Fear Itself: Reasoning the Unreasonable (At the Interface Probing the Boundaries)

Fear Itself Reasoning the Unreasonable

At the Interface

Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Dr Nancy Billias

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

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

Volume 61 A volume in the At the Interface series ‘Fear, Horror and Terror’

Probing the Boundaries

Fear Itself Reasoning the Unreasonable

Edited by

Stephen Hessel and Michèle Huppert

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2806-7 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2807-4 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Printed in the Netherlands

Table of Contents Introduction Stephen Hessel

Part I: Early Modern Reflections on Fear “Witches, live witches! The house is full of witches!” The Concept of Fear in Early Modern Witchcraft Drama Madeleine Harwood Horrifying Quixote: The Thin Line between Fear and Laughter Stephen Hessel

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Part II: Feminised Fear Pan’s Labyrinth, Fear and the Fairy Tale Laura Hubner

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Sexing or Specularising the Doppelgänger: A Recourse to Poe’s “Ligeia” Susan Yi Sencindiver

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Part III: Fear at the Movies Bringing the Dead to Life - Animation and the Horrific Steven Allen

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

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Part IV: Fear, Power, and Politics Terrified and Terrifying: An Examination of the Defensive Organisation of Fundamentalism 115 Michèle Huppert Rending the Terror-Horror Nexus: The Manifest Lie and its Role in Facilitating Acts of Illegitimate Political Violence C. Ferguson McGregor

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Part V: Societal Fear Zionism, Post-Zionism and Fear of Arabness Henriette Dahan Kalev

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

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Notes on Contributors

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Fear Itself: Reasoning the Unreasonable Stephen Hessel What is fear? Is it the scream that escapes our lips at a moment of shock? Is it the anxiety that keeps us up nights? Is it in the faces of villains projected on the silver screen? Is it in hearts and minds of terrorist and their victims or in the souls of those who torture in the name of peace? What is it? How can we reduce it to an idea, a concept, or a word? Will it always remain a gross reduction of the sum of its parts or an impossibly elusive phenomenon? Fear has a way of touching each and every one of us without being caught, understood or taken to task. The four simple letters that identify it on the written page falsely present it as a unified signified of a unified signifier. It is a four-letter word whose variability confounds many initial and frequently subsequent attempts to define it, but this in no way deters its implementation as a frequent and ever-present part of speech. In short, it is almost always present but rarely understood. Perhaps it is due to the emotion’s primal nature that the annals of history are filled with attempts to rationalize this seemingly irrational phenomenon. A superficial search of the internet will instantaneously provide a plethora of pearls of wisdom that intend to normalize it within a specific context. Cliché has frequently become a form of response. The many aphorisms that have been coined to help assuage fear do just that; they relieve but do not explain. They provide an option that often “deals” with fear but does not deal “with” fear. But in some cases it may be possible to dig deeper. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s iconic quote “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” has become quite cliché. It is spouted frequently in the aforementioned form or is modified to fit a certain situation, but the meaning of the original full quote is frequently forgotten. Roosevelt, in his first inaugural address after winning the presidency of the United States, said: So first of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.1 This proclamation becomes also the acknowledgement of our lacking comprehension. Power is exercised by an ambiguous and shadowy force. Facing fear becomes an impossibility due to the faceless entity that stands before us.

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______________________________________________________________ The nameless and faceless fear mentioned by Roosevelt is a foundational part of each of the works included in this collection. Each endeavours to unveil the ambiguity of fear itself. The focuses may vary but the goal is the same. Multiple intellectual systems and methodologies have been used to comment on specific manifestations of fear in a way that avoids simple regulation and defence. The works herein confront the many faces of fear whose exponential Janus-like façade present the mirage of an incomprehensible unified force. It is this exact attitude toward the study of fear that makes the works of this collection so useful in moving forward in the study of fear, horror and terror while keeping its aesthetic visage in mind. But, perhaps, a less theoretical introduction will aide in understanding the genesis of these pieces because, in truth, with fear emotion frequently precedes reason. ***** In the recent past an intriguing call for papers made its way across cyberspace and caught the attention of numerous scholars, scientists, journalist, artists, etc. The fact that the conference was to be based on the study of fear, horror and terror was by no means provocative. None of these communities have been guilty of ignoring fear but, on the contrary, it has frequently been the crux of their endeavours. The fascinating feature of this call for papers resided in its interdisciplinary and multi-faceted approach. As expected there were references to Gothic literature, international terrorism, and contemporary horror films; but discussed at the same time? How could this be? Furthermore, the openness of the call seemingly provided endless opportunities. Neither literature, nor political science, nor psychoanalysis seemed to foreground the organization of this gathering of minds. The liberty the spirit of the conference afforded the participants attracted those who have based their career on the study of this phenomenon, but also those who had previously found their work stymied by the strictures of limiting requisites. Dr. Rob Fisher and his steering committee had created something special and distinct, if not a bit peculiar. In early September of 2007, approximately 40 conference participants arrived at Mansfield College in beautiful and surprisingly sunny Oxford. They had come from the four corners of the world to participate in a three day discussion. Experts in various fields including philosophy, political science, psychology, psychoanalysis, film studies, literature, engineering, cultural studies and many more travelled from the U.K., the U.S., Denmark, Mexico, Australia, Taiwan, and Turkey (to name only a few). At first the atmosphere was somewhat daunting. How were so many people from so many fields going to conduct a meaningful dialogue? The spectres of specialized vocabularies, differing methodologies, numerous and

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______________________________________________________________ sometimes seemingly incommensurate ideologies, and sheer variety loomed on the horizon like ominous storm clouds. Another bad omen only seemed to compound the sense of impending doom; the first speaker and one of the principal conference organizers had not been able to attend due to an injury that did not permit him to take the long flight from Australia to the U.K. But despite all the signs of trouble the conference began with Dr. Fisher’s introductory remarks. In a short time, his remarks on the opportunity for dialogue and the exchange of ideas grabbed hold of our anxieties and cast them out the door. The fog was burned away by the promise of our endeavour. We stopped fearing and began to talk about fear itself. The conference continued with each paper being sometimes hotly debated but always deeply discussed. Presenters began to refer back to earlier papers showing that work was being done. Questions were followed by discussions of how the presenter could take the project to the next step. Reading lists were compiled, contact information exchanged, bibliographies compared, and joint projects planned. The “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror” ceased to paralyze “needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” ***** The ten papers that make up this volume were all presented in their infancy during these three whirlwind days. Due to our refusal to have multiple concurrent sessions each presenter had a meagre twenty minutes to present their works; most of which deserve a full book if not a multivolume series. With this book we hope to assuage the injustice suffered by the many topics and works that deserve more attention and space. The most enjoyable part of this process has been watching the diffusion of ideas within the included essays. They all have retained their original message and value but their expansion also demonstrates how each author’s experience at the conference has influenced the continuation of their project. For me the best example is Madeleine Harwood’s superb essay which has grown in scope and effect due to her correspondence with another conference presenter David Carter. Their burgeoning friendship and working relationship is evidence enough for me that fear can only be studied well through dialogue, shared interest, and from multiple directions. In this way fear, horror, and terror reveal their complexity and by providing many lenses through which to view it is our hope that the obscured face of fear will begin to come into focus. *****

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______________________________________________________________ Organizing this volume has not been an easy task due to the previously mentioned multiplicity of subject material. The phrase round peg in a square hole comes to mind. In many ways there is no order that can do justice to the works contained in this volume, but putting aside our feelings of failure we present to you our vision. The first section focuses on the development of fear within early modern Europe. This period serves as a foundation upon which much of our contemporary notions of fear have been based and any archaeology of it sets a course for the rest of our study. The tumult of this historical period and its reformulation of the world in almost every sense (philosophically, politically, economically, scientifically) must be taken into account as fear moves from its primordial nature to a social construct. Madeleine Harwood’s piece, “The Concept of Fear in Early Modern Witchcraft Drama”, delves into one of the first modern instances of horror literature by analysing the significant increase in popularity of works focused on witchcraft. Her detailed investigations into the works of authors such as Middleton, Heywood/Brome, and Shadwell enumerate the ways in which an atmosphere of modern fear was constructed at this time through literature and drama while still focusing on the primordial and archetypical figure of the witch. The second piece in this section, “Horrifying Quixote: The Thin Line between Fear and Laughter,” written by Stephen Hessel, attempts to identify the development of the conditions for the genres of horror and terror within a notably comic book Don Quixote. He argues that there exists a common point of genesis from which our contemporary notions of comedy and terror sprung in the subsequent epochs of European history. Ultimately, present manifestations of mixed genre media are presented to exhibit a recent move toward unity between the two opposed genres. These works are followed by two that address what is termed in the section title to be feminised fear. Both focus on female protagonists in their relation to fear and the frightful while paying special attention to the role their femininity plays in their specific situations. The contextualization of fear in this way provides an in-depth and provocative insight into the situation of fear based on gender, sexuality, and power. Laura Hubner’s “Pan’s Labyrinth, Fear and the Fairy Tale” works through the complex character Ofelia from Guillermo de Toro’s awardwinning film while also including an intricate analysis of the connections between the gothic genre and the fairy tale. The rebellious Ofelia and her “fantasies” are used as symbol of empowerment within the incredibly violent and male-centric world of Francoist Spain. Even in this problematic context the author demonstrates how Ofelia subverts mythological femininity. The following chapter, “Sexing or Specularising the Doppelgänger: A Recourse to Poe’s ‘Ligeia’” by Susan Yi Sencindiver, takes the typically

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______________________________________________________________ male doppelganger and uses the psychoanalytic concepts of castration, sexual difference, and gendered identity to analyse Poe’s “Medusa-like doppelganger.” The result is an incredibly rich and complex look at a feminised object of fear whose peculiar significance has at times been overlooked due to its doppelganger nature. Section Three, Fear at the Movies, contains two chapters, both of which transcend merely talking about a movie but instead analyse how their existence as movies adds to their frightening significance. The technologies of production and transmission are intimately tied to their relationship with fear and due to this the very nature of our most popular purveyor of fear, horror, and terror, movies, are put on the examination table. Dr. Steven Allen’s “Bringing the Dead to Life - Animation and the Horrific” explores how the uncommon combination of horror and animation provokes a deep sense of nostalgia that speaks to our fear of loss. The analysis focuses on Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride and Gil Kenan’s Monster House, but the chapter also provides a detailed history of animation while also discussing its relation to the uncanny. This followed by Eric Yu’s investigation of Koji Suzuki’s Ring series and its filmic adaptations. The chapter titled “A traditional vengeful ghost or the machine in a ghost? Narrative dynamics, horror effects, and the posthuman in Ringu” explores how traditional Japanese folklore has been integrated into a contemporary horror story through the use of video technology. The analysis explores the interesting interaction between both aspects and stays true to the question posed by the title. Next the volume begins a section titled “Fear, Power, and Politics” in which two chapters examine the nature of fear and terror with the realms of terrorism/extremism and the state-based response to this growing phenomenon. Both dig deep into the core of the present terrorism conflict and contextualize the motivations and reactions among the two competing forces. The double-sided approach that both present allows study apart from the shouting talking heads usually found on the worldwide media market. Michèle Huppert’s essay “Terrified and Terrifying: An Examination of the Defensive Organisation of Fundamentalism” pushes aside the unfathomable nature of terrorism and explains how humans can be brought to do the unthinkable. More importantly she turns our gaze back upon ourselves and demonstrates how our reactions to these acts follow a similar path of development. The distance between the terrorist and the terrorized is reduced to a fascinatingly minute distance. “Rending the Terror-Horror Nexus: The Manifest Lie and its role in facilitating acts of illegitimate political violence” by C. Ferguson McGregor continues from where the previous work left off. The concept of the manifest lie is shown as tool used by states in order to initiate a program of response that includes imprisonment and torture without the supervision of due process

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______________________________________________________________ and justice. The focus on the present actions of the United States and its allies allows for the author to draw a distinct definition of both terror and horror while still elaborating their relationship to one another. The final section tells the story of two different societal contexts and their act of dealing or coping with events and essences that challenge the very nature of their being. In both cases the idea of societal identity is shaken to the core and the particulars are recorded in order to elucidate how we deal with those terrifying things that make us waver in our own being. Henriette Dahan Kalev presents a work that analyses the idea of otherness as constitutive within the Zionist Jewish identity due to its intimate ties to Arabness. “Zionism, Post-Zionism and Fear of Arabness” explores the peculiar situation of the Mizrahim and their unique situation within the contemporary Zionist society. The volume ends with an essay by Belinda Morrissey and Kristen Davis; “Fear And Horror In A Small Town: The Legacy Of The Disappearance Of Marilyn Wallman.” This piece is a detailed account of the reaction of the people of Mackay to the disappearance of this little girl only a short distance from her house. The superb journalistic work contained in this chapter gives an insight into both how to understand fear but also its troublesome ambiguity. ***** Michel Foucault argues in Madness and Civilization that in the early modern period death was supplanted by madness and unreason as the source of fear and anxiety.2 Fear left its position at the end of the mortal coil and enveloped everything at all times. It was present instead of expected; palpable instead of merely presupposed. Fear was no longer a question of the end but rather if what came before had any reason. Life and its parts were the new source of fear and due to the grand scope of existence an exponential multiplication of fear’s meanings and faces was inevitable. For us, today, fear is both worldly and transcendental. It transforms itself each and every moment and stretches across the whole of our social, psychological, spiritual and philosophical existence. Its chimerical nature poses a problem for all knowledge and humanity. But in the end it is present and intellectually corporeal. It can be mapped, examined and reasoned instead of merely decimated. We may fear differently, different things at different times, but the self-evident truth is we all fear with little rhyme or reason. It has been our task here in this book to ignore the proclamation of futility and unreason and cut deeply to the heart of the matter. It is our hope that these chapters will help you construct your own anatomy of fear, which in truth is the anatomy of each every one of us.

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Notes 1

F D Roosevelt, ‘Franklin D. Roosevelt’s First Inaugural Address, 1933’ in Richard D Heffner (ed.), A Documentary History of the United States, Mentor, New York, 1999, p. 322. 2 “The substitution of the theme of madness for that of death does not mark a break, but rather a torsion within the same anxiety. What is in question is still the nothingness of existence, but this nothingness is no longer considered an external, final term, both threat and conclusion; it is experienced from within as the continuous and constant form of existence.” M Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Richard Howard (trans.), Vintage Book, New York, 1988, p. 16.

Bibliography Foucault, M., Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Richard Howard (trans.), Vintage Book, New York, 1988. Roosevelt, F. D., ‘Franklin D. Roosevelt’s First Inaugural Address, 1933’ in A Documentary History of the United States. Richard D Heffner (ed.), Mentor, New York, 1999, pp. 322-27.

Part I Early Modern Reflections on Fear

“Witches! Live Witches! The house is full of witches”1 The Concept of Fear in Early Modern Witchcraft Drama Madeleine Harwood Abstract The years of the witch-hunts in Early Modern England saw an uprising in the publication of literature on the subject to coincide with the obvious increase in interest among the masses. The vast majority of these works take an instructional or informative stance: discussing the religious implications of witchcraft; publishing accounts of more high-profile trials; or simply telling the tale of some strange, abhorrent or wonderful occurrences attributed to supposed witches. The period also spawned a number of more entertaining pieces - drama and balladry - that, although still a minute percentage of the dramatic literature published during those years, represent the most concentrated cluster of theatrical publications on the subject in history. The purpose of the drama seems to have been to engage, rile and strike fear into both audiences and readers of the text. This paper, therefore, intends to analyse the themes, language and stage-direction used by playwrights in the Early Modern period - namely Middleton; Heywood and Brome; and Shadwell - and to attempt to present how these authors created an atmosphere of fear, or otherwise, in relation to witchcraft in their text. Key Words: Drama, Early Modern, fear, sensationalism, witchcraft, witch. ***** The infamous witch-hunts of the Early Modern period, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, leave us today in no doubt that witchcraft provided great fascination for the contemporary society. The fame of the newly reported English cases, such as those in Essex and Pendle in Lancashire, increased public awareness of the mechanics of witchcraft and the widespread hysteria increased accordingly. Such happenings gave rise to a wealth of literature on the subject, and the study of such resources today is widespread. The majority of analysis, however, has thus far concentrated mainly on the exceptionally large amount of pamphlet and chapbook writing - histories, religious polemics, trial accounts and other such forms. There was, however, a similar upsurge in witchcraft as a subject for popular entertainment in dramatic form, and this portion of the contemporary literary tradition, so far, has not been the primary historical consideration of witchcraft scholars. Those such as Marion Gibson and Diane Purkiss have written extensively on the literature of witchcraft as a whole, but the dramatic

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______________________________________________________________ section always remains secondary to the informative, as something purely influenced by this preceding literature. Anthony Harris stands alone as the only author thus far of an extensive piece of research on the Jacobean drama alone, considering both witchcraft and magic in the seventeenth century.2 Harris skilfully covers all of the prominent plays of the period, and others less known, that deal with witchcraft and also wizardry, supernatural magic, and cunning folk - thoroughly analysed in Owen Davies’ 2003 work on the subject,3 and famously presented by John Lyly in Mother Bombie.4 In his work he provides extensive information to prove the interbreeding of the drama - both amongst the plays themselves and also with other forms of literature, current and historic - and goes on to briefly regard the evolving methods of staging the plays throughout the Early Modern period and beyond. This paper is intended to focus closely on dramatic representations as an ultimate proponent of fear and dread to the audiences who witnessed the Jacobean witchcraft plays, and to analyse exactly how and why the dramatists chose to further alarm society. As with anything fashionable, there is always someone there to capitalise on the popularity and, like modern-day merchandising for popular entertainment, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was these professional playwrights who seized upon the popularity of the witchcraft phenomenon, and produced works that reflected society’s opinions of the craze. Harris notes, in Night’s Black Agents, that “Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses were microcosms of their wider societies and it therefore seems likely that the majority of spectators would have seen in the theatrical portrayal of witchcraft an enactment of actuality.”5 It is this fact - that the public would have perhaps accepted the situations portrayed in such plays as authentic simply because it was often their only referent of a previously unknown subject - that lends the adjective “sensationalist” to the witchcraft drama of the period. This can obviously be seen reflected today in the public opinion of witchcraft and Satanism that arose in 1960s and 1970s Britain on the back of Dennis Wheatley’s work (both written and film adaptation), the most famous being The Devil Rides Out.6 Just as Early Modern audiences were more likely to be privy to the works of dramatists than to the more religious and academic treatises, mid-twentieth century society chose to ascribe to Wheatley’s easily available, popular and, often erroneous, views for “as a hugely best-selling popular author the writings of Wheatley had magnitudes more readers in wider culture ... than those of Blavatsky, Waite, Fortune, Crowley or any other occultists combined.”7 This idea of “sensationalism” is further demonstrated by the recorded popularity of the subject. Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome composed their The Late Lancashire Witches in 1634, even before the Pendle witches who had inspired their work, and later that of Thomas Shadwell, had been brought to trial.8 The fact that the play was first performed in London at

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______________________________________________________________ the Globe Theatre shows just how far-reaching the knowledge of the Pendle witches was and, more importantly, the King’s Men - the performers of the play - successfully petitioned the Lord Chamberlain to prevent the performance of any other play with witchcraft as its subject at the time.9 This was an important exercise in sensationalism, gaining the actors, theatre and writers a very important monopoly over the extremely popular contemporary market. What followed was that The Late Lancashire Witches essentially became a one-of-a-kind. It was exclusive and the public desire and excitement for viewing it would have been greatly increased. To be allowed to view the play would not only have satisfied the contemporary desire for witchcraft drama but it would have instilled a sense of privilege in the public, viewing a play which held so much power over the rest of the dramatic world. It was performed several times and “For a repertory company like the King’s Men to perform a play three times in succession indicates enormous popularity.”10 The trials of the Pendle witches remain so popular even today, that a multitude of tourist attractions can still be found in Pendle country: themed shops, t-shirts, a special walking route (the “Pendle Witch Trail”), and even a specially brewed beer.11 Contemporary accounts of happenings purported to be witchcraft and the trials of those accused display both fascination with and fear of the subject and so the playwrights, in their microcosmic representations, had to attempt to both genuinely reflect and also to cause the fear with which many people viewed witches and their actions. This they achieved in a number of different manners, and several of the most prevalent are to be discussed here. The first and, perhaps, most predictable method is purely rooted in the visual representation of the witch characters’ maleficia - their purportedly magical insalubrious actions - and related unsavoury activities. Take, for example, our modern day penchant for “scary movies.” The most successful examples of the horror genre in recent years have been those that are, generally, classified as “slasher” movies, “gore” films and “video nasties.” Voyeurism is innate in the human condition: we only have to consider those that display curiosity when an ambulance arrives on scene, or slow their vehicles down to gape at a road accident. Those that provide us with our daily news know this tendency all too well and pander to our hunger whenever there is a natural disaster, mass-murder, or otherwise, bombarding us with special bulletins and interviews. They know that however many times we view their reports, a majority of people will not be able to switch off their television sets, or ignore the newspaper as they walk past a vendor. This phenomenon is what modern day film critic David Carter refers to as the “visual taboo” of cinema: “that a visual representation of something somehow has more power than that same thing in abstract.”12 The Early Modern playwrights, therefore, seem to have both understood and capitalised upon this factor that still remains with us today,

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______________________________________________________________ and included often lengthy and specific stage directions that enabled visual enactments of violence to be shown to the audiences, rather than simply implied in speech. This is first seen, albeit on a small scale, in Heywood and Brome’s The Late Lancashire Witches. There are appearances made by “spirits” throughout the text, and they are consistently subject to rigid stage direction, whether that be that they are to be mounted and ridden by the witches, or that they invade Whetstone’s feast in the guises of tailors and gallants. In the final act of the play, however, the stage direction becomes rather more pro-active rather than purely descriptive. The soldier is cornered by a group of spirits who “come about [the SOLDIER] with a dreadful noise” and he proceeds to attempt to ward them off with his sword. In reaction, the stage direction has the spirits “scratch and pinch him” and thus the attack conveyed to the audience immediately takes on a more tangible form. The final stage direction of the scene informs us that the Soldier “beats” the spirits off and chases them from the stage, returning “with his sword bloodied.”13 Here, however, Heywood and Brome shy away from the final act of violence, instead leaving a bloodied weapon to imply to their audience that a killing or severe wounding had taken place. Although this occurrence would also assure the audience that mortal capabilities could bring an end to the existence of spirits, the concentration here is not upon the Soldier’s victory - there are no exclamations of success - but rather the emphasis is placed upon the physical state of his weapon, gore-stained. Ultimately, we are privy to the preceding affray, but not to what is considered the critical act of violence, and this is reminiscent of the play that has gone before. The spirits’ attack is somewhat out of character for the play, as no actual bodily harm is caused elsewhere in the text. Thomas Shadwell, in his later retelling of the tale of the Lancashire Witches, leaves no such protection in place for his audience from the very beginning of the play. During an early meeting of the witches, they are heard to chant: Into the hold I le poure a flood Of Black Lambs bloud, to make all good. The Lamb with Nails and Teeth weel tear. Come wheres the Sacrifice? Appear.14 Then, as if in reaction to their calling for the sacrifice, they are furnished with a lamb, and ordered by the stage direction: “They tear the Black Lamb in pieces and poure the Blood into the hole.”15 Such an enactment of violence, although simulated, would certainly prove repugnant and, above all, frightening to those witnessing the event. Furthermore, this would be made all the more poignant by the infancy and, therefore, helplessness of the witches’ victim. The imagery of the lamb would shock

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______________________________________________________________ yet further, being an accepted representation of Christ, and therefore for it to be both coloured black and ritualistically murdered would be seen as profoundly blasphemous. It is this practice of simulated, mindless violence and presence of fabricated gore that is still in use in popular horrific entertainment today. Carter asserts that “we fear exaggerated gore because of our fear of being corrupted by a visual image. You can read about a horrific murder and be afraid in an abstract way, but it’s an innate human quality that when you see it you become afraid that the image is somehow damaging your soul.”16 This idea of jeopardising the soul only creates a delectable danger that satiates the inherent voyeur in us all and breathes satisfaction into an audience hungry to be transported to the very boundaries of taste and safety. The playwrights of the Early Modern period were not privy to the special effects afforded to film-makers today, however, and so abstract, or implied, violence was the method with which the writers sought to slake the dangerous cravings of their audiences. In 1609, three years after the most famous dramatic witch appearance in Macbeth, Ben Jonson wrote and published his court masque The Masque of Queens at the explicit request of Queen Anne of Denmark, for whom he had already written The Masque of Blackness and The Masque of Beauty. Jonson’s “hags” are more supernatural creatures than human and take great pride in reporting to their “Dame” the horrific acts they have carried out: taking a skull from a charnel house, sucking the breath from a sleeping child, killing an infant with a dagger to obtain his fat, and taking sinew and hair from a murderer hung in chains.17 Jonson’s remit went far beyond that of his fellow dramatists. Not only was he bound by what would later become the regular audience prerequisites of shock, fear and disgust, but as a production for the court of the King, The Masque of Queens had also to pander to the proclivities of the monarch, so lucidly demonstrated in James’ fulminatory Daemonologie (1597). Thomas Middleton, in his 1615 play The Witch, makes effective use of such shock tactics to induce and rile his audience. At the first appearance of his witches in Act 1, Scene 2, the most appalling of these becomes apparent. Hecate calls upon Stadlin, a fellow witch, to “take this unbaptised brat,” a dead baby, and to “Boil it well, preserve the fat; … ‘tis precious to transfer/ Our ‘nointed flesh into the air.”18 Primarily, this indicates that the death of the baby was not natural, and that it was almost certainly brought about by the witches themselves and, secondly, the fact that the child is “unbaptised” signifies that he was “unprotected from the witches.”19 Hecate’s seeming contempt for the child is also apparent, employing the insulting term “brat” and referring to the baby as “it,” objectifying a human infant until he becomes just another ingredient, on a par with the “seeton” and the “serpents” Hecate also mentions as components of the concoction.20 Not only was the idea of a dead baby being used in a witches’ brew appalling to the contemporary audience, but it would also have been recognised as against the

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______________________________________________________________ law. Less than a year after his accession to the throne of England, James I created his Statute of 1604, which stated that it was an offence to: take any dead man or child out of his or her grave, or the skin bone or any other part of any dead person, to be employed or used in any manner of Witchcrafte, Sorcerie, Charm or Inchantment And that any person found to be guilty of such action “shall suffer the pains of deathe.”21 The representation of violence, visual or abstract, however, is targeting the innate, physical human quality of hyperarousal: the “acute stress” or “fight-or-flight” response first identified by American physiologist Walter Cannon in 1915.22 If we are witness to violence, real or enacted, we perceive a threat to mortality and our bodies react accordingly - our subconsciously aroused fear causing undeniable physical reactions such as a so-called adrenaline-rush and the quickening of the heartbeat. Such a variety of fear is blatant and unavoidable, and the Early Modern playwrights employ these simple acts of violent illustration as an easy route to the satisfaction of their fright-hungry audience. Supporting this barrage of overtly violent imagery is a consistently dramatic use of hyperbole in the character’s speech. Even today we refer to the Early Modern period as the time of the witch trials or witch-craze, and this has only come about due to the massive increase, Europe-wide, of reported cases and convictions. Exactly why this dramatic increase occurred is much debated, but it can be confidently said that a kind of hysteria, bred by public trepidation, gripped many at the time, and none more than those in close proximity to a previous accusation or trial. This is clearly illustrated in the records of the witch-trials in Lancashire - as dramatised by Heywood, Brome and Shadwell - and also, for example, St Osyth, Essex where a great number of accusations emanated from one original.23 The playwrights were distinctly aware of the effect that such frenzy had on people - that a hysterical reaction spreads contagiously through those exposed to it - and so sought to reproduce such an effect in their writing. Besides physically mimicking the accusation epidemics, they created a panic-stricken atmosphere through the use of repetition. In The Late Lancashire Witches, during the attack on the Seely feast, Doughty exclaims “Witches, live witches! The house is full of witches!” and later he is heard to shout “Witchery, witchery, more witchery! Still flat and plain witchery!”24 Such alliterative repetition, coupled with the situation in which it is spoken, would certainly lead the actor to deliver these lines with panic rather than incredulity.25 This emotion, directed at an already nervous audience, would have had an almost hypnotic effect upon them, heightening their pre-existing feelings of apprehension, and drawing them

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______________________________________________________________ further in to a micro-cosmic representation of the contemporary witchhysterics. Such reality-blurring entertainment can still be seen evident in the modern day. One only has to look as far as the widely-reported cases of fainting, screaming and vomiting in the first audiences to see William Friedkin’s 1973 horror film The Exorcist to understand this link.26 It is not only these blatantly violent acts that are used to induce fear in audiences, however, but a clear sense of the unjustifiable reasoning behind the actions of some of the characters. A number of the most shocking events are witnessed in the two retellings of the story of the Pendle witches. In Heywood and Brome’s The Late Lancashire Witches, the witch characters are neither approached and asked for aid, nor are they driven to acts of revenge, as can be seen in Middleton’s The Witch. Instead, Meg claims that their devices are “More for our mirth now than our gain,” and their acts of maleficia are referred to as a “game” and a “prank.”27 Although this indicates a sense of humour on the witches’ part, to the audience it would accentuate the pointlessness of their actions and the plain maliciousness of their intentions. An already low public opinion of witchcraft would deteriorate to even lower levels due to the shock of the witches’ fun and games. A slight change occurs when we turn to Shadwell’s handling of the Pendle occurrences, and this is that the witches’ actions are immediately referred to as “business,” synonymous even today with “serious.”28 There is still an element of humour in their actions, but it is not one that holds a comical place in the text. Instead it simply serves to accentuate even further the sheer cruelty of their actions as if they are able to laugh and joke about their murdering, then they must be heartless and inhuman, and their immorality is most poignant here. It is also evident, however, that the dramatists sought to frighten their audiences by all the more covert means, targeting the collective psyche as opposed to mortality, and preying on contemporary and irrational terror. This method of what we could today term “psychological subterfuge” can be broken down into three distinct sections: representation of the feminine, threat of social inversion, and creation of the unknown. Although the positioning of Early Modern women in a traditionally patriarchal hierarchy was beginning to change, as Patricia Crawford asserts, “the axiomatic inferiority of women remained.”29 It was a period that saw two women ascend to the throne of England, both struggling with their feminine stigma in the public eye. Mary, initially ruthless in her implication of Catholic regime and the punishment of dissenters, descended very quickly into the illness and weakness that eventually led to her death in 1558 at the age of 42. Giovanni Michele, the Venetian ambassador to England, wrote of her following a visit in 1557 that she was “thin and delicate” and that she suffered “paleness and … general weakness of her frame.”30 Her former outwardly projected strength had previously faltered profoundly upon her

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______________________________________________________________ marriage to the Catholic Phillip of Spain, causing widespread concern throughout her kingdom. Her half-sister Elizabeth fared better, but her refusal to marry and produce an heir was considered an inability to provide a secure future for her England. Elizabeth herself recognised these ingrained traditions against which she was require to fight, telling her troops at Tilbury in 1588 that “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king.”31 The Early Modern female was expected to be meek, feeble and submissive as, according to John Knox: To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature; an insult to God, a thing most contrary to his revealed will and approved ordinance; and finally, it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice.32 Such deep-seated values, so closely linked with fundamental religious values and history, were comfortable for the Early Modern populace. The idea, therefore, of a powerful and uncontrollable female force, whether it be natural or supernatural in origin, challenged not only their perceptions, but an essential belief in the security of their existence - one that had already been fundamentally destabilised by the changing religious views of Mary I and Elizabeth I. By challenging this entrenched structure of society, playwrights both fundamentally weakened the foundations behind which the mentalities of Early Modern society barricaded themselves and strengthened them by demonstrating the detestable nature of the transgressors. It left the populace open to the terrifying concept of change. To this end, the witches portrayed by the dramatists were not horrific due to their maleficia alone, but their general comportment in the social hierarchy, and perhaps the most poignant of these overt freedoms is a brash and insatiable sexuality present in the witch-characters. The greatest proponent of this method is Middleton, with scenes that are highly sexually charged and riddled with lewd references to the taking of young, and almost certainly innocent, men. Hecate, the leader of the witches in the play, displays a robust and ravenous sexual appetite. She asks Stadlin, a fellow witch, “What young man can we wish to pleasure us,” which not only indicates her power to obtain such a man and a lecherous nature, but the inclusion of the collective “us” signifies the possibility of an orgy, another act traditionally associated with Continental witches.33 She also adds that Stadlin had formerly enjoyed a sexual encounter with the Mayor of Whelpie’s son, a youth of just seventeen, and claims that she will “have him the next mounting.”34 This word, “mounting,” debases the sexual act by conjuring up bestial imagery and lending, perhaps, an element of force to the proposed encounter. She is now witch and whore. Her guilt is both twofold

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______________________________________________________________ and deserving of twice the punishment, adultery being considered such a major crime in Early Modern times that it could be aligned with the severity afforded to witchcraft. Even more scandalous is the incestuous behaviour that is hinted at when Firestone, Hecate’s clown-like son, asks for permission to “overlay a fat parson’s daughter” one evening, and she replies “And who shall lie with me then?”35 Although it could be interpreted as Hecate simply being jealous and apprehensive of being alone both physically and sexually in Firestone’s absence, the stronger implication is that, if her son is elsewhere “overlaying” the parson’s daughter, then he will not be able to lie with Hecate, his mother. The notion of a mother lying with her son in, almost certainly, a sexual manner would have disgusted a contemporary audience just as much as it would audiences today, not only for its incestuous aspect, but also as the exposure of a corrupt maternal figure.36 Heywood and Brome’s witches also consistently challenge this traditional social structure in their actions by means of sustained attempts, and successes, at inverting gender roles. A perfect example of this is the inclusion of “bridling” in the text. This form of transportation among those suspected of being witches was, at this time, almost as widespread a conception as that of riding upon a broomstick, which remains with us in stereotype today. In Northumberland in the year 1673, Ann Armstrong is recorded as stating that: Anne Forster come with a bridle, and bridled her and ridd upon her crosse-leggd, till they come to [the] rest of her companions. And when she light of her back, pulld the bridle of this informer's head, now in the likenesse of a horse; but, when the bridle was taken of, she stood up in her owne shape. . . . This informant was ridden upon by an inchanted bridle by Michael Aynsly and Margaret his wife, Which inchanted bridle, when they tooke it of from her head, she stood upp in her owne proper person. . . . Jane Baites of Corbridge come in the forme of a gray catt with a bridle hanging on her foote, and bridled her, and rid upon her in the name of the devill37 We first encounter the concept in Act 2, Scene 5 where the Boy happens upon witch Gillian Dickinson, having pursued her, with his greyhounds, in the form of a hare. The Boy becomes worried that he will not return home in timely fashion, to which Gillian replies “This bridle helps me still at need,/ And shall provide us of a steed,” producing a bridle and putting it upon her demon-child. When the Boy is asked what he can now see - offstage - he exclaims that “The boy is vanished, and I can see nothing in his/ stead but a white horse, ready saddled and bridled.”38 A demon-boy has become a horse

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______________________________________________________________ at Gillian’s desire, and so she proceeds to ride him hinting, again, not only at the bestiality previously mentioned, but perhaps even at a bizarre form of demonic paedophilia. Perhaps the most symbolic of these instances in the context of the play, however, occurs in Act 3, Scene 2 in which Mr. Generous’ groom Robin is forcibly made to wear a bridle by Mrs. Generous, who then proceeds to ride him to her coven. Mrs. Generous, in carrying out a similar bridling of a young man, causes a threefold gender reversal. Firstly, her initial desire to ride her husband’s grey gelding demonstrates a determination to ignore both Mr. Generous’ wishes and orders and, therefore, to be physically anarchical in the face of a trusting marital relationship. Secondly is her blatant intention to hide her actions from Mr. Generous, asking Robert “And must he be made acquainted with my actions by you, and must I then be controlled by him, and now by you?”39 This assertion demonstrates that Mrs. Generous views male knowledge of female actions as a means of power and control, and that subterfuge is the obvious method of combating such a situation. Covert female activity is therefore a means of breaking patriarchal shackles, and it is no coincidence that the Early Modern perception of a witches’ coven involved just such secretive meetings. Finally Heywood and Brome return to the idea of the libidinous woman, as previously discussed, as Robert attempts to diffuse the situation by turning from Mrs. Generous with the words “You may say your pleasure,” she replies “No sir, I’ll do my pleasure” before bridling the groom and riding him from the stage, Robert neighing as a horse.40 Her “pleasure,” therefore, is not simply to have power over Robert physically and mentally, but again it subconsciously raises the theme of bestiality, pleasure equated with mounting and riding. That a gelding is, by definition, an emasculated horse is also no accidental reference in this scene. Furthermore, the actions of female servant Parnell towards her new husband, fellow servant Lawrence, display that even those females at the lower end of the social spectrum are able to assert dominion over their male counterparts. On their wedding night Lawrence, wearing a supposed love charm from the witch Moll attached to his cod-piece, experiences sudden impotence. Furious Parnell turns physically on her lover, leading his fellow Arthur to ask her, incredulously, “why have you beaten him so grievously?”41 Not content with a reported reversal of physical potency, Parnell continues to publicly emasculate Lawrence, bemoaning his lack of virility in front of his closest friends and so demonstrating the ease with which a female can bring men to their knees with words alone. Although the ultimate source of the situation is witchcraft-induced in this case, the nervousness instilled in contemporary audiences is mostly unrelated to witchcraft as a theme. The fear, instead, is of the growing power of women in general, and their ability to easily assert physical, psychological, social and sexual dominion over the male portion of society.

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______________________________________________________________ Heywood and Brome take this theme of role reversal one step further by inverting the social hierarchy in the Seely household. Arthur, nephew of the head of the household, exclaims that his uncle is “much to be pitied,” for: …. he’s late become the sole discourse Of all the country, for, of a man respected For all his discretion and known gravity, As master of a govern’d family, The house - as if the ridge were fix’d below And groundsills lifted up to make the roof All now turn’d topsy-turvy42 This situation not only allows servants Lawrence and Parnell to marry without the expressed permission of their master and mistress, but Mr. and Mrs. Seely become the servants, organising the wedding feast and running the household during the celebration. The frightening situation being highlighted here, then, is again not one of witchcraft per se - although once more they are responsible for the fundamental sequence of events in the Seely household - but of the mutinous capabilities and possibilities of the lower classes. Likewise, in Jonson’s masque, the witches intend to “loose the whole hinge of things,” intent on causing a social upheaval and, perhaps, even a state of misrule, such as that achieved by Shakespeare’s Macbeth.43 This kind of upheaval may seem comical today, and was meant as such in this dramatic situation in the 17th century, but it has to be understood that such a state of misrule was a circumstance greatly feared by Renaissance minds.44 The notion of such an upheaval would strike home in the minds of the common man, still reeling from the massive disruptions to both England’s governance and the state religion. It would also have spoken profoundly to James I, having experienced, as he had, an attempt by witchcraft to affect both his person and that of Anne, his wife to be. The final and, perhaps most effective, tactic to be discussed here is the intention of the playwrights to create a general insecurity amongst their target audience. Middleton’s witches, by their names alone, are identified as removed from society, the name “Hecate” being synonymous with the ancient Goddess of the Underworld and others such as Stadlin, Firestone and Hoppo recognisable as inhuman. This demonic alignment renders them, although supernatural, more intangible to those watching. They remain, ultimately, fantastical characters in a story. Heywood, Brome and Shadwell, however, create an all the more frightening situation in their use of real, human women as the witches in their respective plays. Their witches are wives, daughters, sisters, girls next door. They are those that the audience of the play would socialise with on a daily basis with no qualms or worries for

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______________________________________________________________ their safety and that of their family and goods. They are old and young, ugly and beautiful, married, betrothed and single and, for the most part, far removed from the contemporary stereotype described by Reginald Scot in 1584 as: Women which be commonly old, lame, bleare-eied, pale, fowle, and full of wrinkles; poore, sullen, superstitious, and papists; or such as knowe no religion…. They are leane and deformed, shewing melancholie in their faces, to the horror of all that see them. They are doting, scolds, mad, divelish; and not much differing from them that are thought to be possessed with spirits.45 A stereotype confirmed by John Gaule in 1646 as: every old woman with a wrinkled face, a furr’d brow, a hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voyce, or a scolding tongue, having a rugged coate on her back, a skullcap on her head, a spindle in her hand, and a Dog or Cat by her side46 In breaking the mould as far as Early Modern perceptions of a typical witch are concerned, the dramatists are fuelling a terror not of witchcraft as it is currently perceived, but of its potential evolution into something less obvious to those wanting to voice an accusation. They are instilling in their audiences a sensation that they must constantly look over their shoulders, be alert and suspicious. Anybody could be a suspect and it is this that relates closely to our social situation today, with the fear of terrorist attacks and the constant reminders to be vigilant and wary of our surroundings. This factor is expounded yet further by the knowledge that the acts of witchcraft are sometimes caused, or even ordered, by those that do not personally participate. In Middleton’s play Almachildes desires the witches to provide him with a love charm to win the heart of his conquest, Amoretta, while the Duchess actively seeks the aid of the witches in attempting to murder Almachildes. The intention, here lust and murder, originates outside of the witch characters themselves and, thus, lends yet another dimension to the echelons of society that require suspicion. The playwrights give a feeling that, in truth, nobody is protected from accusations of witchcraft or of being an accessory to witchcraft. The fear, then, is twofold. Not only would one fear those nearby as either witches or those plotting to bring about some injury by means of the maleficia of others, but one would also fear that those nearby may be suspicious of them as an individual, and that they may become subject to the well-publicised trials, torture and execution reserved

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______________________________________________________________ for those accused of the crime. In short, nobody was protected from such a fate, and this fear and fascination pervaded all. The witchcraft drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be likened to modern day tabloids, and this is an opinion shared by Diane Purkiss in The Witch in History. They poached the “real” stories from the previously published books and pamphlets, and used the information in a creative way to capitalise on the public craving for witchcraft related items. In doing so, however, they not only temporarily sated the appetite, but consequently increased it. Like an addiction, sixteenth and seventeenth century audiences needed more and more representations to achieve their desires. Worse still, more and more was needed to induce fear in, and rile the crowd until the lists of violence and shocking deeds became so common and so long that, as Purkiss asserts, “Dead children become simply one exhibit among many…The specificity of a dead child is lost.”47 We can still see this phenomenon today in the increasing body-counts experienced in newly produced horror films, and this tradition is famously described as one of the “rules” in the parodical teen-slasher sequel Scream 2, the first two of which are: 1. 2.

The body count is always bigger The death scenes are always much more elaborate, with more blood and gore.48

The different plays all seek to follow their own agenda. The early seventeenth century saw an increase in the scaremongering - an increase in people’s fears and suspicions of anyone seen as “ungodly.” But there still remained an uncrossed barrier. The power to do evil was still not possessed by a human alone – demonic and satanic aid was still very much a root of the maleficia. As the furore and number of reported cases declined in the following years, Shadwell took the bold step of releasing the seventeenth century equivalent of the “video nasty,” more graphic and horrific than any that had come before in its visual representations of violence, and the perpetrators enjoyment in their actions. It was a stark reminder of the situation, a sure-fire way to gain notoriety and a new attempt to sensationalise a declining obsession. In the heyday, all levels of society were affected by the craze. The lower classes revelled in the vulgarity and feared the unknown, while the upper classes, and even royalty, did not escape the fascination, permeating as it did into the very heart of the court of King James, a kind of politically subversive tool employed by Anne of Denmark to support her separate Court, and her separate identity, and ultimately to rebel against her husband, displaying herself as a powerful woman - on the stage, as Witch - while still paying homage to James’ unfavourable opinions towards the witchcraft phenomenon. A parallel can obviously be drawn here

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______________________________________________________________ between Anne’s subversive intentions and the inversion of gender roles previously discussed in the plays. The playwrights were, however, above all, “professionals…aiming to satisfy popular tastes and reflecting rather than leading current opinion.”49 They over-dramatised witchcraft and, without a doubt, sensationalised both its existence and prevalence; and its actions. The drama entertained but, above all, bred the suspicion, fear and hysteria that deepened the awareness of witchcraft and increased the accusation, and consequently the conviction, rate. However, hidden behind many of the grim and gory descriptions of maleficia, the hysterical characters worked into a frenzy by the presence of witchcraft, and the all-singing, all-dancing spectacle of the witchcraft plays, were deeper social comments and it was with these new assertions that the dramatists created an atmosphere more frightening than the witches themselves. Although seemingly endemic in Early Modern Europe, the witchhunts did not grab England so vehemently - as a country it experienced few mass-trials like those widely documented on the remainder of the Continent, besides those in the time of famous “Witch Finder General,” Matthew Hopkins, the two Pendle occurrences in 1612 and 1634, and St Osyth, as previously mentioned. The common man, unless resident in an area that had experienced accusation and trial, would have little experience of witchcraft as a subject, and his perception would be fuelled by speculation and word-ofmouth alone. The concept, then, could be interpreted as something that was intangible, perhaps even alien, to those who had not experienced it firsthand. The witch-figure and her purported actions would be as real to the inexperienced as the characters in children’s stories, tales and balladry. What the Early Modern playwrights did in their different presentations of action and identity was, first and foremost, to show the inexperienced, graphically, the abhorrent activities that witches were purported to carry out. This established in their audiences both a negative perception of witches and a fear of their actions. David Carter asserts that “showing a scene of horrific violence forces the audience to deal with it as reality, rather than in abstract” and that you can read, or be told of unsavoury events and “be afraid in an abstract way, but it's an innate human quality that when you see it you become afraid that the image is somehow damaging your soul.”50 The dramatists forged that link between story and reality and unfolded it in front of their audiences on stage. The audiences, now terrified by the witch-concept, were then subjected to a barrage of insinuations of the potential omnipresence of witchcraft through the gross de-specification of the appearance and day-today comportment of a witch-figure. No longer could persons ascribe to Matthew Hopkins’ assertion that the stereotypical identifiers of a witch were so strong that he could “tell by her countenance what she is,”51 or rely upon

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______________________________________________________________ the descriptions provided by such as Scot and Gaule. In actual fact, the writers created and subsequently worsened the sense of dread in their audiences by removing the specificity with which they had become accustomed, and effectively throwing a veil of invisibility over those that posed a threat. Anybody and everybody was suspect and this, in the minds of a religious populous so governed by ideals of good and evil, fundamentally erased any assurance of safety that they believed in. The threat was present, invisible and, above all, genuine.

Notes 1

T Shadwell, The Lancashire Witches, Printed for John Starkey, London, 1682, 3:1, line 128. 2 A Harris, Night’s Black Agents: Witchcraft And Magic In Seventeenth Century English Drama, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1980. 3 O Davies, Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History, Hambledon, London, 2003. The distinctions drawn between those accused of being witches and those of being cunning folk lie firstly in the perceived aim of their actions: witches being malicious and cunning folk more benign. Cunning folk also set themselves apart from witches by claiming that they were able to cure those afflicted by witchcraft. 4 J Lyly, Mother Bombie (1594), in W Tydeman (ed.), Four Tudor Comedies, Penguin, London, 1984. Bombie’s dealings are in herbalism and love magic – characteristics of cunning magic – and, when Silena tells her ‘They saie you are a witch,’ Mother Bombie even replies ‘They lie; I am a cunning woman’ (2:3, lines 785-6), thus demonstrating that a popular distinction between the two was made as early as the 1590s. 5 Harris, op. cit., p. 7. 6 The Devil Rides Out was first published in 1935 but was brought to the attention of the public in a hugely popular and cult rendering by the Hammer studios in 1967. 7 D Evans, The History of British Magick After Crowley, Hidden Publishing, 2007. 8 A quarto of the play was published in the autumn of 1634 displaying the title as The Late Lancashire Witches, an attempt to draw attention to the fact that it dealt with the recent, lesser known, trials rather than those in 1612. However, contemporary accounts of performances – the most notable being a letter from Nathaniel Tomkyns (Clerk to the Queen’s Council) to Sir Robert Phelips, dated 16th August 1634 - refer to Heywood and Brome’s play as The Witches of Lancashire, and one of the British Library copies of the 1634 quarto has this same title as a running header. It is referred to here as The Late Lancashire Witches to differentiate it from Thomas Shadwell’s play of a

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______________________________________________________________ similar name. The Tomkyns letter is reproduced in H Berry (ed.), Shakespeare’s Playhouses, AMS Press, New York, 1987, pp. 123-24. 9 T Heywood & R Brome, ‘The Late Lancashire Witches’ (1634), in G Egan (ed.), The Witches of Lancashire, Nick Hern Books, London, 2002, Editor’s introduction p. X. 10 Ibid. 11 Information taken from James Sharpe’s introductory paper ‘The Lancashire Witches in Historical Context’ that opens the collection of papers from the two day conference: R Poole (ed.), The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2002, pp. 1-18. 12 D Carter, Film Critic and Independent Scholar, personal correspondence of January 13th-16th 2008. 13 Heywood & Brome, Stage directions at lines 23-24, 26-27 and 30. All italics here are as contained in the 2002 edition used here. 14 Shadwell, Act 1, p. 11. 15 Ibid. 16 Carter, personal correspondence. 17 B Jonson, ‘The Masque of Queenes’(1609), in H Morley (ed.), Masques and Entertainments, Routledge & Sons, London, 1890, pp. 111-112. 18 T Middleton, ‘The Witch’ (c.1615), in E Schafer (ed.), The Witch: New Mermaids Edition, AC Black, London, 1994, 1:2, lines 18 and 19-21. 19 Ibid. Note to the text 18, p. 13. 20 Ibid. 1:2, lines 11 and 15. 21 James I, Statute of 1604 (1603 1. Ja I.). 22 W Cannon, Bodily Changes in Fear, Hunger, Pain and Rage, D. Appleton & Co., New York and London, 1915. 23 For a thorough account and interesting analysis of the St Osyth scare, see A Harris, Witch Hunt: The Great Essex Witch Scare of 1582, Ian Henry Publications, Romford, 2001. 24 Heywood & Brome 3:1 line 116 and 4:3 lines 71-2. 25 The editors of the Globe Quartos edition of Heywood and Brome’s play certainly ascribe to this, and the exclamation marks seen here are their additions, not present in the 1634 edition held at the British Library. 26 William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, 1973, is an adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel of the same name. 27 Heywood & Brome, 2:1 lines 3, 6 & 8. 28 Shadwell, Act 1, p. 10. 29 P Crawford, ‘From the woman’s view: pre-industrial England, 1500-1750,’ in P Crawford (ed.), Exploring Women’s Past: Essays in Social History, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985.

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______________________________________________________________ 30

Michele’s account is reproduced in JH Robinson, Readings in European History, Ginn & Co., Boston, 1905. 31 Reproduced in MH Abrams (ed.), The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol.1, 7th Edition, W.W. Norton & Co, New York, 1999. 32 J Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women in D Laing (ed.), The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1, Printed for the Bannative Club, Edinburgh, 1846. 33 Middleton, 1:2, line 30. 34 Ibid. 1:2, line 36. 35 Ibid. 1:2, line 94. 36 Stuart Clark discusses social and gender-specific inversions at length in Thinking With Demons: the idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997. 37 Surtees Soc xl, Durham, 1861, pp. 191-93. 38 Heywood & Brome, 2:5, lines 46-47 and 51-52. 39 Ibid. 3:2, lines 96-98. 40 Ibid. lines 100-101. 41 Ibid. 4:3, lines 124-25. 42 Ibid. 1:1, lines 244-51. 43 Jonson, p. 109. 44 Harris, p. 71. 45 R Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1972, 1:3. 46 J Gaule, Select Cases of Conscience touching vvitches and vvitchcrafts, Printed by W. Wilson for Richard Clutterbuck, London, 1646. 47 D Purkiss, The Witch in History, Routledge, London, 1997, p. 205. 48 Wes Craven’s Scream 2, release-date 1997. ‘The Rules’ as spoken by Randy Meeks (actor Jamie Kennedy). 49 Harris, p. 7. 50 Carter, personal correspondence. 51 M Hopkins, The Discovery of Witches, Printed for R. Royston, London, 1647. Querie 2, p. 1. This quotation forms part of the question portion of the query – commonly posed to him – that Hopkins goes on to answer in the following section of his work.

Bibliography Cannon, W., Bodily Changes in Fear, Hunger, Pain and Rage. D. Appleton & Co., New York and London, 1915.

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______________________________________________________________ Clark, S. (ed.), Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture. Macmillan Press, Basingstoke, 2001. Clark, S., Thinking With Demons: the idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997. Crawford, P., ‘From the Woman’s View: Pre-industrial England, 1500-1750’ in Crawford, P. (ed.), Exploring Women’s Past: Essays in Social History. George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985. Davies, O., Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History. Hambledon, London, 2003. Evans, D., The History of British Magick After Crowley. Hidden Publishing, 2007. Gaule, J., Select Cases of Conscience Touching Witches and Witchcrafts. Printed by W. Wilson for Richard Clutterbuck, London, 1646, Early English Books Online, University of Bristol Library, viewed on 21 November 2007. . Gibson, M (ed.), Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases in Contemporary Writing. Routledge, London, 2000. Gibson, M., Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches. Routledge, London, 1999. Goodcole, H., The wonderfull discouerie of Elizabeth Savvyer a witch late of Edmonton, her conuiction and condemnation and death. Together with the relation of the Diuels accesse to her, and their conference together. Written by Henry Goodcole minister of the Word of God, and her continuall visiter in the gaole of Newgate. Published by authority. Printed for William Butler, London, 1621, Early English Books Online, University of Bristol Library, viewed on 12 May 2005. . Harris, A., Night’s Black Agents: Witchcraft and Magic in Seventeenth Century English Drama. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1980.

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______________________________________________________________ Harris, A., Witch Hunt: the Great Essex Witch Scare of 1582, Ian Henry Publications, Romford, 2001. Heywood, T. & Brome, R., The Witches of Lancashire (1634), in Egan, G. (ed.), Globe Quartos Edition. Nick Hern Books, London, 2002. Hopkins, M., The Discovery of Witches in answer to severall queries, lately delivered to the judges of the assise for the county of Norfolk. / And now published by Matthevv Hopkins, witch-finder. For the benefit of the whole kingdom. Printed for R. Royston, London, 1647, Early English Books Online, University of Bristol Library, viewed on 21 November 2007. . James I, King of England, Daemonologie in forme of a dialogue, diuided into three bookes. Printed by Robert Walde-graue, Edinburgh, 1597, Early English Books Online, University of Bristol Library, viewed on 15 April 2004. . Jonson, B., ‘The Masque of Queens’ in Morley, H. (ed.), Masques and Entertainments by Ben Jonson. George Routledge & Sons, London, 1890. Knox, J. The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women in Laing, D. (ed.), The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1, Printed for the Bannative Club, Edinburgh, 1846. Lyly, J., Mother Bombie (1594) in Tydeman, W. (ed.), Four Tudor Comedies. Penguin, London, 1984. Macfarlane, A., Witchcraft In Tudor And Stuart England: A Regional And Comparative Study (2nd Ed.). Routledge, London, 1999. Middleton, T., The Witch (c.1615) in Schafer, E. (ed.), New Mermaids Edition. A C Black, London, 1994. Oldridge, D., The Witchcraft Reader. Routledge, London, 2001. Poole, R. (ed.), The Lancashire Witches: Histories And Stories. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2002.

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______________________________________________________________ Potts, T., The wonderfull discouerie of witches in the countie of Lancaster With the arraignement and triall of nineteene notorious witches, at the assises and general gaole deliuerie, holden at the castle of Lancaster, vpon Munday, the seuenteenth of August last, 1612. Before Sir Iames Altham, and Sir Edward Bromley, Knights; barons of his Maiesties Court of Exchequer: and iustices of assise, oyer and terminor, and generall gaole deliuerie in the circuit of the north parts. Together with the arraignement and triall of Iennet Preston, at the assises holden at the castle of Yorke, the seuen and twentieth day of Iulie last past, with her execution for the murther of Master Lister by witchcraft. Published and set forth by commandement of his Maiesties iustices of assise in the north parts. By Thomas Potts Esquie. Printed by W. Stansby for Iohn Barnes, London, 1613, Early English Books Online, University of Bristol Library, viewed on 27 September 2006. . Purkiss, D., The Witch In History. Routledge, London, 1997. Robinson, J.H., Readings in European History. Ginn & Co., Boston, 1905. Rosen, B. (ed.), Witchcraft In England 1558-1618 (2nd Ed.). University Of Massachussetts Press, Massachussetts, 1991. Scot, R., The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1972. Shadwell, T., The Lancashire-witches and Tegue O Divelly, the Irish-priest a comedy acted at the Duke's Theater / written by Tho. Shadwell. Printed for John Starkey, London, 1682, Early English Books Online, University of Bristol Library, viewed on 3 October 2005. . Shakespeare, W., ‘Macbeth’ in Greenblatt, S., Cohen, W., Howard, J.E. & Eisamann-Maus, K. (eds.), The Norton Shakespeare (7th Ed.). W.W. Norton and Company Inc., London, 1997. Sharpe, J., Witchcraft in Early Modern England. Pearson Education, Edinburgh, 2001. Surtees Society, Volume xl, Durham, 1861.

Horrifying Quixote: The Thin Line between Fear and Laughter Stephen Hessel For my father who taught me to laugh…

Abstract This paper analyzes the peculiar relationship between comedy and horror, fear and laugher, and their many bizarre co-manifestations. Why does one laugh and tremble simultaneously? Why do some people encounter humour in places where others find abhorrence and shock? These questions can be addressed by viewing both actions as reactions to a similar stimulus. In this sense both are inextricably tied to one another. The fact of the matter is that this assertion is not commonly considered due to the differing aesthetic systems that divide these two genres. Simply put, an audience is predisposed to a specific reaction according to how the work is presented. But does the generic and aesthetic posturing of a work speak to the primal nature of both emotional states? Miguel de Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote serves here as a point of departure that allows an analysis of both issues previous to the solidification of horrific and comedic aesthetic practices by the commercialisation of the gothic novel genre. The late Renaissance and Baroque contexts provide evidence, as seen within Don Quixote, which exhibit how crisis and doubt are issues that provoke both types of reactions and show that prior to the creation of canonical generic practices the issues cannot be seen as separate fields of interpretation. This leads to contemporary questions about both genres. In a day and age of genre-bending working, is it still possible to consider one without the other? The assertion of this work is that a more fruitful understanding of both can be arrived at by carefully viewing their relationship beyond the determinant factors of style and tradition. Key Words: Baroque, Cervantes, comedy, Don Quixote, genre studies, Gothic, horror, madness, Spanish Golden Age. *****

1.

Introduction The border between the realms of laughter and fear is easily traversed. Furthermore, if this border is considered in all its complexity it becomes difficult to decide on which side one stands in any particular

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______________________________________________________________ moment. Several impediments exist that inhibit life’s incessant oscillation between both realms but these are mere molehills in comparison to the severity of these reactions’ supposed state of opposition. Most simply, we laugh with ease and likewise are startled by trifles despite the fact that there is certain strangeness to the matter when both reactions occur simultaneously or in quick succession. On the other hand, laughter and fear have both become inextricably linked in our modern and post-modern world to heavily defined and codified systems that frequently fail to notice the nebulous area between them. Both adhere to a complex matrix of aesthetic, narratological, moral, and iconographic systems (to name a few) that dictate how we laugh and fear, yet they tend to blur the conception of what we laugh at and what we fear. In such a situation it becomes increasingly difficult to see the existence of strong commonality. Our appetites for one or the other appear to be distinct and peculiar to each genre, but this difference in several ways is predicated on the aesthetic accoutrement that package the work in order to appeal to a specific audience. In fact, we are given cues to show us what is funny and what is horrifying. This issue begs the question of why we consume a work. Is it merely a predisposition toward a comfortable aesthetic mode or does it speak to a deeper psychic issue? I intend to explore both sides claiming that each is fundamental in our contemporary understanding of fear, despite the fact that one may tend to be obscured by the other. In some sense our systematically separated genres of comedy and terror have caused the connections between reaction and stimuli to be muddled and diverted. But these systems, which are of the utmost importance in portraying these emotional responses, stand on the historical foundations of western literary/artistic practice. They can be mapped and observed through careful consideration and compartmentalisation of the primal catalyst (in this case crisis and anxiety) and the stylistic response. In this manner they can be analyzed for what they are (or seem to be) and by following the path of their genesis some of their roots can be uncovered. Due to the fact that roots run deep and bifurcate, I have selected a crucial nexus in this system and elaborated what can be said from that point. The point of intersection in this case is Cervantes’ work Don Quixote and its context, which is considered by many to be the first modern novel and therefore located at a crucial point in the development of the western tradition. The goal is not to propose that Don Quixote is a foundational text of our representations of fear, but rather to see how its primal concerns and anxieties demonstrate the presence of factors which will later be of the utmost importance in the evolution of the genres of horror and terror. It is from this point that the ridiculous/tragic knight-errant and his context will be filtered through an uncustomary lens; the lens of fear.

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______________________________________________________________ 2.

Beyond Tragedy and Comedy The first and most obvious question is what is so terrifying about an old withered knight with a barber’s basin set atop his head astride an emaciated nag? At first, second, and perhaps thousandth glance the answer may be absolutely nothing. The two major readings of Don Quixote are either comic or romantically tragic. Daniel Eisenberg spells out the comic approach most clearly in his essay “Teaching Don Quixote as a Funny Book”. 1 Conversely Anthony Close, also of the funny book persuasion, has devoted a whole work to the history of the romantic reading titled The Romantic Approach to “Don Quixote”: A Critical History of the Romantic Tradition in Quixote Criticism, in which he points to the influence of Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, F. W. J. Schelling, Ludwig Tieck, and Jean Paul Richter on the interpretation of these novels.2 He begins this book stating the strong influence this romantic approach has had; “Most criticism of Don Quixote since about 1800 has followed the main lines of the approach to the novel initially adopted by the German Romantics.”3 The importance of these two dominant readings should not be discounted; they constitute a restructuring of the conception of the novels in order to address a certain question or issue. This can be greatly useful in the contextualisation of an interpretation with in a socio-historical environment, however their stranglehold on Cervantine criticism must be deeply considered. These are no doubt the most popular, and therefore visible, readings but they are by no means the only two. In 1996 Henry Sullivan published a study of Don Quixote titled Grotesque Purgatory: A Study of Cervantes’s “Don Quixote”, Part II. This work introduced two important points to the debate of how to read this work: the vocabulary of fear and the idea of preoccupation being based on an uncertain end.4 In Sullivan’s reading, Don Quixote is no longer merely a clown or an object of pity, but rather a man engaged in the grotesque and frightful search for certainty and salvation. Don Quixote, like the archetypical Everyman, shares with the rest of his society an anxiety that is difficult to represent and much more difficult to assuage. In chapter 2 (“The Two Projects of the Quixote and the Grotesque as Mode”), Sullivan recounts a concern among scholars that the reaction against the romantic interpretation has caused something to be missed. He refers to Professor Peter Russell’s proclamation that Don Quixote is a funny book and Anthony Close’s previously mentioned work on the history of Romantic interpretation before recounting some comments made by two colleagues: But, in a 1992 letter to me, John Jay Allen remarks that the more serious line of interpretation “has been somewhat overshadowed in recent years by what I would characterise as an overemphasis on the comic aspects of Part II, a

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______________________________________________________________ reaction in turn against contrary (and unconvincing) emphases deriving ultimately from nineteenth-century Romanticism.” In another 1992 letter to me, Professor Diana de Armas Wilson speaks of the “astonishing darkness of this text.” How is it possible, then, to reconcile Russell’s “funny book” with the dark solemnity of transformation in Don Quixote, Part II?5 These astute commentaries by Allen and de Armas Wilson coupled with Sullivan’s final question pose a problem that plagues almost any work of ambiguous genre; which way should we take it? A single source, here Don Quixote Part 2, has provoked two divergent reactions, which include both light humour and horrifying darkness. The nebulous area between both has just become a little less clearly defined. 3.

The Baroque Condition The religious focus of Sullivan’s work is thought provoking, but the anxiety and fear it unveils can be seen as an integral fact that is almost universal in the culture of the Spanish baroque. By identifying the causal factors in a wide range of societal contexts the symptomatic manifestations (i.e. Don Quixote) and their interpretations are easier to identify as having a relationship and a commonality. In this case the work of José Antonio Maravall is illuminating. His work, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, defines Spanish society as a culture of crisis.6 His analysis ties the societal crisis to the already well-studied economic crisis that ravaged the early modern Spanish empire: According to my thesis the baroque was a culture covering approximately the seventeenth century and consisted in the response given by active groups within a society that had entered into a severe crisis in association with critical economic fluctuations…the baroque century was a long period of a profound social crisis, whose very existence allows us to comprehend that century’s specific characteristics.7 Spain was a country that had been tipped onto its head despite its magnificent and opulent façade. The rise of mercantile capitalism, the economic gap between the haves and have-nots, the splintering of the church, the rise of new sciences and technologies, the discovery of a “New World”, et cetera, created an atmosphere of uncertainty and sensationalism. Fervour and despair both produced their respective manifestations of terror: monsters, heretics, witches, spirits, etc. Fear of an ambitious lower class is tied to the

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______________________________________________________________ dark arts in Fernando de Rojas’ 1499 work La Celestina, in which an “alcahueta” (matchmaker and witch) aids two servants in their insidious plans against their love struck master. The shepherdess Marcela of Don Quixote is called “endiablada moza” (devilish girl) and “pastora homicida” (murderous shepherdess) due to her rejection of Grisóstomo’s love, a scholar of a well-todo family playing at being a shepherd.8 The famous Don Juan myth is portrayed with supernatural factors by Tirso de Molina in his work El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra. Don Gonzalo avenges himself and the honour of his family by appearing as a ghost and leading Don Juan to his death as punishment for seducing his daughter Isabela under false pretences.9 All of these very real anxieties are tied in literature to infernal forces (corporeal) and spirits (incorporeal) that assault the systems of reason and piety. The existence of these proto-horror stories employs frightful narrative tools and personalities, but they most obviously lay bare the cause of the preoccupation itself; typically a preoccupation that comes from an aspect of a society in crisis. David Castillo points to this in “Horror (Vacui): The Baroque Condition.” His analysis of several Spanish baroque authors (Cervantes, Baltasar Gracián, Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor, Cristóbal Lozano, et cetera) identifies their texts as being centred upon the horror vacui which occupies the centre of baroque existence and provokes reactions “in the extreme.”10 The vacui functions as an absence or aporia that must be navigated through its aesthetic manifestations which typically consist of labyrinthine abundance. This is the typically known nature of the baroque aesthetic, but Castillo also rationalises the empty wall within this context: Whether the writer or artist cultivates exuberance or holds to a severe simplicity of form, the key is to pursue either route to the extreme. Thus, an empty wall would be as emblematically baroque as an excessively decorated one, as long as it is perceived to be empty in the extreme, and therefore, to convey the shock of extreme emptiness. On the other hand, a wall that has been completely covered over might call attention to what is hidden.11 In this sense, all work of this period is ultimately focused toward the abysmal centre that devours all its meaning and leaves the observer and artist longing to relate with that which has been lost. While some choose to obfuscate this centre, others lay it bare, but, in the end, the distance between them is negligible since they occupy the small space in crisis. The previous literary examples demonstrate baroque fullness and emptiness but also that the opposition of styles is not always so cut and dry. Each in its own way contains elements outside its dominant genre designation. La Celestina is so much a combination of laughter and anxiety

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______________________________________________________________ that it is subtitled “Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea” (The tragic comedy of Calisto and Melibea).12 This combination of seemingly opposed terms is reminiscent of the two principal interpretations of Don Quixote, and in a similar fashion this work and the others provide both reactions provoked by a single source of anxiety. La Celestina ruminates over the changing status of master and servant within the developing modern world. The ambition of the servants terrifies and is akin to someone saying “you just can’t find good help these days” while a knife protrudes from their back. Marcela’s case exhibits a breakdown in the systematically controlled nature of femininity that is almost unimaginable at this time. In the case of Don Juan, the threat to honour is paramount due to the fact that the honour system was central within Spanish society at this time, and this works assault on it exemplifies the growing anxiety over the besieged institution. These stories show the latent fear that permeated this society, yet the fearful and the fearsome were not the only voices to be heard in the cacophony of culture. It is here where the comedy makes its entrance and frequently lays bare the emptiness of the metaphorical baroque wall; the comic part of tragedy that coexists with it due to the lack of modern genre cues that serve as border markers. These others (those who do not cringe) looked around and laughed at the mad state of affairs. Those that chose to seek answers and certainty through definitive and unalterable avenues were parodied and mocked. The chivalric knight became the target for Cervantes’ barbs, the politician and clergyman suffered the wrath of Baltasar Gracián’s El Criticón which Santos Alonso refers to as a bitter social analysis, and playwrights like Lope de Vega frequently portrayed and made light of the tenuous relationship between the nobles and the common people.13 Despite their openness to the incursion of fear, the expectation of laughter postpones the very same anxiety that produces it. 4.

Now Tell Me What You See? A Case of Questionable Genre Cervantes’ entremes “El retablo de las maravillas” puts a humorous spin on anxiety over “la pureza de sangre” (purity of blood), which focused on the importance of a Spaniard not having any Moorish or Jewish blood in the time after the “reconquista” (reconquest) of the Iberian Peninsula. The great trickster of this story, Chanfalla, unleashes the paranoiac force of his “retablo,” retable in English, on a small town and shows how easy fear can be produced by preying on a latent anxiety. The implied power of this retablo is that a person of pure Christian blood will see biblical events enacted within the retablo itself. Those who fail to see these marvellous spectacles are therefore identifiable as cryptojews or cryptomuslims. Of course, nothing really happens within the retablo, but this does not stop almost everyone in

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______________________________________________________________ the town from having religious visions. The fear of not belonging pushes the trickery along until the characters even appear to be tricking themselves.14 The humour of this situation is predicated fully on the horrifying prospect of the disguised infiltrator that has passed him or herself off as a genuine and upstanding part of the community. Behind the laughter, the spectre of an interloper remains, despite its perhaps incredulous nature for us, very real in the minds of the Spanish audience. The institution of the inquisition is historical evidence enough. Cervantes names this work a comedy in the title of the collection to which it pertains, but he does not discredit the sheer power of fear within the work itself. The resulting response may be different than one of shock and fear but the root cause has not been diminished in its horrific possibility. The fact that comedy is identified as the general thrust of the work while fear is also palpable exhibits the peculiar double function of what Maravall terms as “guided culture.” The guiding force, for him, is also one of estrangement and alienation, which gives direction but also confounds it due to the contrary currents of guided discourse and palpable reality. Maravall states: In such a sense baroque culture led human beings to be other than themselves, to go outside of the beaten path, and this technique of alienation…provided the basis to bring to bear upon such subjects a culture of estrangement, a guided culture. The basis for the baroque to be a guided culture is revealed in the fact that it was fundamentally a culture of alienation.15 This alienation is painfully obvious in “El retablo de la maravillas” because Chanfalla’s trickery guides the villagers to a process of social alienation due to fear of the interloper, but it also places the interloper inside the observer who knows that there is a disjunction between what he sees and what he is guided to see. The process of self-estrangement is humorous to the reader but painfully frightful for the fictive audience. The existence of a trap endangers the reader in their quest to stay comfortably separate from the story. This trap lies in the fact that the reader is the audience to an audience and Chanfalla can be seen as merely Cervantes’ textual counterpart. These facts cause a collapse of the borders between the real and fictional that forces the reader to ask what they would see and therefore fall prey to the process of self-estrangement. In this case, laughing at this work becomes a less enticing prospect. 5.

Madness and the Necessity of Choosing Sides In the previously mentioned cases, comedy had become an alternative response to the same situation. The peculiarity of these works lie

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______________________________________________________________ in the fact that they could be easily reformulated into their polar opposite forms; comedy to horror and horror to comedy. But sides were to be taken. The crises that permeated every aspect of society demanded a reaction from every member of the culture in one direction or the other. The crises present within Don Quixote, like those of its contextual environment, are diverse and complex, but some can be identified and tracked throughout their history. Perhaps the most well-known is that of madness. The mad knight-errant is a caricature of the issue of how to deal with madness. As Foucault pointed out in his work Madness and Civilisation: This world of the early seventeenth century is strangely hospitable, in all senses, to madness. Madness is here, at the heart of things and of men, an ironic sign that misplaces the guideposts between the real and the chimerical, barely retaining the memory of the great tragic threats—a life more disturbed than disturbing, an agitation in society, the mobility of reason.16 Madness, here, is a very apt symbol for what has been framed as the stimuli of laughter and fear. The inability for one to apply reason to the world and therefore make sense of the surrounding environment is a terrifying notion and the prevalence of this inability in this epoch strengthens the consensus that it is perhaps more of a case of impossibility than inability. The fool is a horrific example of madness’s grinning yet macabre gaze. Yet on the flipside of the coin the fool is the epitome of comedy and laughter. The works of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Calderón, Lope de Vega, and many others reformulate the role of the fool within stories. The idiot, buffoon, or clown frequently takes centre stage in the works of these authors and elucidate as much as they entertain. This occurs to such a degree that the foolishness of the fool loses its footing in the archetypal character and is projected upon the supposedly reasonable players of the story. Despite its literary prevalence, the central role of the fool is complicated and in a transitional period during this time; therefore its centrality does not signify acceptance and much it does preoccupation and anxiety. In the introduction to Reason and Its Others: Italy, Spain, and the New World, Massimo Lollini and David Castillo point out the crucial role that unreason played in the early 16th century by referencing The Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus, but in the same breath they mention the birth of the mental institution that later pathologised and isolated unreason’s worldly manifestation of madness.17 Foucault identifies the inauguration of this process symbolically as the foundation of the Hôpital Général of Paris in 1656 which occurs almost 150 years after the publication of The Praise of Folly in 1511. Therefore, this prevalent fool is undergoing a metamorphosis

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______________________________________________________________ during the height of its popularity and cannot be seen as exclusively normalised or pathologised. It is in this context that Don Quixote took his first steps out onto the field of Montiel. 6.

The Ambiguous yet Terrifying Fool Frequently, Don Quixote steps into the role of the wise man and through his madness is found to have reason. In the episode of the Knight of the Green Coat, aka Don Diego de Miranda, judging Don Quixote as mad or sane proves to be a difficult endeavour. The knight’s son, Don Lorenzo, discusses many matters with the book’s protagonist and, part way through the colloquium, admits that he cannot truly define this withered man as mad.18 The knights reasoned arguments dot the narrative landscape of the two novels with a movement toward efficacy. In part I, Don Quixote is a man in search of how to be a wandering knight. He pours over his books and encyclopaedic knowledge of the chivalric genre, but he also receives input from those he meets along the way such as the first innkeeper that urges him to carry money and clean shirts.19 Yet in Part Two, the reader encounters a man who spouts reasonable rhetoric and even wins a few arguments as occurs with the ecclesiastic in the court of the duke and duchess (Don Quixote II (chapters XXXI and XXXII). In the end, Don Quixote may not be able to tell giants from windmills, but he can paint himself a sufficiently reasonable man. Part of the anxiety that Don Quixote provokes through his madness once again ties into the idea of surreptitious invasion, but it does not stop there. Madness is very much a pestilence at this time, its communicable nature only reinforced by not-so-distant memories of the plague and its constant ominous presence. Foucault, in Madness and Civilisation, equates the madman of early modern Europe metaphorically to the previously large population of lepers who were ostracised and exiled in the interest of public health. The wandering madman was a common phenomenon that consigned the mentally ill to an existence in the interstitial space between civilised areas. To keep it away was to distance society from its symptoms and infectious possibility, but the modern world was at the same time beginning to occupy these spaces in the interest of increasing transit. Don Quixote is this madman, this “…Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of passage” who should ideally stay out of trouble in the rural waste of La Mancha, but this is not the case.20 In part 1 he assaults several groups of civilians and even liberates the members of prisoner convoy. His troublesome existence “out there” is much like the presence of a horrific entity that occupies the unoccupied areas and preys upon those who are unlucky enough to find themselves so far from the comforts of civilised existence. The good news in this case is that the monstrous manifestation of madness is isolated and therefore merely a cautionary tale for those who consider to stray from the beaten-path (metaphorically and literally

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______________________________________________________________ speaking). David Castillo demonstrates the typical outsider nature of this type of fear: Admittedly, a topographical “survey” of horror literature and film would show that in most cases the monstrous Thing that disturbs “our character” comes from the uncharted no-man’s land that extends beyond the city walls or from the “parasitical” edges of the urban centres, outside the boundaries and controls of reason…21 This feature of the “monstrous Thing” epitomises the initial nature and positioning of Don Quixote’s madness, but a truly terrifying shift occurs to further complicate his frightening possibility. Part Two changes things around due to the fact that Don Quixote is now highly visible in all his mad glory. The publication of Part One is a fictional fact within Part Two and Don Quixote and Sancho have both achieved an almost celebrity status, and it is exactly this widespread efficacy that reformulates their terrifying potential. They are no longer anomalous or easily ignored, and their difference assaults the communities of society like a giant Japanese monster devouring Tokyo. The threat is madness’ spread and the consequences its high visibility could have. 7.

Troubling Mistakes or Can Books Drive You Mad? As can be seen in readings of the Quixote’s subversive power its ambivalent nature functions similarly in a subtle fashion. It does not jump out of dark corners or accompany itself with terrifying string arrangements. It picks at the back of the mind from time to time reminding the reader that it is there and potentially harmful. It is even more disconcerting when one notes that ambivalence is by no means strictly exhibited within the fictional plot structure itself. The reader is sucked into the confusion by narrative concerns that permeate the realms of the metanarrative. The reader encounters editors of the work, translators, critics, doppelgangers of the protagonists, and even other readers. Their strange presence is coupled with the incessant errors of all kinds that plague both works. In Discordancias Cervantinas Julio Baena, categorises and catalogues the various types of errors that can be encountered but also points out that the first part is incorporated intertextually into the second.22 This actually increases the confusion and anxiety caused by some of the mistakes of the first part because it brings them even closer to the realm of the real; i.e. the realm of the reader. Sancho’s disappearing donkey is, perhaps, the most archetypical example of this bizarre and dysfunctional textual relationship. The most basic example for this case is still quite complex. Sancho’s donkey disappears during part 1 and is said to have been stolen even though the robbery is

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______________________________________________________________ neither described nor pinpointed on the timeline. To make matters worse the donkey slowly starts to reappear with no explanation of how. The reader is left scratching their head, flipping back to see if perhaps some pages stuck together or the scene slipped their mind. No answer is provided to explain this error’s existence but the subsequent printings (more widely distributed) included inserted chapters depicting the robbery and recovery. The anxiety over the donkey was over…for the moment. Ten years later Part Two was published and the events open with a fictional reader, Sansón Carrasco, asking Sancho about what happened. His response is essentially so incredible that it does little to calm any reader who still frets over the donkey’s uncertain end. This excerpt of Sancho’s explanation shows the unconvincing nature of this attempt to resolve the issue: As for what Señor Sansón said about people wanting to know who stole my donkey, and how, and when, I can answer by saying that on the same night we were running from the Holy Brotherhood, and entered the Sierra Morena after the misadventurous adventure of the galley slaves, and of the dead man being carried to Segovia, my master and I rode into a stand of trees where my master rested on his lance, and I on my donkey, and battered and tired from our recent skirmishes, we began to sleep as if we were lying on four featherbeds; I was so sound asleep that whoever the thief was could come up to me, and put me on four stakes that he propped under the four sides of my packsaddle, and leave me mounted on them, and take my donkey out from under me without my even knowing it.23 Don Quixote quickly calls this plausible since it once happened to a character of the chivalric romances named Sacripante, but despite this glowing endorsement the physics of the task are mind-boggling. The effect is even further compounded by the fact that most readers probably wondered what Sancho and Sansón were talking about due to the fact that the later printings were “corrected” to include the pertinent information. These cases of error may not seem at first to be horribly scary, but it is their effect on the reader that makes them a source of preoccupation. The closeness of the reader to the text, due to the use of intertextuality and the ambivalence produced by various types of errors, transforms the reader into something very akin to Don Quixote. The base of their faculty of perception is shaken and doubtful due to the machinations of the text/fictional world and they begin to perceive disappearing/reappearing entities much like Don Quixote’s transforming windmills. The reader is constantly reminded by

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______________________________________________________________ these mistakes that it is exactly the action they are currently engaged in that drove the protagonist to such heights of lunacy. 8.

Contemporary Classification Conundrums So what is so terrifying about madness or what could be called everyone’s burden of uncertainty and doubt? A frequent set of questions that arose throughout the seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created by Joss Whedon, may offer some clarification. Am I nobody? Is this truly the real world? What is the point of it all? These types of questions plague the series viewers (and non-viewers) as much as they do the protagonists of this horrifying comic drama; the story of a special woman chosen to fight the forces of darkness. It seems that the most popular remedy or answer relied on is the assignment of everything within the dichotomy of good and evil. If this system were to hold water then the enemies would be identified and allies easy to find. Half the fear of any situation is not knowing where everything stands. The most terrifying vampire is the vampire who does not appear to be a villain. The psychological aspects of suspense within fear are facilitated by the inability of the system of good and evil to be infallible. In Buffy we find demons that have become human, vampires with souls, and rogue slayers who just want to be loved, but we also see the monstrous things that good people do. The so-called Buffyverse is impossible to navigate using a strict system of polar oppositions; yes/no, good/evil. Yet, in the face of the failing system the viewers and characters are forced to react, forced to do something that will allow them to keep living in the face of such an inexplicable existence. Frequently, the reactions are giggles and gasps. In many ways Buffy is very similar to Don Quixote. Both live by a code that when applied to the world in which they live is shockingly inadequate. Both of them battle monsters not always seen by everyone around them. Both must struggle with heroic personas that frequently appear ineffective when faced with the difficulties of an unreasonable or all too reasonable world. These two “heroes” play a role that is constantly challenged by the context in which they live offering no two-sided systems to make their decisions simple. The true fearful and comic nature of their struggle is more about the decisions of how to act or if one should act than the act itself. In an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer titled “Normal Again” (original aired on March 12 1992) the questions of madness and certainty of reality are paramount.24 The slayer is stricken by a poison that causes her to wake up in a “reality” in which she is no longer the chosen vampire hunter, but rather a resident of mental institution. Her oscillation between realities preys on the pre-existing doubts she already had about her strange life. The back story for this new reality makes sense and is in many ways more

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______________________________________________________________ believable. This ultimately causes Buffy to try to kill off her original reality in a somewhat obvious plot twist, but two factors stand out in their odd similarity to Don Quixote. Outside the obvious connections such as madness and imagining, the final renunciation of the supposed fantasy world exists in both cases. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is Don Quixote as Buffy the mental patient is Alonso Quijano “el bueno”. But finally it is the unresolved feeling and uncertainty that make both so troubling. Just like Don Quixote’s unsatisfying deathbed conversion, the end of “Normal Again” leaves the viewer to their own devices. Buffy returns to her reality as the slayer, but no evidence is provided to prove that the other reality was not the real one. In many ways when Buffy the mental patient says goodbye to her mother she is almost admitting that she prefers to live in the fantasy world. The horrific potential of uncertainty in this series is also shown in its converse form when a transformed reality gives rise to a humorous episode in which the series’ token nerd, Jonathan, suddenly becomes the perfect hero (“Superstar” originally aired April 4 2000).25 The discovery of reality’s transformation occurs due to a series of observations that something is just not right with the world. The tone of the episode is fun and humorous unlike the aforementioned one which is notably dark and horrific. It is here where a contemporary example of variable results can arise from a common stimulus. This then begs the question when comedies and horror stories are considered of why these two genres have so long exists in distinct traditions. What distinguishes a monster from comic relief? At its most basic the answer can be found in the needs and reactions of the audience. In the 16th and 17th centuries audiences reacting in either fear or in laughter did not frequently see eye to eye. Like the audiences of the 20th century, these people opted to prefer fear, comedy or a controlled combination of both. Ask a group of friends today if they prefer comedy or horror and many will praise one and deride the other. This is no different for the early modern period except that their desires and reactions facilitated the construction of each genre’s aesthetic system. 9.

Selling the Gothic There is no denying that the monsters of the ancient folklore were reinvented in the period directly following the late Renaissance and the Baroque. To this day authors and artist persist in portraying monsters within the context of their own renaissance. Anne Rice’s vampire Lestat exudes the style of an 18th century gentleman. Bram Stoker’s Dracula of 1897 is a result of folklore and the aesthetic context of that time. Frankenstein is also a result of an earlier period of this epoch. The gothic novel was at the height of its popularity. These examples portray the style of horror as it is typically known, but the preoccupations of these stories are not very dissimilar from those of

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______________________________________________________________ the preceding time periods. A vampire is an immortal being untouched by the ravages of time, but still susceptible to the uncertain nature of the world. The Frankenstein monster is at its root an analysis of life and what it means to be alive. All monsters, despite their other-worldly nature, exist in the world and beg society to question the very nature of this existence. The gothic novel as a style may be one of the most popular aesthetic modes in which works of horror and terror are presented, but the complexity of the genre is not always exhibited in its contemporary stylistic manifestations. If anything contemporary works using gothic modes are more akin to what Rosemary Jackson calls early gothic fiction. She states in her book Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion that later gothic works use the early gothic rhetoric to once again express the loss of meaning; as in the baroque. She writes, “Early Gothic fiction did not explicitly explore these fracturings of meaning, but it did establish a rhetoric of fantasy to be developed by later writers to tell of a loss of signification.”26 Gothic works are, therefore, much more complex than what I call their Hollywood counterparts: packaged and consumer-ready to provide the exact desired amount of screams and shivers. Jackson’s observations are very similar to the information presented here on the baroque condition, but they differ in the fact that gothic authors and readers lived in a fully modern and not proto-modern world. Industrialism and urbanisation, among other things, were full realities and not developing phenomenon. Jackson speaks of the gothic reaction, “Gothic is seen as being a reaction of historical events, particularly to the spread of industrialism and urbanisation. It is a complex form situated on the edges of bourgeois culture, functioning in a dialogical relation to that culture. But it also conducts a dialogue within itself, as it acts out and defeats subversive desires.”27 Like the baroque it comes from historical, economic, and cultural factors while also preserving its ambivalent and potentially subversive nature, but it also occupies an epoch with a vastly different print market and literacy rate. The post-baroque is a time of literary serials and bestsellers so there is no wonder that the aesthetic success of the gothic genre has been carried on while at times being detrimental to its deeper psychic issues. But what of comedy? How does it relate? In short, comedy was also swept up in the transformative whirlwind of the emerging literary systems. To relate the word comedy as applied to Shakespeare’s works and its use in the following periods is to force a square peg into a round hole just as has been seen with the curious term “tragicomedia.” As Anthony Close states in The Romantic Approach the Cervantine comedy of Don Quixote was not frequently identified by the readers of the Romantic period or seen as merely superficial.28 Comedy, just like horror, transformed and broke away from its relationship with fear and anxiety. Fear had little to do with laughter and visa versa.

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______________________________________________________________ 10.

Resuscitating Baroque Anxiety: Parodist Horror/Comedy It is plausible to infer that most of the world’s story-addicted audience do not think of laughter and fear as two reactions to one stimulus, but that is not to say that the links have been fully eradicated. Today is, in reality, the perfect time to resuscitate their near dead relationship. The recent surge in generic parody is in many ways a digression to the quixotic satire of Cervantes. The Scary Movie series is a prime example in that it allows us to laugh at an altered version of a movie that previously proved terrifying, but this only scratches the surface of the phenomenon.29 Mystery Science Theater 3000 takes one more step by leaving the original work of horror unchanged and producing all its comedy from the antiquated style, or ambience of the work, and humorous commentary provided by two robots and a human watching the films in the distant future.30 In both cases the practice of parody is linked to the genre of horror for humour producing purposes. This renewed parodist spirit has been accompanied by many other genre bending manifestations which could be directly related to Cervantes’ assumed project within Don Quixote, but unfortunately the issue is not so simple for those in Cervantes studies. The idea that this work is strictly a parody has fallen from favour for several camps (including those who stand by the Romantic reading). Despite the fact that the narrator explicitly states twice that the work is a parody of the works of chivalric literature, many choose to not find these declarations as credible, and with just cause. The entirety of the work includes numerous different narrators and an almost innumerable amount of drastic contradictions. So if the work cannot be seen as clear parody then the link between the previous examples becomes tenuous. But this work cannot be framed as true parody if fear and laughter are seen to be as similar as they seem to be. Don Quixote is a novel that, in its uncertainty, provides opportunities to laugh and cringe. In a recent survey class of the work, I found that some students found the misadventures of Don Quixote incredibly funny while others abhorred the sadistic torture that he suffered. For others the reaction was mixed but what was most fascinating was their initial aversion to analyzing why they feared or laughed at something. The next step was dominated by explanations of the aesthetically superficial nature. Dracula is scary because he wears a black cloak and has bloody teeth and clowns are funny because they wear big pants and have red noses. It was not until the stylised aesthetic features of comedy and horror were seen as symbolic placeholders, used to evoke a specific reaction, that the realisation that fear and laughter are constituted by their form and their origins/stimuli became widespread. It is through this avenue that the studies of both these genres can be brought into contact and equally enriched. Despite the fact that the baroque is specifically identified by Maravall as an epoch of crisis, every age must cope

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______________________________________________________________ with its own dramatic and world-shaking problems. Both comedy and horror have been reactions that allow humanity to cope with some of the most everpresent issue such as the impossibility of certainty, the essence of faith, and its absence. By seeing their similar utilitarian possibilities and their seemingly many stylistic differences a greater understanding of how we think, feel and our practices can be arrived at. Our only choice is to fear it or laugh at it.

Notes 1

D Eisenberg, ‘Teaching Don Quixote as a Funny Book’ in R Bjornson (ed.), Approaches to Teaching Cervantes’ ‘Don Quixote’, Modern Languages Association of America, New York, 1984, pp. 62-68. 2 A J Close, The Romantic Approach to ‘Don Quixote’: A Critical History of the Romantic Tradition in Quixote Criticism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1978, p. 29. 3 Ibid, p. 1. 4 H W Sullivan, Grotesque Purgatory: A Study of Cervantes’s ‘Don Quixote’, Part II, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 1996, p. 12. 5 Ibid. p. 59. 6 J A Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, Terry Cochran (trans.), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986, p. 19. 7 Ibid, p. 19. 8 M Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, Tom Lathrop (ed.), Juan de la Cuesta, Newark, 2005, p. 84 and p. 88. 9 T Molina, El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra, Everett W. Hesse and Gerald E. Wade (eds.), Ediciones Almar, S.A., Salamanca, 1978, pp. 160-164. 10 D R Castillo, ‘Horror (Vacui): The Baroque Condition’ in Nicholas Spadaccini and Luis Martín-Estudillo (eds.), Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context, Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville, 2005, p. 87. 11 Ibid, p. 87. 12 F Rojas, La Celestina, Dorothy S. Severin (ed.), Cátedra, Madrid, 2000, p. 67. 13 B Gracián, El Criticón, Santos Alonso (ed.), Cátedra, Madrid, 2000, p. 20. 14 M Cervantes, Entremeses, Nicholas Spadaccini (ed.), Cátedra, Madrid, 1987, pp. 215-236. 15 Maravall, op. cit., p. 213. 16 M Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Richard Howard (trans.), Vintage Book, New York, 1988, p. 37.

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______________________________________________________________ 17

D R Castillo and M Lollini, ‘Introduction: Reason and Its Others in Early Modernity (A View from the South)’ in D R Castillo and M Lollini (eds.) Reason and Its Others: Italy, Spain, and the New World, Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville, 2006, p. XV. 18 M Cervantes, Don Quixote, Edith Grossman (trans.), Ecco, New York, 2003, p. 569. 19 Ibid, p. 31. 20 Foucault, op. cit., p. 11. 21 Castillo, ‘Horror (Vacui): The Baroque Condition’, p. 93. 22 J Baena, Discordancias Cervantinas, Juan de la Cuesta, Newark, 2003, p. 96. 23 Cervantes, Don Quixote, p. 481. 24 ‘Normal Again’ by Diego Gutierrez, Rick Rosenthal (dir.), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon (creator), UPN, 12 March 2002. 25 ‘Superstar’ by Jane Espenson, David Grossman (dir.), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon (creator), WB, 4 April 2000. 26 R Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, Methuen and Co. Ltd, London, 1981, p. 96. 27 Ibid, p. 96. 28 Close, pp. 16-17. 29 Scary Movie by Shawn Wayans and Marlon Wayans, Keenen Ivory Wayans (dir.), Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, 2000. 30 Mystery Science Theater 3000, Joel Hodgson (creator), Best Brains Inc., 1988-1999.

Bibliography Baena, J., Discordancias Cervantinas. Juan de la Cuesta, Newark, 2003. Castillo, D. R., “Horror (Vacui): The Baroque Condition” in Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context. Nicholas Spadaccini and Luis Martín-Estudillo (eds.), Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville, 2005, pp. 87104. Castillo, D. R. and M Lollini, “Introduction: Reason and Its Others in Early Modernity (A View from the South)” in Reason and Its Others: Italy, Spain, and the New World. D R Castillo and M Lollini (eds.), Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville, 2006, pp. ix-xxiv. Cervantes, M., Don Quixote, Edith Grossman (trans.), Ecco, New York, 2003.

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______________________________________________________________ ――. El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, Tom Lathrop (ed.), Juan de la Cuesta, Newark, 2005. ――. Entremeses. Nicholas Spadaccini (ed.), Cátedra, Madrid, 1987. Close, A. J., The Romantic Approach to ‘Don Quixote’: A Critical History of the Romantic Tradition in Quixote Criticism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1978. Eisenberg, D., “Teaching Don Quixote as a Funny Book” in Approaches to Teaching Cervantes’ ‘Don Quixote’. R Bjornson (ed.), Modern Languages Association of America, New York, 1984, pp. 62-68. Foucault, M., Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Richard Howard (trans.), Vintage Book, New York, 1988. Gracián, B., El Criticón, Santos Alonso (ed.), Cátedra, Madrid, 2000. Jackson, R., Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, Methuen and Co. Ltd, London, 1981. Maravall, J. A., Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, Terry Cochran (trans.), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986. Molina, T. de, El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra, Everett W. Hesse and Gerald E. Wade (eds.), Ediciones Almar, S.A., Salamanca, 1978. Mystery Science Theater 3000, Joel Hodgson (creator), Best Brains Inc., 1988-1999. “Normal Again” by Diego Gutierrez, Rick Rosenthal (dir.), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon (creator), UPN, 12 March 2002. Rojas, F., La Celestina, Dorothy S. Severin (ed.), Cátedra, Madrid, 2000. Scary Movie by Shawn Wayans and Marlon Wayans, Keenen Ivory Wayans (dir.), Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, 2000. Sullivan, H. W., Grotesque Purgatory: A Study of Cervantes’s ‘Don Quixote’, Part II, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 1996.

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______________________________________________________________ ‘Superstar’ by Jane Espenson, David Grossman (dir.), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon (creator), WB, 4 April 2000.

Part II Feminised Fear

Pan’s Labyrinth, Fear and the Fairy Tale Laura Hubner Abstract This chapter investigates some of the fears that are represented in Guillermo del Toro’s film El laberinto del fauno / Pan's Labyrinth. A close analysis of sequences from the film establishes how fantasy and dream-worlds are interwoven with scenes depicting traumas caused by Fascism immediately after the Spanish Civil War. The paper focuses on the young heroine, Ofelia, the fantasies she fabricates, the roles she adopts and the choices made available to her. It examines how far Ofelia functions as an empowering, progressive representation of a young female hero who, in discovering disobedience, is capable of subverting mythologies of femininity and biology. Pan’s Labyrinth raises questions about fears associated with the female role, in relation to: death and disease; the home and the wood; childbirth and the (male) bloodline, often rooted in gothic horror as well as fairytale traditions. Beyond this, the film explores the horrors surrounding mystical boundaries and transitional phases such as those between life and death or childhood and adulthood. The paper examines the role of the child’s imagination in overcoming fear, making links with del Toro’s El espinazo del diablo / The Devil’s Backbone. Key Words: Boundaries, fairy tale, fantasy, Fascism, gothic, Guillermo del Toro, heroine, Pan’s Labyrinth, Spanish Civil War. ***** 1.

Introduction This chapter locates some of society’s fears as they are embedded in film, looking at Guillermo del Toro’s El laberinto del fauno / Pan's Labyrinth. It considers the film’s treatment of the horrors endured during Franco’s domination in Spain, and the fears at stake when representing events that relate to specific historical actualities. However, the main focus of the chapter is the pre-pubescent heroine, Ofelia, as she faces her terrors, by fabricating a dream-world, partly as an escape and partly in defiance against her step-father’s violent regime. The paper considers the film’s reception in critical reviews and investigates these in relation to secondary sources of critical theory on fairy tale, gothic and gothic horror. Fairytale themes in the film - fears of “otherness,” rites of passage and liminal phases of fantasy,

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______________________________________________________________ dream, nightmare and death - are interwoven with the historically specific, to address traumas caused by Fascism and male brutality. Pan’s Labyrinth is set in 1944, five years after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Events take place in a remote hamlet within woodlands in the north of Spain close to the French frontier. Vidal, a captain in Spain’s Civil Guard, has been posted there to purge the area of the maquis, the Republican resistance movement. Crushed in the Civil War, a small number of the Resistance continue to fight a campaign against Franco’s regime. 2.

Confronting the Past To some extent, Pan’s Labyrinth is a bold and challenging film, at least as far as it confronts the horrors of human brutality and terror, positioning them within a specific historical context. While the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s regime are traumatic events that have received considerable (though sporadic) attention in the history of post-Franco filmmaking, close inquiry into specific ideological and political proceedings has been sparse, suggesting a wariness, or fear, of re-treading and negotiating past events. Spain’s recent history has provided Spanish film-makers in particular with a wealthy source of material; as Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas calculate, more than half of the nearly three hundred historical films produced since the 1970s are set during the Second Republic, the Civil War and Francoism.1 The oppositional film-making of the 1970s was quick to subvert Francoist idealism. However, as David Archibald argues, “This initial move to debate the central political concerns of the Civil War was followed by a move away from detailed historical political analyses.”2 Perhaps this is because, along with other real-life atrocities like the holocaust and Hiroshima, there has been a numbness stemming from deep-rooted subjection, trauma and fear. As Archibald argues, this tendency of Spanish films to elide the political and historical detail “is reflective of a more widespread tendency in Spanish society itself.”3 What Archibald refers to is the haunting silence, noted by historians, such as Paul Preston: Since the return of democracy to Spain, commemoration of the Civil War has been muted. The silence was partly a consequence of the legacy of fear deliberately created during the post-war repression and by Franco’s consistent pursuit of a policy of glorifying the victors and humiliating the vanquished. It was also a result of what has come to be called the pacto de olvido (the pact of forgetfulness). An inadvertent effect of Franco’s post-war policies was to imbue the bulk of the Spanish people with a determination never to undergo again either the violence experienced during the war or the repression thereafter.4

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______________________________________________________________ Rob Stone argues that this silence rose up again more recently when, following a widespread disillusionment with socialism, the right-wing Partido Popular (“People’s Party”) were voted into power in 1996: “Since then, Spanish film-makers have barely touched on contemporary social issues or even a political theme.”5 In recent years, there has been an increasing tendency to either glorify the present by distancing or satirizing the past or keep the focus away from central political scrutiny.6 Thus, the graphic level of detail used in Pan’s Labyrinth to represent the carnage resulting from Franco’s power is significant, making it a very hard film to watch and listen to. We see, for instance, a starving father and son (who are out hunting rabbits) slaughtered by Captain Vidal, who assumes that they are resistance fighters. He smashes the son in the nose and face repeatedly with a metal truncheon until he is dead, then shoots the father in the throat. Within the frame, the specks of blood fly. When Vidal finds the skinny dead rabbit afterwards, he takes it home for supper. We also see Vidal’s brutal torture of “the stuttering man.” He tells him that if he can count to three without stuttering he will go free. The scene, shown in a long take and in close-up, lingers to capture the blood flowing from the man’s mouth, his every breath clear on the soundtrack as he fails to say the number three. We also watch as Mercedes later slices Vidal across the mouth, part self-protection, part-revenge. These are just a few examples of the graphic realism afforded the many violent acts. This close engagement with specific acts of violence to capture the horrors of Franco’s regime makes Pan’s Labyrinth distinctive within contemporary cinema. However, the film’s subversive representations of brutality echo the severe violence embedded in many of Spain’s post-Franco oppositional films of the 1970s, such as José Luis Borau’s Furtivos. Both films reveal the illusory façade of the Francoist rural idyll by exposing an uncomfortably “real” cruelty and violence at its core. Furthermore, the function of the rural woodland setting in Pan’s Labyrinth can also be related back to the 1970s oppositional films. Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas suggest that in contrast to official Francoist cinema’s depiction of a rural idyll to convey Franco’s vision of Spain as a timeless forest, oppositional writing and films: …appropriated the rural context for the elaboration of a critical discourse which established rural Spain as the spatial representation of stasis and repression. The rural came to be represented in terms of its material deprivation and anachronistic repressive structures.7 A similar emphasis is evident in Pan’s Labyrinth. In addition, the film recalls the tendency of Spanish film-making in the 1970s to mythologise the

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______________________________________________________________ individual fighters of the Resistance and their brave supporters in rural communities. For example, Los días del pasado, the first film to focus on the previously banned subject of the maquis, pays close attention to the characters, their lifestyles, their interminable waiting and lack of supplies. As Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas argue: “The isolation and mystique of the rural setting contribute to the elevation of these figures to the level of myth.”8 The ending of Pan’s Labyrinth raises Mercedes, her brother and his companions to this level of myth, and Ofelia’s final transcendence legitimises her decision to become involved. Moreover, the film’s rural setting of dark undergrowth and woodland helps to enable a blurring between “reality” and fantasy that is also reminiscent of these earlier representations of the maquis in Spanish cinema. 3.

The Wild Wood José Arroyo suggests in Sight&Sound that, plot-wise, the physical setting in Pan’s Labyrinth provides the resistance movement with a “potential escape.”9 The woods certainly offer a space for Outlaw existence, but the Resistance aim to fight rather than to escape. As Captain Vidal observes: The guerrillas are sticking to the woods because it’s hard to track them up there. Those bastards know the terrain better than any of us. The woodlands can be liberating for those who know how to navigate it. To the villain Vidal they represent his fears, of the unknown “other,” of all that is uncivilised and less easily controlled. His intention is to starve the “creatures” out commanding his forces to block all access to food and medicine.10 In this way, the wild wood also becomes a threat to the Resistance. Its remoteness from civilisation leaves them hungry and trapped. As Arroyo goes on to assert: “Generically, the setting allows for the dense woodlands, darkness, rain and damp traditionally associated with horror.”11 With the slaughter of some of the Resistance, the wood becomes what Carol Clover calls the “Terrible Place,” in which the victims at some point find themselves in the horror movie, symbolically here the dark, amoral side of the human psyche, invaded by the monstrous Fascist regime. 12 In this respect, we should note horror’s homage to fairy tale as a forum for critical engagement with taboo subject-matter. Parallels can again be made with Spanish film-making since the 1970s where, as Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas argue, “the use of legends and fairytales as provocative correlatives of reality” was often integral to the narrative form.13 Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas discuss, for example, three major films by Julio Medem, a key art-house director of Basque cinema - Vacas, La ardilla roja and Tierra

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______________________________________________________________ - revealing that all three films emphasise “the disruption of the pastoral and spiritual tranquillity of the rural context by violence in its various forms of war, rivalry, jealousy and madness, again forging a link with this darker aspect of both fairytale fantasy and rural genres.”14 These are central elements in del Toro’s film-making that will be examined later in this chapter. We should also note Pan’s Labyrinth’s homage to fairytale ambivalence, where wild woodland can be both threatening and dangerously appealing. This ambivalence is evident in the shift of representation in Spanish cinema from forest as repressor in the 1970s towards the reincarnation of its nostalgic appeal from the 1980s onwards, where wild woodland again becomes a source of charm. Wild woodland functions in Pan’s Labyrinth as both oppressor and liberator; it offers Ofelia a temporary form of escape and defiance, as is made clear from the start of the film. The film opens with the sound of the faint melody. It is the film’s theme tune, sung by Mercedes to soothe Ofelia later in the film. Mercedes is Vidal’s maid, secretly helping the resistance fighters. The melody is accompanied by Ofelia’s breathing. White words on a black background explain the context. We then see a close-up of Ofelia’s face looking towards the camera but slightly off-frame, blood streaming from her nose. The camera rotates to reveal that her face is on the ground, her left hand out towards the corner of the frame; the sound of her breathing becomes louder. It becomes apparent that the shot is being played in reverse as the blood starts retreating back into her nose. She adjusts her gaze to look directly at the camera as the voice-over starts up. We might note some of the complexities of the film even at this stage. In an interview for the Guardian with Mark Kermode, del Toro states that Pan’s Labyrinth is a “female movie.”15 The close-up on Ofelia’s face identifies her as central to the tale, and the Brechtian break with naturalism as she stares into the camera suggests that we become aware of her position and perspective within the political events of the film. However, the male voiceover narrating the tale of a princess who fled to our world from her magical kingdom only to die, leaving her father yearning for her return suggests a further perspective, a male authorial voice. The film returns to the close-up of Ofelia’s face at the end, but the final images of a flower opening and insect are accompanied by the same male voice-over. After initial shots of the young princess leaving the dark underworld and running up the spiral staircase to the bright circle opening to the human world, the main narrative begins with Ofelia, travelling with her mother, Carmen, to join her new step-father, Vidal. The first shot is of Ofelia’s hand turning the page of a book. There is a cut to a close-up of the page. Next to the words we see an illustration of a girl in a floating dress, surrounded by four fairies flying around her. A cut to medium shot reveals mother and

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______________________________________________________________ daughter side by side, and the woodland outside Ofelia’s window. The mother holds her stomach, her other hand holding a tissue to her mouth as she tries to stave off the sickness of late pregnancy. The sharp distinction between the adult world and the fantasy world of the child are depicted in the relationship between mother and daughter. For instance, when they stop the car for Carmen to relieve her sickness and Ofelia ventures into the woods, an insect, somewhere between a dragonfly and a mantis, flies around her face. She is called to return to the car by her mother, who is standing with a military official of the Civil Guard: Ofelia: I saw a fairy. Carmen: Just look at your shoes! In this short scene, it is clear that the woodland is the place that ignites Ofelia’s imagination and where she lives out her fantasies. As they return to the car, the camera is positioned behind the insect watching them leave. When it moves around the tree to the other side, the camera follows to view the vehicles (the two shiny black cars followed by the luggage truck) leave in an ordered line. The insect follows them. Fantastical viewpoints helping us to see and authenticate Ofelia’s visions such as this single moment and later when she crawls into a hole between roots of a tree act as a further reminder of Julio Medem’s work. For example, naturalism is extended in Vacas when the camera assumes the viewpoint of cows or is swallowed into a magical hollow tree trunk. In Tierra we see the insects busily working underground, as they affect the local wine production. From the opening of Pan’s Labyrinth, Ofelia’s imaginary world is one that we are invited to share. The otherworldly clicking sound of the insect switches to the orderly ticking of Vidal’s pocket watch, shown in close-up before there is a cut to the captain looking up, uttering “15 minutes late.” Ofelia sees the insect again after her first meeting with Captain Vidal, suggesting a powerful rejection of his world. The insect takes her to the labyrinth, an old ruin within the woods, not far from the old mill and their new home. Mercedes, who becomes her friend, warns “Better not go in there. You may get lost.” Within the new woodland context, Ofelia begins to be lured to the magical fantasy world. During the night, the insect returns to Ofelia, transforms itself into the fairy in her book and leads her to the labyrinth, where they descend through the circle into the underworld shown at the start of the film. Deep within she encounters the faun who tells her that she is the lost princess, and that if she completes three tasks before the advent of the full moon she can reclaim her rightful place in her father’s realm. She must use the book he gives her, full of blank pages, to guide her. Though of her

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______________________________________________________________ own imagining, Ofelia seems to be physically drawn to the labyrinth, and to the dark wild wood. Woodland signifies a space in-between, its liminality a pointer to something once seemingly understood as primeval, prior to discourse, providing an insight into an archetypal understanding of human behaviour. Through the course of western history, diverse fairy-tellers (Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier, Charles Perrault, Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and Walt Disney, for example) have used woods and forests to warn children against straying from the path. Jack Zipes argues, for instance, that Charles Perrault and the Grimm Brothers transformed Little Red Riding Hood from “an oral folk tale about the social initiation of a young woman into a narrative about rape in which the heroine is obliged to bear the responsibility for her violation.”16 While there have been multiple modifications of this tale making it difficult to assess an original (“true”) folktale, Zipes demonstrates the point that fairy tales are subject to social, cultural and moral shifts, and that meanings interpreted by authors and readers are ideologically positioned. As a warning against revolt, woodlands can be a symbol of repression, as much as a symbol of escape, pointing finally towards a return to civilisation, a sanitised norm governed by societal law and order, as part of a necessary rite of passage for those between the age of childhood and adulthood. 4.

Gender, Sexuality and the Fairy Tale Paradoxically, the attractions of fear and the pleasures of the tale lie also in the possibilities of straying from the path. Due to recent shifts in attitudes towards gender and sexuality, writers (such as Marina Warner, Angela Carter and Vicki Feaver) have investigated the fantasy of straying, and of actively desiring to stray, as a possible voice for female sexuality. Despite multiple retellings and re-workings of fairy tales, the fears of burgeoning female sexuality and the ambiguities of the female body, and female desire, remain a controversial talking point that is never finally resolved. In “The Power of Myth,” del Toro states that it is important that Ofelia is not mature sexually, that she is still a girl. He acknowledges the film’s homage to fairytale conventions in which pre-pubescent girls pass through a rite of passage, “blooming into womanhood” or “independence.” He states that, while most people can identify Ofelia with Alice in Wonderland and Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, the tradition is much older.17 However, while Ofelia is approaching womanhood, her burgeoning sexuality is glossed over in the film, encoded with slightly conventional, or even tame, symbolism. To claim that Pan’s Labyrinth is tame gives a misleading and incomplete picture, particularly bearing in mind its head-on confrontation of

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______________________________________________________________ the horrors of human brutality following on from the Spanish Civil War, and the graphic level of detail used to represent the carnage, as discussed earlier in this chapter. However, to some extent there is a sense that the film functions according to a rather “simple” essentialist understanding of gender and sexuality. Indeed, del Toro uses the word “simple” when discussing the character types that appear in the film, drawn from fairytale traditions.18 The film’s use of polarised archetypes to distinguish gender is also a conscious authorial decision; del Toro claims that, while Fascism is a “boy’s game,” the film centres on the “11-year-old girl’s universe.”19 Ofelia’s innocence is linked with her gender, placing boundaries on her insight and capabilities. At the end of the film, the fatherly (Godly) male voice-over tells us that Ofelia returns to the realm of her father. Gender roles are divided reductively in the sense that the females are unquestionably good, possess magical powers and intuition, and Mercedes does not kill Vidal. In contrast, Vidal is naturally evil. The (male) voices of the priest at the funeral, the faun, the father (Father) and the final voice-over preach the Catholic law that one must suffer pain to receive transcendence.20 The mise-en-scène emphasises the sharp gender distinctions between Vidal’s world and Ofelia’s fantasy world. The rounded interiors of the labyrinthine monster worlds contrast with the sharp phallic angularity of Vidal’s world; we might take as examples the long columns of cars and men with guns, and the scene where Vidal is stood beside his extended table, planning their attack. These serve as iconic references to an international history of war genre movies, labelling Vidal as instantly recognisable Fascist villain. What is perhaps most striking about Vidal, though, is his reductively typed behaviour that visibly defies ambiguity or depth of character. He is pure evil from the moment he castigates Ofelia for holding out the wrong hand to greet him at their first meeting. His acute precision as he shaves with a sharpened blade connotes a masculinity as rigid as the ideological framework that he embodies; he resembles a comic-book figure of evil destined to provoke terror. This refusal to allow Vidal’s character further dimensions reinforces the notion that the film is reductively simple and tame. In this respect, the generic references to war films and fairy tales stifle any sense of complex historical events, as if it were possible to rid them of the terrors that provoked them. There is scarcely anything to be found in Vidal’s character that asks us to reflect on how these atrocities came about or the human characters involved in perpetuating them. In this sense, Pan’s Labyrinth corresponds with a tendency common in the previous decade to gloss over these events or to consign them safely to the past. The depiction of Vidal as a two-dimensional figure mirrors the representation of similar figures in 1990s Spanish films that attempt to distance the past, such as the immature and absurdly fanatical Francoist leaders in La noche más larga. In this respect, Pan’s Labyrinth filters the past through a mask of caricature.

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______________________________________________________________ However, this reading would be to overlook the subversive potential of fairy tale. Del Toro discusses the film’s debt to fairy tale, and recounts at some length his attempts to remain faithful to fairy tales’ “simple” ingredients: “I always felt that the power of a fairy tale was that it was at the same time very simple and very brutal.”21 He claims that the characters need to be types, and that today there is too much fear of simplicity. It is crucial, he argues, that Ofelia is innocent and good, incapable of violence against any living being. He suggests that if we are to take the rebels in the woods as the woodsman who rescues Little Red Riding Hood, and the Captain as the Big Bad Wolf and Ofelia as Little Red Riding Hood, then it is necessary to hold onto fairytale simplicity: “I believe that the hardest thing to pull off in art is actually simplicity.”22 He has a point in that devastating subjects, silenced in other spheres, can be dealt with in the form of fairy tale. It is striking that, despite some blurring between the two worlds of the film, the strictest character types belong to the “real” world whereas the ambiguous characters are reserved for the fantasy world. Simplicity is brought in to handle difficult subject-matter. Many theorists have debated the centrality of simplicity for the functioning of fairy tale within diverse media and contexts. For instance, Millie Taylor examines fairytale archetypes as a means to understanding British pantomime: Good characters and evil characters are clearly separated and identified… There is no room for complexity or development of character because the tale is told through action and each character has a role in delivering the action of the story.23 The action revolves around good conquering evil. However, reading the fairytale action often involves tracing darker and more complex roots embedded within the tale. The fairytale framework allows Pan’s Labyrinth to allude to the actions of fathers and forefathers during this period of history. Here, troubling practices are transferred onto the evil stepfather. Ofelia’s good (anti-Fascist) real father is dead. Evil lies outside Ofelia’s natural bloodline. Fatherless and then orphaned, she conforms to the traditional fairytale hero. As Maria Tatar asserts, transcribed fairy tales in successive editions of Nursery and Household Tales often dealt with the “bad” mother by turning her into the step-mother. As step-mother there are no bounds to her cruelty: Thus the heartless mother who leaves her children to starve so that she and her husband might live and thrive become a wicked stepmother, and the evil queen driven by sexual

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______________________________________________________________ rivalry to do away with her daughter slips easily into the role of the jealous stepdaughter. In each case, Willhelm Grimm recognised that most children (along with those who read to them) find the idea of wicked stepmothers easier to tolerate than that of cruel mothers.24 Pan’s Labyrinth sanitises history by transferring all the cruelty onto the stepfather.25 However, the allusion (to the possibility of a world where the father is to be feared) is not completely lost. Pan’s Labyrinth is testament to the fairy tale’s residing ability to suggest the unspoken and the unspeakable. In this sense, the fairytale elements of the film function as subversive allegories for the taboo. The multiple levels of meaning and the diversity of possible readings propose that audiences’ responses are variable according to different cultural and historical contexts. However, the subversive element is slightly tempered if we note that the film glosses over many of the sexual themes familiar to fairytale and gothic horror films featuring pre-pubescent and teenage girls. This is not necessarily a limitation though. We have only to think of The Exorcist of William Friedkin and Carrie of Brian de Palma. Women’s creative power lies in their biology, and the female body is depicted as hideous, “other,” to be feared, out of control, without limit and regressively linked with witchcraft. As Barbara Creed argues: Menstruation was also linked to the witch’s curse - a theme explored in Carrie… Historically, the curse of a woman, particularly if she were pregnant or menstruating, was considered far more potent than a man’s curse. A “mother’s curse”, as it was known, meant certain death.26 The convention of working through fears of the female body, the menarche, the menstrual cycle, female sexual desire and childbirth all take as their inspiration a combination of folk/fairy tale and gothic traditions (note the punishment of the female sexual deviants in, for example, Jayne Eyre and Rebecca). With respect to childbirth, we might also consider films like Rosemary’s Baby of Roman Polanski and The Hand that Rocks the Cradle of Curtis Hanson. In this respect it is possible to argue that Pan’s Labyrinth is refreshing, in the sense that it is a rite of passage film, where gender (overtly, at least) seems less important than a universal understanding of humankind. Parallels can be made with del Toro’s previous film El Espinazo del diablo / The Devil’s Backbone, centring on the heroic determination of a young boy and his male friends at a deserted orphanage during the Spanish Civil War. Indeed, del Toro has often stated that these two films are linked together, that

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______________________________________________________________ Pan’s Labyrinth is the “sister movie” to The Devil’s Backbone, which he sees as the “boy’s movie.”27 It might be argued that a deeper terror underlies The Devil’s Backbone with its uninhibited slaughter of so many children. However, in both films, the child hero has visionary capabilities, probes further to know the darkness, prepared to save others’ lives, risking his or her own. This humanist belief in the individual motivates both films. 5.

Gothic, Fantasy and Subversion What is perhaps most striking about Pan’s Labyrinth is that Ofelia’s imaginary world is as dark as the “real” world. Moreover, as suggested earlier, the fantasy world contains opaque and ambiguous qualities that are lacking in the dimensions of the “real” world. Ofelia’s fantasies give direct expression to the unspoken dualities and taboos of human nature, reminiscent of the subversive functions that Rosemary Jackson attributes to Fantasy literature: The fantastic traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made “absent.”28

Although ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ (my emphasis) is the film’s formally recognised international English title, del Toro is clear that the faun is not Pan, and that “Pan” conjures up misleading connotations; he is “too dangerous a character to put in a fable like this.”29 The faun’s ambiguous and duplicitous characteristics make Ofelia’s responses to his tasks and the decisions she has to make all the more difficult. The true course is obscured, and it is never finally clear whether the choices she makes are morally right. Gothic, as well as fairytale, sensibilities are evident in the scenes awakened by Ofelia’s imagination. Gothic elements extend beyond the decadent excesses of the setting, pervading the obscure figures that Ofelia encounters, fundamentally upsetting the core of her identity. Lisa Hopkins’ definition of “gothic” exposes its dual function: In the first place, Gothic tends to create polarities: extreme good is opposed to extreme evil, extreme innocence to extreme power, and very often extreme youth to extreme age… And yet at the same time, there is an uncanny sense that the polarisations so beloved of the Gothic are not in fact as absolute as they seem - that things which appear to be opposite can actually be frighteningly, uncannily similar.30

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______________________________________________________________ The fantasy world within Pan’s Labyrinth creates this kind of destabilizing effect. Ofelia’s extreme innocence and youth contrast with the faun’s extreme power and age. However, a number of factors break down these absolutes and allude to a less than straightforward gothic doubling. The fantasy is fabricated by Ofelia and she is curious about it. The faun is ambivalently good and evil and Ofelia is surprisingly untroubled by the monsters. Links might be traced between Vidal and the faun; the captain’s more ambiguous features are displaced onto the faun. We might even see a doubling between Ofelia and the faun. However, it is beyond the film’s moral scope to envisage parallels between Ofelia and Vidal. The fantasy world’s gothic elements nevertheless function as compelling allusions to some of the real-life dualities and confusions that contributed to the rise of Francoist Fascism. Ofelia confronts head-on her visions of the faun tearing off raw flesh with his teeth. On her second task, she approaches “the Pale Man” whose eyeballs rest on the table along with the dripping red fruits of the banquet in front of him. Curious as Alice, she looks at the portraits of babies being devoured by monsters on the walls. She gazes at and moves towards the opulent fruit-pile, and flicks away one of the fairies that gestures against touching it. Turning back to check on the life-less Pale Man, and flicking away another fairy, Ofelia plucks a succulent purple grape-like fruit and pops it into her mouth. This act awakens the Pale Man, who inserts the eyeballs into his palms, and holds up his hands to his head, fingers out-stretched, emulating the appearance of the faun. Ofelia takes another grape, pulls off another fairy and eats the grape, pausing to chew for a moment and savour the delicious taste. The Pale Man grasps the fairies and bites their heads off messily, then places his hands in the position of the faun as Ofelia runs off. Parallels can be drawn between the faun and the Pale Man, and the duplicitous nature of Ofelia is explored when, Eve-like, she tastes the forbidden fruit. Her encounter with these decadent, gothic and grotesque images of ageing and decay suggests an awareness of a dark, tangible, mortal side of humans befitting a hero on a quest rather than a passive ethereal princess. 6.

Fear and the Female Body Ofelia’s ability to make decisions and act upon them, sometimes in defiance, is empowering. As Kira Cochrane argues: In a contemporary landscape in which many young girls aspire to a dull, passive version of princesshood, Ofelia offers something different, something complex, something uniquely powerful. She is a strong antidote in a sea of blandness.31

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______________________________________________________________ For Cochrane, what makes Ofelia stand out as a female hero is that she is represented as having “a clear certainty, self-absorption and objectivity, which make her far from simplistically vulnerable.”32 Cochrane also argues that “the sexual themes are far less pronounced than usual, and Ofelia’s creativity is presented at face value.” She suggests that the celebration of the female does not rest solely, as it does in so many of these pre-pubescent fantasy tales, on “our ability to reproduce.”33 I would agree that the sexual and reproduction themes are less pronounced, but only so far. There is a certain awe surrounding the female body in the uterine imagery of Ofelia’s fantasy world, the infinite circular archways and interiors and the shots of Ofelia’s baby brother in the womb.34 Sexual themes are often couched in a more stylised symbolism in the plethora of fairytale literature and films. For example, there is the indelible icon of red (Little Red Riding Hood’s cloak) or red on white (the three drops of blood on the snow/milk in Snow White and the pricking of the finger in Sleeping Beauty) to symbolise emerging womanhood, sexuality or the loss of innocence. And traditionally, this tends to be a symbol of fear, of something to be kept in check. Pan’s Labyrinth’s use of red on white embraces some of these fears. At the end of the film, Ofelia’s body shines white in the light of the full moon, blood floating from her mouth. A golden light marks her transcendence into the realm of her father, where emerging wearing bright red boots, reminiscent of Dorothy, she inhabits the womblike red golden palace of her father’s kingdom. This new birth comes as the result of pain, linking her emerging sexuality with death.35 Fears of childbirth are also striking. In one scene, Ofelia watches as red ink blotches fill the pages of her fairytale book like blood on cloth. She rushes from the bathroom to find her mother bent double, blood spilling around her white skirts below the waist. Carmen’s pregnancy takes a turn for the worse after she throws the mandrake root Ofelia has been keeping under the bed into the fire. Carmen eventually dies after giving birth to a baby boy. Thus, the female body is linked with death, magic and witchcraft. The thematic use of red and white demonstrates the film’s dependence on the imagery surrounding the mystique of the female body in transition. Nevertheless, as Cochrane goes on to argue, there is evidence that the film also resists nature and biology when Ofelia responds to Mercedes’ caution that “having a baby is complicated” with “Then I’ll never have one.” Indeed, the close relationship between Ofelia and Mercedes and the intricate networks they set up create a strong sense of female complicity.36 In a powerful way, Ofelia disobeys throughout the film: she refuses to call Vidal “father,” she ventures into the woods and returns to the labyrinth. Finally she disobeys her step-father and steals her baby brother, she disobeys the faun by not handing over the baby and she says “no” to Vidal after he takes the baby.

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______________________________________________________________ Biology and the (male) bloodline are also undercut at the end of the film. Vidal appears from the labyrinth holding his baby son, having shot Ofelia. He realises that he faces death as he turns the corner to find the resistance fighters waiting for him, his house ablaze behind them. He walks up to Mercedes and Pedro, handing over the baby. He takes out his pocket watch to crush it at the time of his death, a tradition handed down from his father. When he says, “Tell my son - Tell him what time his father died - Tell him that I,” Mercedes interrupts with “No. He won’t even know your name.” This scene directly subverts the codes and conventions of official Francoist cinema made during the 1940s, where violence is glossed over and the deaths of Fascist heroes are glamorised as they sacrifice themselves for Spain and for their God. Vidal’s words echo the words of Pedro Churruca in Raza, “When death calls, one must go proudly…such was your forefathers’ beautiful death.” Pan’s Labyrinth reverses the heroic figures, and reinstates the violence at the hands of the Fascist villains. 7.

Conclusion Pan’s Labyrinth raises questions about fears associated with the female role, in relation to death, childbirth and the (male) bloodline, often rooted in gothic horror as well as fairytale traditions. The fairy tale, as elastic, fantastical vehicle for imaginary worlds and taboo subject matter, can act as a strong voice for societal fears. But its powers to subvert and challenge existing codes and practices only partly account for its functioning in respect of fear, since fairy tales also use fear to purify and refine, to revert as much as to subvert, often embracing long-established boundaries and pathways. Although tame or limited in some respects, Pan’s Labyrinth goes some way in subverting some of the fears of the female body entrenched in fairy tales, gothic and horror. The final ending offers a cyclical return to the fairytale realm of the father, but Franco’s regime as historical actuality remains. This is the true horror.

Notes 1

B Jordan and R Morgan-Tamosunas, Contemporary Spanish Cinema, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1998, p. 16. 2 D Archibald, “Re-framing the past: representations of the Spanish Civil War in popular Spanish Cinema,” A Lázaro Reboll and A Willis (eds.), Spanish Popular Cinema (Inside Popular Film), Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 2004, p. 76. Archibald cites as an example La lengua de las mariposas / Butterfly’s Tongue (José Luis Cuerda, 1999). He suggests that the film depicts Republican Spain with “rose-tinted spectacles,” consigning the Civil War to the past: “The stress that La lengua

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______________________________________________________________ de las mariposas places on the transformative powers of education suggests that in contemporary Spain, with a generation of young people brought up free from the constrictive dictatorship and educated in the world of liberal democracy, it is a nightmare that need no longer haunt contemporary Spanish society.” Ibid, p. 81. 3 Ibid, p. 77. 4 P Preston, Comrades! Portraits From the Spanish Civil War, HarperCollins, London, 2000, p. 21. 5 R Stone, Spanish Cinema (Inside Film), Longman, Harlow, England, 2002, p. 130. One of the few exceptions, noted by Stone, Sé quien eres / I Know Who you Are (Patricia Fereira, 2000), can be seen to reflect on the dualities and complexities of Spanish identity. This romantic thriller centres on a female psychiatrist who locates the traumas connected to her patient’s loss of memory, by unearthing the hidden violent episodes of history blotted out by an entire nation. As Stone argues, “Thus, in this film’s honest look back at recent Spanish history, there is, perhaps, the beginning of a cure for social amnesia and a recognition of its necessity.” Ibid, p. 131. 6 This difficult and ambivalent relationship with the past is something that is also relevant to Mexican culture. In addition, Mexican cinema has a rollercoaster history controlled by varying levels of censorship. 7 B Jordan and R Morgan-Tamosunas, Contemporary Spanish Cinema, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1998, p. 46. 8 Ibid. p. 47. 9 J Arroyo, Review of Pan’s Labyrinth, Sight & Sound, Vol. 16 (12), BFI, December 2006, p. 66. 10 In this sense, the treatment of the fighters is reminiscent of abandonment in fairy tales, such as Hansel and Gretel. 11 Arroyo, op. cit., p. 66. 12 C J Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film” in Fantasy and the Cinema, J Donald (ed.), BFI, London, 1989, p. 101. 13 Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas, op. cit., p. 50. 14 Ibid, pp. 51-52. 15 Speaking to Mark Kermode, “Guardian interview at the National Film Theatre with Director” (courtesy of the British Film Institute in association with the Guardian), Pan’s Labyrinth 2 Disc DVD set, Optimum Home Entertainment, Disc 2. 16 J Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre, Routledge, London and New York, 2006, p. 28. 17 Presumably here he refers to young heroines in fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Rapunzel. 18 Del Toro speaking on “The Power of Myth.”

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______________________________________________________________ 19

Ibid. Though note that Ofelia’s refusal to sacrifice the baby opposes Abraham’s agreement to hand over his son Isaac to God. 21 Del Toro speaking on “The Power of Myth.” 22 Ibid. 23 M Taylor, British Pantomime Performance, Intellect, Bristol, 2007, p. 77. 24 M Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Princeton University Press, 1987, 2003, p. 37. 25 Although, the step-mother is much more common in the fairytale canon than the step-father, Pan’s Labyrinth is not the first to split the father in two. William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Ingmar Bergman’s film Fanny and Alexander (1982) serve as two examples of this divide between the good “real” father and the wicked step-father. 26 B Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Routledge, London and New York, 1993, p. 74. 27 Cf. for example, speaking to Mark Kermode, “Guardian interview at the National Film Theatre with Director.” 28 R Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, Routledge, London and New York, 1981, 1991, p.4. 29 Del Toro speaking on “The Power of Myth,” Pan’s Labyrinth 2 Disc DVD set, Optimum Home Entertainment, Disc 2. “The Labyrinth of the Faun” is perhaps less inspiring than “Pan’s Labyrinth.” 30 L Hopkins, Screening the Gothic, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2005, p. xii. 31 K Cochrane, “The girl can help it,” in Guardian Unlimited, Friday 27 April 2007, viewed on 1 May 2007. . 32 Cochrane (Ibid.) suggests that Ofelia is rather like Rosaleen in this respect, from The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984) adapted from Angela Carter’s short story. 33 Ibid. 34 As suggested earlier, these rounded interiors contrast with the sharp phallic angularity of Vidal’s world. 35 Del Toro attributes this sense of transcendence emerging out of pain to his Mexican roots. He relates it to the mythology of Mexican people’s awareness and acceptance of death as a cyclical process and to his status as “lapsed Catholic.” Speaking to Mark Kermode, “Guardian interview at the National Film Theatre with Director.” 36 It is worth noting that the female network is a strong feature of a number of films by Pedro Almodóvar, who significantly worked as one of the producers on del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone. 20

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______________________________________________________________

Bibliography Archibald, D., “Re-framing the past: representations of the Spanish Civil War in popular Spanish Cinema,” A Lázaro Reboll and A Willis (eds.), Spanish Popular Cinema (Inside Popular Film), Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 2004, pp. 76-91. Arroyo, J., Review of Pan’s Labyrinth, Sight&Sound, Vol. 16 (12), BFI December 2006, pp. 66-68. Clover, C. J., “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film” in Fantasy and the Cinema, J Donald (ed.), BFI, London, 1989. Cochrane, Kira, “The girl can help it”, in Guardian Unlimited, Friday 27 April 2007, viewed on 1 May 2007, http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,2066034,00.html. Creed, B., The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Routledge, London and New York, 1993. Hopkins, L., Screening the Gothic, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2005. Jackson, R., Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, Routledge, London and New York, 1981, 1991. Jordan, B. and R. Morgan-Tamosunas, Contemporary Spanish Cinema, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1998. Joseph, G., A. Rubenstein and E. Zolov (eds.), Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2001. Kinder, M., Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993. Pan’s Labyrinth 2 Disc DVD set, Optimum Home Entertainment. Paranaguá, P. A. (ed.), Mexican Cinema, British Film Institute, London, 1995.

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______________________________________________________________ Preston, P., A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War, HarperCollins, London, 1996. Preston, P., Comrades! Portraits From the Spanish Civil War, HarperCollins, London: 2000. Stone, R., Spanish Cinema (Inside Film), Longman, Harlow, England, 2002. Taylor, M., British Pantomime Performance, Intellect, Bristol, 2007. Tatar, M., The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Princeton University Press, 1987, 2003. Zipes, J., Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre, Routledge, London and New York, 2006. Zucker, C., “Sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth: The dangers of dreaming in Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves”, Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 28 (1), 2000, pp. 66-71.

Filmography Raza (José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, 1942) Furtivos (José Luis Borau, 1975) Los días del pasado (Mario Camus, 1977) Vacas (Julio Medem, 1992) La ardilla roja (Medem, 1993) Tierra (Medem, 1995) La noche más larga (García Sánchez, 1991) El espinazo del diablo / The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001) El laberinto del fauno / Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)

Sexing or Specularising the Doppelgänger: A Recourse to Poe’s “Ligeia” Susan Yi Sencindiver Abstract The fictional doppelgänger resists narrow categorisation and definition, yet exhibits a peculiar feature: it is claimed to be the exclusive property of the male gender. As a sole male phenomenon, the doppelgänger would seem to fortify the essentialist scheme of a gendered identity. However, as the doppelgänger decisively decentres the idea of a unified subjectivity, it cannot be presumed that gendered identity remains miraculously intact. I seek to extend the traditional critical approaches to the iconography of doppelgänger literature by inquiring how the otherness of sexual difference - under the guise of castration - forms a conceptually coherent nucleus at the interface of both the uncanny and the doppelgänger motif. Doppelgänger narratives are racked with the persistent themes of unreliable vision that pertain to the transposition of symbolic castration. It is not only blindness that figures as a displaced trope for castration, but also the sight of the castrated female and sexual difference; a danger circumvented by veiling the female body and the operations of the fetish. However, the repressed returns as other: sexual difference - one in which womb is equated with tomb as seen through the lens of male anxiety - indelibly marks the alterity within male subjectivity and the latter’s concomitant crisis. Since the sexed doppelgängerin is disclosed as specularised, she features a disconcerting otherness that proves to be construed less in opposition to selfhood than as a constitutive element integral to the formation of subjectivity. To substantiate this framework, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” will be read as a paradigmatic example, in which its title character emerges as a terrifying Medusa-like doppelgänger. Key Words: Castration, Doppelgänger, Fetishism, Gender, the Uncanny. ***** No nos une el amor sino el espanto; será por eso que la quiero tanto.1 - Jorge Luis Borges, Buenos Aires Je est un autre - Arthur Rimbaud

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______________________________________________________________ The fictional doppelgänger as a recurring literary device generates uneasy perplexity and anxiety for its readers as it articulates the disturbing crisis of self-division and identity as alterity. It renders literal Rimbaud’s maxim above: the elementary yet incongruous conjunction of self and other. However, what happens when Rimbaud’s autre or the double is female; in a sense already “other” in a phallocentric confine? Does she necessarily entail a subjectivity that differs sexually from itself? What implications, if any, do the differing gendered configurations of host(ess) and double have? These are some of the questions I would like to cover with reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Ligeia” of 1838, in which we witness the impossible resurrection of its title character by virtue of metempsychosis. While previous criticism has compellingly emphasised the overt doubling of the narrator’s first wife by his second wife, Ligeia and Rowena respectively; my argument, instead, mainly pursues the critical implications of reading Ligeia as the narrator’s reverberant echo of his self, in order to further elucidate the source of her transgressive potency - one that ostensibly resides in the fatality that the castrated female body presents for the male observer. This paper benefits from such a reading not simply because of the mirroring between the portrayal of Ligeia, imputed with a language inflected with tropes of castration, and the narrator’s defensive strategies against castration anxiety, but more so because she features a disconcerting otherness that proves to be construed less in opposition to selfhood than as an alien entity least avowable and more immanent than acknowledged. The incongruous conjunction of self and other in this tale emerges more specifically as the troubling conjunction of an ontologically inconsistent self and specular self-same other. 1.

Sexing the Doppelgänger There are ubiquitous doppelgänger elements in Poe’s tales, and although these have been subjected to various critical frameworks, surprisingly, the question of female doubles that looms largely in his work has been treated with relatively little exposition - despite the fact that a number of his tales belong to the earliest examples of explicit female doubling in literary history.2 The cause hereof pertains to the lack of currency for the “doppelgängerin.” A female license for doubling has been overlooked in previous criticism, or perhaps even deliberately marginalised, apparently on account of a faulty premise: the doppelgänger motif has been claimed to be the exclusive property of the male gender. According to Robert Alter “there is something intrinsically, and weirdly, sexless about … most of the arid Doppelgänger bachelors.”3 Similarly, Otto Weininger, Freud’s contemporary, avers that the double solely appears in the male form. On the other hand, it can be argued that their strictures merit partial validity. Compared to the male doppelgänger, there are only a few literary instances of an overt female version - the pressing question is why? Weininger’s own

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______________________________________________________________ notoriously misogynist and anti-Semitic treatise entitled Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Charakter) offers a dubious, yet unwittingly telling, account for the resistance towards the notion of the doppelgängerin. He writes: die Tiere erschrecken nie, wenn sie sich im Spiegel sehen, aber kein Mensch vermöchte sein Leben in einem Spiegelzimmer zu verbringen. Oder ist auch diese Furcht, die Furcht vor dem Doppelgänger (von der bezeichnenderweise das Weib frei ist) “biologisch,” “darwinistisch” abzuleiten? Man braucht das Wort Doppelgänger nur zu nennen, um in den meisten Männern heftiges Herzklopfen hervorzurufen4 This passage includes an interesting footnote: “[n]och hat niemand von Doppelgängerinnen gehört ... Es gibt eine tiefe Furcht, die nur der Mann kennt.”5 This excerpt intends to adduce the singular aspect of subjectivity left unexplained by the contemporary empirical approach to psychology - an autonomous subjectivity certified by “the acute heart-palpitation” that the doppelgänger excites. This fear of doubling or disintegration presupposes the existence of (male) subjectivity, since the double causes the subversion of, yet is also intrinsic to, the fundamental basis of identity. Since Weininger precludes women a unified subject position, their subjecthood is not at stake; accordingly, they do not manifest “the fear of the doppelgänger,” nor can they figure as a hostess for a doppelgängerin. Although an androcentric paradigm denies the double a hostess, it does already implicitly incorporate the female double in the name of “woman” owing to her allocation as man’s second self, reduced to his alter ego within an economy of the self-same. This is literally predicated in Weininger’s tract: woman figures as an emanation of the hypostatic self, more specifically, woman is the symptom of man, inasmuch as “[d]as Weib hat keinen Teil an der ontologischen Realität.”6 In Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Weininger: …it is man’s Fall into sexuality itself that creates woman, conferring existence upon her: ‘[i]t is only when man accepts his own sexuality, denies the absolute in him [his spiritual-ethical essence], turns to the lower, that he gives woman existence … she would disappear the moment man had overcome his sexuality. Woman is the sin of man’… of which Žižek adds “woman is not the cause of man’s Fall, but its consequence.”7 Weininger’s homology, in which sexual difference is predicated upon the opposition between subject and object, has long permeated Western cultural tradition and systems. As Simone de Beauvoir

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______________________________________________________________ vindicates in The Second Sex: femininity has been formed by relation to - and differentiation from - a male standard, thus the corollary construction of the former as the quintessential “other,” as “lack,” or as “absence.” Likewise, it follows that the female hostess to the doppelgänger can only remain the silent other of the term available in a phallocentric logic as it is ostensibly incompatible for an other to accommodate another other. Arguably, the early cases of female doubling are typically conceptualised on the basis of masculine parameters; e.g., conforming to the time-honoured polarised eternal types of women: the asexual Madonna and over-sexed whore. It is exigent to emphasise that the doubling of female personae in early doppelgänger narratives speaks to us more about male fears or man’s split view of woman than about the altered states of the feminine subject divided against herself. However, her mere yet inexorable presence does challenge the hitherto predominant view of the double’s male ascription. Since the doppelgänger is contingent on the status of subjectivity, it is not until feminine subjectivity is sanctioned and consolidated during the twentieth century that the doppelgängerin exceeds her role as the man’s object double and is assigned a hostess in her own right.8 However, theorizing this modern female doppelgänger, her hostess, and illative female subjectivity, still requires caution, since, heeding to Irigaray’s caveat, “[w]e can assume that any theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the ‘masculine.’”9 As an apparently solely male phenomenon, the doppelgänger would seem to fortify the essentialist scheme of a securely gendered identity. However, this categorical characterisation can be contested; as the doppelgänger decisively decentres the subject by subverting the logic of identity, it cannot be presumed that gendered identity remains miraculously intact. In effect, Weininger’s contention of the “deep fear that only the man knows” also tacitly subsumes patriarchal fears about sexual difference, insofar as gender - an essential specification of identity - is jeopardised. In fact, man’s “deep fear” is repeated in Weininger’s tract - and in this particular context the deep fear concerns the fear of woman: “jene tiefste Furcht im Manne: die Furcht vor dem Weibe, das ist die Furcht vor der Sinnlosigkeit: das ist die Furcht vor dem lockenden Abgrund des Nichts.”10 The dangerous spectres of both the doppelgänger and female sexuality share a curious affinity: both insidiously mark the alterity within male subjectivity and the latter’s concomitant crisis. The early literary doppelgängerin embodies the same destabilizing effect of eroding conceptual categories as her male counterpart, in which demarcations between identity and difference, self and other, and the absolutes of life and death are undone; but she introduces an added dimension: the “enticing abyss of the nothing” that is ascribed woman is actually within man and is understood in terms of sexual difference as seen through the lens of male anxiety. In other words, sexual difference is

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______________________________________________________________ misperceived as ontological difference - a difference that Žižek defines as “the bare minimum of a difference not between beings but between the minimum of an entity and the void, nothing.”11 As Weininger’s conviction inadvertently suggests, woman, created as a result of man’s division and invention, and by implication the corollary femininity of the doppelgängerin, is discursively constituted, an androcentric construct in which the actual woman is absent; the doppelgängerin functions as a magnifying mirror for the psychic disturbances of the male protagonist, a screen upon which he projects his own fears, desires, and the failure to coincide with himself. Within the narratives depicting the relationship between a male host and his female double, tropes of castration abound.12 Frequently the male character misconceives female sexual difference in terms of his own fears; that is to say, as castration - a pervasive and perverse malapropism for sexual difference - that violates the narcissistic conception of body integrity and its self-image as whole while generating the unbearable fear of loss. Castration becomes the metaphor for man’s own chronic incompleteness. Here, “castration” can also be understood as integral to the formation of subjectivity. Translated into Lacanese, “castration” implements the irrevocable split within the subject who is radically displaced yet constituted by the signifier.13 “Castration,” as Lacan writes, “means that jouissance [the manifestation of the Real] must be refused, so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder (l’échelle renversée) of the Law of desire.”14 “Castration” enables the grounding of symbolic subjectivity by enforcing the constitutive sacrifice of one’s being: by forfeiting jouissance, the maternal soma, and the Real. In other words, “castration” constitutes the psychic separation from the maternal pre-Oedipal realm of imaginary plenitude, a pre-abstracting existence anterior to the origin of the individuated ego. This traumatic “cut” of the figurative umbilical cord transforms jouissance into permanent insatiable desire; it thus introduces the very lack and desire that mobilises and is required for the entry into the Symbolic circuit. Since the gaps integral to the Symbolic register hinder the full representation of one’s being, the speaking subject is likewise lacking, split, and alienated from himself. “I identify myself in language,” Lacan says, “but only by losing myself in it like an object,” which results in the subject’s “lack-of-being” or lack-in-being” (manque à être).15 Consequently, the Lacanian cogito is torn asunder between what it is within the Symbolic and the fact that it is within the Real: “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.”16 Pure subjectivity, Žižek contends, is located in this “insurmountable gap” between substantial being and symbolic definition, between “what I am ‘in the real’” and “the symbolic mandate that procures my social identity: the primordial ontological fact is the void, the abyss … Every symbolic identity I acquire is ultimately nothing but a supplementary feature whose function is to fill this void.”17 In effect, Weininger’s masculine fantasy of the ontological nullity of

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______________________________________________________________ woman returns in the figure of the castrating doppelgängerin to haunt not only the intimate sexual borders of the masculine “I,” but also the borders of an existential nature. 2.

The Double Eyes of the Doppelgängerin “Ligeia” unremittingly presents us with the disquieting nature of blindness and unreliable vision, which not only suggests precarious insight, but also intimates the transposition of castration anxiety - in particular its relation to the role played by women, inasmuch as female genitalia have often been culturally construed as a signifier for castration.18 Freud’s discussion on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman in his essay “The ‘Uncanny’” focuses to a large extent on the role played by vision: the idea that the “anxiety about one’s eyes, the fear of going blind” is a displaced trope for castration anxiety.19 Blinding represents displaced castration fear, not only in terms of the substitutive relation between the eye and the male organ as Freud explicates, but also in terms of the castrated maternal body.20 Its terror is also of a visual nature; it is derived from the sight of something, or to be more precise, from something absent from sight: the negative perception of an absent maternal penis. Hence, it is befitting that among Freud’s manifold selected examples in “The ‘Uncanny,’” female genital organs are presented as unheimlich. They are the “entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning.” The uncanny marks the return of something “familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.”21 In this sense, our once intimate relationship with the heimlich womb - the inanimate state anterior to life - returns as a reversion of the repressed, thus becoming frightening and uncanny. Women’s sex organs pose an uncanny fear in more than one sense. In “Fetishism,” Freud states that “[p]robably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital … it is as though the last impression before the uncanny and traumatic one [the sight of the female genital] is retained as a fetish.”22 Although implicit, Freud himself failed to fully articulate the castration threat engendered by female genitalia in “The ‘Uncanny.’” Jane Marie Todd, in her article “The Veiled Woman in Freud’s ‘Das Unheimliche’,” keenly discerns Freud’s curious parapraxis in the 1919 edition of “The ‘Uncanny;’” here, “the name ‘Schleiermacher’ [which literally means ‘veilmaker’] is substituted for Schelling” whose definition of the uncanny Freud endorses.23 In his inadvertent, but telling, slip of the pen Freud unwittingly reveals how he himself is a veilmaker: by dismissing the uncanniness of the doll Olympia her hollow eyes in particular - in favour the castrating father-imago of the Sandman, Freud elides or veils the terrifying peril posed by the castrated

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______________________________________________________________ female body - “If he failed to see the veiled woman, if he averted his eyes, it was because he, too, was afraid of being blinded.”24 Visual ambiguity and ocular anxiety informs Poe’s “Ligeia” and this is most conspicuously rendered by Ligeia’s “most brilliant of black” eyes and the black and/or golden interior of the “ever accursed” bridal chamber-cumcrypt.25 These are weaved together forming a concatenating network that all share attributes associated with the phantasmagoric effect of the draperies whose arabesque figures are “made changeable in aspect”: the distorted and distorting light of the parti-coloured fires of the censer and the “leaden hue” of the tinted chamber window - entities which augment the changing appearance of the interior.26 As the chamber’s illusory quality, deceptive light, and Ligeia’s black yet luminous eyes suggest: vision is always double and duplicitous. Ligeia’s large eyes constitute the site for the narrator’s scopophiliacepistemophilia. They are “the source but also the failure for his analytic abilities”: they proffer the promise of acquiring a “wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden,” and without their medial function he is unable to gain insight.27 The description of her eyes is characterised by their transcendental nature: her eyes that are “far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race” and their “miraculous expansion” point to her excessive capacity for seeing and divine omniscience. For the narrator, when the peculiarity of her eyes becomes evident “in moments of intense excitement,” her beauty becomes “the beauty of beings either above or apart from the earth.” Her otherworldly eyes are likened to stellar bodies emitting light “her large and luminous orbs” - which render “vividly luminous” and legible the dark and occult passages of transcendentalist texts. With her waning health these texts become obfuscated; without “the radiant lustre of her eyes, letters, lambent and golden, grew duller than Saturnian lead.”28 Not only does her absence, that is, the loss of her eyes, create the narrator’s figurative blindness, who becomes a “child groping benighted”; but her eyes also represent the “failure of his analytic abilities” in the additional sense in that they themselves confound the narrator. Peering into the orbs of Ligeia, he tries in vain to “trace home [his] own perception of ‘the strange.’” “The ‘strangeness,’ however, which I found in the eyes … must, after all, be referred to the expression. Ah, word of no meaning!” Her eyes are of a textual nature, but for the narrator their expression resists legibility and becomes mere sound or an empty signifier. This corresponds with his accretive descriptions of Ligeia, excessive yet deficient; his efforts to describe her are futile: “[w]ords are impotent,” and he “would in vain attempt to portray the majesty, the quiet ease, of her demeanour, or the incomprehensible lightness and elasticity of her footfall. She came and departed as a shadow.”29 Owing to the inadequacy of language to fix her identity, Ligeia presents inexhaustible interpretations for both the narrator

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______________________________________________________________ and the reader. Her eyes are “the most brilliant of black,” a quality that is consonant with the texts whose “letters” are both “lambent and golden” and “duller than Saturnian lead.” She takes on the formal properties of the text itself in several senses: both Ligeia and “Ligeia,” the title of the tale itself, defy any single consistent reading. Ligeia’s incomplete name, unmarked by a paternal name, equates her with a plethoric yet incommensurate sign, Leerstellen, or subversive illegible interstices. Her evanescent and mutable form signifies her status as an incessantly shifting and floating signifier, whose underlying signified can only be approximated but never appropriated. Ligeia’s eyes are not only characterised as sublime heavenly bodies, but are also contradictorily encoded with chasmal infinity: “[w]hat was it that something more profound than the well of Democritus - which lay far within the pupils of my beloved?” Poe’s phrase “the well of Democritus” may be a reference to the latter’s conception of the bottomless void or empty space between atoms, or his axiom: “truth is in an abyss.” The secret and “strangeness” of Ligeia is deeply hidden in a most unheimlich place: in her eyes, a displaced trope for her sexuality - the loci of both an abyss and a divine ineffable truth beyond man’s reach. Woman can serve “allegorically as the site of truth which is beyond man’s reach. What he can’t know, namely woman’s lack … translates into a lack in his knowledge.”30 Hence, the narrator’s scopic obsession - his “intense scrutiny of Ligeia’s eyes” - that pertains to his epistemological quest conflates with his castration anxiety.31 The truth to be found in Ligeia’s eyes translates into the narrator’s (and Weininger’s) fear of woman’s latent and alluring boundlessness - “the enticing abyss of the nothing.” In “A Glance into the Archives of Islam,” Žižek speculates that perhaps the ultimate purpose behind the Islamic veil: …is precisely to sustain the illusion that there IS something, the substantial Thing, behind the veil? If, following Nietzsche’s equation of truth and woman, we transpose the feminine veil into the veil which conceals the ultimate Truth, the true stakes of the Muslim veil become even clearer. Woman is a treat [sic] because she stands for the “undecidability” of truth, for a succession of veils beneath which there is no ultimate hidden core; by veiling her, we create the illusion that there is, beneath the veil, the feminine Truth - the horrible truth of lie and deception, of course.32 This deceptive function of the veil also pertains to “Ligeia” which performs the notion of feminine masquerade. By veiling the feminine body, the nothingness an uncovering would disclose is avoided. According to Jacques-

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______________________________________________________________ Alain Miller, “[w]e no doubt cover women up because we cannot discover Woman. We can only invent her.”33 A deferred unveiling keeps the promise and illusion of truth alive and the threat of castration at bay. However, once removed, the mirage is dispelled: the seeker of truth only finds a gaping void, lack of meaning, and the emergence of death. Ligeia’s deification converts to radical reification when her duplicitous eyes in the final scene are unveiled as strictly black with their former luminosity absent. Her eyes are revealed as chasmal black holes signalling the horror vacui of a castrated being and this horrifying sight of “nothing” attests that castration can occur - or if read along Lacanian lines that symbolic “castration” has occurred. Hence, we understand the necessity the narrator has felt to assume the role of a “Schleiermacher”: to willingly blind himself from the blindness of the castrated body. 3.

Specularising the Uncanny Doppelgängerin The narrator’s bizarre decoration of the chamber suggests the revival of infantile complexes: “[f]or such follies, even in childhood, I had imbibed a taste, and now they came back to me.” Not only is Rowena’s corpse veiled, but this Schleiermacher obsessively veils “with child-like perversity” the entire chamber with the most remarkable “gorgeous and fantastic draperies”: …in the drapery of the apartment lay, alas! the chief fantasy of all. The lofty walls, gigantic in height … were hung from summit to foot, in vast folds, with a heavy and massive-looking tapestry - tapestry of a material which was found alike as a carpet on the floor, as a covering for the ottomans and the ebony bed, as a canopy for the bed, and as the gorgeous volutes of the curtains which partially shaded the window.34 The delusive appearances and phantasmagoric effect of the draperies reinforce the significance of their function - the disavowal of perception: the veil seems to indicate the presence of a hidden entity, while at the same time concealing the nothingness of the castrated body. The narrator assimilates the fetishist who disavows woman’s castration and instead posits the possibility of the phallic mother - the mother endowed with an imaginary penis or its substitutes.35 The fetishised draperies are marshalled to protect the narrator: they dissimulate a phallic veil that replaces and masks the pernicious lack of the castrated body. This is most evident in the depiction of Ligeia as a Medusa figure, whose decapitated head represents a fetish object par excellence. A sui generis text on this ambiguous motif is naturally Freud’s sketch, “Medusa’s Head.” Since “[t]o decapitate = to castrate,” Perseus’ decapitation of Medusa’s head violently inflicts upon her a vaginal wound.

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______________________________________________________________ The terror of Medusa stems from the sight of the castrated and “terrifying genitals of the Mother.” However, the phallic serpentine hair upon Medusa’s head alleviates the castration fear for the male observer: “frightening they may be in themselves, they nevertheless serve actually as a mitigation of the horror, for they replace the penis, the absence of which is the cause of the horror.” Furthermore, Freud infers the mythological petrifaction from the erection of the penis: “[t]his sight of Medusa’s head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone…becoming stiff means an erection…he is still in possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of the fact.” 36 The motif of Medusa remains latently present throughout the tale and is portrayed in its ubiquitous snake imagery: the references to the arabesque patterns of the chamber’s interior, the serpentine pattern of the vine clambering the turret, the censer - that is “Saracenic in pattern” from which light exudes in a writhing form “as if endued with a serpent vitality,” the multibranches of the candelabra which connote Medusa’s phallic hair; as well as the embedded poem “The Conqueror Worm” which thematically reticulates with the narrative.37 The most explicit reference to the terror of Medusa occurs before the final revelation of the resurrected Ligeia. A glance at Medusa’s head turns the viewer into stone, and likewise the narrator dares to glimpse the spectacle and is immediately petrified: I trembled not - I stirred not … the stature, the demeanour of the figure, rushing hurriedly through my brain, had paralyzed - had chilled me into stone. I stirred not - but gazed upon the apparition.38 Ligeia-Medusa serves as a fetish in that she both frightens and reassures; she functions as both a site of castration and what covers the lack: the illusion of penile possession. Although the fetishist denies the castrating sight, he can never fully eliminate the smouldering acknowledgement of its lack and the inadequacy of the substitute. The “nothing” to be transpired behind the veil of the penis’ representations always has the potential to violently emerge. Indeed, since this fetishistic logic operates ambivalently, it conflicts with Freud’s notion of unheimlich female sex organs, notably in the consequence of the fact that the indeterminate dialectic between veiling and unveiling is intrinsic to the uncanny. Freud relies heavily on Schelling’s definition of uncanniness as “everything…that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.”39 His definition involves both “hiding and uncovering, the primary function of a veil, but the phrase immediately following Schelling’s in the dictionary entry quoted by Freud is: ‘To veil the divine, to surround it with a certain Unheimlichkeit.’” In other words, both unveiling and veiling are uncanny: “In the first example, the Unheimliche is the unveiling that should not have taken place; in the second case, something,

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______________________________________________________________ the divine (?), is veiled in Unheimlichkeit.”40 Hence, any distinction between veiling and unveiling remains untenable, like that of the apparent opposition between heimlich and unheimlich. In fact, this ambiguous uncanny (un)veiling inheres in Freud’s linguistic approach - in which he traces the genealogy of the linguistic usage of unheimlich - in an attempt to define the uncanny. The word unheimlich denotes the disquieting unfamiliar and is ostensibly opposite of heimlich/heimisch. However, unheimlich constitutes not a simple negation of heimlich, of what is known and familiar, as the former is a scion of the latter: “the word ‘heimlich’ is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight.”41 Hence, unheimlich is only contrary to the first signification of heimlich, as heimlich develops in the direction of ambivalence until it coincides with its antithesis. In this sense, the negative prefix “un-” only negates the first root meaning of heimlich (the familiar, agreeable, homelike), but does not affect the second (the unfamiliar, concealed, furtive) as unheimlich seemingly does not signify the familiar, candid, and homey. Yet, this proposition is irreconcilable with Schelling’s definition of the uncanny as designating everything that ought to have been secret but has come to the fore; in this instance, the prefix “un-” operates on the secret and hidden involving its unveiling thus negating the second signification of heimlich, but not the first. Veiling is invariably subject to the puzzling operations of the prefix “un-,” being that its concealed secret equivocally implies both the unknown and confidential known. It, moreover, mimics the mode of the uncanny by making invisible what is already absent from sight, an act of annulment yet doubling, an act at once contrary yet marks the collapse with its antithesis. It is a blanketing yet divulging loud warning, as contradiction constitutes an internal condition of every uncanny entity. The inconclusive function of the uncanny prefix, being both redundant and incumbent, its unfixed role in Freud’s linguistic analysis and Schelling’s definition, as well as their chiastic combination, relates two contradictory processes at work, but without resolution or sublation; in other words, a nonteleological unresolved dialectical progression. Žižek emends the conventional view of the Hegelian triad by asserting that his “‘synthesis’ is not any kind of return to the thesis, some kind of healing of the wound made by the anti-thesis - the ‘synthesis’ is exactly the same as the anti-thesis; the only difference lies in a certain change of perspective.”42 It is not without reason that Freud regarded the double as the epitome of the uncanny: like the uncanny and its aberrant prefix, it annuls yet doubles; it is contrary with yet coincides with its host. Consonant with the prefix “un-,” a supplement in the Derridean sense to the word heimlich and the act of veiling,43 the double’s return as other entails its participation in a play of Derridean supplementary difference.44 As Derrida famously avers “Il

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______________________________________________________________ n’y a pas de hors-texte” [“There is no outside-of-the-text”]: “there has never been anything but writing, there has never been anything but supplements and substitutional significations which could only arise in a chain of differential relations.”45 Identity is created from difference, and the doppelgänger becomes the relational signifier and the supplementary mediation responsible for the impression of what it defers: the immediate presence of original identity; in other words, for the sense of a precedent host subject. Analogously, the fetish, in its capacity as a substitute, generates a surrogate penis for an original that was never there in the first place. Both the double and fetish are simultaneously contained in the notion of a Meduzian double, a combination that exacerbates the mocking of our belief in inviolable, original identity as well as the cherished idea of the subject as a coherent, self-identical, and unified whole. Ligeia is a Meduzian double who uncannily returns as other. According to Otto Rank and Freud, the double was originally a narcissistic wish-fulfilment “against the destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death.’” However, once “this stage had been surmounted, the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death … The ‘double’ has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons.”46 Correspondingly, the narrator adheres to an ambitious Faustian enterprise intending to transcend the bounds of life and death. Although his vision of immortality is in fact implemented, it becomes unintentionally and irretrievably secular. The final indelible image of Ligeia’s reconstitution in the flesh renders the possibility of life after death, yet asserts the return of a strictly physical and fatal corporeality abridging the synthesizing moment of transcendence. In a parallel fashion, Freud highlights how: [t]his invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of dreams, which is fond of representing castration by a doubling or multiplication of a genital symbol.47 Whereas the male double originally served as a guarantee against the threat of death, the female double, homologously, in the form of Medusa originally averted castration anxieties - an energetic denial of castration. Her phallic hair and the male double express two versions of the same doublingmechanism, in which the self is narcissistically protected from castration and death by a tropic replacement of excess, the unbounded doubling of the penis and self respectively. In the same way the male double outlines a reversal of aspect, the phallic female double returns as an uncanny harbinger of violent dismemberment in terms of the mutilated female genitals - the abysmal black holes of Ligeia’s eyes. It would be more accurate, however, to say that this

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______________________________________________________________ perception of the absent penis or “incompleteness” of the female body defines the subject in his own absence and incompleteness to himself. As harbingers of death and castration respectively, both the male and female double present a mortal danger directed at the body, dislocate the idea of presence, and adumbrate subjectivity in its modality of negativity. Regardless of its gender, the double features a host-subject split, fractured, and alienated from himself. The doubling-mechanism intended to ward off death and castration inverts its effect signalling its affiliation with the compulsive repetition of the death drive. The narrator is confronted with a dreadful sight, but the paralysing power of Ligeia’s gaze remains ambiguous. Does the sight of Ligeia repel and/or attract? Fetishism operates according to the paradoxical logic of seeing while not seeing. Similarly, Medusa summarises the perceptual duplicity of seeing vs. being seen. What gives rise to the process of petrifaction? Is it the narrator-observer’s sight of Ligeia-Medusa or is it the Meduzian gaze itself? Not only does the cause of the narrator’s meduzation present a fundamental ambiguity, but also its effect: castration or penile possession? Does Ligeia’s revival arouse the narrator’s terror or is his beloved’s return a cause for elation? In fact, the responsibility for petrifaction can be located with the narrator-observer. In the critical moment when he is chilled into stone, it is he who ultimately observes Ligeia and assumes the unconditional role of seer, “I stirred not - but gazed upon the apparition.” Ligeia does not open her eyes until after the unveiling of her ghastly cerements in which he himself is subjected to her observation and is turned into the object in the act of seeing - but here, the moment of meduzation has elapsed. The undecidability of the Meduzian fetish, its both/and logic, is undone in the final scene, as narrator himself states, “[h]ere then, at least … can I never - can I never be mistaken - these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes - of my lost love - of the lady - of the LADY LIGEIA.”48 Although the final unveiling and her abysmal black eyes-as-holes ostensibly suggest the disclosure of the nothingness of the castrated female, what this spectacle presents can neither be the phallic and/or castrated woman. The moment of peremptory certainty - that he can “never be mistaken” - cancels the undecidability and binaries of the fetish, suspends the logic of castration and the primacy of phallic value. Furthermore, the phallocentric functioning of the gaze, through which female castration is affirmed, is unsettled by Ligeia who looks back. Irigaray reminds us that according to Freud, “female sexuality can be graphed along the axes of visibility of (so-called) masculine sexuality,” insofar as visibility is understood to be the condition of presence. However: …the question should still be raised of the respective relationships between the gaze and sexual difference …

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______________________________________________________________ Unless all the potency and the difference (?) were displaced into the gaze(s)? So Freud will see, without being seen? Without being seen seeing? Without even being questioned about the potency of his gaze? … The gaze is at stake from the outset. Don’t forget, in fact, what ‘castration,’ or the knowledge of castration owes to the gaze.49 Correspondingly, the potency of the narrator’s gaze no longer persists without being questioned; he no longer sees without being seen, without being seen seeing. Ligeia’s dark eyes, no longer brilliant and reflective, lose their specular function. Thus, one can surmise that what the narrator glimpses is irreducible sexual difference defined by and for itself without recourse to a male standard; that is, sexual différance beyond relational difference amounting to equivalence - one that disrupts what Irigaray coined hommosexualité.50 Actual sexual difference is veiled as the castrated woman who, in turn, is veiled as phallic; thus, non-binary sexual difference is twice removed. Does this doubly veiled woman ultimately divest her ghastly cerements? But here at the climax of the tale - meant to afford a final anagnorisis - the tale abruptly yet appropriately ceases, seeing that sexual différance can only remain unrepresentable in a signifying system that privileges the signifier of the phallus. In Irigaray’s Spéculum de l’autre femme [Speculum of the other woman], she argues how the specular logic of the “self-same” underlying Western philosophical discourse is, in the words of Toril Moi, …incapable of representing femininity/woman other than as the negative of its own reflection … The thinking man not only projects his desire for a reproduction of himself (for his own reflection) on to the woman; he is … incapable of thinking outside this specular structure … Woman is not only the Other, as Simone de Beauvoir discovered, but is quite specifically man’s Other: his negative or mirrorimage.51 Hence, Weininger’s comment on woman’s lack of ontological actuality surprisingly proves equitable when modified and read in the light of the Lacan’s infamous and often misunderstood proposition “la femme n’existe pas”: woman’s non-being results not from the non-existence of female empirical reality, but from the inability of Woman to be adequately defined and inscribed into the Symbolic texture - of which Ligeia’s lack of patronymic also betokens.52 As otherness qua ontological category is inevitably translated into other-than-self, the sexually different other irreducible to interiority is misconstrued as a relational other within the

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______________________________________________________________ linguistico-cultural register of a patriarchal paradigm. Weininger, however, as Žižek notes, falls short in recognizing that the “nothingness” he discerns in woman constitutes “the very negativity that defines the notion of the subject”: “Weininger’s aversion to woman bears witness to the fear of the most radical dimension of subjectivity itself: of the Void which ‘is’ the subject.”53 His longed for epiphany is turned on its head, since “Fear of the Double is fear of self-knowledge.”54 “Ligeia” forces us to rethink and emend the categories of the doppelgänger by resisting the latter’s monopolisation by one sex: it opens up alternate ways of conceptualizing the bodily and sexual economy of the doppelgänger. However, it is important to differentiate between the doppelgängerin’s heterogeneous iterations. The doppelgängerin presented in this tale is viewed through a male optic and thus merely mimics sexual difference. Hence, she does not delineate a subjectivity that differs sexually from itself, nor does she designate a radical alterity within or divided states of the psyche of women, but rather the irreducible existential lacunae within male consciousness; in other words, the specularised doppelgängerin dons the veil of a sexed doppelgängerin. According to the myth of Medusa, Perseus can never catch a direct glance of her actual appearance, since he makes use of his reflecting shield as a mirror in order to avoid petrifaction. He can only gaze at her refracted specular-image. Her true (sexual) difference exceeds representation, and thus she is only present as an index of the unrepresentable. The mirrored simulacrum of Ligeia-Medusa’s castrateddecapitated head constitutes the reflections and projections of a castrative incompleteness hidden deep within the narrator’s own psyche: the intolerable ontological nullity around which subjectivity is structured - that intimate, yet abysmal part of the self which we endeavour not to see. On the other hand, if we ventured to look at the Medusa straight on, we would in Cixous’ words discover that “she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”55

Notes 1

[We are united, not by love but by horror; that must be why I love her so.] 2 Poe’s doppelgänger narratives include among others “William Wilson,” “The Man of the Crowd,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” “The Purloined Letter,” “The Cask of Amontillado;” and of the female variety: “Morella,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Oval Portrait.” 3 R Alter, ‘Playing Host to the Doppelgänger,’ Times Literary Supplement, 1986, p. 1190.

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[no animal is made afraid by seeing its reflection in a mirror, but no man would be able to spend his life in a room surrounded with mirrors. Or can this fear, the fear of the doppelgänger (the female is characteristically devoid of this fear) be explained “biologically”, “Darwinistically”? One need only mention the word doppelgänger in order to call forth acute heart-palpitation in most men.] O Weininger, Sex and Character with Interlinear Translation, R Willis (trans.), pp. 267-68. viewed on 25 March 2007 <www.theabsolute.net/ottow/geschlecht.pdf>. My translation. 5 [Female doppelgängers are not heard of ... There is a deep fear that only the man knows.] Ibid. p. 269. 6 [The woman has no part in ontological reality.] Ibid, p. 389. 7 S. Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality, Verso, London & New York, 2005, pp. 140-41. 8 Robert Rogers, in his psychoanalytic study The Double in Literature, distinguishes between subjective and objective doubling. The former “represents conflicting drives, orientations, or attitudes without respect to their relation to other people,” while the latter “displays inner conflict expressed in terms of antithetical or incompatible attitudes toward other people.” R Rogers, The Double in Literature, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1970, p. 5. 9 L Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, G C Gill (trans.), Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1985, p. 133. 10 [that deepest fear in the man: the fear of the woman, that is the fear of meaninglessness: that is the fear of the enticing abyss of the nothing.] Weininger, op. cit., p. 405. 11 S Žižek, The Parallax View, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2006, p. 24. 12 Other examples of doppelgänger narratives that feature fatal female doubles while incorporating various forms of figurative castration include Poe’s humorous grotesque “The Spectacles,” in which blindness precipitates an oedipal embrace with a corpselike old hag: a nearsighted young man refusing to wear spectacles courts what he believes to be an attractive young woman, but who is revealed to be his eighty-two year old great, great grandmother. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë’s memorable madwoman Bertha, the title character’s double, ignites a fire that engenders Rochester’s blinding. Princess Langwidere, in L. Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz, owns a monstrous cabinet containing her thirty interchangeable heads; and wishes to add Dorothy’s head to her collection in exchange for No. 26. Langwidere literally becomes a different person for each head: “[t]here was only one

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______________________________________________________________ trouble with No. 17; the temper that went with it … and it often led the Princess to do unpleasant things which she regretted when she came to wear her other heads.” The castration theme in this tale becomes apparent when Langwidere’s detachable heads are compared to Medusa’s decapitated head. In Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, the female protagonist’s encounter with her doppelgängerin results her ambiguous demise in a cauldron of boiling broth with one carrot and two onions as her companions. Matthew “Monk” Lewis’ bestseller presents us with omnifarious visual deceptions, suspect sanctified exteriors, and oedipal scenarios. The engine and impetus of Ambrosio’s corruption, the shape shifting and transgendered double Rosario/Matilda, both Madonna and demon incites the transgressive excesses of the fallen hero’s desire. His final torturous death can be read as transposed castration, traditional punishment for incestuous relations. The episode of the Bleeding Nun, one of the most haunting moments in The Monk, relates a similar triangular configuration of male host and two female doubles to that of “Ligeia;” and both tales, in addition, share conspicuous similarities indicative of castration in their most celebrated scenes. In a chiastic structure of mistaken identity, Raymond, intending to elope with Agnes disguised as the legendary Bleeding Nun, unwittingly absconds with the actual Bleeding Nun, who he mistakes for Agnes. The spectral nun’s subsequent nocturnal visits to his chamber are characterised by unveilings revealing “an animated corpse”: “She lifted up her veil slowly … her eyeballs, fixed steadfastly upon me, were lustreless and hollow. I gazed upon the spectre with horror … I remained in the same attitude inanimate as a statue;” and like Raymond, the narrator in the final scene of “Ligeia” is paralyzed and petrified “into stone. I stirred not but gazed upon the apparition … she let fall from her head, unloosened, the ghastly cerements … And now slowly opened her eyes.” The significance of this germane scene will be elaborated upon ensuing. See also L F Baum, L. Frank Baum’s Original Oz Series, Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax Ltd., London, 2005, p. 95; M G Lewis, The Monk: A Romance, Penguin Books Ltd., London, 1998, p. 140; and E A Poe, Selected Tales, Penguin Books Ltd., London, 1994, pp. 63-64. 13 Within both the Freudian and Lacanian paradigm, castration initiates the process whereby one becomes a sexed subject, which is inaugurated by a paternal injunction that severs the dyadic unity between mother and infant. However, according to Lacan’s revisionary interpretation of Freudian castration, “castration” is to be understood in a wider sense as defining a structural aspect of language, for which the “phallus” is the structuring principle: a signifier of lack and sexual difference. Lacan’s notion of “castration” is to be distinguished from its thematic notion - the literal fear of losing an actual bodily organ - that occurs on an experiential level; castration

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______________________________________________________________ “is insoluble by any reduction to biological givens.” Thus “castration” is not a threat that awaits the subject prohibiting antecedent incestuous desire, as it is for Freud. It has already occurred: we are always already “castrated.” Hence, forbidden desire is created as an effect of “castration.” In order to distinguish between the Freudian and Lacanian notion of castration, the latter will be accompanied by scare quotes. J. Lacan, Ecrits. A Selection, A. Sheridan (trans.), Tavistock Publications, London, 1977, p. 282. 14 Ibid, p. 324. 15 Ibid, p. 86. 16 Ibid, p. 166. 17 Žižek, Metastases of Enjoyment, p. 144. 18 By presenting the notion of castration, I do not unconditionally endorse psychoanalytically based theories of sexual difference. As Juliet Mitchell points out “psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a patriarchal society but an analysis of one.” Likewise, for Luce Irigaray, rather than rejecting psychoanalysis as futile, “[i]t is more a question of displaying its still inoperative implications. To say that although Freudian theory certainly gives us something that can shake the whole philosophical order of discourse, it paradoxically remains submissive when it comes to the definition of sexual difference.” Indeed, in the spirit of Irigaray, it is rather the fuller implications and preteritions of an androcentric theoretical economy that will be illustrated ensuing. J Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1975, p. xv. Irigaray quoted in T Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, Routledge, London & New York, 1988, p. 129. 19 S Freud, ‘The ‘Uncanny’’, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, V B Leitch, et al. (ed.), W. W. Norton & Co., Inc, London & New York, 2001, p. 939. 20 The threat of castration can be affected by way of two procedures. In contrast to the direct threat of castration posed by the father precipitating the subsidence of the oedipal phase, the maternal body plays an indirect role. On apprehending the anatomical differences between the sexes, the deemed maternal absence of a male organ, the child’s “infantile theory of sexuality” i.e., the theory that every human being, regardless of sex, is equipped with a penis - is replaced by a new assumption: that females have been castrated, which in turn renders the possibility of castration visible to the child. S. Freud, ‘On the Sexual Theories of Children’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, J. Strachey (ed.), Hogarth Press, London, 1953-1974, p. 207.

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Freud, ‘The ‘Uncanny’’, pp. 944-47. S Freud, ‘Fetishism,’ The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, V B Leitch, et al. (ed.), W. W. Norton & Co., Inc, London & New York, 2001, p. 954. My italics. 23 J M Todd, ‘The Veiled Woman in Freud’s ‘Das Unheimliche,’” Signs, Vol. 11 (3), 1986, p. 522. 24 Ibid, p. 523, p. 528. 25 Poe, op. cit., p. 50, p. 56. 26 “[T]he rays of either the sun or moon, passing through [the pane], fell with a ghastly lustre on the objects within.”Ibid, p. 57. 27 E Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, Manchester UP, Manchester, 1992, p. 331. 28 Poe, op. cit., pp. 50-53. 29 Ibid, pp. 49-54. 30 Bronfen, op. cit., p. 264. 31 Poe, op. cit., pp. 50-51. 32 S Žižek, ‘A Glance into the Archives of Islam,’ Lacan dot com, viewed on 28 January 2008 . 33 Quoted in E Wright, Lacan and Postfeminism, Icon Books Ltd., Cambridge, 2000, p. 37. 34 Poe, op. cit., pp. 56-58. 35 The Freudian schema of the fetish constitutes an operation of undecidability that permits the feminine body to be seen as both whole and castrated, since the construction of the fetish admits two contradictory premises simultaneously: “both the disavowal and the affirmation of … castration.” The fetishist “has retained that belief [that women have a penis] but he has also given it up.” Hence, the fetish functions to allay man’s castration anxiety, to elude the threat that sexual difference represents to his narcissism. Freud, ‘Fetishism’, pp. 954-955. 36 S Freud, ‘Medusa’s Head,’ Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, Collier, New York, 1993, pp. 212-13. 37 Poe, op. cit., p. 57. 38 Ibid, pp. 63-64. 39 Freud, ‘The ‘Uncanny,’’ p. 934. 40 Todd, op. cit., pp. 521-22. 41 Freud, ‘The ‘Uncanny’’, p. 933. 42 S Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, London & New York, 1989, p. 176. 22

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Comparatively, for Lacan, the veil is the supplement for the phallus; in other words, the veil both generates and constitutes the simulacra of the phallus that was never there in the first place. 44 Derrida’s logic of supplementarity proposes the idea that the original is created as an effect of its supplement; and signifies how the entity supplemented is found to need supplementation as it, after examination, is shown to have the same qualities originally ascribed to the supplement. See J Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, pp. 9-14. 45 J Derrida, ‘That Dangerous Supplement,’ Of Grammatology, G C Spivak (trans.), Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1992, p. 159. 46 Freud, ‘The ‘Uncanny’’, pp. 940-41. 47 Ibid, p. 940. 48 Poe, op. cit., p. 64. My emphasis. 49 Irigaray, op. cit., pp. 47-48. 50 Hommosexualité designates the homogeneity of a same-sex system, in which sexual difference is defined in terms of one denomination: the unitary presence or absence of the penis/phallus. To “castrate woman,” as Irigaray writes of the Freudian/Lacanian paradigm “is to inscribe her in the law of the same desire, of the desire for the same.” Hence, the male/female binary remains within a single sexual economy, a male universalism that merely dissimulates a difference between the sexes but is, in fact, a disavowal of this difference. Likewise, the phallic mother and the fetish are to be subsumed under the heading of hommosexualité as they both serve as a conduit for a phallic economy. Ibid, p. 55. 51 Moi, op. cit., pp. 132-33. 52 “[E]xistence is here synonymous with symbolisation, integration into the symbolic order - only what is symbolised fully ‘exists’ … Neither Woman nor the sexual relationship possess a signifier of their own, neither can be inscribed into the signifying network, they resist symbolisation.” S Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1992, p. 136. 53 Žižek, Metastases of Enjoyment, pp. 143-45. 54 P Coates, The Double and the Other: Identity as Ideology in Post-Romantic Fiction, Macmillan Press Ltd., Houndsmill & London, 1988, p. 3. 55 H Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’ K Cohen & P Cohen (trans.), Signs Vol. 1 (4), 1976, p. 885.

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Bibliography Alter, R., ‘Playing Host to the Doppelgänger’. Times Literary Supplement, 1986, p. 1190. Baum, L. F., L. Frank Baum’s Original Oz Series. Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax Ltd., London, 2005. Bronfen, E., Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1992. Cixous, H., ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’. K. Cohen & P. Cohen (trans.), Signs Vol. 1 (4), 1976, pp. 875-93. Coates, P., The Double and the Other: Identity as Ideology in Post-Romantic Fiction. Macmillan Press Ltd., Houndsmill & London, 1988. Culler, J., Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000. Derrida, J., “That Dangerous Supplement”, in Of Grammatology, G. C. Spivak (trans.), Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1992. Freud, S., “Fetishism”, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, V. B. Leitch, et al. (ed.), W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., London & New York, 2001, pp. 952-56. ―― . “Medusa’s Head”, in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, Collier, New York, 1993, pp. 212-13. ―― . “On the Sexual Theories of Children”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, J. Strachey (ed.), Hogarth Press, London, 1953-1974. ―― . “The Uncanny’’, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, V. B. Leitch, et al. (ed., W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., London & New York, 2001, pp. 929-52. Irigaray, L., Speculum of the Other Woman. G. C. Gill (trans.), Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1985.

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______________________________________________________________ Lacan, J., Ecrits. A Selection. A. Sheridan (trans.), Tavistock Publications, London, 1977. Lewis, M. G., The Monk: A Romance. Penguin Books Ltd., London, 1998. Mitchell, J., Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1975. Moi, T., Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. Routledge, London & New York, 1988. Poe, E. A., Selected Tales. Penguin Books Ltd., London, 1994. Rogers, R., The Double in Literature. Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1970. Todd, J. M., “The Veiled Woman in Freud’s ‘Das Unheimliche’”, Signs, Vol. 11 (3), 1986, pp. 519-28. Weininger, O., Sex and Character with Interlinear Translation. 2nd Ed. R. Willis (trans.), 2005, pp. 267-405, viewed on 25 March 2007. <www.theabsolute.net/ottow/geschlecht.pdf>. Wright, E., Lacan and Postfeminism. Icon Books Ltd., Cambridge, 2000. Žižek, S., ‘A Glance into the Archives of Islam.’ Lacan dot com, viewed on 28 January 2008, . ―― . Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1992. ―― . The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality. Verso, London & New York, 2005. ―― . The Parallax View. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2006. ―― . The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, London & New York, 1989.

Part III Fear at the Movies

Bringing the Dead to Life - Animation and the Horrific Steven Allen Abstract Whilst animation and horror are not unfamiliar bedfellows, this paper examines how two recent films, Corpse Bride (2005) and Monster House (2006), have breathed new life into the tradition. As would be expected, the resulting merger compels a more light-hearted treatment of the horrific, with animation retaining its restrictive function as a comedic genre, culturally embodied in the pejorative term cartoon. The language of fear is therefore partly distilled through a blithe treatment of genre conventions (both the gothic and the comedic). However, the combination has its benefits too. Although a tension exists between the nostalgic meditation upon the gothic film, and the showcased new developments in the respective animation styles, these films generate a productive evocation of the uncanny through the clash. In part, grotesque fears are softened, allowing a site for negotiation of anxieties and terror. But more than that, within such an aesthetic of the familiar/unfamiliar, the securities and ideologies of marriage and family are revealed as tenuous, with a central element of my paper being an examination of the ways in which these social institutions are structured as safe yet unsafe. Through bringing to the surface the stresses of passionate relationships (both pursued and lost), a particular focus is placed upon gender and its fearful incarnations, especially in respect of overwhelming desires. With both films exploring the emotions of love and lost love, a key question will therefore be how the weight of the gothic tradition imbues a tone of remembrance, thus enabling Corpse Bride and Monster House to tackle the harrowing topic of bereavement within a framework of hope. In effect, the fear of losing a loved one, and the possibility of overcoming that fear, structure a reflection on romance and rage, duty and decay, amidst the finite nature of everlasting love. Key Words: Animation, Corpse Bride, Gothic terror, Monster House, uncanny. ***** 1.

Uncanny Aesthetic In spite of, or perhaps because the animated film has been seen as a predominantly children’s genre, animation and fear are almost inextricably linked for most people that have grown up with Disney films of the 1930s

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______________________________________________________________ and 40s. Although noted for their saccharine characterisations and the ‘they all lived happily ever after endings’, they dealt with such traumatic themes as would-be infanticide (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937) and witnessing the death of parent (Bambi, 1942). The short animation, or cartoon, has often exploited an even more Gothic sense of terror, for example MGM’s Bottles of 1936 featured a pharmacist falling asleep in his apothecary, where his potions come to life and he is pursued by spirits of ammonia. Such films are the antecedents of the texts I wish to discuss in this paper. Corpse Bride from 2005 and Monster House of 2006, reinterpret Gothic terror in relation to marriage and gender. Alongside an exploration of these twin elements of the narrative, I will focus on how a nostalgic display of genre conventions produces a surprising complement to the sophisticated animation techniques foregrounded in both films. In combination, an uncanny space is generated within which the two films interrogate the fear of losing a loved one, and the possibility of overcoming that fear. With Corpse Bride, Tim Burton directs a tale of Victor, a shy groom, mistakenly marrying a dead woman when he practises his wedding vows on the eve of his big day, and places the ring on what he thinks is a branch, but is in fact a corpse bride’s skeletal finger. The central thrust of the narrative is that the corpse bride, Emily, was murdered on the eve of her wedding by her fiancé, and although falling in love with Victor, sacrifices herself to enable him to attain the love she was denied. Crucial to the look of the film is the use of stop-motion animation - a form of filmmaking with its horror ancestry closely linked to the 1930s’ version of King Kong (1933) - and which relies on manipulating puppets by small increments between each shot. Although reviews such as Peter Whittle’s in the Sunday Times referred to it as an ‘oldfashioned’ technique,1 the project was also noted for its technical innovations, including sophisticated mechanics within the puppets to enable subtle facial expressions and movements, and the application of much smaller digital cameras to get closer to the figures. The characters therefore register as inanimate puppets, but take on a more expressive, life-like form. Consequently, although traditional, the film was simultaneously seen as inventively new. The film’s aesthetic was far more traditional though, borrowing greatly from generic conventions of both the Gothic novel and horror cinema. Mostly set at night, disquieting spaces are established in both the wood and a church, whilst the dead eerily come to life, but with the underworld more colourful and alive than the grey-hued, moralistic land of the living. It is a phantasmagoric space. Monster House, although featuring a far less Gothic aesthetic, relies on the generic trope of a haunted house for its fear. All the local children are terrified of old Mr Nebbercracker, but the threat is not him, it is his house. Three school children, tellingly on the verge of puberty, discover that the building is infused with the presence of Mr Nebbercracker’s dead wife,

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______________________________________________________________ Constance, an entity he is afraid of losing even though he is terrified the anthropomorphic home will devour the neighbourhood children. The film used the same performance-capture technology as The Polar Express (2004), whereby human actors are recorded and then traced via digital postproduction animation. The technique provides a highly detailed style of animation, which many reviewers saw as disconcerting. The spectator fails to achieve the point of empathy normally experienced with animation because the character feels not sufficiently human or inhuman. The effect was softened in Monster House by having a greater number of imperfections and textures, but was enhanced through modelling the humans as if they were ‘articulate puppets made out of high-density foam’.2 In effect, they are humanistic puppets. The disturbing response generated by the style of animation can be interpreted via Freud’s conception of ‘the “uncanny”’; indeed, the visual effect is now described as the ‘uncanny valley’. In a much cited work in respect of the Gothic, Freud explores the meanings of heimlich (or homely) and its converse, unheimlich, (the unhomely or uncanny), which he sees as the opposite to what is familiar.3 However, his assertion is that ‘[t]he uncanny is that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’. 4 In other words, there is a link back to an origin or former state via memory. The aesthetics of the two films have this combination at their core. Although using very different styles of animation, Visual Effects Supervisor on Monster House, Jay Redd, articulated a shared vision: ‘[w]e wanted it to look photo-real like stop motion … like Corpse Bride. We wanted it to feel tangible’.5 Three-dimensional detail, synthetic facial textures, but with expressive human features, and virtuoso (virtual) camera movements form a conglomeration of technological sophistication, but which inherently reference an older style of animation, that is long familiar. In effect, there is a collision and partial coalescing of old and new, which evokes the uncanny. 2.

Nostalgia I will return to the notion of the uncanny later in my paper, but it is important to situate this alongside the films’ application of nostalgia to explore the fear of bereavement. Generically, the two narratives draw upon a heritage of terror films. One example from both should suffice to demonstrate the point. The corpse bride, Emily, features a malevolent version of Jiminy Cricket in the form of a maggot in her head with a face and voice modelled on Peter Lorre. A staple caricature from Warner Brothers’ cartoons of the 1930s and 40s, Lorre’s persistent filmic persona was described in a

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______________________________________________________________ Twentieth-Century Fox biography as Hollywood’s ‘one-man chamber of horrors’. He is distinctive shorthand for terror. Monster House borrows from the Gothic tradition of haunted houses, as I have mentioned, but in particular, references cinema. Charlene Bunnell pinpoints The Shining (1980) as a key example of Gothic’s transition into film,6 and tellingly, it too features a character, played by Jack Nicholson, becoming part of the fabric of a building, the Overlook hotel. That we should make such a link is made clear by the opening of Monster House, where a young girl cycles her tricycle along the street, and the camera follows her in a virtual Steadicam effect, just as a young boy had been followed around the corridors of the hotel in the earlier film. These two examples illustrate how the films, although full of humour, are situated within an appreciative reflection on the genres of terror. We might also note that the narratives reflect a certain idealism for childhood, or at least, pre-adult times. In Monster House, DJ begins the film by saying he is too old to go trick-or-treating, but at the end, he and his friend Chowder run off dressed as pirates to do exactly that. In Corpse Bride, when Victor travels to the underworld, his dead wife gives him a wedding present of his old family pet - now, only a skeleton, the dog is naturally somewhat confused when told to play dead, but still offers the comfort Victor needs. The nostalgia in the films is therefore thematic as well as self-reflexive of animation and the horror genre. Both films centre on the fear of letting go of the past, and celebrate the pleasures of previous behaviour and events. Ultimately then, the films attempt to articulate the contradiction of nostalgia: it is a potent tool for coping with the progression of time, but also a barrier to the necessary progression of life. My thoughts on nostalgia are guided by Maryse Fauvel’s study of two French films, the documentary Gleaners and I (Varda, 2000) and the animation The Triplets of Belleville (Chomet, 2003).7As with Corpse Bride and Monster House, these films foreground technology in a reflexive manner, notably in terms of digital techniques and equipment, but whilst Fauve positions it in respect of an ironic tension with nostalgia, my focus is on how the combination functions within an overarching portrayal of the uncanny. Furthermore, where Fauvel sees the past being recalled in her films, but ultimately nostalgia is rejected in a process of recycled renewal, Corpse Bride and Monster House utilise nostalgia in tandem with an exploration of the fear of love and loss, and so celebrate its importance alongside the need to let go. Therefore, what Fauvel sees as the ‘impossibility of indulging in nostalgia’8 is replaced by its necessity, at least temporarily, as a means to alleviate the pain of loss. The two films achieve this by different means however. In her book The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Svetlana Boym pays particular attention to the etymology of nostalgia. The word comes from

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______________________________________________________________ nostos: a return home, and algia/algos: meaning pain, but also a longing. Applying these twin components, Boym distinguishes between restorative and reflective nostalgias. Restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps. Reflective nostalgia dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance. […] Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time.9 Although some overlap, it is not difficult to distinguish between my two films along these lines. Monster House quite literally features the rebuilding of a lost home. Transmogrified into the domestic embodiment of Constance, the house takes on the countenance of a human as it attempts to devour all children that come near, but shifts back into wood, bricks and mortar when adults appear. Deep in the cellar is a shrine, complete with concrete sarcophagus, constructed by Nebbercracker in reverence to his accidentally-killed wife. The house is a monument to the past: an example of restorative nostalgia. In Corpse Bride, the tone is one of reflective nostalgia. The ruins of the film are the lives and degenerated bodies of the dead from all ages, complete with falling off limbs, sword wounds and corpse-less heads. Above all else, both Emily initially, and later Victor when taken to the underworld, are dreaming of a different time and place they think of as home. That Corpse Bride promotes a reflective nostalgia is also shown by Victor’s reaction to his dead dog, Scraps. Initially pleased as the dog greets him, he suddenly stops short when Scraps jumps on the bench, and Victor remembers that his mother did not approve of that, before voicing the damning comment that she ‘never approved of anything’. His nostalgia is tempered so that the yearning contains a critical awareness of what was bad, and his fear of loss is moderated. By contrast, Nebbercracker, although revealed via a flashback to have had a tempestuous relationship with Constance, declares, in the present tense, ‘I love her so much’. His emotions are shaped by a restorative nostalgia that obscures his current relationship with his wife/house/housewife. Fear permeates their relationship, not only his fear of losing her but also his fear of what she might do as the monster house. The relationship of fear to nostalgia is therefore key in the depiction of bereavement. When Nebbercracker and the children attempt to destroy the monster house, he suddenly has doubts and proclaims, ‘But if I let her go, I’ll have no one’. Just as many people when faced with the death of a partner feel unable to alter or abandon the home they shared together because it somehow

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______________________________________________________________ embodies the deceased, Nebbercracker earlier stated ‘the house is her’. It is only through the promised friendship of the children that he can finally brave letting go. Like Nebbercracker, Emily in Corpse Bride clings to Victor when she believes she can have the love she was denied by her murder. She attempts to rebuild her lost life, but with Victor. However, on seeing his bride-to-be, Victoria, Emily achieves a critical distance, and lets him go. Emily too can now find liberation from her fear of being unmarried and left on her own. It is in this respect that nostalgia helps one to cope with the pain of loss. Only when it is more manageable though can it shift from restorative nostalgia to reflective nostalgia. That both Nebbercracker and Emily relinquish the memories of a lost love and overcome the fear of isolation is justified by the morality of their decision to sacrifice themselves for the collective good. But I wish to suggest that our own insecurities do not enable this to be sufficient justification for the narrative conclusions of separation. Like Nebbercracker and Emily, we hope for a reconciliation with the past; we recognise the fear of losing a partner and our need for wistful remembrance to cope with the parting. To surmount these feelings, and allow the narrative closures to be pleasurable, the texts are constructed so that we are obliged to read the events in a manner that fits that most platitudinous of expressions for bereavement: ‘it’s for the best’. Such an interpretation is achieved through mapping the monstrousness onto marriage and in particular the female. 3.

Marriage and Gender as Monster Marriage is seen as obligation in Corpse Bride. Victoria’s aristocratic but destitute parents, the Everglots, sing that their daughter’s marriage will ‘provide a ticket to our rightful place’. And when Victoria questions if she might like the man in her arranged marriage, her mother answers ‘Do you suppose your father and I like each other?’ Love becomes something to be dreamed of, either as aspiration or nostalgia, as marriage destroys it. Or, we might reverse that and say that the terror contained within passionate love is discovered to be too powerful to persist, and so is curtailed by marriage. Either way, whilst Victoria still has hope, Victor is shown to be confused and fearful. At his wedding rehearsal, he ominously becomes muddled and stumbles over whether he wishes to marry or not. He later confesses he was ‘terrified of marriage’. That marriage is a fool’s errand is confirmed by the drunk skeleton proclaiming, ‘Women, you can’t live with them, you can’t live with…’, before collapsing without finishing the phrase with the negative assertion. DJ’s parents in Monster House seem more united, but he is left in the hands of a female babysitter for the duration of the film, and she is shown to be fixated by boyfriends, blackmailing DJ to enable

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______________________________________________________________ her to spend time with one. And as we have seen, the Nebbercrackers’ marriage is certainly flawed and destructive. That the problems emanate from female desire is also clear. I noted earlier that the three children in Monster House are reaching puberty, and this is joked about both by them and through the narrative. When partly devoured by the house as the hall rug transforms into a tongue, Chowder asks what the sack of hanging balls are in the hallway. Jenny explains it is the uvula, to which he knowingly replies, ‘so it’s a girl house’. Little wonder that Stephen Brown comments that ‘[t]he image can inevitably be read as a vagina dentata motif, the concept taken up by Freud to explain male castration anxieties’.10 That we have now located the female body and its emotions as the site of the uncanny in the film should not be a surprise. It is a familiar feature of horror films. And yet, the emphasis on the need for love throughout both films, and the fear being defined in terms of being alone, disguises the reactionary element. Longing for love is the pain of the corpse bride; Emily poignantly admits that although not burnt by the candle flame, her emotional suffering is as real as those of the living. It is her desire to overcome this pain that makes her pursue Victor and become the clinging monster that threatens Victoria’s union with her groom. Clearly any man would do for Emily as she had no choice in who would wake her from her death slumber, and it was her desires that prompted her murder in the first place, as she had eloped with a man who had only wanted her family’s money. Whether Victoria offers the same threat is debatable. She says that she always ‘hoped to find someone I was deeply in love with’, but she does not play music, a trope that links Victor and Emily, and which Lady Everglot has told Victoria is ‘improper for a young lady’ as it is ‘too passionate’. Emotional excess in a woman is thus cast as dangerous, the point being comically reinforced by the red - back spider introducing herself to Victor with the phrase, ‘Married huh, I’m a widow’. The implication is that although mourning, Nebbercracker and Emily are actually not losing very much. Nebbercracker has become a scary recluse, who frightens the local children, only as a ruse to hide the true monstrousness of Constance. Emily, although not so terrifying, has lain dormant alone in the woods in the hope of rekindling a romance, but realises she must release herself from such futile dreams. When letting go, both Emily and Constance disintegrate into clouds, the former of butterflies, the latter a contented figure in smoke. The dispersal of these forms suggests the omniscient nature we are frequently encouraged to imagine in respect of the dead, and thus the fear of being alone is diffused as well.

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______________________________________________________________ 4.

Conclusion So what can we conclude? Monster House or Corpse Bride, both are horrific forms of the female overcome with emotion. Nebbercracker protects Constance by scaring off children out of duty, whilst Victor says he will still marry Emily as he made her a promise. The men, although admitting to emotions of fear and love, remain rational, whilst the women are still largely defined by their emotions. Such a reactionary depiction is disappointing. Nonetheless, in dealing with the fear of bereavement in two animated films pitched at a family audience, we are witnessing a trend that includes Bambi, but in a radically variant form that explores nostalgia as a means of coping with the pain. An aesthetic that raids genre conventions is able to enhance the feelings of longing and loss, whilst love is shown to be both desirable and terrifying. The uncanny nature of bereavement is thus shown - we cling to what we have lost, but know we must let go, eventually. That love is strange and overwhelming is not new, nor that desire can terrify both us and others, but that the horror lies not in death, but our ways of coping with it, might just be saying something not often heard in a horror film.

Notes 1

P Whittle, “Honey, I married a zombie”, Sunday Times – Culture, 23 October 2005, p. 13. 2 A Thompson, “Monster House has latest FX amenities”, Entertainment News (Reuters), 28 July 2006, viewed on 1 August 2007, . 3

S Freud, “The “Uncanny”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. xvii, Hogarth Press, London, 1955, p. 220. 4 Ibid., p. 220. 5 Cited in Thompson, op. cit. 6 C Bunnell, “The Gothic: A Literary Genre’s Transition to Film” in Planks of Reason, ed. B. K. Grant, Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Md.; London, 1984/1996, pp.79-100. 7 M Fauvel, “Nostalgia and Digital Technology: The Gleaners and I (Varda, 2000) and The Triplets of Belleville (Chomet, 2003) as reflective genres’, Studies in French Cinema, 5:3, 2005. 8 Ibid., p. 219. 9 S Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, Basic Books, New York, 2001, p. 41. 10 S Brown, “Monster House - Review”, Sight and Sound, 16:9, September 2006, p. 61.

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Bibliography Boym, S., The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, New York, 2001. ―― , “Monster House - Review”, Sight and Sound, 16:9, September 2006, pp. 61-62. Bunnell, C., ‘The Gothic: A Literary Genre’s Transition to Film’ in Planks of Reason, ed. B. K. Grant, Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Md.; London, 1984/1996, pp. 79-100. Creed, B., The Monstrous-Feminine – Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Routledge, London; New York, 1993. Fauvel, M., ‘Nostalgia and digital technology: The Gleaners and I (Varda, 2000) and The Triplets of Belleville (Chomet, 2003) as reflective genres’. Studies in French Cinema, 5:3, 2005, pp. 219-229. Freud, S., ‘The “Uncanny”’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey, vol. xvii, Hogarth Press, London, 1955, pp. 217-52. Pirie, D., A Heritage of Horror – The English Gothic Cinema, 1946-1972. Gordon Fraser, London, 1973. Thompson, A., ‘Monster House has latest FX amenities’, Entertainment News (Reuters), 28 July 2006, viewed on 1 August 2007, . Wells, P., Animation and America. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2002. Whittle, P., ‘Honey, I married a zombie’. Sunday Times - Culture, 23 October 2005, p. 13.

A Traditional Vengeful Ghost or the Machine in a Ghost? Narrative Dynamics, Horror Effects, and the Posthuman in Ringu Eric K.W. Yu Abstract The Ring series written by the Japanese fantasy writer Koji Suzuki has been immensely successful and given birth to a cycle of hugely popular horror films, including Hideo Nakata’s celebrated Ringu. In this short paper I wish to explore how some important motifs and iconographies derived from traditional Japanese folklore and drama fuse with what is unmistakably modern and urban, producing a peculiar kind of horror that cannot be explained simply as the invasion of the modern by the archaic. The main narrative of the film cycle is structured by two opposing tendencies. One is the main characters’ endeavour to search for the ‘origin’ of Sadako Yamamura’s resentment, believing that retrieving her remains and a proper burial would lay the unhappy ghost to rest. Contradicting this anthropomorphic understanding of evil is Sadako’s endless propagation by means of video technology, evoking the ideas of mechanical reproduction and simulation. Attending closely to the plot of Ringu, I seek to explicate the narrative dynamics involved and enquire into the posthuman implications in Sadako’s nature with respect to the surprise ending of her ‘crime story.’ With reference to the impressive death scenes, I try to explain how the remarkable horror effects are created. Key Words: Embodiment, Hideo Nakata, Japanese horror film, narrative dynamics, posthumanism, Ringu, Sadako, simulation. ***** The Ring series written by the Japanese novelist Koji Suzuki in the 1990s has been immensely successful and given birth to a cycle of hugely popular cinematic adaptations. Sadako Yamamura, or her American counterpart Samara Morgan, has now become a well known human-turnedmonster familiar to many horror fans in Asia and the west. The scene in which the dripping Sadako crawls out of an old well and emerges into a living room through the TV screen, frightening the male protagonist to death, is no doubt one of the most striking scenes in film history. The main part of the Ring story centres on a mysterious videotape cursed by Sadako’s paranormal power that would kill its victims exactly seven days after viewing it. The only cure is to copy the tape and have other people watch it - thus the

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______________________________________________________________ tape will multiply endlessly and the curse spread globally. While some critics understand the video curse simply as the invasion of modern everyday life by some kind of occult power exercised by the psychic Sadako, a late twentieth century variant of the avenging female spirit not uncommon in old Japanese folktales and drama, a few critics have insightfully attended to the motifs of mechanical reproduction and simulation absent in earlier Japanese horrors. Referring to Ringu (1998), the first film in the cycle, Eric White instructively points out that the film “associates ubiquitous technological mediation - that is, the cameras, television sets, videocassette recorders, telephones and other such hardware foregrounded throughout the film - with the intrusion of “posthuman” otherness into contemporary cultural life”.1 Should we see Sadako as essentially the reincarnation of some traditional tormented, vengeful ghosts, to which the film obviously alludes? Or is she better conceived as a posthuman being thriving on and integrated with modern technology, a machinic force no longer humanly intelligible?2 To give a more satisfactory answer, this paper begins with a brief account of posthumanism and then examines the narrative dynamics of and horror effects in Ringu with reference to the posthuman. Ihab Hassan is one of the first cultural critics who predicted the supposed demise of humanism. Back in the 1970s he already argued that “the human form - including human desire and all its external representations may be changing radically, and thus must be re-visioned…[and that] five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end as humanism transforms itself into something we must helplessly call posthumanism.”3 Recent discussions of posthumanism informed by the developments in cybernetics and information technologies tend to embrace the posthuman future without too much reserve. As N. Katherine Hayles lucidly summarises it, there are four basic assumptions underlying the dominant posthuman view. First, information pattern is valorised over materiality of the body. Second, consciousness is no longer considered the essence of human identity. Third, the body is conceived only as the “original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born.” Lastly, human being “can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines.” 4 As we shall see, through its peculiar emplotment and powerful horror effects highlighting irreducible materiality of the body especially in relation to what Barbara Creed famously calls the “monstrous-feminine,” Ringu rigorously challenges this optimistic posthuman view about the symbiosis between the human and the machine. The apparition of Sadako as a blind and unstoppable monstrous being living in between the spiritual and the material demonises the sci-fi myth of ‘leaving the meat behind’ and ‘jacking in’ to cyberspace, where the subject can flow free without the constraints of the body. As for her victims, there is hardly any possibility of technological augmentation or

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______________________________________________________________ extending embodied awareness. The renowned roboticist Hans Moravec asked us to imagine a “brain in a vat,” “sustained by life-support machinery, connected by wonderful electronic links to a series of artificial rent-a-bodies in remote locations, and to simulated bodies in virtual realities.”5 We can of course picture Sadako furthering her influence on human bodies far away from the well through video technology. Yet none of her victims has become a prosthesis of hers: they either die immediately or pass her curse on by copying the curse videotape for others to watch. Directed by Hideo Nakata, Ringu is one of the pioneering works which inaugurated a new wave of Japanese horror films characterised by tension building and psychological horror. J-Horror does not rely heavily on special effects, nor is it affected by the comic-horror mixing trend we find in such popular cycles as Scream.6 Despite its occasional evocations of extreme dread, Ringu is slow-paced and akin to the mystery-detective genre. The narrative can be divided into the sub-plot of a crime story about what leads to the strange deaths and the main plot of a detective story concerning the two protagonists’ enquiry into the cause of the deaths and their search for a way to dispel the curse.7 Instead of professionals like police officers or private eyes, we have two amateur detectives here - an investigative journalist Asakawa Reiko and her ex-husband Ryuji, a mathematics professor apparently at home in conducting researches. It is through Reiko’s and Ryuji’s hypotheses and findings that Sadako’s crime story is gradually reconstructed and presented to us. Unlike most western mystery-detective stories, what we find underlying the narrative logic of Ringu is not exclusively rational, scientific explanations but an eclectic blending of science and mysticism, belying a deep ambivalence towards modernity. The film begins with the inexplicable deaths of four high-school students: their bodies all show eyes wide open and mouths gaping as if suddenly terrified to death and no circumstantial explanations can be found. As her job for a TV station requires, Reiko looks into the urban legend about a curse videotape which might account for the tragedy. It so happens that one of the victims is her own niece Tomoko, so Reiko is able to get some clues from Tomoko’s residence that help her discovers the curse videotape in a resort. Watching the video in the log cabin visited by Tomoko, Reiko is utterly baffled by the montage of oneiric images. Soon the telephone rings, as predicted by the legend, though instead of a clear verbal warning of her death in seven days, Reiko only hears something like metallic screeching on the phone. Bewildered and scared, she enlists the help of Ryuji. Initially, the scientificminded professor does not believe there are such things as the video curse, yet he quickly learns that, as with the four students’ case, Reiko’s photograph taken after viewing the tape shows an eerie image of distorted facial features. Later he himself feels the visitation of a female form while sitting on a bench in broad daylight. To her shock, Reiko soon finds that their child has also

100 Narrative Dynamics, Horror Effects, and the Posthuman in Ringu ______________________________________________________________ watched the tape. Ryuji and Reiko’s detective work thus becomes a more personal matter of self-preservation and saving their innocent little boy. What propels the development of the main plot, in short, is their need to understand the crime story in order to rescue their lives. A great sense of urgency and suspense is built up as the two protagonists are desperately struggling to solve the riddles about the video within the span of only seven days. Although Sadako’s posthuman leanings all through the film can be detected retrospectively, much of the plot until the surprise ending depends on the working of normal human motives and implies a more or less traditional understanding of the nature of vengeful ghosts. Captivated by the mysterysolving, origin-seeking plot, we are invited to identify with Ryuji and Reiko in their detective work only to realise ultimately that the anthropomorphic view motivating all their endeavours is completely mistaken. The final twist upsetting the deceptively conventional plot very dramatically brings out the posthuman aspect in Sadako. In spite of frequent references to old Japanese ghost lore, the plot of Ringu for the most part is not unlike a typical mystery-detective story familiar to western audiences. Established in the west during the nineteenth century, the mystery-detective genre is primarily a product of modern secular culture, founded on an optimistic belief in the rational, scientific methods of criminal investigations. In Ringu we do see various usual means of enquiry. Ryuji and Reiko interview people, examine the video images closely and repeatedly, and go to the library to look up news archives in order to follow up on the clues they obtain from the tape. Ryuji once seeks help from a linguist in order to decipher a sentence in the video spoken in a little-known dialect. Again and again Ryuji demonstrates to us the strength of his deductive reasoning and how quick he is capable of making hypotheses. With their hard work and some luck, the enigmatic video begins to make sense. The time and place of the particular volcanic eruption obscurely presented there are identified, and soon the combing woman is found to be Shizuko Yamamura, a woman from Izu Oshima possessing psychic power, who successfully predicted that disaster. Further explorations indicate that Shizuko used to work with Professor Heihachiro Ikuma, an expert on ESP, and that their illicit affair brought them a daughter, later revealed to be Sadako Yamamura, the very source of the video curse. At two turning points in the plot, Reiko also shows us her attentiveness to details and analytical power. Making no progress on Oshima Island in the presumably last but one day of her life, Reiko suddenly recalls that the strange telephone call only occurred after viewing the tape in the log cabin but not elsewhere, hence she surmises that since Sadako’s haunting seems to be most powerful there she is probably buried there. Due to this timely deduction, they are able to go back to the resort and find the well to retrieve Sadako’s remains in time to save her own life. Another instance can be seen shortly after Ryuji’s death. Even

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

102 Narrative Dynamics, Horror Effects, and the Posthuman in Ringu ______________________________________________________________ in terms of common human motives or feelings, such as self-preservation, paternal love, resentment and revenge. Even when the narrative gets too laconic, that is, when no satisfactory accounts are given regarding some local details, it is not difficult to follow the overall logic of plot development. Ryuji and Reiko’s indefatigable detective work is motivated by the strong hope that by getting to the root of the mystery, they can find the cure and save their own lives and that of their child. As for Sadako’s story, at first sight it differs little from those of female vengeful ghosts in traditional Japanese folktales and drama.8 Two old ghost stories are of direct relevance here. One tells of the maid Okiku, who threw herself into a well in shame after breaking a plate in the baron’s house. Some versions say that the baron killed her and threw her body into the well. In either case, people could hear her nightly sobs by the well. In all Ring films, Sadako was murdered by someone who threw her into a well and, unable to escape, she died slowly at the bottom of the well, a good cause for her grudge or resentment. If Okiku is not angry enough to be a deadly vengeful ghost, Oiwa resembles Sadako more. In the Kabuki version, Oiwa’s husband poisoned her to death in order to remarry a rich woman. The potion used was so powerful that it also disfigured her, causing her hair to fall out and turning her into a one-eyed monstrous figure. In a hideous form she came back to haunt him on his wedding day, driving him mad. The close-up of Sadako revealing a single drooping eye is obviously an allusion to Oiwa. In fact, the images of combing, the malformed eye and the white dress resembling a funeral kimono in the Ring cycle can all be traced to the hugely popular nineteenth century kabuki play Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan, or Ghost Story of Yotsuya, that features Oiwa the vengeful ghost.9 Ryuji and Reiko’s plan to locate and retrieve Sadako’s remains depends on the traditional Japanese idea about the avenging spirit or the onryou. They believe that it is essential to find out Sadako’s grievances in order to redress them, hoping that some time-honoured rituals such as a proper burial in her homeland, symbolising social reintegration, will lay the maltreated ghost to rest. The surprise ending of Sadako’s crime story, however, utterly shatters this old anthropomorphic understanding of evil and invites us to think about posthumanism. It turns out that, contrary to Ryuji, Reiko, and indeed most audiences’ expectation, what Sadako wants is neither justice nor pity - neither the punishment of her murderer nor people’s sympathetic understanding of her sufferings. The curse simply entails the viewers’ deaths or their reproducing the video to infect more and more people. Sadako is completely unlike traditional vengeful ghosts in at least three respects. First, such ghosts are almost always local beings. Because they were mercilessly murdered or tragically wronged, these discontented spirits would not depart for the underworld but keep haunting a particular locale closely related to their personal life, such as their former residences or

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______________________________________________________________ the places where they were killed, as exemplified by the Ju-on cycle. Although Sadako’s dead body, turned into mere bones, remained at the bottom of the well before Reiko discovered it and took it away from this crime scene, insofar as her apparition could travel to whichever place along with one of the curse videotapes and emerge from any television sets, she is able to cross geographical boundaries and becomes a potentially global presence. Second, as the curse videotapes multiply by mechanical reproduction, Sadako’s self is inevitably decentred. We could imagine countless Sadakos crawling out of the television in many different places, without necessarily knowing what other Sadakos are doing at the same time. In a sequel to the original novel, we do see the stunning picture of many copies of Sadako spreading all over the places but not having any interactions at all. Traditional ghosts, in comparison, are always imagined as more or less unified beings. When Sadako’s copies are everywhere, we can hardly tell which one is the original. Furthermore, when Sadako no longer cares about who maltreated her and seeks them out for revenge, when she does not even want social acceptance as represented by a proper burial in her homeland, it were as though the details of her previous traumatic personal life, and even her social identity, had become meaningless. As if oblivious of her past history none of the Sadakos, we might surmise, enjoy some sort of authentic selfhood. In a Baudrillardian fashion, we might as well claim that the murder of Sadako never happened. This is not to deny that, at the diegetic level, the murder did happen, but that at the end of the story whatever happened then no longer matters now, that the aura or eventness of the originary event has already waned.10 The power of the crime scenes being replayed in black-andwhite old-movie style via Ryuji’s and Reiko’s visions can hardly match the kind of dread aroused by Sadako as a kind of posthuman evil propagating through the reproducible curse video. The grudge based on an individual life history, so important in the understanding of the traditional vengeful ghost, has transformed into an irresistible force attacking the human world indiscriminately. In the world of simulations and endless mechanical reproduction, even the most powerful ghost has lost its human origin and its existence and propagation are scarcely separable from the media of telecommunication in which it manifests itself.11 Finally, we must note that while traditional ghosts can perform relatively simple tasks, Sadako is capable of producing a videotape and using this late-twentieth century technology to reproduce herself. Even her curse on the viewers, causing them to die in exactly seven days, implies the work of uncanny mechanical precision. Such capabilities are of an entirely different order when compared with conventional supernatural happenings. Instead of only interfering with the normal functioning of electrical appliances temporarily causing such phenomena as the white noise, Sadako has become truly machine-like in order to produce a psychic video and to unfailingly carry out the seven-day

104 Narrative Dynamics, Horror Effects, and the Posthuman in Ringu ______________________________________________________________ curse. If we see her as a malicious ghost invading and haunting the machine, we should also note that once merged with the machine she started functioning just like a machine. In this view Sadako is not a mere ghost in the machine, for this idea still implies a human psychology with its conflicting desires and weaknesses, a tormented self that could never let go of its unique past history. Neither is she a mysterious preternatural monster whose behaviours could sometimes be unpredictable and go beyond human understanding. Towards the end of Ringu, not entirely unlike a “contingent mechanism blindly following its path,” to borrow Slavoj Zizek’s words, and completely indifferent to her victims’ needs and reactions, Sadako has in effect turned into “the machine in a ghost” - for the mere drive to multiply and infect and the superb technological power involved with its mechanical precision and efficiency no longer entail a fallible human subjectivity wishing to revenge and caring about the victims’ emotions at all. 12 Regarding the narrative dynamics at work in Ringyu, the mystery-detective plot sustained by an anthropomorphic understanding of evil ultimately takes a shocking turn as Sadako’s posthuman nature is fully revealed towards the end of the film. While advocates of a rosy posthuman future like Moravec dream of downloading human consciousness into a computer and of humans’ seamless articulation with highly intelligent machines, the idea of the machine we can detect in Sadako brings us back to the negative Victorian sense of the mechanical versus the organic, well captured in Thomas Carlyle’s expression the mechanical age in Signs of the Times. The machine in a ghost here implies a straightforward mechanism marked by the repetition of certain precise actions and the lack of spontaneity. This is not to deny that we can still talk about feedback loop when referring to Sadako’s interaction with her victims, or that her uncanny power involves much more complicated mechanisms than can be found in early machines. Yet Sadako’s unalterable will to reproduce and infect appears to be an obsession or a simple drive, a compulsion to repeat, if we still wish to put it in conventional psychological terms. The seven-day curse, insofar as it is so automatic and blind in its working, can hardly be explained with reference to complex human emotions associated with such terms as grudges or vengefulness. Much like a clock, Sadako as an evil force runs on and on in a rather simple way, utterly ignoring the victims’ thoughts and feelings. All she needs to know is if they reproduce the videotape and to have others watch it or not to decide whether to kill them. Even curse, the anthropocentric expression we have been using, can be misleading, because curse often suggests that some moral laws have been broken leading to the execution of justice in the form of punishing the sinners. When the aim is achieved, the curse would naturally stop. But as I have explained, in the end justice no longer seems to matter to Sadako and

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______________________________________________________________ her destructive power moves on ceaselessly, shattering any hope of reconciliation.13 Having discussed the posthuman implications in Sadako, I would like to proceed to an analysis of the creation of strong horror effects in Ringu with respect to the representations of death and the body. At least three visitations in the film do not involve any radical revision of our conventional understanding of spirits and they are all capable of producing eerie feelings: Reiko’s son tells her that Tomoko appeared and asked him to watch the curse video, Reiko herself sees a fleeting figure reflected on the TV screen, and Ryuji’s feeling of a threatening woman approaching him in the park, a phantom-like figure which disappears before Ryuji gathers up his strength to take a look at her face. Much more intriguing are the treatments of death under video curse. The simplest case concerns the inexplicable death of Tomoko’s two friends, who went to the log cabin with her and also watched the tape. The two died in a car with doors locked, presumably just when they were about to make love.14 Instead of allowing the audiences to watch the death scene directly on the spot, the film shows Reiko and her colleague examining a news video concerned. The terror-stricken face of the girl is revealed to us while Reiko’s colleague is operating the machine, using such mechanical functions as reverse, slow motion and freeze-frame. The earlier sequence about Tomoko’s death, in comparison, is more meticulously and directly depicted, and the tension is very effectively built up. It begins with Tomoko joking with a close friend about the curse video at home while her parents are attending a nightly ball game. The telephone suddenly rings, scaring the two girls because they are just talking about the mysterious death warning via the phone in the urban legend. When Tomoko’s friend courageously picks up the phone, they are much relieved to find that it is just Tomoko’s parent calling her. But not long after this false alarm, when Tomoko is left alone in the kitchen, she finds the television being strangely turned on. She turns it off and goes back to the kitchen. Very soon she feels some phantom presence behind her. When she turns around, she is immediately scared to death. Again the audiences are not even given a glimpse of the ghost and the camera focuses only on the face with eyes wide open and mouth gaping. As with the treatment of her two friends’ deaths, the horror effects are not evoked by the vision of some hideous monsters, the naked exhibition of blood-soaked mutilated corpses, nor the depiction of the physical attack as we see in most horror films, particular slasher films in the west: what is emphasised here, instead, is simultaneously the victims’ exaggerated physical reaction and the ubiquitous technological mediation of contemporary life, implying as much the experience of an intense terror causing immediate death and the reproducibility of this terror via the media.15 It is as though we as audiences were commanded to feel the immediate psychological effects of horror represented by the contorted faces of the

106 Narrative Dynamics, Horror Effects, and the Posthuman in Ringu ______________________________________________________________ dying victims, which, captured on the instant and turned into some sort of photographic or video images, could be reproduced or replayed and potentially widely disseminated. Referring to the idea of simulation, one might as well contend that the film is offering us a model to emulate - we are compelled to copy the intense fear registered by the facial expressions of the victims; the invisible ghosts lurking there, while accounting for the deaths in the film, do not confront the audiences directly as the main source of dread like Count Dracula or Freddy Krueger. A common feature of the two death scenes is the conspicuous reference to a postmodern culture dominated by mass media and addicted to the technology of telecommunication. Apart from the prominent presence of equipments such as telephone and television, in the case of Tomoko’s two friends, as we have observed, death is presented to us through news recording. In Tomoko’s own case, right at the moment of her presumed death, we are shown her face turned from the flesh-and-blood form into a black-and-white image like a photographic negative. Such images of death are very suggestive. On the one hand, they may connote the absolute demise of the body. The victims are reified, rendered no longer human in their physicality. But at the same time, caught in a photo or a video, they become undead and can be further copied in a manner not unlike Sadako’s way of propagation. If for Baudrillard it is in death that we humans escape the signs, the unavoidable technological mediation of contemporary culture, in Ringu there is an ironic twist: victims of the video curse become more obviously the slaves of the symbolic when they die.16 Again, here the posthuman notion of ‘leaving the meat behind’ promises no happy symbiosis with highly intelligent machines but involves a curious mix of sheer death (not only ceasing to function physiologically but also, as the film suggests, leaving the body behind) and the undead (as reproducible images that last forever). The death scenes analysed above in effect associate modern technology with a formidable alienating, life-depriving evil force in the name of a ghost. Regarding the themes of the creation of terror, technological mediation of modern urban life and embodiment, the scene in which Sadako climbs out of the television set is not only the most visually stunning but also deeply thought-provoking. When she comes out of the old well and crawls on the ground, she is still moving inside the video. However, the blurring of the video image, her jerky forward movement, and especially her eventual emergence out of the television into the living room, apparently representing another ontological level of reality, very dramatically arouse what Samuel Weber sees as the inherent strangeness of television as a modern technology which undermines the traditional conceptions of time and space. Weber argues that the television screen is a site of an ‘uncanny confusion and confounding’17 and that the ‘reality of television […] no longer follows the traditional logic and criteria of reality’ that entail the unity of time and space

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______________________________________________________________ and selfsame identity.18 Television ‘takes place in at least three places at once: 1. In the place (or places) where the image and sound are “recorded”; 2. In the place (or places) where those images and sounds are received; and 3. In the place (or places) in between, through which those images and sounds are transmitted’. When we watch television, we cannot ‘distinguish, visually or aurally, between that which is reproduced and its reproduction’. We “cannot distinguish through our senses alone between what we take to be simply “alive” and what as reproduction, separated from its origin, is structurally posthumous’.19 Television is thus ‘a vision of the other’, as Weber explains: What we see on the screen is undecidably other for two reasons: first of all, because the power of vision that is transmitted is separated from its link to a situated individual body; and second, because whatever we see is no longer clearly distinguishable from the distant vision being transmitted. What we see, above and beyond the content of the images, is someone or something seeing. But that someone or something remains at an irreducible, indeterminable distance from the television viewer; and this distance split the ‘sameness’ of the instance of perception as well as the identity of the place in which such viewing seem to occur. When we ‘watch’ television, we are watching out for this split, for this instant and place turned inside out.20 Absorbed in the contents of what we see on TV, as when watching our favourite programmes, we do not usually notice this fundamental split. Nevertheless, when the ‘urban legend’ suddenly materialises in Ruiyi’s room, when the supposedly very remote source of evil, the spot where Sadako was murdered years ago, suddenly appears in front of the victim as a proximal image, and especially when the dreadful ghost comes out of the well and unexpectedly climbs out of the television set, the space and time of ‘recording’, ‘transmission’ and ‘viewing’ are confounded in such a way that really gives the audiences the creeps.21 With reference to the theme of embodiment, it should be noted that the idea of the ghost as an immaterial being in traditional Japanese folk belief goes remarkably well with electronic images, which are often shown in a fleeting form.22 The blurring of the video images and the jerky movements Sadako makes when crawling ‘inside’ the television, in this light, does draw our attention to her more elusive, immaterial side when haunting the medium of telecommunication. Yet, having dwelled on the postmodern, posthuman aspects of Ringu, I must point out that the greatest terror evoked by the film

108 Narrative Dynamics, Horror Effects, and the Posthuman in Ringu ______________________________________________________________ does not rely solely on foregrounding the loss of the physical body at death but that iconographies highlighting the irreducible materiality of the ghost’s body play no small role. In the terrifying scene we have just discussed, one finds the ingenious hybridisation of more traditional kinds of ‘body-horror’ motifs with images alluding unmistakably to advanced mediated electronic culture. In her embodiment as a hideous female ghost emerging out of the television rather than a machine-like decentred being, Sadako certainly reminds us of traditional Japanese ghost figures like Oiwa and Okiku in their material forms rather than their ethereal apparitions floating in the air. Despite her posthuman leanings explicated above, her appearance as a ‘fleshand-blood’ suffering woman goes against the usual posthuman valorisation of information pattern over the material body. It is fitting that when attacking Ryuji towards the end of the film Sadako appears as a woman - it is not only because the most powerful vengeful spirits in old Japanese ghost lore are female, but that in a feminist perspective, the association of women with demonic otherness fits well with the paranoiac patriarchal fear of female empowerment in modern-day Japan.23 One might add that the old well, Sadako’s original haunt, with its deep container shape, darkness and water inside, might be considered a womb-like symbol, evoking what Barbara Creed calls the ‘monstrous-feminine,’ the terrifying and abject affects associated with the female body in the male imagination.24 When discussing the cinematic representation of Tomoko’s and her friends’ deaths, I have emphasised the invisibility of the ghost as a tangible threat. In the climatic sequence in which Sadako causes Ryuji’s death, nonetheless, we do see the full presence of her physical body - with long black hair, a single eye on an ugly face, white gown, dripping body, leperlike skin, and blood-stained, nail-broken fingers. Most curiously, instead of presenting Sadako to the audiences as a powerful monster attacking Ryuji right away, the film patiently shows us her climbing out of the well and her laborious crawl towards him after emerging out of the television is astonishingly slow. The appearance of the well, the original ‘crime scene,’ and Sadako’s struggle to ‘escape’ from it reminds us of her long suffering, of her initial status as a victim being injured and murdered rather than a simple aggressor. The marks of suffering like dripping and broken nails, reminding us of her drowning and of her hard climb up the inner wall of the well respectively, suggest the lasting sensation of torture long after her physical demise, which might well be taken as a potent reminder of the irreducible materiality of the body, of the difficulty to simply ‘leave the meat behind’ even for the most powerful ghost that has become sort of a machine. On the other hand, the slow crawl, along with the emotionless expression on Sadako’s face revealed later, suggests primitivism and bestiality rather than a human-like consciousness capable of higher thoughts and delicate emotions. If Sadako has impressed us as a machine, here she resembles a zombie as

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______________________________________________________________ well. In neither case can we see a happy union of a human with a machine, of a thinking subject with its ‘prosthesis.’ As for the reaction to the ghost, similar to what we see in Tomoko’s death scene, Ryuji’s facial expression indicating extreme terror is directly shown to us. But this time round, instead of a single close-up, longer takes reveal more vividly the victim’s failed attempt to run away and dramatise the feeling of sheer helplessness effectively. Interestingly, in the entire sequence conventional iconographies depending on an anthropomorphic understanding of evil and foregrounding bodily sufferings fuse with images evoking the fear of modern technology as a dehumanising, life-threatening force. The overall effect gravely undermines any optimistic vision of posthumanism. I would venture to suggest that the extraordinary uncanniness here derives from the undecidability regarding Sadako’s very nature: is she essentially primitive or modern, an aggressor or a victim, a fully material body or a hyperreal simulacrum, having a tormented soul or entirely emotionless like the machine? It is perhaps the evocation of such profound ambivalences or indeterminacy, rather than the mere hybridisation of traditional horror iconographies with postmodern visual motifs as such, that makes Ringu one of the most intriguing masterpieces of J-Horror.

Notes 1

E White, ‘Case Study: Nakata Hideo’s Ringu and Ringu 2’ in J McRoy (ed.), Japanese Horror Cinema, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 2005, p. 41. 2 White, p. 40. 3 I Hassan, ‘Prometheus as Performer: Towards a Posthumanist Culture?’ in M Benamou and C Caramella (eds.), Performance in Postmodern Culture, Coda Press, Madison, 1977, p. 212. 4 N Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999, pp. 2-3. 5 H Moravec, ‘The Senses Have No Future’ in J Beckman (ed.) Virtual Dimension. Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1998, p. 92. 6 D Kalat claims that J-Horror is not a film genre but more like an art movement characterised by a common iconographic language with ‘recurring visions of ghostly schoolgirls, dark water, viral curses, and disrupted families’. See Kalat, J-Horror, Vertical Inc., New York, 2007, p. 12. 7 The idea of the detective story consisting of two stories comes from T Todorov. For a concise introduction, see S McCracken, Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1998, p. 54. 8 For summaries of the Oiwa and Okiku legends, see L Bush, Asian Horror Encyclopedia, Writers Club Press, New York, 2001, pp. 138-41.

110 Narrative Dynamics, Horror Effects, and the Posthuman in Ringu ______________________________________________________________ 9

To be exact, unlike some other vengeful spirits, Oiwa did not kill her husband directly; it was her brother who eventually avenged her death. 10 I am indebted to W Merrin’s interpretations of the Baudrillardian term ‘non-event’ and of the seemingly absurd claim that the Gulf War did not take place. See Merrin, Baudrillard and the Media, Polity, Cambridge, 2005, pp. 63-97. 11 For Baudrillard’s own explanation of simulation, see his seminal essay ‘Simulacra and Simulations’ in M Poster (ed.), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Polity, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 166-84. 12 S Zisek, The Plague of Fantasies, Verso, London, 1997, p. 40. 13 Ringu is probably the only film in the Ring cycle that fully develops Sadako’s posthuman leanings. In the two Hollywood remakes, for example, her counterpart Samara Morgan is given the commonplace human motive of wishing to possess Rachel as her foster mother and has thus become Aidan’s rival for his mother’s love. But even in Gore Verbinski’s version, Aidan’s famous saying, ‘She never sleeps,’ may be taken as an apt description about Samara’s uncanny mechanical nature. 14 This resembles such western horror cycles as Friday the 13th, in which teenagers who indulge in sexual or other ‘unruly’ behaviours often quickly fall victims to the monster. 15 The great emphasis given to characters’ extremely frightened reactions to the ghost rather than the fearful appearance of the ghost itself is not new in Japanese horror cinema. A prominent early example can be found in the episode entitled ‘Black Hair’ in Masaki Kobayashi’s Kaidan (1964). 16 Baudrillard distinguishes between the ‘semiotic’ and the ‘symbolic’ in a Durkheimian fashion. The former refers to ‘an immediately actualised, collective mode of relations and its transformative experience and communication’, while the latter refers to ‘fallen’ human relations mediated by mass media and signs. See W Merrin, pp. 10-20. 17 S Weber, “Television: Set and Screen” in Weber, (ed) Mass Mediauras, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1996, p. 121. 18 Ibid., p. 125. 19 Ibid., p. 121. 20 Ibid., p. 122. 21 Sadako does not climb out of the TV set in the original book by Koji Suzuki; this is Hideo Nakata’s invention. But Hideo Nakata is hardly the first director to introduce the idea of ghosts invading domestic space through the television. In Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982), for instance, we can find ghosts communicating with a child via static on the television and eventually they use the television as the pathway to enter the house.

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______________________________________________________________ 22

To be exact, ghosts in traditional Japanese culture are not always ethereal beings. With long ragged black hair and white or indigo painted faces, the ghosts in Kabuki plays are obviously more tangible physical presence. With respect to the ghost of Oiwa in particular, the early nineteenth century artist Shunkosai Hokuei created the best known image of hers in his work The Lantern Ghost of Oiwa, in which we can see her face emerging from a swinging lantern. Capable of swiftly moving in the air and changing into an elusive form, such images tend to highlight the disembodied spirit rather than the materiality of ghost nature. 23 Referring to the motif of the avenging female ghost in general, Jay McRoy explains its popularity in recent Japanese cinema with reference to the male fear originated from ‘transformations in the national economy begetting an influx of women in the workforce, as well as radical changes in both family dynamics and the conceptualisation of domestic labour’. See J McRoy, ‘Introduction’ in McRoy (ed.), Japanese Horror Cinema, p. 4. 24 For an introduction to the notion of the ‘monstrous-feminine’, see B Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, Routledge, London, 1993, 1-7. For Creed, female sexuality is perceived as monstrous and can invoke castration anxiety in the male spectator. She contends that ‘when woman is represented as monstrous it is almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions’ (7). However, we must note that, unlike the original novel, which does stress Sadako’s sex appeals, the film cycle as a whole, especially the Hollywood remakes, actually tends to downplay Sadako’s sexuality. Although according to the novel, Sadako died at 19, in Verbinski’s The Ring (2002) and Hideo Nakata’s The Ring Two (2005), Samara Morgan, played by Daveigh Chase, appears to be at a much younger age - that is, before the full development of the so-called ‘secondary sex characteristics.’

Bibliography Baudrillard, J., ‘Simulacra and Simulations’ in M Poster (ed.), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Polity, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 166-84. Bush, L., Asian Horror Encyclopedia, Writers Club Press, New York, 2001. Creed, B., The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Routledge, London, 1993. Hassan, I., ‘Prometheus as Performer: Towards a Posthumanist Culture?’ in M Benamou and C Caramella (eds.), Performance in Postmodern Culture, Coda Press, Madison, 1977, pp. 201-17.

112 Narrative Dynamics, Horror Effects, and the Posthuman in Ringu ______________________________________________________________ Hayles, N., How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literatures, and Informatics, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999. Kalat, D., J-Horror: The Definitive Guide to The Ring, The Grudge, and Beyond. Vertical Inc., New York, 2007. MaCracken, S., Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1998. McRoy, J., ‘Introduction’ in J McRoy (ed.), Japanese Horror Cinema, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 2005, pp. 1-11. Merrin, W. Baudrillard and the Media, Polity, Cambridge, 2005. Moravec, H., ‘The Senses Have No Future’ in J Beckman (ed.) Virtual Dimension. Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1998, pp. 84-94. Weber, S., ‘Television: Set and Screen’ in Weber, Mass Mediauras, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1996, 108-28. White, E., ‘Case Study: Nakata Hideo’s Ringu and Ringu 2’ in J McRoy (ed.), Japanese Horror Cinema, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 2005, pp. 38-47. Zisek, S., The Plague of Fantasies, Verso, London, 1997.

Part IV Fear, Power and Politics

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

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______________________________________________________________ certainty being fought on both frontiers simultaneously. An examination of the impact of the assault of modernity on previously relied upon external structure will be shown to mirror the fear of internal psychic disintegration. This fear of disintegration threatens to unleash unconscious terror of the death of the ‘self’ and its concomitant psychic annihilation. The paper will then provide an examination of the function of the psychoanalytic concept of defensive organisations which will provide an illustration of the nexus between the internal and external world and the difficulty of extricating one from the other. An analysis of material from the World Wide Web will provide further illustration of the projective identification of an external enemy as a way of warding off the terror which threatens the precarious sense of self provided by the defensive organisation. Finally, an explanation of the reaction to the terror, by in fact employing the mechanisms that were employed to enact it, will highlight the complicit relationship between the terrified and the terrifying. 1.

Religious Fundamentalism and the Psychoanalytic Concept of Defensive Organisations Freud described religion as being a tool to create the illusion of the fulfilment of infantile wishes, the wishes for omnipotence and omniscience.1 Other psychoanalytic theorists have been less critical of religion in general but concerned about the ability to potentially ‘misuse’ religion.2 Other social scientists, such as Allport, are also concerned with the potential harm that can be caused by the misuse of religion. It thus appears that religion can be used in varying ways and degrees and the motivations for such usage should be examined. In the 21st century it is those expressions of religion dubbed as ‘Fundamentalist’ by the western world that creates a major source of concern, fear, and indeed terror. Paradoxically, religious fundamentalism is itself a reaction to terror. The term ‘fundamentalism’ has become part of common vernacular. It has gained a derogative connotation to describe anyone who is to the right of the observer’s own political, religious, or moral position. This over usage and misrepresentation has seen some social commentators questioning whether the term has lost all usefulness. Indeed, it can be argued the descriptor can be as divisive as the phenomena it purports to describe but the temptation to replace the term with another, more specifically chosen, one is just as problematic. It is argued here rather than replace the designate ‘fundamentalism’ with another, the academic community should continue the debate of definition and accept misusage and misunderstanding in the general community may be inevitable but not an argument for abandonment. As Ruthven states, “[t]he term may be less than wholly satisfactory, but the phenomena it encompasses deserve to be analysed.”3

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______________________________________________________________ Fundamentalism as a social and religious descriptor is most often traced to its deliberate inception by a morally outraged and threatened sector of the Protestant movement in the United States early in the twentieth century.4 Fundamentalism, as a phenomenon of the 21st century, has gone beyond the intention of the movement first established in America. It at once describes a protestation and reaction to certain aspects of ‘mainstream’ society and a return to non-reflexive and uncompromising tenets of ‘truth,’ ‘life’ and ‘identity’ as prescribed by tradition. Certain key components are manifested by organisations that can be described as fundamentalist: a ‘truth’ that is irrefutable and derived from a doctrinal origin or sacred text; a messenger who is the personification of that truth and the ultimate authority on the interpretation of its divine content; the community is established and sustained by its adherence to the truth; the claim to a future or destiny which is accessible only to adherents of the truth; and the identification of evil from which the community must defend itself. 5 The use of an almost diagnostic criterion for deciding then what ‘qualifies’ as being fundamentalist can be a reductionist method which does little but categorise. What is missing from such a checklist is an understanding of the psychological processes that underlie the manifestation of these observable phenomena. Riesbrodt argues for a distinction to be drawn between two possible reactions by fundamentalist groups to the threat of change in social order. He draws this from the Weberian dichotomy which distinguishes “between affirmation of the world and rejection of the world on the one hand, and between mastery of the world, adaptation to the world, and flight from the world on the other”. 6 The ensuing responses to “rejection of the world” are twofold – fight or flight. For those who flee the world, a retreat into isolation in an attempt to create an existence which is ideologically pure and out of reach from contaminants is attempted. This is the function of the enclave. The concern for members of the enclaved community is thus to protect its members from outside threats of persuasion or contradiction. If left alone there is no need for the members of the enclave to interact with those outside its boundaries. If, however, the threat from the ‘outside’ continues to metaphorically ram against the boundary walls then conflict and territorialmarking violence may ensue. The fight response is more revolutionary in nature and has a messianic quality. Riesbrodt terms this response as “revolutionary fundamentalism” - one which holds the position society should adapt to and adopt a particular group’s ideology as the only legitimate expression of existence. Groups which express this type of fundamentalism not only seek to save the world but regard themselves as the sole authentic power base .Whilst this is a useful and important distinction it is argued here the advent of globalisation has reduced the distinction to the point the differences between the behaviours of the two expressions of fundamentalism

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______________________________________________________________ are almost imperceptible. What is observable is the conflict and ensuing violence - what is no longer obvious is the identity of the protagonist. There is another distinction which must be acknowledged when examining the behaviour of fundamentalist groups - of action and reaction. The percentage of those who commit violence in the name of their beliefs is far smaller than those who applaud the violence. Thus, when investigating why certain fundamentalist groups commit violent acts one has to distinguish between the individuals who fantasise or wish for the destruction of the ‘other’ and those who act out that wish. This is where the debate becomes potentially problematic. Examination of collective behaviour often ignores the influence of and on the individuals who make up the collective. Similarly, the examination of an individual’s behaviour without acknowledging the influence of the individual’s social context does not reveal the entire montage. The nexus between the nomathetic and idiographic is, however, where examination must take place, and to assume an homogeneity within a group and to dismiss or eradicate differences between members is to perform the very act of imposing the pseudo-certainty fundamentalist movements have been charged with. It is, however, impossible to take into account every person’s perspective, motivation and raison d’être for membership of fundamentalist organisations or groups. Certain similarities or patterns of behaviour can be suggested, certain theoretical understandings can be applied, but reflexivity and flexibility cannot be abandoned. What is being suggested here is one theoretical paradigm which explains the impact globalisation has on sectors of humanity which react in particular ways to the perceived threat of uncertainty and insecurity. Psychoanalytic theories propose the mind of the individual will attempt to restore the individual to a status of psychic equilibrium - a status which rids the individual of excessive and intolerable levels of psychic conflict or anxiety. Defence mechanisms are employed by the psychic apparatus to fend off that which cannot be tolerated by the individual. Defensive organisations are intra-psychic structures which are constructed by the use of defence mechanisms to create a safe haven for the vulnerable self. But the ‘relationship’ between the self and the defensive organisation is not between two distinct entities but rather a fusion of one with the other.7 8 The self becomes encased or engulfed by the defensive organisation which stymies individuality and autonomous functioning. This fusion then creates the illusion of a ‘perfect’, or idealised, self, so long as the fusion is not interrupted. Religious fundamentalism, or rather the use of religion as a defensive organisation, can thus be argued to be one way of conjuring up a perception of the self which is idealised because of the individual’s fusion with it. Any perceived attack on the external representation of the defensive organisation, which is the religion itself, will be perceived and experienced as

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______________________________________________________________ an attack on the self with which it is fused. Thus, perceived attack engenders psychic terror - the threat of the death of the self. 2.

Terror as a Psychoanalytic Concept Terror has the ability to bridge the realms of the real and the imagined. The intended victims of the terrorist attack on 9/11 were not the 3,000 dead but the world wide audience who witnessed planes slicing effortlessly through monolithic buildings, a vibrant city shrouded in dust and decay, innocent people forced to jump out of burning buildings and the desperate search of families for their missing loved ones. We watched on in horror, in disbelief, but the terror engendered was our identification with the tragedy – that could be me. Terror requires a personal identification with the horror and this is what the terrorist attack intended - the potential threat of anytime, anywhere. Thus the reality of the horror witnessed on 9/11 combines with the unreality of the fear that we could be next, to produce the terror which is designed to render us helpless and impotent.9 Terror not only undermines the sense of certainty of the self, but threatens our sense of trust in the world – both the internal and external worlds are rendered impotent to provide a safe haven. Paradoxically, this is the same phenomenon which saw the terrorist act being manifest in the first place - “acts of terrorism are themselves the product of loss of trust in the very ground of being.” 10

3.

The Terrified and the Terrifying Terrorism, by definition, is targeted against a group or society’s sense of safety and well-being.11 12 It is not the devastation of the attack itself, but the heightened insecurity and helplessness which follow from the unpredictability promised by the threat.13Terrorism itself is produced by the fear of annihilation where the impotence of terror is transmuted into the potency of rage. What we thus have is a paradox where terrorism is being used by some fundamentalist religions in an attempt to restore the potency stripped from the defensive organisations which keep the self safe from uncertainty. Due to the paranoid nature of defensive organisations, and those who are fused with them, the uncertainty presented by the intrusion of globalisation and concomitant modernity is seen as an attack on the very structures which are designed to protect from intolerable uncertainty. How does one minimise the sense of vulnerability and uncertainty engendered by the threat of terrorist attack? One way would be to make as many variables as ‘certain’ as possible, to build an illusion of control and manageability. Having a sense of ‘knowing’ the enemy, of putting a ‘face’ to they who wield the threat allows those who feel threatened to at least ‘know’ who it is that threatens them. The need to be able to identify and recognise those who wish to do harm becomes urgent. The border which separates ‘Us’ from the ‘Other’ is no

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______________________________________________________________ longer obvious when we are unable to recognise the ‘Other’ who is possibly in our midst. The unfortunate corollary of this is the suspicion which is then directed at all Muslims within our communities Karen Horney’s concept of arbitrary rightness points to the attempts by individuals to reduce the potentially destabilising impact of doubt and unpredictability. Horney explains the individual tries to impose order and control on that which provokes conscious anxiety and unconscious psychic conflict. Horney states “[d]oubt and indecision are invariable concomitants of unresolved conflict and can reach an intensity powerful enough to paralyse all action.”14 The anxiety provoked by fear of uncertainty needs to be reduced back to a tolerable level. This is facilitated by dispelling doubt and uncertainty and replacing it with the belief in an infallible certainty as certainty and doubt are mutually exclusive phenomenon. Horney further explains arbitrary rightness is a “rigid rightness [which]…constitutes attempts to settle conflicts once and for all by declaring arbitrarily and dogmatically that one is invariably right,” thus dispelling the anxiety uncertainty and doubt may generate. The need to impose order on that which is disordered, certainty on that which is uncertain, and security on that which is insecure, is also arbitrary in nature. It can be argued that the greater the inability to tolerate uncertainty, the greater the need to arbitrarily construct certainty. This may be done by imposing arbitrary rightness on ambiguous situations or by arbitrarily ‘ignoring’ risks or difficulties associated with a given situation. The interruption of this arbitrary and artificial control may then be experienced as traumatic and destabilising. It can render the individual incapacitated on two levels - the conscious level of the interruption and the unconscious level of what the interruption symbolically represents. In this discussion it is suggested the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Bali and London have brought the repressed fear of uncertainty to consciousness in the guise of the fear of terrorism. The reason this technique is so effective is it strips away the arbitrary constructs designed to conceal the uncertainty which cannot be tolerated. What the terrorists in effect are saying is “You do not control your fate - it is in our hands; you can be certain of nothing for we control your future”. The counter response, as mentioned previously, is twofold – the reaction to the threat of a terrorist attack and the response to having the initial repressed fear of uncertainty exposed. The counter-response is vested with the need to shore up the arbitrary structures in order to reduce that which is intolerable. The terrorist becomes responsible for the two levels of disruption - the known and the unknown. It is at times of threat and destabilisation, both from without and within, that intolerance to difference becomes blatant. In situations that do not present threat, fear of difference is tolerable; in the tempest of uncertainty the need to ‘manage’ difference becomes acute. It is part of the process of re-

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______________________________________________________________ establishing the arbitrarily defined equilibrium. It is suggested as an individual’s fear of uncertainty increases his/her ability to tolerate difference decreases. The ‘driving force’ behind anger and hatred can be argued to be a way of transposing intolerable levels of fear into something potent. Fear can leave the individual helpless, intolerable fear can lead to a terror of the end of existence. Anger and hatred can be seen as attempts to not only eradicate the primary emotion, fear, but as an attempt to mobilise against that which provoked the primary fear. This paper argues that the primary emotion of fear is part of the psyche of the individual and is tolerated by maintaining a delusional sense of control and safety. When an external threat, such as a terrorist attack, smashes through this delusion the individual is left to deal with the ever-present primary fear at an intolerable level. Mechanisms are engaged to restore the delusion as quickly as possible and make ‘safe’ the environment that has been disturbed. 4.

Fundamentalism and Modernity The inability to tolerate uncertainty has been acknowledged by theorists such as Bauman, 15 and Elliott and Lemert 16 as a driving force for people to manufacture certainty, even if it is an illusion. Religious fundamentalism is one such method which attempts to eradicate uncertainty. The imposed structure of fundamentalism thus provides a defensive organisation designed to protect both the individual and the collective from the potential destabilisation of insecurity which leaves the very essence of both group and individual identity exposed to the threat and challenge of alternative ways of being that would introduce doubt and uncertainty. For the individual adopting or creating a defensive organisation in an attempt to ward off the terror of intolerable uncertainty there is an inability to think about the ‘self’ as the self, unless it is fused with the divine. Without a perception of self outside its fusion with the divine, the individual must also fuse with the group in order to have an identity. The collective identity becomes then paramount for survival of the self, for without it there would be an intolerable threat of psychic annihilation. As there is no ability to be reflexive, there is no ability for the individual to see his/her ‘self’ in any other context than the one he/she has given up selfhood to preserve. Perhaps this is one of the factors that can enable suicide bombers to act - the self has already been sacrificed for the survival of the group and with no sense of ‘self’ the body is merely a corporeal vessel and of little consequence. The fusion between self/group/divine is precarious - the fall of any one will herald the demise of the others. Vigilance and high alert for potential threats are consuming, anxiety provoking and exhausting - for an illustration of this, one need only remember the emotional aftermath throughout the entire world after the attacks in the United States on September 11. But there

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______________________________________________________________ is an added burden for those in possession of ‘absolute truth’ - the limitations of being human which cannot be tolerated in a world which is fused, and dependent for existence, on the divine. To be in a constant state of grace means to disown aspects of the self, the self that is now manifest in the collective identity. This sentiment is captured by the phrase from Matthew 18:9: And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire. However, when one plucks out the offending eye, what does one do with it? The identification of one ‘good’ eye and one ‘evil’ eye exemplifies the defence mechanism of splitting where good and bad must be separated lest the bad contaminate the good. To disown it completely, to deny it as part of the self, employs the defence mechanism of denial. And the need for it to be tossed away into the ‘outer’ where it can no longer contaminate the ‘inner’ employs the psychic defence mechanism known as projection - what cannot be tolerated by the psychic self due to its anxiety provoking nature, must be ‘split off’ from the self, disowned as part of the self and tossed, or projected, to a ‘safe’ distance, into the ‘other’. Thus preoccupation with sexual sinfulness is an illustration of how highly defended the fundamentalist self/group must be. In fact, all human desires that are not considered ‘holy’ will be disowned by the fundamentalist, split off and projected into the outside from whence it can now justifiably feel under threat - but by threat of its own projection. 5.

Reflections of Fundamentalism in the Mirror of the World Wide Web Using the psychoanalytic principle that external manifestations and projections are a reflection of internal mechanisms and structure the examination of the self representations of Fundamentalist organisations as they appear in a group’s web presence provides an opportunity to examine the juxtaposition between the internal representation, the self, and its relationship with the external. Due to my linguistic limitations sites that have an English language interface have been selected. Space constraints have meant the limitation to three web sites for examination. In particular the aspects of ‘absolute truth’, doctrinal infallibility, and descriptions of how the ‘other’ is represented will be the focus here. Quotes have been taken directly from the identified websites and syntax, emphasis by use of bold font and peculiarities of spelling have been maintained. I have italicised all extracts for ease of differentiation from my text.

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______________________________________________________________ There was no particular method in selecting the following websites for analysis, nor were they selected completely randomly. I stumbled upon them by using the keywords “true Islam/Judaism/Christianity” in to the Google search engine. I can tell you little about the groups represented here other than what can be gleaned from their own representation but this, after all, is what is being examined. How do these groups identify themselves and how do they classify others? How do they justify or rationalise their particular orientation? For what purpose are they expressing their presence on World Wide Web? The answers to these questions will help develop an understanding of a fundamentalist position. A.

Allah Akbar17 Our Aim is to establish and propagate Islaam according to the True teachings of the “Qur'ân” and the “Sunnah” in line with the understanding of the first three generation of Muslims.

The doctrinal infallibility of the Koran and the Sunnah is foundational here. It is not only the establishment and maintenance of Islam according to this group’s particular interpretation that is the objective dissemination of this particular interpretation is also chartered as a raison d’être for the group. The express reference to “the first three generations of Muslims” establishes a contextual reference point – a return to a tradition of the past that establishes a link with the present and future which thus precludes an acceptable juxtaposition with the modern era. It also identifies this particular group’s religious orientation. The reference to the first three generations of Muslims alludes to the split between the Sunni and the Shiis over the question of authority after the death of Mohammed and marks this group as Sunni. The Shiis belief was in the lineage of Mohammed, holding that only descendents of Mohammed could be regarded as the legitimate heirs. The Sunni belief was that the leadership title was an honour not a birth rite and that it should be granted to the most learned and pious. The Sunni further charge that the Shiis were delegitimising and insulting the first three caliphs after Mohammed, who were not descendents of Mohammed.18 The movement seeks to purify our lives from deviation and innovations in the Deen and various idolatrous practice (shirk), Religious Innovations (Bid'ah) and fabricated traditions falsely attributed to the prophet, “Muhammad” (s.a.w.s) which continue to distort the beauty of Islaam and hinder the advancement of the Muslim's to attend to the unadulterated under-standing of the Tawheed and the correct

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______________________________________________________________ worship of “Allaah" almighty from the original Authentic sources. this will enable us to live and die as Muslims Insha’Allaah, no matter under what circumstance and secures the blessings, protection, guidance and help of Allaah almighty, unity of the Muslims on the basis of Qur'ân and Sunnah is of paramount importance to it and it strives to make the Ummah strong and shielded from the influence of un-Islaamic or non-Islaamic systems and ideologies and manipulations. The reference to ‘Religious Innovations’ and ‘fabricated traditions’ is another assertion of the corruption of Islam for which Sunni hold Shiis accountable. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism, rejected certain Shii interpretations of Mohammed’s teachings (hadith) as fabrication with the false and deceptive intent to legitimise the supremacy of Mohammed’s descendents over all other Muslims. This, al-Wahhab argued, was in contradiction with the Quran that declared all Muslims to be equal in the eyes of God and thus did not permit the quasi-deified status that was being endowed on Mohammed’s descendents.19 Thus, it is clear that non-Muslims and those deemed ‘non-authentic’ Muslims are to be the target of the dissemination of this group’s message. It is also interesting to note that the charge of differing in opinion from that which is deemed here as ‘authentic’ is that of manipulation, implying a devious and conscious mischief designed to lead the Muslim astray and corrupt, and thus weaken, the community. The Messenger of Allaah said: "Everyone of them in the Hellfire, except for one group that which I and my companions are upon. “A time of Great calamity is dawning upon us. This time it is not from the Serbs, Jews, Fascist Hindus, US, UK, or Other Enemy of Islaam but from our own ranks. Like the Jews of Turkey who converted to Islaam during the latter part of the Ottoman rule, to gain positions of power and destroy Islaam from within, a certain group of people have joined ranks to discredit Islaam. This group of Munafiqeens are openly saying that homosexuality is not Haraam. They launch their campaign in Los Angeles in the United States during a Gay Festival. They are also launching a video and will start a publicity campaign shortly. Let us tell all believers that the followers of the Great Munafiq Abdullah Ibn Saba who brought death and destruction during the Caliphate of Othman (RA) are in action again. Abdullah Ibn Saba the great Munafiq

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______________________________________________________________ succeeded in breaking the Muslims into groups and eventually brought about the division of the Muslims into Sunnis and Shias. But this group in the USA has a much greater mission: that of destroying Islaam and disgracing the Muslims in the eyes of the non believers. AND THIS THEY THINK IS THE ONLY WAY TO STOP THE SPEED AT WHICH ISLAAM IS SPREADING IN THE WEST (sic). This idea that people are "born" homosexual is from the Kufaar and is not based on Islamic Law, after all homosexuality is a CRIME, and as such is punishable by death...” Both non-Muslims and ‘adulterated’ Muslims are damned to “hellfire.” “Innovators” of Islam are regarded as even more threatening to the Ummah than non-Muslims, presumably because of their ability and opportunity to make contact with unsuspecting Muslims. Whilst not explicitly identifying acculturalist or ‘modern’ Muslims, one can see that the Muslim who does not maintain separation from Western influences and indeed incorporates some aspects with religious practice would be regarded as a threat to purity. So too are those who may regard themselves as the ‘true’ Islam from the Shiite persuasion. The penultimate and ultimate excerpts above, the one dealing with innovators and the other with homosexuals, clarify the perceived danger from those who do not follow what is deemed acceptable. The long list of enemies from ‘without’ is joined by those who seek to destroy Islam from ‘within,’ but not without the reminder that the idea of homosexuality as anything other than an evil ‘choice’ is an invention of the Kufaar (the non-believer). The juxtaposition of the non-Muslim enemies with the openly homosexual Muslim highlights two methods of disciplining those who are straying from the ‘path.’ The ridicule and humiliation of being aligned with identified enemies of Islam - especially the Jews who are blamed for the destruction of the Ottoman Empire - together with the proclamation of a crime punishable by death, is an attempt to frighten and intimidate. The double bind that is presented, come back to the fold or be damned, is a reflection of the double bind that the existence of something like homosexuality poses for fundamentalists. Who should be more feared – the enemy from ‘without’ or the enemy from ‘within’? And once the possibility of the unthinkable is raised, that someone calling themselves ‘Muslim’ can also perform an abomination, the sense of security within the enclave is disturbed.

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Exclusive Brethren20 “Who are They? Exclusive Brethren are believers on the Lord Jesus Christ. They hold the truth of His deity, and accept the authority of Scripture as the inspired word of God. Separation The Exclusive Brethren practice separation from evil, recognising this as God's principle of unity. They shun the conduits of evil communications: television, the radio, and the Internet. Their charter is 2 Timothy 2:19 "The Lord knows those that are his; and, Let every one who names the name of the Lord withdraw from iniquity." As a matter of conscience, their social activities and links are reserved exclusively for those with whom they celebrate the Lord's Supper. This sacred remembrance of the Lord Jesus and His death is the core of their Christian fellowship, and the inspiration to live a life apart from worldly pleasures and pursuits; a precious heritage passed down the generations.

Again, the absolute ‘truth’ as dictated by a holy scripture is evident. But what is different here is the prescription of separation - that only those who partake in the “Lord’s Supper” are considered pure enough to socialise with. Thus the Exclusive Brethren also use restrictions with regard to food to keep members from socializing with the outside world. The protection of members from the evil of the ‘unclean’ coupled with the Assemblies’ right to discipline those members who err imposes a strict discipline designed to maintain the boundaries of the community. Testimony To Government Exclusive Brethren believe in Government and are subject to it as outlined by Paul in Romans 13:1. They do not live in countries that do not have a Christian Government. Their approach is non-political. They do not vote, but hold Government in the highest respect as God's ministers, used by Him to restrain evil and provide conditions for the promotion of the glad tidings. Exclusive Brethren hold formal prayer meetings every week and include prayers for the support and guidance of right Government which is clearly of God, and also for divine resistance to the devil's efforts to influence it. Contact with members of parliament or congress is encouraged to express a moral viewpoint of

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______________________________________________________________ legislation in relation to the rights of God and this ongoing communication is found to be acceptable and productive. Although socialisation with those outside the community is forbidden, the involvement in politics is seen as an extension of their ‘divine right’, even though Brethren do not vote. Thus they are not content to remain within the confines of their enclave but find justification to influence Government to follow what the Brethren perceive as the “rights of God”. Thus what is evident in both the examples of Allaah uakba and the Exclusive Brethren is the wish to persuade those outside the enclave to follow the righteous path. Their mission is to serve God, preach the glad tidings in Gospel Halls and in public, represent Christian conscience to Government and those in authority and to train their families to take their place in the testimony of our Lord. The Exclusive Brethren describe themselves as not only the sole encompassment of purity but also as the only group that can be relied upon to provide morality and Christian values to the rest of humanity. Of course, they are only interested in Christian humanity as they only live in countries that have Christian Governments. Furthermore, it is their obligation and duty to keep governments on the righteous path and we are assured that they will ‘train’ future generations of Brethren to maintain this vigilance. The fact that the fellowship continues to exist and thrive, strengthened in its universal commitment, without moving away from the fundamental tenets of its origin, is well known to be a tribute, not only to its success, but also its inherent truth. These features live on, in spite of the absence of a hierarchical organisation of the kind which the average religious mind may look for. This extraordinary piece of logic – “we’re still here so we must be right” - highlights the selectivity that the Exclusive Brethren adopt. The fact that ‘other’ groups also exist, and in some cases have existed longer, is not seen as problematic. These words: "withdraw," "separate" and "with those" are key to the fellowship. They believe that common social activities involve fellowship. These include: - eating and drinking: (1 Corinthians 5:11) - memberships: directorships, associations, clubs, life

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______________________________________________________________ assurance, shares or stock in public companies, health plans, etc: (2 Corinthians 6:14) - entertainment: (2 Timothy 2:19 and 2 Corinthians 6:17). Consequently, as a matter of conscience, their social activities and links described as the fellowship and are reserved exclusively for those with whom they eat the Lords Supper. The ‘fellowship,’ or the relationship with God, is seen as part of every transaction and aspect of life. This fellowship must be kept pure and so all activities with the non-Brethren must be avoided so as not to degrade this perpetual state of fellowship. Thus, those who do not subscribe to the Exclusive Brethren’s interpretation are not worthy of a relationship with God. This sacred remembrance of the Lord Jesus and His death at the Lord's Supper is the core of their Christian fellowship, and the inspiration to live a life apart from worldly pleasures and pursuits; a precious heritage passed down the generations. As true to this position of separation, they are promised and experience the blessings of being in the divine family: "Be not diversely yoked with unbelievers, for what participation is there between righteousness and lawlessness? or what fellowship of light with darkness?... Wherefore come out from the midst of them, and be separated, saith the Lord, and touch not what is unclean, and I will receive you; and I will be to you for a Father, and ye shall be to me for sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty" (2 Corinthians 6:14-18) Again the assertion is that those who belong to the Brethren are exalted to a privileged position that highlights purity and righteousness but now it is twinned with being exalted to a level that ascribes their own divinity. They alone are in a familial relationship with God and all others are deemed “lawless,” “dark” and “unclean.” Assembly Discipline The apostle Paul was commissioned by Christ to establish the administration of local assemblies according to a universal standard of doctrine based on his teaching " as I teach everywhere in every assembly" ( 1 Cor 4:17). Also, as in the holy city in Revelation 21:21 " And the twelve gates , twelve pearls ; each one of the gates , respectively ,

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______________________________________________________________ was of one pearl ; " In his teaching , Paul outlines the functions of the local company, and includes the provisions for the maintenance of the believer's soul. The possession of the Holy Spirit is invaluable but it is also envisaged that Christians can render a service to one another to give strength to overcome in the tests of life. Hebrews 5:2 speaks about “being able to exercise forbearance towards the ignorant and erring." However, Paul also provides for stronger action, where necessary, to maintain a pure position in loyalty to Christ. Such scriptures are 2 Thessalonians 3:14, Matthew 18:18, Galatians 6:1, 2 Timothy 2:19, John 20:23 and 1 Corinthians 5:5 and 5:13. These provisions are only applied when all else has failed to produce a change of mind. The “wall of virtue” is highlighted here. Not only do those within the Fellowship have to contend with God but also with their fellow Brethren who have an obligation to protect the souls of individuals within the enclave. This is described as a “service” which suggests a benefit - a “we’re doing this for your own good” approach. It is not clear what is meant by “forbearance” but together with “stronger action, when necessary” it has a punitive and intimidating tone to it. The desired result of the intervention is to “produce a change of mind” - a mind that is not at one with that deemed appropriate by the group cannot be tolerated here. C.

Neturei Karta21 “WHAT IS THE NETUREI KARTA? Neturei Karta opposed the establishment of and retain all opposition to the existence of the so-called "State of Israel" Neturei-Karta is the Aramaic term for "Guardians of the City. The name Neturei-Karta originates from an incident in which R. Yehudah Ha-Nassi (Rabbi Judah the Prince) sent R. Hiyya and R. Ashi on a pastoral tour of inspection. In one town they asked to see the "guardians of the city" and the city guard was paraded before them. They said that these were not the guardians of the city but its destroyers, which prompted the citisens to ask who, then, could be considered the guardians. The rabbis answered, "The scribes and the scholars," referring them to Tehillim (Psalms) Chap. 127. (Jerusalem Talmud, Tractate Hagiga. 76c).

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______________________________________________________________ The above translation and definition of this group’s name indicates its perception that it is the moral and righteous caretaker of Judaism. Any ‘other’ that proclaims authority is not only seen as incorrect but as destructive. Reference to revered Rabbis from the past is used to legitimise the group’s status in the present. The name was given to a group of Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem who refused (and still refuse) to recognise the existence or authority of the so-called "State of Israel" and made (and still make) a point of publicly demonstrating their position, the position of the Torah and authentic unadulterated Judaism. Neturei Karta also pronounces that all other interpretations of Jewish Law, both written and oral, are fraudulent and corrupt. They alone have the correct understanding of the ‘truth.’ Neturei Karta is not - as is often alleged - a small sect or an extremist group of "ultra-orthodox" Jews. The Neturei Karta have added nothing to nor have they taken anything away from the written and oral law of the Torah as it is expressed in the Halacha and the Shulchan Aruch. The Neturei Karta are fighting the changes and inroads made by political Zionism during the past one-hundred odd years. Guided by the rabbis of our time and under the inspiring leadership of the late Reb Amram Blau, the Neturei Karta refuse to recognise the right of anyone to establish a "Jewish" state during the present period of exile. This is an interesting statement as it seems to anticipate the possibility that others may charge them with being unrepresentative extremists. The reassertion that Neturei Karta alone is authentic is coupled with the responsibility and duty to not just refrain from participating within the State of Israel but to fight against it. Any alternative to their position cannot be tolerated, nor even exist. Neturei Karta oppose the so-called "State of Israel" not because it operates secularly, but because the entire concept of a sovereign Jewish state is contrary to Jewish Law. All the great rabbis who in accordance with Jewish Law opposed Zionism at its inception did not do so merely due to consideration of the secular lifestyles of the then

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______________________________________________________________ Zionist leaders or even for their opposition to Torah heritage and rejection of its values and practices, but due to the fact that the entire concept of a Jewish state is in direct conflict with a number of Judaism's fundamentals. Condemnation of and segregation from anything connected to or affiliated with the so-called modern day "State of Israel" is based on the Talmud, the key fundamental doctrine of the Oral Tradition handed down by G-d to Moses on Mt. Sinai. The Zionist state employs a set of chief rabbis and uses religious parties to ornament their state with a clerical image. They study the Torah with commentaries altered to clothe the words with nationalistic nuances. Our rabbis have countless times proclaimed that it matters little which individuals or parties govern in the Zionist state because the very establishment and existence of the state itself is to be condemned and to be deplored. The true Jews remain faithful to Jewish belief and are not contaminated with Zionism. The castigation of those that do not agree with the ‘inerrant truth’ of Scripture, as interpreted by revered Rabbis, is blatant. Zionism is a contaminant and ‘true Jews’ must separate from any interaction with the ‘unholy’ state. The claim of authenticity in the interpretation of the Oral tradition, a link with the past, and the laws of Torah justify the enmity and public demonstrations aimed at shaming the ‘other’ to capitulate. 6. Summary Psychoanalytic interpretation of the observable phenomena manifested by the fundamentalist individual and/or group reminds us that the propensity for us to dehumanise our ‘enemy’ is a reflection of the same intrapsychic processes at work. It is not necessarily the identification of the threat that is faulty for the necessity of the unconscious invocation of paranoid defences - it is the exaggeration of and preoccupation with the threat that leads to a hostile and often violent reaction. Psychoanalytic theories offer much by way of understanding the unconscious reaction to and retreat from perceived threat and its ensuing insecurity that make the formation of a defensive organisation comprehendible. This paper has attempted to identify and explore the underlying psychological processes that may orient both the individual and the collective to take refuge in the fundamentalist structures. The action and reaction to perceived threat of psychic annihilation is projected away from the self in order to protect the fusion with the idealised object. Terrorism and terrorist acts of violence are invoked in order to turn the paralyzing

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______________________________________________________________ consequence of terror into a potent response and defence. The response to terrorism itself unleashes the same response by way of the same defensive mechanisms of splitting and projection. Common to both the terrorists and those who are reacting to terrorism is the belief that to kill off the ‘evil other’ is good, and should one die in the attempt it is not only a just and courageous act, it also confirms the evil of the enemy. 22

Notes 1

S Freud, The Future of an Illusion, James Strachey (ed.), W.W. Norton & Co., New York & London, 1961. 2 E Fromm, Psychoanalysis & Religion, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1950. 3 M Ruthven, Fundamentalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York, 2004, p. 9. 4 R Wuthnow and M Lawson, “Sources of Christian Fundamentalism in the United States”, in M E Marty and R S Appleby (eds.), Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004. 5 R Frykenberg, “Accounting for Fundamentalisms in South Asia: Ideologies and Institutions in Historic Perspective”, in Marty and Appleby, op. cit. 6 M Riesbrodt, Pious Passion: The Emergence of Modern Fundamentalism in the United States and Iran, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1998. 7 N Symington, Narcissism: A New Theory, Karnac Books, London, 1993. 8 J Steiner, “The Interplay between Pathological Organisations and the Paranoid-Schizoid and Depressive Positions”, in E B Spillius (ed.), Melanie Klein Today Volume 1: Mainly Theory, Brunner-Routledge, Hove & New York, 1988; see also N Symington, in the same volume. 9 D Meltzer, “Terror, Persecution, Dread - A Dissection of Paranoid Anxieties,' in Spillius, op. cit., 10 R Stein, “Fundamentalism, Father and Son, and Vertical Desire”, Psychoanalytic Review, April 2006, vol. 93 (2), pp. 201 - 29. 11 A Bandura, “Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement”, in W Reich (ed.), Origins of Terrorism, Woodrow Wilson Centre Press, Washington, 1998. 12 V. Volkan, Blind Trust, Pitchstone Publishing, Virginia, 2004. 13 L Nosek, “Terror in Everyday Life”, in S Varvin and V Volkan (eds.), Violence or Dialogue? Psychoanalytic Insights on Terror and Terrorism, International Psychoanalytic Association, London, 2003, p. 32. 14 K Horney, Our Inner Conflicts, W.W. Norton & Co., New York & London, 1945. 15 Z Bauman, Globalisation: the human consequences, Columbia University Press, New York, 1998.

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A Elliott and C Lemert, The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalisation, Routledge, London & New York, 2006. 17 http://www.allaahuakbar.net 18 N DeLong-Bas, Wahhabi Islam, Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York, 2004. 19 Ibid. 20 http://www.theexclusivebrethren.com 21 http:// www.nkusa.org 22 Lord J. Alderdice, “Terrorism and the Psychoanalytic Space”, in J Cancelmo, et al. (eds.), Terrorism and the Psychoanalytic Space: International Perspectives from Ground Zero, Pace University, New York, 2003.

Bibliography Alderdice, Lord J., “Terrorism and the Psychoanalytic Space”, in Joseph Cancelmo, et al. (eds.), Terrorism and the Psychoanalytic Space: International Perspectives from Ground Zero, Pace University Press, New York, 2003. Appleby (eds.), Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004. Bandura, A., “Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement”, in W. Reich (ed.), Origins of Terrorism, Woodrow Wilson Centre Press, Washington, 1998. Bauman, Z., Globalisation: The Human Consequences, Columbia University Press, 1998. Delong-Bas, N., Wahhabi Islam, Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York, 2004. Elliott, A. and Lemert, C., The New Individualism : The Emotional Costs of Globalisation, Routledge, London & New York, 2006. Freud, S., The Future of an Illusion, James Strachey (ed.), W.W. Norton & Co., New York & London, 2006. Fromm, E., Psychoanalysis & Religion, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1950.

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______________________________________________________________ Frykenberg, R. E., “Accounting for Fundamentalisms in South Asia: Ideologies and Institutions in Historic Perspective,” in M. E. Marty and R. S. Horney, K., Our Inner Conflicts, W.W. Norton & Co., New York & London, 1945. Meltzer, D., “Terror, Persecution, Dread - A Dissection of Paranoid Anxieties”, in E. B. Spillius (ed.), Melanie Klein Today - Volume 1: Mainly Theory, Brunner-Routledge, Hove & New York, 1988. Nosek, L., in S. Varvin and V. Volkan (eds.), Violence or Dialogue? Psychoanalytic Insights on Terror and Terrorism, International Psychoanalytic Association, London, 2003. Reisbrodt, M., Pious Passion: The Emergence of Modern Fundamentalism in the United States and Iran, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993. Ruthven, M., Fundamentalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York, 2004. Stein, R., “Fundamentalism, Father and Son, and Vertical Desire”, Psychoanalytic Review, April 2006, vol. 93 (2), pp. 201 - 29. Steiner, J., “The Interplay between Pathological Organisations and the Paranoid-Schizoid and Depressive Positions,' in Spillius, op. cit. Symington, N., Narcissism: A New Theory, Karnac Books, London, 1993. Volkan, V., Blind Trust, Pitchstone Publishing, Virginia, 2004. Wuthnow, R. and M. P. Lawson, “Sources of Christian Fundamentalism in the United States”, in Marty and Appleby, op. cit.

Websites http://allaahuakbar.net/aboutus.asp viewed Wednesday, 14th March, 2007. http://www.theexclusivebrethren.com/index-1.asp viewed Wednesday, 14th March, 2007. http://www.nkusa.org/AboutUs/index.cfm viewed Wednesday, 14th March, 2007.

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

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______________________________________________________________ effectively renders the message absurd. This incongruity however is not the result of some innocent bureaucratic blunder nor is it the outcome of defective logic. It is rather the product of a very deliberate and well thought out strategy of political deception, a strategy designed to facilitate and legitimise acts of political violence. This form of ‘deception’, that which is brashly apparent, has long been part of political practice. The atomic bomb used to devastate the Japanese city of Hiroshima, for instance, was given the specious moniker Little Boy. More disturbing was President Harry Truman’s claim that “the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima…because we wished in the first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians.” 1 Hiroshima was of course a regional capital with a civilian population of approximately 350,000 - of which some 130,000 died as a direct result of the attack.2 And while this form of Orwellian doublethink, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, is considered by many to be passé - a relic of authoritarianism - it has in fact seen something of a resurgence in recent years. Indeed, this type of lying has, under the tutelage of President George Bush, reached its democratic nadir. So pronounced has this tactic been that former Vice President, Al Gore, has charged the current administration with engaging in an “unprecedented and sustained campaign of mass deception.”3 We have, for example, seen President Bush present fraudulent intelligence information - information universally known, within both the intelligence and political communities, to be false - to Congress and the American people, in support of his claims that Saddam Hussein was attempting to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger for the purpose of manufacturing nuclear weaponry.4 The same President brazenly maintained that “the American people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war [with Iraq],”5 despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary. Further, we have seen the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, work to justify the invasion of Iraq by repeatedly linking Saddam Hussein to Osama Bin Laden and terrorist activity.6 Indeed Powell claims to have been aware of a “sinister”, although entirely mythological, “nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist network.”7 More recently, we listened as Bush steadfastly declared, before an incredulous Panamanian media, that “we [the United States of America] do not torture.”8 All of these claims, and dozens more to boot, constitute nothing less than lies of the greatest magnitude - lies that unashamedly defy reality.910 In a recent interview, the renowned US Professor of Law, Jonathan Turley, puzzled over the apparent absurdity of such lies. In particular, he was perturbed by Bush’s resolute denial of US military engagement in the practice of torture. “What is bizarre about all of this,” noted a bewildered Turley, “is that they [Bush and Cheney] would try and maintain the sort of not-so noble lie. The whole world knows that we’ve waterboarded.”11 And while Turley’s confusion is understandable there is in fact nothing bizarre

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______________________________________________________________ about this type of lie. The key to rationalising the counterintuitive logic at work here is to look away from the personal and towards the political. Commonsense tells us that a lie is effective only in so far as it works to deceive; to persist with a lie beyond the point of discovery is an act of futility - it is, to use Turley’s term, “bizarre.” The political lie however, or at least the specific form of political lie that I have thus far been discussing - that I refer to as the manifest lie - does not rely on deceit for its effectiveness but on the complex psychological processes of fear and faith. In writing this piece, I aim to detail the terror-horror nexus and outline the process by which the manifest lie (when used effectively) works to rend it. That is, to separate the visceral and petrifying impact of political violence from the moral and intellectual condemnation, or horror, of that violence. It is at this point, that we see political violence at its most effective, for where horror is absent terror is most capable of facilitating political domination. Indeed, in the absence of moral outrage political resistance cannot long survive. It is no coincidence that the great majority of lies currently emanating from the White House address issues of direct relevance to the conflicts within Iraq and Afghanistan. These nations sit at the epicentre of an ongoing campaign of US state terror, a campaign boldly set out in the White House’s 2002 National Security Strategy - better known as The Bush Doctrine. The eminent political theorist, Walden Bello, convincingly argues that this doctrine is “a strategy of permanent intimidation,” a strategy “designed to make future applications of force unnecessary because of the fear they would engender among friends and foes alike.”12 And while the document is new, the strategy is not. The US state has, for many decades, sought to achieve political, military and economic domination through illegitimate political violence and terrorism - techniques well known for their ability to induce fear and facilitate social control.13 However, what is most interesting about Bello’s work in this particular instance is his underlying conception of violence, a conception that runs counter to that presented by a great many liberal theorists. If we accept Bello’s interpretation, then we must also accept the fact that the type of violence that we have seen the US military engage in - torture, indiscriminate bombing, intimidation, arbitrary arrest and detention, disappearances and so on14 - is not directly, nor entirely, instrumental in character. It is, in fact, largely demonstrative. We are thus confronting a form of violence that, in and of itself, achieves very little. It is rather, a violence that, through its exemplary nature, is capable of creating conditions favourable to the attainment of certain political ends - those which depend, for their utility, on the paralysing quality of fear. This notion is encapsulated within the United Nation’s Academic Consensus Definition of Terrorism which notes that:

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______________________________________________________________ the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims...serve as message generators. Threat- and violence-based communication processes between terrorist (organisation), (imperilled) victims, and main targets are used to manipulate the main target (audience(s)), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a target of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propaganda is primarily sought.15 This distinction, between the demonstrative and instrumental aspects of violence, must be fully appreciated if one is to grasp the intricacies of political violence. Indeed, this understanding is crucial if one is to penetrate the all too often obfuscated relationship between fear, terror and horror. And, where violence is understood to exist on this continuum - from the purely instrumental to the purely demonstrative and through the infinite combination of the two - it becomes possible to more accurately assess the ongoing instances of violence in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thus, an examination of arrest and detention practices in Iraq, as recorded by the Red Cross, affords one great insight: Arresting authorities entered houses usually after dark, breaking down doors, waking up residents roughly, yelling orders, forcing family members into one room under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further breaking doors, cabinets and other property...Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly, handicapped or sick people…pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking with rifles. Individuals were often lead away in whatever they happened to be wearing at the time of arrest - sometimes in pyjamas or underwear.16 Certainly, this form of actions contains elements of instrumentality; there are clear and compelling reasons why action of this sort exists within a war zone. However, one must always be aware and concerned with the demonstrative aspects of such practices. Thus, when one learns that “between 70% and 90% of persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq ha[ve] been arrested by mistake” 17 one does not immediately assume that this demonstrates the incompetence of the US military. On the contrary, it becomes possible to understand this not as a mistake but rather as a successful attempt to foster terror and spread fear throughout the Iraqi population. To judge the effectiveness of this practice on its ability to bring specific rebels to justice, or to impede their action, is to

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______________________________________________________________ miss the point; the arrestee is not, in this instance, the target but the victim of the violence. The target, of course, is the potential insurrectionary. This then is inherently illegitimate violence, for this is a violence that, quite strategically, makes victims of innocents. In fact if this violence was legitimate it would lose much of its ability to terrify. If it were possible for invading troops to locate, arrest and charge specific insurgents, based on sound incriminating information, then this would not be the terrifying, and thus politically useful, form of violence it clearly is. Furthermore, an assessment of the operation of such specific action could feasibly be founded on its instrumental effectiveness. This however is not the case; the efficacy of violent action, as we have seen, cannot, despite the best efforts of right wing apologists, be judged on the basis of instrumentality alone. The primary motivating factor here is the creation of fear - in relatives, friends and neighbours - anyone who might be tempted to strive for political or ideological independence. By the same logic, it is possible to view the situation in Iraq as something more than a noble incursion gone wrong, as several liberal thinkers have asserted, or as another unfortunate military defeat for the United States - logical conclusions drawn where violence is viewed as a simple matter of instrumentality.18 It is clear that the conflict has been a significant financial boon to many US capitalists, particularly those engaged in the production and sale of billions of dollars worth of weaponry and armaments and those involved in the massive redistribution of publicly owned Iraqi assets, including of course Iraqi oil.19 Beyond this, however, the conflict has, through its dramatic exhibition of violence and destruction, served to secure the wider interests of the American empire. The destruction of Iraq, her economy, social services and infrastructure has sent a clear message to the Middle East and the world at large: abide by the rules of US empire or face the devastating consequences. When violence is used in this way, that is, as a spectacle, it of course becomes counterproductive to attempt to shroud the action, as one might in the case of purely instrumental violence. Indeed, the terrorising state must make a display of its cruelty. Obviously demonstrative violence requires an audience - be it visual, verbal or textual - if it is to operate effectively. It is at this point that the nexus between terror and horror becomes apparent. For where there is an audience there is judgement, and, in cases such as this, where we see terrifying acts of illegitimate violence, that judgement tends towards horror. That is, towards moral and intellectual condemnation of that violence. To be horrified is to understand a thing to be immoral, and to perceive a state to be immoral is the first step towards holding that state to be illegitimate - a disastrous consequence for those in power. In this case however, the United States is embroiled in a relationship of legitimacy with not one but two populations: with the people of Iraq and with the domestic

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______________________________________________________________ population of the United States. Consequently, when the US state engages in illegitimate action, violence specifically designed to cow the Iraqi population for instance, she finds herself facing condemnation from a domestic population horrified by that action, a population enamoured with the accoutrements of state: with law, with human rights rhetoric, and with a faith in peaceful democracy. It is with good reason that Bello argues this is a “war being waged on many fronts, including that of worldwide public opinion and, most significant, in the hearts and minds of the American people.”20 If the US is to maintain its domestic legitimacy and its hold on Iraq it must be able to rend this problematic nexus that binds horror to terror. It must be able to indulge in illegitimate acts of violence, in an open way, while maintaining a façade of legitimacy. There were, as I previously mentioned, considerable efforts made by those in the White House to concoct the perception that there existed a bond of evil between Al-Qaeda and the Iraqi state under Saddam Hussein. Bush went so far as to say “you cannot distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam.”21 The aim of these untruths was to convince the population of the United States that the Hussein government was responsible for the attacks of 9/11. The manifest nature of this string of lies was undeniable.22 Long before the war began there were reports, issued by European intelligence agents, stating “we have found no evidence of any links between Iraq and alQaeda…if there were such links, we would have found them.”23 Irrespective, this string of lies proved to be fantastically successful. Some 70% of American citizens accepted this obvious fabrication as truth.24 And here we begin to see the effectiveness of the manifest lie. For, to acknowledge these lies as truth is to begin the process of legitimating the illegitimate. Thus, the decision to invade Iraq, that is, to kill thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children, in an attempt to enact regime change, begins to seem reasonable. And of course, where violence is perceived to be necessary or just, it loses its ability to horrify. This then is a lie that has done its job; it is a lie that has facilitated state terrorism by rending the terrorhorror nexus. But how is this possible? How can a lie, a lie that runs counter to all the evidence, do anything but invite scorn? The answer lies not in peoples’ gullibility but in the complexities of fear and faith. This is something Adolf Hitler understood very well. He once noted, in an inspired and incarcerated moment: The magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility…the great masses of the people...more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a little one...they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery.25

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______________________________________________________________ This is a very perceptive acknowledgement and one that goes some way to explaining the working of the manifest lie. People do in fact fall victim to the great lies not through gullibility (as Hitler believed) but through fear. This is particularly true when we are dealing with issues of violence and terrorism. The realm of the ‘monstrous’ is, by definition, terrible - it is a realm to be avoided or, if that proves impossible, to be denied. In many cases this requires an abdication of political responsibility, that is, to become passive and defer power to the experts, to accept truth as authority presents it. In other cases this means denial in the face of strong evidence, or what Orwell would term doublethink. That is, the art of controlled insanity; of concurrently knowing and not knowing, of seeing contradiction, repudiating it, forgetting the repudiating and then forgetting the forgetting. This is a process that facilitates escape from the monstrous - from horror that overwhelms. This is something we saw quite clearly in the so-called Argentine Dirty War of the late 70s and early 80s where the practice of disappearing was relatively common. The victim was abducted, often yelling or screaming for help, by a group of heavily armed men...the group would drive away, recklessly, flaunting. Yet no one was supposed to see or, more specifically, admit to seeing what was going on...The scenario became increasingly surreal as the junta disavowed the state terrorism that people saw with their own eyes...The military blinded and silenced the population which had to accept and even participate in this production of fictions.26 Likewise, in Germany under the Nazi regime a great many citisens existed, as Roberts makes clear, in a kind of “twilight moral world...simultaneously aware of atrocities...and yet profess[ing] ignorance of their existence...double-think...seems to have pervaded the German psyche of the period.”27 From what we have seen however this is no anachronistic phenomenon. Fear, however, does not need to be quite so extreme to facilitate the operation of the manifest lie. Indeed, in many cases the fear we are looking at is little more than the fear of contradiction, of loss of identity, of social embarrassment, and of disapproval. The provocative American political theorist, Michael Parenti, taking his lead from the work of Alvin Gouldner, writes: Our tendency to accept a datum or an argument as true or not depends less on the content and substance of it than it does on how congruent it is with the background

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______________________________________________________________ assumptions we already have. But those background assumptions are of course established by the whole climate of opinion and the whole universe of communication that we are immersed in and constantly hear.28 That is, our willingness to accept a proposition depends in large part on our pre-existing understanding of the world, our experiences and our beliefs and, importantly, the beliefs of those around us. The more deeply ingrained these beliefs are, the more one’s sense of self becomes tied up with them and the more they tend towards dogma. So strong is this faith that even clear and patent evidence may be dismissed if it runs counter to a comfortable internalised understanding. This faith, as Ellul notes, is “irrational, and charged with all of man’s power to believe. It contains a religious element.”29 Those propositions that conform to what we understand to be the truth of the world tend to have more resonance and are more easily accepted than those that do not; these are, after all, propositions that work to validate our sense of self and our place in the social world. This notion is further supported by Ellul who famously notes, “propaganda…must attach itself to a feeling, an idea; it must build on a foundation already present in the individual…Action cannot be obtained unless it responds to a group of already established tendencies or attitudes stemming from the schools, the environment, the regime, the churches, and so on.”30 It is through this insidious churning that the manifest lie operates, for, it appeals to, and creates, faith through repetition. Clearly then one must be aware of orthodoxy and its construction if one is to have any chance of breaking out of this bind. Lying, it seems, is crucial to the operation of state power, particularly that which is more than likely to be deemed illegitimate by the citisens of state. In contrast to personal lies, which rely on deception for their effectiveness, political lying may well operate in an outrageously overt manner - brazen untruths are effective as ‘lies’ if they conform to certain orthodox beliefs. Such lies are tools specifically designed to rend the politically problematic terror-horror nexus; these are tools that facilitate the operation of terror without the damaging imposition of horror and the inherent threat to legitimacy that it brings. It is crucial that we learn to appreciate the significant distinctions between fear, terror and horror, and understand the complex interaction between these entities, if we are to effectively fulfil our political responsibilities as citizens of state.

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Notes 1

As cited in D Corn, The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception, Three Rivers Press, New York, 2004, p. 3. 2 M J Hogan, Hiroshima in History and Memory, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1996. 3 A Gore, The Assault on Reason: How the Politics of Fear, Secrecy and Blind Faith Subvert Wise Decision-Making, Degrade Democracy and Imperil America and the World, 1st edn, Bloomsbury, London, 2007, p. 103. 4 S M Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 To Abu Ghraib, Penguin, Melbourne, 2004, pp. 234-5.; M Curtis, “Psychological Warfare Against the Public: Iraq and Beyond”, in M Thomas (ed.), Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq, Pluto Press, London, 2004, pp. 70-79. 5 G W Bush, President Says Saddam Hussein Must Leave Iraq Within 48 Hours, The White House, 2003, viewed 24 August 2007, . 6 C Powell, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell Addresses the U.N. Security Council, The White House, 2003a, viewed 26 July 2007, . 7 C Powell, Remarks to the United Nations Security Council, U.S. Department of State, 2003b, viewed 24 July 2007, . 8 G W Bush, President Bush Meets with President Torrijos of Panama, The White House, 2005, viewed 24 August 2007, . 9 E Herman, “Normalising Godfatherly Aggression”, in Thomas, op. cit., pp. 176-84. 10 S Dorril, “Spies and Lies”, in Thomas, op. cit., pp. 108-14. 11 J Turley, Countdown with Keith Olbermann for Oct. 27, MSNBC, 2006, viewed 25 August 2007, . 12 W Bello, Dilemmas of Domination: The Unmaking of the American Empire, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2005, pp. 55-56. 13 P Green & T Ward, State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption, Pluto Press, London, 2004, p. 110. 14 See P Green, “A Question of State Crime?” in P Scranton (ed.), Beyond September 11: An Anthology of Dissent, Pluto Press, London, 2002, pp. 7576.; A W McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2006, Ch 4.; N Chomsky, “Who Are the Global Terrorists?” in K Booth & T Dunne (eds.), Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2002, p. 133.; MGAM Taguba, The Taguba Report,

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______________________________________________________________ Article 15-6 Investigation of The 800th Military Police Brigade, 2004.; SM Watt, “Torture, ‘Stress and Duress’ and Rendition as Counter-Terrorism Tools”, in R Meeropol (ed.), America's Disappeared: Secret Imprisonment, Detainees, and the “War on Terror”, Seven Stories Press, New York, 2005, p. 73.; K Williams, American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination, South End Press, Cambridge, 2006, Ch 2. 15 A P Schmid, United Nation's Academic Consensus Definition of Terrorism, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 1988, viewed 24 August 2007, . 16 Red-Cross, 2004 Report of the International Committee of The Red Cross (ICRC) on the Treatment by The Coalition Forces of Prisoners of War and Other Protected Persons by the Geneva Conventions in Iraq During Arrest, Internment and Interrogation, as cited in M Danner, Torture and Truth, Granta Books, London, 2004, p. 248. 17 Ibid, p. 249. 18 Gore, op. cit., p. 103. 19 D Fortson, A Murray-Watson, & T Webb, Future of Iraq: The spoils of war, How the West will make a killing on Iraqi oil riches, The Independent, 2007, viewed 25 August 2007, .; G Muttitt, Crude Designs: The Rip-Off of Iraq’s Oil Wealth, Global Policy Forum, 2007, viewed 24 August 2007, . H A Waxman, Halliburton's Iraq Contracts Now Worth over $10 Billion, Committee on Government Reform U.S. House of Representatives, 2004, viewed 25 August 2007, .; M Parenti, Lies, War, and Empire: Part II, Antioch University, Seattle, 2007, 12 May, . Time: 05:10. 20 Bello, op. cit., p. 61. 21 G W Bush, President Bush, Colombia President Uribe Discuss Terrorism, The White House, 2002, viewed 07 August 2007, . 22 For a more detailed discussion see {Gore, 2007 #146}. 23 As cited in Gore, op. cit., p. 109. 24 Loc. Cit. 25 A Hitler, Mein Kampf, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1943, pp. 23132. 25 Green & Ward, op. cit., p. 116.

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______________________________________________________________ 25

M Parenti 1994, The Control of History, Alternative Radio, Los Angeles, 11 May, Audio Cassette. 26 Green & Ward, op. cit., p. 116. 27 R Roberts 2007, 'Sleepwalking into Totalitarianism: Democracy, Centre Politics and Terror', in R Roberts (ed.), Just War: Psychology and Terrorism, 1st edn, PCCS Books, Ross-On-Wye, p. 184. 28 Parenti, op. cit. 29 J Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes, Vintage Books, New York, 1965, p. 40. 30 Ibid, p. 36.

Bibliography Bello, W., Dilemmas of Domination: The Unmaking of the American Empire. Metropolitan Books, New York, 2005. Bush, G. W., President Bush, Colombia President Uribe Discuss Terrorism, The White House, 2002, viewed 07 August 2007, . ――. President Says Saddam Hussein Must Leave Iraq Within 48 Hours, The White House, 2003,, viewed 24 August 2007, . ――. President Bush Meets with President Torrijos of Panama, The White House, 2005, viewed 24 August 2007, . Corn, D., The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. Three Rivers Press, New York, 2004. Curtis, M., “Psychological Warfare Against the Public: Iraq and Beyond”, in M. Thomas (ed.), Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq. Pluto Press, London, 2004, pp. 70-79. Danner, M, Torture and Truth. Granta Books, London, 2004. Dorril, S., “Spies and Lies”, in Thomas, op. cit., pp. 108-14. Ellul, J., Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. Vintage Books, New York, 1965.

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______________________________________________________________ Fortson, D., Murray-Watson, A. & Webb, T., Future of Iraq: The spoils of war, How the West will make a killing on Iraqi oil riches, The Independent, 2007, viewed 25 August 2007, . Gore, A., The Assault on Reason: How the Politics of Fear, Secrecy and Blind Faith Subvert Wise Decision-Making, Degrade Democracy and Imperil America and the World, 1st edn. Bloomsbury, London, 2007. Green, P., “A Question of State Crime?”, in P. Scranton (ed.), Beyond September 11: An Anthology of Dissent. Pluto Press, London, 2002. Green, P. & Ward, T., State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption, 1st edn. Pluto Press, London, 2004. Herman, E., “Normalising Godfatherly Aggression”, in Thomas, op. cit., pp. 176-84. Hersh, S. M., Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 To Abu Ghraib. Penguin, Melbourne, 2004. Hitler, A., Mein Kampf. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1943. Hogan, M. J., Hiroshima in History and Memory. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1996. McCoy, A. W., A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Metropolitan Books, New York, 2006. Muttitt, G., Crude Designs: The Rip-Off of Iraq’s Oil Wealth, Global Policy Forum, 2007, viewed 24 August 2007, . Parenti, M., The Control of History. Alternative Radio, Los Angeles, 11 May, 1994, Audio Cassette. ――. History as Mystery, 1st edn, City Lights, San Francisco, 1999. ――. Lies, War, and Empire: Part II, Antioch University, Seattle, 12 May, 2007,.

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______________________________________________________________ Powell, C., U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell Addresses the U.N. Security Council, The White House, 2003a, viewed 26 July 2007, . ――. Remarks to the United Nations Security Council, U.S. Department of State, 2003b, viewed 24 July 2007, . Red-Cross, Report of the International Committee of The Red Cross (ICRC) on the Treatment by The Coalition Forces of Prisoners of War and Other Protected Persons by the Geneva Conventions in Iraq During Arrest, Internment and Interrogation, 2004. Roberts, R., “Sleepwalking into Totalitarianism: Democracy, Centre Politics and Terror”, in R. Roberts (ed.), Just War: Psychology and Terrorism, 1st edn. PCCS Books, Ross-On-Wye, 2007, pp. 181-98. Rose, D., Guantanamo: America's War on Human Rights, 1st edn. Faber and Faber, London, 2004. Schmid, A. P., United Nation's Academic Consensus Definition of Terrorism, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 1988, viewed 24 August 2007, . Taguba, M. G. A. M., The Taguba Report, Article 15-6 Investigation of The 800th Military Police Brigade, 2004. Turley, J., Countdown with Keith Olbermann for Oct. 27, 2006, MSNBC, viewed 25 August 2007 . Watt, S. M., “Torture, ‘Stress and Duress’ and Rendition as CounterTerrorism Tools”, in R Meeropol (ed.), America's Disappeared: Secret Imprisonment, Detainees, and the "War on Terror", Seven Stories Press, New York, 2005. Waxman, H. A., Halliburton's Iraq Contracts Now Worth over $10 Billion, Committee on Government Reform U.S. House of Representatives, 2004, viewed 25 August 2007, . Williams, K., American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination, 1st edn. South End Press, Cambridge, 2006.

Part V Societal Fear

Zionism, Post-Zionism and Fear of Arabness Henriette Dahan Kalev Abstract In this paper I discuss the fear of Arabness expressed by Jews of European and American origin, often called in Hebrew Ashkenazim. I explore the impact of the expressions of fear on Jews of Arab origin and the Jews of Moslem countries who have lived in Israel since the establishment of the state - often referred to as Mizrahim. Texts of Post-Zionist and postcolonial critics of Arab-Jewishness shed light on the experience of Mizrahim and Palestinians of being feared. In the last part of the discussion I present some of the Mizrahim’s political reaction to this experience. Key Words: Arabness, Ashkenazi, fear, Mizrahi, Post-Zionism. ***** I begin by relating two anecdotes. When I was 10, there was a boy in my class whose name was Baruch (Baruch in Hebrew means blessed). He had dark skin, black eyes and curly hair. He lived in Beit Saffafa, an Arab village in South Jerusalem. At school he spoke very little but when he did, one could hear his Arab accent. His family name was Salman - a name common to both Arabs and Jews. This has always puzzled me: why an Arab boy was given a Jewish first name. It was only many years later when we met on the street that I dared to ask him about it. He told me that the teachers changed his name from Muhamed to Baruch, explaining that it would make it easier for him in a class where he was the only Arab pupil amongst 35 Jewish pupils. As our conversation went on, both of us agreed that while changing his name made it easier for Jewish children and the teachers to relate to him, it certainly did nothing to ease his social difficulties in the class. A colleague of mine once told me this second anecdote. She is a woman of Ashkenazi origin. As a child, she said, her parents had always warned her against crossing the street but they did not explain why. She grew up in a middle-class Jewish neighbourhood in the Arab-Jewish mixed town of Lead [in Hebrew, Lod] and left it after she had completed her mandatory military service. It was only when she became a peace activist a couple of decades later that she recalled her parents’ reason for not allowing her to cross the street - because Arabs lived on the other side of the street, and, like

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______________________________________________________________ all the Jews in this street, they did not want their children to mingle with Arab children. These two incidents, minor to young Jewish girls and critical to the Arabs who lived amongst them, demonstrate Orientalism1 at work. Clearly, these incidences conceal the deepest fears that Ashkenazi Jews have both of Arabness and of the Palestinians who lived around them and amongst them. They show how easy it is to erase Arab names, bodies, entire neighbourhoods, while simultaneously living in their midst. But could they eliminate the fear of the Arabs who lived inside them, the fear of the Arabic Jews, namely the Mizrahim? And what did the Arabic Jews do with this fear? In other words, how did the fear of Arabness, fuelled by the Israeli establishment - an establishment consisting largely of Ashkenazis in the early years of the state - affect those Israelis who were both Jewish and Arab? What did the Arabic Jews do when they realised that they lived amongst people who envision their Arabness as frightening and as contradicting their Jewishness? Unlike the Palestinian whose Arabness was regarded by Zionist nation builders as compatible with their enmity, the Jews of the Arab countries confused them. As the Zionist project saw itself as the redeemer of the Jews, the idea of redemption in the case of Arabic Jews was taken further to redeem the Arabic Jews of their own Arabness.2 During more than three decades, educators, philosophers, politicians and sociologists engaged themselves with the project of redeeming the Arabic Jews of their Arabness. A prominent educator, Karl Frankenstein, was concerned with “the big picture” of the nation. He focused on the younger generation. He developed “melting pot” methods that aimed at the erasure of the Arab culture and stressed social intellectual abilities. His model of society was one homogenous nation in a Eurocentric spirit. He was concerned with “the fate of the People of Israel.”3 Akiva Ernest Simon, a leading philosopher who tried to understand the nature of the Arabic Jews explicitly etched the term “primitivism” into his body of work expressing his worries regarding the Zionist national project future.4 One debate looked upon the Mizrahim as guinea pigs on which the argument was to be tested: . . the anthropocentric position [as opposed to religious, social, or national positions] calls for extreme caution and moderate pacing, if any possible changes are to take place in the social lives of those same immigrants... 5 and . . . [W]e have found that there are two fronts: the absorbers and the absorbed, the directors and the directed, the culturally developed and the culturally more primitive.6

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______________________________________________________________ These claims caused Nathan Rotenstreich, another prominent philosopher, to angrily state that there is a basic methodological problem regarding the question of looking at the Jewish population as if they were two divided groups: …to what extent is it possible and/or permissible to draw a line distinguishing between the different sides . . . [of the pair of terms used in the previous sentence].7 Rotenstreich's words did not fall on deaf ears. They influenced leading figures such as David Ben-Gurion, the founding father and leading statesman of the Zionist project, who claimed that the unity of Israeli society was dependent upon common conceptions of collective objectives and the means for achieving them. Rotenstreich asked the rhetorical question: Is there hope that such unity can be reached upon the background of the present reality of the veteran settlers? . . . [a return to fundamentals is necessary] in order to merge into the lifestyle founded on the ideas of Israeli society.8 Years later, one of the founders of Israeli sociology, Moshe Lissak, explicitly admitted that they feared that the Arabic Jews would jeopardise the Zionist project: …the absorbing society had the right to protect political and cultural institutions and practices which began long before in the 1930s…the most traumatic thing was the encounter with the immigrants [immigration] from North Africa…even from today’s perspective…our fears had foundations…the absorbing authorities realised the necessity of protecting their own culture.9 These quotations from furious public debates and studies made by leading figures who were engaged in nation-building at its early and crucial years, briefly demonstrate the confusion - and the fear - concealed within it, generated by Arabic Jews. Paradigms of de-socialisation and re-socialisation were designed and applied to the educational system in order to abolish the Arabness of the Jewish immigrants. These paradigms were based on perceptions that redemption justified all means, including aggressive methods. Feurstein, an education researcher who vigorously objected to Frankenstein’s work, presented a study on the children of the Melah (Moroccan ghetto) in the mid1960s. In this study he discussed mental and cultural retardation, and

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______________________________________________________________ expressed homophobic positions defining homosexual “deformations” of the children of the Melah, as he observed them. As Feurstein completed his studies, his perceptions and recommendations to the educators contained a strong tone of essentialism concerning the Mizrahim. His conclusion was based on accepting what he believed was the fact, namely, that the Jewish children from Morocco whom he studied were simply inferior. He provided some educational methods to cope with this alleged inferiority.10 The methods worked well in at least one respect: the Mizrahim made efforts to Ashkenazi-fy themselves. The educational system stressed this as a value, and the children, like children all over the world, wanted to be one of the group and made efforts to succeed in this endeavour. For a couple of decades until the late 1960s, some success had been achieved in separating Arabness from the Jews. Assimilated Mizrahim showed loyalty and condemned the Arab enemy, internalising a derogatory sense of Arabness. Moreover, they participated in national tasks that the decision-makers had placed on the Israeli agenda - they contributed their share to militaristic efforts, settling in the occupied territories, and participating in governing the lives of the Palestinian people. For a while this helped to create an illusion amongst many Israelis - both Ashkenazim and Mizrahim - a belief that Arabness was finally being tamed and that the source of the fear within them was under control. But this went on for only one decade. But the efforts of some post-Zionists in the late 1980s to bring Arabness back in and to problematise it within Israeli discourse, has shored up this belief and re-awakened old fears. The catalyst for this movement was the publication of the breakthrough paradigm of Edward Said, Orientalism. The Iraqi-American Jewish scholar Ella Shohat was among the first to apply Orientalism to the analysis of the Mizrahi-Ashkenazi social tension in Israel. Shohat has treated the Israeli cinema and film industry as texts and narratives that display the deepest fears of Arabness embedded in the Zionist project.11 Shohat claimed that Zionism was more or less a particular case study of Orientalism, saturated in fears of Islam and Arabness. Her genuine contribution to the criticism of Zionism, in The Israeli Cinema in 1991, was later continued in her post-Iraq war article “Dislocated Identities”.12 In both these works she put forward an analysis which laid stress on the idea of the erasure of the hyphen that joined Arabness to Jewishness, and demonstrated this erasure as an Orientalist project. Moreover, what was threatening to the Ashkenazis and the Ashkenazi-fied Mizrahim in her works was that she has re-hyphenated the term, spoiling the decades-long and tireless Zionist efforts to destroy the connection between Arabness and Jewishness.13 Shohat’s re-introduction of the hyphen has re-inflamed the hibernated fears of the Arabness of Israeli Jews, both Mizrahim and

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______________________________________________________________ Ashkenazim. This brought to consciousness painful experiences from the past which began to occupy public intellectual discourse in Israel. Nevertheless, Shohat’s views were criticised from all sides: from Ashkenazi-fied Zionist seculars to Mizrahi activists; right-wing nationalists as well as left-wingers, and the Ultra-Orthodox Mizrahim of the third largest political party, Shas. This multi-faceted criticism of Shohat’s view of the Mizrahim did touch a nerve of fear, but did so in a monolithic and anachronistic way.14 It reduced significant categories and Mizrahi diverse voices into a homogenised group such as the vocal ‘Left Bank’ internet website “www.hagada.org”.15 This website contains, for example, articles on the trial of a Mizrahi woman, Taly Fahima16, who was charged with collaboration with Palestinian terrorists, as well as a religious discourse on Jewish tradition and religion by prominent scholars as Zvi Zohar, who wrote innovative pieces such as “Sephardic Rabbinic Response to Modernity: Some Central Characteristics”, unveiling another aspect of Mizrahist thought..17 Yet another facet of Mizrahim was reflected from the left-wing Mizrahi discourse, in the movement of Mizrahi intellectuals called “The Democratic Mizrahi Rainbow”18, who also launched a website that administers discussions on social justice issues. Other aspects such as the nationalreligious position of the group behind the website www.haokets.org/ were also fiercely put on the public agenda and generate public debates.19 These social instances reflect the complexity and heterogeneity of the Mizrahi population. Although she did not mean to do so, Shohat’s view spurred a debate which showed precisely the active and diverse roles that Mizrahim play in intellectual public discourse in Israel. Her publications unveiled the Mizrahim’s complex position towards their experiences as Arabic Jews. One thing which was clear is that they were not ashamed or contemptuous or afraid of their Arabness. What Shohat’s work did not foster was their role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Their voice on this crucial issue remained silent. From this point of view the Mizrahim were presented as if they were mere victims of Zionism. Indeed, I find it difficult to understand the absence of the discussion of what seems to be the Mizrahim’s active consent and not just subordination, or Mizrahi dispute with the Zionist de-hyphenisation in Shohat’s work. The Mizrahim’s position is very difficult to summarise, but Shohat insists on the victimisation of Arabic Jews, as the title of one of her articles announces: “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims”.20 Shohat reduces the diverse reactions of Mizrahim to one that is politically passive and uniform. Mizrahim appear to be objects who accepted the Zionist imposition of the ‘de-hyphenisation’. This is a monolithic standpoint which does not coincide with possible political heterogeneity and cultural diversity, which Shohat herself attributes to the Mizrahim. Moreover, she treats all

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______________________________________________________________ varieties of Arab Jewishness just the same, and what Zionism has done to Jewish Arabness she also treats in a monolithic manner. Shohat hardly discusses Jewish religion and Jewish tradition in itself. She discusses negation of the Diaspora only in the context of Zionism's goal to eliminate the history of Arabic Jews from the school curricula. Shohat’s attempt was to bring that history back. She argues that Jewishness, when related to the Arabic Jews, was presented in civilian and cultural terms, as “Jewish Iraqi” language, family life, customs and space.21 Jews distinguished themselves as a community only from Moslems, not from Arabs. This was a religious distinction which divided the Arabs into groups of Jews and Moslems.22 Her conclusion is that in the Diaspora the Arabs-Moslems and the Arabic Jews were not alienated from each other. This indeed was the common description repeatedly mentioned by Israeli Jews who came from the Arab world. But while Shohat and other scholars such as Avi Shlaim, the author of the ‘Iron Wall’23, give us a peaceful, even somewhat nostalgic description of community life in Iraq until the emergence of the Zionist movement, Albert Memmi, the author of the powerful work “The Coloniser and The Colonised”,24 discusses his Jewish-Arabness in a very different way, rather furiously insisting that fear of Arabs was part of the Jews’ experience in the Arab countries. In an article entitled “Who is an Arab Jew?”25 Memmi responded to the call of Muammer Khadafi, the Libyan leader, to Jews to return to the Arab countries, rhetorically asking them “Are you not Arabs like us - Arab Jews?” Memmi agrees with Shohat that the similarities between Jews and Moslems are rooted in their Arabness, and that Arabness is a cultural similarity. But while Shohat sees culture with a capital C which includes history, geography politics and space, Memmi's culture is written with a small c. He claims that Jews Arabness was displayed in habits, music and menu. But he also claims that “Jews were at the mercy not only of the monarch but also of the man in the street”,26 pointing to the constant threat, for Arabic Jews, that politics submerges at least two histories. Memmi’s different view of culture, I want to suggest, results from the influence of the time in which he wrote his reply to Khadafi, the mid1970s. Shohat, on the other hand, is writing in the post- era: post-modernist, post-colonialist and post-Zionist. The focus in the idea of the “post-” here is on new modes and forms of colonial actions rather than on something that moves beyond.27 When applied to the above point, this results both in continuities and in discontinuities. In other words, experiencing a phase of othering within what is imagined as one's own country, as the Mizrahim did, has a sobering effect of post-naiveté. And therefore we can conclude that Mizrahim from Arab countries have indeed undergone a twofold suffering: from being Jews in Arab countries and from being Arabs in Israel. Zionism looked down on them, racialising them for being part Arabs, and in this sense

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______________________________________________________________ in Israel, they were Jewish victims of Zionism and Jewish victims of Arabness. However, they have learned how to survive both in the Arab countries and in the Zionist country. That is to say that they suffered because of being classified along racial lines. What I centre on here is how they have survived this racialisation in Israel. Although severely economically deprived, in three decades they have learned how to play the Israeli political game and have became a significant if not the significant actor on the political arena. This paper is in a way a continuation of a paper “The Israeli Palestinian Conflict and the Israeli Arabic Jews” which I delivered in AlKuds University in January 2005.28 I argued that the Mizrahim, the Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries, cannot be categorised as one homogenous social group, and that their political orientation, in general, and their position towards the Israeli Palestinian conflict, in particular, ranges from the right to the left of other political parties. Unlike their popular political image as right-wingers, their political considerations are complex and influenced by factors which are connected to the peace process both directly and indirectly, and in any case are influenced by economic factors and bitter experiences of deprivation. Nevertheless, political analysts and intellectuals - mostly Ashkenazis - inherited the founding fathers’ Orientalist perceptions of Mizrahim as Arabs who were westernised through the socialisation systems of the state. Therefore it would be myopic to see the Mizrahim as Shohat does as merely passive victims and not to consider their impact (albeit indirect) on the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Today they are scattered across the political map, although their voice is mainly heard from the right wing. The reason for this is a question that still needs to be studied. From this point of view Shohat’s proclamation of Arab-Jewish victimisation of the Mizrahim remains an abstract idea that might attract intellectuals but is contradicted by daily life practices. As their experience of racialisation was completely different from that of the Palestinians from both sides of the “green line”, I suggest seeing them neither as exclusively Arabs - victims of Zionism - nor as Israelis - identical to the Ashkenazis - and to study their political role with full attention to their diverse cultural and historical experiences. This turns the gaze to the Palestinians: how do they see the Mizrahim? This complication was fairly well discerned by many Palestinians who have been impatient with the abstruse arguments surrounding epistemological foundations of post-Zionism. They have concentrated instead on more historically-informed studies of the political conditions and biases of particular knowledge claims, as demonstrated, for example, in the works of Bishara.29 Such works ultimately derive from Said; they usually want to preserve some kind of distance from Mizrahim as well as from the postZionist discourse. The Mizrahim post-Zionist, like Shohat however, who

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______________________________________________________________ want to bring Arabness back in to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, deny that this impatience exists or is contestable. In conclusion, the Arabic-Jewish idea offers no model of conflict resolution beyond disputes as to how to remove from Zionism the fear of Arabness or how to move to political action. Given this contested position, relations between Palestinians and leftist Mizrahim, have been wary. Mizrahim in the left-wing organisations such as the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow and Ahoti-Mizrahi Women’s Organisation have paid little explicit attention to the issues raised by Palestinians outside the academic world. From a recent draft published on the internet, one can immediately identify the Zionist middle-class spirit blowing through it. Not even one issue of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is discussed, be it Jerusalem, the right of return or the plight of refugees. Like Shohat, the Mizrahi intellectuals in Israel enjoy the game of pulling Zionism from the hands of the mainstream establishment and delivering it to the hands of critical, perhaps post-Zionist activists. But the problem is that this does not accurately mirror the complex relations between the Mizrahim and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There are Mizrahim who hold Arab-Jewish views and who are often identified as leftwingers, yet they do not enjoy the sympathy of the Palestinians on the common ground of being Arabs; other Mizrahim want the occupation in the territories to continue the oppression of Palestinians. The belief that either view is common to all Mizrahim would be both misleading and synthetic, as there is no such a single Mizrahi view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is impossible to ignore Mizrahim right-wingers who contest from the extreme right and from religious and Orthodox perspectives the very idea of Arabic Jews. Shas, the Ultra-Orthodox Party representing religious people of ArabJewish origin, whom I did not include in this analysis, claim to be the true Zionists. They don't call themselves Arabs or Mizrahim but rather Sepharadim. Zionist Sepharadim. However, it would be too easy and superficial to put all of them in the same pot as right-wingers. It is my contention that understanding the fear of Arabness as it is expressed in Israeli society, both among Ashkenazim as well as among Mizrahim, can help throw some light on the exploration of the fear of Islam and Arabness in general (as has been expressed in other places in other historical times, such in the writings of Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington). Be that as it may, the making of political decisions such as the invasion of Iraq are not idly rooted in fear of Islam. Fear of Islam is not merely a matter of the imagination, as Said himself points out: Yet where Islam was concerned, European fear, if not always respected, was in order. After Mohammed's death in 632, the military and later the cultural and religious hegemony of Islam grew enormously.30 [my emphasis]

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Notes 1

E Said, Orientalism, Vintage NY, 1978. H Dahan-Kalev, “You Are So Pretty, You Don’t Look Moroccan”, Israeli Studies, Vol. 6, pp. 1-14, 2001. 3 K Frankenstein, “On Ethnic Differences”, Megamot, B3, pp. 261-76, 1951 [Hebrew] see also Karl Frankenstein, “On the Concept of Primitivity”, Megamot, B4, p. 342, p. 344, p. 347, 1951 [Hebrew]. 4 A E Simon, “On the Meaning of the Concept Primitivity”, Megamot, B3 p. 227, 1951 [Hebrew]. 5 Idem. 6 Idem. 7 Ibid., 335. See also http://iupjournals.org/israel/iss6-1.html - f25 8 Ibid., 338. See also http://iupjournals.org/israel/iss6-1.html - f26. 9 M Lissak, Lecture presented at the Cherrick Centre for the Study of Zionism ,the Yishuv and the State of Israel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem January 1, 1998. (My translation.) 10 K Fuerstein and M Richel, The Children of the Melah - The Cultural Retardation among Moroccan Children and Its Meaning in Education, published by the Henrietta Szold Institute and the Jewish Agency Jerusalem, 17, 1953 [Hebrew]. 11 E Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, Univ. of Texas Press, 1989. 12 E Shohat, “Dislocated Identities: Reflections of an Arab-Jew”, Movement Research: Performance Journal, 5, 1992. 13 Ibid, 1992. 14 Left Bank internet site http://www.hagada.org.il/hagada/ 15 Ibid. 16 http://www.hagada.org.il/hagada/ 17 Z Zohar, “Sephardic Rabbinic Response to Modernity: Some Central Characteristics”, in: S Deshen and W P Zenner (eds.), Jews Among Muslims: Communities in the Pre-Colonial Middle East, Macmillan and NYU Press, London, 1996, pp. 64-80,. 18 Left-wing Mizrahi discourse forum “Democratic Mizrahi Rainbow”, www.hakeshet.org.il 19 http://www.haokets.org/ 20 E Shohat, “Sephardim In Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims”, Social Texts, 19-20, pp. 1-37, 1988. 21 E Shohat, “Dislocated Identities: Reflections of an Arab-Jew”, Movement Research: Performance Journal Vol. 5, Fall-Winter, p. 8, 1992. 22 Ibid. 2

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______________________________________________________________ 23

A Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World; Norton and Company, NYU Press, NY, 2000. 24 A Memmi, The Coloniser and the Colonised, Beacon Press, Boston, MA, 1967. 25 A Memmi, “Who is an Arab Jew?”, Israel Academic Community on the Middle East, February 1975. 26 Ibid. 27 E Shohat, “Notes on the Post-Colonial”, Social Text 31/32, 1992, pp. 99113. 28 H Dahan Kalev “The Israeli Palestinian Conflict and the Israeli ArabJews”, The Faculty For Israeli-Palestinian Peace, FFIPP, The 4th International Academic Conference on An End to Occupation, A Just Peace in Israel Palestine :Activating an International Network January 3rd – 5th, 2005 Al Quds University East Jerusalem. 29 A Bishara, “On the Question of the Palestinian Minority in Israel”, Theory and Criticism, Jerusalem, 1993, vol. 3 (1). 30 Said, Orientalism, op. cit. p. 5.

Bibliography Bishara, A., “On the Question of the Palestinian Minority in Israel”. Theory and Criticism, vol. 3 (1) 1993. Dahan-Kalev, H., “The Israeli Palestinian Conflict and the Israeli ArabJews,” The Faculty For Israeli-Palestinian Peace, FFIPP, The 4th International Academic Conference on An End to Occupation, A Just Peace in Israel-Palestine :Activating an International Network, January 3rd-5th, 2005, Al Quds University East Jerusalem. Dahan-Kalev, H., “You Are So Pretty, You Don’t Look Moroccan”. Israeli Studies, Vol. 6:1-14. Frankenstein, K., “On Ethnic Differences”. Megamot, B3 261-76 [Hebrew] see also K. Frankenstein, “On the Concept of Primitivity”, Megamot, B4 (1951) p. 342, p. 344, p. 347 [Hebrew], 1951. Memmi, A., The Coloniser and the Colonised. Beacon Press, Boston, 1967. ――, “Who is an Arab Jew?” Israel Academic Community on the Middle East, February 1975.

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______________________________________________________________ Said, E., Orientalism. Vintage, NY, 1978. Shohat, E., Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, Univ. of Texas Press, Austin, TX, 1989. ――, “Dislocated Identities: Reflections of an Arab-Jew”. Movement Research: Performance Journal no. 5, Fall-Winter, 1992. ――, “Notes on the ‘Post Colonial’”. Social Texts, 31/32, 1992. Simon, A. E., “On the Meaning of the Concept Primitivity”. Megamot, B3, 1951. Zohar, Z., “Sephardic Rabbinic Response to Modernity: Some Central Characteristics”, in S. Deshen and W.P. Zenner (eds.), Jews Among Muslims: Communities in the Pre-Colonial Middle East, Macmillan and New York University Press, London, 1996.

Websites http://www.haokets.org/ www.hakeshet.org.il http://student.cs.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/journals/SephardicHeritageUpd ate.php http://www.hagada.org.il/hagada/ 25.9.04

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

***** 1.

The Girl Marilyn Joy Wallman: Born on the 6th March 1958 at Lister Private Hospital, Alfred Street, Mackay, weighing 9 pounds 8 ounces. ‘A lovely baby with red brown hair.’1

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

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______________________________________________________________ hitchhiking.4 Another fellow employed the use of his trusty diviner's rod to insist that not only was she still alive, but that she was on the Gold Coast!5 The police canvassed the possibility that she had been kidnapped for ransom as her grandfather was a wealthy sugar cane producer, and the president of the national Sugar Cane Growers Association. This theory was quickly disputed, however, when no ransom note ever arrived. Marilyn was also considered to have perhaps run away willingly, although no reasons for her having desired to do so were ever uncovered from family and friends. Her friends did suggest she had been ‘permissive’, but police claimed to have given this idea little credence, and the girl’s father, needless to say, hotly denied it.6 A possible sighting of her days later in a car in Mount Isa with three ‘long-haired youths’ and a couple of girls proved insubstantial. 7 Another sighting of her in Habana in another car, again with a couple of ‘youths’, was also dismissed. White slavery came in for a mention as a likely explanation for her disappearance in some national papers. The best story, though, came from the police themselves, with the superintendent in charge of the investigation stating only days after her apparent abduction that ‘an unknown suitor was holding Marilyn prisoner’. He went on to explain that: “It could be that some young member of a migrant family has got the idea from a custom in some European countries - where men abduct … girls to force them into marriage”.8 In the end, all of these theories came to nought. All that mattered was that Marilyn never came home and no trace of her was ever found again. This paper will demonstrate how this inexplicable event altered the social fabric of the small town of Mackay both at the time of the disappearance and into the present. Using interviews with witnesses to the crime, Marilyn’s family, and residents of the town, it will show that Marilyn’s vanishing sent shockwaves into her community that still reverberate, creating a lasting climate of horror and fear. The people of Mackay continue to speak of pre- and post-Marilyn, and even though the town has more than quadrupled in size, the legend lingers on, poisoning all suggestions of safety and ruining all illusions of autonomy for the children of Mackay. The freedom in which other children in small country towns live their lives is, for these children, only a treacherous dream. Instead, the fear of the ‘bogeyman’ is entirely real for these citizens; they know what it is to have a child gone forever, to never have the comfort of closure through an arrest, to live the endless waiting for ‘normality’, for ‘pre-Marilyn’, life to return. Fear and horror have become ordinary, an everyday state of being, as indeed they have been for 36 years and continue to be as the nightmare tale of ‘Marilyn’ continues to haunt the populace. We have employed a narrative inquiry method of analysis in the rest of this paper. This method seemed most relevant to our work as it serves the needs of the researcher who ‘wishes to understand a phenomenon or an

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______________________________________________________________ experience rather than to formulate a logical or scientific explanation’.9 In other words, we desired to understand how experiences come to mean, and all the different ways in which that understanding might happen, than to follow what Richard Rorty has described as the preoccupation of AngloAmerican philosophy with comprehending the ‘truth’ of a matter or object.10 Instead, it was more important to us to discover how events have been constructed by active subjects,11 using their own words, framed by their own context, and delivered in their own narrative style. Thus, we used a very open-ended interview format, merely asking interviewees for their remembrances of the day Marilyn went missing and what happened after. Occasionally prompts were used, such as ‘what did you do?’, or ‘how did you feel?’, but for the most part, we tried to just sit and listen and let the interviewee tell their story of that time in the their own way and at their own speed. This is a very different style of interviewing from that employed by many other researchers, who have a specific agenda, or a finite need for knowledge. It particularly differs from the journalistic interview which is almost always predicated on time constraints and story parameters already formulated in the interviewer’s mind, so that they can generate the kind of ‘story’ their editors demand. In our case, the reverse was true, we allowed the interviewee to drive the interview, permitting them to circle back over particular moments, to jump forward and back in time, to interject their own feelings throughout. In this way, we learned what parts of the incident were most important to them and why events that may have seemed trivial to us formed the basis of the pain each interviewee shared regarding this disappearance. These interviews taught us how people try to make sense of the inexplicable, to give meaning to the impossible, and how they go on living with endless uncertainty. Context, of course, was all important in our comprehension of these interviews. As Mary Kay Kramp has observed, “Context enables the researcher to make meaning where previously there was no meaning”.12 Without historical context, for instance, we would never have understood the intense impact of this one event on this entire town. We were asked, again and again, by interviewees to remember that Mackay was only very tiny at that time, and that Eimeo consisted of no more than half a dozen houses situated on a road that led nowhere. We were encouraged to imagine the sense of community that came from such a small place, where if everyone didn’t personally know everyone else, then they certainly knew of them. That sort of context was vital in our interpretation of the stories we were told. Indeed, in many cases, especially in those where our interviewees didn’t actually know Marilyn, this was the only way to make sense of those people’s intense reactions to her disappearance. It has been argued that narrative is vital to our understanding of the world; that it is the way we come to know.13 However, the term ‘narrative’ is

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______________________________________________________________ perhaps too formal when dealing with the material we were given. For we were presented with stories which were more personal, more familiar, more conversational, and which had less to do with narrative convention than with fragments of memory glued together with emotion. We made them into narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends, so that we could analyse them, but it is important to realise that this is not the way they were told to us. We make no apology for our reformation of these tales for this paper, because it was only in this way that we could isolate themes, discover repetitions, try to fill the space, as Joan Didion has observed, between ‘what happened’ and ‘what it means’.14 Yet, because we are dealing with stories, each still is imbued with the personal, the specific, the particular. Each story still belongs to the person who told it and who lives it now. For, as Anthony Kerby has stated, ‘narratives are a primary embodiment of our understanding of the world, of experience and ultimately of ourselves’.15 Through stories, we impose form on experience,16 filtering and imposing order so that a tale can be told. The storyteller, in our research, is still the authority on their story, no matter how we have played with it so as to provide a meaningful performative piece of writing on Marilyn’s disappearance. We, as researchers, are not the ones who know; we are the ones who piece together, who reframe, who try to understand and interpret in the ways we imagine our informants would like us to. In working with the many stories we recorded from the people of Mackay, we isolated a number of themes and events which we felt allowed this tale of loss to assume a structure that could be followed by those unfamiliar with both the event and the people who talk about it. We chose to do this not to change the stories themselves, but to try to ‘touch the very essence’17 of their experience in a wider context than only their own individual attachments to this case. We made the stories weave together, and then separated out the strands again, depending on the theme we were considering. At times, some themes seemed more general, as though they belonged to the towns of Mackay and Eimeo; at others, they were much more personal, relating only to those who loved and cared for Marilyn herself. In this way, we created a sort of plot, which represented what happened on the day Marilyn went missing and the aftermath of this event, went through with the feelings of those who were there and who can’t forget. Through this plot we ‘restoryed’18 the narratives we were told, configuring and reconfiguring the event to convey their significance for the community and for the family. For us, as for other researchers who use narrative analysis to understand an event, we accept that ‘the telling is in the making’; that although we have created a coherent narrative out of the stories we’ve been told, we are also aware that all such coherencies, stories, narratives, are made by the person each time they are told.19

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______________________________________________________________ What follows is a series of overlapping quotes from the people of Mackay using their own words in their attempts to explain the phenomenon of Marilyn’s disappearance. While we have organised and reconfigured stories, however, we still feel that these people’s voices ring through, expressing the sorrow, horror and fear in a far more colourful and heartfelt manner than we could ever manage. Through them, we can see, feel and hear, that, as Paul Ricoeur has stated: ‘Human time is nothing other than narrated time.’20 For Marilyn is so alive to so many of these interviewees that it becomes ultimately impossible to measure the passing of the years via clocks and calendars; for these people, her vanishing is as yesterday, her promise of return still to come, her experience of the world as real and as valid as that of all those who have lived the 36 years since her parting. 2. The Search Charlie (member of search team): “The whole community really did search. People just came from all around. It was unbelievable. It went on for weeks. All that time the bakers donated bread, and someone donated fillings for the bread. The women were cooking every night. The women fed the men.” Jack (member of search team): “The response at that time was excellent. It was a big search. People came on motor bikes, 4 wheel drives, horses, just combing the area, over and over.” Slim Jones (citizen of Mackay): “I’d say 50% of the total population of that time were on the road looking around. You couldn’t go anywhere, there was people walking sort of arm in arm up the sides of the roads, looking in the grass. Every time you saw something you would wonder. You know, like a plastic bag or something.” Charlie: “But I always felt it was disorganised. They only mounted roadblocks two days later. I felt as though the police shot themselves in the foot that first day.” John Wallman (Marilyn’s father): “It was huge, but it was disorganised. We were often asked to search the same paddock or gully someone else had just finished searching.” Daphne Wallman (Marilyn’s mother): “Even by the time they searched the crime site properly, it was the next day. Close to 200 people had already tramped all over it.” Rob (citizen of Mackay): “The police led the search parties. They combed everywhere. They went through the drills of the cane paddocks to see if there

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______________________________________________________________ were any holes. They found this bloke up in the sand dunes over here. There was 50 blokes walking side by side right through that area and they found him in the sand dunes. He had two big plastic bags and a plastic bin and a shovel with him and the copper said, ‘What are you doing up here?’ and he said, ‘I’m just looking for some good sand.’ Now, he’d walked over sand that you could have filled seven bloody Sydney Harbours up with, and the bloody cops didn’t even suspect anything. If he’d searched he would most probably have found blood in that bin and that’s where she is. She’s up there in them sand hills. I reckon if they took a cadaver dog out there, they’d find her in those bloody sand hills out there.” Charlie: “One of the greatest things I would have loved to have done was to find her watch. Or something. Just for poor old Johnny. Because him and I used to do a lot of fencing, boundary fencing. You could see all day, what we were doing, there was always an eye out, looking for something of hers. I think we all did that. All of the neighbours.” 3. Suspicion Charlie: “The whole community was so much on edge. Our poor old dog died two days later (after the disappearance) and we would not do a thing with the dog. We weren’t game to dig a hole. We weren’t game to burn him. Because we felt as though they’re looking for evidence. One of the worst things I felt, there was a lot of suspicion on a lot of people in the area for a long time after. I had an uncle who was shell shocked from the war who was in and out of mental institutions and there was one bloke who just used to wander the roads who’d had a nervous breakdown and they were questioned and let go. But that suspicion stayed in the community for a long time after. Years after. The finger was pointed to a degree - there was a lot of suspicion. Even on the neighbours who’d killed beasts and there was a little bit of blood in their car.” 4. Horror Daphne: “It was on the Tuesday night that something bad happened to Marilyn. It happened on Tuesday night and I’ll take that to my grave with me. She needed me so bad and I know it’s funny that people say things but I could see her all in her clothes coming, running up to try to get up the stairs. ‘Let me in Mum, Mummy help’. I can still see her to this day. And I remember in a daze walking out to open the door and I really think that something bad happened to her that night.”

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______________________________________________________________ 5. Aftermath David Wallman (Marilyn’s brother): “When we were kids we could go anywhere on our farm and the neighbours’. We’d go off on our pushbikes, drive a tractor, go to the neighbours, mucked around with kids on our bikes. We’d have a time to be home by, and off we’d go, bare feet, we roamed the countryside and everyone felt safe. I don’t even think Mum and Dad had a lock on the door. If there was, there wasn’t a key. Nobody would lock a door and I don’t think anyone had anything stolen. You’d walk straight into someone’s house and the doors’d be open and there’d be no-one home. There was no ‘now you be careful kids, don’t go near the road’, but now, my kids growing up, I wouldn’t let them out of my sight. I feel sorry for my two girls because I’ve had a pretty tight rein on them and ‘cause of Marilyn’s incident, they’ve suffered too. It’s not just Marilyn and Rex and I and Mum and Dad sort of thing, it’s our kids as well. They weren’t even born when it happened, but they’ve been affected by it too because its ‘Don’t you go there. No, you’re not going to that party.’ Don’t roam outside, especially when you know they’re two girls. … I wouldn’t let them go to certain birthday parties because I thought, ‘I don’t like that mother. She’s a bit irresponsible.’ So they’d know they’re not going and they’d sit and cry and thought Dad was a big meany for not letting them go. And I couldn’t get them to realise just why I couldn’t let them go. We told them the Aunty Marilyn story, but that’s just some lady in pictures and on the TV. ‘Til they got a bit older and then they realised.’” Dory (citizen of Mackay): “It took me all my time not to stay with my children the whole time. You had to really hold yourself back from overprotecting after Marilyn vanished.” Merrill (school friend of Marilyn’s): “Marilyn disappeared the day before my birthday. I was just about to turn 15 and being a child at that stage, we were all pretty concerned, but we went on with our own lives. But for me personally it’s affected me in that I’ve thought about it. And even my husband who doesn’t even come from Mackay, whenever he reads something about Marilyn’s case, he’ll bring it home to me. But in the long term, it’s affected me in the way I bring up my children. I’ve very overprotective of them, very strict with them in what they can and can’t do. I’ve only ever left them with people that I trust and to the extent that they’ve told me I’m overprotective because everybody else’s parents let them do this, that and everything else, and I’m very careful with them.” Slim Jones (citizen of Mackay): “It was a very, very nasty business. And the whole town was in shock. It lasted weeks, probably months. And that shock, it’s still there. It frightened a lot of mothers and fathers to the point where

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______________________________________________________________ they drove their kids to school and waited for them to come home. You’ll drive along the road now and you’ll see a couple of kids waiting for the bus and Mum or Dad’s waiting with them It’s still going on. You don’t trust anybody. Mackay was a sleepy little place. It didn’t have any problems and that shook everybody up. It really shook us up. I don’t really think Mackay has been the same since. There’s been a couple of other abductions or rapes or whatever they were since then but they didn’t have that impact. They’re still alive. You don’t sort of trust everybody. Before, well we didn’t know not to trust. I know it spoilt Mackay.” 6. Fear Rex Wallman (Marilyn’s brother): “It changes your whole way of looking at things. You go through different periods in your life when your moods change from down and out and other times you’re feeling just bloody angry and other times then you’re just really possessive about the people around you, and all of those things together doesn’t necessarily create a normal happy friendly lifestyle. It just puts pressure on the whole situation. Makes things extremely tough. I can remember one instance when Julian was only 12 weeks old. My wife had a salon, she’d gone back to work. Julian was with a day-care mum. We spent ages and ages going through people to find the right person. This one afternoon, like every afternoon, I’d gone to pick Julian up. Then one afternoon I got there, house was dark, there was no-one there. I sat outside in the driveway making phone calls. About half an hour later, she pulls into the driveway. She’d decided to take them down to the beach for a while. So, you know, I lost it and grabbed Julian. He wasn’t going back there again. Just about that whole night I sat in his room, either holding him or sitting beside his cot. I just could not make that lady understand …” 7. Sadness Daphne: “Both boys have had breakdowns. It gets to them. The police gave Rex a terrible gruelling: ‘Are you sure you’re not telling lies?’ - about what he heard in the cane. It was one of the worst things they ever did to him. It haunts him. It’s the cause of a lot of his problems today.” 8. Still Searching Daphne and John: “We’ve been everywhere following information over the years. We’ve been to Shepparton and Townsville and Gin Gin. We’ve even been to Western Australia looking. Most of the time you know you’re on a wild goose chase. But you can’t say no. We’ve done a lot of miles.” David: “It’d be nice to be able to say no, go away, leave us alone when someone rings with ideas about what happened. But you can’t because otherwise the case’ll stay in the files, in the cobwebs forever.”

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______________________________________________________________ 9. Speechless David: “I never find myself sitting down having a conversation about Marilyn. It’s too hard to talk about her. It shouldn’t be hard to talk about your sister. And even with friends who we’ve grown up with and known for years. They grew up with us. I never find myself talking about Marilyn. If we do, I have to change the subject. Talk about something else.” Rex: “There was nothing then for us. We never got any sort of help. No trauma counselling. If I’d have had someone to talk to as a young teenager it would have changed my reactions, how I react to things, would’ve explained why I’d be so angry when someone mentions Marilyn. I only have half a dozen people to talk to, and most of them are family. It’d be nice to have a wider group of friends …” 10. Goodbye Daphne: “Our memories get all jumbled, remembering our Marilyn in so many different things, so many different ways, who she was, and all the things of her life. Things we didn’t do, things we missed out on. This will never bring our Marilyn back. I wish it could. I know what happened on that fateful Tuesday morning, 21st March 1972 on her way to school as normal. Only not to get there. My son - horrible mishap at the bottom of one of the big hills. What we still pray to know and we continue to pray for answers to her unknown fate to help us tormented souls. I wish we had more photos from that time in her life, or a video, just to be able to hear her voice or little things relating to life, like they have nowadays. We just, at the moment, we only have our memories to rely on. It is nice, especially, when we come across some of her friends or people who still remember her and people who like to help us in anyway they can. It’s nice to know that she is not forgotten. Thank you. Thank you for bearing with me.”

Notes 1

Personal interview with Daphne Wallman, January 2005. Eimeo is a small town situated near Mackay in northern Queensland. 3 This information is taken from the various newspaper accounts listed in the bibliography and from the personal interviews conducted with Mackay citisens. 4 “Still no trace found of missing teenager”, The Daily Mercury [Mackay], 25.3.72, p. 2. 5 “Diviner certain missing girl alive”, The Daily Mercury [Mackay], 7.4.72, p. 2. 2

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______________________________________________________________ 6

“Missing Teenager - Murder link is not ruled out”, The Daily Mercury [Mackay] 23.3.72, pp. 1, 40. 7 “Mt. Isa lead on missing girl case?”, The Daily Mercury [Mackay], 5.4.72, p. 2; “Search for girl switches to Mt. Isa”, Rockhampton Morning Bulletin 5.4.72, p. 3. 8 “Police search will end today”, Courier-Mail 27.3.72, p. 1. 9 M K Kramp, “Exploring Life and Experience Through Narrative Inquiry” in K DeMarrais (ed.) Foundations for Research: Methods of Inquiry in Education and the Social Sciences Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 2004, p. 104. 10 Cited in J Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1986, p. 12. 11 C K Riessman, Narrative Analysis, Sage, Newbury Park, CA, 1993, p. 70. 12 Kramp, op. cit., p. 105. 13 Bruner, op. cit., p. 4; Kramp, op. cit., p. 106. 14 J Didion, “On keeping a notebook”, in Slouching toward Bethlehem, Dell, New York, 1961. 15 A P Kerby, Narrative and the Self, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1991, p. 3. 16 M Grumet, Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA, 1988, p. 87. 17 M Van Maanen, Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action-Sensitive Pedagogy, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 1990, p. 70. 18 Kramp, op. cit., p. 120. 19 E W Eisner, The Enlightened Eye. Macmillan, New York, 1991, p. 191. 20 P Ricouer, Time and Narrative, Vol. 3, (K B Pellauer & D Pellauer, trans.), University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1988, p. 102.

Bibliography Bruner, J., Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA, 1986. Didion, J., “On keeping a notebook” in Slouching toward Bethlehem. New York, Dell, 1961. “Diviner certain missing girl alive”. The Daily Mercury [Mackay], 7.4.72, p. 2.

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______________________________________________________________ Eisner, E. W., The Enlightened Eye. Macmillan, New York, 1991. Grumet, M., Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA, 1988. Kerby, A. P., Narrative and the self. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1991. Kramp, M. K., ‘Exploring Life and Experience Through Narrative Inquiry” in K. DeMarrais (ed) Foundations for Research: Methods of Inquiry in Education and the Social Sciences. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 2004, pp. 103-21. Personal Interviews with citizens of Mackay, January 2005. “Missing girl searches fail again”. Rockhampton Morning Bulletin 24.3.72, p. 1. “Missing Teenager - Murder link is not ruled out”. The Daily Mercury [Mackay] 23.3.72, pp. 1, 40. “Mt. Isa lead on missing girl case?”The Daily Mercury [Mackay], 5.4.72, p. 2. “Police search will end today”. Courier-Mail 27.3.72, 1. Ricouer, P., Time and Narrative, Vol. 3 (K. B. Pellauer & D. Pellauer, Trans.). University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1988. Riessman, C. K. Narrative Analysis. Sage Publications, Newbury Park, CA, 1993. “Search for girl switches to Mt. Isa”. Rockhampton Morning Bulletin 5.4.72, 3. “Search is called off”. The Daily Mercury [Mackay], 1.4.72, p. 2. “Search on for cars”. Courier-Mail 30.3.72, p. 3.

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______________________________________________________________ “Still no trace found of missing teenager”. The Daily Mercury [Mackay], 25.3.72, p. 2. “They're still hoping”. The Daily Mercury [Mackay], 15.4.72, p. 2. Van Maanen, M. Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an ActionSensitive Pedagogy. State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 1990.

“300 searchers find no trace of girl”. The Daily Mercury [Mackay] 24.3.72, pp. 1, 28.

Notes on Contributors Steven Allen is a lecturer in Film Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Winchester, Hampshire, United Kingdom. He is the Course Leader of the annual Media Studies summer school for the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth, University of Warwick. His research interests include animation, representations (especially of subcultures), horror cinema, and British cinema. Kristen Davis works in the School of Creative Communication, University of Canberra, Australia, and is a PhD student at the Australian National University. She has recently been published in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies and Traffic. She has previously published experimental fiction in a range of Australian journals under pseudonym, Kristen de Kline.

Madeleine Harwood is currently researching her PhD Changing Perceptions of Witchcraft in Literature in England: 1560 to the modern day in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Bristol. Stephen Hessel is a graduate student and instructor of Spanish at the University at Buffalo. His research and writing focuses on the Spanish Golden Age, specifically the works of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and Baltasar Gracián. Laura Hubner is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies within the Faculty of Arts at the University of Winchester, UK. She has published widely on European cinema and gender, including journal articles, book chapters and a monograph, The Films of Ingmar Bergman: Illusions of Light and Darkness (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Michèle Huppert is a Lecturer in Behavioural Studies, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University, Australia. Henriette Dahan Kalev is a political scientist and the Director of Gender Studies at the Ben Gurion University. She is a human rights activist in the occupied territories.

Craig Ferguson McGregor is a lecturer in the School of Global Studies, Social Science and Planning, at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Belinda Morrissey teaches media and communication studies at the University of Canberra, Australia. She is the author of When Women Kill: Questions of Agency and Subjectivity (2003: Routledge), and has also published in journals

Notes on Contributors ______________________________________________________________ including Social Semiotics, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies and Australian Women’s Law Journal. Most recently she has had chapters included in the following edited collections: Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence (2006: Wilfred Laurier University Press, Canada), and Inflections of Everyday Life (2006: University of Canterbury Press, NZ).

Susan Yi Sencindiver is a Ph.D. scholar at the University of Aarhus. Her research centres on the comparative study and working theory of the doppelgängerin. Eric Yu teaches literature and popular film genres at National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. He is a former director of NCTU Film Studies Centre.