Abstract
Scholarship on space in horror narratives has primarily turned to Freud’s concept of the uncanny as framework or focused singularly on its significance as symbol. This chapter proposes other possible concepts, namely the heterotopia, the fold (or pli), and the melancholy object, which can also be appropriated to shed light on the genre’s unique representation of space. Unlike the uncanny, moreover, these concepts do not reduce space to merely a psychical or figurative determination but instead emphasize the importance of its function as material presence in signifying horror. Finally, to substantiate the claim made in this chapter, a particular literary work broadly belonging to the genre is read against each concept.
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Notes
- 1.
While my view of “lived space” is largely informed by Henri Lefebvre’s definition, there is nevertheless one important difference. Like Lefebvre , I view lived space as that which imagination experiences and “seeks to change and appropriate … overlay[ing] physical space [by] making symbolic use of its objects. Thus representational spaces may be said, though again with certain exceptions, to tend towards more or less coherent systems of nonverbal symbols and signs” (Lefebvre 1991, p. 39). It is, in short, spatial experienced as and in everyday practice. However, lived space is not just “dominated—and hence—passively experienced” space, but accommodates a range of qualities, including dominating and active, as my analysis of some Horror works will show (Lefebvre 1991, p. 39).
- 2.
- 3.
For a discussion of the paradox in Foucault’s concept, see Knight (2017).
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- 5.
The appearance of the Victorian house is not, of course, limited to the twentieth-century American Horror fiction, as evident in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), whose house was inspired by a mansion belonging to Hezekiah Usher, America’s first known bookseller, and Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables (1851).
- 6.
Kristeva (1987) would later redefine this circumstance as depression.
- 7.
The former is, in fact, often interpreted as an allegory of the latter by scholars since both themes similarly revolve around the invasion of the self by an other.
- 8.
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Hock Soon Ng, A. (2018). Conceptualizing Varieties of Space in Horror Fiction. In: Corstorphine, K., Kremmel, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97406-4_34
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