The Gothic and the Fantastic in the Age of Digital Reproduction Anne Quéma Acadia University
to categorize artistic produc- Wtions, or we may pause and refl ect on the diffi culty of defi ning genres such as the Gothic and the fantastic. An examination of the critical discourse on the fantastic elaborated by critics such as Todorov, Jackson, and Monleón indicates that the defi nitions of the fantastic and the Gothic—however masterful or tentative—overlap to a considerable degree. In the fi rst sec- tion of this article, I will analyze the similarities between the two critical discourses with the view of proposing a means of distinguishing between the fantastic and the Gothic. While both genres interrogate epistemologi- cal and ontological norms governing mimetic representation, the Gothic stands out by drawing upon a rhetoric of the uncanny which perverts mimesis and creates terror and disorientation in the reader. is rhetoric of aff ect is what distinguishes the Gothic from the fantastic. In the second section, applying this theoretical distinction to visual art, I will consider some of H. R. Giger’s pictures which rest on a tension between the Gothic and the fantastic. I will demonstrate that this generic hybridism constitutes the visual vocabulary of Giger’s critique of the discourse of sexuality and sexual reproduction in the s and s. I will conclude by examining
ESC .. (D(Decemberecember ):): -- the extent and limits of cultural subversion in Giger’s visual art and the Gothic genre. A Q teaches e act of defi ning the Gothic seems to function like a critical irritant, at Acadia University. and the attendant discursive discomfort may indicate that the very notion A specialist in theory of genre belongs to an Aristotelian tradition that has been eroded by post- and twentieth-century structuralist tales of textual indeterminacy. Although critics such as Avril British literature, she has Horner and Sue Zlosnik do take the Gothic bull by the horns by claiming published e Agon of that “Gothic writing always concerns itself with boundaries and their insta- Modernism: Wyndham bilities” (), others adopt an oxymoronic discourse that supports the Lewis’s Allegories, notion that the Gothic is not a stable genre whose recurrent features can Aesthetics, and Politics nevertheless be enumerated. us, Jerrold Hogle begins his introduction to (Bucknell University e Cambridge Companion to the Gothic with the following defi ant asser- Press, ) as well as tion: “Gothic fi ction is hardly ‘Gothic’ at all” (, ), but later proceeds to articles in e Canadian identify its “general parameters” (). In his analysis of the Gothic, Botting Modernists Meet, Studies singles out excess and transgression as recurrent features of a genre he is in Canadian Literature, in other respects reluctant to defi ne. Choosing a term that recurs in other Philosophy and Literature, critical analyses to designate the elusive genre of the Gothic, he states: West Coast Line, and “changing features, emphases and meanings disclose Gothic writing as a Gothic Studies. e mode (my emphasis) that exceeds genre and categories, restricted neither recipient of a to a literary school nor to a historical period” (, ). Both Hogle and research grant, she is Botting underline the fact that in the Gothic we are dealing with a type of currently working on a text that undoes neat typologies and literary genealogies. Why persist then project on contemporary in establishing generic boundaries if the very function of the Gothic text is Gothic fi ction and to blur boundaries? It could be counter-argued that there is no necessary English family law. contradiction between the fact that narratives are concerned with indeter- minacy and the decision to identify the recurrence of this indeterminacy as the index of a genre. e plot thickens when, despite the futility of the exercise, we succumb to the temptation of comparing defi nitions of the fantastic and the Gothic. e major problem one faces in this process of comparison is that critics do not draw any clear distinction between the two genres. In fact, the question as to whether the fantastic and the Gothic are two distinct genres is never raised. In e Fantastic (), Todorov states: In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, a world without sylphides, or vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world. e person who experiences the event must opt for one of the two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination—and laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed
| Quéma | taken place, it is an integral part of reality—but then this real- ity is controlled by laws unknown to us. Either the devil is an illusion, an imaginary being; or else he exists, precisely like other living beings—with this reservation, that we encounter him infrequently. e fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighbouring genre, the uncanny or the marvellous. e fan- tastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event. ()
It is on the basis of this defi nition that Todorov analyzes the Gothic: “we generally distinguish, within the literary Gothic, two tendencies: that of the supernatural explained (the ‘uncanny’), as it appears in the novels of Clara Reeves and Ann Radcliff e; and that of the supernatural accepted (the ‘marvellous’), which is characteristic of the works of Horace Walpole, M. G. Lewis, and Maturin” (). In both tendencies, the fantastic in its pure form does not exist because it is eventually rationalized, or because it remains beyond rationalization. is analysis produces a curious problem. While it clearly indicates that the Gothic is not the fantastic, it also defi nes the Gothic according to categories that determine the fantastic. In addition, it can be argued that the presence of the supernatural is not a condition of the Gothic text. Although historically Gothic narratives have resorted to devices such as ghosts, apparitions, and hallucinations, the violation of natural laws (physiological, perceptual, and ideological) does not necessar- ily lead into the supernatural.¹ J. G. Ballard’s Gothic Crash () certainly defi es what culture might regard as natural laws, but has no truck with the supernatural, let alone the marvellous. Instead, it lands the reader and viewer in the cul-de-sac of alienation and abjection. Conversely, not all fantastic texts are Gothic: fairy tales or the Arabian Nights deal in the supernatural but do not necessarily evince Gothic horror.²
Aguirre makes a similar point when he proposes to distinguish between the numinous and the supernatural: “ e Gothic novel is not primarily about super- natural but about numinous events. If by ‘numinous’ is understood the quality of that which transcends—and opposes—the rational, it is immaterial whether these events arise from outside sources, from nature or from the human mind” (). Aguirre uses the word numinous “to signify not the merely supernatural but that which the world of horror fi ction systematically defi nes as non-human, as alien, as Other: that which we are not” (). However, Lucie Armitt argues that with their ogres and child-devouring witches, fairy tales share with the Gothic confrontations with the uncanny ().
| e Gothic and the Fantastic | In identifying the thematic properties of the fantastic, Todorov singles out two phenomenological features. e fantastic concerns the self in its relation to the world when the deletion of boundaries between subject and object, animate and inanimate occurs: “the transition from mind to matter has become possible” (). ere is little distinction between this defi n- ing criterion of the fantastic and the recurrently discussed parameters of Gothic narrative. Consider, for instance, Hogle’s statement that “the Gothic is … continuously about confrontations between the low and the high.… [I]t is about its own blurring of diff erent levels of discourse while it is also concerned with the interpenetration of other opposed conditions—includ- ing life/death, natural/supernatural, ancient/modern, realistic/artifi cial, and unconscious/conscious—along with the abjection of these crossings into haunting and supposedly deviant ‘others’ that therefore attract and terrify middle-class characters and readers” (). In both cases, the fantastic and the Gothic are declared to delete boundaries between categories. Todo- rov also argues that the fantastic concerns the self in its relation to others, more specifi cally, “the relation of man with his desire—and thereby with his unconscious” (). Similarly, Botting argues that, in the Gothic, excess and “the fascination with transgression and the anxiety over cultural limits and boundaries, continue to produce ambivalent emotions and meanings in their tales of darkness, desire and power” (, ). As a matter of fact, Todorov goes on to select the transgression of the law as the narrative and social pointer of the fantastic: the irruption of the fantastic sets into motion a narrative that contests the social and political rule of the law (Todorov , ). One can observe the same generic blurring in Rosemary Jackson’s Fan- tasy (). Jackson adds to the generic conundrum by not distinguishing between fantasy and the fantastic, as her use of the two terms is undiff er- entiated throughout her study. Her contribution to the critical discourse on the fantastic consists of her Bakhtinian interpretation of the genre: “the fantastic is a mode of writing which enters a dialogue with the ‘real’ and incorporates that dialogue as part of its essential structure. To return to Bakhtin’s phrase, fantasy is ‘dialogical,’ interrogating single or unitary ways of seeing” (). Jackson’s dialogical defi nition of the fantastic overlaps with Botting’s emphasis on the Gothic as an interrogation of the real and cultural monological norms when he states that “Gothic is an inscription neither of darkness nor of light, a delineation neither of reason and morality nor of superstition and corruption, neither good nor evil, but both at the same time. Relations between real and fantastic, sacred and profane, supernatural and natural, past and present, civilized and barbaric, rational and fanciful,
| Quéma | remain crucial to the Gothic dynamic of limit and transgression” (, ). In fact, in establishing a contrast between the real and the fantastic, Botting’s defi nition eerily mirrors Jackson’s. When listing fantastic motifs, she evokes creatures that are also known to populate Gothic texts: ghosts, shadows, vampires, werewolves, doubles, partial selves, refl ections (mirrors), enclosures, monsters, beasts, cannibals. Transgressive impulses towards incest, necrophilia, androgyny, cannibalism, recidivism, narcissism and abnormal psychologi- cal states conventionally categorized as hallucination, dream, insanity, paranoia, derive from … thematic concerns … con- cerned with erasing rigid demarcations of gender and genre. () As in the case of Botting’s defi nition of the Gothic as a site of transgressive practices, Jackson’s list of fantastic motifs is organized according to the principles of transgression and the deletion of boundaries. Typically, critics allude to a distinction between the fantastic and the Gothic when they identify the Gothic as an earlier manifestation of the fantastic. Adopting Todorov’s categories of analysis, Jackson suggests that “early Gothic romances, such as those of Clara Reeve, are closer to the marvellous than to pure fantasy.… As Gothic undergoes transformations through the work of Ann Radcliff e, M. G. Lewis, Mary Shelley and Charles Maturin, it develops into a literary form capable of more radical interroga- tion of social contradictions, no longer simply making up for a society’s lacks” (). e problem such a historical defi nition creates is that, earlier in her analysis, Jackson initially defi ned the fantastic as an ahistorical mode () so that it is diffi cult to think of the transition from the supra-temporal fantastic to the Gothic as a historical “literary form.” Although critical of Jackson’s assumption that the fantastic has the capacity to subvert the political status quo, José B. Monleón follows in her footsteps by describing the Gothic as a stage in the historical develop- ment of the fantastic. Fleshing out the structuralist skeleton, Monleón’s argument can be read as a political radicalization of Todorov’s analysis via Foucault: the fantastic emerged during the Enlightenment at a time when western culture adopted rationalism as its mainstay in philosophy, economics, urban policies, and political ideals. e predominance of this epistemological discourse made possible the emergence of the fantastic as a counter-discourse of the irrational. Monleón identify Gothic monsters as the political outcasts of a culture that, increasingly governed by rationalist principles of effi ciency, ostracized the lower classes, the mad, the useless, and the deviant. e lack of generic distinction between the Gothic and
| e Gothic and the Fantastic | the fantastic in Monleón’s analysis is conspicuous in the following state- ment where the relation between monstrosity, supernaturalism, and the fantastic is taken for granted: It is this very e perception of monstrosity had signifi cant correlations with the way in which dominant culture defi ned and redefi ned its existential political and economic supremacy, and depended upon the concrete forms of class struggle. On the one hand, the fantastic sense of doubt, “refl ected” very real threats; on the other hand, it created a space in which those threats could be transformed into “supernatural- ambiguity, and ism” and monstrosity, thus helping to reshape the philosophical premises that sustained the fantastic and eff ectively reorient disorientation the course of social evolution. () Furthermore, Monleón’s examples of fantastic literature in the nineteenth that critics have century include Maupassant’s Horla, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Stoker’s Dracula, all perfect candidates for Gothic fi ction. underlined in What perhaps constitutes the Gordian knot of these critical discourses is the extent to which each separate genre is claimed to express indeter- their analyses of minacy. According to Todorov, ambiguity and the moment of doubt that derives from such ambiguity characterizes the pure fantastic. e hesitation Gothic which the reader experiences when faced with the fantastic “may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader’s role is so to speak entrusted to narratives. a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes, one of the themes of the work” ().³ Jackson reinforces this defi nition by adding that “what emerges as the basic trope of fantasy is the oxymoron, a fi gure of speech which holds together contradictions and sustains them in an impossible unity, without progressing towards synthesis” (). However, it is this very existential sense of doubt, ambiguity, and disorientation that critics have underlined in their analyses of Gothic narratives. According to David Punter, the Gothic is characterized by the transgression of the law that rests on assertion and boundaries: “the law is the imposition of certainty, the rhetorical summation of the absence, or the the transi- tion from the real to the unreal, that is to say, from normative reality, as defi ned by norms of cognition and cultural dogmas, to a diff erent realm
At the opposite end of Todorov’s argument is Irwin’s defi nition of fantasy as a contract between the text and the reader based on the following rhetorical terms: “Whatever the material, extravagant or seemingly commonplace, a narrative is a fantasy if it presents the persuasive establishment and development of an impos- sibility, an arbitrary construct of the mind with all under the control of logic and rhetoric” (). In contra-distinction from Todorov, he adds: “In successful fantasy all is clarity and certainty, as far as presentation goes” (). eoretically, Irwin’s fantasy seems to correspond to Todorov’s marvellous.
| Quéma | Monleón comments that the “fantastic is, at heart, an epistemological question, not an ethical one, although it does have profound philosophical and political consequences” (). e Republic, trans. Paul Shorey (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ) –.
| e Gothic and the Fantastic | that creates doubt about the nature of reality and its epistemological norms. Punter speaks of “Gothic’s general opposition to realist aesthetics” (). is implies that, from a generic standpoint, an analysis of the Gothic and the fantastic as narratives contesting normative defi nitions of reality remains incomplete without any reference to realism and more generally mimesis. To various degrees, Jackson, Hume, Messent, and Rabkin all refer to mimesis in their discussions of the fantastic and include realism in their generic analyses.⁶ us, Christine Brooke-Rose’s theoretical point that “all types of fantastic, whether uncanny, pure fantastic or marvellous (or merged), need to be solidly anchored in some kind of fi ctionally mimed ‘reality,’ not only to be as plausible as possible within the implausible, but to emphasize the contrast between the natural and the supernatural elements” () rings true. Brooke-Rose’s approach to genre theory is motivated by the attempt to “mark a distinction, in any one genre, between the ‘pure’ type and others (on the basis of any stated criteria), the ‘pure’ type perhaps not existing but representing an abstract model, more or less predominant in the others; in the case of the fantastic, the distinction here would be between a text (existent or not) in which the hesitation is maintained to the end, and the others.” (). Her major concern is to demonstrate that the inheritors of fantastic literature are American postmodernists such as Pynchon and Vonnegut as well as the writers of the French nouveau roman. Her chief criterion is ambiguity which she borrows from Todorov’s defi nition of the fantastic as this evanescent moment of doubt when the reader and the protagonist hesitate between natural and supernatural laws of interpretation. Todorov synthesized his epistemological and ontological defi nition of the fantastic in the following schema: uncanny | fantastic-uncanny | fantastic-marvellous | marvellous
Jackson argues that fantasy “re-combines and inverts the real, but it does not escape it: it exists in a parasitical or symbiotic relation to the real” (). For Hume, fantasy merely constitutes “any departure from consensus reality” (). Messent argues that the literature of the fantastic, which he dubs the literature of the oc- cult, “operates in that area where these two worlds clash head on—that sense of radical disjunction, that thrill, the sensation of numbing dislocation which arises at that point of intersection between two separate worlds, the material and the supernatural. It is this sense of fracture which provides the real power of this type of literature” (). Emphasizing this sense of fracture, and identifying sur- prise, shock, delight, and fear as typical of the fantastic, Rabkin is of the opinion that the “truly fantastic occurs when the ground rules of a narrative are forced to make a ° reversal, when prevailing perspectives are directly contradicted” ().
| Quéma | As Brooke-Rose reminds us, the central line between the fantastic-uncanny and the fantastic-marvellous constitutes the site of the pure fantastic. How- ever, missing from this schema, is the crucial role that mimesis and realism play. Brooke-Rose transforms Todorov’s linear model into a circular model The Gothic and, on the strength of her detailed, narratological comparison between realistic narratives and science-fi ction narratives, she adds the genre of establishes a realism to the combination (). is means that even the most fantastic narratives can be traced back to some referential construct of reality. is narrative addition is crucial because it allows for an analysis of the relation between the fantastic and the cultural, historical, and political origins of a particular fracture that narrative.⁷ It follows then that mimesis plays a crucial role in both the Gothic and always coincides the fantastic genres because the epistemological and ontological norms from which these genres depart are initially inscribed in a realistic dis- with violence course. Brooke-Rose’s analysis of mimesis and the fantastic provides the missing piece in this generic puzzle, for by focusing on the relationship and excess. between the realistic, fantastic, and Gothic codes of representation, one may identify the basic distinction between the Gothic and the fantastic. It is the subversion of epistemological and ontological norms in the mode of terror which generically encodes the reader of Gothic narratives. While
Realism
Uncanny Marvellous
Fantastic- Fantastic- Uncanny Marvellous
Pure fantastic
In his analysis of illustrations of the Arabian Nights produced in England between and , Terry Hackford confi rms Brooke-Rose’s theoretical model when he states: “the persuasive fantasy image—be it the cave of the forty thieves, a roc in fl ight, or the stone king of the Ebony Isles—depends in a complex manner upon the artistic conventions and semiotic codes associated with realism. e fantasy illustrator takes the pictorial conventions of realistic portrayal and then manipulates or inverts them to create marvellous worlds for which there can be no earthly analogy” (). Hackford concentrates on the following illustrators: Arthur B. Houghton, John D. Batten, Henry J. Ford, and Edmund Dulac.
| e Gothic and the Fantastic | the fantastic establishes a narrative fracture in the symbolic space of real- ism that may provoke emotions of wonder, shock, or delight, the Gothic establishes a narrative fracture that always coincides with violence and excess and that threatens us “with the dissolution of our normal cultural foundations for identities we claim to possess” (Hogle ).⁸ is subversion of cognitive and ontological norms in the mode of terror constitutes the chief topic of discussion in “ e Uncanny” () in which Freud articulates major relationships between knowledge, reality, aff ect, and symbolization. For Freud, “an uncanny eff ect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is eff aced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes” (). e representation of the uncanny concerns both the terrifying occultation of familiar norms of knowledge and real- ity and the no less dreadful (re-)discovery of what was best left unknown. Freud’s uncanny functions in the mode of ambiguity which leaves meaning indeterminate, as it “is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it through the process of repression.… [ is allows us] to understand Schelling’s defi nition of the uncanny as something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light” ().⁹ If, indeed, the uncanny is what distinguishes the fantastic from the Gothic, then we need to revisit Todorov’s use of the category in his generic model.
Roger C. Schlobin reports on a conversation with David Ketterer: “Fantasy presents a challenging unknown that can nevertheless be known through intuitive, magical, and personal forces. Horror’s unknown, on the other hand, promises fear and destruction, not fulfi lment; and often its advent is chilling and fear-evoking rather than challenging” (). Armitt describes fantasy as a genre characterized by textual and reassuring closure that forecloses any lasting sense of destabilization and threat (). Elizabeth Bronfen identifi es the role of indeterminacy in “ e Uncanny” when she remarks that because “the word unheimlich refers both to the familiar and agreeable and to something concealed, kept out of sight, it comes to signify any moment where meaning develops in the direction of ambivalence until it coincides with its opposite. Semantic oppositions collapse and a moment of ambivalence emerges that induces intellectual hesitation (Unsicherheit)”)” ().(). PatrickPatrick McGrath’sMcGrath’s defidefi nnitionition ooff tthehe GGothicothic is infl ected by Freud’s analysis of the uncanny: “ e Gothic tends always to assume this posture in relation to the dominant values of a culture. It negates. It denies. It buries in shadow that which had been brightly lit, and brings into the light that which had been repressed” (). In “Psychoanalysis and the Gothic,” Michelle Massé presents the main lines of a psychoanalytical interpretation of the genre of the Gothic. If space permitted, I would demonstrate that paranoia, barbarism and taboo—which Punter selects as recurrent features of the Gothic (, –)—all operate in the mode of ambiguity.
| Quéma | As Peter Schwenger () and Nicholas Royle () point out, Todorov’s use of the term “uncanny” to refer to a narrative which provides a rational explanation of the supernatural is problematic. In fact, Todorov uses the term so loosely that, as in the following passage, the uncanny seems to stand for the supernatural: “the fantastic implies … the existence of an uncanny event, which provokes a hesitation in the reader and the hero” (). Here the uncanny is associated with the fantastic when, at other stages of the argument, it is supposed to cancel the eff ect of the fantastic. Perhaps Jack- son puts it most accurately when she remarks that, in contrast to the other categories, the uncanny is not a literary category (). Furthermore, a glance at the critical history of the term indicates that, in accordance with Freud’s approach, critics have used the uncanny as a state of epistemological and ontological indeterminacy. us, Botting associates the uncanny with “an eff ect of uncertainty, of the irruption of fantasies, suppressed wishes and emotional and sexual confl icts.… [T]he uncanny renders all boundaries uncertain and, in nineteenth-century Gothic writing, often leaves readers unsure whether narratives describe psychological disturbance or wider upheavals within formations of reality and normality” (). Royle bluntly states: “the uncanny is essentially to do with hesitation and uncertainty” ().¹⁰ If the uncanny concerns this sense of hesitation and uncertainty, then it seems to be an uncanny double of Todorov’s pure fantastic; or, we can try to tease out the diff erence between the uncanny and the pure fantastic as a moment of hesitation.¹¹ Unlike the hesitation of Todorov’s description, the uncanny is not con- cerned with a purely intellectual or cognitive moment of hesitation. e representation of the uncanny is a mise en scène of the subject’s ontological panic when caught between the states of knowing and unknowing, blind- ness and revelation. is mise en scène may include supernatural para- phernalia, but the latter stands as a mere legacy or fakery of better times
is defi nition results from Royle’s deconstructive examination of the historical and cultural context in which philosophical certitudes have been eroded by ex- istential nihilism, psychological multiplicity, and the hermeneutics of suspicion questioning the self-evidence of language. Armitt argues that “it is the gothic, of all fantasy modes, that forms the closest parallel with Todorovian readings of the fantastic. Structured around the dis- course of the uncanny, unlike the defamiliarizations of science fi ction this world has invaded our own space to fracture and disrupt the reassuring presence of inner worlds” (). However, in establishing this parallel and in analyzing the role of the uncanny in the Gothic, Armitt does not revaluate Todorov’s problematic defi nition of the uncanny.
| e Gothic and the Fantastic | when the metaphysical débâcle of western culture had not yet occurred.¹² In literature, the uncanny results from the narrative device of ambiguity that evinces terror, horror, dread, or Angst in either the protagonist or the The category reader who become estranged from familiar epistemological norms and are left suspended between a world they know and a world that is refrac- that allows us tory to cultural dogmas yet fascinatingly close to home.¹³ A commonplace of Gothic criticism, the uncanny signals the presence of the Gothic genre. to distinguish us the category that allows us to distinguish between the fantastic and the Gothic belongs to the domain of aff ect.¹⁴ between the We can now revert to Todorov’s generic model as revised by Brooke- Rose and see what, as in Poe’s “ e Purloined Letter,” has always been fantastic and the there. Commenting on Todorov’s use of the uncanny, Brooke-Rose makes a useful distinction: “In the ‘pure’ uncanny there is little or no supernatural, Gothic belongs but only the bizarre or horrifi c, and this opens out onto all narratives with to the domain �������
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strange and unusual events, and ultimately onto all realistic fi ction” (). If my hypothesis is correct, we can modify the Todorov/Brooke-Rose model by renaming the area of the uncanny as that of the Gothic which straddles the area of realism and the area of the fantastic: In “ e Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Progress of Abjection,” Hogle argues that, from the start, the Gothic has been grounded in fakery. He uses Baudrillard’s concept of simulacrum to support his claim. Royle defi nes “the uncanny [as] a crisis of the proper: it entails a critical distur- bance of what is proper (from the Latin proprius, ‘own’), a disturbance of the very idea of personal or private property including the properness of proper names, one’s so-called ‘own’ name, but also the proper names of others, of places, institutions and events. It is a crisis of the natural, touching upon everything that one might have thought was ‘part of nature’: one’s own nature, human nature, the nature of reality and the world” (). While analyzing the tradition of horror movies, Rosenheim reminds us that the “root of horror is a Latin word that means ‘to bristle,’ or ‘to shiver.’ Like thrillers, action fi lms, and pornography, the horror fi lm works to affi rm our corporeal being by making the body respond symptomatically to what it sees” (). In “Genres for the Prosecution,” Michael Gamer presents an archeology of the Gothic as a genre dogged by the law which threatened to prosecute M. G. Lewis’s e Monk () and other titles for obscenity.
| Quéma | In this revised diagram, representations of the grotesque, the abject and other aberrancies that prompt terror and fl out normative reality charac- terize the pure Gothic. Terrifying ghosts, ghouls, vampires, and the occult constitute a supernatural option which establishes a bridge with the super- natural fantastic.¹⁵ For consistency’s sake, we need to identify the dividing line between the Gothic-fantastic and the fantastic-marvellous as the pure fantastic, or site of indeterminacy and hesitation devoid of terror. However, the spectrum from the Gothic to the marvellous concerns diff erent modes of ontological and epistemological indeterminacy in relation to the sphere of realism. At the opposite end of the Gothic, the marvellous unambigu- ously engages the reader to discard norms and to derive unadulterated pleasure from this narrative contract. Finally, this diagram does not prevent the combination of the diff erent categories in one and the same work. I propose to test the validity of my theoretical distinction between the Gothic and the fantastic by interpreting a sample of H. R. Giger’s visual art which, in Monleón’s spirit, could be considered an expression of unreason at a time when mass production, economic globalization, and consumer- ism resulted from a highly systematic and technological rationalization of western culture. However, this hyper-rationalization also produced Goya- like visions such as a napalmed child on the cover of the Times magazine and nuclear mushrooms on the screen. e s and s spawned monstrosities such as air toxins, food contaminants, and alidomide- related birth defects, and it is a truism that in reaction to this apocalyptic script, a counter-culture promoting free love, psychedelic dreams, popular music, ecological awareness, and diff erent forms of spirituality developed. Giger’s art fully participated in this counter-culture. Giger is perhaps best known as the designer of the fantastic setting of the science-fi ction movie Alien (). Fans can visit his museum in Switzerland where he exhibits his works, including sculpture and design objects such as chairs and tables that have no role to play in a middle-class living room, as they hail from the same fantastic imagination that created the cyborgs featured in Alien. Giger’s pictures belong to the type of visual
is area of the diagram corresponds to Clive Bloom’s defi nition of the hor- ror tale in which there is “always the presence of the supernatural, demonic, violent and unpredictable, usually present without explanation or logic” (). For Bloom, the Gothic tale always off ers such a rational explanation. However, Bloom’s use of the uncanny and abjection to defi ne the horror tale indicates that his proposed distinction between the horror tale and the Gothic tale is not clear. Endorsing Todorov’s categories of analysis, Neil Cornwell briefl y refers to the fantastic Gothic as based on an “emphasis on hesitation over the supernatural” ().
| e Gothic and the Fantastic | art that magazines like Omni popularized in the s, and anticipate what Csaba Toth dubs postmodern, postindustrial Gothic art. Toth discusses video production by artists such as , Psychic , andand TestTest DepartmentDepartment who “remark on the postindustrial disappearance of the laboring body against the backdrop of vacant factory yards, deserted farms, bleak down- towns, a polluted environment, and ever-present television screens” (). Arguably, Giger is located somewhere between what Toth refers to as a fi rst wave of performers who resorted to the abjection of the body to inscribe their rejection of dominant culture and a second wave of performers who used media and cybernetics as means of political contestation. With his predilection for erotic themes and popular media, Giger could be easily dismissed as a commercial artist driven by profi t and status. How- ever, there is another possible interpretation of his position. In his study of modern jazz, Paul Lopes questions Bourdieu’s categorization of popular art “within the sub-fi eld of industrial art: [Bourdieu] fails to recognize the tensions between modern culture industries and popular artists and other independent producers outside these industries” (). Lopes demonstrates the way in which jazz musicians struggled to establish their autonomy in the fi eld of popular culture. Similarly, it can be argued that Giger strives to maintain his autonomy in the fi eld of popular design. His artistic practices create a liminal space between popular art and avant-gardism. Cooperat- ing with science fi ction fi lm-makers and the world of pop music as well as developing pop art websites,¹⁶ Giger also developed as an artist by taking part in the avant-gardist culture of Zurich in the sixties.His earlier produc- tion can be traced back to Surrealism and possibly to the absurdism and experimentalism of the Swiss and German Dadaist movement. By strad- dling the two worlds of popular art and experimental art, Giger’s practices defy the binary opposition between commercial art and “culture.” Both his construct of the artist in his catalogues and his design tech- niques unsettle the humanist conception of the artist. Part of his self-con- struct consists in representing the artist as a magus and magician: staring sombrely at the camera, surrounded by the most absurd of his cyborg sculptures and exoskeleton-armchairs, Giger looms through some kind of mist or opens the doors of some forbidden space. In other words, the artist is a conjuror and master of illusio. Although he does use the word
Among other things, Giger produced cover designs for pop groups such as Emerson, Lake and Palmer, contributed to music videos with Debbie Harry (lead singer of Blondie), and designed a stage sculpture for the Mylene Farmer concert in .
| Quéma | “artist,” Giger insists on referring to himself as a designer.¹⁷ His use of the airbrush technique, associated with an inferior type of technique which youths used to adorn their vans and motorcycles, should be considered a subversive disruption of the laws of traditional painting. In his catalogues, The illusion that the juxtaposition of photographs of Giger shooting a gun in a quarry and of Giger spraying his sheets of paper with ink is no coincidence: Giger holds these pictures the airbrush like a pistol which eff ects the transformation of the artist into a de-creator or, perhaps more fl atteringly or provocatively, a sharpshooter. create lies in a roughout his career, Giger has invariably struck a paradoxical alli- ance between the representation of the organic and the use of various hyperbolic mechanical and digital media. Earlier in his career, he used India ink, oil, acrylic, photogravure, prints of diff erent kinds, and the airbrush. In his later representation pictures, he combines the airbrush with stencils so as to decrease the eff ect of spray painting. His works include curtains and doilies patterns as well as of desire. computer-generated stencils, some of which resulted in urban representa- tions like Rote Mechanische Stadt (–), which is reproduced in colour on the back cover of this issue. Mechanical reproduction and organicity do not cancel each other in Giger’s designs. e suff using in organic red of the reiterative design of the spectral and necrotic city produces a most haunting and attractive picture. With its hieratic fi gures, its eerie spaces that are neither here nor there, Giger’s iconography allures. Invariably taking centre stage in the diff er- ent pictures, lascivious female bodies assert their sexual power and hold in their Bearsdley-like elongated hands the bulbous tips of erect penises. e illusion that these pictures create lies in a hyperbolic representation of desire which is, literally speaking, larger than life and part of a spectacle drawing on the iconography of the occult and wicked paganism. However, as in Passage Temple (Life) – (page ), the viewer of Giger’s pictures gets more than was bargained for: the erotics of his meticulous pictures are represented as necrophiliac performances. is death-in-life erotics derives from a redesign of anatomy based on the externalization of the internal components of the body. His creatures—parading their exoskeletons, cara- paces, skulls, and organic innards—exude desire yet provoke revulsion in the viewer. e encounter with Giger’s fantastic pictures amounts to some- thing like a double-take: erotic seduction is checkmated by the necrotic
In his autobiographies, Giger indicates that he took a programme in Interior and Industrial Design at the School of Arts and Crafts in Zurich from to (HR Giger’s – Retrospective), pp. and .
| e Gothic and the Fantastic | Passage Temple (Life). Copyright © by H. R. Giger.
display that identifi es the viewer as a posthumous witness. e very act of viewing corresponds to a double act of transgression and alienation. e complexity of Giger’s art derives from a fundamental tension between the fantastic and the Gothic which his various pictures enact. On the one hand, his pictures estrange the viewer from the realistic norms of knowledge and reality by burgling into a space of the most fantastic type. On the other hand, the transgression of the cognitive norms of reality is represented in the mode of horror and abjection so that typically reactions to Giger’s pictures range from wryness and tickling fascination through dis-
| Quéma | belief to downright rejection—depending on the cultural background of the viewer. In other words, the implied viewer of Giger’s pictures is in the same position as that of the implied reader of fantastic and Gothic narratives. Gazing at the representations from a standpoint determined by cultural norms of knowledge and ideological constructs, the viewer responds to a visual object that obstructs the visual fl ow of referential information. However, the major diff erence between the narrative fantastic and the visual fantastic stems from the temporal form and the spatial form of the respective media. is distinction needs modulation, as it is well known that pictures can adopt a narrative form and also rely on the kinesis of the eye for their meaning to emerge, while texts can adopt a spatial form as in the poems of George Herbert and the visual constructs of concrete poetry. Having said that, it is undeniable that the visual fantastic and the textual fantastic operate diff erently in their production of the moment of hesitation which Todorov associates with the pure fantastic. While the writer has to invent means of maintaining the sense of hesitation through narrative duration, the visual designer has an undeniable asset in the static character of spatial art which can stabilize the moment of hesitation on canvas, paper, screen, or whatever support. Time has not been evicted from the production of the visual fantastic; it has merely been displaced to the viewer, as the moment of fascination lasts as long as the time of viewing, or is renewed with each and every instance of viewing. Giger’s fantastic is manifest in works such as the – Shaft series (page ), which creates a non-space consisting of vertiginous vertical walls fl anked with occasional diagonal stairs; like a minimalist version of Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione, or an illustration of Beckett’s e Lost Ones, this negative space is fantastic to the extent that no rational explana- tion can dispel the sense of indeterminacy that these pictures create. e viewer recognizes the familiar construct of stairs leading up and down the walls, but the walls are not part of a larger spatial context that would help the viewer fi nd bearings in this visual space; nor are the stairs represented according to the norms of physical laws, as they do not connect anything with anything. In other words, Giger’s representation provides the basic units of a mimetic grammar of representation—walls and stairs—but the combination of these units leaves the viewer disoriented and hesitant.¹⁸ My analysis of the relationship between mimesis and the fantastic in visual art diverges from that of George P. Landow who states: “Whereas the artist working with visual fantasy usually must place us immediately inside a fantastic kingdom, the creator of literary fantasy, who works with a narrative, sequential mode, has two choices. Like the artist he can open his work by immediately immersing us in his new world.… [T]he far more usual strategy is for the writer to employ some narrative device which displaces us from our everyday world into his created one” ().
| e Gothic and the Fantastic | Shaft no. . Copyright ©- by H. R. Giger.
| Quéma | e same visual puzzle characterizes Hommage to Beckett (p(pageage )) which Giger produced in . e eye pauses on a non-descript fi gure who, reclining in a seat and thrusting its head backward, is refl ected in a mirror-like rectangle displaying an amorphous thing in which the distinc- The viewer tion between the animate and the inanimate, subject and object, mind and matter has been deleted. e viewer is trapped in that fantastic moment of is trapped in hesitation, the eye oscillating between the recognizable though distorted human shape and what looks like a fl eshy, God-forsaken thing as its that fantastic refl ection. Although the means of representation are mimetic, the framed misshapen refl ection undermines the principle of mimetic reproduction.¹⁹ moment of e grotesque appearance of the refl ected thing and the Munch-like cry which the seated fi gure lets out indicate that the wrenching from mimetic hesitation. reality is eff ected in the mode of the Gothic uncanny by stirring disturbing emotions in the viewer. e role of the Gothic in Giger’s pictures is to pervert the sense of con- sensus reality concerning the representation of the body, desire and sexual reproduction. Etymologically, the word “pervert” means “to turn round or about,” and this is what has happened to his pictorial bodies: the body has been twisted so that the inside is on the outside, and viscera and tissues are spreading over skulls and foreheads; the bone structure has been relocated on the outside so that most of his creatures have exoskeletons. Giger in particular, and the Gothic in general, belong to the twentieth-century trend of anti-humanist representation of identity. is iconoclastic project has its roots in early European avant-gardism so that Epstein’s Rock-Drill, de Chirico’s surrealist silhouettes, and Giger’s biomechanoids are part of the same genealogy. e generic tension between the fantastic and the Gothic can also be seen at work in Passage Temple “Life” (; page ). e realist code of the picture derives from a mimetic representation of sexual genitalia with which the viewer is familiar. e erect penis is located in the usual central position, and organizes the rest of the picture symmetrically. e conven- tional belt of the trousers has been converted into a rim breached in the middle to let the erect penis appear. However, the architectural appear-
Interrogating consensus reality, Passage Temple represents only one strategy in Giger’s visual art. It is interesting to see that some of his catalogues chronicle the transition from mimesis to fantastic and Gothic heterotopias. For instance, in Necronomicon, Giger juxtaposes a photograph of his friend and visual artist Friedrich Kuhn sitting on a derelict sofa with a representation of the same fi gure in a fantastic setting entitled Friedrich Kuhn (). In Giger’s picture, mimetic space and biographical self are transported to a world of polymorphous forms, ghouls, spectral monsters, and necrotic infants.
| e Gothic and the Fantastic | Hommage to Beckett . Copyright © by H. R. Giger.
| Quéma | ance of the belt and the visual magnifying eff ect transport the viewer to a fantastic heterotopia.²⁰ It is in this fantastic setting that Giger’s picture bifurcates, as it depicts a Gothic sexuality of an aberrant type whereby Eros and anatos are locked in the most uncanny embrace. On each side of the rim sits a pair of fi gures: on the right-hand side, the pair consists of a female fi gure displaying a fl eshed body and of a truncated male fi gure; on the left-hand side, the pair consists of another female fi gure and of a skeletal cyborg of some sort. e picture is based on the double iconog- raphy of desire and abjection. If the right-hand side Nosferatu leers at the lascivious female body sitting next to him, the eroticism of his desire is also short-circuited by the fact that he is reduced to a castrated trunk. e left- hand pair is based on the same tension whereby the eroticism of the female body clashes with the murderous intent of the obscene male reduced to a tongue-protruding head. e skeletal cyborg sitting by the woman also reiterates the death principle associated with the castrated Nosferatu on the opposite side. e pièce de résistance is the penis itself whose internal structure presents itself like two vertical rows of four heads. ese two rows read like a phylogenetic progression from foetus to skull, that is to say, from birth to death. In other words, the phallus is bearer of death and hence is in a state of decomposition. e paradox that the internal structure of the penis creates is reiterated in the paradox between the central erection and the castrated grotesques located on each side of the picture. Trumping up both the mimetic and fantastic codes, the Gothic stereotypes are success- ful in creating the sense of the uncanny, representing the unrepresentable and inducing a sense of dread and abjection. e recurrence of the Gothic corpse in Giger’s pictures can be analyzed in Julia Kristeva’s terms: “if dung signifi es the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything.… e corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject” (, ). If mimetic representation is to nurture a sense of re-cognition
I borrow the term from Botting who borrowed it from Foucault to describe the type of space that Gothic fi ction generates. Foucault refers to heterotopias as counter-sites of deviation where dominant values are both refl ected and contested. For Botting, the “main features of Gothic fi ction, in neoclassical terms, are heterotopias: the wild landscapes, the ruined castles and abbeys, the dark, dank labyrinths … are not only excluded from the Augustan social world but introduce the passions, desires and excitements it suppressed” (, ). Foucault’s text, written in , was published in as “Des espaces autres” ().
| e Gothic and the Fantastic | and familiarity—which amounts to the sense of the heimlich—then Giger’s cross between mimesis, the fantastic and the Gothic positively creates the ambiguous sense of the Freudian unheimlich. The Gothic We can then establish a bridge between Freud’s uncanny and Kristeva’s refl ection on abjection as each begets a conception of spectral identity, demonizes the since in its relation to the object the self remains paradoxically cut off from an object of identifi cation which fascinates and annihilates altogether. e process of hypothetical viewer of Giger’s fantastic grotesques is placed in a position best described by Kristeva: “A massive and sudden emergence of uncan- symbolization. niness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me radically as separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either.… [O]n the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me” ().²¹ is psychological experience has aesthetic implications which can be presented in terms of a fundamental paradox aff ecting Giger’s pictures in particular, and the Gothic uncanny in general: while the traditional role of symbolization is to entrench a cognitive distance between subject and object, the Gothic demonizes the process of symbolization which, far from keeping the body at bay, contaminates the viewer with images of abjection that cancel dis- tance and sabotage the contemplative act.²² e gender discourse of Giger’s pictures concerns not only the relation between the two sexes, but also the relation between woman as mother and man as child. Giger’s visual output participates in the counter-culture that dismantled the western traditional discourse of sexual reproduction and which Donna Haraway has described in the following terms: “Ideolo- gies of sexual reproduction can no longer reasonably call on notions of sex and sex role as organic aspects in natural objects like organisms and
Kristeva’s is a theory of the spectral self which off ers a means of establishing a conceptual homology with the type of critical discourse proposed by Terry Castle who, in e Female ermometer, associates the historical emergence of the Gothic with the Romantic spectralization of the other. In his introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction and in “ e Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Progress of Abjection,” Hogle also draws upon Kristeva’s concept of abjection to interpret the Gothic. us McGrath states: “ e Gothic consistently attempts to speak about the unspeakable—that is, death—through a frenzied elaboration of all that it can seize upon that points toward death, that suggests, signifi es, or symbolizes death. ere is, then, a sort of death wish implicit in the Gothic” (). In his exploration of the uncanny in poetry, Punter refl ects that the “‘Ancient Mariner’ enacts the notion of the word as corpse; … it eff ects a redoubling of animism, an incarna- tion of a type of ‘life-in-death,’ which … demonstrates … for us that there is indeed a sense in which every text might duly be perceived as uncanny” (, ).
| Quéma | Birth Machine. Copyright © by H. R. Giger.
| e Gothic and the Fantastic | Stillbirth Machine . Copyright © by H. R. Giger.
| Quéma | families. Such reasoning will be unmasked as irrational, and ironically corporate executives reading Playboy and anti-porn radical feminists will make strange bedfellows in jointly unmasking the irrationalism” (). is historical discourse is adumbrated in the catalogues that Giger has pub- The effect of the lished over the last thirty years, in which he describes a German-speaking Switzerland as an intensely conservative culture of patriarchal militarism uncanny derives and family values. ese two socio-cultural paradigms are at the heart of Giger’s pictorial space whose function is to pervert the laws of the cultural from the oxy- matrix from which it stems. Giger’s resistance to the institution and discourse of sexual reproduc- moronic asso- tion is responsible for his abjection of the birth process which can be analyzed over a period of twelve years. Whether we are dealing with the ciation of sexual early Birth Machine (; page ), or with the later series of Stillbirth (; page ) in which a woman is incarcerated in a Kafka-like metallic reproduction structure and gives birth to an infant who is thrown into the world à la Heidegger, we are always confronted with the representation of reproduc- with murder. tive life as death. Because of its mechanization, the maternal body becomes a cyborg whose off spring is an always-and-already dead infant. In Birth Machine, the womb is designed as a metaphorical gun chamber mimeti- cally reproduced and containing infants holding a gun to their left eye. e picture is based on the device of the mise en abŷme whereby the infant’s weapon is the mere repetition of the larger gun from which it is ejected. e eff ect of the uncanny derives from the oxymoronic association of sexual reproduction with murder. is kind of visual representation rests on the device of estrangement or alienation, whose origin can be traced back to the Russian formalists and Brecht, and which Brooke-Rose has associated with the genre of the fantastic (). In the Gothic, the object of this type of visual estrangement is to turn the real and the natural—that is to say, the ideological—into the uncanny and the unnatural. Giger’s foetuses also hail from a technological culture which emerged in the early sixties and which has become part of an obstetrical routine: the ultrasound, producer of foetal constructs. is medical culture of visual reproduction and the postmodernist critique of the aura of origins coincide in the Landschaft ((pagepage )) where,where, inin a screechingscreeching parodyparody ofof AndyAndy Warhol’s famous reiterative portrait Marilyn Monroe, rows of foetuses are daubed in Gothic hues.²³ e abjection of the baby pictures lies in the
For an analysis of the culture underlying the use of ultrasound technology in obstetric practices, see Rosalind Pollack Petchesky’s “Foetal Images: e Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction.”
| e Gothic and the Fantastic | Copyright © by H. R.Giger. H. by © Copyright . Landschaft Landschaft
| Quéma | Noracyclin. Copyright © by H. R. Giger.
combination of the uncannily absent womb with the mechanical reproduc- tion of the foetuses which deprives the womb of its aura. To locate the specifi c socio-historical origin of these representations, one has to go to Noracyclin (; this page), in which Giger’s desecrating representation of sexual reproduction unambiguously refers to a Swiss- made contraceptive pill available to women in the early seventies.²⁴ As documented by Lara V. Marks in Sexual Chemistry, the discourse of reproduction before and after the advent of the pill had always been shrouded in terms of social control. For instance, before the pill became available, countries such as
For an early analysis of Noracyclin and other contraceptive pills, see Somnath Roy, “Control of Fertility by Steroidal Contraceptives.” See also Lara V. Marks on the manufacture of Noracyclin in by Ciba-Geigi, in Switzerland ().
| e Gothic and the Fantastic | Sweden and the United States used their power to apply poli- cies of sterilization to members of the population deemed unfi t for reproduction. Until the cultural revolution of the sixties, sexual reproduction within the nuclear family had been fi rmly Giger’s Gothic established as the social norm, and those who did not conform with these cultural expectations were held under suspicion. representation In the sixties, pharmaceutical companies manufacturing contraceptive of reproduction pills based their rhetoric on the topos of freedom. Particularly striking is the type of metaphor that drug companies used to win women over to is contraceptive. their medical cause. Marks quotes from an advertisement to promote the Enovid pill: “Unfettered: From the beginning woman has been a vassal to the temporal demands—and frequently the aberrations—of the cyclic mechanism of her reproductive system. Now to a degree heretofore unknown, she is permitted normalization, enhance- ment or suspension of cyclic function and procreative potential.” is new method [of] control is symbolized in an illustration borrowed from ancient Greek mythology—Andromeda freed from her chains. () Although couched in terms of control and normalization, the ad also ges- tures toward the promise of freedom. e reference to Greek mythology is particularly relevant to the counter-discourse Giger developed in his Stillbirth series during the seventies where women are invariably held in bondage by metallic trappings of all kinds, undergoing the process of birth. Unlike the Greek myth where Andromeda is set free by Perseus, the women of the Stillbirth series remain bound to a coercive process and discourse of reproduction which the pictures, in their Gothic excess, over-dramatize. Giger’s Gothic representation of reproduction is contraceptive, that is to say, it constitutes an anti-life discourse of abjection that strikes right at the cultural sense of the sacredness of life and procreation. His anti-reproduc- tive discourse is also the subject of the Spell series, produced between and . Out of the series, I will focus on Spell , produced in , and which in Necronomicon constitutes a large picture with a fl ap folding over the left page. e fantastic dimension of Spell derives from its reference to the occult with which Giger is familiar. His chief picture of reference is Baphomet represented in the nineteenth century by the occult fi gure of Eliphas Levi, alias Alphonse Louis Constant. Levi’s own representation of Baphomet consists of a ram-like fi gure combining the features of a bull, dog and donkey. e ram fi gure wears black wings, and its head is surmounted
| Quéma | Transcendental Magic, , RRitualitual bbyy EEliphasliphas LLevievi ((AlphonseAlphonse LLouisouis CConstant)onstant)
with a pair of horns and a torch. On its forehead rests a pentagram, and from its lap rises Hermes’ phallic rod with its intertwining serpents. e lap is covered with a cloth masking the sexual nature of the creature which, however, displays two generous maternal breasts. e composition of the picture is symmetrical with the right arm upward and the left downward. In addition, the right-hand corner of the picture displays a black moon crescent, while the upper-left corner displays a white moon crescent. e picture reads like the perversion of icons representing Christ the Pantocra- tor. Giger’s Spell , a double parody of Christ the Pantocrator and of Levi’s Baphomet, presentspresents thethe usualusual ambiguousambiguous visualvisual rhetoricrhetoric whichwhich seducesseduces
| e Gothic and the Fantastic | Copyright © by H. R. Giger. by H. Copyright © . Spell Spell
| Quéma | the viewer into an erotic viewing while delivering a blistering representa- tion of sexual reproduction. At the centre of the picture sits Baphomet in basically the same pose as that in Levi’s picture, and exhibiting the same hybrid identity. However, elements have been altered and the fi gure now It is through the sits against a complex background, as Giger submits the quoted visual elements to a procession of perversion or “turning.” perversion of To begin with, the composition of Spell is governed by a principle of symmetry that creates an ominous sense of immutability. It is through this graphic law the perversion of this graphic law of symmetry that the Gothic space of abjection emerges and confronts the viewer. us the Hermes rod has of symmetry been perverted into a metallic gun enclosed by two diabolic snakes; the occult symbolism of the arms’ position is perverted by the planting of a that the Gothic drug syringe into Baphomet’s left arm. e occult torch of Levi’s original design gives way to a phallic rod ramming through the vagina of a pearl- space of abjec- white female fi gure. She is standing on top of Baphomet’s head, poised in a spread-eagle stance with her hands holding long knives. e pentagram tion emerges. of Levi’s Baphomet is no longer confi ned to its forehead, as it is reiter- ated three times in the picture: the spread-eagled female fi gure is pinned against a pentagram, a geometric fi gure which reappears symmetrically on each side of the picture, parodying the contrast between the black and the white moon crescents in Levi’s Baphomet. Giger’s Baphomet is seated on the metallic beam, a recurrent visual motif in his designs. At each end of the beam, a reclining female fi gure, one white, one black, is inseminated by snake-like pistons. e masculine principle is not signifi ed by the representation of a male body; instead, it is signifi ed by means of either metonymy or synecdoche.²⁵ It is the erect penis rising from the skulls on which Baphomet sits; it is also the obscene inseminating pistons mentioned above; and it is the metallic gun rising from the necrotic phallus, morphing into the rod supporting the spread-eagle female and providing the vertical counterpart to the horizontal metallic beam. e very verticality of the triumphant erection is thus co-opted in the lines of coercion which the horizontal beam initiates. What is being abjected is once again sexuality as a social discourse of reproduction. Let’s go back to the central fi gure of this picture. Like the original fi gure of Levi’s picture, Baphomet exhibits her maternal breasts, but at them hang two grotesque infants with sarcastic grins and grenades
Jackson argues that “the movement of fantastic narrative is one of metonymical rather than of metaphorical process: one object does not stand for another, but literally becomes that other, slides into it, metamorphosing from one shape to another in a permanent fl ux and instability” ().
| e Gothic and the Fantastic | held close to their breasts. Baphomet becomes the diabolic mother or matrix inseminated by the erect penis metonymically connected to the metallic gun, bearer of death and annihilation. is delirious representa- tion points to the phallus as inseminator hailing from anatos and to the maternal body as matrix of destruction. Stemming from the inseminated female bodies are diabolical snakes swishing and snapping their tails and slithering through the pentagrams in the upper left and right corners of the picture. e serpents’ heads expel abject and grotesque foetuses, neither beast nor human. At the edge of the right-hand pentagram sits a crouching fi gure characterized by yet another form of duality: half-Punch, half-cadaver, the fi gure is a typical death-in-life Gothic trope gnawing at the discourse of reproduction as social sinew and social practice. However, the subversive character of Giger’s art becomes more prob- lematic as one shifts to representations such as the Passagen series which eff ects the transition from mimetic reality to the fantastic by transforming the photograph of a garbage truck with a slit at the back into a vagina (page ). is series includes at least thirty-nine pictures of the same motif with colour variations, alternating between fi gurative and abstract designs. At what point does Giger’s critique of the discourse of sexual reproduction turn into a voyeuristic and sensationalist fascination for perverse relation- ships of domination between genders? In his (pseudo?) autobiographical commentary, Giger states: “I was so fascinated by the erotic overtones of this mechanical process, which reached its climax in the emptying of the overfl owing dustbin, that I quickly took a couple of photographs” HR( Giger’s Necronomicon ). e text is constructed in such a way as to seduce the viewer into an erotic approach to the picture. Yet the picture tells a story of defi lement and abjection. e text says: “look how erotic the garbage collection is.” e picture says: “look how abject woman’s opening is.” e combination of both discourses creates ambiguity of the least fantastic type. e temptation is strong to throw the book into the garbage bin to join a collection of statements including Marinetti’s manifesto statement on the erotics of war: “See the furious coitus of war, gigantic vulva stirred by the friction of courage, shapeless vulva that spreads to off er itself to the terrifi c spasm of fi nal victory” (–). e notion that the Gothic genre may not have the proper political cre- dentials has haunted critics. In his now classical Literature of Terror, Punter summed up the debate by declaring that “Gothic fi ction demonstrates the
| Quéma | Passage . Copyright © by H. R. Giger.
| e Gothic and the Fantastic | potential of revolution by daring to speak the socially unspeakable; but the very act of speaking it is an ambiguous gesture” (, ). Monleón regards earlier Gothic novels as fundamentally conservative texts, estab- If the Gothic lishing an “archeology of fear, a sadistic … unearthing and reconstruction of unreasonable forms” ().²⁶ However, if the Gothic is concerned with is concerned some sort of death wish—as Patrick McGrath states²⁷—expecting such a genre to transform society may be missing the point. As Giger’s pictures with some sort show, the Gothic has the ability to instigate a destabilization of a violent type: this is its power but also its limitation. In her analysis of the abject, of death wish, Kristeva argues that the “perverse interspace of abjection” rests on an “unshakeable adherence” () to law and prohibition. e abject “neither expecting such a gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny genre to trans- them” (). Gothic representations of abjection do not cancel out ideologi- cal dogmas, but by estranging the subject from dominant discourses and form society by violating ideological norms of reality and knowledge, they lay bare the coercive aspects of social and cultural laws. may be missing Giger’s reiterated strategies of perversion and abjection indicate that the iconography I have analyzed remains under the thumb of cultural laws the point. to the extent that it obsessively exhibits the necessity to contravene the discourse of sexuality and reproduction. In her well-known essay “Writing and the Law,” Cixous analyzes the type of writing which remains enthralled to ideological laws even in cases such as Kafka’s and Blanchot’s where such laws are stated in order to be contravened. She establishes a contrast between this type of writing and the kind of writing by Claire Lispector in which “there are no laws other than those imposed on us by institutions, religion, morals” (). For Cixous, the contrast is not only one of genre but also of gender: the law is always “andromorphic.… If the law tricks us, it is because we internalize its interdiction” (). e internalization of
Hogle points out that the Gothic does not resolve the tension between con- servative and progressive ideologies: “No other form of writing or theatre is as insistent as Gothic on juxtaposing potential revolution and possible reac- tion … and leaving both extremes sharply before us and far less resolved than the conventional endings in most of these works claim them to be” (, ). Botting states: “While Gothic fi ctions are presented as shamelessly indulging illicit desires and excessive passions, they simultaneously serve the interests of a system of power, reinvigorating its surveillance, bolstering its discipline, reinforcing its vigilant attentions to limits” (, ). William Veeder thinks otherwise: “Gothic’s nature is the psycho-social function of nurture; its project is to heal and transform” (). See note .
| Quéma | Biomechanoid. Copyright © by H. R. Giger.
| e Gothic and the Fantastic | the patriarchal law underlies the Passagen series which acts out repeated gestures of defi ance and provocation at the expense of the female viewer. While the abjection of Passage () raises the spectre of phal- locentrism, Biomechanoid (; page ) functions like an interesting ideo- logical trompe-l’oeil, enticing the viewer to get distracted by phantasms of potency, yet undercutting the cultural script of the phallic law. At fi rst sight, the picture appears to entertain the sado-masochistic phantasm of oral sex and female bondage. e fascinating aspect of the picture derives from its mimetic representation of the white female body which, in the tradition of Raoul Hausmann’s Dadaist experimental images such as Tatlin at Home (), is collaged with a sexual cyborg. However, there is something sus- picious concerning this fantastic representation of what we could call the principle of sexual penetration and insemination. Far from calling for a glo- rifi cation of masculine potency, the uncanny register of the picture compels the viewer to see-saw between the erotic seduction of the representation and the abjecting realization that this tale of phantasmal potency has for chief protagonist a crippled and mechanized cyborg. Uncannily defi ant of sexual taboos yet ensnared in their monstrous logic of reproduction, Giger’s art freezes gender roles in fantastic spaces haunted by a phallocentric law, and releases the barely repressed collective unconscious on the surface of elegant catalogues and glossy posters.
Acknowledgements anks to James Cowan at Morpheus Press for permission to reproduce the H. R. Giger work reproduced here. e Giger gallery can be seen at http://www.giger.com.
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