Patrick McGrath. Sue Zlosnik
New York at the time, sweating through those hot summers, couldn’t afford to get out of the city, and there were all these curious creatures, men like The Angel – you saw Quentin Crisp every day on the streets.32
Identified by Andrew Hock-Soon Ng (who has written the only piece of sustained criticism on this story) as ‘a narrative of the fin de siècle that is related to the crisis of representing the body’,33 ‘The Angel’ is marked by features that are characteristic of late nineteenth-century decadence. The city is represented as a place of corruption and decay in which the narrator, Bernard Finnegan, walks along a ‘garbage-strewn and urine-pungent sidewalk’ (1). The city as a locus of Gothic possibility is suggested by a ‘rather grisly murder’ where ‘the body was mutilated and drained of all its blood’, which leads the New York Post to suggest that a vampire may be on the loose’ (5). The subject of Bernard’s story, the old man Harry Talboys,34 is one of the ‘curious creatures’ described by McGrath; he bears the markers of a late nineteenth-century dandy, the shabbiness of his clothes failing to disguise ‘the quality and elegance of the cut’ (1). His mouth is made up with lipstick and he habitually wears a ‘fresh white lily’ in his buttonhole, a flower associated with death. He is a subject waiting to be found by a dandified writer, Bernard, whose opening paragraph displays a self-conscious mannered excess:
It was high summer when I met him, high summer in Manhattan, when liquid heat settles on the body of the city like an incubus, and one’s whole activity devolves to a languid commerce of flesh and fluids, the ingestion and excretion of one by the other, and all sane organisms simply estivate. (1)
Bernard’s narrative creates the frame for Harry’s reminiscences as well as for a shorter intertext, in the form of a Gnostic tale that he discovers. In this, Satan, ‘a great god’, persuades a spirit called Arbal-Jesus to project himself into a human body, causing him great agony. Then, subjected to sexual abuse by Satan, his only consolation is the presence of another spirit in the body, that of Death. Along with this intertext, the fin de siècle markers in the contemporary New York setting point to the two dimensions of Gothic that provide the means through which Harry’s story can be understood: the abhuman and the doppelgänger.
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