 1988a: 46) is named after the James story and inspired by the Jacques Tourneur film adaptation Night of the Demon (1957). Shiels’s effect Black Christmas from the book Bizarre (1988a: 41) was inspired by the following passage from the James essay, ‘Stories I Have Tried to Write’ (1929): There may be possibilities, too, in the Christmas cracker, if the right people pull it, and if the motto which they find inside has the right message on it. They will probably leave the party early, pleading indisposition; but very likely a ‘Previous engagement of long standing,’ would be the more truthful excuse. (James, 1987: 360)

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Black Christmas is written for performance at a Christmas party hosted by the magician. A number of different coloured counters are shown and placed into a velvet bag. The guests each secretly choose a counter and the magician is blindfolded and spun around while a rhyme is chanted. The blindfolded magician points his finger and the guest is selected (for this example we shall call him John and add that he is with his wife Alison) and proceeds to loan the magician a five-pound note. The serial number of the note is written down and the magician tears off a corner for John to keep. The rest of the note is folded into a handkerchief and, with the guests in a circle, the magician chants, ‘Yuletide … Midwinter … is a dark, strange and magical time. The Winter Solstice, Saturnalia, governed by the King of Chaos, the Lord of Misrule, to whom an offering must be made. Our good friend, John, has freely volunteered to sacrifice something he loves dearly … Alison …’ Short pause for effect. ‘Alison will, as I am sure she has many times before, help John wave farewell to his money.’ (Shiels, 1988a: 43)

John waves goodbye to his money, which is then shown to have vanished from the handkerchief. However, we find that John has chosen a black counter and is directed to pick a cracker of the same colour from underneath the tree and to pull it with Alison. Inside they find his five-pound note, which matches the piece he has kept, and a piece of parchment on which is written, Here’s luck to John and Alison, On this special night of Yule, It’s rare to get your money back, From the dark Lord of Misrule. (Shiels, 1988a: 44)

Black Christmas, like many other bizarre magick pieces, follows Andruzzi’s advice that the impact of a performance decreases as the size of the audience increases, and is written for an intimate gathering of friends and pays particular attention to the personal relationships of the guests (in this case a couple). The piece also borrows from other James sources including ‘The Mezzotint’ and ‘Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ as well as changing the pay-off from something sinister in James’s original to a form of friendly Christmas gift. Andruzzi has described a bizarrist as someone who takes the special effects from horror movies and presents them in the living room (Shiels, 1988a). In this vein, bizarrists have adapted H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, in part because it allows them to have fun creating special effects from seafood: Kate Shiels’s Vermicularis (Shiels,

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1988a: 70), which is in turn based on Brother Shadow’s Robin’s Quest (Andruzzi, 2007: 379), requires the construction of a hybrid creature from a squid and an octopus tentacle, while Tony Andruzzi’s Temple of Cthulhu (Andruzzi, 1977) utilises a shelled oyster stained with blue-green food colouring. However, the peak of Lovecraftian bizarre magick is Stephen Minch’s Lovecraftian Ceremonies (1979), a book of seven bizarre magick routines based on Lovecraft’s tales, a key example being The Stigmata of Cthulhu, where the ‘Mark of Cthulhu’ is drawn onto parchment while the magician chants a spell accompanied by the sound of bubbling water gradually increasing in volume. Finally, one spectator collapses, the parchment vanishes in a burst of flame and spectators find the Mark has appeared in various places on their bodies (Minch, 1979). Shiels then suggests that: ‘The magician has a powerful advantage over the story-teller in that he can, through trickery, make that “something” apparently happen to his audience’ (Shiels, 1981: 58). Shiels quotes M. R. James as saying: ‘The reader of a ghost story must be put into the position of thinking to himself, “If I’m not careful, something of this sort may happen to me.”’ We see this philosophy in Jack-in-the-Box (Shiels, 1988a: 78), where the performer introduces a brightly decorated box, about six inches square and securely padlocked, explaining that it is a rare type of Jack-in-the-Box created in the eighteenth century by the ‘eccentric mechanical genius’, Jacobus Lathrop-Pinchbeck. The box appears to be moving slightly. The performer carefully unlocks the box and steps back as if expecting the lid to fly open but it remains closed. He leans forward and lifts the lid but still nothing happens. He peeps inside the box – ‘Come on, Jack, there’s a good fellow…’ – and reaches inside. Suddenly the room is plunged into complete darkness. There is a clattering and a shrill squealing sound, a cry of pain and the smell of sulphur. The lights come back on. ‘The box is on its side, empty, except for a few strands of damp straw, and a tiny round brass bell of the type worn on a jester’s cap.’ The back of the performer’s hand is marked with the impression of teeth, and miniature, hook-nosed, mask of ‘an evil puppet Punch’ is found in the fireplace. Shiels acknowledges that the inspiration for this routine came from Fritz Lieber’s The Power of the Puppets (1942) and the episode in the movie Cat’s Eye (1985) where the murderous little hobgoblin – in a jester’s cap – is thwarted by a protective feline. Bizarrists may not be able to compete with the special effects of the horror film but Jack-in-

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the-Box is a fine example of how suggestion and intimacy can be used to generate unease and even terror in an audience. Bizarre influence While bizarre magick was initially an underground reaction to mainstream magic it continues to influence the mainstream with performers such as Penn and Teller, Criss Angel and Derren Brown all borrowing elements of the genre. The most successful contemporary performers are working with a wide range of styles but the influence of bizarre magick can be seen in their work in the use of story, the development of character, and an appreciation of the fundamentally bizarre nature of all magic performance. As Burger says, ‘Could anything be more bizarre than finding a rabbit in someone’s hat, or cutting an assistant to pieces with a lumber saw to the rhythm of cha-cha music?’ (Burger and Neale, 1995: 7). An example of a contemporary, mainstream performance of bizarre magick can be seen in Derren Brown’s TV series Trick or Treat (2007). The ventriloquist’s dummy has been the subject of a number of cinematic gothic tales including The Great Gabbo (1929), The Devil-Doll (1964) and Magic (1978). One of the tales from the portmanteau horror film Dead of Night (1942) also concerns a ventriloquist’s dummy and was loosely based on Gerald Kersh’s The Extraordinarily Horrible Dummy (1939). In the final scene between the ventriloquist, Maxwell Frere, and his rival, Sylvester Kee, Frere speaks in the voice of his dummy Hugo, ‘Why, hello, Sylvester, I’ve been waiting for you.’ The personalities of the ventriloquist and his dummy are inverted. The voice and the movement of Frere’s lips do not match and we experience an intense moment of the ‘vocalic uncanny’ (Connor, 2000: 412). Derren Brown and co-writer Andy Nyman created Ventriloquist Doll in homage to this scene from Dead of Night. A moment of the vocalic uncanny is created when the psyche of Mr Miggs, a ventriloquist’s dummy, seems to inhabit Andy, an audience volunteer. Mr Miggs is a mind-reading dummy and Andy is asked to think of something bad he has done in the past. Andy stares into the eyes of Mr Miggs and they both start moving their lips. The voice of Mr Miggs describes the bad thing that Andy is thinking of but it is Andy who is doing the talking. This is an original twist on the concept of mind-reading. If Andy is simply answering his own question then why is this mind-reading? If Mr Miggs is speaking through Andy’s mouth then is he inside Andy’s

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head? Mr Miggs is placed inside the suitcase from which he was originally taken but he continues to speak through Andy, ‘No! Lemme out. Can’t see anything.’ The routine ends and the credits roll with Andy still speaking, disoriented, sightless and alone on the stage. Conclusion As contemporary performance magic has been largely untouched by academic theory, we may ask: what kinds of theory can help us to understand such an art? This question is a large one and it is not within the scope of this chapter to suggest an answer. However, we will make some observations about the use of the gothic in bizarre magic as a small step to beginning the debate. There is a tension between narratology and ludology in any attempt to theorise performance magic. A magic performance, especially one of bizarre magick, is clearly a text and can be considered as such, but it is also a performance in which a game is played between the performer and the audience. As a form of play, performance magic may be analysed in terms of physical stimulus and social interaction. Indeed in many magic performances the notion of an audience, with its connotation of passive spectation, is called into question. Audience members can become helper, volunteer, guest, performer, querant, stooge or sucker – all active roles for players in the game of magic. If magic can be seen as a kind of game then the bizarre magician takes the role of the dungeon master, guiding both the play and the narrative. The narratology/ludology tension is particularly evident in the writings of Robert Neale, a retired professor of the psychology of religion and philosophy who has created many examples of story-telling magic and written extensively on the meaning of magic and the role of story: Story magic usually consists of tricks accompanied by story. More rarely, it is story accompanied by tricks. In either case it tends to be limited to children’s magic, gospel magic, and bizarre magick. Ideally, story magic is unaccompanied story. Just as mental magic is simply talk at its best, so general magic is simply story at its best. (Neale, 1991: xv)

Here, Neale seems to take the side of narratology but his real intention may be to collapse the distinction between the magic effect and story. For Neale, all magic is about story but he suggests that in the best performances the story and the tricks appear as one. There are two strong and seemingly opposing approaches that are taken by the bizarre magician to the gothic. The first is an arch, camp,

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affectionate but essentially light-hearted approach to performing spooky stories with magic. The second takes the performance of magic very seriously and believes that there is an important tradition of performance magic that is inherently philosophical and which naturally deals with the dark side of human nature. These two approaches may seem antagonistic and many bizarrists have an uneasy relationship with comedy; however, some of the most powerful moments in bizarre magick performance occur when the performer takes the serious nature of the performance lightly. Schiller has defined play as ‘taking reality lightly’ (Schiller, 2007), and we suggest that magicians, who perform the impossible, often benefit when they express this notion theatrically. When a theatrical ‘reality’ is taken lightly by considering it as a site for the magical to occur then sometimes the monstrous can be fabulous. References Andruzzi, T. and Raven, T. (2007), The Compleat Invocation, Washington, DC: Kaufman and Co. Andruzzi, T. (1977), The Negromicon of Masklyn ye Mage, hand-made limited edition. Burger, E. (1991), Strange Ceremonies, Washington, DC: Kaufman and Co. Burger, E. (2007), ‘Ask Eugene Burger’, The Magic Woods. Available at: www.themag​ icwoods.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=2861&start=45&st=0&sk=t&sd=a (accessed 11 July 2009). Burger, E. and McBride, J (2003), Mystery School. Seattle: The Miracle Factory. Burger, E. and Neale, R. (1995), Magic and Meaning. Seattle: Hermetic Press. Burger, E. and Parr, D. (2000), ‘Speak of the Devil: A Conversation about Tony Andruzzi’. Available at: www.magicbeard.com/view.php?id=2 (accessed 12 July 2009). Butler, E. M. (1948), The Myth of the Magus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, C. (1997), Castle Dracula Mentalism, London: Breese Books. Caplan, M. (1988), Eugene Goes Bizarre, Chicago. Cherniak, D. (1994), The Magic Mystery School. Transcripts available at http:// ca.geocities.com/[email protected]/filmog.htm#The%20Magic%20 Mystery%20School (accessed 18 July 2009). Connor, S. (2000), Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cushman, W. (2008), Suggestabilities, Los Angeles: Outlaw Effects. During, S. (2004), Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. James, M. R. (1987), The Complete Ghost Stories, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Lieber, F. (1942), Power of the Puppets, Thrilling Mystery, January 1942. Magus, J. (2009), Arcana of Bizarre Magick. Magus Enterprises. Marx, H. with Barber, R. (1985), Harpo Speaks, New York: Limelight Editions.

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Max Maven – A Fabulous Monster (2006). [Film] Directed by Donna Zuckerbrot. USA: Reel Time Images. Minch, S. (1979), Lovecraftian Ceremonies: Seven Occult Dramas for the Magickal Performer, Bob Lynn. Neale, R. E. (1991), Tricks of the Imagination, Seattle: Hermetic Press. Neale, R. E. (2000), Life, Death & Other Card Tricks, Seattle: Hermetic Press. Parr, D. (2002), Hallowzine, Issue 2 (Winter). Available at: www.davidparr.com/inter​ views (accessed 17 July 2009). Robert-Houdin, J. and Hoffmann (Professor) (1878), The Secrets of Conjuring and Magic, or, How to Become a Wizard, London and New York: G. Routledge and Sons. Saville, I. (2004), ‘Brecht On Magic’. Available at: www.redmagic.co.uk/sites/default/ files/documents/bom.pdf von Schiller, F. (2007), Aesthetical and Philosophical Essays, Gloucester: Dodo Press. Shiels, T. (1981), Daemons, Darklings and Doppelgangers. Exeter: Supreme Magic. Shiels, T. (1988a), Bizarre, London: Breese Books. Shiels, T. (1988b), The Cantrip Codex, London: Tony Andruzzi. Shiels, T., Fromer, R. and Andruzzi, T. (1974), And Then There Were Three. Waldwick, NJ: Bob Lynn. Steinmeyer, J. (2003), Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible. London: Arrow. Steinmeyer, J. (2007), ‘Max Maven and the Evolution of a Mind Reader’, Genii 70.10: 50–64. Swiss, J. I., Jillette, P., Hyman, R., Randi, J., Grothe, D. J. and Teller (2009), Skepticism and Magic Panel, Las Vegas. Available at: http://lanyrd.com/2009/tam7/scbtmg/ Waters, T. (1993), Mind, Myth & Magick, Seattle, WA: Hermetic Press.

11 Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

Body genres, night vision and the female monster: REC and the contemporary horror film

Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, horror films have continued to proliferate, evolve and diversify in so many ways that it is nearly impossible to speak about ‘the contemporary horror film’ as such. The current range of products released as ‘horror’ includes everything from the sadistic gore of the SAW series to the sentimentalism of Guillermo Del Toro’s El Orfanato (2007) and comedies such as Shaun of the Dead (2004), Fido (2006) and Zombies of Mass Destruction (2010). Accordingly, many film scholars have all but given up attempts to define the horror film by common plots, conventions, character types or styles. Not only do horror films change significantly from decade to decade; they seem to thrive on systematically re-inventing themselves wholesale, overturning familiar conventions, and exploring a wide range of generic hybrid forms (e.g. combining with comedy, computer game platforms and teen romance narratives). Nevertheless, as Brigid Cherry argues in Horror, there is one factor that ‘remains constant’ in the genre (with the exception of parody): the intention to arouse some sort of fear-related emotional response (2009: 65). This response may range from dread and unease to ‘hair-raising’ and ‘heart-stopping’ terror, but all are linked phenomenologically to fear. The very words ‘heart-stopping’ and ‘hair-raising’, rhetorical flourishes that invariably punctuate horror film reviews and jacket covers, point to two important facts about the horror film genre: one is that that these effects are as much physical as emotional, the other, ironically, is that there is an element of performance in audiences’ acting out of these effects. The rhetoric of horror film pleasure tends to an

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intensely somatic register, invoking shivers, goose bumps, squirms, gasps, screams and the chilling or curdling of blood. Nevertheless, the rhetoric inflates the actual degree of physical response. As in melodrama, there is a certain amount of choice in the degree to which a viewer will allow him or herself to be affected by a film (Hanich, 2008: 36–7). Moreover, horror film fans tend to go further than just allowing themselves to enter into the play proposed by the film; they may also exaggerate and enthusiastically perform their fearfulness, meeting the film more than half-way in its production of generic effects. The idea that genres can be identified by their emotional effects, suggested by Stephen Neale in Genre (1980), has been developed by Linda Williams into the influential notion of ‘body genres’ (Williams, 1991: 4). The three that she identifies, horror, pornography, and melodrama, are all linked by their commitment to provoking a strong bodily reaction (fear, sexual arousal, weeping, respectively). These genres seek to break down the barriers between character and viewer and to produce a strong identification between the out-of-control bodies on screen and those of the audience. Accordingly, when the films ‘work’ as they are supposed to, viewers of pornography are aroused by the sight of bodies in the grip of arousal, and viewers of melodrama are moved to tears by the sight of people weeping or visibly distressed. In horror, this mimetic dimension accounts for the great attention paid to physical symptoms of fear in film characters: the eyes and mouths opened wide with fear, the trembling and sweating, the gasps and screams of terror. Thinking about films in terms of their desired intention to create physical reactions helps to focus our attention on the way in which they choreograph these effects. For example, all three body genres are structured according to the logic of repetition within a crescendo. A series of genre-specific scenes (like the song and dance numbers in musicals) will occur, each one designed to be slightly more effective than the last, until the final number brings the emotional effects to a climax. This dramaturgical model of increasing effectiveness is based on the fact that all three genres are organised around the intent to produce a physical response, which can be considered as structurally hard-wired into the form. Another feature that may be considered universal to the three body genres is the requirement to show a spectacle relevant to the desired reaction, that is, an aroused or at least naked body in the porn film, a victim’s visible or audible suffering in a melodrama, and a terrified face and/or body or a frightening scene in the horror film. Since a maxi-

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mum display of horror from the beginning would be counter-effective, this is where the crescendo effect of the increasingly scary ‘numbers’ comes into play. The horror film needs to construct a carefully choreographed and evolving play between concealment, suggestion and display. Although the final effectiveness of a monster or scary scene may be created in any number of ways, the two most important elements in the way that scariness is dosed in the horror film are: one, according to how much exposure a monster gets (the less the better), and two, how unexpected and realistic it is. If the first issue is linked to the traditional chiaroscuro aesthetics of horror films (especially their attraction to shadow effects), the second is related to the importance accorded to special effects and make-up art in horror cinema. What I propose to do in this chapter is to examine a recent horror film, Jaume Balagueró’s and Paco Plaza’s REC (2007), in order to see how these core genre features mentioned above work in tandem with other more recent developments, including the hand-held camera or found-footage device, the night vision function, a zombie-like contagion, and a female monster. The film has been extremely successful, spawning an American remake (Quarantine [2008]) and three sequels (REC 2 [2009], REC 3: Génesis [2012], and REC 4: Apocalypse [2014]). The premise on which REC is based is simple: a female reporter, Ángela Vidal, and her cameraman plan to spend the night in a fire station for a local news station. The film begins in TV-journalism style as Ángela interviews the firemen, visits their mess hall and tries on a firefighter’s outfit. What we see is the unedited footage, the out-takes, practice shots and everything else that would, in principle, be removed from a television report. Much of the rough realism and authenticity of hand-held camera cinema comes from this seemingly unedited handling of footage. A call comes during the night and they rush in a fire engine to an apartment building where an old woman has been heard screaming. When they enter her apartment, she bites one of the men on the face. The remaining firemen now discover that police have sealed the building, and the other residents, gathered in the lobby, are growing angry. The film assumes a Romero-esque quality as it turns out that the old woman had a mysterious contagion that transforms victims into violent cannibals when they are bitten. Eventually, only Ángela and her cameraman are left uninfected. Hiding in what they believe is an abandoned apartment, they discover a monstrous female creature that attacks them. The final fifteen minutes of the film take place in the

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pitch-black apartment and are filmed first with the camera’s spotlight and then entirely in the night vision mode. The most striking visual feature of REC is, as its title suggests, its use of the hand-held camera narrative device, a trend popularised by the very influential The Blair Witch Project in 1999. This strategy (also known as subjective camera, amateur camera, found footage, POV and mock documentary) has come to be widely used, including in Death of a Ghost Hunter (2001), The Descent (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007), the Paranormal Activity series (2007–12), Cloverfield (2008), The Zombie Diaries (2008), The Last Exorcism (2010), Troll Hunter (2010), Apollo 18 (2011) and The Bay (2012), among many others. Two things have contributed to the current success of this device: one is its innovation on the play between visibility and invisibility, and the second is its use of realistic sound (often from an unseen source, which heightens the first effect). Even films that rely mainly on suggestion will try to show something scary at some point, usually near the end. Films that play peek-a-boo with the viewer for the entire length of the film and never deliver on the promise to show a disturbing sight tend to be a let-down.1 What the hand-held camera contributes to the horror film aesthetic is actually to reduce visibility, thus heightening the tension in the play between concealment and revelation.2 For example, in REC, the camera is often blocked by other bodies or even threatened with being turned off by characters that do not wish to be filmed. The cameraman then invents ways to keep filming and overcome obstacles to visibility, either by filming in secret or by thrusting the camera into angles and positions where he himself physically cannot go (near the ground, between people’s legs, over people’s heads, through windows, and finally, in the attic like a periscope). These obstructions make it both harder to see clearly and more satisfying when they are circumvented. The narrowed field of lighted vision was used to great effect in Blair Witch, when Heather trains her flashlight or the camera spotlight on the woods in order to try to see what is making the strange sounds. The light makes a circle that reveals nothing while being surrounded by terrifying darkness that might hold anything. The same strategy is used in the last scene of REC, where the cameraman uses his spotlight to discover the creepy apartment, bit by terrifying bit. In a sense, this scene in REC is typical of the horror genre. The characters discover a disordered penthouse full of strange scientific and religious objects. This is the ‘bad place’ that has been the staple of the gothic since the eighteenth-century obsession

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with dungeons and haunted graveyards and other places one does not want to be in the dark. Yet in the dark is precisely where REC places its two protagonists, first with the small comfort of the camera spotlight, and finally, with only the night vision function allowing the cameraman (and spectators) to see while Ángela gropes blindly in the darkness. Although the soundtrack is an essential feature of any film, nowhere is it more important and more vitally a part of genre function than in the body genres. Melodrama, of course, depends so much on music that its very name derives from the combination of ‘melos’ (music) and ‘drama’ (action). Just as in melodrama the music cues the viewer to the emotions they should be experiencing, so the soundscape in horror is essential to creating suspense and unease, and accentuating the shock cuts that accompany the revelation of the monster, his mutilated victim, or some other scary sight. For example, the screeching violins in Psycho are as integral to the shower scene as the many cuts that reflect the violence of the stabbing. Part of the challenge, as well as the appeal, of the hand-held camera is that the soundscape of the film will be far more naturalistic than in a traditional film. Although Romero’s Diary of the Dead unwisely adds an orchestra score to its images, most of the recent films explore the full range of heavy breathing, footsteps, thumps and other ambient sounds offered by the amateur camera premise. Again, it was Blair Witch that revealed the potential of hand-held camera sound, especially in the scenes where the characters can hear yells and footsteps (or the crackling of leaves) but never see where they are coming from. REC employs the full range of naturalistic sounds that may be recorded by a hand-held camera, including breathing, whispering, footsteps, on- and off-camera speech as well as the ominous sounds of the helicopters and megaphones from outside. Most effective, however, is the recurrent use of off-camera screams, shrieks and grunts emanating from other parts of the building, most of which are never explained or connected to a source, and so function as a unnerving soundtrack of invisible threat. In a self-reflexive moment typical of horror films, the film-makers call attention to the issue of off-camera sound during an interview with the little girl Jennifer conducted by Ángela during the first part of the film. While she is interviewing the child, Jennifer’s mother breaks in several times to answer in her place, which leads Ángela to lecture her on the problems created by off-camera voices, which ‘parasitise’ the filmed scene. In light of this information, it is striking (and no doubt deliberate) how often there are sounds from outside the camera frame throughout the film.

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In fact, sounds without clear visual correlatives take central stage in the climactic final scene because visibility has been reduced to nothing or next to nothing. For example, Ángela and her cameraman are first alerted to the presence of another being in the room by the sounds it makes, and they are also constrained to try to remain silent in order to not betray their location. As a result, the viewers, like the characters, are transformed into listeners, anxiously pricking up their ears, dreading to hear the sound they are wholly focused on detecting. The intensity of this final scene owes much to the amplified sounds of the terror-crazed Ángela and her cameraman: their frantic whispers, rapid breathing and hysterically high-pitched voices. The inhuman shrieks of the creature are also very important to this scene, as they completely denaturalise and dehumanise her as well as contributing to the general sense of frenzy. Significantly, the film ends with Ángela’s own shriek as she is dragged off into the darkness, and the sound lingers for a moment after the scene has gone black. The film suspends naturalism at this point and keeps the screen completely dark while we hear Ángela whisper: ‘Whatever happens, don’t stop filming’, a phrase she used earlier in the film and which appears on the film’s publicity poster. The film now delivers its last jolt with loud hard-rock music suddenly blaring as the credits start to roll. The film ends with a particularly strong emphasis on its aural dimension, reminding the viewer by means of the soundtrack accompanying the credits that there has in fact been no music or nondiegetic sound up to now. The third issue that emerges with particular force in found-footage films is the use of the night vision function. REC gives its night vision scene the place of honour, in terms of film structure (i.e., at the very end), but it is far from being the only recent film to deploy this device. Other films that have used it extensively include Death of a Ghost Hunter, The Descent, Troll Hunter and The Tunnel (2011). One of the most immediately fascinating things about night vision is the spectral green aesthetics that bathe everything in a greenish glow and turn people into ghostly figures with uncannily opaque and shiny eyes. In a genre where the gaze is often active and foregrounded, the transformation of characters’ eyes into uncanny reflective surfaces operates a powerfully dehumanising effect. In fact, in Death of a Ghost Hunter, the character whom we see most often with night vision becomes a ghost herself at the end of the film, and we realise that the earlier scenes served to visually foreshadow her death. In a related strategy, the 2004 South Korean horror film R-Point uses a green night-vision-inspired

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lens whenever the camera adopts the perspective of a ghost watching the main characters. It is as if the dead see the world with built-in night vision, in a specifically cinematic coding of difference, not unlike the way memories are often rendered in home-video sequences. Similarly, the werewolf predators of the military gothic film Dog Soldiers (2002) are able to see in the dark, and their point of view is always rendered in grey-scale night vision cam shots. Although Blair Witch may be said to have initiated the hand-held camera trend in horror film, the first effective cinematic use of night vision goes back further, to Silence of the Lambs (1991). The scene where it is used is also near the end and occurs when the killer turns off the lights in his basement and watches Clarice Starling fumble around terrified in the pitch-blackness. This fact that it is the killer and not the victim that is able to see in the dark with the night goggles situates this film in an earlier epoch of the horror genre, that of the 1970s and 1980s. This period is characterised by the identification of the camera with the point of view of the monster/killer as he stalks his victims. This identification is further reinforced in the film by the way in which Buffalo Bill reaches out his hand to almost touch Clarice and his arm enters the screen the way our own body enters our field of vision. What the night goggles reveal in this scene then is not the monster but the terrified woman so important to the genre. Audience identification is potentially very complex at this moment since we are visually obliged to identify with the killer even though we continue to empathise with the female protagonist we have followed sympathetically throughout  the movie. As Carol Clover has argued in Men, Women and Chainsaws, the horror film activates identification with both killer and victim at the same time, and here we may add the detective/rescuer to the list (Clover, 1992: 45–64). Nevertheless, the fact remains that we identify visually with the point of view of the killer/monster in this scene. The recent use of the night vision function is very different. Instead of the killer, it is the victims who hold the camera and offer the audience a subjective and intradiegetic point of view. The ostensible motive for this strategy is to insert the viewer into the world of the film as realistically as possible, to break down the distance between viewer and character, and to make the audience identify seamlessly with those characters. In short, the goal is to make the film scarier by chipping away at the buffer created by the fact that it is ‘only a film’. Yet there often comes a moment in the film where we realise that we are not identifying with the camera-holder so much as with the

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camera itself. In REC, this illusion of identification with the cameraman is brutally ruptured when the creature attacks him and the camera falls to the ground, and we ‘fall’ with it. Our point of view now is with the camera on the floor, and we realise that we ‘are’ this camera. It is a comforting realisation that we are a machine or perhaps simply vision itself because not having a body in this film-world means not being vulnerable to attack. The sense of power and mastery that is created by the night vision function is therefore reinforced by the narrative at this point, when all the characters are gone and yet we continue seeing and hearing. This privileged position recalls the argument made by JeanLouis Baudry in the 1970s in what came to be called ‘apparatus theory’. Baudry compared classical realist cinema to the workings of ideology, in so far as both naturalised the constructedness of reality, erasing traces of their own artifice, and creating the illusion of a transcendent subject (Baudry 1974–75: 39–43). Like many theorists of the period, influenced by the notion that engaged art must be non-realistic and foreground its artificialness, Baudry saw the tendency of realist cinema to create an objectivist illusion as politically retrograde. If the camera’s point of view is an empowered one, being in front of the camera is to be relatively disempowered and vulnerable. The last scene of REC makes this very clear, where Ángela is completely in the dark while the camera is still able to see. This scene also reminds us that these positions are frequently (although I would be unwilling to take the psychoanalytic position that they are inherently) gendered. The final scene presents us with the sight of two women who may be regarded as polar opposites in most respects: the heroine and the monster. One is a professional public woman, young, beautiful, poised and ambitious. Her fit and attractive body has been on display since the first fireman was bitten and she took off her jacket to bandage his wound. The other is a totally private and disempowered woman, an emaciated monster who has been tortured and confined for years. Her body is deformed and grotesque. Yet the final scene presents these two women as made strangely equal before the camera by the eerie effects of the green night vision glow. Both are in the dark and unable to see, yet both are visible to the audience and on display. One could even say that both are equally exposed: one is virtually naked in her loose underwear and the other wears a tight tank top which allows us a good look down her shirt before she is dragged off-screen. I have mentioned that the horror film, like the two other body genres, needs to display the body in the grips of fear. This body is nearly always

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female (though naturally there are exceptions). The course of the narrative generally involves this body becoming increasingly frightened, disordered and unselfconscious. Even the paradigm-changing Blair Witch Project was unable to circumvent the convention of placing a fearful female body in front of the camera. Thus, even though Heather is the principal film-maker and often uses one of the cameras, she nevertheless spends increasing amounts of time filming herself in the last section of the film. In fact, the iconic image from the film, used on the poster and reproduced whenever the film is discussed, is of Heather’s terrified and tear-stained face. This image contrasts ironically with the first frames of the film, which show Heather posing confidently in her room. Her other early appearances include the documentary narration she records for the official project, again emphasising her ease before the camera and her poised, professional demeanour, which will gradually fall away as the film progresses. REC ensures that a female body is constantly before our eyes by using the premise that the camera is following around a female television reporter. This way it is possible to have a subjective camera and a female body on display at all times. Ángela Vidal is not only the narrator and protagonist of this story, her bodily transformation from cool, collected professional woman to hysterical victim so scared that she cannot control herself even to save her life is the visual gauge by which the film attempts to measure and display its own effectiveness. The film begins with a strong focus on Ángela’s body, emphasised for example when she is shown dressing up in a firefighter’s protective suit and then taking it off. The basic situation established by the film itself, a woman alone at night in a fire station full of men (vaguely recalling the contrived situations of pornography) also emphasises Ángela’s sexual difference. The first attack in the film results in Ángela removing her jacket, as I mentioned earlier, and being shown visibly disturbed, indicated by her swearing at the cameraman, insisting on rewinding the camera to watch the attack again, and looking away from the camera for the first time while being filmed. It is as if a layer of emotional buffering were stripped away along with the outer layer of clothing. After a momentary lull in the action following the first attack and its immediate reaction upon the characters, the film quickly progresses into a series of attacks and shocks which are reflected in Ángela’s increasingly agitated, sweaty, and finally, blood-stained and hysterical body. Another way that female characters have taken centre stage in recent horror films is as monsters. This recent trend does not emerge from the

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much older and more familiar tradition of sexualised female monsters, whose danger and evil is directly rooted in their predatory sexuality, as with vampires and in films like Fatal Attraction (1987), Basic Instinct (1992) and Species (1995). Much feminist film criticism, influenced by psychoanalytic paradigms, focuses on the sexualised female monster. For example, Barbara Creed’s well-known essay on the ‘monstrousfeminine’ links it to the mother and to the abject, both of which are linked to female sexuality and reproduction (Creed, 1986: 44–70). The new female monsters are not overtly sexual, at least not initially, because they are too old, or more often, too young. If the power of the traditional sexualised female monster lies in her deadly beauty, the power of the recent female monster lies in the way we expect her to be helpless and vulnerable. When she turns out to be violent and dangerous, much of her dramatic effectiveness comes from the surprise and uncanniness created by this reversal. REC offers up at least three of these figures, each one more uncanny and terrifying than the one before. The first is the old woman who lives alone with her cats. When the firemen enter her apartment, their principal concern is to reassure and help her. The fact that she is bloodied, incoherent and violently growling at them does not serve to over-ride their culturally ingrained assumption that she must be a victim rather than a potential source of danger. This is why the moment when she lunges at the policeman and bites off a chunk of his face is both totally unexpected and intensely pleasurable for an expert audience, who, as Matt Hills explains in The Pleasures of Horror, particularly enjoy reversals of film conventions (Hills, 2005: 5–9). This figure is conceivably a variation on the witch, but departs from that trope by her direct physical violence. She may be understood as what Vivian Sobchack calls an ‘excessive woman’, a woman defined by physical as well as social excess (Sobchak, 2000: 338). Over-weight and well past middle age, she is not desirable in spite of her scanty and revealing nightgown. As a woman living alone with her cats, she is also excessive to the social order defined by the family unit. The cinematic power of her attack relies heavily on the taboo effect of seeing an older woman exposed and physically out of control. The next surprise in the film is even more unexpected and comes from a little girl about seven years old. Most often appearing in her mother’s arms, Jennifer is feverish and awaiting medicine from her father who was outside when the building was sealed off. Her young age and especially her illness allow the film-makers to emphasise her

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vulnerability and play up her status as object of pity and compassion. Even at critical moments in the early part of the film, the characters take the time to caress and comfort the sick little girl. When she bites her mother on the face and screams threateningly at the neighbours, the transformation from object of pity to violent monster is extremely rapid and intensely uncanny. The device of the little-girl monster has been around since The Bad Seed (1954) and The Village of the Damned (1960), achieving a memorable success with The Exorcist (1973), but has been especially important in the more recent years in films such as The Ring (2002) and Silent Hill (2006). Homage is also paid to George Romero, who used a similar scene as a sort of climax in The Night of the Living Dead in 1968. In that film, the little girl, who has been the centre of a nuclear family insisting on its right to protect her and itself at any cost, kills her mother with a trowel and eats her. Although the little girl eating her mother was used near the end of Romero’s film, indicating its status as ultimate taboo, the little girl in REC appears mid-way through. The final taboo, the most monstrous female body, and the most terrifying sight in REC is the possessed girl in the attic. She is known in the film, and in the credits, as the ‘Niña Madeiros’, emphasising her identity (now somewhat anachronistic, as she must be near or past twenty) as a ‘niña’ or ‘little girl’. This character fits even more closely the recent pattern of girl monsters, whose violence and rage come from the fact that they have first been victims of terrible abuse. Much of the haunting power of The Ring derives from this device, since the ghostly girl in the video had been murdered by being sealed inside a well and left to drown. Similarly, we learn from evidence around the penthouse that the Niña Madeiros was kidnapped by agents of the Vatican when she was a child, and has been the subject of confinement and unorthodox medical experimentation for years. Her violent body is all the more terrifying because it bears the visible signs of torture and neglect: emaciation, deformity and grotesque scars. She is clearly both a victim and now a killer, hammer in hand, as she attacks the cameraman, and so defies our desire to characterise her as either one or the either. REC 2 evolves from a zombie-contagion film into a possession film, resonating intertextually with the other hand-held camera success story of 2007, Paranormal Activity. It also carries the gambit of the subjective camera a step further, by multiplying the number of cameras. Each of the special operations agents entering the building has a camera built into his helmet, and yet another camera is involved

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when curious teenagers sneak in through the sewer. The spectator’s identification with any one cameraman is thereby reduced and the effect of identifying with the optical technology of the camera itself reinforced. The night vision device returns and is again given a crucial and climactic role when it turns out that there are doors and openings in the penthouse that are visible only with the night vision mode. If the hand-held camera device serves to break the illusion of transparency created by conventional Hollywood narration and to foreground its recording technology, REC 2 brings the camera even more explicitly and thematically into the narrative frame. Dramaturgically, however, the crescendo effect is not as effective in REC 2 as in REC. The little girl is reprieved but her attack no longer commands the surprise factor of the first film. In general, the attacks seem repetitive rather than escalating. What is reserved for the climax, however, is Ángela’s unexpected return (doubly surprising because it comes so late in the second film) and dramatic reversal from victim/ survivor to monster. Just as the Niña Madeiros’ status as victim/killer created the ethically complex shock in the first film, in REC 2 it is Ángela who creates this uncanny ambivalence. In the very last moments, when only the cameraman, the priest (who has served as protagonist) and Ángela are left alive, Ángela expectedly assaults the priest and shoots the cameraman. Then she speaks to the priest in his own voice in order to show him (and the spectator) that she has become (possessed by) the demon he is looking for. As I have argued earlier, sound is especially important in hand-held camera narration, and here Ángela’s voice, now uncannily male, is offered to the audience as the last surprise. Ángela’s transformation deliberately plays on the ‘final girl’ device since she is the only character to leave the scene of the slaughter, but she leaves as a monster rather than as a survivor, thereby giving the convention a twist. REC 3: Genesis continues to innovate horror film conventions while referencing well-known film scenes, becoming in the process a parody of horror films in general as well its two predecessors in particular. It begins with the hand-held footage device but drops it a quarter of the way through the film. Most subjective camera films feature a moment where the person making the film is asked to stop or is accused of voyeurism or using the camera as a social mask, but REC 3 is the only film where the camera is actually destroyed in a scuffle after such an accusation and traditional objective cinematography resumed. Surveillance videos are occasionally used, but on the whole the film abandons the digital horror premise and there is no night vision foot-

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age at all. Following the lead of parodies like Scream (1996) and Scary Movie (2000), REC 3: Genesis is more of an intertextual slasher movie than a horror film. Blending references to Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Saw (2004) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967), among many other films, REC 3 features a chainsaw-wielding bride who loses her arm and becomes infected anyway, killed with her husband in the last scene in a hail of bullets. Here too the final girl becomes a monster, biting off her husband’s tongue as he gives her a last kiss. Made only five years after the first REC, the third instalment illustrates how quickly new techniques emerge, peak and begin to wane in a genre like the horror film. However, there is a fourth instalment on its way, which promises to reactivate the original mood of the first and leave parody behind. To conclude, within the generic need to constantly innovate on certain structural parameters (such as the crescendo structure and the concealment/visibility dialectic), one thing that emerges with clarity is the complex interplay between genre and technological form. Not only does the film medium seem tuned to gothic possibilities, the camera itself enters the narrative frame to become a central motor in the gothic aesthetics of the contemporary horror film. Heightened realism is the driving feature of the hand-held camera device, but the night vision function, which has assumed unprecedented importance in the recent wave of films using this premise, pulls in another direction – that of spectral and uncanny effects. These innovations, along with the evolving uses of female monsters and final girls, reanimate the complex dialectic between the bodies on screen and the bodies reacting to the images and sounds, and keep the horror film (along with its spectators) on the edge. Notes 1 Even The Blair Witch Project, while wisely never trying to show a witch to the camera, leaves the viewer with a very disturbing scene in the last seconds of the movie: the sight of Mike facing the corner, as in the legend, and the dropping of the camera to suggest Heather has been struck down. In other words, although The Blair Witch Project is able to produce great effects very economically, it is not accurate to say that one ‘never sees anything’ in the film as the last scene visually confirms that key elements of the legend are being enacted. 2 Daniel North has argued that Cloverfield’s ‘aesthetic of opacity’ offered a critique of the film’s ‘apparent realism’ (2010: 76). This may be true for that one film, but in general the reduced visibility is meant to heighten the found-footage film’s seeming realism.

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References Baudry, J.-L. (1974–75), ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus’, Film Quarterly 28.2 (Winter): 39–47. Cherry, B. (2009), Horror, London and New York: Routledge. Clover, C. (1992), Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Creed, B. (1986), ‘Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection’, Screen 27: 44–70. Death of a Ghost Hunter (2007). [Film] Directed by Sean Tretta. USA: Ominous Productions. Diary of the Dead (2007). [Film] Directed by George A. Romero. USA: Artfire Films/ Romero-Grunwald Productions. Dog Soldiers (2002). [Film] Directed by Neil Marshall. UK/Luxembourg/USA: Kismet Entertainment Group/The Noel Gay Motion Picture Company/The Carousel Picture Company. Hanich, J. (2008), ‘A Weep in the Dark: Tears and the Cinematic Experience’, in R. J. Poole and I. Saal (eds), Passionate Politics: The Cultural Work of American Melodrama from the Early Republic to the Present, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Hills, M. (2005), The Pleasures of Horror, London: Continuum. Neale, S. (1980), Genre, London: British Film Institute. Night of the Living Dead (1968). [Film] Drected by George A. Romero. USA: Image Ten/Laurel Group/Market Square Productions/Off Color Films. North, D. (2010), ‘Evidence of Things Not Quite Seen: Cloverfield’s Obstructed Spectacle’, Film & History 40.1 (Spring): 75–92. [REC] (2007). [Film] Directed by Jaume Balaguaró and Paca Plaza. Spain: Castelao Producciones/Filmax. [REC] 2 (2009). [Film] Directed by Jaume Balaguaró and Paca Plaza. Spain: Castelao Producciones/Filmax. [REC] 3: Genesis (2012). [Film] Directed by Paco Plaza. Spain: Canal+ España/ Filmax. R-Point (2004). [Film] Directed by Su-chang Kong. South Korea: CN Film. Sobchack, S. (2002), ‘The Revenge of The Leech Woman: On the Dread of Aging in a Low-Budget Horror Film’, in K. Gelder (ed.), The Horror Reader, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 336–48. The Blair Witch Project (1999). [Film] Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. USA: Haxan Films. The Ring (2002). [Film] Directed by Gore Verbinski. USA/Japan: Dream Works SKG/MacDonald/Parkes Productions/Benderspink. The Silence of the Lambs (1991). [Film] Directed by Jonathan Demme. USA: Strong Heart/Demme Production/Orion Pictures Corporation. Williams, L. (1991), ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess’, Film Quarterly 44.4: 2–13.

12 Stephen Curtis

You have been saved: digital memory and salvation

What at first appears to be a nostalgic visit to the universe’s largest library, home of fifty-first-century versions of every book ever written, instead becomes a gothic nightmare for the Doctor and his companions in 2008’s two-part episode, scripted by Steven Moffat, of the British science fiction series Doctor Who, ‘Silence in the Library’ and ‘Forest of the Dead’. The horrors of the library reveal anxieties about the uncanny nature of digital memory and what it means to save and to be saved. These anxieties lead to the heart of a recurring concern with the impact of technology on our notions of individual subjectivity and consciousness. Most recently this has resurfaced, owing to debates around the prospect/fantasy of backing up or downloading human identities in a digital format. In this chapter, I trace the origins of such anxieties through the changing signification of ‘save’ before carrying out a close reading of the library episodes of Doctor Who in which I argue that their particular fusion of science fiction, cyberpunk and gothic reveals much about the impact of digital theory on contemporary gothic. For Martin Heidegger, saving is inextricably linked to a notion of the essential nature of an object: What does ‘to save’ mean? It means to loose, to emancipate, to free, to spare and husband, to harbour protectingly, to take under one’s care, to keep safe […] to put something back into what is proper and right, into the essential, and to keep it safe therein. That which genuinely saves is that which keeps safe, safekeeping. (1977: 42)

Such a taxonomy begins to unravel the complex meanings of ‘to save’ but also contains a telling contradiction through which its positive

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interpretation of the word can be deconstructed. How can something be ‘loosed’ and yet kept ‘safe therein’? The relocation implied by Heidegger’s discussion also uncovers spatial and temporal anxieties. As Fred Botting argues in relation to security and surveillance technology, ‘that which keeps us safe tells us how endangered we are’ (2008a: 57). To be saved, digitally or otherwise, for all time also ensures that we are kept endangered eternally as well. The conflicting meanings of ‘save’ are a result of a semantic shift from soteriological to technological discourses. Medieval notions of a release from Purgatory are inverted by the digital encoding and storage of files in which there is no prospect of heavenly release. Salvation has metamorphosed into stasis and the current cultural fantasy has moved from eternal life after death to eternal life without death. Such a shift cannot be pure, however, and uncanny traces of the previous signification remain. Friedrich Kittler reminds us that: ‘The bulk of written texts […] no longer exist in perceivable time and space, but in a computer memory’s transistor cells’ (1997: 147). Indeed, when we sit in front of an electronic document we are experiencing a cybernetic version of Hamlet’s wandering soul ‘from the undiscovered country’, as George Landow details: All texts the reader and writer encounter on a computer screen exist as a version created specifically for the user while an electronic primary version resides in the computer’s memory. One therefore works on an electronic copy until such time as both versions converge when the writer commands the computer to ‘save’ one’s version of the text by placing it in memory. At this point the text on screen and in the computer’s memory briefly coincide, but the reader always encounters a virtual image of the stored text and not the original version itself. (1997: 22)

Jean Baudrillard describes the process of saving as a ‘shift from tactile to digital’ (cit. Landow, 1997: 22), a spectralisation that defies physical ontologies. We must put faith in the computer, give up our work to the invisible, and be prepared to conjure forth a ghostly revenant to interrogate and save again. Each time we save, we renounce our claim to the file, and, as Derrida states, ‘A phantom’s return is, each time, another, different return, on a different stage, in new conditions’ (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 22). This description restates one of the most famous and oft-quoted passages from Derrida’s earlier Specters of Marx: ‘Repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, since the singularity of any first time, makes of it also a last time. Each time it is the event itself, a first time is a last time. Altogether other. Staging for the end of history. Let us call it a hauntology’ (2006: 10). Our relation-

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ship with the digital document is an uncanny one, since it is always a phantom. We must rely on the mediation of the machine to regain access, a situation parodically illustrated in 2001’s comedy film Zoolander (Ben Stiller, 2001). In an intertextual nod to 2001 A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), one of the seminal filmic expressions of technophobia, the two ‘really, really, ridiculously good-looking’ models attempt to extract files from a computer. Their frustration at being unable to locate a physical, tangible object sees them revert to primate-like behaviour. At the conclusion of the film, the computer reappears but is destroyed in an idiotic attempt to release the files trapped within, leaving a confused Handel to exclaim ‘where did all the files go?’ Here, the files are endangered, and ultimately lost, by the incompetence of human (meat or wetware in cyberpunk terminology) interference. Technophobia is not a new phenomenon. Plato’s report of Socrates’ mistrust of writing as an alien technique in the Phaedrus is invariably cited in discussions of the digital age whilst the earliest illustration of a printing works, in a woodcut from 1499, shows it being haunted by skeletal figures in a macabre dance of death. A process of cultural amnesia takes place, however, in which techniques become accepted and lose their unsettling affects, to be replaced in turn by new sources of technological concern: Technology, in the lexicon of many humanists, generally means ‘only that technology of which I am frightened.’ In fact, I have frequently heard humanists use the word technology to mean ‘some intrusive, alien force like computing,’ as if pencils, paper, typewriters, and printing presses were in some way natural. (Landow, 1997: 26)

The realisation that such normalised phenomena are still fundamentally unnatural leads us down an ontological rabbit hole in which human identity is brought into question. As John Johnston details, ‘According to Derrida’s “logic of supplementarity,” the invention of a new machine or technology added to what was already functionally complete only reveals that the latter was already a machine’ (1997: 23). Writing was already a machine, and so the anxieties surrounding word processing can be read as an attack of the uncanny, revealing the repressed artificiality of the technique of writing itself, an artificiality that has been internalised to the point of becoming part of our identity. This logic of supplementarity can help to explain the extreme nervousness with which predictions of backing up our consciousness are often met. To digitise subjectivity will reveal ­conclusively

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that subjectivity is mechanical, reliant on the technology of language. The construction of subjectivity through the technology of language has undergone three crucial shifts – oral, print and electronic, Mark Poster argues in The Information Subject: In the first, oral stage the self is constituted as a position of enunciation through its embeddedness in a totality of face-to-face relations. In the second, print stage the self is constructed as an agent centred in rational/imaginary autonomy. In the third, electronic stage the self is decentred, dispersed, and multiplied in continuous instability. (2001: 7)

Whilst these developments have brought unquestioned benefits in terms of the democratisation of knowledge, the decentred self that forms the basis of postmodernism is a fragmented – and fragile – thing. If we see ourselves as constructed by and through language, the ramifications of this language being digitised are clear. Notions of essential individuality are exposed as remnants of a liberal humanist worldview in which the self was fixed and immutable. To return to Heidegger’s definition of ‘save’ in this context requires a different conception of the essential, as Michael Heim proposes: As we now live and work with computers in our writing, building, banking, drawing, and so forth, how does our reality change? As Heidegger might put it: What is the meaning of this intimate connection of Being with computers? (2003: 541–2)

The ability of programming such as UNICODE to convert alphabetic languages to their purest forms of presence and absence through binary code make the familiar unfamiliar; the heimlich unheimlich. Our inevitable value judgements about language are not shared by computers, which make no distinction between shopping lists and Shakespeare. As Kittler puts it, ‘inside the computers themselves everything becomes a number: quantity without image, sound, or voice’ (1999: 1). The physical act of writing changes too, as we are further removed from the formation of the letters and words themselves. N. Katherine Hayles provides a taxonomy of the stages inserted between the user and the text: Intervening between what I see and what the computer reads are the machine code that correlates alphanumeric symbols with binary digits, the compiler language that correlates these symbols with higher-level instructions determining how these symbols are to be manipulated, the processing program that mediates between these instructions and the commands I give the computer, and so forth. (1999: 31)

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Derrida describes the experience of such a distancing from the text thus: Having written something or other on the screen, the letters remaining as if suspended and floating yet at the surface of a liquid element, I pushed a certain key to ‘save’ a text undamaged, in a hard and lasting way, to protect marks from being erased, so as to ensure in this way salvation and indemnity, to stock, to accumulate, and, in what is at once the same thing and something else, to make the sentence available in this way for printing and for reprinting, for reproduction. (1996: 26)

This alienation from the mark of writing is fundamental to the technology of digitisation and brings with it a further disintegration of individuality and a concomitant conflation of the processes of production and reproduction. In the digital age, the previous distinction between original and reproduction is no longer relevant. When Walter Benjamin valorised the erosion of the aura of art and celebrated the increased access that mechanical reproduction can create, digital advances were far in the future, meaning that the essence of the original was still present: Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is missing in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownerships. (2004: 1235)

The uncanny nature of digital encryption is exacerbated by its ability to produce identical copies. Judith Roof highlights the effect of this, asking: ‘if a copy is identical to or better than the original, is it a copy any longer? Can we retain that sense of an original, an originator, or, for that matter, an author or a procreator? Is there any longer such a thing as reproduction?’ (1996: 25). Digital copies may be perfect, and, having no material essence, cannot deteriorate, but they are always at risk of corruption, error or deletion. Moreover, the availability of any potential identity digitisation will inevitably be restricted by the socioeconomic and financial considerations that prevent universal access to current technology. Pace Donna Haraway, for whom ‘exchange in the [cyborg] world transcends the universal translation effected by capitalist markets that Marx analysed so well’, the reality of technological production means that such markets will control the digital world much as they do now (2000: 79). In short, the servers will always require servants. As Sconce puts it:

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Given the current trajectory of late capitalism, it is more than likely that only 10 percent or so of the future first world will be able to escape into VR programs while the other 90 percent flip hamburgers, take nightshifts, and work other service jobs to maintain the infrastructure that supports the electronic bliss of the ruling class. (2000: 208)

Furthermore, even supposing that digitisation becomes so established as to be available to the majority, the ramifications of handing over control of our memories and identities to such a process have long been the subject of speculative fiction dystopias such as Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999). For Viktor Mayer-Sch­önberger, the seeds of this posthuman nightmare are being sown through our age’s increasing reliance on external supplements to human memory. In Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, he argues that what begins as an aid to memory can easily become a sinister way of reshaping history: But trusting digital memory more than our own human recollection exposes us to yet another challenge: what if external memory itself (digital memory in particular) is not unalterable, but can be modified after the fact, and thus does not necessarily represent an accurate rendition of a past event? If we all trust the same source, we are all equally vulnerable to its alterability. (2009: 120)

Far from the paranoid technophobic response that this might be characterised as, such an awareness of the ‘alterability’ of digital memory is intrinsic to the digitisation process itself. Bernard Stiegler reminds us that: ‘Digitisation breaks the chain, it introduces manipulation, even into the spectrum, and by the same token, it makes phantoms and phantasms indistinct […] Essentially indubitable when it is analog … the this was has become essentially doubtful when it is digital’ (Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 153). The cultural impact of this intrusion of the ‘doubtful’ nature of digital images can be seen in the sceptical view that photographs have invariably been ‘shopped’, that is digitally altered in some more or less subtle way. If such practices are the accepted norm for images, it is no great stretch to consider that similar ‘enhancements’ might be made to the digitally encrypted identity. Such risks do not dampen the enthusiasm in some quarters for fantasies of a posthuman future in which the mortal flesh itself is transcended and consciousness is digitised in perpetuity, resulting in ‘a technological purification of bodies’ (Baudrillard, 2000: 34). These fantasies are clearly related to much older ideas of eternal life. ‘Imagined since the age of the telegraph,’ Sconce relates, ‘dreams of a complete absenting of the body and entrance into a more rarefied plane of existence have

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definitively shifted from the metaphysics of the church to those of the computer chip’ (2000: 19–20). It is not in the area of metaphysics, however, that the main stumbling blocks for the project of digitisation reside, but in the material differences between the brain and the computer. The metaphorical link between the two can only be taken so far before it breaks down: ‘In some sense brains and computers both “think,” certainly, and both are animated by electricity. But this does not mean that they are compatible hardware systems ready to share various forms of software’ (Sconce, 2000: 206). The technophile’s response is that just because something is not yet possible does not mean that it will never be so, a view that John Gray likens to superstition: ‘Science continues to be a channel for magic – the belief that for the human will, empowered by knowledge, nothing is impossible. This confusion of science with magic is not an ailment of a kind that has a remedy. It goes with modern life. Death is a provocation to this way of living, because it marks a boundary beyond which the will cannot go’ (Gray, 2001: 208). Despite – or perhaps, because of – this correlation between science and magic, the logical conclusion of a surrendering to the fantasy of digitisation is the deconstruction of the magical beliefs upon which it depends. ‘In the end we are always left with a material machine at the heart of such supernatural speculation, a device mechanically assembled, socially deployed, and culturally received within a specific historical moment’ (Sconce, 2000: 20). These discussions construct the context for my reading of Doctor Who. The rest of this chapter examines the gothic ramifications of such anxieties about what it means to save and to be saved. Although generally considered a family programme, the prime-time viewing slot for Doctor Who does not prevent it from utilising many of the tropes of cybergothic. Botting defines this relatively new phenomenon through its impact on traditional gothic notions of temporality, stating that ‘as gothic cedes to cybergothic, the genre’s cultural role in screening off an ultimate, formless horror with familiar figures of fear is turned on its head: gothic shapes occlude a darker and more destructive romantic flight, a return, not from the past, but from the future’ (2008b, 58). Posthuman in both his technological prowess (ably illustrated by the ubiquitous TARDIS and sonic screwdriver) and his physiological nature (he has two hearts), the time-travelling Doctor does not follow a linear path, and thus always represents a return from both past and future. The library, similarly, embodies both past and future, being, in effect, a bricolage of digital and physical media.

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The library is a highly gothic space, ripe for hauntings and uncanny encounters between traditional and technological media. It is also tellingly what ‘Marc Augé terms a “non-place” that functions as a public place “only during designated hours of operation.” Outside of these hours “such places then seem drained of meaning”’ (cit. Bolter and Grusin, 2002: 177). Such a lack of meaning leaves a space for the gothic to burst through in the literal form of the sentient shadows: the Vashta Nerada. The Doctor’s (David Tennant) first words upon landing on the library planet reveal a nostalgic desire for tangible media: ‘Fifty-first century. By now you’ve got holovids, direct-to-brain downloads, fiction mist, but you need the smell.’ However, the reliance on more advanced technology is soon revealed: ‘The whole core of the planet is the index computer, biggest hard drive ever. And up here, every book ever written … Brand new editions, specially printed.’ The idea of a library world reverses the teleology of digitisation, in which a continual process of miniaturisation enables thousands of books to be contained on a USB stick. In an echo of Heidegger, the physical object is ‘put … into the essential’, through a transference into digital form. The essential nature of binary encryption blurs the distinction between types of media, as each storage device contains an unimaginable amount of data of various types: ‘As long as information can be digitized, it can be stored on a digital storage device, irrespective of whether the information represents sound, video, text, or any other type. People can put Beethoven and their wedding movie, plus their latest business plan, on the same hard disk without running the risk of mixing things up or otherwise harming their information’ (Mayer-Schönberger, 2009: 58). Although safe from ‘harm’, the data requires the searching and archiving abilities of an external computer program; the individual’s digital identity is thus situated in the manner of the residents of Bentham’s panopticon: in stasis and under constant surveillance. In a neat inversion of the ‘print book’s fear that once it has been digitized, the computer will garble its body, breaking it apart and reassembling it into the nonstory of a data matrix rather than an entangled and entangling narrative’ (Hayles, 1999: 41), it is in fact the mass project of printing that garbles the body of the library, the huge physical resources required bringing the plague of the Vashta Nerada forth. ‘Swarms, emergent patterns, hive minds’, Botting reminds us, ‘are not guided by modern principles of rationality, morality, or even, utility’ (2008b: 200). In a nightmarish version of post-colonialism the vora-

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cious shadows swarm out of the paper made from the deforestation of their planet and colonise the library. In their uncanny sentiency the Vashta Nerada also display all the traits that Botting, following Kelly Hurley (1996), identifies in the ‘abhuman’, being ‘formless, vile, shapes of revulsion and recognition’. Botting goes on to explain how ‘abhumanity defines the outer limits of monstrosity’, with its ‘corporeal “Things” from supernatural and scientific dimensions’ (2008b: 144). As shadowy non-corporeal beings they literalise the metaphorical idea of monsters existing in the darkness but rather than the darkness outside of our understanding it is the darkness cast by our own bodily presence that enables their attack. The life-form readings hint at the connection between the books and the absence of humans, a connection rejected by Donna (Catherine Tate) who believes books to be inert, lifeless things: ‘But there’s no one here. There’s just books. I mean, it’s not the books, is it? I mean, it can’t be the books, can it? I mean, books can’t be alive?’ Once the threat has been revealed, gothic tropes multiply. The uncanny effect of technology is manifested through the ghosting described by the Doctor: ‘There’s a neural relay in the communicator, lets you send thought mails. That’s it there, those green lights. Sometimes it can hold an impression of a living consciousness for a short time after death. Like an after image.’ Although established as an auditory ghosting, the necessity of the ‘green lights’ accords with Derrida and Stiegler’s definition of a ghost as ‘first and foremost something visible. It is of the visible, but of the invisible visible, it is the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood. It resists the intuition to which it presents itself, it is not tangible’ (2002: 115). The first case of such ghosting is rendered even more sinister by the repetition of ‘ice cream, ice cream’, a comfortingly banal final thought haunted by the phonetic connotations of ‘I scream, I scream’, as the soul is trapped forever in digital encryption. Such spectral digital encryption is characteristic of the hybrid genre of cyberpunk, as Botting relates: ‘Though cyberpunk abounds with ghosts, demons and monsters, they all appear as technological effects: ghosts are virtual, haunting screens, neural circuits, the dead living on as data’ (2008b: 185). For such a relatively niche genre to find its way on to prime-time family viewing illustrates the unique position that Doctor Who occupies in the schedule but also uncannily mirrors the camouflaged infiltration carried out by the Vashta Nerada themselves. A comic doubling sees two characters named Proper Dave and

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Other Dave, a doubling that foreshadows events to come. The Vashta Nerada hunt by latching onto their prey before consuming them in an instant. Such an attack is prefigured by the addition of an extra shadow. ‘Shadows … were among the foremost characteristics of gothic works. They marked the limits necessary to the constitution of an enlightened world and delineated the limitations of neoclassical perceptions’ (Botting, 1996: 32). The darkness that contains the Vashta Nerada is contagious and ignores the protective space suits worn by the archaeologists. Once the extra shadow disappears, the individual is consumed and a faceless skull is all that remains of their former identity. Such a skull is an uncanny reminder of what lies beneath the flesh whilst the repetition of ‘Hey, who turned out the lights’ reminds us that ‘the death drive has no substance, no materiality other than the compulsion to repeat’ (Botting, 1996: 193). The haunting of the space suit also recalls Derrida’s ‘visor effect’: ‘This Thing meanwhile looks at us and sees us not see even when it is there, a spectral asymmetry interrupts here all specularity. It desynchronises, it recalls us to anachrony. We will call this the visor effect: we do not see who looks at us’ (2006: 6). A feminine version of this is presented through the subplot of Donna, who has been trapped inside the computer by a teleporter malfunction. Whilst a data ghost herself, she is haunted by an anachronistic vision of Victoriana, veiled and clad in black. This figure is revealed to be Miss Evangelista, the ‘ice cream’ ghost from earlier. Owing to ‘transcription errors’ Miss Evangelista is disfigured but these errors also move a decimal point in her IQ, giving her the intelligence to see the simulacrum of the computer generated world for what it is. She reveals the horror of having been saved to Donna, who has undergone a period of reprogramming in order to integrate. Her realisation is achieved through the absence of any ‘presence in time and space’ (Benjamin, 2004: 1235); the hauntology of Donna’s digitised existence is one of ghostly singularities. Travel requires only a destination, not a journey, moving at the speed of a search engine. Incidentally, this mirrors the experience of the Doctor; unbound by any linear notion of time, he embodies the Baudrillardian idea of speed: ‘What does speed itself mean to us if not the fact of going from one place to another without traversing time, from one moment to another without passing via duration and movement? Speed is marvellous: time alone is wearisome’ (Baudrillard, 2000: 41). Donna’s experience suggests, however, that it is time that allows the space for human individuality. The alternative is

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stasis and stagnation; here, it really is the journey that matters, not the destination. Such a cyberlife leaves no room for subjectivity. The children created by the program are endlessly repeated and replicated, a nightmare vision of homogeneity in which personalities are glitches to be defragmented by a system designed to prize similarity over individuality. The computer here resembles the swarm mentality of the Vashta Nerada, ‘not guided by modern principles of rationality, morality, or even, utility’. Perhaps the most interesting scene of the episodes involves the Doctor attempting to communicate with the Vashta Nerada through the neural relays of their victims. Derrida’s conclusion to Specters of Marx is uncannily brought to mind: ‘The “scholar” of the future, the “intellectual” of tomorrow … should learn to live by learning not how to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself’ (2006: 221). Who better than the Doctor to embody the ‘scholar’ of the future? The Doctor’s instructions, ‘It’s easy. Neural relay. Just point and think. Use him, talk to me’, bring together the technological and supernatural ghosts conflated in the lurching threat of the haunted suit but even more uncannily predicts David Tennant’s subsequent casting as Hamlet by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2008. The interrogation of Yorick’s skull, invoked by Derrida from Hamlet, casts a ghostly shadow over this scene, a shadow from the future that is rendered even more disturbingly uncanny by the fact that the skull used in the production starring David Tennant as the Danish Prince was left to the Royal Shakespeare Company by a fan, André Tchaikowsky, after his death, in order to be saved as a prop. One cannot help but be shaken by the connections to the ‘fleshbanks’ of the library, in which bodies are digitally encoded as donations. These fleshbanks are revealed to be the location of the ‘saved’ patrons of the library, and CAL, the central node of the computer, to be the original donor. Mr Lux: My grandfather’s youngest daughter. She was dying, so he built her a library, and put her living mind inside, with a moon to watch over her, and all of human history to pass the time, any era to live in, any book to read. She loved books more than anything. He gave her them all. He asked only that she be left in peace. A secret, not a freak show […] This is only half a life, of course. But it’s for ever. Doctor: And then the shadows came.

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This sudden return to familial concerns recontextualises the library as a family mausoleum, perhaps the epitome of gothic locations. We are left to wonder whether the notion of a half-life that lasts forever is a future version of heaven or hell. As expected, the Doctor solves the riddle of the ‘4022 saved, no survivors’ and the saved patrons are returned from the fleshbanks and teleported away, abandoning the library world to the Vashta Nerada. But there is an unsettling epilogue to the story, involving the mysterious River Song (Alex Kingston), herself a ghost from the Doctor’s future, whom he has not yet met (due to the wonderful paradoxes of time travel). Their first meeting thus also becomes their last, another echo of Specters of Marx. Her sacrifice, substituting herself for the Doctor in his plan to release the saved by adding his memory banks to relieve the critical memory levels of the data core, is characteristic of the series. The Christmas special in 2010 saw Kylie Minogue’s Astrid sacrifice herself to save the Doctor, for example, but despite the Doctor’s comment early on in the Library episodes that: ‘You need a good death. Without death, there’d only be comedies. Dying gives us size’, the character of River Song is not allowed such a death. A convoluted sequence of revelations results in the Doctor plunging down to the data core in a cyberpunk reimagining of the Harrowing of Hell in order to save those who had died throughout the episodes. Such an ending, although initially uplifting, seems to selectively forget the horrors of digitalisation demonstrated by the ghosting and hauntology discussed throughout this chapter. In a frustrating deus ex machina, CAL declares that the Doctor has managed to reboot the meaning of save back to its theological roots, ‘It’s OK. You’re safe. You’ll always be safe here. The Doctor fixed the data core. This is a good place now.’ Even this messianic ending is not allowed the last word, however, as a familiar replaying of Donna’s tucking in of the virtual children sees River Song also kissing CAL goodnight. This picture of virtual domestic bliss is rendered uncanny by the echoing of the earlier scenes, as well as the realisation that the world surrounding the data core is now abandoned to the darkness. The final scenes remind us that ‘that “which keeps us safe tells us how endangered we are”’ (Botting, 2008a: 57). The Whiggish teleology of scientific progress is revealed to be a naive and comforting fairy tale. As John Gray powerfully argues, technology and salvation are not concomitant phenomena: The end-result of scientific inquiry is to return human-kind to its own intractable existence. Instead of enabling humans to improve their lot, science degrades the

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natural environment in which humans must live. Instead of enabling death to be overcome, it produces ever more powerful technologies of mass destruction. None of this is the fault of science; what it shows is that science is not sorcery. The growth of knowledge enlarges what humans can do. It cannot reprieve them from being what they are. (2011: 235)

The invitation to save when we close a document merely reminds us how prone to loss and deletion it is, and by extension so are we.

References 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). [Film] Directed by Stanley Kubrick. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Baudrillard, J. (2000), ‘Prophylaxis and Virulence’, in N. Badmington (ed.), Posthumanism, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 34–41. Benjamin, W. (2004), ‘The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in J. Rivkin and M. Ryan (eds), Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1235–41. Blade Runner (1982). [Film] Directed by Ridley Scott. USA: Warner Bros. Bolter, J. D. and Grusin, R. (2002), Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Botting, F. (1996), Gothic, London and New York: Routledge. Botting, F. (2008a), Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Botting, F. (2008b), Gothic Romanced: Consumption, Gender and Technology in Contemporary Fictions, London and New York: Routledge. Derrida, J. (1996), Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression, trans. E. Prenowitz, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (2006), Specters of Marx, trans. P. Kamuf, New York and London: Routledge. Derrida, J. and Stiegler, B. (2002), Echographies of Television, trans. Jennifer Bajorek, Cambridge: Polity. Doctor Who (2008), ‘Silence in the Library’ and ‘Forest of the Dead’. [TV programme] BBC, BBC1, 31 May and 7 June 2008, 19.00. Gray, J. (2011). The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death, London: Penguin. Haraway, D. J. (2000), ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialistfeminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in N. Badmington (ed.), Posthumanism, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 69–84. Hayles, N. K. (1999), How we Became PostHuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

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Heidegger, M. (1977), ‘The Turning’, in The Question of Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt, New York: Harper & Row, pp. 36–49. Heim, M. H. (2003), ‘Heidegger and McLuhan and the Essence of Virtual Reality’, in R. C. Scharff and V. Dusek (eds), Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition: An Anthology, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 539–55. Hurley, K. (1996), The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnston, J. (1997), ‘Introduction: Friedrich Kittler: media theory after poststructuralism’, in F. A. Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems, trans. by J. Johnston, Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, pp. 1–30. Kittler, F. A. (1997), Literature, Media, Information Systems, trans. J. Johnston, Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association. Kittler, F. A. (1999), Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. G. Winthrop-Young and M. Wutz, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Landow, G. P. (1997), Hypertext 2.0, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mayer-Sch­önberger, V. (2009), Delete: the Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Poster, M. (2001), The Information Subject, Amsterdam: Overseas Publishing Association. Roof, J. (1996), Reproductions of Reproduction: Imaging Symbolic Change, New York and London: Routledge. Sconce, J. (2000), Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, Durham and London: Duke University Press. The Matrix (1999). [Film] Directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski. USA: Warner Bros. Zoolander (2001). [Film] Directed by Ben Stiller. USA: Paramount Pictures.

Index

9/11 15, 27 abhuman 8, 92, 96, 165 Abu Ghraib 19 affect 20, 27, 80, 88, 90, 93, 94, 143–4, 159 Agamben, Georgio 97 alchemy 91, 103 American Civil War 20 American gothic 8, 16–17, 26–7, 73 Andruzzi, Tony 130, 133, 134–5, 137–8 Attenborough, Richard Magic 139 authenticity 81, 82–3, 84, 87, 104, 145 Bacon, Francis 94, 96 Badham, John Dracula 110, 111 Bal, Mieke 6, 15 Balagueró, Jaume and Plaza, Paco [REC] 9, 145–8, 150, 151, 152–3, 154 [REC] 2 145, 153–4 ballet 8–9, 104–5, 113 Bataille, Georges 93–4, 97, 98 Baudrillard, Jean 158, 162, 166 Benjamin, Walter 3, 4, 57, 161 Bierce, Ambrose 20–1 In the Midst of Life 20 ‘What I Saw at Shiloh’ 20–1 biopower 88 body 4, 16, 27, 33, 34, 43, 45, 46, 50, 52, 53–4, 60, 64, 77, 78, 86, 91, 92, 94,

96–8, 111–12, 144, 150–1, 153, 162, 165 Bradbury, Ray Something Wicked This Way Comes 134 Brooke, Rupert 6, 15–17, 21 Brooks, Mel Dracula: Dead and Loving It 131 Brown, Derren 139 Browning, Robert ‘Mesmerism’ 44 Browning, Tod Dracula 18 The Devil-Doll 139 Burger, Eugene 132–3, 134, 139 Burger, Neil The Illusionist 9, 116, 117–19, 123–6, 128 Burroughs, William 89 Burton, Tim 106 camera obscura 4, 45–7, 63 Cameron, Charles 129, 131–2 Cavalcanti, Alberto et al Dead of Night 139 cell-phones 19 Charcot, Jean-Martin 109 cinematograph 29, 34, 38, 107, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122 city 30–2, 56–8, 64, 65, 66 see also London Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 2 collage 105–8

Index

172 Collins, Wilkie Armadale 68 Basil; A Story of Modern Life 7, 56–68 The Black Robe 62 The Haunted Hotel 68 The Moonstone 68 colonialism 2, 43, 164–5 see also imperialism comedy 9, 130, 141, 143, 159, 165–6 commodity culture 4, 57 see also consumption Conan Doyle, Arthur The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes 32 ‘The Man With the Twisted Lip’ 32 consumption 7, 8, 21, 26, 27, 57, 58, 59, 60, 80, 90, 92 see also commodity culture contagion 1, 89, 145 conundrum (musical instrument) 75–6 Coppola, Francis Ford Bram Stoker’s Dracula 29, 33–4, 38, 104, 107, 114 Cornwall 57, 66–7, 134 Crowley, Aleister 129 Cushing, Peter 130 cybergothic 163 see also cyberpunk cyberpunk 157, 159, 165, 168 see also cybergothic cyborg 82, 161 daguerreotype 45, 50, 52 Deane, Hamilton Dracula 104 degeneration 29, 33, 92–3, 109 Deleuze, Gilles 1, 87, 89, 93, 94–5, 98 Demme, Jonathan Silence of the Lambs 149 De Quincey, Thomas 68 Derrida, Jacques 2, 95, 123, 124, 158, 159, 161, 162, 165, 166, 167 Specters of Marx 2, 158, 167, 168 Diaz, Jean 21–2 discipline 88–9, 96 Doctor Who 9–10, 157, 163–9 dorsality 8, 74–5, 77–8 double exposure 7, 33, 34 Dracula see Browning, Tod; Coppola, Francis Ford; Stoker, Bram

dreams 30–2, 33, 34, 57, 58, 59, 60–1, 62, 64, 68, 106, 116, 125, dubstep 75 du Maurier, George Trilby 44 Edison, Thomas 33 Expressionism 18, 131 Fields, W. C. 134 final girl 9, 154, 155 fin-de-siècle 7, 29–39, 43, 92, 93, 95, 104, 109, 117, 119, 120, 122 Fish, Stanley 123 flâneur 31, 58, 59, 65 Foucault, Michel 88–9, 109 found footage 9, 145–6, 148, 155 Fox Talbot, Henry 5 Frankenstein, see Shelley, Mary Freud, Sigmund 122 dream language 106 ‘return of the repressed’ 43 see also uncanny the unconscious 47, 48 Fuseli, Henry The Nightmare 57 galvanism 56 Gance, Abel J’Accuse 21–3 Garnerin, André-Jacques 56 gaze, 7, 31, 35, 37, 43, 44, 54, 148 Ghost Box Records 95 Giamatti, Paul 118, 125 Gorky, Maxim 26, 34, 36 goth 77–8 Goya, Francisco The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters 1 Griffith, D. W. The Birth of a Nation 18 Haiti 17 Hammer Studios 110, 130 hand-held camera 9, 145–7, 149, 153–5 Haraway, Donna 161 hauntology 6, 95–6, 158, 166, 168 Hawthorne, Nathaniel The House of the Seven Gables 44 Heidegger, Martin 157–8, 160, 164 heterotopia 17

Index Hitchcock, Alfred Psycho 147 The Lady Vanishes 133 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 117 Holmes, Sherlock, see Conan Doyle, Arthur hypnosis 35, 42–3, 58, 117, 125 immigration 15, 23–4, 27, 107, 110, 122 imperialism 9, 106, 109, 111, 117, 119 American 16–17, 23 industrial music 8, 76, 86, 87–8, 90, 93–4 internet 19, 23, 24 Iraq War 18, 19 James, M. R. 138 ‘Casting the Runes’ 136 ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ 136, 137 ‘Stories I Have Tried to Write’ 136 ‘The Mezzotint’ 137 Jordan, Neil 106 Joy Division 77 Kafka, Franz 5 Karloff, Boris 133 Kersh, Gerald The Extraordinarily Horrible Dummy 139 Kinetoscope 38 Kong, Su-Chang R-Point 149 Kubrick, Stanley 2001: A Space Odyssey 159 Langella, Frank 110 Lee, Christopher 110, 130 Lewis, Matthew 3 The Monk 67 Loch Ness Monster 134 Lombroso, Cesare 109 London 29, 42, 56, 57, 59, 64, 66, 68, 89, 104, 107, 110, 121, 131 Lovecraft, H. P. 137–8 Lugosi, Bela 133 Lumière, Auguste and Louis 29, 33, 120, 123 McBride, Jeff 133 Machen, Arthur 92 The Great God Pan 33, 136

173 The Novel of the Black Seal 136 The White People 136 Maddin, Guy Dracula – Pages From a Virgin’s Diary 8–9, 104–26 My Winnipeg 123 magic ‘bizarre magick’ 9, 128–41 performance 8, 9, 116–26, 128–41 voodoo 16, 17 vs. science 104, 163 magic lantern 1, 3, 30, 34, 38, 63, 117, 118 see also phantasmagoria Mahler, Gustav 8, 105, 108, 112, 113 ‘Resurrection Symphony’ 108 Marsh, Richard The Beetle 7, 42–54 Marshall, Neil Dog Soldiers 149 The Descent 148 Marx, Karl 4, 161 masochism 44, 89 materialism 92, 93, 97 Maven, Max 129–30, 135 Méliès, Georges 120, 121 Carrefour de l’Opera 33 Le Diable et la statue 121 Le Diable noir 121 Le Manoir du diable 121 Les 400 farces du diable 121 melodrama 105, 106, 144, 147 mesmerism see hypnotism metamorphosis 33, 43, 44–5, 92, 97, 103, 112 Millhauser, Steven 116, 124 ‘August Eschenburg’ 116, 119 Dangerous Laughter 116 ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’ 116, 117–18, 119–22 ‘The Invention of Robert Herendeen’ 116 ‘The Little Kingdom of Franklin J. Payne’ 125 Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer 121 ‘The New Automaton Theater’ 116 ‘A Precursor of the Cinema’ 116, 119 Minch, Stephen 138 Ming the Merciless 129–30 modernity 1, 3, 4–5, 8, 60, 62, 95, 110, 113, 119

174 Murnau, F. W. 106 Nosferatu 34–5, 38, 110, 131 Myrick, Daniel and Sánchez, Eduardo The Blair Witch Project 146, 147, 149, 151, 155n.1 negative (photographic) 5, 7, 42–54 neo-liberalism 96 New Woman 109 Nietzsche, Friedrich 51–2, 93 night-vision 21, 145, 148–50, 154, 155 noise 8, 73–84, 86, 88, 89, 90, 93–4 Nolan, Christopher The Prestige 125, 128 Nordau, Max 109 nostalgia 8, 95 omnibus 58, 59 opium 32, 68 optics 46, 54 optogram 7, 50–3 Owen, Wilfred 6, 17–18 ‘Strange Meeting’ 17–18 Pater, Walter 105 Peli, Oren Paranormal Activity 146, 153 phantasmagoria 1, 3–4, 7, 9, 56–7, 60–8, 117, 118, 120 see also magic lantern phenakitiscope 59 phonograph 5, 34, 75, 107 photography 3, 5, 6, 7, 17, 19, 30, 34, 36, 42–54, 95, 103, 107, 134, 162 spirit 34 time-lapse 33 Plato 46, 159 Plaza, Paco [REC] 3: Genesis 145, 154–5 Poe, Edgar Allan 117 Polidori, John The Vampyre 114n.1 pornography 88, 144, 151 P-Orridge, Genesis 87–8, 91, 92 posthumanism 162, 163 postmodernism 121, 160 post-punk 8, 86, 87, 89, 95, 96 psychoanalysis 109, 117, 119, 152 see also Freud, Sigmund; uncanny punk 87

Index Radcliffe, Ann 3 The Italian 67 The Mysteries of Udolpho 67 railway 5, 31, 62, 104, 109, 110, 122–3 rasp 81–2, 83 realism 2, 9, 34, 43, 53, 105, 106, 121, 145, 155 Reeves, Matt Cloverfield 146, 155n.2 Renoir, Jean Grand Illusion 18 reverse colonisation 109 reverse motion 7, 33 rhizome 87 Richardson, Tony The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner 124 Robert-Houdin, Jean-Eugène 120–1, 124, 130 Robertson, Étienne-Gaspard 63, 117, 118 romance 2–3, 58, 61–2, 104, 142 Romanticism 2, 56–7, 67, 108, 109 Romero, George A. 6, 145 Diary of the Dead 6–7, 15, 18, 21, 23–8, 147 Night of the Living Dead 6, 18–19, 153 Royal Shakespeare Company 167 Royal Winnipeg Ballet 20, 104–5 see also ballet sacrifice 21–2, 94, 97, 98, 168 Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de 3 sadism 44, 89, 143 Saville, Philip Count Dracula 104 Schreck, Max 110 science fiction 157 Sex Pistols 87 Shakespeare, William Hamlet 158, 167 Shelley, Mary 56 Frankenstein 2, 56–7, 58, 61, 62–3, 64 Shiels, Tony ‘Doc’ 129, 133, 134, 136–7, 138–9 silent film 8–9, 105–6, 113 spectrality 1–2, 5, 18, 95, 116, 117–18, 123, 124, 166

Index spiritualism 91, 92, 128 see also photography, spirit stereoscope 60 Stevenson, Robert Louis The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 7, 30–2, 39 Stiller, Ben Zoolander 159 Stoker, Bram Dracula 5, 7, 8–9, 29, 33–4, 38–9, 42, 103–14, 130, 131 sublime 56, 67–8 suburbia 58–9, 60 superimposition see double exposure surveillance 38, 154, 158, 164 synthesiser, Chamberlin 76, 80 technophobia 159, 162 Tennant, David 164, 167 thaumatope 7 Throbbing Gristle 8, 85–98 ‘Discipline’ 89, 90, 95 ‘Funeral in Berlin’ 92 timbre 20, 73, 77, 81 Tourneur, Jacques Night of the Demon 136 transformation see metamorphosis transgression 8, 15, 36, 94 trauma 20–2, 44, 47, 49, 50–4, 96 Tretta, Sean Death of a Ghost-Hunter 146, 148 typewriter 107, 108, 159 uncanny 1, 9, 10, 16, 18, 22, 43, 65, 78, 80, 83, 84, 116, 118, 120, 124, 139, 148, 152, 155, 157, 158–9, 161, 165, 166, 167, 168 vampire 5, 17, 18, 34–5, 38, 103–14, 132, 152 veil 58, 59, 64–5, 166 ventriloquism 139–40 Verbinski, Gore The Ring 153

175 Verne, Jules The Kip Brothers 52 Vietnam War 7, 18–19 violence 21, 24–7, 94, 110, 147, 152, 153 voodoo see magic Waits, Tom 8, 73–84 ‘All Stripped Down’ 82, 83 Bone Machine 8, 73–84 ‘Dirt in the Ground’ 82 ‘Earth Died Screaming’ 82 ‘Goin’ Out West’ 82 ‘I Wish I Was in New Orleans’ 80 ‘Jesus Gonna Be Here’ 82–3 ‘Kentucky Avenue’ 80 ‘Let Me Get Up On It’ 79–80 ‘Martha’ 80 ‘The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me’ 79–80, 82 Swordfishtrombones 73, 82 ‘Whistle Down the Wind’ 80, 82 ‘Who Are You’ 80 Walpole, Horace 2 The Castle of Otranto 43 Wan, James Saw 97, 143, 155 Wells, H. G. 31, 92 The Island of Dr Moreau 7, 32–3 The Time Machine 32 Wiene, Robert 106 The Cabinet of Dr Caligari 18, 114, 134 Wilde, Oscar ‘The Critic as Artist’ 36 The Picture of Dorian Gray 7, 29, 32, 35–8, 39 Wood, Ed 107 World War I 6, 15–16, 17, 20, 21–3 X-ray 34 Zhang, Wei-Qiang 110 zoetrope 7, 59 zombie 6, 15–17, 18–19, 21, 23–8, 96, 145, 153