Patrick McGrath

Patrick McGrath: Directions and Transgressions

Edited by

Jocelyn Dupont

Patrick McGrath: Directions and Transgressions, Edited by Jocelyn Dupont

This book first published 2012

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2012 by Jocelyn Dupont and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-4121-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4121-4

The stare of the murderer intimates many things, but one thing mainly, which he sometimes forgets. That every image committed to paper contains the ghost of the author who fashioned it. Outside the frame, beyond the border, is often the space where the subject is standing. A shifting and elusive presence, certainly, but a palpable one for its camouflages. —Joseph O’Connor, Star of Sea.

Call him Ishmael. —Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ...... ix

Introduction ...... 1 Jocelyn Dupont

Part I: Beyond the Gothic

Chapter One...... 11 McGrath, Martha Peake and Generic Complexity Max Duperray

Chapter Two...... 21 Variations on the Body Snatcher: The New Gothic Visions of Patrick McGrath and Joyce Carol Oates Tanya Tromble

Chapter Three...... 37 The Severed Hand, or, the Beast with Five Fingers: A Genealogical Approach to Patrick McGrath’s “Hand of a Wanker” Jérôme Dutel

Part II: Gender, Power and Ecstasy

Chapter Four...... 51 The Ecstasy of the Abyss: The Void beyond Dr Haggard’s Disease Ineke Bockting

Chapter Five ...... 65 The Turn of the Screw in McGrath’s Asylum Hélène Machinal

Chapter Six...... 81 McGrath’s Women Sue Zlosnik viii Table of Contents

Part III: Across the Atlantic

Chapter Seven...... 103 American Gothic Romance as Trauma in Port Mungo Marc Amfreville

Chapter Eight...... 115 Journeys to Selfhood in Post-9/11 New York: Reynold Price, Patrick McGrath and Jay McInerney Gérald Préher

Chapter Nine...... 127 Love, Trauma and Creation in “Julius” Claude Maisonnat

Afterword ...... 143 Patrick McGrath

Contributors...... 147

Index...... 151

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The articles in this volume follow the first international conference devoted to the work of Patrick McGrath, which was held at the University of Perpignan, France, from Mary 12 to May 14, 2011. The editor of this volume, who was also the conference organizer, would like express his warmest thanks to the VECT-Mare Nostrum research group and his colleagues at the University for their generous help and support. I would also like to thank Actes Sud Publishing House for making this event possible. Many thanks also to Richard Riddick for his thorough and conscientious proofreading. Most of all, I would like to express my most heartfelt thanks to Patrick McGrath for his goodwill, generosity, and presence throughout this memorable conference.

INTRODUCTION

JOCELYN DUPONT

The coming of Patrick McGrath to Perpignan in May 2011 deserves to be regarded as an ‘event’ in more than one way. First of all, the presence of an internationally recognized American author – albeit a British-born one – in a relatively modest-sized university at the Southernmost tip of France certainly was a change for this far-flung city, generally more accustomed to hosting French, Spanish and Catalan-speaking artists within its picturesque Mediterranean walls. This possible incongruity, however, was somewhat tempered by the fact that the author in question is reputed to be a “Gothic” author and that the city of Perpignan, although generally sun-basked and not always wrongfully regarded by many as a holiday destination, does have some Gothic connections, not only in architectural terms but also as far as the early Gothic literary imagination is concerned. It may even appear somewhere in the background, though unnamed, in the early chapters of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, as Emily de Saint-Aubert accompanying her father and Valancourt, “set forward among these romantic wilds about Roussillon,”1 where the city is located. Secondly, the author did not come unaccompanied. In his wake there followed a posse of European scholars, all well-acquainted with McGrath’s work, mostly specialists in Gothic and contemporary literature, eager to engage in the first international conference to be entirely devoted to the author of such acclaimed novels as Spider, Asylum and Trauma, his latest novel at the time, which had just been translated into French.2 That is the reason why this three-day conference was not intended to be an exclusively academic event. Its aim was also to bring together ordinary readers and scholars under the same roof. The two widely attended public

1 Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 42. 2 My heartfelt thanks go to Marie-Catherine Vacher and her team at Actes Sud for their enthusiasm and generous support. This conference would not have been possible without their commitment. I would also like to thank the VECT Mare Nostrum research group and its head, Pr. Jonathan Pollock, for the material and moral support provided. 2 Introduction readings given by the author as well as the screening of David Cronenberg’s Spider in front of a packed audience at the Perpignan’s Jean Vigo Film Institute are evidence that it succeeded in doing so, regardless of geographical or linguistic barriers. The title of the conference “Directions and Transgressions”, deliberately sought to open a number of paths for intellectual and literary investigation. “Directions” could first be read as a spatial metaphor, even as a possible echo to the 2007 International Gothic Association conference in Aix-en- Provence, entitled “Gothic N.E.W.S.”3 where the geographical became associated with the contemporary, and “mapped Gothic territories [merged with] Gothic outposts”, as Denis Mellier put it.4 This tension between familiar Gothic territories and new literary explorations seemed quite appropriate for a writer such as Patrick McGrath, who for a long time has been associated with what may be regarded as a somewhat reductive label, and whose writings, especially in the last decade, have evolved significantly towards new modes of literary expression. Though still relying on Poe- esque paradigms and offering captivating insights into the deeper recesses of the human psyche – focusing on morbid, neurotic and obsessional states spawning diseased narratives – McGrath’s later fiction, such as his novels Port Mungo (2004), Trauma (2008) and the forthcoming Constance (2012), show a clear move away from the (New) Gothic props exploited in his earlier novels and short stories. “Directions” thus called for new directions, not necessarily Gothic ones and, as a matter of fact, preferably not. The second meaning of the word “direction” had less to do with topography than authority and control. The author of a novel, he who directs his book from the opening page to the last, is after all the one who decides, organizes and structures his own work, control-thirsty, not unlike the towering figure of Peter Cleave, the psychiatrist-narrator in Asylum. Control is indeed a hallmark of McGrath’s fiction, the core of every one of his deranged narratives, either craving for totalitarian omnipotence (The Grotesque, Asylum, “Ground Zero”), or desperately trying to hold on to some form of coherence in the midst of – often inner – worlds falling apart (Spider, Dr Haggard’s Disease, Trauma). Even though once written, published and read, the text will, through sheer ontological necessity, disseminate and ultimately escape the grasp of his author, there will always remains a pull, a magnetic force connecting the text to its point of origin, a force that will be all the more potent if the

3 Incidentally, Patrick McGrath attended part of this conference as invited author. 4 Mellier in Duperray, 8. Patrick McGrath: Directions and Transgressions 3 author5 is still alive. In a reader-oriented perspective, such influence may be seen as a nefarious one. Hence the famous Barthesian death sentence pronounced on the author in 1968, as well as the post-structuralist subsequent efforts to erase him or her from their exegesis. It is certainly true that “writing about the work of a living author presents several challenges,”6 even in the case of Patrick McGrath, a outstandingly generous and genial man. The first one is that of multiple interpretations verging on the contradictory and possibly antagonistic exegetic directions likely to lead to a destabilization of discourses which might eventually result in conflict. This risk was very much present in my mind when this conference was being planned, and it certainly was in the author’s too when he decided to accept the invitation, as he confesses in the Afterword of this volume. Yet it is a well-known fact that risk-taking can also prove a catalyst for greater satisfaction. Retrospectively, it is the editor’s firm belief that everyone who attended the conference will agree that the transgression of the academic categorical imperative, i.e. not having a live author attend a conference devoted to him or her, was a risk worth taking. This leads me to the second operating term in the title of the conference, that is, transgression. Transgression has long been an essential matrix of Gothic stories, a genre that, from its very origins, has fed avidly on the transgression of taboos, conventions and norms. Gothic literature may not be founded on terror as much as on that which Georges Bataille saw as an essentially erotic experience, a dynamic towards sublime jouissance, what he called the “explosive movement of transgression.”7 Patrick McGrath’s expertise in transgression is remarkable. His early work, particularly his short stories, made unbridled use of formal and generic transgression, using pastiche and parody in what may be called a generalized enterprise of textual subversion and transgressive grotesqueries, perhaps best illustrated in such baroque gems of his short fiction as “The Black Hand of Raj”, “Ambrose Syme”, “The E(rot)ic Potato” and “Hand of a Wanker,”8 the latter tale being granted a full-length analysis in this collection of articles. Sue Zlosnik and Avril Horner have shown remarkably well how McGrath’s early fiction could be seen as a series of “comic turns

5 One should here recall that the etymology of the word “author” is the Latin auctoris, meaning root, origin. 6 Zlosnik, Patrick McGrath, 6. 7 Bataille, L’érotisme, 124. (My translation) 8 All of these can be found in the collection Blood and Water and Other Tales (1988). 4 Introduction born of gruesome incongruity, of taboos violated [...] and constitute[d] a textual bravado in the face of real cultural anxieties.”9 Beside such postmodern manipulations of his literary heritage – which is mostly characteristic of his early writings10 – McGrath’s ars poetica certainly can be said to rest on the poetics of transgression and its narrative potentialities. The world of his fiction has invariably gone awry: doctors are diseased, psychiatrists are insane, monstrous parents eat their young while sons murder their mothers, brothers and sisters are incestuous, trauma healers are deeply traumatized. In McGrath’s diegetic universe, transgression becomes the norm; every narrative is contaminated. Each is a tortuous, diseased journey over murky waters with some foul undercurrent, not unlike those of the mangrove in Port Mungo. In a 1997 article, aptly entitled “Transgression and Decay”, McGrath writes about the subversive potential of literature in ways that are reminiscent of the preface to the seminal anthology The New Gothic which he co-wrote with Bradford Morrow some years earlier. To him, central to the art of the gothicist, old or contemporary, is a subversive intention, a rhetoric of inversion which upsets discursive paradigms. Having predated psychoanalysis by more than a century, the Gothic, he writes, “buries in the shadow that which had been brightly lit, and brings into light that which has been repressed,”11 pointing at “the instability of identity.”12 To say that the question of identity was central during the conference would be an understatement. The living presence of the author in the room while papers followed one another, his many comments and responses to them kept bringing to light, even perhaps performing, one of the most central issues of literature, namely the relationship between the author as a person, as a tale-teller and as a theoretical model that has preoccupied generations of writers and critics from Henry James to Umberto Eco. One thing was certain: the author was not dead – he still isn’t. Yet who, and where was he exactly? Turned spectator of his own textual material, he became in a very Derridean way a specter among us all, yet a highly responsive and genial one. Almost invariably, his rippling echoes that followed the papers opened new horizons for further investigations, new directions for literary analysis, thereby confirming that the interaction

9 Horner and Zlosnik, Gothic and The Comic Turn, 164. 10 With the notable exception of Martha Peake, a sustained and ambitious historographic metafictional pastiche of 18th century Gothic, re/deconstructing the narrative of the historical foundation of the United States of America as a tale of Gothic transgression. 11 McGrath in Grunenberg, Gothic, 157. 12 Ibid., 155. Patrick McGrath: Directions and Transgressions 5 between text, reader and author operating in presentia could generate the most fruitful moments of literary exchange and enjoyment.13 In one of the most powerfully insightful moments of McGrath’s Trauma, the narrator declares: “We see nobody clearly. We only see ghosts of absent others, and mistake for reality the fictions we construct from blueprints drawn up in early childhood, this is the problem.”14 On those May days, our visions suddenly became more acute. There was no more absent other, the specter was decidedly present. And his fictions, for a few magic moments, did seem to merge perfectly with our reality. The contributors to this volume, who all took part in the conference, knew that by coming to Perpignan, they were embarking on a very particular trip, one that, if not perilous, was at least somewhat daunting. It was a great honor to welcome as keynote speakers Professor Sue Zlosnik, a long-standing scholar of the Gothic – who had shortly before published an essential study of McGrath’s work – and Professor Max Duperray, also an authority on the Gothic in all its guises, who was the very first French academic to write about McGrath’s work.15 All the other contributors must be warmly thanked too for the high quality and originality of their articles. As mentioned earlier, one of the goals of this conference was to move beyond the oft-visited topoi of the Gothic while not completely overlooking their significance. That is the reason why the first three chapters of the volume deal with recurring issues of genericity (Duperray), genealogy and grotesqueries (Dutel) and the question of “New Gothicism,” particularly in comparison with Joyce Carol Oates (Tromble), another major contemporary American writer who has also often been labeled as gothic. Having thus firmly established that beyond its parodic antics, McGrath’s New Gothic fiction is a necessary literary answer to some of our deepest existential fears in a potentially healing process that is akin to psychoanalysis, the three following chapters explore with detail issues of gender, power, and jouissance, all three recurrent in McGrath’s texts. While gender has already been identified as a Gordian knot from the earliest years of

13 In the Barthesian sense of “plaisir du texte”. 14 McGrath, Trauma, 149. 15 Professor Duperray also supervized the only two doctoral theses on McGrath’s work in France. The first one, by Magali Faclo, La poétique néo-gothique de Patrick McGrath was successfully defended in October 2005 at the university of Aix-Marseille and subsequently published by Publibook in 2007. The second one, entitled Autorité et intertextualité dans l’œuvre de Patrick McGrath was written by the editor of this volume and successfully defended in November 2008 at the same university. 6 Introduction

McGrath’s literary output,16 it seemed that these issues did deserve pride of place in this collection. Building from the operating concept of liminality and addressing the figure of the androgyne in Dr Haggard’s Disease, Ineke Bockting submits McGrath’s third novel to a scrupulous micro-reading, showing how this spectacular and masterfully controlled novel, hovering between Gothic tale and Romantic elegy, is governed by “the ecstatic pull of the void.” Hélène Machinal’s thorough study of the conflicting discourses of authority at work in McGrath’s Asylum, mirrored for the occasion in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw¸ offers a minute analysis of the power struggle taking place in the author’s best-known and crafted narrative. In a more sweeping and synthesizing gesture, Sue Zlosnik’s panoptical survey of the status of women in the whole œuvre gives another turn of the screw in the investigation of the gender question in McGrath’s fiction, ominously suggesting that many Gothic nightmares may in fact derive from “night-mères” in the first place. The final three chapters of the volume are centered on what has been referred to elsewhere as Patrick McGrath’s “American New Gothic”17, that is the shift from the Old World to the New in the course of the author’s 25-year long literary career. While McGrath’s textual mechanics of madness in Spider, Dr Haggard’s Disease and Asylum all unfold against the backdrop of a fantasized version of a somewhat stuffy “Old England” wallowing in its post-Victorian traditions, the crossing to America with the transitional Martha Peake – whose intricate textual web is explored in depth in the first chapter of this volume – at the turn of the millennium must be seen as a radical move for an author who has lived in New York for close to 30 years.18 “Everything finds its way across the Atlantic”, writes Edmund, the narrator of “The Year of the Gibbet” in Ghost Town, McGrath’s own New York Trilogy. He himself certainly did, and while he may not be the first Englishman of letters to have called America home, he has seemed very determined in his later novels to become a more fully- fledged American artist,19 and inscribe himself more permanently as a New York City writer, alongside the likes of Paul Auster and Don DeLillo. It thus seemed perfectly appropriate to address the question of

16 See Zlosnik and Horner, Gothic and the Comic Turn, 136-164. 17 See Dupont and Falco in Duperray, 272-281. 18 And who therefore wrote all his fiction, including his “English” novels, from the East Coast of the United States. 19 And citizen too: Patrick McGrath obtained American nationality at the turn of the century. It may also be worth noting that Trauma was actually written in American English, unlike the other novels, which were still written in British English. Patrick McGrath: Directions and Transgressions 7 national heritage by bringing the Gothic back into play, through the resurfacing of Gothic romance in Port Mungo, McGrath’s first “American” novel, published in 2004. This is precisely what Marc Amfreville sets about doing in his subtly orchestrated study of trauma and its relation to American Gothic romance in that book. The author of the article shows how intertextual strategies at work in Port Mungo, associated with the paradoxical mechanics of trauma, result in a palimpsestuous20 mode of textual haunting that conjures up the very first novel ever to have been written on American soil: Wieland or the Transformation by Charles Brockden Brown, in 1798. The Gothic may thus well be, somehow inescapably, the very kernel of McGrath’s dark art of fiction, whichever shore of the Atlantic he chooses to set it in. It is now established that the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center saw another explosion in their wake: that of post 09.11 fiction. And it has been hard, not to say impossible, for New York City writers not to try and seize back the narrative in order to write back to the traumatic reality of that infamous day. McGrath’s Ghost Town came as his own personal response to the city’s inhabitants’ brutal confrontation with this evil act perpetrated against them. Gerald Préher’s reading of “Ground Zero” alongside other pieces of fiction written in the aftermath of 09.11 makes a significant contribution to the debate surrounding the repercussions and symbolic inscription of a traumatic event in the contemporary American literary scene. Claude Maisonnat’s exemplary reading of “Julius” in the light of Lacanian theory and intertextual strategies also deals with symbolic strategies of self-inscription. The author of the final chapter of the volume shows how a tale haunted by those of Edith Wharton and Henry James, among other ghosts, can become a mirror for the act of creation, be it artistic, literary, or divine. Simultaneously, intertextual resonances subtly shift from Byron and Shakespeare to Melville and Emerson, American intellectual icons turned intertextual symptoms of the Americanization of McGrath’s work. Finally, it is an immense honor to the editor of this volume that the author himself has agreed to write the Afterword. After all, it did seem more than fair to he who became, for the course of three days, an object of the study, to regain some subjective agency and give us, as he jokingly put it, “a taste of our own medicine”. McGrath’s disease is, after all, a rather healthy one.

20 This bold leap from incest to palimpsest in Port Mungo and the connection with Brockden Brown’s Wieland had already been suggested in a previous article dealing with McGrath’s later fiction, thereby confirming the fecundity of this seemingly unholy intertextual alliance. See Dupont and Falco, 276-77. 8 Introduction

Works Cited

Bataille, Georges. L’érotisme. Paris: Minuit, 1957. Duperray, Max, ed. Gothic N.E.W.S. Vol. 1: Literature. Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2009. Dupont, Jocelyn and Falco, Magali. “Patrick McGrath’s American New Gothic.” In Gothic N.E.W.S. Vol. 1: Literature, edited by Max Duperray, 272-282. Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2009. McGrath, Patrick. Trauma. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2008. —. Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now. London: Bloomsbury, 2005. —. “Transgression and Decay.” In Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art, edited by Christoph Grunenberg. 158-153. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press, 1997. Mellier, Denis. “The Open Range of an Acronym”, In Gothic N.E.W.S. Vol. 1: Literature, edited by Max Duperray, 7-26. Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2009. Radcliffe, Anne. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1794], 1980. Zlosnik, Sue. Patrick McGrath. Gothic Authors: Critical Revisions. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011. —. and Avril Horner. Gothic and the Comic Turn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. PART I

BEYOND THE GOTHIC

CHAPTER ONE

MCGRATH, MARTHA PEAKE AND GENERIC COMPLEXITY

MAX DUPERRAY

Talking about a writer with the writer among the audience is a stimulating experience though a bit uneasy. In the old days, it was a rule in French universities not to undertake doctoral research about someone unless he or she was dead. It does not mean that an author is better dead than alive, even a gothic one, but it does raise problems as to the participation of a writer in the exegesis of his own work and whether he is a welcome intruder or not. Is the writer the ultimate source of information about his work? Critics would maintain that he is not in order to save their jobs. On the side of the analyst there is however a lingering anxiety about prizing closed boxes open and letting the wrong cat out of the bag. The writer being, to a certain extent, the ascertained source of information whether you like it or not, the suspicion is that professional readers’ brilliant ideas may entice a hearty laugh on the part of the victim, however courteous he may be in keeping all this to himself or for later and more intimate confessions. Hence the caution of the structuralists declaring the author dead once and for all. Death sentences being outlawed now, the author is back again. In other words the risk in the circumstances is to slip into the grotesque unawares; McGrath being an authority where the grotesque is concerned that hardly alleviates the tension felt by the analyst. After all, the writer is in the position of a snooping visitor overhearing behind curtains what the others will say about him. This is already a rather gothic situation similar to that of Udolpho whose heroine, Emily, makes the most of imagining horrors behind closed doors and lifts curtains to discover booby traps, dummies in the semblance of smeared corpses, or similar to Sir Hugo’s imagining that Fledge, his servant, is up to no good behind his back: “imagination always tends towards the grotesque.”1

1 McGrath, The Grotesque, 6. 12 Chapter One

So let us not imagine too much about Patrick McGrath. For one thing, his biography tells us that he was the son of a psychiatrist and was brought up in the mental institutions his father used to run, Broadmoor in particular, where apparently he attended medical profession’s debates about psychology. That upbringing may constitute a predicament which is paradoxically a godsend for all investigators in psychopathology, even though critics should be wary not to clutch too quickly at providential straws. There is another relatively famous example of a boy brought up among the inmates of lunatic asylums: Lyttleton Forbes Winslow, in East London at the end of the 19th century. At the time of the gruesome Jack the Ripper case, Winslow, a distinguished psychiatrist himself, had become engrossed in the brutal crimes of Whitechapel, so much so that he had become familiar with all the actors of the drama on the premises; he ultimately claimed to know who the monster was and was even for a time suspected by police authorities of being the murderer himself, since he neatly fitted in with the mad doctor type, up to curious experiments in the open, often by night. Only, Winslow did not turn into a novelist, though he published his memoirs in 1910. However interested McGrath seems to be in mad doctors, nobody can suspect him of any transgression other than literary, but this is a field that is sometimes even more fertile than mundane reality may be. Psychoanalysts will urge their patients to speak rather than act out their embarrassments. This is where the crux of the matter lies: how far can speech convey truth or anything that can reasonably be defined as such? That is a question almost inherent in all literatures of course, but Patrick McGrath has remarkably elaborated on it. Most of the fiction he has written is indeed based on the dynamics of confessions, however indirect they may be: the most fruitful method in embracing otherness by projecting the self as the locus of mystery, disposing of omniscience – confessions at one remove. The first novels at least are unnamed confessions about an experience fed by literary traditions and tropes bringing in an incessant metafictional self-questioning. Master/servant, parent /child, patient/therapist, man/woman relationships will expatiate on the eternal author/reader implied dialogue. Throughout history, confessions have adopted a series of pretexts and flaunted a series of purported purposes, religious for St Augustine, self-vindication for De Quincey, romantic portrayal for Rousseau, or indirect insights into remarkable periods for Musset. But confessions are basically, as the celebrated formula runs, “homodiegetic,” they verge on mental turmoil and self-internment, a sort of paradoxical, self-defeating creativity. The opium eater stands as a case in point for he opened the way for decadent McGrath, Martha Peake and Generic Complexity 13

“dialogues with a madman.” His style was a masterpiece of rhythmic classic prose and drifted to the relation of dreams of sheer punitive madness. He started from the surprising acknowledgement that most of his knowledge was derived from “demireps”, that is exciting social dropouts, somewhat surprising bedfellows. De Quincey claimed to be remarkably truthful, measuring the number of laudanum drops he would ingest day by day but conveying the impression of a self-inflicted disease which contaminates discourse. In McGrath’s Spider the narrator starts with a paradoxical remark for someone who is bound to tell his own life story. He says he can have no confidence in his own memory, which sounds as something like an assertion from a story by Borges: asserting that you are unable to assert anything. The same tension between the rationality of expression and the unimaginable behind runs through Patrick McGrath’s fiction. Peter Cleave in Asylum is the ultimate form of a narrator who conceals himself in his professional account, a figure which onomastically connects to others like Clegg, the spider or Clyte, the body-snatcher of Martha Peake. They surely point out a clinking overtone as if humanity could accomodate a disquieting propensity to resonate when striving for coherence. So the unreliability of the narrator is not so much the trick of a u-turn in reader’s expectations, detective and detected swapping their roles in the manner of Agatha Christie’s Roger Ackroyd, but an undecidability which affects the whole process as Asylum or Spider exemplify most, along a line which is much more modernist than classically gothic. Spider for one goes beyond the mere diary of a madman: it is also firmly planted in the soil of the dark past of London’s East End. Murder, prostitution and usurpation of marital law against the backdrop of more recent ravages of war serve as a suggestive context. The hybridization of gothic tropes with a modernist outlook started early in McGrath’s shorter fiction, blood washed up in water perhaps. The collection Blood and Water leads to studies in uncanny liquidity. Gothic spookery blends with metafictional sarcasm and no creaking is ever heard the way you can hear characters creak as Dr Haggard does. In “Blood and Water”, the eponymous short story of the collection, water circulation is akin to blood in the body. Sir Norman is up against problems with his ageing boiler exploding in the vault beneath. The throbbing vein in his temple threatens to do the same, as he is unsurprisingly enough a victim of a streak of madness which runs in the family. Transformation is under way, contaminating Sir Norman’s effete wife who suffers from a depressive “clitorical tumefaction”, in other words, sexual mutation. Her picturesque doctor from Harley Street is brutally bled to death in his steaming bath because he meant to expose the case to a clinical gaze. As in 14 Chapter One

Dracula, blood also connotes blue blood, the scions of ancient families have to tinker with water pipes and face patriarchal degeneracy, demented respectability and incongruous physicality – the sexual divide being quaintly questioned in grotesquely humorous terms. In another early piece entitled “Ambrose Syme”, a story of lurid sexual crime with a young victim left to moulder like flotsam in marshy water (Ambrose Slime?), the humorous description of the predicament of the boy trained in a gothic religious institution underscores that concept again:

[He] was taught to displace energy from the lower part of his body to the higher. A process which implies an insight into hydraulic engineerings […]. The technique employed in the case was somewhat analogous to the operation of a common refrigerator in which liquid is pumped up through tubes to the evaporator in the head being turned in the process into gas. […] Ambrose Syme did not turn his sexual urges into gas, rather he learned to turn them into long ponderous sentences of a verbose and bombastic turgidity.2

The renewal of old times Gothic with its rhetorical inflation is thus lampooned through the metaphor of some mechanism grinding ahead relentlessly, like water spilling over the bath tub. That renewal of an antiquated mode sounds like therapy – or rather repairs? – with a view to keeping Gothic alive against heavy odds. The irony of recycling is thus close at hand. The recycling trick has been in fashion for the last thirty years or so, metafiction being granted pride of place instead of metaphysics – an echo of the rise of ecological obsessions in modern societies perhaps, since literature never springs from the void. One remarkable image early in Patrick McGrath’s fiction is that of The Grotesque, where the body dumped in the bog will feed the pigs on which the family feeds – a salutary process if not salubrious. The solidarity implied in the food chain is a grisly illustration – despite deadpan irony – of everlasting impulses in fictional constructs beyond formal preoccupations: men visualized as ogres and the fear of the devourer being devoured implying role swapping again. One can have no faith in the narrator’s narratives, the Gothic risks becoming a crumbling pile. I would side with one critic’s remark that McGrath is closer to Saki than to Poe.3 In the short story “The Open Window”, a romantic and imaginative girl welcomes a visitor in a forlorn country house where she is

2 McGrath, “Ambrose Syme” in Blood and Water, 60. 3 Gooderham, “Going inside the head”, Times Literary Supplement, 26 April 1991, 18. McGrath, Martha Peake and Generic Complexity 15 resting after a nervous breakdown and treats him to the story of a tragedy which occurred there three years before when her siblings died after being engulfed by a treacherous stretch of bog during a shooting party. Her poor aunt has lost her reason since, she says, and still expects to see them back any minute at the French window. When the hunters do come back from the fields at the end of the day, looming in the mist, the girl staring madly at them, the scared visitor takes to his heels while the aunt wonders at such a behaviour. Interpreting is the core of the process. Much of the gist of the genre lies in that subtle blend of humour, fear and cynicism. Humour, however dark, lies in a gradually deflated system as if the writer, caught at his own trick and recapturing modern anxieties and human tragedies, were resorting to a somewhat outmoded way of staging them, a used up method revitalized sardonically. The writer thus stands as the gothic ironist, sharing in the uncanny hybridization of our times, not altogether alien from the character of the madman in Asylum, Edgar, who destroys the remarkable artefacts he creates. Talking about truth, my hunch is that truth remains intimately embroiled in notions of genres and gender, and the writer, a person whose persona links up to doctors of a kind and to historians, both exhibiting an explicit kinship with black magic whose vocation is to transform dirt into gold: “[i]t is a black art, the writing of history is it not […] I think historians must be melancholy creatures, rather like poets, or doctors perhaps,” as the first sentence of Martha Peake runs.4 Only, black magic reads like psychopathology. One of McGrath’s most prominent doctors, pointedly called Haggard, is diseased, a mostly incapacitated reclusive practitioner; more precisely he suffers from a past injury and nurses his wounded leg and neurotic obsession for a spent passion which ultimately leads to the queer sexual transformation of his lost mistress’s son, the process smacking of sex-change surgery. Dr Haggard’s Disease is an interesting signpost to the underlying transformation of genre in McGrath’s fiction – more or less implemented through the image of gender metamorphosis, already staged in the early stories mentioned above. The drug addicted doctor sheltering his mania in a gothic mansion is torn between a naive near priestly idealism and the mounting sickness of a demented creator who hungers for transsexual totalitarian dreams while calling the dead back to life. Victor Frankenstein had similarly shaped out of human matter a monster with feminine features. Mary Shelley herself was taking her distance from gothic

4 McGrath, Martha Peake, 3. 16 Chapter One ancestry by dallying with the portrayal of a mad scientist who meant to ape God’s creation. Patrick McGrath gave us brilliant illustrations of that in two or three major novels before coming to the pseudo historical style of his Martha Peake, which reads like a turning point in more ways than one; first and foremost because of the choice of its title. Martha Peake, like Moll Flanders or Jane Eyre, Jenny Gerhart or Esther Waters and the likes, harks back to the Bildungsroman effect, a greatly realistic mode. Obviously the idea was to raise historical connections, cultural references to make the story an inheritance from the past, meant to usher in the future. Hence a strong intertextual flavor dominates: Moll Flanders and the colonies, the Dickensian underworld, Cornwall and the smugglers, Moonfleet by John Meade Falkner, or the story of Burke and Hare, Clyte and the body snatchers, Stevenson, Dracula and the castle across the moor, Elephant man, John Merrick’s life by Frederick Treves. He somewhere mentioned Hogarth and Smollet in his intertextual reminiscences. Similarly to Stoker’s Dracula, in particular, everything springs from a mock gothic tale in an isolated castle where visitors explore secret premises and unacknowledged desires before coming back to a more mundane reality, however slight the frontier may be between the one and the other. But McGrath’s poetics return to the fascinated gaze on the misshapen human body in its flaws, deformation and bizarre creativity; the Cripplegate monster also emerges as a writer and poet who comes under the predatory eye of the anatomist. He is both creature and object, strongly idealist and articulate, while also ready for dissection as an item of the anatomist’s museum. Here lies the essence of McGrath’s specificity: in the twisted mind and body at the core of his fiction, echoing the lure of disjointed tales. Harry, Martha’s father, has the ambiguous position of the artist, the outlaw who infringed the law of the land as a smuggler, the law of society by ravishing his daughter, the transcendental law by playing with fire and suffering the punishment of the gods, becoming the fallen angel, a deformed Prometheus. He comes under the cold scrutiny of the anatomist not because he is an artist, but because he is a curiosity, a priceless item for the cabinet of curios, just as the fiction he associates with tends to be. The deformity he was punished with is a sign of spiritual, albeit sinful, singularity, a rebellion against norm and normality: McGrath borrows the universal symbolic structure of Fall and Redemption as a passport for the McGrath, Martha Peake and Generic Complexity 17 new world. The narrator Ambrose Tree5 has come to his uncle in the hope of inheriting from the tree of knowledge. Like some of his literary ancestors, John Melmoth among them, he is confronted with the huge portrait of a wild forbear, Harry Peake, and hears about the ancient story which is the founding drama, akin to tragedy, always close to some Faustian bargain. For the writer himself the contract is also transformative: to make something new out of older materials. The narrator himself will suffer a transitory illness and recovery within the damp walls of the quaint mansion. Harry is a poet, he is the author of “The Ballad of Joseph Tresilian”, a romantic appeal to the Sea as a liberating force. Incidentally, Robert Tresilian was a judge in Cornwall under Richard II, who was ultimately executed for felony. Harry is first a spinner of yarns with a knack for self- reflexive stories such as that of “a man who attended his own funeral”6 which disturbs Martha so much7. Writing makes Harry a new man, “as though he were attempting to expel the demon through the medium of ink”8, a new man coming to terms with his own body whose deformity is but accidental: “an accidental membrane sheathing a soul that in all its proportions and lineaments was not deformed.”9 Similarly the narrator speaks of his report as “mere tissue (…) manufactured to flesh the bare bones of (the old man’s) own past narrative.”10 Answering a question by Lord Drogo about the cause of his deformity, he comes out with a story redolent of black magic: his mother had suffered from the evil eye, which is both wrong and terribly adequate for a hunchback gifted with a writing talent. Not unlike Jonathan Harker in the Carpathian castle, Ambrose ponders the inner recesses of his uncle’s demesne as they might harbour the “skeletal remains” of the fallen artist condemned to trespass the limits of reason and wisdom and sin against the law of God.11 Ambrose has inherited the skeletal remains of a gripping story that history and black magic provide, the bold and perilous attempt to break the mould that humanity is made of. Clyte the evil servant, the vile hunchman,

5 Yet another Ambrose, as if there was a definite liking for that name Ambrose and a preparation for a passage to the country of Ambrose Bierce and his stories of terrible delight. 6 McGrath, Martha Peake, 30. 7 An idea somewhat similar to that of Hawthorne’s tale “Wakefield” – McGrath has read Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. 8 McGrath, Martha Peake, 76. 9 Ibid., 68. 10 Ibid., 130. 11 “What monstrous things awaited me in the bowels of the house?” (86) 18 Chapter One delivering hanged bodies from Tyburn, a living skeleton himself, stands as “the resurrection man” pointed out as “the whispering principle of negativity,”12 a process again which is reminiscent of famous dalliances with the charnel house two centuries back. Now Martha who smells the vinegar in the American temperament – a sour Martha’s Vineyard? – comes full circle (the first meaning of the word Revolution) by going back to a kind of Cornwall, to her childhood, back to square one, to the hidden desire for some fanciful murder of the father. She also travels back to a world of romance, invigorating and superseded, embellishing a dark tale, in between progression and regression. America, the land of all possibilities, also reflects the embarrassment of the drive for emancipation, freedom from the frame of the past to be able to write a new story. Only that story is a pull back to another and perhaps even older type of textuality: the romantic epic. Susie Mackenzie wrote in the Guardian that McGrath’s novels “all focus on interiors.”13 This of course relates to studies of the unconscious, but Martha Peake is an extraordinary sally outdoors, apart from the fact that the American remains within. “The American within” is a phrase which sounds ironical enough, since it refers to the product of an unnatural copulation. That open American horizon is to be found within an everlasting gothic structure. See the imbrication of figures, the Russian doll effect, in the narrative structure, stories handed over at one remove and the guideline of incestuous procreation. The giant responsible for the newcomer within his daughter is like Hobbes’s Leviathan, or the Revolution to the body politic. Martha’s story develops in the yarn- spinning process of an old man reported by a passionate younger one who catches diseases and makes things up by trying to recapture what might have been left alone with bits of papers, fragments. A devious narrative, as always, if not a blank page for imagining minds to fill. Again a problem of joints. The climactic irony is that Martha should give birth to little Harry with the twisted spine of his father while Ambrose, back in England, desperately searches Drogo Hall for his skeleton. Everything labours under the tyranny of the same, however transformative the process can be. Old time stories obsessively kept alive. McGrath playfully confides in one of his interviewers that writing Martha Peake as a pastiche and a parody of gothic fiction was a big joke, highly pleasurable to write.14 There are illustrious antecedents to such a remark: remember that Henry James said the same thing about “The Turn

12 Ibid., 96. 13 McKenzie, “In Pursuit of Sublime Terror” in The Guardian, 3 September 2005, 14 Falco, Unpublished MA dissertation, Aix-Marseille University, 47. McGrath, Martha Peake and Generic Complexity 19 of the Screw”. He called it an amusette, yet it still frightens every passing generation, like Walpole’s sins revisited on his children. If Martha Peake is a joke, we need to read it as Freud did jokes, giving us food for thought about what literature is made of and the hazards of its renewal. Inflating and deflating the gothic balloon is indeed part of the overall project. Imagination will be cut down to size: in the same way as Martha’s story of martyrdom is part of an American myth, the transgressive body-snatching melodrama evaporates after a single pistol shot. Harry Peake is thus restored to life and reality, however painful it may be, as the caring father figure. There is much talk of structures collapsing in the late discovery that Lord Drogo was yet another psychiatrist opening “the royal road to an understanding of the structure and function of the mind.”15 Very similar to the common gothic reader, Ambrose connives in the gothic construction: the mad scientist’s grisly experiments, a body- snatcher and a collector of skeletons, so much so that he instinctively murders the alleged ghost, to be called back to reality where gothic stories no longer abide and nurses the old wounded father, Harry, who has survived unhurt. Yet the move towards a dissolution of gothic fancies washed down by studies of the mind remains uncertain: “to think of that giant constitution in all its magnificent imperfection; being replicated in the new America – now that is sublimity incarnate.”16 Sublimity that is the mixture of desire and fear: fear still there in the land of one’s heart desire, to use Yeats’ phrase. It is appropriate that the move to America should be repeated in particularly decadent terms with Port Mungo, a tale of bereavement and family dysfunctioning and slow drift into a gin-soaked world of artistic restlessness. The young Rathbone is spirited away to America by Vera Savage (a telling name), a free-living painter of specific mores. They move on to a destructive place and the story harbours a secret: the drowning of their eldest daughter in the mangrove. There is no escape from a world of confinement from which humour itself seems to ebb away, into the ghost town of mad history and maddening reiteration: new traumas for sublime narratives. Literature is not so much a matter of generic adequacy as the specific expression of the artist remoulding rules. There is a strong suspicion that McGrath has put a lot of himself into the Cripplegate monster, the sensitive artist turning wild against destiny, the giant who fosters the “American within” for a renewal of tales of sublimity. But he also might

15 McGrath, Martha Peake, 331. 16 Ibid., 333. 20 Chapter One bear some kinship with Lord Drogo, the psychiatrist bent on understanding the mysteriously creative mind. Hence the idea that the author’s return that we toyed with at the beginning – back to square one or ground zero – is something to be considered. Like his forebears, he is the ever solitary walker in a ghost town.

Works Cited

McGrath, Patrick. Blood and Water and Other Tales, London: Penguin Books Originals, [1988] 1989. —. The Grotesque, London: Penguin Books, 1989. —. Spider, New York: Simon and Shuster, 1990. —. Dr Haggard’s Disease, New York: Viking, 1993. —. Asylum, New-York: Viking, 1996. —. Martha Peake: A Novel of the Revolution, London: Penguin Books, 2000. —. Port Mungo, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004. —. Ghost Town, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005.