ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some remarks on McGrath’s Spider (1990), but it does so through a set of reflections on “spidery writing” through the ages, on what one might call an “arachnographia” or, in terms akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s, on the issue of “becoming-spider.” Over the course of this journey through the web, the chapter considers the original myth of Arachne; the African/Caribbean figure of Anansi, the spider/trickster; Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s spider poems; Jeremias Gotthelf’s 1842 novel The Black Spider; Italo Calvino’s The Path to the Spiders’ Nests (1947); Louise Bourgeois’s monumental “spider” sculptures; and David Wong’s This Book is Full of Spiders (2012).
Across many of these texts, the trope of the spider and madness is drawn tight, as it is even more obviously in the image of the “tarantella” in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879). And we find this again, of course, in McGrath. But although we may fear entrapment, the spider is also a figure of freedom and resistance; that which hides from the light of day in the corners of our rooms or of our imaginations may also form a base from which we may see the world differently. Madness, after all, may be a terror, but it may also be a privileged site; “spidery writing” may be the gothic stuff of nightmares, but it may also be evidence of a historical endurance that surpasses our conventional definitions of the human.
