The Queer Uncanny: New Perspectives on the Gothic

The Queer Uncanny: New Perspectives on the Gothic

by Paulina Palmer
The Queer Uncanny: New Perspectives on the Gothic

The Queer Uncanny: New Perspectives on the Gothic

by Paulina Palmer

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Overview

The Queer Uncanny: New Perspectives on the Gothic investigates the roles played by the concept of the uncanny, as defined by Sigmund Freud and other theorists, in the representation of lesbian and male gay sexualities and transgender in a selection of contemporary British, American and Caribbean fiction published 1980-2007. Novels by Christopher Bram, Philip Hensher, Alan Hollingurst, Randall Kenan, Shani Mootoo, Sarah Schulman, Ali Smith, Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson and other writers receive analysis in the context of queer theory and gothic critical writing. Topics discussed include: secrets and their disclosure, queer spectrality, the homely/ unhomely house, the grotesque, lesbian social invisibility, transgender doubles, and the intersection between sexuality and race.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781783164912
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Publication date: 01/15/2012
Series: Gothic Literary Studies
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
File size: 399 KB

About the Author

Dr Paulina Palmer has now retired from a senior lectureship in English at Warwick University, where she helped establish the Women's Studies MA, she also lectured for the MA in Gender and Sexuality at Birkbeck, London University. Dr Palmer's publications include Contemporary Women's Fiction: Narrative Practice and Feminist Theory; Contemporary Lesbian Writing: Dreams, Desire, Difference; and Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions. http://www.paulinapalmer.org.uk

Read an Excerpt

The Queer Uncanny

New Perspectives on the Gothic


By Paulina Palmer

University of Wales Press

Copyright © 2012 Paulina Palmer
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7083-2460-8



CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Queering the Uncanny


* * *


The uncanny is queer. And the queer is uncanny.


Fiction, queer perspectives and the uncanny

Horace Cross, the sixteen-year-old African American protagonist of Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits (1989), one of the novels discussed in this study, lives in the rural Christian Fundamentalist community of Tims Creek, North Carolina. Obsessed with guilt on account of his homosexuality and his inability to achieve the heterosexual masculinity that his family expects of him, he takes the risk of confiding the secret of his sexuality to his cousin Jimmy Greene, a minister at the local Baptist church. Jimmy advises him to pray in an effort to resist temptation, confirming Horace's role as sinner and outcast. When his attempts at prayer predictably fail, Horace rejects the rational approach to life that he learnt at school and from the books on science he borrowed from the library and turns, in desperation, to magic. However, instead of the transformation into a bird that he hoped to achieve when he recited the magic spell, he finds himself the victim of a monstrous demon that, erupting from his psyche, takes him on a tour of the neighbourhood. Scenes he is forced to witness include a sermon in the church denouncing the evils of homosexuality and a visit to a community theatre in the nearby town where he has had affairs with white male actors. Here he sees a black figure dressed as a clown in the act of putting on white makeup, and is horrified to recognize it as himself. He thinks, 'Of all the things he had seen this night, all the memories he had confronted, all the ghouls and ghosts and specters, this shook him the most'. The novel concludes with him taking his grandfather's rifle and shooting himself in the head while his spectral double looks mockingly on.

Kenan's novel – as well as being of interest for its vivid representation of the conflict that Horace experiences, trapped as he is between the homophobia of the local community and his homosexuality, and its imaginative interweaving of fantasy and realism – is notable for its introduction of motifs and ideas relating to the uncanny, many of them recognizable from Sigmund Freud's essay on the topic and the work of theorists writing subsequently. There is, for instance, the idea that uncanny sensations, and the disturbing transformation of the familiar into the unfamiliar that they generate, reflect the projection of unconscious fears and desires originating in 'something repressed which recurs'. This is illustrated by the way Horace's feelings of guilt about his homosexuality and his fear that he has betrayed his racial identity by engaging in affairs with whites return to haunt him, transforming his surroundings into the site of the supernatural. The novel also introduces other motifs with uncanny resonance. These include the secret of Horace's transgressive sexuality which, although the residents of Tims Creek would prefer it to remain hidden, nonetheless comes to light when he discloses it to Jimmy; his encounter with his double at the theatre; and his feelings of uncertainty about his identity – is he homosexual or heterosexual, black or white, a human being, a bird or a monster? In addition, central to the theme of the conflict between contrary value schemes that Kenan treats, there is the fatal shift that Horace undergoes from a rational approach to life to a reliance on superstition and 'old, discarded beliefs' crediting magical transformation and demonic possession. And framing the narrative is the concept of taboo, another topic that Freud foregrounds. It is exemplified here by the Christian Fundamentalist prohibition of homosexuality. Jimmy endorses this by instructing Horace to pray to resist temptation, while the preacher vehemently hammers it home in the sermon he delivers.

Although Kenan's treatment of these themes is uniquely inventive, A Visitation of Spirits is not unusual in its use of concepts and motifs relating to the uncanny to represent facets of queer sexuality and experience and society's response to them. A number of other novels by contemporary writers, texts focusing on lesbian and transgender as well as male gay interests, employ them in a similar manner. Hélène Cixous describes the uncanny as appearing 'only on the fringe of something else', while Rosemary Jackson, developing that thought, observes that it 'exists only in relation to the familiar and the normal. It is tangential, to one side.' This tallies with the experience of the queer individual living in a minority subculture and existing, as Sara Ahmed remarks in her discussion of queer phenomenology, 'slantwise' and in oblique relation to heteronormative society. With this in mind, I aim in this study to investigate the roles that the uncanny plays in a selection of queer fictional texts and the different ways writers represent it. The project raises interesting questions. What roles does the uncanny play in fiction of this kind? Is reference to it introduced merely to arouse a frisson of excitement or unease in the reader or is it pertinent to the themes the writer treats? Which aspects of the uncanny do writers prioritize and which features of queer existence do they employ them to explore? What narrative strategies and structures do they utilize in depicting them? How, if at all, does the lesbian treatment of the uncanny differ from the male gay?

The works of fiction I have selected for discussion, while all published during the period 1980–2007, vary considerably in style and form. Some, such as Ali Smith's Hotel World (2001) and Christopher Bram's Father of Frankenstein (1995), are overtly Gothic, recasting from a queer perspective narratives and scenarios inscribing spectral visitation, the double and encounters with the monstrous. Others, such as Paul Magrs's Could It Be Magic? (1997) and Jeanette Winterson's The Power Book (2001), though lacking the dark, scary atmosphere that we associate with Gothic, interrelate fantasy and realism and introduce motifs and imagery with Gothic and uncanny connotations. There is also a third category of fiction on which I focus, exemplified by Emma Donoghue's Stir-Fry (1994), Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) and Sarah Schulman's People in Trouble (1990), that is predominantly realist in style. However, it too employs Gothic imagery and structures. The texts in the latter two categories illustrate the tendency of motifs and imagery relating to the uncanny and Gothic to infiltrate different forms of fiction, demonstrating their versatility and the attraction they continue to hold for writers and readers.

Queer theory, as Annamarie Jagose explains, 'describes those gestures or analytical models which dramatise incoherences in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire'. It encompasses a range of different sexualities and, since it is non-specific, has the potential to be utilized in different contexts. The novels that I discuss reflect this multifaceted focus. Some, such as David Leavitt's While England Sleeps (1998) and Ellen Galford's The Dyke and the Dybbuk (1993), operate primarily in terms of the identity categories 'gay' and 'lesbian'. Others, however, in keeping with the Foucauldian view of such categories as regulatory and oppressive, and influenced by the poststructuralist emphasis on the mobility of desire, seek to destabilize the notion of a stable sexual identification or gender. Accepting the view of identity as contingent and the product of fantasy, they interrogate and deconstruct the binary division of homosexual/heterosexual. Novels adopting this approach include James Purdy's Mourners Below (1981), Donna Tartt's The Secret History (1992) and Winterson's The Power Book. Fiction, however, unlike theory, frequently avoids defining its ideological perspective explicitly. It tends towards the dialogic, displaying tensions and ambiguities. As a result there is, as we shall see, a significant degree of interaction and overlap between these approaches, with texts combining and interrelating them. The usage of the term 'queer' is itself ambiguous. While employed in academia in relation to queer theory to challenge the concept of a stable sexual identification and problematize the binary division homosexual/heterosexual, it is alternatively used as a form of shorthand to encompass the categories of lesbian, gay and, on occasion, transgender. I use it in both ways, with the context indicating its meaning.

In addition to novels focusing on different sexualities, I discuss others, including Patrick McGrath's Dr Haggard's Disease (1993) and Stella Duffy's Beneath the Blonde (1997), that deal with transgender and transsexuality. These are topics that feature prominently on the queer agenda since the transgender and transsexual body, as well as being important in its own right, illustrates in a particularly readable form the constructedness of sex and gender in general. And, taking account of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's observation that in queer discourse 'Race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality crisscross with other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses', I also consider Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits (1989), Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) and H. Nigel Thomas's Spirits in the Dark (1993) that represent African American and Caribbean constructs of queer sexuality and gender. In investigating the intersection between racial and sexual identifications and exploring different forms of hybridity, these works challenge and help rectify the Eurocentric bias that dominates queer writing.

The novels cited above form the focus of this study. They employ reference to the uncanny to explore, among other topics, what Ahmed describes in Queer Phenomenology as the 'dynamic negotiation between what is familiar and unfamiliar' (p. 7) that typifies queer existence in heteronormative society, and the efforts the queer individual makes to resist 'being kept in line, often by force' (p. 83) with its conventions and sexual mores. Some readers may assume that in the present era of civil partnerships and the improvements in the situation of queer people in the West that they reflect, negotiations of this kind are no longer necessary and their fictional representation is outdated. This, however, is not the case. As Jeffrey Weeks writes in his study of present-day lesbian and gay life in Western society aptly entitled The World We Have Won, 'Despite really significant transformations, in many quarters homophobia remains rampant, from vicious queer bashing to school bullying, from heterosexist jokes to the minstrelization of openly gay television personalities. A continuing undercurrent of unease remains pervasive.' The increasing visibility of lesbians and gay men has, he observes, employing a phrase that itself has uncanny implications of ambiguity, 'a double edge' (p. 48). While bringing the queer subject a sense of freedom in certain areas of life, it simultaneously generates outbreaks of prejudice and hostility. These tensions and contradictions are registered in some of the novels by British and American writers discussed below. The texts by the Caribbean Thomas and the Trinidadian-Canadian writer Mootoo to which I refer also illustrate particularly vividly the struggles that queer sexuality and existence continue to involve for many people.

However, before turning to the discussion of fiction, I need to investigate a topic that is pertinent to it and furnishes a cultural and intellectual context for its analysis. This is the infiltration of motifs and images relating to the uncanny into queer theoretical discourse and the varied uses that theorists and critics make of them. As well as creating a frame for the discussion of the novels reviewed below, it sheds light on the interest that present-day writers display in the uncanny, illuminating their treatment of it as a vehicle for queer representation.


Theoretical approaches

The idea that the uncanny has sociopolitical significance and that reference to it can contribute to the perspectives and literature of emergent political movements occurs frequently in twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing. Motifs with uncanny connotations including the spectre and the vampire, the latter employed to represent the processes of modern capitalism, appear in the writing of Karl Marx, while Saul Newman describes the concepts of the return of the repressed and the interplay between the familiar and unfamiliar associated with the uncanny as 'crucial for politics understood as the attempt to construct something new, coupled with something old'. He observes that 'Radical politics is always haunted by the ghosts of the past – revolutionary traditions which are dead, yet remain unburied, which have been repressed, yet insist on returning in uncannily familiar forms' (p. 117). Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, likewise developing the idea of the return of repressed emotions and desires, argue that the abilities of art and the written word to 'disturb, defamiliarize or shake our beliefs and assumptions are deeply bound up with the uncanny'.

Pertinent to the role that the uncanny plays in queer theory and fiction is Rosemary Jackson's description of it as expressing 'drives which have to be repressed for the sake of cultural continuity'. She explores the way in which the ghost story, the literary form that Freud cites as illustrating its operations, 'helps to make visible that which is culturally invisible' (p. 69), including topics that society regards as unspeakable and taboo. Topics of this kind include, of course, lesbian and male gay sexuality, and it comes as no surprise to find metaphors and motifs with uncanny connotations, spectral in particular, infiltrating queer theoretical discourse. Diana Fuss's essay collection Inside/Out, a publication that in the 1990s helped to promote an interest in homo-spectrality, illustrates some of their uses. Fuss comments on society's attempt to suppress homosexuality by relegating the lesbian and male gay subject to the role of 'phantom other' and describes homosexual and heterosexual economies coexisting uneasily in a form of mutual haunting. She depicts the essays in the collection, though treating different facets of queer experience, as linked by a 'preoccupation with the figure of the homosexual as specter and phantom, as spirit and revenant, as abject and undead' (p. 3).

The spectre and phantom, key signifiers of the uncanny, carry connotations of 'excess' since their appearance exceeds the material, and this is another concept that connects the uncanny with 'queer'. The role of the uncanny as a signifier of excess is reflected in its ability, as Rosemary Jackson describes, to uncover the unfamiliar beneath the familiar and, by challenging the conventional view of reality as unitary, to prompt the subject to question mainstream, 'common-sense' versions of it. As James R. Kincaid remarks, the uncanny involves perceptions and phenomena that 'lie outside the realm of the explicable, outside of language', such as fantasy and dreams which transcend rational explanation. Queer theorists too depict homosexuality, on account of its invisibility and transgressive dimension, as evoking (from a phallocentric viewpoint) connotations of excess. Lee Edelman argues that from a heteronormative viewpoint, the male homosexual – like the female – signifies both 'excess' and 'lack', while Fuss represents homosexuality as occupying the role of 'supplement' to heterosexuality, necessary to its self-definition though regarded by many as a threat. Lisabeth During and Terri Fealy portray gay culture itself as signifying 'a culture of excess'. They investigate how 'the representations of the "respectable" world are turned upside down' in it, citing in illustration the different forms of role-play and innuendo that the gay individual employs in 'moving incognito through a heterosexual world'. Bonnie Zimmerman also associates lesbianism with excess. Arguing that lesbian desire 'functions as excess within the heterosexual economy', she illustrates how postmodern writers, in seeking to represent it, interrogate and critique accepted norms of both sexuality and textuality through their experimental use of narrative and the excessive proliferation of storytelling and fantasy it inscribes. This is the kind of narrative that, as we shall see, Smith's Hotel World, Waters's Fingersmith and Winterson's The Stone Gods create in interweaving multiple storylines and recasting from a lesbian viewpoint literary genres with heteronormative associations.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Queer Uncanny by Paulina Palmer. Copyright © 2012 Paulina Palmer. Excerpted by permission of University of Wales Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Preface

1. Introduction: Queering the Uncanny
2. Secrets and their Disclosure
3. Queer Spectrality
4. Place and Space
5. Monstrous Others

Notes
Bibliography
Index
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