New Abject

Description

SOMETHING HAS FALLEN AWAY. We have lost a part of ourselves, our history, what we once were. That something, when we encounter it again, look it straight in the eyes, disgusts us, makes us retch. This is the horror of the abject. Following the success of Comma's award-winning New Uncanny anthology, The New Abject invites leading authors to respond to two parallel theories of the abject - Julia Kristeva's theory of the psychoanalytic, intimate abject, and Georges Bataille's societal equivalent - with visceral stories of modern unease. As we become ever-more isolated by social media bubbles, or the demands for social distancing, our moral gag-reflex is increasingly sensitised, and our ability to tolerate difference, or 'the other', atrophies. Like all good horror writing, these stories remind us that exposure to what unsettles us, even in small doses, is always better than pretending it doesn't exist. After all, we can never be wholly free of that which belongs to us.

Sujets

• Short story

Informations

• Publié par: Comma Press
• Date de parution: 29 octobre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781912697458
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Comma Press.
www.commapress.co.uk
Copyright © 2020 remains with the authors.
This collection copyright © Comma Press.
All rights reserved.
The right of the authors to be identified has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patent Act 1988
A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.
This collection is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authors’ imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental. The opinions of the authors are not those of the publisher.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges assistance from the Arts Council England.
Contents
Introduction
Ra Page

Stool
Bernardine Bishop

Teeth and Hair
Christine Poulson

The Universal Stain Remover
Gaia Holmes

( ) ( (
Lara Williams

The Reservoir
Meave Haughey

The Leftovers
Margaret Drabble

An Enfleshment of Desire
Saleem Haddad

Bind
Matthew Holness

Rejoice
Sarah Schofield

It’s a Dinosauromorph, Dumdum
Adam Marek

misisedwuds
Karen Featherstone

The Honey Gatherers
Gerard Woodward

Adobo
Paul Theroux

On Monkeys Without Tails
Mike Nelson

The Room Peels
Alan Beard

O Death
Mark Haddon

Wretched
Lucie McKnight Hardy

Out of the Blue
David Constantine

Extending the Family
Ramsey Campbell

About the Authors
Special Thanks
Introduction


All of us have had bad dreams during the pandemic. One of mine takes place several years from now, when the world has finally recovered. For some reason I’m rooting through a box of old clutter when I come across one of my face masks from the dark times. It wasn’t the most comfortable mask I owned, nor the safest, but it was the one I wore most often – dark burgundy, stylishly contoured, with an imposing black side-vent. It made me look badass, or so I thought, like a Hong Kong protestor back when face-coverings were still exotic. However cool I thought it looked at the time, though, in the dream the old mask horrifies me, like finding a dried umbilical cord in one of my mother’s scrapbooks of pressed flowers. Stiff, lifeless, alien, its very appearance is a betrayal of the trust I once placed in it, wearing it so often that I forgot I had it on; so habitually that, for those people outside of my bubble who saw me, it was effectively my face.
The horror, disgust or recoil we experience when we are faced with what we have shed, let go, expelled, sloughed off – that is the fear of the abject. The philosopher Julia Kristeva developed a psychoanalytic theory to explain this revulsion in her book Powers of Horror (1980). She argued that the boundary between the self (I, the subject) and its environment (objects, things and other people) isn’t always a cleanly defined border, that it can be disrupted by encounters with anything that was once part of us but has since been disowned, cast off or jettisoned. Encountering such abject objects horrifies us because, according to Kristeva, it reminds us of the much more seismic separation that took place at birth and in early childhood: the separation of the ‘self’ from the m/other. Experiences of abjection contain traces of this early traumatic separation – that of being ripped from a continuum, from a unity with the other, from that first ‘home’ from which we are permanently evicted.
Kristeva offers a scattered list of examples for the kinds of things which constitute the abject as we experience them in everyday life, those disgust-inducing ‘border objects’ which trouble the distinction between self and other. It is a list we can easily elaborate on: shed skin, cut or malted hair, nail clippings, faeces, urine, breast milk, menstrual blood, lost teeth, amniotic fluid, afterbirth, severed limbs, etc. All fairly gross and fairly straightforward. These were once in us, living parts of us, but we discarded them, and their reappearance repels us because it troubles the integrity of the self. Kristeva has a special place set aside in her own personal hell for milk, in particular the skin of milk, its separation into cream and the start of its decay – milk presumably being a stand-in for breast milk and infant feeding, a reminder of prior maternal dependency. The abject horrifies us not because of what it signifies but because of what it is. Kristeva uses the example of a wound compared to a flat-lining encephalogram to illustrate this point: a flat-lining ECG signifies death; a wound, cutting through the skin envelope of the self, puts us in the presence of death, slap bang in the theatre of it. 1 It disrupts the clean border between us and not-us, both reminding us of the ‘great separation’ and confronting us with our own ongoing and inescapable materiality. This lifeless, drying-up piece of scab – this was us. This is us.
Kristeva’s development of this theory of the abject is perhaps restricted by its origins in psychoanalytic theory; in this field, there is limited space for cultural, historical, socio-economic or political considerations; everything is contained within the drama of personal psychological development; everything is traced back to the infant and its immediate relations. But there is another reading of the abject, a social abject to counterweight Kristeva’s psychological rendering. Social abjection – as written about much earlier by the philosopher Georges Bataille in his essay ‘Abjection and Miserable Forms’ (1934) – comprises of such things or ‘others’ that the body politic casts off, rather than what the individual body does: things and people that society expels. Examples here range from obvious enemies of the state and social order, like traitors, spies, and criminals, through to those whose difference is felt (or constructed for political ends) as a threat to the integrity or identity of the body politic: social and political scapegoats or demographics collectively imagined as disgusting or abhorrent. To use the social theorist Imogen Tyler’s words, abjection in Bataille’s reading is ‘the imperative force of sovereignty, a founding exclusion which constitutes a part of the population as moral outcasts: “represented from the outside with disgust as the dregs of the people, populace and gutter”’. 2
Tyler’s recent re-evaluation of this social abject in her book Revolting Subjects (2013), provides a persuasive occasion for putting this anthology together. Thanks to her work, we are now able to talk about what disgusts us, abjectly, across both the realms – the psychological and the social – and to examine how the pre-history of the self is entangled with the histories and practices of the body politic. It was with this dual understanding of abjection in place that Comma, in late 2019, set about inviting authors to respond to the abject with short stories that would explore new examples of it – much as we had with a previous anthology, The New Uncanny , updating Freud’s own drop-down menu of irrational fears. Again, we had a suspicion that our current historical moment had new manifestations of the theory to offer. And we weren’t disappointed.
The first six stories collected here – by Bernardine Bishop, Christine Poulson, Gaia Holmes, Lara Williams, Meave Haughey and Margaret Drabble – all ostensibly explore the corporeal, intimate abject that Kristeva alerted us to. We encounter excrement, teeth, hair, menstrual blood, picked-off moles, amniotic fluid, urine and nail clippings, with conflicting states of disgust, horror, fascination, occasional relish and even empowerment. Saleem Haddad’s ‘An Enfleshment of Desire’ transitions us into a broader reading, intertwining both the intimate and public politics of abjection and desire, and reversing the direction of the subject/object boundary-blurring with an insertion, rather than an ejection. Matthew Holness, Sarah Schofield, Adam Marek and Karen Featherstone all offer stories that flip perspectives on the ‘great separation’, exploring the rejection, disconnection or abandonment of the child from the parent or society’s point of view. Gerard Woodward considers social abjection in the light of a perceived invasion from outsiders, whilst Paul Theroux focuses on the materiality of the abject, in particular sex in the age of mail-order brides. Mike Nelson and Alan Beard dig deeper into this materiality and what happens when we become so separated from other people that we have only physical objects – random belongings, furniture or the walls around us – to relate to. Mark Haddon and Ramsey Campbell explore the abjection of one’s own past from one’s present, while David Constantine and Lucie McKnight Hardy consider the abjection of whole categories of people – refugees and the ‘underclass’ – in present day and future Britain, respectively.
Throughout these stories, there is an attempt to expand and complicate the often very singular (self- or ego-oriented) perspective on the abject provided by purely psychoanalytic readings. Instead the authors examine it from multiple perspectives: from the points of view of mothers, maternal subjects, women, queer subjects, working-class masculinity, class disgust and bourgeois revulsion. The presence or absence of mothers (or of mothering tendencies or connection) is often a recurring theme. In certain moments, such as in Karen Featherstone’s and Ramsey Campbell’s stories, the image of a neglected infant hints at how our (social) disgust for poverty takes root in the most intimate image, before propagating into a disgust for all those around it. To quote Bataille: ‘Filth, snot and vermin are enough to render an infant vile. His personal nature is not responsible for it, only the negligence or helplessness of those raising him.’ 3 Instead of soliciting simple sympathy, these images of extreme vulnerability somehow elicit a mix of physical disgust and moral outrage.

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