The_domination_of_fear.pdf

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The Domination of Fear

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At the Interface

Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Dr Daniel Riha

Advisory Board Dr Alejandro Cervantes-Carson Professor Margaret Chatterjee Dr Wayne Cristaudo Dr Mira Crouch Dr Phil Fitzsimmons Professor Asa Kasher Owen Kelly Dr Peter Mario Kreuter

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

Volume 70 A volume in the At the Interface series ‘Fear, Horror and Terror’

Probing the Boundaries

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The Domination of Fear

Edited by

Mikko Canini

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

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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: 978-90-420-3084-8 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3085-5 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Printed in the Netherlands

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Table of Contents Introduction Mikko Canini PART I

Cultural Materialisation of Fear, Horror, Terror Carnographic Culture: America and the Rise of the Torture Porn Film Beth A. Kattelman

PART II

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We’re All Dirty Harry Now: Violent Movies for Violent Times Thomas Riegler

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The Gothic Topography in Scandinavian Horror Fiction Yvonne Leffler

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Getting Medieval: Bodies of Fear, Serial Killers and Se7en Shona Hill

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Fear, Horror and Politics Clash of Nihilisms Ali Riza Taskale Long Term Terrorism in Turkey: The Government, Media and Public Opinion Banu Baybars-Hawks

PART III

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Fear, Horror and Literature Into the Woods: Little Red Riding Hood and The Wolf Cynthia Jones Solar Midnight: Traversing the Abject Borderline State in Rudyard Kipling’s The City of Dreadful Night Lizzy Welby

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The Laughter of Horror: Judgement of the Righteous or Tool of the Devil? Maureen Moynihan

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Trash Mob: Zombie Walks and the Positivity of Monsters in Western Popular Culture Simone do Vale

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Horror and the Politics of Fear Mikko Canini

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Introduction Mikko Canini ***** Perhaps the representational trope of contemporary fear, horror and terror is the grainy televisual screen as its channels are rapidly switched: a disheveled man speaks from behind a mass of microphones – a rodeo cowboy is thrown from the back of a twisting horse – revellers dance at an Afghan wedding – protesters fight off police dogs in black and white – the undercarriage of a bomber in flight as its payload is released – a shirtless man brandishing a pistol glowers at the camera – the slow motion immolation of crash test dummies shattering a windscreen – a close-up of a woman’s eye. The rhetorical power of this trope can be attributed to the overdetermination of meaning produced by the conflation of disparate images, the vertiginous telescopic slippage from macro to micro, the anarchic presentation of potentially synchronic yet incommensurate contexts. Television, that atrophying medium from the previous century has informed and shaped our fears, diagnosing threats big and small as we negotiate our place in an uncertain world. Indeed, if one lists the multifarious loci of fear, each appears pre-presented by a televisual image: international terrorism, nuclear winter, global warming, economic collapse, disease (pandemics, cancer, AIDS), crime (juvenile, paedophiliac, racial), biotechnological catastrophe, corporate monopoly (economic, agricultural, Statist), antibiotic resistance, overpopulation, peak oil, peak water, religious war, environmental disaster (megatsunamis, supervolcanos, hypercanes), manufactured micro black holes, 2012 apocalypticism, biblical eschatology, colony collapse disorder, cosmic threats (meteoroids, magnetic field reversal, hypernova radiation), societal collapse, extinction (animal, botanical, cultural), rogue states, famine, drought, deforestation, desertification, mass migration… 1.

Risk Society Reading the list above, it is hard to disabuse oneself of the commonplace that the contemporary subject is marked by fear. From the films of Michael Moore, to pronouncements from political parties of all stripes, to critical-theoretical texts, the idea that fear dominates our shared affective reality is widespread. This analysis finds its roots in the early 1990s work of Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, who perceived an evolving future-oriented social organization preoccupied with the regulation and mitigation of risk.1 Insofar as the types of risk that concern the social formation identified by Giddens and Beck are ‘manufactured’, that is, produced through human agency, they arise as the consequences of

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______________________________________________________________ modernisation. For both, risk is an embedded component of contemporary social life – an irreducible recognition of the potential global consequences of technological progress that both mitigates, and produces, new social phenomena. One of the principle consequences of risk society, according to its theorists, is the production of an intense reflexivity in which the individual assumes a position of continuous reassessment of their ideological positions, beliefs and social roles. This reflexive position is the result of the widespread critique of previously (that is, prior to the advent of modernity) uncontested areas of social and political concern, and has resulted in loss of belief in the traditional forms of ideology as well as in the authority ascribed to traditional institutions. The subject in this characterisation is anxious insofar as they are required, by rapidly transforming technologies and socio-political conditions, to make decisions fraught with potentially devastating consequences, all the while reflexively acknowledging the impossibility of either anticipating outcomes or of grounding them in a meta-narrative of progress or ideological necessity. According to Beck, this anxious reflexivity has become the organizing principle of a society in which ‘the commonality of anxiety takes the place of the commonalty of need’.2 There are three aspects in the analysis of risk that are essential for an understanding of contemporary fear. The first is the ‘low-probability, high consequence’ nature of these new risks. From the sterilization of men due to the pollution of water supplies with oestrogen expelled from contraceptive pill users, to the development of self-replicating molecular nanotechnologies that transform the planet into grey-goo, the possibility of a worst-case, eschatological event makes all calculations of probability appear inherently irrational. This problem is exacerbated by risk society’s reflexive uncertainty about the motives and truth-claims of traditional institutions, which make it difficult to determine whether fear about this or that risk are justified or paranoid. As Peter Knight notes, ‘a permanent, low-level and sceptical form of everyday paranoia now seems to be a necessary and understandable default approach to life in risk society’.3 The second essential aspect is the separation of time and space from locality, termed ‘distanciation’ by Giddens, in which interaction and interdependence between remote social systems is increasingly a significant feature of life. This has two effects. First, it adds to the complexity of a previously localizable, and therefore circumscribable, consideration of the sources of risk, which are now increasingly influenced by distant events. Second, the potential consequences of risks are not only no longer restricted to a place (e.g. a nuclear accident will affect many other locales) but neither are they to time (this same accident could have grave repercussions for future generations). Risk, in this sense, is both unpredictable and uncontrollable –

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______________________________________________________________ not an isolated disruption, but an inescapable fact of the functioning of what Beck terms ‘second modernity’. The third aspect is that of the intensifying complexity produced by the net effect of distanciation, evolving technologies, and multiplying fields of knowledge. In describing the reflexive subject produced by risk society, Giddens states that, ‘social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character’.4 However, this dynamic also describes the behaviour of risk itself. For example, in the May 2000 outbreak of the ‘ILOVEYOU’ computer virus, which spread from Asia to Europe to America in a matter of a few hours, not only were network servers clogged up with email traffic generated by the virus itself, but they were also clogged by reflexive effects: people trying to download anti-virus software, emailed warnings about the virus, forwarded hoax warnings, follow-up emails warning that the first emails should be ignored and not circulated, etc. This third aspect of intensifying reflexive complexity has consequences not only for the smooth functioning of the internet (in this case), but for all processes that engage with the dynamics of globalisation. The anxiety that attends this complexity can clearly be seen in the wild fluctuations of international markets in response to the collapse or near-collapse of various American financial institutions in September 2008, and in the behaviour of legislators and central banks racing to secure deals in an effort to stave-off reflexive feedback loops that risked total economic ruin. 2.

A Cosmopolitan Future This reflexive complexity also has consequences for the exercise of power. The U.S. Department of Defence’s 2003 Information Operations Roadmap (declassified in 2006 under the Freedom of Information Act) stated that: information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP, increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice-versa…PSYOP messages…will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public.5 This is the kind of problematic secondary effect produced by the dynamics of modernism that disrupts all traditional boundaries, up to and including those of the nation-state.6 Beck argues that this structural disintegration of boundaries has lead to the ‘cosmopolitanisation of reality’: an unforeseen social consequence of actions directed at other results in a context of global interdependence and its

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______________________________________________________________ attendant risks. These cosmopolitan side effects, often undesired and mostly unintended, frustrate the equation of the nation-state with national society and create new transnational forms of living and communicating, new ascriptions and responsibilities, new ways in which groups and individuals see themselves and others.7 That is, the structures for global cooperation amongst nation-states and peoples have been put in place by modernity itself: the interdependencies of globalism. Add to this the scale of the risks that are the secondary effects of this modernity, (which can only be addressed in global terms) and one has the formula for what Beck calls a ‘cosmopolitan future’. The paradigm example for this thesis is, of course, the ecological crisis: Suddenly, and for the first time in history, every population, culture, ethnic group, religion and region in the world faces a future that threatens one and all. In other words, if we want to survive, we have to include those who have been excluded. The politics of climate change is necessarily inclusive and global – it is cosmopolitics.8 For Beck, the anxiety that attends risk society contains the spark of a progressive geopolitics. 3.

The Politics of Fear In the late 1990s, Frank Furedi’s Culture of Fear: Risk-Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation9 and Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things10 exchanged Beck’s ‘anxiety’ with ‘fear’ and in so doing, reframed the analysis of risk society. Furedi and Glassner’s position has now become common wisdom: we live in a culture dominated by fear and this fear has damaging social consequences. They both argue that as this fear is often irrational, exaggerated, or misplaced – it is not simply a reasonable response to the conditions of risk society, but the result of a debilitating obsession with safety (Furedi) or the outcome of a media-produced perception of heightened risk (Glassner). Although much of the work that follows Furedi and Glassner typically posits a shift in intensification of social fear following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, most argue that the origins of this ‘culture of fear’ can be traced back to 20th century developments. For example: increased globalisation is felt to have intensified ideological competition between incommensurable and otherwise separate entities; scientifictechnological advancements from military capabilities to biological manipulation are slowly producing a world in which the individual’s

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______________________________________________________________ corporeal existence is threatened by unknown and irreversible forces; the development of modernity has led to increased rationalisation of all modes of sociality which has led to a denigration of ‘the human’ while simultaneously provoking fundamentalist religious beliefs; the advent of postmodern thought has divested traditional sources of authority of their power to organize a coherent sociality. Regardless of the cause, the subject in this schema is one of diminished agency, handicapped by a timid and fatalist sensibility. Therefore, and contra Beck, fear for these theorists can never participate in the construction of a utopian future, but could at its worse, produce a barbaric one. A basic problematic generally left unconsidered in this work is the question of the extent to which one can typify a culture as fearful. Most accounts presume that Western nations are undergoing a historical moment in which fear is present to a greater degree than in the past. However, the loose conceptualization of fear generally adopted makes its status uncertain and impossible to define or compare. What is the relationship between, say, the current fear of climate change, 1980s AIDS fear, and the 19th century’s fear of being buried alive? As Joanna Bourke argues in Fear: A Cultural History (2005),11 our understanding of, response to, and even subjective feeling of fear is historically determined. That is, although fear is necessarily tied to the somatic (fear is not fear without its sensation), it is fundamentally constituted through a dynamic process with the social. While it is apparent that the causes and sources of fear have transformed along the historical axis, it is unclear how one would measure its intensity or compare different historical moments. Used more or less interchangeably, the terms fear, horror, and terror are used to describe a common psychological response to perceived threat, uncertainty, and risk. This transformation is variously described as expressing itself through fear of others (e.g. crime, moral panics), anxiety about the future (e.g. terrorism, climate change), or dread of development (e.g. biotechnology, pollution). Furthermore, this culture of fear is understood to permeate social life, affecting everything from geopolitical manoeuvring to the minutiae of daily behaviour. In the main, the general conception that operates in this body of work is that this ‘culture of fear’ operates as a ‘freefloating anxiety’, the intensity of which may waver over time, but whose unremitting pressure is ever-present. This conceptualization allows writers to connect anxieties about nuclear radiation, say, with fear of street crime as expressions of a larger, unacknowledged cultural affect. However, this conception betrays an essentialist view of fear. When it is left unexamined, most conceptions of fear assume it to be ‘hard-wired’: a primitive singular force at the foundation of our being. A recent article published in Nature would seem to reinforce this view. 12 Ko Kobayakawa et al. found that genetically-manipulated mice bred without olfactory sensory

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______________________________________________________________ neurons in a specific location in the brain had no natural fear of cats. (Interestingly, these mice still expressed a fearful response to the sound of a cat’s meow). The researchers hypothesize that certain fears are innately conditioned, and in this case, it is precisely the smell of cats that mice fear innately. In other words, fear might form part of the genetic inheritance of mammals. However, a study published the same year in The Journal of Neuroscience identifies a region in the cortex responsible for the expression of ‘learned fears’. 13 After conditioning mice to fear a thirty second tone with an electric shock to the foot, the inactivation of this region of the cortex had the result of reducing (fearful) freezing to the tone, although the mice still expressed this freezing in the presence of cats. At the neurobiological level then, certain fears can be traced to specific, distinct regions in the brain, and this suggests that the experience of fear is diverse, or at the least, differently formed whether this fear is innate or learned, thereby suggesting that even at the material-biological level, fear should not be perceived as a singular category, but multiple. 4.

Fear, Horror, Terror The chapters collected in this book were first presented during the 2nd Global Conference on Fear, Horror and Terror at Mansfield College, Oxford, 3-5 September 2008. The inter-disciplinary nature of the conference resulted in a multiplicity of approaches to the subject despite overlapping concerns and some shared referents. The primary cultural materialization of fear, horror and terror, that is, horror fiction, is addressed by Beth A. Kattleman, Thomas Riegler, Yvonne Leffler, and Shona Hill. Kattleman addresses what she terms ‘carnographic culture’: the relationship between the West’s increased fear of terrorism and random violence with the appearance of graphically-violent films known as ‘torture porn’. Riegler examines the relationship between the current success of horror cinema and the themes of 1970s horror film in order to argue that it is to cinema we should turn for an expression of society’s response to a historical moment of instability. Leffler gives an account of Swedish horror that distinguishes it from its European counterpart insofar as its ‘gothic topography’ is generated by reference to a pre-medieval, pagan past that locates evil within nature itself. Looking closely at the 1995 film Se7en, Hill argues that it presents a resurrection of a medieval Christian worldview in which the wounded body serves a pedagogic role that speaks to society’s construction. Addressing the relationship between the subject at hand and politics, Ali Riza Taskale and Banu Baybars-Hawks consider contemporary terrorism in two different contexts. Taskale analyses the war against terrorism and terrorism itself as two forms of nihilism (passive and active), arguing that the dominant form of politics, post-politics, cannot provide a credible alternative to the religious nihilism of fundamentalists. Focusing on the past two decades

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______________________________________________________________ of terrorism in Turkey, Baybars-Hawks analyses the symbiotic relationship between terrorist groups, the media, the government and public opinion. Two very different approaches to horror located in literary texts are presented by Cynthia Jones and Lizzy Welby. Jones addresses the fairytale Little Red Riding Hood arguing that the story is a myth about discovering one’s animus (animal nature) through an encounter with liminal space: the wolf and the forest of the story. Welby analyses Kipling’s ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ through Kristeva’s model of the abject, locating horror in the narrator’s fragmenting subjectivity punctured by the encroachment of an excessive, teeming metropolis. Addressing a different text by Kipling, Maureen Moynihan employs theoretical models of laughter to interpret the horror of The Mark of the Beast, arguing that it produces a complex affective relationship between text and reader. Simone do Vale looks at the recent sub-cultural trend of ‘zombie walks’, which she interprets as ironic acts of resistance against the ‘dictatorship of fear’ in contemporary mass-mediated culture. Finally, in my own contribution, Kierkegaard’s notion of ‘dread’ is extended to model an alternative schema of the relationship between fear and politics. Taken individually, these texts embody a variety of theoretical approaches to the analysis of fear, horror, and terror, each with distinct claims as to the value of engaging the subject critically and as to their applicability to the everyday. Taken as a whole, they return us to the trope we began with: Little Red Riding Hood slips into bed with the wolf – a mass of zombies lurch through the streets of Toronto – people flee as PKK bombs explode in øzmir – the Swedish landscape erupts a pagan evil – a man laughs hysterically…

Notes 1

See A Giddens, Consequences of Modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1990, and U Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Sage Publications Ltd, London, 1992. 2 Beck, p. 49. 3 P Knight, ‘ILOVEYOU: Viruses, Paranoia, and the Environment of Risk’, in The Age of Anxiety: Conspiracy Theory and the Human Sciences, J Parish & M Parker (eds), Blackwell, Oxford, 2001, p. 24. 4 Giddens, p. 38. 5 United States Department of Defense, ‘Information Operations Roadmap’, in The National Security Archive, 2003, viewed on 1 August 2009, . 6 ‘Instead of either-ors, we now have both-ands: war and peace simultaneously, the military acting as police, and the police defending

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______________________________________________________________ national security, operations definable as both crimes and acts of war, civilians behaving like soldiers, and soldiers doing civilian jobs’. U Beck, ‘Neither Order Nor Peace: A Response to Bruno Latour’, Common Knowledge, vol. 11(1), 2005, p. 5. 7 U Beck, ‘The Truth of Others: A Cosmopolitan Approach’, Common Knowledge, vol. 10(3), 2004, p. 430. 8 U Beck, ‘In the New, Anxious World, Leaders Must Learn to Think Beyond Borders’, in The Guardian, 13 July 2007, viewed on 1 August 2008, . 9 F Furedi, Culture of Fear: Risk-Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation, Continuum, London, 1997. 10 B Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things, Basic Books, New York, 1999. 11 J Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History, Virago Press, London, 2005. 12 K Kobayakawa, et al., ‘Innate Versus Learned Odour Processing in the Mouse Olfactory Bulb’, Nature, vol. 450, 2007, pp. 503-8. 13 K Corcoran & G Quirk, ‘Activity in Prelimbic Cortex Is Necessary for the Expression of Learned, But Not Innate, Fears’, The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 27(4), 2007, pp. 840-4.

PART I Cultural Materialisation of Fear, Horror, Terror

Carnographic Culture: America and the Rise of the Torture Porn Film Beth A. Kattelman Abstract This chapter examines how a recent spate of mainstream, graphically-violent horror films reflects societal stresses circulating in the United States as a result of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, and posits that the popularity of these films has been fueled by the American public’s increased awareness of the threat of terrorism and a fear of random violence. These films have been variously labeled ‘carnography’, ‘gorenography’, or ‘torture porn’ by critics due to their emphasis on extreme violence presented in lingering close-ups and the prurient element that may be involved in their viewing, thus aligning them with pornography. The chapter looks specifically at James Wan's Saw (2004) and Eli Roth's Hostel (2005), two of the films credited with starting the current carnographic trend, and shows how they satisfy an audience through narratives of contained violence and retribution. In addition, the chapter draws a parallel between the current trend of graphic films and a similar one that took place during the early 1970s at the height of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Key Words: Carnography, film, graphic, horror, Hostel, Saw, terrorism, torture, trauma, violence. ***** [W]e’re living in a horror show. The post-9/11 period, all politics aside, has been extremely difficult for the average American. We all know what's floating around out there. That's big stuff and it comes out in a million ways, from people drinking a bit more to kids going to hard-core movies.1 Wes Craven There is no doubt that the collective consciousness of the United States has fundamentally changed since the events of 11 September 2001 when terrorists flew airplanes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, killing over 3000 people. Xenophobia has risen. Our tolerance for the use of questionable methods of interrogation by our military and intelligence forces has risen. Many Americans have come to accept a curtailing of civil rights and a larger dose of governmental interference in the name of ‘homeland security’. In a 2006 ABC News/Washington Post Poll, for example, 63

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______________________________________________________________ percent of Americans found the surveillance of telephone records ‘an acceptable way for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, expressing broad unconcern even if their own calling patterns are scrutinised’.2 We have seen news reports featuring incidents of human rights violations and torturous practices by players on all sides of this ‘war on terror’, including the torture and beheadings of Americans, and inhumane treatment perpetrated against others by the American military. In May 2005, for example, Tim Golden of the New York Times broke the story that two Afghan inmates had died as a result of inhumane treatment at the Bagram Air Force Base, a secret detention center near Kabul run by the United States military.3 The detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, in operation since 2002, has also been at the center of numerous reports of improper treatment and human rights violations. Some governmental authorities have begun to openly acknowledge that we have been engaging in abusive procedures, as in January 2009 when Susan Crawford, a top Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo, concluded that ‘the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks’.4 Perhaps the most notorious incidents of transgression took place at Abu Ghraib an American detention camp in Iraq in which inmates were subjected to ridicule, humiliation and what many would describe as torture as part of the daily routine. As David Edelstein notes: Post-9/11 we’ve engaged in a national debate about the morality of torture, fueled by horrifying pictures of manifestly decent men and women (some of them, anyway) enacting brutal scenarios of domination at Abu Ghraib.5 The Abu Ghraib photographs of smiling, seemingly-jocular prison guards flashing a ‘thumbs-up’ next to a pile of naked prisoners, holding a man on a dog leash or engaging in other acts of humiliation and cruelty became a wakeup call for many Americans who finally had to come to terms with the fact that brutality can have many different faces – and that sometimes those faces belong to us. 1.

The First Wave Within the current climate, there has been a revival in the popularity of horror films in America. This is not surprising since American horror cinema often reflects the collective nightmares circulating among the public, and therefore, in times of great stress or upheaval – when our collective nightmares push their way into the forefront of our conscious minds—there is often a resurgence in films that contain particularly violent content. In the early 1970s, for example, during the height of America's involvement in the

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______________________________________________________________ Vietnam War, a spate of films that became notorious for their rawness and brutality was released onto American screens. Some critics consider this first wave of viscerally violent films to be the ones which moved us into the period of horror films that some describe as postmodern, featuring those that put special emphasis upon showing the torn and maimed human body. As Isabel Cristina Pinedo argues: Unlike classical horror films, which tell and imply but show very little of the destruction wrought upon the human body, the postmodern horror film is obsessed with the wet death, intent on imaging the mutilation and destruction of the body’.6 Films such as Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971), Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left (1972), John Boorman’s Deliverance (1973) and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), although not all considered horror films, per se, have horrific elements and contain a viciousness that seemed to feed upon and reflect the frustration and repressed anger circulating within the American zeitgeist of their time. The increasingly dire situation in Vietnam left Americans feeling powerless and looking for outlets that would help them harmlessly channel pent-up emotions, and these films fit the bill. It was as if Americans, who were horrified by the images of war and suffering that came splashing across their television screens each night, needed an opportunity to see those images within a different context, one that would keep them contained and give them some semblance of meaning. Instead of the random, inexplicable carnage featured on the evening news, moviegoers were looking for violence that served a knowable purpose. They were looking for some kind of containment and closure. Since the 1970s, theorists have taken note of how many of the most popular films of that era reflect the turmoil and angst that was engendered by the Vietnam War and how the narratives of these films were thinly-veiled metaphors for a society trying to come to grips with a disastrous and stressful situation. Pinedo, for example, believes that ‘The proliferation of apocalyptic, graphically violent films that dot the post-sixties landscape attest to the need to express rage and terror in the midst of postmodern social upheaval’.7 Rick Worland notes that, ‘horror films throughout the 1970s can be seen as both a reaction to, and assimilation of, the social traumas of the Vietnam era’.8 The concept of ‘horror film as social barometer’ has become so accepted, in fact, that one critic claims, ‘It’s practically a cliché that you can tease out a generation's subconscious fears just by watching its horror movies’.9 Even the filmmakers themselves acknowledge that their films sometimes serve a sociological function and that they can be a reflection of anger and frustration. Wes Craven, director of Last House on the Left, for example, has admitted

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______________________________________________________________ that his use of unrelenting intensity and graphic violence in the film was partly in response to what was happening in American society during the time of its creation. Craven saw what was happening overseas and felt that the country wasn’t facing-up to the violence that was being perpetrated by, and upon, Americans. It seemed to him that no one was confronting the reality of war and killing: Films about violence at that time had become tremendously stylized. I was watching Peckinpah’s films – violence becoming legitimized as balletic and almost beautiful. The critics were all swooning about how it could be handled so artistically. At the same time, Vietnam was going on, there was much there that was brutal and protracted and awful and ugly.10 Craven allowed his frustration to manifest itself in his filmmaking, thus creating what would come to be considered one of the most vicious films of the decade. Last House on the Left is not an easy film to watch, but it certainly captures the fear, rage, and insanity of the time. 2.

The Second Wave We are once again in a period of great societal stress. There is a strong parallel between the mood of the United States during the Vietnam War and the mood today. The country is deeply divided regarding support for the Iraq war, and the conflict is taking its toll on America’s families, civil liberties and economy. Many Americans currently feel helpless and confused and are looking for a way to make sense of a world that seems out-of-control. Given these parallels to the early 1970s, it is not surprising that a new wave of films marked by scenes of blatant brutality and intense onscreen violence have arisen at the box office. Fueled by the collective stress that the September 11 attacks and America’s subsequent war on terror have engendered, films such as the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), The Devil’s Rejects (2005), Saw II (2005), Saw III (2006) the remake of The Hills Have Eyes (2006), and The Strangers (2008) have drawn large audiences into the theatres, thus raking in big box office returns. Upon its opening, Hostel spent a week as America’s top moneymaker,11 and within its first year and a half the Saw franchise had already earned $250 million dollars worldwide.12 All of the films in this new wave feature extremely graphic gore, complete with close-ups of bodies being eviscerated, impaled, dissected or slowly torn asunder, and lingering shots of victims writhing in agony as they endure these horrific punishments. In addition to putting lacerated bodies on display, the films also seem to revel in scenes of protracted pain and mental anguish that is doled out in particularly diabolical ways. Most of the deaths in

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______________________________________________________________ these films are not quick or clean. For example, in Saw III, we watch as a young man’s limbs are slowly twisted in a torture machine, accompanied by the sounds of his bones breaking and shots of them popping through the skin, intercut with shots of his agonized face; and in Eli Roth’s Hostel we see a young man chained to a chair and tortured by having his kneecaps drilled and his Achilles tendons sliced, and then watch as he slowly and painfully crawls toward the door in a futile effort to escape. Due to their emphasis upon extreme, graphic violence and the supposedly prurient element involved in watching these films, they have been variously labeled ‘gorenography’, ‘carnography’, or most commonly, ‘torture porn’, a term first coined by David Edelstein in a 2006 article for New York Magazine.13 This recent group of graphic horror films has once again ignited a discussion surrounding the effects of viewing violence, and once more raised the question, ‘Why, during a time in which the real world seems particularly frightening and terrifying, would audiences seek out entertainment that frightens and terrifies them?’. In order to explore the cultural resonances at work in the current spate of torture porn films, I will take a look at two of the films that are credited with starting the trend: James Wan's Saw (2004) and Eli Roth's Hostel (2005). Saw Saw14 centers upon two main characters, Dr. Gordon, a physician, and Adam, a freelance photographer, who wake up to find themselves chained to pipes in a filthy bathroom. They have each been provided a hacksaw, a small audiocassette, and a few other items that provide a series of cryptic clues as to why they now find themselves in this predicament. Pieces of the puzzle are slowly revealed through flashbacks and we come to find out that they have been put here by John Kramer, a former patient of Dr. Gordon’s who is dying of terminal brain cancer. Kramer is on a mission to teach people to truly appreciate life by subjecting them to torturous games in which they must choose to live or die. Choosing to live, however, usually involves subjecting oneself to an intense amount of physical and/or psychological pain. For example, in order for Dr. Gordon or Adam to survive, one must kill the other and then cut off his own foot with a hacksaw in order to escape before the door of the bathroom locks and permanently entombs him. By the time the narrative of Saw begins, John Kramer has already killed several other people with his diabolical traps, so he is now considered a serial killer by the police, who have given him the moniker ‘Jigsaw’. Throughout the film, we are introduced to Jigsaw’s other victims through a series of gory flashbacks in which we see each victim in his or her trap and also the aftermath. Saw provides pleasure through a strong narrative of containment and surveillance. Although Jigsaw’s traps are bloody and horrifying, the audience is told, specifically, how each one functions, and in many cases also exactly how long the victim has to escape. Most of the threats within Saw are 2.1

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______________________________________________________________ delimited, and the gore is delivered in finite, small doses, giving the viewer a strong sense of control. The episodic structure of the film effectively provides a tension/release effect for the viewer. In the flashbacks, audiences are introduced to a catalog of victims and a pattern is quickly established. The film introduces one elaborate and horrific trap after another, allowing moviegoers to quickly grasp the structure and to understand that the gory sequences will be presented as small, self-contained vignettes. An audience feels control over the mise-en-scène because they easily recognize the repetitive pattern the narrative employs. The violence in Saw is not random violence against innocent bystanders, but is very measured, calculated and, although twisted, each violent episode has a purpose that is targeted toward a specific person. This is directly conveyed to the audience via the explanations that Jigsaw provides on audio and videotapes left for the victims. An audience member's experience of Saw's contained violence provides a reassurance that he or she can't get from the violence of random suicide bombers and terrorist attacks outside. As Pinedo notes, ‘Horror produces a bounded experience of fear’.15 The audience can keep the violence of Saw under surveillance, thus giving them some measure of control. They know where it is coming from, and why - a much different scenario than they face in the outside world. Hostel Hostel16 is also one of the earliest and most notorious of the torture porn films. It tells the story of Josh and Paxton, two young men from America who are backpacking through Europe. They and their Icelandic friend Oli head to an unmapped hostel in Slovakia after they hear that it is filled with beautiful girls who are eager to fulfill their every sexual desire. This hostel, however, turns out to be a trap as it is actually a front for an organization called Elite Hunting which offers wealthy patrons an opportunity to torture and kill a tourist of their choice for a hefty fee – and American tourists are the most sought-after and expensive. Soon after arrival, the three young travelers find themselves victims of the horrible scheme. After enduring protracted sessions of torture, Oli and Josh are killed and dismembered. Paxton is eventually able to escape, but not before suffering torture and some severe injuries of his own. At the end of the film, Paxton exacts a bloody revenge upon Josh's murderer during a chance meeting at a train station and then heads for home.17 While Hostel’s premise may seem extreme to some, it has been widely reported that the idea for the film came when Roth was told about a web site offering a unique opportunity wherein, ‘somewhere in Thailand, a business was profiting on the visceral thrill of murder. For a fee of $10,000, anyone so willing could be escorted to a room, handed a loaded gun and offered another human being to kill’.18 Although Roth never discovered

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______________________________________________________________ whether the web site was legitimate, he realized that the possibility was not that far-fetched, a thought that troubled him. He states: The concept instantly made me nauseous, but it also felt real. People are sick. There are no limits to what they will do to another person for their own pleasure, and that’s the most horrifying thing of all. It’s what always stuck with me.19 Roth took this distressing idea and turned it into a disturbing film that reflects the anger and capacity for human cruelty that we see played out every day on the news. Hostel’s themes and iconography resonate with events that come directly from the war on terror. Its representation of human beings who gleefully engage in the recreational infliction of torture and death upon their fellow man, for example, brings to mind images of the smiling, ‘thumbs-up’ photographs of the prison guards at Abu Ghraib, who seem to be having a wonderful time tormenting their captives. Hostel also plays heavily upon the xenophobia that is currently rampant in the United States. Ever since 9/11 many Americans have been afraid of anyone whom they believe is foreign, especially if that person seems to be of Middle Eastern descent. Hostel takes these fears and justifies them by offering a story in which foreigners are indeed ‘out to get Americans’. Although within the course of the film we do briefly meet one American who is just as sick and sadistic as the rest of the hostel’s clientele, the majority of the evil characters who people Hostel are from other countries. And they all have a similar mindset: Americans are disposable, and they deserve to be treated as commodities because that is how they have treated us. It is not hard to see why the xenophobic strain in Hostel would play well with American audiences in 2005. As much as we may want to deny it, there is a still a great deal of anger and hostility toward anyone we feel may be associated with those who perpetrated the terrorist attacks of September 11 and also against those terrorists with whom we are now embroiled in war. This causes many Americans to feel a great deal of suspicion toward anyone whom they consider to be different. Hostel vindicates those feelings and offers audience members a way in which to enact vicarious retribution against the evil ‘others’ who want to do Americans harm. Unlike the unclear, confusing and seemingly never-ending turmoil in the real world, Hostel’s narrative provides a clear distinction between the good guys and the bad guys and offers closure. In addition to the xenophobia that Hostel contains, however, there is also an element of American masochism at play here. For the first half of the film, for example, Josh and Paxton perfectly fit the stereotype of the ‘ugly American’ as they move through Europe arrogantly flaunting their hedonism and sense of entitlement. Josh and Paxton do not know the language

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______________________________________________________________ or the customs of the countries they are visiting, and they don’t much care. They believe that their birthright as Americans serves as a license for all types of bad behavior, and they exhibit plenty of it. Unfortunately, Josh and Paxton’s arrogance and ignorance gets them into trouble as they become embroiled in an untenable situation due to their own trespasses. Looking at Hostel from this perspective, it is easy to see why some film critics have noted the relation between this narrative and the United States’ current foreign policy. As director, Eli Roth is proud of reporting, ‘Art Forum magazine said that Hostel was the smartest film in terms of being a metaphor for the Iraq war and America's attitude overseas’.20 3.

The Appeal of Torture Porn Saw, Hostel, and the other films of the torture porn genre provide pleasure in several ways. For starters, the gory spectacle they feature offers an adrenaline rush and a pleasurable tension-release sensation for audience members. This is the ‘roller-coaster’ effect that so many horror-film theorists have noted Human beings enjoy being frightened in a safe environment where they can revel in the bodily sensations and visceral impact that intense images can create, and these torture porn films provide opportunities for those types of vicarious experiences in large doses. The appeal of these carnographic films comes from more than just the promise of an adrenaline rush, however. Audience members also enjoy the torture porn genre because it loosely references the extreme violence that is present in today’s society and offers a sense of control over it. Unlike the rampant violence in the real world, these films present what closely resembles real violence in a contained space where it can be kept under surveillance. This containment allows audience members the freedom to safely escape into an alternative, albeit all-too-recognizable, world, one that references lived reality, but yet exhibits less chaos and uncertainty. As Pinedo notes: A film is not only a time-bound experience, it is also an imaginary one. The screen constitutes the spatial frame on which a film is projected. It marks off a bounded reality, one that need not conform strictly to lived experience. The borders of the screen establish parameters that free the viewer to engage in fantasy.21

Because the reality of a film is bounded, filmgoers can safely vent their frustrations, confront their fears, and inhabit positions that they would never wish to in real life. The spatial frame allows viewers a great deal of opportunity for control. They have the freedom to closely examine the diegetic world and to experience the narrative from multiple positions, first identifying with one character, then another. Throughout the course of a

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______________________________________________________________ horror film, audience members have the opportunity to occupy both the role of the tormentor and the tormented. As Carol Clover puts it: just as attacker and attacked are expressions of the same self in nightmares, so they are expressions of the same viewer in horror film. We are both Red Riding Hood and the Wolf; the force of the experience, in horror, comes from ‘knowing’ both sides of the story.22 This act of knowing the whole story is the key to the main pleasure that torture porn films provide. These texts allow for the surveillance and containment of horrors and fears. We know exactly where the carnage will be exhibited; we know that there will be an ending to it very soon (even though it may be an open ending); and we know that nobody is really getting hurt in the scenes that we are witnessing. By situating the carnage within a narrative and a spatial frame, the pain and suffering inflicted in a film can provide a sense of comfort and reassurance. The audience knows that there is a reason for this violence to be displayed. Unlike violence in the real world, this violence makes sense. And, as the infamous ad campaign for Craven’s Last House on the Left reminds us, ‘It’s Only a Movie’. Torture porn films are excellent examples of how ‘traces of traumatic events leave their mark on cultures’.23 These marks are recombined and recirculated through a society's arts that then provide a new window into the original trauma. The current spate of extreme films has become popular because they reflect and refract the fears that have arisen from America's ongoing war on terror. From films such as Hostel, which validate the fear of foreigners and offer a mise-en-scène in which retribution is enacted, to films like Saw which provide a safe escape into a bloody-yet-contained world, the torture porn genre has connected with the current American zeitgeist. As Kendall R. Phillips attests: certain films become the touchstone of fear for an entire generation. It is as if, at certain points, a particular film so captures our cultural anxieties concerns that our collective fears seem projected onto the screen before us. Not every horror film achieves this effect, indeed, very few do, but when a film does so touch our collective nerve, our reactions to it are unmistakable. We talk about these films, debate their meaning, praise and condemn them. These films that touch upon our collective fears become part of our culture.24

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______________________________________________________________ The heightened sense of personal danger in the post-9/11 culture and the ongoing discussions surrounding the use of torture, have certainly contributed to the revitalization of the horror genre and to the direction that this revitalization has taken. As Adam Lowenstein has noted, ‘the modern horror film may well be the genre of our time that registers most brutally the legacies of historical trauma’.25 The themes of torture and graphic violence in today's most popular horror films reflect the concerns of current American culture. While the American public had long been able to shield itself from a day-today fear of terrorist threats, the attacks of September 11 brought that fear screaming into consciousness. And the fear, in turn, has found itself screaming onto movie screens across the country.

Notes 1

W Craven Quoted in D Gordon, ‘Horror Show’, in Newsweek, 3 April 2006, viewed 9 July 2008, http://www.newsweek.com/id/45907?tid=relatedcl. 2 G Langer & D Sussman, ‘Phone-Records Surveillance is Broadly Acceptable to Public’, in ABC News, 12 May 2006, viewed on 24 March 2009, . 3 T Golden, ‘In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths’, in New York Times, May 20 2005, viewed on 8 February 2008, . 4 B Woodward, ‘Detainee Tortured, Says U.S. Official’, Washington Post, 14 January 2009, p. A01. 5 D Edelstein, ‘Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn’, New York Magazine, 28 January 2006, viewed on 7 January 2009, . 6 I C Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing, SUNY Press, New York, 1997, p. 51. 7 ibid., pp. 48, 50. 8 R Worland, The Horror Film: An Introduction, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, 2007, p. 94. 9 Gordon, op. cit. For an excellent book-length discussion of how particular films reflect the social traumas of their times see A Lowenstein, Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film, Columbia University Press, New York, 2005. 10 Quoted in B J Robb, Screams and Nightmares: The Films of Wes Craven, Overlook Press, Woodstock, 1998, p. 24. 11 Edelstein, op. cit. 12 Gordon, op. cit.

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Edelstein, op. cit. J Wan (dir), Saw, Lions Gate Films, United States, 2004. 15 I C Pinedo, ‘Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film’, in The Horror Film, S Prince (ed), Rutgers UP, New Brunswick, 2004, p. 91. 16 E Roth (dir), Hostel, Lions Gate Films, United States, 2006. 17 Josh exacts a bloody revenge on his tormentor, a Dutch businessman, in the US theatrical release of Hostel by severing two of his fingers and slitting his throat. In the director’s cut of the film that can be found on the DVD, however, Roth includes a new ending where Josh does not physically assault the businessman, but kidnaps his daughter instead, providing a much more ambiguous and open-ended story. 18 MacReady, ‘A Look Inside Eli Roth’s HOSTEL!’, in Movies Online, viewed on 25 March 2009, . 19 Roth quoted in MacReady. 20 P McClintock, ‘Blood Brothers’, Variety, December 25-31, 2006, p. 34. 21 Pinedo, ‘Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film’, p. 108. 22 C J Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1993, p. 12. 23 E A Kaplan and B Wang, ‘Introduction: From Traumatic Paralysis to the Force Field of Modernity’, in Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2004, p. 16. 24 K Philips, Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture, Prager, Westport, 2005, p. 3. 25 A Lowenstein, Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film, Columbia University Press, New York, 2005, p. 10. 14

Bibliography Clover, C. J., Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1993. Edelstein, D., ‘Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn’, in New York Magazine, 28 January 2006, retrieved 7 January 2009, . Golden, T., ‘In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths’, in New York Times, May 20 2005, retrieved 8 February 2008,

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______________________________________________________________ . Gordon, D., ‘Horror Show’, in Newsweek, 3 April 2006, retrieved 9 July 2008, . Kaplan, E. A. & B. Wang, ‘Introduction: From Traumatic Paralysis to the Force Field of Modernity’, in Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations. Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2004, pp. 1-22. Langer, G. & D. Sussman, ‘Phone-Records Surveillance is Broadly Acceptable to Public’, in ABC News, 12 May 2006, retrieved 24 March 2009, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=1953464. Lowenstein, A., Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film. Columbia University Press, New York, 2005. MacReady, ‘A Look Inside Eli Roth’s HOSTEL!’, Movies Online, retrieved 25 March 2009, http://www.moviesonline.ca/movienews_6451.html. McClintock, P., ‘Blood Brothers’, Variety, December 25-31, 2006, p. 34. Philips, K., Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture. Prager, Westport, 2005. Pinedo, I. C., ‘Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film’, in The Horror Film, Stephen Prince (ed), Rutgers UP, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2004, pp. 85-117. ——, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. SUNY Press, New York, 1997. Robb, B. J., Screams and Nightmares: The Films of Wes Craven. Overlook Press, Woodstock, 1998. Roth, E. (dir), Hostel. Lions Gate Films, United States, 2006. Wan, J. (dir), Saw. Lions Gate Films, United States, 2004.

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______________________________________________________________ Woodward, B., ‘Detainee Tortured, Says U.S. Official’, Washington Post, 14 January 2009, p. A01. Worland, R., The Horror Film: An Introduction. Blackwell Publishing, Malden, 2007. Beth A. Kattelman is an Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University and the Associate Curator of the Lawrence and Lee Theatre Research Institute at OSU. Currently her research is devoted to the interplay between horror films and culture. She also writes extensively on the history of magic and conjuring.

We’re All Dirty Harry Now: Violent Movies for Violent Times Thomas Riegler Abstract Assuming a connection between violent periods and violent pop culture, this article explores the present conjuncture of fear, horror, and terror in American films and TV through comparison with matching themes in 1970s Hollywood cinema. Both the 1970s and 2000s can be categorized as ‘ages of fear, horror and terror’, shaped by political, social, and economic crisis: Since 9/11 and the beginning of the War on Terror a new brand of explicitly violent horror movies has scored major box office hits. ‘Shoot ’em up’-scenarios and revenge thrillers are predominant, as well as conspiracy and paranoia motives. In a similar way splatter horror and dark thrillers referred to the Vietnam War, political scandals, and economic problems of the 1970s. Once again cultural products tell us: ‘There is something profoundly wrong with our world.’ Dark and nightmarish fantasies express anger and frustration about forces out of control, warlike events, and estrangement between public and elites. The conclusion is that real/reel violence and horror overlap/mirror each other. Key Words: Fear, Hollywood, horror, popular culture, torture, violence. ***** 1.

Introduction Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek recently noted, ‘It’s only in cinema that we get that crucial dimension which we are not yet ready to confront in our reality. If you are looking for what is, in reality, more real than reality itself, look into cinematic fiction.’1 That echoes film-theorist Siegfried Kracauer, who stated in 1947, ‘What films reflect are not so much explicit credos as psychological dispositions - those deep layers of collective mentality which extend more or less below the dimension of consciousness.’2 Kracauer’s famous thesis that Germany’s expressive cinema had somehow predicted Nazism’s rise to power is very contended, but nevertheless 1930s cinema was clearly influenced by the Depression and the tensions leading up to the Second World War. The ‘great period of horror’ with classic films like Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolfman corresponded with this period of anxiety and rapid change. Similarly the 1950s were shaped by the nuclear threat and the paranoia of the McCarthy era. This contribution aims to examine the interaction of violent and fearful times and their equally violent and anxious popular culture in depth

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______________________________________________________________ by (1) specifying the themes of fear, horror and terror in the familiar 1970s and 2000s contexts, and (2) by using the cinematic ‘mirror image’ for drawing lessons about the contemporary mindset. 2.

Fear, Horror, Terror in 1970s 1970s violent movie genres fed on political and social turmoil that began in the late 1960s: The Vietnam War, a string of high profile political assassinations, racism, and urban riots. There was evident paranoia about the rise of violent crime, economic woes resonated strongly, and the political system was engulfed in a serious crisis of confidence after the Watergate scandal. Overall there was a crisis of faith. As Kendall R. Phillips writes: This sense that the hopes and aspirations of the American dream had ended, of course, was pervasive in 1970s America…The collapse of the counterculture had left only the promises of the official authorities, and, within months, even those guarantees were unravelling. In contrast to the hopefulness of the 1960s, the 1970s began, as SlocumSchaffer, notes, ‘like a pounding hangover’.3 Filmmakers reflected this state of affairs in various ways. With George A. Romero’s Night of the living Dead (1968) horror was finally localized at home and took a dramatic turn towards social and political criticism. In reference to this film, Ben Hervey notes: In pursuit of authenticity and truth, it debunked everything that had served to vanquish evil in prior ‘monster flicks’: individual heroism, teamwork, science, knowledge, religion, love, the family, the media, the army and the government. Panic, selfishness and power struggles tear the would-be heroes apart before the ghouls do.4 Romero and fellow directors like John Carpenter, Wes Craven, and Tobe Hooper depicted America’s youth sacrificed by old, paternal, reactionary forces full of resentment, sadism, and pure hatred – uncompromising pictures of a nation devouring itself.5 Central to this pessimistic outlook was of course the Vietnam War and its effect on American society. Some filmmakers were even personally affected – like legendary horror makeup artist Tom Savini, who served in Southeast Asia as a combat photographer. The traumatizing impressions from his period of service influenced Savini’s later work. On a more general level Wes Craven explained how the war shattered long held certainties and enraged young filmmakers like him:

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______________________________________________________________ I think there is something about the ‘American Dream’, the sort of Disneyesque dream, if you will of the beautifully trimmed front lawn, the white picket fence, mom and dad and their happy children, god fearing and doing good whenever they can; that sort of expectation, and the flipside of it, the kind of anger and the sense of outrage that comes from discovering that that's not the truth of the matter...6 Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972) can be seen as a device to let off some steam. The ads for this film, whose genesis was influenced by brutal news footage from Vietnam, advised audiences, ‘To avoid fainting, keep repeating: It’s only a movie.’7 Last House on the Left first depicts the brutal rape and murder of two girls by a gang – the murderers are in turn massacred when they coincidentally seek refuge with the parents of one of the victims. When the respectable couple discovers the background of their guests they ‘explode’ in murderous rage and kill them one by one. This motif of savageness lurking behind ordinary façade can also be found in Craven’s The Hills have Eyes (1977) about a clan of mutants, deranged from atomic tests, attacking a family on vacation in a barren Californian wilderness. The fight for survival is merciless and ends only when the last mutant is dead. Craven made it clear that this violence is ‘home-grown’, ‘It’s not that there are violent people out there waiting to break into our own affluent circle. No. We are those people…We have done the most violent things.’8 Like in The Hills have Eyes it is the unforgiving countryside that is inhabited by menace and danger: In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) a group of teenagers who run out of gas find themselves suddenly hunted by a backwoods family of cannibals led by the masked ‘Leatherface’. As one reviewer observed, the assailants can be interpreted ‘as the youth of America that joined the military and their elders are the government. The siblings do what they have been taught and told to do. So here they are, killing the innocent without knowing why.’9 By contrast filmmakers approached the ‘real’ war in Vietnam directly only after the fighting had ended (with the notable exception of John Wayne’s The Green Berets, 1968). Before that the subject was tackled indirectly via historical analogies like brutal and cynical Westerns (The Wild Bunch, 1969, Little Bigman, 1970, Soldier Blue, 1970) or through the prism of more recent engagements like Korea (M.A.S.H, 1972-1983). Meanwhile the undeclared ‘war at home’ – between the generations or ‘red’ and ‘blue’ America – was fought out in dramas like Easy Rider (1969) and Deliverance (1972). Dark and pessimistic tones can also be found in the thriller genre, full of motifs of revenge and vigilantism. In Dirty Harry (1971), The Enforcer (1973), and Magnum Force (1976) the San Francisco police

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______________________________________________________________ inspector Harry Callahan fights his war on crime without regard to authority, rules, and due process. As Leonard Quart observes: Using heroic low-angle and full shots of the demigod Harry the film totally identifies with his perspective, making the superiors seem lame and weak, and Harry’s skill at providing vigilante justice the only protection against a violent, demonic world.10 The days of the clean and incorruptible lawman were clearly over. William Friedkin, who made The French Connection (1971) – about an antiheroic, alcoholic, and racist cop taking on a drug syndicate – stated: Those of us who made the films in the 70s were not following the zeitgeist: we shaped it. We no longer believed in a man on a white horse. We knew he was flawed, because we were flawed…What informed those films was the moral ambiguity we recognized in ourselves.11 In Taxi Driver (1976) or Death Wish (1974) the system has failed completely and it is up to ordinary New Yorkers to turn into one-man death squads. Assaulted by violent crime the L.A. suburb Anderson has already spiraled out of control: In Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) policemen, convicts, and civilians have to club together to fight off a murderous assault by a gang. It is not only urban squalor and criminality threatening America, the danger of modern terrorism is also explored, although in a very detached way, since the U.S. had not been really affected by this phenomenon during the 1970s. Therefore Hollywood displays terrorists mostly as psychopaths lacking any political aims. Their prime motivation is money, whether it is the young man who orchestrates horrible accidents in an amusement park to blackmail its owners (Rollercoaster, 1977) or the thugs taking over a New York subway train (The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, 1974). At least John Frankenheimer’s Black Sunday (1977) grants terrorism a political agenda by connecting the cause of radical Palestinians with the frustration of a Vietnam veteran.12 Notions of paranoia, conspiracy, and cynicism were at the core of political films. The Conversation (1974), Days of the Condor (1975), All the President’s Men (1976) depicted corrupt politicians and spies rushing to defend their diminishing power and authority. Evil capitalists were also singled out, whether it is the danger of a corporatist state (Rollerball, 1975) or media manipulation (The Parallax View, 1974, Network, 1976).13

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______________________________________________________________ The medium for confronting the deepest fears and nightmares was of course the disaster genre, which went through a golden age with any kind of apocalyptical danger and threat imagined: Extraterrestrial (Andromeda Strain, 1971, Meteor, 1979), a militarized system running out of control (The Crazies, 1973), killer insects (Swarm, 1978), spectacular accidents (Airport, 1970, The Poseidon Adventure, 1972, Towering Inferno, 1974), and natural disasters (Earthquake, 1974). 3.

Fear, Horror, Terror on the Screens Today In a piece for The Atlantic Monthly Ross Douhat argued that Hollywood took a remarkably different path after the 9/11 attacks. Many experts had warned of a strategic ‘pact’ between the movie industry and Washington promoting patriotism and even jingoism – just like in the aftermath of Pearl Harbour. Instead, writes Douhat, Hollywood returned to the ‘paranoid, cynical, end-of-empire 1970s.’14 3.1

New Age of Paranoia There are indeed many similarities. To begin with, the dark, amoral world of unregulated and destructive corporate power has returned: Syriana (2005), Blood Diamond (2006), Shooter (2007), Michael Clayton (2007) and The International (2009) are all populated by powerful white men who use every necessary mean to enhance profits and personal gain. Like in the 1970s classics, committed individuals want to overcome forces much bigger than they are. In The International, for example, the enemy is a ‘bad bank’ – the Luxembourgian International Bank of Business and Credit (IBBC) that sells weapons to terrorists, cuts deals with African coup plotters, and lends its money in a predatory way. The tagline reads: ‘They control your money. They control your government. They control your life. And everybody pays.’15 An Interpol agent who takes on this elusive enemy and stops at nothing to protect its deals, is told that justice in this case is not possible, since ‘everyone is involved Hezbollah, CIA, the Colombian drug cartels, Russian organised crime, governments of Iran, Germany, China, your government, every multinational cooperation, everyone.’ The system will not allow anything to happen to the IBBC since it needs banks like this to operate within the ‘black and grey latitudes’. The revelation of a spider web of Byzantine structures and power relations behind ‘everything’ is a typical paranoid theme, which resonates in a time of cooperate scandals. So even in the more conservative TV series 24 the Islamist terror plots are a mere deception, designed by shadowy networks of oilmen and a corrupt president. The powerful and hidden schemers also function as bad guys in conventional action films, manipulating the heroes in their evil schemes. In The Bourne Identity (2001), The Bourne Supremacy (2004), and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) CIA-killer Jason Bourne takes on

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______________________________________________________________ his superiors after a painful awakening to the fact that he was used as a pawn in national security matters. The intelligence apparatus, whose original function is to protect society, is seen as an over-vigilant system spinning out of control and endangering the public. So when a journalist in the 2007 film accidentally stumbles across the codename ‘blackbriar’, the gigantic surveillance apparatus immediately makes him a ‘transparent’. Spymaster Noah Vosen, a classic evil bureaucrat, eventually orders the confidant to be executed to keep the operation, a string of extra-legal assassinations, secret. When questioned about the legality of these means he simply declares: ‘You know how real the danger is. We need these programs now.’16 When set in the recent past, paranoia-thrillers adapt the looks and setting of 1970s classics: Munich (2005) – depicting the Israeli retribution for the massacre of its athletes during the 1972 Olympic Games – was full of references to The Day of the Jackal (1973), most notably the casting of Michael Lonsdale. Zodiac (2007) went to great lengths to faithfully recreate the atmosphere of the San Francisco Bay Area shattered by the attacks of the serial killer.17 In 1968/69 this serial murderer targeted young couples and people in the San Francisco Bay area at random. In letters to the tabloid press he bragged about his crimes, obviously relishing the attention they garnered him. But unlike Hannibal Lecter, Zodiac is not given superhuman capacities in the film, being portrayed instead in a deliberately matter of fact way.18 3.2

‘We’re All Dirty Harry Now’ A distinct 1970s character has also returned – the vigilante. Man on Fire (2004), The Punisher (2004), and Hitman (2007) show lonely avengers going on wild rampages. In The Brave One (2007) radio show host Erica Bain kills random criminals after being brutally assaulted and her fiancé murdered in New York. This urban nightmare fits into a wider perspective of suspicion and fear of the other. High profile cases of child abuse, domestic violence and terrorists living perfect double lives seem to have sharpened concern for what is ‘really’ going on behind the scenes. The TV series Sleeper Cell speculates that Al Qaeda is already firmly established in America, its members waiting to strike at any time. More personal is the confrontation in Red Eye (2005), where the charming yuppie on the neighbouring passenger seat reveals himself as a kidnapper and would-be killer. Likewise the successful and happily married businessman in Mr. Brooks (2007) turns out to be a split personality: His sadistic alter ego ‘Marshall’ is a serial killer.19 What unites characters like these is that they murder randomly in an increasingly lawless world slowly coming apart. In No Country for Old Men (2007) the U.S.-Mexican border area is a battlefield of rival drug syndicates, sparking a crime wave with unprecedented violence. Its chief architect, the contract killer Anton Chriugh, engages in a killing spree that soon loses sight

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______________________________________________________________ of the original assignment. His aura of deadly seriousness and lack of humanity make this ultimate badass a modern personification of pure evil. His arrival somewhere in the plains of West Texas and the deserts of New Mexico is in keeping with an ever more lawless world that is slowly but inexorably disintegrating. Chriguh’s absolute single-mindedness, his emotional numbness, and outsized weapon leave an impression in the viewer of being confronted with a threatening and menacing force of nature, rather than an ordinary human being. The aging Sheriff Bell is unable (and unwilling) to counter Chirguh, simply because he cannot comprehend this new breed of violence. Whereas this particular character still believes in the values of the Old West, cops in general are depicted with the ambivalent undertones of the 1970s: Crime fighting has grown into urban warfare (S.W.A.T, 2003), corruption is rife (Pride and Glory, 2008, Street Kings, 2008), and ‘pragmatic’ methods are okay as long as the yield results (Training Day, 2001). Playful 1980s icons Sonny Crocket and Ricardo Tubbs have been totally redesigned for the remake of Miami Vice (2006); the colourful and self-ironic pop of the TV-series has been replaced by hyper real, cool aesthetics. Under the tagline ‘No Rules. No Law. No Order’, the protagonists operate in a nihilistic and violent world where the best cops are those imitating the bad guys. Bearing such films in mind William Friedkin reached the conclusion that ‘We’re all Dirty Harry now’: Though technically more sophisticated, modern super-cop movies are less believable because who else gets to chase bad guys, leap tall buildings and has a license to kill? We may not approve of the movie cop’s morality, but his actions speak louder than any words, and if the means are compelling enough, the end justifies them.20 The end is justified because the nature of the threat has changed Crime syndicates are now truly global endeavours (Miami Vice) that yield enormous financial resources and overwhelming firepower. The line between crime and terrorism becomes increasingly blurred (S.W.A.T). Charged with upholding a crumbling social order and confronted with more dangerous threats, dirty means get applause, just like in the 1970s when Dirty Harry delivered ‘justice’ by executing thugs on the spot. Terrorism is of course the biggest threat. It has grown to apocalyptical proportions in Right at Your Door (2006), which focuses on the aftermath of the explosion of several ‘dirty bombs’ in Los Angeles. Martial law is declared Subsequently people who do not follow orders are shot on the spot by the security services. This general state of emergency is microanalysed on the basis of a relationship: An ordinary couple has to face the

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______________________________________________________________ ultimate nightmare. One of them is at home, while the other is trapped on the outside and desperately wants to come inside the sealed-off building. But since the fallout of the explosions is contaminated the decision of granting access or not is a difficult one.21 3.3

Reality Checks vs. Escapism The War on Terror has arrived on the screen with unparallel speed: Not since World War II has Hollywood so embraced an ongoing conflict. It took years for pop culture to tackle the Korean wars, and it took time before the country was ready to be entertained by those politically charged conflicts.22

Still most of the Iraq movies do not focus on the military conflict, but instead on the ‘homecoming’ of the veterans (Land of the Brave, 2006, In the Valley of Elah, 2007, Badland, 2007, Grace is Gone, 2007), whereas Redacted (2007) and The Hurt Locker (2008) took on the perspective of GIs hopelessly entrapped in a ‘dirty’ conflict, which they do not understand and often overreact violently against Iraqi civilians. On the other hand the excesses of counterterrorism were critically explored in Rendition (2007), The Kingdom (2007), and Body of Lies (2008). Most of these films failed commercially. The Vietnam movies of the 1970s and 1980s had the benefit of hindsight and offered an opportunity to reflect from a distance on what had gone wrong. As Guy Westwell notes: Today’s Iraq films, by contrast, are writing the script as they go along – and with the long-term outcomes as yet unknown, there’s no opportunity for a dramatically satisfying epiphany.23 According to director Paul Haggis the ‘pro-war films aren’t actually about the war’. ‘Shoot them up’–scenarios like Transformers (2007) or 300 (2007) offer a ‘fantasy where the message is that if we can’t win over there, we can win it at home on our screens. To make a film like Transformers at a time of war is a political act.’24 In this film two races of good and evil robots battle on another in the middle of a contemporary American metropolis and the efforts of the U.S. military is to eliminate ‘all specimens of this alien race’. The teenage hero, who is told by an officer ‘You are a soldier now’, absorbs the lesson of the struggle quickly: ‘No sacrifice, no victory’. It is no surprise that the U.S. military lent the filmmakers aircrafts, vehicles, and manpower to increase the ‘realism’ of the spectacular battle scenes.25 Monumental struggles between the forces of light and darkness like in Transformers were indeed extremely popular after 9/11. In reference to the

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______________________________________________________________ Lord of the Rings trilogy film critic Lev Grossman explained the fascination of this matter: Tolkien gives us the war we wish we were fighting – a struggle with a foe whose face we can see, who fights on the open battlefield, far removed from innocent civilians. In Middle Earth, unlike the Middle East, you can tell an evildoer, because he or she looks evil.26 But filmmakers also revisited the crusades (Kingdom of Heaven, 2005), replayed the myths of the ancient world (Troy, 2004, Alexander, 2005, 300, 2007), or American legends (Alamo, 2004, The New World, 2005) as if to give a troubled and uneasy nation a moment of gratifying self-reassurance. The pitched battle scenes in those movies offer clarity and oversight lacking in the real world, as well as the certainty that the forces of good will eventually triumph. ‘This is our way of dealing with 9/11 and how we feel about those foreigners, and those terrorists, whom we are trying very hard to define’, a film-historian told the New York Times under the headline: ‘At the Movies, at Least, Good Vanquishes Evil.’27 3.4

The Horror Boom The most obvious choice for a 1970s revival is of course the horror boom: Just like Vietnam was a main catalyst, the ongoing War on Terror and its implications resonate in a revival of the genre. Wes Craven observed: ‘The new films are very similar to those in the 1970s in that they are merciless with the audience. I think they are a cultural way of coming to terms with the horrible realities of everyday life.’28 When the documentary The American Nightmare explored the connection between 1970s horror movies and their context in 2000, a reviewer asked: ‘At this point, what real-life horrors would be required to return the genre to its former glory?’ With hindsight the answer did not take long in coming: ‘In short order, we got the real horrors and then, inevitably, the reel ones.’29 In a similar way Anne Billson wrote in the ‘Guardian’ that, ‘The good news about the recession is that we can look forward to some great horror movies. The fright genre has traditionally flourished in straitened times.’30 First a retro-trend brought remakes of almost all classics, often made by their veteran directors. Most notably George A. Romero returned with Land of the Dead (2005) and Diary of the Dead (2008). He wrote the Land of the Dead script in 2000 and sent it to the studios on 8 September 2001, three days before 9/11, but it was shelved immediately since Hollywood only wanted ‘family films’ at that time. After the invasion of Iraq (2003) there was renewed interest in the project and Romero integrated certain contemporary

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______________________________________________________________ influences into his movie: ‘The idea of living with terrorism – I‘ve tried to make it more applicable to the concerns Americans are going through now.’31 In Land of the Dead the zombies have finally taken over. The remaining people live in security enclaves like Fidler’s Green, a shopping mall complex dominated by a tower like a ‘cathedral of commerce’. The zombies, who are clearly a metaphor for the excluded underclass, eventually break into this ‘green zone’ and smash it to pieces. In his follow-up Diary of the Dead Romero makes fun of zombiefied youngsters, who keep on documenting the spectacle of a society consuming itself through the distance of the video camera.32 Romero’s point is that the exclusion or negation of fundamental problems is no solution. Ills like poverty, homelessness, or AIDS keep building up, eventually breaking inside with devastating effect. Joe Dante, another ‘master of horror’, produced an outspoken condemnation of the Bush administration and its policies (Homecoming, 2006). In the film, the remark of a communication advisor to a mother of a soldier killed in Iraq (‘If I had one wish…I would wish for your son to come back’) causes the dead soldiers rise from their graves to participate in the presidential election (‘we will vote for anybody who ends this war’) and find peace again after casting their vote. But when the republicans manipulate the results (‘we count the votes’), the army of the dead rises again, this time supported by dead veterans of all of America’s past wars and together they march on Washington and force the government into exile.33 Like in the 1970s unspeakable evil lurks in remote places at home, mostly in ‘red state’-territory and in the shape of ignorant, reactionary or retarded backwoodsmen, whose appetite for slaying youngsters, yuppies, or city-slickers seems insatiable. This reflects the tensions and divisions within American society – whether it be about the difference between city and countryside or diverging opinions on morals, religion, and politics. Thus, like in the classics, the main characters find themselves suddenly beset by savage strangers. In Wrong Turn (2003) college students on a trip in the West Virginia Mountains are prey to a group of cannibalistic rednecks, deranged by generations of inbreeding. Hatchet (2007) has a group of tourists in the Louisiana bayou decimated by a lone serial killer. In Cabin Fever (2002) college graduates partying in a remote cabin succumb one by one to a flesh eating bacteria. No outside help is coming, and because they spread the virus, the local hillbillies attack them out of revenge. The only survivor of the original group – who managed to evade transmission – claims ‘I made it’, only to be shot by the police, who act on order to kill all infected Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2003) offers a glimpse into the past of the infamous Hewitt Clan from Tobe Hooper’s 1975 film. Disguised as a policeman, the patron ‘arrests’ unsuspecting youngsters only to cook them, using recipes from his wartime in Korea. Before Leatherface kills them all

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______________________________________________________________ with his chainsaw, the victims have to parade around as ‘recruits’. Like in the 1970s these films propose that the country eats up its innocent youth again. 3.5

Torture Porn? Some of the recent horror films had a distinct trademark. In Captivity (2007), Hostel (2005), Hostel: Part II (2007), Saw (five parts between 2004 and 2008), The Devil’s Reject (2005), Turistas (2006), or Wolf Creek (2005) explicit and up-close violence is administered on the victims in lengthy torture sessions and often directed primarily against women. Critics labelled this ‘torture porn’. 34 From the point of view of directors, experts, and fans this graphic horror reflects only contemporary horrors. For example Eli Roth remarked that his two Hostel-films were made thorough the lenses of 9/11 and the War on Terror: Right now we're at war, and then you have Hurricane Katrina, where there are people on roofs screaming for help. I have this feeling that civilization could collapse, and that if you go overseas, you could get killed…This film is also about the dark side of human nature.35 This perspective of a dangerous world and a shaken belief in civilisation is exemplified in Hostel, which has become synonymous for ‘torture porn’. Promised cheap booze and easy sex, young American backpackers on a trip around Europe are lured to a Bratislava youth hostel – only to be abducted and brought to an abandoned warehouse where they are subjected to all kinds of cruel and sadistic treatment. Their tormentors are American businessmen who pay to maim and murder them with torture tools. In the popular Saw franchise most of the excruciating pain is selfinflicted, because the serial killer ‘Jigsaw’ constructs death traps for his victims confronting them with the choice of certain death or severe selfmutilation. From the point of view of Jigsaw, who is dying from an inoperable tumour, this is an educational matter with which he forces his ‘pupils’ to re-appraise the gift of life. Another fitting example is Captivity, where a supermodel is kidnapped and brutalised by an obsessed fan. Held captive in a cell her all-powerful kidnapper subjects her to a series of psychological and physical tortures until she manages to break free. Box office results were mixed. In the beginning these movies proved to be extremely successful. The first three Saw movies made $103 million, $147 million and $164 million, Hostel I more than $80 million.36 But by the end of 2006 the genre showed signs of beginning to wane off. Turistas and Captivity failed commercially, while Hostel II proved to be a flop.37 All of these films play with the audience’s identification with the torturer – mainly because the action is often witnessed through the

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______________________________________________________________ perspective of the killer. Characters like Jigsaw appear as evil overmen who transcend all moral and ethical bounds and preach an inhuman ideology of absolute mercilessness. As a German reviewer observed, ‘torture porn’ suggests that some people might deserve to be tortured – at a time when the infamous pictures of the Abu Gharib prison scandal or rumours about suspects of terrorism disappearing in Eastern European ‘dark sites’ circulate in the media.38 The debate whether this degree of screen violence is something completely new or simply a reinterpretation of already existing trends is ongoing. James G. Poulos, for example, noted a critical difference separating films like Hostel or Saw from ‘classic’ horror: In the great zombie horror movies, the possibility of our humanity remaining intact is never entirely sealed off. Instead, the new torture movies present a closed world of inescapable doom. The rot of mind and soul devours all; the horror takes place in play chambers were choice is strapped down and humiliated, and reason profoundly mocked39 Luke Thompson took the opposite perspective, arguing ‘why it isn’t torture porn’: The thing that's grating is the way some critics don't just pan the movies, but also pan the people who watch them, acting as though we're some depraved new breed who like unprecedented levels of hideousness, even as the movies themselves deliver the same kind of visceral kicks horror films have always had.40 3.6

Apocalypse Now! Another 1970s parallel lies in a renewed obsession with mysterious dangers and apocalyptic catastrophes, especially in TV series: Impending doomsday (Revelations), nuclear holocaust (Jericho), paranormal threats (Supernatural), extraterrestrial abductions (Taken), and infiltration of small town-America (Invasion). These threats are so overpowering that only people with special abilities can rescue an otherwise doomed mankind (The 4400, Heroes). Or as superhero movie The Dark Knight (2008) proposes by fighting fire with fire: Batman imitates the means of the enemy and operates outside of the law using intimidation, torture, and rendition since the state authorities are so corrupted that they are unable to resist the terrorist onslaught of the Joker. The vigilante has observed the advice his butler Alfred gave him by recounting a story from his past as a British colonial agent in Burma. He had been assigned the task by the local government to

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______________________________________________________________ arrest a bandit who had stolen precious diamonds. In the end it turned out that the bandit had thrown the diamonds away. Referring to the Joker, Alfred stresses that, ‘some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money…they can’t be bribed, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.41 When asked later on how the bandit was finally apprehended Alfred replies, ‘We burned the forest down’.42 That the system is not up to the test, often making matters even worse, is the message of several new disaster movies. The U.S. government is too slow to respond to the rapid climate change in The Day after Tomorrow (2004) and its forces don’t even have a chance defending the homeland from a devastating Alien attack (War of the Worlds, 2005). Fighter jets and tanks prove useless stopping a gigantic monster from destroying Manhattan (Cloverfield, 2008). ‘Forget about the world and hang on to those people you love the most’, one of the protagonists states programmatically. And from the start of I Am Legend (2007) all seems finished: A microbiologist is the sole survivor of a deadly disease in a completely empty New York. In Southland Tales (2006) the world ends, ‘Not with a bang but a whimper’. In the film, generators producing alternative fuel cause the earth to slow its rotation, which rips the fabric of space and time. It is unclear if the eventually revealed ‘messiah’ can rescue mankind in the nick of time. According to pictures like these the only hope for humanity lies in virtues such as love, self-sacrifice, and faith – typical cultural reactions to states of uncertainties.43 But there are even bleaker scenarios, where human civilisation is shattered by forces bigger than itself. For example, in Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness (2008), an adaptation of a novel by Jose Saramago, a mysterious infectious disease of ‘white blindness’ makes people suddenly loose their sight until society completely collapses. The origins of the epidemic are never explained, but it seems like a biblical punishment. At a certain point sight is recovered again and people look differently onto the world. Mankind gets a last chance in the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth stood still (2008): The almighty alien Klaatu halts his campaign of destruction when convinced that man has the capacity to change for good. This sense of indomitable hope resonates strongly in the Academy Award winning films of 2009 like Slum Dog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, or Milk, where individuals defy the odds by sheer will and optimism. Therefore Daniel Carr has called them ‘riveting tales for dark days’: The films are built on individual successes — kids from the slums who better themselves, a television celebrity who finds his inner newsman, a newborn who overcomes old age and the midlife closeted man who steps into the light

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______________________________________________________________ — that accrue to the greater good. That message, that darkness can be overcome by individuals working for the common good, is not so distant from the current collective impulse.44 4.

Ages of Fear, Horror, Terror in Comparison To sharpen the characterisations of these two ages of fear, horror and terror, it is necessary to clarify the main differences separating them and forming the ‘space’ in between. As mentioned before, the 1970s were a decade of crisis on many fronts: The country had still to come to terms with the unsolved issues of the civil rights conflict, while the economy struggled because of high energy prices and a weak dollar. The most poignant expression of this crisis was the bankruptcy of New York in 1975. In the international sphere the U.S. suffered setbacks and humiliation such as the retreat from Saigon (1975) or the occupation of the embassy in Teheran (1979). Fears of nuclear war and Communist infiltration had shaped the national psyche of the 1950s and 1960s, but Americans looked differently on their country’s prospects back then: The U.S. had won World War II and in Korea, living standards and incomes were continuously improving in the boom of Fordism. Starting in the late 1960s a crisis of confidence set in, shaped by the political, social, and economic problems described For the first time in American history, public opinion polls reported that the American public was no longer optimistic about the future of the nation.45 Overall the 1970s were an age of skepticism, as Kendall Philips noted: Across the world…people became increasingly sceptical of the progress of science and the emancipation promised by governments and politicians. Western civilisation began to loose faith. This is not to say that science or politics were openly rejected but to say that the cultural tendency was moving towards a sceptical lack of faith.46 It was Ronald Reagan’s promise of restoring America’s might and belief in itself (‘A New Morning’) that won him the election in 1980. That goal was achieved by the following means: Brief military adventures with few casualties against inferior foes (Grenada, Libya) mastered the Vietnam ‘syndrome’. Economic policies – privatisation, deregulation, and cuts on welfare – opened new markets for finance capital, while in the cultural sphere the U.S. took a profound shift to conservative values. The movie industry was part of this atmospheric change. Adjusting itself to this new America, the dark and cynical days of ‘New Hollywood’ were over and the era of blockbusters and escapist entertainment began with the Star Wars and

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______________________________________________________________ Indiana Jones franchises. This trend was widespread – in the wake of Friday 13 (1980) even sub-cultural horror became primarily self-referential, detached from real events and entering the mainstream with teen slashers (Scream, 1996) in the 1990s. The self-satisfied and optimistic tone of this decade was constituted by the ‘victory’ in the Cold War and a long period of steady growth. Correspondingly, Hollywood showed a functioning system: Repelling an Alien invasion (Independence Day, 1995), preventing a meteor from hitting earth (Armageddon, 1998), or a president defeating terrorists single-handedly (Air Force One, 1997). No matter how much dissent was articulated, there was an overall sense of confidence in American values. Also, the major differences between the 1970s and now have to be taken into consideration as well. For example, the impact of the Vietnam War was felt more strongly. Today, with an all-volunteer army, the overwhelming majority of Americans witness the War on Terror as spectators. Although far fewer soldiers are deployed in overseas conflicts, the extent of violence in the international sphere is hardly comparable to the decades before. Since 9/11 the U.S. has invaded two Islamic countries, the civilian death toll from the Iraq conflict alone is estimated at between 80,000 and 151,000. On other fronts war lords, militias, and gangs are continuing to devastate large areas of Africa, civil war rages in Latin America (Columbia), Russia (Chechnya), and Asia (India, Afghanistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, etc.). Terrorism is also rife: In the years following 9/11 it increased sharply, in 2006 alone by 25 percent. The clear and manageable Cold War polarity has given way to a constant state of anarchy, with new powerful actors emerging and asymmetrical threats to which the conventional military apparatus struggles to adjust. If one looks at violence in local context it is obvious that crime rates in the U.S. are no longer at the level of the 1970s: They peaked in the 1980s, before decreasing in the 1990s and 2000s. 2005 was overall the safest year in the past thirty years, but recent statistics indicate that crime could again be increasing. However, violence is certainly more visible today through 24 hour news cycles, the dynamics of a corporate media system, the internet portals like YouTube and the easy circulation of digital photography. This reinforces the popular perception of a dangerous, lawless, and disintegrating era, not only on the peripheries of the American Empire, but also in the U.S. itself. The failure of federal agencies to respond adequately to Hurricane Katrina, the crumbling infrastructure, and the pauperization of large urban areas can be described as symptoms of failing state power. During the presidency of George W. Bush the national debt doubled, amounting to 10 trillion dollars. The number of people without access to health care increased from 8 to 47 million, while the number of people below the poverty line rose

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______________________________________________________________ by 6 million. According to a 2008 poll by the Pew Research Center the percentage of Americans expecting to be better off in the next five years is at its lowest since the start of the census 44 years ago. 47 The worst economic slowdown since the Great Depression has already claimed 3.6 million American jobs by the start of 2009. The shockwaves of the crisis are felt profoundly around the world as the New York Times reported: ‘From lawyers in Paris to factory workers in China and bodyguards in Colombia, the ranks of the jobless are swelling rapidly across the globe.’48 Thus, trust in political systems and their elites is diminishing, there is much discontent about corporate scandals and continuing economic decline, and an ongoing armed conflict without any kind of resolution. Neoliberalism, privatization, and free trade have altered the socio-economic structure dramatically as well as establishing a powerful value-system based upon individual success, risk, flexibility, and self-responsibility. The financial crisis delivered a devastating blow to neoliberal hegemony – but the pressure to compete and succeed as well as fears of unemployment and loss of social status are more real than ever. 5.

Conclusion After having evaluated the symptoms of fear, horror, and terror, what lessons can be learned about what American (or Western) society is in the process of becoming? Reviewing two ‘shoot ‘em up’ pictures for the ‘New Yorker’, David Denby concluded that, ‘Made in a time of frustration…300 and Shooter feel like the products of a culture slowly and painfully going mad.’49 That may be exaggerated, but the ‘mirror’ of films and TV programmes shows a bleak, pessimistic and unsparing picture of a society deeply affected by fear, uncertainty, and aggression. The comparison inspired by Kracauer and Žižek has shown that real and reel violence do not exist apart from each other, that they are constantly overlapping. Just as in the high profile case of ‘torture porn’: Some of the sadistic practices in Hostel clearly resemble methods of harsh interrogation employed by the U.S. military and intelligence agencies in the War on Terror. Videos and pictures detailing this real abuse spread through the Internet, while fictitious torture trickled down – not only through ‘torture porn’ movies but also via mainstream entertainment. According to a study by the Parents' Television Council there were 102 torture scenes on American TV between 1996 and 2001. During only three years, from 2002 until 2005, this number increased to 624. Especially singled-out were five seasons of 24 that featured 67 torture scenes, more than in any other series. Its protagonist, counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer, uses torture on a frequent basis to obtain vital information on the locations of terrorist plotters and ticking bombs. He chops-off the finger of a Russian diplomat with a cigar tip cutter, stages the execution of a

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______________________________________________________________ ringleader’s family, and maltreats even his own traitorous brother with electric shocks.50 But torture was also a key motif in ABC’s Alias, where an unnamed villain torments key characters, or in Lost, where an Iraqi military officer tortures a fellow castaway. Even FX’s Nip/Tuck – a series about cosmetic surgery – featured physical abuse in two simultaneous scenes. ‘It’s unclear – both to people who create torture-infected scenarios and those who have taken note of their proliferation – whether such themes reflect a pop culture recalibration or a blip on the screen. But for now, at least, torture seems inescapable’, journalist Grey Braxton has argued51 This ongoing illustration and rationalization of torture contributed to a climate of opinion, which regards it both as normal and justifiable. According to a 2005 Pew Research Center study 46 percent of the American public believe that torturing terror suspects to gain important information is sometimes (31 percent) or often (15 percent) justified while 17 percent thought it is rarely justified and 32 percent were opposed52 Writer Eric Greene even diagnosed a ‘national Jack Bauer syndrome’, by which he meant ‘a disregard for standards of restraint and cooperation; an unrealistic belief in the power of force to clarify, establish dominance, quell chaos, and assert control.’53 24 even influenced the actual application in the field: ‘People watch the shows, and then walk into the interrogation booths and do the same things they’ve just seen’, Tony Lagouranis, a former Army interrogator in the war in Iraq, reported54 When asked which ‘television-type torture’ was imitated, Lagouranis said, ‘Mock executions and mock electrocution, stress positions, isolation, hypothermia. Threatening to execute family members or rape detainees' wives and things like that.’55 Diane Beaver, staff judge advocate at Guantanamao, told human rights lawyer Philippe Sands that Jack Bauer ‘gave people lots of ideas’. According to her, the series ‘contributed to an environment in which those at Guantanamo were encouraged to see themselves being on the frontline – and go further than they otherwise might.’56 When the infamous pictures of the Abu Ghraib scandal appeared, they were not only testimony to a sadistic and brutal military culture, but also of a darker quality of post 9/11-America, since torture’s aspects of domination and control are increasingly found in civil debate. It is almost common sense that ‘lesser evils’ are necessary to win the War on Terror, whereas complex conditions are increasingly judged simply in Manichean black and white. There is also a dimension of low-level violence through the rapid expansion and privatisation of security, the strict regulation of immigration, and enforcement of hegemonic values. Obviously the ‘evils’ of our times – terrorism, genocide, failing state power, economic crises, depleted resources, and environmental disasters – have shaped a growing recognition that civilisation is indeed a thin veneer,

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______________________________________________________________ and security is fragile and can be lost any time. It is still left to be seen how societies cope with the loss of long-held certainties. Popular culture provides an outlook on this future, and this critical barometer should be taken seriously. The nihilistic violence of ‘torture porn’, the draconic counterterrorism of 24, and dystopian visions of impending doom are obviously more tightly linked to reality than we want to acknowledge. If cinema and TV are indeed safe places for confronting unconscious social and political nightmares, this experience should also function as inspiration for change – not to allow the real world to increasingly resemble its dark abstractions.

Notes 1

‘The Pervert's Guide to Cinema', in Time Out, 6. October 2006, viewed on 17 July 2007, . 2 S Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1947, p. 6. 3 K R Philips, Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture, Praeger, Westport, 2005, p. 107. 4 B Hervey, Night of the Living Dead, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2008, p. 27. 5 R Humphries, The American Horror Film: An Introduction, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2002, pp. 115-125. 6 A Simon (dir), The American Nightmare, Minerva Pictures, USA, 2000. 7 J Zinoman, ‘A Bloody Cut Above Your Everyday Zombie Film’, in The New York Times, 10 June 2007, viewed on 2 February 2009, . 8 N Lee, ‘Let’s Do it Again: From Psycho to Funny Games’. Film Comment, March/April 2008, pp. 24-28. 9 P Staffle, ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’, in www.pollystaffle.com, viewed on 12 January 2008, . 10 L Quart, American Film And Society Since 1945, Praeger, Westport, 2002, pp. 113-114. 11 W Friedkin, ‘We’re all Dirty Harry Now’, in The Guardian, 28 November 2008, viewed on 13 February 2009, . 12 E Lichtenfeld, Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie, Praeger, Westport, 2004, pp. 39-42. 13 L Quart, American Film And Society Since 1945, Praeger, Westport 2002, pp. 114-115.

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R Douthat, ‘The Return of the Paranoid Style’, in The Atlantic Monthly, April 2008, viewed on 22 April 2008, . 15 K Conolly, ‘Fiction Becomes Fact as Banking Thriller Opens Festival’, The Guardian, 6 February 2009, viewed on 12 February 2009, . 16 P Greengrass (dir), The Bourne Ultimatum, Universal Pictures, United States, 2007. 17 R Douthat, op. cit. 18 M Stiglegger, Die Fürsten der Finsternis und die Verführung zur Gewalt, in www.epd-film.de, viewed 13 October 2008, . 19 R Douthat, op. cit. 20 W Friedkin, op. cit. 21 N Genzlinger, ‘Terror and Duct Tape’, in The New York Times, 24 August 2007, viewed on 30 August 2007, . 22 C Soriano & A Oldenburg, ‘With America at War, Hollywood Follows’, USA Today, 7 February 2005, p. 1A. 23 G Westwell, ‘Casualties of War’, Sight and Sound, February 2008, p 20. 24 ibid. pp. 20-22. 25 ibid. p. 20. 26 L Grossman, ‘Feeding on Fantasy’, in Time, 9 December 2002, viewed on 16 June 2008, . 27 S Waxmann, ‘At the Movies, at Least, Good Vanquishes Evil’, in The New York Times, 10 May 2004, viewed on 1 June 2004, . 28 J Zinoman, op. cit. 29 R Nelson, ‘The Zeitgeist Made ‘Em Do It’, in The Village Voice, 5 June 2007, viewed on 12 October 2007, . 30 A Billson, ‘Crash and Squirm’, in The Guardian, 31 October 2008, viewed on 13 February 2009, . 31 L Beale, ‘The Zombies Brought Him: George Romero is Back’, in The New York Times, 3 November 2004, viewed on 10 June 2008, . 32 K Onstad, ‘Horror Auteur is Unfinished with the Undead’, in The New York Times, 10 February 2008, pp. AR13-AR18.

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D Lim, ‘Dante’s Inferno’, in The Village Voice, 29 November 2005, viewed on 13 June 2008, . 34 D Edelstein, ‘Now Playing at Your local Multiplex: Torture Porn’, in New York Magazine, 28 January 2006, viewed on 17 March 2008, . 35 G Braxton, ‘Rise in Torture Scenes Raises Red Flags’, in The Los Angeles Times, 11 February 2006, viewed on 10 June 2008, . 36 S Macomber, ‘Tortured Cinema’, in The American Spectator, 11 September 2007, viewed on 25 March 2008, . 37 A Herren, ‘The Life and Death of Torture Porn’, in the217.com, viewed on 13 March 2008, . 38 L Baier, ‘Mordsspaß im Schlachthof’, Der Spiegel, 24 July 2006, pp. 128130. 39 J Poulos, ‘Tortured Souls’, The Weekly Standard, 12 May 2006, p. 10. 40 L Thompson, ‘Why it Isn’t Torture Porn’, in OC Weekly, 6 September 2007, viewed on 15 February 2009, . 41 C Byrne, C Nolan & J Nolan, The Dark Knight: Featuring Production Art and Full Shooting Script, New York 2008, p. 138. 42 ibid. p. 187. 43 M Madden, ‘Apocalyptic Films and TV Reveal our Fear of the Times’, Detroit News, 27 February 2008, p. 16. 44 D Carr, ‘Riveting Tales for Dark Days’, in The New York Times, 29 January 2009, viewed on 12 February 2009, . 45 Quart, pp. 100-102. 46 Philips, p. 170. 47 E Follath, ‘Der White House Blues’, Der Spiegel, 27 October 2008, pp. 114-133. 48 N Schwartz, ‘Rise in Jobless Poses Threat to Stability Worldwide', in The New York Times, 15 February 2009, viewed on 10 March 2009, . 49 D Denby, ‘Men Gone Wild’, in The New Yorker, 2 April 2007, viewed on 10 March 2009, . 50 M Miller, ‘‘24’ Gets a Lesson in Torture From the Experts’, The Los Angeles Times, 13 February 2007, pp. 1-4.

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G Braxton, op. cit. W Fisher, ‘How do Americans Feel About Torture’, in www.openednews, 9 December 2005, viewed on 28 February 2009, . 53 E Greene, ‘Jack Bauer Syndrome’, in R Miniter (ed), Jack Bauer for President: Terrorism and Politics in 24, Ben Bella Books, Dallas 2008, pp. 171-193. 54 J Mayer, ‘Whatever It Takes: The Politics of the Man Behind ‘24’’, The New Yorker, 19 February 2007, pp. 66-82. 55 J Bennett, ‘What US Interrogators Learned from TV’, in Newsweek Web Exclusive, 27 February 2007, viewed on 16 March 2008, . 56 P Sands, Torture Team. Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, Palgrave, New York 2008, p. 62. 52

Bibliography Baier, L., ‚Mordsspaß im Schlachthof’, Der Spiegel, 24 July 2006, pp. 128130. Barkham, P., ‘I Had to Wimp Down a Little Bit’, in The Guardian, 6 August 2007, retrieved on 6 March 2008, . Bennett, J., ‘What US Interrogators Learned from TV’, in Newsweek Web Exclusive, 27 February 2007, retrieved 16 March 2008, . Billson, A., ‘Crash and Squirm’, in The Guardian, 31 October 2008, retrieved on 13 February 2009, . Beale, L., ‘The Zombies Brought Him. George Romero is Back’, in The New York Times, 3 November 2004, retrieved on 10 June 2008, . Braxton, G., ‘Rise in Torture Scenes Raises Red Flags’, in The Los Angeles Times, 11 February 2006, retrieved on 10 June 2008, .

www.ebook3000.com

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______________________________________________________________ Breznican, A., ‘‘Transformers’’ Breaks Out the Big Guns for Sequel’, in USA Today, 28 December 2008, retrieved on 10 February 2009, . Byrne, C., C. Nolan, J. Nolan, The Dark Knight: Featuring Production Art and Full Shooting Script. Universe, New York, 2008. Carr, D., ‘Riveting Tales for Dark Days’, in The New York Times, 29 January 2009, retrieved on 12 February 2009, . Conolly, K., ‘Fiction Becomes Fact as Banking Thriller Opens Festival’, The Guardian, 6 February 2009, retrieved on 12 February 2009, . Denby, D., ‘Men Gone Wild’, in The New Yorker, 2 April 2007, retrieved on 10 March 2009, . Douthat, R., ‘The Return of the Paranoid Style’, The Atlantic Monthly, April 2008, retrieved on 22 April 2008, . Edelstein, D., ‘Now Playing at Your local Multiplex: Torture Porn’, in New York Magazine, 28 January 2006, retrieved on 17 March 2008, . Fisher, W., ‘How Do Americans Feel About Torture’, in openednews, 9 December 2005, retrieved on 28 February 2009, . Follath, E., ‘Der White House Blues’, in Der Spiegel, 27 October 2008, pp. 114-133. Friedkin, W., ‘We’re all Dirty Harry Now’, in The Guardian, 28 November 2008, retrieved on 13 February 2009, .

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______________________________________________________________ Genzlinger, N., ‘Terror and Duct Tape’,in The New York Times, 24 August 2007, retrieved on 30 August 2007, . Greengrass, P. (dir), The Bourne Ultimatum. Universal Pictures, United States, 2007. Grossman, L., ‘Feeding on Fantasy’, in Time, 9 December 2002, retrieved on 16 June 2008, . Herren, A., ‘The Life and Death of Torture Porn’, the217.com, retrieved on 13 March 2008, . Hervey, B., Night of the Living Dead. Palgrave Macmillan, London , 2008. Humphries, R., The American Horror Film: An Introduction. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2002. Kracauer, S., From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1947. Lee, N., ‘Let’s do it Again: From Psycho to Funny Games’, Film Comment, March/April 2008, pp. 24-28. Lichtenfeld, E., Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie. Praeger, Westport, 2004. Lim, D., ‘Dante’s Inferno’, in The Village Voice, 29 November 2005, retrieved on 13 June 2008, . Macomber, S., ‘Tortured Cinema’, in The American Spectator, 11 September 2007, retrieved on 25 March 2008, . Madden, M., ‘Apocalyptic Films and TV Reveal our Fear of the Times’, Detroit News, 27 February 2008, p. 16. Mayer J, ‘Whatever It Takes. The Politics of the Man Behind ‘24’’, The New Yorker, 19 February 2007, pp. 66-82.

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______________________________________________________________ Miller, M., ‘‘24’ Gets a Lesson in Torture from the Experts’, The Los Angeles Times, 13 February 2007, pp. 1-4. Miniter, R. (ed), Jack Bauer for President: Terrorism and Politics in 24. Ben Bella Books, Dallas, 2008. Nelson, R., ‘The Zeitgeist Made ‘Em Do It’, in The Village Voice, 5 June 2007, retrieved on 12 October 2007, . Onstad, K., ‘Horror Auteur is Unfinished with the Undead’, The New York Times, 10 February 2008, pp. AR13-AR18. Patterson, J., ‘Putting the Gory in to Allegory’, in The Guardian, 23 June 2007, retrieved on 15 May 2008, . Philips, K., Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture. Praeger, Westport, 2005. Poulos, J., ‘Tortured Souls’, The Weekly Standard, 12 May 2006, p. 10. Quart, L., American Film And Society Since 1945. Praeger. Westport, 2002. Sands, P., Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. Palgrave, New York 2008. Schwartz, N., ‘Rise in Jobless Poses Threat to Stability Worldwide’, in The New York Times, 15 February 2009, retrieved on 10 March 2009, . Scott, A., ‘Characters Who Learn to See by Falling Into a World Without Sight’, in The New York Times, 3 October 2008, retrieved on 10 February 2009,. Simon, A. (dir), The American Nightmare, Minerva Pictures, USA, 2000. Soriano, C. & A. Oldenburg, ‘With America at War, Hollywood Follows’, USA Today, 7 February 2005, p. 1A.

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______________________________________________________________ Staffle, P., ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’,in pollystaffle.com, retrieved on 12 January 2008, . Stiglegger, M., ‘Die Fürsten der Finsternis und die Verführung zur Gewalt’, in epd-film.de, retrieved on 13 October 2008, . Thompson, L., ‘Why it Isn’t Torture Porn’, in OC Weekly, 6 September 2007, retrieved on 15 February 2009, . Waxmann, S., ‘At the Movies, at Least, Good Vanquishes Evil’, in The New York Times, 10 May 2004, retrieved on 1 June 2004, http://www.nytimes.com /2004/05/10/movies/10BOX.html>. Westwell, G., ‘Casualties of War’, in Sight and Sound, February 2008, pp. 16-21. Zinoman, J., ‘A Bloody Cut Above Your Everyday Zombie Film’, in The New York Times, 10 June 2007, retrieved on 2 February 2009, http://query.Nytimes .com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E3DF1E30F933A25755C0A9619C8B63>. ‘The Pervert's Guide to Cinema’, in Time Out, 6 October 2006, retrieved on 17 July 2007, . Thomas Riegler is a historian based in Vienna. He has published on a wide range of topics including terrorism, counterinsurgency and the depiction of political violence in Hollywood movies.

The Gothic Topography in Scandinavian Horror Fiction Yvonne Leffler Abstract It is possible to discern a certain Gothic tradition in Scandinavian literature and film from the late 18th century to the present day. The stories are located in specific Scandinavian environments, regional folklore, and local traditions are used to enhance the atmosphere, as well as to intensify the gothic mode. The gothic castle or haunted house is replaced by the wilderness, the large dark forest, the stormy sea, or the crags and rocks of the mountains. This paper will show how the protagonists in Scandinavian horror fiction are victims of the environment in contrast to the traditional gothic villain. Their loss of control and their dark side is much more distinct than in European fiction and is connected to, and triggered by, the landscape and is thereby an integral part of the barbaric pagan past. Therefore it is noteworthy that Scandinavian writers and filmmakers do not, as do most European ones, return to the Middle Ages to revive a feudal past in their horror stories. Instead they recall a prehistoric time further back in history: the pagan premedieval era before Christianity was brought to Scandinavia. On the basis of selected examples I will articulate what I call the ‘gothic topography’ in Scandinavian horror fiction, which is the complex relationship between landscape and character, space and focalisation, external environment and internal mental state, present time and hidden past. In this way I will introduce a new way of analysing characteristic elements in horror fiction with specific focus on those that are especially frequent in Scandinavian fiction. Key Words: Scandinavian horror, Gothic fiction, monster. ***** The Swedish horror film Frostbite (Frostbiten, 2006),1 which has won several awards, is an interesting example of a modern Scandinavian horror film. This vampire tale takes place in a small Swedish town north of the polar circle in the immense darkness of the arctic winter night. The standard vampire tale elements are sometimes playfully exaggerated and the director Anders Banke plays with these elements, for instance when one of the male protagonists accidentally takes a pill containing vampire blood. The first effect of the drug is to make him part of the domestic wildlife of the town. No boundaries exist between him and the pets he meets in the streets. He hears the thoughts of the dogs as voices inside his head and he feels more akin to them than to his old friends or even his girlfriend.

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______________________________________________________________ Frostbite is an example of the boom in horror novels and films that has taken place in Scandinavia, especially in Sweden, in the last two decades. Frostbite has been classified as a modern vampire parody, showing how horror has taken over elements from other genres and turned into an everchanging popular genre. Still, the film is also a good example of a long tradition of Scandinavian horror fiction and a specific gothic tradition in Scandinavian literature and film that stretches from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Scandinavian horror stories are, like Frostbite, set in specific Scandinavian environments using regional folklore and local traditions to enhance the atmosphere, as well as to intensify the gothic mode. The gothic castle or gothic city is here replaced by the Nordic wilderness, the arctic climate and the darkness of the long winter nights. I will begin by discussing a few illustrative examples of the gothic setting in Scandinavian horror fiction from the early nineteenth century to the present day. The Danish author Bernhard Ingemann’s short novel The Dwarves Below (De Underjordiske: Et Bornhomsk Eventyr, 1817)2 is a typical example of a story located in a specific Scandinavian environment that makes references to what the contemporary reader would have recognized as historical facts. It takes place on the island Bornholm, between Sweden and Denmark, and depicts certain historical battles. However, the authentic setting is only there as the backdrop to another story: a story of the evil forces in nature and within man. Another example of how a well-known geographic location is turned into a gothic landscape in Scandinavian nineteenth century literature is the novel Singoalla (1857) by the Swedish author Viktor Rydberg.3 In the first chapter the narrator stresses that the story he recounts has taken place at an old castle at a certain lake in the county of Småland in Sweden. It is a story about a Christian knight, the heir of the castle, whose love for a pagan Gipsy girl causes him to abandon his Christian values and his duties. The first section is also sprinkled with many gothic elements. The moon, the Nordic night and pagan blood rituals gradually achieve a profound symbolic significance. The combination of these elements adds a mystical edge to the love between the knight Erland, and the Gipsy girl Singoalla, in a way that turns the love story into a vampire tale à la Gauthier’s La Morte Amoreuse (1845). Ingemann’s and Rydberg’s novels illustrate a most prominent feature of the gothic in Scandinavian literature: the major role played by the scenery, the powers of nature and the pagan past as driving narrative forces. As in most gothic fiction the setting is related to the characters, but in the Scandinavian tales the setting – the scenery and the wilderness – plays the part of an independent character in the story. In Ingemann’s novel The Dwarves Below, the dwarves are Nature: the earth, the sea and the forest. Likewise, in Rydberg’s Singoalla, the knight Erland and the Christian society

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______________________________________________________________ in which he lives are threatened by all things connected to the wilderness, i.e. the untamed landscape surrounding the castle and the monastery. Singoalla and her people are not only foreigners and heathens but are also part of that wilderness. They worship the moon, and with the help of the powers of the moon they take possession of Erland and force him to leave his family, causing his personality to split in two. During the day he is the righteous Christian crusader married to the pious lady Helena, but at night becomes Singoalla’s passionate lover succumbing to the influence of the forces of nature. Just as in Ingemann’s story, the wild landscape – untamed nature – is one of the principal driving forces of the plot. In the most recent horror fiction the protagonists are also victims of the environment. Much more distinctly than in European horror fiction, their dark sides are activated by the landscape, and the protagonists therefore become an integral part of this wilderness. In Jonas Cornell’s film The Moon God (Månguden, 1988) the Swedish wilderness triggers a psychopath to act as the moon god looking for human beings to sacrifice.4 In Michael Hjorth’s film The Unknown (Det Okända, 2000) the Swedish forest is transformed into a claustrophobic horror setting for a group of young scientists sent to investigate a remote fire-ravaged area in the northern forest.5 The scientists’ work, their investigation and their documentation of it, is gradually threatened by an unknown alien force as the forest starts acting as a living organism. The scientists’ modern scientific worldview is more and more challenged by some ancient primitive force in nature. One of the latest Swedish horror novels, Andreas Marklund’s The Harvest Queen (Skördedrottningen, 2007),6 again demonstrates the central role of the powers of the Nordic wilderness in Scandinavian horror fiction. The young university scholars Olof and his friend Carolina are trying to find out what happened to their mutual friend Fabian, who has disappeared. Soon Olof and Carolina are drawn into a fatal adventure, as they believe they are being pursued by a secret brotherhood organisation. Their investigation leads them to the very north of Sweden, deep in the wilderness, to an old, decayed farm belonging to their lost friend. But what starts out as a modern thriller or detective story soon turns into a real horror story, wherein the protagonist, Olof, transforms into an alien being with an uncanny connection to the wilderness. He is a demon belonging to the destructive death goddess, known as the ‘Harvest Queen’. It is then revealed that by birth he is destined to serve the Harvest Queen, as did all his male ancestors before him. Like in many Scandinavian horror stories the protagonist’s romantic quest in The Harvest Queen is twisted into a journey back to a dark, barbaric or savage state prior to civilisation. The male protagonist in the novel transforms into a savage being, a beast of prey, closely connected to the wilderness and the savage rituals of sacrifice and nature worship. Two earlier examples of this is Ingemann’s story The Werewolf (Varulven, 1835),7 and

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______________________________________________________________ Rydberg’s The Vampire (Wampyren, 1848).8 In both narratives the protagonists are bound to the wild forest: in the The Werewolf the young bridegroom turns into a hunting wolf, who after his killings disappears into the forest, and in The Vampire, Ruthven, unlike most European vampires, does not haunt his victims in their bedrooms but instead, like a werewolf, he brings them into the forest where he drains them of blood before disappearing into the wilderness. In Tomas Alfredson’s film Let the Right One In (Låt den Rätte Komma In, 2008),9 which is based on John Ajvide Lindqvist’s recent vampire novel from 2004,10 the rather urban setting of the novel is placed in the background. The horror scenes, which show the attacks of the vampire Eli and her assistant, take place in the snow-covered forest areas left within the modern suburbs outside Stockholm. The snow and the forest are just as important for the vampire’s health as the darkness of the night. 1.

The Gothic Topography These examples all show a ‘gothic topography’ that is typical of Scandinavian horror, i.e. a complex relationship between landscape and character, space and focalisation, external environment and internal mental state, the present time and the forgotten past. In most Scandinavian horror novels and films, as illustrated by the examples above, the mazy architecture of the gothic building, the labyrinthine city or the haunted house, is replaced by a boundless, uncontrollable, and wild Nordic landscape. The protagonist is not so much threatened by a distinct monster as by an undefined ever-present force connected to the wilderness. The scenery is not mainly, as in most gothic fiction, an emotionally coloured landscape that expresses the emotional state of the main characters or the narrator. Instead, it is the generating locus of action, or an active character in the story. It has a life of its own and acts as an alien force or organism threatening the protagonist. Its function is not solely, as in most gothic fiction, to enhance the atmosphere by causing mists and storms, but to literally attack, invade, and transform the protagonist into a savage creature. In Scandinavian fiction the landscape, or the force of nature, may even act as an external antagonist fighting the protagonists and preventing them from reaching their goal. In the film The Unknown, some undefined force in nature defends itself against the young scientists’ research project by attacking them when they are working in the forest. In some stories the landscape even forces the protagonist to act in certain ways. In Marklund’s The Harvest Queen the snowstorm brings Olof and Caroline to Fabian’s old house and it is the harsh arctic climate that keeps them at the farm during the winter. The snowbound winter landscape prevents Olof and Caroline from returning to Stockholm, and brings Olof gradually closer to his ancestors’ dark history preparing him to become a new servant to the old mother goddess, the Harvest Queen.

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______________________________________________________________ The encounter with the wilderness, as demonstrated by The Unknown and The Harvest Queen, places the protagonist in a state of mental dissolution on the verge of collapse as an individual. This is a state I would call a ‘gothic atopos’: a mental state where no boundaries exist between the self and the environment, between man and landscape, memories and present experiences. An example of this intertwined mental state is the Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist’s short story Border (Gräns, 2006).11 It is a story about a very successful customs officer Tina, who seems to possess an almost supernatural skill in finding smugglers and their goods. Her meeting with a stranger makes her discover her own hidden past and makes her revert into that ancient primitive humanoid species of which she is an offspring. Tina is nature; there is no border between her and the surrounding wildlife. She is more at home in the forest than in a house, and her most intimate confidant is an old tree in the forest. In Border there is a more passive and harmonious psychological bond between the female protagonist and the wilderness than in most Scandinavian horror fiction. Often the wilderness acts as an evil force within the protagonist, as illustrated by Selma Lagerlöf’s short story The Outlaws (De Fågelfria, 1892), where one of the outlaws, the good-hearted Tord, is taken over by the dark forces of the wilderness at the end of the story. We are told how he starts hearing a forest ‘full of voices’, whispering ‘mournful songs’ and ‘heavy threats like roaring woes’ [my translation].12 He is soon convinced that it is the voice of the avenging and merciless Christian God telling him to betray his friend Berg Rese, who once murdered a monk. Naturally, Tord does not dare to act against the will of God. He becomes possessed by this voice and is eventually taken-over by evil forces when he betrays his friend and finally becomes his friend’s murderer. As in The Outlaws the alien and repressed forces within man are often depicted as a product of the savage, untamed wilderness and its predators. Most Scandinavian horror stories are about man and his pagan inheritance. It is noteworthy that Scandinavian writers and filmmakers do not, as do most European ones, return to the Middle Ages to revive a feudal past in their horror stories. Instead they recall prehistoric times further back in history, i.e. the pagan pre-mediaeval era before Christianity was brought to Scandinavia. Instead of the atmosphere of decay in European horror fiction, in Scandinavian horror there is an atmosphere of doom focused on the protagonist and his family. In almost all Scandinavian tales the characters are victims of their ancestors’ crimes, and they are often doomed to repeat them. In The Outlaws Tord is, for instance, known to be the son of a witch who fed on drowned men’s bones. And in The Harvest Queen the scholar Olof is from the start a victim of his ancestors’ pagan past. In the end he discovers that his friend Fabian’s mysterious disappearance is connected to his and his ancestors’ dark history and that his search for his friend is part of the dark

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______________________________________________________________ forces’ plotting to make him uncover his ancestors’ hideous secret, as well as another powerful reality beyond modern life, a world ruled by the merciless Harvest Queen. Another elucidatory example of the gothic atopos and how the border between man and nature, as well as present and past, breaks-down in modern Scandinavian literature is presented in Kristoffer Leandoer’s story The Black Swans (De Svarta Svanarna, 1994).13 A young family is moving to an old farm in the southern part of Sweden. In the garden there is a pond where a couple of black swans of a rare species, thought to be extinct, are nesting. The young woman Charlotte establishes an intimate bond to the swans while the narrator, her husband Jonas, feels threatened by them. When he arrives home late or wakes-up in the middle of the night he often finds his wife walking around in the garden petting the swans and one night he witnesses the male swan making love to his wife, entering her body through her mouth and making her almost immediately give birth to a snakelike creature which dives down into the pond. Jonas finds an explanation to what is happening when he is told an old story dating from pagan times, the Saga period, explaining the presence of the two black swans at the farm and their uncanny connection to the wilderness, forbidden love, uncontrollable hatred and murder. In The Black Swans it is, however, not the protagonist, the main character or the narrator, who is connected to the wilderness and transforming into some non-human being. Instead the tale is told by someone who witnesses the horrible transformation of his wife. It is not, as is usual in gothic fiction, the male protagonist but a female character who becomes part of the wildlife at the farm and who at the end transforms into an alien being, a black swan. The way she becomes part of the wild life of her environment is, however, characteristic of Scandinavian horror. The representatives of the old wildlife of the farm, the black swans, trigger repressed forces and forbidden desires within the young woman and make her transform into the ‘Other’. Like a werewolf she is suffering from what Noël Carroll calls ‘temporal fission’14: during the day she is Jonas’s wife Charlotte, at night she transforms into a black swan joining the other swans at the pond. Thus, the setting, the powers of nature, and the pagan past play a major part in The Black Swans. They are the driving forces of the plot as they trigger the repressed forces within man as a product of a savage, untamed wilderness and its predators. The meeting with the black swans, the link to the past, makes chronological time dissolve in a way that is typical of Scandinavian horror. Past, present and future lose their chronological and historical sequence and tend towards an eternal present.

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______________________________________________________________ 2.

The Haunting Pagan Past What characterizes horror fiction in Scandinavia is that the gothic castle, monastery or spooky ruin is replaced by the wilderness, e.g. the large dark forest or the snow covered Nordic mountains. Like most gothic characters, the protagonists in Scandinavian horror lose control of their repressed desires and are taken over by their dark sides. But in Scandinavian fiction the dark side is, much more distinctly than in most European horror, bound to, and triggered by, the landscape. When the protagonists in Scandinavian horror lose control over their perceptions and imagination, or over their ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy, or between accurate perceptions and feverish imaginations, there is a fusion between inner and outer reality within the character, that is, between ego and milieu. Their unreliable status as narrators or focalisers does not solely illustrate their mental states as much as the state of the world itself. In most horror fiction the stability of the external world breaks down, and the mysteries relate more to the human personality than to the environment. In Scandinavian horror it is quite the opposite: the horror is the environment. The mind is invaded and taken-over by the Nordic landscape and the wilderness. However, the gothic topography in Scandinavian horror fiction is about more than setting and focalisation. Besides an unstable distinction between landscape and character or external conditions and inner mental state, there is a complex relationship between time and focalisation, between what is happening to the protagonist at present and what has happened in the past. In Scandinavian horror the threatening landscape and wilderness is very much part of a barbaric past. When man cannot resist the powers of nature residing within him he cannot resist the power of the prehistoric pagan past connected to, or part of, the surrounding wilderness. As in most gothic fiction and horror the past represents a threat to the protagonist, but in contrast to most European authors, Scandinavian writers do not return to the Middle Ages to revive a medieval feudal past in their horror fiction. Instead they recall prehistoric times further back in history, a pagan pre-mediaeval era before Christianity was brought to Scandinavia. Therefore, it should be noted that even if most modern horror deals with the protagonist’s individual trauma, Scandinavian horror is more frequently concerned with evoking a collective trauma bound to a common past. Thus, Scandinavian horror fiction seems to express a fear of losing control over external circumstances, the landscape and the climate, as well as a lack of control over the still present remains of a pagan past. Old conceptions of supernatural creatures and powers activate a repressed memory of a past condemned by the Christian church, disowned by the new bourgeois society of the nineteenth century and the modern scientifictechnical society of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beyond the civilised modern world there is another world lurking, a world that calls forth

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______________________________________________________________ the haunting memory of a hidden past. Because this dark pre-medieval past is repressed and not clearly recognised, it is not easily exorcized. As it existed prior to the concepts of good and evil, time and place, it is a threat to both the existing social order and to the prevailing concept of the modern, civilized and rational world. At least, that is the way things are in Scandinavian horror.

Notes 1

A Banke (dir), Frostbiten, Cinepost Studios, Sweden, 2006. B Ingemann, De Underjordiske: Et bornholmsk Eventyr, Copenhagen, 1817. 3 Singoalla has been published in several versions and editions. It was first published in the magazine Aurora in 1857. 4 J Cornell (dir), Månguden, SVT drama, Sweden, 1988. 5 M Hjort (dir), Det Okända, Action Film AB, Sweden, 2000. 6 A Marklund, Skördedrottningen, Järnringen, Stockholm, 2007. 7 B Ingemann, ‘Varulven (1835)’, Samlede Eventyr og Fortaellinger, vol. 3, C. R. Reissel, Copenhagen, 1845, pp. 139-185. 8 V Rydberg’s Wampyren was first published as a serial in the newpaper Jönköpingsbladet in 1848. 9 T Alfredson (dir), Låt den Rätte Komma In, EFTI, Sweden, 2008. 10 J A Lindqvist, Låt den Rätte Komma In, Ordfront, Stockholm, 2004. 11 J A Lindqvist, ‘Gräns’, in Pappersvägar: Tio berättelser, Ordfront, Stockholm, 2006. 12 S Lagerlöf, ‘De Fågelfrie’, in Osynliga länkar: Berättelser, Albert Bonnier, Stockholm, 1927, pp. 60–88. 13 K Leandoer, ‘De Svarta Svanarna’, in Svarta Speglar: Skräckberättelser, Norstedts Förlag AB, Stockholm, 1994. 14 N Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror: Or Paradoxes of the Heart, Routledge, London, 1990, p. 46. 2

Bibliography Alfredson, T. (dir), Låt den Rätte Komma In. EFTI, Sweden, 2008. Banke, A. (dir), Frostbiten, Cinepost Studios, Sweden, 2006. Caroll, N., The Philosophy of Horror: Or Paradoxes of the Heart. Routledge, London, 1990. Cornell, J. (dir), Månguden, SVT drama, Sweden, 1988.

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______________________________________________________________ Hjorth, M. (dir), Det Okända. Action Film AB, Sweden, 2000. Ingemann, B., ‘De Underjordiske: Et Bornholmsk Eventyr (1817)’, in Samlede Eventyr og Fortaellinger, vol. 3. C. R. Reissel, Copenhagen, 1845. ——, ‘Varulven (1835)’, in Samlede Eventyr og Fortaellinger, vol. 3. C. R. Reissel, Copenhagen, 1845. Lagerlöf, S., ‘De Fågelfrie’, in Osynliga Länkar: Berättelser. Albert Bonnier, Stockholm, 1927, pp. 60–88. Leandoer, K., ‘Svarta svanar’, in Svarta Speglar: Skräckberättelser. Norstedts Förlag AB, Stockholm, 1994. Lindqvist, J. A., ‘Gräns’, in Pappersväggar: Tio Berättelser. Ordfront, Stockholm, 2006. Marklund, A., Skördedrottningen. Järnringen, Stockholm, 2007. Rydberg, V., ‘Singoalla: Romantisk Sagodikt’, in Aurora:Toilette-Kalender för 1858, Gothenburg, 1857. ——, ‘Wampyren’, Jönköpingsbladet, 1848. Yvonne Leffler is Professor of Comparative Literature at Gothengurg University, Sweden. Her research is devoted to gothic literature and horror film, the Swedish nineteenth century novel, and modern popular fiction.

Getting Medieval: Bodies of Fear, Serial Killers and Se7en Shona Hill Abstract Fear can be understood as a perspective for viewing social experience. To explore this perspective, this paper will use an example of serial killing displayed through the wounded body in Fincher’s 1995 film Se7en. Instead of asking why serial killers are so popular in the entertainment media, I examine how they are presented. I argue that what is interesting about the way Se7en interacts with its audience is that it presents a resurrection of a medieval worldview. Telling a story of death through the Christian wounded body was a mundane event in the public spaces of the medieval execution. Yet from a contemporary perspective the presentation of public death in this film is understood in terms of information and images pertaining to fear, horror and terror. This presentation affects audiences to the point where they are both horrified and mesmerised, as much for what they think they see, as for the actual presentation of wounded bodies in this film. Key Words: The body, religion, fear, pain, social production of violence, ideal types. ***** 1.

Introduction Fear, terror and horror are created and managed through the manner in which the media represents serial killers (among other things). I contend that the current process for managing this fear is historically conditioned. I also contend that traces of past processes for creating and managing fear are more or less replicated in current processes. To explore this, I focus on the serial killer represented in David Fincher’s 1995 film Se7en. Specifically, my purpose is to discuss how the sight of the wounded, pained and punished body is used in Se7en and what this tells us about that which creates fear/terror and horror and also the way in which it is usually managed. To do this, I examine dominant portrayals of serial killers in contemporary film and the role the body plays in these narratives. I briefly compare this with Se7en and then outline some of the negative societal reactions to Se7en’s representation. To illustrate how Se7en motivates such vehement attacks (and box office success) I bring into relief contemporary approaches to fear in serial killer movies by comparing them with the ways in which medieval execution narratives used the body-in-pain to tell a story. I establish a contrast between the use of the body in dominant serial killer movies and medieval executions, but resist describing these two worldviews as polar opposites. Rather I look at how traces of a past that had a place for

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______________________________________________________________ the ‘thinking body’ to communicate stories of right and wrong continue in Se7en. Using this comparison, I analyse how it is that the role of the body in Se7en invokes fear, horror, outrage, and terror on viewing images that would have been processed as mundane sources of sacred knowledge 600 or so years ago. This is not to delve into empiricist history, but to take a sociological approach to better understand the role of the contemporary body in creating and managing fear, horror, and terror. 2.

Re-Presentations of Serial Killers -The Absent Wounded Body Contemporary Western society is often assumed to have fully adopted Norbert Elias’ ‘civilising processes of restraint’.1 This assumption has led some commentators to question how serial murders can occur in modern society.2 Yet they do take place and are represented in our news and entertainment media. Furthermore, there is no clear cut distinction between people’s understanding of fact and fiction because, as Annalee Newitz argues, biographies, true story representations, and reference to real life in fictional representation means the serial killer narrative spans both fictional and non-fictional genres.3 This is especially relevant because most people have such a low statistical probability of ever coming into contact with a real serial killer. Most people’s information about serial killers will come from representations rather than experience. In this sense, serial killer representations play an important role in shaping the contemporary habitus. The habitus is a concept I use from Pierre Bourdieu to mean ‘a set of acquired patterns of thought, behaviour, and taste which…constitute[s] the link between social structures and social practice (or social action)’.4 I use this concept to side step the argument of whether our representations shape reality or vice-versa. Rather, I am interested in the ways in which representations of serial killers both create and manage fear, horror, and terror. Adam Lowenstein and Daniel Franklin also take this approach and argue (in different ways) that representations both assist audiences to work through pain and trauma and also to relive it in fiction.5 They note that the popularity of films such as The Silence of the Lambs (1991) attests to the societal need to discuss feelings about serial killing, crime, and eating disorders. To explore this process of creating and managing the fear of serial killers I begin with a description of what many scholars claim is the dominant way of creating and managing the fear of the serial killer concept. Scholars confirm the sign of the serial killer is mutable, but nevertheless argue that it stabilises when the serial killer is portrayed as a moral alien, monstrous or the ultimate evil. This manages fear by constructing the serial killer in a distanced and restrained way. Such ‘fictionalising’ of the concept of a serial killer means it can be treated as informative and non-threatening. Richard Tithecott and Joseph Grixti, for example, both examine how representing the

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______________________________________________________________ serial killer as a distant ‘other’ is designed to preserve our favoured identity as a restrained society.6 It also provides a ‘frame of reassurance’, which facilitates safe explorations of fearful subjects.7 Below, I will briefly touch on three dominant ways that this distancing, restraint, and comfort is maintained in serial killer representations. The three inter-related approaches I examine are: (1) establishing the killer’s actions as motive-less and unknowable, (2) the process of equating serial killers with mythical creatures, and (3) the focus on the ‘criminal mind’ making the bodies of victims and society invisible. 2.1

Establishing the Killer’s Action as Motiveless and Unknowable Tithecott notes that the repetitive use of words like ‘motiveless’ to explain serial killing separates the civilised labeller from the ‘decivilising effects’ of an alien mental consciousness.8 This conceptualises and constructs the serial killer’s crime as unable to be rationally understood and therefore outside the moral boundaries that restrain ‘everyone’ through common sense. As a result, the serial killer’s crime is essentially unknowable and the serial killer loses all credibility. Being characterised as ‘unknowable’ means society and individuals are unable to interact with the serial killer concept at any meaningful level. As a result, people are unable to process the actions of the serial killer in relation to the self or the social whole. In being so isolated from ‘everyday life’ the dominance of restraint appears intact and everyday life can be managed as ‘nearly always’ non-fearful. 2.2

Equating Serial Killers with Mythological Creatures Constructing the serial killer and crime as unknowable and outside acceptable moral boundaries can be extended. Suanne Epstein argues that myths about Incubi and Vampires were created to manage fear regarding human serial rapist and murders.9 Whatever the origins of these myths, in modern times, the existence of such creatures, and other forms of devils, is largely refuted. Common sense dictates that these creatures cannot be ‘real’.10 Grixti argues that making the serial killer another fictional representation of evil places these killers in the same realm as other mythical evil creatures and are then equated with imaginary constructions. This brings the same reassuring frame and comfort that is habitually applied to other imaginings to the serial killer, despite its basis in fact.11 2.3

Focus on the ‘Criminal Mind’ Makes Bodies Invisible When consideration is given to exploring the serial killer beyond the shadowy and unknowable figure of myths, the exploration tends to focus on the deranged mind of the killer. Utilising theories of psychologists such as Freud (either in its appropriate complexity or in the manner of ‘poppsychology’) the focus of understanding the serial killer is not usually on

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______________________________________________________________ his/her actions or even on society, but predominately on the development of his or her mind. These explorations usually traverse past trauma in childhood and adolescence, and the ways in which this affected their mind.12 This trauma often takes the form of child abuse or some other social stigma. Both news reports on convicted serial killers and representations in entertainment films use this formula, not in order to make the serial killer’s action understandable but to explain how this individual is so different from ‘everyone else’. While the psychological state of the killer is obviously material in any discussion of the serial killer, the use of the mental development of the killer as the dominant focus makes invisible the pained mutilated bodies of victims and the role of society in the production of physical violence. If there is no meaningful motive, and the mind of the serial killer is unknowable, then fear is managed down to isolated random incidents. Consequently society can have no role in eliminating such random occurrences. Tithcotte goes further to argue that this distancing of the majority from serial killer actions is part of an embedded cultural denial of the society’s responsibility for the manufacturing of violence. 13 This means these dominant ways of constructing the serial killer conceal elements that potentially scare us, especially our own societal role in creating and managing serial killing. Yet despite this dominant way of managing fear of serial killers through restraint, mythicisation, and focus on the mind, audiences are still attracted to the wounded bodies of serial killer representations. Had Clifford Geertz been asked about this matter he may have said it is because every culture ‘loves its own form of violence’.14 Seltzer, furthermore, attributes this attraction to a ‘culture of the wound’. He defines this as a public fascination with torn and open bodies that often result in a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound.15 However this fascination gives way to a sociality of fear intensified by the media. David Altheide and Edward Ingebretsen, for example, argue in different ways that a permanent ‘script of fear’ permeates modern society.16 This encourages popular culture in general, and the entertainment media in particular, to embody fascination and fear when representing serial killers, which, as evil creatures (such as devils), are temptingly fascinating and fearful. The consequence of this undercurrent of fascination that still underpins societies’ restraints is that minority portrayals of serial killers sometimes emerge – and create reaction. These reactions can be both positive (in terms of positive critiques or increasing box office sales) and negative (such as abusively berating the director in person or print, or through increased requests for more stringent censorship). I argue Se7en is one of these minority representations. Se7en is one representation of a serial killer that does not comply with the dominant approach of the unknowable moral alien. Se7en is not the only minority representation. There are others, one of which is discussed in this book, the film Saw III (2006). I have chosen

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______________________________________________________________ Se7en for discussion because, in my mind, it vividly recasts the stabilised sign of the serial killer as morally alien. It is also indicative of broader trends in understanding what scares contemporary society. Let me start by describing two key signs that Se7en does not conform to the dominant representations of serial killers. Se7en is the story of two detectives, William Summerset (Morgan Freeman) and David Mills (Brad Pitt) following a serial killer, John Doe (Kevin Spacey), who is killing people in a manner that reflects one of the seven deadly sins. John Doe is not represented as a moral alien. One sign of this is that Summerset explicitly refutes that John Doe’s actions are incomprehensible. He states, ‘If he is Satan himself, that might live up to our expectations. But he’s not the Devil. He’s just a man’. The second is that once John Doe’s actions are given a biblical frame of reference by Summerset they have a logic and purpose. John Doe is very clear that he is teaching a moral lesson through graphic bodily wounding, pain, and death. He states, ‘There is a deadly sin on every corner, and we tolerate it, not any more, I’m setting an example’. He has been using pain to shock (and kill) his victims into ‘correcting’ their sins (or dying). For example, he slices the nose off a model, leaving her bleeding to death. He leaves her with a choice, sleeping pills (death) or a telephone glued to her hand, so she can call for help and live with her deformity. She chooses death and John Doe says she died of Pride. This moralistic story told through bodies mutilated, and subsequently displayed, is underpinned with a theme that invites the audience into participation with the moral ambiguities that John Doe raises. The film culminates with John Doe inciting Mills to turn into Wrath by decapitating his wife. Mills shoots John Doe as punishment for his sin of Envy. While some critics acclaimed the success of Se7en, others were more angrily vehement in their critique.17 For example, David Fincher was approached by a viewer who berated him, claiming that there was no reason to show the severed head of Mill’s wife. She went on to state that it was an unconscionable act and questioned how he was raised and the moral character of his parents. When Fincher replied he didn't know what she meant – the head is never seen – she answered that she had seen the movie, implying that she did see the head-in-the-box.18 What is interesting about seeing heads that are not there and then equating this with a moral lapse is, as I will argue in the next sections, more than a natural reaction to displaying the mutilated body. Being appalled by the sight of the wounded, pained, or dead body is not an innate response, as is sometimes argued in contemporary times.19 Other eras have been very explicit in their representation of pain, gore, wounds, and death. For example, speaking of his reaction to medieval crucifixion paintings, John Dury asserts that:

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______________________________________________________________ we, a ‘modern’ people, can only be distressed, even appalled by the central body…hanging from the cross: an atrocious form of public death by ignominious torture which any body can see only with feelings of horror. 20 Dury’s perspective suggests that the role of the body in medieval piety is profoundly alien to contemporary sensibilities. Despite this distanced feeling of alienation when presented with medieval artifacts, contemporary popular culture is littered with references to modern people ‘getting medieval’. So, before exploring the sensibilities that deliberately painted Christ's body wounded, punished, pained, and bleeding, I consider what we ‘modern people’ mean when we claim we are ‘getting medieval’. 3.

Getting Medieval ‘Getting medieval’ is a phrase attributed to Courtney Love, Pulp Fiction and Law and Order, as well as circulating now in many popular TV series, such as Bones. According to Carolyn Dinshaw, ‘medieval’ has come to mean ‘things that can’t be eradicated, despite efforts to construct something free of them’.21 Dinshaw goes on to say that people use ‘medieval’ to highlight the impurity of modern concepts. In this sense, it can be seen as similar to Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjectness.22 Abjection is when people respond in horror (or through bodily acts such as vomiting) at incidents that challenge the distinctions between stable categories, thereby challenging the nature of ‘meaning’ in those categories. Examples in modern times include: the open wound, blood, and excrement. This feeling of horror arises because something that was inside our bodies is now outside and we are forced to consider the fragmentation and fluidity of bodily boundaries. Se7en certainly provides a number of these types of images. For example, the entrails of the victim of Gluttony are seen in the autopsy room. It is this abjectness that starts to explain why people feel horror at the sight of Se7en. But horror and physical reaction, such as feeling sick, do not seem enough to explain the outrage and vehemence of some critics. I suggest that Se7en challenges more deeply than by simply revealing mutable bodies and that this challenge is what leads to the fear Se7en invokes. I claim this fear is related to the window Se7en provides on a habitus that had a very different view about the responsibilities of bodies and society in producing and mitigating violence and pain. In the medieval era the sight of entrails in a public execution scene (where bodies were real) did not make the accused unknowable. Furthermore, representations of Christ’s death were not designed to invoke the type of appalled horror at his execution that Dury describes. In both types of execution-narrative the body told a story supported by God and State power. Such execution narratives were not impenetrable acts committed by the psychologically deranged moral alien.

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______________________________________________________________ Therefore, by delving more deeply into what was commonplace, mundane, and sacred in the medieval period I argue that Se7en can be seen as so much more challenging to modern sensibilities than the abjectness of mutilated bodies. It is this ‘so much more’ that I think is important in understanding the fear and terror of Se7en. 4.

Re-Presentations of Embodied Medieval Pain Narratives To get medieval then, I cut-away to re-presentations of the wounded and pained body in the medieval era. In this era, I contend that the sight of the abject wounded body was not only commonplace, but that the dominant belief system required a mediation of this ‘palatable unbearable’. This communal mediation was a pedagogical technique that ordered and gave meaning to pained and bleeding bodies. This pedagogical technique contributes to the historical traces of fear and fascination at the sight of the wounded body in Se7en. To explore this argument further, I will outline some of these historical traces using an ideal type that Philip Mellor and Chris Shilling have entitled the Volatile (Catholic) Body. I will augment this ideal type by systematising the focus on bodies in pain, which I have entitled Valued Embodied Pain.23 Before describing Mellor and Shilling’s ideal type I must deal with a common objection to ideal type methodology. This objection is that ideal types suffer from generalisations and need ‘sound historical research’.24 This criticism may be valid if the purpose of using ideal types was to better understand medieval history. However, my purpose is to explore the constructed basis upon which contemporary people make judgements about serial killing and bodies-in-pain in Se7en. I have used an ideal type because it is an amalgamation of a number of factors made into a ‘type’. This type, if properly constructed, can expose temporally contingent social constructions of fear and horror around the pained and wounded body. I use an ideal type because, as Umberto Eco claims, when speaking of the Middle Ages, it is necessary to specify ‘which one’.25 Rather than chose a particular historical period, Mellor and Shilling’s ideal type looks for dominant themes or traces in the sacred and profane cosmologies of periods that are different from our own. An ideal type takes the complexity and contradictory elements of particular social, economic, environmental, physical, and political realities and accentuates specific self-sustaining aspects to focus analysis on those aspects. This simplifying process has been criticised as generalisation. However, Max Weber, a principal proponent of the methodology, claims that in simplifying the embeddedness of specific aspects in other complex phenomena, an ideal type facilitates comparison of those aspects. Weber acknowledges that in any given society dominant ideas are never coherent because ideas ‘exist in the minds of an indefinite and constantly changing mass of individuals and assumes in their minds the most

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______________________________________________________________ multifarious nuances of form and content, clarity and meaning’.26 Nevertheless the ideal type draws from this complexity to construct a less conflicted notion that makes explicit and transparent those aspects that are relevant to the analysis and those that have been 'framed out'.27 Consequently, what is framed in becomes a ‘one-sided accentuation’ that is not a description of reality, but merely a tool to create a necessary precision in comparing aspects across different phenomena.28 This makes explicit the value judgements used when selecting comparable phenomenon from the infinite variety of human society.29 Weber’s development of ideal type models was, in part, a method for making those judgements and selections transparent and explicit. The explicit judgments about responses to the body-in-pain framed in this chapter are figura and carnal knowing: pain as a valued and embodied pedagogical technique, and everyday community participation and responsibility. I do not claim to have constructed ‘the’ belief system of ‘the’ medieval period. I have merely arranged three ideas from a time that was dominated by a different belief system. These aspects would have been more or less dominant at various times and would have been acted upon more or less by different people. Furthermore, there will no doubt be some people today with an affinity with some or all of the aspects described below. Therefore I am not outlining a particular historical viewpoint, rather it is a collection of ideas that enable and frame particular responses to the body-inpain. And, subsequently, I show how these traces are manifest in the portrayal of the serial killer, John Doe, in Se7en. 5.

Medieval Habitus According to Mellor and Shilling, the medieval habitus was a place where violence was normative, if not common, and marks on the body as a result of violence or disease had a significant role in communication. The body could have this role in communicating because knowledge was acquired through figural and carnal knowing.30 Figural knowing is a term that denotes the need to simultaneously interpret objects and events as having an allegoric, symbolic, and literal meaning. Events and objects can also be marks of forewarning because they were God-given.31 This belief was grounded in the idea that God dwelled within this world and intervened to make His will clear. An example of the dual existence of literal and symbolic interpretations was the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ during the Mass. This was believed to be both a literal transformation of matter and a symbolic transformation of the believer. The importance accorded the body as communicator contrasts with the modern focus on speech and the mind. Consider, for example, how strange it feels to read the following judgement recorded against Gilbert de Middleton’s body in 1326:

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______________________________________________________________ because the heart and other entrails of Gilbert have furnished him with the presumptuousness to think out such horrible felonies… to be practiced against God and Holy Church and the King, his liege-lord, let his heart and entrails be [burned] together under the gallows.32 From the medieval perspective, Gilbert de Middleton’s heart and entrails were believed to be just as culpable for his actions as his mind and consequently needed painful punishment for evil doing. Hence this type of medieval ‘thinking body’ is contrasted with contemporary modes of being that prioritise the cognitive powers of the mind. Mellor and Shilling capture this difference in their term ‘carnal knowing’.33 Carnal knowing is made possible in this habitus because following the parameters of ritual structures and transpersonal meaning systems, people were believed to acquire knowledge through an open body with limited metaphorical barriers. In this medieval route to knowledge the body was the central organising principle. This was inherent within the medieval worldview because it was believed, as Cicero (a pagan figura incorporated into medieval thought) claimed, an act of thought required an ‘abode in as much as a material object without a locality is inconceivable’.34 Thought alone, without the agency of a body to live it, could not be a foundation of faith. The body had agency to live the faith and therefore minds, souls, and bodies were linked and inseparable. Consequently it was believed that ‘by action the body talks’.35 These types of beliefs encouraged an active agency of the body and thereby, by the sixteenth century, the body became a ‘principal means of expression’.36 Within this way of thinking the body could be used to tell right from wrong as the body in general, and each of the senses in particular, told specific stories about how to interpret God’s will. Taste, for example, was a critical sense during Mass where the body and blood of Christ was believed to be literally incorporated into the body of believers through taste and digestion. As Mellor and Shilling state, ‘eating God during the [medieval] Mass was an oral signifier of the Catholic emphasis on the transformation of the body through its incorporation of Christ’.37 Or, from another perspective, a sweet odor was believed to identify the pure while stench identified ‘great sinners’.38 In this habitus, bodies could be guides for interpreting the world, and worldly affairs of the community could be interpreted through the ‘sensory body’. For example, during one formation of the trial by ordeal the accused was required to grasp a red-hot iron. God was believed to write upon the body of the participants the rights and wrongs of the case and the community witnessed God’s communication and judgement through the pained body.39

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______________________________________________________________ In this way pain was a very public phenomenon. It was shared and it was part of the belief system that supported active participation in community life. This not only means that acts, such as participating in painful rituals, are communicative actions, but also that bodily images and bodily responses, understood from such things as hagiographical writings of saints, passion plays or paintings, were also aids to learning. Elaborating on the role of the body-in-pain as pedagogical technique, Enders claims medieval learning, and in particular memory, was embedded through the marking of violent painful suffering – a pedagogy of mnemonics that were literally and symbolically, that is figurally and carnally, etched on the body.40 Pain becomes a memory and mark of forewarning (figura). It records and re-lives the past, present, and future. Enders claims that the ‘mental rehearsals’ of violence and pain, as learned through repetitious exposure to real and imaged violence and pain in this world, physically mark the body so that the body reenacts incarnational (carnal) knowing in medieval courtrooms, classrooms, churches, and theatres.41 Cicero advocated this embodied approach to learning and reintegration, claiming that, ‘we ought, then, to set up images of a kind that can adhere longest to memory… images …that [are] doing something (agentes)’.42 I argue Cicero envisioned images that have agency. That is, medieval images (living and artistic) not only remembered acts like the Crucifixion, but transformed or gave agency to the audience through the memory of past pain and lived painful existence. I use the hyphenated term ‘re-membered’ to signify that in contemporary times the act of remembrance is a mental activity but, in the medieval era, it was also a reassembling of body parts of association.43 For example, most crucifixion paintings of the era included representation of the community witnessing/remembering Christ’s death. This community is often depicted as reaching toward Jesus, willing closer sensory contact with his broken and bleeding body as an act of devotion. While in contemporary thought this longing for contact through the sensory body with a bleeding and wounded body might be considered ‘excessive’, or a source of horror, within medieval thought this form of sensory contact was believed to be not only necessary but also the proper order of social relations between the community and God.44 This belief made this process more salvational than fearful. This shows that while the Protestant Reformation privatised religious reflection, the medieval habitus reinforced that faith was a lived communal activity and participation in ritual acts of sacraments and penitence was required for salvation. Medieval rituals and executions were communal events in which the bodies of penitents, both of the condemned and of the spectators, were required to participate. In this way, pain served a dual purpose. First, the State inflicted pain in God’s name, and this has been interpreted as a deterrent. To modern

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______________________________________________________________ sensibilities, the use of pain as a deterrent is easy enough to comprehend. For example, in 1497 Richard Grafton stated the body could and should be used as a ‘document for hereafter to beware’.45 The second purpose was pain as merciful cure. The idea that pain could be a re-integrative cure for evil is more alien to contemporary sensibilities. As Wolfgang Katzheimer (14781508) chiselled into one of his medieval woodcuts ‘if you bear pain patiently it shall be useful to you, [and] therefore give yourself to it willingly’.46 Pain from this perspective was viewed as a cure for evil and ‘the penitent who flailed his skin…to the point of intense pain, removed…shame and humiliation’ that came from evil doing.47 This reintegrated the suffering body into the community and thus was experienced as a reduction from the isolation of sin, reducing fear. Pain had a dual function and was simultaneously a deterrent and cure for evil. For the most extreme evildoers, painful death was the ultimate cure because it ended evil doing in a way that purified the body for renewal in the afterlife. Therefore the beheaded traitor, whose body was drawn and quartered and left to decay in different public and spatially significant locations, was sending more than a message of deterrence from the State. The severed and decaying body parts were read as a sign of the finality of the condemned man’s death and the presence of his soul in Hell. It reinforced the role pain had in ending evil, because the location of the soul in Hell confirmed the evil acts of the living. The finality of the death and rightful punishment also reaffirmed the safety of society and the proper order of things. Consequently bodies in this habitus were read literally and symbolically for both profane and sacred meaning. In this way executions ‘became a performance’.48 This aesthetic developed over time so that by the late medieval period England had entered an age of spectacular justice for the elite.49 As Hanawalt notes, while homicide was relatively common, conviction or even condemnation for murder at the State level was rare.50 For traitors to the King, however, a ‘painful justice and judicial cruelty were in full bloom’.51 It was also in the condemned person’s interest to confess in order to make peace with God and the community. A person’s confession and penance on the scaffold ensured a good death through the grace of God. This was called ‘the art of dying well’ (ars moriendi). At the same time, dying well also legitimised the execution process in ending evil. While a refusal to confess on the scaffold created uncertainty and contradiction within the habitus, in the main, a painful dying well could be seen as both valuable and merciful.52 Reinforcing this perspective, by as early as the 12th century, significance was placed on Christ’s human body and mediation focused on his painful passion, blood, wounds, and love. As John Lydgate encouraged in the 15th century, ‘Ye shall also most louyngly remember/Uppon hys most peynfull passyoun’.53 Bodies-in-pain had the potential to make visible Godly

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______________________________________________________________ knowledge in all active (and responsive) community participants. This habitus therefore encouraged the detailed representation of blood, flesh, and spiritual anguish both in art and in life. As Merback notes, ‘pain, though ugly to behold…revealed the inner beauty of the soul that had made peace with God’.54 Dury is appalled at this representation. However, within this habitus, the appalling act is to not acknowledge the pain and suffering of Christ as a figura and the community’s role in that suffering. As a result, the medieval habitus gave an increasing visible presence to death and its corollary, pain, and signs of this began to pervade medieval Chronicles and devotional works. This increased visibility intertwined religious art and execution narratives as well as other religious pedagogical techniques and rituals, such as morality plays and the carnival. In effect, execution narrative feedback loops stimulated carnal memory, association, and emphatic mediation on the blood, torment, and painful body of Christ and the condemned’s performance on the scaffold. This in turn guided the embodied worshipper, condemned sinner, and spectator (the community) ‘towards enlightenment and hope’ through rituals of imitation (imitatio) and the art of dying well.55 Consequently the temporal flow of the Volatile Body ideal type body is grounded in bodily experiences of living, seeing, and imagining competing narratives of painful justice (deterrent and cure) framed in a practice of mediating on and imitating Christ’s pain and death. Within daily life people fulfilled the religious obligation to value and suffer in pain and, by cultivating an attitude of humility and gratitude, created meaning in, not fear or horror at, the sight of pain.56 Therefore, collectively, bodily pain as deterrent, cure, and mediation meant it was a pedagogical technique to reinforce integration within the community and reinforce the community’s role in the creation and mitigation of the social production of sin, violence, and death. In this way it mitigated fear of the wounded body. This description of Mellor and Shilling’s ideal type and my focus on bodies-in-pain is not meant to describe in its entirety the medieval belief system. Nor is it meant to describe how Catholics today do, or do not, view the body and pain. Rather by emphasising these aspects from past belief systems I make visible different ways of thinking about how to use the bodyin-pain to communicate. My claim is that these aspects of the medieval habitus permeate the explanatory frame of Se7en. This makes John Doe’s actions strangely knowable and fascinating. It also makes us confront worldviews not often screened and which can therefore be fearful and unsettling. Obviously the context in which audiences interpret Se7en is completely different to those watching a medieval execution or crucifixion painting. However as Bergesen reminds us, constructed objects, especially cultural objects like film and art, assert messages independently of the context in which they are being interpreted.57 It is these independent

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______________________________________________________________ assertions that I am exploring in this paper. I claim the reoccurrence of these traces of medieval views regarding the role of the body in communicating painful meaning bring into relief the ways in which Se7en challenges the current acceptable way of managing the fear of serial killers in film. Applicability to the Film Se7en I contend that these elements of Volatile Bodies and Valued Embodied Pain are what scares and terrifies contemporary audiences. Although these were mundane and sacred messages and communication forms in the medieval era, contemporary audiences rarely confront this way of communicating and this is especially so within the serial killer genre. While some elements of the dominant serial killer representations are found in Se7en, below I discuss to what extent it mirrors values about the body-inpain contained in the Volatile ideal type. In particular, I examine where Se7en deviates from the frame of reference of dominant portrayals. I assert that those people who responded to Se7en with fear, and those whose outrage was grounded in terror, were reacting to the challenges Se7en makes to this dominant representation. To demonstrate this I begin by showing how Se7en adapts, but maintains, traces of the Volatile ideal type to communicate its messages. The figural scene is set in Se7en when Summerset, the lead detective in this serial killer case, notes that the deliberate and patient murder of an obese man is a beginning (by implication a figura). Figural knowing takes a frame of reference that interprets all acts as having literal, symbolic and allegorical meaning as well as being marks of forewarning. Taking this frame of reference Summerset sees the murder as a forewarning, not merely of the literal murders to come, and searches for a symbolic and allegorical message. To reveal this figural message, Summerset uses carnal knowing to realise that ‘the act itself has meaning’. That is, he sees the body as a source of knowledge and consequently views the whole story of literal, symbolic, and allegoric bodily and other signs at the crime scene, not just the murder. For example, in the first murder he notes the manner of death (over-eating) and its relationship with the state of the victim (his obesity), the placement of the body and other symbols, such as artwork, as well as the disturbed furniture at the crime scene. This leads him to realise John Doe is preaching a sermon cut into the bodies of victims. This may invoke horror in contemporary sensibilities, but in Se7en pained and torn bodies are used as valuable pedagogical techniques. I continue by examining John Doe’s literal punishments/messages before proceeding to the symbolic and allegorical techniques of communication. I separate these two not because they are clear cut categories 6.

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______________________________________________________________ in Se7en, but merely to organise the discussion. I primarily focus on one deadly sin, Sloth, to allow a fuller discussion. John Doe’s literal victim of Sloth, (Victor), is tied to a bed for one year in order to perform this sin through motionlessness, or idleness. John Doe uses carnal knowing by inflicting bodily suffering related to the sin onto the sinner. This is similar to medieval executioners. For example, the State demanded David of Wales die four times, for his four crimes, and this was done in full view of the public who have their bodies marked in the process of the execution.58 In Se7en, John Doe induces a SWAT team and detectives to enter Victor’s apartment, because they expect to find the serial killer. The SWAT team identify that Victor is in bed and pull back his bedcovers believing him to be idle. Instead, their bodies are marked with the living sight of an immobile Sloth, a message cut into their consciousness through a pained body that is a graphic depiction of suffering. In this way John Doe is using the body-in-pain as a pedagogical technique that communicates not just to the victim, but with those that see the victim. By cutting this message into bodies of victims and spectators he enacts the belief that humans cannot change until understanding and bodies are changed. As Tertullian notes, the ‘figura of bodily healing told of a spiritual healing according to the rule by which carnal things come first, as a figuram of spiritual things’.59 John Doe’s forewarnings are a literal inscription on bodies that will adhere to memory that, as Cicero indicated, was important to learning. By using pain and death as a pedagogical technique, John Doe gives pain a value as deterrent and cure for the sinner/victim. This role as both deterrent and cure is materialised in Se7en when one of the SWAT team members tells Victor he deserves his punishment. The SWAT team member gives this message to a supposed corpse, but when the corpse responds, the SWAT team realise he is still alive – living in tormented agony as Sloth. In this sense, like medieval mass, John Doe is not just commemorating the victim’s past, but rather he re-performs it through the body and the bodies of spectators (including the film's viewers). In this way medieval executions and Se7en involve the whole community in knowing the crime through the treatment of the body. The reason that the SWAT team think Victor deserves his punishment is because he was not idle prior to this ‘forced contrition’, as Summerset describes the murders. Victor was a violent child rapist and criminal, and his actions are reminiscent of the meanings of Sloth beyond idleness. Sloth is derived from the Latin acedia meaning ‘without care’. Chaucer advised that Sloth was the enemy of all good works, in part because is allows people like Victor (without care) to commit horrific acts.60 By ending evil through pain, John Doe performs a merciful service to the community and victim, just as medieval Kings did in ending treachery. In this

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______________________________________________________________ case, the SWAT team agree with the concept of the service, if not the service itself. Moreover, John Doe’s sermon is about more than Victor’s literal sin. There is another branch of Sloth, which is the apathy to which Se7en is an allegorical treatise. As Stanford Lyman notes, ‘emotionally and cognitively, the evil of Sloth finds [its] expression in a lack of feeling for the world, for the people in it, or for the self’.61 This results not only in the ability to do evil (such as with Victor), but also to allow evil acts to happen. This apathy, or lack of social intervention, is what allows John Doe (and other criminals) to both perform and get away with crimes/sins. Summerset specifically notes at one point that ‘apathy is a solution’ because it is easier than taking the ‘right actions’. John Doe’s carnal message is aimed at curing this science of minding your own business. In this worldview, this can only be accomplished through carnal knowing that incites bodily connection and empathy. Thereby John Doe’s carnal sermon, and the movie Se7en, is a message about the pervasiveness of isolation and separation in society that overlooks and hides mutilated bodies, and therefore, John Doe and the film Se7en utilise the medieval lens of figural and carnal knowing. John Doe’s acts are pedagogical techniques that encompass inquisitorial methods, execution narratives/sermons, and the trial by ordeal that marks the body in a ritualised performance. The cumulative effect is to show us that our present civilised arrangement of distanced and isolated bodies is not a cure for serial killing (among other things). Rather, current arrangements will perpetuate isolated individuals and allow violent crime to occur because we never confront society’s role in the perpetuation of that violence. Unlike medieval integration rituals this does not manage fear in contemporary society but, I claim, creates it. John Doe goes further. He predicts that the consequence of this apathy for contemporary society is not only needless sin, but also that evil acts such as serial killings occur undetected and unchallenged (at an individual level). By involving the whole community in his moral lesson on the consequences of Sloth, he is not just using pain to end the evil of the victim, but to deter and cure the audience of their apathy against doing the right thing. This would involve active participation in society and interest in the affairs of others. It would also involve acknowledging how dependent John Doe was on others ignoring him and even assisting him to succeed. For example, John Doe buys a custom-made serrated knife-like dildo to use in the murder of a prostitute. The person who manufactured it never asks what it might be used for. John Doe makes a direct challenge to the isolation of individuals and the distancing of bodies-in-pain from all except those who treat bodies in hospitals. This not only contravenes the expectation of the serial killer genre, but also the assumption that society’s distanced ‘civilisation’ is its superior characteristic. In this way Se7en’s challenge is

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______________________________________________________________ more complex than Kristeva’s horror that stems from an abjectness that breaks down stable bodily categories. Se7en’s challenge is to the categorisation of modern society as being superior to its antecedents who gave a more prominent place to the body, pain, and death. Se7en manages and contains the fear it creates by killing the serial killer (ending his threat) and by safeguarding the community in the form of Summerset’s arousal from apathy to ‘be around’ to save us from more serial killers, (that is, if we listen to his counsel, unlike his former partner Mills). However, even this containment technique of Summerset’s arousal raises anxiety in its audience. John Doe might be dead, but his message is still cut into the memory in the audience – will they easily forget the role they play in allowing the world to be what it is? Perhaps this is why they see heads that are not there. Added to this, Summerset has chosen the harder path – that of continuing to face the violence of society and fight it. This raises questions as to which role the audience will chose to play in society when it leaves the theatre. Summerset has been on a transformative journey and has learnt something in the process – he chooses the harder moral path, a path that requires active agency. What about the audience? Implicating the community/audience in the current state of society’s crime and fear is, I claim, much more likely than abject bodies to be at the heart of outrage at Se7en’s representations. This film challenges the superiority of contemporary values that isolate the individual but make it easier to exist insofar as we are never confronted with the responsibility for the construction of society. Therefore, the role collectively achieved by John Doe and Summerset (in making this worldview clear) is to draw the community (audience and characters) into a deeper appreciation of the role of the community in the violence that John Doe perpetuates. Consequently the habitus of the Volatile body views the pain and death of each sinner as a painful reminder of each participant’s place in the ritual transformation of curing people and society of their tolerance for social violence. Clearly some audiences did not want to confront that message. In sum, whether or not this film is interpreted in such an explicitly medieval way, and whether or not John Doe can be called religious, the morality of Se7en's serial killer is clear, and it is a morality that implicates its audience. Unlike dominant representations of serial killers, John Doe is not isolated from Western morality systems and human understanding; he is not a moral alien. Indeed, Summerset accredits him with a deep understanding of contemporary social problems. This meaning and morality is apprehended through an interaction with the close-contact senses of the body (both John Doe’s and others) in which pain has a valued role as cure, deterrent, and punishment. It is an allegory that exposes societal apathy and lack of social responsibility/intervention. While John Doe’s solution may be too ‘extreme’, as his lawyer puts it, the historical basis of his logic is irrefutable. By forcing

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______________________________________________________________ the audience to confront messages of their own complicity in the violence of society, Se7en does not contain or manage the audience’s fear of serial killers. Instead it is a medieval forewarning of society's role in the production of violence and pain. In opposition to the distancing and isolating effects of dominant serial killer portrayals, Se7en demands consideration of the victims’ bodies, the audience, and society. These are images that do not usually confront audiences of this genre, and its figural implication is not only about the watching of movie murder, but also of the wider social and community production of other forms of violence. If more representations, in fiction and non-fiction, were seeking to explore and understand the serial killer, rather than to contain him or her in stories of alien monstrosity, then we would have a pathway for making visible the open body. This would also open examination of the serial killer’s manipulation of the body-in-pain to create or manage fear (or the State’s manipulation for that matter). When the dominant accounts of serial killers close the body to scrutiny as part of Elias’ civilising processes of restraint, they isolate the individual and we lose the opportunity to acknowledge our ability to change the social production of our world, or at least the way we have transformed it through narrative representations. Se7en challenges these dominant portrayals and it is this challenge that leaves its impression on the audience. 7.

Conclusion: Consequences for Fear, Horror and Terror Describing Fincher’s film as ‘getting medieval’ highlights its rejection of modern societal norms of restraint and clean bodies. In this sense Fincher’s film is medieval in a way that has no concern for historicity. This means Fincher’s film probably inspires horror because of its abject display of bodies, blood, and entrails. Contemporary sensibilities that feel unease at seeing the breakdown of bodily categories is a modern construction that tries to solidify the concept of the body into a stable category, thereby managing a certain type of horror. But, I argue Se7en is fearful because it challenges the assumption of superiority attached to the distancing and isolating of bodies and society. Resurrecting a medieval lens of figura, carnal knowing, and pain as pedagogical techniques highlights what contemporary society is loosing as it isolates bodies and people. Images of bodily pain, as Cicero predicted, adhere most to memory, and Fincher sees an enactment of this when people remember the head that is not there. Se7en’s communication techniques adhere to memory. This fascinates some audiences because it is a rare glimpse that encourages mediation on open, pained bodies, both those of the serial killer and the victims. These lasting memories do not sit comfortably with dominant fear management techniques. Se7en contextualizes those pained and wounded bodies within the complicity of the community – a contemporary community

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______________________________________________________________ that does not usually see bodies or its role in the body’s social production. As Fincher acknowledges, this forces you to confront how serial killers are made and exist. I argue Se7en’s figural lens also implies we should end isolation from our own culpability in societal violent bodily pain. In many other movies isolation manages the fear of serial killers, but in Se7en you are forced to confront it through carnal knowing. This is a terrifying revelation.

Notes 1

See N Elias, The Symbol Theory, Sage Publications Ltd, London, 1991. J Ferrell & C Sanders, Cultural Criminology, Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1995, p. 75. 3 A Newitz, ‘Serial Killers, True Crime, and Economic Performance Anxiety’ in Cine-Action, vol. 38, 1995, pp. 38-46. 4 G Marshall (ed), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Sociology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998, p. 268. 5 See A Lowenstein, Shocking Representations: Historical Trauma, National Cinema and the Modern Horror Film, Columbia University Press, New York, 2005, or D. Franklin, Politics and Film: The Political Culture of Film in the United States, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc, Oxford, 2006. 6 See J Grixti, 'Consuming Cannibals: Psychopathic Killers as Archetypes and Cultural Icons', Journal of American Culture, vol. 18:1, 1995, p. 90, or R Tithecott, Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1997, p. 7. 7 Grixti, op. cit., p. 90. 8 R Tithecott, op. cit., p. 28. 9 S Epstein, Characters Amok: The Representation of Serial Killers in American Film, Unpublished Dissertation, University of Connecticut, 1994, p. 245. 10 D Oldridge, ‘“Dead Man Walking”: The Historical Context of Vampire Beliefs’, in Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, P Day (ed), Rodopi, New York, 2006, p. 81ff. 11 Grixti, op. cit., p. 90. 12 For example, see Waltje’s comparison of two films, Peeping Tom and Psycho, in J Waltj, Blood Obsession: Vampires, Serial Murder and the Popular Imagination, Peter Lang Publishing, New York, 2005, p. 113-4. 13 Tithecott, op. cit., p. 5. 14 C Geertz quoted in A Kuper, Culture: The Anthropologist’s Account, Harvard University Press, Harvard, 2000, p. 109. 15 M Setlzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture, Routledge, New York, 1978, p. 1. 2

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D Altheide, Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis, Aldine De Gruyter, New York, 2002, and E Ingebretsen, Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King, M.E. Sharpe, New York, 1996. 17 P Simpson, Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer through Contemporary America Film and Fiction, Southern Illinois University Press, Edwardsville, 2000, p. 194. 18 D Fincher (dir), Se7en, New Line Productions, United States, 1995. 19 K Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination, Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, 1998, p. 6. 20 J Dury, Painting the Word: Christian Pictures and their Meanings, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1990, p. ix. 21 C Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern, Duke University Press, Durham, 1999, p. 37. 22 ibid. 23 P Mellor & C Shilling, Re-Forming the Body: Religion, Community and Modernity, Sage Publications, London, 1997, p. 1ff. 24 R Griffith, ‘Re-Forming the Body – Book Review’, Sociology of Religion, Summer 1999, p. 201. 25 U Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, W Weaver (trans), Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, San Diego, 1986, p. 19. 26 M Weber, 'Objectivity in Social Sciences and Social Policy', in Max Weber: The Methodology of the Social Sciences, E Shils (trans), H Finch (ed), The Free Press, New York, [1905] 1949, p. 96. 27 K Morrison, Marx, Durkheim, Weber: Formations of Modern Social Thought, Sage Publications, London, 1995, p. 271-3. 28 Weber, op. cit. p. 90. 29 ibid., p. 96. 30 Mellor and Shilling, op. cit., p. 48. 31 Auerbach uses the Latin term that amalgamates allegorical, symbolic, literal, and marks of forewarning, to distinguish it from the contemporary English meaning that separates literal and figurative. E Auerbach, ‘Figura’, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, R Manheim (trans), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, [1959] 1984, p. 54. 32 Jean le Bon Chronicle quoted in D Westerhof, 'Deconstructing Identities on the Scaffold: The Execution of Hugh Despenser the Younger, 1326', Journal of Medieval History, vol. 33, 2007, p. 105. 33 Mellor and Shilling, op. cit., p. 48. 34 Cicero, quoted in J Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory and Violence, Cornell University Press, London, 1999, p. 67.

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Cicero in Enders, op. cit., p. 19. Enders, op. cit., p. 19. 37 Mellor and Shilling, op. cit., p. 79. 38 ibid. 39 ibid., p. 75. 40 Enders, op. cit., p. 66. 41 ibid. 42 ibid., p. 67. 43 ibid., p. 60-70. 44 R Mills, Visions of Excess: Pain, Pleasure and the Penal Image in Late Medieval Art and Culture, Unpublished PhD dissertation, Cambridge University, 2000, p. 1-12. 45 K Royer, Rhetoric, Ritual and Redemption: Narratives of Execution in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, Unpublished PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 2001, p. 21. 46 M Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, Reaktion Books, London, 1999, p. 155. 47 A Glucklich, Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001, p. 178. 48 Royer, op. cit., p. 25. 49 ibid., p. 28. 50 B Hanawalt, ‘Violent Death in Fourteen and Early Fifteenth-Century England’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 18(3), 1976, p. 315. 51 J Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, F Hopman (trans), Arnold & Co, London, [1924] 1996, or Royer, op. cit., p. 20. 52 See for example, P Smith, ‘Narrating the Guillotine: Punishment Technology as Myth and Symbol’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 20(5), 1996, pp. 27-49. 53 Quoted in Enders, op. cit., p. 66. 54 Merbeck, op. cit., p. 20. 55 A Hayum, The Isenheim Altarpiece: God’s Medicine and the Painter’s Vision, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1989, p. 149. 56 Merbeck, op. cit., p. 157. 57 A Bergesen, The Depth of Shallow Culture: The High Art of Shoes, Movies, Novels, Monsters and Toys, Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, 2006, p. 210. 58 H Maxwell, The Chronicle of Lanercost, 1272 -1346, H. Maxwell (trans), James Maclehose and Sons, Glasgow, 1913, p. 35. 36

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Auerbach, op. cit. p. 33. S Lyman, The Seven Deadly Sins: Society and Evil Revised and Expanded, Roman and Littlefield, New York, 1989, p. 5. 61 ibid. 60

Bibliography Altheide, D., Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis. Aldine De Gruyter, New York, 2002. Auerbach, E., ‘Figura’, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. R. Manheim (trans), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, [1959] 1984. Bergesen, A., The Depth of Shallow Culture: The High Art of Shoes, Movies, Novels, Monsters and Toys. Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, 2006. Bourdieu, P., Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. R. Nice (trans), Routledge, London, 1984. Dinshaw, C., Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. Duke University Press, Durham, 1999. Dury, J., Painting the Word: Christian Pictures and their Meanings. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1990. Eco, U., Travels in Hyperreality: Essays. W. Weaver (trans), Harcourt Brace Joanovich, San Diego, 1986. Elias, N., The Symbol Theory. Sage Publications Ltd, London, 1991. Enders, J., The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory and Violence. Cornell University Press, London, 1999. Epstein S., Characters Amok: The Representation of Serial Killers in American Film. Unpublished Dissertation, University of Connecticut, 1994. Fincher, D. (dir), Se7en. New Line Productions, United Sates, 1995. _______

, Politics and Film: The Political Culture of Film in the United States. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc, Oxford, 2006.

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______________________________________________________________ Geertz, C., The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. Fontana, London, 1993. Glucklich, A., Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001. Griffith, R., ‘Re-Forming the Body – Book Review’. Sociology of Religion, Summer, 1999, p. 201. Grixti, J., 'Consuming Cannibals: Psychopathic Killers as Archetypes and Culutral Icons'. Journal of American Culture, vol. 18:1, 1995, pp. 87-96. Halttunen, K., Murder Most Foul: the Killer and the American Gothic Imagination. Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, 1998. Hanawalt, B., ‘Violent Death in Fourteen and Early Fifteenth-Century England’. Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 18(3), 1976, pp. 297-320. Hayum, A., The Isenheim Altarpiece: God’s Medicine and the Painter’s Vision. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1989. Huizinga, J., The Waning of the Middle Ages. F. Hopman (trans), Arnold & Co, London, 1924. Ingebretsen, E., Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King. M. E. Sharpe, New York, 1996. Kristeva, J., Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection. L. Roudiez (trans), Columbia University Press, New York, 1982. Lowenstein, A., Shocking Representations: Historical Trauma, National Cinema and the Modern Horror Film. Columbia University Press, New York, 2005. Lyman, S., The Seven Deadly Sins: Society and Evil Revised and Expanded. Roman and Littlefield, New York, 1989. Maxwell, H., The Chronicle of Lanercost, 1272 -1346. H. Maxwell (trans), James Maclehose and Sons, Glasgow, 1913.

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______________________________________________________________ Marshall, G. (ed), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994. Mellor, P. & C. Shilling, Re-Forming the Body: Religion, Community and Modernity. Sage Publications, London, 1997. Merback, M., The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Reaktion Books, London, 1999. Mills, R., Visions of Excess: Pain, Pleasure and the Penal Image in Late Medieval Art and Culture. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Cambridge University, 2000. Morrison, K., Marx, Durkheim, Weber: Formations of Modern Social Thought. Sage Publications, London, 1995. Newitz, A., ‘Serial Killers, True Crime and Economic Performance Anxiety’, in Cine-Action, vol. 38, 1995, pp. 38-46. Oldridge, D., ‘‘Dead Man Walking’: The Historical Context of Vampire Beliefs’, in Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil. P. Day (ed), Rodopi, New York, 2006. Royer, K,. Rhetoric, Ritual and Redemption: Narratives of Execution in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Stanford University, 2001. Scarry, E., The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York, Oxford University Press, 1985. Setlzer, M., Serial Killers: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture. Routledge, New York, 1998. Simpson, P., Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer through Contemporary America Film and Fiction. Southern Illinois University Press, Edwardsville, 2000. Smith, P., ‘Narrating the Guillotine: Punishment Technology as Myth and Symbol’. Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 20(5), 1996, pp. 27-49.

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______________________________________________________________ _______

, ‘Executing Executions: Aesthetics, Identity and the Problematic Narratives of Capital Punishment Ritual’. Theory and Society, vol. 25(2), 2003, pp. 235-261. Tithecott, R., Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1997. Weber, M., 'Objectivity in Social Sciences and Social Policy', in Max Weber: the Methodology of the Social Sciences. E . Shils (trans), H. Finch, (ed), The Free Press, New York, [1905] 1949. Westerhof, D., 'Deconstructing Identities on the Scaffold: The Execution of Hugh Despenser the Younger, 1326'. Journal of Medieval History, 33, 2007, pp. 87-106. Shona Hill has recently submitted her PhD and is currently a tutor in Religious Studies and contract researcher for the School of Government. Previously she has tutored in Media Studies and Sociology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

PART II Fear, Horror and Politics

Clash of Nihilisms Ali Riza Taskale Abstract In this article, I discuss a contemporary problem, the ‘antagonism’ between the war against terror and terror, as a disjunctive synthesis between passive nihilism and radical nihilism. In so doing, I turn to contemporary society and ask how nihilism operates in it. I deal with this in three steps: first, by discussing nihilism in relation to today’s dominant form of politics, postpolitics, and, finally, by focusing on the disjunctive synthesis between postpolitics and contemporary terrorism. Finally, I contend that, for all its violence, the antagonism between terror and post-politics is a false one; what is suspended here is the real antagonism between nihilist and anti-nihilist politics, between the nihilism of sovereign exception, of biopolitics, and life. This antagonism cannot be politicised by post-politics precisely because postpolitics is itself grounded in the de-politicisation of this antagonism. Key Words: Disjunctive synthesis, nihilism, post-politics, terror, War on Terror. ***** In the primordial scene, which René Girard1 has described better than others, society is constituted on the basis of the lynching mob, whose mimetic desire, whose envy and egoism, culminates in sacrificing the scapegoat. With terror, though, we confront the opposite situation, in which the mimetic desire does not establish but rather destroys society. Here everybody, and not only the scapegoat, is threatened with destruction. Significantly in this respect, contemporary society systematically produces ‘losers’ while, at the same time, depicting this condition as a fate, as one’s own fault. But what if the loser does not accept his condition as fate, radicalising his resentment into spiteful acts? Such a ‘radical loser’ is unable to create a way out of the dilemma, the impossible space in-between resigning to his fate – ‘it is my fault’ – and holding others responsible for his lack of power: ‘the only way out of the dilemma is to fuse destruction and self-destruction, aggression and auto-aggression’.2 The point at which selfdestruction and destruction merge is also a point at which the radical loser comes as close as possible to the feeling of power, both over himself and others. As I argue in the following, however, the radical nihilism of spiteful actions is intertwined with the passive nihilism of the contemporary postpolitical society. When antagonism is foreclosed in the politics of consensus, terror often becomes the only ‘political’ (re)action which, as a form of

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______________________________________________________________ symbolic exchange, uncannily combines political impotence and enjoyment in passivity, two experiences that are closely related to the increasing transformation of politics into post-politics and biopolitics, and of the ‘social’ into simulacra, into a ‘society of spectacle’. Following this, the article claims that the disjunctive synthesis3 between passive and radical nihilism repeats itself today at an international scale as an antagonism between capitalism/post-politics and terrorism. In this respect, the article takes a politicising stance against the moralization of politics since 9/11 through a discussion of terrorism, old and new, relating this discussion to the politics of security/fear. The main argument here is that there is a mimetic relationship between terror and the war against terror, and that the link between them is that of a disjunctive synthesis between radical and passive nihilisms. In the face of this twinning between enemies (despite the absence of immediate resemblance), this self-contradictory, non-resolving duality, the real threat is Janus-faced: terrorism and the politics of security, which is, by reducing all politics to a matter of security, fast becoming a new religion in the emerging control society. 1.

Genealogy of Nihilism It is no wonder that in a society that constantly produces ‘losers’ some of them do not accept their fate and, dreaming of revenge, radicalise to the point of acting spitefully. A ‘radical loser’4 can imagine only one solution to his problems: ‘a worsening of the evil conditions under which he suffers’.5 If cruelty consists of inflicting pain on the other, ascetism is the voluntary infliction of harm or cruelty against oneself. ‘One thing is certain from now on, I have no doubt – that is, the kind of pleasure of the selfless, the selfdenying, the self-sacrificing man feels from the outset: this pleasure belongs to cruelty’.6 That is, the radical loser seeks equality in destruction of others together with himself, but this demand for justice emerges as a demand for the curtailment of the other’s enjoyment, while ‘the necessary outcome of this demand, of course, is asceticism: since it is not possible to impose equal jouissance, what one CAN impose is only the equally shared PROHIBITION’.7 Therefore, the radical loser is no egoist. As the nameless antihero of Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1864) insists, ‘man can, consciously, act against his own interests’.8 Crucially, however, the Underground Man is ‘disinterested’ in so far as we refer to values held in common. He renounces all values in the name of a higher, supreme value, which this world cannot accommodate, and which forces him into the labyrinth of spite: it seems there must really exist something that is dearer to almost every man than his greatest advantages, or (to be illogical) there is a most advantageous advantage…for the

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______________________________________________________________ sake of which a man if necessary is ready to act in opposition to all laws; that is, in opposition to reason, honour, peace, prosperity – in fact, in opposition to all those excellent and useful things if only he can attain that fundamental, most advantageous advantage…9 In this sense, the radical loser does not have a passive feeling but an active will invested in this world.10 Concomitantly, pain and suffering are necessary to the ‘spiteful actor’11 in order to construct his subjectivity. This paradoxical subject is Nietzsche’s radical (or ‘suicidal’) nihilist, who emerges with the death God: the ascetic who can no longer mediate between this and the other, transcendent, ‘true’ world, that is, realizes that his ‘supreme values’ are not realizable in this world. The raw material of such nihilism is, in a nutshell, despair: ‘a nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be’.12 If the supreme values cannot find a place in this world one can just as well destroy it. Thus, spite denies political authority and wills the total collapse of the socio-symbolic order.13 When society is devalued as imperfect and inadequate, it can also be sacrificed in the name of Truth, by acting-out spite as a ‘passion for the Real’ that transcends the symbolic order.14 The paradoxical outcome of which is a fanatic profanation, an iconoclastic destruction, of the existing world.15 As such, the actual (city, society) is no longer seen as a precondition for the virtual (or the transcendent) but is destroyed in its name. Insofar as spite is a form of nihilism (‘radical nihilism’), the situation of having values without a world, it has a shared genealogy with other forms of nihilism. Thus, Nietzsche’s full definition of a nihilist reads: ‘A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist’.16 If supreme values are themselves devalued while, at the same time, this world is preserved, we encounter the situation described by the second part of the definition: passive nihilism, or, a ‘world without values’.17 It should be noted in this context that, in its origin, that is, before it appears as radical or passive nihilism, nihilism is a feeling of powerlessness, an inability to accept this world as it is.18 Starting with monotheistic religions, this ‘religious nihilism’ has created illusions to be able to deny the existing world by juxtaposing it to a transcendent one and tried to justify these illusions as reason, truth, supreme values, and so on. Nihilism emerged as a ‘philosophy of illusion’.19 Radical and passive nihilisms are what follow when the illusion fades away – when God dies. Passive nihilism emerges when the man of ressentiment turns against God – kills him – and places himself in his place. He no longer believes in values that belong to a supra-sensual world that are superior to life. But this life, significantly, remains a reactive life devoid of will.

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______________________________________________________________ Whereas the radical nihilist suffers because of his will, the passive nihilist avoids suffering through a narcotisation of the will. However, since suffering is a part of life, denying suffering amounts to denying life, which is why the ‘life’ of the passive nihilist is a reactionary life. ‘We know what the result of this is – the last man, the one who prefers a nothingness of will, who prefers to fade away passively, rather than a will to nothingness’.20 Nietzsche21 refers to passive nihilism as a ‘normal condition’, implying that the experience of the loss of truth, value, and meaning no longer generates a crisis but is now accepted as a matter of fact. That is, passive nihilism emerges, as the becoming rule of exception, or, as the ‘banalisation of nihilism’.22 One no longer tries to find a telos in the world and concludes that such an attempt is the cause, rather than merely a consequence, of disappointment, of meaninglessness. In this sense the culture of (normalized/banal) nihilism takes the form of a disbelief in any metaphysical world. Consequently, the mediation between the actual and the virtual is broken again, but this time in favour of the ‘actual’: hence the world of passive nihilism is a ‘world without values’. This normalization, however, is inherent in the ascetic principle in that in surplus-enjoyment the dialectic of the norm (the law) and exception (perversion/transgression) is dissolved. In a sense, therefore, what we have here is a process paradoxically initiated by the originary (religious) nihilism. What, in other words, defeated the God of the Christian ascetic was ultimately his own higher values, his own morality, and especially his emphasis on truth.23 Even though the ascetic ideal has been unsuccessful in finding the transcendent truth, it has, by giving form to an unconditional will to truth, ‘eventually led its advocates to discredit the ideas of God and another, metaphysical world’.24 Paradoxically, the logical consequence of the will to truth has become the repudiation of the Real/Truth. Therefore, as Alenka Zupanþiþ remarks, sooner or later the ascetic ideal confronts us with two options: either we persist, up to the end, with the ‘rather nothing than …’ (whereby we link the imperative of the Real to some [self-] destructive passage à l’acte), or we take one step in the direction of purifying our ascetism by renouncing Nothingness itself (as the only and the last Real that is left), thereby renouncing the constitutive element of the will as such.25 In other words, there are two consequences of the death of God – disorientation (passive nihilism) and despair (radical nihilism). Disorientation, because if the highest values disappear, ‘then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself’.26 In this

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______________________________________________________________ sense, passive nihilism is closely related to the gradual devaluation of highest values, which ends in a world without values. Despair, on the other hand, emerges as an insight that the ideal world cannot be realized within this world.27 According to passive nihilism (disorientation), what is wrong is our values, not the world itself; according to radical nihilism (despair), the problem is not rooted in our values but rather in the world as it is.28 In this way, the relationship between radical nihilism and passive nihilism constitutes a ‘disjunctive synthesis’29 in which will is captured in an oscillation between willing nothingness and not willing at all, between spite and passivity. In this sense one can speak of a twinning, a non-dialectical synthesis between the two forms of nihilism, which are both opposed to each other and bound together in a radical ambivalence. The death of God means the dividing of the originary (religious) nihilism into two nihilisms, which, like non-identical twins, reveal a contradictory, non-resolving duality in disparity. To discuss nihilism in the context of this twinning, let us now turn to two examples. 2.

Terror The first example is terror, an invisible murderous rage, a terrible evil condition, which can create a general atmosphere of fear and trigger counter-reactions based on panic without end. What renders terror ‘radical’ is, as Baudrillard argues,30 its underlying rejection of all the cardinal principles of strategic action. Strategy is traditionally understood as the calculation of means to ends. Action, however, ‘only has a strategic value if it can be calculated in subordination to some political end that is being achieved in its execution’.31 Terror, in contrast, Baudrillard argues, is devoid of futility. This is what Baudrillard believes defines the intuitive genius of the strategy of terror: its refusal of the limits through and within which life has traditionally been strategised. Terror breaches the boundaries between civility and its other, and therefore helps foment a control society in which the state, too, becomes affective and so immanent. Terror undoes the distinction between inside and outside. And in terror, we approach the condition of bare life: ‘we suddenly find ourselves abandoned in emptiness’.32 Consequently, terror reverberates through contemporary society now more than ever. As Bülent Diken states: Since 9/11 many have pointed out that terror has social origins in globalisation, in injustice, that global society itself produces terror. Equally significantly, however, today terror produces society. Terror has become a dispositif, a technique of governance that imposes a particular conduct, a new model of truth and normality, on contemporary sociality by redefining power relations and by unmaking

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______________________________________________________________ previous realities. In other words, it is no longer an exceptional terror from the outside; it is terror within, a terror that disrupts the dialectic of exception and the rule.33 Herein lies the difference between the ‘classical’ and the new, ‘complex’ forms of terror. The ‘classic’ war is ‘original’ in that it redefined who the enemy was and where the borders should be. The new terror, in contrast, exerts an irresistible attraction on the radical losers, which allows them to combine ‘destruction and self-destruction at the same time as acting out both their megalomaniac fantasies and their self-hate’.36 Thus the basic desire is ‘the desire of the subject for its own death, or suicide’.37 And if there is one thing that is repressed and banished from the culture of passive nihilism, it is death. Thus the new terror signifies the return of the repressed with a vengeance. What is really at stake is death as an event, as symbolic sacrifice.38 With the new terror, the enemy is potentially unclear, and the battlefield is without demarcations: it is a ‘formless war’.39 Whereas the classical terror targeted political adversaries and aimed at a realisation of a political program (e.g. RAF’s, ETA’s and IRA’s terror), and in most cases was linked to carefully measured strategic or political goals, the new terror is blind and diffuse.40 We will never know, for example, the exact political goals that motivated the attacks to the WTC and Pentagon. Such events (e.g. the bombs in the Madrid and London subways) ‘did not come from the usual suspects of a modern, disciplinary order, from the other(ed) occupying the margins without ‘touching’ the rest of the society’.41 In contrast with a traditional terrorist who has to remain camouflaged within a territory under enemy control, the ‘new’ terrorist does not need to try too much to remain unnoticed because he is a ‘normal’ (not mad and bad) person: he could be your neighbour.42 The classical terror was highly symbolic and was pre-occupied with arranging spectacular scenes that had everybody as its potential audience.43 In this sense, it could be seen, in Foucauldian terms, as an act of resistance, as a form of counter-power. In contrast, the new terror is highly invisible, off-scene/obscene, which means that we cannot identify terrorist networks in terms of systems, categories, structures or territories, for they are mutable and viral.44 However, what is truly frightening about this new terror is its potential for lethality and radicality. Its ‘personal end’ is despair; its ‘theoretical end’ a philosophy of destruction. To put it bluntly, it is the will to negation, a radical nihilism. This ‘negation’ or ‘annihilation’ can be turned against oneself, but can also be turned against others, perhaps against a whole world. Sacrificing the most sacred of the sacred, human life, the 9/11 and 7/7 suicides articulate a new, post-modern fear: the fear of the excessive, nihilistic quality of the violence; the intense spirituality of suicide and martyrdom; and the symbolic sacrifice of life which contains a radically

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______________________________________________________________ heterogeneous and excessive dimension that is no longer intelligible within the framework of power relations. That the terrorists were prepared to sacrifice their own lives and the lives of others in a highly symbolic and violent fashion is deeply shocking to a modernity governed by the principle of the preservation of life and the careful, methodical and administrative functioning of power. That is, the new terrorism articulates a deep-seated challenge to the passive nihilist consumer society in which to die for a cause is unimaginable. It would seem that in an age where the spectacle of sovereign power has vanished from the register of politics it has returned as the power of the spectacle itself – the spectacle of excessive violence that, Medusa-like, paralyses our gaze. The spectacle of violence, which characterised sovereign power, has become ‘the violence of the pure spectacle itself’.45 Perhaps what was truly shocking about the September 11 attacks, as well as other suicide bombings that are taking place around the world, is that we are witnessing a religious fervour – ‘a spiritual jouissance’46 – that is entirely alien to us. After all, here are people who are prepared to die for their cause, to immolate themselves in the most ferocious explosions, to use their bodies as guided missiles, to sacrifice themselves in the absolute conviction that it is God’s will. Suicide and martyrdom are essential to the symbolic force of these attacks. We see in this form of violence the ‘operation of the power of the sacred, beyond all ideologies and direct political concerns’.47 As Baudrillard says about this new form of terrorist violence, ‘Its goal is no longer to transform the world; rather, as with all, it seeks to radicalise the world through sacrifice …’.48 Revolutionary struggles have become, in the case of this new paradigm of terrorism, heterogeneous spiritual struggles characterised by martyrdom, a will to destruction, for its own sake. It is a radical nihilism in whose heart there is nothing but emptiness, the terror of pure form, and the death-drive that approaches the edges of the abyss. The excessive dimension of this violence refers precisely to this nihilistic void. By actively consenting to be nothing, the new terror aims to become something of great price. In this context, what cannot be annihilated is the very will, a will to negation, which drives the radical terrorists to annihilate themselves. One may say that these terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated, by the sinful life of the nonbelievers.49 After all, the fundamentalist ‘does not believe, he knows directly’.50 It is this reduction of belief to knowledge that justifies violence in his eyes. As a consequence of this certainty, the gap between the divine and the earthly is no longer mediated but viciously traversed: the human and divine are reduced to elements on the same continuum. Profanation becomes a paradoxical consequence of fanaticism. In this sense the new terrorism is ‘the contemporary face of the iconoclastic desire for pan-destruction: a conscious, resentful denunciation of the actual city in the name of the City of

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______________________________________________________________ God’.51 Thus, being indifferent to the choice of targets, the fundamentalists have an active desire for the spectacular act of destruction and they seek to maximise destruction and fear. In this sense, ‘nothing in their life becomes them like the leaving of it. Dying ceases to be useless expenditure’.52 In short, then, the radical new terror is a supreme exercise of a will to destruction, which is part of what binds it to the civilisation it opposes. It glides through some invisible frontier at which its ‘everything’ collapses into nothing, a purely destructive negation. This radical nihilism suspects that the real world is merely a semblance and thus tries to ‘purify’ it by purging the semblance. But ‘at the end of its purification, the real, as total absence of reality, is the nothing’.53 That is, the new terror expresses a radical nihilist passion that can find certainty only in Nothingness, in spiteful destruction. 3.

War on Terror This brings us to the second example, the War on Terror. The reterritorialising54 effects of global capitalism have a paradoxical effect on the state itself. The modern state is undergoing a kind of convulsion, whereby its sovereignty is, on the one hand, undermined – at least with respect to its control over economic life – and yet, on the other hand, aggressively reasserts state sovereignty and power with the so-called ‘war on terrorism’. In the wake of September 11, and with the emergence of this permanent global state of war, we have seen hitherto unthinkable control and surveillance measures being implemented in the dubious name of security.55 While governments assure us that they are trying to ‘strike the right balance between liberty and security’, they have been introducing legislation that undermines even the most basic civil liberties,56 such as the right to due process. The usual techniques and practices of control have been intensified and given new impetus and consistency in the war on terrorism. The sophistication of technologies of control and surveillance find their strange counterpart in a rediscovery of torture and the practice of permanent detention: ‘the mis en scene of the control society is now to be found in the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo’.57 In this sense, the two modalities of power – the off-shore prison camps and extra-legal spaces of detention – have intersected and ‘control and sovereign exceptionalism become indistinguishable in the ‘war on terrorism’’.58 How are we to understand the political nexus that allows this intersection to take place? Firstly, the discourse of ‘security’ itself must be rigorously analysed. ‘Security’ is the word on everyone’s lips today, from media outlets to politicians from across the political spectrum. The ability to provide security from terrorism is now the single stamp of legitimacy for any government, and is considered the overriding responsibility of the modern state. However, as Giorgio Agamben shows – referring to Foucault’s work on eighteenth

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______________________________________________________________ century governmental discourses – ‘security’ consists not in the prevention of crises and catastrophes, but rather in their continual production, regulation and management. Therefore, by making security central to modern governance, there is the danger of producing a situation of clandestine complicity between terrorism and counter-terrorism, locked in a deathly embrace of mutual incitement59: Today we face extreme and most dangerous developments in the thought of security. In the course of a gradual neutralization of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security becomes the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among several definitive measures of public administration until the first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterion of political legitimization.60 It is here also that the logic of the exception must be considered. For Agamben, as well as for other theorists of sovereignty like Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt, sovereignty is conditioned by the exception: the ability of the sovereign to stand inside and outside the law at the same time. In other words, in order to guarantee the law, the sovereign is not bound by the law but stands outside it, having the power to suspend it through a unilateral decision. In the words of Schmitt, the sovereign is ‘he who decides on the state of exception’.61 The hidden secret of sovereignty, then, is this radical indistinction between law and lawlessness, between politics and violence. However, what was once the secret of political philosophy has now become explicit: The state of the exception has become the rule. In other words, the intensification of control and surveillance techniques, coupled with practices of extra-judicial detention and governments thumbing their nose at constitutional checks and human rights norms, suggests a normalisation of the state of exception. Governments in socalled liberal democracies are operating in an increasingly extra-judicial way; the state of exception is becoming the dominant paradigm of politics today.62 When security becomes the dominant form of politics and law is replaced by a permanent state of exception, a state ‘can always be provoked by terrorism to become itself terroristic’.63 Therefore, our understanding of the society of control should include not simply the subtle technologies, but also the whole panoply of control measures that we see today: everything from the permanent detention of terrorist suspects to the heightened policing of national borders64 forms a new paradigm of power and a new logic of politics that must be critically analysed. These developments in the control society signify, one could suggest, a more fundamental transformation in contemporary politics. What

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______________________________________________________________ passes for democracy in developed capitalist countries is nothing but a gaudy mediatised spectacle of spin-doctoring and endless opinion polls – a banal reality show which masks the almost total ideological convergence between the major parties and the lack of genuine political alternatives. Modern politics is characterised by a kind of stifling ideological consensus: the dominant political discourse today is that which announces the eclipse of ideological conflicts between left and right, claiming to be ‘post-ideological’ and to be about solving society’s problems in a rational, ‘common sense’ way without the constraints of ideology. The idea of the social-democratic ‘Third Way’, or ‘reflexive modernity’, which claims to seek a middle road between socialism and capitalism, and which purports to represent the radical centre of political opinion, would be paradigmatic of the post-ideological consensus. Reflexive modernity, Anthony Giddens claims, is ‘Beyond Left and Right’.65 Similarly, for Ulrich Beck, in reflexive modernity partisanship based on collective identities or beliefs is not possible: contemporary politics is an activity ‘without enemies’.66 So, following this logic, we end up with the following scenario: ‘on one side, a multiplicity of ‘sub-political’ struggles about a variety of ‘life issues’ which can be dealt with through dialogue; on the other side, either the old-fashioned ‘traditionalists’ or, more worryingly, the ‘fundamentalists’ fighting a backward struggle against the forces of progress’.67 A scenario in which passive nihilism, a politics without belief, fights radical nihilism, a belief without politics. The passive nihilism of post-politics expresses itself as an inability to think of the antagonistic element in politics; hence the gene silencing of politics, the emptying out of its constitutive dimension – the political. In a sense, post-politics has a particular blindness towards what is really at stake in politics: ‘the very configuration of power relations around which a given society is structured’.68 However, this blindness is itself constitutive; it is what constitutes post-politics as a form of politics, a politics in which already recognized groups compete and negotiate interests without challenging the hegemonic relations in a given political constellation. Politics as game playing without the possibility of changing the game, as a form of hyperpolitics. Thus, in post-politics everything is politicized, can be discussed, but only in a non-committal way and as a non-conflict by keeping absolute and irreversible choices at bay. However, when the simulacrum of pluralism becomes an end in itself, politics is delimited to the actual by preventing disruptive events from occurring. That is, post-politics breaks-up the link between the virtual (the political) and the actual (politics). Its passive nihilism consists in an impossibility of distanciating actual reality, in the impossibility of sublimation in the sense of sustaining the gap between the actual and the virtual, reality and the Real, by maintaining a space for objects

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______________________________________________________________ considered impossible, by giving ‘value to what the reality principle does not value’.69 And when the virtual collapses into the actual politics disappears and radical questioning of the social becomes impossible. Insofar as politics is politicization, that is, insofar as politics involves ‘the ongoing critique of reality’,70 post-politics signifies the foreclosure of politics. As such postpolitics lays bare the totalitarian aspect of capitalism.71 A ‘totality’ that designates the reduction of the social to a ‘one dimensional society’; a society without a virtual dimension, without the capacity to imagine social change.72 In this sense, post-politics brings with it an internal perversion of democracy, a ‘post-democratic’ politics that eliminates real dispute by assuming that everyone is already included in politics and that remaining problems can be dealt with through expert systems.73 And importantly, this nihilistic polishing-off of politics proper does away with political subjectivity in the sense of the naming of ‘a part of those who have no part, of a count of the uncounted’74 Of course one should recognise that this so-called era of postideological consensus simply means that the ideology of neo-liberal markets has become so entrenched, so sedimented, so accepted as economic orthodoxy by both sides of politics, that we no longer recognise it as ideology as such. The post-ideological consensus is simply a neo-liberal ideological consensus, and the so-called Third Way was never really a third way at all, but simply a way of disguising the formal Left’s capitulation to neoliberalism by providing it with some flimsy social democratic window dressing.75 Far from this new consensus style of politics being a sign of the maturity of modern democratic politics, it is a sign of its degradation and immanent collapse. We are dealing here with a new mutation of politics in which the triumph of ‘democratic consensus’ coincides with, and is symptomatic of, the complete eclipse of real politics. There has been an erosion of a genuine public space for politics – democracy is no longer a collective activity engaged in by the people, but rather a media-driven process determined by endless surveys, opinion polls and specialists, from which the category of ‘the people’ is entirely absent.76 That is, the democratic subject is made invisible. The politics of dispute and disagreement – upon which any notion of democracy rests – is replaced by consensus, by a ‘reasonable’ politics of negotiation. In this context, the dominant form of politics controlling terrorism becomes post-political in the sense that it disavows politics as such, which takes place not by ‘repressing’ politics but by foreclosing it.77 This politics, however, is not a positive politics, actively pursuing a new social project, but a politics of fear, ‘a reactive politics, whose motivating force is defence against a perceived threat’.78

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______________________________________________________________ Indeed, the politics of fear is, in the aftermath of September 11, fast becoming the dominant form of politics,79 redefining what it means to be a political subject. Hence the tendency today to ‘terrorize’ the political space by transforming democracy into a hostage while we are witnessing, once more, that forms of security (and fear) are related to forms of life; security is a formative, productive and dynamic aspect of social life.80 We are left with a politics that ‘mobilizes the crowd by way of invoking the fear of the corrupt intruder’,81 obfuscates antagonisms, sublimates order as an absolute value, and exclusively indexes politics to the politics of security.82 Significantly in this respect, the politics of fear justifies itself with reference to, and thus mirrors, terror. It ‘can curb citizenship rights to save democracy, kill people to protect them from despots, and legalize torture to preserve human dignity’.83 However, politics always involves antagonisms that require us to make a choice between conflicting alternatives. As such, politicization requires the metaphoric universalisation of particular demands, aiming at the restructuring of the social space rather than negotiation of particular interests. But in post-politics particular demands remain particular without being able to function as a metaphoric condensation of a general opposition to power.84 That is why post-politics, the politics of fear, far from standing for the political as such, always involves a de-politicisation, a naturalization of the political. As Slavoj Žižek argues, ‘[in] trying to neutralize negativity by transforming politics into apolitical administration…individuals pursue their consumerist fantasies in the space regulated by expert social administration’.85 In this sense, it ‘is about finding apolitical solutions to political problems’.86 At its core there is no proper content of politics: all political struggles and decisions concern other specific spheres of social life (taxation, the regulation of sexual mores and procreation, the health service, and so on and so forth) – ‘politics is merely a formal mode of dealing with these topics, insofar as they emerge as topics of public struggle and decision’.87 Thus what is at stake here is, Žižek argues: Not primarily the way politicians are packaged and sold as merchandise at elections; a much deeper problem is that elections themselves are conceived along the lines of buying a commodity (power, in this case): they involve a competition between different merchandise-parties, and our votes are like money which buys the government we want. What gets lost in such a view of politics as just another service we buy is politics as a shared public debate of issues and decisions that concern us all.88

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______________________________________________________________ Despite its hegemony, however, the lack of antagonistic politics and subjectivities does not make post-politics a peaceful order. Rather, it seems as if the lack of antagonism in post-politics is countered with an excess of antagonism, a (self)destructive passion for the Real. Thus, today’s dominant ideological space looks like a battle ground between un-antagonistic politics and an ultra-antagonistic fundamentalism: terrorism. Seen from this angle, terror highlights the dangers implied in the delusions of the universalist globalist discourse that postulates that human progress requires the establishment of world unity based on the implementation of the Western model. It shatters the illusions of the ‘Universalist humanitarians that antagonisms could be eliminated thanks to a unification of the world that would be achieved by transcending the political, conflict, and negativity’.89 In this model, in which one is continuously reminded of the need to be protected, political questions are solved by experts and decisions are made on the most efficient way of distributing social goods. Thus, the democratic subject is transformed into a consumer of government services, and also a consumer on the democratic ‘marketplace’ who selects the party that most closely corresponds with one’s ‘preferences’. This is an aseptic universe where nothing can happen, where genuine disputes and conflicts are translated into ‘policy challenges’, and where we – in our radical comfort, as Baudrillard puts it90– must be protected against any foreseeable security risk. Consequently, the drive for security and conformity transformed society by a post-politics wrapped in the culture of fear which glorifies passivity rather than activism. In this sense post-politics perceives dedication to a cause, to a belief, as a sign of a lack of reflexivity, as fundamentalism. As such it demonstrates an inability to act politically. That is, it reflects a defect: ‘unable to dream, tired of life, takes no risks, weakened by our materialism and consumerism we, the Westerners, cannot imagine a political cause to fight and die for’.91 In such a situation passivity is not the great-vote winner, but it is actually the best policy. Thus we are all ready to ‘‘indulge’ in utter scepticism, cynical distance’, exploitation of others ‘without any illusions’, ‘violations of all ethical constraints, extreme sexual practices, and so on and so forth – protected by the silent awareness that the big Other is ignorant about it’.92 What remains is a passive and hedonistic nihilist world, in which happiness is reduced to consumerism, politics to security/fear and conformism. In this, the politics is reactive, the category of people is entirely absent, meaning is eradicated, and conflict is eliminated. Change is no longer desirable or possible. There is no alternative. Yet for all that it is a suffocatingly sterile world. It is in this very imbrication of brutal cynicism with wide-eyed belief that the objective irony of post-politics resides. The paradox in this context is that:

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______________________________________________________________ We in the West are the Nietzschean Last Men, immersed in stupid daily pleasures, while the Muslim radicals are ready to risk everything, engaged in the nihilist struggle up to the point of self-destruction. What is gradually disappearing in this opposition between those who are ‘in’, the Last Men who dwell in aseptic gated communities, and those who are ‘out’, are the good old middle classes. The middle class is a luxury capitalism can no longer afford.93 4.

Clash Most disturbing here is the non-dialectical togetherness of two existential strategies ruthlessly pitted against each other, that is, the total coincidence of the cruel, senseless and radical hatred of the Other with the post-political, ‘tolerant’ logic of control society in which nobody, no difference, is excluded in principle. Thus, what we see here is a disjunctive synthesis between passive nihilism (the dampening or sterilization of life, the reduction of desire to mechanical sensualism), and radical nihilism (the hateful spectacle of (self) destruction, the will to nothingness). The harsh consequence to be accepted here is that we have two networks that stand against, mimic, and justify each other: ‘We have two camps, each of which claims to be the good and to fight the evil’.94 And we have two strategies that dissolve the democratic habitus in a post-political condition. Although they are opposed, both radical nihilism (terror) and passive nihilism (post-politics/politics of fear) are Siamese twins of sorts as ‘they both agree on the meaninglessness of reality, or rather its essential unreality, which inspires either passive withdrawal or violent destruction’.95 On the one hand, there is a ‘hedonist permissiveness plus new forms of social apartheid and control based on fear’,96 (that is, a reactive world without values), and on the other hand, there is a purely destructive negation, (that is, a will to negation): post-politics versus post-political terror. So, it seems, ours is a ‘one-dimensional society’ in which distinctions have disappeared and opposites are united in a nihilistic synthesis. Thus, for all their mutual enmity, both terror and the war against terror remain mired in what Alain Badiou describes as ‘the disjunctive synthesis of two nihilisms’97 which foster, on the one hand, a violent – even aesthetic – taste for the politics of imperial global hatred for nomadic multitudes and, on the other, the immense and awesome politics of insurrectionary desire, animating the very diversely enacted political hatred of the imperial. They simultaneously express convergence and divergence, similarity and difference, without, of course, perfect identity. Both depict a world of either/or and reduce politics to a clash between MacWorld and Jihad. Both speak in absolutes. Both fetishise their own ‘way of life’ (religious orthodoxy, and security as a new religion). And finally, both have their own priests.

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______________________________________________________________ What distinguishes them is, however, ‘the site of the enjoyment demanded: our own in permissiveness, God’s own in fundamentalism’.98 Accordingly, this distinction is sustained by a shared underlying feature: ‘they are both permeated by the negative passion of the resentment’.99 In this sense, both terror and the war on terror tend to transcend politics. And significantly what makes the disjunction between these two enemies (terror and the War on Terror) is also a synthesis in that what terror and the postpolitical war against terror share in common is nihilism: Terror against terror, there is no more ideology behind this. One is, from this point forward, far beyond ideology and politics. No ideology, no cause – not even the Islamic one – can explain the energy that feeds terror. It no longer aims at transforming the world. Like heresies in more ancient times, it aims at radicalising the world through sacrifice, while the system aims at realizing the world by force.100 The clash between terror and the War on Terror is not, then, a clash between barbarism and civilisation, but a clash between passive nihilism and radical nihilism. However this passive nihilism neutralizes everything and provokes radical nihilism in the sense that it ‘has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference’.101 Terror is, in this sense, a ‘fatal strategy’, a traumatic intervention of the real into the virtual, symbolic reality.102 In such a space, the only form protest can take is ‘meaningless’ violence. The overall result of this clash then remains a register constituted by the ‘bloody and nihilistic games of power without purpose and without truth’.103 Perhaps, it is here that one of the main dangers of capitalism should be located: Although it is global and encompasses the whole world, it sustains a stricto sensu ‘worldless’ ideological constellation, depriving the large majority of people of any meaningful mapping. Capitalism is the first socio-economic order which detotalises meaning: it is not global at the level of meaning (there is no global ‘capitalist worldview’ no ‘capitalist civilisation’ proper – the fundamental lesson of globalisation is precisely that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilisations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East); its global dimension can only be formulated at the level of truth-without-meaning, as the ‘Real’ of the global market capitalism.104

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Notes 1

See R Girard, The Scapegoat, The University of John Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1986. 2 See H M Enzensberger, ‘The Radical Loser’, in Der Spiegel, N Grindell (trans), November 7 2005, , viewed on 5 August 2008, . 3 The concept of ‘disjunctive synthesis’ lies at the heart of Deleuze’s conception of the ‘vitality’ of Being, which is the same thing as its productive univocity. It designates the power of the One that manifests itself even in the most divergent series. See Difference and Repetition (1994) and AntiOedipus (1983) for an extended discussion. 4 Enzensberger, ‘The Radical Loser’. 5 ibid. 6 See F Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996, pp. 67-8, 118. 7 S Žižek, ‘Some Politically Incorrect Reflections on Violence in France & Related Matters. 6. Class Struggle in France, Again’, in lacan.com, 2005, viewed on 1 August 2009, . 8 F Dostoevsky, Notes form the Underground, Dover Publications, New York, 1992, p. 14. 9 Ibid., p. 15. 10 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, pp. 67, 119. 11 See B Diken, Nihilism, Routledge, London, 2009. 12 See F Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Vintage, New York, 1967, p. 318. 13 See D Colas, Civil Society and Fanaticism: Conjoined Histories, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1997. 14 See A Badiou, The Century, London, Polity, 2007. 15 Colas, op. cit., pp. 5-6. 16 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 318. 17 See G Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy, Columbia University Press, New York, 1983, p. 148. 18 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 12. 19 Haas, cited in B Diken., Nihilism, Routledge, London, 2009, p. 3. 20 Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy, p. 174. 21 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 9. 22 See K L Carr, The Banalization of Nihilism: Twentieth-Century Responses to Meaninglessness, State University of New York Press, New York, 1992. 23 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, pp. 134-5. 24 See B Reginster, The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2006, p. 261.

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See A Zupanþiþ, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2003, p. 66. 26 See M Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York: Harper, 1977, p. 61. 27 ibid., p. 66. 28 Reginster, op. cit., p. 34. 29 See G Deleuze & F Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1983, pp. 75-83. 30 J Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, Verso, London, 2002. 31 See J Reid, The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity, and the Defence of Logistical Societies, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2006, p. 71. 32 G Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2004, p. 64. 33 See B Diken, ‘From Exception to Rule - from 9/11 to the Comedy of (T)errors’. Irish Journal of Sociology, vol. 15(1), 2006, p. 91. 36 See Enzensberger, ‘The Radical Loser’. 37 Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, p. 7. 38 Ibid. 39 Lotringer, S & P Virilio, Pure War, Columbia University Press, New York, 1997, p. 173. 40 Homer-Dixon, cited in B Diken & C B Laustsen, ‘7/11, 9/11, and PostPolitics’, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, viewed on 10 January 2009, . 41 ibid. 42 Recent MI5 research, based on hundreds of case studies by the security service, reveals that the ‘mad and bad’ theory to explain why people turn to terrorism does not stand up, with no more evidence of mental illness or pathological personality traits found among British terrorists than is found in the general population. The research also concludes that the terrorist groups operating in Britain today are different in many important respects both from Islamist extremist activity in other parts of the world and from historical terrorist movements such as the IRA or the Red Army Faction (A Travis, ‘MI5 Report on Terrorism’, The Guardian, 21 August 2008, p. 1). 43 M Jürgensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000, pp. 119, 144. 44 See S Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Verso, London, 2002, pp. 36-37.

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S Newman, ‘Terror, Sovereignty and Law: On the Politics of Violence’. German Law Journal, vol. 5, 2004, pp. 569, 584. 46 ibid., p. 583. 47 ibid. 48 Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, p. 10. 49 S Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes, Verso, London, 2008, p. 73. 50 ibid., p. 31. 51 Diken, Nihilism, p. 32. 52 T Eagleton, Holy Terror, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, p. 98. 53 Badiou, The Century, p. 64. 54 Deleuze and Guattari themselves see capitalism as a process of deterritorialization - in which identities and institutions are destabilised and integrated into global circuits of flux and becoming. And yet, as they point out, for every deterritorialization there is also a reterritorialization: while capitalism releases flows of desire, and economic and social flows, it simultaneously imposes a ‘code’ on them, seeking to regulate and control them. Control technology is the means by which this is achieved (see G Deleuze & F Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987, p. 129). 55 We are in possession of biometric passports; we have our fingerprints scanned at US ports of entry; we produce our documentation on demand; and when we cannot, we forfeit ourselves as politically intelligible - as eligible subjects. The War on Terror - with its colour-coded terror alerts, its secret trials and detention camps, its shadowy super-bureaucracies, its vague reports of special forces operations in far-off places of the world, and of foiled terrorist plots, all the while with the assurances that another major 9/11 - style attack is ‘only a matter of time’ - seems increasingly like a phoney war that the public has no control over, and that hides a more sinister agenda, one of aggressively reasserting state sovereignty at home and abroad. The terrorist threat is ‘real and immanent’, we are told, but it is best that, at the same time, we know as little about it as possible. In such a situation, the talk about anticipation, precaution, and risk control tends to become meaningless, since we are dealing with what, in the terms of Rumsfeldian terminology, one should call the ‘unknown unknowns’: ‘we not only do not know where the tipping point is, we do not even know exactly what we do not know.’ (Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes, p. 456). 56 It is worth remembering Rizwaan Sabir’s case - a master’s student - in the UK, who was arrested on May 14 after the document (‘al Qaida Training Manual’) was found by a university staff member on an administrator’s computer. Despite his Nottingham University supervisors’ insisting the

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______________________________________________________________ materials were directly relevant to his research, Rizwaan Sabir was held for nearly a week under the Terrorism Act, accused of downloading the materials from US Justice Department website for illegal use (‘Held Student ‘Felt Terrorised’’, BBC, 10 June 2008, viewd on 7 July 2008, ). 57 See S Newman, ‘Control, Post-Politics and the Invisibility of the People,’ a paper presented at the conference Futures: Time, Control and Insecurity, Lancaster University, 8-9 May 2008. It is a brutal allegory in which Guantánamo is not the exception but the rule. Even though the new US President-elect Barack Obama plans to order the closing of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay as early as his first week in office to show a break from the Bush administration’s approach to the war on terror, it still remains as a major issue because for critics of the Bush administration as it has become a symbol of mismanagement and overreach in the war on terror. The camp has not hosted a single trial, and only 19 of the remaining 270 detainees have been charged. The people are being held without charge or trial, denied the right to legal counsel, and subject to degrading and cruel conditions such as solitary confinement and intensive interrogation without the presence of a lawyer. Not only have most men not been charged but the US refuses to clarify their legal status, referring to them as ‘enemy combatants’ in order to be able to hold them indefinitely without recourse to the courts. (See E Isin & K Rygiel, ‘Abject Spaces: Frontiers, Zones, Camps’, in The Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror: Living, Dying, Surviving, E Dauphinee & C Masters (eds), Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2007, p. 197). Agamben’s contention that the concentration camp ‘is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule’ (G Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998, p. 168) is chillingly ironic when one thinks of the US-run detention camps for ‘enemy non-combatants’: legally dead (deprived of a legal determinate status) while biologically still alive - and the US authorities which treat them in this way are also of an in-between status which forms the counterpart to homosacer: ‘acting as a legal power, their acts are no longer covered and constrained by the law - they operate in an empty space that is sustained by the law, and yet not regulated by the rule of law’ (Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes, p. 49). 58 See Newman, Control, Post-Politics and the Invisibility of the People. 59 See G Agamben, ‘Security and Terror’, Theory & Event, vol. 5:4, 2001. 60 Agamben, cited in B Diken & C B Laustsen, The Culture of Exception: Sociology Facing The Camp, Routledge, London, 2005, p. 71.

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Schmitt, cited in G Agamben, State of Exception, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005, p. 1. 62 Ibid., pp. 1, 31. 63 See Agamben, ‘Security and Terror’. 64 It is interesting to examine a high-level confidential report on future security, which suggested that Europe should consider sharing vast amounts of intelligence and information on its citizens with the US to establish a ‘Euro-Atlantic area of cooperation’ to combat terrorism. The report also proposed that the 27 members of the EU should pool intelligence on terrorism; develop joint video-surveillance and unmanned drone aircraft, start networks of anti-terrorism centers, and boost the role and powers of an intelligence-coordinating body in Brussels. I Traynor, ‘Secret EU Security Draft Risks Uproar with Call to Pool Policing and Give US Personal Data’, The Guardian, August 7 2008, p. 4. 65 See A Giddens, Beyond Left and Right, Polity, London, 1994. 66 See U Beck, Democracy Without Enemies, Polity, London, 1998, pp. 150151. 67 C Mouffe, On The Political, Routledge, London, 2005, p. 50. 68 ibid., p. 21. 69 Zupanþiþ, The Shortest Shadow, p. 78. 70 Z Bauman, Society Under Siege, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2002, p. 56. 71 A Hewitt, ‘Masochism and Terror: Fight Club and the Violence of Neofascist Ressentiment’, Telos, vol. 136, 2006, p. 108. 72 See H Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, Beacon, Boston, 1964. 73 J Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1999, p. 116. 74 ibid., pp. 116, 121. 75 C Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, Verso, London, 2000, p. 93. 76 At the formal level, people in advanced Western societies are increasingly unlikely to participate in the political process. This effect is most striking among younger age groups. Electoral turnouts in many countries are at an alltime low and in the few instances where these are high, emotional attachment often appears to rule over reasoned argument. (See P F Whiteley & P Seyd, High-Intensity Participation: The Dynamics of Party Activism in Britain, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2002). Accordingly, the categories of left and right have been expunged of their traditional associations and meanings. (See F Furedi, The Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right, Continuum, London, 2006, pp. 45-6). 77 S Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, Verso, London, 1999, p. 198. 78 Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes, p. 41.

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The sociologist Frank Furedi points to how certain words have exploded into popular consciousness in recent years as reflecting fundamental changes in society. For instance, references to the phrase ‘at risk’ in British broadsheet newspapers increased ten-fold over the course of the 1990s. Presumably this is not because we actually face ten times as many risks as previously. Rather, it reflects developments in our perception of the world. (See F Furedi, Culture of Fear: Risk-Taking and the Morality of Low Expectations, Continuum, London, 2002, p. 56). 80 See M Dillon, Politics of Security, Routledge, London, 1996. 81 Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes, p. 304. 82 S Žižek, ‘Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics’, in The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, C Mouffe (ed), Verso, London, 1999, p. 18. 83 Diken, ‘From Exception to Rule - from 9/11 to the Comedy of (T)errors’, p. 88. 84 See Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, pp. 204-208. 85 Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes, p. 325. 86 Diken, ‘From Exception to Rule - from 9/11 to the Comedy of (T)errors’, p. 89. 87 Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes, p. 291. 88 ibid., p. 284. 89 Mouffe, On The Political, p. 82. 90 Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, p. 15. 91 S. Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the Mis(use) of a Notion, Verso, London, 2001, pp. 1, 4. 92 Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes, p. 300. 93 S Žižek, Violence. Profile Books, London, 2008, p. 25 94 See Diken and Laustsen, ‘7/11, 9/11, and Post-Politics’. 95 See S Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, Verso, London, 2007, p. 6. 96 Žižek, Violence, p. 24. 97 A Badiou, Infinite Thought, Continuum, London, 2005, p. 119. 98 Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes, p. 34. 99 ibid., p. 333. 100 Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, p. 97. 101 J Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1994, p. 163. 102 Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, p. 36. 103 Badiou, Infinite Thought, p. 120. 104 Žižek, Violence, p. 68

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Bibliography Agamben, G., Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998. ——, ‘Security and Terror’, Theory & Event, vol. 5:4, 2001. ——, The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2004. ——, State of Exception. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005. Badiou, A., Infinite Thought. Continuum, London, 2005. ——, The Century. London: Polity, 2007. Baudrillard, J., Fatal Strategies. Semiotext(e)/Pluto, Paris, 1990. ——, The Spirit of Terrorism. Verso, London, 2002. ——, Simulacra and Simulation. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1994. Bauman, Z., Society Under Siege. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2002. Beck, U., Democracy Without Enemies. Polity, London, 1998. Carr, K. L., The Banalization of Nihilism: Twentieth-Century Responses to Meaninglessness. State University of New York Press, New York, 1992. Colas, D., Civil Society and Fanaticism: Conjoined Histories. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1997. Critchley, S., Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. Verso, London, 2007. Deleuze, G., Nietzsche & Philosophy. Columbia University Press, New York, 1983.

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______________________________________________________________ Deleuze, G. & F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1983. ——, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis & London, 1987. Diken, B., ‘From Exception to Rule - From 9/11 to the Comedy of (T)errors’. Irish Journal of Sociology 15(1), 2006, pp. 81-98. ——, Nihilism. Routledge, London and New York, 2009. Diken, B. & C. B. Laustsen, The Culture of Exception: Sociology Facing The Camp. Routledge, London and New York, 2005. _______

, ‘7/11, 9/11, and Post-Politics’, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, retrieved 10 January 2009, . Dillon, M., Politics of Security. Routledge, London, 1996.

Dostoevsky, F., Notes form the Underground. Dover Publications, New York, 1992. Eagleton, T., Holy Terror. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005. Enzensberger, H. M., ‘The Radical Loser’. Der Spiegel, N. Grindell (trans), November 7 2005, retrieved 5 August 2008. . Furedi, F., Culture of Fear: Risk-Taking and the Morality of Low Expectations. Continuum, London, 2002. ——, The Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right. Continuum, London, 2006. Giddens, A., Beyond Left and Right. Polity, London, 1994. ‘Held Student ‘Felt Terrorised’’. BBC, 10 June 2008, retrieved 7 July 2008, .

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______________________________________________________________ Heidegger, M., The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Harper, New York, 1977. Hewitt, A., ‘Masochism and Terror: Fight Club and the Violence of Neofascist Ressentiment’. Telos, vol. 136, 2006, pp. 104-31. Isin, E. & K. Rygiel, ‘Abject Spaces: Frontiers, Zones, Camps’, in The Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror: Living, Dying, Surviving. Elizabeth D. & C. Masters (eds), Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2007. Jürgensmeyer, M., Terror in the Mind of God. The Global Rise of Religious Violence. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000. Lotringer, S. & P. Virilio, Pure War. Columbia University Press, New York, 1997. Marcuse, H., One Dimensional Man. Beacon, Boston, 1964. Travis, A., ‘MI5 Report on Terrorism’. The Guardian, 21 August 2008, p. 1. Mouffe. C., The Democratic Paradox. Verso, London, 2000. ——, On The Political. Routledge, London, 2005. Newman, S., ‘Terror, Sovereignty and Law: On the Politics of Violence’. German Law Journal, vol. 5, 2004, pp. 569-584. ——, ‘Control, Post-Politics and the Invisibility of the People’. A paper presented at the conference Futures: Time, Control and Insecurity, Lancaster University, 8-9 May, 2008. Nietzsche, F., The Will to Power. Vintage, New York, 1967. ——, On the Genealogy of Morals. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996. Rancière, J., Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1999.

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______________________________________________________________ Reid, J., The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity, and the Defence of Logistical Societies. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2006. Reginster, B., The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2006. Traynor, I. ‘Secret EU Security Draft Risks Uproar with Call to Pool Policing and Give US Personal Data’. The Guardian, August 7, 2008, p. 4. Whiteley, P. F. & P. Seyd, High-Intensity Participation: The Dynamics of Party Activism in Britain. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2002. Žižek, S., The Ticklish Subject. Verso, London, 1999. ——, ‘Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics’. The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, C. Mouffe (ed), Verso, London, 1999, pp. 18-37. ——, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the Mis(use) of a Notion. Verso, London, 2001. ——,Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Verso, London, 2002. ——, ‘Some Politically Incorrect Reflections on Violence in France & Related Matters. 6. Class Struggle in France, Again’. lacan.com, 2005, retrieved 1 Agusut 2009, . ——, Violence. Profile Books, London, 2008. ——, In Defence of Lost Causes. Verso, London, 2008. Zupanþiþ, A., The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two. The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2003. Ali Rıza Taskale is a Doctoral Student in the Department of Geography, The University of Sheffield, UK. His research fields are social theory, urbanism, post-structuralism and political philosophy.

Long Term Terrorism in Turkey: The Government, Media and Public Opinion Banu Baybars-Hawks Abstract Turkey has been subjected to terrorism for the past 24 years with the PKK’s campaign of terror. Under the pressure of PKK terrorism, a complex relationship has developed between the Turkish government, the media, and public opinion. In a world where information and communication play a key role, terrorists try to achieve the maximum possible media impact from violent acts. The media are the best way of getting a message across to the wider public. So when we define terrorism, we have to keep in mind that a three-way relationship exists between the main protagonists: terrorists want something from governments and work to get it through the agency of public opinion by seeking to terrorise the public at large in the most spectacular way possible. Public opinion is influenced by the media that sometimes produce exaggerated accounts of terrorist events. There is, therefore, a contradiction between the duty to serve the public and give a truthful presentation of what is going on, and pressures in times of crises where journalists are at something of a loss. Their integrity can be abused in such troubled times. This chapter will seek to examine how this three-way relationship works under the threat of terrorism in Turkey. It will investigate how the government has responded to terrorist attacks, how public opinion has been formed in such an environment and how it has influenced governments’ policies and decisions in regard to terrorism. Also, it will explore how the media have reacted in this cycle, whether they have served as the fourth power or prefer to reflect exaggerated accounts of violent acts. Key Words: Terrorism, terrorist organizations, media, government, public, Turkey. ***** Public opinion today is that one of the greatest threats to the peaceful and safe existence of humankind comes from international terrorist organizations. The new face of terrorism does not recognize any law of war, national borders, sovereignty or legal measures; instead, it is considerably free, acting any way it desires.1 The ever-increasing roles and power of nonstate actors today have reached a point that they pose a challenge to the authority of nation-states. Turkey, with its long history of struggle against terrorism, is one of the best examples within this context.

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______________________________________________________________ War by terrorism is terrifyingly familiar in Turkey. It is a country between South-eastern Europe and South-western Asia with a population of more than 70,000,000. Terrorism has been all too commonplace in Turkey since 1984 when the Kurdish Worker’s Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan or PKK) began its armed struggle against Turkey. In Turkey, a country with roughly one-fifth of the population of the United States, nearly 40,000 lives have been lost in terrorism incidents over the last 24 years. Despite the rise and fall in the frequency and severity of their terrorist attacks through the years, PKK terror has never ended and still continues with recent attacks on the Turkish military targets as well as civilians. Before discussing the effects of terrorism in Turkey, it is necessary to illustrate a history of the PKK and its terrorist activities against Turkey. 1.

History of the PKK The PKK is an ethnic separatist terrorist organization whose ideology is based on Marxism-Leninism. The organization’s ‘use of terror and violence as a means of achieving its ultimate goal, the destruction of the territorial integrity of Turkey, is recognized and classified as an international terrorist organization by most western countries’.2 While the PKK emphasizes human rights, they have also committed brutal murders. These murders have included innocent women, children and the old. The PKK was founded in 1974. The organization emerged from the leftist student groups active in Turkey in the 1960s. Abdullah Ocalan (nicknamed Apo), a Kurdish student at Ankara University, joined the Revolutionary Youth Federation (Dev-Genç) —an umbrella organization for such groups that was formed in 1970. The PKK’s initial goal was to realize communist revolution in Turkey, a common goal of leftist groups throughout the 1970s. But Ocalan quickly changed his priorities from a broader-based leftist revolution to the ‘liberation’ of the Kurds.3 By 1974, the PKK had begun taking shape, and on November 27 1978, the organization was secretly but formally set-up in the Diyarbakir district. The PKK confined itself to attacks on tribal chiefs in Urfa province until 1980. Starting in 1984, the organization intensified its violence against Turkish targets with the aim of establishing a Kurdish state. The main targets in that period were ‘temporary village guards’ - a paramilitary force set up by Turkey to combat the PKK - and other Turkish security forces. The PKK attacked Turkish diplomatic and commercial targets across Europe in 1993 and again in 1995.4 The group also employed suicide-bombing methods, waged mainly by women terrorists in Turkey; and kidnapped foreign tourists in the early to mid-1990s. In order to damage Turkey’s economy, the organization also set forests in Turkey’s tourist resorts on fire.5 Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the organization, was captured by Turkish authorities in Kenya in early 1999, and the Turkish State Security

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______________________________________________________________ Court subsequently sentenced him to death, a sentence later commuted to life imprisonment following the abolition of the death penalty.6 Following the capture of Ocalan, the PKK declared a cease-fire and began claiming that it had switched its strategy to peaceful methods and would pursue political struggle from then on. In April 2002, the organization changed its name to the Kurdish Freedom and Democracy Congress (KADEK), ‘alleging that PKK has fulfilled its historical mission and would now like to be accepted as a political organization’.7 In late 2003, the group underwent another name change to KONGRA-GEL (Kurdistan People’s Congress). Despite the changes in its name and strategy, the group still continued to carry out attacks mainly in South-eastern Turkey, though not on the scale of the pre-1999 period.8 In August 2003, the government passed an amnesty law for those members of the organization that agreed to leave the PKK. On May 29 2004, the organization renounced its so-called unilateral cease-fire of the past five years. In July 2006, PKK bombs and snipers killed twenty-three civilians. Over time, the PKK has moved into northern Iraq and almost 3,500 PKK members have established a safe haven in Qandil. According to 2007 estimates, there are a total of 5,000 PKK/KONGRA-GEL terrorists situated in northern Iraq where the organization’s headquarters are located.9 The PKK has established significant criminal activities inside Europe, ranging from extortion, trafficking drugs and heroin, to smuggling illegal immigrants into the EU. The group also generates other revenues by running media outlets (dailies, periodicals, TV and radio channels) to help carry out anti-Turkey propaganda activities in many parts of the world.10 2.

The Government’s Response Terrorism creates fear, and in modern democracies, it is not difficult to produce widespread fear ‘by demonstrating how easily state mechanisms can be circumvented and individuals attacked’.11 Most of the time, terrorists do not target a specific person, but wish to create fear and demoralization in a society as a whole—more than simply among those targeted in an attack. Terror Management Theory argues that a fear of death leads the public to support aggressive policies and governments in order to reduce anxiety.12 In Turkey, a host of laws exist that can be employed when the state feels threatened. In this context, dozens of books and publications have been banned, and many journalists have been arrested, sentenced or fined by government officials in previous years in Turkey—mainly because they supported the appeal of Kurds for autonomy in the eastern region of Turkey. But with the recent amendments, the government has lifted restrictions on the publication of Kurdish books, magazines and newspapers, and allowed broadcasting in Kurdish.

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______________________________________________________________ After the onset of PKK terrorism in Turkey, the government has responded by issuing a series of laws. On June 16 1983, the State Security Courts were established in Turkey, and the law regarding the establishment and trial procedures of the Court was passed. The law authorized State Security Courts to deal with offenses against the integrity of the state. ‘Article 23/V’ of this law stated that those who damage the order and integrity of the court with words, publications, and/or actions, or insult the court, the president of the court, the members of the court, or the public prosecutor and its assistant, can be held in contempt, and their publications can be suspended. If they continue to publish by violating the order of suspension, they can be imprisoned from three months to six months, and can also be fined from five thousand to fifteen thousand Turkish lira. 13 ‘A State of Emergency Act’ passed on October 25 1983 brought additional restrictions on the press. Article 11 of the Act stated that when a state of emergency exists, the printing, publication and distribution of newspapers, magazines, pamphlets and books can be stopped, seized, or required to obtain a permit in order to protect the general order and peace of the nation and to prevent violent actions.14 ‘Press Law No. 5680’, which was passed on July 15 1950, had imposed strict limitations on press freedom. With the new amendments made on November 10 1983, the punishments for press crimes were increased. The law also authorized a public prosecutor, without securing a court order, to stop distribution of any publication containing material that constitutes an offense against the state and that reveals government secrets.15 ‘Additional Article 2.2’ of the ‘1950 Press Law (No. 7564)’ sets the temporary period of closure from three days to one month. In the first incident, the daily newspaper Milliyet was prevented from publishing the first of a series of interviews with the head of the PKK. Before the June 16 1988 issue of the newspaper reached the newsstands, police raided the printing plant and seized that issue. Milliyet was also forbidden to print other versions of the interview. Mehmet Ali Birand, a well-known journalist who conducted the interview and the editor of the newspaper were charged with creating propaganda detrimental to patriotic sentiment.16 They faced 15 years of prison, but were eventually acquitted. In Turkey, where a civil-law tradition exists, the judiciary is not central in developing the law. Instead, a series of laws enacted by the Parliament, including the press laws, draw the boundaries for press freedom. Laws issued during a state of emergency also regulated the press in that they gave authorized agencies of the government the power to censor publications mostly on the basis of national security reasons. On April 12 1991, the government passed the ‘Anti-Terror Law’. ‘Article 1’ of the Anti-Terror Law described terror as ‘the actions of a person or group of persons which belonged to an organization whose purpose is to

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______________________________________________________________ change the political, legal, social, economic order and principles of the Republic, to destroy the indivisible integrity of the State, to endanger the presence of the State and the republic, to attempt to weaken or destroy the stability of the Government, to destroy basic rights and freedoms, to threaten the internal and external security of the State and the general order of the nation.’17 ‘Article 2’ of the Law made it a crime to commit the actions stated above. Also Article 8 prohibits separatist propaganda that aims to destroy the indivisible integrity of the State. Those who commit the stated crimes can be punished with imprisonment from one to three years, and be fined from 100 million to 300 million Turkish lira. After 1990, the government in Turkey started to ease its restrictions over the printed media. Following that, the press was gradually allowed to openly criticize the government and its policies. Currently there is no restraint on books and newspapers, and no day-to-day censorship in general, resulting in the expansion of the areas in which free speech is permitted. However, some restrictions still remain. While there is no official restraint, every writer and publisher is responsible for the consequences of his or her efforts to publish. And those consequences can be severe, ranging from heavy fines to occasional detentions by police.18 Threats to national security and order, publishing propaganda detrimental to national feelings, insulting the authorities, and threats to the indivisible integrity of the State (its nation and territory) are still the major reasons for the suppression of press freedom.19 The laws and constitution of the country authorize the government to restrict freedom of expression and the press for the following purposes: preventing crime, punishing offenders, withholding information duly classified as a state secret, protecting the rights of individuals’ reputation and the personal and family privacy of individuals, protecting professional secrets as prescribed by law, and ensuring the proper functioning of the judiciary. The broadcasting field is one of the fastest growing and profitable industries in Turkey. In order to regulate this industry, a governmental body was created in 1994 and authorized to allocate frequencies, assign broadcasting licenses, and supervise stations’ compliance with broadcasting standards, which are stated in the two legal documents: ‘Law No. 3984’ and ‘The European Convention on Trans-frontier Television’. The Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTUK) receives its authority from Law No. 3984 as a supervisory body for broadcasting. The RTUK imposes restrictions on radio and television broadcasters based on violations of the law’s Article 4g. For example, Ozgur Radyo [Free Radio] was suspended for a year for broadcasting information likely to incite ‘violence, terror or ethnic discrimination or give rise to feelings of hatred in the community’ (‘Article 4g’ of ‘Law No. 3984’). This decision was made in response to the radio station’s news bulletin on February 19, which mentioned ‘a directive instructing police to shoot real bullets at the legs of demonstrators who

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______________________________________________________________ expressed their support for the PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan too strongly’.20 On 1 April 1999, Radyo Umut [Radio Hope], broadcasting from Istanbul, was suspended for a year after the publication on February 21 of a PKK communiqué.21 According to the 1999 Report of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), on 30 October 1999, Radyo Foreks [Radio Forex], based in Istanbul, was suspended from broadcasting for 30 days for ‘persisting, despite warnings, in broadcasting statements from a terrorist organization, thus facilitating its activities, in violation with Article 4a of Law No. 3984.’22 RTUK took this action in response to Radyo Foreks’ May 26 broadcast of the BBC’s ‘Turkish Service’, a regular program, carrying an item about a recent meeting of the Kurdish National Congress in Europe. The same report of the CPJ also mentioned that RTUK has forced stations to suspend broadcasting for a total of 5,642 days in the period from 1994 to 2000, ‘for such alleged offenses as violating morals, depicting violence, invading privacy, ‘separatist propaganda’, or ‘reactionism’ (i.e., pro-Islamist political discourse)’.23 The year 2000 also witnessed a high number of suspensions of broadcasting stations by RTUK. According to information given by the Turkish government, RTUK closed 62 television stations for 704 days and 67 radio stations for 3,889 days in 2000.24 In February 2000, RTUK suspended the broadcasting of CNN TURK for a day, ‘in response to a January broadcast in which a commentator asked a program guest if PKK leader Ocalan could be compared with former South African president Mandela’.25 According to RTUK, this broadcast was a violation of ‘Article 4a’. CNN TURK appealed RTUK’s decision and won the case.26 In October 2000, the law authorizing the Turkish government to issue decrees with the force of law was annulled by the constitutional court of Turkey.27 Turkey’s ‘Anti-Terror Law’ was amended on June 29 2006, in order to give authorities greater powers in their fight against illegal terrorist organizations. The new law expanded the scope of crimes punishable as ‘terrorist acts’—from drug and human trafficking to the hijacking of transport vehicles and forgery. It calls for prison terms of one to three years for those who publish the statements of terrorist organizations. The same jail terms are given for spreading propaganda in favour of terrorist groups, with the sentence increased by half if the offense is committed in the media. Wearing emblems and uniforms of outlawed groups or covering one’s face during demonstrations is punishable under the propaganda charge. Under the new law, suspects detained on terrorism charges can be denied access to a lawyer for the first 24 hours in custody, but cannot be forced to testify during that time. The law also allows security forces to use weapons against suspects who ignore orders to surrender during a security operation.28

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______________________________________________________________ Since being formally declared a candidate for European Union (EU) membership in 1999, Turkey has deliberately set about expanding freedoms. When announcing Turkey as a candidate for membership, the EU identified a number of requirements necessary for Turkey to become a full member, including the rule of law, freedom of expression, human rights, constitutional reform, and respect for the rights and protection of minorities.29 In accordance with EU membership requirements, Turkey has adopted a set of political and economic goals. Accordingly, twenty-eight items of the 1982 Constitution of Turkey, which include restraints on freedom of thought and expression, the freedom and security of the individual, the privacy of individual life, the freedom of communication, the freedom of residence and movement, and freedom of association, underwent profound changes in late 2001. Broadcasting in the Kurdish language, which was illegal previously, was allowed under the new Turkish Constitution of 2001. The death penalty, which had not been administered since 1984, was limited to acts of terrorism and treason with the new amendments, accordingly sparing Ocalan’s life despite overwhelming public demand for his execution. PKK terror peaked again towards the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008. On October 21 2007, PKK terrorists killed twelve soldiers and injured sixteen in Hakkari’s Daglica region. Following the attacks, all news and regular programs cut their normal schedules and all of them, including social magazines and women’s programs, began to air coverage related to the attacks and invited ex-military staff to discuss possible strategies and movements of the Turkish military in response to these attacks. Subsequently, the government suspended the broadcasting of terrorist attacks that occurred in Hakkari. State Minister Cemil Cicek announced that the government used its right to suspend based on ‘Law No. 3984, Article 25’. The relevant article states: With the exception of court orders, broadcasts shall not be subject to a priori control or suspension. However, in cases of acute necessity for reasons of national security or out of a strong possibility that public order may be disturbed, the Prime Minister or a minister designated by him may suspend a broadcast. Radio and television enterprises are obliged to broadcast public announcements issued by the President of the Republic or the Government for reasons of national security, public order, public health or public morals.30 Upon application by the TV channel Kanalturk; the State Council lifted the ban, pointing out that ‘a decision [made] within vague borders is against the

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______________________________________________________________ freedom of broadcasting in a democratic society.’ The council also added that it was indeed unclear which types of broadcasts were to be suspended. As General ølker Baúbug, the Commander of Land Forces, stated at the opening ceremony of the Military Academy’s new academic year in September 2007, ‘the fight against terror is neither completely militaristic nor entirely political. The related problem has both political and military dimensions’.31 Therefore, there must be coordination between security institutions and the government to deal with the issue of terrorism. Terrorists generally try to provoke government overreaction and to cause isolation and demoralization of the public within an atmosphere of anxiety and insecurity, so governments should be alert against being an instrument at the hands of terrorist groups. 3.

The Media Media has an important role during crises. Terrorism becomes threatening not only through the violent events themselves but also through the publicity and coverage that follow. As terrorism has become a worldwide phenomenon the news media’s function has increased exponentially. Terrorist events directly involve three major players, in addition to the intended victims. They are first of all the government and its security forces; second are the perpetrators of the crimes themselves; and third is the media—and each player has colliding interests. It is generally agreed that there is a symbiotic relationship between terrorists and the media. Terrorist groups use the media to convey their political message whilst supplying exciting news for the media. As Pries-Shimshi points out, ‘the media has the capacity to multiply the impact of terrorists and further their message in a way that terrorists are themselves incapable of projecting’.32 Terror attack coverage can create a tunnel vision scenario where viewers only see the repeated coverage of terror attacks, thereby losing perspective about other news and focusing only on the singular event.33 An increase in the coverage of news about terrorism leads to an increase in concern about terrorism throughout the public. The media has a duty to report on terrorism to fulfil the public’s need to know and to promote open and informed discussion about terrorism. On the other hand, ‘terror attacks mean ratings’.34 Stories highlighting the grief, suffering and shock of the victims’ families; sensational scenes from Turkish soldier martyrs’ funerals; condemnation by government officials and generals; and public anger towards terrorists are the common features of media’s coverage of terrorism. The human-interest value of the attack, where the media explores the background of the victims, creates further viewer interest.35 The sensational elements in the coverage of terrorism are also prevalent in Turkish media. Take the following headlines from one of the most popular newspapers, Hurriyet, for example: ‘Poetic Farewell to Martyr’,

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______________________________________________________________ ‘There Were Only 10 Days Left in his Military Service,’ ‘Tears for Martyr Brother,’ and, ‘PKK Terror Will be Protested in Times Square.’ The media’s coverage of terrorism serves three purposes. First of all, terrorists want to be in the media for publicity, so they use media to reach larger audiences. One of the most important aims of a terrorist attack is to gain publicity for a particular cause or even a particular aim, and the terrorist depends on the media to inform the public. Second, the public learn about terror events through the media. Here, media has a great responsibility to inform the public correctly. But by its nature, terrorism creates sensational stories and emotional reactions, and this means ratings for the media. Competition between media organizations only heightens the necessity to focus on their ability to affect emotions. Terrorists understand this and carefully script and manufacture attacks to attract the coverage they want. The government also uses media during terrorist events in two ways. They first learn about public demands from the government regarding the issue, and second, they convey their actions through the media to the public. At the same time, the media also play a very important counterterrorism role when covering terrorism. They can mitigate ‘the effectiveness of terrorism by creating hostility towards terrorist organizations, compelling decision-makers attention to the topic of terrorism, and raising public awareness about terrorism’.36 For the Turkish media, the Turkish Military General Staff is the official source for their coverage of PKK terrorist attacks. The media provides the figures of casualties and the latest on operations through the website of the General Staff. Because of the nature of PKK terror, it can be argued that Turkish media as a whole are very sensitive about the issue, and their reporting mostly is parallel to the government’s policies. It must also be emphasized that most of the headlines and contents of the news sounds patriotic. Moreover, the news media almost always puts emotional and dramatic headlines on their news stories. Scenes from the funerals of soldiers who lost their lives while fighting PKK terrorists invade the airspaces of daytime and evening news. The sufferings and grievances of martyrs’ loved ones become the source of additional news stories. This sensationalism mounted to such a point in late 2007 that it forced the government to suspend the broadcasting of terrorist attacks. For a detailed analysis of newspapers’ coverage of terrorism, one of the mainstream and most popular newspapers of the country has been selected: Hurriyet. This newspaper’s coverage has been evaluated from 1987 through the year 2000. As a method, every other year has been selected, and ten days in each year have been looked at for the news about PKK terrorism.

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______________________________________________________________ Table 1 (Hurriet Headlines) Day 1

Day 2

1987

PKK Bomb

1989 1991 1993 1995

PKK Massacre: 22 Dead Terrorists Apologized PKK Bullet to a Teacher Warning to Moscow for PKK

1997 1999

German Judiciary Saw the Truth Shame on You

Destruction Plan for the Traitor PKK Trap: 5 Dead Again Kirkuk Patrol Passed to Kurds PKK Massacre: 6 Dead We Notified Iran One More Time About PKK Camps We Hit PKK From Air PKK Terrorists: Execute Us Too

Day 3

Day 4

1987 1989

Rebels Challenged, 30 Dead PKK Rocket Launchers in Hakkari

1991 1993

Bloody Day in Izmir Traitors

1995

We Will Erase PKK

1997 1999

He Wants All of Turkey PKK Threat Continues

PKK’s Heavy Gun Road Unemployment Pushes East to Apo PKK Meeting with Germany They Murdered 33 Civilians Including 11 Children PKK’s Gratefulness for Athens Great Hunting in Amanos IBDA-C and PKK Cooperation

Day 5

Day 6

1987 1989 1991 1993

PKK’s Target: Saved Base What will Happen to this PKK? 4 PKK Militants Captured Dead 6 PKK Dead in Siirt

1995

End of the Terrorist

1997

PKK-Turkey Trading Line

1999

Terror Panic in England

They Ran from a PKK Camp They Target Our Borders PKK Bullet to a 2 Year Old Çiller Establishes Terror Congress 35 Thousand Soldiers in Northern Iraq Anti-Terrorist Department Vice Head is Ahmet Demirci God Bless

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______________________________________________________________

1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999

Day 7

Day 8

Apo Will Take the Lesson He Deserves Two Fierce Women Hero Mother

PKK Massacre Again

America is Uneasy About TurkeyIsrael Allying Tight Cooperation with Germany Against PKK 33 PKK Terrorists Have Been Killed Drop the Guns

Military is Uncomfortable Terror Meeting with Iran is in October Batman is Exporting Terror Threat Against Germany by PKK There are 140 PKK Militants in Region Ceasefire to Barzani by PKK

Day 9

Day 10 Terror Fear 22 Terrorists were Killed

1995

Bloody Fight Vertical Passing Barrier from PKK Ve Tikko 7 PKK Members Captured Dead at Fighting in Bingol Thos who Committed this Massacre Cannot be Human Increase in Martyr Compensation

1997

Sakik Came for Action

1999

His Concerts are PKK Gatherings

1987 1989 1991 1993

PKK Confession Cross Border Operations will Continue Threat Against German Police by PKK PKK Surrenders Ostensibly Today RP Negotiation by FP Against Apo

The news media in any society is expected to play a central role in shaping public opinion, and this is the case for Turkish public opinion. Figures reveal that the proportion of the coverage devoted to attacks has increased over time. As seen from the table, the newspaper coverage seems informative—it provides official information regarding the casualties and nature of the operations. On the other hand, most of the headlines are patriotic and have sensational elements. For the years 1997 through 2008, a simple keyword search for news in Hurriyet featuring the term ‘PKK terrorism’ was also employed. Hurriyet’s coverage of PKK terror dramatically increased from 1997 to 2008, in parallel to the increase in real-time events as well as the increase in the issue’s importance on the public agenda. The ever-increasing PKK terror in

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______________________________________________________________ Turkey moved terrorism to the top of the public’s agenda, and consecutively to the media’s agenda. There were 360 PKK-related stories in Hurriyet in 1997, 1520 in 1998, 1699 in 1999, 804 in 2000, 523 in 2001, 810 in 2002, 1172 in 2003, 1065 in 2004, 2064 in 2005, 2619 in 2006, 4774 in 2007, and 2254 until July 2008. As we see, the newspaper’s coverage of terrorism increased in parallel to the escalation of PKK terror in Turkey, while it declined slightly after the capture of Ocalan and following the cease-fire of the PKK, and began to increase again following the resumption of terrorist attacks after 2004. The results also revealed that dramatic cases with emotional stories featuring the victims’ families attracted the greatest attention in the Turkish media. Reactions to the attacks and support for a number of government policies and responses were also the ones covered the most. As is common in crisis coverage, Turkish press and television closely tracked official resources. Patriotic stories that focused on the bravery of Turkish soldier martyrs and national pride, along with the cruelty of terrorist acts and their impact on innocent civilians, were the most common themes of the media’s coverage of terrorism. From this perspective, it can be argued that the news media contributed to ‘emotional reactions that could immobilize the public, making them fearful and unable to respond rationally to future terrorism risks’.37 On the other hand, it primed public opinion in a fashion hostile to terrorists by helping the military and the government to justify their actions in the fight against terrorism. 4.

The Public The success of terrorism is measured by the impact it causes. As Brian Jenkins has said ‘terrorism is a theatre’ and its aim is the feelings it will create in the audience.38 In times of crisis public opinion is an important player. ‘Public opinion can be mobilized quickly against an external threat in ways that produce dramatic shifts in policy’.39 Turkish public opinion is significantly affected by news coverage, as well as by real world indicators and by personal experience of terrorist events. In a very recent example, on July 27 2008 terrorists detonated bombs in a crowded region of Istanbul, claiming the lives of 17 people and seriously injuring 154 innocent civilians. Among those who died were a pregnant woman and three small children. For this type of event, personal experience plays a crucial role. ‘The link between personal experience and physical proximity to the events clarified the additional power of terrorist events to frighten individuals most immediately affected by terror’.40 On the other hand, concerning the operations of the Turkish military against PKK terrorists in Southeastern Turkey, we depend on the media to inform us, since we don’t have a chance to experience the event firsthand. In this instance, the vast majority of the population is not exposed directly to events, so they are

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______________________________________________________________ provided with information through the mass media. Duration of the coverage is also important. The ability of the public to make sense of terrorist events has been influenced by accumulated exposure to news reports. Regular tracking of the news has increased ‘both the perceived risk of terrorism, as well as fear and anxiety’.41 Fear and anxiety, in turn, have increased patriotism. The escalation of PKK terror in real life and the mass media’s coverage of it made it one of the most discussed topics on the public agenda in Turkey. According to the survey done by Estima Research Company of Istanbul in September 2006, terrorism and the PKK were considered to be the most important issues (along with unemployment and economic problems) facing Turkey. Respondents revealed that security concerns were the one issue that they feared and worried about the most. About 25% of the public said that they feared for their safety the most. Terror, unemployment, economic instability and social erosion, with the violence portrayed by the media, were the factors that inflict public fears about security.42 The government, the news media, and events themselves seem set to continue fuelling this sense of threat, so that concern about terrorism will remain relatively high on the Turkish public’s agenda.43 According to another survey done by Turkish Information Research Consultancy Company on November 3-4 2006, the public held the government responsible for security issues and for terror attacks. One question asked about the source of security issues like terror and purse/bag snatching. In response, 54.5% of respondents gave the government as the source, while 38.7% of them held politicians responsible. In late 2006, The International Strategic Research Education and Consultancy Centre Platform of Turkey measured the Turkish public’s opinions regarding institutional and professional reliability. A sample of 2,100 people was selected from fifteen cities. The Turkish Army was chosen as the most trusted institution by 81.94% of respondents, while the political parties were the least trusted institution (7.30%). The platform’s coordinator, sociologist Dr. øbrahim Armagan, evaluated the results of the survey, and stressed that the public expects the solutions of economic and security problems to come from politicians and the government, and as they see that these problems have remained unsolved, they rate the politicians as unsuccessful.44 Media Monitoring Centre in Turkey traditionally prepares a report every year called ‘Media Agenda of the Year.’ The 2007 report was compiled after the examination of each news item in over 1,700 newspapers, magazines, TV Channels and news web sites in Turkey. According to the report, terror was the top of the media’s agenda in 2007. In other words, terrorism became the most discussed topic of the year. Terror incidents were covered in 270,535 news items, and broadcasted for 4,678 hours on TV

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______________________________________________________________ (equivalent to 195 full days of broadcasting on one channel). News about terrorism also led to a decline in the European-Union related news in the media.45 An American research organization, the International Republican Institute, held a survey to measure Turkish public opinion in November 2006. The survey methodology was in-person, in-home interviews. One of the questions in the survey asked about the most serious danger facing Turkey in the next five years. Thirty percent of respondents identified the ‘economic crisis’ as the most serious danger, while 17% of them identified ‘terror in the Southeast’, and 12% ‘terror in major cities’. The majority of participants also held the ‘government in Ankara’ responsible for the problems in the Southeast, while also stating that the government’s role is the most crucial. Fifty-four percent of participants also thought that the West had helped separatist groups like the PKK gain strength. The International Republican Institute measured public opinion in Turkey again on May 31 – June 7, 2007. A total of 1507 people were selected as a sample. When the respondents were asked to rate the issues that would be important to them while voting in the July 22, 2007 general election, they rated unemployment, economy, and security-terrorism as the top three issues. Fifty percent of participants saw themselves as more nationalist than before. In another question, the reasons for the problems in the Southeast were asked. The most reported reasons were economic underdevelopment of the region and the desire of foreign governments to divide Turkey. When participants were asked which institution they trust the most on a scale from 1 to 10, they revealed the army as the most trusted institution (7.84). The same survey was repeated between March 29 - April 13 2008. The size of the sample was 1,554 people, and the methodology was the same as in previous years. Respondents were asked to rate the institutions that they trust the most on a scale from 1 to 4. And the army again hit the top with 3.46, while the judiciary came in second place. According to the majority of people, unemployment/economy along with security issues/terror are the most important issues. On 28 October 2007, in the Eurasia Marathon on the Bosphorus Bridge, which is a traditional run from the Anatolian to the European side of Istanbul, thousands of runners waved Turkish flags and shouted slogans denouncing the PKK. The marathon turned into an anti-terror protest with the participation of more than 100,000 people. Thousands of protesters also marched with flags in Ankara, Kocaeli, øskenderun, and Kayseri on the 84th anniversary of the establishment of the Turkish state the next day. These were the signs of growing public anger in the aftermath of deadly attacks by the PKK which left 47 civilians and soldiers dead over a period of a couple of weeks. These protests put pressure on the government to order a cross-border operation into northern Iraq to hit terrorist cells,46 and resulted in a resolution

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______________________________________________________________ approving such a military operation. After the resolution’s approval, Turkish security forces made a sustained push against the PKK in late 2007, inflicting heavy casualties.47 In the presence of the worrisome threat of terrorism in Turkey, the public’s trust for the government’s officials and institutions declined, while the trust toward Turkish military skyrocketed. Citizens who rallied around the flag also rallied around Turkish armament. Violent attacks and those that involve high numbers of casualties increase the policy salience of terrorism, but they also lead to a decline in support for the government. 5.

Conclusion In democratic societies, the public depends on the mass media for information about daily events and the actions of the government. ‘Thus, many people believe that one of the roles of the press in a democracy is to ensure an informed citizenry.’48 Coverage of one of the most popular newspapers in Turkey of PKK terrorism seems to confirm this pattern. As Picard suggested, as in the case of most newspapers’ coverage, Hurriyet initially emphasized the details of the incidents, followed by an emphasis on government responses, with an eventual third phase emphasizing ‘latest developments’ and causes of the incident.49 This chapter has analysed how the news media reported the threat of terrorism with an example of one mainstream newspaper’s coverage and how the news media coverage in turn helps shape Turkish public opinion. Considering the numbers of casualties, it can be argued that Turkey is in a category of high terrorist vulnerability. Terrorism affects the ability of modern democracies to fulfil one of their primary functions—the preservation of personal security.50 As terrorism makes people feel unsafe, it undermines the sense of stability and security ‘even if it does not pose a grave risk to the country as a whole’.51 The message conveyed by the terrorists is that anybody, at anyplace, at anytime, might be a casualty of an attack. This disruption of daily life, in turn, results in severe damage to the foundations of governments. The government and the media exist in a symbiotic relationship. In times of crisis, this relationship becomes even more critical, as both parties need each other to survive. But as Doris Graber emphasizes, ‘balancing the security interests and freedom of the press is a critical goal in democratic societies. The preservation of civilian oversight of the military, and popular oversight of government, depend on an informed public’.52 This chapter shows that people learn from news and ‘improving the quality of news can produce a more informed, trusting public, even in crisis characterized by terrorism frames’.53 Knowledge is power, and the anxiety of terrorism can be reduced by providing knowledge, therefore the public must understand that terrorism is

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______________________________________________________________ indeed psychological warfare. ‘Modern terrorism strategy places the civilians on the front of the war against terror-armed forces may do a great job, but if the public is afraid of terrorism, we can win the battle but lose the war’.54 A nation facing the threat of terrorism should guarantee its citizens’ preparedness to deal with terrorism and its psychological ramifications.55 The government, media and public opinion—each player has a unique responsibility under the threat of terrorism. The media should avoid coverage and broadcasting that would serve terrorist organizations’ propaganda, always provide the source of information regarding casualties, avoid broadcasting scenes or publishing pictures of victims that could cause trauma for the public, and send experienced reporters to incident scenes. On the government side, a spokesperson needs to exist to inform the public about terror incidents when they happen. The government should work in coordination with the military and the media, trying to provide as accurate information as possible for them. Since the main purpose of terrorism is to convey its actions to larger audiences sensationally, the public’s biggest responsibility is not to allow terrorists to disrupt their daily lives, and to continue their routines under the threat of terrorism.

Notes 1

D Ü ArÕbo÷an, ‘Possibilities of Coordination and Cooperation Against Terrorism Among Institutions’, Proceedings of the First International Symposium on ‘Global Terrorism and International Cooperation’, Ankara, 23-24 March 2006, p. 130. 2 Foundation for Middle East and Balkan Studies, ‘A Case Study of the PKK in Turkey’, in Federation of American Scientists, 21 May 2004, viewed on 2 July 2008, . 3 Terrorism Project, ‘In the Spotlight: PKK (A.k.a. KADEK) Kurdish Worker’s Party (A.k.a. Kurdish Freedom and Democracy Congress)’, in Center for Defense Information, 21 May 2002, viewed on 1 July 2009, . 4 ibid. 5 ‘PKK and Terrorism’, in TurkishPress.com, 23 October 2007, viewed on 1 July 2009, . 6 Foundation for Middle East and Balkan Studies, op. cit. 7 ‘PKK and Terrorism’, op. cit. 8 ibid. 9 S Cagaptay, ‘Can the PKK Renounce Violence?’, Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2007, p. 45. 10 ibid., pp. 47-48.

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______________________________________________________________ 11

R Matthew & G Shambaugh, ‘The Pendulum Effect: Explaining Shifts in the Democratic Reponse to Terrorism’, Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, vol. 5(1), 2005, p. 4. 12 M Landau, et al., ‘Deliver Us from Evil: The Effects of Mortality Salience and Reminders of 9/11 on Support for President George W. Bush’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 30(9), 2004, pp.1136-1150. 13 Foundation for Middle East and Balkan Studies, op. cit., p. 172. 14 Translated and paraphrased from the Turkish by the author from ‘25 Ekim 1983 tarihli 18204 sayili Olaganustu Hal Kanunu [A State of Emergency Act No.18204, October 25, 1983]’, in Turkiye’de Basin Ozgurlugu Mevzuati (The Regulations Concerning Press Freedom in Turkey), M S Gemalmaz and O Dogru (eds), Hurriyet Ofset Matbaacilik, Istanbul,1990, p. 179. 15 Translated and paraphrased from the Turkish by the author from ‘2950 Sayili Kanun, ek madde 1 [The Act No. 2950, added Article No.1]’, 10 November 1983, viewed on 12 July 2008, . 16 L Whitman & T Froncek, ‘Paying the Price: Freedom of Expression in Turkey’, The Report of U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, 1989, p. 4. 17 Anti-Terror Law of Turkey, Act No.3713, 12 April 1991, viewed on 27 April 2008, < http://www.opbw.org/nat_imp/leg_reg/turkey/anti-terror.pdf>. 18 ibid., p. 77. 19 ibid. 20 Translated and paraphrased from the Turkish by the author from ‘1999 Yili RTUK Basin Bildirileri [The RTUK Press Releases of 1999]’, 20 January 2000, viewed on 1 August 2008, . 21 ibid. 22 Committee to Protect Journalists, ‘Middle East and North Africa: Country Report’, 2 February 2000, viewed on 3 August 2008, . 23 ibid. 24 The U.S. Department of State, ‘The 2000 U.S. Department of State Country Report on Human Rights Practices in Turkey’, 6 February 2001, viewed on 7 August 2009, . 25 ibid. 26 ibid. 27 ibid. 28 Anti-Terror Law of Turkey, op. cit. 29 ‘The 2000 Regular Report from the European Commission on Turkey’s Progress towards Accession’, in European Commission, 8 November 2000,

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______________________________________________________________ viewed on 28 July 2008,<www.dpt.gov.tr/Docobjects/Download /2472/2000% 20(En).pdf>. 30 Article 25, ‘Law on the Establishment of Radio and Television Enterprises and Their Broadcasts Law No. 3984’, 20 April 1994, viewed on 26 May 2008, . 31 Anti-Terror Group, ‘Self-Criticism on PKK from Land Forces Commander’, in PKKterror.com, 26 September 2007, viewed on 2 June 2008, . 32 Y Pries-Shimshi, ‘Creating a Citizenry Prepared for Terrorism: Education, Media, and Public Awareness’, in International Institute for CounterTerrorism, 1 June 2005, viewed on 23 June 2008, http://www .ict.org.il/Articles/tabid/66/Articlsid/184/currentpage/13/Default.aspx . 33 ibid. 34 ibid. 35 ibid. 36 ibid. 37 P Norris, M Kern & M Just, ‘The Lessons of Framing Terrorism’, in Framing Terrorism: The News Media, the Government and the Public, P Norris, et al. (eds), Routledge, London, 2003, p. 295. 38 B M Jenkins, ‘High Technology Terrorism and Surrogate War: The Impact of New Technology on Low-Level Violence’, Project Rand Report #P-5339, The Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, 1975, pp. 12-15. 39 Matthew and Shambaugh, op.cit., p. 5. 40 Norris et al., op. cit., pp. 295-96. 41 ibid., p. 295. 42 Report on Halkın Gundemi (Public Agenda), 2 September 2006, viewed on 3 May 2008, < http://www.estima.com.tr/raporlar.asp?page=3 >. 43 Norris et al., op. cit., p. 291. 44 ‘En Az Güven Milletvekili, Müteahhit ve Din AdamÕna’, in Hurriyet, 6 November 2006, viewed on 15 July 2008, <www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/ 5383513_p.asp>. 45 ‘Media Agenda of the Year’, Medya Takip Merkezi, 2 January 2008, viewed on 24 June 2008, <www.medyatakip.com/medya_sistem/medya_ data/site/medyaarastirmalari/58.doc>. 46 ‘Public up in arms against PKK terror’, in Today’s Zaman, 29 October 2007, viewed on August 1 2009, .

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______________________________________________________________ 47

‘BasÕn AçÕklamasÕ (Press Release)’, 21 October 2007, viewed on 22 July 2008,. 48 M W Traugott & T Brader, ‘Explaining 9/11’, in Framing Terrorism: The News Media, the Government and the Public, P Norris, M Kern & M Just (eds), Routledge, London, 2003, pp. 194-195. 49 R G Picard, ‘Stages in Coverage of Incidents of Political Violence’, in Terrorism and the News Media Research Project Monograph Series, Emerson College, Boston, 1988. Quoted in M W Traugott & T Brader, ‘Explaining 9/11’, in Framing Terrorism: The News Media, the Government and the Public, P. Norris, M. Kern & M. Just (eds), Routledge, London, 2003, pp. 194-195. 50 Matthew and Shambaugh, op.cit., p. 4. 51 ibid. 52 D A Graber, ‘Terrorism, Censorship, and the 1st Amendment: In Search of Policy Guidelines’, in Framing Terrorism: The News Media, the Government and the Public, P Norris, et al. (eds), Routledge, London, 2003, p. 294. 53 Norris et al., op. cit., p. 298. 54 Pries-Shimshi, op. cit. 55 ibid.

Bibliography Anti-Terror Group, ‘Self-Criticism on PKK from Land Forces Commander’, in PKKterror.com, 26 September 2007, viewed on 2 June 2008, . Anti-Terror Law of Turkey, Act No.3713, 12 April 1991, viewed on 27 April 2008, < http://www.opbw.org/nat_imp/leg_reg/turkey/anti-terror.pdf>. ArÕbo÷an, D. Ü., ‘Possibilities of Coordination and Cooperation Against Terrorism Among Institutions’. Proceedings of the First International Symposium on ‘Global Terrorism and International Cooperation’, Ankara, 23-24 March 2006, p. 130. ‘BasÕn AçÕklamasÕ (Press Release)’, 21 October 2007, viewed on 22 July 2008, .

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______________________________________________________________ Cagaptay, S., ‘Can the PKK Renounce Violence?’. Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2007, pp. 47-48. Committee to Protect Journalists, ‘Middle East and North Africa: Country Report’, 2 February 2000, viewed on 3 August 2008, . ‘En Az Güven Milletvekili, Müteahhit ve Din AdamÕna’, in Hurriyet, 6 November 2006, viewed on 15 July 2008, <www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/ 5383513_p.asp>. Foundation for Middle East and Balkan Studies, ‘A Case Study of the PKK in Turkey’, in Federation of American Scientists, 21 May 2004, viewed on 2 July 2008, . Gemalmaz M. S., & O. Dogru (eds), Turkiye’de Basin Ozgurlugu Mevzuati (The Regulations Concerning Press Freedom in Turkey). Hurriyet Ofset Matbaacilik, Istanbul, 1990, p. 179. Graber, D. A., ‘Terrorism, Censorship, and the 1st Amendment: In Search of Policy Guidelines’, in Framing Terrorism: The News Media, the Government and the Public, P Norris, et al. (eds). Routledge, London, 2003, p. 294. Jenkins, B. M., ‘High Technology Terrorism and Surrogate War: The Impact of New Technology on Low-Level Violence’, in Project Rand Report #P5339, The Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, 1975, pp. 12-15. Landau, M., et al., ‘Deliver Us from Evil: The Effects of Mortality Salience and Reminders of 9/11 on Support for President George W. Bush’. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 30(9), 2004, pp. 1136-1150. Law on the Establishment of Radio and Television Enterprises and Their Broadcasts Law No. 3984, 20 April 1994, viewed on 26 May 2008, . Matthew, R., & G. Shambaugh, ‘The Pendulum Effect: Explaining Shifts in the Democratic Reponse to Terrorism’. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, vol. 5(1), 2005, pp. 4-5.

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______________________________________________________________ Medya Takip Merkezi, ‘Media Agenda of the Year’, 2 January 2008, viewed on 24 June 2008, <www.medyatakip.com/medya_sistem/medya_data/site/ medy aarastirmalari/58.doc>. Norris P., M. Kern & M. Just, ‘The Lessons of Framing Terrorism’. Framing Terrorism: The News Media, the Government and the Public, P Norris, et al. (eds). Routledge, London, 2003, p. 295. Picard, R. G., ‘Stages in Coverage of Incidents of Political Violence’. Terrorism and the News Media Research Project Monograph Series, Emerson College, Boston, 1988. Quoted in M. W. Traugott & T. Brader, ‘Explaining 9/11’. ‘PKK and Terrorism’, in TurkishPress.com, 23 October 2007, viewed on 1 July 2009, . Pries-Shimshi, Y., ‘Creating a Citizenry Prepared for Terrorism: Education, Media, and Public Awareness’, in International Institute for CounterTerrorism, 1 June 2005, viewed on 23 June 2008, . ‘Public up in arms against PKK terror’, in Today’s Zaman, 29 October 2007, viewed on August 1 2009, . Report on Halkın Gundemi (Public Agenda), 2 September 2006, viewed on 3 May 2008, < http://www.estima.com.tr/raporlar.asp?page=3 >. Terrorism Project, ‘In the Spotlight: PKK (A.k.a. KADEK) Kurdish Worker’s Party (A.k.a. Kurdish Freedom and Democracy Congress)’, in Center for Defense Information, 21 May 2002, viewed on 1 July 2009, . ‘The 2000 Regular Report from the European Commission on Turkey’s Progress towards Accession’, in European Commission, 8 November 2000, viewed on 28 July 2008, <www.dpt.gov.tr/Docobjects/Download/2472/ 2000%20(En).pdf>. The U.S. Department of State, ‘The 2000 U.S. Department of State Country Report on Human Rights Practices in Turkey’, 6 February 2001, viewed on 7 August 2009, .

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______________________________________________________________ Traugott, M. W. & T. Brader, ‘Explaining 9/11’, in Framing Terrorism: The News Media, the Government and the Public, P. Norris, M. Kern & M. Just (eds). Routledge, London, 2003, pp. 194-195. Whitman L., and T. Froncek, ‘Paying the Price: Freedom of Expression in Turkey’. The Report of U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, 1989, pp. 4-77. ‘1999 Yili RTUK Basin Bildirileri [The RTUK Press Releases of 1999]’, 20 January 2000, viewed on 1 August 2008, . ‘2950 Sayili Kanun, ek madde 1 [The Act No. 2950, added Article No.1]’, 10 November 1983, viewed on 12 July 2008, . Banu Baybars-Hawks is an Associate Professor and Chair of Public Relations Department at the Faculty of Communications at Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey. Her research interests include media studies, media law, politics and terrorism.

PART III Fear, Horror and Literature

Into the Woods: Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf Cynthia Jones Abstract Little Red Riding Hood is one of the most popular and beloved fairytales of Western society. It remains so popular because of the interesting relationship between the little girl and the wolf. While many believe this tale to be merely a cautionary tale, warning young girls about the ‘big bad wolf’, this tale is actually about the subversion of fear and the recognition of one’s inner animal nature, or the animus. This chapter will point out the important role that the forest plays in the encounter between Little Red Riding Hood and how the wolf is actually a part of Little Red Riding Hood. The wolf symbolizes a side of herself that she does not yet know or understand, and it is within the woods that she is able to encounter this side. By comparing and contrasting three different versions of the tale, we will discover how the wolf is the representation of the wild and animal nature within Little Red Riding Hood, and how she is able to internalize this animal nature and thus become consciously aware of her animus. Thus, this tale remains so popular not because it is a cautionary tale, but because it is a tale about subverting the fear of one’s inner animal nature. Key Words: Animus, Jung, Little Red Riding Hood, liminal space. ***** [O]nce we begin listening to or reading a fairytale, there is estrangement or separation from a familiar world inducing an uncanny feeling which can be both frightening and comforting.1 Why is it that fairytales never lose their popularity? The same tales have been enjoyed by children and adults for centuries. What makes fairy tales so important is their ability to fascinate both younger audiences and more mature audiences, because there is always something that the reader or listener will connect with. Fairy tales become a key to understanding our own emotions and thoughts. This chapter will take an in-depth look at the popular fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, which never ceases to lose its popularity, and discuss the relationship between the girl and the wolf. Little Red Riding Hood (which shall be abbreviated to LRRH when referring to the character) is not merely a cautionary tale to warn little girls of the perils of speaking to strangers, although this may have been the intent that

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______________________________________________________________ Charles Perrault had when he wrote Le Petit Chaperon Rouge in 1679. Unlike the oral versions of the tale that were around at the time, Perrault allowed LRRH to be eaten at the end of the story and summarized it by adding a moral poem at the end warning young girls about the smooth talking ‘big bad wolf’: Mais hélas! Qui ne sçait pas que ces loups doucereux De tous les loups sont les plus dangereux! 2 [But alas for those who do not know that of all wolves The docile ones are those who are most dangerous]3 In fact, what is even more interesting about the fairy tale written by Perrault is that this is the first time the little girl in the story wore a red cap – in earlier oral versions she didn’t have any distinctive clothing. The oral version of the folktale that was collected by Paul Delarue, The Story of the Grandmother, had a very different ending in which the little girl realized who she was in bed with and was able to escape from the wolf and save herself.4 The other popular version of this tale is Rotkäppchen, by the brothers Grimm where LRRH is saved at the end of the story by the heroic Jäger. This chapter will seek to explore the relationship between LRRH and the wolf within these three versions of the tale: The Story of the Grandmother (Paul Delarue), Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (Charles Perrault) and Rotkäppchen (Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, 1825). First, it will be important to note the role of the woods in the fairytale, and how it creates the liminal space that makes her encounter with the wolf possible, and then we will look at how the wolf represents LRRH’s inner animal nature and her animus. Then the question that remains to be answered is: What can we learn from LRRH and the wolf in this tale? The tale of LRRH is actually the tale of a girl who subverts the fear of her unknown inner animal nature. The wolf in this tale represents the inner animal nature of LRRH that she has not yet become consciously aware of. The wolf becomes the symbol for the fear of the wild and savage man within. Thus one confronts the dialectic between cultural nature and the wild, animal nature in man. LRRH goes into the woods through a rite of passage, and before she can return to society, she must confront her inner animal nature. She must overcome the fears that society has placed on the wild or savage nature of man in order to understand this other side of herself that she has, until this point, not been aware. LRRH cannot meet this side of herself within the safety and confines of society and therefore must go into the woods. She must leave society and all that she knows of society in order to be allowed to meet this other side of herself. In this journey, she must physically leave society and enter into the wilderness (or in a Rousseauan way, return to

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______________________________________________________________ nature in order to meet her animal/nature side), before she can return to society. 1.

The Role of the Forest as Liminal Space The forest in folklore is often associated with fear; it is the place where anxieties and desires clash. This is the space where all metamorphoses take place. The deeper one goes into the forest, the darker and more ominous it becomes, as if digging through the depths of the human mind – going into dark corners where one would normally never dare to explore. In all three of the versions of the tale being explored in this chapter, LRRH is never afraid to go into the woods, even though the reader may feel scared for her. The reason for such lack of fear on LRRH’s part is that the woods in the fairytales represent a liminal space. This space becomes a place that is neither here nor there. It is a space of transition, where one is no longer in a fixed state. According to Victor Turner, these entities are ‘betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and [the] ceremonial’. 5 Turner uses the term ‘liminal’, coming from the Latin for ‘threshold’ that is part of the three steps in the rites de passage that Arnold van Gennep researched in his early twentieth century writings. The first stage in the rites de passage was the separation which van Gennep called the ‘preliminal rites’, the second stage was the transitional stage, which he called ‘liminal or threshold rites’, and the final stage which is the ceremony of reincorporation was called the ‘postliminal stage’. 6 What we are most concerned here with is the space that is created for these rites of passage in the second stage. This transitory state needs a space in which the person can go to subject themselves to, or undergo, these rites. It is the liminal space. It is a space that is ‘betwixt and between’, ‘neither here nor there’, and allows the individual a somewhat, although not completely, safe space to undergo this transition from one world/state to another. One could liken the liminal space to Purgatory, insofar it is neither hell nor heaven, but a space in which one waits to be purified in order to ascend to heaven. In the liminal space one is at the threshold, meaning that one is neither within the centers of society nor outside the center, merely at the threshold or the border, sitting on the fence. James Conroy goes on to further explain the threshold as ‘the entry and exit point between zones of experience or understanding. In this sense it is on the edge of ‘things’: a point of entry and/or exit’.7 At this threshold, one is able to perceive the world, culture, and society differently than when in the center of these places. The previous frameworks and ideology of that society dissolves and leaves the liminal space free of any attachments to these ideologies. This is a normative space, where things that may not be normal within the frameworks of society, are normal within the liminal space. It is not a question of being on the outside or being the outsider amongst society, but of a space separate from the insiders

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______________________________________________________________ and the outsiders where anything goes and anything can happen, and anything will be perceived as ‘normal’. When used in the context of fairytales, it makes a little girl talking to a beast seem normal, therefore the reader following the character through its passage into the liminal space will also perceive this behavior as normal. When Perrault and the Grimms note that LRRH did not know any better than to not speak to wolves, the reader knows that within the normal conventions of society this would not be advisable, nor even possible for that matter, but because LRRH herself has entered the liminal space, it is normal that she would engage in conversation with any other being sharing that space with her. This transitional state is not a state or place used for good. Conroy notes that, ‘the liminal does not offer an unalloyed space for good…it was not unknown for someone occupying a liminal space to be attacked’, 8 meaning that evil and harm can come to the people that have entered this space. A boy that is sent into the forest, as a rite of passage to manhood, should expect that he would encounter the animals that live there. Yet within the context of the relationship between the reader and the character in the liminal space, it allows the reader to enter into the liminal space and remain safe while following the character on its journey through this space. Upon entering into this space, all previous statuses are stripped away and everyone within the space is on an equal level. Within this space, one is reduced to a common level with all others in the space. Beings in this space are neophytes or initiands, and must not have any status markers or symbols separating them from others in the space. Neophytes become a blank slate within the liminal space; they are open and submissive to new knowledge that will be bestowed upon them within this transitory state to take with them to the next world or state. Entering the liminal space is much like Alice falling through the rabbit hole and coming out into a world where everything is backwards, upside down and opposite to the world on the other side. The neophyte enters into a situation where everything is the opposite of the previous state. Turner listed the binary oppositions from the preliminal world to the liminal one to show how the status- system changes. In the preliminal space it is a state (meaning static state) whereas the liminal space is a transition. The main character is static in the preliminal world, but once entering the liminal area this character is in transition. In the liminal space there is equality, in the preliminal and post liminal spaces there is inequality. This is due to the fact that within the liminal space there are no hierarchical statuses. Also within the liminal space there is anonymity as opposed to systems of nomenclature. This makes it possible that when LRRH enters the woods she is only known as the little girl: she loses whatever name society had given her prior to entering the liminal space. Turner also mentions the opposition between foolishness and sagacity, simplicity and complexity. Inside the liminal space,

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______________________________________________________________ foolishness becomes the norm. One would do things in the liminal space that they would know not to do within society. The liminal space is also one of simplicity in opposition to the complexity of society. Everything in this world has been turned upside down, and is the opposite of the previous world. According to Victor Turner: Liminality, marginality, and structural inferiority are conditions in which are frequently generated myths, symbols, rituals, philosophical systems, and works of art. These cultural forms provide men with a set of templates or models that are, at one level, periodical reclassifications of reality and man’s relationship to society, nature, and culture. But they are more than classification, since they incite men to action as well as to thought.9 Therefore, the woods within the tale of Little Red Riding Hood are clearly man’s creation of a liminal space through which LRRH must travel. In all three tales she goes through each step on Gennep’s rites de passage. She starts in her mother’s house where she is given the goodies to take to Grandmother. In the second step, she enters into the woods, which becomes her liminal space. Finally, she returns from the woods, where she is initiated or reincorporated back into society. This space of ‘neither here nor there’ and ‘betwixt and between’ offers the perfect setting for LRRH to encounter her animus, which shall be discussed later. Here she will be on the same level as her animus and it would not seem odd or abnormal that she would speak to him, since in this transitional state the normal laws and regulations of society do not apply. In her preliminal state, she is closed off from her animus and fixed in a static position within society. However, once she is allowed to enter the threshold she becomes open and more submissive to what is around her. She ignores any rules or warnings from the outside world because in this space, they do not apply. Liminal space exists in each of the versions being explored in this chapter, although the largest difference would be between the oral tale and the written versions. In The Story of the Grandmother, there is no specific costume making her different from any other girl. She is simply referred to as la petite fille: she has no specific nomenclature that differentiates her status from another. The girl remains anonymous, as does the wolf, which is called a bzou, meaning werewolf. There is also a ceremonious stripping-away of her little girl clothing that the other versions don’t have. In this tale she is asked to take off each article of clothing that she is wearing and throw it into the fire. She is being stripped down to nothing so that she may enter the new world, or next stage. The bzou says to the little girl, ‘undress, my child…and

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______________________________________________________________ come and sleep beside me’.10 She does as he says, for in the liminal space one is often submissive where outside of this space one would not be. She follows all of his directions and hops into bed with the bzou. Turner notes that reincorporation into the postliminal stage is often through sexual acts. The character of liminality is often marked as being sexless or of undetermined sex. Before the little girl lies with the wolf, she is still just a child with no marked sexual polarity; however, ‘the resumption of sexual relations is usually a ceremonial mark of the return to society as a structure of statuses’.11 Only upon close inspection, in the bed, does the little girl realize that she is not with her grandmother, and devises a plan to escape. This is the only version of the three tales where the little girl gains the knowledge to save herself on her own. Within the topsy-turvy liminal world, she is able to outrun a beast that within her normal world would have surely eaten her. She has learned how to take care of herself and to not be overtaken by the bzou without the help of any other person. She leaves the woods and re-enters society with the new knowledge that she learned in the woods. The journey the little girl takes through the woods is also important. In this version of the tale, unlike the tale by Perrault or the Grimms, she comes upon a fork in the road where she meets the bzou. The bzou asks her where she is going and which path she plans to take to get there, the path of the needles or the path of the pins. In any other world this would seem strange, but at the threshold, all that is strange becomes normal. Neither path seems better than the other: both are painful, one with needles and the other pins, indicating that no matter which path you choose in life, there will be pain. She must make her initiatory voyage through these woods in order to get to the other side and neither path will guarantee safety. The bzou in this story acts more like a guide than an enemy: asking her to choose a path, aiding her in her rise to the matriarchal head of the family by having her eat the flesh of her grandmother, and then testing her to make sure she can survive on her own wit. She survives this test and thus returns to society no longer a child but a young woman. Within this tale, and similar to the others, the little girl is extremely obedient and submissive, to the point where the reader may see her actions as foolish. All of these are qualities normal to the liminal space and abnormal to the real world. The bzou asks her to choose a path and she does so obediently, he asks her to eat the flesh of her grandmother and she does so with no questions asked, he then asks her to remove all of her clothes and she does that willingly as well. She is submitting to the wolf who is at the same time her equal and a knowledgeable guide who will help her access knowledge that she needs. There are three distinct stages in The Story of the Grandmother that are also present in Rotkäppchen, but not entirely present in Le Petit Chaperon Rouge. In The Story of the Grandmother and also in Rotkäppchen, she starts

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______________________________________________________________ in the preliminal stage where a woman, not specifically her mother, gives the little girl bread and milk to take to her grandmother. The liminal stage is when she enters the woods. The woods become the threshold space through which the little girl completes her transitional voyage to her grandmother’s house. The third step, the postliminal, or reincorporation to society, is when she is able to escape from the bzou and run all the way back to her house before the bzou can catch her. The little girl completes her initiatory encounter with the wolf, also representing her animus, and is able to successfully complete the transitional stage and reenter into society. The version written by Charles Perrault does not have the third stage in the rite of passage. She leaves her mother’s house, enters the woods, but after being eaten by the wolf the story ends. It is not clear that there is an entrance into the postliminal stage, although the death of LRRH could symbolize an entrance into another world. She is no longer a little girl and therefore could not return as such. The version that the Grimms published has a rebirth of LRRH back into the world after being swallowed whole by the wolf. The Jäger cuts her out of the wolf’s stomach and she returns to the world with new knowledge that she had gained from her experience in the liminal space. Perrault’s version is the first account of the tale where the little girl is known by her red hood. Previous oral versions collected by Paul Delarue did not have the girl dressed in any specific clothing, unless the version had been influenced by the Perrault version of the tale. Subsequent written versions of this tale have usually had the famous red riding hood, including the version by the Grimms that was heavily influenced by the Perrault version. This feature which distinguishes her from other little girls seems to go against the anonymity of the liminal character. However, one could also look at this cloak as being a symbol that she is a child, no different from another child. According to Turner, neophytes embarking on a rite of passage are often only wearing a strip of clothing. 12 In parts of Hessen, Germany there was the custom of little girls wearing a little red hat, but once they passed through puberty they wouldn’t wear it anymore. Therefore, the red riding hood symbolizes her status as a neophyte entering the liminal space. The most important aspect that all three tales have in common is the lack of fear after entering the woods. All three tales make it very clear that LRRH was not afraid to speak to the wolf, whereas under normal circumstances, she should be. In this space of ‘betwixt and between’ LRRH is able to meet her animal nature without any fear. In the version by Perrault and the Grimms, it is stated clearly to the reader that LRRH did not know not to talk to the wolf: ‘however, Little Red Cap did not know what a wicked sort of an animal he was and was not afraid of him’.13 She doesn’t fear the wolf, nor can she fear him, because within the liminal space all normal conventions

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______________________________________________________________ of society no longer apply and what one fears within society one does not fear. The wolf is a part of LRRH that has been distanced from her in this space so that she may understand it. She is learning to find the balance between her animal nature and her cultural nature. Hans Peter Duerr mentions that: Werewolves are persons who are able to dissolve within themselves the boundary between civilization and wilderness, who can step across the fence separating their ‘civilization side’ from their ‘wilderness side’, their ‘wolf’s nature’. These are people who can look their ‘animal nature’ in the eye, something usually kept under lock and key in their culture and in this way can develop a consciousness of their ‘cultural nature’.14 In this liminal space LRRH is able to dissolve the boundary that lies between her and her animal nature, and therefore successfully confront him without fear. In the famous illustration by Gustave Doré, Le Petit Chaperon Rouge dans la Forêt, which represents the encounter between LRRH and the wolf, he depicts her looking directly into the eyes of the wolf.15 Jack Zipes notes that this illustration shows that the wolf represents her own sexual desires and also that of the male desire to dominate and violate women.16 While this may have been Doré’s intention, it also shows that within this encounter LRRH is not afraid to look at her animal or wild self directly in the eye. In fact, she is inviting this encounter. In the liminal space she is discovering her own ability to move between her animal nature and her cultural nature. The fact that she is devoured by the wolf in the Perrault and Grimms’ version means that she allowed herself to completely change into her ‘animal nature’. Although Perrault ends the story with the wolf devouring LRRH, the Grimms show that she is able to come back to her cultural nature, though only with the help from another member of society, the Jäger, who is also a member of the woods and familiar with the transformation from man to animal and vice versa. According to Duerr, ‘those who wished to come to know the essence of culture needed to go into the wilderness. Only there could they discover their everyday nature which was familiar to them and yet unknown’.17 The Jäger had already made his journey into the woods and had come to understand his animal nature. Within this space of transition he is able to help LRRH understand this other side of herself. In the oral version LRRH is able to overcome the wolf on her own without the help of anyone. The reason that the liminal space is so important in this tale is that without it, she would not be able to meet her animus. This transition stage allows her to

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______________________________________________________________ discover a side of herself that has been cut-off from society, yet she cannot return to society until she understands and learns to use this animal side. 2.

The Wolf The symbol of the wolf has changed and had several meanings throughout time. The wolf can be a nurturing symbol, such as the she-wolf in Romulus and Remus and the wolves that raised Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. The wolf as a symbol of lust came from the Roman slang lupa that meant ‘whore’ and was generally attributed to woman’s lust. It wasn’t until after the Elizabethan period that the wolf was used as a symbol for male lust.18 The word ‘wolf' also resonates with the idea of hunger and the need for flesh. Man fears these nocturnal animals that lurk silently in the woods, taking their prey by surprise, because man does not possess the ability to see in the night and to sniff out their prey. The wolf also carries the symbol of the outsider, or of the outlaw, in archaic times. People who were outcasts from society and law were often considered ‘dead’ by the people still living within society, and these ‘dead’ people often took on the embodiment of the wolf. Duerr notes that, ‘the outlaw, [was] considered to be ‘dead’, the banished person…was called vargr, ‘strangler’ or ‘wolf’ by the Salic Franks and by the Goths’. 19 The wolf becomes an interesting symbol because it carries both positive and negative conations. It has both symbolically good and evil qualities. It is admired for its nurturing social qualities, but is also awed and feared for its ferocious and carnivorous nature. Often, the wolf is equated with young warriors who camp in the woods, on the outside of civilization. The ‘beserkers’, a brotherhood of young men who lived on the outskirts of society, were compared to wolves. These men would eat raw meat and drink blood, professing their faith in Odin (the god of death) as their leader. These men were known for being particularly ferocious in battle, biting into shields and wearing the skins of either a bear or wolf.20 The wolf is the symbol of something that cannot be tamed: something within men that will always be wild and savage, and also admired, yet also feared for the havoc that it causes within tamed civilization. Werewolves were seen as people who could pass easily from human to animal form, melting between the boundaries of civilization and the wilderness. These people had control and access to their animal nature, something that is normally locked up and repressed by society. The wolf in the Perrault version and the brothers Grimm version is described as being wicked. While LRRH does not recognize that the wolf is dangerous, the narrator makes it clear to the audience that wolves do not always have good intentions. In the Perrault version the little girl encounters ‘Old Father Wolf’ who ‘would have very much liked to eat her’, and the narrator makes a note to the audience that, ‘the poor child not knowing that it was dangerous to stop and listen to a wolf’ stopped to talk to him.21 The

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______________________________________________________________ brothers Grimm version says that she meets ‘the wolf’ as opposed to ‘a wolf’, making it a specific wolf that was living in the woods – perhaps waiting for the little girl to pass through. Again, they mention to the reader that, ‘Little Red Cap did not know what a wicked sort of animal he was and was not afraid of him’.22 The narrator in both these tales instills a sense of fear in the listener or reader, whereas in the oral folktale, the wolf is called ‘the bzou’, and nothing else is mentioned. There is no account of his nature – it is up to the reader or listener to decide what the intentions of this bzou is. However, given man’s history with the wolf, simply saying his name brings about fears of being devoured. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in France, wolf attacks in rural areas were rampant. Because of famine, wolves came from out of the woods searching for food, and a great fear of wolves and wolf attacks developed. There were numerous accounts of werewolves attacking children in the fields. Catherine Orenstein quotes one particular case: ‘He [the werewolf] confessed without torture to killing a small girl with his hands and teeth, removing her clothes, eating part of her thighs and arms, and then taking a portion back home for his wife’. 23 Thus, the wolf/werewolf also carries this image of man, broken-down to his most savage state, living off of pure animal instincts. In all three versions, the wolf has decidedly human features. When LRRH describes the features of the wolf she uses words normally used to describe the body of a human rather than an animal. The brothers Grimm version and the Perrault version both state ‘Oh, Grandmother, what big hands you have’24 instead of saying ‘what big paws you have’. In the oral version the little girl says, ‘Oh Grandmother, what big nails you have’,25 instead of using the word ‘claws’. Although it has already been established that this is a werewolf, and being such, he would have human-like qualities. The encounter between LRRH and the wolf in bed rings tones of bestiality. Something that is completely forbidden within the realms of society, however, within the liminal space of the forest, is nothing less than normal. She describes the wolf through human characteristics, yet the reader/listener knows that she is in bed with a wolf. The build-up of sensual sensations in the description of the wolf leads to a sort of climax when the wolf says, ‘all the better to eat you with!’ This situation in the story could be some sort of sexual initiation and has been read that way by many people. However, it could also be the point in the story where she finally recognizes herself within the wolf. She sees that the wolf is merely her animal nature, but in order to understand that part of herself, she needs to be distanced, or using a more popular term, alienated from it. She needs this separation in order to discover her own animal instincts. Between the three tales, the little girl names all five senses as she discovers this new side of herself. She is exploring a new side of herself, slowly touching, smelling, hearing and

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______________________________________________________________ seeing it. By using her most basic senses she will be able to internalize her inner animal nature. 3.

The Wolf as the Animus The wolf in these tales becomes the symbol of LRRH’s animus and her wild nature. In C.G. Jung’s theory of the anima and the animus, the animus is the projection of the masculine in the female’s subconscious. The anima is simply the opposite – the projection of the feminine in the male’s subconscious. The term ‘animus’ comes from the Latin for ‘mind, spirit, courage, passion and wrath’, and was first used in the 1820’s to mean ‘temper’, usually hostile.26 It wasn’t until a century later that Jung used the term towards the inner masculine of the female. However, the original definition is very befitting for the Jungian use of the word. The masculine inner being of the female is often presented as the thug in the first stages of the female’s animus. It is not till the second and third stages that the animus becomes a source of creativity and power for the female. The animus is the personification of the collective unconscious combined with the subconscious of the individual. Not every female will have the same figure as the animus, although they will be able to recognize the symbol of the animus. Jung notes that the collective unconscious is something that is innate in an individual, something that doesn’t come from the individual’s experiences, but is part of a universal nature which all men share.27 Steven F. Walker points out that, ‘biologically, the anima, the inner woman, expresses the presence of a minority of female genes in a man, just as the animus, the inner man, expresses the presence of a minority of male genes in a woman’. 28 The animus becomes a way of dealing with the biological presence of male genes within a woman. The projection of the animus onto another being becomes a way for the female to recognize her inner male qualities. Everyone has within themselves masculine and feminine qualities, but one cannot recognize these qualities until coming face to face with their anima/animus. The animus is a masculine figure: both a product of the individual’s unconscious ideas of masculinity through their own experiences and also the collective unconscious. Jung was against the idea that all people were born a tabula rasa. He believed that all humans shared a collective and universal past that is imprinted in the brain within the unconscious, and it is within this realm where we can identify with universal archetypes. 29 Therefore the projection of the animus will be something that all women can recognize. Women often project their animus onto a figure that corresponds with her own unconscious ideas of the masculine, but this projection will also have masculine ideals of the collective unconscious. Thus the wolf in the story is not only the projection of LRRH’s own masculine qualities, but it will also be recognized by other girls listening or reading the tale as their own animus.

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______________________________________________________________ Recognising the animus will help LRRH have a better understanding of herself. According to Emma Jung, the animus is the ‘link or bridge between the personal and the impersonal, the conscious and the unconscious’,30 and finding this link will help LRRH gain knowledge of parts of herself that she didn’t know existed till this point. If the wolf represents LRRH’s animus, then he becomes the link between her conscious and unconscious. The wolf is the projection of her own inner masculinity that she does not consciously understand within herself. She projects these masculine qualities and tendencies onto the wolf in order to gain distance so that she may look at herself from outside of herself. Until she projects these unconscious masculine qualities onto a figure, she cannot fully see or understand them. The encounter in the woods is allowing LRRH to see her inner masculine self on a more conscious level. LRRH overcomes the fear one may have of becoming possessed by her animus. If the animus is allowed to posses the female, she will be ‘suddenly entered by a mood of cold male determination, taken over by abstract opinionated thinking and driven by an impulse toward rash, brutal, determined action’. 31 Since the animus is the representation of masculine qualities that the female may not possess on a conscious level, if she is possessed by her animus, these masculine qualities that could be used to her advantage will actually become her disadvantage. So if she can find the power to hold her own against her animus and not be possessed by it, she will then be empowered by her animus and not hindered by it. The animus will no longer be a danger to her; instead, it will become a creative power that she can use to expand her creative capacity.32 In becoming more aware of her animus she must learn how she can use it to increase her own power rather than allowing it to take over. In the Grimms’ version LRRH is possessed by her animus, but then she is able to become un-possessed with the help of the Jäger. This tale is more educational for the female reader in that she can see how LRRH is learning to control her animus. She is swallowed whole by the wolf (her animus), then rescued by the Jäger, and later in the second part of the story when she is confronted by another wolf she is able to overcome him. LRRH shows that she has learned how to deal with her animus and doesn’t allow herself to be possessed by it. She uses the cunning instincts from her animus in order to control it. In the Perrault version LRRH is swallowed by the wolf, and the story ends there. This could be a caution to other little girls to not let themselves be completely taken over by the wolf, or this could illustrate Perrault’s own fear of women’s animus. It should be noted that both of these tales were written or recorded by men who, perhaps on an unconscious level, fear women’s animus and the power that it gives them. Jung, who coined the terms animus/anima was afraid of women’s animus. According to Steven F. Walker, Jung felt that:

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______________________________________________________________ a woman’s ruthless criticism is one form of animus attack that men resent greatly. A woman…possessed by her animus is ‘always right’ and Jung believes that ‘in intellectual women the animus encourages a critical disputatiousness’.33 Men fear a woman who is possessed by her animus, or even worse, has learned to use her animus and become empowered by it, because they then become less subordinate or willing to be dominated by men. Particularly within the version by Perrault one can sense a deep underlying fear of women who become stronger than men: LRRH must be punished for wanting to know her animus and is therefore devoured by it. The Story of the Grandmother is the only version where the reader sees the little girl overcome the situation by herself. She is not completely taken-over by her animus, for once she realizes what it is she devises a way to get away from the wolf. She is not running away from her animus in this instance, but is instead using the creative power of her animus to overcome it. This version of the story provides its audience with a solution for the confrontation with one’s own inner animal/animus that is dealt with solely by the main character without the help of another individual. It shows the audience that it is possible to return to society after confronting the animus, and that this confrontation will only aid in the understanding of one’s self. 4.

Conclusion In each of the tales discussed in this chapter, the relationship between LRRH and the wolf is similar. The wolf represents her double, her animus or animal nature that she has not yet discovered. Within the woods (the liminal space) she can be alienated from her animal nature so that she may see it as another being. Before she can return to society, she must internalize this part of herself and become consciously aware that it exists within her. However, the intent of the authors of these tales may have differed as to the question of how to deal with one’s inner animal. Perrault is warning young maidens to not be possessed by their animus; in fact, they should just avoid it all together. The Grimms are trying to teach these young girls how to overcome the animus. However, this is only possible through the help of the Jäger, indicating that she would not be able to do this on her own. In the oral version, The Story of the Grandmother, LRRH is able to hold her own against her animus/animal nature. She does not allow herself to be devoured by it, but uses the creative powers of her animus to escape. Through her encounter with the wolf, she becomes empowered by a side of herself that she is starting to become consciously aware of. Thus Little Red Riding Hood truly becomes a tale about learning to harness one’s own inner instinctual being and to become empowered by it, rather than devoured by it.

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______________________________________________________________ There is a part of us that belongs to society, a part that belongs to nature, and we must learn how to find this balance. LRRH is simply trying to teach young readers how to go about finding this balance, reminding them that there will come a time when they will sense these instincts that lurk within themselves, and that they should not be afraid of these instincts but instead harness them for their benefit. In the end, LRRH is not defeated by the Big Bad Wolf; instead she subverts fear and consciously internalizes her animus. One should not fear one’s own animus – one should use its creative power to one’s advantage.

Notes 1

J Zipes, ‘Jack Zipes - Are Fairy Tales Still Useful to Children?’, in The Art of Storytelling with Children, 28 June 2008, viewed 24 February 2009, . 2 C Perrault, Les Contes de Charles Perrault, Librairie des Bibliophiles, Paris, 1976, p. 129. 3 J Zipes, The Trials and Tribulations of Little Riding Hood, Routledge, New York, 1993, p. 93. 4 There was once a woman who had some bread, and she said to her daughter: ‘You are going to carry a hot loaf and a bottle of milk to your grandmother’. The little girl departed. At the crossroads she met the bzou, who said to her: ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I’m taking a hot loaf and a bottle of milk to my grandmother’. ‘What road are you taking’, said the bzou, ‘the Needles Road or the Pins Road?’ ‘The Needles Road’, said the little girl. ‘Well, I shall take the Pins Road’. The little girl enjoyed herself picking up needles. Meanwhile the bzou arrived at her grandmother’s, killed her, put some of her flesh in the pantry and a bottle of her blood on the shelf. The girl arrived and knocked at the door. ‘Push the door’, said the bzou, ‘it’s closed with a wet straw’. ‘Hello, Grandmother; I’m brining you a hot loaf and a bottle of milk’. ‘Put them in the pantry. You eat the meat that’s in it and drink a bottle of wine that is on the shelf’. As she ate there was a little cat that said: ‘A slut is she who eats the flesh and drinks the blood of her grandmother!’ ‘Undress, my child’, said the bzou, ‘and come and sleep beside me’. ‘Where shall I put my apron?’

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______________________________________________________________ ‘Throw it in the fire, my child, you don’t need it any more’. And she asked where to put all the other garments, the bodice, the dress, the skirt, and the hose, and the wolf replied: ‘Throw them in the fire, my child, you will need them no more’. ‘Oh, Grandmother, how hairy you are!’ ‘It’s to keep me warmer, my child’. ‘Oh, Grandmother, those long nails you have!’ ‘It’s to scratch me better, my child’. ‘Oh, Grandmother, those big shoulders that you have!’ ‘All the better to carry kindling from the woods, my child’. ‘Oh, Grandmother, those big ears you have!’ ‘All the better to hear with, my child’. ‘Oh, Grandmother, that big mouth you have!’ ‘All the better to eat you with, my child’. ‘Oh Grandmother, I need to go outside and relieve myself’. ‘Do it in the bed, my child’. ‘No, Grandmother, I want to go outside’. ‘All right, but don’t stay long’. The bzou tied a woolen thread to her foot and let her go out, and when the little girl was outside she tied the end of the string to a big plum tree in the yard. The bzou got impatient and said: ‘Are you making cables?’ When he became aware that no one answered him, he jumped out of bed and saw that the little girl had escaped. He followed her, but he arrived at her house just at the moment she was safely inside. P Delarue, ‘The Story of the Grandmother’, in Little Red Riding Hood: A Casebook, A Fife (trans), A Dundes (ed), The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1989. 5 V Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Aldine Publishing Company, New York, 1969, p. 95. 6 A van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, M Vizedom & G L Caffee (trans), Routledge, London, 1977, p. 21. 7 J C Conroy, Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Imagination, Education and Democracy, Peter Lang Publishing, New York, 2004, p. 55. 8 ibid. 9 V Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Aldine Publishing Company, New York, 1969, pp. 128-9. 10 P Delarue, op. cit., p. 15. 11 V Turner, op. cit., p. 104. 12 ibid. p. 95.

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J & W Grimm, ‘Little Red Cap’, in Little Red Riding Hood: A Casebook, A Dundes (ed), The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1989, p. 9. 14 H P Duerr, Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Society, F Goodman (trans), Basil Blackwell Inc, New York, 1985, pp. 86-87. 15 G Doré, ‘Illustration de Les Contes de Charles Perrault’, in Bibliothèque Nationale de France, viewed on 6 March 2009, . 16 J Zipes, The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, Routledge, New York, 1993, p. 359. 17 H P Duerr, op. cit., p. 65. 18 D Harper, ‘Wolf’, in Online Etymology Dictionary, viewed on 20 February 2009, . 19 H P Duerr, op. cit., p. 61. 20 ibid. p. 62. 21 C Perrault, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, in Little Red Riding Hood: A Casebook, A Dundes (ed), The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1989, p. 4. 22 J & W Grimm, op. cit., p. 9. 23 C Orenstein, Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked, Basic Books, New York, 2002, p. 95. 24 J & W Grimm, op. cit., p. 10. 25 P Delarue, op. cit., p. 15. 26 D Harper, ‘Animus’, in Online Etymology Dictionary, viewed on 03 March 2009, . 27 C G Jung, Les Racines de la Conscience, Y Le Lay (trans), Editions Buchet/Chastel, Paris, 1997, p. 14. 28 S F Walker, Jung and the Jungians on Myth, Garland Publishing Inc, New York, 1995, p. 45. 29 C G Jung, op. cit., p. 78. 30 E Jung, Animus and Anima, Spring Publications, Zürich, 1978, p. 1. 31 S F Walker, op. cit., p. 54. 32 ibid., p. 58. 33 ibid., p. 52.

Bibliography Bettelheim, B., The Uses of Enchantment. Vintage Books Edition, New York, 1977. Bricout, B., La Clé des Contes. Seuil, Paris, 2005.

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______________________________________________________________ Conroy, J. C., Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Imagination, Education and Democracy. Peter Lang Publishing, New York, 2004. Delarue, P., Le Conte Populaire Français. Editions Erasme, Paris, 1957. Deulin, C., Les Contes de ma Mère l’Oye Avant Perrault. Slatkine Reprints, Genève, 1969. Douglas, C., The Woman in the Mirror: Analytical Psychology and the Feminine. Sigo Press, Boston, 1990. Duerr, H. P., Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary Between Wilderness and Society. F. Goodman (trans), Basil Blackwell Inc, New York, 1985. Dundes, A., ‘Bruno Bettelheim’s Uses and Abuses of Scholarship’, The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 104, Winter 1991, pp. 74-83. ——, (ed), Little Red Riding Hood: A Casebook. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1989. Eliade, M., Myths and Reality. W. R. Trask (trans), Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1963. Garrat, A. M., Une Faim de Loup: Lecture du Petit Chaperon Rouge. Babel, Paris, 2004. Harper, D., Online Etymology Dictionary. retrieved 20 February 2009, . Heuscher, J. E., A Psychiatric Study of Myths. Charles C. Thomas Publisher, Springfield, 1974. Jones, S. S., ‘On Analyzing Fairy Tales: ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ Revisited’, Western Folklore, vol. 46, April 1987, pp. 97-106. Jung, C. G., Les Racines de la Conscience. Yves Le Lay (trans), Editions Buchet/Chastel, Paris, 1997. ——, The Collected works of C G Jung. R F C Hull (trans), Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1975.

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______________________________________________________________ Jung, E., Animus and Anima. Spring Publications, Zürich, 1978. Orenstein, C., Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked. Basic Books, New York, 2002. Péju, P., La Petite Fille Dans la Forêt des Contes. Robert Lafront, Paris, 1981. Perrault, C., Contes. GF Flammarion, Paris, 1989. ——, Les Contes de Charles Perrault. Librairie des Bibliophiles, Paris, 1976. Van Gennep, A., The Rites of Passage, M. Vizedom and G. L. Caffee (trans). Routledge, London, 1977. Von Franz, M. L., Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales. Shambala, London, 1995. Walker, S. F., Jung and the Jungians on Myth. Garland Publishing Inc, New York, 1995. Zipes, J., The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood. Routledge, New York, 1993. Cynthia Jones is currently a graduate student at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Her current research is devoted to lycanthropy in French and Francophone folklore and literature.

Solar Midnight: Traversing the Abject Borderline State in Rudyard Kipling’s The City of Dreadful Night Lizzy Welby Abstract In Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ we see a narrator on the very border of ‘I’, precarious, brittle and in disarray. It is a state of utter disunity where identity, according to Julia Kristeva, ‘do[es] not exist or only barely so – double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject’.1 Abjection expels its brutal ambiguity and forces the subject to acknowledge its fragile grip on its own identity. Straddling the border between Romanticism’s crumbling rhetoric and what would become the more introspective art of Modernism, Kipling’s story, captures with remarkable clarity a nihilistic vision of a teeming metropolis. It is a world of horrifying contradictions with his narrator balanced precariously above it all, threatened at any moment to become engulfed by the uncanny pathology of his paradoxical states of subjectivity. The text moves between places, meanings and signifiers that are skewed and buckled; nacreous bones merge with the blanched, cadaverous skin of a leper, sleepers are indistinguishable from corpses, phantoms slip silently through the narrative, gusts of wind are brought to life, predatory creatures are anthropomorphised and breathing the stagnant air threatens suffocation. This chapter will explore, from a Kristevan perspective, Kipling’s portrayal of this abjected, nightmare world of mutability, chaos and fragmentation where death is the ‘border that has encroached upon everything’.2 Key Words: Abjection, city, Julia Kristeva, Modernism, Romanticism, Rudyard Kipling, semiotic, symbolic. ***** An ‘I’, overcome by the corpse…For it is death that most violently represents the strange state in which a nonsubject, a stray, having lost its non-objects, imagines nothingness through the ordeal of abjection. The death that ‘I’ am provokes horror, there is a choking sensation that does not separate inside from outside but draws them the one into the other, indefinitely.3 Julia Kristeva His tone was weary, yet deep and disturbingly calm. The voice of a survivor. God knows what languages it had gone

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______________________________________________________________ through, what silences it had conquered amidst prayers and sobs, what corpses it had had to wrench itself free from in order to reach that low, serious pitch.4 Hélène Cixous Fear, Horror and Terror. Presented in literary topoi these potent emotions engender unsettling feelings that our scholarly texts struggle to pinion, let alone contain, in our critical analyses. A rigorous critical language that regulates and structures our complex and multivalent perspectives on a given text dissolves in the presence of primal fear. Words, the symbolic’s calling-card, become nullified enabling an archaic horror to pass with ease through our now membranous conceptual mirrors and trace a path to an asymbolic elsewhere, the un-entitled semiotic.5 In this fold within the symbolic, an altogether more primal anxiety lies supine, the fear of our own corporeal disintegration. Question: How can we speak of a fear that cannot be captured with any words that might fall from our lips? How can we symbolize the asymbolic? We begin an orchestrated shadow dance of transference from this unnameable anxiety to nameable paradigms of fear. We visit our fears, magically conjure the words to voice them, and transfer them to a flickering cinema screen, to the pristine pages of a book, to the nihilism of the terrorist, to a theological representation of perdition, to a disturbing composition on canvas. To express our archaic fear cinematically, politically and socially is to acknowledge the porosity of our precarious borders, to provoke the death of ‘I’. Sliding beneath the surface of ourselves we become liminal beings, glimpsing the precariously brittle nature of our difficult relationship with our Other self. In a heterogeneous obliquity through which swirl discomfort and anxiety, we confront our Other self, the Other we must keep behind the Lacanian mirror if we are to remain functioning social creatures. For a society to maintain boundaries and limits, the abject must remain marginalised. Julia Kristeva argues that the abject is repellent, it horrifies, it engulfs us in waves of nausea. Abjection, she maintains, in Powers of Horror is: an extremely strong feeling which is at once somatic and symbolic, and which is above all a revolt of the person against an external menace from which one wants to keep oneself at a distance, but of which one has the impression that it is not only an external menace but that it may menace us from the inside. So it is a desire for separation, for becoming autonomous and also the feeling of an impossibility of doing so.6

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______________________________________________________________ As grotesque as it is monstrous, the abject mesmerises us despite the disgust that overwhelms our subjectivity. It compels us to stare in fascinated horror as it leers from the void. The abject has many signifiers that herald its approach. The abject announces itself in the rotting flesh of the zombie who, by blurring the demarcation between the living and the dead, is straddling the borders of subjectivity. Defilement and pollution become the translinguistic markers that track the scent of the abject where the symbolic’s injunction of exclusion or taboo can be executed according to the autocratic law-of-thefather (le nom du père). The abject in the form of crimes, such as terrorism, contravene the law and provoke punishment, sometimes tortuous and bloody. Transgressions deemed immoral or ‘sinful’ by religious institutions can reveal the abject, theological miscreants becoming dangerous Others. But it is in the face of death that the abject truly blooms. Like some grotesque trophy, it sits on the surface of the cadaver. Its presence elicits an incandescent horror that overwhelms us. Glimpsed at the rent of subjectivity, between the symbolic and the semiotic, the abject is both fascinating and repulsive and attests to the constant threat of annihilation. Probe the abject further and the symbolic’s rotting underbelly is revealed, a substructure congested with discomfort, and one retches in disgust, in horror. The abject stretches the limits of subjectivity, we feel faint, ready to fall through the fragile borders of self and into the gaping limitlessness of the abyss: the mis en abîme between the monolithic edifices of self and Other that has been culturally forged once we enter into the symbolic and accept to become socialised creatures. But abjection’s very presence, in guises that I will develop throughout the course of this chapter, mockingly illuminates in, to use Kipling’s turn of phrase, ‘heliographic signals’ of horror and its melancholic companion sorrow, the symbolic’s precarious hold over the tenebrous semiotic. Encroaching upon borders of subjectivity, the abject makes being unbearable. Shattered and in disarray, we are, according to Kristeva, transformed into ‘ill-beings’.7 The abject not only attests to the incommensurability of subject/object but also hovers at the margins of a healthy society, enabling us to recognise and thus cast away the anti-social. In every society the abject occupies the singular position of threatening the coalescence and symbolic identity of both the whole and the individual. Abjection threatens the stability of the symbolic order, forcing both society and the socialised being to confront the tenuousness of différance. The manifestation of the abject may differ from culture to culture but the ensuing fear remains constant in every society. The symbolic’s stability rests on the precarious solidity of its vulnerable borders that prohibit defilement and pollution. The symbolic is thus the order of inner and outer borders where discrimination and difference can be articulated.8 The world that we perceive is merely the systemised cataloguing of experiences that are translated linguistically and bound by the

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______________________________________________________________ structuring organisation of the norms of grammar and syntax. We speak the world into being, in effect. Language circumscribes experience that, in turn, regulates society by shaping religious and secular laws, political and ideological notions and social interactions amongst other things. So that we can function as speaking beings and society can function as a whole, the symbolic issues injunctions (le non du père), and the abject emerges from the borders of prohibition. Ostensibly, the non du père is a prohibition of desire for unity with the maternal figure, but is extended into any breach of the law: venturing into an elsewhere that remains off-limits, one is outside of borders, exiled from the paternal function. Analysing Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ (1888) from a Kristevan perspective I aim to demonstrate the horror that ensues when the borders of subjectivity are breached, when the exile catches in murmuring silences the lost voice of the mother figure, residing in the semiotic, a space where he was not-yet-subject/not-yet-object. The abject helps to define and reconfigure the borders of the ‘I’, thus the subject is in opposition to the named or imagined object. The exile, for Kristeva, is the ‘one by whom the abject exists…a deject’.9 Incapable of delineating the territory of his being, his sense of place, instead, provides the deject with a desire of meaning - his ‘where’ replaces his ‘who’. As this space is in a constant state of flux, the deject is compelled eternally to reinterpret and re-territorialize his world. In the case of ‘The City of Dreadful Night’, Kipling stalks through his literary past, cannibalises the images that he finds there, and produces a decidedly abject text. For it is in the mercurially shimmering nature of this exile’s universe, wherein lies the abject, that threatens to reveal the frightening brittleness of the narrator’s identity. Like a speculum, the narrator’s wanderings excavate a canal from his torn and shattered sense of self to an altogether more archaic separation from an Other figure, the suffering of which is revealed in a continual echo of loss that ripples through the story: loss of sleep, loss of linear time, loss of boundaries, loss of cultural markers, loss of literary lineage. The position of the Other presents a threat that is connected to autonomy and borders, but the exile, Kristeva tells us, although he senses the danger of loss ‘cannot help taking the risk the very moment he sets himself apart’.10 A stalker and wanderer, the exile’s reparation is inextricably fettered to diaspora. Like a neurotic whose corporeal injuries are but the signs of masked memories, ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ is troubled by the corpse of memory.11 Hovering on the border between self and Other, ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ reanimates a suffering that the narrator is never quite able to articulate. Overwhelming loss characterises much of Kipling’s earlier fiction: loss of self/identity (‘To be Filed for Reference’, 1888), loss of childhood (‘The Story of Muhammad Din’, 1886, ‘Little Tobrah’, 1888), loss of sanity (‘At the End of the Passage’, 1890, ‘The Mark of the Beast’, 1890), loss of status (‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’, 1885), loss of love (‘On

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______________________________________________________________ Greenhow Hill’, 1890). The stories of the 1890s are written in the aftermath of a breakdown, hastened by a disappointing chance encounter with his first love Flo Garrard, the death of his closest friend Wolcott Balestier, and a final parting from his best-beloved India.12 Indeed, there was much for Kipling to forget, yet stories such as ‘The City of Dreadful Night’, ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’ (1890) and ‘The Brushwood Boy’ (1895), written in the final decade of the century, actually read like obsessive rituals as they reanimate the very horrors of separation and loss that they try to repress. ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ is crowded with images of horror, manifested in inverted cultural codes that are contained in its masterfully ragged syntax. Tired idioms limp through the story snuffling at their own fragmented forms. Viewed through a Kristevan lens, the story struggles to stifle its unbearable reality yet, becomes ritualised in the process, relocating interior horrors onto an exterior landscape. According to Freud, ceremonial rites, whilst appearing to neutralise acts and desires culturally deemed taboo, actually replicate them. A ritual, Freud argues is ‘ostensibly a protection against the prohibited act; but actually…a repetition of it’.13 In ‘The City of Dreadful Night’, the very effort to shroud its suffering in whispering silences lays the story open to be rattled by the terrors of its synchronic memories. A silence ‘voices’ an archaic Other whilst obliterating signifiers, replacing them with, to use Homi Bhabha’s term, the ‘non-sense’14 of alterity. Just as E. M. Forster writes of the Marabar caves translating ‘the squeak of a boot’ or the ‘divine words’ of Christianity into a reductive ‘boum’15, so mimetic social codification is obscured in Kipling’s elegant textual tapestry where the ‘guttural growl’ of a shopkeeper is etymologically fastened to a ‘gutter[ing]’ hookah pipe.16 Individuals merge with inorganic matter to produce, in Kristevan terms, a violent dark revolt of being where the narrator is placed ‘literally beside himself’.17 The story, curiously overlooked by a number of commentators of Kipling’s art, is a repressive text that is assiduously pulled in two opposing directions. The semiotic and symbolic modalities endlessly work against each other. The narrator’s need to stamp the symbolic’s law upon this most frightening vista, coupled with the defilement that threatens to burst through the very frame of the narrative, drenches the text in horror. The narrator ultimately establishes the supremacy of the autocratic symbolic but not before the horrors of the night reveal that mutability can be a normative state. Although the desire for order is the driving force behind the story, the power of the abject, which threatens a fragmentation of subjectivity, also provides movement within the story. The abject borderline state throws into relief the eternal stillness of the semiotic modality counterbalanced as it is by the parcelling drives of the symbolic. This nœud borroméen creates a textual tension between inexorable drive toward mutability and the desire for the restoration of boundaries. But order is an illusion due in part to the

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______________________________________________________________ underlying fluidity of the story that acts as kaleidoscopic undercurrent, pulling the narrator beneath the authority he struggles to maintain. Surface order merges with a substratum of reigning decomposition and meanings are lost in the polluted mire. Is this a story of life or death, of rejuvenation or annihilation? Does it surrender to nihilism or laud religious discourse? Does it privilege a single voice that has access to a ubiquitous ‘truth’ or does it embrace a social heteroglossia that incorporates an Other discourse? Is the narrator’s horror extraterrestrial or intra-terrestrial? 1.

The World was Horribly Changed ‘The City of Dreadful Night’, collected in Life’s Handicap (1891) begins in horror: ‘The dense wet heat that hung over the face of the land, like a blanket, prevented all hope of sleep in the first instance’.18 Sliding from the heat-scorched earth to the narrator’s insomnia almost imperceptibly, Kipling’s masterful sleight of writer’s hand reveals a narrative of obverse symbols. The mélange of culture/nature and civility/chaos become hybrid signifiers of torment. We find the narrator embedded in a cavernous darkness: an ‘empty, echoing house’, around which curls a suffocating ‘dead air’.19 The necropolis outside signifies immobility, a stasis magnified in the dry, discarded bones, an image of dusty and faded death that spares the narrator from the viscosity of the cadaver. The bones that peep from under the soil point to a ready acceptance of death as an abstract concept, a signified death. Kristeva argues that in the presence of such signification ‘a flat encephalograph, for instance – [we] would understand, react, or accept’.20 Bleached bones appear to be notional corroborators of death. But Kipling, adept at literary ‘tints and textures’,21 is rarely so one-dimensional a writer. The narrator passes over the ‘jawless skulls and rough butted shank-bones’22 for the July rains, and whilst they hold promise for renewal of life, are like an agent of abjection, disinterring the dead. In a ‘hare-like’ movement the narrator’s world is overturned as the narrator discovers beyond the borders of the cemetery, ‘sleeping men who lay like sheeted corpses’.23 Neither alive nor dead these ‘corpses disposed on beds in fantastic attitudes’24 present in Kristeva’s terms, ‘the most sickening of wastes…a border that has encroached upon everything’.25 Kipling’s description is even more horrifying as these are not corpses but despoiled living creatures – abjection’s markers made flesh, so to speak. Kristeva maintains that ‘refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live’.26 In the natural process of things, she argues, we are used to seeing detritus in the form of bodily fluids, and waste matter. These things are what ‘life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death’.27 Such falling away of refuse is representative of the border between the clean and the polluted, between the safeguarded and the wasted, between life and death. Kipling’s description of the sleepers with death’s signifying

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______________________________________________________________ ‘bound-up mouths’28 dissolves these lines of demarcation, ‘death infecting life’29 from which there is little protection, nothing to shore up an identity crumbling and in disarray. Overcome by uncanniness, the corpse as abject beckons to the narrator although its embrace, to which he is repulsed by but curiously drawn to, offers only engulfment. All linear time and logicality is smashed and the past rushes up to greet him in the present as the long-dead of the cemetery are reanimated in the corpse-like sleepers whose subjectivity is ambiguous; the impossibility of an ‘I’ which is simultaneously an Other. The narrator, too, becomes an ‘I’ which is not; a negative characterised by lack, his ‘I’ residing in the place where it most decidedly shouldn’t be - in the realm of the Other. Bereft of light: a Romantic symbol of transcendental vision and spiritual illumination, bereft of human contact, bereft of sleep, the narrator’s perspective, his point of view is in danger of disappearing in the abjected void of representation, situated on the translinguistic borders of the symbolic. The dark, echoing house becomes the horror vacui, and like the mother’s body, is representative of the Absolute beginning and end of space. The only way the narrator avoids being devoured by this terrifying void is to repeat the gesture of original separation and leave the house. But outside lies a surreal Manichean wasteland filled with nightmarish abjected elements. Detritus is the abiding image in ‘The City of Dreadful Night’. The narrator, in ritual purgation, inventories the waste of quotidian life that lies scattered about him, the ‘disused Mahomedan burial-ground’, the exposed fragments of bones, a ‘smoke-stained lamp-shard’.30 The heat from the dead air that sets the cicalas and jackals screaming also sends the bones in a Muslim cemetery rattling to the surface to escape its oppressive presence. Liminal spaces open up in the narrative as the moon changes places with the sun. ‘It was hard not to believe that the flood of light from [the moon] above was warm’ says the narrator, reinforcing the ambivalence.31 Caught between sleep and wakefulness, between the silent stasis of the house and the rustling movement outside, between life and death, the narrator enters a state of ambiguity situated on the very borders of subjectivity: a state that Victor Turner argues is ‘neither here nor there, betwixt and between all fixed points of classification’.32 Almost as an agent of abjection, the narrator reveals a membranous inside/outside by blurring the difference between the living and the dead and becoming in the process the revealer of in-betweenness. Living things have become dead things, unearthly things, and have overrun the city: ‘more corpses…and again more corpses…ghosts rise up wearily from their pallets’.33 Yet the story does not emphasise a fear of the dead in themselves so much as their invasion of the perimeters of the living, and this in-between space gnaws away at the distinctions of subjectivity, like the rat that has burrowed into the turban of the Mosque’s janitor. Their existence recalls the spectral figure of Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’, doomed to exist neither in

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______________________________________________________________ the world nor out of it, but occupying a space on the borders between life and death, endlessly intoning the horror of the abyss. In a sense ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ is already struggling toward invocation. An uncanny re-writing of James Thomson’s apocalyptic 1874 poem of the same title, the story strives toward a cathartic relief by purloining Thomson’s imagery, structure and nullifying vision. The vast, deserted cemetery where ‘Perchance you find one mourner to a thousand dead’34 of the poem finds its narrative counterpart in Kipling’s image of the narrator standing in isolation before a Muslim burial ground; Thomson’s ‘men that were as phantoms flit and roam’35 become ‘sheeted ghosts [that] flit into the dark depths of the building’.36 The trudging, desolate rhythm of the poem with lines that seem to overhang their rhythmic breaks is mirrored in Kipling’s guttering sentences as if the narrator is struggling to contain the words within their syntactical boundaries: More corpses; more stretches of moonlit, white road; a string of sleeping camels at rest by the wayside; a vision of scudding jackals; ekka ponies asleep – the harness still on their backs, and the brass-studded country carts, winking in the moonlight – and again more corpses.37 Just as the poet is condemned to wander in a limbo of the lost, Kipling’s narrator stalks through an equally ambivalent landscape where nightmare and reality have become confused and con-joined. Although Kipling borrowed both the title and the recurrent motif of isolation and disintegration from the poem, it struggles to cast out Thomson’s pessimistic vision of urban decay. Kipling’s city is an ambivalent megalopolis where the wreckage of humanity lies exhausted on the city’s rooftops and littered by its roadside, silently disintegrating. It is a waste ground where life no longer holds the promise of vitality and regeneration. This ruined city suggests the very borders that stand between renewal and deterioration have dissolved, leaving a scattered wasteland of human debris in a grotesque pastiche of its former inhabitants that have been unearthed in a nearby Muslim cemetery. The dead-in-life are everywhere: some face downwards, arms folded in the dust; some with clasped hands flung up above their heads; some curled up dog-wise; some thrown like limp gunny-bags over the side of grain carts; and some bowed with their brows on their knees.38 The decay is evident in the landscape. The ‘grain cart atilt’ and ‘a few handfuls of thatch’39 not only signify cultural decay but also underscore the

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______________________________________________________________ somatic deterioration. The dissemination of urban waste reflects an inner fragmentation. The text is overrun with corporeal waste, cadaverous remains that stray among its syntax. Sleepers on the path into the city, their subjectivity translated and transposed by a narrator failing to extricate their bodies from the borders of being, become corpses, falling beyond the limits of self. The narrator’s ‘I’ disappears in ‘naked dead’,40 the cadaver that penetrates the other side of the border, the place where, according to Kristeva, ‘I am not and what permits me to be’41. It is this ambiguity that distinguishes the abject from the ‘object’, which the subject meticulously rejects (ob-jects). The border between the subject/object is scrupulously maintained in order for the symbolic to function. The abject, according to Kristeva is neither an ‘ob-ject facing me’ nor an ‘ob-jest ceaselessly fleeing’ but a ‘place where meaning collapses’.42 The abject emerges when exclusions flounder, in the horror of collapsing borders unable to extricate ‘I’ from this liminal space. An example might be found in the in-between that eerily resurfaces in the narrative as a hot breeze that becomes animate as it blows from the mouth of the city or swirls around gullies expelling noxious odours with poisonous intent. In the semantic landscape of the text, the heat, the debris and the frail distinction between sleepers and corpses all imply dissolving definitions. The horror of ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ is located in its porous boundaries, its membranous inside/outside. The miasma that blows through the city implies not only bodily decay but also dissolution of boundaries. Likewise the proliferation of corpses signifies the ‘utmost of abjection’, in Kristeva’s words, ‘that which has irremediably come a cropper’43, and the story is quite literally stuffed with corpses, figuratively disinterred from below ground. The narrator’s garden borders an ossuary where fragments of bones germinate and pierce the earth with the perverse life-giving qualities of night-heat and the July rains. The corporeal debris, which conversely bespeaks of the vitality of life, announces the dereliction of a narrator whose centre has shattered in a terror of ambiguity, an ‘in-between’, ‘composite’ existence where all order and structure have disintegrated.44 Beset by the horror of abjection, the narrator struggles to organise and catalogue the human waste that litters this most terrifying of landscapes. The ‘one hundred and seventy bodies of men’ that lie on either side of the road, some ‘shrouded all in white’, some ‘naked and black as ebony’45 are manifestations of inner disintegration as well as bodily decay. The outcast leper ‘silvery white and ashen grey,’46 attests, in a decidedly Foucauldian way, to a psychological disintegration.47 The filth, which the corpse-like figures garishly display, represents what is ceaselessly cast out in order to live, whilst hinting at a defilement operating within the narrator on a wholly internal level. The narrator too succumbs to this in-betweenness as his narratorial position is split by a voice in the third person pronoun that enters the story

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______________________________________________________________ from outside of its frame. This disembodied voice, like that of an uncanny doppelganger, describes the scene in clipped sentences that, ringing with clarity and authority, counterbalance the increasingly surreal description of the sleeping figures in the preceding lines. Kipling writes: A leper asleep; and the remainder wearied coolies, servants, small shopkeepers and drivers from the hackstand hard by. The scene - a main approach to Lahore city, and the night a warm one in August.48 Enclosed in quotation marks, and only appearing once, it is, in a Kristevan sense, the voice of reason, the voice of the symbolic. The ordered ‘I’ that offers a detached reportage of the scene is connected to its obverse Other who articulates the text’s mutability. The two narratorial points of view make us aware of the borderline state to which the text has succumbed. More fully, horror floods the now ambivalent discourse connecting its opposing modalities: that of reason (symbolic) and that of unreason or non-sense (semiotic). Horror is the symbolic’s reaction to the domain of déraison (Foucault’s term). Bhabha writes that ‘Two contradictory and independent attitudes inhabit the same place, one takes account of reality, the other is under the influence of instincts which detach the ego from reality’.49 The abject borderline state signals a return of the repressed, from a Kristevan perspective, a return of the undifferentiated semiotic modality. What started as an editorial ‘I’ becomes the mark of migration: an ‘I’ that incorporates an Other. Restlessly displacing voice and subjectivity, the énoncé of the semiotic is able to establish an unimaginable énonciation in dialectic opposition to the symbolic. The ‘voiced breath’50 of the semiotic competes with the authoritative tone of the symbolic. In an impossible discourse, the narrator that epistemically catalogues the scene in a logical signifying chain also ‘sees’ that the ‘witchery of the moonlight’51 has morphed the landscape and the people who populate it into frightening inversion of the daytime world, a surreal all-encompassing world that incorporates elements of reality as well as bizarre nightmarish visions. For example, the road to the city by day is by night transformed into a ‘rigid silver statue’ that is ‘straight as a bar of polished steel,52 and splits the now-living dead in two. Bodies fragment in a disjointed heap. Scraps of sounds like clinking bracelets, pitiful shrieks and the tinkling of falling water are connected to shards of river glimpsed through gaps in the city’s walls, flashes of ragged lightening on the horizon and finally returns to the moon that illuminates the entire scene like an inverted sun, or in Kristeva’s terms, a black sun.53 Travestying objects into abject objets is not confined to images of quotidian life. The text is plagued by its own literary forerunners, who like the dead-in-life, become grotesque abject emblems of a narrative that engenders entropy.

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______________________________________________________________ ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ struggles with its Romantic tradition.54 Kipling mutilates his literary past in pastiche, an accomplished skill of the author and a much-loved pastime since boyhood. For poets such as Wordsworth, ambitions and the noblest hopes for humanity, love, harmony, grace imbued with splendour, and might were locked into valued aspects of the natural world, like the sun and moon, stars and mountains, rivers and pastures and so forth. Endowing nature with such lofty attributes enabled the poet to vicariously instil these attributes within him/herself in the search for inner order. The Romantic ideal is reanimated in the optimism of Browning’s poetry, the evocation of a long-gone epoch as in Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King, the resounding patriotism to which even Kipling succumbed throughout his literary career. But in Kipling’s narrative the semantic landscape of the text, reflected in the city, its inhabitants and the narrator, is in disarray. The Romantic ideal of transcendental order established by the imagination reads as a dead language and should be confined, like the bones in a deserted Muslim cemetery, underground. But as the skeletal remains become the translinguistic spoors (Kristeva’s term) of the sleeping corpses in the story, so the carcass of Romantic vision is crossbred with a wan, introspective figure of Modernism to produce a hybridized, borderline image of internal disintegration, like the pigeon imprisoned in niches by the ‘broad diagonal bands’55 of the moon unable to fly, fully grown but ‘squab’56 nonetheless. Dissolving definitions are paradoxically given shape and strength when viewed in conjunction with the majesty of literatures past and the order they brought to a fragmented psyche. Like Thomson’s poem before him, Kipling’s story works as a profanity against the Romantics, abjecting their vision of spiritual unity. The murky ‘clump of tamarisk trees’57, with their reptilian, scale-like leaves, despoil the grace bestowed by the Romantics upon the natural world. The shadow that they cast recalls Matthew Arnold’s ‘pure, dark regions’58 of the heavens, but instead of leading to a path of spiritual fulfilment, this darkness dispassionately swallows life, like the startled hare that hides amongst their roots, in a whimper. Dawn, that traditional image of regeneration and juvenescence is subjected to the same borderline state with a sky that is washed ‘gray, and presently saffron’.59 Saffron, produced by an autumn flowering crocus, becomes a bastardized image of spring, offering no respite from the horror of this cadaverous land. Inverting Romantic images to give a decidedly Modernist feel, the narrator is psychically inserted into the shadow that lays on the border between the symbolism of dawn as rebirth and the actuality of dawn as heralding quotidian city life, between, in effect, the idea and the reality. Potent concepts that resonate in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922).60 ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ plunders its literary past. Invoking a Romantic vision that it continually disavows, thematically, the story anticipates the iconoclastic vigour that defined the Modernist movement.

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______________________________________________________________ Renouncing the Romantic vision and aligning himself more to Thomson’s desolate anti-myth, Kipling creates a vision of the city that is, for the narrator, deeply personal but also stretches tight across text, encompassing its sleeping inhabitants. Like Joyce’s treatment of the city, Kipling presents past and present in synthesis. The ‘once current puns’ and ‘quashed quotatoes’61 of a vanished age evoke the Romantic leitmotif of an exile’s journey, but the narrative’s abjected images deny its restorative potentiality. The journey was an important symbol in Romantic poetry. The traveller was usually the poet and usually alone. In a thematic sense it was a voyage through life and at its end was death or a triumph of the soul over death, ‘life endless…Infinity and God’ in Wordsworth’s words.62 Similarly, the narrator of this story embarks upon a journey, but what begins with psychological suffering (insomnia) and physical suffering (unendurable heat) ends in a horror-filled landscape where the only hope, when it comes, is from the guardianship of paternal authority. Yet even this solicitous space is penetrated by the abject. The child, enclosed in his father’s protective embrace, is threatened by the ‘yellow-skinned, white-toothed pariahs’63 representing, from a Kristevan perspective, the terrifying devouring phallic mother that threatens annihilation.64 The image of the city is a spiritual void, grotesquely modified by its relation to the familiar life of the daytime. A trader continues the work of the day, balancing books with the ‘precision of clockwork’ but spectral ‘sheeted’ figures ‘bear him company’.65 Kipling, the insomniac, frequently strolled the streets of Lahore and Allahabad when, as he describes, ‘the night got into [his] head’66. His memoirs tell us that words literally fail him and he audibly refrains from comment whilst visiting these ‘exotic’ locations ‘for the sheer sake of looking’67, but that these experiences became reanimated in a fictionalised world of dreams. Vividly recreated in ‘The City of Dreadful Night’, Kipling’s penetration of this nighttime world uncovered chaos and fragmentation where death is the ‘border that has encroached upon everything’.68 Unlike Joyce’s Baudelairean flâneur, Stephen Dedalus, Kipling’s narrator stumbles through the wreckage of a literary past, calling forth Zola, Doré and Thomson, scavenging the corpses of their despairing artistic visions and scattering their remains across his text. Yet it is by corrupting the Romantic past that Kipling grieves the passing of its notions of inner harmony. Self-intuition that creates order out of chaos could be achieved by the imagination. The purity and permanence of the natural world could be an antidote to the disorder of a futile, polluted society. Viewed through a Kristevan lens, symbols disentangle the poet from a heterogeneous obliquity establishing a locus in the symbolic, creating order out of ordure, so to speak. ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ is given a setting of sorts but it remains a liminal space. Neither hellish nor empyrean, dreamscape nor reality, but a limbo state between them and this is related to the psychological ‘location’ of the story. The city, scene of urban decay and

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______________________________________________________________ waste, is ring-fenced by the heat-scorched plains. Both images of horror, the city and the plains meld together, no longer metonymically separate but not yet interchangeable signifiers; they are caught, like the narrator himself, in an eternal in-betweenness. The entire landscape is abjected along with its inhabitants. The city’s population fragmented, humanity reduced to a synecdochic jumble of body parts: ‘A black little bullet-head peeped over the coping, and a thin…brown leg slid over on to the gutter pipe…a woman’s arm showed for an instant above the parapet’.69 For there is no return to a lost paradise, a self that Kristeva argues is ‘without others or limits, a fantasy of untouchable fullness’.70 The authoritative walls of the symbolic are crumbling as abjection runs unchecked across the narrative. With the symbolic’s dialectic disintegrating and the narrator’s identity submerging in the void, possibility is glimpsed in its counterpart, the pre-verbal imprints of the fecund semiotic modality. The symbolic’s authority cedes to the pleasurable fluidity of the signifier. Temporality undulates and in one aqueous movement ripples into a spatial environment where the intimacies of whispering silences peep through the veil of the text. ‘Muscular buffaloes blow…like fluid grampuses’. Men’s conversation becomes a muted babble that mixes with the soft guttering of a hookah-pipe.71 The hitherto ‘silenced’ semiotic manifests itself in the city’s echolalia, the ‘voiced breath’, that ripples across the text weaving its abstruse way through it. These archaic sounds, like the metamorphosed buffaloes, blow away the signifying chain of the symbolic enabling a certain unfettered rapture to emerge in the narrative. The noises of the night, in contrast to the silence of the abjected living corpses, are warm and close, reminiscent, in Kristevan terms, of a ‘semiotic rhythms, which convey an intense presence of meaning in a presubject still incapable of signification’.72 In the short time that the narrator rests observing this intimate scene of companionship – men sharing a pipe, seeking solace in one another’s company – we as voyeurs sense his longing to be enveloped in this profoundly welcoming space. The implication is that the narrator’s goal is not to find some conclusion to his journey, but that he might scrap it altogether and retrace his life to what Thomson describes as an ‘antenatal night’ that is ‘beyond the reach of man-evolving Doom’.73 The Romantics wrote for a society that could no longer be measured against a concept of order, and in this respect the breakthrough of primary processes, those elements of the semiotic that are dominated by intonation and rhythmic utterances, lead us, according to Kristeva, ‘directly to the otherwise silent place of its subject’.74 Pre-symbolic existence announces itself in indistinct strains of stringed instruments that melt into the sounds of nature itself. Distance softens coarse music into a ‘plaintive wail’, the ‘low grumble of faroff thunder’75 adding to its melody. The story demonstrates that writing necessarily engenders subversion, just as being cast outside of the law necessitates regulations in situ in the first instance. These indistinct noises, in

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______________________________________________________________ obliterating sequential discourse, subvert the rigidity of the phallic order, replacing semantics with acoustics. In Kristeva’s terms, the semiotic encroaches and overpowers the authority of the symbolic, relinquishing signifiers for inchoate, rhythmic utterances. T. S. Eliot calls this amputation of meaning from sound the ‘dissociation of sensibility’76 and regards it as linguistically undermining signification. Eliot argues that poetry that yields to musicality rather than sense, like that of Milton, is a pleasure ‘aris[ing] from noises’, a language that delights in the ‘mazes’ of its resonances.77 Similarly, Kipling’s descriptions of the soft sounds of the night are Miltonic in their muted undertones that read as rhythmic incantations, extolling the beauty of the semiotic. Language, in this instance, is purified by the alchemy of nonsense. The release of the semiotic into the narrative takes place inside the walled city amongst its indigenous population, a population that the child and adult Kipling was drawn to and entranced by.78 Kipling’s description of the city with its ‘vacant main street’79 evokes Thomson’s forlorn metropolis where its inhabitants, if they meet at all, rarely speak to each other, merely, ‘throw[ing] in a remark from time to time’.80 But whilst Thomson presents a city with no voice, with no community in its ‘soundless solitudes immense’81 Kipling’s silence rings with snatches of speech merging with fragments of music to produce a powerful driving pulsation. Kipling writes that the sleeping city comprises ‘a silence that is full of…night noises’. The binary position of sound and syntax trembles, overturning the ascendancy of meaning over meaninglessness and the text is influenced instead by the more rhythmic incantations of the semiotic. This section is defined by rhythms and refrains that cannot be easily signified. The music of the ‘stringed instrument’ that is ‘only just audible’ is augmented by the ‘rattle of woodwork’ that in turn picks up fragments of conversation over a bubbling hookah.82 The irruption the semiotics heterogeneous rhythmic agency can be thus read as a sublime infraction of the law-of-the-father. As in the example above, semiotic drives appear in the almost cubist juxtaposition of images that rely on sensory perceptions rather than coherent meanings. As the symbolic’s insistence on binary distinctions crumbles, an altogether more archaic modality brings a new energy, a new subjectivity of difference that can paradoxically hold the abject at bay. The ‘slit of light [that] shows itself between the shutters of a shop’83summons up the beauty of the semiotic but is glimpsed momentarily on the borders of the symbolic. In this inbetweenness the mourning of the loss of a pre-verbal state, and a conscious authority over it, is played out in the narrative. For a moment the rhythms, condensation and displacement of imagery shape the direction of the narrative, and the logic of discourse is lost in the kaleidoscopic ambiguity of the text. In Kristevan terms the symbolic processes give way to the semiotic processes.84

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______________________________________________________________ The intrusive affect of this elegant tapestry of aesthetic prose, however, is fleeting as the narrator moves deeper into the heart of the city. All too soon the sclerotic framework of the symbolic attempts to re-insert itself, the thematic and linguistic dialectic of the symbolic and semiotic are set in opposition once again as the narrator struggles for conscious mastery over semiotic echolalia. Kipling’s real-life experiences of the noises emanating from ‘in and around the narrow gullies under the Mosque of the Wazir Khan’85 recall the mutability within its fictionalised counterpart. They are only refuge for a speaker that faces the heart of darkness, a black sun that bespeaks of the horror of abjection threatening violation and annihilation. The voices that articulate a non-sense, the sounds beyond signifiers, the mutterings beyond words become cadenced signifiers to other meaningless but more menacing sounds, the ‘yelling jackals’, the screaming cicadas, the shrieking children’.86 The force of the socialised ego must repress libidinal impulses, which are characteristic of the semiotic modality. In Kipling symbology, the policeman (Strickland87, Policeman Day), the experienced soldier (Private Mulvaney), the benevolent figure of authority (Colonel Creighton, Captain Corbyn), all have the ability to restore psychological and transcendental order to the narrative. However, in this story the desire that threatens the very principle of symbolic order will not submit to the law-ofthe-father and its guardian for the policeman, is subject to the same abjection as the city’s inhabitants. The ‘bar of moonlight [that] falls across the forehead and eyes’ of the turban-less policeman lying asleep on the road’ brings no divine vision of harmony for ‘he never stirs’.88 He remains corpse-like, lying like some grotesque signpost pointing to the mosque where the narrator will find a proliferation of corpses. The narrator’s attempt to reach the summit of the minar is fraught with terror. Picking his way across the hordes of sleeping dead, he encounters a world that, like the ‘pitch-black, polished walls of the corkscrew staircase’,89 is spiralling into chaos where signifiers lose their meaning and transform into ghastly nightmare images. The kites that line the staircase are subject to the same mutability as the hare, the bones, and the narrator whose shifting identity is on the brink of imminent collapse. The kites that ‘snore like over gorged humans’90, the janitor who is a corpse that opens his eyes, the worshippers who are ghosts, all imply unstable signifiers. The narrator’s only hope of halting this slide into obliquity seems to be to get above the horror that is, like the toxic air of the walled city, eddying all around him threatening to engulf him at any moment and consign him to the abyss where the blankness of oblivion waits. But the panorama that awaits the narrator is the embodiment of the nightmare realm. Unable to articulate the horror of the scene the narrator, who momentarily loses the power of narration, calls upon his artistic precursors, Zola and Doré to enunciate what he cannot, the image of the thousands of bodies, illuminated under a glaring moon, writhing in the

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______________________________________________________________ torment of a sleep that eludes them. Kipling presents these corpse-like figures shuddering en masse as a socio-symbolic multitude in ruin. Analytical sobriety has shattered as the law-of-the-father falls and the horror of abjection threatens to engulf the narrator as the void devours the city’s inhabitants: A small cloud passes over the face of the Moon, and the city and its inhabitants - clear drawn in black and white before - fade into masses of black and deeper black. Still the unrestful noise continues, the sigh of a great city overwhelmed with the heat, and of a people seeking in vain for rest.91 The ‘unwinking eye of the moon’ presiding over this hellish scene with ‘sickly warm[th]’92 illuminates the restless multitude below. By breaking down the border of living and dead, by turning the sleeping figures into a proliferation of corpses that litter the realm of vision wherever the narrator’s gaze falls, Kipling erases the taboos surrounding the dead, the signification of which, Freud argues, uncover a vacillation between reverence and repulsion. These taboos, Freud goes on to stress, are ‘expressions of mourning; but on the other hand they clearly betray what they seek to conceal – hostility against the dead’93. It is not the actual corpse that so disturbs identity and eclipses boundaries and limits but more its invasion of the perimeters of the living, the ‘I’, that is distinguishable from the object. Without taboos to hold meaning in place and re-instate the demarcation between the living and the dead, abjection overwhelms the subject like a contagious infection, displacing and shattering as it engulfs. With signification in disarray the narrator turns to religion to provide meaning and reinforce the symbolic against the threat of the semiotic. Kristeva argues that religion is based upon exclusion of the abject through certain taboos.94 The requirement of a ‘stern father’,95 whose word (in name and law) is made flesh, is a prerequisite for self-representation, or syntactic symbolization, in other words. The figure of the priest as keeper of the paternal word helps to maintain the borders of subjectivity. The Muezzin arrives at the mosque ‘to tell the Faithful that prayer is better than sleep – the sleep that will not come’96 asserting, from a Kristevan point of view, that religion provides a homogeneous discourse that denies the oscillation of the semiotic and symbolic: an oscillation in binary opposition that conversely guarantees the stability of the ego.97 The roar that issues from the trumpet together with the call to prayer momentarily provides a refuge from the horrors of the city. The sheer noise of the cry functions as an act of defiance to the landscape of urban decay symbolized in the lightening that ‘leaps like a bared sword’98 on the horizon. The words La ilaha Illallah have lost their

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______________________________________________________________ meaning, but this hardly matters for they represent the word of the father (le non and le nom du père), the paternal law that guarantees the subjugation of the semiotic modality. The ‘splendid cry…of the creed that brings men out of their beds by scores at midnight’99 is de-coded, de-symbolized, for it is the musical cadence as opposed to the words themselves that reinstate the precarious borders of subjectivity. The echolalia of the semiotic modality has been, in effect, signified and reinterpreted in the symbolic. In this respect, the narrative lends itself to the Kristevan interpretation of religion that argues that the unity of the church cannot acknowledge the process of heterogeneity upon which subjectivity is established – that of the symbolic and the semiotic in a state of flux. This instability finds its narrative counterpart in Kipling’s image of the storm that paratactically connects the priest to his abjected surroundings. The ‘thunder[ing]’ voice of the muezzin joins the ‘bass thunder’ of the trumpet in ‘flinging his defiance’ to a wasted landscape that, alive with lightning, answers in the ‘low grumble of far-off thunder’, which is finally extinguished by the muezzin’s ‘grumbling’ as he descends into the silence that has swallowed the city. 100 In Kristevan terms, the authoritative cry of religious discourse, proclaiming the absolute mastery of the symbolic, does not replace the lost pre-symbolic state; rather, it re-establishes the fusion of the self/Other and symbolizes the relationship within the framework of a phallic discourse, the word/construct of God. Religion is reduced to a prosodic discourse that attempts to revoke the text’s collapsing symbols. To an extent it is partly successful. Amid the continued ‘plaintive wail’101 of the city, the moon, that Romantic emblem of magical imagination, ‘slides down toward the horizon’102 bringing an end to the noises of the night and with it the possibility of rejuvenation as the city settles down to silence. Even the narrator’s insomnia is momentarily relieved as he falls into an uneasy doze. A sense of order runs through the narrative, connecting and mapping contrasting social and cultural subject positions, reinforcing colonial hierarchies, and ultimately controlling and structuring linear time after dawn brings an end to the ‘several weeks of darkness’103 that have, in actuality, passed in moments. As well as throwing the semiotic into relief, the reestablishment of phallic order in the narrative ensures that the abject, which has throughout the story disturbed identity, is diminished. The abject borderline state, a painful violent place marked by loss and the fear of loss, slides out of vision as death departs from the living corpses and reinstated to its ‘proper’ place. The narrator’s journey ends with him witnessing the body of a woman, who, unable to withstand the crushing heat, is borne high above the bystanders on her way to the incendiary fires of the burning ghats. The resolution of the narrator’s journey into the city, in these terms, is ultimately an acknowledgement of the autocratic symbolic turning its covetous gaze away from the semiotic. ‘Will the Sahib, out of his kindness, make room?’ says the voice at the end of the story, and in doing so re-inscribes the cultural

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______________________________________________________________ status of, in this instance, the colonizer’s symbolic order where semiotic forces have become co-opted by the symbolic. But more generally, the dialectical oscillation between the supremacy of the symbolic and the subjugated semiotic has been reinstated. Without the symbolic we would live with delirium, defined by psychosis. The absence of the symbolic would deny a discourse of any kind. The narrator’s acknowledgement of the diametrically opposite positioning of the symbolic and the semiotic modalities is implicit in the last line of the story: ‘the city was of death as well as Night after all’.104 Desire and horror, attraction and repulsion lie at the heart of Kipling’s early fiction. The geographical site of rebellion that Kipling found in the night time world of Lahore and Allahabad finds its metaphoric counterpart in Kipling’s early stories of India. The internal struggle between the desire for the unknowable night time India captured in Life’s Handicap (1891) and the reassurance of daytime work of the Empire, brought into sharp relief in The Day’s Work (1898), underline the dichotomy of Kipling’s narrators as distanced and dispassionate spectators and ambivalent voyeurs clearly enjoying what Kipling saw as the intimate and ethereal India. However, the need for boundary control over the self is metaphorically played out in the British imperial civilizing mission over the teeming, seemingly ungovernable population of the Indian subcontinent. Like the nameless, bruised and defiled woman of Eliot’s The Waste Land whose ‘feet are at Moorgate’ and ‘heart/Under [her] feet’105, the India of ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ attests to the constant threat of fragmentation. The monstrous, bloody finger which, in this story, lays bare abjection will, in subsequent story collections, become sheathed, cold, and sterile. It will henceforth point to Best-beloved India as the site of Other, the borders of self will become established, and bleeding boundaries will be cauterized with surgical precision. The speaker on his way into the heart of a night of dread issues a cri de cœur that calls across the text, and wrenching himself free from the corpse of abjection, the voice of a survivor sings, in answer, a melancholic lamentation. India as an artistic expression of the semiotic already under the sway of the autocratic symbolic brings Kipling’s narrator as exile, traveller, and deject to the very brink of existence and forces him to stand petrified at the edge of the abyss; alone, save for the unnameable, unspeakable anguish buried deep in the desire for a perpetually unreachable Other.

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Notes 1

J Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, L S Roudiez (trans), Columbia University Press, New York, 1982, p. 207. 2 ibid., p. 3. 3 ibid., p. 25. 4 H Cixous, ‘Angst’, in The Hélène Cixous Reader, J Levy (trans), S Sellers (ed), Routledge, London, 1994, p. 72. 5 Kristeva’s motion of the semiotic modality that accommodates the child’s pre-linguistic, unarticulated body, replete with her desire for the maternal body can be found in ‘Revolution in Poetic language’, in The Kristeva Reader, T Moi (ed), Blackwell, Oxford, 1987, pp. 93-100. 6 ‘Interview with Julia Kristeva’, in Women Analyze Women, E Baruch & L Serrano (eds), New York University Press, New York, 1988, pp. 135-36. 7 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 140. 8 ibid., p. 69. 9 ibid., p. 8. 10 ibid. 11 J Breuer & S Freud, ‘Studies in Hysteria (1893-5)’, The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, J Strachey (trans), Hogarth, London, 1953-74, vol. II, p. 7. 12 D Gilmour, The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, John Murray, London, 2002, p. 89. 13 Breuer, op. cit., p. 50. 14 H Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 2006, p. 178. 15 E M Forster, A Passage to India, Penguin Books, London, 1979, p.146. 16 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, p. 272. 17 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 1. 18 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, p. 270. 19 ibid. 20 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 3. 21 Kipling, Something of Myself, p. 111. 22 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, p. 270. 23 ibid. 24 ibid. 25 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 3. 26 ibid. 27 ibid. 28 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, p. 270. 29 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 3. 30 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, p. 270. 31 ibid.

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V Turner, Drama, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1974, p. 232. 33 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, pp. 271, 273. 34 J Thomson, ‘The City of Dreadful Night’, in The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems, Reeves & Turner, London, 1888, I., 93. 35 ibid., VII., 415. 36 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, p. 273. 37 ibid., p. 271. 38 ibid. 39 ibid. 40 ibid. 41 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 3. 42 ibid. 43 ibid., pp. 4, 3. 44 ibid., p. 4. See also, p. 9. 45 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, p. 270. 46 ibid. 47 Michael Foucault’s argument of the connection between leprosy in the Middle Ages and the animality of madness in the Classical Age can be found in the greatly abridged Madness and Civilization, R Howard (trans), Pantheon, New York, 1965. Whereas in the Renaissance, madness was integrated, by the Classical Age it suffered exclusion and confinement, and by the nineteenth century it was classified as mental illness, ‘ill-being’, in effect. British colonials feared that an extended working life in the punishing heat of India brought the threat of madness or going ‘Fantee’. 48 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, p. 270. 49 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p.188. 50 Kristeva writes that the indistinct echolalia of the infant anticipates the emergence of syntactical speech. This babble, that is jettisoned by the infant as s/he develops a recognisable language, demonstrates the semiotic modality in oscillation with the symbolic. She writes in ‘The Novel as Polylogue’: ‘To rediscover the intonations, scansions, and jubilant rhythms preceding the signifier’s position as language’s position is to discover the voiced breath that fastens us to an undifferentiated mother, to a mother who later, at the mirror stage, is altered into a maternal language. It is also to grasp this maternal language as well as to be free of it thanks to the subsequently rediscovered mother, who is at a stroke…pierced, stripped, signified, uncovered, castrated, and carried away into the symbolic’. J Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, T Gora, A Jardin & L S Roudiez (trans), L S Roudiez (ed), Blackwell, Oxford, 1993, p. 195. 51 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, p. 271.

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ibid. In Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, L S Roudiez (trans), Columbia University Press, New York, 1989, Kristeva argues that the black sun metaphor sums up the ‘borderline experience of the psyche struggling against dark asymbolism’, p.151. 54 Making his literary name in London (1889-1891), Kipling despised the ideals of the French Aesthetics and their English aficionados, the Decadents, particularly the notion of art for art’s sake, preferring instead the working class patrons of the music halls and the ordinary soldier whose demotic idioms found their crafted way into Kipling’s prose and verse. It is beyond the scope of this essay to deal with Kipling’s vociferous declaiming of what he saw as England’s political and literary inertia, which he attempted to counter by extolling the virtues of action – something that would impact on his literary output for the rest of his writing career. For further discussion see A Lycett, Rudyard Kipling, Phoenix, London, 2000, pp. 247-270. 55 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, p. 273. 56 ibid. 57 ibid., p. 270. 58 M Arnold, ‘A Summer Night’, in Selected Poems, T Peltason (ed), Penguin, London, 1994, p.106. 59 ibid., p. 275. 60 When addressing members of the Kipling Society at their Annual Luncheon, Eliot stated that ‘Kipling had accompanied me ever since boyhood …traces of [his art] appear in my own mature verse where no diligent scholarly sleuth has yet observed them’. ‘The Unfading Genius of Rudyard Kipling’, Kipling Journal, vol. XXXVI(129), March 1959, pp. 9-12, p. 9. A scholarly sleuth by the name of Robert Crawford has subsequently tracked down those ghostly whispers of Kipling. For his excellent analysis of Kipling’s influence on Eliot’s work see R Crawford, ‘Rudyard Kipling in The Waste Land’, Essays in Criticism, vol. XXXVI(1), 1986, pp. 32-46. 61 J Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake, Bradford & Dickens, London, 1960, p.183. 62 W Wordsworth, The Prelude: The Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850). Penguin Books, London, 1995, XIII., 183-4. 63 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, p. 271. 64 For a further discussion of the abject mother’s relationship to her child and the problems this poses for the child’s autonomy see ‘Stabat Mater’, in Tales of Love, L S Roudiez (trans), Columbia University Press, New York, 1987, pp. 234-263. 65 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, p. 272. 66 Kipling, Something of Myself, p. 33. 67 ibid. 53

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Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 3 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, p. 271. 70 Kristeva, Black Sun, p. 20. 71 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, p. 272. 72 J Kristeva, In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, A Goldhammer (trans), Columbia University Press, New York 1987, p. 62. 73 Thomson, op. cit., XVIII., 948, 950. 74 Kristeva, Desire in Language, p. 167. 75 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, p. 275. 76 T S Eliot, Selected Essays, Faber, London, 1932, p. 228. 77 ibid., pp. 261-3. 78 In Something of Myself, Kipling writes fondly of his ‘early morning walks to the Bombay fruit market’, accompanied by his beloved ayah (Something of Myself, p. 3) or peering through the darkness at ‘dimly-seen, friendly Gods’ in Hindu temples (ibid., p.3). As an adult he writes that he would frequently ‘wander till dawn in all manner of odd places…which are not a bit mysterious’ (ibid., p. 33). 79 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, p. 272. 80 ibid. 81 Thomson, op. cit., I., 86. 82 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, p. 272. 83 ibid. 84 Kristeva, Black Sun, p. 65. 85 Kipling, Something of Myself, p. 33. 86 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, pp. 270-271. 87 Kipling’s most famous policeman, the shape shifter Strickland appears in numerous tales, including ‘The Bronkhurst Divorce Case’ and ‘Miss Youghal’s Sais (Plain Tales), ‘The Mark of the Beast’ and ‘The Return of Imray’ (Life’s Handicap) and Kim, amongst others. With a skill that is matched only by Kim, Strickland has the unlikely ability to cross over the cultural barrier that divided native Indian from colonial white man. 88 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, p. 272. 89 ibid., p. 273. 90 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, p. 275. 91 ibid., p.274. 92 ibid., p. 270. 93 Breuer, op, cit., vol. II, p. 61. 94 In Powers of Horror, pp. 90-112, Kristeva discusses biblical prohibitions on waste, food, incest, women and disordered speech to shore up the symbolic from the continued threat of the irreconcilably heterogeneous semiotic. 69

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J Kristeva, ‘Freud and Love: Treatment and Its Discontents’, in The Kristeva Reader, T Moi (ed), Blackwell, Oxford, 1987, p. 261. 96 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, p. 274. 97 J Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology, A Jardine & H Blake (trans), N Keohane, M Z Rosaldo & B C Gelpi (eds), Harvester, Brighton, 1982, p. 50. 98 Kipling, Life’s Handicap, p. 274. 99 ibid. 100 ibid., p. 275. 101 ibid. 102 ibid. 103 ibid. 104 ibid., p. 276. 105 T S Eliot, The Waste Land, in Selected Poems, Faber and Faber, London, 1976, p. 62.

Bibliography Arnold, M., Selected Poems. T. Peltason (ed), Penguin Books, London, 1994. Bhabha, H., The Location of Culture. Routledge, London, 2006. Breuer, J. & S. Freud, ‘Studies on Hysteria (1893-5)’, in The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. J. Strachey (trans), Hogarth, London, 1953-74. Carrington, C., Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work. Macmillan, London, 1978. Cixous, H., ‘Angst’, in The Hélène Cixous Reader. J. Levy (trans), S. Sellers (ed), Routledge, London, 1994. Crawford, R., ‘Rudyard Kipling in The Waste Land’. Essays in Criticism, vol. XXXVI(1), 1986, pp. 32-46 Eliot, T. S., Selected Essays. Faber & Faber, London, 1932.

——, The Waste Land: Selected Poems. Faber & Faber, London, 1976.

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——, ‘The Unfading Genius of Rudyard Kipling’. Kipling Journal, vol. XXXVI(129), March 1959, pp. 9-12. Forster, E. M., A Passage to India. Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1979. Foucault, M., Madness and Civilization. R. Howard (trans), Pantheon, New York, 1965. Gilmour, D., The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling. John Murray, London, 2002. Joyce, J., Finnegan’s Wake. Bradford & Dickens, London, 1960. Kipling, R., The Day’s Work. Macmillan, London, 1898.

——, Traffics and Discoveries. Macmillan, London, 1904. ——, Actions and Reactions. Macmillan, London, 1951. ——, ‘The City of Dreadful Night’, in Life’s Handicap. A. O. J. Cockshut (ed). Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987.

——, Wee, Willie, Winkie. H. Haughton (ed), Penguin Books, London, 1988.

——, Something of Myself and Other Autobiographical Writings. T. Pinney (ed), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991. ——, Plain Tales from the Hills. A. Rutherford (ed), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001. ——, Kim. M ní Fhlathúin (ed), Broadview, Peterborough, Canada, 2005. Kristeva, J., Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. L S Roudiez (trans), Columbia University Press, New York, 1982.

——, ‘Women’s Time’, in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology. A. Jardine & H. Blake (trans), N. Keohane, M. Z. Rosaldo & B. C. Gelpi (eds). Harvester, Brighton, 1982.

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——, In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith. A. Goldhammer (trans), Columbia University Press, New York, 1987. ——, The Kristeva Reader. T. Moi (ed), Blackwell, Oxford, 1987. ——, Tales of Love. L. S. Roudiez (trans), Columbia University Press, New York, 1987.

——, ‘Interview with Julia Kristeva’. Women Analyze Women, E. Baruch & L Serrano (eds), New York University Press, New York, 1988. ——, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. L. S. Roudiez (trans), Columbia University Press, New York, 1989. ——, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. T. Gora, A. Jardin & L. S. Roudiez (trans), L. S. Roudiez (ed). Blackwell, Oxford, 1993.

——,‘Foreign Body: A Conversation with Julia Kristeva and Scott L. Malcomson’. Transition, vol. 59, 1993, pp. 172-183. ——, New Maladies of the Soul. R. Guberman (trans), Columbia University Press, New York, 1997. Lycett, A., Rudyard Kipling. Phoenix, London, 2000. Ricketts, H., The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling. Chatto & Windus, London, 1999. Thomson, J., ‘The City of Dreadful Night’, in The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems. Reeves and Turner, London, 1888 Turner, V., Drama, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1974. Wordsworth, W., The Prelude: The Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850). Penguin Books, London, 1995. Lizzy Welby is affiliated with the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom.

The Laughter of Horror: Judgement of the Righteous or Tool of the Devil? Maureen Moynihan Abstract Laughter requires interpretation from witnesses eager to ‘get’ the joke or to be suspicious of unexplained mirth. In horror texts laughter plays multiple roles, not all of which are clear tools for good or evil, but all of which effect the reader or viewer. The following article will discuss the interpretation of laughter in terms of its coexistence with horror from the familiar sounds of evil laughter to the torturous laughter of apparent hysteria in such texts as The Mark of the Beast by Rudyard Kipling, in which seemingly inexplicable laughter at a horrible situation receives detailed analysis in retrospect, evidence of more than a physiological response to strain. The fear of being laughed at, and the social bonds of shared laughter, indicate laughter’s potential as a performative utterance and instrument of social bonds, even those outside the limits of good taste and ethics. Recent interdisciplinary work in humour studies takes laughter as the product of superiority, incongruity, and relief. These theories provide a framework of self, other, body, and society in which particular instances of laughter can be reread and reinterpreted from critical distance rather than from the subjective position of the interpreter’s personal tastes. Key Words: Horror, humour, interpretation of laughter, kynicism, nihilism, Rudyard Kipling. ***** Fans of Rudyard Kipling or the genre of the short story should appreciate Neil Gaiman’s recent collection of Kipling’s spooky and supernatural tales.1 Notably, the collection includes numerous soldiers and officers spooked by culture clashes and the mysteries of the Orient during British colonial efforts to civilize the East. While politically incorrect now, many are also eerily apt despite the passing decades. Amid the international debates over how and when the United States of America must deal with the issue of torture, terrorist prisoners, and the prosecution of war criminals, The Mark of the Beast (1890) strikes a resonant chord.2 Worst of all for the narrator is the horrible, horrifying laughter of the protagonists turned torturers. The laughing figures bear little resemblance to the honourable image of the patriot and gentleman, but Kipling paves the way to the raucous transformation with such keen attention to human and animal behaviour as to demonstrate how laughter, perhaps even hysterical laughter, both tortures and

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______________________________________________________________ condemns them both to witness their own fall without hope of confession or society’s recognition. Kipling’s text, however, highlights a broader trend in the horror genre – of laughter’s ambiguous and often threatening implications. In 1956, Sean O’Casey wrote ‘The Power of Laughter: Weapon Against Evil’, an essay on the status of laughter and the need to rescue it from ignominy and ignorance.3 Although critics praise catharsis through tragedy’s tears, O’Casey argues that people generally and unnecessarily fear and distrust laughter. A 21st century perspective on this essay begs the question: ‘Who is laughing?’ His unshakable faith in the good of laughter has much to do with the confidence in the ability of the individual to distinguish between good and evil, likely by means of the Bible and good upbringing, and to stand on the moral high ground. While postmodern theories and neopragmatism took the capital letters out of such concepts as absolute Good and Evil for many scholars, those still hoping for a distinction for the purposes of ethics and religion may cringe at the thought that not only are such terms relative, but frequently complicated and inverted in grotesque or carnivalesque literature that offers alternative positions with respect to centralized power.4 Milton’s Satan, read as the embodiment of heroic resistance to an imperious God, has inspired writers up to and including the apocalyptic hilarity of Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens (1990).5 In studies of laughter, devilish laughter has been used to describe Peter Sloterdijk’s recovery of the ‘kynical’ impulse that challenges and destroys claims to absolute truth and authority. Recognizing that power could also laugh, F. H. Buckley’s The Morality of Laughter (2003) identifies ‘genuine laughter’ as a gentle remonstration and separates it from association with the oppressive and insidious ‘derisive laughter’.6 Even studies of Nietzsche have touched on his employment of the laughter of the superman in Beyond Good and Evil (1886).7 Rather than despair, the scholar hoping to take a stance in this postmodern cacophony of recovered and revitalized models of laughter should take heart in the plurality of theories and texts to match the complexity of our relationship to laughter as a product, tool, and consequence of literature’s participation in the centuries’ long dialogue of about good, evil, and human nature. Laughter often belongs to the powerful, to the super villain, the evil genius, the mass murderer. Laughter can terrify on a smaller scale whenever one’s opponent forces recognition of his or her unwelcome superiority. From comic books and radio, to motion pictures and television, to games and the explosion of internet entertainments, the concept of evil laughter has survived and produced reactions ranging from dread to hilarity depending on its context, intertexts, and audience. The recent film The Dark Knight (2008) highlights how the nemesis of Batman, the Joker, twists laughter with a deranged, but potent intellect that delights in the kind of chaos that results not

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______________________________________________________________ in liberty and a new order but in death and destruction.8 Earlier representations of the Joker have employed this laughter for momentary horror or suspense, but few others have reached this level of cynical horror through exploration of the Joker’s bizarre psyche. Other examples can be located in the history of villains. A villain’s laughter can raise anxiety and propel the hero or heroine in a frantic race away from danger as the laughter signifies the certainty of failure, however often the protagonists escape in the final moment. The sound itself has become so familiar that it possesses onomatopoetic forms in many languages, most notably in English as ‘mwahahaha’ or some variation thereof. Whether the goal is comedy or horror, the right evil laugh can prove as important as the right shriek of the damsel in distress or the roar of the alien/dinosaur/beast in hot pursuit. In written texts, the role of the evil laugh may not have the same visceral effect as its aural counterpart, but it can progress a scene by inspiring action or serving in a dialogue as a cryptic or menacing reply in place of a formal verbal response. However not all laughs need be evil, nor from positions of power. In the bodies of the oppressed laughter can equal the offence of spitting in the face of authority. From the perspective of authority this laughter is the devilish laughter, the insidious laughter of the rebel, the traitor, the terrorist. Sloterdijk reminds us: ‘An essential aspect of power is that it only likes to laugh at its own jokes’.9 So too, often, is the individual in the case of jokes at his or her expense. While this may be recovered in looking back at an error in the past, laughter at oneself does represent a confession of error, of limitation, or of weakness no matter how momentary. It invites the laughter of others, the opportunity of being laughed at, the chance to question one’s superiority or even mental fitness. Indeed, a wellblurred grey area lies between the laughter of evil and the laughter of madness, especially considering the twentieth century’s increased pathologising of evil and the psychological state ascribed to the minds of villains and mass murderers. As religion ceded the podium to science with the increasing popularity of psychological explanations of behaviour, the line between good and evil acts can often be equivalent to the line between normal and pathological. Given the number of ways in which laughter produces fear in the inferior or uncomprehending listener, its appearance in horror texts comes as a logical aesthetic and plot element. However, relatively little scholarly work has been produced on the presence of laugher in horror texts. Critics and scholars in many fields have devoted thousands of articles and books to the topic of laughter and the related subject of humour, but studies of laughter often fail to consider examples in the presence of fear, horror, and terror. While it stands to reason that scholars of humour seek to study comedy and satire, but one must look to critics and theorists confronting horror to find

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______________________________________________________________ mention of the exceptional laughter that coexists with fear, disproving the necessary tie with the positive affect of humour. Moments of laughter, like other lacunae, are gaps in the text that serve a valuable function in decoding horror texts. For the purposes of discussing laughter and horror, the following example isolated from a single 19th century writer describes what many current theorists overlook. Most theories of laughter’s form and function indicate that laughter should break the finely tuned tension appreciated by aficionados of classic horror. However, the Rudyard Kipling story The Mark of the Beast describes a fit of laughter as a horror on par with native revolt, supernatural revenge, and torture – a source of the cosmic terror that causes Lovecraft to praise Kipling four decades later in his essay on ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’.10 Seen through the complementary lenses of humour studies and the psychoanalytic work of Julia Kristeva, the layers of expectation within the production of laughter offer an exemplary point of entry for inquiry as a second climax in the story, perhaps more important than the rescue of the victim’s soul. By drawing a broader conflict down to the scale of individual men, Kipling brings a moral conflict of national proportions to the scale of an individual’s crisis of identity. The story’s unsettling dénouement undermines personal and national assumptions of integrity and superiority on which the colonizer’s role in that conflict has been justified. Kipling reaffirms the role of the literature in offering us a mirror in which to understand ourselves. Here, the laughter of two terrified men is not only appropriate and emotionally resonant, but also exemplary in its detail, ambiguity, and ethical analysis. The short story begins with a celebration of the good old boys of the colonizing forces, now dispersing across the entirety of the British Empire. The attendees of the gathering drink not to victory and success but, as the narrator recalls years later, with knowledge of the loss and atrocity of a violent project. The narrator ominously lists destinations and fates as he sets that stage for the drunken officer Fleete to provide the catalyst for the local conflict. Unable to return home safely, Fleet’s friends, the narrator, and fellow officer Strickland struggle to guide him home, losing their control of him in a temple to the monkey-god Hanuman. Defiling the statue with the butt of his cigar, Fleete laughs in mockery of the god. His delight is short lived. A leper appears from behind the statue, cursing the officer with a bite or ‘mark’ that transforms him into a beast through the gradual erosion of his humanity. Once the connection has been made, and the leper tied up, Strickland and the narrator wordlessly commit to torture unfit to be printed in order rescue the civilized self from this irrational and unacceptable fate.11 To force the leper to repeal the curse, the two men abandon language and go straight to violence without needing to confirm their mutual decision verbally or rationalize their actions. Ironically, their next wordless

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______________________________________________________________ communication in the text will be their combined laughter at the horrifying consequences of this brutal decision. The text indicates only the location and the instruments of torture, not the graphic violence that one might expect in a modern adaptation. A modern adaptation would also have to show the rabid figure of the mindless officer streaked with the blood of the raw meat he gorges on in order to allow the reader to continue identifying with the desperation of Fleete’s companions. In the heat of the moment, their actions were the righteous defence of one of their own, but nonetheless results in a full night of scarring the flesh of the leper with heated gun barrels and other unspecified tortures. The marking of this ‘beast’, the mewling, otter-like native leper, by the British officers finally results in the repeal of the curse. The burned and beaten man returns Fleete’s soul by means of a remarkably gentle embrace and leaves, clothing himself for the first time in the story in order to hide the marks left on his pale skin. All evidence of the event seems to vanish, except in the memories of the perpetrators. Mere hours later, Strickland has confirmed that the two have gotten away with the events of the evening without the slightest damage to their reputation. The monks of the temple deny knowledge not only of the leper, who has vanished along with the guns, but also of the initial defilement. Thus Strickland begins to doubt that the experience occurred at all. In response to Strickland voicing his doubts, the narrator says nothing. He has no need. The sensory evidence left in the home reinforces the memory for them both: ‘The red-hot gun-barrel had fallen on the floor and was singeing the carpet. The smell was entirely real’.12 In fact, the return of Fleete to the scene of the torture highlights this precise and apparently ambiguous piece of evidence. Fleete’s interpretation stands in stark contrast to the grim awareness of his rescuers: One other curious thing happened which frightened me as much as anything in the night’s work. When Fleet was dressed he came into the dining-room and sniffed. He had a quaint trick of moving his nose when he sniffed. ‘Horrid doggy smell, here’, said he. ‘You should really keep those terriers of yours in better order. Try sulphur, Strick’. But Strickland did not answer. He caught hold of the back of a chair, and, without warning, went into an amazing fit of hysterics. It is terrible to see a strong man overtaken with hysteria. Then it struck me that we had fought for Fleete’s soul with the silver man in that room, and that we had disgraced ourselves as Englishmen forever, and I laughed and gasped and gurgled just as shamefully as

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______________________________________________________________ Strickland, while Fleete thought that we had both gone mad. We never told him what we had done. 13 Why laugh rather than cry or scream? Tears, screams, and laughter are physiological responses resulting from a largely unconscious assessment of an individual’s position in a situation. In light of the visceral similarity between screams and laughter as unconscious reactions, it is little surprise that the first study of horror in literature to incorporate a serious and threatening laughter takes the perspective of psychoanalysis. As a scholar intent on the interactions of physical and psychological experience, Julia Kristeva refers to laughter as a means of ‘placing or displacing abjection’.14 To laugh severs the abject’s tie to the self and thus establishes and maintains the illusion of a bounded individual despite the fact that those boundaries, even on the most basic level, must be continually trespassed by the input of sustenance and expulsion of waste. True to her visceral style, Powers of Horror (1982) combines physiological and psychological explanations: the body’s convulsion in laughter becomes the emotional equivalent of vomitingup the abject, of rejecting the reality of the symptoms of the individual’s interaction with the world, of the inevitable rupture and decay inherent to the material processes of life and death. Kristeva specifies that the abject involves ‘those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal’.15 Thus the title declares the abject in the story (the bestial nature of man), but readers may not realize they will find themselves complicit with sins of the narrator by their shared national and religious identity and the benefits derived from colonial expansion. Though abjection is a productive force, excising the abject creates and establishes an identity by contrast with the not-I.16 In The Mark of the Beast, the narrator’s laughter rejects his unthinkable capacity for brutality in the sense of animal violence in a situation where he did not need to explain or defend himself, but is overcome regardless by evidence of the strain on his identity. The sudden conflation of the self-abject results in what the narrator himself dubs hysteria, and even today might be called hysterical laughter. These uses of the term hysteria have a connotative difference from the Freudian use, but both suggest the loss of control of the self. The nonhysteric succeeds in displacing the abject well enough to feel secure that the boundaries are unbroken, but the hysterical subject recognizes the permeability of the self and loses its grip on its distinction. The narrator’s continued anxiety over his changed status puts him in the category of hysteric at least in so far as the evidence prohibits recovery of the identity others assume of him. If psychoanalysis were the only way to explain such processes, why then is the narrator so explicit in presenting such an analysis years before the publication of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1899)? The answer lies in

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______________________________________________________________ the text’s proximity to the development of psychology as well as to the conscious understanding of humour that predates its interpretation by psychoanalysis. Although other models in humour studies fail to account for the coexistence of laughter and horror as explicitly as Kristeva, the processes and mechanisms in the theories of humour and laughter illuminate the structure of the cognitive process depicted by Kipling’s story and the ways by which we interpret the wordless utterance in social situations such as conversation. The diverse models are often viewed as competing or contradictory, but no single theory has won the support of a significant majority. Still, their various views offer support to the narrator’s interpretation of his fellow’s reaction and begin to explain why he too cannot resist joining his laughter at the moment of recognition. As an utterance, laughter’s significance and performativity depends on context and intonation since it lacks a precise denotative meaning. It has a referent, but it refers not to an object but to a quality or relationship compared to the laughing individual’s expectations. In order to pin down laughter by its causes, interdisciplinary work in humour studies takes on laughter by one or more of the following concepts: (1) superiority, the relative status of the persons involved, (2) incongruity, the gap between the event and the observer’s expectations , and (3) relief, with the event causing a shift from tension to relief. Freud is a key figure in the explanation of laughter as relief, so its little surprise that Kristeva’s mention of laughter begins in that vein. The officers’ response has much to do with relief: the cause of the tension and surfacing guilt – or perhaps dread – is erased in the banal interpretation of the evidence. However, relief only establishes part of laughter’s function. Relief theory focuses on the result of laughter, and to an extent its purpose for the laughing individual, but it stops short of exploring laughter as an interpersonal and performative utterance. Also, this hysterical laughter indicates a continued tension and thus incomplete relief. The two theses of superiority and incongruity frequently override relief in the competition to isolate the necessary condition for laughter. First, superiority. Despite a long history dating back to antiquity, the superiority theory has recently been championed by the aforementioned F. H. Buckley. The popularity of the superiority thesis may stem from the popularity of superiority itself. However, I would also credit the punishing experience of being laughed at, as well as the isolation of being left out of a joke, of not knowing and not belonging. Those laughing are sharing in delight or even triumph, by comparison with an inferior other. The superiority theory’s focus on judgment creates a knot when applied to Strickland and narrator. The narrator laughs at himself because he recognizes his inferiority relative to expected standards of behaviour. In the superiority model, laughter should be impossible at such a moment. As Buckley puts it, ‘He might be an inferior brute, but he can never think himself so when he laughs’.17 However, the

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______________________________________________________________ narrator holds both positions simultaneously. He has split into the monster and the horrified victim, an English gentleman inseparable from his brutal Other. Although relief and superiority are here at work, incongruity appears to be essential to the triggering of laughter. The other two explanations identify value, sources of energy, and the role of the figure’s temporal and ethical position, but do not address the problem of the cause except as a breach of the status quo, which in this case hardly constitutes a joke. Going beyond jokes, the incongruity theory of Immanuel Kant incorporates relief, but emphasizes the laughable as the momentary contrast between expectation and reality. Laughter results when ‘our expectations evaporate into uselessness’.18 For the narrator, the evaporation of his expectations benefits him by freeing him from a measure of dread. However, the evaporation of his expectations about himself has painful and lingering consequences. In his personal ‘fall’ from civilized to bestial, he has seen the lie of the hierarchy. He has witnessed the perceived order and stability of the boundary between West and East, the basis for his national and personal identity, literally dissolve at a touch. Linguist Linda Houts-Smith’s conversational analysis demonstrates that ‘differences in experiences, perceptions, and expectations’ provoke not only humorous laughter but, more importantly here, nervous laughter.19 Although her research findings are limited to conversations, her analysis resonates with buzzwords of literary theory and humour studies: ‘The tension is primarily the differentiation of reality from unreality as it relates to the difference between self and other’.20 In this case, the narrator sees his reality replaced by a harsher world and self-image, only to find that the world around him has not changed. The protagonist recognizes immediately what Edward Said describes much later: ‘Behind the White Man’s mask of amiable leadership there is always the express willingness to use force, to kill and be killed. What dignifies his mission is some sense of intellectual dedication’.21 Indeed, the horror of shamefully dissolving into hysterics lies precisely in his loss of justification and dignity. He perceives the illusion superimposed on his new and harsh contact with the world and himself, but that illusion still exists only in the eyes of the ignorant Fleete, and is unfortunately - for his emotional state at least - now incongruous with his self-image. He is not fundamentally rational, he is fundamentally animal. In terms of the theories discussed, the structure of his laughter appears congruent with several elements of the predominant theories considered in humour studies. The laughter responds to Fleete’s statement in the context, but excludes him from explanation. The narrator and reader are superior in knowledge in respect to Fleete, aware of the incongruity of the explanation, but also relieved at the outcome of the incident. Most importantly, the components indicate that the other side of the cognitive

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______________________________________________________________ conflict that caused the laughter is an incongruity between the ‘White Man’ and the narrator’s transformed self-image. All three theories referenced in humour studies depend on social and often unconscious processes of comparison of events with expectations. The superiority theory begins from a less detailed analysis of the individual psyche, but it focuses on the relationship of individuals, both the inferior other and the comfortable view of the self-identical. Laughter as a response to incongruity parallels Kristeva’s link between laughter as a reaction to the abject – the unexpected and quite possibly undesirable element. The beast, the soulless man, threatens the existing definition of the self, as with the abject corpse. That soulless man causes a similar transformation in the viewer of Fleete’s transition to animal, denying the ‘I am’ at the core of the narrator. Though he lives, he is a walking corpse. Finally, laughter as displacing or safely placing the abject beyond the boundaries of the self parallels the idea of laughter as relief, and the apocalyptic laughter that Kristeva finds in modern texts is hysterical in the sense that it cannot release enough energy to dispel the tension. Combined, psychoanalysts’ determination to look at the unconscious and the external focus of linguistic pragmatics and sociological studies allow study of laughter’s function in terms of the human animal’s interaction with the body, the environment, and society. When laughter results from the recognition of incongruity between one’s actions and one’s identity, seeing oneself as unethical or inhuman, laughter can temporarily relieve the strain of straddling the gap, but expulsion and displacement of the blame is required before the identity can recover the acceptable status and coherence. In the case of the story, the laughter of these men fails to provide full relief for the narrator because it accompanies an unsuccessful repression of the memory of the events. The narrator cannot expel the beast that he recognized within himself. He becomes Other to himself by his own definitions and thus irreparably split and monstrous. The narrator’s story includes this analysis as a confession of the underside of his ambiguous laughter, the unthinkable reality of his experience. Explaining the target of his laughter, he shows its components in slow motion, at the speed of contemplation and reason rather than instinct. By this rhetorical delay, the unheard sound becomes horrible, not in spite of, but because of the laughter’s wordless judgment on the civilized façade of authority and self-control. By exposing the reader to the cognitive dissonance that produced the laughter, he cracks the assumed reality and integrity of that identity. The struggle of wills between torturers and their victim succeeds in returning life and ‘soul’ to one ‘beast’, but damns the Englishmen as hypocrites and beasts themselves. When threatened with the loss of a fellow, he is not a gentleman or the moral superior guided by the values and law and Church that he has attempted to establish in the colony - discipline, administration - but instead the successful aggressor, the bestial superior.

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______________________________________________________________ When the narrator comprehends the cost of his actions, the story he tells to himself about himself - his identity as formed against the Other and the abject - collapses. As Edward Said stated in Orientalism, Kipling is the model interpreter of the East-West chain of being.22 The disruption of this chain by the inversion of man and beast, here paralleled with the hierarchy of officer and subject, is potentially catastrophic to the narrator’s understanding of the universe and his place in it. In the case of Kipling, the narrator’s comment on the horror of hysteria recalls Nietzsche’s epigram on human laughter: ‘When man howls with laughter, he surpasses all animals by his coarseness’.23 Even when interpreted in terms of the laughter of a happy man, the concept of permitting oneself to be transported by deep, uncontrollable laughter is horrifying. Here, the laughter condemns civilized man to a position lower than the innocent animal, the personal inferno of the repentant hypocrite unable to confess. Not only is this a personal trauma, but a national horror to recognize the existence of the brute and the hypocrite within the elite officers responsible for establishing the superiority of the British Empire. Indeed, the literature of cosmic terror entails ‘a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature that are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos’ and demons.24 The Mark of the Beast suggests that the perceived order of Church and State is either so fragile that it can dissolve at a touch on foreign soil, or that foreign powers are so strong that contact with them can prove lethal in ways beyond the explanations and defences of the British. Horror films and texts can also provoke laughter in the reader, viewer, or listener even though their creators produce them with the utmost grotesque detail – even because of this detail. As Mikhail Bakhtin demonstrated, the comical and the grotesque can be joined to great effect even beyond the denunciations of satire. However, pinpointing the response and its cause with readers proves difficult to observe and theorize except from the subjective experience of the reader. Anecdotal evidence of laughter at horror films exists. In the Second Global Conference on Fear, Horror and Terror (September 2008), members of the discussion recalled the cases of their own laughter. Most striking was a single case, here anonymous, who mentioned becoming interested in horror films precisely because they struck him as laughable as a child. Out of context, this may appear a sign of psychological misalignment or childish innocence, but there is also the matter of ‘camp’ and the difficulty of interpreting horror in differing or outdated aesthetics. The interpretive process depends on the use of styles and content capable of striking the reader where the goose bumps and the cold sweats hide. The appreciation of cosmic terror in Lovecraft’s ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ relies heavily on the participation of the reader, in

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______________________________________________________________ whom the texts ‘work’ on unconscious and primal fears. However, those fears may not be as universal or reached through the same means in different literary epochs: ‘The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life’.25 The imagination is involved not only in the production of the world of the story but in connecting the ‘vast residuum of inherited associations that clings round all the objects and processes that were once mysterious’.26 His defence and gathering of the horror genre, thus, serves to unite the ‘sensitive’ few. All horror texts, as well as comic texts, include this aesthetic play with the limits of ‘taste’ and the breach of that taste particular to a specific period. The elements of greatest scandal in Kipling likewise depend in part on a historical perspective, but the moral line between man and beast has continued to be interrogated as torture recurs in history. For Lovecraft, the politics of taste that marginalizes horror from mainstream literature is governed by a majority for whom these tales naturally hold little appeal: one no longer has to be ‘sensitive’ to appreciate horror. In fact, a thicker skin may be required. As Beth A. Kattleman’s conference presentation ‘Carnographic Culture: America and the Rise of the Torture Porn Film’ highlighted, complaints of desensitisation have been levelled against horror texts and films, placing the blame for violent behaviour among students and young people on early or frequent exposure to increasingly gory texts and images.27 Such desensitisation is also blamed for some individuals not taking violence seriously, when others are appalled by violence at the surface. However, the presence of violence in cultures and questions of morality must be considered in their immediate temporal and cultural context. The mores that govern Kipling are not commensurate with those that govern the production of the Resident Evil games or remakes of classic horror films, now ‘new and improved’ by the addition of more terrifying pacing, freshly produced musical scores, and more vivid blood spatters. On the other hand, familiarity with violence is no new development in Western culture. In horror texts, the process of one-upmanship and style produce massive constellations of sub genres wherein jokes and humour can be found in allusions to other horror texts, either as mockery of their failures or as inside-jokes to the culture of horror fandom and cult classics. In the recent film Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008), 28 pornography and gore are combined in a Hollywood argument against the commoditisation of human organs and the illusory immortality available to those who can afford the constant upgrades in fresh organs. The Repo Man here is an all too flesh-andblood bogeyman who repossesses the designer organs of those who default on their payments, regardless of their screams and the lethal effects of wrenching organs from struggling victims. The Goth Metal horror musical

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______________________________________________________________ offers chilling scenes of splatter punk violence, pornographic sexuality, and rampant kids tearing through addictions as long as the money holds out. Depending on one’s familiarity with the cast, the allusions to rock musicals, the hyperbolic greed and vanity of Hollywood, the aesthetics of tragicomic horror, this musical argument can become a madhouse pastiche with ample opportunities for interpreting it as a keen parody or outright ridiculousness. Sometimes these allusions become hilarious, if only to relieve the tension of the painfully distorted world and the sudden shifts in styles and tone. For example, a moment of unexpected abuse between the central characters – the father striking a blow across the face that knocks the chronically ill teenage protagonist to the ground – is followed by a sudden outburst of modern punk rock by the young woman who has inexplicably changed her Dickensian waif dress for the jeans and barely-there shirt of a highly-sexualised teen star. The repetitive lyrics and energetic choreography snap the viewer away from shock and horrified awe for a moment before the camera returns to the ‘real’ world version of her fainting from the blow and being watched over by her repentant father for signs of a dubious recovery. Current trends indicate a healthy subsection of horror texts that move beyond the use of laughter to produce horror or relief, pointing out the absurdity of the relationships between the readers and a horrible, laughable reality. A certain cynical glee confronts nihilism in the texts of the 20th and 21st century, a hilarious ‘Yes, we know!’ that Kristeva portrays as humourless in her description of Celine’s apocalyptic laughter, but which need not be so. Chaucer and Rabelais’ grotesque satires and celebrations of a corrupt, absurd, and yet entertaining reality continue on in the spirit of works that only tangentially fit within the horror genre because the comical elements make it difficult to make them stick within the horror genre with which they converse so fluently. The aforementioned articles on Nietzsche’s presentations of laughter argue for a conception of laughter as the ultimate challenge to nihilism or, perhaps more precisely, as the only way to produce a vital energy within an already nihilistic stance. A more sober perspective catches the desperation in the laughter that knows all too well how we will eventually be disillusioned or dead, or disillusioned and then dead. But the next work under consideration moves away from the bitter laughter of Kipling’s guilt-ridden narrator to an affirmative kynicism, a concept developed by Peter Sloterdijk that has produced a new wave of appreciation for the irreverent philosophy behind the etymology of cynicism. In a carnivalesque comedy of errors, popular fiction authors Terry Prachett and Neil Gaiman combined their humour and unusual approach to the world to present to us not the Apocalyptic laughter identified in 20th century high literature by Kristeva, but rather the 20th century laughter at the Apocalypse via mass market literature. The 1990 result, the previously cited Good Omens, demonstrates Gaiman’s fascination with the horror genre going

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______________________________________________________________ straight back to a sometimes reverent, sometimes irreverent obsession with H. P. Lovecraft and classic horror films. Terry Prachett’s trademark style lightens the atmosphere with the addition of his peculiar tongue-in-cheek parody of the lives of British and American people. The Book of Revelations undergoes drastic rewriting at their hands, transformed from a set of ominous predictions into a literal ride of the Four Horsemen, who have traded in horses for Harleys and wear jackets proclaiming themselves ‘Hell’s Angels’, across the world to reach an idyllic town in the heart of the English countryside where the Antichrist currently resides. While the distortion of the Biblical sources and the inclusion of popular culture bring numerous belly laughs, the intrusion of the real world in the violence and the problems facing humanity come closer and closer to home. For example, while we can laugh at Death, War, Famine, and Pestilence and his successor Pollution, the perspective of an eleven-year-old boy returns us to that elementary horror at the realization of how the world really is outside of a privileged Western existence. While the reader accepts the invitation to laugh at the Apocalypse as envisioned by the writers of the Bible and various later prophets, or even as envisioned by the angels and demons themselves, the real world creeps-up on him or her, leaving the final scenes charged with palpable threats to the reader in the real world, threats he or she may never have expected to encounter in the comedic text they entered. The cynical reader can laugh only up to a point before the challenge of the young but suddenly eerily wise Antichrist sinks in. Here the reader can reply, ‘Yes, I know’, but that knowledge is there beneath the petty jealousies, the frustrations of commutes, and the pressures of modern life. As an answer, and to end the text with an open ending, the book suggests that the Apocalypse has not been called off, but merely delayed by the refusal of the Antichrist to play his preordained role. The potential for mankind to destroy himself without the assistance of Heaven and Hell stands proven in the change from self-righteous witchhunters to 20th century style genocide, hellfire to nuclear missiles, and famine to fad diets. In the face of serious problems, the authors reply is not bitterly cynical but delightfully kynical, returning not to animal behaviour as the original Cynics, but to a childhood desire for freedom, simple pleasures, and a safe environment. The non-academic reader approaches debates on religion, nihilism, and faith vs. reason with trepidation and a justified wariness of jargon, but works of fiction such as the novel by Prachett and Gaiman invite multileveled readings and reward ‘insider knowledge’ of British and American culture, world events, history, religion, and most importantly the perspective of the not-so-innocent Western child. Science, politics, and intellectualism have been problematic and volatile topics in horror films, part of the problem rather than a solution, but ultimately many of the fears discussed during the conference and this volume have more to do with people than technology or

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______________________________________________________________ natural disasters. Interpersonal relations can provide numerous founts for laughter at the unthinkable, the unclean, or the morally and ethically incongruous. Whether that laughter accompanies a sense of humour or horror depends entirely on the context and the reader’s perception of the ‘appropriateness’ of laughter, the mysterious and unspoken ‘invitation’ to laughter, of which no theorist speaks when we talk of the parallel phenomena of screams and other wordless utterances. Screams and catharsis are natural and respectable processes, while laughter is ‘human, all too human’ or worse, animal and thus part of our guilt. ‘How can you laugh at that?’ one might ask as Jersey Girl (2004) re-enacts Sweeny Todd in a grade school auditorium.29 Any reply belongs to the one who appreciates the irony of a brutal killer and his accomplice’s cannibalistic cuisine serving as the climactic reconciliation between a father and daughter all too accustomed to tragedy, bitterness, and disappointment. Why then would a true horror text not avail itself of the ability to reward viewers and create greater contrasts between moments of humour and horror by invoking all the possibilities of laughter both within, and at, the text? The exposure of the mind to horror produces anxiety, a fact most could accept without the need to retreat to the terms of psychoanalysis or cognitive psychology. The active imagination perceives the world and the work of art in terms of the self’s current identity and his or her ability to identify with the situations and characters, including recognition of texts already part of one’s identity, by their consumption and remembrance. For Kristeva, art replaces religion as the source of catharsis and thus purification.30 Still, the failure of the text to elaborate the abject sufficiently, subject to the limitations of ‘taste’, produces a lingering anxiety, an incomplete catharsis. In the case of the excessive representation of the abject, and provided the reader accepts the terms of the text, humour rather than horror is produced by abjection taken to the level of absurdity. The narrator employs writing as an exploration of the abject itself. Laughter appears capable of both of placing and displacing abjection.31 Placing abjection here includes instilling shame, locating the abject and isolating it from the identity of the self. But when it goes beyond credible or realistic limits, or occurs out of the expected limits, the participant can distance him or herself again and laugh. In displacing abjection, the laughter is the removal of the abject from the self. Laughter is judge, jury, and executioner. Laughter can distance the audience from horror, breaking the serious consideration Lovecraft demands for cosmic terror. Kipling, then, is successful as a horror writer insofar as the reader is not capable of laughing. What better way to kill a laugh than to explain the ‘joke’? When the narrator and Strickland hear Fleete’s description of the evidence of torture in such a banal, dismissive, and unaccountably ignorant manner, they erupt with hysterical laughter that allows at least the delay of the written confession. By

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______________________________________________________________ contrast, the reader’s perspective is denied the opportunity for the abject to leap out of the body in this way so long as the aesthetic spell holds. Is laughter at a text that exaggerates horror and violence a ‘weapon against evil’ or the tool of the devil? To answer either of those would require identifying a moral stance and drawing a line in ever shifting sands. Laughter as a judgment on evil or inferiority, as a victorious declaration of superiority or understanding, as a relief of strain, or simply a recognition of the absurdity of it all, is no more a single-edged sword than ‘propaganda’ or ‘rumour’. The role of laughter in horror bears scrutiny in what it suggests about the perspective of the moment of its production. The interpretation of the central cause of the laughter would depend on the context, the laugher, the laughable, and the position of the interpreter relative to all three. To add moral and ethical considerations would be to ask a different question by a different means. Instead, decisions about the use of laughter require looking not only at the one who laughs, but at the position of the creator who produces the particular text. In Kipling, the result is a loop of inescapable knowledge of the level of civilization and superiority that should have been true, yet is groundless and false. Tastes in literature and morality have changed, but a civilized man of his times so swiftly provoked to brutal violence as is the protagonist of The Mark of the Beast holds a lingering note of warning to the rest of us, echoed in his torturous laughter. In the narrator’s repentance, a faint hint of irony remains to demonstrate his despair at the possibility of recognition and reconciliation; he is not the sociopath or psychopath of a modern gore-fest who glories in his difference. He remains a member of society because of the implausibility of his story, all the while knowing himself an exile. This position no longer makes him laugh, but he cannot escape irony. Other texts free readers from association with villainy and allow the reader the distance needed to think rather than feel the paralysis of terror, and thereby leave the reader free when he or she feels the not-so inexplicable urge to laugh.

Notes 1

R Kipling, Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy, N Gaiman (ed), New York, Pegasus Books, 2008. 2 R Kipling, ‘The Mark of the Beast’, The World’s Greatest Horror Stories, Stephen Jones and Dave Carson (eds), New York, Barnes and Noble Books, 2004. 3 S O'Casey, ‘The Power of Laughter: Weapon Against Evil’, in The Green Crow, George Braziller, New York, 1956, pp. 226-32.

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As will be discussed later, see M M Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, H Iswolsky (trans), Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1984. 5 N Gaiman and T Pratchett. Good Omens, Ace Books, New York, 1996. 6 P Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, M Eldred (trans), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987; F H Buckley, The Morality of Laughter, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2003. 7 See for example, M Weeks, ‘Beyond a Joke: Nietzsche and the Birth of ‘Super-Laughter’’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, vol. 27, 2004, pp. 1-17. 8 C Nolan (dir), The Dark Knight, Warner Bros., United States of America, 2008. 9 Sloterdijk, op. cit., p. 103. 10 H P Lovecraft, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature, (1927, 1933-1935)’, D Patterson & S Davies (eds), in Gaslight, 11 Jan 2000, viewed on 5 Mar 2007, 11 Kipling, op. cit., p. 316. 12 ibid. 13 ibid., p. 317. 14 J Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, L S Roudiez (trans), Columbia University Press, New York, 1982, p. 8. 15 ibid., p. 12-13. 16 ibid, p. 45. 17 Buckley, op. cit., p 37. 18 L Houts-Smith, ‘Funny Ha-Ha or Funny Strange: The Structure and Meaning of Laughter in Conversation’, Unpublished Dissertation, U North Dakota, 2007, p. 7. 19 ibid., p. 3. 20 ibid., p. 27. 21 E Said, Orientalism: 25th Anniversary Edition, Vintage Books, New York, 1994, p. 226. 22 ibid., p. 45. 23 F W Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, M Faber & S Lehmann (trans), Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1984, p. 243. 24 Lovecraft, op. cit. 25 ibid. 26 ibid. 27 B A Kattleman, ‘Carnographic Culture: America and the Rise of the Torture Porn Film’, presented at the Second Global Conference on Fear, Horror, and Terror, Oxford, Mansfield College, 3 September 2008. 28 D L Bousman (dir), Repo: The Genetic Opera, Lionsgate and Twisted

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______________________________________________________________ Pictures, United States of America, 2008. 29 K Smith (dir), Jersey Girl, Miramax Films, United States of America, 2004. 30 Kristeva, op. cit., p. 17. 31 ibid., p. 8.

Bibliography Bakhtin, M. M., Rabelais and His World. H. Iswolsky (trans), Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984. Bousman, D. L. (dir), Repo: The Genetic Opera. Lionsgate and Twisted Pictures, United States of America, 2008. Buckley, F. H., The Morality of Laughter. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2003. Gaiman N. & T. Pratchett, Good Omens. Ace Books, New York, 1996. Houts-Smith, L., ‘Funny Ha-Ha or Funny Strange: The Structure and Meaning of Laughter in Conversation’. Unpublished Dissertation, University of North Dakota, 2007. Kipling, R., ‘The Mark of the Beast’, in The World’s Greatest Horror Stories, S. Jones & D. Carson (eds), Barnes and Noble Books, New York, 2004, pp. 306-317.

——, Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy. N. Gaiman (ed), Pegasus Books, New York, 2008. Kristeva, J., Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. L. S. Roudiez (trans), Columbia University Press, New York, 1982. Lovecraft, H. P., ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature, (1927, 1933-1935)’. In Gaslight, 11 Jan 2000, retrieved 5 Mar 2007, http://gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/ superhor.htm.

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______________________________________________________________ Nietzsche, F. W., Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. M. Faber & S. Lehmann (trans), University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1984. Nolan, C. (dir), The Dark Knight, Warner Bros., United States of America, 2008. O’Casey, S., ‘The Power of Laughter: Weapon Against Evil’, in The Green Crow. George Braziller, Inc., New York, 1956, pp. 226-32. Said, E. W. Orientalism: 25th Anniversary Edition. Vintage Books, New York, 1994. Sloterdijk, P., Critique of Cynical Reason. M. Eldred (trans), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987. Smith, K., Jersey Girl. Miramax Films, United States of America, 2004. Weeks, M., ‘Beyond a Joke: Nietzsche and the Birth of ‘Super-Laughter’’. Journal of Nietzsche Studies, vol. 27, 2004, pp. 1-17. Maureen Moynihan currently studies Romance Language and Literatures at the University at Buffalo. She holds an M.A. in English from the University of Nebraska Lincoln.

Trash Mob: Zombie Walks and the Positivity of Monsters in Western Popular Culture Simone do Vale Abstract Employing flash mob tactics and performed worldwide by youngsters dressed as the undead since 2003, zombie walks keep spreading all over like a ‘plague’, in a metaphor that illustrates contemporary fears of disintegration, nuclear catastrophes and infection, whilst revealing an affectionate identification with this amazingly resilient monstrous cultural icon that mixes life and death, human and non-human, in one single lurching carcass. These parades were inspired by the ever growing zombie culture due to the constant appropriation of George Romero's famous apocalyptic trilogy through remakes and original movies like The Return of the Living Dead (1985), 28 Days Later (2002) or Shaun of the Dead (2004), as well as the popular video game Resident Evil and its celluloid versions. By focusing on the recent global phenomenon of zombie walks, this chapter aims to discuss the positivity of monsters in contemporary Western popular culture by exploring the new role assigned to the zombie myth. Key Words: Horror films, subcultures, zombie walk. ***** 1.

Introduction La vida pública no es solo política, sino, a la par y aun antes, intelectual, moral, económica, religiosa; comprende los usos todos colectivos e incluye el modo de vestir y el modo de gozar.1 Ortega y Gasset

Back in 2003, just one week after Halloween, six Toronto horror movie fans decided to go out dressed as zombies, apparently for no special reason other than having fun. In the following years, however, the group formed by Thea Munster, who used to throw zombie parties, launched its own website and began summoning the public to take part in their enactment. Thus ‘zombie walk’, a movement that in less than three years has managed to spread like a real plague along several Canadian and North American cities, and infected countries like Brazil, England, Poland, and Australia, has spread through the internet. Dolled up as the living dead, participants follow a previously planned route whose goal is crossing each town's busiest spots: malls, parks,

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______________________________________________________________ and main boulevards. However, it is not an simultaneously orchestrated happening, held on a specific date. Although many groups obviously prefer dragging their carcasses on Halloween (when traditions holds that the dead are allowed to walk among the living) or, like in the Brazilian case, in the Dia de Finados (Day of the Dead), marches may happen worldwide at random dates, therefore totally independent from one another. According to the definition provided by the Porto Alegre Zombie Walk organizer’s website, zombie walk is a 'flash mob, a free event without any apparent purpose, in spite of the intention of gathering horror movies and music fans'.2 Yet, unlike flash mobs, instant gatherings whose intent is intervening in the urban space that, at least superficially, seems pointless and dissolves into the air, zombie walk does not fade away all of a sudden: the mob mingles with the crowd as a line up of bizarre celebrators. The reticence regarding explanations, theories and manifestos, and the use of publicity strategies employed to disclose the marches, as well as the surrealistic element, are very similar between flash mobbers and zombie walkers. Nevertheless, the adjective ‘flash’ - that expresses an intense although brief experience - in the zombie walk case, does not make any sense. Thus, Zombie walks could be understood rather as an unfoldment: an appropriation of flash mobs tactics by a kind of collective performance that is entirely distinct. The main goal of the zombie walk is the simulation of an invasion of zombies who feed themselves on human flesh, like in George A. Romero's most popular movies, which originated a very special living-dead cult. Romero's trilogy - Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985) - never ceased to reverberate, either through remakes or appropriations like Return of the Living Dead (Dan O'Bannon, 1985), whose zombies are particularly drawn to human brains and appear in the movie grumbling the punch-line ‘brains, brains’, echoed until exhaustion by zombie walk participants worldwide. Besides the remake of Dawn of the Dead (Zach Snyder, 2004), several recent movies recaptured the zombie theme, especially Romero's apocalyptic theme, such as in 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) and the parody Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004), as well as the notorious videogame Resident Evil (1996), which gave rise to its own blockbuster trilogy, not to mention the wide variety of short movies and independent productions. In Brazil, as in other countries, it seems that what initially binds participants together is this very particular thematic universe ruled by a taste for horror movies. It also includes their own particular vintage clothing style, tattoos, piercings, and a preference for rock bands that incorporate horror and science-fiction movies elements, all of which constitute an important part of the 1950's and 1960's trash culture, their ultimate aesthetic theme.

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______________________________________________________________ Albeit sometimes very different in musical style, we could say this aesthetic has already been appropriated by bands that share the zombie icon as an emblem. See for example, British group Zombina and the Skeletons, composers of the symptomatic ‘Nobody Likes You When You're Dead’; YouTube's parody act Zombeatles; and Brazilian trio Catalépticos (Cataleptics), whose front man Vlad holds a festival named Psycho Carnival, just to name a few. Beware: a whole new culture of the undead seems to be rising...from the tomb. In order to deepen our understanding of the peculiar cultural phenomenon of the zombie walk, as well as the positive role it assigns to monstrosity, it is necessary to approach trash culture without prejudice, examining its aesthetic project, as well as the potential for resistance it may provide, in opposition to either contemporary mass-mediated culture or hegemonic values. Although the discussion of the concept of resistance may be controversial, insofar as, in a somewhat fateful manner, subcultures which are often spectacular in their strategies, inevitably end up being absorbed by the cultural industry as commodities, it is undeniable that these contemporary subcultural manifestations should at least be seen, according to João Freire Filho, as ‘seismometers...for the shifts in cultural production and consumption, behaviour and social interactions’.3 Freire Filho translates exactly what this article aims to explore: instead of addressing a debate on taste, this is an attempt at mapping the symbolic relationship suggested by this identification with this alluring figure, inasmuch as its resignification through the new social practise of zombie walking has potential for providing an ironic kind of resistance against mainstream culture and values. 2.

Horror, Fear and Entertainment In recent decades, the expression ‘trash’, although traditionally associated with the most undervalued segment of the horror film industry, has distinguished itself from its pejorative meaning and began connoting a whole new genre of low budget productions that, regardless of the imposition of Hollywoodian dogmas for success, and featuring supposedly unintentional gags due to lack of time and financial resources, has become highly appreciated by its aficionados. Concerning the interaction between the audience and the action onscreen, horror movies are especially fruitful for studies on spectatorship, as Jeffrey Sconce observes, for due to their own kind of cinematic narrative, they provide a more explicit scope than any other cinematic genre for the analysis of the roles played by vision and power, in which the identification with characters are much more complex and harder to analyse. Unlike other genres, the identification process in horror movies is ambiguous: one might alternatively identify oneself with the victim and also with the monster/murder/slasher role.4

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______________________________________________________________ In order to address the issue of identification in horror movies, let’s take a somewhat brief look at its early historical background. Le Manoir du Diable (George Méliés, 1896) is said to be the first horror movie, and it is also important to note that the first great horror movie production was Frankenstein (1910), filmed by Thomas Alva Edison. Among the groundbreakers of horror we can assemble the obscure Danish version for Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hide (August Blom, 1910); German classics The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Nosferatu (1922), and Universal Studios The Phanton of the Opera (1925), Dracula (1931), and Frankenstein (1931), which launched its own icons to stardom - namely, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff. Concurrently, monsters, in their immaterial glamorous version, once again became a focus of empathy for the viewer, different from the clearly defined good/evil loci of identification in early productions, despite the strong appeal of creatures of the night such as the vampire. Many theorists claim that the proliferation of horror movies often coincides with times of overall insecurity, like the Great Depression or the German defeat in WWI. However, it is reasonable to argue that this is far from being the only potential explanation for the popularity of scary cinematic narratives. An intense curiosity and awe for the different, morbid, and monstrous - omnipresent in child tales throughout history - have always permeated Western culture. As an example, we can mention the Greek myth of the Gorgon to illustrate our ancient fascination for monstrosity. Rather than a mere interpretative model for what we fear in given times, horror movies are also a means to problematise identity, social, political, and cultural issues. According to David Skal, historically, the macabre has played a significant role in circuses, since Seargent-Major Philip Astley (1742-1814), founder of the modern circus ring, already held bizarre sideshows presenting numerous kinds of freaks, both animal and human.5 However, it was Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810-1891) who became the most notorious predecessor of the horror show later appropriated by modern cinema. Barnum's circus sideshows consisted of a kind of cabinet des curiosités that travelled around the so-called civilized world exhibiting Otherness in its most dramatic and, consequently, reassuring form, because the boundaries between normal and deviant were thereby clearly stated. But soon psychiatric studies on scopic pulsion and the perversion of vision, along with other important cultural factors, resulted in the banishment of monsters from the public sight, confining the freaks to the now exclusive authority of the medical gaze. So, despite the prestige achieved by the likes of Jojo the dog-faced boy, monstrous celebrities were gradually interdicted to the lay gaze of the masses. A set of restrictions was prescribed against the public exhibition of the so-called ‘living phenomena and human prodigies’, based upon a

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______________________________________________________________ condemnation of the populace's vulgarity and lack of compassion towards human anomalies. This censorship gained momentum particularly in England and France around 1860. Coincidentally, as notes Jean-Jacques Courtine, early manifestations against freak shows took place in the 1880's, invariably uniting their voices in the psychiatric discourse. These entertainments began to be questioned under the emblem of the psychopathology of sight, which included voyeurism and exhibitionism in the set of perversions. Therefore, as Courtine argues: Resorting to medical intervention for juridical and administrative dispositions in the name of the control of visual culture from then on will stretch the field of anomalies from objects to subjects, from deformities exposed to the eyes set on them, from the curious pulsion to the psychological qualification of the person who surrenders to it. The curiosity for human monsters, whenever pursued outside the sphere of medicine, will be vicious, morbid, perverse. In other words, an infraction reprehensible to the eyes of the law and a psychological deviation in contrast with the norm at the same time.6 Closely following the propagation of eugenic ideals in the 1930's, and on the verge of the WWII, the good families withdrew from the grotesque spectacles which once amused their well-born children. Only physicians held the moral and juridical privilege of contemplating monstrosity vis-à-vis. One good example of this interdiction of vision, now imbued with compassion, is the case of British physician Frederick Treves, who, in 1884, rescued John Merrick - the notorious Elephant Man immortalized onscreen by David Lynch - from a rented room in Whitechapel Road, London, where he was exhibited, in order to hospitalize and reveal Merrick to the world as the object of a meticulous scientific study.7 Ironically, in 1932, Freaks, directed by Todd Browning, whose cast enrolled authentic freak show celebrities, was not as well received as other contemporaneous horror movies. The film tells the story of a sideshow midget, Hans (Harry Earles), who falls in love with Cleo (Olga Baclanova), a beautiful blond trapezist, who not only intends to marry him so to drain his pocket out of money, but also plans to poison him to inherit his estate after his death. The other human prodigies of the circus discover the plan, taking revenge on her by mutilating and transforming the ruthless beauty into another sideshow attraction, a squawking and repulsive ‘duck woman’.

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______________________________________________________________ Due to this unexpected ending, Freaks remained censored for almost 30 years, and thus can be seen as a statement against the tyranny of normality that currently seems to be the predominant model according to which we might shape ourselves, changing the very way we regard our own bodies. One good example of this shift is surgical reality shows like Extreme Makeover or The Swann. In these programmes, the people chosen to be corrected by plastic surgeons and dentists are not what we could call aberrations. However, the goal of the shows is to transform them according to the current beauty canons. The emphasis is not on a supposed monstrosity of the subject, but rather on the ideal of an utter normality. Because of their rarity, monsters were an affirmation of order itself, a warrant for the humanity of the human itself. Normality, on the other hand, is not as generous as monstrosity. Whether dystopian or conventional, in the sense that the monster must always be defeated at the end, horror movies indeed provide allegories that might represent our fears. For Douglas Kellner, they 'reproduce the resurgence of the occult in contemporary society, an indication that people realize that they do not control their own everyday lives'.8 Thus, Kellner argues that in those times when dealing with social and economical reality becomes more challenging, the occult helps out by making sense of unpleasant circumstances or unintelligible events, such as catastrophes for instance. I agree that, especially concerning catastrophic films, this is a valid argument. However, it is necessary to say that it can not account for every horror movie, in particular ones like Romero's zombies, the Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th series, among so many others, where ghoulish creatures and terrifying slashers command stroboscopic butchery scenes and hence become the primary focus of attention and even fondness. Fear alone is not able to explain the attraction for such films, as Nöel Carrol argues, because it is a fact that people also enjoy horror movies or simply watching yes - repulsive scenes. In Carrol's definition: Horror stories, in a significant number of cases, are dramas of proving the existence of the monster and disclosing (most often gradually) the origin, identity, purposes and powers of the monster. Monsters, as well, are obviously a perfect vehicle for engendering this kind of curiosity and for supporting the drama of proof, because monsters are (physically, though generally not logically) impossible beings. They arouse interest and attention through being putatively inexplicable or highly unusual vis-à-vis our standing cultural categories, thereby instilling a desire to learn and to know about them. And since they are also

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______________________________________________________________ outside of (justifiably) prevailing definitions of what is, they understandably prompt a need for proof (or the fiction of a proof) in the face of scepticism. Monsters are, then, natural subjects for curiosity, and they straightforwardly warrant the ratiocinative energies the plot lavishes upon them.9 Once again, I shall argue that curiosity and the sheer pleasure of watching lots of gore spilling everywhere onscreen, however, do not also account for why people identify so closely with monsters with so much devotion as to need 'real' vampire nightclubs to hang around with their friends. Some monsters in particular also have another important attribute: they result from some obscure process that takes place within the body itself, thereby posing questions of identity. 3.

Zombies ‘R’ Us According to Slavoj Žižek, paranoia's most elementary form is exactly the belief in an Other of the Other: an Other that, under the socially explicit Other, conjures up random effects in social life, hence warranting its consistency.10 Differently from dystopias like 1984, evil has no fixed focus in Romero's movies. Although figures of authority are fiercely satirized, evil is represented in ambiguous forms. Romero does not totally explain the origin of the mysterious radiation that causes the dead to rise from their graves and feed on people, whilst the first zombie movies – White Zombie (1932) and Plague of the Zombies (1966) – refer to zombies as people enslaved by voodoo sorcerers. Therefore, before Romero, the zombie condition was a reversible one. Anticipating the nihilism of horror movies from the 1970s, in which authority is shown as absolutely helpless before evil, Night of the Living Dead, as his other movies, uses the monster as an allegory of dehumanization the fear of mass alienation, the loss of identity, and the fear of homogenization and disregard for singularity. In its turn, Dawn of the Dead criticises mass-mediated, consumption society. The opening sequence shows a TV station that is broadcasting the news on the emergence of a sudden attack of cannibal zombies. Running for their lives, the main characters seek refuge in a shopping mall, where staggering zombies struggle to repeat the same acts they used to perform when alive. Obviously, here the compulsion for human meat, whose lack makes the poor creatures from hell moan like there is no tomorrow, is a critique of consumerism. When her friends decide to hide in the living-dead infested mall, Francine, the only woman in the group, argues that they 'must be hypnotized, this is a prison'. Her boyfriend retorts, ‘Here we have everything we need'. The metaphor couldn't be clearer. After they destroy all

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______________________________________________________________ the zombies in the mall, Francine and the others start behaving in a curious Decameron-like fashion. In Bantu, zombie means a ghost that looms at night. Through a powerful potion, Haitian tradition holds that the sorcerer or boko is able to stir and make the dead perpetrate crimes for him. The zombie could then be defined as a body deprived of will, controlled by an invisible force, a borderline creature between human and monster, life and death. It is only after Romero’s approach to the zombie allegory that we find it directly associated with an idea of a contagious outbreak posed by a putrid-body mass. In interviews, Romero himself usually states that the zombie, in his films, must be understood as a metaphor for the passiveness frequently associated with consumption society. Consequently, the affection zombie walk participants express for the unappealing living-dead that lurch miserably in trash movies, and not for glamorous monsters like vampires, for example, is quite striking. In part, one can argue that the logic of the outsider could help explain the origin of the fondness for such a wreck of a monster. Like his fans, Romero himself can be called an outsider – and as a matter of fact, a very successful outsider role model. In the contemporary context, in spite of all the spectacularization of catastrophes and genocide, death itself became an aseptic abstraction, secluded to the hospital environment. For Julia Kristeva, 'the corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life'.11 And whilst its imagery may give rise to uncanniness and revulsion, death becomes a constant fear. As Philippe Ariès puts it, ‘The dead became beautiful in social vulgate when they started to be a real source of fear, a fear so deep that it can only be expressed through interdicts, that is, silences’.12 As any other monster that inhabits an at least nominal human form, the zombie represents the supposedly untameable animality that resists the perishing concept of human: a return of the repressed. But surely it is also a representation of the fear of disintegration, contagion, the plague, and hence the trespassing of boundaries, and consequently isolation. Common fears in a society that faces dramatic shifts in social interaction, particularly due to the constant media messages featuring ubiquitous towering menaces like terrorists, ecological and economical disasters, HIV, bird flu, swine flu, and young Marilyn Manson fans going postal apparently everywhere around the globe. Through the zombie metaphor, Romero movies present an idea of a predating, alienated, despicable crowd. On the other hand, however, the Toronto zombie walk website explains the zombie allure as follows: ‘which other monsters accomplish such a unity as a mass in death?’.13 Unlike flash mobs, a clear desire for closeness and distinction moves zombie walk participants. However, this does not prevent it from becoming a commodity

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______________________________________________________________ someday. A series of paid events have already been created for the zombie walkers, like after-hour film festivals, for instance. But there are also beneficent zombie walks, and the astounding civilian organization Zombie Squad,14 based in Saint Louis, Missouri, whose mission is offering community assistance regarding survival tactics in the occurrence of earthquakes, floods, terrorists acts and...Zombie invasions. Finally, the zombie walk could be understood as a carnivalization of fear, besides being a reason for people who share a cultural universe in common to get together and display their power as a mass. And, in this sense, the zombie walk could be seen as a political manifestation, however deprived of the modern idealism of the term, as an ironic act of resistance against the dictatorship of fear in contemporary mass-mediated culture. In its grotesque representation of death, zombie walk holds a principle of bodily materiality. Inspired by Bakhtin's essay on Rabelais,15 I believe the corporal images provided by zombie movies, and then reproduced by zombie walk participants in the most varied fashions, are exactly as exaggerated as the excesses contemporary risk society condemns.

Notes 1

'For public life is not only political, but is equally, and even more so, economic, moral, intellectual, and religious. It includes all our collective habits, even our fashions in dress and modes of amusement'. J Ortega Y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, A Kerrigan (trans), K Moore (ed), University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1985, p. 3. 2 Zombie Walk Porto Alegre, viewed on 1 August 2007, . 3 J F Filho, Reinvenções da Resistência Juvenil: Os Estudos Culturais e as Micropolíticas do Cotidiano, Mauad, Rio de Janeiro, 2007, p. 22. 4 J Sconce, ‘Spetacles of Death: Identification, Reflexivity and Contemporary Horror’, in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, J Collins, H Radner & A P Collins (eds), Routledge, New York, 1993, pp.110-111. 5 D Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, W. W. Norton, New York, 1993, p. 29. 6 J J Courtine, ‘O Corpo Anormal: História e Antropologias Culturais da Deformidade’, in História do Corpo: As Mutações do Olhar - O século XX Vol. III, J J Courtine (ed), Vozes, Rio de Janeiro, 2008, p. 303. 7 S B Clark, ‘Frankenflicks: Medical Monsters in Classic Horror Film’, in Cultural Sutures: Medicine and Media, L D Friedman (ed.), Duke University Press, Durhan, 2004, p. 132. 8 D Kellner, A Cultura da Mídia, Edusp, São Paulo, 2001, p. 165.

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N Carrol, ‘Why Horror?’ in Horror: The Film Reader, M Jancovich (ed), Routledge, London, 2002, p. 35. 10 S Žižek, ‘The Matrix: Or, the Two Sides of Perversion’, in The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real, W Irwin (ed.), Open Court Publishing Company, Peru, 2002, p. 245. 11 J Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Columbia University Press, New York, 1982, p. 4. 12 P Ariés, História da Morte no Ocidente, Ediouro, Rio de Janeiro, 2003, p. 158. 13 Toronto Zombie Walk, viewed on 1 August 2009, . 14 Zombie Squad, viewed on 1 August 2008, . 15 M Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1984, pp. 18-19.

Bibliography Ackermann, H. W. & J. Gauthier, 'The Ways and Nature of the Zombi'. Journal of American Folklore, vol. 104, 1991, pp. 466-93. Ariès, P., História da Morte no Ocidente. Ediouro, Rio de Janeiro, 2003. Bakthin, M., Rabelais and His World. Indiana University Press, Indiana, 1984. Brooks, M., The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from The Living Dead. Three Rivers Press, New York, 2003. Canetti, E., Massa & Poder. Companhia das Letras, São Paulo, 2005. Carrol, N., 'Why Horror?' , in Horror: the Film Reader, Jancovich, M. (ed), Routledge, New York, 2002, pp. 33-46. Clark, S. B., 'Frankenflicks: Medical Monsters in Classic Horror Film', in Cultural Sutures: Medicine and Media, Friedman, L. D. (ed), Duke University Press, Durhan, 2004, pp. 129-148.

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______________________________________________________________ Courtine, J. J., 'O Corpo Anormal: História e Antropologias Culturais da Deformidade', in História do Corpo, vol. III. As Mutações do Olhar. O século XX., Courtine, J. J. (ed.), Vozes, Rio de Janeiro, 2008, pp. 253-340. Foucault, M., Os Anormais. Brandão, E. (trans), Martins Fontes, São Paulo, 2002. Gil, J., 'Metafenomenologia da Monstruosidade: o Devir-Monstro', in Pedagogia dos Monstros: os Prazeres e os Perigos da Confusão de Fronteiras, Silva, T. T. (ed), Autêntica, Belo Horizonte, 2000. Greenland, C., 'An Indication of Monsters', in Aliens: the Anthropology of Science Fiction, Slusser, G. E. & E. S. Rabkin (eds), Southern Illinois University Press, Illinois, 1987, pp. 151-157. Felinto, E., A Imagem Espectral: Comunicação, Cinema e Fantasmagoria Tecnológica. Sulinas, Porto Alegre, 2008. Filho, J. F., Reinvenções da Resistência Juvenil: os Estudos Culturais e as Micropolíticas do Cotidiano. Mauad, Rio de Janeiro, 2007. Kellner, D., A Cultura da Mídia. Edusc, São Paulo, 2001. Kristeva, J., Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press, New York, 1982. Lopes, M. S., Flash Mob: Uma Experiência dos Meios de Comunicaçã Como Suporte Para Novas Práticas Subjetivas e Sociais. Master’s thesis. Department of Graduation Studies in Communication & Culture, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2006. Skal, D., The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. W. W. Norton, New York, 1993. Sloterdijk, P., O Desprezo das Massas. Estação Liberdade, São Paulo, 2002. Tucherman, I., Breve História do Corpo e de Seus Monstros. Vega/ Passagens, Lisbon, 1999.

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______________________________________________________________ Villaça, N., A Edição do Corpo: Tecnociência, Artes e Moda. Estação das Letras, São Paulo, 2007. Villaça, N. & F. Góes, Em Nome do Corpo. Rocco, Rio de Janeiro, 1998. Žižek, S., 'The Matrix or the Two Sides of Perversion', in The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Irwin, W. (ed), Open Court Publishing Company, Illinois, 2002, pp. 241-266. Simone do Vale is a doctorate candidate at the Department of Graduate Studies in Communication & Culture, Escola de Comunicação, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her dissertation explores the relationship of representations of the body in contemporary medicine, mass-mediated culture, and subjectivity.

Horror and the Politics of Fear Mikko Canini Abstract In the past decade of theorization on the ‘politics of fear’, fear has come to be understood as the general sense of uncertainty that leaves current political forms intact and immune to challenge, makes conservative and authoritarian positions more likely, and increases the propensity for individuals to prioritize their own security at the cost of an indifference to larger injustices. However, this analysis neglects to account for the radical potential of the experience of dread, first conceptualized by Kierkegaard. Extending Kierkegaard’s theorization through an analysis of horror cinema, this chapter argues that the transformative potential of dread is a function of its framing of threat. Whereas fear necessitates the positing of normative social structure disrupted by an external, antagonistic element, dread is the recognition of threat as an internal, constitutive element of the subject’s life-world. Key Words: Dread, drone, horror, Kierkegaard, politics of fear, terror. ***** Responding to reader-submitted questions about his 2006 article ‘The Age of Horrorism’1 the novelist Martin Amis attempts taxonomy of fear: If for some reason you were about to cross Siberia by sleigh, you would be feeling ‘anxiety’; when you heard the first howl of the wolves, your anxiety would be promoted to ‘fear’; as the pack drew near and gave chase, your fear would become ‘terror’; ‘horror’ is reserved for when the wolves are actually there.2 This rather concise definition articulates the general conceptualization of fear as it appears in the body of work devoted to what is variously referred to as a ‘culture of fear’ or a ‘politics of fear’. In this understanding, fear is understood to be a singular, primitive force, the subsets of which (anxiety, terror, etc) are measured by proximity to threat and their attendant affective intensity. The purpose of this chapter is to articulate a distinction in the understanding of fear (as exemplified by the Amis quotation) and to consider its consequences. Specifically, while fear is generally treated as a selfcontained category, I will argue that there is a fundamental division between fear, which relates to threat as an external property, and dread, which relates

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______________________________________________________________ to threat as an internal property. However, fear and dread are not fixed categories, but rather, framings, the dynamics of which are largely determined by the formal properties of the representation of threat. That is, the distinction is not determined by the threat itself, but rather, by its perception. These categories of fear and dread are based on an observation of horror cinema in which I make a distinction between what I think of as a ‘horror’ film and a ‘terror’ film. A terror film is concerned with fear, generally produced through a narrative that posits a normative social structure that is then disrupted by an antagonistic element. The obvious case is the classic monster movie in which, to put it in its most generic terms: we begin with a recognizable, stable microcosm of society, (a town, a family, a group of friends); some monster intrudes as a disgusting, terrifying, unmanageable extra; and finally the monster is rejected and destroyed with the result that the community is restructured as a cohesive whole, consolidated, (though, it has to be said, a few people short) and presumably with a renewed sense of solidarity through its shared trauma. As I said, terror films are concerned with the production of fear, and the paradigm move of the terror film begins with the protagonist carefully descending into the cellar only to discover…an empty room. The tension is released, the viewer made secure, but when the protagonist turns around the monster is revealed behind them with a sudden Dolby surround-sound BLAM! On the other hand, the reality presented by the horror film is disturbed a priori, that is, the antagonistic element is written into the very fabric of the world and emerges from its folds. In the case of the horror film, then, there is some aspect of social reality that is itself monstrous. However, unlike the generic terror film I just described, horror film, as a category, is more difficult to characterise, for its procedures are much more varied and, by definition, less tangible, but the obvious case here is probably the ghost movie. In generic terms, the social microcosm represented by the ghost movie contains within itself the source of horror, typically in the form of a past trauma that has gone unacknowledged. Usually this takes the shape of a past misdeed, such as an unsolved murder. This past misdeed presents us with a social microcosm that is the opposite of the stable, unified group in the terror film, that is, a group whose bonds are, perhaps, temporary and unfixed. When the ghost does finally appear it cannot be directly confronted, but must be understood through a process of uncovering, and is why ghost films tend to take the form of the detective story. So, in this case, the monster cannot be destroyed directly, but rather, understood and, at best, appeased. As with the terror film, which I exemplified by the use of a sound effect, we will proceed to describe horror and dread through the framework of sound: a kind of non-music musical sound generally referred to as a ‘drone’. In musical terms, a drone is simply the sustained, continuous

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______________________________________________________________ sounding of a note or a chord: a monotonous, undifferentiated tone that lacks the fundamental series of contrasts and shifts that generally makes music music. Although popular in Medieval European music, this sound was eventually phased-out in the western tradition, more or less disappearing by the 18th century, only to make its re-appearance in 1958 with La Monte Young’s Trio for Strings. This work, generally acknowledged as introducing Minimalism in music composition, is based on seriality, comprising only of drones in varying alignments. A few points need to be made in order to appreciate the theorization and critical reception of the work and its relevance to the subject at hand. The first is that the serial nature of the piece, and the specific nature of the drone, has what might be called chronological consequences. There is no internal logic that would dictate either a beginning or an end, but rather, its construction implies a possible indefinite extension in time, and as such is strictly non-teleological. The second point is that, in lacking the fundamentals of rhythm and melody, the work cancels the possibility of an overall narrative of conflict and resolution. In western music, melodies and chordal patterns express moments of instability (or dissonance), but are expected to resolve with a final statement of its tonal center that produces a sense of stability and finality. Third, the work emphasizes what might be called flow, the transition of one moment into another according to a determined system that makes the rupture of an event (for example, an unexpected key change, the introduction of a new theme, etc.) impossible. Instead, the listener is presented with a representation of duration. These three principles, the non-teleological, the non-narrative, and the durational encouraged early practitioners and theorists to link this early work with the drone to various forms of mysticism, and the relationship between the use of the drone in minimalist music and the practice of liturgical chanting in various religious sects, for example the Eastern Orthodox Church or Zen Buddhism, is formally quite strong. However, I would argue that the correct reading of the drone only became available as this sound was translated into the language of horror cinema during the late 1970s. While examples of drone-like elements in various horror film scores can be found prior to this, it was only in the ‘70s that this sound is allowed to stand on its own as a singular affective element. It has since become something of a cliché and one has no trouble thinking of generic examples, say, of a film’s protagonist staring dumbfounded as the camera pans slowly down an empty hallway sonically accompanied by a low, rumbling drone. It is probably no coincidence that the drone entered the repertoire of horror film effects at the same moment that the development of miniaturized electronic components allowed the synthesizer to become widely available, and the first examples of the drone in horror cinema were produced with this instrument. This is important insofar as synthesizers produce their sound

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______________________________________________________________ through the generation and combination of signals of different frequencies: the sound of the synthesizer is the sound of amplified electrical signals. That is, the synthesizer is capable of producing perfect drones, undiluted by the limitations of traditional acoustic instruments. (These limitations include the impossibility of producing extended constant tones, the variation of volume due to sonic decay, and the impossibility of recording an acoustically produced drone unaffected by room tone). Furthermore, the artifice of the synthesizer’s sound is essential for materializing the drone, for the drone is fundamentally not a natural occurrence. As Young has stated, ‘…aside from the sound of groups of insects and natural geographic resonators, sounds of constant frequency [drones] are not easily found in nature before mechanization and electronics’.3 Outdoors, telephone poles hum; in the home, the refrigerator rumbles; in the office, fluorescent lights buzz. The drone is the soundtrack of modern life. If the drone is the more or less constant background sound of experience, what then accounts for its affective charge in the horror film? To answer this question, which will lead us to some conclusions about the politics of dread, I will first make a couple of observations about dread more generally. The historical antecedent to this conversation about dread begins with the 1844 work by Søren Kierkegaard titled The Concept of Dread.4 In order to define and understand dread Kierkegaard sets it in opposition to fear, providing three propositions. The first is that dread is different from fear insofar as dread has no precise object. While fear is an instinctive reaction, a part of our animal make-up that causes us to recoil before a specific danger, dread is ambiguous in so far as it is necessarily indefinite. Dread is dread of nothing, of ‘the possibility of possibility’.5 This aspect relates itself to Amis’ description of anxiety: ‘If…you were about to cross Siberia by sleigh…’. It is a sense of unease, a tightening of the intestines, a twanging of the nervous system, powerful because one is unable to identify its source. Second, dread is deeply ambivalent, simultaneously repelling and attracting us. It does not have the simple directionality of fear that famously produces the ‘fight or flight’ response (fear demands above all else action). Rather, we might say, the confusing repulsion-attraction of dread causes one to stand still. This is not, however, simply the result of dread’s objectlessness, our inability to identify the threat that seems to be the cause of this alarmed state, but for Kierkegaard, an essential aspect of dread’s affectivity which he describes through the following formula: dread is ‘a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy’.6 What Kierkegaard seems to be aiming at with this formula is a description of the complexity of this affect that resists the usual dichotomous co-ordinates of Epicurean pleasure and pain, but rather insists on uncertainty as its fundamental structure.

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______________________________________________________________ Third, dread stands in relation to the future. That is, dread organizes itself around nothing other than a possibility as its non-object is forever displaced. In dread the subject moves from a known, finite situation towards an (as yet) unknown situation. By defining dread as a relation with possibility, Kierkegaard argued that it reflexively posited the fundamental freedom of the subject. In other words, dread is always the dread of freedom. It is here in this third proposition that Kierkegaard’s analysis departs from the logic of dread that we have been approaching. Kierkegaard frames his analysis of dread in relation to the biblical story of the prohibition. He writes that: The prohibition induces in [Adam] anxiety, for the prohibition awakens in him freedom’s possibility. What passed by innocence as the nothing of anxiety has now entered into Adam, and here again it is a nothing – the anxious possibility of being able.7 By introducing the prohibition God simultaneously introduces freedom, and Adam’s confrontation with this possibility to act is what produces dread. For Kierkegaard, dread has a redemptive aspect insofar as dread provokes a reflexive analysis of our freedom to transform the given, to move beyond the immediacy of the present towards an unscripted future. What is correct about this analysis is that in dread Adam’s innocence is disrupted, as he is made aware that his life-world, which had been for him complete and known, contains within itself the possibility of transformation, of otherness. However, I would argue that in adopting the prohibition parable, Kierkegaard is lead to incorrectly connect the concept of dread with that of freedom. This is because the instantiation of dread in this case is produced precisely through the presentation of a choice, and the freedom of the act is thereby presupposed. In order to extend this analysis, let us return to the basic orientation of dread that I provided in the beginning and consider it against Kierkegaard’s three propositions. As stated, dread relates to threat as an internal property. That is, dread is the recognition of the functioning of a threat as constitutive of one’s situation. This readily coincides with Kierkegaard’s claim that dread is objectless. Dread relates to the very construction of the life-world of the subject: it is the situation which is in some way disturbed, and one cannot identify and extract some singular element whose eradication would eliminate the threat. Kierkegaard’s claim about dread’s ‘sympathetic antipathy and antipathetic sympathy’ also logically overlaps insofar as the experience of dread provokes a state of alarm, while simultaneously its refusal to make its cause known demands one’s continued engagement with it. It is in Kierkegaard’s third claim about

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______________________________________________________________ dread’s inherent future orientation that requires elucidation in regards to what I’ve claimed is dread’s fundamental, constitutive internality. The first thing to state is that undoubtedly one aspect of dread’s affect is its sense of foreboding, its concomitant apprehension of impending misfortune. Despite the sense of uncertainty that I would like to insist on as an essential aspect of dread’s structure, there is also this sense of certainty insofar as the eventual uncovering or expression of the threat is understood to be inevitable. It is in only in this precise sense of foreboding that dread engages temporally with the future. This paradoxical sense of uncertainty (as to the source, cause and possible response to threat) and certainty (as to the eventual expression of this presentiment) can perhaps best be explicated by returning to the question asked earlier: what accounts for the affective charge of the drone in horror cinema? Generally speaking, the phenomenological experience of everyday sound is one of cause and effect: the plunk of the set-down coffee cup, the rustle of leaves as the wind picks up, the click of a closed door. The drone, in its theoretical sense, in the sense that it occurs in film, has no direct cause. In film, the drone appears, emanates and recedes, unlike other sounds that begin, exist and end. When the drone is not brought about by a swelling or dwindling of volume, it appears or ends with an edit to a different scene that returns the viewer to the everyday of the known world. The drone simply exists, and precedes the subject in the self-same way that the life-world precedes the subject’s existence. I stated earlier that the introduction of the synthesizer was necessary for the materialization of the drone in its essential form due to two properties: its ability to produce perfect drones, and the inherent artifice of the synthesizer’s sound. These two qualities embody dread’s situated otherness insofar as the experience of dread is an experience of some aspect of reality which is unknown. We can observe this readily in terms of the drone’s uncertain relationship to the diegesis of the horror film. While the drone is certainly an extra-narrative element in the same sense that a film’s score is non-diegetic, it is at the same time, diegetic insofar as it seems to emanate from within the space of the narrative, materializing the invisible presence of some force. This force, in its very unknowableness, cannot be represented through a naturalized, locatable sound as it must be both embedded in the life-world of the film and in some way alien to it. Let’s return to what was said about the drone’s general properties, which I listed as non-teleological, non-narrative and durational, in order to consider what might be the consequences of dread in relation to the ‘politics of fear’. At first glance, these properties seem to insist on a conservative world-view that would deny the subject the freedom of the act. And as we have seen, without the self-reflexive turn that Kierkegaard insists upon, dread appears to be the opposite of the founding experience of freedom, that is, an

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______________________________________________________________ experience of subjugation to the facts of the situation, an experience of nonagency. In this regard, dread again appears as the opposite of fear, for fear is a response to an identifiable threat and as such not only allows for, but demands, immediate action. Furthermore, fear has the spontaneous effect of grouping individuals into a larger social collective while dread seems to promote individualization. This social atomization is due, in part, to the indeterminacy of the dread-threat that makes its representation and communication difficult. In this reading then, it is precisely dread, and not fear, that provokes the widespread critiques of the ‘culture of fear’ as responsible for the general sense of uncertainty that leaves current political forms intact and immune to challenge,8 makes conservative and authoritarian positions more likely,9 and increases the propensity for individuals to prioritize their own security at the cost of an indifference to larger injustices.10 However, despite lacking this immediate appeal to collective social action, it is the experience of dread that inheres the potential to provoke social transformation. In perceiving threat through the framework of dread, the subject necessarily recognizes and acknowledges the complexity of the context from which the threat emerges, while in fear the subject is required to posit a unified, bounded and normative life-world untroubled save for the disruptive external threat. The situating of this threatened but otherwise untroubled life-world to which the (fearful) subject belongs has two immediate consequences. The first is that it obscures the social and historical network of relations in which one is a participant, naturalizing ideological presuppositions and relationships. The second is that it divests the subject of any responsibility other than the requirement to mount a defence. One might object that the very sense of uncertainty, of the unknown, that is at the core of dread is antithetical to political action insofar as it denies the straightforward efficacy of proscriptive gestures to vanquish threat. Indeed, the threat recognized in dread cannot, by its very nature, be directly confronted, (and perhaps never fully defeated) but only dissipated through a transformation of the situation that produced it. This is not, however, a denial of politics as such, but rather a denial of the narrative of fear that necessarily aims for resolution through a final restatement of its melody’s tonal centre.

Notes 1

M Amis, ‘The Age of Horrorism’, in The Observer, 10 September 2006, viewed on 4 October, 2008, . 2 M Amis, ‘You Ask the Questions’, in The Independent, 15 January 2007, viewed on 4 October, 2008,
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______________________________________________________________ martin-amis-you-ask-the-questions- 432146.html>. L M Young & M Zazeela, Selected Writings, ubuclassics, New York, 2004, p. 34. 4 This was the translation of the Danish Begrebet Angest employed until the early 1980s when it became common to translate ‘angest’ as ‘anxiety’. For the purpose of brevity, we will ignore the differences between anxiety and dread. 5 S Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1980, p. 42. 6 ibid. 7 ibid., p. 44. 8 See for example L Huddy, S Feldman & C Weber, ‘The Political Consequences of Perceived Threat and Felt Insecurity’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, vol. 614(1), 2007, pp. 131-153. 9 See for example T Pyszczynski, ‘What are we so Afraid of? A Terror Management Theory Perspective on the Politics of Fear’, Social Research, vol. 71(4), 2004, pp. 827-848. 10 See for example W Hollway & T Jefferson, ‘The Risk Society in an Age of Anxiety: Situating Fear of Crime’, The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 48(2), 1997, pp. 255-266. 3

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