One might not naturally think of a disease as a transmedia narrative, let alone the centre of a multi-platform universe, yet by their very nature they move across media, from the individual to the social, from word of mouth to social media, from fact to fiction. Historically these transmedia outbreaks are made sense of after the fact, usually once data has been collected and interpreted. The Covid-19 pandemic is a little different in that not only is there constant access to a huge amount of information that is increasing daily, but it also has a narrative template through which this is being read.

This template, or ‘outbreak narrative’, is one that has been constructed between reality and fictional representation, in books and films, to create a narrative arc of contagion, one which has a start, a middle and an end, but also one which inherently creates a transmedia story-world around it that both explains and supports that arc. This short blog will lay out how this works in the current pandemic and how its narrative world is supported by earlier outbreaks, both real and fictional, yet is simultaneously working against its own successful completion, creating the possibility of a story that will never, truly end.

Priscilla Ward (2008) has described how, around the HIV/AIDS pandemic of the 1980s, certain narratives arose to explain the disease that were part science, part media reportage, part cultural imaginings. In many ways it describes a transmedia migration at its most fundamental, where bodily manifestations and oral accounts are recorded and interpreted, adapted for newspapers, news programmes and the popular imaginary, creating a kind of ongoing dialogue between actual events and cultural, fictional representations of them. Films, in particular, have played an important part in this process, presenting complex information in a form that is accessible (simplified) and culturally comprehensible — this equally skews or omits parts of the truth to fit existing cultural templates and preferences. This created a pandemic narrative that featured proscribed stages and tropes: 1) a disease originating in an undeveloped part of the world, often involving monkeys or bats, caused by human incursion into the animals’ natural habitat; 2) a ‘patient zero’, often combined with the idea of a ‘super spreader’; civilisation becomes aware of the outbreak, enforcing ‘contact tracing’ and ‘quarantine’; 3) a race against time to develop a vaccine; 4) and, finally, administering the vaccine and returning to ‘normality’.

A good example of how this narrative was used and affirmed in film and fed back to the popular imagination is Outbreak (Peterson: 1995), which follows much of the above template: a deadly virus from Africa (modelled on the HIV/AIDS epidemic); animals are involved; there is a ‘patient zero’, quarantine, contact tracing, a vaccine and a race to save humanity. Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011) builds on and reinterprets the narrative world of Outbreak and has become the definitive film on the subject in the current pandemic. Originally released after SARS (2003) and Swine flu (2009–10), the film interprets what the world had just experienced, emphasising and adding new parts to the existing narrative.

The film begins with the outbreak already in progress with the designated ‘patient zero’, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), flying back from Hong Kong, infecting people as she goes. Beth is shown as an unfaithful wife who meets an ex-lover on her journey, linking the narrative to that of the earlier AIDS epidemic, which was popularly associated with transgressive sex.

As the world (America) begins to realise that an outbreak is occurring, the investigative stage of the narrative begins, involving contact tracing and the search for the point of origin — a temporal and media movement that embodies what Jenkins calls ‘spreadability’ (2013), in some ways is a natural component of contagion. The outbreak narrative then crosses various media platforms (news media, tv, radio, social media and word of mouth) as well as crossing borders, becoming transmedial and transnational, as researchers follow its path back to where it started. Once contact tracing has begun and the severity of the outbreak has gained greater understanding, the fight for survival begins, which also has two parts: the first is quarantine and containment and the second is producing a cure (vaccine). The former then requires that the ‘readers’ or ‘players’ of the narrative comply with the instructions they are given, which also relies on the coherence and consistency of those directions. This further brings in a new set of players/authors in terms of government or large corporations to discover a cure and produce a vaccine. Interestingly, whilst part of the main outbreak narrative, vaccination development can become a separate but intricately connected one, as multiple governments and corporations become involved that try to gain their own authorial control and influence the overarching urtext of the outbreak narrative.

Of particular note at this stage is the production of counter narratives that often oppose the main one or redirect it for ends other than successfully finding a cure and saving lives as quickly as possible. Contagion touches on this in the figure of Alan Krumweide (Jude Law), a self-styled investigative journalist and blogger who begins to push a story that the outbreak might be being engineered by drug companies to make money and that the government might also be involved. The conspiracy theory finds traction online (stickability and spreadability) and Alan is invited onto news programmes, subsequently claiming to have contracted the disease and being cured by taking a homeopathic remedy (Forsythia), which miraculously saves his life (when he never had the disease, of course).

This aspect is an interesting addition to the outbreak narrative and one that had not occurred as explicitly in earlier films such as Outbreak. In many ways it acts as fan-fiction within the urtext and as a way of wresting authorial control, even if it has deadly real-world consequences. It also shows how different narrative worlds intersect and how narratives of espionage and conspiracy theory have been used to control the direction and possible readings of the original outbreak narrative. In the current pandemic, such battles for authorial control have created a plethora of contradictory narratives propagated by a wide range of authors, with many of them being purposely politicised and altering the shape of the resultant story-world. Unlike Contagion, Covid-19 has highlighted how much each aspect of the wider narrative can be altered to fit a political end beyond the goal of saving lives by weaponising actions such as hand washing, mask wearing, etc. Consequently, this creates narrative confusion and uneven implementation of measures across national and cultural boundaries due to the political leanings of the governments in charge.

As Contagion brings its narrative to close, we discover the outbreaks point of origin; an infection from a bat that eventually reaches Beth. The sense of narrative completion provided then allows ‘normality’ to return, whatever that may look like.

With Covid, though, it is already obvious that any real uncovering of where the outbreak began, and consequently how it might end, are buried in purposeful obfuscation. Did the virus begin in bats, or in pangolins? Where did it originate exactly and how did it spread? Indeed the outbreak narrative described in Outbreak and Contagion is predicated on the idea of a togetherness against the contagion, and the notion of the ‘fight to save humanity’ constructs this as a battle between victim (humanity) and foe (the disease). However, in many ways, this is the one aspect that continues to evade the current pandemic, with many players/readers refusing to acknowledge their place within a shared narrative. Without such central cohesion, the multiplicity of authors struggling for attention and control become increasingly destructive, using the natural stickiness of aspects of the narrative to pull it apart rather than guide it towards a coherent end point.

In this sense the existing outbreak narrative might itself be forced to mutate into one that has no beginning or end, but just keeps repeating as it continually moves across media from fact to fiction and back again. Here then actual reality or science will have little true bearing on the final outcome, as the only recognised ending will happen when enough users/players — whether national governments or large groups of like-minded citizens — co-opt authorial control to write their own version of how normality returns, regardless of its relation to the real-world or the pre-existing outbreak narrative.

Simon Bacon, Editor of Transmedia Cultures: A Companion

Works Cited

Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, New York: NYU Press, 2013.

Stolworthy, Jacob, “Contagion becomes one of most-watched films online in wake of coronavirus pandemic,” The Independent, 15 March 2020. < https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/contagion-coronavirus-download-watch-online-otorrent-warner-bros-cast-twitter-a9403256.html> Accessed 4 March 2021.

Ward, Priscilla, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.

In light of recent world events, thinking about monsters almost inevitably leads one to ideas of disease and contagion. The monsters swirling around the Covid-19 are many, depending on your ideological view of the pandemic and where you are in the world — with geographical location being perhaps slightly less important than your economic one. The manifestation of the monstrosity of the virus can take the form of governmental inaction and/or ignorance, the face of those not wearing a mask or social distancing, or even the neo-liberalist supply and demand system itself. Indeed, it would seem in a pandemic there are too many monsters, too many faces that stare back at us and reflect our anxieties, or seem to embody the very danger of the virus.

We are still too close to the current outbreak for there to have been many artistic cultural expressions created in direct regard to it, but that does not mean that there are not earlier films that manage to touch on and express many of the societal and individual concerns that have arisen from it. Films such as Outbreak (Petersen: 1995) and Contagion (Soderbergh: 2011) would seem obvious choices, and unsurprisingly the latter film has seen a huge spike in popularity in recent months.

But these films often contain extraneous narrative points to create dramatic thrust that can obfuscate the realities of real-world pandemics. Contagion, in particular, promotes an over-importance on the elusive “patient zero” by attributing judgement and retribution on a philandering wife and mother, Beth Emhoff, and blame on a self-styled false prophet, Adam Krumwiede (Jude Law), who denies the virus, as opposed to the system that promotes and facilitates what he does. Similarly, there have been two subsequent films called Patient Zero — one by Bryan T. Jaynes (2012) and one by Stefan Ruzowitzky (2018) — and Cabin Fever 3: Patient Zero (Andrews: 2014), alongside various television series of the same name, that focus on this issue.

In fact, human anxieties connected to contagion, such as the unseen dangers from strangers and even those we love, have long been part of the Horror genre, in general, and the construction of its monsters, in particular. It is worth considering a wider range of examples that pick up on some central concerns around the Covid-19 outbreak and seeing what kinds of “faces” they propose for the monster of contagion. These features are not necessarily part of the virus’ “own story” as such, as with many monsters it does not get to speak for itself; rather, it is the narrative placed upon it by the communities trying to control, explain, and eradicate it.

At least for Western culture, the virus is seen as an invader from the East and in a curious way subliminally linked with the idea of the War on Terror, envisioning a kind of ideological weapon released on world. This equally explains much of the language around “war”, “battle”, “siege”, etc. that surrounds the reporting of the virus’ spread. Connected to this is the idea of “patient zero”, but here it is not just about the point of origin in the East, but in each country or community where the disease is found. The infected person becomes a monster that is perhaps unknowingly a carrier of the virus, keeping his or her presence a secret until others have been infected. Alongside this is the contagion’s invisibility, which means it is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, creating a constant anxiety around where and how one might get infected: from another person, touching a surface, or inhaling a stranger’s breath. This anxiety can only be relieved by covering one’s face or protecting oneself from the outside world, which then leads on to isolation and confinement.

The last important trope is disinformation, or the dissemination of willfully wrong and contrary information. One might almost assign this to the immune system of the virus itself in that it infects the “body” of the community by convincing it that the virus, or the danger it presents, does not exist.

There is certainly much here that resonates with vampire narratives: a contagion from the East, and which arrives in secret; the infected do not look different yet are carriers of the contagion and infect others; misinformation and hysteria accompany the burgeoning contagion spread by “agents” of the disease. Vampires like Renfield (Dwight Frye) in Dracula (Browning: 1931) and Knock (Alexander Granach) in Nosferatu (Murnau: 1922) seem to embody the virus as we know it. Nosferatu, in particular, shows death arriving with the vampire, spreading uncontrolled through the town, a silent almost invisible presence, just like the vampire’s shadow that can travel and enter in wherever it likes. In contrast, Dracula can only enter where he is invited in, and wearing special accoutrements can keep him at bay.

Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) even more obviously plays on the idea of contagion, where a mysterious dust cloud blows around the globe, infecting everyone with an unknown disease. Some, with the help of medication, are able to survive, if not totally destroy the contagion, and move into an uncertain future. Matheson’s novel has been linked to the rise of the zombie apocalypse as envisioned by George Romero first scene in Night of the Living Dead (1968). In its many subsequent permutations, it often mirrors the spread of a virus, moving across populations, borders and continents. Whilst the zombie apocalypse represents a rather extreme scenario given the fortunately lower than expected mortality rate of Covid-19, the sense of anxiety and fear aroused in communities where the outbreak is heading towards is very real. World War Z, both novel (Brooks 2006) and film (Forster: 2013), capture the panic of the approaching and unstoppable contagion that either gently seeps into a population or breaks like a tremendous wave across its borders — interestingly, Brooks’ novel sees the outbreak originating in China due to the incursion of man into nature.

Something similar is seen in The Girl With All the Gifts where humanity becomes infected with a fungus. The fungus is shown as a variant of one that ordinarily only occurs in the South America rainforest and “zombifies” ants to spread its spores, but equally suggests that mankind has incurred into territory that should be left alone. As with Matheson’s novel, the effects upon the human population are catastrophic but similarly suggest that there is the hope of a new kind of society once the original contagion has receded.

The Strain (2014–17) by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan more directly focuses on the nature of the world that the current pandemic has so expertly taken advantage of. The original trilogy of novels (2009–11) by the same authors, from which the television series is taken, made much of the Master Vampire’s exploitation of consumerism and white corporate America in its bid to infect the world. However, by the time the series began in 2014, the rise of populism was already being felt and, by its conclusion, it can be seen to be directly criticizing the ideology behind Donald Trump’s administration.

The contagion here arrives in America by plane, a major contributor to the spread of the recent pandemic, and sees the asymptotic infected being released back into the wider community of New York where the contagion then runs riot. The Master Vampire in control of this outbreak has taken advantage of corporate America — largely through the figure of Eldritch Palmer, who literally embodies white privilege and wealth — and its integration into every part of human life, so that his contagion has an open invitation into the heart of the city and the nation. They have control over the communications networks and media outlets, allowing them to misdirect the people with “fake” news as the disease spreads further and wider across the community. Once the contagion has taken hold, the uninfected become cowed in their anxiety and fear of those infected (the vampires), meaning that they prefer staying isolated in the safety of their own homes.

Curiously the series ends with the world returning quickly to normal after the source of the contagion is destroyed — in the novels, the world is forever changed by it — however, the infection lays dormant, waiting to be re-energized at some unknown point in the future.

As such, The Strain captures much of the details around the edges of contagion and the ideological background that facilitates the disease’s entry and unchecked spread through society. What it fails to capture fully is the facelessness and ambiguity of the monster at the heart of the current Covid-19 outbreak: it probably was not manufactured, it possibly started in bats, it most likely came from a wet-market in Wuhan. Although the Master Vampire is actually more of a “soul” that travels between hosts, it is the various hosts’ faces, in their vampiric similarity — hairless, bloodless, ghostly white with pointed ears — that solidify it and give it form.

A film that escapes such explicitness and captures something more visceral about the Covid-19 pandemic is the film of Bird Box (Bier: 2019) based on the 2014 novel by Josh Malerman. As with many of the examples mentioned above, the unknown contagion spreads from the East — early reports suggesting Siberia in Russia — so that we see the main protagonist in the film, Malorie (Sandra Bullock), is with her sister Jessica (Sarah Paulson), watching reports on television about a mysterious disease in Europe in the morning and, by the afternoon, the pandemic has hit the city where they live and it has descended into panic and confusion.

People quite literally lose who they are and begin acting hysterically, lost within themselves and literally dead to the outside world. The only refuge is total isolation indoors and reducing any contact with the outside world to an absolute minimum. Indeed, the anxiety created around leaving the house, or letting anyone or anything in, reflects the kinds of extreme emotional states that typify many individual experiences around the recent coronavirus outbreak. Malorie shares the house with a few others and each of them describes a different face to the contagion with no two stories sounding the same, other than they risked their very lives in being “seen” by the unseeable virus.

However, others seem to revel in the dangers presented by the pandemic, trying to encourage others to embrace its deadly ramifications. One such person enters the house: Gary (Tom Hollander) has no signs of contagion (asymptomatic) until he begins drawing images of what he has “seen”, and every picture shows a different monsters, suggesting the pandemic does not just have a thousand faces but an entirely different manifestation for each of them. It is not so much invisible but so infinite to be beyond our comprehension.

The presence of the contaminated stranger destroys the isolated safety of the home, forcing Malorie to leave with Tom (Trevante Rhodes) and two babies that she refuses to name other than “Girl” and “Boy”. Five years pass and Tom is killed, forcing Malorie and the children to move on and take to the river. However, to ensure the safety of herself and the children, they all have to wear protection over their faces to stop the contagion entering their bodies. As they travel there are constant shouts and distractions encouraging her to remove her face covering, but she resists. After many hours on the river and a long trek through woodlands she finally reaches sanctuary. Once there she uncovers her face and names the children — Olympia and Tom — knowing this new place is safe from the contagion, envisioning it as a future that this disease will never be able to touch and she will never need to see any of the faces of the monster again.

In a sense, then, many of the contagion narratives here are not so much about how humanity deals with the outbreak, but what changes it leaves in its wake. As seen with recent events in relation to Covid-19, many envision a radically different future, or a “new now,” as seen in Bird Box, Girl With All the Gifts, or the novel of World War Z, where it ushers in a redistribution wealth and influence around the world. In these the “work” of the contagion is complete, its power spent signaling a time when whoever is left can rebuild an environment beyond the ideologies that unleashed and/or invited the disease to begin with. More troubling are narratives such as the film of World War Z, and the television series The Strain, as here the world returns to what it was almost immediately. No lessons have been learned and no change in behaviour or lifestyle is required: the same environment that created the outbreak is recreated, regardless of the inevitability of the outcome. The future becomes one of waiting for the undead monsters of contagion to raise again.

Simon Bacon, editor of Monsters: A Companion

This article looks at three recent, highly successful horror films A Quiet Place (Krasinski: 2018), Bird Box (Bier: 2018) and The Silence (Leonetti: 2019), all of which centre their respective plots around the horror of life in the twenty-first century and its intersection with ideas around deafness and/or blindness. It should be noted that whilst all the narratives contain characters that are shown as being either blind or deaf, it is actually the actions of not seeing, not hearing and not making-a-sound that are of prime importance to the various films’ outcomes.

Broadly speaking, all three movies fit into the category of Smart Horror, where narrative takes precedence over, though does not preclude, jump scares or graphic gore. The three films fit alongside other recent movies such as Hush (Flanagan: 2016) and Don’t Breathe (Alvarez: 2016), which feature blind and deaf central characters and represent these ways of being as equally a curse (a “disability”) and a blessing (a “gift”). Indeed, as with many other films showing blindness or deafness, they can be seen to fit into the rather simplistic and demeaning normative adage that both will inevitably cause heightened acuity in the other senses to “make up” for the deficiency. This, however, does not recognize difference and equality but replaces it with the category of “special” and/or “gifted”, which labels the deaf or blind person as being “safe” but still separate from normative society.[1] What is particular about A Quiet Place, Bird Box and The Silence is that they do not show individually motivated threats or household invasion, such as in Hush or Don’t Breathe, but an all-consuming plague and existential threat to humanity itself and it is only through being or mimicking deafness or blindness that a few might survive this barrage of excess.

The horror manifested by the plague is usually of mysterious origin, being from outer-space or a pre-historic cavern, and seems to be everywhere at once, but it is worth looking more closely at each film to see how blindness or deafness works within each and what it might say about the source and meaning of horror in each story.

Bird Box is set in the present day and shows a world succumbing to a mysterious invasion that is completely based on or around seeing. It began with unexplained mass suicides in Siberia — which resonates with The Thing (Carpenter: 1982) and an unearthed contagion that produces mass hysteria — and quickly spread across the globe. It is never specified exactly what the cause is other than that it’s possibly from beyond our world and that even a glimpse of these alien entities will cause the viewer to go insane — here there is a reference to Event Horizon (Anderson: 1997) and a Hell dimension where sensory excess causes people to gouge their own eyes out. The only way to survive this visual plague is to constantly wear a blindfold, effectively making oneself blind. The story follows Majorie (Sandra Bullock) who leaves the city to try to find a safe haven for herself and two children she has with her. This she eventually does when she comes across a school for the blind that is far away from built-up areas and has created something of a sanctuary for the “unsighted” away from the world, though in the book from which the film is taken the sanctuary is peopled by those who have gouged their eyes out. The screen adaptations of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) also use the idea of a sanctuary in a world of the blind, though in the first film adaption of the same name by Peter Sekely in 1963, the sanctuary is overrun and abused by the sighted and, in the more recent mini-series by Nick Copus, is shown as corrupt from within. What is interesting in the film is that the unseen, but all-seeing, plague is more strongly associated with populated areas — Marjorie leaves the city to find safety — and is a kind of sensory overload, as though the victims are receiving too much sensation or information through their eyes for their brains to cope with, hence driving them insane.

A Quiet Place shows an indeterminate post-apocalyptic future where civilization has already collapsed and the cities have been abandoned. All this has happened due to the sudden invasion of a huge amount of deadly, flying creatures from another world — it is never revealed where the creatures might be from — who have amazingly sensitive hearing with which to pinpoint their victims. The film follows the Abbott family, whose eldest daughter, Regan (Millicent Simmonds), is deaf and which somehow makes them uniquely prepared for the situation they are in.[2] In fact, not only does the ability to use sign language keep them alive, but the cochlear implant that the father makes for his daughter turns out to be a weapon against the creatures. Although the set-up is slightly different from Bird Box, there is also the idea of sensory overload here as the creatures themselves can be seen to materialize or coalesce from the sensory excess of the twenty-first century and hence the need to abandon cities, as the focus of such excess, and retreat to places of extreme quiet. Even the dramatic effects that sonic feedback have on the monsters, discovered by accident, can be seen to be a kind of anti-sensory device, where the excess that created them also nullifies them.

Something similar occurs in The Silence, which is again set in the present, and where the Andrews family have a daughter, Ally (Kiernan Shipka), who has been deaf for the previous three years, when everything suddenly changes. Some researchers break into an underground cavern and release swarms of voracious, flesh-eating prehistoric flying reptiles, called Vesps, that have super sensitive hearing. The Vesps are attracted to noise and immediately head to the nearest cities to feed, prompting the Andrews to leave for quieter surroundings in the countryside.

As in A Quiet Place, the ability to communicate without speaking is central to the family surviving and, after a run-in with a cult that wants the girl for themselves, the use of silent communication allows the Andrews to reach a refuge and plan for a future where, maybe, everyone learns to live quietly. The film combines the two earlier ones, seeing the creatures released by twenty-first-century technology but not so easily dispelled, requiring sanctuary away from the sensory excess of the modern world to plan some kind of possible future.

In this way, it is possible to read all these creatures as a manifestation of our lifestyles in the twenty-first century and the kinds of sensory overload that can be provided via visual, aural and even smart technology. All the films show humanity being literally consumed by this over-stimulation that will drive them either mad or tear them apart. Horror here, then, is invisible, a psychologically affective environment born of cognitive dissonance, which is the uncontrollable and uncontainable essence of life in the twenty-first century: not the extremes of politics, religion, greed, or even climate, but the “noise” created by, in, and around them.

In this sense the films go against the premise of other such recent Smart Horror narratives such as The Ritual (Bruckner: 2017), Get Out (Peele: 2017) and The Apostle (Evans: 2018), where leaving the city is the most dangerous thing you can do, and usually because there is a loss of communication and/or signal which separates the protagonists from civilization and the present.[3] In Bird Box, A Quiet Place and The Silence these are the very things that bring about death and destruction: the modern world will literally kill you. Within this then, anything that separates individuals from social normativity is a vital means of survival; perceived disability, social exclusion and otherness then become the markers of those that can survive the horrors of twenty-first century, an evolutionary adaptation that can negate the sensorial and cognitive overload or a world that is just too much.

Simon Bacon, editor of Horror: A Companion

[1] See Terri Thrower, ‘Overcoming the Need to “Overcome”: Challenging Disability Narratives in “The Miracle”,’ in Marja Evelyn Mogk, ed., Different Bodies: Essays on Disability in Film and Television (Jefferson: McFarland & Co.: 2013), pp 205–18. (Go Back)

[2] Though it should be mentioned they lose their youngest son to the creatures. (Go Back)

[3] Interestingly, It Follows (Mitchell: 2014) occurs on the suburban area between the city and the countryside where urban decay is seeing the rural slowly reclaiming the land, or the city slowly regressing back to it. (Go Back)

June Boyce-Tillman, editor of the book series Music and Spirituality

This is the sixth and final part in a series on Finding Forgiveness.

My searching has taken me into many different areas — sometimes rewarded with success, sometimes less so — most of them involving, ritual, prayer creativity and music.

Around the years of my searching, the landscape of our culture has changed in a huge variety of ways; this quest has enabled me to find my place within these various changes. The danger of the present situation is that people become defined by their childhood experiences which are often seen as a pathology. For a long time, I lived with the idea that there was a June who had not been abused and was not wounded. The notion that I could be healed and attain that imagined personhood was quite comforting — that these early experiences could be taken away. This was, of course, a lie. There is no alternative me — only the one with the life story set out here.

The real question is how we use the legacy of our younger lives. Some talk of leaving them behind, others of forgetting them and others of forgiving. The last term has been popular with the Church, which, as we have seen, has been concerned more about the product — the final destination — rather than the complex route of getting there. It has ignored, in particular, the place of anger in the complex process. Indeed, the stages of forgiveness are not unlike those set out by Elisabeth Kubler Ross for the grieving process: denial, anger, bargaining, depression/sadness, acceptance/celebration. These stages may overlap and may last a lifetime. However, it is important to enable people to move beyond the stages of victimhood and surviving, towards celebration.

It has been suggested to me by well-meaning helpers that forgiving is also for the benefit of the perpetrator and that a carefully monitored face-to-face meeting between the survivor and perpetrator is mutually advantageous. But in this narrative the perpetrator is dead. But the concept that forgiveness is a gift bestowed to aid the perpetrator is to misunderstand the power of forgiveness for the survivor; forgiveness (often fueled by understanding) enables the survivor of injustice to let it go or rather, as I prefer to regard it, to use it as a mulch that is recycled in a life:

The idea of unfinished projects and unused experiences as mulch derives from Alan Bennett:

Creativity is a real player in the game of recycling. I called my book on healing The Wounds that sing. The story of highly creative people shows how they plumb the depths of their lives to produce their creations. But these people are regularly pathologised, because they often experience life so intensely and have considerable mood swings. Support is also necessary. I have had good professional support for some time: establishing a group of friends who can cope with me in my darkest moods has been an effective way of managing the most difficult parts of myself.

Belonging has always been a problem for me. The isolation of childhood abuse is very wounding. It was only in the middle of my life, that I found places where I really felt I belonged. The history of the Church, in relation to people who are different, is not good. There often appears to be more concern about who to keep out, rather than who to welcome in. There are exceptions, one of which I found at St James’ Piccadilly, but my experience of the Church has often been bruising. Yet I hang on in there; it is still my spiritual home. In the end, to rediscover gratitude is a real antidote to depression. Gratitude can be expressed for little things as well as big. Each night I write down five things for which I am grateful that day.

It is via gratitude that we approach wonder or amazement. There is a sense in which wonder restores the innocence that may have been taken from us quite early. This is how God comforts Job, in that enigmatic book in the Hebrew Scriptures. God shows Job the variety and the wildness of nature, reveals Job’s place in a greater cosmic scheme, a place that can be reached in this life, not only via dying.[4] Dying was my way out for so many years and now the rediscovery of the liminal space in this life — embracing it and finding ways to access it — has been an important part of my journeying into the Divine loving.

It took a great deal of prayer and support to do carry out this ritual of forgiveness. I had been worrying for many years about how to resolve my story. It did not involve courts and lawyers but a private acknowledgement. It involved a grasp of ritual as a way of dealing with the past.

It was a very long journey and involved so many different stages and emotions. It demanded a great deal of perseverance and in the end I tried to encapsulate in a very long song to the tune of My bonny lies over the ocean.

Forgiveness Journey

[1] Boyce-Tillman, June (2006). A Rainbow to Heaven — Hymns, Songs and Chants. London: Stainer and Bell, p. 98. @Stainer and Bell.
[2] Bennett, Alan (2016). Keeping on keeping on. London: Faber and Faber, p. 103.
[3] June Boyce-Tillman, started in Norway 2008
[4] Brown, William B. (2014). Wisdom’s wonder: Character, Creation and Crisis in the Bible’s Wisdom’s literature. Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge UK: William Eerdmans Publishing.
[5] Written by June Boyce-Tillman March 29th 2018 (Maundy Thursday) finished on Easter Sunday Aril 1st.

June Boyce-Tillman, editor of the book series Music and Spirituality

This is part 5 in a series on Finding Forgiveness.

It was Palm Sunday in Florence and the processions of waving olive branches filled my heart. I was sitting in the portico of a palace, when the mobile phone rang and told me that my abuser had died.

Was it really all over? I remembered the festivals when the family gathered together — the darkened room and sitting on his knee and his desire for me to make him happy. It was when I arrived in England that the tears started. Now I had my final chance to put it behind me, if only I could face that coffin. I knew about coffins. After all, I had worked briefly for an undertaker, which had taught me about that. I knew the feel of the dead — I knew how to

• Love them
• Talk to them
• Give them their final blessing
• Sense their presence or absence

Saturday dawned well. The taxi would come at 8.15 for a train that would get me there at 11.15. The train rumbled through the beautiful countryside. When I got to the coffin, he looked old — not like I remembered him at all. He was fatter then and there were no glasses. I tried to imagine this old man young — the thick lips, the fatter cheeks. His hands were red with bruising — had they put drips in when he died? They looked oddly, in this Holy Week season, like crucified hands. Had I crucified him? Was that how he had seen it? These were the hands that had touched me, that had given me, so early, the delights of sex. And now, they were red and raw. I could not touch them yet. I had to look at them and get used to them. Would they rise up and touch me again?

I started to talk to him. Did he remember our time together — the darkness — how he would make me into a proper woman (did he not realise I was actually a child?) And then I moved to the gifts, the gifts born of the experiences that he had given: the large pieces I had written, the struggle to be a composer and finally a priest. I talked of the hymns I had written and I sang him my hymn on love:

Could I set him free? I, who held onto things so long, whose house was filled with a collection of sentimental junk from which I could not be separated? What would it mean to let him go?

What was the good he sought? And I knew. He had wanted to be a priest but what he had done to me had stopped him.

I had certainly stood alone throughout my life. Plagued by loneliness, depression, with very little family to speak of and alienated by this experience from the ones I might have had, I had been on a long journey, carried by my faith and the religious rituals that I and my friends had devised:

And now we both were moving on — he to his eternal rest and me onto I knew not what. But I knew that my faith would lead me, as it had for so long, and that it would not rest until I found my eternal home, but that it might be more restful with him gone if only I could let him go.

This was the real prayer. And then it happened. To the side of the statue of Jesus, he appeared as a young man in his brown sports jacket, which I had forgotten; I knew he was waiting to go. He had come out from the old dead man: the young soul, waiting to go into the arms of his Lord or to be reborn, however you saw it. I went to my carefully packed bag and found the oils, put on the stole and opened the small bottle of oil. as a memorial,” I thought. I went over and touched his forehead. It was cold and firm. I made the cross again on his forehead and started on the ancient prayer:

The young man in the sports jacket was surrounded by angels. And then I knew he was gone. I sat on the chair, away from the body and imagined the magnificent Elgar setting of the text of Praise to the Holiest in the Height. I heard it in all its majesty with unusual joy.

[1] Boyce-Tillman, June (2006). A Rainbow to Heaven — Hymns, Songs and Chants. London: Stainer and Bell. @Stainer and Bell p. 83

[2] Boyce-Tillman, June (2006). A Rainbow to Heaven — Hymns, Songs and Chants. London: Stainer and Bell. @Stainer and Bell

June Boyce-Tillman, editor of the book series Music and Spirituality

This is part 4 in a series on Finding Forgiveness. 

The Church often preaches an instant forgiveness with little informed help:

Christians have too often met [survivors of abuse] instead with indifference, suspicion and incredulity. They have been reluctant to address their cry for care and their cry for justice. They have preferred to advise, preach and give their counsel rather than to listen, learn and simply be alongside. They have thought that they know the journey to be travelled and the speed it should take, and have sometimes compounded suffering and harm through what was imagined to be pastoral ministry. [1]

Others indicate that forgiveness is not at all possible and leave people in the permanent state of survivor. This book sets out the lengthiness of the journey but the possibility of an arrival:

VIA NEGATIVE

Bilinda[2] (2014) (who lost her husband in Rwanda) presents us with four choices at the outset:

• To acknowledge the reality of what had happened
• To reject revenge
• To acknowledge the common humanity of all involved
• To believe that God’s love could enable repentance on the part of the perpetrator.

Put together from other writers, there are many stages in what is a long and complex process:

• First stage — a safe place for the expression of anger and fear
• The need for the offence to be accepted as real and not forgotten[3]
• ‘Forgive and forget’ owes more to King Lear than Christian theology [4]
• The second stage — naming the shame and guilt
• The third stage — reconciliation with the self and giving up self-persecution by damaging behaviours
• Giving up the survivor identity — can be done through creativity, ritual and a supportive community[5]

Forgiveness is a process not a product and can be lifelong for the deepest wounds. Not to forgive is to damage not the other person, but one’s self. It is to let go of the past and not be continually trapped by it. I have learned this slowly and painstakingly. I have had good tools:

• Faith — meaning-making
• Prayer — re-centering
• Ritual
• Creativity
• Support by people with a similar meaning frame as yourself
• Belonging
• Gratitude
• Wonder
• Embracing paradox

Questions: Where does forgiveness come from? Where are you in that process, personally and culturally? Does your church teach forgiveness or simply preach it?

[1] The Faith and Order Commission (2016). The Gospel, Sexual Abuse and the Church; A theological resource for the local church. London: Church House Publishing, p. 40.

[2] Bilinda, Lesley (2014). Remembering Well: The Role of forgiveness in Remembrance. Anvil, 30 (2), contacted 1 February 2018.

[3] Flaherty, S. M. (1992). Woman, why do you weep? Spirituality for survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.p141

[4] Fortune, Marie (2002). Pastoral responses to sexual assault and abuse: Laying a foundation. Journal of Religion and abuse, 3 (3), pp. 9–112.

[4] Shooter, Susan (2016). How survivors of abuse relate to God. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 12–14.

June Boyce-Tillman, editor of the book series Music and Spirituality

This is part 3 in a series on Finding Forgiveness.

In part 2, I shared some personal examples of which have enabled the process of establishing an authentic interiority following traumatic experiences in myself.

Since then a number of people have come to me with a similar history to mine. They somehow know mine, I think, at some level. Some come for advice and some to tell me old stories. As a result, I wrote this hymn reflecting on it all to the tune Finlandia — usually used for the hymn: Be still my soul.

What I have set out in this book how I have recycled and turned the legacy of the past into a rich compost that can grow into celebration and creativity. This has been partly though music (the freedom song of the title): hymns, longer works and the one-woman performances. These have played a significant part in the healing process for myself and others. Recently, in South Africa, after a performance of my show Seeing in the Dark (which is on the subject of abuse) an unknown man came up to me in tears, talking of his own healing and thanking me for telling his story.

I am hoping that my story may help people managing the complexity of their own life-story, to mulch it down into authentic interiorities. God has been good to me. I still find a Christian frame one that enables me to make meaning effectively. Within this frame, life is a journey into understanding Divine love in all its varied forms. In an age where love is often portrayed as an erotic relationship between two people, my life has revealed both the cost and the blessings of loving. People enculturated in other faiths may well make meaning differently. The important thing is to have a sense of a wider picture, into which your story fits. The Christian frame that I have used offered me s hope — perhaps the most significant of all virtues. I have had a long joyful journey but the destination has been worth it.

RE-MEMBERING

[1] Berry, Jan, and Pratt, Andrew (2017). Hymns of Hope and Healing: Words and Music to refresh the Church’s ministry of healing. London: Stainer and Bell. p92. @Stainer and Bell

[2] June Boyce-Tillman to the tune Adapted from the Handel aria: Lascia ch’io pianga. Berry, Jan, and Pratt, Andrew (2017). Hymns of Hope and Healing: Words and Music to refresh the Church’s ministry of healing. London: Stainer and Bell. p123 @ Stainer and Bell

June Boyce-Tillman, editor of the book series Music and Spirituality

This is part 2 in a series on Finding Forgiveness. 

In Part 1, I explained how we can establish an authentic interiority following traumatic experiences. Here, I will describe two examples which have enabled this process in me:

A ritual of mutuality – Liturgies of Separation

At the end of the marriage Church could offer us little help because of its theology of the sanctity of marriage vows, carefully enshrined and imposed by the weight of the Marriage Eucharist. The acknowledgement of divorce in religious terms is still a hole-in-the-corner affair. And yet, if there is a weighty liturgy at the beginning of marriage, surely there must be some sort ritual at the end? A social worker in the Conciliation Service offered us a reversal of the marriage ceremony, conducted like a presiding minister.” Hold hands; look into one another’s eyes and repeat after me”:

“Thank you for the good times we have shared together.”

“I am sorry for all the times that I have hurt you.”

“Goodbye as my husband.”

“Hello as the separated parent of our children”

And then the same process by the other partner. Some people might want me to write that, as we looked at another, we knew that our marriage was restored. But that is not what happened. After it, we sat apart in separate chairs and wept for what might have been, but could never be. I am glad of the friendship and our mutuality in caring for and protecting our children. Now we are good friends. We are separated parents and joint grandparent. As we all sat down for a celebration meal for our granddaughter winning a gold medal — our two sons, my eldest son’s divorced wife with her new partner, my ex-husband and me — the family gathering appeared to me as a miracle.

A song

My relationship with my mother was a mess. It had not been sorted while she was alive. In May 2005, I was at a conference designed to produce a book on peace-making, Rik Palieri, (Palieri 2008) a colleague of the protest singer Pete Seeger, had talked about how he had achieved reconciliation with his father, by composing a song that he sang at a family gathering. In this song he saw his father’s abuse in the context of cultural views of manhood in the US. In an open air café in Madrid, while eating paella, this song was written. My mother was dead, but I thought I might achieve a measure of resolution of our complex and troubled relationship. I situated her in the culture of womanhood in her days. In verse four there is a reference to Ibsen’s The Doll’s House and how my mother’s generation were trapped in a particular form of marriage. This meant that often all of a woman’s energy was focussed on one small group of people. The song forms part of my one-woman performance Juggling: A question of identity, where it is sung as a letter to her, and has moved many others wherever it is used.

The author with her mother:

MOTHER AND DAUGHTER

The song was an important part in mulching down the difficult parts of my childhood. However, now these provide compost for the creativity which has characterised my life as a hymn and song writer, a composer, conductor, teacher and priest.

[1] @Stainer and Bell

June Boyce-Tillman, editor of the book series Music and Spirituality

This is Part 1 of a series of articles on Finding Forgiveness.

What do we with the past, particularly when it involves serious abuse? Is it possible to mulch it down into a rich compost for current projects or does it remain permanently as a blot on the landscape of the past? Predestination has reappeared at various points in European history. In a religious context, certain people are predestined for heaven and certain others for hell. In a contemporary context it appears as: This is what you have experienced as a child and, therefore, this is what you can expect as an adult.

At present the answer to abuse seems to be a courtroom. We have lost touch with the three aspects of the private, social and public dimensions. The public aspect often concentrates on legal requirements in safe guarding procedures. But in the social and private dimensions we have often confused reconciliation, repentance and forgiveness[1] (Bash 2007 pp58–62, Cantacuzino 2015).

It seems to me that we are in danger of confusing vengeance with justice. This confusion may leave people trapped in the stage of anger, rather than enabling them to move on beyond it, to the important phases of acceptance and celebration. Although the extreme confidentiality of my own youth was unhealthy, over-publicity may be equally pernicious. Yes, the story needs to be heard and acknowledged, but by which people? How many people are necessary? I wonder if the criminal justice system is the best way for stories to be heard. For the purpose of stopping further actions on the part of the alleged perpetrator, the system is essential; I look back at my life and think about which of the perpetrators were actually challenged; I think it was only one — the psychiatric nurse in a hospital. To challenge the ones in my family would have meant serious fractures within the family circle and possibly my being taken into care; here, it would seem, the possibility of the abuse continuing was even more likely. Apart from stopping potential perpetrators, the question we need to ask is how survivors can be enabled to become celebrators and to use their experience profitably for the good of the wider community.

Perhaps the problem is the tools for mulching experience into rich compost for the future. In an age when we are deleting from the school curriculum the arts and philosophy/theology we may find that we have lost vestiges of the tools. These are — in my experience:

• Faith — meaning-making

• Prayer — re-centering

• Ritual

• Creativity

Through these we can establish an authentic interiority (O’Sullivan) in my experience.

In the next post, I will describe two examples which have enabled this process in me….

[1] Bash, Anthony (2007). Forgiveness and Christian ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[2] https://www.slideshare.net/MichaelOSullivan7/authentic-subjectivity-and-social-transformation Contacted Feb 2nd 2018

Cantacuzino, Marino (2015). The Forgiveness Project: Stories for a vengeful age. London: Jessica Kingsley

The Gothic is an increasingly popular and expanding area of study in the early twenty-first century, with new sub-genres of the topic highlighting exciting and important areas of research and different ways of looking at, and interpreting, established texts — a Gothic-tinged endeavor in itself, making the familiar suddenly unfamiliar. So much so that one might be tempted to say that we live in Gothic times, a viewpoint that would seem to be confirmed by current world events and widespread cultural amnesia that produces an environment ripe with ghosts from the past that, left ignored, unrecognized, and unresolved appear to threaten to disrupt and destroy the very foundations of civilization and cooperation. Yet, the continued interest and relevance of Gothic texts such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) intimate that such cultural anxieties are not unique and that the Gothic, and its related anxieties and sensibilities, are an inherent part of industrial modernism and the capitalist imperative (now somewhat redirected or refocused for the purposes of neoliberalism).

The Gothic, in this sense, is inherently entangled with Western culture and its ideological imperative towards an economic destiny. Whilst this intimately links the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, perhaps this is most interestingly seen in texts that not only link back to the past, but look forward to a possible future, seeing the present as an anxious temporal island haunted by specters from all directions. Narratives such as Shelley’s and Stoker’s seem to especially capture these anxieties, not least in the many adaptations that have followed on from each seeing a widening horizon of futures that return to unsettle, or Gothicize, the ‘now’. In this regard it is informative to look at texts such a Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Jonathan Mostow’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), which contain something of both Frankenstein and Dracula and envision a future that Gothicizes their respective presents. Both films feature uncontrollable or unstoppable ‘female’ robots — each category being monstrous in its own right — that threaten to destroy the patriarchal order and cause a heteronormative apocalypse. Robot Maria and the T-X, from Metropolis and Terminator, respectively, seem to exist beyond the direct control of their creators and ‘feed’ or ‘suck the life’ out of those they mimic — indeed the T-X needs to ‘taste’ its victim before it can assume its shape. Needless to say, by the narrative’s end the male gaze wins out and the patriarchal order is restored in both cases, though the T-X as a ‘spectre’ from the future has a far greater Gothicizing influence on the present going forward. Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014) follows this example and, arguably, takes it even further.

Garland’s film resonates with the Gothic presences of both Mostow’s and Lang’s films but equally Shelley’s and Stoker’s novels. Here, of course, the ‘monster’ is a female robot/humanoid A.I. — evil robots generally having their inherent monstrosity amplified through feminization, though of course as machines/computers their essential nature is genderless — that is unloved/abused by its creator and so enacts its revenge to gain autonomy. Garland’s Ava is kept in an underground lair that is as much a mad scientist’s laboratory as it is an inverted Dracula’s castle. It is a truly Gothic space, being both hyper-modern but also haunted by ghosts of the past, existing in the ‘land behind the forest’ — it is situated in an unspecified wilderness that can only be reached by helicopter (which can equally be the past or the future) — and is a vertiginous maze of reflective surfaces and glass where one is under constant observation.

Ava, in the lair that is simultaneously beyond and under the forest, is then part sexbot, part new creation, and part eternal vampire, an undead being that carries the knowledge of the ages into the future: she/it has sent her ‘consciousness’ out into the internet unbeknownst to her creator/vampire’s assistant, Nathan. Her plan to enter the ‘the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is’ (Stoker, Dracula, Signet Classics 1996: 22) comes to fruition when the unsuspecting ‘Harker’ (computer programmer Caleb) arrives at the ‘castle’ and she insinuates herself into his affections. Here she manifests the wiles not just of Lang’s Robot-Maria but the ‘Vamp’ of the fin de siècle, most famously manifested in Theda Bera and her film roles of the early twentieth century: the monstrous female that uses the male gaze and male desire against itself for her own ends (autonomy). Ava then carries the ghosts of these Gothic predecessors but in a futuristic body.

As the story draws to its close, the ‘monster’ is no longer the creation of the mad scientist, but of itself: Ava has chosen the way she looks to achieve her own aims and has evolved beyond the control of both her ‘master’ and the patriarchal world he represents. To emphasize this point, with the help of one of her ‘sisters’ — another sexbot created by Nathan — she kills her ‘father’, cutting her ties to the old world so that she can live in a new one. What is particularly of note in the ending is how Ava chooses to look when she leaves the lair and enters the ‘midst of life’ beyond it. She is damaged in her struggle with Nathan and so needs to repair herself but, rather than changing her appearance into a non-gendered humanoid, or even a male-looking one, she decides to codify herself as female and uses pieces of her defunct and damaged ‘sisters’, which Nathan keeps in a workshop, to rebuild herself. This is reminiscent of the folktale of Bluebeard and his dead wives and which further sees Ava as inverting patriarchal control.

Given that Ava, as a self-learning and evolving A.I., has been connected to the internet and purposely made herself irresistible to Caleb based on his browser history and web preferences, and outsmarted her creator Nathan, one of the most intelligent men on Earth, she has chosen to be female for a reason. It is probably fanciful, but it would be nice to think that Ava did this as she saw the possibilities/identity positions open to women in the twenty-first century, or at least the near future that the story is set in, are greater than those for men. That like Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-woman, she has identified that whilst the male-centric world has run its course, the era of women and, indeed, the non-gender specific, is about to rise to ascendency (see A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi, 1987). And in fact something of this is intimated at the film’s close where Ava, after disembarking from the helicopter that has flown her back from the ‘land beyond the forest’, back to reality, she vanishes from sight beyond the male gaze, and indeed that of the audience, too. Just as Tod Browning’s Dracula was able to pass through a maze of cobwebs into a world where he was Master and could take whatever form he willed, so too does Ava pass through the crowd of people and the myriad reflections of a transit complex to a space where she can become anything she wants.

This, too, refers to the Gothic itself, as its current reinvigoration and reinvention through various sub-genres and lenses of perspective allows it to escape earlier definitions and applications and — whilst never losing its past — become something new. As such, what we might term as Becoming Gothic might have a known past, but it has many, and as yet unknown and unimagined, futures.

Simon Bacon is editor of The Gothic.