and, it is implied, will have his eye put out with the eponymous skewer by the narrator. This will be in revenge for the torment he caused the narrator’s uncle, who is revealed at the end of the story to be her/his aunt (the reader never learns the sex of the narrator). Neville (Evelyn) Pilkington’s aesthetic and reclusive masculine identity, related to her disfigurement from an accident which killed her twin, has been a masquerade. The narrator states that her/his uncle’s mind had taken ‘a mystical, not to say Gothic, turn in the twilight of his life’ (108). Nordau, however, claims at Neville’s inquest that he had suffered self-inflicted torment: he had hanged himself in his London home, having already cut out his own eye in a Brussels hotel room. Neville’s journal forms a significant part of the framed narrative and he writes of his harassment by visions of miniature psychoanalysts: Freud, Otto Rank and Ernest Jones and eventually ‘the whole Weimar Congress’, infesting his room like vermin (121). Descriptions of these encounters as they appear in the journal are interleaved with Nordau’s report in the courtroom, giving an account of psychoanalysis as violence; it is the miniature Ernest Jones who uses a pen as a lance to put out Neville’s eye, an act interpreted by Nordau as symbolic castration, in accordance with classic psychoanalytic theory. The narrator recognizes this as a ‘phallocentric fallacy’, although the reader does not discover Neville’s biological identity until the twist at the end of the tale, which ends on a note of intended violent revenge: ‘an eye for an eye, I say’ (123). In the later novels, medical men continue to be represented as problematic characters, but the most suspect of all are the psychiatrists. In McGrath’s most recent novel, Trauma (2008), the psychiatrist narrator is finally revealed to be himself deeply traumatized and in need of therapy.
In the American short stories, the doctor figure is notably absent. In contrast with this thematic figure, who, at this stage of McGrath’s career, seems to be connected with his British past, creative protagonists are more in evidence: a painter, a writer and a photographer inhabit the pages of three of the stories. McGrath had left England after university and, following a spell in Canada, had been living in New York since 1981. Whereas the England of the short stories is that of earlier decades, an apocalyptic future and a distinctly Gothic late twentieth-century New York provide settings for several of the American stories. In another, ‘Marmilion’, there is a clear homage to the Southern Gothic tradition of Poe. In all of them, the Gothic concerns of transgression and decay remain paramount.
In contrast with the specific location and history which frame ‘Marmilion’, a ghastly future is imagined in two of the stories, reflecting the apocalyptic fears that many harboured in the America of the 1980s. McGrath has commented that as he was living in the United States during the Reagan era, he and many others found them selves speculating what the world would be like after a nuclear holocaust, when there were no human beings left to tell their own tale.27 Neither of the first-person narrators of ‘The E(rot)ic Potato’ (his first published story) and ‘The Boot’s Tale’ is human (being a fly and a boot, respectively). With their implication that human beings’ ascendancy is inevitably doomed, both stories adopt a darkly comic treatment of the most abject subject-matter: corpses and cannibalism. In the case of ‘The Boot’, McGrath’s story sits within a long tradition of satire, where an ‘innocent’ voice (in this case that of an inanimate narrator) lays bare the spiritual and moral bankruptcy of others. This story raises some uncomfortable questions about the positioning of the reader. Just as its human characters are lacking in human sympathy (a mother is eaten by her family without any compunction), their unsympathetic portrayal invites a similar lack of affect in the reader. Such a misanthropic vision is not, however, characteristic of McGrath’s work. Some of his characters who commit abject acts, like Spider in the novel of the same name, tell their own stories; others, like Harry Peake in Martha Peake, are recuperated in the narrative. Always in the novels the human situation is rendered as complex, and this displacement of the human focus does not happen elsewhere in McGrath’s fiction.
These two stories offer a blackly comic look into a bleak future; in the others, the past tends not to be far away in the present day. ‘Marmilion’, the homage to Poe, is set in a derelict mansion in the Deep South. Unusually for McGrath, the first-person narrator is a woman. She undergoes an uncanny experience and pieces together a speculative and possibly quite erroneous history for the house, its owners (the Belvederes) and the events that had taken place in the aftermath of the Civil War. Entering the ruined mansion, she feels ‘something in the house react to [her] presence’ but nevertheless spends the night there, only to be woken and terrified by the sound of something ‘like a nail being scraped by a feeble hand against a brick’. ‘Was there some sort of creature in the chimney?’ she wonders; she has had ‘the bizarre experience that something was trying to communicate’ with her in the night (127). As a result of this experience she tries to find out about the history of the house and those who lived there. Her reflections on history anticipate the unreliability of historical narrative that is thematic in the 2000 novel Martha Peake; it is, she suggests:
all a matter of sympathetic imagination. For to construct a cohesive and plausible chain of events from partial sources like letters and journals requires that numerous small links must be forged – sometimes from the most slender of clues – and each one demands an act of intuition. (134)
Her own partiality in the interpretation of events is there to read between the lines – a demand that McGrath frequently makes upon the reader. She is herself a Southerner, a ‘monkey woman’–in other words, a photographer of monkeys. The story begins with an observation on spider monkeys that ‘the Cajuns have long considered the spider monkey a great delicacy’, adding, ‘I should know: my husband was a Cajun’ (126). Later in her narrative, she makes a strong statement about her alienation from the traditions of her own society, one ‘dedicated to the greatest good for the smallest number. Endorsing such a society, I consider the moral equivalent of eating monkeys’ (131). Her outright condemnation of the son of the family, William, is connected with her contempt for Creole society, which, she reminds the reader, has an aristocracy ‘descended from thieves, prostitutes, and lunatics – Parisian scum forcibly recruited to populate the colony in the reign of Louis XIV’ (139).
She has already speculated that no doubt the relationship between mother and son began to deteriorate at an early stage, and casually informs the reader, ‘I should know; I’ve had a son of my own’ (130). What emerges from her narrative is that her ‘sympathetic imagination’ may well be a projection of her own attitudes and familial failures. She feels close to the mother, Camille, ‘like the wives of so many planters in the Old South, a deeply unhappy woman’ (this, she adds, ‘perhaps … accounts for my intuitive attraction to her’) (129). When the historical sources can take her no further, she admits that the rest of the story is ‘the construction of a sympathetic imagination’ (140). She speculates that Caesar, Marmilion’s former slave (who has fathered a child with the daughter, who died as a result of the birth), wreaks a dreadful vengeance on William for causing the death of Camille when she intervenes in his attempt to kill Caesar. The latter, she asserts, ‘was a black nemesis, an agent of retributive justice’; he ‘bricked him up in that pillar by the fireplace, buried him alive, upright and conscious’ (141). In her desire to find out the truth of this speculation, she demolishes the pillar, to find instead ‘the tiny, perfect skeleton – of a spider monkey’ (143).
This climax to the story leaves an ambiguous closure, as the reader is left to reflect on the meaning of the nexus of identification between the narrator, Camille (whose historical trace, her hand writing, is described as ‘spidery’ (132)), and the spider monkey. As William Patrick Day suggests:
The parody is above all the metamorphosis of one thing into another. It is, then, a literary device that perfectly embodies the mystery basic to the Gothic fantasy. Out of one thing comes two; the second subverts the first but is dependent upon it. While the parody subverts the original, it also affirms it, since it is a likeness of the original. The exact meaning of a parody, particularly in the Gothic, is always somewhat ambiguous.28
The motif of live burial, as suggested earlier, is recurrent
