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Lost Bodies

The original research contribution in this piece is its reconfiguration of the classic and modern psychological thriller (Crime and Punishment, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, The Killer Inside Me, Psycho et al), as a contemporary post-modern, metaphysical thriller. Using post-colonialist theory (Fanon, Said) and feminist/post-feminist (Sedgwick, Butler) constructions of identity, it proposes the serial killer as the result of social manufacture and defines his robotic, programmed behaviour as the result of the social formation of masculinity.

Research traced the character of the killer protagonist in fiction, from classical through Romantic and Modernist literature to contemporary Post-Modern versions. It examined the effects of isolation, industrialism and class on the formation of the archetypal character of the serial killer, taking as its predominant symbols the opposition of metal and flesh. It included war and the study of the soldier in action, especially the slaughter of World War 1. One of the killer’s inevitable actions, burial, especially where it referred to the body, became a key motif:

…buried bodies must make fertile ground in any fiction, but especially

in work dealing with the missing, the haunted or the psychologically interred.

Lost Bodies/Social Critique: a critical introduction, unpublished, 2011

This investigation was undertaken within the frame of current debates on the representation of the male in fiction. Ultimately this gave rise, in the original fiction, to the portrayal of a ‘hero’ as a series of false fronts in the sense of unyielding outer surfaces: armour, glass, knives, tools, tiles, stone and lack of communication. These outer skins cut off internal humanity and prevent any kind of a breakthrough between spirit and body, thought and flesh. Over-determined, the killer male (and, possibly, female) is condemned to function along ever-faster pre-programmed lines: to undergo a spiral of killing, and endure escape or capture.