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. Beautiful undead women with flimsy garments—like Haggard’s Ayesha or Stoker’s mummy, Queen Tera—pursued by living male paramours become, in Butts’s novel, sadistic women pursuing and feeding on the wounds and deaths of their male lovers. The alluring femme fatale of Haggard is transformed through the war. Trysts in tombs are traded for lonely deaths in mass graves, while women gain pleasure and sustenance from the
alive / From this deep place’).11 This ‘deep place’ is the place of poetry, and Prufrock’s being, conferred by a poem formed of such a place, is that of neither life nor death but is that of the un-dead. Guido da Montefeltro is thus the persona of the poem. It would seem right to ask, in this context, who are ‘we’? Is death possible only when the ‘I’ of the poem has been passed beyond? Or is it that the poem achieves a point that is supernumerary, where that which persists does so beyond parts and wholes? Eliot’s writing engages with a non-rational excess that is out
’ in a movement that itself enacts a kind of jolting awake, ‘As the Dead Prey Upon Us’ introduces a new term: the vent. This Shelleyan ‘wind’, in the face of ‘the ugly automobile … the heaviness of the old house, the stuffed inner room’, is offered as a force that ‘lifts the sodden nets’: The vent! You must have the vent, or you shall die. Which means never to die, the ghastliness of going, and forever coming back, returning to the instants which were not lived (CP, 391–2) The meaning of the dead is fully described here: they are undead figures of backwardness whose
). Van Helsing, according to Harker (188), ‘is the man to unmask [Dracula] and hunt him out’. ‘I have clues which we can follow’, Van Helsing indeed obligingly volunteers, ‘in our great quest’ (217, 218). He has also evolved a ‘philosophy of crime’, according to which the true criminal (a status to which Dracula has by now been reduced) ‘is predestinate to crime’, is ‘clever and cunning and resourceful’ – empirically single-minded, but ‘of child-brain in much’ (341). 17 Van Helsing has studied ‘the powers of the Un-Dead’ (or nosferatu ), through ‘the lore and
spectral returns,’23 a clever echo of Jonathan MUP_Schultz_Haunted.indd 133 03/04/2014 12:23 134 Revolution Harker’s observation early on in Stoker’s novel that ‘the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere “modernity” cannot kill.’24 The past – whether undead vampire, historical event, or literary form – is not static. Seamus Deane and Anna Burns employ the standard machinery of the Gothic in their Troubles fiction, but set it in a recurring, transgenerational framework. Extreme mental disturbance emerges in both Reading in the Dark and No Bones
future undoubtedly lies ahead for Zacharias and his fellow travellers, then, it is an uncertain one, shaped and energised as it is by a devastating past of dislocation, loss, and the radical indeterminacy of being. Undead histories: ‘The Happy Corpse Story’ According to Said, the work of the intellectual exile operates ‘by force of risk, experiment, innovation. Not the logic of the conventional but the audacity of the daring, and moving, moving, moving, representing change, not standing still.’ 51
reach out yer hand and stroke his face, this seeker of sanctuary within, so close ye could close yer eyes and sense his breath on yer face this furin stranger varmint, congenital member of the evil undead. ( YH 356–7) Though, as I have said, the last two novels are a formal departure from the preceding four, the critique of nation and language they display is perfectly consistent with traits developing out of Kelman’s evident sense of foreignness within English, perhaps out of an alienation from Scottishness, but certainly a disappointment
penultimate, before ‘Millennium Eve’, the putative deadline for the completion of the circuit) makes explicit the centrality of Gothic to Sinclair’s work and to London Orbital : Vampire scholars, such as Kim Newman, have always recognised that yesterday’s Undead are today’s asylum seekers, the Undispersed. The slow-detonating impact of Stoker’s 1897 fiction came, not from its novelty, but from the sense of the book as an original rewrite, the recapitulation of a recurring fable. Beneath the breastbeating Shakespearean echoes (cod Irving), and the
-textual and meta-historiographical in its treatment of questions about history and representation than other modernist texts, which tend to treat historical narrative more obliquely. By recognizing patterns of historical reinvention in the novel, we can see how Joyce takes on the dual role of novelist and historiographer. Doing so, he exposes the overt constructedness of Ireland’s undead past, while also introducing a new critical paradigm for readers and writers following in his wake. In the following chapters, we will encounter contemporary Irish writers who call upon
to different branches of speculative fiction. The Gilda Stories – which is part speculative, part historical – re-envisions the fantasy branch of the At home in the world 175 genre that includes horror and the gothic, whereas Fledgling belongs to the branch that grows out of science fiction in which the vampire is a different species from homo sapiens and is thus a natural rather than an undead or supernatural being (M. Carter, 2004: 3).15 What Gomez’s and Butler’s vampire novels do have in common is a female African American orphan figure at the very center of