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- Volume 2, Issue 2, 2011
Horror Studies - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2011
Volume 2, Issue 2, 2011
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[De]Composing ghosts: The failure of truth and the truth of failure from James to Oates
By Trafton MathIn the prologue to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, the frame narrator explicitly warns his audience that the ghost story to follow will not reveal any of its mysteries, at least, ‘not in any literal vulgar way’. The novella itself famously withholds any final explanation of its ambiguous ghosts, which has in part led to Joyce Carol Oates’s re telling of the tale in her ‘Accursed inhabitants of the house of Bly’ (1994). Though accused of simplistically making the inexplicit explicit, her tale complexly investigates the limits of the search for truth, and demonstrates that while a delivery of all of the dead letters of the original ostensibly recomposes James’s narrative holes, it also simultaneously decomposes the original, asking far more questions than it answers. Drawing from Alain Badiou’s concept both of the void that represents invisible nothingness and of the ‘phantom remainder’ that unhinges the thesis of stable knowledge and suggests the inaccessibility of the truth of being, this article will explore the ways in which the treatment of ghostliness exposes the intricate haunting in the relationship between a revision and its original, between a narrative and the event it narrates, and between knowledge and the truth that exceeds it. In applying Badiou’s Being and Event to an investigation of how James’s and Oates’s tales compose, decompose and recompose narrative structures in order to articulate an event, it will become clear that the narrative act paradoxically both induces and exorcises the haunting void, and as such, provides the means of negotiating the irretrievable loss of the truth of being.
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Ghosts that are not ghosts: The domesticated un-ghost in Victorian fiction
More LessAlthough the ghost has been a standard literary device for centuries, how that device is used, what the ghost represents within the framework of the narrative, the purposes for manifestation, authorial intention and even reader expectation of haunting is constantly challenged. This article focuses on the shift of narrative haunting from its eighteenth-century Gothic roots to its centrality in Victorian fiction by offering a close reading of particular entities appearing in canonical Victorian texts by Brontë, Collins, Dickens, Braddon, James and Le Fanu, establishing their relationship to the template, and then analyses the metamorphosis of form based on historical, social, scientific and epistemological context.
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Hybrid vigour: Heterogeneity, horror and history in George R. R. Martin’s Fevre Dream
More LessEqual parts antebellum steamboat odyssey and gothic vampire story, Fevre Dream (1982) is a consciously hybrid novel, one that embodies, encompasses and ultimately transcends multiple genres. My article uses Monster Theory – especially Nina Auerbach’s theory that vampires tend to personify a historical Zeitgeist – to deconstruct the generic play of Fevre Dream, demonstrating that the novel’s hybridism, rather than undermining aesthetic unity of effect, in fact engenders its success both as a historical novel and a tale of terror. In doing so the article not only interrogates the rigidity of generic boundaries but shows how the horrific specifically can complement rather than contaminate an otherwise realistic historical narrative.
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An ethics of decomposition: Ian McEwan’s early prose
More LessWhile in the last few decades Ian McEwan’s prose progressively moved towards a sort of ‘emancipated realism’, McEwan’s early works – the short story volumes First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1978) and the short novel The Cement Garden (1978), in particular – seem to operate under a rather different representational convention. Horrific imagery apparently borrowed from sources as diverse as the traditional Gothic novel, modern horror films or violent pornography is almost blinding at the surface level – and, in fact, every level of the narrative progresses steadily towards dissolution in a manner reminiscent of the violent strategies of decomposition of avant-garde movements such as Dadaism, surrealism or expressionism, or of the Theatre of the Absurd. These strategies denounce the seemingly realist construction of the texts as a no longer consequential carcass that can only serve as an object of mockery. As the historical avant-gardes have done before him, McEwan offers to his readers, in his early texts, the Enlightenment notion of the consistency and relatability of human experience as a hideous, grinning head on a stick. This article will discuss the correlation between horrific imagery and various narrative and linguistic strategies of textual decomposition in McEwan’s early prose, in an attempt to elucidate McEwan’s particular type of ethical engagement at that point in his career as a writer.
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Repetition with a difference: Representation and the uncanny in House of Leaves
More LessThe uncanny permeates Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), a postmodern version of the classic haunted house tale. Characters are stalked by their pasts, the novel is burdened with its own belatedness in the history of the genre, and language seems to suffer from its own imprecision and inauthenticity. Rather than resulting in mere repetition, however, incessant echoes of the past give rise to new visions. The anxiety of influence that seems to plague Danielewski perhaps ironically provides a route out of entropy and derivation. A series of imperfect narrators and editors describe the eponymous house whose interior dimensions belie the limits of its architecture, suggesting that the possibilities of any medium are boundless. The novel simultaneously reveals the failures and triumphs of representations, uncanny in their simultaneous fullness and emptiness, their presence and absence. The haunted structure in Danielewski’s novel represents the novel, the darkroom, the canvas, the digital image – any medium able to be interpreted, any medium whose distance from reality renders it familiar and yet strange, any medium that creates the world as it attempts to replicate it.
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Abstract comics and the decomposition of horror
More LessThe recent rise of abstract comics raises the problem of how horror can be conveyed in a purely non-representational mode. This article compares the strategies for evoking horror employed by three abstract comics. The shapes of Henrik Rehr’s Reykjavik simultaneously evoke a threatening geological exterior and an equally threatening interior, accelerating from horror into terror. To make The Panic, Andrei Molotiu resorted to a lengthy technical process out of which ambiguous forms emerged spontaneously; this Rorschach-like effect becomes part of the horror of his comic. Alexey Sokolin’s Life, Interwoven layers dozens of drawings in a steady progression of crowdedness and darkening, again moving from horror to terror. In all three comics the very obscurity of these abstract images contributes to their emotional impact.
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