Patrick McGrath. Sue Zlosnik
do we now define this mode, and how indeed does a writer like McGrath make and remake Gothic writing? This book examines the evolution of his writing, considering each text in turn while identifying continuing threads and establishing connections with the Gothic tradition in which he initially placed himself. Words, images and themes in the early work find expression of increasing complexity in the later novels. As his career has progressed, there has been a shift of emphasis so that the flamboyant parody of the early work gives way to a more subtle intertextuality in its representation of transgression and decay, themes that continue to inform his work. Richard Davenport-Hines’s magisterial and interdisciplinary Gothic: 400 Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin (1998) makes this judgement on McGrath’s work up to that date:
McGrath is a dandyish stylist who depicts tumult, evil, monstrosity, disease, madness, horror and death with hallucinatory menace. Like many early Goth novelists, his narratives often lead the reader into discoveries of danger within what had seemed safe. He is pitiless about human confusion and sometimes painterly in the way of David Lynch. While McGrath’s most relentlessly Gothic work seems frivolous or ephemeral pastiche, he achieves superb effects when the Gothicism is relaxed.11
Without acknowledging that the early, more overtly parodic, work is ‘frivolous or ephemeral pastiche’, this book argues that the change of emphasis in the later works achieves a different kind of Gothicism. Whereas the early work is clearly influenced by a postmodern preoccupation with play and parody, the 1996 novel Asylum takes the fiction in a different direction. Adopting some of the conventions of realism while continuing to make use of the unreliable and complicit first-person narrator, it presents a text the surface of which appears to be anti-Gothic but with depths that probe disturbingly the boundary between sanity and madness. In Martha Peake (2000), realism and postmodern parodic Gothic are played off against each other in a novel that signals the shift into the twenty-first century and into the narratives of America that constitute the later work.
In a 2001 interview, McGrath identified the novelist John Hawkes as a key formative influence on his work. Asked what his literary references were, he replied:
They change all the time, depending what I’m thinking about in my work. When I got to New York in 1981, I was just starting to write, and that’s when I found Hawkes’s work. It was a sort of … flash. I thought this is – particularly Travesty – this is what the novel should be. Psychologically dark, a tight, elegant structure, deeply disturbing, first person narration, slim.12
McGrath seems to have found twentieth-century echoes of Poe in Hawkes’s work. He likens Travesty’s tale of a speeding car, narrated by its mad driver, who is bent on the destruction of his passengers and himself, to Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’: in both the reader is trapped in the mind of the narrator and in the book itself.13 When McGrath co-edited with Bradford Morrow a collection of short stories, The New Gothic, in 1991, Hawkes was a contributor. This volume pays tribute in its introduction to Poe for turning the Gothic inward ‘to explore extreme states of psychological disturbance’.14
Published just over a decade later than The Literature of Terror, David Punter’s ground-breaking critical work, The New Gothic may be regarded as a seminal collection, its appearance coinciding with growing momentum in academic interest in the Gothic.15 It set out to bring together contemporary short stories that, in the editors’ judgement, demonstrated that Gothic had survived in mutated forms and was flourishing in the late twentieth century; their preface acknowledges the ‘fascinating’ Gothic tradition and offers the reader stories ‘no longer shackled by the conventional props of the genre’, but nonetheless ‘strongly manifest[ing] the [G]othic sensibility’.16 Almost twenty years later, its list of British and American contributors makes for interesting reading. There are some names that are more associated with experimental fiction: in addition to Hawkes, Martin Amis and Jeanette Winterson are both represented here. There are also those whose reputation has developed as serious literary writers with a Gothic sensibility: Angela Carter, Emma Tennant and Janice Galloway. Then there are those who have enjoyed a growing reputation for popular Gothic writing: Scott Bradfield, for example, and, more famously, Anne Rice, whose vampire novels have enjoyed great commercial success.
McGrath himself does not enjoy the commercial popularity of Anne Rice or her spectacularly successful contemporary exponent of Gothic horror, Stephen King (who wrote an unfilmed screenplay of McGrath’s novel Asylum).17 He is also less easy to categorize than some of the other inheritors of the Gothic tradition. Although vampirism figures in his fiction, it is not a central theme, as it is in the work of Rice or other noted writers of the sub-genre, like Poppy Z. Brite. His horror tends to be more insidious and more psychological than King’s or that of writers like Clive Barker or Dean Koontz; his terrors are less immediate than those in the fiction of Shirley Jackson or Ramsey Campbell. He has not as yet embraced the zombie. In contrast, McGrath’s fiction tests the boundaries of what we recognize as ‘Gothic’ and, far from abandoning ‘the conventional props of the Gothic’, he tends to use them in creative and parodic ways, as did fellow contributor to The New Gothic Angela Carter. Her story ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ (in a 1979 collection of rewritten folk tales, The Bloody Chamber), for example, presents a poignant portrait of a female vampire which exposes the tawdry artificiality of those very props.
Until recently, parody (like Gothic) has been considered a debased mode of writing. It is only since the early 1990s that work by critics such as Linda Hutcheon, Margaret Rose and Simon Dentith has claimed some sophistication for parodic writing, arguing that, in foregrounding its own textuality, parody represents part of a complex cultural dialogue.18 In the later fiction, ghosts of ‘the props of the genre’ manifest themselves in different and more subtle representations of decay and transgression. In McGrath’s work, an inclination towards Gothic excess remains in tension with a sceptical and ironic sensibility.
McGrath is well read in Gothic literature. He has acknowledged the influence of a host of writers, most notably Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Louis Stevenson, Emily Brontë, Joseph Conrad and Bram Stoker as well as Edgar Allan Poe.19 He is familiar with a tradition that has explored ways of giving shape to the forbidden, the unspeakable, the secret and the haunted. In its representation of transgression and decay the Gothic shows disorder and dismemberment, both physical and mental. It is balanced precariously between tragedy and comedy; its embrace of excess means that many Gothic tales are, in the words of Chris Baldick, ‘already halfway to sending themselves up’.20 McGrath’s narrative technique in the earlier novels carries many of the markers of the postmodern; the double coding inherent in parody is, as Linda Hutcheon has pointed out, linked to the ironic stance of postmodernism.21 A number of critics have pointed out the postmodern impulse in Gothic writing. Andrew Smith suggests that ‘postmodernism seems to be peculiarly suited to the Gothic because it questions the notion that one inhabits a coherent or otherwise abstractly rational world’.22 For Allan Lloyd Smith, ‘what underlyingly links the Gothic with the postmodern is an aesthetic of anxiety and perplexity, as similar responses to the confusing new order – or should that be the new disorder?’23 The dialectic between order and disorder and the power dynamics of the struggle between them characterize all McGrath’s fiction, from the earliest darkly comic parodies in the short stories and the novel The Grotesque through to the story of his psychiatrist narrator Charlie Weir’s inner conflict in the 2008 novel, Trauma.
Writing about the work of a living author presents several challenges. Although criticism since Barthes can never again use biographical information naively to validate readings of texts, the status of such information needs to be considered. McGrath is extraordinarily generous with his time and has been willing to give numerous interviews over the years, in which the same questions have been posed to him in various forms about the impulses behind his work. He is also reflective about the creative process and willing to comment on material that he has consciously employed.24 In the following pages due weight has been given to his views as they have been expressed in various contexts. His engagement with the Gothic tradition, one informed by current critical debates, is distinctive and conscious. What he has to say, however, has been set alongside other readings of his