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your symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out (New York: Routledge, 1992). 89 Brainerd defines masochism as ‘suffering that repeats itself, potentially altering itself through shifting power relations’ (Brainerd, ‘Stolen pain’, p. 72). 90 Paul Megna, ‘Courtly love hate is undead: Sadomasochistic privilege in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde ’, in Everything you wanted to know about literature but were afraid to ask Žižek , ed
love hate is undead: sadomasochistic privilege in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde ’, in Everything you wanted to know about literature but were afraid to ask Žižek , ed. Russell Sbriglia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 267–89. Though outside the scope of this essay’s focus on historophilia and sadomasochism, Megna’s argument provides a thorough explanation of Slavoj Žižek’s and Jacques Lacan’s interpretations of medieval courtly love alongside the
1904, Bernarr Macfadden asserted that children ‘would be far better off dead rather than undergoing the living death that follows on the practice of secret sensuality’. 112 Masturbators and consumptives are ‘dying’ but are, equally, ‘undead’ and infectious. Furthermore, in their condition of ‘un-death’, they subvert conventional stereotypes of passive ‘invalidism’, bringing both salacious pleasure and consequent debility and death. 113 Contagion is essentially a discourse of transmission and transformation. The pale woman is, thus, a locus for male anxiety
-Z Guide to Everything Undead (London: Robson Books, 1996), pp. 46–8. 52 Tracy, ‘Introduction’ to In a Glass Darkly , p. xix. 53 ‘A Lady’, The Young Lady’s Friend; A Manual of Practical Advice and Instruction to Young Females on Their Entering Upon the Duties of Life (London: John W. Parker, 1838), p. 185. 54 In ‘English girl’s schools and women’s colleges’ romantic friendships between girls/women were known as ‘raves’. See: Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic
Secret Scripture asks us to rethink the cultural significance of historical narration so susceptible to transformation, particularly histories that may have been deliberately falsified. In this way, Barry has taken on the dual role of novelist and historiographer: he explores, by means of one invented life, the overt constructedness of Ireland’s variegated and undead past. Barry invites his readers to interpret his most recent novel not merely as an esthetic object, but also as a theory concerning the esthetics of historical representation and identity construction
54 Transporting Chaucer two similes: ‘[a]s Hurlewaynes meyne in every hegg that capes’ and ‘as the leves grene’ (8–9). To be a member of Hurlewaine’s retinue is to be neither living nor dead. In medieval French texts, Hurlewain, or Hellequin, is a figure from charivari. He leads processions of cavorting tricksters who wear disguises or masks and dress up in outlandish costumes. Illustrations show Hellequin as a leader of the ‘undead’.2 Prior to any formal introductions on first-name terms, the pilgrim assembly of The Canterbury Interlude is become a harlequinade
works not only against Dante but also against the implied reader. If Dante the character wishes to share his pity, Dante the ‘difficult poet’ chastises such an attitude. And yet, Belacqua’s ‘impersonal pity’ is not towards the dead but towards the ‘undead’, the nameless multitude not of the damned souls but of the ‘current quick’. Furthermore, Belacqua’s impersonal pity is perceived by the ‘public’ as ‘callousness in respect of this or that wretched individual’ but is said to have very great ‘private advantages’ (115). Dante’s misdirected pity is ‘damned’ and killed
after the almost rapacious destruction of his ‘undead’ fiancée, Lucy Westenra: ‘Great drops of sweat sprang out on his forehead, and his breath came in broken gasps.’ In this instance too, sweat can be seen to encode another bodily fluid. See: Bram Stoker, Dracula (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 216. 108 ‘W.’, ‘Insanity, Produced by Masturbation’, p. 111. 109 a.i., The Dictionary of Medical and Surgical Knowledge (London: Houlston and Sons, n.d. [c.1874]), p. 654. Taken nightly in the way
–22). This genre is as undead as the highbrow literary novel but ‘ambles along happily’ (Tuten, 2015), believing in the durability of uncritical realism and seemingly untroubled by its own structural contradictions. This clearly gets under McCarthy’s skin; the conventions of realism are as knowingly artificial as any avant-garde metafiction and provide ‘no more purchase on the real than anything else’ (Hart, Jaffe, and Eburne, 2013: 679). Burying one’s head in a naïve realism and ignoring the legacies of modernist and postmodernist experimentation is culturally ingenuous
underpins everything that Parks learns about the tattoo trade, for he quickly apprehends that, without the extremes of behaviour and the suffering that they cause, there would be no regular business. He muses on this fact after his arrival in America: There were the beatings, the cheatings, the welts from the buckles of belts on the hide of sanity, the ploughing of fists through faces, the avalanche of cocks against orifices, the rapes, the killings, the loss of loved ones from a blade, a gun, poison, lunatic voices in the head. There were gangrenous scars of the undead