Mind games

In a bit of luck, I started reading Robert Mighall's A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction just after finishing Patrick McGrath's Asylum. Mighall rightly observes that until recently, one of the dominant strains in Gothic criticism has been psychoanalysis--a point that threw some unintended but interesting light on McGrath's novel. Asylum, as one might expect, is largely set in an insane asylum. Typically for McGrath (Google HTML cache), the storyteller is an unreliable male narrator, psychiatrist Peter Cleave. Cleave tells us the story of a passionate and ultimately destructive affair between Stella, wife of Cleave's colleague Max, and asylum inmate Edgar Stark--who is, not coincidentally, Cleave's patient. As love interests go, Stark was not perhaps the best choice: he murdered his wife after suffering from intense delusions about her promiscuity, then did some rather unpleasant things to her head. The after-effects of the affair ultimately lead to Stella's own incarceration in the asylum, where she too becomes Cleave's patient.

It's very difficult to get Cleave into a summary of the novel, since one naturally gravitates towards the passionate excesses of the actions themselves. McGrath does something rather clever with his unreliable narrator, however. Edgar Stark's madness partly derives from his desire to see his wife/model with perfect clarity; as he explains to Stella when she too begins sitting from him, he believes that he can only get a true "likeness" of his model when he sees her without interference from his own feelings. In other words, Stark fantasizes about achieving a perfectly detached and disembodied gaze--a fantasy which goes hand-in-hand with his murderous jealousy. As he explains to Cleave, he was unable to see his wife properly because he also saw all the men with whom she supposedly slept. But the reader receives this information only after Cleave himself complains that Stella's illicit relationship with Edgar disrupts the psychoanalytic process: because Edgar ("My Edgar," Cleave says at one point) begins lying about his thoughts, Cleave loses what he thought was his total access to his patient's subjectivity. Later, after Stella too becomes Cleave's patient, he cheerfully notes that he is coming to see her clearly. Cleave the psychoanalyst and Stark the artistic madman thus share an aesthetic, a parallel heightened by Cleave's own problematic embodiment. (Cleave never gives us anything like a full description of himself, other than that he's much older than Stella, and his sexuality remains obscure.)

Moreover, Stark's sculpting practice turns out to have much in common with Cleave's psychoanalysis. Stark's sculpture of Stella (as well as his more gruesome "sculpture" of his wife) becomes smaller and smaller as he seeks to find her "true" likeness. The process, that is, is reductive. Cleave, meanwhile, attempts to reduce people to their psychoses: Stella is "hysterical," Stark suffers from "morbid jealousy," and so on. Here lies part of McGrath's trick, for the reader initially feels comfortable with Cleave's clinical gaze in a way that she does not with Stark's. It's only after we are some way into the book that we see how far McGrath pushes the parallel between the psychoanalyst and the artist, with immediate repercussions for the narrative itself: both men identify representation with power, both men try to control their subjects by naming or figuring their "likeness," and both men ultimately destroy what they desire to possess. But here's where Mighall also comes in. McGrath incorporates the discourse most commonly used to analyze the Gothic into the narrative and makes it in some sense produce the narrative. The novel's horror emerges when inarticulate passions intersect with psychoanalysis' explanations for them. (It is, after all, Cleave's discourse that frames the novel, not Stark's.) Is there not a potential joke here on anyone who would try to psychoanalyze Cleave?