On Harrowing in Dead Europe

ABSTRACT Dead Europe (2005) is a book about the harrowing of Isaac. The anti-Semitic logics of the novel inflect the familial curse that proceeds in the wake of Elias’s death, and the curse that haunts Isaac offers a re-emergence of a murderous anti-Semitic past. Yet this moment also confronts the critical reader with a choice: to embrace this supernatural motif of the curse or to shun it as psychopathology. Favouring the former, this article draws on the resources of Lacanian psychoanalysis and post-Marxist theory to analyse how this curse remains an exemplary trope. The argument will trace how Isaac is harrowed by the curse and, therein, ask what it means for Isaac to be harrowed. By looking again at the construction of the curse in Dead Europe, this article will examine some of the critical ideas that are uncovered by the novel’s supernaturalism.


Introduction
Since the publication of Dead Europe in 2005, Christos Tsiolkas has gone on to become a prominent author of literary fiction, winning numerous literary prizes with this and successive novels.Tsiolkas's storytelling matters because it confronts the contradictions, perversions and maladies of contemporary Australian society and global political order alike.Indeed, Dead Europe is perhaps the novel for understanding Australian culture and society as a microcosm of the problems facing global economic, political and religious forces in the 21st century: the crisis of liberal democratic capitalism, the distrust of political cultures, particularly in democratic nations, and the collapse of faith in organised religion.Unlike most of Tsiolkas's other novels, Dead Europe contains many elements that position it closer to speculative fiction than to literary fiction.While these categories are not mutually exclusive, the overriding commonality for many works in either camp is their commitment to deploying figurative language in the style of lyrical realism: they are all exercises in the modern realist novel.
This critique of Dead Europe targets how the novel's realism brushes up against its fantastic or speculative tropes, especially the curse cast upon Isaac's family by the vengeful spirit of the murdered Elias.The unfolding of the curse creates a disturbing image of a forgetful historical consciousness at the whims of atavism.I aim to offer a reading of Dead Europe against the grain of focusing on responsibility for Elias's death that has so dominated the criticism of this novel by instead emphasising the metanarrative of the curse through a view to the material of the novel itself.The discussion begins by elaborating the literary and critical contexts of Dead Europe.It then examines the political ontology that frames the numerous scenes of abjection in the novel by paying close attention to the narrative function and operation of the curse.The discussion then closes with a critical reappraisal of the function of the curse.Dominating all aspects of this argument is the way in which the curse harrows Isaac; the etymology of this term provides some new ways to approach the curse in contemporary critical milieux.Dead Europe is a turning point for Tsiolkas's body of work.This novel appeared in print a decade after Loaded (1995), and three years after The Devil's Playground (2002), both of which engage with the notions of psychosexual awakening that also radiate from Dead Europe's protagonist, Isaac.Dead Europe precedes the better-known The Slap (2008), but more importantly, it marks the end of Tsiolkas's dramaturgy with only one of his seven plays appearing in the wake of the novel, whereas previous scripts were performed in the same year of release as other works: The Jesus Man novel and Elektra AD theatre piece both appeared in 1999, and the Fever and Dead Caucasians plays appeared in 2002 with the release of The Devil's Playground critique.Tsiolkas's most recent novel at the time of this article, 7 1/2 (2021), shows his continued engagement with the tropes of memory and history that he previously explored in Dead Europe.

Dead Europe
The plot of Dead Europe follows Isaac, a university graduate and photographer, as he travels to Europe to disperse his father's ashes in his Greek homeland.Set in the present day, the novel invokes historical traces of anti-Semitism during the Second World War to thread a complex family narrative around the postwar migration of Isaac's parents to Australia.Popular reviews of the novel have tended to defer this dramatic impetus of Isaac's European tour to an antipodean view of Europe and its Australian diasporas.This emphasis is quite at odds with the novel's fictocritical lambasting of such a binary illusion.The novel shifts between two perspectives that tell the story of the time before and after migration.The shift between these story arcs towards the present-time narrative of Isaac constructs the transgenerational guilt that haunts his psyche in an era of hyperindividualism.While the novel is written in the style of lyrical realism, Lucia's narrative of the time before migration tends to demonstrate a more poetic style, whereas Isaac's narrative is more narrowly realist.
Dead Europe is a postcolonial novel insofar as it confronts colonialism, diasporas and exile.That said, it is also a speculative novel, and this literary style underscores the importance of examining postcolonial elements in the novel.The curse is the thing that tends to draw the "speculative" label to Dead Europe.The core concern with such postcolonial fiction is that the magical realist conventions it embraces risk trapping the colonial subject within the traces of the past rather than affirming a transformation of an identity politics (that is, Isaac's Greek-Australian heritage) into a struggle for social recognition, thereby coming to terms with the past by a working through of its contents in the present.1

Critical Reception and the Harrow
The past decade of criticism on Tsiolkas's Dead Europe shows a concentrated, almost fetishistic, interest in the cultural logics of the ideologies refracted by the design and story of the novel: capitalism, globalisation, Eurocentrism and anti-Semitism.In this critical space, the more popular and public reviews have tended to focus exclusively on the thematic development of anti-Semitism in the novel.This populist critique holds that Tsiolkas's thematic deployment of anti-Semitism was either misguided or deeply problematic, less so for the novel and more so for the author himself. 2 As a work of modernist fiction, where literary art is set to the task of provocation, this air of intentional fallacy fails to adequately capture the necessarily speculative tone of the novel.
In popular reviews, the narrative of Dead Europe is sometimes circumscribed through a critic's fantasised image of Tsiolkas.These popular reviews of Dead Europe tend to hinge on an either/or distinction: either the novel is read as a less-than-subtle confrontation with the racist underpinnings of neoliberal capitalism in which its audience is largely complicit, or the novel is reduced to the act of storytelling as a kind of bribe to allow Tsiolkas to pass the most inflammatory notions on to his readers.The primary condition for both sides of this either/or decision is that the novel fails to satisfy either requirement.As critics such as Andrew McCann have noted, the cosmopolitanism of Dead Europe fragments its claim to cultural pluralism by reducing society to economy, albeit an economy of blood in a mauvaise foi (bad faith) that condenses in Isaac's vampiric arc in the novel. 3This trope of bad faith is reduced by reviewers such as Les Rosenblatt, Jeff Sparrow and Ian Syson, and even the much-maligned Robert Manne, to a kind of double blackmail. 4The first ploy is to bind the figurative language used in the narrative to an indexical view of the world inhabited by the author, such that the critics' fantasies of Tsiolkas's authorial ego as a storyteller become what is read in the "fictive" quality of Dead Europe's narrative.This move is then followed by critics dismissing the novel and its author through the supposedly "odious" deployment of figurative language to pursue a topic as visceral and maligned as anti-Semitism.The prevalence of this position in these reviews is indicative of a tendency to read as if the story of Dead Europe (and perhaps literary fiction more broadly) were somehow representationally authentic and/ or autobiographical for the author.The status of the story of Dead Europe as "fiction" is elided by such an argument.Therefore, there is a need to recover this "fictional" status of Dead Europe and redeem its primacy for understanding the novel as part of a speculative literary genre that includes other stories that regularly deploy tropes such as Isaac's curse.
Many speculative fictions, especially vampire and ghost stories, contain haunting as a leitmotif that harrows its characters.Harrowing is a useful concept here because it at once connotes the traumatic impact of the haunting-often felt through kinship ties, their disintegration or their embodied realisation, as in Dead Europe or Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872)-and the functional tip of a tattooing apparatus that inscribes its mark upon the body of a subject, as in Franz Kafka's In the Penal Colony (1919).Yet there is a longer genealogy to this term "harrow" that reaches to Middle and Old English, where it is largely used in reference to raking in a harvest. 5In the modern conjugation of harrowing, this archaic meaning of the collection and transformation of a resource in the world is displaced, transforming the connotation of harrowing from an act performed by a harvester, a harrower, into an act performed on a person, one who is harrowed.This modern inversion of harrowing allows us to understand the haunting and the act of reading Tsiolkas's Dead Europe as a speculative fiction.
To begin this investigation of the curse, we must begin by asking who is harrowed in Dead Europe, and by whom.At a descriptive level, we may say that the ghost of Elias haunts Isaac's photographs as the curse grows to its full effect with Isaac's vampirism in the second act of the narrative.Elias's ghostly visage stands as a figuration of the abrogation of a symbolic debt owed by Isaac's lineage, who chose to abuse and murder the child who anachronistically reappears in the present not as a "history of the past" but as a "condition of the future" for Isaac by distorting his photographs.These distortions of Isaac's photographs displace the conventional view of atavism as a purely genetic phenomenon by uprooting its effects and letting them roam in a psychohistorical narrative.On closer inspection, it appears that the harrowing of Isaac by Elias's ghost opens a way for the novel to construct and serve Isaac with the message of his unconscious desire rather than a throwback to a forgotten past.The first half of Isaac's narrative arc involves a constant pressure for meaningful change, to become Other in the present.The way that Isaac desires this transition changes over the course of the early chapters, and by the time Elias begins haunting Isaac's photographs, we suddenly find this desire in an inverted form: the realisation that the Other (Elias) was veiled by the perpetratorless crime of its own disappearance.For Isaac's narrative, Elias is ghostly, inconsistent, a rumour, and what Isaac attains in his vampiric episode is instead an Otherness-living with the silent needs inflicted by the curse-rather than the exorcism of the haunting.This is the properly harrowing quality of the haunting: it shows Isaac's desire to be the desire of the Other, thereby abandoning Isaac's agency as he is overcome by the curse.

The Political Ontology of (In)Human Europe
While the construction of the curse in Dead Europe is unique to the novel's plot, the way that it engenders a discussion about the treatment of disenfranchised persons such as Elias is not uncommon to "canonical" vampire fiction.The narrative that Tsiolkas constructs around Isaac's perverse journey contains the tensions between social and sexual relations that may remind readers of Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, for example. 6To understand how this desire functions in Dead Europe, it may be useful to take a slight detour through this allied vampiric text to draw out a point of comparison that clarifies the "modernism" of Tsiolkas's novel.
In Carmilla, the eponymous villain is fascinating to both the mature narrator and various characters in the story.This fascination grows into fear and revulsion, and eventually condenses as a violent execution in retribution for Carmilla's murder of the general's niece.This drama takes place against the backdrop of a bourgeois society that injects privilege into the general and his niece so as to, supposedly, solicit our sympathy.
The setting of the story is marked by an ennui for its impoverishment in a time of wealth.The story begins with the following description of the capitalist social fabric of the nation of Styria: "In Styria, we, though by means magnificent people, inhabit a castle, or schloss.A small income, in that part of the world, goes a great way … But here, in this lonely and primitive place, where everything is so marvellously cheap, I really don't see how ever so much more money would at all materially add to our comforts, or even luxuries." 7The general use of wealth is here called into question alongside a setting that is split between the aristocratic schloss (castle) and the milieu of primitivism for, we might assume, the peasants of Styria.Therefore, we are thoroughly within a bourgeois view that seeks to control the social order; the scene offers the illusion that the "primitive" social order will stay the same even if money loses its value.
While the aesthetics of Le Fanu's novella move through this bourgeois texture, there is something more to discern here about the way this situation is defined by its condition of surplus value.Unlike a hazy utopia of democratic equality, the situation of Styria is described as primitive, suggesting that the situation remains inequitable despite the accumulation of surplus value.In this way, surplus value is directly linked to the iniquity of the story's setting by its surplus rather than substantive status-"I really don't see how ever so much more money would at all materially add to our comforts, or even luxuries." 8f we follow what Marx has argued about surplus value, it may help us to understand how such a paradox can persist.Marx makes an acute observation of this function of surplus value in the Grundrisse, where he locates a connection between the falling rate of profit and the inevitability of capitalism's ultimate self-destruction by its own historical emergence.For Marx, a system of private exchange such as capitalism does not relinquish its reliance on a propertyless labour force.For Le Fanu's depiction of Styria, the emphasis on the value of its economic exchange by its own surplus labour is what remains unaccounted for in the novella.The narrative becomes a ghost story precisely where the hunt for Carmilla supposes that she resides in a tomb that is never assigned ownership in the story.That is to say, a properly propertyless agent occupies some possession otherwise denied to her-Carmilla is characterised here as a perversion, a void version of the right to property, to be eradicated for the ongoing exploitation of Styria's social contract by its bourgeois hierarchies.And yet she irrepressibly rises from this grave.
Where Le Fanu's ghost story drills down to the social iniquity that came to define many of the stories told by Irish novelists in the 19th and 20th centuries, Tsiolkas takes a much more postmodern approach to the institutions of art that the mode of the novel is itself a part.9This dynamic of Dead Europe is most apparent in the way that the novel uses the institutionalised art spaces referenced in Isaac's narrative during the early sections of the novel to locate his photography practice in a bourgeois context.
Isaac's photography is most pointedly complicated by Sal Mineo's pornography because it revels in the realism of bodies reduced to their "Thingliness", realising the obscenity at the heart of the scopophilic consumption of art in the bourgeois gallery: to see differently, to unveil the soft ideological underbelly of liberal democratic capitalism, to show the sublime objects of this liberal ideology for what they are, if in extremis.Isaac's position is complicated here by Mineo's equation of pornography with art in the same logic Isaac's photography lecturer paraphrased early in the novel: art without compassion is pornography.The burden of Isaac's curse relies on the collapse of this distinction by the rupture caused by Elias's haunting of his photographs-the image becomes unfamiliar and dangerous.
While Le Fanu's novella equates surplus wealth with bourgeois ennui, Tsiolkas's novel reveals the world pacified by the camera to the stage of the spectacle and its isolation.This move undermines the claim of social relations as little more than social for what is in camera for Dead Europe-"And what about the boys in the streets below?What about the boys you're going to fuck tonight?What does the market give them?" 10 The agency of the models in Mineo's studio is broken down to elements of bare life that are signalled by the signs of habitation that dot the scene.11Such a shift is curious because it is far from the suffering face of some victimised Other soliciting responsibility from the self.Such a relation's social link is curtailed within what is always already social. 12The haunting quality of the curse on Isaac comes upon him precisely because it is given body beyond this link.However, this link does not rest easily within what remains of the linear narrative as the parallel arc of the past situates the quandary of Elias's abject treatment and murder as the condition for Isaac's more liberal and perverse present.
Even an elementary reading of Dead Europe can observe that Isaac's social relations are destroyed by the harrowing of this curse.Tsiolkas's novel economises this fall by leveraging the price of Isaac's vampirism in the temporality of the "present-time" narrative: vampirism comes upon Isaac after he finds himself effectively abandoned and socially isolated on a train.In the train scene, Isaac abandons himself to the call of blood: "I understand that the sexual encounter with the woman on the train had nothing to do with lust, and everything to do with nourishing myself on her blood and her spirit." 13The encounter is initially framed by Isaac's sensuous yet abject arousal that gives way to a shared gaze: "I lifted myself out of my slouch and smiled over at her.She had lit a cigarette and was absentmindedly looking over in my direction.Cautiously, she returned my smile."14There is a simple misreading here if we presume that the exchange of glances on the train between the young female art student and Isaac is based on a humanist image of desire.I am rounding on this un-psychoanalytic image of desire here because much of the novel up until this encounter on the train is at lengths to show how fragile any humanity is when it is under the sway of the psychosocial logic of perversion.
While there is sufficient cause to read the train scene as another example of abjection in the novel for reasons of its textuality and condensation of earlier plot points, I want to expand this discussion in a different, less often travelled direction: the curse as a construction of the narrative form of the story. 15To attend to this concept of narrative form in Dead Europe, we must consider how the cause of Isaac's vampirism is posited by the temporal structure of the novel.The reader's response to the train scene, as indicated by some reviews, seems to be unduly isolated or reduced to this scene. 16If not to consider such an event in isolation but rather as a symptom of the temporal structure of the novel, we may instead read this scene as a culmination of frustrated attempts to resolve the fundamental antagonism that separates Isaac's present-day narrative from the antecedent narrative that features Elias's murder.It is here that we find ourselves confronted with how we embody this fundamental antagonism by being able to paradoxically inhabit both temporalities of the two narrative arcs simultaneously.The diegetic blind spot of Isaac's perversion here is this fundamental antagonism, as the curse of vampirism appears to be a self-generating cause in his narrative arc.More strongly, this causa sui (the self-generation of a cursed Issac) stands against the deliberate misreading of it as an effect created by Isaac's own assumptions or agency because he does not have access to Elias's temporality: Isaac is harrowed by it.
What are we to make of the train scene if it is a culmination of previous energies delivered to us, the readers, through distinct narrative arcs?If we focus on the affects that characterise Isaac here, we can begin to observe the mechanics of how his persona, at this point in the novel, disintegrates to reveal an abyss or void.First, we must be clear that Isaac is not disgusted but rather aroused by the "gaseous bouquets that recalled all the possible eruptions of the body". 17This response does not make him inherently perverse.Critically, perversion is structured through a transgression of social relations to solicit the gaze of the Other supposed to enjoy some substantial pleasure that is otherwise inaccessible to us through our voice in language.The Other is here a fiction of last resort that presses against the veil of the void.Slavoj Žižek and others have noted how this desperate Other is often at the crux of the theft of enjoyment that motivates anti-Semitism, sexism and other hierarchies of identity politics.Yet there is something nonetheless transgressive to Dead Europe, something that tests the limits of representation for Isaac's search for meaning.
In contemporary critical milieux, there are three prominent modes of ontology that may help us to understand the status of Isaac's curse in Dead Europe.The differences between these modes allow us to reassess the status of the curse.These modes are the philosophical, the psychoanalytic and the speculative realist.Each of these modes postulates how the curse of Isaac's vampirism is able to arise at all.The traditional philosophical question asks: why is there something rather than nothing?Here existence is brought forward as an antinomy from the void nothingness.In this mode, Elias's curse is an outlier of the forgotten past that cannot be assimilated to its void status.By such a logic, Isaac's curse remains at the level of representation, an anaglyph of Elias's murder and its ongoing displacement in the present where neither history nor the harrowing of the curse is commensurate with the other.
In distinction to the philosophical mode, the psychoanalytic question asks: why is there nothing rather than something?Along this axis, lack is a constituent part of desire.Framed in this way, Isaac's curse becomes a matter of "tarrying with the negative", of confronting the inconsistency of the cosmopolitan vision in an increasingly embodied and yet involuntary way.For much of the late chapters of the novel, Isaac narrates his curse as an illness, overlooking the external source of his harrowing.
The third ontological mode that may guide us in understanding the curse is the question of speculative realism: why is there some Thing, some monster, where we thought there was nothing to see?In this frame, we might understand the curse-qua-Elias as what Quentin Meillassoux calls "the ancestral". 18Elias's curse is something from outside the structure of Isaac's reality of shared human experience that arrives with a destructive gravity to eclipse the agency of the subject, Isaac, as the curse demands endless blood.The curse of Dead Europe does not fit neatly into the narrative.It is an excess that persists from beyond the grave.By moving between and within the historical periods represented by the narrative arcs of Dead Europe, Tsiolkas uses the curse to play upon the insufficiency of representation.The curse is especially important for emphasising the limits of figurative language where it comes to represent abject scenes rather than an object to be assimilated into the ordinary experience of Isaac's perspective.This excessive standing enables the curse to harrow Isaac rather than be worked through in a more traditional or therapeutic way.

Jouissance and the Frame of the Image
How then can the curse harrow Isaac if, as I have argued above, it arises outside representation?The connection of the instances of the curse to excessive enjoyment in Tsiolkas's fiction may be the clue here.Isaac's complexity is drawn initially through the eclipse of communism and his father's devotion to that lost cause in the world of the novel.Isaac's return to Greece is to spread his father's ashes, and this is where he encounters the village and the curse of Elias for the first time.Even before Isaac arrives in Europe, he shows a clear disdain for the devotion that his father had to communism.What becomes a problem for Isaac is his father's devotion in the face of corrupt liberal democratic capitalist systems.Thus, Isaac's familial position is not defined by the transgression of some Oedipal prohibition (which may negatively portray his homosexuality) but rather by the transformation of this place of the absent father into the seat of the link between Elias's abuse and murder and Isaac's family line, which is clearly proscribed by a phallocentric structure that shuns this past.
Isaac is compelled to solicit Elias's gaze through his photographs and, more metonymically, through his harrowing by the impulses wrought by the curse.Isaac's harrowing is a stand-in for the symbolic debt owed to Elias.The relation to this debt for Isaac is therefore through what psychoanalysis defines as the structure of perversion.The inherent paradox of perversion is that although it aims to ritualise this transgression of social relations, it remains that the pervert gets some semblance of what they desire-the desire of the Other.However, this is the Other as a perverted authority (lüder) with invested needs that can be manipulated by the subject.These manipulations are organised through rituals to contain the risk of the perverse enjoyment overrunning the psyche.Jacques Lacan summed up this relation in his Kant avec Sade (1989) as the pervert becoming the tool, the instrument of the Other's enjoyment to prohibit. 19In this way, perversion is a type of conservativism against what resists representation (Elias's curse), rather than a dangerous subversion of a norm (the abuse of Elias that generates the debt). 20n the scene of cunnilingus on the train in Dead Europe, however, the Other's enjoyment is instrumentalised by Isaac-not to elicit the gaze of the Other but to embrace perverse enjoyment more fully beyond its ritual decline.For example, the story uses several metaphorical veils to hide the supposed transgression of Isaac and the art student before they retire to the toilet stall.These metaphors are most pointedly expressed when Isaac tries to calm the mood with an intimate assurance. 21At a basic level, the scene feigns a conservative privacy by removing the sexual act from the potential gazes of others on the train.Thus, Isaac is here trending towards a psychosis insofar as he assumes the position of authority conditioned by the excessive pressure of his desire for blood, the harrowing stain of some cursed jouissance that can be explained only in parallel with Elias's narrative arc rather than from Isaac's perspective. 22he curse to rupture and mark the life of Isaac.In terms of Isaac's photography, the manifestation of Elias's visage in various pictures is an invasion by an excessive force from outside the frame of the image.The disruption of Isaac's photographs unnerves him because his photography is no longer held to his agency as a photographer.This disruptive excess or jouissance is cursed.
The cursed jouissance of Elias's manifestation in Isaac's photographs has two conditions that can prove useful for how we read Isaac's photography as neither pathological nor polite.First, we must consider how the pressure of this cursed jouissance is first hinted at by the way in which Elias's ghost disrupts Isaac's photographs. 23This disruption is identified by the eruption into the processed frame of something that was not immediately apparent through the assumption of the border control decided by Isaac: "What I could not understand were the shadows that dotted my landscape." 24But is such confusion a red herring?If Isaac's confusion, "fairytales, I had dismissed", is a part of the verisimilitude of this novel, then it may not be too far a leap to consider that Isaac-the university-trained art student-would be familiar with Susan Sontag's classic essay On Photography (1979). 25ere Sontag notes the way that the border of any photograph is a technological limit that is also an intentional limit.Isaac similarly signals these things with his interior monologue: "I walked away from her, my camera swinging alongside me, determined to bring this place to clear rational modern life with my flash and camera, through film and chemicals." 26Where the photographer's ethics of intervention promise to make good through the work of the image, this position is critiqued by Sontag as a mystical conservativism that searches for an abstract good at one remove.In contrast, Sontag asserts that photography is always political through its processes of framing.In the novel, we can see how the issue of framing is for Isaac a strategy of control.Elias's visage is a distortion that functions as a trompe l'oeil of the fundamental antagonism between history and the present from Isaac's vantage-by this point in the story, both the reader and Isaac know that there is a link between what happened at Thessaloniki and what is happening to him. 27So not only is the visage of Elias unruly in terms of Isaac's photographic controls including his agency as a photographer, but it is also a visage that typifies the reader's surplus access to the logic of the novel "from above".The first condition of cursed jouissance in Dead Europe is, therefore, that it collapses the linear temporal logic of the novel for both the characters in situ and the reader looking into Isaac's world.
What the photographic controls do not elucidate, however, is how the cursed jouissance is included within the affective nexus of Isaac's character.Rather than Isaac possessing the curse as a defined quantity or limit, the curse is structured by possessing Isaac.We must remember here that the manifestation of Elias as a distortion in Isaac's photographs is told to us through Isaac's perspective in the novel: "What I could not understand were the shadows that dotted my landscape." 28Yet, at the same time, the nature of photography discussed by Sontag suggests another observable universe to capture in the frame-a universe from which the ghost of Elias emerges, the mediated image itself.Therefore, we may recognise the way that this distortion has an irreducible kernel enabling it to bridge the dual narratives of the novel.It is irreducible because it is an object that mediates for the story within itself.The curse is autonomous but without appeal for Isaac.This cursed jouissance is therefore an Otherness issuing demands to Isaac so that he may win the favour to repair the damage of his heritage: "Cursed?What the fuck did that mean?That wasn't in my language, that wasn't part of my world."29It follows that the second condition of the cursed jouissance is the way in which the curse is structured by possessing Isaac rather than Isaac possessing it: it disturbs his images.The jouissance of the curse is therefore not a question of Isaac's agency but rather how his agency as a photographer collapses with the spectre of his hitherto unknown foreclosure on Elias's murder, given that his trip to Thessaloniki is to honour his dead father and family.
The aesthetics of the curse in Isaac's photographic practice disrupt its process of framing.This disruption enables us to see further into the structural conditions of the curse.Here we can pose a simple question: what does a camera capture?For Sontag and surrealists such as Man Ray, Lee Miller or Dora Maar, the zero-level of a photograph is nothing more than the image itself, the composition in situ of its own border. 30ontag's framing discussion takes this a step further to suggest that what is in the frame is chosen, and that this choice has a political context.The curse in Tsiolkas's novel disrupts Isaac's political choice about what is to be framed by his image-work.Moreover, this disruption undermines Isaac's photography with something that cannot be held accountable in the image, only accounted for by the existence of the image as such, in its irreducible dimension.

Conclusion
Dead Europe invites us to think carefully about the contemporary world and its historical, political and economic legacies.Though the novel's preoccupation with abject scenes and viciousness border on the fantastic, they are written about in Tsiolkas's lyrical realist style.This literary style makes the scenes not only narrowed and stylised in focus but evocative as well.Positioning the abjection of the Other in this way has invited many to consider the novel ripe for readings framed by existential concerns, especially the unequal relation of the self to the suffering of others.Yet here I find another kind of critical reading ripe to harvest.The novel's preoccupation with scenes of pleasures beyond the limit of satisfaction signals something about jouissance.It is here that a psychoanalytic reading can come to bear on the intimate network of memories and fantasies that structure Isaac's character and the horizon of meanings for the reader.
The speculative scope of the novel is curiously piqued by the jouissance that resonates through the fiction of the curse.When we look closely at this jouissance, as I have above, it is clearly a thicket of winding paths.The curse is held in tension between two basic ontological positions: the psychoanalytic question of desire (of taking lack as an object) and the speculative realist question of the Real (the Thing that rises where the lack ought to be).By recognising this tension, it is possible to pursue a reading of the novel's development of a cursed jouissance to screen the more self-conscious manifestation of the curse in Isaac over which he has little, if any, control.This is Isaac's harrowing by the curse in Dead Europe.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

First
published by Vintage in 2005, Dead Europe has seen a Random House Australia reprint in 2011, in prelude to the release of Tony Krawitz's 2012 adaptation of the work to film, and a further reprint with Penguin in 2018.Translations of the novel have appeared in Turkish in 2007 and Greek and Polish in 2010.The novel won the Age Book of the Year in 2006, squarely positioning Tsiolkas and his work in a contemporary Australian canon alongside Gail Jones (Sixty Lights, 2004), Andrew McGahan (The White Earth, 2004), Sonya Hartnett (Of a Boy, 2002), Joan London (Gilgamesh, 2001) and Peter Carey (True History of the Kelly Gang, 2000)-all winners of the prize since 2000.While the generic conventions of the past winning novels range from works of historical fiction to mystery, only one other speculative novel has received the award: The Deep Field by James Bradley in 1999.Like the other prize winners, Dead Europe remains firmly within the political horizon of liberal capitalist democracy that has flourished in the wake of the Second World War.Despite the novel's speculative fantasy of a transgenerational curse, the lyrical realism and types of narrative voice used in the novel derive from the modernist literary traditions that have long stood at the centre of Australian literature.That said, these conventions are complicated by Tsiolkas's Dead Europe in some critically important ways.