Abstract
S.P. Somtow’s novel The Other City of Angels (2008) portrays Bangkok as a Gothic metropolis: a city stuck between illusion and reality, where dreams and nightmares come to life, simultaneously backwards and modern, spiritual and material, and full of peculiarities that make one doubt whether such a place exists at all. It is a temple to consumerism filled with fortune tellers and high society serial killers that for Somtow, a composer himself, can best be expressed through the jarringly haunting sounds of Béla Bartók’s music. The Other City of Angels (2008) is a modern retelling of the Gothic tale of Bluebeard’s wife and her fatal discovery of her husband’s dark secret, and – true to its Gothic origins – it is filled with romance, terror, and laughter. This paper focuses on the novel’s comic dimension and discusses Somtow’s use of dark humour and the Gothic grotesque as a strategy to exoticize Bangkok for foreign readers by simultaneously reinforcing and defying Western stereotypes of Bangkok as the Oriental city, once (in)famously described in the Longman dictionary as the city of temples and prostitutes (Independent, 6 July 1993). The paper also explores the way comic elements are used to offset the critical commentary on class division and social inequality that are seen as ingrained in the fabric of Thai culture and further aggravated by the materialism and consumerism characteristic of contemporary Thai society.
Highlights
S.P Somtow’s Gothic landscapesW riting exclusively in English, S.P
This certainly can be said of Somtow’s Bangkok-themed works, most notably The Other City of Angels – a novel that originally appeared as a series written for The Nation newspaper during the 1990s, was first published in book format in 2003 as Bluebeard’s Castle, and five years later reprinted under its current title
This paper proposes to read Somtow’s exoticization of Bangkok and its inhabitants in terms of a self-Orientalising gesture used as a strategy to offset the critique of social inequality inherent in Thai culture and further aggravated by a materialism and consumerism characteristic of contemporary Thai society
Summary
Gelder observes that the fiction of Somtow articulates Peter Brophy’s concept of “horrality,” providing the readers with a haphazard collection of “horror, textuality, morality, hilarity” (Brophy quoted in Gelder, 2001, p.136) This certainly can be said of Somtow’s Bangkok-themed works, most notably The Other City of Angels – a novel that originally appeared as a series written for The Nation newspaper during the 1990s, was first published in book format in 2003 as Bluebeard’s Castle, and five years later reprinted under its current title. 2 The Thai name of Bangkok: Krung Thep Maha Nakhon means “the city of angels.” 3 Somtow’s grandfather's sister was a cousin and consort of King Vajiravudh of the Chakri dynasty He was born in Thailand, Somtow’s first encounter with Thai culture took place in the early 1960s when he returned to Bangkok as a stranger to his own country, unable even to speak the language. The discussion incorporates Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism and Bakhtinian carnivalesque grotesque, and is informed by relevant Gothic criticism
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