The abhuman

Summary

A naked man was lying on the floor, his arms and legs stretched wide apart, and bound to pegs that had been hammered into the boards. The body was torn and mutilated in the most hideous fashion, scarred with the marks of red-hot irons, a shameful ruin of the human shape. But upon the middle of the body a fire of coals was smouldering; the flesh had been burnt through. The man was dead, but the smoke of his torment mounted still, a black vapour.

“The young man with spectacles,” said Mr. Dyson.

Arthur Machen, The Three Imposters (p. 353)

As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (p. 387)

The topic of this book is the ruination of the human subject. Such a ruination, figured in the most violent, absolute, and often repulsive terms, is practiced insistently, almost obsessively, in the pages of British Gothic fiction at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Or perhaps it would be more precise to say that the topic of this book is the ruination of traditional constructs of human identity that accompanied the modeling of new ones at the turn of the century.