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