The Laughter of Other Places: Humour and Heterotopias in the Works of Edward Gorey

Abstract

The paper employs Michel Foucault’s ideas on heterotopias, outlined in his essay Of Other Spaces (1984), to analyse the interaction of humour and spaces in Edward Gorey’s works, with special emphasis on the book The Evil Garden (1966). Foucault’s theory of heterotopias is used to provide an understanding of Gorey’s fusion of sombre places and macabre tales with his characteristically dry humour and to examine what Gorey’s heterotopias can tell us about the problem of the categorisation of Gorey as an author of children’s literature. In the reading of The Evil Garden, the paper illustrates how Gorey’s disturbing heterotopias achieve a hybridity of spaces, genres, tones, and reader roles in order to encourage polyvalent readings. Gorey plays with the juxtaposition of various heterotopias, destabilising the reader’s position through recurring motifs and intertextual allusions, but the one element that is represented in all those “other” places is invariably humour in all its different forms. It is precisely at the intersection of the various spaces which collide in heterotopias that Gorey’s dark humour emerges and performs its subversive function.