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Conclusion Following the discovery that Dahmer had illicitly joined his High School Honors group for their yearbook photograph, his image was blocked out with a marker pen before publication. That empty space among smiling, well-groomed students is one which we have been particularly keen to fill. Sometimes the blackness, the darkness, the void within the ordinary is transformed into the distinctly unordinary. We can imply and sometimes explicitly state that Dahmer did what he did because that's what homosexuals are supposed to do. We can suggest that he did what he did because that's what people from dysfunctional families are supposed to do. But Dahmer, we are also told, comes from a traditional, white, middle-class family, and any attempt to block him out from normality usually proves unsuccessful. The space becomes one contextualized by ordinariness, its mystery framed by normality. Earlier in this study I talked of the ways we attempt nevertheless to protect that normality. Thus we read former FBI agent Robert Ressler remarking that "Jeffrey Dahmer falls into the subcategory of the sadistic, sexually oriented serial killer who is inevitably a white male loner" (Newsweek, 12 August 1991: 28), and instead of examining what "maleness" or "whiteness" or "the loner" means in our culture, we turn away, are content in our dumbfoundedness, and attempt to close the interrogation with "but there are no real theories as to why that is so." I later suggested, however, that we sometimes peer a little more knowingly into that space and, off our guard, allow the unordinary to trickle into the ordinary. And sometimes we allow the space and indeed the ordinariness that it touches to be invested with the power of the unspeakable. The connection between unspeakableness and power is one expressed by Nietzsche's Zarathustra: "You would do better to say: 'Unutterable and nameless is that which torments and delights my soul and is also the hunger of my belly.' Let your virtue be too exalted for the 168 Conclusion familiarity of names" (Nietzsche 1977, 63). We make this connection repeatedly in our serial killer stories. In chapter 10 I suggested that the serial killer's empowerment proceeds in part from our readiness to construct him as a symbol of the unspeakableness lying at the heart of masculinity, as a symbol, that is, of masculinity's mystical essence. At the same time as we reassure ourselves that the serial killer's acts "just happen," like bolts from the blue, we confer an authority on him by figuring his acts as natural, as acts which simply occur, that require no words to justify or explain them. He signifies the possibility of motivelessness that lies within our writing, the mystical and frightening possibility of the writing to which we are accustomed (the possibility that is essential to narrative: the gap, the space, the silence into which narrative propels itself, only to create more gaps, spaces, and silences). He becomes the conductor of an irreducible force of violent nature. As a mystical essence of particular forms of familiar discourse, as unspeakable (that which cannot be spoken for fear of deconstructing that discourse), the serial killer is constructed by discourses whose involvement in that construction is shrouded in mystery. Patriarchal discourse cannot articulate fully his unspeakableness without beginning to unravel. His crimes are associated with the breaking down of valued social structures-the family, patriarchy-not with them. Like all essences , he can never be fully known through or as discourse. As an essence he must be protected: he is unspeakable and must remain so. As a result, our representation of the serial killer is repetitive: in an age which fervently demands explanation, the denial of explanation requires us to ask again and again. The repetitiveness of his representation echoes the repetitiveness of his performance. In the same way as the apparent randomness and motivelessness of his crimes make him largely undetectable, he evades capture by familiar language. Our powers of representation fail us. The construction of the serial killer is one which cannot be controlled; consequently, he is figured as more powerful than those powers of representation, than those who attempt to represent him. J. Gerald Kennedy sees Poe as anticipating the ascendency of death as a metaphysical presence in the twentieth century, and identifies Saul Bellow's Herzog as a witness to that ascendency. "What is the philosophy of this generation? Not God is dead, that point was passed long ago. Perhaps it should be stated Death is...

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