Speaking the Language of the Night: Aspects of the Gothic in Selected Contemporary Novels 9783631628034

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Tales of Labyrinths – The White Tiger and the Postcolonial Metamorphosis of Gothic
From Behind the Iron Curtain: Herta Müller’s Female Gothic
Lost in Bombay and Istanbul: Urban Gothic in Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram and Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book
Blurring Boundaries in Never Let Me Go
The Sublime of the Intimate Others: Salman Rushdie’s Shame
Refracting Spaces in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Raducanu Adriana Raducanu

Adriana Raducanu

This study contributes to the emerging field of Global Gothic. It focuses on the survival and evolution of Gothic subgenres and tropes in selected contemporary novels, produced in geographies and histories far away from its Western cradle. Some Gothic features identified as universal such as the relationship between space and character, the sublime, the process of Othering, uncanny doubles and the dissolution of identity are explored. This study maintains that the novels under scrutiny, written by a wide variety of authors such as Adiga, Desai, Ishiguro, Müller, Pamuk, Roberts and Rushdie, facilitate a fruitful dialogue between West and East under the sign of Gothic. A diverse critical apparatus is employed, including texts from Bhabha, Kristeva, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Mishra and others. The Author Adriana Raducanu is Assistant Professor in the English Language and Literature Department of Yeditepe University, Istanbul. She teaches English and Comparative Literature and has published on contemporary Gothic novels, Jungian criticism, postcolonial and gender studies.

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Speaking the Language of the Night

Speaking the Language of the Night

Speaking the Language of the Night Aspects of the Gothic in Selected Contemporary Novels

Adriana Raducanu - 978-3-653-99834-4 Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/20/2021 06:42:43AM via Victoria University of Wellington

19.02.14 14:32

Raducanu Adriana Raducanu

Adriana Raducanu

This study contributes to the emerging field of Global Gothic. It focuses on the survival and evolution of Gothic subgenres and tropes in selected contemporary novels, produced in geographies and histories far away from its Western cradle. Some Gothic features identified as universal such as the relationship between space and character, the sublime, the process of Othering, uncanny doubles and the dissolution of identity are explored. This study maintains that the novels under scrutiny, written by a wide variety of authors such as Adiga, Desai, Ishiguro, Müller, Pamuk, Roberts and Rushdie, facilitate a fruitful dialogue between West and East under the sign of Gothic. A diverse critical apparatus is employed, including texts from Bhabha, Kristeva, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Mishra and others. The Author Adriana Raducanu is Assistant Professor in the English Language and Literature Department of Yeditepe University, Istanbul. She teaches English and Comparative Literature and has published on contemporary Gothic novels, Jungian criticism, postcolonial and gender studies.

Adriana Raducanu - 978-3-653-99834-4 www.peterlang.com Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/20/2021 06:42:43AM via Victoria University of Wellington

Speaking the Language of the Night

Speaking the Language of the Night

Speaking the Language of the Night Aspects of the Gothic in Selected Contemporary Novels

Speaking the Language of the Night

Adriana Raducanu - 978-3-653-99834-4 Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/20/2021 06:42:43AM via Victoria University of Wellington

Adriana Raducanu - 978-3-653-99834-4 Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/20/2021 06:42:43AM via Victoria University of Wellington

Adriana Raducanu

Speaking the Language of the Night Aspects of the Gothic in Selected Contemporary Novels

Adriana Raducanu - 978-3-653-99834-4 Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/20/2021 06:42:43AM via Victoria University of Wellington

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Raducanu, Adriana, 1969Speaking the Language of the Night : Aspects of the Gothic in Selected Contemporary Novels / Adriana Raducanu. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-631-62803-4 1. Gothic fiction (Literary genre)–History and criticism. 2. Gothic revival (Literature)–History and criticism. I. Title. PN3435.R33 2014 809.3'876--dc23 2014000374

Cover illustration: © Mehmet Korman

ISBN 978-3-631-62803-4 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-653-02858-4 (E-Book) DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-02858-4 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2014 All rights reserved. PL Academic Research is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH. Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main ∙ Bern ∙ Bruxelles ∙ New York ∙ Oxford ∙ Warszawa ∙ Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. www.peterlang.com Adriana Raducanu - 978-3-653-99834-4 Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/20/2021 06:42:43AM via Victoria University of Wellington

Contents

Acknowledgements.................................................................................................7 Introduction.............................................................................................................9 Tales of Labyrinths – The White Tiger and the Postcolonial Metamorphosis of Gothic.....................................................................................25 From Behind the Iron Curtain: Herta Müller’s Female Gothic............................47 Lost in Bombay and Istanbul: Urban Gothic in Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram and Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book.........................75 Blurring Boundaries in Never Let Me Go...........................................................109 The Sublime of the Intimate Others: Salman Rushdie’s Shame.........................129 Refracting Spaces in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain....................................................................151 Bibliography.......................................................................................................175 Index...................................................................................................................193

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Acknowledgements

Speaking the Language of the Night would have not been possible without many discussions with friends and colleagues at different stages in its preparation. Among them special thanks are due to my close friend and colleague Dr. Catherine MacMillan who helped define many of the approaches taken. Other colleagues at Yeditepe University, among them Dr. Charles Sabatos, Dr. Fiona Tomkinson, Prof. Dr. Oğuz Cebeci and Prof. Dr. Mediha Göbenli offered precious advice in the course of writing this book. Thanks are also due to my friend and former colleague Kim Laykin who did the proofreading and Mehmet Korman, my talented MA student who helped me with the design of the cover. Other friends and colleagues whose professional achievements over the years have constituted a most valuable incentive for this book include Prof. Dr. Pia Brinzeu, Prof. Dr. Reghina Dascal and Prof. Dr. Süheyla Artemel. Many thanks to Dr. Andrew Hock Soon Ng, whose professional and friendly support has made it possible for me to carry on when it seemed impossible to do so. His sharp critical insights have proved my most significant inspiration. I would also like to express my gratitude to the editorial team at Peter Lang for their professionalism and assistance. Special thanks are due to Cem, for the gift of love (as well as unfailing technical support), my father and Aurelia who always encouraged me and expressed their enthusiasm for this project. This book is dedicated to them.

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Introduction

Fragmentation and a fascination with the forbidden are arguably among the most important characteristics of Gothic in literature. Unlike in architecture for example, where both the formal and historical features of the Gothic are rigorously established, in literature and criticism this genre is presently negotiating between two opposing tendencies; the one represented by the ‘classicists’ who insist on the focus on the clearly-defined Gothic canon in the West, and who are sceptical about the expansion of the genre outside its canonical boundaries, and the one represented by the ‘reformers’ who opt for challenging the canonicity of the Gothic and argue that it represents more than just a set of established texts.1 Arguably, such heated debates in the field of Gothic Studies are the theoretical consequences of the slipperiness and ambiguity of this genre, another two vital features of Gothic, which marked its very beginnings.2 Hogle, in his Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Gothic notices that “Gothic fiction is hardly ‘Gothic’ at all”, but “an entirely post-medieval and even post-Renaissance phenomenon” (Hogle: 9). To sustain his claim, he also remarks on the fragmentary, hybrid nature of the initial Gothic writings, “from ancient prose and verse romances to Shakespearean tragedy and comedy” and points out that: 1 The classicists and the reformers are ad-hoc categories which I am introducing in order to attempt a very rough and perhaps simplistic differentiation between the actual tendencies in Gothic criticism. To my knowledge, no critic whose area of expertise and research is Gothic has attempted any such categorization. Nevertheless, many Western academics refute the concept of Asian Gothic, for example, and have difficulties acknowledging its potential as an aesthetical experience, whereas an increasing number of ‘Eastern’ academics strive to ‘force’ the boundaries of Gothic and render it as an enriching reading and interpreting practice. 2 Robert Miles, in the attempt to define Gothic, claims that it “is a discursive site, a “carnivalesque” mode for the representations of the fragmented subject”, since “both the generic multiplicity of Gothic and what one might call its discursive primacy, effectively detach the Gothic from the tidy simplicity of thinking of it as so many predictable, fictional conventions. This may end up making “Gothic” a more ambiguous, shifting term, but then the textual phenomena to which it points are shifting and ambiguous” (Miles 2002: 4, emphasis added).

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[…] the first published work to call itself “A Gothic Story” was a counterfeit me-

dieval tale published long after the Middle Ages: Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, printed under a pseudonym in England in 1764 and reissued in 1765 in a second edition with a new preface which openly advocated a “blend (of) the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern,” the former “all imagination and improbability” and the latter governed by the “rules of probability” connected with “common life.” (Hogle: 9)

In commenting on the hybrid nature of this new type of writing, Walpole seems to have made an uncanny prediction, especially when assessed in the context of the directions of contemporary Gothic fiction and criticism. Always miscellaneous, the contemporary Gothic trends are increasingly displaying all the characteristics of an amalgam and a formless entity operating with a variety of tropes and within theoretical frameworks. Clearly, once the ‘return to origins’ (i.e. to Walpole’s canonical Gothic text) is attempted even the most ardent supporters of a uniform tradition, which was born in eighteenth century England and has continued unabashed until the present day, must reconsider their position. On the one hand, as Watt notices, in acknowledging Walpole’s novel as the foundational Gothic text, the tendency to selectively attribute “an illusory stability to a body of fiction which is distinctively heterogeneous” is proven mistaken (Watt: 1, emphasis added). On the other, Walpole’s own admission that his writing was “a blend”, confirmed by Watt’s characterization of Gothic fiction and its distinctive heterogeneity, should not automatically discard the possibility of a different kind of tradition altogether. From a postmodernist perspective, for example, it is precisely this fragmentation, the proclivity for de-constructionist exercises, the experimental and frequently the meta-fictional qualities of Gothic that argue for the validity of what may be seen as the fractured tradition of Gothic. Watt also claims that a historical perspective upon texts “accommodated” as Gothic may contribute even more to the dissolution of any fixed Gothic features observable in a variety of texts and render them as irrelevant in their arbitrariness (Watt: 1). It is undoubtedly possible, if extrapolating from this argument, which mostly refers to Gothic as insufficiently equipped to deal with historical detail and context, to hastily reach the conclusion that Gothic on the one hand, and historical specificity on the other are frozen in a relationship of mutual exclusivity.3

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Baldick and Mighall made a similar point when they claimed that “Gothic criticism has abandoned any credible historical grasp upon its object, which it has tended to reinvent in the image of its own projected intellectual goals of psychological ‘depth’

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But Gothic is about history and the anxieties of lived history, at both the individual and collective level, although Gothic criticism has only recently acknowledged the inextricable bond between history and Gothic fiction.4 In The Literature of Terror, a remarkable piece of scholarship for the new and powerful impetus that it gave to Gothic studies, David Punter argues that the genre is closely linked to the bourgeoisie’s attempts “to understand the conditions and history of their own ascent”, marked by obsessive concerns with inheritance, ancestry and the transmission of property in “a literature whose key motifs are paranoia, manipulation and injustice, and whose central project is understanding the inexplicable, the taboo, the irrational” (Punter 1980: 127–8). However, it should be noted that Punter’s study, although valuable both in itself and as an inspiration for the subsequent criticism derived from it, does not read as a metatheory of the Gothic, but rather as a suggestion of a few unifying principles for a body of literature which, as we now know, cannot be unified. Indeed, Gothic scholars commenting on the impossibility of such an enterprise agree that Gothic, whether we read it as genre, concept, mode, adjective, or even as a frame of mind or ‘affect’ (to use a Freudian term), cannot be ‘incarcerated’ (in the same way it did its early heroes and heroines), and generally rejoice in this extreme flexibility. More than anything else, as contemporary Gothic critics frequently conjecture, reading Gothic is an issue of individual perspective, a matter of interpretation, an endeavour to select particular texts, acknowledge a variety of common characteristics, discuss their function in particular contexts and consider the intertextual web of which they are part and parcel. According to Howard, individual Gothic texts can only be approached in a specific manner, conducive to “the generic frame against which (they are) being read” (Howard: 1). Using a Bahktinian approach to Gothic fiction, the critic argues that the discursive ambiguity inherent in such texts and the political force of individual discourses depend on their interaction with other discourses in the reading process, highlighting the intertextual nature of all texts and through this, the very heterogeneity of reality.5 Wolstenholme adopts a similar position from a gendered

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and political ‘subversion’” (Baldick and Mighall: 210). The essays in this book aim at correcting this rather biased perspective and argue, among others, for Gothic criticism as situated at the confluence between historicity and psychology. For pioneering works of Gothic criticism, see Edith Birkhead’s The Tale of Terror (1921), Eino Railo’s The Haunted Castle (1927), Montague Summers The Gothic Quest (1938), Devendra Varma’s The Gothic Flame (1957). Besides Jacqueline Howard’s Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach (1994), Susan Wolstenholme’s Gothic (Re) Visions (1993) and Ian Duncan’s Modern Romance and the Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (1992)

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authorship perspective. Thus, she raises the issue of “women’s writing” which alludes to “prior texts written by women, an act that calls attention to its own repetition, its evocation of the performance of writing in another text that re-enacts the same performance”; moreover, she also mentions the special connection between women as writers and women as readers realized via texts which “teach us to read them as re-writings that are re-readings” (Wolstenholme: xiv).6 Duncan remarks that romance does not mean “a synchronicity of archetypes across history, but an active, cultural work of the discovery and invention of ancestral forms, in other words, the construction of the archetype as a rhetorical figure” (Duncan: 7). “The novelist”, he argues, “[…] needs to re-create the myth if he is to make full use of it, in a process that is allusive rather than vatic, not so much visionary as revisionary. The relationship of an individual work to a genre is not one of passive membership but of active modulation” (7). My own perspective on contemporary novelists whose works I perceive as informed by Gothic tropes is inspired by the various approaches of Howard, Wolstenholme and Duncan. Succinctly put, all three critics emphasize, albeit in different ways, that the main aspect of the act of perusal and assessment of Gothic texts is the multiplicity, the wide variety of perspectives and reflective gazes which grant the interpretational enterprise freedom from dogmatic approaches. Even more importantly, they all consider the dialogical relationship between Gothic texts and the different historical, social, political and cultural contexts in which Gothic archetypes and tropes survive. As most of the authors whose works are analyzed in this book have not been read as writers who consciously employed Gothic tropes, my own claim for their assessment from a Gothic perspective, depends on the play of intertextuality, hence the affiliations with and allusions to texts whose ‘Gothic-ness’ is arguably apparent. In that sense, my argument for this study also agrees with the one put forward by Smith in noticing that: “Different nations […] generate different types of Gothic that develop and feed into other Gothic forms which proliferate in one place but seemingly die out in another” (Smith: 4).

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also focus on the particular way in which Gothic negotiates while questioning representational structures, history, subjectivity and interpretation. Nowadays, Wolstenholme’s presupposition of an identifiable and even quantifiable difference between male and female writing (which she draws on Cixous and Kristeva’s views on ecriture feminine) is highly contested. However, the aspect that interests me here is not so much the gendered perspective which she notes, but the emphasis that she places on the dialogical aspects of Gothic writings and the way Gothic texts always feed on and allude to other Gothic texts. Arguably, this is a characteristic of literature as a whole, but in my opinion, more poignantly expressed within Gothic.

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Although Smith mainly refers to the relationship between the British and American traditions, the current study posits that the development, the proliferation and the apparent death of Gothic forms alternating with uncanny resurrections from elsewhere are phenomena which may be read within a larger frame. Consequently, the fundamental theme of inquiry that this study proposes is related to both history and geography. I have already referred to the inextricable link between Gothic and history. The other axis, in the absence of which Gothic is devoid of its ‘Gothic-ness’ refers to geography, to space. Settings are vital to Gothic literature, whether as specific countries (Spain, France, Italy, England) or as the generalized locales of a castle, a convent, a monastery, a city, or a deserted, isolated house.7 In terms of its purely geographical inception, Gothic as a genre originated in Western Europe where it enjoyed its heyday in the eighteenth century and, in a modified form, the following century. Nevertheless, as pertaining to a protean genre, capable of multiple mutations and adaptations, Gothic features have long been expanding well beyond their canonical eighteenth century temporal and spatial borders, especially during the last four decades. Recently, some characteristics of Gothic which will be discussed further on have been found to penetrate other cultural spaces and disciplines, such as philosophy and the social sciences.8

In the context of Global Gothic Starting with the last decades of the twentieth century and continuing to the present day, the unprecedented possibilities of rapid communication and travel have facilitated intellectual contacts on an impressive scale. In this dynamic and stimulating context, Gothic critics’ attention has been drawn to the presence of Gothic motifs in non-Western literatures and cultures. The present study draws its inspiration from such inquiries which facilitate a new and lively dialogue across West and 7

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Again Walpole’s Castle of Otranto is responsible for this imposition, along with Anne Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, as the first Gothic novelists who dwelled on the essentiality of location. Since then, Gothic texts have constantly focused on settings, at times so significantly powerful that they can be read as characters in their own right who frequently dictate the convolutions of the plot and the fate of the other characters. See Franco Moretti’s Dialectics of Fear (1982) and Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1994), Richard Devetak’s The Gothic Scene of International Relations: Ghosts, Monsters, Terror and the Sublime after September 11 (2005), and R. Bleiker and M. Leet’s From the Sublime to the Subliminal: Fear, Awe and Wonder in International Politics (2006).

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East. Thus, while acknowledging the fluctuating and contradictory characteristics of the Gothic, this book is written on the premise that Gothic, although undoubtedly a Western genre, presents certain characteristics which can be found in literatures produced in historically and geographically remote territories.9 Among these Gothic tropes, on which the essays in the present collection focus are: an almost obsessive concern with space/setting/location, apparent in different literatures and hence contexts, binary oppositions and the way Gothic narratives subvert them, the process of Othering, monstrosity, uncanny doubles and dissolution of identity, as well as specific Gothic plots and feelings, such as betrayal, loss, negotiation of trauma, terror, and horror. Of course, noticing the presence of Gothic tropes is not to be read as equivalent to the fact that other parts of the world create works in this very genre, leaving unaltered its early conventions. Rather, what this collection of essays aims at illustrating is Gothic as discourse or as aesthetical experience.10 Therefore, most importantly, the following essays achieve to establish a discussion of such typical tropes, in their ‘new’ historical and geographical context, i.e. the East. This is not a simple case of mirroring Western Gothic features in fictional samples from different Eastern literatures, nor should it be read as a cultural, colonial imposition (an aspect to which I will refer further on), but rather as a thorough

9 In Interrogating Interstices, Ng mentions Howard J. Hughes’s “Familiarity and the Strange: Japan’s Gothic Tradition” (2000), Charles Shiro Inouye’s introductory essays to two collections of stories by the Japanese writer Izumi Kyoka, entitled Japanese Gothic Tales (1996) and In Light of Shadows (2005), the Chinese Ban Wang’s The Sublime Figure of History (1997), and David Wang’s The Monster that is History (2004). All these recent works, Ng explains, testify that Asian societies, although in possession of a tradition rich in macabre literature, lack the critical apparatus necessary to interpret them. To correct this lack, Western theories significantly connected to Gothic have proved inspirational (Ng 2007: 25). At this point, I would also like to emphasize that although Ng does not specifically claim that his work is inspired by and focused on the concept of “Global Gothic”, in my opinion his work is undoubtedly one of the pioneering ones of this recent trend in Gothic studies. 10 As Jacobs observes, Emma Clery, Anne Williams and Robert Miles argue that Gothicism is actually a discursive practice that extends far beyond the texts nominally associated with the 18th century novel, although their text analyses almost exclusively concentrate on 18th century British literary discourse (Jacobs: 15). Andrew Hock Soon Ng, in the same vein, takes Gothic to signify an aesthetic, meaning both an experience in reading and a framework to interpret literature (Ng 2007: 6). My own argument here follows Clery, Williams and Miles, but mostly Ng, since he is one of the first critics to argue for the extension of the Gothic discourse in order to decipher non-Western texts.

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examination of the contingency of the said tropes, as dictated by specific political, social, economic and psychological conditions. Moreover, the claim that this book makes according to which the literatures of the ‘Other’, the remote, the un-canonical, the Eastern, employ Gothic to tackle local realities is sustained in the light of the bodies of thought that are instrumental in deciphering and assessing it; for example, both Eastern and Western scholars interested in Gothic acknowledge its interactions with postcolonialism and postmodernism, along with its more traditionally-acknowledged dialogues with feminism and psychoanalysis.11 To exemplify the issue of an increasing although debatable universality which characterizes the present tendencies in Gothic criticism and implicitly the present study, a brief consideration of the concept of globalization and its relations with Gothic is of paramount importance. Nowadays, globalization is invoked with increased frequency in various disciplines in spite of its contentious value, possibly indicative of its threat of becoming a new totalizing principle, a dictatorship of the present.12 In Dirlik’s opinion, globalization has added to the complexity of “contradictions between and within societies, including a fundamental contradiction between a seemingly irresistible modernity, and past legacies that not only refuse to go away, but draw renewed vitality from the very globalizing process (qtd in Byron: 372). Dirlik’s view of globalization bears a strange resemblance to what in Gothic terms is read as ‘the return of the repressed’ or as the ‘haunting, obsessive presence of the revenant’; viewed from this angle, “globalization itself becomes a Gothic manifestation, a material and psychical invasion, a force of contamination and dominance” (Byron 2012: 272). Thus, most recently, the connections and points of convergence between Gothic and globalization have merged in the concept of “Global Gothic”. As Byron argues, “global gothic” is “a form marked by the increasing cross-cultural dynamics of the past century”, which “will help identify what the gothic texts of different countries have in common”; in this capacity, it is expected to “reveal the ways in which texts of one country are influenced by, and in turn influence, those of other countries”. Finally, “global gothic […] should ultimately help us to assess more accurately what really is culturally specific about any particular gothic text” (Byron 2008: 33). 11 Among the most recent titles, see Smith and Hughes’ s Empire and the Gothic, Andrew Hock Soon Ng’s Interrogating Interstices; Gothic Aesthetics in Postcolonial Asian and Asian American Literature (2007) and Asian Gothic: Essays on Literature, Film and Anime (2008), Maria Beville’s Gothic-postmodernism; Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity (2009). 12 For a very concise but useful discussion of globalization, its discontents, and its limitations, but also its potential, see Manfred B. Steger’s Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (2009).

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Global Gothic, therefore, involves a complex movement. Firstly, it scrutinizes the regional, the ethnic and the national, and secondly it tests the resulting specificities and particularities for their universally Gothic value. As Byron notes, critics have remarked on the presence of Gothic features in literature from New Zealand, Italy, Singapore and Argentina, as well as the propagation of regional Gothics, such as Margaret Atwood’s Southern Ontario Gothic, the Gothic of the North Atlantic exemplified by Lisa Moore’s Alligator, Kalpana Swaminathan’s Goa Gothic (Bougainvillea House), and Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s Barcelona Gothic (Byron 2012: 369)13. The critical claims regarding the existence of “regionally or nationally specific forms of Gothic” in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, for example, are “relatively uncontroversial”, as they may be considered as “outgrowths of an imported Anglo-European genre” (369, emphasis added). In the above-mentioned transmutations, Gothic and its tropes acquire an important function, that of a catalyst of “the lingering traumas produced by colonial life, with buried pasts resurfacing in horrific form to disturb the present” (369). However, other critical opinions regarding Global Gothic, its limitations and the directions of future research are more problematic and contentious, since the field is increasingly informed by a tendency to notice and argue for “the existence of Gothic traditions […] quite distinct from those emerging out of the AngloEuropean” (Byron 2012: 369). Hughes (previously mentioned in this Introduction), in his study of Japanese Gothic, remarks that “Gothic” does not necessarily refer to those Japanese authors influenced by Western literature, but is employed as “a convenient translation term for a similar tradition observable in both cultures” (qtd in Byron 2012: 370).14 As previously shown, Global Gothic carries on the inheritance of ambiguity and elusiveness established by the Gothic in the eighteenth century, in that it continues to be a contested site, a grey area where readings and interpretations of what may constitute a ‘true’ Gothic text are a matter of dispute among scholars. The current study will inevitably be part and parcel of this grey area, but it is the hope of the author that it will also open new areas for exploring the contemporary Gothic and for considering its potential as an aesthetic experience.

13 Part V of A New Companion to the Gothic edited by David Punter includes, besides Byron’s, five more essays on regional versions or appropriations of Gothic, written by Ken Gelder (Australian Gothic), Ian Conrich (New Zealand Gothic), Cynthia Sugars (Canadian Gothic), Katarzyna Ancuta (Asian Gothic), and Charles Shiro Inouye (Japanese Gothic). 14 Obviously, Hughes refers to Gothic as an aesthetic rather than a generic convention.

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The texts from which this collection draws its substance are far removed from a Gothic ‘cradle’, both in time and in space, a fact that raises a series of theoretical issues which the current work will attempt to clarify. For example, where does the current study situate itself in the view of the above-mentioned conundrum regarding Global Gothic? What are its inevitable limitations? To what extent can it argue for the expansion of the tropes of the genre outside their initial geographical and historical contexts? Furthermore, what is the nature of the mindscape in which the critical ability to see and read Gothic loses its creative force and, if used in excess, achieves the opposite result and stereotypes the interpretational endeavour? When scrutinizing contemporary novels in which Gothic tropes are recognized (albeit not by everyone), can a “Gothic survival” (Beville: 17) be claimed, or, given Hogle’s contention that Gothic fiction itself is hardly Gothic, should we be talking about a metamorphosis of a genre which has never been ‘itself’, but has always been self-conscious and prone to multiple mutations?15 Firstly and most importantly, the current collection of essays on contemporary novels aims to endorse the early but valuable efforts already made in the field of Global Gothic and argue for the validity of the concept. In this capacity, the essays are inevitably situated at the crossroads of the theoretical debates which currently animate the field. Some of the authors whose novels are under scrutiny are ‘uncontroversial’ in terms of their more obvious Gothic affiliations, whereas others are distinctly removed from direct influences. Salman Rushdie, Aravind Adiga, Anita Desai, and Gregory David Roberts were born in former British colonies. Therefore, their works may be read as national variations, as regional offspring of the Gothic as a pre-eminently Western genre, albeit adapted to the realities of the post-colonial era. Nevertheless, it should be noted, this is not mainly a study of postcolonial authors who employ Gothic in their novels, as the inclusion of novels by Herta Müller, Kazuo Ishiguro and Orhan Pamuk indicates. The latter are authors who were either born and/or raised in countries outside the sphere of British political domination and cultural influence; thus, the attempt to approach their works from a Gothic perspective may appear as problematic. However, in their case, Gothic and the Gothic readings they inspired in the present collection are, to quote Hughes again: “a convenient translation term for a similar tradition observable in both cultures”.16

15 As the texts of my choice do not belong to the Western space, and are contemporary texts, it seems that metamorphosis would be the more felicitous term, but it is the metamorphosis of specific tropes and themes which have survived, since the beginning of Gothic. 16 It is important to notice at this point that this study does not aim at arguing for a tradition of Gothic in Turkish literature, for example. To make such a claim, obviously, the

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Moreover, in their case, the Gothic and its tropes clearly avoid the possible accusation of being a cultural continuation of a colonial imposition; instead, the chapters focusing on their works claim Gothic and its conventions as an enriching theoretical and interpretational exercise, ultimately as a means of analyzing aspects that have traditionally been regarded as belonging to the Gothic.17 As I perceive it, Global Gothic demands heterogeneity, flexibility of analysis, and a strong predilection for comparative work, both in terms of the critical apparatus employed (an aspect that I will confront further on), as well as the selection of authors and their particular novels. As early as 1969, Robert Humes pointed out that “the key characteristic of the Gothic novel is not its devices but its atmosphere […] one of evil and brooding terror” (Humes: 286). Some decades later, Watt reinforced this argument in stating that “the Gothic seems to preclude randomness by its nature […] many disparate texts can be considered Gothic” (Watt: 13). Humes’ and Watt’s approach is reflected in the selection of the authors and novels that make up the subject of this study. The novels under consideration are obviously heterogeneous, but not altogether lacking unifying criteria for comparison and categorization. Firstly, they are contemporary novels18 which employ Gothic tropes and concepts by authors who seem to have made a ‘detour’ in reaching this approach. Interestingly, none of the authors analyzed here actually comments on the presence of Gothic elements in their works, although they all confess to different influences, many of them Gothic, but not acknowledged as such.19 analysis of works of more authors and works than Orhan Pamuk’s, accompanied by a thorough analysis of a possible history of influences and adaptations are necessary. Nevertheless, at least in the case of Turkish literature, this appears to be a promising area of research; to my knowledge, there is at least one more other Turkish academic who seems to re-consider some parts of the national from a Gothic perspective; see Ayşe Didem Uslu’s Grotesque and Gothic Comedy in Turkish Shadow Plays (2007). 17 Previously mentioned: a concern with space/settings/locations, binary oppositions and the way Gothic narratives subvert them, the process of ‘Othering’, monstrosity, uncanny doubles, dissolution of identity, as well as specific Gothic plots and feelings, such as betrayal, loss, negotiation of trauma, terror, and horror. 18 All of them, except Jane Eyre, the Victorian classic which is analyzed in comparison with a contemporary novel for the purpose of showing the modern, postcolonial contextualization of typically Gothic spaces. 19 I can only speculate on the reasons behind the authors not giving the genre its due; they may be the perpetuation of an active prejudice which considers Gothic less than serious literature, undeserving of consideration by the elite trend of academic criticism or, even simpler, the result of a misconception, a deficit of authorial (self)perception, according to which the Gothic died when its knights, its castles and its fainting demoiselles were

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The other unifying element between the works of these very different authors is what I call the Eastern theme. Thus the contemporary novels under scrutiny were written by authors whose country of origin and/or education, residence, subject matter, setting, or all of the above speak of a physical and/or a spiritual journey either from or towards a multiplicity of East(s), since, as previously explained, this book does not embark only upon an analysis of postcolonial works and authors. The Eastern theme which I suggest as a unifying principle between the selected authors refers to: the European East represented by Romania (Herta Müller), Istanbul as a liminal space between the continents of Europe and Asia (Orhan Pamuk), Bombay as the Eastern metropolis par excellence (G.D. Roberts and Aravind Adiga), Pakistan (Salman Rushdie), India (Anita Desai), and Japan (Kazuo Ishiguro).

A Hybrid Method The field of Gothic studies abounds in anthologies, monographs, and collections of essays which have developed a certain terminology and methodology for the interpretation of canonical and contemporary Gothic texts or texts that can be read as displaying certain Gothic features.20 no more. Katarzyna Ancuta, referring to both critical and authorial engagements with Gothic, remarks in her “Asian Gothic” that Asian scholars generally show a remarkable lack of interest in analyzing Asian literatures from a Gothic perspective, “since the term itself is often understood as degrading national literature to the level of cheap horror paperbacks, and many Asian writers and academics see that as threatening to their literary standing” (Ancuta: 429). She further on categorizes authorial attitudes in relation to Gothic as “‘doing Gothic’ (or consciously acting upon an established genre convention) and ‘being Gothic’ (or resorting to the use of Gothic conventions without the intention to follow the specific demands of the genre” (Ancuta: 430). According to Ancuta’s categorization, some of the authors whose works are analyzed in the current study are Gothic, in that they “are concerned with political and social horrors, discrimination, abuse of power, corruption, and the resultant violence of everyday life” (Ancuta: 430). Herta Müller is probably the most representative for this category. However, this study is also based on authors who do Gothic, whose “works can be seen as a result of encroaching cultural globalization, a conscious hybridization of local and foreign influences” and who often “allude to well-known Gothic texts” (Ancuta: 430). Orhan Pamuk is, in my opinion, the most significant of the writers whose novels are under scrutiny in this volume who consciously employs Gothic tropes in his novels (as it will be argued further on), although he does not acknowledge it. 20 The following is by no means an exhaustive list; it merely indicates some important titles of Introductions to the field of Gothic studies and its theoretical apparatus.

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My endeavour here both builds on and differs from the already considerable existing scholarship. On the one hand, as will be reflected in the essays that make up this book, in approaching Gothic, I found a certain theoretical conventionalism inescapable (the use of psychoanalytical tools, for example). On the other, I will be employing these already consecrated theories (from different disciplines) in a more eclectic and fragmentary manner. Thus, my analysis will display a mosaic structure in terms of the disciplines, theories and concepts employed, shifting, in the course of the same chapter, from architecture to analytical psychology, and from philosophy to anthropology, for example. Since Walpole on, Gothic, as shown at the very beginning of the Introduction, has allowed and inspired such methodological and theoretical leaps of faith, juxtapositions, and mixtures of approaches, all the more poignant in our increasingly fragmented, dissolute and fractured times. Therefore, in terms of the theoretical apparatus employed, this book is a celebration of the fragmentariness residing at the heart of any known theory, and of the contemporary impossibility of relying on any one of them at the expense of the others, for interpretational purposes. In arguing for this hybrid approach, I take my inspiration from Punter who, albeit referring to the postcolonial and not to Gothic, claims that: […] what is specifically not needed, in the West in general and in the encounter with the postcolonial, is more theoretical ‘frameworks’ or ‘matrices’, which inevitably repeat a prior subjugation and exploitation, a kind of mining and transportation of natural resources reinscribed at the cultural level: What is needed is perceptions and ideas: perceptions of what might be in the text (however broadly the ‘text’ may be conceived) and ideas about how and why it might be there. (Punter 2000: 10–11)

Hence, in terms of methodology and theoretical frameworks, this book aims to read as an answer to Punter’s call in the field of Gothic Studies. Albeit in what may superficially seem an unacceptable ‘blurring of boundaries’, this study proposes a discourse/discourses directed towards working reflexively and stating the supremacy of the text which, more often than once refuses to ‘bend’ and satisfy the ‘greed’ of any particular theory. Moreover, as it will be detailed further on, this collection of essays suggests a new way of approaching and contextualizing standard Gothic tropes, concepts, and bodies of thought, outside canonical temporal and geographical borders. In this See: David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (1980) Fred Botting, Gothic (1990), Robbins, R. and J. Wolfreys (eds.) Victorian Gothic, Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century (2000). Andrew Smith, Gothic Literature (2007).

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way, the current chapters will argue for the diffusion and the metamorphosis of the genre, whose main tropes inform texts outside its traditional sphere of influence.

The Structure of the Study Although I will be employing already existing theoretical concepts to novels written by hyphenated authors21, these authors fall into two categories with regard to Gothic criticism. They are either writers whose novels have not been read as having any Gothic affiliations (Part I-chapter 1–3), or authors for whom I suggest different Gothic readings beside the already existing ones (Part II-chapter 4–6). The first part of this collection of essays is entitled Contemporary Gothic Readings. It contains three chapters. Chapter 1 is centred on a single author and one of his novels, chapter 2 focuses on four novels written by the same author, and chapter 3 is a comparative work, which deals with two contemporary authors whose novels are read from the same Gothic angle/s. Chapter 1: Tales of Labyrinths – The White Tiger and the Postcolonial Metamorphosis of Gothic argues for the inclusion of Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize winner The White Tiger into the already rich stream of works previously acknowledged as postcolonial Gothic: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle and The Robber’s Bride, Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, Fury and Shame, Ruth Prawer Jhabwala’s Heat and Dust, V.S. Naipaul’s Guerillas, Toni Morrison’s Beloved. My reading of Adiga’s novel focuses on the discussion of typical Gothic tropes in a postcolonial context, such as: the Other versus the Self, light versus dark, döppelganger, abject and grotesque. The theoretical framework of this chapter draws on (withough being limited to) Jansson’s theory of Internal Orientalism, Bahktin’s discussion of the grotesque, Bhabha’s concept of hybridity and the Other, Spivak’s view of the subaltern, Stirner’s critique of the concept of the universal human, and Kristeva’s notion of the abject. 21 In my understanding, hyphenation is an endorsement of what I have previously attempted to describe as the Eastern theme. Thus, it may refer to the dual nationality of the authors, the place of their birth juxtaposed with the place of their education, the setting of their novels, and the hybridity of their approach and subject-matter. For example, Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish author, well-versed in the intricacies of the East and West cultural contacts, writing on Istanbul-a liminal land between East and West, and making use in his novels of both postmodernism (as a Western phenomenon) and the mesnevi mystical romances, meddah, narrative styles that mix Perso-Arabic and pure Turkish.

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Chapter 2: From Behind the Iron Curtain – Herta Müller’s Female Gothic offers a Gothic reading of some of Herta Müller’s novels, focusing on issues of politics, gender, the body and trauma, intertextually connected in The Land of Green Plums, The Appointment, The Passport and Nadirs. The premises of the research are implied in its very title: Romania and its nightmare, embodied by the vampiric figure of Nicolae Ceauşescu, reclaim even now the attention of the Western world and ensure the methaphoric survival of the dictator, as well as that of the memory of broken generations. The strong vampiric subtext in Müller’s novels can help decode the ideological context of her narratives. As the author was trapped for three decades in a totalitarian state and forced to develop strategies of survival on a daily basis, her novels stand testimony to the Gothic, horror-like atmosphere of the nightmarish Eastern European history in the communist era. The chapter begins with a survey of female Gothic and the present debates in the field. In discussing the complex relationships between characters, either female friends or mothers and daughters, the theoretical emphasis will be on Hoeveler’s victim feminism (an unpdated version of Ellen Moers’ “heroinism”), which, in this reading, becomes a creative negotiation of trauma and loss (Lacan’s definition of the concept of loss as “anxiety”, as “lack of lack”), Moers’ sexual Gothic and Firestone’s recently coined matrophobic Gothic. Chapter 3: Lost in Bombay and Istanbul – Urban Gothic in Gregory David Robert’s Shantaram and Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book assesses the two novels from the perspective of Urban Gothic. As a sub-genre that developed in nineteenth century England, Urban Gothic included Reynolds, with his Mysteries of London as well as Dickens with his many novels set in the imperial capital. The two protagonists of the novels that make up the subject of this chapter are engaged in a struggle for redefining disrupted identities in the urban settings of Bombay and Istanbul. The theoretical outlines are inspired mostly by Kristeva, Levinas, Deleuze and Guattari. With regard to Kristeva’s concept of the abject, this chapter differs from the previous one on postcolonial Gothic, in that it argues for the extrapolation of the concept to decode space, particularly the slums of Bombay, which make up “the unintended city” (in Jai Sen’s words). The philosophical lens of Levinas and his concepts of Self and Other, as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome concept are also part of the theoretical outlook of this chapter whose aim is to depict the complex dialectic established in the struggle for the recuperation of the individual sense of Self. In this reading of the two novels under scrutiny the Self may either expand beyond imagination, willingly incorporating the Other (Shantaram), or be threatened with dissolution (The Black Book) in an alienating and threatening cityscape.

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The second part of this book concentrates on different Gothic tropes and concepts, such as liminality, the uncanny, gendered spaces, and the Gothic sublime. This part contains three chapters; the first and the second focus on one novel from a single author, while the third comprises a comparative essay. Chapter 4: ‘Simply Gothic’ – Liminality and Blurring Boundaries in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, while considering the previous readings of Ishiguro’s novel (as autobiography and dystopia) focuses on liminality, and the boundary-blurring technique. A concept derived from anthropology (particularly V. Turner and Van Gennep), liminality is also a useful concept in analyzing literature and is one of the staples of Gothic literature and criticism. As Viljoen and der Merwe point out, liminality refers to the regarding of literature as “part of society’s rituals, albeit a voluntary ritual” (Viljoen and der Merwe: 11). From this perspective, Ishiguro’s novel will be read as a cultural ritual of an increasingly Gothicized and dystopian world. More specifically, this chapter will tackle the distinctions and the juxtapositions of human versus non-human, present versus past, art versus life, enlightenment versus ignorance, language versus meaning, and arché versus non-arché. Nicholas Royle’s connections between liminality and the uncanny, and his and Derrida’s discussions of ghosts (hauntology) will also be instrumental in arguing that Ishiguro’s novel is centred on the creative clash between the dystopian feeling of complete annihilation at the hands of society, and the individual resilience derived from the overpowering will to be inspired by a multitude of past, personal ghosts. Chapter 5: The Sublime of the Intimate Others – Salman Rushdie’s Shame is built from the perspective of a shift of emphasis from the rhetorical, the natural and the ideological to the psychological and the subjective. Consequently, it posits and argues for three interrelated aims. Firstly, it attempts to reinforce Vijay Mishra’s argument that, almost identically to the Gothic sublime, in Salman Rushdie’s novel, “no sublime […] is pure in terms of either discursivity or phenomenality”, and that “all sublimes are contaminated” (Mishra: 22). Secondly, this chapter questions and challenges the limitations of Patricia Yaeger’s concept of female sublime according to which this is a strategy and narrative of empowerment to be mainly used by female authors. Finally, as both aim and word of conclusion, this chapter claims that Rushdie’s novel is informed by the Gothic sublime, an aesthetic category which refuses to dwell on narrow female-male distinctions. Instead, the Gothic sublime escapes categorizations and as such, in this novel is simply instrumental in the creation of memorable female/male characters whose narratives of death, destruction and blind revenge serve to connect the elusive borders of gender, nation and monstrosity.

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Chapter 6: Refracting Spaces in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain focuses on the Gothic genre’s acknowledged ability to exploit the house’s differentiated sexual spaces, establishing a dialectic relationship between interiority and/or entrapment. As mentioned by Beatriz Colomina in the Introduction to Sexuality and Space “the politics of space are always sexual, even if the space is central to the mechanisms of the erasure of sexuality” (Colomina: iii–v). Taking its cue from Colomina’s discussion of the relationship between politics, sexuality and space, this chapter challenges the assumption that house necessarily signifies home and starts from the premise that for the Gothic heroine, since the founders of the genre such as Walpole and Radcliffe, the house is either prison or crypt. Thus, the symbolic value of space rendered as subject extension in two women’s novels constitute the focus of this chapter; moreover, it is argued that in spite of the different contexts (historical, biographical, and social) that oversaw their production, both novels can be analyzed from a Gothic angle, through concepts belonging to different disciplines such as architecture, philosophy, psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. The theoretical framework of this chapter mainly focuses on Anthony Vidler’s discussion of the uncanniness of space, Heidegger’s equation of space with being/dwelling, Abram and Torok’s examination of the phantom as a metapsychological fact, and Jung’s investigation of the archetypes of self, persona and individuation in relation to the Gothic space of the haunted house.

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Tales of Labyrinths – The White Tiger and the Postcolonial Metamorphosis of Gothic

When Aravind Adiga was interviewed about the origins of his novel The White Tiger he explained that it was the result of his “coming back to India”, “after having lived in Australia, and studied English literature at Columbia University in New York and Oxford University”, in other words after having lived “abroad from the age of 15 until 28” (Adiga 2008: 2). Clearly then, according to its author, The White Tiger is a narrative born from a ‘return’ to, a ‘re-acquaintance’ with, and a ‘reappraisal’ of social, psychological, and national realities, which had seemingly melted into the larger frame of a Western educational framework, but which were definitely ‘there’, waiting to ‘haunt’ Adiga and claim their right to being voiced, in fictional form. Considering the long period of time that he spent abroad in his formative years, the young author belongs to the category of the socalled “deshi-writers”, i.e. Indian writers who often return to India in what they write, not just to placate a most natural nostalgia, but also because of a shift in perspective, leading to a double discovery of their country of origin and country of choice (Kumar: xiv). Interestingly, Adiga seems to have brought from abroad, and locally revived not just a fresh, inquisitive spirit, perhaps (not necessarily, though) more alert in depicting Indian and Western realities, but also the Gothic, a genre that saw the light of day in eighteenth century England and managed to survive into our postmodern world. Recently Gothic has extended beyond its claimed and familiar domains (psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism) and allowed for juxtapositions with postcolonialism. At first sight this seems an ‘uncanny’ marriage, as Smith and Hughes remark: Theories of postcolonialism and scholarship on the Gothic might, superficially, appear to be the product of rather different intellectual, cultural and historical traditions. The Gothic, a fantastical literary form that had its heyday in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries might seem to inhabit a different world than that confronted by writers working in postcolonial contexts in the twenty-first century. However, the picture is more complex that this because an historical examination of the Gothic and accounts of postcolonialism indicate the presence of a shared interest in challenging post-enlightenment notions of rationality. In the Gothic, as in Romanticism in general, this challenge was developed through an exploration of the feelings, desires and passions which compromised the Enlightenment project of rationality calibrating all forms of knowledge and behaviours. (Smith and Hughes: 1)

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This unlikely juxtaposition between Gothic and postcolonialism may be understood in view of the many unsolved (and still lingering) problems of colonialism which could be addressed better – ironically – via a European narrative mode par excellence, reputed for its ambiguities and its transgressions, but mostly for preserving a strong sense of history.22 The works so far recognized as belonging to postcolonial Gothic, and on whose analysis resides the very existence of this new, emergent sub-field include Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle and The Robber’s Bride, Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, Fury and Shame, Ruth Prawer Jhabwala’s Heat and Dust, Naipaul’s Guerrillas and Toni Morrison’s Beloved to name but a few. In all these narratives Gothic and postcolonialism display a “shared interest in challenging post-enlightenment notions of rationality”, as a most obvious point of convergence with “the Gothic [which] gives a particular added emphasis to this through its seeming celebration of the irrational, the outlawed and the socially and culturally dispossessed” (Smith and Hughes: 1). It is particularly this “seeming celebration of the irrational, the outlawed, and the socially and culturally dispossessed” that forms the substance of The White Tiger and inspires my present analysis. More specifically, my reading of Adiga’s novel focuses on the discussion of typical Gothic tropes in a postcolonial context, such as: the Other versus the Self, light versus dark, döppelganger, abject and grotesque; the theoretical framework of this chapter draws on (withough being limited to) Jansson’s theory of Internal Orientalism, Bahktin’s discussion of the grotesque, Bhabha’s concept of hybridity and the Other, Spivak’s view of the subaltern, Stirner’s critique of the concept of the universal human, and Kristeva’s notion of the abject. Equally important is another aim of my discussion of Adiga’s novel, one that is derived from and linked to the theoretical framework employed; I seek here to establish connections and parallels with other Gothic or Gothic-influenced narratives, so as to contextualize a Gothic reading of a text which has not been analyzed so far from this particular perspective. The plot of The White Tiger is deceptively simple, but rich in allowing inter-textual exercises. Balram, the son of a poor rickshaw-puller manages to escape

22 Perhaps the contemporary connections between Gothic and postcolonialism are easily justifiable if one considers them as a natural outgrowth of earlier Gothic works which tackled the links between colonialism and Gothic. Among such works, Michael Franklin includes Beckford’s Vathek, a “landmark in the history of European literary Orientalism”, Gothicized poems such as Walter Savage Landor’s Gebir (1798) and Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810) (Franklin qtd. in Hughes and Smith: 3).

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the narrow confines of his native village and gets a job as a driver with the family of a Westernized Indian living in Delhi. Although a considerable move upwards on the social scale, Balram’s new position furthermore intermediates his contemplation of even higher opportunities which he is determined to grasp at any cost. Although initially fond of his master and keen to obtain his approval, mimicking him in detail, Balram will end up slitting his throat and stealing a large amount of money which will enable him to start a new existence as an “entrepreneur” and a man of substantial fortune. Far from drawing a moral conclusion and punishing his Machiavellian hero, Adiga chooses to leave the lines of narrative open-ended, a strategy that has fuelled many controversies and will undoubtedly continue to do so. Adiga’s narrative structure makes it appear to some of its early commentators as an “epistolary novel”, although the author clarifies that “there are no real letters involved”. Instead, the reader is witnessing “the narrator […] lying in his small room in Bangalore in the middle of the night, talking aloud about the story of his life”, “obsessed (a colonial legacy, probably) with the outsider’s gaze […] and stimulated to think about his country and society by the imminent arrival of a foreigner, and an important one” (Adiga 2008: 2). From the very first pages then, the time, “11:32 p.m.” (The White Tiger: 3), the chandelier23 – mute witness to the pouring of thoughts and feelings and the language of confession – English – a language not shared by either the confessor, nor the confessant, but employed as a lingua franca or meta-language of dominance over both past and present, argue for a Gothic and postcolonial perspective. The seven nights during which a life-story is told will be brutally dissected by the protagonist of The White Tiger. In their bareness of narration and directness bordering on violence, the seven nights of story-telling in Adiga’s novel call to memory The Arabian Nights and their contemporary re-writing in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. As argued by Teverson, the attempts of Rushdie’s Saleem to re-organize post-partition Indian history through the potentiality of the tale-telling are modelled on The Arabian Nights, frequently referred to and hence converted into a source of authority (Teverson: 217). However, The Nights as primordial model is 23 At the beginning of his confession, Balram mentions that the only other ‘presence’ in the room, almost overtaking it, “huge…, full of small diamond-shaped glass pieces”, with a “personality of its own” (The White Tiger: 7) is a chandelier. By the end of his confessional journey, after having committed an abominable crime, he considers the possibility of all his many chandeliers “crushing down to the floor” (The White Tiger: 320), possibly as a sign of divine justice. The personified chandelier calls to mind the famous one in Gaston Leroux’s Gothic The Phantom of the Opera, which crashes down on the audience after silently witnessing the development of a plot of betrayal, love, wild passions and ultimately murder.

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but a fabricated collection, merely the product of the efforts of Orientalist writers in the eighteenth century. As Rana Kabbani postulated in her seminal Imperial Fictions; Europe’s Myths of the Orient, The Arabian Nights, a source of inspiration for many Gothic writers, with Beckford’s Vathek probably the best-known example, is merely a reflection of a narrative structure considered as meaningful to Western eyes, designed to satisfy the palate of Western readers, inspire interest in the Orient, and also establish an authoritative discourse of power over it: The collection of stories commonly referred to as the ‘Arabian Nights’ was never a definitive text in Arabic literature as is generally supposed by a Western reader. These stories, the Alf laila wa laila were first and foremost folklore kept alive orally […] Thus there was no definitive text of Alf laila wa laila, but numerous variations on that particular set of oral narrative […] It was only when an European encountered these stories, decided to translate them and produced a set text that remained in currency for over a century (1704–1838) that they became institutionalised in the way they are known to the West. (Kabbani: 48–9)

Obviously inspired by The Arabian Nights and/or Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Adiga nevertheless goes beyond the labyrinthine, open-ended suggestions of either Scheherazade or Saleem. Thus, he offers both an alternative to the thousand and one nights as narrative framework and a way of deconstructing the grand narratives of the East by opposing them to their Western counterparts, only to subvert the latter as well. The protagonist of The White Tiger completes the cycle of his deeds and becomes the master of his own fate, doomed as it may be, in seven nights. Not only does the structuring figure change – the dark world of Adiga’s novel is told by the narrator over seven nights, not a thousand, but The Arabian Nights as an already subaltern, vague, obscure narrative frame compiled, as stated before, by the authority of the West – is furthermore opposed to Western master-narratives. The very obvious biblical connotations and the rich symbolism of the magic number seven call to memory the well-known passage from the Old Testament: And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made. (Gen ii: 2–3, emphasis added)

However, this apparent act of acknowledgment24 and confirmation of the perpetuation of Christian founding myths, internalized as they seem to be by the formerly colonized (I am referring here to both the author and his protagonist) have a different 24 The Christian God created the world in seven days, not seven nights… Literary pun-intended, I believe, on Adiga’s part.

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function in The White Tiger. Balram’s world, as revealed through his confessions25 is one of murder and destruction, and the security he appears to have gained through his pathological deeds is not even remotely similar to the Christian God’s self-satisfaction at the end of His toils. Therefore, by employing taboo Christian symbolism, related to the acts of God as all good and omnipotent, the author purposely distorts the very image of God as supreme, benign and life-giving and ironically substitutes Him with a self-appointed Indian entrepreneur. Adiga, in an authentic Gothic manner subverts and deconstructs colonial power narratives by rendering them as evil in a postcolonial context. This subversion becomes even more an act of “writing back” to the grand master-narratives, since Balram’s act of self-construction and defiance of authority – designed by masters for the use of servants – reminds the readers of the more spectacular defiance addressed to the Christian God by the fallen angel, the superb hero of Milton’s Paradise Lost. At the end of his toils, carried out in an India depicted as Land of Darkness, Balram triumphantly announces: “I’ll say it was all worthwhile to know, just for a day, just for an hour, just for a minute, what it means not to be a servant. I think I am ready to have children, Mr. Premier. Ha!” (The White Tiger: 321, emphasis added). Interestingly then, this self-made Indian entrepreneur shares a deep spiritual kinship with the being who defiantly called to rebellion in the prophetic words: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven!” (Milton: 263)

25 Confession is one of the most well-known Gothic tropes, and also one that will later on inform postcolonial novels. See James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Thomas DeQuincey’s The Private Memories of an English Opium Eater, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground. More recently, Coetzee embraced the same mode in his Age of Iron (1990) and The Master of Petersburg (1994). According to Dominic Head, Coetzee’s “development of the mode fashions a postcolonial equivalent to Hogg’s agonized Romanticism” and seeks “to extract from it a secular equivalent of absolution” (Head: 233). Adiga’s Balram is very far from aspiring to absolution; quite the opposite, his confessions are provocative and ever-defiant, witty and sarcastic, but never self-apologetic. Apart from constituting the substance of the narrative and the modality for Balram to introduce himself and reveal all his entrepreneurial hideousness to the readers, The White Tiger is also Adiga’s journalistic confession. As Brouillet remarks: “Adiga additionally claims that his treatment of Balram’s labour stems from a distinction he was forced to draw, in his own career, between his “official reporter’s diary” and “another, secret diary”, that contained what he was meant to leave out of his journalism, when his responsibility was to that “middle-class Indian”, rather than to his or her servants. Thus, the novel, a fictional reading of the contexts of Adiga’s “secret diary” is meant to right this discursive imbalance. Stated precisely, it is meant to correct what the author came to perceive as mainstream journalism’s elision of the reality of exploited service labour from images of India’s economic boom” (Brouillet: 42).

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The confession mode, apart from inspiring authenticity and demanding participation both rational and emotional from the reader, is employed by Adiga to introduce a very ambiguous type of protagonist, the anti-hero. Balram, in the present reading a typical Gothic character, inhabits the liminal space of human emotions, and can be alternatively approached in sympathy and rejected in horror. Peter Robbins, in The Telegraph review on Adiga’s novel, subtly links the ambiguous substance of the protagonist and what may be called the ‘present state of affairs’ in modern India: “A sign, for the people who notice that sort of thing, of just how thrusting India’s economy has become: it can now be embodied in fiction by a desperate killer, […] by a satirical murderer … Balram Halwai” (Robins: 1, emphasis added). This very interesting appraisal, presumably but not necessarily voicing the views of The Telegraph as a major leader of opinion, reveals the double and dangerous significance of the protagonist. In Balram, the private and the public overlap, in an image evoking violence and peril on both levels. Not only is Balram a murderer, a personal menace to those close to him, but – if one agrees with Robbins’ pertinent observation – he can also be read as a symbol for a potential “murderer” economy, like India’s, vigorous, relentless, “thrusting” and hence the major Other to the Self of the economies of the Western world. Moreover, the very fact that Balram calls himself an “entrepreneur”, a “businessman”, speaks for a rather distorted perception of the concept, when compared to its equivalent in the West (at least theoretically), but all the more dangerous if grasped as the model to be emulated. So what is the life story of this dark character and how can he be read through the lens of postcolonial Gothic? According to Khair: “The Gothic and the postcolonial are obviously linked by a common preoccupation with the Other and aspects of Otherness” (Khair: 3). The analysis of the case of Otherness as it is depicted in The White Tiger expands the limits of the concept and refers not only to the dichotomy Self versus Other, in terms of West versus East, but mainly to what may be called Internal Otherness26, which refers to demarcations within the category of either Self, or Other. The protagonist of The White Tiger enters the narrative nameless (he is known as “Munna” which means “boy”) and thus a character who is apart, different from others in his native village. Although not literally an

26 Internal Otherness (or Internal Orientalism) in the sense I use it here, is an attempt at a psychological adaptation of a concept derived from the works of various scholars who focus on divisions within regions and within nations. A proper explanation of Internal Orientalism, with references to the text of The White Tiger will be offered in the following pages.

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orphan, Munna is placed outside the comforting boundaries of a caring family structure, since his mother’s illness, and his father’s overwhelming, ultimately unrewarding attempts at making a living practically render him an orphan. ‘Didn’t your mother name you?’ ‘She’s very ill, sir. She lies in bed and spews blood: She’s got no time to name me.’ ‘And your father?’ ‘He’s a rickshaw-puller, sir: He’s got no time to name me.’ ‘Don’t you have a granny? Aunts? Uncles?’ ‘They’ve got no time either.’(The White Tiger: 15)

The above lines, the literary birth-certificate of a complex hero/anti-hero like Balram, suggest a future life-trajectory of displacement and alienation, originating in both extreme poverty and neglect and confirming from incipient stages the status of the Other. Ironically, the name chosen for him by his teacher, a character from outside his family circle, ‘consolidates’ his position of subaltern to subaltern authorities.27 “Balram” is ironically translated as “the sidekick of the God Krishna” (The White Tiger: 14), a poignant ‘coincidence’ meant to subject him, as the bearer of the name “Balram” to someone (his teacher), whose name ‘happens’ to be “Krishna”. The implications of the act of naming, which ostensibly erect walls of servitude around the character and render him as permanent victim, scapegoat and kickback to a system and a world that ‘does not have time’ for its dispossessed are particularly relevant from a postcolonial Gothic perspective. Nevertheless, a character like Balram’s is always at odds with the attempt to label him; hence, his very ‘ascension’ may be read as a reversal of Spivak’s postcolonial conclusion, a critique of her assumptions and generalizations.28 This problematic hero is able to change identities29 and fabricate potentialities at each and every step. From “Munna” to “Balram Halwai” to “White Tiger” and finally to “Ashok Sharma”, 27 The half-comic, half-despotic figure of the teacher, the disdain and scorn characterizing his dealings with his pupils, has its own explanations, if not quite justifications. He is, Adiga tells us, but a poor person among the poor, who “hadn’t been paid his salary in six months”, considering “a Gandhian protest to retrieve his missing wages”, yet “terrified of losing his job, because through the pay of any government job in India is poor, the accidental advantages are numerous” (The White Tiger: 33). 28 I am referring here to the seminal Can the Subaltern Speak? and Spivak’s negative answer to the rhetorical question that frames her analysis. Not only does Balram not need any intermediaries to express his views, but he purposely renders them as shocking and subversive for both East and West. 29 The character Balram and his ability to ‘shape-shift’ in terms of the names that seemingly delineate a unitary identity construction process, but actually preserve a state of

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readers are drawn into stories of unlawful deeds, opportunism, prostitution, drinking, gambling, culminating in murder. These are the stories which may shape the destiny of a potentially outspoken underclass, determined to alter its historical predicament at the hands of both external and internal ruthless masters and reclaim the right to become an individual, however evil, extreme and pathological. Balram and his tales of ‘becoming’ have obvious similarities with the typical Gothic plots which, in Botting’s word, focus on “usurpation, intrigue, betrayal, and murder”, appearing “to celebrate criminal behavior, violent executions of selfish ambitions and voracious passion and licentious enactments of carnal desire” (Botting: 6). Therefore, Balram can be read as an Indian figure of horror, embodying the caste and class fears related to a potentially monstrous rise of the lower caste, roughly the Indian equivalent of the proletariat. As such, he transgresses boundaries of parenthood, is self-forged and thus different from Shelley’s monstrous creature, in that he appears to discard the need for paternal guidance, which renders him all the more terrifying and threatening to the established order. Gothic as a genre indulges in a play of dualities and oppositions, and thrives on transgressing boundaries of space, gender, and class. Adiga divides the setting of his novel into an India of Darkness and an India of Light, with the first representing the village world where Balram was born and the second one the urban space to which he aspires30. Thus, the author employs space and the village versus city distinctions as a background for exposing and criticizing the binary nature of Indian culture31, and the caste system which he sardonically reduces to “men with big bellies” and “men with small bellies”. In Adiga’s India of Darkness, all liminality, and fragmentariness makes him into a literary brother to Jasmine from the eponymous novel by Bharati Mukherjee, among others. 30 It is at this point that Gothic converges with Post-colonialism and Orientalism. Turner (2000), Wolff (1994), Todorova (1997), and Paulgaard (2008) draw heavily on Said’s Orientalism (1978) in discussing the relevance of the division within regions and within the nations. Lawson (2007) mentions gender, place and class differences as the basis for Othering. However, it is Jansson (2003, 2005) who achieves a remarkable merging of Hechter’s pioneering theory of Internal Colonialism and Said’s Orientalism; in Jansson’s view Internal Orientalism can be summarized as a fixed practice and tradition of projecting different vices and lacks onto a subaltern region, with the aim of fabricating a ‘superior’, ‘exalted’ national identity, free from human and geographical inadequacies. Balram’s aims can thus be said to be focused toward fostering an identity divorced from the ‘vices’ and ‘lacks’ automatically projected onto his inferior geography. 31 This, as explained above, can be read as an Indian counterpart for the Western Internal Orientalism.

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traditional values that have supported like divisions, such as solid family structures, hierarchical acts of obedience, mostly based on feudal pecuniary dependencies merge into a stifling, and oppressive atmosphere, characterizing a topos of dread and despair. Even ancient beliefs that had been shaped into forceful myths are mercilessly anatomized and exposed in their hideousness. Hence, Balram asserts his own geography and delights in what he perceives to be its authentic characteristics, which contradict all general beliefs; almost with glee, he explains that the axis mundi of the India of Darkness, responsible for its decay is the much celebrated River Ganga, “Mother Ganga, daughter of the Vedas, river of illumination, protector of us all, breaker of the chain of birth and rebirth. Everywhere this river flows, that area is the Darkness” (The White Tiger: 15). Implicitly, the inhabitants of the India of Darkness seem to be trapped in the implacability of Internal Orientalism, which suggests the impossibility of escape from essential geographic identities (Jansson 2003, 2005). The rural India of Darkness and the urban India of Light testify for a division of the world in terms of both time and space; in Massey’s words “space turns into time and geography into history” (Massey: 5).32 For Balram the image of Ganga and the image of his witch-like grandmother Kusum, with “teeth all gone”, that only “made her grin more cunning” and who somehow facilitated “her way into control of the house” (The White Tiger: 15–6) overlap and preside over history itself, converted into a distorted and distorting mythology of childhood, where the body of his dead mother will be ritually consumed by fire. In a poignant Gothic scene, meant to play on the readers’ emotions and break a possible state of complacency, horror is shown as accompanying the funerary rites, with mud covering their ‘poetry’ and with the Indian childhood sucked into a state of oblivion: I looked at the ooze, and I looked at my mother’s flexed foot, and I understood. This mud was holding her back: this big swelling mound of black ooze. She was trying to fight the black mood; her toes were flexed and resisting; but the mud was sucking her in, sucking her in. It was so thick, and more of it was being created every moment as the river washed into the ghat…And then I understood: this was the real god of Benaras – this black mud of the Ganga into which everything died, and decomposed, 32 Adiga is not alone in his attempt to portray the “India of Darkness”. There are many other remarkable depictions of a Dark India, among the best known: A Suitable Boy (Vikram Seth, 1994), A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry, 1995), The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy, 1997), Sacred Games (Vikram Chandra, 2006), The Glass Palace, Sea of Poppies, (Amitav Gosh, 2000 and 2008 respectively). Careful readings of these works seems to sustain the argument that the younger generation of Indian authors writing in English have all gone ‘Gothic’.

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and was reborn from, and died into again. The same would happen to me when I died and they brought me here. Nothing would get liberated here. I stopped breathing. This was the first time in my life I fainted. I haven’t been back to see the Ganga since then: I am leaving that river for the American tourists! (The White Tiger: 18–9)

The very last sentence of the above quotation demonstrates Adiga’s insightful perspective rendered through his powerful hero/anti-hero into the devastating effects of succumbing to mythologies that had long lost their relevance. Far from preserving the image of Indian belief in Ganga as embodying peace, hope and the contentment of performed familial duties to the deceased, the only way for the river to retain its mystique is its spiritual appropriation by anonymous American tourists who might long for a glimpse of it, as either counterpart to an existence centered on material values only, or as an opportunity for experiencing cheap death thrills from the comfortable position of witnesses.33 Either way, in a very sharp and concise form, Adiga achieves both the deconstruction of cherished symbols of Indian-ness, and their ‘selling’ to naïve Westerners, in an act of reversed Orientalism.34 33 In his obvious display of the actual ‘de-sacredness’ of the Ganges, Goh notices, Balram “essentially refutes the whole notion of India as Hindu nation, and “Hindutva” as its way of life, which is propagated by Hindu Right parties like the BJP and Shiv Sena, and endorsed by like-minded individuals and organizations throughout the Indian diaspora” (Goh: 334). 34 For his depiction of India, perceived as the result of what is mostly a perpetuation of Orientalist attitudes, Adiga was heavily criticized by some Indian critics, such as Shobhan Saxena who claims that “…Adiga’s story may remain the view of a professional observer, who failed to see anything good about the country he travelled through as a journalist, always recording and never experiencing anything real. It could be mere suspicion, but it takes care of our guilt” (qtd. in Singh: 101). In my opinion, such a comment is due to an overwhelming national need, that of ‘protecting’ the ‘real India’ from the critical eyes of Westerners. In reality, far from celebrating the Westerners as objective, rational, and scientific observers or classifiers, Adiga through his character Balram suggests that only an insufficiently developed intellect, a childish, naïve and even morbid spirit (well-known attributes of the natives, as depicted by Orientalists) like that of American tourists could possibly long for the thrill of witnessing the spectacle of death and horror which is the true essence of a Ganga experience. This passage in The White Tiger can be also referred to in Adiga’s interview ‘Dangers of Ignoring India’s Poor Are Greater’, in which the author comments on the Western reception of his book: “I don’t think that many people in the West will take comfort from this figure, the main character in the book. It is not a figure they can patronize or condescend to. This character is very entrepreneurial and smart and he has a very negative view of Westerners and of white people. He is quite happy to take on the West. He is quite an aggressive, confident character” (Adiga 2008: 1).

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Along with dismembering national mythologies long converted into hostile geographical realities, Adiga through Balram, his fictional mouth-piece, is also harshly critical of human geographies. The masters of the India of Darkness are rendered as local adaptations of Orwellian nature. The four Zamindars (feudal lords) who rule Balram’s rural world of birth are called ‘the Buffalo’, ‘the Stork’, ‘the Wild Boar’ and ‘the Raven’, with physical characteristics moulded to fit the animals after which they are nicknamed. For example, “the Stork was a fat man with a fat moustache, thick and curved and pointy at the tips”, who “owned the river that flowed outside the village”, and “took a cut of every catch of fish caught by every fisherman in the river”, the Wild Boar – his brother, was the proud owner of “all the good agricultural land around Laxmangarh” and a pair of teeth, “on either side of his nose”, “long and curved, like little tusks” (The White Tiger: 24–5). The four ‘social’ animals in Adiga’s novel preside over a sub-world of people reduced to the condition of animals and insects, composite creatures that squirm and crawl for a meagre income, who, while attempting to act from within the conceptual boundaries of hard-work that will ‘pay off’, and bravely struggling in the face of abject poverty, in fact are grotesque distortions of humanity. Balram’s father is depicted as wearing a symbolic band around his neck, since the “clavicle is curved…in high relief, like a dog’s collar”, with a body on which the story of a life is written in a Kafkaesque manner, “in a sharp pen” so that he resembles a “human beast of burden” (The White Tiger: 27). The men working in tea-shops along the Ganga are but “human spiders that go crawling in between and under the tables”, “crushed humans in crushed uniforms”, yet perform their jobs with “honesty, dedication and sincerity”. (The White Tiger: 51).35 Arguably the most

35 The Orwellian nature of names is something familiar to the Western readers. Fanon adds a postcolonial touch to it, via the analogy he establishes between oppressed subjects and animals: “When the settler seeks to describe the native fully in exact terms he constantly refers to the bestiary. The European rarely hits on a picturesque style; but the native, who knows what is in the mind of the settler, guesses at once what he is thinking of. Those hordes of vital statistics, those hysterical masses, those faces bereft of all humanity, those distended bodies which are like nothing on earth, that mob without beginning or end, those children who seem to belong to nobody, that laziness stretched out in the sun, that vegetable rhythm of life – all this forms part of the colonial vocabulary” (Fanon: 42–43). However, it should be noted that in a place like Kashmir, for example, surnames are usually nicknames, some denoting an animal and usually emphasizing the similarities with that particular animal. Therefore, what appears grotesque from a Western perspective is, in fact, a social/cultural practice in some Eastern territories.

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poignant animal imagery that Adiga employs in order to summarize the essence of a system which survives because of the passivity of those who constitute its lowest layers, is the metaphor of the “Rooster Coop”. In this terrifying description, millions of human beings bond in lifetime servitude, incessantly working for the fortification of the power relations which characterize the rapport between classes and castes, so that any attempt to ‘break free’ is refuted as sacrilege. The servitude is so strong that, “you can put the key of his emancipation in a man’s hands, he will throw it back at you, with a curse” (The White Tiger: 175–6). The above substitutions between humans and animals call to mind Bakhtin’s discussion of the grotesque in Rabelais and his World. However, while for Bakhtin, “the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract” “to the material level” (Bakhtin: 19) is both grotesque and strangely vital, Adiga’s representation of the grotesque is closely linked to degradation, and a perspective of the human body only as object, thing, rather than subject. Thus, in The White Tiger Adiga adds a new dimension to Bakhtin’s discourse; his transgression of the abject limits of the human body as human body nevertheless blurs the boundaries between animal and human to the almost extinction of the latter. The suggestion is also supported by the comments made by The White Tiger protagonist related to what distinguishes free individuals – as subjects, from slaves – as objects: Iqbal, who is one of the four best poets in the world – the others being Rumi, Mirza Ghalib, and a fourth fellow, also a Muslim, whose name I’ve forgotten – has written a poem where he says this about slaves: They remain slaves because they can’t see what is beautiful in the world. (The White Tiger: 40, emphasis added)

Beauty cannot be perceived by either master-animals, or servant-animals. Its ineffable qualities escape those who make the power-poles of Adiga’s India of Darkness and leave unattended the human potential to go beyond the sordid mundane; beauty as freedom, as time for contemplation of the world and Self is implacably and eternally overthrown by its opposites: grotesque and abject. Even more powerfully, the use of the grotesque as degrading strategy is not only limited to human characters. Balram starts his journey under the flag of hubris and deliberately abases the many divinities of the Muslim, Christian and Hindu pantheon put together, reducing them to a laughable corporeality, and converting sanctity into satire, in another Bakhtinian image:36 36 There is a difference, though, between Bakhtin’s perspective on the grotesque body as comic body and Adiga’s use of the grotesque. While Bakhtin liberates and sees gross materiality, abject corporeality as source of regeneration and energy, Adiga denounces the degradation of the human/divine body as matter only and claims that

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It is an ancient and venerated custom of people in my country to start a story by praying to a Higher Power. I guess, Your Excellency that I too should start off by kissing some god’s arse. Which god’s arse, though? […] Bear with me, Mr. Jiabao. This could take a while. How quickly do you think you could kiss 36,000,004 arses? (The White Tiger: 8–9)

Ironically, Balram’s escape from the rural India of Darkness into the urban India of Light does not signify his escape from the overpowering force of the grotesque. In the city, Balram becomes the driver of Mr. Ashok, who is one of the sons of the ‘Stork’ and nephews of the “Wild Boar.” The animal print labelling Balram, as well as those around him, regardless of their caste and financial status thus survives, only in a different disguise. He earns the nickname “Country-Mouse”, given by the other drivers and thus confirms his status as subject of the ‘animal kingdom’, the jungle that marks both the rural as well as the urban existence. Moreover, together with his fellow-servants, he is still part of the ‘underground’ life, a dark mirror of the world above, the masters’ world: I don’t know how buildings are designed in your country, but in India every apartment block, every house, every hotel is built with a servants’ quarters – sometimes at the back, and sometimes (as in the case of Buckingham Towers B Block) underground – a warren of interconnected rooms where all the drivers, cooks, sweepers, maids and chefs of the apartment block can rest, sleep, and wait. (The White Tiger: 130, emphasis added)

The spatial antidote to the labyrinthine structure inhabited by the mass of undifferentiated servants is also a site labelled by its abject and grotesque features; Balram chooses for himself the only ‘private’ space, a small room with walls “covered with cockroaches” whose “chewing made a continuous noise”, which get crushed but not deterred from landing on the net and meeting the same fate, in an unending cycle of unnecessary deaths (The White Tiger: 131). Thus, the rural India of Darkness and the urban India of Light mockingly overlap and testify to a hostile and alienating place, inhabited by composite creatures, half-human, half-animal, forced to keep company with other species and reduced to squirming, chewing, defecating masses. It is my contention here that Adiga’s sensibility in tackling spatial, cultural and human realities has a Gothic flavour to it, as it blurs boundaries and thrives on liminality as the very condition of existence. Hence, far from ascribing darkness to there is no regeneration involved, no expected salvation, and no escape from the destructive earthiness. The discussion of the gods’ many ‘arses’ and the de-sanctification of Mother Ganga into repulsive mud are thus kindred strategies.

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the regions of Hell and damnation (raised in the novel, but not authentic matters of concern), it is the dark and the night when Balram tells his stories, remembers his past and plans for his future that give birth to a new life and consciousness. From this point of view, Adiga’s novel calls to mind Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, in which, as stated by Botting “the contemplation of death and decay serves to encourage speculations on the life to come” and “darkness enables a person to perceive the soul within, it expands the mind by producing a consciousness of its own potential for divinity” (Botting: 33–34). In Young’s words, Balram could very well declaim: Darkness has more Divinity for me, It strikes Thought inward, it drives back the Soul To settle on Herself, our Point supreme! (qtd. in Botting: 34)

The only character who initially escapes inclusion into and absorption by India’s “animal world” and is singled out as a higher being, in spite of his family ties, is Mr. Ashok. This Westernized Indian shares with Balram an ancestral place of origin, but is depicted as inhabiting a different sphere altogether. His physical characteristics (tall and handsome), his gentleness, and generally tolerant views are in rigid conflict with everyone else’s, so that he appears as an authentic divine figure to Balram, who dotes on him and his wife Pinky Madam, in a similar manner to Hanuman unconditionally serving Ram and Sita (The White Tiger: 38). As pointed out by Hansen: Years abroad have inflicted a benign amnesia upon Mr. Ashok. He has forgotten about paan and the need for spittoons; he is oblivious to Hindu bias against Muslims; he is startled at the intricacies of caste and his driver’s ersatz religiosity. Mr. Ashok’s innocence and naiveté makes him an ideal boss to work for, and Balram quickly attaches himself to his new patron. (Hansen: 303)

A further expansion of Hansen’s argument regarding the special bond between Balram and Ashok suggests an initial reading of their characters as a brotherhood of Others. Ashok, having returned to India after spending years in New York, is forced to get re-acquainted with an intricate network of family ties, led by a corrupted and corrupting father and brother. Having married a woman of a different caste, in a different country (USA), he has to suffer the consequences of his choice, at home, facing his wife’s unwillingness and inability to adapt to Indian realities. His wife’s rejection of India is mirrored by his male relatives’ inertia, translated into a system of patriarchal gender relations that impose obedience on the female and a firm hand on the male. Ashok, influenced by his “American ways” (The White Tiger: 139), apparently more liberal and inclined towards a lenient

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behaviour in the domestic sphere, commits many acts of personal and cultural ­insubordination. Through varying degrees of rebellion, Ashok’s character is a reflection which reinforces Balram’s Otherness. Unsurprisingly then, Balram’s fascination with his master’s ways turns into a desire to emulate Ashok and become the mimic man. From buying the same type of clothes so as to be granted access to one of the flashy urban malls, to learning how to see the world through Ashok’s eyes, Balram’s attempts at copying and reproducing the master’s image call to mind the many acts of adoration performed by Frankenstein’s monster in the attempt to become like his creator: “And so I saw the room with his eyes; smelt it with his nose; poked it with his fingers – I had already begun to digest my master” (The White Tiger: 79, emphasis added). The verb to digest here and its cannibalistic and vampiric connotations can be interpreted not only as an undying colonial desire to form an identity based on faithful replication of the master race, but it also suggests one of the best known Gothic tropes, the double. Although the general understanding of the double or the doppelgänger refers to the danger of extinction should this dark part of the Self be allowed to manifest itself freely, The White Tiger renders it a different function altogether. By ‘incorporating’ the master through numerous acts of imitation, by initially seeing him as a better, beneficent double, Balram will avoid annihilation, erase his status of ‘invisible man’, and finally reclaim the right to live. From a postcolonial perspective, at a first, superficial glance, Balram appears to idealize the Western culture responsible for his master’s cosmopolitanism, and attempts to penetrate its boundaries, especially when the liberalism of the West dissolves barriers and is instrumental for turning Balram into a confidante. Master and servant enjoy a secret complicity, swift glances in the rear mirror, minor acts of mutual recognition and acknowledgement. Tastes for foreign liquor, expensive perfumes, and white, blonde-haired women are copied by the servant who wants to ‘get Western’. However, gradually, differences of caste, education and financial status start corroding the unlikely brotherhood of Others or doubles. Trivial but numerous instances of difference and separation prepare the grounds for the split of the brotherhood and the return to the ancestral conflict of Self versus Other. Ashok will deliberately mock Balram’s inability to pronounce foreign words, like “mall” and “pizza”, cruelly exposing the driver’s lack of general knowledge which gains him the epithet of “half-baked”37, and will finally agree with Balram playing 37 Hansen suggested that all these acts of humiliation may be read as a ‘projection’ onto Balram of Ashok’s “self-hatred of the inauthentic migrant.” While supportive of her argument, I would also like to add that Ashok himself makes a last desperate attempt

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the scapegoat for a car accident caused by Pinky Madam. All of the above examples argue for a case of abuse of servant by master. As stated by Punter, “Gothic, from its inception, has provided a range of images of social violence” with “the Gothic castle” that “can be seen as a location where such violence can flourish, in one sense – at least in its earlier manifestations – safely contained by its distancing in time and place, yet at the same time inextricably entwined with more contemporary histories” (Punter 2004: 288). In Adiga’s novel, abuse is re-territorialized in the urban locus, while Balram as victim is as inexorably trapped by caste, education, and subaltern status as the Gothic heroines of Radcliffe and Monk once were by the menacing patriarchal figures inhabiting the castle’s structure. For Balram, the possibility of a life in prison, with more abuse and unjust punishments inflicted on him at the hands of the wardens, seems to be the normal price paid for the ‘privilege’ of being employed and having an income, however meagre. As stated by Azam, “postcolonial gothic is less an intertextual ‘writing back’ to empire than it is a form of commentary on the politics of home that asks fundamental questions about the relations of family life and the private sphere” (Azam: 32). In The White Tiger, as has already been exemplified, we assist in a fracturing of family life, a break from normality and a horrible propensity for destroying the closest. Balram’s own grandmother, the diabolical Kusum, agrees to be the witness to her grandsons’ ‘confession’; on hearing this, Balram cynically comments on the ability of the history of abuse to replicate itself even within the domestic confines: “Doesn’t the driver’s family protest? Far from it. They would actually go about bragging. Their boy Balram had taken the fall, gone to Tihar Jail for his employer. He was loyal as a dog. He was the perfect servant” (The White Tiger: 169). I posit here that loyalty to one’s masters and one’s family is cynically depicted by Adiga and acknowledged by his dark hero as morality, as the principle sustaining family ties and social hierarchies alike. To be more specific, I suggest a reading of Balram’s ‘duties’ to his family and society at large and his consequent refusal to comply with the laws of subordination from Max Stirner’s theoretical perspective on morality and personal identity. According to Stirner, the very concept of a universal human is responsible for the absolutization of moral and rational ideas. This fundamental concept of humanity, of man’s essence is so deeply ingrained that any transgression would represent man’s forsaking of his own humanity. Nevertheless, this essential humanity acts as unspeakable burden and is an alien presence inside to ‘fit in’, to reconstruct his temporarily lost identity as an Indian, by making barriers between himself and Balram visible. The initial “uncanniness” of the warm rapport between master and servant thus gives way to a ‘proper’ hierarchy and subordination.

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man; man, it can be stated, by embracing this generally accepted perspective on humanity, is actually haunted and alienated by his own self, by a specter of “essence” inside him: “Henceforth man no longer, in typical cases, shudders at ghosts inside him, but at himself: is terrified at himself” (Stirner: 41). Similarly, morality is also a “spook”, an abstract ideal and an alienating one, a discursively closed fiction that denies difference and plurality which has transgressed the individual and achieved his complete domination. Stirner does not oppose morality as such but its definition as something sacred, as an unbreakable law; thus, he exposes it as sustained by the cruelty, the domination and the sheer will-to-power. Morality is actually based on complete control over individual will and is thus internalized. Although for Stirner, the individual is paramount, at the same time, he is plagued by impossible moral standards which impede the affirmation of his uniqueness. Such uniqueness can only be achieved if one engages in to question and contest any essentialisms. To return to Adiga’s novel, it becomes obvious that Balram, in his refusal to comply with the general rules of subordination that equate loyalty-family-the rule of law-social hierarchies is willingly breaking taboos, acknowledging his rejection of impossible and actually de-humanizing moral standards (“He was loyal like a dog”). As the narrative proceeds, Balram will question essentialisms of subordination by ‘giving in’ to the dark demands of his nascent individuality, at odds with those around him. This is a supreme gesture of replacing loyalty to others with loyalty to Self, so that, in Stirner’s words, morality can stop acting as a “spook” and free him from the human contacts that can conjure it. As it turns out, in Balram’s case that means all human contacts, including the one with his formerly respected master, Ashok. In a genuine Gothic twist, what should constitute ‘the fall’ of Balram and his incarceration for a deed he had not actually committed, actually signifies his ‘rise’ from the state of victim to that of victimizer. It is Ashok, the educated, well-connected, Westernized Indian the one who will suffer the fatal consequences of his own inability to re-accustom himself with the ‘new state of affairs’ in an India that appears to be struggling to break free from the overpowering Rooster Coop metaphor, and reverse ancient hierarchies. After the accident and after Balram’s miraculous escape from playing the scapegoat (due to some contacts with the police and due to the fact that nobody reported the gruesome death of an anonymous child, an offspring of the India of Darkness), Ashok’s wife leaves him in the middle of the night and returns to New York. The envelope with four thousand and seven hundred rupees that she hands Balram, in a self-apologetic gesture, opens new paths for the servant and once again alters the nature of the relationship with this master. Initially overcome by conflicting

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feelings, ranging from pity to the instincts of self-preservation, Balram almost mothers his despondent boss, tends to his daily needs and drives him to places of facile entertainment at night, thus dangerously changing and challenging the strict nature of subservience. When dissipation takes over Ashok, and he finds solace in pick-up bars, and by fondling call-girls in the back seat of the car, Hansen notices, “he tumbles from the pedestal that Balram had placed him on”, stops being “the proverbial ma-bap”, and becomes “just another lusty male” (Hansen: 303). Consequently, “the cosmopolitan character becomes the victim of the class-based rage of the driver” (Hansen: 304). The final blow to the brotherhood of the Others is unwittingly given by the master himself, who, oblivious to Balram’s attempts to soothe his hurt feelings of an abandoned husband, celebrates his brother’s unexpected arrival to Delhi in a few words which will seal his own fate: ‘When I was in America, I thought family was a burden, I don’t deny it. When you and Father tried to stop me from marrying Pinky because she wasn’t a Hindu I was furious with you, I don’t deny it. But without family, a man is nothing. Absolutely nothing. I had nothing but this driver in front of me for five nights. Now at last I have someone real by my side: you.’ (The White Tiger: 189, emphasis added)

The above paragraph embodies the entire dynamics of the uncanny urban contact between Ashok and Balram, possibly a reproduction of Ashok’s own state of invisibility in the metropolis of New York that he had left in order to become ‘real’ in India. The shift from the brotherhood of Others (although experienced only by Balram) towards Self and Other engaged ‘in mortal combat’ is irreversible. It also demonstrates that mixing is not attainable and that real knowledge of the Other, even if, or possibly because it seems so reachable, transgresses limitations of race, caste, class, status. In Punter’s words, such knowledge: […] can exist only as an unassimilable foreign body, only according to the logic of the host and parasite, a logic that can end only in exile or death. Under these circumstances there can be no real dialogue, no real exchange; only whisperings, half-understood glances, intimations that can never be allowed to approach intimacy. (Punter 2000: 120, emphasis added)

Indeed, in The White Tiger the attempts to know the Other, become the Other, and incorporate the Other, or differently put, to dissolve doubles into a fully-formed adult identity are doomed to both exile and death. As Ashok has been tragically unaware of the mutual exchange, which properly carried, might have facilitated a social and personal growth, as well as a place for his own alienated Self, his destiny is death, at the hands of the driver who had worshipped him almost to the point of a god. In a typically Gothic instance, the murder is carried on at night, in “soggy black mud” (The White Tiger: 283), under the rainwater which seems

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to wash away all distinctions and foster a new beginning for the dispossessed Balram. Thus, in a supreme gesture of status-levelling, the driver lures his master out of the comfortable and secure confines of the car and literally makes Ashok get “down on his knees”, presumably to check the tires, so that they can continue their journey. At this climactic moment in the narrative, Ashok undergoes a final metamorphosis; the glorious Rama, who had long lost his divine attributes together with his Sita, has his head (centre of power and reason) depicted as “just a black ball”, which Balram hits with a “strong bottle, Johnnie Walker Black – well worth its resale value” (The White Tiger: 284). Under the impact, Ashok reaches the final stage of the journey, unwillingly undertaken for Balram’s cultural, political, personal and social scrutiny, and his last seconds alive present us with a “thing with the hissing lips”, which “began crawling around in a circle, as if looking for someone who was meant to protect it” (The White Tiger: 284). Thus the initial subject of awe and fascination, worthy of emulation and adoration becomes the paradoxical object of horror and pity, which requests annihilation if the new Self of Balram is to emerge victorious from this urban epic battle. The driver ends his master’s life, by pressing “the place where all the tendons and veins stick out in high relief” (The White Tiger: 285), in a gesture which reverses the tender childhood games that he used to play with his father. Symbolically, the murder blurs the boundaries of victimhood, between the cherished memory, the mental image of the father, who had died as the result of poverty and the inefficiency of the medical treatment reserved for the poor, and the physical presence of the master, who has to die because of not having seen Balram and acknowledged him as an equal, in spite of their close interaction in the city jungle. With Ashok almost dead, Balram virtually beautifies the murder and renders it as poetic justice, as the victim has come full-circle and reverted to his true condition of animal origins: “The Stork’s son opened his eyes – just as I pierced his neck – and his lifeblood spurted into my eyes. I was blind. I was a free man” (The White Tiger: 285). Ashok’s death signals Balram’s ‘escape’, his consequent exile and his ascension to self-appointed entrepreneurship with the money and the name stolen from his former boss. However, the price of blood spilled is but the entrapment in reproducing the victim’s destiny, and possibly his plight. As Ashok and his family once did, Balram bribes corrupt police officers in order to keep his new identity secret, and upgrades his sexual ‘conquests’ to women he can buy in five-star hotels. Unlike Heinrich Heine’s hero in Still ist die Nacht who recoils in horror at the memories of his lost love ‘embodied’ by his ‘doppelgänger’, and “pale companion”, Adiga’s protagonist seems to experience an almost narcissistic pleasure of recognition and kinship with his model-victim-double, and finds pleasure and relief while he

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‘apes’ the habits of his now dead master. Interestingly, even after the Gothic crime is committed, there seems to be no typical Gothic haunting process at work in the still-continuing ‘relationship’ between master and servant. Quite the opposite: Adiga may be said to deconstruct the average psychological horror of victim pursuing his killer and detachedly depict it only as the nightmare that informs popular culture, but never gets to permeate reality: Now, what happens in your typical Murder Weekly story – or Hindi film, for that matter? A poor man kills a rich man. Good. Then he takes the money. Good. But then he gets dreams in which the dead man pursues him with bloody fingers, saying, Mur-der-er, mur-der-er. Doesn’t happen like that in real life. Trust me. It’s one of the reasons I’ve stopped going to Hindi films. (The White Tiger: 313)

However comforting or simply absent the memories of Ashok may be, the Gothic paranoia reclaiming dominion over Balram’s wounded psyche is detectable in the text. Paranoia, as a “classic psychology […] whereby the self is threatened and pursued by its own un-accommodated residues” (Punter and Byron 2004: 273) informs many well-known Gothic narratives.38 In spite of his newly-gained freedom, Balram’s reputation as entrepreneur and his considerable financial progress, while musing on the potentialities of his future, cannot stop being haunted by the feeling that his new life, led far from the grinding, infernal space of the Rooster Coop, is but an illusion and that all along, after the killing scene, he had only been waiting in terror for the pointed finger of the policeman, and the accompanying voice to deliver the implacable verdict: “Time’s up, Munna” (The White Tiger: 320). However, the novel does not end with images of despair and hopelessness, nor does Balram’s subjectivity appears to be disintegrating under the pressure of paranoid fantasies; the final message delivered by the hero-villain once again demonstrates his remarkable, even if somehow cynical lucidity. Balram, having ended his confession, and guided us through the horrendous meanders of his problematic Bildungsroman considers himself worthy of emulation by his biological

38 Among the classical examples: William Godwin’s Things as They Are; or the Adventures of Caleb Williams, Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. I would argue here that Adiga somehow twists the usual understanding of paranoia, based on the Gothic texts above, which refer to characters and sometimes even omniscient narrators who frequently cannot grasp the full reality of the power structures enveloping them. Quite the opposite, Balram’s apprehension of the law’s long ‘fingers pointed at him’ is based on a full understanding of Indian realities, where “there’s no end to things” and where “getting caught-it’s always a possibility” (The White Tiger: 320).

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replicas, his future children. As readers and critics alike, then, we are reminded of Frankenstein’s words and left to muse on their gloomy implications, should he, in any way, facilitate the spread of monstrosity: Even if they were to leave Europe and inhabit the desert of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the dæmon thirsted would be children, and a race of evils would be propagated upon those who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. (WoolstonecraftShelley: 435–436)

Conclusion This chapter offered a reading Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger as a novel containing Gothic tropes, so as to justify its inclusion in the developing canon of Gothic postcolonialist narratives. Mostly, I have concentrated on the Gothic tropes of the double, the Self and the Other, the abject of location (translated as Internal Orientalism), paranoia, and the grotesque and discussed them in the complex social, political, psychological context of twenty-first century India. Fundamentally, I have tried to analyze the different ways in which “the irrational, the outlawed and the socially and culturally dispossessed” embodied in the protagonist of this dark narrative, forges for himself a new identity which is the uncanny result of a ‘double mimesis’ (that of Ashok in the West and that of himself of Ashok). Moreover, I have attempted to read the Gothic and the postcolonialist tropes in Adiga’s novel as belonging to a mixed genre which acknowledges history and contemporary developments, and incorporates them in the cultural dimensions and materiality of the text. In attempting to establish connections between The White Tiger and classical Gothic texts, such as Frankenstein, The Phantom of the Opera, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and others, my analysis was also meant as a critical re-endorsement of Judie Newman’s insightful comment: Postcolonial writers frequently begin from a self-conscious project to revise the ideological assumptions created by Eurocentric domination of their culture, to rewrite the fiction of influential predecessors and therefore to deconstruct conventional images of the colonial situation. Intertextual strategies may work by repositioning the text in relation to its point of origin, or by providing revisions to canonical texts (Newman: 171).

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From Behind the Iron Curtain: Herta Müller’s Female Gothic39

Introduction […] But Herta Müller is simply a writer, and her literature has an international relevance, because it speaks about human beings, about traumas which touch the most intimate or deepest cords in human beings and transcend any form of thematic or problematic localism. By the stylistic formula and the deep on-going problems she tackles, by the profound attitude of her writing, she is a universal writer. Actually, she won a prize which is granted to writers from all over the world, by virtue of universality, that Herta Müller undoubtedly has plenty of, in my opinion.” (Cernat in Herta Müller and the Memory of Europe)

The opinion of the Romanian critic Paul Cernat, regarding Herta Müller, the 2009 Nobel laureate for literature, concurs with those expressed in early articles, such as those in Norbert Otto Eke’s 1991 edited volume Die erfundene Wahrnehmung.40 The pre-Nobel evaluations generally preferred an apolitical perspective on Herta Müller’s works, reading them through philosophical lenses or strictly literary tropes (Marven 2005a: 15). Nevertheless, after Müller was granted the Nobel Prize for Literature, the tone of criticism shifted towards appraising the political aspects of her works. This is a dangerous exercise, I would suggest, and one which would somehow deny her value as a writer and champion her only as a voice from the former Iron Curtain whose artistic purpose has been limited to the social task of lifting the veil from the face of Eastern Europe, disfigured by a half a century of communism. My aim in this chapter is to read Herta Müller as a writer and not only as a political activist, notwithstanding the influence of the social and 39 In shorter and different versions, this chapter was previously published as ‘From behind the Iron Curtain’, in Proceedings of the International Symposium on Comparative Literature, Salwa A. Kamel and Hoda S. Gindi (eds.), Cairo: Hussein Abdel-Aziz & co. Printing Press, 2011, 345–339 and ‘Herta Müller and Undoing the Trauma in Ceauşescu’s Romania’, in Episodes from a History of Undoing: The Heritage of Female Subversiveness, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012, 85–107 ((published with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing). 40 See especially: Claudia Becker’s analysis of Niederungen through E.T.A Hoffmann’s Serapiontisches Prinzip.

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political realms on the individual and her fiction. Furthermore, as I argue for a female Gothic reading of Herta Müller’s novels, I infer that the act of granting the prestigious Nobel prize to a relatively unknown, ‘marginal’ writer (at least to the English and American audience) mirrors the process through which a formerly marginal Western-European genre, the Gothic, appears to gradually expand its cultural territories towards Eastern-European contemporary fiction.41 According to Moers, Gothic should not be regarded as a specific genre in literary history, but rather as a mode of writing, which can appear as a sub-mode in novels that have been generally called realistic (Moers: 152). Writing some decades after Moers, Punter reinforces her argument and claims that the power of this formerly-marginal genre is of such a nature that it can be employed not only to interpret fiction produced centuries after the death of Walpole, and in a very remote territory, but also socio-political reality overcome by literary conventions. Accordingly, for him “Gothic is not only a literary genre, but a way of relating to the real, to historical and psychological facts, which will clearly contain a moment of variation as other aspects of cultural life, but which nonetheless has forms of continuity […]” (Punter 1996: 4). Gothic is a contested site, a characteristic also visible in the case of female Gothic, which Moers’ pioneering definition simply regarded as “the work that women have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic” (Moers: 90). Her assessment, at the time valuable in that it drew attention to works produced by female authors, nowadays can be seen as suffering from a certain essentialism; taken ad literam, it claimed that female Gothic is a monolithic category which needs not and indeed does not consider plural contexts. Howards, in her Bakhtinian approach to Gothic, challenges the North American assumptions, represented by Moers, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar who emphasize “the personal, the private, the subjective, body and nature against the political, the public, the objective, mind and culture” (Howards: 64). Such an approach, in Howards’ opinion, inevitably ignores “the larger tension-filled discursive environments in which the Gothic and other texts emerge and are later reproduced” (64). Other critics have also warned against the tendency to over-“genderize” the Gothic, which may lead to artificial categories. According to Baldick and Mighal, the female Gothic, is often

41 As mentioned in the Introduction Herta Müller is one of those hyphenated authors, whose works make the present collection of essay. She is a Romanian-born German novelist, her native language German; she was educated in the University of Timisoara, a Romanian city. In her novels Romania and especially the decades under Ceauşescu’s dictatorship are permanent, haunting presences.

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erroneously read as emblematic for “some invariable female ‘experience’ or the archetypal ‘female principle’” divorced from “history” but displaying strong links with “timeless melodrama […] in which (wicked) ‘male Gothic’ texts always express terror of the eternal ‘(M)other while (good) female Gothic texts are revealed to be – as Anne Williams claims – not just ‘empowering’ but ‘revolutionary’” (Baldick and Mighall 2000: 209). In essence, Baldick and Mighall support and encourage the criticism of female Gothic as a sub-genre which has come to frequently signify an exaggerated focus on the eternal, binary opposition male versus female read as bad versus good Gothic texts, at the expense of historical evaluations that often subvert such interpretations. Their view is also supported by Hoeveler who notices that: “As critics we cannot afford to indulge the notion – in life or in literature – that women can ever escape their social, political, and economic conditions and thereby create or preserve some sort of pristine ahistorical ‘self’” (Hoeveler: 3). Recently, as Wallace and Smith have pointed out, conceptual alternatives or extensions of female Gothic have been offered and alternatively discharged; among them, the best-known are “Women’s Gothic”, “feminist Gothic”, “lesbian Gothic”, “Gothic feminism” and even “postfeminist Gothic” (Wallace and Smith: 1). All these alternative conceptualizations may be read as attempts to direct female Gothic towards a better defined historical perspective, but this tendency is not as un-problematic as it may at first sound. However beneficiary, some critics’ warnings against the possibility of female Gothic ignoring history, taken at their face value, may suggest yet again the centuries-old politics of disenfranchisement to which women and more recently feminist critics have been subjected. As Wallace and Smith remark, there seems to be no immediate danger of history collapsing into “universal psychology” (Wallace and Smith: 2). However, I would add, glossing over the psychological implications of distorted/distorting histories, and refraining from a careful consideration of how History (as the larger structure) may affect Her-story appears to be an even greater danger. Female characters, since Radcliffe, have developed multiple strategies for resisting the patriarchy, ranging from apparent submission to open rebellion. Hence, one of the most interesting debates raised in female Gothic is whether the genre could be read as either subversive or conservative. Hoeveler claims that: The female gothic constitutes what I would call a rival female-created fantasy – gothic feminism – a version of “victim feminism”, an ideology of female power through pretended and staged weakness […] The gothic feminist always manages to dispose of her enemies without dirtying her dainty little hands. The position that Radcliffe and her followers advocated throughout the female gothic was one of “wise passiveness” or what we might more accurately recognize as a form of passive-aggression (Hoeveler: 7)

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My contention in the present chapter is that the “victim feminism” to which Hoeveler refers and its associations with “the ideology of female power”, albeit disguised as weakness, is a particularly useful strategy for approaching some of Herta Müller’s female characters. They, similarly to their author, manage to escape the stifling, oppressive and ultimately lethal atmosphere that characterized the (not only) fictional world of Ceauşescu’s Romania. Thus, “victim feminism” in my reading signifies a creative negotiation of trauma. Within literary criticism, trauma has been attracting increasing attention, especially since it seems to allow for a fruitful discussion of the manner in which fragmentation, alienation, dismembering – the staples of postmodernism, merge with the specifics of politics and history. However, trauma is also one of the fixed characteristics of Gothic, whether historical, fantastic, urban, postcolonialist, post-modernist, or female. The present chapter aims at demonstrating that in Müller’s novels trauma and the Gothic are rendered as mutually-constitutive categories, as pointed out by Bruhm: “Gothic itself is a narrative of trauma” with the protagonists usually experiencing “some horrifying effects that profoundly affect them, destroying, (at least temporarily) the norms that structure their lives and identities” (Bruhm 2002: 268).

Nadirs In Herta Müller’s novels, as remarked by Beverly Driver Eddy and Brigid Haines, the trauma resulting from the brutal penetration of the personal by the political holds a central position (Marven 2005a: 15). While this personal-political connection is more visible in The Land of Green Plums, the stories that make the volume Nadirs speak of a different type of trauma, less tuned to the political and closer to the personal. Paradoxically, Nadirs almost absolves Ceauşescu and the atrocity of his regime; in this collection of stories narrated from the perspective of a child, repression, pain and trauma are staples of the Swabian community’s daily life, seen as an isolated group and not as part of the communist society at large, as in later volumes.42 Müller constructs her narrative of trauma from an “ethnic minority” perspective; although both apparently separate from the majority, the Romanians, and contained in the larger frame of the authoritarian regime, the Swabian

42 For an excellent article which explains the complex ethnic situation in Herta Müller’s Banat, as well as the repercussions of the political and historical on both characters and author, see Glajar’s article ‘Banat-Swabian, Romanian and German: Conflicting Identities in Herta Müller’s “Hertzier” (1997).

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community is depicted as sufficient and ‘efficient’ per se in its destructive effects on the individual, regardless of the political and social circumstances. In one of the many interviews she gave regarding her life in Romania, Müller clarifies the issue of the “latent violence, and corruption” visible in personal lives, as well as the problem of the ethnic conflicts in Banat, by discussing them from a wider, more generally human but not necessarily political perspective: I think there was conflict in Banat, but at a “normal” level, so to speak. But then there is conflict between all kinds of people in every society. We all need conflict, deep down. With our neighbours, with our colleagues, with our spouses, which I believe is normal. I think the national minorities you mentioned didn’t live together with the Romanians. They lived in the same space with them (Herta Müller on Growing Up in Ceauşescu’s Romania).

Furthermore, she admits that: […] every national minority, including the Germans, lived in a kind of “ethno-centricity”, which I found natural. Back in the village a German thought he knew exactly what was wrong or negative in a Romanian, a Hungarian, a Serbian, or Gypsy, and the other way around. Then in the city I made friends among the Romanians and I realized that what I knew about Romanians from my family wasn’t accurate (Müller in Herta Müller on Growing Up in Ceauşescu’s Romania).

As inferred from the quotations above, the insularity of education and background and the alienation experienced at a very early age have deeper roots than the politically-imposed. This is particularly accurate if one reads Müller’s novels in terms of autobiography – and such an appraisal is inescapable, given the many confessions revealed in as many interviews.43 In stories such as The Funeral Sermon, The Swabian Bath, About German Moustaches and Hair Parts, Mother, Father and Little One, to name just a few, one would have to considerably test the limits of political imagination in order to discover Ceauşescu’s shadow lurking menacingly and threatening domesticity in its own realm. The parents’ overwhelming and stifling silence, the scarcity of feelings, the oddity of the domestic, all point to a core sadness and

43 Interestingly, in Ceauşescu’s Romania, the ‘source’ Eva, a Securitate informer, assigned to the case of Herta Müller, will also comment upon the atmosphere of Nadirs and its autobiographical connotations: “About the short prose pieces signed by Herta Müller in “Neue Literatur”, no. 8, 1983, I might say that the author renders scenes from her childhood in a particular abstract form, I might even call it grotesque […]. This pessimism, this despair in Herta Müller’s prose, must only be explained via the present situation of the author who is currently unemployed (Onisei 2010, my translation from Romanian).

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dissatisfaction poisoning individual destinies, reigning supreme and blackening the universe of childhood regardless of the external circumstances. Rather, when reading the short stories which build the stifling and oppressive atmosphere of Nadirs, one remembers a final passage from Freud. His is a comment significant for the quality of the uncanny and by extension the Gothic, but also one that may be employed to gain insights into Müller’s style when she engages in depicting the dark universe of childhood: “One may wander about in a dark, strange room, looking for the door of the electric switch, and collide time after time with the same piece of furniture” (Freud qtd in Punter 2000: 204). In Nadirs, Ceauşescu and his pathological politics may, at first sight, be read as the embodiment of the “electric switch”; once switched off, the darkness and the strangeness of mere existence, the very dread of growing up unloved dissolves. However inviting this solving of personal and familial conflicts via vilifying a demented ruler and his equally demented system, in Nadirs, the idea of the female childhood inexorably damaged by political circumstances is substituted with the more lurking shadow of parental hence, personal damage. Thus, in this context, Freud’s “same piece of furniture”, with which collision is inevitable refers to a monstrous parenthood. Parents’ lack of involvement with the child’s harmonious growth resulting in the most destructive “proximal abandonment” is the only stable element that inhabits an otherwise empty space of fear, silence, alienation and anxiety, disguised as normal states of mind and regulating behaviour. As Bruhm pointed out, the child and the idea of childhood itself are trapped in a particularly complex relationship with twentieth century Gothic. On the one hand, childhood and the child are construed as “fully-fledged and developed”; on the other as an “infinitely malleable, formable being who can turn out right if only the proper strategies are employed” (2006:75). A perusal of Nadirs ‘speaks volumes’ about ‘non-proper strategies’. Ever on her own, the nameless narrator, a little girl who seemingly innocently assimilates little facts of village-life, such as the ritualistic animal sacrifices on different important occasions, turns into a depersonalized entity, unable to communicate the horror of her daily experiences. Hence, the psychological untranslatability of the language in Nadirs that seems emitted by a speaking machine and not a human subject, and whose shocking imagery is characterized by discursive bluntness and scarcity.44 Nightmarish experiences are recollected in a flat tone, in flagrant contrast with their terrifying content: 44 In my opinion, this psychological untranslatability of Müller’s language and style has a strong Gothic flavour about it. Gothic, according to Halberstam: “is the breakdown of a genre and the crisis occasioned by the inability to narrate and the inability to categorize” (Halberstam: 23, emphasis added).

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I heard the pig. It was moaning. Its resistance was so little that the chains were superfluous. I was lying in bed. I felt the knife at my throat. It hurt, the cut went deeper and deeper, my flesh got hot, it began to boil in my throat. The cut got much bigger than me, it grew above the whole bed, it burned under the blanket, it moaned its way into the room. The torn intestines were rolling over the rug, they were steaming and smelling of half-digested corn. (Nadirs: 23)

The paragraph above is devoid of any political content and only renders the horror experienced by any child confronted with the experience of animal-sacrificing on special occasions. This ritual sacrificing however is not depicted as a unifying practice, meant to weave strong connections between the community members; indeed it fails to achieve its function even in the microcosm of the family. Instead, this particular experience is associated with abjection, and, as any experience of abjection it remains accessible to the fully formed subject as a kind of ‘phantom’ of ‘somatic memory’ (Hogle 2002: 51). For, as it will be argued further on, what in Nadirs – as a collection of stories centred on childhood – is experienced as mere physical nausea, will become existential nausea in Müller’s other works. Thus, the feelings of panic and horror triggered by the sight of bodily fluids, albeit neither one’s own, nor even another human being’s, will ‘inhabit’ the child-host in Nadirs as she grows into traumatized adulthood in later volumes. This experiencing of the abject and grotesque, as Gothic tropes that have been installed since the appearance of the genre, informs other stories of Nadirs as well. In one of them, the protagonist, a nameless female child and her friend Heini become aware of physical age and its discontents; again, like in the passage quoted above, the paranoid fear of one day becoming the feared object pervades the text and subjects the character’s imagination: Grandmother would sprinkle flour on the dough and knead it lengthwise and crosswise. And then she would cut off a corner and brush egg white on it. Grandmother’s skirts would bob. Her apron was full of flour. My other grandmother has big breasts, but this one is quite flat. And the other grandmother has a low belly. Heini saw it. Probably all grandmothers have a low belly. But with this grandmother you can’t see it through her skirts. (Nadirs: 38)

Rotten Pears also deals with rites of passage, such as marriage and the discovery of sexuality, both outside and inside marriage. A visit to a friend and an opportunity for the female narrator’s father to commit adultery with the aunt constitute a brutal introduction to sex, as a rather sordid experience in adults’ lives: A creak is falling down the stairs. I raise my head and drop it again. Father is following the creak. Father is barefoot. […] My aunt giggles and says: cold feet. Father smacks his lips and says: mice and hay. The bed creaks. The pillow breathes loudly. The blanket’s long thrusts come quickly. Aunt is moaning, father is panting. The bed jerks out of the wood in short thrusts. (Nadirs: 80)

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As in all previous examples, this last one also tackles organic fear and disgust; the answer on the part of the child-narrator and the means of resisting it actually speaks of masochistic strategies. Thus, the girl offers her own self, part of the perceived universe, for substitution, as if to experience generalized trauma. Bed, pillow, and blanket acquire life and can be subjected to physical penetration, thus dissolving adultery – in itself a socially-stigmatized sin – into a nightmare of sensations, meant to repel and render the carnal as “dirty” and “impure”: “The creek babbles between my eyes: I did impure acts, I watched impure acts, I heard impure acts, I read impure acts” (Nadirs: 80). Not even when intercourse is protected by social mores, and the protagonists are Mother and Father, is the involuntary spying on adults’ lives less traumatizing. The sexual act remains trapped in the serpentine sin and the internal voice obsessively repeats the same refrain: “The clock is ticking through the room: I heard impure acts […]. Behind the wall of the room the bed creaks in short thrusts. Mother moans. Father pants” (Nadirs: 84, emphasis added). As I have so far argued, Nadirs does not revolve around the concept of a child self in progress, nor is there any unifying theme to the stories. Rather, they are distorted reflections of an even more distorted and fragmented reality, constitutive of a nightmarish vision of childhood. There is no innocence in the rendering of the narrations either, as the child whose eyes have experienced the early nightmare of life is but a broken vessel out of which memories, words, conflicts, repressed pains ceaselessly pour and disrupt whatever illusion the evocation of childhood may still hold for the reader. Therefore, one may argue, long before the young female adult – the narrator/ protagonist of later novels encounters any of the evil characters and attempts to resist absorption into and annihilation by the world of politics turned insane, the female child-narrator of Nadirs seems to have breathed in a stifling, paranoid, and hostile domestic environment. The ethnic German community in the rural Banat, the one that has offered both Müller and her child-narrator the earliest exposure to repression and trauma is the first environment that renders loss, a pivotal aspect of trauma and hence another typical Gothic element. Although loss cannot be properly defined in the absence of a focus, be it an object, a person or a feeling, Müller’s manner of rendering it lacks any such focus, but is instead converted into atmosphere, thus magnifying itself45; therefore, the stories in Nadirs, communicate the impossibility of any attempt to alleviate this overpowering pain of growing up among domestic strangers. 45 The presence of loss in the absence of a person, an object, a feeling to concentrate is related to Lacan’s attempts at defining anxiety, which, in my opinion stress the strong link between anxiety and the uncanny. Lacan claims that anxiety is the result of the lack of lack. In the absence of the lack which is necessary for meaning-transmission,

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The Land of Green Plums In The Land of Green Plums, centred on town-life during Ceauşescu’s dictatorial regime, Müller’s narrative takes on new aspects. As stated by Marven, it marks “Müller’s shift towards “auto-fictional” writing (her preferred term)”, whereas “the protagonists and narrators who are particular close to her experiences […] express the physical threat and psychological repression of the Romanian state” (Marven 2005b). Paul Cernat also reads The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment as a narrative fight against: […] a political evil, an evil which has permeated into the body, soul and minds; an evil which has sickened the whole of mankind. Her literature is obsessed with the theme of evil and this evil bears the name Securitate, the secret police during the communist regime […] they are books on fear, but also on the fight against fear, books on the recovery of a traumatic memory. (Cernat qtd in Herta Müller and the Memory of Europe)

The Land of Green Plums traces out the varied destinies of five young people who meet at the University of Timisoara, a city in the Western part of Romania. Lola, Edgar, Kurt, Georg and the unnamed narrator are depicted as random samples of a generation raised and trained in fear, a political fear which bears Ceauşescu’s name. Perusing this dark novel is equivalent to the act of witnessing the tribulations (and the temptations) of a mind confronted by a vestige of the past that solicits an unnatural extension of life. In other words, the novel is centred on the trauma of the survivors and their attempt to negotiate it far away from both the psychological and the geographical boundaries that fostered it. The Land of Green Plums abounds in traumatic moments, but the initial one, the suicide of Lola, one of the protagonist’s roommates is the event that triggers a series of adversities, closely linked to the political: Five girls stood by the entrance-way of the dormitory. Inside the glass display case was Lola’s picture, the same one as in her party book. Under the picture was a piece of paper. Someone read out loud: This student has committed suicide. We abhor her crime and we despise her for it. She has brought disgrace upon the whole country […] At four o’clock in the afternoon, in the great hall, two days after she hanged herself, Lola was expelled from the party and ex-matriculated from the university.

one is facing this real claustrophobic feeling of anxiety (Lacan: 35). Similarly, in Herta Müller’s Nadirs, the child female narrator’s peculiar unawareness regarding the death of feelings, the abnormality of the family environment, and the automatism of the village life, may be read as both loss without an object or claustrophobic anxiety.

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Hundreds of people were there. Someone stood at the lectern and said. She deceived us all, she doesn’t deserve to be a student in our country or a member of our party. Everybody applauded. (The Land of Green Plums: 23–24)

The complex relationship between female characters, such as the nameless narrator and Lola, or, later on in the novel, the narrator and Tereza suggests a mirroring, a repeated exercise in loss and trauma and, in my reading, constitutes the focus of the novel. However, in order to contextualize it, I will focus on the analysis of the various Gothic settings of the novel, since, in my opinion, the manner in which they are experienced by the male characters provisionally achieves the displacement of the female plight. The first horror setting in the novel is the otherwise utilitarian space of the slaughterhouse which becomes a locus of the political pestilence rendered in physical terms, although the contamination is initially carefully contained. According to Kurt, forced to work in the slaughterhouse, the workers are in the habit of drinking warm blood, in a most authentic Dracula’s children-like fashion: It’s done deliberately; they don’t want people who work in the slaughterhouse to go back to the village every day. They just want village people who live in the village. And if new people come in, they quickly turn them into accomplices. All it takes is a couple of days for them to get like the others, mute and addicted to drinking warm blood. (The Land of Green Plums: 91, emphasis added)

This nightmarish depiction – apart from the fact that it might be read as a wound in the narrator’s sensibility, playing horror games with her imagination and forcing the readers to accept her vision of the communist Romania as the land of Dracula’s off-springs46 – is symptomatic of an unequalled degradation and repudiation of humanity in a less than human society. Alternatively, the blood-drinking habit 46 Iulian remarks that after years of complete silence regarding the horrors of Ceauşescu’s regime, the Western media decided to break the silence. It was done in a most interesting and sensational manner, by merging the historical figure of Vlad Tepeş (the famous “Dracula” of Bram Stoker’s novel) with Ceauşescu. Articles such as “Dracula’s Country”, “Bucharest, Dracula’s Capital City” revealed the systematic annihilation of Romanian values and past by a dictator keen to re-invent history, so as to better suit his own demented goals. Post-1989, the Western journalists’ strategy for drawing attention to Romania’s nightmare, was gleefully borrowed by Romanian agencies, who devised a touristic itinerary called “In Dracula’s Footsteps”(referring to Vlad Tepeş), in the hope of increasing the number of tourists visiting the country. It seems to have worked, since Francis Ford Coppola himself, in the process of making his film on Dracula, travelled to Romania, so as to “get impregnated” with the vampire-like atmosphere of the country […] (Iulian: 90, my translation from Romanian).

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may acquire a different signification and be read as a misled strategy of revenge against oppression; the men drink the blood of the slaughtered animals and trade stolen raw animal parts for casual and violently demeaning sex, while entertaining the illusion that this can be taken as a blow to the regime’s less than human practices. Along with the “blood-guzzlers”, Ceauşescu’s presence lurks abominably in the air, intoxicating the country and seemingly prone to ritual sacrifices in order to maintain his health (The Land of Green Plums: 150).47 Thus, Herta Müller links the horror mythology with the dictator at its centre and the rumours about his frequent child blood-baths to the proletarians from the slaughterhouse, suggesting a metaphoric but no less frightening metamorphosis into an entire nation of vampires, the twentieth century children of Dracula.48 Georg’s working place is yet another Gothic setting, “a town in the middle of a forest”, where “no trains or buses go”, but “only trucks with monosyllabic drivers, all missing a few fingers” (The Land of Green Plums: 88). The atmosphere of this lugubrious site is quite similar to Kurt’s slaughterhouse, inhabited by automated blood-drinking proletarians. Georg’s isolated town is a place where workers make “wooden melons” “called wood-processing industry” (The Land of Green Plums: 88). The factory itself is rendered as a locus of terror and horror, operated by physically-marked people, casually brutalized industrial workers and drivers, working in dangerous environments and producing useless articles that nobody has any 47 “In the same period (i.e. 1990, 1991), a few Romanian newspapers ‘informed’ about the procedure of collecting young, fresh blood in order to invigorate the dictator. There were rumours about prison-colonies for children who were fed and taken care of for this particular purpose, the way cows were. These so-called revelations were only rumours, vague confessions, and after a few weeks, nobody was left interested in the ‘sinister discovery’” (Iulian: 106, my translation from Romanian). 48 It would be interesting to mention here the fact that those historically responsible for making public the acts of cruelty of Vlad Tepeş’ (‘Dracula’ since Stoker’s novel) were German merchants from Brasov whose rights to free trade were severely limited by the medieval ruler, due to their openly supporting other political claimers to the throne and repeated tax evasions. The above-mentioned acts of cruelty were not exceptional by any means in the European context of the time, but when reinforced by the power of the written word, they served to fabricate an entire mythology of terror and horror forever linked with Transylvania, hence Romania. As Herta Müller confessed more than once that she has been carrying Romania and the dictatorship with her, the surrealistic slaughterhouse episodes and the future vampires populating it, draw attention, maybe, to a different kind of haunting, and the presence of a deep historical and personal wound, centuries old, when German merchants were made to suffer Vlad Tepeş’s wrath materialized in an authentic blood-bath.

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need of. Blood-drinkers, workers and wood melon-makers through their homogeneity and likeness are representatives of the category of the “New Man”, the demented prototype with which Ceauşescu dreamt of populating Romania; in that, this sinister historical figure is an obvious contemporary and Eastern counterpart of Victor Frankenstein, self-appointed as founder of a “new race”.49 To employ Baudrillard’s words, Ceauşescu’s obsession with the creation of the “New Man” is reminiscent of a “serial production” which “gives way to the generation of images through models” in a “cyberneticized social exchange” that controls Western humanity “by means of prediction, simulation, programmed anticipation and indeterminate mutation”, so that the body is: […] no longer a metaphor for anything at all, merely the locus of metastasis, of the machine-like connections between all its processes, of an endless programming devoid of any symbolic organization of overarching purpose” (Baudrillard qtd in Hogle 2012: 503). Arguably, Müller’s depiction of the automatization and mutation of human beings into depersonalized automatons expands Baudrillard’s prediction to more than just the Western world and it can be applied to East-European space as well. In Georg’s factory, the reproduction of futility reaches pathological dimensions: “the workers steal scraps of wood and make them into parquet floors at home”, but even when “their apartments have wall-to-wall parquet, they can’t stop stealing and laying more” so that “the parquets eventually covers the walls, right up to the ceiling” (The Land of Green Plums: 88). People themselves have become accomplices in their own “wood-ification” and resort to building their own symbolic coffins, perpetuating the efforts of Ceauşescu’s camarilla of creating a self-contained society of willing zombies. Confronted with the nightmare of working alongside Ceauşescu’s self-encased automatons, the characters of both Georg and Kurt are cast as victims, forced to assimilate but unwilling to do so, hence dispensable to the regime via exile, death or madness. Their frequent encounters with the nameless narrator 49 Actually, the “New Man” was the cherished utopia of all the totalitarian communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe, post -World War II. The “New Man” signified the obedient subject, the individual stripped off identity and humanity, the malleable instrument in the hands of the political power. Apart from Herta Müller’s workers depicted as “blood-drinkers” and “wood melon-makers”, the dystopian novels of other two Romanian authors, Bujor Nedelcovici and I.D. Sarbu feature the torturers and the informers as huge gastropods, batrachians, rats, hyenas, bedbugs, leeches, Ubu-esque giants and dwarfs. This is, as Cesereanu claims, a process of “rat-ificaton” and “indevilation”, strategies conducive to the creation of society as a new hell, where the presence of the devils is no longer necessary and is efficiently supplanted by human beings, content to be the artisans of their own subjection (Cesereanu: 164).

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and Edgar only serve to further emphasize the feelings of alienation, despair and horror. In The Land of Green Plums, weekly conversations among friends, sharing their tribulations – both real and imaginary – represent but a short respite from madness, although the characters are constantly haunted by it, in a terrifying, never-ending process. Another character exposed to Ceauşescu’s dystopian world is Edgar, who works as a teacher in a city and witnesses how his pupils “eat mulberries to keep their voice in shape for the Party songs and […] eat manna so that they can be wise and remember their multiplication tables” (The Land of Green Plums: 85). In this corrupted and dystopian universe, even the children’s dreams have been irremediably corrupted, since they can only picture themselves as “officers and policemen when they grow up” or as “guards ready for everything, standing by the way-side somewhere in the country” (The Land of Green Plums: 87). Through corrupting and deforming children’s imaginings, Müller renders a most powerful representation of social trauma(s) that her characters, to their dismay, witness, partially reveal, but cannot alter. Significantly, the individual ego is crushed by the confrontation with a world of overpowering and destructive uniformity and either loses or can never achieve human status. In this, The Land of Green Plums, like Nadirs is a narrative about the impossibility of narration. Seen from this perspective, Müller’s perceived literary sins, such as the frequent impossibility of following her stories, the attempts to convey more through language than actions, and the honest depictions that can be depressing in their relentlessness, can be read as typical Gothic strategies, effectively rendering the dystopian background and atmosphere. As mentioned above, the female characters in The Land of Green Plums are systematically subjected to a process of mental and physical disintegration, all the more petrifying when it becomes quintessential in the depiction of what can be called a ‘failed sisterhood’. In the novel, Lola and her habits had been an object of fascination for the narrator for a long time prior to the suicide; this is a narrator who involuntarily turned witness. Lola’s escapades, Lola’s men, Lola’s libertinage are never openly criticised by her narrator-roommate, but merely witnessed. Although theoretically oppressed and repressed in the same way and sharing a common background, that of villagers attempting to penetrate the urban world of Timişoara, the narrator and Lola never experience female friendship or the much-celebrated feminist ‘sisterhood’. Instead, the peculiar dynamics of the relationship between Lola and the unnamed narrator is reduced to the unusual paradigm of doer versus contemplator. The mere carnality of Lola, the food that she consumes – the tongue and the kidneys and other animal organs that she keeps in the common fridge, the ‘hunger’ for other girls’ clothes, the many men that keep

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her company, whose influence, she hopes, may help her to accede higher than her simple provincial status suggest an almost-vampire female presence. Mirroring this hunger, forever entrapped in the act of watching her, the narrator also displays an inner, well-hidden desire to mimic, even to “consume” the other girl who is a problematic role-model, a seller of carnal pleasures, a perennial seeker of opportunities, but also a female victim of both a patriarchal system and a political dictatorship: “Neither in the cafeteria nor in the gym hall could I tell whether Lola ate the bits of organ meat or whether she threw them away. I wanted to know. My curiosity burned to hurt Lola. I watched until my eyes gave out” (The Land of Green Plums: 16). In this continuous devouring of young flesh, even metaphorically so, in this voyeurism that is accompanied solely by the omnipresence of the Party-eye which can see everywhere, anytime, anyone, elements of what may be called Sexual Gothic can be discerned. As pointed out by Moers, a literary work can be called Sexual Gothic or present certain characteristics of it when “the gothic heroine and the text are haunted by repressed sexual desire, prominence of repressed doubling in Gothic fiction where the self is split in order to keep sexuality and sexual pleasure at bay” (Moers: 152). This fictional sexual split or doubling has an interesting counterpart in real life. Müller herself, while disclosing facts about her Securitate file, explains: In my file I am two different people. One is called ‘Cristina’, is an enemy of the state and is targeted. In order to compromise this Cristina, the falsification factory of section D (disinformation) fabricates a decoy out of all the parts which damage me most – loyal communist, ruthless secret agent, member of the party, which I, like many functionaries in the country, never was […]. Wherever I went I had to live with this decoy. She wasn’t just sent after me, she also went ahead. Although I have only ever spoken against the dictatorship in my writing, right from the start, the decoy goes her own way to this very day. She has become independent. (Müller in An Alien Gaze)

Significantly, from a Gothic perspective, where boundaries between the real and the imaginary are often dissolved, the doppelgänger motif has the ability to trespass survival strategies in real life and invade fiction, although with a different function. A form of psychological defence from external forces and pressures in real life, the sexual doppelgänger allows for living the life of uninhibited sexuality in The Land of Green Plums. From this point of view the narrator and Lola, the first victim of disturbed psychological and physical destinies, can be read as twins or doubles, with the second one acting upon the overpowering desires of the first. The sexual life of the narrator, self-confessed and not alluded to or imposed by others (although Captain Pjele’s interrogations are of a highly sexual nature), will later on follow a similar pattern to Lola’s. Every Wednesday, years after Lola’s tragic death,

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the narrator automatically reproduces the pattern of impersonal contact between man and woman and although she claims that “we made love hurriedly, feeling heat and frost on our skin at the same time” (The Land of Green Plums: 160, emphasis added), these strangely casual and yet regular flesh-encounters speak more of consummation of desperate lust than love. The narrator’s “­love-affair”, silent in its being a “one-only”, actually mirrors the deafening licentiousness of Lola. Maybe less physically repressed, but more oppressed by the judgmental attitude of her roommates, Lola decides to abruptly end a carnal concert given for the benefit of various men – some party acolytes, others anonymous ­workers – who pour their many frustrations, their lack of personal, social and political perspectives into the temporary power granted by random acts of intercourse. It is my contention that in spite of the apparently “dirty, impure acts” (see Nadirs), Lola’s suicide marks her as victorious and pure, and the authentic Gothic heroine/victim of the narrative. Although she has prostituted herself repeatedly, sometimes as an act of female rebellion against the system – some other times with clear goals in mind – “to become someone in the city […] and then, four years later, to go back to the village, not on the dusty path down below, but higher up, through the branches of the mulberry trees” (The Land of Green Plums: 3), Lola remains the provincial girl who refuses a life-long compromise with men who use her body but refuse her love. Her romantic dreams of love – not the actions of a “fallen” woman – are preserved via the suicidal act, and earn her a tragic escape from the political and personal nightmare: It will be hard to keep the shirts of a gentleman white. If, in four years, he comes back with me to the drought, it will be because of my love. If his white shirts manage to dazzle the people walking in the village, it will be because of my love. And it will be my love if he proves a gentleman, on whom the barber will call at home, leaving his shoes at the door: It will be difficult to keep the shirts white with all that dirt and all those leaping fleas, writes Lola. (The Land of Green Plums: 7)

Lola’s naïve pining for an imaginary love suggests a culturally induced trauma, disguised as ‘normal’ feminine development, which demands completion through a man’s love and protection. Therefore, read as unrequited romance, but romance nevertheless (or the dream of it, at least), Lola’s yearning(s) appear(s) as symptomatic of the heated debate among the feminists in the 1980s regarding the connection between romance/Gothic and pornography: The Gothic uses woman’s whole body as a pawn: she is moved, threatened, discarded, and lost. And, as the whole person is abducted, attacked, and so forth, the subtext metaphorically conveys anxiety about her genital risk. Pornography reverses the synecdochal relation by instead using the part to refer to the whole: a woman is a

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twat, a cunt, a hole. The depiction of explicitly genital sexual practice which is pornography’s metier can be simply a difference in degree, not in kind, from the Gothic’s more genteel abuse. (Masse: 108)

Prior to taking her fate in her own hands and committing suicide, Lola’s body does epitomize physical and sexual abuse, ironically accompanied by complicity with her abusers, yet another politically-induced strategy of survival for a provincial girl pursuing a career in a town, but actually pursuing patriarchal protection and, ideally, love. Her life and the gruesome details of her death – she hangs herself using the narrator’s belt – are revealed to the readers via the narrator. Ambiguous, if not culpable in her passivity, Lola’s roommate and nameless narrator, on the one hand witnesses Lola’s culinary and sexual debaucheries, on the other peruses her diary after her death, thus continuing what may be called an act of symbolic devouring and incorporating. Watched, followed, stared at, Lola seems to be not only the victim of the political, but also of the personal and perhaps more destructive female envy, albeit maintained at an abstract level and not acted upon. The Land of Green Plums, apart from pillorying a political system that breathes terror, also displays the anguish poisoning the female psyche when confronted with a more attractive, apparently more liberated roommate, who becomes – and not necessarily due to political circumstances – the Other, alien essence to be symbolically consumed even after death, since emulation is not an option. Apart from Lola, The Land of Green Plums displays another female alter-ego for the narrator, in the character of Tereza. As stated above and also noticed by Marven “the autobiographical elements of Müller’s work can also be understood as a form of splitting” since the other two works by Müller, besides The Land of Green Plums, may be read in terms of “doubling of female characters”, “where one is complicit in the activities of the state” (Irene and Dana, Adina and Clara, the “I” and Tereza). (Marven 2005a: 57) Tereza’s character is based on a friend of Herta Müller’s who delivered information on her to the Securitate while maintaining the illusion of true friendship. Tereza, similarly to Lola, displays a voracity, an insatiable appetite for clothes, jewels, stories, everything that is connected to a life fully lived, to maintaining an appearance of youth and health in a body that is slowly rotting from inside, eaten by cancer. The narrator also clings on to Tereza and her support, in spite of knowing that her father is a well-connected sculptor and hence the very remote possibility of Tereza not having been already tainted and become an accomplice in the political hysteria that is threatening to molest everything, starting and ending with personal relationships. When reading the three female characters in The Land of Green Plums in a triadic connection, with the unnamed narrator dying twice in the hypostasis of Lola and Tereza, the issue of survival at

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all costs exhibits interesting connotations. Thus, it seems obvious that the death of former female friends is the price paid so that the unnamed narrator – hardly can she be called the ‘protagonist’, as she more often than once, in the economy of the text, takes great pains to secure for herself only the function of witness – may be allowed to retain her bodily wholeness (she emigrates to Germany), even when, or probably because, psychologically, she is forever a cripple. As stated by Crystal, “the survivor’s identification with the opposite pole in the victim-oppressor polarization is the most difficult wound to heal” (Crystal: 77). Significantly, the narrative strategy employed by Müller, in juxtaposing the depiction of trauma with poetic incursions into an even more traumatic past, comes full circle, as the first and the last sentences of the novel are identical: “When we don’t speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves” (The Land of Green Plums: 1, 242).

The Appointment The Appointment is yet another of Herta Müller’s novels which justifies a gender-based reading. Written in German and originally published in 1997 in Berlin, four years after The Land of Green Plums, The Appointment displays both similarities with and differences from the previous novel. In terms of plot (notwithstanding the difficulty, at times the impossibility, to discuss plot in Müller’s novels), The Appointment can be read as a counterpart, or a companion work to The Land of Green Plums. The latter ends with the narrator’s emigration to West Germany, whereas the former focuses on the horror of numerous interrogations by the Securitate, the Romanian Secret Police, prior to emigration. Another element common to both novels refers to the complex relationship between female characters, with the (again nameless) narrator and her friend Lily constructed according to the pattern of the pairs Lola-narrator and Tereza-narrator from the previous novel. As stated by Marven, “the interpersonal relationships Müller examines tend to be between women: problematic mother-daughter relationship or female friendships” (Marven 2005a: 153). Dormant or overactive female sexuality in times of dictatorship, which is not only political, but patriarchal as well, also connects the two novels. It is Thursday morning, and the unnamed female narrator of The Appointment has to take the tram to the headquarters of the secret police, as she has been summoned for further interrogations. Her crime, that of sewing ‘Marry-me’ notes in the hem of newly-made clothes to be exported to Italy, would be comic under

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different circumstances, but in Ceauşescu’s Romania ‘comic’ is the code name for ‘tragic’. The two frequently mix, in the same manner in which Gothic as a mode: […] always concerns itself with boundaries and their instabilities, whether between the quick/the dead, eros/thanatos, pain/pleasure, ‘real’/‘unreal’, ‘natural’/‘supernatural’, material/transcendent, man/machine, human/vampire or ‘masculine’/‘feminine’. (Horner and Zlosnik: 243)

Real events as sources of inspiration aside, Müller manages to engage the reader (the Western-European, not the Eastern-European one, for whom such strategies of survival are painfully familiar in their absurdity) through laughter. However absurd and hilarious this pathetic attempt to escape Ceauşescu’s Romania may seem to a Westerner, the author soon converts the incipient laughter into tragedy, as the nameless narrator abandons the present moment and undertakes a journey back to her traumatised past, triggered by her ritual confrontation with Major Albu. The two time dimensions overlap throughout the novel, so that it becomes increasingly difficult to assess the intensity of pain, despair, and alienation that they contain. That is why readers attempting to locate exactly the source of the unbearably unsettling quality of The Appointment, need to break the boundaries of the plot – elusive as it may be – and look behind it, into the fragmented and elliptical consciousness of the profoundly traumatised narrator. Her trauma is actually reflected by all the other characters whose interactions design the contours of a surreal and destructive psychological game; thus, all the characters challenge the average understanding of human nature and point to that ambiguous space between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’. Major Albu, the Securitate officer who does the summoning, initiates his interrogation with a ritual combination of masculine physical force and the mark of bodily fluids on the narrator’s hand: “Major Albu lifts my hand by the fingertips, squeezing my nails so hard I could scream. He always kisses my hand the exact same way, but what he says is always different” (The Appointment: 3, emphasis added). Paul, the narrator’s second husband, although supportive of his wife’s ordeal, ‘faces’ the quotidian horror by taking refuge in frequent alcoholic binges. He is a heavy drinker, in the habit of “barhopping late into the night”, who often “has to sleep off his drink” and whose breath infests the kitchen with a stale odour reminiscent of the “bar downstairs”. (The Appointment: 9). Lilli, a radiant beauty and the narrator’s friend, the initiator of a sexual relationship with her stepfather in her early teenage years, cannot escape her sexual past and endlessly replicates it by sleeping with much older men. The narrator’s father commits adultery with a young girl, his daughter’s age, a fact which brings about a most extraordinary offer from the daughter, who suggests taking the place of the father’s mistress: “I’m better than that girl with her

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braid, I thought, why doesn’t Papa take me. She’s dirty, her hands are green from all the vegetables” (The Appointment: 71). Lolitas in spirit and body they are, both Lilli and the narrator, but only one of them acts upon her incestuous desires, while the other, after carefully constructing the seduction scene aimed at her father as a sexual prize, senses rejection and withdraws in bitterness. The Electra complex, long discredited in male narratives, is reinstated in its own right by Müller, since both the narrator and Lilli actually attempt to “marry” the father/father figure so as to be saved from the either oppressive or oddly inefficient mother. The other important relationship between female characters is the one between the mother and her daughter, the unnamed narrator. This is a complex bond, definable, in my opinion, through one of the strands of female Gothic, focused on the absent mother.50 Kahane claims that the missing mothers and the “ongoing battle” fought by heroines “with a mirror image that is both self and other” is at the centre of the Gothic structure”, which allows her “to confront the confusion between mother and daughter and the intricate web of psychic relations that constitute their bond” (Kahane: 337). Although The Appointment represents only the metaphoric absence of the mother, the psychologically and affectively absent, yet physically present mother figure, the ineffectual manner in which she connects with her daughter has more devastating effects on the narrator’s psyche than literal orphanhood would. Thus, the narrator’s mother’s textual function is limited to a reinforcement of the feeling of inadequacy, experienced by the narrator since early childhood. Significantly, one of the first memories about the mother is a whisper from the past which both “degrades” the narrator and renders her very existence as a surrogate: “It wasn’t until one day when I was eight years old that a boy with grazed knees was sitting across from us in the tram that mama whispered in my ear: If your brother had lived, we wouldn’t have had you” (The Appointment: 71). Thus, although narrated from the perspective of the daughter’s viewpoint, the 50 More recently, following the tradition initiated by the so-called “demon-texts” (Switnow qtd in Rogers: 2), such as de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Friedan’s The Feminine Mistique, Firestone’s Dialectics of Sex, Rogers noticed that “the matrophobia that characterizes many mother-daughter bonds has rarely been considered. By matrophobia I mean more than fear of mothers. I also mean fear of becoming a mother as well as fear of identification with and separation from the maternal body and the motherline. I read matrophobia as the central metaphor for women’s relationships with each other within the context of patriarchal, or male-dominant culture” (Rogers: 1). As I will also argue further on, in Müller’s The Appointment and The Passport, the complex dynamics between mother and daughter and the unspoken but all the more poignant “mother-blaming” can be read as a fictional rendering of “matrophobic gothic”.

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mother-daughter bond is “pathologized”, instead of constituting itself in an empowering connection (Rogers: 3). Later on in the narrative, the daughter reciprocates, by commenting on the mother’s numbness of face and feelings and thus emphasizing her redundancy: Neither happy nor sad – merely beyond all changes of facial expression. There was more life in a glass of water. When she dried herself she became like the towel, when she cleared the dishes she became like the table, and she became like the chair when she sat down.” (The Appointment: 76)

Ironically, as a result of a failed attempt to ‘act’ like the insensitive mother, the narrator herself, facing the long and tormenting process of coming to terms with her many ordeals, will also ‘become an object’, a permanent counting machine: I do a lot of counting. Cigarette butts, tress, fence slats, clouds, or the number of paving stones between one phone pole and the next, the windows along the way to the bus stop in the morning, the pedestrians I see from the bus between one stop and the next, red ties on an afternoon in the city. How many steps from the office to the factory gate. I count to keep the world in order, I said. (The Appointment: 170)

Since both Gothic works in general, and the text under consideration here as Müller’s version of female Gothic, are about ambiguous meanings and interpretations, the reader and the critic alike are left to wonder about the function of objectification. De-humanization and hence an existence devoid of the most basic traits of what being human means, such as experiencing and displaying feelings and emotions, or the opposite, a well perfected methodology of resistance, a voluntary tuning in with the world of objects, meant to divert attention and thus confuse surveillance, even that initiated by the closest people? Müller does not clarify the meaning of this “confusion between mother and daughter” until the very end of the novel, when she suggests this confusion to have been a creative and liberating one, at least in the daughter’s case. In fact, all the narrator’s relationships, whether belonging to the past or to the present, are relevant for an understanding of her daily trials. An introvert with no means to relate to the outside world, born only to substitute the higher dream of a son, the narrator navigates through life completely alone and poisoned by hate, directed both towards self and the others: How often have I had to lie or keep my mouth to protect the people I love most – at the very times I could stand them least – to keep them from plunging headlong into some disaster. Whenever I wanted my hatred to last forever, a feeling of disgust would soften it up. With a hint of love on the one hand, and a heap of self-reproach on the other, I was already surrendering to the next hatred. I’ve always had just enough sense to spare others, but never enough to save myself from misfortune. (The Appointment: 74)

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The friendship between Lilli and narrator also deserves a special emphasis, as it further problematizes the female gender conundrum. As previously mentioned, the pair Lilli-narrator calls to memory the pairs Lola-narrator and Tereza-narrator in The Land of Green Plums. Even more poignantly than in the first novel, The Appointment focuses on the dynamics of physical beauty and harmonious body, to highlight a sense of sad self-awareness, which arguably poisons the narrator’s sexual and physical life.51 Lilli is everything that the narrator is not but painfully wishes she could be: Lilli’s beauty was a given, what your eyes saw wasn’t to blame for dazzling them so. Her nose, the curve of her neck, her ear, her knee, in your amazement you wanted to protect them, cover them with your hand, you were afraid for them and your thoughts turned to death. But it never occurred to me that such skin might someday wrinkle. Between her being young and her being dead, it never crossed my mind that Lilli might age. (The Appointment: 35)

I contend here that the female gaze, the spectatorship involved in assessing Lilli’s physical charm, exceptional in itself but painful to acknowledge, is almost male in its intensity. The wish for protection, the idealization of the female overpowering beauty, the refusal to admit the possibility of the effects of biological aging, they

51 In Signs Taken for Wonders, Moretti ponders on the outmost relevance of natural beauty and general physical aspect in Balzac’s Lost Illusions. They can dictate “which of the two friends will be the protagonist”, since Davide Sechard, invited to an evening at the de Bargeton’s explains his refusal to Lucien in the following terms: “[…] you are neither ticketed nor docketed. Take advantage of being socially uncommitted […] You are well-built, have a graceful figure, you carry your clothes well […]. In such circle I should look like a working man. I should be awkward, ill at ease. I should talk nonsense […] (Balzac qtd in Moretti: 112–3). Moretti emphasizes that Lucien’s ascension to the role of protagonist is possible and advisable, “because he is not ’describable’: his beauty will be the means to social ascent not, in the banal sense, as seductive beauty, but because it singles him out as the physically unmarked (‘virgin’) being, the man without signs. Lucien is ‘neither ticketed nor docketed’. His beauty is his polyvalence, his transformability, his intrinsic predisposition to shift from one role to another, from one attachment to another (and even from one surname to another).” (Moretti: 113) Although the two characters compared here are male, I find this comparison strangely applicable to Müller’s depiction of female dynamics of assessing Self and Other in terms of beauty. Of all the female characters, only the nameless narrator will survive and manage to escape the dictatorship (this being the equivalent of the Balzacian hero’s social ascension), perhaps because she is ‘the woman without signs’, who is capable of transforming, surviving and adapting to hostile circumstances and forever keeping her identity secret.

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all speak of unconsumed desire for possession. At the same time, they confess to the sorrows of self-awareness, and to the present moment becoming even more devastating when ‘enriched’ by hypothetical dreams of substitution: Like all married people, Albu wears his narrow wedding ring at work […] But jewellery at a job like that, tormenting people. It’s not an ugly ring by any means, and if it weren’t his it would be beautiful. The same is true of his eyes, cheeks, earlobes. I’m sure Lilli would gladly have stretched out her hands to stroke him; maybe even introduced him to me one day as her lover. (The Appointment: 34)

The implications of the narrator’s imagining Lilli still alive, either taking her place, and being interrogated by Albu, or making his acquaintance under more benign circumstances are self-revealing; physical beauty in itself can, under certain circumstances, deal with the patriarchal menace and thus avoid annihilation of both mind and body. Müller’s narrator, in The Appointment, similarly to the one in The Land of Green Plums, apart from many other past demons that she needs to exorcise, confronts the readers with a primordial conflict; the attempts of the not-so-attractive female ego to rationalize the id’s non-ceasing laments over not merely a lost, but never possessed, female beauty. Excessively preoccupied with the buying of beautiful clothes in an attempt to render an average physique more attractive, the narrator cannot avoid noticing the futility of her efforts compared to the natural beauty of Lilli who needs no embellishments to shine: Even before, Lilli never had any time for clothes. Still, men would turn around to look at Lilli. I’d have noticed her too, if I had been a man. The worse she dressed, the more striking her beauty. It was all right for her, but I’d been vain since I was a child. When I was five I cried because my new coat was too big for me. (The Appointment: 41)

The conflict that the narrator has become the centre of cannot be reduced to a simplistic antagonism, no matter how destructive, between the interrogator Albu and herself. Therefore, nor can the strategy of survival consist solely of physically escaping Romania, but also escaping from endlessly reproducing the survivor’s guilt; in other words, accepting living with guilt, as the penance she has to pay for the gift of survival. The Appointment depicts the life stories of two friends, out of whom only the not-so-beautiful one survives, whereas the carnal/ethereal beauty of Lilli becomes torn pieces of flesh: Lilli lay where she had fallen […] the prisoner was not allowed to sit, although he was permitted to look over at the grass where Lilli lay. Five dogs came running, their legs flying over the grass, which was as high as their throats. Trailing far behind, a number of hard-driven soldiers ran after them. By the time they reached Lilli, it was not only her dress that was in tatters. The dogs had torn Lilli’s body to shreds. Under their muzzles Lilli lay red as a bed of poppies. (The Appointment: 58)

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The details of Lilli’s horrible yet strangely aestheticized death haunt the narrative; the one who “cannot let go” and makes Lilli into a ghost haunting her already tormented psyche is the narrator, who had ambiguously felt protective, desirous and envious at the same time. In Judith Butler’s words: The lost object is […] made cohesive with the ego itself. Indeed, one might conclude that melancholic identification permits the loss of the subject in the external world precisely because it provides a way to preserve the object as part of the ego and, hence, to avert the loss as a complete loss (…). Giving up the object becomes possible only on the condition of a melancholic internalization or, what might for our purposes turn out to be more important, a melancholic incorporation. (Butler: 246–247)

Thus, in The Appointment, even more poignantly than in The Land of Green Plums, the “devouring” or “the melancholic incorporation of the female body”, especially when attractive and beautiful, becomes a site of life-long suffering for the survivor. As previously stated, starting from the moment of Lilli’s horrible demise, the narrator experiences and defines what may be read as a “Gothic aesthetic” that is particularly close to Cathy Carruth’s definition of trauma and its corollary, post-traumatic stress-disorder (PTSD): […] there is a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviour stemming from the event, along with numbing that may have begun during or after the experience, and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of) stimuli recalling the event […] (T)he event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. (Carruth: 4)

Although Carruth refers to the survivors of Auschwitz and Vietnam, it is obvious that PTSD following the communist terror behind the Iron Curtain, a historical atrocity of the twentieth century that covered almost fifty years, means displaying similar symptoms. The death imprint, the nightmares, the numbness and almost, by the end of the novel, a search for and a finding of meaning, make up for a narrator’s journey which resembles wanderings into a labyrinth of memories, regrets, and frustrations. In The Appointment all of these together appear to fashion a contemporary Gothic phenomenon. As stated by Bruhm: Words, the building blocks of stories, rise and fall in consciousness, constituting horrifying returns and traumatic suggestions. The very act of storytelling itself has the resonance of multiple traumas that we […] cannot integrate into a coherent whole. What gets left in this blank space where our narratives cannot be is, paradoxically, a massive production of other Gothic narratives. In the process of trauma shattering us from one into a stunning multitude, we are forced to confront our demons, our worst fears about the agents and influences that might control and create us. (Bruhm 2002: 171, emphasis added)

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The Passport The plot of this very short novel is deceivingly simple but, like the previous ones analyzed here, rich in social, political and gender connotations. As the title itself suggests, the quest which shapes the text is focused on the obtaining of what was arguably the most coveted document in Ceauşescu’s Romania’s, the only possible escape from the political, social, cultural and personal nightmare. The character engaged in the quest – again, one cannot exactly employ the word “protagonist”, as he is but one of the many fictional presences in the novel, and perhaps not even the most relevant – belongs to a community of East German Romanians and attempts to emigrate to West Germany together with his family. In my reading, The Passport suggests a different type of Gothic frame from The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment, a reading closely related to surrealism; in Kaye’s words: “Post-war Europe and America were all too familiar with visions of death and mutilation, and art movements such as German expressionism, surrealism and Dadaism all reflect these obsessive nightmare images” (Kaye: 182, emphasis added). As mentioned by Skolkin-Smith, what mostly attracts the attention of contemporary critics to the literary substance of The Passport is its surrealism; not the Western European one, but that inspired by the Dadaist and Symbolist poet Tristan Tzara (Skolkin-Smith: 2). Arguably, Müller employs the particular, Romanian version of surrealism, centred around the figure of the dictator; instead of experimenting with “depicting dream-life through beguiling pictures and words”, she opts for reflecting “helplessness and disorientation in a world destabilized by a foreign dictatorship demanding […] submission to the pseudo-reality of its imposed tyranny” (Skolkin-Smith: 2). Hence, the Gothic connection is all the more obvious, since both Surrealism and Gothic (in literature as well as in art) rely on imagination, on the strength of human emotions, passions and traumas, all situated in the uncanny human psyche. Müller’s world in The Passport is gloomy, desolate and stifling at the same time. Hopelessness and helplessness reign supreme even over nature – despair and futility lend their laments to poplar trees, animals, clouds and rivers alike. From the very first paragraphs when Windisch, the man desperately trying to procure a passport, is introduced to the readers, images of automatons attempting to regulate the world display their dominance over the text and the psyche: Every morning, as he cycles alone along the road to the mill, Windisch counts the day. In front of the war memorial he counts the years. By the first poplar tree beyond it, where he always hits the same pot hole, he counts the days. And in the evening, when Windisch locks up the mill, he counts the years and the days once again. (The Passport: 7)

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Windisch resembles the unnamed female narrator in The Appointment. Both of them, individuals under extreme external and internal pressure, endeavour to regularize chaos through rational exercises such as counting. However, both of them only manage to replicate life in an automaton-like fashion and hence they can be read as Gothic characters. Freud, in his seminal essay The Uncanny mentions Jentsch and his “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate” (Freud: 5). Windisch is not very convincing as an ‘alive’ character; on the other hand, in powerful surrealistic images, Müller bestows volition, tragic life and self-destructiveness onto trees: “Two hours after midnight the apple tree began to tremble. At the top, where the branches forked, a mouth opened. The mouth ate apples.” (The Passport: 30) Arguably, the symbolic presence of this vampiric apple tree, devouring his own ‘fruit-children’, introduces the reader to the problematic of gender. Called to mediate the conflict between the apple tree and the wealthy peasants who would like to see it dead, the ecclesiastic source of authority, the bishop who “didn’t pray”, emits his implacable verdict: “God has known for a long time,” he cried, “God reminded me of Adam and Eve. God”, said the bishop softly, “God has told me: The devil is in the apple tree” (The Passport: 30). Thus, the archetypal image of Eve, the lurking shadow of the first sinner, the temptress, the destroyer of the primordial harmony between man and God shapes the male perception of all female characters in the novel. Therefore, the apple tree and its desired doom are but harbingers of yet another, equally desired, gender doom. Müller’s male characters, victims to the system victimize in return. Women in men’s houses, still alive or long dead, wives, mothers, and daughters are the Other, the enemy, the malefic, diabolical presence that has to be cauterized if their male counterparts are to survive. The night watchman’s dreams on a night of a full-moon become nightmares, haunted by the images of his dead wife: “I knew,” he says, “that I wouldn’t be able to sleep. The moon is large. I dreamt of the dry frog. I was dead tired. And I couldn’t get to sleep. The earth frog was lying in bed. I was talking to my wife. The earth frog looked with my wife’s eyes. It had my wife’s plait. It had her nightshirt on, which had ridden up to the stomach. I said, cover yourself, your thighs are flabby. I said it to my wife. The earth frog pulled the nightshirt over its thighs. I sat down on the chair beside the bed. The earth frog smiled with my wife’s mouth. The chair is creaking, it said. The chair hadn’t creaked. The earth frog had laid my wife’s plait across its shoulder. It was as long as the nightshirt. I said: You hair has grown. The earth frog raised its head and shouted: You’re drunk, you’re going to fall off the chair.” (The Passport: 10)

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For the manner in which Müller depicts the complex relationship between men and women in the domestic sphere, the above quotation is exceptionally relevant especially that it appears at the very beginning of the novel. Bizarre substitutions, “earth frog”“dead wife”, petty marital bickering about the inevitable loss of female attractiveness versus male anti-social habits such as drinking, fabrication of physical events such as chairs collapsing under dream-weights, all carried on when the moon as ancient female element is at its strongest, confess to a dread and a desire alike. The underlying gender dilemmas, the trauma of difference that has always been a characteristic of the problematic of male-female interaction – are surrealistically depicted in The Passport and inexorably claim the narrative. Alive, women are life-destroyers, cheap whores selling their bodies to the highest bidder; dead they commit the even greater sin of an easy escape, and thus achieve a preservation of their sinfulness for eternity: “Men are stupid,” says the night watchman, “and always ready to forgive.” … “I forgave her over the baker. I forgave her for what happened in town.” … “The whole village laughed at me.” … “I couldn’t look her in the eye any more” … “Only one thing I didn’t forgive her – that she died so quickly, as if she’d had no one.” “God knows” says Windisch, “what they’re for, women.” The night watchman shrugs his shoulders: “Not for us, not for you. I don’t know what they’re for.” The nightman strokes the dog. “And our daughters,” says Windisch.”God knows, they become women too.” (The Passport: 10)

Further on in the novel, women – significantly of a different religion from the main male characters (Windisch and the night watchman) – are assimilated with the Jews, another traditionally oppressed ‘category’, that of universal scapegoats. Thus gender and race overlap and ‘support’ their mutual deflation: “The ones with small hats are Baptists. They howl when they pray. And their women groan when they sing hymns, as if they were in bed. Their eyes get big, like my dog’s” […] “They’re all brothers and sisters”[…]“On their festival days they pair off. With whoever they catch in the dark.” […] “They do it on the carpet in the prayer house” […] “That’s why they have so many children. This religion comes from America” […] “Yes […] “the Jews are the ruin of the world. Jews and women.” (The Passport: 63–64)

Clearly, women and Jews alike, as annihilating, ruinous monsters, neither human, nor animal (see the comparison with the dog’s eyes) are not straightforwardly just “monsters”. In texts inspired by Gothic conventions, albeit not reduced to them, “monsters” actually illustrate the presence of certain cultural anxieties. In a Swabian (East-German) community, the reference to Jews is symptomatic for the traumatizing effects of World War II, painfully reinforced by the quotidian trauma of living in Ceauşescu’s dictatorship.

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Another issue that deserves consideration is the focus on women’s vilification which inevitably revolves around their bodies and their questionable (from a male’s perspective) rights of engaging in free sexual intercourse. However, when directed towards the obtaining of certain advantages, women’s sexuality is pivotal and supported by patriarchal authorities. As noted by Marven: “The sexual exploitation of women pervades all aspects of life, from the prostitution which guarantees a passport in The Passport, to the sexualized interrogation methods employed by Captain Pjele in The Land of Green Plums (2005a: 58). Thus, Windisch, the protagonist of the former novel is complicit in his daughter’s prostitution. Amalie, with her father’s tacit approval, sells her virginity to the village officials in exchange for passports and freedom for her family. In this, she ‘uncannily’ resembles her mother, who, prisoner of the Soviets for five years and submitted to various kinds of humiliations and tortures, has also been forced to negotiate her sexuality in order to survive. Ironically, although “sold female body” means “alive female body”, Windisch, the ruthless patriarch – himself engaging in multiple adulterous acts – will still believe that all women can do, including Amalie, is carry sadness and destruction with them wherever they go: “Windisch can feel her voice inside his head. He throws his coat into the suitcase. “I’ve had enough of her”, he shouts, “I don’t want to see her any more.” He lowers his head. And quietly adds: “The only thing she can do is make people sad.” (The Passport: 86) The climax of The Passport is highly ambiguous and is related to the male character’s ‘exploits’, intermediated by his daughter’s negotiation of her sexuality. In 1969, writing about Gothic and its conventions, Hume claimed that what defines Gothic is not necessarily “the sentimental fiction of the day fitted with outlandish trappings”, but rather “a complex villain-hero” (Hume: 283, 287). Windisch’s fictional destiny is depicted by Müller as trapped between the condition of the misogynist villain who parasitically draws the substance of life from his own daughter’s youth, and the one of the undisputable hero who manages to defy the system and lead his family towards freedom and a better life: Windisch follows the beating wings of the small birds. They fly in ragged flocks. They’re searching for woods along the river flats, where there are only thickets and sand and water. The train travels slowly, because the rails criss-cross in confusion, because the town is beginning. Scrap heaps. Small houses stand in overgrown gardens. Windisch sees that many rails run into one another. He sees other trains on the confusion of rails. (The Passport: 89)

Just like the railways criss-crossing “in confusion”, Windisch escapes a language of resolution and a system of values; although he can be read as a modern Gothic character, he seems to partake from Manfred’s (castle of Otranto) substance and

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hence face the ambiguous verdict of morality. Examined as a novel with certain Gothic traits (setting, fantastic imagery, endless confrontation between villains and victims), The Passport appears to conform to the typical features of many a Gothic narrative, in that it “offers no conclusions”, but rather preserves “a tangle of moral ambiguity for which no meaningful answers can be found” (Hume: 288). However, the female characters appear to evade the ambiguity and “undo the trauma” in the end. Vilified, forced to prostitute themselves in order to either survive or ensure a normal life for their families in faraway countries, held responsible for all the evil that poisons a man’s world, the women in The Passport endure against all odds. As noted by Skolkin-Smith: “The female is both whore and mother and, like the nature that subsists and endures despite its impoverishment, she is the carrier of seed and sun, bringing regeneration and light to each family’s feelings of despair and discoloration” (Skolkin-Smith: 3).

Conclusion This chapter has suggested a Gothic and especially a female Gothic perspective for interpreting some of Herta Müller’s novels. Albeit not mentioned by the author herself, nor advocated by the considerable body of critical material inspired by her works (considerable in view of her relative recent emergence into the Western world), Gothic and its tropes – trauma, doppelgänger, alienating urban settings, gender clashes nevertheless are easily discernible at both textual and intentional level. The Appointment resonates with the nightmarish atmosphere of the Banat village in Nadirs and the never-expressed, but all the more powerful feelings of remorse in The Land of Green Plums. In The Passport we witness the conflicts and tribulations of a powerfully genderized world, which nevertheless states women’s resilience, in both political and personal realms. The female self, after being literally and metaphorically torn to pieces at the hands of the secret police succeeds in forging a victorious strategy of undoing the trauma: “The trick is not to go mad” (The Appointment: 214). And, it can be added: “live to tell the story”.

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Lost in Bombay and Istanbul: Urban Gothic in Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram and Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book52 Introduction ‘Do you know the Borsalino hat test?’ ‘The what?’ ‘The Borsalino hat test. It is the test that reveals whether a hat is a genuine Borsalino, or inferior imitator.’ […] ‘Just a hat? Oh, no, my friend! The Borsalino is more than just a hat. The Borsalino is a work of art! It is brushed ten thousand times, by hand, before it is sold. It was the style expression of first choice by discerning French and Italian gansgsters in Milan and Marseilles for many decades. The very name of Borsalino became a synonym for gangsters. The wild young men of the underworld of Milano and Marseilles were called Borsalinos. Those were the days when the gangsters had some style. They understood that if you were to live as an outlaw and steal and shoot people for a living, you had a responsibility to dress with some elegance. Isn’t it so?’ (Shantaram: 83, emphasis added)

Thus spoke Didier, one of the many characters that populate the semi-autobiographical universe of Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram, a novel which, since its 2003 publication, has sold millions of copies around the world. As inferred from the above quotation, the Borsalino hat is the city symbol par excellence, encompassing the urban dichotomy between style and danger. Inspired by the power of this symbol, the present chapter reads Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram and Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book from an Urban Gothic perspective, with an emphasis on individual and/or collective indentity. Thus, the two novels will be interpreted as texts which are on the one hand a continuation of the Western Urban Gothic tradition, dating from since the pre-Victorian era, and on the other a counterpart of the said tradition, in that they focus on the contemporary and Eastern flavour of the urban setting.

52 This chapter was, in considerably shorter and different versions, previously published as ‘Urban Gothic as a Borsalino Hat in Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram’ in Romanian Journal of English Studies, no. 8, 2011, ISSN 1584–3734, Frentiu, L. (ed.), Timişoara: Editura Universitatii de Vest, 410–421 and ‘From Romance to Urban Gothic in Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book’ in), Romance: The History of a Genre, Percec, D. (ed.), Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012, 149–164 (published with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing).

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The complex relationships established between the indvidual and his/her surroundings, or the indvidual and crowds, the either hostile or friendly ecounters that form the substance of metropolitan life are of paramount importance for the definiton of the urban subject’s transactional identity. Diana Fuss, in her booklength study of identity and identification argues that: Identification is a process that keeps identity at a distance, that prevents identity from ever approximating the status of an ontological given, even as it makes possible the formation of an illusion of identity as immediate, secure and totalizable […] identity becomes problematic in and through the work of identification. In perhaps its simplest formulations, identification is the detour through the other that defines a self. This detour through the other follows no predetermined developmental path, nor does it travel outside history and culture. Identification names the entry of history and culture into the subject, a subject that must bear the traces of each and every encounter with the external world. Identification is, from the beginning, a question of relation of self to other, subject to object, inside to outside. (Fuss: 2–3)

Fuss’s discussion of the concepts of ‘identity’ and ‘identification’, as well as the relationship established between them helps define the lines of inquiry of the present chapter. As previously mentioned, the urban journey that the protagonists of Shantaram and The Black Book undertake is marked by their search for a personal identity and definition of self. In both cases, an identity that had only appeared as “immediate”, “secure” and “totalizable” is brutally questioned as a consequence of unforeseen circumstances which disrupt the complacency of the self. Hence, in the urban spaces of Bombay and Istanbul the protagonists initiate a quest which is sustainable only by means of a continuous interaction between self and Other, as well as the self’s willingness to submit to and incorporate the often destructive effects of such interaction. Urban Gothic is a contentious, almost illusory concept which, according to Mighall, “should be a contradiction in terms”, since “the Gothic depicted what the city (civilization) banished or refused to acknowledge, except in the form of thrilling fiction” (Mighall 2007: 54). Indeed, although the Gothic constituted itself as a genre concerned with location, with settings53, it initially focused on either Catholic countries (Spain, Italy and France) or even more exotic, faraway places. 53 Significantly, the titles of two Gothic foundational texts are Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. Such is the overpowering role of location in Gothic fiction that it almost replaces the protagonists; even in the absence of a setting/character total substitution (which the reader may experience, albeit subconsciously), settings and surroundings of all sorts impose their own mystique and significantly affect plot and characters. For more exotic locations,

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The movement away from the domesticity and safety of the Protestant English landscape constituted a preliminary stage in the formation of Urban Gothic, the Pre-Industrial Gothic which “typically features threatening action occurring in a relatively isolated setting, in a remote country, in a distant time” (Donovan: 4).54 Although in British literature the idea of the existence of Urban Gothic literature has been extensively argued by numerous critics55, the vast majority of them acknowledge the birthdate and the birthplace of this sub-genre to be nineteenth century London. More recently, Donovan has argued for the existence of Early Urban Gothic as an intermediary category between Pre-industrial and Victorian Gothic which includes texts such as Thomas DeQuincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, William Godwin’s Things as They Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams, and William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (2009: ii). Furthermore, Donovan argues, novels such as Stoker’s Dracula, Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dickens’s Bleak House (all Victorian and Urban Gothic novels) portray “Gothic villains” who “live largely undetected among Londoners and choose their victims primarily by chance” (9). Hence, such texts are signifcant for the full acknowledgment of “the horror that attends urban anonymity and randomness” (9). In contrast, Donovan claims, “to the predations of Victorian Urban Gothic villains imposing themselves upon a hapless city” (9), the texts of the Early Urban Gothic “show the fluctuating relationship between the non-villainous individual and city […] with broader possiblites for identity” (9, emphasis added). The focus of this chapter is also the non-villainous individual and his struggle to articulate a consistent process of identity formation and identification in the urban environment. As I further on argue, neither Shantaram, the protagonist of the eponymous novel, nor Galip, Pamuk’s hero are Eastern avatars of the Victorian Urban Gothic villains; their see William Beckford’s Vathek and its settings, such as Samarrah, Isthakar and, frighteningly so, the Hall of Iblis itself, the very Gates of Hell. 54 According to Donovan, Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) with its multiplicity of settings – Dublin, Spain, an island in the Indies, – may be read as the last significant exemplar of the Pre-Industrial Gothic (Donovan: 4). 55 As this is a brief survey of the Urban Gothic criticism and not a detailed analysis of it, it is beyond the scope of the present chapter to provide an exhaustive list of the many studies centred on Urban Gothic. Mighall’s seminal A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction (1999) is arguably the best starting point. Its value lies in many of Mighall’s insights, such as the abject quality of this sub-genre in comparison to its mainstream counterpart, for being “not just a Gothic in the city” but “a Gothic of the city” (30–1, emphasis in the original text).

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“lack” of villainy actually complicates their individual search and adds new layers to the struggle to grasp selfhood under frequently hostile circumstances, produced and maintained through the urban setting.

Shantaram – Incredible Settings The present reading of Roberts’ Shantaram, a roman a clef placed in contemporary Bombay endorses Lloyd Smith’s definition of contemporary Urban Gothic as: A form in which the windings of the labyrinthine city substitute for the castle dungeons or monastery crypts of earlier Gothic, as in Poe’s detective stories and in “The Man of the Crowd”, or George Lippard’s “The Quaker City”. This has become a dominant form of Gothic in recent work, through noir thrillers to “Blade Runner”, and is frequently the origin of a subtle Gothicism in otherwise more realistic fiction. (Lloyd Smith: 176)

As its author repeatedly confessed, Shantaram has a very strong autobiographical flavour to it. In that respect, it shares similarities with Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1838), Bleak House (1852–3) and Little Dorrit (1855–7), Victorian novels where “it is the Gothic that facilitates the realist agenda”, since a variety of “traditional Gothic motifs and scenarios” serve to establish “the city, with its dark, narrow, winding streets and hidden byways” as “a site of menace” instead of “the labyrinthine passages of the earlier castles and convents.” (Punter and Byron: 28) The city, as the new Gothic setting replacing the older one, affects the specificity of terror, as experienced by the protagonist, in that it is quintessentially modern and characteristic of a new time and a new environment (Punter and Byron: 28). Shantaram is a novel which opposes the individual and background as mutually constitutive forces; as such, it focuses on the urban which gradually reveals itself as a composite, a bricolage, constantly challenging the protagonist and forcing him to negotiate his choices and follow a sinuous urban trajectory whose main coordinates are good and evil. As the novel expands the frontiers of the urban towards Bombay, the Eastern metropolis, and the counterpart of London56, the

56 Bombay is a colonial creation; there was no urban entity called Bombay prior to the arrival of the British, but a collection of seven islands, whose main deity, worshipped by the kolis, was the goddess Mumbadevi. In time, this village conglomeration, called Bombay by the English, acquired the status of the most important city of the overseas Empire, in Rushdie’s words, a real “Star of the East/With her face to the West” (Ashcroft: 498). In my opinion, the recent “return to origins” (where origins are not

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first part of this chapter aims at depicting the manner in which the author, albeit without acknowledging it, employs the Urban Gothic conventions. Roberts confesses in his explanatory The Architecture of the Novel that all throughout his carrer as an author he has nourished an interest in the theme of ‘alienation’ and what he considers to be its constitutive parts: ‘conflict’, ‘exile’ and ‘the search for meaning’. Thus, he introduces Shantaram to his readers as the central part of a trilogy, focused on exile, whereas conflict and the search for meaning are intended to be the themes of the other two novels. Furthermore, he explains that: The components I chose: conflict, exile and the search for meaning – correspond to an abbreviated form of Campbell’s analysis of global myth structures, which describe the journey of a young man or woman who leaves the tribe or village or family home, experiences great adventure and hardship in exile and then returns to share whatever he or she has learned, as part of the tribe or family’s search for meaning. (Roberts 2010: 4)

What distingushes the protagonist of Shantaram from this generic portrait of the hero, lies in that his leaving his country is not the result of an overwhelming desire to know the world and thus fulfil his destiny, but is the consequence of complex personal circumstances. Following a painful divorce and the even more painful loss of custody of his daughter, the protagonist-narrator looks for mental and physical solace in the world of drugs, becomes a heroin addict and commits numerous armed robberies to support his habit. After years of imprisonment he manages to escape from an Australian maximum-security prison, goes to India and lives for a while in a Bombay slum. There he learns Hindi and Marathi, establishes a free health clinic, and even replicates his Australian prison experience in Bombay, a direct consequence of the manoeuvrings of an evil brothel owner. An almost miraculous release intermediated by a Bombayite Godfather makes him join the local mafia and add to the list of his felonies money laundering, forging and working as street soldier for the all-powerful mafia don. For a short while, he also acts in Bollywood films, and gets to fight against the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, only to seemingly end his Indian adventures amidst loving friends and expectations of a better future. part of the national mythology, but a product of external conquest) signalled by the “renaming” of the city (Bombay became Mumbai in 1996, the result of growing nationalism and Anglophobia in India perpetuated by extremist and xenophobic parties such as Shiv Sena) conveys a ghostly quality of the urban space, the paradoxical result of imposed historical corporeality.

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As most of the protagonist’s adventures take place in Bombay, the image of the city occupies a central space in the narrative. Although Bombay is later on in the novel depicted as a metropolis of many layers, it is the slum which opens the gates of this rich fictional world. The slum occupies a considerable space in the novel and, with its overpowering demands on the senses, defines the protagonist’s contact with the Indian urban as a space which provokes a variety of emotions, ranging from strong dislike to deep attachment. At first glance, Bombay, the Island City bedazzles the hero with its ambivalent exoticism and poverty: Like brown and black dunes, the acres of slums rolled away from the roadside and met the horizon with dirty heat-haze mirages. The miserable shelters were patched together from rags, scraps of plastic and paper, reed mats and bamboo sticks. They slumped together, attached one to another, and with narrow lanes winding between them […] My first impression was that some catstrophe had taken place, and that the slums were refugeed camps for the shambling survivors. (Shantaram: 7)

This apocalyptic imagery constructs itself as an unexpected encounter with the abject, in the sense in which Kristeva employs the term, in Powers of Horror. In Kristeva’s view, the abject can be defined as “the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite”; moreover, it refers to any phenomenon that “disturbs identity, system, order” and that “does not respect borders, position, rules”(Kristeva: 4). Although I will return to Kristeva’s rich definitions of the abject when discussing the urban characters in Shantaram, I posit here that the image of the slum which appears early in the novel can be defined in terms of the abject, a space abject of the Eastern urban, especially when appraised from a Western perspective. Thus, from the very first pages, the Western narrator/subject whose cultural expectations are shaped according to certain standards of urban planning appears confused and repelled by the strange proximity between the sanitized and highly functional space of the airport and the catastrophic abjection of the slum. The Bombay slum contradicts the norm and subverts the Western comprehension of space and thus comes to stand for a different representation of space in the Eastern half of the world. As noticed by Hansen and Verkaaik: “Cities like Mumbai, Cairo or Nairobi […] are intense and dense cities” which “derive enormous energies from a constant jockeying over space” (Hansen and Verkaaik: 11). Such Eastern urban entities seem to be forever suspended in an “anatgonistic battle between impoverished and respectable groups, between newcomers and entitled, between city planners and the battling for livelihoods, between cars, pavement-dwellers and pedestrians” (Hansen and Verkaaik: 11). In Shantaram, this brutal intervention upon the mental landscape of the Western perceiver achieved through the presence of the slum symbolizes the exposure to another type of city, in Sen’s words: “the unintended city”, “never part of the

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formal master plan, but always implicit in it” (Sen: 33–40). Thus, an Urban Gothic perspective on the slum serves to articulate it as the Other of the city’s Self, a Gothic monstruous and spatial entity whose boundaries are impossible to control and whose urban appetite threatens to consume the real city. Its very squalor theoretically ascribes the slum to the underground; however, its very physical and concrete existence seems to reclaim the space of the ‘norm’, and as such it is visible, touchable and threateaning in its disturbing immediacy. Paradoxically, the slum dwellers themselves, fully aware of their impossible existence because of the illegal location, nevertheless subvert this Gothic sense of not-being and jokingly metamorphose it into a special, privileged condition. As expressed by one of the charaters inhabiting the slum: ‘“We are the not-people’ Prabaker said happily, ‘And these are the not-houses, where we are not-living’” (Shantaram: 250). However repulsive to the Western subject (no less so, to an Easterner, haunted by the possibility of ending up living in it) the slum can also be read as a metonymic representation of a purer space, perhaps involuntarily inserted in the cityscape, a world sheltered from the implacable laws of urban growth and/or decay.57 This different perception also affects the protgonist of Shantaram. In an instance typical of the tradition of Gothic articulation of opposites, the protagonist, following the intial gloomy, dismal appraisal of the slum, suffers a ‘change of heart’ and starts seeing beyond the apparent misery, displaying a spectacular, verging on the inauthentic and almost melodramatic, ability to open himself to a different type of understanding. I read this special willingness from within the perspectives suggested by Bourdieu and Levinas. In Bourdieu’s words, “the capacity to see (voir) is a function of knowledge (savoir)” (Bourdieu: 2). Moreover, seeing more signfies the will-to-know, that is the protagonist’s first steps on a journey towards self-knowledge – which will reach its overarching potential as the novel unfolds – since “the welcoming of the Other is the beginning of moral consciousness” (Levinas: 84) and the very act of being able to “receive from the 57 In the introduction to an excellent volume on Indian popular cinema, Nandy comments on the ambivalence of the slum: on the one hand, he remarks that “the slum recreates the remembered village in a new guise and resurrects the old community ties in new forms” (Nandy: 6); on the other, he points out that “the slum dwellers loom large on the urban consciousness as a dark, ominous, ill-understood, unmanageable presence”, and that the slum itself is a “negative utopia or dystopia”, a symbol of the “standard nightmares of the middle classes the world over” (Nandy: 3–4). Although Nandy refers to the significance of the slum in Indian popular cinema, in my opinion the image of the slum communicates, whether in media or in literature a raw introduction to Urban Gothic in its Indian disguise.

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Other beyond the capacity of the I” is “to have the idea of infinity” (Levinas: 27). Consequently, in Shantaram the mental image of the slum as the putrid reservoir of human squalor, inhabited by the marginal, the outcast, and the abjectly poor is erased by the immediate perception of its physical and not so tragic realities. A woman brushing “the black satin psalm of her hair”, yet another one bathing her children “with water from a copper dish”, men engaged in different routine activities, such as leading “three goats with red ribbons tied to the collars at their throats” and shaving “in a cracked mirror”, children playing, laughing and smiling faces everywhere (Shantaram: 8) confess to the existence of a soul of the urban, squalid space, of a ‘normal’ life being carried on under the most challenging (to a Western eye) of circumstances. In terms of a Gothic appraisal of the text, sustainable through a multiplicity of tropes and categories, the sublime ranks among the most signifcant. However, at this point, I would remark on the different type of sublime which can be discerned in this incipient description of Bombay. If, according to Botting, in the eighteenth century, “craggy, mountainous landscapes, the Alps in particular, stimulated powerful emotions of terror and wonder in the viewer”, “intimations of a metaphysical force beyond rational knowledge and human comprehension” (Botting: 8), in the twenty-first century the setting changes. The natural sublime is replaced with the urban sublime, which preserves, albeit in a different shape, the fascination with the object of gaze. Thus, in the act of aestheticizing the slum by way of presenting its dwellers engaged in normal, routine activites smilingly performed, Roberts subliminally observes Gothic norms. As a genre, Gothic traditionally incited “emotional effects on its readers rather than developing a rational or properly cultivated response” (Botting: 4). Therefore, the Bombay slum as an alien space, rendered even more so through the overwhelming depiction of a site of gloom, misery and dejection is actually inhabited by seemingly content individuals. This, in my opinion, is an Indian version of Urban Gothic which requires an emotional response and a vision of the heart rather than a socio-political appraisal, even with the abject body of the city never completely separated from body-politics. Although the protagonist cannot fail to ponder on the monstrosity of the political and social culprits: “What kind of a government […] what kind of a system allows suffering like this?” (Shantaram: 7), the paradigm of approaching the ambivalence of the slum is mostly sustained by the play of feelings and emotions, as well as the willing, albeit temporary, silencing of political undertones. As previously mentioned, Bombay is a many-layered city composed of different settings, representative of varied types of inhabitants. Leopold’s Beer Bar is the meeting point of the underground diaspora, men and women engaged in a network

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of illegal activities, ranging from the dealing of drugs, weapons and political influence to prostitution. Unlike the slum situated near the airport, Leopold’s stands at the very heart of Colaba – itself a central district – and is one of the largest bars in the city. It also stands for another core, that of the new but overpowering condition of uprootedness and displacement, which is shared by all its customers. As such, it is a space whose inhabitants, mostly due to their illicit activities which define their status as law-breakers but also paradoxically strengthen the bonds between them, are forced to live in a state of ‘in-betweenness’ and increasingly experience a loss of identity. At the same time, the urban network which they have to maintain so as to be able to survive in an alien space – they are all Westerners compelled to adapt to a profoundly Eastern city – requires the forging of a new type of identity althogether, strategically atuned to the multiple-layered realities of the city. Decked out in mirrors, the bar offers the opportunity “to inspect, admire and ogle others in a circumspect if not entirely anonymous fashion” (Shantaram: 45). Notwithstanding its openness and flexibility, which at first sight may be indicative of a shelter for the marginals, an oasis away from the madding crowds, Leopold’s is run by a set of internal, implacable norms which regulate behaviour and maintain strict hierarchies in this open underworld. For example, prostitution is ethnicized and categorized into “downstairs” and “upstairs” and “deals for drugs and other contraband were openly transacted at the tables, but the goods could only be exchanged outside the bar” (Shantaram: 45). It is these myriads of rules and norms which not only mark Leopold’s as a “third space” and a “diasporic space”, but one with a Gothic flavour resembling, for example the incessant flow of illegalities operating in and out of Montoni’s castle in Radcliffe’s novel.58 Shantaram may be read as a metamorphosis and an expansion of the Western Gothic, in terms of location per se. Thus, India, Bombay and Leopold’s constitute a syntagmatic chain of locations, the contemporary and Eastern ones, in contrast to those of the eighteenth century novels. As such, they are not physically isolated locations, removed from the perception of the modern subject in the same way in which the Alps and the Appenines for example, were faraway territories, cut from

58 My understanding of space here is not limited to the physical, geographical qualities of space as place. Instead, I read Leopold’s, inspired by the amazing ramifications of its subterranean activities, as denoting the economic, cultural and political practices of its cultural and collective actors within this particular location. For the concept of “third space”, see The Third Space. Interview with Homi Bhabha (1998) and The Location of Culture (1994), for “diasporic space”, see Brah’s Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (1996).

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the comforting landscapes of Protestant England. Instead, in the present age of globalism and multiculturalism translated into a significant melting of geographic and cultural distances, India-Bombay-Leopold’s are open, visible, accessible, at the centre. Their depiction is typical of the ambivalence of Gothic writings; as the land of the “honest bribe” (Shantaram: 47) they can either repel or attract. The visibility and accessibility of Leopold’s read as metonymy for Bombay and by extension for India, suggests a sustained process of cultural bricolage. Leopold’s thus signifies the emergence of a relatively strong urban subjectivity, resembling a rhizome and shared by many diasporic inhabitants. In Deleuze and Guattari’s words: A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb “to be”, but the fabric of the “rhizome” is conjunction, “and, and, and…” Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are totally useless questions. Making a clean slate, starting and beginning again from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a foundation all imply a false conception of voyage and movement… The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed… (Deleuze and Guattari: 25)59

In Shantaram, the concept of the rhizome is equally applicable to space – Leopold’s, the slum, the city as a whole, and to the identity formation process in an alien urban teritorry. The rhizome becomes the characteristic feature for the negotiation of identity for the narrator/protagonist, and all the other characters. In this sense, Didier, Karla, Ulla, Modena, Maurizio, the conglomerate of expatriates involved in more or less lucrative and dark enterprises, do not actually “move”, nor do they exist; rather, they are linked to one another by the invisible bonds of love, hatred, duty, revenge and friendship, feelings that may and do occasionally spill. Such characters are “by no means an average” (in Deleuze and Guattari’s words), but rather individuals who “pick up speed” and learn to survive and even prosper in an alien/alienating space. Thus, Leopold’s, with its manifold suggestions and revelations of underground activities, in spite of its flaunting visibility, is merely a separate space where diasporic subjects, marginals of all sorts, bricoleurs, gangsters, and pimps dwell in relative harmony. As noticed by Ashcroft, “the curious paradox of Bombay is that the space with which nobody identifies is the one with which ‘everybody’ can identify” (Ashcroft: 503).

59 For this reading I am much indebted to Karaman’s excellent study of Istanbul as a rhizomatic city, in the novels of Pierre Loti, Cornelia Golna and Orhan Pamuk (2011). Although she employs the rhizome to argue for the labyrinthic structure of Istanbul, in my reading I employ it to represent the labyinthic structure of the relationships established between the many characters that populate the world of Shantaram.

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Bombay displays a “Chinese box” structure of locations which, unfolded, challenge while construing the characters’ identity. The towers in the centre of the city slum, ironically called “The Villages in the Sky” are a temporary settlement on the roof of a major construction project, fulfilling the function of a slum suspended in the air. They also constitute an ambivalent space: on the one hand, they are a mimetic village, a shelter away from the urban jungle; on the other they induce a feeling of entrapment and forced isolation, vaguely reminiscent of Vathek’s tower, in the eponymous novel. There, the tower is the concrete result of the caliph’s desire to get close to the stars and also the site which, by inflating his ego, nurtures his absolute control over his subjects whose cities are perceived as mere “beehives” (Beckford: 111). The distance between the ruthless ruler in Vathek and his subjects is both physical and mental and it fulfils its sinister potential in the gruesome infanticide, the result of a “valorization of a center of concentrated solitude […] so strong, so primitive, and so unquestioned” (Bachelard: 32). At first glance, “the Villages in the Sky” in Shantaram are not sites of individual “concentrated solitudes”, since they are temporary villages in the sky shared by many. However, the workers are actually victims of a monstruous, devouring urban development process, which displays significant Gothic overtones. Thus, the workers are compelled to eat, sleep and labour up in the sky, on the newly-erected floors of buildings which “with no flash or reflection or trim to relieve the grey massiveness of the structures, […] swallowed light into themselves, extinguished it, and became silos for storing shadows” (Shantaram: 251, emphasis added). Another location of Shantaram is the brothel for the exclusive use of the rich and the powerful; it is also the site of abominable sexual practices meant to satisfy ‘elevated’ carnal tastes, and a Gothic prison for the girls forced to work there. In its isolation, Madame Zhou’s Palace is reminiscent of Satis House in Great Expectations. It is a building whose “street windows were barred with wrought-iron curlicues beaten into the shape of acanthus leaves”; inside, there is a “long corridor, darker than the sunlit street but softly illuminated by lily-shaped lamps of fluted glass”, and the “eerie, padded silence of rooms” confirms the Gothic atmosphere of this Eastern temple of carnal pleasure. (Shantaram: 276–277) Arguably the most disheartening and isolated of all the ‘islands’ that make up Bombay the Island City is Arthur Road Prison. The name of this particularly terrifying urban location is misleading, for the Indian prison is not indicative of Purgatory with the hope for a road to salvation, but Hell itself, “not a living place” whose inhabitants “are all dead men” (Shantaram: 417). The tunnel entrance is guarded by “two lines of convicted killers, who’d become guards themselves” (Shantaram: 415). When the protagonist, a human fly trapped in the diabolical net of Madam Zhou, is

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‘welcomed’ into this realm of pain and suffering he is made to atone not only for his own transgressions, but for the sins of the colonisers. Thus, in the prison-scenes of Shantaram, the Urban Gothic and the postcolonial Gothic are juxtaposed in scenes of extreme violence which present the hero’s plight through the angle of race. His whiteness and his perceived Britishness are opposed to India’s colonial past which demands violent expiation: “‘British built this jail in the time of the Raj,’ he hissed at me, showing teeth. ‘They did chain Indian men here, whip then here, hang them there, until dead. Now we run the jail, and you are a prisoner here’” (Shantaram: 413). The prison is also the very embodiment of the manifestation of the Urban Gothic exile experience which is situated in perfect opposition with the slum and its feeling of belonging. As a typical Gothic location, with its multitude of blood-sucking parasites tormenting the prisoners in their sleep and its worm-infested water, it displays a strong imgery of horror, painful death, and slow decay, reminiscent of Agnes’s torments in Lewis’s The Monk. Arthur Road, as the author himself explains, is meant to stand: for all the senses of exile that are connected to our intimate senses of ourselves. Lin is reduced to half of his body weight, covered in parasites, tortured and forced to wear leg-irons: he is gradually exiled from anything that had given him a sense of personal, physical identity. Lin was already exiled from his family, friends, nation and name. In the prison, he becomes exiled from his own skin and flesh. (Roberts 2010: 15)

In terms of settings and characters Shantaram employs the typical Gothic binary oppositions: good versus evil, dark versus light, rationality versus irrationality, order versus chaos. Nevertheless, such oppositions are frequently subverted as the novel progresses. The experiencing of the city of Bombay as predominantly a site of murder, betrayal, corruption, revenge and poverty is balanced by the soothing images of an Indian village, whose inhabitants appear to be in perfect communion with nature and its laws. The village in Maharastra, of which the Bombay slum is an uncanny harbinger represents the antidote to exile, the utopian yet real world that can alleviate any suffering, a sort of spiritual Eldorado. The villagers, unlike the uprooted crowds in the city of Bombay are perfectly aware of their place of origin, belonging, and permanence: We are here a long time, Lin. Sunder village has been in this place for two thousands of years. The next village, Natinkerra, has been there for much longer, about three thousands of years. In some other places – not near to here – the people do have a bad experiences with the floods, in monsoon time. But not here. Not in Sunder. Our river has never come this far, even so old Deepakbhai says it will. Everybody knows where the river will stop, Lin. (Shantaram: 135)

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In Shantaram, Roberts opposes city and village, in a manner reminiscent of Ann Radcliffe’s dichotomy between the corrupted society in Mysteries of Udolpho, luring Valancourt away from his positive essence, and the simplicity of country life, as a secure site for ensuring domestic happiness. The protagonist of Shantaram confesses that “there was a sense of certainty, in the village, that no city I’ve ever known provides”, whereas “cities are centres of constant and irrversible change”, where “the definitive sound” is the “rattlesnake chatter of a jackhammer – the warning sound you hear as the business reptile strikes” (Shantaram: 132). The reptile imaginary is symptomatic for the corruption of nature, its subjection by the gloomy urban conglomerates that humans have created for themselves, mesmerized by the myth of progress and aquisitions, but in reality, enslaved in souls and lives to an inhuman space, organized by the merciless laws of the capital. In Ashcroft’s words: However, crime and corruption reveal that, while nation and caste were the enemies of the city, capitalism, which arguably had a more lasting impact on the city’s dysfunction and economic disparity, was embraced whole-heartedly (in both it legal and illegal forms) by all sections of this “live-and-let-live” miracle. (Ashcroft: 507)

To conclude my discussion of settings in Shantaram, I notice that the various locations that constitute the fictional universe and the manner in which they relate to the issue of the characters’ identity correspond to what Abbas calls “the generic global city”. This is an entity in a continuous process of reorganizing itself, reflected not so much in the characters’ loss of identity, but rather in a liberation from it (qtd. in Rao: 15). In Shantaram, the constant changing of the urban opposes the slums’ threat of encroaching space horizontally, to the Village in the Sky Towers which achieve a similar effect vertically. The inhabitants of the slums, the Village in the Sky, the prison, the brothel and Leopold’s are merely temporary, and fluid presences on the urban scene, subjected, like the space itself, to unfamiliar mutations and identity changes, rendered inevitable when, in Rao’s words: the surface of the city becomes a site for the play of aliases, unmoored from an essential identity hidden in the depths of the underground – the organizational layer of technologies and infrastructure which structured the life of the city. The city formally turns into a series of meditations and experiences that no single figure, no urban type might organize or read with the clarity of x-ray detective or the detached vision of the enagagement of the flaneur, because there are no hidden depths that anchor identity. (Rao: 15)

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Characters and Plot According to Varma, “the Gothic mind loves to brood over the hallowed glory of the past” (Varma: 18), so that: It is much like the concern of the saint who tries to touch the still centre of intersection of the timeless with time. And when the Gothic novelist attempts to do the same he remembers the grand design of the cathedrals, and tries to blend into his novel the same volatile ingredients of fear and sorrow, wonder and joy, the nothingness and infinitude of man. The reader is terror-stricken and lost; carried away and redeemed, found and made whole in the same manner. The Gothic novel is a conception as vast and complex as a Gothic cathedral. One finds in them the same sinister overtones and the same solemn grandeur. (Varma: 16)

Varma’s comments are relevant not only for Roberts’ novel, but also for its accompanying study, The Architecture of the Novel. Here, Roberts confesses to a carefully-structured narrative, touching upon various constitutive elements such as the theme of the trilogy and its sub-themes: plot formation, character building, colouring and imagery, and usage of doubles. Such explanations also articulate suggestions for interpretation which, carefully considered, sustain this almost parallel reading of the novel and reveal it as a complex and awesome composition comparable, in aesthetic terms, to that of a Gothic cathedral. Moreover, after perusing both Shantaram and The Architecture of the Novel, not only have the readers as witnesses been “terror-stricken and lost, carried away and redeemed, found and made whole in the same manner” (in Varma’s words, quoted above), but the protagonist himself, via his interactions with other characters, has undergone the same range of experiences, in an authentic Gothic manner. Thus, the considerable length of the novel is justified via the complex network of relationships that the protagonist-narrator establishes and their relevance to a double unveiling – that of the city and that of the self in the city. In Shantaram, Roberts achieves a thorough exploration of space and a positioning of the urban subject via an intermediary category of inhabitants, well-versed in geographical and psychological interstices, defined by Hansen and Verkaaik as “urban specialists”, that is: “[…] individuals who by virtue of their reputation, skills and imputed connections provide services, connectivity and knowledge to ordinary dwellers in slums and popular neighbourhoods […] hustlers, big men, community workers, brokers, even gangsters” (Hansen and Verkaaik: 16). From Prabaker, the first guide into the city, including its underworld, to Khaderbhai, the dark and all-powerful mafia father, the protagonist’s penetration of the city-layers and his subsequent love for it is never an individual enterprise. Appropriating

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Bombay, transforming it into a familiar world is a group-effort. All the guiding characters share with the protagonist the quality of outsiders and they all facilitate his construction of an image of city and self, which is very much a replica of their own fragmentary identities: […] the shrewd clarity of near sleep suddenly showed me what it was that those new friends – Khaderbhai, Karla, Abdullah, Prabaker, and all the others- had in common. They were all, we were all, strangers to the city. None of us was born there. All of us were refugees, survivors, pitched up on the shores of the island city. If there was a bond between us, it was the bond of exiles, the kinship of the lost, the lonely and the dispossessed. (Shantaram: 345)

The protagonist/narrator’s self-awareness prompted by the realization of a shared destiny with other marginal figures becomes obvious in view of Bhabha’s argument: “it is from those who have suffered the sentence of history – subjugation, domination, diaspora, displacement – that we learn our most enduring lessons for living and thinking” (Bhabha 1994: 246, emphasis added). Although Bhabha’s remark characterizes the struggle of mainly the subaltern trapped in the socio-economic labyrinth, in Shantaram the protagonist and the human web that defines his growth focuses on the psychological reversal of the disjunctive, fragmented and displaced agency of those who, either by choice, or by fate have been victimized by history. The Bombayite Lin is, as previoulsy mentioned, the sum of all the human – and non-human60 – interactions with a wide variety of characters. Among those who mostly influence and even determine the protagonist’s urban becoming is Karla. Frequently in Shantaram, her character and the setting itself overlap, so that the images of Karla and Bombay lose their individuality and merge into each other, to the point where they constitute an atmosphere, a challenge and a rite of passage for the protagonist: But my story doesn’t begin with them, or with the mafia: it goes back to that first day in Bombay. Fate out me in the game there. Luck dealt the cards that led me to Karla Saaranen. And I started to play it out, that hand, from the first moment I looked into her green eyes. So it begins, this story, like everything else – with a woman, and a city, and a little bit of luck. (Shantaram: 3)

The beautiful Swiss-American woman, with striking green eyes and a dubious circle of expatriate friends inspires in the protagonist an obsession which is the central element 60 Becoming a true Bombayite also requires getting accustomed to sharing space with and being able to avoid the possible dangers of a different type of interraction altogether. Monkeys, cobras, rats, even a bear make their presence occasionally or frequently felt and they very often represent the alternative to the human subjects who populate the urban territory of the slum.

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in the novel. Karla is no typical Gothic heroine, nor is she the damsel-in-distress archetype of femininity within the genre. Rather, she is one of the modern, unconventional Gothic heroines who, in Masse’s words, begin “to stir and come to life”: No longer cast as emblems of the Persecuted Maiden or other archetypes, their textual histories begin to be noted, the ways in which they, too, have been carefully schooled in their roles discussed, and the reality of their textual dangers acknowledged. (Masse: 237)

A striking character, this femme fatale looms over the protagonist’s tale and maps its territory. She differs from the female and transgressive Gothic characters, since hers is not a cautionary tale, nor does she pay the price for her mistakes as the narrative concludes. Instead, she journeys through the novel with a highly sexualized performance, ultimately emerging as an almost victorious figure, in spite of being the mastermind behind a gory set of killings committed by the monstruous figure of Sapna. Her unconventionality thus resides in a powerful subversion of gender roles and stereotypes, for she is the female who has managed to penetrate the typically masculine space of the urban gangster. Even more significantly, she confuses the narrator/protagonist with her inaccessibility, secrecy of past, and strange inability to love; in this sense, she proves to be a Gothic character, in Punter’s and Byron’s words, displaying “uncertainties of character positioning and instabilities of knowledge” (Punter and Byron: 273). All throughout the novel, Karla inhabits the protagonist’s mind with a persistence that only the Gothic ghosts from afar showed in pursuing their victims. For Lin, she is at the same time, rescuer and victim, guide and instrument, and the source of all evil and of all good. The hand of destiny for the protagonist, she ‘selects’ his services for the benefit of the Bombay mafia father-figure, and finally betrays his love when she discovers in herself an unexpected penchant for domestic life next to a different partner. Karla is only one of the many characters to whose betrayal the protagonist falls victim, mostly because of his initial inability to perform in and master the urban landscape and its inhabitants. This lack of awareness represents an important aspect which justifies the Gothic quality of the hero in Shantaram. As Punter and Byron point out, very often, in Gothic fiction, characters and even narrators possess limited information regarding the universe they inhabit or the “structures of power which envelop them” (Punter and Byron: 273). As commented upon by Roberts, the black circle maintained by the instigators of betrayal and their respective victims lies at the very heart of the novel:61 61 Betrayal is one of the major themes of Gothic. Starting with The Castle of Otranto and Manfred’s grandfather’s betrayal of his master, the rightful owner of Otranto and continuing with Frankenstein’s betrayal of family ties in exchange for the dubious

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Lin’s betrayal of his true nature, through drug addiction in Australia, is what leads to his exile in Bombay. The first cause of betrayal, so to speak, is echoed throughout the book by other betrayals: Karla’s betrayal of Lin, Abdel Khader’s betrayal of Lin, Khaled’s betrayal of Habib, Madame Zhou’s betrayal of Karla, Ulla’s betrayal of Modena, Maurizio’s betrayal of Modena, Abdul Ghani’s betrayal of Khader Khan and so on. The link between all of these betrayals, from Lin’s first cause of betrayal of his true nature to Karla’s final betrayal of Lin (by marrying Jeet) at the novel’s end, is the action-intention dialectic of the novel: the plot works in and through the chain of betrayals, and the unfolding revelations of motives for those betrayals. (Roberts 2010: 27)

In Shantaram, betrayal as urban practice is committed by characters impossible to pinpoint on a moral canvas. This impossibility is rendered more poignantly through the lens of the abject, which, as previously argued, is a feature of the urban space of the slum. However, the abject is also poignant at the level of characters who frequently break the laws of friendship, love and trust. In Kristeva’s words: The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior… Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge, are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility. He who denies morality is not abject, there can be grandeur in amorality and even in crime that flaunts its disrespect for the law –rebellious, liberating and suicidal crime. Abjection, on the other hand, is immoral, sinister, scheming and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you, a friend who stabs you. (Kristeva: 4)

As betrayal implies a kind of duality, a duplicity between the impulse to adhere to the laws of morality overcome by the even more powerful impulse to survive and even prosper at the cost of others and sometimes self, the author of Shantaram often makes recourse to another Gothic device, that of mirrored events and characters. Major events in the novel occur twice and this repetitiveness, far from being boring and contextual, actually confesses to the accumulation of experiences and emotions. At the beginning of the novel, Prabaker, the guide and the protagonist are involved in a car accident which results in the Bombayite mob lynching the taxi driver responsible for the accident. This is an instance that emphasizes the hero’s self-effacement, passivity and almost-paralysis in a space which is not his,

rewards brought on by the efforts of the over/ever-searching scientific mind, betrayal as the dark propensity of the human spirit has informed a multitude of Gothic plots. Shantaram, in the present reading, is merely a case in point.

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and at a moment when even the connoisseurs of the urban intricacies can be overwhelmed. As Hansen and Verkaaik point out: In the face of the crowd – that faceless and uniquely urban monster that is so dreaded and mythologized – the local strong men can do little because the crowd transforms humans into a different categorical order, both animalistic and redemptive at the same time. The crowd is both human and not human, both ourselves and something radically alien in our mist. (Hansen and Verkaaik: 17)

Gothic murders are usually committed at night by generally psychologically-strained individuals who employ violence and rage, perhaps as a means of proving themselves as individuals in full control of their destinies.62 The cityscape of Shantaram redefines both the time and the producers of violence; thus, the lynching is carried out in broad daylight, by the anonymous mob, “the faceless and uniquely urban monster” in front of which the individual is reduced to a helpless spectator. Later on in the narrative, an uncanny replica of this incident however, subverts the image of the narrator/protagonist as powerless; by virtue of accumulated urban knowledge, in an instant of self-determination and control of the surroundings, Lin is able to detect the weaknesses of the “urban monster”, and thus save those who would have suffered a similar fate to the taxi driver. As previously mentioned, there are many instances of events which double each other and thus sustain a Gothic reading of the novel. The village flood, whose natural laws are perfectly understood by the peasants, but completely confuse Lin, is mirrored by the Taj Mahal Hotel flood, when he manages to rescue Karla in Vinod’s boat, Prabaker has his face “amputated” in a taxi accident, Maurizio “amputates” his friend’s face in a horror sequence, the journey to the village becomes the counterpart of the journey to Afghanistan, the protagonist’s ordeal in prison foreshadows the “cold turkey” of his struggle to stay off heroin (Roberts 2010: 19). In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Gothic’s use of doubling was a clear indication of the internalization of “evil”, which could become so powerful that it presented the serious threat of taking over the personality of the “host”, forced to succumb to its darker side. For Freud, writing decades later, the double suggests that the self is haunted by repressed feelings which threaten to disrupt commonplace notions of everyday reality. Therefore, as Smith persuasively argues, since Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde the Gothic novel has moved into the “view of the double as a harbinger of death, as a liberator from censorship, and as a mode of repression” (Smith: 95). The döppelganger continues into the twentieth and

62 See the chapter on The White Tiger in this book.

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twenty-first centuries, maintaining its psychological implications and reinforcing the good versus evil dichotomy, albeit allowing for successive juxtapositions. In Shantaram, the most important characters conflict with their doubles and create an atmosphere of painful ambivalence, a state of mental fuzziness, a labyrinth of extremes that both inhabit the protagonist’s troubled psyche, and constantly test and influence his allegiances and decisions. Prabaker, the small man with a large smile is Lin’s brother of light, at odds with Abdullah, the equally appealing brother of dark. The father-figure is split into the “black” and all-powerful Abdel Khader Khan, the Bombay mafia don, charismatic but dangerous, ruling with an iron fist and employing murder, blackmail and rape to maintain his domination, and his “white” counterpart, Qasim Ali Hussein, the slums “master”, exercising not power and ruthlesness but merely guidance and integrity (Roberts 2010: 20): Ulla is the mirror character of Khaled, the Palestinian, because both have sold themselves, body and soul, to survive in a broken world: Khaled has a scar from cheek to jaw, and Maurizio cuts Ulla with a knife, from cheek to jaw […] Maurizio is the mirror character for Abdul Ghani, Karla is the mirror character for Lisa Carter, Modena is the mirror character for Nazeer, Didier is the mirror character for Vikram, and so on, through all of the characters. (Roberts 2010: 20)

According to Roberts, the purpose of using the doubles, or what he calls the “technique of mirroring events and characters” is “to enrich the world of the novel through self-referential reinforcements, which should act in a not-conscious manner to make that world seem familiar (despite its potentially “exotic” otherness) […]” (2010:20). The obvious paradoxical value of the above confession resonates with the Freudian heimlich-unheimlich failed distinction, suggestive of the impossibility of clear-cut categorizations. As noticed by Allan Lloyd-Smith, Freud’s “uncanny” is “an effect incapable of precise definition” which: […] could be produced by a sense of strange in the familar; by what should have been hidden but nevertheless comes to light, as in “the return of the repressed”; and by atavistic feelings about death, against which the double was once a defence; coincidence; repetitions, and so on. (Lloyd-Smith: 176)

In my opinion, the author of Shantaram achieves the alteration and thus the adding of new layers of complexity to Freud’s tentative definitions of the uncanny. Roberts’ confessed employment of doubles and mirror-imagery is meant to create the sense of the “familiar”; nevertheless, as the author himself admits, the “potential “exotic” otherness” lies within the text, and as such, it cannot fail to haunt the readers’ and the characters’ perceptions.

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By the end of the novel, the protagonist’s first encounter with an Indian village is mirrored not in its letters but in its spirit. Thus, the final setting and perhaps the author’s most inspired of all his instances of doubling technique, is not the village but the slum. Nonetheless, it is a setting no longer informed by an abject quality, but one definitely energized and purified by the vitality of its inhabitants, most of them villagers who, although compelled to abandon the rural space, are still atuned to its peace and harmony. Similarly to the protagonist, the slum-dwellers have carved for themselves an ‘intended’ ‘city of the mind’, remote from the darkness and perils of the real city. Thus, the symmetrical imagery underlines the character/s’ meanderings outside and inside self, and indicates a completed journey. After losing friends to death and betrayal, and almost losing himself to hatred and drugs, the protagonist is reconciled to the necessity of honouring the signficance of his given name – ‘Shantaram’, man of peace: Looking at the people, listening to the breathing, heaving, laughing, struggling music of the slum, all around me, I remembered one of Khaderbhai’s favourite phrases. Every human heartbeat, he had said many times, is a universe of possibilities. And it seemed to me that I finally understood exactly what he’d meant. He had been trying to tell me that every human being will have the power to transform its fate. I’d always thought that fate was something unchangeable: fixed for every one of us at birth, and as constant as the circuit of the stars: But I suddenly realized that life is stranger and more beautiful than that. The truth is that, no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought of a single act of love.” (Shantaram: 932)

The Black Book The Victorian fin-de-siecle presented a rather gloomy picture of a society plagued by the fear of a major civilizational crisis. On the one hand, the threat was embodied by the steady rise of Germany and the United States, the new giants of the international scene; on the other, the domesticity and safety of the national realm gradually started being affected by the various difficulties abroad, ranging from the loss of overseas markets to the ever-growing restlessness of the colonized subjects. In the face of a declining state of affairs at home, in London, the imperial self-righteousness conceptualized as the mission civilisatrice could no longer be maintained. The capital of the Empire was inexorably becoming an unsafe space, whose slums were torn apart by disease and crime, confronted with a threateningly increasing population, mostly consisting of farm workers whose livelihoods had been destroyed by the agricultural depression. The very fabric of moral superiority which had sustained the British exploits overseas was slowly corroding, faced with the threats to the traditional values and family structures (Byron 2001: 132).

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Urban Gothic texts, such as Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894), Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) and Stoker’s Dracula (1897) are novels which focus on the theme of dissolution; a menace “to nation, society and the human subject itself” (Byron 2001: 133). However, the threat does not only originate in the possibility of an external force invading the metropolis, the very heart of the Empire; frequently, it is the city itself which has become “the locus of cultural decay” (Byron: 134). It resounds with a “low growl”, and “the dismal quarter of Soho” is the equivalent of “a district of some city in a nightmare” (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: 17, 27, qtd in Byron: 134). Dorian Gray’s East End is made of a labyrinth of “dimly-lit streets, past gaunt black-shadowed archways and evil-looking houses”, populated by “grotesque children”, coarse-looking women and cursing drunkards, sounding like “monstruous apes” (The Portrait of Dorian Grey: 117 qtd. in Byron: 134). In Turkish literature as well as in texts written by Western authors on the Ottoman Empire, and/or having Istanbul/Constantinople as setting, the fin de siecle landscape and the texts focusing on it display a civilizational anxiety very similar to that of the end of the Victorian era. The dissolution of former Ottoman glory, the irrevocable ‘contamination’ with Western values and traditions at the expense of the national ones, were economic as well as social, political, cultural and psychological issues. As early as 1890, the French master of travelogues and exotic fiction, Pierre Loti, uncannily foresaw the implementation of a Western modernity and its effects onto the Eastern space of Istanbul. To the sultan who had invited him to witness the lights of Kadir Gecesi63, Loti expressed his overwhelming, “melancholy regret in seeing the old things dissapear, in seeing great Stamboul opening up and being transformed” (qtd in Seyhan: 136). For Loti, Istanbul’s “imposing silhouette”, the only city in the world which embraces two continents, was still somehow able to communicate “the thrill of old memories, the great mystical world of Islam” (qtd in Seyhan: 136). Loti’s feelings of melancholy, nostalgia, and loss correspond to a Gothic and a Romantic sensibility keen on preserving the past, although it is not the disappearance of his past he laments, but one he seems to have appropriated for aesthetic reasons. As a Westerner, when writing about the urban splendours of Istanbul and deploring their gradual dissolution and colonization by modernity, Loti anticipates and inspires the later narratives of Turkish writers. Such authors, apparently subjected to an obsession with the past which can be labelled as Gothic, deplore the implacability 63 A night of celebration, the twenty-sixth night of the holy month of Ramadan.

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of time and history engaged in the erasure of both the Imperial values and that of the individuals associated with them. Thus, such authors may be said to contextualize outside the Western boundaries the national, cultural and social spaces as generators of specific forms of Gothic.64

Images of Istanbul Trauma, loss and search for identity are general Gothic tropes which are also present in different urban narratives and/or poems written by Turkish authors centred on the image of Istanbul.65 Ever since becoming the capital city of the Ottoman Empire in 145366, Istanbul maintained its uninterrupted status as both the heart of the Empire and its pride. As Seyhan points out: “For its modern scribes, Istanbul has become the definitive trope of loss and melancholy, a monument of time that survives only in the faded splendor of its seraglios, in archives and libraries, and in the ruins of fortresses and walls that once protected the city” (Seyhan: 36). Juan Goytisolo, in his collection of essays entitled Estanbul Otomano emphasizes the

64 Among the specific forms of Gothic, we can count for example, the American Gothic tradition, generally but not exclusively focused on issues of race, slavery and the shaping of a specific black identity, post-Civil War period. The emergence of Scottish Gothic in the nineteenth century, in works by Walter Scott, James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson, as Wright suggests, may be related to two important crises which occurred in the eighteenth century, i.e. the union of the parliaments of England and Scotland and the Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745/6 (Wright: 73). Canadian Gothic and its mid-nineteenth century beginning (with texts such as John Richardson historical romance Wacousta; or, The Prophesy: A Tale of the Canadas (1832) and Susanna Moodie’s non-fictional immigrant memoir Roughing it in the Bush; or Life in Canada (1862) dwells on wilderness, “anxieties over national identity and history”, representing a new society suffering from an identity crisis”, “emphasizing not only location but dislocation, refiguring the classic tropes of European Gothic in a New World context”(Howells: 105–106). 65 The poet Yahya Kemal (Beyatlı), the novelist and essayist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Buket Uzuner, Elif Şafak and Orhan Pamuk are only a few of the most important writers who, in their works, have focused on Istanbul and its ineffable essence, and attempted to read its arcane character. 66 The 1453 world-shattering event is still referred to in antagonistic terms; for the Westerners it will always be remembered as The Fall of Constantinople, whereas the Turks will always cherish it as The Conquest of Istanbul.

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ineffable quality of the city’s mystery reinforced by the inability of many Western writers to decipher its profound significances. Goytisolo talks about: […] the facts, anecdotes, hypothetical observations, descriptions of the interior of Topkapı Palace (which) are transmitted from text to text without much variation, as if its (Istanbul’s) authors, confronted with the enigma of the great city and unable to overcome the pull of its exoticism, gave up the uncertainty of their personal impressions to take refuge in the certainty of print that books provide. (Goytisolo: 115)

Istanbul is the very symbol of the Ottoman past as well as, more recently, an in-between setting which determines and sustains the Turkish indvidual and collective search for identity. Especially after the publication of Orhan Pamuk’s novels, Istanbul’s almost iconic presence became even more poignant, so that, far from mere exotic setting, the only city in the world spread on two continents has come to signify character and story. For the contemporary reader, Pamuk holds the unoffcial title of Istanbul’s most acclaimed literary son.67 In the present chapter I argue that this acknowledgment of the Turkish witer’s contribution to the manufacturing and maintaining of the mythical quality of the metropolis can be furthermore enriched if viewed from a new perspective. Thus, although I will be concentrating on The Black Book only, I contend that all Pamuk’s novels, either centred on the urban or placed on the margins, suggest a Gothic sensibility, atmosphere and manner of writing. They all offer a representation of the unstable identity in a specific Ottoman or Turkish historical context.68 Moreover, The White Castle, The Black Book, My Name is Red and more recently, The Museum of Innocence, all revolve around characters who, “like the author himself, are both orientalized and nationalized subjects, with an inclination to question their (often) imposed identities” (Göknar: 34). This double quality leads, in turn, to a doubling of every one of Pamuk’s books, where the narrative, although in fact a significant “story of lament and failure”, is carefully “balanced by the quiet birth of a narrative of hybrid or multiperspectival authority” (Göknar: 34). Such hybrid narratives, celebrating the excess of meanings 67 Pamuk himself entertains this image and claims that although his dream city has always been depicted in great detail, especially in short pieces, before his works there had never been an attempt to paint the cityscape on a larger canvas and thus obtain a panoramic view (Seyhan: 149). 68 Göknar makes a similar point when she argues that all of Pamuk’s books centre on a repeated, obsessive return to national history, assessed in a comparative, European context. The four major historical areas that Pamuk scrutinizes and depicts in his novels are Ottoman history in a European context, the Ottoman Empire’s legacy on the modern Middle East, the early twentieth century Kemalist cultural revolution and the lasting effect of all three on present-day Turkey (Göknar: 34).

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and interpretations are highly similar to the Gothic ones, inspired by myths, legends and folklore of medieval romances where, as a rule, reason is surpassed by imagination and emotional effects. Göknar further on distinguishes the Ottoman theme in Pamuk’s novels; its characteristics bear uncanny similarities to the Gothic ones, albeit appropriated for an Eastern palate. Thus, the Ottoman theme, as Göknar rightly notices, is not only an evocation of history or the historical, but, more relevantly, a discussion of the aesthetic concerns of form and content. It also tackles the innovation of the concept of selfhood, a finely-tuned critcism of Turkish culture and ideology, the definition and establishment of contemporary novelistic forms – “as inspired by historical novels such as mesnevi mystical romances, meddah, commedia dell’arte stories or miniature paintings, the new narrative styles that mix Perso-Arabic and pure Turkish”, as well as “the creative possibilities inherent in ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ intertextuality”. (Göknar: 37).69 In Pamuk’s opinion, The Black Book is meant to read as “a personal encyclopedia of Istanbul”, as well as a “history of many personal memories”: In The Black Book, I finally did something that I’ve been wanting to do for years, a sort of collage, bits of history, bits of future, the present, stories that seem unrelated… To juxtapose (all these) is a good technique for signifying a meaning that should (only) be intimated, indirectly alluded to. (qtd in Seyhan: 149)

69 Compare with Walpole’s Gothic manifesto, in the second Preface to his Castle of Otranto: “It was an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success” (Walpole: 43). Moreover, it can be easily argued that The White Castle, for example, Pamuk’s first novel to be translated into English, starts and reads as a Gothic novel. As we learn from the first pages, the novel is the result of Faruk’s Darvinoğlu’s translation of an Ottoman manuscript that he has found in “that forgotten ‘archive’ attached to the governor’s office in Gebze” (The White Castle: 9) whose author “nourished no pretentions to style while revising the book into contemporary Turkish” (12). For Gothic specialists, Pamuk’s debt to Walpole (albeit unacknowledged) is obvious. In the Preface to the first edition of The Castle of Otranto, Walpole also claims that “The following work was found in the library of an ancient family in the north of England” (Walpole: 39). As Göknar points out, much of Pamuk’s ulterior fame resides in the translation of The White Castle and its content of “mediating metahistorical and metafictional (“postmodern”) elements, as a master-slave allegory, imperio-national historiography, an interrogation of narrative identity, the clash of civilizations, ‘intimations’ of autobiography, dramatic mystery”, as “transnational elements accessible to outsiders” (Göknar: 36). But, I would add, all of the above, all the recognizable elements of Pamuk’s The White Castle are also Gothic tropes and modalities of composition.

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The very title of The Black Book seems to invite a Gothic perspective upon the text, as do the titles of many of its chapters: Someone’s Following Me, The Eye, Look Who’s Here, The Dark Air Shaft, Can’t You Sleep?, I Must Be Myself, The Executioner and the Weeping Face, The Mystery of the Letters and the Loss of Mystery, and Mysterious Paintings (Ştefan: 359). Through such titles and allusions to Gothic authors and texts, the image of modern Istanbul, translated as a multi-faceted mystery to be solved by the protagonist can be deciphered as an Eastern equivalent of Sue’s fin-de-siecle Paris and Reynolds’ no less macabre London. Paradoxically, in spite of its ramifications and suggestions of multiple readings (social, political, post-modernist, psychological)70, the plot of The Black Book can be summarized in only a few words: A young small-time lawyer, Galip, returning from his work to his modest apartment, discovers that his wife, Rüya – an avid reader of detective novels – has disappeared. Consequently, he embarks on a quest to find her, and in the process he gradually comes to exchange identities with his cousin, Celal, a journalist whose columns seem to carry obscure implications for Galip’s quest. By the end of the novel, both Rüya and Celal are found dead, although the reasons are unclear. The last image of the novel is that of the widowed Galip-Celal, surprised in a despondent contemplation of the city from the window of Celal’s flat. Since the plot is triggered and sustained by the wife’s disappearance followed by the husband’s desperate attempts to find her, I contend that The Black Book can be read as a Gothic romance; however, Rüya’s character is but a Gothic heroine manqué. Had Pamuk followed the conventions of traditional Gothic resting upon the rescue of the missing female character from danger – real or imaginary – The Black Book could have easily been read in a more conservative manner and perhaps been more facile to classify. However, since Rüya, the “object” of love and quest, is gradually but irrevocably replaced by a male character, Celal, the identity of the protagonist/seeker is ‘taken over’ by Celal who becomes his double. As noticed by Karaman: “In return, this doubling process serves to metamorphose the search for the other (Rüya), into a search for the self” (Karaman: 44). “Rüya” means “dream”, a ‘detail’ which is inserted by Pamuk to support the idea that

70 The Black Book has so far been read as an example of intertextuality by Jale Parla, as a “stratified fiction” by Göksel Aytaç, and as an original mixture between the postmodern novel and the Eastern tale by Ramazan Çeçen. Enis Batur based his critical analysis of the book on the comparison between Pamuk’s Istanbul, Joyce’s Dublin and Musil’s Vienna, whereas Aytaç discovered similarities between Pamuk’s and Thomas Mann’s styles.

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it is the self-quest which shapes the novelistic substance, and not the search for an actual life or love. Loosely touching upon the tropes of romance, but abandoning them for a more complex type of Gothic, The Black Book is yet another of Pamuk’s books which thwarts expectations, much like The White Castle, My Name is Red and others.

Setting The first sounds of the winter morning penetrated the room: carts passing by sporadically and old buses, the salep maker, who was in cahoots with the pastry man, banging his copper jugs up and down on the sidewalk, the whistle of the shill at the dolmuş stop (The Black Book: 3).

In The Black Book the exploration of the urban space coincides with the protagonist and his wife waking up in the routine domesticity of their bedroom and simultaneoulsy engaging in an early confrontation with the disturbing hubbub of the city (Bayrakçeken and Randall: 201). This initial juxtaposition between the state of dreaming and reality will mark the entire narrative and the protagonist’s desperate search for identity, as “it stages the anxious sense of living another’s dream” (201) and hence the imposibility of being oneself. The character’s struggle for self-definition has its counterpart in the city’s successive attempts at forming a spatial identity. For Martin Stokes, in spite of it being a “beloved” city, Istanbul is a space characterized by a “schizophrenic placelessness (between Europe and Asia), both in terms of geographical and cultural positions” (Stokes: 225). My argument, inspired by Stokes, is that Pamuk reinforces this “schizophrenic placelessness”, and gothicizes Istanbul by constantly emphasizing its qualities of an urban palimpsest. One of the most poignant such references almost cuts the substance of the novel into two halves, reminding the audience of what they are actually reading about and urging them to stay on the same course: […] each incarnation of this city – Byzantium, Vizant, Nova Roma, Anthusa, Tsargrad, Miklagrad, Constantinople, Cospoli, Istin-Polin had beneath it the underground passages in which the previous civilization had taken refuge. This had led to an extraordinary sort of double city, the guide explained heartedly, with the underground city ultimately wreaking revenge on the overground city that had supplanted it […] (The Black Book: 191, emphasis added)

Istanbul as an exceptional urban space is articulated through the exposition of a multiplicty of historical layers, reminiscent not of a Tower of Babel-like imagery,

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but one that is suggestive of heaviness, the enormous historical and geographical burden that the city has to endure. Ştefan remarks on the fact that “in The Black Book Istanbul does not spread and does not rise; heavy with history, it seems to sink” (Ştefan: 360). It is this figurative sinking which recreates the memory of loss, as Pamuk’s depiction of Istanbul breathes the desolate air of a quest for a problematic identity for the Turkish people. The endeavour at establishing an identity is rendered even more contentious in the context of Islam, depicted as an ambivalent component of Turkish identity. On the one hand, Islam is the religion at the root and core of nostalgia for a “true” or “original” identity (Almond: 82). Islam helps establish and foster such nostalgia, and define “the nebulous whole called ‘Turkishness’”, by way of providing “a politically useful storehouse of images to supply the Turkish citizen with a carefully constructed series of heritages, destinies, hopes” (82). An attack against Islam or its prominent figures such as Mohammed cannot be forgiven by Turkish readers (The Black Book: 76), nor can conservative media stop broadcasting programmes which lament the loss of Balkan mosques, fallen into the “hands of Yugoslavians, Albanians and Greeks” (62). On the other hand, Islam had to be relgated to the margins of Turkish life in the name of modernization. Thus, inexorably trapped between East and West, vilified by the former for an act of betrayal of authentic Islamic values, and disparaged by the latter for barely achieving a pathetic mimicry of ‘the civilized world’, Pamuk’s inhabitants of Istanbul – especially the intellectual protagonist – can but contemplate the failure of history to grant them an inhabitable territory of the mind. Early in the novel, Pamuk conveys his comprehension of the urban space in desolate, apocalyptic imagery which threatens to consume the Istanbulites. In the second chapter of the First Book, suggestively entitled The Day the Bosphorus Dries Up (also the title of a journalistic column), the consequences of global warming and its possible effects on the Black Sea have become yet another trope of confrontation between East and West. Celal’s column thus reads as the innevitable result of a troubled psyche, compelled to face the effects of the urban ­non-belonging, entrapment and despair materialized in an apocalyptic scenario. From among the many other chapters facilitating a reading of The Black Book from a Gothic perspective, arguably this is the quintessence of Pamuk’s version of Urban Gothic. The flight of the dark, fantastic, and gruesome imagination creates a picture that hangs abominably over the entire structure of The Black Book, and haunts the subconscious long after the act of reading has finished. The idea is simple, yet all the more effective: “a short time from now, the paradise we call the Bosphorus will turn into a pitch-black bog, glistening with muddy shipwrecks baring their shiny teeth like ghosts” (The Black Book: 16). This apocalyptic image

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is not mere mental acrobatics meant to add new circles to Dante’s Hell, but a painful reflection on contemporary issues of poignant interest to the Turkish nation. The much-desired, profound Westernization of the Turks is depicted as a failed enterprise; moreover, perhaps one that should have never been attempted in the first place. Thus, only futile mimicry, readable from Bhabha’s perspective as a destabilizing “ironic compromise […] the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same but not quite” (Bhabha 1994: 86, emphasis added) appears to have succeeded in the city of Istanbul, grotesque implications notwithstanding. In Pamuk’s text, the context of mimicry as a cultural process is rendered through the symbolic reality of the American cars sunk in the Eurasian waters. Thus, it was this forced modernization – symbolized by the foreign cars – that which bore the full responsibility for a lack of identity which now haunts the Turkish people: A night will come in this new hell when I slip through the barbed wire in search of a certain Black Cadillac. This Cadillac was the prize possession of a Beyoğlu bandit (I cannot bring myself to dignify him with the word gangster)…Gripped though I am by the enchanted terror of midnight, I shall light a match; in the flickering gray glow I shall see the steering wheel, the nickel-plated dials, needles, and clocks still glistening as brightly as knights in shining armor – and there, still kissing in the front seat, the skeletons of the bandit and his mistress, her bony wrists still gleaming with bracelets, her ring-clad fingers still intertwined with his. Not only are their jaws conjoined, their very skulls are locked in an eternal embrace. (The Black Book: 19–20, emphasis added)

The voice depicting this macabre scene belongs to Celal, the columnist, and it is but a stage in the subtle but powerful insinuation of the persona of the journalist into Galip, the small-time lawyer. Thus, at a textual level, the estrangement of the reader from the identity of the narrator (Galip and Celal overlapping and confusing meanings), corresponds to a general tone of death, anxiety, paranoia, fixations on the rich and famous, pathetic simulacra of a much-wished for harmonious mixture of Turkish and Western values. This forced Westernization does not work, it never truly has, the text suggests, similarly to the Turkish mistress who failed to achieve refined opulence, acquiring tackiness instead. The image also implies that only a kiss of death or a deadly kiss can link East and West. A Gothic reading of Pamuk thus displays the otherwise traditional affiliation of the genre to politics and cultural allegiances. From a “traditional” Gothic perspective the terror of midnight, the eerie hour when Celal contemplates the results of his search – the skeletons embraced in a doomed posture, travelling bewteen past and present and stretching its ghastly tentacles to grasp future as well – evokes a Radcliffean feeling of terror

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mixed with Lewis’ horror. In On the Supernatural in Poetry (1826), Radcliffe argued that: “Terror and horror are so far oposite that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them” (Radcliffe: 168). With this terminological distinction in mind, therefore, the image of the Cadillac car inhabited by human remains, especially looked for, as if to amplify the initial dread, presents the reader with a sample of “Gothic à la Pamuk”. The above scene makes a further important point. As mentioned by Khair, in his analysis of Wuthering Heights: Wonders take place ‘elsewhere’; terror comes form ‘elsewehere’. But terror, contrary to what some might claim ‘here’ is not born ‘elsewhere’. Terror takes place when that which has been disowned, exorcised, banished, exiled, prevented entry, nevertheless crashes barriers. The Devil tempts the most virtuous monk alive, Frankenstein’s repudiated monster returns to stalk his creator, Count Dracula rises from his coffin, ghosts walk into the lives of the living, the gypsy-lascar slave whose labour has contributed to the affluence of the Lintons and the Earnshaws arrives in Wuthering Heights- and is not allowed to be other than evil. (Khair: 69, emphasis added)

In Pamuk’s Istanbul, Galip-Celal simply has to remember, in order to evoke local dread and thus render an urban locus haunted by skeletal figures of small-time fame. Faced with the remains of the Beyoğlu bandit and his mistress, faced with the disowned, exorcised, banished, yet familiar figure of a local negative celebrity, decomposed at the hands of time, memory and imagination, Celal/Galip ­actually confronts the plight of in-betweeness. Significantly, one can remark on the theoretical in-betweenness, on which Gothic often dwells, as the state of Turks b­ eing neither Easterners, nor Westerners, but rather belonging to a no-man’s-land, tangible only when the waters of the Bosphorus have dried up. Such a reading is reinforced by the literally Gothic midnight moment, the “witching-hour” when the protagonist/s make/s his/their macabre discovery.

Characters and Plot Azade Seyhan chooses to read The Black Book as a quest, not only Galip’s for his lost wife, Rüya, but: as a bildungsroman about rebuilding or a new Bildung (“education or formation”). The quest unfolds in the form of a detective story in which writer, reader and protagonist are all Bildungsreisende (“travellers on the road to Bildung”) […] Reading the novel as an expression of the desire for a new Bildung suggests that the cultural pedagogy of modernity requires correction. The path to reform goes through a reeducation, designed to recall memories where erased or forgotten knowledges are restored.

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The path winds through various sites of Istanbul, through apartments, offices, stores, underground storehouses, which are all compact memory archives. The city tuns into a mini-encyclopaedia of cultural history. (Seyhan: 150)

Then, what does the protagonist turn into? Obviously into a wanderer, but one of the worst species, the utterly self-aware, over-intellectualized, as “schizophrenic” in his pursuit as the site that shelters him, while also splitting him. Galip has to become Celal so that he might have a chance to find himself in the end. Although at first Galip shrinks under the veiled accusations that protrude from Celal’s columns, accusations meant to shatter a world of self-complacency in which people like Galip carry on their daily existence, he gradually starts impersonating Celal, enters his apartment, starts living there, and even answers the questions of foreign journalists, as Celal. Thus, a much-loved Gothic theme, that of the double, informs Pamuk’s novel. As stated by Marina Warner: the double, while wholly dissimilar, unnervingly embodies a true self […] To be doubled can entail, for example, that you are shadowed by another, and that someone else is living with your identity, and that identity has been stolen; in this way the döppelganger derives its being from the nexus of ideas about soul theft and multiple, wandering spirits that structure the living dead. (Warner: 139)

Undoubtedly The Black Book is a case of stolen identity although that aspect by itself does not make it into a modern rewriting of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Other similarities with Stevenson’s work can be detected. For example, neither of the two novels provides any kind of closure, nor are the readers offered a satisfactory explanation of the mystery that initiated the search in Pamuk’s case, or fostered the exchanging of identities in Stevenson’s novel. What the reader does know – and s/he has to work hard at preserving this certainty – is that Galip is in search of a lost dream (as mentioned above, Rüya means “dream” in Turkish), but instead of capturing its essence in the good old-fashioned Freudian sense, he projects a world of urban, political, cultural and personal nightmare onto his fellow-travellers, Pamuk himself and the reader. As Seyhan claims, on his road Galip “encounters the fiery criticism of the voice of the people, who fault the intelligentsia for having sold out to the hollow values of the West and having exchanged a cultural heritage for the false promise of progress.” (Seyhan: 153) Much indebted to Seyhan’s fine criticism, germane to the manner in which the Turkish writer chose to depict the social and psychological aspects of the identity-quest, I would also argue that Pamuk, extremely accurate in capturing modernity and/or post-modernity and its discontents, opted for a subtle insinuation of Gothic conventions into the fabric of the narrative, as both valuable literary device and as a manner of “writing back in anger” to the West that fostered

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the genre. Thus, Galip, the problematic protagonist, masochistically delights in becoming the Other, seems oddly detached from Rüya, and manifests a special inclination for the grotesque, gruesome, horrible aspects of the metropolis. In reading his character, one might remember the ambivalence that accompanies any Gothic writing, manifested in excess blamed while perversely enjoyed. For Pamuk renders a contemporary Istanbul, enamoured of its own enigmas and incomprehensibility, through the macabre findings of Galip, stretching from the dummies of Master Bedii and the brothel full of movie-star lookalikes. Actually, these seem to be the real characters of the book; a city that has become a field of corpses after the imaginative exercise that depicts a dried up Bosphorus can only be inhabited by mannequins and starlet whores. Master Beddi’s Children, another column written by Celal, is prefaced by a quotation from Dante, “sighs rising and trembling through the timeless air” from Inferno, Canto IV. Master Bedii, the narrator tells us, was the artist who created the mannequins for the first Naval Museum, established during Sultan Abdülhamid’s reign. The materials, carefully chosen but bizarre in their differences, range from wood to plaster, from wax to human hair. The effect is one of uncomfortable realism, as their maker spared nothing in order to make them look as human as possible. Pamuk deliberately reverses one of the many understandings of the uncanny, a Gothic appropriation of a Freudian category. Among other examples of the uncanny, such as döppelganger, deja-vu, coincidences, fear of being buried alive, and telepathy, automatism is one of the most representative. As stated by Bennet and Royle, automatism is an example of shape-changing referring to a process whereby “what is human is perceived as merely mechanical” (Bennet and Royle: 37). Thus, one notices in Pamuk’s novel a reversed automatism at work, in the sense that Master Bedii’s “children” are objects in fact, mannequins, but the craftsman’s art has rendered them as real as humans, seemingly on the point of emerging from their “father’s” shelter to experience the world outside. Unfortunatley, there is no place for these dummies in the traditional Muslim world, where artefacts, such as icons, statues and pictures are perceived as manipulating and distorting real faith through their visual appeal. Thus the dummies’ very resemblance to people seals their doom, as the then Sheikh al-Islam reads in them a blasphemous attempt to compete with Allah in creating life. In terms of ‘parenthood’ and its accompanying responsibilities, Pamuk’s chapter about the dummies is Frankenstein with a twist. Unlike Victor who renounces his creature and thus condemns him to the desolate destiny of an outcast, marked by an obvious, physical monstrosity, Master Bedii never gives up his idea of placing his “children” in a museum. Could it be that this Oriental mother/father figure is more

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responsible for his progenies, because he is Eastern and thus, per force, at least according to a Western reading of the East, feminized, comfortable with the idea of motherhood as well as with the responsibilities derived form it? Could master Bedii’s failure to find his ‘children’ a house, even in the “Enlightened” years of the Republic, be related to the present cultural placelessness of Turkish people, who have a country, but not a cultural space where to feel at home, so that they are forever doomed to live in a black dungeon? It would seem so, for when contemplating the dummies, the narrator takes an imaginary leap backwards into the times divine and ‘remembers’ “the gods who had suffered the loss of their innocence as well as the loss of their awesome shadows exaggerated in the dim light; of penitents who consume themelves for being someone else” (The Black Book: 67–8). The symbolism of gods having lost their “innocence” is furthermore supported by the overpowering image of Jalal ad-Din Mohammed Rumi, the Sufi mystic poet and philosopher known as “Rumi” in the Western world. Rumi ‘made a career’ in the West and inspired an alternative vision of Islam as Sufism, that is as a religion which is peaceful, apolitical and characterized by a non-denominational spirituality. In spite of his world-fame, what most Westerners know about Rumi (and the knowledge of most Turkish people does not fare any better) is that at the age of forty-five, quite inexplicably, he fell under the overpowering influence of Shams of Tabriz, thus alienating his former followers who possibly murdered Shams. Up to now, nobody has been able to provide a satisfactory answer to the dilemma of Shams’ disappearance. Celal, the columnist of The Black Book in trying to penetrate the thick veil of mystery suggests the real reason for this unheard of conversion of Rumi, the reputable Konya sheikh to the less than orthodox values of a wandering spirit like Shams’: All his life, Rumi had been searching for his “other”, the double who might move him and light up his heart, the mirror who might reflect his face and his very soul. So whatever they’d done or said in that cell, they were best seen as the words and deeds of a multitude masquerading as a single person. Because to endure this suffocating thirteenth-century Anatolian town and the devotion of the brainless disciples (whom he just couldn’t bring himself to give up), Rumi needed to be able to draw from a storehouse of alternative identitities, just as poets over the ages have availed ­themselves of disguises for much the same reason – to enjoy a few moments’ peace. (The Black Book: 256, emphasis added)

Pamuk’s suggestion regarding the uncanny relationship between Rumi and Shams is that the former has ‘constructed’ the latter, so that he could find some solace from his daily ordeals at the hands of hordes of worshippers. Shams as an ‘extreme creation’ – especially considering the negative impact he had over Rumi’s followers – may be read as similar to Victor Frankenstein’s monster, constructed from

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bits and pieces, but also serving a purpose, that of an escape from the burdens of a future pater familia. The suggestion of a comparison between Pamuk’s and Shelley’s works would be even more viable, I would argue, if the potentially lethal effects of self-replication as a phenomenon at the core of both novels were taken into consideration. Thus, the message conveyed by The Black Book and Frankenstein is similar in that only violent death and destruction can accompany an extreme desire to see oneself artificially reflected in another, or to obsess about giving life. Moreover, in the same manner in which Viktor Frankenstein is actually projected in a world of Others – the monster, but also Clerval, his best friend and Watson, the explorer, so does Rumi, along with many others, invade Celal’s personality and consequently Galip’s too: In a notebook filled with half-finished stories that looked to be autobiographical, Galip read that in the course of one ordinary summer day Celal had imagined himself to be Liebnitz, the famous tycoon Cevdet bey, Mohammed, the owner of a newspaper, Anatole France, a successful chef, an imam much admired for his sermons, Robinson Crusoe, Balzac, and six other people whose names he’d crossed out in embarrasment. Glancing through the caricatures inspired by the drawings of Rumi on so many stamps and posters, he happened onto a clumsily drawn caricature of a casket on which were written the words Rumi Celal. (The Black Book: 258)71

Islam, whose ambivalent role regarding the Turkish identity-formation has been previously mentioned, acquires a new, symbolic dimension conveyed in the story of Rumi and Shams. Like Sufism, Islam is employed by Pamuk in order to dismantle the concept of identity, in particular that of self. From this perspective, the story of Rumi and/or Shams, one of the many doubles or selves that Galip-Celal 71 In Other Colours Pamuk confesses his interest in and inspiration from authors who, like him, focus on the trope of the double. Regarding the genesis of The White Castle, he explains: “I was of course familiar with the tales of twins in E.T.A. Hoffmann, who was always dissatisfied with himself, and who, because he’d wished to be a musician, imitated Mozart, going so far as to add Mozart’s name to his own; I knew the bloodcurdling stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Dostoyevsky’s The Other, to whom I paid homage in the legend on the epileptic pope in the Slavic villages […] I was in awe of the comic-book character Onethousandandonefaces, who was forever changing identities: If he changed places with me, what would he do? I wondered. If he changed places with an amateur psychologist, he might say, “Actually, what all writers want is to become someone else.” Robert Louis Stevenson put even more of himself into Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde than Hoffmann put into his fairy tales: an ordinary citizen by day and by night a writer! Whenever my own identical twin changed places with me, he would try to remind my readers of my debt to doubles” (Pamuk 2008: 249–250). Obviously, this is also a debt to the Gothic.

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comes to embody in his citadine wanderings “becomes a deconstructive parable for the dissolution of selfhood into a confused “nothingness” (Almond: 82). Thus, provided with the historical example of an Islamic saint’s failed quest for and establishment of a new self via the incorporation of the other, we finally understand that the protagonist of The Black Book, “the secular Western hero of the text, a comfortably middle-class Istanbul lawyer, moves deeper and deeper into the book’s Orient and its various hurufisms and messianisms, not to find his identity but ultimately to lose it” (Almond: 84, emphasis in the original text).

Conclusion The present chapter has offered a reading of Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book and Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram from an Urban Gothic perspective, focusing on the protagonists’ endeavours to construct and maintain identity in the Eastern metropoli of Istanbul and Bombay. Moreover, it has tried to establish the similarities with and the differences from other Gothic or Gothic-influenced texts. In both novels, the metropolis may be said to expand its attributes of setting only, and become character and story. Shantaram and The Black Book, as Eastern counterparts of the Western Urban Gothic differ from it in their treatment of female characters. Thus, the traditional Gothic plot which generally revolves around the stock figure of a fainting, helpless heroine, in need of rescue from real or imaginary perils by her faithful lover is given different significance. In both novels it becomes a pretext for a self-search, doubled by a quest for reconciliations between East and West, themselves effaced by the many voices of Bombay and Istanbul as urban settings, characters and stories, corresponding to many historical avatars, past, present and future. The Gothic trope of the double or the döppelganger, traditionally expressing anxiety concerning the emergence of the human dark side and its lethal potential is rendered as a means for negotiating moral allegiances (in Shantaram) or as masochistic pleasure (in The Black Book). As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter and argued throughout, the protagonists of the two novels which are read as Urban Gothic are non-villainous individuals, compelled by extraordinary external circumstances to foster a new sense of self and identity via interractions with others, in a frequently hostile urban environment. In Shantaram the fusion between self and other is harmoniously carried out and the end of the novel presents us with a hero who has ‘made peace’ with himself and others. On the other hand, the now widower-protagonist of The Black Book is doomed to continue his futile existence, detached from self and others in an Istanbul unredeemed by efforts to capture its essence and “continue – as my readers will have noticed – to be its old miserable self” (The Black Book: 459).

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Blurring Boundaries in Never Let Me Go72

Kazuo Ishiguro’s unsettling novel Never Let Me Go has so far inspired multiple readings and interpretations which, on the one hand facilitate the flight of the critical imagination, on the other confuse and impede the reaching of final meanings. One of the most evident and undoubtedly fruitful readings of Ishiguro’s novel sees it as a brilliant, recent continuation of the dystopian tradition, notwithstanding the time-frame of the narrative that places Ishiguro’s world in a recent past while dealing with matters of vital interest for the future of mankind. Nevertheless, in spite of this perspective, inspired by the similarities with canonical dystopian works, such as novels (Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Handmaid’s Tale, Ridley Walker, Fahrenheit 451) and films (2001: A Space Odyssey, The Island, Blade Runner, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Solaris), Never Let Me Go by far surpasses the limits and the standards of the dystopian genre. Generally speaking, the dystopian is centred on the controversial (from the perspective of authority) figure of the rebel, a hero/heroine who opposes an oppressive system and usually manages to reach his/her radical goals. As will be argued further on, in Never Let Me Go neither at the textual level, nor at the speculative one, are the readers presented with a symbol of resistance, since not even Kathy H., the ‘central intelligence’ of the novel, ever conceives the possibility of rebellion. Yet another theoretical lens for interpreting Never Let Me Go is its placement within a narrative framework which is typical of the autobiographical mode of writing. As has been frequently conjectured, the autobiography represents a sensitive space of assessment and self-assessment in view of its frequent associations with the almost inevitable transcriptions of trauma. According to Leigh Gilmore: Because testimonial projects require subjects to confess, to bear witness, to make public and shareable a private and intolerable pain, they enter into a legalistic frame in which their efforts can move quickly beyond their interpretation and control, 72 A much shorter version of this chapter was published as ‘Blurring Boundaries in Never Let Me Go’, in Kazuo Ishiguro and His Work-Proceedings of the 19th METU British Novelists Conference, ISBN: 978-605-125-592-7, Yildiz-Bağçe, H., Ö. Türe Abacı, Ş. Akdoğan, Ş. Sezer (eds.), Ankara: Department of Foreign Language Education, Faculty of Education, Middle East Technical University, 2012, 105–119.

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become exposed and ambiguous, and therefore subject to judgements about their veracity and worth. (qtd in McDonald 74)

Furthermore, as stated by McDonald, whose arguments were inspired by Paul De Man, beyond the trauma implications, the concepts of veracity and worth argue for the autobiography’s expansion beyond the boundaries of a mere genre. Regarding De Man’s assessments of the concepts of veracity, worth and trauma as embedded in autobiography as a genre, McDonald claims that the philosopher “is extremely effective in destabilizing the notion that autobiography should primarily function as a genre where truthful accounts unfold, rather than a cross-genre approach to reading” (McDonald: 75). Therefore, McDonald suggests that only: […] freed from the restrictions of genre and mode, autobiography can be seen as a means of providing a coherent narrative account that focuses on the recounting of experience (be it empirical or rational) as a means of creating a rapport between reader and writer across a broad spectrum of literary genres. (McDonald: 75, emphasis added)

Taking my cue from the idea of autobiography as freedom from generic limitations, I suggest in the present chapter a free reading of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Nevertheless, I do not read free as completely divorced from any type of genre association. Much as Never Let Me Go escapes attempts made at clear-cut categorizations and generic inclusions, in the reading that this chapter suggests, there still exists a genre to host most, if not all aspects of Ishiguro’s work. Thus, I opt for reading Ishiguro as a text displaying certain Gothic tropes, particularly liminality, the uncanny and the ghost (Derrida’s hauntology).73 As a genre, Gothic is possibly the most ‘flexible’ in allowing for transgressions and digressions from a formulaic type of literature. As acknowledged by many scholars, since the 1970s the Gothic has become a highly popular field of academic studies as well as a notoriously difficult field to define. This difficulty, experienced by Gothic specialists and commented upon by many others, is all the more obvious if one chooses to ‘go astray’ from the familiar and consecrated paths opened by Radcliffe, Walpole, Beckford, Maturin and Shelley (to name just a few) 73 Although Ishiguro has not generally been acknowledged as an author whose work is actively influenced by Gothic conventions and tropes, there is an exception to this exclusion. See Hillary Thompson’s exhaustively argued essay Encrypted Ancestries: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Its Uncanny Inheritances which, albeit focusing on a different novel, also draws on the relevance of the Gothic genre for an insightful interpretation of Ishiguro’s work.

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and ‘hunt’ for specific Gothic topoi in works of literature which, at first sight, might not appear to display any connection with the aforementioned genre. In my opinion this difficulty of reaching all-encompassing definitions and characterizations stands as the point of convergence between Gothic as a genre and Ishiguro’s work. Yet another important and common feature is, as previously mentioned, the liminality74 and the boundary-blurring technique which informs both Gothic and Never Let Me Go. In a recent study on the concept of liminality and the variety of ways in which it can inform human experience at all levels and especially literature, Viljoen and der Merwe claim that: The relevance of the idea of liminality for literature is not only that many texts describe and represent liminal states, persons and transformations, but also that the space of the text itself is a symbolically demarcated zone where transformations are allowed to happen – imaginary transformations that model and possibly bring into being new ways of thinking and being. Literature, in this view, does not constitute an autonomous aesthetic sphere, but it is regarded as part of society’s rituals, albeit a voluntary ritual. (Viljoen and der Merwe: 11, emphasis added)

The present chapter will dwell on the idea of liminality and its particular application to the Gothic genre, famed for its rejection of totalizing definitions and its preference for what Bhabha called interstices, and/or in-betweeness.75 Thus, it proposes a liminal reading of opposing categories, such as human identity versus non-human identity, real versus unreal, present versus past, adult versus child, art versus life, being told versus not being told, language versus meaning, and arché versus non-arché in Ishiguro’s novel.

74 Liminality is a term which originates with the ethnographer and folklorist Arnold Van Gennep, the first to notice that ritual ceremonies and rites of passage have a universal essence, with only minor differences between various cultures and civilizations. Van Gennep distinguishes between separation (preliminary), transition (liminality) and incorporation (post-liminality) (see van Gennep, Arnold, 2010). The anthropologist Victor Turner was heavily influenced by van Gennep’s conceptualization of liminality, which he extended in various successive works (see Turner 1974, 1977). More recently, the concept of liminality has inspired Bakhtin’s and Bhabha’s concept of hybridity and in-betwenness (see Bakhtin 1988, Bhabha 2004). 75 Manuel Aguirre also discusses liminality as an important characteristic of the Gothic novel. In his opinion, the effects of terror in the Gothic novel are the result of the diegetic (textual) constitution of a threshold between a “domain of rationality […] and the world of the Other, the Numinous” (Aguirre: 15). This threshold constitutes an unhomely space of its own from which the protagonists try to flee.

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Among its many other characteristics, as pointed out by Hurley, “Gothic has been theorized as an instrumental genre, re-emerging cyclically, usually at periods of cultural stress, to negotiate the anxieties that accompany social and epistemological transformation and crises” (Hurley: 9). Surpassing even the interest aroused by the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1997, the 2001 Advanced Cell Technologies’ announcement of the existence of a cloned embryo which had reached a six-cell stage of development led to protests verging on mass-hysteria. As Kass points out, literature has amplified the overwhelming effect of the horror contained in the process of endless replications, and the fear of “the Frankensteinian hubris to create human life and increasingly to control its destiny”, (Kass: 43) has not left the public consciousness since the publication of certain key-texts. Huxley’s Brave New World has fostered numerous fictional responses among which a most notable precursor to Never Let Me Go, is Ira Levin’s Boys from Brazil (1976). This thriller, highly reminiscent of Frankenstein, is built on Jozef Mengele, the infamous Nazi scientist’s creation of ninety-four boys by cloning Hitler’s cells. Unlike Ishiguro’s characters, the said boys are not killed at the end of the novel, in view of the possibility of social circumstances nurturing a different development, of responsible and humane individuals. However, the final vision of one of the boys painting while imagining himself as the object of adoration of a large mass of spectators, “sort of like in those old Hitler movies” (Levin: 280) clearly symbolizes the never-ending threat of a future mass of replica Hitlers. Like Levin’s novel, Never Let Me Go tackles one of the most poignant issues of the present day, touching upon the moral dimensions connected to the process of human cloning and its implications; unlike Levin’s novel, Ishiguro’s text does not end on a note of menace and doom whose source are the clones. Thus, considerably dissimilar to previous novels centred on the effects of cloning, Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go does not even remotely entertain the possibility of the human world being taken over by a mass of clones focused on the obliteration of their models. The destiny of Ishiguro’s clones, designed as donors-only of organs for the humans, is firmly implied and sustained throughout the novel, especially via the spatial dimension which irrevocably limits the surpassing of their condition. I would argue here for a transmutation of the usual plot of a Gothic hero/heroine seeking freedom and agency after an unfortunate entrapment in a hostile environment, governed by the usual Gothic villain. Instead, the Gothic takes over the setting of Never Let Me Go and spatially determines the heroes’ consequent development or, in this particular case, the lack of it. Hailsham, a real place with a long history that stretches back to the Doomsday Book is also the name of the school where the clones Kathy H., Ruth and Tommy, among many others, are raised. Apparently, Hailsham is a benign space, serving a humanistic purpose of educating the clones in the simulacrum of a

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boarding-school. The dangers lurk elsewhere, “in the woods […] at the top of the hill that rose behind Hailsham House”, from where “the dark fringe of trees […] cast a shadow over the whole of Hailsham” and the only way to keep safe was to be placed at “the front of the main house, because you couldn’t see them from any of the windows” (Never Let Me Go: 49–50). Horror stories of clones either having their hands and feet chopped off or being turned into Catherine Earnshaw-like ghosts, who beg to be allowed back but are refused re-entrance, designate the space outside as the realm of lethal menace and implicitly idealize the school as a sacred and safe space. As Viljoen points out, for spaces to become sacred, certain conditions need to be fulfilled. Among sacred territories are “places where humans have had particularly strong encounters with God or the forces of nature”, such as: dark caves […] associated with mystery and danger, since they are invested with the immense and mysterious power of the numinous” and whose sanctity is due to the “community [which] maintains and reinforces their sacred status by means of festivals and rituals.” (Viljoen: 193–4)

Moreover, space sanctity, as Eliade argues, is often related to thresholds, powerfully marked as axis mundi which separate organized reality or cosmos from everything that is placed outside it, that is, from the unknown, disorder, darkness and chaos (Eliade 1965). Read from this perspective, for the clones sheltered by it, Hailsham represents a mental and a spatial axis mundi, a locus which protects known reality from the menacing exterior chaos. In contrast, the woods and the legends that create their aura of evil are, according to Smith and his analysis of space, inspired by Durkheim and Northrop Frye, polluted, associated with evil and eliciting emotions like “unease, terror or revulsion” (qtd in Viljoen: 195). Nevertheless, Hailsham as a safe location is but an illusion, since the reality behind its walls is sinister, marked by dark connotations of future, inescapable doom. For, whilst apparently nurturing and protecting the clones’ human characteristics, Hailsham is but a comfortable incubatory where the clones are taught ‘the meaning of life’, mostly via the close perusal of Victorian novels.76 Above everything else, Hailsham signifies initiation into the unconditional acceptance of a gruesome fate. As the anthropologist Victor Turner argued, any initiation presupposes a separation from the community at large, at least until the age when a new status is reached: “The initiand has been divested of the outward attributes of structural position, set aside from the main arenas of society, life in a seclusion lodge or camp, 76 For a critique of the way in which Victorian novels, besides teaching the clones the values of empathy, also create a false sense of expectation and possible future achievements, see Anne Whitehead’s Writing with Care (2011).

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and reduced to an equality with his fellow initiands, regardless of their preritual status” (Turner 1974: 232). However, for Ishiguro’s clones there is no accession to a superior stage and no acceptance by society at large. Education is not directed towards the idea of Bildung, so that “[…] by dismembering the students at adulthood, Ishiguro seems to be reinforcing their exclusion from the national community, not their participation within it” (Eatough: 142). Rather, the clones’ initiation resembles in futility the self-acquired education of Frankenstein’s creature whose efforts at self-improvement do not facilitate its inclusion into the human community but instead preserve its status of an outsider. As stated above, Ishiguro depicts Hailsham as a place where education can be acquired; however, it is the type of education which deliberately renders confusing any early attempts to perceive its true function. I would argue here for an authorial employment of what may be called the technique of obscuring, present at the level of both setting and narrative structure. Edmund Burke, one of the earliest men of letters to inspire Gothic conventions wrote: “To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes” (Burke: 54). It is in the setting therefore, which while obscuring, in fact capitalizes on the dichotomy between good breeding conducive to evil purposes (from the perspective of the educated and humane reader, at least), that Gothic first enters the novelistic arena of Never Let Me Go. Hailsham, as perceived by the orphan clones represented by the reminiscing voice of Kathy H. thus blurs the boundaries between school and home while it uncannily preserves its double significance. Before proceeding with my analysis, I would like to clarify, albeit briefly, the sense in which I employ here the categories of the uncanny and the double as well as their connection with liminality, as I consider them relevant for what I perceive as the Gothic dimension of Ishiguro’s novel. The uncanny77, as Royle argues: has to do with the sense of a secret encounter: it is perhaps inseparable from apprehension, however fleeting, of something that should have remained secret and hidden but has come to light. But it is not ‘out there’, in any simple sense: as a crisis of the proper and natural, it disturbs any straightforward sense of what is inside and what is outside. The uncanny has to do with a strangeness of framing and borders, an experience of liminality” (Royle: 2, emphasis added). 77 As it is universally acknowledged by Gothic scholars, the uncanny is a famously difficult concept to define. For the most recent attempt at creatively surveying the multiple ways in which the uncanny can tentatively be written on and employed for the purpose of deciphering literary texts and not only, see Anneleen Masschelein’s fine study The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny in Late-Twentieth-Century Theory (2011).

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Read from this angle, the borders which Ishiguro’s text establishes early in the novel and which I discussed before, between Hailsham as a safe space and the woods as polluted and dangerous are in fact, non-existent. The ghosts that lurk outside and the horror stories which prevent the Hailsham clones from ever venturing outside the school are actually premonitions of the abominable truth that Hailsham contains, “of something that should have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.” This quality of the uncanny also permeates Ishiguro’ style and choice of language, as it will be argued further on. For Freud, the double signifies the “uncanny harbinger of death” (Freud: 338). Although he refers to strange, disturbing encounters between characters and their doubles, I posit that this trope may be extended to indicate the quality of places, actions, and plots, generally found in Gothic fiction or fiction inspired by Gothic.78 Thus, in terms of space, the double value of Hailsham serves very early in the novel, I would argue, as a metaphorical announcement of the double destiny of the protagonist as first carer then donor. Therefore, although originally the use of doubles in Gothic fiction appears to indicate a clear distinction between good versus evil79, the manner in which Ishiguro employs the trope confuses such obvious readings and renders them open to other interpretations. Consequently, Hailsham’s cosy domesticity disguises or is doubled by the certainty of an early death preceded/doubled by extreme physical and psychological suffering. The use of the doubling is further extended to the regulators of life in Hailsham, with Miss Geraldine possibly the best example: Miss Geraldine was everyone’s favourite guardian when we were that age. She was gentle, soft-spoken, and always comforted you when you needed it, even when you’d done something bad, or been told off by another guardian. If she ever had to tell you off herself, then for days afterwards she’d give you lots of extra attention, like she owed you something. (Never Let Me Go: 19, emphasis added)

The depiction of Miss Geraldine as both favourite, and guardian sustains the idea that in Hailsham boundaries between affect and authority are dissolved, but it is precisely this juxtaposition that constructs the novel’s sinister atmosphere.80 In Hailsham “guardians” who are also “teachers” supervise everything. Although not

78 See the mirrored plots, characters and situations in the chapter on Shantaram, in this book. 79 See Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein and creature, Poe’s William Wilson, Dorian Grey and his portrait, the protagonists in Hoffman’s Tales, etc. 80 One is almost reminded of the figure of Mengele, the Auschwitz ‘Angel of Death’ who allegedly took extra-care of his ‘collection’ of children to experiment upon, treating them kindly, offering them sweets, before submitting them to horrific experiments.

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depicted as monstrous figures of authority, imposing their arbitrary rule in cruel and sadistic ways (the customary characteristics associated with the concept of ‘guardianship’), they nevertheless regulate a Panopticon-like structure, obviously intended to suppress the children’s potential for rebellion. Besides its gradually revealed sinister connotations, Hailsham facilitates the construction of a problematic and unstable clone identity, and of certain existential borders which are uncomfortably trapped between the real and unreal. To the outside world, that is, to the world of the humans, a structure like Hailsham and its residents is better left un-talked about, if considered at all. Hence, this ‘non-consideration’ by the humans and the veiled existence of the clones is actually reproduced in the clones’ appraisal of the world inhabited by humans. As mentioned by Griffin: “ordinary human beings”, people who occupy no particular function in the specificity “of the command-and-control structure which the clones inhabit, figure only as images: ‘actors you watch on your videos’, ‘individuals observed through plate-glass windows, pictures in porn magazines or advertisements. They are the “unreal” real that haunt the clones ‘Since each of us was copied at some point from a normal person, there must be, for each of us, somewhere out there, a model getting on with his or her life.’” (Griffin: 650, emphasis added)

Yet, at the same time, the passage above may convey the opposite meaning, referring to the fact that the clones may be painfully self-aware that theirs is but a ‘reproduction’ of normality and hence inferior to it. The passage is relevant for its ambiguity of language and its derivative meanings – one of the many ambiguities in a novel which thrives on such blurred understandings – and so it invites a careful appraisal of the linguistic potential, dwelling on the alternative between telling versus non-telling. This particular instance of ambiguity also regards the distinctions between the clones’ perception of the humans as the Other, and self-perception, roughly corresponding to distinctions between normality and abnormality. It seems that the clones’ self-perception is inexorably tainted by the painful realization that they are not ‘normal’, that they are merely ‘copied’ and that the ‘model’ that they were built after is able, unlike them, to get on “with his or her life”. Nonetheless, this particular perspective on the stability of hierarchies between humans and clones, sustaining the favourable appraisal of the former at the expense of the inferiority of the latter, will be erased by the clones engaged in the quest for their ‘models’; only this time they will be called their ‘possibles’. Therefore, as Thompson astutely remarks, a clear and unquestionable establishing of the nature of the relationship between clones and humans escapes the readership’s grasp and overturns hierarchies, since in the act of categorizing the humans as ‘possibles’, actually the “young clones give themselves paradoxical priority” (Thompson: 83).

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As inferred from the above, the humans’ and the clones’ unspoken need for establishing a valid identity characterizes the relationships they establish. Quite poignantly, Ishiguro’s text draws a rich parallel between identity and disgust. As Pole mentions in his Disgust and Other Forms of Aversion: “Nothing is more fearfully disgusting than experiences that seem to call in doubt the whole scheme of known distinctions by which we live” (Pole: 227). Seen from this perspective, in Never Let Me Go the attempts at establishing an identity are tainted by disgusting experiences which pose unanswerable existential questions. The encounters between Madame and the clones, rare and ceremonial as they are – she only visits Hailsham in order to collect the clones’ artefacts – provoke ambiguous feelings of disgust, barely controllable dread and almost panic in the human collector:81 And it wasn’t even as though Madame did anything other than we predicted she’d do: she just froze and waited for us to pass by. She didn’t shriek, or even let out a grasp … As she came to a halt I glanced quickly at her face – as did the others, I am sure. And I can still see it now, the shudder she seemed to be suppressing, the real dread that one of us would accidentally brush against her … Ruth had been right: Madame was afraid of us. But she was afraid of us in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders. We hadn’t been ready for that. It had never occurred to us to wonder how we would feel, being seen like that, being the spiders. (Never Let Me Go: 35)

At first sight, the passage above seems to emphasize one of the clones’ many moments of painful self-awareness and comprehension of the nature of their being different from the humans. However, for interpretational purposes, I would favour a reading that revolves around similar concerns on the part of the humans whose felt intensity of the effect of disgust is doubled by what Hurley (referring to other 81 As Miss Emily later on explains, the pieces of art produced by the Hailsham clones were collected by Madame, in her Gallery, as proof that they had souls, “that if students were reared in humane, cultivated environments, it was possible for them to grow to be as sensitive and intelligent as any ordinary human being” (Never Let Me Go: 256). Interestingly, the strategy concerning the employment of art in order to reveal deep truths about the artists themselves was put into practice in real life, in certain mental institutions: “Meanwhile, asylum superintendents and psychiatrists began to encourage patients to paint […] in hopes that their creative artistic processes would shed light on the deep and dark recesses of the mind. In a private asylum near Bern, Dr. Walter Morgenthaler encouraged the extraordinary patient-painter Adolf Wölfli, while the scholar Hans Prinzhorn and the painter Jean Dubuffet were active in establishing collections of the art of the insane, not as diagnostic but as rewarding in its own right. Art as psychotherapy also became popular, though the danger lurked that rather as with Charcot’s hand-pocked hysterics-patients would end up being unconsciously coached to produce artworks according to psychiatric expectations” (Porter: 181).

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texts) dubbed “the essential ambivalence of an emotion compounded of aversion and desire, revulsion and fascination” (Hurley: 41). Accordingly, Madame’s experiencing the clones’ almost-touch and her reaction speaks of the humans’ own liminality and inability to firmly trace the boundaries of an identity completely divorced from that of the clones, since, in Pole’s words: “what is lacking is some element of self-identification […] that makes the horrifying thing also a part of me” (Pole: 227). In this context the present study will offer further arguments that question human identity and sustain the reading of the human characters’ ego as fragile, on the verge, perishable, especially when physical contact with the clones becomes a distinct possibility and an unwelcome reminder of their own transitory condition. The proximity to the clones, the risk of ‘contagion’ brought about by the possibility of their touch grants the humans only a simulacrum of identity, “an identity of sorts – not of the spectacular ego, unmade by abjection, but of the body-ego, remade in the contractions of disgust” (Hurley: 51). That is, undoubtedly, the Gothic identity, ever-trapped in the vortex of self-definition, and doomed to reproduce ad nauseam a sterile struggle for meaning and permanence in an ever-changing world, which thrives on liminality and collapsed boundaries between human and non-human, sublime and abject, spiritual and material. Another important aspect of Ishiguro’s work, pivotal for the discussion of the novel from a Gothic perspective, is his complex representation of childhood, an aspect which I will tackle later on; closely related to it is the subtle but poignant way in which the author, although he apparently and implicitly favours the human children, nevertheless blurs the boundaries between them and the clones to the point where the two come to ‘dissolve’ in a universe of no relevance compared to the privileged world of the adults. This reading of childhood may seem a misplaced emphasis, since the text focuses exclusively on the clones’ childhood whereas the human children are conspicuously absent. Nevertheless, the latter are, I maintain, ‘looming’ at a subtextual level, and employed as an element of reference for establishing the implacability of the clones’ plight. According to Phil Scratton, “Childhood is not a static, objective and universal fact of human nature, but a social construction which is both culturally and historically determined” (Scratton: 2). Arguably, Ishiguro’s image of childhood, although implicitly favouring human children, as individuals who are allowed to mature, establish agency and exercise free will82, as opposed to the inferior clone children reared for the 82 I am not using here agency and free will in the classical, Kantian sense, a concept that given its essentialist and universalist presuppositions had been repeatedly refuted. Rather, I have in mind a Foucauldian perspective, i.e. the power to challenge what is

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sole purpose of becoming organ-donors, in fact rests on the totalitarian erasure of children’s rights, be they humans and/or clones. Much has already been written on the distinction between human and non-human and about the atrocities governing the life of the clones; however, as previously mentioned, this distinction is blurred when it comes to childhood. It seems that in Never Let Me Go, glossing over the rights of human children is at least as atrocious as inviting an honest analysis of the plight of the cloned children. More specifically, we never read about donations for human children. The clones are reared for the sake of adults’ health only, so even for the human children the Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ seems to be the governing principle. It seems that only when and if human children reach maturity, is society organized so as to respond to medical emergencies via organs removed from the clones. The representation of the clones’ childhood is carefully detailed within the text and it offers supplementary arguments for a Gothic appraisal of the novel. Before analyzing them, I would again emphasize that childhood in and by itself is Gothic material. As Steven Bruhm mentioned, taking his cue from Henry James’s observation that the very inclusion of a child in a ghost story is meant to add a “particular touch”, to give an effect of horror that goes “beyond everything”: James’s nineteenth century child increases the effects of horror because s/he is presumed innocent of those complex and repressed emotions that constitute the Gothic […] pivots on the discrepancy between how much the narrating governess presumes the children see and what little – at least by way of the supernatural – they do see. But second, James’s proto-modern children do have secrets, they do know, and their knowledge is nuanced and layered. Like the child that Freud would soon theorize, the Jamesian child is by no means tabula rasa or Rousseauistic innocent. Rather, young Miles’s eviction from school registers on, if only vaguely, the crisis that twentieth century Anglo-America would inherit in its definition of The Child: suspended between the blank slate and the desiring id, between humanistic perfectibility and a ravenous death instinct, the twentieth century child is innocence always sullied, virtue always already in distress, a Romantic revolution/revelation degenerated into a Reign of Terror. (Bruhm: 1)

I find Bruhm’s assessment of James’s The Turn of the Screw highly relevant for the approach which Ishiguro employs so as to negotiate his depiction of the clones’ childhood in Never Let Me Go. Similarly to the Jamesian children, Kathy H., Ruth, Tommy and other child-clones in Hailsham also appear to be treacherously suspended between innocence and knowledge, compliance and contained rebellion, generally taken for granted reinforced by the capacity to change oneself and possibly, one’s milieu.

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“the blank state and the desiring id”.83 As previously mentioned, this suspension is mostly rendered in terms of language which, in Ishiguro’s novel, like in most, perhaps all narratives informed by Gothic conventions serves to illuminate a certain anxiety about meaning. Anne Williams claims that: In Gothic, fragments of language often serve ambiguously to further the plot – in letters (lost, stolen, buried); in mysterious warnings, prophecies, oaths, and curses; in lost wills and lost marriage lines. Such fragments may be misinterpreted (often because they are removed from the original context), and frequently deceive or betray the interpreter. (Williams: 67)

Ishiguro’s employment of language solicits a post-structuralist appraisal, with an emphasis on what may be called ‘faulty communication’, or language that veils rather than displays. The child-clones, although frequently submitted to ‘medicals” and warned about their health being “special”, about “keeping yourselves well, keeping yourselves very healthy inside” (Never Let Me Go: 68) are never actually told the reasons for this obsessive emphasis on self-preservation. Retrospectively, however, Kathy H.’s confessions annihilate any possible illusion that readers and characters alike might entertain about the ingenuousness of the blessed state and the children’ s comfortably presumed lack of knowledge. If anything, the clones’ is a fabricated innocence, a pretence meant to perpetuate the problematic normality of a place like Hailsham and as such, it speaks of an uncanny complicity between victimizers and those who are to be victimized: So why had we stayed silent that day? I suppose it was because even at that age – we were nine or ten – we knew just enough to make us wary of that whole territory. It’s

83 Shoshana Felman remarks that The Turn of the Screw turns readers-especially those of a psychoanalytical formation- into governesses, and thus subjects them to wild suspicions regarding the possibility of children’s sexual secrets. She then opts for searching elsewhere for the unconscious and points out that the children in James’ text embody unconscious knowledge. In her opinion, the text is a trap: “[…] James’s reader-trap thus functions by precisely luring the reader into attempting to avoid the trap, into believing that there is an outside to the trap. This belief, of course, is itself one of the trap’s most subtle mechanisms: the very act of trying to escape the trap is the proof that one is caught in it” (Felman: 239). In my opinion, Ishiguro employs a similar mechanism; thus the text becomes an unconscious trap, serving to defer knowledge from both clones and readers. In perusing Ishiguro’s novel from the angle of Feldman’s insightful reading of The Turn of the Screw, it becomes obvious that instead of turning his readers into governesses, Ishiguro forces them to become clone children and live in well-disguised fear and suspicion regarding not their sexuality, but the very purpose of their lives.

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hard now to remember just how much we knew by then. We certainly knew – though not in any deep sense – that we were different from our guardians, and also from the normal people outside; we perhaps even knew that a long way down the line were the donations waiting for us. But we didn’t really know what that meant. If we were keen to avoid certain topics, it was probably more because it embarrassed us. We hated the way our guardians, usually so on top of everything, became so awkward whenever we came near this territory. It unnerved us to see them change like that. (Never Let Me Go: 69, emphasis added)

Preserving the sanctity of Hailsham as geographical and affective territory therefore implies maintaining a safe distance from a certain territory of the mind, whose coordinates embarrass and pessimistically challenge clones and humans alike. I find the quotation above one of the many instances in the novel relevant for the obscuring of boundaries between humans and non-humans who, although engaged in different pursuits, humans preserving clones and clones preserving themselves for the sake of humans’ health, nevertheless share a mutual understanding when it comes to preserving affective silence, either by distilling language or by eliminating it altogether. As Green argues in The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytical Discourse, clinical psychoanalysis, besides dealing with “depersonalization neurosis” which causes a “sudden, temporary break in the object relation”, has also “revealed a gamut of more discrete states”, among which “most […] belong to the borderline states. They are characterized by alternations of object loss and recovery” (Green: 131). For example, in toxicomania: the toxicomaniacal object aims to warn of or repair an object loss” and “patients complain of feeling completely emptied from the inside, as if they were in a state of permanent affective starvation. They hunger and thirst after objects and must really incorporate an external object capable of restoring them, in both senses of the term, that is to say, of feeding them and making good the effects of the destructive drives […] Whatever may engender a state of affect – a sign of life – will be totally cathected against affective silence – a sign of death” (Green: 132, emphasis added).

If approached from this particular psychoanalytical angle, it becomes obvious that both Ishiguro’s human and non-human characters are almost like toxicomaniacal patients. They are “thirsty”, ready to ingurgitate the ‘object’ which will restore their well-being, “feed them” and annihilate “the effects of destructive drives”; in the case of clones, the passivity with which they accept their lot, in the case of humans, the quotidian sharing the space and the atmosphere of the doomed ones. This illusory object though is language, it constantly escapes ingurgitation, and metamorphoses into an instrument of deceit, until it dies altogether and becomes “affective silence”.

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The careful exposure of the different functions of language is furthermore supported by the clone versus human differing emotional responses triggered by the lyrics of the song that gives the novel its title. For Kathy H. the words “Baby, never let me go…” construct the powerful scenario of a woman experiencing ambiguous feelings of joy coupled with fear when, after years of longing to have a baby, finally sees her dreams becoming reality, but at the same time “she’s so afraid something will happen, that the baby will get ill or be taken away from her” (Never Let Me Go: 70). At a superficial, first glance the clone’s affective translation of the song’s lyrics seems to be at odds with Madame’s interpretation, of which she becomes aware years later. To Madame, the song evokes “a new world coming rapidly”, “more scientific, efficient” with “more cures for the old sicknesses”, but at the same time, “a harsh, cruel world” (Never Let Me Go: 267). This world is opposed to the image of “a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go” (Never Let Me Go: 267). Besides the debatable simplification of old as kind and new as harsh and cruel (yet another blurring of boundaries that calls into question the very idea of ‘progress’), and the different reading of the same lyrics, Kathy H. and Madame’s nevertheless share the same uncanny feeling of loss. In spite of the many differences: clone versus human, child versus adult, arché versus non-arché, the uncanny expanded so as to encompass loss, whether actual or projected also facilitates the reading of the Ishiguro’s novel from a Gothic perspective. Analyzing the emotional responses of Kathy H. and Madame to the song’s lyrics, it also becomes obvious that while listening, both clone and human temporarily exchange categories and ages. Kathy H., the cloned child, thus identifies with the emotions of late maternity and the anxieties experienced by a female human adult, whereas Madame, although generally repelled by the very sight of the clones, momentarily overcomes her powerful physical reactions and identifies with a little clone girl, after having stared at her dancing in the solitude of a study room. Thus, influenced by the power of music and art in general, uncanny foreign bodies are allowed to invade personal boundaries and communicate the most powerful feelings of Gothic loss. Loss is among the main tropes of the entire novel. As mentioned above, Never Let Me Go can obviously be read as an autobiographical novel; nevertheless, I contend that Ishiguro’s work by far expands the borders of the said genre and incorporates the pathographic trope. The pathographic, as remarked by Hawkins, rests on the narration of corporeal decline and the way in which individual illness affects those who witness it (Hawkins: 28). It is also closely connected

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to writings on trauma, which around 1990 became a trope informing both the memoir genre (Luckhurst: 31) and, I would argue here, the Gothic since its inception. If Gothic “signifies a writing of excess” (Botting: 1), then it follows that trauma is thoroughly a Gothic concern, since it is concerned with breaking everyday boundaries of supportability. As stated by Luckhurst: “The experiential, if it was to gain a hearing, had to pass over certain thresholds that mark our traumatic exceptionality from the everyday” (Luckhurst: 36, emphasis added). Kathy H., although as previously argued, is doubly disempowered, first as a carer whose life responsibility is to witness while attempting to alleviate the physical and psychological sufferings of the donors, and then as a prospective donor who will have to undergo the same tribulations, nevertheless manages to establish a certain type of agency by becoming “involved in a project focused on a life writing project that will preserve the memory of the dead and dying loved ones” (McDonald: 80). It is therefore, by means of story-telling, literature and art that she actually achieves the only possible growth, that of the clone closest to a human development. Thus, the apparently insurmountable differences between the clone-condition and the human one disappear in the act of story-telling and invite a re-appraisal of at least one clone-character from a human perspective. That, in itself, constitutes the only act of ‘rebellion’ that the clones ever achieve, perhaps a more poignant one than the armed rebellion of which today’s dystopian films and books are so fond. This is also the only threat that Kathy H. poses and the only instance that makes the reader wonder about the significance of the letter with which her surname begins. Could H. actually stand for human? Is she, in fact, the only character whose boundaries of humanity and cloneness dissolve into each other and render a literary presence which haunts the reader with unvoiced and unspeakable questions regarding the scope and the meaning of life itself? If that is the case, than the menace contained in her apparently benign act of story-telling cannot be transcended. Hers is the old story of futile life and even more futile death, a universal ‘privilege’ shared by clones and humans alike, which she voices and painfully reminds us of. She is then a potent psychological threat to domestic complacency, to daily purposes, to an entire fabricated world with which humans have struggled to silence their fear of the great unknown, since time immemorial. As Achebe reminds us: “[…] story-tellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control; they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit – in state, in church, or mosque, in party congress, in the university or whatever” (qtd in Punter 128). They are also, in this particular novel, a threat to the fundamental right to despair, and mourn and let go.

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Although literature and authorship bequeath a certain sense of power and self-determination upon Kathy H., it is also evident that her story speaks of what Nicholas Royle called “a logic of haunting and ghosts” (Royle: 53). Extremely relevant in this sense is the last passage of the novel, when Kathy revisits the recesses of her memory, and bestows fictional life onto Tommy, thus incorporating him in her story: All along the fence, especially along the lower line of wire, all sorts of rubbish had caught and tangled. It was like the debris you get on a seashore: the wind must have carried some of it for miles and miles before finally coming up against these trees and these two lines of wire. Up in the branches of the trees, too, I could see, flapping about, torn plastic sheeting and bits of old carrier bags. That was the only time, as I stood there, looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming across those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because this was Norfolk, after all, and it was only a couple of weeks since I’d lost him. I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I’d ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and gradually got larger until I’d see it was Tommy, and he’d wave, maybe even call. The fantasy never got beyond that – I didn’t let it – and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever I was supposed to be (Never Let Me Go: 282).

I have quoted this passage at length, as I consider it to represent the crux of the authorial intentions, both Ishiguro’s and Kathy’s, and also to justify much of the claims of this chapter in terms of reading the novel from a Gothic perspective. On the one hand, as argued above, this last confessional piece sustains a gloomy and desperate perspective upon the very essence of human/clone life, whose only scope resides in multiple re-enactments of mourning and melancholia caused by the demise of dear ones. On the other hand, as will be argued further on, it is precisely the incommensurable sadness which accompanies existence that somehow justifies it and makes it meaningful. Clearly, in the writing of the passage above, Kathy is not alone, but in the company of the many ghosts of her past, disguised as scraps, “torn plastic sheeting” and “strange rubbish”84. In her case, the apparently 84

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Interestingly, Ishiguro himself, when asked whether he doubts his authority as a writer when confronted with the contemporary “proliferation of popular media and images which tend to make the examination of interior lives more difficult,” replies: “I feel that when I am writing a novel, I am actually tapping into this, what in the pejorative people might call the garbage and ephemera in people’s heads” (Ishiguro qtd in Wong: 320).

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diminishing and silent associations between events, people, and feelings that populate her memory and irrelevant fragments of perishable matter “flapping about” and torn away by the wind serves to emphasize the volatility of human (or clone) experience, which nevertheless, dismembered as it is, still affirms the power of the past, the grip of the “ghosts” on the present moment. Furthermore, it facilitates the reading of Kathy H’s character not only as clone-writer, but also as clone-teacher, whose pupils are all of us, humans and clones alike. Many commentators have been extremely unsympathetic in criticising the passivity of the clones, the non-resistance strategy which supports the endless reproduction of the organ-harvesting scheme. Among them, possibly the harshest (albeit humorous) is Harper Barnes who, in his review of the novel for St. Louis Post-Dispatch ironically remarks: “if you were scheduled to have your organs plucked out at any day now, but in the meantime were permitted to wander around the British countryside pretty much as you chose, wouldn’t you decide at some point. ‘This is really a bad deal, and I’m moving to France’?” (Barnes: 2) To attempt to answer Barnes’ rhetorical question becomes imperative if we are to understand the full extent of what really is ‘at stake’ in Never Let Me Go. Firstly, although Ishiguro is very specific about the time and the place (England, the 1990s), Kathy H.’s measured account, suggestive of the normality, the “everydayness” of the abomination she composedly describes, seems to support the idea of, among others, the internationalization of the organ-harvesting scheme. Secondly, but no less significant, what Barnes seems to overlook is the fact that Ishiguro’s employment of what is inexorable in the clones’ fate merely mirrors the human condition. Comprehending this oblique technique implies then, a different value set in Kathy’s last lines. As mentioned above, the very act of remembering through writing or speaking is what seems to blur the boundaries between empowerment and disempowerment. Then, Kathy H.’s writing of her life and the lives of her closest friend and lover also constitutes a solution for the existential questions that humans have tackled for centuries. Although dripping with the pain of loss, Kathy is not, even for a single moment “out of control”, nor is she “sobbing”; moreover, she knows the importance of responsibilities to be fulfilled, the value of the act of driving off “wherever I was supposed to be”, in other words she not only fully comprehends the importance of going on living, in spite of everything, but also imparts that painful knowledge to others. It is this particular restraint in remaking the past without being destructively possessed by it, which inspired me to consider Kathy not just as a donor/writer but also, and perhaps more importantly, as a carer/teacher, who cherishes and shares the phantoms of experience, love, and loss with all those who take the time to listen to her story and who, in turn, may gain something in the process.

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In Derrida’s words: “everyone reads, acts, writes with his or her ghosts” (Derrida: 139) and everyone has “to answer to the dead, to respond to the dead” (136): To correspond and have it out with [s’expliquer avec] obsessive haunting, in the absence of any certainty or symmetry. Nothing is more serious and nothing is more true, nothing is more exact [juste] than this phantasmagoria. The spectre weighs [pese], it thinks [pense], it intensifies and condenses itself within the very inside of life, the most singular (or, if one prefers, individual) life. The latter therefore no longer has and must no longer have, insofar as it is living, a pure identity to itself or any assured inside: this is what all philosophies of life, or even philosophies of the living and the real individual, would have to weigh carefully. (Derrida: 136)

Read from Derrida’s perspective, the imaginary encounter between Kathy H. and her now dead lover and friend that ends the novel reinforces the previous struggles regarding identity and forever dissolves its borders. If and when the ‘spectre’ haunts the living and demands recognition, then individual identity (clone or human) is untenable and phantasmagoria, the strenuous process that accompanies the not-yet-dead becomes the very essence of life. If that is the case, the final border between clones and humans is dissolved in the collective process of making, listening and sharing memory. Moreover, if we, as readers accept the hypostasis of Kathy H. as not only a writer, but also a teacher, who imparts the knowledge of living with the phantom, as the present study suggests, the final message of Never Let Me Go loses its initial suggestion of foreboding and almost acquires the opposite feeling of hope.85 In allowing for an ambiguous, a liminal reading, the novel’s ending also becomes relevant in view of the consideration of the Gothic tropes informing it. In Royle’s words: To be haunted, to be in the company of ghosts is not necessarily a cause for fear of panic. It is something to affirm: it is the very condition of thinking and feeling. There is no teaching without memory (however unconscious or cryptic) of the dead, without a logic of mourning that haunts or can always come back to haunt, without an encounter with questions of inheritance (Who or what is a teacher? Who or what has taught the teacher? How did this scene of teaching come about? Am I thinking my own thoughts? Where does a thought, an idea, a teaching begin?) To affirm the uncanny ‘presence’ and power of ghosts is not to give oneself up to some gothic fantasy of lugubrious nostalgia: it is the very basis of trying to think about the future. (Royle: 54)

85 I am considering here the different ghosts that haunt the text; from the first ones freely roaming in the woods outside Hailsham and containing the promise of early death and suffering to Tommy’s benign apparition against Kathy H.’s memory landscape. Ishiguro performs, in my opinion, a domestication of ghosts, a sine-qua-non ritual which allows Kathy H. to achieve something similar to Bildung.

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Conclusion This chapter offered a Gothic reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go with a special emphasis on the concept of liminality and the boundary-blurring technique. From within liminality as a theoretical frame, other typical Gothic tropes, such as the uncanny, the double, and the ghost were employed to examine space, characters and plot. Gothic, as previously argued, is the genre that regularly emerges at times of age-old anxieties and epochal uncertainties, as a catalyst of traumatic events both individual and societal. Closely related to world-shattering events and derived from their implications is the issue of identity, which in Ishiguro’s novel holds an important position. As Thompson argues: “Both clones and creators allow us to see behind identities a play of multiple moveable figures and possibilities” in a Borgesian manner (Thompson: 83). Thus, the present chapter has argued for a Gothic identity (of both clones and humans) and its complex rapport with the effect of disgust. Finally, but not least important in my opinion, the ghosts that accompany the protagonist’s acts of story-telling and story-writing justifies the present reading from within a Gothic perspective, one of the many possibles from which this thought-provoking contemporary masterpiece can be approached and analyzed.

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The Sublime of the Intimate Others: Salman Rushdie’s Shame

According to Vijay Mishra the sublime has recently been subjected to a conceptual inflation, in that “every possible association of the word has been “used (and abused)”, such as: […] the Romantic sublime, the American sublime, the Indian sublime, the nuclear sublime, the Arctic sublime, the female sublime, the imperial sublime, the post-Kantian sublime, the postmodern sublime, the Oedipal sublime, the oppositional sublime, the Euro-American sublime, the Enlightenment sublime, the moral sublime, the technological sublime […] (Mishra: 21)

The above list, endless as Mishra seems to imply, is hardly surprising, especially if read in conjunction with in the remarkable career of sublime aesthetics in the history of Western thought, expanding over centuries and raising a conundrum of multiple perspectives. Longinus, Burke, Kant, Schiller, Coleridge and Hegel, as well as contemporary critics such as Bloom, White, Lyotard, and Jameson86 have constantly attempted to define the sublime, assigning it universal characteristics, recognizable in any epoch. Regarding canonical literature, the opinions of the above-mentioned male critics generally coincide, pointing to the sublime as embodied in the overwhelming effects of masterpieces (usually male, too). Such opinions also converge when depicting the strenuous albeit remarkable connection between sublime and gender. Regarding the latter, Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful is arguably

86 See Longinusst and Smith Dionysius Longinus on the Sublime (2009), Burke Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1968), Kant Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (2011), Pillow Sublime Understanding: Aesthetic Reflection in Kant and Hegel (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (2003), von Schiller Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime (1966), Stokes Coleridge, Language and the Sublime: From Transcendence to Finitude (2010), Bloom The Literary Criticism of John Ruskin (1965), Bloom and Hobby The Sublime: Bloom’s Literary Themes (2010), White The Politics of Historical Interpellation: Discipline and De-Sublimation (1982), Lyotard Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime’ (1982) and The Sublime and the Avant-Garde (1984), Jameson Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1984).

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one of the most significant treatises. As the title of his work suggests, there is a clear demarcation between the sublime and the beautiful, which corresponds to the demarcation between the male and the female. It is this rigid delineation that possibly inspired Patricia Yaeger, the advocate of the female sublime to read the sublime as a genre “of questionable use […] old fashioned, outmoded, concerned with self-centered (male) imperialism”, but also to notice its endless potential for empowerment and authority and urge for its appropriation by women writers (Yaeger: 192). As the Indian critic Vijay Mishra notices, Yaeger’s depiction of the female sublime, in opposition to the one championed by generations of male critics, makes it “ideological and critical […] of a sublime male subjectivity” (Mishra: 21). However, Mishra remarks that there may be nothing in existence except “effects of subjectivity, constructions of the object whose validity, whose reality (as the Lacanian “real”, so to speak) were to reside only in consciousness” (Mishra: 21–22). If we are to accept Mishra’s premise of nothingness in the absence of “effects of subjectivity”, then it follows that Yaeger’s female sublime merely re-defines subjectivity according to gender. As such, this antidote-category to the male sublime is not, nor can it be in any way, original, pure, and ‘standing alone’, given that it has already been ‘tainted’ by its originally male origins. Moreover, the female sublime that she proposes is simply yet another category among other types of sublime, be they Gothic, Romantic, American, Indian, nuclear or postmodern. Therefore, any attempt to reach clear-cut categories of the sublime, which do not thrive ‘parasitically’ on the corpses of previous conceptualizations appears doomed to fail. This is the case for all types of sublime, however it is more poignantly so for the Gothic sublime, a category whose genealogy cannot be traced, due to the “adjective” that is supposed to “transplant or “supersede the noun substantive, and this is clearly not one” (Mishra: 22). Mishra’s remarks on the sublime shifting from the “rhetorical/natural/ideological to the psychological” (Mishra: 22), hence to the subjective, are central to my analysis. Drawing on his perspective, the present chapter has three closely related aims; firstly, it is intended to reinforce the argument regarding the distinctly individual perception of the sublime. Secondly, it attempts to read Salman Rushdie’s Shame as a novelistic reflection of the Gothic sublime, an aesthetic category which, similarly to the other types of sublime is not “pure”, “in terms of either discursivity or phenomenality”, and therefore is “contaminated” (Mishra: 22). The third aim derives from the second, in that implicitly this chapter also questions and exposes as reductionist Yaeger’s own limitations and suggestions that only female writers should employ the female sublime as a mode of empowerment. To round up the purposes of this chapter, I aim to demonstrate that in

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Shame the Gothic sublime does not dwell on narrow female-male distinctions, it escapes categorization and is simply instrumental in the creation of memorable female/male characters whose narratives of death, destruction and blind revenge serve to connect but also to transcend, the elusive borders of gender, nation and monstrosity. At the heart of Rushdie’s novel lie the intertwined stories of success and demise of two families, situated at politically opposite poles – the (Raza) Hyders and the (Iskander) Harappas. Although we understand the country in which the said families live is a post-Partition Pakistan (by the narrator’s own acceptance, in spite of the unreliability that characterizes his tale), torn apart by political conflicts between male leaders, the narrative frequently downplays the political and replaces it with the personal. As Dayal points out, this is one of the many characteristics of Rushdie’s style, a self-confessed writer of the interstices, who mixes “interiority”, “internal borders”, “the domestic rather than the international (notwithstanding his cosmopolitanism), the psychological rather than the sociological, and the linguistic rather than the objective”, but who also does not “ignore the world of politics” and “the problematic imbrications of gender with nation” (Dayal: 39). By the author’s own admission, Shame was supposed to recount: […] an almost excessively masculine tale, a saga of sexual rivalry, ambition, power, patronage, betrayal, death, revenge. But the women seem to have taken over; they marched in from the peripheries of the story to demand the inclusion of their own tragedies, histories and comedies, obliging me to couch my narrative in all numbers of sinuous complexities, to see my ‘male’ plot refracted, so to speak, through the prisms of its reverse and ‘female’ side. It occurs to me that the women knew precisely what they were up to – that their stories explain, and even subsume, the men’s. Repression is a seamless garment; a society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, which crushes the women beneath the intolerable burdens of honour and propriety, breeds repressions of other kinds as well. Contrariwise: dictators are always – or at least in public, on other people’s behalf – puritanical. So it turns out that my ‘male’ and ‘female’ plots are the same story, after all. (Shame: 173, emphasis added)

The mere intensity, the spiritual heights and abysses that the human mind and soul are supposedly made to experience when exposed to detailed dismantling of powerful feelings such as rivalry, ambition, power, patronage, betrayal, death, or revenge qualify the possible tale of Rushdie’s, the unaccomplished one, as a narrative of the male sublime, in Burkean terms. Thus, Rushdie’s well-tempered lament for the loss of his “masculine saga” due to women’s relentless attacks, resembles the Burkean and later on the Romantic one for “the fall of the sublime into inauthenticity […] when men of culture accompanied their efforts to restore the sublime to its original brightness with attacks on its decadence”; such attacks

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“primarily focused on the middle classes who trooped to Mont Blanc and the Lake District”, delighting in sampling “the terrible” and thus encouraging “presses to creak out innumerable “fiends, incomprehensible characters […], shrieks, murders, and subterranean dungeons,” to quote a typical Coleridgean catalogue of horrors” (Swann: 10). With Rushdie’s initial disenchantment with his story, stolen by women (marginal, peripheral characters), we are also reminded that in Burke’s Enquiry “the sublime at moments resembles a null text or a category of experience that can only be spoken of elegiacally” (Ferguson: 72). Furthermore, Rushdie’s stolen narrative and its unequivocally masculine features bring to memory Burke’s analysis of The Book of Job and Paradise Lost, earlier masculine tales of rivalry, ambition, power, patronage, betrayal, death, and revenge. In Ferguson’s words, Burke’s otherwise creative critique of such masculine tales is disrupted by sections on the “artificially infinite”, automatically explained via strange insertions, which sound like a how-to book, as the structure of a “straight avenue, long, but not too long, with trees evenly spaced”, displaying “a rotunda”, with “the whole set ‘situated’ in a gloomy landscape” (Ferguson: 74–77). It is my contention that in Rushdie’s Shame, the female characters’ tales which often disrupt the historical and male narrative and replace it with the “artificially infinite” – which is nevertheless “personal” – are framed in a “gloomy landscape” characteristic of the peculiar atmosphere of the Gothic genre. Gothic tropes in Shame have already been discussed by Punter, Spearey and Ng87. Employing a similar perspective, though with a different emphasis, the current chapter posits that, if carefully analyzed, Rushdie’s narrative appears less then “straight”, trees embrace each other grotesquely, and “the rotund arena” hosts and shamelessly displays both public and private sufferings. Thus, “the gloomy landscape” of the women’s minds has taken over the masculine tale; in other words, what could have pointed to a certain gender-reductionism embodied in a story of men, for men and by men and its potentially male sublime, has dissolved into something altogether different. The remaining, sinuous, woman-centred tale constitutes itself as a plea for a careful reconsideration of notions of masculinity and femininity, as well as a refusal to be encroached in a framework of stable gender borders. In my opinion, it is in this sense that Rushdie’s novel can be read as informed by a highly ‘contaminated’ sublime, that is, a Gothic sublime. 87 See Punter’s chapter on Shame in Postcolonial Imaginings; Fictions of a New-World Order (2000), Spearey’s chapter on Shame in Postcolonising the Commonwealth: Studies in Literature and Culture (2000) and Ng’s chapter on Shame in Interrogating Interstices; Gothic Aesthetics in Postcolonial and Asian American Literature (2007).

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From a slightly different Gothic perspective Ng claims that “the narrator’s conflation of his two plots would confirm the male plot’s unsuccessful attempt at controlling and repressing the feminine other” and that “the deliberate erection of the male-subject/female-object structure in much male Gothic unconsciously evidences a fear of/fascination for the ‘other’” (Ng 2007: 51). In my reading, the post-modernist contamination of plots, as well as the imagery, the juxtaposition of public and private, external and internal, male and female sustains the reading of Shame as a sublime tapestry of multiple voices, all canonizing contradictions, clamouring for recognition, and demanding supremacy. Writing about the sublime effect of loud noises, Burke claimed that: The shouting of multitudes has a similar effect; and by the whole strength of the sound, so amazes and confounds the imagination, that in this staggering, and hurry of the mind, the best established tempers can scarcely forbear being borne down, and joining the common creep and common resolution of the crowd. (Burke 1968: 82)

Rushdie’s novel was harshly assessed as displaying misogynist tendencies, in that his female characters are invariably depicted as muted, mere shadows and victims of the overwhelming patriarchal rule of their despotic fathers, sons and husbands.88 While acknowledging the female characters’ less than privileged position in radical patriarchal households, I posit that this is an incomplete, rather tendentious perception. As will be further argued, such is the profundity of Rushdie’s female characters’ stance, the influence of their stories, and the loud subjectivity of their side of history – both personal and private – that they can be read under the sign of a Burkean “shouting of multitudes” and thus almost undermine a ‘victimizing’ reading. To begin with, there is the staggering and yet sublime/sublimated horror of motherhood introduced by Rushdie through the characters of the three Shakil sisters. Theirs is a remarkable fictional presence, especially in that their story will somehow foreshadow the more general trajectory of other female characters. Through them, as Dayal points out, Rushdie displays a “deflation of rhetoric of phallic self-sufficiency, a rhetoric that bolsters “nation-ness” in the patriarchal Symbolic” (Dayal: 45). Released by the providential death of a tyrannical father from the shackles of servitude and ignorance, Chunni, Munnee and Bunny decide to forge their own destiny. Thus, they challenge the laws of passivity and sterile waiting, the habitual attributes of women’s condition, especially those women left 88 See especially Aijaz’s chapter on Shame in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992), Cundy’s Salman Rushdie (1996), and Grewal’s chapter on Shame in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie (1994).

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without any male protection. One of them fathers a hybrid child, presumably with one of the Angrez officials invited to a party thrown to celebrate the severe diminution of their material assets, as well as, maybe liminally but not less poignantly, the long-awaited for demise of the patriarch of the house. However, instead of being “overwhelmed by any feelings of dishonour” (Shame: 17), they convert this act of breaking gender taboos into a sublime, aristocratic indifference to societal laws, and into a monstrous, yet sublime motherhood. Similarly to the three Graiai (Graeae) sisters, the ancient sea-daimones who share among themselves a single detachable eye and tooth, the Shakil sisters decide to share motherhood between them, thus transforming it into something beyond the realms of common experience, hence into a typical Gothic experience, which Mishra, albeit not referring to Rushdie’s novel, describes as something “unthinkable, unnameable and unspeakable” (Mishra: 23). In so doing, they bend the very rules of nature, in that motherhood – theoretically a profoundly individual experience – instead becomes subjected to “surplus, excess and spillage”, which, according to Mishra, “surrounds the discourse of the sublime” (Mishra: 22). All the Shakil sisters “thicken at the waist and the breast”, “identically their wombs ballooned towards the pregnancy’s full term” so as to “transform the public shame of unwedlocked conception into the private triumph of the longed-for group baby” (Shame: 20). An unspeakable act requires an impossible space in which to unfold its full potential for subversion; moreover, as will be argued further on, a bizarre communion develops between the setting and the character of Omar Khayyam. The Nishapur mansion – a Rushdian equivalent of the primordial Gothic castle and the locus that hosts sin and shame – also spills, extends its boundaries and becomes daemonic through its unheard of sexual and social contamination. Imprisoned by tyrannically-loving mothers in a mansion completely isolated from the outside world, Omar Khayyam, the unnaturally common son of Chunni, Munnee and Bunny develops an uncanny ability, a different kind of perception altogether, to see his surroundings in infinitely magnified form. William Blake, the darkest of the Romantic poets, once wrote: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it truly is, infinite” (Blake: xv). To Omar Khayyam, as “the creature of the edge”, the “peripheral man” (Shame: 24), “fed at too-many mammary glands” (Shame: 30), the improbable offspring of a sexual union that bends and tests the very limits of genesis as almost but not quite parthenogenesis, Nishapur responds with an equally uncanny gift for expanding its margins. Time and space cannot contain it; its “corridors so long untrodden” raise moles of dust up to Omar’s ankles, “the impossible forms of painted Neolithic pottery in the Kothidji style” adorn it and the “quake-exposed intricacies of brick drainage

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systems”, “out of date for centuries” render the “colossal palace” as a sublime relic of the past (Shame: 31). To use Punter and Byron’s assessment of typical Gothic settings, Nishapur, as any Gothic castle worthy of its name, represents and causes “slippage between what is natural and what is human-made”(Punter and Byron 2004: 260). Moreover, it also acts as “unreliable lenses through which to view history and from the other side of which may emerge terrors only previously apprehended in dream” (260). In Rushdie’s novel, motherly, temporal and spatial surpluses are mirrored in the monstrosity of the begotten child, a “dizzy, peripheral, inverted, infatuated, insomniac, stargazing, fat” hero (Shame: 25) who is taught from early infancy never to feel shame, or “embarrassment, discomfiture, decency, modesty, shyness” (Shame: 39). Nevertheless, Omar Khayyam substitutes the natural feelings of shame he is forced to repress, with their very opposite, i.e. an inexhaustible shamelessness. Such alternatives and substitutions inform the atmosphere of many episodes of Shame, and they also define the psychological contours of many characters, among whom Sufiya Zinobia is arguably the most significant. I would suggest, following Beville’s argument on the role of terror in postmodernist fiction, that Rushdie constructs his pseudo-hero, Omar, as subject to repression/oppression which foster and announce “terror as a sublime experience in the sense of a liminal state of existence that puts the ‘real’ into question, and which subsequently gives access to its most knowable of manifestations through which Levinas would most likely call ‘awareness’, and Lyotard, ‘heterogeneity’” (Beville: 27). Read from this angle, the son with the three mothers appears to suffer from ‘terrified’ awareness as “an altered or suspended state of being, in which consciousness is limited to a specific subjective situation”, where “possibilities are opened up for the reception of unlearned realities” (Beville: 27). A little bookcase containing a multitude of volumes on the theory and practice of hypnosis becomes the centre of knowledge for Rushdie’s improbable hero, the very omphalos of his longings: Sanskrit mantras, compendiums of the lore of the Persian magi, a leathern copy of the Kalevala of the Finns, an account of the hypno-exorcisms of Father Gassner of Kloster, and a study of the ‘animal magnetism’ theory of Franz Mesmer himself; also (and most usefully) a number of cheaply printed do-it-yourself manuals. (Shame: 33–34)

Such books open the world of arcane science, and grant Omar power over different women, among whom the most significant are his first lover/victim Farah Zoroaster, as well as his wife, Sufiya Zinobia. Thus, knowledge turns to terror (physical and psychological) in the hands of the knowledgeable, albeit of the subtlest kind and disguised as freedom of choice. As Nicholls points out, Omar Khayyam’s raping of Farah Zoroaster and uncountable others while they are under hypnosis supplies

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his alibis of consent: “You will do anything that I ask you to do, but I will ask you to do nothing that you will be unwilling to do” (Nicholls: 115). In Beville’s words, the terror as surplus of knowledge and perception could either be assimilated to the dream state, or “more accurately to the suspended condition of hypnotic trance”, a theme which is very familiar in Gothic fiction and screen masterpieces, especially in the form of the somnambulist (Beville: 27). Omar’s exceptional and uncanny abilities, which constitute the fabric of the occult, are viciously employed in order to subject, disempower, deceive and betray; to be noted, however, is that the hypnotist’s potential can only be fulfilled in the presence of subjects to be hypnotized. Exit – temporarily – Omar Khayyam, enter Sufiya Zinobia, the character most famous for committing her unspeakable acts in a state of trance. In Shame, Sufiya Zinobia’s character and, indeed, her very name89 are hardly mentioned for the best part of the introductory chapters. And while speculations on Rushdie’s reasons for employing this ‘avoidance technique’ may be in order, one of the possible reasons could be more general than personal. As Earl explains, 89 Various critics have speculated on the sources for inspiration for the name of Rushdie’s most famous female character. Nicholls makes, in my opinion, two of the most interesting suggestions when he says that Zinobia, can be read as a reference to Zina (from the Zina Ordinance, which “means that the rape victim’s testimony may amount to prima facie evidence of her indulgence in illicit fornication – [Sufia Zinobia as a married woman engages in sexual acts with four young men, her mother Bilquis is accused of infidelity with the cinema manager, Omar Khayyam starts with Farah his long series of disguised rapes, etc.] – as might any pregnancy resulting from the rape, while the perpetrator’s denials, or even the complete failure to mount a legal defence, might mean that he avoids incrimination altogether” (Nicholls: 116–7). Another possibility that Nicholls puts forward regarding the character’s name is that it might refer to “the cosmopolitan metropolitan injustice of ‘xenophobia’”, bearing in mind” the racist attack upon an ‘Asian’ girl by white youths on a late-night underground train and in the dream of retributive violence that the incident inspires, foreshadowing who knows what explosions?” (Nicholls: 120). In my opinion, the surname Zinobia may have been inspired by the legendary queen of Palmyra who actively fought against the Roman occupation. Antonia Fraser in her thought-provoking book entitled The Warrior Queens. Boadicea’s Chariot (2002) claims that many of the warrior female leaders were inspired to act against oppressions of all sorts by what she calls “the Shame Syndrome: not only is it wondrous to find a mere woman acting in a martial manner, but in so doing the woman concerned shows up, positively shames the weaker males who surround her” (Fraser: 29). I find Fraser’s general perspective on the warrior queens strangely applicable to Sufiya Zinobia’s behaviour, whose shame imposed frequently turns into shaming her (only) male oppressors, albeit through acts of unspeakable cruelty. It is in this sense also that I chose to read her as a sublime, terrifying and ultimately free character.

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this is a symptom of many novels written by Indian writers in English, where “characters’ names are often withheld, or withheld for a long time”, including Tagore’s The Home and the World, Rao’s Kanthapura, Narayan’s Mr. Sampath, Talkative Man, A Tiger for Malgudi, Desai’s In Custody, and Chaudhuri’s Afternoon Raag (Earl: 101). Earl suggests three motives for this particularity: firstly, he claims, it can be read as a strategy, a “common oddity calculated enough to qualify as a literary feature”, “a technique for creating a kind of suspense”; secondly, he considers the possibility of the said method to be a reflection of “Indian social practice” defined by the norms of polite behaviour; and finally, he wonders if it could be “another symptom of a broader attitude towards subjectivity, like the decentring of the subject in passive sentence structure”, since “in an Indian family people are often addressed not by name but by relationship, for example, “little brother” (Earl: 101–2). In Shame, the relatively late apparition/appearance of Sufiya Zinobia is probably best understood in terms of both an admirable technique for increasing suspense, as well as the difficulty, arguably experienced by Rushdie’s narrator, of articulating her essence or abruptly attempting to take in her abhorrent, majestic and sublime character; hence the sinuosity, although hers is still the most eloquent of the many women’s tales that weave the narrative of Shame. She first enters the narrative on page twenty-two when she is briefly introduced as the wife of Omar Khayyam, victim of a severe insomnia, “foolish Sufiya Zinobia”, who “would lie in bed squeezing her eyelids shut between her thumbs and her forefingers, as if she could extrude consciousness through her eyelashes, like motes of dust, or tears” (Shame: 22). Silent for thirty-seven more pages, Rushdie’s actual protagonist makes another short-lived appearance. This time we learn that she is the first daughter of Bilquis and Raza Hyder, that the novel is about her, but that it could also be said, albeit in a “more opaque” way, “that Sufiya Zinobia is about this novel” (Shame: 59). Arguably the most obvious manner of reading her character is via the allegorical absorption into the newborn nation of Pakistan, also a “miracle that went wrong”, the destructive consequence of a monstrous political act which resulted in the hasty and irresponsible partition of India. From this perspective, Sufiya Zinobia, “born into shame for being a girl instead of a boy” represents the terrifying incarnation of the collapse of a “patriarchal society obsessed with the pursuit of honour and status” (Cook: 410), which projects its failed expectations onto the most obvious ‘‘intimate Other’’, the retarded female: I repeat: there is no place for monsters in civilized society. If such creatures roam the earth, they do so on its uttermost rim, consigned to the peripheries of convention of disbelief…but once in a blue moon something goes wrong, a beast is born, a ‘wrong miracle’ in the citadels of propriety and decorum. That was the danger of Sufiya

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Zinobia: that she came to pass not in any wilderness of basilisk and fiends, but in the heart of the respectable world. As a result of that the world made a huge effort of the will to ignore the reality of her, to avoid bringing matters to a point at which she, disorder’s avatar would have to be dealt with, expelled – because her explosion would have laid bare what-must-on-no-account-be known, namely the impossible verity that barbarism could grow in cultured soil, that savagery could lie concealed beneath decency’s well-pressed shirt. That she was, as her mother had said, the incarnation of her shame. To comprehend Sufiya Zinobia would be to shatter, as if it were a crystal, these people’s sense of themselves; and so of course, they would not do it, they did not, for years. The more powerful the beast became, the greater the efforts to deny its very being. (Shame: 199–200)

I quote this passage at length because it tackles several relevant aspects related to the discussion of Sufiya Zinobia as the intimate Other whose containment in the home was attempted but failed. In a sense, the story of her birth replicates the sublime horror introduced in the novel with Omar Khayyam. Both characters disrupt the limits of respectability, of normality of expectations: the girl by her very femaleness followed by a fever which leaves her retarded at the age of two, the boy by his unknown paternal (and maternal) genealogy. Hence, they are both monstrous, but also intimate Others who, while kept secret, also become part of their respective families’ mythology. In the characters of Sufiya Zinobia and Omar Khayyam, Rushdie achieves the fusion of family secrets and monstrosity. In their double capacity, of themselves cast as family secrets, and offspring kept on the margins of the grey, muddy area of family secrets, Omar Khayyam and Sufiya Zinobia play with variations of the lethal, as inferred by Abraham and Torok. They transcend the mere quality of family secrets and they become subjects of metapsychology, a type of psychic presence which while ‘scapegoating’ the individual (frequently a child excluded, for various reasons, from sharing the secrets of parents/parentage) also impedes self-exploration. For Abraham and Torok, metapsychology is that which is “rejected, masked, denied precisely as “reality” (Abraham and Torok: 63), that which should not be known. This is a different concept of Reality, also connected with the site of the psychic apparatus, the exact location where the secret is buried, known as the crypt (Abraham and Torok: 63), whose potency is magnified by the victim’s refusal to disclose it. In Rushdie’s novel though, both Sufiya Zinobia and Omar Khayyam fail to conform to the particular quality of their status as monstrous Others, which demands silence and compliance with the victimizers. Thus, in different manners, Omar and Sufiya brutally break out of the crypt and thus defy personal and social confinements. In so doing, they divert – especially Sufiya – our attention from the suggestion of metapsychology and begin to inhabit another realm of subjectivity which, as previously suggested, may be seen as the domain

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of the sublime. I therefore contend that the lengthy quotation, apart from depicting the situation of the intimate Other carefully contained in the home, also conveys and suggests the feeling of the Gothic sublime, a useful lens for approaching the mystery, the horror, the very incompressibility of Sufiya Zinobia. At first sight, as Rushdie’s narrator suggests, the mere presence of the disturbance and the violence embodied by this unspeakable “disorder’s avatar” suggests the necessity of careful containment, directed at preserving the general well-being of society at large. As Byron reminds us, “monsters […] do cultural work” and “through difference” they “police the boundaries of the human and consequently allow us to define the politics of the normal” (2008: 32). In Gothic fiction, the monsters are there to strike a chord, to remind us of what should be annihilated or at least repressed, as the sine-qua-non rule for conceptualizing and maintaining identity, both culturally and nationally. The most relevant example is the founding text of the Gothic, The Castle of Otranto, which coincided with the formation of Britain’s cultural and political nationalism. Walpole’s masterpiece comfortably placed abnormal behaviour both “in a barbaric past or present day rogue group” and “in the foreign” (Byron 2008: 32). However, it would be rudimentary and restricting to read Sufiya Zinobia as a character who can only be deciphered through what Byron, in referring to other Gothic texts, calls “the work of any nationalistic agenda” (Byron 2008: 32) and thus attempt to explain her exceptionality only in terms of gender confrontation and nation formation. Punter also notices that while Rushdie does “look back into history” and succeeds in displaying the “grotesque cultural distortions caused throughout the Indian subcontinent by the long years of imperial rule”, he nevertheless remains ambiguous as to who should be blamed for “Pakistan’s continuing crisis”, or indeed for Sufiya Zinobia’s very existence. Is her difference – her monstrosity – a mere result of “specific historical circumstances”, or are we in the presence of “a less easily attributable plight”? (Punter 2000: 114). Ng claims that should we opt for reading her monstrosity allegorically – allegory after all being “a calculated method of ‘fixing’ a reading and privileging a particular interpretation”, we may stultify “the possibility of reading […] beyond […] alleged socio-critical agendas” (Ng 2007: 176). To answer these fine issues raised by Punter and Ng, I suggest that Sufiya Zinobia’s rage, her very essence is, to use Jane Harrison’s words, an atavistic, Dionysian and ultimately chtonian rage, devoid of boundaries and almost inassimilable in terms of historical considerations.90 This is the reason 90 This is how Camille Paglia in her Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson explains the confrontation that, in her opinion, lies at the heart

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why I consider that, while attempting to grasp her aesthetically and psychologically and not exclusively politically (notwithstanding the novel’s concerns with such perspectives), she could be approached from the angle of the Gothic sublime, and it could be claimed that her existence is not merely meant to criticize historicity but to remind us of the all-too-human, eternal fascination with the dark, the violent and the maddeningly irrepressible. In 1747, ten years before the publication of his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, whilst still an undergraduate at Trinity College, Burke was shocked by the extreme public enthusiasm, the social uproar raised by the execution of Lord Lovat: Chuse a day on which to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have, appoint the most favourite actors; spare no cost upon the scenes and decorations; unite the greatest efforts of poetry, painting and music; and when you have collected your audience, just at the moment when their minds are erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoining square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts, and proclaim the triumph of the real sympathy. (qtd in Black: 4)

I propose here that the perverse pleasure – experienced primarily by her father – of watching Sufiya Zinobia’s trajectory of violent and bloody deeds (the decapitated turkeys and men, with the intestines flowing from approximately where the necks used to be), the ‘aesthetic’ pleasure experienced at the sight of multiple mutilations of the formation of Western culture: “Our focus on the pretty is an Apollonian strategy. The leaves and flowers, the birds, the hills are a patchwork pattern by which we map the known. What the west represses in its view of nature is the chtonian, which means “of the earth”-but earth bowels, not its surface. Jane Harrison uses the term for pre-Olympian Greek religion, and I adopt it as a substitute for Dionysian, which has become contaminated with vulgar pleasantries. The Dionysian is no picnic. It is the chtonian realities which Apollo evades, the blind grinding of subterranean force, the long slow suck, the murk and ooze. It is the dehumanizing brutality of biology and geology, the Darwinian waste and bloodshed, the squalor and rot we must block from our consciousness to retain our Apollonian integrity as persons” (Paglia 5–6, emphasis added). Although Paglia refers to the Apollonian and the Dyonisian-chtonian as conceptualized in Western culture, I find her distinction poignant and applicable to Eastern realms as well. As previously shown, Sufiya Zinobia is described as a monster at the heart of civilized and Eastern society. Paglia’s arguments are particularly useful for approaching Sufiya Zinobia’s character who, as an embodiment of infinite rage and violence, in other words as a chtonian, natural force, represents that which the society as culture in which she was born has to repress and annihilate.

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and gruesome murders that subjugates while horrifying, can be compared to that of the crowd who, centuries ago, clamoured for the spectacle of a public execution. Confronted with Sufiya Zinobia’s uncontainable, murderous frenzy, history, even “the monster that is history” (to quote a well-known title) turns pale.91 Gender struggle also, notwithstanding its significance in the novel, loses its lustre. If, as I suggest, the reading of Sufiya Zinobia through the lens of the discourse of the sublime is an enriching interpretational exercise then, in Swann’s words, we shall also have to accept: an almost anti-critical, affective mode of engagement with power which turns a perception of the arbitrariness of signs to the advantage of at least certain representational forms, as the subject becomes oriented to shape or figure for its own sake, in the register of aesthetics. (Swann: 13, emphasis added)

Swann bases her observations regarding the sublime on the difference between Milton’s lines in Paradise Lost, where the poet infers that we should appreciate the inseparability of rhetoric and politics as forms of representation, and Burke’s strategy of disguising the political in his argument, and then justifying its eloquence due to the power of art. Thus, she argues, the reading is brought in touch with political danger, but in a ‘safe’ manner, one that “establishes more firmly the man of culture and the order he represents”; hence, the act of “responding to great literature” does manage to “challenge the established order of things without the consequences: in true sublime fashion, we can feel we are in danger without actually risking our necks” (Swann: 13). What I read in this chapter as Rushdie’s version of the Gothic sublime is a most original and skillful mixture of the Miltonic and Burkean strategies. Thus, although in Shame, Rushdie alludes to the historical, social, and cultural realities of Pakistan, he warns us that his novel cannot and should not be read as a historical treatise, not even as a realistic novel, which would necessarily have to contain “much real-life material” (Shame: 69). Instead, he constantly reminds his readers that they are, in fact, reading fiction, and that wild flights of the imagination are the only reality that counts. As he explains elsewhere: Fantasy, or the mingling of fantasy and naturalism, is one way of dealing with these problems (i.e. “black and white descriptions of society”). It offers a way of echoing in the form of our work the issues faced by all of us: how to build a new, modern world out of an old, legend-haunted civilization, an old culture which we have brought into the heart of a newer one. But whatever technical solutions we may find, Indian writers in these islands, like others who have migrated into the north from the south, 91 See David Der-Wai Wang’s The Monster that is History (2004).

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are capable of writing from a double perspective: because they, we, are at one and the same time insiders and outsiders in this society. The stereoscopic vision is perhaps what we can offer in place of “whole sight”. (Rushdie 2010: 19)

I would also suggest, taking my cue from Rushdie’s assessments of Indian writers, that the situation of the diaspora writers and their literary recipes, their double status of insiders and outsiders can be compared to the female plots in Shame, which as demonstrated before, have taken over the narrative. At the same time, the very act of bringing legends and tales from an old culture into a newer one suggests aggression and penetration of the new, suggested male centre by the old, potentially female, margin. Formally different but conceptually the same, Yaeger discusses this violence and its necessity, as a “sublime of violence”, a potentially “liberating structure of female violence and aggression”; further on, she sees the conventional, masculine, oedipal sublime as masking a primordial female sublime, a desire to merge with the body of the pre-oedipal mother. Yaeger, as stated at the beginning of this study, also claims that the female sublime is the privilege of female writers, a means of liberating both themselves and their characters from the cells of patriarchal aesthetic conventions (Yaeger: 191–212). In my opinion, the female sublime, as a type of correction of the male sublime with its rigid dissociations from beauty is a technique which Rushdie masters without succumbing to it. In this sense he may be said to transcend strict male-female boundaries and write in the note of the Gothic sublime, a category that is an amalgam and gender-independent, aesthetically a hybrid. As previously suggested, such a category can be discerned mainly in the character of Sufiya Zinobia. She is also a hybrid form, one that predictably exceeds and disrupts the many systems of classifications employed in a rather futile attempt to order experience and gain knowledge. The mere force of her character is testimony to the fact that “once in a blue moon” her Frankensteinian birth, as a composite creature of three historical individuals, two of them the victims of patriarchy and its implacable laws, does not seem to bear a strong significance to the version of her particular monstrosity. Rushdie’s narrator appears strikingly detached when reporting the fate of the East London Pakistani girl who died at the hands of her own father, after he was shamed by her presumed “making love to a white boy” (Shame: 115). Equally distant, he depicts the second individual melted into the matrix of Sufiya Zinobia, a girl, “set upon in a late-night underground train (in London) by a group of teenage boys […]. The girl ‘Asian’ again, the boys predictably white” (Shame: 117). It is to be noted that, as if ‘ashamed’ by his own emotional distance and by the fact that he is able to comprehend the murder of honour, the narrator opts for empowering the second victim. This character is

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reinvented as a type of angel of justice, with the power and the will to fight back and “trash the white kids within an inch of their lives, breaking arms legs noses balls, without knowing whence the violence came, without seeing how she, so slight a figure, could command such awesome strength” (Shame: 117). The other third of Sufiya Zinobia is a “boy from a news clipping”, who “had simply ignited of his own accord, without dousing himself in petrol or applying any external flame” (Shame: 117). As seen from the different stories of her explanatory parts, extreme violence goes into the making of Sufiya Zinobia. Significantly, it is the type of violence that the narrator comprehends and that is the axis of Sufiya Zinobia’s character. Horribly, this is even justifiable violence – as the narrator himself confesses when he depicts the father who butchered his daughter, the beaten girl becoming the beating one, and the more numinous but not less terrifying violence that is directed itself against the young boy’s body. Violence, with its accompanying pain and danger breeds and is bred by terror; similarly, terror breeds and is bred by violence. Both powerful emotions, they inform the domain of the sublime, as Burke claims. In his opinion, “terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime”, so that: Whatever is fit in any way to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible object, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. (qtd in Beville: 26)

Confronted for the first time with the terrible embodied in Sufiya Zinobia, having risen from the depths of an otherwise sleeping (because retarded) consciousness, the different characters witnessing the “aftermath of the Loo” (Shame: 138) express stupefaction at the mere physical impossibility of a little girl strangling two hundred and eighteen turkeys. This is Sufiya Zinobia’s first exploration of deep, organic rage: Pinkie Aurangzeb looked hollowly upon the carnage, and was struck by the meaningless hatred in Bilquis’s eyes; the two women remained silent, each in the grip of a different horror, so that it was Raza Hyder, his watery black-rimmed eyes riveted upon the face of his daughter with her bloodied lips, who spoke first in a voice echoing admiration as well as revulsion: ‘With her bare hands,’ the new government minister trembled, ‘what gave the child such strength?’ (Shame: 139)

As inferred in the above quotation, the reactions of the characters in Shame, at least during this particular episode, are reminiscent of stupere, a term that according to Burke, the Romans used for terror, and also one that “strongly marks the state of an astonished mind”. (qtd in Beville: 26) The sublime terror which

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the character of Sufiya Zinobia embodies is obviously built around “the ideas of pain” which “are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure” (Beville: 26). Conversely, the above scene – only a mere prelude to a series of monstrous acts committed by Sufiya Zinobia, but in a way the most eloquent because of its irrationality – can also be read via what Lyotard, inspired by Kant, called the theory of ‘the unrepresentable’. According to Lyotard, it is this uncanny reunion with the unimaginable, or the unrepresentable, which determines the halting of subjective action, steals agency and causes an unfixable rupture between rationality and imagination (Lyotard 1991: 210). The Kantian pleasure/displeasure or ‘negative pleasure’ are clearly reflected in Hyder’s “admiration”/“revulsion” as well as the “horror” experienced by the girl’s mother and Pinkie Aurangzeb. The butchered-turkey episode is only the first in a chain of events which are testimony to the gradual conversion from beauty to beast. This incipient slide into the bestial and the monstrously forcible also challenges the Kantian and the Burkean distinction between sublime as the prerogative of the male and beauty as the prerogative of the female, as Sufiya Zinobia is both beautiful and frighteningly sublime. When she falls under the spell of violence, in turn she casts a spell over her terrified audience; gradually, she metamorphoses into “one of those supernatural beings, those exterminating or avenging angels, or werewolves, or vampires, about whom we are happy to read in stories” (Shame: 197). The habit which she develops, that of tearing her hair till it forms “a kind of halo of destruction around her face” (Shame: 138) almost sanctifies her appearance and argues for her having left behind the mere mortals among whom she was born as a “wrong miracle” and now inhabiting a superior and martyred sphere. Similarly to Omar who develops a different kind of perception and awareness, Sufiya metaphorically turns into “a sponge”, able to incorporate and absorb various “emotions that should have been felt but where not […]” (Shame: 122). Although doomed to “become shame made flesh” (Shame: 139), she retains her purity, as her retardation is symbolic of her cleanliness “[…] in the midst of a dirty world” (Shame: 121), and her uncanny sainthood of “a person who suffers in our stead” (Shame: 141). The encounter between Omar Khayyam and Sufiya Zinobia occurs after the terrifying butchering of the turkeys, when “something frightful had begun to happen to the girl’s tiny body”, who “had started to come out in huge blotchy rashes, red and purple, with small hard pimples in the middle” whereas “boils were forming between her toes and her back was bubbling up into extraordinary vermilion lumps” (Shame: 140). In the narrator’s words “[…] Sufiya Zinobia had chosen the form of her own end” (Shame: 141). Read from Kristeva’s perspective on the abject, Sufiya Zinobia again manages to reaffirm the hybridity of her condition.

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Although she loses consciousness, she faints, almost becoming a “corpse”; she also has “pus bursting from her sores”, she “dribbles”, she is “incontinent”, that is, she is very much and grotesquely alive. As Kristeva reminds us, “[…] the wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay does not signify death. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit, are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death” (Kristeva: 5). Furthermore, the eruption of the beast and its manifestation of “the horror within” are relevant for the fact that, from the perspective of Kristeva’s conceptualization of the abject, Sufiya’s “body inside shows up in order to compensate for the collapse of the border between inside and outside”, since it appears that “the skin, a fragile container, no longer guaranteed the integrity of one’s “own and clean self”, but scraped or transparent, invisible or taut, gave way before the dejection of its contents” (Kristeva: 53). Sufiya Zinobia’s corporeality, her surrender to the monstrous, the Real (in the Lacanian sense)92 of her nature, the violent effects which her attack celebrate may be read as abjection of self. In Kristeva’s words, this refers to “the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all its objects are merely based on the inaugural loss that had laid the foundations of its own being”. (Kristeva: 5, emphasis added) Thus, this abjection of self, which Sufiya’s body seems to willingly undertake is actually a reinforcement, a painful “recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language or desire is founded” (Kristeva: 5). Devoid of maternal love and paternal care, allocated to the margins of the domestic sphere, Sufiya’s attack against her own body and its terrifying, pus, blood and shit-infected nature, dissolves “the fantasy of the stable, unimpeachable body” and acknowledges its monstrosity (Ng 2004: 11). This identification with the abject is a gradual process, initiated with her attack and continued through the farce of a marriage to the grotesquely fat 92 One of the three orders that Lacan puts forward, the Real, is different from reality, opposed to the Imaginary and situated outside the Symbolic. It is outside language and escapes symbolization, nevertheless, unlike the Symbolic, “the Real is always in its place” (Lacan 1977: 37), and it bears no fissures. According to Lacan, the Real, as a consequence of its placement outside language (that is, outside the Symbolic) is “impossible” to imagine, hence impossible to attain. The Real has a traumatic quality, it is thus “the essential object which is not an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence” (Lacan 1988: 53). In my opinion, there are noticeable similarities between Lacan’s Real and the Gothic sublime, especially regarding the quality of being “unimaginable”, the failure of language to describe it and the anxiety which can also be read as terror.

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Omar Khayyam, who while curing her body, succumbed to its fresh and young beauty. The marriage is far from an expected happy-ending, nor is the ceremony itself impressive, but merely a “private affair; no guests, no marquees […]” where the bride managed to smile and “ate a plate of laddoos decorated with silver paper” (Shame: 199). “The horrible thing and the horrible-not-doing the thing” (Shame: 215) defines Sufiya and Omar’s sexless marriage. The bride’s sexual frustrations (not recognized by an impoverished reason but far more dangerously contaminating the senses), and the feeling of familiar shame at being replaced by her Parsee ayah in Omar’s bed, trigger the post-coital murders of four adolescents, whose “four […] male, pungent” bodies with “heads […] wrenched off their necks by some colossal force, literally torn from their shoulders” are found in some “slums” of no account (Shame: 217).93 At this point in the novel, Sufiya Zinobia fully becomes “a horror story”, “the woman in the veil” (Shame: 217), who, in order to be subdued, once acknowledged by father and husband as the author of unspeakable acts of violence, “was to be kept unconscious until further notice”, “enter a state of suspended animation”, with “long chains” “padlocked […] to the attic beams” (Shame: 250). Her sleep is

93 As previously mentioned, Antonia Fraser discerns the Shame Syndrome as quintessential in the making of a Warrior Queen. Besides it, she also mentions the so-called “titivating theme of sexual licence, the Voracity Syndrome […] developed with the emergence of the flesh-and-blood woman. Lust (especially on the part of the widow, the status of so many Warrior Queens […] remained a popular vice to associate with the name of a female leader, just as it had been characteristic of a Celtic goddess (Fraser: 29, emphasis added). Semiramis was said “to regularly call the most stalwart soldiers under her command into a different kind of service; ungratefully if practically, she was in the habit of putting her lovers to death immediately after a night of love lest the tale of the Empress’s desires should be spread about”(Fraser: 31). Likewise, Queen Tamara of Georgia – now canonized – is immortalized in Georgian folklore and myth as a woman of voracious sexual appetite. Lermontov’s famous ballad The Demon depicts her ‘as having the face of an angel but with a heart ‘like sprites from hell’; she allegedly lured her suitors to enter her tower on a gloomy crag using her magnetic voice ‘brimming with passion o’er’, only to hurl her suitors to death over the precipice in the morning (Fraser: 43–4). Naturally, Sufiya Zinobia is no Warrior Queen although it is obvious that she frequently acts instead of the incapacitated male leaders around her, especially at moments of crisis, when the web of lies, corruption and torture suffocates the political life of Rushdie’s Pakistan; in my opinion, the textual evidence of Shame regarding the character of Sufiya Zinobia reflects the characteristics of the archetypal journey performed by many an exceptional and historical female leaders, the immortal Warrior Queens.

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deeper than death, as her guilty burial is sanctioned by all the family members. In this, she temporarily becomes the sister of many Gothic heroines, forced to accept the consequences of their alterity of mind and body. As Denison points out: […] Zinobia becomes the undead, a vampire who will eventually strike against those who have buried her alive… in Zinobia we find the image of many women of the past […] Braddon’s Lady Audley conveniently shoved into a sanitarium and forgotten […] Jane’s Bertha, locked behind bars and raging against her imprisonment […] or do we, instead find Rochester’s Antoinette, escaping her lethal bars amidst the flames of captivity? (Denison: 301)

At the end of two years of imprisonment, Sufiya manages to escape from the attic and for a while she is unheard of. This is but a false disappearance, as she will re-enter the story as yet another, even more frightening “disorder’s avatar”, her new reality narrated in tales of a white panther that murders indiscriminately, people as well as animals. When her husband stares at “the Sufiya-Zinobia shaped hole in a bricked-up window”, according to Deszcz, he “experiences an ever deeper illumination” and “sees that Sufiya’s coarse animality is actually her freedom” (Deszcz: 34). Omar Khayyam, the now deserted/formerly deserting husband becomes “proud of her strength, proud of the violence that was making her a legend, that prohibited her from doing, or whom to be, or what she did not wish to hear” (Shame: 254). Sufiya’s unequivocal embracing of her beastly nature and, more importantly, the effects of this final transformation on her husband, who fully accepts her final metamorphosis is Rushdie’s version of Gothic sublime, which is both inspired by and transcends the Kantian sublime: “Sublimity, therefore, does not reside in any of the things of nature, but only in our own mind, in so far as we may become conscious of our superiority over nature within, and thus also over nature without us (as exerting influence upon us)” (Mishra: 114). The inevitability of the final confrontation with his wife’s irreversible metamorphosis into the beast which cannot be contained fosters Omar’s reappraisal of his own life in a succinct, kaleidoscopic set of images, a brief catalogue of his many sins, confessed to an imaginary interrogator, the figment of delirium caused by malaria: What shall I put […] I can confess to many things. Fleeing-from-roots, obesity, drunkenness, hypnosis, getting girls in the family way, not sleeping with my wife, too many pine-kernels, peeping-tommery as a boy. Sexual obsession with under-age brain-damaged female, resultant failure to avenge my brother’s death. (Shame: 283)

The catalogue of transgressions which have constituted the substance of Omar’s life may be interpreted as an accession – albeit contorted – “to the sublime through self-contemplation”, as Mishra puts it, “unrestrained by other demands or imperatives” (Mishra: 35), or to the sublime as “simply the heightened consciousness

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of beholding oneself beholding the world” (Levine qtd in Mishra: 35). However, there are external imperatives for Omar’s painful awareness at the moment of his impending death. It is one of Omar’s victims, Sufiya Zinobia with her death call, with her natural, marvellously unleashed and lethal sublimity, that facilitates her husband’s “heightened consciousness”. What Omar experiences waiting for his imminent death, is shock but may also be read as a negotiation between what Neil Hertz has termed “the mental overload” and release, between “confusion and assurance”, between “the drama of the imagination’s collapse and reason’s intervention” (Hertz 68). Forced to face Sufiya’s limitless, turbulent and ungraspable nature, now imminently visible in the gaze that, like Medusa’s, petrifies her victim, Omar actually faces the scope of his life-long shamelessness. Thus, he accepts death whose source she is, as a groom anxious for his lovely bride, on the sacred wedding-night. Omar, the ungrateful son and careless brother, the revoltingly inconsistent hero, the very quintessence of the many-folded miseries and misfortunes (both suffered and caused) that the human breast can hold together, finally accepts the gift of love and death from the only woman he could/would not have and submit, due to her monstrously ineffable nature. His last words, when facing his bride, approaching him “on all fours, naked, coated in mud and blood and shit, with twigs sticking to her back and beetles in her hair” are: “Well, wife, so here you are, at last” (Shame: 286). Such words expressing the acknowledgment of imminent death and insurmountable experience call to mind Shelley’s address to Mary, at the beginning of his Revolt of Islam: “There is no danger to a man, that knows/What life and death is; /There’s not any law/Exceeds his knowledge; neither is it lawful/That he should stoop to any other law” (Shelley qtd in Hutchinson: 38). I read the final scene of the novel, Omar’s almost-joy at the contemplation of death at the hands of his wife as the last, and possibly the most interesting component of the hybrid that is Gothic sublime, as I read it in Rusdhie’s novel. According to Mishra, the Gothic sublime includes Schoppenhauer’s oceanic sublime, through the Nirvana principle. In Mishra’s words, this is: “[…] an oceanic consciousness that is clearly linked to the Indian principle […] ‘I am the origin of this entire universe and its dissolution’, said Krishna to Arjuna, in the Bhagavadgita” (Mishra: 36). Schoppenhauer’s type of oceanic consciousness is also sustained by Schiller’s acknowledgement of “the daemonic in us”; they both confess to a negativity, to “the impossible representation of an idea”, to “the incomparable greatness of the Thing in question as it also connects the imagination with pain” (Mishra: 36) The relevance of such considerations on the Gothic sublime, as it is employed in Rushdie’s novel, is textually sustained through the symbolism of the manner of killing, a definitive re-enactment of Sufiya’s atrocities. It is Omar’s head, the seat of consciousness and reason that will

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be separated from his body and it is this very decapitation which suggests that “the metaphysics of human superiority espoused by Kant are no longer the conditions of the sublime” and that instead “death is embraced contemplatively, and idealism is now tempered by pessimism and human insignificance.” (Mishra: 37) In Gothic sublime (which contains, among others, the oceanic sublime), reason – which may be roughly equalled in Shame with the instinct of self-preservation, that which Omar lacks – gives way to the absolute of death, to death desired, dreamt about as a permanent shelter, as an abode of tranquillity and safe distance from the multiple terrors of life (Levine: 398). It may be said then, along the same lines, that Sufiya as sublime death incarnate, and Omar as failed reason, finally consummate their marriage.

Conclusion As stated at the beginning of this chapter, my aim was to read Salman Rushdie’s Shame through the theoretical lens of the Gothic sublime. As a category, the Gothic sublime is far from having acquired, as Mishra pertinently argues, an all-encompassing definition. As such, it is constituted of multiple layers, comprising but not being reduced to designations by Burke, Kant, Schoppenhauer, Lyotard, Žižek and many others. Furthermore, Yaeger’s concept of the female sublime may also be read as a component of the Gothic sublime. We are, if attempting to capture the elusive nature of the Gothic sublime, confronted “with a black-hole theory” which mainly, but not only, as argued above, suggests the existence of a double-folded problematic. The first, the Kantian one, refers to the “issue of the presentation of the unrepresentable”, the second, expanded from Schoppenahuer and enriched by Freud, is the “oceanic sublime”, “the sublime as the dissolution of self in death” (Mishra: 255–6). This compulsion towards the death of the self is a reflection of the “inherently apocalyptic tendencies in the Gothic as the subject ingratiatingly gets absorbed into the sublime object” (Mishra: 256). I conclude by emphasizing that the various “dimensions of monstrosity” (in Ng’s words)94 which Salman Rushdie articulates in his novel can be read via the ineffability of the Gothic sublime; in my opinion, such a reading, although allowing for the relevance of the historical, social and cultural aspects of Shame, nevertheless intermediates a more comprehensive, albeit personal one, of self, body, and other, as well as the paradigm that unites them all in a celebration of subjectivity. 94 See Ng Dimensions of Monstrosity in Contemporary Narratives. Theory, Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism (2004).

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Refracting Spaces in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain Introduction Sometimes strikingly dissimilar texts and genres which nevertheless display evident similarities, allusions to other texts, echoes of previous works in terms of plot, character construction, and atmosphere have mostly been analyzed in the context of intertextuality and parody.95 Notwithstanding the variety of interpretations they inspire, at a closer look, both intertextuality and parody appear to oversimplify the various rapports between two or more literary texts and reduce them to either “a relation of subversion (in various degrees) or a relation of retrieval (with no revisionist purport” (Onega and Gutleben: 9). In Refracting the Canon in Contemporary British Literature and Film, Onega and Gutleben argued for the emergence of refraction: “a striking and complex phenomenon of contemporary fiction”, which they define as “a double process involving the ways in which a text exploits and integrates both the reflections of a previous text and the new light shed on the original work by its rewriting” (Onega and Gutleben: 8). Arguably the most significant feature of refraction is its very theoretical premise, based on a “dialectic relation between a text and its hypotext(s), affecting the result as well as the source, the new text as well as the old one, the modern product as well as the original prototype” (8). Refraction, understood as a visual metaphor, bearing 95 Once revolutionary, intertextuality, a concept coined by Julia Kristeva in 1960, appeared “to deliver us from old controversies over the psychology of individual authors and readers, the training of literary origins, and the relative value of imitation or originality. By shifting our attention from the triangle author/work/tradition to that of text/discourse/culture, intertextuality replaces the evolutionary model of literary history with a structural or synchronic model of literature as sign system. The most salient effect of this strategic change is to free the literary text from psychological, sociological, and historical determinisms, opening it up to an apparently infinite play of relationships with other texts, or semiosis.” (Morgan qtd in Onega and Gutleben: 8). Nevertheless, in practice, this revolutionary concept and its premises proved elusive and untenable, as it led to either “Derrida’s indeterminacy of meaning produced by the free play of signifiers among numerous texts, or to a return to the search for classic hypotexts” (Onega and Gutleben: 8).

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affinities with Gary Saul Morson’s “sideshadowing”96 also infers a “dialectic relation between the canonical and the postmodernist text” which affects both “result and source”, and which “obliterates any hierarchical or evaluative distinction between two related texts”, so that “an Oedipal relation” is rendered impossible (Onega and Gutleben: 9). Since from the point of view of refraction, intertextual hierarchies are untenable, a more ‘democratic’ practice is at work, in which texts are supposed to employ each other as a “reading prism”, and consequently allow for new insights into old works (9). Referring to contemporary Scottish literature and particularly to the works of Alasdair Gray, Boehnke remarks that refraction may also encompass an act of “writing back to the established literary tradition […] one is therefore confronted by the paradox of a double canon and the question of which canon is being refracted” (Boehnke: 54). It is with this second perspective upon refraction that my current analysis is mostly concerned; hence, this is also the reason for the greater emphasis placed on Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain, at the expense of the ‘more canonical’ Jane Eyre.97 Although the reading I am suggesting here is primarily meant to constitute 96 As Morson explains it: “By restoring the presentness of the past and cultivating that something else might have happened sideshadowing restores some of the presentness that has been lost. It alters the way we think about earlier events and the narrative models used to describe them” (Morson qtd in Onega and Gutleben: 9). 97 With the advent of contemporary literary theories in the twentieth century the problematic of a new canon gained momentum. However, the ‘requirements’ of a new canon have fuelled intense debates among critics and authors, mostly between the ‘purists’ or ‘traditionalists’ (who, for instance, would reject outright any modern perspective on Shakespeare for example, on the grounds that it would radically undermine his literary value-and his very ‘canonicity’) and the ‘revisionists’ (who would opt for updating and developing Shakespearean topical concerns, thus achieving an increased acknowledgment of his universality) (Onega and Gutleben: 12). The issue of a canon becomes even more complex in the post-colonial context, that is, when geography becomes part of the discussion. For example, the concept of a post-colonial counter-canon formed by Indian writers writing in English (who are residents of either the Western metropolis or the former colony) is far too complex to be thoroughly explained here. This complexity is at least in part the result of the problematic reception of such authors by Indian critics who, while acknowledging their appreciation of their works, frequently denounce the authors as culturally prolonging the colonization and its effects. A vast number of Indian critics frown upon the works of Indian authors writing in English, invoking the ‘authenticity’ of Indian literature which is presumably ‘spoiled’ in the very process of offering translations or adaptations of certain Indian words/concepts, in order to make them accessible to a foreign audience. For example, although Aijaz Ahmad is clearly one of the critics made less than happy by

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a dialectical assessment of two novels informed by the Gothic genre, my analysis will seek to reverse hierarchies and suggest Fire on the Mountain as hypotext refracting its symbolism of imagery, characters and particularly setting onto Jane Eyre as its hypertext. In this sense, it is useful to remember at this point that arguably, literature has long been interested in the ideological allusions of architecture, based on a rather complex dialectic. On the one hand, countless literary texts have offered a celebration of the monumentality of the aristocratic taste, translated into sumptuous mansions and palaces, inhabited by the privileged classes; on the other they emphasized the inescapable shabbiness of the dispossessed forced to lead lives of misery in poor, and insalubrious random dwellings.98 The inescapable connections between literature and architecture have been made particularly obvious throughout the Gothic genre, also well-known for its continuous exploitation of the house’s differentiated sexual spaces, which often help establish a dialectic relationship between interiority and/or entrapment. Ever since Walpole and Radcliffe, ‘the founding parents of the Gothic genre opted for representing space and gender in a mutual and tormented embrace, the house has rarely stopped signifying a literal/metaphorical prison or crypt for the Gothic heroine. Therefore, my focus in the present chapter correlates the concept of refraction to that of space, the former instrumental for establishing the latter as the main source of the gloomy, Gothic atmosphere of the two novels. In the present reading of Fire on the Mountain and Jane Eyre the emphasis on spatiality symbolizes an extension of the female subjects, an aspect which, in my opinion, argue for the Gothic quality of the texts. Consequently, in reading the novels as heavily influenced by the Gothic genre, this chapter aims at discussing what Baldick calls the “Gothic effect”, translatable as the attempt to recognize “a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration.” (Baldick: xix). Thus, in both novels, spatial and architectural metaphors symbolize the entrapment, violence and repression encountered by the female protagonists. For the present reading, I am also taking my cue from the cosmopolitanism of Indian authors who chose to live and write in the West, ‘in his books’ Anita Desai fares better. The reason is simple: together with other Indian authors, she opted to live “inside India – which undoubtedly helps to consolidate their claim to represent – indeed to embody – the Indian national experience, for their readerships here as well as abroad, while the shared medium of English serves to strengthen that tie, and the metropolitan perceptions of that tie, between the writers based in India and those who have migrated to metropolitan countries” (Ahmad: 75). 98 See, for example the chapter on Urban Gothic in Shantaram and The Black Book.

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Colomina’s view on the relationship between sexuality and space, according to which “the politics of space are always sexual, even if the space is central to the mechanisms of the erasure of sexuality” (Colomina: iii-v). My intent is to demonstrate that both the novels which constitute the topic of this chapter highlight the mansion/house trope as instrumental in revealing the juxtaposition between space and subject, opposing Self and Other, male and female, visibility and invisibility, reality and refraction. The final aim of my analysis is actually a matter of methodology and to, a certain extent, conceptualization; thus, I maintain that in spite of the different contexts (historical, biographical, and social) that saw the production of the texts, both novels uphold a Gothic-inspired literary analysis, by means of employing suggestions from different disciplines such as architecture, philosophy and analytical psychology.

Fire on the Mountain Anita Desai’s 1977 novel is centred on three female characters: Nanda Kaul who, following a life of domestic servitude, ‘escapes’ to the solitude of Carignano; Raka, her most unwelcome great-granddaughter who is abruptly sent by her psychologically traumatized mother to spend some time with her; and Ila Das, Nanda’s lifelong friend, a deprived, unconnected woman with hardly any compensatory skills to facilitate a decent existence in her old age. This is a narrative which spins female characters’ particular tales of deep unhappiness and sorrow, as they are uncomfortably trapped between a will to alienation from others and self, and a constant, mute appeal to nature’s soothing powers. Nanda Kaul’s tale frames the others’ to the extent that, according to Ramanathan, the whole novel “sets out to tell the mother’s story” (Ramanathan: 22), but also, in my view, the story of the space of violence, rebellion and denunciation of traditional female values. Violence and eccentricity of action and thought also define Raka, whose inner nature favours the “bareness” and the “starkness” of her outer nature, and makes her avoid human contact. At the very end of the book, in an overwhelming destructive frenzy, Raka sets the mountain on fire, an act which inexorably annihilates any prospects of her future placement in the social milieu. Ila Das’s violent and diasphoric journey also ends in Kasauli, in the most disconcerting manner, as rape followed by murder at the hands of a peasant, whose daughter’s child marriage she had attempted to prevent. As Karamcheti points out, these three female characters’ tales inscribe “the texts’s geography (which) actualizes the women’s place without men and the marginality of India in the world map” (Karamcheti: 139).

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From the very first pages of Desai’s text, the reader gets engrossed in the quiet quality of the spatial descriptions which encompass a “whole-female world, characterized by a sense of stasis” (Karamcheti: 137). The house in which Nanda Kaul lives is situated “on the ridge” (Fire on the Mountain: 4) while the “bareness” and “starkness” (4) of the surroundings seem to agree with her self-imposed “bareness”, and her consequent attempts to escape the stifling circle of duties and responsibilities which constitute the domestic universe of an Indian wife and mother. In Knapp’s Jungian reading, Nanda Kaul is an “archetypal Old Woman”, “sign and countersign – the repository of filled and unfulfilled needs and feelings”, which are gradually revealed as the narrative proceeds (Knapp 1987: 209). Her decision “to live out her remaining years in this topos – which is really an a-topos, a non-place – in serenity and repose” can be read as the final step towards initiation, and towards “an ex-centring or de-centring of her ego” (Knapp 1987: 209). However, this final psychological metamorphosis fails to materialize itself, a direct consequence of the hostility of space, embodied in the malefic figure of the house. Thus, although situated on the mountain, “on the ridge”, tiny and fragile in comparison to the majesty of the landscape, the house challenges the supremacy of nature. Arguably in Desai’s novel, the function of the mountain as literary symbol does not conform to the standard one, identified in many religions (Mounts Sinai, Tabor, Meru, Olives, Caf) with celestial forces, consciousness and masculine elements. Instead of nature serving as Nanda Kaul’s personal temenos, as sacred precinct, as spiritual fortress, the outer geography of the mountain is contaminated by the uncanniness of the house, which becomes crypt or cave, and is haunted/ inhabited by victimizing/victimized female presences.99 In his discussion of the generic house and its benign qualities, Ballantyne maintains that “It has witnessed our indignities and embarrassments, as well as the face we want to show to the outside world. The home has seen us at our worst, and still shelters us and protects us” (Ballantyne: 17). In Desai’s novel, the contours of the house as a comforting space are dissolved very early, from the opening pages when the text exposes it as a present creation inscribed in the past; in other words, when we learn the history of its previous, non-Indian inhabitants. Its disturbing, uncanny quality renders it as a sort of composite product situated at the crossroads of architecture and psychology. Vidler, in remarking upon the difficulty of defining 99 Knapp claims that Nanda conceives of her house as “figurative and literal temenos” (Knapp 1987: 213). As this chapter will further argue, the house is actually destructive, it has an infinite potential for evil and death, endlessly replicating the curse which history and psychology laid at its very foundations.

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an “architectural uncanny”, using the same coordinates as for the “literary or psychological uncanny”, notices that: […] in each moment of the history of the representation of the uncanny, and at certain moments in its psychological analysis, the buildings and spaces that have acted as the sites for uncanny experiences have been invested with recognizable characteristics. These almost typical and eventually commonplace qualities – the attributes of the haunted houses in Gothic romances are the most well-known – while evidently not essentially uncanny in themselves, nevertheless have been seen as emblematic of the uncanny, as the cultural signs of estrangement for particular periods. (Vidler: 11)

In Fire on the Mountain, establishing and arguing for the uncanniness of the dwelling is made possible via a retrospective look at the former owners of the house who were British and, more specifically and historically, British colonizers of India. As will be argued further on, their deaths, fears, repressions, and obsessions have almost cast a colonizing spell over the Indian property, “emblematic of the uncanny”, and a type of “cultural sign of estrangement” for the “particular” period of the Empire. Edward Said, in emphasizing the indissoluble connections between imperial politics and geography, claimed that: If there is anything that radically distinguishes the imagination of anti-imperialism, it is the primacy of the geographical in it. Imperialism after all is an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control. For the native, the history of colonial servitude is inaugurated by the loss of locality to the outsider; its geographical identity must thereafter be searched for and somehow restored […] Because of the presence of the colonizing outsider, the land is recoverable at first only through the imagination. (Said: 71)

Indeed, Desai’s quiet quality of the text is initially instrumental in inviting the readers to indulge in reveries of peace in the formerly confiscated land and house, finally returned to the rightful owners in an act meant to restore pre-colonial harmony.100 Nevertheless, such reveries are soon to be thwarted, with the detailed personal histories of the British inhabitants of the house. Arguably, Desai employs the Gothic figure of the house as a means to connect with a haunting and unheimlich concept of history according to which the past cannot be escaped, its secrets

100 In the famous The Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin claim that “it is not possible to return to or to rediscover an absolute pre-colonial purity” (195). Anita Desai’s novel, as it will be argued further on, proves them right.

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will be revealed and a high price from the present exacted.101 Baldick notes that Gothic tales typically invoke: […] the tyranny of the past (a family curse, the survival of archaic forms of despotism and superstition) with such weight as to stifle the hopes of the present (the liberty of the heroine of the hero), within the dead-end of the physical incarceration (the dungeon, the locked room), or simply the confinements of a family house closing in upon itself. (Baldick: xix)

Since I am reading Fire on the Mountain and Jane Eyre as novels replete with Gothic tropes, Baldick’s statement is of particular relevance to my analysis. From this perspective, the refracted tyranny of the past over the present is instrumental in the creation of a Carignano space mythology of Gothic substance which ensnares its protagonists and can be approached from a gender perspective. In Fire on the Mountain, the unheimlich concept of history, enhanced by its association with space as haunted territory appears to have a much greater impact on female characters, be they British or Indian. This is a female gender burden which may be explicable thorough the characters’ doubly subordinate position; firstly, to the males around them, secondly, to the Empire which is either promoting their men to unnatural and demanding positions, or entrapping them and metaphorically castrating their will and right to action. As noticed by Ramanathan: The history of the house itself signifies women’s desire for separation from domesticity and for control over the space of the house. The desire for control over this space is manifested through a form of veiled violence. Through the series of the owners of the house, we seem to be told the mother’s unheard story obliquely, expressed as women’s rage. (Ramanathan: 23)

Colonel Macdougall and his wife, the first inhabitants and builders of the Carignano house, wrongly attribute healing virtues to the nature surrounding it. In the attempt to save “ominously pale children” from an early death, they choose Carignano as residence, only to be left in their old age, “she wrapped in a cashmere shawl for she was sickly and he with his pipe and tobacco” to “gaze out across the valley at Sabathu where […] their own seven children came to be buried one by one” (Fire on the Mountain: 6). The potential for the evil quality of the house thus unequivocally established, what follows is a series of unsuspecting owners or workers who come to their gruesome deaths in this space of Gothic horror,

101 For an insightful essay on the uncanniness of space and its relevance in generally determining the characters’ literary journey, see Punter’s Arundhati Roy and the House of History (2003).

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evocative of the cinematic house of Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho. For, although the house is left uninhabited for a few years after the death of the Colonel and his wife, the human desertion does not achieve any type of exorcism. Devoid of the human presence, this malignant abode almost turns against itself in its destructive impulse, only to find a better victim at the last moment, when the roof “sliced the head off a coolie who was trying to shelter beside a load of stacked wood on the roadside” (Fire on the Mountain: 6). The second pair of occupants are a pastor and his wife, trapped in a relationship that speaks of strenuous and daily domestic hatred for one’s partner. Although yearning for family bliss, as the Colonel before him, the pastor is depicted by Desai as a long-suffering husband, forced to share his life with a woman who “hated him too much to cook jam for him. The longer their marriage the more she hated him and almost daily she made an attempt to murder him.” (Fire on the Mountain: 7); in a strange, grotesque and typically Gothic victim-substitution, while the man survives, the wife: […] split her head open on a rock, and so he lived on safely and died ‘peacefully’, as they say, in bed in Lady Linlithgow’s sanatorium for the tubercular. His ghost was seen to haunt the house, or at least his pipe did, for at certain movement of the evening the veranda would be wafted over by the rich, ripe odour of invisible tobacco freshly kindled. (Fire on the Mountain: 7)

The first two couples who inhabited this gloomy and already ominous dwelling are followed by a long series of “maiden ladies”, some strange sort of overseas replicas of Miss Havisham.102 Their eccentricities, cruelties and personal reasons for despair add further layers to the already pregnant myth of the Carignano

102 For what may be read as the ‘real’, historical tales behind the ‘abnormal behaviour’ of Desai’s “maiden ladies”, see Anne de Courcy’s excellent study The Fishing Fleet: Husband-Hunting in the Raj (2012). Briefly put, the book tackles the numerous cases of young British women who lacked either the good looks or the financial means to make a good match at home in the time of the British Raj. Many of them and their families saw India as rich ‘husband territory’ (the ratio was three men per one woman!) and therefore they willingly chose to travel there (voyage funded by the East India Company) where they were maintained for a year and expected to find a husband in that time. Although de Courcy concentrates on a time period previous to the one referred to in Fire on the Mountain, the husband-hunting practice, albeit with some minor alterations, survived till 1947. The women’s tales that de Courcy re-creates from diaries, journals, memoirs abound with both the physical horrors of travel to a faraway land of a trying climate and illness, as well as the psychological ones, fraught with humiliations, thoughts of rejection and the possibility of returning home as “returned empties”.

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house. For example, a certain Miss Applebee, a former governess with the means to purchase the house, repeatedly thrashes and whips her gardener for the sin of planting the much-hated marigolds in her garden (Fire on the Mountain: 7). Miss Shrewsburry slits the cook’s throat with a fork while trying to “save” him from choking, whereas the behaviour of “vivacious Miss Weaver” anticipates the much less socially accepted one of the “reputedly promiscuous Miss Polson” (Fire on the Mountain: 9). The authentic horror chain ensnaring the British inhabitants of the Carignano house is abruptly broken on the eve of the declaration of the 1947 Independence. The politically motivated desertion ensures that the male colonizers’ fears regarding the safety of their women (maidens or not) at the hands of the natives are comfortably dissipated through a re-territorialization into the bosom of the protecting and nurturing British landscape: Quickly, quickly, before the fateful declaration of independence, they were packed onto the last boats and shipped back to England – virginity intact, honour saved, natives kept at bay. A hefty sigh went up – of relief, of regret. A commonplace remark amongst them had been how like Kasauli was to English country towns of memory. Back in those English country towns, so unexpectedly and prematurely, they sighed and said no, these were nothing like Kasauli, let alone Simla. But there was nothing to be done, no going back. Carignano was up for sale and Nanda Kaul bought it. The little town went native. (Fire on the Mountain: 10)103

The above quotation is one of the many that endorses my reading of space in the novel from the perspective of Colomina’s statement regarding “the politics of space” and their being “always sexual, even if the space is central to the mechanisms of the erasure of sexuality.” In saving the women’s bodies from being potentially ravished by “the natives” in the Carignano house, situated at the heart of “native landscape”, the British men attempt and carry on a process of de-sexualisation of space. The English women, on the other hand, although starting with the conviction that they will once again succumb to the charm of the “English town of memory”, when actually back in their native country feel no 103 Any of the “maiden ladies” in expressing their definitive sense of loss after the Partition could sound like Veronica Bamfield, whose family had lived in India for three generations and who, after being educated in England returned to India as part of the Fishing Fleet: “The smell of the earth soaking up the first rain of the monsoon, of watered Lucerne [alfafa], of roasting gram [chickpea from the servants’ godowns], of tobacco smoked on the roadside in a communal pipe and the tremendous, heady bitter smell of something in the Simla bazaar you never forgot and you longed to smell it again…” (de Courcy: 16).

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elation at all, but merely the bitter realization that colonial history has played one of its last cards and that “there was nothing to be done, no going back” (Fire on the Mountain: 10). I read this regret and sense of loss experienced by the English maidens when they are “unexpectedly and prematurely” (Fire on the Mountain: 9) removed from their surroundings as a lament for the past freedom, isolation and relative sense of power acquired in Kasauli, as well as the fear of failure regarding the re-integration into a social landscape which had presumably cast them as the Other and forced them to faraway lands. In Fire on the Mountain, the most immediate repercussions of the post-British history of India can be detected in the issue of property. With the space now reclaimed by its rightful owners, the Carignano house is bought by Nanda Kaul, a native woman, in the larger context of the entire “little town” which has gone “native” (Fire on the Mountain: 10). However, the change of owners does nothing to lift the curse of female violence, impotent rage and despair which, as previously argued, had defined the essence of the house during the colonial era. The different occupants and circumstances and what may appear as a breath of ‘historically and personally fresh air’ brought around by a long-due reparation cannot, and indeed do not, alter the weight of the past. In his 1994 Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, Derrida discusses the significance of the spectres, of the revenants who refuse to be erased from history, and in haunting the present ensure the continuation of the past: To be just: beyond the living present in general – and beyond its simple negative reversal. A spectral moment, a moment that no longer belongs to time, if one understands, by this word the linking of modalised presents (past present, actual present: ‘now’, future present). We are questioning in this instant, we are asking ourselves about this instant that is not docile to time, at least to what we call time. Furtive and untimely, the apparition of the spectre does not belong to that time, it does not give time, not that one: ‘Enter the ghost, exit the ghost, re-enter the ghost’. (Hamlet) (Derrida: xx)

Read thorough Derrida’s hauntological suggestions, Desai’s text displays the ‘new’ life of the colonized subjects in the ‘aftermath’ of post-colonialism and the inexorability which motivates the colonial ghosts to constantly refute the attempts made by the post-colonial children to set them free. As such, in Fire on the Mountain, in a manner relevant for the politics of the house formerly inhabited by the “English maidens” – behind the historical implications of Desai’s choice of a phrase, I also read a strong suggestion of female potential unfulfilled, begging for a personal reparation of sorts, via the fertility of Indian women – Nanda Kaul, Ila Das and Raka cannot but re-embody the colonial spirits haunting the apparently purged

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landscape of the post-colonial era.104 Although paradoxically, in this context, one is reminded of L.P. Hartley’s famous opening sentence in his The Go-Between, which is highly suggestive for the emphasis that can be placed on the inexorability of time passed and the impossibility to return to former experiences and enjoy the ever-seductive fragrance of memory. “The past is a different country” commences Hartley, and “they do things differently there” (Hartley: 5) are phrases which offer a most poignant description of a metaphorical temporal distance. Nevertheless, the ties between past and present are never severed in Fire on the Mountain and the permanent and inescapable colonization of the latter by the former. Nanda Kaul and the other two female characters, by their exposure to the uncanniness of the house simply reproduce the past and carry on its legacy of gender violence. To employ a Freudian concept, we witness an unavoidable return of the repressed, disguised in the brutal ending of Ila Das. The said ending, related in a scene of gratuitous violence, triggers the death of Nanda Kaul and the destructive force of Raka who lights up the mountain, in what may be read as an unconscious but all the more effective attempt to simultaneously purge house, nature and history. Viewed from a spatial perspective, the story of the post-colonial Carignano house, as reflected both in the desires as well as the physical appearance of its inhabitants seems to be reducible to a daily and unwanted confrontation between verticality and horizontality, embodied in floral and faunal imagery. Thus Nanda Kaul, although having been spurned by her children and forced to lead a life of frustration and conjugal neglect, coupled with a series of interrupted social duties as the wife of the Vice-Chancellor, desires to merge her identity with the trees (as symbols of verticality), so that she can keep herself at a safe distance from “the unwelcome intrusion and distraction” (Fire on the Mountain: 3–4). She is also fascinated by birds, particularly the eagle, which, as Knapp aptly notices, is “identified with celestial realms”, and is depicted as the very opposite of “ the matter-bound serpent, an animal of great importance in India” (Knapp 1987: 215). The eagle transcribes an upward movement and (psychologically) symbolizes the abandonment of “the ego-centred sphere” and its merging with the trans-personal realms (215). Nanda’s fascination with the eagle, the “messenger between heaven and earth” confesses her own aspiration towards liberation, towards reaching “lightness and the soul escaping from the body”, a state that she dreams of experiencing (215) but fails to. 104 This is a sexuality fulfilled in form, but not in content. I find Knapp’s perspective correct, when she notices that although Nanda is the mother of many children, “her sexuality had remained untouched, barren, and cold”, devoid of “any real sexual of feeling relationship with her husband” (Knapp, 1987: 215).

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On the other hand, Raka, her great granddaughter, both subverts and lives up to the expectations dictated by her very name (“Raka” means “moon”). This bizarre girl is depicted in the novel only via insect-imagery, suggesting either the act of crawling or hopping, and thus her uninterrupted connection to earth, to horizontality. On page 39 of Desai’s novel we are told that Raka is like “one of those dark crickets that leap up in fright but do not sing, or a mosquito, minute and fine, on thin, precarious legs”; further on she is perceived by her grandmother as “lizard-like” (42), as “an insect burrowing through the sandy loam and pine-needles of the hillside” (47–8), a “pet-insect” (54), “an uninvited mouse or cricket” (85). Thus, Raka’s appearance, her preference for and ability to tune to nature’s internal cycles, and almost listen to the voice of the earth render her as a powerful element of undisciplined nature, a mystery and a secret accidentally incarcerated in a ­human dwelling. Also, as Knapp notices, “like the Moon God, Chandra, who measures time, is the bearer of nectar (soma), and is said to foster thoughts and ideas, Raka represents a period in Nanda’s life”, fostering “indirect knowledge” (Knapp 1987: 218). If on the one hand Raka is herself secret knowledge imparted by the lunar power, on the other she is also the keeper of dark, family secrets, in her capacity as both an abused and traumatized child (by the father), as well as a neglected one (by an ineffectual mother, unable to stand against her husband’s violence). Thus, Raka’s presence in the Carignano house confirms its function of cave and crypt. The cave, the crypt, the grottos and subterranean vaults are spaces that suggest diverse and opposed readings. By way of their obvious similarities with the sacred maternal, and with the womb they can be assessed as shelters, as loci attached to the prospect of birth (or re-birth), safety and protection. They also suggest obscurity and containing factors, being part of that “prima materia”, the unconscious and feminine principle. For the Hindus, the cave is an area which inspires a communion between the ephemeral/individual and eternal/cosmos (Knapp 1978: 362). At the same time, there is undoubtedly a more unsettling quality of these enclosed spaces, since they lead, especially in Gothic and fantastic novels, not to mention all mythologies, to obscure and hidden realms, dwelling places of gods and demons, arousing the ambivalence of fear and fascination. The geographical and symbolic equivalence established between the Carignano house-cave-potential threat is sustained, as previously argued, by the insect-imagery depicting the character of Raka. The spatial equivalence determines an extended historical one, in that the ‘past’ of the house and the general sense of doom floating over its female inhabitants impede female development, regardless of the historical period that served as its background. The final correction of the colonizer-colonized power paradigms fail to provide happy endings for the women based in Carignano.

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Clearly the malefic content of the house and the relation that it establishes with its various occupants transcends the now and the here. As Heidegger states, the house and the act of living in it represents “the manner in which we humans are on earth. To be a human being means to be on earth as a mortal. It means to dwell” (Heidegger: 147). At a risk of unnecessarily extrapolating this already generalizing assumption, in taking my cue from Abraham and Torok, I would argue that for Desai’s female characters, to be a female human and to dwell in a haunted, isolated house, means sharing life with a: phantom […] meant to objectify, even under the guise of individual or collective hallucinations, the gap produced in us by the concealment of some part of a love object’s life. The phantom is therefore also a meta-psychological fact: what haunts are not the dead, but the gap left within us by the secrets of the others (Abraham and Torok: 171).

This ‘phantom’ is haunting both Raka and Nanda Kaul’s experiences and memories, either nearby the house, at the club (Raka), or in the house itself (Nanda). Although a reclusive child, skilled in avoiding human interaction, Raka falls under the spell of the servant Ram Lal’s stories regarding the famous parties once held at the club. His words of warning about the alterations of a formerly famous place of entertainment “when the Angrez Sahibs and Memsahibs had dances” (Fire on the Mountain: 66) call into memory the description of any Gothic setting, whose present deterioration is made even more obvious when compared to the illustriousness of the past. In DeVore’s words: The setting is greatly influential in Gothic novels. It not only evokes the atmosphere of horror and dread, but also portrays the deterioration of its world. The decaying, ruined scenery implies that one time there was a thriving world. At one time, the abbey, castle or landscape was something treasured and appreciated. Now all that lasts is the decaying shell of a once thriving. (1)

As Raka chooses to disregard Ram Lal’s cautions about the proper time of the day to visit the club, she sneaks out of her room at night.105 What she witnesses there, 105 By doing this, she proves to be an authentic Gothic heroine, from the same kin as the female protagonists of Anne Radcliffe, the ‘mother’ of Gothic novels. Walter Scott’s discussion of the characters Emily St. Aubert and Ellena Rosalba may as well be employed to describe Raka’s nocturnal adventures at the club: “Her heroines voluntarily expose themselves to situations, which in nature a lonely female would certainly have avoided. They are too apt to choose the midnight hour for investigating the mysteries of a deserted chamber or secret passage, and generally are only supplied with an expiring lamp, when about to read the most interesting documents” (Scott qtd in Miles: 46).

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however, is more reminiscent of goblin stories than a “vision of kings and queens in a rosy court” (Fire on the Mountain: 68): […] madmen and rioters leapt, bowed, swayed and jigged, costumes flying, paper horns blowing […] a woman with a bucket on her head laughed inside it […] a figure in black answered her call and sidled up and bowed […] he had a scythe tucked under his arm and it glinted and shot off bolts of lights when he raised it and chopped off the woman’s bucket head […] and she laughed in bubbles of blood […] a lady mouse […] was being chased by a man who had his hair combed down over his eyes and wore a scarf around his neck like a noose before it is tightened […] Into the midst of this rabble stalked a very tall man in white, a stethoscope about his neck […] she thought he would silence them all, stretch them out on the ballroom floor and perform the operation that would wash them all away in a river of blood […] all the caged, clawed, tailed, headless male and female monsters followed her, pell-mell, prancing to the tune of The Bridge on the river Kwai: ‘Ta-ra, ta-ra, ta-ra-ra/Ta-ra…’(Fire on the Mountain: 69, 70, 71)

The excerpt above appears to forsake the quiet albeit unsettling realism of the novel and venture into the realm of the fantastic, the grotesque, and the terrifying and the author seems to have suddenly decided for a fracture, a schism of genres, perhaps in order to better define a female world forever excluded and exclusive of the conventions of the quotidian. Actually, what Raka witnessed was a mere party, albeit with very drunken male and female participants, engaged in a flurried activity of mocked sexual pursuits. The fact that it is all disguised as a macabre, “individual hallucination” of violence and destruction, of blood and death can, I believe, be explained through “the gap produced in us by the concealment of some part of a love object’s life” (Abraham and Torok: 171). Raka thinks she witnesses a sexual dance of the devil, because she is plagued by the ‘secret’ of her father’s “mouth opening to let out a flood of rotten stench, beating at her mother with hammers and fists of abuse – harsh, filthy abuse […] and her mother lay down on the floor and shut her eyes and wept” (Fire on the Mountain: 71–72). In accordance with the failed mythology of grandeur and the civilizing function of the Angrez club, which stopped being what it should be and is now mere pathetic remains of a formerly prosperous and carefree life, Raka’s family secret, centred on male aggression against the passive and victimised female, is but the terrible shadow of what a normal family life should be. In Merleau-Ponty’s words (albeit in another context), Raka’s spatial “disturbance does not affect the information which may be derived from perception, but discloses beneath ‘perception’ a deeper life of consciousness” (Merleau-Ponty: 329). Similarly, Nanda Kaul’s string of lies, imposed on self and others, which cast her as a fulfilled woman who in her old age is actually desirous of the social and personal respite generously provided by the Carignano house, is brutally exposed

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in/by the very uncanniness of her chosen shelter. Triggered by the unexpected news of Ila Das’s rape and subsequent murder, Nanda Kaul’s carefully elaborated imagery of an alternative past suddenly collapses. Thus, we learn that Nanda Kaul’s father was never the world-traveller she made him out to be, but a petty collector of cheap artefacts. The many exotic animals roamed free in the garden of her mind but not in the actual, physical one, since they were in fact “overfed dogs and bad-tempered parrots” (Fire on the Mountain: 145). Far from being loved, cherished and treated “like a queen” by her husband, she was exposed all her life to the frustrations and humiliations of a wife whose mate, although in love with another woman and completely besotted by her, was only prevented from marrying her “because she was a Christian” (Fire on the Mountain: 145). Perhaps even more painfully, we witness the painful flashbacks of a mother always alienated from her children, at a loss as to how to forge a bond with them, who is now forced by those same alienated children to live her remaining days in the solitude and ominous atmosphere of the Carignano house. We learn therefore, that Nanda Kaul’s “phantom” is “also a meta-psychological fact” and that “what haunts” her “are not the dead, but the gap left […] by the secrets of the others”, the overpowering desire to “conceal” the truth of a crippled family life, as crippled as her great granddaughter’s. After the revelations regarding Raka, Nanda Kaul’s real life as opposed to the fictitious one, fabricated for personal and others’ satisfaction (a very obvious self-defence mechanism), and Ila Das’s horrible end, the final act of violence, that of Raka’s setting the mountain on fire, comes as little surprise. In discussing the fire-symbolism, Pandit claims that it can be connected “with the Indian word “davanala” found in Sanskrit, Hindi, and various other Indian languages, “used as a recurrent metaphor in Indian literature and myth”, traditionally associated “with feminine sexuality”, and meant “to suggest the socially/morally disruptive consequences of sexual transgression of women” (Pandit: 157). Although appreciative of Pandit’s suggestions, Desai herself reveals an authorial perspective on the significance of the fire, which, after having been used throughout the book as a “physical actuality”, “at the end of the book […] acquires “a symbolic dimension – it is the fire with which Raka devastates all the lies and fantasies of Nanda Kaul” (Desai qtd in Pandit: 157). One can do little more, in terms of reading more into the symbolism of the fire, given Desai’s unequivocal explanations and Pandit’s rich suggestions. However, I would like to conclude the first part of the present chapter with an additional emphasis on what has already been argued. I am referring here to the possibility of reading the fire symbolism not only as a personal and powerful, albeit unconscious act of female revenge against crippling patriarchal figures (Raka’s father, Nanda’s husband, Ila Das’s murderer), but as an archetypal and spatial metaphor of

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liberation for all the female characters who have, at one point or another, inhabited the Carignano house. In other words, I suggest that both the colonial history and its host of horrors for the subjected, isolated, and objectified female characters, as well as its necessary post-colonial appraisal (subtly addressed by Desai) are overwhelmed by the archetypal, cataclysmic potential of a fire whose rage seems to roar out of the page, the effect all the more powerful, since the readers have been previously cocooned in a sense of treacherous silence and security. This much larger scheme of destruction is sustained, I believe, by the fact that although Raka inhabits the house, she deliberately sets the forest and the mountain on fire, that is she sets on fire the verticality and the open space which only appeared to offer the female characters the opportunity for a second, better life, but in fact proved to be equally stifling and destructive. Thus, the Moon-Child destroys the house of horror through the mountain breeding mute despair; in Anglo-Indian literature (and not only confined to this literature), there are few other novels which leave the reader with an almost literal taste of ashes in the mouth while achieving perfection in communicating the sense of complete and utter doom.

Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a famous Victorian classic that has never failed to inspire heated literary debates since its publication in 1847. Reviewing the titles of articles and books of its ‘most classical’ readings is well beyond the scope of this chapter.106 Instead, attempting to establish an inter-textual dialogue with what I consider to be its contemporary (and Indian) counterpart, Fire on the Mountain, I will engage in a discussion of space and its relation to the main characters. The analysis will focus on the relevance of Thornfield, which in the present reading is also one of the novel’s major ‘characters’, and the manner in which it can be read as space refracted, in relation to its Anglo-Indian counterpart. 106 The historicist, the liberal humanist, the feminist, and the postcolonial are only a few of the critical traditions focusing on Brontë’s text, addressing topics such as female authorship and consciousness, female labour politics, ideological struggles focused on class, gender and race, xenophobia and imperialism, and genre issues. For a recent and comprehensive collection of essays focusing on modern adaptations, re-writings, derivatives, reproductions, transformations, appropriations, hypertexts and spin-offs of Jane Eyre in literature, visual arts and stage performance, see Rubik’s and Mettinger-Schartmann’s (eds.) A Breath of Fresh Eyre: Intertextual and Intermedial Reworkings of Jane Eyre (2007).

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At the risk of simplifying to the point of trivializing the generic Gothic setting and plot, I would like to start with a quotation which to an anonymous critic writing in the eighteenth century appeared to encapsulate the essence of this genre and expose its stereotypes: Take – An old castle, half of it ruinous/A long gallery, with a great many doors, some secret ones. /Three murdered bodies, quite fresh./As many skeletons, in chests and presses… /Mix them together, in the form of three volumes, to be taken at any/of the watering-places before going to bed. (Anon. qtd in Botting: 44)

Charlotte Brontë, although observant of the main recipe of Gothic, not only because she places her characters in a majestic mansion, nevertheless subverts the typically Gothic chronology of architectural and human decay. In her novel, this suggestively-named castle, Thornfield, is not semi-ruined (but it will become so); there are no murdered bodies, fresh or not; nor are there any skeletons in chests and presses (but there is a woman locked in an attic room, and she does resemble a walking corpse). Instead, Thornfield and my contemporary reading of it, similarly to the Carignano house in Fire on the Mountain, is uncomfortably positioned at the intersection between colonial secrets and female developments, since its destructive and oppressive ‘aura’ includes, inescapably, the colonial subject (Bertha) and her younger imperial counterpart (Jane). Read from a postcolonial perspective, Thornfield is clearly the English embodiment of English values, erected on English soil, the site and fount of the British ‘civilizing mission’, reinforced by patriarchal authority, containing the recalcitrant colonial subject (Davison: 137). Interestingly – but hardly surprisingly, considering the class and gender components of the colonial enterprise – this postcolonial reading resonates with a feminist one in the context of Gothic fiction or fiction inspired by Gothic. In Geyh’s words, the mansion/Great house/castle functions as “[…] the site for the reproduction of the patriarchal family” (Geyh: 106), a function that touches upon issues of inheritance, gender powerlessness, automatisms and exploitation not only of the colonized female, but of females in general. As readers, we are introduced to the sinuous topography of Thornfield by Jane Eyre herself, who, recently arrived, notices its “vault-like” structure (Jane Eyre: 129), the appearance of a “mere dungeon” (244), “the aspect of a home of the past – a shrine of memory” (137), but also, even more importantly, compares it to “Bluebeard’s castle” (138). If this is a simile originating in Jane’s uncanny insight into events to come, it is also one nourished by the fairy-stories, and the Gothic tales that animated the morbid Victorian era.107 Thus, before Jane and readers alike 107 As Wolfrey reminds us: “The Gothic is always with us. Certainly, it was always with the Victorians. All that black, all that crepe. All that jet. All that swirling fog. If there

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have the horrible revelation of the master’s secret incarcerated in the attic, but frequently haunting corridors and rooms at small hours, the perils of space insinuate themselves into the narrative. Thornfield, similarly to the Carignano house, is a space inhabited mainly by females whose gloomy tales intermingle in the ‘master’s residence. As previously mentioned, the house which constitutes the main setting in Fire on the Mountain was erected by Colonel Macdoughall so as to shield his wife’s delicate health from the scorching climate in the military cantonment at Ambala and also “to save her ominously pale children by taking them to the mountains in summer” (Fire on the Mountain: 6, emphasis added). This is clearly a powerful act of the male master who, in building the house exercises not only gender protection, but also, as the text suggests, holds the wife and her poor health responsible for the genetic fragility and declining health of their children. As argued beforehand, the children’s deaths inscribe the initial curse on/of the house, implacably scarring the lives of its female residents until Raka’s final act destroys and at the same time, redeems space. Paradoxically, Thornfield Hall also subverts its function of shelter and prevents its women from embodying the famous ‘Angels in the House’.108 As Ruskin elaborated, the function of the dwelling as a safe space could only be achieved based on the contrast between “the terror, doubt and division” (Ruskin qtd in Bloom 1965: 194) of the outside world and the sanctified domestic realm, that is on the contrast between the male active sphere and the passive female world. Arguably, in Jane Eyre, “the terror, doubt and division” are not the attributes of the outside world; instead, through Bertha, the colonial subject incarcerated in the attic, they have penetrated the inside of the mansion and soon, as it will slowly be revealed, the interior of the human psyche. Consequently, in Jane Eyre, like in Fire on

is a transition in the nature of the gothic from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle years of the nineteenth century, it is marked by an inward turn perhaps. There is an internalization be considered not so much as a denial of the gothic as a form of intimacy. In writing of the nineteenth century which manifests a gothic turn, there is an embrace of the uncanny within ourselves rather than a displacement of projection on to some foreign of distant other” (Wolfreys: 31). 108 Angel in the House is the title of a poem by the now mostly-forgotten poet, Coventry Patmore but also, in contemporary feminist criticism, the coded name for the typical ideology of domesticity, to which Victorian society reduced and by means of which it represented women. As Gilbert and Gubar point out in their seminal Madwoman in the Attic, “the eternal type of feminine purity was represented not by a Madonna in Heaven but by an angel in the house” (Gilbert and Gubar: 20).

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the Mountain, the architectural “uncanny” opens paths and sinuous routes to the psychological “uncanny”: As a concept, then, the uncanny has, not unnaturally, found its metaphorical home in architecture: first in the house, haunted or not, that pretends to afford the utmost security while opening itself to the secret intrusion of terror, and then in the city […] In both cases, of course, the “uncanny” is not a property of the space itself nor can it be provoked by any particular spatial conformation; it is, in its aesthetic dimension, a representation of a mental state of projection that precisely elides the boundaries of the real and the unreal in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming.” (Vidler: 1, emphasis added)

In order to exemplify this special type of uncanny, as originating in the connections between the external (architectural) uncanny and the internal (psychological) one, I would like to refer to Jane’s dreams, featuring the ruins of Thornfield. They are, as commented upon by a host of critics, highly disturbing dreams, of separation, anxiety, and unwanted children; they feature Jane and Rochester, her husband-to-be who departs without so much as a look over his shoulder. I contend that Jane’s dreams and the psychological torment they inflict, although apparently restricted to the night, actually pertain to that confusing territory of the mind where boundaries are melting, and dream and reality are juxtaposed, mirroring the protagonist’s struggle to grasp her own sense of self. In her less than enviable position as a governess, a paid servant, who nevertheless enjoys the unheard of privilege of dining with the master, Jane’s mental state speaks of ambiguity and slippage.109 Her troubled psyche is marred by the confrontation between submission (dictated by her social standing and gender) and the need for independence and assertion. In Jungian terms, the Thornfied episodes in Jane Eyre textually display the necessity 109 Fewer occupations for women in the Victorian era were more ambivalently charged than that of ‘governess’, as it involved survival in a social limbo for a lot of young women of modest means but good education. In Uneven Developments, Poovey argues that Jane Eyre’s being a governess bears a “proximity to two of the most important Victorian representations of woman: the figure who epitomized the domestic ideal, and the figure who threatened to destroy it. Because the governess was the middleclass mother in the work she performed, but like a working-class woman and man in the wages she received, the very figure who theoretically should have defended the naturalness of separate spheres threatened to collapse the difference between them”(Poovey: 127). For a more recent and well-argued social analysis of governesses in the Victorian era, see Kathryn Hughes’ The Victorian Governess (1993). For an inspired psychoanalytical reading of governesses in different Victorian novels, Jane Eyre among them, see Beth Newman’s Subjects on Display: Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation and Victorian Femininity (2004).

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for the protagonist to separate the domain of the personal (ego) from the much larger and anterior domain of collective values (persona),110 since individuation can only be achieved by not allowing the ego to be absorbed by the persona. Thus, for Jane to become Rochester’s future wife, the assertion of her individual value as a person (ego) has to overcome the limitations and restrictions dictated by her subaltern position (persona). It is, undoubtedly, a long and difficult process, as sinuous and labyrinthine as the structure of Thornfield. However winding the road to becoming may be for Jane, she is nevertheless the survivor of the narrative and her dark experiences in the Rochester’s mansion leave her relatively unscathed.111 This is more than can be said about her colonial counterpart, although for a while, as Azim points out: A mimetic relationship is set up between the two women. This process of mimesis is as much doubling as opposition and serves to destabilize, as well as to secure, Jane’s identity. If Bertha Mason is Jane’s antithesis, the distinction between them can only be secured by a type of initiation or rite of passage in which, momentarily, they are the same. (Azim: 179)

The connection between Jane and Bertha mirrors and reverses the relationship between Nanda and her grand granddaughter, Raka, although one cannot simply 110 According to Rowland: “The Jungian is primarily rooted in the efforts of the unconscious to create meaning through becoming embodied in an ego in the world” (Rowland: 141, emphasis added). The persona encompasses “a mask of personality that is oriented towards the social and professional environment”, “a solidifying of personality, half-consciously sculpted for everyday life”, which can starve “the deep unconscious energies of true psychic health” (17). Individuation refers to the process of bringing the ego “into a relationship with the archetypal dynamics of the unconscious” (179, emphasis in the original text). 111 While extremely insightful, Gayatri Spivak’s conclusions about Jane’s triumph at the cost of Bertha’s demise fail to consider certain textual developments. Thus, when Spivak announces that: “I must read this as an allegory of the general epistemic of imperialism, the construction of a self-immolating colonial subject for the glorification of the social mission of the colonizer” (Spivak qtd in Warhol: 804), she overlooks the fact that Jane actually refuses to act as the colonizer in India. While the novel ends with the saintly figure of St. John dying in the service of imperial exported religion and civilization, the female protagonist herself never became part and parcel of the colonizing mission. Moreover, Jane’s decision to leave Thornfield and her psychological and almost physical death that she experiences afterwards, affirm, in my opinion that the colonized subject’s curse, does indeed, demand some kind of gratification from the ‘privileged’ white, middle-class ‘colonizer’ female, even outside the boundaries of Thornfield.

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equate Jane with Nanda and Bertha with Raka. Nevertheless, Nanda’s final years in the Carignano house and Jane’s stay in Thornfield share the quality of being a stage, a step towards either “exit” or “initiation”.112 In both cases this step is intermediated by female characters who, regardless of their age, experiences, and social status, unconsciously act as guides on the psychological and physical journeys of their counterparts. Knapp claims that Raka is “a reflection of Nanda as she used to be […] free, provocative and essentially naïve” (Knapp 1987: 219). On the other hand, Bertha, as has been repeatedly argued by critics, embodies an omen meant to warn Jane of her possible fate, should she unconditionally decide to accept Rochester’s marriage offer.113 For Bertha, Thornfield is the crypt, the final destination of a de-centred individual, cut from her inheritance by her husband. It has been noted that in keeping his first wife incarcerated in the attic, Rochester is actually a typical Victorian case, a sample of male authority bending morals and space in one gesture. As mentioned by Showalter: The portrait of Bertha Mason depicts a time before moral management, when it was common for crazy women to be kept in homes (there were numerous legends of such women in Brontë’s native Yorkshire), or to behave and be treated like wild beasts in cruel asylums. (Showalter: 67)

When Rochester becomes the sole owner of Thornfield, an inheritance from which the implacable laws of the primogeniture had kept him apart, he decides to ‘bury’ his past alive in the attic. In this desire to erase the dark memories of his marriage to Bertha, (actually a burden imposed on him by his father and brother), he resembles Nanda Kaul who, in the stillness of the Carignano house, in fact attempts to ‘bury’ the life-long frustrations of a good Indian wife. However, in ascribing Bertha to the role of ‘the mad woman in the attic’, Rochester inadvertently submits his inheritance to the curse of the colonized that she has carried with her and now embodies on English soil. Bertha is no more ‘buriable’ than the wives and the ‘maiden ladies’ that haunt the Carignano house in Fire on the Mountain; if anything, she is more lethal, since she is curse incarnated and not curse re-enacted. Like the pastor’s wife in the Indian novel, she uses her uncanny physical force and her cunning abilities to break out of her ‘den’ at night and, fuelled by an unquenchable hatred towards the males who had been the architects of her imprisonment (the husband 112 Bettina Knapp’s archetypal reading of Fire of the Mountain to which I previously referred in my analysis of the Indian novel is suggestively entitled “Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain: A Rite of Exit”. 113 To the present day, the most exhaustive analysis in this respect remains Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic.

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and the brother), repeatedly attempts to murder Rochester. Her attacks intensify as she is also the victim of her husband’s decision to de-sexualize her; in that, although she is theoretically a wife, she shares the same sexual void as the ‘maiden ladies’ of Carignano. Showalter, in expanding Gubar and Gilbert’s famous reading of Bertha Mason as Jane’s double, comments on the former’s ‘madness’ as “linked to female sexuality and the periodicity of the menstrual cycle” (Showalter: 67). The peaks of her attacks correspond to a “blood-red” or “broad and red moon” (Jane Eyre, chapters 25 and 27). Therefore, Bertha’s nocturnal trips out of her room in the attic validate a psychological and a sexual reading of her attacks, as they are fixed by the reference to space as enclosure. They all culminate in the igniting of Thornfield, a ‘detail’ which suggests the inextricable bond between sexuality, the moon as female principle and perhaps the unconscious but overpowering desire to transcend constructed, man-made space in order to exist on a larger, archetypal female level. Thus, in Jane Eyre, Thornfield as the master’s house/private space of power and domination whose “contours, boundaries and geographies are called upon to stand in for all the contested realms of identity, from the national to the ethnic” (Vidler: 167), uncannily appears to turn against Rochester and to fail in its mission of guarding uncomfortable secrets. Hence, although “[…] space is assumed to hide, in its darkest recessed and forgotten margins, all the objects of fear and phobia that have returned with such insistency to haunt the imaginations of those who have tried to stake out spaces to protect their health and happiness” (Vidler: 167), the isolated room in the attic cannot contain Bertha, so that Rochester will finally be compelled to face the return of the repressed. Bertha’s setting Thornfield Hall (space of male dominance and control) on fire carries various significations for each and every character. For Bertha herself, the fire may be read as an ambiguous mixture of revenge against the male power that has kept her incarcerated and appropriated her inheritance; and liberation of self through death and the destruction of the very symbol of the said male power. The verticality and majesty of Thornfield, as proud emblem of patriarchy, are reduced to “[…] but a shell-like wall, very high and very fragile looking, perforated with paneless windows: no roof, no battlements, no chimneys – all had crushed in” (Jane Eyre: 450). Obviously, Bertha’s suttee is not the unavoidable result of deliberation and willingness, but an instinctive gesture of rebellion, revolt and ultimately madness. Her character, though, may also be read as an embodiment of the archetypal motif of sacrifice as the foundation of life. Bertha’s death is final and not even Jean Rhys who wrote her a life in Wide Sargasso Sea could circumvent the pressure of the canonical text’s ending. The reasons for Bertha’s self-immolation are human passion, devoid of its object, since Rochester is not a

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husband, but a guardian; love turned into implacable hatred, grief, and, perhaps most importantly, the final modality of tearing the veil of respectability of a Victorian marriage that went wrong. However much inspired by rage directed against the dissipated Rochester, Bertha’s fire completes the pattern of sacrificial gestures. As the Baumlins point out: Set by Bertha, the fire becomes, symbolically, a Self-willed transformation arising from the depths of Jane’s own unconscious. The symbolic connection between Bertha’s action and the earlier representation of Jane’s Self, Helen Burns, should also be noted, for it is fire that unites Shadow and Self, driving Bertha out of the dark attic of the unconscious and down to the brighter pavement of ego-unconscious (Baumlins: 132).

For Rochester, the devastation of Thornfield, his most prized possession, is accompanied by blindness – a type of symbolic castration (Dooley: 268) and the loss of his right arm. Nevertheless, space dissolved by fire also means the beginning of atonement for his individual transgressions, his trespassing of human laws made visible in the attempts to deceive both wife and wife-to-be; viewed from this angle, the loss of Thornfield heralds the beginning of repentance and the forging of his new identity.

Conclusion The present chapter, through emphasizing the relevance of space to characters’ complex psychological lives, has attempted to offer a comparison and a refracted reading of a twentieth century Anglo-Indian novel and a classical Victorian one. Notwithstanding the plot variations, the two texts share common themes and motifs. Among the most significant, one can mention the Freudian return of the repressed, the complex relationships between colonizers and colonized, the problematic interactions between victimizing men and victimized women, the overpowering, Gothic quality of space, and the symbolism of fire. Both Desai and Brontë masterfully trace the literary journeys of their characters within the confines of dwellings (the majestic British mansion and the Indian house, both haunted by memories) which, shaped by historical, political, social and psychological coordinates, appear endowed with a life of their own, reflecting the characters’ while projecting the shadow of uncanniness onto them.

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Index

abject, grotesque, Gothic tropes, 53 abject, view of, Julia Kristeva, 26 abjection, 53, 80, 91 act of living humans on earth as mortals, 163 Adiga, Aravind, The White Tiger, 21, 25−45 Balram, anti-hero, 30−31 bond with Ashok, 38–40 defiance of authority, 29 fictional mouthpiece of Adiga, 35 imitation of Ashok, 39–40 Indian figure of horror, 32 perfect servant, 40 self-construction of, 29 victim of caste, education, 40 chandelier, personified, 27 concept of self, 107 double, Gothic trope, 39 “epistolary novel”, 27 grotesque in Adiga, 36–7 India as Hindu nation, 34 labyrinths, 25−45 loyalty, 40–41 morality, 40–41 murder of Ashok by Balram, 43 novel containing Gothic tropes, 45 Otherness of Balram, emulation of Ashok, 39 patriarchal gender relations, India, 38–40

post-partition Indian history, 27 River Ganga, India, 33–4 “Rooster Coop” metaphor, 36 aesthetic experience of contemporary Gothic, 16 American Gothic tradition race, slavery, black identity, 96 ancestry, 11 Ancuta, Katarzyna, on “Asian Gothic”, 19 animal-sacrificing horror, 53 anxiety and the uncanny, 54 Arabian Nights, 27–8 Argentina “Asian Gothic”, 16, 19 Gothic features in literature, 16 refutation of, 9 Asian Gothic, 9 Asian societies and macabre literature, 14 atmosphere of Gothic novel, 18 Atwood, Margaret Lady Oracle, 21, 26 The Robber’s Bride, 21, 26 Southern Ontario Gothic, 16 Auschwitz survivors, 69 Australian Gothic, 16 autobiographical writing assessment and self-assessment, 109 automatization of human beings Romania (Herta Müller), 58

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Bakhtin, Mikhail M. discussion of the grotesque, 21 Balzac, Honoré de Lost Illusions, relevance of natural beauty, 67 beauty, perception of by master-animals, or servantanimals, 36 Beckford, William, Vathek, 26, 28, 77 betrayal as Gothic theme, 90–91 Birkhead, Edith, The Tale of Terror, 11 Blake, William, Romantic poet on ‘doors of perception’, 134 Bleiker, R From the Sublime to the Subliminal, 13 blood-drinking proletarian workers Romania (Herta Müller), 57–8 blood from children, for Ceauşescu, 57 Bombay (Aravind Adiga) Easterm theme, 19 Bombay (G.D. Roberts) Eastern theme, 19 Borsalino hat test, 75 Botting, Fred, Gothic, 20 boundary-blurring techniques, 127 boundary transgression in Gothic genre, 32 British colonies, former, writers from, 17 British colonizers of India, 156 British literary discourse, 18th century, 14 Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, 18, 24, 151–4, 165−73 Bertha, as colonial subject, 167−8 Bertha and Jane, mimetic relationship, 170

194

Bertha as ‘maiden ladies’ of Carignano, 172 blindness of Rochester after fire, symbolic castration, 173 colonized, curse of the, 171 discussion of space, 166 Jane’s dreams, ruins of Thornfield, 169 postcolonialism and feminism, 167 space dissolved by fire, atonement for Rochester, 173 Thornfield, house ‘character’, 166 Thornfield as “Bluebeard’s castle”, 167 Thornfield as crypt for Bertha, 171 Thornfield Hall, space of male dominance, Bertha’s fire (suttee), 172–3 “uncanny” in architecture, 169 Brontë, Emily, Wuthering Heights, 103 brotherhood of Others, 42 Burke, Edmund Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 129–30, 132 Canadian Gothic, 16, 96 capitalism, 87 carnality of Lola character, 59–60 caste, fear of rise of lower in India, 32 Catholic countries, Urban Gothic, 76 cave, crypt, grotto dwelling places of gods and demons, 162

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as shelters of safety, or obscurity, 162 Ceauşescu, Nicolae, Romanian president, 22, 47, 50, 57, 70 “New Man”, 58 Romania, ‘comic’ is ‘tragic’, 64 Cernat, Paul on political evil in Herta Müller’s work, 55 Chandra, Vikram, Sacred Games, 33 child as depersonalized entity, 52 child blood baths, Ceauşescu, 57 child-clones, 120 childhood and twentieth-century Gothic, 52, 119 childhood, dark universe, 52, 54 Christian Bible, Old Testament on the “seventh day”, 28 Christian symbolism distortion of God, 29 cityscape, threatening, 22 “classicists” in Gothic, 9 clinical psychoanalysis, 121 cloned embryos, 112 Coetzee, John Michael Age of Iron, 29 The Master of Petersburg, 29 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, catalogue of horrors, 132 Colomina, Beatriz, Sexuality and Space, 24 colonial Gothic, 26 colonial imposition, 18 communist terror behind Iron Curtain, 69 concept of universal human, Max Stirner, 26 confession as Gothic trope, 29–30

Coppola, Francis Ford, film on Dracula, 56 cultural decay in city, 95 dark versus light, 86 death of feelings, Romania, 55 de Beauvoir, Simone, The Second Sex, 65 degradation of humanity, Romania depersonalization neurosis, 121 De Quincey, Thomas The Private Memories of an English Opium Eater, 29, 77 Derrida, Jacques clones and humans, 126 hauntology, 23 spectres of revenants, 160 Spectres of Marx, 13 Desai, Anita, Fire on the Mountain, 24, 154−66 Carignano house bought by native women, 160 Carignano house-cave potential threat, 162 child abused by father, in Carignano house, 162 curse of female violence, despair, 160 destruction of house of horror, Carignano, 166 destructive house, Carignano, 155 ‘English maiden ladies’, fertile Indian women, 160 fantastic, grotesque and terrifying actions of party crowd, 164 female British inhabitants at Partition, sent back to England, 159

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female gender burden because of Empire, 157 female potential unfulfilled, 160 Females in Carignano house, sharing life with phantoms (former residents), 163 fire symbolism as female revenge against patriarchal figures, 165 gender violence in house, 161 girl resembling insect, in Carignano house, 162 gruesome deaths of house owners, 157–9 house in Hitchcock’s Psycho, 158 malefic figure of house on mountain, 155 past and present, 161 Raka (young girl) nocturnal adventures, 163 Raka sets mountain on fire, 165 spatial metaphor for liberation for all female characters, 166 three female characters, 154 whole-female world, and sense of stasis, 155 “deshi-writers” Indian writers, return to India, 25 Devetak, Richard The Gothic Scene of International Relations, 13 dialogical aspects of Gothic writing, 12 Dickens, Charles Bleak House, 77, 78 Little Dorrit, 78

196

London novels, 22 Oliver Twist, 78 dissolution as novel theme, 95 dissolution of identity, 18 doppelgãnger motif, 60 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich Notes from the Underground, 29 Dracula (Vlad Tepeş), 56, 57 Dracula and Ceauşescu, 56 dreams of love, preservation by suicide, 61 dummies Frankenstein, 105 none in traditional Muslim world, 105 Duncan, Ian Modern Romance and the Transformation of the Novel, 11–12 East and West reconciliation, 108 East German Romanians, 70 Eastern European history in communist era, 22 Eastern theme, 19, 21 Eke, Norbert Otto Die erfundene Wahrnehmung, 47 empathy in clones, 113 England and Scotland union of parliaments, 96 Enlightenment rationality, 25 ethnic German community, in rural Banat, 54 European literary Orientalism, 26 European East, 19 family environment abnormality, Romania, 55 fantasy and naturalism, 141

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fear and the fight against it, books by Herta Müller, 55 female characters, significance of, 108 female Gothic, 48, 66 sub-genre definition, 49 “female power” ideology of, 50 through staged weakness, 49 female presence, almost-vampire, 60 female sexuality, over-active in times of dictatorship, 63 female sublime, 23, 130, 142, 149 Patricia Yaeger’s concept, 23 feminism Gothic interactions in literature, 15 feminist debate, 1980s Gothic romance and pornography, 61–2 “feminist Gothic”, 49 Frankenstein, Viktor, 45, 107, 112 founder of “new race”, 58 Fraser, Antonia on lust and sexual licence of woman, 146 Freud, Sigmund, 52, 92 The Uncanny, 71, 93 Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, 65 Ganga (River Ganges), Indian belief in, 34 gender powerlessness and exploitation, 167 gender taboos, 134 gendered spaces, 23 Germany, international power, 94 Global Gothic, 13−19 globalism, 84

globalization relations with Gothic, 15 Godwin, William Things as They Are; of the Adventures of Caleb Williams, 44, 77 good versus evil, 86 Gosh, Amitav The Glass Palace, Sea of Poppies, 33 Gothic aesthetic, 14, 69 Bakhtinian approach, 11 discourse, 14 fractured tradition, 10 mode of writing, 9, 48 Gothic domains psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, 25 “Gothic feminism”, 49 Gothic identity, 118, 127 Gothic literature, analysis of, 18–19 Gothic motifs in non-Western cultures, 13 Gothic novel, vastness of, 88 Gothic obsession with past, 95–6 Gothic plots and feelings, 18 Gothic-postmodernism, 15 Gothic setting, generic, 166 Gothic strategies dystopian background and atmosphere, 59 Gothic sublime, 23, 130–32, 145, 148−9 Gothic tales, tyranny of the past, 157 Gothic texts, assessment of, 12 Gothic tropes, 17, 19 abject of location, paranoia, grotesque, 45 double, Self, Other, 45 in twenty-first century India, 45

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‘Gothic villains’, 77 Gothicism as discursive practice, 14 grotesque in Rabelais and his world Mikhail M. Bakhtin, 26, 36 Hall of Iblis, Gates of Hell, 77 Hartley, L.P. ‘The past is a different country’, 161 haunted houses in Gothic romances emblematic of uncanny, 156 haunting, in company of ghosts, 126 Heine, Heinrich, Still ist die Nacht, 43 history and geography in Gothicism, 13 history and Gothic fiction, 11 Hitler, Adolf, 112 Hogg, James Confessions of a Justified Sinner, 29 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, 44 Scottish Gothic, 96 Hogle, James E. Cambridge Companion to Gothic, 9 house as crypt or prison got Gothic heroine, 24, 153 Howard, Jacqueline Reading Gothic fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach, 11–12 Hughes, Howard, J. “Familiarity and the Strange: Japan’s Gothic tradition”, 14 Hughes, Kathryn The Victorian Governess, 169 human cloning, 112 human geographies, 35 human versus non-human identity, 111

198

Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World, 112 hybridity concept, Homi K. Bhabha, 21, 26 hyphenation, 21 identity and identification, 76 identity dissolution, 14 imperialism, colonial servitude, 156 impure acts, watching, hearing, doing, 54 India (Anita Desai) Eastern theme, 19 India, criticism of depiction of, by Aravind Adiga, 34 India of Darkness, rural, 32−3, 35, 37 India of Light, urban, 32−3, 37 Indian culture, binary nature, 32 Indian traditional values, 32–3 India’s economy, embodiment in fiction, 30 individual perspective of Gothic, 11 individuality, crushing of, in Romania, 59 inheritance, 11 insiders and outsiders, 142 Internal Orientalism, 26, 30, 32, 33, 45 Jansson, David R., 21 intertextuality, 151 Ishiguro, Kazuo, Never Let Me Go, 23, 109−27 art as psychotherapy, 117 autobiographical novel, 122 boundary-blurring technique, 111 childhood, complex representation of, 118 clone identity, 116 cloneness and humanity, 123

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clones, 112–14 and humans, 118–19 organ donors, 125 domestication of ghosts, 126 donors-only of organs for humans, 112–14 ‘faulty communication’, 120 Gothic genre, 111 identity and disgust, 117 liminality, the uncanny, the ghost, 110, 118 Loss as main topic of, 122 organ donation, 112 pathographic trope, 122–3 toxicomania, 121 translation of song’s lyrics, 122 the uncanny, 115 Islam component of Turkish identity, 107 mystical world of, 95 Istanbul between Europe and Asia, 100 effects of Western modernity, 95 Istanbul (Orhan Pamuk) Eastern theme, 19 Istanbul, images of, 96−100 Italian gangsters, 75 Italy, Gothic features in literature, 16 Jacobite Rebellions, 1715, 1745, 96 James, Henry childhood as Gothic material, 119 The Turn of the Screw, 119, 120 Jansson, David R., Internal Orientalism, 32 Japan (Kazuo Ishiguro), Eastern theme, 19 Japanese Gothic, 16

Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, Heat and Dust, 21, 26 Jung, Carl Gustav, 24 Kabbani, Rana, Imperial Fictions, 28 Kant, Immanuel, 149 ‘negative pleasure’, 144 knowledge of the Other, 42 Kristeva, Julia notion of the abject, 21 Powers of Horror, 80 Kyoka, Izumi In Light of Shadows, 14 Japanese Gothic Tales, 14 Landor, Walter Savage, Gebir (poem), 26 Leet, M. From the Sublime to the Subliminal, 13 Leroux, Gaston The Phantom of the Opera, 27, 45 “lesbian Gothic”, 49 Levin, Ira, Boys from Brazil, 112 Lewis, Matthew Gregory (“Monk”), The Monk, 86 lifetime servitude of humans, India, 36 light versus dark, 21, 26 liminality, 23, 127 Arnold Van Gennep on, 111 importance in Gothic novel, Manuel Aguirre, 111 location in Gothic, 13–14 locations in Bombay ‘The Villages in the Sky’, 85 London, nineteenth century, unsafe space, 94 loyalty to Self free from human contacts, 41

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male active sphere passive female world, 168 male aggression in family, 164 male and female writing, difference, 12 male sublime, 131 masculine tales The Book of Job, Paradise Lost, 132 masculinity and femininity, notions of, 132 matrophobia mother-daughter relationship, 65–6 Maturin, Charles Robert Melmoth the Wanderer, 44, 77 Mengele, Jozef, Nazi scientist Auschwitz ‘Angel of Death’, 112, 115 Miles, Robert, on Gothic, 9 Milton, John, Paradise Lost, 29, 141 Mishra, Vijay, on the sublime, 130 Mistry, Rohinton, A Fine Balance, 33 monstrosity, 14, 18, 45 monstrous Others, 138 Moodie, Susanna Roughing it in the Bush; or Life in Canada, 96 Moore, Lisa, Alligator, 16 Moretti, Franco, Dialectics of Fear, 13 Morrison, Tony, Beloved, 21, 26 mosaic structure of analysis, 20 motherhood, sharing of, 134 Müller, Herta, 47−84 The Appointment, 22, 63−9 death of Lilli, of female body, 68–9 Electra complex, 65 female characters’ relationship, 63

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mother figure, inadequacy of, 65 sexual relationships and adultery, 64–5 gender-based reading, 63−9 Growing Up in Ceauşescu’s Romania, 51 The Land of Green Plums, 22, 55−63 blood drinking, of slaughtered animals, 56 dystopian background, 28 female alter-ego, Tereza, 62–3 female characters, 59–61 female psyche, anguish, 62 generation raised in political fear, 55–8 information to Securitate, 62 Lola’s survival strategy, 62 lust not love, 61 patriarchal system victim, 60 political dictatorship victim, 60 sexual doppelgänger, 60 social trauma, 59 suicide, traumatic moment, 55–6 suicide of Lola, 60 willing zombies, 58–9 trauma, 50 Nadirs, 22, 50−54 animal-sacrificing, 53 autobiographical connotations, 51 Ceauşescu’s atrocious regime, 50 nightmare vision of childhood, 54 parenthood, monstrous, 52 The Passport, 22, 70−74 apple tree and Eve, 71

Adriana Raducanu - 978-3-653-99834-4 Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/20/2021 06:42:43AM via Victoria University of Wellington

Dadaism, nightmare images, 70 female Gothic perspective, 74 German expressionism, nightmare, 70 moral ambiguity, 74 surrealism, nightmare images, 70–71 women, Jews, annihilating monsters, 72 women, life-destroyers, cheap whores, 72 women as Other, the enemy, 71 From Behind the Iron Curtain, 47−74 Nobel Prize for Literature, 47–8 political aspects of work, 47 stories, threat from Ceauşescu, 51–2 use of Gothic in novels, 17 vampiric subtext in novels, 22 multiculturalism, 84 murder of Ashok by Balram for no acknowledgement as equal, 43–4 murders, Gothic, 92 myth re-creation, 12 Naipaul, V. S. Guerillas, 21, 26 “New Man”, obedient subject, 58 New Zealand Gothic features in literature, 16 Newman, Beth Subjects on Display: Psychoanalysis, Social Expectations and Victorian Femininity, 169

nightmarish experiences, relating of, 52–3 novels, dystopian genre, 109 objectification, 66 oceanic sublime, 149 Omar Khayyam, common son of three women (Shame), 134 order versus chaos, 86 organic fear and distrust, 54 Orientalism, 32 Orwellian names in The White Tiger oppressed subjects and animals, 35–6 Other versus Self, 21, 26 Othering process, 14, 15, 18, 22, 32 Otherness, The White Tiger, 30 Ottoman Empire, 95 Paglia, Camille, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson 90−91 Pakistan (Salman Rushdie) Eastern theme, 19 Pamuk, Orhan, The Black Book, 94−108 automatism, reversed, 105 Bosphorus bog, 101–3 characters and plot, 103−8 cultural placelessness of Turkish people, 106 the double, 104 forced Westernization, 102 Galip-Celal, journalist and lawyer, 102 global warming and Black Sea, 101

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identity-quest, 78, 104 Islam, component of Turk identity, 101−2 masochistic pleasure in double, 108 personal encyclopedia of Istanbul, 98 plot of, 99–100 self definition, 76 spacelessness of Istanbul, 100 Sufi mystic poet, “Rumi”, 106–7 terror of midnight, 102–3 Turkish identity, 101 Turks, Easterners or Westerners, 103 urban space exploration, 100 Western hero, loss of identity, 108 Westernization of the Turks, 102 The Museum of Innocence, 97 My Name is Red, 97 The White Castle, 7−8 literary son of Istanbul, 97 Ottoman theme in novels, 98 Turkish author, 21 use of Gothic in novels, 17–18 paranoia in Gothic narratives, 44 parental damage, 52 parenthood, monstrous, 52 parody, 151 partition of India hasty and irresponsible, 136 passport procuration The Passport, Herta Müller, 70 pathological politics of Ceauşescu, 52 Patmore, Coventry Angel in the House, poem, 168 patriarchy, resistance to, 49

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penetration of personal by political trauma, 50 perils of space, Thornfield Hall, 168 Perso-Arabic, 21 personal, private, against political, public, 48 phantoms as fact, 24 political subversion, 11 post-colonial counter-canon Indian writers writing in English, 152–3 postcolonial narratives, Gothic, 30, 45 postcolonialism, 20, 25–6, 29, 32 Gothic interactions with, 15 postcolonialist metamorphosis of Gothic, 25−45 “postfeminist Gothic”, 49 postmodernism, 10, 21 Gothic interactions with, 15 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 69 prison-colonies for children, 57 property transmission, 11 psychoanalysis Gothic interactions in literature, 15 psychoanalytical tools, 20 psychological “uncanny”, 169 Punter, David The Literature of Terror, 11, 20 A New Companion to the Gothic, 16 Radcliffe, Anne, 49 Mysteries of Udolpho, 13, 76, 87 On the Supernatural in Poetry, 103 Gothic heroines, 40 Railo, Eino, The Haunted Castle, 11 Ramadan, twenty-sixth night, Kadir Gecesi, 95

Adriana Raducanu - 978-3-653-99834-4 Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/20/2021 06:42:43AM via Victoria University of Wellington

rationality versus irrationality, 86 ‘reformers’ of Gothic, 9 refraction, definition of, 151 rhizome, 84 Rhys, Jean, Wide Sargasso Sea, 21, 26, 172 Richardson, John Wacousta; or, The Prophecy: A Tale of the Canadas (1832), 96 rites of passage marriage and discovery of sexuality, 53 Robbins, R, Victorian Gothic, 20 Roberts, Gregory David The Architecture of the Novel, 88 Shantaram, 22, 108 abjection, 80, 91 Arthur Road Prison, Bombay, 85–6 autobiographical flavour, 78 betrayal as urban practice, 91 Bombay, colonial creation, 78–9 Bombay as slum, 80−2 Borsalino hat, city symbol, 75 brothel for rich and powerful, 85 capitalism, 87 characters and plot, 88−93 conflict, exile, search for meaning, 78−9 contemporary Urban Gothic, 78 doubles, 93 femme fatale, 90 Gothic binary oppositions, 86 Gothic murders, 92 heroin addiction, 78–9 identity and identification, 76 Leopold’s Beer Bar, Bombay, 83 Maharastra village, 86–7

mirror-imagery, 93–4 moral allegiances in double, 108 Mumbadevi, goddess, 78–9 national variations of Gothic, 17 rhizome concept, 84 self definition, 76 settings, 78−87 Shantaram, ‘a man of peace’, 94 space exploration, 88 space in Leopold’s, 83 strangers in Bombay, 89 the sublime, 82 Urban and postcolonial Gothic, 75, 86 ‘Village in the Sky’, 87 Westerners in Eastern city, 83 Romania (Herta Müller), 47 communist, as land of Dracula, 56 Eastern theme, 19 Romanian state physical threat, psychological ­repression, 55 Romanians, ethnic minorities, 51 Roy, Arundhati, The God of Small Things, 33 Royle, Nicholas, liminality and the uncanny, 23 Rushdie, Salman Fury, 26 Midnight’s Children, 27–28 The Moor’s Last Sigh, 21, 26 Shame, 23, 26, 129−49 Asian girl, attack in London, 142–3 books on hypnosis for Omar, 135 collapse of patriarchal society, 136–7

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death as abode of tranquillity, 148−9 family secrets, 138 female plots in, 142 gender confrontation, 139 ‘gloomy landscape’, women’s minds, 132 Gothic sublime, 141 ‘male’ and ‘female’ plots, 131 male story taken over by women, 131–2 motherhood, horror of, 133–4 murder of Pakistani daughter, 142 mysogynist tendencies, 133 name-giving to character, 136–8 nation formation, 139 Nishapur, Gothic castle, 135 Omar, common son of three mothers, 134 Omar, reappraisal of sins, 147–8 post-Partition Pakistan, 131 rape under hypnosis, 135–6 sexless marriage of Omar and Sufiya, 146 shamelessness of Omar Khayyam, 135 Sufiya becoming a panther, 147–8 Sufiya, daughter of Omar, 136–9 Sufiya, hybrid disrupting form, 142 Sufiya, monster in civilized Eastern society, 140 Sufiya Zinobia, the terrible, 143 turkey butchering, 144 violent deeds of Sufiya, 140 women-centred tale, 132 sadness in existence, 124

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Said, Edward, Orientalism, 32 Schopenhauer, Artur oceanic sublime, 148−9 Scott, Walter, Scottish Gothic, 96 Securitate, Romanian Secret Police, 55, 63 Self and Other, opposition, 39, 154 self-dissolution in death, 149 Seth, Vikram, A Suitable Boy, 33 settings in Gothic literature castles, convents, monasteries, 13–14 specific countries, 13 sexual appetites of certain women, 146 Sexual Gothic, 60 sexual spaces of house, 24 sexual transgression of women disruptive consequences, 165 sexuality and space, 154 sexuality of women, 73 Shakespeare, William rejection of modern perspectives, 152–3 Shams of Tabriz, 106 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, 29, 32 Singapore, Gothic features in literature, 16 slaughterhouse, utilitarian space political pestilence, 56 slaves and free individuals, 36 slums, 81, 82 Smith, Andrew, Gothic Literature, 20 social violence, images of, in Gothic, 40 society as new hell demonization of humans, 58 rat-ification of humans, 58

Adriana Raducanu - 978-3-653-99834-4 Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/20/2021 06:42:43AM via Victoria University of Wellington

Southey, Robert The Curse of Kehama, 26 Thalaba the Destroyer, 26 space in characters’ psychological lives, 173 de-sexualisation of, 159 as enclosure, 172 politics of, 24 refracted, 166 subject and, 154 uncanniness of, 24 Spivak, Gayatri, Charakravorty Can the Subaltern Speak, 31 subaltern, view of, 26 Stevenson, Robert Louis Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 77, 92, 95, 104, 107 Scottish Gothic, 96 Stirner, Max, universal human, 40–41 Stoker, Bram, Dracula, 77, 95 story-tellers as threat, 123 sublime aesthetics, 129, 130 Sufi mystic poet, “Rumi”, 106 Sufism (version of Islam), 106 Summers, Montague, The Gothic Quest, 11 surrealism, 70–71 Swabian community destructive effects on individual, 50–51 Swaminathan, Kalpana Goa Gothic (Bougainvillea House), 16 territories, geographically remote, 14 text and hypotext, relations between refraction, 151–2

Topkapi Palace, Istanbul, 97 totalitarian communist regimes Eastern and Central Europe, 58 town-life under Ceauşescu, 55 toxicomania, 121 Transylvanian terror and horror, 57 trauma, 123 in autobiography, 109–10 ethnic minority perspective, 50 generalised, 54 Gothic tropes, 96 loss, search for identity Turkish literature, 17–18, 95 Turkish search for identity, 97, 101 Turner, Victor, anthropologist, 113−14 uncanniness of space, 173 The Uncanny, 127 uncanny doubles, 18 underground diaspora, 83 United States international power, 94 universal human, 21 universality in Gothic criticism, 15 Urban Gothic, 22, 76, 108 London, nineteenth century, 77 Other versus Self, 81 Uslu, Ayşe Didem Grotesque and Gothic Comedy in Turkish Shadow Plays, 18 Varma, Devendra The Gothic Flame, 11 Vathek’s tower, 85 “victim feminism”, 49, 50 Victorian domestic ideal and destroyer of, 169

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Victorian era, governesses modest means, good education, 169 Victorian fear of civilizational crisis, 94 Victorians and Gothic, 167–8 Vidler, Anthony uncanniness of space, 24 Vietnamese survivors, 69 voyeurism of Communist Party, 60 Walpole, Horace, The Castle of Otranto, 9–10, 13, 20, 39, 76, 90−91, 98 on literary Gothic, 48 Wang, Ban, The Sublime Figure of History, 14 Wang, David, The Monster that is History, 14 Warrior Queens, 146 Watt, James, on the Gothic, 18 Wells, H.G. The Island of Dr. Moreau, 95 Westernization for Balram, 39 Westernized Indian, Ashok characteristics and behaviour, 38–9

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Wilde, Oscar The Picture of Dorian Gray, 77, 95 Wolfreys, J., Victorian Gothic, 20 Wolstenholme, Susan Gothic (Re)Visions, 11–12 women, problematic mother-daughter relationships, 63 women and Jews, annihilating monsters, 72 women as Other, the enemy, 71 women’s bodies, vilification, 73 “Women’s Gothic”, 49 “women’s writing”, 12 definition, 114 “wood-processing industry”, Romania, 57 Wordsworth, William, The Prelude, 77 Young, Edward, Night Thoughts, 38 Zafon, Carlos Ruiz, Barcelona Gothic, 16

Adriana Raducanu - 978-3-653-99834-4 Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/20/2021 06:42:43AM via Victoria University of Wellington