through to the story of his psychiatrist narrator Charlie Weir’s inner conflict in the 2008 novel, Trauma.
Writing about the work of a living author presents several challenges. Although criticism since Barthes can never again use biographical information naively to validate readings of texts, the status of such information needs to be considered. McGrath is extraordinarily generous with his time and has been willing to give numerous interviews over the years, in which the same questions have been posed to him in various forms about the impulses behind his work. He is also reflective about the creative process and willing to comment on material that he has consciously employed.24 In the following pages due weight has been given to his views as they have been expressed in various contexts. His engagement with the Gothic tradition, one informed by current critical debates, is distinctive and conscious. What he has to say, however, has been set alongside other readings of his work. A contextualization of the fiction in relation to literary traditions, the contemporary cultural and social context and McGrath’s own sense of a writing identity all inform this book. Critical approaches from Gothic studies that seem to be appropriate and helpful in particular instances have been adopted, rather than a tightly focused theoretical lens.25
Certain key critical concepts have emerged from the recent evolution of Gothic studies. Two terms that appear repeatedly in the studies of the last twenty years are ‘the uncanny’ and ‘the abject’; both concepts provide interesting perspectives on McGrath’s fiction. Psychoanalytic critics have turned to Freud’s influential essay, ‘The Uncanny’, in order to theorize the unsettling affect generated by the Gothic. Although Freud’s terms ‘heimlich’ and ‘unheimlich’ do not translate comfortably into English, their pairing emphasizes the interrelatedness of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the circular effect whereby what is found to be strange and alienating is also recognized as already known. Thus, the boundary between the homely (heimlich) and the unhomely or uncanny (unheimlich) is radically unstable. As Nicholas Royle suggests: ‘The uncanny has to do with a strangeness of framing and borders, an experience of liminality.’26 Thus, the ‘transgression’ that so preoccupies McGrath is imbued with the uncanny. Even those critics who identify the limitations of psychoanalytic approaches to the Gothic find this term useful in discussing the ways in which Gothic gives shape to that which may not be directly spoken in a culture. Historical studies have helped to illuminate the cultural and historical inflection of the uncanny.27
The same is true of Kristeva’s concept of the abject, a concept also concerned with boundaries, which many scholars have found invaluable in discussing the effects of horror. Although McGrath may not easily be categorized as a horror writer, his identification of ‘decay’ as a key element in the Gothic means that its presence may be felt in his fiction, sometimes in surprising contexts. Kristeva’s 1982 book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection has been seen to have particular relevance to Gothic writing by a number of critics. Horror and revulsion, she argues, are an echo of our early anxieties, surrounding the separation from the mother, that involve insecurity about materiality and the borders of the self. Abjection within the Gothic text frequently signifies both fear concerning the breakdown of culturally constructed boundaries of identity at a particular historical moment, and an attempt to shore them up. Oral abjection, one of the three broad categories of the abject (along with waste and sexual difference), is perhaps the most clearly marked by cultural difference through social taboo. What is considered edible in one culture may not be thought fit for eating in another; the almost (but not quite) universal taboo on cannibalism is made thematic in some of McGrath’s early fiction and remains as a haunting presence (as it does in so many Gothic texts) through traces of vampirism. As Nicholas Royle reminds us, for Freud cannibalism is ‘the taboo desire par excellence’ and ‘psychoanalysis gets started, in so far as it can and must get started, only on the base of a theory of cannibalism’.28
The abject writ large in social terms, Kristeva suggests, is that which:
disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a saviour … Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility.29
Jerrold E. Hogle and Robert Miles have shown how Kristevan theory may be used to explore the way in which representations of the abject in some Gothic texts relate to discourses and cultural values at a particular historical moment.30 This approach, as Hogle points out, allows us to ‘connect psychological repression with the cultural ways of constructing coherent senses of “self” that initially made and still make the very concept of repression conceivable’.31 Kristeva’s concept of the abject thereby becomes a way of defining how shared constructions of ‘otherness’ derive from shared cultural values: you may know a culture by what it ‘throws off’.
In exploring what is abjected in drawing the boundaries of dominant cultures, Gothic criticism of the last twenty-five years has often been concerned with three elements identified by David Punter as lying at the heart of Gothic writing: the concept of paranoia, the notion of the barbaric and the nature of the taboo – ‘aspects of the terrifying to which Gothic constantly, and hauntedly, returns’.32 The ongoing debate in Gothic studies about psychoanalysis and historicity (and whether or not they are mutually exclusive) provides a frame work for the discussion of McGrath’s fiction, which characteristically pre-empts a psychoanalytic reading. It does this by questioning – both implicitly and explicitly – the validity of psychoanalysis as a mastering discourse while offering a postmodern critique of history and histories. Indeed, McGrath is a particularly interesting writer to consider in the light of this debate in Gothic criticism, which became crystallized following the intervention of Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall in 2000. Their argument is summed up in their opening salvo: ‘In our view, Gothic Criticism has abandoned any credible historical grasp upon its object, which it has tended to reinvent in the image of its own projected intellectual goals of psychological “depth” and political “subversion”.’33 They are particularly critical of the depth model of psychoanalytic criticism that analyses the text in order to uncover deep-seated – and usually bourgeois – anxieties. Anne Williams has noted how many Freudian readings of Gothic tend to be reductive, and unsophisticated, resembling ‘a kind of Freudian Easter Egg Hunt’ for lurking complexes and delusions.34 For William Patrick Day, Gothicism and Freudianism are different but related responses to ‘the problems of selfhood and identity, sexuality and pleasure, fear and anxiety as they manifest themselves in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’. ‘The Gothic’, he suggests, ‘arises out of the immediate needs of the reading public to escape from conventional life and articulate and define the turbu lence of their psychic existence. We may see Freud as the intellectual counterpart of this process.’35 Psychoanalysis itself has been acknowledged by a number of critics as a Gothic discourse. Alexandra Warwick’s essay in the recent Routledge Companion to Gothic, for example, suggests that, just as ‘Freud’s theories of the structure and processes of the psyche have been used more than any other to read the Gothic … it is equally plausible to reverse the terms of the analogy, and to use the Gothic to read his work.’ ‘If Gothic’, she continues, ‘can be thought of as interrogating the anxiety of the influence of the past on the present, then Freud’s work can also be defined in these terms, persistently concerned with the question of what is dead, what survives and how things are revived.’36
Not only is McGrath well read in Gothic fiction, he is also well informed about Freudian psychology (an interest originating in his background as the son of an eminent psychiatrist).37 In two of his novels (Asylum and Trauma) McGrath makes psychiatry (the medical cousin of psychoanalysis) thematic, pointing to its ambiguous status as a mastering discourse. Indeed, medicine itself is represented Gothically in McGrath’s fiction; the doctor in McGrath is a Gothic figure, from physically monstrous Cadwallader in ‘Blood and
