Haunted Spaces and Monstrous Lairs

Space is not merely an inert fact of nature, or a simple backdrop to history. It is, rather, a socially constructed set of meanings that are attached to the world around us – in place-names, in stereotypes and values (e.g. ‘rough’ neighbourhoods and ‘desirable locations’), and the psychological resonances of different spatial concepts (e.g. the meanings suggested by ‘cottage,’ ‘mansion’ and ‘cave’). Supernatural antagonists contribute to these layers of meaning, producing haunted spaces and territories where trespassers meet gruesome ends. This chapter looks at the production of monstrous space in Irish literature, leaning particularly on Michel Foucault’s understanding of the ‘heterotopia’ (a space of crisis, containing that which cannot be spatially ordered according to the dominant ideology of the society that produces them), and Gaston Bachelard’s categorisation of fear into ‘Fear in the Attic’ (transitory, insubstantial) and ‘Fear in the Cellar’ (enduring, resistant to rationalisation).

Ghosts, Narrative, and Noumenal Reality

This chapter considers Ireland’s rich tradition of ghost stories through the lens of Kant’s ‘noumenal reality’ – that is, facts of nature that are (and will forever remain) beyond the understanding of human minds: ghosts resist comprehension in proportion to the scrutiny applied to them, appearing as self-evident facts to the untroubled believer and as frustrating enigmas to those who look for scientific evidence. It is thus hardly surprising that their manifestations interfere with our ability to create narratives, whether on an interpersonal or national scale. The ghost stories considered here complicate traditional family dynamics and nation-building historiography alike, and pose interesting questions regarding the role of storytellers in a modern Ireland where literal belief in the supernatural is no longer a constant feature.

From Lore to Law

This chapter considers the tension between magic and law: when legal structures are assumed (correctly or incorrectly) to safeguard the rights of individual citizens and punish transgressors against the common good, magic-users become ‘monsters’ for their ability to do harm at a distance, anonymously and without accountability. Beginning with an outline of the transitional moment in Irish history where scientific legal codes started to supplant the de facto belief in folk magic, this chapter looks at ‘spiritual warfare’ narratives and conspiracy tales alike to discuss how malevolent witches, wizards and sorcerers disrupt established norms of legitimacy and authority. The works considered here range from 19th-century depictions of witches as heroic figures standing up to bullying clerics, to 20th-century texts where the magically-inclined are ignorant throwbacks at best and sinister cultists at worst.

The Undead Generations

The first half of this chapter establishes the historical context for depictions of the corporeal undead (i.e. reanimated corpses in various forms, such as zombies, vampires and other revenants, as opposed to ghosts, spirits and less-substantial beings). This context incorporates not just the concept of abjection – which describes the actions by which the ‘unclean’ is removed from the space of everyday life – but also looks at Ireland’s haphazard history when it comes to the management of death, from the dilapidation of graveyards to grave-robbing to lackadaisical death registration. All of these factors combined the make burial spots ‘porous’ rather than hermetically sealed, so that death leaked into the space of the living. A number of texts are considered against this backdrop to suggest a general sense of what it means to be undead in Ireland. The second half of the chapter is given over to vampires, and the ways in which the dominant trends in analyses of vampire stories (allegorical reading and humanisation) fail to do justice to the vampire’s unique nature. This extended argument looks at two classic Irish vampire tales, Carmilla and Dracula.

Introduction

In political rhetoric, academic analysis, social theory and everyday speech, fear is characterised as a limitation or an obstacle to be overcome – see turns of phrase such as ‘culture of fear,’ ‘management by fear’ and so on. This introduction argues for a more useful conception of fear, based on Ernst Bloch’s continuum of ‘negative expectant emotions,’ and combines this with a Sartrean conception of the absurdity of human existence to establish the function of monsters in human culture. In short, monsters reveal the limitations of our ideologically constructed world by breaking it: history cannot continue in their presence; they refute humanity’s ownership of the world, and traditionally, they have occupied spaces where human civilization cannot or will not go. Each monster disrupts history in a way particular to itself, and this chapter lays the groundwork for further analysis along those lines.

Conclusions

This chapter revisits the specific works and incidents mentioned previously, placing them in chronological order and applying the conclusions reached in each thematic analysis. What emerges from this chronological overview is not a straightforward timeline of literary development, but a series of breaks and interruptions marked by the repetition and reinvention of established gothic and horror narratives: this is, after all, what monstrous literature has been refined to do. Unlike science fiction, where shifting emphases and innovation can be mapped onto historical moments and popular ‘moods’ of the time, these texts concern themselves with breakages and ruptures. This reading suggests a political context for the interpretation of these stories, as the monstrous actions of martyrs, bureaucrats and political leaders invite monstrous responses, some of which are artistic and literary. The monster’s history-ending power makes it an appealing figure in contexts where history is a nightmare from which one is trying to awake.

Breeding Breaks Out

A central tenet of modern Western culture is the distinction between human and animal, particularly on psychological and cultural grounds: physical differences aside, we emphasise our difference from other species by defining self-awareness, motive, individuality and history as uniquely human traits – to be an animal is effectively to be an automaton. This denial of sapience to animals (or, at its most charitable extreme, the ascription of a kind of ‘diminished personhood’ to them) is fruitful ground for gothic and horror stories. On the one hand, to become or act like an animal is a kind of dissolution; on the other hand, an animal that behaves like a human provokes an unnerving, uncanny response. This chapter considers these aspects of animal-horror, alongside the unsettling phenomena of animal ‘vagrants’ and cryptids, to look at how authors have disrupted the boundaries between human and beast.

Just Sign Here

This chapter looks at Irish works featuring deals with the Devil, as well as folktales and texts concerning encounters with demonic beings. Herein are considered multiple kinds of Devil (i.e. the ‘Adversary’ of religious orthodoxy, and the oddly personable hedonist of folklore) and different kinds of Faust (Marlowe’s irredeemable diabolist versus Goethe’s driven, Romantic genius), and it is shown that Irish texts tend to mix and match characteristics from the various iterations of each – Peadar Ua Laoghaire’s Séadna uses his demonic pact to enrich himself, as per Marlowe’s materialistic Faust, but he retains his conscience and retains the reader’s sympathy, much like Goethe’s protagonist; John Banville’s Mefisto, on the other hand, offers us two potential Satan figures – one of whom conforms to the archetype of the malevolent trickster, while the other’s single-minded pursuit of knowledge posits an existential threat to the universe. Overall, demons emerge from the analysis as agents of chaos, disrupting humanity’s attempts to understand the universe and dismantling the bonds of community.

We Dare Not Go A-Hunting

This chapter examines Irish fairy lore from the standpoint of ‘weird’ fiction. A subset of horror, fantasy and science fiction, weird fiction emphasises the chaotic nature of the universe and humanity’s precarious position within it, usually with reference to unfathomable scales of time and distance. The Book of Invasions, being the closest that Ireland has to a ‘creation’ myth, positions the Gaels as the last in a series of tribes to settle on the island, and the only fully human tribe in that series; the stories of the daoine sidhe, the original inhabitants of the country, complicate Ireland’s national history and imbue the very landscape with gruesome significance. The texts considered in this chapter all tap into this latent weirdness, whether by invoking the fairy-folk directly, through extrapolations of evolution, or via ruminations on antiquity and the Sublime.

Harbingers of Hunger

This chapter begins with a survey of literary depictions of the Great Famine of the late 1840’s, looking at the differences between what actually occurred and the recurring features of fictional Famine scenes: for example, there is often an assumption of cannibalism in Famine-set novels, though there is little historical data to support the idea that cannibalism actually occurred on an appreciable scale. Novelists of the time conceive of the desperation of the time as a ‘hunger demon,’ which possesses the deprived and drives them to monstrous acts; echoes of this concept can be seen in later Irish fiction, indicating the existence of a threshold beyond which the suffering victim of horror becomes its harbinger. The chapter proceeds from here to an analysis of Apocalyptic dread in Irish fiction.