PATRICK McGRATH
SERIES PREFACE
Gothic Authors: Critical Revisions is dedicated to publishing innovative introductory guides to writers of the Gothic. The series explores how new critical approaches and perspectives can help us to recontextualize an author’s work in a way that is both accessible and informative. The series publishes work that is of interest to students of all levels and teachers of the literary Gothic and cultural history.
SERIES EDITORS
Andrew Smith, University of Glamorgan
Benjamin Fisher, University of Mississippi
EDITORIAL BOARD
Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts
Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia
David Punter, University of Bristol
Angela Wright, University of Sheffield
Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona
GOTHIC AUTHORS: CRITICAL REVISIONS
Patrick McGrath
Sue Zlosnik
© Sue Zlosnik, 2011
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 978-0-7083-2375-5 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-7083-2374-8 (paperback)
e-ISBN 978-1-78316-447-9
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Cover: Gothic Cityscape by Robert Daniel Ullmann
In loving memory of my mother, Elsie Wealleans Peters
Without the inspiration of the International Gothic Association and its conferences, this book would never have been written.
I am grateful to Manchester Metropolitan University for giving me a term’s relief from Head of Department duties and especially grateful to Berthold Schoene and Ann Holmes who saw the need and made it happen. Thank you to excellent colleagues Mike Bradshaw and Linnie Blake who looked after everything in my absence – and to all the members of the Department of English, without whom life would be much less interesting.
Andrew Smith and Benjamin Fisher, the general editors of this series, deserve a special mention. Special thanks too to Avril Horner, my long-time collaborator, who has been so supportive of this solo enterprise. Most of all, I am, as ever, indebted to my family – my three sons, James, Sam and Tom, and my husband, John – for more than I can say.
Finally, Patrick McGrath himself has taken a keen interest in the project and has been more than willing to answer my questions without attempting in any way to influence what I was writing. Thank you, Patrick.
CONTENTS
2The Transgressive Self
3Worlds New and Old
4Afterword: Exorcizing the ghosts of the Gothic
Notes
Select Bibliography
‘Why are you so weird?’ According to Patrick McGrath, this is the question he and David Cronenberg asked each other on the set of Spider, the 2002 adaptation of McGrath’s novel of the same name.1 The answer to this question is beyond the scope of this book. The persistence of the ‘weird’ in McGrath’s writing, however, is central to its discussion of his work in relation to the Gothic tradition. In a recent interview following the publication of his most recent novel, Trauma, he claimed that he did not want to be labelled as a Gothic writer.2 However, when a new critical edition of Daphne du Maurier’s short stories was published in 2008, recent critical recognition of her Gothic sensibility was marked by the fact that it was McGrath who was invited to write an introduction.3 In spite of his reluctance, he remains the contemporary literary novelist preeminently associated with the Gothic; indeed, one reviewer has suggested that ‘he may be the best Gothic novelist ever’.4 When invited to write an essay on the nature of Gothic for Cristoph Grunenberg’s Gothic (a glossy compilation of material from different art forms) he entitled it ‘Transgression and Decay’, suggesting that these are the features that define the Gothic in its representation of what Freud identified as ‘the death wish’.5 Recognizing the political potential of Gothic’s transgressive tendency, he acknowledges its ‘impulse to identify specific conditions and power relations that foster what we experience as evil’, and claims that ‘Gothic allows us to manage the nightmares of a world in which control seems increasingly tenuous’.6
No longer do scholars identify Gothic as a historically defined novel genre, located at the end of the eighteenth century; instead, they tend to see it as a mode of writing intrinsic in all its variations to the rise of modernity.7 As Fred Botting points out in his introduction to the English Association’s 2001 collection of essays, entitled, problematically it would seem, The Gothic: ‘These days it seems increasingly difficult to speak of “the Gothic” with any assurance.’ The term, he goes on to suggest, continues to spread, generating a variety of qualifying adjectives (‘postcolonial Gothic’ and ‘queer Gothic’, for example, alongside such historically
