Session 3: Pain and Metaphor

1st Global Conference

Wednesday 17th February – Friday 19th February 2010
The Women’s College, Sydney, Australia

in association with the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney

The Scandinavian Zombie and the Welfare State: Politics, Pain and Love in John Ajvide Lindquist’s Handling the Undead
Katarina Gregersdotter
Department of Language Studies, Umea University, Sweden

John Ajvide Lindqvist, renowned author of horror vampire novel Let the Right One In, has with his writings made critics praise the horror genre. His second novel, Handling the Undead has a zombie theme.

In this paper I will argue that the Swedish zombie is very much formed by — or part of— a typically Scandinavian literary context. This entails, among other things, that a surrounding – implied or explicit – discussion about the welfare state is present in the narrative. In this horror novel it is even possible to say that the welfare state is a character itself: it speaks to the other characters, it acts, it affects them. In Handling the Undead, Ajvide Lindqvist describes a contemporary Stockholm, where thousands of dead people suddenly wake up, causing fear and chaos. The zombies want to go “home” to their loved ones – these loved ones, who many of them suffer great pain due to their grief and loss. I will discuss how the author depicts this pain and grief due to personal loss as a means to simultaneously debate the health of the (dying?) welfare state.

This paper maintains that the zombie is used as a metaphor for the (dying) welfare state. The zombie embodies the social structures and ambitions which are failing people, causing them pain, leaving them desolate and without hope. The author intertwines these two sorrows (personal and societal), sometimes making them hard to separate from each other. Handling the Undead is a novel that combines the political with the personal within the framework of the horror genre, making it possible to look at emotions such as pain and love in a new way.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Painstaking Pain: Alice McDermott’s Child of My Heart
Hoda Khallaf
Faculty of Arts, Menofia University, Egypt

In a Powell’s Author interview (2002), Alice McDermott stated that her novel, Child of My Heart (2002), is the story of a teenage girl’s coming of age, a kind of response to the attacks of 9/11, a way of remaking the world through art, and a lament. Reviewers have often puzzled over the book’s “meaning”; and the character of Theresa itself, the teenage heroine, raises more questions than answers.

To me, the novel is mainly about pain: the pains of searching for cultural identity, of adolescence, of illness, of growing old, of loss, of death. Yet the theme of pain as such is not a clear-cut one. A set of undercurrent thematic dualisms adds to the ambiguity of the novel: Adolescence/ Maturity (the novel is supposed to be about an adolescent girl, we can see that clearly in her sexrelated observations and experiences; but as one reviewer remarks, where are her girlfriends or boyfriends? And the mature way with which she treats her “dependant” children?), Life/ Death (a recurring theme that starts with the very first sentence embracing both lively kids and baby rabbits that will shortly die. And then there are Daisy and Theresa’s playful excursions against Uncle Tom, the cat, and even Daisy’s deaths), Conformism/ Non-conformism (an Irish family settling in New York, the time-long symbol of immigrants’ doorway into the U.S. While Theresa’s parents, aunt, and friends cling on to their Irish memories and heritage, Theresa cuts herself away from that heritage, even deforming an “inherited” song while exploring the limitless boundaries of her new identity as an American citizen), and Traditional/ Untraditional ( McDermott said that she intended the book to be a traditional novel. Well, traditional elements are there all right; but what do we make of the lack of chapters and the random divisions? And the narrative is not entirely linear, what with all those ripples of past memories every now and then).

However, through a deconstructive reading of the text, and an analysis based on psychological theories of Defense Mechanisms, this paper will attempt to resolve the novel’s thematic ambiguity.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Gravity’s Rainbow: The Baroque Folds and ‘Conatus Sense Conservandi’ in Tandem Singh’s The Fall
Yen-Chen Chuang
Soochow University, Taipei, Yaiwan

Following the philosophical notion of conatus (endeavor), this paper discusses the relationship between motion, emotion, and pain in Tarsem Singh’s 2006 film The Fall. In the Newtonian physics, conatus refers to a state of inertia, a force that keeps planets moving along their orbits. Such force that occurs at a distance, so to speak, is a force of gravity. Later, Spinoza associates conatus with a motion governed by emotions. The principle of conatus is based on a passion or endeavor to avoid pains. As gravity makes possible the dynamics of attractive and repulsive forces, conatus conditions two emotions opposing each other, pleasure and pain. Spinoza uses the term conatus sese conservandi (the striving for self-preservation) and insists on the being’s will to live. At some level, the experience of living is considered choreography of pleasure and pain. The moving bodies become affects of striving, and those bodies are defined through their movements. In Singh’s film, whirls, rotations, dances, and fans are essential to create tensions in which the hero strives to live. Despite his death wish, the movie’s Baroque folds have produced a stunt that defies gravity. The hero’s attempt to commit suicide, a fall condemned because of loss, finally leads to levitation of pains. However, it is not simply a victory in which weightlessness overcomes gravity. A will to live is somehow akin to a will to suffer.

For Singh, life is a Spezialfall of gravity—it not only owns the power to drag down but also heaves the objects to a certain kind of glory. The Bacchanalian dance can be profoundly noble. In the film, the protagonist features a monadic conatus, which takes action out of passion. The monad, though situated in a static windowless room, is able to move like a fluid vortex. The hamstrung patient, in the cinematic imagination, performs a dazzling ballet out of suffering. Further, I argue that the director’s Baroque style is predicated on a sense that the characters are always on the verge of falling. As Deleuze sums up, “[t]he Baroque itself already marks a crisis in theological reasoning—a final attempt to reconstruct a world that’s falling down” (N, 161). This vertigo, the danger of tumbling down, envisions the law of gravitation nothing but various curvatures or recurrent patterns unfurling the eternal return of sufferings.