This is one of two term papers written as practice and a way of getting my thoughts together in preperation for my masters thesis which I have published on this blog here. It has been e put up here for the sake of completion. The other one has been posted here.
Introduction, Colonialism without Monsters
What is empire without its monsters? In the historiography of the culture of
empire the monsters seem conspicuously absent.
This may be because of an old Leavisite tendency in cultural studies and
cultural history that favors a canonical approach to texts, wherein there is a
certain prejudice against the fantastic (perhaps for reasons outlined
below). This is not important, but the
fact is, much scholarly work on the subject of imperial culture[1]
does not address this particular aspect.
Without the authors having intended it, one gets the impression of a
well functioning “para-literary wing of the imperial project”[2],
where the heroic literature of childhood turns boys into soldiers and men are
absolved of any empathy by the Orientalism of the subject populations. There is no guilt, no fear and all is
rational. No one is overwhelmed by their
emotions and terror is unknown.
Not
only does this prospect seem like a massive injustice to the range and
complexity of the human condition, but it also ignores an important part of the
actual operation of culture in the context of imperialism. Writing within the context of the
independence struggle in Algeria
I. Structures of feeling and Authority
As
Edward Said has put forward in his (in?)famous monograph Orientalism, the pursuit of knowledge of the Orient by scholars,
map makers and colonial administrators-turned anthropologists etc. wasn’t
merely an act of passive observation[5]. Applying a Foucaultian power discourse
analysis to these activities he makes a compelling argument that this was
actually a process of the making of the East by the West, often with a
specific objective with regards to the Imperial project. For example, he looks at the politics
inherent in cartography, in which maps become practical tools of imperial
penetration into unknown land. He also
notes that along side these rational discourses of the imperialist project,
there existed an entire discourse of the imaginative[6]. In this essay it is my contention that this
other discourse, which takes place only on the margins of the dispassionate
scientific/scholarly world of orientalism, mainly within the world of the arts,
is no less significant to the formation of the imperial hegemony than its
rational counterpart, which it both underlies and in some ways sustains. Through examining the two discourses in conjunction
with each other we can possibly uncover an imperial structure of feeling for an
emotional history of the phenomenon.
At
this point it seems prudent to expand on what is meant by the term structure of
feeling in the context of this essay. In
describing his own theoretical basis in the essay “Sociology and literature”
Raymond Williams describes a ‘structure of feeling’ as “certain common
characteristics in a certain group of writers …(and) others, in a particular
historical situation”[7]. Going on from that basic assertion, and
drawing on the theories of Frankfurt School, Marxists Lukács and Goldman, he
extrapolates out a notion of a structure of feeling as a relation between those
that produce the literature that inculcates a particular “organising view” of
the world and which comes to operate in consciousness[8]. Like Marx’s notion of Capital, it is a
cultural process whereby the mentality daily re-creates itself. In the present application then, we can
describe the Imperial “Structure of Feeling”, as doing the same, i.e. recreating
the necessary colonial mentality in the discourses of the colonisers and their
home countries, and so through the system of representations of the monstrous
and inhuman does the structure re-create the colonised as unhuman and
monstrous.
This
was also an emotive process as the images themselves were loaded with emotional
significance. In fact, some theorists
might go so far as to say that it could only have been through the solicitation
of emotion and irrational impulses that the natural sympathy we as social
animals feel for other members of our species could have been suppressed to create the necessary condition of
dehumanisation that colonialism requires.
For example, to Theodor Adorno the Authoritarian Personality was based
on the suppression of certain taboo emotions that arise from being the subject
of authority and their projection onto minority groups. Although he was writing in a different
context (post-Nazi Germany)[9]
and there have been some criticisms of the specifics of his approach[10],
a proportion of what he has laid down (in collaboration with the other authors
of The Authoritarian Personality) seems pertinent to the colonial
situation, if only because varying degrees of authority need to be maintained
by the colonial power.
Specifically,
according to Adorno;
“ The authoritarian personality is characterised by the following:
hostility to people of inferior status; shows contempt for weakness; is rigid
and inflexible; is intolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty: is unwilling to
introspect feelings; will uphold conventional values and ways of life.
This belief in convention and intolerance of ambiguity combine to make
minorities 'them' and the authoritarian's membership groups 'us'…
Authoriarians also project onto these groups their own unacceptable anti
social impulses, especially sexual and aggressive impulses. Their prejudice serves an ego - defensive
function, which protects them from unacceptable parts of themselves.””[11]
One
important point made by Adorno, which is of tremendous significance to
understanding the history and culture of colonialism, is how random irrational
actions are inherent in the system.
Whether this is the bizarre psycho-sexual behaviour of the Japanese
soldiers during the rape of Nanking, the recent treatment of Iraqi prisoners at
Abu Grahib, or a much smaller act, such as the British colonial administrator
and Anthropologist ‘Cocky’ Hahn (allegedly) kicking a near naked Ovambo woman
‘between her legs’[12],
these actions are not merely the result of over worked irresponsible
individuals. Rather, these actions
should be seen as the inevitable result of the irrationality at the heart of
the authoritarian structures necessary for the operation of the colonial
system.
II. Languages of Monstrosity
This
now leads to some real epistemological questions of how specific irrational
discourses were constructed in history, how they were disseminated and how we
may be able to reach them.
It
is my contention that many answers to these questions can be found in some
recent Cultural Studies’ approaches to the Fantastic and the emerging inter
disciplinary field of Teratology. It is
in the horror stories, racist caricatures, and random details in the official
accounts that we can draw out some of the emotions that lurk behind the post
enlightenment dispassionate exterior.
Fantastic literature presents an arena of almost pure imagination on the
part of the writer where ideas and symbols come together and he (and it is
usually he) can tether his vision to what reality means in his time and place,
to the extent that he wishes. Of course
any fictive narrative account is constructed imaginatively to some degree, even
if it is based on “Real Life”[13],
but the Gothic Horror genre is unique as a form of literature that is intended
to produce a fearful response or a feeling of psychological disquiet. These are stories that are meant to provoke
our fears and anxieties, so naturally they will be the site of representations
of the fears and anxieties of society at large (or at least among the classes
that produce and consume this sort of literature).
Taken
together, we can see that the symbols that are common through any civilization
can constitute a language, by which I mean a system of signs and referents used
to convey meaning or to represent. While
some common theories of the phenomenology of symbols seem to emphasise “the
structure of symbolic language for its own sake[14]”
there is a long-standing tradition that treats language as a social phenomenon
that is only explicable when it is understood as a dialogic practice. This approach, most commonly associated with
Valentin Voloshinov and other early Soviet academics[15]
but there are elements of it in more recent work such as Geertz’s social
Anthropology[16],
and has a broad application in understanding a complex of symbolic language in
a social-historical context.
The
Voloshinovian concept of language also gives us an indication of the social and
symbolic nature of consciousness. In the
1960s, Schachter’s famous experiment[17]
found that the articulation of an emotional/chemical impulse (in that case
through the administration of epinephrine) wasn’t as important to determining
the way the emotion is experienced by the individual as the form of words given
to it by the participant, based on the context.
Transposed to the colonial situation, one might say that the heat and
stress of living in a colony in the tropics might engender a strong
psycho-physiological response, but the social symbolism of the colonial
experience may determine how this manifests itself as a specific emotion.
If
the body of monstrous images in a society represents a language, then the
monsters and the stories associated with them are the grammar and sentence
structure of that language. According to Judith
Halberstam;
“the monster’s body is a machine
that…produces meaning and can represent any horrible trait…The monster
functions…when it is able to condense as many fear producing traits as possible
into one body”[18].
In
other words, the monster articulates numerous - even contradictory - social
emotions, and by doing so recreates them.
The recent emergence of the field of teratology, the study of monsters,
can therefore provide some insight into the specific functioning of monsters in
relation to historical processes, such as colonialism. For example, some critics have suggested that
Frankenstein, which doesn’t overtly deal with the subject, derives much of its
power as an articulation of social anxieties by drawing on the imagery of the
Negro in enlightenment discourses around the abolition of slavery[19].
III. Enlightenment and the making of the Gothic unconscious
This
brings us on to one of the major themes in the field of teratology, which
despite the relative newness of the discipline constitutes (possibly the only)
operational paradigm and certainly isn’t without relevance to the colonial
monster. This is the idea of the
enlightenment as watershed in the development of the fantastic, and
particularly the monstrous in western civilisation. Whether it’s E. Michael Jones, who writes
from a conservative catholic perspective[20],
or Marxist oriented literary theorists like Baldick and Monleon[21]
or a postmodernist like Halberstam, the social forces unleashed by political
revolution in France and industrial Revolution in Britain are quite reasonably
presented as creating a revolution (and counter-revolution) in the arts which
established new forms of literature and a new lexicon of monstrous images.
Indeed,
as Chris Baldick points out, it is precisely at this time that the word
“Monster” takes on its modern connotations.
Monster comes from the same Latin root as demonstrate and (as Foucault
mentions in Madness and Civilisation[22])
until this period is something or someone that is to be shown. This is how it is used by William Shakespear,
though even in the early 17th century it is picking up the
connotation of ingratitude, particularly the ingratitude of children towards
their parents[23]
(which would have carried obvious political connotations in a patriarchal
state). In the context of the French
Revolution, it is these elements which are picked up on by conservative
commentators in Britain
It
is also the period that sees significant penetrations by the west into the “Far
East” of the world, Tippu Sultan’s rebellion in Mysore on the Indian
sub-continent, the successful slave up-rising on Saint-Domingue in the
Carribean plantation complex and the, “birth of modern Orientalism”,[26]
with Napoleon’s failed invasion of Egypt.
Furthermore,
it is the time of a huge conceptual and epistemological shift in western
thought where the notions of the rational and reason emerge in western
discourses. Science brings with it the
notion of provability, a category of intellectual authority based on
observation rather than faith or political power. While the degree to which this actually
represented “better” evidence or just a system of authority more orientated to
the needs of the new political elites has been raised recently by the
Foucaultian tradition in postmodernism, the Mythic effect of science cannot be
underestimated. The effect on the
Orientalist discourse is described by Edward Said as follows;
“The very language of Orientalism
changed…It’s descriptive realism was upgraded… and became a means of creation.”[27]
And
so the irrational discourse was pushed away from the mainstream of western
political economy and “serious” philosophies.
The irrational, emotional and super-natural were relegated to the
margins of “scientific” discourse, classified as the “unreason” of a bygone era[28]. Although the power and influence of the
institutions of Christianity meant that that particular form of the
supernatural would have a continuos presence in western life, the currency of
the Bible as a basis of intellectual authority was massively de-valued in the
subsequent centuries and the process of secularisation was begun. From then on when an enlightenment figure
like Adam Smith, T.W. Malthus wanted to put forward an economic system that
included divine providence as on of its components, he could only allude to it
in terms of collective human action (i.e. The Market). Without the institutional power of the
church, other forms of supernatural belief didn’t even fare so well.
Prior
to this shift in western thought, the two discourses shared a common space in
the intellectual space. The great
thinkers of the previous centuries often had interests across the range of
science and mysticism, one need only think of recent discoveries about Sir
Isaac Newton’s alchemical investigations, or John Dee, the Magus at the
Elizabethan court during the renaissance.
Dee was a noted authority on a number
of subjects and saw no contradiction between expertise in cartography,
mathematics and scrying[29]. Going back a few more centuries we can see
how this undifferentiated structure of feeling worked with regards to colonial
culture. The History and Topography of Ireland by Gerald deBarri[30],
(aka Geraldus Cambrensis or Gerald of Wales) is a classic text of Medieval
Orientalism from that age of the expansion of “Western” culture into the
European hinterlands. Its subject is the
construction of Ireland
In
Ardornian terms, one might say that as pre-enlightenment societies were
structured around naked authority, particularly when that had a legitimacy
based on metaphysics, of course the irrational and symbolic would have been
more prevalent in the discourses of the time.
So the marginalising the irrational discourse by the young
revolutionaries of the enlightenment can be read as the de-legitimising of the
old order.
While
in the enlightenment unreason was marginalised (often literally[32])
within the margins of culture there coalesced the gothic genre in art and
fiction. Thoughts and feelings that had
been pushed out of public discourse came to rest here and this would remain the
home of de-validated ideas and social anxieties until the present day. This unending flow of the effluvia of the
enlightenment would pool into the spawning grounds of monsters, monsters that
were capable of reproduction.
At
the same time, it is important to note how the division between Reason and
Unreason was itself an important element in the constitution of otherness
between the colonial powers and the colonised[33]. The feminist historian Joan Wallach Scott has
remarked on the tendency to couch the division of rational and irrational in
gendered terms[34]. In the colonial situation, the natives are
often depicted as effeminate or womanly in various ways while the propagandists
of empire in their depiction of the colonial adventurer strove for an ideal of
masculinity. These issues are no less
evident in the monstrous construction of the racial other. Judith Halberstam suggests that monsters are
the products of categorical ambiguities, in race and gender/sexuality[35]. In his influential essay on Dracula[36],
Stephen Arata indicates how the image of the vampire as a foreigner and his
ambiguous gender and sexuality all combine into a Victorian nightmare of the
colonisation of the Imperial heartlands from the margins.
One
interesting thing to note about the relationship between these discourses is
the way in which they inhabit the modern myth of the (false) dichotomy between
brain functions in the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Despite this view now having been thoroughly
discredited, it is a persistent subject of magazine articles and is apparently
being taught in schools[37]. Significantly, they are often overtly
associated with bogus pop-psychological notions of an implicit biological
gender difference, specifically that women or effeminate men have a more
developed right hemisphere. One might
reasonably ask how long it will be before someone says something similar about
the brains of Islamic terrorists or Chavistas in Venezuela
Another
important point raised by these applications of the discourses as we have been
discussing them is the way in which the rational operates in relation to the
irrational. One of the important
contributions made to our understanding of culture and meaning by Jacques
Derrida is to take the Sassurian notion of difference and show how the binary
oppositions that, according to Sassure, create meaning in language, are “rarely
neutral and always express relations of power“[39]. Taking this into our consideration, we can
see how the binary opposition between the rational and irrational in post
enlightenment discourses expresses a power relation in favour of the rational
discourse. By being overtly fictive, the
narratives of the fantastic validate the “non-fictive” Orientalist
constructions (even as they inform them).
Concurrently, even the overtly fantastic stories contain elements,
usually in their setting, that are implicitly non-fictive or at least based on
the non-fictional, that are validated as fact in relation to the fantastic
elements in the story.
Thus,
for example, the authorial authority gives an air of informed opinion to W.
Carlton Dawe’s racist musings on Chinese society in ‘Coolies’[40]. Here he talks about the cargo of Chinese
coolies the ship is carrying as being inordinately (and fantastically) filthy
in relation to pilgrims to Mecca
That
said, it would be unfair to take a totalising or homogenous view of culture as
being entirely geared towards a societal project. While ‘Coolies’, (which ends with the
narrator heroically power-hosing to death his entire contingent of mutinous
Chinese labourers) might rightly be seen as an imperial wish-fulfilment fantasy,
there are many other stories that are no less racist but are filled with
anxiety and trepidation at the entire imperialist project. The best-known of all the late-gothic
novellas[43]
for example deals with the implicitly racist anxiety over the colonial
adventurer “going native“, i.e. becoming as horrific as the very people he’s
supposed to be bringing enlightenment to.
Furthermore, in some stories we can see some manifestations of guilt and
anxiety over the easy appropriation of land and resources through the murder
and dispossession of the native peoples.
Monsters in particular have always had an implicit element of dire
warning not to go too far in any particular endeavor. As Jeffery Cohen reminds us with his Fifth
thesis, “The Monster Policies the Borders of the Possible”[44]. They can be both the product of hubris[45]
and the punishment for it. This is also
of course the classic rendering of the primogenitor of nearly all the late
modern monster stories, the Frankenstein Myth, which ironically is not how the
story was in the original edition of the book but swiftly overcame the
authorial intent to the point of being incorporated by Shelly into the second
edition[46].
In
Edward Lucas White’s Lukundoo[47]
we can read many of these aforementioned elements, a monstrification of the
African other, anxieties at dispossession, but also at the consumption of the
European invader by Africa itself. The story itself concerns the fate of an
African explorer and anthropologist, Ralph Stone. Stone is the paradigm of the explorer, a
“notable leader of men”, a linguist extraordinaire
with a great knowledge of local custom.
The incident that precipitates the events in the story is a rendition of
the myth of the European invader breaking the authority of native superstition
to be replaced with the authority of the white male. The specific details are alluded to but the
effect is spelt out quite explicitly and in biblical terms;
“We had heard of him two years before, south of Luebo
in the Balunda country, which had been ringing with his theatrical strife against
a Balunda witch-doctor, ending in the sorcerer's complete discomfiture and the
abasement of his tribe before Stone. They had even broken the fetish-man's
whistle and given Stone the pieces. It had been like the triumph of Elijah over
the prophets of Baal, only more real to the Balunda.[48]”
As
the narrator and his party approach the place were Stone is encamped more
details emerge. It seems that the
adventurer had been stricken with a mystery ailment ‘something like carbuncles’[49]. Considering that obscure tropical diseases,
and venereal disease in particular, were often the actual punishment for
transgressing the boundaries of the occident it seems significant that the
author chooses to make this the means of retribution for this fictional
transgressor. As they get to the camp,
what actually emerges is that tiny African bodies, copies of the aforementioned
Balunda witch-doctor, are pushing their way up through Stone’s skin and
tormenting him in thin reedy voices so that he has to slice them off with a razor. Here we can see embodied horrors about
tropical disease combined with the fear of the invader being consumed from
within by what he has invaded. The
African continually rising through the skin of the white explorer to be sliced
off every time is like the continuos and unrelenting resistance of Africa to colonial domination. Not just breaking skin, but also talking, the
heads of the ‘minnikins’ engage in a running dialogue with Stone as he lies in
his sickbed, almost like a guilty conscience.
Interestingly Stone’s eruptions say more than all the other African
figures in the story, in fact the only other African character whose words we
hear, second hand from one of the white characters, is from the civilised
trading port of Zanzibar at the coast.
The Africans that are indigenous to the region the story is set in are
completely silent, except for the monster.
The
element of guilt is spelt out in the final words between Stone and his
tormentor;
"Has
she forgiven me?" Stone asked in a muffled strangle.
"Not
while the moss hangs from the cypresses," the head squeaked. "Not
while the stars shine on Lake Pontchartrain
will she forgive.[50]"
The “She” here is entirely ambiguous, one might
say that it’s one of the women in stones life alluded to earlier, but considering
the imagery used and who is speaking that doesn’t seem likely. No, this is the gothic unconscious
representing the soul of Africa to
itself. We will not be forgiven, it
says, not while the moss hangs from the cypresses, not while the stars shine on
Lake Pontchartrain can we be forgiven.[51]
IV.
Problems and conclusions
There
are some cautionary notes with
the approach as outlined so far which are worthy of comment. The first is that the approach relies on a
sort of application of psychoanalysis to culture, which is problematic in some
ways. Firstly because deep
psycho-analysis has a way of degenerating into an insoluble circular discourse
of self-referential logic which says much more about the analyst than the
subject[52]. While these criticisms aren’t entirely
escapable, the historical method can bring in two important mitigating factors
that balance out the problems of working completely within the realm of
thought, i.e. context and empirical validity.
While contextualising an action, statement or document doesn’t
automatically provide an explaination for its specific form, taken in concert
with similar phenomena of the same type, it can provide a degree of probability
of relevance for interpretations thereof.
Which leads us to a second criticism, that of displacing psychoanalytic
methods from their therapeutic context.
Something that, it is hoped, ought to have been demonstrated so far is
that collective psychology is as capable of being analysed as the
undividual. For example, Jeremy Crickler
makes a strong case that social neurosis that charachterise societies in
certain epochs can be the result of a mass forgetting of traumatic incidents
from within recent memory[53].
There
is also an epistemological issue there with regards to how the thoughts of
individual writers can actually relate to society at large. Stories are not just the product of society,
but of writers. Writing is a very
specific, if heterogeneous, profession and the profession requires the writer
to exercise his creative talents in a manner unlike any other. To find an answer to this criticism, we must
go back to Williams’ structure of feeling.
Williams highlights a useful notion of there being a difference between
a “possible” and “actual” consciousness[54]. Actual consciousness is the widest
multiplicity of thought possible in a given social group. Possible consciousness is the maximum degree
of coherence for the thought of a social group[55]. In other words, we could say that the writer,
whose work it is to construct narratives, gives coherence to the elements
within the group, whether this is through the practical task of scholarly
construction of those outside the group, or the articulation of the groups
inchoate fears of the other through its monstrous representation. Williams also emphasises the structures
within works as a means of getting at these structures within the social groups
that construct them. For example, we
could take Lukundoo with its fears of
the uncharted monstrous space of the African interior and the dehumanisation of
the explorer Stone, along with other stories with a similar internal
structuring such as A Strange Goldfeild[56]
or The Wendigo[57]
as indicating a general disturbance at the dehumanising effect of the
fringes of civilisation.
What
I hope to have established is a theoretical approach to reading the history of
colonial culture through the system of representations of monstrosity in
popular literature as well as the orientalist scholarship and propagandist
literature for a fuller understanding of the phenomena that takes the fullest
possible spectrum of human emotion into consideration. In this fashion, we can get below the
surfaces of the mentalities of other times and into the dark undercurrents of
human nature, and perhaps make the seemingly irrational explicable. It is not the function of history to provide
therapy, our subjects are usually well past any need for catharsis or
absolution, what we can hopefully provide is some understanding and in
understanding those that have gone before us, so understand ourselves.
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[1] Such as
in the recent work by Bernard Porter among others.
[2] To
borrow Paddy Magee’s characterisation of the “Troubles Novel”, P. Magee
Gangsters and Guerillas p17
[3] First
published as a review for Temps Modernes in 1957
[4] J.P.
Sartre, ‘Introduction’ in A. Memmi, The Coloniser and The Colonised p.xxviii
[5] E. Said,
Orientalism p2
[6] ibid, p8
[7] in R. Williams, Problems in Material and
Culture p22
[8] ibid.
p22
[9] See P.
McVarnock, Lecture notes
[10] ibid.
[11] ibid
[12] P. Hayes ‘”Cocky” Hahn and the
“Black Venus”, The making of a Native Commissioner in South West Africa,
1915-46’pp344-348
[13] Indeed
one could say that Elizabeth Gaskell’s slums, or Emile Zola’s Second Empire
France are as much fantasy universes as Tolkien’s Middle Earth or one of
William Gibson’s visions of the future.
[14] J.
Parrington, ‘In Perspective; Valentin
Voloshinov’
[15] Ibid.
[16]
See the parable of the winks in C. Geertz, 'Thick Description: Towards an Interpretative Theory of Culture'
[17] S.
Schachter and J. Singer ‘Cognitive Social and Physiological determinants of
emotional states’
[18] J.
Halberstam, Skin Shows; Gothic
Horror and the Technology of Monsters p22
[19] See. H.
Malchow ‘Frankenstein's Monster and Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain
[20] See, E.
M. Jones, Monsters from the Id
[21] J.
Monleon, A specter is haunting
Europe : a Socio-historical Approach to The
Fantastic
[22] M.
Foucault, Madness and Civilisation pp.68-70
[23] C.
Baldick, pp11-12
[24] ibid.
pp13-14
[25] This is
actually the main argument of Chris Baldick’s book, which is one of the most
respected and most cited in the field.
[26] E.
Said, p87
[27] ibid.
p87
[28] J.
Monleon, pp25-6
[29] Scrying
– Seeking occult knowledge through trance induced by a Crystal
[30] G. De Barri, The History and Topography
of Ireland
[31] In
other words a more honest rendering of modern orientalism.
[32] E.g. By
the removal of cemeteries and the leprous and insane away from the town
centres, J. Monleon. p30
[33] See Joanna DeGroot, ‘“Sex” and “Race”:
the construction of language and image in the Nineteenth Century‘ pp37-60
[34] See her
critique of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, in J.W.
Scott, Gender and the politics of history, pp.68-90
[35] J.
Halberstam, p22
[36] S.D.
Arata, ‘The Occidental tourist; Stoker and Reverse Colonization’ in S.D.
Arata (ed.), Fictions of Loss in the
Victorian ‘Fin de Siecle’ pp107-132
[37] E.g.,
see Sousa, D. A. How the Brain Learns: A Classroom Teacher’s Guide
[38] See for
example A. Moore, From Hell ch4 or the lyrics to the popular song by The White
Stripes ‘Fell in Love With A Girl’;
“these two sides of my brain
need to have a meeting …
my left brain knows that
all love is fleeting”
“these two sides of my brain
need to have a meeting …
my left brain knows that
all love is fleeting”
-J. White
[39] C.
Hall, ‘Introduction; thinking
the post colonial, thinking the empire’ p17
[40] W. Carlton Dawe ‘Coolies’ in Lamb,
H. (ed.) A Bottomless Grave and Other Victorian Tales of Terror pp172-184
[41] ibid,
p173
[42] See A.
Gramsci,. Selections from Prison Notebooks pp332-4
[43] J.
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
[44] J.J.
Cohen, pp.12-16
[45] See the
myth of Lycaon, ibid. p13
[46] C.
Baldick,
[47] E.L.
White, Lukundoo in Lukundoo and other stories
[48] ibid.
[49] ibid.
[50] ibid.
[51] This
point also leads us to the question of whether the gothic unconscious, as a
section of idea-space away from the mainstream discourse is an inherently
subversive or radical space i.e. can we read Lukundoo as radical or
conservative? This is an interesting
question and an important one at that, which certainly requires more space for
discussion than is currently available, but may be addressed in a future
project. For more on the radical potential
of horror in art please see, N. Carroll, The Philosophy of horror pp195-206
[52] See P.
McVarnock
[53] J. Crickler, ‘Social Neurosis and
Hysterical Pre-Cognition’ p492
[54] R. Williams, pp23-26
[55] ibid,
pp23
[56] G. Boothby ‘A Strange Goldfeild’ in
Lamb, H. (ed.) A Bottomless
Grave and Other Victorian Tales of Terror pp200-206
[57] A.
Blackwood, ‘The Wendigo’ in Bleiler,
E.F. (ed.) The Best Stories of Algernon
Blackwood pp158-208
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