Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film

By Xavier Aldana Reyes

The gothic, particularly in its contemporary incarnations, is often constructed around largely disembodied concepts such as spectrality or the haunted. Body Gothic offers a counter-narrative that reinstates the importance of viscerality to the gothic mode. It argues that contemporary discourses surrounding our bodies are crucial to our understanding of the social messages in fictional mutilation and of the pleasures we may derive from it. This book considers a number of literary and cinematic movements that have, over the past three decades, purposely turned the body into a meaningful gothic topos. Each chapter in Body Gothic is dedicated to a different corporeal subgenre: splatterpunk, body horror, the new avant-pulp, the slaughterhouse novel, torture porn and surgical horror are all covered in its pages. Close readings of key texts by Clive Barker, Richard Laymon, Joseph D'Lacey, Matthew Stokoe, Tony White or Stanley Manly are provided alongside in-depth analyses of landmark films such as Re-Animator (1985), The Fly (1986), Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), The Human Centipede (2011) and American Mary (2012).

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781783160945

Xavier Aldana Reyes

Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes is Reader in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University and a member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. He is the author and editor of various book in Gothic and Horror Studies, including Spanish Gothic (2017), Horror: A Literary History (2016), Horror Film and Affect (2016) and Body Gothic (2014).

Book preview

BODY GOTHIC

SERIES PREFACE

Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking scholarship on Gothic in literature and film. The Gothic, which has been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is a form which plays an important role in our understanding of literary, intellectual and cultural histories. The series seeks to promote challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy.

Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion, nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition. Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for scholarly developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory. The series will be of interest to students of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary and cultural histories.

SERIES EDITORS

Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield

Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi

EDITORIAL BOARD

Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts

Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia

David Punter, University of Bristol

Chris Baldick, University of London

Angela Wright, University of Sheffield

Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

Body Gothic

Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film

Xavier Aldana Reyes

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

CARDIFF

2014

© Xavier Aldana Reyes, 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN       978-1-78316-092-1

e-ISBN    978-1-78316-094-5

The right of Xavier Aldana Reyes to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image: © 1Apix / Alamy

This book is dedicated to my parents,

Ana María Reyes Bertolín

and

Juan Antonio Aldana Ribeiro

Sin vosotros, nunca.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction:

From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic

1 Splatterpunk

2 Body Horror

3 The New Avant-pulp

4 The Slaughterhouse Novel

5 Torture Porn

6 Surgical Horror

Conclusion: Corporeal Readings

Notes

Works Cited

Filmography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Halfway through the writing of my doctoral thesis, I realised that I was working on two very different projects. At the time, this was a great source of anxiety, as I felt I would never get to the end of either. I would like to thank my supervisors, Catherine Spooner and Brian Baker, for all their advice and endless patience, and for encouraging me to pursue the writing of both. Without them, I would never have been able to see the wood for the trees.

Thanks to the commissioning editor at the University of Wales Press, Sarah Lewis, and to the Gothic Literary Studies co-editor, Andrew Smith, for seeing me throughout the editorial process and for being so enthusiastic about Body Gothic.

I would like to thank my colleagues at Manchester Metropolitan University for believing in me and for giving me the time to write this book. I would like to thank Berthold Schoene and Helen Malarky for their championing of my research and for helping me achieve things that had, until recently, remained mere academic dreams. Thanks to the wonderful gothic research cluster at MMU, especially Sue Zlosnik, Anna Powell, Angelica Michelis and Emma Liggins, who have offered their help and guidance when most needed. Special thanks to Linnie Blake and Sorcha Ní Fhlainn for countless stimulating discussions and for some of the best laughs I have ever had. Time with them enriches me both academically and personally.

I would like to thank my gothic and horror colleagues and peers around the world for inspiring me with their work. It is easy to take for granted how important it is to be involved in a supportive academic community. For their encouragement and general loveliness, I would like to thank Fred Botting, Isabella van Elferen, Stacey Abbott, Dale Townshend, Justin Edwards, Sara Wasson, Claire Nally, Angela Wright, Paulina Palmer, Glennis Byron, Monica Germanà, Maria Beville, Tracy Fahey, Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Ian Conrich, Colette Balmain, David Punter, Steven Bruhm, William Hughes, Sam George, Emma McEvoy, Gina Wisker, Bill Hughes, Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Roger Luckhurst, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, Bernice M. Murphy, Dara Downey, Steve Jones, Johnny Walker, Hannah Priest, David J. Jones, Joan Hawkins, Lorna Jowett, Karen Macfarlane, Lucie Armitt, Sue Chaplin, Avril Horner, Brigid Cherry, Matt Hills, Steffen Hantke, Jay McRoy, Aris Mousoutzanis, Tom Watson, Matt Foley, Neil McRobert, Aspasia Stephanou, Lena Wånggren, Stuart Lindsay, Rachel Taylor and Laura Kremmel.

I also remember, with particular fondness, my time spent at Lancaster University, where some of the ideas for Body Gothic grew and developed. I would like to thank, for their collegiality and friendliness, Liz Oakley-Brown, Kamilla Elliott, John Schad, Andrew Tate, Arthur Bradley, Alison Findlay, Keith Hanley, Jayne Steele, Rose Jack, Polly Atkin, Lynne Pearce, Lindsey Moore, Michael Greaney and Jo Carruthers. Thanks also to the no less fantastic postgraduate community, particularly those who accompanied me during my doctoral journey: Sarah Post, Chris Witter, Lucy Perry, Enrique Ajuria Ibarra, Sunday Swift, David McWilliam, Neal Kirk, Alan Gregory, Chloe Buckley, Malgorzata Drewniock, Stephen Curtis and Amy Pugh.

I would like to thank Chris Barker for bearing with me during the writing of this book. His understanding and patience are immense, and I am very grateful for his company.

Last, but not least, I would like to thank my family. Their love and support knows no bounds and I feel blessed to have them in my life.

Extracts from Books of Blood by Clive Barker, copyright © 1984 and 1985, published by Sphere, reproduced by permission of Little, Brown (world) and of ALW Associates (world).

Extracts from Flesh and Resurrection Dreams by Richard Laymon, copyright © 1987 and 1988, published by Headline, reproduced by permission of Headline Publishing Group (UK and Commonwealth) and WH Allen, an imprint of Ebury Publishing (world).

Extracts from Satan! Satan! Satan! by Tony White, copyright © 1999, published by Attack! Books, an imprint of Creation Books, reproduced by permission of the author (world).

Extracts from Raiders of the Low Forehead by Stanley Manly, copyright © 1999, published by Attack! Books, an imprint of Creation Books, reproduced by permission of the author (world).

Extracts from Cows by Matthew Stokoe, copyright © 1999, published by Creation Books, reproduced by permission of the author (world).

Extracts from Meat by Joseph D’Lacey, copyright © 2008, published by Bloody Books, reproduced by permission of Andrews UK and the author (world).

Introduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic

‘Your flesh is his fantasy’ threatened an ominous tagline from the theatrical trailer of The Human Centipede (Tom Six, 2010), one of the most notorious and controversial films to join the gothic horror canon in the twenty-first century. Its villainous Dr Josef Heiter (Dieter Laser), an expert in separating Siamese twins, is a clear throwback to Victor Frankenstein, with his obsessive compulsion to create new creatures out of various independent bodies. His surgical dreams include the mouth-to-anus sewing of three human beings with matching bodily tissues in order to create a unique Siamese triplet. That Heiter is German is relevant for more than one reason. On the one hand, this is an allusion to the University of Ingolstadt, where Frankenstein gains the knowledge necessary to infuse the ‘spark of being’ in Mary Shelley’s novel of 1818.¹ On the other hand, it speaks to the ‘othering’ of Europe that is common to late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century literary gothic, with the action often set in past and barbaric versions of Spain, Italy or France. Dr Heiter can thus be read as an archetypal European villain whose anatomic experiments update the trope of the mad scientist for the twenty-first century, turning creationist delusions of grandeur into a form of coerced surgery that evokes the Holocaust through the invocation of Josef Mengele, a real-life Nazi physician. This is important, because, whilst the film is most firmly a horror vehicle which attempts to scare and gross out in equal measures, it is also entrenched within a specific literary and filmic heritage. The Human Centipede very explicitly recurs to a shared sense of the complexity of embodiment and the vulnerability of our flesh. This corporeal interest is seminal to the gothic.

Although the spectral, uncanny and psychological aspects of the gothic are often foregrounded in academic writing and continue to be popular in its many contemporary theorisations, the gothic is also inherently somatic and corporeal.² It relies on the readers’/ viewers’ awareness of their own bodies, particularly of their vulnerability and shared experience of projected pain through vicarious feelings. Where this visceral quality has been acknowledged at all, it is separated from the more subtle workings of the suggestive or the sublime and seen as a less refined and accomplished artistic form.³ For example, Stephen King, in his horror textbook Danse Macabre (1981), establishes a clear hierarchy between terror, horror and revulsion. Terror is the ‘finest emotion’, connected to anticipation and suspense, and is followed by horror, which he equates with shock.⁴ Revulsion, or the ‘gross-out’, comes last, and he only resorts to it when the other two fail.⁵ Such a critical position is so common, particularly when considering film, that, excepting explicit literary adaptations or heavily intertextual films, horror cinema has largely been ignored by gothic academia.⁶ This is partly the case because, as Peter Hutchings has noted, a ‘fairly widespread approach identifies horror as a vulgarised, exploitative version of Gothic’, and because the terms ‘gothic film’ and ‘horror film’ have been traditionally theorised contradistinctively.⁷

Body Gothic does not intend to detract from phantasmatic readings or from approaches that prioritise the subtler atmospheric workings of the gothic mode. Instead, it seeks to reclaim the importance of the body to the gothic text, particularly in its contemporary context, and show that effective viscerality is more complicated to achieve artistically than has thus far been conceded. This book sees the gothic as a form of experience, as well as a recognisable aesthetic, one that relies on the susceptibility to being under attack or scared that is instinctive to us. In order to illustrate this, Body Gothic gives prevalence to texts that have been ignored by critics, often because they have been deemed unintellectual or schlocky, and which expose the prevalence of a grotesquerie and explicitness that I read as part and parcel of the gothic. As Dale Townshend argues in a piece that connects the excesses of this artistic mode to the disciplinary spectacles of the scaffold, the gothic ‘persists in representing a range of bloody rituals, gruesome tortures, ghastly punishments, and spectacular immolations’.⁸ In the various chapters that follow, I explore the consequences of this graphic side of the gothic alongside changes and developments in our conception of the body – its taboos, limits and social functions – throughout the latter part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.

Gothic Bodies

It is necessary to emphasise, before I unpack the critical value of ‘body gothic’ in rethinking the gothic mode, that I am not suggesting that contemporary gothic is intrinsically more graphic or corporeal than its late eighteenth-century or nineteenth-century counterparts. Banning, book burnings and expurgation due to political and religious censorship were a reality for a number of texts, including Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) or his play The Captive (1803), and canonical gothic texts often recur to the strong images or instances of voyeuristic gore which Richard Gehr once called ‘carnographies’ in the context of splatterpunk fiction.⁹ The Monk itself features strong scenes that include the trampling of the living body of a nun, the rotting corpse of a baby and, in its last paragraph, the bruising and mangling of the titular character, as well as the ordeal he undergoes from being exposed to a scorching sun, blood-drinking insects and flesh-eating and eye-pecking eagles. Charles Robert Maturin’s late gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) includes a horrific scene of cannibalism between two lovers locked in a subterranean passage, and the ending of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ (1845), where a man who has been kept alive through mesmerism shrinks and crumbles into ‘a nearly liquid mass of loathsome – of detestable putrescence’ is only one example amongst many of the author’s reliance on the body as a source of horror.¹⁰ Even Ann Radcliffe’s gothic, which is often referred to as ‘terror’ to distinguish it from the more visceral and harrowing ‘horror’ of Lewis, falls back into the very mortifyingly corporeal nightmares of the Inquisition in The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797). In her seminal The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), the heroine Emily St. Aubert faints after the encounter with one particular corpse ‘crimsoned with human blood’ and whose ‘features, deformed by death, were ghastly and horrible’.¹¹ What is interesting about this scene is that the sight of the man’s heavily wounded face also drives Emily to ‘bend … over the body’ and to ‘gaze … for a moment, with an eager, frenzied eye’.¹² Scopophilia, it would seem, is recognised by the intradiegetic characters who, in the case of the manuscript-reading Adeline in The Romance of the Forest (1791), provide a blueprint for the suggested reactions of readers.

Although prevalent, violence is not essential to the gothic mode, as corporeality may be explored via histrionic extension, transformation or deformation. The gothic often relies on the grotesque, which, as opposed to the carnivalesque, is unredeemed by laughter, and often uses mutilation in conjunction with images of bodies that have been modified and no longer appear strictly human. In H. G. Wells’s gothic classic The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), the grotesque bodies of the Beast folk who populate the island are one of the sources of terror for castaway Edward Pendrick. The monstrous nature of their anatomies, the fact that they are eminently hybrid and therefore resistant to clear-cut categorisation, is deeply disturbing and causes mistrust or hatred. The suspicions that something ‘other’ lies just beyond what the eye can see creates a sense of uncanniness that generates horror; the Beast folk are ‘unnatural’ and ‘repulsive’ and eventually threatening.¹³ Their existence is worrying to Pendrick because their feral nature makes them dangerous (animals looking for prey), but also because their interstitiality and acquired human characteristics make him question his own distance to the creatures. Fears of atavism, or evolutionary regression, mix here, as they do in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), with a sense of revelation that affects Pendrick’s capacity to return to civilisation: the exacerbated monstrosity and alterity of the creatures, their gothic bodies, end up making him realise that humans are also inherently monstrous. As Kelly Hurley has argued, this extreme fin de siècle corporeality lays bare anxieties and fantasies connected to new understandings of the body in light of developments such as Darwin’s evolutionary theories, criminal anthropology or contemporary psychology.¹⁴ The exciting discovery of the possibilities of the human body is therefore also fraught with extreme fear about its limits. For Moreau, and, implicitly for his readers, it is the plasticity of bodies, the ‘new shapes’ they can be moulded into through grafting and transfusion, which is fascinating.¹⁵

Gothic bodies produce fear through their interstitiality: they are scary because they either refuse absolute human taxonomies or destabilise received notions of what constitutes a ‘normal’ or socially intelligible body. The titular creature in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), like the Beast folk in Moreau, is a source of distress to the many characters in the novel because it has a face that is ‘disagreeably suggestive of something animal’.¹⁶ It does not fit into the narrator’s experiential parameters of what human physiognomy is or should be. The fluid nature of the Beetle’s body and features also cause repulsion, because subsequent transformations capitalise on preternatural fears regarding invertebrates. As Marjorie Lindon explains, her serious feeling of unease when faced with insects stems from ‘a rooted, and, apparently, illogical dislike’ that most humans feel towards certain types of animals.¹⁷

Although such transformations may also be used, as I explain in chapter 2, to explore the limits and possibilities of the human body creatively, they harbour a series of anxieties regarding difference. For example, one of the main concerns for esquire Sydney in The Beetle is the impossibility of gendering the creature: after seeing it naked, he realises that it possesses female genitals but has a manly demeanour.¹⁸ Robert Holt, the man who first encounters the monster, articulates this intergender horror. After realising that he may ‘have blundered’ and ‘mistaken a woman for a man’, he questions whether the individual may be ‘some ghoulish example of her sex, who had so yielded to her depraved instincts as to have become nothing but a ghastly reminiscence of womanhood’.¹⁹ This clear demarcation between expected forms of corporeality, sexuality and gender, and those that lie outside the realm of what is conceivable or acceptable is represented through nomenclature as well as description. Characters irremediably refer to the supernatural being as ‘it’ or the ‘Nameless Thing’ and thus emphasise the distance between that which is recognisable and therefore nameable and the ‘othered’ unspeakable body.²⁰ In Marsh’s case, this segregationist approach is marked by an orientalist discourse that associates the racial ‘other’ with the unknown and the disturbing. The beetle in Marsh’s story, as happens with many other monstrous bodies in gothic fiction, needs to be cast aside from the conventional order; it is, in fact, to be loathed precisely because it escapes social norms.

Deformity is another staple of gothic bodies. These are often described through a conflicted and compromising rhetoric that disability studies has started to challenge from its respective critical corner.²¹ In Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), gothic bodies are used to critique and challenge the normative discourses that oppress them, yet are simultaneously exploited for their affective, shocking or morbid qualities. The text makes a point of opening a window to the lives of people who have been forced to join a freak show; during its first half its naturalist approach allows the characters to be portrayed with a degree of tender intimacy. However, whilst the narrative aims to humanise them and show the plights they must overcome, the denouement exploits the alterity of their bodies and renders them threatening under the light of a thunderstorm. Although their revenge on Cleopatra (Ola Baclanova), who feigns sentimental interest in a rich midget (Harry Earles), is presented as retributional and therefore justifiable, the ‘freaks’ are still given a monstrous treatment that presents them as nightmarish figures. This is significantly worsened by the fact that their turning of Cleopatra into ‘one of them’ becomes a form of punishment. Her exhibition as part of a freak show ultimately inscribes her body as undesirable and as a source of horror and laughter.

In other texts, most notably Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love (1989), the same extreme imagery and circus performance context is invoked, but alterity is exploited with a view to deconstruct normality. In this novel, Arturo the Aqua Boy, born with hands and feet in the form of flippers due to his mother’s experiments with drugs, insecticides and radioisotopes, becomes a tyrannical prophet figure who takes revenge on the normative humanity that has ‘othered’ him. To this aim, he founds a sect that champions the gradual amputation of all limbs in order to achieve a state of internal perfection that does not rely on the lies of ‘the movies and the ads and the clothes in the stores and the doctors and the eyes as you walk down the street all telling you there is something wrong with you’.²² Interestingly, however, Arturo’s is a disingenuous megalomaniac plot that does not necessarily seek to challenge received notions of beauty, but rather to make money and exploit the gullibility of his public. Geek Love shows that bodies are always defined by opposition and that notions of the grotesque or the abhuman shift to accommodate perspectives anxious to establish themselves as normative. Gothic bodies can break down traditional concepts of what normal bodies allegedly are by virtue of their existence. As Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund have recently proposed, ‘the normal can never truly escape the lingering shadow of the abnormal, the freak, the grotesque’, it is ‘[a]lways haunted by its other’.²³ Gothic bodies, in their grotesque guises, explore our fears of difference and marginalisation, but they also work to undermine normative conceptions of what a body is forced to be and mean, thus laying bare the impositional structures of biopolitics or advertising.²⁴

Grotesquerie and excess are, as I have shown, key aspects of body gothic. However, to assume that the corporeal elements of the gothic can be limited to a number of separate instances of monstrosity or unspeakable corporeality would, however, be tantamount to ignoring another important dimension often avoided due to its connection to the lower orders of literary or filmic pleasure. As I have mentioned, my starting point in this book is that all gothic, by virtue of its sensationalist or shocking nature, is inherently corporeal. In a sense, all gothic is body gothic, because, as an artistic mode, it naturally appeals to the body of readers or viewers, as well as their imagination and intellect. The genre is invested in representational excesses of the body, like monstrosity, partly because these are helpful in negotiating larger concerns about humanity and its shifting boundaries. My interest and focus in this volume is with the type of gothic that takes this corporeality to the extreme, so that one could say that the texts in question do not merely aim to have an effect on the bodies of their consumers, but also openly play with the body at thematic and imaginary levels. These texts, which often turn carnage and corporeal mutilation into one of their selling points, align themselves with transgression. In this respect, body gothic prods the limits of taste and decorum, and needs to be understood alongside changing notions of what constitutes taboo and, in some cases, what may be censored by authorities who have the moral right to protect consumers. Body Gothic is interested in forms of corporeality that escape the ordinary, as the chapters on splatterpunk, body horror and the new avant-pulp show, and they can have a creative as well as a cautionary purpose. They may use the body to show cruelty and hence generate a thorough dislike for given characters, but they may also simultaneously capitalise on shock value.

Corporeality is important to the gothic because it is, like the mode itself, caught up in a tug of war between its denunciation of the laws that govern the status quo and its exploitation of carnality and gore for affective or entertainment purposes. This means the gothic is particularly well suited to transgress boundaries and play with decorum, but it can also, for this very reason, become the perfect potential scapegoat in debates about the effects of fictional violence. Texts in gothic literature and film that go too far are often accused of being one-dimensional, and may even be connected to puerility and bad taste.²⁵ As I hope to show, the type of shock that surrounds body gothic is socially constructed and far from simple in either method or effect.

Corporeal Transgression

I proposed in the first part of this introduction that the gothic is inherently corporeal. Because horror film has been perceived to be one of the main ‘body genres’ by established critics such as Linda Williams, the development of body theories that explore the experiential ramifications of their consumption have been more forthcoming.²⁶ Steven Shaviro, in The Cinematic Body (1991), expounded the neglected bodily nature of the horror film in relation to the work of George A. Romero.²⁷ Similarly, Philip Brophy, Jonathan Lee Crane and Jack Morgan have all contributed important volumes to legitimising the value of its visceral and neglected aspects.²⁸ Brophy also succinctly summarised the phenomenological rationale for a relational connection between texts that appeal to the viewing bodies and the viewers themselves:

[T]he actuality of a given ‘truth’, its empirical presentation, its rational explanation, and its physical impression on our physical bodies are all secondary to the primary acknowledgement. The touch, the flesh, the body are not just cultural metaphors or experiential facts, but also phenomenal agents in the realization of our existence. Not only may