Roger Luckhurst

Beyond Trauma Torturous times

This essay investigates whether the ‘trauma paradigm’ that has emerged in cultural theory is adequate to examine one of the most urgent political questions of our time: the question of state-sanctioned torture in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. The first part explores whether the delight in aporia and paradox of much trauma theory is at odds with more urgent political imperatives to represent and circulate images of atrocity in torturous times. The second part investigates a number of cultural representations of trauma that have emerged outside the modernist trauma aesthetic, in particular looking at how Gothic tropes have been used in television and cinema to offer representational modes to debate torture. The study concludes with a reading of the film Pans Labyrinth as an instance of how fantasy, Gothic and overdetermined historical traces have converged to navigate experience in an era of torture.

Trance-Gothic, 1882–97

My thesis is that the waves of production of gothic fictions are bound up with the cyclical history of trance-states as they have been theorized within modernity. Identifiable clusters of gothic activity — the late eighteenth century, the 1840s, and the late nineteenth century — map onto three phases of great public and scientific interest in trance extremely well. The first is the rapid rise of Anton Mesmer’s theory and practice of ‘animal magnetism’ across Europe in the 1780s and its intermittent falls and revivals through to the 1810s; the second wave starts from the dismissal of Elliotson from University College in 1839 over his mesmeric treatments, and the emergence in the 1840s of a mesmeric counter-orthodoxy which included Bulwer Lytton, Dickens, Thackeray and Harriet Martineau (an American mesmeric gothic appears contemporaneously); finally, there is the sanction by ‘official’ science of the hypnotic state as a result of the eminent neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s report in 1882, which was followed by twenty years of intense dispute over the pathological status and even existence of hypnotic susceptibility.1 One could argue that the critical industry that has proliferated around the gothic in the last decade or so is also linked to the most recent cyclical recurrence of hypnosis after its long suppression by the very different suspicions of psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology.

‘Something Tremendous, Something Elemental’: On the Ghostly Origins of Psychoanalysis

Andre Breton’s 1924 Surrealist novel or document Nadja opens with the following statement: Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I ‘haunt’ …. Such a word means much more than it says, makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part.3 Breton plays on the double meaning in the proverb, shifting the emphasis from ‘tell me whom you frequent (or: what your haunts are), and I will tell you who you are’ to literalize the effect of that haunting. Discomfort attends this becoming-ghostly, for the haunting Breton has to suffer the ghost’s ‘blind submission to certain contingencies of time and place’ and is ‘doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring,… learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten’.4 His own subjectivity, now ghosted, far from masters the spatio-temporal world from a place outside it, but is constructed contingently and through a sequential forgetting; it must shadow itself, ceaselessly failing to conjure self-proximity. Nadja will pursue how Breton’s subjectivity is constructed disjointedly through chance, accident and the uncanny encounter. As Margaret Cohen reads this opening passage: ‘Breton posits … identity as a sequence of temporally differentiated moments.

Creating the 20th Century

and Out of Time will certainly dispel any notion of Peter as a safe, cozy character. editors Donna R. White and C. Anita Tarr, professors of children’s and young adult literature, have collected essays whose diversity attests to the complexities of the Peter Pan story, some of them evident from the rubrics in the exemplary index: adults, ambiguity, childhood, death, desire, flying, gender, growing up, hero, identity, innocence, manhood, mothers, sexuality, time, and youth. Useful as well are the sixteen Works Cited lists, which, if coalesced, would constitute a substantial, up-to-date Peter Pan bibliography. What amazes is that, aside from some important quotations and the use of a few key critical sources (among them the work of R. D. S. Jack, Jacqueline Rose, and Jackie Wullschläger), there is very little overlap from one essay to another, further evidence of the richness of Barrie’s story and of the diversity of interpretations. The combined work of the book’s eighteen contributors—they range from established scholars to doctoral candidates and recent PhDs—exemplifies not only how this children’s classic continues to fascinate young readers, but why Peter Pan is also a surprisingly—often shockingly—adult story.

(Touching on) Tele-Technology

As Julian Stallabrass notes, ‘the concept of cyberspace attracts a breathless, hyperbolic writing … whether positive or negative’ (Stallabrass 1995,22). Barely existent, and barely existent without a strange kind of cathexis, it hooks up to a rhetoric that might be codified according to the linked but divided investments analysed in Freud’s ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’: overvaluation and denigration (Freud 1984, 179–90). Scott Bukatman has coined the term ‘cyberdrool’ to describe the overvaluative discourse (’Cyberspace becomes another venue for consciousness itself’, says one [Benedikt, cit. Stallabrass 1995, 8]; ‘The Net wires the world for Hegelian Geist’, say others [Taylor and Saarinen, cit. Stallabrass 1995, 9), but his own text is unable to avoid the rhetorical vortex of the scene. Terminal Identity (Bukatman 1993) self-described as ‘intriguingly hyperbolic’ (1993, 17), rushes to announce a full-scale epistemological and ontological revolution: ‘a fully technologised existence … has forced a crisis around untenable definitions of the human’, (1993, 5) such that a new ‘terminal identity’ ‘situates the human and technological as coextensive, co-dependent and mutually defining’ (1993, 22). The frisson of Bukatman’s uncontrolled exuberance derives from those peerless rhetoricians of the denigrative pole, Baudrillard and Virilio.

The weird: a dis/orientation

ABSTRACT This essay attempts to explore the recent resurgence of interest in ‘weird fiction’ from Arthur Machen in the 1890s via H. P. Lovecraft in the 1920s to the rise of the New Weird in 2003 and beyond in the works of China Miéville, M. John Harrison and Jeff VanderMeer. It aims to provide an overview of its slippery genre status, existing as it does in the interstices of gothic and science fiction, decadent and pulp fiction. But it also recognizes that the very slipperiness of the genre insidiously undermines any fixity of definition, constantly shifting boundaries and defying the act of ever being fully ‘introduced’. An orientation in this emergent field is also about acknowledging disorientation.

The Cambridge companion to Dracula

Book synopsis: Bram Stokers Dracula is the most famous vampire in literature and film. This new collection of sixteen essays brings together a range of internationally renowned scholars to provide a series of pathways through this celebrated Gothic novel and its innumerable adaptations and translations. The volume illuminates the novels various pre-histories, critical contexts and subsequent cultural transformations. Chapters explore literary history, Gothic revival scholarship, folklore, anthropology, psychology, sexology, philosophy, occultism, cultural history, critical race theory, theatre and film history, and the place of the vampire in Europe and beyond. These studies provide an accessible guide of cutting-edge scholarship to one of the most celebrated modern Gothic horror stories. This Companion will serve as a key resource for scholars, teachers and students interested in the enduring force of Dracula and the seemingly inexhaustible range of the contexts it requires and readings it might generate.

30@30: the future of literary thinking

All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility?

The Uncanny After Freud: The Contemporary Trauma Subject and the Fiction of Stephen King

For about twenty years, Western culture has staged and restaged a particularly dramatic scene which tells us much about the nature of the contemporary subject. A distressed and disoriented individual is assailed by their own memory. He or she discovers, by involuntary flashbacks or perhaps by hypnotic regression, a whole tranche of memory that had been lying dormant, walled off or hidden away (somehow) in the psyche. The occluded memories always concern a devastating event or series of events, of such searing intensity that the conscious mind cannot bear it and so (somehow) propels it into the outer psychical darkness. The type of events that generate this defensive reaction are now generally brought under the umbrella category of ‘trauma’: the violence of war, familial abuse, rape, being a witness to an accident or disaster. There are complex arrays of symptoms that have been clustered under the clinical illness post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) since it entered official diagnostics in 1980, but this pattern of defence, period of latency and belated lifting of amnesia has most captured the wider cultural imagination.

Dreamlands of Consumption

Bowlby’s book continues her work excavating the origins of consumer society, first explored in her Just Looking and the essays in Shopping with Freud. Whilst there is some repetition of material concerning the emergence of the department store in the mid-nineteenth century, Carried Away extends this material through to the development of scientistic consumer psychology in the 1950s and 1960s. There are also gestures towards the present-day situation of saturated consumption; the book opens with a kind of primal scene set in an IKEA superstore, where the computerized checkouts have crashed, yet the customers patiently queue, `carried away’ by their desire for acquisition. The aim of the book is to uncover some of the routes that have led to such a scene, `to recover a sense of the peculiarity of supermarkets and the selves they have made or imagined for their customers’. Bowlby wants to conjure the ghosts haunting our supermarkets: rather like Walter Benjamin’s focus on Parisian arcades, then, Bowlby at first seems intent on waking the reader/consumer from the entrancing phantasmagoria of modern shopping by strategies of historical excavation or recovery of the outmoded, the forgotten or abandoned futures of earlier capitalist formations. The main narrative to emerge from Carried Away is the development of `self-service’ shopping from the 1930s to the 1960s. In such wonderfully arcane journals as Modern Packaging and Shelf Appeal, Bowlby tracks the debates, which move from anxiety over the abandonment of personal service shopping to enthusiastic discussion of the unmediated efficiencies of selfservice. The shift is from a selling psychology that focuses on interactive dialogue between salesperson and customer (rather like a seduction or, Bowlby suggests, the psychoanalytic session) to the massification of techniques following the Second World War. These are evangelized largely by American companies and selling gurus, and are seen to be practised `scientifically’ on undifferentiated consumers, in a language that attempts to mimic behaviourist discourse. There are some absorbing micro-narratives here: the confused debate over conflicting desires embodied in Pretty Girl packaging for chocolates in the 1930s; the radical abstract modernist design 252 . WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW ............................................ ..................................................................................... ...........