Carmen-Veronica Borbély Genealogies of Monstrosity
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CARMEN-VERONICA BORBÉLY GENEALOGIES OF MONSTROSITY: CONSTRUCTIONS OF MONSTROUS CORPOREAL OTHERNESS IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH FICTION CARMEN-VERONICA BORBÉLY GENEALOGIES OF MONSTROSITY: CONSTRUCTIONS OF MONSTROUS CORPOREAL OTHERNESS IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH FICTION PRESA UNIVERSITARĂ CLUJEANĂ 2015 Referenţi ştiinţifici: Prof. univ. dr. Sanda Berce Prof. univ. dr. Virgil Stanciu ISBN 978-973-595-837-4 © 2015 Autoarea volumului. Toate drepturile rezervate. Reproducerea integrală sau parţială a textului, prin orice mij- loace, fără acordul autoarei, este interzisă şi se pedepseşte conform legii. Universitatea Babeş-Bolyai Presa Universitară Clujeană Director: Codruţa Săcelean Str. Hasdeu nr. 51 400371 Cluj-Napoca, România Tel./fax: (+40)-264-597.401 E-mail: [email protected] http://www.editura.ubbcluj.ro Contents Introduction ................................................................................................. 9 I. Towards a Genealogy of Monstrosity ................................................ 17 I.1. Genealogy and the Teratological “Archive” .............................. 17 I.2. Demonstration, Remonstration: Definitional Excursions .......... 28 I.3. Epistemic Paradigms of Monstrosity ......................................... 38 II. Towards an Anthropology of Monstrosity ........................................ 53 II.1. The Monster as Pharmakos: Scapegoating Otherness ............... 53 II.2. The Ontological Liminality of Monstrous Others...................... 60 II.3. “Matter out of Place”: Monstrosity as a Pollution Phenomenon .................................... 68 II.4. Monstrosity on Display: The Grotesque in Carnivals and Freak Shows ........................................................................ 73 III. Monstrosity and the Gothicity of Contemporary British Fiction ... 81 III.1. Unsettling Notions of the “Monstrous-Feminine” ..................... 88 III.1.1. (De)“Monstrifying” Female Bodies in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus ......................... 96 III.1.2. “Sewing Us at the Hip”: Hybrid Selves in Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry .................................... 108 III.1.3. Gargatom Refigured: Giantesses and Shrivelled Crones ................................................. 112 III.1.4. Monstrous Imagination: Reconstru(ct)ing Teratical Females in A.S. Byatt’s Fiction .................... 120 III.1.5. Neo-Gothic Phantasms: Parodies of “Deranged Imagination” in Clare Clark’s The Nature of Monsters138 III.2. The “Savage Exteriority” of Monstrous Others ....................... 144 III.2.1. Out of the Orrery: Marina Warner’s Indigo, or Mapping the Waters .................................... 150 III.2.2. “Whither Albion?” Chutnified Identities in Marina Warner’s The Leto Bundle ........................... 162 5 III.2.3. Spectral Encounters: The Fabulous Other in Lawrence Norfolk’s The Pope’s Rhinoceros ........... 168 III.2.4. Textualised Traces of the Teratological Archive: Lawrence Norfolk’s In the Shape of a Boar ................ 178 III.2.5. “Strange Metamorph”: Salman Rushdie’s Narratives of “Liquid Modernity” ............................... 185 III.3. De-naturing the Monster: Posthuman Others .......................... 204 III.3.1. Dislocated Origins: Bio-Technical Generation in Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil ............... 209 III.3.2. In Frankenstein’s Footsteps: Monstering the Father in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things .................. 219 III.4. Troping the Monstrous Body Politic ........................................ 225 III.4.1. Monstrous Bodies Individual, Deformed Bodies Politic ............................................. 225 III.4.2. Sovereign Power, Disciplinary Biopower, and Schizoid Lines of Fugue ....................................... 226 III.4.3. The Monstrous State in Feminist Dystopias: From Molar Identity to Molecular Becomings ............ 231 III.4.4. “Savage Survivals,” “Dragon Sublimations”: Alasdair Gray’s Lanark. A Life in Four Books ............ 251 Conclusions............................................................................................... 261 Works Cited.............................................................................................. 265 6 To Blanca Introduction This study embarks on a Foucauldian descent into the archival traces of contemporary figurations of monstrosity, which permeate postmodernist British fiction at the turn of the millennium. In view of monstrous corporeality constantly marking out the perimeters of proper human embodiment, whether in teratological taxonomies or in travelogues depicting deformed races at the fringes of human civilisation, I rally to my argument Michel Foucault’s genealogical survey of the pathologisation and discursive constitution of a domain of marginal otherness serving to delineate the abjected outside of the western liberal subject. The plural from my title, genealogies, emphasises the dislocation or diffraction of the monstrous figures outlined by the fictional texts I examine from strict, fixed origins: by admixing mythical, scientific, culturally perspectivist or citational Gothic constructions of monstrosity, the novels I investigate ultimately evince the firm imbrication between teratology, as the discourse of the monstrous, and attempts to construct notions of what counts as normal and normative humanity. I see monstrosity, therefore, as a historically variable, discursive cons- truction of otherness, arising at the nexus of a wide array of cultural, scientific, religious and ideological discourses. Undergirding any attempt to retrieve historical responses to the monstrous, however, must be the awareness that archival texts encrypt operations of subduing monstrosity, that is, of containing its contagious potential through representational/inter- pretational schemes. In that sense, Foucault’s genealogical method can serve to highlight, on the one hand, how knowledges of the monstrous are organised within various historical periods and, on the other, how their legitimacy is queried or challenged in postmodernist fictional works that simultaneously invoke and contest, to follow Linda Hutcheon’s argument, the textualised traces of historically legitimated truths.1 Thus, the narratives of monstrosity under consideration here perform their own genealogical enquiry into the legacy of encrusted meanings from what Dennis Todd calls the literature of monsters,2 or the teratological archive, itself evincing the complex, extensive citational and cross-referencing techniques teratologists resort to. 1 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 81. 2 Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters. Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 44. 9 Genealogies of Monstrosity The novels I analyse here open up spaces for what Foucault calls an insurrection of subjugated knowledges, by which he understands those historical contents that have undergone concealment and interment in the name of “functionalist coherence or formal systemisation.”3 In light of what analysts have recognised as the persistent enquiry of British postmodernist fiction into its identity and its self-reflexive contestation of consecrated hegemonies, such novels as the ones I have selected for analysis dispute, in Frankenstein’s footsteps, the authority of master texts by exhibiting the discursive constitution and circulation of monsters, by allowing monstrified others to recount stories of their own identity, to contest grand narratives of origins and paternity, and to break through molar aggregates of enfreakment. My study deploys an interdisciplinary approach to monstrosity, combi- ning Foucauldian genealogy, anthropological considerations of liminality, teratological studies, as well as theoretical insights into the culture of postmodernity and postmodernist fiction, as I am fully aware that my research on figurations of monstrous corporeality in contemporary British writing, under the four headings, the “monstrous-feminine,” the foreigner, the posthuman other, and the monstrous body politic, lends itself not to a reductive, unilateral approach, but to a programmatically heterogeneous perspective, intent on discarding monolithic verities. The corpus of fictional texts I look at includes novels and short stories by authors who manifest a marked propensity towards exploiting the neo-Gothic sensibility that pervades the millennial turn. I have selected those narratives written by Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Marina Warner, A.S. Byatt, Clare Clark, Jeanette Winterson, Alasdair Gray, Lawrence Norfolk, Margaret Atwood and Fay Weldon that substantiate my argument related to a contemporary reassessment of monstrous corporeality in fictional genealogies of the teratological archive. The structure of my study is presented below. The first chapter, entitled Towards a Genealogy of Monstrosity, is divi- ded into three subsections which set the methodological grounds of my re- search. Thus Genealogy and the Teratological “Archive” explores Foucault’s notion of genealogy as an alternative history that is not bent on retrieving origins or foraging for an uninterrupted, linear progression of concepts or events but on following their course of descent, tracing the archival mutations, ruptures and discontinuities inevitably accompanying epistemic shifts. It also looks at Foucault’s own genealogy of abnormality, grounded, as he shows, in a threesome of normalisation stages that anomalous embo- diment registered